In the Mountains

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

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.