The wind blew from the darkness against them. It lashed Muriel's hair against her eyes, and rushed against her, as though it were forcing her back along the road to Godfrey.
Mrs. Hammond seemed to be quite sure now. Muriel lay wondering. Until that night, she had never believed it to be possible, but now she saw that it was almost likely, for nobody else would ask from him so little, and he, she realized it at last, had not been proud but humble, aware how little there was for him to give. She had never liked him so well as now when she knew that he had been true to his idea of Clare. He was conceited. He was sure of himself. He was terribly limited and arrogant and complacent, but he was wistful, too, for something quite beyond his comprehension, and just because of that he might ask Muriel to marry him. There were, of course, other reasons, and to Godfrey they would be important, for nine-tenths of him was just the practical country squire, devoted to his estate and his position. The Hammonds had money. In spite of her father's recklessness, he was himself too able, and Old Dickie Hammond had been too cautious, to allow the business once built up to crumble. With the Hammond money Godfrey could keep hunters. He would not upset Mrs. Neale, who wanted to have a grandson, and who cared little for the smart young women from the county families. Arthur Hammond's daughter would present to her no insurmountable obstacle, because Muriel was also Rachel Bennet's daughter, and the Bennets had once been as good a stock as any in the East Riding. Muriel too, was all Bennet and no Hammond. She was not like Connie, with the coarse strain that gave her vitality hardly curbed by Bennet gentleness.
If he asked her to marry him, she would, of course, accept. It would be a splendid triumph, the end of her long years of waiting and feeling that she was a complete failure. It would be the consummation of her duty to her mother, of her success as a woman. She would be the mistress of the Weare Grange, the mother of its heir. She would be mistress then of Marshington, and of her own rich destiny.
Strange, it seemed to her, that her body lay limp and unresponsive between the cold sheets, that the word marriage conveyed to her, not a picture of Godfrey but of the Wears Grange, that she shrank from the thought of further intimacy with his bodily perfection and his limited mind. He was nice, far nicer than she had thought. There was even that little unexpected strain of the romantic in him. She was sure that she could love him. "I have loved him all my life," said Muriel, and lay, waiting to feel the glow of love warming her coldness.
"This is not as it should be," she felt. But nothing ever was as it should be in a world where the best conclusion was a compromise. She turned her face into the pillow and thought of Martin Elliott, and the happiness that glowed about Delia's swift mind. "Well, if Godfrey had been like Martin Elliott," she thought.
Crash!
As though the fury of a thousand thunderbolts had hurled, crashing against the house, the noise shattered the morning and then ceased.
So swiftly the quietness closed in again, it seemed as though the sound were but a jagged rent across the silence, letting into the world for a moment the roaring of the spheres. Yet, though this one blow crashed and then was still, Muriel felt as though such violence must last for ever, and silence became the incredible thing.
She lay quite still, her limbs relaxed in the flat darkness of the bed, her arms lying beside her, heavy with sleep. She did not believe that the sound had really happened. Her thoughts returned to their path. If Godfrey had been a man like Martin Elliott, someone in whom one could seek companionship of mind, with whom one could feel as much at home as with one's own thoughts . . .
Crash! Crash! Crash!