She shut her eyes and thought of Herr Dremmel; of Robert, as she was was learning to call him. With all her heart she liked him. And he had been so kind when he found she really disliked being engulfed in embraces, and had restricted his exhibitions of affection to the kissing of her hand, telling her he could very well wait till later on, sure that she would after marriage warm, as he had explained to her on the Rigi all women did, to a just appreciation of the value of the caresses of an honest man. He had also produced a number of German love-names from some hitherto fallow corner of his mind, and garnished his conversation with them in a way that made her who, nourished as she had been on the n.o.ble language of the Bible and the Prayer-book, was instantly responsive to the charm of words, laugh and glow with pleasure. She was his Little Heart, his Little Tiny Treasure, his Little Sugar Lamb--a dozen little sweet diminished German things translated straight away just as they were into English. The freshness of it! The freshness of being admired and petted after the economies in these directions practised in her home. And his ring at that very moment dangled beneath her dress on the same chain as her father"s cross. Yes, she was bound to him. Duty, she perceived, could be a very blessed thing sometimes if it protected one from some other duty. It was Herr Dremmel now who had become her Duty.
She put up her hand to get courage by feeling the ring, for her spirit was fainting within her--she had just caught sight of the cathedral. The ring had been slung on the chain alongside the confirmation cross because it was impossible to wear it on her thumb; and out there in Switzerland, where one was simple, it had seemed a most natural and obvious place to put it. Yet now, as the fly rattled over the cobbles of the Close and the familiar cathedral rose before her like a menace, she hung her head and greatly doubted but what the juxtaposition was wicked.
n.o.body was on the doorstep when she arrived beneath the great cedar that spread its shade, an intensified bit of dripping gloom where all was gloom and dripping, across from the lawn to the Palace"s entrance, except the butler, whose black clothes struck her instantly as very neat and smooth, and his underling, a youth kept carefully a little on the side of a suitable episcopal shabbiness. She had telegraphed her train from Paddington, but that, of course, was no reason why any one should be on the doorstep. It was she whose business lay with doorsteps when people arrived or left, she was the one who welcomed and who sped, and, since she could not welcome herself, there was n.o.body there to do it.
She stole a nervous look at Wilson as he helped her out, but his face was a blank. The boy on her other side had an expression, she thought, as though under happier conditions he might have let himself go in a smirk, and she turned her eyes away with a little sick feeling. Did they know already, all of them, that she had left her aunt"s a week ago? But, indeed, that seemed a small thing now compared with the things she had done since.
"I"m a dead girl," thought Ingeborg, as she pa.s.sed beneath her parents"
porch.
The servants brought in her luggage, off which in her newness at deceit she had not thought to sc.r.a.pe the continental labels, and she crossed the hall, treading on the dim splashes of lovely blurred colour that fell from the vast stained gla.s.s windows on to the stone flags of its floor. It was the n.o.blest hall, as bare of stuffs and carpets as the cathedral itself, and she looked more than insignificant going across it to the carved oak door that opened into the wide panelled pa.s.sage leading to the drawing-room, a little figure braced to a miserable courage, the smallest thing to be going to defy powers of which this magnificence was only one of the expressions.
Her mother was as usual on her sofa near a fire whose heat, that warm day, was mitigated by the windows being wide open. Beside her was her own particular table with the usual flowers, needlework, devotional books, and biographies of good men. It was difficult to believe her mother had got off that sofa nine times to go to bed, had dressed and undressed and had meals--thirty-six of them, counted Ingeborg mechanically, while she looked about for the Bishop, if you excluded the before breakfast tea, forty-five if you didn"t--since she saw her last, so immovable did she appear, so exactly in the same position and composed into the same lines as she had been nine days before. The room was full of the singing of thrushes, quite deafeningly full, as she opened the door, for the windows gave straight into the green and soppy garden and it was a day of many worms. Judith was making tea as far away from the fire as she could get, and there was no sign of the Bishop.
"Is that you, Ingeborg?" said her mother, turning her face, grown pale with years of being shut up, to the door.
Ingeborg"s mother had found the sofa as other people find salvation. She was not ill. She had simply discovered in it a refuge and a very present help in all the troubles and turmoil of life, and in especial a shield and buckler when it came to dealing with the Bishop. It is not easy for the married, she had found when first casting about for one, to hit on a refuge from each other that shall be honourable to both. In a moment of insight she perceived the sofa. Here was a blameless object that would separate her entirely from duties and responsibilities of every sort. It was respectable; it was una.s.sailably effective; it was not included in the Commandments. All she had to do was to cling to it, and n.o.body could make her do or be anything. She accordingly got on to it and had stayed there ever since, mysteriously frail, an object of solicitude and sympathy, a being before whose helplessness the most aggressive or aggrieved husband must needs be helpless, too. And she had gradually acquired the sofa look, and was now very definitely a slightly plaintive but persistently patient Christian lady.
"Is that you, Ingeborg?" she said, turning her head.
"Yes, mother," said Ingeborg, hesitating in spite of herself on the threshold.
She looked round anxiously, but the Bishop was not lurking anywhere in the big room.
"Come in, dear, and shut the door. You see the windows are open."
Judith glanced up at her a moment from her tea-making and did not move.
Even in the midst of her terrors Ingeborg was astonished, after not having seen it for a while, at her loveliness. She seemed to have taken the sodden greys of the afternoon, the dulness and the gathering dusk, and made out of their gloom the one perfect background for her beauty.
"We thought you would have written," said Mrs. Bullivant, putting her cheek in a position convenient for the kiss that was to be applied to it.
"I--I telegraphed," said Ingeborg, applying the kiss.
"Yes, dear, but only about your train."
"I--thought that was enough."
"But, Ingeborg dear, such a great occasion. One of _the_ great occasions of life. We did expect a little notice, didn"t we, Judith?"
"Notice?" said Ingeborg faintly.
"Your father was wounded, dear. He thought it showed so little real love for your parents and your sister."
"But--" said Ingeborg, looking from one to the other.
"We wrote to you at once--directly we knew. Didn"t we, Judith?"
"Of course," said Judith.
Ingeborg stood flushing and turning pale. Had one of the Dent"s Tour people somehow found out where she lived and written about her engagement and the impossible had happened and they weren"t going to mind? Was it possible? Did they know? And were taking it like this? If only she had called at her aunt"s house on the way to Paddington and got the letters--what miserable hours of terror she would have been spared!
"But--" she began. Then the immense relief of it suddenly flooded her whole being with a delicious warm softness. They did know. Somehow. And a miracle had happened. Oh, how _kind_ G.o.d was!
She dropped on her knees by the sofa and began to kiss her mother"s hand, which surprised Mrs. Bullivant; and indeed it is a foreign trick, picked up mostly by those who go abroad. "Mother," she said, "are you really pleased about it? You don"t mind then?"
"Mind?" said Mrs. Bullivant.
"Oh, how glad, how glad I am. And father? What does he say? Does he--does _he_ mind?"
"Mind?" repeated Mrs. Bullivant.
"Father is very pleased, I think," said Judith, with what in one less lovely would have been a slight pursing of the lips. And she twisted a remarkable diamond ring she was wearing straight.
"Father is--pleased?" echoed Ingeborg, quite awe-struck by the amount and quality of these reliefs.
"I must say I think it is really _good_ of your dear father to be pleased, when he loses--" began Mrs. Bullivant.
"Oh, yes, yes," interrupted the overcome Ingeborg, "it"s a wonder--a wonder of G.o.d."
"Ingeborg dear," her mother gently rebuked, for this was excess; and Judith looked still more what would have been a little pursed in any other woman.
"When he loses," then resumed Mrs. Bullivant with the plaintive determination of one who considers it the least she may expect as a sofa-ridden mother to be allowed to finish her sentences, "so much."
"Yes, yes," a.s.sented Ingeborg eagerly, whose appreciation of her parents" att.i.tude was so warm that she almost felt she must stay and bask in its urbanity forever and not go away after all to the bleak distance of East Prussia.
"Your father loses not _only_ a daughter," continued Mrs. Bullivant, "but 500 a year of his income."
"Would one call it his income?" inquired Judith, politely but yet, if one could suspect a being with an angel"s face of such a thing, with some slight annoyance. "I thought our grandmother--"
"Judith dear, the 500 a year your grandmother left to each of you was only to be yours when you married," explained Mrs. Bullivant, also with some slight annoyance beneath her patience. "Till you married it was to be mine--your father"s, I mean, of course. And if you never did marry it would have been mine--I mean his--always."
Ingeborg had heard of her Swedish grandmother"s will, but had long ago forgotten it, marriage being remote and money never of any interest to her who had no occasions for spending. Now her heart bounded with yet more thankfulness. What a comfort it would be to Robert. How it would help him in his research. Extraordinary that she should have forgotten it. When he told her of his stipend of five thousand marks--250 it was in English money, he explained, and there was the house and land free--most of which went in his experiments, but what was left being ample, he said, for the living purposes of reasonable beings if they approached it in a proper spirit, it all depending, he said, on whether they approached it in a proper spirit. "And after all," he had added triumphantly, throwing out his chest just as she was about to inquire what the proper spirit was, "no man can call me _thin_--"--to think she had forgotten the substantial help she was going to be able to bring him!
The full splendour of her father"s generosity in being pleased at her engagement was now revealed to her. The relief of it. The glad, warm relief. So must one feel who is born again, all new, all clean from old mistakes and fears. She felt lifted up, extraordinarily happy, extraordinarily good, more in harmony with Providence and the Bible than she had been since childhood. She would have been willing, and indeed found it perfectly natural, to kneel down with her mother and Judith then and there and say prayers together out loud. She would have been willing on the crest of her wave of gratefulness quite readily to give up Herr Dremmel in return for the family"s immense kindness in not asking her to give him up. She had felt nothing like this exaltation before in her life, this complete being in harmony with the infinite, this confidence in the inherent goodness of things, except on the afternoon her tooth was pulled out.
"Oh," she exclaimed, laying her cheek on her mother"s hand, "oh, I do _hope_ you"ll like Robert!"
"Robert?" said Mrs. Bullivant; and at the tea-table there was a sudden silence among the cups, as though they were holding their breath.
"His name"s Robert," said Ingeborg, still with her cheek on her mother"s hand, her eyes shut, her face a vision of snuggest, safest contentment.
"What Robert, Ingeborg?" inquired Mrs. Bullivant, shifting her position to stare down more conveniently at her daughter.
"Herr Dremmel. It"s his Christian name. He"s got to _have_ one, you know," said Ingeborg, still with her eyes shut in the blissfulness of perfect confidence.
"Herr who?" said Mrs. Bullivant, a sharper note of life in her voice than there had been for years. "Here"s your father," she added quickly, hastily composing herself into the lines of the una.s.sailable invalid again as the door opened and the Bishop came in.
Ingeborg jumped up. "Oh, father," she cried, running to him with the entire want of shyness one may conceive in the newly washed and forgiven soul when it first arrives in heaven and meets its Maker and knows there are going to be no more misunderstandings for ever, "how _good_ you"ve been!"