October

'Mais rien, rien, rien,' asseverated Mrs. Antoine vehemently, her hands spread out, her shoulders up to her ears, passionately protesting the empty purity of her adopted church,—'mais rien du tout, du tout. Madame peut venir un dimanche voir....'

Then, having cleared off these imputations, she switched back to the coffee. 'Le caf?mdash;Madame d閟ire que j'en fasse encore? Ces dames et Monsieur l'Ev阸ue—'

'Il n'est pas un 関—'

'Ah—here you are!' exclaimed my uncle, his head appearing at the top of the stairs. 'I was just coming to see if there was anything the matter. Here she is—coming, coming!' he called out genially to the others; and on my hurrying to join him, for I am not one to struggle against the inevitable, he put his arm through mine and we went down together.

Having got me to the bottom he placed both hands on my shoulders and twisted me round to the light. 'Dear child,' he said, scrutinizing my face while he held me firmly in this position, 'we were getting quite anxious about you. Mrs. Barnes feared you might be ill, and was already contemplating remedies—' I shuddered—'however—' he twisted me round to Mrs. Barnes—'nothing ill about this little lady, Mrs. Barnes, eh?'

Then he took my chin between his finger and thumb and kissed me lightly, gaily even, on each cheek, and then, letting me go, he rubbed his hands and briskly approached the table, all the warm things on which were swathed as usual when I am late either in napkins or in portions of Mrs. Barnes's clothing.

'Come along—come along, now,—breakfast, breakfast,' cried my uncle. 'For these and all Thy mercies Lord—' he continued with hardly a break, his eyes shut, his hands outspread over Mrs. Barnes's white woollen shawl in benediction.

We were overwhelmed. The male had arrived and taken us in hand. But we were happily overwhelmed, judging from Mrs. Barnes's face. For the first time since she has been with me the blessing of heaven had been implored and presumably obtained for her egg, and I realised from her expression as she ate it how much she had felt the daily enforced consumption, owing to my graceless habits, of eggs unsanctified. And Dolly too looked pleased, as she always does when her poor Kitty is happy. I alone wasn't. Behind the coffee pot I sat pensive. I knew too well what was before me. I distrusted my uncle's gaiety. He had thought it all out in the night, and had decided that the best line of approach to the painful subject he had come to discuss would be one of cheerful affection. Certainly I had never seen him in such spirits; but then I haven't seen him since my aunt's death.

'Dear child,' he said, when the table had been picked up and carried off bodily by the Antoines from our midst, leaving us sitting round nothing with the surprised feeling of sudden nakedness that, as I have already explained, this way of clearing away produces—my uncle was actually surprised for a moment into silence,—'dear child, I would like to take you for a little run before lunch.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph?'

'That we may get rid of our cobwebs.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'I know you are a quick-limbed little lady—'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph?'

'So you shall take the edge off my appetite for exercise.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'Then perhaps this afternoon one or other of these ladies—' I noted his caution in not suggesting both.

'Oh, delightful,' Mrs. Barnes hastened to assure him. 'We shall be only too pleased to accompany you. We are great walkers. We think a very great deal of the benefits to be derived from regular exercise. Our father brought us up to a keen appreciation of its necessity. If it were not that we so strongly feel that the greater part of each day should be employed in some useful pursuit, we would spend it, I believe, almost altogether in outdoor exercise.'

'Why not go with my uncle this morning, then?' I asked, catching at a straw. 'I've got to order dinner—'

'Oh no, no—not on any account. The Dean's wishes—'

But who should pass through the hall at that moment, making for the small room where I settle my household affairs, his arms full of the monthly books, but Antoine. It is the first of October. Pay day. I had forgotten. And for this one morning, at least, I knew that I was saved.

'Look,' I said to Mrs. Barnes, nodding in the direction of Antoine and his burden.

I felt certain she would have all the appreciation of the solemnity, the undeferability, of settling up that is characteristic of the virtuous poor; she would understand that even the wishes of deans must come second to this holy household rite.

'Oh, how unfortunate!' she exclaimed. 'Just this day of all days—your uncle's first day.'

But there was nothing to be done. She saw that. And besides, never was a woman so obstinately determined as I was to do my duty.

'Dear Uncle Rudolph,' I said very amiably—I did suddenly feel very amiable—'I'm so sorry. This is the one day in the month when I am tethered. Any other day—'

And I withdrew with every appearance of reluctant but indomitable virtue into my little room and stayed there shut in safe till I heard them go out.

From the window I could see them presently starting off up the mountain, actively led by my uncle who hadn't succeeded in taking only one, Mrs. Barnes following with the devoutness—she who in our walks goes always first and chooses the way—of an obedient hen, and some way behind, as though she disliked having to shed her cobwebs as much as I do, straggled Dolly. Then, when they had dwindled into just black specks away up the slope, I turned with lively pleasure to paying the books.

Those blessed books! If only I could have gone on paying them over and over again, paying them all day! But when I had done them, and conversed about the hens and bees and cow with Antoine, and it was getting near lunch-time, and at any moment through the window I might see the three specks that had dwindled appearing as three specks that were swelling, I thought I noticed I had a headache.

Addings-up often give me a headache, especially when they won't, which they curiously often won't, add up the same twice running, so that it was quite likely that I had got a headache. I sat waiting to be quite sure, and presently, just as the three tiny specks appeared on the sky line, I was quite sure; and I came up here and put myself to bed. For, I argued, it isn't grape-stones this time, it's sums, and Mrs. Barnes can't dose me for what is only arithmetic; also, even if Uncle Rudolph insists on coming to my bedside he can't be so inhumane as to torment somebody who isn't very well.

So here I have been ever since snugly in bed, and I must say my guests have been most considerate. They have left me almost altogether alone. Mrs. Barnes did look in once, and when I said, closing my eyes, 'It's those tradesmens' books—' she understood immediately, and simply nodded her head and disappeared.

Dolly came and sat with me for a little, but we hadn't said much before Mrs. Antoine brought a message from my uncle asking her to go down to tea.

'What are you all doing?' I asked.

'Oh, just sitting round the fire not talking,' she said, smiling.

'Not talking?' I said, surprised.

But she was gone.

Perhaps, I thought, they're not talking for fear of disturbing me. This really was most considerate.

As for Uncle Rudolph, he hasn't even tried to come and see me. The only sign of life he has made was to send me the current number of the Nineteenth Century he brought out with him, in which he has an article,—a very good one. Else he too has been quite quiet; and I have read, and I have pondered, and I have written this, and now it really is bedtime and I'm going to sleep.

Well, a whole day has been gained anyhow, and I have had hours and hours of complete peace. Rather a surprising lot of peace, really. It is rather surprising, I think. I mean, that they haven't wanted to come and see me more. Nobody has even been to say goodnight to me. I think I like being said goodnight to. Especially if nobody does say it.

October 2nd.

Twenty-four hours sometimes produce remarkable changes. These have.

Again it is night, and again I'm in my room on my way to going to sleep; but before I get any sleepier I'll write what I can about to-day, because it has been an extremely interesting day. I knew that what we wanted was a man.

At breakfast, to which I proceeded punctually, refreshed by my retreat yesterday, armed from head to foot in all the considerations I had collected during those quiet hours most likely to make me immune from Uncle Rudolph's inevitable attacks, having said my prayers and emptied my mind of weakening memories, I found my three guests silent. Uncle Rudolph's talkativeness, so conspicuous at yesterday's breakfast, was confined at to-day's to saying grace. Except for that, he didn't talk at all. And neither, once having said her Amen, did Mrs. Barnes. Neither did Dolly, but then she never does.

'I've not got a headache,' I gently said at last, looking round at them.

Perhaps they were still going on being considerate, I thought. At least, perhaps Mrs. Barnes was. My uncle's silence was merely ominous of what I was in for, of how strongly, after another night's thinking it out, he felt about my affairs and his own lamentable connection with them owing to God's having given me to him for a niece. But Mrs. Barnes—why didn't she talk? She couldn't surely intend, because once I had a headache, to go on tiptoe for the rest of our days together?

Nobody having taken any notice of my first announcement I presently said, 'I'm very well indeed, thank you, this morning.'

At this Dolly laughed, and her eyes sent little morning kisses across to me. She, at least, was in her normal state.

'Aren't you—' I looked at the other two unresponsive breakfasting heads—'aren't you glad?'

'Very,' said Mrs. Barnes. 'Very.' But she didn't raise her eyes from her egg, and my uncle again took no notice.

So then I thought I might as well not take any notice either, and I ate my breakfast in dignity and retirement, occasionally fortifying myself against what awaited me after it by looking at Dolly's restful and refreshing face.

Such an unclouded face; so sweet, so clean, so sunny with morning graciousness. Really an ideal breakfast-table face. Fortunate Juchs and Siegfried, I thought, to have had it to look forward to every morning. That they were undeserving of their good fortune I patriotically felt sure, as I sat considering the gentle sweep of her eyelashes while she buttered her toast. Yet they did, both of them, make her happy; or perhaps it was that she made them happy, and caught her own happiness back again, as it were on the rebound. With any ordinarily kind and decent husband this must be possible. That she had been happy was evident, for unhappiness leaves traces, and I've never seen an object quite so unmarked, quite so candid as Dolly's intelligent and charming brow.

We finished our breakfast in silence; and no sooner had the table been plucked out from our midst by the swift, disconcerting Antoines, than my uncle got up and went to the window.

There he stood with his back to us.

'Do you feel equal to a walk?' he asked, not turning round.

Profound silence.

We three, still sitting round the blank the vanished table had left, looked at each other, our eyes inquiring mutely, 'Is it I?'

But I knew it was me.

'Do you mean me, Uncle Rudolph?' I therefore asked; for after all it had best be got over quickly.

'Yes, dear child.'

'Now?'

'If you will.'

'There's no esc—you don't think the weather too horrid?'

'Bracing.'

I sighed, and went away to put on my nailed boots.

Relations ... what right had he ... as though I hadn't suffered horribly ... and on such an unpleasant morning ... if at least it had been fine and warm ... but to be taken up a mountain in a bitter wind so as to be made miserable on the top....

And two hours later, when I was perched exactly as I had feared on a cold rock, reached after breathless toil in a searching wind, perched draughtily and shorn of every cob-web I could ever in my life have possessed, helplessly exposed to the dreaded talking-to, Uncle Rudolph, settling himself at my feet, after a long and terrifying silence during which I tremblingly went over my defences in the vain effort to assure myself that perhaps I wasn't going to be much hurt, said:

'How does she spell it?'

Really one is very fatuous. Absorbed in myself, I hadn't thought of Dolly.

October 3rd.

It was so late last night when I got to that, that I went to bed. Now it is before breakfast, and I'll finish about yesterday.

Uncle Rudolph had taken me up the mountain only to talk of Dolly. Incredible as it may seem, he has fallen in love. At first sight. At sixty. I am sure a woman can't do that, so that this by itself convinces me he is a man. Three days ago I wrote in this very book that a dean isn't quite my idea of a man. I retract. He is.

Well, while I was shrinking and shivering on my own account, waiting for him to begin digging about among my raw places, he said instead, 'How does she spell it?' and threw my thoughts into complete confusion.

Blankly I gazed at him while I struggled to rearrange them on this new basis. It was such an entirely unexpected question. I did not at this stage dream of what had happened to him. It never would have occurred to me that Dolly would have so immediate an effect, simply by sitting there, simply by producing her dimple at the right moment. Attractive as she is, it is her ways rather than her looks that are so adorable; and what could Uncle Rudolph have seen of her ways in so brief a time? He has simply fallen in love with a smile. And he sixty. And he one's uncle. Amazing Dolly; irresistible apparently, to uncles.

'Do you mean Mrs. Jewks's name?' I asked, when I was able to speak.

'Yes,' said my uncle.

'I haven't seen it written,' I said, restored so far by my relief—for Dolly had saved me—that I had the presence of mind to hedge. I was obliged to hedge. In my mind's eye I saw Mrs. Barnes's face imploring me.

'No doubt,' said my uncle after another silence, 'it is spelt on the same principle as Molyneux.'

'Very likely,' I agreed.

'It sounds as though her late husband's family might originally have been French.'

'It does rather.'

'Possibly Huguenot.'

'Yes.'

'I was much astonished that she should be a widow.'

'Yet not one widow but two widows....' ran at this like a refrain in my mind, perhaps because I was sitting so close to a dean. Aloud I said, for by now I had completely recovered, 'Why, Uncle Rudolph? Widows do abound.'

'Alas, yes. But there is something peculiarly virginal about Mrs. Jewks.'

I admitted that this was so. Part of Dolly's attractiveness is the odd impression she gives of untouchedness, of gay aloofness.

My uncle broke off a stalk of the withered last summer's grass and began nibbling it. He was lying on his side a little below me, resting on his elbow. His black, neat legs looked quaint stuck through the long yellow grass. He had taken off his hat, hardy creature, and the wind blew his grey hair this way and that, and sometimes flattened it down in a fringe over his eyes. When this happened he didn't look a bit like anybody good, but he pushed it back each time, smoothing it down again with an abstracted carefulness, his eyes fixed on the valley far below. He wasn't seeing the valley.

'How long has the poor young thing—' he began.

'You will be surprised to hear,' I interrupted him, 'that Mrs. Jewks is forty.'

'Really,' said my uncle, staring round at me. 'Really. That is indeed surprising.' And after a pause he added, 'Surprising and gratifying.'

'Why gratifying, Uncle Rudolph?' I inquired.

'When did she lose her husband?' he asked, taking no notice of my inquiry.

The preliminary to an accurate answer to this question was, of course, Which? But again a vision of Mrs. Barnes's imploring face rose before me, and accordingly, restricting myself to Juchs, I said she had lost him shortly before the war.

'Ah. So he was prevented, poor fellow, from having the honour of dying for England.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'Poor fellow. Poor fellow.'

'Yes.'

'Poor fellow. Well, he was spared knowing what he had missed. At least he was spared that. And she—his poor wife—how did she take it?'

'Well, I think.'

'Yes. I can believe it. She wouldn't—I am very sure she wouldn't—intrude her sorrows selfishly on others.'

It was at this point that I became aware my uncle had fallen in love. Up to this, oddly enough, it hadn't dawned on me. Now it did more than dawned, it blazed.

I looked at him with a new and startled interest. 'Uncle Rudolph,' I said impetuously, no longer a distrustful niece talking to an uncle she suspects, but an equal with an equal, a human being with another human being, 'haven't you ever thought of marrying again? It's quite a long time now since Aunt Winifred—'

'Thought?' said my uncle, his voice sounding for the first time simply, ordinarily human, without a trace in it of the fatal pulpit flavour, 'Thought? I'm always thinking of it.'

And except for his apron and gaiters he might have been any ordinary solitary little man eating out his heart for a mate.

'But then why don't you? Surely a deanery of all places wants a wife in it?'

'Of course it does Those strings or rooms—empty, echoing. It shouts for a wife. Shouts, I tell you. At least mine does. But I've never found—I hadn't seen—'

He broke off, biting at the stalk of grass.

'But I remember you,' I went on eagerly, 'always surrounded by flocks of devoted women. Weren't any of them—?'

'No,' said my uncle shortly. And after a second of silence he said again, and so loud that I jumped, 'No!' And then he went on even more violently, 'They didn't give me a chance. They never let me alone a minute. After Winifred's death they were like flies. Stuck to me—made me sick—great flies crawling—' And he shuddered, and shook himself as though he were shaking off the lot of them.

I looked at him in amazement. 'Why,' I cried, 'you're talking exactly like a man!'

But he, staring at the view without seeing an inch of it, took no heed of me, and I heard him say under his breath as though I hadn't been there at all, 'My God, I'm so lonely at night!'

That finished it. In that moment I began to love my uncle. At this authentic cry of forlornness I had great difficulty in not bending over and putting my arms round him,—just to comfort him, just to keep him warm. It must be a dreadful thing to be sixty and all alone. You look so grown up. You look as though you must have so many resources, so few needs; and you are accepted as provided for, what with your career accomplished, and your houses and servants and friends and books and all the rest of it—all the empty, meaningless rest of it; for really you are the most miserable of motherless cold babies, conscious that you are motherless, conscious that nobody soft and kind and adoring is ever again coming to croon over you and kiss you good-night and be there next morning to smile when you wake up.

'Uncle Rudolph—' I began.

Then I stopped, and bending over took the stalk of grass he kept on biting out of his hand.

'I can't let you eat any more of that,' I said. 'It's not good for you.'

And having got hold of his hand I kept it.

There now, I said, holding it tight.

He looked up at me vaguely, absorbed in his thoughts; then, realising how tight his hand was being held, he smiled.

'You dear child,' he said, scanning my face as though he had never seen it before.

'Yes?' I said, smiling in my turn and not letting go of his hand. 'I like that. I didn't like any of the other dear children I was.'

'Which other dear children?'

'Uncle Rudolph,' I said, 'let's go home. This is a bleak place. Why do we sit here shivering forlornly when there's all that waiting for us down there?'

And loosing his hand I got on to my feet, and when I was on them I held out both my hands to him and pulled him up, and he standing lower than where I was our eyes were then on a level.

'All what?' he asked, his eyes searching mine.

'Oh, Uncle Rudolph! Warmth and Dolly, of course.'

October 4th.

But it hasn't been quite so simple. Nothing last night was different. My uncle remained tongue-tied. Dolly sat waiting to smile at anecdotes that he never told. Mrs. Barnes knitted uneasily, already fearing, perhaps, because of his strange silence, that he somehow may have scented Siegfried, else how inexplicable his silence after that one bright, wonderful first evening and morning.

It was I last night who did the talking, it was I who took up the line, abandoned by my uncle, of wholesome entertainment. I too told anecdotes; and when I had told all the ones I knew and still nobody said anything, I began to tell all the ones I didn't know. Anything rather than that continued uncomfortable silence. But how very difficult it was. I grew quite damp with effort. And nobody except Dolly so much as smiled; and even Dolly, though she smiled, especially when I embarked on my second series of anecdotes, looked at me with a mild inquiry, as if she were wondering what was the matter with me.

Wretched, indeed, is the hostess upon whose guests has fallen, from whatever cause, a blight.

October 5th.

Crabbe's son, in the life he wrote of his father, asks: 'Will it seem wonderful when we consider how he was situated at this time, that with a most affectionate heart, a peculiar attachment to female society, and with unwasted passions, Mr. Crabbe, though in his sixty-second year should have again thought of marriage? I feel satisfied that no one will be seriously shocked with such an evidence of the freshness of his feelings.'

A little shocked; Crabbe's son was prepared to allow this much; but not seriously.

Well, it is a good thing my uncle didn't live at that period, for it would have gone hard with him. His feelings are more than fresh, they are violent.

October 6th.

While Dolly is in the room Uncle Rudolph never moves, but sits tongue-tied staring at her. If she goes away he at once gets up and takes me by the arm and walks me off on to the terrace, where in a biting wind we pace up and down.

Our positions are completely reversed. It is I now who am the wise old relative, counselling, encouraging, listening to outpours. Up and down we pace, up and down, very fast because of the freshness of Uncle's Rudolph's feelings and also of the wind, arm in arm, I trying to keep step, he not bothering about such things as step, absorbed in his condition, his hopes, his fears—especially his fears. For he is terrified lest, having at last found the perfect woman, she won't have him. 'Why should she?' he asks almost angrily, 'Why should she? Tell me why she should.'

'I can't tell you,' I say, for Uncle Rudolph and I are now the frankest friends. 'But I can't tell you either why she shouldn't. Think how nice you are, Uncle Rudolph. And Dolly is naturally very affectionate.'

'She is perfect, perfect,' vehemently declares my uncle.

And Mrs. Barnes, who from the window watches us while we walk, looks with anxious questioning eyes at my face when we come in. What can my uncle have to talk about so eagerly to me when he is out on the terrace, and why does he stare in such stony silence at Dolly when he comes in? Poor Mrs. Barnes.

October 7th.

The difficulty about Dolly for courting purposes is that she is never to be got alone, not even into a corner out of earshot of Mrs. Barnes. Mrs. Barnes doesn't go away for a moment, except together with Dolly. Wonderful how clever she is at it. She is obsessed by terror lest the horrid marriage to the German uncle should somehow be discovered. If she was afraid of my knowing it she is a hundred times more afraid of Uncle Rudolph's knowing it. So persistent is her humility, so great and remote a dignitary does he seem to her, that the real situation hasn't even glimmered on her. All she craves is to keep this holy and distinguished man's good opinion, to protect her Dolly, her darling erring one, from his just but unbearable contempt. Therefore she doesn't budge. Dolly is never to be got alone.

'A man,' said my uncle violently to me this morning, 'can't propose to a woman before her sister.'

'You've quite decided you're going to?' I asked, keeping up with him as best I could, trotting beside him up and down the terrace.

'The minute I can catch her alone. I can't stand any more of this. I must know. If she won't have me—my God, if she won't have me—!'

I laid hold affectionately of his arm. 'Oh, but she will,' I said reassuringly. 'Dolly is rather a creature of habit, you know.'

'You mean she has got used to marriage—'

'Well, I do think she is rather used to it. Uncle Rudolph,' I went on, hesitating as I have hesitated a dozen times these last few days as to whether I oughtn't to tell him about Juchs—Siegfried would be a shock, but Juchs would be crushing unless very carefully explained—'you don't feel you don't think you'd like to know something more about Dolly first? I mean before you propose?'

'No!' shouted my uncle.

Afterwards he said more quietly that he could see through a brick wall as well as most men, and that Dolly wasn't a brick wall but the perfect woman. What could be told him that he didn't see for himself? Nothing, said my uncle.

What can be done with a man in love? Nothing, say I.

October 8th.

Sometimes I feel very angry with Dolly that she should have got herself so tiresomely mixed up with Germans. How simple everything would be now if only she hadn't! But when I am calm again I realise that she couldn't help it. It is as natural to her to get mixed up as to breathe. Very sweet, affectionate natures are always getting mixed up. I suppose if it weren't for Mrs. Barnes's constant watchfulness and her own earnest desire never again to distress poor Kitty, she would at an early stage of their war wanderings have become some ardent Swiss hotelkeeper's wife. Just to please him; just because else he would be miserable. Dolly ought to be married. It is the only certain way of saving her from marriage.

October 9th.

It is snowing. The wind howls, and the snow whirls, and we can't go out and so get away from each other. Uncle Rudolph is obliged, when Dolly isn't there, to continue sitting with Mrs. Barnes. He can't to-day hurry me out on to the terrace. There's only the hall in this house to sit in, for that place I pay the household books in is no more than a cupboard.

Uncle Rudolph could just bear Mrs. Barnes when he could get away from her; to-day he can't bear her at all. Everything that should be characteristic of a dean—patience, courtesy, kindliness, has been stripped off him by his eagerness to propose and the impossibility of doing it. There's nothing at all left now of what he was but that empty symbol, his apron.

October 10th.

My uncle is fermenting with checked, prevented courting. And he ought to be back in England. He ought to have gone back almost at once, he says. He only came out for three or four days—

'Yes; just time to settle me in,' I said.

'Yes,' he said, smiling, 'and then take you home with me by the ear.'

He has some very important meetings he is to preside at coming off soon, and here he is, hung up. It is Mrs. Barnes who is the cause of it, and naturally he isn't very nice to her. In vain does she try to please him; the one thing he wants her to do, to go away and leave him with Dolly, she of course doesn't. She sits there, saying meek things about the weather, expressing a modest optimism, ready to relinquish even that if my uncle differs, becoming, when he takes up a book, respectfully quiet, ready the moment he puts it down to rejoice with him if he wishes to rejoice or weep with him if he prefers weeping; and the more she is concerned to give satisfaction the less well-disposed is he towards her. He can't forgive her inexplicable fixedness. Her persistent, unintermittent gregariousness is incomprehensible to him. All he wants, being reduced to simplicity by love, is to be left alone with Dolly. He can't understand, being a man, why if he wants this he shouldn't get it.

'You're not kind to Mrs. Barnes,' I said to him this afternoon. 'You've made her quite unnatural. She is cowed.'

'I am unable to like her,' said my uncle shortly.

'You are quite wrong not to. She has had bitter troubles, and is all goodness. I don't think I ever met anybody so completely unselfish.'

'I wish she would go and be unselfish in her own room, then,' said my uncle.

'I don't know you,' I said, shrugging my shoulders. 'You arrived here dripping unction and charitableness, and now—'

'Why doesn't she give me a chance?' he cried. 'She never budges. These women who stick, who can't bear to be by themselves—good heavens, hasn't she prayers she ought to be saying, and underclothes she ought to mend?'

'I don't believe you care so very much for Dolly after all,' I said, 'or you would be kind to the sister she is so deeply devoted to.'

This sobered him. 'I'll try,' said my uncle; and it was quite hard not to laugh at the change in our positions—I the grey-beard now, the wise rebuker, he the hot-headed yet well-intentioned young relative.

October 11th.

I think guests ought to like each other; love each other if they prefer it, but at least like. They too have their duties, and one of them is to resist nourishing aversions; or, if owing to their implacable dispositions they can't help nourishing them, oughtn't they to try very hard not to show it? They should consider the helpless position of the hostess, she who, at any rate theoretically, is bound to be equally attached to them all.

Before my uncle came it is true we had begun to fester, but we festered nicely. Mrs. Barnes and I did it with every mark of consideration and politeness. We were ladies. Uncle Rudolph is no lady; and this little house, which I daresay looks a picture of peace from outside with the snow falling on its roof and the firelight shining in its windows, seethes with elemental passions. Fear, love, anger—they all dwell in it now, all brought into it by him, all coming out of the mixture, so innocuous one would think, so likely, one would think, to produce only the fruits of the spirit,—the mixture of two widows and one clergyman. Wonderful how much can be accomplished with small means. Also, most wonderful the centuries that seem to separate me from those July days when I lay innocently on the grass watching the clouds pass over the blue of the delphinium tops, before ever I had set eyes on Mrs. Barnes and Dolly, and while Uncle Rudolph, far away at home and not even beginning to think of a passport, was being normal in his Deanery.

He has, I am sure, done what he promised and tried to be kinder to Mrs. Barnes, and I can only conclude he was not able to manage it, for I see no difference. He glowers and glowers, and she immovably knits. And in spite of the silence that reigns except when, for a desperate moment, I make an effort to be amusing, there is a curious feeling that we are really living in a state of muffled uproar, in a constant condition of barely suppressed brawl. I feel as though the least thing, the least touch, even somebody coughing, and the house will blow up. I catch myself walking carefully across the hall so as not to shake it, not to knock against the furniture. How secure, how peaceful, of what a great and splendid simplicity do those July days, those pre-guest days, seem now!

October 12th.

I went into Dolly's bedroom last night, crept in on tiptoe because there is a door leading from it into Mrs. Barnes's room, caught hold firmly of her wrist, and led her, without saying a word and taking infinite care to move quietly, into my bedroom. Then, having shut her in, I said, 'What are you going to do about it?'

She didn't pretend not to understand. The candour of Dolly's brow is an exact reflection of the candour of her mind.

'About your uncle,' she said, nodding. 'I like him very much.'

'Enough to marry him?'

'Oh quite. I always like people enough to marry them.' And she added, as though in explanation of this perhaps rather excessively amiable tendency, 'Husbands are so kind.'

'You ought to know,' I conceded.

'I do,' said Dolly, with the sweetest reminiscent smile.

'Uncle Rudolph is only waiting to get you alone to propose,' I said.

Dolly nodded. There was nothing I could tell her that she wasn't already aware of.

'As you appear to have noticed everything,' I said, 'I suppose you have also noticed that he is very much in love with you.'

'Oh yes,' said Dolly placidly.

'So much in love that he doesn't seem even to remember that he's a dignitary of the Church, and when he's alone with me he behaves in a way I'm sure the Church wouldn't like at all. Why, he almost swears.'

'Isn't it a good thing?' said Dolly, approvingly.

'Yes. But now what is to be done about Siegfried—'

'Dear Siegfried,' murmured Dolly.

'And Juchs—'

'Poor darling,' murmured Dolly.

'Yes, yes. But oughtn't Uncle Rudolph to be told?'

'Of course,' said Dolly, her eyes a little surprised that I should want to know anything so obvious.

'You told me it would kill Kitty if I knew about Juchs. It will kill her twice as much if Uncle Rudolph knows.'

'Kitty won't know anything about it. At least, not till it's all over. My dear, when it comes to marrying I can't be stuck all about with secrets.'

'Do you mean to tell my uncle yourself?'

'Of course,' said Dolly, again with surprise in her eyes.

'When?'

'When he asks me to marry him. Till he does I don't quite see what it has to do with him.'

'And you're not afraid—you don't think your second marriage will be a great shock to him? He being a dean, and nourished on Tables of Affinity?'

'I can't help it if it is. He has got to know. If he loves me enough it won't matter to him, and if he doesn't love me enough it won't matter to him either.'

'Because then his objections to Juchs would be greater than his wish to marry you?'

'Yes,' said Dolly, smiling. 'It would mean,' she went on, 'that he wasn't fond of me enough.'

'And you wouldn't mind?'

Her eyes widened a little. 'Why should I mind?'

'No. I suppose you wouldn't, as you're not in love.'

I then remarked that, though I could understand her not being in love with a man my uncle's age, it was my belief that she had never in her life been in love. Not even with Siegfried. Not with anybody.

Dolly said she hadn't, and that she liked people much too much to want to grab at them.

'Grab at them!'

'That's what your being in love does,' said Dolly. 'It grabs.'

'But you've been grabbed yourself, and you liked it. Uncle Rudolph is certainly bent on grabbing you.'

'Yes. But the man gets over it quicker. He grabs and has done with it, and then settles down to the real things,—affection and kindness. A woman hasn't ever done with it. She can't let go. And the poor thing, because she what you call loves, is so dreadfully vulnerable, and gets so hurt, so hurt—'

Dolly began kissing me and stroking my hair.

'I think though,' I said, while she was doing this, 'I'd rather have loved thoroughly—you can call it grabbing if you like, I don't care what ugly words you use—and been vulnerable and got hurt, than never once have felt—than just be a sort of amiable amoeba—'

'Has it occurred to you,' interrupted Dolly, continuing to kiss me—her cheek was against mine, and she was stroking my hair very tenderly—'that if I marry that dear little uncle of yours I shall be your aunt?'

October 13th.

Well, then, if Dolly is ready to marry my uncle and my uncle is dying to marry Dolly, all that remains to be done is to remove Mrs. Barnes for an hour from the hall. An hour would be long enough, I think, to include everything,—five minutes for the proposal, fifteen for presenting Siegfried, thirty-five for explaining Juchs, and five for the final happy mutual acceptances.

This very morning I must somehow manage to get Mrs. Barnes away. How it is to be done I can't think; especially for so long as an hour. Yet Juchs and Siegfried couldn't be rendered intelligible, I feel, in less than fifty minutes between them. Yes; it will have to be an hour.

I have tried over and over again the last few days to lure Mrs. Barnes out of the hall, but it has been useless. Is it possible that I shall have to do something unpleasant to myself, hurt myself, hurt something that takes time to bandage? The idea is repugnant to me; still, things can't go on like this.

I asked Dolly last night if I hadn't better draw Mrs. Barnes's attention to my uncle's lovelorn condition, for obviously the marriage would be a solution of all her difficulties and could give her nothing but extraordinary relief and joy; but Dolly wouldn't let me. She said that it would only agonise poor Kitty to become aware that my uncle was in love, for she would be quite certain that the moment he heard about Juchs horror would take the place of love. How could a dean of the Church of England, Kitty would say, bring himself to take as wife one who had previously been married to an item in the forbidden list of the Tables of Affinity? And Juchs being German would only, she would feel, make it so much more awful. Besides, said Dolly, smiling and shaking her head, my uncle mightn't propose at all. He might change again. I myself had been astonished, she reminded me, at the sudden violent change he had already undergone from unction to very nearly swearing; he might easily under-go another back again, and then what a pity to have disturbed the small amount of peace of mind poor Kitty had.

'She hasn't any, ever,' I said; impatiently, I'm afraid.

'Not very much,' admitted Dolly with wistful penitence. 'And it has all been my fault.'

But what I was thinking was that Kitty never has any peace of mind because she hasn't any mind to have peace in.

I didn't say this, however.

I practised tact.

Later.

Well, it has come off. Mrs. Barnes is out of the hall, and at this very moment Uncle Rudolph and Dolly are alone together in it, proposing and being proposed to. He is telling her that he worships her, and in reply she is gently drawing his attention to Siegfried and Juchs. How much will he mind them? Will he mind them at all? Will his love triumphantly consume them, or, having swallowed Siegfried, will he find himself unable to manage Juchs?

Oh, I love people to be happy! I love them to love each other! I do hope it will be all right! Dolly may say what she likes, but love is the only thing in the world that works miracles. Look at Uncle Rudolph. I'm more doubtful, though, of the result than I would have been yesterday, because what brought about Mrs. Barnes's absence from the hall has made me nervous as to how he will face the disclosing of Juchs.

While I'm waiting I may as well write it down,—by my clock I count up that Dolly must be a third of the way through Siegfried now, so that I've still got three quarters of an hour.

This is what happened:

The morning started badly, indeed terribly. Dolly, bored by being stared at in silence, said something about more wool and went upstairs quite soon after breakfast. My uncle, casting a despairing glance at the window past which the snow was driving, scowled for a moment or two at Mrs. Barnes, then picked up a stale Times and hid himself behind it.

To make up for his really dreadful scowl at Mrs. Barnes I began a pleasant conversation with her, but at once she checked me, saying, 'Sh—sh—,' and deferentially indicating, with her knitting needle, my reading uncle.

Incensed by such slavishness, I was about to rebel and insist on talking when he, stirred apparently by something of a bloodthirsty nature that he saw in the Times, exclaimed in a very loud voice, 'Search as I may—and I have searched most diligently—I can't find a single good word to say for Germans.'

It fell like a bomb. He hasn't mentioned Germans once. I had come to feel quite safe. The shock of it left me dumb. Mrs. Barnes's knitting needles stopped as if struck. I didn't dare look at her. Dead silence.

My uncle lowered the paper and glanced round at us, expecting agreement, impatient of our not instantly saying we thought as he did.

'Can you?' he asked me, as I said nothing, being petrified.

I was just able to shake my head.

'Can you?' he asked, turning to Mrs. Barnes.

Her surprising answer—surprising, naturally, to my uncle—was to get up quickly, drop all her wool on the floor, and hurry upstairs.

He watched her departure with amazement. Still with amazement, when she had disappeared, his eyes sought mine.

Why, he said, staring at me aghast, 'why—the woman's a pro-German!'

In my turn I stared aghast.

'Mrs. Barnes?' I exclaimed, stung to quite a loud exclamation by the grossness of this injustice.

'Yes,' said my uncle, horrified. 'Yes. Didn't you notice her expression? Good heavens—and I who've taken care not to speak to a pro-German for five years, and had hoped, God willing, never to speak to one again, much less—' he banged his fists on the arms of the chair, and the Times slid on to the floor—'much less be under the same roof with one.'

'Well then, you see, God wasn't willing,' I said, greatly shocked.

Here was the ecclesiastic coming up again with a vengeance in all the characteristic anti-Christian qualities; and I was so much stirred by his readiness to believe what he thinks is the very worst of poor, distracted Mrs. Barnes, that I flung caution to the winds and went indignantly on: 'It isn't Mrs. Barnes who is pro-German in this house—it's Dolly.'

'What?' cried my uncle.

'Yes,' I repeated, nodding my head at him defiantly, for having said it I was scared, 'it's Dolly.'

'Dolly?' echoed my uncle, grasping the arms of his chair.

'Perhaps pro-German doesn't quite describe it,' I hurried on nervously, 'and yet I don't know—I think it would. Perhaps it's better to say that she is—she is of an unprejudiced international spirit—'

Then I suddenly realised that Mrs. Barnes was gone. Driven away. Not likely to appear again for ages.

I got up quickly. 'Look here, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, making hastily, even as Mrs. Barnes had made, for the stairs, 'you ask Dolly about it yourself. I'll go and tell her to come down. You ask her about being pro-German. She'll tell you. Only—' I ran back to him and lowered my voice—'propose first. She won't tell you unless you've proposed first.'

Then, as he sat clutching the arms of his chair and staring at me, I bent down and whispered, 'Now's your chance, Uncle Rudolph. You've settled poor Mrs. Barnes for a bit. She won't interrupt. I'll send Dolly—goodbye—good luck!'

And hurriedly kissing him I hastened upstairs to Dolly's room.

Because of the door leading out of it into Mrs. Barnes's room I had to be as cautious as I was last night. I did exactly the same things: went in on tiptoe, took hold of her firmly by the wrist, and led her out without a word. Then all I had to do was to point to the stairs, and at the same time make a face—but a kind face, I hope—at her sister's shut door, and the intelligent Dolly did the rest.

She proceeded with a sober dignity pleasant to watch, along the passage in order to be proposed to. Practice in being proposed to has made her perfect. At the top of the stairs she turned and smiled at me,—her dimple was adorable. I waved my hand; she disappeared; and here I am.

Forty minutes of the hour are gone. She must be in the very middle now of Juchs.

Night.

I knew this little house was made for kindness and love. I've always, since first it was built, had the feeling that it was blest. Sure indeed was the instinct that brought me away from England, doggedly dragging myself up the mountain to tumble my burdens down in this place. It invariably conquers. Nobody can resist it. Nobody can go away from here quite as they arrived, unless to start with they were of those blessed ones who wherever they go carry peace with them in their hearts. From the first I have felt that the worried had only got to come here to be smoothed out, and the lonely to be exhilarated, and the unhappy to be comforted, and the old to be made young. Now to this list must be added: and the widowed to be wedded; because all is well with Uncle Rudolph and Dolly, and the house once more is in its normal state of having no one in it who isn't happy.

For I grew happy—completely so for the moment, and I shouldn't be surprised if I had really done now with the other thing—the minute I caught sight of Uncle Rudolph's face when I went downstairs.

Dolly was sitting by the file looking pleased. My uncle was standing on the rug; and when he saw me he came across to me holding out both his hands, and I stopped on the bottom stair, my hands in his, and we looked at each other and laughed,—sheer happiness we laughed for.

Then we kissed each other, I still on the bottom stair and therefore level with him, and then he said, his face full of that sweet affection for the whole world that radiates from persons in his situation, 'And to think that I came here only to scold you!'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph,' I said. 'To think of it!'

'Well, if I came to scold I've stayed to love,' he said.

'Which,' said I, while we beamed at each other, 'as the Bible says, is far better.'

Then Dolly went upstairs to tell Mrs. Barnes—lovely to be going to strike off somebody's troubles with a single sentence!—and my uncle confessed to me that for the first time a doubt of Dolly had shadowed his idea of her when I left him sitting there while I fetched her—

'Conceive it—conceive it!' he cried, smiting his hands together. 'Conceive letting Germans—Germans, if you please—get even for half an instant between her and me!'—but that the minute he saw her coming down the stairs to him such love of her flooded him that he got up and proposed to her before she had so much as reached the bottom. And it was from the stairs, as from a pulpit, that Dolly, supporting herself on the balustrade, expounded Siegfried and Juchs.

She wouldn't come down till she had finished with them. She was, I gathered, ample over Siegfried, but when it came to Juchs she was profuse. Every single aspect of them both that was most likely to make a dean think it impossible to marry her was pointed out and enlarged upon. She wouldn't, she announced, come down a stair further till my uncle was in full possession of all the facts, while at the same time carefully bearing in mind the Table of Affinity.

'And were you terribly surprised and shocked, Uncle Rudolph?' I asked, standing beside him with our backs to the fire in our now familiar attitude of arm in arm.

My uncle is an ugly little man, yet at that moment I could have sworn that he had the face of an angel. He looked at me and smiled. It was the wonderfullest smile.

'I don't know what I was,' he said. 'When she had done I just said, "My Beloved"—and then she came down.'

October 15th.

This is my last night here, and this is the last time I shall write in my old-age book. To-morrow we all go away together, to Bern, where my uncle and Dolly will be married, and then he takes her to England, and Mrs. Barnes and I will also proceed there, discreetly, by another route.

So are the wanderings of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly ended, and Mrs. Barnes will enter into her idea of perfect bliss, which is to live in the very bosom of the Church with a cathedral almost in her back garden. For my uncle, prepared at this moment to love anybody, also loves Mrs. Barnes, and has invited her to make her home with him. At this moment indeed he would invite everybody to make their homes with him, for not only has he invited me but I heard him most cordially pressing those peculiarly immovable Antoines to use his house as their headquarters whenever they happen to be in England.

I think a tendency to invite runs in the family, for I too have been busy inviting. I have invited Mrs. Barnes to stay with me in London till she goes to the Deanery, and she has accepted. Together we shall travel thither, and together we shall dwell there, I am sure, in that unity which is praised by the Psalmist as a good and pleasant thing.

She will stay with me for the weeks during which my uncle wishes to have Dolly all to himself. I think there will be a great many of those weeks, from what I know of Dolly; but being with a happy Mrs. Barnes will be different from being with her as she was here. She is so happy that she consists entirely of unclouded affection. The puckers from her face, and the fears and concealments from her heart, have all gone together. She is as simple and as transparent as a child. She always was transparent, but without knowing it; now she herself has pulled off her veils, and cordially requests one to look her through and through and see for oneself how there is nothing there but contentment. A little happiness,—what wonders it works! Was there ever anything like it?

This is a place of blessing. When I came up my mountain three months ago, alone and so miserable, no vision was vouchsafed me that I would go down it again one of four people, each of whom would leave the little house full of renewed life, of restored hope, of wholesome looking-forward, clarified, set on their feet, made useful once more to themselves and the world. After all, we're none of us going to be wasted. Whatever there is of good in any of us isn't after all going to be destroyed by circumstances and thrown aside as useless. When I am so foolish—if I am so foolish I should say, for I feel completely cured! as to begin thinking backwards again with anything but a benevolent calm, I shall instantly come out here and invite the most wretched of my friends to join me, and watch them and myself being made whole.

The house, I think, ought to be rechristened.

It ought to be called Chalet du Fleuve Jordan.

But perhaps my guests mightn't like that.

THE END.