CHAPTER IV

No one in Roxton would have imagined that any shadow of dread darkened the windows of the house in Lombard Street. Even to his most intimate friends, James Murchison would have appeared as the one man least likely to be dominated by any inherited taint of body or mind. His face was the face of a man who had mastered his own passions, the mouth firm yet generous, the jaw powerful, the eyes and forehead suggesting the philosopher behind the virility of the man of action. He had built up a substantial reputation for himself in Roxton and the neighborhood. His professional honesty was unimpeachable, his skill as a surgeon a matter of common gossip. But it was his warm-heartedness, the sincerity of his sympathy, his wholesome Saxon manliness that had won him popularity, especially among the poor.

For Catherine the uncovering of the past had come as a second awakening, a resanctification of her love. Women are the born champions of hero worship, and to generous natures imperfections are but as flints scattered in the warm earth of life. Women will gather them and hide them in their bosoms, breathing a more passionate tenderness perhaps, and betraying nothing to the outer world.

James Murchison and his wife had held each other’s hands more firmly, like those who approach a narrow mountain path. They were happy in their home life, happy with each other, and with their children. To the woman’s share there was added a new sacredness that woke and grew with every dawn. There were wounds to be healed, bitternesses to be warded off. The man who lay in her arms at night needed her more dearly, and there was exultation in the thought for her. She loved him the more for this stern thorn in the flesh. The pity of it seemed to make him more her own, to knit her tenderness more bravely round him, to fill life with a more sacred fire. She was not afraid of the future for his sake, believing him too strong to be vanquished by an ancestral sin.

It was one day in April when James Murchison came rattling over the Roxton cobbles in his motor-car, to slacken speed suddenly in Chapel Gate at the sight of a red Dutch bonnet, a green frock, and a pair of white-socked legs on the edge of the pavement. The Dutch bonnet belonged to his daughter Gwen, a flame-haired dame of four, demure and serious as any dowager. The child had a chip-basket full of daffodils in her hand, and she seemed quite alone, a most responsible young person.

A minute gloved hand had gone up with the gravity of a constable’s paw signalling a lawbreaker to stop. James Murchison steered to the footway, and regarded Miss Gwen with a surprised twinkle.

“Hallo, what are you doing here?”

Miss Gwen ignored the ungraceful familiarity of the inquisitive parent.

“I’ll drive home, daddy,” she said, calmly.

“Oh—you will! Where’s nurse?”

“Mending Jack’s stockings.” And the lady with the daffodils dismissed the question with contempt.

Murchison laughed, and helped the vagrant into the car.

“Shopping, I see,” he observed, refraining from adult priggery, and catching the spirit of Miss Gwen’s adventuresomeness.

“Yes. I came out by myself. I’d five pennies in my money-box. Nurse was so busy. The daffies are for mother.”

Her father had one eye on the child as he steered the car through the market-place and past St. Antonia’s into Lombard Street. The youth in him revolted from administering moral physic to Miss Gwen. Even the florist seemed to have treated her pennies with generous respect, and like the majority of sympathetic males, Murchison left the dogmatic formalities of education to his wife. The very flowers, the child’s offering, would have withered at any tactless chiding.

Mary, the darner of Mr. Jack’s stockings, was discovered waddling up Lombard Street with flat-footed haste. Miss Gwen greeted her with the composure of an empress, proud of her flowers, her father, the motor-car, and life in general. To Mary’s “Oh—Miss Gwen!” she answered with a sedate giggle and hugged her basket of flowers.

Murchison saw his wife’s figure framed between the white posts of the doorway. He chuckled as he reached for his instrument bag under the seat, and caught a glimpse of Mary’s outraged authority.

“Look, mother, look, you love daffies ever so much. I bought them all myself.”

Catherine’s arms were hugging the green frock.

“Gwen, you wicked one,” and she caught her husband’s eyes and blushed.

“We are growing old fast, Kate. I picked her up in Chapel Gate.”

“The dear flowers; come, darling. Jack, you rascal, what are you doing?”

“Master Jack! Master Jack!”

Male mischief was astir also in Lombard Street, having emerged from the school-room with the much-tried Mary’s darning-basket. There was an ironical humor in pelting the fat woman with the stockings she had mended and rolled so conscientiously. His father’s appearance in the hall sent Master Jack laughing and squirming up the stairs. He was caught, tickled, and carried in bodily to lunch.

James Murchison was smoking in his study early the same afternoon, ticking off visits in his pocket-book, when his wife came to him with a letter in her hand.

“From Marley, dear. A man has just ridden in with it. They need you at once.”

“Marley? Why, the Penningtons belong to Steel.”

He tore open the envelope and glanced through the letter, while his wife looked whimsically at the chaos of books and papers on his desk. The ground was holy, and her tact debarred her from meddling with the muddle. The room still had a sense of shadow for her. She could not enter it without an indefinable sense of dread.

Murchison did not show the letter to his wife. He put it in his pocket, knocked out his pipe, and picked up his stethoscope that was lying on the table.

“I am afraid you will have to go to the Stantons’ without me, dear,” he said; “Steel wants me at Marley.”

Catherine gave him a surprised flash of the eyes.

“Something serious?”

“Possibly.”

“Parker Steel is not fond of asking your advice.”

“Who is, dear?”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“So am I, dear,” and he kissed her, and rang the bell to order out his car.

Marley was an old moated house some five miles from Roxton, a place that seemed stolen from a romance, save that there was nothing romantic about its inmates. A well-wooded park protected it from the high-road, the red walls rising warm and mellow behind the yews, junipers, and cedars that grew in the rambling garden. Spring flowers were binding the sleek, sun-streaked lawns with strands of color, dashes of crimson, of azure, and white, of golden daffodils blowing like banners amid a sheaf of spears. Here and there the lawns were purple with crocuses, and the singing of the birds seemed to turn the yew-trees into towers of song.

The panting of Murchison’s car seemed to outrage the atmosphere of the place, as though the fierce and aggressive present were intruding upon the dreamy past. A manservant met the doctor, and led him across the Jacobean hall to the library, whose windows looked towards the west.

Parker Steel was standing before the fire, biting his black mustache. He had the appearance of a man whose vanity had been ruffled, and who was having an unwelcome consultation forced upon him by the preposterous fussing of some elderly relative.

The two men shook hands, Steel’s white fingers limp in his rival’s palm. His air of cultured hauteur had fallen to freezing point. He condescended, and made it a matter of dignity.

“Sorry to drag you over here, Murchison. Mr. Pennington has been on the fidget with regard to his daughter, and to appease him I elected to send for you at once.”

Murchison warmed his hands before the fire. Steel’s grandiloquent manner always amused him.

“I am glad to be of any use to you. Who is the patient, Miss Julia Pennington?”

“Yes.”

“Anything serious?”

“Nothing; only hysteria; the woman’s a tangle of nerves, a mass of emotions. I have grown to learn her idiosyncrasies in a year. One month it is palpitation—and imaginary heart disease, next month she is swearing that she has cancer of the ?sophagus and cannot swallow. The lady has headaches regularly every other week, and merges on melancholia in the intervals.”

Murchison nodded.

“What is the present phase?” he asked.

“Acute migraine and facial neuralgia. She is worrying about her eyes, seems to see nothing—and everything, mere hysterical phantasmagoria. The woman is not to be taken seriously. She is being drenched with bromide and fed upon phenacetin. Come and see her.”

Parker Steel led the way from the library as though he regarded the consultation as a mere troublesome formality, a pandering to domestic officiousness that had to be appeased. Miss Julia Pennington was lying on a sofa in the drawing-room with a younger sister holding her hand. The room smelled horribly of vinegar, and the blinds were down, for the patient persisted that she could not bear the light.

The younger lady rose and bowed to Murchison, and drew aside, with her eyes fixed upon her sister’s face. Miss Julia was moaning and whimpering on the sofa, a thin and neurotic spinster of forty with tightly drawn hair, sharp features, and the peevish expression of a creature who had long been the slave of a hundred imaginary ills.

Murchison sat down beside her, and asked whether she could bear the light. His manner was in acute contrast to Parker Steel’s; the one incisive, almost brusque in his effort to impress; the other calm, quiet, deliberate, sympathetic in every word and gesture.

The younger Miss Pennington drew up the blinds. Murchison was questioning her sister, watching her face keenly, while Parker Steel fidgeted to and fro before the fire.

“Much pain in the eyes, Miss Pennington?”

“Oh, Dr. Murchison, the pain is terrible, it runs all over the face; you cannot conceive—”

She broke away into a chaos of complaints till Murchison quieted her and asked a few simple questions. He rose, turned the sofa bodily towards the light, and proceeded to examine the lady’s eyes.

“Things look dim to you?” he asked her, quietly.

“All in a blur, flashes of light, and spots like blood. I’m sure—”

“Yes, yes. You have never had anything quite like this before?”

“Never, never. I am quite unnerved, Dr. Murchison, and Dr. Steel won’t believe half the things I tell him.”

Her voice was peevish and irritable. Parker Steel grinned at the remark, and muttered “mad cat” under his breath.

“You are hardly kind to me, Miss Pennington,” he said, aloud, with a touch of banter.

“I’m sure I’m ill, Dr. Steel, very ill—”

“Please lie quiet a moment,” and Murchison bent over her, closed her lids, and felt the eyeballs with his fingers. Miss Pennington indulged in little gasps of pain, yet feeling mesmerized by the quiet earnestness of the man.

Murchison stood up suddenly, looking grave about the mouth.

“Do you mind ringing the bell, Steel? I want my bag out of the car.”

Steel, who appeared vexed and restless despite his self-conceit, went out in person to fetch the bag. When he returned, Murchison had drawn the blinds and curtains so that the room was in complete darkness.

“Thanks; I want my lamp; here it is. I have matches. Now, Miss Pennington, do you think you can sit up in a chair for five minutes?”

The thin lady complained, protested, but obeyed him. Murchison seated himself before her, while Parker Steel held the lamp behind Miss Pennington. A beam of light from the mirror of Murchison’s ophthalmoscope flashed upon the woman’s face. She started hysterically, but seemed to feel the calming influence of Murchison’s personality.

Complete silence held for some minutes, save for an occasional word from Murchison. Parker Steel’s face was in the shadow. The hand that held the lamp quivered a little as he watched his rival’s face. There was something in the concentrated earnestness of Murchison’s examination that made Mrs. Betty’s husband feel vaguely uncomfortable.

Murchison rose at last with a deep sigh, stood looking at Miss Pennington a moment, and then handed the ophthalmoscope to Steel. The lamp changed hands and the men places. Miss Pennington’s supply of nerve power, however, was giving out. She blinked her eyes, put her hands to her face, and protested that she could bear the light from the mirror no longer.

Parker Steel lost patience.

“Come, Miss Pennington, come; I must insist—”

“I can’t, I can’t, the glare burns my eyes out.”

“Nonsense, my dear lady, control yourself—”

His irritability reduced Miss Pennington to peevish tears. She called for her sister, and began to babble hysterically, an impossible subject.

Parker Steel pushed back his chair in a dudgeon.

“I can’t see anything,” he said; “utterly hopeless.”

Murchison drew back the curtains and let dim daylight into the room. He helped Miss Pennington back to the sofa, very gentle with her, like a man bearing with the petulance of a sick child, and then turned to Steel with a slight frown.

“Shall we talk in the library?”

“Yes.”

“I will just put my lamp away.”

They crossed the hall together in silence, and entered the room with its irreproachable array of books, and the logs burning on the irons. Murchison went and stood by one of the windows. A red sunset was coloring the west, and the dark trees in the garden seemed fringed with flame.

Parker Steel had closed the door. He looked irritable and restless, a man jealous of his self-esteem.

“Well? Anything wrong?”

The big man turned with his hands in his trousers pockets. Steel did not like the serious expression of his face.

“Have you examined Miss Pennington’s eyes?”

Parker Steel shifted from foot to foot.

“Well, no,” he confessed, with an attempt at hauteur, “I know the woman’s eccentricities. She may be slightly myopic—”

Murchison drew a deep breath.

“She may be stark blind in a week,” he said, curtly.

“What!”

“Acute glaucoma.”

“Acute glaucoma! Impossible!”

“I say it is.”

Parker Steel took two sharp turns up and down the room. His mouth was twitching and he looked pale, like a man who has received a shock. He was conscious, too, that Murchison’s eyes were upon him, and that his rival had caught him blundering like any careless boy. There was something final and convincing in Murchison’s manner. Parker Steel hated him from that moment with the hate of a vain and ambitious egotist.

“Confound it, Murchison, are you sure of this?”

“Quite sure, as far as my skill serves me.”

“Have you had much experience?”

There was a slight sneer in the question, but Murchison was proof against the challenge.

“I specialized in London on the eyes.”

Parker Steel emitted a monosyllable that sounded remarkably like “damn.”

“Well, what’s to be done?”

“We must consider the advisability of an immediate iridectomy.”

They heard footsteps in the hall. The library door opened. A spectacled face appeared, to be followed by a long, loose-limbed body clothed in black.

“Good-day, Dr. Murchison. I have come to inquire—”

Parker Steel planted himself before the fire, a miniature Ajax ready to defy the domestic lightning. He cast a desperate and half-appealing look at Murchison.

“We have just seen your daughter, Mr. Pennington.”

A pair of keen gray eyes were scrutinizing the faces of the two doctors. Mr. Pennington was considered something of a terror in the neighborhood, a brusque, snappish old gentleman with a ragged beard, and ill-tempered wisps of hair straggling over his forehead.

“Well, gentlemen, your opinion?”

Murchison squared his shoulders, and seemed to be weighing every word he uttered. He was too generous a man to seize the chance of distinguishing himself at the expense of a rival.

“I think, Mr. Pennington, that Dr. Steel and I agree in the matter. We take, sir, rather a serious view of the case. Is not that so, Steel?”

The supercilious person bent stiffly at the hips.

“Certainly.”

“Perhaps, Steel, you will explain the urgency of the case.”

Mr. Pennington jerked into a chair, took off his spectacles and dabbed them with his handkerchief.

“I am sorry to have to tell you, sir, that your daughter’s eyesight is in danger.”

The gentleman in the chair started.

“What! Eyesight in danger! Bless my bones, why—”

“Dr. Murchison agrees with me, I believe.”

“Absolutely.”

“Good God, gentlemen!”

“A peculiarly dangerous condition, sir, developing rapidly and treacherously, as this rare disease sometimes does.”

Perspiration was standing out on Parker Steel’s forehead. He flashed a grateful yet savage glance at Murchison, and braced back his shoulders with a sigh of bitter relief.

“I think a London opinion would be advisable, Murchison, eh?”

“I think so, most certainly, in view of the operation that may have to be performed immediately.”

“Thank you, gentlemen, thank you. I presume this means my writing out a check for a hundred guineas.”

“Your daughter’s condition, sir—”

“Of course, of course. Don’t mention the expense. And you will manage—”

Parker Steel resumed his dictatorship.

“I will wire at once,” he said; “we must lose no time.”

He accompanied Murchison from the house, jerky and distraught in manner, a man laboring under a most unwelcome obligation. The rivals shook hands. There was much of the anger of the sunset in Parker Steel’s heart as he watched Murchison’s car go throbbing down the drive amid the slanting shadows of the silent trees.