The Great Victorian Age was laid to rest.
The great pageant of mortality had wound along the officially-appointed route, under the cold grey sky, an apparently endless, slowly-marching column of Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry of the Line, progressing pace by pace between the immovable barriers of great-coated soldiers, and the surging, restless sea of black-clad men and women pent up on either hand behind them. The long rolling of muffled drums, and the dull boom of cannon; the baring of men's heads; the wail of the Funeral March, the flash of suddenly whitened faces turned one way to greet Her as She passed, borne to Her rest upon a gun-carriage, as fitting an aged warrior Queen; drawn to her wedded couch within the tomb by the willing, faithful hands of her sons of the twin Services, who shall forget, that heard and witnessed?
Who shall forget?
The Royal Standard draped across the satin-white, gold-fringed pall, where on rich crimson cushions rested the Three Emblems of Sovereignty. The dignified, kingly figure of a man, no longer young, bowed with sorrow underthe Imperial heritage, preceding the splendid sombre company of crowned heads; the blaze of uniforms and orders, the clank of sword and bridle, the potent ring of steel on steel, the sumptuously-trapped, shining horses pacing slowly, drawing the mourning-carriages of State, their closed windows, frosted with chilly fog, yielding scant glimpses of well-known faces. One most beloved, most lovely, and no less so in sorrow than in joy. "Did you see her?" the women asked of one another, as the pageant passed and vanished, and one good soul, all breathless from the crush, gasped as she straightened her battered bonnet and twitched her trodden skirt: "There never was a better than the blessed soul that's gone, but there couldn't be a sweeter nor a beautifuller Queen than the one she leaves behind her!"
The last wail of the Funeral March having died away into silence, the last cannon-shot gone booming out, down came the foggy dusk on bereaved London. A chill rime settled on the swaying laurel wreaths, and on the folds of the fluttering purple draperies at the close of the dismal day. The shops were shut, and many of the restaurants, but the windows of the Clubs gleamed radiantly down Piccadilly, and every refreshment-bar and public-house was thronged to bursting. Noon changed to evening, and evening lengthened into night, and the pavements began to be crowded. The Flesh Bazaar was being held in Piccadilly, and all up Regent Street and all down the Haymarket the chaffering went on for bodies and for souls.
A deadly physical and mental lassitude weighed on Saxham. His soul was sick with the long, hopeless struggle. He would end it. He would die, and take away the shadow from Lynette's pure life, and leave her free. His will devised to her everything he possessed, leaving her untrammelled. Let her learn to love once more, let her marry a better man, and be happy in her husband and her children....
* * * * *
He turned in at one of the chemist's shops. One or two gaudily-dressed, haggard women were at the distant end of the counter, in conference with an assistant. Saxham spoke to the chemist, a grey-whiskered, fatherly individual, who listened, bending his sleek bald head. The chemist bowed, but as he had not the honour of knowing hiscustomer, would the gentleman oblige by signing the poison-book, in compliance with Schedule F of the Pharmacy Act, 1868?
Saxham nodded. The chemist produced the register, and opened it on the counter before Saxham, and supplied him with pen and ink. Then he found that he had business at the other end of the shop, and when he returned he smartly closed the book, without even satisfying himself whether the client had written down his name and address, or merely pretended to. Then he filled a two-ounce vial with the fragrant, deadly acid, and put on a yellow label that named the poison, but not the vendor, and stoppered and capsuled, and sealed, and made it into a neat little parcel, and Saxham paid, and put the parcel in his inner breast-pocket, and turned to leave the shop.
It was crowded now; the roaring business of the little hours was in full swing. The three assistants ran about like busy ants; the chemist joined his merry men at the game of making money, serving alcoholic liquors, mixing pick-me-ups, dispensing little bottles of tabloids and little boxes of jujubes, taking cash and giving change.
The crush was terrific. Saxham, his hat pulled low over his broad brows, his great chest stemming the tide of humanity that incessantly rolled over the threshold, was slowly making his way to the door, when he felt the arresting touch of a hand upon his arm.
The owner of the hand belonged, as ninety per cent. of the women in the place belonged, to François Villon's liberal sisterhood. Something in the pale square face and massive shoulders had attracted her vagrant fancy. She had quitted her companions—two gaily-dressed, be-rouged women and a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, moustached young German, whose stripy tweeds, vociferously-patterned linen, necktie of too obvious pattern, and high-crowned bowler hat, advertised the Berlin tailor and haberdasher and hatter at their customer's expense, as Saxham went by. Now she looked up into the strange, sorrowful eyes that were shaded by his tilted hat-brim, and twined her thin hands caressingly about his arm, asking:
"Why do you look so queer, dear? Is anything wrong?—excuse me asking—or is it the Funeral has given you theblue hump? It did me! I've not felt so bad since mother——" She broke off. Then as a shrill peal of laughter from one of her female companions followed a comment made by the other—"One of those ..."—she jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an unprintable epithet in the direction of her lady friends—"says you're ugly. I don't think so. I like your face!" Her own was cruelly, terribly young, even under the white cream of zinc, the rouge, and the rice-powder. "Were you looking for a friend, dear?" she asked tightening the clasp of her thin, feverish hands.
"Yes," said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no illumination in his sombre face. "For Death! There is no better friend than Death, my child, either for you or me!"
Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him, and turned and pushed his way out through the noisy, raving, chaffering, patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone, swallowed up in the roaring torrent of humanity that foamed down Piccadilly, leaving her frozen and stricken and staring.
Months went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made towards a more familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters, attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic, frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and flourished on the fireplace-tiles.
Only a few weeks more, he said to himself, and he would set her free. Before the natural craving for love, and life, and happiness should brim the cup of her fair sweet womanhood to overflowing; before her sex should rise in desperate revolt against himself her gaoler, Death should unlock her prison-doors and strike the fetters from those slender wrists, and point to Hope beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life.
Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held theswift dismissing pang was in the locked drawer of the writing-table beside the whisky-flask. When he was alone and undisturbed—for Lynette seldom came to his consulting-room now—Saxham would take it out and dandle it, and hold it in his hands.
He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp that he might torture himself with looking at that pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet, common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in those two rooms over the garage at the bottom of the yard.
There was a third performer in the shadow-play now. You could hear him roaring lustily at morn and noon and milky eve. The Wonderfullest Baby you ever!
When W. Keyse was invited by Saxham to inspect his son and heir, crimson, and pulpy, and squirming in a flannel wrap, the Adam's apple in the lean throat of the proud father jumped, and his ugly, honest eyes blinked behind salt water. The nipper had grabbed at his ear as he stooped down. And that made the Fourth Time, and he hadn't even thanked the Doctor yet!
A date, he hoped, would arrive when a chalk or two of that mounting score might be wiped off the board. He said so to Mrs. Keyse, the first time she was allowed to sit up and play at doing a bit of needlework. Not that she did a stitch, and charnce it! With her eyes—beautiful eyes, with that new look of mother-love in them; proud eyes, with that inexhaustible store of riches all her own,—worshipping the crinkly red snub nose and the funny moving mouth, and the little downy head, and everything else that goes to make up a properly-constituted Baby.
"I think the time'll come, deer. Watch out, an' one d'y you'll see!"
"I'll watch it!" affirmed W. Keyse. "And wot are you cranin' your neck for, tryin' to look out o' winder? Blessed if I ever see such a precious old Dutch!—--"
The song was in the mouths of the people that year. She laughed, and rubbed her pale cheek against his.
"You be my eyes, deer. Peep and see if the Doctor is in 'is room."
It was ten o'clock on a shining May morning, and theclouds that raced over great grimy London were white, and there were patches of blue between. The trees in the squares were dressed in new green leaves, and the irises and ranunculuses in the parks were out, and the policemen had shed their heavy uniforms, and instead of hyacinths behind the glass there were pots of tulips in bloom upon the window-sills of the two rooms over the garage. And the Doctor, who had been seeing patients ever since nine, was sitting at the writing-table, said W. Keyse, with his 'ead upon 'is 'ands.
"Like as if 'e was tired, deer, or un'appy? Or tired an un'appy both?"
"Stryte, you 'ave it!" admitted W. Keyse, after cautious inspection.
"The Doctor—don't let 'im see you lookin' at 'im, darlin', or 'e might think, which Good Gracious know how wrong it 'ud be, as you was a kind o' Peepin' Pry—the Doctor 'ave fell orf an' chynged a good deal lately—in 'is looks, I mean!" said Mrs. Keyse, tucking in the corner of the flannel over the little downy head. "Wasted in 'is flesh, like—got 'oller round the eyes——"
"So 'e 'as!" W. Keyse whistled and slapped his leg. "An' I bin' noticin' it on me own for a long while back—now I come to think of it. Woddyou pipe's the matter wiv 'im? Not ill? Lumme! if 'e was ill——" The eyes of W. Keyse became circular with consternation.
"No, no, deer!" She reassured him, in his ignorance that the maladies of the soul are more agonising far than those that afflict the body. "Down'arted, like, an' 'opeless an'—an' lonely——"
Downhearted, and hopeless, and lonely! The jaw of W. Keyse dropped, and his ugly eyes became circular with sheer astonishment.
"Him!Wiv a beautiful 'ouse to live in—an' Carriage Toffs with Titles fair beggin' 'im to come an' feel their pulses an' be pyde for it, an' Scientific Institooshuns an' 'Orspital Committees fightin' to git 'im on their staffs—an' all the pypers praisin' 'im for wot 'e done at Gueldersdorp, an' Government tippin' 'im the 'Ow Do? an' thank you kindly, Mister!—an'——" W. Keyse could only suppose that Mrs. Keyse was playing a bit of gaff on hers truly—"andhim with a wife, too! Married an' 'appy, an' goin' to be 'appier yet!" He pointed to the little red snub nose peeping between the folds of the flannel. "When a little nipper like that comes——"
She reddened, paled, burst out crying.
"O William! William——"
Her William kissed her, and dried her tears. He called it mopping her dial, but you have not forgotten that, as the upper house-and-parlour-maid had at first said, both Her and Him were plainly descended from the Lowest Circles. She had melted afterwards, on learning that Mrs. Keyse had been actually mentioned in Despatches for carrying tea under fire to the prisoners at the Fort; had sought her society, lent paper-patterns, and imparted, in confidence, what she knew of the secret of Saxham's wedded life.
"Dear William! My good, kind Love! Best I should 'urt you, deer, if 'urt you 'ave to be. You see them three large winders covered wiv lovely lace?"
"'Ers—Mrs. Saxham's!" He nodded, trying to look wise.
"Yes, darlin'. Mrs. Saxham's bedroom and dressin'-room they belongs to. I've bin inside the bedroom wiv the upper 'ouse-an'-parlour-myde, an' a Fairy Princess in a Drury Lane Pantomime might 'ave a bigger place to sleep in—but not a beautifuller. When the Foreign Young Person come in of evenin's to git 'er lady dressed for dinner, she snaps up the lights, bein' a kind soul, before she draws the blinds, to give me a charnst like, to see in." She stroked the tweed sleeve. "An' once or twice Mrs. Saxham 'as come in before they'd bin pull down, an' then—O William!—there was everythink in that room on Gawd's good earth a 'usband could ask for to make 'im 'appy, except the wife's 'art beatin' warm and lovin' in the middle of it all!"
"Cripps!... You don't never mean ...?" He gasped. "Wot? Don't the Doctor make no odds to 'er? A Man Like That?" ...
She clung to the heart that loved her, and told him what she had heard.... And if Saxham had known how two of the unconscious actors in his shadow-play pitied him, the knowledge would have been as vitriol poured into an open wound.
The card of Major Bingham Wrynche, C.B., was brought to Saxham one morning, as, his early-calling patients seen and dismissed, the Doctor was going out to his waiting motor-brougham.
Bingo, following what he was prone to call his pasteboard, presented himself—a large, cool, well-bred, if rather stupid-looking, man, arrayed in excellently-fitting clothes, saying:
"You were goin' out? Don't let me keep you. Look in again!"—even as he deposited a tightly-rolled silk umbrella in the waste-paper basket, and tenderly balanced his gleaming hat upon the edge of the writing-table, and chose, by the ordeal of punch, a comfortable chair, as a man prepared to remain. Saxham, pushing a cigar-box across the consulting-room table, asked after Lady Hannah.
"First-rate! Seems to agree with her, having a one-armed husband to fuss over!"
"She won't have a one-armed husband long," returned Saxham, not unkindly, glancing at the bandaged and strapped-up limb that had been shattered by an expanding bullet, and was neatly suspended in its cut sleeve in the shiny black sling.
"By the Living Tinker! she's had him long enough for me!" exploded Bingo, who seemed larger and fussier than ever, if a thought less pink. "So'd you say if they tucked a napkin under your chin at meals, and cut your meat up into dice for you, and you'd ever tried to fold up your newspaper with one hand, or had to stop a perfect stranger in the street, as I did just now outside your door, and ask him to fish a cab-fare out of your right-hand trouser-pocket if he'd be so good? because your idiot of a man ought to have put your money in the other one."
"You're lookin' at my head," pursued the Major, "and I don't wonder. She's been and given me a fringe again. 'Stonishing thing the Feminine Touch is. Let your servant part your hair and knot your necktie, and you simply look a filthy bounder. Your wife does it—and you hardly knowyourself in the glass, and wonder why they didn't christen you Anna-Maria. Not bad weeds these, by half! You remember those cigars of Kreil's and the thunderin' price me and Beauvayse paid for 'em, biddin' against each other for fun?" The big man blew a heavy sigh with the light blue smoke-wreath, and added: "And before the last box was dust and ashes, poor old Toby was! And that chap Levestre—never fit to brown his shoes—is wearing 'em; and 'll be Marquess of Foltlebarre when the old man goes. Queer thing, Luck is—when you come to think of it?"
Saxham nodded and looked at the clock. A dull impatience of this large, bland, prosperous personage was growing in him. From the rim the top-hat had left upon his shining forehead to the tightly-screwed eyeglass that assisted his left eye; from the pink Malmaison carnation in the buttonhole of his frock-coat to the buff spats that matched his expansive waistcoat in shade, the large Major was the personification of luxurious, pampered, West End swelldom, the type of a class Saxham abhorred. He had seen the heavy dandy under other conditions, in circumstances strenuous, severe, even tragic. Then he had borne himself after a simple, manly fashion. Now he had backslidden, retrograded, relaxed. Saxham, always destitute of the saving sense of humour, frowned as he looked upon the pampered son of Clubland, and the sullen lowering of the Doctor's heavy smudge of black eyebrow suggested to the Major that his regrets for "poor old Toby!" had been misplaced. The man who had married Miss Mildare could hardly be expected to join with heartiness in deploring the untimely decease of his predecessor.
"Not that it could have come to anything between poor Toby and her if the dear old chap had lived," reflected Bingo, and wondered if the Doctor knew about—about Lessie? "Bound to," he mentally decided, "if he keeps his ears only half as open as other men keep theirs. Didn't a brace of bounders of the worst discuss the story in all its bearin's, sittin' behind my wife and Mrs. Saxham in the stalls at the theatre the other night! Everybodyisdiscussin' it now that the Foltlebarres have left off payin' Lessie not to talk, and provided for her and the youngsterout of the estate, and Whittinger's given her a back seat in the family.... That family, too!... Lord! what a rum thing Luck is!"
The musing Major cleared his throat, and his large, rather stupid, blonde face was perfectly stolid as he smoked and stared at his host, reminding himself that Beauvayse had been jealous of Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, and had feared that, if the fellow knew of the scratch against him, he might force the running; and recalling, with a tingling of the shamed blood in his expansive countenance, how he—Wrynche—had let Beauvayse into the sordid secret that Alderman Brooker had blabbed. He wondered, looking at the square, set face, whether Saxham had ever really earned the degrading nickname that he could not get quite right. The 'Peg Doctor,' was it?—or the 'Lush Doctor?' Something in that way.... Not that Saxham looked like a man given to lifting his elbow with undue frequency....
"—But you never know," thought experienced Bingo sagely, even as, in his heavy fashion, he went pounding on: "The Chief's continuin' the Work of Pacification, and acceptin' the surrender of arms—any date of manufacture you like between thechassepotof 1870 and the leather-breeched firelock of Oliver Cromwell's time. The modern kind, you find by employin' the Divinin' Rod"—the large narrator bestowed a wink on Saxham and added—"on the backs of the fellows who buried the guns. Never fails—used in that way. And—as it chances—I have a communication to make to you."
"A communication—a message—from the Chief to me?"
Saxham's face changed, and softened, and brightened curiously and pleasantly.
Major Bingo nodded and cleared his throat. He rebalanced his shiny hat upon the table corner, and said with his eyes engaged in this way:
"I was to remind you—from him—that—not long before the ending of the Siege, a lady who is now a near connection of yours sustained a terrible bereavement through the—infernally dastardly crime of a—person then unknown!"
Saxham's vivid eyes leaped at the speaker's as if to drag out the knowledge he withheld. But Bingo was balancingthe glossy triumph of a Bond Street hatter, and looked at it and not at the Doctor, who said:
"You refer to the murder of the Mother-Superior at the Convent of the Holy Way on February the —th, 1900. And you say a personthenunknown.... Has the murderer been arrested?"
Major Bingo shook his head.
"He hasn't been arrested, but his name is known. You remember the runner who came in from Diamond Town with a letter for a man called Casey? Not long after—after my wife was exchanged for a spy of Brounckers'?"
"I did not see the man myself," returned Saxham, "but I perfectly recollect his getting through."
Major Bingo said:
"I thought you would. Well, the letter was a blind; the bearer an agent of the firm of Huysmans and Eybel, sent to make certain of our weakest points before they put in the attack on the Barala town; and—that's the man who committed the murder!"
"The man who committed the murder?"
Saxham's vivid eyes were intent upon the Major's face. The Major coughed, and went on:
"My wife came across that man at Tweipans under curious circumstances, which I'm here to put before you as plainly as may be.... She'd met him before the Siege, travelling up from Cape Town. He scraped acquaintance, called himself a loyal Johannesburger, and an Agent of the British South African War-Intelligence-Bureau. Not that there ever was such a Bureau." Major Bingo blinked nervously, and ran a thick finger round the inside of his collar as he added: "The beggar spoofed Lady Hannah up hill and down dale with that, and she believed him. And when she subsequently flew the coop—dash this cold of mine!..."
The Major drew out a very large pink cambric pocket-handkerchief, and performed behind its shelter an elaborate but unconvincing sneeze:
"—When she shot the moon with Nixey's mare and spider, it was by private arrangement with this oily, lying blackguard, who had given her an address—a farm on the Transvaal Border, known as Haargrond Plaats—whereshe might communicate with him through another scoundrel in the Transport Agency line, supposin' she chose to do a little business on her own in Secret Intelligence——"
Saxham interrupted:
"I shall say nothing to my wife of this, and I trust you will impress upon Lady Hannah that it would be highly inadvisable for her to do so."
"She won't, you may depend on it." Major Bingo palpably grew warm, and mopped the dew from his large, kind, rather stupid countenance with the pink cambric handkerchief—"She's awfully afraid, as it is, that a word or two she dropped quite innocently, to that infernal liar and swindler, who'd bled her of a monkey, good English cash—paid for procurin' and forwardin' items of information that he took damned good care should reach us at Gueldersdorp too late to be of use, led up to—to the crime!... By the Living Tinker! it's out at last!"
The big man, so cool and nonchalant a minute or so before, fanned himself with the pocket-handkerchief, and turned red, and went white, and went red, and turned white half a dozen times, in twice as many beats of his flurried pulse.
"—Out at last, Saxham, and that's why I've been gulpin' and blunderin' and bogglin' for the last ten minutes. Poof!" Major Bingo exhaled a vast breath of relief. "Tellin' tales on a woman—and her your wife—even when she's begged you to, isn't the sweetest job a man can tackle!"
"Let me have this story in detail once and for all," said Saxham, turning a stern, white face, and hard, compelling eyes upon the embarrassed Major. "What utterance of Lady Hannah's do you suppose to have led to the tragedy in the Convent Chapel? Upon this point I must and shall be clear before you leave me!"
"You shall have things as clearly as I can put 'em. This pretended Secret Agent of the War-Intelligence-Bureau that never existed, and who called himself Van Busch—a name that's as common among Boers as Murphy is among Irishmen—arranged to pass off my wife as his sister, a refugee from Gueldersdorp, who'd married a German drummer, and buried him not long before. Women are so dashed fond ofplay-actin'! Kids, Saxham,—that's what they are in their weakness for dressin' up and makin'-believe! And my wife——"
The large Major was in a violent lather as he ran the thick finger round inside his collar, and swallowed at the lump in his throat.
"—My wife saw Van Busch at Kink's hotel at Tweipans from time to time. He came, I've already explained, to sell bogus information for good money. And as the boodle ran low, the cloven hoof began to show, and the brute became downright insolent."
"As might have been expected," said Saxham, coldly.
"—Kept his hat on in my wife's room, talked big, and twiddled a signet-ring he wore," went on the Major. "And, bein' quick, you know, and sharp as they make 'em, you know, my wife recognised the crest of an old acquaintance cut upon the stone. I knew the man myself"—declared Major Bingo—"and a better never stepped in leather. A brother-officer of the Chiefs, too, and a rippin' good fellow!—Dicky Mildare, of the Grey Hussars."
"Mildare!" repeated Saxham.
"You understand, Saxham, the name did it. My wife had seen the present Mrs. Saxham at Gueldersdorp, and, not knowin' that the surname of Mildare had been taken by her at the wish of her adopted mother, supposed—got the maggot into her head that the Mother-Superior's ward might possibly be a—a daughter of the man the seal-ring had belonged to, knowing—Lord! what a mull I'm making of it!—that Mildare had at one time been engaged to marry that"—the Major boggled horribly—"that uncommonly brave and noble lady, and had, in fact, thrown her over, and made a bolt of it with the wife of his Regimental C.O., Colonel Sir George Hawting."
The faint stain of colour that had showed through Saxham's dead-white skin faded. He waited with strained attention for what was coming.
"South Africa Lady Lucy and Mildare bolted to," went on Bingo, "and now you know the kind of mare's-nest her ladyship had scratched up. And," declared Bingo, "rather than have had to spin this yarn. I'd have faced a Court-Martial of Inquiry respectin' my conduct in the Field.For my wife has a kind heart and a keen sense of honour, and rather than bring harm upon Miss Mildare that was, or anyone connected with her, she'd have stood up to be shot! By G——!" trumpeted Bingo, "I know she would!"
Saxham's face was blue-white now, and looked oddly shrunken. His voice came in a rasping croak from his ashen lips as he said:
"Lady Hannah mentioned my wife to this man, thinking that she might prove to be the daughter of the owner of the ring. What could possibly lead her to infer such a relationship?"
"You must understand that the blackguard had given my wife details of Mildare's death at a farm owned by a friend of his in Natal, and that Hannah—that my wife knew poor little Lucy Hawting had had a child by Mildare," Major Bingo spluttered. "That was why she asked Van Busch outright whether the girl with the nuns at Gueldersdorp was—could be—the same child, grown up? By the Living Tinker!—I never was in such a lather in my life! The better the light I try to put the thing in, the dirtier it looks. And I'm not half through yet, that's the worst of it!"
He mopped and mopped, and took several violent turns about the room, and subsided in a chair at length, and went on, waving the large pink cambric handkerchief, now a damp rag, in the air, at intervals, to dry it.
"She says—Lady Hannah says—that the eagerness and curiosity with which the brute snapped up the hint she'd never meant to drop, warned her to shunt him off on another line, and give no more information. They got on money matters; and, seeing plain how she'd been bilked, my wife gave the welsher a bit of her mind, and he showed his teeth in a way that meant Murder. Just in time—before he could wring her neck round—and he'd started in to do it, you understand—Brounckers came stormin' and bullyin' in, to tell the prisoner she was exchanged, and would be sent down to Gueldersdorp.... They packed her back that very day.... And not a week after, the pretended runner came in from Diamond Town with the bogus letter from Mrs. Casey."
Saxham had thought. He said now:
"This man, this rascally Van Busch, acting as a spyfor Brounckers, was disguised as the runner? Is that what has been proved? Did Lady Hannah see the man and recognise him?"
Bingo leaned forward to answer.
"Lady Hannah never set eyes on the man from Diamond Town. But the day theSiege Gazettecame out, with a blithering paragraph in it that never ought to have appeared, announcin'"—he coughed and crimsoned—"Lord Beauvayse's formal engagement to Miss Mildare;—my wife was rung up at the Convalescent Hospital by a caller who wouldn't say where he telephoned from. And the message that came through—couched in queer, ambiguous language, and purportin' to come from an old friend—was a message for the young lady who is now Mrs. Saxham!"
Saxham's eyes flickered dangerously. He said not a word. The Major went on:
"My wife didn't then and there identify the voice with Van Busch's. She remembered the name given her as that of the owner of the farm at which Mildare died, a place which by rights was in what's now the Orange River Colony, and not Natal at all. She asked plump and plain: 'Are you So-and-So?' There was no answer to the question. But seven hours later the Mother-Superior was shot; and the nuns and Miss Mildare, on their way to the Convent, were passed by a thickset, bearded man, who ran into one of the Sisters in his hurry, and nearly knocked her down."
"That," said Saxham, "has always been regarded as a suspicious circumstance. But the man was never subsequently traced."
"No! Because," said Bingo, "the runner from Diamond Town evaporated that night."
Saxham said, with his grim under-jaw thrust out:
"Surely that circumstance, when reported to the Officer commanding the Garrison, might then have awakened his suspicions?"
"Naturally," agreed Bingo, "and therefore he kept 'em dark. As for my wife, the shock of the murder, accompanied with her own secret conviction that, in some indirect way, she'd helped to set a malicious, lurking, watchful, dangerous Force of some kind working against your wife—whenshe dropped that hint I've told you of—bowled her over with a nervous fever."
"I remember," said Saxham, who had been called in.
"Consequently, it wasn't until some days after the Relief—a bare hour or two before the Division—Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, and a company or so of Civilian Johnnies that had made believe they were genuine fightin' Tommies till they couldn't get out of the notion—marched out of Gueldersdorp for Frostenberg, that her ladyship got a chance of makin' a clean breast to the Chief. Hold on a minute, Doctor——"
For Saxham would have spoken.
"—The Chief had had his own private opinion, from the very first. He heard what my wife had to say. As you may guess, she'd worked herself up into a regular cooker of remorse and anxiety—told him she was ready to go anywhere and do anything—he'd only got to give her orders, and all that sort of thing! He charged her with the simple but difficult rôle of holdin' her tongue, and keepin' her oar out, and findin' him—if by good luck she'd got it by her—a specimen of the handwritin' of the clever scoundrel who'd played at bein' a War Intelligence Agent, and waltzed with her five hundred pounds, which sample, as it chanced, she was able to supply. And the fist of the man who'd swindled her, and the writin' of the Mrs. Casey who'd sent a letter per despatch-runner from Diamond Town to a husband who didn't exist, tallied to an upstroke and the crossin' of a 't'!"
"Is it beyond doubt that the letter from the supposed Mrs. Casey was not a genuine communication?" Saxham asked.
"Beyond doubt. As a fact, the neatly-directed envelope had simply got a sheet of blank paper inside. Another odd fact brought to light was, that the person who communicated with my wife at the Convalescent Hospital about half-past twelve on the day of the murder, rang her up on the telephone belongin' to the orderly-room at the Headquarters of the Baraland Rifles. We had up the orderly, and after some solid lyin', he owned that the man from Diamond Town had bribed him with 'baccy to let him put a message through. And that's another link in the evidence, I take it?" said Major Bingo.
"Undoubtedly!"
"There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo, "that the first march of the Division on its route to Frostenberg led past the Border farm called Haargrond Plaats. It looked deserted and half-ruined, with only a slipshod woman and a coloured man in charge; but something was known of what had gone on there, and might be going on still, and the Boers are clever stage-managers, and it don't do to trust to appearances! So the Chief detached a party with dynamite cartridges and express orders to make the ruin real. Our men searched the place thoroughly before they blew it up; and hidden in a disused chimney—solid bit of old Dutch masonry big enough to accommodate a baker's dozen of sweeps—were a few things calculated to facilitate that search for the needle in the haystack—you understand? Disguises of various kinds—a suit of clothes lined with chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin'—a good deal of the raw stuff itself, scattered all over the shop by the blow-up—and in a rusty cashbox a diary or private ledger, posted up in a clumsy kind of thieves' cipher, impossible to make out, but with the name written on it of the identical man my wife suspected and the Chief believed to be the murderer of Miss Mildare's adopted mother! And that's what you may call the Clue Direct, Saxham, I rather fancy?"
Major Bingo Wrynche leaned back with an air of some finality, and with some little difficulty extracted a biggish square envelope from the left inner pocket of the accurately-fitting frock-coat. He lightly placed the envelope upon the blotter before Saxham; reached out and took the shiny top-hat off the writing-table, fitted it with peculiar care on his pinkish, sandy, close-cropped head, and said, looking at Saxham with a pleasant smile.
"Perhaps you wouldn't mind throwin' your eye over the contents of that envelope? There are three photographs of handwritin' inside, marked on the backs respectively." He waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the big envelope, examining the polish of his own varnished patent-leather boots with a fastidious air of anxiety that was extremely well assumed, if it was not strictly genuine. His large face was as bland and expressionless as the face ofthe grandfather-clock in the Sheraton case that ticked against the wainscot behind him, as he advised:
"Take 'em in numerical sequence. No. 1 is the photographed facsimile of the cover of the bogus letter to Mr. Casey. No. 2"—the speaker lightly touched it with a large round finger-tip—"that's the replica—also photographed—of a card the man we're after wrote on and gave to Lady Hannah, in case she found herself inclined to invest a hundred or so in the kind of wares he professed to supply. Photo No. 3 is a reproduction of an autograph and address that's written on the inside cover of the ledger —posted up in thieves' cipher—that was in the cashbox found at Haargrond Plaats." He waited, screwing painfully at the stiff, waxed ends of the scrubby moustache.
Saxham took the photographs in their order. The envelope of the bogus letter brought by the supposed runner from Diamond Town had been addressed in a big bold black round hand with curiously malformed capitals, to
"Mr.Barney Casey,"Commercial Traveller,"Gueldersdorp."Care of the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces"
"—Don't put it back in the envelope," said Major Bingo. "Compare the writin' with No. 2."
No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was written in ink, in the same bold hand:
"Mr.Hendryk Van Busch,"C/o Mr. W. Bough,"Transport Agent,"Haargrond Plaats,"Near Matambani,"Transvaal."
There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by street noises filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking of the Sheraton grandfather clock, and the breathing of two people. Saxham glanced at Major Bingo witheyes that seemed to have been bleached of colour, and laid the second calligraphic specimen beside the first, and took up No. 3, and read in the same large nourishing round hand:
"W. Bough,"Free State Hotel,"50 m. from Driepoort,"Orange Free State."
After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and the faint, far-off street noises came through the intervening screens, but only one of the men in the room seemed to be breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips moved. He said in a horrible clicking whisper:
"Van Busch and Bough are—one?"
Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative. But it was as expressionless as the grandfather clock's.
"One man!—and that's what I may call the pith of my verbal Despatch for you!"
Saxham said with hard composure:
"Van Busch is a Dutch surname that, as you say, is common in South Africa. With the name of Bough, as the Chief is aware, I have—associations. It was, in fact, one of the many aliases used by the witness for Regina in an Old Bailey case in which I was concerned nearly seven years ago."
The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity:
"Same man!"
Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was the same man. The tense muscles of his face told nothing. Bingo added:
"—But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount to little compared with the wrong and injury inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham! That—— Good Lord! what's the matter?"
For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue lips:
"What wrong? What injury? What—what are you hinting at?——"
"Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round light blue eyes was so palpably genuine that the crazyflame died out of the Doctor's, and his clenched hand dropped. "I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all!"
"I beg your pardon, Major!" Saxham picked up his chair and sat down on it, inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. "My nerves have been giving trouble of late."
Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright eyes, the Doctor looked like that—uncommonly like that! And the big Major, remembering Alderman Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the stiff, blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have reverted to the old vice? "Bad for the girl he's married if he has!" he thought, even as he said:
"Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' the tension, don't you know? Norway in June, or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind and go!"
"I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling bitterly, as he remembered the little phial with the yellow label that lay beside the whisky-flask in the drawer beneath his hand. "I shall go very soon now!"
"But not immediately?"
"Not immediately." There was something strange, almost exalted, in the look that accompanied the words. Saxham added: "If you could give me an approximate date as regards the finding of that—needle in the haystack of South Africa, it would—facilitate my departure more than you can guess!"
"Would it, by George!" Bingo slipped the thumb and forefinger of the useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket. Something sparkled in the big pink palm he extended to Saxham—something sparkled, and spurted white and green and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled from its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful face of a young, refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all his iron self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement and a stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.
For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.
With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakablerage and horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light.
Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!
The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have indicated the height of the latest fashion—say, twenty-two or even three years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the dull gold of the inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it. Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 1879."
* * * * *
The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's opaque skin had given place to pallor. His face was sharp and thin, and of waxen whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. His blue eyes burned ominously in their caves under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice was very quiet as he asked: "How did you come by this?"
"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits of evidence were bits of a man—two men you might call him! And, by the Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"
"He had this upon him? He—wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.
"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a neck to boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd hand it over to—anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully! So long!"
In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of the Siege—a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written by an unsteady hand.
Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and drove there that afternoon.
The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West. Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged passages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and able to receive a visitor?
The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she would be happy to oblige the gentleman.
"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an ordinary caller on business connected with religion."
The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream-washed, brown-distemper-dadoed passage, smelling of kippered haddocks and incense, to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a view of mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.
Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library; chrome-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by Old Masters hung above. The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who was lying down.
"I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the prone figure, a single stride having taken him to the side of the sofa, "to prescribe for a man whose nerves are playing him tricks. I have torn up your letter—the epistle in which you ask me to afford you an opportunity of making an avowal which will prove to what depths of infamy a man may descend at the bidding of his lower nature. Lower nature! If I am any judge of a man's physical condition, a lower nature is what you want!" He threw down his hat and stick upon the green-baize-covered table, took one of the Windsor chairs, and crashed it down beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big body on it, and reached out and captured the thin wrist of his victim, who mustered breath to stammer:
"There is nothing whatever the matter with my health. I am well—that is, bodily." He got up from the sofa, and crossed to the Zoological hearthrug, and poked the smoky little fire burning in the narrow grate, for the May day was wet and chilly. "I shall be better, mentally," he said, with an effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham, "when you have heard what I have to tell." He rose up, and turned round, his thin face flaming. "Mind, I'm not to be gagged by your not wanting to," for Saxham had impatiently waved his hand. "Hear you shall, and must!"
He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that couched on a field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove his hands down deep into his pockets, and the painful scarlet surged over the rim of his Roman collar and dyed his thin, sensitive, beautiful face and high, white forehead to the roots of his dark, curling hair.
"Perhaps you may recall an oath I swore at your instigationone day in your room at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp?"
"Yes—no! What does it matter?" said Saxham thickly, with his angry, brooding eyes upon the floor.
"It matters," said Julius doggedly, "in the present case. I need hardly tell you that I have kept that oath. If the man had not been dead, I might have ended by breaking it—who knows? What I have to tell you is that, some two months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is now your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by a despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen—deservedly fallen—to your lot, sought out Miss Mildare, and told her—something I had learned to your detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling, worthless creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength of a seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."
Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall now instead of the floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His right hand, resting on the table near which he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to hear more. And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the parted wooden mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden:
"I knew that the man lied—on my soul, I knew it! But the opportunity he had given me of lowering your value in—in another's eyes was too tempting to resist. The man had told me——"
"In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," said Saxham; "and, as it happens, he told the truth!" He added: "And what I was then I am now. There is no change in me, though once I thought it!"
"Saxham!... For God's sake, Saxham!" stuttered Julius. But Saxham, hunching his great shoulders, and lowering his square, black head, not at all unlike the savage bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went on:
"It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham of abstinence and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and various grades in our drunkenness, as in our other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises the common drunkard; and the sippers of ether look downwith infinite contempt—or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the toper and the slave of morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxygenated racehorse run for the Cup! A year or so, and the Transatlantic oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equipment of the British athlete. Even to-day the professional footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer, inhale oxygen as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that is born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The man who scales an Alpine summit winds himself up with a whiff or so; the orator, inspired by oxygen, astonishes the House of Commons or the Bar. And the actor, delirious with oxygen, rushes on the stage; and the clergyman, drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit to preach a Temperance sermon. And the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying tipplers; and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: 'Physician, heal thyself!'"
The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure as he got up. His fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken caves as he took his hat and stick from the table.
"What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrong me. Moralists would say that you acted conscientiously—played the part of a true friend in telling—her—what you knew!"
"Of my benefactor—the man who had saved my life!" Julius moistened his dry lips. "Your approving moralist would be the devil's advocate. But I have not forgotten what your own opinion is of the man who tries to enhance his own virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the vices of a rival. And, if you will believe me, I was punished for the attempt. Her look of surprise ... the tone in which she said, 'Did he not save your life?' that was enough!... Then I—I lost my head, and told her that I loved her—entreated her to be my wife, only to learn that she never had—never could——" Julius's thin white fingers knotted themselves painfully at the back of his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks between his gritted teeth: "It was revolting to her—a girl rearedamong nuns in a Catholic Convent—that a man calling himself a priest should speak to her of love. There was absolute horror in her look as she learned the truth." He groaned. "I have never met her eyes since that day without seeing—or imagining I saw—some reflection of that horror in them!"
"Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations?" said Saxham, not unkindly.
He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure, when Julius stopped him.
"One moment. Has—has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to you of—this that I have told you?"
"Never!" answered Saxham, pausing at the door.
"One moment more! Saxham, is it hopeless? Could you not by a desperate effort break this habit that may—that must—inevitably bring misery to your wife? In the name of her love for you—in the names of the children that may be born of it——"
—"Unless you want me to murder you," advised Saxham, facing the passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a breaking wave, "you had better be silent!"
"My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, "is better than you know. When I endeavoured—unsuccessfully—to injure you, I robbed myself of my belief in myself. But you—you who gave me back my earthly life, you have robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal God. Do you know the effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It is a choking fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that day at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 'The Human Will is even more omnipotent than the Deity, because it has created Him, out of its own need!' I have done my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utterance—I have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrung his hands, that were wet as though they had been dipped in water. "I have tended souls as mechanically as a gardener might water pots in which there was nothing but dead sticks and dry earth!"
"Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung by the suffering in the thin young face and in thebeautiful haggard eyes, "that I never meant the harm that I appear to have done! Nor can I recall that I have habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I remember that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen an announcement in theSiege Gazettethat ... I dare say you understand?" He laughed harshly. "As to my theory of the Omnipotence of Human Will, it is blown and exploded, and all the King's horses and all the King's men will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from. I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me! Of how far Will, in another man, may carry him, I dare not judge or calculate. My own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows!"
He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a bookcase, and said, pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes:
"The best of us are bad in spots, Parson: the worst of us are good in patches. You Churchmen don't recognise that fact sufficiently.... And I think no worse of you for what you have told me! If I have anything to forgive—why, it is forgiven! Do you try, on the other hand, to think leniently of a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothing of his own to lean upon. As for my wife, in whose interests I know you to be honestly solicitous, I will tell you this much: She will be spared the 'inevitable misery' of which you spoke just now!"
"How? Have you decided to undergo a cure? I have heard," hesitated Julius, "that these things are not always successful—that they sometimes fail!"
"Mine is the only cure that never fails," returned Saxham.
A vision of the little blue-glass, yellow-labelled vial that held the swift dismissing pang, floated before him. He shook hands with Julius, and went upon his lonely way.
Even the saintly of this earth are prone to rare, occasional displays of temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her descent from Eve by stamping her slender foot at herhulking Doctor; had, after a sudden outburst of passionate, unreasonable upbraiding, risen from the dinner-table and run out of the room, to hide a petulant, remorseful shower of tears.
Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst—merely an invitation from Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were settled for the London summer season in Eaton Square, for Owen and his wife to spend the scorching months of August and September at the old home, perched on the South Dorset cliffs, among its thrush-haunted shrubberies of ilex and oleander and rose—nothing more.
But Mrs. Owen Saxham had passionately resented the idea. Why never occurred to Saxham. He had long ago forgiven and forgotten Mildred's old treachery. If David's betrayal had brought him shame and anguish, it had borne him fruit of joy as well. And if the fruit might never be gathered, if its divine juices might never solace her husband's bitter thirst, at least, while he lived, it was his—to look at and long for. He owed that cruel bliss to his brother and that brother's wife. And their meeting had been, upon his side, free of constraint, unshadowed by the recollection of what had once appeared to him a base betrayal—a gross, foul, unpardonable wrong.
Suppose he had married Mildred, and been uneventfully happy and successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would never have seen and known Lynette. She would never have come to him and laid in his the slight hand whose touch thrilled him to such piercing agony of yearning for the little more that would have meant so much—so much....
Ah, yes! he was even grateful to Mildred. She had not worn well. She had grown thin andpassée, and nervous and hysterical. But she was amiable, even demonstrative in her professions of admiration and enthusiasm for Owen's wife. Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the sisterliness of its expression when he was present, if in his absence it was tempered by a regretful sigh—even by a reference to the time:
"When poor dear Owen thought me the only woman worth looking at in the whole world.Ah, well! that is all over, long ago!" Mildred would say, with an inflection that was meant to be tenderly reassuring. And she wouldtilt her still pretty head on one side and smile with pensive kindness at her successor upon the throne of poor dear Owen's heart.
These gentle, retrospective references were never made in the Doctor's hearing. With truly feminine tact they were reserved for Mrs. Owen's delectation. And possibly they might have rankled in those pretty shell-like ears, if their owner had loved Saxham.
But Saxham knew that she did not;—had even ceased to wish that the miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be very dense. When she stamped her foot and cried, "I decline to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to! If you can forget how hideously she and your brother have treated you, I cannot! I loathe treachery! I abominate ingratitude and deceit! And I hate her—and I shall not go!" Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had never before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He found his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among the débris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table. Her fetters were galling her to agony, he knew! His square pale face grew more Rhadamanthine than ever, and the glass he had been filling with port overflowed unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light silken draperies passed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure, mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite, where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must be warned to complete his work without delay.
For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals andsnowy shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest to his young widow.
Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year before.
He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-passes and lashing the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.
When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower, now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion. When those blocks of cyclopæan masonry should be tufted with the golden wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask should come into use.
When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be covered for leagues by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread by the broom and the furze; when the innumerable little yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly bushes, thrusting pertly through the powdery white sand, and every hollow and hillock should be gay with the star convolvulusand the flaunting scarlet poppies—then Death should come, borne on winged feet, and bearing the sword of keenness, to sever the iron bonds of Andromeda chained to the rock. And here was Summer, knocking at the door!
Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out and ask the reason of her strange display of emotion. Only a husband could do that who had the right to take her in his arms and kiss the last remaining traces of her tears away. Saxham went to his consulting-room, and while all the clocks of London made time, and the moon veered southward, and the stars rose and set, he toiled over his notes and case-books in the brilliant circle cast by the shaded electric lamp upon his writing-table, and the tide in the big whisky-flask in the table-drawer ebbed low.
Hours hence he laid down his pen. The flask had long been emptied; the alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey chambers of his brain. Weariness of life weighed on him like a leaden panoply. He had almost stretched his hand to take the little blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting in the deep table-drawer aside the drained flask before sleep overcame him. His head sank against the chair-back. His was a sudden, heavy lapsing into forgetfulness, unmarred by dreams.
Time sped. The silver table-clock, the clock upon the mantelshelf, and the grandfather clock in the corner, ran a race with the chronometer in the pocket of the sleeping man. The brilliant unwavering circle of electric light did not reach the face of the Dop Doctor. It bathed his hands, that hung lax over the arms of the Sheraton chair, and tipped his lifted chin, leaving the strong brow and closed eyes in shadow. But as the pale glimmer of dawn began to outline the edges of the blinds and stretched at length a broad, pointing finger across the quiet room, the sleeping face showed greyish pale and luminous as a drawing by Whistler in silver-point.
The dawn had not rested on it long before there came a knock upon the panel of the consulting-room door. It was so faint and diffident a knock, no wonder it passed unheeded. Then the door opened timidly, and a slenderfigure in pale flowing draperies of creamy embroidered cashmere stole upon small, noiseless, slippered feet over the thick Turkey carpet.
It was Lynette. She had risen from her bed, and looked out from the landing into the hall below, and, seeing the light of the unextinguished lamp shining under the lintel of the consulting-room door, had stolen timidly down to ask Owen's pardon. Why had she behaved so badly? She could not explain. Only she was sorry. She must tell him so. His name was upon her lips, when she saw the Dop Doctor sleeping in his chair.
Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side. And then—it was to her as though she looked upon her husband's face for the first time.
There was no stain of his secret excess upon it—no bloating of the features. You would have said this was a sane and strong and temperate man, upon whom the mighty brother of all-conquering Death had come, like one armed, and overthrown in the heat and stress of the life-battle. Only the sorrow of a suffering soul was written as deeply on that pale mask of human flesh as though the sculptor-slaves of a Pharao, dead seven thousand years agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, resistless temper in the diamond-hard Egyptian granite.
He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle twitched as Lynette bent over and looked at him. A mass of her red-brown hair, heavy with the weight of its own glossy luxuriance, slipped from her half-bared bosom as she leaned over him, and fell upon his breast. A sudden blush burned over her as it fell. He never stirred. But as though the rod of Moses had touched the rock in Horeb, one slow tear oozed from between Saxham's black fringed, close-sealed eyelids, and hung there, a burnished, trembling point of steely light. And the deep, still, manly anguish of his face cried out to the reawakening womanhood in Lynette, and a strange, new, overwhelming emotion seized and shook her as a stream of white and liquid fire seemed to pass into her veins and mingle with her blood.
She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart and bated breath, upon the living page before her eyes.
In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, thatface of Saxham's pleaded with her. In its stern acceptance of suffering and disappointment for Saxham, in its rugged confrontation of the inevitable; in its resolute long-suffering and grim patience; in its silent abnegation of any claim upon her gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness, the face was more than eloquent to-night. In the pride that would never stoop to beg for pity—would rather die hungered than accept one crumb of grudged and measured love; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to that promise given to a dead man; in the nobility of its refusal to shine brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that other man's mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony of love for her, insensible and careless; in the sick despair that had given up and left off hoping: even in the pride that had—or so it seemed to her—asserted itself at the last, and said, "I have left off crying for the moon; I wish for your love no longer!"—it pleaded—pleaded.... Words struggled for answering utterance in her, but none came.... She leaned nearer, drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips lightly upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of black meeting eyebrow smudged across it, and then, with a sudden leap and thrill, she knew....
All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only this man mattered who sat sleeping in the chair. How easy to awaken him with a touch, and tell him all! She dared not, though she longed to.