"Dent"s had a funeral once," said a square small lady who kept her hands plunged in the pockets of a grey jersey.
"Now Miss Jewks, really--" protested the elderly lady. "One doesn"t mention--"
"Well, it wasn"t their fault, Miss Andrews. They didn"t _want_ to have it, I"m sure. It was a gentleman from Gipsy Hill--"
"What a beautiful--er--cake," hastily interrupted the elderly lady.
"Funny thing, I sometimes think," continued Miss Jewks, "to go for a holiday and die instead."
"Those silver leaves--" said the elderly lady, raising her voice, "I call them dainty."
"It"s like a wedding-cake, isn"t it?" said the young lady of the sunset, peering close at it with a face of gloom.
"Will you not, Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, calling her for the first time by her name, "cut the cake? And perhaps these ladies will do us the honour of tasting it."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "Will you not, Ingeborg," said Herr Dremmel, calling her for the first time by her name, "cut the cake?"]
She did not recognise him in this persistent ceremoniousness. Every trace of his usual lax behaviour was gone, his ease and familiarity of speech, and he was as stiff and correct and grave as if he were laying a foundation stone or opening a museum. They were the manners, though she did not know it, which all Germans are trained to produce on public occasions.
"Oh, thank you--"
"Oh, you"re really very kind--"
"Oh, thank you very much I"m sure--"
There was a murmur of awkward and reluctant thanks. The seven ladies were not at all certain that their cordiality ought to stretch as far as cake. They had been moved by an impulse that did honour to their womanliness to offer congratulations, but they did not for all that forget the dreadful things the couple had constantly been heard talking about and the many clear proofs it had provided that it was what Dent"s Tours were accustomed to describe as no cla.s.s; and though they all liked cake, and were getting steadily hungrier as the Dent week drew to its close, they were doubtful as to the social wisdom of eating it. It would be very unpleasant if these people, encouraged, were later on to presume; if they were to try to use the eaten cake as a weapon for forcing their way into English society. If, in a word, when the Tour got back to England, they were to want to call.
So they took the cake reluctantly that Ingeborg, in a sort of dream, cut and offered them; and with even more reluctance they sipped the wine in which the German gentleman requested them to drink the newly betrothed couple"s health.
"But--" said Ingeborg, trying to rouse herself even at this eleventh hour.
"True. There are not enough gla.s.ses. I will ring for more," was the way Herr Dremmel finished her sentence for her.
The immense official promptness of him! She felt numbed.
And when the gla.s.ses were brought there was another ceremony--a clinking of Herr Dremmel"s gla.s.s with each gla.s.s in turn, his heels together as in the days of his soldiering, his body stiff and his face a miracle of solemnity; and before drinking he made a speech, the Asti held high in front of him, in which he thanked the ladies for their good wishes on behalf of his betrothed, Miss Ingeborg Bullivant, whose virtues he dwelt upon singly and at length in resounding periods, before proceeding to a.s.sure those present of his firm resolve to prove, by the devotion of the rest of his life, the extremity of his grat.i.tude for the striking proof she had given before them all of her confidence in him; and every sentence seemed to set another and a heavier seal on her as a creature undoubtedly bound to marry him.
Dimly she began to realise something of the steely grip of a German engagement. She wondered whether there were any more room left on her forehead for further seals. She felt that it must be covered with great red things, scrawled over with the inscription:
DREMMEL"S.
Well, she was after all not a parcel to be picked up and carried away by the first person who found her lying about, and the minute she was alone with him she would, she _must_, tell him that what she had really come down for, though appearances were certainly by this time rather against her, was to refuse him. She would be as gentle as possible, but she would be plain and firm. The minute these women left them alone she would tell him.
With a start she saw that the women were leaving them alone, and that the minute had come. She wanted them not to go; she wanted to keep them there at any cost. She even made a step after them as the last one, nodding to the end, went out and shut the door, but Herr Dremmel still had hold of her hand.
When the door had finally shut she turned to him quickly. Her head was thrown back, her eyes were full of a screwed-up courage.
"But you know--" she began, determined to clear things up, however much it might hurt them both.
And again he promptly finished her sentence for her, this time by enfolding her in his arms and kissing her with a largeness and abundance which no bishop, her mind flashed as her body stood stiff with surprise and horror, could possibly approve.
She felt engulfed.
She felt she must be disappearing altogether.
He seemed infinitely capacious and soft.
"Oh, but I can"t--I won"t--oh, stop--oh, stop--it"s a mistake--" she tried to get out in gasps.
"My little wife," was all the notice Herr Dremmel took of that.
CHAPTER VII
It was raining at Redchester when Ingeborg got out at the station a week and a day after she left it--the soft persistent fine rain, hardly more than a mist, peculiar to that much-soaked corner of England. The lawns in the gardens she pa.s.sed as her fly crawled up the hill were incredibly green, the leaves of the lilac bushes glistened with wet, each tulip was a cup of water, the roads were chocolate, and a thick grey blanket of cloud hung warm over the town, tucking it in all round and keeping out any draught that might bite and sting the inhabitants, she thought, into real living.
The porter told her it was fine growing weather, and she wondered stupidly why, after the years she had had of the sort of thing, she had had not grown, then, more thoroughly herself. A retired colonel she knew --she knew all the retired colonels--waved his umbrella and shouted a genial inquiry after her toothache, and she looked at him with a dead, ungrateful eye. A pa.s.sing postman touched his cap, and she turned the other way. The same sensible female figures she had seen all her life draped in the same sensible mackintoshes bowed and smiled, and she pretended she hadn"t seen them. Everybody, in fact, behaved as though she were still good, which was distressing, embarra.s.sing, and productive of an overwhelming desire to shut her eyes and hide.
There were the shops, with the things in the windows unchanged since she left nine days ago, the same ancient novelties n.o.body ever bought, the same flies creeping over the same buns. There was the book-seller her _Christian Year_ had come from, his windows full of more of them, endless supplies for endless dieted daughters, vegetarians in literature she called them to herself, forcibly vegetabled vegetarians; and there was the silversmith who provided the Bishop with the crosses after a good Florentine fifteenth-century pattern he presented to those of his confirmation candidates who were the daughters in the diocese of the great. The Duke"s daughter had one. The Lord-Lieutenant"s daughter had one. On this principle Ingeborg herself had been given one, and wore it continually night and day, as her father expected, under her dress, where it bruised her. It was pleasant to her father to be able to recollect, in the stress and dust of much in his work that was unrefreshing, how there was a yearly increasing though severely sifted number of gentle virgin blouses belonging to the best families beneath which lay and rhythmically heaved this silver reminder of the wearer"s Bishop and of her G.o.d.
"Father," Ingeborg said, after she had worn hers for a week, "may I take my cross off at night?"
"Why, Ingeborg?" he had inquired; adding quietly, "Did our Saviour?"
"No; but--you see when one turns round in one"s sleep it sticks into one."
"Sticks, Ingeborg?" the Bishop said gently, raising his eyebrows at such an expression applied to such an object.
"Yes, and I"m getting awfully bruised." She was still in the schoolroom, and still saying awfully.
"By His stripes we are healed," said the Bishop, shutting up the conversation as one shuts up a book.
In spite of the wet warmth she shivered as the silversmith"s window reminded her of this. It had happened years ago, but even farther back, as far back as she could remember, every time she had asked leave of her father to do anything it had been refused; and refused with bits of Bible, which was so peculiarly silencing.
And now here she was about to face him covered with the leaves she had not asked for at all but had so tremendously taken, and going to ask the most tremendous one of all, the leave to marry Herr Dremmel.
For that was how the last two days of her Dent"s Tour had been spent, in being openly engaged to Herr Dremmel. She had found her attempts to explain that she was not so really availed nothing against his conviction that she was. And public opinion, the public opinion of the whole Tour, also never doubted but that she was--had not seven of its most reliable members actually seen her in the act of becoming it? In fact it not only did not doubt it, it was sternly determined that she should be engaged whether she liked it or not. It was the least, the Tour felt, that she could do. So that there was nothing for it now but to face the Bishop.
She felt cold. No amount of the familiar moist stuffiness could warm her. Vainly she tried to sit up, to be proud and brave, to recapture something at least of the courage that had seemed so easy just at the end in Switzerland with Herr Dremmel to laugh at her doubts. Her head would droop, and her hands and feet were like stones.
It was the place, the place, she thought, the hypnotic effect of it, of her old environment. The whole of Redchester was heavy with recollections of past obediences. Not once had she ever in Redchester even dreamt of rebellion. She had questioned latterly, in the remoter and less filial corners of her heart, but she had never so much as thought of rebellion. And the moment she got away out of sight and hearing of home, things she knew here were wicked had appeared to be quite good and extremely natural. How strange that was. And how strange that now she was back everything was beginning to seem wicked again.
What was a poor wretch to do, she asked herself with sudden pa.s.sion, confronted by these shuffling standards that behaved as if they were dancing a quadrille? This was the place in which for years her conscience had been c.o.c.kered to size and delicacy; and though it had become temporarily tough in Herr Dremmel"s company she felt it relapsing with every turn of the wheels more and more into its ancient softness.
Yet she undoubtedly, conscience-stricken and frightened or not, had to tell her father what she had done. She had got to be brave, and if needs be she had got to defy. She was bound to Herr Dremmel. He had only gone home to set his house in order, and then, he announced, she meanwhile having prepared the Bishop, he was coming to Redchester to marry her.
Prepared the Bishop! She shivered. Herr Dremmel had tried to marry her in Lucerne; but the Swiss, it seemed, would not be hurried, so that here she was, and within the next few hours she was going to have to prepare the Bishop.