The Dop Doctor

"Father, you remember how my mother loved you? And Richard is as dear to me as you were to her. I want words when it comes to speaking of so great a thing as the love I feel for him. But it is my life… I seem to breathe with his breath, and think his thoughts, and speak with his voice, since we found out our secret, and we are each other's for Time and for Eternity." Then she added, with a lovely smile that had a touch of humour in it: "And he will be quite content to take me with only my share of mother's money."

"Tschah!" said the old father. "Nonsense! Of course, St. Barre will be delighted to provide for you. Excuse me … I must go."

St. Barre, in the Castleclare nursery, had set up another squeal.

Thenceforwards the course of true love might have been expected to run smoothly for Lady Bridget-Mary and her gallant lover. But she had reckoned, not without her host, but without her Grey Hussar. In love there is always one who loves the more, and Lady Bridget-Mary, that fine, enthusiastic, tempestuous creature, was far from realising that she was less to her Richard than he was to her. The reason was not farther to seek than a few doors off in London, when the Ladies Bawne occupied their sombre old corner-house in Grosvenor Square. It was Lady Bridget-Mary's dearest Lucy and bosom-friend, who had married that handsome, grey-moustached martinet, Richard's Colonel. In Lady Lucy Hawting's drawing-room Lord Castleclare's elder daughter had met Captain Mildare, the hero of Futtehabad and Ahmed Khel. The Colonel's wife was a pretty, delicate, graceful creature, some three years older than her black-browed handsome friend, and much more learned, as, of course, befitted a married woman, in the ways of the world. And Lady Lucy saw the budding of young passion in the heart of her junior … and it occurred to her that it would furnish a very excellent excuse for the constant presence of Captain Mildare, if …! the sweetest and most limpid women have their turbid depths, their muddy secrets – and she had confided everything to dearest Bridget-Mary, except the one thing that mattered!

Well! We all know for what reason Le Roi Soleil addressed himself to the wooing of La Vallière. Louis fell genuinely in love with the decoy, not quite so Richard. But sometimes, when those proud lips meekly gave back his kisses, and that lofty beauty humbled itself to obey his will, he almost wished that he had never met the other. A day came when the secret orchard he had joyed in with that other was threaded with a golden clue, and the hidden bower unveiled to the cold-eyed staring day.

Captain Mildare and Lady Lucy Hawting went away together, and from Paris Richard wrote and broke to the girl who loved him, and had been his betrothed wife, the common, vulgar, horrible little truth. Bridget-Mary had been deceived by both of them from the very beginning. Estimate the numbing, overwhelming weight of that blow, delivered by a hand so worshipped, upon so proud a heart. Those who saw her, and should have honoured her great grief with decent reticence, say that she was mad for a while; that she grovelled on the earth in her abandonment, calling upon God and man to be merciful and kill her. Pass over this. I cannot bear to think that the mere love of a Richard Mildare should bring that lofty head so low.

While the scandal lived in the mouths of Society, Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne remained unseen. She was pitied – oh, burning, intolerable shame! She was commiserated as a catspaw, and sneered at as a dupe. Her sisters and her stepmother, her father and her seven aunts, her relatives, innumerable as stars in the Milky Way, found infinite relish in the comfortable conviction that every one of them had said from the very outset that Bridget-Mary would regret the step she had taken in engaging herself to that Captain Mildare. Sharp claws of steel were added to her scourge of humiliation by a thousand petty liberties taken with this, her great, sacred sorrow, as by letters of sympathy from friends, who wrote as if she had suffered the loss of a pet hunter, or a prize Persian cat.

A suitor ventured to propose for that white rejected hand, addressing himself with stammering diffidence to Lord Castleclare. A young man, the son of an industrious father who had consolidated the sweat of his brow into three millions and a Peerage, hideously conscious of the raw newness of his title, painfully burdened with the bosom-weight of a genuine, if incoherent love, he seemed to Lady Bridget-Mary's family tolerable, almost desirable, nearly quite the thing…

"He has boiled jam into sweetness for the whole civilised world," said the most influential and awful of Lord Castleclare's seven sisters, a Dowager-Duchess who was Lady-in-Waiting, and exhaled the choicest essence of the Middle Victorian era. She still adhered to the mushroom-shaped straw hats of her youth, trimmed with black velvet rosettes, in the centre of each of which reposed a cut jet button. She went always voluminously clad in black or shot-silk gowns, their skirts so swelled out by a multiplicity of starched cambric petticoats, adorned with tambour-work, that she was credited with the existence of a crinoline. She had, in marrying her now defunct Scots Duke, embraced Presbyterianism, and though her brother believed her, as far as the next world was concerned, to be lost beyond redemption, he entertained for her judgment in the matters of this planet a great esteem.

"He has boiled jam enough to spread over the surface of the civilised globe, and now proposes to hive its concentrated extract for the benefit of our dearest girl, in the shape of a settlement that a Princess of the Blood might envy. I call the whole thing pretty," pronounced the Dowager, "almost romantic, or it might be made to sound so if a person of superior intelligence and tact would undertake to plead for the young man. His terrible title has quite escaped me. Lord Plumbanks? Thank you! It might have been Strawberrybeds, and that would have increased our difficulty. No time should be lost. Therefore, as you, dear Castleclare, with your wife and the boy, who, I am gratified to hear, has cut another, are going to Rome for Holy Week, perhaps you would wish me in your absence to break the ice with Bridget-Mary?"

Lord Castleclare's long, solemn face and arched, lugubrious eyebrows bore no little resemblance to the well-known portrait of the conscientious but unlucky Stuart in whose service his ancestor had shed blood and money, receiving in lieu of both, a great many Royal promises, the Eastern carpet that had belonged to the monarch's Irish oratory, and the fine sard intaglio, brilliant-set, and representing a Calvary, that loyal servant's descendant wore upon his thin ivory middle finger. He twiddled the ring nervously as he said:

"She has gone into Lenten Retreat at a Convent in Kensington. I – arah! – I do not think it would be advisable to disturb salutary and seasonable meditations with – arah! – worldly matters at this present moment."

"Fiddle-faddle!" said the Dowager-Duchess sharply.

Lord Castleclare lifted his melancholy arched eyebrows.

"'Fiddle-faddle,' my dear Constantia?"

"You have the expression!" said she. "Young women of Bridget-Mary's age and temperament will think of marriage in convents as much as outside them. Further, I dread delay, entertaining as I do the very certain conviction that this weak-minded man who has thrown your daughter over will be back, begging Bridget-Mary to forgive him and reinstate him in the possession of her affections before another two months are over our heads. That little cat-eyed, squirrel-haired woman he has run away with, and against whom I have warned our poor dear girl times out of number" – she really believed this – "is the sort of pussy, purring creature to make a man feel her claws, once she has got him. Therefore, although my family may not thank me for it, I shall continue to repeat, 'No time is to be lost!' Still, in deference to your religious prejudices, and although I never heard that the Catholic Church prohibited jam as an article of Lenten diet, we will defer from offering Bridget-Mary the pot until Easter."

But Easter brought the news that Lady Bridget-Mary had decided upon taking the veil, and begged her father not to oppose her wishes. The Dowager-Duchess rushed to the Kensington Convent… All the little straw-mats on the slippery floor of the parlour were swept like chaff before the hurricane of her advancing petticoats as she bore down upon the most disappointing, erratic, and self-willed niece that ever brought the grey hairs of a solicitous and devoted aunt in sorrow to the grave, demanding in Heaven's name what Bridget-Mary meant by this maniacal decision? Then she drew back, for at first she hardly credited that this tall, pale, quiet woman in the plain, close-fitting, black woollen gown could be Bridget-Mary at all. Realising that it could be nobody else, she began to cry quite hysterically, subsiding upon a Berlin woolwork covered sofa, while her niece rang the bell for that customary Convent restorative, a teaspoonful of essence of orange-flower in a glass of water, and returning to the side of her agitated relative, took her hand, encased in a tight one-button puce glove, saying:

"Dear Aunt Constantia, what is the use of crying? I have done with it for good."

"You are so dreadfully changed and so awfully composed, and I always was sensitive. And, besides, to find you like this when I expected you to beat your head upon the floor – or was it against the wall, they said? – and pray to be put out of your misery by poison, or revolver, or knife, as though anybody would be wicked enough to do it …"

A faint stain of colour crept into Lady Bridget-Mary's white cheeks.

"All that is over, Aunt Constantia. Forget it, as I have done, and drink a little of this. The Sisters believe it to be calming to the nerves."

"To naturally calm nerves, I suppose." The Dowager accepted the tumbler. "What a nice, thick, old-fashioned glass!" She sipped. "You hear how my teeth are chattering against the rim. That is because I have flown here in such a hurry of agitation upon hearing from your father that you have decided to enter the Novitiate at once."

"It is true," said Lady Bridget-Mary, standing very tall and dark and straight against the background of the parlour window, that was filled in with ground-glass, and veiled with snowy curtains of starched thread-lace.

"True! When not ten months ago you declared to me that you would not be a nun for all the world… You begged me to befriend you in the matter of Captain Mildare. I undertook, alas! that office…"

The Dowager-Duchess blew her nose.

"A little more of the orange-flower water, dear aunt?"

"'Dear aunt,' when you are trampling upon my very heart-strings! And let me tell you, Bridget-Mary, you have always been my favourite niece. 'For all the world,' you said with your own lips, 'I would not be a nun!' Three millions will buy, if not the world, at least a good slice of it… Figuratively, I offer them to you in this outstretched hand!" The Dowager extended a puce kid glove. "The husband who goes with them is a good creature. I have seen and spoken with him, and the dear Queen regards me as a judge of men. 'Consie,' she has said, 'you have perception…' What my Sovereign credits may not my niece believe?"

Lady Bridget-Mary's black brows were stern over the great joyless eyes that looked out of their sculptured caves upon the world she had bidden good-bye to. But the fine lines of humour about the wings of the sensitive nostrils and the corners of the large finely-modelled mouth quivered a little.

"Drink a little more orange-flower water, dear, and never tell me who the man is. I do not wish to hear. I decline to hear."

The Dowager-Duchess lost her temper.

"That is because you know already, and despise money that is made of jam. Yet coal and beer are swallowed with avidity by young women who have not forfeited the right to be fastidious. That is the last thing I wished to say, but you have wrung it from me. Have you no pride? Do you want Society to say that you have embraced the profession of a Religious, and intend henceforth to employ your talents in teaching sniffy-nosed schoolgirls Greek and Algebra and Mathematics, because this Mildare has jilted you? Again, have you no pride?" She agitated the Britannia-metal teaspoon furiously in the empty tumbler.

Lady Bridget-Mary took the tumbler away. Why should the humble property of the Sisters be broken because this kind, fussy woman chose to upbraid?

"You ask, Have I no pride?" she said. "Why should I have pride when Our Lord is so humble that He does not disdain to take for His bride the woman Richard Mildare has rejected?"

"You are incorrigible, dearest," said the sobbing Dowager-Duchess, as she kissed her, "and Castleclare must use all his influence with the Holy Father to induce the Comtesse de Lutetia to give you the veil. All of you think I am damned, and possibly I may be, but if so I shall be afforded an opportunity (which will not be mine in this life) of giving Captain Mildare a piece of my mind!"

So the Dowager-Duchess melted out of the story, and Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne became a nun.

X

This is what the Mother-Superior wrote to her kinswoman, with her mobile, eloquent lips folded closely together as she thought, and her grave eyes following the swift journey of the pen as it formed the sentences:

"Now let me speak to you of Lynette Mildare. I have never thought it necessary to make the slightest disguise of my great partiality for this, the dearest of all the many children given me by Our Lord since I resigned my crown of earthly motherhood to Him."

She stopped, remembering what another great lady, also a relative of hers, had remarked when it was first made public that she intended to enter the Novitiate:

"Indeed! It would seem, then, that you are devoid of ambition, my dear, unlike the other people of your house."

She had said, paraphrasing a retort previously made:

"Does it strike you as lack of ambition that one of our family should prefer Christ before any earthly spouse?"

What a base utterance that had seemed to her afterwards! How devoid of the true spirit of the religious, how hateful, petty, profane! But the great lady had been greatly struck by it, and had gone about quoting the words everywhere. She, who had spoken them, repented them with tears, and set the memory of them between her and ill-considered, worldly speech, for ever.

She wrote on now:

"She has no vocation for the life of a religious. I doubt her being happy or successful as a teacher here, were I removed from my post by supreme earthly authority, or by death, either contingency being the expression of the Will of God. She has a reserved, sensitive nature, quick to feel, and eager to hide what she feels, indifferent to praise or popularity among the many, anxiously desirous to please, passionately devoted where she gives her love…"

The firm mouth quivered, and a mist stole before her eyes. Being human, she took the handkerchief that lay amongst her papers and wiped the crowding tears away, and went on:

"I could wish, in anticipation of either eventuality named, that provision might now be made for her. Those who love me – yourself I know to be among the number – will not, I feel assured, be indifferent to my wish that she should be placed beyond the reach of want."

She wrote on, knowing that the implied wish would be observed as a command:

"We have never been able to trace any persons who might have been her parents – we have never even known her real name. – Those among whom her childhood was spent called her by none. As you know, I gave her in Holy Baptism one that was our dear dead mother's, together with the surname of a lost friend. She is, and must be always, known as Lynette Mildare."

Her eyes were tearless, and her hand quite steady as she continued:

"You must not be at all alarmed or shaken by this letter. I am perfectly well in health, be quite assured; I trust I may be spared to carry on my work here for many long years to come. But in case it should be otherwise, I write thus:

"The country is greatly disturbed, in spite of the reassuring reports that have been disseminated by the Home Authorities. I do not, and cannot, imagine what the official view may be in London at this moment, but it is certain that the Transvaal and Free State are preparing for war. Every hour the enmity between the Boers and the English deepens in intensity. It will be to many minds a relief when the storm bursts. The War Office may think meanly of the Africanised Dutchman as a fighting force, but the opinion of every loyal Briton in this country is that he is not a foe to be despised, and that he will shed the last drop of his own blood and his children's for the sake of his independence.

"Above the petty interests of greedy capitalists looms the wider question: Shall the Briton or the Dutchman rule in South Africa? Here in this insignificant frontier town we wait the sounding of the tocsin. The Orange Free State has openly allied itself with the Transvaal Government. There are said to be several commandos in laager on the Border. A public meeting of citizens of this town has been held, at which a vote of 'No confidence' in the Dutch Ministers has been passed, and an appeal for help has been made to the Government at Cape Town. It is not yet publicly known what the response has been, if there is any. I think it ominous that all of our Dutch pupils, save one, should have been hurriedly sent for by their parents before the ending of the term. Knowing my responsibility, I am sending all home, except the few who happen to be resident in this town, and the school will remain closed, at all events, until the outlook assumes a less threatening aspect. It is a relief to many that a Military Commandant has been appointed by the authorities at Cape Town, and that he arrived here a week ago. He is reported to be an officer of energy and decision, and as he has already set the troops under his command to work at putting the town into a condition of defence, and is organising the civil male population into a regiment of armed – "

There was a light knock at the door. She responded with the permission to enter, and a tall, slight girl, with red-brown hair, came in and closed the door, dropping her little curtsy to the Mother-Superior. She wore the plain black alpaca uniform of the Convent, with the ribbon of the Headship of the Red Class, to be resigned when she should become a pupil-teacher at the opening of the next term; and the rare and beautiful smile broke over the face of the elder woman as the younger came to her side.

"Are you busy, Reverend Mother? Do you want me to go away?"

"I shall have finished in another five minutes, and then there will be no more letters to write, my child. Sit where you choose; take a book, and be quiet; I shall not keep you waiting long."

The words were few; the Mother-Superior's manner a little curt in speaking them. But where Lynette chose to sit was on the cheap drugget that covered the beeswaxed boards, with her squirrel-coloured hair and soft cheek pressed against the black serge habit.

The Mother-Superior wrote on, apparently absorbed, and with knitted brows of attention, but her large, white, beautiful left hand dropped half unconsciously to the silken hair and the velvet cheek, and stayed there.

There is a type of woman the lightest touch of whose hand is subtler and more sweet than the most honeyed kisses of others. And the Mother-Superior was not liberal of caresses. When Lynette turned her lips to the hand, the face that bent over the paper remained as stern and as absorbed as ever. She went on writing, directed, closed, and stamped her letter, and set it aside under a pebble of white quartz, lined and streaked with the faint silvery green of gold.

"Now, my child?"

The girl said, flushing scarlet:

"Reverend Mother, I have told the Red Class the truth about me!"

The Mother-Superior started; dismay was in her face.

"Why, child?"

"I – I mean" – the scarlet flush gave place to paleness – "that I have no name and no family, and no friends except you, dearest, and the Sisters. That you found me, and took me in, and have kept me out of charity."

"Was it necessary to have told – anything whatever?"

"I think so, Mother, and I am glad now that I have done it. There will be no need for deception any more."

"My daughter, there has never been the slightest deception of any kind whatsoever upon your part, or the part of anyone else who knew. No interests suffered by your keeping your own secret. Who first solicited your confidence in this matter?"

"Greta Du Taine."

"Greta Du Taine." Very cold was the tone of the Mother-Superior. "May I ask how she received the information she had the bad taste to seek?"

"Mother – she took it – not quite as I expected."

"Yet she and you have always been friends, my child."

Lynette rose up upon her knees. The long arm of the Mother-Superior went round the slight figure that leaned against her, and in the sudden gesture was a passion of protecting motherhood.

"Mother, she does not wish to be my friend any longer. She was quite horrified to remember that she had invited me to stay with her at the Du Taine place near Johannesburg. But she said that if I liked she would not tell the class."

"I have no fear of the rest of the class. They have honour, and good feeling, and warm hearts. What was your reply to Greta's obliging proposition?"

"I told her that the sooner everybody knew the better; and I went out of the room, and came to you – as I always do – as I always have done, ever since – "

Her voice broke in the first sob.

"Ah!" cried the voice of the mother-heart she crept to, as the long arms in the loose black serge sleeves went out and folded her close, "ah, if I might be always here for you to run to! But God knows best!"

She said aloud, gently putting the girl away:

"Well, the ordeal is over, and will not have to be gone through again. And for the future, bear in mind that every human being has a right to regard his own business – or hers – as private, and to exclude the curious from affairs which do not concern them." She reached out quick tender hands, and framed the wistful, sensitive face in them, and added, in a lower tone: "For a little told may beget in them the desire to know more. And always remember this: that the only just claim to your perfect confidence in all that concerns your past life, and I say all with meaning" – the girl's white eyelids fell under her earnest gaze, and the delicate lips began to quiver – "will rest in the man – the honourable and brave and worthy gentleman – who I pray may one day be your husband."

"No!" she cried out sharply as if in terror, and the slight figure was shaken by a sudden spasm of trembling. "Oh, Mother, no! Never, never!"

With a gesture of infinite pity and tenderness the Mother drew her close, and hid the shame-dyed face upon her bosom, and whispered, with her lips upon the red-brown hair:

"My lamb, my dearest, my poor, poor child! It shall be never if you choose, Lynette. But make no rash vows, no determinations that you think irrevocable. Leave the future to God. Now dry these dear eyes, and put old thoughts and memories of sorrow and of wrong most resolutely away from you. Be happy, as Our Lord meant all innocent creatures of His to be. And do not be tempted to magnify Greta's offence against friendship. She has acted according to her lights, and if they are of the kind that shine in marshy places, a better Light will shine upon her path one day. I know that you have real affection for her … though I must own I have always wondered in what lay the secret of her popularity in the school?"

"She is so amusing – and so pretty, Mother."

"She is exquisitely pretty. And beauty is one of the most excellent among all the gifts of God. Our sense of what is beautiful and the delight we have in the perception of it must linger with us from those days when Angels walked visibly on earth, and talked with the children of men. A lovely soul in a lovely body, nothing can be more excellent, but such a body does not always cage what St. Columb called 'the bird of beauty.' And we must not be swayed or led by outward and perishable things, that are illusions, and deceits, and snares."