Doomsday. Warwick Deeping

      Arnold Furze struck back along the lane, and turned into the Gore Field by the gate opposite the pond. He had blown out his lantern, for in truth it had not been needed after its lighting of Mary Viner down the steps and along the path, with the moon's silver lamp rising in the sky. Furze loitered here, one arm along the bar of the gate, the old thorn trees in the hedge making a shaggy blackness, and the Gore sloping away from his feet like a mirror that has been breathed upon.

      His sheep were pastured here, for he preferred to run them on the grass to folding them on a root crop, and at the end of the field and under the shelter of the Gore Wood were the pens and shelters of hurdles and faggots where the lambing ewes and their lambs were kept snug for the first few days. But for the moment Furze was not thinking of his ewes. He was thinking of Mary Viner and her big brown eyes with their smoking lashes, and her quick changes of colour, and her air of breathlessness. A creature so easily scared and silenced—so he thought. And sensitive, and not too happy. Yet, she puzzled him, and he, supposed that he did not know much about women. He had been too busy doing things. But her moods and their expressions seemed to blow this way and that like brown leaves on a March day; she appeared to be moved by vague currents that would not have been perceived by his stronger nature. She was yea and nay all in one breath, giving him the impression of a palpitating, warm-blooded bird. Her refusing to enter his house—for instance, and then her coming in, and the queer blight that had swept suddenly over her face after he had closed the door of Mrs. Damans' parlour. Certainly, he had hesitated about asking her in, for never till that moment had he realized the almost sordid poverty of his house. It had come upon him in a flash when he had seen her there with the white jug pressed to her bosom, and her brown eyes all glimmering. It had come as a shock. He had put out a hand and closed that other door because he had felt that house's nakedness and was suddenly ashamed of it.

      What had she thought of his room with its rough tables and its litter and its deplorable old chair? It must have seemed to her a squalid hole. And what if the seeming squalor of it had attached itself to her impression of him? He was conscious of a gust of mortification.

      She would not understand—perhaps—how he had had to labour incessantly and furiously in the service of the soil, and that he had had neither the time nor the patience nor the money to be fastidious? He had just succeeded in keeping clean. But that room, and Mary sitting on the edge of the chair as though she was not sure of it, and her air of rigid decorum, and her half-frightened eyes, and her hurry to be gone!

      "Damn!" he said, and flung away from the gate and down the field. "I can't afford sentiment—at present."

      For the rest of the night, under the waning moon and the shepherding stars, he was kept busy. Crouching in one of the shelters, with his lamp hung from a forked stake, he had to succour one of the ewes. It was life and death in the sheep pen, with the moon paling and the stars going over, and a little whispering wind coming with the dawn, and Furze, like the eternal shepherd, losing life and saving it. In the greyness of the dawn the poor ewe lay dead, and Furze, tired and grave eyed, went up the slope of the Gore with a new-born lamb wrapped up in his coat.

      Passing through the gate he met Will Blossom coming to his day's work, and the two men looked at the little, long-legged creature.

      "I'm sorry to have lost that ewe, Will."

      "They will die, sir."

      The blue eyed man spoke as though dying was a natural cussedness.

      "You'll give he the bottle."

      Furze smiled, and stroked the lamb's head.

      "Bring me up an armful of hay, Will. The little fellow can lodge in my room."

      So Bobbo sat and watched a little bleating thing lying on a sack on his master's bed, while Furze routed out an old hamper, and filled it with hay, and put the orphan to bed beside the fire. Bobbo was a very wise dog; he knew all about sheep and their stupidities, and the mischievous vagaries of young cattle. The lamb was as safe with him as it would have been with its own mother.

      Furze looked from the lamb to the dog.

      "Gentle, Bobbo. We've got to be gentle, old chap, to all such things."

      The dog's amber eyes stared up at him devotedly. The night was over, but the day's work waited, and Furze went into the kitchen to wash.

      2

      There were other ministrations at "Green Shutters" where two old people lay propped up in bed, with all the sitting-room cushions brought into use because the number of the Viner pillows were limited. They coughed separately and they coughed in chorus, poor old Hesketh very red in the face, and Mrs. Charlotte all fluffed up like a sick bird. They were very much worried about each other.

      "I'm afraid I shall keep you awake, dear."

      "I shall do that myself, my love. You are the one to be pitied."

      "I could not sleep—anyway—Hesketh. I should be sitting up with you. It must have been that wretched 'bridge' party. The Vachetts had terrible colds."

      And Mary was cumbered with much serving. She had a fire to light in the old people's bedroom, and Dr. Ransford had given her instructions to keep it up, and they were to have their medicine during the night, and some warm milk if they fancied it. She was in no mood for bed or the prospect it offered her of emerging from the warmth of it every two hours to put coals on the fire or to pour out medicine. An arm-chair in front of the sitting-room fire seemed to her a more practical and comfortable proposition, for she had a book to read, if she chose to read it. Moreover, bed might have proved too persuasive, and her duties have sunk submerged beneath a healthy young woman's need of sleep.

      Mary belonged to a generation that values comfort, and though she had had no chance of experiencing the complete flavour of it, her sensitive nostrils could quiver over the imagined perfume. Her parents' ideas upon comfort were utterly different from her own, and to express her ideal of it she arranged the two arm-chairs in front of the fire, and curling up in one of them, disposed of her legs and feet in the other. She had brought her pillow down from her bedroom, and collected her novel, and two or three copies of the weekly illustrated magazines lent her by Winnifred Twist. A box of chocolates would have completed the illusion.

      For it was an illusion. She had just snuggled down and opened the Bystander when she heard the rapping of her father's stick on the floor of the room above. She was wanted. She had to get out of her two chairs and go upstairs where a night-light was burning, throwing the shadows of two heads upon the wall. The room had a flat, warm, stuffy smell.

      "Mary, dear, your father feels so sick."

      "Get me—a basin," said her father, with the anxious and earthy face of a man urgently in need of it.

      She was just in time. She steadied the basin for him, and when the paroxysm was over and he crouched there panting, she supported his poor old head against her bosom. How deplorably thin the back of his neck looked. She too was feeling overwhelmed by a sense of nausea, and the stuffy heat of the room. But how beastly of her! Though somehow—she could not help it.

      Her mother was twittering.

      "You had better empty the basin."

      Of course she would have to empty the basin when her father felt secure without it.

      "Can you manage now, daddy?"

      Captain Viner's head was back on the pillow.

      "Yes, my dear, thank you. But I think I will have it on a chair."

      She carried the basin away, emptied it, washed it, and returning, placed it on a chair beside the bed. Was there anything else she could do for them? No, not for the moment. They were grateful to her, nicely appreciative.

      "Sorry to give you all this trouble, child."

      "O,—that's all right, daddy."

      She patted his old hand with its blue veins and shiny and mottled skin, and closed the door gently,