Pastor's Wife — 04 Section 04

CHAPTER IX

A pall descended on the Palace and enveloped it blackly for four awful days, during which Mrs. Bullivant and her daughters and the chaplain and the secretary and all the servants did not so much live as feel their way about with a careful solicitude for inconspicuousness.

This pall was the pall of the Bishop's wrath; and there was so much of it that it actually reached over into the dwellings of the Dean and Chapter and blackened those white spots, and it got into the hitherto calm home of the Mayor, who had the misfortune to have business with the Bishop the very day after Ingeborg's return, and an edge of it--but quite enough to choke an old man--even invaded the cathedral, where it extinguished the head verger, a sunny octogenarian privileged to have his little joke with the Bishop, and who had it unfortunately as usual, and was instantly muffled in murkiness and never joked again.

That the Bishop should have allowed his private angers to overflow beyond his garden walls, he who had never been anything in public but a pattern in his personal beauty, his lofty calm, and his biblically flavoured eloquence of what the perfect bishop should be, shows the extreme disturbance of his mind.

But it was not that he allowed it: it was that he could not help it.

He had, thanks to his daughter, lost his self-control, and for that alone, without anything else she had done, he felt he could never forgive her.

Self-control gone, and with it self-respect.

He ached, he positively ached during those first four black days in which his natural man was uppermost, a creature he had forgotten so long was it since he had heard of him, thoroughly to shake his daughter.

And the terribleness of that in a bishop.

The terribleness of being aware that his hands were twitching to shake--hands which he acutely knew should be laid on no one except in blessing, consecrated hands, divinely appointed to bless and then dismiss in peace.

That small unimportant thing, that small weak thing, the thing he had generously endowed with the great gift of life and along with that gift the chance it would never have had except for him of re-entering eternal blessedness, the thing he had fed and clothed, that had eaten out of his hand and been all bright tameness--to bring disgrace on him!

Disgrace outside before the world, and inside before his abased and humiliated self.

And she had brought it not only on a father, but on the best-known bishop on the bench; the best known also and most frequently mentioned, he had sometimes surmised with a kind of high humility, in the--how could one put it with sufficient reverence?

--holy gossip of the angels.

For in his highest moods he had humbly dared to believe he was not altogether untalked about in heaven.

And here at the moment of much thankfulness and legitimate pride when his other daughter was so beautifully betrothed came this one, and with impish sacrilegiousness dragged him, her father, into the dust of base and furious instincts, the awful dust in which those sad animal men sit who wish to and do beat their women-folk.

He could not bring himself to speak to her.

He would not allow her near him.

Whatever her repentance might be it could never wipe out the memory of these hours of being forced by her to recognise what, after all the years of careful climbing upwards to goodness, he was still really like inside.

Terrible to be stirred not only to unchristianity but to vulgarity.

Terrible to be made to wish not only that you were not a Christian but not a gentleman.

He, a prince of the Church, was desiring to be a navvy for a space during which he could be unconditionally active.

He, a prince of the Church, was rent and distorted by feelings that would have disgraced a curate.

He could never forgive her.

But the darkest hours pass, and just as the concerned diocese was beginning to fear appendicitis for him, unable in any other way to account for the way he remained invisible, he emerged from his first indignation into a chillier region in which, still much locked in his chamber, he sought an outlet in prayer.

A bishop, and indeed any truly good and public man, is restricted in his outlets.

He can with propriety have only two--prayer and his wife; and in this case the wife was unavailable because of her sofa.

For the first time the Bishop definitely resented the sofa.

He told himself that the wife of a prelate, however ailing--and he believed with a man's simplicity on such points that she did ail--had no business to be inaccessible to real conversation.

With no one else on earth except his wife can a prelate or any other truly good and public man have real conversation without losing dignity, or, if the conversation should become very real, without losing office.

That is why most prelates are married.

The best men wish to be real at times.

When Ingeborg stripped off her deferences, and, after having most scandalously run away and most scandalously entangled herself with an alien clerical rogue, had the face to hold up her hands at him and accuse him, accuse _him_, her father, of being the cause of their shaking, the Bishop had been as much horrified as if his own garden path on which he had trodden pleasantly for years had rent itself asunder at his feet and gaped at him.

He had made the path; he had paid to have it tidied and adorned; and he required of it in return that it should keep quiet and be useful.

To have it convulsed into an earthquake and its usefulness interrupted must be somebody's fault, and his instinct very properly was to go to his wife and tell her it was hers.

But there was the sofa.

He desired to converse with his wife.

He had an intolerable desire for even as few as five minutes' real conversation with her.

He wanted to talk about the manner in which Ingeborg must have been brought up, about the amount of punishment she had received in childhood; he wished to be informed as to the exact nature of the participation her mother had taken in her moral education; he wished to discuss the responsibility of mothers, and to explain his views on the consequences of maternal neglect; and he wanted, too, to draw his wife's attention to the fact she easily apparently overlooked, that he had bestowed a name grown celebrated on her, and a roof that through his gifts and God's mercy was not an ordinary but a palace roof, and that in return the least he might expect....

In short, he wanted to talk.

But when driven by his urgencies he went to her room to break down the barricade of the sofa, he found not only Richards hovering there tactfully, but the doctor; for Mrs. Bullivant had foreseen her husband's probable desire for conversation, and the doctor, a well-trained man, was in the act of prescribing complete silence.

It was then that, thwarted and debarred from the outlet a man prefers, he sought his other outlet, and laid all these distressful matters in prayer at the feet of heaven.

On his knees in his chamber he earnestly begged forgiveness for his descent to naturalness, and a restoration of his self-respect.

Without his self-respect what would become of him?

He had lived with it so intimately and long.

Fervently he desired the molten moments in which his hands had twitched, wiped out, and forgotten.

He asked for help to conduct himself henceforth with calm.

He implored to be given patience.

He implored to be given self-control.

And presently, after two days of his spare moments spent in this manner, he was sitting upon a chair and telling himself that the main objection to praying, if one might say so with all due reverence, is that it is one-sided.

It is a monologue, said the Bishop--also with all due reverence--and in troubles of the kind he was in one needs to be sure one is being attended to.

He did not think he could possibly be being attended to, because, pray as he might, withdraw and wrestle as he might, he continued to want to shake his daughter.

For there was the constant irritation going on of the affairs of the diocese getting into a more hopeless disorder.

All that time she was away guiltily gadding, and now all this time she was not away but unavailable till she should have utterly repented, his letters were piling themselves up into confused heaps, and his engagements were a wilderness in which he wandered alone in the dark.

The chaplain and the typist did what they could, but they had not been with him so long as his daughter and were not possessed of the mechanical brainlessness that makes a woman so satisfactory as a secretary.

His daughter, not having what might be called actual brains, was not troubled by thought.

The distresses of possible alternatives did not disturb her.

She did not, therefore, disturb him by suggesting them.

She was mechanically meticulous.

She respected detail.

She remembered.

She knew not only what had to be done, which was easy, but what had to be done exactly first.

And both the chaplain and the typist were men with ideas, and instead of assisting him along one straight and narrow path which is the only way of really getting anywhere, including, remembered the Bishop, to heaven, they were constantly looking to the right and the left, doubting, weighing, hesitating.

The chaplain had as many eyes for a question as a fly, and saw it from as many angles.

Fairness, desirability, the probable views of the other side, their equal Rightness, these things faltered interminably round each letter to be answered, were hesitated over interminably in the mellow intonations of that large-minded, well-educated young man's voice, and he was echoed and supported by the typist, who was also from Oxford, and had been given this chance of nearness to the most distinguished of bishops at such a youthful age that the undergraduate milk had not yet dried on the corners of his eloquent and hesitating mouth, and gave a peculiarly sickly flavour, thought the irritated Bishop, to whatever came out of it.

The Bishop felt that if this went on much longer the work of the diocese would come to a standstill.

In ten days the Easter recess would be over, and he was due in the House of Lords, where he had been put down for a speech on the Home Rule Bill from the point of view of simple faith, and how was he to leave things in this muddle at home, and how was he to have the peace of mind, the empty clarity, appropriate to a proper approach of the measure if his inward eye went roving away to Redchester all the time and to the increasing confusion on his study table?

The trail of Ingeborg was over all his day.

When, warm and ruffled from prayer, he plunged down into his work again, he could not do a thing without being reminded she was not there.

He was forced to think of her every moment of his time.

It was ignoble, but without her he was like an actor who has learned not his part but to lean on the prompter, and who finds himself on the stage with the prompter gone dead in his box.

She was dead to him, dead in obstinate sin; and dignity demanded she should continue dead until she came of her own accord and told him she had done with that terrible affair of the East Prussian pastor.

He did not know whether he would then forgive her--he would probably defer forgiveness as a disciplinary measure, after having implored heaven's guidance--but he would allow a certain amount of resurrection, sufficient to enable her to sit up at her desk every day and disentangle the confusion her wickedness alone had caused.

In the evenings she would, he thought, at any rate for a time, be best put back in her grave.

At this point he began to be able to say "Poor girl," and to feel that he pitied her.

But it was not till the end of the week, as Sunday drew near, that his prayers did after all begin to be answered, and he regained enough control of his words if not of his thoughts to be able to reappear among his family and show nothing less becoming than reserve.

He even succeeded, though without speaking to her, in kissing Ingeborg's forehead night and morning and making the sign of the Cross over her when she went to bed as he had done from her earliest years.

She seemed smaller than ever, hardly there at all, and made him think of an empty dress walking about with a head on it.

Contemplating her when she was not looking his desire to shake her became finally quenched by the perception that really there would be nothing to shake.

It would be like shaking out mere clothes, garments with the body gone out of them; there would be dust, but little satisfaction.

She had evidently been feeling, he was slightly soothed to observe, for not only was her dress empty but her face seemed diminished, and she certainly was remarkably pale.

She struck him as very unattractive, entirely designed by Providence for a happy home life.

And to think that this nothing, this amazing littleness--well, well; poor girl.

On the Sunday afternoon he determined to help her by getting into touch with her from the pulpit.

On that day he several times assured himself before preaching that his only feeling in the sad affair was one of concern for her and grief.

The pulpit, he knew from experience, was a calm and comfort-bringing place when he was in it; it was, indeed, his way with a pulpit that had brought the Bishop to the pinnacle of the Church on which he found himself.

He was at his best in it, knowing it for a blessed spot, free from controversy, pure from contradiction, a place where personal emotions could find no footing owing to the wise custom that prevented congregations from answering back.

Put into common terms, the terms of his undergraduate days, he could let himself rip in the pulpit; and the Bishop was in a ripped condition altogether at his greatest.

He spoke that Sunday specially to Ingeborg, and he told himself that what had come straight from his heart must needs go straight to hers.

The Bible was very plain.

It did not mince matters as to the dangers she was running.

The punishment for her class of sin right through it was various and severe.

Not that the ravens of another age and the eagles of a different climate--he had taken as his text that passage, or rather portion of a passage--he described it as remarkable--in the Proverbs: "The ravens of the valley shall pick it out and the young eagles shall eat it"--were likely ever miraculously to appear in Redchester, though even on that point the Bishop held that nothing was certain; but there were, he explained, spiritual ravens and eagles provided by an all-merciful Providence for latter-day requirements whose work was even more thorough and destructive.

He earnestly implored those members of his flock who knew themselves guilty of the particular sin the passage referred to, to seek forgiveness of their parents before Heaven interfered.

He pointed out that what is most needed, if people are to live with any zest and fine result at all, is encouragement, and what encouragement could equal full and free forgiveness?

The Bible, he said, understood this very well, and the Prodigal Son's father never hesitated in his encouragement.

It seemed difficult to suppose one could equal the lavishness of the best robe, the ring, the shoes, and the fatted calf, yet he felt certain--he _knew_ there were fathers at that very moment, there in that town, nay, in that cathedral, ready with all and more than that.

Who would wish to punish his dear child, the soul given into his hands to be whitened for heaven?

One knew from one's own experience--all who had once been children must know--how sorry one was for having done wrong, how _bleeding_ one felt about it; and just then, just at that moment of sorrow, of heart's blood, was not what one needed so that one might get on one's feet again quickly and do better than ever, not punishment but forgiveness?

A frequent and free forgiveness, said the Bishop, and his voice was beautiful as he said it, was one of the chief necessities of life.

What poor children want, poor frail children, so infinitely apt to fall, so infinitely clumsy at getting up, is a continual wiping out and never thinking again of the yesterdays, a daily presentation by authority to yesterday's stumblers of that most bracing object, the cleaned and empty slate.

Why, it was as necessary, he declared, his fine face aglow, if one was to work well and add one's cheerful contribution to the world's happiness, as a nourishing and sufficient breakfast--the congregation thrilled at this homely touch--and to numb a human being's powers of cheerful contribution by punishment was _waste_.

How cruel, then, to force a father by one's stubbornness to punish; how cruel and how sinful to hinder him, by not seeking out at once what he so freely offered, to hinder him from bringing forth his best robe, his ring, his fatted calf.

What a heavy responsibility towards their fathers did children bear, said the Bishop, who had ceased himself being anybody's child many years before.

This, he said, is a sermon to children; to erring children; to those sad children who have gone astray.

We are all children here, he explained, and if life has been with us so long that we can no longer find any one we may still with any certainty call father, we are yet to the end Children of the Kingdom.

But, he continued, though every single soul in this cathedral is necessarily some one's child, not every single soul in it is inevitably some one's father, and he would say a few words to the fathers and remind them of the infinite effect of love.

To punish your child is to make its repentance go sour within it.

Do not punish it.

Love it.

Love it continuously, generously, if needs be obstinately;

smite its hardness, as once a rock was smitten, with the rod of generosity.

Give it a chance of gushing forth into living repentance.

Generosity begets generosity.

Love begets love.

Show your love.

Show your generosity.

Forgive freely, magnificently.

Oh, my brothers, oh, my children, my little sorry children, what could not one, what would not one do in return for love?

The Bishop's face was lifted up as he finished to the light of the west window.

His voice was charged with feeling.

He had forgotten the ravens and eagles of the beginning, for he never allowed his beginnings to disturb his endings, well knowing his congregation forgot them, too.

He was an artist at reaching into the hearts of the uneducated.

Everything helped him--his beauty, his voice, and the manifest way in which his own words moved him.

And the typist, as he walked back to the Palace with the chaplain across the daisies of the Close, was unable to agree with the chaplain that a course at Oxford even now in close reasoning might help the Bishop.

The typist thought it would spoil him; and offered to lay the chaplain twenty to one that Redchester that afternoon would be full of erring children upsetting their fathers' Sunday by wanting to be forgiven.

It was; and Ingeborg was one of them.

CHAPTER X

She waylaid him after tea on the stairs.

"Father," she said timidly, as he was passing on in silence.

"Well, Ingeborg?"

said the Bishop, pausing and gravely attentive.

"I--want to tell you how sorry I am."

"Yes, Ingeborg?"

"So sorry, so ashamed that I--I went away like that on that tour.

It was very wrong of me.

And I went with your money.

Oh, it was ugly.

I--hope you'll forgive me, father?"

"Freely, Ingeborg.

It would be sad indeed if I lagged behind our Great Exemplar in the matter of forgiveness."

"Then--I may come back to work?"

"When you tell me you have broken off your clandestine engagement."

"But father--" "There are no buts, Ingeborg."

"But you said in your sermon--" The Bishop passed on.

In her eagerness Ingeborg put her hand detainingly on his sleeve, a familiarity hitherto unheard of in that ordered and temperate household.

"But your sermon--you said in your sermon, father--why, how can free forgiveness have conditions?

They didn't do it that way in the Bible"--(this to him who was by the very nature of his high office a specialist in forgiveness; poor girl, poor girl)--"You said yourself about the Prodigal Son--his father forgave _everything_, and perhaps he'd done worse things even than going to Lucerne--" "We are not told, Ingeborg, of any clandestine engagement," said the Bishop, pursuing his way hampered but, as he was glad to remember afterwards, calm.

"But you know about it--how can it be clandestine when you know about it?"

"Once more, Ingeborg, there are no buts."

"But why shouldn't I marry a good man?"

She was actually following him up quite a number of the stairs, still with her hand on his arm, and her face, so unattractive in its unwomanly eagerness, quite close to his.

"Why should I have to be forgiven for wanting to marry a good man?

Everybody marries good men.

Mother did, and you never told her she wasn't to.

Oh, oh--" she went on, as his dressing-room door was quietly closed upon her, "that isn't free forgiveness at all--it isn't what you _said_--it isn't what you _said_--it's _conditions_."

And her voice from the doormat became quite a cry, regardless of possible listening Wilsons.

How glad he was that he had been able to put her aside quietly and get himself, still controlled, into his dressing-room.

How strange and new were these reckless outbreaks of unreserve.

And her reasoning, how wholly deplorable.

She wished, unhappy girl, to enjoy the advantages and privileges of the forgiven state while continuing in the sin that had procured the forgiveness.

She wished, he reflected, though in educated language, to eat her cake and have it, too.

Yet was it not clear that a free forgiveness could only be bestowed on an unlimited penitence?

There could be no reservations of particular branches of sin.

All must be lopped.

And the East Prussian pastor was a branch that must be lopped with the cleanest final cut before real submission could be said to have set in.

But the Bishop in his dressing-room, though he retained his apparent calm, was sore within him.

His sermon had failed.

The girl must be a stone.

It wasn't, he thought profoundly worried, as if he hadn't given her nearly a week for undisturbed thought and hadn't approached her that day with all the helpfulness in his power from the pulpit.

Both these things he had done; and she was no nearer recovery than before.

Was training then nothing?

Was environment nothing?

Was blood nothing?

Was the blood of bishops, that blood which of all bloods must surely be most potent in preventing its inheritors in all their doings, nothing?

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 cushions....

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 nobody 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 flushing; 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.

"Nobody 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 fag 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 Duchess who had wanted her eldest son to marry Judith tapped Ingeborg on the arm with her umbrella as she passed 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 passion 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 compass 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 attitude, 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!

Nobody 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 constituted one of its many inscrutable ends.

The baser portion of the Bishop's brain was about to substitute another word for guiding when he was saved--providentially, the nobler portion of his brain instantly pointed out--by encountering the Duchess.

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 shiny 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 Duchess, 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 Duchess.

"I knew it was Arnebia even when I said it was something else.