CHAPTER XXV
The windows of Parker Steel’s consulting-room looked out on the garden at the back of the house, where Lent lilies were already swinging their golden heads over borders of crocuses, purple, yellow, and white. The lower part of the window was screened by a wire gauze blind, and the red serge curtains were looped back close to the shutters.
However drab and dismal it may be, a physician’s consulting-room has much of the mystery that shadows the confessional of the priest. The uninitiated enter with a pleasurable sense of awe. Wisdom seems to admonish them from her temple of text-books piled up solemnly in the professional bookcase. There is an air of suave confidence and quiet reserve about the room. Even the usual Turkey carpet suggests comfortable sympathy and the touch of the healing hand.
Even as it is unnatural to suspect a priest of the sins he rebukes in others, so to the lay mind the physician appears as a being above the diseases that he treats. There is always something illogical in a doctor needing his own physic. And yet of all men he is the last that can boast of the bliss of ignorance. He knows the curses that afflict man in the flesh, how grim and inevitable his own end may be. He is too well aware of the malignant significance of symptoms, and a month of dyspepsia may reduce him to a state of morbid and half hypocondriacal self-introspection. It is told of a great surgeon how he lay awake all through one night imagining that he had discovered an aneurism of his aorta. It is dangerous to know too little, but on occasions it may be desperately unpleasant to know too much.
It was a serious and rather worried figure that moved to and fro in the lofty room, as the March day drew towards a dreary close. The house was silent, a depressing silence, suggestive of stagnation and cynical melancholy. A fitful wind set the tops of the cypress-trees swaying and jerking in the garden. The only living thing visible from Dr. Steel’s window was a black cat stalking birds under the shadow of a bank of laurels.
Parker Steel had taken off his coat and folded it carefully over the back of a chair. He stood by the window, fumbling at his cuff-links, a preoccupied frown pinching up the skin of his forehead above the thin, acquisitive nose. After turning up his shirt-sleeves, he picked up a pocket-lens from the table and focused the light upon the forefinger of his right hand.
The hand that held the lense trembled very perceptibly. On the right forefinger, immediately above the base of the nail, a dull red papule stood out upon the skin. It was clearly circumscribed in outline, and hard to the touch. Parker Steel noticed all these details with the strained air of a man scrutinizing an unpleasant statement of accounts.
Presently he laid the lens down on the flap of the bureau by the window, and, unbuttoning his waistcoat, passed his left hand under his shirt and vest. The deft fingers half buried themselves in the hollow of his right armpit. Parker Steel’s eyes had a peculiar, hard, staring look, the expression seen in the eyes of the expert whose whole intelligence is concentrated for the moment in the sense of touch. His lower lip fell away slightly from his teeth. Sharp lines of strain were visible upon his forehead.
“Good Lord!”
The words escaped from him involuntarily as he drew his hand out from under his shirt. The smooth face had grown suddenly haggard and sallow, and there was a glint of ugly fear in the eyes. Parker Steel stood staring at his hand, his mouth open, the lips softening as the lips of a coward soften when his manhood melts before some physical ordeal. The dapper figure has lost its alertness, its neat and confident symmetry, and had become the loose and slouching figure of a man suffering from shock.
Parker Steel roused himself at last, forced back his shoulders, and walked slowly towards the door. He turned the key in the lock, and stood listening a moment before picking up a hand-mirror from among the multifarious books and papers on the table. Returning to the window, he peered at the reflection of his own face, furtively, as though dreading what he might discover. The sallow skin was blemishless as yet. Not a spot or blur showed from the line of the hair to the clean curve of the well-shaven chin.
In another minute Parker Steel was turning over the leaves of his journal with impetuous fingers. He worked back page by page, running a finger down each column of names, stopping ever and again to recollect and reconsider. It was on a page dated “February 12th” that he discovered an entry that gave him the final pause.
“Mrs. Rattan, 10 Ford Street. Partus, 5A.M.”
A foot-note had been added at the bottom of the page, a foot-note whose details were significant to the point of proof.
Parker Steel threw the book upon the table.
“Good Lord!”
He looked round him like a man who has taken poison unwittingly, and whose brain refuses to act under the paralyzing pressure of fear. He, Parker Steel, a—! Physician and egoist that he was, he could not bring himself to think the word, to brand himself with the poor fools who crowd the hospitals of great cities. The very vision, a hundred visions such as he had seen in the dingy “out-patient rooms” of old, made the instinct of cleanliness in him sicken and recoil. For Parker Steel had much of the delicate niceness of a cat. This sense of unutterable pollution struck at his vanity and his self-respect.
He moved close to the window, and stood staring over the wire blind into the garden.
Was it not possible that he might be mistaken? He could consult an expert. And yet in the inmost corners of his heart he knew that the truth was merciless towards him.
What then?
The question threw him into a more desperate dilemma. He remembered his wife.
Again, his profession? He would have to abandon it for one year, perhaps for two. And Parker Steel knew that success in professional life is largely a matter of personality. Withdraw that individual power, and the whole structure, like the city of an Eastern fable, may melt abruptly into mist.
Baffled and irritated, a man with no great moral hold on the deeper truths of life, he moved aimlessly about the room, holding his right hand a little from him like one with bleeding fingers, who fears the blood may stain his clothes. The leather-padded consulting-chair stood empty before the table. Parker Steel dropped into it by the casual chance of habit, and sat staring dully at the patterning of the paper on the wall.
It was the ordeal of an egoist unlightened by a signal sense of self-abnegation or of public duty. Mercenary motives and professional ambition prompted a compromise at any hazard. The temptation to procrastinate is ever with us, and the man of the polite world is the most ingenious of sophists. For more than half an hour Parker Steel sat silent and almost motionless in his chair. When he at last left it, it was with the air of a man to whom sanity, the sanity of the self-centred ego, had returned after the hideous doubt and discord of a dream.
The wisest course was for him to temporize, seeing that it was possible that he might be mistaken.
He recognized no immediate need for trusting any one with mere suspicions.
Was he not a physician, and therefore wise as to all precautions?
As for his wife? That was a problem that might have to be considered.
The sound of the front door closing roused him to the needs of the impending present. He noticed to his surprise that it was growing dark, and that the room was full of deepening shadows.
“Is Dr. Steel in, Symons?”
It was his wife’s voice, and Parker Steel slipped into his coat and unlocked the door.
“Tea nearly ready, dear?”
“Parker, are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Any one with you?”
“No. I will be with you in a minute.”
He groped for a box of matches on the mantel-shelf and lit the gas. Turning, he was startled by the reflection of his own white face staring at him mistrustfully from the mirror over the fire. It was as though Parker Steel shirked the glance of his own eyes. He had a sense of unflattering discomfort and deceit as he walked to a glass-fronted cabinet fitted with drawers that stood in one corner of the room.
They were in the middle of tea when Betty Steel glanced at her husband’s hand.
“Have you hurt yourself, Parker?”
“I?”
“Yes. Ah, the bathotic chilblain, of course! Has it broken?”
Her husband felt afraid behind his mask of casual indifference.
“I must have rasped the skin and got some dirt into the place,” he said. “A mere nothing. I have just put on this finger-stall. So you have heard that the De la Mottes are leaving, eh? They were not much good in the town, so far as the practice was concerned?”
Parker Steel’s reply to his wife’s question had flashed a suggestive gleam across his mind. Very probably it was too late for him to defend her against himself. And even if his fears proved true, he could swear absolute ignorance as to the presence of the disease. No guilt attached to him. He was merely striving to neutralize the effects of a damnable and undeserved misfortune.
CHAPTER XXVI
James Murchison, walking along the pavement of Wilton High Street with the sharp, savage strides of a man tortured by his own thoughts, turned into Dr. Tugler’s surgery as the clock struck eight, finding in this stern routine a power to steady him against despair. He slipped off his overcoat, folded it slowly and methodically over the back of a bench, and hung his hat on one of the gas brackets projecting from the wall. To John Tugler, who was seated at one of the tables, examining a girl with a red rash covering her face, there was something in the big man’s slow and restrained patience that betrayed how sorrow was shadowing his assistant’s home.
John Tugler pushed back his chair, and crossed the room to the corner where Murchison was bending over his open instrument bag. The droop of the shoulders, the whole pose of the powerful figure, told of the burden that lay heavy upon the father’s heart.
“Murchison.”
The face that met John Tugler’s was haggard and stupid with two sleepless nights.
“Yes.”
“Any news?”
“Oh—worse,” and he snapped the bag to with an irritable closure of the hands.
John Tugler looked at him as he might have looked at a refractory friend.
“Come now, Murchison, you’re feeling damned bad. Knock off to-day. Stileman and I can manage.”
“Thanks. I must work.”
“Must, eh?”
“It helps.”
“Like punching something when you’re savage. Perhaps you’re right.”
Tugler returned to the girl with the red rash, while Murchison passed on to the surgery, where some half-score patients were waiting to be treated.
“Good-morning,” and he glanced round him like a man in a hurry; “first case. Well, how’s the leg?”
A scraggy, undersized individual with a narrow, swarthy face was pulling up a trousers leg with two dirty, drug-stained hands. He was a worker in a chemical factory, and his ugly, harsh, and suspicious features seemed to have taken the low moral stamp of the place.
“No worse, doct’r.”
“No worse! Well, have you been resting?”
“Half an’ half.”
“I suppose so. You may as well come here and grumble for months unless you do what we tell you. It is quite useless continuing like this.”
He bent down and began to unwind the dirty bandage from the man’s leg. The chemical worker expanded the broad nostrils of his carnivorous nose, sniffed, and cocked a battered bowler onto the back of his head. Manners were not mended in Dr. Tugler’s surgery.
“God’s truth, doct’r, easy with it—”
Murchison had stripped a sodden pad of lint and plaster from the ulcer on the man’s leg.
“Nonsense; that didn’t hurt you.”
“Beg to differ, sir.”
“When did you dress this last?”
The patient hesitated, eying Murchison sulkily as though tempted to be insolent.
“Yesterday.”
“Speak the truth and say three days ago. You’re on your ‘club’—of course.”
“Well, what’s the harm?”
“And you don’t trouble much how long you draw club-money, eh?”
“That’s your business, I reckon.”
“My business, is it? Well, my friend, you carry out my instructions or there will be trouble about the certificate. You understand?”
The man cast an evil look at Murchison’s broad back as he turned to spread boracic ointment on clean lint.
“I don’t know as how I come here to hear your sauce,” he remarked, curtly.
Murchison faced him with an irritable glitter of the eyes.
“What do you mean!”
“I suppose some of us poor fellows cost you gentlemen too much in tow and flannel.”
“There you are just a little at sea, my friend. What we do is to prevent the Friendly Societies being imposed upon by loafers. Dress your leg every day. Rest it, you understand, and keep out of the pubs. You had better come by some manners before next week.”
The chemical worker snarled out some vague retort, and then relapsed into silence. Such shufflers had no pity from James Murchison. He was in no mood that morning to bear with the impertinences of malingerers and humbugs.
The clock struck eleven before the last patient passed out into Wilton High Street with its thundering drays and clanging trams. Murchison had done the work of two men in the surgery that morning, silent, skilful, and determined, a man who worked that the savage smart of sorrow might be soothed and assuaged thereby. With the women and the children he was very gentle and very patient. His hands were never rough and never clumsy. Perhaps none of the people whose wounds he dressed guessed how bitter a wound was bleeding in the heart of this sad-eyed, patient-faced man.
John Tugler sidled in when Murchison had pinned up the last bandage. He swung the door to gently, sighed, and pretended to examine the entries in the ledger. Murchison was washing his hands at the sink, staring hard at the water as it splashed from the tap upon his fingers.
“Not much visiting to-day.”
“No.”
“I’ll hire a cab, and drive down to Black End. Most of them seem to lie that way.”
Murchison was looking for a clean place in the roller-towel.
“I can manage the visiting down there,” he said.
John Tugler surveyed him attentively over a fat shoulder.
“You’ll knock up, old man,” he remarked, quietly.
Murchison started. The familiarity had a touch of tenderness that lifted it from its vulgar setting.
“Thanks, no.”
“Very bad, is she?”
“Comatose.”
“Oh, damn!”
The little man whipped over the leaves of the ledger, as though looking for something that he could not find.
“It seems a beastly shame,” he said, presently.
“Shame?”
“Yes, this sort of smash-up of a youngster’s life. They call it Providence, or the Divine Will, or something of that sort, don’t they? Must say I can’t stick that sort of bosh.”
Murchison was wringing his hands fiercely in the folds of the rough towel.
“It is a natural judgment, I suppose,” he said.
“A judgment?”
“It was my fault that the child ever came here. It need not have been so—” and he broke off with a savage twisting of the mouth.
John Tugler ran one finger slowly across a blank space in the ledger.
“Don’t take it that way,” he said, slowly; “it doesn’t help a man to curse himself because a damned bug of a bacillus breeds in this holy horror of a town. Curse the British Constitution, the law-mongers, or the local money shufflers who’d rather save three farthings than clean their slums.”
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.”
“How is she?”
“The same; I can see no change.”
Catherine rose with a suggestion of effort, and leaned for a moment on her husband’s arm. The impulse seemed simultaneous with them, the impulse that drew them to the room above. They went up together, hand in hand, silent and restrained, two souls awed by the mysteries of death and life.
On the bed by the window lay Gwen, with childishly open yet sightless eyes. A flush of vivid color showed on either cheek, her golden hair falling aside like waves of light about her forehead. Her breathing was tranquil and feeble, and spaced out with a peculiar rhythm. The pupils of the eyes were markedly unequal; one lid drooped slightly, and the right angle of the red mouth was a little drawn.
It is a certain pitiful semblance of health that mocks the heart in many such cases. Children who die thus are often beautiful. They seem to sleep with open eyes. The flush on the cheeks has nothing of the gathering grayness of death.
Catherine, bending low, looked at Gwen with the long look of one who will not see the vanishing torch of hope.
“She is still asleep.”
“Yes, asleep.”
The man’s voice was a tearless echo.
“James, it can’t be. Look, what a color! And the eyes—”
Murchison laid a hand gently on her shoulder.
“I know; I have seen such things before.”
“But she will wake presently?”
“Presently.”
“Yes. This long sleep will do her good.”
Murchison sighed.
“She will not wake for us, wife,” he said.
“Not wake!”
Catherine’s eyes were incredulous, full of the intenseness of a mother’s love.
“No, not here.”
“But look—look at her!”
“That is the pity of it.”
“Then I shall not hear her speak again; she will never see me?”
“Never.”
“But why? I cannot believe—”
“Dear, it is death—the way some children die.”
They stood silent, side by side. Then Catherine bent low; child’s mouth and mother’s mouth met in a long dream kiss. There was a sound of broken, troubled whispering in the room, a sound as of inarticulate tenderness and wordless prayer. Murchison’s right hand covered his face. His wife’s eyes and cheeks were wet with tears.
“Kate.”
She bowed herself over the child, and did not stir.
“No, no, these last hours, they are so precious.”
He looked at her mutely, put a hand to his throat, and turned away. It was too solemn, too poignant a scene for him to outrage it with words. Gwen, dead in life, would see her mother’s face no more.
Murchison was on the stairs when the blare of a tin trumpet seemed to hurt the silence of the little house. An impatient fist was beating a tattoo on the front door. It was the boy Jack come home from school.
Murchison’s mouth quivered, and then hardened. He went to the door, and opened it to a blast of the boy’s trumpet.
“Hallo, I say—”
A strong hand twisted the toy from the boy’s fingers.
“Silence.”
Jack Murchison’s mouth gaped. He looked at his father’s face, wonderingly, grievedly, and was awed into a frightened silence, child egoist that he was, by the expression in his father’s eyes.
Murchison pointed to the sitting-room door.
“Go and sit down.”
The boy obeyed, sullen and a little stupefied. His father closed and locked the door on him, and then passed out into the space behind the house that they called a garden. A few crocuses were gilding the sour, black earth. They were flowers that Gwen had planted before Christmas-time. And Murchison, as he looked at them, thought that she should take them in her little hands to the Great Father of all Children.
CHAPTER XXVII
Miss Carmagee sat crying at the breakfast-table over a letter that she held in her fat, white hand. It was a letter from Catherine, and told of the last resting-place of Gwen, a narrow bed of clay amid white headstones on the Wilson hills. She had been reading the letter aloud to her brother, whose face was a study in the irritable suppression of his feelings.
“Damn that bird!”
The canary in its cage by the window was filling the room with shivers of shrill sound. Porteus pushed his chair back, jerked an antimacassar from the sofa, and flung it over the bird’s cage.
“Go on, dear, go on. I am expecting Dixon to see me in ten minutes.”
Miss Carmagee wiped her spectacles, and blundered on brokenly through the letter. There were eight pages, closely written, and whether it was the indistinctness of Catherine’s writing, or the dimness of Miss Carmagee’s eyes, the old lady’s progress was sluggish in the extreme. She had forgotten to add milk to her untasted cup of tea, and the rashers of bacon on her plate were congealing into unappetizing grease.
Porteus sat fidgeting at the far end of the table. The vitality of his interest betrayed itself in a frowning and jerky spirit of impatience.
“Well, what are they going to do now, eh? Stay on and lose the boy? Murchison ought to have more sense.”
Miss Carmagee’s eyes had assumed an expression of moist surprise behind her spectacles. She appeared to be digesting some unexpected piece of news in silence, and with the amiable forgetfulness of a lethargic mind.
Porteus had handed her his empty cup. Some seconds elapsed before his sister noticed the intrusion of the china.
“Dear, what a coincidence!”
She took the cup and filled it mechanically, her eyes still fixed upon the letter.
“Well, what is it?”
“If only it had happened earlier, the money would have been of use.”
Mr. Porteus betrayed the natural impatience of the energetic male.
“Bless my soul, are you contriving a monopoly?”
Miss Carmagee lifted her mild spectacles to her brother’s face.
“Mrs. Pentherby is dead,” she said.
“Dead!”
“Yes.”
“No extreme loss to the community. Ah—would you—!” and he cast a threatening glance in the direction of the bird-cage at the sound of an insinuating “tweet.” “Well, what about the money?”
The lawyer’s eyes twinkled as though Mrs. Pentherby’s dividends were more interesting than her person.
“She has left nearly all her money and her furniture to Catherine. She died the very same day as Gwen.”
“Pity it wasn’t six months ago. The old lady had some first-class china, and a few fine pictures. Does Catherine say how much?”
“How much what, Porteus?”
“Money, my dear, money.”
“I don’t think she says.”
Her brother pushed back his chair, and glanced briskly at his watch.
“I’ll take it with me,” he said, stretching out a brown and energetic hand for the letter.
“I haven’t quite finished it, Porteus.”
“Never mind; there’s your breakfast getting cold. You had better have some fresh tea made.”
His sister surrendered the letter with a spirit of amiable self-negation.
“The money ought to make a difference to them,” she said, softly, taking off her spectacles and wiping them with slow, pensive hands.
“Money always makes a difference, my dear, especially when people are heroically proud.”
Miss Phyllis Carmagee’s thoughts were towards that gray-skied, slaving, sordid town where Gwen was buried, as she sipped her tea and looked at her brother’s empty chair. She was a woman whom many of her neighbors thought stolid and reserved, a woman not gifted with great powers of self-expression. Friendship with many is a mere gratification of the social ego. The vivacious people who delight in conversationalism, take pleasure in those personalities that are new and pleasing for the moment, even as they are interested in new and complex flowers. To Phyllis Carmagee, however, her friends had more of the enduring dearness of familiar trees. They were part of her consciousness, part of her daily and her yearly life.
Porteus’s sister came by an idea as she sat alone at the breakfast-table that morning. Serene and obese natures are slow in conceiving, yet the concept may have the greater stability for the very slowness of the progress. The crystallization of that idea went on all day, till it was ready to be displayed in its completeness to her brother as he dined. Miss Carmagee had decided to go down to Wilton, and to show that her friendship was worth a long day’s journey. A sentimental and unctuous letter would have sufficed for a mere worldling. But Porteus Carmagee’s sister had that rare habit of being loyal and sincere.
“I should like to see the child’s grave,” she said, quietly, her round, white face very soft and gentle in the light of the shaded lamp; “it seems hard to realize that the little thing is dead. Gwen meant so much to her father. I wonder what they are going to do.”
Porteus Carmagee stared hard at the silver epergne full of daffodils before him on the table. They were at dessert, and alone, with the curtains drawn, and a wood fire burning in the old-fashioned grate. The whole setting of the room spoke of a generation that was past. It suggested solidity and repose, placid kindliness, prosaic comfort.
“Murchison ought never to have left us,” said the lawyer, curtly.
“No.”
“The affair might have blown over in a year.”
“You think so, Porteus.”
“If he had only stuck to his guns. People always wait to see what a man will do. If he skedaddles they draw their own inferences. Life is largely a game of bluff.”
The eyes of brother and sister met in a sudden questioning glance. Possibly the same thought had occurred to both.
“Would it be possible?”
“Possible for what?”
“For James Murchison to come back to Roxton?”
The lawyer reached for his napkin that had slipped down from his knees.
“That is the question,” he confessed, “it is not easy to rebuild a reputation. I would rather face fire than the sneers of my genteel neighbors.”
Miss Carmagee’s placid face had lost its habitual air of contentment and repose.
“I know it would require courage,” she said.
“People would probably call it impertinence. It requires more than courage to be successfully impertinent in this world.”
“Cleverness, Porteus?”
“Genius, the genius of patience, magnanimity, and self-restraint.”
His sister pondered a moment, while Porteus sipped his port.
“Then—there is Catherine?”
Her brother’s keen eyes lit up at the name.
“Ah, there we have a touch of the divine fire.”
“She could help him.”
“Next to God.”
There was silence again between them for a season. The dim and homely room seemed full of a quiet dignity, a pervading restfulness that was clean and good. The most prosaic people grow great and lovable when their hearts are moved to succor others. The words of a beggar may strike the noblest chords of time, and live with the utterances of martyrs and of prophets.
“Porteus.”
Brother and sister looked at each other.
“I might speak to them.”
“Perhaps, dear, better than any one.”
“And if they need money? Mrs. Pentherby’s property cannot come to them at once. The law—”
Porteus’s face twinkled benignantly.
“The law, like a mule, is abominably slow. If I can be of any use to them—remind Kate that I am still alive.”
Miss Carmagee regarded her brother affectionately across the table.
“Then I shall go to-morrow,” she said, with a quiet sigh.
CHAPTER XXVIII
An increased sallowness and a slight thinning of the hair were the only changes that might have been noticed in Parker Steel that spring. The characteristic symptoms had been slight and evanescent, the “rash” so faint and transient that a delicate dusting of powder had hidden it even from Mrs. Betty’s eyes. A few of his most intimate friends had noticed that Parker Steel had the tense, strained look of a man suffering from overwork. That he had given up his nightly cigar and his wine, pointed also to the fact that the physician had knowledge of his own needs.
To such a man as Steel the zest of life lay in the energetic stir and ostentatious bustle of success. His conceit was in his cleverness, in the smartness of his equipage and reputation, and in the flattering gossip that haunts a healer’s name. Parker Steel was essentially a selfish mortal, and selfish men are often the happiest, provided they succeed.
Yet no man, however selfish, can wholly stifle his own thoughts. That the silence he kept was an immoral silence, no man knew better than did Parker Steel. People would have shrunk from him had they known the truth, as a refined woman shrinks from the offensive carcass of a drunken tramp. His own niceness of taste revolted from the consciousness of chance and undeserved pollution. Ambition was strong in him, however, and the cold tenacity to hold what he had gained. More isolated than Selkirk on his island, he had to bear the bitterness of it alone, knowing that sympathy was locked out by silence.
The supreme trying of his powers of hypocrisy came for him in his attitude towards his wife. Parker Steel was in no sense an uxorious fellow, and neither he nor Betty were ever demonstrative towards each other. An occasional half-perfunctory meeting of the lips had satisfied both after the first year of marriage. For this reason Parker Steel’s ordeal was less complex and severe than if he had had to repulse an emotional and warm-blooded woman.
The first diplomatic development had been insomnia; at least that was the excuse he made to Betty when he chose to sleep alone in his dressing-room at the back of the house. The faintest sound disturbed him, so he protested, and the rattle of wheels over the cobbles of the Square kept him irritably sleepless in the early hours of the morning. To Betty Steel there was no inconsistency in the excuse he gave. She thought him worried and overworked, and there was abundant justification for the latter evil. Winter and early spring are the briskest seasons of a doctor’s life. Dr. Steel had had seven severe cases of pneumonia on his list one week.
“You are too much in demand, Parker,” she had said. “There is always the possibility of a partner to be considered.”
“Thanks, no; I am not a believer in a co-operative business.”
“You must take a jaunt somewhere as soon as the work slackens.”
“All in good time, dear.”
“Sicily is fashionable.”
Parker Steel had indulged in optimistic reflections to distract her vigilance. She had sought to prove that he was in stale health by remarking that the wound on his forefinger had not completely healed. He was still wearing the finger-stall that covered thefons et origo mali.
“There is absolutely no need for you to fuss about me,” he had answered; “I am not made of iron, and the work tells. Three thousand a year is not earned without worry.”
“As much as that, Parker?”
He had touched a susceptible passion in her.
“Perhaps more. We shall be able to call our own tune before we are five-and-forty.”
“Heaven defend us, Parker, you hint at terrible things. Respectable obesity, and morning prayers.”
Her husband had laughed, and given her plausible comfort.
“You will be more dangerous then than you are now,” he had said.
In truth, their fortunes were very much in the ascendant, and the social side of professional life had prospered in Mrs. Betty’s hands. The brunette was supreme in Roxton so far as beauty was concerned, supreme also in the yet more magic elements of gracefulsavoir-faireand tact. She was one of those women who had learned to charm by flattery without seeming to be a sycophant; moreover, she had tested the wisdom of propitiating her own sex by appearing even more amiable to women than to men. Since the passing of the Murchisons she had had nothing in the way of rivalry to fear. True, two “miserable squatters” had put up brass plates in the town, and scrambled for some of the poorer of James Murchison’s patients. Mrs. Betty had been able to call upon the wives with patronizing magnanimity. They were both rather dusty, round-backed ladies, with no pretensions to style, either in their own persons or in the persons of their husbands. One of these professional gentlemen, a huge and flat-faced Paddy, resembled a police constable in plain clothes. The other was rather a meek young man in glasses, destitute of any sense of humor, and very useful in the Sunday-school.
Roxton had weathered Lent and Easter, and Lady Sophia Gillingham, Dame President of the local habitation of the Primrose League; patroness of all Roxton charities, Dissenting enterprises excepted; and late lady-in-waiting to the Queen; had called her many dear friends together to discuss the coming Midsummer Bazaar that was held annually for the benefit of the Roxton Cottage Hospital. Roxton, like the majority of small country towns, was a veritable complexity of cliques, and by “Roxton” should be understood the superior people who were Unionists in politics, and Church Christians in religion. There were also Chapel Christians in Roxton, chiefly of Radical persuasion, and therefore hardly decent in the sight of the genteel. People of “peculiar views” were rare, and not generally encouraged. Some of the orthodox even refused to buy a local tradesman’s boots, because that particular tradesman was not a believer in the Trinity. The inference is obvious that the “Roxton” concerned in Lady Sophia’s charitable bazaar, was superior and highly cultured Roxton, the Roxton of dinner-jackets and distinction, equipages, and Debrett.
To be a very dear friend of Lady Sophia Gillingham’s was to be one of the chosen and elect of God, and Betty Steel had come by that supreme and angelic exaltation. Perhaps Mignon’s kitten had purred and gambolled Mrs. Betty into favor; more probably the physician’s wife had nothing to learn from any cat. Betty Steel and her husband dined frequently at Roxton Priory. The brunette had even reached the unique felicity of being encouraged in informal and unexpected calls. Lady Sophia possessed a just and proper estimate of her own social position. She was fat, commonplace, and amiable, poorly educated, a woman of few ideas. But she was Lady Sophia Gillingham, and would have expected St. Peter to give her proper precedence over mere commoners in the anteroom of heaven.
The third Thursday after Easter Mrs. Betty Steel drove homeward in a radiant mood, with the spirit of spring stolen from the dull glint of a fat old lady’s eyes. There had been an opening committee meeting, and Lady Sophia had expressed it to be her wish that Mrs. Steel should be elected secretary. Moreover, the production of a play had been discussed, a pink muslin drama suited to the susceptibilities of the Anglican public. The part of heroine had been offered, not unanimously, to Mrs. Betty. And with a becoming spirit of diffidence she had accepted the honor, when pressed most graciously by the Lady Sophia’s own prosings.
Mrs. Betty might have impersonated April as she swept homeward under the high beneficence of St. Antonia’s elms. The warmth of worldly well-being plumps out a woman’s comeliness. She expands and ripens in the sun of prosperity and praise, in contrast to the thousands of the ever-contriving poor, whose sordid faces are but the reflection of sordid facts.
Betty Steel’s face had an April alluringness that day; its outlines were soft and beautiful, suggestive of the delicacy of apple bloom seen through morning mist. She was exceeding well content with life, was Mrs. Betty, for her husband was in a position to write generous checks, and the people of Roxton seemed ready to pay her homage.
Parker Steel was reading in the dining-room when this triumphant and happy lady came in like a white flower rising from a sheath of green. It was only when selfishly elated that the wife showed any flow of affection for her husband. For the once she had the air of an enthusiastic girl whom marriage had not robbed of her ideals.
“Dear old Parker—”
She went towards him with an out-stretching of the hands, as he dropped theMorning Post, and half rose from the lounge chair.
“Had a good time?”
“Quite splendid.”
She swooped towards him, not noticing the furtive yet watchful expression in her husband’s face.
“Give me a kiss, oldMorning Post.”
“How is Madam Sophia?”
“Most affable.”
Parker Steel had caught her out-stretched hands. It was as though he were afraid of touching his wife’s lips.
“Making conquests, eh?”
“Waal—I guess that”—and she spoke through her nose.
“Dollars?”
“Enticing them into the family pocket.”
Something in her husband’s eyes touched Betty Steel beneath her vivacity and easy persiflage. Her husband had risen from his chair, released her hands, and moved away towards the fire. She had a sudden instinct telling her that he was not glad of her return.
The wife’s airiness was damped instantly. Parker Steel had repelled her with the semi-playful air of a man not wishing to be bothered. She had noticed this suggestion of aloofness much in him of late, and had ascribed it to irritability, the result of overwork.
“Anything the matter, dear?”
“Matter?”
He looked at her frankly, with arched brows and open eyes.
“Yes, you seem tired—”
“There is some excuse for me. This is the first ten minutes I have had to myself—all day. It is an effort to talk when one’s tongue has been going for hours.”
His wife’s face appeared a littletristeand peevish. She glanced at herself in the mirror over the mantel-piece, and found herself wondering why life seemed composed of actions and reactions.
“Have you had tea?”
“No, I waited,” and he turned and rang the bell with a feeling of relief. It was trying to his watchfulness for Parker Steel to be left alone with his own wife. Even the white cap of the parlor-maid was welcome to him, or the flimsiest barrier that could aid him in his ordeal of silent self-isolation. The art of hypocrisy grows more complex with each new statement of relationships. And hypocrisy in the home is the reguilding of a substance that tarnishes with every day. The wear and tear of life erase the lying surface, and the daily daubing becomes a habit by necessity, even as a single dying of the hair pledges the vain mortal to perpetual self-decoration.