CHAPTER XI
THE CHARIOT OF FIRE
When Jane, scolded by Aunt Anne for an untidy appearance, gave notice and at once departed, Maggie felt as though the ground was giving way under her feet.
A week until the New Year, and no opportunity of hearing from Martin during that time. Then she laughed at herself:
"You're losing your sense of proportion, my dear, over this. Laugh at yourself. What's a week?"
She did laugh at herself, but she had not very much to base her laughter upon. Martin's last letters had been short and very uneasy. She had already, in a surprising fashion for one so young, acquired a very wise and just estimate of Martin's character.
"He's only a boy," she used to say to herself and feel his elder by at least twenty years. Nevertheless the thought of his struggling on there alone was not a happy one. She longed, even though she might not advise him, to comfort him. She was beginning to realise something of her own power over him and to see, too, the strange mixture of superstition and self-reproach and self-distrust that overwhelmed him when she was not with him. She had indeed her own need of struggle against superstition. Her aunts continued to treat her with a quiet distant severity. Aunt Elizabeth, she fancied, would like to have been kind to her, but she was entirely under the influence of her sister, and there, too, Maggie was generous enough to see that Aunt Anne behaved as she did rather from a stern sense of duty than any real unkindness. Aunt Anne could not feel unkindly; she was too far removed from human temper and discontent and weakness. Nevertheless she had been deeply shocked at the revelation of Maggie's bad behaviour, and it was a shock from which, in all probability she would never recover.
"WE'LL never be friends again." Maggie thought, watching her aunt's austere composure from the other side of the dining-table. She was sad at the thought of that, remembering moments—that first visit to St. Dreot's, the departure in the cab, the night when she had sat at her aunt's bedside—that had given glimpses of the kind human creature Aunt Anne might have been had she never heard of the Inside Saints.
Maggie, during these last days, did everything that her aunts told her. She was as good and docile as she could be. But, oh! there were some dreary hours as she sat, alone, in that stuffy drawing-room, trying to sew, her heart aching with loneliness, her needle always doing the wrong thing, the clock heavily ticking, Thomas watching her from the mat in front of the fire, and the family group sneering at her from the wall-paper.