CHAPTER IX
James Murchison’s motor-car drew up before a row of buildings in Mill Lane, a series of brick boxes that were flattered with the name of “Prospect Cottages.” So far as prospect was concerned, the back yard of a tannery offered no “patches of purple” to the front windows of the row, and the breath that blew therefrom had no kinship to a land breeze from the Coromandel coast. In blunt Saxon, Mill Lane stank, and with the whole-heartedness of a mediæval alley. Over the gray cobbles that dipped between the houses to the river came a glimpse of the foam and glitter of the mill pool and the dull thunder of the wheels and water hummed perpetually up the narrow street.
Murchison swung open the gate, and in three strides stood at the blistered door of No. 9 Prospect Row. A painted board hung beside the door bearing a smoking chimney “proper,” and for supporters two bundles of sweep’s brushes that looked wondrous like Roman fasces. The letter-press advertised Mr. William Bains as a sweeper of chimneys, soot merchant, and extinguisher of fires. The little front garden was neat as a good housewife’s linen cupboard, with double daisies along the borders, and nasturtiums, claret, crimson, and gold, scrambling up pea-sticks below the window.
A stout woman, who smelled of soup, opened the door to Murchison and welcomed him with the most robust good-will.
“Good-morning, doctor; hope I ’aven’t kept you waiting. Step in, sir, if you please.”
Murchison stepped in, bending his head by force of habit, as though accustomed to cottage doorways. Mrs. Bains in a starched apron made way for him like a ship in sail. She was a very capable woman, so said her neighbors, black-eyed, sturdy, with a nose of the retroussé type, and patches of color over her rather prominent cheek-bones.
“You’re looking better, doctor, excuse me saying it. I can tell you you gave us a bit of a shock when you went off in that there dead faint on Tuesday.”
Mrs. Bains was a woman with a sanguine temper, a temper that made her an aggressive enemy, but a very loyal and active friend. Her black eyes twinkled with motherly concern as she watched Murchison pull off his gloves and stuff them into his hat.
“They tell me that I have been working too hard,” he said, with a smile.
“Lor’, sir, you do work; you don’t do your cooking with no pepper. I was taking it to myself, sir, the power of worry we’ve give you over the child.”
“A good fight is worth winning, Mrs. Bains. I am proud of the victory.”
“And I reckon none else would ’a’ done it, and so says the neighbors. Will you step up-stairs, sir? Don’t mind my man, he’s just scrubbing the soot off ’im.”
A pair of huge fore-arms, a gray flannel shirt, and a red face covered with soap-suds saluted Murchison from the steaming copper in the scullery.
“Good-mornin’, sir; ’ope you’re well.”
“Better, Bains, thanks. Washing the war-paint off, eh?”
“That’s it, sir,” and the sweep grinned good-will and sturdy admiration; “the kid’s doing fine, I hear.”
“Could not be better, Bains.”
“I reckon you’ve done us a rare good turn, sir.”
Murchison’s eyes smiled at the man’s words.
“I’m glad we won,” he said; “a child’s life is worth fighting for.”
“It be, sir, it be,” and the sweep swished the soap-suds from his face till it shone like the sun brightening from behind a cloud.
Murchison climbed the stairs to the front bedroom, a room liberally decorated with cheap china and colored texts. The patient, a little girl, christened Pretoria by her patriotic parents, lay on the bed beneath the window. The satiny whiteness of the child’s skin contrasted with the cherry-pink night-gown that she wore. It had been a case of diphtheria, a case that would probably have ended in disaster before the days of serum. Murchison had sat up half one night, doubtful whether he would not have to tracheotomize the child.
“Hallo, Babs, how’s that naughty throat?”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and chatted boyishly to Pretoria, whose shy eyes surveyed him with a species of delighted adoration. The hero worship that children give to men is pathetic in its ideal trustfulness.
“I’m better, thank you, sir.”
“That’s right; you are beginning to know all about it, eh? Tongue fine and red. She’ll be a talker, Mrs. Bains. Taking her milk well, yes. Keep her lying down.”
Mrs. Bains’s big, red hands were fidgeting under her white apron.
“Begging your pardon, doctor, but the child’s been a-bothering me since you called last, to know whether she mayn’t give you some flowers.”
Mrs. Bains reached across the bed to where a cheap mug on the window-sill held a posy of pink daisies.
“They’re just common things,” said the sweep’s wife, with an apologetic smile.
The child’s hand went out, and there was a slight quivering of the bloodless lips.
“For the doctor, with Pretoria’s love.”
Murchison took the flowers tenderly in his strong, deft hand.
“Who’s spoiling me, I should like to know? Aren’t they beauties? Supposing I put two in my button-hole? Thank you, little one,” and he bent and kissed the child’s forehead.
“You won’t drop ’em in the street, sir?”
The pathetic touch of unconscious cynicism went to the man’s heart.
“What, lose my flowers! You wait, miss, to see whether I don’t wear some of them to-morrow.”
The little white face beamed.
“You’re that kind to humor the kid, sir,” quoth Mrs. Bains, with feeling, as she followed Murchison down the stairs.
An hour later Mr. William Bains was hanging his clean face over the garden fence as an example to the neighbors, when a smart victoria stopped at the upper end of Mill Lane. A dapper gentleman sprang out, and came quickly down the footway as though the reek of the tannery disgusted his polite nostrils. He glanced right and left with stiff-necked dissatisfaction, his sleek, fashionable figure reminding one of some aristocratic fragment of Sheraton plumped down amid battered oddments in some dealer’s shop.
Mr. William Bains scanned him, and grunted, noting the effeminate sag of the shoulders and the glint of the patent-leather boots. There was a certain insolent gentility in the dapper figure that made the man of the brawny fore-arms feel an instinctive and workman-like contempt.
“Can you inform me where a Mrs. Randle lives?”
The sweep caught the white of Dr. Steel’s left eye, and jerked his pipe-stem laconically at the next cottage down the lane.
“No. 10.”
“Obliged,” and Parker Steel passed on.
Five minutes later the door of No. 10 Prospect Row was clapped snappishly on the doctor’s heels. It opened again when the smart physician had regained his carriage and driven off. A thin woman, with an old cloth cap perched on her mud-colored hair, came out bare-elbowed. Her face warned Mr. Bains of the fact that she was the possessor of a grievance.
“See the gent come along?”
The sweep nodded.
“Sort of kid-gloved gentleman that makes a respectable woman think of this ’ere charity as an insult. Mrs. Gibbins sent him to see my Tom. I’m thinking she might as well mind ’er business.”
Mr. Bains cocked his pipe and chuckled.
“Dr. Steel’s one of the smart ’uns,” he said.
“Toff! I’d like to give ’im toffee! Comes into my ’ouse with ’is ’at on, and looks round ’im as though ’e was afraid to touch the floor with ’is boots. Sh’ld ’ear ’im talk, just as though ’is voice ’adn’t any stomach in it. I told ’im we had Murchison, Mrs. Gibbins or no Mrs. Gibbins. ’E looked me over as though I was a savage, and said, ‘Haw, yes, Dr. Murchison ’as all the parish cases, I believe.’ ‘And a good job, sir,’ says I. Lor’, I wouldn’t as much as scrub ’is dirty linen.”
Mr. Bains fingered his chin and sucked peacefully at his pipe.
“I likes brawn in a man,” he said, “and a big voice, and a bit of spark in th’ eye.”
“Don’t give me any of yer ‘trousers stretchers’ or yer fancy weskits—Murchison’s my man.”
“Grit, blessed grit to the bone of ’im.”
“And a real gentleman. Takes ’is ’at off in a ’ouse. T’other chap ’ain’t no manners.”
It is a cheap age, and cheap sentiment satisfies the masses, a mere matter of melodrama in which the villain is hissed and the “stage child” applauded when she points to heaven and invokes “Gawd” through her cockney nose. Sentiment in the more delicate phases may be either the refinement of hypocrisy or the shining out of the godliness in man. The trivial incidents of life may betray the true character more finely than the throes of a moral crisis. The average male might have dropped Miss Pretoria’s flowers round the nearest corner, or thrown them into his study grate to wither amid cigar ends and burned matches. James Murchison kept the flowers and gave them to his wife.
“Put them in water, dear, for me.”
“From a lady, sir?” and Catherine’s eyes searched the lines upon his face. She was jealous for his health, but her eyes were smiling. Dearest of all virtues in a woman are a brave cheerfulness and a tactful tongue.
Her husband kissed her, and it was a lover’s kiss.
“A thank-offering, dear, from the Bains child.”
“How sweet! Somehow I always treasure a child’s gift; it seems so fresh and real.”
“Poor little beggar,” and he smiled as he spoke. “I wouldn’t have lost that life, Kate, for a very great deal. It was something to feel that fellow Bains’s hand-grip when I told him we had won.”
Catherine was settling the flowers in a glass bowl.
“It was just a bit of life, dear,” she said.
“Yes, it is life that tells. I think I would rather have saved that child, Kate, than have written the most brilliant book.”
She turned to him and put her arms about his neck.
“That is the true man in you,” and her eyes honored him.
“You dear one.”
“Kiss me.”
Marriage had been no problem play for these two.
Catherine lay thinking that night, with her hair in tawny waves upon the pillow, waiting for her husband to come to bed. She was happier and less troubled at heart than she had been for many weeks. The strain had lessened for her husband with the summer, and he seemed his more breezy, strenuous self, a great child with his children, a man who appeared to have no dark corners in the house of life. Wilful optimist that she was, she could not conceive it possible that a mere “inherited lust” could bear down the man whose strength and honor were bound up for her in her religion. Where great love exists, great faith lives also. Catherine was too ready, perhaps, to forget her fears, to regard them as mere thunder-clouds, black for the hour, but destitute of heavier dread. She ascribed his momentary weakness to the brain strain of the winter’s work. The words that had terrified her in Porteus Carmagee’s garden had proved but a fantasy, for a trick of the heart had explained the incident and given the denial to Mrs. Betty’s insinuations. The ordeal need never be repeated, so she told herself. Murchison could be saved from overwork. The assistant he had engaged was a youngster of tact and education.
Love will stand trustfully through the storm, under a tree, braving the lightning; nor had Catherine realized how vivid his own frailty appeared to the man she loved. He was sitting alone in his study while she comforted herself with dreams in the room above, his head between his hands, his heart heavy in him for the moment. An inherited habit is never to be despised. The gods of old were prone to mortal weakness in the flesh, and no man is so masterful that he can command his own destiny unshaken. We are what the world and our ancestors have made us. The individual hand is there to hold the tiller, but even a Ulysses must meet the storm.
Murchison turned his tired face towards the light, heaved back his shoulders, and sighed like a man in pain. He rose, put out the lamp, locked the study door, and taking his candle went up to his dressing-room that looked out on the garden. The blind was up, the window open, the darkness of space afire with many stars. He stood awhile at the open window in deep thought, letting the night breeze play upon his face. He was glad of his home life, glad that a woman’s arms were waiting for him, ready to shelter him from himself. He thanked God, as a strong man thanks God, for blessings given. The breath of his home was sweet to him, its life full of tenderness and good.
His wife’s bedroom had an air of delicacy and refinement with its cherished antique furniture, its linen curtains flowered with red, the paper and carpet a rich green. Candles in brass sticks were burning on the dressing-table, where a silver toilet-set—brushes, mirror, combs, and pin-boxes—recalled to the wife her marriage day. There were books—red, green, and white—on a copper-bound book-shelf over the mantel-piece. The room suggested that those who slept in it had kept the romance of life untarnished and unbedraggled. There was no slovenly realism to hint at apathy or the materialism of desire.
“Have you been reading, dear?”
“Yes, reading.”
Murchison was not a man who could act what he did not feel. He looked at his wife’s face on the pillow, and wondered at the beauty of her hair.
“It is good to see you there, Kate,” he said.
The unrestrainable wistfulness of his look made her arms flash out to him. He knelt down beside the bed and let her fondle him with her hands.
“You regret nothing, dear?”
“Regret!”
“It is always in my mind—this curse. I am not a coward, Kate, but I go in deadly fear at times of my own flesh.”
“Always—this!”
“Would to God I could bear it all myself.”
“Come,” and she hung over him; “I understand, I am not afraid. You must rest; we will go away together to the cottage—a little honeymoon. You are not yourself as yet. Oh, my beloved, I want you here, here—at my heart!”
Darkness enveloped them, and she pillowed her husband’s head upon her shoulder. He heard her heart beating, heard the drawing of her breath. In a little while he fell asleep, but Catherine lay awake for many hours, her love hovering like some sacred flame of fire over the tired man at her side.
CHAPTER X
A white-capped servant came running across Lombard Street from Mr. Carmagee’s, and hailed Murchison’s chauffeur, who had just swung the car to the edge of the footway outside the doctor’s house. The white streamers of the maid’s apron were fluttering jauntily in the wind. Some weeks ago the chauffeur had discovered the fact that the lawyer’s parlor-maid had an attractive simper.
“Good-day, miss; can I oblige a lady?”
“Mr. Carmagee wants to know whether the doctor and the missus are going to Marley Down this afternoon?”
“Yes, straight away. I’m waiting for ’em to finish tea.”
“You’re to step over to Mr. Carmagee’s garden door at once.”
“Thank you. And who’s to mind the car?”
“It won’t catch cold,” and the maid showed her dimples for a bachelor’s benefit.
The chauffeur crossed the road with her, and was met at the green gate in the garden by Mr. Porteus himself. A hamper lay on the gravel-path at the lawyer’s feet, with straw protruding from under the lid. Mr. Carmagee twinkled, and gave the man a shilling.
“Stow this in the car, Gage; you’ve room, I suppose.”
“Plenty, sir.”
“Don’t say anything about it to your master. Just a little surprise, a good liver-tonic, Gage—see?”
The man grinned, touched his cap, and, picking up the hamper, recrossed the street. He packed Mr. Carmagee’s offering away with the light luggage at the back of the car, and after grimacing at the maid, who was still watching him from the garden door, busied himself with polishing the lamps.
“Good-bye, darling, good-bye. Be a good boy, Jack, and do what Mary tells you.”
Catherine was bending over her two children in the hall, a light dust cloak round her, a white veil over her summer hat. Miss Gwen, looking a little pensive and inclined to weep, hugged her mother with a pair of very chubby arms. Master Jack was more militant, and inclined to insist upon his rights.
“Oh, I say, mother, I don’t call it fair!”
“You shall come next week, dear.”
“Gage says he’ll teach me to drive. I’ll come next week. You’ve promised now—you know.”
Catherine kissed him, and laughed like a young bride when her husband came up and lifted the youngster off his feet.
“Who wants to boss creation, eh?”
Master John clapped his heels together.
“It’s no fun with old Mary, father.”
“You must learn to be a philosopher, my man.”
“I’m going to buy a busting big pea-shooter at Smith’s,” quoth the heckler, meaningly, as he regained the floor.
Murchison caught his daughter up in his strong arms.
“Good-bye, my Gwen—”
“Dood-bye, father.”
“No tears, little sunlight. What is it, a secret?—well.”
The child was whispering in his ear. Murchison listened, fatherly amusement shining in his eyes.
“I put ’em in muvver’s bag.”
“All right. I’ll see to it.”
“They’re boofy; I tried one, jus’ one.”
Murchison laughed, and hugged the child.
“What a wicked fay it is! You shall come with us next time. We’ll have tea in the woods, stir up ant-heaps, and play at Swiss Family Robinson. Good-bye,” and he carried her with him to the door to take her child’s kiss as the sunlight touched her hair.
Summer on Marley Down was a pageant such as painter’s love. Heather everywhere, lagoons of purple amid the rich green reefs of the rising bracken. Scotch firs towering into mystery against the blue, roofing magic aisles where shadows played on grass like velvet, bluff banks and forest valleys, heather and whortleberry tangling the ground. In the marshy hollows of the down the moss was as some rich carpet from the Orient, gold, green, and bronze. Asphodel grew in these rank green hollows, with the red whorls of the sundew, and the swinging sedge. Everywhere a broad, breezy sky, brilliant with color above a brilliant world.
The palings of the cottage-garden glimmered white between the sombre cypresses, and the dark swell of the fir-wood topped the red of the tiled roof. This nook in Arcady had the charm of a surprise for Murchison, for Catherine had made him promise that he would leave the stewardship to her. She had spent many an hour over at Marley Down, and her year’s allowance from her mother had gone in art fabrics, carpets, and old furniture. Catherine had taken Gwen with her more than once, having sworn the child to secrecy on these solemn motherly trifles, and Gwen had hidden her bubbling enthusiasm even from her father.
“Here we are! Is it not a corner of romance?”
“The place looks lovely, dear.”
“Wait!” and she seemed happily mysterious.
“I can guess your magic. Carry the luggage in, Gage; Dr. Inglis may want you for an hour or two at home.”
He gave his hand to Catherine, and together they passed into the little garden. Murchison looked about him like a man who had put the grim world out of his heart. The peacefulness of the place seemed part of the woodland and the sky. Purple clematis was in bloom, with a white rose over the porch. The beds below the windows were fragrant with sweet herbs, lavender and thyme, rosemary and sage. A crimson rambler blazed up nearly to the overhanging eaves, and there were rows of lilies, milk white, beneath the cypress-trees.
Within, a woman’s careful and happy tenderness welcomed him everywhere. A dozen nooks and corners betrayed where Catherine’s hands had been at work. Flowered curtains at the casements; simple pottery, richly colored, on the window shelves; his favorite books; a great lounge-chair for him before an open window. The place was a dream cottage, brown beamed, brown floored, its walls tinted with delicate greens and reds, old panelling beside the red brick hearths, beauty and quaintness everywhere, flowers in the garden, flowers in the quiet room.
“What a haven of rest!”
He stood in the little drawing-room, looking about him with an expression of deep contentment on his face. Catherine knew that his heart thanked her, and that her simple idyl was complete.
He turned and put his arm across her shoulders.
“You have worked hard, dear.”
“Have I?” and she laughed and colored.
“It is all good. I am wondering whether I deserve so much.”
Her happy silence denied the thought.
“Your spirit is in the place, Kate.”
“My heart, perhaps,” she answered.
He bent and kissed her, and drew from her with smiling mouth as they heard the man Gage come plodding down the stairs.
He stopped at the door and touched his cap.
“All in, sir. I’ve put your bag in what the old lady told me was your dressing-room.”
“Thanks, Gage.”
“Any message to Dr. Inglis, sir?”
“Oh, ask him to call at Mrs. Purvis’s in Carter Street; I forgot to put her on the list.”
“Right, sir,” and they heard the clash of the garden gate; then the panting of the car, and the plaintive wail of the “oil horse” as it got in gear.
“Out—old world,” and Murchison swept his wife towards the piano; “give me a song, Kate.”
“Now?” and her eyes were radiant.
“Yes, I shall remember the first song you sing to me in this dear place.”
Catherine had gone to her room, when Murchison stumbled on the hamper that Porteus Carmagee had given the man Gage to carry in the car. The fellow had set it down in the little hall, between an oak settle and a table that held a bowl of roses by the door. Murchison imagined that his wife had been investing in china or antiques. A letter was tucked under the cord, and, looking closer, he recognized his own name and the lawyer’s scrawl, the “qualifications” added with a humorous flourish of Mr. Carmagee’s pen.
Murchison sat on the oak settle, opened the envelope, and drew out the paper with its familiar crest.
“My dear Fellow,—Being a hearty admirer of your wife’s management of your health, I, a ridiculous bachelor, presume to afflict you with medicine of my own, gratis. I send you half a dozen bottles of Martinez’s 1887, as good a port as you will find in any cellar. I know that you are an abstemious beggar, but take the stuff for the tonic it is, and drink to an ‘incomparable’ wife’s health. The wine has purpled me out of the gray dumps on many an occasion. Not that you will need it, sir, for such a disease. Chivalry forbid! Yours ever,“Porteus Carmagee.”“P. S.—Gage is smuggling this over for me in the car.”
“My dear Fellow,—Being a hearty admirer of your wife’s management of your health, I, a ridiculous bachelor, presume to afflict you with medicine of my own, gratis. I send you half a dozen bottles of Martinez’s 1887, as good a port as you will find in any cellar. I know that you are an abstemious beggar, but take the stuff for the tonic it is, and drink to an ‘incomparable’ wife’s health. The wine has purpled me out of the gray dumps on many an occasion. Not that you will need it, sir, for such a disease. Chivalry forbid! Yours ever,
“Porteus Carmagee.”
“P. S.—Gage is smuggling this over for me in the car.”
Murchison read the letter through as though this eccentric but lovable gentleman had written to bully him on behalf of some injured client. Six bottles of Martinez’s 1887, plumped by this dear old blunderer into Kate’s haven of refuge! Had Murchison believed in the personal existence of the devil, he would have imagined that the Spirit of Evil had bewitched the innocent heart of Mr. Porteus Carmagee. Good God! what a frail fool he was that such a thing should have the least significance for him! James Murchison scared by a drug in a bottle! And yet the first impulse that he had was to dash the hamper on the floor, and watch the red juice dye the stones.
He heard his wife singing in her room above, singing with that tender yet subdued abandonment that goes with a happy heart. He heard the door open, her footstep on the landing.
“James, dear.”
He started as though guilty, and crumpled the letter in his hand.
“Yes.”
“Would you like supper now, and a walk later? There will be a moon.”
“Let us have supper,” he answered back.
“I will come in a minute. Have you seen the sunset? It is grand over the heath.”
She went back into her bedroom, humming some old song, her very happiness hurting the man’s heart. What was this lust, this appetite, this thirst in the blood, that it should make him the creature of such a chance? Had he not free will, the self-respecting strength of his own manhood? Strange irony of life that six bottles of choice wine should typify the father’s sins visited upon the children! A scientific platitude! And yet the thought was pitiful to him, pitiful that the spiritual beauty of a woman’s love could be challenged by such a pathetic thing as this. He had grappled and thrown the passion time on time, and yet it had slunk away to come grinning back to him with open mouth and burning eyes.
He was still sitting on the settle with the letter crumpled in his hand, when Catherine called to him again from her bedroom.
“Do look at the sky, dear, it is wonderful.”
His wife’s innocent happiness stung him with its unconscious pathos. She had conceived this Eden for him, and lo—the serpent was amid the flowers her hands had gathered. He roused himself, picked up the hamper by the cord, and carried it into the little dining-room beyond the hall. Ignorance was bliss for her; knowledge would dash her joyous confidence in a moment. There was no need for her to know; he felt sure of himself, safe with her in such a place. Looking round him a moment, he pushed the hamper under the deep window-seat, where it was hidden by the drapings. Poor Porteus, how little he thought that an asp lurked under the leaves of the vine!
A full moon was rising in the east when husband and wife went out into the garden. The glimmering witchery of the night bathed the world in silent splendor. From the cottage the broad swell of the heathland rolled back under the sky to where a forest of firs rose like distant peaks against the moon. Mists, white and ghostly, were rising in the meadows of the plain, vistas of woodland, vague and mysterious, shining up through the gathering vapor. In the garden the scent of the lilies mingled with the old world sweetness of the herbs. The flowers stood white before the cypresses, and the dew was falling.
Not a sound save the distant baying of a dog. Murchison opened the little gate to the path that wound amid the gorse and heather. The turmoil and clamor of the world seemed far from them under the moonlit sky; the breath of the night was cool and fragrant.
Catherine’s head was on her husband’s shoulder, his arm about her body. She leaned her weight on him with the happy instinct of a woman, her face white towards the moon, her eyes full of the light thereof.
“Eight years,” she said, as though speaking her inmost thoughts.
“Eight years!” and he echoed her.
“Do you remember that night at Weybourne? It was just such a night as this.”
His arm tightened about her.
“Memories are like books,” he said, “a few live in our hearts through life, the rest, like the bills we pay, are read, and then forgotten.”
“You were very nervous.” And she laughed, alluringly.
“I can remember stammering.”
“And how you held my wrist?”
“Like that,” and he proved that he had not forgotten.
They wandered on for a while in silence, looking towards the fir-woods whose spires were touched by the light of the moon.
“I hope the children are asleep.”
“And that poor Mary has not been blinded by your son’s propensity for blowing pease.”
“Jack will be like you, dear.”
“Poor child, he might do better.”
He spoke lightly, caught up self-consciousness, and sighed. His wife’s eyes looked swiftly at his face.
“You feel that you can rest here, dear?”
“With you, yes.”
She felt the pressure of his hand, and saw his mouth harden, his brows contract a little. The subject saddened him, brought back the introspective mood, and recalled the darker past. Catherine broke from it instinctively, knowing that it was poor comfort to let him brood.
“To-morrow—”
“What are your plans?”
“Shall we walk to Farley church?”
“Yes, I love the old place, the cedars and yews shading the graves. It has repose—poetry.”
His mind recoiled on happier things. Catherine felt it, and was comforted.
“I often went to Farley as a child.”
“The memory suits you, dear. I can see a little, golden-headed woman sitting in the sunlight in one of those black old pews.”
“I was like our Gwen, but more noisy.”
“Gwen cannot do better than repeat her mother.”
The moon sailed high over Marley Down when husband and wife returned to the cottage. The old village woman whom Catherine had hired had lit the lamp in the small drawing-room, and the warm glow flooded through the casement upon the flowers and the dew-drenched grass. Catherine wandered to the piano, her husband lying in the chair before the open window. She played and sang to him, the old songs she had sung when they had been betrothed.
She rose at last, and, bending over him, put her arms about his neck, while his hands held hers.
“I am going to bed.”
“Dustman, eh?”
“And you?”
He looked through the window at the black sweep of the heath and the stars above it.
“I shall sit up awhile, dear, and do some work.”
“Work, traitor!”
He glanced up at her with a smile.
“I brought a ledger over with me. No time like the sweet and idle present. There are such things as bills, dear.”
Catherine brushed the commonplace aside with a woman’s adroitness.
“Well, an hour’s exile, and no more.”
“I promise that.”
“Good-night, till you come—”
She kissed him, glided away, and went up to her room, humming one of Schubert’s songs.
CHAPTER XI
Murchison sat for a while before the open window after his wife had gone to bed. He could hear her moving to and fro in the room above him, the only sound in the silence of the night. He was at rest, and happy, her very nearness filling him with a sense of peace and strength. The tenderness of her love breathed in the air, and he still seemed to hear her radiant singing.
We mortals are often in greater peril of a fall when we trust in the cheerful temerity of an imagined strength. To a man standing upon the edge of a precipice the lands beneath seem faint and insignificant, and yet but a depth of air lies between him and the plain. Our frailties may seem pitiful, nay, impossible to us when we listen to noble music, or watch the sunrise on the mountains. The man who is exalted in the spirit lives in a clearer atmosphere, and wonders at the fog that may have drifted round him yesterday. He may even laugh at thealter egoframed of clay, and ask whether this soft-bodied, cringing thing could ever have answered to the name of “self.”
Some such feeling of optimism took possession of Murchison that night. The words of his wife’s songs were in his brain; he heard her moving in the room above, and felt the dearness of her presence in the place. Everywhere he beheld the work of her hands—the curtains at the windows, the flowers in the bowls. Her photograph stood on the mantel-shelf, and he rose and looked at it, smiling at the eyes that smiled at him. Could he, the husband of such a woman, and the father of her children, be the mere creature of the juice of the grape? Was he no stronger than some sot at a street corner? He gazed at his own photograph that stood before the mirror, gazed at it critically, as though studying a strange face. The eyes looked straight at him, the mouth was firm, the jaw crossed by a deep shadow that betrayed no degenerate sloping of the chin. Was this the face of a man who was the victim of a lust? He smiled at the memory of his weaker self as a man smiles at a rival whom he can magnanimously pity.
The pride of strength suggested the thought of proof. Old Porteus Carmagee had sent him this choice wine, and was he afraid of six bottles in a basket? Why not challenge thisalter ego, this mean and treacherous caricature of his manhood, and prove in the grapple that he was the master of his earthly self? There was a combative stimulus in the thought that appealed to a man who had been an athlete. It fired the element of action in him, made him knit his muscles and expand his chest.
Murchison looked at himself steadily in the mirror, held up his hand, and saw not the slightest tremor. He crossed the hall, entered the dining-room, and dragged the hamper from under the window-seat with something of the spirit of a Greek hero dragging some classic monster from its lair. Coolly and without flurry he carried the thing into the drawing-room and set it down on the little gate-legged table. He cut the cord, raised the lid, and let the musty fragrance of the lawyer’s cellar float out into the room. The simile of Pandora’s box did not occur to him. He put the straw aside, and pulled out a cobwebbed bottle from its case. His knife served him to break up the cork; he sniffed the wine’s bouquet, and looked round him for a glass.
He found one among Catherine’s curios, an old Venetian goblet of quaint shape. Half filling it, he tossed Porteus Carmagee’s letter on to the straw, and standing before his wife’s portrait, looked steadily into the smiling eyes.
“Kate, I drink to you. One glass to prove it, and the open bottle left untouched.”
Deliberately he raised the glass and drank, looking at his wife’s face in its framing of silver on the mantel-shelf.
More than two hours had passed since she had left him, and Catherine was lying awake, watching the moonlight glimmering on the moor. Her heart was tranquil in her, her thoughts free from all unrest as she lay in the oak bed, happily lethargic, waiting for her husband’s step upon the stairs. The day had been very sweet to her, and there was no shadow across the moon. She lay thinking of her children, and her childhood, and of the near past, when she had first sung the songs that she had sung to the man that night.
The crash of broken glass and the sound of some heavy body falling startled Catherine from her land of dreams. She sat up, listening, like one roused from a first sleep. Murchison must have turned out the lamp and then blundered against some piece of furniture in the dark. If it were her treasured and much-sought china! She slipped out of bed, opened the door, and went out on to the landing.
“James, what is it?”
The narrow hall lay dark below her, and she won no answer from her husband.
“Are you hurt, dear?”
Still no reply; the door was shut.
“James, what has happened?”
She crept down the stairs, and stepped on the last step. A curious, “gaggling” laugh came from the room across the hall. At the sound she stiffened, one hand holding the bosom of her laced night-gear, the other gripping the oak rail. A sudden blind dread smote her till she seemed conscious of nothing save the dark.
“James, are you coming?”
Again she heard that mockery of a laugh, and a kind of senseless jabbering like the babbling of a drunken man. A rush of anguish caught her heart, the anguish of one who feels the horror of the stifling sea. She tottered, groped her way back into her room, and sank down on the bed in an agony of defeat. Was it for this that her love had spent itself in all the tender planning of this little place? How had it happened? Not with deceit! Even in her blindness she prayed to God that he had not wounded her with willing hand.
“Oh, God, not that, not that!”
She rose, catching her breath in short, sharp spasms, shaking back the hair from off her shoulders. The torture was too sharp with her for tears. It was a wringing of the heart, a dashing of all devotion, a falling away of happiness from beneath her feet! She stretched out her arms in the dark like a woman who reaches out to a love just dead.
Catherine turned, saw the empty bed, and the white face of the moon. The memories of the evening rushed back on her, wistful and infinitely tender. “No, no, no!” Her heart beat out the contradiction like a bell. It was unbelievable, unimaginable, that he should have played the hypocrite that night. They had spoken of the children, their children, and would he have lied to her, knowing that this vile devil’s drug was in the house? Her heart cried out against the thought. Her love came forth like an angel with a burning sword.
With white hands trembling in the moonlight, Catherine lit her candle, slipped her bare feet into her shoes, and went down the stairs. The inarticulate and pitiable mumbling still came from the little room. In the hall she halted, irresolute, the candle wavering in her hand. The shame of it, the pity of it! Could she go in and see the “animal” stammering in triumph over the “man”? No, no, it would be desecration, ignominy, an unhallowed wounding of the heart. He would sleep presently. The madness would flicker down like fire and die. Yes, she would wait and watch till he had fallen asleep. To see him in the throes of it, no, she could not suffer that!
With a dry sob in the throat, Catherine set the candle down on the table, beside the bowl of roses that she had arranged but yesterday with her own hands. How cold the house was, even for summer! She returned to her bedroom, took down her dressing-gown from behind the door, and wrapped it round her, thanking Heaven in her heart that she was alone with her husband in the house. The village woman slept away, and came at seven in the morning. She had all the night before her to recover her husband from his shame.
Going down to the hall again, she walked to and fro, listening from time to time at the closed door. The restless babbling of the voice had ceased. The fumes were dulling the wine fire in his brain. She prayed fervently that he would fall asleep.
An hour passed, and she heard no sound save the sighing of her own breath. For a moment the pathos of it overcame her as she leaned against the wall, the child in her crying out for comfort, for she felt alone in the emptiness of the night. The weakness lasted but a second. She grappled herself, opened the door noiselessly and looked in.
The lamp was still burning in the room, its shade of crocus yellow tempering the light into an atmosphere of mellow gold. On the gate-legged table stood Porteus Carmagee’s ill-omened hamper, the lid open, and straw scattered about the floor. Fragments of broken glass glittered among the litter, with the twisted stem of the Venetian goblet. An empty bottle had trackled its lees in a dark blot on the green of the carpet.
Catherine would not look at her husband for the moment. She was conscious of a shrunken and huddled figure, a red and gaping face, the reek of the wine, the heavy sighing of his breath. Her nerve had returned to her with the opening of the closed door. Her heart knew but one great yearning, the prayer that the downfall had not been deliberately cruel.
A sheet of note paper lay crumbled amid the straw. She stooped and reached for it, and recognized the writing. It was Porteus Carmagee’s half-jesting letter, and she learned the truth, how the fatal stuff had come.
“I know that you are an abstemious beggar, but take the stuff for the tonic it is, and drink to an ‘incomparable’ wife’s health. . . . Gage is smuggling this over for me in the car.”
She stood holding the letter in her two hands, and looking at the senseless figure on the floor. Love triumphed in that ordeal of the night. There was nothing but pity and great tenderness in her eyes.
“Thank God!” and she caught her breath; “thank God, you did not do this wilfully! Oh, my beloved, if I had known!”