The old woman nodded dully, pressed his hand.
"All that I ask," said Adolphine, addressing her husband, Paul, Dorine and Adeline, "is that you will not talk about it. Don't talk about it to outsiders. The less it's talked about, the better pleased I shall be.... We have that Indian lack of reserve in our family, that habit of at once going and telling everybody everything.... If people ask, we can say that Ernst has had a nervous break-down; yes, that's it: let's arrange to say that Ernst has had a nervous break-down...."
She asked them to give her their word; and they promised, in order to keep her quiet.
"You'll see," she said, "this business with Ernst will mean that Van Saetzema will once more fail to get elected to the town council."
Paul looked at her in stupefaction, failing to grasp the logic of her remark. Then he said, calmly:
"Yes, you see funny things happen sometimes."
"Yes," said Adolphine, nodding her head to show how much she appreciated the fact that Paul understood her. "It's horrid for me: you'll see, Van Saetzema won't get in...."
"I believe that Ernst ... is the sanest of the lot of us!" thought Paul.
And, as he moved to a seat, he first looked to make sure that there were no bits of fluff on the chair.
But Constance had come in; and, when the old lady saw her, she half-rose, threw herself into her daughter's arms and began to sob more violently than she had done. It was strange how she had gradually come to look upon Constance once more as the nearest to her of her children, this daughter whom she had not seen for years and years, until at last Constance had returned to Holland and the family. As a mother, she had never had a favourite; yet she would often, for months at a time, feel drawn now more towards the one, then again towards the other. She was growing old, she was getting the broken look which a mother's face begins to wear as she sees sorrow coming into her children's lives: a sorrow which, in her case, arrived so late that by degrees the illusion had come to her that there would never be any sorrow. The sudden break-up of Bertha's house—that house which she was so fond of visiting, because she found in it the continuation of her own life, the reflection of her own past grandeur—had fallen on her as a painful blow: Van Naghel's sudden death; the sort of apathy into which Bertha had sunk; the divorce between Van Raven and Emilie after Emilie had refused to come back from abroad, preferring to stay in Paris with her brother Henri, who had been sent down from Leiden: a divorce obtained in the face of all the persuasion which Uncle van Naghel, the Queen's Commissary in Overijssel, had brought to bear upon them; Louise living with Otto and Frances, in order to help Frances, who was always ailing, with the children, so that Bertha was living alone with Marianne in her little villa at Baarn, now that Frans had taken his degree and gone to India, while Karel and Marietje were at boarding-school. The big household had broken up, in a few months, in a few days almost; and the old grandmother, whose dearest illusion it had always been to keep everything and everybody close together, had been seized with an innocent wonder that things could happen so, that things had happened so.... She no longer went about, finding a difficulty in walking; and, because Bertha had become so apathetic and had also ceased to go about, she had as it were lost Bertha and all who belonged to her. It had produced a void around her which nothing was able to fill, even though she saw Constance every day. A void, because with none of her other children did the old lady find the same atmosphere of rank and position which she had loved in the Van Naghels' ministerial household. She would often complain now, a thing which she never used to do: she would complain that Karel and Cateau were so selfish, so stiff and Dutch, that they were getting worse every year; she would complain that at Gerrit's the children were always so noisy, that Adeline was unable to manage them, that both Gerrit and Adeline were much too weak to bring up so many children—nine of them—with proper strictness; she would complain that Adolphine was growing more and more envious and discontented, because her husband did not make his way, because Carolientje was not married, because the three boys were so troublesome; she would complain of Dorine and Paul and had all sorts of little grievances against both of them. Then, on the Sunday evenings, when the children and grandchildren came to her, she felt the void which Van Naghel and Bertha had left behind them, missed the sound of a few aristocratic names, missed any reference to the Russian minister in her children's conversation; and, with a little half-bitter laugh, she would say to the Ruyvenaers that the family was no longer what it had been, called it a grandeur déchue and took a melancholy pleasure in the phrase, which she would repeat again and again, as though finding consolation in its gentle irony. And Constance had become the child towards whom she felt most drawn in these dreary days, because Constance devoted herself regularly to her old mother and also because she, Mamma, in her secret heart, loved to talk with Constance about Rome, about De Staffelaer even, about the Pallavicinis, the Odescalchis, whom Constance had known in the old days; because Constance, whatever might be said against her, was connected with the best Dutch families; because Constance had a title; because Addie was the only one of her grandchildren who bore a title, good family though the Van Naghels were. Oh, those grandchildren, whom she now saw so seldom! And, now that the terrible thing had befallen Ernst, the terrible thing which the children had at first wished to conceal from her, but which she had guessed nevertheless, because she had so long feared it, feared it indeed from the time when Ernst was a tiny child—oh, what frightful convulsions he used to have as a child!—now that the terrible thing had befallen Ernst, it was Constance in whose arms she was first able to sob out her grief, in whose arms she first felt how sorely she had been stricken in her declining days: