XXI
The concert for the hospital was almost over. Muriel, who had been selling programmes, leant against the radiator and felt its friendly warmth comforting her. Across the row of bobbing heads, she could see Mrs. Neale's gaunt head and her untidy hair. Duty had brought Mrs. Neale to the concert, and duty was keeping her there until the end, but the strained lines about her mouth, and the misery in her long face could hardly be due entirely to Mrs. Purdon's rendering of "Little grey home in the west."
Something had happened to Godfrey. He was still in London, so it could not be the worst thing that happened to men during the war. Muriel hardly thought that it was even a sudden order to the front. She told herself that it was this, but she knew, just as she knew after the bombardment was over, that she had lost Godfrey now a second time.
She wished that the concert was over. She was so tired of everything that happened. Connie, working among the mud and turnips of the sheep-fold at Thraile, was immensely to be envied. How like her to win her domestic battles, when Muriel always lost hers! Since Connie had gone, Muriel was more securely tied to Miller's Rise than ever.
Against the other radiators, and by the two curtained doorways, the other girl programme-sellers talked, as they waited, to officers from the Wearminster camp. It was the same everywhere. At the Pictures, on motor-cycles, at the garrison sports, here at the concert; everywhere life was regulated upon the partner system. Since their visit to Scarborough, Mrs. Hammond had taken fewer pains to provide Muriel with a man to save her face, because she too was expecting Godfrey Neale to write. She did not know what had happened in the hall at 199 The Esplanade. She did not know that Muriel had made herself cheap and then just let him go.
A scattered fusillade of clapping followed the stately exodus of Mrs. Purdon from the platform. One far more vigorous heralded the entrance of Queenie Saunders, a florist's daughter from Kingsport. Queenie was an L.R.A.M. and really she played the piano quite well, thought Muriel. Also her silk-clad ankles below her short skirt were pronounced fetching by Captain Galtry.
"Fetching. I should call her very fetching," he remarked to Mrs. Waring with the air of a connoisseur.
"Fetching?" echoed that lady archly. "What does she fetch?"
Muriel turned away. That precisely was what she wanted to know more than anything else in the world. She lost the end of the concert in a bitter reverie.
Mrs. Neale stood beside her.
"Ah, good evening, Muriel."
"Good evening."
They made way for the crowd brushing past, and Muriel was conscious then that Mrs. Neale approved of her.
"It's a long time since I saw you."
"Yes." She would speak naturally. "The last time was when Godfrey brought me over to tea, when we met out walking."
"Yes." Mrs. Neale now was silent.
Muriel thought, "I believe that she would have been glad if he had wanted to marry me." She felt grateful to Godfrey's mother.
"Have you had any news of Godfrey lately?" she asked, feeling that it was perhaps the bravest thing that she had ever done.
"Yes. I suppose that you would call it news."
Muriel knew then what was coming. She knew too that she herself must say it.
"Is he engaged to Clare yet?"
Mrs. Neale turned upon her. "You knew?"
"Clare was my friend," said Muriel.
"She wrote to you?"
Muriel shook her head.
"I have not heard from her since she wrote to tell me of her engagement to Signor Alvarados."
"Then how did you know? Godfrey wrote?" Mrs. Neale's dark eyes flashed an accusation at her, as though she said, "You little fool, why couldn't you hold him? You had your chance, and you would have been inoffensive. If he had married you, he would still have been mine. You could never have stolen him from me, and now he has gone. You little fool."
"I knew that he was in love with her. I knew that she had returned to England. He loved her from the time that he first met her. And he has been accustomed to get what he wants."
"That was a boy and girl affair. And, then, she's so unsuitable. A girl like that would never settle down to the country. She'll paint the drawing-room yellow with black stripes and fill the house with Italian tenors and try to be Bohemian. Godfrey would hate it."
"Godfrey wanted to marry her. She—she'll find him a change from the men whom she has met lately." The thought came to her, "Who is Godfrey, that here we all are with our lives centred in his?" She thought of him as she knew him to be, a little stupid, kindly and sure of himself. Only in loving Clare had he ever been brushed by the wings of divinity, and Clare was the one person whom he could encounter who valued her own personality before she thought of his. "When it comes to it, Clare will be more selfish than Godfrey," she thought, and yet knew that for his sake she was glad that they had met again. For herself, she only knew that life had conquered her. She could not look into Mrs. Neale's sad, ugly face.
"I'm sorry," she said, shuffling her foot along the floor. "Men do as they like. That's where they're different. We just wait to see what they will do. It's not our fault. Things happen to us, or they don't. We stretch out our hands and grasp nothing."
Godfrey's mother turned on her again.
"Stuff and nonsense. A clever woman can do as she likes. I was eight years older than Godfrey's father, and I have never been a beauty, but I married him and I bore him a son, and I've kept Godfrey's confidence till now. I let him do as he pleases, because I want my son to be his own master. I did as I pleased when I was young. He must face his fences and take his tosses himself. He's been his own master since his father was killed, but he is that because I please that he shall be."
"Some people never do as they please. They are bound by a sort of burden that they call duty."
"Duty? I've no patience with this pother about duty. I suppose that some people would say that it's my duty to keep Godfrey from making a fool of himself now. I shan't. Life's too short. I've no patience with this talk about souls."
Nobody, reflected Muriel, had been talking about souls, but Mrs. Neale was like that, frequently breaking through the barrier of speech and alluding to the hidden thought that lay beyond. That was why Marshington privately thought her a little mad.
"My Sealyham bitch pupped in the drawing-room on Tuesday afternoon. I've lost my parlourmaid in consequence."
"Really? Oh, aren't maids impossible these days?" broke in the soft voice of Mrs. Hammond. She had drifted gently up to Mrs. Neale, after having just given Mrs. Waring to understand that the present mistress of the Weare Grange was talking to her successor.
Her mother would have to know about Godfrey, thought Muriel. This was going to be the part that hurt her most of all. She remembered the incident of Connie and Dr. McKissack. Better use the same treatment here, and have it over quickly.
"Mother," she said brightly, "have you heard Mrs. Neale's splendid news? Godfrey's engaged to Clare, Clare Alvarados, Clare Duquesne, you know. They met again in London."
Only for the flicker of an eyelid, did Mrs. Hammond hesitate.
"Really?" she said. "How splendid, dear! I am glad, Mrs. Neale; such a nice, bright girl. Do you know, I always had a feeling that something like that might happen there. I've always had a warm place in my heart for Clare."
She did it so well that Muriel herself hardly knew how much was true. Perhaps more than she thought, for her mother had already seen a way to transform her defeat to victory. As Muriel bent over the treasurer's table five minutes later, counting the money from the programmes, she heard her mother say to Mrs. Marshall Gurney:
"Yes, you know, she was Muriel's great friend. We are so delighted. Right from the first. . . . I take quite a credit to myself for the match . . . Lord Powell's niece, you know, so suitable. And so nice for Muriel if she comes to live at the Weare Grange."