"No. We've been rather absorbed by our own affairs for the last few weeks, I am afraid." Then, with sharpening anxiety, "Not about—her son?" She could not say his name.
"Poor Godfrey. Yes, poor Godfrey. We only heard last night over the telephone. Mrs. Marshall Gurney rang up about the nursing fund, and then . . ."
The crowd moved forward. In another minute Miss Dale might be swept away and Muriel would not know. She stretched out her hand and caught at the little woman's sleeve.
"You said—you were saying—Mrs. Neale had heard . . ." Her heart cried, "Tell me, tell me," yet she did not want to know.
"Poor Godfrey—— She had a telegram from the War Office—— Reported wounded and prisoner of war. Of course reports are not always true. As I said to my sister Maud . . . you know, she was so sorry that she could not come to-day," and Miss Dale proceeded to describe all that Muriel had known for weeks past about her sister Maud's sciatica.
But Muriel did not hear. She was picking at the silver paper round her pink carnations while she fought for self-control. She saw all sorts of irrelevant, meaningless things, her father's broad, black back, the frightened pertness of the bow in Miss Dale's hat, Mrs. Marshall Gurney's flowing scarves and veils. Part of her mind recalled the stale Marshington joke that Mrs. Marshall Gurney wore as many veils as a widow because she had forgotten her husband's existence long ago. The other part remembered as though she herself had seen them, the horrors that she dreamed of at the front. She saw again pictures drawn by the too graphic pencil of a war-artist. She saw the wooden face of an old woman in a lamp-lit shop, who said, "War's bloody hell, ah'm telling you, bloody hell." She saw Godfrey's splendid body torn and broken, his handsome face distorted out of its complacency, his smiling eyes looking straight into despair.
She supposed that she must have followed her sister out into the sunlit churchyard, where fallen chestnut leaves spread a carpet of mottled gold and green before the bride. She supposed that people must have thrown confetti at her, for afterwards she shook it from her hat and it lay on her bedroom carpet like the fallen petals of pink and white may. She must have sat through the long luncheon party, and have helped Connie into her brown travelling dress, and have talked to Uncle George and Aunt Rose, and the long-legged cousin, Adeline, from Market Burton, who would stay until the evening train.
Only when she had helped to tidy the abandoned luncheon table, and helped Annie to pack in their tissue paper the rose bowls and silver inkstands destined incongruously for the High Farm, Thraile, horror and desolation overcame her. Perhaps the act of packing away Connie's presents reminded her of that evening at Scarborough when she had packed her mother's trunk, and Godfrey found her. Perhaps, all the time since Miss Dale spoke to her, her imagination had been feeding upon horrors. But suddenly she put down the painted blotter that she was holding, and fled from the room. The house was full of borrowed maids, and aunts and stray acquaintances. She rushed to the only sure retreat and locked the bathroom door behind her. Flinging herself down beside the towel rail, she stifled her sobs in the rough softness of her father's bath towels.
"Oh, Godfrey, Godfrey!" she moaned. "Oh, poor Godfrey. He mustn't be hurt. He mustn't." Her own body writhed as with acute physical pain. She could feel the agony of his wounds. They tore her without mercy.
The light of motor lamps in the yard shone through the uncurtained window on to her small, shaking body and the bowed darkness of her head. Her lips moved.