Part 13 (2/2)
”I don't,” said Anna. ”It would be very kind--I really would be grateful. It is so important that I should find somebody soon.”
”It is of the first importance,” said Lohm.
”Has the parson told him of my plans already?” thought Anna. But Lohm had not seen Manske that morning, and was only picturing this little thing to himself, this dainty little lady, used to such a different life, alone in the empty house, struggling with her small supply of German to make the two raw servants understand her ways. Anna was not a little thing at all, and she would have been half-amused and half-indignant if she had known that that was the impression she had made on him.
”My sister, Grafin Hasdorf,” he began--”Heavens,” she thought, ”has _he_ got an unattached sister?”--”sometimes stays with me with her children, and when she is here will be able to help you in many ways if you will allow her to. She too knew your uncle from her childhood. She will be greatly interested to know that you have had the courage to settle here.”
”Courage?” echoed Anna. ”Why, I love it. It's the most beautiful place in the world.”
Lohm looked doubtfully at her for a moment; but there was no mistaking the sincerity of those eyes. ”It is pleasant to hear you say so,” he said. ”My sister Trudi would scarcely credit her ears if she were present. To her it is a terrible place, and she pities me with all her heart because my lot is cast in it.”
Anna laughed. She thought she knew very well what sister Trudis were like. ”I do not pity you,” she said; ”I couldn't pity any being who lived in this air, and under this sky. Look how blue it is--and the geese--did you ever see such white geese?”
A flock of geese were being driven across the sunny yard, dazzling in their whiteness. Anna lifted up her face to the sun and drew in a long breath of the sharp air. She forgot Lohm for a moment--it was such a glorious Easter Sunday, and the world was so full of the abundant gifts of G.o.d.
Dellwig, who had been watching them from his wife's window, thought that the brawlers who were going to be fined had been kept waiting long enough, and came out again on to the steps.
Lohm saw him, and felt that he must go. ”I must do my business,” he said, ”but as you have given me permission I will send an advertis.e.m.e.nt to the papers to-night. Of course you desire to have an elderly lady of good family?”
”Yes, but not too elderly--not so elderly that she won't be able to work. There will be so much to do, so very much to do.”
Lohm went away wondering what work there could possibly be, except the agreeable and easy work of seeing that this young lady was properly fed, and properly petted, and in every way taken care of.
CHAPTER X
He sent the advertis.e.m.e.nt by the evening post to two or three of the best newspapers. He had seen the pastor after morning church, who had at once poured into his ears all about Anna's twelve ladies, garnis.h.i.+ng the story with interjections warmly appreciative of the action of Providence in the matter. Lohm had been considerably astonished, but had said little; it was not his way to say much at any time to the parson, and the ecstasies about the new neighbour jarred on him. Miss Estcourt's need of advice must have been desperate for her to have confided in Manske. He appreciated his good qualities, but his family had never been intimate with the parson; perhaps because from time immemorial the Lohms had been chiefly males, and the att.i.tude of male Germans towards parsons is, at its best, one of indulgence. This Lohm restricted his dealings with him, as his father had done before him, to the necessary deliberations on the treatment of the sick and poor, and to official meetings in the schoolhouse. He was invariably kind to him, and lent as willing an ear as his slender purse allowed to applications for a.s.sistance; but the idea of discussing spiritual experiences with him, or, in times of personal sorrow, of dwelling conversationally on his griefs, would never have occurred to him. The easy familiarity with which Manske spoke of the Deity offended his taste. These things, these sacred and awful mysteries, were the secrets between the soul and its G.o.d. No man, thought Lohm, should dare to touch with profane questioning the veil shrouding his neighbour's inner life. Manske, however, knew no fear and no compunction. He would ask the most tremendous questions between two mouthfuls of pudding, backing himself up with the whole authority of the Lutheran Church, besides the Scriptures; and if the poor people and the partly educated liked it, and were edified, and enjoyed stirring up and talking over their religious emotions almost as much as they did the latest village scandal, Lohm, who had no taste either for scandal or emotions, kept the parson at arm's length.
He thought a good deal about what Manske had told him during the afternoon. She had gone to the parson, then, for help, because there was no one else to go to. Poor little thing. He could imagine the sort of speeches Manske had made her, and the sort of advertis.e.m.e.nt he would have told her to write. Poor little thing. Well, what he could do was to put her in the way of getting a companion as quickly as possible, and a very sensible, capable woman it ought to be. No wonder she was not to be past hard work. Work there would certainly be, with twelve women in the house undergoing the process of being made happy. Lohm could not help smiling at the plan. He thought of Miss Estcourt courageously trying to demolish the crust of dejection that had formed in the course of years over the hearts of her patients, and he trusted that she would not exhaust her own youth and joyousness in the effort. Perhaps she would succeed. He did not remember having heard of any scheme quite a.n.a.logous, and possibly she would override all obstacles in triumph, and the patients who entered her home with the burden of their past misery heavy upon them, would develop in the suns.h.i.+ne of her presence into twelve riotously jovial ladies. But would not she herself suffer? Would not her own strength and hopefulness be sapped up by those she benefited? He could not think that it would be to the advantage of the world at large to subst.i.tute twelve, nay fifty, nay any number of jolly old ladies, for one girl with such sweet and joyous eyes.
This, of course, was the purely masculine point of view. The women to be benefited--why he thought of them as old is not clear, for you need not be old to be unhappy--would have protested, probably, with indignant cries that individually they were well worth Miss Estcourt, in any case were every bit as good as she was, and collectively--oh, absurd.
He thought of his sister Trudi. Perhaps she knew of some one who would be both kind and clever, and protect Miss Estcourt in some measure from the twelve. Trudi's friends, it is true, were not the sort among whom staid companions are found. Their husbands were chiefly lieutenants, and they spent their time at races. They lived in flats in Hanover, where the regiment was quartered, and flats are easy to manage, and none of these young women would endure, he supposed, to have an elderly companion always hanging round. Still, there was a remote possibility that some one of them might be able to recommend a suitable person. If Trudi were staying with him now she would be a great help; not so much because of what she would do, but because he could go with her to Kleinwalde, and Miss Estcourt could come to his house when she wanted anything, and need not depend solely on the parson. It was his duty, considering old Joachim's unchanging kindness towards him, and the pains the old man had taken to help him in the management of his estate, and to encourage him at a time when he greatly needed help and encouragement, to do all that lay in his power for old Joachim's niece.
When he heard that she was coming he had decided that this was his plain duty: that she was so pretty, so adorably pretty and simple and friendly only made it an unusually pleasant one. ”I will write to Trudi,” he thought, ”and ask her to come over for a week or two.”
He sat down at his writing-table in the big window overlooking the farmyard, and began the letter. But he felt that it would be absurd to ask her to come on Miss Estcourt's account. Why should she do anything for Miss Estcourt, and why should he want his sister to do anything for her? That would be the first thing that would strike the astute Trudi.
So he merely wrote reminding her that she had not stayed with him since the previous summer, and suggested that she should come for a few days with her children, now that the spring was coming and the snow had gone.
”The woods will soon be blue with anemones,” he wrote, though he well knew that Trudi's att.i.tude towards anemones was cold. Perhaps her little boys would like to pick them; anyhow, some sort of an inducement had to be held out.
Outside his window was a duck-pond, thin sheets of ice still floating in broken pieces on its surface; behind the duck-pond was the dairy; and on either side of the yard were cow-sheds and pig-styes. The farm carts stood in a peaceful Sunday row down one side, and at the other end of the yard, shutting out the same view of the sea and island that Anna saw from her bedroom window, was a mountainous range of manure. When Trudi came, she never entered the rooms on this side of the house, because, as she explained, it was one of her peculiarities not to like manure; and she slept and ate and aired her opinions on the west side, where the garden lay between the house and the road. She never would have come to Lohm at all, not being burdened with any undue sentiment in regard to ties of blood, if it had not been necessary to go somewhere in the summer, and if the other places had not been beyond the resources of the family purse, always at its emptiest when the racing season was over and the card-playing at an end. As it was, this was a cheap and convenient haven, and her brother Axel was kind to the little boys, and not too angry when they plundered his apple-trees, damaged the knees of his ponies, and did their best to twist off the tails of his disconcerted sucking-pigs.
He was the eldest of three brothers, and she came last. She was twenty-six, and he was ten years older. When the father died, the land ought properly to have been divided between the four children, but such a proceeding would have been extremely inconvenient, and the two younger brothers, and the sister just married, agreed to accept their share in money, and to leave the estate entirely to Axel. It was the best course to take, but it threw Axel into difficulties that continued for years.
His father, with four times the money, had lived very comfortably at Lohm, and the children had been brought up in prosperity. For eight years his eldest son had farmed the estate with a quarter the means, and had found it so far from simple that his hair had turned grey in the process. It needed considerable skill and vigilance to enable a man to extract a decent living from the soil of Lohm. Part of it was too boggy, and part of it too sandy, and the trees had all been cut down thirty years before by a bland grandfather, serenely indifferent to the opinion of posterity. Axel's first work had been to make plantations of young firs and pines wherever the soil was poorest, and when he rode through the beautiful Kleinwalde forest he endeavoured to extract what pleasure he could from the thought that in a hundred years Lohm too would have a forest. But the pleasure to be extracted from this thought was of a surprisingly subdued quality. All his pleasures were of a subdued quality. His days were made up of hard work, of that effort to induce both ends to meet which knocks the savour out of life with such a singular completeness. He was born with an uncomfortably exact conception of duty; and now at the end of the best half of his life, after years of struggling on that poor soil against the odds of that stern climate, this conception had shaped itself into a fixed belief that the one thing entirely beautiful, the one thing wholly worthy of a man's ambition, is the right doing of his duty. So, he thought, shall a man have peace at the last.
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