She went back to the fire and sat down on the hearth-rug. The room was full of his remembered presence, the scent of tobacco smoke, the crumpled cushion in his chair, the cigarette ash that he had spilled on to the hearth.
She leaned against the chair where he had sat, and so lay very quietly, gazing into the fire with eyes that did not see.
When Delia came in, nearly an hour later, she found Muriel asleep, her eyelids red with crying, her head down on the big arm-chair, and a little smile, childlike and tender, tilting the corners of her mouth.
BOOK V
MURIEL
August, 1920
XXXVIII
Marshington was triumphant. The garden fête for the British Legion to be held in the park of the Weare Grange meant far more than a local entertainment. It meant the final abandonment of six years' gloom and difficulty. The war and all the inconvenience of war-time was past. The months following the armistice, months of intoxicating rapture, disorganization, irritating delays, and disillusionment, had gone. August, 1920, marked a turning in the ways.
Indeed, its triumph was not merely negative. It marked the promise of good things to come as well as the forgotten dream of dark things past. Marshington boomed. The new motor-bus service in and out of Kingsport, the projected town hall, the recently opened golf course, were signs of prosperity not lightly to be dismissed. There were, of course, disadvantages. Trade was bad, but undoubtedly it would improve. Unemployment was disquieting, but always this happened after any war. The British Legion, linking up village with village and class with class in memory of a glorious army, was not this a noble thing? And surely the symbolism of this fête to-day, Godfrey Neale opening the ceremony, Major Godfrey Neale, once prisoner of war, now squire of Weare and Marshington and lord of the Mardlehammar property, stooping to comradeship with the men who had once fought with him—surely this was a hopeful sign! And he looked so charming too! No wonder Phyllis Marshall Gurney, pretty and soft and pale in her rose-coloured crêpe de Chine, looked wistfully up at him as before the opening he talked with his mother on the smooth, grass terrace. No wonder that little Miss Dale, radiant in sprigged muslin (pre-war but renovated) should whisper buoyantly to Mr. Potts, the curate, "Isn't he like the Prince of Wales?"
And then the day, too, after that terrible July with its incessant rain, the day was perfect. Little feathery clouds floated along the sky. The spacious lawns of the Weare Grange lay green as emeralds. The stonework on the terraces foamed over with crimson ramblers. The flagged paths lay like white ribbons between herbaceous borders flaming with phlox and sunflowers and campanula. The beeches spread above a company as gay and flowerlike as the crowded borders. Mrs. Marshall Gurney in lilac charmeuse, Mrs. Cartwright in a saxe blue foulard, Mrs. Parker, manly and imposing in a black suit with a white pin stripe, and her flowerlike daughter—how on earth had Daisy Weathergay happened?—delicate as a fairy in pale blue, darting in constant pursuit of a small, charming child, all white frills and pink ribbons, who strayed like a wind-blown flower from laughing group to group on the wide lawn.