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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 “I don’t know as how I come here to hear your sauce,” he
remarked, curtly.
Murchison faced him with an irritable glitter of the eyes.
“What do you mean!”
“I suppose some of us poor fellows cost you gentlemen too much
in tow and flannel.”
“There you are just a little at sea, my friend. What we do is to
prevent the Friendly Societies being imposed upon by loafers. Dress
your leg every day. Rest it, you understand, and keep out of the
pubs. You had better come by some manners before next week.”
The chemical worker snarled out some vague retort, and then
relapsed into silence. Such shufflers had no pity from James
Murchison. He was in no mood that morning to bear with the
impertinences of malingerers and humbugs.
The clock struck eleven before the last patient passed out into
Wilton High Street with its thundering drays and clanging trams.
Murchison had done the work of two men in the surgery that
morning, silent, skilful, and determined, a man who worked that the
savage smart of sorrow might be soothed and assuaged thereby.
With the women and the children he was very gentle and very
patient. His hands were never rough and never clumsy. Perhaps
none of the people whose wounds he dressed guessed how bitter a
wound was bleeding in the heart of this sad-eyed, patient-faced
man.
John Tugler sidled in when Murchison had pinned up the last
bandage. He swung the door to gently, sighed, and pretended to
examine the entries in the ledger. Murchison was washing his hands
at the sink, staring hard at the water as it splashed from the tap
upon his fingers.
“Not much visiting to-day.”
“No.”
“I’ll hire a cab, and drive down to Black End. Most of them seem
to lie that way.”
Murchison was looking for a clean place in the roller-towel.
“I can manage the visiting down there,” he said.
John Tugler surveyed him attentively over a fat shoulder.
 “You’ll knock up, old man,” he remarked, quietly.
Murchison started. The familiarity had a touch of tenderness that
lifted it from its vulgar setting.
“Thanks, no.”
“Very bad, is she?”
“Comatose.”
“Oh, damn!”
The little man whipped over the leaves of the ledger, as though
looking for something that he could not find.
“It seems a beastly shame,” he said, presently.
“Shame?”
“Yes, this sort of smash-up of a youngster’s life. They call it
Providence, or the Divine Will, or something of that sort, don’t they?
Must say I can’t stick that sort of bosh.”
Murchison was wringing his hands fiercely in the folds of the
rough towel.
“It is a natural judgment, I suppose,” he said.
“A judgment?”
“It was my fault that the child ever came here. It need not have
been so—” and he broke off with a savage twisting of the mouth.
John Tugler ran one finger slowly across a blank space in the
ledger.
“Don’t take it that way,” he said, slowly; “it doesn’t help a man to
curse himself because a damned bug of a bacillus breeds in this holy
horror of a town. Curse the British Constitution, the law-mongers, or
the local money shufflers who’d rather save three farthings than
clean their slums.”
James Murchison was silent. Yet in his heart there burned the
fierce conviction that the father’s frailty had been visited upon the
innocent body of the child.
Four o’clock had struck, and the houses were casting long
shadows across the waters of the canal, before Murchison turned in
at the gate of Clovelly after three hours visiting in the Wilton slums.
He let himself in silently with his latch-key, hung his hat and coat in
the hall, and entered the little front room where tea was laid on the
imitation walnut table. On the sofa by the window he found
Catherine asleep, her head resting against the wall. It was as though
sheer weariness, the spell of many sleepless nights, had fallen on
her, and that but a momentary slacking of her self-control had
suffered nature to assert her sway.
Murchison stood looking at his wife in silence. Sleep had wiped
out much of the sorrow from her face, and she seemed beautiful as
Beatrice dreaming strange dreams upon the walls of heaven. A stray
strand of March sunlight had woven itself into her hair. Her hands lay
open beside her on the sofa, open, palms upward, with a quaint
suggestion of trustfulness and appeal. To Murchison it seemed that if
God but saw her thus, such prayers as she had uttered would be
answered out of pity for the brave sweetness of her womanhood.
If peace lingered in sleep, there would be sorrow in her waking.
Murchison was loath to recall her to the world of coarse reality and
unpitying truth. A great tenderness, a strong man’s tenderness for a
woman and a wife, softened his face as he watched the quiet
drawing of her breath. And yet what ultimate kindness could there
be in such delay? Life and death are but the counterparts of day and
night.
Catherine awoke with a touch of her husband’s hand upon her
cheek. She sighed, put out her arms to him, a consciousness of pain
vivid at once upon her face.
“You here!”
She put her hands up to her forehead.
“I never meant to sleep. What a long day you must have had!”
“It is better that I should work.”
“Yes.”
“How is she?”
“The same; I can see no change.”
Catherine rose with a suggestion of effort, and leaned for a
moment on her husband’s arm. The impulse seemed simultaneous
with them, the impulse that drew them to the room above. They
went up together, hand in hand, silent and restrained, two souls
awed by the mysteries of death and life.
On the bed by the window lay Gwen, with childishly open yet
sightless eyes. A flush of vivid color showed on either cheek, her
golden hair falling aside like waves of light about her forehead. Her
breathing was tranquil and feeble, and spaced out with a peculiar
rhythm. The pupils of the eyes were markedly unequal; one lid
drooped slightly, and the right angle of the red mouth was a little
drawn.
It is a certain pitiful semblance of health that mocks the heart in
many such cases. Children who die thus are often beautiful. They
seem to sleep with open eyes. The flush on the cheeks has nothing
of the gathering grayness of death.
Catherine, bending low, looked at Gwen with the long look of one
who will not see the vanishing torch of hope.
“She is still asleep.”
“Yes, asleep.”
The man’s voice was a tearless echo.
“James, it can’t be. Look, what a color! And the eyes—”
Murchison laid a hand gently on her shoulder.
“I know; I have seen such things before.”
“But she will wake presently?”
“Presently.”
“Yes. This long sleep will do her good.”
Murchison sighed.
“She will not wake for us, wife,” he said.
“Not wake!”
Catherine’s eyes were incredulous, full of the intenseness of a
mother’s love.
“No, not here.”
“But look—look at her!”
“That is the pity of it.”
“Then I shall not hear her speak again; she will never see me?”
“Never.”
“But why? I cannot believe—”
“Dear, it is death—the way some children die.”
They stood silent, side by side. Then Catherine bent low; child’s
mouth and mother’s mouth met in a long dream kiss. There was a
sound of broken, troubled whispering in the room, a sound as of
inarticulate tenderness and wordless prayer. Murchison’s right hand
covered his face. His wife’s eyes and cheeks were wet with tears.
“Kate.”
She bowed herself over the child, and did not stir.
“No, no, these last hours, they are so precious.”
He looked at her mutely, put a hand to his throat, and turned
away. It was too solemn, too poignant a scene for him to outrage it
with words. Gwen, dead in life, would see her mother’s face no
more.
Murchison was on the stairs when the blare of a tin trumpet
seemed to hurt the silence of the little house. An impatient fist was
beating a tattoo on the front door. It was the boy Jack come home
from school.
Murchison’s mouth quivered, and then hardened. He went to the
door, and opened it to a blast of the boy’s trumpet.
“Hallo, I say—”
A strong hand twisted the toy from the boy’s fingers.
“Silence.”
Jack Murchison’s mouth gaped. He looked at his father’s face,
wonderingly, grievedly, and was awed into a frightened silence, child
egoist that he was, by the expression in his father’s eyes.
Murchison pointed to the sitting-room door.
“Go and sit down.”
The boy obeyed, sullen and a little stupefied. His father closed
and locked the door on him, and then passed out into the space
behind the house that they called a garden. A few crocuses were
gilding the sour, black earth. They were flowers that Gwen had
planted before Christmas-time. And Murchison, as he looked at
them, thought that she should take them in her little hands to the
Great Father of all Children.
 CHAPTER XXVII
Miss Carmagee sat crying at the breakfast-table over a letter that
she held in her fat, white hand. It was a letter from Catherine, and
told of the last resting-place of Gwen, a narrow bed of clay amid
white headstones on the Wilson hills. She had been reading the
letter aloud to her brother, whose face was a study in the irritable
suppression of his feelings.
“Damn that bird!”
The canary in its cage by the window was filling the room with
shivers of shrill sound. Porteus pushed his chair back, jerked an
antimacassar from the sofa, and flung it over the bird’s cage.
“Go on, dear, go on. I am expecting Dixon to see me in ten
minutes.”
Miss Carmagee wiped her spectacles, and blundered on brokenly
through the letter. There were eight pages, closely written, and
whether it was the indistinctness of Catherine’s writing, or the
dimness of Miss Carmagee’s eyes, the old lady’s progress was
sluggish in the extreme. She had forgotten to add milk to her
untasted cup of tea, and the rashers of bacon on her plate were
congealing into unappetizing grease.
Porteus sat fidgeting at the far end of the table. The vitality of his
interest betrayed itself in a frowning and jerky spirit of impatience.
“Well, what are they going to do now, eh? Stay on and lose the
boy? Murchison ought to have more sense.”
Miss Carmagee’s eyes had assumed an expression of moist
surprise behind her spectacles. She appeared to be digesting some
unexpected piece of news in silence, and with the amiable
forgetfulness of a lethargic mind.
Porteus had handed her his empty cup. Some seconds elapsed
before his sister noticed the intrusion of the china.
“Dear, what a coincidence!”
She took the cup and filled it mechanically, her eyes still fixed
upon the letter.
 “Well, what is it?”
“If only it had happened earlier, the money would have been of
use.”
Mr. Porteus betrayed the natural impatience of the energetic
male.
“Bless my soul, are you contriving a monopoly?”
Miss Carmagee lifted her mild spectacles to her brother’s face.
“Mrs. Pentherby is dead,” she said.
“Dead!”
“Yes.”
“No extreme loss to the community. Ah—would you—!” and he
cast a threatening glance in the direction of the bird-cage at the
sound of an insinuating “tweet.” “Well, what about the money?”
The lawyer’s eyes twinkled as though Mrs. Pentherby’s dividends
were more interesting than her person.
“She has left nearly all her money and her furniture to Catherine.
She died the very same day as Gwen.”
“Pity it wasn’t six months ago. The old lady had some first-class
china, and a few fine pictures. Does Catherine say how much?”
“How much what, Porteus?”
“Money, my dear, money.”
“I don’t think she says.”
Her brother pushed back his chair, and glanced briskly at his
watch.
“I’ll take it with me,” he said, stretching out a brown and
energetic hand for the letter.
“I haven’t quite finished it, Porteus.”
“Never mind; there’s your breakfast getting cold. You had better
have some fresh tea made.”
His sister surrendered the letter with a spirit of amiable self-
negation.
“The money ought to make a difference to them,” she said,
softly, taking off her spectacles and wiping them with slow, pensive
hands.
“Money always makes a difference, my dear, especially when
people are heroically proud.”
 Miss Phyllis Carmagee’s thoughts were towards that gray-skied,
slaving, sordid town where Gwen was buried, as she sipped her tea
and looked at her brother’s empty chair. She was a woman whom
many of her neighbors thought stolid and reserved, a woman not
gifted with great powers of self-expression. Friendship with many is
a mere gratification of the social ego. The vivacious people who
delight in conversationalism, take pleasure in those personalities that
are new and pleasing for the moment, even as they are interested in
new and complex flowers. To Phyllis Carmagee, however, her friends
had more of the enduring dearness of familiar trees. They were part
of her consciousness, part of her daily and her yearly life.
Porteus’s sister came by an idea as she sat alone at the
breakfast-table that morning. Serene and obese natures are slow in
conceiving, yet the concept may have the greater stability for the
very slowness of the progress. The crystallization of that idea went
on all day, till it was ready to be displayed in its completeness to her
brother as he dined. Miss Carmagee had decided to go down to
Wilton, and to show that her friendship was worth a long day’s
journey. A sentimental and unctuous letter would have sufficed for a
mere worldling. But Porteus Carmagee’s sister had that rare habit of
being loyal and sincere.
“I should like to see the child’s grave,” she said, quietly, her
round, white face very soft and gentle in the light of the shaded
lamp; “it seems hard to realize that the little thing is dead. Gwen
meant so much to her father. I wonder what they are going to do.”
Porteus Carmagee stared hard at the silver epergne full of
daffodils before him on the table. They were at dessert, and alone,
with the curtains drawn, and a wood fire burning in the old-
fashioned grate. The whole setting of the room spoke of a
generation that was past. It suggested solidity and repose, placid
kindliness, prosaic comfort.
“Murchison ought never to have left us,” said the lawyer, curtly.
“No.”
“The affair might have blown over in a year.”
“You think so, Porteus.”
 “If he had only stuck to his guns. People always wait to see what
a man will do. If he skedaddles they draw their own inferences. Life
is largely a game of bluff.”
The eyes of brother and sister met in a sudden questioning
glance. Possibly the same thought had occurred to both.
“Would it be possible?”
“Possible for what?”
“For James Murchison to come back to Roxton?”
The lawyer reached for his napkin that had slipped down from his
knees.
“That is the question,” he confessed, “it is not easy to rebuild a
reputation. I would rather face fire than the sneers of my genteel
neighbors.”
Miss Carmagee’s placid face had lost its habitual air of
contentment and repose.
“I know it would require courage,” she said.
“People would probably call it impertinence. It requires more
than courage to be successfully impertinent in this world.”
“Cleverness, Porteus?”
“Genius, the genius of patience, magnanimity, and self-restraint.”
His sister pondered a moment, while Porteus sipped his port.
“Then—there is Catherine?”
Her brother’s keen eyes lit up at the name.
“Ah, there we have a touch of the divine fire.”
“She could help him.”
“Next to God.”
There was silence again between them for a season. The dim
and homely room seemed full of a quiet dignity, a pervading
restfulness that was clean and good. The most prosaic people grow
great and lovable when their hearts are moved to succor others. The
words of a beggar may strike the noblest chords of time, and live
with the utterances of martyrs and of prophets.
“Porteus.”
Brother and sister looked at each other.
“I might speak to them.”
“Perhaps, dear, better than any one.”
 “And if they need money? Mrs. Pentherby’s property cannot come
to them at once. The law—”
Porteus’s face twinkled benignantly.
“The law, like a mule, is abominably slow. If I can be of any use
to them—remind Kate that I am still alive.”
Miss Carmagee regarded her brother affectionately across the
table.
“Then I shall go to-morrow,” she said, with a quiet sigh.
 CHAPTER XXVIII
An increased sallowness and a slight thinning of the hair were
the only changes that might have been noticed in Parker Steel that
spring. The characteristic symptoms had been slight and evanescent,
the “rash” so faint and transient that a delicate dusting of powder
had hidden it even from Mrs. Betty’s eyes. A few of his most intimate
friends had noticed that Parker Steel had the tense, strained look of
a man suffering from overwork. That he had given up his nightly
cigar and his wine, pointed also to the fact that the physician had
knowledge of his own needs.
To such a man as Steel the zest of life lay in the energetic stir
and ostentatious bustle of success. His conceit was in his cleverness,
in the smartness of his equipage and reputation, and in the flattering
gossip that haunts a healer’s name. Parker Steel was essentially a
selfish mortal, and selfish men are often the happiest, provided they
succeed.
Yet no man, however selfish, can wholly stifle his own thoughts.
That the silence he kept was an immoral silence, no man knew
better than did Parker Steel. People would have shrunk from him
had they known the truth, as a refined woman shrinks from the
offensive carcass of a drunken tramp. His own niceness of taste
revolted from the consciousness of chance and undeserved pollution.
Ambition was strong in him, however, and the cold tenacity to hold
what he had gained. More isolated than Selkirk on his island, he had
to bear the bitterness of it alone, knowing that sympathy was locked
out by silence.
The supreme trying of his powers of hypocrisy came for him in
his attitude towards his wife. Parker Steel was in no sense an
uxorious fellow, and neither he nor Betty were ever demonstrative
towards each other. An occasional half-perfunctory meeting of the
lips had satisfied both after the first year of marriage. For this reason
Parker Steel’s ordeal was less complex and severe than if he had had
to repulse an emotional and warm-blooded woman.
 The first diplomatic development had been insomnia; at least
that was the excuse he made to Betty when he chose to sleep alone
in his dressing-room at the back of the house. The faintest sound
disturbed him, so he protested, and the rattle of wheels over the
cobbles of the Square kept him irritably sleepless in the early hours
of the morning. To Betty Steel there was no inconsistency in the
excuse he gave. She thought him worried and overworked, and
there was abundant justification for the latter evil. Winter and early
spring are the briskest seasons of a doctor’s life. Dr. Steel had had
seven severe cases of pneumonia on his list one week.
“You are too much in demand, Parker,” she had said. “There is
always the possibility of a partner to be considered.”
“Thanks, no; I am not a believer in a co-operative business.”
“You must take a jaunt somewhere as soon as the work
slackens.”
“All in good time, dear.”
“Sicily is fashionable.”
Parker Steel had indulged in optimistic reflections to distract her
vigilance. She had sought to prove that he was in stale health by
remarking that the wound on his forefinger had not completely
healed. He was still wearing the finger-stall that covered the fons et
origo mali.
“There is absolutely no need for you to fuss about me,” he had
answered; “I am not made of iron, and the work tells. Three
thousand a year is not earned without worry.”
“As much as that, Parker?”
He had touched a susceptible passion in her.
“Perhaps more. We shall be able to call our own tune before we
are five-and-forty.”
“Heaven defend us, Parker, you hint at terrible things.
Respectable obesity, and morning prayers.”
Her husband had laughed, and given her plausible comfort.
“You will be more dangerous then than you are now,” he had
said.
In truth, their fortunes were very much in the ascendant, and the
social side of professional life had prospered in Mrs. Betty’s hands.
The brunette was supreme in Roxton so far as beauty was
concerned, supreme also in the yet more magic elements of graceful
savoir-faire and tact. She was one of those women who had learned
to charm by flattery without seeming to be a sycophant; moreover,
she had tested the wisdom of propitiating her own sex by appearing
even more amiable to women than to men. Since the passing of the
Murchisons she had had nothing in the way of rivalry to fear. True,
two “miserable squatters” had put up brass plates in the town, and
scrambled for some of the poorer of James Murchison’s patients.
Mrs. Betty had been able to call upon the wives with patronizing
magnanimity. They were both rather dusty, round-backed ladies,
with no pretensions to style, either in their own persons or in the
persons of their husbands. One of these professional gentlemen, a
huge and flat-faced Paddy, resembled a police constable in plain
clothes. The other was rather a meek young man in glasses,
destitute of any sense of humor, and very useful in the Sunday-
school.
Roxton had weathered Lent and Easter, and Lady Sophia
Gillingham, Dame President of the local habitation of the Primrose
League; patroness of all Roxton charities, Dissenting enterprises
excepted; and late lady-in-waiting to the Queen; had called her
many dear friends together to discuss the coming Midsummer
Bazaar that was held annually for the benefit of the Roxton Cottage
Hospital. Roxton, like the majority of small country towns, was a
veritable complexity of cliques, and by “Roxton” should be
understood the superior people who were Unionists in politics, and
Church Christians in religion. There were also Chapel Christians in
Roxton, chiefly of Radical persuasion, and therefore hardly decent in
the sight of the genteel. People of “peculiar views” were rare, and
not generally encouraged. Some of the orthodox even refused to buy
a local tradesman’s boots, because that particular tradesman was
not a believer in the Trinity. The inference is obvious that the
“Roxton” concerned in Lady Sophia’s charitable bazaar, was superior
and highly cultured Roxton, the Roxton of dinner-jackets and
distinction, equipages, and Debrett.
 To be a very dear friend of Lady Sophia Gillingham’s was to be
one of the chosen and elect of God, and Betty Steel had come by
that supreme and angelic exaltation. Perhaps Mignon’s kitten had
purred and gambolled Mrs. Betty into favor; more probably the
physician’s wife had nothing to learn from any cat. Betty Steel and
her husband dined frequently at Roxton Priory. The brunette had
even reached the unique felicity of being encouraged in informal and
unexpected calls. Lady Sophia possessed a just and proper estimate
of her own social position. She was fat, commonplace, and amiable,
poorly educated, a woman of few ideas. But she was Lady Sophia
Gillingham, and would have expected St. Peter to give her proper
precedence over mere commoners in the anteroom of heaven.
The third Thursday after Easter Mrs. Betty Steel drove homeward
in a radiant mood, with the spirit of spring stolen from the dull glint
of a fat old lady’s eyes. There had been an opening committee
meeting, and Lady Sophia had expressed it to be her wish that Mrs.
Steel should be elected secretary. Moreover, the production of a play
had been discussed, a pink muslin drama suited to the
susceptibilities of the Anglican public. The part of heroine had been
offered, not unanimously, to Mrs. Betty. And with a becoming spirit
of diffidence she had accepted the honor, when pressed most
graciously by the Lady Sophia’s own prosings.
Mrs. Betty might have impersonated April as she swept
homeward under the high beneficence of St. Antonia’s elms. The
warmth of worldly well-being plumps out a woman’s comeliness. She
expands and ripens in the sun of prosperity and praise, in contrast to
the thousands of the ever-contriving poor, whose sordid faces are
but the reflection of sordid facts.
Betty Steel’s face had an April alluringness that day; its outlines
were soft and beautiful, suggestive of the delicacy of apple bloom
seen through morning mist. She was exceeding well content with
life, was Mrs. Betty, for her husband was in a position to write
generous checks, and the people of Roxton seemed ready to pay her
homage.
Parker Steel was reading in the dining-room when this
triumphant and happy lady came in like a white flower rising from a
sheath of green. It was only when selfishly elated that the wife
showed any flow of affection for her husband. For the once she had
the air of an enthusiastic girl whom marriage had not robbed of her
ideals.
“Dear old Parker—”
She went towards him with an out-stretching of the hands, as he
dropped the Morning Post, and half rose from the lounge chair.
“Had a good time?”
“Quite splendid.”
She swooped towards him, not noticing the furtive yet watchful
expression in her husband’s face.
“Give me a kiss, old Morning Post.”
“How is Madam Sophia?”
“Most affable.”
Parker Steel had caught her out-stretched hands. It was as
though he were afraid of touching his wife’s lips.
“Making conquests, eh?”
“Waal—I guess that”—and she spoke through her nose.
“Dollars?”
“Enticing them into the family pocket.”
Something in her husband’s eyes touched Betty Steel beneath
her vivacity and easy persiflage. Her husband had risen from his
chair, released her hands, and moved away towards the fire. She
had a sudden instinct telling her that he was not glad of her return.
The wife’s airiness was damped instantly. Parker Steel had
repelled her with the semi-playful air of a man not wishing to be
bothered. She had noticed this suggestion of aloofness much in him
of late, and had ascribed it to irritability, the result of overwork.
“Anything the matter, dear?”
“Matter?”
He looked at her frankly, with arched brows and open eyes.
“Yes, you seem tired—”
“There is some excuse for me. This is the first ten minutes I have
had to myself—all day. It is an effort to talk when one’s tongue has
been going for hours.”
 His wife’s face appeared a little triste and peevish. She glanced at
herself in the mirror over the mantel-piece, and found herself
wondering why life seemed composed of actions and reactions.
“Have you had tea?”
“No, I waited,” and he turned and rang the bell with a feeling of
relief. It was trying to his watchfulness for Parker Steel to be left
alone with his own wife. Even the white cap of the parlor-maid was
welcome to him, or the flimsiest barrier that could aid him in his
ordeal of silent self-isolation. The art of hypocrisy grows more
complex with each new statement of relationships. And hypocrisy in
the home is the reguilding of a substance that tarnishes with every
day. The wear and tear of life erase the lying surface, and the daily
daubing becomes a habit by necessity, even as a single dying of the
hair pledges the vain mortal to perpetual self-decoration.
 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.
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