"Home!"
"Oh, home? Oh, don't they live here?... Well, good-bye, Marie; thanks for your visit. Good-bye, Gertrude! You are Gertrude, aren't you?"
"Ye-e-es!" Auntie Tine assured her, in a shrill, long-drawn-out yell. "She's Ger-trude, Marie's daugh-ter."
"Well, then, good-bye, Gertrude."
"Never mind, Mamma, let them think I'm Gertrude," said Constance, softly, indulgently, while Mrs. van Lowe became a little irritable, not understanding how very old people could cling so stubbornly to an opinion and a little sad at the thought of Gertrude, who was dead.
And so the weeks passed and the months, very quietly, lonely and monotonously: the dreary months of the unseasonable cold, wet autumn, with heavy storms whipping the trees in the Kerkhoflaan, the wind incessantly howling round the house, the rain clattering down. Constance hardly ever went out, shut herself up indoors, as though her soul had received a hurt, as though she would rather henceforward remain safe in her dear rooms. She was very silent, she looked pale, she often sat thinking, pondering—she hardly knew what—sunk in her melancholy, staring at the fury of the storm outside. She did not often have scenes with Van der Welcke now, as though a brooding sadness had numbed her nerves. At half-past four, she would go to the window and watch longingly for her son, would cheer up a little when she saw him, when he talked nicely and pleasantly, her boy who was becoming more of a man daily. But she did not see very much of him now that he went to the grammar-school and had a lot of work to do in the evenings, which, studious by nature, he did conscientiously. Van Vreeswijck came to dinner once every two or three weeks, generally alone, or perhaps, as Paul was still abroad, she would ask Marianne van Naghel, of whom she was very fond. It would be one of those cosy, daintily-arranged little dinners which she knew so well how to give; and that was the extent of her social doings.
Thus she lived in herself and in her house. The rooms in which she sat always reflected herself, a woman of elegant and refined taste, even though she was not exactly artistic; and those rooms displayed in particular the inhabited, sociable, home-like appearance that comes from the presence of a woman who is much indoors and finds solace in her home. And round about her the lines and colours of her furniture and flowers, her knicknacks and fancy-work all made an atmosphere of soft fragrance peculiarly her own, with something very personal, something delicate and intimate: a soft dreaminess as of really very small, simple femininity, without one really artistic object anywhere, without a single water-colour or drawing or fashionable novel; and yet with nothing in colour or form or line that could offend the eye of an artist: on the contrary, everything blending into a perfect harmony of small material things with inner personal things that likewise had no greatness....
One day, when Truitje brought her some circulars, letters and bills from the letter-box, Constance' eye fell upon a newspaper in a wrapper; and she opened it. She read the title of the little sheet: the Dwarskijker;[22] and, as she seldom received much by post, she thought that it must have been sent as an advertisement. Suddenly, however, she remembered: the Dwarskijker was an odious little weekly paper edited by a disreputable individual who pried into all the secrets of the great Hague families; who had often been tried for blackmail, but always managed to escape; and who as constantly resumed his vile trade, because the families whom he attacked paid hush-money, whether his attacks were based on truth or calumny. Constance was about to tear up the paper indignantly, when her eye caught the name of Van Aghel, a parody obviously meant for Van Naghel, and she could not help reading on. She then read a nasty little article against her brother-in-law, the colonial secretary, an article crammed with personal attacks on Van Naghel, describing him as a great nonentity, who had made money at the bar in India by means of a shady Chinese practice and had been shoved on in his career by a still greater and more pompous nonentity, his father-in-law, the ex-Governor-general "Van Leeuwen." The article next attacked Van Naghel's brother, the Queen's Commissary in Overijssel, and, in conclusion, it promised, in a subsequent issue of the Dwarskijker to give a glimpse into the immorality of the other relations of this bourgeois who had battened on the Chinese and who had rendered no real service to India. And the writer aimed very pointedly at Mrs. van Naghel's sister, another woman moving in those exalted circles whose end would soon be nigh in the better order of things at hand: she was described as the "ex-ambassadress;" and he wound up with the alluring promise to give, next week, full details of those old stories, which were always interesting because they afforded the reader a peep into the depravity of aristocratic society.
Constance, as she read on, felt her heart beating, the blood rushing to her cheeks; her hands trembled, her knees shook, she felt as though she were about to faint. She was growing accustomed to oral slander; but these written, printed articles, which everybody could read, came as a shock to her; and, with eyes starting from their sockets, she read the thing over and over again. She was filled with helpless despair at the thought that such things were being published about her and hers, that next week more things would be printed about her in that libellous paper. She was at her wits' end what to do, when, vaguely rolling her terrified eyes, she caught sight, among the bills and circulars, of another paper, which said:
"NOTICE!!!
"Why not become a subscriber to the
"DWARSKIJKER?
"Terms of subscription:
"50 guilders quarterly, post-free."