A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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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.
MISS CARMAGEE sat crying at the breakfasttable
over a letter that she held in her fat, white hand.
It was a letter from Catherine, and told of the last restingplace of Gwen, a narrow bed of clay amid white headstones on the Wilton 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
breakfasttable 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 x 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 tomorrow,” she said, with a quiet
sigh.
FAST 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
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