A Woman's War. Warwick Deeping

you walk?” she asked.

      “Yes, it is only Carter Street. Go to bed, dear, don’t wait up.”

      She kissed him, and let her head rest for a moment on his shoulder.

      “I wish I could do the work for you, dear.”

      He laughed, a tired laugh, looking dearly at her, and went out into the dark.

      A vague restlessness took possession of Catherine that night, when she was left alone in the silent house. She had sent the servants to bed, and drawing a chair before the fire, tried to forget herself in the pages of romance. Color and passion had no glamour for her in print, however. It was as though some silent watcher stood behind her chair, and willed her to brood on thoughts that troubled her heart.

      She put the book aside at last, and sat staring at the fire, listening to the wind that moaned and sobbed about the house. The curtains swayed before the windows, and she could hear the elm-trees in the garden groaning as though weary of the day’s unrest. There was something in the nature of the night that gave a sombre setting to her thoughts. She remembered her husband’s tired and jaded face, and her very loneliness enhanced her melancholy.

      The Dutch clock in the hall struck eleven, the antique whir of wheels sounding strange in the sleeping house. Catherine stirred the fire together, rose and put out the lamp. She lit her candle in the hall, leaving a light burning there, and climbed the stairs slowly to her room. Instinct led her to cross the landing and enter the nursery where her children slept.

      The two little beds stood one in either corner beside the fireplace, each headed by some favorite picture, and covered with red quilts edged with white. Gwen was sleeping with a doll beside her, her hair tied up with a blue ribbon. The boy had a box of soldiers on the bed, and one fist cuddled a brass cannon.

      Catherine stood and looked at them with a mother’s tenderness in her eyes. They spelled life to her—these little ones, flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone. They were her husband’s children, and they seemed to bring into her heart that night a deep rush of tenderness towards the man who had given her motherhood. All the joy and sorrow that they had shared together stole up like the odor of a sacrifice.

      “When the strength’s out of a man, the devil’s in.”

      She remembered those words he had spoken, and shuddered. Was it prophetic, this voice that came to her out of the deeps of her own heart? Tenderly, wistfully, she bent over each sleeping child, and stole a kiss from the land of dreams. Betty Steel’s speech recurred to her as she passed to her own room, feeling lonely because the arms she yearned for would not hold her close that night.

      Catherine went to bed, but she did not sleep. Her brain seemed clear as a starlit sky, the thoughts floating through it like frail clouds over the moon. She heard the wind wailing, the rain splashing against the windows, the slow voice of the hall clock measuring out the hours. Some unseen power seemed to keep her wakeful and afraid, restless in her loneliness, listening for the sound of her husband’s return.

      The clock struck five before she heard the jar of a closing door. Footsteps crossed the hall, and she heard some one moving in the room below. For some minutes she sat listening in bed, waiting to hear her husband’s step upon the stairs. Her heart beat strangely when he did not come; the room felt cold to her as she shivered and listened.

      A sudden, vague dread seized her. She slipped out of bed, lit the candle with trembling hands, and throwing her dressing-gown round her, went out on to the landing. The lamp was still burning in the hall, and the door of the dining-room stood ajar. Shading the candle behind her hand, she went silently down the stairs into the hall. The only sound she heard was the clink of a glass.

      “James, husband!”

      Catherine stood on the threshold, her hair loose about her, the candle quivering in her hand. For the moment there was an agony of reproach upon her face. Then she had swayed forward, snatched something from the table, and broke it upon the floor.

      “My God, Kate, forgive me!”

      He sank down into a chair and buried his head in his arms upon the table. Catherine bent over him, her hands resting on his shoulders.

      “Oh, my beloved, I had dreaded this.”

      He groaned.

      “Miserable beast that I am!”

      “No, no, you are tired, you are not yourself. Come with me, come with me, lie in my arms—and rest.”

      He turned and buried his face in the warmth of her bosom.

      “Thank God you were awake,” he said.

      CHAPTER VII

       Table of Contents

      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 æsthetician, 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 ’eard 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