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The opening · free to read
There was a ripple of chimes through the frosty air as Catherine Murchison turned from King’s Walk into Lombard Street, and saw the moon shining white and clear between the black parapets and chimney-stacks of the old houses. St. Antonia’s steeple was giving the hour of three, and a babel of lesser tongues answered from the silence of the sleeping town. Hoar-frost glittered on the cypresses that stood in a garden bounding the road, and the roofs were like silver under the hard, moonlit sky.
Catherine Murchison stopped before the great red-brick house with its white window-sashes, and its Georgian air of solidity and comfort. The brass lion’s-head on the door seemed to twinkle a welcome to her above the plate that carried her husband’s name. She smiled to herself as she drew the latch-key from the pocket under her sables, the happy smile of a woman who comes home with no searchings of the heart. Several shawl-clad figures went gliding along under the shadows of the cypresses, giving her good-night with a flutter of laughter and tapping of shoes along the stones. Catherine waved her hand to the beshawled ones as they scurried home, and caught a glimpse of St. Antonia’s spire diademed by the winter stars. She remembered such a night seven years ago, and man’s love and mother’s love had come to her since then.
Catherine closed the door gently, knowing that her husband would be asleep after a hard day’s work. It was not often that he went with her to the social gatherings of Roxton. Professional success, fraught with the increasing responsibilities thereof, brightened his own fireside for him, and Catherine his wife would rather have had it so. James Murchison was no dapper drawing-room physician. The man loved his home better than the dinner-tables of his patients. He was young, and he was ambitious with his grave and purposeful Saxon sanity. His wife took the social yoke from off his shoulders, content in her heart to know that she had made the man’s home dear to him.
A standard-lamp was burning in the hall, the light streaming under a red-silk shade upon the Oriental rugs covering the mellow and much polished parquetry. There were a few old pictures on the walls, pewter and brass lighting the dead oak of an antique dresser. Catherine Murchison looked round her with a breathing in of deep content. She unwrapped the shawl from about her hair, rich russet red hair that waved in an aureole about her face. Her sable cloak had swung back from her bosom, showing the black ball-dress, red over the heart with a knot of hothouse flowers. There was a wholesome and generous purity in the white curves of her throat and shoulders.
Catherine laid her cloak over an old Dutch chair, and turned to the table where fruits, biscuits, and candles had been left for her. Her husband’s gloves lay on the table, and his hat with one of Gwen’s dolls tucked up carefully herein. Catherine’s eyes seemed to mingle thoughts of child and man, as she ate a few biscuits and looked at Miss Gwen’s protégé stuffed into the hat. James Murchison had had a long round that day, with the cares and conflicts of a man who labors to satisfy his own conscience. Catherine hoped not to wake him; she had even refused to be driven home lest the sound of wheels should carry a too familiar warning to his ears. She lit her candle, and, reaching up, turned out the lamp. Her feet were on the first step of the stairs when a streak of light in the half-darkness of the hall brought her to a halt.
Some one had left the lamp burning in her husband’s study. She stepped back across the hall, and hesitated a moment as other thoughts occurred to her. Housebreaking was a dead art in Roxton, and she smiled at the melodramatic imaginings that had seized her for the moment.
A reading-lamp stood on the table before the fire, that had sunk to a dull and dirty red in the smokeless grate. The walls of the room were panelled with books and the glass faces of several instrument cabinets—the room of no mere specialist, no haunter of one alley in the metropolis of intelligence. On the sofa lay the figure of a man asleep, his deep breathing audible through the room.
To the wife there was nothing strange in finding her husband sleeping the sleep of the tired worker before the dying fire. Her eyes had a laughing tenderness in them, a sparkle of mischief, as she set down the candle and moved across the room. Her feet touched something that rolled under her dress. She stooped, and looked innocent enough as she picked up an empty glass.
“James—”
There was mirth in the voice, but her eyes showed a puzzled intentness as she noticed the things that stood beside the lamp upon the table. An open cigar-box, a tray full of crumbled ash and blackened matches, a couple of empty syphons, a decanter standing in an ooze of spilled spirit. Memory prompted her, and she smiled at the suggestion. Porteus Carmagee, that prattling, white-bobbed maker of wills and codicils had slipped in for a smoke and a gossip. James Murchison never touched alcohol, and the inference was obvious enough, for her experience of Mr. Carmagee’s loquacity justified her in concluding that he had droned her husband to sleep.
Wifely mischief was in the ascendant on the instant. She stooped over the sleeping man whose face was in the shadow, put her lips close to his, and drew back with a little catching of the breath. The room seemed to grow dark and very cold of a sudden. She straightened, and stood rigid, staring across the room with a sense of hurrying at the heart.
Then, as though compelling herself, she lifted the lamp, and held it so that the light fell full upon her husband’s face.
Man is the heir of many ancestors, and his inheritance of life’s estate may prove cumbered by mortgages unredeemed by earlier generations.
In the spring of the year the blood is hot, and the quicksilver of youth burns in the brain. The poise of true manhood is not reached at twenty, the experience to know, the strength to grapple. James Murchison of the broad back and sunny face, first of good fellows, popular among all, had followed the joy of being and feeling even into shady back-street rooms. In the hospital “common-room” he had always had a knot of youngsters round him, lounging, smoking, lads with no studied vice in them, but lads to whom life was a thing of zest. For Murchison it had been the crest of the wave, the day of the world’s youth. An orphan with money at his bank, the liberty of London calling him, a dozen mad youngsters to form a coterie! As for heredity and such doctrines of man’s ascent and fall, he had not studied them in the thing he called himself.
James Murchison had carved up corpses, electrified frogs, and learned the art of dispensing physic before the world taught him to discover that there were other things to conquer besides text-books and examiners. His father had died of drink, and his grandfather before him, and God knows how many fat Georgian kinsmen had contributed to the figures on the debit side. From his mother he had inherited wholesome yeoman blood, and the dower perhaps had made him what he was, straight-backed, clean-limbed, strong in the jaw, brave and blue about the eyes. There had been no blot on him till he had gone up to London as a lonely boy. There in the solitude the world had caught him, and tossed him out of his dingy rooms to taste the wine of the world’s pleasures.
The phase was natural enough, and there had been plenty of young fools to applaud it in him. The first slip had come after a hospital concert; the second after a football match; the third had followed a successful interview with the Rhadamanthi who passed candidates in the duties of midwifery. An ejectment from a music-hall, a brawl in Oxford Street, a liaison with a demi-mondaine, complaints from landladies, all these had reached the ears of the Dean’s “great ones” who sat in conclave. Murchison had been argued with in private by a gray-haired surgeon who had that strong grip on life that goes with virility and the noble sincerity of faith.
“Fight yourself, sir,” the old man had said; “fight as though the devil had you by the throat. If you bring children into the world you will set a curse on them unless you break your chains.” And Murchison had gone out from him with a set jaw and an awakened manhood.
Then for the first time in life he learned the value of a friend. The man was dead now; he had died in Africa, dragged down by typhoid in some sweltering Dutch town. James Murchison remembered him always with a warming of the heart. He remembered how they had gone together to a little Sussex village by the sea, taken a coast-guard’s disused cottage for eighteen pence a week, bathed, fished, cooked their own food, and pitched stones along the sand. James Murchison had fought himself those summer weeks, growing brown-faced as a gypsy between sun and sea. He had taken the wholesome strength of it into his soul, passed through the furnace of his last two years unscathed, and set out on life, a man with a keen mouth, clean thoughts, and six feet of Saxon strength. The world respected him, never so much as dreaming that he had the devil of heredity tight bound within his heart.
He had told her everything, sitting in the dusk before the fire, one fist under his chin, and his eyes the eyes of a strong man enduring bitter shame. Woman’s love had watched over him that day. She had striven to lift him up out of the dust of his deep remorse, and had opened her whole heart to him, showing the quiet greatness of her nature in her tenderness towards this strong man in his sorrow.
“Kate, how can you bear this!”
“Bear it, dear?”
“Finding so much of the beast in me. My God, I thought the thing was dead; we are never dead, dear, to our father’s sins.”
She came and sat beside him before the fire, a man’s woman, pure, generous, trusty to the deeps. The light made magic in her hair, and showed the unfathomable faith within her eyes.
“Put the memory behind you,” she said, looking up into his face.
He groaned, as though dust and ashes still covered his manhood.
“You are too good to me, Kate.”
“No,” and she drew his hands down into her bosom; the warmth thereof seemed to comfort him as a mother’s breast comforts a child at night.
“I am glad you have told me—all.”
“Yes—all.”
“It helps me, it will help us both.”
“I ought to have told you long ago,” he said.
“But then—”
“I thought that I had killed the thing, and I loved you, dear, and perhaps I was a coward.”
She drew closer to him, leaning against his knee, while one of his strong arms went about her body. The warm darkness of the room seemed full of the sacred peace of home. They were both silent, silent for many minutes till the sound of children’s laughter came down from the rooms above.
James Murchison bent forward, and drew a deep breath as though in pain. The flash of sympathy was instant in its passage. Husband and wife were thinking the same thoughts.
“Kate, you must help me to fight this down—”
“Yes.”
“For their sakes, the children—for yours. I think that I have worked too hard of late. When the strength’s out of one, the devil comes in and takes command. And the servants, you are sure—?”
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