A WOMAN’S WAR
A Novel
BY
WARWICK DEEPING
AUTHOR OF
“BESS OF THE WOODS”
“THE SLANDERERS”
ETC.
LONDON AND NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
MCMVII
Copyright, 1907, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
_All rights reserved._
Published June, 1907.
TO
COULSON KERNAHAN
MY FATHER’S FRIEND—AND MINE
IN MEMORY OF
MANY GENEROUS WORDS—AND DEEDS
A WOMAN’S WAR
CHAPTER I
There was a ripple of chimes through the frosty air as Catherine
Murchison turned from King’s Walk into Lombard Street, and saw the moon
shining white and clear between the black parapets and chimney-stacks of
the old houses. St. Antonia’s steeple was giving the hour of three, and
a babel of lesser tongues answered from the silence of the sleeping
town. Hoar-frost glittered on the cypresses that stood in a garden
bounding the road, and the roofs were like silver under the hard,
moonlit sky.
Catherine Murchison stopped before the great red-brick house with its
white window-sashes, and its Georgian air of solidity and comfort. The
brass lion’s-head on the door seemed to twinkle a welcome to her above
the plate that carried her husband’s name. She smiled to herself as she
drew the latch-key from the pocket under her sables, the happy smile of
a woman who comes home with no searchings of the heart. Several
shawl-clad figures went gliding along under the shadows of the
cypresses, giving her good-night with a flutter of laughter and tapping
of shoes along the stones. Catherine waved her hand to the beshawled
ones as they scurried home, and caught a glimpse of St. Antonia’s spire
diademed by the winter stars. She remembered such a night seven years
ago, and man’s love and mother’s love had come to her since then.
Catherine closed the door gently, knowing that her husband would be
asleep after a hard day’s work. It was not often that he went with her
to the social gatherings of Roxton. Professional success, fraught with
the increasing responsibilities thereof, brightened his own fireside for
him, and Catherine his wife would rather have had it so. James Murchison
was no dapper drawing-room physician. The man loved his home better than
the dinner-tables of his patients. He was young, and he was ambitious
with his grave and purposeful Saxon sanity. His wife took the social
yoke from off his shoulders, content in her heart to know that she had
made the man’s home dear to him.
A standard-lamp was burning in the hall, the light streaming under a
red-silk shade upon the Oriental rugs covering the mellow and much
polished parquetry. There were a few old pictures on the walls, pewter
and brass lighting the dead oak of an antique dresser. Catherine
Murchison looked round her with a breathing in of deep content. She
unwrapped the shawl from about her hair, rich russet red hair that waved
in an aureole about her face. Her sable cloak had swung back from her
bosom, showing the black ball-dress, red over the heart with a knot of
hothouse flowers. There was a wholesome and generous purity in the white
curves of her throat and shoulders.
Catherine laid her cloak over an old Dutch chair, and turned to the
table where fruits, biscuits, and candles had been left for her. Her
husband’s gloves lay on the table, and his hat with one of Gwen’s dolls
tucked up carefully herein. Catherine’s eyes seemed to mingle thoughts
of child and man, as she ate a few biscuits and looked at Miss Gwen’s
protégé stuffed into the hat. James Murchison had had a long round that
day, with the cares and conflicts of a man who labors to satisfy his own
conscience. Catherine hoped not to wake him; she had even refused to be
driven home lest the sound of wheels should carry a too familiar warning
to his ears. She lit her candle, and, reaching up, turned out the lamp.
Her feet were on the first step of the stairs when a streak of light in
the half-darkness of the hall brought her to a halt.
Some one had left the lamp burning in her husband’s study. She stepped
back across the hall, and hesitated a moment as other thoughts occurred
to her. Housebreaking was a dead art in Roxton, and she smiled at the
melodramatic imaginings that had seized her for the moment.
A reading-lamp stood on the table before the fire, that had sunk to a
dull and dirty red in the smokeless grate. The walls of the room were
panelled with books and the glass faces of several instrument
cabinets—the room of no mere specialist, no haunter of one alley in the
metropolis of intelligence. On the sofa lay the figure of a man asleep,
his deep breathing audible through the room.
To the wife there was nothing strange in finding her husband sleeping
the sleep of the tired worker before the dying fire. Her eyes had a
laughing tenderness in them, a sparkle of mischief, as she set down the
candle and moved across the room. Her feet touched something that rolled
under her dress. She stooped, and looked innocent enough as she picked
up an empty glass.
“James—”
There was mirth in the voice, but her eyes showed a puzzled intentness
as she noticed the things that stood beside the lamp upon the table. An
open cigar-box, a tray full of crumbled ash and blackened matches, a
couple of empty syphons, a decanter standing in an ooze of spilled
spirit. Memory prompted her, and she smiled at the suggestion. Porteus
Carmagee, that prattling, white-bobbed maker of wills and codicils had
slipped in for a smoke and a gossip. James Murchison never touched
alcohol, and the inference was obvious enough, for her experience of Mr.
Carmagee’s loquacity justified her in concluding that he had droned her
husband to sleep.
Wifely mischief was in the ascendant on the instant. She stooped over
the sleeping man whose face was in the shadow, put her lips close to
his, and drew back with a little catching of the breath. The room seemed
to grow dark and very cold of a sudden. She straightened, and stood
rigid, staring across the room with a sense of hurrying at the heart.
Then, as though compelling herself, she lifted the lamp, and held it so
that the light fell full upon her husband’s face.