I
If at the beginning of the last chapter Miss Haldane was perturbed, worried, perplexed, so, rather more than two months later, Muriel Lancing was perturbed, worried, perplexed, also; and for the same cause, namely, the strange demeanour of the Lady Anne Garland, who had returned to town at the beginning of November.
She was changed, she was totally different, so sighed Muriel, reflective, meditative. Where was her former charm? her former sweet kindliness? her faith, her trust, her buoyancy—in short, her everything that went to make up the Anne Muriel knew and loved? An obsession seemed to have come upon her. She was cynical, hard, the speaker of little bitter phrases, deliberately calculated to wound and hurt. She was not, as Muriel reflected, [Pg 217]Anne at all, but a mask, a shell of a woman, in which deep down the real Anne was imprisoned, buried.
“If only she would speak,” sighed Muriel to herself. “If only the mask could be removed for a moment the real Anne would be liberated. Confession, so says dear old Father O’Sullivan, is good for the soul. It would be incalculably good for Anne’s. But she won’t make one. And short of asking her straight out to do so, which would inevitably fix the mask on tighter still, I can do nothing.”
But, all the same, Muriel went off to the Oratory and set up a candle to St. Joseph, telling him pretty lucidly the whole state of affairs and requesting him to do something.
Now whether it was the intervention of St. Joseph, or whether it was that the real imprisoned Anne could bear her solitary confinement no longer, must be a matter for pure conjecture: but on the next occasion that Muriel visited Anne’s house in Cheyne Walk she was distinctly conscious that though the mask was on there was a tiny crack in it, and through the crack the real Anne was looking with a kind of dumb pleading.
In a twinkling Muriel’s finger was towards it, in, of course, the most insidious and hidden way imaginable. It is useless to attempt to describe her methods; they were purely feminine, entirely delicate. At length the shell, the mask, fell asunder, and the real Anne, being liberated, spoke. It was an enormous relief to her, and from the very beginning up to Millicent’s disclosure she confided the whole story to Muriel, who watched her with her greeny-grey eyes full of sympathy.
“Oh, but,” cried Muriel as she stopped, “I quite understand your anger. Of course, it’s very difficult to put into exact words why you are angry, the whole situation is so extraordinarily complicated. But,” she concluded, “any woman with the smallest modicum of sense must see why. And the fact that Millicent was the person there at the time can’t have made things a bit nicer.”
“It didn’t,” said Anne quietly. “But I haven’t finished yet. He wrote to me.”
“Yes?” queried Muriel.