A Woman's War - Warwick Deeping (best black authors .TXT) 📗
- Author: Warwick Deeping
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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.
“Goodmorning, 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, brownfaced 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.
BETTY STEEL sat alone at the open window of her
room one evening as the sun went down over the
red roofs of the old town. Lying back in her chair, with
her head on a cushion of yellow silk, she could see nothing of the life in the square below, but only the tops of
the elm-trees, the black spire of the church, and an infinite expanse of cloud-barred sky. The west stood one
great splendor of scarlet and of gold. Above, at the
zenith, the clouds were bathed in a radiance of auriferous
rose. A cold chalcedony blue held the eastern arch,
where the purple rim of the night merged into the amethystine shadows of the woodland hills.
Betty Steel was alone, save for the cat Mignon, curled
up asleep in her mistress’s lap. Half covering the cat
was a crumpled letter, a letter that had been read and
reread by eyes that were blind to the pageant of the summer sky. She stirred now and again in her chair, and
shivered. The evening seemed cold to her despite all
this chaos of color, this kindling of the torches of the
west. The house, too, had an empty silence, like a
lonely house where death had been and set a seal upon
its lips.
Betty lifted Mignon from her lap, rose, crossed the
room, and rang the bell. She took a crimson opera-cloak
from a wardrobe in the corner, flung it across her shoulders, and returned to her chair, with the crumpled letter
still in her hand.
“—”
“Yes, ma am.”
A white cap and apron were framed by the shadows
of the landing.
“Is Miss Ellison back yet, Symons?”
“No, ma’am. She said—”
“Listen! Isn’t that the front door?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Will you ask her to come to me here?”
The white cap and apron vanished into the shadows.
Betty, lying back in her chair, looked vacantly at the
paling sky, with the blood-red cloak deepening the darkness of her hair. The cat Mignon sprang into her lap.
Dreamily, and as by habit, she began to stroke the cat,
while listening to the murmur of the two voices in the
hall below.
Brisk footsteps ascended the stairs, with the swish of
silk, and the soft sighing of a woman’s breath.
“Here I am, dear, at last.”
“Shut the door, Madge.”
“I missed my train. You must have wondered what
had happened.”
“I have ceased to wonder at anything in life.”
Madge Ellison looked curiously at Betty lying back in
her chair, and crossed the room slowly, unbuttoning her
gloves.
“You sound rather down, dear. What’s that? Have
you heard?”
Betty Steel’s hand closed spasmodically upon the
crumpled letter that she held. Her face was hard and
reflective in its outlines. And yet in the eyes there was
a pathos of unrest, the unrest of a woman whose gods
have left her utterly alone.
“I have heard from Parker.”
Madge Ellison threw her gloves on the bed, unpinned
her hat, and waited.
“He is leaving England.”
“Leaving England?”
“Yes, for the Cape.”
“And you?”
“My own mistress to do everything anything that I
please.”
She gave a curious little laugh, and began straightening
out the letter on her knee, looking at it with eyes that
strove to make cynicism cover the wounded instincts of
her womanhood.
“Of course he does not care. He was afraid to face
things.”
“The coward!”
Madge Ellison bent over her, and laid one hand along
her cheek.
“And he has left you here?”
“I suppose he thought there was nothing else to do.
He says ” and she still smoothed the creased letter under
her hand “you have your own money to live on. The
practice is worth nothing under the circumstances. I
should advise you to let the house. You cannot afford
to live in it on two hundred pounds a year.”
“Is that all you have?”
“My father left it me.”
“Wise father!”
“I never thought, Madge, I should value two hundred
pounds so much.”
Mignon, who still possessed some of the kittenish spirit
of her youth, rolled over in Betty’s lap, and began to
clutch at the letter with her paws. There was something
pathetic in the way the wife suffered that scrap of paper
to be a plaything for her pet.
“Then he says nothing, dear?”
“Nothing?”
“About your joining him?”
Betty’s lips curled into a cynical smile.
“Why should he?”
“But, surely”
“It was I who broke the ties between us. I think I
hated him. He had so little so little manliness and
. strength.”
Madge Ellison lifted up her face to the fading sky.
She was serious for one occasion in her life, a woman
touched by the realism of life’s tragedies.
“Can you never?”
“Don’t ask me that, Madge.”
“You will be well, soon, your old self. It is only temporary.”
“I know.”
“Then”
“If it were only skin deep; but it is deeper, deep to the
heart.”
The confidante gave a sad shrug of her shapely shoulders.
“Don’t say that yet,” she said; “you might repent
of it.”
“You think so?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
The sky had darkened; the clouds had cast their cloaks
of fire, and in the west one broad band of crimson and of
gold held back the banners of the approaching night.
From St. Antonia’s steeple came the chiming of the hour,
slow, solemn tones that filled the silence with mysterious
eddies of lingering sound.
Madge Ellison was still leaning over Betty’s chair, her
hands touching her friend’s face.
“Try not to brood too much on it, dear. I know I am
not much of a woman to give advice. You might say
that I had no experience.”
“And I too much! Listen,” and she straightened in
her chair, “can’t you hear people shouting?”
“Shouting?”
“Yes; as though there were a fire. It seems to come
from Castle Gate.”
They were both silent, listening, and leaning towards
the open window. Vague, scattered cries rose from the
shadowiness of the darkening town. They seemed to
be drawing from Castle Gate towards the square, a low
flux of sound that rose and fell like the cadence of the
sea upon a shore at night.
Betty sank back in her chair with a glimmer of impatience on her face.
“Of course I remember.”
From under the arch of the old gate-house a crowd
of small boys came scattering into the far corner of the
square. A number of men followed, lined along a couple
of stout ropes. They were dragging a carriage over the
gray cobbles and under the dark elms in the direction
of Lombard Street.
Madge Ellison drew back from the window. Not so
Betty. She rose from her chair, and stood looking down
upon those rough men of the Roxton lanes who were
shouting and waving caps with the unsophisticated and
exhilarating zest of children.
The carriage with its plebeian team passed under Betty’s
window. In it were a man and a woman, the woman
holding a boy upon her knees.
Whether some subtle thought -wave passed between
those two or not, it happened that Catherine looked
up and saw the face at the open window overhead. It
seemed to her in the hurly - burly of this little triumph, that the face above looked down at her out of
a gloom of loneliness and humiliation. A sudden cry
of womanly pity sounded in her heart. Catherine’s
arms tightened unconsciously about her boy, and her
eyes, that had been smiling, grew thoughtful and very
sad.
The carriage rounded the corner and disappeared into
Lombard Street, with a small
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