“I ain’t blackguardin’ the man, I’m statin’ facts.”
“Facts, facts—why, the man’s clean daft on facts. Facts must be another name for a pint of bitter.”
“I’ll smash your jaw, Bill Bains, if you don’t stow it.”
“Smash away, my buck. Who’s afraid of a bloomin’ cask?”
Whereon the dwellers in Mill Lane were treated to an exhibition of two minutes straight hitting, an exhibition that ended in the intervention of friends. But since the drayman departed with a red nose and a swollen eye, it may be inferred that the sweep had the best of the argument.
To have one’s past, present, and future dragged through the back streets of a country town is not an experience that a man of self-respect would welcome. A sensitive spirit cannot fail to feel the atmosphere about it. It may see the sun shining, the clouds white against the blue, the natural phenomena of health and of well-being; or the faces of a man’s fellows may be as sour puddles to him, their sympathy a wet December.
Trite as the saying is, that in trouble we make trial of our friends, only those who have faced defeat know the depth and meaning of that time-worn saying. A week in Roxton betrayed to Catherine and her husband the number and the sincerity of their friends. The instinct of pride is wondrous quick in detecting truth from shams, even as an expert’s fingers can tell old china by the feel. The population of the place was soon mapped out into the priggishly polite, the piously distant, the vulgarly inquisitive, the unaffected honest, and the honestly indifferent. Catherine met many a face that brightened to hers in the Roxton streets. The past seemed to have banked more good-will for them then they had imagined. It was among the poor that they found the least forgetfulness, less of the cultured and polite hauteur, less affectation, less hypocrisy. As for the practice, they found it non-existent that first humiliating yet half-happy week.
But perhaps the sincerest person in Roxton at that moment was the wife of Dr. Parker Steel. Betty was not a passionate woman in the matter of her affections, but in her capabilities for hatred she concentrated the energy of ten. She had come quite naturally to regard herself as the most gifted and interesting feminine personality that Roxton could boast. Every woman has an instinctive conviction that her own home, and her own children, are immeasurably superior to all others. With Betty Steel, this spirit of womanly egotism had been largely centred on herself. She had no children to make her jealous and critical towards other women’s children. It was the symmetry of her own success in life that had developed into an enthralling art, an art that absorbed her whole soul.
It might have been imagined that she had climbed too high to trouble about an old hate; that she was too sufficiently assured of her own glory to stoop to attack a humbled rival. Jealousy and a sneaking suspicion of inferiority had embittered the feud for her of old; and Kate Murchison, saddened and aged, half a suppliant for the loyalty of a few good friends, could still inspire in Betty a spirit of aggressive and impatient hate. She remembered that she had seen Catherine triumphant where she herself had received indifference and disregard. The instinct to crush this antipathetic rival was as fierce and keen in her as ever.
“Call on her,” had been Madge Ellison’s suggestion.