It was the afternoon of a February day when Murchison stopped before the theatre in Wilton High Street, for the colliery town delighted in melodrama, and pulling out a pigskin purse, examined the contents with critical consideration. He had saved a few shillings by stinting himself in tobacco, and in his daily lunch at a cheap eating-house near Dr. Tugler’s surgery. The pantomime “Puss in Boots” was still running at the theatre, and at the box-office Murchison bought four tickets for the upper circle.
In the old days the children had gone up yearly to Drury Lane, and Master Jack had been making many allusions to the gaudy “posters” covering a hoarding near the row of red brick villas. More than once the boy’s thoughtless words had hurt the father’s heart. It was chiefly of Gwen that Murchison thought as he thrust the envelope with its yellow slips into his breast-pocket.
At Clovelly, Catherine, her sleeves turned up, stood in the little back kitchen making a suet-pudding. The Murchisons had dispensed with a servant because of the expense, for their income had practically no margin, and money had to be scraped together to pay the yearly dividend on the husband’s life-insurance. Catherine’s mother, a somewhat stern, pious, and bedridden old lady, living in a respectable south-coast town, allowed her daughter a small sum each year. Mrs. Pentherby was the possessor of a comfortable income, but suffered from a meanness of mind and a severity of prejudice that had made her rather merciless to Murchison in the hour of his misfortune. Such money as she sent was to be spent “solely on the children.” Catherine’s face had often reddened over the contents of her mother’s drastic and didactic letters. Her love and her loyalty were hurt by the old lady’s blunt and Puritanical advice. As for James Murchison, he had too much pride to ever dream of touching Mrs. Pentherby’s “ear-marked” donations to his children.
On several occasions a five-pound note had reached Clovelly anonymously from another quarter. Murchison had suspected Porteus Carmagee of this noiseless generosity, but he had been unable to discover whence the money came. The little lawyer of Lombard Street alone knew how the phenomenal damages accorded to Mrs. Baxter by a sentimental jury had swept away all Murchison’s savings, and even the money realized by the sale of his furniture and his car. Yet these five-pound notes were always placed in Catherine’s hands, to be deposited in the post-office savings-bank in Gwendolen Murchison’s name. At Christmas a huge hamper had reached them from Roxton, a hamper whose bulk had symbolized the abundant kindness of Miss Carmagee’s virgin heart. Friends in adversity are friends worthy of honor, and Miss Carmagee, good woman, had packed the hamper with her own fat and generous hands.
Catherine, her fore-arms white with flour, stood in the little back kitchen, tying a piece of cloth over the pudding-bowl before sinking it in the steaming saucepan on the fire. The winter day was drawing towards twilight. Mists hung over the black canal. Through the windows could be seen the zinc roofs of a number of storage sheds attached to the buildings of a steam-mill.
In the front parlor the horse-hair sofa had been drawn beneath the window, and Gwen, her golden head on a faded blue cushion, lay, trying a new frock on a great wax doll. The child’s eyes looked big and strange in her pale face, and the blue veins showed through the pearly skin. Apathy in a child is pathetic in its unnaturalness, the more so when the sparkle of health has but lately left the eager eyes. Gwen had whitened like a plant deprived of life. Her black-socked legs were no longer brown and chubby. She had the unanimated and drooping look of a child languid under the spell of some insidious disease.
The garden gate closed with a clash as Master Jack came crunching up the gravel-path, swinging his ragged school-books at the end of a strap. He grimaced at Gwen, and rang the bell with the cheerful verve of youth, for John Murchison was a sturdy ragamuffin, capable of adapting himself to changed surroundings. The young male is a creature of mental resilience and resource. Toys were fewer, puddings plainer, parties unknown. But a boy can find treasures in a rubbish heap and mystery in the dirty waters of a canal.
Master Jack’s return from school was usually a noisy incident. He appeared loud and emphatic, an infallible autocrat of eight.
“I say—I’m hungry.”
Bang went the books into a corner of the hall. For the hundredth time Catherine reproved her son, and insisted on Master Jack’s “primers” being put in order on the proper shelf. The boy, much under compulsion, stooped for those battered symbols of civilization, disclosing in the act a disastrous rent in his blue serge knickers.