Page:Dr Adriaan (1918).djvu/35

Rh able to go on living, in this house, and together with their child performing the task that seemed to be laid upon them: looking after Gerrit's children! . ..

And Adeline took it as quite natural; but yet. . . how grateful she was to them! How often she told them that she could never have brought up the children alone, that she would have had neither the strength for it nor the money! . . . Gerrit's death had broken her. She had always quietly done her little duties as a wife and mother, but Gerrit's death had broken her. She had remained among all her children as one who no longer knows. It was as if the simplicity of her life had become shrouded in a darkness wherein she wandered and sought, groping with outstretched hands. Ah, if Constance and Addie had not led her! . ..

And Constance in her turn was grateful to Van der Welcke, for was it not his house in which she lived with her nephews and nieces, was it not with his money, for a great part, that she brought up those children? . . . Oh, if the old man would only cease spreading that rancour around them, filling the whole great sombre house with it because they had intruded, because they were living there on his money, though that money now belonged to his heir! At every guilder that Constance spent on her swollen household, she felt the old man's rancour. And it made her thriftier than she had ever been at the time when she and Henri, though their needs were far from small, had had to live on a few thousand guilders a year. Though she now lived in this big house, though twelve and often fifteen of them sat down to table, she was comparatively thriftier in her whole mode of life than she had ever been in her little house with her husband and child. . . . It was the old man's money,