The Pastor's Wife

Ingeborg was astonished.

She stared at him speechless. The gulf between even the warmest friendliness and marriage! She had, she knew, been daily increasing in warm friendliness towards him, characteristically expecting nothing back. That he, too, should grow warm had not remotely occurred to her. Nobody had ever grown warm to her in that way. There had always been Judith, that miracle of beauty, to blot her into plainness. It is true the senior curate of the Redchester parish church had said to her once in his exhausted Oxford voice, "You know, I don't mind about faces—will you marry me?" and she had refused so gingerly, with such fear of hurting his feelings, that for a week he had supposed he was engaged; but one would not call that warmth. As the sun puts out the light of a candle so did the radiance of Judith extinguish Ingeborg. They were so oddly alike; and Ingeborg was the pale, diminished shadow. Judith was Ingeborg grown tall, grown exquisite, Ingeborg wrought wonderfully in ivory and gold. No man could possibly fall in love with Ingeborg while there before his very eyes was apparently exactly the same girl, only translated into loveliness.

From the first it had been the most natural thing in the world to Ingeborg to be plain and passed over. Judith was always beside her. Whenever there was a pause in her work for her father it was filled by the chaperoning of Judith. She accepted the situation with complete philosophy, for nothing was quite so evident as Judith's beauty; and she used, in corners at parties, to keep herself awake by saying over bits of the Psalms, on which, not being allowed to read novels, her literary enthusiasms were concentrated.

It was, then, really a very astonishing thing to a person practised in this healthy and useful humility to have some one asking her to marry him. That it should be Herr Dremmel seemed to her even more astonishing. He didn't look like somebody one married. He didn't even look like somebody who wanted to marry one. He sat there, his hands folded on the knob of his stick, gazing at her with an entirely placid benevolence and asked her the surprising question as though it were a way of making conversation. It is true he had not called her Little One before, but that, she felt as she stood before him considering this thing that had happened to her, was pretty rather than impassioned.

Here was an awkward and odd result of her holiday enterprise.

"It's—very unexpected," she said, lamely.

"Yes," he agreed. "It is unexpected. It has greatly surprised me."

"I'm very sorry," she said.

"About what are you sorry, Little One?"

"I can't accept your—your offer."

"What! There is some one else?"

"Not that sort of some one. But there's my father."

He made a great sweep with his arm. "Fathers," he said; and pushed the whole breed out of sight.

"He's very important."

"Important! Little One, when will you marry me?"

"I can't leave him."

He became patient. "It has been laid down that a woman shall leave father and mother and any other related obstacle she may have the misfortune to be hampered with, and cleave only to her husband."

"That was about a man cleaving to his wife. There wasn't anything said about a woman. Besides—" She stopped. She couldn't tell him that she didn't want to cleave.

He gazed at her a moment in silence. He had not contemplated a necessity for persuasion.

"This," he then said with severity, "is prevarication."

She sat down on the grass and clasped her hands round her knees and looked up at him. She had taken off her hat when first she got to the top to fan herself, and had not put it on again. As she sat there with her back to the glow of the sky, the wind softly lifted the rings of her hair and the sun shone through them wonderfully. They seemed to flicker gently to and fro, little tongues of fire.

"Why," said Herr Dremmel, suddenly leaning forward and staring, "you are like a spirit."

This pleased her. For a moment her eyes danced.

"Like a spirit," he repeated. "And here am I talking heavily to you, as though you were an ordinary woman. Little One, how does one trap a spirit into marrying? Tell me. For very earnestly do I desire to be shown the way."

"One doesn't," said Ingeborg.

"Ah, do not be difficult. You have been so easy, of such a comfortable response in all things up to now."

"But this—" began Ingeborg.

"Yes. This, I well know—"

He was more stirred than he had thought possible. He was becoming almost eager.

"But," asked Ingeborg, exploring this new interesting situation, "why do you want to?"

"Want to marry you?"

"Yes."

"Because," said Herr Dremmel, immensely prompt, "I have had the extreme good fortune to fall in love with you."

Again she looked pleased.

"And I do not ask you," he went on, "to love me, or whether you do love me. It would be presumption on my part, and not, if you did, very modest on yours. That is the difference between a man and a woman. He loves before marriage, and she does not love till after."

"Oh?" said Ingeborg, interested. "And what does he—"

"The woman," continued Herr Dremmel, "feels affection and esteem before marriage, and the man feels affection and esteem after."

"Oh," said Ingeborg, reflecting. She began to tear up tufts of grass. "It seems—chilly," she said.

"Chilly?" he echoed.

He let his stick drop, and got up and came and sat down, or rather let himself down carefully, on the grass beside her.

"Chilly? Do you not know that a decent chill is a great preservative? Hot things decay. Frozen things do not live. A just measure of chill preserves the life of the affections. It is, by a very proper dispensation of Nature, provided before marriage by the woman, and afterwards by the man. The balance is, in this way, nicely held, and peace and harmony, which nourish best at a low temperature, prevail."

She looked at him and laughed. There was no one in Redchester, and Redchester was all she knew of life, in the least like Herr Dremmel. She stretched herself in the roomy difference, happy, free, at her ease.

"But I cannot believe," burst out Herr Dremmel with a passionate vigour that astonished him more than anything in his whole life as he seized the hand that kept on tearing up grass, "I cannot believe that you will not marry me. I cannot believe that you will refuse a good and loving husband, that you will prefer to remain with your father and solidify into yet one more frostbitten virgin."

"Into a what?" repeated Ingeborg, struck by this image of herself in the future.

She began to laugh, then stopped. She stared at him, her grey eyes very wide open. She forgot Herr Dremmel, and that he was still clutching her hand and all the grass in it, while her mind flashed over the years that had gone and the years that were to come. They would be alike. They had not been able to frostbite her yet because she had been too young; but they would get her presently. Their daily repeated busy emptiness, their rush of barren duties, their meagre moments of what when she was younger used to be happiness but had lately only been relief, those rare moments when her father praised her, would settle down presently and freeze her dead.

Her face grew solemn. "It's true," she said slowly. "I shall be a frostbitten virgin. I'm doomed. My father won't ever let me marry."

"You infinitely childish one!" he cried, becoming angry. "When it is well known that all fathers wish to get rid of all daughters."

"You don't understand. It's different. My father—why," she broke out, "I used to dose myself secretly with cod liver oil so as to keep up to his level. He's wonderful. When he praised me I usedn't to sleep. And if he scolded me it seemed to send me lame."

Herr Dremmel sawed her hand up and down in his irritation.

"What is this irrelevant talk?" he said. "I offer you marriage, and you respond with information about cod liver oil. I do not believe the father obstacle. I do not recognize my honest little friend of these last days. It is waste of time, not being open. Would you, then, if it were not for your father, marry me?"