A Woman's War. Warwick Deeping

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 a pace 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 drawing-room 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 cœur 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. He 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, brown-faced 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 C₂H₅OH. 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.

      “C₂H₅OH, 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 drawing-room, 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—the Murchisons 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 C₂H₅OH stand for, Parker?”

      “C₂H₅OH! What on earth have you to do with chemical formulæ?”

      “Answer my question.”

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

      CHAPTER VIII

       Table of Contents

      Porteus Carmagee, the lawyer, and his sister lived in Lombard Street, in a grim, blind-eyed, stuccoed house with laurels in tubs before it, and chains and posts defending an arid stretch of shingle. There was something about the house that suggested law, a dry and close-mouthed look that was wholly on the surface. Porteus Carmagee was a little man, who forever seemed spluttering and fuming under some grievance. He was hardly to be met without an irritable explosion against his own physical afflictions, the delinquencies of tradesmen and Radicals, or the sins of the boy who brought the morning paper. The lawyer’s almost truculent attitude towards the world was largely the result of “liver”; his sourness was on the surface; one glimpse of him cutting capers with Kate Murchison’s children would dissipate the notion that he was a cadaverous and crusty hater of mankind.

      Miss Phyllis Carmagee was remarkable for the utter unfitness of her Christian name, and for the divine placidity that contrasted with her brother’s waspishness. A big, moon-faced, ponderous woman, she was a rock of composure, a species of human banyan-tree under whose blessed branches a hundred fretful mortals might rest in the shade. Her detractors, and they were few, asserted that she was a mere