A Woman's War, Warwick Deeping [have you read this book .TXT] 📗

CHAPTER VII

ROXTON, that little red town under a June sKy,

looked like a ruby strung upon the silver thread of

a river and set in a green hollow of the hills. As yet

the enterprising builder had not stamped the mark of the

beast glaringly upon the place, and the quaint outreachings of the town were suffered to dwindle through its

orchards into the June meadows, where the deep grass

was slashed and webbed with gold. The hills above

were black with pine thickets that took fire with many

a dawn and sunset, and to the north great beech-woods

hung like purple clouds across the blue.

 

The most miserly of mortals might have warmed with

the ridge view from Marley Down. Southward a violet

haze of hills, larch-woods golden spired in glimmering

green valleys, bluff knolls massive with many oaks, waving fields, blue smoke from a few scattered cottages.

From Marley Down with its purple heather billowing between the pine woods like some Tyrian sea, the road

curled to the red town sleeping amid its meadows.

 

Mrs. Betty Steel was at least an aesthetician, and her

eyes roved pleasurably over the woods and valleys as she

drove in her smart dog-cart over Marley Down. She had

been ridding her conscience of a number of belated country “calls ” with a friend, Miss Gerratty, beside her, a

plump little person in a pink frock. There was a certain

cottage on Marley Down that Betty Steel had coveted

for months, an antique gem, oak panelled, brick floored,

with great brown beams across the ceilings. Betty Steel

had the woman’s greed for the possession of pretty things.

The house in St. Antonia’s Square seemed too large and

cumbersome for her at times. Perhaps it was something

of a mausoleum, holding the ashes of a dead desire.

Often she wearied of it and the endless domestic details,

and longed for some nook where her restless individualism could live in its own atmosphere.

 

A glazier was tinkering at one of the cottage casements

when Mrs. Betty drove up the grass track between sheets

of glowing gorse. A pine wood backed the cottage on

the west; in front, before the little lawn, a white fence

linked up two banks of towering cypresses. Mrs. Betty

drew rein before the gate, and called to the man who was

releading the casement frames.

 

“I hear the cottage is to let. Can you tell me where

Mr. Pilgrim, the owner, lives. Somewhere on the Down,

is it not?”

 

The man, an unpretentious, wet-nosed creature, crossed

the grass plot, wiping his hands on a dirty apron.

 

“Mr. Pilgrim’s just ‘ad an offer, miss.”

 

“Has he?”

 

“Well, we’re doin’ the repairs. I ‘ave ‘card that Mrs.

Murchison of Roxton ‘ave taken it.”

 

“Dr. Murchison’s wife?”

 

The man nodded.

 

“How utterly vexatious. I suppose Mr. Pilgrim would

not sell?”

 

“Don’t know, miss, I ‘ain’t the authority to say.”

 

Parker Steel’s wife flicked her horse up with the whip

and turned back to the main road, a woman with a

grievance. Her companion in pink offered sympathy

with a twitter. Being of the Steel faction, she was wise

as to the friction between the households, and a friend’s

grievance has always an element of wickedness for a

woman.

 

“How very annoying, dear!”

 

Mrs. Betty waved her whip.

 

“I have had that cottage in mind for over a year.

Some one must have told the selfish wretch that I was

after it.”

 

“Strangely like spite, dear,” cooed the dove in pink.

 

“I wonder what the Murchisons want with the place?

To make a summer beer-garden for their brats, perhaps.”

 

“Marley Down’s so bracing. I hear Jim Murchison

has been overworking himself. Probably he intends

spending his week-ends here.”

 

“Rather curious.”

 

Miss Gerratty’s blue eyes were too shallow for the holding of a mystery.

 

“I can’t see anything strange in it, Betty. Jim Murchison has that assistant of his, a finnicking little fellow

in glasses, with a neck like a giraffe’s. Strange that they

should have snapped up your particular cottage.”

 

“Oh, that’s just like Kate Murchison,” and Mrs.

Betty’s brown eyes sparkled.

 

Hatred, like love, is a transfiguration of trifles, and

nothing is too paltry to be registered against a foe. Parker Steel’s wife drove home in the most unenviable of

tempers, untouched by the scent of the bean-fields in

bloom, or by the flash of the river through the green of

 

June. She rattled down the steep hill into Roxton town

at H ; % ace that made Miss Gerratty wince. Metaphorically, Betty Steel would have given much to have had her

bit in Catherine Murchison’s mouth, and to have treated

her to a taste of her nimble whip.

 

Leaving Miss Gerratty at the end of Queen’s Walk by

the old Jacobean Market-House, Mrs. Steel drove home

alone, to find some half-dozen letters waiting for her,

the mid-day post that she had missed by lunching with

Mrs. Feveril, of The Cedars. She shuffled the letters irritably through her hands like a pack of cards, her eyes

sparkling into sudden vivacity as a foreign envelope

showed among the rest. The letter bore the Egyptian

Sphinx and pyramids, and the familiar writing of a friend.

 

The letter lay unopened in her lap awhile, as she sat

by the open window of the drawingroom and looked out

over the beds that were gorgeous with the flare of Oriental

poppies. The lawn, studded with standard roses, swept

to the trailing branches of an Indian cedar. Rhododendrons were still in bloom in the little shrubbery under

the rich green shade shed by two great oaks.

 

She tore open the envelope at last, having lingered like

one who shirks the reading of news long waited for.

The familiar squirl of the man’s handwriting made her

smile, bringing back memories of a first serious affaire de

cceur with the quaint grotesqueness of the foolish past.

She remembered the thin, raw-boned youth with the red

mouth and the strenuous eyes who had kissed her one

night after a river-party. H’e was still vivid to her, even

to the recollection how his boating-shirt had slipped a

button and given her a glimpse of a hairy chest. What

a little fool she had been in those days! Mrs. Betty was

not the slave of sentiment, and Surgeon-Major Shackleton had slipped with his somewhat strenuous love-making

into the past. She still had occasional letters from him,

and from other sundry friends, letters that she always

showed her husband. Parker Steel was not a jealous

being. He was mildly pleased by the conviction that he

was still envied in secret by a bevy of old rivals.

 

“Dear Betty,”

 

Mrs. Steel made a little grimace as she pictured the

number of “dear Betties” who had probably drifted within

the sphere of Charlie Shackleton’s passion for romance.

She skipped through the letter with watchful eyes, ignoring the surgeon-major’s bantering persiflage, the familiar

gibes of an old friend. It was on the fourth page that

she unearthed the news she delved for, tangled beneath

the splutterings of an execrable pen.

 

“I think you asked me in your last letter whether I

knew a fellow named Murchison at St. Peter’s. Haven’t

you mentioned ‘the creature’ to me before? I remember

Jim Murchison just as you describe him, a solid, brownfaced six-footer, one of those happy-go-lucky beggars

who seem ready to punch creation. I left the place two

years before he qualified; he had brains, but if my pate

serves me, he was the sworn slave of a drug we catalogue

as C 2 H 5 OH. Not a bad sort of fool, but bibulous as

blotting-paper. Funny he should have turned up your

way, and married Kate of the golden hair. Mark this

private, and let my friend Parker deal with the above

formula. Glad to hear that he is raking in the guineas—”

 

The letter ended with a few personal paragraphs that

Mrs. Betty hardly troubled to read. She crossed the hall

to her husband’s study, hunted out a text-book on chemistry from the shelves, and proceeded with much patience

and deliberation to unearth the scientific hieroglyph the

surgeon-major’s letter contained. She found it at last,

and smiled maliciously at its vulgar triteness.

 

“C 2 H S OH, ethyl alcohol; commonly known as alcohol;

a generic term for certain compounds which are the

hydroxides of hydrocarbon radicals. The active principle of intoxicating liquors.”

 

Mrs. Betty put the book back on the shelf, and buttoned Mr. Shackleton’s letter into her blouse. There was

a queer glitter in her eyes, a spiteful sparkle of satisfaction.

She went back to the drawingroom, and seating herself

at the piano, played Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” with

fine verve and feeling.

 

Her husband found her in a brilliant mood that night

at dinner. She looked sleek and handsome, blood in her

cheeks and mischief in her eyes. Mrs. Betty at her

best could be a very inflammatory and sensuous creature,

like a Greek nymph taken from some Bacchic vase.

 

“The latest news, Parker theMurchisons have snapped

up my cottage on Marley Down.”

 

“The dickens they have! You don’t appear jealous.”

 

“No, I have a forgiving heart. The place is like a

hermitage. What can the Murchisons want with such a

cottage?”

 

Her husband, cold intellectualist, warmed to her beauty

as to true Falernian.

 

“Am I a crystal gazer?”

 

“Read me the riddle.”

 

Parker Steel laughed, and looked at her with a slight

loosening of the mouth.

 

“Riddle -de -dee! You women are always analyzing

imaginary motives. Murchison has been looking run to

death, lean as an overdriven horse. I don’t blame him

for wishing to munch his oats in rustic seclusion.”

 

Mrs. Betty bubbled over with sparkles of intuition.

 

“What does C 2 H 6 OH stand for, Parker?”

 

“C 2 H fi OH! What on earth have you to do with chemical formulas?”

 

“Answer my question.”

 

“Gin, if you like; the stuff the blue-ribbonites battle

with.”