CHAPTER XXXI

“Good-bye, Mrs. Murchison; good-bye, old man; wish you could have stayed with us. Shake hands, sonny, now you’re off.”

A barrow-load of belated luggage went clattering by as the shrill pipe of the guard’s whistle sounded the departure. On the opposite platform a couple of porters were banging empty milk-cans on to a truck. Yet from the noise and turmoil of it all, John Tugler’s red face shone out with a redeeming exuberance of good-will.

“Good-bye.”

Murchison was leaning from the window, and the two men shook hands.

“Good luck to you.”

“Thanks. You have been very good to us. We shall not forget it.”

“Bosh, man, bosh!” and John Tugler gave Catherine a final flourish of his hat.

The train was on the move, but Murchison still leaned from the window, to the exclusion of his excited and irrepressible son. We grow fond of people who have stood by us in trouble, and John Tugler, bumptious and money-making mortal that he was, carried many generous impulses under his gorgeous waistcoat. The gift of sympathy covers a multitude of imperfections, for the heart craves bread and wine from others, and not the philosopher’s stone.

Interminable barriers of brick, back yards, sour, rubbish-ridden gardens were gliding by. Factories with their tall chimneys, the minarets of labor, stood out above the crowded grayness of the monotonous streets. Hardly a tree, and not an acre of green grass, in Wilton. It was as though nature had cursed the place, and left it no symbol of the season, no passing pageantry of summer, autumn, or of spring.

Catherine had kept Jack by her side, and the boy was kneeling on the seat and looking out of the window. She felt that her husband was in no mood for the child’s chattering. In leaving Wilton he was leaving a poignant part of reality behind, to enter upon a life that should try the strength of his manhood as a bowman tries a bow.

An old lady and a consumptive clerk were their only fellow-travellers. Murchison had chosen a corner whose window looked towards the west, and an intense and determined face it was that stared out over the ugliness of Wilton town. Houses had given place to market-gardens, acres of cabbages, flat, dismal, and dotted with zinc-roofed sheds. Beyond came the slow, sad heave of the Wilton hills, and, seen dimly—white specks upon the hill-side—the crowded head-stones where the dead slept.

The eyes of husband and wife met for a moment. They smiled at each other with the wistful cheerfulness of two people who have determined to be brave, a pathetic pretence hardly created to deceive. Moroseness need not testify deep feeling. The gleam from between the clouds turns even the wet clouds to gold.

Jack Murchison was watching a couple of colts cantering across a field beside the line.

“Mother, look at the old horses.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Silly old things. They’re making that old cow run. The brown one’s like Wellington, the horse we had before dad bought the car.”

“So it is, dear.”

“P’r’aps it is Wellington?”

“No, dear, Wellington must be dead by now.”

The old lady in the opposing corner was looking at Jack over her spectacles, and the boy took to returning the stare with the inimitable composure of youth. Catherine had turned again towards the other window, but the white head-stones no longer checkered the hill-side. Instead, she saw her husband’s profile, stern and determined, yet infinitely sad.

Life has been described as a series of sensations; and though some days are dull and passionless, others vibrate with a thousand waves of feeling. To Murchison the day had been crowded with sensation since the break of dawn. It was a day of disruption, a plucking up of routine from the soil, a change of attitude that concerned the soul even more than the body. He yearned towards Wilton, and yet fled from it with gratitude; his old home called to him, and yet he dreaded it as a disgraced man might fear the shocked faces of familiar friends. It was a day of unrest, self-judgment, and great forethought for him. The physical atoms seemed to tremble and vibrate, till the manhood in him might have been likened to a tremulous vapor. He could eat nothing, fix his mind on nothing. Even the sagging wires, coming and going as the train swept from pole to pole, were not unsymbolical of his thoughts.

Two hundred miles, with an hour’s wait in London, and the monotonous Midlands gave place to the more mysterious and dreamy south. Pine-crowned hills, great oaks and beeches purpling the villages, the blue distance of a more magical horizon. In orchards and meadows the infinite glamour of a golden spring. Quiet rivers curling through the mists of green. In many a park the stately spruce built sombre, windless thickets; larches glimmered with Scotch firs red-throated towards the west. Trees in whispering and triumphant multitudes. Quiet, dreamy meadows where the willows waved. Mysterious Isles of Avalon imaginable towards the setting sun.

Murchison, leaning back in his corner, watched for the pine woods about Roxton town with a deep commingling of yearning and of dread. It was to be a home-coming, and yet what a home-coming! The return of a prodigal, but no cringing prodigal; the return of a man, stiff-necked and square-jawed, ready to fight but not to conciliate. There was something of the tense expectancy of the hour before the bugles blow the assault. Every nerve in Murchison’s body tingled.

The boy Jack was jumping from foot to foot at the other window.

“Look, mother, look, there’s old Mr. Tomkin’s farm! And there’s the river. Look—and the kingcups are out! Gwen used to call ’em—”

He stopped suddenly, for his mother had drawn him to her and smothered the words with her mouth.

“You take care of the rugs and umbrellas, dear.”

“Yes. Shall I get ’em down?”

“In a minute. Sit still, dear, and don’t worry.”

She looked across quickly at her husband. Their eyes met. He was pale, but he smiled at her.

“Here we are, at last.”

“At last.”

Both felt that the ordeal had begun.

They let the boy lean out of the open window as the train ran in and slowed up beside the platform. Porteus Carmagee and his sister were waiting by the door of the booking-office. Jack sighted them and waved a salute, their coach running far beyond the office, for they were in the forepart of the train.

Murchison was the first out of the carriage. He lifted the boy down, and stood waiting to help his wife with some of her parcels.

“Luggage, sir?”

Murchison turned, and stared straight into the face of one of his old patients. The man looked at him blankly for a moment before recognition dawned upon his face.

“Good-day, doctor. Didn’t know you, sir, at first,” and he touched his cap.

Murchison’s upper lip was stiff. He looked like one who had come to judge rather than to be judged.

“Get my luggage out, Johnson. Three trunks, a Gladstone, hat-box, and two wooden cases.”

“Yes, sir.”

The man was polite, though ready to be inquisitive.

“Glad to see you again in Roxton, sir.”

“Thanks.”

“Cab, sir? There’s Timmins’s fly.”

“Yes, that will do.”

Murchison turned abruptly from the porter to find Miss Carmagee and Catherine kissing, and Jack tugging at his godfather’s hands. It was Porteus in a new Panama hat, whose whiteness made his face look brown as an Asiatic’s.

“Ah, my dear Murchison, ten minutes late; beast of a line this.”

“It was good of you to come.”

“Eh, what?—not a bit of it. Where’s your luggage? I abhor stations; can’t talk in comfort. This imp of darkness can come along with us.”

An unprejudiced observer would have imagined the little man in the most peppery of tempers. He tweaked Jack by the ear, frowned hard at Catherine, and bit his mustache as though possessed by some uncontrollable spirit of impatience.

His sister was straightening her bonnet-strings.

“You can drive straight home, dear; everything is ready.”

“You don’t know how much I feel all this.”

“There, you must be tired. We are going to take the boy to-night.”

Miss Carmagee’s stout figure seemed to stand like a breakwater between Catherine and the world, and there was an all-sufficing courage on her face.

People were staring; Murchison became aware of it as they moved towards the booking-office. Several familiar faces seemed to start up vividly out of the past. He noticed two porters grinning and talking together beside a pile of luggage near the bridge, and his sensitive pride concluded that they were making him their mark. The ticket collector was a thin, gray-headed man whom Murchison had known for years. He found himself conjecturing, as one conjectures over trifles at such a pass, whether the man would remember him or not. The official received the tickets without vouchsafing a glimmer of recognition. But he stared after Murchison when he had passed, with that curious, peering insolence typical of the breed.

Outside the station a very throaty individual in a very big cap, Harris tweed suit, white stock, and mulberry red waistcoat, was giving instructions to a porter with regard to a barrow-load of luggage. A trim dog-cart stood by the curb, with a sleek little woman in a tailor-made costume perched on the seat, and looking down on everybody with something of the keenness of a hawk.

It so happened that this exquisite piece of “breeding,” this Colonel Larter of county fame, stepped back against Murchison in turning towards his dog-cart.

“Beg pardon.”

The words were reinforced by a surprised and rather impertinent stare.

“What!”

“Don’t trouble to mention it, sir.”

“How d’you do? Had heard you were knocking about down our way. Wife well?”

Colonel Larter’s glance had passed the figure in black, and had fixed itself on the Carmagees and Catherine. There is always some charm about a handsome woman that can command courtesy, and Colonel Larter walked round Murchison with the sang-froid of a superior person, and ignored the husband in appearing impressive to the wife.

“How d’you do, Mrs. Murchison? Back in Roxton? Miss Carmagee has been keeping secrets from us. Quite a crime, I’m sure.”

Catherine had seen the slighting of her husband.

“We are back again, Colonel Larter.”

“That’s good. To stay?” and he nodded affably to the lawyer.

“Yes, to stay.”

“And the piccaninnies? Hallo, here’s one of them! And where’s my little flirt? What! Left her behind?”

Colonel Larter had one of those high-pitched, patronizing voices that carry a goodly distance and allow casual listeners to benefit by their remarks. Yet even his obtuse conceit was struck by Catherine Murchison’s manner. A sudden sense of distance and discomfort obtruded itself upon the gentleman’s consciousness. He caught Porteus Carmagee’s brown, birdlike eye, and the glint thereof was curiously disconcerting.

“Expect you’re busy. My wife’s waiting for me; mustn’t delay,” and he withdrew with a jerk of his peaked cap, repassing Murchison with an oblivious serenity, and rejoining his wife, who had acknowledged the presence of acquaintances by a single inclination of the head.

“Insufferable ass! Where’s that luggage? Ah, here we are,” and Porteus opened the cab-door with emphasis.

“Get in, Kate, you’ll find everything shipshape at home.”

“You will come across later?”

“If I’m wanted.”

“Then we shall expect you both. We have not thanked you yet.”

“Oh, if I’m to be thanked, I sha’n’t come.”

“Don’t say that,” and Murchison’s hand rested for a moment on Porteus Carmagee’s shoulder.

Lombard Street again, broad, tranquil Lombard Street, warm with its red-walled houses, shaded by its cypresses, its budding elms and limes, St. Antonia’s steeple clear against the blue. The old house itself, white-sashed and sun-steeped, curtains at the windows, the steps white and fresh as snow.

A head disappeared from the hall window as the cab drove up; the front door opened; they were welcomed by a homely and familiar face.

“Mary!”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This is like home.”

“I’m glad, ma’am, I’m glad—”

Catherine kissed her. They were both good women, and heart met heart in that home-coming, so full of memories of mingled joy and pain.

“It is good to see you here, Mary,” and Murchison held out a hand.

“Oh, sir, it was good to come.”

“You will only have one to worry you now.”

“It wasn’t a worry, sir.”

And she retreated because her weakness was a woman’s weakness and showed itself in tears.

A man was helping the cabman with the luggage. He came in carrying one end of a heavy trunk, cap in hand, gaiters on legs, a smart figure that seemed a little faded and out of fortune, to judge by the threadbare cleanliness of its clothes.

“What, you here, Gage?”

The man colored up like a boy.

“Glad to see you, sir, and you, ma’am. The old house begins to look itself again.”

“You are right, Gage. Old faces make a welcome surer. We shall want you if you are free.”

“Only too happy, sir. Family man now, sir.”

“What, married!”

“A year last Easter, sir,” and he disappeared up the stairs, carrying the lower end of the trunk.

An hour had passed. Husband and wife had wandered over the whole house together, and found many an old familiar friend that had been saved from the wreck of that disastrous year. The sympathetic touch showed everywhere, a reverent and sensitive spirit had schemed and plotted to retain the past. The coloring of each room was the same as of old; much of the furniture had been rebought; the very pictures were as so many memories. It was home, and yet not the home they had known of yore.

“Does it feel strange to you?”

“Strange?”

“Yes, it is all so real, and yet there is something we shall always miss.”

They were standing together at the study window, looking out into the garden that was lit with flowers. Polyanthuses were as so many gems scattered on the brown earth of the beds. An almond-tree was still in bloom, a blush of pink against the sky. Tulips, red, white, and yellow, lifted their cups to the falling dew.

“It can never be the same, dear.”

“No.”

“Gwen?”

“Yes, our little one. And yet—in death—”

“In death?”

“My child has given me victory over myself. As I trust God, dear, I believe that curse is dead.”

“Yes, it is dead.”

“The house is cleansed; we have come home together. I am ready now to face my fellow-men.”