The Dop Doctor

"That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the male an' the female character. A man will no' keep on dithering for what he kens he canna' get. A woman, especially a young an' pretty – " He broke off to say: "Toch! will ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the sex sets that lad rampaging."

"Beautiful! I tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp was emphatically assuring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, "the loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see – bar none! I saw her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day she passed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my hat to her as the Staff dismounted at the gate."

"Another rara avis, Beau?" the Colonel called across the intervening group of talkers. The group of khâki-clad figures separated, and turned first to the Chief, then to the bright-eyed, bright-faced enthusiast. White teeth flashed in tanned faces, chaff began:

"In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?"

"Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that pretty 'Jollity' girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, and the postcard grin."

"Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moonless night on the Cape Town Hotel verandah!"

"She turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?"

"Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed…"

"She was neither," the crimson boy declared. "She was simply a lady, quiet and high-bred and simple enough to have been a Princess of the blood, or to look a fellow in the face and pass him by without the slightest idea – I'd swear to it – that she'd fairly taken his breath away."

"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a title. "Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is – I may say the word – in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce you, unless the Colonel entertains objections …"

"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."

"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-class long-distance eyesight." There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are … here she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass them."

The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff had congregated. Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching feminine shapes should pass across the open space. One or two Staff monocles went up. The Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his steel-rimmed eyeglasses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose.

They came and passed – the white figure and the two black ones. Of these one was very tall, one short and dumpy – veiled and mantled, their hands hidden in their ample sleeves, they went by with their eyes upon the ground. But the girl with them – a slight, willowy creature in a creamy cambric dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and bowed, upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide strings of muslin under her delicate round chin – looked with innocent, candid interest at the group of men outside the Hospital. The tanned faces, the simple workman-like Service dress, setting off the well-knit, alert figures, the quiet, soldierly bearing, even the distant sound of the well-bred voices, pleased her, even as the whiff of cigars and Russian leather that the breeze brought down from the stoep struck some latent chord of subconscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed golden hazel eyes. And cognisant of every fleeting change of expression in those lovely eyes, the taller of her two companions thought, with a stab of pain:

"Your father was that man's friend, and the comrade of others like him."

"Now, then!" challenged Beauvayse, as the three figures moved out of sight.

"The 'Girl With the Golden Eyes'?" said somebody.

"You wouldn't speak of her in the same breath with that brainless beast of Balzac's, hang it all!" expostulated the champion. He turned eagerly to the Colonel. "Now you've seen her, sir, would you?"

"Not exactly. And I'm bound to say, I regard your claim to the possession of good taste as completely established… 'Ware the horse, there! Look out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted orderly before the gates, and rendered nervous by the pressure of the crowd, shied at the towering panache of imitation grass-made ostrich feathers trailing from the aged and crownless pot-hat worn by a headman of the Barala in holiday attire, jerked the bridle from the hand of the trooper, and backed, rearing, in the direction of the three women passing on the sidewalk. The other horses shied, frustrating the efforts of the orderly to catch the flying bridle, and the danger from the huge, towering brown body and dangling iron-shod hoofs was very real, seemed inevitable, when a man in white drill and wearing a Panama hat ran out of the crowd, sprang up and deftly caught the loose bridoon-rein, mastered the frightened beast, and dragged it back into the roadway, in time to avert harm.

"Cleverly done, but a close thing," the Chief said, as he turned away. "I wish I had had that fellow's chance!" was written in Beauvayse's face. To have won a look of gratitude from those wonderful black-fringed eyes, brought a flush of admiration into those white-rose cheeks, would have been worth while. The slight, tall, girlish figure in its dainty creamy draperies had passed out of sight now between its two black-robed guardians. And had not Luck, that mutable-minded deity, given the golden chance to a hulking stranger in white drill, his, Beauvayse's, might have been the hand to intervene in the matter of the Colonel's restive charger, and his the ears to receive Beauty's acknowledgments.

If he had known that her eyes had been too full of his own resplendent, virile, glowing young personality, to even see the man who had stepped in between her and possible danger! The most innocent girl will have her ideal of a lover and thrill at the imagined touch, and furnish the dumb image with a dream-voice that woos her in impossible, elaborate, impassioned sentences, very unlike the real utterances of Love when he comes. The blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, golden-locked St. Michael portrayed in celestial-martial splendour upon one of the panels of the triptych over the altar in the Convent chapel, had, as he bent stern young brows over the writhing demon with the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of the young soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and profane, Sister Cleophée or Sister Ruperta would have said, to liken a handsome, stupid, young lieutenant of Hussars to the immortal Captain of the Armies of Heaven.

But she knew another who would understand. There was no flaw in the perfect sympathy that maintained between Lynette and the Mother-Superior, though, certainly, since the Colonel's visit of the previous day, the Mother had seemed strangely preoccupied and sad… Her good-night kiss, invariably so warm and tender, had been the merest brush of lips against the girl's soft cheek; her good-morning had been even more perfunctory; her eyes, those great maternal radiances, turned their light elsewhere. Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a noble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the slender white figure leaning from her chamber-casement, whispering, with outstretched hands, and eyes that gleamed through the darkness:

"Open the door! Do you hear, you Kid? Open the door!"

Her heart beat once, heavily, and seemed to stop. A cold breath seemed to blow upon the little silken hair-tendrils at the nape of her white neck, spreading a creeping, stiffening horror through her body, deadening sensation, paralysing every limb.

The close approach of any man, even the thought of such contact, turned her deadly faint, checked her pulses, stopped her breath. At picnics and parties and dances to which the Mayor's wife or the mothers of some of the pupils would invite or chaperon her, her vivid, delicate, fragile beauty would draw, first men's eyes, and then their owners, not all unhandsome or undesirable; while showier girls looked in vain for partners or companions. The little triumph, the consciousness of being admired and sought after, would quicken Lynette's pulses, and heighten the radiance of her eyes, and lend animation to her girlish chatter and gaiety to her laughter – at first. Then some over-bold advance, some hot look or whispered word, would bring quick recollection leaping into the lovely eyes, and drive the vivid colour from the virginal transparent face, and stamp the smiling mouth into pale, breathless lines of Fear. That night in the tavern on the veld had branded a child with premature knowledge of the ferocious, ravening, devouring Beast that lies in Man concealed. Again she felt the scorching breath of lust upon her; she quailed under the intolerable touch; she shook like a reed in the brutal hands of the evil, dominating power that would brook no resistance and knew no mercy. The horrible obsession came upon her now, all the stronger for those moments of forgetfulness:

"Clang – clang – clang!"

The little Irish novice had rung the chapel bell for Sext and None. She could hear, from the nuns' end of the big rambling, two-storied house, the rustling habits sweeping along the passage. She hurried to the door, and tore it open, frantically as though that ravening breath had been hot upon her neck, saw the dear black figure of the Mother sweeping towards her, and rushed into the arms that were held out, hiding from that burning, scorching, hideous memory in the bosom that dead Richard Mildare had turned from in his blindness.

Just as Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the Mayor's promise to introduce him to the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life, or ever should see, mentally registered a vow that he would keep the old buffer up to that, by listening to his interminable hunting-stories, and laughing at his venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War, sharpened a fellow's faculties…

"It's rum to reflect," Beauvayse said, conscious of perpetrating an epigram, "that from time immemorial the fellow who wants to make up to a young woman has always had to begin by getting round an old man!"

He looked round for the old man, whom the title would have estranged for ever. He had buttonholed the Chief, and was gassing away – joy! – upon the very subject.

"I fancy the ladies of the Convent, who occasionally visit the Hospital, were coming in at this gate. The short nun, I noticed, had a little basket in her hand. Probably they went round to the side entrance, seeing the – ha, ha! – the stoep garrisoned by Her Majesty's Imperial Forces. Certainly… Without doubt. We respect the Mother-Superior highly. A most gifted, most estimable person in every way, if rather stern and reserved… Unapproachable, my wife calls her. But Miss Mildare, her ward – "

XXIV

"Miss Mildare!"

The Chief's keen eyes had lightened suddenly. The whole face had darkened and narrowed, and the clipped brown moustache lost its smiling curve, and straightened into a hard line.

"Miss Mildare?"

"Why, yes, that is her name… An orphan, I have heard, and with no living relatives. But she seems happy enough at the Convent, judging by what Mrs. Greening says."

The hearer experienced a momentary feeling of relief and of anger – relief to think that dead Dick Mildare's daughter should have found refuge in such a woman's heart; anger that the woman should have concealed from him the girl's identity, knowing her the object of his own anxious search.

Then he understood. His anger died as suddenly as it had been kindled. He recalled something that he had seen when the rearing horse had inclined perilously towards the footway – that protecting maternal gesture, that swift interposition of the tall, active, black-robed figure between the white-clad, flower-faced, girlish creature and those threatening iron-shod hoofs…

"She loves the girl – Dick Mildare's daughter by the treacherous friend who stole him from her. Is there a doubt? With poor little Lady Lucy Hawting's willowy figure and the same nymph-like droop of the little head, with its rich twists and coils of dead-leaf-coloured hair, shaded by the big black hat. That woman has taken her to her heart, however she came by her; the parting would be agony, stern, proud, tender creature that she is! I suppose she will be doing thundering penance for not having told me, a fellow who simply walked into the place and assegaied her with my death-news. Here's a marrowy bone of gossip Lady Hannah shall never crack. And yet I wouldn't swear there's not an angel husked inside that dried-up little chrysalis. For God made all women, though He only turned out a few of 'em perfect, and some only just a little better than the ruck."

He roused himself from the brown study that brought into relief many lurking lines and furrows in the thin, keen face, as the Chief Medical Officer, fixing him through suspicious eyeglasses, demanded:

"Ye got your full allowance o' sleep last nicht?"

He nodded.

"Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was born not only with eyes and ears, like other infants, but with the capacity for using 'em."

"Ay. It's remarr'kable how many men will daudle complacently through life, from the cradle to the grave, wi'out the remotest consciousness that they're practically blind and no better than deaf, as far as regards real seeing and hearing. But who's your prodeegy?"

"One of Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. They put him on at the Convent with another sentry, their first experience of a night on guard. By not being in a hurry to challenge, and keeping his ears open while a conversation of the confidentially-affectionate kind was going on between a Dutchman – a fellow employed in the booking-office at the railway, on whom I've had my eye for some little time past – and his sweetheart, my townie found out for himself something that most of us knew before, and something else that we wanted to know particularly badly…"

"Namely?"

"For one thing, that the town is a hotbed of spies, and that our friends in laager outside are nightly communicated with by means of flash-signals."

"And that's an indeesputable fact. Toch!" No other combination of letters may convey the guttural, "Have I no' seen the lamps at warr'k mysel', after darr'k, at the end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld! The Dutchman would be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking."

"He will have plenty of time to think where he is at present. When the sentry interfered he was instructing the young woman in a simple but effective code of match-flare signals, by means of which she was to communicate with him when he had cleared out. And he had announced his intention of doing that without delay."

"An' skipping to his freends upo' the Borr'der… Toch!" The network of wrinkles tightened about the sharp little blue-grey eyes of the Chief Medical Officer. "That would gie a thochtfu' man a kind o' notion that a reese in the temperature may be expectit shortly. An' so you – slept soundly on the strength o' many wakeful nichts to come? Ay, that would be the kind o' information ye were badly wanting!"

"You're wrong, Major. The bit of information was this – from the spy to his friends outside: 'No – news – to-night.'" The keen hazel eyes conveyed something into the Northern blue ones that was not said in words: "'No news to-night.' And the sender of that message was a railway man!"

The wiry hairs of the Chief Medical Officer's red moustache bristled like a cat's.

"Toch! Colonel, you will have reason to be considering me dull in the uptake, but I see through the mud wall now. And so the knowledge that ye have no equal at hiding your deeds o' darkness even in the licht o' the railway-yard was as good to ye as Daffy's Elixir. And when micht we reckon on getting notification from what I may presume to ca' your double surpreese-packet?"

He looked at his watch – a well-used Waterbury, worn upon the silvered steel lip-strap of a cavalry bridle, and said:

"Ten o'clock. At a quarter past eleven I think we may count upon something. The driver of Engine 123 has given me the word of an Irishman from County Kildare; and the stoker, a Cardiff man, and the guard, who hails from Shoreditch, are quite as keen as Kildare."

"You're sending the stuff up North?"

"In the direction of the stretch of railway-line they're busy wrecking, in the hope that it may come in useful."

"Weel, I will gie ye the guid wish that the affair may go off exactly as ye are hoping."

"Thanks, Major! You could hardly word the sentence more happily."

They exchanged a laugh as the Mayor bustled up, rubicund, important, and with a Member of the Committee to introduce.

"Colonel, you'll permit me to present Alderman Brooker, one of our most energetic and valued townsmen, President of the Gas Committee, and an Assistant Borough Magistrate. One of Major Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. Was on sentry-go last night not far from here, and had a most extraordinary experience. Worth your hearing, if you can spare time to listen to my friend's account of it."

"With pleasure, Mr. Mayor."

Brooker, a stout and flabby man, with pouches under biliously tinged eyes, bowed and broke into a violent perspiration, not wholly due to the shiny black frock-coat suit of broadcloth donned for the occasion.

"Sir, I humbly venture to submit that I have been the victim of a conspiracy!"

"Indeed? Step this way, Mr. Brooker."

Brooker, soothed by the courteous affability of the reception, his sense of importance magnified by being led aside, apart from the others, into the official privacy of the stoep-corner, began to be eloquent. He knew, he said, that the story he had to relate would appear almost incredible, but a soldier, a diplomat, a master of strategy, such as the personage to whom he now addressed himself, would understand – none better – how to unravel the tangled web, and follow up the clue to its ending in a den of secret, black, and midnight conspiracy. A blob of foam appeared upon his under-lip. He waved his hands, thick, short-fingered, clammy members…

"My story is as follows, sir…"

"I shall have pleasure in listening to it, Mr. Brooker, on condition that you will do me first the favour of listening to a story of mine?"

Deferred Brooker protested willingness.

"Last night, Mr. Brooker, at about eleven-thirty to a quarter to twelve, I was returning from a little tour of inspection" – the slight riding sjambok the Chief carried pointed over the veld to the northward – "out there, when, passing the south angle of the enclosure of the Convent, where, by my special orders, a double sentry of the Town Guard had been posted, I heard a sound that I will endeavour to reproduce:

"Gr'rumph! Honk'k! Gr'rumph!"

Brooker bounded in his Oxford shoes.

The face upon which he glued his bulging eyes was grave to sternness. He stuttered, interrogated by the judicial glance:

"It – it sounds something like a snore."

"It was a snore, Mr. Brooker, and it proceeded from one of the sentries upon guard."

"Sir … I … I can expl – "

"Oblige me by not interrupting, Mr. Brooker. This sentry sat upon a short post, his back fitted comfortably into an angle of the Convent fence, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open. From it, or from the organ immediately above, the snore proceeded. He was having a capital night's rest – in the Service of his Country. And as I halted in front of him, fixing upon him a gaze which was coldly observant, he shivered and ceased to snore, and said": – the wretched Brooker heard his own voice, rendered with marvellous fidelity, speaking in the muffled tone of the sleeper – "'Annie, it's damned cold to-night; and you've got all the blanket.'"

"Sir … sir!" The stricken Brooker babbled hideously… "Colonel … for mercy's sake!.."

"I could not oblige the gentleman with a blanket, Mr. Brooker, but I relieved him of his rifle and left him, to tell his picket a cock-and-bull story of having been drugged and hypnotised by Boer spies. And – I will overlook it upon the present occasion, but in War-time, Mr. Brooker, men have been shot for less. I think I need not detain you further. Your rifle has been sent to your headquarters – with my card and an explanation. One word more, Mr. Brooker – "

Brooker, grey, streaky, and desperately wretched, was blind to the laughter brimming the keen hazel eyes.

"I am entrusted by the Imperial Government with the preservation of Public Morality in Gueldersdorp, as well as with the maintenance of the Public Safety – and I should be glad of an assurance from you that Mrs. Brooker's Christian name is really Annie?"

"I – I swear it, Colonel!"

Brooker fled, leaving the preserver of public morality to have his laugh out before he rejoined the Staff, glancing at the Waterbury on the short steel chain. Half-past ten. Would the Dop Doctor turn up to appointment, or had the battle with habit and the deadly craving born of indulgence ended in defeat? As his eyes moved from the dial, they lighted upon the man:

"Clothed and in his right mind…"

His own words of the night before recurred to memory as he came forwards with his long, light step, greeting the new-comer with the easy, cordial grace of high-breeding.

"Ah, Dr. Saxham, obliged to you for being punctual. Let me introduce you to Major Lord Henry Leighbury, D.S.O., Grenadier Guards, our D.A.A.G. Dr. Saxham, Colonel Ware, Baraland Rifles, and Sir George Wendysh, Wessex Regiment, commanding the Irregular Horse; Captain Bingham Wrynche, Royal Bay Dragoons, my senior aide-de-camp, and his junior, Lieutenant Lord Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars. And Dr. Saxham, Major Taggart, R.A.M.C., our Chief Medical Officer."

He watched the man keenly as he made the introductions, saying to himself that this was better than he had hoped. The ragged black moustache had been shaved away; the frayed but spotless suit of white drill fitted the heavy-shouldered, thin-flanked, muscular figure perfectly; the faded blue flannel shirt, with the white double collar and narrow black tie; the shabby black kamarband about his waist, the black-ribboned Panama, maintaining respectability in extremest old age, as that expensive but lasting headgear is wont to do, possessed, as worn by the Dop Doctor, a certain cachet of style. His slight, curt, almost frowning salutations displayed a well-graduated recognition of the official status of each individual to whom he was made known, betokening the man accustomed to move in circles where such knowledge and the application of it was indispensable, and who knew, too, that slight from him would have given chagrin. But another moment, and the junior Medical Officer, a black-avised little Irishman from County Meath, had gripped him by both hands, and was exclaiming in his juicy brogue, real delight beaming in his round, rosy face: