Roden's Corner Part 9

Outwardly Mrs. Vansittart's house was of dark red brick, with stone facings, and probably belonged to that period which in England is called Tudor. Inwardly the house was as comfortable as thick carpets and rich curtains and beautiful carvings could make it. The Dutch are pre-eminently the flower-growers of the world, and the observant traveller walking along Orange Street may note even in midwinter that the flowers in the windows are changed each day. In this, as in other _menus plaisirs_, Mrs. Vansittart had a.s.sumed the ways of the country of her adoption. For Holland suggests to the inquiring mind an elderly gentleman, now getting a little stout, who, after a wild youth, is beginning to appreciate the blessings of repose and comfort; who, having laid by a small sufficiency, sits peaceably by the fire, and reflects upon the days that are no more.

It was Mrs. Vansittart's pleasant habit to surround herself with every comfort. She was an eminently self-respecting person--of that self-respect which denies itself nothing except excess. She liked to be well dressed, well housed, and well served. She possessed money, and with it she bought these adjuncts, which in a minor degree are within the reach of nearly everybody, though few have the wit to value them.

She was not, however, a vociferously contented woman. Like many another, she probably wanted something that money could not buy.

Mrs. Vansittart, in fulfilment of her promise to Percy Roden, called on Dorothy at the Villa des Dunes, who in due course came to the house at the corner of Park Street and Orange Street to return the visit.

Dorothy had been out when Mrs. Vansittart called, but she thought she knew from her brother's description what sort of woman to expect. For Dorothy Roden had been educated abroad, and was not without knowledge of a certain cla.s.s of English lady to be met with on the Continent, who is always well connected, invariably idle, and usually refers gracefully to a great sorrow in the past.

But Dorothy knew, as soon as she saw Mrs. Vansittart that she had formed an entirely erroneous conception. This was not the sort of woman to seek the admiration of the first-comer, and Percy Roden had allowed his sister to surmise that, whether it had been sought or not, Mrs.

Vansittart had certainly been accorded his highest admiration.

"It is good of you to return my call so soon," she said, in a friendly voice. "You have walked, I suppose, all the way from the Villa des Dunes. English girls are such great walkers now--a most excellent thing. I belong to the semi-generation older than yours, which preferred a carriage. I am an atrocious walker. You are not at all like your brother." And she threw back her head and looked speculatively at her visitor. "Sit down," she said, with a laugh. "You probably came here harbouring a prejudice against me. One should never get to know a woman through her men-folk. That is a rule almost without exception; you may take it from one who is many years older than you. But--well, _nous verrons_. Perhaps we are the exception."

"I hope so," answered Dorothy, who was ready enough of speech. "At all events, all that Percy told me made me anxious to meet you. It is rather lonely, you know, at the Villa des Dunes. You see, Percy is engaged all day with his malgamiters. And, of course, we know no one here yet."

"There is Herr von Holzen," suggested Mrs. Vansittart, ringing the bell for tea.

"Oh yes. The man who is a.s.sociated with Percy at the works? I do not know him. Percy has not brought him to the villa."

"Ah! Is that so? That is nice of your brother. Sometimes men, you know, make use of their wives or their sisters to help them in their business relationships. I have known a man use his pretty daughter to gain a client. Beauty levels all, you see. Not nice, no; I suppose Herr von Holzen, is--well--let us call him a foreign savant. Such a nice broad term, you know; covers such a plentiful lack of soap." And she laughed easily, with eyes that were quite grave and alert.

"My brother does not say much about him," answered Dorothy Roden.

"Percy never does tell me much of his affairs, and I am not sorry. I am sure I should not understand them. Stocks and shares and freights and things. I never quite know whether a freight is part of a ship; do you?"

"No. There are so many things more useful to know, are there not?--things about people and human nature, for instance."

"Yes," said Dorothy, looking at her companion thoughtfully--"yes."

And Mrs. Vansittart returned that thoughtful glance. "And the other man," she said suddenly, "Mr.--Cornish--do you know him?"

"He called at the Villa des Dunes. My brother brought him in to tea the evening of arrival of the first batch of malgamiters," replied Dorothy.

"Mr. Cornish interests me," said Mrs. Vansittart. "I knew him when he was a boy--or little more than a boy. He came to Weimar with a tutor to learn German when I happened to be living there. I have heard of him from time to time since. One sees his name in the society papers, you know. He is one of those persons of whom something is expected by his friends--not by himself. The young man who expects something of himself is usually disappointed. Have you ever noticed in the biographies of great men, Miss Roden that people nearly always began to expect something of them when they were quite young? As if they were cast in a different mould from the very first. Really great men, I mean not the fashionable pianist or novelist of the hour whose portrait is in every ill.u.s.trated journal for perhaps two months, and then he is forgotten."

Mrs. Vansittart spoke quickly in a foreign manner, asking with a certain vivacity questions which required no answer. Dorothy Roden was not slow of speech, but she touched topics with less airiness. Her mind seemed a trifle insular in its tendencies. One topic attracted her, and the rest were set aside.

"Why does Mr. Cornish interest you?" she asked.

Mrs. Vansittart shrugged her shoulders and leant back in her deep chair.

"He strikes me as a person with infinite capacity for holding his cards. That is all. But perhaps he has no good cards in his hand?

Nothing but rubbish--the twos and threes of ordinary drawing-room smartness--and never a trump. Who can tell? _Qui vivra verra_, Miss. Roden. It may not be in my time that the world shall hear of Tony Cornish--the real world, not the journalistic world, I mean. He may ripen slowly, and I shall be dead. I am getting elderly. How old do you think I am, Miss Roden?"

"Thirty-five," replied Dorothy; and Mrs. Vansittart turned sharply to look at her.

"Ah!" she said, slowly and thoughtfully. "Yes, you are quite right.

That is my age. And I suppose I look it. I suppose others would have guessed with equal facility, but not everybody would have had the honesty to say what they thought."

Dorothy laughed and changed colour. "I said it without thinking," she answered. "I hope you do not mind."

"No, I do not mind," said Mrs. Vansittart, looking out of the window.

"But we were talking of Mr. Cornish."

"Yes," answered Dorothy, b.u.t.toning her glove and glancing at the clock.

"Yes; but I must not talk any longer or I shall be late, and my brother expects to find me at home when he returns from the works."

She rose and shook hands, looking Mrs. Vansittart in the eyes. When Dorothy had gone, the lady of the house stood for a minute looking at the closed door.

"I wonder what she thinks of me?" she said.

And Dorothy Roden, walking down Park Straat, was doing the same. She was wondering what she thought of Mrs. Vansittart.

Although it was the month of April, the winter mists still rose at evening and swept seawards from the marshes of Leyden. The trees had scarcely begun to break into bud, for it had been a cold spring, and the ice was floating lazily on the ca.n.a.l as Dorothy walked along its bank. The Villa des Dunes was certainly somewhat lonely, standing as it did a couple of hundred yards back from a sandy road--one of the many leading from The Hague to Scheveningen. Between the villa and the road the dunes had scarcely been molested, except indeed, to cut a narrow roadway to the house. When Dorothy reached home, she found that her brother had not yet returned. She looked at the clock. He was later than usual. The malgamite works had during the last few weeks been absorbing more and more of his attention. When he returned home, tired, in the evening, he was not communicative. As for Otto von Holzen, he never showed his face outside the works now, but seemed to live the life of a recluse within the iron fence that surrounded the little colony.

Percy Roden had not returned to the Villa des Dunes at the usual hour because he had other work to do. Von Holzen and he were now standing in one of the little huts in silence. The light of the setting sun glowed through the window upon their faces, upon the bare walls of the room, rendered barer and in no way beautified by a terrible German print purporting to represent the features of Prince Bismarck.

Von Holzen stood, with his hands clasped behind his back, and looked out of the window across the dreary dunes. Roden stood beside him, slouching and heavy-shouldered, with his hands in his trouser pockets.

His lower lip was pressed inward between his teeth. His eyes were drawn and anxious.

On the bed, between the two men, lay a third--an old-looking youth with lank red hair. It was the story of St. Jacob Straat over again, and it was new to Percy Roden, who could not turn his eyes elsewhere. The man was dying. He was a Pole who understood no word of English. Indeed, these three men had no language in common in which to make themselves understood.

"Can you do nothing at all?" asked Roden, for the second or third time.

"Nothing," answered Von Holzen, without turning round. "He was a doomed man when he came here."

The man lay on the bed and stared at Von Holzen's back. Perhaps that was the reason why Von Holzen so persistently looked out of the window.

The work-hours were over, and from some neighbouring cottage the sounds of a concertina came on the quiet air. The musician had chosen a popular music-hall song, which he played over and over again with a maddening pertinacity. Roden bit his lip, and frowned at each repet.i.tion of the opening bars. Von Holzen, with a still, pale face and stern eyes, seemed to hear nothing. He had no nerves. At times he twisted his lips, moistening them with his tongue, and suppressed an impatient sigh. The man was a long time in dying. They had been waiting there two hours. This little incident had to be pa.s.sed over as quietly as possible on account of the feelings of the concertina player and the others.

The door stood ajar, and in the adjoining room a professional nurse, in cap and ap.r.o.n, sat reading a German newspaper. This also was a bedroom.

The cottage was, in point of fact, the hospital of the malgamite workers. The nurse, whose services had not hitherto been wanted, had since the inauguration of the works spent some pleasant weeks at a pension at Scheveningen. She read her newspaper very philosophically, and waited.

Roden it was who watched the patient. The dying man never heeded him, but looked persistently towards Von Holzen. The expression of his eyes indicated that if they had had a language in common he would have spoken to him. Roden saw the direction of the man's glance, and perhaps read its meaning. For Percy Roden was handicapped with that greatest of all drags on a successful career--a soft heart. He could speak harshly enough of the malgamiters as a cla.s.s, but he was drawn towards this dumb individual, with a strong desire to effect the impossible. Von Holzen had not promised that there should be no deaths. He had merely undertaken to reduce the dangers of the malgamite industry gradually and steadily until they ceased to exist. He had, moreover, the strength of mind to give to this incident its proper weight in the balance of succeeding events. He was not, in a word, handicapped as was his colleague.

The sun set beyond the quiet sea and over the sand dunes the shades of evening crept towards the west. The outline of Prince Bismarck's iron face faded slowly in the gathering darkness, until it was nothing but a shadow in a frame on the bare wall. The concertina player had laid aside his instrument. A sudden silence fell upon land and sea.

Von Holzen turned sharply on his heel and leant over the bed.

"Come along," he said to Roden, with averted eyes. "It is all over.

There is nothing more for us to do here."

With a backward glance towards the bed, Roden followed his companion, out of the room into the adjoining apartment where the nurse was sitting, and where their coats and hats lay on the bed. Von Holzen spoke to the woman in German.

"So!" she answered, with a mild interest, and folded her paper.

The two men went out into the keen air together, and did not look towards each other or speak. Perhaps they knew that if there is any difficulty in speaking of a subject it is better to keep silence. They crossed the sandy s.p.a.ce between this cottage and the others grouped round the factory like tents around their headquarters. One of these huts was Von Holzen's--a three-roomed building where he worked and slept. Its windows looked out upon the factory, and commanded the only entrance to the railed enclosure within which the whole colony was confined. It was Von Holzen's habit to shut himself within his cottage for days together, living there in solitude like some crustacean within its sh.e.l.l. At the door he turned, with his fingers on the handle.

"You must not worry yourself about this," he said to Roden, with averted eyes. "It cannot be helped, you know."

"No; I know that."