The Pastor's Wife Part 54

To this, however, he did not trust himself to reply, but vanished with a kind of pounce into his bathroom.

He came to breakfast clean, but in a mood that could bear nothing, least of all good temper. Ingeborg was by nature good tempered. She sat there pleased and refreshed--after all, he remembered resentfully, she had had five hours' sleep in the train while he had not had a wink--gaily making the best of things. She pointed out the strength of the coffee and the crispness of the rolls. She asked him if he did not think it a nice hotel. She did not agree when he alluded to the waiter as blighted. She predicted a break in the weather at eleven, and said that it had always come true what her old nurse used to tell her, that rain at seven meant fine at eleven.

He hated her old nurse.

Until he had had some sleep, a long steady sleep, he would, he knew, be nothing but jarred nerves. When then after breakfast she inquired, with a cheerful air of being ready for anything, what they were going to do next, he briefly announced that he was going to sleep.

"Oh? Shall I have to go, too?" she asked, her face falling.

"Of course not."

"Then," she said eagerly, "I'll go out and explore."

"What, in this rain?"

"Oh, I've got goloshes."

Goloshes! He retreated into his room.

It annoyed him intensely that she should be not only ready but pleased to go out for her first walk in Italy without him. He threw himself angrily on the bed, rang the bell, and bade the person who answered it, the same young man in shirt sleeves and a green ap.r.o.n who had welcomed them, tell Madame that if he were not awake by luncheon time she was not to wait for him, but was to have luncheon at the proper hour just the same.

The young man sought out Ingeborg in her room. She was tugging on her goloshes, one foot on a chair, her face flushed with effort and expectancy.

"_Monsieur votre pere_--" he began.

"_Ce n'est pas mon pere_," said Ingeborg, turning an amused face to him as she tugged.

"_Monsieur votre mari_--"

"_Quoi? Certainement pas_," said Ingeborg, who in spite of her prize for French was unacquainted with the refinements of that language. "_Ce n'est pas mon mari_," she said, energetically repudiating.

"_Ah--Monsieur n'est pas le mari de Madame_," said the young man trippingly.

"_Certainement pas_," said Ingeborg. "_Mon mari est a la maison_."

"_Ah--tiens_," said the young man.

"_C'est mon ami_," said Ingeborg.

"_Ah--tiens, tiens_," said the young man; and he delivered his message with a sudden ease and comfort of manner.

But though the young man's manner grew easy, after his report of this brief dialogue the hotel's manner grew stiff, for on the slip of paper presented to Ingram to be filled in with his name he had, unaware of the things Ingeborg was saying, described himself and her as Mr. and Mrs.

Dobson, and the hotel, in which English Church services were held, and which was at that moment, though the season was over, being stayed in by several representative English spinsters, and a clergyman also from England with a wife and grown-up daughters, most respectable nice ladies who all took him out every day twice, once after breakfast and once after tea, for a little walk--the hotel decided, putting its heads together in the manager's office, that it would, using tact, encourage the Dobsons to depart.

It could do nothing, however, for the moment, for the lady had disappeared with an umbrella into the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, was sleeping; and this condition of things continued for many hours, the lady not coming into luncheon but remaining in the wet, and the gentleman, it could hear, going on sleeping. Then it became aware that they were both having tea in a distant corner of the slippery windowed wilderness of bamboo chairs and tables described in its prospectus as the Handsome Palmy Lounge, and that they had drawn up a second table to the one their tea was on and piled it with undesirably dripping branches of the yellow broom that grew high up in the hills, and that they were being noticed with suspicion by the hotel's authentic guests who were used to having their tea in the silent stupor of the really married, because the gentleman, contrary to the observed habits of genuine husbands, was talking to the lady instead of reading the _Daily Mail_.

The hotel was nothing if not competent. It could handle any sort of situation competently, from runaway couples to that most unpleasant form of guest of all, the kind that came alive and went away dead. Full of tact, it allowed the lady and gentleman to finish their tea undisturbed; then it sent some one sleek to inform them that, most unfortunately, their rooms had been engaged for weeks beforehand for that very night, and therefore--

But before this person could even begin to be competent the gentleman requested him to have a carriage round in half an hour as he intended going on that evening; and thus the parting was accomplished, as all partings should be, urbanely, and the manager was able to display his doorstep suavity and bow and wish them a pleasant journey.

The Dobsons departed in a gay mood, with the branches of yellow broom rhythmically nodding between them over the edge of the waterproof ap.r.o.n that b.u.t.toned them in. Ingram had slept soundly for seven hours, and felt altogether renewed. He was taking her to Cann.o.bio, along the road he had hoped to walk with her in sunshine; but Ingeborg, who had climbed hills till her blood raced and glowed, saw peculiar beauties even in the wetness, and would not believe that sun could make things lovelier.

Outside Locarno, in that flat and gra.s.sy place beyond the town where the beautiful small hills draw back for a little from the lake, and the ox-eyed daisies grow so big, and the roads are strewn white with the blossoms of acacias, it stopped raining and Ingram had the hood put down. The mountains on the other side of the lake were indigo-coloured, with pulled-off tufts of woolly clouds lying along them down near the water. The lake was a steely black. The valley brooded in sullen lushness; and the branches of broom they carried with them in the carriage cut through the sombre background like a golden knife.

"The one doubt I have," said Ingeborg, breathing in the warm scented air in long breaths, "is that it's all too good to be true."

"It isn't," said Ingrain, safely disentangled for a while from the intricate effect on his enthusiasms of fatigue and dirt and headaches, "it's absolutely good and absolutely true. But only," he said, turning and looking at her, "because you're here, you dear close sister of my dreams. Without you it would be nothing but grey empty s.p.a.ce in which I would just hang horribly."

"You wouldn't. You couldn't not be happy in this," she said, gazing about her.

"If you weren't here I wouldn't see it," said Ingram, firmly believing it in the face of the fact that nothing ever escaped his acute vision.

"I see all this only through you. You are my eyes. Without you I go blind, I grope about with the light gone out. You don't know what you are to me, you little shining crystal thing--you don't begin to realise it, my dear, my dear sweet Found-at-Last."

"And this morning," said Ingeborg, smiling at him, but only with a pa.s.sing smile on her way to all the other things she wanted to look at, "you said I suggested perambulators."

For a s.p.a.ce they drove on in silence, for he deplored her trick of reminding him of past moods. But beyond Ascona, where the mountains come down to the lake and leave only just room enough between them and the water for the road to twist through, he recovered again, consoled by her joy in the beauty of the drive and unable to see her happiness without feeling pleased. After all, what he most loved in her was that she was, so miraculously, a child; a child with gleams of wisdom flickering like a lizard's tongue in her mouth, and who even when she was silly was silly also somehow in gleams--gleams of silver and sunshine. And always at the back of her, far away, hidden in what he thought of as depths of burning light, was that elusive thing by which he was so pa.s.sionately attracted, the thing he was going to paint, the thing his own secret self crept to, knowing that here was warmth, here was understanding, her dear, dear little soul.

The evening at Cann.o.bio was unsatisfactory. Ingeborg manifestly enjoyed herself, but it was with an absorption in what she was seeing and an obliviousness to himself that seemed to him both excessive and tiresome.

Here was everything to make two people so happily alone whisper--warmth, dusk, the broad shadow of plane-trees, unruffled water, lights romantically twinkling in corners, the tw.a.n.ging of a distant guitar, laughter and singing and the glint of red wine from the little lit-up tables along the front of the restaurants beneath the arcade at the back of the piazza, and he there, Ingram, after all a person of real importance, Edward Ingram at her feet, only asking to be allowed to explain to her in every variety of phrase how sweet she was. But she was dead to her opportunities. There wasn't another woman in Europe, he told himself angrily, who would not have whispered.

They wandered out of their hotel after dinner, a square pink Italian albergo facing the lake where the town left off, and free, as indeed Cann.o.bio altogether was, from transitory English with their awful eyes, and they strolled about looking at things. He did not look much, for he knew these Italian sights and sounds by heart, and at that moment only wanted to look at her; but the least little thing caught her attention away from him absolutely, to the exclusion of anything he might be saying. Positively she even preferred to listen to the throb of the steamer coming nearer from the other end of the lake than to him; and she interrupted him in the middle of a sentence that intimately concerned herself to stand still in the piazza and ask him what he thought of the smells.

"I don't think about them at all," he said shortly.

"Oh, but there are such a lot of them," she exclaimed, sorting them out with her lifted nose. "There's the smell of roses, and the smell of lake, and the smell of frying, and there's more roses, and then there's garlic, and then there's a quite dim one, and then there's a little puff of something else--I don't know what--sheer Italy, I expect. _I_ never smelt so many smells," she ended, with a gesture of astonishment.

He tried to get her away from them. He led her to a bench beneath a plane-tree. "Come and sit by me and I will tell you things," he said, luring her. "Look, there's the moon got free from the clouds--and do you see how the coloured lights of the steamer that's coming shine right down a ladder of light into the water? And what do you think of the feel of the air, little sister? Isn't it soft and gentle? Doesn't it remind you of all kind and tender things?"

"But much the most wonderful of anything are these smells," she said, absorbed in them. "There are at least twelve different ones."

"Never mind them. I want to talk."

"But they're so amusing," she said. "There are interesting ones, and exciting ones, and beautiful ones, and disquieting ones, and awful ones, and too-perfect-for-anything ones, and they're all chasing each other up and down and round and round us."

He lit a cigarette. "There," he said, "that will blot the whole lot of them into only one, and you'll talk to me reasonably. Let us talk while we can, my dear. In a little time we shall be dead to all feeling for ever and ever."

"Yes, we shall be little shreds of rottenness," she said placidly.

"G.o.d, who wastes a sunset every night--" he said, getting up to stamp on the match he had thrown away--

"If they were mine," she interrupted, "I'd keep them all in a gallery or a portfolio."

"--understands, I suppose," he went on, sitting down again, "why such dear things as this evening here, this time of being alone together here, should end and be forgotten."

"As long as I live," she said with earnestness, "it will not be forgotten. All my other memories will be like a string of--oh, just beads and nuts and fir-cones, till I get to this one, and then on the string there'll be suddenly a shining jewel."

"Really? Really?" he murmured, stopping to look into her eyes, revived by this speech. "Little flame in my heart, really?"

"Oh," said Ingeborg dreamily, in her husky, soft voice, "but the wonderfullest thing, the wonderfullest jewel. My first Italian town--Cann.o.bio...."