Doomsday. Warwick Deeping

a silly, shy male pride, and after a moment of mortification?

      "That's not my job," he thought; "it should be hers."

      He closed the door deliberately and firmly, but his hand remained on the handle. He had gone down into sudden deep thought, and the candle, tilted askew, dripped grease upon the floor. He did not notice it. "Hers." And who was she? Was she the woman? Were hers the hands that were to complete the rough-hewn product of his labour, to give the soft and delicate touches to the home, to bring a sense of tenderness and beauty into it? Flowers, and soft fabrics, and pretty human things, human because of their association, and the soft breathing of her about the house, and the spell of her presence?

      Something very deep stirred in him. Five years of loneliness, and all that he had lacked! He began to yearn for it now with a fierceness that was part of his man's nature. He was not a man to love easily or soon. Oak, deep rich soil, tough fibre, a devotion that could be tragic. He stirred like a man in his sleep, and all the while the dog watched him. He became aware of the guttering candle and the grease on the floor.

      "Dear heart,—it is time. The spring is here."

      He smiled. His deep blue eyes had light in them. He went and opened the door leading to the old staircase, and climbing it, passed slowly from room to room. He stood in the centre of each of them, looking gravely and intently round. Yes—this should be the woman's room, the one looking south over the roof of Mrs. Damaris' parlour and her garden. He must do something with that garden.

      He came down again to the fire, to find the dog standing absolutely still beside his chair, waiting and watching for him.

      "Dreams, old chap."

      The dog's cool nose nudged his hand.

      Dreams? But why should it be a dream?

      CHAPTER V

       Table of Contents

      1

      Colonel Sykes had finished his tea, and was standing at the window of the "Simla" dining-room, lighting a cigarette, and looking uncommonly complacent over it. He was tallish and slim, with a birdlike head and a high colour and very English blue eyes. He wore an eyeglass. His hair, growing thin, was of a dubious and yellowish brown, and most carefully spread like thin butter on a brown loaf. He looked youngish for eight and fifty, because of his slimness and his colour, but when that colour was examined more closely it lost much of its youthfulness, being a stippling of minute and twisted blood vessels. His appearance must have caused Colonel Sykes to pay much attention to detail. He shaved twice a day, so that he should never be caught with an incipient crop of grey stubble upon his chin. He was mostly seen in golfing clothes, grey, very baggy as to the knickers, with a blue and yellow "pull-over" under the coat, the stockings a soft fawn. He was alert, loquacious, and emphatic, and at emphatic moments he would drop his eye-glass out of his eye. His friendly loquacity was such that at times he would talk to his own reflection in a mirror.

      Colonel Sykes was a bachelor. Behind him his cook-housekeeper was clearing away the tea things from the oak table. An immensely tall woman, and incredibly ugly, with a broad flat colourless face, a black moustache, and grey hairs on her chin, she had been with Colonel Sykes for seven years. Her name was Death, Mrs. Jane Death. "Cheerful name" as the colonel put it—"and safe." Having lived the life, he appreciated safety. No chance of any romantic foibles being attached to Jane Death. "Might as well consider a little riskiness with Cleopatra's needle."

      Colonel Sykes completed the lighting of his cigarette and threw the match into a brass ash-tray on his writing table. The woman was still clearing the table, and he glanced a little testily over his left shoulder. What a time she was about it!

      The door closed upon the straight immensity of this black figure and china jiggering on a metal tea-tray. The colonel faced about and dropped his eye-glass. The thought had been recurring of late that Mrs. Death was becoming a little too authoritative. "Knows too much about me, damn it!" Which she did. Also, there was another reason for Toby Sykes' reaction against the funereal finality of the woman's name. Death? Not a bit of it. He was feeling young, sentimentally and benignly young, a well-tailored Orpheus capable of leading life back out of the shades, a bachelor Orpheus whose young old fingers were fidgeting to twang the strings of a romantic and domestic lyre! The inspiration piqued his mature youthfulness.

      Over the mantelpiece hung a mirror of the Regency period, and Colonel Sykes wandered firewards to look at himself in the mirror, carefully and with a certain complacent primness. He passed a hand over the back of his head, and gathering his eye-glass, adjusted it into his left eye.

      "Capital, capital! Splendid, splendid!"

      Notable words during the war, for the junior members of his mess had caught their colonel on one occasion in this very same pose, and addressing his own reflection. Irreverently they had christened him the "Parrot." Those words served him in every sort of crisis, or when he was feeling young, or had accepted a cigar, or wished to be sporting at golf, or to praise some noble sentiment.

      "Splendid! Capital!"

      He returned to the window, and from it he could look down the cinder Via Sacra he had created, and command the various homesteads, and by shifting his position a little he was able to obtain a view of a portion of the Viners' back garden. The Jamiesons had planted a golden privet hedge against a portion of the boundary fence and over the top of this hedge Colonel Sykes beheld a deck chair and a young woman sitting in it. It was an April day and warm, but the young woman was all wrapped up, April herself convalescing after March.

      The Colonel's eyes grew sentimental.

      "Poor child—poor little Mary."

      Twenty-six was she! And he felt less than forty, and was quite sure that he could pass for forty-five. Splendid, splendid! Capital, capital! A pretty, affectionate, dark-eyed creature was Mary Viner, a young woman who stayed at home and did her job, God bless her, without much jam on her bread. The poor old Viners were very dull people, anecdotal sit-by-the-fire folk, and the woman Death would have made a much more suitable nurse for them than a pretty girl who ought to have been eating chocolates out of a box.

      Colonel Sykes stroked his chin and considered the girl in the deck chair. Poor little Mary! Life was rather hard for her, nothing but the filling of hot water bottles for a couple of amiable old bores; and there she was sunning herself after a nasty bout of 'flu. She needed a month at the seaside or in Switzerland, away from Harold Coode's patched shirt and his devotion, and the voices and the strawberry jam faces of the Jamieson children. Blatant people those Jamiesons. Sorry he had sold the land to them. And Coode was the sort of fellow who took off his hat when he met a funeral. Quite right—of course—and proper, but Coode would do it with too much nobility, or as though it was the one and only funeral he had ever met.

      Colonel Sykes collected copies of Punch, and the Graphic, and the Bystander. Not that he needed an excuse to wander into the "Green Shutters" garden, and stand with an air of tender distinction beside Mary's chair. How was she to-day? Better? Capital, capital; splendid—splendid! For he was beginning to feel himself a veritable Lochinvar destined to snatch her up and carry her off to a world of sentimental happening. He was sure that she would make a sweet wife. He would buy a new car, teach her to play golf, and rid himself of the Death woman.

      Pausing with his bundle of magazines he looked with sentimental blue eyes in the direction of the gentle lady. Someone was coming up the cinder road, a man in a grey green suit, and wearing new brown boots that glistened. That fellow Furze—"Captain Furze!" To Colonel Sykes there was no incongruity in the reverting of a temporary captain to the status of a milkman, but when he saw Furze stop at the "Green Shutters" gate he felt challenged. What did the chap want there? Had he called for his money? The Viners were never anything but hard up. And the fellow could not be allowed to dun the household when Mary was lying there convalescing.

      Obviously—no! Colonel Toby