Ursula struck the piano a violent crash, and then ostentatiously dragged, banging through the same composer’s “Marche Funèbre.” Towards the end she looked up defiantly at her husband standing in the embrasure of a window with folded arms. Suddenly she broke away from the music, and threw herself on his breast.
“I am sorry,” she said.
The Freule van Borck was the member of the household—an unimportant member—who took most interest in the new-comer. Otto’s fondness seemed devoid of investigation, like his mother’s apathy, but Aunt Louisa looked upon the fresh factor in her old maid’s life of fuss-filled monotony as a worthy subject of scientific experiment. Was Ursula—or was she not—quelqu’un? That, said the Freule van Borck, is the question.
Louisa van Borck had created for herself a peculiar position in her sister’s family. Some twenty years ago her tiresome existence with her old father in the Hague had come suddenly to an end through the conclusive collapse of Mynheer van Borck’s financial operations. He was about seventy at the time, and she thirty-eight. She had never wanted to marry, nor had she ever had an opportunity of wanting. Her ambition had always been to live with herself, occupying, enlarging, and fully inhabiting her own little entity, as few of us find time to do. That nothing much came of it was hardly her fault. She had a lot of little fads and fancies with which she dressed up her soul for want of better furniture.
“We must go and live with the Van Helmonts,” Louisa had said to her protesting parent. “It is unavoidable.”
“But, Louisa, your money, your share of your mother’s money—”
“Cannot support us both. Besides, I don’t intend to die in a workhouse.”
So the old gentleman had to turn his back upon the sweets of the “Residency,” and die away into the wilderness. Of course, the Van Helmont’s made room for their relatives. “So that’s settled,” said the lord of the Horst. Tout s’arrange. But grandpapa’s brain soon got clogged, in the still country atmosphere, from inertia and want of winding up. For many years his body vegetated in an upper room, with an attendant and a box full of toys. Nobody objected to him, nor was any one ever unkind. Besides, he had still his pension of four hundred a year, which made a welcome addition to the family revenues. Yet it was he they regretted mildly when he died.
Freule Louisa could not honestly be accused of unthriftiness. “I know nothing about money matters,” she was wont to exclaim, with pink-spotted agitation. “You mustn’t talk to me about money. I haven’t got any to spend.” Nobody knew how much of her private fortune was still in her possession, or how much she had possibly lost by investments. “You will see,” Baron Theodore had always prophesied, “Louisa will die a pauper.” His wife doubted it.