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It was in the afternoon of a fine, breezy summer’s day when two ladies walked together into the vestibule of a smart and dignified but pleasingly unpretentious new block of flats not very far from Regent’s Park. The first of the pair went with a bold, confident step and wore the robust and sensible clothing of a practical countrywoman in town; she gave the concierge a cheerful smile as she and her companion passed, for, while not a very frequent visitor, she was regular enough to be a familiar one. The second lady was a very different sort of person. Somewhat older than her companion, she was dressed in the sober uniform of a nursing Sisterhood; she had the serious, rather pale face which went with that costume, and yet her expression was not altogether an austere one.
They went side by side, this odd couple, up to the first floor, and rang the bell of one of the flats.
‘We’re early,’ remarked the first of the two to her friend as they stood waiting, ‘but I don’t suppose they’ll mind. Gwynneth is always prepared for anything.’
Presently the door was opened by a small, neat maidservant, who led them to the drawing-room and announced their names to the lady who waited there. She rose to her feet, smiling through her spectacles, and came forward to greet the visitors.
‘Gwynneth is just helping Alice get the things ready,’ she said; ‘she’ll be here in a moment. You must forgive our untidiness... I’m glad you could both come,’ she continued, as they sat down together in comfortable seats arranged round a little table in the recess of the window, ‘especially you, Helena, as I was very much afraid the hospital would find some last-minute excuse to keep you back again. I haven’t persuaded you to throw up the place yet, I see?’
Sister Helena smiled, and said, ‘Yet I may occasionally go out to tea with my friends, as you must also see, Ella, dear.’ This remark and the preceding one were both spoken in the amiable if not exactly jesting tone that belonged to a matter of once real argument which, neither party changing her own view but each respecting the other as thoroughly as ever, had descended to a thing of occasional familiar teasing.
Here the fourth member of the party entered—herself bearing a tray of scones, sandwiches and little cakes, and accompanied by the maidservant with the tea. They set down their burdens on the table, and the maid, following a ‘Thank you, Alice,’ from her mistress, bobbed a curtsey and withdrew.
The sensible countrywoman, if that was what she was, watched the door close behind the maid, and then remarked: ‘Alice is new, isn’t she?’
‘Yes; Sukey left us last month to get married,’ said Gwynneth, taking her place on the sofa beside Ella. ‘Do you want to pour, Ella, or shall I?—Oh, thank you.’
‘Pah!’ exclaimed the visitor. ‘Very poor judgement, in my opinion, leaving a good place like this just to get married—for it is a good place, I’m sure,’ she added. ‘Now, when I was a servant——’
‘Tea, Jill?’ gently interrupted Ella. ‘And I’m sure we all share your views on marriage, of course, but Sukey tells us she’s very happy,’ she continued as she poured the tea into Jill’s cup.
Gwynneth looked towards the window—where the waving branches of a tree looking down on them made what might have been quite a good counterfeit of peaceful rural scenery, had the tree not been so conspicuously a London plane—to hide her smile. Really she was still a little astonished to hear this spirited friend of Sister Helena’s talk so casually about how she had once been a servant (albeit Jill Trecastle had been a lady’s maid and not a parlourmaid). She was of better birth than Gwynneth herself, and was now mistress of her own estate! Yet Gwynneth liked her very well; her character combined that bold adventurousness which had sent her out into the world to find her fortune as a lady’s maid with a basic and utterly solid integrity of self, and though the combination expressed itself rather differently from its appearance in Gwynneth’s own nature, she recognised it and responded to its draw. And she saw why Helena had been attracted by her, too, despite their making such an odd pair—for Gwynneth knew very well that the most unlikely opposites can go together.
‘Now, you must tell me all your news,’ said Jill, having taken a sip of tea and a large bite out of a buttered fruit scone. ‘How is little Georgie getting on at that day-school?’
‘Oh, marvellously,’ said Gwynneth—for here Jill had hit upon the right topic on which to question her. ‘He’s very happy there, and he’s terribly popular, too! He comes home chattering about all his new friends.’
‘And sometimes also about how much he likes the work,’ added Ella. ‘Gwynneth’s trying to get him on to music, of course, but so far the greatest interest he’s showing is in literature.’
‘Literature! He can help me with my memoirs,’ said Jill happily.
‘Your memoirs would have enough of adventure in them to please even the most un-literary schoolboy,’ returned Ella. ‘I’m sure Georgie will love them. But how are things down at Castle Manor?’
Things down at Castle Manor, said Jill, were going on very well; and she launched into an involved and colourful account of life on the country estate which she had inherited on her father’s death a few years ago: the improvements which she had been making to the cottages, her plans for a series of lectures upon philosophical, scientific and artistic topics to be given in the village (‘You must come and talk to us about music, Gwynneth!’), how she was getting on with managing the servants in her own house. ‘It is really astonishing,’ she concluded, ‘what a difference it makes to a place, having one’s own responsibilities and plenty to do and to work on there. I once thought the country—and Castle Manor itself—dull, if you can believe that!’
‘Nowhere you went could ever be dull, Jill, I’m sure,’ remarked Ella.
‘Indeed it could not!’ said Sister Helena, who, not having spoken for a while, had been watching Jill with a quietly bright sort of a look on her serious face. ‘There is useful, worthy—and interesting—work to be done in every corner of this world, you see.’ In this speech a tone which might have been simply moralising was leavened by a smile—as it often was with her.
‘I couldn’t do it all without Helena, of course,’ said Jill, laying a hand on her friend’s arm. ‘She writes to me from the hospital—goodness knows how she finds the time—and advises me upon what to do.’
‘I wouldn’t quite say that,’ said Helena. ‘I know as little of managing a country estate as you did when you began; I only try to see, on general principles and as far as I can, what might be the best thing——’
‘Nonsense,’ said Jill firmly. ‘You know how invaluable you are, Helena, darling.’
And Helena smiled. She had a quietly appealing smile; it was a look of pleasure not unsuited to the general gravity of her face.
A short silence followed; Jill helped herself to another slice of cake, and Ella sat back more comfortably in her corner of the sofa. She was looking carefully at Gwynneth as she did so, and presently she said, ‘Now, Georgie isn’t the only one who’s been making good progress in new studies lately. Gwynneth and I often go out together to lectures, concerts, debates and such things——’
‘—There are so many things to go to, living in town, you see,’ added Gwynneth—who, if she had come late and not entirely happily to an appreciation of the social breadth of life beyond the confines of Long Stow, was now growing more steadily to appreciate its intellectual breadth. No more must she do battle with the coachman for an eight-mile drive to a lecture; life had developed greatly for her from that determined beginning.
‘—And you, my dear, are learning such heaps of things about the history and theory of music as quite astonish me,’ finished Ella, who, straightforward herself, had no hesitation in showing her pride in her friend’s accomplishments.
‘You know,’ said Jill thoughtfully, ‘I think that’s just what Helena was saying—about there being worthy work to do in all parts of the world, I mean. I love to hear about how you get on here, both of you, because your way of living wouldn’t suit me at all—being so intellectual. I am a little more given to steady application than I once was, I’ll allow’—here she glanced at Helena—‘but real dedication to regular study for its own sake has no appeal for me, any more than it did when I was a girl in the schoolroom. And there’s dear Georgie: I like children well enough, but I shouldn’t like to have any of my own, or to have charge of one all the time—but you and he get along perfectly. Meanwhile, there is Helena in her hospital, and there I am on my estate; all of us so different, and all of us, I hope, happy.’
‘Just so,’ said Helena, nodding.
‘And none of us,’ continued Jill, who was warming to her subject, ‘none of us in that one position which the world thinks the only one for women, and quite sufficient for any of us—that is, being married, and devoting ourselves to a man’s happiness. Well, I trust none of us would want it!’ This last remark was accompanied by a mischievous glance at the other three, but she quickly went on, all earnestness once more, ‘It’s my opinion that women have the spirit of adventure in us to just the degree that men have; we need variety in life, and proper spheres in which to develop our talents, and if we only have the boldness to set out and seek them, we will find them, and do very well. I suppose even women who like to marry men need something else besides.’
‘Hear, hear! Well put, Jill,’ said Ella, when this speech was done.
‘There you have a passage for your memoirs,’ said Gwynneth. Then she turned more solemn. ‘It isn’t always easy to get there,’ she said; ‘but I think God does call us to many different things in life, and if we... try to understand where we are led, and help each other to understand, then we will find it.’
For Jill’s speech had, perhaps, expressed something of how Gwynneth had come to see the history of her own life, at a distance of years from those events to which she now alluded so delicately. Jill had perhaps been a little tactless in speaking so breezily of her unmarried state; it was true enough now that Gwynneth had no wish ever to marry, but it had been different once... Yet Gwynneth, long after she had watched the flowers of February bloom round a new-made grave in a Suffolk churchyard, had realised—slowly, and with that soft, muted quality which characterises a second love after grief, and makes it perhaps the stronger—that she really was happier here in her independent life, and with Ella at her side, than she would have been, not only as Sidney Gleed’s wife, but as Robert Carlton’s.
But all that was long past. Here, in the present, Gwynneth sighed and raised her eyes from the floor, then smiled and addressed a question to Helena about her work at the hospital; and the general, light-hearted conversation was resumed.
At last Jill took out her watch, glanced at it and said, ‘I must leave you very soon, I’m afraid; my train is at 3.24, and I really must get back to Castle Manor to-night.’
This brought very sincere expressions of regret from both hostesses. ‘Well, make sure you come back up soon,’ said Gwynneth firmly, as Jill gathered up her hat and gloves.
Helena also rose from her seat, and said that she should be getting back to the hospital.
‘You’ll walk with me to the station, won’t you?’ said Jill. ‘You know it’s hardly out of your way,’ she added, as Helena looked hesitant.
But at this argument Helena agreed without demur—indeed, with a smile—to accompany Jill to Euston, and they left the flat together.
‘I do like seeing them,’ said Gwynneth as, Alice having cleared away the tea things, she and Ella found themselves alone together in the quiet drawing-room. ‘Jill Trecastle is really a remarkable person—and she always energises one so.’
Ella laughed softly and drew Gwynneth into her arms. ‘Just so,’ she said.
*
A few days later Ella, happening to have an errand in the neighbourhood of Sister Helena’s hospital, stopped at that establishment and enquired whether the Sister could see her. She knew that this question would probably be answered in the negative, for Helena’s work left her scarcely a minute to herself from morning to night; but, she reasoned, to ask after her was still worthwhile, for Helena would hear of it and be cheered to know that Ella had thought of her. And Ella got, as reward for her thoughtfulness, the pleasantly surprising news that Sister Helena was disengaged just at this moment, and would be happy to see her.
Helena received her in the cosy room, tastefully if sparely arranged, where she spent those scant few minutes. When Ella arrived she was sitting at the table with a great ledger open before her, looking over whatever was written in it—hospital records of some kind, Ella supposed—but she closed the book and rose to her feet, smiling, as Ella entered the room.
‘I thought I should just call and see how you were,’ said Ella, once they were sitting at the little table together. ‘How Jill is I know already, because Gwynneth and I had a long letter from her yesterday, telling us all about happenings at Castle Manor.’
Helena laughed. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve heard all about it too,’—with a very slight blush which meant, perhaps, that Jill had written rather more to her than she had written to Ella and Gwynneth.
‘Look here, Helena,’ said Ella suddenly. ‘I know you and I have gone over the whole question before—the worthiness of Sisterhoods as a form of religious organisation, and as an avenue for women to find useful work, and all that—we are of different temperaments, and the life strikes us differently, I know—but, if you’ll allow me to say it, wouldn’t you be happier going and living with her?’
She did not add, as I have been. It was, as she said, unnecessary; Helena knew Ella’s history perfectly well, and had never censured her or Gwynneth for leaving the Sisterhood at Campden Hill where they had met, to go back out into the world together.
Helena raised her eyes and looked at her friend, not with surprise or offence, but rather gravely, as was her way when she thought any question, remark or other speech addressed to her really worthy of thought, and was weighing how best to respond to it. She glanced down at her hands, which were folded in her lap—still a lady’s hands, fine and sensitive, as they had been formed in her early life, but far more worn and roughened with hard toil than a lady’s hands often are—and then she began: ‘You know, Ella, why I took up this life: I wished to serve God in the best way I could, and I believed—from a serious study of my inclinations, as well as my abilities—that this was the way He called me to follow. I believe it still; and I think Jill was right in what she said the other day. I give my best service to God here, in my work with the nurses, and she does the same among the tenants and villagers at Castle Manor.’
She sighed, paused for a moment, and, Ella not making any interruption, continued, ‘Jill is... Jill is one of the greatest blessings God has sent into my life. Of course I miss her when we are parted! But we are not really parted—not absolutely, I mean—for we write to each other, and I think we are always with each other, in heart and soul, supporting each other in all we do. Whenever I’m struggling to decide about something I think what she would say or do; and she tells me I’ve been a great influence for the better upon her. And,’ she added, after another slight pause, ‘aren’t you and Gwynneth doing the same thing here—supporting each other, and each guiding the other’s life?’
‘Yes,’ said Ella, ‘but not only in heart and soul, Helena, dear.’ She smiled—a wry look, of sympathy and amusement together. ‘That wouldn’t be enough.’
‘Well, we also have our visits,’ murmured Helena. Then, ‘Ella, I am happy; and I hope she is too. I think I would not be happy without my work, any more than I would be entirely without her.’
‘I own it would not suit me,’ said Ella, leaning back in her chair, ‘but there, I suppose Jill really was right about us all finding happiness in different ways.’
She spoke quite sincerely. She did not try any other argument—did not, for instance, set out her views on the wisdom of going on in a life which had been chosen under conditions very different from those of the present, simply out of pride in keeping a promise. Ella was wise enough to see that those views which she held so strongly were formed by her own experience of life, and she paid her friend the compliment of believing that, with a character and a past experience very different from Ella’s own, she too was sincere in what she said. After all, Ella thought to herself, she always had enjoyed friendship with characters quite unlike her own.
The rest of the visit, then, passed in conversation about Georgie, and a concert which Ella and Gwynneth had attended the previous day, and how the newest nurse at the hospital, of whose abilities Helena already had a high opinion, was getting on. It ended, about a quarter of an hour later, in the usual way. There was a knock, and the door was immediately opened by a nurse, who said could the Sister come to the downstairs ward at once, please?
Helena, with hasty apologies and farewells to Ella, went away with the nurse. ‘You can find your own way out?’ she said.
‘Yes, of course. Good-bye, dear!’ said Ella.
But before she did find her way out of the hospital, Ella sat for a few minutes at the little table, gazing reflectively round at the furniture, books and the few other personal items which decorated the room. The visit had given her material for reflection.
Then, moving all at once briskly, she rose, put on her hat and gloves, and left, closing the door carefully behind her.