CHAPTER XVIII
THE DUTY OF A PARENT
Next morning, so it happened, the Dominé awoke to a moderately disagreeable task. While dressing, he grumbled over the speck in his tranquil sky, as mortals will do when unaware of the storm-cloud fringing their horizon.
The Dominé had a parishioner who caused him more annoyance than the rest. This sheep of the flock was, however, not a black sheep. It was serenely white. It never wandered, for it never even got up. Its name was Klomp, and its nature was unmitigated indolence.
This man Klomp inhabited a little cottage of his own, lost among the woods. He shared it with two daughters, aged respectively twelve and eighteen. Like its owner, the cottage lived on, disgraceful but comfortable. Theoretically, it ought to have been pulled down.
Klomp knew better. All summer he lazed over a hedge which mysteriously bore his weight; all winter he dozed by the stove. If any remnant of useless ornamentation fell away from the cottage, the proprietor never winked an eye, but should a tile drop whose fall let in the rain or wind, Klomp would scramble up on the roof and replace it. He was a philosopher.
He never ill-treated his daughters unless they let the fire go out in winter. To keep it lighted during seven months of the year was their whole earthly duty, for house-keeping had long been reduced to an almost imperceptible minimum. The entire family lived on next to nothing very cheerfully, and was a disgrace to the neighborhood.
Vices the father had none. As has already been hinted, he was negatively virtuous. He drowsed at peace with himself and with all the world above and below him, except when the Dominé came to make trouble.
The Dominé was making trouble just now. By a stroke of unexpected good-fortune an opportunity had occurred of “doing something for those poor girls,” whose one desire was that nothing should be done either for them or by them. Freule van Borck, it must be known, occasionally took a philanthropic interest in the village at her brother’s castle-gates, an interest which manifested itself in spasmodic bursts of tidying up neglected corners. She had suddenly disapproved of that long-standing eyesore, the Klomps’ cottage, and had made a beginning of improvement by getting an energetic person in the north to accept of Pietje, the elder girl, as a possible servant, wages five pounds per annum, all found. This good news had been communicated to Pietje by Hephzibah, the Freule’s maid. Pietje had merely answered, “Let the Freule go herself,” but that retort got modified on its way to Louisa.
So now the Dominé went to try his hand. He especially disliked all intercourse with Klomp, because, during their interviews, one of the two invariably lost his temper, and that one was never the parishioner. That was the worst of Klomp; he had no temper to lose.