The Pastor's Wife Part 13

On the following afternoon there was a party at the Palace, arranged by Mrs. Bullivant in the confident days before she knew what Ingeborg was really like. It was a congratulatory party for Judith, and all Redchester and all the county had been invited. Nothing could stop this party but a death in the household--any death, even Richards' might do, but nothing short of death, thought the afflicted lady, wondering how she was to get through the afternoon; and as she crept on to her sofa at a quarter to four to be put by Richards into the final folds and knew that as four struck a great surge of friends would pour in over her and that for three hours she would have to be bright and happy about Judith, and sympathetically explanatory about Ingeborg--who looked altogether too odd to be explained only by a long past dentist--she felt so very low that she was unable to stop herself from thinking it was a pity people didn't die a little oftener. Especially maids. Especially maids who were being so clumsy with the cus.h.i.+ons....

And the Master of Ananias had been there since before luncheon, and how exhausting that was. She had had to do most of the entertaining of him, the Bishop being unavoidably absent from the meal, and Ingeborg, who did the conversation in that family, not being able to now because she was in disgrace, and Judith, dear child, never saying much at any time. And the Master had been very exuberant; and his vitality, delightful of course but just a little overwhelming at his age, had reminded her that she needed care. How difficult it had been to get him out into the garden, to somewhere where she wasn't. She hadn't got him there till half-past two, by which time he had been vital without stopping since twelve, and even then she had had to invent a pear-tree in full blossom that she wasn't at all sure about, and tell him she had heard it was a wonderful sight and ought not to be missed. But how difficult it had been. Judith had not seemed to want to show him the pear-tree, and he would not go and look at it unless she went, too. Judith had gone at last, but with an expression on her face as though she thought she was going to have to bear things, and no girl should show a thought like that before marriage. And then there had been an immense number of small matters to see to because of the party, matters Ingeborg had always seen to but couldn't now because she was in disgrace, and how difficult all that was. Still, Mrs. Bullivant felt deeply if vaguely that n.o.body temporarily evil should be allowed to minister to anybody permanently good. Such persons, she felt, should be put aside into a place made roomy for repentance by the clearing out of all claims. During the whole of the week since her daughter's return she had not let her even pour out tea, either when the riven family was by itself or when congratulatory callers came. "Poor Ingeborg isn't very well," she had murmured, quenching the inquisitiveness natural to callers. She had made up her mind that first evening, when the full horror of what her daughter had done became clear to her, that she would ask nothing of her, not even tea.

But it did make difficulties. She felt entirely low, quite damp with the exertion of meeting them, when she crept into position on the sofa at a quarter to four and waited with closed eyes for the next wave of life that would wash over her. And it all happened as she had feared--she was perpetually having to explain Ingeborg. Guest after guest came up with the expressions of rejoicing proper to guests invited to rejoice over Judith, and the smiling laudations of what was indeed a vision of beauty each ended with a question about Ingeborg. What had she been doing?--(the awful innocence of the question)--how perfectly miserably seedy she looked; poor little Ingeborg; was it really just that tiresome tooth?

Mrs. Bullivant, as she murmured what she could in reply to this ceaseless flow of sympathy from the retired officers and their wives and daughters, and the cathedral dignitaries and their wives and daughters, and the wives and daughters of the county who came without their men because their men wouldn't come, felt vaguely but deeply that it was somehow wrong that Ingeborg should both sin and be sympathised with. She had no right, her injured mother felt, to look so small and stricken.

Her family had quite properly removed her outside the pale of their affection till she should announce her broken-off engagement to that dreadful German and ask to be forgiven for ever having been engaged at all, but she ought not to look like somebody who is outside a pale. She seemed positively to be advertising the pale. It was bad taste. It was really the worst of taste when you were the sinner to look like the sinned against; to look ill-used; to droop openly. Yet never could a girl who had done such horrible, such detestably deceitful and vulgar things, have been treated so gently by her family. It had been, Mrs.

Bullivant felt, the only good thing in a wretched affair, the perfect breeding with which the Bullivants had met the situation. Not one of them had even remotely alluded to the scene she had made the first afternoon. No one had questioned her, no one had troubled her in any way. She had been left quite free, and no one had exacted the smallest sacrifice of her time to any of their needs. Her father had given her a complete holiday, not allowing her at all in his study, and whenever she had attempted to do anything for her mother or in the house Richards had been rung for. Judith, dear child, seemed instinctively to do the right thing, and without a word from her mother avoided Ingeborg; she was so delicate about it, so fine in her feeling that here was something not quite nice, that she turned red each time Ingeborg during the first day or two tried to talk to her, and quietly went into another room. All the last part of the week Ingeborg had spent in the garden, quite free, quite undisturbed, not a claim on her. And yet here she was, standing about at the party or sitting alone in foolish corners, thin, and pale, and unsmiling, like a reproach.

Through a gap in the crowd Mrs. Bullivant presently saw her being talked to by one who had once been a general but now in retirement wreaked his disciplines on bees. She just had time to notice how her daughter started and flushed when this man suddenly addressed her--such bad manners to start and flush--before the crowd closed again. She shut her eyes for a moment and felt very helpless. Who knew to what lengths Ingeborg's bad manners might not go, and what she might not be saying to the man?

What the general was telling her, with the hearty kindliness fathers of other daughters use to daughters of other fathers--will use, indeed, commented the Bishop observing the incident from afar and allowing himself the solace of an instant's bitterness, to any created female thing if only she will oblige them by not being their own--was that he couldn't have her looking like this.

"Oh, like what?" asked Ingeborg quickly, starting and flus.h.i.+ng; for her week as an outcast had lowered her vitality to such an extent that she was morbidly afraid her face might somehow have become a sort of awful crystal in which everybody would be able to see the Rigi, and herself being proposed to on its top.

"Shocking white about the gills," said the hearty man standing over her, cup in hand and see-sawing on his toes and heels because his boots creaked and it gave him a vague pleasure to make them go on doing it.

"You must come round and have a good game of tennis with Dorothy some afternoon. You've been shut up working too hard at that letter-writing business, that's what you've been doing, young lady."

"I wish I had--oh, I wish I had," said Ingeborg, pressing her hands together and looking up at this stray bit of kindliness with a quick gratefulness.

"We always think of you as sitting there writing, writing," the hearty man went on, more intent on what he was saying than on what she was saying. "Father's right hand, mother's indispensable, you know. I tell Dorothy--"

Ingeborg twisted on her chair. "Oh," she said, "don't tell Dorothy--don't tell her--"

"Tell her what? You don't know what I was going to say."

"Yes, I do--about that's how daughters ought to be--like _me_. And Dorothy's so good and dear, and wouldn't ever in this world have gone off to--"

She stopped, but only just in time, and looked at him frightened.

She had all but said it. The general, however, was staring at her with kindly incomprehension. Her head drooped a little, and she gazed vaguely at his toes as they rhythmically touched and were lifted up from the carpet. "n.o.body knows what anybody else is really like inside," she finished forlornly.

"You come up and have some tennis," he said, patting her on the shoulder. And later on to the Bishop he remarked, in his hearty desire to have everything trim and in its proper place, the young in the fresh air, older persons at desks in studies, white faces reserved for invalids, roses blooming in the cheeks of girls, that he mustn't overwork that little daughter of his.

"Overwork!" exclaimed the Bishop, full of bitter memories of an empty week.

"Turn her out into the sun, Bully, my boy," said the general whose f.a.g the Bishop had been at Eton.

"Into the sun!" exclaimed the Bishop, having for six mortal days observed her from windows horribly idling in it.

"If you keep 'em shut up you can't expect girls any more than you can expect a decent bee to provide you with honey."

"Honey!" exclaimed the Bishop.

That d.u.c.h.ess who had wanted her eldest son to marry Judith tapped Ingeborg on the arm with her umbrella as she pa.s.sed her followed by her daughter and said: "Little pale child, little pale child," and shook her head at her and frowned and smiled, and whispered to Pamela that it looked very like jealousy; and Pamela said Nonsense to that, and tried to linger and talk to Ingeborg, but her mother, filled with the pa.s.sion for refreshment that seizes all persons who go to parties, dragged her along with her to where it could be found, and on the way she was seen by the Bishop, who at once left the old lady who was talking to him to enfold Lady Pamela in his care and compa.s.s her about with a cloud of little attentions--chairs, ices, fruit; for not only had he confirmed her but he felt a peculiar interest in her particular kind of clean-limbed intelligent beauty. Of all the confirmation crosses he had given away he liked best to think of Lady Pamela's. Certainly in that soft cradle, beneath the muslin and lace of propriety, he could be sure it would not jangle against an illicit and alien ring.

"You still wear it?" he said, his beautiful voice, lowered to suit the subject, charged with feeling as with his own hands he brought her tea; and he felt a little checked, a little disappointed, when she said, smiling at him, her grey eyes level with his so well grown was she, "Wear what?"

And another thing this young woman did that afternoon that checked and disappointed him--she showed a disposition to take care of him; and no bishop of sixty, or indeed any other honest man of sixty, likes that.

"She thinks me _old_," he thought with acute and pained surprise as she charmingly made him sit down lest he might be tired standing, and charmingly shut a window behind them lest he should be in a draught, and charmingly later on when he took her down the garden to show her the pear-tree turned her pretty head and asked him over her shoulder whether she were walking too fast. "She thinks me _old_," he thought; and it was an amazement to him, for only last year he was still fifty-nine, still in the fifties, and the fifties, once one was used to them, were nothing at all.

He became very grave with Lady Pamela. He felt that the showing of the pear-tree had lost a good deal of its savour. He felt it still more when, turning the bend in the path that led to the secluded corner that made the pear-tree popular as a resort, he perceived Ingeborg sitting beneath it.

She was alone.

"Why is she always by herself?" asked Lady Pamela, who was, the Bishop could not help thinking, being rather steadily tactless.

He made no answer. He was too seriously nettled. Apart from everything else, to have one's daughter cropping up....

"Ingeborg--!" called Lady Pamela, waving her sunshade to attract her attention as they walked on towards her, for Ingeborg, under the tree, was sitting with her chin on her hand looking at nothing and once more advertising by her att.i.tude, Mrs. Bullivant would have considered, that she was outside the pale.

"I think," said the Bishop pausing, "we ought perhaps to go back."

"Ought we? Oh, why? It's lovely here. Ingeborg!"

"I think," said the Bishop, now altogether annoyed at this persistent determination to include his daughter--as though one could ever satisfactorily include daughters--in what might have been a poetic conversation between beauty and youth on the one side and prestige and more than common gifts on the other, beauty, too, if you come to that, and as great in its male ripe way as hers in its girlishness--"I think that I at any rate must go back. My wife--"

"Ingeborg! Wake up! What are you dreaming about?"

Positively Lady Pamela was not listening to him.

He turned on his heel and left her to go on waving her sunshade at his daughter if that was what she liked, and went back towards the house reflecting that women really are quite sadly deficient in imagination and that it is a great pity. Even this one, this well-bred, well-taught bright being, was so unimaginative that she actually saw no reason why a man's grown-up daughter.... Really a deficiency of imagination amounted to stupidity. He hardly liked to have to admit that Lady Pamela was stupid, but anyhow women ought not to have the vote.

He went away back into the main garden along the path by the great herbaceous border then in a special splendour of tulips and all the clean magnificence of May, thinking with his eyes on the ground how different things would have been if when he was a curate he had been sane enough not to marry. The clearness now in his life if only he had not done that! n.o.body sofa-ridden in it, no grown-up thwarting daughters, and himself vigorous, distinguished, entirely desirable as a husband, choosing with the mellow, yet not too mellow, wisdom of middle life exactly who was best fitted to share the advantages he had to offer. Even Lady Pamela would not then have been able to think of him as old. It was his family that dated him: his grey-haired wife, his grown-up daughters. The folly of curates! The black incurable folly of curates. And he forgot for a gloomy instant what he as a rule with a sigh acknowledged, that it had all been Providence, even then restlessly at work guiding him, and that Mrs. Bullivant and the girls merely const.i.tuted one of its many inscrutable ends.

The baser portion of the Bishop's brain was about to subst.i.tute another word for guiding when he was saved--providentially, the n.o.bler portion of his brain instantly pointed out--by encountering the d.u.c.h.ess.

She was coming slowly along examining the plants in the border with the interest of a garden-lover, and pointing out by means of her umbrella the various successes to a man the Bishop took to be one of her party.

He was a big man in ill-fitting s.h.i.+ny black with something of the air of one of the less reputable Cabinet Ministers and was, in fact, Herr Dremmel; but no one except Herr Dremmel knew it. He had arrived that afternoon, a man animated by a single purpose, which was to marry Ingeborg as soon as possible and get back quickly to his work; and he had come straight from the station to the Palace and walked in unquestioned with all the others, and after a period of peering about in the drawing-room for Ingeborg had drifted out into the garden, where he had at once stumbled upon the d.u.c.h.ess, who was being embittered by a prebendary of servile habits who insisted on agreeing with her as to the Latin name of a patch of Prophet-flower when she knew all the time she was wrong.

"You tell me," she said, turning on Herr Dremmel who was peering at them.

"What shall I tell you, madam?" he inquired, politely sweeping off his felt hat and bowing beautifully.

"This. What is its name? I've forgotten."

Herr Dremmel, who took a large interest in botany, immediately told her.

"Of course," said the d.u.c.h.ess. "I knew it was Arnebia even when I said it was something else. It's a borage."

"_Arnebia echinoides_, madam," said Herr Dremmel peering closer. "A native of Armenia."

"Of course they'll conquer us," remarked the d.u.c.h.ess to the prebendary.

"Oh, of course," he agreed, though he did not take her meaning, for he had been a prebendary some time and was a little slow, intellectually, at getting under way.

Then the d.u.c.h.ess dropped him and turned entirely to Herr Dremmel, who though he had never seen a herbaceous border in his life by sheer reasoning was able to tell her very intimately what the Bishop, who he supposed did the digging, had been doing to it the previous autumn, and the exact amount and nature of the fertilizers he had put in.

She was suggesting he should come back with her that afternoon to Coops and stay there indefinitely, so profound and attractive did his knowledge seem of what her own garden and her farm needed in the way of a treatment he alluded to as cross-dressing, when he interrupted her--a thing that had never happened to her before while inviting somebody to Coops--to inquire why there were so very many people in the drawing-room and on the lawn.