Martha was not much concerned as to where they might be ultimately tossed. She had other absorptions. Even apart from her enraptured inner drama, her life was full enough to keep her thoughts engaged. She came home from long crowded days in schools and lecture-rooms to make the supper, set the house to rights, prepare as far as she could the next day’s dinner; and rose in raw black mornings to get breakfast ready and attend to Emmeline’s wants. Never, through all the weeks of Emmeline’s illness, had she to clean the stove, light the fire, or carry water. Slowly and clumsily, but without fail, Geordie did these things; and he and Madge between them dished up some sort of dinner, while Aunt Josephine came frequently about, and the neighbours ran in and lent a hand. By and by Emmeline rose again, and sat heavily by the fire, putting her hand to an occasional job; and the winter wore through.
Meanwhile Martha’s private drama had spun more fiercely. She had discovered, on the opening of the Training Centre session, with something like dismay, that Miss Warrender, now with Double Firsts, had been appointed to the lecturing staff; and that she would spend an hour a week under her tuition. Her reason repudiated the dismay. To feel a fool in the presence of a brilliant woman when one meets her socially, is no excuse for dread of her as a teacher: but reason was not particularly successful in her arguments. Martha continued to feel constraint in Miss Warrender’s presence.
Others of the girls, who though her juniors had been the year before the young lecturer’s fellow-students, were less abashed. The student’s inalienable right to criticize his teachers became doubly a right when the teacher had been a fellow student the previous year. Martha therefore heard, in the Common Room and corridors, much discussion of Miss Warrender’s affairs. It was thus that one afternoon, waiting in the lecture room for the lady herself to appear − for with all her brilliance Miss Warrender had no very accurate ideas on punctuality − Martha heard her name coupled with that of Luke Cromar, and coupled lightly. Luke, it appeared, talked philosophy with Miss Warrender elsewhere than in Union Street. She was reported to have said that he counted her his greatest friend. The tone implied that species of friendship that has laws outwith the common moral law. It was the tone, even more than the disclosure, that played havoc in Martha’s brain. She tried to shout, ‘It’s a lie, a lie,’ but her lips were parched, her tongue was too clumsy for her mouth. Miss Warrender came in. Martha could distinguish words but no ideas in the lecture. Her pulses were pelting and in a little she rose and went out. ‘Are you sick?’ her neighbour whispered. She paid no attention, walking straight past the lecturer’s desk to the door.
Outside she stood still in a fury of anger. This breaking of the third commandment! But was it true? The blood thundered in her ears and wave after wave rushed hotly to her brow. She hurried at random among the mean streets that surrounded the Training Centre, but recollecting that her fellow-students might come out from lecture and meet her, directed her steps towards Union Street. A filthy lie. − But if he had given it circumstance? His walking with Miss Warrender was so hateful to herself that she saw it as a dishonour to his nature. That Luke should stain his honour! − could even act so that foul breath might play upon his honour.
In Union Street she met Dussie. Dussie cried, ‘Do come and see this frock!’ and dragged her to a window. ‘That golden-brown one. Marty, you’d look lovely in it.’
‘Duss,’ blurted Martha, staring through the plate-glass window, ‘I heard something abominable just now. Some girls talking. They suggested that Luke goes too much with Lucy Warrender.’
‘Pigs,’ said Dussie.
Martha had spoken from an urgent impulse to thrust the knowledge outside herself, but regretted at once that she had thrust in on Dussie.
‘I oughtn’t to have told you. I−’
‘Why ever not? You’ll better tell me next who the damsels were, so that I can claw their eyes out when I meet them.’
She had broken across Martha’s slower speech, so that simultaneously Martha was saying:
‘− didn’t mean to make you unhappy.’
‘Oh, that doesn’t make me unhappy! It’s rather fun than not to be properly angry. I could slaughter the lot of them and then dance upon their reeking corpses.’
She made a mouth at the shop-window and laughed at it herself so heartily that Martha was compelled also to laugh.
‘I suppose,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘a thing like that couldn’t make you unhappy unless you weren’t sure of Luke.’
‘Marty! − You’re the pig now.’
‘Oh, I don’t mean you. I mean anyone. I was only −’ after a perceptible pause she concluded − ‘theorising.’
‘Don’t, then. Theorising’s stupid. Sure − ! I’m as sure as death. No, as life. That’s a lot surer.’
‘I know you are. No one could be not sure of Luke.’
Her anguish nevertheless was because she was not sure. Not that she doubted his faithfulness to Dussie! But she feared lest by a careless gesture he had marred his own shining image, made himself a little less than ideally perfect.
It was at that moment it dawned on Dussie that Martha was in love with Luke, and the irony of her own procedure struck her. But immediately after she was moved with a grave pity for her friend. ‘How unhappy she must be.’
But Martha was not unhappy. So long as she was unaware of it, to be in love with Luke was bliss; and she was not yet quite aware. She was however at the moment in an agony of fear for him. Her love was ruthless on his behalf and would have nothing less for him than her imagined perfection. For two days she supped and slept with her agony, rose with it in the morning and carried it to every task she undertook. She began to understand the Incarnation. It was the uttermost shame for her to offer rebuke to the man who had dazzled her eyes until she could not see his human littleness; but if one cared enough for a person one would be thankful to suffer any shame, humiliation, misunderstanding, if so be the beloved could be saved from becoming a lesser man than was in him to become. God, put gladly to shame and reviled, because that was a lesser anguish than to see men and women fail of their own potentialities. … By the third day she had tortured herself into the persuasion that she must do violence to her nature and tell Luke that he had laid himself somehow open to public reproach.
She told him what she had heard.
‘Do you happen to know one George Keith, fifth Earl Marischal?’ he said, in the curious voice that she used to think had a smile in it.
She turned enquiring eyes, as though to ask what the Earl did there.
‘As you may have heard,’ Luke proceeded, ‘he founded Marischal College, of which I am an unworthy member, in the year of grace 1593. Rather a magnificent Earl he must have been, since he did of his own prowess what it required kings and such-like bodies to do elsewhere − founded a University. The only one in Britain, you know, founded by an Earl. It was a separate University then, a sort of rival grocer’s shop across the street from King’s − whence it results that Marischal had a motto which I daresay you have heard.’
She wished he would be serious.
‘What’s good enough for an Earl is good enough for me.’ And he quoted the old motto: ‘They haf said: Quhat say they: Lat them say.’
So! − He had not understood.
She made her