“Muvver, muvver!” and a doll’s red pelisse was waved over the window-sill. Catherine felt all her womanhood yearn longingly towards the child.
“Muvver. I’ve spelled a whole page. Daddy’s gone out. May I come wid you?”
Catherine shook her head, her eyes very bright with tenderness under her blue sunshade. How little the child realized the grim beneathness of life!
“No, dear, no. I shall be back soon. Ask Mary to take you for a walk in the meadows,” and she passed on with a lingering look at the red pelisse and the golden curls.
Porteus Carmagee, white as to waistcoat, brown as to face, jumped up briskly from his well-worn leather chair when his head clerk announced Mrs. Catherine Murchison. The lawyer, despite his eccentricities, was a keen and tenacious man of business, the emphasis of whose advice might have impressed an audience more cynical than the English House of Commons. He had a habit of snapping at his syllables with a vindictive sincerity that stimulated nervous clients suffering from the neurasthenia of indecision.
“What!—a professional visit? My dear Kate, this is a most portentous event; all my musty deeds must blush into new pink tape. Sit down. Do you want damages against your washerwoman for spoiling the underlinen? Believe me—I have been asked to advise on such questions. Ah, and how did your husband like my port?”
An inward shudder swept through Catherine. The memories of that night at Marley Down were brutally vivid to her, like the bizarre dreams of a feverish sleep remembered in the morning. Porteus had been the innocent cause of all this misery. Tell him she could not, that his very kindness had brought her husband to the brink of ruin.
“We ought to have thanked you”—and the words clung to her throat. “James has had one of his attacks of nervous depression and an endless amount of worry.”
Porteus Carmagee’s keen brown eyes sparkled with intentness as he watched her face. She looked white, uneasy, haggard about the mouth, like one who has suffered from the strain of perpetual self-repression. Catherine had always moved before him as a serene being, a woman whose face had symbolized the quiet splendor of an evening sky. He had often quoted her as one of the few people in the world whose happiness displayed itself in the beauty of radiant repose. The stain of suffering on her face was new to him, and the more remarkable for that same reason.
“You speak of worries, Kate. Am I to be concerned in them as a fatherly friend?”