"Rather hard; I thought every one had--er--time off."
"An evening out?" she suggested. "I believe the number of evenings out is regulated by the number of applications for the post when vacant; cooks could get more evenings than housemaids, and nursery governesses might naturally expect a minus number, if that were possible. There would be lots of applications for my post, so I can't expect many evenings; however, I have thought of a plan by which I can get out again and again!"
"What will you do?" he inquired.
"I shall get Denah--she is one of the girls who went for the excursion--to come and teach Mevrouw a new crochet pattern after dinner of a day. It will take ages, Mevrouw learns very slowly, and Denah will know better than to hurry matters; she admires Mijnheer Joost, the Van Heigens' son, and she will be only too delighted to have an excuse to come to the house."
"And if she is there you will have a little leisure? Some one always has to be on duty? Is that it?"
Julia laughed softly. "If she is there," she said, "she will want me out of the way, and I am not satisfactorily out of the way when I am anywhere on the premises. Not that Mijnheer Joost talks to me when I am there, or would talk to her if I were not; she just mistrusts every unmarried female by instinct."
"A girl's instinct in such matters is not always wrong," Rawson-Clew observed.
But if he thought Julia had any mischievous propensities of that sort he was mistaken. "I should not think of interfering in such an affair," she said; "why, it would be the most suitable thing in the world, as suitable as it is for my handsome and able sister to marry the ambitious and able nephew of a bishop; they are the two halves that make one whole. Denah and Joost would live a perfectly ideal pudding life; he with his flowers--that is his work, you know; he cares for nothing besides, really--and she with her housekeeping. He with a little music for relaxation, she with her neighbours and accomplishments; it would be as neat and complete and suitable as anything could be."
"And that commends it to you? I should have imagined that what was incongruous and odd pleased you better."
"I like that too," she was obliged to admit, "though best when the people concerned don't see the incongruity; but I don't really care either way, whether things are incongruous or suitable, I enjoy both, and should never interfere so long as they don't upset my concerns and the end in view."
He looked at her curiously; again it seemed he was at fault; she was not merely a wayward girl in revolt against convention, saying what she deemed daring for the sake of saying it, and in the effort to be original. She was not posing as a Bohemian any more than she was truly one.
"Have you usually an end in view?" he asked.
"Have not you?" she answered, turning on him for a moment eyes that Joost had described as "eating up what they looked at." "Of course,"
she said, looking away again, "it is quite natural, and very possible, that you are here for no purpose, and I am here for no purpose too; you might quite well have come to this little town for amusement, and I have come for the money I might earn as a companion.
Or you might have drifted here by accident, as I might, without any special reason--" She stopped as she spoke; they were fast approaching the first house of the village now, and she held out her hand for the basket. "I will take it," she said; "I have a very short distance to go; thank you so much."
"Let me carry it the rest of the way," he insisted; "I am going through the village; we may as well go the rest of the way together, I want you to tell me--"
But Julia did not tell him anything, except that her way was by the footpath which turned off to the right. "I could not think of troubling you further," she said. "Thank you."
She put her hand on the basket, so that he was obliged to yield it; then, with another word of thanks, she said "good-evening," and started by the path.
For a moment he looked after her, annoyed and interested against his will; of course, she meant nothing by her words about his purpose and her own, still it gave him food for reflection about her, and the apparent incongruity of her present surroundings. On the whole, he was glad he had met her, partly for the entertainment she had given, and partly for the opportunity he had had to apologise.
An apology was due to her for the affair of last winter, he felt it; though, at the same time, he could not hold himself much to blame in the matter. He had gone to Marbridge to see into his young cousin's affairs at the request of the boy's widowed mother. The affairs, as might have been expected, were in muddle enough, and the boy himself was incorrigibly silly and extravagant. The whole business needed tact and patience, and in the end had not been very satisfactorily arranged; during the process Captain Polkington's name had been mentioned more than once; he figured, among other ways, of spending much and getting little in return. Somehow or other Rawson-Clew had got the impression that the Captain was--well, perhaps pretty much what he really had come to be; and if that was not quite what his wife had persuaded herself and half Marbridge to think him, surely no one was to blame. The mistake made was about the Captain's wife and daughters and position in the town; Rawson-Clew, in the first instance, never gave them a thought; the Captain was a detached person in his mind, and, as such, a possible danger to his cousin's loose cash. He went to No. 27 to talk plainly to the man, not to tell him he was a shark and an adventurer; it was the Captain himself who translated and exaggerated thus; not even to tell him what he thought, that he was a worthless old sponge, but to make it plain that things would not go on as they had been doing. The girl's interruption had been annoying, so ill-timed and out of place; she ought to have gone at once when he suggested it; she had placed him and herself, too, in an embarrassing position; yet, at the same time--he saw it now, though he did not earlier--there was something quaint in the way she had both metaphorically and actually stood between him and her miserable old father. He had dictated the subsequent letter to the Captain more on her account than anything else. He considered that by it he was making her the amend honourable for the unfortunate interview of the afternoon, as well as closing the incident. Of course, nothing real was forfeited by the letter, for under no circumstances would the money have been repaid; he never had any delusion about that. From which it appears that his opinion of the Captain had not changed.
As for his opinion of Julia, he had not one when he first saw her, except that she had no business to be there; now, however, he felt some little interest in her. There was very little that was interesting in this small Dutch town; it was a refreshing change, he admitted it to himself, to see a girl here who put her clothes on properly; something of a change to meet one anywhere who did not at once fall into one of the well-defined categories.
Much in this world has to be lain at the door of opportunity, and idleness in youth, and _ennui_ and boredom in middle ages. Rawson-Clew was in the borderland between the two, and did not consider himself open to the temptations of either. He was not idle, he had things to do; and he was not bored, he had things to think about; but not enough of either to prevent him from having a wide margin.
When he met Julia again there was no reason for dropping the acquaintance renewed through necessity. But also there was no opportunity, on that occasion, for pushing it further, even if there had been inclination, for she was not alone.
It was on Saturday evening; she was walking down the same road, much about the same time, but there was with her a tall, fair young man, with a long face and loose limbs. He carried, of course, an umbrella--that was part of his full dress--and the basket--he walked between her and the cart track. She bowed sedately to Rawson-Clew, and the young man, becoming tardily aware of it, took off his hat, rather late, and with a sweeping foreign flourish. She wore a pair of cotton gloves, and lifted her dress a few inches, and glanced shyly up at her escort now and then as he talked. They were speaking Dutch, and she was behaving Dutch, as plain and demure a person as it was possible to imagine, until she looked back, then Rawson-Clew saw a very devil of mockery and mischief flash up in her eyes. Only for a second; the expression was gone before her head was turned again, and that was decorously soon. But it had been there; it was like the momentary parting of the clouds on a grey day; it illumined her whole face--her mind, too, perhaps--as the eerie, tricky gleam, which is gone before a man knows it, lights up the level landscape, and transforms it to something new and strange.
Rawson-Clew walked on ahead of the pair; he had to outpace them, since he was bound the same way, and could not walk with them. He was not sure that he was not rather sorry for Denah, the Dutch girl; one who can laugh at herself as well as another, and all alone, too, is he thought, rather apt to enjoy the incongruous more than the suitable.
CHAPTER VII
HOW JULIA DID NOT GET THE BLUE DAFFODIL
Vrouw Van Heigen was learning a new crochet pattern; one did it in thread of a Sevres blue shade; when several long strips were made, one sewed them together with pieces of black satin between each two, and there was an antimacassar of severe but rich beauty. Denah explained all this as she set Mevrouw to work on the pattern; it was very intricate, quite exciting, because it was so difficult; the more excited the old lady became the more mistakes she made, but it did not matter; Denah was patience itself, and did not seem to mind how much time she gave. She came every day after dinner (that is to say, about six o'clock), and when she came it was frequently found necessary that Julia should go to inquire after the invalid cousin. Denah thought herself the deepest and most diplomatic young woman in Holland; she even found it in her heart to pity Julia, the poor companion, who she used as a pawn in her romance. The which, since it was transparently obvious to the pawn, gave her vast, though private, delight.
So Julia went almost daily down the long flat road to the village, and very often Rawson-Clew had to go that way too; and when he did, his time of going being of necessity much the same time as hers, he was almost bound to walk with her. There was but one way to the place; they must either walk together in the middle of the road, or else separately, one side of it; and seeing that they were of the same nationality, in a foreign land, and had some previous acquaintance, it would have been nothing short of absurd to have done the latter. So as often as they met they walked together and talked of many things, and in the course of time Rawson-Clew came to find Julia's company a good deal more entertaining than his own; although she had read nothing she ought to have read, seen nothing she ought to have seen, and occasionally both thought and said things she certainly ought not, and was not even conventionally unconventional.
They usually parted at the footpath, which shortened her way a little, Rawson-Clew giving her the basket there, and going down the road alone; in consequence of this it was some time before she knew for certain where it was he went, although she had early guessed. But one damp evening she departed from her usual custom. It had been raining heavily all day, and although it had cleared now, a thick mist lay over the wet fields.
"I shall have to go round by the road," she said, as she looked at the track.
Rawson-Clew agreed with her. "I am rather surprised that you came out at all this evening," he remarked. "I should have thought your careful friends would have been afraid of colds and wet feet."
"Vrouw Van Heigen was," Julia answered, "but Denah and I were not. It is the last opportunity we shall have for a little while; Joost goes to Germany on business to-morrow."
Rawson-Clew laughed. "Which means, I suppose," he said, "that she will neglect the crochet work, and you will have to superintend it? Not very congenial to you, is it?"
"Good discipline," she told him.
"And for that reason to be welcomed? Really you deserve to succeed in whatever it is you are attempting; you do not neglect details."
"Details are often important," she said; "stopping at home and doing crochet work while Joost is in Germany, for instance, may help me a good deal."
The tone struck Rawson-Clew as implying more than the words said, but he did not ask for an interpretation, and before long she had put a question to him. They were nearing a large house that stood far back from the road on the left hand side. It was a big block of a place, greyish-white in colour, and with more than half of its windows bricked up, indescribably gloomy. A long, straight piece of water lay before it, stretching almost from the walls to the road, from which it was separated by a low fence. Tall, thick trees grew in a close row on either side, narrowing the prospect; a path ran up beside them on the one hand, the only way to the house, but in the steamy mist which lay thick over everything this evening one could hardly see it, and it looked as if the place were unapproachable from the front.
Julia glanced curiously towards the house; it was the only one of any size or possible interest in the village; the only one, she had decided some time ago, that Rawson-Clew could have any reason to visit.
As they approached the gate she ventured, "You go here, do you not?"
"Yes," he answered; "to Herr Van de Greutz."
"The cousin tells me he is a great chemist," Julia said.
"He is," Rawson-Clew agreed, "and one much absorbed in his work; it is impossible to see him even on business except in the evening."
He paused by the gate as he spoke. "You have not much further to go, have you?" he said. "Will you excuse me carrying your basket further?
I am afraid I am rather behind my time."
Julia took the basket, assuring him she had no distance to carry it, but her eyes as she said it twinkled with amusement; it was not really late, and she knew it.
"You are afraid of what will be said next," she thought as she looked back at the man, who was already vanishing among the mists by the lake. And the thought pleased her somewhat, for it suggested that Rawson-Clew had a respect for her acumen, and also that her private fancy--that the business which brought him here was not of a kind for public discussion--was correct.
The cousin was better that evening; she even expressed hopes of living through the summer, a thing she had not done for more than three days.
Julia cheered and encouraged her in this belief (which, indeed, there was every reason to think well founded) and gave her the messages and dainties she had brought. After that they talked of the weather, which was bad; and the neighbours, who, on the whole, were good. Julia knew most of them by name by this time--the kind old Padre and his wife; the captain of the little cargo-boat, who drank a little, and his generous wife, who talked a great deal; the fat woman who kept fowls, and the thin one who sometimes stole the eggs. Julia had heard all about them before, but she heard over again, and a little about the great chemist, Herr Van de Greutz, too.
This great man was naturally only a name to the invalid and her friends, but they had always plenty to say about him. He was so distinguished that all the village felt proud to have him live on their borders, and so disagreeable that they were decidedly in awe of him. Of his domestic arrangements there was always talk; he lived in his great gloomy house with an old housekeeper, whom Julia knew by sight, and a young cook, whom she did not; the former was a permanency, the latter very much the reverse, it being difficult to find a cook equal to his demands who would for any length of time endure the shortness of the housekeeper's temper, and the worse one of her master. The domestic affairs of the chemist were a favourite subject of gossip, but sometimes his attainments came in for mention too; they did to-night, the cousin being in a garrulous mood.
According to her, the great man had done everything in science worth mentioning, and was not only the first chemist in Holland, but in all the world; he looked down on all others, she said, regarding two Germans only as anything approaching his peers, all the English and French being nothing to him. He had discovered a great many things, dyes, poisons, and explosives; of the last he had recently perfected one which was twenty-two times stronger than anything before known.