The Valley of Vision | Page 8

chatter dies down, as he speaks in his gruff authoritative voice, but
with a twinkle in his eyes, rather like a middle-aged Santa Claus.
"Look here! I've got two fine babies."
A titter runs through the room.
_"Ja, Men'eer,"_ says one of the women, "congratulations! They are
_lievelingen_--darlings!"
"Silence!" growls the commandant amiably. "None of your impudence,
you women. Look here! These two children--I want somebody to adopt
them, or at least to take care of them. I will pay for them. Their names
are Hendrik and--"
A commotion at the lower end of the room. A thin, dark little woman is
standing up, waving her piece of sewing like a flag, her big eyes
flaming with excitement.
"Stop!" she cries, hurrying and stumbling forward through the crowd of
women and girls. "Oh, stop a minute! They are mine--I lost them--mine,
I tell you--lost--mine!"
She reaches the head of the table and flings her arms around the boy,
crying: "My Hendrik!"
The boy hesitates a second, startled by the sudden wildness of her
caress. Then he presses his hot little face in her neck.

_"Lieve moeder!"_ he murmurs. "Where was you? I looked."
But the thin, dark little woman has fainted dead away.
The rest we will leave, as the wise commandant does, to the chief
nurse.

A SANCTUARY OF TREES

The Baron d'Azan was old--older even than his seventy years. His age
showed by contrast as he walked among his trees. They were fresh and
flourishing, full of sap and vigor, though many of them had been born
long before him.
The tracts of forest which still belonged to his diminished estate were
crowded with the growths native to the foot-hills of the Ardennes. In
the park around the small chateau, built in a Belgian version of the First
Empire style, trees from many lands had been assembled by his father
and grandfather: drooping spruces from Norway, dark-pillared
cypresses from Italy, spreading cedars from Lebanon, trees of heaven
from China, fern-leaved gingkos from Japan, lofty tulip-trees and
liquidambars from America, and fantastic sylvan forms from islands of
the Southern Ocean. But the royal avenue of beeches! Well, I must tell
you more about that, else you can never feel the meaning of this story.
The love of trees was hereditary in the family and antedated their other
nobility. The founder of the house had begun life as the son of a
forester in Luxemburg. His name was Pol Staar. His fortune and title
were the fruit of contracts for horses and provisions which he made
with the commissariat of Napoleon I. in the days when the Netherlands
were a French province. But though Pol Staar's hands were callous and
his manners plain, his tastes were aristocratic. They had been formed
young in the company of great trees.
Therefore when he bought his estate of Azan (and took his title from it)
he built his chateau in a style which he considered complimentary to
his imperial patron, but he was careful also to include within his
domain large woodlands in which he could renew the allegiance of his
youth. These woodlands he cherished and improved, cutting with
discretion, planting with liberality, and rejoicing in the thought that
trees like those which had befriended his boyhood would give their
friendly protection to his heirs. These are traits of an

aristocrat--attachment to the past, and careful provision for posterity. It
was in this spirit that Pol Staar, first Baron d'Azan, planted in 1809 the
broad avenue of beeches, leading from the chateau straight across the
park to the highroad. But he never saw their glory, for he died when
they were only twenty years old.
His son and successor was of a different timber and grain; less
aristocratic, more bourgeois--a rover, a gambler, a man of fashion. He
migrated from the gaming-tables at Spa to the Bourse at Paris, perching
at many clubs between and beyond, and making seasonal nests in
several places. This left him little time for the Chdteau d'Azan. But he
came there every spring and autumn, and showed the family fondness
for trees in his own fashion. He loved the forests so much that he ate
them. He cut with liberality and planted without discretion. But for the
great avenue of beeches he had a saving admiration. Not even to
support the gaming-table would he have allowed them to be felled.
When he turned the corner of his thirty-first year he had a sharp illness,
a temporary reformation, and brought home as his wife a very young
lovely actress from the ducal theatre at Saxe-Meiningen. She was a
good girl, deeply in love with her handsome husband, to whom she
bore a son and heir in the first year of their marriage. Not many moons
thereafter the pleased