LIII…

LIII

There were two funerals in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, upon a night that no one will forget who stood in the packed throng of shadowy mourners about each of those open graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the vault of heaven might have been hollowed out of the darkling depths of an amethyst of inconceivable splendour and planetary size. Myriads of stars, dazzlingly white, swung under this, the Mother's fitting canopy, shared with another, not like her holy, not noble or unselfish or devoted, but like her in that he was brave and much beloved.

Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowding faces about the narrow open trench where the Reverend Julius Fraithorn read the Burial Service by lantern-light without being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet, and women sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful and so merry and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed women; the men praised him for having been such a swordsman, horseman, shot. Everyone spoke of him as the life and soul of the garrison, the idol of his brother-officers, and worshipped by the men under his command. Everyone had something to tell of dead Beauvayse that was pleasant to hear.

But the great bulk of the crowd was massed behind the black-robed, white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling rigid and immovable about the second open grave, where the Mother-Superior lay in her snow-white coffin, fully habited and mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on which the plain gold ring of her Divine espousals shone, the parchment formula of the vows she took when admitted to her Order nineteen years before, lying under those meekly-folded hands upon her breast. So she had lain, feet to the altar, in the Convent chapel that her daughters in Religion had draped and decked for her, keeping their loving vigils about her from twilight to dawn, from dawn to twilight, until this hour when they must yield all that was mortal of her to Earth's guardianship and the unsleeping watchfulness of God.

Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and strangely quiet. The women's faces white and haggard and tearless, the men's drawn and deeply lined. Not even muffled groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence as the solemn rite drew to its singularly simple and impressive close. As the fragrant incense rose from the censer and the holy water sprinkled the snow-white pall that bore the Red Cross, one dreadful word lurked sinister in every thought:

Murdered!...

Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose hands had staunched the bleeding wounds of many present, whose arm had lifted and pillowed the dying heads of others dear to them; who had stood through long nights of fever and delirium beside their Hospital pallets, ministering as a very Angel from Heaven to tortured bodies and suffering souls--murdered!

The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched continually with her lamp prepared, that at the first summons of the Heavenly Bridegroom she might enter with Him into the marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had come to her by the bloodstained hand of an assassin? It was so. And--ah! the horror of it!

The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he moved round the grave within the enclosing wall of kneeling Sisters. But no answering sob came from the vast assemblage. They were as dumb--stricken to stone. They could not yet contemplate the felicity of the pure soul of the martyred saint, carried by God's Angels into the Land of the ever-living, admitted to the unspeakable reward of the Beatific Vision. They could only realise that somebody had killed her.

But when the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and left her earthly body, how wonderful in its marble, hushed, close-folded, mysterious beauty none who had looked upon it ever could forget, waiting for the second coming of her Master and her Lord, a great sob mounted, and broke from every breast, and every face was drenched with sudden tears. Perhaps God let her see how much they loved her in that parting hour. And then the bugle sounded "Last Post" over both the open graves, softly for fear of Brounckers' German gunners, and the great crowd melted away, and all was done and over.

I have said that all the people wept. There was a girl in white, for she would not let the Sisters put black garments on her, kneeling between Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony. This girl did not weep at all. Chief mourner at both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact. She knew that Beauvayse was on duty at Maxim Outpost South, and could not get away, and that the Reverend Mother was vexed with her, and was hiding at the Convent, pretending that she had gone somewhere, and would never come back.

She was especially clear of mind when she thought all this. At other times she was not Lynette, and knew no one, and had never known anybody of the name. She was the ragged Kid, crouching on the Little Kopje in the gathering twilight or on the long mound that its eastward shadow covered. Or she was lying under the tattered horse-blanket on the foul straw pallet in the outhouse, waiting for the Lady to come with the great, kind, covering dark.

Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned cube-sugar box beside the green rep sofa where Bough lolled on wet days or stormy nights, her great eyes wild with apprehension, her every nerve tense and strained with terror of the master in his condescending moods, when he would make pretence of teaching her to scrawl coarse pothooks and hangers on the greasy slate that usually hung below the glass-and-bottle shelf. Or--and at these times the Sisters found her difficult to manage--she was crouching upon one side of a locked door, and a long thin wire was feeling its way into the keyhole on the other side, and the man who manipulated it laughed as the agile pliers nipped the end of the key and turned it in the wards of the lock....

And then she would be running through the night, anywhere, nowhere, and Bough would be riding after. She could hear the short wheezing gallop of the tired pony when she laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok, wielded by a strong and brutal hand, would bite into the quivering flesh of the child, and she would shriek for mercy, and presently fall upon the ground and lie there like one dead--acting that old tragedy over and over again.

God was very kind to you, Reverend Mother, if He hid that sight from one to whom she was so dear. But if His Blessed in Heaven have cognisance of what takes place in this dull, distant speck of Earth, I think some salt tears must needs have fallen from the starry eyes of one of Christ's saintly maiden-spouses, glorious under the dual crown of Virginity and Martyrdom, and yet a mother as truly as His Own.

That swift unerring judgment of Saxham's had pointed, months ago, to some such mental and physical collapse, as the result of shock, crowning long-continued nervous overstrain. He had said to the Mother that such a result would be easier to avert than to deal with.

There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that he did not employ in dealing with it now.

Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story of the Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words.

"The last charge the Mother laid on us--Sister Hilda-Antony and me--was to keep our eyes upon the child. The very day it was done she told us, and I saw that something had made her anxious by the look that was in her eyes." She dried her own with a coarse blue cotton handkerchief before she took up her tale. "She went alone to the Head Hospital that day. None of us were to be surprised, she said, if she came home extra late. Sister Hilda-Antony and me were on duty at the Railway Institute. We took Lynette with us.--There!... Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as if she remembered her name?"

She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool in her old corner of the Convent bombproof, but she did not heed the shattering crashes of the bombardment any more. She had only moved to push out of her eyes the dulled and faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and bent over her little slate again. Before that, and a pencil had been given her she had been restless and uneasy. Now she would be occupied for long hours, making rude attempts at drawing houses and figures such as a child represents, with round "O's" of different sizes for heads and bodies, and pitchforks for legs and arms....

Sister Tobias went on: "The Siege Gazette had come out that day, with the news of"--she dropped her voice to a whisper--"of her being likely to be married before long to him that's gone. May Our Lord give him rest!" Sister Tobias's well-accustomed fingers pattered over the bib of her blue-checked apron, making the Sign. "And Sister Hilda-Antony and me had the world's work with all the people who stopped us in the street and came round us at the Institute to say how glad they were. Talk of a stone plopped in a duckpond! You'd have thought by the crazy way folks carried on that two pretty young people had never went and got engaged before." Sister Tobias was never coldly grammatical in speech. "But the child was happy, poor dear, in hearing even strangers praise him; and when the firing stopped and we were on our way home, she begged us to turn out of it and call in at the Convent, where he'd begged her to meet him, if only for a minute, not having seen her since the Sunday when----"

"Yes--yes!"

Saxham, who writhed inwardly, remembering that Sunday, nodded, bending his heavy brows. His ears were given to Sister Tobias, his eyes to the slight figure that somehow, in the skirt some impatient movement had wrenched from the gathers and the shirt-bodice that was buttoned awry, had the air of a ragged, neglected child. And she held up her scrawled slate to ward off his look, and peeped at him round the side of it.

Big strong men like that could be cruel when they were angry. The Kid knew that so well.

"We went to the Convent with the child," Sister Tobias continued: "We hadn't the heart to deny her, though we thought the Mother might be vexed that we hadn't come straight home. A queer thing happened as we crossed the road and went up along the fence towards the gates with the child between us.... A big, heavy man, dressed as the miners dress, with a great black beard and his hat pulled down over his eyes, came along in such a hurry that he knocked Sister Hilda-Antony off the kerb into the road, and brushed close up against her----"

"Against Miss Mildare? Did it occur to you that the man had come out of the Convent enclosure?" Saxham asked quickly.

Sister Tobias shook her head.

"No; but I did think he meant stopping and speaking to the child, and then changed his mind and hurried on. 'Did he hurt you, dearie?' I asked her, seeing her shaking and quite flustered-like. And she answers, 'I don't know....' And 'Was it anyone you knew?' I puts to her again, and 'I can't tell,' says she, like as if she was answering in her sleep. Do you thinks she understands we're talking about her, poor lamb?"

They both looked at her, and she, having been taught by painful experience that to be the object of simultaneous observation on the part of the man and woman meant punishment involving stripes, began to tremble, and hung her head. From under her tangled hair she peeped from side to side, wondering what it was she had left undone? Ah!--the broom, standing in the corner. She had forgotten to sweep out the house-place and the bar. When the dreaded eyes turned from her, she got up and went softly to the corner where Sister Tobias's besom stood, and took it and began to sweep, casting terrified glances through her hair at her two Fates.

Something gripped Saxham by the heart and wrung it. The scalding tears were bitter in his throat. Do what he would to keep them free, his eyes were dimmed and blinded, and Sister Tobias wiped her own openly with the blue cotton handkerchief.

"We thought the young gentleman would be waiting near the Convent," said Sister Tobias, "or in one of the ground-floor rooms, but he wasn't there. Me and Sister Hilda-Antony looked at one another. 'Early days for a young girl's sweetheart to be late at the meeting-place!' says Sister Hilda-Antony's eyes to me, and mine said back, 'The Lord grant no harm's come to him!' We waited five minutes by the school clock, that's never been let run down, and then another five, and still he didn't come. He had got his death-wound, though we didn't know it, hours before."

"The Angel of Death had spread his wings over the Convent. Both me and Sister Hilda-Antony felt there was a strange and awful stillness and solemnness about the place. At last me and her told the child that go we must. We'd wait no longer. But she, knowing we'd never leave without her, ran upstairs. We heard her light feet going over the wet matting and down the long passage to the chapel door. Then----"

Sister Tobias sobbed for another moment in the blue handkerchief. The child, who had been diligently sweeping, looked at the woman and at the big man who had made her cry, with great dilated eyes of fear. She put the broom back noiselessly in its corner, and stole back to her stool. Who knew what might happen next?

"Then," said Sister Tobias, "we heard the dreadfullest scream. 'Mother!' just once, and after it dead silence. Then--I don't know how we got there, it was so like a cruel dream--but we were in the chapel, trying to raise them up. That dear Saint--may the Peace of God and the Bliss of His Vision be upon her for ever!--lay dead on the altar-steps where the wicked, murdering hand had shot her down.... And the child lay across her, just where she had dropped in trying to lift her. And the strength of me and the Sister, and the strength of them that came after, wasn't equal to unloose those slender little hands you're watching."

The slender little hands were busy with the slate and pencil as Saxham looked at them.

"Those that came and helped us had been sent on from the Convent bombproof, where they'd been to look for her"--Sister Tobias glanced sorrowfully at the owner of those little busy hands--"with an Ambulance chair and a story of more trouble. But Our Lady had had pity on the child. She was past understanding why they'd come to fetch her.... The brain can soak up trouble till it won't hold a drop more. But she was quiet and happy kneeling by that blessed Saint, waiting till the Lady should wake up, she said.... And, 'deed and 'deed, but it looked like the blessedest sleep----"

Sister Tobias broke down and cried outright. The child eyed her half suspiciously, half wonderingly. Her great terrified eyes had not seen the man strike, but he must have hurt the woman. Therefore, she looked sharply at the man between the tangled masses of the hair that could not be kept pinned up, and saw two great slow tears ooze over his thick underlids, and glitter as they hung there, and then fall. Others followed them, tumbling down the square white face, and the stern mouth was wrenched with a strange spasm, and the grim chin trembled curiously....

Somebody had hurt the man.... It is not possible to follow up the workings of the disordered intelligence, and spell out the blurred letters of the confused mind. It is enough that her terror of him abated. She slipped from her stool to the floor, under the pretence of picking up her slate-pencil, threw back the hair that prevented her seeing clearly, and peered up in that working face of Saxham's with curiosity, crouching near. She did not recoil violently when the strange, sorrowful face bent towards her; she only shrank back as Saxham asked:

"You remember me? You know my name?"

She nodded, eyeing him warily. If his hand had moved, she would have sprung backwards. But it did not stir.

"Tell me who I am, then?"

"Man."

Her lips shaped the word. Her voice was barely audible. His heart beat thickly as he went on:

"Quite right, but something else besides a man. A man with a name. Tell me the name, or shall I tell it you?"

She nodded, and her eyes were great and timorous, but there was no terror of him in them now.

"My name is Saxham--Owen Saxham. Say the name after me."

For a wonder she obeyed. Sister Tobias caught a breath of surprise, but her subdued exclamation was silenced in mid-utterance by Saxham's look.

"Dr. Owen Saxham--Doctor because I try to cure sick people. You have seen me trying at the hospitals. You have helped me many times----"

She puckered her delicate, bewildered brows, and held her head on one side. To be made to think, and recall, and remember, hurt.

"--Many times, and the sick people were grateful. They often ask me now, How is Miss Mildare?"

Her attention had wandered to the bronzed buttons on the Doctor's khaki coat. She was trying to count them, it seemed, by the movement of her lips. Saxham went on with inexorable patience:

"Never mind the buttons. Look at me. Think of the patients at the Hospital who are asking when Lynette Mildare is coming back again. Tell me what I am to say to them, Lynette?"

His voice shook over the beloved name. In spite of his grim effort to fight down the overmastering emotion, his eyes brimmed over, and a drop splashed, hot and heavy, upon the wandering hand that crept out to finger the buttons that would not let themselves be counted right. She looked up at the eyes that wept for her, and their mingled love and anguish touched even her dulled mind to pity. She held her slender hand up against the light, and looked at the splash of wet upon it.

"You--cry?"

There was a glimmer of something in the eyes that redeemed their vagueness. A rushlight seen shining through a night of mist upon a desolate mountain-side might have meant as little or as much to eyes that saw it. Saxham saw it, and it meant much to him. His great chest lifted on a wave of hope as he answered her:

"I cry for somebody who cannot cry for herself. Shall I tell you her name? It is Lynette Mildare. When tears come to her, then it will be for those who love her to cry again for joy, for she will be given back to them...."

"Lord grant it!" breathed Sister Tobias behind them. But Saxham had forgotten her. The fountains of his deep were broken up and words came rushing from him.

"I think that day will come, Lynette. I believe that day will come," he said, holding the beautiful vague gaze with his. "If every drop in these veins of mine, poured out, could bring it more quickly, it should be hastened so; if every faculty of my body, every cell in my brain, bent to the achievement of one end, expended to the last unit of energy, in the restoration of what is infinitely dearer to me than life--than a hundred lives, if I had them to devote!--could insure its dawning, and bring the light of Reason and Memory and Hope into these beloved eyes again----"

A sob tore its way through the Doctor's great frame. He rose up abruptly and hurried away.

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LIV

A deadly lassitude, both physical and mental, had settled down upon the men and women of the garrison. They knew that Brounckers had gone south, leaving General Huysmans in command of the investing forces. They knew that the rainy season brought them fever, for they shivered and burned with it, and they knew that the scanty rations of coarse and unpalatable food were getting smaller every day.

But they were conscious of these things in a dull way, and as though they affected people who were a long distance off. One day, when for the thousandth time word came that the advance-guard of the Relief was in sight, when the commotion visible in the enemy's laagers suggested a poked-up ant-hill, and seemed to confirm the report, there was a brief flicker of excitement. Mounted men rode out in force, guns were limbered up and galloped out north and west, to divert General Huysmans' attention, and give Grumer, conjectured to be waiting for it, the opportunity for an eagle-like swoop down upon the harassed tortoise sprawling on her sand-hills. But the rainy dark came down upon the clatter of artillery, and the shining dawn crept up and brought the cruel news that the allies had really been beaten back; and if there was any doubt of that, it was dissipated at the day's end when one of the Red Cross waggons came rumbling back out of the sloppy twilight, bringing Three Messengers to confirm the tale.

They were eloquent enough, even in their speechlessness, those three dead troopers, whose boots and coats were missing, and whose pockets had been turned inside out. Not a man of them was known to any member of the beleaguered garrison. Yet every man and woman there was the poorer by three friends and one more hope.

We know what was happening while Gueldersdorp ate her patient heart out. It has been written in the History of Successful Strategy how Lord Williams of Afghanistan, landing at Cape Town in January, found Muller on his way from Port Christmas, Whittaker at Bergstorm, Parris at Kooisberg, Ruthven on the Brodder, and everybody and everything at a deadlock. And being too old and wise to disdain the wisdom of others, the keen old brain under the frosty thatch recalled to mind the story of Stonewall Jackson, collected what forces he could muster, slipped in between two of the columns held immovable, and having established his lines of communication to the south, launched himself on Groenfontein, and created the necessary diversion. A mighty wave rolled back to protect the menaced Free State capital, the paralysed columns moved again, Diamond Town was relieved by Sir George Parris, and Commandant Selig Brounckers was captured at Pijlberg.

Doubtless he was a bully and a tyrant, that roaring-voiced, truculent man. But those angry, red-veined grey eyes of his could look Death squarely in the face, and the brain behind them could conceive and plan stratagems and tactics that were masterly, and devise works that were marvels of Defensive Art. And the heavy hand that patted Mevrouw Brounckers' head, as that devoted woman sat disconsolate in the river-bed, surrounded by her children, and pots, and bundles, and the roaring voice that softened to speak words of consolation, even as the trap so ingeniously set to catch a Tartar closed in--North, South, East, West--belonged to a man who knew not only how to fight and win and how to fight and lose, but how to love and pity.

There came the faint dawn of a day in May when the plan of that bright young man Schenk Eybel was tried, and tried successfully.... The line between two forts that lay far apart on the south and south-west was pierced, while the incessant roll of rifles made a mile-long fringe of jagged yellowish flame along the enemy's eastern trenches. Even before the feint sputtered out the rush had been made, the stratagem had developed, and at the bidding of twenty incendiary torches, the daub-and-wattle huts of the Barala town leaped skyward in one roaring conflagration.

We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that day of fire and blood. It is marked with a white stone in the History of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, and the chapter is headed "The Turning of the Tables." It gives a spirited description of the prudent retreat of General Huysmans, the unconditional surrender of Commandant Eybel, and winds up with a pen-and-ink sketch of Brounckers' bright boy breaking the chaff-bread of captivity in the quarters of that slim duyvel, the Engelsch Commandant.

But while the Boer was yet top-dog in the scuffle, and held the Barala stad, and the fort that had lately done duty as headquarters for the Irregulars, holding captive their commanding officer, several of his juniors, and some fifteen troopers, with a handful of Town Guards; and all the fighting men who could be spared from the trenches were being posted between the menacing danger and the town, and a couple of field-guns were being hurried into position, and it had not yet occurred to Commandant Schenk Eybel that the cautious Huysmans might leave him in the lurch, things looked very bad indeed for the doughty defenders of little Gueldersdorp--certainly up to afternoon-tea time, when a couple of Scotch girls crossed the two hundred yards of veld that lay between the Fort and the town, carrying cans of steaming tea for the parching Britons penned up there.

You are to see those calm, unconscious heroines start, fixing their hairpinned braids with quick, deft touches, pinning up their skirts as for the crossing of a wimpling burn rather than for the fording of Death's black river. They measured the distance with cool, keen eyes, took up a can in each hand, exchanged a word, and started. The remaining can they left behind, saying they would come back for it. And they meant to, and would have, but for a pale young woman in curling-pins, crowned by the deplorable wreck of a large and flowery hat, and wearing a pink cotton gown of deplorable limpness, through the washed-out material of which her sharpened collar-bones and thin shoulders threatened to pierce. For 'ow are you to take to call a proper pride in yourself when you 'aven't got no 'art for anythink any more?

You are to understand that Emigration Jane 'ad bin 'in 'Orspital along of what the doctors called the Triphoid Fever, months an' months; and 'ad bin orful bad, an' sent back again after being discharged, on accounts of an Elapse, and kep' a dreadful time at the Women's Combalescent, through her blood being nothink but water--and now you may guess the reason of that fruitless search on the part of W. Keyse.

She tried to run at first, but the can was full and heavy, and her knees shook under her at the screaming of the bullets over that cross-swept field. Her pore 'art beat somethink crooil, and there was a horrible kind of swishing in her years, but to give up, and chuck away the can, and scuttle back to cover, with Them Two stepping along in front as cool--and more than halfway over, was what Emigration Jane could not demean herself to do. And at last they passed her coming back, and the Fort loomed up before her, as suddenly as though it had sprouted up mushroom-fashion under her dazzled eyes. And grimy men were leaning over the sandbag-parapet applauding her, and blackened hands attached to hairy arms reached down and grabbed the can, and it was taken up into the air and vanished, she never knew how. And then she was staring up into the lean, brickdust-coloured face of a Corporal of the Town Guard, whose head was swathed in a bloody bandage, and in all the world there was only Her and Him.

"You fust-class little Nailer. You A1 bit o' frock----" W. Keyse began. Then his pale eyes bolted and his jaw fell, and his overwhelming joy and relief took on the aspect of horrified consternation.

"Watto!" he was beginning weakly, but she tore her gaze from his, and with a rending sob, covered her face with her hands, and ran blindly. He remained petrified and staring. And then a bullet struck him full in the face, and he screamed like a shot rock-rabbit, and threw up his arms and fell back, smothering in his own blood, behind the breastwork. And she never knew the cruel trick that Fate had played her, as she ran....

She learned it later, when Young Eybel and his party were marched prisoners into town, and cheer upon cheer went up from British throats, and bells were ringing joyfully, and "God Save the Queen!" bellowed in every imaginable key, was heard from every possible quarter.

It was while the Barala were wailing over their suffocated women and piccaninns, and the acrid fumes of burning yet hung heavy in the powder-tainted air, and the R.A.M.C. men and their volunteer helpers were bringing in the wounded and the dead, that Emigration Jane saw a face upon a stretcher that was being carried through the rejoicing crowd, and screamed at the sight, and fell tooth and nail upon the human barrier that interposed between herself and it, and got through--how, she never could 'a' told you.

Rather a dreadful face it was, with wide-open, staring eyes protruding through a stiffening mask of gore. The teeth grinned, revealed by the livid, drawn-back lips, and how she knew him again in such a orful styte she couldn't tell you--not if you offered her pounds and pounds to say----

She was only Emigration Jane, but when the bearers halted with the stretcher, it was in obedience to the gesture and the look of a young woman who had risen above herself into the keen and piercing atmosphere of High Tragedy.

"Put that down, you two blokes. Wot for?" Her thin throat swelled visibly before the scream came: "'Cos 'e belongs to me! 'Ain't that enough? Then--I belongs to 'im! Dead or livin'--oh, my darlin'! my darlin'!"

The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their burden down. It was not heavy, for Corporal W. Keyse, even when not living under conditions of semi-starvation, was a short man and a spare. Had been, one was tempted to say, in regard to his condition: "For," said one of the R.A.M.C. men to a sympathetic bystander, "the chap has had a tremendous wipe over the head with a revolver-butt or a gun-stock, and he has been shot in the face besides. There's the hole plain where the bullet went in under his near nostril, and came out at the left-hand corner of his off eye. And unless a kind o' miracle happens, I should say, myself, that it would be a saving of time to carry him straight to the Cemetery."

"Don't let the poor girl hear you!" said the sympathetic bystander. But Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing anything but the damaged head upon the canvas pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly, dropping on her knees beside it:

"O my own, own, try an' know me! Come back for long enough to s'y one word! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll pray to You all my days. O pore, pore darlin' 'ead that wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil----"

It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under the limp and shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that called W. Keyse to come back from the very threshold of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true love.

It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's stiffened eyelids quivered and came down halfway, and the martial spirit of its owner flickered up long enough for W. Keyse to sputter out:

"Cripps, it's 'Er! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven--on somebody else's pass?"

"Born to be hung, I should say," commented the R.A.M.C. man aside to his mate. "Chuck some water over the young woman, one of you," he added, as the stretcher was lifted. "And tell her, when she comes to, that we've taken her sweetheart to Hospital instead of to the other place."

"Rum critters, women," commented another bystander, not untender in his manner of sprinkling the dubious liquid known in Gueldersdorp as water out of a cracked tin dipper over the face of the young woman who sat upon the ground in the centre of a circular palisade of interested human legs. "Look at this one, for instance. Lively as a vink as long as she believes her chap a corpse, and does a solid flop as soon as she finds out he has a kick in him. Help her up, you on the other side. Do you think you could walk now, miss, if you tried to?"

She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook under her. Her clasped hands shook, too, as she held them out, beseeching those about her to be pitiful, and tell her where "they" had taken him. Then, when she was told, and because she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the way to the Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him.

Saxham stitched up the split scalp of W. Keyse, and grimly congratulated him upon the thickness of the skull beneath it. The bullet had, as has already been indicated, gone in under the left nostril, and emerged below the inner corner of the right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound notoriety as well as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight permanent cast....

"You shall git well, deer," Emigration Jane would tell her patient twenty times a day. "You carn't 'elp it, becos I means to myke you."

"A' right," her hero would snuffle. One day he added, with a weakly swoop of one lean arm in the direction of her waist: "Mend me an' marry me. That's wot I call a Fair Division o' Labour. Twig?"

She crimsoned, gasping:

"You don't never mean it?"

"Stryte I mean it," declared W. Keyse. "Wot d'you tyke me for?"

His bed was in a corner, and a screen baffled prying eyes. She hung over him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful, faltering:

"S'y it agyne, darlin'! Upon yer solemn natural----"

He said it with the lean arm round her.

"An' it's me--me wot you wants--an' not that Other One?----"

He swore it.

"You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy Cripps!"

"An' you've forgiven me--abart them letters?" Her face was coming close....

"Every time I blooming well kissed 'em, arter I bin an' picked 'em up," he declared.

"You did--that?" she quavered, marvelling at the greatness of his nature.

"Look in me jacket pocket if you think I'm spinnin' you fairy ones." His close arm slackened a little. "Now there's somethin' I got to up an' tell, if you never tips me the 'Ow Do no more."

"Wot is it, deer?" Her heart beat painfully. Was this something the reason why he had not yet kissed her?

"It's got to do with the Dutchy wot landed me this slip over the cokernut"--he indicated some plaster strappings that decorated the seat of intelligence--"with a revolver-butt, when they rushed the Fort. After 'e'd plugged at me wiv' 'is last cartridge an' missed." The Adam's apple in his thin throat worked up above the collar of the grey flannel Hospital jacket. "I--I outed 'im!" said W. Keyse.

"O' course you did, deer." Her heart thrilled with pride in her hero. "An' serve 'im glad--the narsty, blood-thirsty, murderin'----"

He interrupted:

"'Old 'ard! Wait till you knows 'oo it was." He gulped, and the Adam's apple jerked in the old way. "That 'ulkin' big Dopper you was walkin' out along of, when I----"

"Walt! It was--Walt?"

She shuddered and grew pale.

"That's the bloke I means. I 'ad to 'ave 'im," explained W. Keyse, "or 'e'd 'ave 'ad me. So I sent 'im in. With my one, two, an' the Haymaker's Lift. Right in the middle of 'is dirty weskit. F'ff!" He blew a sigh. "Now it's out, an' I suppose you 'ates me?"

She panted.

"It's 'orrible, deer, but--but--you 'ad to. An'--an'--if I 'ave to s'y it, I'd a bloomin' sight rather it was 'Im than You!"

"I'll 'ave my kiss now," said the lordly W. Keyse. And took it from her willing lips.

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LV

There was no perceptible change in Lynette, either at the time of young Eybel's frustrated coup, or for long after. She was to live as much as possible in the open air, Saxham had insisted, and so you would find the girl, with a Sister in charge of her, sitting in the Cemetery, where the crop of little white crosses thickened every day. The little blue and white irises had bloomed upon those two graves where her adopted mother and her brave young lover lay, before the dawning of that day the nuns prayed and Saxham hoped for.

It was his bitter-sweet joy to be with her constantly, striving with all his splendid powers of brain and body to brace the shattered nerves, and restore the exhausted strength, and lead the darkened mind back gently and by degrees towards the light.

She did not shrink from him now, but would answer his questions submissively, and give him her hand mechanically at meeting and parting. Saxham had not the magnetic influence over shy and backward children that another man possessed. She would smile and brighten when she saw the Colonel coming, upright and alert as ever, though bearing heavy traces now in the haggard lines and deep hollows of his face, to the greying hairs above his temples and to the close-clipped brown moustache, as in the Quixote-like gauntness of the figure that had never carried much flesh, of the long struggle of close on seven months' duration.

The pleasant little whistle would die upon his lips when he saw her sitting by the Mother's grave, plaiting grasses while the Sister sewed, or making clumsy babyish attempts at drawing on her little slate. From this she disliked to be parted, so her gentle nurses fastened it to one end of a long ribbon, and its pencil to the other, and tied the ribbon about her waist.

One day, as the Colonel stooped to speak to her, his keen glance noted that the wavering outline of a house stood upon the little slate. The living descendant of the primitive savage who had outlined the forms of men and beasts upon the flank of the great boulder when this old world was young, would have scorned the drawing, and with good reason. It was so feeble and wavering an attempt to convey, in outline, the idea of a white man's dwelling.

The roof sagged wonderfully, and the chimneys were at frenzied angles with the sides of the irregular cube, with its four windows of impossibly varying size, and the oblong patch that meant a door between them. Above the door was another oblong, set transversely, and rather suggesting a tavern-sign.

There were some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly sheds and stables of daub and wattle, eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them knew they were native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the clumsy drawing on the slate. Without those rude lines in the foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a little kopje of boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the drawing would have meant nothing at all, even to the eye of a practised scout, except a tavern on the lonely veld. The grave at the foot of the little kopje located the spot.

"A veld hotel in the Orange Free State--a wretched shanty of the usual corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the grass country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein."

He heard the wraith of his own voice speaking to the dead woman who lay under the blossoming irises at his feet. He saw her with the mental vision quite clearly. Her great purple-grey eyes were bent on his from their superior level, and they were inscrutable in their strange, secret defiance, and indomitable in the determination of their regard.

Why had she been so bent upon hiding the trail? Why had she distrusted him?

He bent upon one knee in the grass beside the slender, shrinking figure, woman's and yet child's, and held out the little slate to her, and said, with the smile that even backward children could not resist:

"Did you draw this?"

She nodded, with great wistful eyes, looking shyly up at him from under their sweeping black lashes. He went on, pointing with a slender grass-blade to each object as he named it:

"It is a house, and these are sheds and stables, and this is an orchard, and here the Kaffirs live. But who lives in the house?"

She whispered, with a look of secret fear:

"The man lives there. And the woman."

"Tell me the man's name."

She breathed, after a hesitation that was full of troubled apprehension:

"Bough."

A red flush mounted in his thin cheek, and he drew his breath in sharply. He asked:

"Does anyone else live in the house?"

She reflected with a knitted brow. He helped her.

"I do not mean the travellers--the men and women who come driving up in Cape-carts and transport-waggons, and drive away again, but someone who lives with Bough and the woman. She has been at the tavern a long, long time, though she is so young and so little. Try to remember her name."

The knitted brow relaxed, and the beautiful dim eyes had almost a smile in them.

"It is 'the Kid.'"

"Try and think. Has she no other name?"

She shook her head. He gave up that trail as lost, and moved the grass-blade to another part of the drawing on the slate.

"Tell me what this is?"

She answered at once:

"It is the Little Kopje. The English traveller made it when he put the dead woman in the ground."

His heart beat heavily, and the hand that pointed with the grass-blade shook a little.

"Where is the man who buried the dead woman and built the Little Kopje?"

She pointed to the rude oblong that was meant for a grave.

"There." The slender finger climbed the heap of boulders. "And there is where the Kid sits when she is a bad girl and runs away." She peeped up in his face almost slyly. "Then they call her: 'You Kid, come here! Dirty little slut, take the broom and sweep out the bar! Idle little devil, fetch water for the kitchen!'" Her smile was peaked and elfish. She laid a cunning finger beside her pursed-up lips. "But though they scold and call bad names, they never come and fetch her down off the Little Kopje. Beat her when she comes in, and serve her right, the impudent little scum! But never come near the Little Kopje, because of the spook the Barala boy saw there one night when the moon was big and shining."

He said, with infinite pity in his tone, and a compassionate mist rising in those keen bright eyes of his:

"They are cruel to the Kid, both Bough and the woman?"

She began to shake. The guardian Sister, who sat sewing a little way behind her, looked up anxiously at her charge. He pacified her with a glance, and, taking one of the slender trembling hands in a firm, kind clasp, repeated his question:

"Always cruel, cruel! But Bough----"

A spasm contracted her face. At the base of the slender throat something throbbed and throbbed. She whispered brokenly:

"When the woman went away----"

Her slender fingers closed desperately upon his. Her heart shook her, and Fear was in her eyes. Her voice vibrated and shuddered at her white lips as a caught moth vibrates and shudders in a spider-web. She began again:

"When the woman went away, Bough----"

Her eyes quailed and flickered; her pale and quivering face was convulsed by a sudden spasm of awful fear. The muscles of her whole body stiffened in the immovable rigor of terror. Only her head jerked from side to side, like that of some timid creature of the wilds held captive in crushing folds or crunching fangs. And he comprehended all; and understood all, in one lightning leap of intuition, as he saw.

"Hush!" He stopped her with his authoritative eyes and the firm, reassuring pressure of his hand. "Forget that--speak of it no more. Try and tell me who lies here, under these grasses and flowers that you water every day?"

He moved the hand he held to touch the grave, and the spasm that contracted her features relaxed, and the terror died out of her eyes, as though some soothing, healing virtue were conveyed to her by the mere contact with that sacred earth. He went on:

"She was very noble, very pure, and very beautiful. Everyone loved her, and her life was spent in doing good. You were dear to her--inexpressibly dear to her. She used to call you her beloved daughter. Tell me who she was?"

Her face quivered, and in the depths of her dim, vague eyes a beam of the golden light of old was rekindled.

"She was the Lady. When will she come again?"

He raised his hand and pointed to the sky.

"When that is rolled away, and the Sign of the Cross shines from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, and the King of Glory comes with His Angels and His Saints, we shall see her again, Lynette----"

His voice broke. He laid the cool, delicate, nerveless hand back upon her knee, and rose, for the Sister was folding up her sewing. He looked long after the girlish figure as it was led away.

He understood everything now. He knew why the mother-plover had trailed her wing in the dust, striving to lead the footsteps of the stranger aside from the hidden nest. He stooped and gathered a blade or two of grass, and a few crumbs of red, sandy earth, from the grave at his feet, and kissed them, and folded them reverently in an envelope, and hid the little packet in his breast before he went.

That evening there were pillars and banks of dust on the north-west horizon, and the flashes of lyddite and the booming of artillery told patient Gueldersdorp that the hour of deliverance was near. A few hours later the Relief had lamp-signalled brief details of the battle with Huysmans, ending with "Good-night" and the promise to fight a way in next morning. Later still, eight troopers in khaki, jaunty ostrich-tips in their smasher hats, rode into the little battered village town that huddled on the low, sandy mound, and all the waiting world was gladdened with the news. And London called on a quiet elderly lady, to tell her what the man, her boy, had done.

The name of that little hamlet town has, cruelly enough, passed into a byword--a synonym for everything that is rowdy, vulgar, apish in the English character, with the dregs stirred up. But yet it will ring down the silver grooves of Time as long as Time shall be.

Do I wander from the thread of my story--I who have dressed my puppets in the brave deeds of those who strove and endured and suffered, to what a glorious end?

Great writers lay down plans, formulate elaborate synopses. Not so I, who, out of all the wreaths that Fame holds yet in her lap to give away, shall never call one laurel mine....

A wandering wind came sighing past my ears one night upon the Links at Herion, burdened with this story it had to tell. Before then it had only blown in fitful gusts. Then again it blew steadily. I had caught some whispers from it years before. On the deck of the great, populous, electric-lighted ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across the Atlantic, racing the porpoise-schools to get to New York City; and later at Washington, when the red sunset-fires burned low behind the Capitol, it spoke to me in the wonderful, beloved voice I shall never hear on earth any more. Yet once more the wind came faintly sighing, in the giant blue shadow of Table Mountain; it blew at Johannesburg, six thousand feet above sea-level, in a raging cyclone of red gritty dust. Again it came, stirring the celadon-green carpet of veld that is spread at the feet of the Magaliesberg Ranges, that were turquoise-blue as the scillas growing in the South Welsh garden that lies before the window where I write, this variable spring day. But it blew with a most insistent note on the dumpy mound where they have rebuilt the ridiculous, glorious village that gave birth to deeds worthy of the Age Heroic, about whose sand-bagged defences nightly patrolled a Sentinel who never slept.

Gueldersdorp tumbled out of bed at three-thirty, to see the troops march in by the cold white morning moonlight that painted long indigo-blue shadows of marching horsemen and rolling guns, drawn by many horses, and huge-teamed baggage-waggons, eastward over the bleached dust.

I dare not attempt to describe the indescribable. Zulu and Barala, Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each after his own manner, and were glad and rejoiced. But of these haggard men and emaciated women of British race I can but say that in them human joy attained the climax of a sacred frenzy--that human gratitude and enthusiasm, loyalty and patriotism, reached the pitch at which the mercury in the thermometer of human emotion ceases to record altitudes.

At its height, when the last fort had fallen to England and the flag of the United Republics had fluttered down from the tree whence it had waved so long, and the Union Jack went up to frantic cheering, and the retreating cloud of dust on the horizon told of the exit of the enemy from the Theatre of War, Saxham played his one trump card in the game that meant life and death to him, and life, and everything that made life worth living, to one other.

* * * * *

You are to see the hulking Doctor with the square-cut face, his grim under-jaw more squarely set than ever, his blue eyes smouldering anxiety under their glooming brows, trying to coax a pale, bewildered girl to take a walk with him. She would at length, provided Sister Tobias walked on the other side and held her hand. So this party of three plunged into the boiling whirlpool of joyous Gueldersdorp.

People were singing "God Save the Queen," and "The Red, White, and Blue," "Auld Lang Syne" and "Rule, Britannia," all at once and all together, and playing the tunes of them on mouth-organs and concertinas. They were shaking hands with one another and everybody else, and shedding tears of joy, and borrowing the pocket-handkerchiefs of sympathetic strangers to dry them, or leaving them undried. They were crowding the Government kitchens, drinking the healths of the officers and men of Great Britain's Union Brigade in hot soup and hot coffee. They were clustered like bees upon the most climbable house-tops, watching those retiring dust-clouds in the distance, and the nearer movements of their friends and allies; they were hearing the experiences of dust-stained and travel-worn Imperialists, and telling their own; and one and all, they were thanking God Who had led them, through bodily fear, and mental anguish, and bitter privations, to hail the dawn of this most blessed day.

The electrical atmosphere, the surge of the multitude, the roar of thousands of voices, the gaze of thousands of eyes, had its effect upon the girl. She trembled and flushed and paled. Her breath came quick and short. She threw back her head and gasped for air. But she did not wish to be taken back to the Convent bombproof. She shook her head when Sister Tobias suggested that they should return.

And then some of the women whom she had helped to nurse in hospital saw her, and recognised her, and came about her with pitiful words and compassionate looks--not only for her own sake, but for that dead woman's whose adopted daughter they knew her to have been.

"You poor, blessed, innocent lamb!" They crowded about her, kissing her hands and her dress, and Sister Tobias's shabby black habit. "Lord help you!" they mourned over her. "Christ pity you, and bring you to yourself again!"

"Why are you so sorry?" Lynette asked them, knitting her delicate brows, and peering curiously in their tearful smiling faces. "No!" she corrected herself; "I mean why are you so glad?"

"Glad is ut, honey!" screamed a huge Irishwoman, throwing a brawny red arm about the shrinking figure and hugging it. "Begob, wid the Holy Souls dancin' jigs in Purgatory, an' the Blessed Saints clappin' their han's in Heaven, we have rayson to be glad! Whirroosh! Ould Erin for ever--an' God save the Cornel!"

She yelled with all the power of her Celtic lungs, plucked off her downtrodden shoes, slapped their soles together smartly, and, with a gesture of royal prodigality, tossed them right and left into the air, performed a caper of surprising agility on elephantine, blue-yarn-stocking-covered feet, and was carried away by a roaring surge of the joyous crowd, vociferating.

Saxham felt the slender hand of his charge tighten upon his arm, and his heart leaped as he noted the working of the sensitive face and the heaving of the small, nymph-like bosom under the thin material of her dress. He hoped, he believed that a change was taking place in her. He said to himself that the delicate mechanism of her brain, clogged and paralysed by a great mental shock, was revitalising, storing energy, gaining power; that the lesion was healing; that she would recover--must recover.

Then his quick eye saw fatigue in her. They took her back out of the dust and the clamour and the crowd, back to the quiet of the Cemetery.

It happened there. For as she stood again beside the long, low mound beneath which the heart that had cherished her lay mouldering, they saw that the tears were running down her face, and that her whole body was shaken with sobbing. And then, as a wild tornado of cheering, mingled with drifts of martial music, swept northwards from Market Square, she fell upon her knees beside the grave, and cried as if to living ears:

"Mother;--oh! Mother, the Relief! They're here! Oh, my own darling--to be glad without you!..."

She lay there prone, and wept as though all the tears pent up in her since that numbing double stroke of the Death Angel's sword were flowing from her now. And Sister Tobias, glancing doubtfully up at Saxham's face, saw it transfigured and irradiated with a great and speechless joy. For he knew that the light had come back to the beautiful eyes he loved, and that the Future might yield its harvest of joy yet, even yet, for the Dop Doctor, he believed in his own blindness.

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LVI

They were standing together in the same place two months later when he told her all, and asked her to be his wife in his own brusque characteristic way.

"You have been so good, so kind," she said, in rather formal phrase, but with her sweet eyes shining through tears and her sensitive lips trembling. "You have shown yourself to be so noble in your unselfish care for others, in your unsparing efforts for the good and benefit of everyone----"

"Put that by," said Saxham rather roughly, "and please to look at me, Miss Mildare."

He had never called her Lynette since her recovery, or touched the pretty hand he coveted unless in formal greeting.

"Put all that by. You see me to-day as you have seen me for months past, conscientious and cleanly, sober and sane, in body as in mind, discharging my duty at the Hospital and elsewhere as well as any other man possessing the special qualifications it demands. Pray understand that I am not a philanthropist, and have never posed as one. For the sake, first of a man who believed in me, and secondly of a woman whom I love--and you are she--I have done what I have."

He squared his great shoulders and stood up before her, and, though his face had never had any charm for her, its power went home to her and its passion thrilled.

"I play no part. The man I seem to be I am. But up to seven months ago, before the siege began, I was known in this town, and with reason, as the Dop Doctor."

He saw recollection waken in her eyes, and nerved himself to the sharp ordeal of changing it to repulsion and disgust.

"You have heard that name applied to me. It conveyed nothing loathsome to your innocent mind. You once repeated it to me, and were about to ask its meaning. I had it in my mind then to enlighten you, and for the mean and cowardly baseness that shrank from the exposure I have to pay now in the"--a muscle in his pale face twitched--"the exquisite pain it is to me to tell you to-day."

"Then do not tell me." She said it almost in a whisper. "Dr. Saxham, I beg you most earnestly to spare yourself." She dropped her eyes under the fierce earnestness of his, and knitted her cold little hands in one another. "Please leave the rest unsaid," she begged, without looking at him.

"It cannot be," said Saxham. "Miss Mildare, the Dop Doctor was only another nickname for the Town Drunkard. And now you know what you should have known before if I had not been a coward and a knave."

She turned her eyes softly upon him, and they could not rest, it seemed to her, upon a man of braver and more lofty bearing.

"I was the Town Drunkard," Saxham went on, in the cold, clear voice that cut like a knife to the intelligence. "Known in every liquor-saloon, and familiar to every constable, and a standing butt for the clumsy jests that the most utter dolt of a Police Magistrate might splutter from the Bench." His jarring laugh hurt her. "The Man in the Street, and the Woman of the Street, for that matter--pardon me if I offend your ears, but the truth must be told--were my godfather and my godmother, and they gave me that name between them. You are trembling, Miss Mildare. Sit down upon that balk, and I will finish."

There was a remnant of timber lying near that had been used in the construction of a gun-mounting. She moved to it and sat down, and the Doctor went on:

"I am not going to weary you with the story of how I came to be--what I have told you. But that I had lived a clean and honourable and temperate life up to thirty years of age--when my world caved in with me--I swear is the very truth!"

She said gently: "I can believe it, Dr. Saxham."

"Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And then, at the height of my success, and on the brink of a marriage that I dreamed would bring me the fulfilment of every hope a man may cherish, one impulse of pity and charity towards a wretched little woman brought me ruin, ruin, ruin!"

Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about. She was glad to see the Saxham of her knowledge in that Saxham whom she had not known. He folded his great arms upon his broad breast and went on:

"Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Rehabilitation in the eyes of the Law--for I gained that much--did not clear me in the eyes of Society--that hugs the guilt-stained criminal to its heart in the full consciousness of what his deeds are, and shudders at the innocent man upon whom has once fallen the shadow of that grim and bloody Idol that civilisation misnames Justice. I was cast out. Even by the brother I had trusted and the woman I had loved. I had in a vague way believed in God until then; I know I used to pray to Him to bless those I loved, and help me to achieve great things for their sakes. But nothing at all was left of that except a dull aching desire to throw back in the face of the Deity the little He had left to me. My health, and my intellectual powers, and my self-respect...."

Her voice came to his ears in the half-whispered words:

"Had He left you so little, after all?"

"Little enough," said Saxham doggedly, "compared with what I had lost. And as it is the privilege of the Christian to blame either the Almighty or the devil for whatever ills are brought on him by his own blind, reckless challenging of the Inevitable--termed Fate and Destiny by classical Paganism,--so I found myself at odds with One I had been taught to call my Maker."

In His own acre, close to her beloved dead, with all those little white crosses marking where other dust that had once praised Him with the human voice lay waiting for the summons of the Resurrection, it was incredibly awful to her to hear Him thus denied. She grew pale and shuddered, and Saxham saw.

"You see that I wish to be honest with you, and open and above-board. I would not ever have you say to yourself, 'This man deceived--this man misled me, wishing me to think him better than he was.' There is not much more to tell you--save that I took what money remained to me at the bank and from the sale of my last possessions--about a thousand pounds--and shook the dust off from my shoes, and came out here, drunk, to carry out my purpose of self-degradation to the uttermost. And I became a foul beast among beasts that were even fouler, but less vile and less shameful because their mental and moral standard was infinitely lower than my own. And they gave me the name you know of." His voice had the ring of steel smitten on steel. He drew himself up with a movement of almost savage pride, and the knotted veins swelled on his broad white forehead, and his blue eyes blazed under his thunderous smudge of black eyebrows.

"The name you know. It used to be called after me when I reeled the streets--they whispered it afterwards as I rode by. To-day it is forgotten." His nostrils quivered, and he threw out his hands as if with that action he tossed something worthless to the winds. "Miss Mildare, I have not touched Drink--the stuff that was my nourishment and my sustenance, my comfort and my bane, my deadliest enemy and my only friend--since that hour when with the last effort of my will I rallied all my mental and bodily forces to resist its base allurement."

"I know it, Dr. Saxham. I am sure of it." She rose and held out her hands to him, but he folded his arms more closely over his starving, famished heart, and would not see them yet.

"You can be sure of it. Alcohol is no longer my master and my god. I stand before you a free man, because I willed to be free." There was a little blob of foam at one corner of his mouth, but the square pale face was composed, even impassive. "Once, not so long ago, I filled a place of standing in the professions of Surgery and Medicine; I knew what it was to be esteemed and respected by the world. For your dear sake I promise to regain what I have lost; be even more than I used to be, achieve greater things than are done by other men of equal powers with mine. I am not a man to pledge my word lightly, Miss Mildare...." His voice shook now and his blue eyes glistened. "If you would be so--so unutterably kind as to become my wife, I promise you a worthy husband. I swear to you upon what I hold dearest and most sacred--your own life, your own honour, your own happiness, never to give you cause to regret marrying me! For I may die, indeed, but living I will never fail you!"

There was a lump in her throat choking her. Her eyes had gone to that other grave some fifty paces distant from the Catholic portion of the Cemetery. There were freshly-gathered flowers upon it, as upon the grave that lay so near, and two gorgeous butterflies were hovering about the blooms, in mingled dalliance and greediness.

"You loved him," said Saxham, following the journey of her wistful eyes. "Love him still; remember him for every trait and quality of his that was worthy of love from you. But give me the hope of one day gaining from you some shadow of--of return for what I feel for you. Is it Passion? I hardly know. Whether it is Love, in the sense in which that word is employed by many of the women and nearly all the men I have met, I do not know either. But that it is the life of my life to me and the breath of my being--you cannot look at me and doubt!"

She was not looking at him. Her eyes were on the little white cross above the Mother's grave; there was an anxious fold between the slender dark eyebrows.

"You--you wish to marry a Catholic--you, who tell me that you were once a Christian and are now Agnostic?"

"If I have not what is called Faith," said Saxham, "I may at least lay claim to the quality of reverence. And I honour the religion that has made you what you are. Cleave to your Church, child--hold to your pure beliefs, and keep a little love back, Lynette, from your Holy Family and your Saints in Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs it desperately!"

The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than beautiful in its compassion. She said:

"I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day our Lord will give you back the faith that you have lost."

"Thank you, dear!" said Saxham humbly. She was opening her lips to speak again when he lifted his hand and stopped her.

"There is one other thing I should like to make clear. I--am not rich. But neither am I absolutely poor. Letters that I have received from a firm of solicitors acting for the trustees and executors of--a near relative deceased, will prove to you that I am possessed of some small property, bringing in an annual income of something like two hundred pounds, and funds sufficient to settle a few thousands upon my wife by way of marriage-jointure. Believe me," he added, in answer to her look, "I know you to be incapable of a mercenary thought. But what I should have explained to"--he pointed to the grave that lay so near--"to her, I must make clear to you. It could not be otherwise."

She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid her pure cheek upon it, and spoke to the Dead in a low, murmuring tone. Saxham knew as he watched her, breathing heavily, that the consent of the Mother would never have been given to the marriage he proposed. That other obstacle in the road of his desire, the lover who had deceived, had been swept away, with the stern and tender guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He went back in thought to the ending of his long shooting-match a outrance with Father Noah, and remembered how he had promised himself that all should go well with Saxham provided Saxham's bullet got home first.

Were not things going better than he had hoped? She had not even recoiled from him when he had told her of those degraded days of wastrelhood. Surely things were going well for Saxham, he said, as he waited with his hungering eyes upon his heart's desire. What it cost him not to step over to her, snatch her from the ground, and crush her upon his heart with hot and passionate kisses and wild words of worship, he knew quite well. But in that he was able to exercise such a mastery over himself and keep that other Saxham down, Saxham gave praise to that strange god he had set up, and worshipped, and bowed down before, calling it The Omnipotent Human Will.

She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands, thinking. It was very still, and the air was sweet and balmy, and beyond the lines of the defence-works miles upon miles of sunlit veld rolled away to the hills that were mantled in clear hyacinth-colour and hooded with pale rose.

"If I married you, you would take me away from this country and these people who have killed her?"

She had the thought of another in her heart and the name of another upon her lips. But only her eyes spoke, travelling to that more distant grave where the butterflies were hovering above the flowers, as Saxham answered:

"I would take you away, if you wished it."

"To England?"

"Back to England."

"I should see London, and the house where Mother lived...." She seemed to have forgotten Saxham, and to be uttering her thoughts aloud. "I might even see the green mountains of Connemara in Ireland--her own mountains she used to call them. I might one day meet people who are of her blood and name----"

"And of his," thought Saxham, following her eyes' wistful journey to that other grave.

"But," she went on, "it would all depend"--she breathed with agitation and knitted her slim white fingers together, and looked round at him with that anxious wrinkle between her fine eyebrows--"upon how much you asked of me! Suppose I----" His intent and burning eyes confused her, and she dropped her own beneath them. "If I were to marry you, would you leave me absolutely free?"

"Absolutely," said Saxham. "With the most complete freedom a wife could possibly desire."

"I meant--a different kind of freedom from a wife's." She knitted and unknitted her hands. "It is difficult to explain. Would you be willing to ask nothing of me that a friend or a sister might not give? Would you be content----"

Her transparent skin glowed crimson with the rush of blood. Her bosom laboured with the hurry of her breathing. Her white lids veiled her eyes, or the sudden terrible change in Saxham's face might have wrung from her a cry of terror and alarm. But he mastered the raging jealousy that tore him, and said, with a jarring note of savage irony in the voice that had always spoken to her gently until then:

"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage that should be practically no marriage at all--a formal contract that is not wedlock? That might never change as Time went on, and alter into the close union that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare?"

She looked at him full and bent her head. And the man's heart, that had throbbed so wildly, stopped beating with a sudden jerk, and the divine fire that burned and tingled in his blood died out, and the cold sickness of baffled hope weighed on him like a mantle of lead. And the voice that had whispered to him so alluringly, telling him that it was not too late, that he might even yet win this virginal pure, sweetly-budding maiden, and know the bliss of being loved at last, sank into silence. His face was set like granite, and as grey. His eyes burned darkly under his heavy brows. He waited, sombrely and hopelessly, for her to speak again.

"There are such marriages----?"

The question was diffidently and timidly put. He answered:

"Assuredly there are. But not between those who are--physically and mentally, sane and healthy men and women,--at least, in my experience. One case, of three I am at liberty to quote, was that of an aged and wealthy woman of position and a young and rising public man."

"Were--weren't they happy?"

The face of the inward, unseen Saxham was twisted in a miserable grin, but the outward man preserved immobility.

"He enjoyed life. She sat by, and saw, every day joining nearer, her death, that was to leave him free."

"And the others?"

She asked it with an indrawn breath of anxiety.

"The second case was that of a man, middle-aged and helplessly paralysed by an accident in the hunting-field, and of a beautiful and high-spirited young woman--almost a girl. She took a romantic interest in him--talked of his ruined career and blighted life, and all that sort of thing. And--they married, and she found her bondage intolerable.... It ended in his divorcing her. The decree nisi was made absolute a few days before I left London. The third case bears more analogy to yours and mine."

"Please go on."

"There was no great disparity of age between these two people. They were sympathetic, cultured, independent both. Their views upon many subjects--including the sex question--were identical," said Saxham slowly. "And they entered into a bond of union that had for its ultimate aim the culture of the intellect and the development of what they called the Soul. The Flesh had nothing in it; the Body," said Saxham, with a grating sarcasm, "was utterly ignored. I forget whether they were Agnostics, Buddhists, or Christians. They certainly suffered for their creed. But"--his voice softened and deepened--"at any rate, the woman suffered most!"

Her lips parted, her eyes were intent upon him.

"You have lived with Sisters of Mercy in a Convent," went on Saxham. "You know of their lives even more than I--greatly to my advantage--have learned. Energetic, useful, stirring, active, never complaining, always ready to make the best of the world as they find it, and help others to do the same; always regarding it as the preparatory school or training-college for a state of being infinitely greater, nobler, and more glorious than anything the merely mundane imagination can conceive--you can realise how infinitely to the nuns' advantage is the contrast between them and the laywomen of Society, peevish, hysterical, neurotic, sensual, and bored. But before these chastened, temperate bodies, these serene and well-balanced minds attained the state of self-control and crossed the Rubicon of resignation, what struggles their owners must have undergone!--what ordeals of anguish they must have endured! Did that never strike you?"

Her lips were pale, and there were shadows under her eyes. She bent her head.

"The woman, who was not a nun, did for the sake of a man what the nun feels supernaturally called upon to do for her God," said Saxham. "She thrust her hand deep into her woman's bosom, and dragged out her woman's heart, and wrung from it every natural human yearning, and purged it--or thought she purged it--of every earthly desire, before she laid the pulseless, emptied thing down before his feet for him to tread upon. And that is what he did!"

He heard her pant softly, and saw her hand move upward to her beating heart. His deadly earnestness appalled her. Was he not fighting for what was more than life to him? He folded his arms over his great chest, and said:

"For ten years he and she lived together in a union called ideal by ignorant enthusiasts and high-minded cranks. Then she drooped and died--victim of the revolt of outraged Nature. A little before the end they sent for me. I said to the man: 'A child would have saved her!' And he--I can hear him now, answering: 'Ah! but that would have nullified all the use and purpose of our example for humanity.' The idiot--the abortive, impossible, dreary idiot! And if ever there was a woman intended by wholesome Nature to bear and nurture babes, it was that woman, who died to prove the possibility of carrying on the business of living according to his damned theories."

His broad chest heaved; a mist came before his eyes; his deep vibrating voice had in it a passionate appeal to her.

"The nun would tell you that in the lofty, mystical sense marriage and motherhood are hers, 'Christ being her Spouse.' I echo this in no spirit of mockery. But this woman of whom I have told you knew no vocation and took no vow. She merely tried to ignore the fundamental truth that every normal woman of healthy instincts was meant to be a mother."

He added:

"And every husband who loves his wife sees his manhood proved and perfected in her. She was dear and beloved before; she is holy, sacred--worshipped in his eyes, when they look upon his child in her arms, at her breast."

Something like a sob broke from him. His heart cried:

"Lynette! have pity upon yourself and upon me!"

He stood and waited for her reply. She was so exquisite and so full of womanly allure, and yet so crystal-cold and passionless, that he knew his arguments thrown away, his entreaties mere dust upon the wind.

"Tell me," he said at length, "do I inspire you with antipathy? Am I physically repulsive to you, or disagreeable? Answer me frankly, for in that case I would--cease to urge my suit with you, and go upon my way, wherever it might lead me."

She looked at him, and there was no shrinking in her regard--only a gentle friendliness, as far removed from the feeling he would have roused in her as the North is from the South.

"I will tell you exactly how I feel towards you." He writhed under the knowledge that it was possible to her to analyse and to explain. "I like you, Dr. Saxham. I am deeply grateful to you----"

"Gratitude!" He shrugged his shoulders. "You owe me none; and even if you did, what use is gratitude to a man who asks for love?"

"I trust you; I rely upon you," she said. "It is--pleasant to me to know that you are near." A line of perplexity came between the dark fine eyebrows; the sweet colour in her face wavered and sank. "But--if you were to touch me--to take me in your arms--I----" She shivered.

"You need not say more!" If she was pale, Saxham's stern, square face was ashen. His eyes glowered and fell under hers, and a purple vein swelled in the middle of his broad white forehead. "I understand!"

"You do not understand quite yet." She moved away from the Mother's grave, saying to him with a slight beckoning gesture of the hand, "Please come!..."

Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of that other Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His covetous, despairing eyes dwelt on her and clung about her. Ah! the exquisite poise of the little head, with its red-brown waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of shape, like a young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with which she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous, delicate care among the little crowding white-painted crosses; the atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that breathed from her and environed her!...

His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at his ear.

"You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation. Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break your promise to that dead man, and tell her--as he would have had you tell her, remember!--as he would have had you tell her!--that when he asked her hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of the dancer, Lessie Lavigne!"

He knew where she was leading him--to Beauvayse's grave. The voice kept whispering, urging as they went. He saw and heard as a man sees and hears in a dream the pair of butterflies that hovered yet about the fresh flowers her hands had gathered and placed there. One jewel-winged, diamond-eyed insect rose languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light footsteps drew near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed, waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quivering antennae, sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead man had drunk of the joy of life.

Now she was speaking:

"Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have something to tell you that he"--her face quivered--"should have been told. When you spoke a little while ago of openness and candour--when you said that you would never mislead or deceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the worst of you together with the best--you held up before me, quite unknowingly, an example that showed me--that proved to me"--her voice wavered and broke--"how much I am your inferior in honesty and truth!"

"You my inferior!" Saxham almost laughed. "I an example of light and leading, elevated for your guidance! If you were capable of irony----"

He broke off, for she went on as though he had not spoken:

"When first we met--I mean yourself and me--I remember telling you, upon a sudden impulse of confidence and trust in you, what I had determined my life-work was to be----"

"Dear, innocent-wise enthusiast," thought Saxham, "dreaming over your impossible plan for regenerating the world! Beloved child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Madness--madness on the face of it!" But, madness or sanity, he could not choose but love her.

"Your life-work!... It was to be carried out among those others whose voices you heard calling you. See," he said, with the shadow of a smile, "how I remember everything you say, or have ever said, in my hearing!"

"You think too well of me," she broke out, with sudden energy.

"It is not possible to think too well of you!"

"You think so now, perhaps, but when you know----"

Her eyes brimmed and the tears welled over her white under-lids. She put up both her little hands, and rubbed the salt drops away with her knuckles, like a child.

"When I have told you, you will alter--you cannot help but alter your opinion!"

"No!" denied Saxham; and the monosyllable seemed to drop from his grim lips like a stone. Her bosom heaved with short, quick sobs.

"I meant to go out into the world, and meet those women who think and work for women, and hear all they have to say, and learn all they have to teach. Then----"

She was Beatrice again, as she turned her face full on Saxham, and once more the virginal veil fell, and he was conscious of strange abysses of knowledge opening in those eyes.

"--Then I meant to seek out those women and girls and children of whom I spoke to you, those who lie fettered with chains that wicked men have riveted, in the dark dungeons that their tyrants and torturers have quarried out of the living rock, out of the reach of fresh air and sunshine, beyond the reach of those who would pity and help ... I meant to go down to them, and comfort them, and raise them up. I meant to have said: 'Trust me, believe me, listen to me, follow me! For my sorrow is your sorrow, and my wrong your wrong, and my shame yours--O! my poor, poor unhappy sisters!...'"

There was a great drumming and surging of the blood in Saxham's ears. His heart beat in heavy laboured, measured strokes, like the tolling of a death-bell. He saw her cover her face with her hands, and drop upon her knees amongst the grasses that greenly clothed the red soil. He saw the butterfly, startled from its feast, rise and waver away. And he saw, too, his veiled nymph, his virginal white goddess, his chaste, veiled maiden Artemis, toppled from her pedestal and lying in the gutter.

Her sorrow the sorrow of those spotted ones! her wrong theirs, and theirs her shame!... So this was the sordid secret that haunted the depths of those eyes--the eyes of Beatrice! He turned his head away, so as not to look upon her, and his face grew dark with the rush of blood. But still he heard her speaking, as a man hears in a dream.

"At school all the older girls thought and talked of nothing but Love, and most of the younger ones did the same.... And I, who knew the dreadful, cruel, hideous side of the thing that each of them set up and worshipped--I who shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice, and a man's face came near--I said in my heart that Love should never find a dupe and a slave and a tool in me. I meant to live for the Mother, and be to those poor sisters of mine what she was--oh, my darling! my darling!--to me! And all the while Love was coming nearer and nearer, and at last----"

She swept the tears from her face with the palms of her slight open hands, and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and went on brokenly, with sobs between the gasped-out sentences:

"--At last it came. I never tried to struggle against it; it wrapped me in a net of exquisite sweet softness, that held me like a cage of steel. I gave myself up to the blissfulness and the joy of it. I was unfaithful to those others--I forgot them for Beauvayse! Oh, why should Love make it so easy to do unlovely things? to be unworthy, to break promises, and to be false to vows? You are in earnest when you make them ... you are proud to be so sure that nothing shall change or turn you.... Then eyes that are like strange jewels look deep into yours. A voice that is like no other voice whispers at your ear. It says strange, sweet, secret things--things that come back and burn you--and his breath upon your cheek drowns out your scruples in wave upon wave of magical, thrilling, wonderful sensation!..." She shuddered. "And everything else is blotted out, and no one else matters! You are not even sorry that you have left off caring.... Love has made you indifferent as well as unkind!"

She looked up at Saxham from where she crouched down at his feet among the grasses, and her distress melted some of the ice that was closing round his heart.

"Love cannot be good. It brings no peace, no happiness--nothing but restless misery and burning pain. It makes you even willing to deceive him." Her lids fluttered and she caught her breath. "When another to whom I was dear, and who knew, said, 'Never tell him! I command you never to tell him!' I pretended to myself that the words had not been spoken out of pity, because my darling loved me too well to see me suffer; and I told myself that it was right to obey."

Saxham, following the yearning look that went back to that other's grave, heard the unforgettable voice uttering the command.

"He never dreamed of my miserable secret. He was so free, so frank, so open himself. He had nothing to hide--he was incapable of deceit! It never occurred to him--oh, Beau! Beau!"

Saxham's face was set like a mask carved in granite, but that other Saxham, within the man she saw through her tears, was wrung and twisted and wrenched in spasms and gusts of insane, uncontrollable, helpless laughter.

"Nothing to hide--incapable of deceit!" It seemed to him that the dead man, all that way down under the red earth and the grass and the flowers, must be laughing, too, at the Dop Doctor who was fool enough not to speak out and end the farce for ever.

Should he? Why not? But for what reason now, and to what end, since his virginal-pure, dew-pearled, Convent lily lay trodden in the mire? And yet, to look in those eyes....

They did not falter or droop under his again, as she told him in few and simple words the story of what had happened in the tavern on the veld.

"Now you know all!" she said; "now you understand!... Sister Tobias knows, too, and there is one other.... I do not speak of ..."--she shuddered and grew pale--"but of a man whom all of us here have learned to look up to, and believe in, and trust. No confidence has ever passed between us. I cannot give you any reason for this belief of mine in his knowledge of my story. I only feel that it is no secret to the Colonel, whenever he looks at me with those wise, kind, pitying eyes."

There was a look in Saxham's eyes that was not pity. The sunbeam that shone through the loose plait of her coarse straw hat, and gilded the edges of the red-brown hair-waves, aureoled again for him the head of Beatrice.

"I have no faith left, but I am capable of reverence," he had said to her.

Now, as he knelt down in the grass before the little brown shoes, and lifted the hem of her linen gown and kissed it, the hulking-shouldered Doctor proved his possession of the quality. Devouring desire, riotous passion, were, if not killed in him, at least quelled and overthrown and bound. Pure pity and tenderness awakened in him. And Chivalry, all cap-a-pie in silver mail, rose up to do battle for her against the world and against that other Saxham.

"I accept the trust you are willing should be mine. Take my name--take all I have to give! I make no reservations. I stipulate no conditions. I ask for nothing in return, except the right to be your brother and guardian and defender. Trust me! The life-work you have chosen shall be yours; as far as lies in my power, I will help you in it. Your pure ends and noble aims shall never be thwarted or hindered. And have no fear of me, my sweet saint, my little sister. For I may die," said Saxham once again, "but, living, I will never fail you!"

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LVII

Saxham, of St. Stephen's, had long ago faded from the recollection of London Society, but Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., Late Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, and frequently mentioned in Despatches from that bit of debatable soil, while it was in process of debating, was distinctly a person to cultivate. Not that it was in the least easy--the man was almost quite a bear, but his brevity of speech and brusqueness of manner gave him a cachet that Society found distinguished. He was married, too--so romantic! married to a girl who was shut up with him in Gueldersdorp all through the Siege. Quite too astonishingly lovely, don't you know? and with manners that really suggested the Faubourg St. Germain. Where she got her style--brought up among Boers and blacks--was to be wondered at, but these problems made people all the more interesting. And one met her with her husband at all the best houses since the Castleclares had taken them up. Indeed, Mrs. Saxham was a relative--was it a cousin? No--now it all came back! Adopted daughter, that was it, of an aunt--no, a step-sister of Lord Castleclare, that ineffable little prig of twenty-two, who as a Peer and Privy Councillor of Ireland, and a Lord-in-Waiting to boot, was nevertheless a personage to be deferred to.

One had heard, hadn't one, ages ago, of the famous beauty, Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne? Well, that was the very person, who had been Abbess, or Prioress, or something-else-ess of a Roman Catholic Sisterhood at Gueldersdorp, and died of pneumonia during the Siege, or did she get shot? That was it, poor dear thing, and how quite too horrid for her!

We may know that that belated letter of the Mother's--written to her kinswoman when the first mutterings of the storm were yet dulled by distance, and the threatening clouds were beginning to build their blue-black bastions and frowning ramparts on the horizon--had got through at last. The Bawnes, true to their hereditary quality of generous loyalty, threw open their doors and their hearts to dead Bridget-Mary's darling; and Saxham was undisguisedly grateful when he saw how she warmed to them. But he gave no encouragement, verbal, written, or tacit to their desire to fulfil the dead woman's wishes in the settlement of a sum of money upon Lynette. He had made such provision for her himself as his means permitted. His books had been selling steadily for the past six years, his publishers had paid him a handsome sum in royalties, and a thousand guineas for the copyright of a new work. Plas Bendigaid was secured to his wife; and Saxham's life was heavily insured, and the bulk of the sum remaining from the purchase of the furniture and fixtures of the house in Harley Street, with the practice of the physician who was giving up tenancy, had been invested in her name with the other funds. Why should strangers interfere with his sole privilege of working for her?

"I should prefer that the decision should be left entirely to my wife," he said, when the Head of the House of Bawne, with the pompous solemnity distinctive of a young man who takes himself and his position seriously, formally broached the subject.

"Lady Castleclare has--arah!--already approached Mrs. Saxham on the question," said Lord Castleclare, tapping the shiny surface of the leather-covered writing-table near which he sat with the long, thin, ivory-hued fingers, ending in long, narrow, bluish-tinted nails, that had descended to him--with the peculiar sniffing drawl that prolonged and punctuated his verbal utterance--from his late father. "And I regret to hear from Lady Castleclare that Mrs. Saxham gave no encouragement to the suggestion. I confess myself disappointed equally with my wife and my elder step-sister, the Duchess of Broads, to whom the letter was written--the letter that you will understand conveys to the family I represent, the last wishes of one whose memory we hold in the most sacred love and reverence----"

The Right Honourable Privy Councillor had here to stop and dry his eyes, that were frankly overflowing. Though short, and not at all distinguished of appearance, having derived from his mother, the Dowager Countess, nee Miss Nancy McIleevy, of McIleevystown, County Down, certain personal disadvantages to counterbalance the immense fortune amassed by her uncle, the brewer, this little gentleman of great affairs possessed the kindly heart, and the quick and sensitive nature of the paternal stock. Now he continued:

"--Under the circumstances you will permit me to renew the proposal with a slight modification. The sum we proposed to invest in Government securities for Mrs. Saxham's benefit, carrying out a charge that we regard it as a privilege to--to have received--is not large, merely five thousand pounds." He coughed. "Well, now it has occurred to me that Mrs. Saxham's objection to receive what she seems to regard as a gift from people upon whom she has no claim--that is how she expressed herself to Lady Castleclare--might be got over--if I may employ the expression, by our settling the money upon your children?"

"Upon our children----"

They were sitting in Lord Castleclare's library at Bawne House, Grosvenor Square. Great books in gilded bindings gleamed from their covered and latticed shelves, and the perfume of Russia leather and cedar mingled with the aroma of rare tobacco in the air. A thin fog hung over the West End, deadening the sound of traffic, and dimming the polish of the tall plate-glass windows. The fire burned red behind bars of silvered steel, the ashes fell with a little clicking whisper. It seemed to Saxham that he could hear his pierced heart bleeding, drip, drip, drip! But he sat like a man of stone, his white, firm, supple hand clenched upon the carved knob of the chair-arm. Then he said, looking the Right Honourable Privy Councillor full in the face with those gentian-blue eyes of his, now sunk in caves that grew deeper day by day:

"Let it be so, my lord. I am willing, if my wife consents, that the money should be settled upon--her children."

He prescribed, at Lord Castleclare's request, for a political dyspepsia, and took leave in his brusque, characteristic way, and sent away his waiting motor-brougham, and walked home, thinking, by that new light that had flashed upon him.

It was January, the London January of whirling dust clouds below, and racing, murky vapours above. They had been settled in the Harley Street house four months. It seemed to Saxham as though they had lived there for years. The routine of professional life was closing in upon him once again. Patients thronged to his door; Hospitals, and Societies, and Institutions were open to him as of old; Society courted and flattered him, and gushed about the beauty of Mrs. Saxham. It was as though that celebrated Criminal Case, The Crown v. Saxham, had never developed into ugly, sinister shape under the dirty skylight of the Old Bailey.

He crossed Grosvenor Square, and turned down Brook Street, thinking as he went. Pretty women in furs, their make-up subdued by silk-gauze veils, nodded to him from motor-broughams and victorias.

Though the horse-drawn hansom yet plied for hire, petrol was driving brute-power off the streets. The hooting and clanking of the motor-omnibus made Oxford Street hideous. And that St. Vitus's Dance of the Tube Railway swept under the pavement beneath Saxham's tread as he had passed up New Bond Street. Certainly London was not more beautiful or pleasanter to live in for the six years that had gone by.

The Tube Works were responsible for much. The Companies were linking up the North with the West, and strings of trolleys, coupled together like railway-trucks, and laden with yellow clay or great balks of timber, or giant scales of bored armour-plating, or moleskin-clad, brawny navvies, progressed incessantly and at all hours through the thoroughfares of the metropolis behind huge, giraffe-necked, splay-wheeled, smoke-vomiting traction-engines. Houses and other buildings were being pulled down to make stations; great hoardings were up, enclosing spaces where work went on all day, amidst clankings and groanings of machinery, and clouds of oily-smelling steam, and where work went on all night, with more groanings and more clankings, deplorable shrieks of steam-sirens and hellish flares that might have been reflections from a burning Tophet, cast upon yet bigger and denser clouds of the oily-smelling steam.

Yes! the big black opulent city was greatly changed. But the change in the people, affecting all ranks and every class, was even greater. There were compensations, if you could balance against the decay of good manners the improvements in sanitation, or set against the crop of evil sown by the dissemination of the vilest literature in the cheapest printed forms, the attainability, by the poorest, of the noblest productions of literary genius. Or if in congratulating yourself upon the marvellous progress of Scientific Inventions, hailing from the keen-brained West, you could condone the degradation of the English language in the mouths of Shakespeare's countrymen and countrywomen by the use of American slang phrases, common, vulgar, coarse, alternating with choice expressions culled from the vocabulary of the East End costermonger.

Privacy and reticence had become unfashionable, impossible in this, the era of the guinea-hunting Press-Interviewer. The barriers of social exclusiveness had given way before the push of the plutocrat. The Rubicon between good Society and bad Society had become invisible. Racial suicide and sexual licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile disease from rank to rank, and class to class. Woman had become less womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer any meaning. Religion had decayed; the fear of God had been forgotten. But Socialism was springing up, a rank and lusty weed, in crude neglected soil that might have been tilled to good purpose; and a cheap and rowdy form of patriotism was in a very healthy state, although the Union Jack had not yet replaced the Bible in the Board Schools.

Yes, things had changed, and not for the better! There was a tang upon the moral atmosphere that made the material petrol-fumes of the motor-omnibus almost acceptable by comparison. The air of Gueldersdorp had been cleaner, even with that taint from the crowded trenches heavy on it. Things had changed; and in the midst of all these changes, the last sands of the Great Victorian Age were running out of the glass.

That wonderful life was drawing to its simple, peaceful, noble, profoundly touching close, this January of 1901. And its ending had been hastened by the War.

Truly of her it has been said, and shall be; even when scholars of another race and another civilisation, springing from the ashes of this, wrest from the relics of a history of to-day the secrets of an ancient Past:

"She was not only the Sovereign, but the Mother of her people."

* * * * *

Saxham turned into Cavendish Square, and was in Harley Street. The white-enamelled door of a prosperous-looking corner-house bore a solid brass plate with his name. He thought, as he opened the door with his Yale key, how strange it was that this, the very house he had planned to live in with Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and decorated for her, should have been offered for his inspection by the first West End house-agent he applied to upon returning to London, whose dust he had shaken off the soles of his feet forever, barely six years before.

The practitioner who occupied the house--not the same man who had taken over the lease and fittings from Saxham--was ready to give it up, with all its costly appurtenances and up-to-date appointments, together with the practice, for quite a moderate slice of that legacy of thousands that had come to Saxham from Mildred's dead boy. Saxham, diagnosing the man's fever to realise and depart, wondered what secret, desperate motive lay at the back of his hurry? The reason was soon evident. Like thousands of other men, professional and private, the physician had been a dabbler on the Stock Exchange, and had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock, and had been ruined by the War.

It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Washington P. Jukes and Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-blooded buck niggers, elegantly scented, white-gloved, and arrayed in evening garments of Bond Street cut, danced the newly-imported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and reception-saloons, with laughter on its reddened lips, and paste imitations of its family jewels in its waved coiffure and on its powdered bosom, and Ruin in its heart.

Great manufacturing enterprises, paralysed by lack of funds and lack of hands, were ruined. Managers producing plays to empty houses were ruined. Publishers publishing books that nobody cared any longer to buy, were ruined. Painters expending time, and money, and toil, upon pictures that no longer found purchasers were ruined. Millions of smaller folks were ruined by the ruin of their betters. Only the great Mourning Warehouses prospered exceedingly, like the Liquor Trade and the Drug Trade. And the Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army-Contractors, flourished as the green bay-tree.

Saxham's motor-brougham had gone on in advance, twisting knowingly in and out of various corkscrew thoroughfares. It was waiting outside the house in Lower Harley Street as the Doctor reached the door. The chauffeur, a spare, short young man, punctiliously buttoned up in a long dark green, white-faced livery overcoat, a cap with a white-glazed peak shading a lean, brickdust-coloured face, with ugly, honest eyes that are familiar to the reader, cocked one of the eyes inquiringly at his employer, and receiving a sign implying that his services would not be required for some space of time to come, pulled up the lever, moved on, and turned down the side-street where were the entrance-gates of the stable-yard that had been turned into a garage. He had been in Saxham's employment nearly two months.

W. Keyse, late Corporal, Gueldersdorp Town Guards, had learned to clean, manage, and drive a motor-car belonging to an officer of the Garrison in spare hours during the Siege. This accomplishment, with some other learning gained in those strenuous and bracing times, had justified him in answering a Times advertisement for a sober, active, and intelligent young man, possessing the requisite knowledge of London--"Cripps!" said W. Keyse, "as if I couldn't pick my way about the Bally Old Dustbin blindfolded!"--to act in the capacity of chauffeur to a West End medical practitioner.

An acquaintance who was a waiter at a Pall Mall Club gave him the tip, and the chance came in the nick of time, for Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse were up against it, and no gay old error. "If you was to offer to blooming-well work for people for nothing," said Mrs. Keyse, "my belief is, they wouldn't 'ave you at the price!"

The Old Shop, as W. Keyse affectionately called his native island, had drawn the exiles home. Good-bye to the bronzed, ungirdled vastness of veld and karroo, and the clear, dark, distant blue of level-topped mountains bathed in the pure stimulating atmosphere that braces like champagne. Old England called with a voice there was no resisting, great draggle-tailed, grimy London beckoned to her boy and girl, as the big grey liner, with the scarlet smoke-stacks, engulfed her mails and passengers, dipped the Red Ensign in farewell to Table Mountain, and sped homewards on even keel over the heaving sapphire plain.

Southampton Dock was a pure delight to Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse. The Waterloo Arrival platform sent thrills through their boot-soles to the roots of their hair. They sat in the Pit at the Oxford that night, and there was a South African sketch on with two of the chronic-est jossers you ever see, gassing away in khaki behind earthworks of sacks stuffed with straw, and standing up to chuck sentimental and patriotic ballads off their chests, while the Enemy, who had kept up an intermittent rifle-practice at the wing, left off--presumably to listen. "After being used to the Reel Thing," W. Keyse said, "it was enough to make you up and blub!"

That was the first disillusion. Others followed. The aunt who had inhabited one of the ginger-brick almshouses over aginst 'Ighgyte Cemetery was dead when they took her a whole pound of tea and three-quarters of best cooked ham, and the delicacies had to be given to the old woman next door, with whom the deceased had always had words. You couldn't 'ave expected the old gal to last much longer, but still it was a blow.

Lobster had long ago given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, in return for the ham and the tea; and they got her address and hunted her up in a back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise his charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated German in the baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you ever----! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated upon the subject of his family, maintained a portentous dumbness, punctuated with ringing sniffs, during the visit, and was sarcastic on the bus, and tearfully penitent when they got back to the Waterloo Road lodging that was cheap at the weekly rent, she said, if you were paying for dirt and live-stock.

You couldn't spend your time enjoying yourself for ever, she added a little later on, as their small joint purse of savings dwindled and that pale ghost that men call Want began to hover about their hired bolster. W. Keyse had thought of soliciting a re-engagement at the fried-fish shop in the High Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept away in favour of an establishment where they mended your boots while you waited. So he sought elsewhere. The War had drained away so many men, one would have thought employment could be had by any chap who took the trouble to walk about and look for it. But the soles of W. Keyse's boots were worn to their last thickness of brown paper, and all his clothes and Emigration Jane's, with the exception of the things him and her had on, had been pawned before it occurred to the man that that kind of walking ended in the Workhouse. The woman had known it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of W. Keyse stood him in no good stead. London was stiff with liars who boasted of having been through the Siege, and their lies were more ornamental and sparkling than his truths.

Mrs. W. Keyse would have took a situation as General, and glad, but there were family reasons against that. She had broke down and cried somethink dreadful on her William's shabby tweed shoulder the morning he went out to answer the West End Doctor's advertisement. He kissed her and told her to keep her hair on, but she was so hysterical that he was fair afryde to leave 'er. So he took her along, and his good Angel must have suggested that.

Cripps!--when the manservant in plain clothes said, "Step this way, upstairs please"--W. Keyse and wife having applied at the area-door--"and Dr. Saxham will see you," the name, not having been mentioned in the advertisement, which gave only the address and an initial, imparted to both an electrical shock of surprise. They had looked a very small and very shabby and very lost and lonely little couple under those high-moulded ceilings and upon the Turkey carpets that covered the polished parquet of the handsomely-furnished and well-appointed consulting-room that the practitioner who had caved in through South African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate setting for his bald-browed and portly presence. Now both curved backbones assumed the perpendicular, and their wide Cockney mouths were wreathed in joyful smiles.

The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing-table that matched it, the man with the black head and square pale face and heavy muscular shoulders, who looked up from among his papers and notebooks with the receiver of a telephone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them with a kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a word or forgot a face. And here were two faces from Gueldersdorp. He shook the hands that belonged to them, and said in his curt way:

"How are you, Mrs. Keyse? And you, Keyse? You may guess when I heard that somebody had called to answer my advertisement I hardly imagined that two old patients had dropped down on me from the skies!"

The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth agape and the tears trickling down her hollow cheeks. The young man swallowed something with a violent effort, and blurted out:

"Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out of the Other Shop--an' landin' in the middle of New Jerusalem! Weeks along"--he picked up the shabby bowler that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet--"for weeks along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me! Now I knows! I've bin 'omesick--fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of the very plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of four months back. Good old Gueldersdorp!" He winked the wet out of his eyes and pointed to Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?"

Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said, touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the inner corner of the right eye:

"You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you at the Hospital."

"Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since she's bin' my wife----" The prominent Adam's apple in his thin throat jerked. He gulped a sob down as he looked at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her mate, there shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face darkened with angry blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage impulse to dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his own beggary.

Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet fire in answer to the challenge of his own! Empty, empty the heart whose chambers were swept and decked and garlanded for a guest who never came! Lonely, lonely, desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of her--dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was yet to man!

He had said to her: "But come to me, and I shall be content--even happy. Live under my roof, take the shelter of my name--I ask no more!"

He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be companioned, in the silence that would never be broken by Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He was not content; his craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and gnawed his heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal. Happy--was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this happiness she had conferred upon him--and that was to be without her.

He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling misery, and kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the absurd little couple. W. Keyse was tested, proved capable of manipulating the steering-wheel, duly certificated, and engaged. There were a couple of living-rooms over the coach-house that was now a garage. Saxham sent in some plain furniture, and behold an Eden! Pots of ferns purchased from a street hawker showed greenly behind the tidiest muslin blinds you ever sor! and Mrs. William Keyse, expectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and as she patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn--and whether they're let out on hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat 'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come back from Them Plyces is something chronic!--she sang, sometimes "Come, Buy My Coloured 'Erring," which they learned you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board School in Kentish Town; and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come True!"

This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two rooms--one of them opening upon nothing by a loft-door--over a garage that had been a coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin running on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights were switched on, before the inner blinds were drawn down, you could see quite plain into the consulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat at his big writing-table that was heaped with notebooks and papers and had a telephone on it, and all sorts of mysterious instruments in shining brass and silver, as brightly polished as the gleaming thing with a lid, shaped like a violin-case and with a spirit-lamp underneath it, in which all sorts of wicked-looking knives and forceps were boiled when they were taken out of the black bag; or into Mrs. Saxham's bedroom, that was on the floor above, and was done up in the loveliest style you ever! "Not that Missis W. Keyse would exchange 'er present quarters for Buckin'am Palace," she declared, pouring out her William's tea, "if invited to do so by 'er Majesty the Queen 'erself."

William stopped blowing at his smoking saucer.

"They s'y She's dyin'!" His face lengthened. He put the saucer down. "They 'ave it in the evenin' pypers!"

Mrs. Keyse had a flash of inspiration.

"I reckon it don't seem dyin' to 'Er!"

"Wot are you gettin' at?" asked the man in bewilderment.

"I'm gettin' at it like this," said the lighter brain. "All 'er long life she's 'ad to be a queen first, an' a wife after. Now she lays there she's no more than a wife--a wife wots goin' to meet 'er 'usband agin after yeers an' yeers o' waitin'. For 'er Crown she leaves be'ind 'er for 'er son, but 'er weddin' ring goes wiv' 'er in 'er coffin! See?"

"I pipe. Wonder wot 'Er an' 'Im 'll s'y to one another fust thing they meet?"

"They won't s'y nothink," said the visionary, soberly taking tea. "But I shouldn't be surprised but wot they'd stand an' look in one another's fyces wivout s'yin' a word, for a week or so by the Time Above, an' the tears a-runnin' down an' never stoppin'!"

"Garn! There ain't no cryin' in 'Eaven," said W. Keyse, beginning on the bread-and-butter. "The Bible tells you so!"

"That's right enough. But I lay Gawd lets folks do a bit o' blub--just once," said Emigration Jane, "before 'E wipes their eyes, becos you don't begin to know wot 'appiness means until you've cried for joy!"

"I pretty near did when the Doctor give me this chauffeuring job, and so I tell you stryte," affirmed her lord. "D'you know I 'ad a shy at thankin' 'im agyne, an' got my 'ead bit orf. 'Shut your damned mouth!'--that's wot the Doctor s'ys to me. Well, I 'ave shut it!" He closed his jaws upon an inch-thick slice. "But wot I s'y to myself is," he continued, masticating, "that makes the Third Time, an' the Third Time's the Charm!"

"Wot do you mean by the third time, deer?" asked Mrs. Keyse, putting more hot water in the teapot.

"The First," said W. Keyse, with an air of mystery, "was in a saloon-bar full o' Transvaal an' Free State Dutchies at Gueldersdorp."

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

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

"I never would. Oh, William!"

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

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

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

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LVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saxham asked:

"Is she an Englishwoman or a Colonial?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You give me everything----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

She crimsoned, and stammered:

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

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

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

"She isn't your wife!"

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

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

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

He shook his head.

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

"Owen!"----

She spoke his name in a whisper.

--"Owen!"

"Yes?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She would hardly thank you for pitying her."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Owen!..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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LX

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saxham's cold eyes clashed with the malicious turquoises.

"I did not mingle in Society at Gueldersdorp."

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

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

Her light laugh fluttered mockingly about his ears.

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

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

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

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LXI

The Great Victorian Age was laid to rest.

The great pageant of mortality had wound along the officially-appointed route, under the cold grey sky, an apparently endless, slowly-marching column of Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry of the Line, progressing pace by pace between the immovable barriers of great-coated soldiers, and the surging, restless sea of black-clad men and women pent up on either hand behind them. The long rolling of muffled drums, and the dull boom of cannon; the baring of men's heads; the wail of the Funeral March, the flash of suddenly whitened faces turned one way to greet Her as She passed, borne to Her rest upon a gun-carriage, as fitting an aged warrior Queen; drawn to her wedded couch within the tomb by the willing, faithful hands of her sons of the twin Services, who shall forget, that heard and witnessed?

Who shall forget?

The Royal Standard draped across the satin-white, gold-fringed pall, where on rich crimson cushions rested the Three Emblems of Sovereignty. The dignified, kingly figure of a man, no longer young, bowed with sorrow under the Imperial heritage, preceding the splendid sombre company of crowned heads; the blaze of uniforms and orders, the clank of sword and bridle, the potent ring of steel on steel, the sumptuously-trapped, shining horses pacing slowly, drawing the mourning-carriages of State, their closed windows, frosted with chilly fog, yielding scant glimpses of well-known faces. One most beloved, most lovely, and no less so in sorrow than in joy. "Did you see her?" the women asked of one another, as the pageant passed and vanished, and one good soul, all breathless from the crush, gasped as she straightened her battered bonnet and twitched her trodden skirt: "There never was a better than the blessed soul that's gone, but there couldn't be a sweeter nor a beautifuller Queen than the one she leaves behind her!"

The last wail of the Funeral March having died away into silence, the last cannon-shot gone booming out, down came the foggy dusk on bereaved London. A chill rime settled on the swaying laurel wreaths, and on the folds of the fluttering purple draperies at the close of the dismal day. The shops were shut, and many of the restaurants, but the windows of the Clubs gleamed radiantly down Piccadilly, and every refreshment-bar and public-house was thronged to bursting. Noon changed to evening, and evening lengthened into night, and the pavements began to be crowded. The Flesh Bazaar was being held in Piccadilly, and all up Regent Street and all down the Haymarket the chaffering went on for bodies and for souls.

A deadly physical and mental lassitude weighed on Saxham. His soul was sick with the long, hopeless struggle. He would end it. He would die, and take away the shadow from Lynette's pure life, and leave her free. His will devised to her everything he possessed, leaving her untrammelled. Let her learn to love once more, let her marry a better man, and be happy in her husband and her children....

* * * * *

He turned in at one of the chemist's shops. One or two gaudily-dressed, haggard women were at the distant end of the counter, in conference with an assistant. Saxham spoke to the chemist, a grey-whiskered, fatherly individual, who listened, bending his sleek bald head. The chemist bowed, but as he had not the honour of knowing his customer, would the gentleman oblige by signing the poison-book, in compliance with Schedule F of the Pharmacy Act, 1868?

Saxham nodded. The chemist produced the register, and opened it on the counter before Saxham, and supplied him with pen and ink. Then he found that he had business at the other end of the shop, and when he returned he smartly closed the book, without even satisfying himself whether the client had written down his name and address, or merely pretended to. Then he filled a two-ounce vial with the fragrant, deadly acid, and put on a yellow label that named the poison, but not the vendor, and stoppered and capsuled, and sealed, and made it into a neat little parcel, and Saxham paid, and put the parcel in his inner breast-pocket, and turned to leave the shop.

It was crowded now; the roaring business of the little hours was in full swing. The three assistants ran about like busy ants; the chemist joined his merry men at the game of making money, serving alcoholic liquors, mixing pick-me-ups, dispensing little bottles of tabloids and little boxes of jujubes, taking cash and giving change.

The crush was terrific. Saxham, his hat pulled low over his broad brows, his great chest stemming the tide of humanity that incessantly rolled over the threshold, was slowly making his way to the door, when he felt the arresting touch of a hand upon his arm.

The owner of the hand belonged, as ninety per cent. of the women in the place belonged, to Francois Villon's liberal sisterhood. Something in the pale square face and massive shoulders had attracted her vagrant fancy. She had quitted her companions--two gaily-dressed, be-rouged women and a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, moustached young German, whose stripy tweeds, vociferously-patterned linen, necktie of too obvious pattern, and high-crowned bowler hat, advertised the Berlin tailor and haberdasher and hatter at their customer's expense, as Saxham went by. Now she looked up into the strange, sorrowful eyes that were shaded by his tilted hat-brim, and twined her thin hands caressingly about his arm, asking:

"Why do you look so queer, dear? Is anything wrong?--excuse me asking--or is it the Funeral has given you the blue hump? It did me! I've not felt so bad since mother----" She broke off. Then as a shrill peal of laughter from one of her female companions followed a comment made by the other--"One of those ..."--she jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an unprintable epithet in the direction of her lady friends--"says you're ugly. I don't think so. I like your face!" Her own was cruelly, terribly young, even under the white cream of zinc, the rouge, and the rice-powder. "Were you looking for a friend, dear?" she asked tightening the clasp of her thin, feverish hands.

"Yes," said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no illumination in his sombre face. "For Death! There is no better friend than Death, my child, either for you or me!"

Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him, and turned and pushed his way out through the noisy, raving, chaffering, patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone, swallowed up in the roaring torrent of humanity that foamed down Piccadilly, leaving her frozen and stricken and staring.

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LXII

Months went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made towards a more familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters, attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic, frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and flourished on the fireplace-tiles.

Only a few weeks more, he said to himself, and he would set her free. Before the natural craving for love, and life, and happiness should brim the cup of her fair sweet womanhood to overflowing; before her sex should rise in desperate revolt against himself her gaoler, Death should unlock her prison-doors and strike the fetters from those slender wrists, and point to Hope beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life.

Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the swift dismissing pang was in the locked drawer of the writing-table beside the whisky-flask. When he was alone and undisturbed--for Lynette seldom came to his consulting-room now--Saxham would take it out and dandle it, and hold it in his hands.

He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp that he might torture himself with looking at that pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet, common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in those two rooms over the garage at the bottom of the yard.

There was a third performer in the shadow-play now. You could hear him roaring lustily at morn and noon and milky eve. The Wonderfullest Baby you ever!

When W. Keyse was invited by Saxham to inspect his son and heir, crimson, and pulpy, and squirming in a flannel wrap, the Adam's apple in the lean throat of the proud father jumped, and his ugly, honest eyes blinked behind salt water. The nipper had grabbed at his ear as he stooped down. And that made the Fourth Time, and he hadn't even thanked the Doctor yet!

A date, he hoped, would arrive when a chalk or two of that mounting score might be wiped off the board. He said so to Mrs. Keyse, the first time she was allowed to sit up and play at doing a bit of needlework. Not that she did a stitch, and charnce it! With her eyes--beautiful eyes, with that new look of mother-love in them; proud eyes, with that inexhaustible store of riches all her own,--worshipping the crinkly red snub nose and the funny moving mouth, and the little downy head, and everything else that goes to make up a properly-constituted Baby.

"I think the time'll come, deer. Watch out, an' one d'y you'll see!"

"I'll watch it!" affirmed W. Keyse. "And wot are you cranin' your neck for, tryin' to look out o' winder? Blessed if I ever see such a precious old Dutch!----"

The song was in the mouths of the people that year. She laughed, and rubbed her pale cheek against his.

"You be my eyes, deer. Peep and see if the Doctor is in 'is room."

It was ten o'clock on a shining May morning, and the clouds that raced over great grimy London were white, and there were patches of blue between. The trees in the squares were dressed in new green leaves, and the irises and ranunculuses in the parks were out, and the policemen had shed their heavy uniforms, and instead of hyacinths behind the glass there were pots of tulips in bloom upon the window-sills of the two rooms over the garage. And the Doctor, who had been seeing patients ever since nine, was sitting at the writing-table, said W. Keyse, with his 'ead upon 'is 'ands.

"Like as if 'e was tired, deer, or un'appy? Or tired an un'appy both?"

"Stryte, you 'ave it!" admitted W. Keyse, after cautious inspection.

"The Doctor--don't let 'im see you lookin' at 'im, darlin', or 'e might think, which Good Gracious know how wrong it 'ud be, as you was a kind o' Peepin' Pry--the Doctor 'ave fell orf an' chynged a good deal lately--in 'is looks, I mean!" said Mrs. Keyse, tucking in the corner of the flannel over the little downy head. "Wasted in 'is flesh, like--got 'oller round the eyes----"

"So 'e 'as!" W. Keyse whistled and slapped his leg. "An' I bin' noticin' it on me own for a long while back--now I come to think of it. Woddyou pipe's the matter wiv 'im? Not ill? Lumme! if 'e was ill----" The eyes of W. Keyse became circular with consternation.

"No, no, deer!" She reassured him, in his ignorance that the maladies of the soul are more agonising far than those that afflict the body. "Down'arted, like, an' 'opeless an'--an' lonely----"

Downhearted, and hopeless, and lonely! The jaw of W. Keyse dropped, and his ugly eyes became circular with sheer astonishment.

"Him! Wiv a beautiful 'ouse to live in--an' Carriage Toffs with Titles fair beggin' 'im to come an' feel their pulses an' be pyde for it, an' Scientific Institooshuns an' 'Orspital Committees fightin' to git 'im on their staffs--an' all the pypers praisin' 'im for wot 'e done at Gueldersdorp, an' Government tippin' 'im the 'Ow Do? an' thank you kindly, Mister!--an'----" W. Keyse could only suppose that Mrs. Keyse was playing a bit of gaff on hers truly--"and him with a wife, too! Married an' 'appy, an' goin' to be 'appier yet!" He pointed to the little red snub nose peeping between the folds of the flannel. "When a little nipper like that comes----"

She reddened, paled, burst out crying.

"O William! William----"

Her William kissed her, and dried her tears. He called it mopping her dial, but you have not forgotten that, as the upper house-and-parlour-maid had at first said, both Her and Him were plainly descended from the Lowest Circles. She had melted afterwards, on learning that Mrs. Keyse had been actually mentioned in Despatches for carrying tea under fire to the prisoners at the Fort; had sought her society, lent paper-patterns, and imparted, in confidence, what she knew of the secret of Saxham's wedded life.

"Dear William! My good, kind Love! Best I should 'urt you, deer, if 'urt you 'ave to be. You see them three large winders covered wiv lovely lace?"

"'Ers--Mrs. Saxham's!" He nodded, trying to look wise.

"Yes, darlin'. Mrs. Saxham's bedroom and dressin'-room they belongs to. I've bin inside the bedroom wiv the upper 'ouse-an'-parlour-myde, an' a Fairy Princess in a Drury Lane Pantomime might 'ave a bigger place to sleep in--but not a beautifuller. When the Foreign Young Person come in of evenin's to git 'er lady dressed for dinner, she snaps up the lights, bein' a kind soul, before she draws the blinds, to give me a charnst like, to see in." She stroked the tweed sleeve. "An' once or twice Mrs. Saxham 'as come in before they'd bin pull down, an' then--O William!--there was everythink in that room on Gawd's good earth a 'usband could ask for to make 'im 'appy, except the wife's 'art beatin' warm and lovin' in the middle of it all!"

"Cripps!... You don't never mean ...?" He gasped. "Wot? Don't the Doctor make no odds to 'er? A Man Like That?" ...

She clung to the heart that loved her, and told him what she had heard.... And if Saxham had known how two of the unconscious actors in his shadow-play pitied him, the knowledge would have been as vitriol poured into an open wound.

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LXIII

The card of Major Bingham Wrynche, C.B., was brought to Saxham one morning, as, his early-calling patients seen and dismissed, the Doctor was going out to his waiting motor-brougham.

Bingo, following what he was prone to call his pasteboard, presented himself--a large, cool, well-bred, if rather stupid-looking, man, arrayed in excellently-fitting clothes, saying:

"You were goin' out? Don't let me keep you. Look in again!"--even as he deposited a tightly-rolled silk umbrella in the waste-paper basket, and tenderly balanced his gleaming hat upon the edge of the writing-table, and chose, by the ordeal of punch, a comfortable chair, as a man prepared to remain. Saxham, pushing a cigar-box across the consulting-room table, asked after Lady Hannah.

"First-rate! Seems to agree with her, having a one-armed husband to fuss over!"

"She won't have a one-armed husband long," returned Saxham, not unkindly, glancing at the bandaged and strapped-up limb that had been shattered by an expanding bullet, and was neatly suspended in its cut sleeve in the shiny black sling.

"By the Living Tinker! she's had him long enough for me!" exploded Bingo, who seemed larger and fussier than ever, if a thought less pink. "So'd you say if they tucked a napkin under your chin at meals, and cut your meat up into dice for you, and you'd ever tried to fold up your newspaper with one hand, or had to stop a perfect stranger in the street, as I did just now outside your door, and ask him to fish a cab-fare out of your right-hand trouser-pocket if he'd be so good? because your idiot of a man ought to have put your money in the other one."

"You're lookin' at my head," pursued the Major, "and I don't wonder. She's been and given me a fringe again. 'Stonishing thing the Feminine Touch is. Let your servant part your hair and knot your necktie, and you simply look a filthy bounder. Your wife does it--and you hardly know yourself in the glass, and wonder why they didn't christen you Anna-Maria. Not bad weeds these, by half! You remember those cigars of Kreil's and the thunderin' price me and Beauvayse paid for 'em, biddin' against each other for fun?" The big man blew a heavy sigh with the light blue smoke-wreath, and added: "And before the last box was dust and ashes, poor old Toby was! And that chap Levestre--never fit to brown his shoes--is wearing 'em; and 'll be Marquess of Foltlebarre when the old man goes. Queer thing, Luck is--when you come to think of it?"

Saxham nodded and looked at the clock. A dull impatience of this large, bland, prosperous personage was growing in him. From the rim the top-hat had left upon his shining forehead to the tightly-screwed eyeglass that assisted his left eye; from the pink Malmaison carnation in the buttonhole of his frock-coat to the buff spats that matched his expansive waistcoat in shade, the large Major was the personification of luxurious, pampered, West End swelldom, the type of a class Saxham abhorred. He had seen the heavy dandy under other conditions, in circumstances strenuous, severe, even tragic. Then he had borne himself after a simple, manly fashion. Now he had backslidden, retrograded, relaxed. Saxham, always destitute of the saving sense of humour, frowned as he looked upon the pampered son of Clubland, and the sullen lowering of the Doctor's heavy smudge of black eyebrow suggested to the Major that his regrets for "poor old Toby!" had been misplaced. The man who had married Miss Mildare could hardly be expected to join with heartiness in deploring the untimely decease of his predecessor.

"Not that it could have come to anything between poor Toby and her if the dear old chap had lived," reflected Bingo, and wondered if the Doctor knew about--about Lessie? "Bound to," he mentally decided, "if he keeps his ears only half as open as other men keep theirs. Didn't a brace of bounders of the worst discuss the story in all its bearin's, sittin' behind my wife and Mrs. Saxham in the stalls at the theatre the other night! Everybody is discussin' it now that the Foltlebarres have left off payin' Lessie not to talk, and provided for her and the youngster out of the estate, and Whittinger's given her a back seat in the family.... That family, too!... Lord! what a rum thing Luck is!"

The musing Major cleared his throat, and his large, rather stupid, blonde face was perfectly stolid as he smoked and stared at his host, reminding himself that Beauvayse had been jealous of Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, and had feared that, if the fellow knew of the scratch against him, he might force the running; and recalling, with a tingling of the shamed blood in his expansive countenance, how he--Wrynche--had let Beauvayse into the sordid secret that Alderman Brooker had blabbed. He wondered, looking at the square, set face, whether Saxham had ever really earned the degrading nickname that he could not get quite right. The 'Peg Doctor,' was it?--or the 'Lush Doctor?' Something in that way.... Not that Saxham looked like a man given to lifting his elbow with undue frequency....

"--But you never know," thought experienced Bingo sagely, even as, in his heavy fashion, he went pounding on: "The Chief's continuin' the Work of Pacification, and acceptin' the surrender of arms--any date of manufacture you like between the chassepot of 1870 and the leather-breeched firelock of Oliver Cromwell's time. The modern kind, you find by employin' the Divinin' Rod"--the large narrator bestowed a wink on Saxham and added--"on the backs of the fellows who buried the guns. Never fails--used in that way. And--as it chances--I have a communication to make to you."

"A communication--a message--from the Chief to me?"

Saxham's face changed, and softened, and brightened curiously and pleasantly.

Major Bingo nodded and cleared his throat. He rebalanced his shiny hat upon the table corner, and said with his eyes engaged in this way:

"I was to remind you--from him--that--not long before the ending of the Siege, a lady who is now a near connection of yours sustained a terrible bereavement through the--infernally dastardly crime of a--person then unknown!"

Saxham's vivid eyes leaped at the speaker's as if to drag out the knowledge he withheld. But Bingo was balancing the glossy triumph of a Bond Street hatter, and looked at it and not at the Doctor, who said:

"You refer to the murder of the Mother-Superior at the Convent of the Holy Way on February the --th, 1900. And you say a person then unknown.... Has the murderer been arrested?"

Major Bingo shook his head.

"He hasn't been arrested, but his name is known. You remember the runner who came in from Diamond Town with a letter for a man called Casey? Not long after--after my wife was exchanged for a spy of Brounckers'?"

"I did not see the man myself," returned Saxham, "but I perfectly recollect his getting through."

Major Bingo said:

"I thought you would. Well, the letter was a blind; the bearer an agent of the firm of Huysmans and Eybel, sent to make certain of our weakest points before they put in the attack on the Barala town; and--that's the man who committed the murder!"

"The man who committed the murder?"

Saxham's vivid eyes were intent upon the Major's face. The Major coughed, and went on:

"My wife came across that man at Tweipans under curious circumstances, which I'm here to put before you as plainly as may be.... She'd met him before the Siege, travelling up from Cape Town. He scraped acquaintance, called himself a loyal Johannesburger, and an Agent of the British South African War-Intelligence-Bureau. Not that there ever was such a Bureau." Major Bingo blinked nervously, and ran a thick finger round the inside of his collar as he added: "The beggar spoofed Lady Hannah up hill and down dale with that, and she believed him. And when she subsequently flew the coop--dash this cold of mine!..."

The Major drew out a very large pink cambric pocket-handkerchief, and performed behind its shelter an elaborate but unconvincing sneeze:

"--When she shot the moon with Nixey's mare and spider, it was by private arrangement with this oily, lying blackguard, who had given her an address--a farm on the Transvaal Border, known as Haargrond Plaats--where she might communicate with him through another scoundrel in the Transport Agency line, supposin' she chose to do a little business on her own in Secret Intelligence----"

Saxham interrupted:

"I shall say nothing to my wife of this, and I trust you will impress upon Lady Hannah that it would be highly inadvisable for her to do so."

"She won't, you may depend on it." Major Bingo palpably grew warm, and mopped the dew from his large, kind, rather stupid countenance with the pink cambric handkerchief--"She's awfully afraid, as it is, that a word or two she dropped quite innocently, to that infernal liar and swindler, who'd bled her of a monkey, good English cash--paid for procurin' and forwardin' items of information that he took damned good care should reach us at Gueldersdorp too late to be of use, led up to--to the crime!... By the Living Tinker! it's out at last!"

The big man, so cool and nonchalant a minute or so before, fanned himself with the pocket-handkerchief, and turned red, and went white, and went red, and turned white half a dozen times, in twice as many beats of his flurried pulse.

"--Out at last, Saxham, and that's why I've been gulpin' and blunderin' and bogglin' for the last ten minutes. Poof!" Major Bingo exhaled a vast breath of relief. "Tellin' tales on a woman--and her your wife--even when she's begged you to, isn't the sweetest job a man can tackle!"

"Let me have this story in detail once and for all," said Saxham, turning a stern, white face, and hard, compelling eyes upon the embarrassed Major. "What utterance of Lady Hannah's do you suppose to have led to the tragedy in the Convent Chapel? Upon this point I must and shall be clear before you leave me!"

"You shall have things as clearly as I can put 'em. This pretended Secret Agent of the War-Intelligence-Bureau that never existed, and who called himself Van Busch--a name that's as common among Boers as Murphy is among Irishmen--arranged to pass off my wife as his sister, a refugee from Gueldersdorp, who'd married a German drummer, and buried him not long before. Women are so dashed fond of play-actin'! Kids, Saxham,--that's what they are in their weakness for dressin' up and makin'-believe! And my wife----"

The large Major was in a violent lather as he ran the thick finger round inside his collar, and swallowed at the lump in his throat.

"--My wife saw Van Busch at Kink's hotel at Tweipans from time to time. He came, I've already explained, to sell bogus information for good money. And as the boodle ran low, the cloven hoof began to show, and the brute became downright insolent."

"As might have been expected," said Saxham, coldly.

"--Kept his hat on in my wife's room, talked big, and twiddled a signet-ring he wore," went on the Major. "And, bein' quick, you know, and sharp as they make 'em, you know, my wife recognised the crest of an old acquaintance cut upon the stone. I knew the man myself"--declared Major Bingo--"and a better never stepped in leather. A brother-officer of the Chiefs, too, and a rippin' good fellow!--Dicky Mildare, of the Grey Hussars."

"Mildare!" repeated Saxham.

"You understand, Saxham, the name did it. My wife had seen the present Mrs. Saxham at Gueldersdorp, and, not knowin' that the surname of Mildare had been taken by her at the wish of her adopted mother, supposed--got the maggot into her head that the Mother-Superior's ward might possibly be a--a daughter of the man the seal-ring had belonged to, knowing--Lord! what a mull I'm making of it!--that Mildare had at one time been engaged to marry that"--the Major boggled horribly--"that uncommonly brave and noble lady, and had, in fact, thrown her over, and made a bolt of it with the wife of his Regimental C.O., Colonel Sir George Hawting."

The faint stain of colour that had showed through Saxham's dead-white skin faded. He waited with strained attention for what was coming.

"South Africa Lady Lucy and Mildare bolted to," went on Bingo, "and now you know the kind of mare's-nest her ladyship had scratched up. And," declared Bingo, "rather than have had to spin this yarn. I'd have faced a Court-Martial of Inquiry respectin' my conduct in the Field. For my wife has a kind heart and a keen sense of honour, and rather than bring harm upon Miss Mildare that was, or anyone connected with her, she'd have stood up to be shot! By G----!" trumpeted Bingo, "I know she would!"

Saxham's face was blue-white now, and looked oddly shrunken. His voice came in a rasping croak from his ashen lips as he said:

"Lady Hannah mentioned my wife to this man, thinking that she might prove to be the daughter of the owner of the ring. What could possibly lead her to infer such a relationship?"

"You must understand that the blackguard had given my wife details of Mildare's death at a farm owned by a friend of his in Natal, and that Hannah--that my wife knew poor little Lucy Hawting had had a child by Mildare," Major Bingo spluttered. "That was why she asked Van Busch outright whether the girl with the nuns at Gueldersdorp was--could be--the same child, grown up? By the Living Tinker!--I never was in such a lather in my life! The better the light I try to put the thing in, the dirtier it looks. And I'm not half through yet, that's the worst of it!"

He mopped and mopped, and took several violent turns about the room, and subsided in a chair at length, and went on, waving the large pink cambric handkerchief, now a damp rag, in the air, at intervals, to dry it.

"She says--Lady Hannah says--that the eagerness and curiosity with which the brute snapped up the hint she'd never meant to drop, warned her to shunt him off on another line, and give no more information. They got on money matters; and, seeing plain how she'd been bilked, my wife gave the welsher a bit of her mind, and he showed his teeth in a way that meant Murder. Just in time--before he could wring her neck round--and he'd started in to do it, you understand--Brounckers came stormin' and bullyin' in, to tell the prisoner she was exchanged, and would be sent down to Gueldersdorp.... They packed her back that very day.... And not a week after, the pretended runner came in from Diamond Town with the bogus letter from Mrs. Casey."

Saxham had thought. He said now:

"This man, this rascally Van Busch, acting as a spy for Brounckers, was disguised as the runner? Is that what has been proved? Did Lady Hannah see the man and recognise him?"

Bingo leaned forward to answer.

"Lady Hannah never set eyes on the man from Diamond Town. But the day the Siege Gazette came out, with a blithering paragraph in it that never ought to have appeared, announcin'"--he coughed and crimsoned--"Lord Beauvayse's formal engagement to Miss Mildare;--my wife was rung up at the Convalescent Hospital by a caller who wouldn't say where he telephoned from. And the message that came through--couched in queer, ambiguous language, and purportin' to come from an old friend--was a message for the young lady who is now Mrs. Saxham!"

Saxham's eyes flickered dangerously. He said not a word. The Major went on:

"My wife didn't then and there identify the voice with Van Busch's. She remembered the name given her as that of the owner of the farm at which Mildare died, a place which by rights was in what's now the Orange River Colony, and not Natal at all. She asked plump and plain: 'Are you So-and-So?' There was no answer to the question. But seven hours later the Mother-Superior was shot; and the nuns and Miss Mildare, on their way to the Convent, were passed by a thickset, bearded man, who ran into one of the Sisters in his hurry, and nearly knocked her down."

"That," said Saxham, "has always been regarded as a suspicious circumstance. But the man was never subsequently traced."

"No! Because," said Bingo, "the runner from Diamond Town evaporated that night."

Saxham said, with his grim under-jaw thrust out:

"Surely that circumstance, when reported to the Officer commanding the Garrison, might then have awakened his suspicions?"

"Naturally," agreed Bingo, "and therefore he kept 'em dark. As for my wife, the shock of the murder, accompanied with her own secret conviction that, in some indirect way, she'd helped to set a malicious, lurking, watchful, dangerous Force of some kind working against your wife--when she dropped that hint I've told you of--bowled her over with a nervous fever."

"I remember," said Saxham, who had been called in.

"Consequently, it wasn't until some days after the Relief--a bare hour or two before the Division--Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, and a company or so of Civilian Johnnies that had made believe they were genuine fightin' Tommies till they couldn't get out of the notion--marched out of Gueldersdorp for Frostenberg, that her ladyship got a chance of makin' a clean breast to the Chief. Hold on a minute, Doctor----"

For Saxham would have spoken.

"--The Chief had had his own private opinion, from the very first. He heard what my wife had to say. As you may guess, she'd worked herself up into a regular cooker of remorse and anxiety--told him she was ready to go anywhere and do anything--he'd only got to give her orders, and all that sort of thing! He charged her with the simple but difficult role of holdin' her tongue, and keepin' her oar out, and findin' him--if by good luck she'd got it by her--a specimen of the handwritin' of the clever scoundrel who'd played at bein' a War Intelligence Agent, and waltzed with her five hundred pounds, which sample, as it chanced, she was able to supply. And the fist of the man who'd swindled her, and the writin' of the Mrs. Casey who'd sent a letter per despatch-runner from Diamond Town to a husband who didn't exist, tallied to an upstroke and the crossin' of a 't'!"

"Is it beyond doubt that the letter from the supposed Mrs. Casey was not a genuine communication?" Saxham asked.

"Beyond doubt. As a fact, the neatly-directed envelope had simply got a sheet of blank paper inside. Another odd fact brought to light was, that the person who communicated with my wife at the Convalescent Hospital about half-past twelve on the day of the murder, rang her up on the telephone belongin' to the orderly-room at the Headquarters of the Baraland Rifles. We had up the orderly, and after some solid lyin', he owned that the man from Diamond Town had bribed him with 'baccy to let him put a message through. And that's another link in the evidence, I take it?" said Major Bingo.

"Undoubtedly!"

"There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo, "that the first march of the Division on its route to Frostenberg led past the Border farm called Haargrond Plaats. It looked deserted and half-ruined, with only a slipshod woman and a coloured man in charge; but something was known of what had gone on there, and might be going on still, and the Boers are clever stage-managers, and it don't do to trust to appearances! So the Chief detached a party with dynamite cartridges and express orders to make the ruin real. Our men searched the place thoroughly before they blew it up; and hidden in a disused chimney--solid bit of old Dutch masonry big enough to accommodate a baker's dozen of sweeps--were a few things calculated to facilitate that search for the needle in the haystack--you understand? Disguises of various kinds--a suit of clothes lined with chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin'--a good deal of the raw stuff itself, scattered all over the shop by the blow-up--and in a rusty cashbox a diary or private ledger, posted up in a clumsy kind of thieves' cipher, impossible to make out, but with the name written on it of the identical man my wife suspected and the Chief believed to be the murderer of Miss Mildare's adopted mother! And that's what you may call the Clue Direct, Saxham, I rather fancy?"

Major Bingo Wrynche leaned back with an air of some finality, and with some little difficulty extracted a biggish square envelope from the left inner pocket of the accurately-fitting frock-coat. He lightly placed the envelope upon the blotter before Saxham; reached out and took the shiny top-hat off the writing-table, fitted it with peculiar care on his pinkish, sandy, close-cropped head, and said, looking at Saxham with a pleasant smile.

"Perhaps you wouldn't mind throwin' your eye over the contents of that envelope? There are three photographs of handwritin' inside, marked on the backs respectively." He waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the big envelope, examining the polish of his own varnished patent-leather boots with a fastidious air of anxiety that was extremely well assumed, if it was not strictly genuine. His large face was as bland and expressionless as the face of the grandfather-clock in the Sheraton case that ticked against the wainscot behind him, as he advised:

"Take 'em in numerical sequence. No. 1 is the photographed facsimile of the cover of the bogus letter to Mr. Casey. No. 2"--the speaker lightly touched it with a large round finger-tip--"that's the replica--also photographed--of a card the man we're after wrote on and gave to Lady Hannah, in case she found herself inclined to invest a hundred or so in the kind of wares he professed to supply. Photo No. 3 is a reproduction of an autograph and address that's written on the inside cover of the ledger --posted up in thieves' cipher--that was in the cashbox found at Haargrond Plaats." He waited, screwing painfully at the stiff, waxed ends of the scrubby moustache.

Saxham took the photographs in their order. The envelope of the bogus letter brought by the supposed runner from Diamond Town had been addressed in a big bold black round hand with curiously malformed capitals, to

"Mr. BARNEY CASEY, "Commercial Traveller, "Gueldersdorp.

"Care of the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces"

"--Don't put it back in the envelope," said Major Bingo. "Compare the writin' with No. 2."

No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was written in ink, in the same bold hand:

"Mr. HENDRYK VAN BUSCH, "C/o Mr. W. Bough, "Transport Agent, "Haargrond Plaats, "Near Matambani, "Transvaal."

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LXIV

There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by street noises filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking of the Sheraton grandfather clock, and the breathing of two people. Saxham glanced at Major Bingo with eyes that seemed to have been bleached of colour, and laid the second calligraphic specimen beside the first, and took up No. 3, and read in the same large nourishing round hand:

"W. BOUGH, "Free State Hotel, "50 m. from Driepoort, "Orange Free State."

After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and the faint, far-off street noises came through the intervening screens, but only one of the men in the room seemed to be breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips moved. He said in a horrible clicking whisper:

"Van Busch and Bough are--one?"

Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative. But it was as expressionless as the grandfather clock's.

"One man!--and that's what I may call the pith of my verbal Despatch for you!"

Saxham said with hard composure:

"Van Busch is a Dutch surname that, as you say, is common in South Africa. With the name of Bough, as the Chief is aware, I have--associations. It was, in fact, one of the many aliases used by the witness for Regina in an Old Bailey case in which I was concerned nearly seven years ago."

The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity:

"Same man!"

Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was the same man. The tense muscles of his face told nothing. Bingo added:

"--But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount to little compared with the wrong and injury inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham! That---- Good Lord! what's the matter?"

For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, knocking over his chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue lips:

"What wrong? What injury? What--what are you hinting at?----"

"Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round light blue eyes was so palpably genuine that the crazy flame died out of the Doctor's, and his clenched hand dropped. "I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all!"

"I beg your pardon, Major!" Saxham picked up his chair and sat down on it, inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. "My nerves have been giving trouble of late."

Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright eyes, the Doctor looked like that--uncommonly like that! And the big Major, remembering Alderman Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the stiff, blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have reverted to the old vice? "Bad for the girl he's married if he has!" he thought, even as he said:

"Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' the tension, don't you know? Norway in June, or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind and go!"

"I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling bitterly, as he remembered the little phial with the yellow label that lay beside the whisky-flask in the drawer beneath his hand. "I shall go very soon now!"

"But not immediately?"

"Not immediately." There was something strange, almost exalted, in the look that accompanied the words. Saxham added: "If you could give me an approximate date as regards the finding of that--needle in the haystack of South Africa, it would--facilitate my departure more than you can guess!"

"Would it, by George!" Bingo slipped the thumb and forefinger of the useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket. Something sparkled in the big pink palm he extended to Saxham--something sparkled, and spurted white and green and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled from its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful face of a young, refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all his iron self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement and a stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.

For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.

With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakable rage and horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light.

Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!

The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have indicated the height of the latest fashion--say, twenty-two or even three years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the dull gold of the inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it. Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 1879."

* * * * *

The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's opaque skin had given place to pallor. His face was sharp and thin, and of waxen whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. His blue eyes burned ominously in their caves under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice was very quiet as he asked: "How did you come by this?"

"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits of evidence were bits of a man--two men you might call him! And, by the Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"

"He had this upon him? He--wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.

"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a neck to boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd hand it over to--anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully! So long!"

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LXV

In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of the Siege--a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written by an unsteady hand.

Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and drove there that afternoon.

The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West. Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged passages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and able to receive a visitor?

The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she would be happy to oblige the gentleman.

"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an ordinary caller on business connected with religion."

The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream-washed, brown-distemper-dadoed passage, smelling of kippered haddocks and incense, to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a view of mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.

Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library; chrome-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by Old Masters hung above. The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who was lying down.

"I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the prone figure, a single stride having taken him to the side of the sofa, "to prescribe for a man whose nerves are playing him tricks. I have torn up your letter--the epistle in which you ask me to afford you an opportunity of making an avowal which will prove to what depths of infamy a man may descend at the bidding of his lower nature. Lower nature! If I am any judge of a man's physical condition, a lower nature is what you want!" He threw down his hat and stick upon the green-baize-covered table, took one of the Windsor chairs, and crashed it down beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big body on it, and reached out and captured the thin wrist of his victim, who mustered breath to stammer:

"There is nothing whatever the matter with my health. I am well--that is, bodily." He got up from the sofa, and crossed to the Zoological hearthrug, and poked the smoky little fire burning in the narrow grate, for the May day was wet and chilly. "I shall be better, mentally," he said, with an effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham, "when you have heard what I have to tell." He rose up, and turned round, his thin face flaming. "Mind, I'm not to be gagged by your not wanting to," for Saxham had impatiently waved his hand. "Hear you shall, and must!"

He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that couched on a field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove his hands down deep into his pockets, and the painful scarlet surged over the rim of his Roman collar and dyed his thin, sensitive, beautiful face and high, white forehead to the roots of his dark, curling hair.

"Perhaps you may recall an oath I swore at your instigation one day in your room at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp?"

"Yes--no! What does it matter?" said Saxham thickly, with his angry, brooding eyes upon the floor.

"It matters," said Julius doggedly, "in the present case. I need hardly tell you that I have kept that oath. If the man had not been dead, I might have ended by breaking it--who knows? What I have to tell you is that, some two months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is now your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by a despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen--deservedly fallen--to your lot, sought out Miss Mildare, and told her--something I had learned to your detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling, worthless creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength of a seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."

Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall now instead of the floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His right hand, resting on the table near which he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to hear more. And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the parted wooden mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden:

"I knew that the man lied--on my soul, I knew it! But the opportunity he had given me of lowering your value in--in another's eyes was too tempting to resist. The man had told me----"

"In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," said Saxham; "and, as it happens, he told the truth!" He added: "And what I was then I am now. There is no change in me, though once I thought it!"

"Saxham!... For God's sake, Saxham!" stuttered Julius. But Saxham, hunching his great shoulders, and lowering his square, black head, not at all unlike the savage bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went on:

"It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham of abstinence and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and various grades in our drunkenness, as in our other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises the common drunkard; and the sippers of ether look down with infinite contempt--or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the toper and the slave of morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxygenated racehorse run for the Cup! A year or so, and the Transatlantic oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equipment of the British athlete. Even to-day the professional footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer, inhale oxygen as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that is born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The man who scales an Alpine summit winds himself up with a whiff or so; the orator, inspired by oxygen, astonishes the House of Commons or the Bar. And the actor, delirious with oxygen, rushes on the stage; and the clergyman, drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit to preach a Temperance sermon. And the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying tipplers; and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: 'Physician, heal thyself!'"

The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure as he got up. His fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken caves as he took his hat and stick from the table.

"What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrong me. Moralists would say that you acted conscientiously--played the part of a true friend in telling--her--what you knew!"

"Of my benefactor--the man who had saved my life!" Julius moistened his dry lips. "Your approving moralist would be the devil's advocate. But I have not forgotten what your own opinion is of the man who tries to enhance his own virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the vices of a rival. And, if you will believe me, I was punished for the attempt. Her look of surprise ... the tone in which she said, 'Did he not save your life?' that was enough!... Then I--I lost my head, and told her that I loved her--entreated her to be my wife, only to learn that she never had--never could----" Julius's thin white fingers knotted themselves painfully at the back of his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks between his gritted teeth: "It was revolting to her--a girl reared among nuns in a Catholic Convent--that a man calling himself a priest should speak to her of love. There was absolute horror in her look as she learned the truth." He groaned. "I have never met her eyes since that day without seeing--or imagining I saw--some reflection of that horror in them!"

"Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations?" said Saxham, not unkindly.

He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure, when Julius stopped him.

"One moment. Has--has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to you of--this that I have told you?"

"Never!" answered Saxham, pausing at the door.

"One moment more! Saxham, is it hopeless? Could you not by a desperate effort break this habit that may--that must--inevitably bring misery to your wife? In the name of her love for you--in the names of the children that may be born of it----"

--"Unless you want me to murder you," advised Saxham, facing the passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a breaking wave, "you had better be silent!"

"My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, "is better than you know. When I endeavoured--unsuccessfully--to injure you, I robbed myself of my belief in myself. But you--you who gave me back my earthly life, you have robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal God. Do you know the effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It is a choking fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that day at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 'The Human Will is even more omnipotent than the Deity, because it has created Him, out of its own need!' I have done my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utterance--I have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrung his hands, that were wet as though they had been dipped in water. "I have tended souls as mechanically as a gardener might water pots in which there was nothing but dead sticks and dry earth!"

"Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung by the suffering in the thin young face and in the beautiful haggard eyes, "that I never meant the harm that I appear to have done! Nor can I recall that I have habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I remember that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen an announcement in the Siege Gazette that ... I dare say you understand?" He laughed harshly. "As to my theory of the Omnipotence of Human Will, it is blown and exploded, and all the King's horses and all the King's men will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from. I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me! Of how far Will, in another man, may carry him, I dare not judge or calculate. My own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows!"

He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a bookcase, and said, pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes:

"The best of us are bad in spots, Parson: the worst of us are good in patches. You Churchmen don't recognise that fact sufficiently.... And I think no worse of you for what you have told me! If I have anything to forgive--why, it is forgiven! Do you try, on the other hand, to think leniently of a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothing of his own to lean upon. As for my wife, in whose interests I know you to be honestly solicitous, I will tell you this much: She will be spared the 'inevitable misery' of which you spoke just now!"

"How? Have you decided to undergo a cure? I have heard," hesitated Julius, "that these things are not always successful--that they sometimes fail!"

"Mine is the only cure that never fails," returned Saxham.

A vision of the little blue-glass, yellow-labelled vial that held the swift dismissing pang, floated before him. He shook hands with Julius, and went upon his lonely way.

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