Page:Max Havelaar Or The Coffee Sales of the Netherlands Trading Company Siebenhaar.djvu/112

 She had lost her parents when very young, and been brought up with relations. When she was married they told her that she possessed a little money, which they paid her. But Havelaar discovered, from some letters of an earlier date, and from stray notes which she kept in a small case that had belonged to her mother, that her people, both on the side of her father and her mother, had been very rich; yet he could find nothing to explain where, when, or through what cause that wealth had been lost. She herself, who had never taken an interest in money matters, could answer him little or nothing when he pressed for particulars with regard to the former possessions of her relatives. Her grandfather, the Baron Van Wynbergen, had followed Prince William V in exile to England, and had been a cavalry captain in the army of the Duke of York. He appeared to have led a gay life with the exiled members of the stadhouder’s family, and this had been assigned in many quarters as the cause of losing his fortune. Afterwards, at Waterloo, he fell in a charge with the hussars of Boreel. It was touching to read the letters of her father—who was then a youth of eighteen, and who, as a lieutenant in the same corps, received in the same charge a sabre cut on the head, from the consequence of which he was to die demented eight years later—letters to his mother, in which he complained that he had vainly searched the battlefield for the body of his father.

As regards her descent on her mother’s side, she remembered that her grandfather had lived in great affluence, and it was evident from some of the papers that he had owned the postal service in Switzerland, in the same manner as, even now, in large portions of Germany and Italy, this branch of revenue is the appanage of the princes of Turn and Taxis. This suggested a large fortune, but again, without any known cause, nothing or only very little appeared to have come down to the second generation.

Havelaar did not learn the little that was still to be learnt about the matter until after his marriage, and in his researches it aroused his astonishment that the small case which I just referred to—and