“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 [[73]]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 [[74]]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.