The Dop Doctor

"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 antennæ, 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-à-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!"

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, née 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.