did not doubt that there were many happy and natural marriages among the eight hundred workpeople employed by the Larkshill Iron Works, in spite of the squalid lives to which their boasted civilization had brought them: many clean engagements of unsoiled romance: many integrities, both of men and women, which lived aloof and undegraded….
She had heard the tale with a ready sympathy, and with the occasional helping word or the well-judged silence that made it easy to tell. She had heard so many like it before!
Her thoughts wandered to a kindred trouble in a Zulu kraal, where a girl who had crouched stolidly in expectation of death had waked to a trembling terror at the knowledge that the white woman had interposed, and might, or might not, persuade her husband to pardon her infidelity.
In the end she had said what she had thought it right to say, and the girl had listened sullenly. She was not thinking of any trouble which she might cause to God, but of what the discovery might cause to her. Muriel had been resolved to help her practically as well as spiritually, but they differed as to the relative importance of the two parts of the programme.
Muriel had asked Mrs. Wilkes on returning if her husband would drive her over to Larkshill in his market-cart that evening. She had felt that she lacked the strength to walk such a distance, but she was not used to delay when dealing with anything that she had undertaken. She wished to see Tom Butler, the alleged cause of the trouble, and perhaps others.
Mrs. Wilkes had agreed, as she would have agreed to almost anything that her lodger had asked, but she felt that Mr. Wilkes might look at the matter somewhat differently. It is a natural consequence of such habits of thought as Muriel Temple cultivated that they are apt to be as exacting to others as to themselves. Mrs. Wilkes may never have had a lodger who caused her more trouble in proportion to the remuneration she offered. But Mrs. Wilkes served her gladly.
“Perhaps, Miss Temple, if you asked him…. He might do it for you,” she said doubtfully.
Muriel had asked him. He was busy earthing up his potatoes, and in no mood to leave them. Opportunities were few, and the growth of weeds unceasing. He meant to have the whole garden straight before the short Whitsun holidays should be over. He had compromised at last by saying that he’d see how he got on, and she could ask him again come Monday.
He felt that he was doomed as he said it. Miss Temple would have her way. Probably she felt a corresponding confidence. Unless something very unforeseen should happen…. As, in fact, it did.
* * * * * * *
Muriel lay till late, as she had reluctantly promised her doctor, and rested in the garden during the afternoon, half asleep in the sunlight.
Unused to leisure, her mind wandered backward in reminiscences that were sometimes sad, and sometimes pleasant to recall.
She had had much happiness, she decided, and also many mercies.
The sky was comparatively clear, its smoke-laden atmosphere having been unrecruited since the previous noon, and the June sun was warm and bright. Sterrington, though on the edge of one of England’s invented hells, was clear of mine or foundry for twenty miles on its north-western side, from which the winds of that time and place most commonly blew.
Muriel felt that it was a fair world, and a kind one. It was sad to think that it might be the last earthly summer that she would see She did not feel ill when she lay quietly, only weak if she tried to do too much.
In the evening she felt the need of joining in the acts of worship in which her life so largely consisted. There was a little Unitarian chapel in the village, but that was impossible. Unitarians, Muriel knew, are not Christians at all. There was nothing else but the Anglican church, and there she went (borrowing a prayer-book from Mrs. Wilkes) to hear a sermon from a text in the one hundred and seventh Psalm, “He turneth the wilderness into a standing water,” which wandered into abstract considerations of the methods of the Divine control of the cosmos, the antiquity of geologic records—the Rector was an enthusiast in geology—and introduced, rather awkwardly, the newest theories as to the rather numerous occasions on which Great Britain had been separated from or reunited to Western Europe, with allusions to the “Carboniferous Limestone Sea,” the “deltaic apron of the Hercynian Mountains,” and the “confluent deltas of the Millstone Grit,” which may have featured prominently in his reading of the previous week, but were unlikely to be received with any intelligent interest by his evening audience.
To Miss Temple’s thinking it was not a sermon at all.
Chapter Three
Muriel went to bed at once when she returned from the evening service. She had done a good deal during the day, and she was physically tired and mentally somewhat depressed. She tired so easily now. She remembered when…. But she supposed that, for good or evil, her work was done. It had never been anything to boast of. It was all as God willed it.
I would not have the restless will
That hurries to and fro,
Seeking for some great thing to do,
Or secret thing to know.
She had had ambitions once; dreams, as we all have. But they were faded now. Besides, she was not her own, and the regret was an infidelity. “Thine be the glory.” Tears came as she thought how little glory she had brought to God. And now His message had come that she was no longer needed. She must just rest and die.
Her thoughts wandered to the Rector to whom she had listened that evening. His personality had attracted her. A somewhat ascetic face, with a weary look in the eyes. She was not uncharitable. She supposed he served God in his own way, though it was not hers. “He who is not against us is of our part.” She wondered vaguely as to the nature of the work he did—so different from what hers had been among the Zulu kraals. Probably he was tired and dispirited also. The empty pews…. But what use was there in telling people about geological changes, which, if they were true at all, had no meaning today? The flood was past. That was part of the old dispensation. Now there were only the troubles of the last days for the world to endure before the glory of the millennium dawn. “There shall be wars, and rumours of wars, and earthquakes in divers places….” The last days might be very near….
She went to sleep at last; and while she slept the earth’s crust sank slightly and very gently in the northern hemisphere, and lifted slightly further toward the equator.
It was a trivial change. Not enough to make it falter in its settled course through the heavens, scarcely enough to change the axis on which it spun. There would be some space of bare land, steaming in tomorrow’s sun, which the tropic ocean had covered: some space of water where the land had been. That was all.
Muriel dreamed that she stood with the Rector on a bare plain. It was black night, and the wind was terrible. They were lost in the night. He said he knew the way, but she did not believe him. He was leading her into a pit where they would drown together. And there was a voice that cried through the night—a voice she knew—a voice that cried in an agony of terror, “Miss Temple, wake up! I think the roof’s a-falling!”
Muriel was awake now. By the light of a candle which she was holding she saw the comfortable face of her landlady, now white with fear. She heard the noise of a steady rush of air, which did not pause nor vary. She heard the rumble of a falling wall. She heard the woman’s frightened voice protesting. “I’m scairt to death, Miss Temple. It’s got such a queer sound. It’s not an ornary storm.”
No, it was not an ordinary storm. Muriel realized that, as she reassured her companion
