“Young or not, people change in twelve years.”
Gerard would have availed himself of this palpable opportunity to suggest something pretty; clumsy Otto merely made answer, “My grandfather is dead.” The most tragic words can somehow sound funny, and Ursula, in her nervousness, very nearly laughed.
“I miss him,” continued Otto, quite unconsciously. “He wasn’t--childish, you know, when I went away. How the poor old man would have enjoyed some talks about my tiger-hunts. He was such a splendid shot.”
[Illustration: “‘GIRD UP YOUR LOINS!’ CRIED THE DOMINÉ”]
“Yes.” A man always feels foolish under such a question as that.
“That depends on your ideas of proportion. Tigers must not be confounded with rabbits. I have shot enough to be able to beg your father’s acceptance of a skin when my boxes come.”
They walked on for some minutes in silence, awkward silence, she flicking at the corn ears with her white parasol. Then she said, “I feel sorry for the tiger.”
He answered, dryly, “The parents of his final supper did not take that view.”
“But,” he added, “I dare say you don’t quite understand about wild beasts, or heathen countries. I shouldn’t wonder, Juffrouw Rovers, if you had never even crossed the frontier.”
“No, I haven’t,” she answered, shortly, much put out by his innocent patronage, “and I am glad I haven’t. I should hate to come back as people do, finding all things small at home. And, above all, I should hate to go to India--a horrible place with spiders as big as my sunshade, and a python curled up, perhaps, under one’s pillow of nights. You needn’t laugh; I may have forgotten the dreadful creatures’ names, but I know they’re there, for my Uncle Mopius told me.”
“Ah, yes, your Uncle Mopius. He was out in Java, wasn’t he?”
“Yes, he was notary there, and he tells the most awful stories.”
“Then don’t believe them. So you would never go to India?”
“Well, it’s a good thing there’s no necessity. I had to, you see. People even face pythons, when they _must_. And there’s always the fun of killing them.”
She shuddered. “The fun of killing,” she repeated, “I cannot understand at all. We are speaking different languages, Mynheer van Helmont. I hate the idea of killing anything. And do you know what I hate still more? It is what you call ‘a splendid shot.’ Gerard is a splendid shot, like his grandfather; the finest, they say, in the province. Yes, I can’t help it; I’ve often told him.” She plunged headlong. “I dare say you’re a splendid shot. But it’s just my hobby. To go creep, creeping through God’s creation, a gun in one’s hand, seeking some innocent life you may slay for the pleasure of slaying! Or, still worse, to sit in a chair and have the poor fluttering wretches driven in quantities on to one’s barrels! It’s the one thing that spoils the country for me, and only in the autumn I long to get away from Horstwyk. There’s no shooting in towns.”