CHAPTER IX

James Murchison’s motor-car drew up before a row of buildings in Mill Lane, a series of brick boxes that were flattered with the name of “Prospect Cottages.” So far as prospect was concerned, the back yard of a tannery offered no “patches of purple” to the front windows of the row, and the breath that blew therefrom had no kinship to a land breeze from the Coromandel coast. In blunt Saxon, Mill Lane stank, and with the whole-heartedness of a medi?val alley. Over the gray cobbles that dipped between the houses to the river came a glimpse of the foam and glitter of the mill pool and the dull thunder of the wheels and water hummed perpetually up the narrow street.

Murchison swung open the gate, and in three strides stood at the blistered door of No. 9 Prospect Row. A painted board hung beside the door bearing a smoking chimney “proper,” and for supporters two bundles of sweep’s brushes that looked wondrous like Roman fasces. The letter-press advertised Mr. William Bains as a sweeper of chimneys, soot merchant, and extinguisher of fires. The little front garden was neat as a good housewife’s linen cupboard, with double daisies along the borders, and nasturtiums, claret, crimson, and gold, scrambling up pea-sticks below the window.

A stout woman, who smelled of soup, opened the door to Murchison and welcomed him with the most robust good-will.

“Good-morning, doctor; hope I ’aven’t kept you waiting. Step in, sir, if you please.”

Murchison stepped in, bending his head by force of habit, as though accustomed to cottage doorways. Mrs. Bains in a starched apron made way for him like a ship in sail. She was a very capable woman, so said her neighbors, black-eyed, sturdy, with a nose of the retroussé type, and patches of color over her rather prominent cheek-bones.

“You’re looking better, doctor, excuse me saying it. I can tell you you gave us a bit of a shock when you went off in that there dead faint on Tuesday.”

Mrs. Bains was a woman with a sanguine temper, a temper that made her an aggressive enemy, but a very loyal and active friend. Her black eyes twinkled with motherly concern as she watched Murchison pull off his gloves and stuff them into his hat.

“They tell me that I have been working too hard,” he said, with a smile.

“Lor’, sir, you do work; you don’t do your cooking with no pepper. I was taking it to myself, sir, the power of worry we’ve give you over the child.”

“A good fight is worth winning, Mrs. Bains. I am proud of the victory.”

“And I reckon none else would ’a’ done it, and so says the neighbors. Will you step up-stairs, sir? Don’t mind my man, he’s just scrubbing the soot off ’im.”

A pair of huge fore-arms, a gray flannel shirt, and a red face covered with soap-suds saluted Murchison from the steaming copper in the scullery.

“Good-mornin’, sir; ’ope you’re well.”

“Better, Bains, thanks. Washing the war-paint off, eh?”

“That’s it, sir,” and the sweep grinned good-will and sturdy admiration; “the kid’s doing fine, I hear.”

“Could not be better, Bains.”

“I reckon you’ve done us a rare good turn, sir.”

Murchison’s eyes smiled at the man’s words.

“I’m glad we won,” he said; “a child’s life is worth fighting for.”

“It be, sir, it be,” and the sweep swished the soap-suds from his face till it shone like the sun brightening from behind a cloud.

Murchison climbed the stairs to the front bedroom, a room liberally decorated with cheap china and colored texts. The patient, a little girl, christened Pretoria by her patriotic parents, lay on the bed beneath the window. The satiny whiteness of the child’s skin contrasted with the cherry-pink night-gown that she wore. It had been a case of diphtheria, a case that would probably have ended in disaster before the days of serum. Murchison had sat up half one night, doubtful whether he would not have to tracheotomize the child.

“Hallo, Babs, how’s that naughty throat?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed and chatted boyishly to Pretoria, whose shy eyes surveyed him with a species of delighted adoration. The hero worship that children give to men is pathetic in its ideal trustfulness.

“I’m better, thank you, sir.”

“That’s right; you are beginning to know all about it, eh? Tongue fine and red. She’ll be a talker, Mrs. Bains. Taking her milk well, yes. Keep her lying down.”

Mrs. Bains’s big, red hands were fidgeting under her white apron.

“Begging your pardon, doctor, but the child’s been a-bothering me since you called last, to know whether she mayn’t give you some flowers.”

Mrs. Bains reached across the bed to where a cheap mug on the window-sill held a posy of pink daisies.

“They’re just common things,” said the sweep’s wife, with an apologetic smile.

The child’s hand went out, and there was a slight quivering of the bloodless lips.

“For the doctor, with Pretoria’s love.”

Murchison took the flowers tenderly in his strong, deft hand.

“Who’s spoiling me, I should like to know? Aren’t they beauties? Supposing I put two in my button-hole? Thank you, little one,” and he bent and kissed the child’s forehead.

“You won’t drop ’em in the street, sir?”

The pathetic touch of unconscious cynicism went to the man’s heart.

“What, lose my flowers! You wait, miss, to see whether I don’t wear some of them to-morrow.”

The little white face beamed.

“You’re that kind to humor the kid, sir,” quoth Mrs. Bains, with feeling, as she followed Murchison down the stairs.

An hour later Mr. William Bains was hanging his clean face over the garden fence as an example to the neighbors, when a smart victoria stopped at the upper end of Mill Lane. A dapper gentleman sprang out, and came quickly down the footway as though the reek of the tannery disgusted his polite nostrils. He glanced right and left with stiff-necked dissatisfaction, his sleek, fashionable figure reminding one of some aristocratic fragment of Sheraton plumped down amid battered oddments in some dealer’s shop.

Mr. William Bains scanned him, and grunted, noting the effeminate sag of the shoulders and the glint of the patent-leather boots. There was a certain insolent gentility in the dapper figure that made the man of the brawny fore-arms feel an instinctive and workman-like contempt.

“Can you inform me where a Mrs. Randle lives?”

The sweep caught the white of Dr. Steel’s left eye, and jerked his pipe-stem laconically at the next cottage down the lane.

“No. 10.”

“Obliged,” and Parker Steel passed on.

Five minutes later the door of No. 10 Prospect Row was clapped snappishly on the doctor’s heels. It opened again when the smart physician had regained his carriage and driven off. A thin woman, with an old cloth cap perched on her mud-colored hair, came out bare-elbowed. Her face warned Mr. Bains of the fact that she was the possessor of a grievance.

“See the gent come along?”

The sweep nodded.

“Sort of kid-gloved gentleman that makes a respectable woman think of this ’ere charity as an insult. Mrs. Gibbins sent him to see my Tom. I’m thinking she might as well mind ’er business.”

Mr. Bains cocked his pipe and chuckled.

“Dr. Steel’s one of the smart ’uns,” he said.

“Toff! I’d like to give ’im toffee! Comes into my ’ouse with ’is ’at on, and looks round ’im as though ’e was afraid to touch the floor with ’is boots. Sh’ld ’ear ’im talk, just as though ’is voice ’adn’t any stomach in it. I told ’im we had Murchison, Mrs. Gibbins or no Mrs. Gibbins. ’E looked me over as though I was a savage, and said, ‘Haw, yes, Dr. Murchison ’as all the parish cases, I believe.’ ‘And a good job, sir,’ says I. Lor’, I wouldn’t as much as scrub ’is dirty linen.”

Mr. Bains fingered his chin and sucked peacefully at his pipe.

“I likes brawn in a man,” he said, “and a big voice, and a bit of spark in th’ eye.”

“Don’t give me any of yer ‘trousers stretchers’ or yer fancy weskits—Murchison’s my man.”

“Grit, blessed grit to the bone of ’im.”

“And a real gentleman. Takes ’is ’at off in a ’ouse. T’other chap ’ain’t no manners.”

It is a cheap age, and cheap sentiment satisfies the masses, a mere matter of melodrama in which the villain is hissed and the “stage child” applauded when she points to heaven and invokes “Gawd” through her cockney nose. Sentiment in the more delicate phases may be either the refinement of hypocrisy or the shining out of the godliness in man. The trivial incidents of life may betray the true character more finely than the throes of a moral crisis. The average male might have dropped Miss Pretoria’s flowers round the nearest corner, or thrown them into his study grate to wither amid cigar ends and burned matches. James Murchison kept the flowers and gave them to his wife.

“Put them in water, dear, for me.”

“From a lady, sir?” and Catherine’s eyes searched the lines upon his face. She was jealous for his health, but her eyes were smiling. Dearest of all virtues in a woman are a brave cheerfulness and a tactful tongue.

Her husband kissed her, and it was a lover’s kiss.

“A thank-offering, dear, from the Bains child.”

“How sweet! Somehow I always treasure a child’s gift; it seems so fresh and real.”

“Poor little beggar,” and he smiled as he spoke. “I wouldn’t have lost that life, Kate, for a very great deal. It was something to feel that fellow Bains’s hand-grip when I told him we had won.”

Catherine was settling the flowers in a glass bowl.

“It was just a bit of life, dear,” she said.

“Yes, it is life that tells. I think I would rather have saved that child, Kate, than have written the most brilliant book.”

She turned to him and put her arms about his neck.

“That is the true man in you,” and her eyes honored him.

“You dear one.”

“Kiss me.”

Marriage had been no problem play for these two.

Catherine lay thinking that night, with her hair in tawny waves upon the pillow, waiting for her husband to come to bed. She was happier and less troubled at heart than she had been for many weeks. The strain had lessened for her husband with the summer, and he seemed his more breezy, strenuous self, a great child with his children, a man who appeared to have no dark comers in the house of life. Wilful optimist that she was, she could not conceive it possible that a mere “inherited lust” could bear down the man whose strength and honor were bound up for her in her religion. Where great love exists, great faith lives also. Catherine was too ready, perhaps, to forget her fears, to regard them as mere thunder-clouds, black for the hour, but destitute of heavier dread. She ascribed his momentary weakness to the brain strain of the winter’s work. The words that had terrified her in Porteus Carmagee’s garden had proved but a fantasy, for a trick of the heart had explained the incident and given the denial to Mrs. Betty’s insinuations. The ordeal need never be repeated, so she told herself. Murchison could be saved from overwork. The assistant he had engaged was a youngster of tact and education.

Love will stand trustfully through the storm, under a tree, braving the lightning; nor had Catherine realized how vivid his own frailty appeared to the man she loved. He was sitting alone in his study while she comforted herself with dreams in the room above, his head between his hands, his heart heavy in him for the moment. An inherited habit is never to be despised. The gods of old were prone to mortal weakness in the flesh, and no man is so masterful that he can command his own destiny unshaken. We are what the world and our ancestors have made us. The individual hand is there to hold the tiller, but even a Ulysses must meet the storm.

Murchison turned his tired face towards the light, heaved back his shoulders, and sighed like a man in pain. He rose, put out the lamp, locked the study door, and taking his candle went up to his dressing-room that looked out on the garden. The blind was up, the window open, the darkness of space afire with many stars. He stood awhile at the open window in deep thought, letting the night breeze play upon his face. He was glad of his home life, glad that a woman’s arms were waiting for him, ready to shelter him from himself. He thanked God, as a strong man thanks God, for blessings given. The breath of his home was sweet to him, its life full of tenderness and good.

His wife’s bedroom had an air of delicacy and refinement with its cherished antique furniture, its linen curtains flowered with red, the paper and carpet a rich green. Candles in brass sticks were burning on the dressing-table, where a silver toilet-set—brushes, mirror, combs, and pin-boxes—recalled to the wife her marriage day. There were books—red, green, and white—on a copper-bound book-shelf over the mantel-piece. The room suggested that those who slept in it had kept the romance of life untarnished and unbedraggled. There was no slovenly realism to hint at apathy or the materialism of desire.

“Have you been reading, dear?”

“Yes, reading.”

Murchison was not a man who could act what he did not feel. He looked at his wife’s face on the pillow, and wondered at the beauty of her hair.

“It is good to see you there, Kate,” he said.

The unrestrainable wistfulness of his look made her arms flash out to him. He knelt down beside the bed and let her fondle him with her hands.

“You regret nothing, dear?”

“Regret!”

“It is always in my mind—this curse. I am not a coward, Kate, but I go in deadly fear at times of my own flesh.”

“Always—this!”

“Would to God I could bear it all myself.”

“Come,” and she hung over him; “I understand, I am not afraid. You must rest; we will go away together to the cottage—a little honeymoon. You are not yourself as yet. Oh, my beloved, I want you here, here—at my heart!”

Darkness enveloped them, and she pillowed her husband’s head upon her shoulder. He heard her heart beating, heard the drawing of her breath. In a little while he fell asleep, but Catherine lay awake for many hours, her love hovering like some sacred flame of fire over the tired man at her side.