"Lor'! You don't ever mean——" began his wife, and stopped short. The scene of her first meeting with W. Keyse flashed back upon her mental vision. She saw the big man waking up out of his drunken stupor and lurching to the rescue of the little one. "Was it 'im?" she panted, as the teapot ran over on the clean coarse cloth. "Was it Dr. Saxham?"

"You may tyke it from me it was." W. Keyse rescued the kettle, restored it to the hob, returned to his place, and shook his finger at her warningly. "And if you go to remind me as wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e did——" He looked portentous warnings.

"I never would. Oh, William!"

"Mind as you never do, that's all!... I tried to thank 'im then," went on W. Keyse, "an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im agyne at the Hospital—an' e' wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is own doorstep, an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is—Wait! When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion back...."

"I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse, "But it was a mouse"—she repressed a shudder—"an' not the—thing you said."

"Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse with burning eyes. "And the Doctor's goin' to find it does." He held up his lean right hand and swore it. "So 'elp me, Jimmy Cripps!"



LVIII

Lynette Saxham came into the consulting-room that was on the ground-floor of the house in Harley Street, behind the room where patients waited their turn. Her quick, light step and the silken rustling of the lining of her gown broke the spell that had bound the man who sat motionless in the armchair before the Sheraton writing-table, staring with fixed eyes and gripping the arms of his chair with unconscious force ...

A faint, pleasant odour of Russia leather and camphor-wood came from the dwarf bookcases that dadoed the walls. The room was quite dark; the two high windows, screened by clear muslin blinds running on gilded rods, showed pale parallelograms of cold twilight. The coachhouse and stable building at the end of the paved yard showed as a cube of blackness. One window in the centre of the wall was lighted up, and on its white cotton blind the shadows of a man and woman acted a Domestic Play.

Perhaps Saxham had been watching this? The shadow-man seemed to sit at a table reading a newspaper by the light of the lamp behind him, the shadow woman sat nearer the window, employed upon some homely kind of needlework. Her outline when she rose, showed that the woman's great, mysterious ordeal, the sacrament of keenest anguish by which her dearest and most sacred joy is won, was very close upon her. She passed behind the man as if to fetch something, stopped behind his chair, and drew her arm about his neck, leaning her cheek down to his so that their two shadows became one.

The starving waif outside the window of the cook-shop knows no more excruciating aggravation of his pangs than to look at food, and yet keeps on looking. It may have been like this with Saxham, empty of all love, and gnawed by the tooth of a sharper hunger than that which is merely physical. He started out of his lethargy when his wife's voice reached him.

"Owen!... Why, you are sitting in the dark!"

Lynette heard someone moving among the shadows. The electric reading-lamp upon the writing-table diffused a mellow radiance under its green silk shade. Two other globes sprang into shining life, and showed her, smiling, and shrinking a little from the sudden incursion of light, as Saxham, with the quiet, unhurried, scrupulous courtesy he always showed towards his wife, received the heavy driving-mantle of sables that she dropped from her shoulders, and laid it over a chair. A frosty breath from the outer atmosphere clung to it, but the silken lining was penetratingly warm, and instinct with the sweetness of the woman, so much so that it was agony to the man....

She wore a white cloth gown of elegantly-simple cut, that revealed with unostentatious art the lovely lines of the slender shape. A knot of white and golden freesias, exhaling a clean, delicate perfume, was fastened at her breast; her wonderful red-brown hair was shaded by a broad-brimmed brown felt hat of Vandyke shape, with creamy drooping plumes. The rare promise of her beauty had fulfilled itself in the last six months. She was bewilderingly lovely.

She drew out the jewelled pins that fastened her hat, and threw it down, and took a favourite seat of hers beside the fire, and looked across at the man who was her husband, smiling faintly as she held her little foot, delicately shod, high-arched and slim, to the blaze of the wood-fire.

"Do I interfere with your work? Are any patients waiting?"

"It is past my hour for seeing patients," said Saxham, with a smile. "And if anyone were waiting, you are an older client, and have the prior claim."

"We will have tea in here, then," she said, and touched the bell, adding: "I am fond of this room."

It was just now a place that was dear to Saxham. He came across to the hearth and stirred the fire to a ruddier blaze, and stood at the opposite side of it, leaning an arm upon the mantelshelf. The shining mirror above it reflected a square black head that was getting grizzled, and the profile of a face that was haggard and worn.

The servant came with tea, and drew down the upper blinds, shutting out that mocking shadow-play at which Saxham had been staring. As Lynette busied herself with the shining silver and delicate Japanese porcelain, there was a chance of studying, unobserved, the beloved book of her face—a locked book to Saxham since that day in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp.

Ah, what a face it was! It fascinated and held him. Such long, thick, shadowy eyelashes, sweeping the white cheeks! Such a low, wide, perfectly modelled forehead above them, with fine arched eyebrows, much darker than the richly rippling, parted hair that was coiled and twisted and roped into a mass behind the small, delicate ears, as though its owner were impatient of its luxuriance. Such a close-folded, mysterious mouth, with deep-cut curves, hiding the pure white, rather overlapping teeth. An irregular nose, rather square-ended, with eager nostrils; a rounded chin, with a little cleft in it, went to the making of the face that Saxham and many others thought so beautiful.

Only something was wanting to it. "Animation," the physiognomist would have said. "Vitality, mobility." "Health," might have thought the ordinary observer, mistaking the bluish shadows under the drooped eyelids and about the mouth and nostrils for the usual signals of debility.

But Saxham, when he looked into the golden-hazel eyes, so often hidden by the thick white eyelids, with their deep fringe of black-brown lashes, said to himself with bitterness: "She is quite well. Nothing on earth is wrong with her, except that she is not happy! I can give her everything else on earth, it seems, but what she needs most of all!"

Let Joy, that radiant torch of the soul, illuminate those dim windows, let Happiness sink like sweet rain into the dry heart, and the whole woman would awaken into vivid glowing beauty, like the parched South African veld after the spring rains. Red tulips would bloom between the boulders; exquisite glowing pelargoniums and snow-white or pale-blue iris would clothe the baked earth. The ice-plant would no longer be the only green thing growing in the crannies of the rock. Delicate ferns and dew-gemmed pitcher-plants would quiver there, and the spikes of the many-coloured gladioli would thrust from the earth like spears; and the sweet-scented clematis and the passion-vine would trail and blossom in rose and white and purple on the edges of the kloofs and gorges, every stem and leaf and bud and blossom growing and rejoicing in the balmy breeze and the glorious June sunshine; the cruel, lashing rains, the devastating floods, and the burning droughts forgotten as though they had never been.

Meanwhile the heavy fringe of dark lashes drooped wearily on Lynette's white cheeks, and the long-limbed, slight, supple body leaned back in the favourite chair by the fireside with a little air of languor that only added to her allure. And Saxham, looking at her, said again in his heart:

"Her children—let them settle the money upon her children!"

She had learned to love, and thrilled at the touch of passion. Well, Beauvayse was dead, but Love would come again. He would read its resurrection in the radiance of those eyes. Then, exit Saxham! Such a marriage as theirs could be easily dissolved, but he would not take the easy road. He had decided. His should be the strait and narrow way of death. His death was a debt he owed her. You are to learn why!

While he reviewed, for the thousandth time, this determination of his, and told himself again how the thing should be done, his tea had grown quite cold. She leaned forwards and touched his sleeve in drawing his attention to the neglected cup, and flushed because he started and looked at her so strangely.

He never, if it could be avoided, touched her. Her old shrinking from him had worn away. His companionship, though he did not guess it, was to her desirable—even dear. The light, firm tread of his small muscular feet, the curt, decided utterance, made welcome music in her ears. She would watch him without his knowledge when they went abroad together. The esteem in which his peers and seniors held him, the deference with which his opinions were solicited and listened to gave her strange delightful throbs of pride.

She had felt the first stirring of that pride in him when the man who had been the thinking brain and the beating heart of beleaguered Gueldersdorp had said, wringing her husband's hand:

"'If' you have been of any use to me.... 'If'.... You have been my right hand and my mainstay from first to last, Saxham, and while I live I shall remember it!"

Brave words—heartsome words for the hearing of a woman who had loved him. Lynette was almost sorry that she did not.

He did not believe that he had won any hearts in Gueldersdorp. His curtness, his roughness, his harshness had been unfavourably commented upon many and many a time. Yet when he left them, how the people cheered! What volumes of roaring sound from lusty throats had bidden him good-bye and God-speed!

"Hurrah for the Doctor! Three cheers for Saxham! Don't forget us, Doc! Come back again! God bless you, Saxham! Bravo, Saxham! Saxham! Saxham! Hurrah!"

A woman who had loved him would have wept for joy. A pity his wife did not!

How strangely Owen had looked at her just now, when she had brushed his sleeve lightly with her finger-tip! How curious it was that he never touched her if he could help it! She had quite forgotten having told him that, while she liked to know him near, she could not endure the thought of being taken by him, caressed by him, held in his embrace.... That had been the frank, truthful expression of her feelings at the time. She did not recoil so from his contact now. She had not realised how deeply her words had wounded the man's great, suffering, patient heart. Spoken, they had passed from her memory. It is so natural for a fair, sweet woman to forget! It is so impossible for a man who has been stabbed to help remembering, with the deep, bleeding wound unclosed!

There was another thing that Saxham did not know. Although, as time went on, the beloved image of the Mother, cherished in the innermost shrine of her adopted daughter's heart, suffered no change in the clear, firm beauty of its outlines or deterioration in the richness of its tender and austere and gracious colouring; and each new day supplied some fresher garland of old imperishable memories to grace it with;—that Shape with the grey-green jewel-eyes and the gay mouth that laughed had faded—faded! She would not own it even to herself, but the keen edge of her grief for Beauvayse was blunted. The anniversary of his death, occurring in the coming month of February, was to be a solemn retreat of sacred prayer for her. But it was the Mother's death-day also, when to the palm of martyrdom had been added the Saint's crown. She was going to spend three days at the Kensington Convent, where the dead nun had taken the vows. She told Saxham now of the arrangement she had made through Lady Castleclare, who was intimate with the Superior.

"It will be a little like old times," she said to Saxham, "living in a Convent again. And there are many Sisters there who knew Mother, and loved her——"

Her eyes swam in sudden tears. And Saxham, as he looked at her, felt his heart contract in a spasm of bitter jealousy. All that love for the dead, and not a crumb for the living! He saw Beauvayse, his rival still, stretching a hand from the grave to keep her from him. And he could have cried aloud:

"Those tears are for a trickster who cheated you into loving him. Listen, now, and I, who have never lied, even to win you, will show him to you as he really was!..."

But he did not yield to the temptation to enlighten her. A vision rose up before him of a dying man on a camp-bed, and he heard his own voice saying:

"I will never tell her! I will not blacken any man's reputation to further my own interests!"

She was speaking, telling him something. He came back out of the fierce mental struggle to listen to the voice that was so sweet and clear, and yet so cold, so cold....



"Imagine it! I met an old friend to-day at my dressmaker's in Conduit Street. Not a man. A girl who was a pupil at the Convent at Gueldersdorp—or, rather, I should say a woman, for she is married."

Saxham asked:

"Is she an Englishwoman or a Colonial?"

"She is of mingled French and Dutch blood. She was a Miss Du Taine. Her father was a member of the Volksraad at Pretoria. He controls large interests on the Rand, and has an estate near Johannesburg. She is married to an English gentleman. He is very rich, and has a title. She told it me, but I have forgotten it. She asked me to drive home and lunch with her...." She hesitated. "I did not want to go," she said.

"Well, and what happened then?" Saxham asked.

"I made some kind of excuse, and hailed a hansom, and drove to Lady Castleclare's. I lunched with her. She is always very kind. She thought the pearls were beautiful. But—but surely they cost you a great deal of money?"

She touched a string of the gleaming, milky things that encircled her white throat above the lace cravat. Saxham said, smiling:

"They did not cost more than I could afford to pay. I am glad you liked them. I told Marie to put them on your dressing-table, where you would be likely to see them in the morning."

"You are too good to me!" she said, with quivering lips, looking at him. Her white hand wavered in the air, as though she meant to stretch it out to him.

"It is not possible to be too good—to you!" said Saxham curtly. He would not see the outstretched hand. She drew it back, and faltered:

"You give me everything——"

"You have given me what I most wanted in the world!" he lied bravely.

"But"—she rose and stood beside him on the hearthrug, tall, and fair, and slender, and oh! most seductively, maddeningly sweet to his adoring thought—"but you take nothing for yourself. That bedroom of yours at the top of the house is wretchedly bare and comfortless; and then, those absurd pictures!"

She laughed ruefully, recalling the row of pictorially-illustrated nursery rhymes that adorned the brown-paper dado of Saxham's third-floor bedroom, the previous tenant having been a family man.

"—Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy; the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and the Cow that jumped over the Moon. How can you endure them?"

She looked at him, and was startled by the set grimness of his face and the thunderous lowering of the black smudge of eyebrow. He said:

"You went to my room to-day. Why?"

She crimsoned, and stammered:

"It was this morning, after you had gone out. I—it struck me that your linen ought to be overlooked and put to rights from time to time. How did you know?"

He did not explain that the perfume of her hair, of her breath, of her dress, had lingered when she had gone, to tempt and taunt and torture him. He said nothing of the little knot of violets that had dropped from her breast upon the floor, and he had found there. His heart beat against it even then. He answered:

"You told me yourself. And, as for the linen, let it be. The housekeeper knows that she is expected to attend to it."

"She isn't your wife!"

Her golden eyes flashed at him rebelliously. He was provoking her, in his innocence of all intention, as a subtle wooer might have planned to do.

"I am extremely glad that she is not." His mouth relaxed in a smile, and his thunderous brows smoothed themselves. "And now, don't you think you ought to go and dress? You are dining with Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche at The Carlton at seven, and going on to a theatre." He held his watch out. "Six-thirty now," he said, and restored the chronometer to his waistcoat pocket.

"Very well." She moved a step or two in the direction of the door, and turned her head as gracefully as a young deer, and looked back at him. "But you are coming, too?" she said, and her eyes were very soft.

He shook his head.

"It is impossible. I have several urgent cases to visit, and there is an article for the Scientific Review." He moved his hand slightly in the direction of some sheets of manuscript that lay upon the blotting-paper. "I have a heavy night's work before me with that alone. My excuses have already been telephoned to Lady Hannah."

"Owen!"——

She spoke his name in a whisper.

—"Owen!"

"Yes?"

"Couldn't I?—would you care to have me?—may I stay and dine at home with you?"

"And disappoint your friends!... Most certainly not. Unless, indeed"—his tone warmed to interest—"unless you are not feeling well?"

"I am perfectly well, thanks!" she said coldly.

"Then go to your dinner and your play, child," said Saxham, with the smile that changed and softened his harsh features almost into beauty. "I will drive with you to The Carlton, and fetch you from the play. Which of the theatres have you decided to patronise?"

"Lady Hannah and the Major left the choice to me," she said, with a little touch of girlish importance, "so I telephoned to Nickalls in Bond Street for a box at The Leicester. He had not got one; he sent me three stalls for 'The Chiffon Girl' at The Variety instead. It is a revival. I don't quite know what that means," she added, rather puzzled by Saxham's silence and the grimness of his face. "You do not mind at all? You do not think it is the kind of play the Mother would not have liked me to see?"

"No!" said Saxham curtly, and with averted eyes.

She bent her head to him as he opened the door, and went away to her own rooms on the floor above, the drawing-room that was upholstered and hung with delicate, green-and-white, rose-garlanded Pompadour brocade, and graceful water-colours from famous hands, and furnished with every luxury and elegance that the heart of woman could desire; the charming boudoir, pink as a sea-shell, and full of new books and old china; the bedroom, with the blue-and-white decorations, where an ivory Crucifix that had always stood upon the Mother's writing-table hung above the dainty bed....

"I think he is a little hard on me at times," she said, as she passed through the warm, firelit, perfumed rooms that were fragrant with the narcissi and violets and lilies that were sent in by his orders, and strewn with the costly, pretty trifles that she, who had been used to the barrack-like bareness of the Convent, delighted in like a child, and the gleaming mirrors gave her back her loveliness. "He treats me as if I were a stranger. And, after all, I am his wife...."

Saxham's patients found him even curter and more brusque in manner than usual that evening, and the article for the Scientific Review made little way. He threw down his pen at last, and leaned his head upon his hands and wondered, staring at the unfinished page of manuscript with eyes that saw no meaning in the sentences, whether any man born of woman had ever been so great a fool as the man who had written them?

To have made that promise of secrecy to the dead traitor was an act of sheer, quixotic folly. To have kept it was madness, nothing less. And yet Saxham knew that he would keep it always. That if she ever learned the truth, it would be hinted by the chance remark of some stranger, gathered from a paragraph in some newspaper. There was a small-print line at the bottom of the quarter-column devoted by the compilers of Whittinger's "Peerage" to the Marquisate of Foltlebarre, which might have enlightened her. He turned to it now, and read:

"Viscountess Beauvayse, Esther, dau: of Samuel Levah, Esq., of Finsbury, E.C., mar: June, 1899, the late John Basil Edward Tobart, Lieut. Grey Hussars, 11th Viscount Beauvayse. Killed in action during the defence of Gueldersdorp, Feb., 1900, while atta: as Junior aide to the Staff of Colonel Commanding H.M. Forces, leaving issue one dau: The Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart, now aged eighteen months."

At the Clubs, Service and Civil, Saxham had heard the impromptu marriage of the late John Basil Edward Tobart freely discussed. The story of his subsequent entanglement "with some girl or other at Gueldersdorp" had been mooted in his presence a dozen times by Society chatterers, whose enjoyment of the scandal would have been pleasantly stimulated by the knowledge that "Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., late Attached Medical Staff," was married to the girl. But they did not know, and she ...

What use—what use in her knowing? Of what avail could be the melting of the ice about her heart, the loosening of the fetters of her tongue, the quickening of her nature, the miracle vouchsafed? Of none, now, for a reason! Saxham told himself, in those hours when he propped his burning forehead on his hands and looked into the starless night of his desolate soul, that he had ceased even to desire that she should come to love him. Far better that she should never know!

It was growing late, and he had promised to fetch her from the theatre. The silver clock upon the mantelshelf chimed ten. He had stretched his hand to the telephone to ring up his motor-brougham from the garage, when he heard the click of her latchkey in the outer door and the silken whisper of her garments passing quickly through the hallway. Then came a knock at the consulting-room door—sharp, quick, imperious, oddly unlike Lynette's soft tap.... At the summons Saxham made two strides across the carpet and opened to her, a question on his lips.

"Why have you come back so early? Has anything happened?"

Even as he asked, her look told why. She knew....

She knew.... Her face was rigid, a pure white mask of ivory; there was not a trace of colour even in the set lips. Her eyes burned upon him, twin flames of dark amber, steady under levelled brows. She was wrapped in a long ermine-caped and bordered black brocade mantle, that gleamed with jet passementerie; a scarf of white lace covered her head. It hid the red-brown hair with the Clytie ripple in it, and the great silken coils, transfixed by a sapphire and diamond dagger, that were massed at the nape of the slender neck. Seen so, she was nunlike in her chaste severity, but for those stern, resentful eyes.

"I have come to tell you that I am no longer in ignorance. I have found out what you have hidden from me so long—what the Wrynches knew and would not tell me; what the world has known while I sat in the dark...."

A spasm wrung her mouth. Saxham rolled a chair towards her. He said guardedly, avoiding her eyes:

"Until you acquaint me in detail with what you have heard, I cannot explain or defend myself. Will you not sit down? You are looking pale and overwrought."

She laid one slight gloved hand upon the chair-back, and leaned upon it.

"I would rather stand, if you have no objection, whilst I tell you what I have learned to-night. I dined alone with Lady Hannah at the Carlton; we went together to the theatre—Major Wrynche had had a summons to attend at Marlborough House."

She untied the knot of lace beneath her chin, and stripped away the long gloves with nervous haste and impatience, and tossed them with the scarf upon the chair beside her, and went on:

"I had heard much of 'The Chiffon Girl.' I wanted to see it. When the First Act began I wondered very much why they called it a Musical Comedy, when the noise the orchestra made could hardly be called music; and there was no comedy—only slang expressions and stupid jokes. But the actress who sang and danced in the principal part ... Miss Lavigne ..." She had loosened her mantle; now she let it drop upon the Eastern carpet, emerging from its blackness as a slender, supple, upright shape in clinging, creamy-white draperies; her exquisite arms bare to the shoulder, and clasped midway by heavy, twisted bracelets of barbaric gold, her nymph-like bosom swelling from the folded draperies of the low-cut bodice like a twin-budded narcissus flowering from the pale calyx, her sweet throat clasped about with Saxham's gift of pearls.

"She could not sing, though the people applauded and encored her"—there was a gleam of disdain in the golden eyes—"but she was very pretty ... she danced with wonderful grace and lightness ... it was like a swallow dipping and darting over the shallows of the river-shore—like a branch of red pomegranate-blossoms swayed and swung by a spring breeze.... I admired her, and yet I was sorry for her.... To have to pose and bound and whirl before all those rows and rows of staring faces night after night!..."

Saxham did not smile. But a muscle twitched in his cheek as he said:

"She would hardly thank you for pitying her."

"She would be right to resent my pity!" Lynette burst out with sudden vehemence. "She has been injured, and I was the cause! Oh! how could you be so cruel as to let me go on loving him? Was it kind? Was it fair to yourself and me?"

Saxham's square, pale face was perfectly expressionless. He waited in silence to hear the rest.

"You know of whom I speak ..." said Lynette. "He was gay and beautiful and winning—not chivalrous, as I believed him; not honest, or sincere, or true. Months before we met at Gueldersdorp he was the husband of this actress—the woman I saw upon the stage to-night. And you knew all this, and never told me! You knew that his memory was sacred in my heart. A woman I was introduced to here in London once tried to blacken it. She said she wished to act towards me as a friend. I remember that I laughed in her face as I turned and left her. 'You thought to make me hate him,' I said. 'You have failed miserably. If it were possible to love him better—if I could honour his memory more than I do now, I would, because of the evil you have spoken of my dead!'"

She heard Saxham draw breath heavily. She went on with increased passion, and gathering resentment:

"All my life long I might have gone on in my blindness, honouring the dishonourable, cherishing the base, but for the idle gossip of two strangers in the theatre to-night—a man and a woman in the stalls behind us. They talked all the louder when the lights went down. They wondered 'why the Lavigne did not star on the programme as a Viscountess?' but, of course, they said, 'the Foltlebarres would never stand that! They were nearly wild when that handsome scamp of theirs married her—poor Beauty Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars.' He and she had kept house together; there was a kiddie coming; they said the little woman played her cards uncommonly well!... The marriage was pulled off on the quiet at a Registrar's a week or so before Beau got his appointment on the Staff. Straight of the fellow, but afterwards, at Gueldersdorp, didn't he kick over the matrimonial pole? Somebody had seen his engagement to a Miss Something-or-other announced in a Siege newspaper, published the very day he got killed.... Poor beggar! Rough on him, and rough on the Foltlebarres, and a facer for Lessie ... and what price the girl?' And I was the girl!... It was of me they were talking!..."

Her lips writhed back from her white teeth. She winced and shuddered. "Oh! can't you see me sitting and listening, and every word vitriol, burning to the bone?"

"Why did you remain," said Saxham, wrung by pity, "to be tortured by such prurient prattlers? Why did you not get up and leave the place?"

"I could not move," she said.... "I could only sit and listen. Then the First Act ended, and the lights went up, and Lady Hannah touched my arm. I knew when our eyes met that she had heard as I had. She got up, saying, 'I think we have had enough of this?' and then we came away."

She caught her breath and bit her underlip, and he saw her eyes grow misty.

"She sent a Commissionaire to call a hansom.... She took my hand as we stood waiting in the empty vestibule. She said: 'Those chattering pies behind us have saved me some bad half-hours! Your husband, for some reason of his own, has never told you. And it has more than once occurred to me that if I were the true friend I want to be to both of you, I'd have proved it before now by telling you myself. But I've learned to be doubtful of my own inspirations!...' I asked her then if all they had said was true? She shrugged her shoulders and nodded: 'Pour tout dire, they let Beau down rather gently.... But if he never could tell the truth to a woman, he never went back on a man; and, after all, these things run in the blood. Passons l'eponge la-dessus. Forget him, and thank your good Angel you're married to an honourable man!'"

Saxham's eyes were on the carpet. He did not raise them or move a muscle of his face.

"She told me to forget him. It is easier to forgive him; there are deceits that smirch the soul of the deceived no less than the deceiver. He lied to the Mother—that I cannot pardon! Perhaps some day—but I do not know. Lady Hannah called you honourable.... I needed no one to tell me what you are and have always been! You hide the things that other men boast of.... You are loyal even to those you scorn. You kept his secret. I have reproached you to-night for keeping it, even while I honoured you in my heart!"

"Do not honour me," said Saxham harshly, "for behaving with common decency! Can a man tell tales on another who is dead? To commit murder would be a crime less cowardly. I do myself mere justice when I say that I am incapable of an act so vile! Nor would I blacken a living man to make myself show whiter in any man's—or woman's eyes!"

She was no longer pale. A lovely colour flushed her, and her eyes were wistful and very kind. Her draperies rustled as she moved towards him. "Owen ..." she said, and her white hands were held out to him, and her sweet mouth quivered, and her voice was a sigh, "I am alive at last to your infinite generosity. I beg you to forgive me for being blind before!"

"Generosity," said Saxham, "does not enter into the question. My silence has no merits whatever. What good could I have gained by telling you?" He lifted his eyes, and met hers full, dropping the words coldly one by one. "The advantage one has ceased to desire can hardly be called gain, in any sense of the word. And—I have left off crying for the moon. Even were you willing to give it me, I have ceased to wish for your love!"

She looked at him with piteous, incredulous wistfulness, as he told the hardy lie. His mask of a face revealed nothing, but he could not disguise the rage of hunger for her that ravened in his famished eyes. They were upon her lips, her throat, the lovely curves of her young bosom even as he spoke; she felt them as the kisses of a fierce, possessive mouth, and glowed with sudden shame, and something more. He saw her beauty change from the pale rose to the fire-hearted crimson, tore away his eyes, and mastered himself. He stepped back, and the still out-stretched, quivering hands dropped nervelessly at her sides.

"You have asked me to pardon you," he said, "for some fancied lack of perception. It is I who owe an apology to you. Try and forgive me for having married you.... I should have known from the first that no good or happiness could ever come of a contract like ours."

"Have I ever said I was unhappy?" she demanded. Her breath came quick and short.

"Your face has said so very often," returned Saxham, looking at it, "though you were too considerate to tell me so in words. But I ask you on this night that sees you freed from an illusion, to have courage and not yield to depression. Your fetters may be broken sooner than you think!"

"Owen!..."

She was paler than before, if that could be possible. She swayed a little, and caught at the back of a chair that was near, and there was terror in her darkened, dilated eyes....

"Do you say this to prepare me? Have you any illness? Do you mean that you are going to die?"

"I meant nothing ..." answered Saxham, "except that men are mortal, sometimes fortunately for the women who are bound to them! Go to bed, my child; to sleep will do you good."

"Good-night," she said, and dropped her head, and went away. He opened the door for her, and locked it after her, and went back to the writing-table, and sat in his chair. He gripped the arms of it in anguish, and the sweat of agony stood on the broad forehead where a woman who had loved him would have laid her lips.

He had repelled her, slighted her, wounded her.... He knew what it had cost him not to take those offered hands.... He was tortured and wrung in body and in soul as he took a key that hung upon his chain and unlocked a deep drawer, and took a flask from it that gurgled as if some mocking sprite had laughed aloud when he shook it close to his ear. He whom she had praised as honourable was a traitor no less than the dead man. He had said to her, months ago in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp:

"I may die, but I will never fail you!"

He had not died, and he had failed her. The Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp was drinking hard again.



LIX

Before you turn away in loathing of the man whose experience of Life's game of football had been chiefly gained from the ball's point of view, hear how it happened that the work of all those months of stern self-repression and strenuous denial had been rendered useless.

In the previous July, when Sir Danvers Muller was visiting Lord Williams of Afghanistan at Pretoria, Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., had been married to Lynette Bridget-Mary Mildare at the Registrar's Office, Gueldersdorp, and at the Catholic Church. One hour after the ceremony the happy pair left by the mail for Cape Town.

Gueldersdorp turned out to do them honour. We have heard the people cheer. Three days and three nights of the Express, delayed in places by the wrecking of the line, and then the Alpine mountain-ranges sank and dwindled with the mercury in the thermometer. The little white towns succeeded each other like pearls on a green string. Humpy blue hills gave way to the flats, and then in the shadow of Table Mountain—Babel's confusion of tongues—and the stalwart flower of many nations, arrayed and armed for battle, and the glory, and pomp, and power of War.

The grey and white transports disgorged them, ants of sober, neutral colours, marching in columns to attack other ants. They grew upon the vision and filled it, and the sound of their feet was louder than the beating of the surf on Sea Point, and although martial music beat and blew them on—a brazen whirlwind dominating the mind, blaring at the ears—the trampling of men's feet and the hoofs of horses, and the rolling of iron-shod wheels, triumphed in the long-run.

Saxham engaged rooms at the Trafalgar Hotel, a handsome caravanserai standing in its own gardens at the top of Imperial Avenue, for himself and his wife, and the savage irony that can be conveyed in the term struck him, not for the first time since he had laid gold and silver on the open book, and endowed a woman with the gift of himself and all his worldly goods.

It was early in the forenoon. They were to sail next day. The big building was crammed, not only with officers under orders for the Front, and their wives, who had come to see them start. Society had descended like a flock of chattering, gaudily-plumaged paroquets upon the spot where new and exciting sensations were to be had. For the trampling feet and the rolling wheels that ceaselessly went North imparted one set of thrills, and the long trains of wounded and dying that met and passed them, coming down as they went up, gave another kind. Amongst the poor dears in the trucks, and waggons, and Ambulance-carriages you might eventually find a man you knew.... The sporting odds were given and taken on these exciting chances; and the fluttering and screaming paroquets that crowded the Railway Stations, in spite of their gay feathers, bore no little resemblance to carrion-feeding birds of prey.

Saxham, Recently Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, suffered from the notoriety inseparable from the name of a man who has been thrice mentioned in Despatches, and has been publicly thanked by the representatives of an Imperial Government. The Interviewer yapped at his heels whithersoever he went, and the Correspondent strove to lure him into confidences, and Society fluttered at him with shrill squawkings, and wanted to know, don't you know? It must have been "devey" and "twee" to have gone through all those experiences. It was the year when "devey," and "twee," and similar abbreviations first became fashionable.

There were pleasanter episodes than these, when soldierly, bronzed warriors and simple, unaffected men of great affairs, expressed to Saxham in few words their belief that he had done his duty. The approval of these warmed him and helped to raise him higher. It was a little creature, a human insect no bigger than a bar-tender, that brought about the mischief.

There was an American bar on the ground-floor of the Trafalgar. Saxham stood upon the threshold of the place, replying to the questions of a group of Colonial officers, New South Wales Mounted Engineers and Canadian Rangers, when somebody suggested Drinks, and led the way in. Invited to make his choice from a long list of alcoholic mixtures, beginning with Whisky Straight, and ending with Bosom Caresser and Gin Sour, Saxham said that he would take a glass of ice-water.

"Well, boss, since you're on the Temperance Walk," said the Australian, his would-be host, a little huffily, "you'll please yourself, I suppose?" He collected the preferences of his other guests, and gave the orders to the man behind the bar.

The barman had the misfortune to be a joker of the practical kind. Seeing Saxham held in conversation by one of the other men, he winked portentously at the New South Waler, and whispered in his ear.

The Australian understood. A reason for Saxham's abstinence had been given him. The new-made bridegroom as a rule shuns Alcohol. And in proportion to his desire to avoid, grows the determination of other men to compel him to drink. The bridegroom is fair game all the world over for the Rabelaisian jest and the clown's horseplay.

The bar-tender, hoisting his eyebrows to his scollops of gummed hair, winked at the New South Waler with infinite meaning, and pointed to a cut-glass carafe that stood on the shining nickel-plated counter. It appeared to contain pure sparkling water, but the liquor it held was knock-out whisky, a tintless drink of exceeding potency, above proof. The Australian shook his head. But he laughed under his neat moustache as he turned away, and the bar-tender concluded to carry his joke through. He dealt out the drinks to their respective owners, and with a dexterous sweep of a shirt-sleeved arm brought the innocent-seeming carafe and a gleaming, polished tumbler immediately before the square-faced hulking doctor with the queer blue eyes, whose pretty bride of three days was waiting for him in their room upon the third floor of the humming, overcrowded caravanserai. Saxham, absorbed by the thought of her, poured out a tumblerful of the clear, sparkling stuff, and had half emptied it before he realised the trick. His eyes grew red with injected blood, and his hair bristled on his head. He struck out once across the narrow counter. The long wall-mirror behind the bar-tender cracked and starred with the crashing impact of the joker's skull, and the man fell senseless, bleeding from the mouth and nostrils.

Another attendant came running at the crash, and the exclamations of those who had seen the swift retaliation wreaked. Saxham, leaving a banknote lying on the counter, wheeled abruptly, and went out of the bar.

His brain was on fire. His blood ran riot in his burning veins, and the vice he had deemed dead stirred in the depths of his being, lifted its slender head, and hissed, quivered a forked tongue, and struck with poisoned fangs. He went out into the purple night that wedded lovers would have found so perfect. The great white stars winked down at him jeeringly, and a little mocking breeze sniggered among the mimosas and palms of the hotel gardens. He passed out of them into the many-tongued Babel of the streets, packed with humanity, throbbing with virile life, and tramped the magnificent avenues and wide electric-lighted streets of Cape Town with the thousands who had no beds at all, and the ten thousand who had, but preferred not to occupy them. To his narrow couch in the dressing-room adjoining Lynette's bedroom her husband dared not go.

So he wore the night out, doggedly wrestling with the demon that boils the blood of strong fierce men to forgetfulness of compacts and breach of oaths. Daybreak touched him with a chilly shivering finger, a hulking figure dozing on one of the white-painted iron seats near the Athletic Ground on Greenpoint Common. The last lingering star throbbed itself out, a white moth dying in the marvellous rose and orange fires of dawn, and the overwhelming, brooding bulk of Table Mountain gleamed, an emerald and sapphire splendour against the rising sun, and the two lesser peaks that are the mountain's bodyguard shone glowing in golden mail as Saxham got to his feet, and shook some order into the disorder of his dress, and faced hotelwards.

Despair was in the heart of the Dop Doctor, and for him the wonder of the dawn, the marvel of the sunrise meant no more than if he had been born blind. A menial's trick had wrought him confusion; his will, in the saving strength of which he had trusted, was a leaf in the wind of his desire. Even now his throat and tongue were parched, his being thirsted for the liquor he had abjured.

What was to be done? What was to happen in the future? He asked himself in vain. As Mouille Point shut its fixed red eye in apparent derision, and the Greenpoint Light winked a thirteen-mile wink and went out, unlike the Hope that had burned in Saxham, and would be rekindled never more.



LX

Pity the man now as he sat brooding alone in the consulting-room, consumed by the thirst he shuddered at, once more an unwilling slave to the habit he abhorred.

He unscrewed the large flask and drank, and his lips curled back with loathing of the whisky, and his gorge rose at it as it went down. Then he put the flask back and locked the drawer, and laid his head down upon his folded arms in silence. No help anywhere! No hope, no joy, no love!

Death must come. Death should come, before the shadow of disgrace fell upon the Beloved, of whose love he knew now that he had never been worthy. Well for Lynette that he had never won it! Happy for her that she had never even learned to care for him a little!

* * * * *

A few days more, and the great Victorian Age had drawn its last breath.

The people went about the London streets softly, as though their footsteps led them through the stately, grand, and solemn chamber where lay the august, illustrious Dead.

A subdued, busy hum of preparation was perceptible to the ear. The eye saw the thoroughfares being covered with sand, the draperies of purple rising at the bidding of the pulley and the rope, the carts laden with wreaths and garlands of laurel, passing from point to point, discharging their loads, often renewed.

A lady was ushered into Saxham's consulting-room as a long procession of those carts went creaking by. She was a dainty, piquante, golden-haired, blue-eyed little woman, quite beautifully dressed. Her gown was of black, in deference to the national mourning, but it glittered with sequins, and huge diamonds scintillated in her tiny ears, and she wore a mantle of royal ermine, that reached to the high heels of her little shoes. Her hat was of the toque description. Ermine and lace and artificial blooms from Parisian shop-window-gardens went to make up the delicious effect. A titled name adorned her card, which bore a Mayfair address. She seemed in radiant health. As Saxham waited, leaning forward in his consulting-chair, to receive the would-be patient's confidence, you can imagine those blue eyes of his, once so hard and keen, looking out of their hollowing caves with a sorrowful, clear sympathy that was very different from their old regard. To his women-patients he was exquisitely considerate. Only to one class of patient was he merciless and unsparing.

Upon the woman who desired to rid herself of her sex-privilege, upon the wedded wanton who sought to make of her body, designed by her Maker to be the cradle of an unborn generation, its sepulchre, Saxham's glance fell like a sharp curved sword. He wasted few words upon her, but each sentence, as it fell from his grim mouth, shrivelled and corroded, as vitriol dropped on naked human flesh. He listened now in silence that grew grimmer and grimmer, and as in flute-like accents, their smooth course hampered by the very slightest diffidence, the little lady explained, those heavy brows of his grew thunderous.

Ah, the tragic errand, the snaky purpose, coiled behind those graceful, ambiguous forms of speech! Not new the tale to the man who sat and heard. She admired the black-haired, powerful head, and the square, pale face with its short, aquiline, rather heavily-modelled features, and the broad, white forehead that the single smudge of eyebrow barred pleased her, as it did most women. Only the man's vivid blue eyes were unpleasantly hard and fixed in their regard, and his mouth frightened her, it was so stern and set.

She was not as robust as she appeared, she said. When she had been married, the family physician had mentioned to her mother that it would hardly be advisable.... Delay for a year or two would be wise. And her husband did not care for children. He was quite willing. He had sent her to Saxham, in fact. Of course, the Profession of Surgery had made such huge strides that risk need not enter into consideration for a moment.... And heaps of her women friends did the same. And expense was absolutely no object, and would not Dr. Saxham——

Saxham struck a bell that was upon his table, and rose up with his piercing eyes upon her and crossed the room in two strides. He flung the door wide. He bowed to her with cool, withering, ironical courtesy as he stood waiting for her to depart.

She hesitated, laughed with the ring of hysteria, fluttered into speech.

"You are not, of course, aware of it, but I happen to be an old schoolfellow of your wife's." Her pretty, inquisitive eyes went back to the writing-table, where stood a photograph of Lynette, recently taken—an exquisite, delicate, pearly-toned portrait in a heavy silver-gilt frame. "We used to be great friends. Du Taine was my maiden name. Surely Mrs. Saxham has spoken to you of Greta Du Taine? I left Gueldersdorp at the beginning of the siege. Later, we went to Cape Town. I met my husband there. He is Sir Philip Atherleigh, Baronet." She italicised the word. "He was with his regiment, going to the Front. We were married almost directly. It was a case of love at first sight. Now we are staying at our town house in Werkeley Square. Mrs. Saxham must visit us—my husband is dying to know her."

"I regret that the desire cannot be gratified, madam." The angry blood darkened his face. His tone, even more plainly than his words, told her that the boasted friendship was at an end.

Greta reddened too, and her turquoise-hued eyes dealt him a glance of bitter hatred.

"I did not stay long at the Convent at Gueldersdorp. Nuns are good, simple creatures, and easily imposed upon. And—mother did not wish me to be educated with strays and foundlings—dressed up like young ladies—actually allowed to mingle upon equal terms with them——"

It was Cornelius Agrippa, I think, who once materialised the Devil as an empty purse. The necromancer should have evoked the Spirit of Evil in the shape of a spiteful woman. Greta went on:

"—Such Society as there was, I should say. You were at Gueldersdorp throughout the siege, and for some time before it, I think, Dr. Saxham?"

Two pairs of blue eyes met, the man's hard as shining stones, the woman's dancing with malicious intention. Saxham stiffly bent his head. But her fear of him had evaporated in her triumph. Those inquisitive, turquoise eyes had an excellent memory behind them. Something in the shape of the square black head and hulking shoulders quickened it now.

"It's odd——" Her smile was a grin that showed sharp little white teeth ready to bite, and her speech was pointed with venomed meaning. "I used to go out a great deal in such Society as the place possessed. Yet I do not remember ever having met you!"

Saxham's cold eyes clashed with the malicious turquoises.

"I did not mingle in Society at Gueldersdorp."

He signed to the waiting manservant to open the hall-door. She drew her snowy ermines about her and rustled over the threshold. But in the hall she turned and dealt her thrust.

"No? You were too busy attending cases. Police-Court Cases ..."

Her light laugh fluttered mockingly about his ears.

"I remember the funny headings of some of the newspaper reports.... 'Another Rampant Drunk! The Town Painted Red Again by the Dop Doctor!'"

"Door!" said Saxham, shaping the word with stiff grey lips. His face was the face of Death, who had come close up and touched him. Her little ladyship went out to her waiting auto-brougham, and her light, malignant laugh fluttered back as the servant shut the hall-door.

Saxham went back into the consulting-room. The Spring sunshine poured in through the tall muslin-screened window. There was a cheerful play of light and colour in the place. But to the man who sat there it was full of shadows, dark and gloomy, threatening and grim. And not the least formidable among them was the shadow of the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, looming portentously over that fair face within the silver-gilt frame upon the writing-table, stretching out long octopus-arms to drag down shame upon it, and heap ashes of humiliation undeserved upon the lovely head, and mock her with the solemn altar-vows that bound her to the drunkard.



LXI

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 under the 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 his customer, 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 Francois 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 the blue 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.



LXII

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 the swift 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 the clouds 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—"and him 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.



LXIII

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 know yourself 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! Everybody is discussin' it now that the Foltlebarres have left off payin' Lessie not to talk, and provided for her and the youngster out 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 the chassepot of 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 balancing the 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 person then unknown.... 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—where she 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 of play-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 spy for 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 the Siege Gazette came 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—when she 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 role 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.