James Murchison was silent. Yet in his heart there burned the fierce conviction that the father’s frailty had been visited upon the innocent body of the child.
Four o’clock had struck, and the houses were casting long shadows across the waters of the canal, before Murchison turned in at the gate of Clovelly after three hours visiting in the Wilton slums. He let himself in silently with his latch-key, hung his hat and coat in the hall, and entered the little front room where tea was laid on the imitation walnut table. On the sofa by the window he found Catherine asleep, her head resting against the wall. It was as though sheer weariness, the spell of many sleepless nights, had fallen on her, and that but a momentary slacking of her self-control had suffered nature to assert her sway.
Murchison stood looking at his wife in silence. Sleep had wiped out much of the sorrow from her face, and she seemed beautiful as Beatrice dreaming strange dreams upon the walls of heaven. A stray strand of March sunlight had woven itself into her hair. Her hands lay open beside her on the sofa, open, palms upward, with a quaint suggestion of trustfulness and appeal. To Murchison it seemed that if God but saw her thus, such prayers as she had uttered would be answered out of pity for the brave sweetness of her womanhood.
If peace lingered in sleep, there would be sorrow in her waking. Murchison was loath to recall her to the world of coarse reality and unpitying truth. A great tenderness, a strong man’s tenderness for a woman and a wife, softened his face as he watched the quiet drawing of her breath. And yet what ultimate kindness could there be in such delay? Life and death are but the counterparts of day and night.
Catherine awoke with a touch of her husband’s hand upon her cheek. She sighed, put out her arms to him, a consciousness of pain vivid at once upon her face.
“You here!”
She put her hands up to her forehead.
“I never meant to sleep. What a long day you must have had!”
“It is better that I should work.”
“Yes.”