The Vicar had taken a step or two to the bay-window, where, with hands thrust within his trouser-pockets, he stood staring gloomily out on the bright flower-beds that, next to the comeliness and order of her ministering to the Church—garnishing of the altar, lustration of the holy vessels, washing and mending of vestments,—were the pride of Mrs Steele's life.
"See how the flowers, as at parade,
Under their colours stand display'd:
Each regiment in order grows,
That of the tulip, pink, and rose.—
O thou, that dear and happy Isle,
The garden of the world erstwhile,
Thou Paradise of the four seas
Which Heaven planted us to please,
But, to exclude the world, did guard
With wat'ry, if not flaming, sword;
Unhappy! shall we never more
That sweet militia restore?
When gardens only had their towers,
And all the garrisons were flowers. . . ."
He murmured Marvell's lines to himself and, with a shake of the shoulders coming out of his brown study, swung round to the writing-table again.
"Dear, I beg your pardon! . . . The truth is, I feel savage with myself: and, being a condemned non-combatant, I vented it on the most sensitive soul I could find, knowing it to be gentle, and taking care (as you say) to catch and render it helpless." He groaned. "Yes, yes—I am a brute! Even now I am using that same tone which you detest. You do right to detest it. But will it comfort you a little to know that when a man takes that tone, often enough it's because he too feels helpless as well as angry? 'Mordant' is the word, I believe: which means that the poor fool bites you to get his teeth into himself."
She rose from her writing-chair and touched him by the arm.
"Robert!" she appealed.
"Oh, yes—'What is the matter with me?' . . . Nothing—or, in other words, Everything—that is to say, this War."
"It's terrible, of course; but I don't see—" She broke off. "Is it the War itself that upsets you, or the little we can do to help? If that's your trouble, why, of course it was silly of me to worry you just now about my being nervous of facing these people. But we're only at the beginning—"
"Agatha!" The Vicar drew a hand from his pocket, laid it on his wife's shoulder, and looked her in the eyes. "Don't I know that, if the call came, you would face a platoon? It's I who am weak. This War—" He stared out of the window again.
"It is a just War, if ever there was one. . . . Robert, you don't doubt that, surely! Forced on us—Why, you yourself used to warn me, when I little heeded, that the Germans were preparing it, that 'the Day' must come sooner or later: for they would have it so."