XXXIII
The meeting of the House Committee for St. Catherine's Home was over when Muriel entered the room. Down the dining-room table of Miller's Rise were scattered notebooks, sheets of blotting-paper, and occasional inkpots. Mrs. Hammond, in her black and white dress, talked with animation to the Honble. Mrs. Potter Vallery. When Muriel saw this, she smiled a little. Nobody noticed the smile but Mr. Vaughan, and it made him feel vaguely uneasy.
He had not been to Miller's Rise for a long time, not indeed since the spring of 1916, when he had called to offer his sympathy after Connie's death. Miller's Rise was not very near to the Vicarage, and he hated calls, and though Mrs. Hammond was charming up to a point—rather a low point perhaps—the vicar never felt quite happy in her old-rose drawing-room. He sat now a little apart from the assembled ladies, hoping very much that Mrs. Cartwright, or Miss Rymer, the Matron of St. Simeon's, would not consider it their duty to approach him sociably. He found that Marshington committees depressed him because nobody was quite whole-hearted over anything. Even when the House Committee laid a request for new clothes-horses before the General Committee, everybody seemed to weigh the question in the balance against Mrs. Potter Vallery's approval or Mrs. Cartwright's possible discomfiture. Hedging from self-interest to sentimental altruism, weighing a hundred side-issues against the case presented, they gave their opinions from policy rather than conviction. This distressed the vicar. But he had decided long ago that these committees were very good for the ladies, and did little harm to the Rescue Work, and that God frequently pours the waters of His mercy from imperfect vessels. So, with one eye on the clock, the vicar had taken the chair at this "extraordinary" but quite usual meeting, wondering how soon he could escape to his peaceful library and "The Personnel of the Estate of Clergy during the Lancastrian Experiment." Whenever particularly bored by the limitations of his parishioners, he fled to the study of the limitations of his countrymen in former centuries and found it consoling.
"You're always thinking about the identity of the pseudo-Walsingham or whether the Confirmatio Cartarum was a propagandist forgery," scolded Delia, "while all the time souls are being snatched away by the devil under your very nose."
"My dear," he would assure her mildly, "if I did not sometimes remove my attention from the short-comings of my neighbours, the first soul to be so snatched would be my own. Nothing leads so promptly to damnation as the critical contemplation of other people's souls." And yet it seemed that here before him was a soul in evident need of some form of salvation. The vicar felt unhappy.
Muriel Hammond had no business to be cynical. Now, Muriel Hammond, Muriel Hammond. What had happened to the child?
The vicar cast back his thoughts. "I ought to keep card-index biographies of my parishioners," he told himself. He could remember so little about her. A small, very shy school-girl, a quiet little thing at tennis parties, and—hadn't she once been secretary of the Nursing Association? Surely those beautifully symmetrical figures still decorating the books were hers. And then—till about a year ago, she had been a regular communicant. The vicar was stirred by a recollection of that small virginal face upraised in an austere rapture of devotion. Her great shining eyes had looked beyond him, as though they gazed on holy mysteries.
The eyes that now stared coldly at Mrs. Hammond could certainly see no holy mysteries. It was doubtful whether they saw even the common kindnesses and uncertain altruisms that lit occasionally the drawing-rooms of even Darkest Marshington—another phrase of Delia's. The vicar studied more closely the neat, indifferent figure. Muriel's clothes were prettily chosen but negligently worn. Mrs. Hammond, perhaps, had been responsible for the choice. Muriel's manner combined the boredom of distaste with the confusion of timidity. The vicar watched her moving from chair to chair, picking up conversations, hovering on the edge of confidences, turning away again before contact was established. He watched her shepherding the committee ladies into the drawing-room for tea, hearing her half-apologetic invitations, her laugh abruptly breaking off, her sentences deferentially curtailed. Her indifference shattered his serene detachment. No girl of her age ought to look like that. He screwed up his mild short-sighted eyes, seeing her for the first time not only as a personality but as a problem.
What had been happening to the girl? Her sister had died; but mortality was a usual experience, and the vicar had seen no sign of affection deeper than the unexcited tolerance common to most sisters in the relationship between Muriel and Connie. A love affair? He had heard of none, and Muriel seemed to lack that particular intensity which made of love a devastating experience to women like—well, Delia. She had not even been away doing war-work, where the realism of more harsh experience might have cut her off from her old interests.
The dining-room had emptied.
Muriel turned from the door and saw the vicar.
"Aren't you coming into tea, Mr. Vaughan?"
He smiled his shy conciliatory smile. "Has Mrs. Cartwright gone into the drawing-room?"
"Yes, I think so."
"Muriel—I appeal to you. I want some tea, I would like one of your mother's scones. Are there scones? Good. But to get them I must face Mrs. Cartwright, and Mrs. Cartwright wants to tell me for the seventh time this afternoon that it was false economy to refuse to pay Sister Lilian's railway fare to Hardrascliffe. Now won't you take pity on me? Mayn't I be spoiled for once and have my tea in here?"
"Oh, yes, I should think so," said Muriel in the tone of one but faintly interested in the eccentricities of an old clergyman.
As she left the room, Mr. Vaughan frowned and accused himself with quite unusual acrimony for having been led aside by the raptures of constitutional research from the more pressing spiritual needs of his parishioners.
"Only," he explained to himself, rather as though he were arguing with Delia, "they probably know so much better than I do the things belonging to their peace." At the thought of the limitations of his wisdom he groaned wearily and bowed his head forward into his hands with a half humorous despair.
Muriel re-entered the dining-room with a tray and tea. He noticed that she had taken the trouble to arrange a small tray daintily with a white cloth and a little teapot and a covered dish of toasted scones. Usually he ate his meals with impatience at the inconvenient necessity, but this afternoon he had set himself to observe.
"Won't you bring a cup too? Have you had your tea?"
"I—no, really. I shall have mine afterwards in the drawing-room."
"Do have it with me now. There's heaps of tea here. I feel greedy drinking all alone."
When she left the room to fetch her cup he sadly recognized her complete indifference, coupled with her recognition of him as a privileged person. Vividly aware of his unworthiness for privilege, he awaited her return.
She came in and sat down by the long table to pour out his tea. Her movements were gentle but hesitating. She held the china cup, the teapot, the sugar-tongs lightly but never firmly.
"Sugar?"
"Please—four lumps."
"Cream?"
"Please. A lot."
She did not smile and humour him as other girls would smile. Gravely she dropped four lumps and poured him a generous portion of cream. He frowned as he stirred the over sweetened tea, and only then remembered that he really hated sugar.
"Muriel, you don't belong to the St. Catherine's Committee?"
"No, Mr. Vaughan. Will you have a scone?"
"Thank you. Work among girls—you don't find it interesting?"
"Oh, quite. I hadn't particularly thought about it. I don't suppose that I should be much good."
"Well, it was not so much the girls that I was thinking of. The House Committee needs somebody to help with the accounts. I remember your excellent work with the Nursing Association. Mrs. Cartwright is a conscientious lady but no mathematician. It would be of immense service both to us and to the home if you would sometimes help her with the books."
"I'll ask Mother. I dare say I could."
He smiled at her. "I am sure that Mrs. Hammond could not mind. It depends upon what you would like. I don't want to urge more work upon you if your time is full."
She shrugged her thin shoulders. "I don't do anything much. I'll ask Mother——"
A hat-stand would have been more responsive.
He changed the conversation.
"Have you noticed much change in Marshington since the war ended?"
"Change? Here? No, I don't think so. People are still washing dishes to be dirtied at the next meal, and sitting at the same stools to add up other people's accounts, and giving tea parties to be envied by other men's wives."
"That's rather a pessimistic view of it, isn't it?"
"Is it? Yes, perhaps it is. I'm very silly I know." She laughed nervously. "Of course it's not as bad as that. But sometimes—one wonders—you know, I don't know how the war could have made a difference. It was only a grocery shortage here, and an influx of officers and the arrival of the Graingers."
"Ah, the Graingers. She was a nice woman. A friend of your mother's, I think."
Again that fleeting, unpleasant smile crossed Muriel's face. "Was she?" she said. "Oh, I suppose so."
"You know, you're a little hard on Marshington in war-time," he continued. "Did you never think of Mrs. Pinden carrying on her husband's business, of Dickie Weathergay, of Bobby Mason, of the women who sent their children to school, kept their homes together and spent their spare time doing all that they could at the depot and hospital although the postman's arrival was an hourly torment and the sight of every telegraph boy turned them sick? It may have been all rather small and petty, but it was a multiplication of that spirit that formed the bulwark of civilization."
"Oh, yes, of course," acquiesced Muriel, but her face seemed to ask "Is civilization then worth saving?"
"My daughter Delia, you know, was working in the Women's Army at the end of the war. She said that it was a revelation to her—the possibility for development among trivial-minded, half-grown, half-educated girls—a pity that it should have been left to war-time."
"Yes, wasn't it?"
The vicar could not face it. Conversation with Muriel was like conversation with a gramophone. There was something almost indecent in her apathy. She could not even uphold her own opinions.
"I am unhappy about Delia," he continued, experimenting. "She is working herself to death, living in one of these terrible clubs, and enjoying a diet almost exclusively composed of boiled eggs and fish kedgeree, as far as I can discover. She is very thin."
"She never was fat, was she? But I dare say that she will look after herself all right. She was always very capable."
"Since Martin Elliott's death," remarked the vicar meditatively, "she seems to have been capable of almost anything but sanity about her personal surroundings."
A gleam of the faintest interest awoke in Muriel's eyes.
"Poor Delia. Of course. It was terribly bad luck. But then, she has her work. Women who have their work have an immense thing, even if they are unfortunate in the people whom they love. It is when you have nothing, neither work nor love, nor even sorrow, that life becomes rather intolerable." She laughed again. "That does sound a dismal picture, doesn't it?"
He looked at her sharply. "Delia saw Godfrey Neale in London—he had just come back."
Muriel's tea-cup clattered softly in her saucer. The vicar almost started at his discovery. At last he had probed her terrible indifference. But even while he was congratulating himself, the light had died and Muriel's chill, equable little voice continued:
"I am very glad to hear that he has come back safely. Mrs. Neale worried terribly, and I am sure that Clare must be glad."
"Senora Alvarados was your friend I think?"
"A school-friend, yes."
The door opened and Mrs. Hammond entered.
"Oh, there you are, you two culprits! Really, Mr. Vaughan, I can't have you stealing my daughter like this, you know! Muriel, dear, there are thousands of empty cups in the drawing-room. My wrist aches. Do come and relieve me. Mr. Vaughan, Mrs. Cartwright is asking——"
"Oh, I know, I know," pleaded the vicar. "She has asked several times. Mrs. Hammond, don't you think that it would be a good idea if Muriel came to help us with the accounts for the House Committee? You know how difficult we people who have not mathematical minds all find them."
Mrs. Hammond raised her pretty eyebrows. "On the House Committee of St. Catherine's? Muriel? Well—really—I hadn't thought of it. Hardly the kind of work—I mean—not for a young girl—in contact with the sort of home like—well, really, what do you think yourself, Mr. Vaughan?"
"I think that the checking of bills for dust-pans and stair-rods can hardly be contaminating, even if they are to be used by reformed prostitutes," remarked the vicar dryly.
"Oh, well—it isn't quite that, you know. It's the idea of it. No other unmarried girl is on St. Catherine's Committee. It doesn't somehow seem to me quite the thing. Of course, if Muriel wants to very much—I never stand in her way over anything—girls do as they like nowadays, don't they? But I have always tried to keep her away from all that sort of thing as much as possible."
The vicar was uncertain afterwards whether he had really seen that expression cross Muriel's face then—that scornful yet submissive aversion, which lacked spirit even to be violent. He answered bravely:
"I think that Muriel is almost old enough to judge for herself."
"I'm not really keen, if Mother doesn't want me to," said Muriel.
And yet, in the following silence, the vicar could feel the clash and tension of their personalities as clearly as though swords had crossed. In the St. Catherine's incident lay some secret significance for Muriel and her mother. Behind Muriel's untranquil quiet lay a suppressed resentment, and somewhere, but Heaven knew where, lay the solution of her problem.
The vicar sighed, shook hands and walked unhappily homeward to write a long and troubled letter to his daughter.