He fell into a fit of abstraction, – a habit not uncommon with learned men, – wondering why life should be so different with different people; why he should be in that warm, handsome room, with its soft rich hangings and carpet, with its beautiful furniture of carved wood, its pictures, and the rare china scattered here and there among the grim array of skeletons which were his delight. He wondered why he should take his tea out of costly and valuable Oriental china, sugar and cream out of antique silver, while other poor souls had no tea at all, and nothing to take it out of even if they had. He wondered why he should have a lamp under his teapot that was a very marvel of art transparencies; why he should have every luxury, and this poor creature should be dying in the street amid the wind and the rain. It was all very unequal.
It was very odd, the professor argued, leaning his back against the tall, warm stove; it was very odd indeed. He began to feel that, grand as the study of osteology undoubtedly is, he ought not to permit it to become so engrossing as to blind him to the study of the greater philosophies of life. His reverie was, however, broken by the abrupt reentrance of Koosje, who this time was a trifle less breathless than she had been before.
“We have got her into the kitchen, professor,” she announced. “She is a child – a mere baby, and so pretty! She has opened her eyes and spoken.”
“Give her some soup and wine – hot,” said the professor, without stirring.
“But won’t you come?” she asked.
The professor hesitated; he hated attending in cases of illness, though he was a properly qualified doctor and in an emergency would lay his prejudice aside.
“Or shall I run across for the good Dr. Smit?” Koosje asked. “He would come in a minute, only it is such a night!”
At that moment a fiercer gust than before rattled at the casements, and the professor laid aside his scruples.
He followed his housekeeper down the chilly, marble-flagged passage into the kitchen, where he never went for months together – a cosey enough, pleasant place, with a deep valance hanging from the mantel-shelf, with many great copper pans, bright and shining as new gold, and furniture all scrubbed to the whiteness of snow.
In an arm-chair before the opened stove sat the rescued girl – a slight, golden-haired thing, with wistful blue eyes and a frightened air. Every moment she caught her breath in a half-hysterical sob, while violent shivers shook her from head to foot.
The professor went and looked at her over his spectacles, as if she had been some curious specimen of his favourite study; but at the same time he kept at a respectful distance from her.
“Give her some soup and wine,” he said, at length, putting his hands under the tails of his long dressing-gown of flowered cashmere. “Some soup and wine – hot; and put her to bed.”
“Is she then to remain for the night?” Koosje asked, a little surprised.
“Oh, don’t send me away!” the golden-haired girl broke out, in a voice that was positively a wail, and clasping a pair of pretty, slender hands in piteous supplication.
“Where do you come from?” the old gentleman asked, much as if he expected she might suddenly jump up and bite him.
“From Beijerland, mynheer,” she answered, with a sob.
“So! Koosje, she is remarkably well dressed, is she not?” the professor said, glancing at the costly lace head-gear, the heavy gold head-piece, which lay on the table together with the great gold spiral ornaments and filigree pendants – a dazzling head of richness. He looked, too, at the girl’s white hands, at the rich, crape-laden gown, at their delicate beauty, and shower of waving golden hair, which, released from the confinement of the cap and head-piece, floated in a rich mass of glittering beauty over the pillows which his servant had placed beneath her head.
The professor was old; the professor was wholly given up to his profession, which he jokingly called his sweetheart; and, though he cut half of his acquaintances in the street through inattention and the shortness of his sight, he had eyes in his head, and upon occasions could use them. He therefore repeated the question.
“Very well dressed indeed, professor,” returned Koosje, promptly.
“And what are you doing in Utrecht – in such a plight as this, too?” he asked, still keeping at a safe distance.
“O mynheer, I am all alone in the world,” she answered, her blue misty eyes filled with tears. “I had a month ago a dear, good, kind father, but he has died, and I am indeed desolate. I always believed him rich, and to these things,” with a gesture that included her dress and the ornaments on the table, “I have ever been accustomed. Thus I ordered without consideration such clothes as I thought needful. And then I found there was nothing for me – not a hundred guilders to call my own when all was paid.”
“But what brought you to Utrecht?”
“He sent me here, mynheer. In his last illness, only of three days’ duration, he bade me gather all together and come to this city, where I was to ask for a Mevrouw Baake, his cousin.”
“Mevrouw Baake, of the Sigaren Fabrijk,” said Dortje, in an aside, to the others. “I lived servant with her before I came here.”
“I had heard very little about her, only my father had sometimes mentioned his cousin to me; they had once been betrothed,” the stranger continued. “But when I reached Utrecht I found she was dead – two years dead; but we had never heard of it.”
“Dear, dear, dear!” exclaimed the professor, pityingly. “Well, you had better let Koosje put you to bed, and we will see what can be done for you in the morning.”
“Am I to make up a bed?” Koosje asked, following him along the passage.
The professor wheeled round and faced her.
“She had better sleep in the guest room,” he said, thoughtfully, regardless of the cold which struck to his slippered feet from the marble floor. “That is the only room which does not contain specimens that would probably frighten the poor child. I am very much afraid, Koosje,” he concluded, doubtfully, “that she is a lady; and what we are to do with a lady I can’t think.”
With that the old gentleman shuffled off to his cosey room, and Koosje turned back to her kitchen.
“He’ll never think of marrying her,” mused Koosje, rather blankly. If she had spoken the thoughts to the professor himself, she would have received a very emphatic assurance that, much as the study of osteology and the Stradivari had blinded him to the affairs of this workaday world, he was not yet so thoroughly foolish as to join his fossilised wisdom to the ignorance of a child of sixteen or seventeen.
However, on the morrow matters assumed a somewhat different aspect. Gertrude van Floote proved to be not exactly a gentlewoman. It is true that her father had been a well-to-do man for his station in life, and had very much spoiled and indulged his one motherless child. Yet her education was so slight that she could do little more than read and write, besides speaking a little English, which she had picked up from the yachtsmen frequenting her native town. The professor found she had been but a distant relative of the Mevrouw Baake, to seek whom she had come to Utrecht, and that she had no kinsfolk upon whom she could depend – a fact which accounted for the profusion of her jewellery, all her golden trinkets having descended to her as heirlooms.
“I can be your servant, mynheer,” she suggested. “Indeed, I am a very useful girl, as you will find if you will but try me.”
Now, as a rule, the professor vigorously set his face against admitting young servants into his house. They broke his china, they disarranged his bones, they meddled with his papers, and made general havoc. So, in truth, he was not very willing to have Gertrude van Floote as a permanent member of his household, and he said so.
But Koosje had taken a fancy to the girl; and having an eye to her own departure at no very distant date, – for she had been betrothed more than two years, – she pleaded so hard to