“I a good catch? My wealth is not very great, I can tell you, and I am no longer in the market,” she said with a little sad smile. “You see, I am getting old gradually; I’ve served my time.”
He spoke to her as cheeringly as he could. Her trip would cure her of all those gloomy ideas. After Jeanne, whom Eline had called into the room, had been told of the plan, he left; he had still to pay a visit to the Nassauplein, to the Van Raats.
Eline remained alone while Jeanne conducted him to the door. A multitude of thoughts rushed through her brain, like showering rose-leaves, like sparks of sunshine, like glittering bubbles of soap. She looked out of the window at the great clouds of dust which the wind blew up from the paths and roadways. And she turned away shuddering at the grave tints of autumn that met her gaze, when all at once her eye fell on Frans’s diary, which was hanging on the wall, with the date 15th November distinctly visible.
Great heavens! that was the very day which only a few months ago Otto and herself had fixed upon as—their wedding day! Her gaze was as transfixed on those black figures. A wild, a hopeless grief and remorse suddenly overwhelmed all her new bright [[250]]happiness, and savagely she flung herself into her big chair and sobbed as if she would sob her very life out.
The news soon spread; the Eekhofs, the Hydrechts, and the Van Larens repeated it to one another; Eline Vere was going abroad with her uncle, Daniel Vere, who lived in Brussels and had only been married a year.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Her head languidly resting against the red velvet cushions, Eline was seated alone in the ladies’ coupé. She listened mechanically to the rattling of the wheels along the rail, and it seemed to her as if she heard a nervous tattoo in that monotonous hard melody of steel and iron. Once or twice she took her handkerchief and wiped the glass to have a glance outside, where the gray evening shades were falling, and an opaque mist was rising over the meadows. In a few minutes she would be in the Hague, in the Hague, where now she had not been for eighteen months, and after her continuous wanderings the place seemed dear to her now, a place where yet she might find something of a home.
For eighteen months she had been travelling, and in all that time she had lived with strangers without the smallest spot that she could call her own. The changeful life she had led made the time pass rapidly; change, ceaseless change had been hers. New cities, new scenes, new people, wherever she went, until she was tired, dead tired of all this variety. Now she longed for rest and calmness, for a long dull period of slumbering repose, free from dreams and free from sorrows.
Something of a home! Should she indeed find that, with that sad, aged woman who loved her, but who did not understand her as she was now—quiet, sadly quiet, and tired, utterly tired of her young life? For henceforth she would be sad and quiet and tired of it all, she would not again excite herself to an artificial glitter of gaiety, as she had been forced to do among the strangers with whom she had sojourned. [[251]]