He turned away with a sigh from the window.
“In any case, he had better come home for a day or two before he goes up to Cambridge,” he said, “so that I can talk it all over with him. In fact, they had both better come home. They have been in town a fortnight,—a fortnight of pure amusement. Besides, the Parish library wants looking after.”
“I can manage that, if you would like Helen to stop a little longer,” said his sister.
“No, dear, your hands are full enough already. Besides, Rupert’s letter has made me altogether a little uneasy. It is time they both came home.”
CHAPTER VI
Helen was seated at a big plain deal table in the village Room with a large array of volumes in hospital spread in front of her. Some wanted covers,—the cover peculiar to the books in the library of the Room was brown holland of a strangely discouraging hue, stitched over the back and sides, and turned down inside; others wanted stamp-paper over torn edges, and most wanted labels, bearing the title, gummed on to their backs. True, the very magnitude of the repairs needed was evidence that the library was at any rate appreciated by the parishioners, but the thought that her nimble hands were employed on a useful work did not at the present moment succeed in consoling her for the extremely distasteful nature of the occupation. Dispiriting, too, were her surroundings. On the walls hung the hateful maps of Hampshire and the Holy Land, scientific diagrams of the construction of flowers, and several charts of geological strata, shewing old sandstone, new sandstone, blue lias in which diamonds occur, and yellow bands of auriferous reef. A large, black, cast-iron stove stood in one corner, a bagatelle-board with torn cloth and tipless cues—these, too, would have to be mended after the library—occupied another table, and standing against the wall were low deal bookcases. The floor was covered with an affair of oil-cloth pattern and of corky texture, so indestructible as to be practically eternal, and a harmonium, happily not at all eternal but in advanced senile decay of cypher and dumb-notes and strange noises like a death-rattle, stood near the door. In spite of the wide-open windows, the characteristic smell of the Room hung heavy and stale on the air in this oppressive heat of an August day.
Helen had been back from London some three weeks, but in spite of her endeavours to settle down again into the village life, she had not been very successful in doing so. Duties which before had seemed tolerable enough had become frightfully tedious, while those which before had seemed tedious had become intolerable. Only the evening before her father had spoken to her about her general behaviour à propos of what he called the “falling-off” of the village choir. This meant that on the previous Sunday the organist had played one tune and the choir had sung another, which had displeased his unmusical ear, though Martin, who had been home from Cambridge for the Sunday, had listened with rapt attention, and said to Helen that he thought it extremely Wagnerian. This opinion, it may be remarked, he had not expressed to his father.
“I am afraid your pleasure-trip to London has unsettled you, Helen,” her father had said, “and you should really take yourself in hand, and make up your mind to recapture your habits of industry again. One is often disposed to be impatient with what one calls ‘little duties,’ but, dear girl, there is no such thing as a little duty. There is no such scale possible; duty is duty, and it is all great; and your eager and willing performance of all those things which may seem to you small is just as much a part of real life as to the emperor the discharge of the cares of his empire. For instance, the hymn at the morning service on Sunday——“
“But it isn’t my fault if Mr. Milton plays the wrong hymn,” said Helen.
“But it ought to be impossible that such accidents should occur,” said her father. “You should think, dear Helen, in Whose Honour it is that we stand up to sing in church, and that knowledge constantly with you, you will find must elevate the smallest duty and raise the most insignificant piece of work into an act of praise and worship.”