A Woman's War by Warwick Deeping (ap literature book list .txt) 📖

CHAPTER XVIII

CATHERINE’S lips were tightly set as she turned

from the shadows of St. Antonia’s elms, where the

sunlight made a moving fret of gold upon the grass. The

sky was a broad canopy of blue above the town, the wooded hills about it far and faint with haze. To Catherine

the summer stillness of the place, the dim blazoned windows of the church, the wreathing smoke, the circling

pigeons, were parts of a quaint and homely tenderness

that made her realize the more the repellent coldness of

the house she had just left.

 

She had come by one conviction through her visit, the

conviction that those two intellectualists hungered to

humiliate her and her husband. Mrs. Betty’s eyes had

betrayed too much. She would be content with nothing

but sensational head-lines, and the discussion of “the

scandal” in every Roxton home. The brain behind that

ethereal yet supercilious face knew no flush of feeling for

a rival in distress. The pair were exulting over the chance

James Murchison had given them, and the wife had realized it with a bitter flooding up of loyalty and love.

 

Catherine had made her plans before she reached the

glare of Lombard Street. She had left her husband sitting in the darkened room, the blinds drawn down over

his humiliation and self-shame. Her heart grieved in her

for the strong man whose sensitive consciousness had been

paralyzed by the realization of his own irrevocable blunder.

Her pity left him undisturbed, like a sick man needing

rest. Inglis had taken the work for the whole day, for

Catherine had interviewed him in the surgery, and shocked

the theorist by imparting a portion of the truth to him.

 

“Incredible!” had been Mr. Inglis’s solitary remark,

and Catherine’s heart had blessed him for that single

adjective.

 

As she passed the house in Lombard Street, her face

seemed overshadowed for the moment by the unpropitious heaviness of her thoughts. The vision of her

husband’s pale and troubled face saddened her more utterly than any regretfulness her pride might feel. Nor

did she pass her home unchallenged, for at the barred

but open window of the nursery, a ripple of gold in the

sunlight bathed her daughter Gwen’s round face.

 

“Muvver, muvver!” and a doll’s red pelisse was waved

over the windowsill. Catherine felt all her womanhood

yearn longingly towards the child.

 

“Muvver. I’ve spelled a whole page. Daddy’s gone

out. May I come wid you?”

 

Catherine shook her head, her eyes very bright with

tenderness under her blue sunshade. How little the

child realized the grim beneathness of life!

 

“No, dear, no. I shall be back soon. Ask Mary to

take you for a walk in the meadows,” and she passed on

with a lingering look at the red pelisse and the golden

curls.

 

Porteus Carmagee, white as to waistcoat, brown as to

face, jumped up briskly from his well-worn leather chair

when his head clerk announced Mrs. Catherine Murchison. The lawyer, despite his eccentricities, was a keen

and tenacious man of business, the emphasis of whose

advice might have impressed an audience more cynical

than the English House of Commons. He had a habit

of snapping at his syllables with a vindictive sincerity that

stimulated nervous clients suffering from the neurasthenia

of indecision.

 

“What! a professional visit? My dear Kate, this is a

most portentous event; all my musty deeds must blush

into new pink tape. Sit down. Do you want damages

against your washerwoman for spoiling the underlinen?

Believe me I have been asked to advise on such questions. Ah, and how did your husband like my port?”

 

An inward shudder swept through Catherine. The

memories of that night at Marley Down were brutally

vivid to her, like the bizarre dreams of a feverish sleep

remembered in the morning. Porteus had been the

innocent cause of all this misery. Tell him she could not,

that his very kindness had brought her husband to the

brink of ruin.

 

“We ought to have thanked you” and the words clung

to her throat. “James has had one of his attacks of

nervous depression and an endless amount of worry.”

 

Porteus Carmagee’s keen brown eyes sparkled with

intentness as he watched her face. She looked white,

uneasy, haggard about the mouth, like one who has suffered from the strain of perpetual self-repression. Catherine had always moved before him as a serene being,

a woman whose face had symbolized the quiet splendor

of an evening sky. He had often quoted her as one of

the few people in the world whose happiness displayed

itself in the beauty of radiant repose. The stain of suffering on her face was new to him, and the more remarkable for that same reason.

 

“You speak of worries, Kate. Am I to be concerned

in them as a fatherly friend?”

 

She tried to give him one of her happy smiles.

 

“You see I have to run to you because I am in

trouble.”

 

The pathetic simplicity of her manner touched him.

 

“My dear Kate,” and his voice lost its usual snappishness, “how can I serve you as a friend? It is not

usual to see you worried.”

 

“You know James has been overworked.”

 

“Have I not lectured the rogue on a dozen different

occasions?”

 

“Yes, yes, I know; and he was ill at Marley Down on

Sunday, in the little place where I had hoped to give him

rest. Oh, Porteus, how brutal the responsibilities of

life can be at times! Inglis, our assistant, sent for him

to attend a serious case. James’s sense of duty dragged

him away from Marley. He went, braved a critical

operation, and—”

 

She faltered, her face aglow, as though the very loyalty

of her love made the confession partake of treachery.

The wrinkles about Porteus Carmagee’s eyes seemed to

grow more marked.

 

“And made a mess of it, Kate, eh?”

 

His brusquerie passed with her as a characteristic

method of concealing emotion.

 

“Yes.”

 

“Ugh!” and he jerked one leg over the chair; “confound

his sense of duty, risking his reputation to ease some old

woman’s temper.”

 

Catherine looked at him with a quivering of the lips.

 

“Porteus, you can’t blame him. It seems hard that

one slip may undermine so much.”

 

“Why ‘undermine’? why ‘undermine’? The law

does not expect infallibility.”

 

“I know but then the man died.”

 

“Who? Whatman?”

 

“Farmer Baxter, of Roland’s Farm.”

 

“A fool who has been eating himself to death for

years.”

 

Catherine spread her open hands with the look of a

pathetic partisan.

 

“James was not in a fit state to meet the strain. The

wife quarrelled with him after the operation, and refused

to let him continue the case.”

 

“My dear, inferior females always quarrel!”

 

“And we have enemies.”

 

“So had the saints, and plenty.”

 

“It was Parker Steel”

 

Porteus Carmagee sat up briskly in his chair, his

wrinkled face twitching with intelligence.

 

“Now we are growing vital. Well, I can forecast that

gentleman’s procedure.”

 

“Steel was called in, and the man died.”

 

“Most natural of mortals!”

 

“He performed a post-mortem with Dr. Brimley, of

Cossington, at the widow’s request. As a result he has

refused to give a death certificate and