The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (12 page)

“I
have
deserted you,” she said gravely. “Good-bye, Miles.” She shut the door quietly behind her as she went out, knowing that the red-haired woman would hold him from following her, if need be by force with her grasping hands.

Captain Gregg’s voice was very quiet when he came to her that evening.

“Nothing that I can say would be adequate,” he said. “It would be useless for me to tell you that you were in love with a man that never existed, because he did exist in your mind and heart. All I do ask is that you try and forgive me, bloody fool that I am.”

“I forgive you,” said Lucy dully. “I should probably have met him in any case.”

“No,” said the captain, “if I hadn’t sent him up the hill
that day he would have left the following morning. It was all my fault.”

“I forgive you,” repeated Lucy.

“But I cannot forgive myself,” said the captain. “I should have known better, because interfering unasked in other people’s lives, whether from kindness or cruelty, is one of the greater sins, and I knew it. It was my own damn pride. I thought you needed a lesson, and I am the one that should be taught. I am, indeed, a poor representative of either world, and I shall go away until I have learned greater wisdom. Shall I go away, Lucy?” he asked humbly.

But she did not answer him with her voice or her thoughts. She sat there, staring at the ghost of her own happiness.

Captain Gregg did not come back, and the years followed each other, seeming to gather greater pace with their going, till a season seemed no more than a month, and a year no more than a season.

Lucy, in the restlessness of her sorrow, changed her way of living at first. She no longer had any peace in solitude and sought out work in a way that would have gladdened the heart of her sisters-in-law, helping at the Girls’ Club and the Women’s Institute, at the summer Camp for Slum Children and the winter Soup Kitchen for the Poor, until an attack of influenza followed by pneumonia, drove her back, on the advice of her doctor, into her old quiet existence, which she resumed with a relief that surprised her. The dog Tags had died the summer before, and Anna, saving up her pocket money, had bought her, as a Christmas present, a Pekinese of no certain pedigree. Then memory itself seemed to take on the ease of a lap dog, and she found that she could remember Miles with tolerance, and gratitude for the happiness he had given her.

The Pekinese was fawn-coloured, with a black face and a curling ostrich feather of a tail. Lucy called her Miss Ming, and painted a dog basket lacquer red for her to sleep
in at the foot of her own bed; but Miss Ming had other ideas about her sleeping quarters and invariably insinuated herself under the eider-down, against Lucy’s feet, as soon as she was asleep, creeping out again in the morning before she waked, till one night Lucy was awakened by a fierce growling, and heard the almost forgotten voice of Captain Gregg booming in her ears.

“Take the damn dog off the bed—off my bed—bless my soul, it will be between the sheets next.”

“Oh! So you’ve come back,” said Lucy, hauling Miss Ming up into her arms and stifling her growls for fear that she should awaken the children.

“And quite time, too,” said the captain. “It’s not healthy to have a flea-ridden dog sleeping in your bed—in my bed.”

“She’s not flea-ridden,” said Lucy indignantly, “poor little pet! What a thing to say about my best girl!”

“Oh, my God,” said Captain Gregg in disgust, “what sort of talk is that for a sensible woman?”

“I thought you liked dogs,” said Lucy.

“So I do like dogs,” replied the captain, “not furred frogs like that—it’s an insult to call a creature like that a dog, blast it.”

“You don’t seem to have changed,” said Lucy. “I thought you’d come back full of noble talk and wise sayings.”

“Oh, so you were sure I would come back,” said the captain.

“I was too busy to think of you at all till just lately,” said Lucy, “though when I was ill I thought of you once or twice. Have you been learning a great deal?”

“I’m not a very good pupil,” said the captain. “My thoughts kept wandering back here. I’m still too interested in Mammon, I dare say.”

“Meaning me?” asked Lucy pleasantly.

“Meaning you and my house,” said the captain. “I thought at any minute you might make another will leaving it to those Slum Children.”

“You still don’t trust me, I see,” said Lucy.

“Well, admit that the idea did cross your mind,” said the captain.

“Yes, it did,” said Lucy. “It would seem a more natural will for me to make, and Cyril is growing up and may ask questions about such things. He wants to go into the church. He has won a scholarship to a theological college.”

“I know,” said Captain Gregg, “and Anna wants to be a ballet dancer.”

“She hasn’t said so,” remarked Lucy.

“No, but she will as soon as she leaves school, and then there’ll be ructions with Master Cyril, you mark my words,” said the captain.

“But why should there be?” asked Lucy. “They each have their own lives to live.”

“Cyril has never been the same since he won that scholarship and was taken up by the Bishop of Whitchester as his pet protégé,” said the captain, “and a more narrow-minded man I have seldom heard.”

“How do you know about all this?” asked Lucy.

“Oh, I take an interest and I’ve been about,” said the captain.

“Oh!” said Lucy and was silent, clasping Miss Ming’s warm little body to her.

“Yes, I’ve seen Miles,” said the captain quietly. “You were well out of that, me dear. He has grown stout and bald and his taste in women gets younger and younger. They laugh at him and take all he’ll give them and turn him down, when he runs back to his wife to be consoled.”

“She hasn’t divorced him?” asked Lucy.

“No,” said the captain, “she is a very faithful wife and forgives him every time.”

“She’s a better wife than I should have been,” Lucy admitted.

“She’s in love with him, not romance,” said the captain, “and real love isn’t blind, it sees everything and has an endless capacity for forgiving.”

“Were you ever in love?” asked Lucy.

“I thought I was, often,” answered the captain, “but I never went so far as wanting to marry any of them. The nearest I came to proposing was one time in Dublin. She had black hair, and black-lashed blue eyes, and an Irish complexion.”

“What was her name?” asked Lucy, a little stiffly.

“God bless my soul! I don’t remember,” replied the captain. “I used to visit her home every evening I could get free, the week we were in port. She used to sing to me. But the sea and my ships always came first with me.”

“Cyril says he thinks celibacy is a very fine ideal,” said Lucy.

“You wait,” said Captain Gregg, “the Bishop has a daughter with quite other ideas.”

“He never told me about a daughter,” said Lucy, “but that is like Cyril, he has always been secretive, so unlike Anna—which makes me think you must be wrong about her wanting to become a dancer as I’m sure she would have told me about it.”

“She will tell you,” said the captain, “and then the trouble will begin. Be gentle with her, Lucy, it means a lot to her.”

The trouble started the following week after Anna had danced at a charity concert. She came home bright-eyed and flushed with excitement.

“Mummy,” she cried, bursting into the kitchen where Lucy was preparing the supper, having hurried home before her, “mummy! Madame Lachinsky was at the concert and she says she’ll take me.”

“Take you, darling,” said Lucy, putting butter in a pan for the omelette, “take you where?”

“Into her dancing school in London,” said Anna. “She’s been on holiday at The Hotel here, and I went to see her and she said she’d come and see me dance and I never dreamed she would, and there she was and she says she’ll teach me. Oh, mummy, I’m going to be a dancer!” and, seizing her mother around the waist, she waltzed her about the kitchen.

“What’s all this noise about?” asked Cyril, coming in from the dining-room where he had been writing, it being a week before his college term began.

“I’m going to be a dancer, a dancer, a dancer,” sang Anna, continuing to whirl alone as Lucy sank breathlessly onto a chair, still grasping the frying pan.

“A dancer!” said Cyril suspiciously. “What sort of a dancer?”

“A beautiful ballet dancer,” said Anna, seizing a dishcloth and pirouetting on her toes.

“Not on the stage!” said Cyril.

“Of course on the stage,” retorted Anna, coming to a full stop in front of him. “Why not?”

“Mother, she can’t,” said Cyril, turning to Lucy. “What will the Bishop say?”

“Who cares what the Bishop says?” said Anna.

“I do,” said Cyril.

“Well, I don’t,” said Anna, dropping the dishcloth over her brother’s head. “That for the old Bishop!”

Cyril removed the dishcloth and turned on his sister in
cold anger. “It may not strike you, but if you go on the stage it may ruin my whole career,” he said.

“And what about my career?” asked Anna hotly.

“The church would appear to be rather more important than the stage,” said Cyril, “and more Christian.”

“Not your sort of church,” flashed Anna. “Christianity doesn’t think of careers, and gaiters, and mitres.”

“Now, children, don’t lose your tempers,” said Lucy, rising and going on with her work. “We must talk this over quietly and——”

“But, mother, make her see——”

“But, mummy, make him see——”

“We won’t discuss it at all until after supper,” said Lucy. “Anna, go and lay the table.”

Nor would she listen to a word from either of them on the subject until they had eaten, Cyril in white, sulky silence, Anna pink-cheeked and voluble on the subject of Miss Ming, and the garden, and anything that came into her head.

“And now,” said Lucy after the supper things had been washed up and put away, “we will go into the sitting-room and try and talk this matter out in a sensible, grownup way, not like unbalanced children. What are your objections, Cyril, to your sister’s becoming a dancer?” she went on, seating herself in the armchair.

“The Bishop doesn’t approve of the stage,” said Cyril, “and if he hears that my sister is exhibiting herself practically naked——”

“Who says I’m going to be practically naked?” burst out Anna.

“Please, Anna, we will hear what Cyril has to say first,” said Lucy. How much she hated violence, and here was
violence surging up all round her again, wrecking the peace of her home.

“And it’s a well-known fact that most stage people are immoral,” said Cyril. “Of course, Anna’s my sister, so I expect she would be all right, but I don’t want to be connected with the stage, it might do me a great deal of harm.”

“Aren’t your ideas rather old-fashioned, dear?” said Lucy.

“They aren’t his ideas, they’re the Bishop’s,” said Anna scornfully, “and Noah put him in the Ark in mistake for a camel.”

“Anna!” said Lucy sternly, fighting down the laughter that rose in her, for Bishop Winstanley did look very like a camel. “If you say another word before it is your turn, you will go to bed.”

“If she must dance,” went on Cyril, “why can’t she take it up as a teacher and give lessons to people we know.”

Anna hurled herself on to the sofa and stuffed a corner of a cushion into her mouth.

“That’s all I have to say,” said Cyril, “except that if she insists on being so selfish she will ruin everything for me.”

“And what about you, aren’t you being selfish?” demanded Anna, sitting up. “I’ve wanted to dance ever since I was a baby. I’ve practised and practised ever since I could stand almost, and Cyril has thought of being all sorts of things—a doctor, you remember, when he cut up those frogs all over the house, and a banker, and a politician. It’s only since the Bishop took him up that he’s wanted to be a Bishop, too; as he says, it’s a career. To me dancing is a vocation, and I am going to dance. Madame Lachinsky doesn’t take just anyone into her school, it’s a great honour.”

“There must be some solution,” said Lucy.

They were still seeking it at eleven o’clock when Lucy sent them to bed and went wearily to her own.

“I feel like a battered shuttlecock,” she thought as she slid down between the cool linen sheets.

“If I hadn’t said I would never interfere with anyone again, I should suggest that they compromise,” said the captain’s voice.

“In what way?” asked Lucy.

“Tell them that they must each give in a little,” said the captain. “If Anna wants to become a dancer, she must change her name; then they can go their several ways and their lives need never meet.”

“But isn’t that rather sad,” said Lucy, “a complete break between a brother and a sister?”

“It seems to me that that would come in any case,” said the captain, “and if the church is right for Cyril and the stage for Anna, it will work out for the best—but I’m not interfering, let that be clearly understood.”

“I will sleep on it,” said Lucy. “I don’t want to interfere with my children’s lives any more than you do, but I want them to be happy. Must growing up always mean a breaking up?” she asked sadly.

“No, but it often means a breaking away,” the captain said. “And you wouldn’t want them to stay anchored for the rest of their existence, growing barnacles all over them and rotting away with rust.”

There being no better way out of the impasse, Cyril agreed that if Anna were to change her name, there need be no further connection between them.

“Do you mean that you’ll never speak to Anna again?” asked Lucy, seeking him out in the privacy of his bedroom.

“I shall always be pleased to speak to Anna as Miss Muir, and if she is living a life suitable to my sister,” he replied gravely.

There it is coming out again, thought Lucy, the possessiveness of the Muirs with their “my … my … my,” trying to force the world and everyone in it into their own pattern as if they had been given the copyright of living by God Himself.

“Try and be a little more tolerant, Cyril dear,” she said gently; “it will make life so much easier for you and other people,” and she went away to help Anna pack for she was to leave immediately for London.