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.”