"Will you come down soon?"
"Yes, yes, at once...."
She went upstairs, up the wide, winding oak staircase.... Why did she think, each time the wind blew, of that evening when she had gone up like that, across the passage, through the rooms, to the great, dark bedstead, in which the wan face of the dying woman showed palely on the pillow?... Then as now the heavy rain rattled against the windows and the tall cabinets in the dark passage creaked with those sudden sounds which old wood makes and which sometimes moaned and reverberated through the house. But one scarcely heard them now, because the house was no longer silent, because now there were always voices buzzing and young feet hurrying in the rooms and along the passages, thanks to all the new life that had entered the house.... Ten years, thought Constance, while she put on the light in her room, before dressing: was it really ten years?... Immediately after the death of her poor brother Gerrit—poor Adeline and the children had moved from their house to a cheap pension—came the death of old Mr. Van der Welcke, just as she, Van der Welcke and Addie, going through Gerrit's papers, had come upon this letter:
"Addie, I recommend my children to your care; my wife I recommend to yours, Constance."
It was the letter of a sick man, mentally and physically sick, who already saw death's wings beating before his eyes. And even in that shabby pension Addie had taken charge of the children, as though he were their own young father; but, when the old gentleman died and both Van der Welcke and Addie insisted on moving to Driebergen, then the boy had stepped forward boldly as the protector of those nine children, as the protector of that poor woman distraught and utterly crushed by the blow.... Even now, while hurriedly changing her dress, so as not to keep them waiting too long downstairs, Constance still heard her boy say, in his calm, confident voice:
"Papa ... Mamma ... we have a big house now, a very big house.... We are rich now ... and Aunt Adeline has nothing ... the children have only a couple of thousand guilders apiece.... They must all come to us now, mustn't they, all come and live with us at Driebergen, mustn't they, Papa ... and Mamma?"
He said nothing beyond those few simple words; and his confident voice was as quiet as though his proposal spoke for itself, as though it were quite commonplace....
"What is there to make a fuss about?" he had asked, with wide-open eyes, when she fell upon his neck with tears of emotion and kissed him, her heart swelling with happiness in her child....
She had just looked round anxiously at her husband, anxious what he would wish, what he would say to his son's words.... There were fewer scenes between them, it was true, much fewer; but still she had thought to herself, what would he say to this?... But he had only laughed, burst out laughing, with his young laugh like a great boy's ... laughed at all his son's great family: a wife and nine children whom Addie at sixteen was quietly taking unto himself, because his people had money now and a big house.... Since that time Van der Welcke had always chaffed the boy about his nine children. And Addie answered his father's chaff with that placid smile in his eyes and on his lips, as though he were thinking:
"Have your joke, Daddy. You're a good chap after all!..."