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 passed 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 passing 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, embarrassing, 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 nobody 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 God.

"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 passion, 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 cockered 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.

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 noble 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.

Nobody 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 nobody 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 passed beneath her parents' porch.

The servants brought in her luggage, off which in her newness at deceit she had not thought to scrape the continental labels, and she crossed the hall, treading on the dim splashes of lovely blurred colour that fell from the vast stained glass windows on to the stone flags of its floor. It was the noblest 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 passage 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.