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The Benefactress

by Elizabeth Von Arnim · English · Gutenberg #30302 · 660,771 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Benefactress

Author: Elizabeth Von Arnim


        
Release date: October 20, 2009 [eBook #30302]
                Most recently updated: October 24, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BENEFACTRESS ***

                          The Benefactress

         BY THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"


New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1901

_All rights reserved_

Copyright, 1901,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Norwood Press
J. S. Gushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




             Man bedarf der Leitung
    Und der männlichen Begleitung.

                    WILHELM BUSCH.




THE BENEFACTRESS




CHAPTER I


When Anna Estcourt was twenty-five, and had begun to wonder whether the
pleasure extractable from life at all counterbalanced the bother of it,
a wonderful thing happened.

She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying
herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a
pleasant laugh, and limbs that were long and slender. Certainly she
ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in
that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those
unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among
women, to the elderly and plain. Many and various are the motives that
impel a woman so to ponder; in Anna's case the motive was nothing more
exalted than the perpetual presence of a sister-in-law. The
sister-in-law was rich--in itself a pleasing circumstance; but the
sister-in-law was also frank, and her husband and Anna were entirely
dependent on her, and her richness and her frankness combined urged her
to make fatiguingly frequent allusions to the Estcourt poverty. Except
for their bad taste her husband did not mind these allusions much, for
he considered that he had given her a full equivalent for her money in
bestowing his name on a person who had practically none: he was Sir
Peter Estcourt of the Devonshire Estcourts, and she was a Dobbs of
Birmingham. Besides, he was a philosopher, and philosophers never mind
anything. But Anna was in a less agreeable situation. She was not a
philosopher, she was thin-skinned, she had bestowed nothing and was
taking everything, and she was of an independent nature; and an
independent nature, where there is no money, is a great nuisance to its
possessor.

When she was younger and more high-flown she sometimes talked of
sweeping crossings; but her sister-in-law Susie would not hear of
crossings, and dressed her beautifully, and took her out, and made her
dance and dine and do as other girls did, being of opinion that a rich
husband of good position was more satisfactory than crossings, and far
more likely to make some return for all the expenses she had had.

At eighteen Anna was so pretty that the perfect husband seemed to be a
mere question of days. What could the most desirable of men, thought
Susie, considering her, want more than so bewitching a young creature?
But he did not come, somehow, that man of Susie's dreams; and after a
year or two, when Anna began to understand what all this dressing and
dancing really meant, and after she had had offers from people she did
not like, and had herself fallen in love with a youth of no means who
was prudent enough to marry somebody else with money, she shrank back
and grew colder, and objected more and more decidedly to Susie's
strenuous private matrimonial urgings, and sometimes made remarks of a
cynical nature to her admirers, who took fright at such symptoms of
advancing age, and fell off considerably in numbers.

It was at this period, when she was barely twenty-two, that she spoke of
crossings. Susie had seriously reproved her for not meeting the advances
of an old and rich and single person with more enthusiasm, and had at
the same time alluded to the number of pounds she had spent on her every
year for the last three years, and the necessity for putting an end, by
marrying, to all this outlay; and instead of being sensible, and talking
things over quietly, Anna had poured out a flood of foolish sentiments
about the misery of knowing that she was expected to be nice to every
man with money, the intolerableness of the life she was leading, and the
superior attractions of crossing-sweeping as a means of earning a
livelihood.

"Why, you haven't enough money for the broom," said Susie impatiently.
"You can't sweep without a broom, you know. I wish you were a little
less silly, Anna, and a little more grateful. Most girls would jump at
the splendid opportunity you've got now of marrying, and taking up a
position of your own. You talk a great deal of stuff about being
independent, and when you get the chance, and I do all I can to help
you, you fly into a passion and want to sweep a crossing. Really," added
Susie, twitching her shoulder, "you might remember that it isn't all
roses for me either, trying to get some one else's daughter married."

"Of course it isn't all roses," said Anna, leaning against the
mantelpiece and looking down at her with perplexed eyebrows. "I am very
sorry for you. I wish you weren't so anxious to get rid of me. I wish I
could do something to help you. But you know, Susie, you haven't taught
me a trade. I can't set up on my own account unless you'll give me a
last present of a broom, and let me try my luck at the nearest crossing.
The one at the end of the street is badly kept. What do you think if I
started there?" What answer could anyone make to such folly?

By the time she was twenty-four, nearly all the girls who had come out
when she did were married, and she felt as though she were a ghost
haunting the ball-rooms of a younger generation. Disliking this feeling,
she stiffened, and became more and more unapproachable; and it was at
this period that she invented excuses for missing most of the functions
to which she was invited, and began to affect a simplicity of dress and
hair arrangement that was severe. Susie's exasperation was now at its
height. "I don't know why you should be bent on making the worst of
yourself," she said angrily, when Anna absolutely refused to alter her
hair.

"I'm tired of being frivolous," said Anna. "Have you an idea how long
those waves took to do? And you know how Hilton talks. It all gets
whisked up now in two minutes, and I'm spared her conversation."

"But you are quite plain," cried Susie. "You are not like the same girl.
The only thing your best friend could say about you now is that you look
clean."

"Well, I like to look clean," said Anna, and continued to go about the
world with hair tucked neatly behind her ears; her immediate reward
being an offer from a clergyman within the next fortnight.

Peter Estcourt was even more surprised than his wife that Anna had not
made a good match years before. Of course she had no money, but she was
a pretty girl of good family, and it ought to be easy enough for her to
find a husband. He wished heartily that she might soon be happily
married; for he loved her, and knew that she and Susie could never, with
their best endeavours, be great friends. Besides, every woman ought to
have a home of her own, and a husband and children. Whenever he thought
of Anna, he thought exactly this; and when he had reached the
proposition at the end he felt that he could do no more, and began to
think of something else.

His marriage with Susie, a person of whom no one had ever heard, had
brought out and developed stores of unsuspected philosophy in him.
Before that he was quite poor, and very merry; but he loved Estcourt,
and could not bear to see it falling into ruin, and he loved his small
sister, who was then only ten, and wished to give her a decent
education, and what is a man to do? There happened to be no rich
American girls about at that time, so he married Miss Dobbs of
Birmingham, and became a philosopher.

It was hard on Susie that he should become a philosopher at her expense.
She did not like philosophers. She did not understand their silent ways,
and their evenness of temper. After she had done all that Peter wanted
in regard to the place in Devonshire, and had provided Anna with every
luxury in the shape of governesses, and presented her husband with an
heir to the retrieved family fortunes, she thought that she had a right
to some enjoyment too, to some gratification from her position, and was
surprised to find how little was forthcoming. Really no one could do
more than she had done, and yet nothing was done for her. Peter fished,
and read, and was with difficulty removable from Estcourt. Anna was, of
course, too young to be grateful, but there she was, taking everything
as a matter of course, her very unconsciousness an irritation. Susie
wanted to get on in the world, and nobody helped her. She wanted to bury
the Dobbs part of herself, and develop the Estcourt part; but the Dobbs
part was natural, and the Estcourt superficial, and the Dobbses were one
and all singularly unattractive--a race of eager, restless, wiry little
men and women, anxious to get as much as they could, and keep it as long
as they could, a family succeeding in gathering a good deal of money
together in one place, and failing entirely in the art of making
friends. Susie was the best of them, and had been the pretty one at
home; yet she was not in the least a success in London. She put it down
to Peter's indifference, to his slowness in introducing her to his
friends. It was no more Peter's fault than it was her own. It was not
her fault that she was not pretty--there never had been a beautiful
Dobbs--and it was not her fault that she was so unfortunately frank, and
never could and never did conceal her feverish eagerness to make
desirable acquaintances, and to get into desirable sets. Until Anna came
out she was invited only to the big functions to which the whole world
went; and the hours she passed at them were not among the most blissful
of her life. The people who were at first inclined to be kind to her for
Peter's sake, dropped off when they found how her eagerness to attract
the attention of some one mightier made her unable to fix her thoughts
on the friendly remarks that they were taking pains to make. In society
she was absent-minded, fidgety, obviously on the look-out for a chance
of drawing the biggest fish into her little net; but, wealthy as she
was, she was not wealthy enough in an age of millionnaires, and not once
during the whole of her career was a big fish simple enough to be
caught.

After a time her natural shrewdness and common sense made her perceive
that her one claim to the scanty attentions she did receive was her
money. Her money had bought her Peter, and a pleasant future for her
children; it had converted a Dobbs into an Estcourt; it had given her
everything she had that was worth anything at all. Once she had
thoroughly realised this, she began to attach a tremendous importance to
the mere possession of money, and grew very stingy, making difficulties
about spending that grieved Peter greatly; not because he ever wanted
her money now that Estcourt had been restored to its old splendour and
set going again for their boy, but because meanness about money in a
woman was something he could not comprehend--something repulsive,
unfeminine, contrary to her nature as he had always understood it. He
left off making the least suggestion about Anna's education or the
household arrangements; everything that was done was done of Susie's own
accord; and he spent more and more time in Devonshire, and grew more and
more philosophical, and when he did talk to his wife, restricted his
conversation to the language of abstract wisdom.

Now this was very hard on Susie, who had no appreciation of abstract
wisdom, and who lived as lonely a life as it is possible to imagine.
Peter kept out of her way. Anna was subject to prolonged fits of chilly
silence. Susie used, at such times, to think regretfully of the cheerful
Dobbs days, of their frank and congenial vulgarity.

When Anna was eighteen, Susie's prospects brightened for a time. Doors
that had been shut ever since she married, opened before her on her
appearing with such a pretty _débutante_ under her wing, and she could
enjoy the reflected glory of Anna's little triumphs. And then, without
any apparent reason, Anna had altered so strangely, and had disappointed
every one's expectations; never encouraging the right man, never ready
to do as she was told, exasperatingly careless on all matters of vital
importance, and ending by showing symptoms of freezing into something of
the same philosophical state as Peter. Their mother had been German----a
lady-in-waiting to one of the German princesses; and their father had
met her and married her while he was secretary at the English Embassy in
St. Petersburg. And Susie, who had heard of German philosophy and German
stolidity, and despised them both with all her heart, concluded that the
German strain was accountable for everything about Peter and Anna that
was beyond her comprehension; and sometimes, when Peter was more than
usually wise and unapproachable, would call him Herr Schopenhauer--which
had an immediate effect of producing a silence that lasted for weeks;
for not only did he like her least when she was playful, but he had, as
a matter of fact, read a great deal of Schopenhauer, and was uneasily
conscious that it had not been good for him.

While Peter fished, and meditated on the vanity of human wishes at
Estcourt, Anna, with rare exceptions, was wherever Susie was, and Susie
was wherever it was fashionable to be. For a week or two in the summer,
for a day or two at Easter, they went down to Devonshire; and Anna might
wander about the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much
better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had
known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything
was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie's money and Susie's
taste had rubbed off all the mellowness and all the romance. Anna was
glad to leave it again, and be taken to Marienbad, or any place where
there was royalty, for Susie loved royalty. But what a life it was,
going round year after year with Susie! London, Devonshire, Marienbad,
Scotland, London again, following with patient feet wherever the
unconscious royalties led, meeting the same people, listening to the
same music, talking the same talk, eating the same dinners--would no one
ever invent anything new to eat? The inexpressible boredom of riding up
and down the Row every morning, the unutterable hours shopping and
trying on clothes, the weariness of all the new pictures, and all the
concerts, and all the operas, which seemed to grow less pleasing every
year, as her eye and ear grew more critical. She knew at last every note
of the stock operas and concerts, and every note seemed to have got on
to her nerves.

And then the people they knew--the everlasting sameness of them, content
to go the same dull round for ever. Driving in the Park with Susie,
neither of them speaking a word, she used to watch the faces in the
other carriages, nearly all faces of acquaintances, to see whether any
of them looked cheerful; and it was the rarest thing to come across any
expression but one of blankest boredom. Bored and cross, hardly ever
speaking to the person with them, their friends drove up and down every
afternoon, and she and Susie did the same, as silent and as bored as any
of them. A few unusually beautiful, or unusually witty, or unusually
young persons appeared to find life pleasant and looked happy, but they
avoided Susie. Her set was made up of the dull and plain; and all the
amusing people, and all the interesting people, turned their backs with
one accord on her and it.

These were the circumstances that drove Anna to reflect on the problems
of life every time she was beyond the sound of Susie's voice.

She passionately resented her position of dependence on Susie, and she
passionately resented the fact that the only way to get out of it was to
marry. Every time she had an offer, she first of all refused it with an
energy that astonished the unhappy suitor, and then spent days and
nights of agony because she had refused it, and because Susie wanted her
to accept it, and because of an immense pity for Susie that had taken
possession of her heart. How could Peter live so placidly at Susie's
expense, and treat her with such a complete want of tenderness? Anna's
love for her brother diminished considerably directly she began to
understand Susie's life. It was such a pitiful little life of cringing,
and pushing, and heroically smiling in the face of ill-treatment. No one
cared for her in the very least. She had hundreds of acquaintances, who
would eat her dinners and go away and poke fun at her, but not a single
friend. Her husband lived on her and hardly spoke to her. Her boy at
Eton, an amazing prig, looked down on her. Her little daughter never
dreamed of obeying her. Anna herself was prevented by some stubborn
spirit of fastidiousness, evidently not possessed by any of her
contemporaries, from doing the only thing Susie had ever really wanted
her to do--marrying, and getting herself out of the way. What if Susie
were a vulgar little woman of no education and no family? That did not
make it any the more glorious for the Estcourts to take all they could
and ignore her existence. It was, after all, Susie who paid the bills.
Anna pitied her from the bottom of her heart; such a forlorn little
woman, taken out of her proper sphere, and left to shiver all alone,
without a shred of love to cover and comfort her.

It was when she was away from Susie that she felt this. When she was
with her, she found herself as cold and quiet and contradictory as
Peter. She used, whenever she got the chance, to go to afternoon service
at St. Paul's. It was the only place and time in which all the bad part
of her was soothed into quiet, and the good allowed to prevail in peace.
The privacy of the great place, where she never met anyone she knew, the
beauty of the music, the stateliness of the service offered every day in
equal perfection to any poor wretch choosing to turn his back for an
hour on the perplexities of life, all helped to hush her grievances to
sleep and fill her heart with tenderness for those who were not happy,
and for those who did not know they were unhappy, and for those who
wasted their one precious life in being wretched when they might have
been happy. How little it would need, she thought (for she was young and
imaginative), to turn most people's worries and sadness into joy. Such a
little difference in Susie's ways and ideas would make them all so
happy; such a little change in Peter's habits would make his wife's life
radiant. But they all lived blindly on, each day a day of emptiness,
each of those precious days, so crowded with opportunities, and
possibilities, and unheeded blessings, and presently life would be
behind them, and their chances gone for ever.

"The world is a dreadful place, full of unhappy people," she thought,
looking out on to the world with unhappy eyes. "Each one by himself,
with no one to comfort him. Each one with more than he can bear, and no
one to help him. Oh, if I could, I would help and comfort everyone that
is sad, or sick at heart, or sorry--oh, if I could!"

And she dreamed of all that she would do if she were Susie--rich, and
free from any sort of interference--to help others, less fortunate, to
be happy too. But, since she was the very reverse of rich and free, she
shook off these dreams, and made numbers of good resolutions
instead--resolutions bearing chiefly on her future behaviour towards
Susie. And she would come out of the church filled with the sternest
resolves to be ever afterwards kind and loving to her; and the very
first words Susie uttered would either irritate her into speeches that
made her sorry, or freeze her back into her ordinary state of cold
aloofness.

If Susie had had an idea that Anna was pitying her, and making good
resolutions of which she was the object at afternoon services, and that
in her eyes she had come to be merely a cross which must with heroism be
borne, she probably would have been indignant. Pitying people and being
pitied oneself are two very different things. The first is soothing and
sweet, the second is annoying, or even maddening, according to the
temperament of the patient. Susie, however, never suspected that anyone
could be sorry for her; and when, after a party, before they went to
bed, Anna would put her arms round her and give her a disproportionately
tender kiss, she would show her surprise openly. "Why, what's the
matter?" she would ask. "Another mood, Anna?" For she could not know how
much Anna felt the snubs she had seen her receive. How should she? She
was so used to them that she hardly noticed them herself.

It was when Anna was twenty-five, and much vexed in body by efforts to
be and to do as Susie wished, and in soul by those unanswerable
questions as to the why and wherefore of the aimless, useless existence
she was leading, that the wonderful thing happened that changed her
whole life.




CHAPTER II


There was a German relation of Anna's, her mother's brother, known to
Susie as Uncle Joachim. He had been twice to England; once during his
sister's life, when Anna was little, and Peter was unmarried, and they
were all poor and happy together at Estcourt; and once after Susie's
introduction into the family, just at that period when Anna was
beginning to stiffen and put her hair behind her ears.

Susie knew all about him, having inquired with her usual frankness on
first hearing of his existence whether he would be likely to leave Anna
anything on his death; and upon being informed that he had a family of
sons, and large estates and little money, looked upon it as a great
hardship to be obliged to have him in her London house. She objected to
all Germans, and thought this particular one a dreadful old man, and
never wearied of making humorous comments on his clothes and the oddness
of his manners at meals. She was vexed that he should be with them in
Hill Street, and refused to give dinners while he was there. She also
asked him several times if he would not enjoy a stay at Estcourt, and
said that the country was now at its best, and the primroses were in
full beauty.

"I want not primroses," said Uncle Joachim, who seldom spoke at length;
"I live in the country. I will now see London."

So he went about diligently to all the museums and picture-galleries,
sometimes alone and sometimes with Anna, who neglected her social duties
more than ever in order to be with him, for she loved him.

They talked together chiefly in German, Uncle Joachim carefully
correcting her mistakes; and while they went frugally in omnibuses to
the different sights, and ate buns in confectioners' shops at
lunch-time, and walked long distances where no omnibuses were to be
found--for besides having a great fear of hansoms he was very
thrifty--he drew her out, saying little himself, and in a very short
time knew almost as much about her life and her perplexities as she did.

She was very happy during his visit, and told herself contentedly that
blood, after all, was thicker than water. She did not stop to consider
what she meant exactly by this, but she had a vague notion that Susie
was the water. She felt that Uncle Joachim understood her better than
anyone had yet done; and was it not natural that her dear mother's
brother should? And it was only after she had taken him to service at
St. Paul's that she began to perceive that there might perhaps be points
on which their tastes differed. Uncle Joachim had remained seated while
other people knelt or stood; but that did not matter in that liberal
place, where nobody notices the degree of his neighbour's devoutness.
And he had slept during the anthem, one of those unaccompanied anthems
that are sung there with what seem of a certainty to be the voices of
angels. And on coming out, when a fugue was rolling in glorious
confusion down the echoing aisles, and Anna, who preferred her fugues
confused, felt that her spirit was being caught up to heaven, he had
looked at her rapt face and wet eyelashes, and patted her hand very
kindly, and said encouragingly, "In my youth I too cultivated Bach. Now
I cultivate pigs. Pigs are better."

Anna's mother had been his only sister, and he had come over, not, as he
told Susie, to see London, but to see Susie herself, and to find out how
it was that Anna had reached an age that in Germany is the age of old
maids without marrying. By the time he had spent two evenings in Hill
Street he had formed his opinion of his nephew and his nephew's wife,
and they remained fixed until his death. "The good Peter," he said
suddenly one day to Anna when they were wandering together in the maze
at Hampton Court--for he faithfully went the rounds of sightseeing
prescribed by Baedeker, and Anna followed him wherever he went--"the
good Peter is but a _Quatschkopf_."

"A _Quatschkopf_?" echoed Anna, whose acquaintance with her
mother-tongue did not extend to the byways of opprobrium. "What in the
world is a _Quatschkopf_?"

"_Quatschkopf_ is a _Duselfritz_," explained Uncle Joachim, "and also it
is the good Peter."

"I believe you are calling him ugly names," said Anna, slipping her arm
through his; by this time, if not kindred spirits, they were the best of
friends.

Uncle Joachim did not immediately reply. They had come to the open space
in the middle of the maze, and he sat down on the seat to recover his
breath, and to wipe his forehead; for though the wind was cold the sun
was fierce. "_Gott, was man Alles durchmacht auf Reisen!_" he sighed.
Then he put his handkerchief back into his pocket, looked up at Anna,
who was standing in front of him leaning on her sunshade, and said, "A
_Quatschkopf_ is a foolish fellow who marries a woman like that."

"Oh, poor Susie!" cried Anna, at once ready to defend her, and full of
the kindly feelings absence invariably produced. "Peter did a very
sensible thing. But I don't think Susie did, marrying Peter."

"He is a _Quatschkopf_," said Uncle Joachim, not to be shaken in his
opinions, "and the _geborene_ Dobbs is a vulgar woman who is not rich
enough."

"Not rich enough? Why, we are all suffocated by her money. We never hear
of anything else. It would be dreadful if she had still more."

"Not rich enough," persisted Uncle Joachim, pursing up his lips into an
expression of great disapproval, and shaking his head. "Such a woman
should be a millionnaire. Not of marks, but of pounds sterling. Short of
that, a man of birth does not impose her as a mother on his children.
Peter has done it. He is a _Quatschkopf_."

"It is a great mercy that she isn't a millionnaire," said Anna, appalled
by the mere thought. "Things would be just the same, except that there
would be all that money more to hear about. I hate the very name of
money."

"Nonsense. Money is very good."

"But not somebody else's."

"That is true," said Uncle Joachim approvingly. "One's own is the only
money that is truly pleasant." Then he added suddenly, "Tell me, how
comes it that you are not married?"

Anna frowned. "Now you are growing like Susie," she said.

"_Ach_--she asks you that often?"

"Yes--no, not quite like that. She says she knows why I am not married."

"And what knows she?"

"She says that I frighten everybody away," said Anna, digging the point
of her sunshade into the ground. Then she looked at Uncle Joachim, and
laughed.

"What?" he said incredulously. This pretty creature standing before him,
so soft and young--for that she was twenty-four was hardly
credible--could not by any possibility be anything but lovable.

"She says that I am disagreeable to people--that I look cross--that I
don't encourage them enough. Now isn't it simply terrible to be expected
to encourage any wretched man who has money? I don't want anybody to
marry me. I don't want to buy my independence that way. Besides, it
isn't really independence."

"For a woman it is the one life," said Uncle Joachim with great
decision. "Talk not to me of independence. Such words are not for the
lips of girls. It is a woman's pride to lean on a good husband. It is
her happiness to be shielded and protected by him. Outside the narrow
circle of her home, for her happiness is not. The woman who never
marries has missed all things."

"I don't believe it," said Anna.

"It is nevertheless true."

"Look at Susie--is she so happy?"

"I said a _good_ husband; not a _Duselfritz_."

"And as for narrow circles, why, how happy, how gloriously happy, I
could be outside them, if only I were independent!"

"Independent--independent," repeated Uncle Joachim testily, "always this
same foolish word. What hast thou in thy head, child, thy pretty woman's
head, made, if ever head was, to lean on a good man's shoulder?"

"Oh--good men's shoulders," said Anna, shrugging her own, "I don't want
to lean on anybody's shoulder. I want to hold my head up straight, all
by itself. Do you then admire limp women, dear uncle, whose heads roll
about all loose till a good man comes along and props them up?"

"These are English ideas. I like them not," said Uncle Joachim, looking
stony.

Anna sat down on the seat by his side, and laid her cheek for a moment
against his sleeve. "This is the only good man's shoulder it will ever
lean on," she said. "If I were a preacher, do you know what I would
preach?"

"Thou art not, and never wilt be, a preacher."

"But if I were? Do you know what I would preach? Early and late? In
season and out of it?"

"Much nonsense, I doubt not."

"I would preach independence. Only that. Always that. They would be
sermons for women only; and they would be warnings against props."

She sat up and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, but he
continued to stare stonily into space.

"I would thump the cushions, and cry out, 'Be independent, independent,
independent! Don't talk so much, and do more. Go your own way, and let
your neighbour go his. Don't meddle with other people when you have all
your own work cut out for you being good yourself. Shake off all the
props----'"

"Anna, thou art talking folly."

"'--shake them off, the props tradition and authority offer you, and go
alone--crawl, stumble, stagger, but go alone. You won't learn to walk
without tumbles, and knocks, and bruises, but you'll never learn to walk
at all so long as there are props.' Oh," she said fervently, casting up
her eyes, "there is nothing, nothing like getting rid of one's props!"

"I never yet," observed Uncle Joachim, in his turn casting up his eyes,
"saw a girl who so greatly needs the guidance of a good man. Hast thou
never loved, then?" he added, turning on her suddenly.

"Yes," replied Anna promptly. If Uncle Joachim chose to ask such direct
questions she would give him straight answers.

"But----?"

"He went away and married somebody else. I had no money, and she had a
great deal. So you see he was a very sensible young man." And she
laughed, for she had long ago ceased to be anything but amused by the
remembrance of her one excursion into the rocky regions of love.

"That," said Uncle Joachim, "was not true love."

"Oh, but it was."

"Nay. One does not laugh at love."

"It was all I had, anyhow. There isn't any more left. It was very bad
while it lasted, and it took at least two years to get over it. What
things I did to please that young man and appear lovely in his eyes! The
hours it took to dress, and get my hair done just right. I endured
tortures if I didn't look as beautiful as I thought I could look, and
was always giving my poor maid notice. And plots--the way I plotted to
get taken to the places where he would be! I never was so artful before
or since. Poor Susie was quite helpless. It is a mercy it all ended as
it did."

"That," repeated Uncle Joachim, "was not true love."

"Yes, it was."

"No, my child."

"Yes, my uncle. I laugh now, but it was very dreadful at the time."

"Thou art but a goose," he said, shrugging his shoulders; but
immediately patted her hand lest her feelings should have been hurt.
And, declining further argument, he demanded to be taken to the Great
Vine.

It was in this fashion, Anna talking and Uncle Joachim making brief
comments, that he came to know her as thoroughly as though he had lived
with her all his life.

Soon after the excursion to Hampton Court a letter came that hurried his
departure, to Susie's ill-concealed relief.

"My swines are ill," he informed her, greatly agitated, his fragile
English going altogether to pieces in his perturbation; "my inspector
writes they perpetually die. God keep thee, Anna," and he embraced her
very tenderly, and bending hastily over Susie's hand muttered some
conventionalities, and then disappeared into his four-wheeler and out of
their lives.

They never saw him again.

"My swines are ill," mimicked Susie, when Anna, feeling that she had
lost her one friend, came slowly back into the room, "my swines
perpetually die--"

Anna was obliged to go and pray very hard at St. Paul's before she could
forgive her.




CHAPTER III


The old man died at Christmas, and in the following March, when Anna was
going about more sad and listless than ever, the news came that, though
his inherited estates had gone to his sons, he had bought a little place
some years before with the intention of retiring to it in his extreme
old age, and this little place he had left to his dear and only niece
Anna.

She was alone when the letters bringing the news arrived, sitting in the
drawing-room with a book in her hands at which she did not look, feeling
utterly downcast, indifferent, too hopeless to want anything or mind
anything, accepting her destiny of years of days like this, with herself
going through them lonely, useless, and always older, and telling
herself that she did not after all care. "What does it matter, so long
as I have a comfortable bed, and fires when I am cold, and meals when I
am hungry?" she thought. "Not to have those is the only real misery. All
the rest is purest fancy. What right have I to be happier than other
people? If they are contented by such things, I can be contented too.
And what does a useless being like me deserve, I should like to know? It
was detestably ungrateful of me to have been unhappy all this time."

She got up aimlessly, and looked out of the window into the sunny
street, where the dust was racing by on the gusty March wind, and the
women selling daffodils at the corner were more battered and blown about
and red-eyed than ever. She had often, in those moments when her whole
body tingled with a wild longing to be up and doing and justifying her
existence before it was too late, envied these poor women, because they
worked. She wondered vaguely now at her folly. "It is much better to be
comfortable," she thought, going back to the fire as aimlessly as she
had gone to the window, "and it is sheer idiocy quarrelling with a life
that other people would think quite tolerable."

Then the door opened, and the letters were brought in--the wonderful
letters that struck the whole world into radiance--lying together with
bills and ordinary notes on a salver, carried by an indifferent servant,
handed to her as though they were things of naught--the wonderful
letters that changed her life.

At first she did not understand what it was that they meant, and pored
over the cramped German writing, reading the long sentences over and
over again, till something suddenly seemed to clutch at her heart. Was
this possible? Was this actual truth? Was Uncle Joachim, who had so much
objected to her longing for independence, giving it to her with both
hands, and every blessing along with it? She read them through again,
very carefully, holding them with shaking hands. Yes, it was true. She
began to cry, sobbing over them for very love and tenderness, her whole
being melted into gratitude and humbleness, awestruck by a sense of how
little she had deserved it, dazzled by the thousand lovely colours life,
in the twinkling of an eye, had taken on.

There were two letters--one from Uncle Joachim's lawyer, and one from
Uncle Joachim himself, written soon after his return from England, with
directions on the envelope that it was to be sent to Anna after his
death.

Uncle Joachim was not a man to express sentiment otherwise than by
patting those he loved affectionately on the back, and the letter over
which Anna hung with such tender gratitude, and such an extravagance of
humility, was a mere bald statement of facts. Since Anna, with a
perversity that he entirely disapproved, refused to marry, and appeared
to be possessed of the obstinacy that had always been a peculiarity of
her German forefathers, and which was well enough in a man, but
undesirable in a woman, whose calling it was to be gentle and yielding
(_sanft und nachgiebig_), and convinced from what he had seen
during his visit to London that she could never by any possibility be
happy with her brother and sister-in-law, and moreover considering that
it was beneath the dignity of his sister's daughter, a young lady of
good family, for ever to roll herself in the feathers with which the
middle-class goose-born Dobbs had furnished Peter's otherwise defective
nest, he had decided to make her independent altogether of them,
numerous though his own sons were, and angry as they no doubt would be,
by bestowing on her absolutely after his death the only property he
could leave to whomsoever he chose, a small estate near Stralsund, where
he hoped to pass his last years. It was in a flourishing condition, easy
to manage, bringing in a yearly average of forty thousand marks, and
with an experienced inspector whom he earnestly recommended her to keep.
He trusted his dear Anna would go and live there, and keep it up to its
present state of excellence, and would finally marry a good German
gentleman, of whom there were many, and return in this way altogether to
the country of her forefathers. The estate was not so far from Stralsund
as to make it impossible for her to drive there when she wished to
indulge any feminine desire she might have to trim herself (_sich
putzen_), and he recommended her to begin a new life, settling there
with some grave and sober female advanced in years as companion and
protectress, until such time as she should, by marriage, pass into the
care of that natural protector, her husband.

Then followed a short exposition of his views on women, especially those
women who go to parties all their lives and talk _Klatsch_; a spirited
comparing of such women with those whose interests keep them busy in
their own homes; and a final exhortation to Anna to seize this
opportunity of choosing the better life, which was always, he said, a
life of simplicity, frugality, and hard work.

Anna wept and laughed together over this letter--the tenderest laughter
and the happiest tears. It seemed by turns the wildest improbability
that she should be well off, and the most natural thing in the world.
Susie was out. Never had her absence been terrible before. Anna could
hardly bear the waiting. She walked up and down the room, for sitting
still was impossible, holding the precious letters tight in her little
cold hands, her cheeks burning, her eyes sparkling, in an agony of
impatience and anxiety lest something should have happened to delay
Susie at this supreme moment. At the window end of the room she stopped
each time she reached it and looked eagerly up and down the street, the
flower-women and the blessedness of selling daffodils having within an
hour become profoundly indifferent to her. At the other end of the room,
where a bureau stood, she came to a standstill too, and snatching up a
pen began a letter to Peter in Devonshire; but, hearing wheels, threw it
down and flew to the window again. It was not Susie's carriage, and she
went back to the letter and wrote another line; then again to the
window; then again to the letter; and it was the letter's turn as Susie,
fagged from a round of calls, came in.

Susie's afternoon had not been a success. She had made advances to a
woman of enviably high position with the intrepidity that characterised
all her social movements, and she had been snubbed for her pains with
more than usual rudeness. She had had, besides, several minor
annoyances. And to come in worn out, and have your sister-in-law, who
would hardly speak to you at luncheon, fall on your neck and begin
violently to kiss you, is really a little hard on a woman who is already
cross.

"Now what in the name of fortune is the matter now?" gasped Susie,
breathlessly disengaging herself.

"Oh, Susie! oh, Susie!" cried Anna incoherently, "what ages you have
been away--and the letters came directly you had gone--and I've been
watching for you ever since, and was so dreadfully afraid something had
happened----"

"But what are you talking about, Anna?" interrupted Susie irritably. It
was late, and she wanted to rest for a few minutes before dressing to go
out again, and here was Anna in a new mood of a violent nature, and she
was weary beyond measure of all Anna's moods.

"Oh, such a wonderful thing has happened!" cried Anna; "such a wonderful
thing! What will Peter say? And how glad you will be----" And she thrust
the letters with trembling fingers into Susie's unresponsive hand.

"What is it?" said Susie, looking at them bewildered.

"Oh, no--I forgot," said Anna, wildly as it seemed to Susie, pulling
them out of her hand again. "You can't read German--see here----" And
she began to unfold them and smooth out the creases she had made, her
hands shaking visibly.

Susie stared. Clearly something extraordinary had happened, for the
frosty Anna of the last few months had melted into a radiance of emotion
that would only not be ridiculous if it turned out to be justified.

"Two German letters," said Anna, sitting down on the nearest chair,
spreading them out on her lap, and talking as though she could hardly
get the words out fast enough, "one from Uncle Joachim----"

"Uncle Joachim?" repeated Susie, a disagreeable and creepy doubt as to
Anna's sanity coming over her. "You know very well he's dead and can't
write letters," she said severely.

"--and one from his lawyer," Anna went on, regardless of everything but
what she had to tell. "The lawyer's letter is full of technical words,
difficult to understand, but it is only to confirm what Uncle Joachim
says, and his is quite plain. He wrote it some time before he died, and
left it with his lawyer to send on to me."

Susie was listening now with all her ears. Lawyers, deceased uncles, and
Anna's sparkling face could only have one meaning.

"Uncle Joachim was our mother's only brother----"

"I know, I know," interrupted Susie impatiently.

"--and was the dearest and kindest of uncles to me----"

"Never mind what he was," interrupted Susie still more impatiently.
"What has he done for you? Tell me that. You always pretended, both of
you--Peter too--that he had miles of sandy places somewhere in the
desert, and dozens of boys. What could he do for you?"

"Do for me?" Anna rose up with a solemnity worthy of the great news
about to be imparted, put both her hands on Susie's little shoulders,
and looking down at her with shining eyes, said slowly, "He has left me
an estate bringing in forty thousand marks a year."

"Forty thousand!" echoed Susie, completely awestruck.

"Marks," said Anna.

"Oh, marks," said Susie, chilled. "That's francs, isn't it? I really
thought for a moment----"

"They're more than francs. It brings in, on an average, two thousand
pounds a year. Two--thousand--pounds--a--year," repeated Anna, nodding
her head at each word. "Now, Susie, what do you think of that?"

"What do I think of it? Why, that it isn't much. Where would you all
have been, I wonder, if I had only had two thousand a year?"

"Oh, congratulate me!" cried Anna, opening her arms. "Kiss me, and tell
me you are glad! Don't you see that I am off your hands at last? That we
need never think about husbands again? That you will never have to buy
me any more clothes, and never tire your poor little self out any more
trotting me round? I don't know which of us is to be congratulated
most," she added laughing, looking at Susie with her eyes full of tears.
Then she insisted on kissing her again, and murmured foolish things in
her ear about being so sorry for all her horrid ways, and so grateful to
her, and so determined now to be good for ever and ever.

"My _dear_ Anna," remonstrated Susie, who disliked sentiment and never
knew how to respond to exhibitions of feeling. "Of course I congratulate
you. It almost seems as if throwing away one's chances in the way you
have done was the right thing to do, and is being rewarded. Don't let us
waste time. You know we go out to dinner. What has he left Peter?"

"Peter?" said Anna wonderingly.

"Yes, Peter. He was his nephew, I suppose, just as much as you were his
niece."

"Well, but Susie, Peter is different. He--he doesn't need money as I do;
and of course Uncle Joachim knew that."

"Nonsense. He hasn't got a penny. Let me look at the letters."

"They're in German. You won't be able to read them."

"Give them to me. I learned German at school, and got a prize. You're
not the only person in the world who can do things."

She took them out of Anna's hand, and began slowly and painfully to read
the one from Uncle Joachim, determined to see whether there really was
no mention of Peter. Anna looked on, hot and cold by turns with fright
lest by some chance her early studies should not after all have been
quite forgotten.

"Here's something about Peter--and me," Susie said suddenly. "At least,
I suppose he means me. It is something Dobbs. Why does he call me that?
It hasn't been my name for fifteen years."

"Oh, it's some silly German way. He says the _geborene_ Dobbs, to
distinguish you from other Lady Estcourts."

"But there are no others."

"Oh, well, his sister was one. Give me the letter, Susie--I can tell you
what he says much more quickly than you can read it."

"'_Unter der Würde einer jünge Dame aus guter Familie_,'" read out Susie
slowly, not heeding Anna, and with the most excruciating pronunciation
that was ever heard, "'_sich ewig auf den Federn, mit welchen die
bürgerliche Gans geborene Dobbs Peters sonst mangelhaftes Nest
ausgestattet hat, zu wälzen_.' What stuff he writes. I can hardly
understand it. Yet I must have been good at it at school, to get the
prize. What is that bit about me and Peter?"

"Which bit?" said Anna, blushing scarlet. "Let me look." She got the
letter back into her possession. "Oh, that's where he says that--that he
doesn't think it fair that I should be a burden for ever on you and
Peter."

"Well, that's sensible enough. The old man had some sense in him after
all, absurd though he was, and vulgar. It _isn't_ fair, of course. I
don't mean to say anything disagreeable, or throw all I have done for
you in your face, but really, Anna, few mothers would have made the
sacrifices I have for you, and as for sisters-in-law--well, I'd just
like to see another."

"Dear Susie," said Anna tenderly, putting her arm round her, ready to
acknowledge all, and more than all, the benefits she had received, "you
have been only too kind and generous. I know that I owe you everything
in the world, and just think how lovely it is for me to feel that now I
can take my weight off your shoulders! You must come and live with _me_
now, whenever you are sick of things, and I'll feel so proud, having you
in my house!"

"Live with you?" exclaimed Susie, drawing herself away. "Where are you
going to live?"

"Why, there, I suppose."

"Live there! Is that a condition?"

"No, but Uncle Joachim keeps on saying he hopes I will, and that I'll
settle down and look after the place."

"Look after the place yourself? How silly!"

"Yes, you haven't taught me much about farming, have you? He wants me to
turn quite into a German."

"Good gracious!" cried Susie, genuinely horrified.

"He seems to think that I ought to work, and not spend my life talking
_Klatsch_."

"Talking what?"

"It's what German women apparently talk when they get together. We
don't. I'd never do anything with such an ugly name, and I'm positive
you wouldn't."

"Where is this place?"

"Near Stralsund."

"And where on earth is that?"

"Ah," said Anna, investigating cobwebby corners of her memory, "that's
what I should like to be able to remember. Perhaps," she added honestly,
"I never knew. Let me call Letty, and ask her to bring her atlas."

"Letty won't know," said Susie impatiently, "she only knows the things
she oughtn't to."

"Oh, she isn't as wise as all that," said Anna, ringing the bell.
"Anyhow she has maps, which is more than we have."

A servant was sent to request Miss Letty Estcourt to attend in the
drawing-room with her atlas.

"Whatever's in the wind now?" inquired Letty, open-mouthed, of her
governess. "They're not going to examine me this time of night, are
they, Leechy?" For she suffered greatly from having a brother who was
always passing examinations and coming out top, and was consequently
subjected herself, by an ambitious mother who was sure that she must be
equally clever if she would only let herself go, to every examination
that happened to be going for girls of her age; so that she and Miss
Leech spent their days either on the defensive, preparing for these
unprovoked assaults, or in the state of collapse which followed the
regularly recurring defeat, and both found their lives a burden too
great to be borne.

There was a preliminary scuffle of washing and brushing, and then Letty
marched into the drawing-room, her atlas under her arm and deep
suspicion on her face. But no bland and treacherous examiner was
visible, covering his preliminary movements with ghastly pleasantries;
only her mother and her pretty aunt.

"Where's Stralsund?" they cried together, as she opened the door.

Letty stopped short and stared. "What's that?" she asked.

"It's a place--a place in Germany."

"Letty, do you mean to tell me that you don't know where Stralsund is?"
asked Susie, in a voice that would have been of thunder if it had been
big enough. "Do you mean to say that after all the money I have spent on
your education you don't know _that_?"

Was this a new form of torture? Was she to find the examining spirit
lurking even in the familiar and hitherto harmless forms of her mother
and her aunt? She openly showed her disgust. "If it's a place, it's in
this atlas," she said, "and if this is going to be an examination, I
don't think it's fair; and if it's a game, I don't like it." And she
threw her atlas unceremoniously on to the nearest chair; for though her
mother could force her to do many things, she could never, somehow,
force her to be respectful.

"What a horror the child has of lessons!" cried Susie. "Don't be so
silly. We only want to see if you know where Stralsund is, that's all."

"Tell us where it is, Letty," said Anna coaxingly, kneeling down in front
of the chair and opening the atlas. "Let us find the map of Germany and
look for it. Why, you did Germany for your last exam.--you must have it
all at your fingers' ends."

"It didn't stay there, then," said Letty moodily; but she went over to
Anna, who was always kind to her, and began to turn over the
well-thumbed pages.

Oh, what recollections lurked in those dirty corners! Surely it is hard
on a person of fourteen, who is as fond of enjoying herself as anybody
else, to be made to wrestle with maps upstairs in a dreary room, when
the sun is shining, and the voices of the children passing come up
joyously to the prison windows, and all the world is out of doors! Letty
thought so, and Miss Leech thought it hard on a person of thirty, and
each tried to console the other, but neither knew how, for their case
seemed very hopeless. Did not unending vistas of classes and lectures
stretch away before and behind them, dotted at intervals, oh, so
frequent! with the black spots of examinations? Was not the pavement of
Gower Street, and Kensington Square, and of all those districts where
girls can be lectured into wisdom, quite worn by their patient feet? And
then the accomplishments! Oh, what a life it was! A man came twice a
week and insisted on teaching her to fiddle; a highly nervous man, who
jerked her elbow and rapped her knuckles with his bow whenever she
played out of tune, which was all the time, and made bitter remarks of a
killingly sarcastic nature to Miss Leech when she stumbled over the
accompaniments. On Wednesdays there was a dancing class, where a pinched
young lady played the piano with the energy of despair, and a hot and
agile master with unduly turned-out toes taught the girls the Lancers,
earning his bread in the sweat of his brow. He also was sarcastic, but
he clothed his sarcasms in the garb of kindly fun, laughing gently at
them himself, and expecting his pupils to laugh too; which they did
uneasily, for the fun was of a personal nature, evoked by the clumsiness
or stupidity of one or other of them, and none knew when her own turn
might not come. The lesson ended with what he called the March of Grace
round the room, each girl by herself, no music to drown the noise her
shoes made on the bare boards, the others looking on, and the master
making comments. This march was terrible to Letty. All her nightmares
were connected with it. She was a podgy, dull-looking girl, fat and pale
and awkward, and her mother made her wear cheap shoes that creaked.
"Miss Estcourt has new shoes on again," the dancing master would say,
gently smiling, when Letty was well on her way round the room, cut off
from all human aid, conscious of every inch of her body, desperately
trying to be graceful. And everybody tittered except the victim. "You
know, Miss Estcourt," he would say at every second lesson, "there is a
saying that creaking shoes have not been paid for. I beg your pardon?
Did you say they had been paid for? Miss Estcourt says she does not
know." And he would turn to his other pupils with a shrug and a gentle
smile.

On Saturday afternoons there were the Popular Concerts at St. James's
Hall to be gone to--Susie regarded them as educational, and
subscribed--and Letty, who always had chilblains on her feet in winter,
suffered tortures trying not to rub them; for as surely as she moved one
foot and began to rub the other with it, however gently, fierce
enthusiasts in the row in front would turn on her--old gentlemen of an
otherwise humane appearance, rapt ladies with eyeglasses and loose
clothes--and sh-sh her with furious hissings into immobility. "Oh,
Letty, _try_ and sit still," Miss Leech, who dreaded publicity, would
implore in a whisper; but who that has not had them can know the torture
of chilblains inside thick boots, where they cannot be got at? As soon
as the chilblains went, the Saturday concerts left off, and it seemed as
though Fate had nothing better to do than to be spiteful.

It was indeed a dreadful thing, thought Letty, as she bent over the map
of Germany, to be young and to have to be made clever at all costs. Here
was her aunt even, her pretty, kind aunt, asking her geography questions
at seven o'clock at night, when she thought that she had really done
with lessons for one more day, and had been so much enjoying Leechy's
description of the only man she ever loved, while she comfortably
toasted cheese at the schoolroom fire. Anna, who spent such lofty hours
of spiritual exaltation at St. Paul's, and came away with her soul
melted into pity for the unhappy, and yearned with her whole being to
help them, never thought of Letty as a creature who might perhaps be
helped to cheerfulness with a little trouble. Letty was too close at
hand; and enthusiastic philanthropists, casting about for objects of
charity, seldom see what is at their feet.

It was so difficult to find Stralsund that by the time Letty's wandering
finger had paused upon it Susie could only give one glance of horror at
its position, and hurry away with Anna to dress. Anna, too, would have
preferred it to be farther south, in the Black Forest, or some other
romantic region, where it would have amused her to go occasionally, at
least, for a few weeks in the summer. But there it was, as far north as
it could be, in a part of the world she had hardly heard of, except in
connection with dogs.

It did not, however, matter where it was. Uncle Joachim had merely
recommended and not enjoined. It would be rather extraordinary for her
to go there and set up housekeeping alone. She need not go; she was
almost sure she would not go. Anyhow there was no necessity to decide at
once. The money was what she wanted, and she could spend it where she
chose. Let Uncle Joachim's inspector, of whom he wrote in such praise,
go on getting forty thousand marks a year out of the place, and she
would be perfectly content.

She ran upstairs to put on her prettiest dress, and to have her hair
done in the curls and waves she had so long eschewed. Should she not
make herself as charming as possible for this charming world, where
everybody was so good and kind, and add her measure of beauty and
kindness to the rest? She beamed on Letty as she passed her on the
stairs, climbing slowly up with her big atlas, and took it from her and
would carry it herself; she beamed on Miss Leech, who was watching for
her pupil at the schoolroom door; she beamed on her maid, she beamed on
her own reflection in the glass, which indeed at that moment was that of
a very beautiful young woman. Oh happy, happy world! What should she do
with so much money? She, who had never had a penny in her life, thought
it an enormous, an inexhaustible sum. One thing was certain--it was all
to be spent in doing good; she would help as many people with it as she
possibly could, and never, never, never let them feel that they were
under obligations. Did she not know, after fifteen years of dependence
on Susie, what it was like to be under obligations? And what was more
cruelly sad and crushing and deadening than dependence? She did not yet
know what sort of people she would help, or in what way she would help,
but oh, she was going to make heaps of people happy forever! While
Hilton was curling her hair, she thought of slums; but remembered that
they would bring her into contact with the clergy, and most of her
offers of late had been from the clergy. Even the vicar who had prepared
her for confirmation, his first wife being then alive, and a second
having since been mourned, had wanted to marry her. "It's because I am
twenty-five and staid that they think me suitable," she thought; but she
could not help smiling at the face in the glass.

When she was dressed and ready to go down she was forced to ask herself
whether the person that she saw in the glass looked in the least like a
person who would ever lead the simple, frugal, hard-working life that
Uncle Joachim had called the better life, and in which he seemed to
think she would alone find contentment. Certainly she knew him to be
very wise. Well, nothing need be decided yet. Perhaps she would
go--perhaps she would not. "It's this white dress that makes me look
so--so unsuitable," she said to herself, "and Hilton's wonderful waves."

And she went downstairs trying not to sing, the sweetest of feminine
creatures, happiness and love and kindness shining in her eyes, a lovely
thing saved from the blight of empty years, and brought back to beauty,
by Uncle Joachim's timely interference.

Letty and Miss Leech heard the singing, and stopped involuntarily in
their conversation. It was a strange sound in that dull and joyless
house.

"I don't know what's the matter, Leechy," Letty had said, on her return
from the drawing-room, "but mamma and Aunt Anna are too weird to-night
for anything. What do you think they had me down for? They didn't know
where Stralsund was, and wanted to find out. They pretended they wanted
to see if _I_ knew, but I soon saw through that game. And Aunt Anna
looks frightfully happy. I believe she's going to be married, and wants
to go to Stralsund for the honeymoon."

And Letty took up her toasting fork, while Miss Leech, as in duty bound,
refreshed her pupil's memory in regard to Stralsund and Wallenstein and
the Hansa cities generally.




CHAPTER IV


Peter, meditating on the banks of the river at Estcourt, came to the
conclusion that a journey to London would be made unnecessary by the
equal efficacy of a congratulatory letter.

He had been greatly moved by the news of his sister's good fortune, and
in the first flush of pleasure and sympathy had ordered his things to be
packed in readiness for his departure by the night train. Then he had
gone down to the river, and there, thinking the matter over quietly,
amid the soothing influences of grey sky, grey water, and green grass,
he gradually perceived that a letter would convey all that he felt quite
well, perhaps better than any verbal expressions of joy, and as he would
in any case only stay a few hours in town the long journey seemed hardly
worth while. He sent a letter, therefore, that very evening--a kind,
brotherly letter, in which, after heartily congratulating his dear
little sister, he said that it would be necessary for her to go over to
Germany, see the lawyer, and take possession of her property. When she
had done that, and made all arrangements as to the future payment of the
income derived from the estate, she would of course come back to them;
for Estcourt was always to be her home, and now that she was independent
she would no longer be obliged to be wherever Susie was, but would, he
hoped, come to him, and they could go fishing together,--"and there's
nothing to beat fishing," concluded Peter, "if you want peace."

But Anna did not want peace; at least, not that kind of peace just at
that moment. Sitting in a punt was not what she wanted. She was thrilled
by the love of her less fortunate fellow-creatures, and the sense of
power to help them, and the longing to go and do it. What she really
wanted of Peter was that he should take her to Germany and help her
through the formalities; for before his letter arrived she too had seen
that that was the first thing to be done.

Of this, however, he did not write a word. She thought he must have
forgotten, so natural did it appear to her that her brother should go
with her; and she wrote him a little note, asking when he would be able
to get away. She received a long letter in reply, full of regrets,
excuses, and good reasons, which she read wonderingly. Had she been
selfish, or was Peter selfish? She thought it all out carefully, and
found that it was she who had been selfish to expect Peter, always a
hater of business and a lover of quiet, to go all that way and worry
himself with tiresome money arrangements. Besides, perhaps he was not
feeling well. She knew he suffered from rheumatism; and when you have
rheumatism the mere thought of a long journey is appalling.

Susie, whose head was very clear on all matters concerning money, had
also recognised the necessity of Anna's going to Germany, and had also
regarded Peter as the most natural companion and guide; but she was not
surprised when Anna told her that he could not go. "It was too much to
expect," apologised Anna. "He often has rheumatism in the spring, and
perhaps he has it now."

Susie sniffed.

"The question is," said Anna after a pause, "what am I to do, helpless
virgin, in spite of my years,--never able to do a thing for myself?"

"I'll go with you."

"You? But what about your engagements?"

"Oh, I'll throw them over, and take you. Letty can come too. It will do
her German good. Herr Schumpf says he's ashamed of her."

Susie had various reasons for offering herself so amiably, one being
certainly curiosity. But the chief one was that the same woman who had
been so rude to her the day Anna's news came, had sent out invitations
to all the world to her daughter's wedding after Easter, and had not
sent one to Susie.

This was one of those trials that cannot be faced. If she, being in
London at the time, carefully explained to her friends that she was ill
that day, and did actually stay in bed and dose herself the days
preceding and following, who would believe her? Not if she waved a
doctor's certificate in their faces would they believe her. They would
know that she had not been invited, and would rejoice. She felt that she
could not bear it. An unavoidable business journey to the Continent was
exactly what she wanted to help her out of this desperate situation. On
her return she would be able to hear the wedding discussed and express
her disappointment at having missed it with a serene brow and a quiet
mind.

It is doubtful whether she would have gone with Anna, however urgent
Anna's need, if she had been included in those invitations. But Anna,
who could not know the secret workings of her mind, once more remembered
her former treatment of Susie, so kind and willing to do all she could,
and hung her head with shame.

They left London a day or two before Easter, Letty and Miss Leech, both
of them nearly ill with suppressed delight at the unexpected holiday,
going with them. They had announced their coming to Uncle Joachim's
lawyer, and asked him to make arrangements for their accommodation at
Kleinwalde, Anna's new possession. Susie proposed to stay a day in
Berlin, which would give Anna time to talk everything over with the
lawyer, and would enable Letty to visit the museums. She had a hopeful
idea that Letty would absorb German at every pore once she was in the
country itself, and that being brought face to face with the statues of
Goethe and Schiller on their native soil would kindle the sparks of
interest in German literature that she supposed every well-taught child
possessed, into the roaring flame of enthusiasm. She could not believe
that Letty had no sparks. One of her children being so abnormally
clever, it must be sheer obstinacy on the part of the other that
prevented it from acquiring the knowledge offered daily in such
unstinted quantities. She had no illusions in regard to Letty's person,
and felt that as she would never be pretty it was of importance that she
should at least be cultured. She sat opposite her daughter in the train,
and having nothing better to do during the long hours that they were
jolting across North Germany, looked at her; and the more she looked the
more unreasoningly angry she became that Peter's sister should be so
pretty and Peter's daughter so plain. And then so fat! What a horrible
thing to have to take a fat daughter about with you in society. Where
did she get it from? She herself and Peter were the leanest of mortals.
It must be that Letty ate too much, which was not only a disgusting
practice but an expensive one, and should be put down at once with
rigour. Susie had not had such an opportunity of thoroughly inspecting
her child for years, and the result of this prolonged examination of her
weak points was that she would not let any of the party have anything to
eat at all, declaring that it was vulgar to eat in trains, expressing
amazement that people should bring themselves to touch the
horrid-looking food offered, and turning her back in impatient disgust
on two stout German ladies who had got in at Oberhausen, and who were
enjoying their lunch quite unmoved by her contempt--one eating a chicken
from beginning to end without a fork, and the other taking repeated sips
of an obviously satisfactory nature from a big wine bottle, which was
used, in the intervals, as a support to her back.

By the time Berlin was reached, these ladies, having been properly fed
all day, were very cheerful, whereas Susie's party was speechless from
exhaustion; especially poor Miss Leech, who was never very strong, and
so nearly fainted that Susie was obliged to notice it, and expressed a
conviction to Anna in a loud and peevish aside that Miss Leech was going
to be a nuisance.

"It is strange," thought Anna, as she crept into bed, "how travelling
brings out one's worst passions."

It is indeed strange; for it is certain that nothing equals the
expectant enthusiasm and mutual esteem of the start except the cold
dislike of the finish. Many are the friendships that have found an
unforeseen and sudden end on a journey, and few are those that survive
it. But if Horace Walpole and Grey fell out, if Byron and Leigh Hunt
were obliged to part, if a host of other personages, endowed with every
gift that makes companionship desirable, could not away with each other
after a few weeks together abroad, is it to be wondered at that weaker
vessels such as Susie and Anna, Letty and Miss Leech, should have found
the short journey from London to Berlin sufficient to enable them to see
one another's failings with a clearness of vision that was startling?

On the lawyer, a keen-eyed man with a conspicuously fine face, Anna made
an entirely favourable impression. When he saw this gracious young lady,
so simple and so friendly, and looked into her frank and charming eyes,
he perfectly understood that old Joachim should have been bewitched. But
after a little conversation, it appeared that she had no present
intention of carrying out her uncle's wishes, but, setting them coolly
aside, proposed to spend all the good German money she could extract
from her property in that replete and bloated land, England.

This annoyed him; first because he hated England and then because his
father had managed old Joachim's affairs before he himself had stepped
into the paternal shoes, and the feeling of both father and son for the
old man had been considerably warmer than is usual between lawyer and
client. Still he could not believe, judging after the manner of men,
that anything so pretty could also be unkind; and scrutinising Lady
Estcourt, because she was unattractive and had a sharp little face and a
restless little body, he was convinced that she it was who was the cause
of this setting aside of a dead benefactor's wishes. Susie, for her
part, patronised him because his collar turned down.

Whenever Letty thought afterwards of Berlin, she thought of it as a
place where all the houses are museums, and where you drink so many cups
of chocolate with whipped cream on the top that you see things double
for the rest of the time.

Anna thought of it as a charming place, where delightful lawyers fill
your purse with money.

Susie thought of it with satisfaction as the one place abroad where, by
dint of sternest economy, walks from sight to sight in the rain, and
promiscuous cakes instead of the more satisfactory but less cheap meals
Letty called square, she had successfully defended herself from being,
as she put it, fleeced.

To Miss Leech, it was merely a place where your feet get wet, and your
clothes are spoilt.

Early the next morning they started for Kleinwalde.




CHAPTER V


Stralsund is an old town of gabled houses, ancient churches, and quaint,
roughly paved streets, forming an island, and joined to the mainland by
dikes. It looks its best in the early summer, when the green and marshy
plains on whose edge it stands are strewn with kingcups, and the little
white clouds hang over them almost motionless, and the cattle are out,
and the larks sing, and the orange and red sails of the fishing-smacks
on the narrow belt of sea that divides the town from the island of Rügen
make brilliant points of contrasting colour between the blue of water
and sky. There is a divine freshness and brightness about the
surrounding stretches of coarse grass and common flowers at that blest
season of the year. The air is full of the smell of the sea. The sun
beats down fiercely on plain and city. The people come out of the rooms
in which most of their life is spent, and stand in the doorways and
remark on the heat. An occasional heavy cart bumps over the stones,
heard in that sleepy place for several minutes before and after its
passing. There is an honest, tarry, fishy smell everywhere; and the
traveller of poetic temperament in search of the picturesque, and not
too nice about his comforts, could not fail, visiting it for the first
time in the month of June, to be wholly delighted that he had come.

But in winter, and especially in those doubly gloomy days at the end of
winter, when spring ought to have shown some signs of its approach and
has not done so, those days of howling winds and driving rain and
frequent belated snowstorms, this plain is merely a bleak expanse of
dreariness, with a forlorn old town huddling in its farthest corner.

It was at its very bleakest and dreariest on the morning that Susie and
her three companions travelled across it. "What a place!" exclaimed
Susie, as mile after mile was traversed, and there was still the same
succession of flat ploughed fields, marshes, and ploughed fields again,
with a rare group of furiously swaying pine trees or of silver birches
bent double before the wind. "What a part of the world to come and live
in! That old uncle of yours was as cracked as he could be to think you'd
ever stay here for good. And imagine spending even a single shilling
buying land here. I wouldn't take a barrowful at a gift."

"Well, I am taking a great many barrowfuls," said Anna, "and I am sure
Uncle Joachim was right to buy a place here--he was always right."

"Oh, of course, it's your duty now to praise him up. Perhaps it gets
better farther on, but I don't see how anybody can squeeze two thousand
a year out of a desert like this."

The prospect from the railway that day was certainly not attractive; but
Anna told herself that any place would look dreary such weather, and was
much too happy in the first flush of independence to be depressed by
anything whatever. Had she not that very morning given the chambermaid
at the Berlin hotel so bounteous a reward for services not rendered that
the woman herself had said it was too much? Thus making amends for those
innumerable departures from hotels when Susie had escaped without giving
anything at all. Had she not also asked, and readily obtained,
permission of Susie at the station in Berlin to pay for the tickets of
the whole party? And had it not been a delightful and warming feeling,
buying those tickets for other people instead of having tickets bought
by other people for herself? At Pasewalk, a little town half way between
Berlin and Stralsund, where the train stopped ten minutes, she insisted
on getting out, defying the sleet and the puddles, and went into the
refreshment room, and bought eggs and rolls and cakes,--everything she
could find that was least offensive. Also a guidebook to Stralsund,
though she was not going to stop in Stralsund; also some postcards with
views on them, though she never used postcards with views on them, and
came back loaded with parcels, her face glowing with childish pleasure
at spending money.

"My _dear_ Anna," said Susie; but she was hungry, and ate a roll with
perfect complacency, allowing Letty to do the same, although only two
days had elapsed since she had so energetically lectured her on the
grossness of eating in trains.

Susie was in a particularly amiable frame of mind, and in spite of the
weather was looking forward to seeing the place Uncle Joachim had
thought would be a fit home for his niece; and as she and Anna were
sitting together at one end of the carriage, and Letty and Miss Leech
were at the other, and there was no one else in the compartment, she was
neither upset by the too near contemplation of her daughter, nor by the
aspect of other travellers lunching. Miss Leech, always mindful of her
duties, was making the most of her five hours' journey by endeavouring,
in a low voice, to clear away the haze that hung in her pupil's mind
round the details of her last winter's German studies. "Don't you
remember anything of Professor Smith's lectures, Letty?" she inquired.
"Why, they were all about just this part of Germany, and it makes it so
much more interesting if one knows what happened at the different
places. Stralsund, you know, where we shall be presently, has had a most
turbulent and interesting past."

"Has it?" said Letty. "Well, I can't help it, Leechy."

"No; but my dear, you should try to recollect something at least of what
you heard at the lectures. Have you forgotten the paper you wrote about
Wallenstein?"

"I remember I did a paper. Beastly hard it was, too."

"Oh, Letty, don't say beastly--it really isn't a ladylike word."

"Why, mamma's always saying it."

"Oh, well. Don't you know what Wallenstein said when he was besieging
Stralsund and found it such a difficult task?"

"I suppose he said too that it was beastly hard."

"Oh, Letty--it was something about chains. Now do you remember?"

"Chains?" repeated Letty, looking bored. "Do _you_ know, Leechy?"

"Yes, I still remember that, though I confess that I have forgotten the
greater part of what I heard."

"Then what do you ask me for, when you know I don't know? What did he
say about chains?"

"He said that he'd take the city, if it were rivetted to heaven with
chains of iron," said Miss Leech dramatically.

"What a goat."

"Oh, hush--don't say those horrible words. Where do you learn them? Not
from me, certainly not from me," said Miss Leech, distressed. She had a
profound horror of slang, and was bewildered by the way in which these
weeds of rhetoric sprang up on all occasions in Letty's speech.

"Well, and was it?"

"Was it what, my dear?"

"Chained to heaven?"

"The city? Why, how can a city be chained to heaven, Letty?"

"Then what did he say it for?"

"He was using a metaphor."

"Oh," said Letty, who did not know what a metaphor was, but supposed it
must be something used in sieges, and preferred not to inquire too
closely.

"He was obliged to retire," said Miss Leech, "leaving enormous numbers
of slain on the field."

"Poor beasts. I say, Leechy," she whispered, "don't let's bother about
history now. Go on with Mr. Jessup. You'd got to where he called you Amy
for the first time."

Mr. Jessup was the person already alluded to in these pages as the only
man Miss Leech had ever loved, and his history was of absorbing interest
to Letty, who never tired of hearing his first appearance on Miss
Leech's horizon described, with his subsequent advances before the stage
of open courting was reached, the courting itself, and its melancholy
end; for Mr. Jessup, a clergyman of the Church of England, with a
vicarage all ready to receive his wife, had suddenly become a prey to
new convictions, and had gone over to the Church of Rome; whereupon Miss
Leech's father, also a clergyman of the Church of England, had talked a
great deal about the Scarlet Woman of Babylon, and had shut the door in
Mr. Jessup's face when next he called to explain. This had happened when
Miss Leech was twenty. Now, at thirty, an orphan resigned to the world's
buffets, she found a gentle consolation in repeating the story of her
ill-starred engagement to her keenly interested friend and pupil; and
the oftener she repeated it the less did it grieve her, till at last she
came actually to enjoy the remembrance of it, pleased to have played the
principal part even in a drama that was hissed off her little stage,
glad to find a sympathetic listener, dwelling much and fondly on every
incident of that short period of importance and glory.

It is doubtful whether she would ever have extracted the same amount of
pleasure from Mr. Jessup had he remained fixed in the faith of his
fathers and married her in due season. By his secession he had
unconsciously become a sort of providence to Letty and herself, saving
them from endless hours of dulness, furnishing their lonely schoolroom
life with romance and mystery; and if in Miss Leech's mind he gradually
took on the sweet intangibility of a pleasant dream, he was the very
pith and marrow of Letty's existence. She glowed and thrilled at the
thought that perhaps she too would one day have a Mr. Jessup of her own,
who would have convictions, and give up everything, herself included,
for what he believed to be right.

As usual, they at once became absorbed in Mr. Jessup, forgetting in the
contemplation of his excellencies everything else in the world, till
they were roused to realities by their arrival at Stralsund; and Susie,
thrusting books and bags and umbrellas into their passive hands, pushed
them out of the carriage into the wet.

Hilton, the maid shared by Susie and Anna, had then to be found and
urged to clamber down quickly on to the low platform, where she stood
helplessly, the picture of injured superiority, hustled by the hurrying
porters and passengers, out of whose way she scorned to move, while Anna
went to look for the luggage and have it put into the cart that had been
sent for it.

This cart was an ordinary farm cart, used for bringing in the hay in
June, but also used for carrying out the manure in November; and on a
sack of straw lying in the bottom it was expected that Hilton should
sit. The farm boy who drove it, and who helped the porter to tie the
trunks to its sides lest they should too violently bump against each
other and Hilton on the way, said so; the coachman of the carriage
waiting for the _Herrschaften_ pointed with his whip first at Hilton and
then at the cart, and said so; the porter, who seemed to think it quite
natural, said so; and everybody was waiting for Hilton to get in, who,
when she had at length grasped the situation, went to Susie, who was
looking frightened and pretending to be absorbed by the sky, and with a
voice shaken by passion, and a face changing from white to red,
announced her intention of only going in that cart as a corpse, when
they might do with her as they pleased, but as a living body with breath
in it, never.

Here was a difficulty. And idlers, whose curiosity was not
extinguishable by wind and sleet, began to press round, and people who
had come by the same train stopped on their way out to listen. The farm
boy patted the sack and declared that it was clean straw, the coachman
stood up on his box and swore that it was a new sack, the porter assured
the Fräulein that it was as comfortable as a feather bed, and nobody
seemed to understand that what she was being offered was an insult.

Susie was afraid of Hilton, who had been in the service of duchesses,
and who held these duchesses over her mistress's head whenever her
mistress wanted to do anything that was inconvenient to herself; quoting
their sayings, pointing out how they would have acted in any given case,
and always, it appeared, they had done exactly what Hilton desired.
Susie's admiration for duchesses was slavish, and Hilton was treated
with an indulgent liberality that was absurd compared to the stinginess
displayed towards everyone else. Hilton was not more horrified than her
mistress when she saw the farm cart, and understood that it was for the
luggage and the maid. It was impossible to take her with them in what
the porter called the _herrschaftliche Wagen_, for it was a kind of
victoria, and how to get their four selves into it was a sufficient
puzzle. "What shall we do?" said Susie, in despair, to Anna.

"Do? Why, she'll have to go in it. Hilton, don't be a foolish person,
and don't keep us here in the wet. This isn't England, and nobody thinks
anything here of driving in farm carts. It is patriarchal simplicity,
that's all. People are staring at you now because you are making such a
fuss. Get in like a good soul, and let us start."

"Only as a corpse, m'm," reiterated Hilton with chattering teeth, "never
as a living body."

"Nonsense," said Anna impatiently.

"What shall we do?" repeated Susie. "Poor Hilton--what barbarians they
must be here."

"We must send her in a _Droschky_, then, if it isn't too far, and we can
get one to go."

"A _Droschky_ all that distance! It will be ruinous."

"Well, we can't stand here amusing these people for ever."

"Oh, I wish we had never come to this horrible place!" cried Susie,
really made miserable by Hilton's rage.

But Anna did not stay to listen either to her laments or to Hilton's
monotonous "Only as a corpse, m'lady," and was already arranging with an
unwilling driver, who had no desire whatever to drive to Kleinwalde, but
consented to do so on being promised twenty marks, a rest and feed of
oats for his horses, and any little addition in the shape of refreshment
and extra money that might suggest itself to Anna's generosity.

"You know, Anna, you can't expect _me_ to pay for the fly," said Susie
uneasily, when the appeased Hilton had been put into it and was out of
earshot. "That dreadful cart is your property, I suppose."

"Of course it is," said Anna, smiling, "and of course the fly is my
affair. How magnificent I feel, disposing of carts and _Droschkies_.
Now, will you please to get into my carriage? And do you observe the
extreme respectfulness of my coachman?"

The coachman, a strange-looking, round-shouldered being, with a long
grizzled beard, a dark-blue cloth cap on his head, and a body clothed in
a fawn-coloured suit and gaiters, on which a great many tarnished silver
buttons adorned with Uncle Joachim's coat of arms were fastened at short
intervals, removed his cap while his new mistress and her party were
entering the carriage, and did not put it on again till they were ready
to start.

"Quite as though we were royalties," said Susie.

"But the rest of him isn't," replied Anna, who was greatly amused by the
turn-out. "Do you like my horses, Susie? Or do you suspect them of
having been ploughing all the morning? Oh, well," she added quickly,
ashamed of laughing at any part of her dear uncle's gift, "I suppose one
has to have heavily built horses in this part of the world, where the
roads are probably frightfully bad."

"Their tails might be a little shorter," said Susie.

"They might," agreed Anna serenely.

With the aid of the porter, who knew all about Uncle Joachim's will and
was deeply interested, they were at last somehow packed into the
carriage, and away they rattled over the rough stones, threading the
outskirts of the town on the mainland, the hail and wind in their faces,
out into the open country, with their horses' heads turned towards the
north. The fly containing Hilton followed more leisurely behind, and the
farm cart containing the unused sack of straw followed the fly.

"We can't see much of Stralsund," said Anna, trying to peep round the
hood at the old town across the lakes separating it from the mainland.

"It's a very historical town," observed Susie, who had happened to
notice, as she idly turned over the pages of her Baedeker on the way
down, that there was a long description of it with dates. "As of course
you know," she added, turning sharply to her daughter.

"Rather," said Letty. "Wallenstein said he'd take it if it were chained
to heaven, and when he found it wasn't he was frightfully sick, and went
away and left them all in the fields."

Miss Leech, who was on the little seat, struggling to defend herself
from the fury of the elements with an umbrella, looked anxious, but
Susie only said in a gratified voice, "I'm glad you remember what you've
been taught." To which Letty, who was in great spirits, and thought this
drive in the wet huge fun, again replied heartily, "Rather," and her
mother congratulated herself on having done the right thing in bringing
her to Germany, home of erudition and profundity, already evidently
beginning to do its work.

The carriage smelt of fish, which presently upset Susie, who,
unfortunately for her, had a nose that smelt everything. While they were
in the town she thought the smell was in the streets, and bore it; but
out in the open, where there was not a house to be seen, she found that
it was in the carriage.

She fidgeted, and looked about, feeling with her foot under the opposite
seat, expecting to find a basket somewhere, and determined if she found
one to push it out quietly and say nothing; for that she should drive
for two hours with her handkerchief up to her nose was more than anybody
could expect of her. Already she had done more than anybody ought to
expect of her, she reflected, in going to the expense of the journey and
the inconvenience of the absence from home for Anna's sake, and she
hoped that Anna felt grateful. She had never yet shrunk from her duty
towards Anna, or indeed from her duty towards anyone, and she was sure
she never would; but her duty certainly did not include the passive
endurance of offensive smells.

"What are you looking for?" asked Anna.

"Why, the fish."

"Oh, do you smell it too?"

"Smell it? I should think I did. It's killing me."

"Oh, poor Susie!" laughed Anna, who was possessed by an uncontrollable
desire to laugh at everything. The conveyance (it could hardly be called
a carriage) in which they were seated, and which she supposed was the
one destined for her use if she lived at Kleinwalde, was unlike anything
she had yet seen. It was very old, with enormous wheels, and bumped
dreadfully, and the seat was so constructed that she was continually
slipping forward and having to push herself back again. It was lined
throughout, including the hood, with a white and black shepherd's plaid
in large squares, the white squares mellowed by the stains of use and
time to varying shades of brown and yellow; when Miss Leech's umbrella
was blown aside by a gust of wind Anna could see her coachman's drab
coat, with a little end of white tape that he had forgotten to tie, and
whose uses she was unable to guess, fluttering gaily between its tails
in the wind; on the left side of the box was a very big and gorgeous
coat of arms in green and white, Uncle Joachim's colours; and whichever
way she turned her head, there was the overpowering smell of fish. "We
must be taking our dinner home with us," she said, "but I don't see it
anywhere."

"There isn't anything under the seats. Perhaps the man has got it on the
box. Ask him, Anna; I really can't stand it."

Anna did not quite know how to attract his attention. It seemed
undignified to poke him, but she did not know his name, and the wind
blew her voice back in the direction of Stralsund when she had cleared
it, and coughed, and called out rather shyly, "Oh, _Kutscher!
Kutscher!_"

Then she remembered that oh was not German, and that Uncle Joachim had
used sonorous achs in its place, and she began again, "_Ach, Kutscher!
Kutscher!_"

Letty giggled. "Go it, Aunt Anna," she said encouragingly, "dig him in
the ribs with your umbrella--or I will, if you like."

Her mother, with her handkerchief to her nose, exhorted her not to be
vulgar. Letty explained at some length that she was only being nice, and
offering assistance.

"I really shall have to poke him," said Anna, her faint cries of
_Kutscher_ quite lost in the rattling of the carriage and the howling of
the wind. "Or perhaps you would touch his arm, Miss Leech."

Miss Leech turned, and very gingerly touched his sleeve. He at once
whistled to his horses, who stopped dead, snatched off his cap, and
looking down at Anna inquired her commands.

It was done so quickly that Anna, whose conversational German was
exceedingly rusty, was quite unable to remember the word for fish, and
sat looking up at him helplessly, while she vainly searched her brains.

"What _is_ fish in German?" she said, appealing to Susie, distressed
that the man should be waiting capless in the rain.

"Letty, what's the word for fish?" inquired Susie sternly.

"Fish?" repeated Letty, looking stupid.

"Fish?" echoed Miss Leech, trying to help.

"_Fisch?_" said the coachman himself, catching at the word.

"Oh, yes; how utterly silly I am," cried Anna blushing and showing her
dimples, "it's _Fisch_, of course. _Kutscher, wo ist Fisch?_"

The man looked blank; then his face brightened, and pointing with his
whip to the rolling sea on their right, visible across the flat
intervening fields, he said that there was much fish in it, especially
herrings.

"What does he say?" asked Susie from behind her handkerchief.

"He says there are herrings in the sea."

"Is the man a fool?"

Letty laughed uproariously. The coachman, seeing Letty and Anna laugh,
thought he must have said the right thing after all, and looked very
pleasant.

"_Aber im Wagen_," persisted Anna, "_wo ist Fisch im Wagen?_"

The coachman stared. Then he said vaguely, in a soothing voice, not in
the least knowing what she meant, "_Nein, nein, gnädiges Fräulein_," and
evidently hoped she would be satisfied.

"_Aber es riecht, es riecht!_" cried Anna, not satisfied at all, and
lifting up her nose in unmistakeable displeasure.

His face brightened again. "_Ach so--jawohl, jawohl_," he exclaimed
cheerfully; and hastened to explain that there were no fish nearer than
the sea, but that the grease he had used that morning to make the
leather of the hood and apron shine certainly had a fishy smell, as he
himself had noticed. "The gracious Miss loves not the smell?" he
inquired anxiously; for he had seven children, and was very desirous
that his new mistress should be pleased.

Anna laughed and shook her head, and though she said with great emphasis
that she did not love it at all, she looked so friendly that he felt
reassured.

"What does he say?" asked Susie.

"Why, I'm afraid we shall have it all the way. It's the grease he's been
rubbing the leather with."

"Barbarian!" cried Susie angrily, feeling sick already, and certain that
she would be quite ill by the end of the drive. "And you laugh at him
and encourage him, instead of taking up your position at once and
showing him that you won't stand any nonsense. He ought to be--to be
unboxed!" she added in great wrath; for she had heard of delinquent
clergymen being unfrocked, and why should not delinquent coachmen be
unboxed?

Anna laughed again. She tried not to, but she could not help it; and
Susie, made still more angry by this childish behaviour, sulked during
the rest of the drive.

"Go on--_avanti_!" said Anna, who knew hardly any Italian, and when she
was in Italy and wanted her words never could find them, but had been
troubled the last two days by the way in which these words came to her
lips every time she opened them to speak German.

The coachman understood her, however, and they went on again along the
straight high-road, that stretched away before them to a distant bend.
The high-road, or _chaussée_, was planted on either side with maples,
and between the maples big whitewashed stones had been set to mark the
way at night, and behind the rows of trees and stones, ditches had been
dug parallel with the road as a protection to the crops in summer from
the possible wanderings of erring carts. If a cart erred, it tumbled
into the ditch. The arrangement was simple and efficacious. On the
right, across some marshy land, they could see the sea for a little
while, with the flat coast of Rügen opposite; and then some rising
ground, bare of trees and brilliantly green with winter corn, hid it
from view. On the left was the dreary plain, dotted at long intervals
with farms and their little groups of trees, and here and there with
windmills working furiously in the gale. The wind was icy, and the
December snow still lay in drifts in the ditches. In that leaden
landscape, made up of grey and brown and black, the patches of winter
rye were quite startling in their greenness.

Susie thought it the most God-forsaken country she had ever seen, and
expressed this opinion plainly on her face and in her attitudes without
any need for opening her lips, shuddering back ostentatiously into her
corner, wrapping herself with elaborate care in her furs, and behaving
as slaves to duty sometimes do when the paths they have to tread are
rough.

After driving along the _chaussée_ for about an hour, they passed a big
house standing among trees back from the road on the right, and a little
farther on came to a small village. The carriage, pulled up with a jerk,
and looking eagerly round the hood Anna found they had come to a
standstill in front of a new red-brick building, whose steps were
crowded with children. Two or three men and some women were with the
children. Two of the men appeared to be clergymen, and the elder, a
middle-aged, mild-faced man, came down the steps, and bowing profoundly
proceeded to welcome Anna solemnly, on behalf of those children from
Kleinwalde who attended this school, to her new home. He concluded that
Anna was the person to be welcomed because he could see nothing of the
lady in the other corner but her eyes, and they looked anything but
friendly; whereas the young lady on the left was leaning forward and
smiling and holding out her hand.

He took it, and shook it slowly up and down, while he begged her to
allow the hood of the carriage to be put back, so that the children from
her village, who had walked three miles to welcome her, might be able to
see her; and on Anna's readily agreeing to this, himself helped the
coachman with his own white-gloved hands to put it down. Susie was
therefore exposed to the full fury of the blast, and shrank still
farther into her corner--an interesting and tantalising object to the
school-children, a dark, mysterious combination of fur, cocks' feathers,
and black eyebrows.

Then the clergyman, hat in hand, made a speech. He spoke distinctly, as
one accustomed to speaking often and long, and Anna understood every
word. She was wholly taken aback by these ceremonies, and had no idea of
what she should say in reply, but sat smiling vaguely at him, looking
very pretty and very shy. She soon found that her smiles were
inappropriate, and they died away; for, warming as he proceeded, the
parson, it appeared, was taking it for granted that she intended to live
on her property, and was eloquently descanting on the comfort she was
going to be to the poor, assuring those present that she would be a
mother to the sick, nursing them with her tender woman's hands, an angel
of mercy to the hungry, feeding them in the hour of their distress, a
friend and sister to the little children, succouring them, caring for
them, pitiful of their weakness and their sins. His face lit up with
enthusiasm as he went on, and Anna was thankful that Susie could not
understand. This crowd of children, the women, the young parson, her
coachman, were all hearing promises made on her behalf that she had no
thought of fulfilling. She looked down, and twisted her fingers about
nervously, and felt uncomfortable.

At the end of his speech, the parson, his eyes full of the tears drawn
forth by his own eloquence, held up his hand and solemnly blessed her,
rounding off his blessing with a loud Amen, after which there was an
awkward pause. Susie heard the Amen, and guessed that something in the
nature of a blessing was being invoked, and made a movement of
impatience. The parson was odious in her eyes, first because he looked
like the ministers of the Baptist chapels of her unmarried youth, but
principally because he was keeping her there in the gale and prolonging
the tortures she was enduring from the smell of fish. Anna did not know
what to say after the Amen, and looked up more shyly than ever, and
stammered in her confusion _Danke sehr_, hoping that it was a proper
remark to make; whereupon the parson bowed again, as one who should say
Pray don't mention it. Then another man, evidently the schoolmaster,
took out a tuning-fork, gave out a note, and the children sang a
_chorale_, following it up with other more cheerful songs, in which the
words _Frühling_ and _Willkommen_ were repeated a great many times,
while the wind howled flattest contradiction.

When this was over, the parson begged leave to introduce the other
clerical-looking person, a tall narrow youth, also in white kid gloves,
buttoned up tightly in a long coat of broadcloth, with a pallid face and
thick, upright flaxen hair.

"Herr Vicar Klutz," said the elder parson, with a wave of the hand; and
the Herr Vicar, making his bow, and having his limp hand heartily
grasped by that other little hand, and his furtive eyes smiled into by
those other friendly eyes, became on the spot desperately enamoured;
which was very natural, seeing that he had not spoken to a woman under
forty for six months, and was himself twenty and a poet. He spent the
rest of the afternoon shut up in his bedroom, where, refusing all
nourishment, he composed a poem in which _berauschten Sinn_ was made to
rhyme with _Engländerin_, while the elder parson, in whose house he
lived, thought he was writing his Good Friday sermon.

Then the schoolmaster was introduced, and then came the two women--the
schoolmaster's wife and the parson's wife; and when Anna had smiled and
murmured polite and incoherent little speeches to each in turn, and had
nodded and bowed at least a dozen times to each of these ladies, who
could by no means have done with their curtseys, and had introduced them
to the dumb figure in the corner, during which ceremonies Letty stared
round-eyed and open-mouthed at the school-children, and the
school-children stared round-eyed and open-mouthed at Letty, and Miss
Leech looked demure, and Susie's brows were contracted by suffering, she
wondered whether she might not now with propriety continue her journey,
and if so whether it were expected that she should give the signal.

Everybody was smiling at everybody else by way of filling up this pause
of hesitation, except Susie, who shut her eyes with great dignity, and
shivered in so marked a manner that the parson himself came to the
rescue, and bade the coachman help him put up the hood again, explaining
to Anna as he did so that her _Frau Schwester_ was not used to the
climate.

Evidently the moment had come for going on, and the bows that had but
just left off began again with renewed vigour. Anna was anxious to say
something pleasant at the finish, so she asked the parson's wife, as she
bade her good-bye, whether she and her husband would come to Kleinwalde
the next day to dinner.

This invitation produced a very deep curtsey and a flush of
gratification, but the recipient turned to her lord before accepting it,
to inquire his pleasure.

"I fear not to-morrow, gracious Miss," said the parson, "for it is Good
Friday."

"_Ach ja_," stammered Anna, ashamed of herself for having forgotten.

"_Ach ja_," exclaimed the parson's wife, still more ashamed of herself
for having forgotten.

"Perhaps Saturday, then?" suggested Anna.

The parson murmured something about quiet hours preparatory to the
Sabbath; but his wife, a person who struck Anna as being quite
extraordinarily stout, was burning with curiosity to examine those
foreign ladies more conveniently, and especially to see what manner of
being would emerge from the pile of fur and feathers in the corner; and
she urged him, in a rapid aside, to do for once without quiet hours.
Whereupon he patted her on the cheek, smiled indulgently, and said he
would make an exception and do himself the honour of appearing.

This being settled, Anna said _Gehen Sie_ to her coachman, who again
showed his intelligence by understanding her; and in a cloud of smiles
and bows they drove away, the school-girls making curtseys, the
schoolboys taking off their caps, and the parson standing hat in hand
with his arm round his wife's waist as serenely as though it had been a
summer's day and no one looking.

Anna became used to these displays of conjugal regard in public later
on; but this first time she turned to Susie with a laugh, when the hood
had hidden the group from view, and asked her if she had seen it. But
Susie had seen nothing, for her eyes were shut, and she refused to
answer any questions otherwise than by a feeble shake of the head.

On the other side of the village the _chaussée_ came to an end, and two
deep, sandy roads took its place. There was a sign-post at their
junction, one arm of which, pointing to the right-hand road that ran
down close to the sea, had Kleinwalde scrawled on it; and beside this
sign-post a man on a horse was waiting for them.

"Good gracious! More rot?" ejaculated Susie as the carriage stopped
again, shaken out of the dignity of sulks by these repeated shocks.

"Oberinspector Dellwig," said the man, introducing himself, and sweeping
off his hat and bowing lower and more obsequiously than anyone had yet
done.

"This must be the inspector Uncle Joachim hoped I'd keep," said Anna in
an undertone.

"I don't care who he is, but for heaven's sake don't let him make a
speech. I can't stand this sort of thing any longer. You'll have me ill
on your hands if you're not careful, and you won't like _that_, so you
had better stop him."

"I can't stop him," said Anna, perplexed. She also had had enough of
speeches.

"_Gestatten gnädiges Fräulein dass ich meine gehorsamste Ehrerbietung
ausspreche_," began the glib inspector, bowing at every second word over
his horse's ears.

There was no escape, and they had to hear him out. The man had prepared
his speech, and say it he would. It was not so long as the parson's, but
was quite as flowery in another way, overflowing with respectful
allusions to the deceased master, and with expressions of unbounded
loyalty, obedience, and devotion to the new mistress.

Susie shut her eyes again when she found he was not to be stopped, and
gave herself up for lost. What could Hilton, who must be close behind
waiting in the cold, uncomforted by any food since leaving Berlin, think
of all this? Susie dreaded the moment when she would have to face her.

The inspector finished all he had intended saying, and then, assuming a
more colloquial tone, informed Anna that from the sign-post onward she
would be driving through her own property, and asked permission to ride
by her side the rest of the way. So they had his company for the last
two miles and his conversation, of which there was much; for he had a
ready tongue, and explained things to Anna in a very loud voice as they
went along, expatiating on the magnificence of the crops the previous
summer, and assuring her that the crops of the coming summer would be
even more magnificent, for he had invented a combination of manures
which would give such results that all Pomerania's breath would be taken
away.

The road here was terrible, and the horses could hardly drag the
carriage through the sand. It lurched and heaved from side to side,
creaking and groaning alarmingly. Miss Leech was in imminent peril. Anna
held on with both hands, and hardly had leisure to put in appropriate
_achs_ and _jas_ and questions of a becoming intelligence when the
inspector paused to take breath. She did not like his looks, and wished
that she could follow Susie's example and avoid the necessity of seeing
him by the simple expedient of shutting her eyes. But somehow, she did
not quite know how, responsibilities and obligations were suddenly
pressing heavily upon her. These people had all made up their minds that
she was going to be and do certain things; and though she assured
herself that it did not in the least matter how they had made up their
minds, yet she felt obliged to behave in the way that was expected of
her. She did not want to talk to this unpleasant-looking man, and what
he told her about the crops and their marvellousness was half
unintelligible to her and wholly a bore. Yet she did talk to him, and
looked friendly, and affected to understand and be deeply interested in
all he said.

They passed through a plantation of young beeches, planted, Dellwig
explained, by Uncle Joachim on his last visit; and after a few more
yards of lurching in the sand came to some woods and got on to a fair
road.

"The park," said Dellwig superbly, with a wave of the hand.

Susie opened her eyes at the word park, and looked about. "It isn't a
park," she said peevishly, "it's a forest--a horrid, gloomy, damp
wilderness."

"Oh, it's lovely!" cried Letty, giving a jump of delight as she peered
down the serried ranks of pine trees.

It was a thick wood of pines and beeches, railed off from the road on
either side by wooden rails painted in black and white stripes. Uncle
Joachim had been the loyalest of Prussians, and his loyalty overflowed
even into his fences. Æsthetic instincts he had none, and if he had been
brought to see it, would not have cared at all that the railings made
the otherwise beautiful avenue look like the entrance to a restaurant or
a railway station. The stripes, renewed every year, and of startling
distinctness, were an outward and visible sign of his staunch devotion
to the King of Prussia, the very lining of the carriage with its white
and black squares was symbolic; and when they came to the gate within
which the house itself stood, two Prussian eagles frowned down at them
from the gate-posts.




CHAPTER VI


A low, white, two-storied house, separated from the forest only by a
circular grass plot and a ditch with half-melted snow in it and muddy
water, a house apparently quite by itself among the creaking pines,
neither very old nor very new, with a great many windows, and a
brown-tiled roof, was the home bestowed by Uncle Joachim on his dear and
only niece Anna.

"So _this_ is where I was to lead the better life?" she thought, as the
carriage drew up at the door, and the moaning of the uneasy trees, and
all the lonely sounds of a storm-beaten forest replaced the rattling of
the wheels in her ears. "The better life, then, is a life of utter
solitude, Uncle Joachim thought? I wish I knew--I wish I knew----" But
what it was she wished she knew was hardly clear in her mind; and her
thoughts were interrupted by a very untidy, surprised-looking
maid-servant, capless, and in felt slippers, who had darted down the
steps and was unfastening the leather apron and pulling out the rugs
with hasty, agitated hands, and trying to pull Susie out as well.

The doorway was garlanded with evergreen wreaths, over which a green and
white flag flapped; and curtseying and smiling beneath the wreaths stood
Dellwig's wife, a short lady with smooth hair, weather-beaten face, and
brown silk gloves, who would have been the stoutest person Anna had ever
seen if she had not just come from the presence of the parson's wife.

"I never saw so many bows in my life," grumbled Susie, pushing the
servant aside, and getting out cautiously, feeling very stiff and cold
and miserable. "Letty, you are on my dress--oh, how d'you do--how d'you
do," she murmured frostily, as the Frau Inspector seized her hand and
began to talk German to her. "Anna, are you coming? This--er--person
thinks I'm you, and is making me a speech."

Dellwig, who had sent his horse away in charge of a small boy, rapidly
explained to his wife that the young lady now getting out of the
carriage was their late master's niece, and that the other one must be
the sister-in-law mentioned in the lawyer's letter; upon which Frau
Dellwig let Susie go, and transferred her smiles and welcome to Anna.
Susie went into the house to get out of the cold, only to find herself
in a square hall whose iciness was the intolerable iciness of a place in
which no sun had been allowed to shine and no windows had been opened
for summers without number. When Uncle Joachim came down he lived in two
rooms at the back of the house, with a door leading into the garden
through which he went to the farm, and the hall had never been used, and
the closed shutters never opened. There was no fireplace, or stove, or
heating arrangement of any sort. Glass doors divided it from an inner
and still more spacious hall, with a wide wooden staircase, and doors
all round it. The walls in both halls were painted grass green; and from
little chains in the ceiling stuffed hawks and eagles, shot by Uncle
Joachim, and grown with years very dusty and moth-eaten, hung swinging
in the draught. The floor was boarded, and was still damp from a recent
scrubbing. There was no carpet. A wooden bracket on the wall, with brass
hooks, held a large assortment of whips and hunting crops; and in one
corner stood an arrangement for coats, with Uncle Joachim's various
waterproofs and head-coverings hanging monumentally on its pegs.

"Oh, how dreadful!" thought Susie, shivering more violently than ever.
"And what a musty smell--it's damp, of course, and I shall be laid up.
Poor Hilton! What will she think of this? Oh, how d'you do," she added
aloud, as a female figure in a white apron suddenly emerged from the
gloom and took her hand and kissed it; "Anna, who's this? Anna! Aren't
you coming? Here's somebody kissing my hand."

"It's the cook," said Anna, coming into the inner hall with the others,
Dellwig and his wife keeping one on either side of her, and both talking
at once in their anxiety to make a good impression.

"The cook? Then tell her to give us some food. I shall die if I don't
have something soon. Do you know what time it is? Past four. Can't you
get rid of these people? And where's Hilton?"

Susie hardly seemed to see the Dellwigs, and talked to Anna while they
were talking to her as though they did not exist. If Anna felt an
obligation to be polite to these different persons she felt none at all.
They did not understand English, but if they had it would not have
mattered to her, and she would have gone on talking about them as though
they had not been there.

Both the Dellwigs had very loud voices, so Susie had to raise hers in
order to be heard, and there was consequently such a noise in the empty,
echoing house, that after looking round bewildered, and trying to answer
everybody at once, Anna gave it up, and stood and laughed.

"I don't see anything to laugh at," said Susie crossly, "we are all
starving, and these people won't go."

"But how can I make them go?"

"They're your servants, I suppose. I should just say that I'd send for
them when I wanted them."

"They'd be very much astonished. The man is so far from being my servant
that I believe he means to be my master."

The two Dellwigs, perplexed by Anna's laughter when nobody had said
anything amusing, and uneasy lest she should be laughing at something
about themselves, looked from her to Susie suspiciously, and for that
brief moment were quiet.

"_Wir sind hungrig_," said Anna to the wife.

"The food comes immediately," she replied; and hastened away with the
cook and the other servant through a door evidently leading to the
kitchen.

"_Und kalt_," continued Anna plaintively to the husband, who at once
flung open another door, through which they saw a table spread for
dinner. "_Bitte, bitte_," he said, ushering them in as though the place
belonged to him.

"Does this person live in the house?" inquired Susie, eying him with
little goodwill.

"He told me he lives at the farm. But of course he has always looked
after everything here."

When they were all in the dining-room, driven in by Dellwig, as Susie
remarked, like a flock of sheep by a shepherd determined to stand no
nonsense, he helped them with officious politeness to take off their
wraps, and then, bowing almost to the ground, asked permission to
withdraw while the _Herrschaften_ ate, a permission that was given with
alacrity, Anna's face falling, however, upon his informing her that he
would come round later on in order to lay his plans for the summer
before her.

"What does he say?" asked Susie, as the door shut behind him.

"He's coming round again later on."

"That man's going to be a nuisance--you see if he isn't," said Susie
with conviction.

"I believe he is," agreed Anna, going over to the white porcelain stove
to warm her hands.

"He's the limpet, and you're going to be the rock. Don't let him fleece
you too much."

"But limpets don't fleece rocks," said Anna.

"He wouldn't be able to fleece me, _I_ know, if I could talk German as
well as you do. But you'll be soft and weak and amiable, and he'll do as
he likes with you."

"Soft, and weak, and amiable!" repeated Anna, smiling at Susie's
adjectives, "why, I thought I was obstinate--you always said I was."

"So you are. But you won't be to that man. He'll get round you."

"Uncle Joachim said he was excellent."

"Oh, I daresay he wasn't bad with a man over him who knew all about
farming, but mark my words, _you_ won't get two thousand a year out of
the place."

Anna was silent. Susie was invariably shrewd and sensible, if inclined,
Anna thought, to be over suspicious, in matters where money was
concerned. Dellwig's face was not one to inspire confidence: and his way
of shouting when he talked, and of talking incessantly, was already
intolerable to her. She was not sure, either, that his wife was any more
satisfactory. She too shouted, and Anna detested noise. The wife did not
appear again, and had evidently gone home with her husband, for a great
silence had fallen upon the house, broken only by the monotonous sighing
of the forest, and the pattering of rain against the window.

The dining-room was a long narrow room, with one big window forming its
west end looking out on to the grass plot, the ditch, and the gate-posts
with the eagles on them. It was a study in chocolate--brown paper, brown
carpet, brown rep curtains, brown cane chairs. There were two wooden
sideboards painted brown facing each other down at the dark end, with a
collection of miscellaneous articles on them: a vinegar cruet that had
stood there for years, with remains of vinegar dried up at the bottom;
mustard pots containing a dark and wicked mixture that had once been
mustard; a broken hand-bell used at long-past dinners, to summon
servants long since dead; an old wine register with entries in it of a
quarter of a century back; a mouldy bottle of Worcester sauce, still
boasting on its label that it would impart a relish to viands otherwise
dull; and some charming Dresden china fruit-dishes, adorned with
cheerful shepherds and shepherdesses, incurable optimists, persistently
pleased with themselves and their surroundings through all the days and
nights of all the cold silent years that they had been smiling at each
other in the dark. On the round dinner-table was a pot of lilies of the
valley, enveloped in crinkly pink tissue paper tied round with pink
satin ribbon, with ears of the paper drawn up between the flower-stalks
to produce a pleasing contrast of pink and white.

"Well, it's warm enough here, isn't it?" said Susie, going round the
room and examining these things with an interest far exceeding that
called forth by the art treasures of Berlin.

"Rather," said Letty, answering for everybody, and rubbing her hands.
She frolicked about the room, peeping into all the corners, opening the
cupboards, trying the sofa, and behaving in so frisky a fashion that her
mother, who seldom saw her at home, and knew her only as a naughty
gloomy girl, turned once or twice from the interesting sideboards to
stare at her inquiringly through her lorgnette.

The servant with the surprised eyebrows, who presently brought in the
soup, had put on a pair of white cotton gloves for the ceremony of
waiting, but still wore her felt slippers. She put the plates in a pile
on the edge of the table, murmured something in German, and ran out
again; nor did she come back till she brought the next course, when she
behaved in a precisely similar manner, and continued to do so throughout
the meal; the diners, having no bell, being obliged to sit patiently
during the intervals, until she thought that they might perhaps be ready
for some more.

It was an odd meal, and began with cold chocolate soup with frothy white
things that tasted of vanilla floating about in it. Susie was so much
interested in this soup that she forgot all about Hilton, who had been
driven ignominiously to the back door and was left sitting in the
kitchen till the two servants should have time to take her upstairs, and
was employing the time composing a speech of a spirited nature in which
she intended giving her mistress notice the moment she saw her again.

Her mistress meanwhile was meditatively turning over the vanilla balls
in her soup. "Well, I don't like it," she said at last, laying down her
spoon.

"Oh, it's ripping!" cried her daughter ecstatically. "It's like having
one's pudding at the other end."

"How can you look at chocolate after Berlin, greedy girl?" asked her
mother, disgusted by her child's obvious tendency towards a too free
indulgence in the pleasures of the table. But Letty was feeling so
jovial that in the face of this question she boldly asked for more--a
request that was refused indignantly and at once.

There was such a long pause after the soup that in their hunger they
began to eat the stewed apples and bottled cherries that were on the
table. The brown bread, arranged in thin slices on a white crochet mat
in a japanned dish, felt so damp and was so full of caraway seeds that
it was uneatable. After a while some roach, caught on the estate, and
with a strong muddy flavour and bewildering multitudes of bones, was
brought in; and after that came cutlets from Anna's pigs; and after that
a queer red gelatinous pudding that tasted of physic; and after that,
the meal being evidently at an end, Susie, who was very hungry, remarked
that if all the food were going to be like those specimens they had
better return at once to England, or they would certainly be starved.
"It's a good thing you are not going to stay here, Anna," she said, "for
you'd have to make a tremendous fuss before you'd get them to leave off
treating you like a pig. Look here--teaspoons to eat the pudding with,
and the same fork all the way through. It's a beastly hole"--Letty's
eyebrows telegraphed triumphantly across to Miss Leech, "Well, did you
hear that?"--"and we ought to have stayed in Berlin. There was nothing
to be gained at all by coming here."

"Perhaps the dinner to-night will be better," said Anna, trying to
comfort her, and little knowing that they had just eaten the dinner; but
people who are hungry are surprisingly impervious to the influence of
fair words. "It couldn't be worse, anyhow, so it really will probably be
better. I'm very glad though that we did come, for I like it."

"Oh, yes, so do I, Aunt Anna!" cried Letty. "It's frightfully nice. It's
like a picnic that doesn't leave off. When are we going over the house,
and out into the garden? I do so want to go--oh, I do so want to go!"
And she jumped up and down impatiently on her chair, till her ardour was
partially quenched by her mother's forbidding her to go out of doors in
the rain. "Well, let's go over the house, then," said Letty, dying to
explore.

"Oh, yes, you may go over the house," said her mother with a shrug of
displeasure; though why she should be displeased it would have puzzled
anyone who had dined satisfactorily to explain. Then she suddenly
remembered Hilton, and with an exclamation started off in search of her.

The others put on their furs before going into the Arctic atmosphere of
the hall, and began to explore, spending the next hour very pleasantly
rambling all over the house, while Susie, who had found Hilton, remained
shut up in the bedroom allotted her till supper time.

The cook showed Anna her bedroom, and when she had gone, Anna gave one
look round at the evergreen wreaths with which it was decorated and
which filled it with a pungent, baked smell, and then ran out to see
what her house was like. Her heart was full of pride and happiness as
she wandered about the rooms and passages. The magic word _mine_ rang in
her ears, and gave each piece of furniture a charm so ridiculously great
that she would not have told any one of it for the world. She took up
the different irrelevant ornaments that were scattered through the
rooms, collected as such things do collect, nobody knew when or why, and
she put them down again somewhere else, only because she had the right
to alter things and she loved to remind herself of it. She patted the
walls and the tables as she passed; she smoothed down the folds of the
curtains with tender touches; she went up to every separate
looking-glass and stood in front of it a moment, so that there should be
none that had not reflected the image of its mistress. She was so
childishly delighted with her scanty possessions that she was thankful
Susie remained invisible and did not come out and scoff.

What if it seemed an odd, bare place to eyes used to the superfluity of
hangings and stuffings that prevailed at Estcourt? These bare boards,
these shabby little mats by the side of the beds, the worn foxes' skins
before the writing-tables, the cane or wooden chairs, the white calico
curtains with meek cotton fringes, the queer little prints on the walls,
the painted wooden bedsteads, seemed to her in their very poorness and
unpretentiousness to be emblematical of all the virtues. As she lingered
in the quiet rooms, while Letty raced along the passages, Anna said to
herself that this Spartan simplicity, this absence of every luxury that
could still further soften an already languid and effeminate soul, was
beautiful. Here, as in the whitewashed praying-places of the Puritans,
if there were any beauty and any glory it must all come from within, be
all of the spirit, be only the beauty of a clean life and the glory of
kind thoughts. She pictured herself waking up in one of those unadorned
beds with the morning sun shining on her face, and rising to go her
daily round of usefulness in her quiet house, where there would be no
quarrels, and no pitiful ambitions, and none of those many bitter
heartaches that need never be. Would they not be happy days, those days
of simple duties? "The better life--the better life," she repeated
musingly, standing in the middle of the big room through whose tall
windows she could see the garden, and a strip of marshy land, and then
the grey sea and the white of the gulls and the dark line of the Rügen
coast over which the dusk was gathering; and she counted on her fingers
mechanically, "Simplicity, frugality, hard work. Uncle Joachim said
_that_ was the better life, and he was wise--oh, he was very wise--but
still----And he loved me, and understood me, but still----"

Looking up she caught sight of herself in a long glass opposite, a slim
figure in a fur cloak, with bare head and pensive eyes, lost in
reflection. It reminded her of the day the letter came, when she stood
before the glass in her London bedroom dressed for dinner, with that
same sentence of his persistently in her ears, and how she had not been
able to imagine herself leading the life it described. Now, in her
travelling dress, pale and tired and subdued after the long journey,
shorn of every grace of clothes and curls, she criticised her own
fatuity in having held herself to be of too fine a clay, too delicate,
too fragile, for a life that might be rough. "Oh, vain and foolish one!"
she said aloud, apostrophising the figure in the glass with the familiar
_Du_ of the days before her mother died, "Art thou then so much better
than others, that thou must for ever be only ornamental and an expense?
Canst thou not live, except in luxury? Or walk, except on carpets? Or
eat, except thy soup be not of chocolate? Go to the ants, thou sluggard;
consider their ways, and be wise." And she wrapped herself in her cloak,
and frowned defiance at that other girl.

She was standing scowling at herself with great disapproval when the
housemaid, who had been searching for her everywhere, came to tell her
that the Herr Oberinspector was downstairs, and had sent up to know if
his visit were convenient.

It was not at all convenient; and Anna thought that he might have spared
her this first evening at least. But she supposed that she must go down
to him, feeling somehow unequal to sending so authoritative a person
away.

She found him standing in the inner hall with a portfolio under his arm.
He was blowing his nose, making a sound like the blast of a trumpet, and
waking the echoes. Not even that could he do quietly, she thought, her
new sense of proprietorship oddly irritated by a nose being blown so
aggressively in her house. Besides, they were her echoes that he was
disturbing. She smiled at her own childishness.

She greeted him kindly, however, in response to his elaborate
obeisances, and shook hands on seeing that he expected to be shaken
hands with, though she had done so twice already that afternoon; and
then she let herself be ushered by him into the drawing-room, a room on
the garden side of the house, with French windows, and bookshelves, and
a huge round polished table in the middle.

It had been one of the two rooms used by Uncle Joachim, and was full of
traces of his visits. She sat down at a big writing-table with a green
cloth top, her feet plunged in the long matted hairs of a grey rug, and
requested Dellwig to sit down near her, which he did, saying
apologetically, "I will be so free."

The servant, Marie, brought in a lamp with a green shade, shut the
shutters, and went out again on tiptoe; and Anna settled herself to
listen with what patience she could to the loud voice that jarred so on
her nerves, fortifying herself with reminders that it was her duty, and
really taking pains to understand him. Nor did she say a word, as she
had done to the lawyer, that might lead him to suppose she did not
intend living there.

But Dellwig's ceaseless flow of talk soon wearied her to such an extent
that she found steady attention impossible. To understand the mere words
was in itself an effort, and she had not yet learned the German for rye
and oats and the rest, and it was of these that he chiefly talked. What
was the use of explaining to her in what way he had ploughed and manured
and sown certain fields, how they lay, how big they were, and what their
soil was, when she had not seen them? Did he imagine that she could keep
all these figures and details in her head? "I know nothing of farming,"
she said at last, "and shall understand your plans better when I have
seen the estate."

"_Natürlich, natürlich_," shouted Dellwig, his voice in strangest
contrast to hers, which was particularly sweet and gentle. "Here I have
a map--does the gracious Miss permit that I show it?"

The gracious Miss inclined her tired head, and he unrolled it and spread
it out on the table, pointing with his fat forefinger as he explained
the boundaries, and the divisions into forest, pasture, and arable.

"It seems to be nearly all forest," said Anna.

"Forest! The forest covers two-thirds of the estate. It is the only
forest on the entire promontory. Such care as I have bestowed on the
forest has seldom been seen. It is _grossartig--colossal_!" And he
lifted his hands the better to express his admiration, and was about to
go into lengthy raptures when the map rolled itself up again with loud
cracklings, and cut him short. He spread it out once more, and securing
its corners began to describe the effects of the various sorts of
artificial manure on the different crops, his cleverness in combining
them, and his latest triumphant discovery of the superlative mixture
that was to strike all Pomerania with awe.

"_Ja_," said Anna, balancing a paper-knife on one finger, and profoundly
bored. "Whose land is that next to mine?" she asked, pointing.

"The land on the north and west belongs to peasants," said Dellwig. "On
the east is the sea. On the south it is all Lohm. The gracious one
passed through the village of Lohm this afternoon."

"The village where the school is?"

"Quite correct. The pastor, Herr Manske, a worthy man, but, like all
pastors, taking ells when he is offered inches, serves both that church
and the little one in Kleinwalde village, of which the gracious Miss is
patroness. Herr von Lohm, who lives in the house standing back from the
road, and perhaps noticed by the gracious Miss, is Amtsvorsteher in both
villages."

"What is Amtsvorsteher?" asked Anna, languidly. She was leaning back in
her chair, idly balancing the paper-knife, and listening with half an
ear only to Dellwig, throwing in questions every now and then when she
thought she ought to say something. She did not look at him, preferring
much to look at the paper-knife, and he could examine her face at his
ease in the shadow of the lamp-shade, her dark eyelashes lowered, her
profile only turned to him, with its delicate line of brow and nose, and
the soft and gracious curves of the mouth and chin and throat. One hand
lay on the table in the circle of light, a slender, beautiful hand, full
of character and energy, and the other hung listlessly over the arm of
the chair. Anna was very tired, and showed it in every line of her
attitude; but Dellwig was not tired at all, was used to talking, enjoyed
at all times the sound of his voice, and on this occasion felt it to be
his duty to make things clear. So he went into the lengthiest details as
to the nature and office of Amtsvorstehers, details that were perfectly
incomprehensible and wholly indifferent to Anna, and spared neither
himself nor her. While he talked, however, he was criticising her,
comparing the laziness of her attitude with the brisk and respectful
alertness of other women when he talked. He knew that these other women
belonged to a different class; his wife, the parson's wife, the wives of
the inspectors on other estates, these were not, of course, in the same
sphere as the new mistress of Kleinwalde; but she was only a woman, and
dress up a woman as you will, call her by what name you will, she is
nothing but a woman, born to help and serve, never by any possibility
even equal to a clever man like himself. Old Joachim might have lounged
as he chose, and put his feet on the table if it had seemed good to him,
and Dellwig would have accepted it with unquestioning respect as an
eccentricity of _Herrschaften_; but a woman had no sort of right, he
said to himself, while he so fluently discoursed, to let herself go in
the presence of her natural superior. Unfortunately, old Joachim, so
level-headed an old gentleman in all other respects, had placed the
power over his fortunes in the hands of this weak female leaning back so
unbecomingly in her chair, playing with the objects on the table, never
raising her eyes to his, and showing indeed, incredible as it seemed,
every symptom of thinking of something else. The women of his
acquaintance were, he was certain, worth individually fifty such
affected, indifferent young ladies. They worked early and late to make
their husbands comfortable; they were well practised in every art
required of women living in the country; they were models of thrift and
diligence; yet, with all their virtues and all their accomplishments,
they never dreamed of lounging or not listening when a man was speaking,
but sat attentively on the edge of their chairs, straight in the back
and seemly, and when he had finished said _Jawohl_.

Anna certainly did sit very much at her ease, and instead of attending,
as she ought to have done, to his description of Amtsvorstehers, was
thinking of other things. Dellwig had thick lips that could not be
hidden entirely by his grizzled moustache and beard, and he had the sort
of eyes known to the inelegant but truthful as fishy, and a big
obstinate nose, and a narrow obstinate forehead, and a long body and
short legs; and though all this, Anna told herself, was not in the least
his fault and should not in any way prejudice her against him, she felt
that she was justified in wishing that his manners were less offensive,
less boastful and boisterous, and that he did not bite his nails. "I
wonder," she thought, her eyes carefully fixed on the paper-knife, but
conscious of his every look and movement, "I wonder if he is as artful
as he looks. Surely Uncle Joachim must have known what he was like, and
would never have told me to keep him if he had not been honest. Perhaps
he is perfectly honest, and when I meet him in heaven how ashamed I
shall be of myself for having had doubts!" And then she fell to musing
on what sort of an appearance a chastened and angelic Dellwig would
probably present, and looked up suddenly at him with new interest.

"I trust I have made myself comprehensible?" he was asking, having just
come to the end of what he felt was a masterly _résumé_ of Herr von
Lohm's duties.

"I beg your pardon?" said Anna, bringing her thoughts back with
difficulty from the consideration of nimbuses, "Oh, about
Amtsvorstehers--no," she said, shaking her head, "you have not. But that
is my fault. I can't understand everything at once. I shall do better
later on."

"_Natürlich, natürlich_," Dellwig vehemently assured her, while he made
inward comments on the innate incapacity of all _Weiber_, as he called
them, to grasp the simplest fact connected with law and justice.

"Tell me about the livestock," said Anna, remembering Uncle Joachim's
frequent and affectionate allusions to his swine. "Are there many pigs?"

"Pigs?" repeated Dellwig, lifting up his hands as though mere words were
insufficient to express his feelings, "such pigs as the gracious Miss
now possesses are nowhere else to be found in Pomerania. They are the
pride, and at the same time the envy, of the whole province. 'Let my
sausages,' said the Herr Landrath last winter, when the time for killing
drew near, 'let my sausages consist solely of the pigs reared at
Kleinwalde by my friend the Oberinspector Dellwig.' The Frau Landräthin
was deeply injured, for she too breeds and fattens pigs, but not like
ours--not like ours."

"Who is the Herr Landrath?" asked Anna absently; but immediately
remembering the description of the Amtsvorsteher she added quickly,
"Never mind--don't explain. I suppose he is some sort of an official,
and I shall not be quite clear about these different officials till I
have lived here some time."

"_Natürlich, natürlich_," agreed Dellwig; and leaving the Landrath
unexplained he launched forth into a dissertation on Anna's pigs, whose
excellencies, it appeared, were wholly due to the unrivalled skill he
had for years displayed in their treatment. "I have no children," he
said, with a resigned and pious upward glance, "and my wife's maternal
instincts find their satisfaction in tending and fattening these fine
animals. She cannot listen to their cries the day they are killed, and
withdraws into the cellar, where she prepares the stuffing. The gracious
Miss ate the cutlets of one this very day. It was killed on purpose."

"Was it? I wish it hadn't been," said Anna, frowning at the remembrance
of that meal. "I--I don't want things killed on my account. I--don't
like pig."

"Not like pig?" echoed Dellwig, dropping his lower jaw in his amazement.
"Did I understand aright that the gracious one does not eat pig's flesh
gladly? And my wife and I who thought to prepare a joy for her!" He
clasped his hands together and stared at her in dismay. Indeed, he was
so much overcome by this extraordinary and wilful spurning of nature's
best gifts that for a moment he was silent, and knew not how he should
proceed. Were there not concentrated in the body of a single pig a
greater diversity of joys than in any other form of pleasure that he
could call to mind? Did it not include, besides the profounder delights
of its roasted ribs, such solid satisfactions as hams, sausages, and
bacon? Did not its liver, discreetly manipulated, rival the livers of
Strasburg geese in delicacy? Were not its brains a source of mutual
congratulation to an entire family at supper? Did not its very snout,
boiled with peas, make an otherwise inferior soup delicious? The ribs of
this particular pig were reposing at that moment in a cool place,
carefully shielded from harm by his wife, reserved for the Easter Sunday
dinner of their new mistress, who, having begun at her first meal with
the lesser joys of cutlets, was to be fed with different parts in the
order of their excellence till the climax of rejoicing was reached on
Easter Day in the dish of _Schweinebraten_, and who was now declaring,
in a die-away, affected sort of voice, that she did not want to eat pig
at all. Where, then, was her vulnerable point? How would he ever be able
to touch her, to influence her, if she was indifferent to the chief
means of happiness known to the dwellers in those parts? That was the
real aim and end of his labours, of the labours, as far as he could see,
of everyone else--to make as much money as possible in order to live as
well as possible; and what did living well mean if it did not mean the
best food? And what was the best food if not pig? Not to be killed on
her account! On whose account, then, could they be killed? With an owner
always about the place, and refusing to have pigs killed, how would he
and his wife be able to indulge, with satisfactory frequency, in their
favourite food, or offer it to their expectant friends on Sundays? He
mourned old Joachim, who so seldom came down, and when he did ate his
share of pork like a man, more sincerely at that moment than he would
have thought possible. "_Mein seliger Herr_," he burst out brokenly,
completely upset by the difference between uncle and niece, "_mein
seliger Herr_----" And then, unable to go on, fell to blowing his nose
with violence, for there were real tears in his eyes.

Anna looked up, surprised. She thought he had been speaking of pigs, and
here he was on a sudden bewailing his late master. When she saw the
tears she was deeply touched. "Poor man," she said to herself, "how
unjust I have been. Of course he loved dear Uncle Joachim; and my coming
here, an utter stranger, taking possession of everything, must be very
dreadful for him." She got up, at once anxious, as she always was, to
comfort and soothe anyone who was sad, and put her hand gently on his
arm. "I loved him too," she said softly, "and you who knew him so long
must feel his death dreadfully. We will try and keep everything just as
he would have liked it, won't we? You know what his wishes were, and
must help me to carry them out. You cannot have loved him more than I
did--dear Uncle Joachim!"

She felt very near tears herself, and condoned the sonorous nose-blowing
as the expression of an honourable emotion.

And Dellwig, when he presently reached his home and was met at the door
by his wife's eager "Well, how was she?" laconically replied "Mad."




CHAPTER VII


When Anna woke next morning she had a confused idea that something
annoying had happened the evening before, but she had slept so heavily
that she could not at once recollect what it was. Then, the sun on her
face waking her up more thoroughly, she remembered that Susie had stayed
upstairs with Hilton till supper time, had then come down, glanced with
unutterable disgust at the raw ham, cold sausage, eggs, and tepid coffee
of which the evening meal was composed, refused to eat, refused to
speak, refused utterly to smile, and afterwards in the drawing-room had
announced her fixed intention of returning to England the next day.

Anna had protested and argued in vain; nothing could shake this sudden
determination. To all her expostulations and entreaties Susie replied
that she had never yet dwelt among savages and she was not going to
begin now; so Anna was forced to conclude that Hilton had been making a
scene, and knowing the effect of Hilton's scenes she gave up attempting
to persuade, but told her with outward firmness and inward quakings that
she herself could not possibly go too.

Susie had been very angry at this, and still more angry at the reason
Anna gave, which was that, having invited the parson and his wife to
dinner on Saturday, she could not break her engagement. Susie told her
that as she would never see either of them again--for surely she would
never again want to come to this place?--it was absurd to care twopence
what they thought of her. What on earth did it matter if two inhabitants
of the desert were offended or not offended once she was on the other
side of the sea? And what did it matter at all how she treated them? She
heaped such epithets as absurd, stupid, and idiotic on Anna's head, but
Anna was not to be moved. She threatened to take Miss Leech and Letty
away with her, and leave Anna a prey to the criticisms of Mrs. Grundy,
and Anna said she could not prevent her doing so if she chose. Susie
became more and more excited, more and more Dobbs, goaded by the
recollection of what she had gone through with Hilton, and Anna, as
usual under such circumstances, grew very silent. Letty sat listening in
an agony of fright lest this cup of new experiences were about to be
dashed prematurely from her eager lips; and Miss Leech discreetly left
the room, though not in the least knowing where to go, finally seeking
to drive away the nervous fears that assailed her in her lonely,
creaking bedroom, where rats were gnawing at the woodwork, by thinking
hard of Mr. Jessup, who on this occasion proved to be but a broken reed,
pitted against the stern reality of rats.

The end of it, after Susie had poured out the customary reproaches of
gross ingratitude and forgetfulness of all she had done for Anna for
fifteen long years, was that Miss Leech and Letty were to stay on as
originally intended, and come home with Anna towards the end of the
holidays, and Susie would leave with Hilton the very next day.

Anna's attempt to make it up when she said good-night was repulsed with
energy. Anna was for ever doing aggravating things, and then wanting to
make it up; but makings up without having given in an inch seemed to
Susie singularly unsatisfactory ceremonies. Oh, these Estcourts and
their obstinacy! She marched off to bed in high indignation, an
indignation not by any means allowed to cool by Hilton during the
process of undressing; and Anna, worn out, fell asleep the moment she
lay down, and woke up, as she had pictured herself doing in that odd
wooden bed, with the morning sun shining full on her face.

It was a bright and lovely day, and on the side of the house where she
slept she could not hear the wind, which was still blowing from the
north-west. She opened one of her three big windows and let the cold air
rush into her room, where the curious perfume of the baked evergreen
wreaths festooned round the walls and looking-glass and dressing-table,
joined to the heat from the stove, produced a heavy atmosphere that made
her gasp. Somebody must already have been in her room, for the stove had
been lit again, and she could see the peat blazing inside its open door.
But outside, what a divine coldness and purity! She leaned out, drinking
it in in long breaths, the warm March sun shining on her head. The
garden, a mere uncared-for piece of rough grass with big trees, was
radiant with rain-drops; the strip of sea was a deep blue now, with
crests of foam; the island coast opposite was a shadowy streak stretched
across the feet of the sun. Oh, it was beautiful to stand at that open
window in the freshness, listening to the robin on the bare lilac bush a
few yards away, to the quarrelling of the impudent sparrows on the path
below, to the wind in the branches of the trees, to all the happy
morning sounds of nature. A joyous feeling took possession of her heart,
a sudden overpowering delight in what are called common things--mere
earth, sky, sun, and wind. How lovely life was on such a morning, in
such a clean, rain-washed, wind-scoured world. The wet smell of the
garden came up to her, a whiff of marshy smell from the water, a long
breath from the pines in the forest on the other side of the house. How
had she ever breathed at Estcourt? How had she escaped suffocation
without this life-giving smell of sea and forest? She looked down with
delight at the wildness of the garden; after the trim Estcourt lawns,
what a relief this was. This was all liberty, freedom from
conventionality, absolute privacy; that was an everlasting clipping, and
trimming, and raking, a perpetual stumbling upon gardeners at every
step, for Susie would not be outdone by her greater neighbours in these
matters. What was Hill Street looking like this fine March morning? All
the blinds down, all the people in bed--how far away, how shadowy it
was; a street inhabited by sleepy ghosts, with phantom milkmen rattling
spectral cans beneath their windows. What a dream that life lived up to
three days ago seemed in this morning light of reality. White clouds,
like the clouds in Raphael's backgrounds, were floating so high overhead
that they could not be hurried by the wind; a black cat sat in a patch
of sunshine on the path washing itself; somebody opened a lower window,
and there was a noise of sweeping, presently made indistinguishable by
the chorale sung by the sweeper, no doubt Marie, in a pious, Good Friday
mood. "_Lob Gott ihr Christen allzugleich_," chanted Marie, keeping time
with her broom. Her voice was loud and monotonous, but Anna listened
with a smile, and would have liked to join in, and so let some of her
happiness find its way out.

She dressed quickly. There was no hot water, and no bell to ring for
some, and she did not choose to call down from the window and interrupt
the hymn, so she used cold water, assuring herself that it was bracing.
Then she put on her hat and coat and stole out, afraid of disturbing
Susie, who was lying a few yards away filled with smouldering wrath,
anxious to have at least one quiet hour before beginning a day that she
felt sure was going to be a day of worries. "There will be great peace
to-night when she is gone," she thought, and immediately felt ashamed
that she should look forward to being without her. "But I have never
been without her since I was ten," she explained apologetically to her
offended conscience, "and I want to see how I feel."

"_Guten Morgen_," said Marie, as Anna came into the drawing-room on her
way out through its French windows.

"_Guten Morgen_," said Anna cheerfully.

Marie leaned on her broom and watched her go down the garden, greedily
taking in every detail of her clothes, profoundly interested in a being
who went out into the mud where nobody could see her with such a dress
on, and whose shoes would not have been too big for Marie's small sister
aged nine.

The evening before, indeed, Marie had beheld such a vision as she had
never yet in her life seen, or so much as imagined; her new mistress had
appeared at supper in what was evidently a _herrschaftliche Ballkleid_,
with naked arms and shoulders, and the other ladies were attired in much
the same way. The young Fräulein, it is true, showed no bare flesh, but
even she was arrayed in white, and her hair magnificently tied up with
ribbons. Marie had rushed out to tell the cook, and the cook, refusing
to believe it, had carried in a supererogatory dish of compot as an
excuse for securing the assurance of her own eyes; and Bertha from the
farm, coming round with a message from the Frau Oberinspector, had seen
it too through the crack of the kitchen door as the ladies left the
dining-room, and had gone off breathlessly to spread the news; and the
post cart just leaving with the letters had carried it to Lohm, and
every inhabitant of every house between Kleinwalde and Stralsund knew
all about it before bedtime. "What did I tell thee, wife?" said Dellwig,
who, in spite of his superiority to the sex that served, listened as
eagerly as any member of it to gossip; and his wife was only too ready
to label Anna mad or eccentric as a slight private consolation for
having passed out of the service of a comprehensible German gentleman
into that of a woman and a foreigner.

Unconscious of the interest and curiosity she was exciting for miles
round, pleased by Marie's artless piety, and filled with kindly feelings
towards all her neighbours, Anna stood at the end of the garden looking
over the low hedge that divided it from the marsh and the sea, and
thought that she had never seen a place where it would be so easy to be
good. Complete freedom from the wearisome obligations of society, an
ideal privacy surrounded by her woods and the water, a scanty population
of simple and devoted people--did not Dellwig shed tears at the
remembrance of his master?--every day spent here would be a day that
made her better, that would bring her nearer to that heaven in which all
good and simple souls dwelt while still on earth, the heaven of a serene
and quiet mind. Always she had longed to be good, and to help and
befriend those who had the same longing but in whom it had been
partially crushed by want of opportunity and want of peace. The healthy
goodness that goes hand in hand with happiness was what she meant; not
that tragic and futile goodness that grows out of grief, that lifts its
head miserably in stony places, that flourishes in sick rooms and among
desperate sorrows, and goes to God only because all else is lost. She
went round the house and crossed the road into the forest. The fresh
wind blew in her face, and shook down the drops from the branches on her
as she passed. The pine needles of other years made a thick carpet for
her feet. The sun gleamed through the straight trunks and warmed her.
The restless sighing overheard in the tree tops filled her ears with
sweetest music. "I do believe the place is pleased that I have come!"
she thought, with a happy laugh. She came to a clearing in the trees,
opening out towards the north, and she could see the flat fields and the
wide sky and the sunshine chasing the shadows across the vivid green
patches that she had learned were winter rye. A hole at her feet, where
a tree had been uprooted, still had snow in it; but the larks were
singing above in the blue, as though from those high places they could
see Spring far away in the south, coming up slowly with the first
anemones in her hands, her face turned at last towards the patient
north.

The strangest feeling of being for the first time in her life at home
came over Anna. This poor country, how sweet and touching it was. After
the English country, with its thickly scattered villages, and gardens,
and fields that looked like parks, it did seem very poor and very empty,
but intensely lovable. Like the furniture of her house, it struck her as
symbolic in its bareness of the sturdier virtues. The people who lived
in it must of necessity be frugal and hard-working if they would live at
all, wresting by sheer labour their life from the soil, braced by the
long winters to endurance and self-denial, their vices and their
languors frozen out of them whether they would or no. At least so
thought Anna, as she stood gazing out across the clearing at the fields
and sky. "Could one not be good here? Could one not be so, so good?" she
kept on murmuring. Then she remembered that she had been asking herself
vague questions like this ever since her arrival; and with a sudden
determination to face what was in her mind and think it out honestly,
she sat down on a tree stump, buttoned her coat up tight, for the wind
was blowing full on her, and fell to considering what she meant to do.

       *       *       *       *       *

Susie did not go down to breakfast, but stayed in her bedroom on the
sofa drinking a glass of milk into which an egg had been beaten, and
listening to Hilton's criticisms of the German nation, delivered with
much venom while she packed. But Hilton, though her contempt for German
ways was so great as to be almost unutterable, was reconciled to a
mistress who had so quickly given in to her wish to be taken back to
Hill Street, and the venom was of an abstract nature, containing no
personal sting of unfavourable comparisons with duchesses; so that Susie
was sipping her milk in a fairly placid frame of mind when there was a
knock at the door, and Anna asked if she might come in.

"Oh, yes, come in. Have you looked out the trains?"

"Yes. There's only one decent one, and you'll have to leave directly
after luncheon. Won't you stay, Susie? You'll be so tired, going home
without resting."

"Can't we leave before luncheon?"

"Yes, of course, if you prefer to lunch at Stralsund."

"Much. Have you ordered the shandrydan?"

"Yes, for half-past one."

"Then order it for half-past twelve. Hilton can drive with me."

"So I thought."

"Has that wretch been rubbing fish oil on it again?"

"I don't think so, after what I said yesterday."

"I shouldn't think what you said yesterday could have frightened him
much. You beamed at him as though he were your best friend."

"Did I?"

Anna was looking odd, Susie thought, and answering her remarks with a
nervous, abstracted air. She had apparently been out, for her dress was
muddy, and she was quite rosy, and her hair was not so neat as usual.
She stood about in an undecided sort of way, and glanced several times
at Hilton on her knees before a trunk.

"Is that all the breakfast you are going to have?" she asked, becoming
aware of the glass of milk.

"What other breakfast is there to have?" snapped Susie, who was hungry,
and would have liked a great deal more.

"Well, the eggs and butter are very nice, anyway," said Anna, quite
evidently thinking of other things.

"Now what has she got into her head?" Susie asked herself, watching her
sister-in-law with misgiving. Anna's new moods were never by any chance
of a sort to give Susie pleasure. Aloud she said tartly, "I can't eat
eggs and butter by themselves. I shouldn't have had anything at all if
it hadn't been for Hilton, who went into the kitchen and made me this
herself."

"Excellent Hilton," said Anna absently. "Haven't you done packing yet,
Hilton?"

"No, m'm."

Anna sat down on the end of the sofa and began to twist the frills of
Susie's dressing-gown round her fingers.

"I haven't closed my eyes all night," said Susie, putting on her martyr
look, "nor has Hilton."

"Haven't you? Why not? I slept the sleep of the just--better, indeed,
than any just that I ever heard of."

"What, didn't that man go into your room?"

"What man? Oh, yes, Miss Leech was telling me about it. He lit the
stoves, didn't he? I never heard a sound."

"You must have slept like a log then. Any one in the least sensitive
would have been frightened out of their senses. I was, and so was
Hilton. I wouldn't spend another night in this house for anything you
could give me."

It appeared that Susie really had just cause for complaint. She had been
nervous the night before after Hilton had left her, unable to sleep, and
scared by the thought of their defencelessness--six women alone in that
wild place. She wished then with all her heart that Dellwig did live in
the house. Rats scampering about in the attic above added to her
terrors. The wind shook the windows of her room and howled
disconsolately up and down. She bore it as long as she could, which was
longer than most women would have borne it, and then knocked on the wall
dividing her room from Hilton's. But Hilton, with the bedclothes over
her head and all the candles she had been able to collect alight, would
not have stirred out of her room to save her mistress from dying; and
Susie, desperate at the prospect of the awful hours round midnight, made
one great effort of courage and sallied out to fetch her. Poor Susie,
standing shivering before her maid's bolted door, scantily clothed,
anxiously watching the flame of her candle that threatened each second
to be blown out, alone on the wide, draughty landing, frightened at the
sound of her own calls mingling weirdly with the creakings and hangings
of the tempest-shaken house, was an object deserving of pity. It took
some minutes to induce Hilton to open the door, and such minutes Susie
had not, in the course of an ordered and normal existence, yet passed.
They both went into Susie's room, locked themselves in, and Hilton lay
down on the sofa; and after a long time they fell into an uneasy sleep.
At half-past three Susie started up in bed; some one was trying to open
the door and knocking. The candles had burnt themselves out, and she
could not tell what time it was, but thought it must be early morning
and that the servant wanted to bring her hot water; and she woke Hilton
and bade her open the door. Hilton did so, gave a faint scream, and
flung herself back on the sofa, where she lay as one dead, her face
buried in the pillow. A man with a lantern and no shoes on was at the
door, and came in noiselessly. Susie was never nearer fainting in her
life. She sat in her bed, her cold hands clasped tightly round her
knees, her eyes fixed on this dreadful apparition, unable to speak or
move, paralysed by terror. This was the end, then, of all her hopes and
ambitions--to come to Pomerania and die like a dog. Then the sickening
feeling of fear gave way to one of overwhelming wrath when she found
that all the man wanted was to light her stove. On the same principle
that a child is shaken who has not after all been lost or run over, she
was speechless with rage now that she found that she was not, after all,
to be murdered. He was a very old man, and the light from the lantern
cast strange reflections on his face and figure as he crouched before
the stove. He mumbled as he worked, talking to the fire he was making as
though it were a person. "_Du willst nicht, brennen, Lump? Was? Na,
warte mal!_" And when he had finished, crept out again without glancing
at the occupants of the room, still mumbling.

"It's the custom of the country, I suppose," said Anna.

"Is it? Well the sooner we get out of such a country the better. You are
determined to stay in spite of everything? I can tell you I don't at all
like my child being here, but you force me to leave her because you know
very well that I can't let you stay here alone."

Anna glanced at Hilton, folding a dress with immense deliberation.

"Oh, Hilton knows what I think," said Susie, with a shrug.

"But she doesn't know what _I_ think," said Anna. "I must talk to you
before you leave, so please let her finish packing afterwards. Go and
have your breakfast, Hilton."

"Did you say breakfast, m'm?" inquired Hilton with an innocent look.

"Breakfast?" repeated Susie; "poor thing, I'd like to know how and where
she is to get any."

"Well, then, go and don't have your breakfast," said Anna impatiently.
She had something to tell Susie that must be told soon, and was not in a
mood to bear with Hilton's ways.

"How hospitable," remarked Susie as the door closed. "Really you are a
delightful hostess."

Anna laughed. "I don't mean to be brutal," she said, "but if we can
exist on the food without looking tragic I suppose she can too,
especially as it is only for one day."

"My one consolation in leaving Letty here is that she will be dieted in
spite of herself. I expect you to bring her back quite thin."

Anna got up restlessly and went to the window.

"And whatever you do, don't forget that the return tickets only last
till the 24th. But you'll be sick of it long before then."

Anna turned round and leaned her back against the window. The strong
morning light was on her hair, and her face was in shadow, yet Susie had
a feeling that she was looking guilty.

"Susie, I've been thinking," she said with an effort.

"Really? How nice."

"Yes, it was, for I found out what it is that I must do if I mean to be
happy. But I'm afraid that _you_ won't think it nice, and will scold me.
Now don't scold me."

"Well, tell me what it is." Susie lay staring at Anna's form against the
light, bracing herself to hear something disagreeable. She knew very
well from past experience that Anna's new plan, whatever it was, was
certain to be wild and foolish.

"I am going to stay here."

"I know you are, and I know that nothing I can say will make you change
your mind. Peter is just like you--the more I show him what a fool he's
going to make of himself the more he insists on doing it. He calls it
determination. Average people like myself, with smaller and more easily
managed brains than you two wonders have got, call it pigheadedness."

"I don't mean only for Letty's holidays; I mean for good."

"For good?" Susie opened her mouth and stared in much the same blank
consternation that Dellwig had shown on hearing that she did not like
eating pig.

"Don't be angry with me," said Anna, coming over to the sofa and sitting
on the floor by Susie's side; and she caught hold of her hand and began
to talk fast and eagerly. "I always intended spending this money in
helping poor people, but didn't quite know in what way--now I see my way
clearly, and I must, _must_ go it. Don't you remember in the catechism
there's the duty towards God and the duty towards one's neighbour----"

"Oh, if you're going to talk religion----" said Susie, pulling away her
hand in great disgust.

"No, no, do listen," said Anna, catching it again and stroking it while
she talked, to Susie's intense irritation, who hated being stroked.

"If you are going into the catechism," she said, "Hilton had better come
in again. It might do her good."

"No, no--I only wanted to say that there's another duty not in the
catechism, greater than the duty towards one's neighbour----"

"My dear Anna, it isn't likely that you can improve on the catechism.
And fancy wanting to, at breakfast time. Don't stroke my hand--it gives
me the fidgets."

"But I want to explain things--do listen. The duty the catechism leaves
out is the duty towards oneself. You can't get away from your duties,
you know, Susie----" And she knit her brows in her effort to follow out
her thought.

"My goodness, as though I ever tried! If ever a poor woman did her duty,
I'm that woman."

"--and I believe that if I do those two duties, towards my neighbour and
myself, I shall be doing my duty towards God."

Susie gave her body an impatient twist. She thought it positively
indecent to speak of sacred things so early in the morning in cold
blood. "What has this drivel to do with your stopping here?" she asked
angrily.

"It has everything to do with it--my duty towards myself is to be as
happy and as good as possible, and my duty towards my neighbour----"

"Oh, bother your neighbour and your duty!" cried Susie in exasperation.

"--is to help him to be good and happy too."

"Him? Her, I hope. Don't forget decency, my dear. A girl has no duties
whatever towards male neighbours."

"Well, I do mean her," said Anna, looking up and laughing.

"So you think that by living here you'll make yourself happy?"

"Yes, I do--I do think so. Perhaps I am wrong, and shall find out I'm
wrong, but I must try."

"You'll leave all your friends and relations and stay in this
God-forsaken place where you can't even live like a lady?"

"Uncle Joachim said it was my one chance of leading the better life."

"Unutterable old fool," said Susie with bitterest contempt. "That money,
then, is going to be thrown away on Germans? As though there weren't
poor people enough in England, if your ambition is to pose as a
benefactress!"

"Oh, I don't want to pose as anything--I only want to help unhappy
wretches," cried Anna, laying her cheek caressingly on Susie's unwilling
hand. "Now don't scold me--forgive me if I'm silly, and be patient with
me till I find out that I've made a goose of myself and come creeping
back to you and Peter. But I _must_ do it--I _must_ try--I _will_ do
what I think is right."

"And who are the wretches, pray, who are to be made happy?"

"Oh, those I am sorriest for--that no one else helps--the genteel ones,
if I can only get at them."

"I never heard of genteel wretches," said Susie.

Anna laughed again. "I was thinking it all out in the forest this
morning," she said, "and it suddenly flashed across me that this big
roomy house was never meant not to be used, and that instead of going to
see poor people and giving them money in the ordinary way, it would be
so much better to let women of the better classes, who have no money,
and who are dependent and miserable, come and live with me and share
mine, and have everything that I have--exactly the same, with no
difference of any sort. There is room for twelve at least, and wouldn't
it be beautiful to make twelve people, who had lost all hope and all
courage, happy for the rest of their days?"

"Oh, the girl's mad!" cried Susie, springing up from the sofa, no longer
able to bear herself. She began to walk about the room, not knowing what
to say or do, absolutely without sympathy for beneficent impulses, at
all times possessed of a fine scorn for ideals, feeling that no argument
would be of any avail with an Estcourt whose mind was made up, shocked
that good money, so hard to get, and so very precious when got, should
be thrown away in such a manner, bewildered by the difficulties of the
situation, for how could a girl of Anna's age live alone, and direct a
house full of objects of charity? Would the objects themselves be a
sufficient chaperonage? Would her friends at home think so? Would they
not blame her, Susie, for having allowed all this? As though she could
prevent it! Or would they expect her to stay with Anna in this place
till she should marry? As though anybody would ever marry such a
lunatic! "Mad, mad, mad!" cried Susie, wringing her hands.

"I was afraid that you wouldn't like it," said the culprit on the floor,
watching her with a distressed face.

"Like it? Oh--mad, mad!" And she continued to walk and wring her hands.

"Well, you'll stay, then," she said, suddenly stopping in front of Anna,
"I know you well enough, and shall waste no breath arguing. That
infatuated old man's money has turned your head--I didn't know it was so
weak. But look into your heart when I am gone--you'll have time enough
and quiet enough--and ask yourself honestly whether what you are going
to do is a proper way of paying back all I have done for you, and all
the expense you have been. You know what my wishes are about you, and
you don't care one jot. Gratitude! There isn't a spark of it in your
whole body. Never was there a more selfish creature, and I can't believe
that ingratitude and selfishness are the stuff that makes saints. Don't
dare to talk any more rot about duty to your neighbour to me. An
Englishwoman to come and spend her money on German charities----"

"It's German money," murmured Anna.

"And to _live_ here--to live _here_--oh, mad, mad!" And Susie's
indignation threatening to choke her, she resumed her walk and her
gesticulations, her high heels tapping furiously on the bare boards.

She longed to take Letty and Miss Leech away with her that very morning,
and punish Anna by leaving her entirely alone; but she did not dare
because of Peter. Peter was always on Anna's side when there were
differences, and would be sure to do something dreadful when he heard of
it--perhaps come and live here too, and never go back to his wife any
more. Oh, these half Germans! Why had she married into a family with
such a taint in its blood? "You will have to have some one here," she
said, turning on Anna, who still sat on the floor by the sofa, a look on
her face of apology and penitence mixed with firmness that Susie well
knew. "How can you stay here alone? I shall leave Miss Leech with you
till the end of the holidays, though I hate to seem to encourage you;
but then you see I do my duty and always have, though I don't talk about
it. When I get home I shall look for some elderly woman who won't mind
coming here and seeing that you don't make yourself too much of a
by-word, and the day she comes you are to send me back my child."

"It is good of you to let me keep Letty, dear Susie----"

"Dear Susie!"

"But I don't mean to be a by-word, as you call it," continued Anna, the
ghost of a smile lurking in her eyes, "and I don't want an Englishwoman.
What use would she be here? She wouldn't understand if it was a German
by-word that I turned into. I thought about asking the parson how I had
better set about getting a German lady--a grave and sober female,
advanced in years, as Uncle Joachim wrote."

"Oh, Uncle Joachim----" Susie could hardly endure to hear the name. It
was that odious old man who had filled Anna's head with these ideas. To
leave her money was admirable, but to influence a weak girl's mind with
his wishy-washy German philosophy about the better life and such
rubbish, as he evidently had done during those excursions with her, was
conduct so shameful that she found no words strong enough to express her
opinion of it. Everyone would blame her for what had happened, everyone
would jeer at her, and say that the moment an opportunity of escape had
presented itself Anna had seized it, preferring an existence of
loneliness and hardship--any sort of existence--to all the pleasures of
civilised life in Susie's company. Peter would certainly be very angry
with her, and reproach her with not having made Anna happy enough. Happy
enough! The girl had cost her at least three hundred a year, what with
her expensive education and all her clothes since she came out; and if
three hundred good pounds spent on a girl could not make her happy,
she'd like to know what could. And no one--not one of those odious
people in London whom she secretly hated--would have a single word of
censure for Anna. No one ever had. All her vagaries and absurdities
during the last few years when she had been so provoking had been smiled
at, had been, Susie knew, put down to her treatment of her. Treatment of
her, indeed! The thought of these things made Susie writhe. She had been
looking forward to the next season, to having her pretty sister-in-law
with her in the happy mood she had been in since she heard of her good
fortune, and had foreseen nothing but advantages to herself from Anna's
presence in her house--an Anna spending and not being spent upon, and no
doubt to be persuaded to share the expenses of housekeeping. And now she
must go home by herself to blame, scoldings, and derision. The prospect
was almost more than she could bear. She went to the door, opened it,
and turning to Anna fired a parting shot. "Let no one," she said, her
voice shaken by deepest disgust, "who wants to be happy, ever spend a
penny on her husband's relations."

And then she called Hilton; nor did she leave off calling till Hilton
appeared, and so prevented Anna from saying another word.




CHAPTER VIII


But if Susie's rage was such that she refused to say good-bye, and
terrified Miss Leech while she was waiting in the hall for the carriage
by dark allusions to strait-waistcoats, when the parson was taken into
Anna's confidence after dinner on the following night his raptures knew
no bounds. "_Liebes, edeldenkendes Fräulein!_" he burst out, clasping
his hands and gazing with a moist, ecstatic eye at this young sprig of
piety. He was a good man, not very learned, not very refined,
sentimental exceedingly, and much inclined to become tearfully eloquent
on such subjects as _die liebe kleine Kinder, die herrliche Natur, die
Frau als Schutzengel_, and the sacredness of _das Familienleben_.

Anna felt that he was the only person at hand who could perhaps help her
to find twelve dejected ladies willing to be made happy, and had
unfolded her plan to him as tersely as possible in her stumbling German,
with none of those accompanying digressions into the question of
feelings that Susie stigmatised as drivel; and she sat uncomfortable
enough while he burst forth into praises that would not end of her
goodness and nobleness. It is hard to look anything but fatuous when
somebody is extolling your virtues to your face, and she could not help
both looking and feeling foolish during his extravagant glorification.
She did not doubt his sincerity, and indeed he was absolutely sincere,
but she wished that he would be less flowery and less long, and would
skip the raptures and get on to the main subject, which was practical
advice.

She wore the simple white dress that had caused such a sensation in the
neighbourhood, a garment that hung in long, soft folds, accentuating her
slender length of limb. Her bright hair was parted and tucked behind her
ears. Everything about her breathed an absolute want of
self-consciousness and vanity, a perfect freedom from the least thought
of the impression she might be making; yet she was beautiful, and the
good man observing her beauty, and supposing from what she had just told
him an equal beauty of character, for ever afterwards when he thought of
angels on quiet Sunday evenings in his garden, clothed them as Anna was
clothed that night, not even shrinking from the pretty, bare shoulders
and scantily sleeved arms, but facing them with a courage worthy of a
man, however doubtfully it might become a pastor.

His wife, in her best dress, which was also her tightest, sat on the
edge of a chair some way off, marvelling greatly at many things. She
could not hear what it was Anna had said to set her husband off
exclaiming, because the governess persisted in trying to talk German to
her, and would not be satisfied with vague replies. She was disappointed
by the sudden disappearance of the sister-in-law, gone before she had
shown herself to a single soul; astonished that she had not been
requested to sit on the sofa, in which place of honour the young
Fräulein sprawled in a way that would certainly ruin her clothes;
disgusted that she had not been pressed at table, nay, not even asked,
to partake of every dish a second time; indeed, no one had seemed to
notice or care whether she ate anything at all. These were strange ways.
And where were the Dellwigs, those great people accustomed to patronise
her because she was the parson's wife? Was it possible that they had not
been invited? Were there then quarrels already? She could not of course
dream that Anna would never have thought of asking her inspector and his
wife to dinner, and that in her ignorance she regarded the parson as a
person on an altogether higher social level than the inspector. These
things, joined to conjectures as to the probable price by the yard of
Anna's, Letty's, and Miss Leech's clothes, gave Frau Manske more food
for reflection than she had had for years; and she sat turning them over
slowly in her mind in the intervals between Miss Leech's sentences,
while her dress, which was of silk, creaked ominously with every painful
breath she drew.

"The best way to act," said the parson, when he had exhausted the
greater part of his raptures, "will be to advertise in a newspaper of a
Christian character."

"But not in my name," said Anna.

"No, no, we must be discreet--we must be very discreet. The
advertisement must be drawn up with skill. I will make, simultaneously,
inquiries among my colleagues in the holy office, but there must also be
an advertisement. What would the gracious Miss's opinion be of the
desirability of referring all applicants, in the first instance, to me?"

"Why, I think it would be an excellent plan, if you do not mind the
trouble."

"Trouble! Joy fills me at the thought of taking part in this good work.
Little did I think that our poor corner of the fatherland was to become
a holy place, a blessed refuge for the world-worn, a nook fragrant with
charity----"

"No, not charity," interposed Anna.

"Whose perfume," continued the parson, determined to finish his
sentence, "whose perfume will ascend day and night to the attentive
heavens. But such are the celestial surprises Providence keeps in
reserve and springs upon us when we least expect it."

"Yes," said Anna. "But what shall we put in the advertisement?"

"_Ach ja_, the advertisement. In the contemplation of this beautiful
scheme I forget the advertisement." And again the moisture of ecstasy
suffused his eyes, and again he clasped his hands and gazed at her with
his head on one side, almost as though the young lady herself were the
beautiful scheme.

Anna got up and went to the writing-table to fetch a pencil and a sheet
of paper, anxious to keep him to the point; and the parson watching the
graceful white figure was more than ever struck by her resemblance to
his idea of angels. He did not consider how easy it was to look like a
being from another world, a creature purified of every earthly
grossness, to eyes accustomed to behold the redundant exuberance of his
own excellent wife.

She brought the paper, and sat down again at the table on which the lamp
stood. "How does one write any sort of advertisement in German?" she
said. "I could not write one for a housemaid. And this one must be done
so carefully."

"Very true; for, alas, even ladies are sometimes not all that they
profess to be. Sad that in a Christian country there should be
impostors. Doubly sad that there should be any of the female sex."

"Very sad," said Anna, smiling. "You must tell me which are the
impostors among those that answer."

"_Ach_, it will not be easy," said the parson, whose experience of
ladies was limited, and who began to see that he was taking upon himself
responsibilities that threatened to become grave. Suppose he recommended
an applicant who afterwards departed with the gracious Miss's spoons in
her bag? "_Ach_, it will not be easy," he said, shaking his head.

"Oh, well," said Anna, "we must risk the impostors. There may not be any
at all. How would you begin?"

The parson threw himself back in his chair, folded his hands, cast up
his eyes to the ceiling, and meditated. Anna waited, pencil in hand,
ready to write at his dictation. Frau Manske at the other end of the
room was straining her ears to hear what was going on, but Miss Leech,
desirous both of entertaining her and of practising her German, would
not cease from her spasmodic talk, even expecting her mistakes to be
corrected. And there were no refreshments, no glasses of cooling beer
being handed round, no liquid consolation of any sort, not even seltzer
water. She regarded her evening as a failure.

"A Christian lady of noble sentiments," dictated the parson, apparently
reading the words off the ceiling, "offers a home in her house----"

"Is this the advertisement?" asked Anna.

"--offers a home in her house----"

"I don't quite like the beginning," hesitated Anna. "I would rather
leave out about the noble sentiments."

"As the gracious one pleases. Modesty can never be anything but an
ornament. 'A Christian lady----'"

"But why a _Christian_ lady? Why not simply a lady? Are there, then,
heathen ladies about, that you insist on the Christian?"

"Worse, worse than heathen," replied the parson, sitting up straight,
and fixing eyeballs suddenly grown fiery on her; and his voice fell to a
hissing whisper, in strange contrast to his previous honeyed tones. "The
heathen live in far-off lands, where they keep quiet till our
missionaries gather them into the Church's fold--but here, here in our
midst, here everywhere, taking the money from our pockets, nay, the very
bread from our mouths, are the _Jews_."

Impossible to describe the tone of fear and hatred with which this word
was pronounced.

Anna gazed at him, mystified. "The Jews?" she echoed. One of her
greatest friends at home was a Jew, a delightful person, the mere
recollection of whom made her smile, so witty and charming and kind was
he. And of Jews in general she could not remember to have heard anything
at all.

"But not only money from our pockets and bread from our mouths,"
continued the parson, leaning forward, his light grey eyes opened to
their widest extent, and speaking in a whisper that made her flesh begin
the process known as creeping, "but blood--blood from our veins."

"Blood from your veins?" she repeated faintly. It sounded horrid. It
offended her ears. It had nothing to do with the advertisement. The
strange light in his eyes made her think of fanaticism, cruelty, and the
Middle Ages. The mildest of men in general, as she found later on,
rabidness seized him at the mere mention of Jews.

"Blood," he hissed, "from the veins of Christians, for the performance
of their unholy rites. Did the gracious one never hear of ritual
murders?"

"No," said Anna, shrinking back, the nearer he leaned towards her,
"never in my life. Don't tell me now, for it--it sounds interesting. I
should like to hear about it all another time. 'A Christian lady offers
her home,'" she went on quickly, scribbling that much down, and then
looking at him inquiringly.

"_Ach ja_," he said in his natural voice, leaning back in his chair and
reducing his eyes to their normal size, "I forgot again the
advertisement. 'A Christian lady offers her home to others of her sex
and station who are without means----'"

"And without friends, and without hope," added Anna, writing.

"_Gut, gut, sehr gut._"

"She has room in her house in the country," Anna went on, writing as she
spoke, "for twelve such ladies, and will be glad to share with them all
that she possesses of fortune and happiness."

"_Gut, gut, sehr gut._"

"Is the German correct?"

"Quite correct. I would add, 'Strictest inquiries will be made before
acceptance of any application by Herr Pastor Manske of Lohm, to whom all
letters are to be addressed. Applicants must be ladies of good family,
who have fallen on evil days by the will of God.'"

Anna wrote this down as far as "days," after which she put a full stop.

"It pleases me not entirely," said Manske, musing; "the language is not
sufficiently noble. Noble schemes should be alluded to in noble words."

"But not in an advertisement."

"Why not? We ought not to hide our good thoughts from our fellows, but
rather open our hearts, pour out our feelings, spend freely all that we
have in us of virtue and piety, for the edification and exhilaration of
others."

"But not in an advertisement. I don't want to exhilarate the public."

"And why not exhilarate the public, dear Miss? Is it not composed of
units of like passions to ourselves? Units on the way to heaven, units
bowed down by the same sorrows, cheered by the same hopes, torn asunder
by the same temptations as the gracious one and myself?" And immediately
he launched forth into a flood of eloquence about units; for in Germany
sermons are all extempore, and the clergy, from constant practice,
acquire a fatal fluency of speech, bursting out in the week on the least
provocation into preaching, and not by any known means to be stopped.

"Oh--words, words, words!" thought Anna, waiting till he should have
finished. His wife, hearing the well-known rapid speech of his inspired
moments, glowed with pride. "My Adolf surpasses himself," she thought;
"the Miss must wonder."

The Miss did wonder. She sat and wondered, her elbows on the arms of the
chair, her finger tips joined together, and her eyes fixed on her finger
tips. She did not like to look at him, because, knowing how different
was the effect produced on her to that which he of course imagined, she
was sorry for him.

"It is so good of you to help me," she said with gentle irrelevance when
the longed-for pause at length came. "There was something else that I
wanted to consult you about. I must look for a companion--an elderly
German lady, who will help me in the housekeeping."

"Yes, yes, I comprehend. But would not the twelve be sufficient
companions, and helps in the housekeeping?"

"No, because I would not like them to think that I want anything done
for me in return for their home. I want them to do exactly what makes
them happiest. They will all have had sad lives, and must waste no more
time in doing things they don't quite like."

"Ah--noble, noble," murmured the parson, quite as unpractical as Anna,
and fascinated by the very vagueness of her plan of benevolence.

"The companion I wish to find would be another sort of person, and would
help me in return for a salary."

"Certainly, I comprehend."

"I thought perhaps you would tell me how to advertise for such a
person?"

"Surely, surely. My wife has a sister----"

He paused. Anna looked up quickly. She had not reckoned with the
possibility of his wife's having sisters.

"_Lieber Schatz_," he called to his wife, "what does thy sister Helena
do now?"

Frau Manske got up and came over to them with the alacrity of relief.
"What dost thou say, dear Adolf?" she asked, laying her hand on his
shoulder. He took it in his, stroked it, kissed it, and finally put his
arm round her waist and held it there while he talked; all to the
exceeding joy of Letty, to whom such proceedings had the charm of
absolute freshness.

"Thy sister Helena--is she at present in the parental house?" he asked,
looking up at her fondly, warmed into an affection even greater than
ordinary by the circumstance of having spectators.

Frau Manske was not sure. She would write and inquire. Anna proposed
that she should sit down, but the parson playfully held her closer.
"This is my guardian angel," he explained, smiling beatifically at her,
"the faithful mother of my children, now grown up and gone their several
ways. Does the gracious Miss remember the immortal lines of Schiller,
'_Ehret die Frauen, sie flechten und weben himmlische Rosen in's
irdische Leben_'? Such has been the occupation of this dear wife, only
interrupted by her occasional visits to bathing resorts, since the day,
more than twenty-five years ago, when she consented to tread with me the
path leading heavenwards. Not a day has there been, except when she was
at the seaside, without its roses."

"Oh," said Anna. She felt that the remark was not at the height of the
situation, and added, "How--how interesting." This also struck her as
inadequate; but all further inspiration failing her, she was reduced to
the silent sympathy of smiles.

"Ten children did the Lord bless us with," continued the parson,
expanding into confidences, "and six it was His will again to remove."

"The drains--" murmured Frau Manske.

"Yes, truly the drains in the town where we lived then were bad, very
bad. But one must not question the wisdom of Providence."

"No, but one might mend----" Anna stopped, feeling that under some
circumstances even the mending of drains might be impious. She had heard
so much about piety and Providence within the last two hours that she
was confused, and was no longer clear as to the exact limit of conduct
beyond which a flying in the face of Providence might be said to begin.

But the parson, clasping his wife to his side, paid no heed to anything
she might be saying, for he was already well on in a detailed account of
the personal appearance, habits, and career of his four remaining
children, and dwelt so fondly on each in turn that he forgot sister
Helena and the second advertisement; and when he had explained all their
numerous excellencies and harmless idiosyncrasies, including their
preferences in matters of food and drink, he abruptly quitted this
topic, and proceeded to expound Anna's scheme to his wife, who had
listened with ill-concealed impatience to the first part of his
discourse, consumed as she was with curiosity to hear what it was that
Anna had confided to him.

So Anna had to listen to the raptures all over again. The eager interest
of the wife disturbed her. She doubted whether Frau Manske had any real
sympathy with her plan. Her inquisitiveness was unquestionable; but Anna
felt that opening her heart to the parson and opening it to his wife
were two different things. Though he was wordy, he was certainly
enthusiastic; his wife, on the other hand, appeared to be chiefly
interested in the question of cost. "The cost will be colossal," she
said, surveying Anna from head to foot. "But the gracious Miss is rich,"
she added.

Anna began to examine her finger tips again.

On the way home through the dark fields, after having criticised each
dish of the dinner and expressed the opinion that the entertainment was
not worthy of such a wealthy lady, Frau Manske observed to her husband
that it was true, then, what she had always heard of the English, that
they were peculiarly liable to prolonged attacks of craziness.

"Craziness! Thou callest this craziness? It is my wife, the wife of a
pastor, that I hear applying such a word to so beautiful, so Christian,
a scheme?"

"But the good money--to give it all away. Yes, it is very Christian, but
it is also crazy."

"Woman, shut thy mouth!" cried the parson, beside himself with
indignation at hearing such sentiments from such lips.

Clearly Frau Manske was not at that moment engaged with her roses.




CHAPTER IX


The next morning early, Anna went over to the farm to ask Dellwig to
lend her any newspapers he might have. She was anxious to advertise as
soon as possible for a companion, and now that she knew of the existence
of sister Helena, thought it better to write this advertisement without
the parson's aid, copying any other one of the sort that she might see
in the papers. Until she had secured the services of a German lady who
would tell her how to set about the reforms she intended making in her
house, she was perfectly helpless. She wanted to put her home in order
quickly, so that the twelve unhappy ones should not be kept waiting; and
there were many things to be done. Servants, furniture, everything, was
necessary, and she did not know where such things were to be had. She
did not even know where washerwomen were obtainable, and Frau Dellwig
never seemed to be at home when she sent for her, or went to her seeking
information. On Good Friday, after Susie's departure, she had sent a
message to the farm desiring the attendance of the inspector's wife,
whom she wished to consult about the dinner to be prepared for the
Manskes, all provisions apparently passing through Frau Dellwig's hands;
and she had been told that the lady was at church. On Saturday morning,
disturbed by the emptiness of her larder and the imminence of her
guests, she had gone herself to the farm, but was told that the lady was
in the cow-sheds--in which cow-shed nobody exactly knew. Anna had been
forced to ask Dellwig about the food. On Sunday she took Letty with her,
abashed by the whisperings and starings she had had to endure when she
went alone. Nor on this occasion did she see the inspector's wife, and
she began to wonder what had become of her.

The Dellwigs' wrath and amazement when they found that the parson and
his wife had been invited to dinner and they themselves left out was
indescribable. Never had such an insult been offered them. They had
always been the first people of their class in the place, always held
their heads up and condescended to the clergy, always been helped first
at table, gone first through doors, sat in the right-hand corners of
sofas. If he was furious, she was still more so, filled with venom and
hatred unutterable for the innocent, but it must be added overjoyed,
Frau Manske; and though her own interest demanded it, she was altogether
unable to bring herself to meet Anna for the purpose, as she knew, of
being consulted about the menu to be offered to the wretched upstart.
Indeed, Frau Dellwig's position was similar to that painful one in which
Susie found herself when her influential London acquaintance left her
out of the invitations to the wedding; on which occasion, as we know,
Susie had been constrained to flee to Germany in order to escape the
comments of her friends. Frau Dellwig could not flee anywhere. She was
obliged to stay where she was and bear it as best she might, humiliated
in the eyes of the whole neighbourhood, an object of derision to her
very milkmaids. Philosophers smile at such trials; but to persons who
are not philosophers, and at Kleinwalde these were in the majority, they
are more difficult to endure than any family bereavement. There is no
dignity about them, and friends, instead of sympathising, rejoice more
or less openly according to the degree of their civilisation. The degree
of civilisation among Frau Dellwig's friends was not great, and the
rejoicings on the next Sunday when they all met would be but
ill-concealed; there was no escape from them, they had to be faced, and
the malicious condolences accepted with what countenance she could.
Instead of making sausages, therefore, she shut herself in her bedroom
and wept.

And so it came about that the unconscious Anna, whose one desire was to
live at peace with her neighbours, made two enemies within two days.
"All women," said Dellwig to his wife, "high and low, are alike. Unless
they have a husband to keep them in their right places, they become
religious and run after pastors. Manske has wormed himself in very
cleverly, truly very cleverly. But we will worm him out again with equal
cleverness. As for his wife, what canst thou expect from so great a
fool?"

"No, indeed, from her I expect nothing," replied his wife, tossing her
head, "but from the niece of our late master I expected the behaviour of
a lady." And at that moment, the niece of her late master being
announced, she fled into her bedroom.

Anna, friendly as ever, specially kind to Dellwig since his tears on the
night of her arrival, came with Letty into the gloomy little office
where he was working, with all the morning sunshine in her face. Though
she was perplexed by many things, she was intensely happy. The perfect
freedom, after her years of servitude, was like heaven. Here she was in
her own home, from which nobody could take her, free to arrange her life
as she chose. Oh, it was a beautiful world, and this the most beautiful
corner of it! She was sure the sky was bluer at Kleinwalde than in other
places, and that the larks sang louder. And then was she not on the very
verge of realising her dreams of bringing the light of happiness into
dark and hopeless lives? Oh, the beautiful, beautiful world! She came
into Dellwig's room with the love of it shining in her eyes.

He was as obsequious as ever, for unfortunately his bread and butter
depended on this perverse young woman; but he was also graver and less
talkative, considering within himself that he could not be expected to
pass over such a slight without some alteration in his manner. He ought,
he felt, to show that he was pained, and he ought to show it so
unmistakably that she would perhaps be led to offer some explanation of
her conduct. Accordingly he assumed the subdued behaviour of one whose
feelings have been hurt, and Anna thought how greatly he improved on
acquaintance.

He would have given much to know why she wanted the papers, for surely
it was unusual for women to read newspapers? When there was a murder, or
anything of that sort, his wife liked to see them, but not at other
times. "Is the gracious Miss interested in politics?" he inquired, as he
put several together.

"No, not particularly," said Anna; "at least, not yet in German
politics. I must live here a little while first."

"In--in literature, perhaps?"

"No, not particularly. I know so little about German books."

"There are some well-written articles occasionally on the modes in
ladies' dresses."

"Really?"

"My wife tells me she often gets hints from them as to what is being
worn. Ladies, we know," he added with a superior smile, checked,
however, on his remembering that he was pained, "are interested in these
matters."

"Yes, they are," agreed Anna, smiling, and holding out her hand for the
papers.

"Ah, then, it is that that the gracious Miss wishes to read?" he said
quickly.

"No, not particularly," said Anna, who began to see that he too suffered
from the prevailing inquisitiveness. Besides, she was too much afraid of
his having sisters, or of his wife's having sister

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