"Wat kost het?"

The Dutch bar-keeper, who seemed to know Slabberts, answered in English, looking at Emigration Jane:

"Half a dollar."

Half a dollar is South African for eighteenpence. Slabberts rattled something metallic in his trousers-pocket, and said something rapidly in the Taal. The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and said to Emigration Jane:

"Your young man has not got the money."

They were all, all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and try on feather-boas at two-and-eleven-three, plucked from the defunct carcase of the domestic fowl. She paid for the drinks with a florin, and it was quite like old times when Slabberts calmly pocketed the sixpence of change. The bar-keeper leaned over to her again, and said, surrounding her with a confidential atmosphere of tobacco and schnaps:

"He is a good man, that young man of yours, and gets much money. He means to give you a nice present by-and-by."

Her grateful heart overflowed to this friendly patronage. She showed the bar-keeper her gathered finger, and said it did 'urt a treat. She expected it would 'urt worse before Dr. de Boursy-Williams—"'adn't 'e got a toff's name?"—'ad done with it.

"You go to that Engelsch doktor on Harris Street, eh?" said the bar-keeper, spitting dexterously.

"Sister Tobias—that's the nun wot 'ousekeeps at the Convent—give me a order to see 'im, to 'ave me finger larnced," explained Emigration Jane. "Ain't 'e all right?"

"Right enough," said the bar-keeper, winking at the Slabberts, and adding something in the Taal, that provoked chuckles among the bystanders and called forth a fine display of neglected teeth on the part of the personage addressed. "There are plenty other Engelsch will be wishing to be as right, oh, very soon! For De Boursy-Williams, he has sent his wife and his two daughters away on the train for Cape Town yesterday morning, and he has gone after them that same night, and he has left all his patients to the Dop Doctor."

"Some red-necked baboons are wiser than others," said the Slabberts in the Taal, and there was a hoarse laugh, and the humorist turned his big heavy body away, and became one of a crowd of other Dutchmen, who were, in veiled hints and crooked allusions, discussing the situation across the Border. Emigration Jane was not sensitive to the electricity in the atmosphere. She knew no Dutch, and was perfect in the etiquette of the outing, which, when the young woman has been supplied with the one regulation drink, stands her up in the corner like an umbrella in dry weather as long as her young man is a-talking to 'is pals.

"So," the bar-keeper went on, "if you shall want that bad finger of yours looked to, you will have to wait until the Dop Doctor wakes up. He is a big man, who can drink as much as three Boers.... He came in this morning to get drunk, and you shall not wake him now if you fire off a rifle at his ear. But he will get up presently and shake himself, and then he will be quite steady; you would not guess how drunk he had been unless you had seen.... He is over there, sleeping on that table in the corner, and it will be very bad for the man who shall wake him up. For, look you, that Dop Doctor is a duyvel. I have seen him break a man like a stick between his hands for nothing but cutting up a thieving monkey of a little Kaffir with the sjambok. And he took the verdoemte thing home where he lives, they say, and strapped up its black hide with plaster, and set its arm as if it had been a child of Christians. But every Engelschman is mad. Groot Brittanje breeds a nation of madmen."

The saloon got fuller and fuller. The air solidified with the Taal and the tobacco, and other things less pleasant. It was not the hour for a crowd of customers, but nobody had seemed to be working much of late. They were all Transvaalers and Free Staters, tradesmen of the town, or Boers from outlying farms, and not a man there but was waiting a certain signal to clear out and leave Gueldersdorp to her fate, or remain in the place on a salary paid by the Republics as a spy. The English customer who came in knew at one whiff of the thick atmosphere that it was unhealthy, and if the man happened to be alone, he ordered, and paid, and drank, and went out quickly. If he happened to be with friends, he pointedly addressed his conversation to his countrymen, and left with a certain degree of swagger, and without the appearance of undue haste.

Once the swing-doors of the saloon opened to admit a short, spare, hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman, whose insignificant Cockney countenance was splashed with orange-coloured freckles of immense size. Between his thin anaemic lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And Emigration Jane, toying with the dregs of her tumbler, recognized the pert, sharp, sallow face seen over the sleeve of a large burgher's outstretched arm. With some trouble she caught the eye of the short, pale young man, and he instantly became a red one. To reach her was difficult, but he dived and wriggled his way across the saloon, wedging his frail person between the blockish bodies with a cool address that reminded her of the first night of a "noo show" at the Camden "Theayter," and the queue outside the gallery door.

"'Ullo, 'ullo! Thought I reckonised you, Miss." He touched his cheap imitation Panama with swaggering gallantry, and winked. "But seeing you eight sizes more of a toff than what you were when I previously 'ad the pleasure, I 'esitated to tip you the 'Ow Do."

She tossed her imitation ostrich plumes in joyous coquetry.

"As if I didn't know wot you're after. Garn! You only wants to know if I acted on the stryte about ..."

His projecting ears burned crimson.

"Well, an' suppose I do. Did she——"

"Did she wot?"

"You pipe well enough. Did she 'ave it?"

"Ain't you anxious?"

"Tyke it I am anxious. Did she? No cod?"

"Did she git your letter wot you put in the box o' choc's? O' course she did, Mister. Wot do you tyke me for? A silly looney or a sneakin' thief?"

"I'll tell you what I tyke you for. A jolly little bit of English All Right. Say! Do you think ..." The prominent Adam's apple jutting over the edge of the guillotining double collar worked emotionally. "Think she'll send an answer, eh?"

"Reckon she will; you watch out an' see!"

"You fust-clarss little brick!"

"Garn!"

"I mean it. Stryte. Next door to a angel—that's wot you are. She's the angel. Tell 'er I said so—that's if you can, you twig? And say that when I 'eard that nearly all the gay old crowd o' pupils 'ad gone away, day before yesterday, I could 'a blooming well cut me throat, thinkin' she'd gone too. Becos' when I swore in for the Town Guard, it was with the idear—mind you rub that in!—of strikin' a blow for Beauty as well as for Britanniar, twig?" The thin elbow in the tweed sleeve nudged her, provoking a joyous giggle.

"I'm fly, no fear. Are you to 'ave a uniform, an' all like that?"

His face fell. "The kit don't run to much beyond a smasher 'at an' puttees, but they're the regular Service kind, an' then there's the bandolier—an' the gun. She ain't the newest rifle served out to Her Majesty's Army, not by twenty years. Condemned Martini, a chap says, who's in the know—an' kicks like a mule when I let 'er off—made me nose bleed fust time I tried with blank. But when we gets a bit more used to each other, it 'll be a case of bloomin' Doppers rollin' over in the dust, like rock-rabbits. Don't forget to tell 'er as wot I said so."

"Why ... ain't she a Dutchy 'erself? She wrote a letter for me in their rummy lingo to my young man!"

"Cripps!" He stared in dismay. "Blessed if I 'adn't forgot. But if an Englishman marries a foreigner," he swelled heroic, "that puts 'er in the stryte runnin'. And 'art an' 'and I'm 'ers, whenever she'll 'ave me! Tell 'er THAT—with a double row of crosses from W. Keyse! And—can you remember a bit o' poetry?" He recited with shamefaced rapidity:

"It is my sentry-go to-night, And when I watch the moon so bright, Shining o'er South Africa plain, I'll think of thee, sweet Greta Du Taine."

Her eyes were full of awe and wonder. "Lor! you don't mean to say you made up that by yourself?"

The poet nodded. "Reckon about as much. Like it?"

"It's perfect lovely! Better than they 'ave in the penny books."

"Where Coralline and the Marquis are playin' the spooney game, and 'im with a Lady Reginer up 'is dirty sleeve. An' there's another thing I want you to let 'er know." His eyes were on hers, his breath fanned her hot cheeks. "There isn't another woman on the earth but her for me. Dessay there may be others; wot I say is—I don't see 'em!" He waved his hand, dismissing the ardent creatures.

A pang transpierced the conscience hiding under the cheap flowery blouse. Emigration Jane hesitated, biting the dog's-eared finger-ends of a cotton glove. Should she tell this ardent, chivalrous lover that the Convent roof no longer sheltered the magnificent fair hair-plait and the mischievous blue eyes of his adored? That Miss Greta Du Taine had left for Johannesburg with the latest batch of departing pupils! If she told, W. Keyse would vanish out of her life, it might be for ever; or, if by chance encountered on the street, pass by with a casual greeting and a touch of the cheap Panama. Emigration Jane was no heroine, only a daughter of Eve. Arithmetic and what was termed the "tonic sofa" had been more sternly inculcated than the moral virtues at the Board School in Kentish Town. And she was not long in making up her mind that she would not tell him—not just yet, anyway.

What was he saying, in the Cockney that cut like a knife through the thick gutturals of the Taal? "I shall walk past the Convent to-morrer in kit and 'cetras, on the charnce of 'Er seein' me. Two sharp. And, look 'ere, Miss, you've done me a good turn. And—no larks!—if ever I can do you another—trust me. Stryte—I mean it! You ask chaps 'oo know me if Billy Keyse ever went back on a pal?"

She swayed her hips, and disclaimed all obligation. But, garn! he was gittin' at 'er, she knew!

"I ain't; I mean it! You should 'ave 'arf me 'eredittary estates—if I 'ad any. As I 'aven't, say wot you'll drink? Do, Miss, to oblige yours truly, W. Keyse, Esquire."

W. Keyse plunged a royal, reckless hand into the pocket of his tweed riding-breeches, bought against the time when he should bestride something nobler than a bicycle, and produced a half-sovereign. He owed it to his landlady and the rest, the coin that he threw down so magnificently on the shiny counter, but you do not treat your good angel every day.... Emigration Jane bridled, and swayed her hips still more. His largeness was intoxicating. One had dreamed of meeting such young men.

"Port or sherry? Or a glass of cham, with a lump o' ice in for a cooler? They keep the stuff on draught 'ere, and not bad by 'arf for South Africa. 'Ere, you, Mister! Two chams for self and the young lydy, an' look slippy!"

The brimming glasses of sparkling, creaming fluid, juice of vines that never grew in the historic soil of France, were passed over the bar. A miniature berg clinked in each, the coldness of its contact with the glowing lip forcing slight rapturous shrieks from Emigration Jane.

"We'll drink 'Er 'ealth!" W. Keyse raised his goblet. "And Friends at 'Ome in our Isle across the Sea!"

He drank, pleased with the sentiment, and set down the empty glass.

The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and tapped him on the arm with a thick, stubby forefinger.

"Mister Engelschman, I think you shall best go out of here."

"Me? Go out? 'Oo are you gettin' at, Myn'eer Van Dunck?" swaggered W. Keyse. And he slipped one thin, freckled hand ostentatiously under his coat of shoddy summer tweed. A very cheap revolver lurked in the hip-pocket of which Billy was so proud. In his third-floor back bed-sitting-room in Judd Street, London, W.C., he had promised himself a moment when that hip-pocket should be referred to, just in that way. It was a cheap bit of theatrical swagger, but the saloon was full, not of harmless theatrical pretences, but bitter racial antagonisms, seething animosities, fanged and venomed hatreds, only waiting the prearranged signal to strike and slay.

Emigration Jane tugged at the hero's sleeve, as he felt for an almost invisible moustache, scanning the piled-up, serried faces with pert, pale, hardy eyes.

"'E ain't coddin'. See 'ow black they're lookin'."

"I see 'em, plyne enough. Waxworks only fit for the Chamber of 'Orrors, ain't 'em?"

"It's a young woman wot arsks you to go, not a bloke! Please! For my syke, if you won't for your own!"

Billy Keyse, with a flourish, offered the thin, boyish arm in the tweed sleeve.

"Righto! Will you allow me, Miss?"

She faltered:

"I—I can't, deer. I—I'm wiv my young man."

"Looks after you a proper lot, I don't think. Which is 'im? Where's 'e 'id 'isself? There's only one other English-lookin' feller 'ere, an' 'e's drunk, lyin' over the table there in the corner. That ain't 'im, is it?"

"Nah, that isn't 'im. That big Dutchy, lookin' this way, showin' 'is teeth as 'e smiles. That's my young man."

She indicated the Slabberts, heavily observant of the couple with the muddy eyes under the tow-coloured thatch.

"'Strewth!" W. Keyse whistled depreciatively between his teeth, and elevated his scanty eyebrows. "That tow-'eaded, bung-nosed, 'ulking, big Dopper. An' you a daughter of the Empire!"

Oh! the thrice-retorted scorn in the sharp-edged Cockney voice! The scorching contempt in the pale, ugly little eyes of W. Keyse! She wilted to her tallest feather, and the tears came crowding, stinging the back of her throat, compelling a miserable sniff. Yet Emigration Jane was not destitute of spirit.

"I ... I took 'im to please meself ... not you, nor the Hempire neither."

"Reckon you was precious 'ard up for a chap. Good-afternoon, Miss."

He touched the cheap Panama, and swung theatrically round on his heel. Between him and the saloon-door there was a solid barricade of heavy Dutch bodies, in moleskin, tan-cord, and greasy homespun, topped by lowering Dutch faces. Brawny right hands that could have choked the reedy crow out of the little bantam gamecock, clenched in the baggy pockets of old shooting-jackets. Others gripped leaded sjamboks, and others crept to hip-pockets, where German army revolvers were. The bar-keeper and the Slabberts exchanged a meaning wink.

"Gents, I'll trouble you. By your leave?..."

Nobody moved. And suddenly W. Keyse became conscious that these were enemies, and that he was alone. A little hooliganism, a few street-fights, one scuffle with the police, some rows in music-halls constituted all his experience. In the midst of these men, burly, brutal, strong, used to shed blood of beast and human, his cheap swagger failed him with his stock of breath. He was no longer the hero in an East End melodrama; his heroic mood had gone, and there was a feel of tragedy in the air. The Boers waited sluggishly for the next move. It would come when there should be a step forward on the part of the little Englishman. Then a clumsy foot in a cow-leather boot or heavy wooden-pegged veldschoen would be thrust out, and the boy would be tripped up and go down, and the crowd would deliberately kick and trample the life out of him, and no one would be able to say how or by whom the thing had been done. And, reading in the hard eyes set in the stolid yellow and drab faces that he was "up against it," and no mistake, W. Keyse felt singularly small and lonely.

Then something happened.

The drunken Englishman who had been lying in a hoggish stupor over the little iron table in the corner of the saloon hiccoughed, and lifted a crimson, puffy face, with bleary eyes in it that were startlingly blue. He drew back the great arms that had been hanging over the edge of his impromptu pillow, and heaved up his massive stooping shoulders, and got slowly upon his feet. Then, lurching in his walk, but not stumbling, he moved across the little space of saw-dusted, hard-beaten earth that divided him from W. Keyse, and drew up beside that insignificant minority. The action was not purposeless or unimpressive. The alcoholic wastrel had suddenly become protagonist in the common little drama that was veering towards tragedy. Beside the man, Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted boy, a steam-pinnace bobbing under the quarter of an armoured battle-ship, its huge mailed bulk pregnant with possibilities of destruction, its barbettes full of unseen, watchful eyes, and hands powerful to manipulate the levers of Titanic death-machines.

Let it be understood that the intervener did not present the aspect of a hero. He had been drunk, and would be again, unless some miraculous quickening of the alcohol-drugged brain-centres should rouse and revivify the dormant will. His square face, with the heavy smudge of bushy black eyebrows over the fierce blue eyes, and the short, blunt, hooked nose, and grim-lipped yet tender mouth, from the corner of which an extinct and forgotten cigar-butt absurdly jutted, bore, like his great gaunt frame, the ravaging traces of the consuming drink-lust. His well-cut, loosely-fitting grey morning-coat and trousers were soiled and slovenly; his blue linen shirt was collarless and unbuttoned at the neck. His grey felt smasher hat was crammed on awry. But there was a thick lanyard round the muscular neck, ending in a leather revolver-pouch that was attached to his stout belt of webbing. A boy with a fifteen-and-sixpenny toy revolver you can laugh at and squelch; but, Alamachtig! a big man with a Webley and Scott was another thing. And the frowy barrier of thick, coarsely-clad, bulky bodies and scowling, yellow-tan faces, began to melt away.

When a clear lane showed to the saloon door, the Dop Doctor took it, walking with a lurch in his long stride, but with the square head held upright on his great gaunt shoulders. W. Keyse, Esquire, moved in the shadow of him, taking two steps to one of his. The swing doors opened, thudded to behind them....

"Outside.... Time, too!"

The wide, thin-lipped Cockney mouth grinned a little consciously as W. Keyse jerked his thumb towards the still vibrating doors of the saloon. "Reg'ler 'ornets' nest o' Dutchies. And I was up agynst it, an' no mistyke, when you rallied up. An', Mister, you're a Fair Old Brick, an' if you've no objection to shykin' 'ands ...?"

But the big man did not seem to see the little Cockney's offered hand. He nodded, looking with the bloodshot and extremely blue eyes that were set under his heavy straight black brows, not at W. Keyse, but over the boy's head, and with a surly noise in his throat that stopped short of being speech, swung heavily round and went down the dusty street, that was grilling in the full blaze of the afternoon heat, lurching a little in his walk.

Then, suddenly, running figures of men came round the corner. Voices shouted, and houses and shops and saloons emptied themselves of their human contents. The news flew from kerb to kerb, and jumped from windows to windows, out of which women, European and coloured, thrust eager, questioning heads.

The Cape Town train that had started at midday had returned to Gueldersdorp, having been held up by a force of armed and mounted Boers twenty miles down the line. And a London newspaper correspondent had handed in a cable at the post-office, and the operator's instrument, after a futile click or so, had failed to work any more.

The telegraphic wire was cut. Hostilities had commenced in earnest, and Gueldersdorp, severed from the South by this opening act of war, must find her salvation thenceforwards in the cool brains and steady nerves of the handful of defenders behind her sand-bags, when the hour of need should come.

History has it written in her imperishable record, that is not only printed upon paper, and graven upon brass, and cut in marble, but stamped into the minds and hearts of millions of men and women of the British race, how, when that hour came, the hero-spirit in their countrymen rose up to meet it. And for such undying memories as these, and not for the mere word of suzerainty, it is worth while to have paid as Britain has paid, in gold, and blood, and tears.



XIII

"Dop," being the native name for the cheapest and most villainous of Cape brandies, has come to signify alcoholic drinks in general to men of many nations dwelling under the subtropical South African sun. Thus, apple-brandy, and peach liqueur, "Old Squareface," in the squat, four-sided bottles beloved no less by Dutchman and Afrikander, American and Briton, Paddy from Cork, and Heinrich from the German Fatherland, than by John Chinkey—in default of arrack—and the swart and woolly-headed descendant of Ham, may be signified under the all-embracing designation.

It did not matter what the liquor was, the bar-tenders were aware who served the Dop Doctor, as long as the stuff scorched the throat and stupefied the brain, and you got enough of it for your money.

His eyes were blood-red with brutal debauch now, as he neared the De Boursy-Williams dwelling, a one-storied, soft brick-built, corrugated-iron-roofed house on Harris Street, behind the Market Square. It had been a store, but green and white paint and an iron garden-fence had turned it into a gentlemanly residence for a medical practitioner. Mrs. De Boursy-Williams, a lady of refinement, stamped with the ineffaceable cachet of Bayswater, had hung cheap lace curtains in all the windows, tying them up with silk sashes of Transvaal green. Between the wooden pillars of the stoep dangled curtains yet other, of chopped, dyed, and threaded bamboo, while whitewashed drain-pipes, packed with earth and set on end, overflowed with Indian cress, flowering now in extravagant, gorgeous hues of red and brown, sulphur and orange.

The Dop Doctor, left to maintain the inviolate sanctity of this English Colonial home, hiccoughed as he stumbled up the stately flight of three cement steps that led between white-painted railings, enclosing on the left hand a narrow strip of garden with some dusty mimosa shrubs growing in it, to the green door that bore the brass plate, and had the red lamp fitted in the hall-light above it. The plate bore this comprehensive inscription:

G. DE BOURSY-WILLIAMS, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.

CONSULTING-ROOM HOURS: 10 A.M. TO 12 A.M.; 6 P.M. TO 8 P.M.

MODERN DENTISTRY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES.

And, scanning the inscription for perhaps the thousandth time, the grim, tender mouth under the ragged black moustache took a satirical twist at the corners, for nobody knew better than Owen Saxham, called of men in Gueldersdorp the "Dop Doctor," what a brazen lie it proclaimed. He heard the town-clock on the stad square strike five as he pulled out the latchkey from his pocket and let himself in, shouting:

"Koets!"

A glazed door at the end of the passage, advertised in letters of black paint upon the ground-glass as "Dispensary," opened, and a long, thin Dutchman, dressed in respectable black, looked out. He had been hoping that the drunken Englishman had been shot or stabbed in a saloon-brawl, or had fallen down in apoplexy in a liquor-bout, and had been brought home dead on a shutter at last. His long ginger-coloured face showed his cruel disappointment. But he said, as though the question had been asked:

"No, there is no telegram from Cape Town."

Then he shut the glazed door, and returned to the very congenial occupation in which he had been engaged, and Owen Saxham went heavily to the bedroom placed at the disposal of the locum tenens. The single window looked out upon a square garden with a tennis-ground, where the De Boursy-Williams girls had been used to play. The apricot on the south wall was laden with the as yet immature fruit, an abandoned household cat slept, unconscious of impending starvation, upon a bench under a pepper-tree.

It was a small, sordid, shabby chamber, with a fly-spotted paper, a chest of drawers lacking knobs, a greenish swing looking-glass, and a narrow iron bedstead. His scanty belongings were scattered about. There were no medical books or surgical instruments. The Dop Doctor had sold all the tools of his trade years before. He turned to Williams's books, standard works which had been bought at his recommendation, when he wished to refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of large calibre, in addition to the weapon he carried, there was not an article of property of any value in the room. Old riding-boots with dusty spurs and a pair of veldschoens stood by the wall; a pair of trodden-down carpet slippers lay beside a big cheap zinc bath that stood there, full of cold water; some well-used pipes were on the chest of drawers, with a tin of Virginia; and an old brown camel's-hair dressing-gown hung over a castorless, shabby, American-cloth-covered armchair. And an empty whisky-bottle stood upon the washstand, melancholy witness to the drunkard's passion.

Yet there were a few poor little toilet articles upon the dressing-table that betokened the dainty personal habits of cleanliness and care that from lifelong use become instinctive. The hands of the untidy, slovenly, big man with the drink-swollen features were exquisitely kept; and when the dark-red colour should go out of the square face, the skin would show wonderfully unblemished and healthy for a drunkard, and the blue eyes would be steady and clear. Excess had not injured a splendid constitution as yet. But Saxham knew that by-and-by ...

What did he care? He pulled off his soiled, untidy garments, and soused his aching head in the cold, fresh water, and bathed and changed. Six o'clock struck, and found Dr. Owen Saxham reclothed and in his right mind, if a little haggard about the eyes and twitchy about the mouth, and sitting calmly waiting for patients in the respectably-appointed consulting-room of De Boursy-Williams, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.

Usually he sat in the adjoining study, near enough to the carefully-curtained door to hear the patient describe in the artless vernacular of the ignorant, or the more cultivated phraseology of the educated, the symptoms, his or hers.

Because the cultured man of science, the real M.D. of Cambridge University and owner of those other letters of attainment, was the drunken wastrel who had sunk low enough to serve as the impostor's ghost. If G. de Boursy-Williams, of all those lying capitals, were a member of the London Pharmaceutical Society and properly-qualified dentist, which perhaps might be the case, he certainly possessed no other claim upon the confidence of his fellow-creatures, sick or well. Yet even before the Dop Doctor brought his great unhealed sorrow and his quenchless thirst to Gueldersdorp, the smug, plump, grey-haired, pink-faced, neatly-dressed little humbug possessed an enviable practice.

If you got well, he rubbed his hands and chuckled over you; if you died, he bleated about the Will of Providence, and his daughters sent flowery, home-made wreaths to place upon your grave, and it all went down, adding to the python-length of the bill for medical attendance.

This world is thick with De Boursy-Williamses, throwing in bromides with a liberal hand, ungrudging of strychnine, happily at home with quinine and cathartics, ready at a case of simple rubeola; hideously, secretly, helplessly perplexed between the false diphtheria and the true; treating internal cancer and fibrous tumours as digestive derangements for happy, profitable years, until the specialist comes by, and dissipates with a brief examination and with half a dozen trenchant words the victim's faith in the quack.

Three years before, when the Dop Doctor, coming up from Kimberley by transport-waggon, had stumbled in upon Gueldersdorp, the verdict of a specialist consulted by one of his patients, much lacking in the desirable article of faith, had given De Boursy-Williams's self-confidence a considerable shock.

Does it matter how De Boursy, much reduced in bulk by a considerable leakage of conceit, came across the Dop Doctor? In a drink-saloon, in a music-hall, in a gaming-house or an opium-den, at any other of the places of recreation where, after consulting and visiting hours, that exemplary father and serious-minded Established Churchman, was to be found? It is enough that the bargain was proposed and accepted. Four sovereigns a week secured to De Boursy-Williams the stored and applied knowledge, the wide experience, and the unerring diagnosis of the rising young London practitioner, who had had a brilliant career before him when a Hand had reached forth from the clouds to topple down the castle of his labours and his hopes. For Owen Saxham the money would purchase forgetfulness. You can buy a great deal of his kind of forgetfulness with four pounds, and drink was all the Dop Doctor wanted.



Now, as the red South African sunset burned beyond the flattened western ridge of the semicircle of irregular hills that fence in the unpretending hamlet town that lies on the low central rise, Owen Saxham sat, as for his miserable weekly wage he must sit, twice daily for two hours at a stretch, enduring torments akin to those of the damned in Hell.

For these were the hours when he remembered most all that he had lost.

Remembrance, like the magic carpet of the Eastern story, carried him back to a rambling old grey mansion, clothed with a great magnolia and many roses, standing in old-time gardens, and shrubberies of laurel and ilex and Spanish chestnut, and rhododendron, upon the South Dorset cliffs, that are vanishing so slowly yet so surely in the maw of the rapacious sea.

Boom! In the heart of a still, foggy night, following a day of lashing rain, and the boy Owen Saxham, whom the Dop Doctor remembered, would wake upon his lavender-scented pillow in the low-pitched room with the heavy ceiling-beams and the shallow diamond-paned casements, and call out to David, dreaming in the other white bed, to plan an excursion with the breaking of the day, to see how much more of their kingdom had toppled over on those wave-smoothed rock-pavements far below, that were studded with great and little fossils, as the schoolroom suet-pudding with the frequent raisin.

More faces came. The boys' father, fair and florid, bluff, handsome, and kindly, an English country gentleman of simple affectionate nature and upright life. He came in weather-stained velveteen and low-crowned felt, with the red setter-bitch at his heels, and the old sporting Manton carried in the crook of his elbow, where the mother used to sew a leather patch, always cut out of the palm-piece of one of the right-hand gloves that were never worn out, never being put on. A dark-eyed, black-haired Welsh mother, hot-tempered, keen-witted, humorous, sarcastic, passionately devoted to her husband and his boys, David and Owen.

David and Owen. David was the elder, fair like the father, destined for Harrow, Sandhurst, and the Army. Owen had dreamed of the Merchant Service, until, having succeeded in giving the Persian kitten, overfed to repletion by an admiring cook, a dose of castor-oil, and being allowed to aid the local veterinary in setting the fox-terrier's broken leg, the revelation of the hidden gift was vouchsafed to this boy. How he begged off Harrow, much to the disgust of the Squire, and went to Westward Ho, faithfully plodded the course laid down by the Council of Medical Education, became a graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and took his degree brilliantly; registered as a student at St. Stephen's Hospital; won an Entrance Scholarship in Science, and secured the William Brown Exhibition in his second year. Thenceforward the world was an oyster, to be opened with scalpel and with bistoury by Owen Saxham.

Oh, the good days! the delectable years of intellectual development, and arduous study, and high hope, and patient, strenuous endeavour! The man sitting with knitted hands and tense brain and staring eyes there in the darkening room groaned aloud as he looked back. Nobody envied that broad-shouldered, lean-flanked, bright-eyed young fellow his successes. Companions shared his triumphs, lecturers and professors came down from their high pedestals of dignity to help him on. When he obtained his London University diploma with honours for a thesis of exceptional merit, he had already held the post of principal anaesthetist at St. Stephen's Hospital for a year. Now, a vacancy occurring upon the Junior staff of surgeons to the Hospital's in-patient Department, Owen Saxham, M.D., was chosen to fill it. This brought Mildred very near.

For he was very much in love. The hot red blood in his veins had carried him away sometimes upon a mad race for pleasure, but he was clean of soul and free from the taint of vice, inherited or acquired, and the Briton's love of home was strong in him. And wedded love had always seemed to him a beautiful and gracious thing; and fatherhood a glorious privilege. Stern as he seemed, grave and quiet and undemonstrative as he was, the youngest and shyest children did not shrink from him. The pink rose-leaf tongue peeped from between the budding rows of teeth, and the innocent considering eyes questioned him only a moment before the smile came. To be the father of Mildred's children seemed the lofty end of all desire that was not mere worldly ambition.

Mildred was the elder daughter of a county neighbour down in Dorsetshire. She had known Owen Saxham from her school-days, but never until he took to calling at the house in Pont Street, to which Mildred, with her family—mere satellites revolving in the orbit of that shining star of Love—migrated in the Season. She was tall, slight, and willowy, with a sweet head that drooped a little, and round brown eyes that were extremely pretty and wore a perpetual expression of surprise. She was rather anaemic, preferred croquet to lawn-tennis—then the rage—and kept a journal, after the style of an American model. But the space which Mary McMullins cribbed from Mary McMullins to devote to a description of the bathroom in which the ablutions of her family were performed, and a vivid word-picture of their tooth-brushes ranged in a row, and their recently wrung-out garments in the act of taking the air upon the back-garden clothes-line, was all devoted to Mildred in Mildred's journal. In it Owen found a place. He was described as a blend between "Rochester" in "Jane Eyre" and "Bazarov" in Turgenev's "Fathers and Children." In one specially high-flown passage he was referred to as a grim granite rock, to which the delicate clematis-like nature of Mildred, clinging, was to envelop it with leaf and blossom. She read him the passage one day. Their faces were very close together as they sat upon the sofa in the pretty Pont Street drawing-room, and his newly-bought engagement-ring gleamed on her long white hand.... The remembrance of that day made the Dop Doctor laugh out harshly in the midst of his anguish. So trivial and so weak a thing had been that love of hers on which he had founded the castle of his hopes and desires.

Now the aspiring young man bought a practice with some thousands advanced by his father out of the younger son's portion that should be his one day. It lay just where Hyde Park merges into Paddington. Here a medical man may feel the pulse of Dives for gold, and look at the tongue of Lazarus for nothing, and supply medicine into the bargain, if he be of kindly soul, and this hopeful, rising surgeon and physician had an open hand and an unsuspecting nature.

God! how much the worse for him. The sweat-drops ran down into the Dop Doctor's eyes as he remembered that.

He set up his bachelor tent in Chilworth Street, furnishing the rooms he meant to inhabit with a certain sober luxury. By-and-by the house could be made pretty, unless Mildred should insist upon his moving to Wigmore Street, or to Harley Street, that Mecca of the ambitious young practitioner. Probably Mildred's people would insist upon Harley Street. They were wealthy; their daughter would be quite an heiress, "another instance of Owen's luck," as David, long ago gazetted to a crack Cavalry regiment, would say, and Owen would laugh, and admit that, though he would have been glad enough to take his young fair love without dower and plenishing, it was pleasant enough to know that his wife would have an independent fortune of her own. It was one of David's best jokes that Owen was marrying Mildred for her money. David's ideas of humour were crude and elemental. On the other hand, his manners were admirable, and his physical beauty perfect of its type, though men and women turned oftenest to look at the younger brother, whom the women called "plain, but so interesting," and the men "an uncommonly attractive sort of fellow, and as clever as they make them." When the great crash came Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., was about twenty-nine.

Do you care for a description of the man at his prime?

He was probably five feet ten in height, but his scholar's stoop robbed him of an inch or more. The great breadth of the slightly-bowed shoulders, the immense depth and thickness of the chest, gave his upper figure a false air of clumsiness. His arms were long and powerful, terminating in strong, supple, white hands, the hands of the skilled surgical operator; his thick, smooth, opaque, white skin covered an admirable structure of bone, knit with tough muscles, clothed with healthful flesh. One noticed, seeing him walk, that his legs were bowed a little, because he had been accustomed to the saddle from earliest childhood, though he rode but seldom now, and one saw also that his small muscular feet gripped the ground vigorously, through the glove-thin boots he liked to wear. He showed no tendency to dandyism. His loosely-cut suits of fine, silky black cloth were invariably of the same fashion. In abhorring jewellery, in preferring white cashmere shirts, and strictly limiting the amount of starch in the thin linen cuffs and collars, perhaps he showed a tendency to faddism. David told him that he dressed himself like a septuagenarian Professor. Mildred would have preferred dear Owen to pay a little more attention to style and cut, and all that, though one did not, of course, expect a man of science to look like a man of fashion. One couldn't have everything, at least, not in this world....

She said that one day, standing beside the writing-table in the Chilworth Street study, with David's portrait in her hand. It usually stood there, in a silver frame—a coloured photograph of a young man of thirty, stupid, and beautiful as the Praxitelean Hermes, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen stood upon the hearthrug, for once in Mildred's company, and not thinking of Mildred. And with tears rising in her round, pretty, foolish eyes the girl looked from the face and figure enclosed within the silver frame, to the face and bust that had for background the high mantel-mirror in its carved frame of Spanish oak.

There was the square black head bending forwards—"poking," she termed it—upon the massive, bowed shoulders; the white face, square too, with its short, blunt, hooked nose and grim, determined mouth and jaws, showing the bluish grain of the strong beard and moustache that Owen kept closely shaven. The heavy forehead, the smutty brows overshadowing eyes of clear, vivid, startling Alpine blue, the close small ears, the thick white throat, were very, very unattractive in Mildred's eyes—at least, in comparison with the three-volume-novel charms of the grey-eyed, golden-moustached, classically-featured, swaggering young military dandy in the coloured photograph. David had been with his regiment in India when Owen had first seemed to be a good deal attracted to Pont Street. He had wooed Mildred with dogged persistency, and won her without perceptible triumph, and Mildred had been immensely flattered at first by the conquest of this man, whom everybody said was going to be famous, great, distinguished ... and now ... the wedding-day was coming awfully near. And how on earth was it possible for a girl to tell a man with Owen's dreadfully grim, sarcastic mouth, and those terrible blue eyes that sometimes looked through and through you—that she preferred his brother?

Poor, dear, beautiful, devoted David! so honourable, so shocked at the discovery that his passion was reciprocated, so very romantically in love. Only the day previously, calling in at Pont Street at an hour unusual for him, Owen had found them together, Mildred and David, who, having been unexpectedly relieved of duty by an accommodating brother-officer, had, as he rather laboriously explained, run up from Spurhambury for the day. It was an awfully near thing, the guilty ones agreed afterwards, but Owen had suspected nothing. These swell scientific men were often a little bit slow in the uptake....

But to-day—to-day their dupe saw clearly. He recalled the Pont Street incident, and the flushed faces of the couple. He saw once more the silver-framed photograph in the girl's hand, he felt the mute disparagement of her glance, and was conscious of the relief with which it left him to settle on the portrait again. Ah, how unsuspicious he had been whom they were duping! Doubtless Mildred would not have had the courage to own the truth, doubtless she would have married him but for the scandal of the Trial. He wrenched his knitted hands together until the joints cracked. She would have married him, and forgotten David. He, the man of will, and power, and patience would have possessed her, stamped himself like a seal upon her heart and mind, given her other interests, other hopes, other desires, children, and happiness. But for the Trial the little germinating seed of treachery would never have grown up and borne fruit.

Had it been treachery, after all? Far, far too grand the word. Who would expect a modern woman to practise the obsolete virtue of Fidelity? Fool, do you expect your miniature French bulldog or your toy-terrier to dive in and swim out to you, and hold your drowning carcase up, should you happen to become cramped while bathing in the sea? The little, feeble, pretty, feather-brained thing, what can it do but whimper on the shore while you are sinking, perhaps be consoled upon a friendly stranger's lap while your last bubbles are taking upward flight, and your knees are drawing inwards in the final contraction? Happy for the little creature if the kindly stranger carry it away!

Poor, pretty, foolish Mildred, whose gentle predilections were as threads of gossamer compared with the cable-ropes of stronger women's passions! She had nestled into the strong protecting arm, and dried her tears for the old master on the sleeve of the new one, whimpering a little, gently, just like the toy-terrier bitch or the miniature bull.

And yet he had once seen a creature tinier and feebler than either of these, a mere handful of yellow floss-silk curls, defend its insensible master with frenzy, as the sick man lay in the deadly stupor of cerebral congestion, from those who sought to aid. Valet and nurse and doctor were held at bay until that snapping, foaming, raging speck of love and devotion and fidelity had been whelmed in a travelling-rug, and borne away to a distant room, from whence its shrill, defiant, imploring barks and yelps could be heard night and day until, its owner being at last conscious and out of danger, the tiny creature was set free.

Ergo, there are small things and small things. Beside that epic atom Mildred dwindled inconceivably.

And David ... David, who had shaken his handsome head sorrowfully over his brother's ruined career, who had been horribly sick at the scandal, shudderingly alive to the disgrace, sorrowfully, regretfully compelled to admit that the evidence of guilt was overwhelming ... he did not trust himself to think of David overmuch. That way of thought led to Cain's portion in the very pit of Hell. For six months subsequently to the finding of the Jury in the well-known criminal case, The Crown v. Saxham, David had married Mildred. If she had been innocent of actual treachery, here was the smooth, brotherly betrayer, unmasked and loathly in the sight of the betrayed.

How quietly the storm-clouds had piled up on his bright horizon at the close of his second year of active, brilliant, successful work!

The first lightning-flash, the first faint mutter of thunder, had passed almost unnoticed. Then the tempest broke, and the building wrought by a strong man's labours, and toils, and hopes, and joys, and dolours had been lifted, and torn, and rent, and scattered as a hill-bothy of poles and straw-bundles, or a moorland shelter of heather and bushes is scattered by the fury of a northern mountain-blast.

His practice had become a large and, despite the many claims of Lazarus at the gates, a lucrative one by the commencement of his third year of residence in Chilworth Street. It was the end of April. He was to be married to Mildred in July. That move to Harley Street had been decided upon, the house taken and beautified. Though his love for her was not demonstrative or romantic, it was deep, and tender, and strong, and hopeful, and Life to this man had seemed very sweet—five years ago. He was successful professionally and socially. He had been chosen to assist a surgeon of great eminence in the performance of a critical operation upon a semi-Royalty. He had written, and publishers had published, a remarkable work. "The Diseases of Civilisation" had been greeted by the scientific reviewers with a chorus of praise, passed through four or five editions—had been translated into several European languages; and his "Text-Book of Clinical Surgery" had been recommended to advanced students by the leading professors of the Medical Schools when the horrible thing befell.



XIV

It was in '94, when even the electro-motor was not in general use, and the petrol-driven machine was slowly convincing Paris and New York of its magnificent possibilities. Saxham used a smart, well-horsed, hired brougham for day-visits, and for night work a motor-tricycle. There were no stables to the house in Chilworth Street. He left the motor-tricycle at the place where he had bought it second-hand. The machine was cleaned and kept in order, and brought to his door by one of the employes at a certain hour, for a fixed weekly sum paid to the proprietor of the establishment, Bough by name, an Englishman born in the Transvaal, who had quite recently, or so he gave out, emigrated from South Africa, and set up in London as a cycle-seller and repairer, though there were not many cycles at the shop. Heavy packing-cases and crates were always being delivered there, and always being despatched from thence, via Cape Town and Port Elizabeth and Delagoa Bay to the Transvaal, Bough being agent, or so he said, for several South African firms engaged in the transport of agricultural machines. Bough had a wife, a large-eyed, delicate-looking, pretty little woman, who seemed afraid of the big, muscular, tanned fellow of thirty-eight or so, with the odd light eyes, and the smooth manner, and the ready smile, and the short, expert, hairy, cruel-looking hands. He had seen life, had Bough, at the goldfields and at the diamond-mines, and as a trooper through the Zulu and Matabele campaigns, and he was ready to talk about what he had seen. Still there were reservations about Bough, and mysteries. The Doctor suspected him of being brutal to his wife, and would not have been surprised any morning upon receiving the news of the man's arrest as one of a gang of forgers, or coiners, or burglars. But he lived and let live, and whatever else the big Afrikander may have been, he was an excellent workman at his trade.

One evening Bough rode round on the motor-tricycle himself, and mentioned casually that his wife was ailing. The Doctor, in the act of mounting the machine, put a brief question or two, registered the replies in the automatic sub-memory he kept for business, and told the man to send her round at ten o'clock upon the following morning.

She came, punctual to the hour, and was shown into Owen's consulting-room—a little woman with beautiful, melancholy eyes and a pretty figure. Illiterate, common, affected, and vain to a degree, hideously misusing the English language in that low, dulcet voice of hers, ludicrous in her application of the debatable aspirate to words in the spelling of which it has no part.

Rather an absurd little person, Mrs. Bough. Yet, a tragic little person, in Saxham's eyes at least, by the time she had made her errand plain.

He heard her tell the tale that was not new to him. Cultured, highly-bred women had made such appeals to him before, and without shame. How should this little vulgar creature be expected to have more conscience than they?

They beat about the bush longer, they put the thing more prettily. They spoke of their frail physical health and their husbands' great anxiety, and quoted the long-ago expressed opinion of ancient family physicians, who possibly turned uneasily in their decent graves. But the gist of the whole was, that they did not want children, and Dr. Saxham had such a great and justly-earned reputation in skilful and delicate operations ... and, in short, would he not be compliant and oblige? They would pay anything. Money was positively no object.

How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of young, rising professional men, who are hampered by honourable debts which threaten to impede and drag them down; who are possessed of high ideals and moral scruples, which, not being essentially, fundamentally embedded and ingrained in the conscience of the man, may possibly be argued away; who have not implanted in their souls and hearts the high reverence for motherhood and the deep tenderness for helpless infancy that distinguished Owen Saxham!

He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others. He began as he had begun with every one of them—the delicate, titled aristocrats, the ambitious Society beauties, the popular actresses, the women who envied these and read about them in the illustrated interviews published in the fashion-papers, and sighed to be interviewed also—to not one of these had he weighed out one drachm less of the bitter salutary medicine that he now administered to Mrs. Bough.

He invariably began with the personal peril and the inevitable risk. Strange how they ignored it, blinded themselves to it, thrust it, the grinning, threatening Death's-head, on one side. Of course, he talked like that! It was most candid of him, and most conscientious. But if they were willing to take the risk—and antiseptic surgery had made such huge strides in these days that the risk was a mere nothing.... Besides, there was not really need for anything like an operation, was there? He could prescribe the kind of dose that ought to be taken, and everything would then be all right.

He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race, tombs and sepulchres—to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp, trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical knife, cut to heal. When they argued with him, saying that the thing was done, that everybody knew it was done, and that it always would be done, by other men as brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the homilist; he admitted the force of their arguments. Let other men of his great calling pile up and amass wealth, if they chose, by tampering with the unclean thing. Owen Saxham would none of it. At this juncture the woman would have hysterics of the weeping or the scolding kind, or would be convinced of the righteousness of the forlorn cause he championed, or would pretend the hysterics or the conviction. Generally she pretended to the latter, and swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to mask the rage and hatred in her haggard eyes, and went to that other man. Then, after a brief absence accounted for as a "rest cure," she would shine forth again upon her world, smiling, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had begun to make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had passed through the Valley of the Shadow, with only her own rod and staff of vanity and pride to comfort her, she would emerge from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and take to pegging or chloral or spiritualism. Most rarely she would not emerge at all, and then her women friends would send wreaths for the coffin and carriages to the funeral, and would whisper mysteriously together in their boudoirs, and look askance upon the doctor who had attended her. For of course he had bungled shockingly, or everything would have gone off as right as rain for that poor dear thing!

Little Mrs. Bough was of the type of woman that pretends to be convinced. She had cried bitterly in the beginning, as she confessed to Saxham that she was not really married to Bough, and that the said Bough, whom Saxham had always suspected of being a scoundrel, would certainly go off with "one of them other women and leave her if she went and 'ad a byby." She cried even more bitterly afterwards, as she wondered how she ever could 'a dreamed o' being that wicked! Bough might kill her—that he might!—or go back to South Africa without her; she never would give in, not now. Never now—the Doctor might depend upon that, she assured him, drying her swollen eyes with a cheap lace-edged handkerchief loaded with patchouli. She was shaken and nervous, and in need of a sedative, and Saxham, having the drugs at hand, made her up a simple draught, unluckily omitting to make a memorandum of the prescription in his pocket-book, and gave her the first dose of it before she went away, profuse in thanks, and carrying the bottle.

And he saw his waiting patients, and stepped into his waiting brougham, and, having for once no urgent call upon his professional attention, dined with Mildred at Pont Street, and was coaxed into promising to take her to the opening performance of a classic play which was to be revived three nights later at a fashionable West End theatre. Mildred had set her heart upon being seen in a box at this particular function, and Saxham had had some trouble to gratify her wish.

He remembered with startling clearness every remote detail of that night at the theatre. Mildred had looked exquisitely fair and girlish in her white dress, with a necklace of pearls he had given her rising and falling on the lovely virginal bosom, where the lover's eyes dwelt and lingered in the masterful hunger of his heart. Soon, soon, that hunger of his for possession would be gratified! It was April, and at the end of July, when work was growing slack, they would be married. They were going North for the honeymoon. A wealthy and grateful patient of Saxham's had placed at his disposal a grey, historic Scotch turret-mansion, standing upon mossy lawns, with woods of larch and birch and ancient Spanish chestnuts all about it, looking over the silver Tweed. In the heat and hurry of his daily round of work, Saxham, who had spent an autumn holiday at this place, would find himself dreaming about it. The smell of the heather would spice the air that was no longer hot and sickly with the effluvia of the city, and the hum of the drowsy black bees, and the cooing of the wood-pigeons would replace the din of the London traffic, and Mildred's eyes would be looking into his, and her cool, fragrant lips would be freely yielded, and her arms would be about his neck, and all those secret aspirations and yearnings and dreams of wedded joy would be realised at last.

He grinned to himself sitting there in the hot darkness of the South African night, the great white stars and the vast purple dome they throbbed in shut out of sight by the miserable little gaily-papered ceiling with its cornice of gilt wood, remembering that everything had ended there. Thenceforth no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom Fate and Destiny, hitherto propitious and obliging, had conspired to lash with scourges, and drive with goads, and hound with despairs and horrors to the sheer brink where Madness waits to hurl the desperate over upon the jagged rocks below.

He supped with them at Pont Street. Mildred came down to say good-night at the door.

"Have you been happy?" he had asked, framing the sweet young face in tender hands, and looking in the pretty, gentle brown eyes.

"You have been so very dear and kind to-night," she had answered, "how could I have helped being happy? And He"—she meant the Semitic actor-manager, whom she romantically adored; whose thick, flabby features and pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eyebrowed with brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately, but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy—"He was so great! Don't you agree with me—marvellously great?"

Saxham had laughed and kissed the enthusiast. It had appeared to him a dreary performance enough, or it would have, had it not been for Mildred and the dear glamour with which her presence had invested the great gilded auditorium, with its rows of bored, familiar, notable faces in the stalls, representing Society, Art, Literature, Music, and Finance; its pit and gallery crowded with organised bodies of theatre-goers, one party certain to boo where the other applauded, riot and disorder the inevitable result, unless by a coincidence rare as snow at Midsummer the rival associations might be won upon to display a unanimity of approval, upon which the dramatic Press-critics would rapturously descant in the newspapers next morning.



XV

Saxham said his lingering sweet good-night, and shut Mildred into the warm, lighted hall, and ran down the steps, and hailed a passing hansom, and was driven back to Chilworth Street. It had rained, and the heat, excessive for April, had abated, and the wise, experienced stars looked down between drifting veils of greyish vapour upon the little human lives passing below.

As he jumped down at his door and paid his cabman, his quick eye noticed a bicycle leaning against the area-railings. One of his poorer patients was waiting for the Doctor. Or a messenger had been sent to summon him. He let himself into the lighted hall, whistling the pretty plaintive melody of Ophelia's song.

A woman sat on the oak bench under the electric globe, her little huddled-up figure making rather a sordid blotch of drab against the strong, rich background of the wall, coloured Pompeian red, and hung with fine old prints in black frames. Her tawdry hat lay beside her, her haggard eyes were set, staring at the opposite wall; her lower jaw hung lax; the saliva dribbled from the corner of her underlip; her yellow, rigid hands gripped the edge of the bench. It was the woman who passed as the wife of the man Bough. And in instant, vivid, wrathful realisation of the desperate reason of her being there, Saxham cried out so loudly that the servant who had let her in and was waiting up for his master in the basement heard the words:

"Are you mad? What do you mean by coming here? Haven't I told you that I will have nothing to do with you and your affairs...."

The voice that issued from her blue lips might have been a scream, judging by the wrung anguish of the awful face she turned upon him; but it was no more than a dry, clicking whisper that the now listening servant could barely hear:

"Don't be 'ard on a woman ... hin trouble, Doctor."

"Hard on you.... On the contrary, I have been too considerate," he said, steeling his heart against pity. "You must go home to your husband, Mrs. Bough, or apply elsewhere for medical advice. I have none to give you."

His square face was very stern as he took the cab-whistle from the hall-salver, that was packed with cards and notes, and letters that had come by the last post, and a telegram or two. She moaned as he laid his hand on the knob of the hall-door.

"It wasn't my doings, Doctor.... Hi told Bough what you said. Hi did, faithful ... an' 'e swore if you wasn't the man to do what 'e wanted, 'e'd be damned but 'e'd find a woman as would! And she come next night—a little, shabby, white-faced, rat-nosed hold thing, shiverin' an' shakin'. Five pounds she 'ad of Bough, shakin' an' shiverin'. An' he wasn't to send no more to the haddress he knew, because she wouldn't be there. Always move hout ... she says, after a fresh job! Oh, my Gawd! An' Bough, he hordered me, an' Hi 'ad to give in. An' to-night Hi reckoned Hi was dyin' an' 'e said Hi best harsk you, 'e was about fed up with women an' their blooming sicknesses. So Hi biked 'ere because Hi couldn't walk. An' now!..." She groaned: "Hi ham dyin', aren't Hi?"

Even to an observation less skilled than that of the expert medical practitioner the signs of swift and speedy dissolution were written on the insignificant, once pretty, little face. Dying, the miserable little creature had ridden to Chilworth Street, hastening her own inevitable end by the stupendous act of folly, and ensuring Saxham's. That certainty had pierced him, even as the first horrible convulsion seized her and wrenched her sideways off the bench. He caught her, and shouted for his man, and they carried her into the consulting-room, and laid her on a sofa, and he did what might be done, knowing that his mercy on her involved swift and pitiless retribution upon himself. Mrs. Bough died three hours later, as the grey dawn straggled through the blinds, and the men with the district ambulance waited at the door, and Dr. Owen Saxham went about his work that day with a strange sensation of expecting some heavy blow that was about to fall. It fell upon the day following the Coroner's Inquest. He was sitting down to breakfast when a Superintendent of Police arrested him upon a warrant from Scotland Yard.

His servant, very pale, had announced that the Superintendent wished to see the Doctor. The Superintendent was in the room, courteously saluting Saxham, before the man had fairly got out the words.

"Good-morning, sir. A pleasant day!"

"Unlike the business that brings you here, I think, Mr. Superintendent?" said Saxham, with his square jaw set. His man spilt the coffee and hot milk over the cloth in trying to fill his master's cup. "You are nervous, Tait. You had better go downstairs, I think, unless——" Saxham looked interrogatively at the burly, officially-clad figure of the Law.

"No, sir, thank you. We do not at present require your man, but it is my duty to tell him that he had better not be out of the way, in case his testimony is wanted."

"You hear?" said Saxham; and as white-faced Tait fled, trembling, to the lower regions: "Of course, you are here," he went on, pouring out the coffee himself with a firm hand, and looking steadily at the Superintendent, "with regard to the case of Mrs. Bough? I have expected that a magistrate's inquiry would follow the Inquest. It seemed only natural——"

The Superintendent interrupted, holding up a large hand.

"It is my duty to tell you, Dr. Saxham, that everything you say will be taken down and used against you in evidence."

"Naturally," said Saxham, putting sugar in his coffee. The sugar was used against him. It amused him now to remember that. The Superintendent had never seen a gentleman more cool, he told the magistrate.

"You see, sir, this Case has been fully considered by the authorities, and it has an ugly look; and it has therefore been decided to charge you with causing the death of the woman Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in your consulting-room, on the twentieth instant, when she visited you ..."

"For the first time," put in Saxham quietly.

"That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent. "You were often at her husband's place of business, you know, and may have seen her or not seen her."

"As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a great many of the man's customers besides myself did see her," Saxham went on, eating his breakfast.

"One of my men out there in the hall—I've noticed you looking towards the door——" began the Superintendent.

"Wondering what the shuffling and breathing at the keyhole meant?" said Saxham quietly. "Thank you for explaining."

"One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished breakfast, and then, sir," said the Superintendent, "I am afraid I must trouble you to come with me to Paddington Police Station."

"Very well," said Saxham, frowning, "unless you object to using my brougham, which will be at the door"—he looked at his silver table-clock, a present from a grateful patient—"in ten minutes' time."

"I don't at all mind that, sir," agreed the obliging Superintendent; "and the men can follow in the cab. Any objection?"

Saxham had winced and flushed scarlet to the hair.

"For God's sake, don't make a procession of it! Let things be kept as quiet as possible for the sake of my—family—and—my friends." He thought with agony of Mildred. They were to be married in July, unless——

The Superintendent coughed behind his glove. "The question of Bail will rest with the magistrate, of course," he said. "But I should expect that it would be admitted, upon responsible persons entering into the customary recognisances."

Saxham rose. He had drunk the coffee, but he could not eat. "Like all the rest of them, in spite of his show of coolness," thought the Superintendent.

"I will ask you for time to telephone to some friends who will, I have no doubt, be willing to give the required undertaking, and arrange for a colleague to visit my patients. You will take a glass of wine while I step into the next room? The telephone is there, on the writing-table."

"And a loaded revolver in the drawer underneath, and poisons of all kinds handy on the shelves of a neat little cabinet," thought the Superintendent. But he said: "With pleasure, sir, only I must trouble you to put up with my company."

A tingling thrill of revulsion ran through Saxham. He set his teeth, and conquered the furious, momentary impulse to knock down this big, burly, smooth-spoken blue-uniformed official.

"Ah, very well. The usual procedure in cases of this kind. Please come this way. But take a glass of wine first. There are glasses on the sideboard there, and claret and port in those decanters."

"To your very good health, Dr. Saxham, sir, and a speedy and favourable ending to—the present—difficulty." The Superintendent emptied a bumper neatly, and with discreet relish, and followed Saxham into the consulting-room, and once more, at the sound of the measured footfall padding behind him over the thick carpet, the suspect's blood surged madly to his temples, and his hands clenched until the nails drove deep into the palms. For from that moment began the long, slow torture of watching and following, and dogging by the suspicious, vigilant, observant Man In Blue.

A Treasury Prosecution succeeded the Police-Court Inquiry, and the accused was formally arrested upon the criminal charge, and committed to Holloway pending the Trial. The Trial took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in the following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in the thrashing out of that vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S. who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude. Who was conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the cell to the dock by warders and policemen, rumbling through back streets and unfrequented ways in a shiny prison-van. Who came at last to look upon the Owen Saxham of this hideous prison nightmare, the man of whom the Counsel for the Crown reared up, day by day, a monstrously-distorted figure, as quite a different person from the other innocent man whom the defending advocate described in flowery, pathetic sentences as a martyr and the victim of an unheard-of combination of adverse circumstances.

Things went badly. The case against the prisoner looked extremely black. That monstrous figure of Owen Saxham, based upon an ingenious hypothesis of guilt, and plastered over with a marvellous mixture of truths and falsities, facts and conjectures, grew uglier and more sinister every day.

The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the hapless victim, dressed in deep mourning and neatly handled by Counsel, evoked a display of handkerchiefs upon his every appearance in the witness-box, from the smart Society women seated near the Bench. Many of them had been Saxham's patients. Several had made love to him, nearly all of them had made much of him, and quite an appreciable number of them had asked him to be accommodating, and render them temporarily immune against the menace of Maternity. These had received a curt refusal, accompanied with wholesome advice, for which they revenged themselves now, in graceful womanly fashion, by being quite sure the wretched man was guilty. More than possible, was it not? they whispered behind their palm-leaf fans: it was sultry weather, and the vendors of these made little fortunes, hawking them outside. Was it not more than possible that he had been the dead woman's lover? The Crown Counsel improved on this idea. Wretched little Mrs. Bough, of infinitesimal account in Life, had become through Death a person of importance. Much was made out of the fact that she had gone to Chilworth Street some days previously to her deplorable ending, and remained closeted with Dr. Saxham for some time. He had supplied her with a bottle of medicine upon her leaving—medicine of which no memorandum was to be found in his notes for the day. She had taken the first dose then and there. According to the testimony of the Accused, the bottle had contained a harmless bromide sedative. Upon the oath of the Public Analyst, the same bottle, handed by the husband of the deceased woman to the Police upon the night of her death, and now produced in Court with two or three doses of dark liquid remaining in it, contained a powerful solution of ergotoxine—a much less innocent drug. Who should presume to doubt its administration by the Prisoner, when the label bore directions in his own characteristic handwriting? Who should dare to affirm his innocence, seeing that to him his victim had hastened, almost in the act of death, begging him, with her expiring breath, "not to be hard on a woman," who had ignorantly trusted him, Gentlemen of the Jury! only to find, too late, the deceptive nature of his specious promises? A whip, cried the Bard of Avon, England's glorious, immortal Shakespeare, should be placed in every honest hand to lash such scoundrels naked through the world! Let that whip, in the honest hands of twelve good Britons, be—the verdict of guilt! The Counsel for the Crown, red-hot and perspiring, sat down mopping his streaming face, for it was tropical weather, with the white handkerchief of a blameless life. Irrepressible applause followed, round upon round thudding against the dingy yellow-white walls, beating against the dirty barred skylight of the stifling, close-packed Court. Then the Judge interposed, and the clapping of hands and thumping of stick and sunshade ferrules upon the dirty floor died down, and the Counsel for the Defence got up to plead for his man, who, by the way, he firmly believed to be guilty.

That remembrance made the Dop Doctor merry again, this scorching night in Gueldersdorp, five years later. But it was ugly mirth, especially when he recalled his agony of sympathy upon hearing, through her mother, that Mildred was ill in bed. Ah! how he hated the simpering, whispering, sneering, giggling women in Court when he pictured her, his innocent darling, his sweet girl, suffering for love of him and sorrow for him. David, detained by onerous duties at Regimental Headquarters throughout the whole of the Case, wrote chilly but fraternally expressed letters on blue official paper. Of his mother, of his father, Owen dared not think. Innocent as he was, the shame of his position, the obloquy of the Trial, must be a branding shame to them for ever.

It had killed them, the Dop Doctor remembered, within a few years of each other—the hale old Squire and Madam, his Welsh wife, feared by the South Dorset village folks for her caustic tongue, beloved for her generous heart, her liberal nature. It was Mildred who he had believed would die if the Verdict went against him—Mildred, who had consoled herself so quickly and so well—Mildred, whom he had held a spotless blossom of Paradise, a young saint in purity and singleness of heart, in comparison with those other women.

Bah! what a besotted idiot he had been! She was as they were. The nodding of their towering hats was before his eyes; the subdued titter that accompanied their whispered comments was in his ears; the lavender, white rose, and violet essences with which they perfumed their baths and sprinkled their clothes were in his nostrils; suffocatingly, as his Counsel went on pleading. The intention of his trenchant cross-questioning of Bough, who had lied from the beginning, like a true son of the Devil, his father, showed plainly now. Little by little the evidence accumulated.

Here, free and unsuspect and doing his best to send another man to Penal Servitude, was the man who had all to gain by fixing the guilt upon the Accused. He had sent the woman, his mistress, to the prisoner; he had resented the prisoner's refusal to commit or to abet a dangerous and illegal operation. He had compelled his hapless victim to submit herself to the hands of a wretch who lived by such deeds. Possibly he had sickened of his poor toy—he had told her as much. Possibly he had determined, by a bold and daring stroke, to free himself of a wearisome burden, and let another man pay the penalty for his own crime. The substitution of the lethal drug found in the bottle for the harmless bromide mixture given to Mrs. Bough by Dr. Saxham would naturally suggest itself to such a wretch, whose calculating cleverness had been crowned with success by the culminating masterstroke, admirable in its simplicity, damnable in its fiendish cunning, of sending the unhappy woman whose deliberate murder he had really planned and carried out, to die upon the threshold of the innocent victim of this diabolical plot. Let those who heard hesitate before they played into the hands of a villain by condemning the blameless to suffer! Let them look at the young man before them, whose hard work had won him, early in life, his brilliant position as one of the recognised pioneers of the new School of Surgery, as an admitted authority on Clinical Medicine, whose wedding-bells—the handkerchiefs came out at this—had rung to-morrow but for this harrowing and bitter stroke of adverse Destiny. Which would they have? Let the Jury decide for Christ or Barabbas! He spoke in all reverence, because the upright, innocent, charitable, self-denying life of a diligent healer of men would support the analogy of Christ-likeness beside that of the principal witness in this Case, the evil liver, the slanderer, the ex-thief and burglar, the English ticket-of-leave man who had emigrated to South Africa eighteen years previously, had enlisted under a false name in the Cape Mounted Police, had deserted, been traced to Kimberley, and there lost sight of, and who, under the name of Bough, had recently returned to England, giving himself out as an Afrikander, and setting up in business in London upon the accumulated savings of a career most probably in keeping with his abominable record.

Warders from Wormwood Scrubbs and Portland Prisons were there to swear to the identity of Abraham Brake, alias Lister, alias Bough, whose photographs, thumb-prints, and measurements an official from the Criminal Identification Department of Scotland Yard was prepared to place before the Court, for whose re-arrest, as a ticket-of-leave man who had failed to keep in proper touch with the Police, an officer with a warrant waited. What, then, was to be the Verdict of the Jury? Was Dr. Owen Saxham innocent or guilty? If innocent, then, in the name of God, let him go forth from bondage, to the unutterable relief of those who waited in anguish for the Verdict. His father, his mother, and the fair young girl—the Court was drowned in tears at this last touching reference, even his Lordship the Judge being observed to remove and wipe eyeglasses that were gemmy with emotion, as Counsel dwelt upon the touching picture of the sorrowing bride-elect, whose orange-blossoms had been blighted by the breath of this hideous, this unbearable, this most unfounded charge....



XVI

The Judge summed up, with an evident bias in favour of the Accused. An old advocate in criminal causes, his Lordship had formed his own opinion of the principal witness for the Crown, though there was no evidence to prove the guilt of the astute Mr. Abraham Brake, alias Lister, alias Bough.

The Jury retired, to return immediately. The Verdict "Not Guilty" was received with applause and cheers. Bough departed, to pay the prison penalty of not keeping in touch with the Police.... More cheers, strongly deprecated by the Judge. The Dop Doctor could hear that ironical clapping and braying five years off. It was over, over! He was free! Oh, the mockery of the word!

His Counsel shook his hand warmly, and several old friends and colleagues pressed round him with hearty congratulations. Then a telegram was handed to him.

"No bad news, I hope," said the advocate who had defended, seeing Saxham's lips blanch. "You have had enough trouble to last for some time, I imagine?"

"It appears as if my measure was not quite full enough," said Saxham quietly. "My father died suddenly last night, down at our place in South Dorset. The wire says, 'An attack of cerebral haemorrhage,' probably brought on by worry and distress of mind over this damned affair of mine." He ground his teeth together, and went on: "I must go to my mother without delay. How soon can I get away from here?"

It was oddly difficult to realise that all the doors were open, and that the following shadow of the Man In Blue would no longer dog his footsteps. It was strange to drive home in the brougham of a friend to Chilworth Street, and let himself into the dusty, neglected, close-smelling, shut-up house. All the servants were out; probably they had been making holiday through all the weeks that had preceded the Trial. His man returned as the master finished packing a portmanteau for that journey down to Dorsetshire. Saxham left him to finish while he changed his clothes and scrawled a letter to Mildred. Nothing else but this death could have kept him from hurrying to the embrace of those dear arms. As it was, he half expected her to rush in upon him, stammering, weeping, clinging to him in her overwhelming relief and gladness.... At every rumble and stoppage of wheels in the street, at every ring, he made sure that she was coming. But she did not come, and he sent his man to Pont Street with his letter, and went down into Dorsetshire by special train from Waterloo, and found the dead man's dogcart waiting for him, with the old bay cob in harness, and the old coachman who had taught him to ride his pony, waiting, with a band of crape about his sleeve, and drove through the deep, ferny lanes to the old home standing in its mantle of midsummer leafage and blossom in the wide gardens whose myrtle and lavender hedges overhung the beach below. There was a little, old, bent, white-haired woman in a shabby black gown and white India shawl waiting for him on the threshold, and only by the indomitable, unquailing spirit that looked out of her bright black eyes did Owen Saxham recognise his mother. She called him her David's dearest son, and her own boy, and took both his hands, and drew his head down, and kissed him solemnly upon the forehead.

"That is for your father, my dear," she said. "He never doubted you for one moment, Owen. And this is for myself. We have both believed in you implicitly throughout. We would not even write and tell you so. It would have seemed, your father thought, like admitting, tacitly, that we doubted our son. But other people believed you guilty, and oh! Owen, I think it killed him!"

"I know that it has killed him," Owen Saxham said simply. The early morning light showed to the mother's eyes the ravages wrought in her son's face by the mental anguish and the physical strain of those terrible weeks that were over, and Mrs. Saxham, for the first time since the Squire's death, burst into a passion of weeping. Owen's eyes were dry, even when he stooped to kiss the high, broad forehead of the grand old grey head that lay upon the snowy, lavender-scented pillow in the cool, airy death-chamber, where the perfume of the climbing roses that flowered about the open casements came in drifts across the sharp, clean odour of disinfectant.

Captain Saxham arrived late that night. His greeting of his brother was stiff and constrained; his grey eyes avoided Owen's blue ones; he did not refer to the events of the past ten weeks. He had always had a habit of twisting and biting at one of the short, thick ends of his frizzy light brown moustache. Now he wrenched and gnawed at it incessantly, and his usually florid complexion had deteriorated to a muddy pallor. Black mufti did not suit the handsome martial figure, and there is no dwelling so wearisome as a house of mourning, when the servants move about on tiptoe, wearing faces of funereal solemnity, and the afternoon tea-tray is carried in in state, like the corpse of a domestic usage on its way to the cemetery, with the silver spirit-kettle bubbling behind it as chief mourner. But, as the elder son, there was plenty to occupy Captain Saxham. There was business to be transacted with the Squire's solicitor, with his bailiff, with one or two of the principal tenants. There were the arrangements to be made for the Funeral, and for the extension of hospitality to relatives and friends who came from a distance to attend it. When it was over and the long string of County carriages had driven home to their respective coach-houses, Owen Saxham returned to town.

"Give my dear love to Mildred. Tell her, if she grudged the first sight of you to me, she will forgive me when she has a son of her own," his mother said.

"You talk as though she were my wife!" he said, the bitter lines about his set mouth softening in a smile.

"She would be but for what is past," said Mrs. Saxham. "She must be soon, for your sake. Your father would have wished that there should be as little delay as possible. Marry quietly at once, and take her abroad. If she loves you, as I know she does, and must, she will not regret the wedding-gown from Paquin's and the six bridesmaids in Directoire hats."



For that deferred wedding was to have been a gorgeous and impressive function at St. George's, Hanover Square, with a Bishop in lawn sleeves to pronounce the nuptial benediction, palms, Japanese lilies, smilax, and white Rambler roses everywhere, while the celebrated "Non Angli sed Angeli" choir of boy-choristers had been specially engaged to render the anthem with proper fervour and give due effect to "The Voice that Breathed."

Owen promised and went back to London. There were cards and envelopes upon the salver in the hall, but not one from Mildred. That stabbed him to the heart.... Not a line, O God!—not a written line, in answer to that letter in which he told her of the acquittal, and of his father's death, and of his own anguish at having to answer the stern call of filial duty, and leave dear Love uncomforted by even one kiss after all these weeks of famine, and hurry away to lay that grand grey head in the vault that covered so many Saxhams. Not a line. But here was the letter, which his idiot of a servant, demoralised by the recent catastrophe, had forgotten to send on lying waiting upon the writing-table in his study. He snatched at it in desperate haste, and tore the envelope open.



Her letter bore the date of that day. She said she had written before and torn the confession up ... it was so difficult to be just to him and true to herself.... It was a roundabout, involved, youthfully grandiloquent epistle in which Mildred announced that her love for Owen was dead, that nothing could ever resuscitate it; that she could not, would not, ever marry him, and that she had returned in an accompanying packet his ring, and presents, and letters, and would ever remain his friend (underlined) Mildred. In a rather wobbly postscript, she begged him not to write or to attempt to see her, because her decision was irrevocable. She spelt the word with only one r.

Saxham read the letter three times deliberately. The walls of the castle he had built, and fondly believed to be a work of Cyclopean masonry, had come tumbling about his ears, and lo! the huge blocks were only bits of painted card, and the Lady of the Castle, his true love, was the false Queen, after all. He folded up the letter and put it away in his pocket-book, and went over to the mantel-glass and looked steadily at the reflection of his own square face, haggard and drawn and ghastly, with eyes of startling blue flaring out from under a scowling smudge of meeting black eyebrows. He laughed harshly, and a mocking devil looked out of those desperate eyes, and laughed back. He unlocked an oak-carved, silver-mounted cellaret, and got out a decanter of brandy, and filled a tumbler, and drank the liquor off. It numbed the unbearable mental agony, though it had apparently no other effect. But probably he was drunk when he rang the bell and said quietly to his man:

"Tait, do you believe there is a God?"

Tait's smooth, waxy countenance did not easily express surprise. He answered, as though the question had been the most commonplace and ordinary of queries:

"Can't say I do, sir. I reckon the parsons are responsible for floating 'Im, and that they made a precious good thing out of bearin' stock in Heaven until the purchasers began to ask for delivery, and after that...." He chuckled dryly. "I've lived with one or two of 'em, and, if I may say so, sir—I know the breed!"

"He knows ... the breed ..." repeated Saxham heavily.

He asked another question, in the same thick, hesitating way, as he moved across the carpet to the oak-and-silver cellaret.

"Tait, when things went damned badly with you, when that other man let you in for the bill you backed for him, and that girl you were to have married went off with someone else, what did you do to keep yourself from brooding? Because you must have done something, man, as you're alive to-day!"

Tait looked at his master dubiously as he poured out more brandy, and went over and stood upon the hearthrug with his back to the empty fireplace, drinking it in gulps. "I did what you're doing now, sir: I took a sight of drink to keep the trouble down. And——" He hesitated.

"Go on," said Saxham, nodding over the tumbler.

"You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said smooth Tait, "and that makes me 'esitate in saying it. But I took on a gay, agreeable young woman of the free-and-easy sort, and went in for a bit o' pleasure, and more drink along with it. One nail drives out another, you know, sir. And if the young lady have thrown you hover——"

"Why, you damned, white-gilled, prying brute! you must have been reading my correspondence," said Saxham thickly, as he lifted the tumbler to his mouth.

Tait grinned. He could venture to tell his master, drunk, what he would not have dared to tell him sober.

"No need for that, sir. I've come and gone between this house and Pont Street too often not to know what was in the wind. Why, Captain Saxham was there with her often and often when you never suspected...."

The tumbler fell from Saxham's hand, and struck the fender, and smashed into a hundred glittering bits.

"Go!" said Tait's master, perfectly, suddenly, dangerously sober, and pointing to the door. The man delayed to finish his sentence.

"While you were in Holloway, sir, and all through the Trial...."

The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been left open. He vanished through it with harlequin-like agility as a terrible, white-faced black figure seemed to leap upon him....

"I've 'ad an escape for my life!" he said, having reached in a series of bounds the safer regions below stairs.

"Of the Doctor?... Go on with your rubbishing nonsense!" said the cook.

"What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear?" demanded the housemaid, who was more imaginative, and cherished the buddings of a romantic passion for one who should be for ever nameless:

"Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by—that's what she've done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his dewy brow. "And seeing the Doctor for the first time since I've been in his service a bit overtook with liquor, and more free and easy like than customary—being a gentleman you or me would 'esitate to take a liberty with in the ordinary way o' things—I thought I'd let 'im know about the Goings On."

"Of them two...." interpolated the cook—"Her and the Captain?"

"Shameless, I call 'em!" exclaimed the incandescent housemaid as Tait signified assent.

"'Aven't they kep' it dark, though!" wondered the cook.

"They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite got over the desertion of the young woman he was to have married, and who had gone off with somebody else, "a precious downy couple. And what I say is—it's a Riddance!"

"How did 'e take it, pore dear?" gulped the housemaid.

"Like he's took everythink—that is, up to the present moment," admitted Tait. "But this is about the last straw."

The housemaid dissolved in tears.

"He'll get another young lady," said the cook confidently. "And him so 'andsome an' so clever, an' with such heaps of carriage-swells for patients."

Tait shook his prim, respectable head.

"The swells'll show their tongues to another man now, my gal, who 'asn't the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coat-sleeve. Whistle for patients now, that's what the doctor may. Why, every one of 'em has paid their bills, and them that haven't have asked for their accounts to be sent in. And it's 'Lady So-and-so presents her compliments,' instead of 'Dear Dr. Saxham.' Done for, he is, at least as far as the West End's concerned.... Mind, I don't set up to be infallible, but experience justifies a certain amount of cocksureness, and what I say is—Done for! Best he can do is—sell the practice, and lease, and plate, and pictures, furniture, and so on, for whatever he can get—the movables would have provoked spirited biddin' at auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under the circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their valoo—and go Abroad." Tait's gesture was large and vague.

"Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel!" sighed the cook.

"And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he don't do away with hisself," sobbed the housemaid. "I do, reely!"

"With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles handy," added the cook.

"Not him!" said Tait. "I'm ready to lay any man the sporting odd against him committing sooicide. He's not the sort. Lord! what was that?"

That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs.



XVII

While the servants talked in the kitchen the master had been sitting quietly in the darkening study. All without and within the man was eddying, swirling blackness. Heat beat and glowed upon his forehead, like the radiation from molten metal; there was a winnowing and fanning as of giant wings or leaping of furnace-fires. The blood in his throbbing temples sang a dull, tuneless song. But presently he became aware of another kind of singing.

It was a little hissing voice that came from the inside of the oak-and-silver cellaret. And it sang a song that the man who sat near had never heard before.

"Why think of the sharp lancet or the keen razor, why long for the swift dismissing pang of the fragrant acid, or the leap down upon the railway-track under the crushing, pulping iron wheels?" sang the little voice. "I can give you Forgetfulness. I can bring you Death. Not that death of the body which, for all you know, may mean a keener, more perfect capability to live and suffer on the part of the Soul, stripped from the earthly husk that has burdened and deadened it. The Death that is Death in Life.... Here am I, ready to be your minister. Drink deep, and die!"

The man who heard lifted his white, wild, desperate face. The song came more clearly.

"Wronged, outraged, betrayed of the God you blindly believed in and the man and the woman who had your passionate love, your absolute faith, have your revenge upon the One—as upon those two others. Degrade, cast down, deface, the image of your Maker in you. Hurl back every gift of His, prostitute and debase every faculty. Cease to believe, denying His Being with the Will He forged and freed. Your Body, is it not your own, to do with as you choose? Your Soul, is it not your helpless prisoner, while you keep it in its cage of clay? Revenge, revenge, through the body and the soul, upon Him who has mocked you! Do you not hear Him laugh as you sit there desolate in the darkness—poor, broken reed that thought itself an oak of might—alone, while your brother kisses the sweet lips that were yours. David and Mildred are laughing too, at you. Hasten to efface every memory of the lying kisses she has given you upon the bosoms of the Daughters of Pleasure! Love, revel, drink! Drink, I say, and you will be able to laugh at the One and the two...."

The little hissing voice drove Saxham mad. He leaped up, frenzied, oversetting the chair. He tore open and threw wide the doors of the oak-and-silver cellaret, and sought in it with shaking hands. He found a bottle of champagne and the brandy-decanter, and a long tumbler, and knocked off the wired neck of the bottle against the chimneypiece, and crashed the foaming wine into the crystal, and filled up the glass with brandy, and tossed off the stinging, bubbling, hissing mixture, and laughed as he set the tumbler down.

The thing inside the oak-and-silver cellaret laughed too.

* * * * *

The hall-door shut heavily as Tait and the women in the kitchen sat and listened. They had not spoken since the crash of the falling chair in the room overhead. The area-door was open to the hot, sickly night air of London in midsummer. Tait slid noiselessly out and listened as his master hailed a passing hansom and jumped lightly in. The flaps banged together, the driver pulled open the roof-trap and leaned down to catch the shouted address. Tait's sharp ear caught it too, and the knowing grin that decorated the features of the cabman was reflected upon his decent smug countenance. His tongue was in his cheek as he returned to the kitchen. For his master had given the direction of a house of ill-fame.