“Is she?” and he sighed.
“We had quite a long walk to-day before it began to rain.”
They spoke in undertones, Murchison leaning over Gwen’s little bed. He looked at her very lovingly, as though wishing to feel her small arms about his neck.
“Good-night, little one. Good-night, Mischief Jack,” and he turned to his wife with the air of a man repeating a solemn and nightly prayer.
CHAPTER XXI
Failure is bitter enough in itself to a man of energy and strength of purpose, but more bitter still are the humiliations and the sufferings that failure may impose on those he loves.
Reputation, resources, his very home, had been swallowed up, but in Murchison there was that dogged northern spirit, that stubborn uplift against odds, that is at its strongest when confronted with defeat. Like a man brought to the edge of a black cliff at night, he had looked down grimly into the depths, depths that waited not for him alone, but for the innocent children who held his hands.
As a cheap assistant in a colliery town, James Murchison had joined issue with his own unfitness for the ordeal of life. A tight-mouthed and rather silent man, he had entered upon the rebuilding of his self-respect with the dogged patience of a Titan. The little, red brick villa, with the dirty piece of waste land in front and the black canal behind, might have suggested no stage for heroic drama to the casual eyes of Murchison’s neighbors. The big, brown-faced man stalked to and fro to work, quiet and unobtrusive, a figure that was soon familiar to most of the middle-class people who lived on either side. He seemed one of those many mortals who move through life without a history, an ant in an ant world, busy, monotonously busy, earning his paltry pounds a week, without glamour, and without fame.
Man suffers most in seeing those dear to him in suffering, and the tragic tones of life are caught from the lips of those he loves. The wounds of a wife or of a child are open in the heart of the husband or father. Remorse or self-accusation, if there be cause for such a feeling, is as the vinegar on the sponge to the man crucified by his own sin. One has but to come in contact with the material side of civilization to discover how desperately sordid this twentieth-century life can be. How great the contrast was between Roxton lying amid its woods and meadows, and the dismal colliery town, Murchison, as a father, realized too soon. The one smelled of the fresh earth, primal and invigorating; the other of soap-works, soot, cabbage-water, and rancid oil. In Roxton the mortality was low; in the colliery town hundreds of infants died yearly before they were four weeks old.
Such realism, the vivid heritage of thousands, might well make a man go grimly through life, the burden of care very heavy on his shoulders.