CHAPTER XXXII

It is said that a pretty woman is never out of patience when she has a glass to gaze at, and Betty Steel, casting critical yet complacent glances into the depths of a Venetian mirror, awaited the descent of her very particular friend, Madge Ellison, with the sweet content of a lily waiting for the moon. Mrs. Betty’s face was a Diana’s face, but her body was of the color of a blush-rose in her summer-rose dress. The figure had charm enough as it idled to and fro in the spacious, mellow-tinted room. Mirror and window showed her patronage; the one, symbolical of self alone; the other of that same self’s outlook upon life at large. Betty was in one of her most radiant moods. A letter had come for her from her husband by the morning post; his eyes were much better, and there was no cloud upon the horizon.

Parker Steel’s wife heard the frou-frou of a silk petticoat sweeping down the stairs, the sudden opening of the study door, a man’s footstep crossing the hall.

“What, out to tea again in your best frock?”

The rustling of silk ceased for a moment at the foot of the stairs. Betty Steel smiled like a wise and intelligent elder sister. Madge Ellison, and their most stylish locum-tenens, Dr. Little, had reached that degree of familiarity that permits two people to spar amiably with each other.

“A grievance, as usual! I suppose you grudge us the carriage?”

“Nothing half so selfish, I assure you.”

“Why not come and pay calls with us?”

“The old proverb, Miss Ellison.”

“A little goes a long way, is that it?”

“Am I so little?”

“What’s in a name!” and she passed on with a significant side glance and an arch lifting of the chin.

Dr. Little, a black-chinned, tailor-waisted, superfine person, with a distinct “air,” proceeded on a hypothetical expedition up the stairs. He had remembered leaving his latch-key in his bedroom, a useful excuse for meeting a pretty woman on the way, as though the coincidence were supremely natural.

“Au revoir.”

Miss Ellison favored him with an undeniable wink as she picked up a pink parasol from the hall table. She was one of those women who remind one forcibly of the stage-beauty as seen on very young men’s mantel-pieces. Madge Ellison would show as much of an open-work stocking as was compatible with social refinement. A retroussé nose and a round and rather cheeky chin associated themselves naturally with her methods of fascination.

“Madge!”

“Yes, dear.”

“Here, quick, I want you!”

“Bless my soul, why this tragic note?”

“Look, the window; do you recognize any one by the church-railings?”

There was a hard abruptness in Betty Steel’s voice. She was leaning forward with her hand on the window-sill, her face curiously changed in its expression from the purring contentment of two minutes ago.

“I see a solitary female, dear.”

“Don’t you recognize her?”

Miss Ellison gave a quaint and expressive little whistle.

“No, surely, it can’t be!”

“Kate Murchison.”

“By George, dear, it is!”

The two friends watched the figure in black disappear under the old gate-house that stood at the northwest corner of the square. For Madge Ellison there was nothing more inspiriting than curiosity in the event. To Betty Steel that passing glimpse had opened up all the hatred of the past.

“What’s in your mind, Madge?”

Miss Ellison was buttoning her gloves.

“I’ll bet a tea-cake to a penny bun, dear, that it is the Murchisons who have taken their house in Lombard Street again.”

“Nonsense!”

Betty Steel’s eyes grew hard and dangerous at the suggestion.

“Why nonsense?”

“The Murchisons would hardly have the impudence to sneak back to Roxton. People don’t care to be bungled into the next world by a drunkard.”

“My word, Betty, draw it mild. I never heard that the man drank.”

“You were in Italy, then, I believe.”

“Nasty, nasty! You are peevish over the poor people’s failings!”

“I hate that woman, Madge.”

Miss Ellison laughed at the sincerity of her friend’s spite.

“Why, what earthly harm can that woman do you by choosing to live in Roxton?”

“I tell you, Madge, there are some people in this world who set one’s teeth on edge. After all, what need for all this waste of antipathy. Kate Murchison must be staying with the Carmagees. I’ll risk that as my explanation.”

Spirited away on a round of social duties, Betty Steel and her friend paid their third call that afternoon at the Canonry in Canon’s Court, off Cloister Street. A row of carriages under the avenue of limes, and a liveried servant standing on duty under the Georgian portico, reminded Betty Steel that the third Friday in the month was the date printed on Mrs. Stensly’s cards. Betty and her gossip were announced in the crowded drawing-room, where a number of bored figures were balancing teacups and talking with forced animation. A few men, severely saddened by their responsibilities, were treading on each other’s heels, and looking anxiously for ladies who would take pity on sandwiches or cake. The French windows of the room were open to the May sunshine of the garden, and the fringes of a cedar could be seen sweeping the sleek grass.

Individual faces disassociate themselves slowly from such an assemblage, and Betty Steel, blockaded under the lee of a grand-piano, had but half the room under the ken of her keen eyes. Madge Ellison had been left to chat with Mr. Keightly, a very popular and enthusiastic curate who had rendered his character doubly fascinating by professing to hold prejudices in favor of celibacy. Betty had a brewer’s wife at her elbow. They had exchanged ecstatic confidences on the exquisite shape and color of Mrs. Stensly’s tea-service, and were both groping for some further topic to keep the conversation moving.

“And how is the play going, Mrs. Steel?”

“The play?”

Mrs. Betty seemed unusually pensive and distraught.

“Lady Sophia’s play.”

“As well as a piece can go—with amateurs. We all find fault with our neighbors.”

“I hear it is a splendid little play.”

“Not at all bad.”

“I must say I like the pathetic style of play.”

“Oh yes, quite charming.”

“I saw Julia Neilson play in that play, oh—what was the play called?—”

“‘A Woman of no Ideal,’ most likely,” thought Mrs. Betty. “I wonder how many more times she is going to tread on that one unfortunate word.”

She waited demurely for the title to recur, but it appeared lost in the limbo of the fat lady’s mind. The brewer’s wife continued to grope for it like a conscientious housewife who has lost the Sabbath threepenny bit in her glove-box while dressing for church.

Betty Steel, however, had become utterly oblivious of her presence for the moment. She was gazing towards one of the open windows where a woman’s figure, tall and comely in simple black, showed against the rich green of the grass. The woman’s back was turned towards the room, but Betty knew her by her figure and the lustre of her hair.

“Very odd, Mrs. Steel, I can’t remember the name of that play.”

“Really, I beg your pardon, I was thinking of other things.”

A slight rearranging of this aggregate of Roxton culture released Betty Steel from this amiable mass of irresponsible bathos. She contrived to wedge herself beside Madge Ellison, whose retroussé nose had failed to tempt the celibate to expand.

“You see?”

A smart hat was tilted significantly towards the window.

“I do.”

“Any news?”

“You have lost, dear. The tea-cake is on top. The sensation of Roxton. They are here to stay.”

Mrs. Betty’s face expressed infinite pity.

“How eccentric!”

“Kate Murchison has had money left her.”

“And the husband?”

“I hear his plate is up in Lombard Street.”

Whether it was a mere matter of coincidence or the working of a definite purpose, the fact was curiously self-evident to Betty Steel that the drawing-room of the Canonry had divided itself into two camps. Window-ward sat Miss Carmagee, dressed in black, her large face shining like a buckler against the embattled foe. Porteus—the irascible Porteus who blasphemed all tea-parties—was chattering like a little brown baboon. Several of Kate Murchison’s old friends appeared to have congregated together on the opposition benches. Mrs. Betty remarked all this, and her mouth grew a mere line in her pale and alert face.

The breweress had risen to depart. A number of nervous people who had been waiting for some bold spirit to initiate the movement, followed the fat lady’s inspiriting example. Mrs. Stensly was in the garden. The breweress and her flock of sheep filed through the open window to shake hands—and go.

“Madge.”

“Hallo, dear, am I sitting on you? Whither away?”

“To pay my most dutiful respects!”

Catherine Murchison and the Canon had left the window, and were pacing the grass under the benisons of the great cedar. By the expression of their faces, and the serious yet sympathetic inflection of their voices, they had broken the mere social surface, and were speaking of deeper things. It is the fashion to abuse the priesthood in the abstract, yet any critic who took the clean-girt manliness of Canon Stensly’s character might find his rhetoric chilled in its free flow.

“You have done the right thing, and your true friends will be glad of it.”

“It was my husband’s wish.”

“The wish of a brave man.”

“What a wonderful thing is sympathy! You have helped me so much this afternoon. It was an ordeal. You know, we dread the unknown—uncertainty.”

The big, gray-headed man looked down at her with much of the affection of a father. His hands had given her confirmation and joined her hand in marriage.

“Doubt is a great distorting glass,” he said, simply; “the difficulties of life decrease the moment they are faced.”

“I am glad you are on our side.”

“I should be a poor Christian if I were not.”

A figure in a pink dress, sumptuous and perfect as to the milliner’s craft, glided across the grass, and cast a shadow at Catherine’s feet.

“How d’you do, Kate? You have surprised us all—assuredly.”

The two women touched hands. Betty Steel’s drawl ascended towards patronage. She assumed the air of a mistress of a salon whose salutation decided destinies and dispensed fame.

“How is Dr. Murchison? This long rest must have done him good.”

“Thanks. My husband is very well.”

“I am afraid we all misunderstood your plans. We thought you had left Roxton for good. I suppose Dr. Murchison will not expose himself again to the strain of general practice. Surgical cases are such a responsibility.”

It is the ability of women to be politely insolent and to cover a taunt with ironical courtesy. There were at least a dozen people within range of Mrs. Betty’s aggressive drawl, and Betty Steel had no intention of letting Roxton forget James Murchison’s past.

“And how are the children?”

Her eyes were studying the details of Catherine’s dress with the critical acuteness so trying to a woman.

“The boy is very well, thanks.”

“And the other—a girl, was it not?”

“You need not trouble to remember her.”

“That sounds as though you were disappointed. I remember how you used to read me texts on the divinity of motherhood.”

“The child is dead, Betty, that is all.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I always thought the girl was delicate.”

Canon Stensly’s massive shadow interposed itself between the slighter silhouettes upon the grass.

“Your husband has kept his promise, Mrs. Murchison.”

“Is he here?”

“Yes, yonder, with my wife.”

Betty Steel’s face was tinged with a malignity that leaked from her eyes and from the sneering angles of her mouth. She felt glad that Catherine’s favorite child was dead. The incomprehensible malice in the thought justified itself in the reflection that Catherine had lost something that she, Betty, had always lacked.

She passed James Murchison as she returned towards the house, a man with a certain dignity of past suffering writ heavily upon his face. He was talking to two old friends. Betty swept by him without troubling to notice whether he bowed to her or not. The man was a mere pawn in the game so far as she was concerned. Any humiliation that he might suffer was only valuable so far as it humiliated his wife.

The carriage was waiting for them under the limes of Canon’s Court. Madge Ellison flounced down in her corner with a relieved sigh.

“What a function! Well, how is she, charming as ever?”

“Who?”

“You know whom I mean, Betty?”

“That beast?”

“I heard you call her that once when we were at school,” and Miss Ellison tittered; “I believe she’ll make the whole town swallow the past.”

“Will she—indeed!”

“You don’t relish the idea?”

“Wait, my dear girl; we have not seen the end of the game yet.”