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, [[71]]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. [[72]]
“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[1] 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.”