Kitabı oku: «The Pastor's Wife», sayfa 7

"What?" said the Duchess, intent on the notes she was making of his recommendations in her note-book.

"That," said Herr Dremmel.

The Duchess looked up. "Why, the Bishop, of course. Go on about the hot weather."

"Her father," said Herr Dremmel; and he advanced, hat in hand, and the other held out in friendliest greeting, to meet him.

The Duchess went after him. "Bishop," she said, "this is a man who knows all the things worth knowing." And the Bishop, taking this to be her introduction of a friend, cordially returned Herr Dremmel's handshake.

He was never cordial again.

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel, "I am greatly pleased to make your acquaintance. My name is Dremmel. Robert Dremmel."

The Bishop had just enough self-control not to snatch his hand away, but to let Herr Dremmel continue to hold and press it. His mind began to leap about. How to get the Duchess away; how to get Herr Dremmel turned, noiselessly, out of the house; how to prevent Ingeborg's coming at any moment along the path behind them with Lady Pamela....

"We have every reason, sir," said Herr Dremmel, holding the Bishop's hand in a firm pressure, "to congratulate each other, I you, on the possession of such a daughter, you me—"

"Isn't she a lovely girl," said the Duchess, for whom only Judith existed in that family. "Would rape cake and the other thing help my flowers at all, or is it only for the mangels?"

"Mangels!" thought the Bishop, "Rape cake!" And swiftly glanced behind him down the path.

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel, desiring to be very pleasant to the Bishop and slightly waving the Duchess aside, "permit me also to congratulate you—"

"Have you had any tea?" inquired the Bishop desperately of the Duchess, turning to her and getting his hand away.

"Thank you, yes. Well, Mr. Dremmel? Don't interrupt him, Bishop, he's most interesting."

"—on the results," continued Herr Dremmel to the Bishop, "of your autumnal activities. This blaze of flowers is sufficient witness to the devotion, the assiduity—"

"You don't suppose he did it himself, do you?" said the Duchess.

"And your costume, sir," said Herr Dremmel, concentrated on the Bishop and earnestly desiring to please, "suggests a quite particular and familiar interest in what this lady rightly calls the things really worth knowing."

"But he can't help wearing that," said the Duchess.

Again Herr Dremmel, and with some impatience, waved her aside.

"It is a costume most appropriate in a garden," he continued. "Even the gaiters are horticultural, and the apron is pleasantly reminiscent of the innocence of our first parents. So Adam might have dressed—"

"Oh, but you must come to Coops!" cried the Duchess. "Bishop, he's to come back with me."

"Sir," said Herr Dremmel with something of severity, for he was beginning to consider the Duchess forward, "is this lady Mrs. Bishop?"

"Oh, oh!" screamed the Duchess, while Herr Dremmel watched her disapprovingly and the Bishop struggled not to seize him by the throat.

"My dear Bishop," said the Duchess, wiping her eyes, "I never had such a compliment paid me. The best-looking bishop on the bench-"

"Do come indoors," he implored. "I can't really let you stand about like this—"

"Thank you, I'm not in the least tired. Go on, Mr. Dremmel."

"Sir, can I see you alone?" said Herr Dremmel, now without any doubt as to the Duchess's forwardness. "On such an occasion as this, before we begin together openly to rejoice it seems fitting we should first by ourselves, unless this lady is your daughter's mother—"

"Oh, oh!" again screamed the Duchess.

The Bishop turned on him in a kind of blaze, quite uncontrollable. "Yes, sir, you can," he said. "Come into my study—"

"What? Are you going to take him away from me?" cried the Duchess.

"My dear Duchess, if he has business with me—" said the Bishop. "I'll take you indoors first," he said, offering her his arm. "This gentleman"—he glared at him sideways, and Herr Dremmel, all unused as he was to noticing hostility, yet was a little surprised at the expression of his face—"will wait here. No, no, he won't, he'll come, too"—for approaching round the bushes behind which grew the pear-tree the Bishop had caught sight of skirts. "Come on, sir—"

"But—" said the Duchess, as the Bishop drew her hand hastily through his arm and began to walk her off more quickly than she had been walked off for years.

"Come on, sir—" the Bishop flung back, almost hissed back, at Herr Dremmel.

"One moment," said Herr Dremmel holding up his hand, his gaze fixed on what was emerging from the bushes.

"Come on, sir!" cried the Bishop, "I can only see you alone if you come at once—"

But Herr Dremmel did not heed him. He was watching the bushes.

"Will you come?" said the Bishop, pausing and stamping his foot, while he held the Duchess tight in the grip of his arm.

"Why," said Herr Dremmel without heeding him, "why—yes—why it is—why, here at last appears the Little Sugar Lamb!"

"The little what?" said the Duchess, resolutely pulling out her hand from the Bishop's arm and putting up her eyeglass. "Heavens above us, he can't mean Pamela?"

But nobody answered her; and indeed it was not necessary, for Herr Dremmel, gone down the path with a swiftness amazing in one of his appearance, was already, in the sight of all Redchester and most of the county, enfolding Ingeborg in his arms.

"Of course," was the Duchess's comment to the Bishop as she watched the scene with her eyeglass up and the placidity of relief, "of course they will conquer us."

CHAPTER XI

And so it came to pass that Herr Dremmel, armed only with simplicity, set aside the resistances of princes, potentates, and powers, and was married to Ingeborg by her father the Bishop in his own cathedral. And it was done as quickly as the law allowed, not only because Herr Dremmel was determined it should be, but because the enduring of his daily arrival for courting purposes from Coops, where he was staying, became rapidly impossible for the Bishop. Also there was the Master of Ananias, spurred to a frenzy of activity by Herr Dremmel's success in getting things hurried on, insisting that he had been engaged long enough and demanding to be married on the same day.

In the end he was, and Ingeborg's wedding, being Judith's as well, was unavoidably splendid. All along the line the Bishop's hand was forced. The very wedding-dress had to be as beautiful for the one as for the other of his daughters; and, absurdly and wickedly, he was obliged to spend as much on her trousseau who was going into pauperdom and obscurity for the rest of her days as on hers who would no doubt be soon, though of course only in God's good time, the most magnificent of widows. He never afterwards was able to feel quite the same to the Duchess. Without knowing anything of the circumstances, of the secret disgrace of the affair, of the blank undesirability in any case of such a son-in-law, of the extraordinary inconvenience and pecuniary loss of Ingeborg's marrying at all, she had taken up Herr Dremmel to an extent that was positively near making her ridiculous, supposing that, humanly speaking, were possible, and had rammed him down the county's throat till at last it believed that of the two husbands Ingeborg had secured the better. And this gossip filtered through into the Palace, and Judith, who never did speak, spoke less than ever, but edging away more and more decidedly from the blandishments of the Master, who had not been invited to Coops, spent most of her time in her own room engaged in not looking at her trousseau; and the Palace became such an uncomfortable place what with one thing and another, and the strain of remaining calm and becoming in conduct to the ducally protected Herr Dremmel was so great, that at last the Bishop was as eager as any one to get the wedding over and feverishly furthered any scheme that would, by hastening it, deliver him.

To Ingeborg he never spoke, but turned away with the same cold horror that came over the rest of the family when from windows he or it beheld her being courted with what seemed a terrible German thoroughness in places like the middle of the lawn. He could no longer walk round his own garden without meeting an interlaced couple; and though he suggested to Herr Dremmel with what he felt was really admirable self-restraint that these public endearments might give rise to comment, Herr Dremmel merely replied that as Ingeborg was his Braut it ought to give rise to much more comment, even to justifiable complaints, if his manner to her were less warm.

"In England we do not—" began the Bishop; but broke off for fear of losing his self-restraint. And Herr Dremmel and Ingeborg continuing to perambulate the garden slowly, with a frequent readjusting of their steps to each other's—for it is a difficult method, the interlaced one, of getting along a path—the Bishop and Mrs. Bullivant retreated for refreshment and comfort to the delicacy of Judith, to her lovely withdrawals. That the Master should blandish was natural, because a man is natural; but they knew that a woman, if she is to approach any ideal of true womanhood, cannot be too carefully unnatural, and should she be persuaded or betrayed into some expression of affection for her lover, some answering caress, at least she must not like it. And there was Ingeborg progressing round the garden as described, or in the middle of the lawn openly having her hand held, and looking pleased.

It was rank.

Ingeborg, in fact, was pleased. She was more, she was extremely happy. Here she was suddenly no longer a disgraced and boycotted and wicked girl, but that strangely encouraging object, that odd restorer of faith in oneself, a Little Sugar Lamb. The cosiness of being a Sugar Lamb! She had been so very miserable. She had dragged through such cold, anæmic days. She had had such a horrible holiday, forced upon her on the very scene of her activities, and had had it brought home to her so freezingly, so blightingly, that she had done too dreadful a thing to be allowed apparently ever again to associate with the decent. And Robert—she quickly began calling him that to herself under the influence of her family's methods of reclaiming her—had not written a single letter.

"But he came," said Herr Dremmel, for whose enlightenment she was picturing the week she had had.

And her father would not speak to her at all, would not look at her.

"Old sheep," said Herr Dremmel good-naturedly.

And Judith had seemed entirely horrified, and used to blush if she tried to speak to her.

"Foolish turkey," said Herr Dremmel placidly.

But now somehow it did seem as if she needn't have been quite so miserable, and might have had more faith.

"What ought the Little One to have had more of?" asked Herr Dremmel; for his thoughts had not much time to spare, and he profitably employed them while she talked in working out the probable results of, say, the treatment of three acres of sugar-beet with sulphate of potash, sulphate of ammonia, and nitrate of soda respectively, all of them receiving 400 lbs. of basic slag as well—would not sulphate of ammonia be more effective as a nitrogenous manure than nitrate of soda in the case of sugar-beets, whose roots grew smaller and nearer the surface than mangels? "That is what little women should constantly have more of," he said, breaking away from sugar-beets to a zestful embracing; for on this occasion they were under the pear-tree, a place she seldom went to because she had not yet acquired, in spite of his assurances that she undoubtedly would, any real enthusiasm for embracings, keeping by preference to the only immune place in the garden, which was the middle of the lawn.

"I wonder," she thought while it was being done, "if this will really grow on me...."

And, while it was still being done, "Mother must have been kissed, too, and she's still alive...."

And presently, while it was still being done, "But mother isn't much alive—there's the sofa—perhaps that's why...."

Well, he loved her, somehow; she did not now care how. Whether it was a spiritual affection or one that would go on requiring at frequent intervals to enfold her capaciously did not matter any more, for it was a warm thing, a warm human thing, he was offering her, and she had been half-dead with cold. What did it matter if she herself was not in love? It was the dream of a schoolgirl to want to be in love. Life was not like that. Life was a thing full of friendliness and happy affection; and love, anyhow on the woman's side, was not a bit necessary. The Bishop would have been surprised if he had known how nearly she approached his ideal of womanhood. She was going to be so good, she said to herself and to Herr Dremmel, too, her heart full of gratitude and glad relief—oh, so good! She was never going to be dejected or beaten out of hope and courage again. She would work over there, work hard at all sorts of happy things in the parish, and among the poor and sick, and she would help Robert in his work if he would let her, and if he wouldn't then she'd help him when he had done—help him to play and rest. They would laugh together and talk together and walk together, and he would explain his experiments to her and teach her to understand. And the first thing she would do would be to learn German very thoroughly, so as to be able to write all his letters for him, and even his sermons if needs be, and save his precious time.

"Those," said Herr Dremmel, who in the lush meadows of dalliance had forgotten that what had first attracted him to her had been a certain bright baldness of brain, "would be pretty little nonsense sermons the small snail would produce."

"You'll see," said Ingeborg confidently; and she suddenly flung out her arms and turned her face up to the sun and the blue through the little leaves and all the light and promise of the world, and stretched herself in an immense contentment. "Oh," she sighed, "isn't it all good—isn't it all good—"

"It is," agreed Herr Dremmel. "But it is nothing to how good it will be presently, when we are surrounded by our dear children."

"Children?" said Ingeborg.

She dropped her arms and looked at him. She had not thought of children.

"Then, indeed, my little wife will not wish to write letters or compose sermons."

"Why?" said Ingeborg.

"Because you will be a happy mother."

"But don't happy mothers—"

"You will be entirely engaged in adoring your children. Nothing else in the world will interest you."

Ingeborg stood looking at him with a surprised face. "Oh?" she said. "Shall I?" Then she added, "But I've never had any children."

"It was not to be expected," said Herr Dremmel.

"Then how do you know nothing else in the world will interest me?"

"Foolish Little One," he said, taking her in his arms, his eyes moist with tenderness, for he knew that here against his breast he held in her slender youth the mother of all the Dremmels, and the knowledge profoundly moved him. "Foolish Little One, is not throughout all nature every mother solely preoccupied by interest in her young?"

"Is she?" said Ingeborg doubtfully, quite a number of remembered family snapshots dancing before her eyes. Still, she was very willing to believe.

She looked at him a moment thinking. "But—" she said, gently pushing herself a little way from him, both hands on his chest.

"But what then, small snail?"

"Wouldn't they be German children?"

"Undoubtedly," said Herr Dremmel proudly.

"All of them?"

"All of them?" he echoed.

"It wouldn't be like Roman Catholics and Protestants marrying, and half the children be German and half English?"

"Certainly not," said Herr Dremmel emphatically.

"But Robert—"

"Continue, little hare."

"What are German children like?"

It was now Herr Dremmel's turn to say confidently, "You'll see."

A week later they were married; and the Bishop, inscrutably watching Ingeborg from the doorstep as she was being tucked by deft hands into the rugs of the car that was to take her to the station, observing how cushions were put in the right places at her back, how a footstool was carefully inserted under her feet, how her least movement was interpreted and instantly attended to, made his farewell remark to his daughter—the last remark, as it happened, that he ever did make to her.

"You will miss Wilson," he said; and re-entered the Palace a slightly comforted man.

She never saw him again.

PART II

CHAPTER XII

On her honeymoon, which was only as long as it took to get from Redchester to Kökensee, except for a day in Holland where a brief and infinitely respectful visit, or rather waiting on, was made to the eminent De Vries, Ingeborg said to herself at frequent intervals as she had said to herself under the pear-tree in what now seemed a remote past, "Perhaps this will grow on me." But even before they reached Kökensee on the fourth day after their marriage she was deciding, though a little reluctantly for she had always heard them praised, that probably she had no gift for honeymoons.

Robert, luckily, was apparently liking his and was quite happy and placid and slept sonorously in the trains. The meals were invariably cheerful. From Bromberg on he woke up and became attentive to the country they were passing through; and once in his own part of the world he expanded into much talk, pointing out and explaining the distinctive features of the methods employed on the different farms along the line.

Ingeborg drank it in eagerly. She was zealous to learn; resolute to be a helpmeet. Had he not delivered her from the immense suffocation of Redchester? She was obsequious with gratitude. It was a country of an exhilarating spaciousness; no hedges, no shutting off of one field from another, no shutting off, indeed, of the sky itself or of the blue delicious distance by little interfering hills like those they had round Redchester. It was all one great sweep, one great roll of earth up to heaven and of heaven down to earth, fresh and free and with a quality in the air of clear bright hardness she thought adorable after the wadded effect of the climate at home. And once, when the train pulled up in the open, she could hear from far away up in the blue the cry of a hawk.

From Allenstein they went on by a light railway with toy carriages and a tiny engine through an infinity of rye-fields and seemingly uninhabited country to the nearest station to Kökensee, a place called Meuk, of some pretension to being a little town, with an enormous church rising out of its middle and containing, among other objects of interest, explained Herr Dremmel, his mother.

"Oh?" said Ingeborg, surprised. "Have you got one?" For he somehow produced a completely motherless impression.

"Invariably, my treasure," said Herr Dremmel with patience, "do people have mothers."

"Yes," she said, reaching down his hat for him and putting it carefully on his head, "but then they say so."

"Perhaps. Sooner or later. I well remember, however, informing you that my father was dead. From that it was possible to reason that my mother was not. She is a simple woman. No longer young. We will visit her on our way through the town."

Outside the station a high vehicle drawn by two long-tailed horses, one of which reached a head and neck further than the other, so that when you looked at them sideways and could not see that they both began at the same place it seemed to be perpetually winning a race, was in readiness to take them to Kökensee.

"This," said Herr Dremmel, introducing it with a wave of the hand, "is my carriage. And this," he continued, similarly introducing the driver, "is my faithful servant Johann. He has been with me now nearly a year."

Ingeborg shook Johann's hand, when he had carefully clambered down over the sacks of kainit that filled the front part of the carriage, very politely. "Do they all stay as long as that?" she murmured to Herr Dremmel.

"All? There is but my widow, and she is adjusting her feathers for flight. She will wing her way to some other bachelor nest as soon as my Little One has been inducted."

"But does she like that?" asked Ingeborg. For she had acquired a habit, due to much repetition of the Litany, of regarding widowers as brittle, needing special care. There was an instant's vision before her eyes of this one flapping blackly athwart the fields of East Prussia, turned out, desolate and oppressed, and with perhaps some cackling trail of curses stridulously marking her course.

"No doubt she will feel it. She, too, has been very faithful. She has been with me now nearly eight months. But if it were less she would still feel it. Widows," he continued abstractedly, peering among the sacks of kainit in search of some Chilisaltpetre that was not there, "are in a constant condition of feeling."

Johann explained—he was a shabby man, grown grey and frayed, Ingeborg supposed, in service—that the previous stuff did not seem to have caught its train, and Herr Dremmel went off to make anxious inquiries of the stationmaster while Ingeborg stood smiling with an excessive friendliness at Johann to make up for her want of words, and wondering how her luggage would get on to a carriage already so much occupied by sacks.

In the end most of it did not and was left at the station till some future time, and clutching her dressing-bag with one hand and the iron rail of the carriage with the other she was rattled away over the enormous cobbles of Meuk with a great cracking of Johann's whip and barking of dogs and kickings of the horses, whose tails were long and kept on getting over the reins. The planks of the carriage's bottom heaved and yawned beneath her feet. The horses shied in and out of the gutters. Her hat wanted to blow off, and she did not dare let either of her hands go free to hold it. She bent her head to try to keep it on. Her skin pricked and tingled from the shaking. She had an impression of red houses flush with the street, railless dwellings giving straight on to it; of a small shop or two; of people stopping to stare; of straw and paper and dust dancing together in the wind.

Herr Dremmel chose these flustered moments to expand conversationally, and raising his voice above the tumult explained in shouts that the three sacks in front were not so much sacks as mysterious stomachs filled with the future. She strained to catch what he said, but only heard a word now and then when she bumped against him—"divine maws—richly furnished banquet—potential energy—" She found it difficult to answer with any sort of connected intelligence, more especially because he kept on breaking off to lean forward and hit the horse-flies that alighted on the back of Johann's neck. When he did this Johann started and the horses kicked.

"Faithful servant"—he shouted in her ear—"nearly a year—must not be stung—"

It was a disorganized and breathless Ingeborg trying to rub things out of her eyes who found herself finally in the passage of the elder Frau Dremmel's house.

The door stood ajar, and her husband pushed it open and called loudly on his mother to appear. "She lurks, she lurks," he said, impatiently looking at his watch; and redoubled his cries.

"Does she expect us?" asked Ingeborg at last, who was trying to pin up her loosened hair.

"She is a simple woman," he said, "consequently she never expects anything." And he pulled open a door out of which came nothing but darkness and a great cold smell.

"That is not my mother," he said, shutting it again.

"Does she know we're coming home to-day?" asked Ingeborg, a doubt beginning to take hold of her.

"She is a simple woman. Consequently she never knows anything. Mother! Mother!"

"Does she know you're married?" asked Ingeborg, the doubt growing bigger.

"She is a simple woman. Consequently—" He broke off and stared down at her, reflecting. "Is it possible that I forgot to tell her?" he said.

It evidently was possible, for at that moment Frau Dremmel came slowly up some steps at the end of the passage from a lower region, and perceiving her son and a strange young woman stood still and said nothing whatever.

"Mother, this is my wife," said Herr Dremmel, taking Ingeborg's hand and leading her to the motionless figure.

"Ach," said Frau Dremmel, without moving.

"Kiss her, Little One," directed Herr Dremmel.

"Yes, yes," said Ingeborg, blushing a vivid red and going a convulsive step nearer.

Frau Dremmel was regarding her with sombre, unblinking eyes, eyes that had the blankness of pebbles. From her waist downwards she wore a big dark-blue apron. She was entirely undecorated. Her black dress ended at the neck abruptly in its own binding and a hook and eye. Her hair was drawn back into the smallest of knobs. Ingeborg felt suddenly that she herself was a thing of fal-lals—a showy thing, bedizened with a white collar and a hat she had till then considered neat, but that she now knew for a monstrous piece of frippery crushed on to insufficiently pinned-up hair.

"You are married to her?" asked the elder Frau Dremmel, turning her pebble eyes slowly from one to the other.

"Undoubtedly," said Herr Dremmel; and to Ingeborg, in English, "Kiss her, Little One, and we will go on home."

He himself put his arm round his mother's shoulder and gave her a hasty kiss.

"My wife is English," he said. "She does not yet either speak or understand our tongue. Kiss her, mother, and we will go on home."

But it did not seem possible to get the two women to kiss. Ingeborg went another shy step nearer. Frau Dremmel remained immobile.

"This," said Frau Dremmel, moving her slow eyes over Ingeborg and then fixing them on her son, "is a pastor's wife?"

"Undoubtedly. I regret I omitted to tell you, mother, but one does occasionally omit." And, in English to Ingeborg, "She is a simple woman. Consequently—"

"But I heard," said Frau Dremmel. "Through your housekeeper. And others. Thus I heard. Of my only son's marriage. I a widow."

Ingeborg, not understanding, stood smiling nervously. She thought on such an occasion somebody ought to smile, but she did not like doing it. The immobility of Frau Dremmel, who moved nothing but her eyes, the dank bare passage, the rush of cold smell that had escaped out of the one door in it, the bleak air of poverty about her mother-in-law—poverty in some strange way regarding itself as virtuous for no reason except that it was poor—did not make her smiling easy. But she was a bride; just coming home; just being introduced to her husband's people. Somebody, she felt, on such an occasion must smile, and, trained as she had been by her father to do the things no one else wanted to do, she provided all the smiling for the home-coming entirely herself.

"Please, Robert, tell your mother how sorry I am I can't talk," she said. "Do tell her I wish I weren't so dumb."

"How much has she?" Frau Dremmel was asking across this speech.

"Enough, enough," said her son, putting on his hat and making movements of departure.

"Ah. I am not to know. More secrets. It is all to go in further unchristian tampering with God's harvests."

Herr Dremmel bestowed a second abstracted kiss somewhere on his mother's head. He had not listened to anything she said for a quarter of a century.

"Nothing for the mother," she went on. "No, no. The mother is only a widow. She is of no account. Yet your sainted father—"

"Farewell, and God be with you," said Herr Dremmel, departing down the passage and forgetting in his hurry to get his bride home as quickly as possible to take her with him.

For a moment she was left alone confronting her new relation. She made a great plunge into filialness and, swiftly blushing, picked up her mother-in-law's passive hand.

She had meant to kiss it, but looking into her eyes she found kissing finally impossible. She shyly murmured an English leave-taking and got herself, infinitely awkwardly, out of the house.

"One has to have them," was Herr Dremmel's only comment.

Kökensee lay three miles along the highroad between Meuk and Wiesenhausen, and they could see the spire of its little church over the fields on the left the whole way. The road, made with as few curves as possible, undulated gently up and down between rye-fields. It was carefully planted on each side with mountain ashes, on that day in full flower, and was white and hard as though there had been no rain for a long while. The wind blew gaily over the rye; the sky was flecked with small white clouds. Ingeborg could see for miles. And there were dark lines of forest, and flashes of yellow where the broom grew, and shining bits of water, and larks quivering out joy, and everywhere on the higher places busy windmills, and the whole world seemed to laugh and flutter and sing.

"It's beautiful—oh, beautiful!" she said.

"Beautiful? I tell you what is beautiful, Little One—the fat red soil of your girlhood's home. The fat red soil and the steady drip, drip of the heavens."

And he bent forward and inquired of Johann when it had rained last, and became very gloomy on hearing that it was three weeks ago, and said things to himself in German. They seemed to be unpastoral things, for Ingeborg saw Johann's ears lifted up by what was evidently, in the front of his face, being a grin.

A weather-beaten sign-post with one bent arm pointed crookedly down a field-track at right angles to the road, and with a lurch and a heave they tilted round the corner. There was an immediate ceasing of sound. She could now hear all sorts of little birds singing besides larks—chaffinches, tits, yellow-hammers, black-caps. The carriage ploughed along slowly through the deep sand between rye that grew more reluctantly every yard. The horses were completely sobered and covered with sweat. Before them on an upward slope was Kökensee, one long straggling street of low cottages lying up against the sunset, its church behind it, and near the church two linden trees which were the trees, she knew for she had often made him tell her, in front of her home.

Ingeborg felt a quick tug at her heart. Here was the place containing all her future. There was nothing left to her to feel, she supposed, that she would not feel here. The years lay spread out before her, spacious untouched canvases on which she was presently going to paint the picture of her life. It was to be a very beautiful picture, she said to herself with an extraordinary feeling of proud confidence; not beautiful because of any gifts or skill of hers, for never was a woman more giftless, but because of all the untiring little touches, the ceaseless care for detail, the patient painting out of mistakes; and every touch and every detail was going to be aglow with the bright colours of happiness. Exulting bits out of the Prayer-book, the book she knew altogether best, sang in her ears—Lift up your hearts.... We lift them up unto the Lord our God.... Oh, the beautiful words, the beautiful world, the wonder and the radiance of life!