"What do you mean by speaking to her like that?" he demanded, an angry flush overspreading his dark face.
"What is the maid to you?" Koosje asked, indignantly.
"Maybe more than you are," he retorted; in answer to which Koosje deliberately marched out of the kitchen, leaving them alone.
To say she was indignant would be but very mildly to express the state of her feelings; she was _furious_. She knew that the end of her romance had come. No thoughts of making friends with Jan entered her mind; only a great storm filled her heart till it was ready to burst with pain and anguish.
As she went along the pa.s.sage the professor"s bell sounded, and Koosje, being close to the door, went abruptly in. The professor looked up in mild astonishment, quickly enough changed to dismay as he caught sight of his valued Koosje"s face, from out of which anger seemed in a moment to have thrust all the bright, comely beauty.
"How now, my good Koosje?" said the old gentleman. "Is aught amiss?"
"Yes, professor, there is," returned Koosje, all in a blaze of anger, and moving, as she spoke, the tea-tray, which she set down upon the oaken buffet with a bang, which made its fair and delicate freight fairly jingle again.
"But you needn"t break my china, Koosje," suggested the old gentleman, mildly, rising from his chair and getting into his favourite att.i.tude before the stove.
"You are quite right, professor," returned Koosje, curtly; she was sensible even in her trouble.
"And what is the trouble?" he asked, gently.
"It"s just this, professor," cried Koosje, setting her arms akimbo and speaking in a high-pitched, shrill voice; "you and I have been warming a viper in our bosoms, and, viper-like, she has turned round and bitten me."
"Is it Truide?"
"Truide," she affirmed, disdainfully. "Yes, it is Truide, who but for me would be dead now of hunger and cold--or _worse_. And she has been making love to that great fool, Jan van der Welde,--great oaf that he is,--after all I have done for her; after my dragging her in out of the cold and rain; after all I have taught her. Ah, professor, but it is a vile, venomous viper that we have been warming in our bosoms!"
"I must beg, Koosje," said the old gentleman, sedately, "that you will exonerate me from any such proceeding. If you remember rightly, I was altogether against your plan for keeping her in the house." He could not resist giving her that little dig, kind of heart as he was.
"Serves me right for being so soft-hearted!" thundered Koosje. "I"ll be wiser next time I fall over a bundle, and leave it where I find it."
"No, no, Koosje; don"t say that," the old gentleman remonstrated, gently. "After all, it may be but a blessing in disguise. G.o.d sends all our trials for some good and wise purpose. Our heaviest afflictions are often, nay, most times, Koosje, means to some great end which, while the cloud of adversity hangs over us, we are unable to discern."
"Ah!" sniffed Koosje, scornfully.
"This oaf--as I must say you justly term him, for you are a good clever woman, Koosje, as I can testify after the experience of years--has proved that he can be false; he has shown that he can throw away substance for shadow (for, of a truth, that poor, pretty child would make a sad wife for a poor man); yet it is better you should know it now than at some future date, when--when there might be other ties to make the knowledge more bitter to you."
"Yes, that is true," said Koosje, pa.s.sing the back of her hand across her trembling lips. She could not shed tears over her trouble; her eyes were dry and burning, as if anger had scorched the blessed drops up ere they should fall. She went on washing up the cups and saucers, or at least _the_ cup and saucer, and other articles the professor had used for his tea; and after a few minutes" silence he spoke again.
"What are you going to do? Punish her, or turn her out, or what?"
"I shall let him--_marry_ her," replied Koosje, with a portentous nod.
The old gentleman couldn"t help laughing. "You think he will pay off your old scores?"
"Before long," answered Koosje, grimly, "she will find him out--as I have done."
Then, having finished washing the tea-things, which the professor had shuddered to behold in her angry hands, she whirled herself out of the room and left him alone.
"Oh, these women--these women!" he cried, in confidence, to the pictures and skeletons. "What a worry they are! An old bachelor has the best of it in the main, I do believe. But oh, Jan van der Welde, what a donkey you must be to get yourself mixed up in such a broil! and yet--ah!"
The fossilised old gentleman broke off with a sigh as he recalled the memory of a certain dead-and-gone romance which had happened--goodness only knows how many years before--when he, like Jan van der Welde, would have thrown the world away for a glance of a certain pair of blue eyes, at the bidding of a certain English tongue, whose broken _Nederlandsche taal_ was to him the sweetest music ever heard on earth--sweeter even than the strains of the Stradivari when from under his skilful fingers rose the perfect melodies of old masters. Ay, but the sweet eyes had been closed in death many a long, long, year, the sweet voice hushed in silence. He had watched the dear life ebb away, the fire in the blue eyes fade out. He had felt each day that the clasp of the little greeting fingers was less close; each day he had seen the outline of the face grow sharper; and at last there had come one when the poor little English-woman met him with the gaze of one who knew him not, and babbled, not of green fields, but of horses and dogs, and of a brother Jack, who, five years before, had gone down with her Majesty"s ship _Alligator_ in mid-Atlantic.
Ay, but that was many and many a year agone. His young, blue-eyed love stood out alone in life"s history, a thing apart. Of the gentler s.e.x, in a general way, the old professor had not seen that which had raised it in his estimation to the level of the one woman over whose memory hung a bright halo of romance.
Fifteen years had pa.s.sed away; the old professor of osteology had pa.s.sed away with them; and in the large house on the Domplein lived a baron, with half a dozen noisy, happy, healthy children,--young _fraulas_ and _jonkheers_,--who scampered up and down the marble pa.s.sages, and fell headlong down the steep, narrow, unlighted stairways, to the imminent danger of dislocating their aristocratic little necks. There was a new race of neat maids, clad in the same neat livery of lilac and black, who scoured and cleaned, just as Koosje and Dortje had done in the old professor"s day. You might, indeed, have heard the selfsame names resounding through the echoing rooms: "Koos-je! Dort-je!"
But the Koosje and Dortje were not the same. What had become of Dortje I cannot say; but on the left-hand side of the busy, bustling, picturesque Oude Gracht there was a handsome shop filled with all manner of cakes, sweeties, confections, and liquors--from absinthe to Benedictine, or arrack to chartreuse. In that shop was a handsome, prosperous, middle-aged woman, well dressed and well mannered, no longer Professor van Dijck"s Koosje, but the Jevrouw van Kampen.
Yes; Koosje had come to be a prosperous tradeswoman of good position, respected by all. But she was Koosje van Kampen still; the romance which had come to so disastrous and abrupt an end had sufficed for her life.
Many an offer had been made to her, it is true; but she had always declared that she had had enough of lovers--she had found out their real value.
I must tell you that at the time of Jan"s infidelity, after the first flush of rage was over, Koosje disdained to show any sign of grief or regret. She was very proud, this Netherland servant-maid, far too proud to let those by whom she was surrounded imagine she was wearing the willow for the faithless Jan; and when Dortje, on the day of the wedding, remarked that for her part she had always considered Koosje remarkably cool on the subject of matrimony, Koosje with a careless out-turning of her hands, palms uppermost, answered that she was right.
Very soon after their marriage Jan and his young wife left Utrecht for Arnheim, where Jan had promise of higher wages; and thus they pa.s.sed, as Koosje thought, completely out of her life.
"I don"t wish to hear anything more about them, if--you--please," she said, severely and emphatically, to Dortje.
But not so. In time the professor died, leaving Koosje the large legacy with which she set up the handsome shop in the Oude Gracht; and several years pa.s.sed on.
It happened one day that Koosje was sitting in her shop sewing. In the large inner room a party of ladies and officers were eating cakes and drinking chocolates and liquors with a good deal of fun and laughter, when the door opened timidly, thereby letting in a gust of bitter wind, and a woman crept fearfully in, followed by two small, crying children.
Could the lady give her something to eat? she asked; they had had nothing during the day, and the little ones were almost famished.
Koosje, who was very charitable, lifted a tray of large, plain buns, and was about to give her some, when her eyes fell upon the poor beggar"s faded face, and she exclaimed:
"Truide!"
Truide, for it was she, looked up in startled surprise.
"I did not know, or I would not have come in, Koosje," she said, humbly; "for I treated you very badly."
"Ve-ry bad-ly," returned Koosje, emphatically. "Then where is Jan?"
"Dead!" murmured Truide, sadly.
"Dead! so--ah, well! I suppose I must do something for you. Here Yanke!"
opening the door and calling, "Yanke!"
"_Je, jevrouw_," a voice cried, in reply.
The next moment a maid came running into the shop.
"Take these people into the kitchen and give them something to eat.
Put them by the stove while you prepare it. There is some soup and that smoked ham we had for _koffy_. Then come here and take my place for a while."
"_Je, jevrouw_," said Yanke, disappearing again, followed by Truide and her children.
Then Koosje sat down again, and began to think.