CHAPTER XXXVIII
It was a wet evening in June, and a steady downrush of rain purred on the tiled roofs of the old town and set the broad eaves and high-peaked gables dripping. A summer sweetness breathed in the gardens where the fallen petals of rhododendrons lay like flame upon the green grass. The roses were weighed down with dew, and each leaf diamonded with a glimmering tear. In Lombard Street the tall cypresses stood like solemn monks cowled and coped against the rain.
The downpour had lessened a little, and Jack Murchison, flattening his nose against the nursery window, saw a country cart driven by a man in a white mackintosh swing into Lombard Street from the silver, rain-drenched sheen of St. Antonia’s trees. The man’s big white body streamed with wet, his face shining out like a drenched peony under the brim of his hat, that dripped like the flooded gutter of a house. Tremulous rain-drops fell rhythmically from the big man’s nose, and the apron that covered his legs was full of puddles.
The country cart drew up outside the doctor’s house, and Master Jack saw the big man in the white mackintosh climb out laboriously, the cart tilting under his weight. He threw the leather apron over the horse’s loins, and swung the water out of his hat, disclosing to the boy above a round bald patch about the size of a saucer.
The bell rang, a good, rattling, honest peal that told of a straightforward and unaffected fist. Jack heard Mary’s rather nasal treble answering the big man’s vigorous bass. The white mackintosh was doffed and hung considerately on the handle of the bell. There was much wiping of boots, while the man Gage appeared at the side gate in the garden wall, and came forward to hold the farmer’s horse.
“Sorry to bother you, doctor, on such a beast of an evening.”
“Come in, Mr. Carrington.”
“You remember me, sir?”
“I don’t forget many faces. Come into my study.”
The doffing of the white mackintosh had uncovered a robust and rather corpulent, thick-set figure in rough tweed jacket and breeches and box-cloth leggings. The farmer had one of those typically solid English faces, fresh-colored though deeply wrinkled, and chastening its good humor with an alert, world-wise watchfulness in the rather deep-set eyes. Mr. Carrington was considered rather a masterful man by his friends, a man who could laugh while his wits were at work bettering a bargain. He was one of the most prominent farmers in the neighborhood, and one of the few who confessed to making money despite the times.
“My trap’s waiting outside, doctor. I want you to come back with me right away to Goldspur Farm.”
Mr. Carrington was sitting on the extreme edge of a chair, and wiping the rain from his face with a silk handkerchief.
“Anything much the matter?”
“Well, doctor, you know I have taken to growing a lot of ground-fruit, and I’ve had about fifty pickers down from town this year.”
Murchison nodded.
“They’re camped out in two tin shanties and a couple of tents down at Goldspur Farm. East-enders, all of them; and you never quite know, doctor, what an East-ender carries. Well, to be frank, I’m worried about some of ’em.”
Mr. Carrington sat squarely in his chair, and tapped the floor with the soles of his boots. He looked thoughtful, and the corners of his big, good-tempered mouth had a melancholy droop.
“There’s one woman in particular, doctor, and her youngster, who seem bad. Sick and sweating; won’t take food; they just lie there in the straw like logs. My foreman didn’t tell me anything about it till this afternoon, but when I’d seen the woman I had the horse put in, and came straight here.”
Murchison glanced at his watch, and then crossed the room and rang the bell.
“Can you have me driven back?” he asked.
“Certainly, doctor.”
“Good. Ah, Mary, will you ask your mistress to have dinner postponed till eight. And tell Gage to take these letters to the post. Now, Mr. Carrington, my mackintosh and I are at your service.”
“You’ll need it, doctor, and an old hat.”
A slender vein of gold gashed the dull west as they left the outskirts of the town behind. As the rent in the sky broadened, long rays of light came down the valley, making the woods and meadows a glory of shimmering green, and firing the rain pools so that they shone like brass. The farmer took the private road that ran through Ulverstone Park, a rolling wilderness of beeches and Scotch firs, whose green “rides” plunged into the glimmering rain-splashed umbrage of tall trees. Here were tangled banks of purpling heather, and great stretches of sweet woodland turf. Old yews brooded in the deeps of the domain, solemn and still, most ancient and wise of trees.
“Get up, Molly,” and Mr. Carrington shook a raindrop from his nose, and flicked the brown mare with the whip. “Clearing a little. Sorry for the people who cut their hay yesterday.”
“Somewhat damp. How is the fruit doing?”
“Oh, pretty fair, pretty fair, as far as our strawberries are concerned. The finest year, doctor, is when you have a first-class crop and your neighbors can only put up rubbish. It’s no good every one being in tip-top form. I’ve got rid of tons, and at no dirt price, either.”
Mr. Carrington’s British face beamed slyly above his angelic white mackintosh. It was a face in which stolid satisfaction and stolid woe were easily interchanged, for the heavy lines thereof could be twisted into either expression.
Murchison was listening to the hoarse rattle of the clearing shower beating upon a myriad leaves. The gold band in the west was broadening into a canopy of splendor. Had Mr. Carrington been educated up to more pushing and aggressive methods of making money, he would have seen in that sky nothing but a magnificent background for some silhouetted sky-sign shouting “Try Our Jam.”
“And these pickers of yours, how long have they been with you?”
The lines in the farmer’s face rearranged themselves abruptly.
“Poor devils, they look on this as a sort of yearly picnic, doctor. There are about fifty of them, and they’ve been at Goldspur about ten days.”
“Many children?”
“Children? Plenty. If they were Irish, they’d bring the family pig out, doctor, just to give him some new sort of dirt to wallow in. But then, what can you expect—what can you expect?”
They had left the park by the western lodge, and came out upon a stretch of undulating fields closed in the near distance by woods of oak and beech. A tall, gabled farm-house of red brick rose outlined against the sky with a great fir topping its chimney-stacks like the flat cloud seen above a volcano in full eruption. Near it, fronting the road, were a few nondescript cottages; farther still a jumble of barns, outhouses, and stables. In the middle of a fourteen-acre field Murchison could see two zinc-roofed sheds and a couple of old military tents standing isolated in a waste of sodden, dreary soil.
Mr. Carrington pointed to them with his whip.
“There’s the colony. Will you come in first, doctor, and have—” he reconsidered the words and cleared his throat—“and have—a cup of tea?”
Murchison had noticed the break in the invitation, and had reddened.
“No, thanks. We had better walk, I suppose?”
“Sit light, doctor; we have a sort of road, though it ain’t exactly Roman.”
The farmer passed Murchison the reins, and climbed down, the trap swaying like a small boat anchored in a swell. He opened a gate leading into the field, his white mackintosh flapping about his legs.
“Not worth while getting up again,” he said, laconically. “Drive her on, doctor, I’ll follow.”
Murchison heard the click of the gate, and the squelch of Mr. Carrington’s boots in the mud, as the trap bumped at a walking pace towards the zinc sheds in the field. The larger of the two resembled a coach-house, and could be closed at one end by two swinging doors. The rain was still rattling on the roof as Murchison drove up, and a thin swirl of smoke drifted out sluggishly from the darkness of the interior. The two tents had a soaked and slatternly appearance. Empty bottles, old tins, scraps of dirty paper, and miscellaneous rubbish littered the ground. On a line slung between two chestnut poles three dirty towels were hanging, either to wash or to dry?
As the trap stopped at the end of the rough road, Murchison could see that the larger shed was like a big hutch full of live things crowded together. A litter of straw, ankle deep, lay round the walls. A fire burned in the middle of the earth floor. The faces that were lit up by the light from the fire were coarse, quick-eyed, and hungry, the faces seen in London slums.
Half a dozen children scuttled out like a litter of young pigs, and stood in the slush and rain, staring at the trap. Murchison’s appearance on the scene seemed to arouse no stir of interest among the adult dwellers in the shed. They stared, that was all, one or two breaking the silence with crude and characteristic brevity.
“’Ello, ’ere’s the b——y doctor.”
“There’s ’air!”
“Look at the hold boss, with a phiz like a round o’ raw beef stuck hon top of a sack of flour.”
Mr. Carrington arrived with his boots muddy and the lines of his face emphatic and authoritative.
“Some one hold the mare. Why don’t you keep the kids in out of the wet? This way, doctor, the second tent.”
Mr. Carrington opened the flap, and, letting Murchison enter, contented himself with staring hard at two figures lying on an old flock mattress with a coat rolled up for a pillow. One was a woman, thin, still pretty, in a hollow-cheeked, hectic way, with a ragged blouse open at the throat, and a couple of sacks covering her. The other was a child, a girl with flaxen hair tossed about a flushed and feverish face. The child seemed asleep, with half an orange, sucked to the pulp, clutched by her grimy fingers.
Murchison remained for perhaps half an hour in that rain-soaked tent, while Mr. Carrington stumped up and down impatiently, kicking the mud from his boots and eying the rubbish that marked the presence of these London poor. The eastern sky was filling fast with the oblivion of night when Murchison emerged. The woman had been able to answer his questions in a dazed and apathetic way.
Mr. Carrington met him with a squaring of his sturdy shoulders and a bluff uplift of the chin.
“Well, doctor?”
“I’m glad you sent for me.”
“As bad as that, is it?”
“Typhoid, or I am much mistaken.”
The farmer thrust his hands into the side pockets of his mackintosh, and flapped them to and fro.
“Well, I’m damned!” was all he said.
The cold sky rose dusted with a few stars in the west when the farmer’s cart set Murchison down in Lombard Street before his own door. Dinner had been waiting more than an hour. Catherine’s face, bright, yet a little troubled, met him in the shaded glow of the hall.
“You must be soaked to the skin, dear,” and she felt his clothes.
“No, nothing much. I’m more hungry than wet.”
“A long case. Dinner is ready.”
They went into the dining-room together, Murchison’s arm about her body.
“Some responsibility for me at last,” he said, quietly; “I believe it is typhoid.”
“Where, at Goldspur Farm?”
“Yes, among Carrington’s pickers.”
“Poor things!”
“They are cooped up like cattle in a shed.”
He was silent for some minutes, for Mary had set a plateful of hot soup before him, and even doctors are sufficiently human to enjoy food.
“There is a child ill,” he said, staring at the bowl of roses in the middle of the table.
“Poor little thing!”
“Strange, Kate, but she reminds me—wonderfully, very wonderfully—of Gwen.”
CHAPTER XXXIX
It was on the second morning following his interview with Dr. Peterson that Parker Steel received two letters, heralding the shadow of an approaching storm.
“I have laid the facts of the case,” wrote the demi-god from Mayfair, “before the General Medical Council. I consider this action of mine to partake of the nature of a public duty; for your abuse of your position has been too gross even for medical etiquette to cover. I cannot understand how a practitioner of your reputation could be so mad as to run so scandalous a risk. That you contracted the disease innocently in the pursuit of duty would have won you the sympathy of your fellow-practitioners. Your concealment of the disease puts an immoral complexion on the case. . . . Needless to say, I have given Major Murray the full benefit of an honest opinion.”
“I have laid the facts of the case,” wrote the demi-god from Mayfair, “before the General Medical Council. I consider this action of mine to partake of the nature of a public duty; for your abuse of your position has been too gross even for medical etiquette to cover. I cannot understand how a practitioner of your reputation could be so mad as to run so scandalous a risk. That you contracted the disease innocently in the pursuit of duty would have won you the sympathy of your fellow-practitioners. Your concealment of the disease puts an immoral complexion on the case. . . . Needless to say, I have given Major Murray the full benefit of an honest opinion.”
Such a letter from a physician of Dr. Peterson’s standing would have been sufficient in itself to demoralize a man of more courage and tenacity than Parker Steel. The curt declaration of war that reached him from Major Murray, by the very same post, exaggerated the effect that the specialist’s letter had produced.
“Sir,—I have received from Dr. Peterson a statement that convicts you of the most scandalous mal praxis. Needless to say, I am placing the matter in the hands of my solicitor; I consider it to be a case deserving of publicity, however repugnant the atmosphere surrounding the affair may be to me and mine.“Murray.”
“Sir,—I have received from Dr. Peterson a statement that convicts you of the most scandalous mal praxis. Needless to say, I am placing the matter in the hands of my solicitor; I consider it to be a case deserving of publicity, however repugnant the atmosphere surrounding the affair may be to me and mine.
“Murray.”
Those who have touched the realities of war will tell you that they have seen men with faces pinched as by a frost, their teeth chattering like castanets, even under the blaze of an African sun. It was at the breakfast-table that Parker Steel read those two ominous letters. The man looked ill and yellow, and his nerves were none too steady, to judge by the way he had gashed himself in shaving. The very clothes he wore seemed to have grown creased and shabby in a week, as though they felt the wearer’s figure limp and shrunken, and had lost tone in consequence.
It may be remembered that the Immortal Three displayed varying symptoms when at grips with death. The tongue of Ortheris waxed feverishly profane; the Yorkshireman broke out into song; Mulvaney, the Paddy, was incontinently sick. Parker Steel emulated the Irishman in this eccentricity that morning, save that his nausea was inspired by panic, and not by heroic rage.
Shaken and very miserable, he sat down at the bureau in his consulting-room, leaned his head upon his hands, and shivered. For two nights he had had but short snatches of sleep, brief lapses into oblivion that had been rendered vain by dreams. The imminent dread of a hundred ignominies had held him sick and cold through the short darkness of the summer nights. Dawn had come and found him feverish and very weary. To a coward it is torture to be alone with his own thoughts.
The third night he had taken sulphonal, a full dose, and had slept till Symons knocked at his bedroom door. The fog of the drug still clung about his brain as he sat at the bureau and tried to think. He seemed incapable of putting any purpose into motion, like an exhausted battery whose cells have been drained of their electric charge.
Parker Steel picked up a pen after he had crouched there silently for some twenty minutes. He opened a drawer, drew out several sheets of note-paper, and began to scribble confused, jerky sentences, to alter, to reconsider, and to erase. The power to determine and to act, even on paper, were lost to him that morning. He wrote two letters, only to tear them up and scatter the pieces in the grate, where a lighted match set them burning. He was still on his knees, turning over the charred fragments, when the door-bell rang.
The sedate Symons came to announce a patient.
“Mrs. Prosser, sir.”
“Tell her I can’t see her.”
Symons stared. Her master had something of the air of an angry dog.
“Tell her I’m busy. She can call again.”
“Yes, sir.”
She still stood in the doorway, irresolute, surprised.
“What the devil are you waiting there for, Symons?”
“Nothing, sir.”
And she withdrew, with her dignity balanced on the tip of a very much tilted nose.
Parker Steel opened the window wide, and leaning his hands on the sill, looked out into the garden. It was air that he needed—air amid the stifling complexities of life that were crowding tumultuous upon his future. The garden with the sumptuous serenity of its trees and flowers had no sympathetic touch for him in his agony of isolation. It was his loneliness that weighed upon him heavily at that moment. He had outlawed himself, as it were, from the heart of his own wife. The very house was a pest-house in which two stricken souls were sundered and held apart.
If Betty would only see him. If she could only bring herself to understand that he had acted this disastrous part in order to retain the social satisfactions that she loved. Any companionship, even the companionship of a half-estranged wife, seemed preferable to the isolation that he felt deepening about him. He argued that it was his realization of Betty’s ambition that had made him dissemble for her sake. Any argument, however suspicious, is pressed into the service of a man whose whole desire is to justify himself.
Unfortunately, when a woman’s trust has been once shocked from its foundations, no buttressing and underpinning can save that superstructure of sentiment that has taken years to build. Betty had kept to her room with no one but Madge Ellison to give her sympathy and advice. The husband had always found the friend embarrassing with her presence anyrapprochementbetween him and his wife.
As he stood at the open window, with the words of the two letters he had read weaving a hopeless tangle of bewilderment in his brain, he heard some one descend the stairs and go out by the front door into the square. Parker Steel realized that this ubiquitous and embarrassing friend had left Betty alone in the room above. There was some chance at last of his seeing her alone, and of attempting to break down the barrier of her reserve.
He climbed the stairs slowly, and stood listening for several seconds on the landing before turning the handle of his wife’s door. The door was locked.
Parker Steel frowned over the ineptitude of the manœuvre. A dramatic entry might at least have given some dignity to the trick. As it was, he felt like a sneaking boy who had been balked and taken in some none too honorable artifice.
“Betty.”
“Yes, what is it?”
She was in a chair near the window, reading, with her dark hair spread upon her shoulders. Her mouth hardened as she recognized her husband’s voice. It was the very day, and she remembered it, the day of Lady Sophia’s fashionable bazaar when Betty Steel had foreseen the people of Roxton at her feet. She had asked Madge Ellison to bring out the dress that she should have worn. Primrose and leaf-green, it hung across the foot-rail of her bed.
“I want to speak to you, Betty.”
“Is there anything that we can discuss?”
The level tenor of her voice, its unflurried callousness, gave him an impression of obstinate estrangement.
“Betty.”
She did not answer.
“Let me in. If you will only give me a chance to justify myself—”
The very words he chose were the words least calculated to move a woman. Betty, lying back in her chair, pictured to herself a cringing, deprecating figure that could boast none of the passionate forcefulness of manhood. A woman may be won by courage and strength, even in the person of the man who has done her wrong; but let her have the repulsion of contempt, and her instinct towards forgiveness will be frozen into an unbending pride.
“I do not wish you to make excuses, Parker.”
“But, Betty—”
“Well?”
“It was for the sake of the home, the practice, everything. Can’t you understand? Can’t you imagine what I have gone through?”
Her momentary silence seemed to suggest a sneer.
“So you would justify a lie?”
“Betty, don’t talk like this. I am worried to death by other matters as it is.”
“I can understand that perfectly.”
He began to pace the landing, halting irresolutely from time to time before the locked door.
“I have heard from Peterson this morning.”
No reply.
“He is reporting the matter to the General Council, and he has given the truth away to Murray. You know what that must mean.”
Still no reply.
“Betty.”
Had he been able to see the cynical smile upon her face, Parker Steel might have understood that by acting the suppliant for her pity he only intensified her contempt.
“Betty, is this fair to me?”
He shook the door with a sudden gust of petulant impatience.
“Show me some little consideration. I have some right to demand—”
“Demand what you please, Parker, but oblige me by not making so much noise.”
“You will regret this.”
His voice was harsh now and beyond control.
“I have regretted much already.”
“Your marriage, I suppose?”
“There is no need, Parker, to indulge in details.”
“This is beyond my patience!”
“And mine, I assure you.”
He turned, and retreated from the attack at the same moment that Madge Ellison reappeared upon the stairs. They passed each other without a word; the woman, clear-eyed and uncompromising; the man gliding close to the wall. Madge Ellison found Betty sitting with closed eyes before the open window, the June sunshine dappling the bosoms of the tall trees in the square with gold.
CHAPTER XL
The month was August, and August at its worst, a month of glare and dust, and an atmosphere more trying to the temper than all the insolent bluster of a bragging March.
Mr. Carrington, in his shirt sleeves, and white linen sun-hat crammed down over his eyes, stood under the acacia-tree at his garden gate, chatting to the Reverend Peter Burt, Curate of Cossington, who had tramped three miles to visit some of the sick people on the farm. Mr. Burt was rather a shy little man, very much in earnest, and very much convinced of the responsibility of his position.
“All this must have been a great worry to you,” said the clergyman, with a comprehensive sweep of an oak stick.
“Worry—don’t talk of it, sir. What with the heat, and the Medical Officer of Health, and the Sanitary Inspector, I’ve been pretty near crazy. I don’t know what I should have done, Mr. Burt, but for Murchison and his good lady.”
“Mrs. Murchison seems to have been a local Florence Nightingale.”
Mr. Carrington stared.
“I don’t happen to know the woman’s name,” he said; “but she must have been a good ’un, Mr. Burt, to be showed in the same class as the doctor’s lady. Why—” and the farmer withdrew his hands from his pockets and tapped his left palm with his right forefinger—“why, d’you know what she did when she’d been over here and seen how we were fixed?”
Mr. Carrington paused expressively, and looked the young clergyman in the face, as though defying him to conceive the nature of this unique woman’s genius.
“No, I have not heard.”
“Well, Mr. Burt, there’s religion and there’s religion; some of us wear black coats on a Sunday and put silver in the plate; some of us aren’t so regular and respectable, but we play the game, and that’s more than many of your sitting pew-hens do. Excuse me, sir, I’m rather rough in the tongue. Well, Mrs. Murchison, she doesn’t strike you as a district visiting sort of lady to look at; she’s got a fine face and a head of hair, like the Countess of Camber, who gave the prizes away at our Agricultural Show last season. Well, Mr. Burt, she came over here, and saw what sort of a fix we were in, two grumbling nurses, and not much more than straw and sacking. Well, what does she do but take one of my wagons and my men and go off to Roxton all on her own.”
Mr. Carrington paused for breath, took off his sun-hat and wiped his forehead with it, his eyes remaining fixed emphatically on the Curate’s face.
“And what d’you think, sir? Back came that wagon of mine loaded up with linen, and basins, and crockery, a bed or two, and God knows what. She’d ransacked her own house, sir, and gone round to all the neighbors begging like a papist. Get the stuff? She did that. Not easy to say no to a woman with a face and a voice like hers. Carmagee joined in, and Canon Stensly, and a good score more. And dang my soul, Mr. Burt, she’d been working with her husband here, day in, day out; and that’s the sort of thing, sir, that I call religion.”
The Curate began to look vaguely uncomfortable under the farmer’s concentrated methods of address. It took much to move Mr. Carrington to words, but when once moved, the result resembled the eruption of a long quiescent volcano, the vigor of the eruption corresponding roughly to the length of the period of quiescence.
“I quite agree with you, Mr. Carrington,” he said, with a certain boyish stiffness, as though he considered it superfluous for the farmer to condemn his soul to perdition.
“You must excuse my language, Mr. Burt; when I get worked up over a subject I must let fly. And it’s these dirty lies that have been flying abroad about this good lady’s husband that have made me hot, sir, to see justice done.”
Mr. Burt appeared interested by the windows of the house that glimmered from amid a mass of creepers like water shining through the foliage of trees.
“One hears very curious rumors,” he acknowledged, with a discreet frown.
“I suppose you’ve heard them over at Cossington?”
“Well, I have heard reports.”
“About our doctor here and the drink?”
Mr. Burt nodded.
“But I don’t think anyone believed them,” he confessed.
The farmer’s right forefinger began to tap his left palm again.
“Look here, sir, I ought to know something about Dr. Murchison’s character, I imagine. The man’s been here nearly a month, living in my house, and working like a Trojan. We’ve had nearly sixty cases, what with the pickers and our own people. You haven’t seen what the doctor’s been through in this little epidemic of ours, Mr. Burt, and I have. You get to the bottom of a man’s nature when he’s working eighteen hours out of the twenty-four, doing the nurse’s jobs as well as his own, and feeding some of the kids with his own hands. I’ve seen him come into my parlor, sir, at night, and go slap off to sleep on the sofa, he was that done. And never, not on one single blessed occasion, have I seen that man show the white feather or touch a drop of drink!”
Mr. Burt appeared to become more and more embarrassed by being stared at vehemently in the face, as the farmer’s right fist smacked the points of his argument into his left palm. He had to return Mr. Carrington’s stare, eye to eye, as a pledge of sincerity. He began to fidget, to scan the horizon, and to fumble with his watch-chain.
“Your evidence sounds conclusive,” he said; “I think it is time I—”
Mr. Carrington ignored the little man’s restiveness, and came and stood outside the gate.
“Now, I make it a rule in life, Mr. Burt, to take people just as I find ’em, and not to listen to what all the old women say. The rule of a practical man, you understand. Now—”
The Curate cast a flurried glance up the road, and pulled out his watch.
“You must really excuse me, Mr. Carrington.”
“In a hurry, are you? Well, I was only going to say that some of us people have come by a shrewd notion how all this chaff got chucked about in these parts. Murchison was a first-class man, and some people got jealous of him, and played a low-down game to get him out of the town. You take my meaning, Mr. Burt?”
“Yes, certainly. Good Heavens, it is nearly twelve. I must really say good-bye, Mr. Carrington; I hope—”
“One moment, sir. I won’t mention any name, but perhaps you are just as wise as I am. And what’s more, Mr. Burt, from what I’ve heard, that gentleman that we know of has just been treated as he tried to treat a better man than himself. It was his wife, they say—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Carrington, but some one is calling you, I think.”
“They can wait. Now—”
“To be frank with you, Mr. Carrington, I can’t.”
“Oh, well, sir, if you are in such a hurry, I’ll postpone my remarks. I was only going to say—”
But Mr. Burt gave him a wave of the hand, and fled.
A girl of seventeen came down the path from the house, between the standard roses, her black hair already gathered up tentatively at the back of a brown neck, and the smartness of her blouse and collar betraying the fact that she considered herself a mature and very eligible woman.
“Dad, are you deaf?”
Mr. Carrington turned with the leisurely composure of a father.
“What’s all this noise about, Nan?”
“I’ve been calling you for five minutes. They’re all there—in the fourteen-acre.”
“Who?”
“Why, Mrs. Murchison and the Canon, and old Lady Gillingham, and half a dozen more. Dr. Murchison sent one of the boys over for you.”
Mr. Carrington began to hustle.
“Dang it, I expected them to-morrow!”
“What a man you are, dad!” and she stood like an armed angel of scorn in the middle of the path; “you can’t go and see them in your shirt-sleeves.”
“Bless my soul, Nan, where’s my coat?”
“On the fence. You were talking to Mr. Burt long enough to forget it. Why didn’t you bring him in?”
Mr. Carrington was struggling into his alpaca coat, his daughter watching his contortions with the superior serenity of seventeen.
“Bring who in?”
“Mr. Burt.”
“The little man’s as shy as a calf.”
“Perhaps you talked him silly.”
“Look here, my dear, it’s too hot to argue. Is my tie proper?”
His daughter regarded him with critical candor.
“It will do,” she answered, resignedly, as though her father’s ties were beyond all promise of salvation.
The camp of the fruit-pickers in Mr. Carrington’s fourteen-acre stood out like a field-hospital under the August sun. There were half a dozen white tents pitched near the two sheds, and on an ingenious frame-work of poles an awning had been spread so that convalescents could be brought out to lie in the shade, and gain the maximum amount of air. The whole place looked trim and clean, and a faint perfume of some coal-tar disinfectant permeated the air.
Mr. Carrington, as he emerged from the orchard gate, saw quite a representative gathering moving through the camp. Several of the Roxton celebrities who had subscribed to the relief fund, had been invited by Porteus Carmagee, the treasurer, to drive over and see how the money had been spent. The farmer recognized Lady Gillingham’s carriage and pair waiting in the roadway beyond the white field-gate. The Canon’s landau had drawn up deferentially behind it, while Mrs. Murchison’s pony, that drew her governess car, was being held by one of the pickers who had lost two children but a week ago.
Lady Sophia appeared to be holding quite a state inspection, for she had Murchison in his white linen jacket at one elbow, and the Canon in his black coat at the other. She was making considerable use of her lorgnette—a very affable, commonplace, and well-meaning great lady, who felt it to be a most Christian condescension on her part to drive out and examine this temporary hospital and its London poor. Catherine Murchison and Mrs. Stensly were talking to one of the women lying under the awning. The treasurer had remained judiciously in the background, and was snapping away to three Roxton ladies who appeared to be fascinated by some subject foreign to enteric fever and pickers of fruit.
Porteus Carmagee looked very much amused. A thin little lady in a hat far too big for her, giving her an indistinct resemblance to a mushroom, was attempting to draw more definite information from the lawyer by the feminine pretence of unbelief.
“But are you sure, Mr. Carmagee? It may only be a rumor; one hears so many extraordinary things.”
“I am perfectly sure, madam. There are facts, however, that cannot well be discussed.”
The suggestion of mystery lent a double glamour to Porteus Carmagee’s information.
“Then he has left the town for good?”
“I think I may swear to that as a fact.”
“And alone?”
“Quite alone.”
“But surely his wife—?”
Mr. Carmagee tightened up his mouth and stared reflectively into space.
“Don’t ask me to unravel the complexities of other people’s households, Mrs. Blount.”
“But how extraordinary! Of course everyone knows that she is ill.”
“Every one knows a great deal more of one’s private affairs, madam, than one knows one’s self.”
The three ladies exchanged glances; they formed three spokes of curiosity, with Mr. Carmagee for the hub.
“And no one has seen Betty Steel for some weeks.”
“That is so.”
“And it is rumored—”
“Then you have heard that too?”
“What, my dear?”
“That it is an affection of the skin.”
The lawyer extricated himself from the group, and moved to where Catherine’s golden head shone Madonna-like over the face of a little child.
“Affection of tom-cats,” quoth he, under his breath; “it is curious the way these women play with a piece of scandal like a cat with a mouse. It mustn’t die, or half the zest of the game would be gone. Catherine, my friend, you are different from the rest.”
During these digressions Mr. Carrington had brought himself within the ken of Lady Gillingham’s lorgnette. It appeared to the farmer that the great lady’s eyes were fixed critically upon his tie. His right shoulder blushed as he remembered that there was a three-inch rent there in the seam of his alpaca coat. Such is the judgment that overtakes those who are mistaken as to dates.
“Good-morning, Mr.—Mr. Carrington. We are admiring how beautifully you have managed everything for these poor people. So clean, and so—so airy. I am sure you must have suffered a great deal of inconvenience and worry.”
Mr. Carrington blushed. Porteus Carmagee, who was watching the drama from a distance, felt for Mr. Carrington a species of ironical pity. The farmer’s boots described an angle of ninety degrees with one another, and the vehement smirk upon his face made the redness thereof seem dangerously sultry.
“We have all been so interested, Mr. Carrington—”
“Very good of your ladyship, I’m sure.”
“I sent you an iron bedstead, you may remember. I hope it has been of use.”
“Great use, your ladyship.”
“Ah, that is right; and is your family quite well, Mr. Carrington? I hope none of you have contracted the disease?”
“Only my youngest boy, your ladyship, but Dr. Murchison soon had him in hand.”
“Ah, quite so; good-day, Mr. Carrington,” and she relieved him from the splendor of her notice, and turned to Murchison, who was waiting at her elbow.
“What a noble profession, the physician’s, Dr. Murchison!”
The big, brown-faced man smiled, and his eyes wandered unconsciously in the direction of his wife.
“It has its responsibilities,” he said, “and also its compensations.”
Lady Sophia waved her lorgnette to and fro, and beamed to the extent of the five-guinea check she had contributed to the relief fund. She was wondering whether it was possible that this quiet, clear-eyed man could ever have been the victim of such a thing as drink. If so—then he was to be pitied, and not abused.
“It must be so gratifying, Dr. Murchison, to save the life of a fellow-being.”
“Yes, it is something to be grateful for.”
“How well your wife looks! I hear she has been working here, like any trained nurse.”
Catherine, dancing a doll before the thin little hands of a child of four, was serenely oblivious of the great lady’s praise. Porteus Carmagee was watching her, smiling, and rattling his keys in his pocket.
“Your wife is very fond of children, Dr. Murchison.”
He looked into the distance, and then at the laughing girl of four.
“She lost a child, and that means much to a woman.”
“Ah, of course, undoubtedly. Poor little creature!” and her ladyship tended benignly in the direction of the awning.
Canon Stensly and Murchison were left alone together by one of the tents. A man was delirious within it, and they could hear the meaningless patter of fever flowing in one monotonous tone.
“A doctor’s life is no sinecure,” and he stroked his firm round chin.
“No, perhaps no. We walk daily at the edge of a precipice. And yet it has great compensations.”
They were silent a moment, watching Lady Sophia trying to coquet with a rather overpowered child.
“You have heard about Steel?”
“Yes, my wife told me.”
“One of those strange fatalities we meet with in life. And yet I think there was something of the nature of a judgment in it.”
“Possibly. I am sorry for the woman.”
“Then you are magnanimous.”
“No, I have learned the true values of life. When one has suffered—”
“One loses the meaner impulses?”
“That is so.”
“And remains thankful for what one has?”
“For what one has.”
And Murchison’s eyes were smiling towards his wife.