The Dop Doctor

The faintest quiver of a smile comes over the lovely face her grudging eyes are trying to find a flaw in.

"Often when I have been crossing the veld between the town and the Hospital, the Mauser bullets have hummed past like bees, or raised little spurts of dust close by my feet where they had hit the ground. And once a shell burst close to us, and a splinter knocked off my hat and tore a corner of her veil – "

"Weren't you in a petrified fright?" demands Lessie.

"I was with her!"

"Who was she?"

A swift change of sudden, quickening, poignant emotion passes over the still face. A sudden swelling of the white throat, a rising mist in the golden eyes, suggests to Lessie that she has been fortunate enough to touch upon a painful subject, and that possibly this presumptuous young woman who has pitied a Viscountess may be going to cry! But Lynette drives back the tears.

"She was the Reverend Mother, the Mother-Superior of the Convent where I lived at Gueldersdorp."

"Where is she now?"

"She is with God."

"With – "

Lessie is oddly nonplussed by the calm, direct answer. People who talk in that strangely familiar way of – of subjects that properly belong to parsons are rare in her world. She hastens to put her next question.

"Was yours the only Convent in Gueldersdorp where young ladies were taught?"

"It is the only Convent there."

"Did you know – among the pupils – a young person by the name of Mildare?"

There is such concentrated essence of spite in Lessie's utterance of the name, that Lynette winces a little, and the faint, sweet colour rises in her cheeks.

"I – know her, certainly; as far as one can be said to know oneself. My unmarried name was Mildare."

"You – don't say so! Lord, how funny!"

The seagulls fishing in the shallows beyond the foam-line, rise up affrighted by the shrill peal of triumphant laughter with which Lessie makes her discovery.

"Ha, ha, ha! Talk of a situation!.. On the boards I've never seen one to touch it!" She jumps from the boulder, with more bounce than dignity, dropping the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, and, extending in one pudgy ringed hand a highly-glazed and coroneted card, "Permit me to introduce myself," she says through set teeth, smiling rancorously. "My professional name, as I have had the honour and pleasure of explaining to you, is Lessie Lavigne, but in private" – the dignity of the speaker's tone is marred by its extreme huffiness – "in private I am Lady Beauvayse."

As Lynette looks in the painted, angry, piquante face she is more than ever conscious of that feeling of antagonism. Then her eyes, turning from it, encounter the cherub rosily sleeping on embroidered pillows, and a rush of blood colours her to the hair. His child – his child by the dancer – this dimpled creature she has clasped and kissed! The icy, tinkling giggle of the mother breaks in upon the thought.

"Of all the queer situations I ever struck, I do call this the queerest! Me, meeting you like this, and both of us getting quite pally! All over Baby, too!.. Lord! isn't it enough to make you die? Don't mind me being a bit hysterical!" Lady Beauvayse dabs her tearful eyes with a cobwebby square of laced cambric. "It'll be over in a sec. And then, Miss Mildare – I beg pardon – Mrs. Saxham – you and me will have it out!"

"I am afraid I must be going." Lynette rises, and stands beside Lessie, looking down in painful hesitation at the blinking, reddened eyelids and the working mouth. "I have guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it not be wise of you to go home and lie down?"

The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an intolerable sting. Lessie jumps in her buckled Louis Quinze shoes, wheels, and confronts her newly-discovered enemy with glaring eyes.

"Go home … lie down!" she shrieks, so shrilly that the sleeping cherub awakens, and adds her frightened roars to the clamour that scares the gulls. "If I had lain down and gone to my long home eighteen months ago, when you were cooped up in Gueldersdorp with my husband, it would have suited you both down to the ground!" She turns, with a stamp of her imperious little foot, upon the scared nurse, who is vainly endeavouring to still Baby. "Take her away! Carry her out of hearing! Do what you're told, you silly fool!" she orders. "And you" – she wheels again upon Lynette, her wistarias nodding, her chains and bangles clanking – "why do you stand there, like a white deer in a park – like an image cut out of ivory? Don't you understand that I, the woman you've pitied – my God! pitied, for singing and dancing on the public stage 'with so few clothes on'" – she savagely mimics the manner and tone – "I am the lawful wife of the man you tried to trap – the Right Honourable John Basil Edward Tobart!" The painted lips sneer savagely. "Beautiful Beau, who never went back on a man, or told the truth to a woman! – that's his character, and it pretty well sizes him up!"

Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled hand clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical instinct in the daughter of the footlights has led her to work up the scene; but her rage of wounded love and jealousy is genuine enough, though not as real as the innocence in the eyes that meet hers, less poignant than the shame and indignation that drive the blood from those ivory cheeks.

"He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cookham," goes on Lessie, her painted mouth twisting, "a fortnight before he was ordered out on the Staff. We'd been friends for over a year. There was a child coming, since we're by way of being plain-spoken," says Lessie, picking up the prostrate red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, possibly to conceal a blush; "and he swore he'd never look at another woman, and write by every mail. And so he did at first, and I used to cry over the blooming piffle he put into his letters, and wish I'd been a straighter woman, for his sake. And then the Siege began, and the letters stopped coming, and I cried enough to spoil my voice, little thinking how my husband was playing the giddy bachelor thousands of miles away. And then came the news of the Relief, and despatches, saying that he" – her pretty face is distorted by the wry grimace of genuine anguish – "he was killed! And a month later I got a copy of a rotten Siege newspaper, sent me by I don't know who, and never shall, with a flowery paragraph in it, announcing his lordship's engagement to Miss Something Mildare. Oh! it was merry hell to know how he'd done me – me that worshipped the very ground he trod!.. Me that had made a Judy of myself in crape and weepers – widow's weepers for the man that wished me dead!"

Her voice is thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious little dancer and comedian, as in this moment when she forgets her art.

"Picture it, you!.. Don't you fancy me in 'em? Don't you see me in my bedroom tearing 'em off?" She rends her flimsy cobweb of a handkerchief into tatters and spurns them from her. "So!.. so!.. that's what I did to 'em!" She snarls with a sudden access of tigerishness. "And if that white face of yours had been within reach of my ten fingers, I'd have ragged it into ribbons like the blooming fallals. Don't dare tell me you'd not have done the same! Perhaps, though, you wouldn't. You're a lady, born and bred," owns Lessie grudgingly, "and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that worked to keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool!"

She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. The swollen face with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's.

"You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!"

Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric:

"Go on!"

"I met Lord Beauvayse out at Gueldersdorp." The voice that comes from Lynette's pale lips is singularly level and quiet. "He was very handsome and very brave; he was an officer of the Colonel's Staff. He asked me to marry him, and I – I believed him honourable and true, and I said, 'Yes.' … That was one Sunday, when we were sitting by the river. On Thursday he was killed, and later – nearly a year after my marriage to Dr. Saxham – I found out the truth."

Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of the speaker have brought conviction. She realises that if she has been injured, her rival has suffered equal wrong.

"You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes me. But that's not my business. You say you found out?" She shows her admirably preserved teeth in a little grin of sardonic contempt – "nearly a year after your marriage. Don't tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to Beau's angelic memory when he might have made you spit on it by telling you the truth!"

Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly.

"He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him I learned it!"

"Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, "as a model husband. Now, my poor – "

Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis:

"I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath with Lord Beauvayse!"

"He's dead – let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth twisting. Yet in the same breath, with another of the mental pirouettes characteristic of her class and type, she adds: "Do you suppose I don't know my own husband? Take him one way with another, you might have sifted the world for liars, and never found the equal of Beau."

She gathers up the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case with reviving briskness, and shakes out her crumpled chiffons in the bright hot sun.

"Me and Baby are leaving to-morrow. I don't suppose we're likely ever to come across you again. Good-bye! I forgive you for pitying me," she says frankly, holding out the plump, over-jewelled hand. "As for the other grudge… What, are you going to kiss me?.. Give Baby another before you go, dear … and … forgive him when you can!"

LXXI

Lynette sat still upon the boulder, thinking, long after the red umbrella had departed. While it was yet visible in the white-hot distance, hovering like some gaudy Brobdingnagian butterfly in advance of the white perambulator pushed by the white-clad nurse, the heads of two little shabbyish, youngish people of the unmistakable Cockney tourist type rose over the edge of a pale sand-crest, fringed with wild chamomile and blazing poppies. And the female, a small draggled young woman in a large hat, trimmed with fatigued and dusty peonies, called out excitedly:

"Oh, William, it's 'er – it's 'er!"

"By Cripps, so it is!" came from the male companion of the battered peonies. He advanced with a swagger that was the unconvincing mask of diffidence assumed by an undersized, lean young man, in the chauffeur's doubtful-weather panoply of black waterproof jacket, breeches merging into knee-boots, the whole crowned with a portentous peaked cap, with absurd brass ventilators, and powdered with many thicknesses and shades of dust. His hair was dusty. The very eyelashes of the honest, ugly light eyes, set wide apart in the thin wedge-shaped, tanned face that the absurd cap shaded, were dusty as a miller's; dust lay thick in all the chinks and creases of his leading features, and a large black smudge of oily grime was upon his wide upper lip, impinging upon his nose. Nor was his companion much less dusty, though the checks of a travelling ulster of green and yellow plaid, adorned with huge steel buttons, would have advertised the Kentish Town Ladies' Drapery Establishment whence they emanated, through the medium of a Fleet Street fog.

"Might we speak to you, ma'am?" The dusty young man respectfully touched the dusty peak of the cap with brass ventilators, and, with a shock of surprise, Lynette recognised Saxham's chauffeur.

"Keyse!.. It is Keyse!" She looked at him in surprise.

"Keyse, ma'am." He touched the cap again, and made a not ungraceful gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red, hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a kind of Beanfeast for Two, we took the notion, being stryngers to South Wyles, of droppin' in 'ere an' tippin' the 'Ow Do." He breathed hard, and rivulets of perspiration began to trickle down from under the preposterous cap, converting the dust that filled the haggard lines of his thin face into mud. "An' payin' our respects." His eye slewed appealingly at his companion, asking as plainly as an eye can, "What price that?" And the glance that shot back from the dusty shadow of the exhausted peonies answered, "Not bad by 'arf – for you!"

Lynette smiled at the little Cockney couple. The surprise that had checked the beating of her heart had passed. It was pleasant to see these faces from Harley Street. She answered:

"I understand. My husband has given you a holiday. Is he well?" She flushed, realising that it was pain to have to ask others for the news of him that he had denied her. "I mean because he has not written… I have been feeling rather anxious. Was he quite well when you left?"

"'Was he – '? Yes, 'm!" W. Keyse shot out the affirmative with such explosive suddenness that the hand upon his arm must have nipped hard.

"I am so glad!" Lynette turned to the young woman in the ulster, whose face betrayed no guilty knowledge of the pinch. She was small, and pale, and gritty, and her blue eyes had red rims to them from the fatigue of the journey, or some other cause. But they were honest and clear, and not unpretty eyes, looking out from a forest of dusty yellowish fringe, deplorably out of curl. Yet a fringe that had associations for Lynette, reaching a long way from Harley Street, and back to the old days at Gueldersdorp before the Siege.

"Surely I know you? I must have known you at Gueldersdorp." She added as Mrs. Keyse's eyes said "Yes": "You used to be a housemaid at the Convent. How strange that I should not have remembered it until now! And your husband… I do not remember ever having seen him before he came to us at Harley Street. But his name comes back to me in connection with a letter" – she knitted her brows, chasing the vague, fleeting memory – "a love-letter that was sent to Miss Du Taine inside a chocolate-box, just when school was breaking up. It was you who smuggled the box in!"

"To oblige, bein' begged to by Keyse as a fyvour. 'E didn't know 'is own mind – them d'ys!" explained Mrs. Keyse, sweeping her husband's scorching countenance with a glance of withering scorn.

"Nor did you," retorted W. Keyse, stung to defiance. "Walkin' out with a Dopper you was – if it comes to that." He spun round, mid-ankle deep in sand, to finish. "An' you'd 'ave bin joined by a Dutch dodger and settled down on a Vaal sheep-farm, if the order 'adn't come 'ummin' along the wire from 'Eadquarters that said, 'Jane 'Arris, you're to 'ave this bloke, and no other. Till Death do you part. Everlasting – Amen!'"

There was so strong a flavour of Church about the final sentence that Mrs. Keyse could not keep admiration out of her eyes.

Her own eyes dancing with mirthful amusement, Lynette looked from one to the other of the unexpected visitors, and, tactfully changing the subject of the conversation, hoped that they were enjoying their trip? – a query which so obviously failed to evoke an expression of pleased assent in either of the small, thin, wearied faces that she hastened to add:

"But perhaps this is the very beginning of your holiday? When did you leave London?"

"Yes'dy mornin' at 'arf-past six," said W. Keyse, carefully avoiding her eyes. A spasm contracted the tired face under the dusty peonies. Their wearer put her hand to the collar of the green-and-yellow ulster, and undid a button there.

"'Yesterday morning at half-past six'!" Lynette repeated in wonder.

"An' if the machine I 'ad on 'ire from a pal o' mine – chap what keeps a second-hand shop for 'em in the Portland Road – 'adn't 'ad everythink 'appen to 'er wot can 'appen to a three-an'-a-'arf 'orse-power Baby Junot wot 'ad seen 'er best d'ys before automobilin' 'ad cut its front teeth," said W. Keyse, with bitterness, "we would 'ave bin 'ere before! As it is, we've left the car at a little 'Temperance Tavern' in S'rewsbury, kep' by a Methodist widder, 'oo thinks such new-fangled inventions sinful – an' only consented to take charge on account o' the Prophet Elijer a-going up to 'Eaven in a fiery chariot – an' come on 'ere by tryne."

Lynette looked at the man in silence. She even repeated after him, rather dully:

"You came on here – by train?"

"Slow Parliamentary – stoppin' at every 'arf-dozen stytions," explained W. Keyse, "for collectors in velveteens and Scotch caps to ask for tickets, plyse? And but that the porter on the 'Erion Down Platform 'ad see you walkin' on the Links, and my wife knoo your dress and the colour of your 'air 'arf a mile 'orf, we'd 'ave lost precious time in finding you, and giving you the – the message what we've come 'ere to bring!"

"From my husband? From Dr. Saxham?"

W. Keyse shifted from one foot to the other, and coughed an embarrassed cough.

"Not exac'ly from Dr. Saxham."

Lynette looked at W. Keyse, and it seemed to her that the little sallow Cockney face had Fate in it. A sudden terror whitened her to the lips. She cried out in a voice that had lost all its sweetness:

"You have deceived me in saying he was well. Something has happened to him! He is very ill, or – ?"

She could not utter the word. Instinctively her eyes went past the stammering man to the woman who hung behind his elbow. And the wearer of the nodding peonies cried out:

"No, no! The Doctor isn't dead – or ill, to call ill!" She turned angrily upon her husband. "See wot a turn you've give 'er," she snapped. "Why couldn't you up and speak out?"

W. Keyse was plainly nonplussed. He took off the giant cap with the brass ventilators, and turned it round and round, looking carefully inside it. But he found no eloquence therein.

"Why did I bring a skirt, I arsk, if I'm to do the patter?" He addressed himself in an audible aside to Mrs. Keyse. "You might as well 'ave stopped at 'ome with the nipper," he added, complainingly, "if I ain't to 'ave no better 'elp than this!"

"You mean kindly, I know." Lynette tried to smile in saying it. "There is trouble that you are here to break to me; I understand that very well. Please tell me without delay, plainly what has happened? I am very – strong! I shall not faint – if that is what you are afraid of?"

She caught her breath, for the woman broke out into dry sobbing and cried out wildly:

"Oh, come back to 'im! Come back, if you're a woman! Gawd, Who made 'im, knows as 'ow 'e can't bear no more! Oh! if my 'art's so wrung by what I've seen him suffer, think what he's bore these crooil weeks an' months!"

The peonies rocked in the gale of Emigration Jane's emotion. Her hard-worked hands went out, entreating for him; her dowdy little figure seemed to grow tall, so impressive was the earnestness of her appeal.

"Him and you are toffs, and me and Keyse are common folks… Flesh and blood's the syme, though, only covered wiv different skins. An' Human Nature's Human Nature, 'owever you fake 'er up an' christen 'er! An' Love must 'ave give an' take of Love, or else Love's got to die! Burn a lamp wivout oil, and see wot 'appens. It goes out! – You're left in the dark!" – Her homely gesture, illustrating the homely analogy, seemed to bring down blackness. Lynette hung speechless upon her fateful lips.

" – Then, like as not, you'll overturn the table gropin'. 'Smashed!' you'll say, 'an' nobody but silly me to blyme! It would 'ave lighted up a 'appy 'ome if I 'adn't been a barmy idiot. It would 'ave showed me the face of my 'usband leanin' to kiss me in our blessed marriage-bed, an' my baby smilin' in its cradle-sleep 'ard by… Oh! – Oh!" – She choked and clutched her bosom, and her voice rose in the throaty screech of incipient hysteria – "An' I've left my own sweet, unweaned boy to come and say these words to you!.. An' the darlin' darlin' fightin' with the bottle they're tryin' to give 'im, and roarin' for 'is mam… And my breasts as 'ard as stones, an' throbbin'!.. Gawd 'elp me!" She panted and fought and choked, striving for speech.

"Keep your hair on!" advised W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper. She turned on him like a tigress, her eyes flaming under her straightened fringe.

"Keep yours! I've come to speak, and speak I mean to – for the sake of the best man Gawd's made for a 'undred years. Bar one, you says, but bar none, says I, an' charnce it! Since the day 'e stood up for you in that Dutch saloon-bar at Gueldersdorp, what is there we don't owe to 'im – you and me, and all the blooming crew of us? And because 'e'll tyke no thanks, 'e gits ingratitude – the dirtiest egg the Devil ever hatched!"

"Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse, awe-stricken by this lofty flight of rhetoric. Ignoring him, she pursued her way.

"You're a beautiful young lydy" – her tone softened from its strenuous pitch – "wot 'ave 'ad a disappyntment, like many of us 'ave at the start. You'd set your 'art on Another One. 'E got killed, an' you married the Doctor – but it's never bin no real marriage. You've ate 'is bread, as the sayin' is, an' give 'im a stone. An' e's beat 'is pore 'art to bloody rags agynst it – d'y after d'y, an' night after night! I seen it, I tell you!" she shrilled – "I seen it wiv me own eyes! You pretty, silly kid! Don't you know wot 'arm you're doing? You crooil byby! do you reckon Gawd gave you the man to torture an' break an' spoil?"

A hand, imperatively clapped over the mouth of Mrs. W. Keyse, stemmed the torrent of her eloquence.

"Dry up! You've said enough," ordered her spouse.

"Do not stop her!" Lynette said, without removing her fascinated eyes from the Pythoness. "Let her tell me everything that she has seen and knows."

"I seen the Doctor – many, many times," the woman went on, as W. Keyse reluctantly ungagged her, "watchin' Keyse and me in our poor 'ome-life together – with the eyes of a starvin' dog lookin' at a bone. You ought to know 'ow starvin' 'urts…" The strenuous voice soared and quivered. "You learned that at Gueldersdorp! Yet you can see your 'usband dyin' of 'unger, an' never put out your 'and! Dyin' for want of a kiss an' a bit o' cuddle – that's the kind o' dyin' I mean – dyin' for what Gawd gives to the very brutes He myde! Seems to you I talk low!.. Well, there's nothink lower than Nature, An' She Goes As 'Igh As 'Eaven!" said Emigration Jane.

The wide, sweeping gesture with which the shabby little woman took in land and sea and sky was quite noble and inspiring to witness. And now the tears were running down her face, and her voice lost its raucous shrillness, and became plaintive, and even soft.

"I'm to tell you everythink I've seen, an' know about the Doctor… I've seen 'im age, age, a bit more every d'y. I've seen 'im waste, waste, with loneliness and trouble – never turnin' bitter on accounts of it – never grudgin' 'elp that 'e could give to man or woman or kid. Late on the night you left 'ome I see 'im come up to your bedroom. 'E switched on the light. 'E forgot the blinds was up. 'E looked round, all 'aggard an' lost an' wild-like, before 'e dropped down cryin' beside the bed."

She sobbed, and dropped on her own knees in the sand among the prickly yellow dwarf roses, weeping quite wildly, and wringing her hands.

"The mornin' found 'im there. Six weeks ago that was; an' every night since then it's bin the syme gyme. Never the blinds left up since that first time, but always light, and his shadow moves about. An' in my bed I wake a-cryin' so, an' don't know which of 'em I'm cryin' for – the lonely shadow or the lonely man – "

She could not go on, and W. Keyse took up the tale.

"She's told you true. Maybe we'd never 'ave come but for the feelin' that things was workin' up to wot the pypers call a Domestic Tragedy. Or at the best the break-up of a 'Ome. That's wot my wife she kep' on stuffin' into me," said W. Keyse. "An' – strewth! when the Doctor sent for me an' pyde me orf … full wages right on up to the end o' the year, an' the syme to Morris an' the 'ouse'old staff, tellin' us e's goin' on a voyage, I s'ys to 'er, 'It's come!'"