‘And by believing in him.’
‘I think everybody must believe in Stephen,’ she said.
Her mother pressed her arm. ‘Darling,’ she said softly; and thought how strange a thing love was, how strange that Virginia, by taking this spinster-man, this middle-aged dry man, and just loving him with all her simple young heart and entirely believing in him, had made him, so completely commonplace before in all his utterances, suddenly—at least in the pulpit—sing. Was it acute, personal experience that one needed? Did one only cry out the truth really movingly when under some sort of lash, either of grief or ecstasy?
They went up the broad steps on to the familiar terrace. George’s peacocks—George had been of opinion that manors should have peacocks—were behaving as peacocks ought. In the great tubs on each side of the row of long windows—George had seen pictures of terraces, and they all had tubs—the first tulips were showing buds. The bells had begun to ring for afternoon service, and the sound floated across the quiet tree-tops as it had floated on all the Sundays of all the years Catherine had spent in that place. Such blameless, such dignified years. Every corner of them open to the light. Years of clear duties, clear affections—family years. And here was her serious young daughter carrying on the tradition. And here was she too come back to it, but come back to it disgracefully, to hide. She hiding! She winced, and held on tighter to Virginia’s arm. What would Virginia say if she knew? It seemed to Catherine that even her soul turned red at the bare thought.
They went into the boudoir, so recently her own—‘I was just going to rest a little,’ said Virginia. ‘Yes, you must take great care not to stand about too much,’ said her mother—and Catherine tucked her up on the sofa, as she had so often tucked her up in her cot, and there they stayed talking, while the sweet damp smells a garden is so full of in early spring came in through the open window, and filled the room with delicate promises.
Throughout the afternoon Virginia talked, and Catherine listened. So it had always been in that family: Catherine listened. How thankful she was to listen now, not to be asked questions, not to have it noticed that she looked pale and heavy-eyed, leaning back in her own old chair, her head, which ached, on a cushion she remembered covering herself. Her humiliated head; the head Christopher only a few hours before had held in both his hands and—no, she wouldn’t, she couldn’t think of it.
Virginia had much to tell of all that she and Stephen were doing and planning and hoping and intending. Drastic changes were being made; the easy-going old days at the Manor were over for ever. She did not say this in so many words, because it might, perhaps, have been tactless, for were not the old easy-going ways her mother’s ways? But it was evident that a pure flame of reform, of determination to abolish the old arrangements and substitute arrangements that improved, helped, and ultimately sanctified, was sweeping over Chickover. Her father’s money, so long used merely on the unimaginative material well-being of a small domestic circle—she didn’t quite put it this way, but so it drifted into Catherine’s consciousness—was to be spread out like some rich top-dressing—nor did she say just this, yet Catherine had a vision of a kind of holy manure, and Stephen, girt with righteousness, digging it diligently in—across the wide field of the whole parish, and the crop that would spring up would be a crop of entirely sanitary dwellings. No one, said Virginia—it seemed to Catherine that it was the voice of Stephen—could live in an entirely sanitary dwelling without gradually acquiring an entirely sanitary body, and from a sanitary body to a sanitary soul was only a step.
‘Stephen said something about that yesterday,’ said Catherine, her eyelids drooping as she lay back in her chair.
‘He puts it so wonderfully. I can’t explain things as he does, but I’d like just to give you an idea, mother——’
‘I’d love to hear,’ said Catherine, her voice sounding very small and tired.