“Yes, for God’s sake, do!”
The other two men came out from the consulting-room, and crossed the hall sheepishly, without looking at Catherine. She turned, and reascended the stairs, leaving to Reynolds the task of watching by her husband. The sound of a small fist beating on the nursery door seemed to echo the loud throbbing of her heart. She steadied herself, choked back her anguish, unlocked the door, and went in to her children.
“Muvver, muvver!” Gwen’s eyes were full of tears.
“Yes, darling, yes.”
“Is daddy ill?”
“Daddy—daddy is ill,” and she took the two frightened children in her arms, and wept.
CHAPTER XIX
By certain scientific thinkers life is held to be but a relative term, and the “definitions” of the ancients have been cast aside into the very dust that they despised as gross and utterly inanimate. Whether radium be “alive” or no, the thing we ordinary mortals know as “life” shows even in its social aspects a significant sympathy with the Spencerian definition. The successful men are those who react and respond most readily, and most selfishly to the externals of existence. Vulgarly, we call it the seizing of opportunities, though the clever merchant may react almost unconsciously and yet instinctively to the market of the public mind. All life is an adjustment of relationships, of husband to wife, of mother to child, of cheat to dupe, of capital to labor.
Thus, in social death, so to speak, a man may be so placed that he is unable to adapt himself to his surroundings. His reputation dies and disintegrates like a body that is incapable of adjusting itself to some blighting change of climate. Or, in the terminology of physics, responsible repute may be likened to an obelisk whose instability increases with its height. A flat stone may remain in respectable and undisturbed equilibrium for centuries. The poised pinnacle is pressed upon by every wind that blows.
The fall of some such pinnacle is a dramatic incident in the experience of the community. The noise thereof is in a hundred ears, and the splintered fragments may be gaped at by the crowd. Thus it had been with James Murchison in Roxton town. Neither doctors nor engine-drivers are permitted to indulge in drink, and in Murchison’s case the downfall had been the more dramatic by his absolute refusal to qualify the disgrace. An inquest, an unflattering finding by the coroner’s jury, a case for damages threatening to be successfully instituted by an outraged widow. Amid such social humiliations the brass plate had disappeared abruptly from the door of the house in Lombard Street. It was as though Murchison’s pride had accepted the tragic climax with all the finality of grim despair. He had even made no attempt to sell the practice, but, like Cain, he had gone forth with his wife and with his children, too sensitive in his humiliation to brave the ordeal of reconquering a lost respect.