A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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wine should typify the father’s sins visited upon the
children! A scientific platitude! And yet the thought
was pitiful to him, pitiful that the spiritual beauty of a
woman’s love could be challenged by such a pathetic
thing as this. He had grappled and thrown the passion
time on time, and yet it had slunk away to come grinning
back to him with open mouth and burning eyes.
He was still sitting on the settle with the letter crumpled
in his hand, when Catherine called to him again from her
bedroom.
“Do look at the sky, dear, it is wonderful.”
His wife’s innocent happiness stung him with its unconscious pathos. She had conceived this Eden for him,
and lo the serpent was amid the flowers her hands had
gathered. He roused himself, picked up the hamper by
the cord, and carried it into the little diningroom beyond
the hall. Ignorance was bliss for her; knowledge would
dash her joyous confidence in a moment. There was no
need for her to know; he felt sure of himself, safe with her
in such a place. Looking round him a moment, he pushed the hamper under the deep window-seat, where it was
hidden by the drapings. Poor Porteus, how little he
thought that an asp lurked under the leaves of the
vine!
A full moon was rising in the east when husband and
wife went out into the garden. The glimmering witchery
of the night bathed the world in silent splendor. From the
cottage the broad swell of the heathland rolled back under
the sky to where a forest of firs rose like distant peaks
against the moon. Mists, white and ghostly, were rising
in the meadows of the plain, vistas of woodland, vague
and mysterious, shining up through the gathering vapor.
In the garden the scent of the lilies mingled with the old
world sweetness of the herbs. The flowers stood white
before the cypresses, and the dew was falling.
Not a sound save the distant baying of a dog. Murchison opened the little gate to the path that wound amid
the gorse and heather. The turmoil and clamor of the
world seemed far from them under the moonlit sky; the
breath of the night was cool and fragrant.
Catherine’s head was on her husband’s shoulder, his
arm about her body. She leaned her weight on him with
the happy instinct of a woman, her face white towards
the moon, her eyes full of the light thereof.
“Eight years,” she said, as though speaking her inmost thoughts.
“Eight years!” and he echoed her.
“Do you remember that night at Weybourne? It was
just such a night as this.”
His arm tightened about her.
“Memories are like books,” he said, “a few live in our
hearts through life, the rest, like the bills we pay, are read,
and then forgotten.”
“You were very nervous.” And she laughed, alluringly.
“I can remember stammering.”
“And how you held my wrist?”
“Like that,” and he proved that he had not forgotten.
They wandered on for a while in silence, looking towards the fir-woods whose spires were touched by the light
of the moon.
“I hope the children are asleep.”
“And that poor Mary has not been blinded by your
son’s propensity for blowing pease.”
“Jack will be like you, dear.”
“Poor child, he might do better.”
He spoke lightly, caught up self-consciousness, and
sighed. His wife’s eyes looked swiftly at his face.
“You feel that you can rest here, dear?”
“With you, yes.”
She felt the pressure of his hand, and saw his mouth
harden, his brows contract a little. The subject saddened
him, brought back the introspective mood, and recalled
the darker past. Catherine broke from it instinctively,
knowing that it was poor comfort to let him brood.
“Tomorrow—”
“What are your plans?”
“Shall we walk to Farley church?”
“Yes, I love the old place, the cedars and yews shading
the graves. It has repose poetry.”
His mind recoiled on happier things. Catherine felt
it, and was comforted.
“I often went to Farley as a child.”
“The memory suits you, dear. I can see a little, goldenheaded woman sitting in the sunlight in one of those
black old pews.”
“I was like our Gwen, but more noisy.”
“Gwen cannot do better than repeat her mother.”
The moon sailed high over Marley Down when husband and wife returned to the cottage. The old village
woman whom Catherine had hired had lit the lamp in the
small drawingroom, and the warm glow flooded through
the casement upon the flowers and the dew-drenched
grass. Catherine wandered to the piano, her husband
lying in the chair before the open window. She played
and sang to him, the old songs she had sung when they
had been betrothed.
She rose at last, and, bending over him, put her arms
about his neck, while his hands held hers.
“I am going to bed.”
“Dustman, eh?”
“And you?”
He looked through the window at the black sweep of
the heath and the stars above it.
“I shall sit up awhile, dear, and do some work.”
“Work, traitor!”
He glanced up at her with a smile.
“I brought a ledger over with me. No time like the
sweet and idle present. There are such things as bills,
dear.”
Catherine brushed the commonplace aside with a woman’s adroitness.
“Well, an hour’s exile, and no more.”
“I promise that.”
“Goodnight, till you come—”
She kissed him, glided away, and went up to her room,
humming one of Schubert’s songs.
MURCHISON sat for a while before the open window
after his wife had gone to bed. He could hear her
moving to and fro in the room above him, the only sound
in the silence of the night. He was at rest, and happy,
her very nearness filling him with a sense of peace and
strength. The tenderness of her love breathed in the
air, and he still seemed to hear her radiant singing.
We mortals are often in greater peril of a fail when we
trust in the cheerful temerity of an imagined strength.
To a man standing upon the edge of a precipice the lands
beneath seem faint and insignificant, and yet but a depth
of air lies between him and the plain. Our frailties may
seem pitiful, nay, impossible to us when we listen to
noble music, or watch the sunrise on the mountains.
The man who is exalted in the spirit lives in a clearer
atmosphere, and wonders at the fog that may have drifted
round him yesterday. He may even laugh at the alter
ego framed of clay, and ask whether this soft-bodied,
cringing thing could ever have answered to the name of
“self.”
Some such feeling of optimism took possession of Murchison that night. The words of his wife’s songs were in
his brain; he heard her moving in the room above, and
felt the dearness of her presence in the place. Everywhere he beheld the work of her hands the curtains at
the windows, the flowers in the bowls. Her photograph
stood on the mantelshelf, and he rose and looked at it,
smiling at the eyes that smiled at him. Could he, the
husband of such a woman, and the father of her children,
be the mere creature of the juice of the grape? Was he
no stronger than some sot at a street corner? He gazed
at his own photograph that stood before the mirror,
gazed at it critically, as though studying a strange face.
The eyes looked straight at him, the mouth was firm, the
jaw crossed by a deep shadow that betrayed no degenerate
sloping of the chin. Was this the face of a man who was
the victim of a lust? He smiled at the memory of his
weaker self as a man smiles at a rival whom he can magnanimously pity.
The pride of strength suggested the thought of proof.
Old Porteus Carmagee had sent him this choice wine,
and was he afraid of six bottles in a basket? Why not
challenge this alter ego, this mean and treacherous caricature of his manhood, and prove in the grapple that he
was the master of his earthly self? There was a combative stimulus in the thought that appealed to a man
who had been an athlete. It fired the element of action
in him, made him knit his muscles and expand his chest.
Murchison looked at himself steadily in the mirror,
held up his hand, and saw not the slightest tremor. He
crossed the hall, entered the diningroom, and dragged the
hamper from under the window-seat with something of
the spirit of a Greek hero dragging some classic monster
from its lair. Coolly and without flurry he carried the
thing into the drawingroom and set it down on the little
gate-legged table. He cut the cord, raised the lid, and
let the musty fragrance of the lawyer’s cellar float out
into the room. The simile of Pandora’s box did not
occur to him. He put the straw aside, and pulled out a
cobwebbed bottle from its case. His knife served him
to break up the cork; he sniffed the wine’s bouquet, and
looked round him for a glass.
He found one among Catherine’s curios, an old Venetian goblet of quaint shape. Half filling it, he tossed
Porteus Carmagee’s letter on to the straw, and standing
before his wife’s portrait, looked steadily into the smiling
eyes.
** Kate, I drink to you. One glass to prove it, and the
open bottle left untouched.”
Deliberately he raised the glass and drank, looking at
his wife’s face in its framing of silver on the mantelshelf.
More than two hours had passed since she had left
him, and Catherine was lying awake, watching the moonlight glimmering on the moor. Her heart was tranquil
in her, her thoughts free from all unrest as she lay in the
oak bed, happily lethargic, waiting for her husband’s step
upon the stairs. The day had been very sweet to her,
and there was no shadow across the moon. She lay
thinking of her children, and her childhood, and of the
near past, when she had first sung the songs that she had
sung to the man that night.
The crash of broken glass and the sound of some heavy
body falling startled Catherine from her land of dreams.
She sat up, listening, like one roused from a first sleep.
Murchison must have turned out the lamp and then
blundered against some piece of furniture in the dark.
If it were her treasured and much-sought china! She
slipped out of bed, opened the door, and went out on to
the landing.
“James, what is it?”
The narrow hall lay dark below her, and she won no
answer from her husband.
“Are you hurt, dear?”
Still no reply; the door was shut.
“James, what has happened?”
She crept down the stairs, and stepped on the last step.
A curious, “gaggling” laugh came from the room across
the hall. At the sound she stiffened, one hand holding
the bosom of her laced night-gear, the other gripping the
oak rail. A sudden blind dread smote her till she seemed
conscious of nothing save the dark.
“James, are you coming?”
Again she heard that mockery of a laugh, and a kind
of senseless jabbering like the babbling of a drunken man.
A rush of anguish caught her heart, the anguish of one
who feels the horror of the stifling sea. She tottered,
groped her way back
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