“Cécile cannot even take comfort by contemplating the beauties of adversity,” said Freule van Borck, crossly. “Surely she might understand, in the midst of her legitimate tears, that sorrow is a great educator. She perversely persists in eluding the blessings.” The Freule did not understand that her sister’s soul was a plant of God’s conservatory, a blossom which could only drop off before the east wind.
Work had to be done, however, and some one must do it. Otto soon recognized, with anticipated acquiescence, that his father’s affairs had been left in utter confusion. The confusion, however, was of the orderly kind. There had been a certain amount of method in the Baron’s madness; only, unfortunately, there had been a good deal more madness in his method. He had evidently entertained to the full an honest gentleman’s distrust of all commercial and industrial undertakings, and had added thereto a contempt for all usury and money-lending. To paper investments he would have nothing to say. Every penny he possessed he had sunk in land or curios.
Also he had made a will, an unwise thing for any man to do. In that entanglement of spoliation which we have glorified by the beautiful name of “jurisprudence,” any personal effort towards equity is only another welcome knot to the lawyer’s hand.
The Baron’s will disinherited his younger and favorite son so far as Dutch law permits parents to disinherit, which means that Gerard would be entitled to exactly one-third of the property as against two-thirds for Otto. Furthermore, the testator expressed a hope that his wife would allow all her claims on his estate to be met by an equivalent transfer of art treasures, and that she would preserve these unsold.
The dead man’s object was plain enough; while unable to stint himself, he yet desired to achieve the retention, after his decease, of the status quo. That is not an easy thing in Holland, where modern law, following the Napoleonic precedent, aims at the destruction of hereditary wealth. The Baron openly avowed his intentions in the last sentence of his brief testament; “I hope,” he wrote, “that my children will always retain the Horst intact as I leave it. Otto must do this; I believe he has it in him. I have ultimately succeeded, after infinite pains, in restoring the whole property as it was at its largest in 1672. I trust that neither Otto nor Gerard will ever consent to part with a rood of it. They will rather suffer privation, as I have done.”
The Baron’s way of “restoring” had been a simple one. Whenever opportunity offered, he had bought such alienated lands as fell open, often paying a fancy price, the money for which he procured by mortgaging other property. Nominally, therefore, his landed estate was a very large one, much of it being encumbered, more depreciated. As for “suffering privation”—he had never bought a Corot.
Evidently he had distrusted Gerard, and felt confidence in intractable Otto. The strangest thing about it all was that he, with his fear of death, should ever have summoned up courage to make a will at all. To Otto this fact, more than anything else, revealed how intensely his seemingly shallow father must have loved the home of his race.
And the discovery brought them nearer now in their separation, the dead lord and the new one. Baron Theodore’s ambition was one such as this son could appreciate; the sudden self-reproach of undue contemptuousness caused Otto to veer round to the other extreme of veneration. He resolved, under this first impulse, that, come what may, his father’s decree should be to him a holy trust.
“Of course,” said the Dowager Baroness, relapsing immediately into her continuous mood of mournful indifference. But Gerard demurred.