A Woman's War, Warwick Deeping [have you read this book .TXT] 📗
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A Woman’s War
by Warwick Deeping
AUTHOR OF
“BESS OF THE WOODS”
“THE SLANDERERS”
ETC.
LONDON AND NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MCMVII
Copyright, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
All rights reserved.
Published June, 1907.
TO
COULSON KERNAHAN
MY FATHER’S FRIEND AND MINE
IN MEMORY OF
MANY GENEROUS WORDS AND DEEDS
A WOMAN’S WAR
THERE was a ripple of chimes through the frosty air
as Catherine Murchison turned from King’s Walk
into Lombard Street, and saw the moon shining white and
clear between the black parapets and chimney-stacks of the
old houses. St. Antonia’s steeple was giving the hour of
three, and a babel of lesser tongues answered from the
silence of the sleeping town. Hoar-frost glittered on the
cypresses that stood in a garden bounding the road, and
the roofs were like silver under the hard, moonlit sky.
Catherine Murchison stopped before the great red-brick
house with its white window-sashes, and its Georgian air
of solidity and comfort. The brass lion’s-head on the door
seemed to twinkle a welcome to her above the plate that
carried her husband’s name. She smiled to herself as she
drew the latchkey from the pocket under her sables, the
happy smile of a woman who comes home with no searchings of the heart. Several shawl-clad figures went gliding
along under the shadows of the cypresses, giving her goodnight with a flutter of laughter and tapping of shoes along
the stones. Catherine waved her hand to the beshawled
ones as they scurried home, and caught a glimpse of St.
Antonia’s spire diademed by the winter stars. She remembered such a night seven years ago, and man’s love
and mother’s love had come to her since then,
Catherine closed the door gently, knowing that her husband would be asleep after a hard day’s work. It was not
often that he went with her to the social gatherings of
Roxton. Professional success, fraught with the increasing responsibilities thereof, brightened his own fireside for
him, and Catherine his wife would rather have had it so.
James Murchison was no dapper drawingroom physician.
The man loved his home better than the dinner-tables of
his patients. He was young, and he was ambitious with
his grave and purposeful Saxon sanity. His wife took the
social yoke from off his shoulders, content in her heart to
know that she had made the man’s home dear to him.
A standard-lamp was burning in the hall, the light
streaming under a red-silk shade upon the Oriental rugs
covering the mellow and much polished parquetry. There
were a few old pictures on the walls, pewter and brass lighting the dead oak of an antique dresser. Catherine Murchison looked round her with a breathing in of deep content.
She unwrapped the shawl from about her hair, rich russet
red hair that waved in an aureole about her face. Her
sable cloak had swung back from her bosom, showing the
black ball-dress, red over the heart with a knot of hothouse
flowers. There was a wholesome and generous purity in
the white curves of her throat and shoulders.
Catherine laid her cloak over an old Dutch chair, and
turned to the table where fruits, biscuits, and candles had
been left for her. Her husband’s gloves lay on the table,
and his hat with one of Gwen’s dolls tucked up carefully
herein. Catherine’s eyes seemed to mingle thoughts of
child and man, as she ate a few biscuits and looked at Miss
Gwen’s protege stuffed into the hat. James Murchison
had had a long round that day, with the cares and conflicts
of a man who labors to satisfy his own conscience. Catherine hoped not to wake him; she had even refused to be
driven home lest the sound of wheels should carry a too
familiar warning to his ears. She lit her candle, and,
reaching up, turned out the lamp. Her feet were on the
first step of the stairs when a streak of light in the halfdarkness of the hall brought her to a halt.
Some one had left the lamp burning in her husband’s
study. She stepped back across the hall, and hesitated a
moment as other thoughts occurred to her. Housebreaking was a dead art in Roxton, and she smiled at the melodramatic imaginings that had seized her for the moment.
A reading-lamp stood on the table before the fire, that
had sunk to a dull and dirty red in the smokeless grate.
The walls of the room were panelled with books and the
glass faces of several instrument cabinets the room of no
mere specialist, no haunter of one alley in the metropolis
of intelligence. On the sofa lay the figure of a man
asleep, his deep breathing audible through the room.
To the wife there was nothing strange in finding her
husband sleeping the sleep of the tired worker before the
dying fire. Her eyes had a laughing tenderness in them,
a sparkle of mischief, as she set down the candle and
moved across the room. Her feet touched something that
rolled under her dress. She stooped, and looked innocent
enough as she picked up an empty glass.
“James”
There was mirth in the voice, but her eyes showed a
puzzled intentness as she noticed the things that stood
beside the lamp upon the table. An open cigar-box, a
tray full of crumbled ash and blackened matches, a couple
of empty syphons, a decanter standing in an ooze of spilled
spirit. Memory prompted her, and she smiled at the suggestion. Porteus Carmagee, that prattling, white-bobbed
maker of wills and codicils had slipped in for a smoke and
a gossip. James Murchison never touched alcohol, and
the inference was obvious enough, for her experience of
Mr. Carmagee’s loquacity justified her in concluding that
he had droned her husband to sleep.
Wifely mischief was in the ascendant on the instant.
She stooped over the sleeping man whose face was in the
shadow, put her lips close to his, and drew back with a
little catching of the breath. The room seemed to grow
dark and very cold of a sudden. She straightened, and
stood rigid, staring across the room with a sense of hurrying at the heart.
Then, as though compelling herself, she lifted the lamp,
and held it so that the light fell full upon her husband’s
face.
MAN is the heir of many ancestors, and his inheritance
of life’s estate may prove cumbered by mortgages
unredeemed by earlier generations.
In the spring of the year the blood is hot, and the quicksilver of youth burns in the brain. The poise of true manhood is not reached at twenty, the experience to know, the
strength to grapple. James Murchison of the broad back
and sunny face, first of good fellows, popular among all,
had followed the joy of being and feeling even into shady
back-street rooms. In the hospital “common-room” he
had always had a knot of youngsters round him, lounging,
smoking, lads with no studied vice in them, but lads to
whom life was a thing of zest. For Murchison it had been
the crest of the wave, the day of the world’s youth. An
orphan with money at his bank, the liberty of London
calling him, a dozen mad youngsters to form a coterie!
As for heredity and such doctrines of man’s ascent and
fall, he had not studied them in the thing he called himself.
James Murchison had carved up corpses, electrified
frogs, and learned the art of dispensing physic before the
world taught him to discover that there were other things
to conquer besides text-books and examiners. His father
had died of drink, and his grandfather before him, and
God knows how many fat Georgian kinsmen had contributed to the figures on the debit side. From his mother he
had inherited wholesome yeoman blood, and the dower
perhaps had made him what he was, straight-backed,
clean-limbed, strong in the jaw, brave and blue about the
eyes. There had been no blot on him till he had gone up
to London as a lonely boy. There in the solitude the
world had caught him, and tossed him out of his dingy
rooms to taste the wine of the world’s pleasures.
The phase was natural enough, and there had been
plenty of young fools to applaud it in him. The first slip
had come after a hospital concert; the second after a football match; the third had followed a successful interview
with the Rhadamanthi who passed candidates in the duties
of midwifery. An ejectment from a music-hall, a brawl
in Oxford Street, a liaison with a demi-mondaine, complaints from landladies, all these had reached the ears of
the Dean’s “great ones” who sat in conclave. Murchison
had been argued with in private by a gray-haired surgeon
who had that strong grip on life that goes with virility and
the noble sincerity of faith.
“Fight yourself, sir,” the old man had said; “fight as
though the devil had you by the throat. If you bring
children into the world you will set a curse on them unless
you break your chains.” And Murchison had gone out
from him with a set jaw and an awakened manhood.
Then for the first time in life he learned the value of a
friend. The man was dead now; he had died in Africa,
dragged down by typhoid in some sweltering Dutch town.
James Murchison remembered him always with a warming of the heart. He remembered how they had gone
together to a little Sussex village by the sea, taken a coastguard’s disused cottage for eighteen pence a week, bathed,
fished, cooked their own food, and pitched stones along
the sand. James Murchison had fought himself those
summer weeks, growing brownfaced as a gypsy between
sun and sea. He had taken the wholesome strength of it
into his soul, passed through the furnace of his last two
years unscathed, and set out on life, a man with a keen
mouth, clean thoughts, and six feet of Saxon strength.
The world respected him, never so much as dreaming that
he had the devil of heredity tight bound within his heart.
“Dear, are you better now?”
He had told her everything, sitting in the dusk before
the fire, one fist under his chin, and his eyes the eyes of a
strong man enduring bitter shame. Woman’s love had
watched over him that day. She had striven to lift him up
out of the dust of his deep remorse, and had opened her
whole heart to him, showing the quiet greatness of her
nature in her tenderness towards this strong man in his
sorrow.
“Kate, how can you bear this!”
“Bear it, dear?”
“Finding so much of the beast in me. My God, I
thought the thing was dead; we are never dead, dear, to
our father’s sins.”
She came and sat beside him before the fire, a man’s
woman, pure, generous, trusty to the deeps. The light
made magic in her hair, and showed the unfathomable
faith within her eyes.
“Put the memory behind you,” she said, looking up into
his face.
He groaned, as though dust and ashes still covered his
manhood.
“You are too good to me, Kate.”
“No,” and
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