CHAPTER XIX
FORFEITS ALL ROUND
For the next three months Otto worked in a sugar-distillery at Boxlo, a little town among the wilds of Brabant. It was rough work, indeed, as the Dominé had foretold. Night after night the Jonker stood, stripped to the waist, before the blazing furnaces; in the small hours he came home to his lodgings and strove to snatch from the daylight such sleep as he could. Fortunately he was very robust, but that, although an alleviation, can hardly be considered an excuse. Sometimes even he wondered whether such slaving, amid grime and oil-stench and sick throbs, was his natural fate, but his father had truly described him as animated by a passion of self-torture. Out-of-the-way horrors were probably one’s duty. Besides, what other career was open to him at the moment? Once in India, with his friend’s assistance, he would stand an excellent chance of making a fortune by sugar, as that friend had done before him, in half a dozen years.
So he worked, night after night, month after month, with set lips and still eyes. Occasionally he spent a Sunday at the Manor-house, as if a traveller traversing mountain solitudes had halted from time to time at a Parisian café. His father and mother accepted him without comment, adverse or otherwise; in the smooth design of their lives he was an arabesque run mad. During his stay the Baroness chiefly regretted Gerard.
The only person who stuck to him through it all, stanch and true, was Roderick Rovers. Once having accepted the duty of sacrifice, the Dominé delighted in its pain. He rejoiced in proving to himself how, like the old soldier he was, he could probe his own wound without wincing.
“It is a great thing in Otto to go,” he said. “It is a great thing in me to let him take Ursula. Great souls do great things gladly.” Then he laughed at himself: “Pshaw,” he said, “‘Men always imagine the struggle of the moment, while they are engaged in it, to be the greatest that ever was.’ You will find that in Thucydides, Ursula. Thucydides was a very wise man.”
Ursula acquiesced a little impatiently. She did not want to go to Java. She thought Otto should have made known his intentions in time. Placed between the two, she immediately discarded her brand-new lover for the father on whose affection her whole life had been built up. In the sudden certainty of separation from the Dominé, she discovered, with alarming unexpectedness, that she could very well have continued to exist without Otto. For several days their engagement dangled on a thread.