CHAPTER II

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.

“Dear, are you better now?”

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—?”

She felt the spasmodic girding of all his manhood, and yearned to him with all her heart.

“They knew nothing; I saved that. Don’t let us talk of it; the thing is over”—and she tried not to shudder. “Ah—I am glad I know, dear, I can do so much.”

James Murchison bent down and drew her into his arms, and she lay there awhile, feeling that the warmth of her love passed into her husband’s body. The hearth was red before them with the fire-light, and they heard the sound of their children playing.

“Shall we go up to them?” she said, at last.

“Yes”—and she knew by his face that he was praying, not with mere words, but with every life-throb of his being—“it will do me good. God bless you—”

And they kissed each other.