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, 5 A.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.