CHAPTER XXIX
There were many men in Wilton who had looked at their children’s graves, little banks of green turf ranged on the hill-side where the winds wailed in winter like the mythical spirits of the damned. A gaunt, graceless place, this cemetery, a place where the insignificant dead lived only in the few notches of a mason’s chisel upon stone. A high yellow brick wall encompassed its many acres. Immediately within the iron gates stood a tin chapel, a building that might have stood for the Temple of Ugliness, the deity of commercialized towns. On either side of the main walk a row of sickly aspens lifted their slender branches against a hueless sky.
To the man and the woman who stood in one corner of this burial-ground, looking down upon a grave that had been but lately banked with turf, there was an infinite and sordid sadness in the scene. Two graves, not ten yards away, had been filled in but the day before, and the grass was caked and stained with yellow clay. Near them stood the black wooden shelter used by the officiating priest in dirty weather. A few wreaths, sodden, rain-drenched, the flowers already turning brown, seemed to mock the hands that had placed them there.
White headstones everywhere; a few obelisks; a few plain wooden crosses; rank mounds where no name lingered after death. Ever and again the thin clink of the hopeless chapel bell. A gray sky merging into a wet, gray landscape. In the valley—Wilton, prostrate under mist and smoke.
James Murchison, standing bareheaded before Gwen’s grave, gazed at the wet turf with the eyes of a man who saw more beneath it than mere lifeless clay. There was nothing of rebellion in the pose of the tall figure—rather, the slight stoop of one poring over some rare book with the reverence of him who reads to learn.
For Catherine there was no consciousness of penance as she stood beside him, silent and distant-eyed. Her hands were clasped together under her cloak. She stood as one waiting, heart heavy, yet ready to awake to the new life that opens even for those who grieve.
There were not a few such groups scattered about this upland burial-ground, colorless, subdued figures seen dimly through the drizzling mist of rain. Quite near to Murchison a working-man was arranging a few flowers in a large white jam-pot; the grave, by the name on the headstone, was the grave of his wife. A few children, who had wandered up to see some funeral, were playing “touch wood” between the aspens of the main walk. There was an irresponsible callousness in their shrill, slum-hardened voices. To them this place of Death was but a field to play in.
Murchison had turned from Gwen’s grave, and was looking at his wife. There seemed some bond more sacred between them now that they had shared both life and death in the body of their child.
“You are cold, dear.”
He touched her cheek with his hand as he turned up the collar of her cloak. Her hair was wet and a-glisten with the rain, her face cold like the face of one fresh from the breath of an autumn sea.
“Only my skin.”
“The wind is keen, though. It is time we turned back home.”
“Yes.”
“Good-bye, my child.”
He spoke the words in a whisper as they moved away from the corner.
Before them, seen dimly through a haze of rain, lay the colliery town, a vague splash of darkness in the valley. Here and there a tall chimney stood trailing smoke, or the faint glow of a fire gave a thin opalescence to the shell of mist. Sounds, faint and far, yet full of the significance of labor, drifted up the bleak slopes of the hillside, like the sounds from ships sailing a foggy sea. The rattle of a train, the shriek of a steam-whistle, the slow strokes of some great clock striking the hour.
James Murchison’s eyes were fixed upon this town beside the pit mouths, this pool of poverty and toil, where the eddies of effort never ceased upon the surface. It was strange to him, this colliery town, and yet familiar. Always would his manhood yearn towards it because of the dear dead, even though its memories were hateful to him, full of the bitterness of ignominy and pain.
Gwen’s death had come to Murchison as a sudden silence, a strange void in the hurrying entities of life. It was as though the passing of this child had changed the phenomena of existence for him, and given a new rhythm to the pulse of Time. He had become aware of a new setting to life, even as a man who has walked the same road day by day discovers on some winter dawn a fresh and unearthly beauty in the scene. He felt an unsolved newness in his being, a solemnity such as those who have looked upon the dead must feel. And no strong nature can pass through such a phase without creating inward energy and power. Sorrow, like winter, may be but a season of repose, troubled and drear perhaps, but moving towards the miracle of spring.
Wilton cemetery, with its zinc-roofed chapel, its yellow walls and iron gates, lay behind them, while the dim horizon ran in a gray blur along the hills. Husband and wife walked for a time in silence, for each had a burden of deep thought to bear.
It was the man who spoke first, quietly, and with restraint, and yet with something of the fierce spirit of an outcast Cain visible upon his face.
“I have been thinking of what I said to you last night.”
She was looking at him with a brave clearness of the eyes.
“I suppose sensible people would call such a venture—mad.”
“We are often strongest, dear, when we are most mad.”
He swung on beside her, his eyes at gaze.
“The madness of a forlorn hope. No, it is not that. I have not any of the impudence of the adventurer. It is something more solemn, more grim, more for a final end.”
“Beloved, I understand.”
“Are you not afraid for me?”
“No, no.”
She put her hand under his arm.
“God give us both courage, dear,” she said.
They had reached the outskirts of Wilton, and the ugliness of the place was less visible in these outworks of the town. The streets had something of the quaintness of antiquity about them, for this was a part of the real Wilton, an old English townlet that had been gripped and strangled by the decapod of the pits.
“About your mother’s money, Kate.”
The rumble of a passing van compelled silence for a moment.
“You must retain the whole control.”
“I?”
“Yes.”
He heard a woman’s unwillingness in her voice.
“It is my wish, dear. I shall need a certain sum to start with, but my life-insurance can be made a security for that.”
“James!”
Her face reproached him.
“Are we so little married that what is mine is not yours also?”
“It is because you are my wife, Kate, that I consider these things. Your mother was wise, though her instructions do not flatter me. Legally, I cannot touch a single penny.”
She looked troubled, and a little impatient.
“I shall hate the money—if—no, I don’t mean that. But, dear,” and she drew very close to him in the twilight of the streets, “it will make no difference. You will not feel—?”
“Feel, Kate?”
“That it is mine, and not yours. You know, dear, what I mean. I don’t want to think—to think that you will feel as though you had to ask.”
They looked, man and wife, into each other’s eyes.
“I shall ask, Kate, because—”
“Because?”
“You are what you are. It will not hurt me to remember that the stuff is yours.”
Now, quite an hour ago a battered and moth-eaten cab had deposited a stout lady on the doorstep of Clovelly. The stout lady had a round white face that beamed sympathetically from under the arch of a rather grotesque bonnet. A girl, hired for the month, and dressed in a makeshift black frock, had opened the door three inches to Miss Carmagee. There had been a confidential discussion between these two, the girl letting the gap between door and door-post increase before the lady in the grotesque bonnet. The doctor and the “missus” were out, and Master Jack having tea at a friend’s house in the next street. So much Miss Carmagee had learned before she had been admitted to the little front room.
It was quite dusk when Catherine and her husband turned in at the garden gate. The blinds were down, the gas lit. Murchison opened the front door with his key, remembering, as he ever remembered, the golden head that would shine no more for him in that diminutive, dreary house.
He was hanging his coat on a peg in the passage, when he heard a sharp cry from Catherine, who had entered the front room. There was the rustling of skirts, the sound of an inarticulate greeting between two eager friends.
No one could have doubted Miss Carmagee’s solid identity. She was resting her hands on Catherine’s shoulders. They had kissed each other like mother and child.
“Why, when did you come? We had no letter. James, James—”
Murchison found them holding hands. There were tears in Miss Carmagee’s mild blue eyes. Warned of her coming, he might have shirked the meeting with the pride of a man too sensitive towards the past. But Miss Carmagee in the flesh, motherly and very gentle, with Catherine’s kisses warm upon her face, stood for nothing that was critical, or chilling to the heart.
He met her with open hands.
“You have taken us by surprise.”
Miss Phyllis’s eyes were on the sad, memory-shadowed face.
“I had to come,” and her voice failed her a little. “I sha’n’t worry you; we are old friends.”
She put up her benign and ugly face, as though the privilege of a mother belonged to her by nature.
“I have felt it all so much.”
A flash of infinite yearning leaped up and passed in the man’s eyes.
“You must be tired,” he said, clinging to commonplaces. “Have they sent your luggage up?”
Miss Carmagee sank into a chair.
“I left it at the hotel. I’m not going to be a worry.”
“Worry!”
“Of course not, child.”
“Oh—but we must have you here. James—”
“My dear,” and the substantial nature of the old lady’s person seemed to become evident, “I insist on sleeping there to-night. Now, humor me, or I shall feel myself a nuisance.”
Miss Carmagee’s solidity of will made her contention impregnable. Moreover, the common-sense view she took of the matter boasted a large element of discretion. People who live in a small house on one hundred and sixty pounds a year cannot be expected to be prepared for social emergencies. Even a philosopher is limited by the contents of his larder, and Miss Carmagee was one of those excellent women whose philosophy takes note of the trivial things of life—pots, pans, and linen, the cold end of mutton, a rice-pudding to supply three. It is truly regrettable that a man’s Promethean spirit should be bound down by such contemptible trifles. Yet a tactful refusal to share a suet-pudding may be worth more than the wittiest epigram ever made.
Miss Carmagee and Catherine spent an hour alone together that evening, for Murchison had patients waiting for him at Dr. Tugler’s surgery in Wilton High Street. Master Jack had returned from his tea-party, to be hugged, presented with a box of soldiers, a clasp-knife, and a prayer-book, and then hurried off to bed. The soldiers and the knife shared the sheets with him; the prayer-book (amiable aunts forgive!) was left derelict under an arm-chair.
But the great event that night for these two women, such contrasts and yet so alike in the deeper things of the soul, came with that communing together before the fire, the lights turned low, the room in shadow. It was somewhile before Miss Carmagee approached the purpose that had brought her across England with bag and baggage. She was a woman of tact, and it is not easy to be a partisan at times without wounding those whom we wish to help.
The elder woman had hardly broached the subject, before Catherine, sitting on a cushion beside Miss Carmagee’s chair, turned from the fire-light with an eager lifting of the head.
“Why, it was only yesterday that James spoke to me of such a plan.”
“To return to us?”
“Yes, and win back what he lost.”
Miss Carmagee saw her way more clearly.
“You know, child, you have many friends.”
“I?”
“Yes, and your husband also. Porteus and I discussed the matter. You must not think us busybodies, dear.”
A kiss was the surest answer.
“I was afraid when James first spoke of it.”
“Afraid?”
“Yes,” and she colored; “it was cowardly of me, but I remembered how we left the place. It will be an ordeal. We shall have to walk through fire together. But still—”
“Well, child,” and Miss Carmagee let her have her say.
“Still, there is a greatness in the plan that takes my heart. We women love our husbands to be brave. I know what it will mean to James. He says that many people will think him mad.”
Miss Carmagee sat stroking one of Catherine’s hands.
“It is the right kind of madness,” she said, softly.
“To rise above public opinion?”
“Yes, when we are in the right.”
They sat for a while in silence, looking into the fire, Catherine’s head against Miss Carmagee’s shoulder. Above, in the nursery, Jack Murchison was trying his new knife on the rail of a bedroom chair. He had crept out of bed, rummaged up some matches, and lit the gas. The boy had no eyes for the empty cot in the far corner of the room. He had not yet grasped what the loss of a life in the home meant.
“I want you to promise me something, dear.”
Miss Carmagee’s hand touched the mother’s hair.
“Yes?”
“I want you to tell me frankly—about the money.”
Catherine looked up into the benign, white face.
“You mean—?”
“I mean, dear, that there is a lot of dusting and polishing to be done before the lawyers allow people to step into their own shoes. I have a pair that I could lend you for a year or so.”
Catherine smiled at the simile, despite the occasion. Miss Carmagee’s shoes were as large and generous as her heart.
“It is too good of you. They tell me I have inherited property that will bring in an income of seven to eight hundred a year. I don’t think—”
“Well?”
“That we could let you be so generous.”
Miss Carmagee leaned forward in her chair.
“Generous? It is not generous, dear; a mere matter of convenience.”
“You call it merely ‘convenience’?”
“No, child, I ought to call it a blessing to me, a true blessing. Don’t you understand that it would make me very happy?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“That’s right.”
“How good and kind you are.”
“Nonsense, dear, nonsense.”
CHAPTER XXX
Mr. Gehogan, the gentleman from Ireland who had attempted to possess himself of the scatterings of James Murchison’s practice, had discovered no proper spirit of appreciation in Roxton, and as though to register his displeasure, had departed abruptly, so abruptly that he had left behind him many unpaid bills. The house in Lombard Street had held him and his progeny for some seasons, and the family had left its mark upon the place in more instances than one. Miss Carmagee and her brother, who went over the house for some unexplained reason, concluded that clean paint and paper, and many scrubbings with soap and water, were needed for the effacement of an atmosphere of mediæval sanctity. The charwoman averred—an excellent authority—that the late tenant had kept pigs in a shed at the end of the garden, and had salted and stored the bacon in the bath. The house itself had been left littered with all sorts of rubbish. Dr. Gehogan’s youngsters had turned the back garden into a species of pleasaunce by the sea. There was a big puddle in the middle of the lawn, and oyster-shells, broken bricks, and jam-jars had accumulated to an extraordinary extent.
About the end of April such people of observation as passed down Lombard Street, discovered that the great red-brick house was preparing for new tenants. Mr. Clayton, the decorator, had hung his professional board from the central first-floor window. Sashes were being repainted white, the front door an æsthetic green. Paper-hangers were at work in the chief rooms, and whitewash brushes splashed and flapped in the kitchen quarters. Questioned by interested fellow-tradesmen as to the name and nature of the incoming tenant, Mr. Clayton blinked and confessed his ignorance. He was working under Mr. Porteus Carmagee’s orders. Mr. Clayton had even heard that the house had changed hands, and that the lawyer had bought it from the late owner, but whether it was let, Mr. Clayton could not tell. Even Mr. Beasely, the local house-agent, was no wiser in the matter. Speculation remained possible, while the more pushing of the local tradesmen were ready at any moment to tout for the new-comers’ “esteemed patronage.”
One afternoon early in May a large furniture van, manœuvring to and fro in Lombard Street and absorbing the whole road, compelled a stylish carriage and pair to come to a sharp halt. The carriage was Dr. Parker Steel’s, and it contained his wife, a complacent study in pink, with a pert little white hat perched on a most elaborate yet seemingly simple coiffure. The footway opposite the Murchison’s old house was littered with straw, and stray odds and ends of furniture, while two men in green baize aprons were struggling up the steps with a Chesterfield sofa. Through one of the open windows of the dining-room, Betty Steel’s sharp eyes caught sight of Miss Carmagee, rigged up in a white apron and unpacking china with the help of one of her maids.
The furniture van had made port, and Parker Steel’s carriage rolled on into St. Antonia’s Square. Mrs. Betty’s eyes had clouded a little under her Paris hat, for unpleasant thoughts are invariably suggested by the faces of people who do not love us. The ego in self-conscious mortals is sensitive as a piece of smoked-glass. The passing of the faintest shadow is registered upon its surface, and its lustre may be dimmed by a chance breath.
This house in Lombard Street had never lost for Betty Steel its suggestion of passive hostility. Its associations always stirred the energies of an unforgotten hate, and though triumphant, she often found herself frowning when she passed the place. Moreover, Miss Carmagee had been the other woman’s friend, and in life there can be no neutrality when rivals fight for survival in the business of success.
Betty Steel had come from the orchards that were white about Roxton Priory, yet the glimpse of the stir and movement in that red-brick house had blown the May-bloom from her thoughts. Did Kate Murchison ever wish herself back in Lombard Street? What had become of her and her children? Betty Steel woke from a moment’s reverie as the carriage drew up before her own home.
The elderly parlor-maid, five feet of starch, to say nothing of the cap, opened the front door to Mrs. Betty. There was an inquisitive lift about the woman’s eyelids, and Betty Steel, an expert in the deciphering of faces, expected news of some sort or another.
“Any one in the drawing-room, Symons?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Well?”
“Dr. Steel is in the study. He wished me to say that he would see you the moment you came home.”
Nearly twenty-four hours had passed since Betty Steel had seen her husband. The physician had been called up in the night, and had breakfasted away. She herself had lunched with Lady Gillingham, so that their paths had run uncrossed since yesterday.
“Has any one called?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You may bring up tea.”
The Venetian blinds were down in the consulting room, an initial coincidence, for Parker Steel was a believer in light. He was sitting at the bureau by the window, but glanced over his shoulder as his wife entered.
“Is that you, dear?”
“Yes; what is it?”
She was playing with her silk scarf, and looking with rather a puzzled air at her husband.
“I’ve just sent off a wire to town.”
“A wire?”
“Yes, to Turner, for a first-class locum. The man will be here early to-morrow. Shut the door, dear—shut the door.”
There was an irritable harshness of voice and a jerkiness of manner that betrayed unusual lack of self-control. Her husband’s back was half turned to her, and he was scribbling on a sheet of paper that he had before him, but she could see the frown upon his forehead and the nervous working of his lips.
“What is the matter, Parker?”
“Oh, nothing serious, only one of your prophecies come home to roost.”
“My prophecies?”
“Yes, about overwork. I was a fool not to knock off earlier. Some inflammatory trouble in my eyes.”
“Eyes?”
She echoed the word, showing for the first time some stirrings of alarm.
“What is it?”
“Strain, nothing more. It came on quite suddenly. I shall have to have a month’s absolute rest.”
He leaned back, and put a hand up to his forehead.
“Let me look.”
Betty went to him, and leaned her hands upon the side rail of his chair.
“You won’t make much of them. See, I’m just writing out a few hints and directions.
“They look inflamed, Parker.”
He shrugged impatiently.
“Don’t bother about the eyes. See, I want you to give these notes to Turner’s locum when he comes. The list is complete, with a cross against the more important people. The work’s lighter again; he can manage it alone.”
“Yes,” but she still looked troubled.
“I shall get away by the 10.15 to-morrow morning.”
“Where are you going?”
“Oh—to Torquay. I’ve wired to a hotel. Ramsden is doing eye-work down there, you know. He will soon put me right.”
Betty stood with her hands resting on the back of his chair. His assurances had not wholly satisfied her. She had a vague feeling that he was keeping something back.
“Parker.”
“Yes, dear.”
He appeared busy dashing down professional hieroglyphics on the paper before him.
“You are not keeping anything from me?”
“Anything from you!”
“Yes. It is nothing dangerous?”
“My dear girl, I ought to know!”
She sighed, looked at the darkened window, and then stooping suddenly, kissed him softly on the cheek.
“Parker—”
He had reddened and drawn aside, with an irritable knitting of the brows.
“Leave me alone, dear, for a while. I want to put the practice in order.”
Repulsed, she removed her hands from the chair.
“I was only anxious—”
“Don’t worry; there’s no cause. You will stay here and look after things for me?”
“Yes. I can have Madge to stay.”
“And, Betty—”
“Yes.”
“Don’t say much about the eyes. It doesn’t do for a professional man to get a reputation for feebleness in his physical equipment.”
“I shall not say anything.”
“Thanks. You see, I’m rather busy.”
She turned, looked round the room vaguely, her face cold and empty of any marked expression. Then she went slowly to the door, opened it, and passed out into the hall. The house seemed peculiarly dim and lonely as she climbed the stairs to her own room.
CHAPTER XXXI
“Good-bye, Mrs. Murchison; good-bye, old man; wish you could have stayed with us. Shake hands, sonny, now you’re off.”
A barrow-load of belated luggage went clattering by as the shrill pipe of the guard’s whistle sounded the departure. On the opposite platform a couple of porters were banging empty milk-cans on to a truck. Yet from the noise and turmoil of it all, John Tugler’s red face shone out with a redeeming exuberance of good-will.
“Good-bye.”
Murchison was leaning from the window, and the two men shook hands.
“Good luck to you.”
“Thanks. You have been very good to us. We shall not forget it.”
“Bosh, man, bosh!” and John Tugler gave Catherine a final flourish of his hat.
The train was on the move, but Murchison still leaned from the window, to the exclusion of his excited and irrepressible son. We grow fond of people who have stood by us in trouble, and John Tugler, bumptious and money-making mortal that he was, carried many generous impulses under his gorgeous waistcoat. The gift of sympathy covers a multitude of imperfections, for the heart craves bread and wine from others, and not the philosopher’s stone.
Interminable barriers of brick, back yards, sour, rubbish-ridden gardens were gliding by. Factories with their tall chimneys, the minarets of labor, stood out above the crowded grayness of the monotonous streets. Hardly a tree, and not an acre of green grass, in Wilton. It was as though nature had cursed the place, and left it no symbol of the season, no passing pageantry of summer, autumn, or of spring.
Catherine had kept Jack by her side, and the boy was kneeling on the seat and looking out of the window. She felt that her husband was in no mood for the child’s chattering. In leaving Wilton he was leaving a poignant part of reality behind, to enter upon a life that should try the strength of his manhood as a bowman tries a bow.
An old lady and a consumptive clerk were their only fellow-travellers. Murchison had chosen a corner whose window looked towards the west, and an intense and determined face it was that stared out over the ugliness of Wilton town. Houses had given place to market-gardens, acres of cabbages, flat, dismal, and dotted with zinc-roofed sheds. Beyond came the slow, sad heave of the Wilton hills, and, seen dimly—white specks upon the hill-side—the crowded head-stones where the dead slept.
The eyes of husband and wife met for a moment. They smiled at each other with the wistful cheerfulness of two people who have determined to be brave, a pathetic pretence hardly created to deceive. Moroseness need not testify deep feeling. The gleam from between the clouds turns even the wet clouds to gold.
Jack Murchison was watching a couple of colts cantering across a field beside the line.
“Mother, look at the old horses.”
“Yes, dear.”
“Silly old things. They’re making that old cow run. The brown one’s like Wellington, the horse we had before dad bought the car.”
“So it is, dear.”
“P’r’aps it is Wellington?”
“No, dear, Wellington must be dead by now.”
The old lady in the opposing corner was looking at Jack over her spectacles, and the boy took to returning the stare with the inimitable composure of youth. Catherine had turned again towards the other window, but the white head-stones no longer checkered the hill-side. Instead, she saw her husband’s profile, stern and determined, yet infinitely sad.
Life has been described as a series of sensations; and though some days are dull and passionless, others vibrate with a thousand waves of feeling. To Murchison the day had been crowded with sensation since the break of dawn. It was a day of disruption, a plucking up of routine from the soil, a change of attitude that concerned the soul even more than the body. He yearned towards Wilton, and yet fled from it with gratitude; his old home called to him, and yet he dreaded it as a disgraced man might fear the shocked faces of familiar friends. It was a day of unrest, self-judgment, and great forethought for him. The physical atoms seemed to tremble and vibrate, till the manhood in him might have been likened to a tremulous vapor. He could eat nothing, fix his mind on nothing. Even the sagging wires, coming and going as the train swept from pole to pole, were not unsymbolical of his thoughts.
Two hundred miles, with an hour’s wait in London, and the monotonous Midlands gave place to the more mysterious and dreamy south. Pine-crowned hills, great oaks and beeches purpling the villages, the blue distance of a more magical horizon. In orchards and meadows the infinite glamour of a golden spring. Quiet rivers curling through the mists of green. In many a park the stately spruce built sombre, windless thickets; larches glimmered with Scotch firs red-throated towards the west. Trees in whispering and triumphant multitudes. Quiet, dreamy meadows where the willows waved. Mysterious Isles of Avalon imaginable towards the setting sun.
Murchison, leaning back in his corner, watched for the pine woods about Roxton town with a deep commingling of yearning and of dread. It was to be a home-coming, and yet what a home-coming! The return of a prodigal, but no cringing prodigal; the return of a man, stiff-necked and square-jawed, ready to fight but not to conciliate. There was something of the tense expectancy of the hour before the bugles blow the assault. Every nerve in Murchison’s body tingled.
The boy Jack was jumping from foot to foot at the other window.
“Look, mother, look, there’s old Mr. Tomkin’s farm! And there’s the river. Look—and the kingcups are out! Gwen used to call ’em—”
He stopped suddenly, for his mother had drawn him to her and smothered the words with her mouth.
“You take care of the rugs and umbrellas, dear.”
“Yes. Shall I get ’em down?”
“In a minute. Sit still, dear, and don’t worry.”
She looked across quickly at her husband. Their eyes met. He was pale, but he smiled at her.
“Here we are, at last.”
“At last.”
Both felt that the ordeal had begun.
They let the boy lean out of the open window as the train ran in and slowed up beside the platform. Porteus Carmagee and his sister were waiting by the door of the booking-office. Jack sighted them and waved a salute, their coach running far beyond the office, for they were in the forepart of the train.
Murchison was the first out of the carriage. He lifted the boy down, and stood waiting to help his wife with some of her parcels.
“Luggage, sir?”
Murchison turned, and stared straight into the face of one of his old patients. The man looked at him blankly for a moment before recognition dawned upon his face.
“Good-day, doctor. Didn’t know you, sir, at first,” and he touched his cap.
Murchison’s upper lip was stiff. He looked like one who had come to judge rather than to be judged.
“Get my luggage out, Johnson. Three trunks, a Gladstone, hat-box, and two wooden cases.”
“Yes, sir.”
The man was polite, though ready to be inquisitive.
“Glad to see you again in Roxton, sir.”
“Thanks.”
“Cab, sir? There’s Timmins’s fly.”
“Yes, that will do.”
Murchison turned abruptly from the porter to find Miss Carmagee and Catherine kissing, and Jack tugging at his godfather’s hands. It was Porteus in a new Panama hat, whose whiteness made his face look brown as an Asiatic’s.
“Ah, my dear Murchison, ten minutes late; beast of a line this.”
“It was good of you to come.”
“Eh, what?—not a bit of it. Where’s your luggage? I abhor stations; can’t talk in comfort. This imp of darkness can come along with us.”
An unprejudiced observer would have imagined the little man in the most peppery of tempers. He tweaked Jack by the ear, frowned hard at Catherine, and bit his mustache as though possessed by some uncontrollable spirit of impatience.
His sister was straightening her bonnet-strings.
“You can drive straight home, dear; everything is ready.”
“You don’t know how much I feel all this.”
“There, you must be tired. We are going to take the boy to-night.”
Miss Carmagee’s stout figure seemed to stand like a breakwater between Catherine and the world, and there was an all-sufficing courage on her face.
People were staring; Murchison became aware of it as they moved towards the booking-office. Several familiar faces seemed to start up vividly out of the past. He noticed two porters grinning and talking together beside a pile of luggage near the bridge, and his sensitive pride concluded that they were making him their mark. The ticket collector was a thin, gray-headed man whom Murchison had known for years. He found himself conjecturing, as one conjectures over trifles at such a pass, whether the man would remember him or not. The official received the tickets without vouchsafing a glimmer of recognition. But he stared after Murchison when he had passed, with that curious, peering insolence typical of the breed.
Outside the station a very throaty individual in a very big cap, Harris tweed suit, white stock, and mulberry red waistcoat, was giving instructions to a porter with regard to a barrow-load of luggage. A trim dog-cart stood by the curb, with a sleek little woman in a tailor-made costume perched on the seat, and looking down on everybody with something of the keenness of a hawk.
It so happened that this exquisite piece of “breeding,” this Colonel Larter of county fame, stepped back against Murchison in turning towards his dog-cart.
“Beg pardon.”
The words were reinforced by a surprised and rather impertinent stare.
“What!”
“Don’t trouble to mention it, sir.”
“How d’you do? Had heard you were knocking about down our way. Wife well?”
Colonel Larter’s glance had passed the figure in black, and had fixed itself on the Carmagees and Catherine. There is always some charm about a handsome woman that can command courtesy, and Colonel Larter walked round Murchison with thesang-froidof a superior person, and ignored the husband in appearing impressive to the wife.
“How d’you do, Mrs. Murchison? Back in Roxton? Miss Carmagee has been keeping secrets from us. Quite a crime, I’m sure.”
Catherine had seen the slighting of her husband.
“We are back again, Colonel Larter.”
“That’s good. To stay?” and he nodded affably to the lawyer.
“Yes, to stay.”
“And the piccaninnies? Hallo, here’s one of them! And where’s my little flirt? What! Left her behind?”
Colonel Larter had one of those high-pitched, patronizing voices that carry a goodly distance and allow casual listeners to benefit by their remarks. Yet even his obtuse conceit was struck by Catherine Murchison’s manner. A sudden sense of distance and discomfort obtruded itself upon the gentleman’s consciousness. He caught Porteus Carmagee’s brown, birdlike eye, and the glint thereof was curiously disconcerting.
“Expect you’re busy. My wife’s waiting for me; mustn’t delay,” and he withdrew with a jerk of his peaked cap, repassing Murchison with an oblivious serenity, and rejoining his wife, who had acknowledged the presence of acquaintances by a single inclination of the head.
“Insufferable ass! Where’s that luggage? Ah, here we are,” and Porteus opened the cab-door with emphasis.
“Get in, Kate, you’ll find everything shipshape at home.”
“You will come across later?”
“If I’m wanted.”
“Then we shall expect you both. We have not thanked you yet.”
“Oh, if I’m to be thanked, I sha’n’t come.”
“Don’t say that,” and Murchison’s hand rested for a moment on Porteus Carmagee’s shoulder.
Lombard Street again, broad, tranquil Lombard Street, warm with its red-walled houses, shaded by its cypresses, its budding elms and limes, St. Antonia’s steeple clear against the blue. The old house itself, white-sashed and sun-steeped, curtains at the windows, the steps white and fresh as snow.
A head disappeared from the hall window as the cab drove up; the front door opened; they were welcomed by a homely and familiar face.
“Mary!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“This is like home.”
“I’m glad, ma’am, I’m glad—”
Catherine kissed her. They were both good women, and heart met heart in that home-coming, so full of memories of mingled joy and pain.
“It is good to see you here, Mary,” and Murchison held out a hand.
“Oh, sir, it was good to come.”
“You will only have one to worry you now.”
“It wasn’t a worry, sir.”
And she retreated because her weakness was a woman’s weakness and showed itself in tears.
A man was helping the cabman with the luggage. He came in carrying one end of a heavy trunk, cap in hand, gaiters on legs, a smart figure that seemed a little faded and out of fortune, to judge by the threadbare cleanliness of its clothes.
“What, you here, Gage?”
The man colored up like a boy.
“Glad to see you, sir, and you, ma’am. The old house begins to look itself again.”
“You are right, Gage. Old faces make a welcome surer. We shall want you if you are free.”
“Only too happy, sir. Family man now, sir.”
“What, married!”
“A year last Easter, sir,” and he disappeared up the stairs, carrying the lower end of the trunk.
An hour had passed. Husband and wife had wandered over the whole house together, and found many an old familiar friend that had been saved from the wreck of that disastrous year. The sympathetic touch showed everywhere, a reverent and sensitive spirit had schemed and plotted to retain the past. The coloring of each room was the same as of old; much of the furniture had been rebought; the very pictures were as so many memories. It was home, and yet not the home they had known of yore.
“Does it feel strange to you?”
“Strange?”
“Yes, it is all so real, and yet there is something we shall always miss.”
They were standing together at the study window, looking out into the garden that was lit with flowers. Polyanthuses were as so many gems scattered on the brown earth of the beds. An almond-tree was still in bloom, a blush of pink against the sky. Tulips, red, white, and yellow, lifted their cups to the falling dew.
“It can never be the same, dear.”
“No.”
“Gwen?”
“Yes, our little one. And yet—in death—”
“In death?”
“My child has given me victory over myself. As I trust God, dear, I believe that curse is dead.”
“Yes, it is dead.”
“The house is cleansed; we have come home together. I am ready now to face my fellow-men.”