a solitary and long-unused windmill....
It was about one o'clock in the morning that her courage, however, altogether ebbed at the prospect of going home. What would it be like, taking up her filialities again, and all of them henceforth so terribly tarnished? She would be a returning prodigal for whom no calf was killed, but who instead of the succulences of a more liberal age would be offered an awful opportunity of explaining her conduct to a father who would interrupt her the instant she began and do the explaining himself.
How was she going to face it, all alone?
If only she could have been in love with Herr Dremmel! With what courage she would have faced her family then, if she had been in love with him and come to them her hand in his. If only he looked more like the lovers you see in pictures, like the one in Leighton's "Wedded," for instance—a very beautiful picture, Ingeborg thought, but not like any of the wedded in Redchester—so that if she couldn't be in love she could at least persuade herself she was. If only he had proper hair instead of just beaver. She liked him so much. She had even at particular moments of his conversation gone so far as to delight in him. But—marriage?
What was marriage? Why did they never talk about it at home? In the Bishop's Palace it might, for all the mentioning it got, be one of the seven deadly sins. You talked there of the married, and sometimes, but with reserve, of getting married, but marriage itself and what it was and meant was never discussed. She had received the impression, owing to these silences, that though it was God's ordinance, as her father in his official capacity at weddings reiterated, it was a reluctant ordinance, established apparently because there seemed no other way of getting round what appeared to be a difficulty. What was the difficulty? She had never in her busy life thought about it. Marriage had not concerned her. It would not be nice, she had felt, unconsciously adopting the opinion of her environment, for a girl who was not going to marry to get thinking of it. And it really had not interested her. She had quite naturally turned her eyes away.
But now this question of facing her father, this need of being backed up, this longing to get away from things, forced her to look. Besides, she would have to give Herr Dremmel some sort of answer in the morning, and the facing of Herr Dremmel required courage, too—of a different kind, but certainly courage. She was so reluctant to hurt or disappoint. It had seemed all her life the most beautiful of pleasures to give people what they wanted, to get them to smile, to see them look content. But suppose Herr Dremmel, before he could be got to smile and look content, wanted to clutch her again as he had clutched her on the top of the Rigi? She had very profoundly disliked it. She had been able to resent it there and get loose, but if she were married and he clutched could she still resent? She greatly feared not. She greatly suspected, now she came to a calm consideration of it, that that was what was the matter with marriage: it was a series of clutchings. Her father had no doubt realised this as she was realising it now, and very properly didn't like it. You couldn't expect him to. That was why he wouldn't talk about it. In this she was entirely at one with him. But perhaps Herr Dremmel didn't like it, either. Wasn't she rather jumping at conclusions in imagining that he did? Hadn't he after all clutched rather in anger up there than in anything else? And what about his earnest wish, so often explained, to be left all day locked up in his laboratory? And what about his praise, that very afternoon, of chill in human relationships?
At that moment her eye was arrested by something white appearing slowly and with difficulty beneath her door. She sat up very straight and stared at it, watching its efforts to get over and past the edge of her mat. For an instant she wondered whether it were not a kind of insect ghost; then she saw, as more of it appeared, that it was a letter.
She held her breath while it struggled in. Nobody had ever pushed a letter under her door before. She grew happy instantly. What fun. Her heart beat quite fast with excitement while she waited to hear footsteps going away before getting up to fetch it. Herr Dremmel, however, must have been in his goloshes, objects from which he was seldom separated, for she heard nothing; and after a few seconds of breathless listening she got up with immense caution and went on tip-toe to the letter and picked it up.
"Why," she thought, pausing for a moment with a sort of solemnity before opening it, "I suppose this is my first love-letter."
There was nothing on the envelope and no signature, and this was what it said:
"LITTLE ONE,
"I wish to tell you that before going to my room to-night I instructed the hall-porter to order a betrothal cake, properly iced and with what is customary in the matter of silver leaves, to be in the small salon adjoining the smoking-room to-morrow morning at nine o'clock. Since no man can be betrothed alone, it will be necessary that you should be there."
CHAPTER VI
It was a perturbed betrothal, there were so many people at it.
Seven ladies besides Ingeborg appeared in the small salon adjoining the smoking-room next morning at nine o'clock. What Herr Dremmel had done, being ignorant which was Ingeborg's room and after laborious thought deciding that to demand her number of the hall-porter later than dusk might very conceivably cast a slur on her reputation, young ladies being, as he well knew, of all living creatures the most easily slurred, was to write as many copies of the letter as there were doors on her landing and thrust them industriously one by one beneath each door, strong in the knowledge that she would in this manner inevitably get one of them.
He was greatly pleased with this plan. It seemed of a beautiful simplicity and effectiveness. "Being unaware of the context," he reasoned, "no lady except the right one will be able to guess what the letter can possibly refer to. She will therefore throw it aside as an obvious mistake and think no more about it."
But the ladies did think. And none of the inhabitants of the third floor, except Mr. Ascough who never thought anything about anything, having discovered that if once you begin to think there is no end to it, and a dried and brittle little man lately pensioned off by the firm he had been clerk to and taking his first trip on the continent in a condition of profound uninterestedness, threw it aside. These two did; but the seven ladies not only did not throw it aside, they read it many times, and instead of thinking no more about it thought of nothing else. Even Mrs. Bawn, who had been a widow for six months and was heartily tired of it, was pleased. She liked, particularly, being addressed as Little One. There was a blindness about this that suggested genuine feeling. She had not been so much pleased since her dear Bawn, now half a year in glory, had told her one day, before their marriage, that he did not care what anybody said he maintained that she was handsome.
They all thought the letter very virile, and that nothing could be more gentlemanly than its restraint. Four of them expected a different male member of the party to be waiting in the small salon, the remaining three expected Mr. Ascough. Mr. Ascough had a caressing way with pats of butter and the closing of the doors of filled flys that had before now led him, on these tours, into misapprehensions. He was long since married, but had omitted to mention it. The ladies, therefore, when they arrived in the small salon at nine o'clock did not find Mr. Ascough nor any of the other four friends they expected. They found, surprisingly, each other; and, standing thick and black near a decorated table at the window and scowling in a fresh astonishment every time the door opened and another lady came in, that very undesirable fellow-tourist, the German gentleman.
Each one immediately knew it was Ingeborg who had been written to, and that the letter had gone astray. Each one also thought she knew that Ingeborg had not got the letter and would not come. But each one, except Mrs. Bawn, was helped to cover up her shock by being sure the others did not know of it; and the custom of life lying heavy on them they were able, after one little start on first seeing Herr Dremmel, to drift into the corners of the room and pretend that what they had come for was books. Except Mrs. Bawn. Mrs. Bawn saw, stared, turned on her heel, and went out again volcanically; and the corridor shook to her departing footsteps and to the angry unintentional rhymes she was making
