“If Wilfrid gets into trouble with Father, he’ll be sent home,” Ethel mourned, “and he isn’t happy there. His mother doesn’t understand him.”
“I shouldn’t think she understands anything—except prayer meetings.”
“Ruth! How can you be so naughty?”
“I don’t care. She’s a horrible old woman and she smells of camphor. All Father’s relations are horrible, and Uncle Jim’s the only decent one we’ve got.”
This diverted Ethel. “Wouldn’t it be lovely if he came for Christmas!” she cried, but Ruth would never share her raptures, and Ethel began pacing the room again in her suspense.
Wilfrid, however, returned cheerfully. “It’s all right!” he said, “nothing worse than idleness. No lies necessary. But it’s confoundedly awkward to have the uncle on all these committees. He’d met the Dean—as well as Mr. Blenkinsop. What’s old Blenkinsop done? You weren’t tactful, Mona Lisa, but you were funny.”
“Was I?” Hannah said. “It was Mr. Blenkinsop who seemed funny to me—picking the locks, running off with the bags of money—”
“But he hasn’t!” Ethel exclaimed. “I don’t think you ought to say such things.”
“If he had,” said Hannah, solemnly, “I should be the last person to breathe a word of it.”
“Then you’d be quite wrong!”
“Poor Ethel!” Wilfrid said tenderly. “It’s no good crossing swords with Mona Lisa.”
“You’re all very unkind!” Ethel cried. “Making fun of everything, when Father’s so upset. You don’t know how he feels it when anyone leaves the chapel. It’s like—like a personal insult.”
“Ah, yes,” Wilfrid said sympathetically, “he’d take it like that, of course,” and he looked at Hannah who was cautiously unresponsive. “But is that all poor old Blenkinsop’s done? Lucky fellar! Still, it’s a poor heart that never rejoices and a dull one that doesn’t take the chance, and I find the chapel distinctly entertaining. I love hearing Mrs. Spenser-Smith telling everybody she’s got a silk petticoat when she swishes down the aisle, and seeing poor old Ernest’s agonies when the widows drop their mites into the plate, and many a time I’ve seen him slip past them before they could do it. I like old Ernest.”
“I like them both,” Ethel said, and, forgetting her grievances, she added eagerly, “I wonder if they’ll have a party this Christmas.”
“If they do,” said Ruth, “I’m going to have a bad cold in the head. I hate their parties.”
“And my duty to my mother will keep me at her side during the festive season. Honestly, I’d rather see her crying over the Christmas pudding and hear her telling fibs about my father and wishing I were like him—and we all know he was a bit of a scamp, and that’s why I hold his memory dear—than go to one of those, you know the word I want to use, Mona Lisa—well, one of those parties.”
“Miss Mole won’t believe you. She knows Mrs. Spenser-Smith.”
“But I’ve never been to one of her parties,” Hannah said.
“I wonder if she’ll ask you!”
“I should hardly think so, and I should have to stay at home and look after Ruth.”
“Which is far better,” Wilfrid murmured. “Well, I’ve promised to turn over a new leaf and I’m going to do it, beside my cheery little gas fire, so farewell! But I’m always forgetting to ask you something. Who makes my bed?”
“I do,” said Hannah.
“Then, what’s happened to my mattress?”
“It was there this morning.”
“I know it’s there, but it’s different. It’s lumpy.”
“They get lumpy in time,” Hannah said.
“It’s done it in jolly quick time, then.”
“But it’s a new one!” Ethel said. “It’s got a red and fawn ticking, hasn’t it, Miss Mole?”
“Green,” said Hannah. “Mine’s red and fawn.”
“Then you’ve got the wrong one. We’ll have to change them.”
“And give Mona Lisa the lumps! What are you talking about?”
“I’ll go and look at them now,” Ethel said.
“Miss Mole’s the housekeeper!” Ruth cried hastily.
“But I bought that mattress,” Ethel said, going off with a jingle.
“She’ll pull the bedclothes off and forget to put them on again!” Wilfrid exclaimed, going after her.
“Did you change them?” Ruth asked softly, and Hannah nodded. “I thought so!” Ruth said with a chuckle.
XI
If Hannah had chosen to look for them, she could have found as many reasons and excuses for Robert Corder’s peculiarities as for those of Ethel and Ruth. Robert Corder himself did not seek excuses; he saw his troubles as the faults of other people and it did not occur to him that the chief of his difficulties was that he had been born too late. Thirty or forty years earlier, he would have been a happier man. It would not have been necessary, then, to make the mental compromises he found so bewildering; he would have been set firmly on the infallibility of his creed and his authority as its exponent would have been unquestioned. Life would have been simpler to direct and consequently simpler to live. It was the knowledge that infallibility of book, of man and of creed was increasingly denied, and with a strength under which one must bend or break, that took the full sweetness out of his position, and being a man of great energy but no intellect, he felt bound to give the appearance of keeping abreast of modern thought, while his mind resented, and did not really make, the effort. In the days when to doubt or to question was bad manners, if it was not sin, his work would have offered him everything he wanted, adulation, security of mind and station and the loyal following of that army of men and boys it had always been his ambition to lead. Self-confidence, physical strength, a manly exterior were his, but the army was merely a handful of old soldiers, suspicious of changes, and raw recruits, and of this disappointment, with its implication of failure in himself or his teaching, his encounter with Samuel Blenkinsop had reminded him. Those people in his chapel who kept the old simplicity and to whom he was God’s vice-regent, were his inferiors,
