In the half-light of the calm, cool study, amid the well-known, stilly sympathetic books, she sat with her two hands in his one, on a footstool by the faded leather arm-chair, and, lifting those big brown eyes of hers to his steadfast response, she told him how the city is full of wickedness incredible, and that Apollyon rules the world.
He listened to her very quietly, and yet he was greatly shocked. True, evil had few secrets for him; he had seen more of the world’s corruption than most men, in the red glare of the Algerian night, amid the devil’s dance of shrieking drunkenness and bare-breasted debauch. He had seen too much. He was one of those happy mortals who always think the world is better than it used to be. “In my day”—he would begin, and sigh cheerfully—“but we have greatly improved since then.” It was doubly sad, therefore, to hear that Gerard, the warrior, despite the weekly bugle-call to resistance, should have surrendered at discretion to so pitiful a cutthroat as Lustings. The Dominé had an ineradicable weakness for a brave soldier. Havelock and Hedley Vicars hung large against his peaceful wall, and between them a very different hero, Bugeaud.
“Well, my dear,” said the Dominé, while Ursula, having finished, sat heavy with sorrowful wrath—“Well, my dear, the farther we go the more we see of the battle-field. I am not sorry you should have reconnoitred a little. And I rejoice all the more now to think how mistaken I was about you and Gerard. You must know, my dear, that at one time, though I never mentioned it to you, I fancied you might be setting your affections on the Jonker. I spoke of it unwillingly to your aunt, for I had no other woman to confide in”—the Dominé’s voice grew reflective—“but she said it was all stuff and nonsense, at once, and you weren’t such a piece of vanity as that. Your aunt is not a woman of exceptional discrimination; still, I am glad to see she was right. It would have been a great mistake on your part, Ursula, and a cause of much useless regret.”
“I shall never love any man but you,” said Ursula, vehemently. “They’re all alike. No woman ought to marry.”
The pastor smiled, and passed his hand over her smooth head.
“I hope,” he said, “that you will never know a worthless love. A hopeless love, even a dead love, these may ennoble man or woman. But a love of the undeserving can only lure into an impasse.”
She smiled confidently.
“No; the Jonker van Helmont is not for such as us, Ursula,” continued the old man. “So much the better. My child, you will marry if God pleases and whom he pleases; but I hope it will be in your own station of life. Not that we must judge any class as such. There is Otto, for instance. He is not a pleasure-seeker. We have seen much of him, my dear, in your absence. He most kindly came to comfort me. He has returned from the Indies as he went, the same pure lover of all that is good. Even in our day the Almighty leads some men untainted through the furnace.” And the simple-hearted pastor launched into praises of his favorite, unwittingly digging pitfalls on paths as yet untrod.
“And as for most men,” he said, “human nature is still much what it was in the days of Thucydides. What says Diodorus, the son of Eucrates, the Athenian? ‘All men are naturally disposed to do wrong; and no law will ever keep them from it.’ And that was the historian’s own view; he repeats it some chapters later. As for women, you remember what he makes Pericles say of them. It holds true, in spite of emancipation. ‘Great is the glory of her who is least talked of among the men, either for good or for evil.’ You remember that, Ursula?”
“Yes, indeed, Captain,” said Ursula, into whose whole life this maxim had been constantly woven.