Part 25 (1/2)
It was a hot September day and the sky over Amsterdam was a clear Delft blue when Hendrick was taken from the cellar and conveyed to court for his trial. He sat in the cart with his face hidden in his arms, wanting no one to recognize him. The previous morning Willem had gained permission to see him and to bring a lawyer and, equally welcome, a razor and a change of clothes, or else a beard and unkempt hair would have disguised him.
Mercifully the trial was over quickly. The lawyer presented a strong defense of provocation caused to a master upon seeing unauthorized signed work by a pupil from his own studio. Willem also spoke on Hendrick's behalf. Lastly Aletta took the witness stand and admitted that she had done work for sale without her father's knowledge. The judge publicly condemned her as a wayward daughter, which caused her intense shame. The punishment imposed on Hendrick was restricted to a heavy fine, which Willem paid on his behalf. Hendrick was careful not to show his jubilation at how lightly he had got away. Once again good fortune had nudged a path through tribulation for him. But as he left the courtroom a free man again, the sobering realization came to him that his debts, now increased by a further six hundred florins, held him in thrall as securely as the prison bars he had left behind him. He would not be truly liberated until Francesca was married to Ludolf.
As he went down the steps into the street, Willem and Sybylla with him, he saw Aletta standing there, but he ignored her. Without a glance in her direction he took a seat in Willem's coach, which was waiting. His pride had suffered another almost insupportable blow and he could not forgive her. Had she used her own name and not gone about her clandestine painting under the name of her mother, he might have found it in his heart to forgive her, but to his mind she had insulted Anna's memory. When he saw Sybylla hesitate as if she would go to Aletta he beckoned her fiercely.
”Get in the coach!”
She obeyed reluctantly. Her eyes, full of sympathy, were on her sister. Willem, wanting to bring Hendrick and Aletta together again, spoke to him persuasively.
”Surely you would like both your daughters to ride home with you on this day?”
”No!” Hendrick sat forward with a grimace that was almost a snarl. ”Aletta shall never paint again under my roof! Or be welcome there! That is to be the punishment of a daughter who has offended against her father!”
Willem sighed and took the seat beside him. As the coach moved forward Willem saw that Aletta stood with her head bowed in distress. It was to be hoped that before long Hendrick's basic good nature would surface and there would be a reconciliation between them. Willem, having heard both sides of the story, thought that Aletta had erred, although he understood and sympathized with her reasons.
As was to be expected, Hendrick was hungry for news as to what had been happening in Amsterdam and elsewhere, for little information about anything had reached the damp confines of the gatehouse tower. Then, as the talk in the coach turned to the trial, Willem spoke of Ludolf.
”Had he not been away from Amsterdam on his business travels, I would have asked him to speak as well on your behalf. I wrote to tell him of your predicament, asking his clerk to see that the letter reached him. With the interest he has in your work and your well-being, I'm sure that upon his return he would have moved heaven and earth to get your release if the worse had come to the worst.”
Hendrick gave a snort. ”I'm sure you're right. Naturally he wouldn't want me to be incarcerated. It would undercut his plans.”
”What do you mean?”
Hendrick realized he had let slip too much and covered it quickly. ”Only that he wants to fill his walls with my paintings without too much delay. Has word of my tribulation been kept from Francesca?”
”It has. You asked me that yesterday.”
”Did I? To have freedom again has set my head in a whirl.”
Sybylla leaned toward him from the opposite seat. ”All will be well when you're home again, Father. Please try to forgive Aletta for being the cause of so much trouble.”
Again his face contorted fearsomely, causing her to draw back in her seat, and he made a threatening gesture. ”Don't mention your sister's name to me! Forgiveness was drained out of me in prison. I don't know yet if it will ever return.”
When Hendrick's home was reached Willem remained in the coach, letting him go in on his own with Sybylla. Maria and Griet must have been watching out, desperately anxious to know the result of the trial, for the entrance door opened wide before they reached it.
Maria wept with relief and happiness to see Hendrick home again and he suffered her kiss, p.r.i.c.kly with whiskers, on his cheek. Then he went straight to his studio. The familiar aroma of chalk, oil, paint and ink had a reviving effect, almost as if his blood had been dormant and was now coursing through his veins again. His self-portrait was exactly as he had left it and he eyed it critically, able to see already where more work was needed. Then he looked in the mirror that was still in its position at the side of the easel and was shocked by the change in his appearance. His face had become thin, his jowls hanging in dewlaps and his eyes were sunken. As for his hair, that had become quite white, almost no trace left of its coppery color. He had been aware of his loss of bodily weight, but he had not realized that incarceration had also stamped old age into his features.
He shuddered and took the half-finished portrait from the easel to place it in the storeroom out of sight. There was no point in finis.h.i.+ng it now. Later he would paint over it and do another likeness of himself once his self-esteem had returned and the memory of prison had faded. In the storeroom Aletta's easel was propped against the wall, her palette and brushes on a shelf above. Whether this had been done through orders he had sent through Willem or whether it had been prompted by Aletta's conscience after his arrest he did not know. He tilted the palette and touched a sc.r.a.p of paint left on the surface. It was hard and dry.
With the memory of her careless work vivid in his mind, he no longer had any faith in Aletta's future as an artist, all thoughts of an apprentices.h.i.+p for her dismissed from his mind. She should concentrate now on marriage. He would give her free choice, even though he was denying it to Francesca. There was nothing that could make him change his mind about seeing Francesca wed to Ludolf. Not even for his beloved firstborn could he ever face prison again.
HENDRICK WAS NOT aware that he was making Aletta a scapegoat for all his troubles. Having made his way home without speaking to her, it remained that way. She might have been invisible for all the notice he took of her. She in her turn had become exceedingly quiet, having lost the more open att.i.tude that had resulted from her going out to sketch and meeting people of many walks of life. That had been a time when she felt she was her own person, making her own decisions and deciding the pattern of her life for herself, no longer overshadowed by Francesca's beauty and Sybylla's exuberance. Now all that had gone. She withdrew into herself, going silently about full-time domestic duties in the house that relieved both Maria and Griet of a number of ch.o.r.es.
Yet she was changed. Her temper, which she had only ever shown before under extreme provocation, now flared more easily, exploding like a firework before she retreated again into her sh.e.l.l of quietness. No one was spared either in the household or out of it.
”You poor child,” Maria said well-meaningly to her one day. ”With your father scarcely speaking to you there's no life for you in this house at the moment.”
Aletta, stripping a bed at the time for laundry, hurled her bundled-up sheet halfway across the room, her cheeks flaring and her eyes flas.h.i.+ng. ”I'm not a child. I'm a woman with a mind and a will of her own. If Father had any compa.s.sion in him he would never have deprived me of the lifeblood of painting that is as vital to me as it is to him!”
It added to her personal torment that she who was to have spoken to Hendrick on Francesca's behalf had failed her sister. He might have listened to her eventually if all the trouble had not occurred. That same evening in her misery she confided Francesca's plight to Sybylla, who was not particularly sympathetic.
”I'm not surprised Father wanted her chaperoned when she's away from home. It would have been the same for any one of us. Remember, she's probably homesick and that would make everything appear much worse to her than it is.”
”But will you appeal to him on her behalf?”
Sybylla sighed. ”Very well. I'll go to him now.”
She went to the family parlor, where Hendrick was sitting, but returned almost immediately.
”What happened?” Aletta asked anxiously.
”I asked him if I could speak about Francesca's accommodation in Delft and he said, 'No.'”
”Didn't he say anything else?”
”Yes. He told me not to speak about you to him either.” Then Sybylla made a sensible suggestion. ”Why don't you go and stay for a week or two with Francesca in Delft? You must have enough money from the paintings you sold. Maria, Griet and I can manage well enough here.”
Aletta's face cleared. ”Oh yes! I'll go tomorrow.”
If her father wanted to see her again after she bade him farewell in the morning he would have to send for her.
Chapter 14.
WHEN ALETTA WENT TO THE STUDIO AND TOLD HENDRICK she intended to go to Delft he did not glance in her direction, but continued to lace a canvas onto a stretcher. Then, when she turned to leave, he slammed the stretcher down on the table and swung around to roar at her.
”Go! Stay away forever, for all your absence matters to me!”
She halted and stood her ground. ”Am I never to be forgiven?” she replied as fiercely.
”Never in my lifetime! Get out of my studio.”
She was ashen-faced, but not cowed, her lace-capped head held high. ”You need never see me again. I'll make a living for myself away from Amsterdam.”
”It will not be at painting,” he retaliated cruelly.
The taunt struck at her so deeply that she flew from the room.
Next morning at breakfast he was the only one who did not speak to her and he shut himself away in his studio while farewells were being said. When he heard her leave the house with Sybylla he went on preparing the canvas he had been stretching the day before, and did not look toward the window in case she should stand on tiptoe outside to take a last glance at him through the gla.s.s.
Aletta sat silent in the stage wagon and did not chat to her fellow pa.s.sengers. It was as if she had been drained of all emotion. She felt numb, cut off from the rest of the world. The many weeks of conscience-stricken misery and the harshness of her father's att.i.tude since his return home had finally taken their toll. She had brought two lots of hand baggage with her, and when she had found employment in Delft, Sybylla would send on a chest with the rest of her belongings. Sybylla, who so often did not think before she spoke, had unwittingly exacerbated Hendrick's taunt of the previous day by suggesting that Aletta could give drawing and painting lessons to bring in an income.
”That's the last thing I'll ever do!” Aletta had hissed. ”I'll use a scrubbing brush and a bucket, but never a dog's-hair brush or a palette again.”
It was not only a thoroughly uncomfortable journey in the stage wagon, but noisy as well, for the weather was rough and wild. Rain drummed on the waxed cloth overhead while the force of the wind caused it to whip and billow as if at any moment it would be ripped away from the iron hoops. Every now and again the wheels would slither in the soft surface mud, the ground below still hard from a long, dry spell. Halts at hostelries meant heads down against the driving rain and some pa.s.sengers chose not to alight, wanting to avoid sitting in damp clothes for the rest of the way.
It was toward the end of the journey when Aletta heard comments being made by those familiar with the area about the speed of a coach approaching from behind along the road. It was obvious to them that the coachman was intent on overtaking the stage wagon before reaching the bridge that lay ahead, for whoever crossed it first would have command of the route for the rest of the narrow road into Delft. Naturally the coachman did not want to follow the stage wagon's slower pace, it having been impossible to put up its little sails with a high head wind blowing toward them.