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 the fons 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 graceful savoir-faire and 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 the Morning 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, old Morning 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 little triste and 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.