“_I_ will read French to you with pleasure, Aunt Louisa,” said Ursula.
“Oh no, my dear, no.” The Freule took her aside in great agitation. “I could not be so inconsiderate to Hephzibah, I could not. Oh no.”
Still, in a hundred small ways, too wearisome to relate, Ursula filled up her time with attentions to the little old maid. It was a relief to find some one she could do something for. She learned a lot of Rossini’s opera airs on purpose, because the Freule had stated that she “adored Rossini.”
“Otto,” said the Freule one morning, “I should like to speak to you.”
He stopped, with his hand on the door-knob.
“Yes?” he answered, his thoughts intent on the morning’s disagreeable work.
“Otto, I have considered, and”--the Freule fidgeted--“under present circumstances I should wish to--pay seven florins more per week for my board.” The Freule gasped.
“Why?” asked the Dowager, sharply, from the top of the breakfast-table.
“Don’t interfere, Cécile. I see in the paper that prices everywhere are being raised.”
“Well, I intend to do it, so now you know. And, Cécile, you need not make any difference.”
“I should think not, indeed,” exclaimed the Dowager.
How difficult is the path of virtue made for most of us by our relations. During the whole of the Freule van Borck’s terrestrial pilgrimage she never committed another action worthy to rank with this voluntary conquest of her ruling passion. Yet nobody understood it.
“Van Helmont of the Horst,” she said to herself, “shall remain Van Helmont of the Horst.” And she deducted the thirty pounds from her already meagre charities.
No one at the Manor-house had ever been prodigal in almsgiving. The old Baron had reckoned the poor a public nuisance; the Baroness provided them with systematically indiscriminate pennies; Gerard flung away an occasional hap-hazard shilling. And the new lord was by no means generally generous. He had very definite ideas on the subject. Charitable help must be strictly limited to the “deserving poor,” whatever that may mean--_only_ the deserving, and _all_ the deserving. The word was his shibboleth. On paper it looks exceedingly well.
Also, he never gave money where he could give work, and he never gave work where he could give advice as to work elsewhere. He was forty when enabled and called upon to put into practice his carefully elaborated theories regarding pauperism. All the paupers of the neighborhood, to a man, resented a charity which had lost the charm of the happy-go-lucky. But to no one came more bitter disappointment than to Ursula, o’er the sun of whose crescent benevolence her husband’s theories spread in tranquil clouds.