CHAPTER XI

Murchison sat for a while before the open window after his wife had gone to bed. He could hear her moving to and fro in the room above him, the only sound in the silence of the night. He was at rest, and happy, her very nearness filling him with a sense of peace and strength. The tenderness of her love breathed in the air, and he still seemed to hear her radiant singing.

We mortals are often in greater peril of a fall when we trust in the cheerful temerity of an imagined strength. To a man standing upon the edge of a precipice the lands beneath seem faint and insignificant, and yet but a depth of air lies between him and the plain. Our frailties may seem pitiful, nay, impossible to us when we listen to noble music, or watch the sunrise on the mountains. The man who is exalted in the spirit lives in a clearer atmosphere, and wonders at the fog that may have drifted round him yesterday. He may even laugh at the alter ego framed of clay, and ask whether this soft-bodied, cringing thing could ever have answered to the name of “self.”

Some such feeling of optimism took possession of Murchison that night. The words of his wife’s songs were in his brain; he heard her moving in the room above, and felt the dearness of her presence in the place. Everywhere he beheld the work of her hands—the curtains at the windows, the flowers in the bowls. Her photograph stood on the mantel-shelf, and he rose and looked at it, smiling at the eyes that smiled at him. Could he, the husband of such a woman, and the father of her children, be the mere creature of the juice of the grape? Was he no stronger than some sot at a street corner? He gazed at his own photograph that stood before the mirror, gazed at it critically, as though studying a strange face. The eyes looked straight at him, the mouth was firm, the jaw crossed by a deep shadow that betrayed no degenerate sloping of the chin. Was this the face of a man who was the victim of a lust? He smiled at the memory of his weaker self as a man smiles at a rival whom he can magnanimously pity.

The pride of strength suggested the thought of proof. Old Porteus Carmagee had sent him this choice wine, and was he afraid of six bottles in a basket? Why not challenge this alter ego, this mean and treacherous caricature of his manhood, and prove in the grapple that he was the master of his earthly self? There was a combative stimulus in the thought that appealed to a man who had been an athlete. It fired the element of action in him, made him knit his muscles and expand his chest.

Murchison looked at himself steadily in the mirror, held up his hand, and saw not the slightest tremor. He crossed the hall, entered the dining-room, and dragged the hamper from under the window-seat with something of the spirit of a Greek hero dragging some classic monster from its lair. Coolly and without flurry he carried the thing into the drawing-room and set it down on the little gate-legged table. He cut the cord, raised the lid, and let the musty fragrance of the lawyer’s cellar float out into the room. The simile of Pandora’s box did not occur to him. He put the straw aside, and pulled out a cobwebbed bottle from its case. His knife served him to break up the cork; he sniffed the wine’s bouquet, and looked round him for a glass.

He found one among Catherine’s curios, an old Venetian goblet of quaint shape. Half filling it, he tossed Porteus Carmagee’s letter on to the straw, and standing before his wife’s portrait, looked steadily into the smiling eyes.

“Kate, I drink to you. One glass to prove it, and the open bottle left untouched.”

Deliberately he raised the glass and drank, looking at his wife’s face in its framing of silver on the mantel-shelf.

More than two hours had passed since she had left him, and Catherine was lying awake, watching the moonlight glimmering on the moor. Her heart was tranquil in her, her thoughts free from all unrest as she lay in the oak bed, happily lethargic, waiting for her husband’s step upon the stairs. The day had been very sweet to her, and there was no shadow across the moon. She lay thinking of her children, and her childhood, and of the near past, when she had first sung the songs that she had sung to the man that night.

The crash of broken glass and the sound of some heavy body falling startled Catherine from her land of dreams. She sat up, listening, like one roused from a first sleep. Murchison must have turned out the lamp and then blundered against some piece of furniture in the dark. If it were her treasured and much-sought china! She slipped out of bed, opened the door, and went out on to the landing.

“James, what is it?”

The narrow hall lay dark below her, and she won no answer from her husband.

“Are you hurt, dear?”

Still no reply; the door was shut.

“James, what has happened?”

She crept down the stairs, and stepped on the last step. A curious, “gaggling” laugh came from the room across the hall. At the sound she stiffened, one hand holding the bosom of her laced night-gear, the other gripping the oak rail. A sudden blind dread smote her till she seemed conscious of nothing save the dark.

“James, are you coming?”

Again she heard that mockery of a laugh, and a kind of senseless jabbering like the babbling of a drunken man. A rush of anguish caught her heart, the anguish of one who feels the horror of the stifling sea. She tottered, groped her way back into her room, and sank down on the bed in an agony of defeat. Was it for this that her love had spent itself in all the tender planning of this little place? How had it happened? Not with deceit! Even in her blindness she prayed to God that he had not wounded her with willing hand.

“Oh, God, not that, not that!”

She rose, catching her breath in short, sharp spasms, shaking back the hair from off her shoulders. The torture was too sharp with her for tears. It was a wringing of the heart, a dashing of all devotion, a falling away of happiness from beneath her feet! She stretched out her arms in the dark like a woman who reaches out to a love just dead.

Catherine turned, saw the empty bed, and the white face of the moon. The memories of the evening rushed back on her, wistful and infinitely tender. “No, no, no!” Her heart beat out the contradiction like a bell. It was unbelievable, unimaginable, that he should have played the hypocrite that night. They had spoken of the children, their children, and would he have lied to her, knowing that this vile devil’s drug was in the house? Her heart cried out against the thought. Her love came forth like an angel with a burning sword.

With white hands trembling in the moonlight, Catherine lit her candle, slipped her bare feet into her shoes, and went down the stairs. The inarticulate and pitiable mumbling still came from the little room. In the hall she halted, irresolute, the candle wavering in her hand. The shame of it, the pity of it! Could she go in and see the “animal” stammering in triumph over the “man”? No, no, it would be desecration, ignominy, an unhallowed wounding of the heart. He would sleep presently. The madness would flicker down like fire and die. Yes, she would wait and watch till he had fallen asleep. To see him in the throes of it, no, she could not suffer that!

With a dry sob in the throat, Catherine set the candle down on the table, beside the bowl of roses that she had arranged but yesterday with her own hands. How cold the house was, even for summer! She returned to her bedroom, took down her dressing-gown from behind the door, and wrapped it round her, thanking Heaven in her heart that she was alone with her husband in the house. The village woman slept away, and came at seven in the morning. She had all the night before her to recover her husband from his shame.

Going down to the hall again, she walked to and fro, listening from time to time at the closed door. The restless babbling of the voice had ceased. The fumes were dulling the wine fire in his brain. She prayed fervently that he would fall asleep.

An hour passed, and she heard no sound save the sighing of her own breath. For a moment the pathos of it overcame her as she leaned against the wall, the child in her crying out for comfort, for she felt alone in the emptiness of the night. The weakness lasted but a second. She grappled herself, opened the door noiselessly and looked in.

The lamp was still burning in the room, its shade of crocus yellow tempering the light into an atmosphere of mellow gold. On the gate-legged table stood Porteus Carmagee’s ill-omened hamper, the lid open, and straw scattered about the floor. Fragments of broken glass glittered among the litter, with the twisted stem of the Venetian goblet. An empty bottle had trackled its lees in a dark blot on the green of the carpet.

Catherine would not look at her husband for the moment. She was conscious of a shrunken and huddled figure, a red and gaping face, the reek of the wine, the heavy sighing of his breath. Her nerve had returned to her with the opening of the closed door. Her heart knew but one great yearning, the prayer that the downfall had not been deliberately cruel.

A sheet of note paper lay crumbled amid the straw. She stooped and reached for it, and recognized the writing. It was Porteus Carmagee’s half-jesting letter, and she learned the truth, how the fatal stuff had come.

“I know that you are an abstemious beggar, but take the stuff for the tonic it is, and drink to an ‘incomparable’ wife’s health. . . . Gage is smuggling this over for me in the car.”

She stood holding the letter in her two hands, and looking at the senseless figure on the floor. Love triumphed in that ordeal of the night. There was nothing but pity and great tenderness in her eyes.

“Thank God!” and she caught her breath; “thank God, you did not do this wilfully! Oh, my beloved, if I had known!”