CHAPTER XXXIX

It was on the second morning following his interview with Dr. Peterson that Parker Steel received two letters, heralding the shadow of an approaching storm.

“I have laid the facts of the case,” wrote the demi-god from Mayfair, “before the General Medical Council. I consider this action of mine to partake of the nature of a public duty; for your abuse of your position has been too gross even for medical etiquette to cover. I cannot understand how a practitioner of your reputation could be so mad as to run so scandalous a risk. That you contracted the disease innocently in the pursuit of duty would have won you the sympathy of your fellow-practitioners. Your concealment of the disease puts an immoral complexion on the case. . . . Needless to say, I have given Major Murray the full benefit of an honest opinion.”

Such a letter from a physician of Dr. Peterson’s standing would have been sufficient in itself to demoralize a man of more courage and tenacity than Parker Steel. The curt declaration of war that reached him from Major Murray, by the very same post, exaggerated the effect that the specialist’s letter had produced.

“Sir,—I have received from Dr. Peterson a statement that convicts you of the most scandalous mal praxis. Needless to say, I am placing the matter in the hands of my solicitor; I consider it to be a case deserving of publicity, however repugnant the atmosphere surrounding the affair may be to me and mine.

“Murray.”

Those who have touched the realities of war will tell you that they have seen men with faces pinched as by a frost, their teeth chattering like castanets, even under the blaze of an African sun. It was at the breakfast-table that Parker Steel read those two ominous letters. The man looked ill and yellow, and his nerves were none too steady, to judge by the way he had gashed himself in shaving. The very clothes he wore seemed to have grown creased and shabby in a week, as though they felt the wearer’s figure limp and shrunken, and had lost tone in consequence.

It may be remembered that the Immortal Three displayed varying symptoms when at grips with death. The tongue of Ortheris waxed feverishly profane; the Yorkshireman broke out into song; Mulvaney, the Paddy, was incontinently sick. Parker Steel emulated the Irishman in this eccentricity that morning, save that his nausea was inspired by panic, and not by heroic rage.

Shaken and very miserable, he sat down at the bureau in his consulting-room, leaned his head upon his hands, and shivered. For two nights he had had but short snatches of sleep, brief lapses into oblivion that had been rendered vain by dreams. The imminent dread of a hundred ignominies had held him sick and cold through the short darkness of the summer nights. Dawn had come and found him feverish and very weary. To a coward it is torture to be alone with his own thoughts.

The third night he had taken sulphonal, a full dose, and had slept till Symons knocked at his bedroom door. The fog of the drug still clung about his brain as he sat at the bureau and tried to think. He seemed incapable of putting any purpose into motion, like an exhausted battery whose cells have been drained of their electric charge.

Parker Steel picked up a pen after he had crouched there silently for some twenty minutes. He opened a drawer, drew out several sheets of note-paper, and began to scribble confused, jerky sentences, to alter, to reconsider, and to erase. The power to determine and to act, even on paper, were lost to him that morning. He wrote two letters, only to tear them up and scatter the pieces in the grate, where a lighted match set them burning. He was still on his knees, turning over the charred fragments, when the door-bell rang.

The sedate Symons came to announce a patient.

“Mrs. Prosser, sir.”

“Tell her I can’t see her.”

Symons stared. Her master had something of the air of an angry dog.

“Tell her I’m busy. She can call again.”

“Yes, sir.”

She still stood in the doorway, irresolute, surprised.

“What the devil are you waiting there for, Symons?”

“Nothing, sir.”

And she withdrew, with her dignity balanced on the tip of a very much tilted nose.

Parker Steel opened the window wide, and leaning his hands on the sill, looked out into the garden. It was air that he needed—air amid the stifling complexities of life that were crowding tumultuous upon his future. The garden with the sumptuous serenity of its trees and flowers had no sympathetic touch for him in his agony of isolation. It was his loneliness that weighed upon him heavily at that moment. He had outlawed himself, as it were, from the heart of his own wife. The very house was a pest-house in which two stricken souls were sundered and held apart.

If Betty would only see him. If she could only bring herself to understand that he had acted this disastrous part in order to retain the social satisfactions that she loved. Any companionship, even the companionship of a half-estranged wife, seemed preferable to the isolation that he felt deepening about him. He argued that it was his realization of Betty’s ambition that had made him dissemble for her sake. Any argument, however suspicious, is pressed into the service of a man whose whole desire is to justify himself.

Unfortunately, when a woman’s trust has been once shocked from its foundations, no buttressing and underpinning can save that superstructure of sentiment that has taken years to build. Betty had kept to her room with no one but Madge Ellison to give her sympathy and advice. The husband had always found the friend embarrassing with her presence any rapprochement between him and his wife.

As he stood at the open window, with the words of the two letters he had read weaving a hopeless tangle of bewilderment in his brain, he heard some one descend the stairs and go out by the front door into the square. Parker Steel realized that this ubiquitous and embarrassing friend had left Betty alone in the room above. There was some chance at last of his seeing her alone, and of attempting to break down the barrier of her reserve.

He climbed the stairs slowly, and stood listening for several seconds on the landing before turning the handle of his wife’s door. The door was locked.

Parker Steel frowned over the ineptitude of the man?uvre. A dramatic entry might at least have given some dignity to the trick. As it was, he felt like a sneaking boy who had been balked and taken in some none too honorable artifice.

“Betty.”

“Yes, what is it?”

She was in a chair near the window, reading, with her dark hair spread upon her shoulders. Her mouth hardened as she recognized her husband’s voice. It was the very day, and she remembered it, the day of Lady Sophia’s fashionable bazaar when Betty Steel had foreseen the people of Roxton at her feet. She had asked Madge Ellison to bring out the dress that she should have worn. Primrose and leaf-green, it hung across the foot-rail of her bed.

“I want to speak to you, Betty.”

“Is there anything that we can discuss?”

The level tenor of her voice, its unflurried callousness, gave him an impression of obstinate estrangement.

“Betty.”

She did not answer.

“Let me in. If you will only give me a chance to justify myself—”

The very words he chose were the words least calculated to move a woman. Betty, lying back in her chair, pictured to herself a cringing, deprecating figure that could boast none of the passionate forcefulness of manhood. A woman may be won by courage and strength, even in the person of the man who has done her wrong; but let her have the repulsion of contempt, and her instinct towards forgiveness will be frozen into an unbending pride.

“I do not wish you to make excuses, Parker.”

“But, Betty—”

“Well?”

“It was for the sake of the home, the practice, everything. Can’t you understand? Can’t you imagine what I have gone through?”

Her momentary silence seemed to suggest a sneer.

“So you would justify a lie?”

“Betty, don’t talk like this. I am worried to death by other matters as it is.”

“I can understand that perfectly.”

He began to pace the landing, halting irresolutely from time to time before the locked door.

“I have heard from Peterson this morning.”

No reply.

“He is reporting the matter to the General Council, and he has given the truth away to Murray. You know what that must mean.”

Still no reply.

“Betty.”

Had he been able to see the cynical smile upon her face, Parker Steel might have understood that by acting the suppliant for her pity he only intensified her contempt.

“Betty, is this fair to me?”

He shook the door with a sudden gust of petulant impatience.

“Show me some little consideration. I have some right to demand—”

“Demand what you please, Parker, but oblige me by not making so much noise.”

“You will regret this.”

His voice was harsh now and beyond control.

“I have regretted much already.”

“Your marriage, I suppose?”

“There is no need, Parker, to indulge in details.”

“This is beyond my patience!”

“And mine, I assure you.”

He turned, and retreated from the attack at the same moment that Madge Ellison reappeared upon the stairs. They passed each other without a word; the woman, clear-eyed and uncompromising; the man gliding close to the wall. Madge Ellison found Betty sitting with closed eyes before the open window, the June sunshine dappling the bosoms of the tall trees in the square with gold.