The Pastor's Wife Part 44

She had even forgotten to shut the door in her excitement, and a puff of wind from the open window picked up Herr Dremmel's papers and blew them into confusion.

He endeavoured to catch them, and requested her in a tone of controlled irritation to shut the door.

"Oh, how dreadful of me!" she said, hastily doing it, but with gaiety.

"I do not know," then said Herr Dremmel, mastering his annoyance, "Mr.

Ingram."

"Rut, Robert, it's _the_ Mr. Ingram. Edward Ingram. The greatest artist there is now. The great portrait painter. Berlin has--"

"Is he a connection of your family's, Ingeborg?"

"No, but he painted Ju--"

"Then it is not necessary for me to interrupt my afternoon on his behalf."

And Herr Dremmel bent his head over his papers again.

"But, Robert, he's _great_--he's _very_ great--"

Herr Dremmel, with a wetted thumb, diligently rearranged his pages.

"But--why, I told him you'd love to see him. What am I to say to him if you don't come?"

Herr Dremmel, his eye caught by a sentence he had written, was reading with a deep enormous appet.i.te.

"Tea," said Ingeborg desperately. "There's tea. You always _do_ come to tea. It'll be ready in a minute."

He looked up at her, gathering her into his consciousness again. "Tea?"

he said.

But even as he said it his thoughts fell off to his problem, and without removing his eyes from hers he began carefully to consider a new aspect of it that in that instant had occurred to him.

There was nothing for it but to go away. So she went.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Ingram's visit to the Glambecks, had in any case been coming to an end the next day, when he was to have gone to Konigsberg on his way to the Caucasus, a place he hoped might trick him by its novelty for at least a time out of boredom, and the Baron and Baroness were greatly surprised when he told them he was not going to the Caucasus but to Kokensee instead.

With one voice they exclaimed, "Kokensee?"

"To paint the pastor's wife's hair," said Ingram.

The Baron and Baroness were silent. The explanation seemed to them beyond comment. Its disreputableness robbed them of speech. Herr Ingram, of course, an artist of renown--if he had not been of very great renown they could not have seen their way to admitting him on terms of equality into their circle--might paint whoever's hair he pleased; but was there not some ecclesiastical law forbidding that the hair of one's pastor's wife should be painted? To have one's hair painted when one was a pastor's wife was hardly more respectable than having it dyed. People of family were painted in order to hand down their portrait to succeeding generations, but you had to have generations, you had to have scions, you had to have a n.o.ble stock for the scions to spring from, and the painting was entered into soberly, discreetly, advisedly, in the fear of G.o.d, for the delectation of children, not lightly or wantonly, not for effect, not, as Herr Ingram had added of Frau Pastor's hair, because any portion of one's person was strangely beautiful. Strangely beautiful?

They looked at each other; and the Baroness raised her large and undulating white hands from her black lap for a moment and let them drop on to it again, and the Baron slowly nodded his entire agreement.

Ingram had found a room in the village inn at Kokensee, a place so sordid, so entirely impossible as the next habitation after theirs for one who had been their guest, that the Baron and Baroness were concerned for what their servants must think when they heard him direct their coachman in the presence of their butler and footman, as he clambered nimbly into the dogcart, to take him to it. And the Baroness went in and wrote at once to her son Hildebrand in Berlin, who had introduced Ingram to Glambeck, and told him she did not intend permitting Herr Ingram to visit her again. "_To please you_," she wrote, "_I did it. But how true it is that these artists can never rise beyond being artists! I have finished with outsiders, however clever. Give me gentlemen_."

She did not mention, she found she could not mention, the hair; and to the Baron that evening she expressed the hope that at least the picture would only be in watercolour. Watercolour, she felt, seemed somehow nearer the Commandments than oils.

It was impossible to paint a serious picture of Ingeborg in the dark little parlour at the parsonage, and as there was no other room at all that they could use Ingram began a series of sketches of her out of doors, in the garden, in the punt, anywhere and everywhere.

"I must get some idea of you," he said, perceiving that a reason for his coming every day had to be provided. "Later on I'll do the real picture.

In a proper studio."

"I wonder how I'll get to a proper studio?" smiled Ingeborg.

"I've got a very good one in Venice. You must sit to me there."

"As though it were round the corner! But these are very wonderful," she said, taking up the sketches. "I wish I were really like that."

"It's exactly you as you were at the moment."

"Nonsense," she said; but she glowed.

She knew it was not true, but she loved to believe he somehow, by some miracle, saw her so. The sketches were exquisite; little impressions of happy moments caught into immortality by a master. Hardly ever did he do more than her head and throat, and sometimes the delicate descent to her shoulder. The day she saw his idea of the back of her neck she flushed with pleasure, it was such a beautiful thing.

"That's not me," she murmured.

"Isn't it? I don't believe anybody has ever explained to you what you're like."

"There wasn't any need to. I can see for myself."

"Apparently that's just what you can't do. It was high time I came."

"Oh, but wasn't it," she agreed earnestly.

He thought her frankness, her unadorned way of saying what she felt, as refres.h.i.+ng and as surprising as being splashed with clear cold s.h.i.+ning mountain water. He had never met anything feminine that was quite so near absolute simplicity. He might call her the most extravagantly flattering things, and she appreciated them and savoured them with a kind of objective delight that interested him at first extraordinarily.

Then it began to annoy him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "But these are very wonderful," she said, taking up the sketches. "I wish I were really like that."]

"You're as unselfconscious," he told her one afternoon a little crossly, when he had been ransacking heaven and earth and most of the poets for images to compare her with, and she had sat immensely pleased and interested and urging him at intervals to go on, "as a choir-boy."

"But what a nice, clean, soaped sort of thing to be like!" she said.

"And so much more alive than lettuces."

"I wonder if you _are_ alive?" he said, staring at her; and she looked at him with her head on one side and told him that if she were not a bishop's daughter and a pastor's wife and a child of many prayers and trained from infancy to keep carefully within the limits of the allowable in female speech she would reply to that, "You bet."

"But that's only if I were vulgar that I'd say that," she explained.

"Gentility is the sole barrier, I expect really, between me and excess."

"You and excess! You little funny, cold-watery, early-morningy thing.

One would as soon connect the dawn and the fields before sunrise and small birds and the greenest of green young leaves with excess."