CHAPTER XXXII
It is said that a pretty woman is never out of patience when she has a glass to gaze at, and Betty Steel, casting critical yet complacent glances into the depths of a Venetian mirror, awaited the descent of her very particular friend, Madge Ellison, with the sweet content of a lily waiting for the moon. Mrs. Betty’s face was a Diana’s face, but her body was of the color of a blush-rose in her summer-rose dress. The figure had charm enough as it idled to and fro in the spacious, mellow-tinted room. Mirror and window showed her patronage; the one, symbolical of self alone; the other of that same self’s outlook upon life at large. Betty was in one of her most radiant moods. A letter had come for her from her husband by the morning post; his eyes were much better, and there was no cloud upon the horizon.
Parker Steel’s wife heard the frou-frou of a silk petticoat sweeping down the stairs, the sudden opening of the study door, a man’s footstep crossing the hall.
“What, out to tea again in your best frock?”
The rustling of silk ceased for a moment at the foot of the stairs. Betty Steel smiled like a wise and intelligent elder sister. Madge Ellison, and their most stylishlocum-tenens, Dr. Little, had reached that degree of familiarity that permits two people to spar amiably with each other.
“A grievance, as usual! I suppose you grudge us the carriage?”
“Nothing half so selfish, I assure you.”
“Why not come and pay calls with us?”
“The old proverb, Miss Ellison.”
“A little goes a long way, is that it?”
“Am I so little?”
“What’s in a name!” and she passed on with a significant side glance and an arch lifting of the chin.
Dr. Little, a black-chinned, tailor-waisted, superfine person, with a distinct “air,” proceeded on a hypothetical expedition up the stairs. He had remembered leaving his latch-key in his bedroom, a useful excuse for meeting a pretty woman on the way, as though the coincidence were supremely natural.
“Au revoir.”
Miss Ellison favored him with an undeniable wink as she picked up a pink parasol from the hall table. She was one of those women who remind one forcibly of the stage-beauty as seen on very young men’s mantel-pieces. Madge Ellison would show as much of an open-work stocking as was compatible with social refinement. Aretroussénose and a round and rather cheeky chin associated themselves naturally with her methods of fascination.
“Madge!”
“Yes, dear.”
“Here, quick, I want you!”
“Bless my soul, why this tragic note?”
“Look, the window; do you recognize any one by the church-railings?”
There was a hard abruptness in Betty Steel’s voice. She was leaning forward with her hand on the window-sill, her face curiously changed in its expression from the purring contentment of two minutes ago.
“I see a solitary female, dear.”
“Don’t you recognize her?”
Miss Ellison gave a quaint and expressive little whistle.
“No, surely, it can’t be!”
“Kate Murchison.”
“By George, dear, it is!”
The two friends watched the figure in black disappear under the old gate-house that stood at the northwest corner of the square. For Madge Ellison there was nothing more inspiriting than curiosity in the event. To Betty Steel that passing glimpse had opened up all the hatred of the past.
“What’s in your mind, Madge?”
Miss Ellison was buttoning her gloves.
“I’ll bet a tea-cake to a penny bun, dear, that it is the Murchisons who have taken their house in Lombard Street again.”
“Nonsense!”
Betty Steel’s eyes grew hard and dangerous at the suggestion.
“Why nonsense?”
“The Murchisons would hardly have the impudence to sneak back to Roxton. People don’t care to be bungled into the next world by a drunkard.”
“My word, Betty, draw it mild. I never heard that the man drank.”
“You were in Italy, then, I believe.”
“Nasty, nasty! You are peevish over the poor people’s failings!”
“I hate that woman, Madge.”
Miss Ellison laughed at the sincerity of her friend’s spite.
“Why, what earthly harm can that woman do you by choosing to live in Roxton?”
“I tell you, Madge, there are some people in this world who set one’s teeth on edge. After all, what need for all this waste of antipathy. Kate Murchison must be staying with the Carmagees. I’ll risk that as my explanation.”
Spirited away on a round of social duties, Betty Steel and her friend paid their third call that afternoon at the Canonry in Canon’s Court, off Cloister Street. A row of carriages under the avenue of limes, and a liveried servant standing on duty under the Georgian portico, reminded Betty Steel that the third Friday in the month was the date printed on Mrs. Stensly’s cards. Betty and her gossip were announced in the crowded drawing-room, where a number of bored figures were balancing teacups and talking with forced animation. A few men, severely saddened by their responsibilities, were treading on each other’s heels, and looking anxiously for ladies who would take pity on sandwiches or cake. The French windows of the room were open to the May sunshine of the garden, and the fringes of a cedar could be seen sweeping the sleek grass.
Individual faces disassociate themselves slowly from such an assemblage, and Betty Steel, blockaded under the lee of a grand-piano, had but half the room under the ken of her keen eyes. Madge Ellison had been left to chat with Mr. Keightly, a very popular and enthusiastic curate who had rendered his character doubly fascinating by professing to hold prejudices in favor of celibacy. Betty had a brewer’s wife at her elbow. They had exchanged ecstatic confidences on the exquisite shape and color of Mrs. Stensly’s tea-service, and were both groping for some further topic to keep the conversation moving.
“And how is the play going, Mrs. Steel?”
“The play?”
Mrs. Betty seemed unusually pensive and distraught.
“Lady Sophia’s play.”
“As well as a piece can go—with amateurs. We all find fault with our neighbors.”
“I hear it is a splendid little play.”
“Not at all bad.”
“I must say I like the pathetic style of play.”
“Oh yes, quite charming.”
“I saw Julia Neilson play in that play, oh—what was the play called?—”
“‘A Woman of no Ideal,’ most likely,” thought Mrs. Betty. “I wonder how many more times she is going to tread on that one unfortunate word.”
She waited demurely for the title to recur, but it appeared lost in the limbo of the fat lady’s mind. The brewer’s wife continued to grope for it like a conscientious housewife who has lost the Sabbath threepenny bit in her glove-box while dressing for church.
Betty Steel, however, had become utterly oblivious of her presence for the moment. She was gazing towards one of the open windows where a woman’s figure, tall and comely in simple black, showed against the rich green of the grass. The woman’s back was turned towards the room, but Betty knew her by her figure and the lustre of her hair.
“Very odd, Mrs. Steel, I can’t remember the name of that play.”
“Really, I beg your pardon, I was thinking of other things.”
A slight rearranging of this aggregate of Roxton culture released Betty Steel from this amiable mass of irresponsible bathos. She contrived to wedge herself beside Madge Ellison, whoseretroussénose had failed to tempt the celibate to expand.
“You see?”
A smart hat was tilted significantly towards the window.
“I do.”
“Any news?”
“You have lost, dear. The tea-cake is on top. The sensation of Roxton. They are here to stay.”
Mrs. Betty’s face expressed infinite pity.
“How eccentric!”
“Kate Murchison has had money left her.”
“And the husband?”
“I hear his plate is up in Lombard Street.”
Whether it was a mere matter of coincidence or the working of a definite purpose, the fact was curiously self-evident to Betty Steel that the drawing-room of the Canonry had divided itself into two camps. Window-ward sat Miss Carmagee, dressed in black, her large face shining like a buckler against the embattled foe. Porteus—the irascible Porteus who blasphemed all tea-parties—was chattering like a little brown baboon. Several of Kate Murchison’s old friends appeared to have congregated together on the opposition benches. Mrs. Betty remarked all this, and her mouth grew a mere line in her pale and alert face.
The breweress had risen to depart. A number of nervous people who had been waiting for some bold spirit to initiate the movement, followed the fat lady’s inspiriting example. Mrs. Stensly was in the garden. The breweress and her flock of sheep filed through the open window to shake hands—and go.
“Madge.”
“Hallo, dear, am I sitting on you? Whither away?”
“To pay my most dutiful respects!”
Catherine Murchison and the Canon had left the window, and were pacing the grass under the benisons of the great cedar. By the expression of their faces, and the serious yet sympathetic inflection of their voices, they had broken the mere social surface, and were speaking of deeper things. It is the fashion to abuse the priesthood in the abstract, yet any critic who took the clean-girt manliness of Canon Stensly’s character might find his rhetoric chilled in its free flow.
“You have done the right thing, and your true friends will be glad of it.”
“It was my husband’s wish.”
“The wish of a brave man.”
“What a wonderful thing is sympathy! You have helped me so much this afternoon. It was an ordeal. You know, we dread the unknown—uncertainty.”
The big, gray-headed man looked down at her with much of the affection of a father. His hands had given her confirmation and joined her hand in marriage.
“Doubt is a great distorting glass,” he said, simply; “the difficulties of life decrease the moment they are faced.”
“I am glad you are on our side.”
“I should be a poor Christian if I were not.”
A figure in a pink dress, sumptuous and perfect as to the milliner’s craft, glided across the grass, and cast a shadow at Catherine’s feet.
“How d’you do, Kate? You have surprised us all—assuredly.”
The two women touched hands. Betty Steel’s drawl ascended towards patronage. She assumed the air of a mistress of asalonwhose salutation decided destinies and dispensed fame.
“How is Dr. Murchison? This long rest must have done him good.”
“Thanks. My husband is very well.”
“I am afraid we all misunderstood your plans. We thought you had left Roxton for good. I suppose Dr. Murchison will not expose himself again to the strain of general practice. Surgical cases are such a responsibility.”
It is the ability of women to be politely insolent and to cover a taunt with ironical courtesy. There were at least a dozen people within range of Mrs. Betty’s aggressive drawl, and Betty Steel had no intention of letting Roxton forget James Murchison’s past.
“And how are the children?”
Her eyes were studying the details of Catherine’s dress with the critical acuteness so trying to a woman.
“The boy is very well, thanks.”
“And the other—a girl, was it not?”
“You need not trouble to remember her.”
“That sounds as though you were disappointed. I remember how you used to read me texts on the divinity of motherhood.”
“The child is dead, Betty, that is all.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I always thought the girl was delicate.”
Canon Stensly’s massive shadow interposed itself between the slighter silhouettes upon the grass.
“Your husband has kept his promise, Mrs. Murchison.”
“Is he here?”
“Yes, yonder, with my wife.”
Betty Steel’s face was tinged with a malignity that leaked from her eyes and from the sneering angles of her mouth. She felt glad that Catherine’s favorite child was dead. The incomprehensible malice in the thought justified itself in the reflection that Catherine had lost something that she, Betty, had always lacked.
She passed James Murchison as she returned towards the house, a man with a certain dignity of past suffering writ heavily upon his face. He was talking to two old friends. Betty swept by him without troubling to notice whether he bowed to her or not. The man was a mere pawn in the game so far as she was concerned. Any humiliation that he might suffer was only valuable so far as it humiliated his wife.
The carriage was waiting for them under the limes of Canon’s Court. Madge Ellison flounced down in her corner with a relieved sigh.
“What a function! Well, how is she, charming as ever?”
“Who?”
“You know whom I mean, Betty?”
“That beast?”
“I heard you call her that once when we were at school,” and Miss Ellison tittered; “I believe she’ll make the whole town swallow the past.”
“Will she—indeed!”
“You don’t relish the idea?”
“Wait, my dear girl; we have not seen the end of the game yet.”
CHAPTER XXXIII
Roxton, like a certain lady of literary fame, was ever ready with its free opinions on any subject that it did not understand. The return of the Murchisons had exercised the town’s capacity for criticism, and inaugurated a debate that was to be heard at public-house bars, as well as in the parlors of the pious. The facts of the case were generally agreed upon; but facts are things that the ingenious mind of man can juggle with. The complexion of the affair varied with the convictions of the debater, and the sacred incidents of home life profaned or honored according to the temper of the tongue that dealt with them.
In Mill Lane the case had a most energetic exponent in the person of Mr. William Bains, the sweep. A certain brewer’s drayman, who had won some crude celebrity as an atheist, had taken upon himself to argue on the adverse side. The two gentlemen squared to each other one evening at the bottom of the lane, and thrashed it out strenuously before a meagre but attentive crowd.
“What about the inquest? Didn’t we read the ’ole of it in theMail and Times? Yer can’t get away from facts, can yer?”
“And supposin’ he did make a mistake for once, does that mean callin’ a man a fool and a danger to the public? Who drove his cart last week into a pillar-box by Wilson’s grocery shop?”
Mr. Bains scored a palpable hit. The audience laughed.
“Got ’im there, William,” said a neighbor.
The drayman sniffed, and threw out his stomach.
“Facts is facts. Doctorin’ ain’t drivin’ ’osses.”
“Thank the Lord, Mr. Sweetyer, it ain’t, for our sakes.”
“I say the man blundered.”
“And who ’asn’t run ’is nose into a lamp-post on occasions? Why, look ’ere,” and Mr. Bains stretched out a didactic forefinger, “when my little girl ’ad the diphtheria, who pulled ’er through? And who saved old Jenny Lowther’s leg? And there was young Ben Thompson, who some London joker swore was a dyin’ man!”
“That’s true,” said a bony woman in an old red blouse.
The drayman, finding the neighbors inclined to take the sweep’s view of the matter, began to look hot, and a little nettled.
“Well, what ’ave yer got to say about the booze?” he asked.
“I reckon that’s more your business than mine.”
Again the audience caught the gibe and laughed.
“Three gallons a day, that’s ’is measure,” interjected a morose gentleman, who was hanging over his garden gate and smoking the stump of a clay pipe.
“Wasn’t ’e carried ’ome from the club?”
“P’r’aps ’e was, p’r’aps ’e wasn’t. Any fool could ’ave seen that the man ’ad been workin’ hisself to death. Why, he fainted bang off one mornin’, round at our ’ouse. Ask my missus. A thimbleful o’ brandy would ’ave made a man in ’is state ’ug the railin’s.”
“Anyhow, he hugged ’em,” said the obdurate opponent.
“We ain’t always responsible for what we do when we’ve ’ad a bad smack over the side of the jaw.”
“Doct’rs oughtn’t ter touch it.”
“You’re a nice one to preach, now, ain’t yer?”
“He is that,” quoth the laconic worthy at the gate.
“Look ’ere, don’t you go shovin’ it into me—sideways.”
“Let me argue ’im, Mr. Catt.”
“Argue, you ’ain’t got a leg to stand on!”
“Haven’t I, my boy!” and the two disputants began to glare.
The drayman wiped his hands on the back of his breeches.
“Some fool’ll be callin’ me a liar soon,” he remarked.
“It’s on the cards.”
“Look ’ere, Bill Bains, I’ve ’ad enough of your sarce. Stow it.”
“You go and bully your kids. Can’t I speak my mind when I bloomin’ well like?”
“Course ’e can,” said the lady in the red blouse; “and ’e speaks it well, ’e does. Murchison was always a right down gentleman; better than that there little nipper, Steel.”
“Right for you, Mrs. Penny. We don’t go blackguardin’ other people’s characters, do we?”
“I ain’t blackguardin’ the man, I’m statin’ facts.”
“Facts, facts—why, the man’s clean daft on facts. Facts must be another name for a pint of bitter.”
“I’ll smash your jaw, Bill Bains, if you don’t stow it.”
“Smash away, my buck. Who’s afraid of a bloomin’ cask?”
Whereon the dwellers in Mill Lane were treated to an exhibition of two minutes straight hitting, an exhibition that ended in the intervention of friends. But since the drayman departed with a red nose and a swollen eye, it may be inferred that the sweep had the best of the argument.
To have one’s past, present, and future dragged through the back streets of a country town is not an experience that a man of self-respect would welcome. A sensitive spirit cannot fail to feel the atmosphere about it. It may see the sun shining, the clouds white against the blue, the natural phenomena of health and of well-being; or the faces of a man’s fellows may be as sour puddles to him, their sympathy a wet December.
Trite as the saying is, that in trouble we make trial of our friends, only those who have faced defeat know the depth and meaning of that time-worn saying. A week in Roxton betrayed to Catherine and her husband the number and the sincerity of their friends. The instinct of pride is wondrous quick in detecting truth from shams, even as an expert’s fingers can tell old china by the feel. The population of the place was soon mapped out into the priggishly polite, the piously distant, the vulgarly inquisitive, the unaffected honest, and the honestly indifferent. Catherine met many a face that brightened to hers in the Roxton streets. The past seemed to have banked more good-will for them then they had imagined. It was among the poor that they found the least forgetfulness, less of the cultured and polite hauteur, less affectation, less hypocrisy. As for the practice, they found it non-existent that first humiliating yet half-happy week.
But perhaps the sincerest person in Roxton at that moment was the wife of Dr. Parker Steel. Betty was not a passionate woman in the matter of her affections, but in her capabilities for hatred she concentrated the energy of ten. She had come quite naturally to regard herself as the most gifted and interesting feminine personality that Roxton could boast. Every woman has an instinctive conviction that her own home, and her own children, are immeasurably superior to all others. With Betty Steel, this spirit of womanly egotism had been largely centred on herself. She had no children to make her jealous and critical towards other women’s children. It was the symmetry of her own success in life that had developed into an enthralling art, an art that absorbed her whole soul.
It might have been imagined that she had climbed too high to trouble about an old hate; that she was too sufficiently assured of her own glory to stoop to attack a humbled rival. Jealousy and a sneaking suspicion of inferiority had embittered the feud for her of old; and Kate Murchison, saddened and aged, half a suppliant for the loyalty of a few good friends, could still inspire in Betty a spirit of aggressive and impatient hate. She remembered that she had seen Catherine triumphant where she herself had received indifference and disregard. The instinct to crush this antipathetic rival was as fierce and keen in her as ever.
“Call on her,” had been Madge Ellison’s suggestion.
“Call on her!”
“It would be more diplomatic.”
“Do you imagine, Madge, that I am going to make advances to that woman? She used to snub me once; my turn has come. I give the Murchisons just six months in Roxton.”
How little mercy Betty Steel had in that intolerant and subtle heart of hers was betrayed by the strategic move that opened the renewal of hostilities. She had driven Kate Murchison out of Roxton once, and the arrogance of conquest was as fierce in this slim, refined-faced woman as in any Alexander. She moved in a small and limited sphere, but the aggressive spirit was none the less inevitable in its lust to overthrow. The motives were the meaner for their comparative minuteness.
Lady Sophia’s Bazaar Committee met in Roxton public hall one day towards the end of May, to consider the arrangement of stalls, and to settle a number of decorative details. Betty had spent half the morning at her escritoire sorting letters, meditating chin on hand, scribbling on the backs of old envelopes, which she afterwards took care to burn.
She seemed in her happiest vein that afternoon, as she left Madge Ellison to provide tea for Dr. Little, and drove to the public hall with her despatch-box full of the Bazaar Fund’s correspondence. No one would have imagined it possible for such refinement and charm to cover instincts that were not unallied to the instincts found in an Indian jungle. Mrs. Betty went through her business with briskness and precision; the committee left their chairs to discuss the grouping of the stalls about the room. There were to be twelve of these booths, each to represent a familiar flower; Lady Sophia had elected herself a rose. Mrs. Betty’s choice had been Oriental poppies.
Lady Sophia was parading the hall with a pair of pince-nez perched on the bridge of her nose, and a memorandum-book open in her hand. A group of deferential ladies followed her like hens about the farmer’s wife at feeding-time. The most trivial suggestion that fell from those aristocratic lips was seized upon and swallowed with relish.
“Betty, dear, have you heard from Jennings about the draperies?”
The glory of it, to be “my deared” in public by Lady Sophia Gillingham!
“Yes, I have a letter somewhere, and a list of prices.”
“You might pin up the letter and the price-list on the black-board by the door, so that the stall-holders can take advantage of any item that may be of use to them.”
Betty moved to the table and rummaged amid her multifarious correspondence. She was chatting all the while to a Miss Cozens, a thin, wiry little woman, alert as a Scotch-terrier in following up the scent of favor.
“What a lot of work the bazaar has given you, Mrs. Steel!”
“Yes, quite enough,” and she divided her attention between Miss Cozens and the pile of papers.
“When is the next rehearsal?”
“Tuesday, I believe.”
“I hear you are the genius of the play.”
“Am I?” and Betty smiled like an ingenuous girl. “I am most horribly nervous. I always feel that I am spoiling the part. Oh, here’s Jennings’s letter, and the list, I think.”
She left the two papers lying unheeded for the moment, while she answered Miss Cozens’s interested questions on costume.
“Primrose and leaf green, that will be lovely.”
“Yes, so everybody says.”
Lady Sophia’s voice interrupted the gossip. She was beckoning to Betty with her memorandum-book.
“Betty, can you spare me a moment?”
Miss Cozens’s sharp eyes gave an envious twinkle.
“Shall I pin up the papers for you, Mrs. Steel?”
“Would you?”
“With pleasure.”
And Betty swept two sheets of paper towards Miss Cozens without troubling to glance at them, and turned to wait on Lady Sophia.
Several ladies congregated about the black-board as Miss Cozens pinned up the letter and the price-list with such conscientious promptitude that she had not troubled to read their contents. Had she had eyes for the faces of her neighbors she might have been struck by the puzzled eagerness of their expression. One elderly committee woman readjusted her glasses, and then touched Miss Cozens with a pencil that she carried.
“Excuse me.”
“Yes.”
“There is some mistake—I think.”
“Mistake?”
“Yes, that letter”—and the spectacled lady pointed to the black-board with her pencil.
Miss Cozens took the trouble to investigate the charge. The letter was written on one broad sheet in a neat, bold hand. Miss Cozens’s prim little mouth pursed itself up expressively as she read; her brows contracted, her eyes stared.
“Good Heavens!—what’s this? I must have taken the wrong letter.”
She tore the sheet down, pushed past her neighbors, and crossed the room towards Betty Steel. The group about the black-board appeared to be discussing the incident. Mr. Jennings’s list of silks and drapings seemed forgotten.
“Mrs. Steel, excuse me—”
“Yes?”
“This letter; there’s some mistake. It’s the wrong one. I pinned it up, and Mrs. Saker called my attention to the error.”
“Let me see.”
Miss Cozens gave her the sheet, intense curiosity quivering in every line of her doglike face.
“Good Heavens!—how did this get mixed up with my business correspondence?”
She looked perturbation to perfection.
“Miss Cozens, what am I to do? Has any one read it?”
The little woman nodded.
“How horrible! I must explain—It must not go any further.”
Betty hurried across the hall towards the door, hesitated, and looked round her as though baffled by indecision. She knew well enough that inquisitive eyes were watching her. Her skill as an actress—and she was consummately clever as a hypocrite—served to heighten the meaning that she wished to convey.
“Lady Sophia.”
Betty had doubled adroitly in the direction of the amiable aristocrat.
“Yes, dear—”
“Can I speak to you alone?”
“What is it?”
“Oh, I have done such an awful thing. Do help me. You have so much nerve and tact.”
“My dear child, steady yourself.”
“I looked out Jennings’s papers; Miss Cozens was chattering to me, and when you called me, she offered to pin the things on the board. How on earth it happened, I cannot imagine, but a private letter of mine had got mixed up with the bazaar correspondence. It must have been lying by Jennings’s list, for Miss Cozens, without troubling to read it, pinned it on the board.”
The perturbed, sensitive creature was breathless and all a-flutter. Lady Sophia patted her arm.
“Well, dear, I see no great harm yet—”
“Wait! It was a letter from an old friend abroad, a letter that contained certain confessions about a Roxton family. What on earth am I to do? Look, here it is, read it.”
Lady Sophia read the letter, holding it at arm’s-length like the music of a song.
“Good Heavens, Betty, I never knew the man drank, that it had been a habit—”
“Don’t, Lady Sophia, don’t!”
“You should have been more careful.”
“I know—I know. I shall never forgive myself. For goodness’ sake, help me. You have so much more tact than I.”
Her ladyship accepted the responsibility with stately unction.
“Leave it to me, dear. I can go round and have a quiet talk with all those who happened to read the letter. How unfortunate that the opening sentences should have contained this information. Still, it need never get abroad.”
“How good of you!”
“There, dear, you are rather upset, most naturally so—”
“I think I had better retreat.”
“Yes, leave it to me.”
“Thank you, oh, so much. Tell them not to whisper a word of it.”
“There will be no difficulty, dear, about that.”
Betty, white and troubled, added a sharper flavor to the stew by withdrawing dramatically from the stage. And any one wise as to the contradictoriness of human nature could have prophesied how the news would spread had he seen the Lady Sophia voyaging on her diplomatic mission round the hall.
“Poor Mrs. Steel! Such an unfortunate coincidence! Not a woman easily upset, but, believe me, my dear Mrs. So-and-So, it was as much a shock to her as though she had heard bad news of her husband. Now, I am quite sure this unpleasant affair will go no further. Of course not. I rely absolutely on your discretion.”
And since the discretion of a provincial town is complex to a degree of an ever-repeated confession, coupled with a solemn warning against repetition, it was not improbable that this froth would haunt the pot for many a long day.
CHAPTER XXXIV
June is the month for the old world garden that holds mystery and fragrance within its red-brick walls. In Lombard Street you would suspect no wealth of flowers, and yet in the passing through of one of those solid, mellow, Georgian houses you might meet dreams from the bourn of a charmed sleep.
Aloofness is the note of such a garden. It is no piece of pompous mosaic-work spread before the front windows of a stock-broker’s villa, a conventional color scheme to impress the public. The true garden has no studied ostentation. It is a charm apart, a quiet corner of life smelling of lavender, built for old books, and memories that have the mystery of hills touched by the dawn. You will find the monk’s-hood growing in tall campaniles ringing a note of blue; columbines, fountains of gold and red; great tumbling rose-trees like the foam of the sea; stocks all a-bloom; pansies like antique enamel-work; clove-pinks breathing up incense to meet the wind-blown fragrance of elder-trees in flower. You may hear birds singing as though in the wild deeps of a haunted wood whose trees part the sunset into panels of living fire.
Mary of the plain face and the loyal heart had opened the green front door to a big man, whose broad shoulders seemed fit to bear the troubles of the whole town. He had asked for Catherine and her husband.
“They are in the garden, sir.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, only Master Jack.”
Canon Stensly bowed his iron-gray head under the Oriental curtain that screened the passage leading from the hall to the garden.
“Thanks; I know the way.”
The Rector of St. Antonia’s came out into the sunlight, and stood looking about him for an instant with the air of a man whose eyes were always open to what was admirable in life. A thrush had perched itself on the pinnacle of a yew, and was singing his vesper-song with the broad west for an altar of splendid gold. The chiming of the hour rang from St. Antonia’s steeple half hid by the green mist of its elms. A few trails of smoke rising from red-brick chimney-stacks alone betrayed the presence of a town.
To an old college-man such an evening brought back memories of sunny courts, cloisters, and sleek lawns, the ringing of bells towards sunset, the dark swirl of a river under the yawn of bridges that linked gardens to gardens beneath the benisons of mighty trees. Yet the light on Canon Stensly’s face was not wholly a placid light. It was as though he came as a messenger from the restless, bickering outer world, a friend whom friendship freighted with words not easy to be said.
A glimmer of white under an old cherry-tree showed where Catherine sat reading, with the boy Jack prone on the grass, theSwiss Family Robinsonunder his chin. Murchison was lying back in a deck-chair, watching the smoke from his pipe amid the foliage overhead.
Master Jack, rolling from elbow to elbow, as he thrilled over the passage of the “tub-boat” from the wreck, caught sight of the Canon crossing the lawn. Catherine was warned by a tug at her skirts, and a very audible stage-aside.
“Look out, here’s old Canon Stensly—”
“S-sh, Jack.”
“Should like to see him afloat in a tub-boat. Take a big—”
A tweak of the ear nipped the boy’s reflection in the bud. His father gave him a significant push in the direction of the fruit garden.
“See if there are any strawberries ripe.”
“I’ve looked twice, dad.”
“Oh, no doubt. Go and look again.”
Canon Stensly’s big fist had closed on Catherine’s fingers. He was not the conventional figure, the portly, smiling cleric, the man of the world with a benignant yet self-sufficient air. Like many big men, silent and peculiarly sensitive, his quiet manner suggested a diffidence anomalous in a man of six feet two. To correct the impression one had but to look at the steady blue of the eye, the firm yet sympathetic mouth, the stanchness of the chin. It is a fallacy that lives perennially, the belief that a confident face, an aggressive manner, and much facility of speech necessarily mark the man of power.
A courtly person would have remarked on the beauty of the evening, and discovered something in the garden to praise. Canon Stensly was not a man given to pleasant commonplaces. He said nothing, and sat down.
Murchison handed him his cigar-case.
“Thanks, not before dinner.”
His habit of silence, the silence of a man who spoke only when he had something definite to say, gave him, to strangers, an expression of reserve. Canon Stensly invariably made talkative men feel uncomfortable. It was otherwise with people who had learned to know the nature of his sincerity.
“Hallo, what literature have we here?”
He picked up Jack’s discarded book, and turned over the pages as though the illustrations brought back recollections of his own youth. As a boy he had been the most irrepressible young mischief-monger, a youngster whom Elisha would have bequeathed to the bear’s claws.
“Ever a member of the Robinson family, Mrs. Murchison?”
Catherine caught a suspicious side glint in his eye.
“I suppose all children read the book.”
“I wonder how much of the moralizing you remember?”
“Very little, I’m afraid.”
“Nor do I. Children demand life—not moralizing upon life,” and the Canon scrutinized a picture portraying the harpooning of a turtle, as though he had gloated over that picture many times as a boy.
Catherine had caught a glimpse of Mary’s white apron signalling for help in some domestic problem. She was glad of the excuse to leave the two men together. The sense of a woman is never more in evidence than when she surrenders her husband to a friend.
“Can you spare me half an hour for a talk?”
“I am not overburdened with work—yet.”
“Oh, it will come.”
He turned over the pages deliberately, glancing at each picture.
“Your wife looks well.”
“Yes, in spite of everything.”
“A matter of heart and pluck.”
“She has the courage of a Cordelia.”
Canon Stensly put the book down upon the grass. The two men were silent awhile; Murchison lying back in his chair, smoking; the churchman leaning forward a little with arms folded, his massive face set rather sternly in the repose of thought.
“There is something I want to talk to you about.”
Murchison turned his head, but did not move his body.
“Yes?”
“Don’t set me down as a busybody. I think I have a duty to you as a friend. It is a matter of justice.”
The Canon’s virtues were of the practical, workman-like order. He was not an eloquent man in the oratorical sense, having far too straightforward and sincere a personality to wax hysterical for the benefit of a church full of women. But he was a man who was listened to by men.
Murchison turned half-restlessly in his chair.
“With reference to the old scandal?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Something unpleasant, of course.”
“Things that are put about behind one’s back are generally unpleasant. It was my wife who discovered the report. Women hear more lies than we do, you know.”
“As a rule.”
“I decided that it was only fair that you should know, since slandered people are generally the last to hear of their own invented sins.”
“Thanks. I appreciate honesty.”
Canon Stensly sat motionless a moment, staring at the house. Then he rose up leisurely from his chair, reached for one of the branches of the cherry-tree, drew it down and examined the forming fruit.
“They say that you used to drink.”
Murchison remained like an Egyptian Memnon looking towards Thebes. The churchman talked on.
“I have heard the same thing said about one or two of my dearest friends. Vile exaggerations of some explainable incident. The report originated from a certain lady who resides over against my church. Her husband is a professional man.”
He pulled down a second bough, and brushed the young fruit with his fingers to see whether it was set or not. The silence had something of the tension of expense. Murchison knew that this old friend was waiting for a denial.
“That’s quite true; I drank—at one time.”
A man of less ballast and less unselfishness would have rounded on the speaker, perhaps with an affected incredulity that would have embittered the consciousness of the confession. Canon Stensly did nothing so insignificant. He let the branch of the cherry-tree slip slowly through his fingers, put his hands in his pockets, and walked aside three paces as though to examine the tree at another angle.
“Tell me about it.”
There was a pause of a few seconds.
“My father drank; poor old dad! I’m not trying to shelve the affair by putting it on his shoulders. My father and my grandfather both died of drink. My wife knows. She did not know when we were married. That was wrong. If ever a man owed anything to the love of a good woman, I am that man.”
Canon Stensly returned to his chair. His face bore the impress of deep thought. He had the air of a man ready to help in the bearing of a brother’s burden, not with any bombast and display, but as though it were as natural an action as holding out a hand.
“It can’t have been very serious,” he said.
Murchison set his teeth.
“A sort of hell while it lasted, a tempting of the devil; not often; perhaps the worse for that.”
“Ah, I can understand.”
“It was when I was overworked.”
“Jaded.”
“The wife was something better than a ministering angel, she was a brave woman. She fought for me. We should have won—without that scandal, but for a mad piece of folly I took to be heroism.”
The churchman extended a large hand.
“I’ll smoke after all,” he said.
“Do.”
Murchison opened his cigar-case. Canon Stensly was as deliberate as a man wholly at his ease. There was not a tremor as he held the lighted match.
“Do you know, Murchison, I appreciate this—deeply?”
He returned the match-box.
“It puts you in a new light to me, a finer light, with that rare wife of yours.”
Murchison was refilling his pipe, lines of thought crossing his forehead.
“When my child died—”
“Yes—”
“I seemed to lose part of myself. I had crushed the curse then. I don’t know how to explain the psychology of the affair, but when she died, the other thing died also.”
Canon Stensly nodded.
“It was what we call dipsomania. I never touched alcohol for years. I had been a fool as a student. At my worst, I only had the crave now and again.”
“And you are sure—”
“Sure that that curse killed my child, indirectly. Is it strange that her death should have killed the curse?”
“As I trust in God, no.”
The thrush was singing again on the yew-tree, another thrush answering it from a distant garden. Canon Stensly lay back in his chair and smiled.
“Stay here,” he said, quietly.
“In Roxton?”
“Yes. You have friends. Trust them. There is a greater sense of justice in this world than most cynics allow. I never knew man fight a good fight, a clean up-hill fight, and lose in the end.”
They were smoking peacefully under the cherry-tree when Catherine returned. She had no suspicion of what had passed, for no storm spirit had left its torn clouds in the summer air. Her husband’s face was peculiarly calm and placid.
“Where’s that boy of yours, Mrs. Murchison?”
“Jack?”
“Yes.”
“He was hunting the strawberry-beds half an hour ago.”
“Tell him,” and the Canon chuckled, “tell him I am not too big yet—for a tub.”
“Oh, Canon Stensly—”
“My dear Mrs. Murchison, I said many a truer thing when I was a boy. Children strike home. To have his vanity chastened, let a man listen to children.”
The big man with the massive head and the broad British chest had gone. Husband and wife were sitting alone under the cherry-tree.
“You told him—all?”
“All, Kate.”
“And it was Betty? That woman! May she never have to bear what we have borne!”
Murchison was sitting with his elbows on his knees, his chin upon his fists.
“Well—they know the worst—at last,” he said, grimly. “We can clear for action. That’s a grand man, Kate. I shall stay and fight—fight as he would were he in my place.”
She stretched out a hand and let it rest upon his shoulder.
“You are what I would have you be, brave. Our chance will come.”
“God grant it.”
“You shall show these people what manner of man you are.”