The Pastor's Wife

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

To shorten it Ingeborg asked whether Emmi was the wife who had been shot—"The sinning one," she explained as nobody answered.

The silence became awful.

She looked up, startled by it. From the expression on their faces and the general feel of things she thought that perhaps they wouldn't mind if she went home now.

She got up, dropping the spoon out of her saucer. "I—think I must be going," she said. "It's a long way home."

"It seems hardly worth while to have come," said the Baroness with extraordinary chill.

To which Ingeborg, absorbed in the failure of her effort to find help and comfort, answered droopingly "No."

Outside the sun had just dropped behind the forest line, and she would have to walk fast if she wanted to be home before dark. The mist was already rising over the meadows beyond the trees of the garden and beginning to mix with the rose and lilac of the sky. The sandy avenue she had come along on that hot July day when first she discovered Glambeck lay at her feet in the still beauty of the last of its dresses for the year, very delicate, very transparent already, the leaves of the beeches almost all on the ground, making of the road a ribbon of light. A November smell of dampness and of peat smoke from cottage chimneys filled the air. There was a brooding peace over the world, as though in every house, in every family, brotherly love must needs in such gentleness continue.

She went carefully down the steps, for her body was already growing cumbersome, and along the golden way of the avenue. She tried not to cry, not to smudge the beautiful evening with her own disappointments. How foolish she had been to suppose that because she wanted to talk Baroness Glambeck would want to listen! Moods did not coincide so conveniently. She walked along, diligently stopping any stray tear with her handkerchief before it could disgrace her by coming out on to her cheeks. Presently Baroness Glambeck might passionately want to listen—it was quite conceivable—and she herself would not in the least want to talk. How foolish it all was! One had to stand on one's own feet. It was no good going about calling out for help. It was less than no good crying. Some day, if she continued intrepidly in this career of maternity which seemed to be marked out for her, she, too, would be happily pouring out coffee for a grown-up and successful man-child, all her impatiences and pangs long since forgotten. You clearly couldn't have a grown-up man-child to love and be proud of if you hadn't begun him in time, he had at some period or other to be begun. And he had to be begun in time, else one might easily be too old for acute appreciation. She went as quickly as she could down the avenue, thinking on large valiant lines and underneath her thinking feeling altogether forsaken. It must be nice, a warm thing to live where one's friends and relatives were within reach, where one could, for instance, when one felt extra lonely go and have tea with one's mother....

A man carrying what seemed to be a great deal of something indefinite was coming down the avenue towards her. She looked at him vaguely, absorbed in her thoughts. It was not the Baron, and except for him she knew nobody. She was within a yard or two of him when a quantity of sheets of paper, long slender brushes, odd articles she did not recognise, suddenly seemed to burst out from his person and scatter themselves over the beech-leaves on the ground.

"Oh, damn!" said the man, making efforts to catch them.