Amélie dragged herself away with an unhappy face. She, too, did not play a brilliant game, and Suzette always lost her temper when she made mistakes.
“I have so long been hoping to make your acquaintance, Mevrouw, that I should not like to miss the opportunity tonight,” answered Quaerts.
She looked at him: it troubled her that she could not understand him. She knew him to be somewhat of a gallant. There were stories in which the name of a married woman was coupled with his. Did he wish to try his blandishments upon her? She had no hankering for that sort of pastime; she had never cared for flirtations.
“Why?” she asked, calmly, immediately regretting the word; for her question sounded like coquetry, and she intended anything but that.
“Why?” he repeated. He looked at her in slight embarrassment as he sat near her, with Jules on the ground between them, against his knee, his eyes closed.
“Because … because,” he stammered, “because you are my friend’s sister, I suppose, and I used never to see you here …”
She made no answer: in her seclusion she had forgotten how to talk, and she did not take the least trouble about it.
“I used often to see you formerly at the theatre,” said Quaerts, “when Mr Van Even was still alive.”
“At the opera?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Ah! I did not know you then.”
“No.”
“I have not been out in the evening for a long time, on account of my mourning.”
“And I always choose the evening to pay my visits here.”
“So it is easily explained that we have never met.”
They were silent for a moment. It seemed to him she spoke very coldly.
“I should like to go to the opera!” murmured Jules with closed eyes. “Ah no, after all, I think I would rather not.”
“Dolf told me that you read a great deal,” Quaerts continued. “Do you keep up with modern literature?”
“A little. I do not read so very much.”
“No?”
“Oh, no. I have two children, and consequently not much time for it. Besides, it has no particular fascination for me; life is so much more romantic than any novel.”
“So you are a philosopher?”
“I? Oh, no, I assure you, Mr Quaerts. I am the most commonplace woman in the world.”
She spoke with her wicked little laugh and her cold voice: the voice and the laugh she employed when she feared lest she should be wounded in her secret sensitiveness, and when therefore she hid herself deep within herself, offering to the outside world something very different from what she really was. Jules opened his eyes and sat looking at her, and his steady glance troubled her.
“You live in a charming place, on the Scheveningen Road.”
“Yes.”
She realised suddenly that her coldness amounted to rudeness, and she did not wish this, even if she did dislike him. She threw herself back negligently; she asked at random, quite without concern, merely for the sake of conversation:
“Have you many relations in the Hague?”
“No; my father and mother live at Velp, and the rest of my family are at Arnhem chiefly. I never fix myself anywhere; I cannot remain long in one place. I have lived for a considerable time in Brussels.”
“You have no occupation, I believe?”
“No; as a boy my longing was to enter the navy, but I was rejected on account of my eyes.”
Involuntarily she looked into his eyes: small, deep-set eyes, the colour of which she could not determine. She thought they looked sly and cunning.
“I have always regretted it,” he continued. “I am a man of action. There is always within me the desire of movement. I console myself as best I can with sport.”
“Sport?” she repeated coldly.
“Yes.”
“Oh.”
“Quaerts is a Nimrod and a Centaur, and a Hercules, are you not?” said Jules.
“Ah, Jules,” said Quaerts, with a laugh, “names and theories and classifications. Which class do you really place me in?”
“Among the very, very few people I really love!” the boy answered, ardently, and without hesitation. “Taco, when are you going to give me my riding-lessons?”
“Whenever you like, my son.”
“Yes, but you must fix the day for us to go to the riding-school. I won’t fix a day, I hate fixing days.”
“Well, tomorrow? Tomorrow is Wednesday.”
“Very well.”
Cecile noticed that Jules was still staring at her. She looked at him back. How was it possible that the boy could like this man? How was it possible that it irritated her and not him – all that healthiness, that strength, that power of muscle and rage of sport? She could make nothing of it; she understood neither Quaerts nor Jules, and she herself drifted away again into that mood of half-consciousness, in which she did not know what she thought, nor what at that very moment she might say; in which she seemed to be lost, and wandering in search of herself.
She rose, tall, frail, in her crêpe, like a queen who mourns; touches of gold in her flaxen hair, where a little jet aigrette glittered like a black mirror.
“I am going to see who is winning,” she said, and went to the card-table in the other room. She stood behind Mrs Hoze, seeming to be interested in the game, but across the light of the candles she peered at Quaerts and Jules. She saw them talking together, softly, confidentially, Jules with his arm on Quaerts’ knee. She saw Jules looking up, as if in adoration, into the face of this man, and then the boy suddenly threw his arms around his friend in a wild embrace, while this latter kept him off with a patient gesture.
V
The next evening Cecile revelled even more than usual in the luxury of being able to stay at home. It was after dinner; she sat on the chaise-longue in her little boudoir with Dolf and Christie, an arm thrown round each of them, sitting between them, so young, like an elder sister. In her low voice she was telling them:
“Judah came up to him, and said, Oh my lord, let me stay as a bondsman instead of Benjamin. For our father, who is such an old man, said to us when we went away with Benjamin: My son Joseph I have already lost; surely he has been torn in pieces by the wild beasts. And if you take this one also from me, and any harm befall him, I shall become grey with sorrow, and die. Then (Judah said) I said to our father that I would be responsible for his safety, and that I should be very naughty if we did not bring Benjamin home again. And therefore I pray you, Oh my lord, let me be your bondsman, and let the lad go back with his brethren. For how can I go back to my father if the lad be not with me …”
“And Joseph, Mamma, what did Joseph say?” asked Christie. He nestled closely against his mother, this poor slender little fellow of six, with his fine golden hair, and his eyes of pale forget-me-not blue, his little fingers hooking themselves nervously into Cecile’s gown, rumpling the crêpe.
“Then Joseph could no longer restrain himself, and ordered his servants to leave him; then he burst into tears, crying, Do you not know me? I am Joseph.”
But Cecile could not continue, for Christie had thrown himself on her neck in a frenzy of despair, and she heard him sobbing against her.
“Christie! My darling!”
She was greatly distressed; she had grown interested in her own recital and had not noticed Christie’s excitement, and now he was sobbing against her in such violent grief that she could find no word to quiet him, to comfort him, to tell him that it ended happily.
“But, Christie, don’t cry, don’t cry! It ends happily.”
“And Benjamin, what about Benjamin?”
“Benjamin returned to his father, and Jacob came down to Egypt to live with Joseph.”
“Was it really like that? Or are you making it up?”