CHAPTER VII.
The Ferelyns occupied the upper part of a small house over a grocer’s shop in the Hugo de Grootstraat. There they lived in a cramped, depressing atmosphere of economy; Frans had had but little left him by his parents, and he was therefore compelled with his wife to live on small salary while on furlough. They settled in the Hague, the city in which both of them had lived since their childhood, where they had first met one another, where they had expected still to find their former friends and their old associations, although Frans had expressed the opinion that they would do better to make their stay in a smaller town. But Jeanne’s father, Mr. van Tholen, was also living in the Hague on his pension, leading a solitary life, little visited by his friends, and gradually forsaken by his children, as they married or went into situations. It was therefor that Jeanne persuaded her husband, notwithstanding their slender purse, to stay in the Hague. She would be economical, she promised, and she kept her word, although by nature she was not much inclined that way.
So they remained in the Hague, in spite of many disappointments. In the four years that they had not seen each other, Jeanne found her father much aged, more discontented and irritable than she had known him before. The days of yore were past and gone, thought she: her happy youth in the old, sunny home, with her mother and her brothers and sisters; her innocent pranks with school-mates; her girlish dreams under the lilac and jasmine in their garden; her engagement days, full of ideal fantasies, with Frans. The souvenirs which she had hoped to find in Holland were scattered far and wide like shrivelled leaves, and much as she had longed in the burning Indies for the damp and fog of her fatherland, she now, bowed down under her disappointments and under her forced economy, looked forward to a return to that matter-of-fact, easy-going life she had enjoyed in the Kadoe with her cow, her fowls, and her goat. And yet, plucky in spite of the thousand and one little troubles that beset her daily life, she struggled on. Doctor Reyer visited her Dora every other day; but she fancied she saw a nervous haste in the popular young physician which made him count every minute of his visit. He stayed a moment, laid his ear on Dora’s little chest, assured her that her cough was going, impressed upon Jeanne not to allow the child to leave the house, and left in his brougham, whilst he made a note in his pocket-book with his gold-cased pencil, and glanced through the list of his patients. Frans, with his severe headaches and his low fever, he had referred to a physician in Utrecht, to whom he had minutely described the patient’s case; and Frans had gone to Utrecht and returned, much dissatisfied at the vague way in which the physician had spoken to him. Whenever Doctor Reyer came to visit Dora, Frans went out, feeling annoyed with him and his Utrecht physician, who between them had been unable to cure him; and he buried his headaches and his continued cold shiverings in a gruff solitude within the four walls of his little private office on the first floor. Something like a twinge of conscience came over him when he heard Jeanne up-stairs talking to the doctor; and Dora, in her peevish little way, was crying in her efforts to escape the ordeal of examination; but he did not move; all doctors were quacks who could talk very wisely, but could not cure him when one was ill.
Jeanne conducted the doctor down-stairs, talking the while, and Frans in his office heard Reyer ask after him, heard her say something and call the servant to show him out. Then, as the carriage rolled away, she came in.
“Do I disturb you?” she asked, in her soft, subdued voice.
“No, certainly not; why?”
“Why did you not come up-stairs for a moment, Frans? Reyer asked after you.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“What is the use?” he said with irritation. “They send you to their Leiden or Utrecht celebrities, who make you pay a tientje for a two minutes’ talk.”
“But what do you want, then? You can’t expect to be cured by magic of a complaint from which you have suffered for the last two years. I think you ought to do more for your health than you have done in the three months we have been here. You have come to Europe for that purpose, have you not?”
“Certainly; but first I must find some one in whom I can place more confidence than Reyer. Reyer is a doctor à la mode, a recommendation of the van Raats, very polite and gentlemanly, but much too superficial and hasty for me. Why, he is gone ere you have seen him.”
“But you don’t speak to him frankly. I ask him about Dora and force him to stay longer, and really, now that he knows us better, he seems to take greater interest in us. And everybody says he is clever; it is not only the van Raats who believe in him.”
“Well, I shall see; there’s plenty of time yet. Sometimes you are just like a drop of water on a stone, continually drip, drip, drip. You are for ever hammering, hammering away at that doctor story,” he cried, impatient and dissatisfied with himself, and he opened his writing-case, as though to give her to understand that he had no more time.
She went, and gently closed the door behind her. Up-stairs in the nursery she found their only servant, a young girl of sixteen, in a dirty apron and unkempt hair, making the beds; while Dora, with the two boys Wim and Fritsje, were playing in the next room.
“I will close the door, then you can air the room, Mietje,” said Jeanne, and she closed the folding doors, and with a smile sat down beside the children, at a table near the window, covered all over with little socks, pinafores, frocks, all to be repaired. Oh! what tiresome, wasteful children they were, to be sure! She sighed, and her small thin hand fumbled about the things, and her eyes filled with tears. Why was she not stronger? how she would have enjoyed getting through all her household duties! Now she found it so hard to lift herself out of the listlessness into which she felt herself sinking, as into a yawning abyss; from the lifeless languor which seemed to encircle her as with velvet arms; and yet—there was so much to be done she durst not yield herself up to idle dreaming, nor rake up her old, wide-scattered recollections, like so many burnt-out cinders, and forget herself in her longing for the illusions of former days. Stern reality stared her in the face, in the shape of a great rent in Dora’s woollen frock, and in the washing that was waiting to be counted before being sent to the laundry.
And yet even now, while her hand went fumbling about the little socks and vests, she let herself be drawn deeper and deeper into the soft down of her listlessness; she bestirred herself with no energy to set about her work, and she did not hear the shrill quarrelling voices of the children.
She would so gladly have infused a flood of sunshine, a wealth of harmony into her humble home; but she was no fairy, and she felt herself so weak even now, and already no longer able to withstand life’s small troubles, so that she dared not hope for a much rosier future. Indeed, when she thought of the future at all, it was not without fear and trembling, as a vague terror shaped itself into an indefinable form before her mind’s eye, so dread and awful that she could find no words with which to depict it.
Her head fell on her hand, and now and again a tear dropped on the linen in front of her. Oh! how sweet would be her slumbers, if but the caress of one who loved her might be hers, one in whose affection she would have felt herself safe from all danger! And she thought of her Frans, and how he had asked her to be his in their garden, under the blossoming lilac; and now she worried him, and had become like a drop of water on a stone—drip, drip, drip.
Ah! she knew it; she had not made him happy; she was a great disappointment to him, but it was not her fault if he thought to find more in her than she possessed; a stupid, simple, weak little woman, with a great need of much, very much love and tenderness, and with something of sentimental poesy in her little soul.
And sighing, she raised herself, and told the children not to make so much noise, papa was down-stairs and had a headache.
Then she looked about on the table after her work-basket, but she had left it in the sitting-room, and so she ordered Dora, like a big girl, to look after her little brothers for a while. She usually spoke to the child as though she were a grown-up daughter, and Dora often helped her, very pleased that ma found her so useful. And Jeanne went down-stairs to the sitting-room, and began looking for the basket, when Frans came in.
He had heard her coming down-stairs, and wanted to see her for a moment, as a feeling of self-reproach overmastered him. He approached her unawares, softly, on the tips of his slippered feet. He took her gently by the arms.
She felt frightened for a moment, and when she looked up she saw in his eyes that very tenderness for which she longed, and with a little smile in which there almost lurked something like fear, he asked her—
“Are you angry?”
Her eyes suddenly grew moist, and she nestled her head on his shoulder, and laid her arm round his neck, and shook her head.
“Really not?”
Again she shook her head, laughing amid her falling tears, and she closed her weeping eyes and felt his moustache on her lips as he kissed her. How quickly he repented when he had been unkind, and what a luxury it was to forgive him!
“Come, don’t cry then; it wasn’t so bad as all that.”
She gave a sigh of relief and clung closer to him.
“If only you are a little gentle and kind to me—oh, then I feel myself so—so strong, then I feel equal to anything.”
“Darling little woman!”
Again he kissed her, and under the warm love of his lips she forgot the icy cold of the fireless room, which caused her to shiver as she clung to his arms.