"What have I conquered?"
"You understand."
"You rank that conquest too high.... And you, why are you conquered?"
"Because ... because I have never achieved anything.... I may sometimes have found, but never, never achieved.... And now I want to rest ... with a heap of books around me ... and, if I can, follow your example ... and do good in a small way."
"I will help you," she said, jesting, very sadly.
They were silent; and between her and him the room was full of bygone things. The furniture was the same, certain lines and tones were the same as years ago.... Out of doors, the unsparing night of the clattering rain and raging wind was the same as years ago. Life went on weaving its long woof of years, like so many grey shrouds. They both smiled at it; but their hearts were very sad.
CHAPTER XVI
And the melancholy of bygone things seemed to swell on the loud moaning of the wind during the following days, when the rain poured down; the house these days seemed full of the melancholy of bygone things. They were days of shadow and half-light reflected around the old, doting woman in the conservatory; Adeline, the silent, mournful mother; Emilie, a young woman, but broken ... like all the greyness exuding from human souls that are always living in the past and in the melancholy of that past; and now that Brauws also saw it as a thing of shadows and twilight round Alex—because the boy could never forget the horror of his father's death—he also understood within himself that bygone things are never to be cast off and that they perhaps hang closer in clouds of melancholy, around people under grey skies—the small people under the great skies—than in bright countries of mountains and sunshine and blue sky. And that there were sorrowful things of the soul that slumbered: did he not see it in Addie's knitted brows, in ailing Marietje's dreamy stare, in Mathilde's glances brooding with envy and secret bitterness and malice? Did he not see it in the sudden melancholy moods of Gerdy, usually so cheerful? And did he not understand that in between their young lives there was weaving a woof of feelings that were most human but exceedingly intense, perhaps so intense because the feelings of small souls under big skies can be deeply sorrowful between the brown walls of a house, between the dark curtains of a room, which the grey daylight enters as a tarnish of pain, mingling its tarnish with the reflexion which lingers from former years in dull mirrors, as though all feeling and all life were quiveringly mirrored in the atmosphere amid which life has lived and palpitated?
Brauws was now living at Zeist and he had collected his heap of books around him and lived there quietly, conquered, as he said. But he was with them a great deal and was hardly surprised when, one morning, intending to come for lunch, he heard unknown children's voices in the hall, saw in the hall a young woman whom he did not know at first, heard her say in a very soft voice of melancholy, with a sound in it like a little cracked bell of silvery laughter: