“And who am I, then?” he said.
“Entrez, mon prince.”
But that was long ago, unfortunately. Even while the Baron said “Stream,” he regretted that his life could not lie stagnant in a bay, among water-lilies. And yet he hurried on each individual day to its close. He was always wanting to pick other flowers a little farther down the bank.
Two sons were left him at the close of his life, and one of these was already annoyingly old. Between the two lay a couple of hillocks in the village church-yard. The Baroness had begged to rescue the small relics therein contained from the musty family vault. “The vault is so cold,” she said. Her husband proved quite willing to adopt the suggestion; he availed himself of the opportunity it gave him to put up a charming Italian marble of a cherub gathering flowers. The “Devil’s Doll,” the Calvinist villagers called it. Occasionally, when her husband was not attending, the Baroness would go and weep a few quiet tears upon the hillocks. There was a chamber in her heart which she occasionally liked to enter, but she never had much objection to coming out again.
“I met Ursula this afternoon, Otto,” said Gerard at dinner. “I told her she had aroused your enthusiastic admiration. I fancy she was very much pleased.” He laughed; the others laughed.
Otto’s bent face sank lower beneath a sudden thunder-cloud. “That was an ungentlemanly thing to do,” he said.
“Ungentlemanly!” The younger brother’s voice had entirely changed its key. “What on earth do you mean? How dare you say such a thing as that?”
A man-servant was in the room. The remarks had been made in Dutch. The man would have understood them in French, but that would not have mattered.
“I mean,” responded Otto, rather awkwardly, floundering into the foreign language to which his plantation life had somewhat choked the inlets, “that it is a shabby thing to do, to go and tell a lady what a man has said of her in confidence.”