She was sobered. She was overcome by the vivid recognition of her cheap enthusiasm.

"Oh," she said, staring up at him, wide awake, entirely ashamed, "how _patient_ you've been with me!"

And as he still held her by the arm, his eyes blazing down at her from the top step of the crypt, she could find no way of expressing her shame and contrition except by bending her head and laying her cheek on his hand.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

They stood there for what seemed to the beadle at the bottom an intolerable time, the lady, evidently n.o.body certificated, with her cheek on the gentleman's hand, and he himself, as honest a man as ever wanted to get his tip and be done with it, kept waiting with nothing to do but curse and rattle his keys; and though it was summer the crypt was cold, and so would his feet be soon; and what could the world be coming to when people carried their caressings even into crypts? Becoming maddened by these delays the beadle cursed them both, their present, past, and future, roundly and thoroughly and also profanely--for by the accident of his calling he was very perfect in profanity--beneath his breath.

"I'm so sorry, so sorry," Ingeborg was murmuring, who did nothing by halves, neither penitence, nor humility, nor grat.i.tude.

"My worshipped child," whispered Ingram, immensely moved by this swift change in her, and changed as swiftly himself by the softness of her cheek against his hand.

"Oughtn't we to go to Venice to-night?" she asked, still standing in that oddly touching att.i.tude of apology.

"Not to-night."

"But how can a picture get painted in just that little time?"

"Ah, but you know I'm good at pictures."

"But I can't stay a minute longer than Thursday. I have to be back on Sat.u.r.day at the very latest."

"You'll see. It will all be quite easy."

"But to think that I _forgot_ the picture!" she said, looking up at him shocked, while the ancient humility in which the Bishop had so carefully trained her descended on her once more, only four-fold this time, like a garment grown voluminous since last it was put on.

They had for some reason been talking in murmurs, and the embittered beadle, losing his self-control, began to say things audibly. Strong in the knowledge of tourist ignorance when it came to real language in Italian, he said exactly what he thought; and what he thought was so monstrous, so inappropriate to beadles and to the atmosphere of a crypt, besides being so extremely and personally rude, that it roused Ingram, who knew Italian almost better than the beadle--for his included scholarly by-ways in vituperation, strange and curious twists beyond the reach of the uneducated--to pour a sudden great burning blast of red-hot contumely down on to his head; and having done this he turned, and holding Ingeborg's hand led her up the steps again, leaving the beadle at the bottom, solitary, shrivelled, and singed.

They thought no more of crypts and beadles. They looked neither to the right nor to the left. Ingram held her by the hand all the way down the Cathedral, and the piazza when they came out on to it with its crowds of vociferating men and bell-ringing tramcars and sellers of souvenirs seemed to Ingeborg nothing now but a noisy irrelevance. Whole strips of postcards were thrust unnoticed into her face. The purpose of her journey was the picture. Marvellous that she should have lost sight of it and of the wonder and pride of being needed for it--needed at last for anything, she who so profoundly had longed to be needed, but needed for this, as a collaborator actually, even though pa.s.sive and humble, in the creation of something splendid.

He put her into a cab and drove with her away from the fuss and din. She was exquisite again to him, adorable altogether. The memory of the fret and hot irritation of the day was wiped out as though it had never been by that other memory of her sweet apology on the steps of the crypt. He told the driver, for it was towards evening, to take them to those gardens described by the guide-book as probably the finest public park in Italy; and presently, as they walked together in the remoter parts, the dusk dropped down like a curtain between them and the Sunday night crowd collecting round the fountains. Tall trees, and clumps of box, and rose-bushes shut out everything except mystery; and she in that quiet place of trickling water and dim flowers began again to talk to him as she had talked at Kokensee, softly, deliciously, about nothing except himself. It was like the shadow of a great rock in a thirsty land; it was infinite refreshment and relief.

She talked about the picture, with reverence, adoringly. She told him how in the rush of new impressions she had been forgetting everything that really mattered, not only that greatest of them all, but the other things she had to thank him for besides--Italy, her unexpected holiday, due so entirely to him. She said, her husky voice softer than ever with grat.i.tude, "You have been giving me happiness and happiness. You've heaped happiness on me with both your hands." She said, searching only for words that should be sweet enough, "Do you know I could cry to think of it all--of all you've been to me since you came to Kokensee. When I'm back there again, this time with you will be like a hidden precious stone, and when I'm stupid and thinking that life is dull I'll get it out and look at it, and it will flash colour and light at me."

"When you talk like that," said Ingram, greatly stirred, "it is as though a little soul had come back into a deserted and forgotten body."

"Is it?" she murmured, so glad that she could please him, perfectly melted into the one desire to make up.

"When you talk like that," he said, "life becomes a thing so happy that it shines golden inside. You have the soul I have always sought, the thing that comes through me like light through a stained-gla.s.s window, so that I am lit, so that my heart is all sweet fire."

"And you," said Ingeborg, picking up his image as she so often irritatingly did, only now it did not irritate him, and flinging it back with a fresh adornment, "the thought of you, the memory of you when I've gone back to my everyday life, will be like a perfect rose-window in a grey wall."

"As though we could be separated again. As though being in love with somebody miles away isn't just intolerable ache. Oh, my dear, why do you look at me?" he asked with a large simplicity of manner that made her ashamed of her surprise; "because I talk of being in love? Why shouldn't two people simply love each other and say so? And if I love you it isn't with the greedy possessive love I've had for women before, but as though the feeling one has for the light on crystals or for clear shining after rain, the feeling of beauty in deep and delicate things, has become personified and exalted."

She made a little deprecating gesture. He was almost too kind to her; too kind. But n.o.body could reasonably object to being loved like crystals and clearness after rain. Robert couldn't possibly mind that.

She cast about for things to say back, shining things to match his, but he found them all first; it was impossible to keep up with him.

"You are delicate and fine, like translucent gold," he said. "And you are brave, and various, and alive. And you are full of sweet little fancies, little swirls of mood, kind eager things. Never in my life is there the remotest chance that I shall meet so good and deep a happiness as you again, and I put my heart once and for all between your dear cool little hands."

She felt bent beneath this generosity, she who had been so tiresome; and not only tiresome, but she who had had doubts, unworthy ones she now saw, round about breakfast time, for instance, piercing through her silly delight in Italy, as to whether she were giving even any satisfaction.

"I perceive," he went on, "I've never really loved before. I've played with dolls, and expressed myself to dummies--like a boy with a ball he _must_ play with, and failing a playfellow he b.u.mps it against a wall and catches it again. But you play back, my living dear heart--"

More and more was she invaded by a happy surprise. The _things_ she had been doing without knowing it! All the right ones, apparently, the whole time--playing back, coming up to his expectations; and moments such as those at the Borromean Islands, and when there were picture postcards, and just recently in the tea-room, had not in the least been what she supposed. She had not understood. She glowed to think she had not understood.

"I've been so wearied and distressed with life," he went on, talking in a low, moved voice. "It has seemed at last such an old hairy thing of jealousies and shame and disillusionments, and work falling short of its best, and endless coming and going of people, and me for ever left with a blunted edge. And now you come, you, and are like a great sweet wind blowing across it, and like clear skies, and a moon rising before sunset. It is as though you had taken up a brush and painted out the old ugly tangles and made a new picture of me in luminous, clear watercolour."

Her surprise grew and grew, and her gladness that she had been mistaken.

"Those streaks," she thought. "He didn't really _mean_ what he said about those streaks--"

"Somehow, though quite intelligent all along," continued Ingram, "I've been shallow and hard in my feelings about everything. Now I feel love like a deep soft river flowing through my heart. I love every one because I love you. I can set out to make people happy, I can do and say fine and generous things because of the love of you shining in my heart--"

"That beadle," she thought, "he didn't really _mean_ what he said to that beadle--"

"You're what I've been looking for in women all my life," he went on.

"You're the dream come true. I've only tried to love before. And now you've come, and made me love, which we all dream of doing, and given me love, which we all dream of getting--"

Her pleasure became tinged with a faint uneasiness, for she wouldn't have thought, left to herself, that she had been giving him love.

Pastors' wives didn't give love except to their pastors. Friendship, yes; she had given him warm friendship, and an abject admiration of his gifts, and pride, and gratefulness--oh, such pride and gratefulness--that he should like being with her and saying lovely things to her; but love? She had supposed love was reserved for lovers.

Well, if he liked to call it love ... one must not be miss-ish it was very kind of him.... It was, also, more and more wonderful to her that she had been doing and being and giving all these things without knowing it. Her suddenly discovered accomplishments staggered her. "Is it possible," she thought with amazement, "that I'm _clever_?"

And as if he had heard the word lovers in her mind he said it.

"Other lovers," he said, "are engaged perpetually in sycophantic adaptations--"

"In what?"

She thought he had been going to say engaged to be married, for though she had known even at Redchester, in spite of the care taken to shut such knowledge out, that the world included wicked persons who loved without engagements or marriages, sometimes indeed even without having been properly introduced, persons who were afterwards punished by the correctly plighted by not being asked to tea, they were, the Bishop informed an anxious inquirer once when he had supposed her out of the room, in G.o.d's infinite mercy numerically negligible.

But Ingram did not heed her. "Except us," he went on.

"Us?" she echoed. Well, if one took the word in its widest sense.

"We fit," he said. "We fit, and reflect each other. I in your heart, you in my heart, like two mirrors that hang opposite one another for ever."

A doubt as to the expediency of so much talk of hearts and love crept into her mind, but she quieted it by remembering how much worse the Song of Solomon was--"And yet so respectable really," she said, continuing her thought aloud, "and all only about the Church."

"What is so respectable? Come and sit on that seat by the bush covered with roses," he said. "Look--in this faint light they are as white and delicate as you."

"The Song of Solomon. It--just happened to come into my head. Things do," she added, beginning to lay hold of the first words that occurred to her, no longer at her ease.

She sat down on the edge of the seat where he put her.