CHAPTER XXVI

James Murchison, walking along the pavement of Wilton High Street with the sharp, savage strides of a man tortured by his own thoughts, turned into Dr. Tugler’s surgery as the clock struck eight, finding in this stern routine a power to steady him against despair. He slipped off his overcoat, folded it slowly and methodically over the back of a bench, and hung his hat on one of the gas brackets projecting from the wall. To John Tugler, who was seated at one of the tables, examining a girl with a red rash covering her face, there was something in the big man’s slow and restrained patience that betrayed how sorrow was shadowing his assistant’s home.

John Tugler pushed back his chair, and crossed the room to the corner where Murchison was bending over his open instrument bag. The droop of the shoulders, the whole pose of the powerful figure, told of the burden that lay heavy upon the father’s heart.

“Murchison.”

The face that met John Tugler’s was haggard and stupid with two sleepless nights.

“Yes.”

“Any news?”

“Oh—worse,” and he snapped the bag to with an irritable closure of the hands.

John Tugler looked at him as he might have looked at a refractory friend.

“Come now, Murchison, you’re feeling damned bad. Knock off to-day. Stileman and I can manage.”

“Thanks. I must work.”

“Must, eh?”

“It helps.”

“Like punching something when you’re savage. Perhaps you’re right.”

Tugler returned to the girl with the red rash, while Murchison passed on to the surgery, where some half-score patients were waiting to be treated.

“Good-morning,” and he glanced round him like a man in a hurry; “first case. Well, how’s the leg?”

A scraggy, undersized individual with a narrow, swarthy face was pulling up a trousers leg with two dirty, drug-stained hands. He was a worker in a chemical factory, and his ugly, harsh, and suspicious features seemed to have taken the low moral stamp of the place.

“No worse, doct’r.”

“No worse! Well, have you been resting?”

“Half an’ half.”

“I suppose so. You may as well come here and grumble for months unless you do what we tell you. It is quite useless continuing like this.”

He bent down and began to unwind the dirty bandage from the man’s leg. The chemical worker expanded the broad nostrils of his carnivorous nose, sniffed, and cocked a battered bowler onto the back of his head. Manners were not mended in Dr. Tugler’s surgery.

“God’s truth, doct’r, easy with it—”

Murchison had stripped a sodden pad of lint and plaster from the ulcer on the man’s leg.

“Nonsense; that didn’t hurt you.”

“Beg to differ, sir.”

“When did you dress this last?”

The patient hesitated, eying Murchison sulkily as though tempted to be insolent.

“Yesterday.”

“Speak the truth and say three days ago. You’re on your ‘club’—of course.”

“Well, what’s the harm?”

“And you don’t trouble much how long you draw club-money, eh?”

“That’s your business, I reckon.”

“My business, is it? Well, my friend, you carry out my instructions or there will be trouble about the certificate. You understand?”

The man cast an evil look at Murchison’s broad back as he turned to spread boracic ointment on clean lint.

“I don’t know as how I come here to hear your sauce,” he remarked, curtly.

Murchison faced him with an irritable glitter of the eyes.

“What do you mean!”

“I suppose some of us poor fellows cost you gentlemen too much in tow and flannel.”

“There you are just a little at sea, my friend. What we do is to prevent the Friendly Societies being imposed upon by loafers. Dress your leg every day. Rest it, you understand, and keep out of the pubs. You had better come by some manners before next week.”

The chemical worker snarled out some vague retort, and then relapsed into silence. Such shufflers had no pity from James Murchison. He was in no mood that morning to bear with the impertinences of malingerers and humbugs.

The clock struck eleven before the last patient passed out into Wilton High Street with its thundering drays and clanging trams. Murchison had done the work of two men in the surgery that morning, silent, skilful, and determined, a man who worked that the savage smart of sorrow might be soothed and assuaged thereby. With the women and the children he was very gentle and very patient. His hands were never rough and never clumsy. Perhaps none of the people whose wounds he dressed guessed how bitter a wound was bleeding in the heart of this sad-eyed, patient-faced man.

John Tugler sidled in when Murchison had pinned up the last bandage. He swung the door to gently, sighed, and pretended to examine the entries in the ledger. Murchison was washing his hands at the sink, staring hard at the water as it splashed from the tap upon his fingers.

“Not much visiting to-day.”

“No.”

“I’ll hire a cab, and drive down to Black End. Most of them seem to lie that way.”

Murchison was looking for a clean place in the roller-towel.

“I can manage the visiting down there,” he said.

John Tugler surveyed him attentively over a fat shoulder.

“You’ll knock up, old man,” he remarked, quietly.

Murchison started. The familiarity had a touch of tenderness that lifted it from its vulgar setting.

“Thanks, no.”

“Very bad, is she?”

“Comatose.”

“Oh, damn!”

The little man whipped over the leaves of the ledger, as though looking for something that he could not find.

“It seems a beastly shame,” he said, presently.

“Shame?”

“Yes, this sort of smash-up of a youngster’s life. They call it Providence, or the Divine Will, or something of that sort, don’t they? Must say I can’t stick that sort of bosh.”

Murchison was wringing his hands fiercely in the folds of the rough towel.

“It is a natural judgment, I suppose,” he said.

“A judgment?”

“It was my fault that the child ever came here. It need not have been so—” and he broke off with a savage twisting of the mouth.

John Tugler ran one finger slowly across a blank space in the ledger.

“Don’t take it that way,” he said, slowly; “it doesn’t help a man to curse himself because a damned bug of a bacillus breeds in this holy horror of a town. Curse the British Constitution, the law-mongers, or the local money shufflers who’d rather save three farthings than clean their slums.”

James Murchison was silent. Yet in his heart there burned the fierce conviction that the father’s frailty had been visited upon the innocent body of the child.

Four o’clock had struck, and the houses were casting long shadows across the waters of the canal, before Murchison turned in at the gate of Clovelly after three hours visiting in the Wilton slums. He let himself in silently with his latch-key, hung his hat and coat in the hall, and entered the little front room where tea was laid on the imitation walnut table. On the sofa by the window he found Catherine asleep, her head resting against the wall. It was as though sheer weariness, the spell of many sleepless nights, had fallen on her, and that but a momentary slacking of her self-control had suffered nature to assert her sway.

Murchison stood looking at his wife in silence. Sleep had wiped out much of the sorrow from her face, and she seemed beautiful as Beatrice dreaming strange dreams upon the walls of heaven. A stray strand of March sunlight had woven itself into her hair. Her hands lay open beside her on the sofa, open, palms upward, with a quaint suggestion of trustfulness and appeal. To Murchison it seemed that if God but saw her thus, such prayers as she had uttered would be answered out of pity for the brave sweetness of her womanhood.

If peace lingered in sleep, there would be sorrow in her waking. Murchison was loath to recall her to the world of coarse reality and unpitying truth. A great tenderness, a strong man’s tenderness for a woman and a wife, softened his face as he watched the quiet drawing of her breath. And yet what ultimate kindness could there be in such delay? Life and death are but the counterparts of day and night.

Catherine awoke with a touch of her husband’s hand upon her cheek. She sighed, put out her arms to him, a consciousness of pain vivid at once upon her face.

“You here!”

She put her hands up to her forehead.

“I never meant to sleep. What a long day you must have had!”

“It is better that I should work.”

“Yes.”

“How is she?”

“The same; I can see no change.”

Catherine rose with a suggestion of effort, and leaned for a moment on her husband’s arm. The impulse seemed simultaneous with them, the impulse that drew them to the room above. They went up together, hand in hand, silent and restrained, two souls awed by the mysteries of death and life.

On the bed by the window lay Gwen, with childishly open yet sightless eyes. A flush of vivid color showed on either cheek, her golden hair falling aside like waves of light about her forehead. Her breathing was tranquil and feeble, and spaced out with a peculiar rhythm. The pupils of the eyes were markedly unequal; one lid drooped slightly, and the right angle of the red mouth was a little drawn.

It is a certain pitiful semblance of health that mocks the heart in many such cases. Children who die thus are often beautiful. They seem to sleep with open eyes. The flush on the cheeks has nothing of the gathering grayness of death.

Catherine, bending low, looked at Gwen with the long look of one who will not see the vanishing torch of hope.

“She is still asleep.”

“Yes, asleep.”

The man’s voice was a tearless echo.

“James, it can’t be. Look, what a color! And the eyes—”

Murchison laid a hand gently on her shoulder.

“I know; I have seen such things before.”

“But she will wake presently?”

“Presently.”

“Yes. This long sleep will do her good.”

Murchison sighed.

“She will not wake for us, wife,” he said.

“Not wake!”

Catherine’s eyes were incredulous, full of the intenseness of a mother’s love.

“No, not here.”

“But look—look at her!”

“That is the pity of it.”

“Then I shall not hear her speak again; she will never see me?”

“Never.”

“But why? I cannot believe—”

“Dear, it is death—the way some children die.”

They stood silent, side by side. Then Catherine bent low; child’s mouth and mother’s mouth met in a long dream kiss. There was a sound of broken, troubled whispering in the room, a sound as of inarticulate tenderness and wordless prayer. Murchison’s right hand covered his face. His wife’s eyes and cheeks were wet with tears.

“Kate.”

She bowed herself over the child, and did not stir.

“No, no, these last hours, they are so precious.”

He looked at her mutely, put a hand to his throat, and turned away. It was too solemn, too poignant a scene for him to outrage it with words. Gwen, dead in life, would see her mother’s face no more.

Murchison was on the stairs when the blare of a tin trumpet seemed to hurt the silence of the little house. An impatient fist was beating a tattoo on the front door. It was the boy Jack come home from school.

Murchison’s mouth quivered, and then hardened. He went to the door, and opened it to a blast of the boy’s trumpet.

“Hallo, I say—”

A strong hand twisted the toy from the boy’s fingers.

“Silence.”

Jack Murchison’s mouth gaped. He looked at his father’s face, wonderingly, grievedly, and was awed into a frightened silence, child egoist that he was, by the expression in his father’s eyes.

Murchison pointed to the sitting-room door.

“Go and sit down.”

The boy obeyed, sullen and a little stupefied. His father closed and locked the door on him, and then passed out into the space behind the house that they called a garden. A few crocuses were gilding the sour, black earth. They were flowers that Gwen had planted before Christmas-time. And Murchison, as he looked at them, thought that she should take them in her little hands to the Great Father of all Children.