Hatred, like love, is a transfiguration of trifles, and nothing is too paltry to be registered against a foe. Parker Steel’s wife drove home in the most unenviable of tempers, untouched by the scent of the bean-fields in bloom, or by the flash of the river through the green of June. She rattled down the steep hill into Roxton town at a pace that made Miss Gerratty wince. Metaphorically, Betty Steel would have given much to have had her bit in Catherine Murchison’s mouth, and to have treated her to a taste of her nimble whip.
Leaving Miss Gerratty at the end of Queen’s Walk by the old Jacobean Market-House, Mrs. Steel drove home alone, to find some half-dozen letters waiting for her, the mid-day post that she had missed by lunching with Mrs. Feveril, of The Cedars. She shuffled the letters irritably through her hands like a pack of cards, her eyes sparkling into sudden vivacity as a foreign envelope showed among the rest. The letter bore the Egyptian Sphinx and pyramids, and the familiar writing of a friend.
The letter lay unopened in her lap awhile, as she sat by the open window of the drawing-room and looked out over the beds that were gorgeous with the flare of Oriental poppies. The lawn, studded with standard roses, swept to the trailing branches of an Indian cedar. Rhododendrons were still in bloom in the little shrubbery under the rich green shade shed by two great oaks.
She tore open the envelope at last, having lingered like one who shirks the reading of news long waited for. The familiar squirl of the man’s handwriting made her smile, bringing back memories of a first serious affaire de cœur with the quaint grotesqueness of the foolish past. She remembered the thin, raw-boned youth with the red mouth and the strenuous eyes who had kissed her one night after a river-party. He was still vivid to her, even to the recollection how his boating-shirt had slipped a button and given her a glimpse of a hairy chest. What a little fool she had been in those days! Mrs. Betty was not the slave of sentiment, and Surgeon-Major Shackleton had slipped with his somewhat strenuous love-making into the past. She still had occasional letters from him, and from other sundry friends, letters that she always showed her husband. Parker Steel was not a jealous being. He was mildly pleased by the conviction that he was still envied in secret by a bevy of old rivals.
“Dear Betty,—”
Mrs. Steel made a little grimace as she pictured the number of “dear Betties” who had probably drifted within the sphere of Charlie Shackleton’s passion for romance. She skipped through the letter with watchful eyes, ignoring the surgeon-major’s bantering persiflage, the familiar gibes of an old friend. It was on the fourth page that she unearthed the news she delved for, tangled beneath the splutterings of an execrable pen.
“I think you asked me in your last letter whether I knew a fellow named Murchison at St. Peter’s. Haven’t you mentioned ‘the creature’ to me before? I remember Jim Murchison just as you describe him, a solid, brown-faced six-footer, one of those happy-go-lucky beggars who seem ready to punch creation. I left the place two years before he qualified; he had brains, but if my pate serves me, he was the sworn slave of a drug we catalogue as C2H5OH. Not a bad sort of fool, but bibulous as blotting-paper. Funny he should have turned up your way, and married Kate of the golden hair. Mark this private, and let my friend Parker deal with the above formula. Glad to hear that he is raking in the guineas—”
The letter ended with a few personal paragraphs that Mrs. Betty hardly troubled to read. She crossed the hall to her husband’s study, hunted out a text-book on chemistry from the shelves, and proceeded with much patience and deliberation to unearth the scientific hieroglyph the surgeon-major’s letter contained. She found it at last, and smiled maliciously at its vulgar triteness.
“C2H5OH, ethyl alcohol; commonly known as alcohol; a generic term for certain compounds which are the hydroxides of hydrocarbon radicals. The active principle of intoxicating liquors.”
Mrs. Betty put the book back on the shelf, and buttoned Mr. Shackleton’s letter into her blouse. There was a queer glitter in her eyes, a spiteful sparkle of satisfaction. She went back to the drawing-room, and seating herself at the piano, played Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” with fine verve and feeling.