PEACE AND GOOD-WILL
“How cross he looks!” said the Dominé, benignly, dangling his grandson on one awkward knee. “I believe he disapproves of existence. Do you know, children, it has struck me from the first, I can’t understand why your son should have been born with such a look of chronic discontent. What do you mean, Ottochen?” He shook the morsel of pink-spotted apathy, and laughed innocently at its unconscious sneer.
Involuntarily the parents’ eyes met. Otto walked to the window.
“Life is good, Ottochen,” continued the Dominé, his eagle face alight with tenderness. “Life is very beautiful. People love each other, and the love falls like a rainbow across every background of cloud. Everything is beautiful, especially the storms.” The baby puckered up its face into one of those sudden, apparently causeless fretfulnesses which the masculine mind resents. “Thou wilt grow up,” said its grandfather, “into a brave soldier of the Cross”—the Baby overflowed in slobbery, but agonizing, sorrow. Ursula hastily took it from the Dominé’s clumsy deprecations.
“It is strange,” protested the Dominé, “that we weep most without a reason. When the reason comes we often forget to weep.”
This time the elder Otto’s eyes remained resolutely fixed on the snow-girt landscape.
“He was frightened,” explained the young mother, reproachfully, as she hushed her screaming charge.
“Frightened! Ah, just so!” The Dominé rose, a warm flush on his face. “That is the cause of most of our sorrow. Frightened! If men were less afraid of trouble, they would see how little there is of it. Good-bye, children, I am going back to Aunt Josine.” And the Dominé marched off, his armless sleeve swinging limp beside his elastic figure.
Otto turned round into the darkened room. It was true the whole atmosphere of the house had long been one of latent worry. He rested his hand silently on Ursula’s shoulder, and a great feeling of assuagement spread over both their hearts. The Baby’s shrieks were dying down into an exhausted gurgle. Both parents gazed deeply at the child.
“Ursula,” said the Baron, presently, “if you feel strong enough, I should like to have one or two people here for Christmas. I should like to invite the Van Helmonts who were so kind to me during my period of hard work at Bois-le-Duc. Theodore van Helmont and his mother. They are our only relations of the name. And I think they have been kept too much out of the family.”