Even the Dominé had felt this, though he knew himself to be a gentleman. Perhaps on that account.
Pharaoh, settling himself in his unaccustomed seat, might well have wished for a Joseph. His predecessor’s years had been years of fatness, agricultural prosperity, but there had been no storing in granaries to stint the full-bellied kine. There had been plentitude everywhere, and plenteous hunger. The hunger remained. Pharaoh resolved to be his own Joseph, but, face to face with famine, Joseph comes too late.
By the united assistance of the two old ladies Gerard’s claim had been met. The Freule van Borck had been very particular about the legal part and the mortgage, holding long consultations with her notary. In all business matters women, starting from the conviction that their defencelessness is sure to be imposed upon, insist on driving bargains of granitic hardness. When four per cent. represents a fair rate of interest, a woman demands six, ultimately resigning herself to accepting five, because a woman, you know, can’t hold out against men, as she querulously tells you ever afterwards. The notary was compelled to restrain the Freule’s fervor of self-sacrificial money-getting. As the weeks crept on she became more and more resolved to assist her nephew advantageously. And, when everything had at last been arranged, the estate was left saddled with a heavy annual payment it could barely sustain.
“Never mind,” said Otto, looking round on the costly treasures he mightn’t sell and didn’t want. That had become the brave refrain of his resolve. “Never mind,” and then he set his teeth hard. It was very different from the tout s’arrange of his race.
He steeled himself, doggedly, and a little dogmatically, to “putting things right.” That process, of course, annoys the numerous persons who don’t care to be told that things were wrong before. Besides, no adjustment is possible—especially not a rectilinear one—without knocks and shoves in all directions.
First and foremost, Otto had to do battle with his mother. The widow resented as an insult the suggestion that anything could need alteration.
“Things have always been like that in your father’s time,” she said over and over again. “And, Otto, I cannot understand all this talk of yours about income and expenditure. Of course, people have income and expenditure. Surely your father must have had them, too; but he never worried about them as you do.”
Otto knew this. It had been a favorite maxim of his father’s—not, perhaps, an altogether incorrect one—that only small incomes need balance to a hair. “Rich men,” the Baron used to say, “have other resources besides their revenues.”
“But your father always told me that you were a bad manager because over-anxious to be a good one,” the Dowager would murmur, querulously. “The excellence of management, he always said, was moderation, and, dear me, Otto, you manage more in a month than your father in all his lifetime. But you don’t sell the art collections, mind. They belong to me. Your father always said you would sell them.”
She even insisted on finishing the costly decoration of the west room, to Otto’s bitter annoyance. “Would you leave it unfinished?” she asked, with a flash of her old bright spirit. It was almost fortunate for Otto that she had never completely recovered from the shock of her husband’s death. For hours she would sit, silent and motionless, in the boudoir she had filled with his portraits from all parts of the house. And when the Baron entered, she would quote his father at him.