The Benefactress Part 34

"But what?" asked Anna angrily. She longed to shake her.

"Why, that about marrying you. I told him it was rot, and I was sure you wouldn't, but as he didn't know what rot was, it wasn't much good. He hunted it out in the dictionary, and still he didn't know."

Anna stood looking at her with indignant eyes. "You don't know what you have done," she said, "evidently you don't. It is a dreadful thing that the moment Miss Leech leaves you you should begin to talk of such things--such horrid things--with a stranger. A little girl of your age----"

"I didn't begin," whimpered Letty, overcome by the wrath in Anna's voice.

"But all this time you have been going on with it, instead of at once telling Miss Leech or me."

"I never met a--a lover before--I thought it--great fun."

"Then all those flowers were from him?"

"Ye--es." Letty was in tears.

"He thought I knew they were from him?"

No answer.

"Did he?" insisted Anna.

"Ye--es."

"You are a very wicked little girl," said Anna, with awful sternness.

"You have been acting untruths every day for ages, which is just as bad as telling them. I don't believe you have an idea of the horridness of what you have done--I hope you have not. Of course your lessons at Lohm have come to an end. You will not go there again. Probably I shall send you home to your mother. I am nearly sure that I shall. Go away." And she pointed to the door.

That night neither Letty nor Miss Leech appeared at supper; both were shut up in their rooms in tears. Miss Leech was quite unable to forgive herself. It was all her fault, she felt. She had been appalled when Anna showed her the heart and told her what had been going on while she was learning to cook in Frau Manske's kitchen. "Such a quiet, respectable-looking young man!" she exclaimed, horror-stricken. "And about to take holy orders!"

"Well, you see he isn't quiet and respectable at all," said Anna. "He is unusually enterprising, and quite without morals. Only a demoralised person would take advantage of a poor little pupil in that way."

She lit a candle, and burnt the heart. "There," she said, when it was in ashes, "that's the end of that. Heaven knows what Letty has been led into saying, or what ideas he has put into her head. I can't bear to think of it. I hadn't the courage to cross-question her much--I was afraid I should hear something that would make me too angry, and I'd have to tell the parson. Anyhow, dear Miss Leech, we will not leave her alone again, ever, will we? I don't suppose a thing like this will happen twice, but we won't let it have a chance, will we? Now don't be too unhappy. Tell me about Mr. Jessup."

It was Miss Leech's fault, Anna knew; but she so evidently knew it herself, and was so deeply distressed, that rebukes were out of the question. She spent the evening and most of the night in useless laments, while, in the room adjoining, Letty lay face downwards on her bed, bathed in tears. For Letty's conscience was in a grievous state of tumult. She had meant well, and she had done badly. She had not thought her aunt would be angry--was she not in full possession of the facts concerning Mr. Jessup's courts.h.i.+p? And had not Miss Leech said that no higher honour could be paid to a woman than to fall in love with her and make her an offer of marriage? Herr Klutz, it is true, was not the sort of person her aunt could marry, for her aunt was stricken in years, and he looked about the same age as her brother Peter; besides, he was clearly, thought Letty, of the guttersnipe cla.s.s, a cla.s.s that bit its nails and never married people's aunts. But, after all, her aunt could always say No when the supreme moment arrived, and n.o.body ought to be offended because they had been fallen in love with, and he was frightfully in love, and talked the most awful rot. Nor had she encouraged him. On the contrary, she had discouraged him; but it was precisely this discouragement, so virtuously administered, that lay so heavily on her conscience as she lay so heavily on her bed. She had been proud of it till this interview with her aunt; since then it had taken on a different complexion, and she was sure, dreadfully sure, that if her aunt knew of it she would be very angry indeed--much, much angrier than she was before. Letty rolled on her bed in torments; for the discouragement administered to Klutz had been in the form of poetry, and poetry written on her aunt's notepaper, and purporting to come from her.

She had meant so well, and what had she done? When no answer came by return to his poem hidden in the wallflowers, he had refused to believe that the bouquet had reached its destination. "There has been treachery," he cried; "you have played me false." And he seemed to fold up with affliction.

"I gave it to her all right. She hasn't found the letter yet," said Letty, trying to comfort, and astonished by the loudness of his grief.

"It's all right--you wait a bit. She liked the flowers awfully, and kissed them."

"Poor young lover," she thought romantically, "his heart must not bleed too much. Aunt Anna, if she ever does find the letter, will only send him a rude answer. I will answer it for her, and gently discourage him."

For if the words that proceeded from Letty's mouth were inelegant, her thoughts, whenever they dwelt on either Mr. Jessup or Herr Klutz, were invariably clothed in the tender language of sentiment.

And she had sat up till very late, composing a poem whose mission was both to discourage and console. It cost her infinite pains, but when it was finished she felt that it had been worth them all. She copied it out in capital letters on Anna's notepaper, folded it up carefully, and tied it with one of her own hair-ribbons to a little bunch of lilies-of-the-valley she had gathered for the purpose in the forest.

This was the poem:--

It is a matter of regret That circ.u.mstances won't Allow me to call thee my pet, But as it is they don't.

For why? My many years forbid, And likewise thy position.

So take advice, and strive amid Thy tears for meek submission.

ANNA.

And this poem was, at that very moment, as she well knew, in Herr Klutz's waistcoat pocket.

CHAPTER XXII

The ordinary young man, German or otherwise, hungrily emerging from boyhood into a toothsome world made to be eaten, cures himself of his appet.i.te by indulging it till he is ill, and then on a firm foundation of his own foolish corpse, or, as the poet puts it, of his dead self, begins to build up the better things of his later years.

Klutz was an ordinary young man, and arrived at early manhood as hungry as his fellows; but his father was a parson, his grandfather had been a parson, his uncles were all parsons, and Fate, coming cruelly to him in the gloomy robes of the Lutheran Church, his natural follies had had no opportunity of getting out, developing, and dissolving, but remained shut up in his heart, where they amused themselves by seething uninterruptedly, to his great discomfort, while the good parson, in whose care he was, talked to him of the world to come.

"The world to come," thought Klutz, hungering and thirsting for a taste of the world in which he was, "may or may not be very well in its way; but its way is not my way." And he listened in a silence that might be taken either for awed or bored to Manske's expatiations. Manske, of course, interpreted it as awed. "Our young vicar," he said to his wife, "thinks much. He is serious and contemplative beyond his years. He is not a man of many and vain words." To which his wife replied only by a sniff of scepticism.

She had no direct proofs that Klutz was not serious and contemplative, but during his first winter in their house he had fallen into her bad graces because of a certain indelicately appreciative att.i.tude he displayed towards her apple jelly. Not that she grudged him apple jelly in just quant.i.ties; both she and her husband were fond of it, and the eating of it was luckily one of those pleasures whose indulgence is innocent. But there are limits beyond which even jelly becomes vicious, and these limits Herr Klutz continually overstepped. Every autumn she made a sufficient number of pots of it to last discreet appet.i.tes a whole year. There had always been vicars in their house, and there had never been a dearth of jelly. But this year, so early as Easter, there were only two pots left. She could not conveniently lock it up and refuse to produce any, for then she and her husband would not have it themselves; so all through the winter she had watched the pots being emptied one after the other, and the thinner the rows in her storeroom grew, the more p.r.o.nounced became her conviction that Klutz's piety was but skin deep. A young man who could behave in so unbridled a fas.h.i.+on could not be really serious; there was something, she thought, that smacked suspiciously of the flesh and the devil about such conduct.

Great, then, was her astonishment when, the penultimate pot being placed at Easter on the table, Klutz turned from it with loathing. Nor did he ever look at apple jelly again; nor did he, of other viands, eat enough to keep him in health. He who had been so voracious forgot his meals, and had to be coaxed before he would eat at all. He spent his spare time writing, sitting up sometimes all night, and consuming candles at the same head-long rate with which he had previously consumed the jelly; and when towards May her husband once more commented on his seriousness, Frau Manske's conscience no longer permitted her to sniff.

"You must be ill," she said to him at last, on a day when he had sat through the meals in silence and had refused to eat at all.

"Ill!" burst out Klutz, whose body and soul seemed both to be in one fierce blaze of fever, "I am sick--sick even unto death."

And he did feel sick. Only two days had elapsed since he had received Anna's poem and had been thrown by it into a tumult of delight and triumph; for the discouragement it contained had but encouraged him the more, appearing to be merely the becoming self-depreciation of a woman before him who has been by nature appointed lord. He was perfectly ready to overlook the obstacles to their union to which she alluded. She could not help her years; there were, truly, more of them than he would have wished, but luckily they were not visible on that still lovely face. As to position, he supposed she meant that he was not _adelig_; but a man, he reflected, compared to a woman, is always _adelig_, whatever his name may be, by virtue of his higher and n.o.bler nature. He had been for rus.h.i.+ng at once to Kleinwalde; but his pupil and confidant had said "Don't," and had said it with such energy that for that day at least he had resisted. And now, the very morning of the day on which the Frau Pastor was asking him whether he were ill, he had received a curt note from Miss Leech, informing him that Miss Letty Estcourt would for the present discontinue her German studies. What had happened? Even the poem, lying warm on his heart, was not able to dispel his fears. He had flown at once to Kleinwalde, feeling that it was absurd not to follow the dictates of his heart and cast himself in person at Anna's no doubt expectant feet, and the door had been shut in his face--rudely shut, by a coa.r.s.e servant, whose manner had so much enraged him that he had almost shown her the precious verses then and there, to convince her of his importance in that house; indeed, the only consideration that restrained him was a conviction of her ignorance of the English tongue.

"Would you like to see the doctor?" inquired Frau Manske, startled by his looks and words; perhaps he had caught something infectious; an infectious vicar in the house would be horrible.

"The doctor!" cried Klutz; and forthwith quoted the German rendering of the six lines beginning, Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased.

Frau Manske was seriously alarmed. Not aware that he was quoting, she was horrified to hear him calling her _Du_, a privilege confined to lovers, husbands, and near relations, and asking her questions that she was sure no decent vicar would ever ask the respectable mother of a family. "I am sure you ought to see the doctor," she said nervously, getting up hastily and going to the door.

"No, no," said Klutz; "the doctor does not exist who can help me."

His hand went to the breast-pocket containing the poem, and he fingered it feverishly. He longed to show it to Frau Manske, to translate it for her, to let her see what the young Kleinwalde lady, joint patron with Herr von Lohm of her husband's living, thought of him.

"I will ask my husband about the doctor," persisted Frau Manske, disappearing with unusual haste. If she had stayed one minute longer he would have shown her the poem.

Klutz did not wait to hear what the pastor said, but crushed his felt hat on to his head and started for a violent walk. He would go through Kleinwalde, past the house; he would haunt the woods; he would wait about. It was a hot, gusty May afternoon, and the wind that had been quiet so long was blowing up the dust in clouds; but he hurried along regardless of heat and wind and dust, with an energy surprising in one who had eaten nothing all day. Love had come to him very turbulently. He had been looking for it ever since he left school; but his watchful parents had kept him in solitary places, empty, uninhabited places like Lohm, places where the parson's daughters were either married or were still tied on the cus.h.i.+ons of infancy. Sometimes he had been invited, as a great condescension, to the Dellwigs' Sunday parties; and there too he had looked around for Love. But the company consisted solely of stout farmers' wives, ladies of thirty, forty, fifty--of a dizzy antiquity, that is, and their talk was of b.u.t.ter-making and sausages, and they cared not at all for Love. "Oh, Love, Love, Love, where shall I find thee?" he would cry to the stars on his way home through the forest after these evenings; but the stars twinkled coldly on, obviously profoundly indifferent as to whether he found it or not. His chest of drawers was full of the poems into which he had poured the emotions of twenty, the emotions and longings that well-fed, unoccupied twenty mistakes for soul. And then the English Miss had burst upon his gaze, sitting in her carriage on that stormy March day, smiling at him from the very first, piercing his heart through and through with eyes that many persons besides Klutz saw were lovely, and so had he found Love, and for ever lost his interest in apple jelly.

It was a confident, bold Love, with more hopes than fears, more a.s.surance than misgivings. The poem seemed to burn his pocket, so violently did he long to show it round, to tell everyone of his good fortune. The lilies-of-the-valley to which it had been tied and that he wore since all day long in his coat, were hardly brown, and yet he was tired already of having such a secret to himself. What advantage was there in being told by the lady of Kleinwalde that she regretted not being able to call him _Lammchen_ or _Schatzchen_ (the alternative renderings his dictionary gave of "pet") if no one knew it?

When he reached the house he walked past it at a snail's pace, staring up at the blank, repellent windows. Not a soul was to be seen. He went on discontentedly. What should he do? The door had been shut in his face once already that day, why he could not imagine. He hesitated, and turned back. He would try again. Why not? The Miss would have scolded the servant roundly when she heard that the person who dwelt in her thoughts as a _Lammchen_ had been turned away. He went boldly round the gra.s.s plot in front of the house and knocked.

The same servant appeared. Instantly on seeing him she slammed the door, and called out "_Nicht zu Haus!_"

"_Ekelhaftes Benehmen!_" cried Klutz aloud, flaming into sudden pa.s.sion.

His mind, never very strong, had grown weaker along with his body during these exciting days of love and fasting. A wave of fury swept over him as he stood before the shut door and heard the servant going away; and hardly knowing what he did, he seized the knocker, and knocked and knocked till the woods rang.