THF
3P DOCTOR
RICHARD ©EMA?
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The Dop Doctor
The Dop Doctor
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By
Richard Dehan ^^hc^otl >
t^l Ary
Toronto
Henry Frowde
191 1
Printed in England
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TO ONE ACROSS THE SEA
What have the long years brought me nnce first, with this pen for
picka,xe, I bowed my loins to quarry from the living rock of my world
abovi me, bread and a home where Love should smile beside the
hearthplace, and chiefly for Love's dear sake, that men should, honour
you who, above all on earth, I hold most in honour — a name among
the writers of books that live ?
What have the long years brought me f Well, not the things I hopad.
Just bread and clothing, fire, and a little roof -tree ; the purchased soil
to make a grave, and a space of leisure, before that grave be needed,
to write, myself, this book for me and for you. Hope has spread her
iridescent Psyche-wings and left me ; Ambition long ago shed hers to
become a working -ant. Love riever came to sit in the chair beside the
ingle. An ocean heaves betveen us, only for nightly dreams and
waking thoughts to span. Were tJiose dear eyes to see me as I am to-day,
I wonder whether they would know me ? For I grow grey, and furrows
deepen in the forehead the dear hand wiU never smooth again. Re-
member me, then, ordy as I used to be ; my heart is the same always ;
in it the long, long years have u/rought no change.
But what have the long years brought me ? Experience, that savoury
salt, left where old tears have dried upon the shares of Time. Knowledge
of my fellow men and women, of all sorts and conditions, and the Love
of them. Patience to bear what may yet have to be borne. Courage
to encounter what may yet Jiave to be encountered. Fortitude to meet
the end, where Faith holds up the Cross. Much liave the long years
brought me — besides your first smile and your last kiss. For your
next, I look past Death, Ood aiding me, to the Eterruil Life beyond. . . ,
South Wales,
J^rU 22, 1909.
2135825 ,
/
Upon a day near the end of August, one long, brilliant
South African winter, when the old Vierkleur waved over
the Transvaal, and what is now the Orange River Colony
was the Orange Free State, with the Dutch canton still
showing on the staff- head comer of its tribarred flag, two
large, heavily-laden waggons rolled over the grass veld, only
now thinking about changing from yellow into green.
Many years previously the wheels of the old voortrekkers
had passed that way, bringing from Cape Colony, with the
household gods, goods and chattels, language and customs
of the Dutch, the slips of the pomegranate and peach and
orange trees, whose abundant blossoming dressed the
orchards of the farms tucked away here and there in the
lap of the veld, with bridal white and pink, and hung their
girdling pomegranate hedges with stars of ruby red. But
days and days, and nights and nights of billowing, spread-
ing, lonely sky- arched veld intervened between each
homestead.
The flat-topped hills were draped and folded in the opal
haze of distance ; the sky was perfect turquoise ; the
rounded kopjes shone hke pink topaz, unclothed as yet with
the young pale green bush. To the south there was a veld
fire leaping and dancing, with swirling columns of white
smoke edged -with flame. But it was many miles away,
and the north-west wind blew strongly, driving some puSs
of gold cloud before it. Perhaps there would be rain ere
long. There had been rain already in the foremost waggon,
not from the clouds, but from human eyes.
The broad wheels crashed on, rolling over the yellow
grass and the dry bushes. Lizards and other creeping
creatures scuttled across their wide tracks. The patient
oxen toiled under the yoke, their dappled nostrils wide-
spread, their great dewy eyes strained and dim with
1
2 THE DOP DOCTOR
weariness. They dumbly wondered why they must labour
in the daytime when all night long they had travelled
■v^dthout rest. The glorious sunrise had flamed in crimson
and gold behind the eastern ranges full five hours before.
They were weary to death, and no dorp or farm was yet in
sight. The Cape boys who tramped, each leading a fore-
ox by the green reim bound about the creature's wide horns,
had no energy left even to swear at their beasts.
The Boer driver was wearied like the ox-team and the
Cape boys. His bestial face was dravrn, and his eyes were
red-rimmed for lack of sleep. The long whip, with the
fourteen-foot stock and the lash of twenty-three feet, had
not smacked for a long time ; the sjambok had not been
used upon the long-suffering wheelers. Huddled up in his
ill-fitting clothes of tan cord, he sat on the waggon-box and
slept, his head nodding, his elbows on his knees. He was
dreaming of the bad Cape brandy that had been in the
bottle, and would be, with luck, again, when the waggon
reached a tavern or a store.
A Kafiir drove the second waggon. It held stores and
goods in bales, and some trunks and other baggage belong-
ing to the Englishman, for you would have set down the
tall, thin, iiigh-featured, reddish-bearded, soft-speaking
man who owned the waggons as English, even though he
had called himself by a Dutch name. The child of
tliree years was his. And his had been the dead body of
the woman lying on the waggon- bed, covered with a new
white sheet, with a stillborn boy baby lying on her
breast.
For this the man who had loved and taken her, and
made her his, had wept such bitter, scalding tears. For
this his dead love, \^-ith Love's blighted bud of fruit upon
her bosom, had given up her world, her friends, her family —
her husband, first and last of all. They had played the
straight game, and gone away openly together, to the
immense scandal of Society that is so wUUng to wink at
tilings done cleverly under the rose. They were to be
married the instant the injured husband obtained his
decree absolute. The State sanctioned the re-marriage
of the divorced if the Churches did not. Their church
ehould thenceforwards be the State. But there W8,s no
THE DOP DOCTOR 3
decree nisi even, the injured husband possessing a legal
heir by a previously-deceased wife. Besides, in a cold way
it gave him pleasure to think of that purpose foiled. He
soon knew that his wife's lover had sold his commission
in the Army, and he learned, later, through a communica-
tion forwarded vhrough a London firm of solicitors, that
although he had chosen to ignore a certain appointment
oHered upon the opposite side of the Channel, the other
man would merely consider it deferred until a suitable
opportunity should occur. Meanwhile the writer was
travelling in South Africa, not alone.
Never to be alone again, she had promised him that not
quite four years ago. And to-day he sat on a box beside
the waggon- bed where she lay dead with her dead boy, and
the only thing left to him that had the dear living fragrance
and sweet warmth of her slept smiling on his knees — their
daughter.
The long fine beard that he had grown swept the soft
flushed cheek of the little creature, and mingled with her
yellow curls. Within the last few hours — hours packed
with the anguish of a lifetime for him — there were sprink-
lings of white upon his high temples, where the hair had
grown thin under the pressvure of the Hussar's furred
busb}'', the khaki-covered helmet of foreign service, or the
forage-cap, before these had given place to the Colonial
smasher of felt, and the silky reddish- brown beard had in it
wide, ragged streaks of grey. He had worshipped the woman
who had given up all for him ; they had lived only for, and in
one another during four wonderful years. Hardly a passing
t\vinge of regret, never a scorpion-sting of remorse, spoiled
their union.
But they never stayed long in any town or even in any
village. Some sound or shape from the old unforgotten
world beyond the barrier, some English voice that had the
indefinable tone and accent of high breeding, some figure
of Englishman or Englishwoman whose rough, careless
clothing had the unmistakable cut of Bond Street, some
face recognised under the grey felt or the white Panama,
would spur them to the desue of leaving it behind them.
Then the vahses would be repacked, the oxen would be
hastily inspanned, and their owners would start again upon
1—2
4 THE DOP DOCTOR
that never-ending Journey in search of something that the
woman was to be the first to find.
At last, when the sun was high and the worn-out beasts
were almost sinking, a group of low buildings came in sight
a few miles away beyond a kloof edged with a few poplar-
like trees and the kameelthom. A square, one-storey
house of corrugated iron, with a mud-walled hovel or two
near it, had a sprawling painted board across its front,
signifying that the place was the Free State Hotel.
Behind it were an orchard and some fields under rude
cultivation, and a quarter of a mile to the north were the
native kraals.
At the sight the Boer shook himself fully awake, and
sent the long lash cracking over the thin, sweat-drenched
backs of the ox-team. They laboured with desperation at
the yoke, and the waggon rumbled on.
The Englishman, hidden with his sorrow under the
canvas waggon-tilt, roused himself at the accelerated
motion. He rose, and, holding the sleeping child upon one
arm, pushed back the front flap and looked out. He spoke
to the taciturn driver, who shook his head. How did he,
Smoots Beste, know whether a minister of the Church of
England, or even a Dutch predikant, was to be found at
the place beyond ? All he hoped for was that he would be
able to buy there tobacco and brandy cheap, and sleep
drunken, to wake and drink again.
The waggon halted on the brink of the kloof. Little
birds of gay and brilliant plumage, blue and crimson and
emerald-green, rose in flocks from the bush and grasses that
clothed the sides of the coomb ; the hollows were full of the
tree-fern ; the grass had little white and purple flowers in it.
At the valley-bottom a little stream, that would be a river
after the first rains, wimpled over sandstone boulders, the
barbel rose at flies. There was a drift lower down. It was
all the goaded, worn-out oxen could do to stay the huge
creaking waggons down the steep bank, and drag them over
the river-bed of sand and boulders, through the muddied,
churned-up water that they were djdng for, yet not allowed
to taste, and toil with them up the farther side.
The Englishman was not cruel. He was usually humane
and merciful to man and beast, but just now he was deaf
THE DOP DOCTOR 5
and blind. Beside him there was her corpse, beyond him
was her grave, beyond that . . .
Both he and she, in that world that lay beyond the
barrier had observed the outward forms of Christianity.
They had first met in the Park, one May morning, after a
church parade. They sat on a couple of green-painted
chairs while Society, conscious of the ever-present news-
paper-reporter, paraded past them in plumage as gorgeous
as that of the gay-coloured birds that flocked among the
tree-fern or rose in frightened clouds as the waggons crashed
by. And they discussed — together ^nth the chances of the
runners entered for the second Spring Meeting at New-
market, and the merits of the problem play, and the newest
farcical comedy — the Immortality of the Soul.
She wore a brown velvet gown and an ostrich-feather boa
in delicate shades of cream and brown, and a cavalier hat
with sweeping white plumes. Her hair was the colour of
autumn leaves, or a squirrel's back in the sunshine, and she
had grey eyes and piquant, irregular features, ears like
shells, and a dehcate, softly-tinted skin undefiled by cos-
metics. She thought it wicked to doubt that one waked
up again after dying. Somewhere — a vague Somewhere,
with all the nice people of one's set about one. He said
that Agnosticism and all that kind of thing was bad form.
Men who had religion made the best soldiers. Like the
Presbyterian Highlanders of the Black Watch and the
" Royal Irish " Catholics — but, of course, she knew that.
And she said yes, she knew ; meeting his admiring eyes with
her own, that were so grey and sweet and friendly, the
little gloved hand that held the ivory and gold- bound
Church Service lying in her lap. He longed to take that
little white, delicate hand. Later on he took it, and a Uttle
later the heart that throbbed in its pulses, and the frail,
beautiful body out of which the something that had been
she had gone with a brief gasping struggle and a long
shuddering sigh. . . .
He kept the beloved husk and shell of her steady on the
waggon- bed with one arm thrown over it, and held the
awakened, fretting child against his breast with the other,
as the sinking oxen floundered up the farther side of the
kloof. Amidst the shouting and cursing of the native
« THE DOP DOCTOR
voor-loopera and the Boer and Kaffir drivers, the rain of
blows on tortured, struggling bodies, and the creaking of
the teak-built waggon- frames, he only heard her weakly
asking to be buried properly in some churchyard, or
cemetery, with a clergyman to read the Service for the
Dead.
Before his field-glass showed him the sprawling hotel-sign
he had hoped that the buildings in sight might prove to
mask the outskirts of a native village with an English
missionary station, or a Dutch settlement important enough
to own a corrugated iron Dopper church and an oak-scrub-
hedged or boulder- dyked graveyard, in charge of a pastor
whose loathing of the Briton should yield to the mollifying
of poured-out gold.
But Fate had brought him to this lonely veld tavern.
He watched it growing into ugly, sordid shape as the
waggon drew nearer. To this horrible place, miscalled
the Free State Hotel — a mere jumble of corrugated-iron
buildings, wattle and mud-walled stables for horses, and
a barbed - wire waggon - enclosure — he had brought his
beloved at the end of their last Journey together. He
shuddered at the thought.
The waggons were baited and outspanned before the
tavern. The drivers went in to get drink, and Bough, the man
who sold it, leaving the women to serve them, came forth. He
ordinaril}' gave himself out as an Afrikander. You see in
him a whiskered, dark-complexioned, good-looking man
of twenty-six, but looking older, whose regard was either
insolent or cringing, according to circumstances, and whose
smile was an evil leer. The owner of the waggons stood
waiting near the closed- up foremost one, the yellow-haired
child on his arm. He looked keenly at the landlord.
Bough, and the man's hand went involuntarily up in the
salute, to its owner's secret rage. Did he vtant every
English officer to recognise him as an old deserter from the
Cape Mounted Police ? Not he — and yet the cursed habit
stuck. But he looked the stranger squarely in the face
with that frank look that masked such depth of guile, and
greeted him with the simple manner that conceaJed so
much, and the English officer lifted his left hand, as though
it raised a sword, and began to talk. Presently Bough
THE DOP DOCTOR 7
called someone, and a smart, slatternly young woman
came out and carried the child, who leaned away from hei
rouged face, resisting, into the house.
The English traveller would take no refreshment. He
needed nothing but to know of a graveyard and men to dig
a grave, and a minister or priest to read the Burial Service.
He would pay all that was asked. He learned that the
nearest village- town might be reached in three days' trek
across the veld, and that the landlord did not know whether
it had a pastor or not.
Three days' trek ! He waved the twinkling-eyed, curious
landlord back, and went up into the foremost waggon,
dravtang the canvas close. He faced the truth in there, and
realized with a throe of mortal anguish that the burial must
be soon — very soon. To prison what remained of her in a
hastily knocked-together coffin, and drag it over the veld,
looking for some plot of consecrated earth to put it in, was
desecration, horror. He would bury her, and fetch the
minister or clergyman or priest to read prayers. Later, if
it cost him all he had, the spot should be consecrated for
Christian burial. He came forth from the waggon and
held parley with the landlord of the tavern. There was a
wire-fenced patch of sandy red earth a hundred yards from
the house, a patch Avherein the white woman who was
mistress at the tavern had tried to grow a few common
English flower-seeds out of a gaily-covered packet left by
a drummer who had passed that way. She had grown
tired of the trouble of watering and tending them, so that
some of them had withered, and the lean fowls had flown
over the fence and scratched the rest up.
• That patch of sandy earth brought a handsome price,
paid down in good English sovereigns — the coinage that is
welcome in every corner of the earth, save among the
scattered islands of the Aleutian Archipelago, where gin,
toba.cco, and coffee are more wilhngly taken in exchange
for goods or souls.
The Englishman was business-like. He fetched pen and
ink and paper out of that jealously closed-up waggon, drew
up the deed of sale, and had it witnessed by the Boer
driver and the white woman at the hotel.
Ho had made up his mind. He would bury her, since it
8 THE DOP DOCTOR
must be, and then fetch the clergyman. Knowing him
on the road, or returning to the fulfilment of his promise,
she would not mind lying there unblessed and waiting for
six lonely days and nights. He whispered in her deaf ears
how it was going to be, and that she could not doubt him.
He swore — not dreaming how soon he should keep one
vow — to visit the grave often, often, with his child and
hers, and to lie there beside her when kind Death should
call him too.
Then he left her for a moment, and sent for the Kaffir
driver and the Boer to come, and, with him, dig her
grave. . . .
But Smoots Beste was already in hog-paxadise, lying
grunting on a bench in the bar, and the Kaffir had gone to
the kraals with the Cape boys. The English officer looked
at the rowdy landlord and the loafing men about the
tavern, and made up his mind. No hands other than his
own should prepare a last bed for her, his dearest.
So, all through the remainder of the long day, streaming
and drenched with perspiration, which the cold wind dried
upon him, he wrought at a grave for her with spade and pick.
It should be deep, because of the wild-cat and the hungry
Kaffir dogs. It should be wide, to leave room for him. The
ground was hard, with boulders of ironstone embedded in
it. What did that matter ? All the day through, and all
through the night of wind-driven mists and faint moonlight,
he wrought Hke a giant possessed, whilst his child, lulled
with the condensed milk and water, in which biscuits had
been sopped, lay sleeping in the tavern upon a little iron bed.
He had had the waggon brought close up to the wired
enclosure. All the time he worked he kept a watch upon
it. Did claws scrape the wide wheels or scurrjdng feet
patter across the shadows, he left off work until the vora-
cious creatures of the night were driven away.
The pale dawn came, and the east showed a lake of
yellow. . . . When the great South African sun rose and
flooded the veld with miraculous liquid ambers and flam in g,
melted rubies, the deep, wide grave at last was done.
He climbed out of it by the waggon ladder, struggling
under the weight of the last great basketful of stones and
THE DOP DOCTOR 9
Bandy earth. He dumped that down by the graveside, and
went to the waggon and removed all stains of toil, and
then set about making the last toilette of the beautiful
woman who had so loved that everything that touched her
should be pure, and dainty, and sweet.
He had dressed her sUken, plentiful, squirrel-brown hair
many times, for the sheer love of its loveliness. With
what care he now combed and brushed and arranged the
perfumed locks ! He laid reverent kisses on the sealed
eyelids that his own hands had closed for ever ; he whis-
pered words of passionate love, vows of undying gratitude
and remembrance, in the shell-like ears. He bathed
with fresh water and reclad in fragrant linen the exquisite
body, upon which faint discolouring patches already
heralded the inevitable end. When he had done, he
swathed her in a sheet, and fetched a bolt of new white
canvas from the store-waggon, and lined the grave with
that.
And then he placed a narrow mattress in it, and freshly
covered pillows, and brought her from the waggon, and to
the grave, and carried her down the light wooden ladder,
and laid her in her last earthly home, with a kiss from the
lips that had never been her husband's. It was so cruel
to think of that. It was so hard to cover up the cold,
sweet face again, but he did it, and lapped the sheet over
her and brought the canvas down. Remained now to fill
in her grave and fetch the man whose mouth should speak
over it the words that are of God.
But first — fill in the grave.
The cold sweat drenched him at the thought of heaping
back those tons of earth and stone above her, crushing
with a frightful weight of inert matter the bodily beauty
that he adored. He felt as though her soul hovered about
him, wailing to him not to be so cruel, tugging at his gar-
ments with imploring, impalpable hands.
The thing must be done, though, before the sordid life
stirred again under the roof of the tavern, before the vulgar
faces, with their greedy, prying eyes, should be there to
snigger and spy.
He loaded a great basket with fine gravelly sand, and
carried it down and laid it on her by handfuls. What
10 THE DOP DOCTOR
were his livid, parched lips muttering ? Over and over,
only this :
" Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . ."
Soon the white swathed-up form was hidden with the
sandy gravel. That was a terrible pang. It wrenched
the first groan from him, but he worked on.
More and more of the sandy gravel, but for precaution the
stones must lie above. Should the voracious creatures of
the night come, they must find the treasure in impregnable
security. That thought helped him to lay in the first,
and the second, and then greater and greater stones. He
was spent and breathless, but still he laboured. He
tottered, and at times the tavern and the veld, and the
waggons on it, and the flat-topped distant mountains that
merged in the horizon, swung round him in a wild, mad
dance. Then the warm salt taste of blood was in his
mouth, and he gasped and panted, but he never rested
until the grave was filled in.
Then he built up over it an oblong cairn of the iron-
stone boulders, made a rude temporary cross out of a spare
waggon- pole, working quite methodically with saw and
hammer and nails, and set it up, under the curious eyes he
hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt
down stifBy, and made, with rusty, long unpractised fingers,
the sacred sign upon his face and breast. He heard her
still, asking him in that nearly extinguished voice of hers,
to pray for her.
* « • • •
"Dicky! . . ."
Ah ! the tragedy of the foolish little nickname, faltered
by stifiening lips upon the bed of death !
" Catholics pray for the souls of dead people, don't
they ? Pray for mine by-and-by. It will comfort me to
know you are praying, darling, even if God is too angry
with us to hear !"
He held her to his bursting heart, groaning.
" If He is angry, it cannot be with you. The sin was
mine — all mine. He must know !"
Later she awakened from a troubled sleep to murmur :
" Richard, I dreamed of Bridget-Mary. She was all
in black, but there was white linen about her face and neck,
THE DOP DOCTOR H
and it was dabbled dreadfully with blood." The \Teak,
slight body shuddered in his embrace. " She said our
wickedness had brought her death, but that she would
plead for us in Heaven."
" She is not dead, my beloved ; I heard of her before
we left Cape Colony. She has taken the veil. She is well,
and will be happy ki her religion, as those good women
always are."
" I was not one of those good women, Richard "
He strained her to him in silence. She panted presently :
" You might have been happy — with her — if I had
never come between you !"
He found some words to tell her that these things were
meant to be. From the beginning . . .
" Was it meant that I should die on these wHd, wide,
desolate plains, and leave you, Richard ?"
He cried out frantically that he would die too, and
follow her. Her djing whisper fluttered at his lips :
" You cannot ! ^Think '.—the chUd !"
He had forgotten the child, and aow, with a great
stabbing pang, remembered it. She asked for it, and he
brought it, and she tried to kiss it ; and even in that Death
foiled her, and her head fell back and her eyes rolled up,
and she died.
He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer,
without which she could not have borne to have him
leave her.
The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door
to see him praying — a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling
there in the face of day.
But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have
dared to Jeer at openly. Too rich, with all that money in
the valise in the locked-up waggon-chest ; too strong, with
that sharp hunting-knife, the Winchesteif repeating-rifle,
and the revolver he carried at his hip.
" Our Father Who art in Heaven. ..."
He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there
was no One beyond the burning blue vault of ether Who
heard . . . and yet, for her sake, supposing, after all
some great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even
now. . , .
12 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Hallowed he Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. . . ."
And if it came, should those have any part in it who had
lived together unwed in open sin ?
" Thy Will he done on earth as it is in Heaven. . . .*'
The words stuck in his dried throat. Be done, that Will
that left him desolate and laid her away, a stiU fair, fast-
corrupting thing, under the red earth and the great iron-
stone boulders !
" Give lis this day our daily bread. ..."
Her love, her presence, her voice, her touch, had been the
daily bread of life to him, her fellow-sinner Oh, how many
base, sordid, loveless marriages had not that illicit bond of
theirs put to shame ! And yet as a boy he had learned the
Seventh Commandment: "Thoushalt not commit adultery."
Had she not believed all along that the price of such sweet
sinning must be paid, if not in this life, then in the life
hereafter, and could it — could it be that her soul was even
now writhing in fires unquenchable, whither he, who would
have gladly died in torment to save her from outrage or
death, had thrust her ?
" Forgive us our trespasses. ..."
Man of Sorrows, pitjdng Son of Mary, before Whom
the Scribes and Pharisees brought the woman taken in
adiiltery, forgive her, pardon her ! If a soul must writhe in
those eternal fires they preach of, in justice let it be mine !
Thou Who didst pity that woman of old time, standing
white and shameful in the midst of the evil, Jeering crowd,
with the wicked fingers pointiag at her, say to this other
woman, lifting up Thyself before her terrified, desperate
soul, confronted with the awf xil mystery that lies behind the
Veil . . .
" Neither do I condemn thee. ..."
And do with me what Thou wilt !
The ragged, wUd-eyed man who had been kneeling rigid
and immovable before the wooden symbol reared upon the
new-raised cairn of boulders swayed a Httle. His bead fell
forward heavily upon his breast. His eyes closed in spite
of his desperate effort to shake off the deadly, sickening
coUapse of ^^ill and brain and body that was mastering
him. He fell sideways, and lay in a heap upon the ground.
THE DOP DOCTOR 13
n
They went to him, and took up and carried him into the
tavern, and laid him down upon a frowzy bed in the room
where the child lay upon the iron-framed cot.
He lay there groaning in the fierce clutches of rheumatic
fever. They tended him in a rude way. A valise and an
iron-bound leather lady's trunk had been brought from
the waggon by his orders, and set in the room where he was
in his sight. These contained her clothes and jewels, and
he guarded them Jealously even in delirium. About his
wasted body was buckled a heavy money-belt. Bough
could feel that when he helped the woman of the tavern to lift
the patient. He winked to her pleasantly across the bed.
But the time was not ripe yet. They must wait awhile.
The English traveller was not always delirious. There
were intervals of consciousness, and though he seemed at
death's door, who knew ? That strong purpose of his
might even yet lift him from the soiled and comfortless bed,
and send him on the trek again. Meanwhile the oxen were
hired out to work for a farmer fifty miles away. That was
called sending them to graze and gain strength for more
work ; and there was the keep of two Cape boys, and the
Kaffir and the Boer driver, and the cost of nursing and sick
man's diet, and the care of the child. A heavy bill of
charges was mounting up against the English traveller.
Much of what the belt contained would honestly be
Bough's.
There was no doctor and no medicine save the few drugs
the sick man had carried, as all travellers do. The milk
for which he asked for himself and the child, which was
procured from the native cattle-kraals for a tikkie a pint,
and for which Bough charged at the price of champagne,
kept him alive. Broth or eggs he sickened at and turned
from, and, indeed, the one was greasy and salt, the others
of appalling mustiness. He would regularly swallow the
tabloids of quinine or lithia, and fall back on the hard,
coarse piUow, exhausted by the mere effort of unscrewing
the nickel-cap of the Uttle phial, and tell himself that he was
getting stronger. Sometimes he really was so, and then the
14 THE DOP DOCTTOR
child sat on his wide hollow chest, at.tl played with the
beard that was now aU grey and unkempt and matted,
until some word in her baby prattle, some look of wondering
inquiry in the innocent eyes, golden-hazel and black-lashed,
like his owti. that were almost too beautiful to be a man's,
people used to say, like the weak, passionate, gentle mouth
under the heavy moustache, would bring back all the
anguish of his loss, and waken anew that torturing voice
that accused him of being false to his compact with the
dead. Then he would call, and send the cliild away, borne
in the arms of the Hottentot chambermaid to breathe the
fresh air upon the veld. And, left alone, he would draw up
the rough sheets over his head, \\dth gaunt clutching fingers,
and weep, though sometimes no tears came to moisten
his haggard, staring eyes.
One night, wliile the fiat gold hunting- watch ticked above
his head in the little embroidered chamois-leather pouch
dead hands had worked, Knowledge came to him with a
sudden rigor of the muscles of the wasted body, and a burst-
ing forth from every pore of the dank, dark-hued sweat of
coining dissolution.
He was not ever going to get well, and fetch the clergyman
to pray over and bless her resting-place. He was going to
die and lie beside her there, under the red earth topped by
the boulder-cairn. He smiled. What an easy solution of
the problem ! He had been too intent upon gratifying her
last desire to entertain for a moment the thought of suicide.
He had always held self-destruction as the last resource of
the coward and the criminal, and besides there was the
child.
The child ! . . .
With a pang of dread and terror unfclt by him before, he
raised his gaunt head with an effort from the uneasy pillow,
and looked towards where she lay, with staring, haunted
eyes. The window was open a little way at the top, and
for fear of the night-cliill his fine leopard-skin kaross had
been spread over her. . . . One dimpled, rounded, bare
arm lay upon the soft dappled fux, the babyish fingers
curli^d one upon the other. Rosy human tendrils that
shoTild never twine again in a mother's hair. Her child,
her daughter ! . . . Born of her body, sharing her nature
THE DOP DOCTOR 15
and her sex, soon to be orphaned For he who could not
even lift himself from bed, and drag his body across the
floor to cover that lovely babyish arm, would soon be no
better protector than the restless ghost that tugged at his
heart with its unseen hands. He knew now why it could
not rest.
What would become of the child ? Another fiery
scourge, wielded by the Hand Unseen, bit deep into his
shrinking conscience, into his writiiing soul His own act
had brought this about. Be a cur, and accuse Destiny,
blame Fate, lay the onus upon God, as so many defaulters
do — he could not. He laj' looking his deed in the foul face
until the dawn crept up the sky, and learning how it may
be that the sins of their fathers are visited on the children.
He called for ink and paper as soon as the house was
awake, and with infinite labour and many pauses to recover
spent strength and breath, for he was greedy of life now,
for the reason that we know — he wrote a letter home to
England, to a relative who was the head of his family, and
bore a great historic title — so great that those who spelled
it out upon the envelope were half afraid to slip the heated
knife under the crested seal. But Bough did it, and opened,
and read.
It was not going to be the soft snap he had thought, but
it would be good enough. Wires might be pulled from
Downing Street that would set the Government at Cape
Town working to trace the tall thin Englishman who had
travelled up with two waggons from Cape Colony in the
company of a child and the woman now dead, and for
whose sake he had given up those almighty swell con-
nections. What a fool — what a thundering, juicy, damned
fool the man had been ! whose gaunt eyes were even now
making out the landfall of Kingdom Come through the
gathering mists of death.
The letter worried Bough. To have the English Grovem-
ment smelling at your heels is no joke, thought he. Any
moment the mastiif may grip, and then, if you happen
to be an ex-convict and deserter from their Colonial Police,
and supposing you have one or two other little things
against you . . . the most honest of speculators being occa-
sionally compelled to dirty his hands, if only to tone down
16 THE DOP DOCTOR
those immaculate extremities to something approaching
the colour of other people's — then what becomes of the
risky but profitable business of gun-running from the
English ports through to the Transvaal ?
For by men like Bough and his associates vast supplies
of munitions tod engines of war were wormed through.
The machine-guns in carefully numbered parts came
in cases as " agricultural implements," the big guns
travelled in the boilers of locomotives, the empty cases of
the shells, large and small, were packed in piano-cases, or
in straw-filled crates as " hardware " ; the black powder and
the cordite and the lyddite came in round wooden American
cheese-boxes, with a special mark ; and the Mauser cart-
ridges were soldered in tins like preserved meat. How
handsomely that business paid only Bough and his merry
men, and Oom Paul and his burghers of the Volksraad,
knew.
But Her Majesty's Government, bound about with red-
tape, hoodwinked by Dutch Assistant-Commissioners of
British Colonies, and deceived by traitorous English
ofQcials, were blind and deaf to the huge traffic in arms and
munitions. Not that there were no warnings. To the
very end they were shouted in deaf ears.
What of that letter sent from the Resident Commis-
sioner's office at Gueldersdorp, that little frontier hamlet on
the north-east comer of British Baraland, September 4,
1899, little more than a month before the war broke out,
the war that was to leave Britain and her Colonies bleeding
at every vein ?
The Boers were in laager over the Border. A desperate
appeal for help had been made to the Powers that were, and
the reply received to the now historic telegram, through the
Resident Commissioner, has equally become a matter of
history.
" All that was possible " was being done by the Imperial
authorities. His Excellency assured the inquirer, to safe-
guard the lives and property of the inhabitants of the Gold-
Reef Town in the event of an attack by a hostile force.
Also the military armament of the place was about to be
materially increased.
THE DOP DOCTOR 17
And yet up to the little frontier town upon which so
much depended not a single modem gun had been
despatched.
An easy prey had the little town upon the flat-topped
hill, set in the middle of a basin, proved to the Boer General
and his commandos but for one thing. For weeks after the
bursting of the first shell over Gueldersdorp three sides of
the beleaguered town were so many open doors for the
enemy. Only upon the threshold of each door stood Fear,
and guarded and held the citadel.
m
That hard taskmaster, Satan, is sometimes wonderfully
indulgent to those who serve him well. While Bough, the
keeper of the tavern, was yet turning about the open letter
in his thick, short, hairy hands, weighing the chances
attending the sending of it against the chances of keeping
it back, the woman who served as mistress of the place
thrust her coarsely-waved head of yellow bleached hair
and rouge-ruddled face in at the room door, and called to
him :
" Boss, the sick toff is doing a croak. Giving up the
ghost for all he's worth — he is. Better come and take a
look for yourself if you don't believe me."
Bough swore with relief and surprise, delayed only to lock
away the letter, and went to take a look. It was as he
hoped, a real stroke of luck for a man who knew how to
work it.
Richard Mildare — ^for Bough knew now what had been
the name of the Englishman : Captain the Hon. Richard
Mildare, late of the Grey Hussars — was dead. No hand
made murderous by the lust of gold had helped him to his
death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggra-
vated cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating
struggle, one brief final pang, he had gone to Join her he
loved. But his dead face did not look at rest. There was
some reflection in it of the terror that had come upon him
in the watches of th»t last night.
3
18 THE DOP DOCTOR
Bough stayed some time alone in the room of death.
When he came out he was extremely affable and gentle.
The woman, who knew him, chuckled to herself when he
met the Kafiir serving-maid bringing back the child from
an airing in the sim, and told her to take it to the mistress.
Then he went into the bar-room to speak to the English-
man's Boer driver.
Leaning easily upon the zinc-covered counter he spoke
to the man in the Taal, with which he was perfectly
familiar :
" Your Baas has gone in, as my wife and I expected."
Smoots Beste growled in his throat :
" He was no Baaa of mine, the verdoemte rooinek ! I
drove for him for pay, that is all. There is wage owing mo
still, for the matter of that — and where am I to get it now
that the heathen has gone to the burning V
Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly
got drunk, not only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt
virtuously certain that the Englishman had gone to Hell.
Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad
Cape brandy, and pushed it across the counter
" You shall get the money, every tikkie. Only listen
to me."
Smoots Beste tossed off the fiery liquid, and returned in
a tone less surly :
" I am listening, Baas."
Said Bough, speaking with the thickish lisp and slurring
of the consonants that distinguished his utterance
when he sought to appear more simple and candid than
usual :
" This dead toff, with his flash waggon and fine team, and
Winchester repeating-rifles, had very little money. He has
died in my debt for the room and the nursing, and tht;
good nourishment, for which I trusted him all these threu
weeks, and I am a poor man. The dollars I have paid you
and the Kaffir and the Cape boys on his account came out
of my own pocket. Rotten soft have I behaved over him,
that's the G<:)d'8 truth, and when I shall get back my own
there's no knowing. But, 'of course, I shall act square."
The Boot's thick lips parted in a grin, showing his dirty,
greenish-yellow teeth. He scratched his shaggy head, and
THE DOP DOCTOR 19
said, his tongue lubricated to incautiousness by the potent
liquor :
" The waggons, and the oxen, and the guns and ammu-
nition, and the stores in the second waggon are worth
good money. And the woman that is dead had jewels— I
have seen them on her — diamonds and rubies in rings and
bracelets fit for the vtouw of King Solomon himself. The
Englishman did not bury them with her under that
verdoemte kopje that he built with his two hands, and
they are not in the boxes in the living-waggon."
" Did he not ?" asked Bough, looking the Boer driver
full in the face with a pleasant smile. " Are they not ?"
Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-
room, looked up at the ceC^ag, down at the floor, anywhere
but into Bough's. He spat, and said in a much more
docUe tone :
"■ What do you want me to do ?"
Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially :
" Just this, friend. I want you to inspan, and take one
of the waggons up to Gueldersdorp, with a letter from me
to the Civil Commissioner. I will tell him how the man
is dead, and he will send down a magistrate's clerk to put a
seal on the boxes and cases, and then he will go through
the letters and papers in the pocket-book, and write to
the people of the dead man over in England, supposing he
has any, for 1 have heard him tell my wife there was not
a living soul of his name now, except the child "
" But what good will all this do you and me, Baas ?"
asked the Boer subserviently.
Bough spresid his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
" Why, when the magistrates and lawyers have hunted
up the man's family, there wiU be an order to sell the
waggons and oxen and other property to pay the expenses
of his burying, and the child's ke^p here and passage from
Cape Town, if she is to be sent to England . . . and what is
left over, see you, after the law expenses have been paid,
wUl go to the settlement of our just claims. They will
never let honest men suffer for behaving square, sure no,
they'll not do that !"
But though Bough's words were full of faith in the fait
dealing of the lawyers and magistrates, his tone implied doubt.
2—2
20 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Boer lawyers are slim rogues at best, and Engelsch
lawyers are duyvels as well as rogues," said Smoots Beste,
with a dull flash of originality.
Bough nodded, and pushed another glass of liquor across
the bar.
" And that's true enough. I've a score to settle with
one or two of 'em. By gum ! I call myself lucky to be in
this with a square man like you. There's the waggon,
brand-new — you know what it cost at Cape Town — and the
team, I trust you to take up to Gueldersdorp, and who's to
hinder a man who hasn't the fear of the Lord in him from
heading north-east instead of north-west, selling the
waggon and the beasts at Kreilstad or Schoenbroon, and
living on a snug farm of your own for the rest of your
life under another man's name, where the English magis-
trates and the police will never find you, though their
noses were keener than the wild dogs ?"
" Alamachtig !" gasped Smoots Beste, rendered breath-
less by the alluring, tempting prospect. Surely the devil
spoke with the voice of the tavern-keeper Bough, when, in
human form, he tempted children of men. Sweat glistened
on Smoots' flabby features, his thick hands trembled, and
his bowels were as water. But his purpose was solidifying
in his brain as he said innocently, looking over Bough's left
shoulder at the wooden partition that divided ofi the bar
from the landlord's dwelling-room :
" Aye, I am no dirty schelm that cannot be trusted.
Therefore would it not be better if I took both teams and
waggons, and all the rooinek's goods with me up to
Gueldersdorp, and handed it over to the Engelsch landrost
there ?"
The fish was hooked. Bough said, steadily avoiding
those twirling eyes :
" A good notion, but the lawyer chaps at Gueldersdorp
will want to look at the Englishman's dead body to be able
to satisfy his people that he did not die of a gunshot, or of
a knife-thrust ; we must bury him, of course, but not too
deep for them to dig him up again. And they will want
to ferret in all the comers of the room where he died, and
make sure that his bags and boxes have not been tampered
with — and then there is the cMld. In a way " — he spoke
THE DOP DOCTOR 21
slowly and apologetically — " the kid and the goods are
my security for getting my own back again — if ever I do.
So you wiU inspan one of the waggons — the best if you like,
with a team of six beasts, and you will trek up to Guelders-
dorp— you will travel light enough with only the grub you
will need, and the Cape boys, and you will hand over the
letter to the Resident Magistrate, and bring back the man
who will act as his deputy."
But at this point Smoots Beste set down his splay foot.
He would undertake to deliver the letter, but he objected
to the company of the coloured voor-loopers or the Kaffir
driver. He was firm upon that and, finding his most
honeyed persuasions of no avail, Bough said no more. He
would pay off the niggers and dismiss them, or get rid of
them without paying ; there were ways and means. He
sent up country, and the team came down, six thin, over-
worked creatures, with new scars upon their slack and
baggy hides, and hoUow flanks, and ribs that showed
painfully. Smoots Beste was about to grumble, but he
changed his mind, and took the letter, buttoning it up in
the flapped pocket of his tan-cord Jacket, and the long whip
cracked like a revolver as the lash hissed out over the backs
of the wincing oxen, and the white tUt rocked over the
veld, heading to the nor'-west.
" When wHl the Dutchy be back, boss ?" asked the
woman, with a knowing look.
Bough played the game up to her. He answered quite
seriously : " In three weeks' time."
Then he strolled out, smoking a cigar, his hat tilted at
an angle that spoke of satisfaction. His walk led him past
the oblong cairn of ironstone boulders in the middle of
the sandy patch of ground enclosed with zinc wire-netting.
At the foot of the cairn was a new grave.
For the lover did not even lie beside his beloved, as he
had vowed once, promised and plarmed, but couched below
her feet, waiting, like some faithful hound that could not
live without the touch of the worshipped hand, for the
dead to rise again.
Why is it that Failure is the inevitable fate of some men
and women ? Despite brilliant prospects, positions that
seem assured, commanding talents nobly used, splendid
22 THE DOP DOCTOR
opportunities that are multiplied as though in mockery,
the result is Nothing from first to last ; while the bad
flourish and the evil prosper, and the world honours the
stealer of the fruit of the brains that have been scattered in
frenzied despair, or have become so worn out from the
constant effort of creation that the worker has sunk into
hopeless apathy and died.
Bough was not one of those men whose plans come to
nothing. He had prospered as a rogue of old in England,
really his native country, though he called himself an
Afrilcander. Reared in the gutters of the Irish quarter of
Liverpool, he had early learned to pilfer for a living, had
prospered in prison as sharp young gaol-birds may prosper,
and returned to it again and again, until, having served out
part of a sentence for burglary and obtained his ticket-of-
leave, he had shifted his convict's skin, and made his way
out to Cape Colony under a false name and character. He
had made a mistake, it was true, enlisting as a trooper of
Colonial Police, but the step had been forced upon him by
circumfitances. Then he had deserted, and had since been
successful as a white-slave dealer at Port Elizabeth, and
as a gold-miner in the Transvaal, and he had done better
and better still at that ticklish trade of gun-runniag for Oom
Paul. Though, get caught — only once get caught — and
the Imperial Government authorities, imder whose noses
you had been playing the game Avith impunity for years,
made it as hot as Hell for you. Bough, however, did not
mean ever to get caught. There was always another
man, a semi-innocent dupe, who would appear to have
been responsible for everything, and who would get
pinched.
Such a dupe now trudged at the head of the meagre
three-span ox-team. WTien, after a hard day's toil, he at
length outspanned, the waggon-pole still faithfully pointed
to the north-west. But before it was yet day the waggon
began to move again, and it was to the north-east that the
waggon-pole pointed thenceforwards, and the letter Bough
had given Smoots Beste for the Chief Resident Magistrate
at Gueldersdorp was saved from the kindling of the camp-
fire by a mere accident.
The oat's-paw could not read, or the illegible, meaningless
THE DOP DOCTOR 23
ink scrawl upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed
envelope would have aroused his suspicions at the outset.
So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty, under-
stood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud,
not elaborate — a mere stage property, nothing more. But
yet he gave it in full belief that it would be burned, and
that, the boats of Smoots Beste being consumed with it,
according to the thick judgment of the said Smoots, it
would be as a pillar of fire behind that slim child of the old
voortrekkers, hastening his journey north-eastwards. It
is typical of the class of Smoots that it never once occurred
to him to go north.
But Smoots Beste never bought a farm with the price of
the oxen and the high-bulwarked, teak-built, waterproof-
canvas tilted waggon that had cost such a good round sum.
There was a big rainfall on the third day. It began with
the typical African thunderstorm— deafening, continuous
rolls and crashes of heavy cloud-artiUery, and lightning that
blazed and darted without intermission, and ran zigzagging
in a horrible, deadly, plajrful fashion over the veld, as
though looking for dishonest folks to shrivel. One terrible
flash struck the wheel-oxen, a thin double tongue of blue
flame sped flickering from ridge to ridge of the six gaunt
backs . . . there was a smell of burning hair— a reek of
sulphur. The team lay outstretched dead on the veld, the
heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long horns
curving, the thin starved bodies already begiiming to bloat
and swell in the swift decomposition that follows death by
the electric fluid.
Smoots Beste crawled under the waggon, and, remember-
ing all he had heard his father spell out from the Dutch
Bible about the Judgment Day, and the punishment of
sinners in everlasting flame, felt very ill at ease. The
storm passed over, and the rain poured all through the
night, but dawn brought in a clear blue day ; and with it
a train of eight transport- waggons, and several wearied,
muddy droves of sheep and cattle, the property of the
Imperial Government Commissariat Department, Guel-
dersdorp, being taken from Basutoland East up to Guel-
dersdorp, under convoy of an escort of B.S.A. Police. To
the non-commissioned officer in command Smoots Beste,
24 THE DOP DOCTOR
resigned to the discharge of a trust, handed the letter for
the Civil Commissioner.
The sergeant, sitting easily in the saddle, looked at the
boldly- written direction on the envelope, and smelt no rats
— at least until he coolly opened the supposed letter.
The scrawled sheet of paper it contained was a surprise,
but he did not let Smoots see that. Then the following
brief dialogue took place :
" You were trekking up to Gueldersdorp," he said to
the decidedly nervous Smoots, " to fetch down a Deputy
Civil Commissioner to deal with the effects of a dead
English traveller, at a house kept by the man who wrote
this letter — that is, three days' trek over the veld to the
southward, and called the Free State Hotel ?"
Smoots nodded heavily. The dapper sergeant cocked
his felt smasher hat, and turned between pleasantly smiling
lips the cigar he was smoking. Then he pointed with his
riding- whip, a neatly varnished sjambok, with a smart
silver top, to the north-west.
" There lies Gueldersdorp. Rum that when the light-
ning killed the ox-team you should have been trekking
north-east, isn't it ?"
Smoots Beste agreed that it was decidedly rum.
The sergeant said, without a change in his agreeable
smile :
" All right ; you can inspan six of our drove- bullocks,
and drive the waggon with us to Gueldersdorp."
" Thank you. Baas !" said Smoots, without enthusiasm.
" If you like to take the risk," added the sergeant, who
had not quite finished. He ended with an irrepressible
outburst of honest indignation : " Why, you blasted,
thieving Dutch scum, do you think I don't kriow you were
stealing that span and waggon ?"
And as Smoots, sweating freely, unyoked the dead oxen,
he decided in his heavy mind that he would be missing
long before the convoy got to Gueldersdorp.
Nine waggons rolled on where only eight had been
before. The mounted men hurried on the daubed and
wearied droves of Commissariat beasts. Smoots Beste
drove the scratch team of bullocks, but his heart was as
water within his belly, and there was no resonance in the
THE DOP DOCTOR 25
smack of his whip. When the convoy came to a town,
he vanished, and the story thenceforth knows him no more.
The discreet sergeant of police did not even notice that he
was missing until several days later, when the end of the
Journey was near at hand. He was a sober, careful man,
and a good husband. He shortly afterwards made quite
a liberal remittance to his wife, and his troopers pushed
Kruger half-sovereigns across most of the bars in Guel-
dersdorp shortly after the purchase by a Dopper farmer
of a teak-built Cape waggon that a particular friend of
the sergeant's had got to sell. And they were careful, at
first, not to wag loose tongues. But as time went on the
story of the English traveller who had brought the body
of the woman to the Free State Hotel, so many days'
trek to the southwards from Gueldersdorp, trickled from
lip to lip. And years later, years too late, it came to
the ears of a friend of dead Richard Mildare.
The sergeant maintained sUence. He was a careful
officer, and a discreet man, and, what is more, religious.
In controversial arguments with the godless he would
sometimes employ a paraphrase of the story of Smoots
Beste to strengthen his side.
" A chap's a blamed fool that doesn't believe in God,
I teU you. I was once after a bung-nosed Dutch thief
of a transport-driver, that had waltzed away Math a brand-
new Cape cart and a team of first-class mules. Taking
'em up to Pretoria on the quiet, to sell 'em to Oom Paul's
burghers, he was. Ay, they were worth a tidy lump !
A storm came on — a regular Vaal display of sky-fireworks.
The rain came down like gun- barrels, the veld turned
into a swamp, but we kept on after the Dutchman, who
drove like gay old HeU. Presently comes a blue blaze
and a splitting crack, as if a comet had come shouldering
into the map of South Africa, and knocked its head in.
We pushed on, smelling sulphur, burnt flesh, and hair.
' By gum !' said I ; ' something's got it '; and I was to
rights. The Cape cart stood on the veld, without a scratch
on the paintA\-ork. The four mules lay in their traces,
deader than pork. The Dutchman sat on the box, holding
the lines and his voorslag, and grinning. He was dead, too
— struck by the lightning in the act of stealing those mules
26 THE DOP DOCTOR
and that Cape cart. Don't let any fellow waste hot air
after that trjang to persuade me that there isn't such a
thing as an overruling Providence !"
Thus the sergeant : and his audience, whether Free-
thinkers, Agnostics, or believers, would break up, feeling
that one who has the courage of his opinions is a respectable
man.
As for Bough, in whose hands even the astute sergeant
had been as a peeled rush, we may go back and find him
counting money in gold and notes that had been taken
from the belt of the dead English traveller.
Seventeen hundred pounds, h?vrd cash — a pretty wind-
fall for an honest man. The honest man whistled softly,
handling the white crackling notes, and feeling the smooth,
heavy English sovereigns slip between his fingers.
There were certificates of Rand stock, also a goodly
number of Colonial Railway shares, and some foreign
bonds, all of which could be realised on, but at a distance,
and by a skilled hand. There were Jewels, as the Boer
waggon-driver had said, that had belonged to the dead
woman — diamond rings, and a bracelet or two ; and there
were sUk dresses of lovely hues and texture, and cambric
and linen dresses, and tweed dresses, in the trunks ; and
a great cloak of sables, trimmed with many tails, and
beautiful underclothing of silk and linen, trimmed with
real lace, over which the mouth of the woman of the
tavern watered. She got some of the dresses and all the
undergarments when Bough had dexterously picked out
the embroidered initials. He knew diamonds and rubies,
but he had never been a Judge of lace.
There was a coronet upon one or two handkerchiefs
that had been overlooked when the dead woman had
burned the others four years previously. Bough picked
this out too, working deftly with a needle.
He was clever, very clever. He could take to pieces a
steam-engine or a watch, and put it together again. He
knew all there is to know about locks, and how they may
best be opened without their keys. He could alter plate-
marks with graving tools and the Jeweller's blow-pipe,
and test metals with acids, and make plaster-cast moulds
that would turn out dollars and other coins, remarkably
THE DOP DOCTOR 27
like the real thing. He was not a clever forger ; he had
learned to write somewhat late in life, and the large, bold
round hand, with the capital letters that invariably began
with the wrong quirk or twirl, was too characteristic,
though he wrote anonymous letters sometimes, risking
detection in the enjoyment of what was to him a dear
delight, only smaller than that other pleasure of mould-
ing bodies to his own purposes, of malice, or gain, or lust.
IV
There was a child in the tavern on the veld ; it lay in an
old orange-box, half-filled %vith shavings, covered with a
thin, worn blanket, in the daub-and- wattle outhouse,
where the Hottentot woman, called the chambermaid, and
the Kaffir woman, who was cook, slept together on one
filthy pallet. Sometimes they stayed up at the tavern,
drinking and carousing Math the Dutch travellers who
brought the supplies of Hollands and Cape brandy and
lager beer, and the American or English gold-miners and
German drummers who put up there from time to time.
Then the child lay in the outhouse alone. It was a frail,
puny creature, always frightened and silent. It lived on
a little mealie pap and odd bits of roaster-cakes that were
thrown to it as though it were a dog. When the coloured
women forgot to feed it, they said : " It does not matter.
Anyhow, the thing will die soon !" But it lived on when
another child would have died. , . . There was some-
thing imcanny about its great-eyed silence and its tenacious
hold on life.
It had only been able to toddle when brought to the
tavern. The rains and thunderstorms of spring went by,
the summer passed, and it could walk about. It was a
weakly little creature, with great frightened eyes, amber-
broMTi, with violet flecks in their black-banded irises,
and dark, thick lashes ; and the delicately-drawn eyebrows
were dark too, though its hair was soft yellow — just the
colour of a chicken's down. Many a cuff it got, tmd many
a hard word, when its straying feet brought it into the way
28 THE DOP DOCTOR
of the rough life up at the tavern. But still the scrap of
food was tossed to it, and the worn-out petticoat roughly
cobbled into a garment for its little body ; for Bough was
a charitable man.
It was a poor orphan, he explained to people, the child
of a consumptive emigrant Englishman who had worked
for the landlord of the tavern, and left this burden for
other shoulders when he died. Charitable travellers fre-
quently left benefactions towards the little one's clothing
and keep. Bough willingly took charge of the money.
The child strayed here, there, and everywhere. It was
often lost, but nobody looked for it, and it always came
back. It liked to climb the caim of boulders, or to sit
on the long, low hillock at the cairn's foot. The wire
fencing had long been removed from the enclosure ; it had
gone to make a chicken-pen in a more suitable spot. The
cross had been taken down when a prop was wanted for
the clothes-line.
The child, often beaten by Bough and the woman of
the tavern, might have been even worse treated by the
coloured servants but for those two graves out on the
veld. Black blood flows thick with superstition, and both
the Kafi&r cook and the snuff-coloured Hottentot chamber-
maid nourished a wholesome dread of spooks. Who knew
but that the white woman's ghost would rise out of the
kopje there, some dark night, and pinch and cufE and
thump and beat people who had ill-used her bantling ?
As for the dead man buried at her feet, his dim shape
had often been seen by one of the Barala stablemen,
keeping guard before the heap of boulders, in the
white blaze of the moon-rays, or the paler radiance of a
starry night, or more often of a night of mist and rain ;
not moving as a sentry moves, but upright and still, with
shining fiery eyes in his shadowy face, and with teeth that
showed, as the dead grin. After that none of the servants
would pass near these two graves later than sundown, and
Bough welted the Barala boy with an ox-reim for scaring
silly Jades of women with lying tales. But then Bough
avoided the spot by day as well as by night. Therefore, it
became a constant place of refuge for the child, who now
slept in the outhouse alone.
THE DOP DOCTOR 29
In the long, brilliant winter nights she would leave the
Btraw-stuJBfed sack that had been her bed ever since the
orange- box had been broken up, and climb the stone-heaps,
and look over the lonely veld, and stare up at the great
glowing constellation of the Southern Cross. In spring,
when pools and river-beds were fuU of foaming beer-
coloured water, and every kloof and donga was brimmed
with flowers and ferns, she would be drawn away by these,
would return, trailing after her armfuls of rare blooms, and
thenceforward, imtil these faded, the ridgy grave-mound
and the heaped cairn of boulders would be gay with them.
She never took them to the house. It might have meant
a beating — so many things did.
Late in November, when the apricots and plums and
peaches were ripening on the laden, starling-haunted boughs,
she would wander in the orchard belonging to the house,
while the heavy drenching rains drummed on the leaves
overhead, and sudden furious thunderstorms rent the livid-
coloured clouds above with jagged scythes and reaping-
hooks of white electric fire, or leaping, dancing, playing,
vanishing tongues of thin blue. Once this fire struck a
krantz, under the lee of which the child was sheltering,
and made a black scorched mark all down the chS-face,
but left the child unscathed.
No one had ever taught her anything ; no one had ever
laid a gentle hand upon her. When she fiirst saw mother
and daughter, friend and friend, sweetheart and sweet-
heart kiss, it seemed to her that they licked each other,
as friendly dogs do. She had no name that she knew of.
" You kid, go there. You kid, fetch this or bring that.
You kid, go to the drift for water, or take the besom and
sweep the stoep, or scrub out the room there — do you hear,
you kid 1" These orders came thick and fast when at
last she was old enough to work ; and she was old enough
when she was very young, and did work like a little beast
of burden. A real mother's heart — all mothers are not
real ones — would have ached to see the dirt and bruises
on the delicate childish limbs, and the vermin that crawled
under the yellow rings of hair. How to be clean and tidy
nobody had ever shown her, though she had learned by
instinct other things.
30 THE BOP DOCTOR
That it was best to bear hunger and pain m silence, lest
worse befell. That a truth for which one suffers is not as
good as a lie for which one gets a bigger roaster-cake, or
the scrapings of the syrup-can. That to little, weak, and
feeble creatures of their race grown human beings can be
marvellously cruel. That the devil lived down in the
kraals with the natives, and that Grod was a swear. It is
a wonder that she had not sunk into idiocy, or hopelessly
sickened and died, neglected, ill-used, half-starved as she
was. But when the little one might have been six years
of age, the Lady began coming. And after the first time,
with very brief intervals of absence, she came every night.
As soon as you lay down on the sack of straw in the corner
of the outhouse, slipping out of the ragged frock if the
weather were hot, or puUing the thin old horse- blanket
over you if the night were a cold one, keeping your eyes
tight shut, for this was quite indispensable, you looked
into the thick dark, shot with gleams of lovely colours,
sometimes with whirling rings of stars, and gradually, as
you looked, all these concentrated into two stews, large
and not twinkling, but softly radiant, and you were happy,
for you knew that the Lady was coming.
For she always came, even when you had been most
wicked : when you were sent to bed without even the
supper-crust to gnaw, and when your body and arms and
legs were bruised and aching from the beating they told you
you deserved. The stars would go a long way off, and
while you tingled and trembled and panted with expecta-
tion, would come back again as eyes. Looking up into
them, you saw them clearly ; the rest of the person they
belonged to arrived quite a little while after her eyes were
there. Such eyes — neither grey, nor brown, nor violet, but
a mingling of all these colours, and deepening as you
gazed up into them into bottomless lakes of love.
Then her face, framed in a soft darkness, which was
hair — the Kid never knew of- what colour — her face formed
THE DOP DOCTOR 31
itself out of the darkness that framed those eyes, and a
warm, balmy breath came nearer, and you were kissed.
No other lips, in your short remembrance, had ever touched
you. You had learned the meaning of a kiss only from
her, and hers was so long and close that your heart left oflE
beating, and only began again when it was over. Then
arms that were soft and warm, and strong and beautiful,
came round you and gathered you in, and you fell asleep
folded closely in them, or you lay awake, and the Lady
talked to you in a voice that was mellow as honey and soft
as velvet, and sounded like the cooing of the wild pigeons
that nested in the l>:rantzes, or the sighing of the wind
among the high veld grasses, and the murmur of the little
river playing among the boulders and gurgling between
the roots of the tree-fern. You talked, too, and told her
everything. And no matter how bad you had been,
though she was sorry, because she hated badness, she loved
you just as dearly as she did when you were good. And
oh ! how you loved her — how you loved her !
" Please," you said that night when she came first —
you remember it quite well, though it is so long ago —
" plefkse, why did you never come before ?"
And she answered, with her cool, sweet, fragrant lips
upon your eyelids, and your head upon her breast :
" Because you never wanted me so much as now."
" Please take me back home with you," you begged,
holding her fast. And she answered in the voice that is
always like the sigh of the wind amongst the tree-tops
and the murmur of the river :
" I cannot yet — but I will come again."
And she does come, and again and again. By degrees,
though she comes to you only at night, when the out-
house is dark, or lighted only by the stars or the moon-
shine, you learn exactly what the Lady is like.
She wears a silken, softly-rustling gown that is of any
lovely colour you choose. The hue of the blue overarching
sky at midday, or the tender rose of dawn, or of the violet
clouds that bar the flaming orange-ruby of the sunset : or
the mysterious robe of twilight drapes her, or her garment
is sable as the Night. The grand sweep of her shoulders
and the splendid pillar of her throat reveal the beauty of
32 THE DOP DOCTOR
her form even to the eyes of an untaught, neglected child.
Her face is pale, but as full of sunlight as of shadow, and
her eyes are really grey and deep as mountain lakes. The
sorrow of all the world and all its Joy seem to have rolled
over her like many waters, and when she smiles the sweet-
ness of it is always almost more than the Kid can bear.
Who is the Lady ?
She has no other name than that. She is very, very
good, as well as beautiful, and you can bear to tell her when
you have been most wicked, because she is so sorry for you.
She can play with you, and laugh so softly and clearly and
gaily that you, who have never learned but to dread grown
people's cruel merriment, join in and laugh too. When she
laughs the corners of her eyes crinkle so like the corners of
her lips that you have to kiss them, and there are dimples
that come wath the laughter, and make her dearer than ever.
Who is the Lady, tall, and strong, and tender ? That
dead woman lying out there under the Little Kopje was
small, and slight, and fraU. Who may the Lady be ? Is
she a dream or a mere illusion born of loneliness and starva-
tion, physical and mental ? Or has Mary, the Mother of
Pity, laid aside her girdle of decades of golden roses, her
mantle of glory, and her diadem of stars, and come stepping
fair-footed down the stau'way that Night builds between
Earth and Heaven, to comfort a desolate child lying in a
stable who never heard the story of the Christ- Babe of
Bethlehem ?
You ask no questions — you to whom she comes. You
call her softly at night, stretching out your arms, and the
clasp of her arms answers at once. You whisper how you
love her, with your face hidden in her neck. The great
kind dark that brings her is your real, real daytime in
which you live and are glad. Each morning to which you
waken, bringing its stint of hunger and abuse and blows
renewed, is only a dreadful dream, you say to yourself, and
so can face your world.
Oh, deep beyond fathoming, mysterious beyond compre-
hension is the hidden heau't of a child !
THE DOP DOCTOR 33
VI
One afternoon when the Kid was quite as tall as the broom
she swept the stoep with she had gone to the drift for water.
It was a still, bright, hot day. Little puffs of rosy cloud
hung motionless under the burning blue sky-arch ; small,
gaily-plumaged birds twittered in the bushes ; the tiny
black ants scurried to and fro in the pinkish sand of the
river beach. She waded into the now clear, sherry-pale
water to cool her hot bare limbs, and, bending over, stared
down into the reflected eyes that looked back out of the pool.
Such a dirty little, large-eyed, wistful face, crowned by a
curling tousle of matted, reddish- brown-gold hair. Such a
neglected, sordid little figure, with thin drab shoulders
sticking out of a ragged caHco frock. She was quite
startled. She had never seen herself in any glass before,
though a cheap, square, wooden-framed mirror hung on the
wall of the bar-room, with a dirty clothes-brush on a hook
underneath, and there were swing toilet-glasses in the
tawdry bedrooms at the inn. Something stirred in her,
whispering in the grimy little ear, " It is good to he dean"
and with the awakening of the maidenly instinct the
womanly purpose framed.
She put off her horrible rags, and washed herself from
head to foot in the warm clear water. She took fine sand,
and scrubbed her head. She dipped and wrung and rinsed
her foul tatters of garments, standing naked in the shallows,
the hot sunshine drying her red-gold curls, and warming
her slight girlish body through and through as she spread
her washed rags to dry on the big hot stones.
There was a man's step on the bank above her, there was
a rustling sound among the green bushes. She had never
heard of modesty, but she cowered down among the
boulders, and the heavy footstep passed by. She hid among
the fern while her clothes were drying, put them on tidily,
and went back with her filled water-bucket to the hotel.
How could she know what injiiry the kind peremptory voice,
bidding her be foul no longer, had done her ? But thence-
forwards a new cruelty, afresh peril, attended her steps.
Bough and the white woman of the inn had quarrels
3
34 THE DOP DOCTOR
often. She was no wife of his. He had not brought her
from Cape Colony. When the hotel was built he had gone
up to Johannesburg on business and on pleasure, and
brought her back with, him from an establishment he knew.
He was generally not brutal to her except when she was
ailing, when he gave her medicine that made her worse,
much worse — so very iU that she would lie groaning upon
a foul neglected bed for weeks, while Bough caroused with
the coloured women and the customers in the bar. Then,
still groaning, she would drag herself up and be about her
work again. She did not want to go back to the house at
Johannesburg. She loved the man Bough in her fashion,
poor bought wretch.
She had quarrelled with him many times for many
things, and been silenced with blows, or curses, or even
caresses, were he in the mood. But she had never quar-
relled with him about the Kid before. Now when he
bought some coloured print and a Boer sunbormet, and
some shifts and stockings of a traveller in drapery and
hosiery, and ordered her thenceforwards to see that the
girl went properly clothed, a new terror, a fresh torture, was
added to the young life. The woman had ignored, neg-
lected, sometimes ill-used her, but she had never hated
her untU now.
And Bough, the big, burly, dark-skinned man with the
strange light eyes, and the bold, cruel, red mouth, and the
bushy brown whiskers, why did he follow her about with
those strange eyes, and smile secretly to himself ? She was
no longer fed on scraps ; she must sit and eat at table with
the man and his mistress, and learn to use knife and fork.
She outgrew the dress Bough had bought her, and
another, and another, and this did not make Bough angry ;
he only smiled. A man having some secret luxury or
treasure locked a^^ ay in a private cupboard will smile so.
He knows it is there, and he means to go to the hiding-
place one day, but in the mfiantitue he waits, licking his lips.
The girl had always feared Bough, and shrunk from his
anger with unutterable terror. But the blow of his heavy
hand was more bearable than his smUe and his jesting
aii^iability. Now, when she went down to the kraals on an
errand, or to the orchard or-garden for fruit or vegetable^, or
THE DOP DOCTOR 35
to the riv6r for water as of old, she heard his light, cautious,
padding footsteps coming after her, and would turn and
pass him with downcast eyes, and go back to the inn, and
take a beating for not having done her errand. Beating she
comprehended, but this mysterious change in the man
Bough filled her with sick, secret loathing and dread. She
did not know why she bolted the door of the outhouse now
when she crept to her miserable bed.
Once Bough dropped into her lap a silver dollar, saying
with a smUe that she was getting to be quite a little woman
of late. She leaj)ed to her feet as though a scorpion had
stung her, and stood white to the very lips, and speechless,
while the big silver coin rolled merrily away into a distant
corner, and lay there. The frowzy woman with the
bleached hair happened to come in at that moment ; or
had she been spying through a crack of the door ? Bough
pretended he had accidentally dropped the coin, picked it
up, and went away.
That night he and the woman quarrelled fiercely. She
could hear them raging at each other as she lay trembling.
Then came shrieks, and the dull sound of the sjambok
cutting soft human flesh. In the morning the woman had
a black eye ; there were livid weals on her tear-blurred face.
She packed her boxes, snivelling. She was going back
along up to Johannesburg by the next thither- bound
transport-waggon-train that shoidd halt at the hotel —
thrown off like an old shoe after all these years. And she
was not young enough for the old life, what with hard work
and hard usage and worry, and she knew to whom she owed
her dismissal. . . .
Ay, and if she could have throttled or poisoned the little
sly devil she would have done it ! Only — there would have
been Bough to reckon with afterwards. For of God she
made a jest, and the devil was an old friend of hers, but
she was horribly afraid of the man with the brown bushy
whiskers and the light, steely eyas. Yet she threw herself
upon him to kiss him, blubbering freely, when at the week's
end the Johannesburg transport-ridt-r's waggons returning
from the district town not 3'et hnked up to the north by
the raQway came in sight.
3—2
36 THE DOP DOCTOR
Bough poured her out a big glass of liquor, his universal
panacea, and another for the transport-rider, with many a
Jovial word. He would be running up to Johannesburg
before she had well shaken down after the journey. Then
they wotdd have a rare old time, going round the bars and
doing the shows. Though, perhaps if she had got fixed up
with a new friend, some flash young fellow with pots of
money, she would not be wanting old faces around 1
Then he turned aside to pay the transport-rider, and the
exile dabbed her swollen face with a rouge-stained, lace-
edged handkerchief, and went out to get into the waggon.
The girl stood by the stoep, staring, puzzled, over-
whelmed, afraid. A piece of her world was breaking off.
As long as she could remember anything she had known
this woman. She had never received any kindness from
her ; of late she had been malignant in her hate, but — she
wished she was not going. Instinctively she had felt that
her presence was some slight protection. Keeping close in
the shadow of this creature's frowzy skirts, she had not so
feared and dreaded those light eyes of Bough's, and the
padding, following footsteps had kept aloof. As the
woman passed her now, a rage of unspeakable, agonising
fear rose in her bosom. She cried out to her, and clutched
at her shabby gay mantle.
The woman snatched the garment from her hold. Her
distorted mouth and blazing eyes were close to the white
young face. She could have spat upon it. But she snarled
at her three words ... no more, and passed her, and got
into the waggon.
" Halloa, there !" said Bough, coming forward threaten-
uiglyj " what you rowing about, eh ?" But no one an-
swered. The girl had fled to the boulder-cairn, and the
woman sat silent in the waggon, until the weary, goaded
teams moved on, and the transport-train of heavy, broad-
beamed vehicles lumbered away.
But the little figure on the cairn of boulders covering the
dust of the bosom from whence it had first drunk life sat
there immovable until the sun went down, ponderiag.
" Missis now, eh /"
What did those three words mean ?
Then Bough called her, and she had to run. She served
THE DOP DOCTOR 37
as waitress of the bar that day, and the men who drove or
rode by and stopped for drinks, chatting in the dirty
saloon, or sitting in the bare front room, with the Dutch
stovfe, and the wooden forms and tables in it, that they
called the coffee-room, to discuss matters relative to the
sale of cattle, or sheep, or merchandise, stared at her, and
several made her coarse compliments. She refused to
touch the loathly-smelling liquor they offered her. Her
heart beat like a little terrified bird's. And she was horribly
conscious of those light eyes of Bough's following, following
her, with that inscrutable look.
When the crowd had thinned he came to her. He caught
her arm, and pulled her near him, and said between his teeth:
" You will sleep in the mistress's room to-night."
Then he went away chuckling to himseK, thinking of
that frightened look in her eyes. Later, he went out on
horseback, and did not return.
The slatternly bedchamber, with its red turkey twill
window-curtains and cheap gaudy wallpaper, which had
belonged to the ruddled woman with the bleached hair,
was a palace to the little one. But she could not breathe
there. Late that night she rose from the big feather bed,
and unfastened the inner window shutters, and di'ew the
cotton blind and opened the window, though the paint had
stuck, and looked out upon the veld. The great stars
throbbed in the purple velvet darkness overhead. The
falling dew wetted the hand she stretched out into the cool
night air. She drew back the hand and touched her
cheek with it, and started, for the fresh, cool, fragrant
touch seemed like that of some other hand whose touch
she once had known. She thought for the first time that
if the woman who had been her mother, and who slept
out there in the dark under the boulder-cairn, had lived,
she might have touched her child so. Then she closed the
window quickly, for she heard, afar off, the gallop of a
hard-ridden horse draw ing nearer — nearer. And she knew
that Bough was coming back.
He came.
She heard him dismount before the door, give the horse
to the sleepy Barala ostler, and let himself into the bar.
She heard him clink among the glasses and bottles. S^«
38 THE DOP DOCTOR
heard his foot upon the three-step stair, and on the landing.
It did not pass by. It stopped at the locked door of the
room where she was.
Then his voice bade her rise and open the door. She
could not speak or move.
She was dumb and paralysed with deadly terror. She
heard his coaxing voice turn angry ; she listened in helpless
terrified silence to his oaths and threats ; then she heard
him laugh softly, and the laugh was followed by the jingle
of a bunch of skeleton keys. He always carried them ;
they saved trouble, he used to say.
They saved him trouble now. When the bent wire
rattled in the lock, and the key fell out upon the floor,
she screamed, and his coarse chuckle answered. She was
cowering against the wall in a corner of the room when he
came in and picked up the key and locked the door. But
when his stretched-out, grasping hand came down upon
her slight shoulder, she turned and bit it like some savage,
desperate little animal, drawing the blood. Bough swore
at the sudden sting of the sharp white teeth. So the
little beast showed fight, eh ? Well, he would teach her
that the master will have his way.
There was no one else in the house, and if there had been
it would have served her not at all. God sat in timeless
Eternity beyond these mists of earth, and saw, and made
no sign. It was not until the man Bough slept the heavy
sleep of liquor and satiety that the thought of flight was
bom in her with desperate courage to escape him. The
shutters had been left unbolted, and the window was yet a
little way open. She sprang up and threw it wide, leaped
out upon the stoep, and from thence to the ground, and fled
blindly, breathlessly over the veld into the night.
vn
Hough, as soon as it was dawn, sent three of the Kaffirs
from the kraals, in difTerent directions, to search for her,
and, mounted on a fresh pony, took the fourth line of
search himself.
II
THE DOP DOCTOR 39
He had chosen the right direction for riding down the
quarry. At broad high noon he came upon her, in a bare,
stony place tufted with mUk-bush. She was crouching
under a prickly-pear shrub, that threw a distorted blue
shadow on the sun-baked, sun- bleached ground, trying to
eat the fruit in the native way with two sticks. But she
had no knife, and her mouth was bleeding. Bough gave
the tired pony both spurs v/hen the prey he hunted came
in sight. She leaped up like a wild cat when the mounted
man rode down upon her, and ran, doubling like a hare.
When overtaken, she fell upon her face in the sand, and
lay still, only shaken by her long pants. Bough dismounted
and caught her by the wrist and dragged her up with his
bandaged right hand. He beat her about her cheeks
with his hard, open left. Then he threw her across his
saddle, but she writhed down, and lay under the pony's
feet.
He kicked her then, for giving so much trouble, lifted
her again, and tried to mount, holding her in one arm.
But the frightened pony swerved and backed, and the
girl writhed, and struggled, and scratched like a wild
cat. She did not know what meroy meant, but she
saw by the look that came into those light eyes that
this man would have none upon her. She fought and
bit and screamed.
Bough took an ox-reim then, that was coiled behind his
saddle, and bound her hands. He tied the end of the
leather rope to the iron ring behind his saddle, and re-
mounted, and spurred his weary beast into a canter. The
little one was forced to run behind. Again and again
she fell, and each time she was jerked up and forced to
run again upon her bleeding feet, leaving rags of her gar-
ments upon the karroo-bushes and blood-marks on the
stones. And at last she fell, Sknd rose no more, showing
no sign of life under the whip and the spur-rowel. Then
Bough bent over and drew his long hunting-knife and cut
the reim, leaving her hands still bound. If any spark of
life remained in he girl, he could not tell. Her knees
were drawn in towards her body ; her eyes were open, and
rolled upwards ; there was foam fipon her torn and bleeding
mouth. She was as good as dead, anyway, and the wild
40 THE DOP DOCTOR
dogs would be sure to come by-and-by. Already an
aasvogel was hovering above ; a mere speck, the great
bird poised upon widespread wings, high up in the illimit-
able blue.
Presently there would be a flock of these carrion feeders,
that are not averse to fresh-killed meat when it is to be had.
Bough remounted, and, humming a dance tune that
was often on his lips, rode away over the veld.
The great vultin"e wheeled. Then he dropped like a
falling stone for a thousand yards or so, and hovered and
dropped again, getting nearer — ever so much nearer —
with each descent. And where he had hovered at the
first were now a dozen specks of black upon the hot, bright
blue.
A wild dog crept down from a cone-topped spitzkop,
and stood, snifiing the blood-tainted air eagerly, whining
a little in its throat.
The great vulture dropped lower. His comrades of the
flock, eagerly following his gyrations and descents, had
begun to wheel and drop also. Another wild dog appeared
on the cone-shaped kop. Other furry, sharp-eared heads,
with eager, snifiing noses, could be seen amongst the grass
and bush.
Then suddenly the higher vultm'es rose. They wheeled
and soared and flew, a bevy of winged black specks hurry-
ing to the north. They had seen something approach-
ing over the veld. The great bird hanging motionless,
purposeful, lower down, became aware of his comrades'
change of tactics. With one downward stroke of his
powerful wings, he shot upwards, and with a hoarse,
croaking cry took flight after the rest.
The wild dogs stole back, hungry, to covert, as a big
light blue waggon, drawn by a well-fed team of eight span,
came lumberkig over the veld.
Would the ox-team veer in another direction ? Would
the big blue waggon \\dth the new white tilt roll by ?
The Hottentot driver cracked his giant whip, and,
turning on the box-seat, spoke to a figiire that sat beside
him. It was a woman in loose black garments, with a
starched white coif like a Dutchwoman's kapje, covered
with a floating black veil. At her side dangled and clashed
THE DOP DOCTOR 41
a long rosary of brown wooden beads, with a copper
crucifix attached. There were two other women in the
big waggon, dressed in the same way. They were Roman
Catholic nuns — Sisters of Mercy coming up from Natal,
by the order of the Bishop of Bellmina, Vicar-Apostolic,
at the request of the Bishop of Paracos, suffragan to
North-East Baraland, to swell the numbers of the Com-
mimity akeady established in Gueldersdorp at the Convent
of the Holy Way.
The oxen halted some fifty yards from that inanimate
ragged little body, lying prone, face downwards, among
the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the hot sand. Little
crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on
the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long
from the feast if the waggon had passed on.
One white-coifed, taJl, black-clad figure sprang lightly
down from the waggon-box, and hurried across to where
the body was lying. A mellow, womanly cry of pity came
from under the starched coif. She turned and beckoned.
Then she knelt down by the girl's side, opened the torn
garments, and felt with compassionate, kindly touches
about the still heart.
The other two black figures came hurrying over then,
stumbling amongst the stones and karroo-bushes in their
haste. Lifting her, they turned the white, bloodless
yoimg face to the blue sky. It was cut and scratched,
but not otherwise disfigured. Her bound arms, dragged
upwards before it, had shielded it from the thorns and the
sharp stones. They were raw from the elbows to the
wrists.
They listened at the torn childish bosom with anxious
ears. They got a few drops of brandy between the clenched
little teeth. The sealed lips quivered ; the heart fluttered
feebly, like a dying bird. They gave her more stimulant,
and waited, while the Hottentot driver dozed, and the sleek,
well-fed oxen chewed the cud patiently, standing in the
sun.
Then the Sisters lifted her, with infinite cave, and carried
her to the waggon. The twenty-f our-f'" ot whip-lash
cracked, and the patient beasts moved on 'ery soon the
big white tilt was a mere retreating spec'. > pon the veld.
42 THE DOP DOCTOR
The ants were still busy when the wild dogs came out and
sniffed regretfully at those traces on the ground.
Coincidence, did you say, lifting your eyebrows over
the book, as the blue waggon of the Sisters rolled lumber-
ingly into the story ? The long arm of coincidence
stretched to aching tenuity by the dramatist and the
novelist ! Nay ! but the thing happened, just as I have
told.
What is the thing we are agreed to call coincidence ?
Once I was passing over one of the bridges that span the
unclean London ditch called the Regent's Canal. I had
walked all the way from Piccadilly Circus to Gloucester
Crescent, haunted by the memory of a man I had once
known. He was the broken-down, drunken, studio-drudge
of a great artist, a splendid Bohemian, who had died some
years before. Why did the thought of the palette-scraper,
the errand-goer, the drunken creature with the cultivated
voice and the ingratiating, gentlemanly manners, possess
me as I went ? I recalled his high, intellectual, pimply
forehead, and large benevolent nose, in a chronic state of
inflammation, and seedy semi-clerical garb, for the thing
had been an ordained clergyman of the Church of England,
and I grinned, remembering how, when a Royal visitor
was expected at the great man's studio, the factotum had
been bidden to wash his face, and had washed one half
of it, leaving the other half in drab eclipse, like the picture-
restorers' trade - advertisement of a canvas partially
cleansed.
Idly I tossed the butt of a finished cigar over the
bridge balustrade. Idly my eye followed it down to the
filthy, sluggishly-creeping water that flows round the
bend, imder the damp rear-garden walls below.
A policeman and a bargeman were just taking the body
of an old man out of that turbid canal -stream. It was
dressed in pauper's garments, and its stiffened knees
were bent, and its rigid elbows crooked, and a dis-
honoured, dripping beard of grey hung over the soulless
breast.
The dreadful eyes were open, staring up at the leaden
March sky. His face, with the dread pallor of Death upon
it, and the mud-stains wiped away by a rough but not
THE DOP DOCTOR 43
unkindly hand, was cleaner than I had ever seen it in
life.
Nevertheless, I recognised in the soaked body in its
workhouse livery the very man the thought of whom had
haunted me, the great Bohemian painter's drunken studio-
drudge.
vm
School at the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp
was breaking up, suddenly and without warning, very soon
after the begirming of the Christmas term. Many of the
pupils had already left in obedience to urgent telegrams
from relatives in Cape Colony or in the Transvaal, and
every Dutch girl among the sixty knew the reason why,
but was too astute to hint of it, and every English girl was
at least as wise, but pride kept her silent, and the Americans
and the Germans exchanged glances of intelligence, and
whispered in corners of impending war between John Bull
and Oom Paul.
That deep and festering political hatreds, fierce enthu-
siasms, inherited pride of race, and instilled pride in
nationality, were covered by worked apron-bibs, and
even childish pinafores, is anyone likely to doubt ?
Schoolgirls can be patriots as well as rebels, and the
seminary can vie with the college, or possibly outdo
it, occasion given. Ask Juliette Adam whether the
bread-and-butter misses of France in the year 1847 did
not squabble over the obstinacy of King Louis Plulippe
and the greed of M. Guizot, the claims of Louis Napoleon
and the theories of Louis Blanc, of Odilon Barrot, and
Ledru-Rollin ? And I who write, have I not seen a North
Antrim Sunday-school wrecked in a faction-fight between
the Orange and the Green ? Lord ! how the red-edged
hyranals and shiny-covered S.P.G. books hurtled through
the air, to burst like hand-grenades upon the texted walls.
In vain the panting, crimson clergyman mounted the
superintendent's platform, and strove to shed the oil of
peace upon those seething waters. Even the class-teachers
had broken the rails out of the Windsor chtur-backs, and
joined the hideous fray, irrespective of age or sex.
44 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Miss Maloney — Miss Geoghegan — I am shocked —
appalled ! In the name of decency I command yees to
desist !"
" Hit him again, Moggy Lenahan, a taste lower
down !"
" Serve you right, Mulcahy ! why would you march wid
the Green ?"
Thirty years ago. As I gaped in affright at the horrid
scene of strife, small revengeful fingers twisted themselves
viciously in my auburn curls, and. wresting from my grasp
a " Child's Own Bible Concordance." a birthday outrage
received from an Evangelical aunt, Julia .Dolan, aged
twelve, began to pound me about the face with it. As a
snub-nosed urchin, gifted with a marvellous capacity for
the cold storage and quick delivery of Scripture genealogies
and Hebrew proper and improper names, I had often
reduced my mild, long-legged girl-neighbour to tearful
confusion. Now meek Julia seemed as though possessed
by seven devils. I had been taught the elementary rule
that boys must not hurt girls, but the code had no precept
helpful in the present instance, when a girl was hurting me.
Casting chivalry to the winds, I remember that I kicked
Julia's shins, and she fled howling ; but not before she had
reduced my leading feature to a state of ruin, which created
a tremendous sensation when they led me home. Later,
during the election riots, two yoxmg women fought in the
Market Place, stripped to the waist, and wielding boards
wrenched from the side of a packing-case, heavy, jagged,
and full of nails. And when the soldiers were called out,
we know how many a saddle was emptied by the stones
the children threw. . . .
Only a day previously the centipede-like procession of
girls of all ages, in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers,
in passing over the Gueldersdorp Recreation-Ground, had
sustained an experience with which every maiden boSom
would have been still vibrating had not an event even more
exciting occurred between the early morning roll-call and
prayers-muster and breakfast.
Greta Du Taine had had another love-letter !
The news darted from class-room to class-room more
quickly than little Monsieur PiiotcU, the French literature
THE DOP DOCTOR 45
professor ; it spread like the measles, and magnified like
the mumps.
The Red Class, composed of the elder girls, " young
ladies " who were undergoing the process of finishing,
surged with volcanic excitement, hidden, but not in the
least repressed. The White Class, their Juniors, who were
chiefly employed in preparing for Confirmation, should
have been immersed in graver things, but were not. They
waited on mental tiptoe for details, and a peep at the
delicious document. The Blue Class, as became mere
infants ranging from six to ten years old, remained phleg-
matically indifferent to the missive, yet avid for samples
of the chocolates that had accompanied the declaration,
made to eighty girls of all ages by one undersized, pasty,
freckled young man employed as junior clerk and chain-
assistant in a surveyor's office, and who signed at the end
of a long row of symbolistic crosses the unheroic name of
Billy Keyse.
He had seen and been helplessly stunned by the vision
of Greta Du Taine out walking at the head of the long
winding procession of English, German, Dutch, Dutch-
French, Dutch-American, and Jewish girls. They are
sent now to be taught in Europe, those daughters of the
Rand millionaires, the Stock Exchange speculators, the
wealthy fruit-farmers, or cereal-growers, or cattle and
sheep breeders, who are descended themselves from the old
pioneers and voortrekkers, but they do not get a better
education than was to be had at the Convent school at
Gueldersdorp, where the Sisters of Mercy took in and
taught and trained coltish girl-children, born in a strongly
stimulating climate, and accustomed to lord it over Kaffir
and Hottentot servants to their hearts' content. These
they tamed, these they transformed into refined, cultivated,
accomplished young women, stamped with the indefinable
seal of high breeding, possessed of the tone and manner
that belongs to the upper world.
What shall I say of the Sisters of the Convent of the
Holy Way at Gueldersdorp, I who know but little of any
Order of Religious ? They are a Community, chiefly of
ladies of high breeding and ancient family, vowed to feed
the hungry, clothe the naked, nurse the sick, comfort the
46 THE DOP DOCTOR
dying, and instruct the ignorant. Like the Fathers of the
Society of Jesuits, those skilled, patient, wise tillers in the
soil of the human mind, their daily task is to hoe and tend,
and prune and train, and water the young green things
growing m what to them is the Garden of God, and to
other good and even holy people, the vineyard of the devil.
Possibly both are right ?
I have heard the habit of the Order called ugly. But
upon the stately person of the Mother Superior the garb
was regal. The sweeping black folds were as imposing as
imperial purple, and the starched guimpe framed a beauty
that was grave, stern, almost severe untU she smiled, and
then you caught your breath, because you had seen what
great poets write of, and great painters try to render, and
only great musicians by their impalpable, mysterious tone-
art can come nearest to conveying — the earthly beauty that
has been purged of all grosser particles of dross in the white
fires of the Divine Love. She was not altogether perfect,
or one could not have loved her so. Her scorn of any base-
ness was bitterly scathing ; the point of her sarcasm was
keen as any thrusting blade of tempered steel ; her will was
to be obeyed, and was obeyed as sovereign law, else woe
betide the disobedient. Also, though kind and gracious to
all, tenderly solicitous for, and incessantly watchful of, the
welfare of the least of her charges, she never feigned where
she could not feel regard or love. Her rare kiss was
coveted in the little world of the Convent school as the
jewel of an Imperial Order was coveted in the bigger world
outside it, and the most rebellious of the pupils held her in
respect mingled with fear. The head-mistresses of the
classes had their followers and admirers. It was for the
Mother Superior to command enthusiasm, and to sway
ambition, and to govern the hearts and minds of children
with the personal charm and the intellectual powers that
covdd have ruled a nation from a throne.
Well, she has gone to God. It is good for many souls
that she lived upon earth a little. There was nothing
sentimental, visionary, or hysterical in her character.
Nor, in giving her great heart with her pure soul to her
Saviour, did she ever quite learn to despise the sweetness
THE DOP DOCTOR 47
of earthly love. Not all a Saint. Yet the children of those
women who most were swayed by her influence in youth
are taught to hold her Saint as well as Martyr. And
there is One Who knows.
It was not until recess after the midday dinner that
Greta Du Taine could exhibit her love-letter. She was a
Transvaal Dutch girl with old French blood in her, a
vivacious, sparkling Gallic champagne mingling with the
Dopper in her dainty blue veins. Nothing could be prettier
than Greta in a good temper, unless it might be Greta in a
rage. She was in a good temper now, as, tossing back her
superb golden hair plait, as thick as a child's arm, and
nearly four feet long, she drew a smeary envelope from the
front of her black alpaca school-dress, and, delicately with-
drawing the epistle enclosed, yielded the envelope for the
inspection of the Red Class.
" What niggly writing !" objected Nellie Bliecker,
wrinkling her snub nose in the disgust that masks the
gnawing tooth of envy.
" And the envelope is all over sticky brown," said another
carping critic.
" That's because he put the letter inside the chocolate-
box," explained Greta, " instead of outside. And the best
chocolates — the expensive ones — always go squashy. Only
the cheap ones don't melt — because they have got stuff like
chalk inside. But wait till I show you as much as the
envelope of my next letter — that's all, Julia K. Shaw !"
Julia K. wilted. Greta proceeded :
" It's directed ' To My Fair Addored One,' because, of
course, he didn't know my name. I don't object to his
putting a d too much in adored ; I rather prefer it.
His own name is simple, and rather pretty." She made
haste to say that, because she felt doubtful about it.
" Billy Keyse."
" Billy ?"
" Billy Keyse ?"
" B-i-1-l-y K-e-y-8-e !"
The name went the round of the Red Class. Nobody
liked it.
" He must, of course, have \t«mx christened William.
Shakespeare was a William. The Emperor of Germany,"
48 THE DOP DOCTOR
Btated Greta loftUy, "is a William. Mr. Pitfc and Mr.
Gladstone were both Williams. Many other great men
have been Williams."
" But not Billies," said Christine Silber, provoking a
giggle from the greedily-listening White Class.
Greta scorched them into silence with a look, and con-
tinued :
" He is by profession a surveyor, not exactly a partner
in the firm of Gadd and Saxby, on Market Square, but
something very near it." (Do you who read see W. Keyse
carrying the chain and spirit-level, and sweeping out the
office when the Kaffir boy forgets ?). " He saw me walking
in the Stad with the Centipede," Greta added.
This was a fanciful name for the whole school of eighty
pupUs promenading upon its hundred and sixty legs of
various nationalities in search of exercise and fresh air.
" Go on !" said the Red Class in a breath, as the White
Class giggled and nudged each other, and the Blue Class
opened eyes and ears.
" He was knocked dumb-foolish at once, he says, by
my eyes and my figure and my hair. He is not long up
from Cape Colony : came out from London through chest-
trouble, to catch heart-trouble in Gueldersdorp " (do you
hear hectic, coughing Billy Keyse cracking his stupid Joke ?).
" And if I'll only be engaged to him, he promises to get
rich, become as big a swell on the Rand as Marks or Du
Taine — isn't that funny, his not knowing Du Taine is my
father 1 — and drive me to race-meetings on a first-class
English drag, with a team of bays in silver-mounted
harness, with rosettes the colour of my eyes."
Greta threw her golden head back and laughed, display-
ing a double row of enviable pearls.
" But I've got to wait for all these things until Billy
Keyse strikes pay-reef. Poor BUly ! Hand over those
chocolates, you greedy things !"
Somebody wanted to know how the package had been
smuggled into the Convent. Those lay-Sisters were so
sharp. . . .
" They're perfect needles — Sister Tarsesias particu-
larly, and Sister Tobias. But there's a new Emigration
Jane among the housemaids. . You've seen her — the sallow
THE DOP DOCTOR 49
thing with the greasy light-coloured fringe in curlers, who
walks flat-footed like a wader on the mud. I keep expect-
ing to hear her quack. . . . Well, Billy got hold of her.
She didn't know my name, being new, but she recognised
me by Billy's description, and sympathised with him,
having a young man herself, who doesn't speak a word of
English, except ' damn ' and ' Three of Scotch, please.'
I've promised to translate her letters ; he writes them in the
Taal. And Billy gave her two dollars, and I've given her
a hat. It's the big red one mother brought back from
Paris — she paid a hundred francs for it at the Maison Climy
— and F migration Jane thinks, though it's a bit too quiet
for hei taste, it'll do her a fair old treat when she trims
it up with a bit more colour and one or two ' imitation
ostridi^e ' tips. ... I'd give another hundred francs for the
Maison Uluny modiste to hear." Again the birdlike laugh
rang out. " Now you know everything there is in the
letter, girls, except the bit of poetry at the end, which only
my most intimate friends may be permitted to read.
Lynette Mildare !"
Lynette, bending over a separate table- desk in the light
of the north window of the long deal match-boarded class-
room, looked up from her work of tooling leather, the
delicate steel instrument in her hand, a little gilding-
brush between her white teeth, a little fold of concentrated
attention between her slender brown eyebrows.
" Yes. Did you want anything ?"
Greta Jumped up, leaving the rest of the box of chocolates
to dissolve among the White Class, and came over, thread-
ing her way between the long rows of desk-stalls.
" Of course I want something."
" What is it ?" asked Lynette, lajang down the little
tool.
" What everyone has a right to expect from the person
who is her dearest friend — sympathy," said Greta, jumping
up and sitting on the corner of the desk, and biting the
thick end of her long flaxen pigtail.
"You have it — when there is anything to sympathise
about."
Greta tapped the letter, trying to frown.
" Do you call this nothing V*
50 THE DOP DOCTOR
" You have saved me from doing so."
" Lynette Mildare, have you a heart inside you ?"
" Certainly ; I can feel it beating, and it does its work
very well."
" Am I, then, nothing to you ?"
Lynette smiled, looking up at the piquant, charming
face.
" You are a great deal to me."
." And I regard you as a bosom-friend. And the duty of
a bosom-friend, besides rushing off at once to tell you if
she hears anybody say anything nasty of you behind your
back — a thing which you never do — is to sympathise with
you in all your love-affairs — a thing which you do even
seldom er."
Greta stamped with the toe of the dainty little shoe
that rested on the beeswaxed boards of the class-room,
and kicked the leg of the desk with the heel of the other.
" Please don't spill the white of egg. or upset the gold-
leaf. And as I shall be pupil-teacher of the youngest class
next term, I suppose I ought to tell you that * seldomer '
isn't in the English dictionary."
" I'm glad of it. I like my own words to belong to me.
my own self. I should be ashamed to owe ev<?rything I
say to silly Nuttall or stupid old Webster. You're artful,
Lynette Mildare, trying to change the conversation. I
say you don't sympathise with me properly in my affairs
of the heart — and you never, never tell me about yours."
The beautiful black-rimmed, golden-tawny eyes laughed
as some eyes can, though there was no quiver of a smile
about the purely-modelled, close-folded hps.
" Don't tell me you never have, or never had, any,"
scolded Greta. " You're too lovely by half. Don't try
to scowl me down — you are ! I'm pretty enough to make
the Billy Keyses stand on their silly heads if I told them
to, but you're a great deal more. Also, you have style
and grace and breeding. Anybody could tell that you
name of tremendously swell people over away in England,
where the Dukes and Marquesses and Earls began fencing
in the veld somewhere about the eleventh century, to keep
common people from killing the deer, or carving their
vulgar names on the castle ■walls, and coming between the
THE DOP DOCTOR 61
wind and their nobility. There's a quotation from your
dear Shakespeare for you ! He does come in handy some-
times."
" Doesn't he !" agreed Lynette, with an ardent flush.
" And you're descended from some of the people he
wrote about," pressed Greta. " Own it !"
There was a faint line of sarcasm about the lovely lips.
" Shakespeare wrote of clowns and churls as well as of
Kings and noblemen."
" If you were a clown, you wouldn t be what you are.
The very shape of your head, and ears, and nails, bespeaks
a Princess, disguised as a finished head-pupil, going to
take over a class of grubby fingered little ones — pah ! —
next term. And don't we all know that an English Duchess
sends you your Christmas and Easter and birthday gifts !
Come, you might as well speak out, when this is my last
term, and we have always been such dear friends, and
always will be," coaxed Greta, " because the Duchess lets
you out, you know !"
She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though
there was a pained contraction between the delicate eye-
brows and a vexed and sorrowful shadow on her face,
Greta went on :
" We have all of us always known that you were — a
mystery. Has it got anything to do with the Duchess ?"
The round, shallow blue eyes were too greedily curious
to be pretty at the moment. Ljmette met them with a
full, grave, answering denial.
" No ; I am nothing to the Duchess of Broads, or she to
me. She is sister to the Mother-Superior, and she sends
to me at Christmas and Easter, and on birthdays, by the
Mother's wish. Doesn't the Mother's second sister, the
Princesse de Dignmont- Veziers, send Katie " — Katie was a
little Irish novice — " presents from Paris twice a year ?"
Greta's pretty eyebrows went up. Her blue greedy eyes
became circular with surprise.
" Yes, of course — out of charity, because Katie was a
foundling, picked up in the Irish quarter in Cape Town."
Lynette went on steadily, but, looking out of the window
at the great wistaria that climbed upon the angle of the
Convent wing in which were the nuns' cella.
1 o
52 THE DOP DOCTOR
" If Katie was a foundling, I am nothing better."
" Lynette Mildare, you're never in earnest ?"
The shocked tone and the scandalised disgust on Greta's
pretty face stung and hurt. But Lynette went on :
" I speak the truth. The Mother and the Sisters,
who have always known it, have kept the secret. In their
great considerate kindness, they have never once let me
feel there was any difference between me and the other
girls — not once in all these years. And I can never thank
them enough — never be grateful enough for their great
goodness — especially hers." The steady voice shook a
little.
" We all know that you have always been the Mother's
favourite." There was a little cool inflection of contempt
in Greta's high, sweet, birdlike tones that had been
lacking before. " And she is the niece of a great English
Cardinal, and the sister of a Duchess and a Princess, and
her step-brother is an Earl." The inflection added for
Greta : '^ And yet she turvs to the charity child !"
Lynette said in a low voice :
" It is because she is perfect in the way of humility.
She is beyond all pride . . . greater than all prejudice . . ,
she has been more to me than I can say, since she and
Sister Ignatius and Sister Tobias found me on the veld
seven years ago, when they were trekking up from Natal
to join the Sisters who were already working here."
Greta's face dimpled, and the bright, cold eyes grew
greedy again. There was a romance, after all.
" My gracious ! How did you get there ? Did your
people lose you, or had you run away from home ?"
The delicate wild-rose colour sank out of Lynette's
cheeks. Her eyes sank under those bold, curious, blue
ones of Greta's. She said, with a painful effort :
" I — had run away from the place that was called my
home. I don't remember ever having lived anywhere
else before."
" My ! And . . . ?"
" It was a — dreadful place." A little convulsive shudder
rippled through the girl's slight frame. Little points of
moistiure showed upon the delicate white temples, where
oiuug the little stray rin£[8 and tendrils of the red-brown
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 53
hair. " I wore worse rag8 than the children at the native
kraals, and was worse fed, I scrubbed floors, and fetched
water, and was beaten every day. Then " — she drew a
deep, quivering breath — " I ran away — and — and ran until
I could run no more, and fell down. ... I don't remember
being picked up. I woke up one day here at the Convent ;
and I was in bed, and my hair was cut short, and there
was ice upon my head. I said, ' Where am I V and the
Mother-Superior stooped down and looked into my eyes,
and said, ' You are at home.' And the Convent has been
my home ever since, and I hope with all my heart it always
will be !"
Greta descended from the desk. She drew her em-
broidered cambric skirts primly about her, and said in a
shocked voice :
" And I asked you to visit me — to come and stay with
us at our place near Johannesburg — you who are not even
respectable !"
Lynette grew burning red. One moment her eyes
wavered and fell. Then she lifted them and looked back
bravely into the pretty, shallow, blue ones.
" That is why I have told you — what you know now."
" Of course," Greta said patronisingly, " if you wish it,
I shall not tell the class."
Lynette deliberately put away her tools and the calf-
bound volume she had been working on, and shut and
locked her desk. Then she rose. Her eyes swept over
the long room, its lower end packed with giggling, whisper-
ing, squabbling, listening, gossiping, or reading girls. She
said very clearly :
" It will be best that you should tell the class. Do it
now. The girls can think it over while they are away, and
make up their minds whether they will speak to me or not
when they come back. Make no delay."
Then she went, moving with the long, smooth, light
step and upright, graceful carriage that she had somehow
caught from the Mother-Superior, out of the room. Curious
eyes followed her ; sharp ears, that had caught fragments
of the colloquy, wanted the rest ; eager tongues plied Greta
with questions, as she stood reticent, knowing, bursting
with information withheld, in the middle of the cla8»-
54 THE DOP DOCTOR
room, where honours she coveted had been won and prizes
gained by the charity-bred foundling.
You may be sure that Greta told the story. It lost
nothing by her telling, be equally sure. But all that
heard it did not take it in Greta's way. The stamp of the
woman who ruled this place was upon many minds and
intellects and hearts here, and her teaching was to bear
fruit in bitter, stormy, bloodstained years of days that were
waiting at the very threshold.
" I tell you," said Christine Silber, the handsome Jewess,
with a fierce flash of her black Oriental eyes, " foundling
or charity girl, or whatever else you choose to call her,
Lynette Mildare is the pride of the school."
Silber's father was President of the Groenfontein Legis-
lative Council. A hum of assent followed on her utterance,
and an English girl got up upon a form. She was the niece
of a High Commissioner, daughter of a Secretary of
Imperial Government, at Cape Town, who wrote K.C.M.G.
after his name.
" Silber speaks the truth. Not a girl here is a patch on
the shoes of Lynette Mildare. I am going home to London
next winter to be presented, and we shall have a house in
Chesterfield Gardens for the season, and if Lynette will
come and visit us, I can tell her that she will be treated
as an honoured guest. As for you, Greta Du Taine, who
are always bragging about your father and his money,
tell me which three letters of the alphabet you would find
tattooed upon his conscience — if the strongest microscope
ever made could find his conscience out ? Shall / tell you
them ?" She held up her finger. " Shall I tell you how
he bought those orange-groves at Rustenburg — and the
country seat near Johannesburg — and the drag with the
silver-mounted harness and the team of blood bays ?"
" No, please !" begged Greta, flinching from the torture.
But the English girl was pitiless. She checked the letters
off upon her fingers :
" I. D. B."
A shout went up from the Red Class.
Greta turned and ran.
THE DOP DOCTOR 55
IX
The cell was a larg.^, light, airy room on the first-floor of
the big two-storied Convent building that stood in its
spacious, teee-shaded, high-fenced gardens beyond the
Hospital at the north end of the town. Tali stained-
wood presses full of papers and account-files covered the
wall upon one side. There also stood a great iron safe,
with heavy ledgers piled upon it. Upon the other three
sides of the room were bookshelves, doubly and trebly
laden, with Latin tomes of the Fathers of the Church, and
the works and writings of modern theologians, many of
them categorised upon the " Index Expurgatorius." Rows
there were of English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish
classical authors, and many volumes of recently-published
scientific works. It might have been the room of a business
man who was at the same time a priest and a scholar.
There were roller maps upon the walls, and two or three
engravings, Bougereau's " Virgin of Consolation," the
" Madonna dei Ansidei " of Raffaelle, and a " Crucifixion "
over the chimneypiece, which had three little statuettes in
tinted alabaster — a St. Ignatius at one end, a St. Anthony of
Padua at the other ; in the middle, the Virgin bearing the
Child.
The Mother-Superior sat writing at a bare solid deal
table of the kitchen kind, with stained legs to add to its
ughness, and stained black-knobbed fronts to the drawers
in it. Her pen flew over the paper.
Seated though she was, you could see her to be of noble
figure, tall and finely proportioned. The habit of the nun
does not hide everything that makes for beauty and for
grace. The pure outlines of the small, perfectly-shaped
head showed through the thin black veil that fell over the
white starched coif. The small, high-instepped foot could
not be hidden in walking ; the make of the thick shoe might
not disguise its form. The delicate whiteness and smooth,
supple beauty of her hands, larger than the hands of
ordinary women, their owner being of more heroic build,
as of ampler mind and keener intellect, betrayed her to be a
woman not yet old, though there were some deep lines and
66 THE DOP DOCTOR
many fine ones on the attentive face that bent over the
large square sheet of paper.
It was a curious face ; its olive skin bleached to dull
whiteness, its expression stern almost to severity. I have
heard it likened to a Westmoreland hill-landscape. Lonely
tarns lie under the black brows of the precipice ; one feels
chilly, and a little afraid. But the sun shines out suddenly
from behind concealing mists, and everything is transformed
to loveliness. I can in no other words describe the change
wrought in her by her rare, sudden, illuminating smile.
Her voice was the softest and the clearest I ever heard, a
sigh made most audible speech ; but in her Just an^er, only
turned to wrath by the baser faults, the fouler vices, it
could roll in organ-tones of thunder, or ring like a silver
trumpet. And her eye made the lightning for such thunder,
and the sword-thrust that followed the clarion-note of war.
She could have ruled an empire or a court, this woman
who managed the thronged, buzzing Convent with the
lifting of her finger, with the softest tone of her soft West
of Ireland voice, devoid of all trace of the unbeautif ul
brogue, cultured, elegant, refined. As I have said, the
lessons that she taught bore great fruit during that red
time of war that was coming, and will bear greater fruit
hereaiter.
A little is known to me of the personal history of
Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne — in religion known as Mother
Mary of Bethlehem — that may be here set down. Some
twenty-three years previously that devout Irish Catholic
nobleman, the Right Honourable James Dominic Bawne,
tenth Earl of Castleclare, Baron Kilhail, Count of the Holy
Roman Empire, and D.L. for West Connemara, not con-
tented with the possession of three very tall, very hand-
some, very popular daughters — the Right Honourable
Ladies Bridget-Mary, Alyse, and Alethea Bawne— con-
sulted his favourite spiritual director, and, as advised,
offered his thin white hand and piously regulated affections
to Miss Nancy Mclleevy, niece and heiress of Mclleevy
of Mclleevystown, the eminent County Down brewer, so
celebrated for his old Irish ales ajid nourishing bottled
porter.
This lady, being sufficiently youthful, of good education
THE DOP DOCTOR 67
and manners, and of like faith with her elderly wooer, under-
took, in return for an ancient name and the title of Countess
of Castleclare, to find the widower m conjugal affection for
the rest of his mortified life, and to do her best to supply
him with the grievously-needed heir. There was no wicked
fairy at Lord Castleclare's wedding, distinguished by
the black-browed beauty of the three bridesmaids, his
daughters ; and two years later saw the beacons at the
entrance of Ballybawne Harbour, on the West Connemara
coast, illuminated by the Castleclare tenants in honour of
the arrival of the desired heir, upon whom before his birth
so much wealth had been expended by Lord Castleclare in
pilgrimages, donations, foundations, and endowments t at,
some months after it, his lordship conveyed to his three
daughters that, in the interests of the Viscount, to whose
swollen gums a gold-set pebble enclosing a pious relic of
an early Christian martyr was at that moment affording
miraculous relief, he, their father, would be obliged by
their providing themselves as soon as possible with hus-
bands of suitable rank, corresponding religion, and suflScient
means to dispense with the customary marriage portion.
Lady Alyse saw the justice of her father's views, and
married the Duke of Broads, an English Catholic peer ; her
younger sister, Alethea, went obediently to the altar with the
aged and enormously wealthy Prince de Dignmont-Veziers.
Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne, eldest and handsomest of the
three, pleaded — if a creature so stormy and imperious could
be said to plead — a previous engagement to an IneUgible.
" We have all heard of Captain MUdare of the Grey
Hussars, my dear child," said Lord Castleclare, going to
the door to make sure that those shrieks that had proceeded
from the Viscount's sumptuous suite of apartments,
situated at the top of the staircase rising at the end of the
corridor leading from his father's library, were stilled at the
maternal fountain. Finding that it was so, he ambled back
to the centre of the worn Bokhara rug that had been under
the prie-Dieu in the oratory of James II. at Dublin Castle,
and resumed. " We have all heard of Captain Mildare.
At the taking of Ali Musjid — arah ! — at Futtehabad, with
Gough — arah ! — and at Ahmed Khel, where Stewart cut
up the Afghans so tremendously, Mildare earned great
6S " THE DOP DOCTOR
diatinction as well as the Victoria Cross, which I am
delighted to see, in glancing through the Army and Navy
Gazette, Her Majesty has been pleased to confer upon him.
As a gentleman and a soldier he presents aH that is
desirable ; as a member of an old Catholic family, he
certainly commands my suffrages. But as the husband of
my eldest daughter I cannot look upon a younger son
with — arah ! — toleration. Honourable reputation is much,
bravery is much, but my son-in-law must possess — arah ! —
other — other qualifications." The old gentleman stuttered
pitiably.
" One other qualification, you mean, father, if that term
can be given to the possession of a certain amount of
money," said Lady Bridget- Mary, standing very straight
and looking very proudly at her father. " Will you object
to telling me plainly for how much you would be content
to sell your stock, with goodwill ?"
Lord Castleclare was a thin, courtly old gentleman, who
had conquered, he humbly trusted, all his passions, except
the passion for early Catholic Theological Fathers and the
passion for Spanish snuff. But he was stung by the irony.
He spilt quite a quantity of choice mixture over the long,
ivory-yellow nail of his lean, delicate thumb as he looked
consciously aside from the great scornful grey eyes that
Judged and questioned and condemned him as a mercenary
old gentleman. And he caught himself wishing that this
fine fiery creature had been born a boy. He looked back
again at his eldest daughter. Her white arms were folded
upon her bosom, her pearl-coloured silk evening gown was
swept aside from the fire, to whose warmth she held an
arched and exquisite foot. Her noble head, with its rich
coronet of silken black coils, was bent ; her broad brows
had ceased to be stormy. With a half-dreamy smile upon
her beautiful firm mouth, she w£is looking at a green
flashing ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand.
And the sight of her so sent a sudden pang of remembrance
leaping through the old man's heart. He forgot his
spoiled pinch of snuff, and stepped over to her, and took
the hand, and looked at the emerald ring with her in
silence.
"My dear daughter," he said, more simply and more
THE DOP DOCTOR 69
sweetly than Lady Bridget -Mary had ever heard him
speak before, " I think you love this brave gentleman
sincerely ?"
His daughter's large, beautifully-shaped hand closed
strongly over the old ivory fingers. The great brilliant
dark grey eyes looked at him through a sudden mist of
tears, though she lifted her head and held it high. She
said in a low, clear voice :
" 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 m© ... 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 ia
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 Bawno 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
60 THE DOP DOCTOR
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 hmpid women have their turbid
depths, their muddy secrets — and she had confided every-
thing to dearest Bridget-Mary, except the one thing that
mattered !
Well ! We all know for what reason Le Roi SoleU
addressed himself to the wooing of La Valliere. 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 lictle 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 abandon-
ment, 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
THE DOP DOCTOR 61
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 Castle-
clare'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 con-
centrated 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. Hi a 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. There-
fore, as you, dear Castleclare, with your wife and tlie boy,
who, I am gratified to hear, has cut another, are going to
62 THE DOP DOCTOR
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, lugu-
brious evebrows 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
monarcli'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 ad-
visable 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 Constant'ia 1"
" You have the expression !" said she. " Young women
or 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 con-
viction that this weak-minded man who has thrown your
daughter over will be back, begging Bridget-Mary to for-
give him and reinstate him in the possession of her affec-
tions 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 reallv 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 CathoUc
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
THE DOP DOCTOR «3
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, demand-
ing 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 re-
turning 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 com-
posed, 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 tliis. 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 siich 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 A\ith ground-glass, and
veiled with snowy curtains of starched thread-lace.
64 THE DOP DOCTOR
" 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 DowagerrDuchess 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, ' / mould 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 out-
stretched 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, ' j^ou
have perception . . .' What my Sovereign credits may
not my niece beheve ?"
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 hnes of humour about the wings of the sensitive
nostrils and the corners of the large finely-modelled mouth
quivered a Httle.
" 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 tiling 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
THE DOP DOCTOR 65
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
afiforded 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.
This is what the Mother-Superior wrote to her kinswoman,
with her mobile, eloquent lips folded closely together as
slie 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 thotbght 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 liers, 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 after-
wards ! How devoid of the true spirit of the rehgious,
how hateful, petty, profane ! But the great lady had been
5
66 THE DOP DOCTOR
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 Juis 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 la}'
amongst her papers and wiped the crowding tears away,
and went on :
" / could v)ish, in anticipation of either eventuality named,
that provision might now be made for her. Those who love
me — yourself 1 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 imphed wish would be
observed as a command :
We liave 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 m Holy Baptism
one that uxis 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.
1 am perfectly well in health, be quite assured ; I trtist I may
be spared to carry on my work here foi- many long years to
cume. B%d in case it should be otherwise, I u^rite thus :
" The country is greatly disturbed, in spite of the reassuring
THP: DOP doctor 67
reports t/uit have been disseminated by the Home Authorities.
I do not, and cannot, imagine wluit the official view may he in
London at this moment, fmt it is certain tJiat the Transvaal
and Free State are preparing for war. Every hour the enmity
between the Boers and the English deepens in intensity. It
will he to many minds a relief when, the storm hursts. The
War Office may thi'ak mexinly of the Africanised Dutchnuin,
as a fighting force, hvi the opinion of every loyal Briton in
this country is tlmt he is not a foe to he despised, arul that he
will shed the last drop of his own hlood and his children's for
the sake of his independence.
" Above the petty interests of greedy capitulists looms the
voider question : Slwll 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 he several cornrnaridos in laager on the Border.
A public meeting of citizens of this town has been held, at
which a vote of 'No cmifidence ' in the Dutch Ministers has
bexn passed, and an appeal for help has been made to the
Government at Cape Town. It is not yet publicly known
what the response lias been, if there is any. I think it
ominous that all of our Dutch ptipils, 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 ha'ppen to be resident in this town, a^id
the school will remain closed, at all events, until the outlook
ass'umes 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 ha.^
already set the troops under his command to work at p-utling
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 cm-tsy to the Mother-Superior. She wore the plain
black alpaca uniform of the Convent, with the ribbon of the
Headship of the Ked Class, to be resigned when she should
5—2
68 THE DOP DOCTOR
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 wdll 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, wliite,
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 stem 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 1"
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— any tiling whatever V*
" I think so, Mother, and I am glad now that I have done
it. There will be no need ior deception any more."
" My daughter, there has never been the slightest
THE DOP DOCTOR 69
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 sHght 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 Johannes-
burg. 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 tlie 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 he always here for you
to run to ! But God knows best /"
She said aloud, gently putting the girl away :
" Well, tlie 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
ooncerns your past life, and I say all \rith meaning " — the
70 THE DOP DOCTOR
girl's -Riiite 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 3^ou 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. Coluinb 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."
The Mother-Superior reached out a long arm, and took a
solid leather- bound, red-edged volume from the table, and
opened it at a page marked by a flamingo's feather, whose
delicate pink faded at the tip into rosy- white.
" I was reading this a little while before you came in.
If you were not a little dunce at Greek, you would be able
to construe the classic author for yourself."
THE DOP DOCTOR 71
" But I am a dunce, dear, and so I leave you to read him
to me," said Lynetto triumphantly.
" Well, balance this heavy book, and listen."
She read :
" ' When first the Father of the Immortals fashioned with
his divirie hands (he huma.n shape :
" ^ An image first he made of red clay from Ida, tempered
with pure water from the stream, of Xanthos, and wine from
the aolden kylix home hy heautifid Ganymede, and it was
godlike to took upon as a thinq fashioned hy the hands of the
god. But the clay ivas not tempered sufficienlly and warped
in the drying. Then Zeus Pater fashioned another shape
with m^ore cunning, and this was tempered well and warped
not. And he bent down to breathe between its lips the living
wul. But as he stooped, Hephaistos, jealous of the divine
gift about to be conferred upon the mortal race, sent from his
forges smoke and vapour, which obscured the vision of the
Almighty Workman. So that the imperfect image received
that which was meant for the perfect one.
" ' A7id Zeus Pater, being angered, said : " See what thy
malice has wrought. Behold, a beautiful soul has been set
in a body unbeauteoUrS and through thine act, and god though
I be, I cannot take back the gift that I have given." Then into
the other image of Man the divine maker breathed a soul.
Bui Zeus being wearied with his labours, and angered by the
craft of Hephaistos, it was less pure than the first. And so
two men came into being.
" ' And he whose body had been fashioiied perfectly and
without flaw by the Jiands of the divine craftsman, walked the
earth with gracious mien. Fair-eyed was he, with locks like
clustering vine-tendrils, and cheeJcs rosy as the apples of Love ;
hut the soul of this man was cunning, and he rejoiced in evils
and cruelties, and deceits and mockeries were upon his lips.
''''And he whose image had warped in the drying ivas un-
heauiifal in body and swart to look upon, as though blackened
by the forge-fires of Hephaistos, but he dealt uprightly and
hated evil, and on his lips there was no guile, but faithfulness
and trulh.
" ^ And he who was imperfect in body teas yet fairer in
the eyes of Zeus Pater than his brother ; because there dwelt
within him a heavieoua aovl.' "
72 THE DOP DOCTOR
" And yet, Mother, if your beautiful soul had not been
i^iven beautiful windows to look out at, and a beautiful
aiouth to kiss me or scold me with, and beautiful hands to
aold, it would have been a beastly shame !"
Is there a woman h'ving who can resist such sweet
daughterly flatteries ? This was very much a woman, and
very much a mother, if very much a nun. She kissed the
mouth distilling such dear honey.
" This, not for the compliment, but because it is seven
years to-day since I found you, lying like some poor little
strayed lamb on the veld, under the burning sun."
" That was my real birthday, dearest, dearest ..."
The girl pressed closer to her with dumb, vehement
affection, as though she would have grown to the bosom
that had been her shield since then.
" On that day a little later, when I looked down and
you looked up with big eyes that begged for love, I
knew that we had found each other. And we have never
lost each other since, I think 1"
Slie smiled radiantly iato the loving eyes.
" Never, my Mother. But if we did ... if we are ever
to be estranged or parted, it would be better ... oh ! it
would be better if you had passed by in the waggon, and
left me lying, and the aasvogels and the wild-dogs had done
the rest."
TJie Mother-Superior said, loosening the clinging arms,
and speaking sternly :
" Never, my daughter. You do gravely wrong to say so.
Holy Baptism has been yours, and Confirmation, and you
have shared with His Faithful in the Body of Christ. . . .
Never let me hear you say that again !"
" Mother, I promise you, you never shall. But I had a
dream last night that was most vivid and strange and
awful. It has haunted me ever since."
The Mother Superior started, for she also had had a
strange dream. Of that vision had been born the written
letter that now lay under the quartz paper-weight — the
letter that was to be sent, with others, by the next English
mail that should go out from Gueldersdorp, which said mail,
being intercepted h>y the Boers, was not for many months
to reach its destination. Supposing it had, this story need
THE DOP DOCTOR 73
never have been written, or else another would have been
written in its place.
" Dear heart, I do not think that it is good or useful to
brood upon such things, or to relate them. And the Church
forbids us to take account of mere dreams, or in any way
be swayed by them."
" That has always puzzled me. Because, you know . . .
supposing St. Joseph had refused to credit a dream ? . . ."
" There are dreams and dreams, my dear. And the
heavenly visions of the Saints are not to be confounded
with our trivial subconscious memories. Besides, sweets
and fruits and pastry consumed in the seniors' dormitory
at night are not only an infringement of school rules, but
an insult to the digestion."
" Mother, how did you find out ?" cried Lynette. There
was something very like a dimple in the bleached olive of
the sweet worn cheek, lurking near the edge of the close
coif, and a twinkle of laughter in the deep grey eyes that
you thought were black until you had learned better.
" Well, though you may not find it easy to believe, I
was once a girl at a boarding-school, and I possibly remember
how we usually celebrated a breaking-up. There is the
washing-bell ; the pupils' tea-bell will ring directly ; you
must hurry, or you will be late. One moment. What of this
unpleasant incident that took place during the afternoon
walk yesterday ? Sister Cleophee and Sister Francis-Clare
have not given me a very definite account."
Lynette's fair skin flushed poppy-red.
" Mother, they hooted us on the road to the Recreation
Ground."
Upon the great brows of the Mother-Superior sat the
majesty of coming tempest. Her white hand clenched,
her tone was awfully stern :
" Who were ' they ' ?"
" Some drunken Boers and store-boys — at least, I think
they were drunk — and some Dutch railway-men. They
cried shame on the Dutch girls for learning from vile
English idolaters. Then more men came up and joined
them. They threw stones, and threatened to duck Sister
Cleophee and the two other Sisters in the river. And they
might have tried to, though we senior girls got round them —
74 THE DOP DOCTOR
at least, some of us did — and said they should try that on
us first "
" That was courageous."
" We " — Lynette laughed a little nervously — " we were
awfully frightened, all the same."
" My dear, without fear there would have been no
courage. Then I am told an English officer interposed ?"
" He was coming from the direction of the Hospital — a
tall thin man in Service khaki, with a riding-sjambok
under his arm. But it would have been as good as a
sword if he had used it on those men. When he lifted it
in speaking to them they huddled together like sheep.'
" You have no idea who he was, of course ?"
" I do not know his name, but I heard one of the Boers
say, ' That slim duyvel with the sjambok is the new Military
Commandant.' Another officer was with him, much
yoiuiger, taller, and with fair hair. He "
" I hope I shall soon have an opportunity of thanking the
Commandant personally. As it is, I shall write. Now go,
my dear."
Lynette took her familiar kiss, and dropped her formal
curtsy, and went with the red sunset touching her squirrel-
coloured hair to flame. The tea-bell rang as she shut the
door behind her, and directly afterwards the gate-bell
clanged, sending an iron shout echoing through the white-
washed, tile-paved passages, as if heralding a visitor who
would not be denied. An Irish novice who was on duty
with the Sister attendant on the gate came shortly after-
wards to the room of the Mother-Superior, bringing a card
on a little wooden tray.
The Mother, the opening sentences of her note of thanks
wet upon the sheet before her, took the card, and knew
that the letter need not be sent.
" This gentleman desired to see me ?"
" He did so, Reverend Mother," whispered the timid
Irish girl, who stood in overwhelming awe of the majestic
personality before her. " ' Ask the Mother-Superior will
she consent to receive me ?" says he. ' If she won't, say
that she must.' Says I : ' Sir, I'd not drame to presume
give Herself a message that bowld, but if you'll please to
wait, I'll tell her what you're after saying.' "
THE DOP DOCTOR 75
" Quite right, Katie. Now go and tell Sister Tobias to
show him into the parlour. I will be there directly."
Katie bobbed and vanished. When the Mother-Superior
came into the parlour, the visitor was standing near the
fireplace, with his hands behind his back. One wore a
shabby dogskin riding-glove. The other, lean and brown
and knotty, held his riding-cane and the other glove, and
a grey " smasher " hat. He was looking up quietly and
intently at a framed oil-painting that hung above.
It represented a Syrian desert landscape, pale and
ghastly, under the light of a great white moon, with one
lonely Figure standing like a sentinel against a towermg
fang of rock. Lurking forms of fierce beasts of prey were
dimly to be distinguished amongst the shadows, and by
the side of the patient, lonely watcher brooded with out-
spread bat-wings, a Shadow infinitely more terrible than
any of these. It was rather a poor copy of a modem
picture, but the truth and force and inspiration of the
origmal had made of the copyist an artist for the time. The
pure dignity and lofty faith and patience of the Christ-eyes,
haggard with bodily sleeplessness and spiritual battle, the
indomitable resistance breathing in the lines of the Christ
figure, wan and gaunt with physical famine as with the
nobler hunger of the soul, were rendered with fidelity and
power.
The stranger's keen ear caught the Mother's long, swift
step, and the sweep of her w oollen draperies over the shiny
beeswaxed floor. He wheeled sharply, brought his heels
together, and bowed. She returned his salutation with
her inimitable dignity and grace. With his eyes on the
pure, still calmness of the face framed in the white close
coif, the Colonel commented mentally :
" What a noble-looking woman !"
The Mother-Superior thought, as her composed eyes
swept over the tall, spare, broad-shouldered figure and the
strong, lean, tanned face, with its alert, hazel eyes, nose
of the falcon-beak order, and firm straight mouth uncon-
cealed by the short-clipped moustache :
" This is a brave man."
76 THE DOP DOCTOR
XI
The great of soul are not slow to find each other out. These
two recognised each other at meeting. Before he had
explained his errand, she had thanked him cordially,
directly, and simply, for his timely interference of the
previous day.
" One of the lesser reasons of my visit, which I must
explain is official in character," he said, " was to advise
you that your pupils and the ladies in charge of them will
not henceforth be safe from insult except in those parts of
the town most frequented by our countrymen, and rarely
even there. It would be wise of you under existing cir-
cumstances, which I shall explain as fully and as briefly as
I may, to send your pupils without delay to their homes."
" All that have not already left," she assured Mm, " with
the exception of those whose parents reside in the town,
or who have no Uving relatives, and therefore do not leave
us, go North and South by early trains to-morrow."
" Ma'am," he said, " I am heartily glad to hear it." He
added, as she invited him to be seated : " Thank you, but I
have been in tlie saddle since five this morning, and if you
have no objection I should prefer to stand. And for
another reason, I explain things better on my legs. But
you will allow me to find you a seat, if — any of these may
be moved ?" His glance, with some perturbation in it,
reviewed the stiff ranks of chairs severely marslialled in
Convent fashion against the varnished skirting-board.
" They are not fixtures," she said, with quiet amusement
at his evident reUef, and he got her a chair, the largest and
most solid that the room offered, and planted himself
opposite her, standing on the hearthrug, with one hand
resting on the comer of the liigh mantelsheK, and the toe of a
spurred riding-boot on the plain brick kerb.
" I may as well say . . ." — he ran a finger round the inside
of the collar that showed above the kliaki jacket — " that,
though I have often had the pleasure, and I will add, the
great advantage, of meeting ladies of — of your religious
profession before, this is the first time that I ever was inside
a Convent."
THE DOP DOCTOR 77
" Or a boarding-school ?" she asked, and her rare, sudden
smile irradiated her. His hand dropped from his collar.
He looked at her with a sudden warmth of admiration there
was no mistaking. But her beauty went as suddenly as
it had come, and her arched, black brows frowned slightly
as she said, in tones that were very cold and very clear,
and rather ironical :
" Sir, you are good enough to waste valuable time in
trying to break, with due consideration for the nerves of a
large household of unprotected women, the news we have
expected daily for months. You have come here to
announce to us the bursting of the cloud of War. Is it
not so ?"
He was taken aback, but liid it like a diplomat.
" Ma'am, it is so. The public notice was posted in the
town this morning. Forces of Boers are massed on the
West Natal and East Baraland borders, waiting untO the
British fire a shot. Their secret orders are to wait that signal,
but some unlooked-for event may cause them to anticipate
these. . . . And we shall be wise to prepare for eventu-
alities. For myself, having been despatched by the British
Goverrmient on special service to report to the Home
Authorities upon our defences in the North — it is an open
secret now — I have been sent down here to put the town
into a condition to withstand siege. And frankly, without
apology for necessary and inevitable bluntness, one of the
most important of those conditions is — that the women
and children should be got out of it."
The blow had been deKvered. The angry blush that he
had expected did not invade the pale olive of her cheeks.
He added :
" I hope you will understand that I say tliis because it
is my duty. I am not naturally unsociable, or bearish,
or a surl}^ misogynist. Rather the contrary. Quite the
contrary."
She remembered a slim, bo3dsh, young lieutenant of
Hussars with wliom she had danced in a famous London
ball-room more than twenty years back. That boy a
woman hater ! Struggle as she would the Mother-Superior
could not keep Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne from coming to
the surface for an instant. But she went under directly,
78 THE DOP DOCTOR
and left nothing but a spark of laughter in the beautiful
grave eyes.
" I understand," she said. " Woman in time of peace
may add a certain welcome pleasantness to life. In time
of war she is nothing but a helpless incubus."
" Let me point out, ma'am, that I did not say so. But
she possesses a capacity for being killed equal in ratio to
tliat of the human male, without being equally able to
defend herself. In addition to this, she eats ; and I shall
require all the rations that may be available to keep alive
the combatant members of the community."
" Eating is a habit," agreed the Mother- Superior,
" wluch even the most rigid disciplinarians of the body
have found difficult to break."
His mouth straightened sternly under the short-clipped
brown moustache. Here was a woman who dared to
bandy words with the Officer Commanding the Garrison.
He drew a shabby notebook from a breast-pocket, and
consulted it.
" On the eleventh, the day after to-morrow, a special
train, leaving No. 2 platform of the railway- station, will
be placed by the British Government at the disposal of
those married women, spinsters, and children who wish
to follow the example of those who left to-day, and go
down to Cape Town. Those who prefer to go North are
advised to leave for Malamye Siding or Johnstouii, places
at a certain distance from the Transvaal Border, where they
will be almost certain to find safety. Those who insist
upon remaining in the town I camiot, of course, remove by
force. I will make all possible arrangements to laager
them safely, but this will entail heavy extra labour upon
the forces at my command, and inevitable discomfort —
possibly severe suffering and privation — upon themselves.
To you, madam, I appeal to set a high example. Your
Community numbers, unless I am incorrectly informed,
twelve religious. Consent to take the step I urge upon you,
retreat with your nuns to Cape Town while the opportimity
is yours."
He folded his arms^ having spoken tlus curtly and
crisply. The Mother-Superior rose up out of her chair.
It seemed to him as though she would never have done
II
THE DOP DOCTOR 79
rising, but at last she stood before him, very straight and
awfully tall, with her great stern eyes an inch above the
level of his own, and her white hands folded in her black
serge sleeves.
'' Sir," she said, " we are here under the episcopal
jurisdiction of the Catholic Bishop of the Diocese. We
have received no order from His Eminence to quit our
post — and until we receive it, give me leave to tell you,
with all respect for your high ofl&cial authority, that we
shall remain in Gueldersdorp."
Their looks crossed like swords. He grew crimson over
the white unsunburned line upon his forehead, and his
moustache straightened like a bar of rusty-red iron across
his thin, tanned face. But he respected moral power
and determination when he encountered them, and this
salient woman provoked his respect.
" Let us keep cool " he began.
" I assure you that I have never been oth3rwise," she
said, " since the begimiing of this interview."
" Ma'am," he said, '" you state the fact. Let me keep
cool, and point out to you a few of the — peculiarities in
which the present situation unfortunately abounds."
He laid down, with a look that asked permission, his
hat and cane and the odd glove upon the round, shining
walnut-table that stood, adorned with mild little religious
works, in the geometrical centre of the Convent parlour,
and checked the various points off upon the lingers of the
gloved hand with the lean, brown, bare one.
" I anticipate very shortly the outbreak of hostilities."
He had quite forgotten that he was talking to a member of
the squeaking sex. " I have begun immediately upon my
arrival here to prepare for them. The nucleus of a sand-
bag fort-system has been formed already, mines are being
laid down far in the front, and every male of the population
who has a pair of capable hands has had a rifle put into
them."
She looked at him, and approved the male type of energy
and action. " If I had been a man," she thought, " I
should have wished to be one like this." But she bent her
head silently, and he went on.
We have an armoured train in the railway-yard,
((
80 THE DOP DOCTOR
with a Maxim and a Hotchkiss. We have a Nordenfeldt,
a couple of Maxims more, four seven-pounder guns of
almost prehistoric date, slow of fire, uncertain as regards
the elevating-gear, and, I tell you plainly, as dangerous,
some of 'em, to be behind as to be in front of ! One or
two more we've got that were grey-headed in the seventies.
By the Lord ! I wish one or two Whitehall heads I
know were mopping 'em out this minute. Ahem !
Ahem !"
He coughed, and grew red under his sun-tan. Her eyes
were elsewhere.
" Ma'am, you must try to recollect that the Boer forces
are armed with the newest Krupps and other guns, and
that it is more than possible they may attempt to shell the
town. In that case artillery of tremendous range, and a
flight almost equal to that of sound itself — I won't be too
technical, I assure you ! — will be mustered against our
crazy pieces, only fit for the scrap-heap, or for gate
ornaments. Understand, I tell you what is common
knowledge among our friends — common jest among our
enemies. And another thing I will tell you, ma'am. Those
enemies shall never enter Gueldersdorp !"
She was radiant now, wdth that smile upon her hps, and
that glow in the great eyes that met his with such frank
approval. Confound it, what business had a nun to be
anything like so beautiful ? Would she pale, would she
tremble, when he told her the last truth of all ?
" Your Convent, ma'am, unluckily for your Community,
happens to be, if not the biggest, at least the most con-
spicuously situated building in the place, lying as it does
at a distance of four hundred yards from the town, on the
north-east side. Like the Hospital, of course, it will be under
the protection of the Red -Cross Flag. But the Boer is
not chivalrous. He does not object to killing women or
sick people, nor does he observe with any standing scrupu-
lousness the Geneva Convention. Any object that shows
up nicely on the skyline is good enough to pound away
at, and the Red-Cross Flag has often helped him to get a
satisfactory range. If tiiey bombard us, as I have reason
to beUeve they will, you'll have iron and lead in tons poured
through these walls."
THE DOP DOCTOR 81
She said :
" When they fall about our ears. Colonel, it will be tim«
to leave them !"
He adored a gallant spirit, and here was one indeed.
" Ma'am, I am disarmed, since you take things in this
way."
" It is the only way in which to take them," she said.
" There should be no panic in the hearts of those who wait
on the Divine Will. Moreover, I should wish you to under-
stand in case of siege, and an extra demand upon the staffs
of the Town and Field Hospitals, that we are all — or nearly
all — certificated nurses, and would willingly place our
services at your disposal. Let me hope that you will
call upon us without hesitation if the necessity should
arise."
He thanked her, and had taken leave, when he asked with
diffidence if he might be permitted to see the Convent
chapel. She consented willingly, and passed on before,
tall and stately, and moving with long, light, even steps,
her flowing serge draperies whispering over the tiled
passages. The chapel was at the end of a long white-
washed corridor upon the airy floor above. His keen
glance took in every feature of the simple, spotless little
sanctuary as the tall, black-clad figure swept noiselessly
to the upper end of the aisle between the rows of rush-
seated chairs, and knelt for an instant in veneration of
the Divine Presence hidden in the Tabernacle.
" Unfortunately situated !" he muttered, standing stiffly
by the west door. Then he glanced riglit and left, a thumb
and finger in the breast-pocket of his jacket, feeHng for a
worn Httle pigskin purse. As he passed out before her at
the motion, and she mechanically dipped her fingers in the
holy-water font, and made the Sign of the Cross before she
closed the chapel door, she saw that he held out to her a
five- pound note.
" Ma'am, I am not a Roman Catholic, but . . ."
" There is no box for alms," she said, pausing outside
the shut door, while the lay- Sister waited at the passage
end, " as this is only a private chapel,"
" I observed that, ma'am. I am, as I have said, a
Protestant. But in the behalf of a dear friend of mine, a
6
82 THE DOP DOCTOR
British officer, of your own faith, who I have reason to
believe died \vithout benefit of his clergy, perhaps %vith this
you would arrange that a service should be held in memory
of the dead ?"
" I understand," said the Mother-Superior. " You
suggest that Holy Mass should be ofPered for the repose of
your friend's soul ? Well, I will convey your offering to
our chaplain, Father Wix, since you desire it."
" I do desire it — or, ratlier, poor Mildare would."
An awful sensation as of sinking down through the solid
floors, through the foundations of the Convent, into
unfathomable deeps possessed her. Her eyes closed ; she
forced them open, and made a desperate rally of her sinking
forces. Unseen she put out one hand beliind her, and
leaned it for support against the iron-studded oak timbers
of the chapel door. But his eyes were not upon her as he
went on, unconsciously, to deal the last, worst blow.
" I said, ma'am, that my dead friend . . . the name is
Richard Mildare, Captain, late of the Grey Hussars. . . .
You are ill, ma'am. I have been inconsiderate, and over-
tired you." He had become aware that great dark circles
had drawn themselves round her eyes, and that even her
lips were colourless. She said, with a vaUant effort :
" I assure you, with thanks, that you have been most
considerate, and that I am perfectly well. Are you at
liberty to tell me, sir, the date of Captain Mildare's death ?
For I know one who was also his friend, and would " — a
spasm passed over her face — " take an interest in hearing
the particulars."
" Ma'am, you shall know what I know myself. About
twenty years ago Captain ISIildare, owing to certain unhappy
circumstances, social, and not pecuniary ones, sent in his
papers, sold his Commission, and left England."
She waited.
" I heard of him in Paris. Then, later, I heard from
him. He was with her here in South Africa. She was a
woman for whom he had given up everything. They
travelled continually, never resting long anywhere, he, and
she. and — their child. She died on the trek and he buried
her."
" Yea ?"
THE DOP DOCTOR 83
The voice was curiously toneless.
" Where he buried her has only recently come to my
knowledge. It was at a kind of veld tavern in the
Orange Free State, a shanty in the grass -country between
Driepoort and Xioonfontein, where travellers can get a bad
lodging, and bad liquor, and worse company. " Trekkers
Plaats ' they call the place now. But when my friend was
there it was known as the ' Free State Hotel.' "
Her lips shut as if to keep out bitter, drowning waters ;
her face was white as wax within the starched blue-white
of the nun's coif ; his slow sentences fell one by one upon
her naked heart, and ate their way in like vitriol. Quite
well, too well, she knew what was coming.
"■ He dug her grave wrh. Ids own hands. He meant to
have a clergyman read the Burial Service over it, but
before that could be arranged for he also died — of fever,
I gather, though'^jnothing is very clear, except that the
two graves are there. I liave seen them, and have also
ascertained that whatever property he left was appro-
priated by the scoundrel who kept the hotel, and afterwards
sold it, and cleared out of South Africa ; and that the
child is not to be found. God knows what has become of
her ! The man who robbed her father may have murdered
or sold her — or taken her to England. A man bearing his
name was mixed up in a notorious case tried at the Central
Criminal Court five years ago. And the case, which ruined
a well-known West End surgeon, involved the death of a
young woman. I trust the victim may not have been the
unhappy girl herself. My solicitors in London have been
instructed to make inquiries towards the removal of that
doubt. . . ."
If those keen eyes of his had not been averted, he must
have seen the strong shuddering that convulsed the
woman's frame, and the spasm of agony that wrung the
lips she pressed together, and the glistening damps of
anguish that broke out upon the broad wliite foreliead.
To save her Ufe she could not have said to him, " She whom
you seek is here !" But a voice wailed in her heart, more
piercingly than Rachel's, and it cried : " Richard's
daughter ! She is Richard's daughter ! The homeless
thing, the blighted child I found upon the veld, and nursed
6— i
84 THE DOP DOCTOR
back to life and happiness and forgetfulness of a hideous
past ; whom I took into my empty heart, and taught to
call me Mother. , . . She is the fruit of my own betrayal !
the offspring of the friend who deceived and the man who
deserted me !"
The visitor was going on, his grave gaze still turned aside.
" Of course, the age of the unhappy girl whose death
brought about the trial I speak of — everything depends upon
that. Mildare's daughter was a child of three years old
when she lost father and mother. If aUve to-day she would
be nineteen years of age. I wish it had been my great good
fortune to trace and find her. She should have had the
opportunity of growing up to be a noble woman. In this
place, if it might have been, and with an example like
yours before her eyes . . . ma'am, good-afternoon."
He bowed to her, and went away with short, quick,
even steps, following the lay-Sister who was to take him
to the gate.
She tottered into the chapel, and sank down before the
altar, and strove to pray. Her mind was an eddying
blackness shot with the Uvid glare of electric fires. Her
faith rocked like a palm in tlie tempest ; her soul was tossed
across raging billows like a vessel in the grip of the cyclone.
Being so great, slie suffered greatly ; being so strong, she
had strong passions to wrestle with and to subdue. Awhile,
like that other Mary, who, unlike her, was a fleshly sinner,
she strove, rent as it seemed to her, by seven devils. And
then she fell down prone at her Master's nail-pierced Feet,
and found there at last the healing gift of tears.
XII
Emiqeation Jane, the new under-housemaid on trial at
the Convent, had a gathering on the top Joint of the first
finger of the hand that burned to wear Walt Slabberts'
betrothal-ring, and the abscess being ripe for the lancet,
she had an extra afternoon in the week to get it attended to.
She found Walt waiting at the street-comer under the lamp-
post, and her heart bounded, for by their punctuality at
THE DOP DOCTOR 86
the trysting-place you know whether they are serious in
their intentions towards you, or merely carrying on, and
her other young men had invariably kept her waiting.
This new one was class, and no mistake.
" Watto, Walt !" she hailed Joyously.
Her Walt uttered a guttura.l greeting in the Taal, and
displayed uncared-for and moss-grown teeth in the smile
that Emigration Jane found strangely fascinating. To the
eye that did not survey Walt through the rose-coloured
glasses of affection he appeared merely as a high-shouldered,
slab-sided young Boer, whose cheap store-clothes bagged
where they did not crease, and whose boots curled upwards
at the toes with mediaeval effect. His cravat, of a lively
green, patterned with yellow rockets, warred with his
tallowy complexion ; his drab-coloured hair hung in
clumps ; he was growing a beard that sprouted in reddish
tufts from the tough hide of his Jaws, leaving bare patches
between, like the karroo. The Slabborts was an assistant-
clerk at the Gueldersdorp Railway-Station Parcels-Office,
and his wddowed mother, the Tante Slabberts, took in
washing from Uitlanders, who are mad enough to change
their underwear with frequency, and did the cleaning at
the Gerevormed Kerk at Rustenberg, a duty which
involves the emptying of spittoons. Her boy was her Joy
and pride.
Young Walt, the true Boer's son that he was, did not
entertain the idea of marrying Emigration Jane. The
child of the Amalekite might never be brought home as
bride to the Slabberts roof. But all the same, her style,
which was that of the Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town,
London, N.W., and her manners, which were easy, and her
taste in dress, which was dazzling, attracted him. As
regards their spoken intercourse, it had been hampered by
the Slabbertian habit of pretending only a limited acquaint-
ance with the barbarous dialect of England. But a young
man who conversed chiefly by grunts, nudges, and signs
was infinitely more welcome than no young man at all, and
Emigration Jane knew that the language of love is uni-
versal. She had sent him a lovely letter in the Taal making
this appointment, causing his pachydermatous hide to
know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only last Sabbath
86 THE DOP DOCTOR
she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young
woman capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might
be made useful in a variety of ways — some of them
tortuous, all of them secret, as the Slabbertian ways were
wont to be.
He advanced to her, without the needless ceremony of
touching his hat, eagerly asking how she had acquired her
new accomplishment ?
But the brain crowned by the big red hat that had come
from the Maison Cluny, and cost a hundred francs, and
had been smartened up ^dtll a bunch of pink and yellow
artificial roses, and three imitation ostrich-tips of a cheerful
blue, did not comprehend. Someone who spoke the Taal
had written for her. The bilingual young woman who
was to be of such use to Walt had only existed in his
dreams. And yet — the disappointing creature was ex-
ceeding fair.
" Pity you left your eyes be'ind you, Dutchy !" giggled
Emigration Jane, deliciously conscious that those rather
muddy orbs were glued on her admiringly
The hair crowned by the screaming hat was waved and
rolled over the horsehair frame she had learned to call a
" Pompydore " ; the front locks, usually confined in the
iron cages called " curlers," frizzled wonderfully about her
moist, crimson face. She had on a " voylet " delaine
skirt, with three bias bands round the bottom, and a
" blowse " of transparent muslin stamped with floral
devices. Her shoes were of white canvas ; her stockings
pink and open-worked ; her gloves were of white thread,
and had grown grey in the palms with agitation. One of
them firmly grasped a crimson " sunshyde," with green
and scarlet cherries growing out of the end of the stick.
The young Dopper warmly grasped the other, provoking
a squeal from the enchantress.
" Mind me bad finger ! Lumme ! you did give us a
squeeze an' a 'arf."
" K I shall to hurt you I been sorry. Miss !" apologized
ilie Slabbert.
" All righto, Dutchy !" smiled Emigration Jane. " Don't
tear your features." She bestowed a glance of almost
vocal disdain upon a Kaffir girl in turkey-red cotton
THE DOP DOCTOR 87
twill, with a green hat savagely pinned upon her woolly
hair.' At another ebony female who advanced along t}).e
sidewalk pushing a white baby in a perambulator she
tossed her head. " Funny," she observed, " when I was
'ome I used to swaller all the tales what parsons kep'
pitchin' about that black lot 'aving souls like me an' you.
When I got out 'ere, an' took my fust place at Cape Town,
an' 'eard the IMissis and tlie Master continual say in',
' Don't do this or that, it ain't Englishwomen's work ; leave
it to the Caffy,' or ' Call the 'Ottintot gal,' I felt quite 'urt
for 'em. Upon me natural, I did ! But when I knoo
these blackies a bit better, I didn't make no more bones.
Monkeys, they are, rigged up in brown 'olland an' red braid,
wot 'ave immytated 'uman beings till they've come to talk
langwidge wot we can understand, and tumble to our
meanings. 'Ow do you Uke me dress, Walty dear ? An'
me 'at ? That chap what passed with the red mustash
said to 'is friend as I looked a bit of fair all right, and no
mistake. But I'd rather 'ear you say so nor 'im if you
'ad enough English to do it with. Wot do I care about
the perisher along of you ?"
It Avas hard work to talk for two. and keep the ball of
courtsliip rolling after the approved fashion of Kentish
Town, when tlie slouching young Boer would only grunt in
reply, or twinkle at her out of his piggish eyes. But
Emigration Jane had come out to South Africa, hearing
that places at five shillings a day were offered you by
employers, literally upon their knees, and that husbands
were thick as orange-peel and programmes on tlie pit-
floor of the Britanniar Theayter, 'Oxton, or the Camden
Varieties on the morning after a Bank HoHday. Slie had
left her first situation at Cape Town, being a girl of spirit,
because her mistress had neglected to introduce her to
eligible gentlemen acquaintances, as the pleasant-spoken
agent at the Emigrants' Information Office in Cheapside,
the young gentleman of Hebrew strain, whose dark eyes,
waxed moustache, and diamond tie-pin had made a deep
impression upon the susceptible heart of his client, had
assured Jane the South African employer would take an
early opportunity of doing. The reality had not corre-
sponded with fche glowing picture. The employer had
88 THE DOP DOCTOR
failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not appeared.
Ephemeral flu-tations there had been, with a postman, with
a trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American
bar-tender. But not one of these had breathed of indis-
soluble union, though each had wanted to borrow her
savings. And Emigration Jane had " bin 'ad " in that
way before, and gone witli her bleeding heart and depleted
Post Office Savings-book before the fat, sallow magistrate
at the Regent's Road County Court, and winced and
smarted under liis brutal waggeries, only to learn that the
appropriator of her womanly affections and her fifteen
sovereigns had already three wives.
The brute, the 'artless beast ! Emigration Jane won-
dered at herself, she did, as 'ad bin such a reg'ler soft as
to be took in by one to whom she never referred in speech
except as " That There Green." That she softened to him
in her weaker moments, in spite of his remembered appetite
for savings and his regrettable multiplicity of wives, gave
her the fair hump. That something in the expression
of this new one's muddy eyes recalled the loving leer
of "That There Green," she admitted to herself.
Womanly anxiety throbbed in the bosom, not too coyly
hidden by the pneumonia blouse, as the couple passed the
gilded portals of a public bar, and the Slabberts' elbow
was thrust painfully into her side, as its owner said
heavily :
" Have you thirst ?"
She coyly owned to aridity, and they entered the saloon,
kept by a Dutchman who spoke English. Two ginger-beers
with a stick of Hollands were supplied, and the stick of
Slabberts was as the rod of Moses to the other stick for
strength and power. But as Emigration Jane daintily
sipped the cooling beverage, giggling at the soapy bubbles
that snapped at her nose, the restless worm of anxiety kept
no gnawing under the flowery " blowse." Too well did she
know the ways of young men who hospitably ask you if
you're thirsty, and 'ave you in, whether or no, and order
drinks as liberal as lords, and then discover that they're
short of the bob, and borrow from you in a joking way. . . .
Her heart bounded as the Slabberts put his hand in his
pocket, saying •
THE DOP DOCTOR 89
" Wat kost het ?"
The Dutch bar-keeper, who seemed to know Slabberts,
answered in English, looking at Emigration Jane ;
" Half a doUar."
Half a dollar is South African for eighteenpence. Slab-
berts rattled something metallic in his trousers-pocket,
and said something rapidly in the Taal. The Dutch bar-
keeper leaned across the counter, and said to Emigration
Jane :
" Your young man has not got the money."
They were all, all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She
bravely dried it Adth a finger of a white cotton glove, and
produced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-
silver aflfair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk
through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really
whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at
Yarmouth, and purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest
Paris style, for threepence, and try on feather-boas at
two-and-eleven-three, plucked from the defunct carcase of
the domestic fowl. She paid for the drinks with a florin,
and it was quite Hke old times when Slabberts calmly
pocketed the sixpence of change. The bar-keeper leaned
over to her again, and said, surrounding her wdth a confi-
dential atmosphere of tobacco and schnaps :
" He is a good man, that young man of yours, and gets
much money. He means to give you a nice present
by-and-by."
Her grateful heart overflowed to this friendly patronage.
She showed the bar-keeper her gathered finger, and said it
did 'urt a treat. She expected it would 'urt worse before
Dr. de Boursy-Wilhams — " 'adn't 'e got a tofE's name ?" —
'ad done with it.
" You go to that Engelsch doktor on Harris Street, eh ?"
said the bar-keeper, spitting dexterously.
" Sister Tobias — that's the nun wot 'ousekeeps at the
Convent — give me a order to see 'im, to 'ave me finger
larnced," explained Emigration Jane. " Ain't 'e all
right ?"
" Right enough," said the bar-keeper, winking at the
Slabberts, and adding something in the Taal, that provoked
chuckles among the bystanders and called forth a fine display
90 THE DOP DOCTOR
of neglected teeth on the part of the personage addressed.
" There are plenty other Engelsch will be wishing to be as
right, oh, very soon ! For De Boursy -Williams, he has sent
his wife and his two daughters away on the train for
Cape Town yesterday morning, and he has gone after them
t] lat same night, and lie has left all his patients to the Dop
Doctor."
" Some red-necked baboons are wiser than others," said
the Slabberts in the Taal. and there was a hoarse laugh, and
tlie humorist turned his big heavy body away, and became
one of a crowd of otiier Dutchmen, who were, in veiled
hints and crooked allusions, discussing the situation across
the Border. Emigration Jane was not sensitive to the
electricity in the atmosphere. She knew no Dutch, and
was perfect in the etiquette of the outing, which, when
the young woman has been supplied with the one regula-
tion drink, stands her up in the corner like an umbrella
in dry weather as long as her young man is a-talking to
'is pals.
" So," the bar-keeper went on, " if you shall want that
bad finger of yours looked to, you will have to wait until
the Dop Doctor wakes up. He is a big man, who can
drink as much as three Boers. . . . He came in this morning
to get drunk, and you shall not wake Imn now if you fire
off a riJ3e at his ear. But he will get up presently and shake
himself, and then he will be quite steady ; you would not
guess how drunk he had been unless you had seen. . . . He
is over there, sleeping on that table in the corner, and it
will be very bad for the man who shall wake him up. For,
look you, that Dop Doctor is a duyvel. I have seen him
break a man like a stick between his hands for nothing but
cutting up a tliieving monkey of a httle Kaffir with the
sjambok. And he took the verdoemte tiling home where
he lives, they say, and strapped up its black hide with
plaster, and set its arm as if it had been a child of Christians.
But every Engelschman is mad. Groot Brittanje breeds a
nation of madmen."
The saloon got fuller and fuller. The air solidified with
the Taal and the tobacco, and otlier things less pleasant.
It was not the hour for a crowd of customers, but nobody
had seemed to be working much of late. Tb«y were all
THE DOP DOCTOR 91
Transvaalers and Free Staters, tradesmen of the town, or
Boers from outlying farms, and not a man there but was
waiting a certain signal to clear out and leave Gueldersdorp
to her fate, or remain in the place on a salary paid by the
Republics as a spy. The English customer who came in
knew at one whiff of the thick atmosphere that it was
unhealthy, and ii the man happened to be alone, he
ordered, and paid, and drank, and went out quickly. If
he happened to be with friends, he pointedly addressed his
conversation to his countrymen, and left witli a certain
degree of swagger, and without the appearance of undue
haste.
Once the swing-doors of the saloon opened to admit a
short, spare, hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman,
whose insignificant Cockney countenance was splashed
with orange-coloured freckles of immense size. Between
his thin anaemic lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And
Emigration Jane, toying with the dregs of her tumbler,
recognized the pert, sharp, sallow face seen over the sleeve
of a large burgher's outstretched arm. With some trouble
she caught the eye of the short, pale young man, and he
instantly became a red one. To reach her was difficult,
but he dived and wriggled his way across the saloon,
wedging his frail person between the blockish bodies with a
cool address that reminded her of the first night of a " noo
show " at tlie Camden " Theayter," and the queue outside
the gallery door.
" 'inio, 'ullo ! Thought 1 reckonised you, Miss." He
touched his cheap imitation Panama with swaggering
gallantry, and winked. " But seeing you eight sizes more
of a toff than what you were when I previously 'ad the
pleasure, I 'esitated to tip you the 'Ow Do."
She tossed her imitation ostrich plumes in Joyous
coquetry.
"As if I didn't know wot you're after. Garn ! You
only wants to know if I acted on the stryte about . . ."
His projecting ears burned crimson.
"Well, an' suppose I do. Did she "
" Did she wot ?"
" You pipe well enough. Did she 'ave it ?"
" Ain't you anxious ?"
92 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Tyke it I am anxious. Did she 1 No cod ?"
" Did she git your letter wot you put in the box o'
choc's ? 0' course she did, Mister. Wot do you tyke me
for ? A silly looney or a sneakin' thief ?"
" I'll tell you what I tyke you for. A Jolly little bit of
Enghsh All' Right. Say! Do you think . . ." The
prominent Adam's apple Jutting over the edge of the
guillotining double collar worked emotionally. " Think
she'll send an answer, eh ?"
" Reckon she will ; you watch out an' see !'*
" You fust-claras little brick !"
" Gam !"
" I mean it. Stryte. Next door to a angel — that's wot
you are. She's the angel. Tell 'er I said so — that's if you
can, you twig ? And say that when I 'eard that nearly all
the gay old crowd o' pupils 'ad gone away, day before yes-
terday, I could 'a blooming well cut me throat, thinkin'
she'd gone too. Becos' when I swore in for the Town
Guard, it was with the idear — mind you rub that in ! — of
strikin' a blow for Beauty as well as for Britanniar, twig ?"
The thin elbow in the tweed sleeve nudged her, provoking
a Joyous giggle.
" I'm fly, no fear. Are you to 'ave a uniform, an' all
like that ?"
His face fell. " The kit don't run to much beyond a
smasher 'at an' puttees, but they're the regular Service kind,
an' then there's the bandolier — an' the gun. She ain't the
newest rifle served out to Her Majesty's Army, not by
twenty years. Condemned Martini, a chap says, who's in
the know — an' kicks like a mule when I let 'er off — made me
nose bleed fust time I tried with blank. But when we gets
a bit more used to each other, it '11 be a case of bloomin'
Doppers rollin' over in the dust, like rock-rabbits. Don't
forget to tell 'er as wot I said so."
" Why . . . ain't she a Dutchy 'erself ? She wrote a letter
for me in their rummy Lingo to my young man !"
" Cripps !" He stared in dismay. " Blessed if I 'adn't
forgot. But if an EngHshman marries a foreigner," he
swelled heroic, " that puts 'er in the stryte rimnin'. And
'art an' 'and I'm 'ers, whenever she'll 'ave me ! Tell 'er
THAT — with a double row of crosses from W. Kevse ! And
THE DOP DOCTOR 93
— can you remember a bit o' poetry ?" He recited with
shamefaced rapidity :
" It is my sentry-go to-night,
And when I watch the moon so bright,
Shining o'er South Africa plain,
I'll thijttk of thee, sweet Greta Du Taine."
Her eyes were full of awe and wonder. " Lor ! you
don't mean to say you made up that by yourself ?"
The poet nodded. " Reckon about as much. Like it ?"
" It's perfect lovely ! Better than they 'ave in the penny
books."
" Where Cbralh'ne and the Marquis are playin' the
spooney game, and 'im with a Lady Reginer up 'is dirty
sleeve. An' there's another thing I want you to let 'er
know." His eyes were on hers, his breath fanned her hot
cheeks. " There isn't another woman on the earth but
her for me. Dessay there may be others ; wot I say is — I
don't see 'em !" He waved his hand, dismissing the ardent
creatures.
A pang transpierced the conscience hiding under the
cheap flowery blouse. Emigration Jane hesitated, biting
the dog's-eared finger-ends of a cotton glove. Should she
tell this ardent, chivalrous lover that the Convent roof no
longer sheltered the magnificent fair hair-plait and the
mischievous blue eyes of his adored ? That Miss Greta Du
Taine had left for Johannesburg with the latest batch of
departing pupils ! If she told, W. Keyse would vanish
out of her Hfe, it might be for ever ; or, ii by chance en-
countered on the street, pass by with a casual greeting
and a touch of tl^e cheap Panama. Emigration Jane was
no heroine, only a daughter of Eve. Arithmetic and what
was termed the " tonic sofa " had been more sternly incul-
cated than the moral virtues at the Board School in Kentish
Town. And she was not long in making up her mind that
she would not tell lum — not just yet, anyway.
What was he saying, in the Cockney that cut like a knife
through the thick gutturals of the Taal ? "I shall walk
past the Convent to-morrer in kit and 'cetras, on the
charnce of 'Er seein' me. Two sharp. And, look 'ere.
Miss, you've done me a good turn. And — no larks ! — if
ever I can do you another — trust me. Stryte — I mean it !
94 THE DOP DOCTOR
You ask chaps 'oo know me if Billy Keyse ever wen* back
on a pal V
She swayed her hips, and disclaimed all obligation. But,
gam ! he was gittin' at 'er, she knew !
" I ain't ; I mean it ! You should 'ave 'arf me 'eredtt-
tary estates — if I 'ad any. As I 'aven't, say wot you'll
drink ? Do, Miss, to oblige yours truly, W. Keyse, Esquire."
W. Keyse plunged a royal, reckless hand into the pocket
of his tweed riding-breeches, bought against the time when
he should bestride something nobler than a bicycle, and
produced a half-sovereign. He owed it to his landlady
and the rest, the coin tliat he threw down so magnificently
on the shiny counter, but you do not treat your good angel
every day. - . . Emigration Jane bridled, and swayed her
hips still more. His largeness was intoxicating. One had
dreamed of meeting such young men.
" Port or sherry ? Or a glass of cham, with a lump o'
ice in for a cooler ? They keep the stufiE on draught 'ere,
and not bad by 'arf for South Africa. 'Ere, you. Mister !
Two chams for self and the young lydy, an' look slippy !"
The brimming glasses of sparkling, creaming fluid, juice
of vines that never grew in the historic soil of France, were
passed over the bar. A miniature berg clinked in each, the
coldness of its contact with the glowing Up forcing slight
rapturous shrieks from Emigration Jane.
" We'll drink 'Er 'ealth !" W. Keyse raised his goblet.
" And Friends at 'Ome in our Isle across the Sea !"
He drank, pleased with the sentiment, and set down the
empty glass.
The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and
tapped him on the arm with a thick, stubby forefinger.
" Mister Engelschman, I think you shall best go out of
here."
" Me ? Go out? 'Oo are you gettin' at, Myn'eer Van
Dunck ?" swaggered W. Keyse. And he slipped one thin,
freckled hand ostentatiously under his coat of shoddy
summer tweed. A very cheap revolver lurked in the hip-
pocket of which Billy was so proud. In his third- floor
back bed-sitting-room in Judd Street, London, W.C., he
had promised himself a moment when that hip-pocket
should be referred to, just in that way. It waa a cheap bit
THE DOP DOCTOR 96
of theatrical swagger, but the saloon was full, not of harmless
theatrical pretences, but bitter racial antagonisms, seething
animosities, fanged and venomed hatreds, only waiting the
prearranged signal to strike and slay.
Emigration Jane tugged at the hero's sleeve, as he felt
for an almost invisible moustache, scanning the piled-up,
serried faces with pert, pale, hardy eyes.
" 'E ain't coddin'. See 'ow black they're lookin'."
" I see 'em, plyne enough. Waxworks only fit for the
Chamber of 'Orrors, ain't 'em 1"
" It's a young woman wot arsks you to go, not a bloke !
Please ! For my syke, if you won't for your own !"
Billy Keyse, with a flourish, offered the thin, boyish arm
in the tweed sleeve.
" Righto ! Will you allow me, Miss ?"
She faltered :
" I — I can't, deer. I — I'm wiv my young man."
" Looks after you a proper lot, I don't think. Which is
'im ? Where's 'e 'id 'isself ? There's only one other
English-lookin' feller 'ere, an' 'e's drunk, lyln' over the
table there in the corner. That ain't 'im, is it ?"
" Nah, that isn't 'im. Tliat big Dutchy, lookin' this way,
showin' 'is teeth as 'e smiles. That's my young man."
She indicated the Slabberts, heavilj'- observant of the
couple with the muddy eyes under the tow-coloured thatch.
" 'Strewth !" W. Keyse whistled depreciatively between
his teeth, and elevated his scanty eyebrows. " That tow-
'eaded, bung-nosed, 'ulking, big Dopper. An' you a
daughter of the Empire !"
Oh ! the thrice-retorted scorn in the sharp-edged Cockney
voice ! Tlie scorching contempt in the pale, ugly little
eyes of W. Keyse ! She wilted to her tallest feather, and
the tears came crowding, stinging tlie back of her throat,
compelling a miserable sniff. Yet Emigration Jane was
not destitute of spirit.
" I ... I took 'im to please meself . . . not you, nor the
Hempire neither.*'
" Reckon you was precious 'ard up for a chap. Good-
afternoon, Miss."
He touched the cheap Panama, and swung theatrically
round on his heel. Between him and the saloon-door there
96 THE DOP DOCTOR
was a solid barricade of heavy Dutch bodies, in moleskin,
tan-cord, and greasy homespun, topped by lowering Dutch
faces. Brawny right hands that could have choked the
reedy crow out of the little bantam gamecock, clenched
in the baggy pockets of old shooting-jackets. 0,thers
gripped leaded sjamboks, and others crept to hip-pockets,
where German army revolvers were. The bar-keeper and
the Slabberts exchanged a meaning wink.
" Gents, I'll trouble you. By your leave ! . . ."
Nobody moved. And suddenly W. Keyse became con-
scious that these were enemies, and that he was alone.
A little hooliganism, a few street-fights, one scuflSe with the
police, some rows in music-halls constituted all his experi-
ence. In the midst of these men, burly, brutal, strong,
used to shed blood of beast and human, his cheap swagger
failed him with his stock of breath. He was no longer tlie
hero in an East End melodrama ; his heroic mood had gone,
and there was a feel of tragedy in the air. The Boers wait? d
sluggishly for the next move. It would come when thert
should be a step forward on the part of the little Englisli-
man. Then a clumsy foot in a cow-leather boot or heavy
wooden-pegged sfildschoen would be thrust out, and the
boy would be tripped up and go down, and the crowd would
deliberately kick and trample the life out of him, and no one
would be able to say how or by whom the thing had been
done. And, reading in the hard eyes set in the stolid yellow
and drab faces that he was " up against it," and no mis-
■take, W. Keyse felt singularly small and lonely.
Then something happened.
The drunken EngUshman who had been lying in a hoggish
stupor over the little iron table in the corner of the saloon
hiccoughed, and lifted a crimson, puffy face, with bleary
eyes in it that were startlingly blue. He drew back the great
arms that had been hanging over the edge of his impromptu
pillow, and heaved up his massive stooping shoulders,
and got slowly upon his feet. Then, lurching in his walk,
but not stumbling, he moved across the little space of saw-
dusted, hard-beaten earth that divided him from W. Keyse,
and drew up beside that insignificant minority. The action
was not purposeless or unimpressive. The alcohohc wastrel
had suddenly become protagonist in the common little
THE DOP DOCTOR 97
drama that was veering towards tragedy. Beside the man,
Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted boy, a steam -pinnace
bobbing under the quarter of an armoured battle-ship, its
huge mailed bulk pregnant with possibilities of destruction,
its barbettes full of unseen, watchful eyes, and hands power-
ful to manipulate the levers of Titanic death-machines.
Let it be understood that the intervener did not present
the aspect of a hero. He had been drunk, and would be
again, unless some mii-aculous quickening of the alcohol-
drugged brain-centres should rouse and revivify the dor-
mant will. His square face, with the heavy smudge of
bushy black eyebrows over the fierce blue eyes, and the short,
blunt, hooked nose, and grim-lipped yet tender mouth,
from the comer of which an extinct and forgotten cigar-
butt absurdly Jutted, bore, like his great gaunt frame, the
ravaging traces of the consuming drink-lust. His well-cut,
loosely-fitting grey morning-coat and trousers were soiled
and slovenly ; his blue linen shirt was coUarless and un-
buttoned at the neck. His grey felt smasher hat was
crammed on awry. But there was a thick lanyard round
the muscular neck, ending in a leather revolver-pouch that
was attached to his stout belt of webbing. A boy with a
fifteen-and-sixpenny toy revolver you can laugh at and
squelch ; but, Alamachtig ! a big man with a Webley and
Scott was another thing. And the frowy barrier of thick,
coarsely-clad, bulky bodies and scowling, yellow-tan faces,
began to melt away.
When a clear lane showed to the saloon door, the Dop
Doctor took it, walking with a lurch in his long stride, but
with the square head held upright on his great gaunt
shoulders. W. Keyse, Esquire, moved in the shadow of
him, taking two steps to one of his. The swing doors
opened, thudded to behind them. . . .
" Outside. . . . Time, too !"
Tlae wide, thin-lipped Cockney mouth grinned a little
consciously as W. Keyse Jerked his thumb towards the still
vibrating doors of the saloon. " Reg'ler 'ornets' nest o'
Dutchies. And I was up agynst it, an' no mistyke, when
you rallied up. An', Mister, you're a Fair Old Brick, an'
if you've no objection to shykin' 'ands . . . ?"
But the big ^xxs^ did not seem to see the little Cockney's
7
98 THE DOP DOCTOR
offered hand. He nodded, looking with the bloodshot and
extremely blue eyes that were set under his heavy straight
black brows, not at W. Keyse, but over the boy's head, and
with a surly noise in his throat that stopped short of being
speech, swung heavily round and went down the dusty
street, that was grilling in the full blaze of the afternoon
heat, lurching a little in his walk.
Then, suddenly, running figures of men came round the
corner. Voices shouted, and houses and shops and saloons
emptied themselves of their human contents. The news
flew from kerb to kerb, and Jumped from windows to
Avdndows, out of which women, European and coloured,
thrust eaLier, questioning heads.
The Cape Town train that had started at midday had
returned to Gueldersdorp, having been held up by a force of
armed and mounted Boers twenty miles down the line.
And a Loudon newspaper correspondent had handed in a
cable at the post-office, and the operator's instrument,
after a futile click or so, had failed to work any more.
The telegraphic wire was cut. Hostihties had com-
menced in earnest, and Gueldersdorp, severed from the
South by this opening act of war, must find her salvation
thenceforward s in the cool brains and steady nerves of the
handful of defenders behind her sand-bags, when the hour
of need should come.
History has it written in her imperishable record, that is
not only printed upon paper, and graven upon brass, and
cut in marble, but stamped into the minds and hearts of
millions of men and women of the British race, how, when
tliat hour came, the hero-spirit in their countrymen rose
up to meet it. And for such undying memories as these,
and not for the mere word of suzerainty, it is worth while to
have paid as Britain has paid, in gold, and blood, and tears.
xm
" Dop," being the native name for the cheapest and most
villainous of Cape brandies, has come to signify alcoholic
drinks in general to men of many nations dwelling under the
THE DOP DOCTOR 99
subtropical South African sun. Thus, apple-brandy, and
peach liqueur, " Old Squareface," in the squat, four-sided
bottles beloved no less by Dutchman and Afrikander,
American and Briton, Paddy from Cork, and Ileinrich irom
the German Fatherland, than by John Chinkey — in default
of arrack — and the swart and woolly-headed descendant of
Ham, may be signified under the all-embracing designation.
It did not matter what the liquor was, the bar-tenders
were aware who served the Dop Doctor, as long as the stuff
scorched the throat and stupefied the brain, and you got
enough of it for your money.
His eyes were blood-red witli brutal debauch now, as he
neared the De Boursy-Williams dwelling, a one-storied, soft
brick- built, corrugated-iron- roofed house on Harris Street,
behind the Market Square. It had been a store, but green
and white paint and an iron garden-fence had turned it into
a gentlemanly residence for a medical practitioner. Mrs. De
Boursy-Williams, a lady of refinement, stamped with the in-
effaceable cachet of Bayswater, had hung cheap lace curtains
in all the windows, tying them up with silk sashes of Trans-
vaal green. Between the wooden pillars of the stoep dangled
curtains yet other, of chopped, dyed, and threaded bamboo,
while whitewashed drain-pipes, packed with earth and set on
end, overflowed with Indian cress, flowering now in extrava-
gant, gorgeous hues of red and brown, sulphur and orange.
The Dop Doctor, left to maintain the inviolate sanctity
of this English Colonial home, hiccoughed as he stumbled
up the stately flight of three cement steps that led between
white-painted railings, enclosing on the left hand a narrow
strip of garden with some dusty mimosa shrubs growing in
it, to the green door that bore the brass plate, and had the
red lamp fitted in the hall-light above it. The plate bore
this comprehensive inscription :
G. DE BOURSY-WILLIAMS, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.
CONilTLTINO-RoOM HoURS : 10 A.M. TO 12 A.M. ; 6 P.M. TO 8 P.M
MODERN DENTISTRY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES.
And, scanning the inscription for perhaps the thousandth
time, the grim, tender mouth under the ragged black
moustache took a satirical twist at the corners, for nobody
7—2
100 THE DOP DOCTOR
knew better than Owen Saxham, called of men in Guelders-
dorp the " Dop Doctor," what a brazen lie it proclaimed.
He heard the town-clock on the stad square strike five as
he pulled out the latchkey from his pocket and let himself
in, shouting :
" Koets !"
A glazed door at the end of the passage, advertised in
letters of black paint upon the ground-glass as " Dispen-
sary," opened, and a long, thin Dutchman, dressed in re-
spectable black, looked out. He had been hoping that the
drunken Englishman had been shot or stabbed in a saloon-
brawl, or had fallen down in apoplexy in a liquor-bout,
and had been brought home dead on a shutter at last. His
long ginger-coloured face showed his cruel disappointment.
But he said, as thougli the question had been asked :
" No, there is no telegram from Cape Town."
Then he shut the glazed door, and retiirned to the very
congenial occupation in which he had been engaged, and
Owen Saxham went lieavily to the bedroom placed at the
disposal of the locum tenens. The single window looked out
upon a square garden with a tennis-ground, where the De
Boursy-Wilhams girls had been used to play. The apricot
on the south wall was laden with the as yet immature fruit,
an abandoned household cat slept, unconscious of impending
starvation, upon a bench under a pepper -tree.
It was a small, sordid, shabby chamber, with a fly-spotted
paper, a chest of drawers lacking knobs, a greenish swing
looking-glass, and a narrow iron bedstead. His scanty
belongings were scattered about. There were no medical
books or surgical instruments. Tlie Dop Doctor had sold
all the tools of his trade years before. He turned to
Williams's books, standard works which had been bought
at his recommendation, when he wished to refresh his
excellent memory ; the instruments he used when to the
entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring
chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. There
were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe ;
there was some linen and underclothing in the knobless
chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester
repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and
ammunition-pouch, a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver
THE DOP DOCTOR 101
of large calibre, in addition to the wtiapon he carried, there
was not an article of property of any value in the room.
Old riding-boots with dusty spurs and a pair of veldschoens
stood by the wall ; a pair of trodden-down carpet slippers
lay beside a big cheap zinc bath that stood there, full of
cold water ; some well-used pipes were on the chest of
drawers, with a tin of Virginia ; and an old brown camel' s-
hair dressing-gown hung over a castorless, shabby, Ameri-
can-cloth-covered armchair. And an empty whisky-bottle
stood upon the washstand, melancholy witness to the
drunkard's passion.
Yet there were a few poor little toilet articles upon the
dressing-table that betokened the dainty personal habits
of cleanliness and care that from lifelong use become
instinctive. The hands of the untidy, slovenly, big man
with the drink-swollen features were exquisitely kept ; and
when the dark-red colour should go out of the square face,
the skin would show wonderfully unblemished and healthy
for a drunkard, and the blue eyes would be steady and
clear. Excess had not injured a splendid constitution as
yet. But Saxham knew that by-and-by . . .
What did he care ? He pulled off his soiled, untidy
garments, and soused his aching head in the cold, fresh
water, and bathed and changed. Six o'clock struck, and
found Dr. Owen Saxham reclothed and in his right mind,
if a httle haggard about the eyes and twitchy about the
mouth, and sitting calmly waiting for patients in the
respectably - appointed consulting - room of De Boursy-
Wilhams, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.
Usually he sat in the adjoining study, near enough to the
carefully-curtained door to hear the patient describe in the
artless vernacular of the ignorant, or the more cultivated
phraseology of the educated, the symptoms, his or hers.
Because the cultured man of science, the real M.D. of
Cambridge University and owner of those other letters of
attainment, was the drunken wastrel who had sunk low
enough to serve as the impostor's ghost. If G. de Boursy-
Williams, of all t!iose lying capitals, were a member of the
London Pharmaceutical Society and properly- qualified
dentist, which perhaps might be the case, he certainly pos-
sessed no other claim upon the confidence of hia fellow-
102 THE DOP DOCTOR
creatures, sick or well. Yet even before the Dop Doctor
brought his great unhealed sorrow and his quenchless thirst
to Gueldersdorp, the smug, plump, grey -haired, pink-
faced, neatly-dressed little humbug possessed an enviable
practice.
If you got well, he rubbed his hands and chuckled over
you ; if you died, he bleated about the Will of Providence,
and his daughters sent flowery, home-made wTeaths to place
upon your grave, and it all went down, adding to the
python-length of the bill for medical attendance.
This world is thick with De Boursy-Williamses, throwing
in bromides with a liberal hand, ungrudging of strychnine,
happily at home witli quinine and cathartics, ready at a
case of simple rubeola ; hideously, secretly, helplessly per-
plexed between the false diphtheria and the true ; treating
internal cancer and fibrous tumours as digestive derange-
ments for happy, profitable years, until the specialist
comes by, and dissipates with a brief examination and with
half a dozen trenchant words the victim's faith in the
quack.
Three years before, when the Dop Doctor, coming up
from Kimberley by transport- waggon, had stumbled in
upon Gueldersdorp, the verdict of a specialist consulted by
one of his patients, much lacking in the desirable article
of faith, had given De Boursy-Williams's self-confidence
a considerable shock.
Does it matter how De Boursy , much reduced in bulk by a
considerable leakage of conceit, came across the Dop
Doctor ? In a drinlc-saloon, in a music-hall, in a gaming-
house or an opium-den, at any other of the places of
recreation where, after consulting and visiting hours, that
exemplary father and serious-minded EstabHshed Church-
man, was to be found ? It is enough that the bargain was
proposed and accepted. Four sovereigns a week secured
to De Boursy-Williams the stored and applied knowledge,
the wide experience, and the unerring diagnosis of the rising
young London practitioner, who had had a brilliant
career before him when a Hand had reached forth from the
clouds to topple down the castle of his labours and his
hopes. For Owen Saxham the money would purchase
forgetfulness. You can buy a great deal of his kind of
THE DOP DOCTOR 103
forgetfulness with four pounds, and drink was all the Dop
Doctor wanted.
Now, as the red South African sunset burned beyond the
flattened western ridge of the semicircle of irregular hills
that fence in the unpretending hamlet town that lies on the
low central rise, Owen Saxham sat, as for his miserable weekly
wage he must sit, twice daily for two hours at a stretch,
enduring torments akin to those of the damned in Hell.
For these were the hours when he remembered most all
that he had lost.
Remembrance, like the magic carpet of the Eastern story,
carried him back to a rambling old grey mansion, clothed
with a great magnolia and many roses, standing in old-time
gardens, and shrubberies of laurel and ilex and Spanish
chestnut, and rhododendron, upon the South Dorset cliffs,
that are vanishing so slowly yet so surely in the maw of the
rapacious sea.
Boom ! In the heart of a still, foggy night, following a
day of lashing rain, and the boy Owen Saxham, whom the
Dop Doctor remembered, would wake upon his lavender-
scented pillow in the low-pitched room with, the heavy
ceiling-beams and the shallow diamond-paned casements,
and call out to David, dreaming in the other white bed, to
plan an excursion with the breaking of the day, to see how
much more of their kingdom had toppled over on those
wave-smoothed rock - pavements far below, that were
studded with great and little fossils, as the schoolroom
suet-pudding with the frequent raisin.
More faces came. The bovs' father, fair and florid, bluff.
%/ ' 7 7
handsome, and kindly, an English country gentleman of
simple affectionate nature and upright life. He came in
weather-stained velveteen and low- crowned felt, with the
red setter-bitch at his heels, and the old sporting Manton
carried in the crook of his elbow, where the mother used
to sew a leather patch, always cut out of the palm-piece of
one of the right-hand gloves that were never worn out,
never being put on. A dark-eyed, black-haired Welsh
mother, hot-tempered, keen-witted, humorous, sarcastic,
passionately devoted to her husband and his boys, David
and Owen.
104 THE DOP DOCTOR
David and Owen. David was the elder, fair like the
father, destined for Harrow, Sandhurst, and the Army.
Owen had dreamed of the Merdiant Service, until, having
succeeded in giving the Persian kitten, overfed to repletion
by an admiring cook, a dose of castor-oil, and being allowed
to aid the local veterinary in setting the fox-terrier's broken
leg, the revelation of the hidden gift was vouchsafed to
this boy. How he begged off Harrow, much to the disgust
of the Squire, and went to Westward Ho, faithfully plodded
the course laid down by the Council of Medical Education,
became a graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and took his
degree brilliantly ; registered as a student at St. Stephen's
Hospital ; won an Entrance Scholarship in Science, and
secured the William BroAvn Exhibition in his second year.
Thenceforward the world was an oyster, to be opened
with scalpel and with bistoury by Owen Saxham.
Oh, the good days ! the delectable years of intellectual
development, and arduous study, and high hope, and
patient, strenuous endeavour ! The man sitting with
knitted hands and tense brain and staring eyes there in
the darkening room groaned aloud as he looked back.
Nobody envied that broad-shouldered, lean-flanked, bright-
eyed young fellow his successes. Companions shared his
triumphs, lecturers and professors came down from their
high pedestals of dignity to help him on. When he ob-
tained his London University diploma with honours for a
thesis of exceptional merit, he had already held the post of
principal anaesthetist at St. Stephen's Hospital for a year.
Now, a vacancy occurring upon the junior staff of surgeons
to the Hospital's in-patient Department, Owen Saxham,
M.D., was chosen to fill it. This brought Mildred very
near.
For he was very much in love. The hot red blood in his
veins had carried him away sometimes upon a mad race
for pleasui'e, but he was clean of soul and free from the taint
of vice, inherited or acquired, and the Briton's love of
home was strong in him. And wedded love had always
seemed to him a beautiful and gracious thing, and father-
hood a glorious privilege. Stern as he seemed, grave and
quiet and undemonstrative as he was, the youngest and
sliyest children did not shrink from him. The pink rose-
THE DOP DOCTOR 105
leaf tongue peeped fiom between the budding rows of teeth,
and tlie innocent considering eyes questioned him only a
moment before the smile came. To be the father of
Mildred's children seemed the lofty end of all desire that
was not mere worldly ambition.
Mildred was the elder daughter of a county neighbour
down in Dorsetshire. She had known Owen Saxham from
her school-days, but never until he took to calling at the
house in Pont Street, to which Mildred, with her family —
mere satellites revolving in the orbit of that shining star of
Love — migrated in the Season. She was tall, slight, and
willowy, A\dth a sweet head that drooped a little, and round
brown eyes that were extremely pretty and wore a per-
petual expression of surprise. She was rather ansemic,
preferred croquet to lawn-tennis — then the rage — and kept
a journal, after the style of an American model. But the
space which Mary McMulHns cribbed from Mary McMullins
to devote to a description of the bathroom in which the
ablutions of her family were performed, and a vivid word-
picture of their tooth-brushes ranged in a row, and their
recently wrung-out garments in the act of taking the air
upon the back-garden clothes-line, was all devoted to Mil-
di'ed in Mildred's journal. In it Owen found a place. He
was described as a blend between " Rochester " in " Jane
Eyre " and " Bazarov " in Turgenev's " Fathers and Chil-
dren." In one specially high-flowTi passage he was referred
to as a grim granite rock, to which the delicate clematis-like
nature of MOdred, clinging, was to envelop it with leaf and
blossom. She read him the passage one day. Their faces
were very close together as they sat upon the sofa in the
pretty Pont Street drawing-room, and his newly- bought)
engagement-ring gleamed on her long white hand. . . .
The remembrance of that day made the Dop Doctor laugh
out harshly in the midst of hia anguish. So trivial and so
weak a thing had been that love of hers on which he had
founded the castle of his hopes and desires.
Now the aspiring young man bought a practice with some
thousands advanced by his father out of the younger son's
portion that should be his one day. It lay just where
Hyde Park merges into Paddington. Here a medical man
may feel the pulse of Dives for cf^ld. and look at the tongue
106 THE DOP DOCTOR
of Lazarus for nothing, and supply medicine into the
bargain, if he be of kindly soul, and this hopeful, rising
surgeon and physician had an open hand and an un-
suspecting nature.
God ! how much the worse for him. The sweat-drops ran
down into the Dop Doctor's eyes as he remembered that.
He set up his bachelor tent in Chil worth Street, furnishing
the rooms he meant to inhabit with a certain sober luxury.
By-and-by the house could be made pretty, unless Mildred
should insist upon his moving to Wigmore Street, or to
Harley Street, that Mecca of the ambitious young prac-
titioner. Probably Mildred's people would insist upon
Harley Street. They were wealthy ; their daughter would
be quite an heiress, " another instance of Owen's luck," as
David, long ago gazetted to a crack Cavalry regiment,
would say, and Owen would laugh, and admit that, though
he would have been glad enough to take his young fair
love without dower and plenishing, it was pleasant enough
to know that his wife would have an independent fortune of
her own. It was one of David's best jokes that Owen was
marrying Mildred for her money. David's ideas of humour
were crude and elemental. On the other hand, his manners
were admirable, and his physical beauty perfect of its
type, though men and women turned oftenest to look at the
younger brother, whom the women called " plain, but so
interesting," and the men " an uncommonly attractive
sort of fellow, and as clever as they make them." When
the great crash came Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., was
about twenty-nine.
Do you care for a description of the man at his prime ?
He was probably five feet ten in heiglit, but his scholar's
stoop robbed him of an inch or more. The great breadth
of the slightly-bowed shoulders, the immense depth and
thickness of the chest, gave his upper figure a false air
of clumsiness. His arms were long and powerful, terminat-
ing in strong, supple, white hands, the hands of the skilled
surgical operator ; his thick, smooth, opaque, white skin
covered an admirable structure of bone, knit with tough
mifficles, clothed with healthful flesh. One noticed, seeing
him walk, that his legs were bowed a little, because he had
been accustomed to the saddle from earliest childhood,
THE BOP DOCTOR 107
though he rode but seldom now, and one saw also that his
small muscular feet gripped the ground vigorously, through
the glove-thin boots he liked to wear. He showed no
tendency to dandyism. His loosely-cut suits of fine, silky
black cloth were invariably of the same fashion. In abhor-
ring jewellery, in preferring white cashmere shirts, and
strictly limiting the amount of starcli in the thin linen cuffs
and collars, perhaps he showed a tendency to faddism.
David told him that he dressed himself like a septua-
genarian Professor. Mildred would have preferred dear
Owen to pay a little more attention to style and cut, and
all that, though one did not, of course, expect a man of
science to look like a man of fashion. One couldn't have
everything, at least, not in this world. . . .
She said that one day, standing beside the writing-table
in the Chilworth Street study, with David's portrait in her
hand. It usually stood there, in a silver frame — a coloured
photograph of a young man of thirty, stupid and beautiful
as the Praxitelean Hermes, resplendent in the gold and
blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen
stood upon the hearthrug, for once in IVIildred's company,
and not tl linking of Mildred. And with tears rising in her
round, pretty, foolish eyes the girl looked from the face
and figure enclosed within the silver frame, to the face and
bust that had for background the high mantel-mirror in its
carved frame of Spanish oak.
There was the square black head bending forwards —
" poking," she termed it — upon the massive, bowed
shoulders ; the white face, square too, with its short, blunt,
hooked nose and grim, determined mouth and Jaws, showing
the bluish grain of the strong beard and moustache that
Owen kept closely shaven. The heavy forehead, the
smutty brows overshadowing eyes of clear, vivid, startling
Alpine blue, the close small ears, the thick white throat,
were very, very unattractive in Mildred's eyes — at least, in
comparison with the three-volume-novel charms of the
grey-eyed, golden-mo ustached, classically-featured, swagger-
ing young military dandy in the coloured photograph.
David had been with his regiment in India when Owen had
first seemed to be a good deal attracted to Pont Street. He
had wooed Mildred with dogged persistency, and won her
108 THE DOP DOCTOR
vnthout perceptible triumph, and Mildred had been im-
mensely flattered at first by the conquest of this man, whom
everybody said was going to be famous, great, distinguished
. . . and now . . . the wedding-day was coming awfully near.
And how on earth was it possible for a girl to tell a man
with Owen's dreadfully grim, sarcastic mouth, and those
terrible blue eyes that sometimes looked through and
through you — that she preferred his brother ?
Poor, dear, beautiful, devoted David ! so honourable, so
shocked at the discovery that his passion was reciprocated,
so very romantically in love. Only the day previously,
calling in at Pont Street at an hour unusual for him, Owen
had found them together, IMildred and David, who, having
been unexpectedly relieved of duty by an accommodating
brother-officer, had, as he rather laboriously explained, run
up from Spurhambury for the day. It was an awfully nea.r
thing, the guilty ones agreed afterwards, but Owen had
suspected nothing. These swell scientific men were often
a little bit slow in the uptake. . . .
But to-day — to-day their dupe saw clearly. He recalled
the Pont Street incident, and the flushed faces of the
couple. He saw once more the silver-framed photograph
in the girl's hand, he felt the mute disparagement of her
glance, and was conscious of the relief with which it left
him to settle on the portrait again. Ah, how unsuspicious
he had been whom they were duping ! Doubtless Mildred
would not have had the courage to own the truth, doubtless
slie would have married him but for the scandal of tlie
Trial. He wrenched his knitted hands together until the
joints cracked. She would have married him, and for-
gotten David. He, the man of will, and poAver, and
patience would have possessed her, stamped himself like a
seal upon her heart and mind, given her other interests,
other hopes, other desires, children, and happiness. But
for the Trial the little germinating seed of treachery would
never have grown up and borne fruit.
Had it been treachery, after all ? Far, far too grand the
word. Wlio would expect a modern woman to practise the
obsolete virtue of Fidelity ? Fool, do you expect your
miniature French bulldog or your toy-terrier to dive in and
swim out to you, and hold your drowning carcase up, should
THE DOP DOCTOR 109
you happen to become cramped while bathing in the
sea ? The little, feeble, pretty, feather-brained thing,
what can it do but whimper on the shore while you are
sinking, perhaps be consoled upon a friendly stranger's lap
while your last bubbles are taking upward flight, and your
knees are drawing inwards in the final contraction ? Happy
for the little creature if the kindly stranger carry it away !
Poor, pretty, foolish IVIildred, whose gentle predilections
were as threads of gossamer compared with the cable-ropes
of stronger women's passions ! She had nestled into the
strong protecting arm, and dried her tears for the old
master on the sleeve of the new one, whimpering a little,
gently, just like the toy-terrier bitch or the miniature bull.
And yet he had once seen a creature tinier and feebler
than either of these, a mere handful of yellow floss-silk
curls, defend its insensible master with frenzy, as the sick
man lay in the deadly stupor of cerebral congestion, from
those who sought to aid. Valet and nurse and doctor were
held at bay until that snapping, foaming, raging speck of
love and devotion and fidelity had been whelmed in a travel-
ling-rug, and borne away to a distant room, from whence
its shrill, defiant, imploring barks and yelps could be heard
night and day until, its owner being at last conscious and
out of danger, the tiny creature was set free.
Ergo, there are small things and small tilings. Beside
that epic atom Mildred dwdndled inconceivably.
And David . . . David, who had shaken his handsome
head sorrowfully over his brother's ruined career, who had
been horribly sick at the scandal, shudderingly alive to the
disgrace, sorrowfully, regretfully compelled to admit that
the evidence of guilt was overwhelming ... he did not trust
himself to think of David overmuch. That way of thought
led to Cain's portion in the very pit of Hell. For six
months subsequently to the finding of the Jury in the well-
known criminal case. The Crown v. Saxham, David had
married Mildred. If she had been irmocent of actual
treachery, here was the smooth, brotherly betrayer, un-
masked and loathly in the siglit of the betrayed.
How quietly the storm-clouds had piled up on his bright
horizon at the close of his second year of active, brilliant,
successful work I
110 THE DOP DOCTOR
The first lightning-flash, the first faint mutter of thunder,
had passed almost unnoticed. Then the tempest broke,
and the building wrought by a strong man's labours, and
toils, and hopes, and joys, and dolours had been lifted, and
torn, and rent, and scattered as a hill -bothy of poles and
straw-bundles, or a moorland shelter of heather and bushes
is scattered by the fury of a northern mountain- blast.
His practice had become a large and, despite the many
claims of Lazarus at the gates, a lucrative one by the
commencement of his third year of residence in Chil worth
Street. It was the end of April. He was to be married
to Mildred in July. That move to Harley Street had
been decided upon, the house taken and beautified. Though
his love for her was not demonstrative or romantic, it
was deep, and tender, and strong, and hopeful, and Life
to this man had seemed very sweet — five years ago. He
was successful professionally and socially. He had been
chosen to assist a surgeon of great eminence in the perform-
ance of a critical operation upon a semi- Royalty. He had
written, and publishers had published, a remarkable work.
" The Diseases of Civilisation " had been greeted by the
scientific reviewers with a chorus of praise, passed through
four or five editions — had been translated into several
European languages ; and his " Text-Book of Clinical
Surgery" had been recommended to advanced students by
the leading professors of the Medical Schools when the
horrible thing befell.
XIV
It was in '94, when even the electro-motor was not in
general use, and the petrol-driven machine was slowly con-
vincing Paris and New York of its magnificent possibilities.
Saxham used a smart, well-horsed, hired brougham for
day- visits, and for night work a motor-tricycle. There were
no stables to the house in Chilworth Street. He left the
motor-tricycle at the place where he had bought it second-
hand. The macliine was cleaned and kept in order, and
brought to his door by one of the employes at a certain
hour, for a fixed weekly sum paid to the proprietor of the
THE DOP DOCTOR 11]
establishment, Bough by name, an Englishman bom in
the Transvaal, who had quite recently, or so he gave out,
emigrated from South Africa, and set up in London as a
cycle-seller and repairer, though there were not many
cycles at the shop. Heavy packing-cases and crates were
always being delivered there, and always being despatched
from thence, via Cape Town and Port Elizabeth and
Delagoa Bay to the Transvaal, Bough being agent, or so
he said, for several South African firms engaged in the trans-
port of agricultural machines. Bough had a wife, a large-
eyed, delicate-looking, pretty little woman, who seemed
afraid of the big, muscular, tanned fellow of thirty-eight or
so, with the odd light eyes, and the smooth manner, and
the ready smile, and the short, expert, hairy, cruel-looking
hands. He had seen life, had Bough, at the goldfields and
at the diamond-mines, and as a trooper through the Zulu
and Matabele campaigns, and he was ready to talk about
what he had seen. Still there were reservations about
Bough, and mysteries. The Doctor suspected him of
being brutal to his wife, and would not have been surprised
any morning up<ui receiving the news of the man's arrest as
one of a gang of forgers, or coiners, or burglars. But he
lived and let live, and whatever else the big Afrikander
mav have been, he was an excellent workman at his trade.
One evening Bough rode round on the motor-tricycle him-
seK, and mentioned casually that his wife was ailing. The
Doctor, in the act of moimting the machine, put a brief
question or two, registered the repHes in the automatic
sub -memory he kept for business, and told the man to send
her round at ten o'clock upon the following morning.
She came, punctual to tlie hour, and was shown into
Owen's consulting-room — a little woman wdth beautiful,
melancholy eyes and a pretty figure. Illiterate, common,
affected, and vain to a degree, hideously misusing the
English language in that low, dulcet voice of hers, ludi-
crous in her application of the debatable aspirate to words
in the spelling of which it has no part.
Rather an absurd little person, Mrs. Bough. Yet, a
tragic little person, in Saxham's eyes at least, by the time
she had made her errand plain.
He heard her tell the tale that was not new to him.
112 THE DOP DOCTOR
Cultured, highly-bred women had made such appeals to him
before, and without shame. How should this little vulgar
creature be expected to have more conscience than they ?
Tliey beat about the bush longer, they put the thmg
more prettily. They spoke of their frail physical health
and their husbands' great anxiety, and quoted the long-
ago expressed opinion of ancient family physicians, who
possibly turned uneasily in their decent graves. But the
gist of the whole was, that they did not want children, and
Dr. Saxham had such a great and Justly-earned reputation
in skilful and delicate operations . . . and, in short, would
he not be compliant and oblige ? They would pay any-
thing. Money was positively no object.
How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of
yotmg, rising professional men, who are hampered by
honourable debts which threaten to impede and drag them
down ; who are possessed of high ideals and moral scruples,
which, not being essentially, fundamentally embedded and
ingrained in the conscience of the man, may possibly be
argued away ; who have not implanted in their souls and
hearts the high reverence for motherhood and the deep
tenderness for helpless infancy that distinguished Owen
Saxham !
He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others.
He began as he had begun witli every one of them — the
delicate, titled aristocrats, the ambitious Society beauties,
the popular actresses, the women who envied these and
read about them in the illustrated interviews published in
the fashion-papers, and sighed to be interviewed also — to
Qot one of tliese had he weighed out one drachm less of the
bitter salutary medicine that he now administered to Mrs.
Bough.
He invariably began with the personal peril and the
inevitable risk. Strange how they ignored it, blinded them-
selves to it, thrust it, the grinning, threatening Death's-
head, on one side. Of course, he talked like that ! It was
most candid of him, and most conscientious. But if they
were willing to take the risk — and antiseptic sui'gery had
made such hurje strides in these days that the risk was a
mere nothing. . . . Besides, there was not really need for
anything like an operation, was there ? He could prescribe
THE DOP DOCTOR 113
the kind of dose that ought to be taken, and everything
would then be all right.
He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and
speak even more to the purpose. To these mothers who
did not wish to be mothers, who threw the gift of Heaven
back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial barrenness
to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that
should have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and
daughters of their race, tombs and sepulchres — to
these he told the truth, in swift, sharp, trenchant sen-
tences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical
knife, cut to heal. When they argued with him, saying
that the thing was done, that everybody knew it was
done, and that it always would be done, by other men
as brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the homilist ;
he admitted the force of their arguments. Let other
men of his great calling pile up and amass wealth, if they
cliose, by tampering with the unclean thing. Owen
Saxham would none of it. At this juncture the woman
would have hysterics of the weeping or the scolding kind,
or would be convinced of the righteousness of the forlorn
cause he championed, or would pretend the hysterics or
the conviction. Generally she pretended to the latter,
and swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to mask
the rage and hatred in her haggard eyes, and went to that
other man. Then, after a brief absence accounted for as
a " rest cure," she would shine forth again upon her world,
smiling, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had
begun to make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had
passed through the Valley of the Shadow, with only her
o^vn rod and staff of vanity and pride to comfort her, she
would emerge from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and
take to pegging or chloral or spiritualism. Most rarely
she would not emerge at all, and then her women friends
would send wreaths for the coffin and carriages to the
funeral, and would whisper mysteriously together in their
boudoirs, and look askance upon the doctor who had
attended her. For of course he had bungled shockingly,
or everything would have gone off as right as rain for that
poor dear thing !
little Mrs. Bough was of the type of woman that pre-
8
114 THE DOP DOCTOR
tends to be convinced. She had cried bitterly in the be-
ginning, as she confessed to Saxham that she was not really
married to Bough, and that the said Bough, whom Saxham
had always suspected of being a scoimdrel, would certainly
go ofiF with " one of them other women and leave her if
she went and 'ad a byby." She cried even more bit-
terly afterwards, as she wondered how she ever could 'a
dreamed o' being that wicked ! Bough might kill her —
that he might ! — or go back to South Africa without her :
she never would give in, not now. Never now — the Doctor
might depend upon that, she assured him, drying her
swollen eyes with a cheap lace-edged handkerchief loaded
with patchouli. She was shaken and nervous, and in need
of a sedative, and Saxham, having the drugs at hand, made
her up a simple draught, unluckily omitting to make a
memorandum of the prescription in his pocket-book, and
gave her the first dose of it before she went away, profuse
in thanks, and carrying the bottle.
And he saw his waiting patients, and stepped into his
waiting brougham, and, having for once no urgent call
upon his professional attention, dined with Mildred at Pont
Street, and was coaxed into promising to take her to tlie
opening performance of a classic play which was to be re-
vived three nights later at a fashionable West End theatre.
Mildred had set her heart upon being seen in a box at this
particular function, and Saxham had had some trouble to
gratify her wish.
He remembered with startling clearness every remote
detail of that night at the theatre. Mildred had looked
exquisitely fair and girlish in her white dress, with a neck-
lace of pearls he had given her rising and falling on the lovely
virginal bosom, where the lover's eyes dwelt and lingered
in the masterful hunger of his heart. Soon, soon, tiiat
hunger of his for possession would be gratified ! It was
April, and at the end of July, when work was growing slack,
they would be married. They were going North for the
honeymoon. A wealthy and grateful patient of Saxham's
had placed at his disposal a grey, historic Scotch turret-
mansion, standing upon mossy lawns, with woods of larch
and birch and ancient Spanish chestnuts all about it,
looking over the silver Tweed. In the heat and hurry of
THE DOP DOCTOR 1 15
his daily round of work, Saxham, who had spent an autumn
holiday at this place, would find himself dreaming about it.
The smell of the heather would spice the air that was no
longer hot and sickly with the effluvia of the city, and the
hum of the drowsy black bees, and the cooing of the wood-
pigeons would replace the din of the London traffic, and
INIildred's eyes would be looking into his, and her cool,
fragrant lips would be freely yielded, and her arms would be
about his neck, and all those secret aspirations and yearn-
ings and dreams of wedded joy would be realised at last.
He grinned to himself sitting there in the hot darkness
of the South African night, the great white stars and the
vast purple dome they throbbed in shut out of sight by
the miserable little gaily-papered ceiling with its cornice of
gilt wood, remembering that everything had ended there.
Thenceforth no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom
Fate and Destiny, hitherto propitious and obliging, had
conspired to lash with scourges, and drive with goads, and
hound with despairs and horrors to the sheer brink where
Madness waits to hurl the desperate over upon the jagged
rocks below.
He supped with them at Pont Street. Mildred came
down to say good-night at the door.
" Have you been happy ?" he had asked, framing the
sweet young face in tender hands, and looking in the pretty,
gentle brown eyes.
" You have been so very dear and kind to-night," she
had answered, " how could I have helped being happy ?
And He " — she meant the Semitic actor- manager, whom
she romantically adored ; whose thick, flabby features and
pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eye-
browed witli brown grease-paint ; whose long, shapeless
body, eloquent, expressive hands, and legs that were very
good as legs go, taking them separately, but did not match,
had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and
possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy — ■
" He was so great ! Don't you agree with me — mar-
vellously great ?"
Saxham had laughed and kissed the enthusiast. It had
appeared to him a dreary performance enough, or it would
have, had it not been for Mildred and the dear glamour
8—2
116 THE DOP DOCTOR
with which her presence had invested the great gilded
auditorium, with its rows of bored, familiar, notable faces
in the stalls, representing Society, Art, Literature, Music,
and Finance ; its pit and gallery crowded with organised
bodies of theatre-goers, one party certain to boo where the
other applauded, riot and disorder the inevitable result,
unless by a coincidence rare as snow at Midsummer the rival
associations might be won upon to display a unanimity of
approval, upon which the dramatic Press-critics would
rapturously descant in the newspapers next morning.
XV
Saxham said his lingering sweet good-night, and shut
Mildred into the warm, lighted hall, and ran down the
steps, and hailed a passing hansom, and was driven back to
Chilworth Street. It had rained, and the heat, excessive
for April, had abated, and the wise, experienced stars
looked down between drifting veils of greyish vapour upon
the little human lives passing below.
As he jumped down at his door and paid his cabman, his
quick eye noticed a bicycle leaning against the area-railings.
One of his poorer patients was waiting for the Doctor.
Or a messenger had been sent to summon him. He let
himself into the lighted hall, whistling the pretty plaintive
melody of Ophelia's song.
A woman sat on the oak bench under the electric globe,
her little huddled-up figure making rather a sordid blotch
of drab against the strong, rich background of the wall,
coloured Pompeian red, and hung with fine old prints in
black frames. Her tawdry hat lay beside her, her haggard
eyes were set, staring at the opposite wall ; her lower jaw
hung lax ; the saHva dribbled from the corner of her under-
lip ; her yellow, rigid hands gripped the edge of the bench.
It was the woman who passed as the wife of the man
Bough. And in instant, vivid, wrathful realisation of the
desperate reason of her being there, Saxham cried out so
loudly that the servant who had let her in and was waiting
up for his master in the basement heard the words :
" Are you mad ? What do you mean by coming here ?
THE DOP DOCTOR 117
Haven't I told you that I will have nothing to do with you
and your affairs. . . ."
The voice that issued from her blue Ups might have been
a scream, Judging by the wrung anguish of the awful face
she turned upon him ; but it was no more than a dry,
cUcking whisper that the now listening servant could barely
hear :
" Don't be 'ard on a woman . . . hin trouble, Doctor."
" Hard on you. ... On the contrary, I have been too
considerate," he said, steeling his heart against pity.
" You must go home to your husband, Mrs. Bough, or
apply elsewhere for medical advice. I have none to give
you."
His square face was very stern as he took the cab- whistle
from the liall-salver, that was packed with cards and notes,
and letters that had come by the last post, and a telegram
or two. She moaned as he laid his hand on the knob of the
hall-door.
" It wasn't my doings, Doctor. ... Hi told Bough
what you said. Hi did, faithful . . . an' 'e swore if you
wasn't the man to do what 'e wanted, 'e'd be damned but
'e'd find a. woman as would ! x4Lnd she come next night —
a little, shabby, white-faced, rat-nosed hold thing, shiverin'
an' shakin'. Five pounds she 'ad of Bough, shakin' an'
shiverin'. An' he wasn't to send no more to the haddress
he knew, because she wouldn't be there. Always move
hout . . . she says, after a fresh job ! Oh, my Gawd ! An'
Bough, he bordered me, an' Hi 'ad to give in. An' to-night
Hi reckoned Hi was dyin' an' 'e said Hi best harsk you, 'e
was about fed up with women an' tbeir blooming sicknesses.
So Hi hiked 'ere because Hi couldn't walk. An' now ! . , ."
She groaned : " Hi ham dyin', aren't Hi ?"
Even to an observation less skilled than that of the
expert medical practitioner the signs of swift and speedy
dissolution were vsTitten on the insignificant, once pretty,
little face. Dying, the miserable little creature had ridden
to Chilwortli Street, hastening her own inevitable end by the
stupendous act of folly, and ensuring Saxham's. Tliat cer-
tainty had pierced him, even as tlie first horrible convulsion
seized her and wrenched her sideways off the bench. He
caught her, and shouted for his man, and they carried her
118 THE DOP DOCTOR
Into the consulting-room, and laid her on a sofa, and he
did what might be done, knowing that his mercy on her
involved swift and pitiless retribution upon himself.
Mrs. Bough died three hours later, as the grey dawn
straggled through the blinds, and the men with the district
ambulance waited at the door, and Dr. Owen Saxham
went about his work that day with a strange sensation of
expecting some heavy blow that was about to fall. It fell
upon the day following the Coroner's Inquest. He was
sitting down to breakfast when a Superintendent of Police
arrested him upon a warrant from Scotland Yard.
His servant, very pale, had announced that the Super-
intendent wished to see the Doctor. The Superintendent
was in the room, courteously saluting Saxham, before the
man had fairly got out the words.
" Good-morning, sir. A pleasant day !"
" UnUke the business that brings you here, I think,
Mr. Superintendent ?" said Saxliam, with his square Jaw
set. His man spilt the coffee and hot milk over the cloth
in trying to fill his master's cup, " You are nervous,
Tait. You had better go downstairs, I think, unless "
Saxham looked interrogatively at the burly, ofificially-
clad figure of the Law.
" No, sir, thank you. We do not at present require
your man, but it is my duty to tell him that he had
better not be out of the way, in case his testimony is
wanted."
" You hear ?" said Saxham ; and as white-faced Tait
fled, trembling, to the lower regions : " Of course, you are
here," he went on, pouring out the coffee himself with a
firm hand, and looking steadily at the Superintendent,
" with regard to the case of Mrs. Bough ? I have expected
that a magistrate's inquiry would follow the Inquest. It
seemed only natural "
The Superiutendent interrupted, holding up a large
hand.
" It is my duty to tell you. Dr. Saxham, that everything
you say will be taken down and used against you in
evidence."
" Naturally," said Saxham, putting sugar in his coffee.
The sugar was used agaiost him. It amused him now to
THE DOP DOCTOR 119
remember that. The Superintendent had never seen a
gentleman more cool, he told the magistrate.
" You see, sir, this Case has been fully considered by the
authorities, and it has an ugly look ; and it has therefore
been decided to charge you with causing the death of the
woman Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in your
consulting-room, on the twentieth instant, when she visited
you ..."
" For the first time," put in Saxham quietly.
" That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent.
" You were often at her husband's place of business, you
know, and may have seen her or not seen her."
" As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a
great many of the man's customers besides myself did
see her," Saxham went on, eating his breakfast.
" One of my men out there in the hall — I've noticed you
looking towards the door " began the Superintendent.
" Wondering what tlie shuffling and breathing at the
keyhole meant 1" said Saxham quietly. " Tliank you for
explaining."
** One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished
breakfast, and then, sir," said the Superintendent, " I
am afraid I must trouble you to come with me to Padding-
ton Police Station."
" Very well," said Saxham, frowning, " unless you object
to using my brougham, which will be at the door " — he
looked at his silver table-clock, a present from a grateful
patient — " in ten minutes' time."
" I don't at all mind that, sir," agreed the obliging Super-
intendent ; " and the men can follow in the cab. Any
objection ?"
Saxham had winced and flushed scarlet to the hair.
" For God's sake, don't make a procession of it ! Let
things be kept as quiet as possible for the sake of my —
family — and — my friends." He thought with agony of
Mildred. They were to be married in July, unless
The Superintendent coughed behind his glove. " The
question of Bail will rest with the magistrate, of course,"
he said. " But I should expect that it would be admitted,
upon responsible persons entering into the customary
recognisances."
120 THE DOP DOCTOR
Saxham rose. He had drunk the coffee, but he could
not eat. " Like all the rest of them, in spite of his show
of coolness," thought the Superintendent.
" I will ask you for time to telephone to some friends
who will, I have no doubt, be willing to give the required
undertaking, and arrange for a colleague to visit my patients.
You will take a glass of wine while I step into the next
room ? The telephone is there, on the writing-table."
" And a loaded revolver in the drawer underneath,
and poisons of all lands handy on the shelves of a neat
little cabinet," thought the Superintendent. But he said :
" With pleasure, sir, only I must trouble you to put up
with my company."
A tingling thrUl of revulsion ran through Saxham. He
set his teeth, and conquered the furious, momentary
impulse to knock down this big, burly, smooth-spoken
blue-uniformed ofl&cial.
" Ah, very well. The usual procedm-e in cases of this
kind. Please, come this way. But take a glass of wine
first. There are glasses on the sideboard there, and claret
and port in those decanters."
" To your very good health, Dr. Saxham, sir, and a
speedy and favourable ending to — the present — difficulty."
The Superintendent emptied a bumper neatly, and with
discreet relish, and followed Saxham into the consulting-
room, and once more, at the sound of the measured foot-
fall padding behind him over the thick carpet, the suspect's
blood surged madly to his temples, and his hands clenched
until the nails drove deep into the palms. For from that
moment began the long, slow torture of watching and
following, and dogging by the suspicious, vigilant, observant
Man In Blue.
A Treasury Prosecution succeeded the Police- Court
Inquiry, and the accused was formally arrested upon the
criminal charge, and committed to Holloway pending the
Trial. The Trial took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in
the following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in
the thrashing out of that vexed question, the guilt or inno-
cence of Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S. Who for airless,
stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and slept and
waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude.
THE DOP DOCTOR 121
Who was conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the
cell to the dock by warders and policemen, rumbling through
back streets and unfrequented ways in a shiny prison - van.
Who came at last to look upon the Owen Saxham of this
hideous prison nightmare, the man of whom the Counsel
for the Crown reared up, day by day, a monstrously-
distorted figure, as quite a different person from the other
innocent man whom the defending advocate described in
flowery, pathetic sentences as a martyr and the victim
of an unheard-of combination of adverse circumstances.
Things went badly. The case against the prisoner
looked extremely black. That monstrous figure of Owen
Saxham, based upon an ingenious hypothesis of guilt, and
plastered over with a marvellous mixture of truths and
falsities, facts and conjectures, grew ugher and more sinister
every day.
The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the
hapless victim, dressed in deep mourning and neatly handled
by Counsel, evoked a display of handkerchiefs upon his
every appearance in the witness-box, from the smart
Society women seated near the Bench. Many of them
had been Saxham's patients. Several had made love to
him, nearly all of them had made much of him, and quite
an appreciable number of them had asked him to be
accommodating, and render them temporarily immune
against the menace of Maternity. These had received a
curt refusal, accompanied with wholesome advice, for which
they revenged themselves now, in graceful womanly fashion,
by being quite sure the wretched man was guilty. More
than possible, was it not ? they whispered behind their
palm-leaf fans : it was sultry weather, and the vendors of
these made little fortunes, hawking them outside. Was
it not more than possible that he had been the dead woman's
lover ? The Crown Counsel improved on this idea.
Wretched little Mrs. Bougli, of infinitesimal account in
Life, had become through Death a person of importance.
Much was made out of the fact that she had gone to Chil-
worth Street some days previously to her deplorable ending,
and remained closeted wdth Dr. Saxham for some time.
He had supplied her with a bottle of medicine upon her
leaving — medicine of which no memorandum was to be
122 THE DOP DOCTOR
found in his notes for the day. She had taken the first
dose then and there. According to the testimony of the
Accused, the bottle had contained a harmless bromide
sedative. Upon the oath of the Public Analyst, the same
bottle, handed by the husband of the deceased woman
to the Police upon the night of her death, and now pro-
duced in Court with two or three doses of dark liquid
remaining in it, contained a powerful solution of ergotoxine
— a much less innocent drug. Who should presume to
doubt its administration by the Prisoner, when the label
bore directions in his own characteristic handwriting ?
Who should dare to affirm his innocence, seeing that to him
his victim had hastened, almost in the act of death, begging
him, with her expiring breath, " not to be hard on a
woman," who had ignorantly trusted him, Gentlemen of
the Jury ! only to find, too late, the deceptive nature of
his specious promises ? A whip, cried the Bard of Avon,
England's glorious, immortal Shakespeare, should be placed
in every honest hand to lash such scoundrels naked through
the world ! Let that whip, in the honest hands of twelve
good Britons, be — the verdict of guilt ! The Counsel for
the CroAivn, red-hot and perspiring, sat down mopping his
streaming face, for it was tropical weather, with the white
handkerchief of a blameless life. Irrepressible applause
followed, round upon round thudding against the dingy
yellow-white walls, beating against the dirty barred
skylight of the stifling, close-packed Court. Then the
Judge interposed, and the clapping of hands and thumping
of stick and sunshade ferrules upon the dirty floor died
down, and the Counsel for the Defence got up to plead for
his man, who, by the way, he firmly believed to be
guilty.
That remembrance made the Dop Doctor merry again,
this scorching night in Gueldersdorp, five years later.
But it was ugly mirth, especially when he recalled his
agony of sympathy upon hearing, through her mother,
that Mildred was ill in bed. Ah ! how he hated the
simpering, whispering, sneering, giggling women in Court
when he pictured her, his innocent darling, his sweet girl,
suffering for love of him and sorrow for him. David,
detained by onerous duties at Regimental Headquarters
THE DOP DOCTOR 123
throughout the whole of the Case, wrote chilly but fraternally
expressed letters on blue official paper. Of his mother, of
his father, Owen daredmot think. Innocent as he was, the
shame of his position, the obloquy of the Trial, must be
a branding shame to them for ever.
It had killed them, the Dop Doctor remembered, within
a few years of each other — the hale old Squire and Madam,
his Welsh wife, feared by the South Dorset village folks for
her caustic tongue, beloved for her generous heart, her liberal
nature. It was Mildred who he had believed would die
if the Verdict went against him — Mildred, who had con-
soled herself so quickly and so well — Mildred, whom he had
held a spotless blossom of Paradise, a young saint in purity
and singleness of heart, in comparison with those other
women.
Bah ! what a besotted idiot he had been ! She was
as they were. The nodding of their towering hats was
before his eyes ; the subdued titter that accompanied their
whispered comments was in his ears ; the lavender, white
rose, and violet essences vnth which they perfumed their
baths and sprinkled their clothes were in his nostrils ; suffo-
catingly, as his Counsel went on pleading. The intention
of his trenchant cross- questioning of Bough, who had lied
from the beginning, like a true son of the Devil, his father,
8ho,wed plainly now. Little by little the evidence accu-
mulated.
Here, free and unsuspect and doing his best to send
another man to Penal Servitude, was the man who had all
to gain by fixing the guilt upon the Accused. He had
sent the woman, his mistress, to the prisoner ; he had
resented the prisoner's refusal to commit or to abet a
dangerous and illegal operation. He had compelled his
hapless victim to submit herself to the hands of a wretch
who lived by such deeds. Possibly he had sickened of
his poor toy — he had told her as much. Possibly he had
determined, by a bold and daring stroke, to free himself
of a wearisome burden, and let another man pay the penalty
for his own crime. The substitution of the lethal drug
found in the bottle for the harmless bromide mixture
given to Mrs. Bough by Dr. Saxham would naturally
suggest itself to such a wretch, whose calculating cleverness
124 THE DOP DOCTOR
had been crovsTied with success by the culminating master-
stroke, admii'able in its simplicity, damnable in its fiendish
cunning, of sending the unhappy woman whose deliberate
murder he had really planned and carried out, to die upon
the threshold of the innocent victim of this diabolical plot.
Let those who heard hesitate before they played into the
hands of a villain by condemning the blameless to suffer !
Let them look at the young man before them, whose hard
work had won him, early in life, his brilliant position as one
of the recognised pioneers of the new School of Surgery,
as an admitted authority on Clinical Mediciae, whose
wedding-bells— the handkerchiefs came out at this — had
rung to-morrow but for this harrowing and bitter stroke
of adverse Destiny. Wliich would they have ? Let the
Jury decide for Christ or Barabbas ! He spoke in all
reverence, because the upright, innocent, charitable, self-
denying life of a diHgent healer of men would support the
analogy of Christ-likeness beside that of the principal
witness in this Case, the evil liver, the slanderer, the ex-
thief and burglar, the English ticket - of - leave man who
had emigrated to South Africa eighteen years previously,
had enlisted under a false name in the Cape Mounted
Police, had deserted, been traced to Kimberley, and there
lost sight of, and who, imder the name of Bough, had
recently returned to England, giving himself out as an
Afrikander, and setting up in business in London upon
the accumulated savings of a career most probably in
keeping with his abominable record.
Warders from Wormwood Scrubbs and Portland Prisons
were there to swear to the identity of Abraham Brake,
alias Lister, alias Bough, whose photographs, thumb-
prints, and measurements an official from the Criminal
Identification Department of Scotland Yard was prepared
to place before the Court, for whose re-arrest, as a ticket- of -
leave man who had failed to keep in proper touch with the
Police, an officer with a warrant waited. What, then, was
to be the Verdict of the Jury ? Was Dr. Owen Saxham
innocent or guilty ? If innocent, then, in the name of God,
let biTTi go forth from bondage, to the unutterable relief of
those who waited in anguish for the Verdict. His father,
his mother, and the fair young girl — the Court was drowned
THE DOP DOCTOR 125
in tears at this last touching reference, even his Lordship
the Judge being observed to remove and wipe eyeglasses
that were gemmy with emotion, as Counsel dwelt upon the
touching picture of the sorrowing bride-elect, whose orange-
blossoms had been blighted by the breath of this hideous,
this unbearable, this most unfounded charge. . . .
XVI
The Judge summed up, with an evident bias in favour of
the Accused. An old advocate in criminal causes, his
Lordship had formed his own opinion of the principal
witness for the Cro^vn, though there was no evidence to
prove the guilt of the astute Mr. Abraham Brake, alias
Lister, alias Bough.
The Jury retired, to return immediately. The Verdict
" Not Guilty " was received with applause and cheers.
Bough departed, to pay the prison penalty of not keeping
in touch with the Police. . . . More cheers, strongly de-
precated by the Judge. The Dop Doctor could hear that
ironical clapping and braying five years ofif. It was over,
over ! He was free ! Oh, the mockery of the word !
His Counsel shook his hand warmly, and several old
friends and colleagues pressed round him with hearty con-
gratulations. Then a telegram was handed to him.
" No bad news, I hope," said the advocate who had
defended, seeing Saxham's Ups blanch. " You have had
enough trouble to last for some time, I imagine ?"
" It appears as if my measure was not quite full enough,"
said Saxham quietly. " My father died suddenly last night,
down at our place in South Dorset. The wire says, ' An
attack of cerebral haemorrhage,' probably brought on by
worry and distress of mind over this damned affair of
mine." He ground his teeth together, and went on : '"I
must go to my mother without delay. How soon can I get
away from here ?"
It was oddly difficult to realise that all the doors were
open, and that the following shadow of the Man In Blue
would no longer dog his footsteps. It was strange to drive
126 THE DOP DOCTOR
home in the brougham of a friend to Chilworth Street, and
let himself into the dusty, neglected, close-smelling, shut-
up house. All the servants were out ; probably they had
been making holiday through all the weeks that had pre-
ceded the Trial. His man returned as the master finished
packing a portmanteau for that Journey down to Dorset-
shire. Saxham left him to finish while he changed his
clothes and scrawled a letter to Mildred. Nothing else
but this death could have kept him from hurrying to the
embrace of those dear arms. As it was, he half expected
her to rush in upon him, stammering, weeping, clinging
to him in her overwhelming relief and gladness. ... At
every rumble and stoppage of wheels in the street, at every
ring, he made sure that she was coming. But she did not
come, and he sent his man to Pont Street with his letter,
and went down into Dorsetsliire by special train from
Waterloo, and found the dead man's dogcart waiting for
him, with the old bay cob in harness, and the old coachman
who had taught him to ride his pony, waiting, with a band
of crape about his sleeve, and drove through the deep,
ferny lanes to the old home standing in its mantle of mid-
summer leafage and blossom in the wide gardens whose
myrtle and lavender hedges overhung the beach below.
There was a little, old, bent, white-haired woman in a
shabby black gown and white India shawl waiting for
him on the threshold, and only by the indomitable, un-
quailing spirit that looked out of her bright black eyes did
Owen Saxham recognise his mother. She called him Ik^p
David's dearest son, and her own boy, and took both hi.s
hands, and drew his head down, and kissed him solemnly
upon the forehead.
" That is for your father, my dear," she said. " He
never doubted you for one moment, Owen. And this is
for myself. We have both beUeved in you implicitly
thi'oughout. We would not even write and tell you so.
It would have seemed, your father thought, like admitting,
tacitly, that we doubted our son. But other people be-
lieved you guilty, and oh ! Owen, I think it killed liim !"
" I know that it has killed him," Owen Saxham said
simply. The early morning light showed to the mother's
THE DOP DOCTOR 12?
eyes the ravages wrought in her son's face by the mental
anguish and the physical strain of those terrible weeks
that were over, and Mrs. Saxham, for the first time since
the Squire's death, burst into a passion of weeping. Owen's
eyes were dry, even when he stooped to kiss the high, broad
forehead of the grand old grey head that lay upon the
snowy, lavender-scented pillow in the cool, airy death-
chamber, where the perfume of the climbing roses that
flowered about the open casements came in drifts across
the sharp, clean odour of disiufectant.
Captain Saxham arrived late that night. His greeting
of his brother was stiff and constrained ; his grey eyes
avoided Owen's blue ones ; he did not refer to the events
of the past ten weeks. He had always had a habit of twist-
ing and biting at one of the short, thick ends of his frizzy
light brown moustache. Now he wrenched and gnawed
at it incessantly, and his usually florid complexion had
deteriorated to a muddy pallor. Black mufti did not suit
the handsome martial figure, and there is no dwelling so
wearisome as a house of mourning, when the servants move
about on tiptoe, wearing faces of funereal solemnity, and
the afternoon tea-tray is carried in in state, like the corpse
of a domestic usage on its way to the cemetery, with the
silver spirit-kettle bubbling behind it as chief mourner.
But, as the elder son, there was plenty to occupy Captain
Saxham. There was business to be transacted with the
Squire's solicitor, with his bailiff, with one or two of the
principal tenants. There were the arrangements to be
made for the Funeral, and for the extension of hospitahty to
relatives and friends who came from a distance to attend
it. When it was over and the long string of County car-
riages had driven home to their respective coach-houses,
Owen Saxham returned to town.
" Give my dear love to Mildred. Tell her, if she grudged
the first sight of you to me, she wUl forgive me when she
has a son of her own," his mother said.
" You talk as though she were my wife !" he said, the
bitter lines about his set mouth softening in a smile.
" She would be but for what is past," said Mrs. Saxham.
" She must be soon, for your sake. Your father would have
128 THE DOP DOCTOR
wished that there should be as little delay as possible.
Marry quietly at once, and take her abroad. If she loves
you, as I know she does, and must, she will not regret the
wedding-gown from Paquin's and the six bridesmaids in
Directoire hats."
For that deferred wedding was to have been a gorgeous
and impressive function at St. George's, Hanover Square,
with a Bishop in lawn sleeves to pronounce the nuptial
benediction, palms, Japanese iiHes, smilax, and white
Rambler roses everywhere, while the celebrated " Non Angli
sed Angeli " choir of boy-choristers had been specially en-
gaged to render the anthem with proper fervour and give
due effect to " The Voice that Breathed."
Owen promised and went back to London. There were
cards and envelopes upon the salver in. the hall, but not
one from Mildred. That stabbed him to the heart. . . .
Not a line, God ! — not a written Une, in answer to that
letter in which he told her of the acquittal, and of his
father's death, and of his own anguish at having to answer
the stern call of filial duty, and leave dear Love uncom-
forted by even one kiss after all these weeks of famine,
and hurry away to lay that grand grey head in the vault
that covered so many Saxhams. Not a line. But here
was the letter, which his idiot of a servant, demoralised by
the recent catastrophe, had forgotten to send on lying
waiting upon the writing-table in his study. He snatched
at it in desperate haste, and tore the envelope open.
Her letter bore the date of that day. She said she had
written before and torn the confession up ... it was so
difficult to be just to him and true to herself. ... It was
a roundabout, involved, youthfully grandiloquent epistle
in which Mildred announced that her love for Owen was
dead, that nothing could ever resuscitate it ; that she
could not, would not, ever marry him, and that she had
returned in an accompanjdng packet his ring, and presents,
and letters, and would ever remain Ms friend (underlined)
Mildred. In a rather wobbly postscript, she begged him
not to write or to attempt to see her, because her decision
was irrevocable. She spelt the word with only one r.
THE DOP DOCTOR 129
Saxham read the letter three times deliberately. The
walls of the castle he had built, and fondly believed to be
a work of Cyclopean masonry, had come tumbling about
his ears, and lo ! the huge blocks were only bits of painted
card, and the Lady of the Castle, ins true love, was the
false Queen, after all. He folded up the letter and put it
away in his pocket-book, and went over to the mantel -glass
and looked steadily at the reflection of his own square face,
haggard and drawn and ghastly, with eyes of startling
blue flaring out from under a scowling smudge of meeting
black eyebrows. He laughed harshly, and a mocking devil
looked out of those desperate eyes, and laughed back.
He unlocked an oak-carved, silver-mounted cellaret, and
got out a decanter of brandy, and filled a timibler, and
drank the liquor off. It numbed the unbearable mental
agony, though it had apparently no other effect. But
probably he was drunk when he rang the bell and said
quietly to Ms man :
" Tait, do you believe there is a God ?"
Tait's smooth, waxy countenance did not easily express
surprise. He answered, as though the question had been
the most commonplace and ordinary of queries :
*' Can't say I do, sir. I reckon the parsons are respon-
sible for floating 'Im, and that they made a precious good
thing out of bearin' stock in Heaven until the purchasers
began to ask for delivery, and after that . . ." He
chuckled dryly. " I've lived with one or two of 'em, and,
if I may say so, sir — I know the breed !"
" He knows . . . the breed . . ." repeated Saxham
heavily.
He asked another question, in the same thick, hesitating
way, as he moved across the carpet to the oak-and-silver
cellaret.
" Tait, when tilings went damned badly with you, when
that other man let you in for the bill you backed for him,
and that girl you were to have married went off with some-
one else, what did you do to keep yourself from brooding ?
Because you must have done something, man, as you're
alive to-day !"
Tait looked at his master dubiously as he poured out
more brandy, and went over and stood upon the hearthrug
9
130 THE DOP DOCTOR
with his back to the empty fireplace, drinking it in gulps.
" I did what you're doing now, sir : I took a sight of drink
to keep the trouble down. And " He hesitated.
" Go on," said Saxham, nodding over the tumbler.
" You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said
smooth ' Tait, " and that makes me 'esitate in saying it.
But 1 took on a gay, agreeable young woman of the free-
and-easy sort, and went in for a bit o' pleasure, and more
drink along with it. One nail drives out another, you know,
sir. And if the young lady have thrown you hover "
" Why, you damned, white-gilled, prying brute ! you
must have been reading my correspondence," said Saxham
thickly, as he lifted the tumbler to his mouth.
Tait griimed. He could venture to tell his master, driuik,
what he would not have dared to tell him sober.
" No need for that, sir. I've come and gone between this
house and Pont Street too often not to know what was in
the wind. Wliy, Captain Saxham was there with her often
and often when you never suspected. . . ."
Tlie tumbler fell from Saxham's hand, and struck the
fender, and smashed into a hundrf3d glittering bits.
"Go !" said Tait's master, perfectly, suddenly, dangerously
sober, and pointing to the door. The man delayed to finish
his sentence.
" While you were in Hollo way, sir, and all through the
Trial. . . ."
The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had
been left open. He vanished through it Avith harlequin-
like agiUty as a terrible, white-faced black figure seemed to
leap upon him. , . .
" I've 'ad an escape for my life !" he said, having reached
in a series of bounds the safer regions below stairs.
" Of the Doctor ? . . . Go on with your rubbishing
nonsense !" said the cook.
" What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear ?"
demanded the housemaid, who was more imaginative, and
cherished tlie buddings of a romantic passion for one who
should be for ever nameless :
" Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by —
that's what she've done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his
dewy brow. " And seeing the Doctor for the first time
THE DOP DOCTOR 131
since I've been in his service a bifc overtook with liquor, and
more free and easy like than customary — being a gentleman
you or me would 'esitate to take a liberty with in the
ordinary way o' things — ^I thought I'd let 'im know about
the Groings On."
" Of them two . . ." interpolated the cook — " Her and
the Captain ?"
" Shameless, I call 'em !" exclaimed the incandescent
housemaid as Tait signified assent.
" 'Aven't they kep' it dark, though !" wondered the cook.
" They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite
got over the desertion of the young woman he was to have
married, and who had gone oflf with somebody else, " a
precious downy couple. And what I say is — it's a Rid-
dance !"
" How did 'e take it, pore dear 1" gulped the housemaid.
" Like he's took every think — that is, up to the present
moment," admitted Tait. " But i his is about the last
straw."
The housemaid dissolved in tears.
" He'll get another young lady," said the cook con-
fidently. " And him so 'andsome an' so clever, an' with
such heaps of carriage-swells for patients."
Tait shook his prim, respectable head.
" The swells '11 show their tongues to another man now,
my gal, who 'asn't the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coat-
sleeve. Whistle for patients now, that's what the doctor
may. Why, every one of 'em has paid their bills, and them
that haven't have asked for their accounts to be sent in.
And it's ' Lady So-and-so presents her compliments,'
instead of ' Dear Dr. Saxham.' Done for, he is, at least
as far as the West End's concerned. . . . Mind, I don't
set up to be infallible, but experience justifies a certain
amount of cocksureness, and what I say is — ^Done for !
Best he can do is — sell the practice, and lease, and plate,
and pictures, furniture, and so on, for whatever he can get
— the movables would have provoked spirited biddin' at
auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under the
circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their
valoo — and go Abroad." Tail's gesture was large and
vague.
9—2
132 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel !" sighed
the cook.
" And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he
don't do away with hisself," sobbed the housemaid.
" I do, reely !"
" With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles
handy," added the cook.
" Not him !" said Tait. " I'm ready to lay any man the
sporting odds against him committing sooicide. He's
not the sort. Lord ! what was that ?"
That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs.
XVII
While the servants talked in the kitchen the master had
been sitting quietly in the darkening study. All without
and within the man was eddjang, swirling blackness.
Heat beat and glowed upon his forehead, like the radiation
from molten metal ; there was a winnowing and fanning
as of giant wings or leaping of furnace-fires. The blood in
his throbbing temples sang a dull, tuneless song. But
presently he became aware of another kind of singing.
It was a little hissing voice that came from the inside of
the oak-and-silver cellaret. And it sang a song that the
man who sat near had never heard before.
" Why think of the sharp lancet or the keen razor, why
long for the swift dismissing pang of the fragrant acid, or
the leap down upon the railway-track under the crushing,
pulping iron wheels ?" sang the httle voice. " I can give
you Forge tfulness. I can bring you Death. Not that
death of the body which, for all you know, may mean a
keener, more perfect capability to live and suffer on the
ps-rt of the Soul, stripped from the earthly husk that haa
burdened and deadened it. The Death that is Death in
Life. . . . Here am I, ready to be your minister. Drink
deep, and die !"
The man who heard lifted his white, wild, desperate
face. The song came more clearly.
" Wronged, outraged, betrayed of the God you blindly
THE DOP DOCTOR 133
believed in and the man and the woman who had your
passionate love, your absolute faith, have your revenge
upon the One — as upon these two others. Degrade, cast
down, deface, the image of your Maker in you. Hurl
back every gift of His, prostitute and debase every faculty.
Cease to believe, denying His Being with the Will He
forged and freed. Your Body, is it not your own, to do
with as you choose ? Your Soul, is it not your helpless
prisoner, while you keep it in its cage of clay ? Revenge,
revenge, through the body and the soul, upon Him who has
mocked you ! Do you not hear Him laugh as you sit there
desolate in the darkness — poor, broken reed that thought
itself an oak of might — alone, while your brother kisses the
sweet lips that were yours. David and Mildred are laugh-
ing too, at you. Hasten to efface every memory of the
lying kisses she has given you upon the bosoms of the
Daughters of Pleasure ! Love, revel, drink ! Drink, I say,
and you will bo able to laugh at the One and the two. . . ."
The little hissing voice drove Saxham mad. He leaped
up, frenzied, oversetting the chair. He tore open and threw
wide the doors of the oak-and-silver cellaret, and sought in
it with shaking hands. He found a bottle of champagne
and the brandy- decanter, and a long tumbler, and knocked
off the wired neck of the bottle against the chimneypiece,
and crashed the foaming wine into the crystal, and filled
up the glass with brandy, and tossed off the stinging,
bubbling, hissing mixture, and laughed as he set the
tumbler down.
The thing inside the oak-and-silver cellaret laughed too.
The hall-door shut heavily as Tait and the women in
the kitchen sat and listened. They had not spoken since
the crash of the falling chair in the room overhead. The
area-door was open to the hot, sickly night air of London
in midsummer. Tait slid noiselessly out and listened as his
master hailed a passing hansom and Jumped lightly in.
The flaps banged together, the driver pulled open the roof-
trap and leaned down to catch the shouted address. Tait's
sharp ear caught it too, and the knowing grin that decorated
the features of the cabman was reflected upon his decent
134 THE DOP DOCTOR
smug countenance. His tongue was in his cheek as he
returned to the kitchen. For his master had given the
direction of a house of ill-fame.
Thenceforwards the door would have shut for ever upon
the strenuous, honourable, cleanly, useful life of Owen Sax-
ham, were it not that the For Ever of humanity means only
a little space of years with God — sometimes only a little
space of hours. Saxham did not need the evidence of the
shower of cheques from people who hated paying, the
request from the Committee of his Club that he would
resign membership, the averted faces of his acquaintances,
the elaborate cordiality of his friends, to tell him what he
knew already. As the astute Tait had said, as Society
knew already, he was a ruined man. He had made money,
but the enormous expenses of the Defence swallowed up
thousands. By bringing an action against the Treasury
he might have recovered a portion of the costs — so he was
told, but he had had enough of Law. He resigned his post
at the Hospital, in spifce of a thinly-worded remonstrance
from the Senior Physician. He dismissed his servants
generously. He disposed of his lease and furniture and other
property through a firm of auctioneers who robbed him,
and sold what stocks he had not realised upon, ajid wrote
a farewell letter to his mother, and sailed for South Africa.
Thenceforwards he was to build his nest with the birds of
night, and rise from the stertorous sleep that is born of
drunkenness only to drink himself drunk again.
Prom assiduous letter- writing friends David heard
reports of his brother that grieved him deeply. He told
these things to Mildred, and they shook their heads over
them and sighed together. Poor Owen ! It was most
fortunate for his family that the Jury had taken so lenient
a view of the case . . . otherwise . . . ! They were quite
certain in their own minds that poor Owen had been
culpable, if not guilty. They were married six months
later. The Directoire hats were out of date, of course,
but Louis Quinze, with Watteau trimmings suited the
six bridesmaids marvellously, and the " Non Angli sed
Angeli " choir rendered the Anthem and the "Voice that
Breathed " to perfection.
And Mildred, who never omitted her nightly prayers.
THE DOP DOCTOR 135
made a special petition for the reformation of poor mis-
guided Owen upon her wedding-night.
" Because we are so happy," she told David, who had
found her kneeling, white and exquisitely virginal in her
lace and cambric draperies by the bedside. " And he
must be so miserable. And you know, though I never
really cared for him, he was perfectly devoted to me."
" Who could help it ?" cooed enamoured David, and
knelt and kissed his bride's white feet. The white feet
would show no ugly stains, although to reach the bridal
bed, towards which her husband now drew her, they must
tread upon his brother's bleeding heart.
XVIII
The Dop Doctor Ufted his head as the bell of the front-
door rang loudly at the back passage-end. Two mounted
officers of the Military Stafif at Gueldersdorp had trotted up
the street with an orderly behind them a moment before.
The elder of the two had pulled sharply up in front of the
green door whose brass- plate flamed in the last rays of
sunset. He had dismounted lightly and gone up the steps
and rung, saying something to his companion. The other
officer had saluted and ridden on, as though to carry out
some order : the orderly had come up and got off his horse
and taken the bridle of the officer's, as the Dutch dispensary-
attendant, Koets, had plodded heavily along the passage
and opened the door, and now slouched heavily back,
usliering in a presumable patient.
" Light the lamp," said the Dop Doctor in Dutch to
the factotum, as he rose up heavily out of his chair. " It
will be dark directly."
" There is no need of more hght, I am obUged to you,"
said the stranger, cool, alert, brown of face as of dress :
a thin man, distinct of speech, quiet of manner, and m ith
singularly vivid eyes of light hazel. " In the actual dark
1 can see quite clearly. A matter of training and habit,
because 1 began life as a short-sighted lad. Do we nQcl
your assistant further ?"
136 THE DOP DOCTOR
In indiiect answer to the pointed question, the Dop
Doctor turned to the Dutch dispensary-assistant, and said
curtly :
" Ga uit !"
Koets went, not without a scowl at the visitor.
" A sulky man and a surly master," thought the stranger,
scanning with those observant eyes of his the gaunt figure
in the shabby tweed suit. " Has seen trouble and lived
hard," he added, mentally noting the haggard lines of the
square face under the massive forehead, over which a
plume of badly-brushed hair, black with threads of grey
in it, fell av, kwardly.
" English and a University man, I should say. Those
clothes were cut by a Bond Street tailor in the height of
fashion about five years ago. And the man is in the second
stage of recovery from a bout of diunkenness — unless he
drugs ?" But even while the visitor was taking these
memoranda, he was saying in the customary tone of polite
inquiry :
" I have, I think, the pleasure of speaking to Dr.
Williams ?"
" Sir, you have not. Dr. De Boursy- Williams has left
for Cape Town with his family. You are speaking to his
temporary substitute." The bloodshot blue eyes met his
own indifferently.
" Indeed ! Well, I do not grudge the family if, as I
believe is the case, it chiefly ranks upon the distaff side.
But the Doctor wil) miss a good deal of interesting practice.
As to yourself, you will allow the inquiry. . . . Are you a
surgeon as well as a medical practitioner ?'*
" If I were not, I should not be here."
" I will put my question differently. I trust you will
not consider its repetition offensive. Have you an extensive
experience in dealing with gunshot wounds ?"
Saxliam said roughly :
" I have experience to a certain extent. I will go no
further than to say so. I am not undergoing examination
as to my professional capabilities that I am aware of, and
if you doubt them you are perfectly at liberty to seek
medical a.dvice elsewhere."
" My good sir, I have been elsewhere, and the other
THE DOP DOCTOR 137
doctor, when he learned the purport of my visit, relished
it as little as your principal is likely to do. With the
imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are making . . ."
The speaker, slipping one hand behind him, moved a step
backwards and nearer to the room-door. " As I said, sir,
with the imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are
making a house-to-house requisition. . . . Ah, I thought
as much !"
The door-knob had been quietly turned, the door
suddenly pulled open, bringing with it Koets, the Dutch
dispensary- attendant, whose large red ear had been glued
to the outer keyhole.
" Your Dutch factotum has been listening. Pick your-
self off the mat, Jan, and take yourself out of earshot."
The stranger whistled the beginning of a pleasant httle
tune, with a flavour of Savoy Opera about it.
" Ik heb not the neem of Jan," snarled the detected
Koets, retiring in disorder.
The whistler left off in the middle of a deftly-executed
embellishment to say : " Unfortunate ; because I don't
know the Dutch word for spy." The keen hazel eyes and
the liaggard blue ones met, and there was the faint sem-
blance of a smile on the grim mouth of the Dop Doctor.
Keeping the door open, the visitor went on :
" I have some notes here — entries copied from the Rail-
way freight-books. Three weeks ago twenty carboys of
carbolic acid, with a considerable consignment of other anti-
septics, surgical necessaries, drugs, and so forth were
delivered to Dr. Williams' order at this address. Frankly,
as the officer commanding Her Majesty's troops on this
border, I am here to make a sequestration of the things
I have mentioned, with all other medical and surgical
requisites stored upon the premises, that are likely to be of
use to us at the Hospital. In the name of the Imperial
Government,"
The smile died out on the grim mouth. A sombre anger
burned in the blue eyes of the haggard man in shabby tweeds.
" Damn the Imperial Government !" said the Dop
Doctor.
The stranger nodded in serious assent. " Certainly,
damn it ! It is your privilege and mine, shared in common
138 THE DOP DOCTOR
with all other Britons, to damn our Government, as long
as we remain loyal to our Queen and country."
The other man quivered with a sudden uncontrollable
spasm of hate, rage, and loathing. He clenched his hand
and shook it in the air as he cried :
" You employ the stock phrases of your profession.
They have long ceased to mean anything to me. I have
been the victim and the sacrifice of British laws. I have
been formally pardoned by the State for a crime I never
committed. I have been robbed, plundered, ruined,
betrayed, by the monstrous thing that bears the name of
British Justice. And as I loathe and hate it, so do I
cast off and repudiate the name of Enghshman. You
speak of the imminent prospect of a siege. What other
causes have operated to bring it about but British greed,
and the British lust for paramountcy and suzerainty and
possession ? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or
Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who
urge on your pohtical machinery by bombast and bribes
and catchwords and lying promises, are swayed by one
motive — governed by one desire — lands and diamonds
and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil
that has been fertilised by the sweat of a nation of agricul-
turists, whom Great Britain despised until she learned
that gold lay under their orchards and cornfields." He
broke into a jarring laugh. " And it is for these, the robbers
and desperadoes, that the British Army is to do its duty,
and for them that De Boursy- Williams is to help pay the
piper. As for his property, which you are about to com-
mandeer in the name of the British Imperial Government,
I suppose I am legally responsible, being left here in charge.
Well, be it so ! . . . 1 can only protest against what 1 am
free to regard as an act of brigandage, reflecting small
credit upon your Service, and leave you, sir, to discover the
whereabouts of the carboys for yourself !"
He waved his hand contemptuously, and swung towards
the door.
" A moment," said the other man, " in which to assure
you that the fullest acknowledgments will be given in the
case of the stores, and that their owner will be paid for
them liberally and ungrudgingly. And, oranting that
THE DOP DOCTOR 139
much of what you have said is true, and that the leaven
of self-seeking is to be found in every man's nature, and that
greed is the predominating motive with those men who,
more than others, work for the building-up of an Empire
and the profitable union of Britain with her Colonies,
don't you think that there may be something in the good
old footballer's motto, ' Play the game, that your side may
win'?"
The Dop Doctor made a slight sound that might have
been of indifferent skssent or of contradiction. The other
chose to take it as assent.
" Take the present situation, purely as football. They
have picked me as a forward player. And I mean — to
play the game !"
The Dop Doctor might or might not have heard. His
square, impassive face looked as if carved in stone.
" To play the game, Doctor. Perhaps I have my bone
or two to pick with — several of the Institutions of my
country. Possibly, but I mean to play the game. Fate
has ridden me on a saddle-gall or two, and mixed too much
chopped straw in proportion to the beans, but — there's the
game, ajid I'm going to play it for all I'm worth. As an
old University man, that way of looking at things ought
to appeal to you."
Still no answer from the big, sullen, black-haired man in
the shabby worn clothes. But his breathing was a httle
quickened, and a faint, smouldering glow of something not
yet quenched in him showed in the haggard blue eyes.
" It's a confoundedly handicapped game, too, on the
defending side. Doesn't that fact rather appeal to the
sportsman in you. Doctor ?"
The other said slowly :
" I gather that the struggle will be unequal. It was
stated in my hearing yesterday afternoon that a con-
siderable force of Boers were advancing on Gueldersdorp
from the direction of Geitfontein, and, later, that another
large body of them were on the march along the river- valley
from the west. I did not attempt to verify what I had
heard from my own observation. I was — otherwise
engaged." The half -incredulous surprise that the other
man could not keep out of his eyes stung him into adding :
140 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Frankly, I did not care to trouble. It did not interest
me.
The Colonel said, with a dry chuckle :
" No ? But it will presently, though ! And, seen
through the glass even now, it's an instructive spectacle.
Masses of Dutchmen, well-weaponed and thoroughly fed
if insufficiently washed, gathering in all quarters — marching
to the assembly points, dismounting, unlimbering, going
into laager. Ten thousand Boers, at a rough estimate, not
counting the blacks they have armed against us. . . . And,
behind our railway-sleepers and sand-bags, eight hundred
fighting European units, twenty per cent, of them raAv
civilians ; and seven thousand neutral Barala and Kaffirs
and Zulus in the native Stad — an element of danger lying
dormant, waiting the spark that may hurry us all sky-high.
. . . By God, Doctor, the game's worth playing, except
bv cowards and curs !"
The smouldering glow in the Dop Doctor's eyes had been
fanned into a fire. The visitor saw the flame leap, and
went on :
*' There's a native proverb — I wonder whether you know
it ? — a kind of Zulu version of the regimental motto, Vestigia
nulla retrorsum. It runs like this : ' If we go forward, we
die ; if we go backward, we die. Better go forward and die.* "
He reached out a long, lean, brown right hand. " Come
forward with us. Doctor. We can do with a man like you !"
The impassive face broke up. Saxham gripped the
offered hand as a drowning man might have done. He
cried out hoeirsely :
" You don't know the sort of man I am. Colonel. But
everybody else in this cursed place knows, or should know.
They call me the Dop Doctor. You understand what that
nickname implies ?" He held out his shaking hands.
" Look at these ! They would tell you the truth, even if
I lied. What use can a man like me be to you, or men like
you ? I am a drunkard, sir. I have not gone to bed sober
one night in the last five years !"
There was a pause before the Colonel answered, filled up
in the odd way characteristic of the man by a softly-
whistled repetition of the opening bars of the pleasant little
tune. Then he said quietly and dryly :
THE DOP DOCTOR 141
" There is another proverb, not Latin nor Zulu, but
English, which impresses on us that it is never too late to
mend !" He looked at a tarnished Waterbury watch,
worn on a horse's lip-strap. " I am due to inspect the
Hospital to-morrow at ten o'clock sharp. If you will
meet me there punctually at the half-hour, I shall have the
pleasure of introducing you to — your Colleagues of the
Medical Staff. And now, if you please, as I have just five
minutes left to spai'e, we will have a look at those carboys
of carbohc."
" They are in the old Chinese godown at the bottom of
the garden," said Saxham. He felt in one of the baggy
pockets of the old tweed coat, pulled out a key, and
offered it silently to the conqueror, who motioned it back.
" Keep it, if you'll be so good. We'll send a waggon and
a careful man or two round from the Army Service Stores
Department within an hour ; for that stufi: in your friend's
carboys is more precious than rubies to us just now — a
man's life in every teaspoonful. And if, as you tell me, there
is some mercurial perchloride, Taggart and the Medical Stall
will jump for joy. What we owe to Lister, Koch, and those
fellows ! You'd say so if you'd ever seen gangrene on War
Hospital scale — in Afghanistan, in 1880, even as recently
as the Zululand Campaign of 1888. The Pathan and the
Zulu are slim, and the Boer is even slimmer, but the wiliest
customer of 'em all is the Microbe. No wonder WelHngton's
old campaigners used to slit the throats of badly-wounded
soldiers, or that the ambulance-men of Soult and Bona-
parte were merciful enough to knock on the head every
poor beggar who had been bayonetted in the body. They
knew there was not the atom of a chance. But to-day we
know how to deal with the invisible enemy. Thanks to
Antiseptic Surgery, that younger daughter of Science and
Genius, as some smart fellow puts it in the National Review.'*
And the pleasant little tune was whistled through to its
final grace-note as the two men went down the house-
passage and crossed the garden. Verily, to some other
men that have lived since Peter of the Nets has it been
given to be fishers of their kind ! This man said that night
to an olhcer of the StafE *
142 THE DOP DOCTOR
XIX
" I LANDED twenty carboj^^s of carbolic to-day, and a lot
of other Hospital stores, by talking football to a man who
knows the game, chiefly from the ball's point of view,"
" That counts to you, Colonel," called out Beauvayse,
the Chief's fair, bojrish Junior aide-de-camp, from the
bottom of the table, " against the awful failure you were
grousing about this morning."
" Ah ! you mean when I tried to frighten some Sisters
of Mercy into leaving the town by painting them a luridly-
coloured verbal picture of the perils of the present situa-
tion," said the Colonel. His keen hazel eyes twinkled,
though his mouth was grave. " I ought to have remem-
bered that you can't scare a religious, be he or she Roman
Catholic, Buddhist, or Mohammedan, by pointing to the
King of Terrors. He does to frighten lay-folk, but for the
others Death's grisly skeleton-hand holds out the Keys of
Heaven."
" What will it hold for some of us others, I wonder,"
said one of the dinner-guests, a moody-looking civilian, of
Semitic features, whose evening clothes made a dull contrast
with the mess-dress of the Staff officers gathered about their
Chief's table in his quarters at Nixey's Hotel on the Market
Square, " before this month is out ?"
The host leaned forward to reply :
" My dear Mr. Levison . . . special mention in De-
spatches Above, with honours and promotion for those of
us Avho have been approved worthy. For others, who have
tried and failed, a merciful overlooking of blunders, a
generous acceptance of the intention where the perfor-
mance came short. . . . And for the rest ... a grave on
the yellow veld in the shadow of a rock or thorn-bush,
with the turquoise sky of day overhead, shimmering in the
white-hot sunshine ; or an ocean of purple ether, ridden by
what old Lucian called ' the golden galley of the regnant
Moon.' That in South Africa ; and at home in England,
one's memory kept warm and living in, say, three hearts
that recognised the best in one, and loved it. A mother's
Leajt, the heait of a friend — and hers /"
THE DOP DOCTOR 143
There was no insincerity of flattery in the hum of applaud-
ing comment that ensued. All earnest original thought
has beauty ; and this man could not only think, but clothe
his thoughts in direct and simple language, and add to it
the charm of well-modulated and musical utterance.
" I call that good enough," said the senior Staff Officer,
a dark, handsome, eagle- faced Guardsman, who bore a great
historic name. " for you or me or any other fellow here —
we're not taking into account the living dead ones."
The Chief leaned forward in his characteristic attitude,
and spoke, a long, lean bro\vn forefinger emphasising the
sentences, his hawk-keen glance driving them home. " I
tell you, Leighbury, that some of those, the rottenest corpses
among 'em, will shed their grave-clothes, and rise up and
do the deeds of living men before, to quote Levison, this
month is out. Never take it for granted that a man is dead
until the grass is growing high over his bare bones, and
don't make too sure even then ! Because to-day I saw
such dry bones move — and it's an instructive if an im-
cannj' sight." •
" Whose were the bones, Colonel ?" called out the hand-
some young aide at the bottom of the table.
The host, his thin, brown fingers busy at the clipped
moustache, was listening to the Mayor of Gueldersdorp,
who sat upon his right. He withdrew his attentive eyes
from that stalwart sportsman's broad, ruddy countenance,
to glance smilingly at the fair, handsome face, and reply :
" Whose 1 Well, up to the present they have belonged
to the Dop Doctor."
" That man !" The Mayor, in the act of taking another
slice of the roast, looked round as at the mention of a name
familiar, shrugging his portly shoulders. "Surely you
know who the fellow is. Colonel ? He drifted up here from
Cape Colony three years ago. A capable — confoundedly
capable man, handicapped by a severe muscular strain,"
the Mayor's twinkling eye heralded the resurrection of an
ancient jest — " contracted in lifting a cask of whisky — a
glass at a time !"
White teeth flashed in alert tanned faces. The school-
boy laugh went round the table ; then the Babel of talk rose
up iigain. Most of these men were quite young . . . their
144 THE DOP DOCTOR
seniors barely middle-aged, not a man but was what they
themselves would have termed both " fit " and " keen."
They had wrought for many days in the erection of sand-
bag defences, in the digging of trenches, in the drilling of
Baraland Irregulars and Rifle Volunteers and the newly-
enrolled Town Guard. This was the pleasant social time
of lull before the storm, and they were not to get many
more good dinners or peaceful nights in bed for a long
siege to come. They did not show outwardly the tension
of strung nerves that waited, as the whole world waited, for
the echo of the first shot, rattling amongst the low hills to
the south. Nor did it occur to them that there was any-
thing heroic or dramatic in their quiet unaffected pose.
Gathered together upon one little spot of border earth
destined to be the vital, tragic, throbbing centre of great
events and tremendous issues, actions glorious, and deeds
scarce paralleled upon the page of History, let us look
upon them, well - groomed, well - bred, easy - mannered,
cheery, demolishing the good dishes furnished by the chef
of Nixey's Hotel, with the hungry zest of schoolboys,
exchanging fusillades of not very brilliant chaff.
Scraps of scientific and technical conversation with refer-
ence to telephonic and telegraphic installations between
outlying forts and headquarters, electric communication
with mines, automatic warning - apparatus, the most
effective methods of constructing bomb-proof shelters, the
comparative merits of Maxim and Nordenfeldt, crossed
in the air like fragments of bursting projectiles, impelled
by those admirable engines of destruction. Mingled with
reminiscences of cricket, golf, tennis, polo, and motoring,
then in its infancy ; anecdotes new and old, and conjectures
as to what the fellows at home were doing '? Hurlingham
and Ranelagh, Maidenhead and Henley, Eton and Oxford,
Sandhurst and Aldershot, Piccadilly in the season, Simla
in the heats, the results for Kempton Park and New-
market Races — of all these they talked, with rhino and
elephant shooting and the big isattues of pheasants now
taking place in the Home Midlands and up North. But
though the watch-fires of their pickets burned upon the
veld, and though the Boer lay in laager over the Border,
of him they said not one word. That reticence upon the
THE DOP DOCTOR 145
vital point was characteristically English. The excitable
Gaul would have wept, kneaded his manly bosom, and
alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would have wept
also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton
would have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about
the Fatherland ; the dignified Spaniard would have recog-
nised himself as a warrior upon the verge of a Homeric
struggle, and said so candidly ; the hysterical American
would have sung " HaU, Columbia !" and waved pocket-
handkerchief-sized replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner
until too exhausted to agitate or vocalise. But to these
men indulgence in sentiment was "bad form," and unre-
strained patriotic utterance merely " gas," tainting the
air with an odour as of election- eggs or sulphuretted
hydrogen. Therefore were many words to be avoided.
A pose, if you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance
of all appearance of enthusiasm or excitement ; showing
the weak spot in the armour of these heroes, henceforth
to be of epic fame. But Man is essentially a weak being.
It is only when the immortal spirit of him nerves the frame
of perishable bone and muscle that he rises to heights
that are sublime. Such souls of fire burned within these men,
that when the Wind of Death blew coldest and the lead-
and-iron hail beat hardest, they only glowed more fiercely
radiant ; and Want and Privation, instead of weakening,
only seemed to make them more strong ; — strong to endure,
strong to foresee plots and avert perils and oppose wit to
cunning, and strategy to deceit ; so strong that, by reason
of their strength, that little frontier town became a fortress
of Titans. And their names, other than those I have
given them in this story, shall go ringing down the grooves
^of Time, until Time itself shall be no more.
10
14« * THE DOP DOCTOR
XX
While they ate and drank, laughed, and chatted, the
man who was to be their comrade, sharer in all those perils
and privations yet to come, was tramping up and down
the bare boards of the dingy bedchamber in Harris Street,
wrestling desperately with his tragic thirst.
" Why did he come and look at me, and take me by the
hand, and awaken my deadened senses to the sting of
anguish that has no name ? Why could he not have left
me alone in this living death I had attained ?" he cried.
" When first I took to the infernal, blessed liquor, it was
for the sak« of respite from mental pain, toriure unbearable.
Then I was a man, only unhappy. Now ± am lower than
the lowest of the sensible, cleanly, decent brutes, because I
desire the drink for its own sake, and find gratification in
physical degradation. O Grod, if Thou indeed art, and I
must perforce return to live the life o* a man amongst
men, help to burst the chains that fett< 'V me ! Help me to
be free !"
He swallowed a great draught of wa^er, and stumbled
to the unused bed, and threw himself acoss it, raging and
panting, and defiant of the very Power iie invoked. And
then, against hope, sleep came to him, drowning memory
and obliterating thought, and relieving physical suffering.
The lines smoothed out of the heavy forehead, and the
grim mouth relaxed in the smile that his dead mother had
kissed, coming in with the shaded candle to look at her
sleeping boy.
Just as the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, that stalwart York-
shireman, mighty hunter of elephetnt, rhino, giraffe, and
lion in the reckless days of bloodshed that were before the
introduction of the Game Laws into South Africa, was
saying to the Colonel :
" Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless ! A confirmed drunkard,
who has soaked away all self-respect, who has been
cautioned and warned and fijied a score of times, by myself
and other magistrates. Dr. de Boursy-Wilhams, our
leading practitioner here, has taken the fellow imder his
wing, in a manner — bails him out when it is necessary,
THE DOP DOCTOR 147
and, I believe, when the man is sober enough, give? him
work in his dispensary and allows him to administer the
anfesthetic when it's a question of a surgical operation.
Wonder he trusts him, for my part! Yet De Boursy-
Williams is a remarkably successful operator, and hardly
ever loses a case. It is unfortunate that he should have
been called away to Cape Town at this juncture."
" He has left Dr. Saxham as locum terpens, I under-
stand."
The Mayor shrugged his portly shoulders.
" As to his qualifications, there's no doubt. Ranked
high at one time as a London West End specialist. I
have seen his name myself in a British Medical Directory
of some years back as principal visiting-surgeon to St.
Stephen's and the Ludgate Hospital for Diseases of the
Chest. Has written books — scientific works that are
quoted now. Must have been making money hand-over-
hand when the collapse came. The usual thing — one slip
— and a Police-court Inquiry follows, and down goes the
unlucky wretch with the CrowTi on top of him, and all the
Press pack yelping for soft snaps. True, the finding of the
Jury was ' Not Guilty,' but the fact of there having been
a prosecution was enough to ruin Saxham professionally.
Ah, I thought you must have heard the name !"
For the listener had moved suddenly. He did remember
the name of the distinguished London practitioner who
had been discreditably mixed up in the case of Mrs. Bough,
the young, miserable, murdered creature, who might
possibly have been the daughter of Richard Mildare.
Tough and cool as his tried nerves were, he shuddered at
the thought, and a sickly heat made the points of per-
spiration stand out upon his forehead. But the Mayor,
good man, was prosing on :
" I can't say the facts of the case are very clear in my
recollection, but I have a file of the Daily Wire at home,
extending over six years back, so the Criminal Court
proceedings must be reported in it. The woman's name.
I do remember, was Bough. As regards her age, now you
ask me " — for the Colonel had put a quick question — " I
fancy she must have been twonty-two or three. Indeed,
I am almost certain that was the age as stated by the
10—2
148 THE DOP DOCTOR
Medical Witness for the Prosecution. . . . However, I'll
go into the reports and let you know for certain."
" Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And, in case those Daily Wire,
files are bomb-proof, possibly it would be better to take
the family with you — and stop until times improve."
" Not bad, not half bad. Colonel ! But to tell the truth,
I wouldn't miss what we used to call the shindy, and these
boys of yours term the ' scrap ' for a pile of Kruger sove-
reigns. And — I can shoot better than most men, if I am
in the sere and yellow sixties." The Mayor was sUghtly
ruffled ; the diplomatic touch smoothed him down.
" My money is on you, Mr. Mayor, when it comes to
stopping a Boer with a rifle- bullet at four hundred yards.
By the way, I have a little confidence to repose in you.
When you meet — as I am convinced you will meet — Dr.
Saxham at the Hospital or elsewhere, metaphorically
clothed and in his right mind, and in the active discharge
of duties which no man, judging by your own testimony,
is better fitted to perform, let him down gently."
The Mayor, conscious of civic dignity and magisterial
warnings from the Bench ignored, swelled obviously.
" My dear sir, you can't let the Dop Doctor down any-
how. He is — just about as low as a man can get — short
of being imderground."
" Lend him a hand up — in the first instance — by for-
getting that confounded nickname which I was clumsy
enough to blurt out just now. Be oblivious of what he is,
because of what he has been in the past, and will be in the
future. For there is tremendous stuff in the fellow even
now — or I am a bad judge of men."
" Colonel, you're a thundering bad judge of drunkards,
from the Bench's point of view, but you'd be a dauined
good special pleader for a client in need of all the excuses
that could be trumped up for him."
" We all have something we'd like to have an excuse
for, Mr. Mayor." The keen hawk-eyes held a twinkle in
reserve. " There was a man I loaew, a mighty hunter
before the Lord — and before the Game Laws." The thin
bro^Ti fingers of the muscular hard-palmed hand played vsdth
the stem of a wineglass as the sentences came out, crisp
and pointed. " Well, this is the story of a mistake, and
THE DOP DOCTOR 149
an olii shikari of your experience can find even more excuses
for it than I can . . . but perhaps I. bore you ?"
" On the contrary — on the contrary, sir."
The fish had taken the bait, remained to play the
quivering captive until his last swirling struggle brought
him within reach of the skilful dip and lift of the angler's
net.
" It was about four years ago, in the Portuguese coast-
lands, South of the Zambesi, where elephants are to be had,
and rhino, particularly the Keitloa variety with the long
posterior horn, and a bad habit of charging the man behind
the 600 bore "
Mr. Mayor's capacious white waistcoat was agitated by
a subterranean chuckle. His double chin shook merrily.
" A side shot through the head— solid bullet — is the best
cure for that, Colonel. But you had to wait in the high
swamp-grass and keep the wind of him, and make sure of
your aim."
" Quite so. This man, from the shelter of a rock, waited
to make sure of his aim. The rhino was feeding tsetse as
he dozed in the high swamp-grass. His biggest horn showed,
and a bit of his shiny black skin. One forward lunge of the
brute's head — and the hunter could get that side-shot. For
that he waited, patience being, as we know, a virtue to be
cultivated by the successful stalker of big game "
The Mayor, boiled prawn-pink to the receding boundary-
line of his upright white hair, coughed awkwardly.
" The man waited two hours. Then the unclad and
obese native lady, carrying a long pointed grass-basket on
her back, who had squatted down in the high grass to smoke
a pipe and administer maternal refreshment to a shiny
black piccannin of three or four !"
The Mayor, purple now, burst out :
" Got up and went on ! And, if these boys of yours get
wind of that story, I shall be roasted within an inch of
my life. Whoever told you ? For the love of Heaven,
don't give me away !"
The keen eyes, were dancing now — the big fish had fairly
got the gaff.
" I promise, Mr. Mayor, upon the understanding that
you don't give away my man. . . . It's a compact ?
150 THE DOP DOCTOR
Thanks tremendously ! And here comes the Manager to
be congratulated upon the haunch. I never tasted better
venison, Mr. Nixey, though, as you say, this is rather
far North for koodoo. And the quail were beyond praise.
Waiter, a glass for Mr. Nixey. . . . Port — and we're going
to ask you to join us in drinlcing a toast. . . ."
The beautiful, flushed boy rose solemnly, glass in hand.
About the long board, adorned with a fine epergne full of
roses, Cape jessamine and purple bougainvillea. spread with
Nixey's best plate and linen, crystal, and dishes of Stafford-
shire cliina piled with golden mandarins, and loquats, the
fruit of October ; there was a great uprising of those phleg-
matic, self-contained Britons. Straight as the flames of
unblown torches, they burned about the table. And with
a simultaneous movement all those eyes of varied colours
turned to the lean bro\^Ti iace of the Chief, as the sweet
young clarion rang out :
" Gentlemen — the Queen !"
The brimming glasses rose high, — one crystal wave
with the crimson of blood in it. The resonant English and
the thinner Colonial voices answered together with a crash.
As of the wave breaking on white cliffs northwards, and a
great surge of love and loyalty went out from all those
hearts to England, throbbing to the steps of the Throne
where She sat, bowed with great griefs and great joys and
great triumphs and glories, and white-haired with the full
burden of her venerable years :
" The Queen !"
XXI
They lingered not long over wine and cigars. Lady
Hannah Wrynche, entertaining what she disdainfully
termed a " hen party " in her private rooms at Nixey's,
vacated in her honour by the landlord's wife — expected
them to coffee. Much to the relief of the military authori-
ties at Cape Town, Milady, most erratic of Society meteors,
had quitted that centre of painstaking official misinforma-
tion, for the throbbing spot of debatable land whence
events might be gathered as they sprang. Shooting across
the orbit of the reddening, low-hanging War-planet, she
THE DOP DOCTOR 151
had descended upon Gueldersdorp in a shower of baggage-
trunks, fox-terriers, and interrogations. For one thing,
she explained to everybody, she had undertaken to supply
a London Daily with a series of articles, written from the
Seat of Hostilities, and for another. Bingo was on the Staff,
and it would be so nice for him, poor dear, to have his ^vife
near him in case he happened to get . . . was " chipped "
the proper technical term, or " potted "? The articles were
intended to be the real thing — racy of the soil, don't
you know ? and full of " go " and atmosphere. Let it be
said here that they achieved raciness. The London print
in which they appeared came to be christened by the
scoffer and the incredulous the Daily Whale — it swallowed
and disgorged so many of the Jonahs rejected by other
editors. But the profits increased, and the proprietors
could afford to smile at envy.
Just now the insatiable gold fountain-pen from whence
our indefatigable Lady Correspondent derived her literary
pseudonym, was employed in recording merest gossip, in
the absence of the longed-for opportunity for its wielder to
prove herself the equal, if not the superior, of Dora Corr.
Dora was the woman Lady Hannah admired and envied
above all others. Colonial Editor to TJte Thunderbolt, War
Correspondent, financial expert, political leader-writer, and
diplomatic go-between when Cabinet Ministers and Empire-
builders would arrive at understandings, the serfdom of sex,
the trammels of the petticoat, may have been said to weigh
as lightly upon this thrice-fortunate spiaster as though it
were no drawback to be a daughter of Eve.
Oh ! prayed Lady Hannah, for the chance of proving that
another woman can equal this brilliant feminine Phoenix !
Meanwhile her bright eyes and quick sense of humour took
note of the toilettes of some of her guests, wives and
daughters of notable citizens who had not hurried South
at the first mutterings of the storm. The purple satin
worn by the Mayoress tickled her no less than the un-
feigned horror of its wearer when offered from her hos-
tess's chatelaine cigarette-case the choicest of Sobranies.
Lady Hannah's laugh was the rattling of a mischievous
boy's stick across his sister's piano- wires, and the metallic
jangle preceded her assurance that everybody did it —
152 THE DOP DOCTOR
all women in Society, at least, and you were thought odd
if you didn't. After dinner, in the most exclusive houses,
the most rigid of hostesses invariably allowed their women
guests to smoke. They knew people worth having wouldn't
come if they weren't allowed to.
" Never beneath my roof !" gasped the shocked and
scandalised wearer of the purple splendours demanded of
the wife of a Chief Magistrate. " Never at my table !"
Of course, the agitated Mayoress went on to say, one had
heard of the doings of the Smart Set. But one had hoped
it wasn't true, or, at least, had been very much exaggerated
by " writing-people." The Mayoress, though a mild
woman, had her sting.
Lady Hannah, immensely tickled to find the morals of
Bayswater rampant, as she afterwards expressed it, in the
centre of South Africa, cackled as she helped herself to a
second liqueur-glass of Nixey's excellent apricot- brandy.
Small, thin, restless, she presented a parched appearance,
with bright, round, beady eyes continually roving in search
of information from beneath the straggling fringe of a
crumpled Pompadour transformation, for those horrors
had recently become fashionable, and the whole world of
women were vying with one another in the simulation of
the criminal type of skull, with the Dolichocephalic Bulge.
" My dear lady, tobacco-ash is an excellent thing for
killing moth in carpets, and Time, — when one is compelled
to bestow it upon dull people ; and a perfectly healthy.
Nonconformist conscience must be a comfortable lodger.
But as regards the sacred roof, and the defended table,
it's a question how long both British institutions remain
intact, with those big guns getting into position round
us. . . ." She waved her small hand, its once well-
tended nails superbly ignored, its sun-cracks neglected, its
load of South African diamonds coruscating magnificently
in the light of Nixey's electric bulbs, and shrugged her thin,
vivacious shoulders.
The entrance of the gentlemen relieved the situation.
Lady Hannah jumped up and rushed at the Colonel. " As
if she meant to eat the man," the Mayoress said afterwards,
in the shadow of that threatened roof. But, impervious
to the entreaty of the bright black eyes and the glittering
THE DOP DOCTOR 153
hand that gesticulated with the urgent fan, he bowed,
smiled, said a few pleasant words to his hostess, and walked
" straight across " — as the Mayoress afterwards confided
to the Mayor — to take a seat beside the large, placid,
matronly figure palpitating in purple satin on an imported
Maple sofa.
Pleased and flattered, she made room for him, while
Lady Hannah became the gossip-centre of a knot of Mess
uniforms. . . .
" Both babies well ?" It would have been unlike him not
to have remembered that he had seen children at her house.
" Hammy and Berta made great friends with me the other
day. . . . Tell them I haven't forgotten the promise to
rummage up some odd native toys I picked up in Rhodesia —
made of mud and feathers and bits of fur and queerly-
shaped seed-pods — the most enchanting collection of birds
and beasts that ever came out of the Ark. And the
Makalaka have a legend about a big flood and a wise old
man who built a house of reeds and skins that floated. . . .
The North American Indians will tell you that it was a Big
Medicine Canoe, and amongst the tribes of the Nilghiri
Hills you find exactly the same story that the Chaldean
scribes wrote on their tablets of clay. To-day in
Eastern Kurdistan they'll point you out the peak on
which the Ark grounded. The Armenians hold it was
Ararat. . . . It's curious how the root-legend crops up
every\\ here. . . ."
" But of course it must." Her good, calm eyes showed
surprise, and her broad, white, matronly bosom was a little
fluttered. " Doesn't the Bible teach us that the Deluge
covered the whole earth ? Even Hammy and Berta can
tell you the whole story about Noah, and the raven — and
the dove."
He smoothed his moustache with a palm that wiped the
smile out.
" I must get them to tell it me one of these days." The
twinkle in his eye was not to be repressed. '' It would
save such a deal of trouble to believe there was only one
Noah, and only one Ark, don't you know ?"
Her motherly bosom panted.
" My children shall never believe anything else !"
154 THE DOP DOCTOR
He was grave and sympathetic, though a muscle in his
thin check twitched.
" I believe the toy Ark of our happy childish memories is
built, if not of gopher-wood, at least upon the lines laid
down in Scripture. Has Hammy ever tried to get his to
float ? Mine invariably used to sink — straight to the
bottom of the bath. Perhaps that continually-recurrent
catastrophe had something to do with the sapping of my
infant faith, or the establishment of a sinking-fund of
doubt regarding the veracity of the Noachian reporter ?"
She leaned towards him, her placid grey eyes dilating
with pity for this man.
" You ought to come and sit under our minister, Mr.
Oddris, on Sundays. Pray do. He would convince you
if anybody could. Such an eloquent, able, well-informed
man, and so trvly pious and brave !"
The laugh perforce escaped him. The convincing
Apostle Oddris had called on him at official headquarters
that day, to inquire whether, as the said Oddris's wife and
children were going to the Women's Laager, his place as a
husband and father was not by their side ? Being informed
that able-bodied male beings were not included in the list of
the defenceless, he had become importunate in the matter of
at least a bomb-proof shelter to be erected in his back-yard.
'* I had rather sit under Hammy and hear about Noah,
with Berta on the other knee."
Her heart went out wholly to him. ... " ' Out of the
mouths of babes.' . . . Wasn't that one of the texts wdth
promise ? . . .
" You love children ?"
" Bless the little beggars !" he said heartily, " they're
the j oiliest company in the world."
She leaned towards him, palpitating between her shyness
of the Commander of the Garrison and her womanly curi-
osity to know more about the man.
" Hammond — the Mayor has told me — I hope it is not
indiscreet to mention it- — that the first thing you did, on
joining your regiment in India as a young subaltern, was
to gather all the European children in cantonments to-
gether and march them through the place, playing ' The
Giri I Left Behind Me ' on the flute."
THE DOP DOCTOR 156
His brow grew black as thunder. The utterance came,
terse and sharp.
" Ma'am, you have been ravely misinformed."
She Jumped in terror.
" Oh ! . . . Can it be ? . . . Colonel, I do so beg you
to forgive me ! Let me assure you that neither the Mayor
nor myself will ever again repeat the story."
'* Ma'am, if you do . . ."
" But I promise, never . . ."
" Ma'am, if you never do, at least remember that the flute
was an ocarina."
He left the good soul in an ecstasy of giggles, and crossed
to Lady Hannah. She welcomed him with a glitter of
eyes and teeth and discovered the reserve-chair that had
been covered by her somewhat fatigued and wilted draperies
of maize Liberty-silk, veiled with black Maltese lace.
" What it is to be a man of tact ! You've made that
purple creature perfectly happy. Don't say you're going
to be less kind to another woman !"
She tapped with a reproachful fan the scarlet sleeve of
his thin serge mess-jacket, her appraising eye busy with the
badges worn on the dark green roll-collar and the miniature
medals and star. If a clever woman could be the con-
fidante of a Cabinet Minister, the post of riglit-hand to
the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces in Gueldersdorp might
be won. And then the world would know what Hannah
Wrynche was born for. What was he saying ?
*' I never warn my victims beforehand."
" Sphinx ! and I hoped to find you in the relenting
mood !"
" If possible, ma'am, my granite bosom is more un-
yielding than on the last occasion when ..."
" Do go on !" said the fan.
" When you tried to tap it."
" You're all alike." She sighed. " That is, you give
the keynote, and the others take up the tune. Even Bingo —
Bingo, whom I fLrmly believed incapable of keeping a secret
in \\ hich his dearest interests were concerned longer than
ten minutes — Bingo has sprung a surprise on me. I shall
end by falling in love with my own husband — such an
indecent thing to do after seven years of married life !*'
156 THE DOP DOCTOR
** Fortunately, the scene of your lapse from the crooked
path of custom is distant from the West End of London
nearly seven thousand miles. And you can rely upon me
for secrecy."
" Ah, that ! . . . If only you did leak a little informa-
tion now and then." Her eyebrows went up to the dry
fringe of her Pompadour transformation. " For the sake
of the thirsting public at home, to say nothing of my reputa-
tion as a Special Correspondent "
" Drive over and call on General Brounckers at Head
Laager, Geitfontein, on the Border, early to-morrow.
Perhaps he would oblige you with matter for a paragraph,
and forward the cable by private wire ?"
Her birdlike eyes were bright on him.
" I would go if I thought I could get anything by going.
Special information — vsdth reference to a Plan of Attack.
Oh ! if you knew how I'm dying to be really under fire.
To hear bullets zip-zip — isn't that the sound ? — as they
strike the ground or walls, and shells scream overhead !"
She clasped her sunburnt little jewelled hands in affected
ecstasy. His eyes were stem, and the lines about his
mouth deepened.
" Pray to-night that you may never hear those sounds
you speak of !"
She struck an exaggerated attitude of horrified con-
sternation.
" But no ! Why am I here ?"
" The Lord only knows. I've seen a hen peck at a lump
of dynamite. , . ."
" Ah, you never will take me seriously. But own in
your secret heart you're as much afraid as I am that a
Relieving Column will be sent down from Do tell me
again where Grumer is with the Brigade ? Uli, in Upper
Rhodesia — thanks ! Well, Grumer is quite a near friend
of Bingo's, and an old flame of mine. But — to burst our
lovely peacock bubble of Siege and let the whole situation
down, sans coup firir, into muddy commonplace — may
Grumer never come !" She held up her coffee-cup, and
drank the toast.
" Only for the women and children here," he said, and
his thin nostrils moved to the measure of his quickened
THE DOP DOCTOR 157
breathing, and a hot spark glowed in his keen eyes, " I'd
have joined you in that. But under the present circum-
stances — I'd give five years of life — and I love life ! — if our
lookouts could pick up Grumer's Advance by the time
grey dawn creeps up the east again."
She was incredulous.
" You, who said when you got orders to sail for South
Africa — I have it on the authority of your Henley hostess —
' I hope they'll give me a warm comer ' !"
" I did say — just that. And I meant it."
His lips pursed in a soundless wliistle. She went on :
"I've seen your preparations. The little old forts, put
into such repair ! and the armoured train, with a Maxim and
a Hotchkiss, standing in the Railway siding, ready for
business. And the earthworks ! And the trek-waggon
barricades, and the shelters panelled and roofed with cor-
rugated iron. And your bomb-proof Headquarter Bureau,
the iron skull that's to hold the working brain of the place
. . . with underground telegraphic and telephonic communi-
cations with all the forts and outposts. It's colossal ! A
masterpiece of cool, deadly, lethal forethought. ... I
thought I was incapable of the delicious shiver of expecta-
tion that the schoolboy enjoys, sitting in the stalls of dear
Old Drury, waiting for the curtain to rise on the fii-st act of
the Autumn Drama. But you've given it to me — ^you and
our friends out there !" She waved the dry httle glittering
hand. " And you can talk in cold blood of marching out —
and leaving the hive — and all the honey you might have had
out of it. Sweet danger, perilous sport, the great Game
of War — played as a man like you knows how to play it
in this little sandy world-arena, with all the Powers and
Dominions looking on. Preserve us ! Oh, to be in your
shoes this minute, if only for one week ! But as I can't,
it's you I hope to see riding the whirlwind and directing
the storm. Not only for my own sake and the wretched
paper's — though, mind you, I don't pretend to be anything
but a mercenary, calculating worldly creature . . ."
His eyes were very kind.
" Bingo knows better !"
Her laugh did not jangle this time.
" Lady Grasby, that vitriol-tonguer' water-nvmph, as
168 THE DOP DOCTOR
Bomebody clever once called her, said that if Bingo gt)t
killed by any chance, I should sit down and write a gossipy
descriptive article, dealing with his military career, married
life, and last moments, before I ordered my widow 's-
weepers. Horrible things ! They've come in again, too !
Talking of gossip, which I know you only pretend to despise,
I found the son of a mutual acquaintance dying in the
Hospital here. You know the Bishop of H . . . ?"
" His eldest son. Major Fraithom, was my senior when I
was Assistant Military Secretary at Gibraltar in '90. And
the Bishop is quite a dear crony of my mother's."
" The Bishop," she said, " was always a person of excel-
lent good taste — except when he cut off his second son,
Julius, with two hundred a year for turning Anglican,
wealing a soft hat and Roman collars, and joining the staff
at that clerical posture shop in Wendish Street West as
Junior Curate."
" St. Margaret's. I know the church. Often go there
when I'm at home."
" It's the Halfway House to Rome, according to the
Bishop, who won't be content with running at every red
rag of Ritualism that flutters in his own diocese, but keeps
up the character of belligerent Broad Churchman by writing
pamphlets and asking questions in the House of Lords
with reference to affairs which are the business of other
people. According to him, the red cassocks of the acolytes
at St. Margaret's are cut out of the very skirts of the
Woman of Babylon, and Father Turney and his curates —
they're all Fathers there, and celibates by choice — are
wolves in wool, and Mephistophelean plotters against the
liberties of the Church. Punch pubUshed a cartoon of the
Bishop shutting his eyes and charging at a ^vindmill in a
cope and chasuble. He is sending out a string of Protes-
tant-Church-Integrity vans all over England, Scotland, and
Wales this season, with acetylene- lantern pictures from
Foxe's ' Book of Martyrs,' and a lecturer to point the morals
and adorn the tales. . . . But if he could see his Mary's
boy to-day, he'd put up with any amount of felt-basin
hats and Roman collars, and incense and altar-genuflec-
tions wouldn't count for a tikkie. Oh ! it's been a sore with
me this many a year, but when I saw him to-day I said.
THE DOP DOCTOR 159
' Thank God I never had a child !' Because to have seen
a boy or girl grow up and wither away as that beautiful
young fellow is withering, is a thing that a mother must
shudder to look back upon, even when she has found her
lost one again in Heaven."
There was genuine feeling in her voice, usually loud,
harsh, and tuneless. The bright black bird-eyes had a gleam
as of tears. He turned to her with sympathetic interest.
"The Bishop will be obliged to you for finding this out. No
hint of it had reached me. 1 am due at the Hospital in the
morning,and we'll see if something can't be done for the boy."
She shook her head.
" It's a case of ttiberculous lung-disease. He developed
it in the Clergy House at St. Margaret's, and made light of
it, supposing or pretending that the oough and wasting
and difficulty of breathing meant bronchial trouble, the
result of London fogs. These young people who don't
value Life — glorious gift that it is ! When he broke down
utterly, at the end of a rampant campaign against Intem-
perance — he wouldn't be the Bishop's son if he didn't gall
the withers of some hobby-horse or other — the doctors
agreed there was nothing for him but South Africa."
He froMTQed, knowing how many sufferers had died of
that deadly prescription. She went on :
"So he came out — alone — upon the i. I vice of the well-
intentioned wiseacres, knowing nothing of the covntry, to
live on his two hundred a year until the end. And the end
is coming — in Gueldersdorp Hospital — with giant strides."
She bhnked. " They've isolated him in a small detached
ward. He has a kind friend in the Matron, and the chart-
nurse is in love with him, unless I'm mistaken in the symp-
toms of the complaint. And he looks like St. Francis of
Assisi, wedded to Death instead of Poverty — and coughs —
fit to tear your heart. B'rrh !" she shuddered.
He repeated : " I'U see what can be done to-morrow.
These cases are deceptive. There may be a gleam of hope."
" There is one doubt about the case which might infer a
hope. I don't know what discoveries the London doctors
made, but I wormed out of the chart-nurse, who plainly
adores him, that the doctors in Gueldersdorp can't scare
up a bacillus for the life of them."
160 THE DOP DOCTOR
His eyes lightened involuntary admiration, though his
tone was Jesting.
" You're thrown away on mere journalism. Criminal
Investigation or Secret Intelligence would offer wider fields
for your abilities."
" Wait !" she said, her beady eyes black diamonds. " I
shall hope to prove one day that an English woman-
journalist can be as useful as a Boer spy in the matter of
useful information. Why, why am I not a man ? You
only don't trust me because I am a woman."
He had touched the rankling point in her ambition. He
applied balm as he knew how.
" Your being a woman may have made all the difference
— for Fraithom. I shall set Taggart of the R.A.M.C. at
him to-morrow ; the Major's a bit of a crack at pulmonary
cases. And he shall consult with Saxham, and "
<<
Saxham." Her eyebrows were knitted. " I thought
I knew the names of your Medical Staff men. But I can't
recall a Saxham."
" This Saxham is Civilian — and rather a big pot — M.D.,
F.R.C.S., and lots more. We're lucky to have got him."
She stiffened, scenting the paragraph.
" Can it be that you mean the Dr. Saxham of the Old
Bailey Case ?"
" The Jury ac([uitted, let me remind you."
" I bolieve so," she said ; " but — he vanished afterwards.
I think an innocent man would have stopped and faced the
music, and not beaten a retreat with the Wedding March
almost sounding in his ears. But — who knows ? You
have met his brother, Captain Saxham, of the — th
Dragoons ? It was he who stepped into the matrimonial
breach, and married the young woman."
" The young woman ?"
" His brother's fiancee — an heiress of the Dorsetshire
Lee-Haileys, and rather a pretty-faced, silly person, with
a penchant for French novels and sulphonal tabloids. I
always shall believe that she liked the handsome Dragoon
best, and took advantage of the Doctor's being — under the
cloud of acquittal by a British Jury, to give him what the
dear Irish call ' the back of her hand.' "
" The better luck for him !"
THE DOP DOCTOR 161
" It was mere instinct to let go when the man was
dragging them both under water," she asserted.
" A Newfoundland bitch would have risen above it."
" You hit back quick and hard."
" I'm a tennis-player and a polo-player and a cricketer."
" What game is there that you don't play ?"
" I could tell you of one or two. . . , But I must really
go and speak to some of these ladies. One of them is an
old friend."
" I know whom you mean. If I didn't, her glare of envj.
would have enlightened me. Did I tell you that I en-
countered an old friend — or, at least, a friend of old — at the
Hospital yesterday ?"
" You mean poor Fraithom ?"
" Not at all. I'm only a friend of his mother. I had
only heard of the boy, not met him, until I tumbled over
him here. But this face — severely framed in a starched
white guimpe and floating black veil — belonged to my Past
in several ways."
He showed interest.
" Your friend is a nun ? At the Convent here ? How
did you come across her ?"
" She called to see the Bishop's son — ^while I was with
him. It seems that. Judging by the poor dear boy's religious
manuals and medals, and other High Church contrap-
tions, the Matron had got him on the Hospital books as
a Roman Catholic. And, consequently, when my friend
looked in to visit a day-scholar who was to be operated on
for adenoids — I've no idea what they are, but a thing with
a name like that would naturally have to be cut out of one
— she was told of this poor fellow, and has shed the light of
her countenance on him occasionally since. Yesterday
was one of the occasions, and Heavens ! what a counten-
ance it is even now ! What a voice, what eyes, what a
manner ! I believed I gushed a bit. . . . She met me as
though we'd only parted last week. Nuns are wonderful
creatures : she's unique, even as a nun."
He said : " I believe I had the honour of meeting the
lady of whom you speak when I called at the Convent
yesterday afternoon. A remarkable, noble, and most
interesting personality."
11
162 THE DOP DOCTOR
Lady Hannah nodded. " All that. But you ought to
have seen her at eighteen. We were at the High-School,
Kensington, together, I a brat of ten in the Juniors' Division,
she a Head Girl, cramming for Girton. She carried every-
thing before her there, and emerged with a B.A. Degree
Certificate in the days when it was thought hardly proper for
a woman to go about with such a thing tacked to her skirts.
And all the students idohsed her, and the male lecturers wor-
shipped the ground sh-e trod. And when she was presented
— what a sensation ! They called her the ' Irish Rose,'
and ' Deirdre,' for her skin of cream and her grey eyes
and billowing clouds of black hair. Society raved of her for
three seasons, until the fools went even madder about that
little Hawting woman — a ; stiff starched martinet's frisky
half — who bolted with the man my glorious Biddy had given
her beautiful hand to. And the result ! She — ^who might
have married an Ambassador and queened it in Petersburg
with the best of 'em — she's in a whitewashed Convent,
superintending the education of Dutch and Afrikander
schoolgirls in Greek, Latin, French, Algebra and Mathe-
matics, calisthenics, needlework, the torture of the piano,
and the twiddle of the globes. He has something to answer
for, that old crony of yours !"
Lady Hannah stopped for breath, giving the listener his
opportunity.
" My dear lady, you have told me a great deal without
enlightening me in the least. Who is my ' crony,' and
who was your friend ?"
Lady Harmah opened her round beady eyes in astonish-
ment.
" Haven't I told you ? She is — or was — Lady Bridget-
Mary Bawne, sister of that high-falutin' little donkey the
present Earl of Castleclare, who came into the title and
married at eighteen. His wife has means, I understand. The
old Dowager Duchess of Strome, a bosom friend of my
mother's, was Biddy's aunt, and Cardinal Voisey, handsome
being ! is an uncle on the distaS side. All the CathoUc world
and his wife were at her taking of the veil of profession nine-
teen years ago. The Pope's Nuncio, the Cardinal-Bishop of
Mozella, officiated, and the Comtesse de Lutetia was there
with the Due d'O. . . . They didn't cut off her beautiful
THE DOP DOCTOR 163
Mack hair, though we outsiders were on tiptoe to see the
tiling done. I don't think I ever cried so much in my life.
Had hysterics — real — when I got home, and mother
scolded fearfully. The Duke of C came with his
equerry, and after the cloister-gates had shut — crash —
on beautiful Biddy in her bridal laces, and white satin, and
popes of pearls, and we were all waiting, breathless, for her
to come back in the habit, I heard the Duke say, not that
the dear old thing ever meant to be profane : ' By Grod !
General, I'm damned if Captain Mildare hasn't made
Heaven an uncommonly handsome present ! ' And the man
he said that to was the husband of the very woman Dicky
had run away with not quite twelve months before. Mercy
on us !"
" Good Heavens !" the Ustener had cried and started to
his feet, the dark blood rushing to his forehead. The ivory-
pale, mutely-suffering face against the background of
whitewashed wall flashed back upon his memory, in a circle
of dazzling light. He saw her again, leaning against the
door of the chapel as he told her the cruel news. He
heard her saying :
" Are you at liberty to tell me the date of Captain
Mildare's death ? For I know — one who was also hia
friend — and would take an interest in the particulars."
The particulars ! And he had bludgeoned the woman
with them — stabbed her to the heart, poor soul, unknow-
ing
He was blameless, but he could not forgive himself. . . .
He drove liis teeth down savagely into his lower lip, and
muttered an excuse, and went away abruptly, leaving
Lady Hannah staring. He took leave soon after, and went
to his own quarters with theD.A.A.G., while her ladyship,
with intinite relief, getting rid of her feminine guests,
repaired with Captain Bingham VVrynche, familiarly
known to a wide circle of friends as " Bingo," and several
chosen spirits to the billiard-room, for snooker-pool, and
whisky -and-soda.
" The grey wolf is on the prowl to-night," said one of
the chosen spirits, as he chalked Lady Hannah's cue with
fastidious care. Ke winked acro.ss the table at Bingo,
sunset- red with dinner, champagne, and stroke- play.
11—2
164 THE DOP DOCTOR
" S'st !" sibilated the Captain warningly, winking in
the direction of his wife. Lady Hannah, her little thumb
cocked in the air, her round, birdlike eyes scientifically
calculating angles, paused before making a rapid stroke,
to say :
" Don't be cheaply mysterious, my dear man. Of
course, the Colonel visits the defences and outposts and
80 forth regularly after dark. It's part of the routine,
surely ?"
" Of course. But you don't suppose he goes alone, do
you, old lady ?" queried Captain Bingo.
" I suppose he takes his A.D.C. ?"
" Not to mention a detachment of the B.S.A. Also a
squad of the Town Guard in red neckties, solar topees
and bandoliers ; with the Rifles' Band, and D Squadron
of the Baraland Irregular Horse. Isn't that the routine,
Beauvayse ? You're more up in these things than me,
and I fancy there was a change in the order for the
evemn'."
"Rather!" assented Beauvayse, continuing,to the rapture
of winking Bingo. " On reaching the earthworks where
our obsoletes are mounted, the townies will now fire a
salute of blank, without falling down ; and the Band have
instructions to play ' There's Death in the Old Guns Yet.'
Those were the only material changes, except that sentries
will for the future wear fly- and fever-belts outside instead
of in."
" So that he can see at a glance," Lady Hannah said
approvingly, " that all precautions are being taken. Very
sensible, I call it."
" Ha, ha, haw !" Bingo's Joyous explosion revealed to
the outraged woman the fact that she had been " had."
" Haw, haw ! What a beggar you are to rot, Beauvayse !
and that makes five to us."
Lady Hannah, vibrating with womanly indignation,
had made her long - delayed stroke, missed the pyramid
ball, and sent Pink spinning into the pocket. She threw
aside her cue and rubbed her fingers angrily. She hated
losing, and they were playing for shilling fives and half-a-
ero wn on the game.
" You — schoolboys !" She threw them a glance of
THE DOP DOOrOR 165
disdain, as Beauvayse, his seraphic face agrin, screwed
in his supererogatory eyeglass, and lounged over the table.
" You artless babes ! Did you suppose I should be likely
to swallow such a feuille de chou without even oil and
vinegar ? For pity's sake, leave off winking, Bingo !
It's a habit that dates back to the era when women wore
ringlets and white book-muslin, and men sported shaggy
white beaver hats and pegtop trousers, and all the world
read the novels of Lever and Dickens."
" Have Lever and Boz gone out ?" asked Beauvayse,
pocketing his pyramid ball. " I play at Blue." He hit
Blue scientifically off the cushion and went on. " Read
'em myself over and over again, and find 'em give points
in the way of amusement to the piffle Mudie sends out.
Not that I pretend to be a judge of literature. Only know
when I'm not bored, you know. You to play. Lord Henry."
But the senior officer of the Staff, Lady Hannah's
partner, had vanished. Somebody passing the open window
of the billiard-room had whistled a bar or so of a particu-
larly pleasant little tune. Another man took Lord Henry's
place, and the game went on, but never finished, for one
by one, after the same quiet, unobtrusive fashion, the male
players melted away. . . . Left alone. Lady Hannah,
feeling uncommonly like the idle boy in the nursery-story
who asked the beasts and birds and insects to play with
him, betook herself to bed.
The arrogance of men ! she thought as she hung her
transformation Pompadour coiffure on the looking-glass.
How cool, how unshaken in their conviction of superiority,
in spite of all deference, courtesy, pretence of consideration
for Queen Dolt. . . . But she would show them all one
of these days, what could be achieved by a unit of the
despised majority. . . .
" I should like to see him at night-work," she said after-
wards, when, very late, her Bingo appeared in the shadow
of the conjugal mosquito-curtains.
" You wouldn't," was her martial lord's reply.
" Wouldn't what ?" asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in
tropical sleeping attire.
Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose,
replied to her reflection in the looking-glaiss :
166 THE DOP DOCTOR
" You wouldn't see him. Like the flea in the American
story, when you've got your finger on him is the time he
isn't there."
" But he is there for you ?"
Bingo shook his head, holding the candle near the glass
and regarding his leading feature with interest.
" Not if he don't choose to be. By the living Tinker !
if I go on brownin' and chippin' at this rate, I shall do
for the Etruscan Antiquity Room at the British Museum.
Piff, what a smell of burning ! It's the hair-thing hangin'
on the looldn'-glass."
Male Society began to practise the shedding of its final
g's, you will remember, about the time that Female Society
took to wearing transformation coififures. Lady Hannah,
her active little figure rustling in the thinnest of silk
drapery, jumped nimbly out of bed, and rushed to save
her property.
" Idiot !" she shrieked.
" Frightfully sorry ! But you're lumps prettier without,"
said Bingo.
" Don't pile insult on injury."
" Couldn't flatter for nuts !"
" I'll forgive you if you'll tell me how he manages — to
attain invisibility ?"
Bingo struck an attitude and began to declaim :
" As the sable shades of Night were broodin' over the
beleaguered town of Gueldersdorp, the manly form of a
mysterious bearded stranger in grey reach-me-downs and
.1 felt slouch might have been observed directin' its steps
from one to the other of the various outlyin' pickets
posted on the veld ..."
" Once for all, I decline to believe such theatrical
rubbish ! A beard, indeed ! Why not a paper nose and
a Pierrot's cap ?"
" Why not ?" acquiesced placid Bingo, getting into bed.
But the eye concealed by the pillow winked ; for he had
told her the absolute truth ; and woman-like, that was
just what she wouldn't swallow, as he said to Beauvayse
next morning.
THE DOP DOCTOR 167
XXII
" The Town Guard," according to W. Keyse. Esquire, who
kept a Betts' Journal, one shilling net, including Rail and
Ocean Accident Insurance, was " a kind of amachoor copper,
swore in to look after the dorp, stand guard, and do sentry-
go, atid tumble to arms, just as the town dogs leave oiJ
barkin'. an' the old gal in the room next yours is startin'
to snore like a Kaffir sow."
Later on, even more was asked of the townie, and he
rose to the demand.
The smasher hat was not unbecoming to the manly brow
it shaded, when W. Keyse put it on and anxiously con-
sulted the small greenish swing looking-glass that graced
the chest of drawers, the most commanding article of
furniture in his room at Filliter's Boarding-House. It
was Mrs. Filliter who snored in the room on the other side
of the thin partition. Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers,
she was harassed by the demands of her resident gentlemen
in connection with gravy ; but, unlike Mrs. Todgers, she
never supplied even browned and heated water as an
equivalent. And the mutton was wonderfully lean, and
the fowls, but for difference in size^ might have been
ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as regarded
the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to
cook shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger
for her gentlemen, and when they were to bear up better
than most sufferers from this tough and lasting form of
diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as
Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with delicacies and kickshaws.
The bandolier was heavy upon the thin shoulders and
hollow chest of a pale young Cockney, who had drifted
down from Southampton ia the steerage, and roa,red and
rattled up from Cape Town by the three foot six inch
gauge railway, eight hundred and seventy miles, to Guelders-
dorp, that he might find his crown of manhood waiting
there. The second-hand Sam Browne belt was distinctly
good ; the yellow puttees, worn with his own brown lace-up
boots, took trouble to adjust. And it was barely possible,
even by standing the small swing looking-glass on the floor.
168 THE DOP DOCTOR
and tilting it excessively, to see how one's legs looked.
W. Keyse suffered from the conviction that these limbs
were over- thin. Behind the counter of a fried-fish shop in
High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned hake,
and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the
hungry customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed
on their homeward way from the Oxford or the Camden
Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction of Gower
Street and the Hampstead Road — one develops acute-
ness of observation, one gains experience, there being
always the bloke who cuts and runs without paying, or eats
and shows reversed trouser- pockets in default of settle-
ment, to deal with. . . . But one does not develop
muscle, the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to
possess. When he went into the printing- business and
bent all day over the formes of type in the composing-room,
hand-setting up the columns of the North London Half-
penny Herald, to the tune of three-and-eightpence a day,
the hollow chest grew hollower, and he developed a " corf."
The physician in charge of the out-patients' department
at University College Hospital said there was lung-trouble,
and a man at the printing-office who had never been there,
said South Africa was the cure for that. And W. Keyse
had thirty pounds in the Post-Office Savings Bank, earned
by the sweat of a brow which was his best feature, and the
steamships were advertising ten-pound third-class single
fares to Cape Town. One of the Societies for the Aid of
Emigrants would have helped him, but while W. Keyse 'ad
a bit of 'is own, no Blooming Paupery, said he, for him !
His sole living relative, an aunt who inhabited one of a row
of ginger-brick Virginia- creeper- clad almshouses " over
aginst 'Ighgyte Cimitery," sniffled a little when he called
to say good-bye, bringing in a parting present of a half-
pound of Liphook's Luscious Tea and a screw of snuff.
" I shan't never see you no more, William."
" Ow yes, you will, mother ! Don't be such a silly !"
William's step-cousin 'Melia, in service as general in Adelaide
Road, Chalk Farm end, had said ; and she had looked
coldly upon William immediately afterwards, bestowing
an amorous ogle upon Lobster, who sat well forward upon
a backless Windsor chair, sucking the silver top of hia
THE DOP DOCTOR 169
swagger cane, — Lobster, who was six foot high and in the
Grenadier Guards, and had supplanted William in 'Melia's
affections, for they 'ad used to walk out regularly on
Sundays and holidays before Lobster came along. . . . How
William loved Lobster now ! Why, but for him he might
have been married to 'Melia to-day ; — doomed to tread in
the ways of commonplace, ordinary married life, fated to live
and die without once having peeped into Paradise, without
ever having looked upon the ' only woman in the world ! '
Greta, of the glorious golden pigtail, the entrancing figure
and the bewitching, twinkling, teasing eyes of blue !
Suppose — only suppose — the silent threatening Thing
across the border, jewelled with the glowing Argus-eyes of
many camp-fires, conjecturable in dark masses flecked with
the white of waggon-tilts, and sometimes giving out the
dull gleam of iron or the sparkle of steel, were to choose this,
W. Keyse's first night on guard, for an attack ! Even to the
inexperience of W. K. the sand-bagged earthworks built
about Gueldersdorp, the barricades of trek-waggons and
railway-trucks blocking up the roads debouching on the
veld, the extending lines of trenches, the watchdog forts,
the sentinelled pickets, the noiseless, continually moving
patrols, all the various parts of the marvellous machinery
of defence, controlled by one master-hand upon the levers,
would count for nothing against that overwhelming onrush
of armed thousands, that flood of men dammed up above
the town, and waiting the signal to roll down and over-
whelm her, and Cripps ! what a chance to make a
glorious, heroic splash in Greta's sight ! Die, perhaps, in
saving her from them Dutchies. To be sure, she, divine
creature, was a Dutchy too. But no matter — a time
would come . . .
Confident in the coming of that time, W. Keyse took the
brown rifle tenderly from the corner, and replaced the
meagre little looking-glass upon the yellow chest of drawers.
In the act of bestowing a final glance of scrutiny upon his
upper lip, whose manly crop had unaccountably delayed,
he caught sight of a cheap paper- covered book lying beside
the tin candlestick whose tallow dip had aided perusal of
the volume o' nights. The red surged up in his thin cheeks
as he picked up the thing. There were horrible woodcuts
170 THE DOP DOCTOR
in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red and blue and
yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still.
Vice mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous,
within those gaudy covers.
He looked round the mean, poor, ugly toom, the volume
in his hand ; a photograph of the dubious sort leered from
the wall beside the bed. . . .
" If they rushed us to-night, an' I got shot in the scrap,
an' they brought me back 'ere, dyin', and She came . . . an'
saw that . . . /" His ears were scarlet as he dashed at the
leering photograph and tore it down. Oh, W. Keyse, it
is pitiful to think you had to blush, but good to know you
had not forgotten how t-o. There was a little rusty fireplace
in the room. W. Keyse burned something in it that left
nothing but a feathery pile of ashes, and a little shameful
heap of mud in the corner of a boy's memory, before he
hurried to the Town Guardhouse, where other bandoliers
wete mustering, and fell in. As though the Powers deigned
to reward an act of virtue on the very night of its per-
formance, he was posted by his picket in the shadow of the
high corrugated iron fence of the tree-bordered tennis-
groimd behind the Convent, as " Lights Out " sounded
from the camp of the Irregulars, beyond the Railway-sheds
and storehouses.
It was glorious to be there, taking care of Her, though
it would have been nicer if one had been allowed to smoke.
The moon of Wilham's passion-inspired verse was not shining
o'er South Africa's plain upon this the very night for her.
It was dark and close and stiflingly hot. A dust-wind had
blown that day, and the suspended particles thickened the
atmosphere, to the oppression of the lungs and the hiding
of the stars. He knew his picket posted a quarter of a
mile away on the other side of the Cemetery ; his fellow-
sentry was on the opposite flank of the Convent. He was
a stout, middle-aged tradesman, with a large wife and a
corresponding family, and it wrung the heart of W. Keyse
to think that a tricky fate might have placed that insensible
man on the side where Her window was ! Through the
boughs of the peach and orange trees, heavily burdened
with unripe fruit, you could get an occasional glimpse of
whitewashed brick walls, darkened by the outline of shut-
THE DOP DOCTOR 171
tered oblongs here and there. And Imagination could blow
her cloud of fragrant vapour, though tobacco were denied
you.
" They're all Her windows while she's there behind
them w^alls," was the reflection in which W. Keyse found
comfort.
She w^as not there. She was at that moment being kissed
on the stoep of the Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg,
by a young officer of Staats Artillery, to whom she had
agreed to be clandestinely engaged, though Papa Du Taine
had other views.
W. Keyse was spared this tragic knowledge. But if the
moon, shining beautifully over the Du Taine gardens and
orange-groves, had chosen to tell tales !
It was still — still and quiet ; a blue radiance of electric
light burned here and there ; at the Staff Office on the
Market Square, and at other centres of purposeful activity.
Aromatic-beer cellars and whisky-saloons gave out a
yellow glare of gas-jets ; the red lamp of an apothecary
showed a wakeful eye. Gueldersdorp spraw Jed in the out-
line of a sleeping turtle on her squat hillock of gravelly
earth and sand. In smoke-coloured folds, closely match-
ing the lowering dim canopy of vapour brooding over-
head, the prairie spread about her, deepening to a basined
valley in the middle distances, sweeping to a rise beyond,
so that the edges of the basin looked dow^n upon the town.
High on the hill-ranges in the South more chains of red
sparks burned ... he knew them for the watch-fires of the
Boer outposts, and the raised edges of the basin East and
West were set thickly with similar tw inkling jewels where
the laagers were ; while smaller groups shone nearer,
marking the situation of isolated vedettes. The sickly
taint upon the faint breeze told of massed and clustered
humanity. 'Strewth, how they stunk, the brutes ! He
hoped there was enough of 'em, lying doggo up there,
waiting the word to roll down and swallow the blooming
dorp ! His palate grew dry, as the sweat broke out upon
his temples and trickled down the back of his neck, and the
palms of his hands were moist and clammy. Also, under
the buckle of the Sam Browne belt was a sinking, all-
gone sensation excessively UEplc.'is;uit to feel. Perhaps
172 THE DOP DOCTOR
its wearer had a touch of fever ! Then the stout tradesman
on the other side of the Convent sneezed suddenly, and
W. Keyse, vrith every nerve in his body jarring from the
shock, knew that he was simply suffering from funk.
Staggering from the shock of the horrible self-revelation,
he gritted his teeth. There was a Billy Keyse who was a
blooming coward inside the other who was not. He told
the sickening, white-gilled little skulker what he thought
of him. He only wished — that is, one of him only wished —
that a gang of the Dutchies would come along now !
He drew a lurid picture for the benefit of the trembler, and
when the young soldier had fired into the brown of them
and seen the whites of their eyes, and fallen, pierced by
a hundred wounds, in the successful defence of the Convent,
he was carried in, and laid on a sofa, and nobody could
recognise him, along of all the blood, until She came,
with her white little feet peeping from the hem of a snowy
nightgown, and her unbraided pigtail swamping the white
with gold, and knew that it was her lover, and knelt by
the hero's side. Soft music from the Orchestra, please ! as
with his final breath W. Keyse implores a last, first kiss.
Even as William No. 1 thrilled to the rapture of that
imagined osculation, Billy No. 2 experienced a ghastly
fright.
For out of the enfolding velvety darkness ahead of him,
and looking towards those firefly sparks shining on the
heights, came the sound of stealthy measured footsteps
and muffled voices talking Dutch. The enemy had made
a sortie. The defences had been rushed, the town sur-
rounded ! Yet there were only two of them — a big, slouch-
ing villain and a short thin one, who wore a giant hat.
The chirping sound of a kiss damped the fierce martial
ardour of WilHam, and greatly reassured Billy. It was
only a townsman taking a night walk with his girl !
Crushed and discouraged, W. Keyse relaxed his grip
upon the trusty rifle, and slunk back into the shadow, as
the tall and the short figures halted at the angle of the
fence.
" 'Ain't it a 'eavenly night ?" came from the short figure,
who leaned against the tall one affectionately. " An' me
got to go in. A crooil shyme, I call it. 'Ain't it, deer ?
THE DOP DOCTOR 173
Leggo me wyste, there's a love. You've no notion 'ow I
shall cop it for bein' lyte."
He sportively declined to release her. There was the
sound of a soft slap, followed by the smack of a kiss. She
was very angry.
" Leggo, I tell you ! Where's your manners, 'orlin' me
abart ! If that's the way you be'ayve with your Dutch
ones . . . !"
He spat and asseverated :
" Neen ! I no other girls but you heb got."
It was the Slabberts with Emigration Jane.
" Ho ! So you can talk English a bit — give you a
charnce ?"
" Ja, a little now and then when it is useful. But when
we are to be married, you shall only to me talk in my own
moder Taal."
" Shan't I myke a gay old 'ash of it !" Recklessly she
crushed the large hat against the unwieldy shoulder.
" There, good-night agyne, deer ! Sister Tobias — that's
what they call the one that 'ousekeeps and manages the
kitchen — Sister Tobias '11 be sittin' up for me, thinkin'
I've got meself lost or bin run away with." She gurgled
enjoyingly.
" Tell me again, before you shall go, about the Engelsch
Commandant who came to visit at the Convent to-day ? "
" Lor ! 'Aven't I told you a'ready ? 'E stopped 'arf
an 'our or more . . . an' She — that's the Reverend Mother,
as they call her — She took 'im over tlie 'ouse, an' after 'e'd
gone through the 'ouse, an' Sister Tobias — ain't that a
rummy name for a nun ? — Sister Tobias, she showed 'im
to the gyte, an' 'e says to 'er as wot 'e's goin' to 'ave the flag-
staff rigged up in the gardin fust thing to-morrow momin',
an' 'e'll undertake that the workin'-party detached for the
purpose will know 'ow to be'ayve theirselves respectful.
An' then 'e touches 'is 'at an' gets on 'is 'orse an' . . ."
" Listen to me." The Slabbertian command of that
barbaric language of the Englanders evoked her surprise,
but the painful squeeze he gave her arm compelled atten-
tion. " Next time the English Commandant to the house
shall come, you to listen at the keyhole is."
" V\ ot for ?"
174 THE DOP DOCTOR
" For what have you before at keyholes listened, little
fool ?"
" To find out when they was goin' to sack me, so's to git
me own notice in fust — see 1 Then you can say to the lydy
at the Registry Office — and don't they give theirselves
hail's ! — as wot you're leaving because the place don't suit.
Twiggy ?"
" You for yourself did listen, then. Goed. Now it is
for me you listen will, if you a true Boer's vrouw wish to
become by-and-by."
She rose to the immemorial allure that is never out of
season in angling for her simple kind.
" That word you said means — wife, don't it, deer ?"
Her voice trembled ; the joyous, longed-for haven of mar-
riage — was it possible that it might be in sight ?
" It shall mean wife, if you obey me — ja ! — otherwise it
will be that I shall marry the daughter of a good country-
man of mine, who many sheep has, and much land, and
plenty of money to give his daughter when she a husband
gets !"
Her underlip dropped pitifully, and the tears welled up.
It was too dark to see her crying, but he heard her sob,
and grinned, himself unseen.
" I'll do anything for you, deer ! Only don't tyke an'
'ave the other One. She may be a Dutchy, but she won't
never care for you like wot I do. Don't you know it,
Walt ?"
" I shall it know when I hear what you have found out,"
proclaimed the Slabberts grimly.
There was a boiling W. Keyse in the deep shadow of the
tall corrugated-iron fence, who restrained with difficulty a
snort of indignation.
" On'y tell me, deer. I'll find out any think you want
me to." Before her spread a lovely vista of floors — her
own floors — to scrub, and a kitchen range — hers, too —
which should cook dinners nice enough to make any hus-
band adore you,
" You shall for me find out what that Commandant of
the rooineks is up to under his Flag of the Red Cross."
" He didn't say nothink about no Red Cross, darlin'."
Stilte ! They will the Red Cross Flag hoist, I tell you.
i(
THE DOP DOCTOR 176
and it will cover more than a parcel of nuns and school-
giils. That Commandant is so verdoemte slim ! Tell
me, do you cartridges well know when you shall see them ?
Little brown rolls with at one end a copper cap — and at the
other a bullet. And gunpowder — you have that seen also ? "
She quavered.
" Yes ; but you don't want me to touch the narsty,
dreadful stuff, do you, Walty deer V*
He scoifed.
" Afraid of gunpowder, Meisje, that like a whey-blooded
Engelschwoman is, A true Boer's daughter would know
how to load a gun, look you, and shoot a man — many men —
if fox the help of the Republic it should be ! But you will
leain. Watch out, I tell you, for stores that Commandant
will be sending into the Convent. Square boxes and long
boxes, and cases — some of them heavy as if lined with iron ;
painted black with white letters, and others stone-colour
with black letters, and yet others grey with red letters ;
the letters remember — ' A.O.S.' "
" But wot '11 be in the boxes, deer ?"
His English, conned from recently published Imperial
Army Service manuals, grew severely technical :
" If you could their big screws unscrew, and their big
locks unlock, you would see, but you will not be able.
What in them 1 Cakes ! Black, square cakes, with in
them holes ; and grey, square cakes, and red caikes, light
and crumbly, that dog-biscuits resemble ; and long brown
sticks, Uke peppermint-candy, in bundles tied together
with string and paper. Boxes of stuff like the hair of
horse, and packets of evil little electric detonators in tubes
of copper. x\lamachtig ! who knows what he has not got —
that Engelsch Commandant — both in the dorp and hidden
in those thrice- accursed mines that he haa laid on the veld
about her. Prismatic powder and gun-cotton, dynamite
and cordite enough to blow a dozen commandos of honest
Booren into dust — a small, fine dust of bones and flesh that
shall afterwards fall mingled with rain of blood. For I
tell you that man has the wickedness of the duyvel in liim,
and the cunning of an old baboon !"
She babbled :
" 'Ow pretty you talk English when you want to. Walty
176 THE DOP DOCTOR
deer ! 'Aven't you bin gittin' at me all along, makin'
out . . ."
He swore at her savagely, and she held her tongue,
worshipping this new development of masterful brutality
in a man whom she had regarded as a " big softy."
He went on :
" Now you shall know what to look for, and when the ver-
doemte explosives come, you will know them by the boxes
and the letters ' A.O.S.' — and you will tell me — and the
guns of our Staats Artillery will not shoot that way, for the
sake of the little woman who is going to be a true Boer's
vrouw by-and-by."
She threw her arms about his rascally neck, and laid her
head upon his hulking shoulder, regardless of the hat she
wrecked, and cried in ecstasy :
" I'll do it, deer ! I'll do it, Walty ! But why should
there be any shootin', lovey ? At 'Ome I never could
abear to see them theayter plays what 'ad guns an' firin'
in 'em ; it made me 'art beat so crooil bad."
He grinned over the big hat into the darkness.
" All right ! I wiU tell the men with the guns that you
do not like to hear them, and they will not perhaps shoot
at all. But you will look out for the boxes with the dyna-
mite, and send me the message when it comes ?"
" Course I will, deer ! But 'ow am I to send the
message ?"
The shadowy right arm of Slabberts swept out, taking in
the black and void and formless veld with a large free gesture.
" Out to there. Stand in this place when it becomes
dark, looking east. Straight in front of us is east. The
game is great fun, and very easy. Strike a match, and
count to ten before you blow it out, and you shall not have
done that three times before you shall see him answer."
" But oo's 'im ?"
" He is my friend — out there upon the veld."
" Lor ! but where '11 you be ? Didn't you say as I'd be
talkin' to you ? I don't 'arf fancy wot you calls the gyme,
not if I 'ave to play it with a strynge bloke !"
The answer came, accompanied by a scraping, familiar
sound.
The Slabberts was striking a match of the fizzling, splut-
i
THE DOP DOCTOR 177
tering, Swedish- made non-safety kind, known to W. Keyse
and his circle by the familiar abbreviation of " stinkers."
" Voor den donder ! Have I not told you I shall be
there with him — after to-night ?"
Her womanly tenderness quickened at the hint of coming
separation. She clung fondly to his arm, and the match
went out, extinguished by a maiden's sigh. He shook her
roughly off, and struck another.
" I shall go away — ]a~and here is the only way for you
to reach me !"
As the fresh match glimmered blue, he held it at arm's
length in front of him, counting silently up to ten, then
blew it out, and set his heavy boot upon the faintly- glowing
spark, and did the thing again.
Endeavouring not to breathe so as to be heard, W. Keyse
flattened himself against the corrugated fence, and waited,
looking ahead into the thick velvet darkness, sensing the
faint human taint upon the tell-tale breeze, and counting
with the Slabberts ; and then, out in the blackness that con-
cealed so much that was sinister, sprang into sudden Hfe
an answering bluish gli mm er, and lasted for ten beats of
the pulse, and went out as suddenly as though a human
breath had blown upon it.
" Is that your pal ?" she whispered.
" That is my pal now." He struck another match, and
flared it, and screened it with his big hand, and showed the
light again, and repeated the manoeuvre three times. " That
is my pal now — and I have said to him ' No news to-night ';
but to-morrow night and the night after, and so on for many
nights to come, I shall be out there where he is, and after
you have called me and I have answered, just as he has
done, you will tell me what there is to tell. Can you spell
your language ?"
" Pretty middlin', Walty deer, though not as I could
wish, owin' to me 'avin' to leave Board School in the Fif
Stannard when father sold up the 'ome in drink after
mother went orf wiv the young man lodger. Some'ow, try
all I could, I never . . ."
" Hou jou smoel ! With our Boer people, when men
speak, the women listen ; but you EngUsh ones chatter
and chatter ! Remember that this match- talk goes thus :
12
178 THE DOP DOCTOR
For the letter A one flare, and hide the light as you saw me
do just now. For B, two flares, and hide the light ; for C,
three, and hide ; for D, four, and hide ; and so on . . .
It is slow, of course, and matches will blow out when you
do not want them to, and a cycle-lamp or a candle- lantern
would be esisier to deal with, but for the verdoemte patrols.
Do you understand ? Say now what I say, after me. For
the letter A one flare and hide. For B . . ."
He put her through the alphabet from end to end ; she
laboured faithfully, and pleased her taskmaster. He
grunted approvingly.
" Zeer goed ! See that you do not forget. And remember,
you are to listen and watch, and tell me what you hear and
see. If you are obedient, I will marry you — by-and-by."
He gave her a clumsy hug in earnest of endearments to
come.
" But if you do not please me " — the grip of his heavy
hand bruised her shoulder through the thin, flowery
" blowse" — "I will punish you — yes, by the Lord ! I will
marry a fine Boer maiden who is the daughter of a landrost,
and who has got much money and plenty of sheep. And
you can give yourself to any dirty verdoemte schelm of an
Engelschman you please, for I will have none of you !
To-morrow you shall have a paper showing you how to tell
me very many things in match -talk, and earn much money
to buy presents for my nice little Boer vrouw. Ala-
machtig ! what is this ?"
" This " was the hard, cold, polished business-end of a
condemned Martini poked violently out of the blackness into
the Slabbertian thorax.
" Not in such a *urry by 'arf, you perishin' Dopper,"
spluttered the ghastly little man in bandoliers behind the
weapon. " Put up them dirty big 'ands o' yours, or, by
Cripps ! I'll let 'er off, you sneakin', match-talkin' spy !"
The arms of Slabberts soared as the tongue of Slabberts
waggt^f in explanation.
" This is assault and battery, Meister, upon a peaceful
burgher. You shall answer to your ofiicer for it, I tell you
slap. Voor den donder ! Is not a young man to light his pipe
as he talks to a young woman without being called spy by a
verdoemte sentry ? Tell him, Jannje, that is all I did do !"
THE DOP DOCTOR 179
W. Keyse felt a little awkward, and the rifle was uncom-
monly heavy. The Slabberts felt it tremble, and thought
about taking his hands down and reaching for that Colts
six-shooter he kept in his hip-pocket. But though the
finger wobbled, it was at the trigger, .and Walt was not fond
of risks.
" Tell him, Jannja !" he spluttered once more.
She had not needed a second bidding.
As the domestic hen in defence of her chicken will
give battle to the wilde-kat, so Emigration Jane, with
ruffled plumage, blazing, defiant eyes, and shrill objurga-
tions, couched in the vernacular most familiar to their
object, hurled herself upon the enemy.
" You narsty httle brute, you ! To up and try an'
murder my young man. With your jor about spies !
Sauce ! I'd perish you, I would, if I was 'im ! Off the fyce
o' the earth, an' charnce bein' 'ung for it ! Take away that
gun, you silly little imitation sojer — d' you 'eer ?"
The weapon was extremely weighty. W. Keyse's arms
ached frightfully. Perspiration trickled into his eyes from
under the tilted smasher. He felt damp and small, and
desperately at a loss. And — as though in malice — the
moon looked out from behind a curtain of thick, dim
vapour, as he said with a lordlj'^ air :
" You be off', young woman, and don't interfere !"
Gawd ! she knew him in spite of the smasher hat. Her
rage burst the flood-gates. She screeched :
" You ! . . . It's you. 'Oo I done a good turn to — an'
this is 'ow I gits it back ?" She gasped. " Because you're
arter one young woman wot wouldn't be seen dead in the
syme street wi' you ..."
Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one miglit
be listening, W. Keyse lifted up his voice.
" Sentry. . . , 'Ere ! . . . Mister !" he cried despairingly.
" You on the other side, can't you hear ?"
In vain the call. The stout fellow-townsman of W.
Keyse, comfortably propped in an angle of the opposite
fence, the bulk of the Convent and the width of its garden
and tennis-ground being between them, continued to sleep
and snore peacefully and undisturbed.
Emigration Jane continued :
12—2
180 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Because that sly cat wiv the yeller 'air-plait won't 'ear
o' you, you try to git a pore servant-gal's fancy bloke
pinched ! Yah, greedy ! Boo ! You plate-faced, 'erring-
backed, s'rimp-eyed little silly, with your love-letters an'
messages ! Wait till I give 'er another o' your screevin' —
that's all !"
" Patrol !" cried W. Keyse in a despairing whimper.
She advanced upon him closer and closer, lashing herself
as she came, to frenzy. How often had W. Keyse seen it
outside the big gaudy pubs in the Tottenham Court Road,
and the Britannia , Camden Town ! Perhaps the recol-
lection staring, newly awakened, in the pale, moonlit eyes
of the little perspiring Town Guardsman stung her to equal
memory, and provoked the act. Who can tell ? We may
only know that she plucked the weapon of lower-class
London from her hat, and Jabbed at the pale face viciously,
and heard the victim say " Owch !" as he winced, and knew
herself, as her Slabberts gripped the rifle- barrel, and wrested
it with iron strength from the failing hands of W. Keyse,
the equal of those dauntless Boer women who killed men
when it was necessary. But, oh ! the 'orrible, 'ideous feeling
of 'aving stuck something into live flesh ! Sick and giddy,
the heroine shut her eyes, seeing behind their lids wondrous
phantasmagoria of coloured pyrotechny, rivalling the
most marvellous triumphs of the magician Brock. . . .
W. Keyse's beheld, at the moment when his weapon was
wrenched from him, two long grey arms come out of the
darkness and coil about the largely- looming form of Slab-
berts. Enveloped in the neutral- tinted tentacles of this
mysterious embrace, the big Boer struggled impotently,
and a quick, imperative voice said, between the thick pants
of striving men :
" Get the gun from him, will you, and call up your
picket. Don't fire ; blow your whistle instead !"
" Pip-ip-ip-'rW ! Pip-ip-r'r /"
The long, shrill call brought armed men hurrying out of
the darkness on the other side of the Cemetery, and con-
siderably quickened the arrival of the visiting patrol.
" Communicating with persons outside the defences by
flashlight signals. We can't shoot him for it just yet, buli
THE DOP DOCTOR 181
we can gaol him on suspicion," said the Commander of the
picket. And Slabberts, with a stalwart escort of B.S.A.
troopers, reluctantly moved off in the direction of the
guard-house.
" Who was the fellow who helped you, do you know ?"
asked the officer who had ridden up with the patrol.
" Threw him and sat on him until the picket came up,
you say," he commented, on hearing W. Keyse's version
of the story. " A tall man in civilian clothes, with a dark
wideawake and short pointed beard ! H'm !"
" Coming from the veld, apparently, and not from
town," said the picket Commander. " Must have known
the countersign, or the sentries out there would have
stopped him. I — see !"
He looked at the patrol-officer, who coughed again. The
moonlight was quite bright enough for the exchange of a
wink. Then :
" Hold on, man, you're bleeding," said W. Keyse's
Sergeant, an old Naval Brigade man. " How did ye get
that 'ere nasty prod under the eye ?"
W. Keyse put up his hand, and gingerly felt the place
that hurt. His fingers were red when they came away.
" The young woman wot was with the Dutchman, she
Jabbed me with a 'at-pin, to git me to let 'im go."
" There's a blindin' vixen for you !" commented the
Sergeant. " Two inch higher, and she'd have doused your
light out. Where did she come from, d'ye know ?"
" Have you any idea who she was ?" asked the Com-
mander of the picket.
W. Keyse shook his head.
" 'Aven't the least idear, sir. Never sor 'er before in my
natural !" he declared stoutly.
" Well, you'll know her again when you meet her — or she
will you," said the patrol-officer, about to move on, when
a deplorable figure came staggering into the circle, and the
rider reined up his horse. " What's this ? Hey, Johnny,
where's your gun 1"
It was W. Keyse's fellow-sentry from the opposite flank
of the Convent.
" And time you turned up, I don't think," commented
W. Keyse. " Didn't you 'ear me sing out to you Just now?"
182 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Come, now, what were you up to 1" the Sergeant
pressed. " Better up an' own it if you've bin asleep on
guard."
The eager faces crowded round. The object of interest
and comment, not at all sympathetic or polite, was a stout,
respectable tradesman, with a large, round, ghastly face,
who saluted his officer with a trembling hand.
" I — I have been the victim of an outrage, sir !**
" Sorry to hear it ; what's your name ?"
" Brooker, sir," volunteered W. Keyse's Corporal. " The
other sentry we put on with Keyse here."
" Mr. Brooker, sir. General Stores, Market Square,"
babbled the citizen.
" Well, Private Brooker, what have you to say ?"
" I have been drugged or hypnotised, sir, and robbed of
my gun while in a state of insensibility, sir — upon my
honour as an Alderman and Magistrate of this borough !
Swear me, sir, if you have any doubt of my veracitj'^ !" He
flapped his hands like fins, and his bandolier heaved above
a labouring bosom.
The Commander of the picket looked pretematuraily
grave.
" Very sorry. Private Brooker, but unless the Sergeant
has brought his Testament along, you'll have to give your
information in the ordinary way. So they drugged you or
hypnotised you — or both, was it ? — and took away your
rifle. Of course you saw it done ?"
" No, sir, I did not see it done. When I woke up . . ."
" Ah, when you woke up ! Please go on."
The crowding faces of B.S,A. men and Town Guardsmen
were grinning now. The patrol-officer was rocking in his
saddle.
" When I revived, sir, from the swoon or trance . . ."
" Very good. Private Brooker ; we'll hear the rest of that
in the morning. Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and
bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic subject before me in
the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at large
for the present, and fall in the picket."
The Sergeant saluted. " Very good, sir,"
The bubbling Brooker boiled over frothily as the sentries
were changing.
THE DOP DOCTOR 183
" A prisoner ! Good God ! do they take me for a traitor ?
A Magistrate ... an Alderman, the President of the Gas
Committee ..."
" I should 'ave guessed you to be that if I 'adn't 'eard
it, sonny," said the Sergeant dryly, the implied sarcasm
provoking a subdued guffaw. He added, as the visiting
patrol rode on and the picket marched back to the Ceme-
tery : " Can't relieve you of your rifle, because you 'aven't
got 'er. What in 'Eaven's name are they goin' to do to
you ? Well, you'll find out to-morrow. Left face ; quick
march !"
Counting left-right, and keeping elbow-touch with the
next man, W. Keyse got in a whisper :
" I say, Sergeant, am I in for it as well as Ole Bulgy
Weskit ? You might as well let me know and charnce it !"
The Sergeant answered with unfeeling indifference :
" Since you ask, I should say you was."
" That's a bit 'ard ! Wot '11 1 git ?"
" Ten to one, your skater."
" Wot is my skater ?"
" Your Corporal's stripe, you suckin' innocent ! Wot
for ? For takin' a Boer spy pris'ner — that's wot for !"
" Cripps !" said W. Keyse, enlightened, illuminated and
srlowinff in the darkness. He added a moment later, in
rather a depressed tone : " But it was 'im, the civilian bloke
with the beard, 'oo downed the Dutchy, an' sat on 'im till
the guard come up."
The Sergeant was ahead of the half-company, speaking
to the officer in charge. It was the Corporal who answered,
across the man who marched upon the left of W. Keyse :
" O' course it was. But you 'ad the Dopper fust, and,"
he cackled quietly, " the Colonel won't be jealous."
The eyes and mouth of W. Keyse became circular.
" The who ?"
" The Colonel, didn't you 'ear me say ?"
" That wasn't never . . . '»m ?"
*' All right, since you know best. But him, for all that !"
" Great Jiminy Cripps !" gasped W. Keyse.
184 THE DOP DOCTOR
XXIII
YoTJ are to imagine Dawn, trailing weary-footed over the
interminable plain, to find Gueldersdorp, lonely before,
and before threatened, now isolated like 8ome undaunted
coral rock in mid-Pacific, crested with screaming sea-birds,
girt with roaring breakers, set in the midst of waters
haunted by myriads of hungry sharks. Ringed with silent
menace, she squatted on her low hill, doggedly waiting
the event.
It was known that on the previous day the telegraph
wires north of Beaton had been cut, and this day was to
sever the last link with Cape Town at Maripo, some forty
miles south. The railway bridge that crossed the Olopo
River might go next. Staat's Engineers had been busy
there overnight. Rumour had it, Heaven knows how,
that the armoured train that had been sent up from the
Cape with two hght guns of superseded pattern — a generous
contribution towards the collection of obsolete engines
now bristling from the sand- bagged ramparts — had been
seized by a commando, with the officer and the men in
charge. This was to be confirmed later by the arrival of
an engine-driver minus five fingers and some faith in the
omnipotence of British arms. But at the beginning of
this chapter he was hiding in a sand-hole, chewing the cud
of his experiences, in default of other pabulum, and did
not get in before dark of the long blazing day.
Crowds gathered on the barely-reclaimed veld at the
northern end of the town to see the Military Executive
take over the Hospital. But that the streets were barri-
caded with waggons and every able-bodied male citizen
carried a rifle, it might have been mistaken for an occasion
of national rejoicing or civic festivity. The leaves of the
pepper- trees fringing the thoroughfares and clumped in
the Market Square rustled in the faint hot breeze. By-
and-by they were to stand scorched and seared and naked
under the iron hail that beat in blizzards upon them,
and die in the noxious lyddite fumes dispersed by bursting
shells.
The variegated crowd cheered as the Staff dismounted
THE DOP DOCTOR 186
at the white-painted iron gates of the railed-in Hospital
grounds. It was not the acclamation of swlmiration, it was
the cheer expectant. They wanted to know what the
Officer in Command was going to do ? Intolerable sus-
pense racked them. Wherever it was known that he would
be, there they followed at this juncture — solid masses of
humanity, bored with innumerable ear-holes, and enamelled
with patient, glittering, expectant eyes. His own keen,
kindly glance swept over them as he touched his grey felt
hat in acknowledgment of their dubious greeting, that half-
hearted but well-meant cheer. He read the mute question
written upon all the faces. Part of his answer to the
interrogation was standing in the Railway-yard, but they
would have to wait a little while longer yet — ^just a little
longer. He whistled his pleasant melodious little tune as
the porter hurried to open the gates.
One pair of pale, rather ugly eyes in the crowd were
illumined with pure hero-worship. " That's 'im," explained
their owner, nudging a big man in shabby white drill, who
was shouldering a deliberate way through the press.
" The Colonel — and ain't 'e a Regular Oner ! Them
along of 'im — with the red shoulder-straps and brown
leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o' the Staff, they
are. An' them others in khaki with puttees — syme as wot
I've got on — they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-
boneses — twig ? You can tell 'em, when you're near enough,
by the bronze badges with a serpint climbin' up a stick
inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their caps
an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot
they carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know
about these things, being a sort of Service man meself."
Thus dehcately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid
additions had certainly been made to the martial outfit
of the previous day. The tweed Norfolk had been replaced
by a khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and obligingly
taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's
stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as
the consequence of over-indulgence in liquor and language,
had one to sell, had been sewn, upon the sleeve. The original
owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing it, and it burned
186 THE DOP DOCTOR
the arm that bore it like a vaccination- pustule on the
fifth day.
" Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse.
He twitched the stripe carelessly into sight. " C'manding
orficer marked me down for this to-day," he continued,
v^dth elaborate indiflFerence, " along of a Favourable
Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much —
a little turn-up with a 'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned
out to be a spy."
In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he
recognised the face under the Panama hat worn by the
big neighbour in white drill, and blushes swamped his
yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face,
no longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was
the man who had stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's
saloon-bar on the previous day, where Fate had stage-
managed effects so badly that the heroic leading attitude
of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor role
of the juvenile walking-gentleman. " Watto !" he began.
" It's you, Mister ! I bin wantin' to say thank "
But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse against the
green-painted iron railings surrounding a municipal gum-
tree, and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as
well that the acqiiaintance made under conditions remote
from respectability should not be renewed. But W. Keyse
would have preferred to thank the rescuer.
The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a
moment, to the disappointment of the ceremony- loving
Briton and the Colonial of British race, to say nothing of
the Kaffirs and the Barala, who anticipated a big indaba.
The little party of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-
drive between the carefully-tended grass plats to the
stoep where the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, with the matron,
house-surgeon, secretary, and several prominent members
of the Committee — including Alderman Brooker, puffy-
cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest — waited.
Military Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands,
and the thing was done. Inspection followed.
"The warr'ds, said ye ?" The Chief Medical Officer, a
tall raw-boned personage, very evidently hailed from North
of the Tweed. " I'm obliged to ye, ma'am," he addressed
THE DOP DOCrOR 187
the flustered matron, " but the warr'ds an' the contents o'
the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance —
at least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion
we'll tak' a look at the Operating Theatre, and overhaul
the sterileezing plant, and the sanitary arrangements, and
maybe, after a gliJff at the kitchens, tliere would be a
moment to spend in ganging through the vi^arr'ds. Unless
the Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them ?" He turned
a small, twinkling pair of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles
upon his Chief.
" Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall
ask five minutes more grace in the interests of the friend
[ spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I made an appointment
at the half-hour."
" You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that
wrote ' The Diseases of Civilisation,' are ye. Colonel ?
I mind a sentence in it that must have been a douse of
cauld watter — toch ! vitriol would be the better worr'd —
in the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. ' Young men,'
he ca'ed them, as if he was a greybeard himsel', ' young
men who, led to take up Surgery by the houp o' gains an'
notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn its
scienteefic principles — showy operators, who diagnose wi'
the knife an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to
assist her.' And yet Saxham could daur ! ' I shall prove
that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out exceesion,' he said,
or they say he said in the Lancet report o' the operation on
the Grand Duke Waldimir — I cam' across a reprint o' it
no' lang ago — when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi'
the sweat o' mortal terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He
cut a hole in the Duke's stomach, ye will understand, in
front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller intesteene, spliced
the twa together wi' a Collins button, and by a successful
deveece o' plumbing — naething less — earned the eterr'nal
gratitude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the
Niliilists. All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune
the day wi'oot a hair's-breadth difference. For why ?
Ye canna paint the lily, or improve upon perfection.
Toch ! . . . Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin'
for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day !"
" Rejoice then. Major, and be exceeding glad, for I
188 THE DOP DOCTOR
believe this is the man who wrote the book and plugged —
or was it plumbed — the potentate."
The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. " I promise
myself a crack or twa wi' him, then. . . . But how is it a
busy chiel hke that can get awa' from his private patients
and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter Season ?
Ahem ! ahem !"
By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing
the conversation, it was plain that he had recalled the cir-
cumstances under which the " busy chiel " had turned
his back upon the private patients and the Hospital wards.
" Colonel," he went on, " I could be wishing this varry
creeditable - appearing institution — judging from the
ootside o't — were twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe
or so to the back of that."
" My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and
happy but once, and that was when we had fifty men down
with dysentery and fever in a tin-roofed Railway goods-
shed, and a hundred and seventy more under leaky canvas,
and you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could
get no milk."
" That goes to prove the eleementary di£ference 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 1" the Colonel called across
the intervening group of talkers. The group of khakd-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 :
THE DOP DOCTOR 189
" In love again, for the first and only time, Toby ?"
" Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that
pretty ' JolUty ' 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 Towti 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 io 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 —
enthusiastic 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 enter-
tains objections ..."
" To Staff flirtations 1 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
190 THE DOP DOCTOR
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
OflBcer 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 mart'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
THE DOP DOCTOR 191
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 bro^\Ti 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. " / loish I had had that fellow's chance /"
was written in Beauvayse's face. To have won a look of
gratitude from those wonderful black-fiinged 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, givpin the golden chance
to a hulking stranger in white drill, Lrs, 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 aclinowledgments.
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 im-
possible, 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 stem young brows over the writhing demon with
192 THE DOP DOCTOR
the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of the yonng
soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and pro-
fane, Sister Cleoph6e 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, cer-
tainly, 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 :
" O'pen the door I 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, stiffen-
ing horror through her body, deadening sensation, para-
lysing 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'a pulses, and heighten the
radiance of her eyes, and lend animation to her girlish
THE DOP DOCTOR 193
chatter and gaiety to her laughter — at first. Then some
over-bold advance, some hot look or wliispered 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 l^reath 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 resist-
ance and knew no mercy. The horrible obsession came
upon her now, all the stronger for those moments of forget-
fulness :
" 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
Ma3'or's promise to introduce him to the loveUest girl he
had ever seen in his life, or ever should see, mentally regis-
tered 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 per-
petrating 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,
13
194 THE DOP DOCTOR
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. Cer-
tainly. . . . Without doubt. We respect the Mother-
Superior highly. A most gifted, most estimable person in
every way, if rather stem and reserved. . . . Unapproach-
able, my wiie calls her. But Miss Mildare, her ward "
XXIV
" Miss Mild are !"
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 3Iildare ?"
" 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
v/hen 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 (jig black hat. That woman has taken her to her heart,
THE DOP DOCTOR 195
however she came by her ; the parting would be agony,
steira, 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 yo't-'r full allowance o' sleep last nicht 1"
He nodded.
" Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was bom
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 dandle
complacently through Hfe, 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 T'
" 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 con-
fidentially-affectionate kirid 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 wair k mysel', after darr'k, at the
13—2
196 THE DOP DOCTOR
end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld ! The Dutch-
man 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 shochtfu' 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 hiizel 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 mous-
tache 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 Dafify'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."
THE DOP DOCTOR 197
'* 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, rubi-
cund, important, and with a Member of the Committee to
iutroduce.
" 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 Magis-
trate. One of Major Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. Was on
sentry-go last night not far from here, and had a most extra-
ordinary 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
bihously tinged eyes, bowed and broke into a violent per-
spiration, 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 recep-
tion, his sense of importance magnified by being led aside,
apart from the others, into the official privacy of the stoep-
comer, 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 under-
stand — none better — how to uru-avel 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, •^bort-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
198 THE DOP DOCTOR
inspection " — the slight riding sjambok the Chief caxried
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 en-
deavour to reproduce :
" Gr'rumph ! HonFk f Or^rumph /'*
Brooker bounded in his Oxford shoes.
The face upon wliich 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, iVs damned cold to-night ;
and yoii^ve got all tJie blanket. ' "
"Sir , . . sir !" The stricken Brooker babbled
hideously. ... " Colonel ... for mercy's sake ! . . ."
" I could not oblige the gentleman with a blanj<et,
Mr. Brooker, but I relieved him of his rifle and left him,
to tell his picket a cock-and-buU 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
THE DOP DOCTOR 199
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 bis 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 1 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, arid 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 intro-
ductions, 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 flaimel 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,
200 THE DOP DOCTOR
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 deUght beaming in
his round, rosy face :
" Saxham ! Saxham of St. Stephens, and the grand ould
days ! Deny me now, to my face. Say, ' Tom McFadyen,
I don't know you,' if you dare."
The blue eyes shone out vivid gentian-colour in the kindly
smile that illumined them, the stern lips parted in a laugh
that showed the sound white closely-set teeth.
" Tom McFadyen, I do know you. But if you offer to
pay me that cab-fare you owe me, I shall say I'm wrong,
and that it's another man."
" Hould your tongue. Jewel," drolled the little junior,
who delighted in exaggerating the brogue that tripped
naturally off his Irish tongue. " Don't be after giving
me away to the Chief and the Senior that believe me, by
me own account, to be descended from Ollamh Fodla, that
was King of Tara, and owned the cow-grazing from Trim
to Athboy, and ate boiled turnips off shields of gold before
potatoes were invented, when the bog-oaks were growing
as acorns on the tree. And as to the cab-fare, sure I hailed
the hansom out of politeness to your honour's glory, the
day that saw me going off to the Army Medical School at
Netley, wid all my worldly belongin's in wan ould hat-box
and the half of a carpet-bag. Wirra, wirra ! but it's some
folks have luck, says I, as the train took me out av' Waterloo
in a third-class smoker, while you were left on the platform
sheddin' half-crowns out av every pore for the newspaper
boys an' porters to pick up, and smilin' like a baby dhramin'
av the bottle. You'd passed your exam in Anatomy wid
wan hand held behind you an' a glove on the other, you'd
got your London University Scholarship in Physiology,
and you'd fallen head over ears in love with the prettiest
and sweetest girl that ever wore out shoe-leather. You
wrote to me two years later to say you'd been appointed
an in-surgeon on the Junior Staff, an' that you were
engaged to be married. But divil the taste of weddin'-
cake did I ever get off you. What "
The little Irishman, thoughtlessly rattling on, pulled up
in an instant, seeing the ghastly unmistakable change upon
THE DOP DOCTOR 201
the other's face. He remembered the grim black reason
for the change in Saxham, and for once, his habitual tact
deserted him. His rosy gills purpled, even as had the
Mayor's on the Dop Doctor's entrance. His eyes winced
under the heavy petrifying, unseeing stare of Saxham's
blue ones. . . .
" Sorry to stem the flood of your reminiscences, McFadyen,
but we're going to overhaul the Hospital now."
It was the voice of the visitor who had come to the
Harris Street house on the previous night, the tall, loosely-
built, closely-knit figure in the easily fitting Service-dress
that now stepped across the gulf that had suddenly opened
between the two old friends, and laid a hand in pleasant,
familiar fashion upon Saxham's heavy, rather bowed
shoulders. But for that scholar's stoop they would have
been of equal height. He went on : " You ^^dll be able to
give us points, Saxham, where they will be needed most.
Can't expect Colonial institutions, even at the best, to
keep abreast of London."
The blue eyes met his almost defiantly.
" As I think I remember telling you, sir, it is five years
since I saw London."
" Well, I don't blame you for taking a long holiday
while it was procurable. There are a few of us who would
benefit by a gallop without the halter, eh, Taggart ?"
Saxham would not stoop even to benefit indirectly by the
shrewd, kindly tact. He drew himself to his full height,
and the words were spoken with such ringing clearness
that they arrested the attention of every man present.
" My holiday was compulsory. I underwent — innocently
— a legal prosecution for malpractice. The Crown Jury
decided in my favour, but my West End connection was
ruined. I resigned my Hospital and other appointments,
and left England."
" Ay !" It was the Chief Medical Officer's broad
Scots tongue that droned out the bagpipe note. " Weel,
Doctor, it's an ill wind blaws naebody guid, and ye
canna expect Captain McFadyen or mysel' to sympatheese
overmuch wi' the West End for a loss that is our gain.
And, Colonel, it's in my memory that ye had set your mind
on beginnin' wi' the Operating Theatre ? . . ."
m THE DOP DOCTOR
XXV
The chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers
of the Garrison Staff were making the rounds, and was
stricken to the soul by the discovery that the Reverend
Julius Fraithorn had had no breakfast. Occupying a small,
single-cotted, electric-bell-less room in the outlying ward —
brick-lined and corrugated-iron-built like the greater
building, and reserved for infectious cases — the Reverend
Julius might have been said to be marooned, had not his
dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created such
hot competition among the nurses for the privilege of
attending on him, that he had frequently received break-
fast and dinner in duplicate, and once three teas. Some
of the probationers, reared in the outer darkness of Dissent,
knew no better than to term him " the minister." To
the matron, who was High Church, he existed as " Father
Fraithorn." Julius is hardly complete to the reader with-
out an intimation that he very dearly loved to be dubbed
" Father." The matron had never failed in this.
A letter from Father Tatha,m, Julius's senior at
St. Margaret's, lay under the bony hand — a mere bunch of
fleshless fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had
been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say
that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a
chosen band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest
Home at Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday
evening Confirmation classes for young costermongers in
Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record attendance
by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and
ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian
Creed with pairs of trousers. Julius had shaken his head
over the trousers, knowing that the first walk taken by the
garments in company with the winners would be as far as
the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy
Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the
stuffy West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew of
London roughs hulking and hustling on the benches,
learning per medium of " the dodger," that one's duty to
one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause.
THE DOP DOCTOR 203
to refrain one's hands from pocket- picking, shop-raiding,
hustling, and jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or
iron knuckle-dusters, and not to get drunk before Saturday
night.
He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of
physicians — honestly-meaning wiseacres- — ignorant of the
shifts, the fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations
that the panting, tottering invalid must inevitably undergo^
in company with the hale traveller and the sound emigrant ;
the rough, protracted journeys, the neglect and discomfort
of the imas and taverns and boarding-houses, where Kaffirs
are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore
them because he must, and struggled on, learning by painful
experience that fever-patches are best avoided, and finding
out what dust-winds mean to the man who has got sick
lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting better, and
would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and
take up his mission in the West and West-Central districts,
and begin work again.
Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the
light chair slipped in behind them, hospital-fashion, he
looked beyond the whitewashed walls northwards, to
grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was
still apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High
Ritual in the sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested
celebrant of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose
in clouds to the gilded, diapered roof, the organ pealed . , .
then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki Service
dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements
and well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the oachtt
of authority. Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the
visitors exhaled the compound fragrance of healthy virility,
clean linen, and excellent cigars ; and the poor sufferer
yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing
about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even
narrower, in which his wasted body must soon lie. And
then he mentally smote his breast and repented. What
was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should
dare to oppose the Holy Will ?
" Weel now, and how are we the dav ?" said the Chief
Medical Ojfificer, presented by the Resident Surgeon to the
204 THE DOP DOCTOR
occupant of the bed. He read approaching death in the
sunken face against the pillows, and in the feeble pulse as
he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon,
catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head sHghtly,
imparting information that was not needed.
" It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you
the conventional answer," said Julius Fraithom. " To
be plain and brief, I am suffering from tuberculous lung-
disease, and I am advised that I have not many days to
live."
He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.
" Everything that can be done for me here is done.
I cannot be too thankful. But I should have liked — I
should have wished to have been spared to return to
England, if not to live a little longer among my friends,
at least to . . ." He broke off panting, and his rattling
breaths seemed to shake him. He sounded Like Indian
com shaken in a gunny- bag ; he wheezed like the mildewed
harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he had once
tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the
flat, deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's.
When he had moved he had suffered torture : the shoulder-
blades and hip-bones had pierced the wasted muscular
tissues and projected through the skin.
" I can't !" he gasped out. " You see "
A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft,
muffled voice trailed away into a whisper, blue shadows
gathered about his large, mobile, sensitive mouth, much
like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and his
head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.
" Poor beggar !" said a large, pink man, wearing the red
shoulder-straps and brown-leather leggings of the Staff.
to another, a fair, handsome, young giant who leaned
against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse hurried
to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and
the shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from
a flask into a glass with water in it, while the tall Scot, his
finger on the pulse, stooped over the pale figure on the bed ;
" No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery.
Should grouse myself if I was in his shoes — or bed-socks
would be the proper word — ^what 1"
THE DOP DOCTOR 205
Beauvayse agreed. " He looks like a chap I saw once
get into a cofl&n at the Cabaret de I'Enfer — that shady
restaurant place in the Boulevard de CHchy. When they
tui-ned on the lights . . ." He shrugged. " The women of
the party thought it simply ripping, I wanted to be sick."
Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea
during a similar experience. " But women' 11 stand any-
thing," he said, " particularly if they've been told it's chic.
My own part, I can stand any amount of dead men —
healthy dead men, don't you know ? But — give you my
word — a cadaverous spectacle like that poor chap, bones
stickin' out of his hide, and breathin' as if he was stuffed
with dry shavin's, or husks like the Prodigal Son, gives me
the downright horrors !"
Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts
with solid shoulders, until the C.M.O., turning his head,
addressed them brusquely, curtly :
" Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beau-
vayse to the passage, myself and my colleagues here would
be the better obliged to ye."
" Pleasure !" They removed, with a simultaneous clink
of scabbards and a ring of spurred heels on the tiled pave-
ment.
The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a
group of five. The chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of
dismissal, a rigid statue of capped and aproned discipline,
upright in the comer.
" Phew !" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and
produced a cigar-case. " Well out of that, my boy. All
jumps this morning ; wouldn't take the odds you're not as
bad ?"
" Rather !" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's
attention, with a look, to the strong young hand that held
a choice Havana just accepted from the offered case.
" Shaky, isn't it ? and yet I didn't punish the champagne
much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels
before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a
raw morning. Not that I've been in anything but a couple
of Punitive Expeditions — ^from Peshawar, under Wilks-
Dayrell, splitting up some North- West Frontier tribes that
had lumped themselves together against British Authority
206 THE DOP DOCTOR
— up to now. But I'm looking out for the chance oi some-
thing better worth having, like you and all the rest of us.
Trouble you for a light !"
" By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth ! Where
d'you think I'd give a cool fifty to be this minute ? Not
cooling my heels in a brick-paved passage while a pack of
doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a moribund
young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters,
lookin' North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my
ears pricked for — you know what !"
Beauvayse groaned. " Isn't that what I'm suffering for 1
And the Chief must be ten times worse. How he keeps his
countenance — demure as my grandmother's cat lappin'
cream. ... I say, the Transvaal Dutch ; they call them-
selves the true Children of Israel, don't they ? Well, which
did Moses and his little gang come across ihst in the Desert,
the Pillar of Cloud, or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of
railway- trucks containin' the raw material for a sky-
journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in among
the djmamite 1 It makes me feel good all over, as the
American women say, Avhen I think of it." He smiled like
a mischievous young archangel, masquerading in Service kit.
Within the room the fainting man was coming back to
consciousness, his dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain
Bingo Wrynche's similitude regarding husks and shavings,
rings of blue fire swimming before his darkened vision, and
a dull roaring in his ears. . . . The Fvoyal Armj' Medical
Corps wrought over him ; the nurse lent a deft helping
hand ; the Resident Surgeon talked eagerly to the Colonel ;
and he, lending ear, scarcely heard the reiterated, stereo-
typed parrot-phrases, so taken up was his attention vtdth
the man in shabby white drill clothes, who leaned over the
foot of the bed, his square face set into an expressionless
mask, his gentian-blue, oddly vivid eyes fixed upon the
wasted, waxy-yellow face of the sick man, his head bent, as
he hstened wdth profound, absorbed attention to the husky,
rattling, laboured breaths.
Suddenly he straightened himself and spoke, addressing
himself to the Resident Surgeon.
" The patient has told us, sir, that he is suffering from
tuberculous disease of the lungs. May I ask, was that the
THE DOP DOCTOR 207
conclusion arrived at by a London consulting physician, and
whether your own diagnosis has confii-med the assertion 1"
The Resident Surgeon nodded with patronising indiffer-
ence. He was not going to waste civilities upon this
rowdy, drunken remittance-man, whom he had seen reeling
through the streets of the stad as he went upon his own
respectable way.
" Phthisis fndmonalis." He addressed his reply to the
Chief. " And the process of lung-destruction is, as you ^vill
observe, sir, nearly complete."
He encountered from the Chief a look of cool displeasure
that flushed him to the top of his knobby forehead, and set
him blinking nervously behind his big round spectacles.
" Br. Saxham asked you, sir, unless I mistake, whether
you had ascertained by your own diagnosis, the . . ."
Lady Hannah's words came back to him. He recalled the
" bit of information wormed out of the nurse," and ended
with " the presence of the bacillus ?"
Saxham's blue eyes thrust their rapier-points at him,
and then plunged into the oyster-like orbs behind the
spectacles of the Resident Surgeon, who rapidly grew from
scarlet to purple, and from purple to pale green. Major
Taggart and the Irishman exchanged a look of intelligence.
" Koch's bacillus, sir, were this a case of tuberculosis
proper, would be present in the expectoration of the
patient, and easy of demonstration under the microscope."
Saxham's voice was cold as ice and cutting as tempered
steel. " May we take it that you can personally testify
to its presence here ?" He poiated to the bed.
" And varra possibly," put in Taggart, " ye could submit
a culture for present inspection ? It would be gratifeeying
to me and Captain McFadyen here, as weel as to our friend
an' colleague Dr. Saxham, late of St. Stephen' s-in-the-
West, London, to varrafy the correctness o' your diagnosis."
" And it would that !" the Irishman chimed in. "So
trot out your bacillus, by all maimer of means !"
The Resident Surgeon babbled somethiag incoherent,
and melted out of the room.
" Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said
McFadyen, coming back from the door
'' He'll no be in sic a Bwcatin' hurry to come back,"
208 THE DOP DOCTOR
pronounced the canny Scot, shedding a wink from a dry,
red-fringed eyelid. He produced from the roomy breast-
pocket of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed stetho-
scope, and put it silently into the hand Saxham had
mechanically stretched out for it. Then he drew back,
his eyes, like those of the other two spectators of the
strange scene that was beginning, fixed upon the chief
actor in it. One other, weak after his swoon as a new-born
child, lay passively, helplessly upon the bed.
Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a
noiseless, feline, padding step towards the prone victim.
A gleam of apprehension shot into JuHus Fraithom's great
dark eyes, reopening now to consciousness. They fixed
themselves, with an instinct bom of that sudden thrill of
fear, upon the lightly-closed right hand. Instantly com-
prehending, Saxham lifted the hand, showed that it held
no instrument save the stethoscope, and dropped it again
by his side, drawing nearer. Then the massive, close-
cropped black head sank to the level of JuHus Fraithorn's
breast, revealed in its ghastly, emaciated nakedness by the
open nightshirt. The massive shoulders bowed, the supple
body curved, the keen ear Joined itself to the heaving
surface. In a moment more the agonising, hacking, rending
cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising him deftly
and tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who hurried to
him, answering his low questions in whispers, giving aid
where he indicated it required.
Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled
over the lung area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching
for silent spaces, sucking evidence into the assimilative brain
behind the eyes that saw nothing but the man upon the
bed, the locked human casket housing the secret that was
slowly, surely coming to Hght. In the fierce determiuation
to gain it, he threw the stethoscope away, and glued his
avid ear to the man again.
" Toch ! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittie o'
Kj-uger sovereigns !" the Chief Medical Officer whispered
to his colleague from Meath. And McFadyen whispered
back :
" Nor me, for your shoes. 'Ssh !"
Saxham was lifting up the groat stooping shoulders, and
THE DOP DOCTOR 209
beginnmg to speak in a voice totally different from that of
the man known in Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear,
ringing, concise, the sentences left his lips :
" Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involun-
tary simulation of the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary
tuberculosis by a patient suffering from a grave disease of
totally different and possibly much less malignant char-
acter. Oblige me by stepping nearer !"
They crowded about the bed like eager students.
" In order to show what false conclusions loose modes of
reasoning and the habitual reliance upon precedent may
lead to, take the instance of the consulting physician to
whom some years ago this young man, now barely thirty,
and reduced, as you may see for yourselves, to the final
extremity of physical decline, resorted."
" I would gie five shillin' if the man could hear his aia
Judgment !" murmured the Chief Medical Officer ; for he
had gleaned from a whispered answer of Julius's the omni-
potent name of Sir Jedbury Fargoe. " Toch !" He
chuckled dryly. Saxham went on :
" The consulting patient suffers from cough, painful and
racking, from impaired digestive power, from increasing
debility, fever, and night-sweats. He visits the specialist,
convinced that he is consumptive, he receives confirma-
tion of his convictions, and you see him to-day presenting
the appearance, and reproducing all the symptoms of a
patient in consumption's final stage. Possibly the germs of
tuberculosis may be dormant in his organisation, waiting
the opportunity to develop into activity ! Possibly — a
very remote possibility — the disease may have already
attacked some organ of his body ! But — and upon this
point I can take my stand with the confidence of absolute
certainty — the lungs of this so-called pulmonary sufferer
are absolutely sound !"
" My certie ! Send I may live to foregather wi' Sir
Jedbury Fargoe !" the Chief Medical Officer prayed in-
audibly. " He will gang to the next International Con-
sumption Congress wi' a smaller conceit of himsel', or my
name's no Duncan Taggart !"
The lecturer, absorbed in his subject, lifted his hand to
silence the murmur, and pursued :
14
210 THE DOP DOCTOR
" From what disease, then, is this man suffering ?
Logical and progressive conclusions drawn from experience,
and based upon the local enlargement which the physicians
previously consulted have apparently failed to perceive,
lead me to diagnose the presence of a tumour in the medi-
astinum, extending its claws into the lungs, and seriously
impeding their action and the action of the heart. An
operation, serious and necessarily involving danger, is
imperative. The growth may be benign or malignant ; in
the latter case I doubt whether the life of the patient is to be
saved. But in the former case he has good hopes. Under-
stand, I speak with certainty. Upon the presence of the
growth, simple or otherwise, I am ready to stake my credit,
my good name, my profcwssional reputation "
Ah ! It rushed upon Saxham with a sickening shock of
recollection that he was bankrupt in these things, and
shame and anger strove for the mastery in his face, and
anguish wrung a sob from him, despite his iron composure.
He wrenched at the collar about his swelling throat, as
he turned away blindly towards the window, seeing nothing,
fighting desperately with the horrible despair that had
gripped him, and the mad, wild frenzy of yearning for the
old, glorious life of strenuous effort and conscious power.
Lost ! lost ! all that had been vron.
" I ... I had forgotten . . . !" he muttered ; and then a
hard, vigorous hand found his and gripped it.
" Go on forgetting. Saxham !" said a voice in his ear —
a voice he knew, instantly steadying — such virtue is there
in honest, heartfelt, comprehending sympathy between
man and his fellow-man — the spinning brain, and quieting
the leaping pulses, and giving him back, as nothing else
could have done, his lost self-control. " You have earned
the right !"
" Man, you're a wonder !" groaned the enraptured Chief
Medical Officer. He added, with a relapse into the national
caution : " That is, ye will be if your prognosis proves
correc'. But the Taggarts are a' of the canny breed of
Doobtin' Tammas, an sae I'll just keep a calm sugh till
I see what the knife lays bare."
" Use the knife now, sir. At once — without delay !"
It was the weak, muffled voice of the patient on the bed.
THE DOP DOCTOR 211
Saxham wheeled sharply about, and the stem blue eyes and
the great lustrous pleading brown ones, looked into each
other.
The pale JuUus spoke again :
" I entreat you, Doctor !"
Saxham spoke in his curt way :
" You are aware that there is risk ?"
JuUus Fraithom stretched out Ms transparent hands.
" What risk can there be to a man in my state ? Look
at these ; and did I not hear you say ..."
" Whatever I may have said, sir, and however urgent I
may admit the necessity for immediate operation, you must
wait until to-morrow morning."
" I am fasting, sir, and fed. I received Holy Com-
munion this morning, and have not yet breakfasted."
The return of the chart-nurse followed by a probationer
carrying a laden tray provoked an exclamation from the
Uttle Irishman.
" Signs on it, the boy's as empty as a drum. The devil
a wonder he went off like he did a bit back. And you can't
deny him, Saxham ?"
" I wad gie him the chance, Saxham " — this from
Surgeon-Major Taggart — " in your place ; and maybe I'm
putting in six worrds for mysel' as well aa haK a dozen for
the patient. For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir
Jedbury Fargoe, aboot a Regimental patient he slew for me,
three years back, wi' his Jawbone of a PhiUstiue ass."
Saxham spoke to Fraithorn authoritatively, kindly.
" You have no near relative to sign the Hospital
Register ?"
" My family are all in England, sir. I have not thought
it necessary to distress them with the knowledge of my
state."
" I think Lady Hannah Wrynche, who is now in Guel-
dersdorp, happens to be an acquaintance of theirs, if not a
friend ?"
JuHus turned eagerly to the Colonel.
" It is true, she did come here yesterday. But I should
hardly wish . . . Surely, being of mature age and in the
full possession of all my faculties " — ^there was a smile on
the pale lips — " I may be allowed to sign the book myself ?"
14—2
212 THE DOP DOCTOR
The doctors interchanged a look. The Colonel said to
the patient :
" Mr. Fraithom, if the idea is not unwelcome to you, I
myself will sign the book, and " — he stooped over the bed
and laid his hard, soldierly hand kindly on the pale one —
" in the event of a less fortunate termination than that we
hope for " — the faces of the three surgeons were a study in
inscrutability — " I will communicate, as soon as any com-
munication is rendered possible, with the Bishop and Mrs.
Fraithom."
The cough shook Julius as a terrier shakes a rat before
he could gasp out :
" Thank you, sir. With all my heart I thank you !"
" You shall thank me when you get well !" The Chief
shook the pale hand, crossed the bare boards to Saxham,
who stood staring at them sullenly, and took him by the
arm. They went out of the ward together, talking in low
tones. The medical officers followed. Then the chart-
nurse and the probationer who had been banished with the
tray, came bustling back with towels, and razors, and a
soapy solution in a basin, having a carbolic smell.
Dr. Saxham had gone to take a disinfecting bath, the
nurse said, as she went about her minute preparations ; and
the Commanding Officer had gone with the Staff, and now
her poor dear must let himself be got ready.
They wrapped the gaunt skeleton in a white blanket-robe
with a heavy monkish cowl to it, and drew thick padded
blanket-stockings over the ligament-tied, skin-covered
bones that served the wasted wretch for legs, and wheeled
in a high, narrow, rubber-wheeled, leather-cushioned
stretcher, and laid him on it, light to lift, a very handful
of humanity, and wheeled him, hooded and head-first,
through the tile-floored passage and out into the golden
African sunshine, that baked him gloriously through the
CO v« rings, and so into the main building and down a tile-
floored passage there.
He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with bhnded,
cowled eyes, through double doors at the end. . . .
THE DOP DOCTOR 213
XXVI
The operation was over, and the two Celts, self- appointed
to the temporary posts of assistant- surgeon and ansesthetist,
expressed their emotions in characteristic manner. . . .
" Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision
an' the last stitch. . . . Och, Owen, the Jewel you are !
Give me the loan of your fist, man, this minute."
" What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo ? The auld-
f arrant, scraiehin', obstinate grey gander. A hand I will
tak' at him ower the head o' this, or I'm no Taggart of
Taggartshowe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was
a pretty operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quick-
ness. And I'm sorry there are no' a baker's dozen o'
patients for ye to deal wi'. It's a gran' treat to see a borrn
genius use the knife."
" You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time."
" Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna ! I doubt but
we Army billies are better at puttin' men thegither than
at takin' them to pieces in the long run. . . . Gently now,
porter, wi' liftin' the patient. . . . Ay, McFadyen, that's
richt, gie the man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no'
fine to luik at ? A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse
is better than I would have expeckit. Wheel him awa',
nurse ; he'll no come round for another hour. . . ."
They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward.
The porter followed. The three surgeons standing by that
grim table in the rubber-floored central space of the
amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save
for half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another.
Bloused and aproned with sterilised material, masked,
rubber-gloved, and slippered, and splashed with the same
ominous stains that were on the table and upon the floor,
Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and
sinister as ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber,
or figured in a nightmare- tale of Poe's device. You can
see the other surgeons, bibbed and sleeved, the Irishman,
small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of sharp
and gleaming implements in a glass bath of carbolic ;
Taggart, standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled and
214 THE DOP DOCTOR
movable, like everything else for use, and laden vi^ith rolls
©f lint and bandaging, and blue-glass bottles of peroxide
of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily returning
reels of silk-vrorm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their
velvet-lined case.
" You're no' fatigued ? You would no' like a steemulant ?"
Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been
staring with dull intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter^
forgotten by the matron, whose usual charge it was. And
the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart followed
the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.
" Fatigued ? I hardly think so !"
He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remem-
bering the lengthy line of patients operated on in a single
mid-week morning at St. Stephen's. And yet his steady
hand shook a little, and a curious soft, subtle dulness of
sensation was stealing over him. He had gone to bed
sober, had risen after three hours of blessed, unexpected,
helpful sleep, to battle with his desperate craving until
morning. When the old woman left in charge of the house-
keeping arrangements had come to his door with hot
water and his usual breakfast — a mug of strong coffee
with milk and a roll — he had gulped dovm the reviving,
steadjdng draught thirstily, and swallowed a mouthful
or two of the bread ; and when he was shaved and tubbed
and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone down
to the dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric
ether and strychnine, strong enough to brace his jarred
nerves for the coming ordeal.
Not that Saxham habitually drugged : that craving was
not yet known to him. But the habitual intemperance
had exacted even from his iron constitution its forfeit of
shakiness in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the man
suffering and unstrung.
Looking about him as the dose began its work of string-
ing the lax nerves and stimulating the action of the heart,
he saw that many of the drawers were open, a costly set
of graduated scales missing, with their plush-lined box. . . .
With a certain premonition of what would next be
missing, he went into the surgery. A case of silver-mounted
surgical instruments had vanished from a shelf, with a
THE DOP DOCTOR 215
presentation loving-cup, given by admirers among De
Boursy- Williams's patients to that gifted practitioner.
A roll-top desk was partly broken open, but not rifled,
the American boltlocks having defied the clumsy efforts
of the thief, Koets, the Dutch dispensarist, who had
cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the previous
night, crossing, with the portable property reft from the
accursed Englander, the barbed-wire fence that formed
the line of demarcation between the British Imperial
Forces and the Army of the United Republics. He had
meant to wait yet another day, and take many things
more, but the coming of those verdoemte soldiers of the
Engelsch Commandant to fetch away the carboys of
carbolic acid and the other medical stores had roused him
to prompt action.
Later, wearing the brass badge of a Surgeon on the sleeve
of his greasy black tail-coat, Koets ruled a Boer Field-
Hospital, fearlessly slashing his way into the confidence of
the United Republics through the tough, wincing brawn
and muscle of Free Stater and Transvaaler. It speaks
for the enduring qualities of the Boer constitution to say
that many of his patients survived.
* * * If *
But the brandy in the decanter. . , .
How it beckoned and allured and tempted. And the
throat and palate of the man were parched with the desire of
it. And yet, a moment before, with the toils about his feet,
Saxham had wondered at the thought of these degraded
years of bondage. He shook his head sullenly as Taggart
repeated his question, and went away to wash and get
dressed.
Then he meant to shake oflf his companions and go where
he could quench that inward fire. He loathed them as
they followed, chatting pleasantly. . . .
But above the hissing of the hot water from the faucets
over the basins came presently another sound, mosfc
famihar to the ears of the gossiping Celts. . . .
" Rifle-fire ! Out on the veld over yonder." McFad-
yen's towel waved North. " Do ye hear it ?"
" Ay, do I First biuid has been drawn. And to
which aide ?"
216 THE DOP DOCTOR
Boom, / . . .
The Hospital quivered to its foundations at the tre-
mendous detonation. Shattered glass fell in showers of
fragments from the roof of the operating-theatre, as the
force of the explosion passed beneath the buildings in a
surging of the ground on which they stood, a slow wave
rolling southwards, without a backward draw.
The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in
earthquakes. Saxham tore it open, and the three shirt-
sleeved, ensanguined men ran through the theatre, strewn
with the debris from the roof, and through the double
glazed doors communicating with the passage, populous with
patients who should have been in bed, pursued by nurses
as pale and shaken as their stampeding charges. The
rear of the Hospital faces North, and they ran down a
corridor full of dust, ending in more glazed doors, and tore
out upon the back stoep, wide and roomy, and full of deck
chairs and wicker lounges.
" Do ye see it ? Ten thousand salted South African
deevils ! Do ye no' see it ?" the Surgeon-Major yelled,
pointing to a monstrous milk-white soap-bubble-shaped
cloud that slowly rose up in the hot blue sky to the North
and hung there, sullenly brooding.
" What is it. Major ?" shouted Saxham, for behind them
the Hospital was full of clamour. Nurses and dressers
were rurming out into the grounds to listen and question
and conjecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the
palings was black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered,
and carrying guns of every kind and calibre, from the
venerable gaspipe of the native and the aged but still
useful Martini-Henry of the citizen, to the Lee - Metford
repeating-carbine, and the German magazine rifle of latest
delivery to the troops of Imperial Majesty at Berlin.
Men were clustered like bees on the flat tin roofs of the
sheds at the Railway Works ; men had climbed the signal-
posts and were looking out from them over the sea of veld ;
the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured from
their temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were massed
on the top of their sand-bag mounds. A fair, handsome
Staff officer, the younger of the two men who had accom-
panied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted
THE DOP DOCTOR 217
on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while
the pot-hat and truncheon of a scared native constable
emerged timidly from the gaping Jaws of a rusty water-
cistern, long dismissed from Hospital use, and exiled to
the open with other rubbish waiting transference to
the scrap-heap ; and far out upon the railway - line that
vanished in the yellowing sea of veld an unseen engine
screeched and screeched. . . .
The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of
Nixey's Hotel, lowered his binoculars as the persistent
whistle kept open. The lines about his keen eyes and
mouth curved into a cheerful smile. The sound was coming
nearer, and presently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile
or so from waiting, expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting,
raced at full speed for her home in the railway - yard.
Her driver was the young Irishman from the County
Kildare, and her guard hailed from Shoreditch. And
both of them had a tale to tell of what Taggart had called
the Colonel's double surprise-packet, to a tall man whom
they found waiting on the metals by the upper Signal Cabin.
" Six mile from the start, sorra a yard more or less, sorr !
I sees a comp'ny o' thim divils mustered on the bog, I
mane the veld, sorr — smokin' their pipes an' passin' the
bottle, an' givin' the overlook to a gang av odthers, that
was rippin' up the rails undher the directions av a head-
gaffer wid a hat brim like me granny's tay-thray, an' a
beard like the Prophet Moses."
" I sor 'is whoppin' big 'at myself, though we was two
mile off when we picked the beggars out," the guard
objected ; " but 'ow could you twig 'is beard or that the
other blokes was smokin' ?"
" Did ye ever know a Dutch boss av any kind clane-
shaved an' not hairy-faced ?" was Kildare's Just retort, " or
see a crowd av Doppers gathered together that the blue
smoke av the Blessed Creature was not curlin' out av
their mouths an' ears an' noses, an' Old Square Face or
Van der Hump makin' the rounds ?"
" You thought the blokes on the metals was a workin'
gang of our chaps at the fust go off," complained the guard,
" an' you opened the whistle to warn 'em !"
" He did that for sure," put in the Cardiff stoker. " But
218 THE DOP DOCTOR
he was tipping me the wink while he did it, so he was ;
as much as to say he knew they were Boers all the time."
" Would they have stopped where they was, well widin
range, av I had let on I knew they was a parcel av unwashed
Dutchmen ?" demanded Kildare hotly. " Would they
have hung on as I pushed her towards thim — would they
have stopped to watch me uncouplin' the two thrucks,
smilin' wid simple interest in their haythen faces, av they
had not taken me for a suckin' lamb in oily overalls that
took themselves for sheep av the same fold ?"
" They got a bit suspicious when we steamed orf,"
said the guard ; " more than a bit suspicious, they did."
" They took the thrucks for the Armoured Thrain,"
recounted Kildare, with a radiant smile illuminating a
countenance of surpassing griminess, " an' they rode to
widin range, an' got off their hairies, an' dhropped in a
volley just to insinse them they took to be squattia'
down inside them insijious divizes, into what they would
be gettin' if they put up the heads av them." He mopped
his brimming eyes with a handful of cotton waste, not
innocent of lubricating fluid. " Tower av Ivory ! 'twas
grand to see the contimpt av thim when the cowards widin
did not reply. ' Donder !' says the gaffer in the tay-thray
hat and the beard like the grandfather av all the billygoats.
' Is this,' he says, ' the British pluck they talk about ?
Show thim verdant English a Dutchman behind a geweer,'
he says, an' that's what they call a gun in their dirty
lingo — ' an' they lie down Mid all four legs in the air like
a puppy that sees the whip. Plug thim again, my sons,'
says he, ' an' wid the blessin' av Heaven, we'll stiffen
the lot !' "
" You could never hear him, so you could not, not at all
that distance," the Cardiff stoker objected.
" Could I not see him, ye blind harper, swearin' in dumb
show, an' urgin' thim to shoot sthraight for the honour
av the RepubUcs an' give the rooi batchers Jimmy !
Ga.-lant-\y they respondid, battherin' the sides av the
mystarious locomotive containin' the bloody an' rapacious
soldiery av threacherous England wid nickel-plated Mauser
bullets, ontil she hiccoughs indacintly, an' wid a bellow
to bate St. Fin Barr's bull, kicks herself to pieces !"
THE DOP DOCTOR 219
" She did so, surely," affirmed the Cardiff atoker.
" Surely she did so."
" Tell the Colonel 'o\v the engine jumped right off the
metals," advised the guard.
" Clane she did," went on Kildare jubilantly, " an'
rattled Davis an' me inside the cab like pays in an iron
pod. See the funny-bone I sthripped agin' the side av
her !" He exhibited a raw elbow for the inspection of the
Chief. " An' when Davis gets the betther av the rest
av the black that's on him wid soft soap an' hot wather,
there's an oi he'll not wash off."
" The brake-handle did that, it did so," said Davis,
touching the optic tenderly. But Kildare was answering
a question of the Chief's.
" Klilled ! Wisha, yarra ! av I'd left a dozen an twenty
to the back av that sthretched on the bog behind me, it's
a glad man I'd be to have it to tell ye, sorr. But barrin'
they wor' blown to smithereens entirely, not a livin' man
or horse av thim did I see dead at all, at all. But the
Sergeant an' the Reconnoithrin' Party will asy know the
place — asy — by the thundherin' big hole that's knocked
in the permanent way there, sizable enough to bury. ..."
He paused, for once at a loss.
" Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," suggested Davis, who,
as a Bible Baptist, had a fund of Scripture knowledge upon
which he occasionally drew, " with their families and their
paviUons and all their substance. . . ."
" Av Cora was there," said Kildare, " she was disguised
as a Dutchman, for sorrow an' oi I clapped on any human
baste that was not a square-buttocked Boer in tan-cord
throusers. Thank you, sorr, your Honour, an' good luck
to yourself an' all av us ! An' we'll dhrink your Honour's
health wid it."
" We will so !" agreed Davis, as the sovereign, dropped
into his own twice-greased palm, vanished in the recesses
of his black and oleaginous overalls.
•' Thankee, sir. You're a gentleman, sir !" the guard
acknowledged, touching Ms cap and concealing the gold
coin slid into his own ready hand with professional celerity.
" Begob ! an' you might have tould the Colonel some-
thin' that was news," commented Kildare, as the tall,
220 THE DOP DOCTOR
active figure stepped lightly over the metals and passed
up the ramp, and 123 trundled on, and backed into the
engine-shed amidst a salvo of cheers and hand-clapping.
The Colonel whistled his pleasant little tune quite
through as, the Reconnoitring Party despatched to the
scene of the explosion, he went contentedly back to lun-
cheon at Nixey's. True, Ealdare had said, and as the
Sergeant in command regretfully testified later, said cor-
rectly, that neither Boer nor beast had been put out of
action by the flying debris. A poor reprisal had been
made, in the opinion of some malcontents, for the act of
War committed by the forces of the Republics in crossing
the Border, in cutting the telegraph lines, and destroying
the railway - bridge. But the moral result was anything
but trifling, in its effect upon the Boer mind. The " new
square gun " became a proverb of dread, inspiring a salutary
fear of more traps of the same kind, " set by that slim
duyvel, the English Commandant," and threw over the
innocent stretch of veld outside those trivial sand-bagged
defences the glamour of the Mysterious and the Unknown.
No solid Dutchman welcomed the idea of soaring skywards
in a multitude of infinitesimal fragments, in company with
other Free Staters or sons of the Transvaal RepubHc
similarly reduced.
No more boasts on the part of Brounckers, General in
command of those massed, menacing, united laagers on the
Border, seven miles from Gueldersdorp as the crow flew.
No more imaginative promises with reference to the taking
of the small, defiant hamlet before breakfast, wiping out the
garrison to a rooinek, and starting on the homeward march
refreshed with coffee and biltong, and driving the towns-
people before them as prisoners of War. The desperate
perils presented by the conjectural and largely non-existent
mine were thenceforth to loom largely and luridly in the
telegrams that went up to Pretoria.
" There's a lot in bluff, you know," that " slim duyvel,"
the Conmiandant of the rooineks, said long afterwards.
" And we bluffed about the Mines, real and dummy, for all
we were worth !"
So, possibly with premonition of the telegram that was
THE DOP DOCTOR 221
even then clicking out its message at Pretoria, there was a
note of satisfaction in his whistle out of keeping with the
execution actually done, as Nixey's Hotel came in sight
with the Union Jack floating over it, denoting that all was
well. That flagstaff, with its changing signals, was to
dominate the popular pulse ere long. But in these days it
merely denoted Staff Quarters, and War, v/ith its grim
accompanying horrors, seemed a long way off.
A white-gowned European nursemaid on the opposite
street-comer waved and shrieked to her deserting elder
charges, and the Chief's quick eye noted that the small,
sunburned, active, bare legs of the boy and girl in cool
sailor -suits of blue-and- white linen twill, were scampering
in his direction. He knew his fascination for children, and
instinctively slackened his stride as they came up, abreast
now, and shyly hand in hand :
" Mister Colonel ... 1" The speaker touched the ex-
pansive brim of a straw sailor hat with a fine assumption
of adult coolness.
" Quite right, and who are you ?"
The small boy hesitated, plainly at a nonplus. The
roiind-eyed girl tugged at the boy's sailor jumper, whisper-
ing :
" I saided he wouldn't know you !"
" I fought he would. Because Mummy said he wemem-
bered our names ve uvver night at ve Hotel . . . when he
promised . . . about ve animals from Wodesia ... all made
of mud, an' feavers, and bits of fur ..."
Memory gave up the missing names, helped by those
boyish replicas of the candid clear grey eyes of the Mayor's
wife, shining under the drooping plume of fair hair.
" Mummy was quite right, Ham my, and Berta was
wrong, because I remember your names quite well, you see.
And the birds and beasts and insects are in a box at my
quarters. Come and get them."
" If Anne doesn't kick up a wow ?" hesitated Hammy,
his small brown hand already in the larger one.
" We'll arrange it with Anne." He waited for the arrival
of the white-canopied perambulator and its fluttering-
ribboned guardian to say, with a tone and smile that won
her instant suffrages : " I'm going to borrow these children
222 THE DOP DOCTOR
for a minute or so. Will you come into the shade and rest ?
I promise not to keep you long."
Beauvayse and Lady Hannah's Captain Bingo, relieved
from lookout duty, and descending in quest of food from
^he Chief's particular e3rrie on the roof of Nixey's Hotel,
hoard shrieks of infant laughter coming from the coffee-
room. Knives, forks, and glasses had been ruthlessly
swept from the upper end of one of the tables laid for the
Staff luncheon, and across the fair expanse of linen, pounded
into whiteness and occasional holes by the vigorous thumpers
of the Kaffir laundry- women, meandered a marvellous pro-
cession of quagga and koodoo, rhino and hartebeest, lion
and giraffe, ostrich and elephant, modelled by the skilful
hands of Matabele toy-makers. Tarantula, with wicked
bright eyes of shining berries, brought up the rear, with the
bee, and the mole-cricket, and, with bulgy brown, white-
striped body and long wings importantly crossed behind its
back, a tsetse of appallingly gigantic size. . . .
" Oh, fank you, Mster Colonel," Hammy was saying,
with shining eyes of rapture fixed upon the glorious ones ;
" and is they weally my own, my vewy own, for good ?"
" Yours and Berta's, really and for good."
" And won't you " — Hammy's magnificent effort at
disinterestedness brought the tears into his eyes — " won't
you want vem to play wif, ever yourself ?"
The deft hands swept the birds and beasts, with tarantula
and tsetse, into the wooden box, and lifted the children
from their chairs, as Captain Bingo and Beauvayse,
following the D.A.A.G., came in, brimming with various
versions of what had happened out there on the veld. . . .
" I have other things to play with just now, Hammy. Run
along with Berta now. You'll find your nurse in the hall."
Berta put up her face confidently to be kissed. Hammy,
in manly fashion, offered a hand — the left — the right arm
being occupied with the box of toys. As Berta's little legs
scampered through the door, he delayed to ask :
" What are your playfings. Mister Colonel 1"
" Live men and big guns, just now, Hammy ; and
chances and issues, and results and risks."
The plume of fair hair fell back, clearing the candid grey
eyes as Hammy lifted up hia face, confidently lisping :
THE DOP DOCTOR 223
" I don't quite fink I know what wesulfcs and wisks are,
but I'd like to play wif the live men an' the big gun? too
sometimes ... if you didn't want vem always ?"
" We'll see about it, Hammy, when you're grown up."
" Good-bye, Mister Colonel. And I would lend you my
beasts an' fings, because I know you wouldn't bweak them ?"
" See that Berta has her share in them meanwhile. Off
with you, now !"
Later, in the seclusion of the connubial bedchamber,
said Captain Bingo, dressing for dinner, the last time for
many months, as it was to prove :
" What do you suppose was the Chief's next move, after
the engine and tender got in, and the crowd hoorayed him
back from the Railway Works ? No use your guessin',
though. Even a woman wouldn't have expected to find
him playin' Noah's Ark in the coffee-room with the Mayor's
two kids !"
" I like that !" said Lady Hannah meditatively, arranging
the Pompadour transformation, not apparently the worse
for the candle-accident of the previous night.
" Because you're a woman and sentimental," said her
spouse, wrestling with a cuff-link.
" No ; because I am a woman whose instinct tells her
that nothing will seem too big for a man for whom nothing
is too small. And — what an incident for a paragraph !"
He grinned : " With headin's in thunderin' big capitals.
. . . ' The Soldier Hero Sports With A Babbling Babe. . . .
The Defender Of British Prestige At Gueldersdorp Puts In
Half an Hour At Cat's-Cradle Ere The Armoured Train
Toddles Out With The B.S.A.P. To Give Beans To The
Blooming Boer !' "
She darted at him, caught him by the lapels . . . made
him look at her.
" It's true ■? You really mean it ? The ball begins ?"
" Upon the honour of a henpecked husband — before
daybreak to-morrow, you'll bear the music."
She sparkled with delight.
" Oh, poor, unlucky, humdrum women at home in
England, walking wath the shooters, or lolling in hammocks
under trees, and trying to flirt with fat City financiers or
vapid young attaches of Legation ! I shall take the Irish
224 THE DOP DOCTOR
mare, and borrow an orderly, and ride out to see a Real
Action !"
His round pink face grew long. " The devil you will !"
" The devil I won't, you mean. Why, for what else
under the sky did I come out here but the glorious chance of
War ?" Her impatient foot tapped the floor. He recog-
nised the warning of domestic battle, glowered, and gave in.
" Well, if you get chipped, don't blame me. There's
about as much cover on a baccarat-table as you'll find on
that small-bush veld."
" All the better for seeing things, my dear !" She gave
him a radiant glance over her shoulder as she snapped her
diamond necklace.
" You'll see things you won't enjoy. Mind that.
Unless the whole affair ends in sheer fizzle."
" I'll pray that it mayn't !"
" I'd pray to have you much more Uke the ordinary
woman who funks raw-head-and-bloody -bones if I thought
it would be any good !"
" My poor old boy, it's thirty years too late. You ought
to have begun while I was crying in the cradle. And — I
was under the impression that you married me because you
found me different from the ruck. And besides — think of
my paper !"
" Damn the rag ! I think of my wife !"
She swept him a curtsy :
" Cela va sans dire !"
" And how a woman of your birth and breedin' can
dream of nothin' else but doin' somethin' that'll make you
notorious — set the smart crowd gabblin' and gapin' and
crushin' to stare — ^is more than I can understand !"
She flashed round upon him. " You have the wrong
word ! Notoriety — any social divorcee or big-hatted music-
hall high-kicker can have that — if only they've kicked high
enough ! Popularity is what I'd have if I could — and only
the People can give it — ^as Brutus and Cromwell and
Napoleon knew !"
He admitted that those old Roman Johnnies who Jawed
in the Forum knew what they were about, but added that
the Puritan chap with the wart on his nose was a thundering
old humbug, ending triumphantly : " And we whacked old
THE DOP DOCTOR 225
Bony at Waterloo ! And — suppose you stop a Boer bullet
and get knocked out — where do I come in ?"
She jangled out her shrillest laugh. " Behind the coffin
as Chief Mourner, I suppose. And you'll tack on the ortho-
dox black sleeve-band, and look out for Number Two,
And choose the ordinary kind, who funks raw-head and all
the rest of it, for the next venture. But I prophesy you'll
be bored. It's settled about Sheila and the orderly ?"
He nodded.
" Righto ! but there'll be two troopers, not one. And
you'll be under the Corporal's orders about range, and dis-
tance, and keepin' out of the hands of — the other side.
You don't absolutely yearn to be killed or taken prisoner, I
suppose ?"
Her heart beat high at the latter-named eventuality.
She saw London rushing to read of the thrilling seizure and
the yet more thrilling escape of the Lady War Correspon-
dent attached to H.I.M. forces on the Frontier :
Who got clean away, mind jou, with complete informa-
tion of the strategic plans of the General in command of
the enemy's laagers, sewn inside her corsets or hidden in
her shoes !
Bingo Uttle dreamed of the definite plan seething under
his httle wife's transformation coifiFure. It had matured
since her meeting on the railway-journey from Cape Town
with an interesting personality. A big, brown-bearded
Johannesburger, wdth hght queer eyes, who had been
reticent at first, but more interesting after his confidence
had been gained.
Van Busch he had named himself. Of the British South
African War Intelligence Bureau. That man knew how
to value women. And he had proved them at what he
called the risky game.
" With nerve and josh Uke yours, and plenty of money
for palm-oil . . ." Van Busch had said, and winked, signifying
that there were no lengths to which a woman of Lady
Hannah Wrynche's capabilities might not go. And ho had
clipped into her hand a card scrawled with an address
where he might be got at in case . . .
The pencilled oblong of soiled pasteboard was yet in a
secret compartment of her handbag. By letter addressed
15
226 THE DOP DOCTOR
care of W. Bough, Transport Agent and Stock-dealer.
Van Busch was to be communicated with at a farmstead
some thirty miles north.
The spice of adventure her palate craved could be had
by corresponding with Van Busch through the man Bough.
After that Well ! She had her plan . . .
She tied her husband's white tie, took him by the ears,
kissed him warmly on each side of his large pink face,
glowing with blushes evoked by her unwonted display of
affection, and led him away to dinner, her mental vision
seeing prophetic broadsheets papering the kerbs of Picca-
dilly, the ears of her imagination making celestial melody
of those raucous yells :
"Speshul Edition! Hextry Speshul Edition! 'Ere
y'are, sir ; on'y a 'a'penny. Speshul !"
XXVII
For nearly two months, from dawn until dark, Guelders-
dorp had squatted on her low-topped hill in a screaming
blizzard of shrapnel and Mauser bullets. Never a town of
imposing size or stately architecture, see her now a battered
hamlet of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and wrecked
chimneys ; staring defiance through glassless windows like
the blind eyeholes in the mouldered House that once has
held the living thought of Man. From dawn until dark
the ancient seven-pounders of her batteries had banged and
grumbled, her Maxims had rattled defiance from Kopje Fort,
and the Nordenfelt released its showers of effective, death-
dealing little projectiles. Scant news from outside trickled
into the town. Grumer, with his Brigade, was guarding
the Drifts, and when the Relief might be expected w&s now
a moss-grown topic of general conversation in Gueldcrsdorp.
And within her girdle of trenches, stem, grimy, haggard
men lived, cheek to the heated rifle- breech, and ate, and
snatched brief spells of sleep, booted and bandoliered,
and with the loaded weapon ready for gripping. Since
the attack on Maxim Kopje had choked the Hospital with
wounded men and dotted the Cemetery with little white
crosses, nothing of much note had occurred. The armoured
THE DOP DOCTOR 227
train had donn good service, and the Baraland Rifle
Volunteers had carried out their surprise against the
enemy's western camp one fine dark night, helped by a
squadron of the Irregulars, with eleven wounded, and the
loss of six out of fifty fighting-men.
The Convent of the Holy Way stood empty and deserted
in its shrapnel-littered garden-enclosure.
From east, west, north, and soTith the deadly iron
messengers had come, making sore havoc of this poor house
of Christ. " When the walls fall about our ears. Colonel,"
the Mother-Superior had declared, " it will be time to
leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion
of bare rafters overhead, over which streamed, as if in
mockery, the Red-Cross Flag. Grim figures, like geo-
metrical problems gone mad, were vxede by water and
gas pipes torn from their bedding, and twisted as if by the
hands of giants in cruel play. The little iron bedsteads
of the Sisters, and the holy symbols over them, were the
only articles missing from the cells, revealed in section by
the huge gaps in the masonry.
The Tabernacle of the chapel altar, void of the Un-
speakable Mystery it had housed, fluttered its rearward
curtains through the wreckage of the east wall and the
cheap little stained-glass window, where the Shepherds
and the Magi had bowed before the Virgin Mother and the
Divine Child. Within sight of their ruined home, the
Sisterhood had found refuge. An underground dwelling
had been dug for them in the garden before an abandoned
soft-brick-and-corrugated-iron bouse, formerly inhabited
by one of the head officials of the railway, a personage of
Dutch extraction and Boer sympathies, at present seques-
tered beneath the yellow flag of the town gaol for their
too incautious manifestation ; while his wife and young
family were inhabitants of the Women's Laager. And
from their subterranean burrow the Sisters carried on their
work of mercy as cheerfully as though their Order bad
been originally one of Troglodytes, nursing the sick and
wounded, cooking and washing for the convalescents,
comforting the bereaved, and tending the many orphans
of the sioge.
South lay the laager of the Refugees. To the westward
16—2
228 THE DOP DOCTOR
within the ring of trenches and about a mile and a half from
the town, was the Women's Laager, visited not seldom
by the enemy's shell-fire, in spite of the Red-Cross Flag.
Fever and rheumatism, pneumonia and diphtheria stalked
among the dwellers in these tainted burrows, claiming
their human toll. Women languished and little children
pined and withered, dying for lack of exercise and fresh
air, with the free veld spreading away on all sides to the
horizon, and the burning blue South African sky overhead.
Famine had not yet appeared among the Europeans, though
grisly black spectres in Kaffir blankets haunted the refuse-
heaps, and fought with gaunt dogs for picked bones and
empty meat- tins, and were found dead not unseldom,
after full meals of strange and dreadful things. Fresh
meat was still to be had, though the cattle and sheep of
the Barala had been thinned by raids on the part of the
enemy, and poor grazing. Shell and rifle-fire not infre-
quently spared the butcher trouble, so that your joints
were sometimes weirdly shaped. But they were joints,
and there was plenty of the preserved article in Kriel's
Warehouse and at the Army Service Stores. Tea and
coffee were becoming rare and precious, the sparkling
draught of lager was to be had only in remembrance ;
the aromatic beer was all drunk up, and the stone-ginger
was three shillings a bottle. Whisky was to be had at
the price of liquid gold, brandy was treasured above rubies,
and served out sparingly by the Hand of Authority, as
medicine in urgent cases.
You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who
continued to cultivate onions, cabbages, potatoes, and
melons in the market-gardens about the town, imperturb-
able under shot and shell, his large straw hat affording
an admirable target from the Boer sniper's point of view,
as metaphorically he gathered his fat harvest of dollars
from the soil. What you could not get for any amount
of dollars was peace and rest, clean air, and space to stretch
your cramped-up limbs in, until Sunday came, bringing the
Truce of God for Englishman and Transvaaler.
The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had
sprung from the parent stalk, was crowded. The operating
theatre had been turned into a ward where the lane between
THE DOP DOCTOR 229
the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a nurse to pass,
and hourly the cry went up : " Room, more room for the
wounded and the sick !" And among these Saxham
worked, night and day, like a man upheld by forces super-
human.
" By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they
urged him to take rest, and would bend his black brows,
and hunch those great shoulders of his to the work again.
" Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the
R.A.M.C, himself a haggard-eyed but tireless labourer
in the red fields of pain. " At three o' the smalls ye got
to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye
were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot
casualties — our friends outside being a gey sicht better
marksmen when refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep ; at
eight ye had had your bit o' breakfast, and got doon your
gun an' gane oot for an hour o' calm, invigorating sniping
on the veld before returning punctually at ten o' the clock
to attack the business o' the day, wi' a bag o' twa Boers
to your creedit."
" I only got one. Major. The other chap hobbled down
bandaged, upon crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at
me as I lay doggo behind my particular stone. I put up
my hat on a stick, and — see !" Saxham gravely exhibited
a felt Service smasher with a clean hole through it, an
inch above the lining-edge. " He's a snowy-locked, hoary-
bearded. Father Noah-hatted patriarch of seventy at least,
and very proud of his shooting, and I've let him think he
got me this time, just to make him happy for one night.
To-morrow he is to make the painful discovery that 1 am
still in the flesh."
" Aweel, aweel ! But I would point out to ye that
Fortune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game
might fall to your patriarch in the antediluvian headgear
to-morrow."
Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in
that wounded heart of his, would not only be with the
patriarch. And the great puzzle. Life, would be solved for
good.
Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could
have answered that only by hard, unceasing, imreniitting
230 THE DOP DOOl'OR
work, or, when no more work was there to do, by the fierce
excitement of those grilling hours spent lying behind the
stone, was the demon to be kept out. Of all things he
dreaded inactivity, and though he would drop upon his cot
in the tiny bedroom that had been a Hospital ward-pantry,
and sleep the heavy sleep of weariness ti.e moment his head
touched the pillow, yet he would start awake after an hour
or two, parched with that savage, unquenched thirst, and
d riak great draughts of the brackish well- water, boiled for
precaution's sake, and tramp the confined space until the
grip of desire grew slack. But he had never once yielded
since the night when a man with the eye and voice of a
leader among men had come to the house in Harris Street
and taken him by the hand.
Do you say impossible, that the man in whom the habit
of vice had formed should be able to cast off his degrading
weakness, like a shameful garment, by sheer force of will,
and be sane and strong and masterful again ? I say,
possible with this man. You see him plucked from the
slough by the strong hand of manly fellowship, and nerved
and strengthened, if only for a littlo while, to play the
game for the sake of that other's belief in him. Such
influence have such men among their fellows for good or
for ill.
You can see the Dop Doctor upon this brilliant
November morning mounting a charger lent him by his
friend, a handsome Waler full of mettle and spirit — oats not
being yet required for the support of humans — and calling
au revoir to Taggart as he rides away from the Hospital
gates followed by an orderly of the R.A.M.C. in a spider,
pulled by a \viry, shabby little Boer mare.
" The man rides like a fox- hunter," commented Taggart.
noticing the ease of the seat, the light handling of the rein,
the way in which the fidgety, spirited beast Saxham rode
answered to the gentling hand and the guiding pressure of
the rider's knee, as a sharp storm of rifle-fire swept from
the enemy's northern trenches, and the Mauser bullets
spurted sand between the v/heels of the spider and under
the horses' bellies.
Saxham spurred ahead, the spider following. The
bullet-pierced, grey felt smasher hat, a manly and not
THE DOP DOCTOR 231
onpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's close- cropped
head with a soldierly air becoming to the square, opaque-
skinned face that had power and strength and virility in
every line of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of
meeting eyebrows, were clear now, and the short aquiline
nose, rough-hewn but not coarse, and the grimly-tender
mouth were no longer thickened and swollen and red-
dened by intemperance. The figure, perfect in its manli-
ness, if marred by the too heavy muscular development of
the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders, looked well
in the jacket of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and puttees
M\d spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white
drills, the blue shirt and shabby black kamarband and
canvas shoes. Looking at Saxham, even with knowledge
of his past, you could not have associated a personality
so striking and distinguished, an individuality so original
and so strong, with the idea of the tipsy wastrel, wallow-
ing like a hog in self-chosen degradation.
The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out
of her underground abode as the horseman and the attendant
spider drew near, thought of Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you
see him, last of the great Condottieri, in the bronze by great
Verrochio at Venice to-day. In armour, complete in the
embossed morion, one with the great Flemish war-horse,
he sat to the sculptor, the baton of Captain-General, given
him by the Doge of Venice, in the powerful hand that only
a little while before aided his picked men of the infantry
to pack and harden snow about the granite boulders of
the mountains in the Val Seriana, and sent the giant snow-
balls thundering down, crushing bloody lanes through the
ranks of the Venetian cavalry massed in the narrow defile
below, and striking chill terror to the hearts of Doge and
Prince and Senate.
Only the baton was a well-worn staghom- handled crop,
Squire Saxham's gift, together with a hunter, to his boy
Owen, at seventeen. It was one of the few relics of home
that had stayed by Saxham during his wanderings.
He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with
marked respect.
" Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours 1"
She answered with unusual hesttation :
232 THE DOP DOCTOR
" All the Sisters are well, thank you. But — if you could
spare me a minute, Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should
like to ask."
" As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your
day for the Hospital, I think ?"
" Ah, no !" she said, with the velvety South of Ireland
vowel-inflection. " We keep Wednesday for the Women's
Laager, always. Many of them are so miserable, poor
souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are
in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are
the children to be cared for and washed. Not only the
siege orphans, but so many who have sick or neglectful
mothers. It takes us the whole day once we get there."
Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of
a blue cotton-covered washing-basket impelled from below
by an ascending Sister. The spider pulled up under
cover of the brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by
the railway-official, as another short storm of riflery cracked
and rattled among the eastern foothills, and a whistling
hurry of the sharp- nosed little messengers of death passed
through Gueldersdorp. Some of them hit and flattened
on the gable of the railway-official's house, one went
through the leathern splashboard of the spider. Saxham
moved instinctively to place himself between the closely-
standing group of nuns and possible danger.
" No, no !" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheer-
ful tones taking a shade of anxiety. " You must not do
that !"
" I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at
them with the smile that made his stern face changed and
gentle.
" I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way
of things. We take our chance of them," the Mother-
Superior answered. But she pressed her lips together and
grew pale as a faint cry came up from the subterranean
dwelling, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon
steel rails, and made bombproof with bags of earth. And
Saxham, looking at the fine face, with its worn lines of
fatigue and over-exertion, and noting the deep shadowy
caves that housed the great luminous grey eyes, said :
" I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be
THE DOP DOCTOR 233
having my best helper on my hands as a patient. And
that won't do, you laiow."
" No, it would not do," she said, looking fully and
seriously at him. " And therefore I think our Lord will
not permit it. But if He should, be sure another will rise
up to fill my place."
" Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham
sincerely, " she would not fulfil my ideal of an absolutely
efficient nurse, as you do. So from the personal, if not the
altruistic point of view, let me beg you to be careful."
" I take all reasonable care," she told him. " It is true,
the work has been heavy this week ; but to-morrow is
Sunday, and we shall rest all day and sleep at the Convent.
Indeed, some of us have taken it in turn to be on guard
there every night, or nothing would be left us."
" I understand."
He knew how prowlers and night- thieves made harvest
in the darkness among the deserted dwelhngs since Police
and Town Guardsmen had been requisitioned to man the
trenches. She went on :
" The upper story of the house is sheer wreck, as you may
see, but the ground-floor Is quite habitable. So much so
that if the shells did not strike the poor dear place so often,
I should suggest your turning it into a Convalescent Home."
" We may have to try the plan yet," said Saxham.
" The Railway Institute is frightfully overcrowded."
" And," she told him, " a shell struck there yesterday
evening, and burst in the larger ward."
" I had not heard of it," he said. " Was anybody hurt ?"
" No one, thank God ! But the fire was difficult to put
out, until one of the Sisters thought of sand."
" It was an incendiary shell ?" Disgust and contempt
swelled his deep-cut nostrils and flamed from his vivid
blue eyes. " And yet these Kaiser's gunners, in their
blue-and-white Death or Glory imiforms, can hardly pretend
ignorance of the Geneva Convention. But — your question ? ' '
" It is — Children !" She beckoned to the two mms,
who stood at a little distance apart holding the washing-
basket between them. " I will ask you to go on slowly
before me with the basket. I wiD overtake you when I
have spoken to Dr. Saxham."
234 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Surely, Reverend Mother." One tall, pale, and thin,
the other round and rosy, they were alike in the placid,
cheerful serenity of their good eyes and readily smiling
lips. " And won't we be after taking the bundle V
" No, no ! It is heavy, and I am as strong as botli of
you together."
" Very well, Reverend Mother."
They were obediently moving on.
" A moment." Saxham stopped them. *' If you two
ladies have no objection to a little crowding, the spider will
hold both of you as well as the bundle and the basket of
washing. At least, it looks like a basket of washing."
All three laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him
that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kafiir
laundrywoman or Hindu dhobi would go down any more to
the washing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that
Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing,
as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class
ferry for niggers and persons of colour ? And from the
waterworks on the Eastern side of the town the supply
had been cut off by the enemy, so that the taps of Guelders-
uorp had ceased to yield.
Old wells and springs had been reopened, cleaned, and
brought into use for drinking purposes, so that of a water-
famine there could bo no fear. But the element became
expensive when retailed by the tin Ducketful, a bath a
rare luxury when the contents of the said bucket might
be spilled or thrown away in the course of the gymnastics
wherewith the sable or coffee-brown bearer sought to evade
the travelUng unexploded shell or the fan-shaped charge
of shrapnel. Therefore, the Sisters had turned laundry-
women. You could hear the sound of Sister Tobias's
smoothing-iron coming up from below, thump- thumping
on the blanketed board.
" And where do you think we get the water, now ?"
the rosy Sister, in process of being packed into the spider,
leaned over the wheel to ask,
" Not from the Convent ?" Saxham thought of the
strip of veld between there and the Hospital, even more
fraught with peril than the patch he had Just traversed.
or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters'
THE DOP DOCTOR 236
bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with
the red sickle in his fleshless hand, stalked openly from
dawn to nightfall.
" From the Convent, carrying it across after dark.
And no well there, either, that you'd get the fill of a tea-
spoon out of " — a •' tayspoon " it was in the rosy
Sister's Dublin brogue — " and yet there's water there."
" But how " Saxham began. The Mother-Superior
shook her head, and the rosy Sister was silent.
" There is no mystery about the water at all. It is
very simple." Standing there with her head held high
and the fine, free, graceful lines of her tall figure outlined
by the heavy folds of the now worn and darned black
habit, and her hands, still beautiful, though roughened
by toil, calmly folded upon her scapular, she was as re-
markable and noble a figure, it seemed to Saxham,
as the golden sunlight could fall upon anj'where in the
world. And besides, she was his right hand at the Hospital.
A capable, watchful, untiring nurse — and beauty would
have decked her in his surgeon's eyes if she had been
physically ugly or deformed.
" There is no mystery whatever, only when the bom-
bardment first began I thought of the waterworks, and
that one of my first cares, supposing I had been General
Broanckers " — she smiled sUghtly — " Mould have been to
operate there. So I set the Sisters to work at filling every
empty barrel and bucket and tub in the Convent with water
from the taps. And as we happened to have plenty of
empty barrels and tubs, why, there is water to be had there
now, and will be for some time to come. Go now, my
children."
The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted
with his whip and drove on m obedience to Saxham's nod.
" Of course, the Sisters are aware," he said, meeting the
Mother's grave glance, " that if it is quicker to drive, it
is safer to walk ?"
She nodded Mith the gay, sweet smile that had belonged
to Lady Biddy.
" They know, of course. But danger is in the day's
work. We do not seek it. We are prepared for it, and it
comes and passes. If one day it does not pass without
236 THE DOP DOCTOR
the cost of life, we are prepared for that, and God's V/ill
is done always."
" You are very brave," he said. It was the first time
in his Life that he had used the phrase to any woman,
and the words came out almost grudgingly.
" Oh no, not brave," she told him ; " only obedient,"
Her veil fluttered in the hot November breeze that bore
with it the heavy fetid taint from the overcrowded trenches
that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the
cordite ; though the air up here on the veld was sweet
compared with the befouled atmosphere of the Women's
Laager and the crowded wards at the Hospital, in spite of
all that disinfectants could do. She went on :
" And we are very grateful to you for the lift. Sister
Ruperta was on duty last night, and Sister Hilda Antony —
the rosy Sister — is not as well as she would have us beheve.
Ah "
With her grave eyes screened by her lifted hand, she
had been watching the progress of the spider westward
over the dun-yellow veld. Now the long wailing notes of
the headquarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the Assembly,
and in the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's
hotel, where the red lamp signalled danger by night and
the Red Flag gave its warning by day, the scarlet danger-
signal fluttered in the breeze. Once, twice, again, the
deep bell of the Catholic Church tolled. A dozen other bells
echoed the warning, signifying danger by the number of their
iron-tongue strokes to the threatened quarter of the town.
" 'Ware big gun !" called the sentries. " West quarter,
'ware !"
The Mother-Superior grew pale, for the Women's
Laager, towards which the little Boer mare was steadily
trotting with the laden spider, lay in the menaced quarter,
with a bare stretch of veld between it and the Camp of
the Irregular Horse, whose white tents and dug-out shelters
were pleasantly shaded by ancient blue gums, picturesque
and stately in spite of broken boughs and foliage torn by
shrapnel and seared by the chemical fumes of bursting
charges innumerable.
" Will you not go down ?" Saxham asked her.
She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting
THE DOP DOCTOR 237
face in prayerful silence, not stirring save to make the
Sign of the Cross. And as the long white fingers fluttered
o.ver the bosom of the black habit, the faint cry that
Saxham's quick ear had heard before floated up from
the populous depths below.
" What is that ?"
Before the question had left Saxham's lips, the monster
gun spoke out in deafening thunder from the enemy's
position at East Point, nearly two miles away. The heavy
grey smoke - pillar of the driving- charge towered against
the sunbright distance, and simultaneously with the
crack of the discharge, sounding as though all the pent-up
forces of Hell had burst the brazen gates of Terror, and
rushed forth to annihilate and destroy, the ninety-four
pound projectile passed overhead, sweeping half the cor-
rugated-iron roof from the railway-official's late dwelling
with a fiendish clatter and din, as it passed harmlessly
over the Women's Laager, and, wrecking a sentry's shelter
on the western line of defences, burst harmlessly upon the
veld beyond, blotting out the low hills behind a curtain
of acrid green vapour.
" Get under cover, quick !" Saxham had shouted to his
companion, as deafened by the tremendous concussion,
and dazed and half-asphyxiated by the poisonous fumes,
he strove for mastery with his maddened horse. This
regained, he looked for the figure in the black habit and
white corf, and knew a shock of horror in seeing it prone
upon the ground.
" No, no, I am not hurt !" she cried, lightly rising as
he hurried towards her. The tremendous air-concussion
had thrown her down, and beyond a scratch upon her
hand and some red dust on the black garments she was in
nothing the worse.
" I don't know how I kept my own legs," Saxham said,
laughing.
" It went by like twenty avalanches," she agreed.
" And blessed be our Lord, excepting for the damage to
the roof, no more seems to have been done. I can see
the spider stopping near the Women's Laager." She peered
out earnestly over the shimmering waste of dusty yellow-
brown, and cried out Joyfully : " Ah, Sister Hilda Antony
238 THE DOP DOCTOR
and Sister Ruperta are getting out. All is well with them ;
all is well."
" But not with the washing."
Sax ham had swung round his binoculars, and brought
them to bear upon the vehicle and its late occupants.
A grim smile played about his mouth as he handed her the
glasses, and heard her cry of womanly distress as sb?
beheld the fruit of late labour scattered on the veld and
the Sisters' agonised activity displayed in the gathering
up of sheets, pillow-slips, handkerchiefs, babies' shirts and
petticoats, with other garments of a strictly feminine and
private character. Her grave, discreet eyes avoided his
as she handed back the binoculars, but a dimple showed
near the edge of the white coii.
" And now," Saxham said, glancing at his watch, " may
I know in what I can be of service ?" It had seemed to
him that the Mother-Superior hesitated to broach the
subject. Nor had he been mistaken. The dimple vanished.
Her calm eyes became troubled, and she asked, with a
slight catching of the breath :
" Yes, there was something. . . . Doctor, is it possible
for a person to die of fear ?"
He answered promptly :
" In circumstances like the present 1 Certainly. Un-
doubtedly possible. I have seen twenty deaths from pure
fright since the bombardment began, and I expect to see
more before the siege ends, or people get callous to the
possibiUties of sudden extermination that are afforded
them a hundred times a day. Is the person to whom you
refer a woman or a child ?"
" A young girl " she was beginning, when a buxom
little figure, black veiled and habited Uke herself, rose up
as if from the bowels of the earth.
" I vill look. But I can see nozing," she called to some-
one invisible below. " It must be that you vait until my
eyes shall become more strong." She shaded them,
newly brought from semi-darkness and blinkiag in the hot,
white sunlight. The Mother-Superior hurried to her, saying
with a note of anxiety in her usually calm voice :
" Sister — Sister Cleophce ; is anything the matter ?'*
" Mon Dien I It is ze Reverend Mozer !" ejaculated
THE DOP DOCTOR 239
the other, relief and joy expressed In the rapid movements
of pliant hands and expressive eyes. " Nozing is ze matter,
Reverend Mozer, if only you are safe."
" Quite safe, and so are the Sisters. Only the linen was
up.sot."
" My 'eavens, but a miraculous escapement !" The
supple hands and the expressive eyes and shoulders of
Sister Cleophee m;xde great play. " Me and Sister Tobias,
'ow we pray when we 'ear ze great gun, vith knowledge zat
you and ze Sisters were upon the vay to ze Women's
Laager. My faith, it vas terrible ! Me, if I 'ad not make
to ascend and learn how it go vid you, Lynette vould 'ave
come running up to make discover}' for herself. She behave
like a Uttle crazy, a little mad sing — I forget your vord
for she zat have lost 'er vits ! Sister Tobias and me, we
'ave to 'old 'er." The fine, expressive eyes went past the
Mother-Superior, and lighted with evident relief on
Saxham. " Ah, Monsieur le Dooteur, it is incredible
vat zat poor child she suffer. Madame 'ave told
you-
" Madame was about to tell me, my Sister," Saxham said,
in his smooth, fluent French, " when you appeared upon
the scene."
Sister Cleophee launched, unwitting of the I^Iother-
Superior's gesture of vexation, into voluble explanations
in that native language which M. le Docteur spoke so well.
Mademoiselle Mildare, the ward of Madame the Mother-
Superior, was no coward. But no ! the child had courage
in plenty — it was the suspense that devoured he. in the
absence of the Mother, to whom Mademoiselle was most
tenderly attached, that reduced her to a state of the most
pitiable. The Sisters left at home each day would talk of
the work and the fine weather — anything to distract the
mind, that presented itself to them — but now, nothing was
of any use. VVlien the Reverend Mother came back at
nightfall, behold a transformation. Mademoiselle would
laugh and sing and chatter. Her eyes would shine like
stars, she would bo happy, said Sister Cleophee, with
dramatic emphasis and gesture, as a soul in Paradise. Next
day, taking her guardian from her side, would bring the
terrors back, find redoubled the nervous sufferings of
240 THE DOP DOCTOR
Mademoiselle, to-day reaching such a height that Sisier
Cleophee felt convinced that something must be done.
" Ah, my Sister, if I could do anything !" the Mother-
Superior said, with the velvet Southern Irish inflection
in the breathing aspirate, and the soft melodious cadence
that made her pure, cultivated utterance so exquisite.
The voice broke and faltered, and a spasm of mother-
anguish wrung the firm mouth, and as a slow tear dimmed
each of her underlids and splashed on the white guimpe she
put out her hand blindly, and the sympathetic Httle French-
woman took it in both her own.
" Reverend Mozer, you can do zis. You can bring
Monsieur le Docteur to see Lynette. You can 'ave his
advice upon 'er case, and you can "
Another fusillade of rifle-fire, sweeping from the west
over Gueldersdorp, brought a repetition of the faint
moaning cry from below. Saxham consulted the Reverend
Mother with a look. She bent her head in silent assent.
He hitched the horse's bridle to what had been the gate-
post of the railway-official's front-garden, as she signed
to him to descend the ladder leading to the Sisters' under-
ground abode. And he went down to meet his Fate there.
XXVIII
The temporary Convent was a roomy trench dug out of
the red gravelly sand, lined with the inevitable sheets of
corrugated iron, and roofed with the same material, sup-
ported by a solid frame of steel rails. Wide chinks between
the metal sheets gave admission to light and air, and
earthen drain-pipes made ventilators in the walls. But
the sunlight penetrated like spears of burning flame, and the
air was stifling hot. The paraffin stove that heated irons
for Sister Tobias smelled clamorously, and the droning of
myriads of flies, not the least of the seven plagues of
Gueldersdorp, kept up a persistent bass to the shrill
singing of the little tin kettle. Later, when the April
rains began, and the tarpaulins were pulled over the sand-
bagged roof, tin lamps burning more paraffin did battle
with Cimmerian darkness.
THE DOP DOCIOR 241
Saxham'a professional approval was won by the mar-
vellous cleanliness and neatness of the place, divided into
living-room and dormitory by a heavy green baize curtain,
that at the Convent had shut off the noise of the great
classroom from the rest of the house. The curtain was
drawn, hiding the little iron cots brought from the Sisters'
cells, ascetic couches whose narrow wire mattresses must
afford scant room for repose to double sleepers now, where
all were crowded, and Conventual rules must be in abeyance.
The outer place held a deal table, the oil cooking-stove ;
some household utensils shining with cleanliness were
ranged upon a shelf, and several pictures hung upon the
walls. Upon a bracket the silver Crucifix from the altar
of the Convent chapel gleamed against the background
of a snowy, lace-bordered linen cloth. There were orderly
piles of cleaned and mended clothes, military and civilian,
the garments of sick and wounded male patients, who
would leave the Hospital without a thought of the un-
selfish women who had foregone sleep to patch jackets
and sew on missing buttons. There were haversacks of
coarse canvas for the Volunteers, finished and partly made,
with ammunition-pouches and bandoliers. And Sister
Tobias stood ironing at the deal table, partly screened by
a line of drjdng linen, wliile Sister Mary-Joseph turned the
mangle, and the little brisk novice, her round cheeks no
longer rosy, folded with active hands. The Dop Doctor's
keen quick glance took note of the patient cheerful weari-
ness written on the three faces, then rested on one other
face there.
Its wild white-rose fairness had dulled into the pallor
of old ivory. There were deep, bluish shadows about the
eyes and round the mouth, and the hollow at the base of
the throat, where the pulse throbbed and fluttered visibly,
had grown deep. Her red-brown hair had lost its bur-
nished beauty. It had become dull like her skin, and her
garments hung loosely upon the form whose soft roundnesses
had fallen away. But her eyes had changed most. Their
golden-hazel irises had faded to pale bronze, the full, fair
eyelids had shrunlc, the pupils were distended to twice
their natural size. She sat upon a stool in a corner, a
slight girlish figure in a hoUand skirt and white cambric
16
242 THE DOP DOCTOR
blouse-bodice, her slender waist girdled with a belt of
brown leather, the colour of her little shoes. Huddled up
against the corrugated-iron wainscot of the rough earth
wall, the obsession of fear that dilated her eyes and parched
her lips shook her in recurrent gusts of trembling, whenever
the guns of the Gueldersdorp batteries spoke in thunder,
whenever the Boer artillery bellowed Death from the
heights above. For since the great gun had spoken from
East Point, Death's red sickle had not ceased to ply its task.
Some work, one of the coarse canvas haversacks made
by the nuns for Gueldersdorp's enrolled defenders, lay at
the girl's feet. Her right hand, horrible to see in its
incessant, mechanical activity, made continually the
motion of sewing. Her eyes stared blankly, unwinkingly
at the opposite wall, and the gusts of trembling went over
her without cessation. At a m.ore deafening crash than
ordinary, an irrepressible scream would break from her,
and her hand would snatch at an invisible garment as
though she plucked back its imaginary wearer from peril
by main force.
" She sees nobody. She hear nozing when we speak —
she vould feel nozing, if you should pinch or shake her.
Was I not right, Reverend Mozer, to say it is time zat
somesing should be done ?"
The shrill whisper came from Sister Cleoph^e. The
Mother-Superior made a sign in assent. Beyond words,
her heart was crying — Oh, misery and joy in one mingled
draught to have won such love as this from Richard's child !
But her face was impassive and stern, and her eyes, looking
over Saxham's great shoulder as he stood silently watching
at the bottom of the ladder stairway, imposed silence on
the busy, observant, tactful Sisters^ who continued their
labours without a break, as the sewing hand went diligently
to and fro, and the recurrent convulsive shudders shook
the girl's slight frame, and the irrepressible cry of anguisli
was wrung from her at each ear-splitting shellburst.. And
yet, with all her agony of love intensifjdng her gaze, the
Mother did not see as much as Saxham, who took in
every detail and symptom with skilled, consummate ease,
realizing the desperate effort that strove for self-command,
noting the exhaustion of suspense in the dropped lines of
THE DOP DOCTOR 243
the half-open, colourless mouth, the incipient mental
breakdown in the vacant stare of the dilated eyes, the
mechanical action of the stitching needle-hand, the con-
vulsive shudder that rippled through the slight j&gure at
each boom, or crash, or fusillade of rifle-fire that drifted
over the shrapnel-torn veld and through the battered
town. He threw a swift whisper over his shoulder pres-
ently, that only reached the ear of the Mother- Superior,
standing behind him, her tall shape concealed from the
sufferer's sight by his great form.
" How long has this been going on ?"
She whispered back : " I am told ever since the bom-
bardment began. Every day, and at night too, should
duty detain me at one or another of the Hospitals."
He added in the same low tone :
" She has a morbid terror of death under ordinary cir-
cumstances ?"
The Mother-Superior murmured, a hand upon the ache
in her bosom :
" Not of death for herself. For — another.'*
His purely scientific attitude must have already aban-
doned him when he knew gladness that Self was not the
dominant note in this dumb threnody of fear. But ho
wore the professional mask of the physician as he ordered :
" Let one of the Sisters speak to her."
The Mother-Superior glanced at the nun who was ironing,
and then at the figure on the stool. The Sister was about
to obey when the Boer Maxim-Nordenfelt on the southern
position rattled. There was a hissing rush overhead, and as
a series of sharp, splitting cracks told that a group of the
shining little copper-banded shells had burst, and that
their splinters were busily hunting far and wide for some-
body to kill, the stitching hand dropped by the girl's side.
A new wave of shuddering went over the desolate young
figure, pitiable and horrible to see. Dull drops of sweat
broke out upon her temples in the shadow of her red-
brown hair.
" How are you getting on %nth your work, dearie ?"
Sister Tobias had spoken tv> her gently. She moved her
head and her fixed eyes in a blind way, and the stitch-
ing hand resumed its mechanical task, but she gave no
l6~-2
244 THE DOP DOCTOR
answer, except with the shudderings that shook her, aa
a lily is shaken in an autumn blast.
Then Saxham stepped backwards noiselessly, climbed
the steep ladder stairway, and stood waiting for the Mother-
Superior in the blazing yellow sunshine, beside the post
to which his horse was hitched. The Mother followed in-
stantly. He was making some pencil memoranda in a
shabby notebook, and kept his eyes upon his writing, and
made a mere mask of his square, pale face as he began :
" It — the case presents a very interesting development.
The subject has at one time or other — probably the critical
period of girlhood — sustained a severe physical and mental
shock ?"
The great grey eyes swam in sudden tears that were not
to be repressed, as the Mother-Superior remembered the
finding of that lost lamb on the veld seven years before.
She bowed her head in silent assent.
" You would wish candour," Saxham said, looking away
from her emotion. " And I should tell you that this is grave."
" I know it," her desperate eyes said more plainly than
her scarcely moving lips. " But so many others are
suffering in the same way, and there is nothing that can be
done for any of them."
He answered with emphasis that struck her cold. " Some
measures must be taken in the case, and without delay. This
state of things must not go on." He saw that the Mother-
Superior caught her breath and wrung her hands together
in the loose, concealing sleeves as she said, with a breath of
anguish :
" If she only had more self-control.'*
" She has self-control." He echoed the word im-
patiently. " She is using every ounce she has for all she
is worth. She has used it too long and too persistently."
" I will say then, if she only had more faith !"
" I know nothing of faith," Saxham said curtly ; " I
deal in common- sense."
She could have asked if it were commonly sensible for
a creature made by God, and existing but by His will,
to live without Him ? But she put the temptation past
her. No cordial flame of mutual esteem and liking ever
sprang up between these two, often brought together in
THE DOP DOCTOR 245
their mutual work of help and healing. She recognised
Saxham's power, she admitted his skill. But, as his
practised eye had diagnosed in the beloved of her heart the
signs of physical and mental crisis, so her clear gaze
deciphered in his face the story written by those unbridled
years of vice and dissipation, and knew him diseased iu
soul. She may have been fully acquainted v/ith all
Gueldersdorp had learned of him, going here, there, and
everywhere, as was her wont, in obedience to her Spouse's
call. But if so, she never betrayed Saxham. There was
no resentment, only delicate irony in the curve of her
finely- modelled lips as she queried :
" Am I so deficient in the quality of common-sense ?"
" Madam," he said, " you have manifested it in each of
the many instances where I have been brought in contact
with you. But in your solicitude for this young girl you
have shown, for the first time in my experience of you,
some lack of good judgment, and have inflicted, and do
inflict, severe suffering on her."
Her eyes flashed grey fire under her stern brows as she
demanded :
" How, pray ?"
" It is out of the question, I suppose," Saxham said
coldly, " that you should slacken in your ministrations
among the sick and wounded, and keep out of daily and
hourly danger — for her sake ?"
" Impossible," her voice answered, and her heart added
unheard : " Impossible, unless I should be false to my
Heavenly Bridegroom out of love for the child He gave."
" Then," said Saxham bluntly, " unless these recurrent
nerve-storms are to culminate in cerebral lesion and mental
and physical collapse — a result more easy to avert than to
deal with — take the girl about with you."
" But " the Mother uttered in irrepressible dismay.
" I — we go everywhere !"
It was most true. He had a vision, as she said it, of the
black-robed, white-coifed, cheerful Sisters passing in couples
through the shrapnel-littered streets, between houses of
gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and glassless windows,
cheerful, serene, helpful, bringing comfort to the dying,
and assistance to the sick, oblivious of whistling bullets
246 THE DOP DOCTOR
and bursting shells. And the most arduous duties, the
most repulsive tasks, the most danger- fraught errands,
were hers, always by right, and claim, and choice. What
a woman it was ! A very Judith in Israel. He knew
that Judith did not like him, but unconcealed admiration
was in his blue eyes as he looked at her.
" I know it. Let her go everywhere. It is the sole
chance, and — you spoke of faith just now. ... If you
have it for yourself and the religious women of your Order,
who go about doing good in confidence of the protection —
I do not speak in mockery — of an Almighty Hand, why
can't you have it for her ?"
She had never seemed so noble in his eyes as when she
took that implied rebuke of his, with meek bending of her
proud head, and candid self-condemnation in the eyes
that were lowered and then raised to his, and beautiful
humility in her speech :
" Sir, your reproach is just ; it is I who have been lacking
in faith. And — it shall be as you advise."
The distant bugle blared out its warning. The bell
tolled twice, stopped, and tolled four ; the smaller bells
echoed. The voices of the sentries came to their ears,
loudly at first, then more distant, then reduced to the
merest spider-thread of sound :
" 'Ware big gun ! South quarter, 'ware !"
" I must go to her," the Mother-Superior said, and
passed him swiftly and went down the ladder. Saxham
followed. The white figure on the stool had not stirred,
apparently. Its blank eyes still stared at the wall, and
the mechanical hand moved, sewing at nothing, as dili-
gently as ever.
" Lynette !"
The fixed, blindly- staring eyes came to life. Colour
throbbed back into the wan ivory cheeks. The mouth lost
its vacant droop. She rose up from the stool with a joyful
cry, and, stumbling in her haste, ran into the outstretched
arms. As they wrapped about her, clinging to her sole
earthly friend and guardian as though she could never
let go, came the crash of the driving-charge, the yelling
Brocken-hunt of the passage of the huge projectile, the
«ar-splitting din of the shellburst. She lifted up a radiant
THE DOP DOCTOR 247
face of laughing defiance, and then choked and quivered
and burst out crying, leaning her panting young bosom
against the black habit, and weeping as though her whole
being must dissolve, Undine-like, in tears.
Ah, the lovely feminine woman who weeps and clings !
She will never lose hef dominion over the sons of men.
The appealing glances of her beautiful wet eyes melt the
stoniest male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of her
arms about the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have
had power to change it back into a breathing human
being once more, if Lot had looked back, instead of his
helpmeet. Her sterner sisters may feel as keenly, love as
tenderly, sorrow even more bitterly than she. Who will
believe it among the sons of dead old Adam, who first felt
the heaving bosom pant against his own, and saw the first
bright tear-showers fall — forerunners of what oceans of
world-sorrow to be shed hereafter, when the Angel of the
flaming sword drove the peccant pair from Paradise.
Ah, the fair, weak woman who weeps and clings !
And Owen Saxham, watching Lynette from the ladder-
foot, and the Mother-Superior, clasping her and murmuring
soft comfort into the delicate, fragile ear under the heaped
waves of red-brown hair, shared the same thought.
How this trembling, vibrating, emotional creature will
love one day, when the man arrives to whom imperious
Nature shall bid her render up her all !
In whom, prayed the unselfish mother-heart, willing to
be bereft of even the Heaven-sent consolation for the
sake of the beloved, in whom may she find not only the
earthly mate-fellow, but the kindred soul. For, all-pitying
Mother of Mercy ! should she, too, be doomed to stake all
upon a wavering, unstable, headlong liichard, what will
happen then ?
Looking at the pair, Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi.
Lynette's tears had been dried quickly, like all joy-drops
that the eyes shed. She was talking low and earnestly,
pleading her cause with clinging hands and wistful looks
and coaxing tones that were broken sometimes by a sob
and sometimes by a little peal of girlish laughter.
" Mother, I am not made of sugar to be melted in the
sun, or Dresden china to be broken. I am strong enough
248 THE DOP DOCTOR
to take my share of the work ; I am brave enough to beai"
anything — anything," she urged, " if only I may be with
you. But to sit cooped up here day after day, safe and
sheltered, sewing powder-bags or giving Katie French
lessons, or helping Sister Tobias, and Hstening to the
guns " — the blood fled from her cheeks and the great pupils
of her eyes dilated until they looked all black in her face
of whiteness — " the dreadful guns, and wondering where
you are when the shells are bursting " — her voice rose in
anguish — " I can't bear it ! Mother, do you hear ?" She
threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and the pulses
in her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, and her
slight hands were desperate in their clutch upon the arms
that held her. " I want my share of the risk, whatever it
is. I will have it ! It is my right. I have tried to be
good and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this
any more !"
Her voice broke upon a sob, and Saxham said from the
doorway that was filled by his great shoulders from post
to post :
" You will not have to stand it any more. The Reverend
Mother has reconsidered her decision. She will take you
to the Hospital and elsewhere from to-day."
The man's curt manner and authoritative tone brought
Ljmette for the first time to knowledge of his presence.
Her glance went to him, and joy was mingled with surprise
in the face she turned towards the Mother-Superior.
" Really, Mother ?"
The Mother-Superior, though her own still face had
flushed with quick, irrepressible resentment at Saxham's
tone, said cheerfully :
" It is true, my child. Dr. Saxham thinks it will be best
for you. Dr. Saxham, this is my ward. Miss M^ldare."
Saxham made his little brusque bow. Lynette, bending
her lovely head, gave a grateful glance at the khaki-clad
figure with the great hulking shoulders, standing under the
patch of hot blue sky that the top of the ladder vanished in,
and a strange shock and thrill went through the man's
whole frame. His odd, gentian-coloured eyes under the
heavy thunder-cloud of black eyebrows lightened so sud-
denly in reply that the girl felt repelled and half frightened.
THE DOP DOCTOR 249
She was conscious of a curious oppression. As for Saxham,
a delicate, stinging fire ran newly in his veins. Something
stirred in the secret depths of him, and came to life with an
awakening thrill exquisitely poignant and sweet. For this
shght, unsophisticated, Convent-bred creature, slender as a
Uly, reared in innocence among the blameless, was rich as
her frail, lovely mother had been before her in the mysteri-
ous allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget-Mary at the
zenith of her stately beauty had never possessed one-tenth
of the seductive charm that emanated from this young
girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming
through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb
made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man
bom of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged
in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that
it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the
Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis
may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter ;
the shy, close-folded nymph among the sedges may awaken
the prijnal desire of Pan among the reeds. . . . Saxham,
even in the years of his degradation, had scarcely simk to
the level of the crook-shinned, hairy-thighed, hoofed satyr.
But he had buOt his nest with the birds of night, and
slaked his thirst at impiire sources, and only now did he
reaUse how his mad dream of vengeance upon the Power
that had cast him down and wrecked his future was to
recoil upon himself. " I have done with Love," he had
said, " and with Hope, and with Life as it is known of the
honourable and the upright and the cleanly among men
for ever ! "
And now ... his thoughts were tipped with fire as he
drank in the suddenly-awakened, vivid, delicate beauty
of Lynette Mildare. Now he realised the depths of his own
mad folly.' Oh, to have had the right to hope again, to
love again, to hve again, and be grateful to David, who had
betrayed him, and Mildred, who had deserted him — to this
end ! Oh, never to have lost the honourable claim to woo
such loveliness as this and win such purity, and wear both
as a talisman upon his heart for ever ! He drew breath
heavily as he looked at the girl, transformed and glowing
under the touch she loved, shining from within like some
250 THE DOP DOCTOR
frail, transparent alabaster lamp with the light that he
had helped to rekindle. And as his great chest expanded
with deep draughts of the subtle, intoxicating atmosphere
of her, and the blood hummed through his veins to that new
measure, the last Unk of his old fetters fell clanking to the
ground. And then, with a sting of intolerable remorse,
came the memory of his shameful five years' Odyssey
spent as a hog among other hogs of the human kind. It
had not been an overthrow. It had been a surrender of
all that was noble and strong in him to all in him that was
despicable and weak and vile. And his soul shuddered, and
his heart contracted in the sickening clutch of shame.
XXIX
He awakened from that lost moment of enthralment to the
pang and the shock of self -disco very, and to the knowledge
that somebody was hailing him by name from the top of
the ladder.
" Saxham ! Doctor ! Are you below there ?"
It was the gay, fresh voice of Beauvayse, halted with a
handful of Irregulars, bandoliered, carrying their rifles and
the day's provisions, wearing their bayonets on their hips,
and sitting their wiry little horses with the ease of old
troopers lq the lee-side of the piled-up mound of sandbags
that roofed the underground convent. Five men and a
Corporal of the Town Guard, similarly burdened and
accoutred — we know the pale Cockney eyes and the thin
face of the Corporal, whose freckles have long ago vanished
in a uniform gingerbread hue — had also taken momentary
shelter from one of the intermittent bUzzards of Mauser
bullets that drifted through Gueldersdorp.
One Irregular was sitting on an earth-filled packing-case,
swearing softly, nursing a disabled right arm, and looking
at the corded network of hairy, sunburned muscles that
were deUcately outlined in the bright red stream that
trickled from beneath the rolled-up shirt-sleeve of raspy
" greyback."
" We saw your hairy tied up outside. Doctor, and
* sensed ' your whereabouts, as McFadyen says. Can the
THE DOP DOCTOR 251
ladies spare you for a moment ? Sorry to be a nuisance,
but one of my fellows has got winged on our way to relieve
the garrison at Maxim Outpost South, and though he swears
he is as fit as a fiddle, I don't believe he ought to come on."
" I'm all right, Sir, 'pon me Sam I am !" protested the
dismounted trooper. " It's a bit stiff, but the bleedin' 'II
take that off. I shan't shoot a tikkie the worse for it. Lay
anybody 'ere a caulker I don't ! "
Nobody took up the bet, fortunately for the sportsman,
as surgical examination proved that the bullet had gone
sheer through the fleshy part of the upper arm, breaking
the bone, just missing the artery, and leaving a clean hole.
" You'll have to go to Hospital, my man," pronounced
Saxham.
The face of the wounded Irregular lengthened in disgust,
" My crimson luck ! And I'd made up my mind to pick off
a brace o' them blasted Dutch wart 'ogs over that there
bad job of pore Bob Elhs."
He blinked violently, and gulped dovra something that
rose in his brown, muscular throat as the voice of a comrade,
middle-aged Uke himself, coffee-baked as a Colonial, and
also speaking with the accents of the English barrack-
room, took up the tale.
" Bob Elhs was 'is pal, Sir, ajod mine, too. We was
in the same battery of 'Orse Artillery at AH Musjid, an'
we went up along of Lord Kitchener to Elhartoum. An'
they shot Bob yesterday. Through the 'ead, clean, an' 'e
never spoke another word."
" Through the loop-'ole o' the parapet, it was," went on
the woimded man. " Bein' in the advance trench, we've
got on neighbourly terms Like, u-ith the Dutchiea, and
Tom Kelly, wot 'as just bin speakin', 'card Bob Ellis
promisin' this bloke as 'ow if 'e'd on'y 'urry up an' git killed
soon enough, Bob would 'ave 'is farm and 'is frow when 'e
come marchin' along to Pretoria. 'Oppin' mad the Dopper
was at that, an' the names 'e called pore Bob was some-
thing disgraceful. An' when 'e got Bob through the loop-
'ole, me an' Kelly made our minds up to show a bit o' fancy
shootin' and lay 'im out in turn. That's 'ow it was, Sir.
An' now " — the voice grew shaky — " they've corked me.
Corked me, by God ! — an' there's not a bloke among the
252 THE DOP DOCTOR
lot of us but me can play the concertina." With his un-
damaged arm he swung round his haversack, bulging at
the top with a cheap, bone-keyed, rosewood- veneered,
gaudy-paper-sided instrument of German make, and himg
his head over it in silence.
" But what on earth has the concertina got to do with
it ?" Saxham was frankly puzzled, and Beauvayse, with
all his professional knowledge of " Tommy," was for once
nonplussed.
" You'd better explain to the Doctor, Corporal Leash.
I'm out of the running when it comes to killing men with
concertinas. And — ^you don't play as badly as all that, do
you ?"
" On the contrywise, Sir," explained the comrade Kelly,
" plays uncommon well, he does — all the tunes of the latest
music-'all and patriotic songs."
" An' them blasted Doppers are uncommon fond o'
music, d'ye see. Sir," explained the wounded trooper.
" They can't keep their ugly 'eads down behind the sand-
bags when they hears it. Up they pops 'em over the edge
and then — you take care they don't pop down no more."
The gay young laughter of Beauvayse was infectious,
while white teeth showed, or teeth that were not white, in
the tanned faces of Irregulars and Town Guardsmen. Even
the mourning comrades grinned, and Saxham smiled grimly
as Beauvayse cried :
" By George, a more original method of reprisal I never
came across ! But it's clear if you can't shoot vnth. that
drilled arm of yours you can't play the concertina. Wish I
could knock a tune out of the thing, Leash, for your sake —
enough to make a Boer put his head up. But I'm a dufifer
at musical instruments — always was. What do you say,
my man ?"
" Beg pardon, Sir." The Corporal with the Town
Guardsmen saluted, making the most of his five feet two
inches. " I can pl'y the squiffer — I mean the concertina,
Sir — a fair treat for a hammatore. And if I might be let
to tyke this man's plyce at Maxim Outpost South, Sir, I
could 'elp serve the gun, too, Sir — we've bin' attendin'
Artillery Drill in spare hours."
" I shouldn't think you had any spare hours to spajo V*
THE DOP DOCTTOR 253
Beauvayse looked at the thin, tanned face with liking, and
the keen pale eyes met his fairly.
" We haven't, Sir, but we manage some'ow."
" But what about your own duty ?"
" I'm tykin' these men over. Sir." He indicated a solid
family grocer, a clerk of the County Court, a pseudo-
Swiss baker, and two Navy Reserve men reduced to the
ranks for aggressive intemperance of the methylated-spirit
kind, which, in the absence of other liquor, had prevailed
among a certain class, until the intoxicating medium was
confiscated by Government.
" Captain Thwaite 'as spared us from the Cemetery
Works to relieve Corporal Brice an' 'is little lot at Angle VII.
South Trenches. A telephone-message come from our
Colonel to say Brice's men was bad with rheumatism and
dysentery — but Brice is all right an' fit, Sir — and " — the
pale eyes pleaded out of the brickdust-coloured face — '* I'd
like the charnce o' gettin' nearer to the enemy, Sir — an'
that's the truth."
Beauvayse conceded. " Very well. I'll square things
with your commanding ofiicer as we go along, and explain
matters to the Colonel per telephone from Maxim Outpost
South. Come on there when you've handed over your men
to Brice."
The pale eyes danced. " Thank you, Sir."
" An' I'll owe you a dollar whisky-peg for the good
turn," muttered the perforated musician, as he handed
over the cherished concertina to the volunteer, " till next
Sunday that I see you in the stad."
'* Righto !" said Corporal Keyse, accepting the sacred
charge.
" Look here, though," came from Beauvayse, " there's
one thing you must remember — what's your name ?"
" Keyse, sir — Corporal, A Company, Gueldersdorp
Town Guard."
" Well, Keyse, you've heard Meisje hiccoughing niaety-
four-pound projectiles all the morning, haven't you ?"
" Couldn't possibly miss 'er, sir " — the pale eyes twinkled
as the Corporal finished — " not as long as she misses me."
" She has a talent for missing, otherwise a good many of
tts fellows would have heai'd the Long Call before now.
254 THE DOP DOCTOR
But most of her delicate little attentions — with the exception
of one shell she sent over the Women's Laager, to show
the people there that she doesn't mind killin' females and
children if she can't get men — most of 'em are meant for
Maxim Outpost South ; and one of 'em may get home
sometimes, when the German gunner isn't thinking of his
sweetheart. Then, if you find yourself soarin' heavenwards
in a kind of scattered anatomical puzzle-map of little bits,
don't blame me for obligin' you, that's all."
There was a guffaw from the listeners. W. Keyse
saluted, cheerfully joining in.
" I shan't s'y a word, sir."
" By George, I believe you !" said Beauvayse. " What's
up ? Seen a ghost ?"
Saxham had swung his wallet round, producing carbolic,
antiseptic gauze, First Aid bandages, and other surgical
indispensables from its recesses, as by legerdemain, and a
tall, stately black figure, followed by a tall, slender white
figure, had risen from the bowels of the earth. The Mother-
Superior, taking in the situation and the need of her at
a glance, called a brief order down the ladder stairway,
and went swiftly over to Saxham, whipping a blue apron
out of a big pocket, tying it about her, and pulling on a
pair of sleeves of the same stuff as she went. Lynette
turned to take the basin of hot water that the arm of
Sister Tobias extended from below, and the jaws of
W. Keyse snapped together. Until he twigged the bronze-
red coils of hair under the broad, rough straw hat, he had
thought . , . Cripps !
We know how the dancing, provoking mischievous blue
eyes and adorable wrist-thick golden pigtail of Greta du
Taine dwelt in his love-stricken remembrance. Her
worshipped image had got a little rubbed and dimmish of
late to be sure, but breathe on the colours, and you saw
them come out clear, and oh ! be\\dlderLngly lovely.
Billy Keyse had never even beheld the enchantress since
that never-to-be-forgotten morning when he had seen her
pass at the head of the serpentine procession of pupils,
slowly winding across the Market Square. But he knew
she was still in Gueldersdorp. He felt her, for one thing.
We know that in hia case Love's clairvoyant instinct had
THE DOP DOCTOR 255
got its nightcap on. We saw Greta depart on the train
bound North and branch off East for the Du Taine home-
stead near Johannesburg. But if she were not in Guelders-
dorp, why did the left breast-pocket of the now soiled and
heavily-patched khaki tunic bulge so ? There were six
letters inside there, tied up with a frayed bit of blue ribbon.
Hers ? 'Strewth, they were ! And each what you might
call a Regular One-er of a love-letter. Never mind the
paper being thumb-marked as well as cheaply inferior,
one cannot expect all the refinements of civilisation in a
beleaguered town. It was the spelling that — although
^ve know W. Keyse to be no cold orthographist — occasion-
ally gave him pause as he perused and re-perused the
greasy but passionate page. And why did she sign herself
" Fare Air ?" The sense of ingratitude pierced him even
as he wondered. Why shouldn't she if she chose ? What
a proper beast he was to grumble ! Him, that ought to
be proud of her demeaning herself to stoop to a young chap
in a lower station, so to call. And her a Regular Swell.
He hugged the letters against him with the arm belonging
to the hand that held the concertina. Beloved missives,
where was the worshipped writer now ? Sitting by a
tapestry-frame, for he could not imagine her peeling
potatoes, down in the Convent bombproof, dreaming of
him, weeping over bis last letter, or blushfully aware of
his vicinity, panting at the bottom of the ladder, listening
for the beloved accents of the man who . . . Hold hard,
though ! she had never heard the voice of W. Keyse ;
or he hers for that matter, but he would have recognised
it among a thousand. He had told her so, writing with
ink pencil, of the kind that when sucked in moments of
forgetfulness tastes peculiarly horrible, and tinges the
saliva mth violet, at spare moments in the trench. A
phlegmatic Chinaman acted as Love's postman, handing
in the envelopes that were addressed to Mr. W. Keyse,
Esquer, m caligraphy that began in the top left-hand
corner, and trickled gradually do^f^n into the right-hand
bottom one. Pumping the Celestial was no use. John
Tow sabee'd only that a fail' foreign devil gave the one
missive, with a tikkie for delivery, and 'spose one time Tow
makee plenty good walkee back with anulla paper some
256 THE DOP DOCTOR
pidgin bime-bye catchee more tikkie. If walkee back no
paper, too muchee John catchee hellee, reaping only re-
proaches and no tikkie at all.
Judge how the heart of W. Keyse bumped against the
concertina when the slender vision in the holland skirt
and white blouse and broad straw hat appeared from under-
ground. It was not she, though, Queen of heroic thoughts,
inspirer of deeds of daring yet to be done, who followed
the Mother-Superior.
It was the loveliest girl Beauvayse had ever seen, or ever
would see. The girl who had stood up in defence of three
nuns against a threatening gang of rowdy Transvaalers,
one day in the Recreation Ground, — the girl who had passed
as the Staff dismounted at the Hospital gate on the day of
appropriation. The Mayor had had no chance of fulfilling
his promise of an introduction. The Mayor's wife, with her
two children, was an inmate of the Women's Laager.
But at last the kind little genii that deal with happenings
and chances had brought Beauvayse and his divinity face
to face. Now she rose out of the Convent dug-out, in the
waste that- had been the railway- official's front-garden,
like a fair white Psyche-statue, delivered in the course of
some convulsion of Nature from the matrix of the earth.
And she was even more exquisite than his remembrance
of her, even more . . .
Beauvayse descended abruptly from an empyrean flight
of poetic imagery to remember his torn and soiled silk
polo-shirt with its rolled-up sleeves, his earth-stained
cords, girt with a belt of vari-coloured webbing, his muddy
leather leggings and boots with their caked and dusty
spurs, telling of hard service and unresting activity.
But he looked radiantly handsome as he leapt to the
ground and came forward, his tall athletic figure, trained
by arduous toil and incessant work until the last super-
fluous ounce of flesh had vanished, looking the personifica-
tion of manliness, his tanned face, still clean-shaven save
for the slight fair moustache, one to set any maiden dream-
ing of its straight clean-cut features and lazy, long-shaped
grey-green eyes. The wide felt hat he touched in salute sat
with a Jaunty air on the close-cropped golden head. Here
was a gallant, heartsome vision to greet Lynette, stepping
THE DOP DOCTOR 257
after the Mother into that outer world, where fire belched
warning from iron mouths, and steel destruction sped
through the skies, and bullets sang like hornets past your
head, or hit the ground near your feet, sending up little
bushy columns and spirts of dust.
The wounded man, now carbolised, plugged, and
bandaged by Saxham's dexterous hands, took the hastily-
scrawled admission-order, included his officer, the ladies,
and the Doctor in a left-handed salute, distributed a parting
wink among his comrades, counselled W. Keyse in a hoarse
whisper to go tender on the off-side G of the instrument
he dandled, and trudged sturdily away in the direction of
the Hospital.
" Thank you, ma'am. There's no stealing a march on
you," Beauvayse said to the Mother-Superior, touching his
hat with his gay, swaggering grace, as she emptied a bowl
of red water on the ground, and whisked the blue apron
and sleeves back into the vast recesses of the mysterious
pocket. " But you're spoiling us. Hot water isn't on
tap, as a rule, for Field -dressings, and — and won't you "
He reddened to the fair untanned skin upon his temples.
" Mayn't I ask, ma'am, to be introduced to Miss Mildare ?"
The Mother complied with his request, smiling indul-
gently. She had known and loved this bright boy's
mother in her early married days. The Dark Rose of
Ireland and the White Rose of Devon, a noted Society
phrasemonger had dubbed them, seeing them together on
the lawn one Ascot Oup Day, their light draperies and
delicate ribbons whip- whipping in the pleasant June breeze,
ivory-skinned, Jetty-locked Celtic beauty and blue-eyed,
flaxen-locked Saxon fairness in charming, confidential
Juxtaposition under one lace sunshade, lined with what
has been the last new fashionable colour under twenty
names, since then ; only that year they called it Rose fanL
Richard Mildare had praised the sunshade, a Paris affair
supplied by Worth with his creation, Lady Biddy Bawne's
beautiful gown. He asked Lady Biddy to marry him at
the back of the box on the Grand Stand when Vemeuil
was winning the Cup. Who shall dare say that he was not
then a sincere lover ? thought the Mother-Superior of the
Convent of the Holy Way. And then she recalled ner
17
258 THE DOP DOCTOR
wandering thoughts, ami turned them to the One Lover
who never betrays His chosen. And her rapt eyes looking
up, seemed to pierce beyond the flaming sky-vault over-
head. She forgot all else, suddenly snatched from earthly
consciousness to beatific realisation of the Divine.
There had been for some minutes now a lull in the
bombardment from the ridges. The enemy's guns were
silent a space, and the hot batteries of harassed Guelders-
dorp snatched a brief respite while Boers gathered for the
nine o'clock coffee-drinking round their little snapping
fires of dried dung and tindery bush. Now and then a
rifle cracked, and a bullet sang past or whitted in the dust.
But comparative peace brooded over the shattered hamlet
of wrecked homes and ploughed-up, littered roads, and
raw earthworks blistering in the pitiless sun.
" jVIias IMildare." Beauvayse was speaking in that
pleasant, boyish voice of his, standing close to Lynctte,
his tall head bending for a glimpse of the eyes of golden
hazel, that were shaded by the broad, rough straw hat ;
*' if you knew how I've waited for this. Nearly seven
weeks since one day in early October, when I saw you on
the Recreation Ground, where some brutes were annoying
you, and a day or so later you went by the Hospital as
I rode up with the Chief. But, of course, you don't re-
member ?" His eyes begged her to say she did.
" I remember quite well." It was the voice he had
imagined for her — low, and round, and clear, udth just an
undernote of piaintiveness matching the wistful appeal of
her eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of exquisite
delight went tlirough him, as though she had touched
him with her slender white, bare hand on the naked breast.
" Thank you for not quite forgetting- You don't know
what it means to me, being kept in mind by you."
" I do not know that I kept you in mind." There was
a touch of girlish dignity in her utterance. " I only said
that I remembered quite well."
He bent his head nearer, and lowered his pleasant voice
to a coaxing, confidential tone.
" You'll think me a presumptuous kind of fellow for
talking like this, won't you. Miss Mildare ? But the
circumstances are exceptional, aren't they ? We're shut
THE DOP DOCTOR 259
up away from the big world outside in a little world of our
own, and — such chances fall to every man and most of
the women here : a shrapnel bullet or a shell-splinter
might stop me before another hour goes by, from ever
saying — what I've felt for weeks on end had got to be said —
what I'd risk a dozen lives, if I had 'em, to get the oppor-
tunity of saying to you." His hot eagerness frightened
her. Her downcast eyelids quivered, and her flushed
maiden-face shrank from him.
" Oh, don't be angry ! Don't move away !" Beauvayse
entreated ; for Lynette's anxious glance had gone in search
of the Mother-Superior, with whom Saxham was now
discussing the nuns' idea of utiHsing the Convent as a
Convalescent Hospital. In another instant she would
have taken refuge by her side. " If you knew how I have
thought of you and dreamed of you since I saw you ! If
you could only understand how I shall think of you now !
If you could only realise how awfully, utterly strange it
is to feel as I am feeling !" His voice was a tremulous,
fervent whisper. His eyes gleamed Uke emeralds in the
shadow of the wide-brimmed felt hat. " And if I die
to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long
for you, and worship you wherever I am !"
" Oh, why do you talk to me like this 1"
Lynette's whisper was as tremulous as Beauvayse's own.
Her eyes lifted to the glowing, ardent face for one shy
instant, and found it good to look upon. Men, young and
not undesirable, had tried to make love to her before,
at dances and parties and picnics to which she had been
chaperoned by the Mayor's wife. But the first hot glance,
the first word that carried the vibration of a passionate
meaning, had wakened the old terror in her, and bidden
her escape. The nymph had always taken flight at the
first step upon the bank, the first rustle of the sedges.
She had never lingered to feel the air stirred by another
burning breath. She had never asked any one of those
other men why he talked like that. Beauvayse went on :
" Perhaps I even seem a Uttle mad to you — fellows
have told me lately that I went on as if I had a tile off.
Perhaps I'm what the Scotch call ' fey.' I've got Highland
blood in me, anyhow. And you have set it on fire, I think
17—2
260 THE DOP DOCTOR
— started it boiling and racing and leaping in my veins
as no woman ever did before. You slender white witch !
you fay of mist and moonlight, you've woven a spell, and
tangled my soul in it, and nothing in Life or in Death
will ever loose me again." His tone changed, became in-
finitely caressing. " How sweet and dear you are to be
so patient with me, while I'm sending the Conventionalities
to the rightabout and terrifying the Proprieties. Forgive
me, Miss Mildare."
The pleading in his face was exquisite. She felt as a
bee might feel drowning in honey, as she wreathed her
white fingers together upon the silver buckle of the brown
leather belt she wore, and said confusedly :
" I ... I beUeve I ought to be very angry with you."
His whisper touched her ear like a Mss, and set her
trembling.
" But you're not ?"
« T 5»
She caught her breath as he came nearer. There was
a fragrance from him — a perfume of youth and health and
vitality — that was powerful, heady, intoxicating as the
first warm, flower-scented wind of Spring, blowing down
a mountain-kloof from the high ranges. Her white-
rose cheeks took sudden warmth of hue, and her pale nostrils
quivered. A faint, mysterious smile dawned upon her
lips. Something of the old terror was upon her still, and
yet — it was delicious to be afraid of him !
" Say that you aren't angry with me for being so thun-
deringly presumptuous. Please be kind to me and say it."
Her lips began to utter disjointed phrases. " What can
it matter really ? . . . Oh, very well, then ... if my saying
so is of such . . . importance. ..."
" More important than anything in the world !" he
declared.
" Very well, then, I am not angry — not furiously so, at
least." The bud of a smile repressed pouted her lips.
" And," he begged, " you'll let what I've said to you be
our secret ? Promise."
" Very well."
" You sweetest, kindest, loveliest "
" Please don't," she entreated.
THE DOP DOCTOR 261
" And I may know your Christian name ?" he persisted.
" I've thought of everything in the worl'd, and nothing's
good enough to fit you."
" Oh, how silly !" Her eyes gleamed with laughter.
" It is Lynette."
He caught at it with rapture. " Perfect ! The last
touch. . . . The scent of the rose, or say the dewdrop on it.
By George, I'm in earnest !"
He had spoken incautiously loud. A grating voice
addressing him pulled his head round.
" Lord Beauvayse ..."
" Did you speak to me, Doctor ? As I was saying, Miss
Mildare," he went on, continuing the blameless conversa-
tion, " dust-storms and flies are the twin curses of South
Africa."
The harsh voice spoke to him again. He looked round,
and met Saxham's eyes, hard and cold as blue stones. The
Doctor said grimly :
" You may not be aware that your men are drawing
fire."
It was undeniable fact. The buUets had begun to hit
the ground under the horses' bellies, spirting httle columns
of dust and flattening against the stones. Coffee-drinking
was over in the enemy's trenches, and the business of the
day had begun again. Beauvayse bade the ladies good-
morning, and swung himself into the saddle.
" Au re voir. Miss Mildare. Please get under cover at
once." The proprietorship iu the tone stung Saxham to
wincing. " Good-morning, ma'am," he cried to the Mother-
Superior, " we know you ignore bullets. So long. Doctor.
Hope I shan't count one in your day's casualty-bag.
Ready, boys ?'*
The chatting troopers sprang to alert attention.
W. Keyse, pensively boring the sandy earth with the
pneumatic auger of imaginafcion, in search of the loved
one beheved to inhabit the Convent bomb-proof, was re-
called to the surface by the curtly-uttered command, and
knew the thrill of hero-worship as Beauvayse threw out
his lightly-clenched hand, and the troopers, answering
the signal, broke into a trot. The hot dust scurried at
the horses' retreating heels. Corporal Keyse, trudging
262 THE DOP DOCTOR
staunchly in their wake with his five Town Guardsmen,
became ghostUke, enveloped in an African repUca of the
ginger-coloured type of London fog. And the Mother-
Superior looked at her well-worn watch.
" My child, we must be moving if you are coming with me
to the Women's Laager. I am nearly an hour late as it is."
" I am ready, Mother dear."
Lynette's eyes came back from following that dust-
cloud in the distance to meet the hungry, jealous fires
of Saxham's gaze.
He had seen Beauvayse's ardent look, and her shy
heart's first leaf unfolded in the answering blush, and a
spasm of intolerable anger gripped him as he saw. He
turned away silently, cursing his own folly, and unhitched
his horse's bridle from the broken gatepost. With the act
a crowd rose up before Lynette and a frightened horse
reared, threatening to fall upon three women who were
hurrying along the sidewalk outside the Hospital, and
a heavy-shouldered, black-haired man in shabby white
drills stepped out of the throng and seized the flying
bridoon-roin, and wrenched the brute down. She recog-
nised the horse and the man again, and exclaimed :
" Why . . . Mother, don't you remember the rearing
horse outside the Hospital that day in October ? It was
Dr. Saxham who caught him, and saved us from getting
hurt."
" And we never even thanked you." The Mother-
Superior turned to Saxham v/ith outstretched hand and the
smile that made her grave face beautiful. " What you
must have thought ! . . ."
" I looked for the person who had been so prompt, but
you had vanished — where, nobody seemed to know,"
Ljmette told him with her clear eyes on the stem, square
face. " And then a man in the crowd called out, ' It's the
Dop Doctor !' And I thought what an odd nickname ! . . ."
She broke off in dismay. Saxham had become livid. His
grim Jaws clamped themselves together, sini the blue eyes
grew hard as stone. One instant he stood immovable,
the Waler's bridle on his left arm, his right hand clenched
upon the old hunting-crop. Then ho said very coldly and
dibtiEotly :
THE DvOP DOCTOR 263
" As you observe, it is a queer nickname. But, at any
rate, I had fairly earned "
The bugle from the Staff headquarters sounded, drowning
the rest of the sentence. The Catholic Church bell tolled.
The other bells took up the warning, and the sentries called
again from post to post :
" 'Ware gun, Number Two ! Southern Quarter, 'ware !'*
The Krupp bellowed from the enemy's north position, and
cleverly lobbed a seven-pound shell not far behind that
rapidly-moving, distant pillar of dust, the nucleus of which
was a little troop of cantering Irregulars, and not far in
front of the lower, slower-moving cloud, the heart of which
was a little knot of tramping Town Guardsmen. The
shell burst with a splitting crack, earth and flying stones
mingled with the deadly green flame and the poisonous
chemical fumes of the lyddite. Figures scurried hither and
thither in the smoke and smother ; one lay prone upon the
ground. . . .
At the instant of the explosion Saxham had leaped
forwards, setting his body and the horse's as a bulwark
between Death and the two women. Now, thoixgh
L^Tiette's rough straw hat had been whisked from her
head by a force invisible, he saw her safe, caught in the
Mother-Superior's embrace, sheltered by the tall, protecting
figure as the sapling is sheltered by the pine.
" We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her
cheek had been cut by a flying flake of flint, and was bleed-
ing. " But look . . . over there !" She pointed over the
veld to the prostrate brown figure, and a cry of alarm broke
from Lynette.
" Oh, Mother, who ... 1'
" It is a Town Guardsman," Saxham answered, his cold
blue eyes meeting the wild frightened gaze of the pale
girl. " Lord Beauvayse and the Irregulars got off scot-
free. Reverend Mother, do not think of coming. Please
go on to the Women's Laager. I v/ill see to the wounded
man, and follow by-and-by."
He mounted, refusing all offers of aid, and rode off.
Looking back an instant, he saw the black figure of the
woman and the white figure of the girl setting out upon
their perilous Journey over the bare patch of ground ^here
>'>
264 THE DOP DOCTOR
Death made harvest every day. They kissed each other
before they started, and again Saxham thought of Ruth
and Naomi. If Ruth had been only one half as lovely as
this Convent-grown lily, Boaz was decidedly a lucky man.
But he had been a respectable, sober, steady-going farmer,
and not a man of thirty-six without a ten-pound note in
the world, with a blighted career to regret, and five years
of drunken wastrelhood to be ashamed of. And yet . . .
the drunken wastrel had been a man of mark once, and
earned his thousands. And the success that had been
achieved, and lost, could be rewon, and the career that had
been pursued and abandoned could be his — Saxham' s —
again. And what were his publishers doing with those
accumulated royalties 1 For he knew from Taggart and
McFadyen that his books still sold.
" The Past is done with," he said aloud. " Why should
not the Future be fair ?"
And yet he had nearly yielded to the impulse to own
to those degraded years, and claim the nickname they had
earned him, and take her loathing and contempt in exchange.
What sudden madness had possessed him, akin to that
unaccountable, overmastering surge of emotion that he had
known just now when he saw her tears ?
We know the name of the divine madness, but we know
not why it comes. Suddenly, after long years, in a crowded
place or in a solitude where two are, it is upon you or upon
me. The blood is changed to strange, ethereal ichor,
the pulse beats a tune that is as old as the Earth itself, but
yet eternally new. Every breath we draw is rapture,
every step we take leads us one way. One voice calls
through all the voices, one hand beckons whether it will or
no, and we follow because we must. With the Atlantic
rolling between us I can feel your heart beat against mine,
and your lips breathe into me your soul. The light that
was upon your face, the look that was in your eyes as you
gave the unforgettable, immemorial kiss, the clasp of your
hands, the rising and falling of your bosom, like a wave
beneath a sea-bird, like a sea-bird above a wave, shall be
with me always, even to the end of time and beyond it.
For there are many loves, but one Love.
THE DOP DOCTOR 265
XXX
A LONG-LEGGED, thianish officer, riding a khaki-coloured
bicycle over a dusty stretch of shrapnel-raked ground, carry-
ing a riding-whip tucked under his arm and wearing steel
Jack-spurs, might have been considered a laughter- provoking
object elsewhere, but the point was lost for Gueldersdorp.
He got o£E his metal steed amongst the zipping bullets,
and came over to the little group of Town Guards that were
gathered round Saxham, who had just ridden up, and
their prostrate comrade, who writhed and groaned lustily.
" You have a casualty. Serious ?"
Saxham looked up, and his hard glance softened in
recognition of the Chief.
" I'll tell you in a moment, sir."
The earth-stained khaki jacket was torn down the left
side and drenched with ominous red. A little pool of the
same colour had gathered under the sufferer.
" He looks gassly, don't him ?" muttered one of the Town
Guardsmen, the Swiss baker wlio was not S^^'iss.
" Makes plenty of noise," said the County Court clerk
hypercritically, " for a dying man."
" Oh Lord ! oh Lord !"
The subject had bellowed with sonority, testifying at
least to the possession of an uninjured diaphragm, as
Saxham begun to cut away the jacket.
" Oh, come now !" said a brisk, pleasant, incisive voice
that sent an electric shock volting through the presumably
shattered frame. " That's not so bad !"
" I told you so," muttered the County Court clerk to the
Sm^ss baker.
" You remember me, Colonel 1"
Haggard, despairing eyes rolled up at the Chief appeal-
ingly. He had met the gaze of those oyster-orbs before.
He recognised Alderman Brooker, proprietor of the grocery
stores LQ Market Square, victim of the outrage perpetrated
on a sentry near the Convent on a certain memorable night
in October last.
" Yes, my man. Anything I can do 1" He knelt down
beside the prostrate form.
266 THE DOP DOCTOR
" You can tell my country, sir, that I died willingly,"
panted the moribund.
" With pleasure, when you're dead. But you're not yet,
you know, Brooker." His keen glance was following the
run of the Doctor's surgical scissors through the brown stuff
and revelling in discovery. And Saxham's set, square face
and stern eyes were for once all alight with laughter. The
dying man "u-ent on :
" It's a privilege, sir, an inestimable privilege, to have
shed one's blood in a great cause."
'' It is, Mr. Brooker, but this is different stuff." His
keen face wrinkled with amusement as he sniffed, and
dipped a finger in the crimson puddle. " Too sticky."
He put the finger to his tongue — " and too sweet. Show
him the bottle, Saxham."
The Doctor, imperturbably grave, held forth at the end
of the scissors the ripped-up ruins of a small-sized india-
rubber hot-water bottle, a ductile vessel that, buttoned
inside the khaki tunic, had adapted itself not uncomfortably
to the still existing rotundities of the Alderman's figure.
A hyaena-yell of laughter broke from each of the crowding
heads. Brooker's face assumed the hue of the scarlet
flannel chest-protector exposed by the ruthless steel.
" What the— what the ?" he stuttered.
" Yes, that's the question. What the devil was inside it,
Brooker, when the shell -splinter hit you in the tummy and
t saved your life 1 Stand him on his legs, men ; he's as
right as rain. Now, Brooker ?"
Brooker, without volition, assumed ^he perpendicular,
and began to babble :
" To tell the truth, sir, it was loquat syrup. Very
soothing to the chest, and, upon my honour, perfectly
wholesome. Mrs. Brooker makes it regularly every year,
and — we sell a twenty-gallon barrel over the counter,
besides what we keep for ourselves. And if I am to be
exposed to mockery when Providence has snatched me
from the verge of the grave ..."
" Not a watery grave, Brooker," came from the Chief,
witli an irrepressible chuckle — " a syrupy one. And —
have I your word of honour that this is a non-alcoholic
beverage ?"
THE DOP DOCTOR 2<>7
" Sir, to be candid with you, I won't deny but what it
might contain a certain proportion of brandy. And the
nights in the trench being particularly cold and myself
constitutionally liable to chill . . . I — I find a drop now and
then a comfort, sir."
"Ah, and have you any more of this kind of comfort at
your place of business or elsewhere ?"
** Why — why . . ." the Alderman faltered, " there might
be a little keg, sir, in the shop, under the desk in the
counting-house."
" Requisitioned, Mr. Brooker, as a Government store.
You may feel more chilly without it ; you'll certainly sleep
more lightly. As far as I can see, it has been more useful
outside of you than ever it was in. And — the safety of
this town depends on the cool heads of the defenders who
man the trenches. A fuddled man behind a gun is worse
than no man to me."
The voice rang hard and clear as a gong. "I'm no
teetotaller. Abstinence is the rule I enforce, by precept
and example. While men are men they'll drink strong
liquor. But as long as they are not fool-men and brute-
men, they can be trusted not to lap when they're on duty.
Those I find untrustworthy I mark down, and they will
be dealt with rigorously. You understand me, Brooker ?
You look as if you did. You've had a narrow squeak. Be
thankful for it that nothing but a bruise over the ribs has
come of it. Corporal, fall in your men, and get to your
duty."
W. Keyse and his martial citizens tramped on, the re-
suscitated Brooker flying rags of sanguine stain. Then the
stem face of the Chief broke up in laughter. The crinkled-
up eyes ran over with tears of mirth.
" Lord, that fellow will be the death of me ' Tarta'^lia
in the flesh — how old Gozzi would have revelled in him !
Those pathetic, oyster-eyes, that round, flabby face, that
comic nose, and the bleating voice with the sentimental
quaver in it, reeling off the live man's djang speech. . . ."
He wiped his brimming eyes. " Since the time when Boer
spies hocussed him on guard — you remember that lovely
affair ? — he's registered a vow k) impress me with his
gallantry and devotion, or die in the attempt. He's the
268 THE DOP DOCTOR
most admirably unconscious humtoug I've ever yet met.
Sands his sugar and brown- papers his teas philanthropi-
cally, for the good of the public, and denounces men who put
in Old Squareface and whisky-pegs, as he fuddles himself
with his loquat bratndy after shop-hours in the sitting-room
back of the store. But let us be thankful that Providence
has sent Brooker on a special mission to play Pantaloon
in this grimmish little interlude of ours. For we'll want
every scrap of Comic Relief we can get by-and-by, Saxham,
if the other one doesn't turn up — say by the middle of
January."
" I understand, sir." Saxham, to whom this man's face
was as a book well loved, read in it that the Commissariat
was caving. " There has been another Boer cattle-raid ?"
The face that was turned to his own in reply had suddenly
grown deeply-lined and haggard. " There has been a lot
of cattle-shooting. Lobbing shrapnel at grazing cows was
always quite a favourite game with Brounckers. But his
gunners hit oftener than they used to. And the Govern-
ment forage won't hold out for ever." He patted the
brown Waler, who pricked his sagacious ears and threw up
his handsome bluntish head in acknowledgment of his
master's caress. " Presently we shall be killing our mounts
to save their lives — and ours. Oats and horseflesh will
keep life in men — and in children and women. . . . The
devil of it is, Saxham, that there are such a lot of women."
" And seventy-five out of a hundred of them stayed out
of pure curiosity," came grimly from Saxham.
" To see what a siege would be like. Well, poor souls,
they know now ! You were going ovor to the Women's
Laager. I'll walk with you, and say my say as I go. I'm
on my wi' v to Nordenfeldt Fort West. Something has gone
wrong witii the telephone- wire between there and Staff
headquarters, and I can't get anything through but
Volapuk or Esperanto. And those happen to be two of the
languages I haven't studied." The dry, humorous smile
curved the reddish- brown moustache agaia. The pleasant
little whistle stirred the short-clipped hairs of it as the two
men turned in the direction of the Women's Laager, over
which the Red-cross flag was fluttering, and where the
spider with the little Boer mare, picldng at the scanty grass.
THE DOP DOCTOR 269
waited outside the earthworks. Saxham's eyes did not
travel so far. They were fastened upon a tall black figure
and a less tall and more slender white figure that were by
this time halfway upon their perilous journey across the
patch of veld, bare and scorched by hellish fires, and
ploughed by shrapnel ball into the furrows whence Death
had reaped his harvest day by day.
" There goes one of the women we couldn't have done
without," commented his companion, wheeling his bicycle
beside Saxham, leading the brown Waler.
" It is the Mother-Superior," Saxham said, " with her
ward, Miss Mildare."
" Ah ! My invariable reply to Beauvayse — ^you know
my Junior A.D.C., who daily clamours for an introduction
to Miss Mildare — is, that I have not yet had one mys.-lf,
though at the outset of aSairs I encountered the young
lady under rather trying circumstances, in which she
showed plenty of pluck. I thought I had told you. No ?
Well, it was one morning on the Recreation Ground.
The School was out walking, a trio of nuns in charge,
and some Dutch loafers mobbed them — threatened to lay
hands on the Sisters — and Miss Mildare stood up in defence
— head up, eyes blazing, a slim, tawny-haired young lioness
ready to spring. And Beauvayse was with me, and ever since
then has been dead-set upon making her acquaintance."
Saxham's blood warmed to the picture. But he said,
and his tone was not pleasant : " Lord Beauvayse attained
the height of his ambition a few minutes ago."
" Did he ? Well, I hope disillusion was not the outcome
of reaHsation. Up to the present " — the humorous, keen
eyes were wrinkled at the comers — " all the boy's swans
have been geese, some of 'em the sable kind."
Saxham answered stiffly : " I should say that in this
case the swan decidedly predominates."
The other whistled a bar of his pleasant little tune
before he spoke again. " It is a capital thing for Beauvayse,
being shut up here, out of the way of women."
" Are there no women in Gueldersdorp ?"
"Noneof the kind Beauvayse's canoe is given to capsizing
on." The line in his senior's cheek flickered with a hinted
smile. " None of the kind that run after him. Ue in wait
270 THE DOP DOCTOR
for him, buzz round him like wasps about a honey-bowl.
I've developed muscle getting the boy out of amatory
scrapes, with the Society octopus, with the Garrison
husband- hunter, with the professional man-eater, theatrical
or music-hall ; and the latest, most inexpressible She, is
always the loveliest woman in the world. Queer world !"
" A damned queer world !" agreed Saxham.
" I'd prefer to call it a blessed queer one, because, with
all its chaotic, weltering incongruities — there's a Carlyleism
for you — I love it ! I couldn't live without loving it and
laughing at it, any more than Beauvayse could get on
miniLS an affair of the heart. Ah, yes, that amatory lyre
of his is an uncommonly adaptable instrument. I've
known it thrummed to the praises of a middle-aged Duchess
— ^uite a beauty still, even by daylight, with her three
V; Js on, and am Operatic soprano, with a mascot cockatoo,
not to mention a round dozen of frisky matrons of the kind
that exploit nice boys. Just before we came out, it could
play nothing but that famous song-and-dance tune that
London went mad over at the Jollity in June — is raving
over still, I believe ! Can't give you the exact title of the
thing, but ' Darling, Will You Meet Me In The Centre Of
The Circle That The Limelight Makes Upon The Floor,
Tiddle-e-yum V would meet the case. We have Musical
Comedy now in place of what usexi to be Burlesque in
your London days, Saxham, with a Leading Lady instead
of a Principal Boy, and a Chorus in long skirts."
Saxham admitted with a cynical twitch of the mouth :
" There's nothing so short as a long skirt — properly
managed."
" You're right. And Lessie Lavigne and the rest of the
nimble sisterhood devote their gifts — Thespian and Terp-
sichorean — ^to demonstrating the fact. Oh, damned
cowardly hounds !" The voice jarred and clanged with
irrepressible anger. " Saxham, can't you see ? Brounc-
ker's sharpshooters are sniping at the women — the Sister
of Mercy and the girl ("
His glance, as well as Saxham's, had followed the tall
black figure and the slender white figure on their journey
through Death's harvest-field. But his trained eye had
been first to see the little jets and puSs of sickly hot, reddish
THE DOP DOCTOR 271
dust rising about their perilous path. They walked
quickly, but without hurry, keeping a pace apart, and
holding one another by the hand. Saxham, watching them,
said, with dry Ups and a deadly sickness at the heart :
" And we can do nothing ?"
" Nothing ! It's one of those things a man has got to
look on at, and wonder why the Almighty doesn't interfere ?
Oh, to have the fellows triced up for three dozen of the
best apiece — good old-fashioned measure. See, they're
getting near the laager now. They'll soon hr^ under cover.
But — I wonder the Convent cares to risk its ewe lamb on
that infernal patch of veld ?"
" It is my doing." Saxham's eyes were glued on the
black figure and the white figure nearing, nearing the
embrasure in the earthwork redoubt, and his face was
of an ugly blue-white, and dabbled with sweat.
" Your doing ?"
" Mine. I was called in, to find Miss Mildare breaking
down from suspense, and the overstrain of inaction. And
— to avert even worse evils, I prescribed the tonic of
danger. There was no choice In at last !"
The Sister of Mercy and the girl had vanished behind
the dumpy earth-bag walls. He thought the white figure
had glanced back, and waved its hand, and then a question
from his companion startled him beyond his ordinary
stolid self-control.
" By the way . . . with reference to Miss Mildare, have
you any idea whether she proposes taking the veil ?"
" How should I have ideas upon the possibility ?" The
opaque, smooth skin of the square, pale face was dyed
with a sudden rush of dark blood. The Colonel did not
look at it, but said, as a bullet sang upon a stone near his
boot, and flattened into a shiny star of lead :
" I would give something to hear you laugh sometimes,
Saxham. You're too much in earnest, my dear fellow.
Burnt NJal himself could hardly have been more grim."
Saxham answered :
" That fellow in the Saga, you mean. He laughed
only at the end, I think, when the great roof-beam burned
through and the hall fell in. But my castle tumbled about
my ears in the begioning, and I laughed then, I remember."
272 THE DOP DOCTOR
" And, take it from me, you will live to laugh again and
again," said the kindly voice, " at the man who took it
for granted that everything was over, and did not set to
work by dawn of the next day building up the hall greater
than before. Those old Vikings did, ' and each time the
high seat was dight more splendidly, and the hangings of
the closed beds woven more fair.' They never knew
when they were beaten, those grand old fellows, and so it
came about that they never were. By the way, I have
something here that concerns you."
" Concerns me ?"
" I think I may say, nearly concerns you. A para^
graph in this copy of the Gape Town Mercury, which, by
the way, is three weeks old."
A rubbed and shabby newspaper, folded small, came out
of the baggy breast-pocket of the khaki jacket. Saxham
received it wth visible annoyance.
" Some belated notice of one of my books." The scowl
with which he surveyed the paper testified to a strong
desire to pitch it to the winds.
" Not a bit of it. It's an advertisement inserted by
a London firm of solicitors — ^Donkin, Donkia, and Judd,
Lincoln's Inn. Possibly you are acquainted with Donkin,
if not with Judd ?"
" They are the solicitors for the trustees of my mother's
property, sir. I heard from them three years ago, when
I was at Diamond Town. They returned my last letter
to her, and told me of her death."
" They state in the usual formula that it will be to your
advantage to communicate with them. May I, as a friend,
urge on you the necessity of doing so ?"
Saxham' 8 grim mouth shut close. His eyes brooded
sullenly.
" I will think it over, sir."
" You haven't much time. A despatch-runner from
Koodoosvaal got through the enemy's lines last night with
some letters and this paper. No, no word of the Relief.
His verbal news was practically nil. He goes out at
midnight with some cipher messages. And, if you will
let me have your reply to the advertisement with the
returned paper by eleven at latest, I will see that it is sent."
THE DOP DOCTOR 273
The rather peremptory tone softened — became persuasive ;
" You must build up the great hall again, Saxham, and
building can't be done without money. And — it occurs
to me that this may be some question of a legacy."
" My father was not a wealthy man," Saxham said.
" He gave me a costly education, and later advanced four
thousand pounds for the purchase of a West End practice,
upon the understanding that I was to expect no more from
him, and that the bulk of his property, with the exception
of a sum left as provision for my mother, should be strictly
entailed upon my brother and his heirs, if he should marry.
The arrangement was most Just, as I was then in receipt
of a considerable income from my profession, and my
father died before my circumstances altered for the worse.
Independently of the provision he made for her, my
mother possessed a small Jointure, a freehold estate in
South Wales, bringing in, when the house is let, about a
hundred and fifty pounds a year. That was to have been
left to me as the younger son. But her trustees informed
me, through these solicitors, that she had changed her
mind, as she had a perfect right to do, and bequeathed
everj'thing she possessed to my brother's son, a child
who " — Saxham's voice was deadly cold — " may be about
four years old."
" A later will may have been found. If I have any
influence with you, Saxham, I would use it in urging you
to reply to the advertisement."
Saxham agreed unwillingly : " Very well."
The other knew the point gained, and adroitly changed
the conversation. It grew severely technical, bristling
with scientific terms, dealing chiefly with food-values.
The black cloud cleared from Saxham's forehead as he
lectured on the energy-fuels, and settled the minimum of
protein, fat, starch, and sugar necessary to keep the
furnace of Life burning in the human body.
Milk, that precious fluid, could henceforth only be given
to invalids and children. Margarine and Jam were severely
relegated to the list of luxuries. Sardines, tinned salmon,
and American canned goods had entirely given out. And
flour, the staff of life, was vanishing.
The Joy of battle lightened La their faces as they talked,
18
274 TUt DOP DOdtdR
forging weapons that sho>tild Oiakfe ilien enduring, stfad
Saxham warmed. His icy armour of habitual silence
melted and broke Up. He became eloquent, pouring out
his treasured projects, suggesting substitutes for ttiis, dncl
makeshifts for that and the other. He was in his element
— he knew the ground he trod. He thrust out his gHm
under-Jaw, and hulked with liis henvy shoulders as be talked
to this man who understood ; ahd every supple movement
of his surgeon's hand pointed out some fresh expedient,
as the singing bullets went by or whit-whiited about them
in the dnst, and now and then a shell burst over patient
Gueldersdorp.
iTiey parted at the Women's Laager, and as the khaki
bicycle grew small in the distance, Saxham realised with a
shock that he was happy, that life had suddenly become
s^eet, and opened! otit anetr before him in a vista, not of
shining promise, but with one golden gleam of hope in it,
to a man freed by the force of Will from the bondage of
the accursed hquoT-thirst. lYeed ! If freed in truth,
why should the sight and smell even of Brooker's sticky
loquat- brandy have set the long-denied palate craving ?
Saxham put that question from him with both hands.
And then he frowned, thinking of that adaptable instru-
ment that had thrummed an accompaniment to the arias
of the Opera soprano, as to the Society drawing-room duets
sung with the frisky married ladies who liked nice boys,
and had made tinkling music for the twinkling small feet,
and the strident voice of Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity
Theatre, and now must serenade outside a Convent-close
in beleaguered Gueldersdorp, where the whitest of maiden
lilies bloomed, tall and pure and slender and unharmed,
in a raging tempest of fire and steel and lead.
XXXI
Pray give a thought to the spy, Walt Slabberts, languishing
in durance vile under the yellow flag. Several times the
fifst-class, up-to-date, efl«otive artfjlery of his countrymen,
being brought to bear upon the gaol, had caused the captive
to bound like the proverbial parched pea, and to curse
THE DOP DOCTOR 275
with curses not only loud but fervent the indiscriminating
zeal of his brother patriots.
He was, though lost to sight behind the walls of what
Emigration Jane designated the jug, still fondly dear to
one whose pliant affections, rudely disentangled by the
hand of perfidy from the person of That There Green, had
twined vigorously about the slouching person of the young
Boer. Letters were received, but not forwarded to suspects
enjoying the hospitahty of the Government, so communica-
tion with the object of her dreams was painfully impossible.
Stratagems were not successful. A ])assionate missive
concealed in a plum-pudding — before it was put on to boil —
had become incorporated with the individuality of a prison
official, who objected on principle to waste.
On Sundays, when you could go out without your 'art
in your mouth an account of them 'orful shellses, a fair
female form in a large and flamboyant hat, whose imitation
ostridge tips Mere now mere bimdlos of quill shavings,
and whose flowers were as wilted as the other blossoms of
her heart, wandered disconsolately round her Walt's place
of bondage, waving a lily hand on the chance of being seen
and recognised. Tactics productive of nothing but blown
kisses on the part of extra-susceptible warders, and one
or two troopers of the B.S.A., who ought to have known
better. These advances Walt's bereaved betrothed rejected
with ringing sniffs of scorn, yet, of such conflicting elements
is the feminine heart composed, found them strangely
solacing.
She 'ad 'ad 'er month's notice from Sister Tobias upon
the morning following the night of the tragedy, another
score to the account of the traitor Keyse. Arriving un-
seemly late, and in an agitated state of mind — and could
you wonder, after her young man had been pinched and
took away 1 — she had mechanically accounted for her late
return in the well-worn formula of Kentish Town, explaining
to the surprised Sisters that there 'ad bin a haccident on the
Underground between the Edgeware Road and 'Ammersmiff,
an' that her sister Hemmaline had bin took bad in conse-
quence, the second being looked for at the month's end ;
and to leave that pore dear in that state — her 'usband bein;;
at his Social Club — was more than Emigration Jano 'uU
IS o
276 THE DOP DOCTOR
'ad the 'art to do. She received her dismissal to bed,
and the advice to examine her conscience carefully before
retiring, with defiance, culminating in an attack of whoop-
ing hysteria. Nor was she repentant, but defiantly elated
by the knowledge that nobody had slept in the Convent
that night, until she had run down. The character suppHed
by Sister Tobias to her next employer specified termino-
logical inexactitude among her failings, combined with lack
of emotional self-control ; but laid stress on an affectionate
disposition, and a tendency to intermittent attacks of
hard work.
She was now, with her new mistress and the kids, pigging
— you couldn't call it nothink else, not to be truthful you
couldn't — at the Women's Laager, along of them there
dirty Dutch frows. She refrained from too candid criticism
of her Walt's countrywomen, but it was proper 'ard all the
same not to call crock and muck by their right names !
Languishing in seclusion, week and week about, cooking
scant meals of the Commissariat beef, moistened with gravy
made from them patent packets of Consecrated Soup,
can you wonder that her burden of bitterness against
W. Keyse, author of all her wrongs, instrument most
actively potential in the jugging of her young man, bulked
larger evei'y day ? She was not one to 'ave the world's
'eel upon 'er without turning like a worm. No Fear, and
Chance it ! Her bosom heaved under the soiled two-and-
elevenpenny peek-a-boo " blowse " as she registered hei
vow. That there Keyse — the conduct of the faithless
Mr. Green appeared almost blonde in complexion beside
the sable villainy of the other — That There Keyse should
Rue the Day !
How to make him ? — that was the question. Then
came the dazzling flash of inspiration — but not until they
had met again.
She was circulating hungry-hearted about the brick-
built case that held her jewel — the man who had held out
that vista of a. home, and called her his good little Boer-
wife to be. We know it was a mere bait designed to allure
and dazzle — the Boer spy had caught many women with
it before. Do you despise her and those others for the
predominance of the primal instinct, the sacred passion for
THE DOP DOCTOR 277
the inviolate hearth ? Not so much they yearned for the
man as for the roof-tree, whose roots are twined about the
heart -strings of the natural woman, the spreading rafter-
branches of which shelter little downy heads.
She encountered the traitor, I say, and her eyes darted
fire beneath a bristling palisade of iron curling-pins. She
had not the heart in these days to free her imprisoned
tresses. The villain had the perishing nerve to accost her,
jauntily touching the smasher hat.
" 'Day, Miss ! 'Aven't seen you since when I can't think."
She replied with a ringing sniff and a glance of infinite
scorn that she would trouble him not to think ; and that she
regarded low, interfering, vulgar fellows as the dirt under
her feet. So there !
" Cripps !" He was took aback, but not to the extent of
taking hisself off, which he ought to. " You're fair mad
with me, an' no misty ke.'* His pale eyes were unmis-
takably good-natured ; the loss of the yellow freckles,
swamped in a fine, uniform, brick-dust colour, was an im-
provement, she could not help thinlcing. " But I only
did my duty, ]\Iiss, same as another chap would 'ave
'ad to. Look 'ere ! Come and 'ave a split gingerade."
The delicious beverage wa.s three shillings the bottle.
She frowned, but hesitated. He persisted ; she ended by
giving in. Weeks and weeks since she had walked with a
young man ! The Dutchman's saloon was closed and
barricaded ; its owner had made tracks to his Transvaal
friends at the beginning of the siege. But the aromatic-
beer cellar was one of the places open. They went in
there. Oh ! the deliciousness of that first sip of the
stinging, fizzling beverage ! He lifted his glass in the way
that she remembered, and drank a toast.
" 'Er 'ealth ! If you knew how I bin wantin' to git
word of 'er ! She's well, isn't she. Miss ? Lumme ! the
Fair Old Knock-out I got when I see the Convent standin'
empty. . . . Gone into laager near the railway works
now, you 'ave, I know. Safe, if not stric'ly luxurious.
But — I git the Regulax Hump when I tiiink of — of a
Angel like 'Er 'avin' to live an' eat an' sleep in a — a — ^in
a bloomin' rabbit-'ole." He sighed as he wiped the pungent
froth from bis upper Up.
278 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Pity you can't tell 'er so !" The sarcasm would have
its way, but it failed of his great simplicity.
" That's why I bin lookin' out for you." He blushed
through the brick- dust hue as he extracted a fatigued-
looking letter from a baggy left breast-pocket in which it
had sojourned in company with a tobacco-pouch, a pipe
which must not be smoked in the trenches if a man would
prefer to do without a bullet through his brain, a handful of
screws not innocent of lubricating medium, a clasp-knife,
a flat tin box of carbolised vaseline, a First- Aid bandage,
and a ration of bread and cheese wrapped in old newspaper.
The bread was getting deplorable, for even the dusty
seconds flour was fast dribbling out.
" You'll give 'er this, won't you, Miss, and tell her I bin
thinkin' of 'er night and d'y ? Fair live in the trenches
now ; and when I do git stroUin' round the stad, blimme if
I ever see 'er. But she's there — an 'ere's a ticker beatin'
true to 'er." He rapped a little awkwardly upon the
bulging left breast-pocket, " To the bloomin' end, wotever
it may be !"
" Oh, you— silly, you !"
She found him ridiculous and tragic, and so touching all
at once that the gibe ended in a sob. It was not the
stinging effervescence of the gingerade that made her choke
and brought the smarting tears to her eyes. It was envy
of that other girl. And then she noticed, under his left
eye, a tiny scar, and she knew how he came by it, and re-
membered what she owed him, and saw that the cha.nce
had come for her revenge. She could pierce the heart
beating under the khaki breast-pocket to its very core with
three words as easily as she had jabbed his face with her hat-
pin on that never-to-be-forgotten night. She would tell
him that the lady of his love had gone up to Jphannesburg
weeks and weeks ago. Oh, but it would be sweet to see
the duped lover's face ! She would givp him a bit of jaer
mind, too — perhaps tear up the letter.
Then flashed across the murky-black night of her stormy
mind the forked- lightning inspiration of what tl^e real
revenge would be. To take his letter — write hii^ another
back, and yet others, fool him to the top of his bent, and
presently tell him, tossing at his feet § sheaf fff billets
THE DOP DOCTOR 279
" And sepve you glad — and no more than your deservings !
Who put away my Walt ?"
She accepted the letter, only permitting herself one
scornful sniff, and put the missive in her pocket. Next day
John Tow, the Chinarpan, serenely fatalistic, smilingly per-
pendicular in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping bullets,
brought to the trench a reply, signed " Fare Air."
Thj writer Toke the Libberty of Hopeing W- Keyse was
as it J^eft her at preasent. She was Mutch obblig for his
Dear Leter Witch it 'ad made her Hapey to Know a Bjave
Man fiteing for her Saik.
" Cr'r !" ejaculated W. Keyse, below his bre^^th. His
face was radiant as hp read. Her spelling was a bit off, it
was impossible to deny. But — Cripps ! — to be called a
brave man by the owner of the maddening blue eyes, q,nd
that great thick golden pigtail. Tt^e letter went on ;
" Dear mr. Keyse yu will be Plese to Kno Jane is Sutch
a Cumfi^t to me ip Trubel- As it is Selldom Fathfpl Fronds
are To be Fownd But Jane is trew as Stele & Cold be
Trustid with lbs & lbs. no More at Preasent fypm j-r
afexn Swetarlj.
X X :s, X " Faru A^i."
His senses reeled, as under pretence of njasldng a sneeze
he pressed his burning lips to those osc^latory crosses. He
wrote her a flaming answer, begging ^ Sunday rendezvous.
She appointed a place and an hour. He went there on the
wings of love, but nqbpdy turned up except the Jane who
could be trusted with pounds and pounds.
She hurried to him trembling and quite pale, hef blue
pyep — he had never noticed that they weye bjue and refilly
pretty — wide with fright under her yellow fripge of curls
newly released from steely fetters. Her lips were apart,
but lie failed to observe that the teeth they revealed vvere
creditably white ; her cotton-gl(»ved hetfid repressed her
flut-tering heart, but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing.
He gulped as he said, with a fallen jaw and a look pf abject
jiusery that pierced her to the quick :
" Si^e — cpuldn't cpme, then ?"
" No. pore deer !" gasped the oomfort in trouble, casting
280 THE DOP DOCTOR
about for something to tell him. She had made up her
mind as she came along ; she would have her revenge there
and then, and chance it. Something kept her from laying
the candle-flame to the time-fuse. She did not know what
It was yet. But, oh ! the sharp look of terror in the thin,
eager face pierced her through and through.
" My Gawd ! She's not bin killed ?" he cried. " Don't
tell me she's bin "
" Lor', gracious goodness, no ! What will you think of
next 1" She lied, rallying him, with Jealousy eating at her
own poor heart. " Can't git away, that's all. Them Sisters
are so precious sharp. An' — ' Go an' tell 'im,' she says,
' 'e'll 'ave to put up with you this once. An' you'll come
back an' tell me all about 'im !' "
He swallowed the bait, and her spirits revived. Emigra-
tion Jane, if not the rose, lived with it. Strictly speaking,
they spent a pleasant Sunday, though when he found him-
self forgetting the absent one, he pulled himself sharply up.
He saw her part of the way home ; more she would not
allow.
"And — and" — she whispered at their parting, her
eyes avoiding his — " if she can't git out next Sunday — an'
it's a chance whether she does, that Sister Tobias being
such a watchful old cat — would you like to 'ave me meet
you an' tell you all about 'er ?"
W. Keyse assented, even eagerly, and so it began. Be-
hold the poor deceiver drinking perilous joys, and learning
to shudder at the thought of discovery. Think of her
cherishing his letters, those passionate epistles addressed
to the owner of the golden pigtail.
Think of her pouring out her poor full heart in those
wildly-spelt missives that found their way to him, and be a
little pitiful.
She did not thirst for that revenge now. But, oh ! the
day would come when he would find out and have his, in
casting her off, with what contempt and loathing of her
treachery she wept at night to picture. This feeling, that
lifted you to Heaven one instant, and cast you down to Hell
the next, was Love. Passion for the man, not yearning for
the hearth-place, and the sheltering roof, and the security
of marriage.
THE DOP DOCTOR 281
She left off walking round the gaol — indeed, rather
avoided the vicinity of the casket that for her had once
held a treasure. What would the Slabberts think of his
little Boer-wife that was to have been ? What would he
say and do when they let him out ? She took to losing
breath and colour at the sound of a heavy step behind her,
and woi^ld shrink close to the martial j&gure of W. Keyse
when any hulking form distantly resembling the Boer's
loomed up in the distance.
Oh, shame on her, the doubly false ! But — but — she had
never been so orful 'appy. Oh, what a queer thing was
Love ! If only But never, never would he. She
was mistaken.
There came a moment when W. Keyse swerved from the
path of single-hearted devotion to the unseen but ever-
present wearer of the golden pigtail.
As Christmas drew near, and Gueldersdorp, not yet
sensible of the belly-pinch of famine, sought to relieve its
tense muscles and weary brains by getting up an entertain-
ment here and there, W. Keyse escorted his beloved — by
proxy, as usual — to a Sunday smoking-concert, given in a
cleared-out Army Service Stores shed, lent by Imperial
Government to the promoters of the entertainment.
Oh, the first deHcious sniff of an atmosphere tinged with
paint and acetylene from the stage-battens and footlights,
and so flavoured with crowded humanity as to be strongly
rcininiscent of the lower troop-deck in stormy weather, when
all the ports are shut and all the hatches are battened
down ! The excess of brilliancy which must no*. *?troam
from the windows had been boarded in, and a tarpaulin
was drawn over the skylight, in case the gunners of Meisje
should be tempted to rouse the monster from her Sabbath
quiet, and send in a ninety-four-pound shell to break up an
orgy of godless Englanders. But the stuffiness made it all
the snugger. You could fancy yourself in the pit of the
Theayter of Varieties, 'Oxton, or perched up close to the
blue starred ceiling-dome of the Pavilion, Mile End, on a
Saturday night, when every gentleman sits in shirt- sleeves,
with his arm round the waist of a lady, and the taggots and
sausage-rolls and stone-gingers are going off like smoko,
and the orange - peel rainp from the upper circle back-
282 THE DOP DOCTOR
benches, and the n^it-craeking runs up and down the packed
rows like the snapping of the breech-bolts in the trenches
when the fire is hottest. . . .
Ah ! that brought one back to Gueldersdorp at once.
Meanwhile, a pale green canvas railway-truck cover,
marked in black, " Light Goods— Destructible," served as
a drop-curtain. Another, upon which the interipp of an
impossible palace had been delineated in a bewildering
perspective of red a^l blue and yellow paint-smudges,
served as a general back-scene for the performance.
The orchestra piano had been wounded by shell-fire, and
had a leg in splints. Many members of the crowded audi-
ence were in 3trapping and bandages. Drink did not flow
plentifully, but there was something to wet your whistle
with, and the tobacco-cloud that hung above the trestle-
benches, packed with black and yellow faces, as well as
brown and white, could almost have been cut with a knife.
It was a long, rambling programme, scrawled in huge,
black-paint characters on a white planed board, hung
where everyone could read it. There were comic songs and
Christy Minstrel choruses by people who had developed
vocal talent for this occasion only, and a screaming display
of conjuring tricks by an amateur of legerdemain who had
forgotten the art, if ever he had mastered it. At every new
mistake or blunder, and with each fre^h change of expres-
sion on the entertainer's streaky face, conveying the id a,
of his being under the influence of a bad dream, and hoping
to vvakc up in his own quarters by-and-by, to find that he
had never really undertaken to make a pudding in a hat, and
smash a gentleman's watch and produce it intact from some
unexpected place of concealment, the spectators rocked
and roared. Then there was a Pantomimic Interlude, with
a great deal of genuine knockabout, and, the crowning item
of the entertainment, a comic song and stump-speech,
announced to be given by The Anonymous Mammoth
Cowique — an incognito not ^imly suspected to conceal the
identity of the Chief himself, being delayed by the Mam-
rpoth's character tpp-h^t — a |ondly cherished property of the
k^tiggins brand — and the cabbage un^brell^ that went with
it, having been accidentally left behind at the Mammoth's
THE DOP DOCTOR 283
hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished by the
jib-sail collar ajid shiny bumt-cork complexion of the
corner-man, was sent to the front to ask if any lady or
gentleman in the audipnce would kindly oblige with a ten-
minute turn ?
" All right, Mister !"
A soiled cotton glove waved, a flowery hat nodded to the
appeal from beliind the acetylene footlights. The faces in
the front rows of seats, pale and brick-dust, gingerbread andl
cigar- browned European, African coimtenances with roll-
ing eyes and shining teeth ; and here and there the im-
passive, almond-ej'ed, yellow mask of the Asiatic, slewed
round as Emigration Jane rose up La the place beside
W. Keyse, a little pale, and with damp patches in the palms
of the washed white cotton gloves, as she said : If the
gentleman pleased, she could sing— just a little !
No, thank you ! She wasn't afryde, not she ; they was
all friends there. And do 'er best she would. She took off
the big flowery hat quite calrqjy, giving it to W. Keyse
to keep. The panic came on later, when the Christy -
minstrel-collared, burnt-corked Master of the Revels was
gallantly helping her up the short side-ladder, and culmi-
nated when he retreated, and left her there, standing on
the platform in the bewildering glare of the acetylene foot-
lights, a little, rather slight and flat-chested figure of a girl,
blue-eyed and yellow-haired, in a washed-out flowpry
"blowse," and a " voylet" delaine skirt that had lost its
pristine beauty, and showed faded and shabby in the yellow
gas-flare.
Oh ! 'owever 'ad she dared ? That dazzling sea of faces,
with the eyes all fixed on her, was terrifying. A big lump
grew in her throat, and the crowded benches tilted, and the
flaming lights leaped to the roof as the helpless, timid tears
welled into her blue eyes.
And then the miracle happened.
W. Keyse sat on a back-bench, the thin Cockney face a
little raised above the others, because he had sUpped a
rolled-up overcoat under him, pretending that it was to get
it out of the way, yovi understand. Always very sensitive
about his shortness, W. Keyse. And she saw his face, as
plain as you please, aqd with a look in the pale, eager eyes.
284 THE DOP DOCTOR
that for once was for Emigration Jane, her very own self,
and not for That There Other One. She knew in that
moment of revelation that she had always been jealous. Oh,
wasn't it strynge ? Her heart surged out to W. Keyse
across the gulf of crowded faces. And her eyes had in
them, all at once, the look that is bom of Love.
Ah ! who can mistake it ? It begets a solitude in a vast
thronged assemblage for you and for me. It sends its
silent, wordless, eloquent message thrilling to the heart of
the Beloved, and wins its passionate answer back. Ah !
who can err about the look of Love ?
She drew a deep breath that was her longing sigh for
him, infinitely dear, and never to belong to her, and began
her song. She sang It quite simply and naturally, in an
untutored but sweet and plaintive voice, and with the
Cockney accent that spoke of home to nearly all that
heard. And her eyes never moved from his face as she
sang.
The song was, I dare say, a foolish, trivial thing. But
the air was pretty, and the words were simple, and it had a
haunting refrain. To this effect, that the world is a big place
and a hard place, with scant measure of Joy in it, for you or
for me. Bitter herbs grow side by side with the flowers in our
Earth gardens. Salt tears mingle with our laughter ; Night
comes down in blotting darkness — perhaps in drenching rain,
— at the close of every short, bright day of sunshine. But
Life gone by, its hopes and fears and sorrows laid with
our once-beating hearts in the good grey dust to rest, I
shall meet with you again, in the Land where dreams
come true.
" The Land Where Dreams Come True." That was the
title of the song and its refrain, and somehow it caught
the listeners by the heart strings, making the women sob
aloud, and wringing bright sudden drops from the bold
eyes of rough, strong, hardy men. You are to remember
how the people stood : that scarcely one was there that had
not lost brother or sister, mother or husband, child or
friend or comrade since the beginning of the siege ; and
thus the touch of Nature made itself felt, and the simple
pathos went home to the sore quick. They sang the re-
frain with her, fervently, and when the song was done, they
THE DOP DOCTOR 285
sat in touched silence but one moment — and then the
applause came down. As it fell upon her like a wall, she
screamed in terror, and ran away behind the scene, and
was found by W. Keyse a minute later, sobbing hysterically,
with her head jammed into an angle of the wail of un-
plastered brick-work.
None saw. He put his arms manfully about the waist-
line of the flowery blouse.
" Oh, let me go ! Oh, what a wicked, wicked girl I've
bin ! Oh, it's all come over me on a sudden, like a flood !
Don't touch me — ^I'm not good enough ! Oh ! how can
you, can you ?"
She sobbed the words out, and W. Keyse had kissed her.
He did not get another utterance of her that night. She
parted from him in tingling silence. His own uneasy sense
of faithlessness to One immeasurably beloved, to whom he
had pledged inviolable and eternal fidelity, nearly prompted
him to ask her not to up and tell. But he manfully kept
silence.
The worst of one kiss of that kind is that it begets the
desire for others like it. She had turned her mouth to his
in that whirling, breathless moment, and it was small, and
warm, and climg. He tried to shake off the remembrance,
but it haunted persistently.
He knew he had beha-ved like a regular beast — a low cur,
in fact. To kiss one girl and mean it for another was, in
the Keysian Code of morals, to be guilty of a baseness. The
worst of it was that he knew, given the chance, he would
do the same thing again.
For he could not shake off the memory of the blushing
face, \\'etted with streaming tears from the wide bright eyes
that pleaded so. They were blue, too, and the fringe above
them might, by a not too exhausting stretch of the imagina-
tion, be termed golden. He heard her voice crying to him,
" How can you, can you 1" And he trembled at the thought
of the mouth that Mssed and clung.
He had known bought kisses, of the kind that brand
the lips and shame the buyer as the seller. Never the
kiss of Love, until now.
And now — was any other worth the taking ?
" Cr'ripps !" said W. Keyse. " Not much !"
286 THE DOP DOCTOR
IXXll
It was Wednesday agatiri, and Saxham came riding through
the embrasure in the oblong earthwork, and down the
gravelly glacis that led into the Women's Laager. An
obsequious Hindu, in an unclean shirt and a filthy red
turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet,
and took the bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.
It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-
river, with spare lengths of steel railway-line borne across
from bank to bank, covered with beams and sheets of
corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide chinks to let
in the much-needed air and light. A line of living- waggons,
crowded with women and children — English, American,
Irish, Dutch, and half-caste — ran down the centre of the
giant trench. In each of its sloping faces a row of dug-out
habitations gave accommodation to twice the number
that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp
cooking-f)iaces had been arranged in mihtary fashion, but
the Dutchwomen's little cofiee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung
and chips burned everywhere, and possibly they did some-
thing towards purifying the air. For, to be frank, it vied
with the native village in the compound and variegated
nature of its smells, without the Afjican muskiness of odour
that is perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The
fat, slatternly, frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest
idea of sanitation ; the Germans and Irish, blandly or dog-
gedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their unsavoury
way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic
measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared
Englishwomen, the energiitic Americans, and the sturdier
Africanders, after making what lieadway was possible
against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to the
lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to
strive. A few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with
the demon of Uucleanliness.
But the first April rainfall would turn the dry ditch
into an open sewer — a vast trough of muddy water — in
which draggled women would paddle for submerged
household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the
THS DOP DOCTOR 287
town at night and sleep in iheir own shraptiel-riddled
homes. But the majority stayed, of choice or of necessity,
incubating sickness in that fetid place where nothing
would thrive but fierce social and political hatreds, and
petty grudges, and rankling Jealousies, and shrieking
quarrels that burst out and raged a hundred times in d
day.
From one of the dlig-otit refuges Saxham nows^wLynette
Mildare coming, making her swift way between the knot^
of frowsy refugees, the negro women-servants squatting
over the Uttle cdoking-fiie^, the palHd children swarming
on the narrow pathways.
" Dr. Saxham." Her simple? brown holland skirt dM thin
linen blouse hung loosely upon her. Her face, too, had
grown thinner, and looked tired. But the eyes were no
longer unnaturally dilated, and the face had a more
healthful pallor. " ]\Irs. Greening begged me to look out
for you. She is so anxious about Berta. We have been
doing everything we can, but I am afraid the child is
seriously ill. It is the tliird shelter from the end, south
side." She pointed out the place.
He had lifted his hat with his short, brusque srtliite.
His vivid eyes wore a preoccupied look, his mobile nostrils
angrily sniffed th( villainous air.
" I'll come directly, iVIiss Mildare. But — who can exjject
childi-en to keep healthy under conditions as ihsanitary
as these ?"
" It is— horrible !" Disgust was in her face. " But
many of the women are as ignorant as the Kailii-s and Cape
boys, and they and the coolie sweepers won't carry away
refuse any more unless they're paid."
" You are sure of this V His tone was curt and official.
" I am almost certain," she told him. " I have heard
some of the women complaining that the charges grew
lugher every day. And, when I asked one of the boys why
he did not do the m ork properly, he was — rude. . . . Oh,
don't punisii him !"
He had not said a word, but a white-hot spark had
darted from his blue eye, and his grim Jaws had clamped
ominously together.
" It is my duty to put dOwn insubordination, and
288 THE DOP DOCTOR
chastise inefficiency where I encounter it. May I ask you
to point out the fellow who behaved insolently ?"
She said : " I — I think he is head of the carting-gang
A Kaffir boy they call Jim Gubo."
" That will do, thank you, Miss Mildare. You are not
alone here ?"
Her glad smile assured him of that. " Oh no, I am
with the Mother. I go everywhere with her, and I think
I am of use. I am not at all afraid of sickness, you know,
or — the other things."
" But yet," Saxham said, " you must be careful of your
health."
" You have no idea how tremendously strong I am,"
she answered him, and he broke into laughter in spite of
himself. She looked so tender, so dehcately frail a creature
to be there in that malodorous Gehenna, ministering to
the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel
Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say : "I did
not thank you the other day, after all."
" The Krupp shell came along and changed the subject
of the conversation." He added : " Were 3'^ou alarmed ?
You had rather an escape."
" I was with Mother."
" You love her very dearly ?" The words had escaped
him unconsciously. They were his spoken thought. She
flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness in her clear
girlish tones :
" More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe
God Himself will be angry with me that I have always
seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's shining through
ners and beyond it ; for He knows as no one else can ever
know what she has been since they brought me to the
Convent years and years ago."
" They " were her people, presumably. It was odd —
Saxham supposed it the outcome of that Convent breeding
— that she should speak of God as simply, to quote Glad-
stone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as
though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared
in the Christian faith by a pious Welsh mother, but
there had always been a little awkwardness about domestic
references to the Deity. In times of sadness or bereave-
THE DOP DOCTOR 289
ment He was frequently referred to. But always in a
deprecatory tone.
" Your family is not Colonial ?" he asked.
She shook her lovely red-brown head.
" I— don't know."
" Mildare is an unusual surname."
" You think it pretty ?"
He thought her very pretty as she stood there, a slender
willowy creature with the golden shadow of her rough straw-
hat intensifying the clear amber of her thoughtful eyes.
" Very."
She looked him in the face and smiled.
" So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it
belonged to someone she used to know, and her mother
was Lynette. So they baptised me Lynette Mildare.
It seems rather strange not having a name of one's own,
but really I never had one."
" Never had one ?"
Saxham echoed her half- consciously, revelling in the
play of light and shadow over the delicate face, and the
gleaming as of golden dust upon the outer edges of the
waves of red-brown hair drawn carelessly back over the
little ears.
" Not to my knowledge. Of course, I may have had
one once." She added, as he looked at her in suddenly
roused surprise, " I must have had one once." She
was looking beyond him at a broad ray of moted white-
hot sunshine that slanted through one of the wide openings
above, and cleft the thick atmosphere of the crowded place
like a fiery sword. " I have often wondered what it really
is, and whether I should like it if I heard it 1 To exchange
Lynette Mildare for EHza Smith . . . that would be horrible.
Don't you think so 1"
Saxham smiled. " I think you are Joking, and that a
young lady who can do so under the present circumstances
deserves to be commended."
She looked at him full.
" I am not joking." Borne by a waft of the sickly air
a downy winged seed came floating towards her, a frail
gossamer courier coming from the world above with tidings
that Dame Nature, in spite of all the destruction wreaked
19
290 THE DOP DOCTOR
by men, was carrying on her business. " And — I do not
even know that I am a young lady. See therfe " — she
blew a Uttle puff of breath at the moving messenger, and it
wafted away upon a new air-pilgrimage, and, rising, caught
a stronger current, and soared out of sight — " that Ls me.
It came from somewhere, and it is going somewhere. That
is all I know about myself ; perhaps as much as I shall ever
know. Why do you look ao glad ?"
His lips were sealed. The throb of selfish triumphant
exultation came of the belief that the gulf between them
was less wide and deep than he had thought it. A wd,strel
may woo and wed a waif, surely, without many questions
being asked. And then, at the clear, innocent questioning
of her eyes, rushed in upon him, soaldin.^, the memories
he had thrust away. He saw the Dop Doctor of Guelders-
dorp, his short daily stint of labour done, settling down
to drink himself into hoggish oblivion in his accustomed
corner of the Dutchman's liquor-saloon. He beheld him,
his purpose accomplished, slex^ping stertorously, spilled
out like the very dregs of manhood in the sawdust of that
foul place ; he shuddered as the bloated, dishevelled thing
roused and reeled homewards, trickling at the mouth, as
the clear primrose day peeped over the flat-topped eastern
hills. And he sickened at the thing he had been.
" I felt glad," he lied, with looks that shunned L5nQette's,
" that in your need you found ao good a friend as the
Mother-Superior. Yours must have been a sorrowful,
lonely childhood."
Her own vision rose before her, blotting out his face.
She saw the little kopje with the grave at its foot. She
saw a ragged cliild sitting there watching for the earliest
flush of dawn or the solemn folding of night's wide wing over
the lonely veld, and the coming of the great white stars. . . .
" She is much, much more than a friend. She is the
Mother." Her loval heart was in her face. " I have no
secrets from her. I tell her everything."
Was that deeper flush bom of the remembrance of a
secret unshared ? And how strange that every change of
colour and expression in the delicate face should mean so
much, so soon. He said, with a hungry flash of the gentian-
blue eyes :
THE DOP DOCTOR 29]
" Your love and oeiufidence repay her richly."
" I can do so littlo. ' There was an anxious fold between
the slender eyebrowg. " Only follow her and bo near her ;
oaiy look on as she spends herself for others, nev«r resting,
never sparing, never discouraged or cast down." Great
tears brimmed the white, darkly-fringed underlids, and
ran over. ' And she only laughs at me at night when I
cry at the sight of her dear, blistered feet."
" \ou will be able to laugh with her when this is over,"
Saxham said rather clumsily.
" Shall I ? Perhaps." Still that fold between the
fine, delicate eyebrows.
" You have seen War," Saxham went on, his own voice
sounding strange to him. " And that is a terrible ex-
perience for a woman, young or old, but you will be the
richer by it in the end, believe me, Mss ^lildare. Richer
in courage and endurance and calnmess in the presence
of danger and death, and in sympathy with the pain and
suffering inevitable under such circumstances."
" Sympathy ? They had all my sympathy before.'"
Her fair throat swelled against its encircling band of moss-
green velvet, her voice rang, her eyes flashed golden fire
under the shadow of the wide straw hat. " Do you think
it needed War to teach me how hideously women suffer ?
How they have suffered since the world began, and how they
will suffer until its end, anless they rise up in revolt once
for all, against the wickedness of men ?"
She was transformed under Saxham's eyce. The slender
virginal body increased in stature and proportions as he
gazed, and what obscure emotions seemed striving in her
face !
" Look at them," she said, indicating with a slight
revealing gesture the swarming, dowdy, listless occupants
of the crowded trench. " How patient they are, bow
resigned tc> the dreadful hfe they drag on here from day to
day, full of the horror aiKl the pain and the suffering that
you say is inevitable. Why should it be inevitable ? Did
these women who are the chief victims of it and the greatest
losers by it, choose that there should be War ? See that
poor soul svith the rag of crape upon her hat, who sits at
her door peehng potatoes. Did she desire it ? Yet her
19—2
292 THE DOP DOCTOR
young husband was shot in the trenches a': week ago
and her Uttle baby died of fever this morning. . . . And,
did those other women whose homes have been wrecked
and ruined, whose sons and husbands and fathers may
be shot, and whose children may sicken with the same fever
before night, demand of their Governments, Imperial or
RepubUcan, that there should be War ? You see them
patient and submissive because they neither realise their
wrongs or understand their rights. But a day will come
when they will understand, and then " — her eyes grew
dreamy — " I do not know exactly what will happen.
But these international questions, with others, will be
decided by a general plebiscite, the women will vote as
well as the men ; and as women are in the majority, and
every woman will vote for Peace — how can there be War 1"
" You are an advocate of Universal Suffrage, then ?
You beUeve that there must be absolute sex-equality before
the world can be — I think ' finally regenerated ' is the
stock phrase of the miUtant apostle of Women's Rights ?
I have heard this outcry from many feminine throats in
London, but Gueldersdorp," said Saxham drily, " is about
the last place one would expect to ring with it."
" ' Universal Suffrage, Sex - Equahty, Women's
Rights. . . .' " The shibboleth that Saxham quoted was
evidently unfamiliar to the girl. " I know " — there was
a sombre shadow in her glance — " what Women's Wrongs
are, but I am not very well informed about the things you
speak of. The Mother tells me that there are many well-
educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and in
New York, who have devoted their hves to the study of
such questions. Who write and speak and labour to teach
their fellow- women that they have only to band themselves
together to be powerful, only to be powerful to be feared,
only to will it to be free. When I am twenty-four I mean
to go out into the world and meet those leader-women.
Some of them, I am told, have suffered loss and ill-usage ;
some of them have even undergone imprisonment for the
sake of what they believe and teach. Well, I will hear
what they have to say, and then they will listen to me.
For until my work is done, theirs will never be accomplished.
Something tells me that with a most certain voice."
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 293
" And until that time comes V said Saxham.
Her eyes grew bright again, a smile played about her
exquisite lips.
" Until that time comes I will study and gather more
knowledge, and capacity to fit myself for a struggle with
the world."
" Tou ' struggle with the world ' !"
Her girlish pride in her high purpose being sensitive,
she mistook the brusque tenderness in Saxham' s face
and voice for irony.
" Yes. Perhaps you may not believe it, but I know
a great many useful things. Latin and French and German
and Italian, well enough to teach and translate. I am well
grounded in History and Science and Mathematics. I can
take a temperature and make a poultice, or sweep a room
and cook a dinner." She nodded at Saxham with a little
spark of laughter underlying the sweet earnestness of her
look. " Also, I have learned book-keeping and typewriting,
and shorthand. I earn enough now, by bookbinding, to
pay for my clothes. The Mother says that I am competent
to earn my Uving anywhere, and to teach others to earn
theirs. But I am not to begin until I am twenty-four.
That is our agreement."
Saxham understood the fine maternal tact that never
set this ardent young enthusiast chafing at the tightened
rein. But he said roughly :
" The Mother. . . . How can she approve yom* joining
the ranks of the Shrieking Sisterhood ?"
" She knows," Lynette explained, with adorable gravity,
" that I should never shriek."
" How will you bear parting from her ? And how will
she endure parting from you 1"
The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous
amber eyes were dimmed with moisture as she said :
" It will not be losing me. Nor could I ever bear to
leave her if I did not know that I should come back. But
I shall come back. And she will ask me what I have
done. And I shall tell her : ' This, and this, and all the
rest, my Mother, for the love of you, and for the sake of
those others who once sat in darkness and the Shadow of
Death, and now have found the Way of Peace.' "
2»4 TME DOP DOCTOR
" And those others, Beatrice ?"
Saxham knew now the secret of the haunting familiarity
of the beautiful girlish face. The delicate oval outline, the
pale wild-rose colouring, th« reddish -bro\\-n of the fine,
glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the wistful, brilliant
eyes, reproduced to a w'>nderful degree the modelling and
tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped
head in the Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Berto-
lotti and the Edinburgh Review, will always be associated
with the name of the sorrowful-sweet heroine of the most
sombre of sex-tragedies.
" Why do you call me Beatrice ?" she asked, with that
sudden darkening of those luminous eyes. He told her :
"Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Shelley
used to be my favourite among the English poets, and when
I first went to Rome, years ago, the first thing I diu was
to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery ;
and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done justice
to it. One could not forget it if one tried."
" I am glad I am like Beatrice," she said slowly. " I
have always loved and pitied her. I pray to her as my
friend among the Blessed Souls in Paradise, and she always
hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go out into
the world "
" To look for those others," Saxham interpolated. '* Tell
me who they are ?"
She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell
from her, and there was strange and terrible knowledge
in her eyes.
" They are women, and girls, and children," she answered
him. " They are the most unhappy of all the souls that
suffer on earth. For they are the slaves and the victims
and the martyrs of the unrelenting, mercOess, dreadful
pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift
them up, and say to them, ' You are free !' And one day I
will do it."
There was a duU burning under Saxham's opaque skjn,
and a drumming in his ears. His authority and knowledge
fell from him as that virginal veil had fallen from her ; he
stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her eyes,
that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an
THE DOP DOCTOE 295
avenging Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct
estimate of himself and his fellow-men. And the distance
between them, that had seemed to be lessening as they
talked, spread illimitably vast ; a dark, sunless plain,
bounded by a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of
foul swamps and pestilential marshes, where poisonous
reptiles bred in slimy, writhing knots, and the Eaters
of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the
Jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than
many men, he felt himself beside this girl a moral leper.
" Unclean, unclean !"
While that voice yet echoed in the desert places of his
soul, he heard her sajdng :
" I don't know why I should talk to you of these plans
and projects of mine. I never have spoken of them yet to
anj^one except the Mother. But — you spoke of sympathy
with those who suffer. I think you have it. Dr. Saxham,
and that you have suffered yourself. It is in your face.
And — ^you are not to suppose that I believe all men to
be "
He ended for her : " To be devouring beasts. No ; but
we are bad enough, the best of us, if the truth must be
told. And — I have suffered. Miss Mildare, at the hands
of men and women, and through the unwritten laws, as
through the accepted institutions of what is called Society,
most brutally. I would not soil and scorch your ears with
the recital of my experiences, for all that a miracle could give
me back. I swear to you that I would not !"
She touched the little ears with a smile that had pathos in it.
*' They have heard much that is evil, these ears of mine."
" And the evil has left them undefiJed," said Saxham.
" Thank you !"
She begged him again not to forgot the sick child at Mrs.
Greening's shelter, and hurried away, keeping her face
from Saxham. He knew that there was no hope for him,
that there never would be any. And he loved her — hungrily,
hopelessly loved her. Dear innocent, wise enthusiast,
with her impossible scheme for cleansing the Augean stable
of this world ! Chivalrous child-Quixote, tilting at the
Black Windmills, whose sails are whirled by burning blasts
from Hell, and whose millstones grind the souls of Eve's losi
296 THE DOP DOCTOR
daughters into the dust that makes the devil's daily bread —
how should the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp dare to love
her ? But he did not cease to, for all the height of his
self-knowledge and all the depth of his self -scorn.
He seemed to Lynette a strange, harsh man, but there
was something in him that won her liking. He had a stem
mouth, she thought, and sorrowful, angry eyes, with that
thunder-cloud of black, lowering eyebrow above them.
And he looked at her as though she reminded him of some-
one he knew. Perhaps he had sisters, though they could
}iardly be very young. Or it was not a sister. He must
be quite old — the Mother had thought him certainly thirty-
five — but possibly he had a young wife in England — or
somewhere else ? And she had spoken to him of her great
project. She wondered now at that impulse of confidence.
Perhaps she had yielded to it to convince herself that her
enthusiasm was as strong, her purpose still as clear, as
ever, in the mirror of the Future ; that no gay, youthful
reflection had ever risen up of late days between it and her
wistful eyes when she peeped in. The remembered image
of the handsome face that had laughed, even as Beauvayse
had declared :
" Even if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think
of you, and long for you, and worship you wherever I am."
The thought of Beauvayse's dying was horrible, intoler-
able. His name came after the Mother's in her prayers.
He had asked her to keep the secret — his and hers — and
called her such exquisite, impossible things for promising
that the mere remembrance of his words and his eyes as
he said them in that low, passionate, eager voice, took her
breath deliciously.
" Sweetest, kindest, loveliest. . . ." She whispered them
to herself as she hurried back to comfort worried Mrs.
Greening with the news that the doctor was coming.
Meanwhile Saxham went on his accustomed way between
the long line of waggons and the corrugated-iron lined huts
on the other hand, in a cross-fire of appeals, requests, com-
plaints. Nothing escaped him. He would pass by, with
the most casual glance and nod, women who volubly pro-
tested themselves dying, and single out the face that bore
the dull, scorched flush of fever or the yellow or livid stamp
THE DOP DOCTOR 297
of rheumatism, or ague, or liver-trouble, with a beckon of
his hand, and the owner of such a face, invariably declaring
herself a well woman, would be summarily dealt with, and
dosed with tabloid or tincture out of the inexhaustible
wallet he carried, slimg about his shoulders by its webbing
band.
" Dokter," screeched a portly Tante in a soiled cotton
bedgown and flapping kappje, appearing, copper stewpan
in hand, from between the canvas tilt-curtains of a living-
waggon. " You are come at last ; the Lord be thanked
for it ! I have much, much trouble inside." She groaned,
and laid her fat, unoccupied hand upon the aflSicted area,
adding : " I feel I shall not be quite wholesome here."
" Wat scheelt er aan, Tante ?" He spoke the Taal with
ease.
The large Tante snorted :
" What is the matter ? Do you ask me what is the
matter ? As if a dokter oughtn't to tell me that ! But
the Engelsch are regular devils for asking questions. Since
you must know, I have a mighty wallowing under my
apron-band, and therewith a pain. How is it begun 1
It is begun since middageten yesterday. And little Dierck
here has the belly-aohe, and is giddy in the head."
" Little Dierck will have something worse than the belly-
ache, and you also, if you eat of broth or vegetables cooked
in a vessel as unclean as that, mevrouw."
" Hoe ?" The large flabby face under the expansive
kappje became red as the South Af'can sunset. She
flourished the venerable copper stewpan, its rim liberally
garnished with verdigris, ancient deposit of fatty matters
accumulated at the bottom. " Do you call my good stew-
pan, that my mother cooked beef and succotash and
pottage-herbs in before me, an unclean vessel — you ? And
were the pan otherwise than clean as my hand — as my
apron !" — a double comparison of the unfortuitous kind —
" how should I alter matters in a heathen place like this ?"
Her large bosom rocked tumultuously. " Dwelling at the
bottom of a mud-hole like a frog, God of my fathers !
with bullets as big as pumpkins trundling overhead, ready
to whip your head off your body if you as much as stick
your nose above ground — the accursed things !"
298 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Th«y are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen,
Tante, so you ought to speak of them more civilly. And —
scour the pot with a double-handful of clean sand ; it will
be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here,
jongen — give me a look at the little tongue." The boy
went to him confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with
innocent wide eyes in the square, powerful face, as Saxham
swung round his wallet, continuing, " Here, mevrouw, is
a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a cup
of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting "
" Alamachtig !" she protested. " Is that the Engelsch
way of doctoring ? To put another belly-grief on the top
of the one you have got, what sense is in that ?"
" It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old
one. Give the boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water,
and remember to scour the pans."
Saxham passed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-
booted, spurred feet between the dung and chip fires
curling up in blue smoke- spirals, and the sprawling chil-
dren, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catch-
ing up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the
rruption was innocent ere he passed on, visiting every
V. ;: -gon-dwelling and cave-refuge, rating the inhabitants
of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging from
three or four of the stuffy, ill-smelling places with a heavy
frown that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine
had not yet begun to gnaw the vitals of those immured in
Gueldersdorp, Di'^ ise had here and there sprung into
active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded
commvmity with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the
hospitals were to be crowded to the doors, to remain
crowded for many months to come ; and the cry, " Room
for the sick ! more room !" was to go up unceasingly.
Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman
in rheumatic fever, whose three children had developed
measles on the previous day, and, seeing about the door of
a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome aggregation
of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direc-
tion to the mild- faced Sister who had assumed charge of
the sick. Then his voice rang out above all the feminine
and childish Babel, strong, resonant, masculine :
THE DOP DOCTOR 299
" Where are the head- boys of the gangs that I told
off to clean up and carry ash-buckets to the dumping-
place ?"
Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste
were carted to the destructor in connection with the
Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to be shattered by
one of Meisje's shells. There was no answer. Saxham
took the wore hunting-crop from under his arm, and with
an easy movement shook out the twisted thong.
" Where are those two boys ? Jim Gubo ! Rasu !"
A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked
up knowingly. " They won't carry away a cabbage-leaf
unless they're bribed, and they open their mouths wider
every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."
The young woman went back to her potatoes. The
offenders, visibly quaking, crept from under a waggon,
where they had been gambling with dry mealies for ill-
gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and
the oroTVTileBs brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned,
blue dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class.
Jim Gubo, with Uberal display of ivory, assured the Baas,
in defiance of the Baas' s own eyes and the organ in Juxta-
position, that the work had bewi regularly done. Rasu the
Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the
Presence that such neglect as was apparent was owing to
the incapacity of the hubshi and his myrmidons, Rasu's
own share of the labour and that of his fellow-countryman
being scrupulously performed.
The Presence made short work of Kaffir and Hindu.
Shrill feminine clamours filled the air as the singing lash
performed its work of castigation ; and while Saxham
scored repentance upon the hide of bis blacker brother,
holding him writhing, shouting, and bellowing at the full
stretch of one muscular arm, as he plied the other he kept
a foot on Rasu the Sweeper, so as to have him handy when
his turn came. Meanwliile. the Oriental, with tears and
lamentable bowlings, wound about the doctor's log. a
vocal worm, deprecating tyranny.
" Your Honour is my father and mother. Let the hand
of justice refrain from excoriating the person of the unfortu-
nate, wreaking double vengeance upon the hubshi, who ia
300 THE DOP DOCTOR
but fuel for Hell, like ail his accursed race, and full ex-
planation shall be made."
He was jerked upward by the scruff, as, smarting,
blubbering Africa retired to the shadow of the waggons.
" Well, what have you got to say ?"
The bellow of the town batteries, with the clack — clack —
clack ! of the HotchMss that had been removed from the
armoured train and mounted on the North Fort, reduced
the tirade to pantomime.
" This is a bad, a very bad, place for the son of my
mother." The lean brown right hand swept upwards to the
thick canopy of white smoke that the shifting breeze rolled
back from the Cemetery Earthworks. " The food of coarse
grain is diet for camels, and the water stinks very greatly.
Moreover, it is better for thy slave to die amongst defile-
ments than to carry buckets and be chased by devils in
iron pots thirsting for the blood of men. Aie — aie !"
One of the enemy's Maxim-Nordenfelts had loosed off a
group of the gaily-painted little shells. With the re-
duplicated rattle of the detonation, they passed over the
laager, bursting as they went, sending their fan-shaped
showers of splinters broadcast. Slatternly women and
scared children bolted for their burrows. Rasu the
Sweeper dived frantically between the fore and hind wheels
of a waggon, praying to all the gods of the low-caste to
ward off those wicked little bits of rending metal. . . .
" Anyone hurt ?" called Saxham.
" No one, I think," called back the strong sweet voice of
the Mother-Superior, who had come out of a hovel, where
she was tending some sick. There was a glint in her deep
eyes as she regarded Saxham' s thorough handiwork that
told her approval of castigation well deserved. Then :
" Maharaj ! Oh, Maharaj ! Succour in calamity ! Aid
for the dying ! Hai, hai, behold how I bleed !"
The red-turbaned martyr rolled in the unclean litter,
elevating a stick- like brown leg, in the lean, muscular calf
of which one of the smallest of the wicked little splinters
had, as Rasu the Sweeper dived for the waggon, found a
home.
" That has saved you a well-earned hiding, so thank your
stars for it. Let the Kaffir see to it that he insults no more
THE DOP DOCTOR 301
English ladies, or he shall pay for every word with an inch
of skin. Now put up your leg." Saxham whipped out the
splinter with a little pair of tweezers, deftly cleansed and
dressed the wound, bandaged it, and, dismissing Rasu the
Sweeper with a caution, was coming across to the Reverend
Mother when a chorus of cries and piercing shrieks broke
forth :
" Mijn Jongen ! mijn Jongen !"
She was a bulky Dutch vrouw, with a dishevelled head of
coarse black hair, and a dirty cotton gown, and dirty bare
feet in bulgy shoes that were trodden down at heel. But
with her livid, purple face and protruding, bloodshot eye-
balls uplifted to the drifting cloud of greenish lyddite
vapour that thinned away overhead, she was great and
terrible, and the very incarnation of Maternity Bereft.
One huge arm gripped the little body to her broad, pant-
ing bosom. She had called him, and he had not answered ;
she had sought and found him, just as he had slidden off the
box-seat, where he had been playing driver of the ox-span,
lying curled up against the dashboard, the little whip of stick
and string he had been at pains to make only yesterday fallen
from the lax, childish hand. The fair hair on the left temple
was dabbled in blood, that trickled from the tiny three-
cornered bluish hole. His eyes were open, as if in wonder
at the sudden darkness that had fallen at bright midday ;
the smile had frozen on the parted, innocent lips. . . .
Oh, look at this, Premier and President ! Look at this,
my Lords and Commons and militant Burghers of Re-
publican States ! Grave Ministers who decide in Cabinet
Councils that the prestige of the Government you repre-
sent is at stake, and that the bedraggled honour of the
Country can only be washed clean in one red river, flowing
from the veins of Humanity, look, look here ! You who
lust for Sovereignty, hiding rapacious Ambitions and base
lust for gold behind the splendid ermined folds of the
Imperial purple. You who resented Suzerainty, coveting
to keep in your hands riches that you could not use, re-
sources that your ignorance could not develop, greedy to
have and hold what you wrested from the Sons of Ham,
lest white men should snatch it back from you again ; and
prating of Liberty and Freedom while the necks of three
302 THE DOP DOCTOR
races of men were bending under the yoke of an oligarchy
more imperious, more pitiless, more covetous, besotted,
brutal, and ignorant than any other that the spotted
records of History can show — look here, look here !
Nations that rush to dreadful Waa", loosing the direful
threefold plagtie of Iron, Fire, and Disease to scourge and
brand and desolate the once smiling face of your Mothur
Earth, pause as you roll onwards in desolating cataclysms
of armed and desperate men, and forgetting the blood-
stained she-devil you misname Glory, look here, in the
Name of One who loved and suffered little children, rating
their iimocent bodies and spotless souls at such high value
that Little Dierck and his countless brother-and-sister-
babes that have perished of Iron, Fire, and Disease, as of
Terror and Famine, Death's twin henchmen, shall weigh
in the balance against Crowned Heads and Lords and
Commons and Presidents axid Representatives and
Deputies, until they kick the beam !
Should there be War ? Of course there should be War !
you say.
Have you seen War ? Perhaps, even as I have. And,
having seen it, dare you Justify the shedding, by men who
hold the Christian Faith, of these spilled-out oceans of
Christian blood ?
That question will be settled when the Trumpet of the
Great Angel sounds, and the Sea and the Earth shall give
up their dead, and everyone shall answer for his deeds before
the Throne of God. And until then, look to it that if you
war in any cause, the cause be a just one.
My Dierck ! My little Dierck ! God ! God !-
Standing with that tragic purple mask turned upwards
to the silent sky, and the wild eyes blazing, and the great
fist at the end of the uplifted arm brandished in the Face
of Heaven itself, the Boer moth^ demanded of her Maker
why this thing had been don© ?
" He was so good. Never a fib since last I gave him the
ox-reim end to taste. Never a lump of sugar or a cookie
or a plum pilfered— he would take them as bold as brass
before your face if you didn't give. He said the night-
prayer regularly. For the morning. Lord, Thou knowest
THE DOP DOCTOR 303
boys want to be up and at mischief as soon as they have
rubbed tho sleep out of their eyes — 'tis only natural. And
the father a God-fearing man, and me a ..^man of piety.
For when have I backslidden before Thee ? If any of mine
have hung b«bck when I told them to loop and do a thing,
or sneaked off and hid when we were inspanned for the
kerk-going, did I fail to whack them as a mother should ?
Nooit, nooit ! And now — ^Death has fallen out of the sky
upon the Benjamin of my bosom. Oh, blasted be the eye-
sight and withered be the hand of the man that sighted and
laid and fired the gun !"
She cmsed the Kaiser's blue-and-white-uniformed gunner
in every function of his body and every corner of his soul,
waking and sleeping, dying and dead, with fluent Scrip-
tural cuises. The crowded faces about her went white.
Some of the women were crying, others shook their heads :
" Thim that puts the Bad Black Wish on odhers finds
sorra knock harrd at their dure," said an Irish voice
oracularly. " An' who but herself did be callin' down all
manner av' misfortune on ivery wan that crassed her ?"
" It's a judgment — my opinion," agreed the thin young
woman who had been peeling potatoes, and who wore a wisp
of draggled crape round a soiled rush hat. " Never a shell
busted but you'd a-heered her say she hoped that one had
sent another parcel of verdant rooiaeks to Hell. And me
sitting over against her with crape on for my husband and
baby. 'Tis a judgment, that's what I say."
" Oh, hush, Mrs. Lennon !" said the Mother-Superior.
" Be pitiful and forget. She did not think — she had not
suffered. Be pitiful, now that her hour has come !"
The thick voice of the Boer woman broke out again :
" Did ever I miss of the Nachtmaal ? Alamachtig, no !
Virtuous as Sarah have I lain in the marriage-bed — never
a sly look for another, and my husband with dropsy-legs
as thick as boomstammeu, and sixty years upon his loins.
Thou knewest, and y< b the joy of my life is taken from me.
Where wert Thou, God of Israel, when they killed my
Uttle Dierck ?"
The Mother-Superior leaned to her, and threw a strong,
tender arm about the fleehy shoulders. She said, speaking
in the Taal :
304 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Hush, hush ! Remember that He gave the Joy before
He sent the sorrow. And we must submit ourselves to the
Holy Will."
The Boer woman snorted :
" As if I didn't know that better than a Papist. Look
you, have I shed one tear ?" She blinked hard bright eyes
defiantly. The Mother went on in that velvet voice of
hers, making the uncouth dialect sound like the cooing of
an Irish dove :
" Better that you had tears, poor mother ! Ah ! best
to weep. Did not our Lord weep over His dearest city,
and for His beloved friend 1 And when He pitied the
Widow of Nain, do you think His eyes were dry 1 Ah !
best to weep."
She strove to wrench herself away, shouting :
" He raised Lazarus from the dead for Mary his sister,
and she had been a shameless wench. And He gave the
other back her boy. What has He done for me 1"
The sisterly arm held her fast ; the great grey eyes looked
into hers, wet with the tears that were denied to her.
" He has given you an Angel to pray for you in Heaven."
She snorted rebelliously :
" His mother wants him down here. . . . And what is
Heaven to Uttle Dierck, when he could be sailing his boat
in the river-pools, and playing at driving the span ?"
But she let tne Mother-Superior take him from her, and
dropped her great arms doggedly at her sides, watching still
dry-eyed aa they laid him down, and Saxham stooped above
him, feeling at the pulseless heart. She saw the doktor
shake his head and lay down the little hand. She saw the
Mother-Superior coax down the eyelids with tender, skilful
fingers, and put a kiss on each, making the Sign of the Cross
on the still, childish breast, and murmuring a little prayer.
She would have screamed to avert the defiling, heathen
thing from him, but the memory of the sister-embrace and
the sister-look held her dumb.
It was only when they were stripping hiTn for the last sad
toilet, and the cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized
marbles rolled out of the pocket in the stumpy little round
Jacket she had made out of a cast-off garment of his father's
that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her grief
THE DOP DOCTOR 305
sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found
resignation. Soon she was sxifficiently herself to scold a
prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that
Little Dierck should be cofiined in his new black Sabbath
suit,
" But you old maids have no sense, no more than so
many cabbages. Little angels in the hemel can fly about
in clean nightgowns — look in the grandfather's big picture-
Bible if you don't believe me. But live boys can't loop
about without breeches. So I'll lay these by for the
next one."
xxxm
Roasting hot Chi-istmas has gone by, with its services and
celebrations, its sports and entertainments, its meagre
feasting, and its hearty cheer, a bloodless triumph followed
by the regrettable defeat sustained in the battle of Big
Tree Fort. To-day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the
flagstaff that rears its slender height over Nixey's, and
the new year is some weeks old. The blue, blue sky of
January is without a single puff of cloud, and the taint
from the trenches is less sickening, unmingled with the
poisonous fumes of the lyddite bursting-charges, and
the acrid odour of smokeless powder. It is Sunday,
when Briton and Boer hold the Truce of God, and the
church-bells ring to cafl and not to warn the people, and
sweet Peace and blessed Silence brood over the shi-apnel-
scarred veld. The aasvogels feast undisturbed on bloated
carcasses of horses and cattle lying on the debatable
ground between the Line of Investment and the Line of
Defence, the barbel in the river leap at the flies, and
partridge and wild guinea-fowl drink in the shallows, and
bathe in the dry hot sand between the boulder-stones.
The Market Square is populous with a chatting, saunter-
ing crowd of people, who enjoy the luxury of using their
limbs without being called on to displays of acrobatic
agility in dodging trundling shell. There are Irregulars
and B.S.A.P., Baraland Rifles and Town Guardsmen. There
are the Native Contingent from the stad, and a company
of Zulus, and the Kaffirs and the Cape Boys with their gas-
20
306 THE DOP DOOTOB
pipe rifles that do good service in default of better, and
bring dowTi Oom Paul's Scripturally-flavoured denuncia-
tions upon Englishmen, who arm black and coloured folk to
do battle for their own sable or brown or yellow rights. These
have donned odd garments and quaint bits of finery to
mark the holiday, and every white man has indulged in the
luxury of a comprehensive wash, a shave with hot water,
and a change of clothing, if it is obtainable. Also, drooping
feminine vanity revives in hair-waves and emerges from
underground buxrows of Troglodytic type, arrayed in
fluttering muslins, and crowned with coquettish hats, which
walk about in compan; ■ with ragged khaki and clay-stained
duck and out-at-elbows tweea, and are proud to be seen
in its brave company.
Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and
mothers, lovers and sweethearts, meet after the week whose
separating days have seemed like weeks, and visit the houses
whose pierced walls and roofs, that let the white-hot sun-
shine in through many jagged holes, may one day, so they
whisper, holding one another closely, shelter them again in
peace. Home has become a sweet word, even to those
who thought little of home before. And many who were
sinful have found conviction of sin and the saving grace of
repentance, and many more who denied their God have
learned to know Him, in this village town of battered
dwellings, whose streets are littered with all the grim
debris of War.
Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The
stately brick chimneys of the kitchen and coflee-room havo
been broken off like carrots, and replaced by tin funnels.
Patches of the universal medium, corrugated iron, indicate
where one of Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles recently
plumped in through the soft brick of the east wall end, and
departed by the west frontage, leaving two holes that might
have accommodated a chest of drawers, and carrying a
window with it. Mrs. Nixey, the children, and the women
of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the back-yard. The
waiters have developed a grasshopper-like nimbleness,
otherwise things go on aa usual.
It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long,
but less bulky, are extended in a couple of long bamboo
THE DOP DOCTOR 307
chairs on Nixey's longish front verandah. The blue,
fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over theii
supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre
modicum of inferior whisky are contained in two long
tumblers, resting in the bamboo nests cunningly devised
for their accommodation in the chair-arms.
It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and
almost too fresh to have spent the greater part of the
night, the younger upon advanced patrol-duty, and the
elder at the Stafi bombproof in the Southern Lines, where
messages come in and where messages go out, and where
reports are received and from whence orders are despatched
from sunset to the peep of day, and from peep of day to
sunset.
The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by
active service, but their originally white flannel trousers, if
patched, discoloured, and shrunken by amateur lavations,
boast the cut of Bond Street ; their shirts, if a trifle ragged,
are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas
shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay.
Beauvayse has runmiaged out and mounted a snowy double
collar in honour of the day, with a knitted silk necktie of
his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match is
wound about his naa-row, springy waist, and knotted to
perfection. Both men might be basking on an English
river-bank after a stiff pull up-stream, or resting after a
bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for the revolver-
lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the
butts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the
bandoliers and belts that lie handy on a table, and the Lee-
Metford carbines that lean in an angle ma»ie by the house-
wall and the verandah end. Also, but for the tension of long-
sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it plain that,
though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them un-
expectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things.
It is a look that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped
on every face in Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty
possesses and pervades even unsentient things. The
Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of its lofty
staff, bathed in the gulden, glowing atmosphere of this
January day, may, in an instant's space, give place to tho
20—2
/*
308 THE DOP DOCTOR
red signal of danger ; the bugle, now silent, may at any
moment blare out its loud and dismal note of warning ; the
bells that call with peaceful insistence, " Come to church !
come to church !" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging
scared townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You
never know. For Greneral Brounckers, though a God-
fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday gim-practice,
quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence,
even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.
Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by
knocking the lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing
his opinion that the weed might be a worse one.
" Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down
to me for at Kxeils' auction yesterday," states Captain
Bingo, " it's simply smokin' gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-
six runs me into, how much apiece V He yawns cavem-
ously, and gives the calculation up. " Always was a duffer
at figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the
act of throwing the nearly smoked-out cigar-butt away, he
pulls himself up, and, economically impaling it on his
penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.
" Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be
no balm left in Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking a grey-
green eye at him in sleepy derision, " and no tobacco in
Gueldersdorp."
" Klreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the
box of a hundred now," says Captain Bingo ; " and I've
a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em. We smoked tea in the
Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the very devil
with the nerves. All Jumps and twitches, you know, after
a pipe or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talk-
ing of women, I wonder where my wife is 1"
He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse.
Beauvayse responds with the air of one who has suffered
boredom from the too frequent enumeration of this con-
jecture. " Not knowing, can't say." And there is
another silence.
" How she got the maggot into her head," presently
resumes Lady Hannah's spouse, " I can't think. I did
suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora Corr — woman
who managed to bum her own and a lot of other people's
THE DOP DOCTOR 309
fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid
business — ^had been quenched for good that momin* you
took those fifty chaps of the Irregulars out for what she
tooutd call their ' baptism of fire.' "
" That's newspaperese," yawns Beauvayse, his supple
brown hands knitted at the back of his sleek golden head.
Groes with ' the tented field ' and cdsrui hdli : cherchez
la femme and cui bono ? "
" She's got the lingo at her finger-ends and in her blood,
or we wouldn't be cherchaying now," says Bingo dolor-
ously. " I asked her if she was particularly keen on gettin'
kiUed "
" Shouldn't have done that. Put her on her mettle not
to show funk if she felt it," mumbles Beauvayse.
" A man can't always be diplomatic," grumbles Bingo.
" Anyhow, she'd seen a bit of a scrap at the outset of
affairs, when the B.S.A. went out with the Armoured Train,
and was wild with me for wantin' to deprive her of another
* glorious experience.' . . . And next morning she rides out
with a Corporal and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible
of their responsibility, and wishin' her at Cape Town, she
in toppin' spirits and as keen as mustard. It was about
six o'clock, morning, and she hadn't been gone five minutes
before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein'
pounded at like Jimmy ! I was on the roof with the
Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the binoculars, until
the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen
habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under
'em, and hoverin' troopers. But I did make out that your
party had got into diificulties "
" We opened on 'em at a thousand yards, and pushed to
within five hundred, and if the fellows in charge of the
Hotchkiss could have got her into play," Beauvayse inter-
rupts rather huffily, " we'd have been as right as rain."
" Possibly. If I hadn't been on special duty that day,
and aa nervous as a cat in a thunderstorm, I'd have volun-
teered to bring No. 2 Troop of A out to the rescue, instead
of Heseltine. As it was, I nearly fell off the roof when I
saw my wife coming, one trooper, as pale with fright as a
piece of soap, supportin' her on his saddle, another man
leading the mare, dead lame and the Corporal's hairy.
310 THE DOP DOCTOR
Plugged in the upper works, the Corporal, poor beggar !
but he'd managed to stick on somehow until they got to the
Hospital. Have you ever had to deal with a woman in
hysterics 1"
Beauvayse nods sagely.
" Once or twice."
" Once is an experience that lasts a man all his lifetime.
Phew !" Captain Bingo mops his large pink face. " Never
had such a dressing-do \vn in my life."
" But what had you to do with the Corporal getting
chipped ?"
" The Lord only knows !" says Bingo piously. " But, if
you'd heard her, all the rest of the day and half through
the night ! . . ."
" I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. " Mine's the
next bedroom to yours, you know."
" ' Oh, the blood ! Oh, the blood !' . . ." Not unsuc-
cessfully does the spouse of Lady Hannah attempt to
render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping screech of
hysteria. " ' Damn it, my dear !' I said, tryin' to reason
with her, ' what else did you expect the fellow had got in
him ? Sawdust V That seemed to rouse her like nothing
else. . . . Turned on me like a tigress, by the living Tinker !
— called me everytliing she could lay her tongue to, and
threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued
to Outrage every feeling of decency that association with
such a thundering brute hadn't uprooted from her nature."
" Whe— «w !"
Beauvay«e's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.
" Of course, her nerves were knocked to smithereens, and
a man can overlook a lot, under the circumstances. She
was a mere Jelly when the bombardment began " goes
on rueful Captain Bingo.
" — ^Rather !" confirms Beauvayse. — " Lived in the
hotfel cellar for the first fortnight, only emergin' from
among the beer-banels and wine-casks and liqueur-cases
after dark "
" — ^To blow me up and forgive me, turn and turn about,
until daylight did appear. Luckily," reflects Bingo, with
a rather dreary chuckle, " I had plenty of night-duty on
just then, and so escaped a lot."
THE DO? DOCTOR 311
" That gave her her chance to shoot the moon !" hints
Beauvayse, in accents raufiSed by his long tumbler.
" By the Living Tinker !" asseverates Captain Bingo,
jerked out of his reclining attitude by vigorous utterance
of the expletive, " you could have bowled me over with a
scent-squirter when I came back to brekker and found her
gone, and a cocked-hat note of farewell left for me on the
dressing-table piacushion, in regular elopement style ; and
another for the Chief, sayin' — he read it to me — that
she'd gone to retrieve the Past, with a capital ' P,' and
hoped to convince him ere long that one of her despised
sex — underlined, ' despised sex ' — can be useful to her
country."
" ' Can be useful to her country,' " repeats Beauvayse.
" Question is, in what way !"
" Damme if I can imagine !" bursts explosively from the
deserted husband. " All I know up to date, and all you
know, is that before it was quite Ught she drove out of our
lines in Nixey's spider, his mouse-coloured trotter pullin',
and her German maid sittin' behind, wavin' a white towel
tied to the end of a walkin' -stick of mine, and went straight
over to the enemy. We hear in the course of things from
a Kaffir despatch-ninner that she's stayin' in a hotel of
sorts at TweipanSj where Broimckers has had his head-
qiiarters siuce he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein.
And for any further information vo may knock our rotten
heads against a brick waU and tAvjddJe our thumbs. Never
you marry. Toby, my boy '"
A V-shaped veia 8well?i and darkens between the hand-
some grey-green eyes and on the broad forehead, white as
a girl's where the sun-tan Joave^s off. Beauvayse takes hia
cigar again from his mouth, and knocks the ash off de-
liberately before he responds :
" Thanks for the advice."
" Be warned," says Captain B:nj;o sententiously, " by
me. Know when you're well off. as I didn't. Take the
advice of your seniors, as I was too pig-headed a fool to
do. and don't put it in the power of any woman to make
you «is rottenly wretched as 1 am at thin minute."
" Why I women can make y^xx rottenly wretched,"
admits Beauvayse, with a confirmatory oreak of the
312 THE DOP DOCTOR
bamboo chair. " Bub, on the other hand, they can make
you awfully happy — what 1"
Captain Bingo throws his long legs off their resting-place,
and sits sideways, staring rather owlishly at his young
friend. He shakes his head in a dismal way several times,
and sucks hard at his cigar as he shakes it.
" For a bit, but does it last ? When I came down to
hunt you up last June at the cottage at Cookham "
" Look here, old man !" The bamboo chair creaks
angrily as Beauvayse in his turn sits up and drops his own
long legs on either side of it, and drives the foot-rest back
under the table seat with a vicious punch. " Don't remind
me of the cottage at Cookham, will you ? It's one of the
things I want to forget just now."
" You were as proud as Punch of it last June. Have
you let it ?" pursues Bingo, ignoring his junior's request.
Beauvayse yawns with ostentatious weariness of the
subject.
"No; I haven't let it."
" Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised.
Somethin' like this : ' To let, Roselawn Cottage, Cook-
ham : a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence. Small
grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat,
stables, a pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duo-
decimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by Rellis. Ideal nest
for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have
become the real thiug if owner hadn't been whisked off in
time to South Africa.' And a dashed good job for him.
For you've had a decentish lot of narrow escapes, Toby, my
boy !" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo, disregarding his
junior's forbidding scowl, " and come out of a goodish few
tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so,
more through luck than wit ; but that little entanglement
I'm delicately alludin' to was one of the closest things on
record in the career of a Prodigal Son."
" Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day."
Beauvayse pitches away his cigar, knocks a feather of ash
from his clean silk shirt, and folds his arms resignedly on
his broad flat chest.
" Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever
strike you," goes on Captain Bingo doggedly, " that if that
THE DOP DOCTOR 313
wire from the Chief asking for your address hadn't found
me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you out
at the — I won't repeat the name of the place, since you
don't seem to like it — ^you'd have been married and done
for, old chap — any date you like to name between then and
the beginning of the war ? And, to put things mildly, there
would have been the mischief to pay with your people."
" Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily ; " there would
have been an awful lot of bother with my people."
" Not that I object to the stage myself," Captaia Biago
says, waving a large, tolerant hand ; " and it seems getting
to be rather the fashion to recruit the female ranks of the
Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a prettier and cleverer
little woman than Lessie . . . What are you stoppin' your
ears for ?"
" I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. " It's a — twinge
of toothache."
" All I've got to say is," declares Captain Bingo, " that
marriage with one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes
a blank draw, but marriage with one's inferior is a howling
error. And if you had done as I'd stake my best hat you
would have done, supposin' you'd been left to loll in the
lap of the lovely Lessie "
Beauvayse Jumps up in a rage.
" Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on
listening to this ? You're simply maundering, man, and
my nerves won't stand it."
" Oh, very well ! But you haven't the ghost of a right
to lay claim to nerves," Captain Biago obstinately as-
severates. " Now look at me."
" I'm hanged if I want to !" declares Beauvayse. " You're
not a cheering object." He drops back into the bamboo
chair again.
" Flyblown, do I look ?" inquires Bingo, with dispas-
sionate interest.
" Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without
removing his eyes from the whitewashed verandah-pillar
at which they blankly stare.
" Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy
under 'em ?" Captain Bingo demands of his younc; friend
with unmistakable relish. " ' Yes ' again ? And 1 grouse
314 THE DOP DOCTOR
and maunder ? Of course I do, my dear chap ! How
can I help it ? A married man who, for all he knows,
may be a widower •"
" I wish to God I knew I was one !**
" My good fellow ?"
" You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his
shoulder.
Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling iaiees,
regards his Junior with circular ey* s staring out of a large,
kind, rather foolish face of utter consternation.
" That you wished to God you were a widower ?**
" Well, I mean it."
XXXIV
•' Good Lord !"
There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain
Bingo says heavily :
" Then you did marry th6 Lavigne after all ? When
was it "
" We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's
a fortnight before you came down with — his wire."
" By the Living Tinker, then it xcas a genuine honeymoon
after all !" A faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's
large perturbed face.
' ' Don' t be epigrammatic , Wrynche . " The dull weariness
in the young voice gives place to quick affront. " And
keep the secret. Don't give me away."
" Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted
me, away 1 Tell me that."
Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between
the declc-chairs with a single stride, and puts a big kind
hand on the averted shoulder.
" Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and
takes the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the
Englishman who responds to some display of solicitude or
affection on the part of a comrade. " Don't mind my
rotting like this. There axe times when one must let off
steam or explode."
" I thought — and ao did a few others, the Chief among
*em — that South Africa had saved you by the skin of your
teeth,' f ays Captain Bingo, smoking vigorously, and driving
THE DOP DOCTOR 315
his hands very deep into his pockets. " Confoundedly
odd how taken in we were ! I could have sworn, my part,
that you'd Just stopped short at "
" At nri ftldn g a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates
Beauvayse. " If you'll go back and sit decently in your
chair, instead of standing behind me rattlin' keys and
coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on my
head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening ?"
" Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after
a noiseless prowl to the coffee-room window.
Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so
fiercely that they crswk again.
" I — ^I was desperately hard hit over Lassie a year
ago
" So were a lot of other young idiots."
" That's a pleasant reflection. They were."
" Of course, I " — Bingo's large face becomes very red —
" I inferred nothing in any way against Miss Lavigne's
chara Dash it, I beg your pardon ! I ought to call
her Lady Beauvayse."
" Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It
would rub things in rather too much," says Beauvayse,
paling as the other has reddened.
" Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, " to get
used to it ?"
" No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. " And don't
assume a delicacy in speaking of the — the lady, because
it's unnecessary. As I've said, I was very much in love.
She had — kept house with a man I knew, before we came
together, and fchere may have been other affairs — for all
I can tell, at least — I should say most probably." Some-
thing in Captain Bingo's face seems to say " uncommonly
probably,' though he utters no word. " But she was awfully
pretty, and I lost my head." He shuts his eyes and leans
back, and the lines of his young face are strained and wan.
" I— I lost my head."
" It's — it's natural enough," volunteers Capi-ain Bingo.
There is another short interval of silence in which the
two men on Nixey's verandah see the same vision — lime-
lights of varying shsides and colours thrown from different
angles across a darkened garden-scene where impossible
316 THE DOP DOCTOR
tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled water-
fall tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling
foam. The nucleus of a cobweb of quivering raj's, crossing
and intersecting, is a dazzling human butterfly, circling,
spinning, waving white arms like quivering antennae,
flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that
are in her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her
rounded waist and wrists, gleam like fireflies from the
folds of her diaphanous skirts, and sparkle on her fingers.
A provokinig, beguiling Impertinence with great stage eyes
encircled by blue rims, a small mouth painted ruby-red,
a complexion of theatrical lilies and roses, and tiny,
twinkling feet that beat out a measure to which Beauvayse's
pulses have throbbed madly and now throb no more.
" It began in the usual way," he goes on, waking from
that stage day-dream, " with suppers and stacks of flowers,
and a muff-chain of turquoise and brilliants, and ended up
with "
" With an electric motor- brougham and a flat in May-
fair. Oh Lord, what thunderin' donkeys we fellows are !"
groans Captain Bingo, rubbing his head, which has hair of
a gingery hue, close-cropped until the scalp blushes pinkly
through it, and rubbing nothing in the way of consolation
into the brain inside it.
" I bought the cottage at Cookham as a surprise for her
birthday," goes on the boy. " She's a year or two older
than me '*
" And the rest," blurts out Captain Bingo. But he
drowns the end of the sentence in a giant sneeze. " Must
have caught cold last night without knowin' it. Dashed
treacherous climate this," he murmurs behind the refuge
of a pocket-handkerchief. " And so you bought the
cottage for Lessie ? Another nibble out of the golden
cheese that the old man's nursing up for you, — what ?
And in thingumbob retirement by the something-or-other
stream you hit on the notion of splicing the lovely Lessie
Lavigne. Poetry, by the Living Tinker !"
" Do you want to hear how I came to cut my own throat ?"
snarls the boy , with white, haggard anger alternating with red
misery and shame in his young, handsome face ; " because
if you do, leave off playing the funny clown and listen."
THE DOP DOCTOR 317
" Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. Ton
my word, I assure you !'* asseverates Bingo. " You're
simply a bundle of irritable nerves, my dear chap, and
that's the truth."
" You wouldn't wonder if you knew . . . Oh, damn it,
Wrynche !" — the young voice breaks in a miserable sob —
" I'm so thundering miserable. And all because there-
there was a kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its
mother."
" Whew !" Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to
a long, piercing, dismal whistle, which so upsets a gaunt
mongrel prowling vainly for garbage in the gutters of
Market Square that he puts up his nose and howls in
answer. " Was that how you fell into the " He is
Dbviously going to say " trap," but with exceeding clumsi-
ness substitutes " state." And wonders at the thing
having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when con-
founded newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.
" That's because I signed my name ' John Basil Kdward
Tobart,' " explains Beauvayse ; " and because the Registrar
— a benevolent old cock in a large white waistcoat, like
somebody's father in a farcical comedy — ^wasn't sufficiently
up in the Peerage to be impressed."
" Weren't there witnesses of sorts ?" hints Bingo.
" Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my
man Saunders— the discreet Saunders who's with me here.
And a fortnight later came the appointment," goes on the
boy. " And — I was gladder than I cared to know at
getting away. She — Lessie — meant to play her part in
the ' Chiffon Girl ' up to the end of the Summer Season,
and then rest until . . ." He does not finish the sentence.
" I suppose she's fond of you — what ?" hazards Captain
Bingo.
" She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully
cut up at my going, and I provided for her thoroughly
well, of course, though she has heaps of money of her own.
And when I went to stay with my people for a night before
sailing, I'd have broken the — the truth to my mother
then, only something in her face corked me tight. From
the moment I took the plunge, the consciousness of what
a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a snowball.
318 THE DOP DOCTOR
But on the voyage out " — a change comes into the weary,
level voice in which Beauvayse has told his story — " I
forgot to grouse, and by the time we'd lifttsd the Southern
Cross I wasn't so much regretting what I'd done as wonder-
ing whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done
it ? Up in Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne
air, and the rousing hard work, the keen excitement and
the tingling expectation of things that were going to happen
by-and-by, that have been happening about us since
October, were like pleasant drugs that keep you from think-
ing. I only remembered now and then, when I saw Lessie's
photograph hanging on the wall of my quarters, and the
portrait she had set in the back of my sovereign-case, that
she and me were husband and wife." He gives a mirthless
laugh. " It makes so little impression on a fellow's mind
somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with a woman
and answer a question or two put by a fat, middle-aged
duffer who's smiling himself into creases, and give your
name ^nd say, ' No, there's no impediment,' and put on
the ring and pay a fee — I believe it was seven- and-six —
and take a blotchy certificate and walk out — married."
" It never does take long, by Gad !" agrees Captain
Bingo with fervour, " to do any of the things that can't
be undone again."
" Undone. . . !" Beauvayse sits up suddenly and turns
his miserable, beautiful, defiant eyes full on the largo,
perturbed face of his listener. " Wrynche, Wrjoiche !
I've felt I'd gladly give my soul to be able to undo it, ever
since I first set eyes on L5mette IVIildare !"
Captain Bingo gives vent to another of his loud, dismal
whistles. Then he gets out of his chair, large, clumsy,
irate, and begins :
" I might have known it, with a chap like you. Another
woman's at the bottom of all your bellowing. You're
not a bit sick at having brought an outsider — a rank
outsider, by Gad ! — ^into the family stud ; you're not a
rap ashamed at havin' disappointed the old man's hopes
of you, for you know as well as I do that when you'd done
so win' your wild oats and had your fling, you'd have come
in when he rang the bell and married Lady Mary IMenzies.
You're not; a damned scrap sorry at having broken your
THE DOP DOCTOR 319
mother's heart, though you know in the bottom of your
soul that she scented this marriage in the ^ind, and
had an interview with the Chief, and went down on her
knees to him — her knees, by the Living Tiuker ! — to give
you the chance of breakin' off an undesirable connection !"
Beauvayse is out of his chair now. " Is that true — about
my mother ?" he demands, blazilng.
" I'm not in the habit of lyin'. Lord Beauvayse !" states
Captain Bingo hufl&iy.
" Don't fly off like a lunatic. Bingo, old man. How did
you find — that — out ?"
" Your cousin Townham told me."
" Damn my cousin Townham for a dried-up, wiggy,
pratin' little scandalmonger !"
Captain Bingo retorts irately :
" Damn him if you please ; he's no friend of mine. As
yours, what I ask you is, between man and man, how far
have you gone in this fresh affair ?"
Beauvayse drives his hands deep into the pockets of his
patched flannels, and says, adjusting a footstool with his
toe over a crack in the board- flooring, as though the
operation were a delicate one upon which much depended :
" I've told her how I feel where she's concerned, and that
I care for her as I never cared yet, and nevei- shall care, for
anyone else."
The faint grin da\\-n8 again on Captain Wrjmche's large,
kindh^ worried face.
" How many times have you met ?"
" Only four or five times in all," says Beauvayse. " I'd
set eyes on her twice before I was introduced. I couldn't
rest for thinking about her. She drew me and drew
me. . . . And when we did meet, there was no strangeness
between us, even from the first minute. She just seemed
waiting for what I had to own up. And when I spoke,
I — I seemed to bo only saying what I was meant to say. . . .
From the beginning of the world ! And you'd understand
better if you'd seen her near "
" I have seen her in the distance, walking with the
Mother-Superior of the Convent. A tall, slight girl. Looks
like a lady," says Bingo, " and has jolly hair."
" It's the colour of dead leaves in autumn suushine or
320 THE DOP DOCTOR
a squirrel's back," raves the boy, " and she's beautiful,
VVr3niche. My God ! so beautiful that your heart stops
beating when you look into her face, and nearly Jumps out
of your body when a fold of her gown brushes against you.
And I swear there's no other woman for me in Ufe or death!"
" I shouldn't be in such a cast-iron hurry to swear if
I were you," Captain Bingo replies Judicially. " And —
I've heard you say the same about the others "
" It was never true before. And she's a lady," pleads
Beauvayse hotly. " A lady in manners, and education,
and everything. The sort of girl one respects ; the sort
of girl one can talk to about one's mother and sisters "
" You'd talk about your mother to a Kafi&r washer-
woman," Captain Bingo blurts out. " Better you should,
than go hanging about a Convent-bred schoolgirl and telling
her you'll never care for anybody else, when you've got
a legal wife, and, for all you know, a family of twins at
home ia England."
The footstool, impelled by a scientific lift of Beauvayse' a
toe, flies to the other end of Nixey's verandah. " Is one
mistake to ruin a man's life ? I'll get a divorce from my
wife. I will, by Heaven !"
" You told me not to maunder Just now," says Bingo,
with ponderous sarcasm. " Who is the maunderer, I'd
like to know 1 By the Living Tinker, I should have thought
that this siege life would have put iron into a man's blood
instead of — of Creme de Menthe. Are you takin' those
dashed morphia tabloids of Taggart's for bad-water colly-
wobbles again ? Yes ? I thought as much. Chuck 'em
to the aasvogels ; stick to your work — you can't complain
of its lackin' iuterest or variety — and let this girl alone.
She's a lady, and the adopted daughter of an old friend of
my wife's, and don't you forget it !" Biago's gills are red,
and he puffs and blows as large, excited, fleshy men are
wont to, " If you do you'll answer to me !"
" I tell you," Beauvayse cries, white-hot with passion,
and raising his voice incautiously, " that I mean to marry
her. I tell you again that I will div "
" Do you want the man in the street and every soul in
the hotel to know your private affairs V* demands Bingo.
^' If so, go on shoutin'. As to your bein' a widower, the
THE DOP DOCTOR 321
chances are on the other side. . . . Gueldersdorp ain't
exactly what you would call a healthy place just now.
And as to divorcin' your wife, how do you know she'll
ever be accommodatin' enough to give you reason ? And
if she did, do you think a girl brought up in a Catholic
Convent would marry you, even if you called to ask her
with a copy of the decree absolute pasted on your chest ?
Hang it, man, your mother's son you ought to know
better ! And — oh come, I say !"
For Beauvayse sits down astride an iron chair, and lays
his shirt-sleeved arms on the back-rail, and his golden,
crisply-waved head upon them.
" I — I love her so, Wrynche. And to stand by and see
another man cut in and win what I've lost by my own
rotten folly hurts so — so damnably." His mouth is
twisted with pain.
" Is there another chap who wants to cut in ?" Bingo
demands.
" You know one gets a bit clairvoyant when one is mad
about a woman," says Beauvayse, lifting his shamed wet
eyes and haggard young face from the pillow of his
folded arms. " Well, I'm dead certain that there is another
man who — who is as badly hit as me."
" Who is the other man ?"
" Saxham !"
" The Doctor ! Shouldn't have supposed a fellow of
that type would be susceptible now," says Bingo. " Gives
an uncompromisin' kind of impression, with his chin like
the bows of an Armoured Destroyer, and his eyebrows
like another chap's moustaches."
" And eyes like a pair of his own lancets undemeatli
'em. But he's a frightfully clever beast," says Beauvayse.
" And what he wants in looks he makes up in brains. And
— and if he knew there was a scratch against me, he might
force the running and win hands down. So hang on to
my secret by your eyelids, old fellow, and don't give me
reason to be sorry I told "
" You have my word, haven't you ? And, talking about
scratch entries," says Biaigo, inspired by a sudden rush of
recollection, " I ain't so sure that the Doctor — though,
mind you, this is between ourselves — is the sort of wooer
21
322 THE DOP DOCTOR
a parent of strict notions would be likely to encourage.
Do you happen to have come across a goggle-eyed, potty
little Alderman Brooker ? — a Town Guardsman who runs a
general store in the Market Place — that's his place of busi-
ness with the boarding up, and the end butted in by a
Creusot shell that didn't burst, luckily for Brooker. Well,
this beast buttonholed me months ago, and began to spin
a cufifer about Saxham."
" What had the dirty little bounder got to say ?" asked
Beauvayse, stiifening in disgust, " about a man he isn't fit
to black the boots of ?"
" Nothing special nice. Said Saxham had lost his
London connection through getting involved in a mess
with a woman," says the big Dragoon.
" Don't we all get into messes of that kind ? What
more ?" demands Beauvayse.
" Said the Doctor had kicked over the traces pretty
badly here. Pitched me a tale of his — Brooker' s — having
often acted as the Mayor's Deputy on the Police Court
Bench, Brooker being an Alderman, and swore that he'd
liad Saxham up before him a dozen times at least in the last
three years, along with the Drunks and Disorderlies."
" It sounds like a hanged lie !"
" If I didn't say as much to Brooker," responds Captain
Bingo, " I shut him up Kke a box by referrin' politely to
glass houses, knowin' Brooker had been squiffy himself
one night on guard, and by remindin' him that men who
talk scandal of their superior officers under circumstances
like the present are liable to be Court-Martialled and given
beans. And as the Chief, and Saxham %vith him, dropped
on Brooker in the act of smuggling lush into the trenches
the other day, I fancy Brooker's teeth are fairly drawn.
Though he swore to me that there isn't a saloon-keeper or
a saloon-loafer in the town that doesn't know Saxham by
the nickname of the Dop Doctor."
" The man don't exist who objects to hear of the dis-
qualifications, mental and physical, of a fellow who he's
thought likely to enter the lists with him in the — in the
dispute for a woman's favour," says Beauvayse, with a
pleasant air of candour. " And though the story sounds
like a lie, as I've said, there's a possibility of its being the
THE DOP DOCTOR 323
other thing. I'm sorry for Saxham — that goes without
sayin' — though I don't like hia overbearin' scientific side
and his sledge-hammer manner. But that a man with a
record of that kind should set his heart upon a girl like
Lynette IMildare is horrible, intolerable, Wrync he ; and while,
for the man's own sake, I should respect his beastly secret,
for her sake and in her interests, and if I consider that he's
putting himself forward at the risk of my — my prospects
and my hopes, I shall make use of what I know."
" You don't mean you'd spHt on the man !" splutters
Bingo ; " because, if you do "
" All's fair in Love and War," says Beauvayse, with a
ring of defiance in his pleasant, boyish voice, and a gleam
of triumph in his beautiful sleepy eyes. " And this is
Love in War. You've put a trump card in my hand against
Saxham, whether you meant to or not, and when the time
comes, I shall play it."
He gets up and lounges away. And Captain Bingo,
emitting another wailing whistle as ho slews round to stare
after the tall, retreating figure with the crisp, golden head,
is sure of nothing so certainly as that Beauvayse will play
that trump card. He is repentant for having broached
the Doctor's secret as he climbs up by the narrow iron stair
that leads out upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, to relieve
his commanding ofl&cer at the binoculars.
XXXV
You are invited, the very Sunday upon which the pre-
viously-recorded conversation took place, to make the
acquaintance of the sprightly P. Blinders, Actiug- Secretary
to Commandant Selig Brounckers, Head Laager, Transvaal
Republic and Orange Free State's United Forces, Tweipans.
P. Blinders, a long-bodied, short-legged young Dutch
apothecary of the Free State, with short-sighted eyes be-
hind hugely magnifying spectacles, and many fiery pimples
bursting through the earthy crust of him, possibly testi-
fying to the presence of volcanic fires beneath, had acted
in the clerkly capacity to the Volksraad at Groenfontein.
When Government did not sit at the Raad Zaal, Blinders,
21—2
324 THE BOP DOCTOR
as calmly as any ordinary being might have done, dispensed
Jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the counter of his store.
These are the three heroic besoms employed by enlightened
and conscientious Boer housewives for sweeping out tbo
interiors of their famiUes.
Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete. The thiifty
mother buys a foot or so, and pinches off a bolus of tho
required magnitude thrice in the year. No dosing is
allowed in between ; the members of the family get it when
the proper time comes round. To everyone his or her share,
not forgetting the baby.
When P. Blinders came away, he left his grandfather to
keep store, previously explaining to the aged man the differ-
ence between hydrocyanic acid and almond-essence for
cake-flavouring, powders of corrosive sublimate and
Gregory's. By a subtle transition the apothecary-clerk then
became the epistolary right-hand of General Broimckers,
whose wife, son, and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up
his personal staff. And round the Commandant's living-
waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and Con-
fusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues — English
severely excepted — made Babel. And, side by side with
the domestic, decent virtues weltered all the vices rampant
in the Cities of The Plain.
It goes without saying that the fresh site of Head Laager
had been cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped
plateau among low, flat-topped hills. The single street of
Tweipans bounded it upon the east, and a rocky ridge
upon the western side that might have been the vertebra
of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected
camp and village from British shell-practice.
Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered
timbers and fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and
guns dismounted from their carriages, were to be seen, near
the dismembered or disembowellfid bodies of the beasts
that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, de-
composing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence
for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was
everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the
works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt
upon a war-map.
„
THE OOP DOCTOR 32fi
Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches
where each fighting unit had his separate box of provisions
sunk in the earth beside him, and his cooking-fire of chips
and dry dung, and ate and slept and smoked and shot as
he thought good. And in despite of such fires, the unre-
stricted space and pure hill - air notwithstanding, the
noisome ditches wherein the cribbed, cabined, and con-
fined defenders of Gueldersdorp alternately grilled and
soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, marvels of sanitary
purity compared with the works of the besiegers, and the
abominable camps, where, in the absence of a nocturnally
active Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers,
stench took you by the throat and nose, while filth absorbed
you over the ankles.
A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you,
made you turn away, and then the immense disorder of
the camp seized and held your eyes.
Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of
provisions and boxes of ammunition, were piled about in
mountainous heaps. Of military organisation, discipline,
authority, law, as these are understood by civilised nations,
there was nothing whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens
and felt billycocks, hobnobbed with men in the gaudiest
uniforms ever evolved by the theatrical costumier. Green
velvet and gold lace, topped by cocked hats that had de-
spoiled the ostrich to make a human biped vainly ridicu-
lous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had no rigiments
belongun' to 'um at all at all ! and had come over from
the Distressful Country to make a bould bid for glory, with
the experience of warfare acquired while lurking behind
hedges with shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour
with the Land League.
Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of
sixteen fought side by side with the fine flower and the
lusty prime of Boer manhood, and many had their wives
and children with them under the Transvaal colours, and
not a few had brought their mothers. When an officer had
any order to give his men, he prefaced it with the Boer
equivalent for " Hi !" When the men had heard as much
as they considered necessary, they would say, " Come on ;
let's be going," and slouch away.
326 THE DOP DOCTOR
P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded
smells no more than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes
occurred to him as odd that the duties of a Secretary should
embrace the peeling of potatoes and the performance of
other duties of the domestic land.
He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's
living-waggon, polishing off the last of a panful, when
Van Busch came along. English being an unpopular
language, the big Johannesburger and the little Free Stater
exchanged greetings in the Taal.
" Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk
a piece with me," said Van Busch. " I have something to
say to you about my sister that marritd the German
drummer, and is stopping at Kink's Hotel."
You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat,
and knocking the sweat from the leather lining-band. He
was dressed in a black broadcloth tailed-coat, flannel shirt,
and cord breeches, wore heavy veldschoens, and carried a
Mauser rifle, as did everybody else, and had a long hunting-
knife as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas
pouch-belt, and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus
panoplied, he accui-atelyresembled ten thousand other men.
But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was
not that of an agriculturist, and the strange light eyes, rust-
coloured like those of an adder, and, like the ophidian's,
set flush with the oddly-flattened edges of their orbits, were
at variance ^rith the high, rounded, benevolent temples
crowned with a thinning brake of curly hair. The rapacious
mouth, with the thick scarlet lips, belonged to the eyes.
He had put on his hat again, but he swept it off in a
flourishing bow, as Mevrouw Brounckers, in high -kilted
wincey, a man's hat of coarse straw perched on her weather-
beaten, sandy-grey head, came stumping do^Ti the waggon-
ladder, calling for her potatoes. What was that lazy
bedelaar of a Secretary about, and it nearly eleven of the
clock ? Didn't he know that her Commandant liked his
meals on time ?
Mevrouw received the politeness less graciously than the
potatoes. That man with the eyes and the greedy red
mouth was a woman-eater, she knew. Not for sheep and
bear would she, grandmother as she was, trust herself in
THE DOP DOCTOR 327
house or barn alone with a klant like that. But her Com-
mandant had uses for him, the twinkling-eyed, soft-
marmered, big rogue. She watched him walking off with
P. Blinders, for whom she entertained a distaste grounded
on the knowledge that no good ever came of these double-
tongued Free Staters,
And this one could write in the accursed shibboleth of
England as well as in the Taal. She shook her head as the
potatoes rattled into the big pot hanging over the fire. And
he walked out on Sundays with the young German woman
who was maid to the refugee-widow staying at Kink's
Hotel, and who never showed her nose inside the Gere-
vormed Kerk, the godless thing ! or went out except by
bat-light. Of that one the Mevrouw Brounckers had her
opinion also. And time would show who was right.
Meanwhile, Van Busch and P. Blinders, who had left
the dorp behind them, and strolled up the almost dry bed of
a sluit leading up amongst the hills, conversed, in Sabbath
security from English artOlery, and reassuring remote-
ness from Dutch eavesdroppers. And their theme was the
German drummer's refugee- widow who never went to kerk.
Van Busch, who found it helpful in his business never to
forget faces, had met her on the rail, months back, travelling
up first-class from Cape Town. Early in October it was,
while the road was still open. And men who kept their
eyes skinned went backwards and forwards and round and
about, getting the hang of things, and laying up accurate
mental notes, because the other kind were even more risky
to carry than the nuggets and raw dust that are hidden in
the padded linings of the gold-smugglers' heavy garments.
The lady, small, dark, stylishly-tailored, and with bright
black, bird-like eyes, was not a German drummer's widow
when Van Busch and she first met. She had chatted in
her native English with her square, bulky, sleek-looking
fellow-passenger, well-dressed in grey linen drill frock-coat
and trousers, with blazing diamonds studding the bosom
of his well-starched shirt and linking his cuffs.
The wide felt hat he politely removed as he came into
the carriage revealed to Lady Hannah a tall, expansive,
well-developed forehead. Below the line of the hat-rim
he was burned coffee-brown, like many another British
328 THE DOP DOCTOR
Colonial. The observant eye of " Gold Pen " took in the
man's vulgarly handsome features and curiously light
eyes, and twinkled at the flaring jewellery and the whiskers
of obsolete Dundreary pattern that stood out on either side
the jewelled one's full, smooth chin. His large, bold, over-
red mouth, with the curling outward flange to it, gave her
a disagreeable impression. One would have been grateful
for a beard that hid that mouth.
Lady Hannah found it curiously disquieting until her
fellow-traveller began to talk, in a thick, lisping voice, with
curiously candid and simple intonations. He presented
himself, and she accepted him at his own valuation, as a
British Johannesburger, and influential member of the
Chamber of Mines, possessing vast interests among the
tall chimneys and white dumping-heaps of the Rand.
Van Busch called his efforts to be ingratiating " sucking
up to " the lady. He sucked up, thinking at first she might
be the wife of the English field officer who had been ordered
down from the north to take over the Gueldersdorp com-
mand. Then he found she was only the grey mare of an
officer of the StafE. . . .
She plied Van Busch in bis triple character of politician,
patriot, and mine-owner with questions. Thought she
was juicing a lot of information, whereas Van Busch was
the one who learned things. Kind of playing at being
newspaper-woman she was, and taking notes for London
newspaper articles all the time. Had laid out to be a httle
tin imitation of Dora Corr, or, say, nickel-plated, with cast
chasLags. Was burning for an opening in the diplomatic
go-betweening line ; wanted to dabble in War Correspon-
dence, and so on. But Van Busch gathered that the biggest
egg in the little lady's nest of ambitions was the desire to
do a flutter on the Secret Service lay.
She wanted to be what he termed a " slew," and she
would have called a spy. He fiddled to her dancing, and
wearied before she did.
" What Woman has done Woman may do !" was the
burden of her ceaseless song. And when she left the train
at Gueldersdorp, ^^ Au revoir " said she with a flash of her
bright black eyes, nodding to the big Colonial, who was so
excessively civil about handing out her dressing-cas« and
THE DOP DOCTOR 329
travelling-bag, " Many thanks, and don't give me away
if you should happen to meet me in a different skin one of
these fine days, ^Ir. Van Busch."
" Sure, no ; not I," said the burly Johannesburger, with
an effusion of what looked like genuine admiration. " By
thunder ! when it comes to playing the risky game there's
no daring to beat a woman's. Give me a petticoat, say I,
for a partner every time."
" Bravo !" Her eyes snapped approvingly. She waved
a little hand towards a large pink officer of the British
Imperial Staff, who was looking into all the first-class com-
partments in search of a wife who had been vainly en-
treated to remain at Cape Town. " There's my husband,
who entertains the precisely opposite opinion. But he
hasn't your experience — only a theory worn thin by
generations of ancestors, all chivalrous Conservative
noodles, who kept their females in figurative cotton-wool.
Do let me introduce you. I'd simply love to have him
hear you talk."
Van Busch did not pant to make the acquaintance of the
Military Authorities. He thanked the impulsive Lady
Hannah, but made haste to climb back into the train. The
big pink officer recognised the object of his search, and
strode down the platform bellowing a welcome. As Lady
Hannah waved in reply, the Johannesburger made a long
arm from the window, and thrust a pencil-scrawled card
into the tiny gloved hand.
" S's'h ! Shove that away somewhere safe," said Van
Busch, in a thrillingly mysterious whisper ; " and, re-
member, any time you want to learn the lay of the land and
follow up the spoor of movements on the quiet, that Van
Busch, of the British South African Secret War-Intelligence-
Bureau, is the man to put you on. A line to that address,
care of W. Bough, will always get me. And with nerve
and josh like yours, and plenty of money for palm-oil . . ."
His greedy mouth made a grinning red gash in the smug
brown face with the fine whiskers of blackish-brown. His
cold eyes scintillated and twinkled unspeakable things at
the httle lady as the train carried him away.
Assuredly Van Busch understood women no less
thorouorbly than his near relative, Bough. He knew that
330 THE DOP DOCTOR
yoii could bait for and catch the sex with things that were
not tangible. Men wanted to be made sure of money or
money's worth. And for the co-operation of P. Blinders
in the adroit little game by which the German drummer's
refugee-widow who stayed at Kink's Hotel, and only went
out after dark, had been relieved of a handsome sum, Van
Busch had had to part with nearly one-third of the swag.
No wonder he felt and talked Uke a robbed man.
" All very well to talk," said P. Blinders, scratching his
newest pimple, and looking with exaggerated moonish sim-
plicity at nobody in particular through his large round
magnif5dng spectacles. " But what could you have done
without me, once the little Englishwoman smelled the
porcupine in the barrel ? When she drove out to your
friend Bough's plaats at Haarsgrond in that spider, pre-
tending she was your sister that had married a Duitscher
drummer in Gueldersdorp, and buried him, and was afraid
to be shut up in the stad with all those lustful rooineks,
you thought it would be enough to tell her Staats Police
or Transvaal burghers were after her to make her creep
into a mousehole and pay you to keep her hid. And it did
work nicely — for a while. Then the Englishwoman got
angry — oh, very angry ! — and told you things that were not
nice. Either you should put her in the way of getting the
information she wanted, or good-bye to her dear brother,
Hendry k Van Busch, and hLs friend Bough."
" For a pinch of mealies I'd have let the httle shrew
go, by thunder !" said the affectionate relative. " But my
good heart stopped me. The country wasn't safe for a
couple of women to go looping about," he added. " And
one of them with two hundred pounds in Bank of England
notes stitched into the front of her stays. ..."
" Five hundred pounds," said the Secretary, with
pleasantly twinkling spectacles. Van Busch's stare was
admirable in its incredulity.
" Sure, no, brother ; not so much as that ?"
" Trudi told me," smirked P. Blinders.
" You and her seem to be great and thick together," said
Van Busch, with a flattering leer. The little ex-apothecary
placed his hand upon his chest, and said, with a gleam of
tenderness lighting up his spectacles :
THE DOP DOCTOR 331
" I have sighed, and she has smiled." He went on, "If
your friend Bough had been brave enough to try and take
away that wad of banknotes from the little English-
woman, he would have met trouble. For in a pocket of her
gown she carries a revolver, and sleeps with it under her
pillow by night ; that is another thing that Trudi has told
me." He kissed his fiuQgers, and waved them in the direc-
tion of Kink's Hotel. " She is a lovely maiden !" He blew
his nose without the assistance of a pocket-handkerchief,
and continued :
" Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the
Englishwoman's coffee that would have made her sleep
while he stole that money, or he might even have killed her
quietly, and buried her on the farm. But a man who does
that is not so clever and so wise as the man who makes a
plan that gets the money and keeps friends all round, and
makes everybody happy — is he, now ? And that man is
me, and that plan was mine. From P. Blinders you
have genuine information to sell the Englishwoman, and
when she has bought it, paying well for it, and written it
ail down in her despatches to the Commandant at Guelders-
dorp, she hands the letters back to you to be smuggled
through the lines, and pays through the nose for that also.
And who shall say she is cheated ? For the letters do get
through " — the pimply countenance of P. Blinders was
quite immobile, but the eyes behind the great spectacles
twirled and twinkled with infinite meaning — " a week or
so after date, perhaps, but what is that ? Nothing —
nothing at all."
" Nothing," agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled
pleasantly in each other's faces for a minute more. Then
said Van Busch, with a loud sigh :
" But what I have to tell you now is something. The
Englishwoman has got no more money. Ask Trudi, if you
think I lie. And, of course, the plan was a good plan,
and you were a smart fellow to hit on it ; but now the two
hundred poimds is gone-
((
Three hundred remain to get." P. Blinders briskly
held up five stumpy red fingers and tucked down the thumb
and Uttle finger, leaving a trio of mute witnesses to the cor-
rectness of his arithmetic.
332 THE DOP DOCTOR
" No more remains to get. The cow has run dry."
The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise.
" Hoe ? What is this I hear 1" he demanded with
indignation. " Nothing left, and I have not had but a
hundred and fifty out of the five hundred. There has
been dishonesty somewhere. There have been tricks,
unbefitting the dealings of scrupulous Christian men.
Foei, foei !"
Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled
amiably down into the indignant eyes behind the spectacles.
Then he said, Tv-ith his most candid look and simplest
lisp :
" No tricks, brother ; all fair and above-board. Ask the
Commandant whether Van Busch is square or not ? He
knows that the hundred and fifty was paid you honestly
on his account, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And
you're not the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no,
you'll never do that, never ! Go and see him now, and settle
up. I had a talk with young Schenk Eybel this morning,
and he says the answer to the screeve you wrote to the
Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp — to patch up an
exchange of the Englishwoman for that slim kerel of a
Boer's son they got their claws on at the beginning of the
siege — has come in under the white flag this morning.
Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without
Walt Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the
old man on his grey pony near the Field Hospital."
The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The
ex -apothecary faltered :
" What — ^what is this you say ? The money paid me on
the Commandant's account — ^when it was to be a secret
between us. . . . Foei, foei ! This is unfair. And suppose
I have spent it, how shall I replace it ? Do you wish to
ruin an honest man ?"
Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly.
At least, it seemed so, for he turned sharp round, and
trotted off with sorrowfully-drooping black coat-tails,
in search of the meek grey pony and the terrible old man.
But the front view of the Secretary displayed a counten-
ance whose pimples radiated satisfaction, and spectacles
that woro r.|:<:ht with joy. Much — very much — would
THE DOP DOCTOR r.)3
P. Blinders have liked to have kept that hundred and fifty,
but his fear had proved greater than his desire.
He had paid every tikkie of the money faithfully to
Brounckers, and his hands were metaphorically clean,
and his neck comfortably safe. He was the poorer by a
hundred and fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and
experience ; and — he chuckled at the thought of this —
in the joy of knowing himself, in postscripts appended to
those despatches of the Englishwoman's, to have poked sly
sarcasm at the British Lion. Whose spiny tail P. Blinders
imagined to be lashing, even then, at the prick of the goad.
For another thing, very pleasant to think of, he had
successfully pitted the cunning behind his giant spectacles
against the superior villainy of Mr. Van Busch of Johannes-
burg.
XXXVI
The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind
two green-shuttered, blinded windows at Kink's Hotel,
and was a sister of that good Boer ]\Tijnheer Hendryk Van
Busch — " a sister indeed !" snorted Mevrouw Kink ; and
never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of
doors at all before dark, and had a maid who did her hair,
and wore her own in waves, the impudent wench ! and
whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and
skirt-bands, had fashionable London tradesmen's labels
inside them, was the only person in the village of Tweipans
and for a mile round it — good Nederlands measure — who
did not know that she was an English prisoner-of-war.
Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its
hardships, as its alarms and excursions, but she plumed her-
self on having accomplished something of what she had set
out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of days when
she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had
behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood
and Imperial sympathies. But his valuable services had
been rendered for so much more than nothing that Lady
Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was wont
to describe as " stony." She had sent for Van Busch
to tell him that the position was untenable. She would
334 THE DOP DOCTOR
evacuate it, when he could manage to get hold of Nixey's
mouse- coloured trotter and the spider, left in the care of
Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.
A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear
the mouse-coloured trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony
ground, and the crack, crack of the sentries' Mausers,
followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches. . . . She
could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation,
flaming on the greenish gloom of the room with the closed
shutters and drawn- down blinds :
" STmRENO Story from the Seat of Hosttuties :
Lady War-Correspondent runs the Gauntlet of
Boer Rifles."
" Speshul. Hextry Speshul !"
* ♦ ♦ ♦ »
Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she
got through the lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons
over the splashboard, and sink into the arms of the husband
loved better than aught save Glory, gasping, as her heroic
spirit fled
* * * -^ *.
" Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots
on ?"
Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable
of the two forbidding beds Kink's principal guest-chamber
boasted, and ran her unoccupied needles through her
interminable knitting, a thick white cotton sofa-cover or
counterpane of irritating pattern — and stood over against
her employer in an attitude of sulky submission. She
was a square-shouldered, sturdily- built young woman of
twenty-five, with round eyes of pinky-blue garnished with
white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a superb and aggressively-
brilliantined head of fair hair elaborately dressed, waved,
and curled.
The hair was all attached to Trudi's scalp. Lady
Hannah had lain in bed morning after morning, for weary
weeks, and watched her " doing it," and wondered that
any young feminine creature with such arms, such skin,
and such hair should be so utterly unattractive. But
she had lived all these weeks in this one room with Trudi,
had languished under her handmaid's lack of intelligence,
THE BOP DOCTOR 335
had seen her eat, wielding her knife with marvellous
dexterity, and, wakeful, tossed the while she snored.
And every morning, after MevrouM' Kank had brought in
coffee, snorting whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous
eye, or whenever the German drummer's widow struck her
as being more foreign of manners and appearance than
usual, Lady Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself
as for a promenade outdoors, lift the comer of a blind,
steal a glance at the seething, stenching single street of
Tv^eipans between the slats of the green shutters, and —
unpin her veil and take off her hat without a word. . . .
By eleven o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of
tongues would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swag-
gerers, the velveteen-coated, wide-awaked loafers, the filthy
tatterdemaUons of all nations and their womankind would
have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the
unwilling Trudi, was accustomed to venture out for what
she called, with some exaggeration, " A whiff of fresh air."
Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the pickets at
either end of it, and the sentries posted at longish intervals
all down its length, the street of new brick and tin, and old
wooden houses that made Tweipans, belonged to Lady
Hannah then. Accompanied by Trudi, whose quality of
being what I have lieard called " deaf- nosed " with regard to
noisy smells, she arrived at the pitch of envying, she would
stumble up and down amongst the rubbish, or ^^■ade through
the slush if it had been wet, and stop at favourable points
to search with her night-glass for the greenish-blue glow-
worm twinkles of distant Gueldersdorp, and wonder whether
anj'body there was thinking of her under the white stars
or the drifting scud ? . . .
But what was Trudi saying ?
" The gracious one cannot have her boots."
" Why not ?" asked Lady Hannah, with languid in-
terest. Trudi struck the blow.
" Because she has none."
" No boots ? Well, then, the walking-shoes."
Trudi smiled all over her largo face. This placidity
should not long endure.
" The gracious one has no shoes either. Boots and
shoes — all have been taken away. Nothing remains except
336 THE DOP DOCTOR
the quilted bedroom slippers the gracious one is wearing.
And it is impossible to walk out in bedroom slippers."
" I suppose it is." Lady Hannah yawned. " Well,
suppose you go and look for the boots. They may have been
carried away by mistake, hke " She wondered afresh
what could have become of that transformation coiffure ?
" There is no mistake." Trudi announced. " And— the
gracious lady forgot her little gun beneath her pillow this
morning. That also is missing," volunteered Trudi, who
had had her instructions and scrupulously acted up to them.
" My revolver has been stolen ?" Lady Hannah sprang
from her chair, made rapid search, and was convinced.
The Browning revolver had been certainly spirited away.
Red patches burned in her thin little face, and her
round black eyes regained some of their lost brightness.
Nothing like a spice of excitement for bringing you up to
the mark. Just now she had felt positively mouldy, and
here she was, herself again.
" Nobody came into the room in the night. I sleep
with the key round my neck, and if they had opened the
door with another, I should have awakened on the instant.
Nobody has been in the room to-day except the Frau
Kink " — ^you will remember that a German drummer's
widow would naturally converse in her defunct spouse's
native language — " the Frau Kink, with the cofifee-tray.
She did not come near the bed. . . ." The suddenness and
force of the suspicion that shot up in Lady Hannah's
mind lifted her up out of her chair, and set her upon her
feet. " It must have been you. Was it you ?"
She looked hard at Trudi, and Trudi sank upon her bed
and dissolved in noisy weeping.
" Ach, the wickedness !" she moaned. " To suspect of
such shamelessness a poor young maiden brought up in
honesty. . . . Ach, ach !"
But Lady Hannah went on :
" Yesterday morning, when you were so long in coming
back with hot water, and I opened the door and looked out
into the passage, I saw you whispering with a little stumpy,
pimply man, in a long-tailed black coat and large spec-
tacles. Who is he, and of what were you talking ?"
Trudi did not at all regard the verbal sketch of P. Blinders
THE DOP DOCTOR 337
as a correct one, but though her love was bluid to his
pimples and ignored his stumpiness, she could not deny the
spectacles, which were to her as peepholes affording visions
of a blissful married future.
" He is a Herr who brought me news from my Mutti
at home in Germany. She is sick, and my father also, and
all my little brothers and sisters are sick too," gulped Trudi,
sobbing and wallowing and rasping her flushed features
against the knobbly counterpane of the most uncomfort-
able of the two beds, " because they hear that I am in this
place, and they so greatly fear that I will be dead."
" You aren't dead yet. And you told me when I engaged
you that you were an orphan brought up by an aunt."
" Pay me my vage," demanded Trudi, lifting a defiant
and perfectly dry countenance, and launching the utterance
in the forbidden English language, " and I vill now go.
I vish not to stop here longer."
" Very well, but where are you going ?"
" That," remarked Trudi, tossing her elaborately-
diessed head and relapsing into her native language,
" has nothing to do with the gracious lady."
There was insolent triumph and unveiled spite in the
large face attached to the elaborate coiffure. The gracious
lady, realising that Trudi formed the one link between
herself and the rough, strange, suspicious, unfriendly male
world outside, pocketed her pride to temporise. Let Trudi
remain as companion and attendant to the German refugee-
widow yet another week, and the month's due of wages,
already trebled in virtue of a service involving risk, should
be substantially increased. . . . But Trudi only snorted
and shook her head, and Lady Hannah found herself con-
fronting not only a rat determined upon abandoning a
sinking ship, but malignantly inclined to hasten the vessel's
foundering.
What was to be done ? It is quite possible to be brave,
adventurous, and daring without a revolver, its absence may
even impart a faint sense of relief to one, as being no longer
under the necessity of shooting somebody with it at a pinch,
but without boots or shoes, and a Trudi to put them on,
Lady Hannah found herself at a nonplus. To conceal the
fact from the rejoicing Trudi, she moved to the window
2'^
338 THE DOP DOCTOR
and drew the blind aside, and was instantly confronted
with a row of round, staring eyes, the nose belonging to
each pair being flattened eagerly against the glass,
" Oh !" exclaimed Lady Hannah, dropping the blind in
consternation at this manifestation of public interest.
A snorting chuckle from the malignant Trudi fanned the
little lady's waning courage into flame. She crossed the
room and turned the door-handle.
The door was locked from the outside, the key having
been removed to accommodate the eye of Mevrouw Kink,
who reluctantly removed it to unlock the door, and announce
that Myjnheer Van Busch had asked to see his sister,
as she ushered the '/isitor in.
Sisters are not sensitive as a rule to subtle alterations in
the regard of their brothers, but the German drummer's
refugee-widow could not but read in the face and de-
meanour of her relative a perceptible diminution of interest
in a woman w ho had no more money. . . . He kept on his
broad-brimmed bat and pulled at his bushy whiskers as
he exchanged a palpable wink with Trudi, who was accus-
tomed, when the gracious lady's brother called, to retire
with her knitting behind the shiny American cloth-covered
screen that coyly shielded the washstand from a visitor's
observation.
Those flat, light eyes of the visitor's twinkled oddly as
Lady Hannah's indignant whisper told of the missing
footgear and the vanished revolver, and her conviction
that the screened knitter was the active agent in their
spiriting away.
" You believe the girl's slewed on you, eh, and that things
are going to pan out rough ? Well, sure, that's a pity !"
The big man lolled against the deal table, covered with a
cloth reproducing in crude aniline colours, trying to the
complexion, but gratifying to the patriotic soul of Mevrouw
Kink, the red, wliite, and blue stripes of the Vierkleur,
with the green staff-line carried all round as an ornamental
border. " And I'd not wonder but you were right." He
stuck his thumbs in his belt, and asked, with his hatted
head on one side and a jeering grin on his bold red mouth :
" So, now, and what did you think to do ?"
Lady Hannah controlled an impulse to knock off the
THE DOP DOCTOR 339
big man*3 broad-brimmed felt, and even smiled back in the
grinning face. . . . One very little lady can hold a great
deal of anger and resentment without spilling any over,
if she is thoroughly convinced that it would be imprudent
as well as useless to display either.
" As you gather, I intend returning to Gueldersdorp
to-morrow at latest. I shall not take my maid, as she
wishes for her own reasons to remain behind. Please
have the mare and spider here by mid-day coffee-time. We
can drive north towards Haargrond and double back
when we're beyond the lines, as the coursed hare would do."
Van Busch's red mouth gleamed, curved back from his
tobacco- stained teeth. He said with meaning :
" Boers shoot hares — not run them."
" They may shoot or not shoot," proclaimed Lady
Hannah. " I start to-morrow."
" Without boots or shoes ?" asked the red-edged, yellow,
fanged smile.
" Barefoot if I must," she answered, with all the more
spirit that she felt like the hare struggling in a wire.
" Please send for the mare and the trap. I leave this place
to-morrow."
" The mare and the spider have been commandeered
for the use of the United Republics," said Van Busch.
As the angry colour flamed up in Lady Hannah's small,
pale cheeks, he added, shrugging his shoulders and spreading
his hands : " Bough did his best to save them for you, no
bounce ! But could one man do anything against so
many ? Sure no, nothing at all !"
She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its
quilted satin slipper.
" Do you suppose T haven't guessed by this time that
Bough the Africander and Van Busch the British-Johan-
nesburger are one Boer when it suits them both ?"
His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks
of old tattooing obliterated by an aci(i burn. Jerked as he
raised it to stroke and feel his ^vhisker8. Something else
upon the hand, in the sharpened state of all her senses,
struck out a spark of old association, and recalled a najne
once known. She went on.
" How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough ?
22—2
340 THE DOP DOCTOR
You provoke the question when I see you wearing the
Mildare crest and coat-of-arms."
He had turned the deeply -engraved sard with his brown
thumb and clenched his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed
his mind, and took off the ring and handed it to her.
" I had this ring off Bough, that's a real Uve man, and
a thundering good pal of mine, for all your funning. The
chap it belonged to died at a farm Bough owned once.
Somewhere in Natal it might have been. And the bloke
who died there was a big bug in England, Bough always
thought. But he came tramping, and hauled up with
hardly duds to his back or leather to his feet. Sick, too,
and coughing like a sheep with the rinderpest. Bough
was kind to him, but he got worse and worse. One night
Bough was sitting up with him reading the Bible, when he
made signs. ' Take this ring off of my finger and keep it,'
says he. ' I've got nothing else to give you, but I reckon
the Almighty' 11 foot your bill, for you're a first-class
Christian, if ever there was one.* Then he went in, and
Bough buried him in regular fancy style "
" And sent the girl to the nuns at Gueldersdorp, or was
she there already ?"
Van Busch was in the act of taking back the sardonyx
signet-ring. His hand Jerked again, so sharply that the
ring was jerked into the air, fell to the floor, and rolled
under the table. He stooped and reached for it, and asked,
with his face hidden by the pa,triotic tablecloth :
" What girl do you mean ?"
His dark iace was purple- brown with the exertion of
stooping as he rose up. Lady Hannah answered :
" The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way
at Gueldersdorp has an orphan ward, a singularly lovely
girl of nineteen or twenty, whose surname is Mildare.
And it struck me Just now — I don't know why now, and
never before — that she might be "
" Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What
like is this one ?" Van Busch twisted the ring about his
little finger, and spoke with a more sluggish lisp and slurring
of the consonants than even was usual with him. " Is
she short and square, with black hair and round blue eyes,
and red cheeks and thick ankles ?"
THE DOP DOCTOR 341
Lady Hannah, despite all her recently-gained experience
of Van Busch, had not yet mastered his method of eliciting
information.
" Miss Mildare is absolutely the opposite of your descrip-
tion," she declared. " She is quite tall, and very slight
and pale, with slender hands and feet, and reddish-bronze
hair, and eyes the colour of yellow topaz or old honey,
with wonderful black lashes. ... I have never seen any-
thing to compare " She stopped.
What strange eyes the man had, full of lines radiating
from the pin-point pupils, scintillating like a snake's. . . .
He said, in his thick, lisping way :
" A beauty, eh ? And how long might the nuns have
had her ?"
" The Mayor's wife told me she has been under the
care of the Convent ladies for some seven years."
His brown full face looked solid, and his eyes veiled
themselves behind a glassy film. He was thinking, as he
said :
" And her name is Mildare, eh ? And you know her 1"
" I have met her once. She was introduced to me as
Miss Lynette Mildare. But just now I find my own affairs
unpleasantly absorbing. I am suspected in this place,
Mr. Van Busch, and if not actually a prisoner, am certainly
under restraint. For how much money down will you
undertake to extricate me from this position, and convey
me back to Guelder sdorp ?"
He shook his head, and for once the scent of gain did not
rouse his predatory appetite. He was wondering how it
should never have occurred to him before that the scared
little white-faced tiling might have fallen into kindly hands,
and been nursed and cockered up and made a lady of ?
He was puzzled to account for her remembering the name
that had belonged to the man whose grave was at the foot
of the Little Kopje. He was conscious of an itching curiosity
to find out for his friend Bough whether it really was the
Kid or no ? What was the little fool of a woman saying
in her shrill voice ?
" It would be burning your boats, I am quite aware.
But if it pays to burn them " she suggested, with her
black eyes probing vainly in the shallow ones.
342 THE DOP DOCTOR
He roused himself.
" A thousand pounds, Enghsh. You've not the money
here ?"
" No."
" Or a cheque ?"
Her laugh jangled contemptuously.
" Do you Boer spies carry cheque-books — upon Secret
Service ?"
" I am no Boer, but aji honest, square-dealing Britisher.
How often have I to tell you that ? Do you suppose you
are a prisoner here because I slewed on you ? Wrong, by
God ! Perhaps I kept things back a bit for fear you would
cut up, as women do, and go into screeching-fits. Sure now,
that's what any man would have done." His tone of
injury was excellently feigned, and his lisp was simplicity
itself. " And to call me a dirty spy, when I got you
firHt-hand information, and ran your letters through to
Gueldersdorp, at the risk of my blooming neck. . . . Well,
you'll be ashamed when you get back there and isee those
letters, that's what you will, sure !"
" The letters got through — ^yes. But did they get through
in time to be of use ?"
The httle she-devil suspected the truth. He stroked his
whiskers and scraped hLs foot upon the floor, and said in
his blandest lisp :
" They got through in useful time. I'll kiss the Book
and swear it, if you want me."
How deal with a knave hke this, who popped in and out
of holes hke a rabbit, and wriggled and writhed like a
snake ? Lady Hannah knew an immense yearning for the
absent Bingo, husband of limited intellectual capacity, man
of superior muscular development, doughty in the use of that
primitive weapon of punishment, the doubled human fist.
" In useful time ? Useful Gueldersdorp time or useful
Tweipans time ? That is what I want to get at."
" Oh, hell ! how do I know ?" He had turned sulky and
scowling, but her blood was fairly up.
" I know that you have successfully swindled me out of
five hundred pounds, I know that when I met you on the
train four months back you shaped your plans and baited
a trap "
THE DOP DOCTOR 343
" To catch a silly woman." His scarlet lips rolled back
from his tobacco-stained teeth. His jeering eyes were in-
tolerable. " Ay, maybe I did. And what's to say now ?"
" I say you are a blackguard, Mr. Bough Van Busch !"
The dark face with the light eyes underwent a murderous
change. He glanced over his shoulders right and left, and
took a step towards her, carrying out the movement sud-
denly, as a tarantula darts upon its prey. Before the thick
brown muscular fingers had choked the scream that rose
in her throat, the key crashed in the lock, and the door was
violently kicked open, admitting . . .
No portrait is required of that burly, bald-browed, sharp-
eyed, grizzle-bearded, square-jawed farmer, of the bronzed
and sun-cracked countenance, implacable under the slouch-
hat Avith the orange- leather band. We know the old green
overcoat, and coarse cordviroy breeches, and roughly tanned
leather boots, with heavy, old-fashioned spurs, to have been
the husk of a fierce, and indomitable, and relentless warrior,
twinned with a quiet family-man of bucolic tastes and patri-
archal habits.
Van Busch, broader by inches and taller by half a head,
dwindled, seen in juxtaposition with this man of the iron
will and the leader's temperament, to a flabby, dwarfish,
and petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in, and
read him, and dropped him, and fastened on the little
EngUshwoman, as the great boots tramped heavily across
the floor, and the great voice roared, speaking in the Taal :
" Pull up that blind ! Voor den donder ! Shall wo be
mice, that sit and squeak in the dark ?"
Down came the Mevronw Ivink's square of glazed yellow
calico, roller, cord, and all, at the impatient wrench of the
big, heavy hand. . . . The window was blocked with heavy
bodies, topped by brown, white, or yellow faces ; the street
was a sea of them, all staring with greedy, curious eyes at
the little EngUshwoman who was a prisoner, and the big
man who ruled them by Fear. His angry grey eyes blazed
at the gapers, and the crowd suiged back a foot or two.
Then the fierce eyes darted back at pale Lady Hannah, and
the roaring voice began again :
" You who came here in difiguiae, with a false story and
false hair "
344 THE DOP DOCTOR
Lady Hannah jumped in her bedroom slippers, and
crimsoned to her natural coiffure, as the missing transforma-
tion, appallingly out of wave, was plucked from the baggy
pocket of the old green overcoat, and brandished before
her astonished eyes. Struggling to restrain the dual im-
pulse to shriek and clutch, no wonder she appeared a con-
science-stricken creature in that great man's watchful eyes.
His big voice shook her and shook the room as he thundered :
*' Woman, you are no widow of a Duitscher drummer, but
the VTOuw of a field-comet of the Army of Groot Brittanje.
He holds a graafschap in Engeland " — a mistake on the
part of the General's informant — " and is hand-in-glove
with the Colonel Commandant at Gueldersdorp." Not so
far from the truth ! thought Lady Hannah. " Would he
spy out the land, let him come himself next time. Boers
hide not behind their wives' petticoats when there is such
business to be done ! "
In defence of blameless Bingo the hysterical little woman
found voice to say :
" He — didn't know I was coming."
" What says she ?"
Before Van Busch could bestir himself to interpret,
Lady Hannah had repeated her words in faulty Dutch.
" So ! Engelsch mevrouws disobey their husbands, it
seems ?" Were the fierce, bloodshot grey eyes really
capable of a twinkle ? " We Boers have a cure for that.
Green reim, well laid on, after the third caution, teaches
our wives to fib and deceive no more."
" You're wrong, sir."
" Wrong, do you say ? Hoe ?"
" What the green reim does teach them," explained Lady
Hannah, secretly aghast at her own temerity, " is, not to
be found out next time."
He gave a wooden chuckle, but his regard was as menac-
ing and his voice as gruff as ever.
" I make no mouth-play with words. I talk in men and
guns, and there are half a dozen among the Engelsch,
niet mier, that know how to talk back. There are one or
two others that are duyvels, and not men. And the wors*
duyvel of all " — he waved the big hand westward — " ia
he over there at Gueldersdorp."
THE DOP DOCTOR 345
She mentally registered the compliment.
" You are a woman who writes for the Engelsch news-
papers that are full of shameless tales about the Boers."
He spat copiously upon the j9oor, and the big voice became
a bellow. " Lies, lies ! I have had them read to me, and
the people who make them should be shot. Hear you
now. You shall write to them and say : * SeUg Brounckers
is a merciful man and a just. He is not as zwart as he
is painted. He caught me mousing round his hoofd laager
at Tweipans — and what does he do ? ' " The pause was
impressive. Then the roaring voice resumed :
" ' He sends me marching down to the gaol at Groenfon-
tein, that is packed with dirty white and dirty coloured
schelms until there is not room for one more "
He named the homely parasite hymned by Bums . . .
— " ' Or he packs me up to Oom Paul at Pretoria,
chained to the waggon-tail like the others.' . . ."
Lady Hannah wondered, while the stuffy room spun
round her, who the others were.
" Geen, I will tell you what he does." He pitched the crum-
pled transformation contemptuously into the corner. " He
writes to the Engelsch Commandant at Gueldersdorp and
says : ' I have here a silly female thing that is no use to me.
Take her you, and give me in exchange a man of mine.' ..."
" And he . . . what does . . .1" She could get out
nothing more.
" He agrees. Mevrouw Vrynks " — " Dutch for Wrynche,"
thought Lady Hannah dizzily — " you will now pay the
Mevrouw Kink what is owing for her amiable entertainment,
and you will start for Gueldersdorp in ten minutes' time."
The roaring voice of the stem, fierce-eyed man, sounded
lovelier than the swan-song of De Rezke. She faltered,
with her Joyful heart leaping at the gates of utterance :
" The — mare and spider. You will be so kind as to
return them ?"
His face became as a human countenance rudely carved
in seasoned oak.
" I know nothing of a mare and spider," blared the great
voice.
She looked him straight between the hot fierce eyes, and
spoke out pluckily.
348 THE DOP DOCTOR
" They are not my property. I hired the trap and the
trotter from a hotel-keeper at Gueldersdorp. And Mr.
Van Busch tells me that they have recently been com-
mandeered for the service of the United Forces of the
Transvaal and Orange Free State."
" So ! . . . Well, that is what I would have done, if
they were worth having. Where is Van Busch 1" The
angry glance pounced on that patriot in the remote comer
to which he had modestly retired. Van Busch cringed
forwards, hat in hand, explaining :
" The English Mevrouw mistakes, Myjnheer. Sure, now,
I never told her anything of that kind. How could I, when
there was no mare and no spider ? Didn't I drive her and the
other woman over from Haargrond, with Bough's Uttle beast
pulling in a cart of my own ? Call the other woxnan, and
she will tell you it was as I say."
Lady Hannah, supremely disdainful, turned her back
upon the liar. . . .
" So, then, you are not willing to go back in a veld
waggon ?" demanded the bullying voice.
" I'm willing to go back in anything that isn't a coffin,"
she declared.
He gave the wooden chuckle, swung about and trampled
to the door, calling to Van Busch in the tone of a dog's
master :
" Here, you . . . !"
Van Busch followed, wriggling as obsequiously as the
dog with a stolen mutton-chop upon his conscience.
The door slammed, the key turned roughly in the lock.
Lady Hannah, obhvious of the absence of outdoor foot-
wear, flew joyously to cram a few belongings into her
travelling-bag and resume her discarded hat.
Outside in the street, the motley crowd having melted
away upon his appearance. General SeUg Brounckers was
saying to Van Busch :
"It is a pity that the Engelsch woman's story was not
true about that mare and spider. For if a mare and spider
there had been, you might perhaps have kept them for
your trouble "
— " Now I come to think of it, Myjnheer Commandant,"
THE DOP DOCTOR 347
said Van Busch in a hurry, " perhaps the woman was not
lying, aiter all. Bough has a mou«e-colouied trotter in
the stables at Haargrond Plaats, and a spider stands under
the waggon-shed in the yard. If they are hers, I'll let
Bough know Myjnheer Commandant said I was to have
them. He'll make no bones about parting then. Sure,
no ! he'll never dare to."
" I will send a couple of my burghers with you to take
care he does not," said the Commandant, in what was for
the redoubtable Brounckers an easy tone. "It is un-
lucky," he added less pleasantly, " that you were such a
verdoemte clever knave as to tell the Engelschwoman I
had commandeered both beast and vehicle for Republics'
use. Because now I will do it, look you ! No Boer's son
that hves, by the Lord ! will I suffer to make Sehg
Brounckers out a liar." He added, as Van Busch salaamed
and squirmed with more than Oriental submissiveness,
" Least of all a sneaking Africander schelm like you. And
now, about the money 1"
" Excellentie " Usped Van Busch, smiling his oily
brown face into ingratiating creases . . .
" I am no Excellentie. ... Of how much money, pro-
perly belonging to the Republics' war-chest, have you
cheated this httle fool of an Engelschwoman ?"
" Five weeks back, Myjnheer Commandant," bleated
Van Busch, " I had from her one hundred and fifty pounds,
which I swear as an honest man has been handed over to
Myjnheer Blinders "
" He has accounted to me."
" Five weeks back ?" Van Busch hinted.
" He has accounted for it five weeks back."
There are men who possess ail the will to be rogues, but
have not the requisite courage. Such a man was Blinders,
who emerged plus a sweetheart, the approval of his Com-
mandant, and the eclat of having chaffed the British Lion,
out of the affair that was to prove so expensive to ^ii.
Van Busch.
" And " — the big voice trumpeted, as Van Busch, like a
stout pinned butterfly, quivered, transfixed by the glare of
the savage eyes — " you will now account to me for the rest."
Van Busch faltered with a sickly smile :
348 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Fifty more, Myjnheer, that I was bringing you my-
self "
" One hundred and fifty you have paid me, and fifty you
were going to pay me. Ik wil het — but where are the other
hundreds you have paid Van Busch ?" bellowed the roaring
voice. " Does not my old man-baboon at home pouch
six walnuts for every one that his wife gets to share A\dth her
youngster 1 When I want to make the big thief spit them
out, I squeeze him by the neck. So, voor den donder ! will
I do to you. Only, geloof mij, I will not do it in play.
Pay Blinders the other five hundred pounds before kerk-
time. If you haven't got the cash about you, he and young
Schenk Eybel shall ride with you to Haargrond, where
lives your friend Bough. They can bring back the money
and the mare and spider, too. Moreover, Eybel, who is a
bright boy, and has a head upon his shoulders, wants a slim
rogue of a fellow that talks Engelsch to worm himself in over
yonder " — he jerked his gnarled thumb ia the direction
of Gueldersdorp — " and bring back a plan of the defences
on the west, where the native stad lies. Perhaps I will let
you keep two hundred of that five hundred if you are the
man to go. . . . But whether you go or stay, by the Lord !
you will find it best to be square with Selig Brounckers."
And the redoubtable Brounckers stumped o£E. Verily,
in times of scarcity, when the lion is a- hungered, the jackal
must lose his bone.
It would be well, thought the dispirited Jackal rue-
fully, to remove the unfavourable impression made, by a
valuable service rendered to the United Republics. It
would be a good thing to stand well with Myjnheer Schenk
Eybel, who would, when Brounckers went south, be left
in sole command. It would be as well, also, to get a look
at that gul that was living with the nuns at Gueldersdorp.
" Mildare ..." That was the puzzle — her having the name
so pat. But these little frightened, white-faced things were
sly, and kids remembered more than you thought for. . . .
Grown up a beauty, too, and with the manners of a lady.
He swore again, the thing seemed so incredible, and spat
upon the dust. A pretty green shining beetle crawled
there. He set his heavy foot upon the insect, and its
beauty was no more.
THE DOP DOCTOR 349
XXXVII
As the Captain's heavy cavalry stride shakes Nixey's roof,
the upright, lightly-built soldierly figure in khaki turns and
comes towards him, giving the binoculars in charge to the
Sergeant-Major of Irregulars, who is his orderly of the day.
" I want a word with you, Wrynche. Rawlings will
take the glasses. Come in here under cover."
He leads the way. The cover is a canvas shelter, perhaps
a protection from the blazing sun, but none at all from shell
and bullets. There are a couple of wooden chairs under
its flimsy spread and a little table. The Chief sits down
astride on one of the chairs, accepts a cigar from Captain
Bingoes enormous crocodile- leather case, and says, as the
first ring of blue smoke goes wavering upwards :
" You'll be glad to know that Monboia's Barala runner
has got through with good news for you." The last two
words are rather strongly emphasised. " Just before dawn
and after Beauvayse relieved you at Staff Bombproof South."
Captain Bingo swallows violently, runs a thick finger
round inside his collar, and his big face goes through
several changes of complexion, ranging from boiled suet-
dumpling paleness to beetroot red. He looks away and
blinks before he says in a voice that wobbles :
" Then my wife's— all right ?"
" Lady Hannah and her German attendant, as far back
as the day before yesterday, when Monboia's man saw them,
were in the enjoyment of excellent health."
" Poof !" Captain Bingo blows a genuine sigh of relief,
and the latent lugubriousness departs from him. " Good
hearing. I've had — call it hippopotamus on the chest this
two months, and you'll about hit the mark. Uncertainty
and suspense get on a man's nerves, in the long-run. Bound
to. And never a word — the deuce a line — all these
Poof !" He blows again, and beams. The Colonel, watching
him out of the comer of one keen eye, says, with a twitch-
ing muscle in the cheek that is turned away from him :
" My good news being told, I have a slice of bad for you.
But first let me make an admission. Since Nixey's pony
pulled Nixey's spider out of Gueldersdorp with Lady Hannah
350 THE DOP DOCTOR
and her maid in it, I have had three communications from
your wife."
" You're pullin' my leg, sir, ain't you ?" queries Bingo
doubtfully.
" Not a bit of it."
In confirmation of the statement he takes out a shabby
pocket-book, fat with official documents, and, unstrapping
it, selects three, and hands them to Bingo. They are flimsy
sheets of tissue-paper covered with spidery characters in
violet ink, and Bingo, taking them, recognises the hand-
writing, and is, as he states without hesitation, confoundedly
flabbergasted.
" For they are in my wife's wild scrawl," he splutters
at last. " How on earth did they reach you, sir ?"
" The first was brought in by a native boy who said
he belonged to the kraals at Tweipans," says the Chief.
" Rolled small and stuffed into a quill stuck through his
ear in the usual way. He trumped up a glib story about
his cow having been killed and his new wife beaten by
Brounckers' men, and his desire to be revenged, and oblige
the English ladv who'd been kind to him "
" Umph ! Native gratitude don't run to being skinned
alive with sjamboks — not much !" the other comments.
" Chap must have been lyin', or a kind of nigger Phoenix."
" Exactly. So I couldn't find it in my heart to part
with him. He's on the coloured side of the gaol now, with
two others, who subsequently landed in with the documents
you have in hand there."
" Am I to read 'em ?" Bingo queries.
His commanding officer nods, with the muscle in his lean
cheek twitching.
" Certainly. Aloud, if you'll be so good."
Bingo reads, with baitings on the way, for the tissue
sheets stick to his large fingers, which are damp with
suppressed agitation :
" Haargrond Plaats,
"Nkar Tweipans,
" October 30ih.
" To the Oolond Commanding Her Majesty^ 8 Forces in
Giieldersdorp.
" Snt, — I beg to report myself arrived at the above
addreas, twelve miles distant from the head laager of the
THE DOP DOCTOR 351
Boer Commandant, General Brounckers. I have to
inform you that an attack will be made on Maxim Kopje
South by a large force of the enemy with guns in the
beginning of November.
*' I have the honour to be,
" On Secret Service,
" Yours most obediently,
" H. Wrynche."
Bingo stares blankly at his Chief, the sheets of crumpled
tissue wavering between his thick, agitated fingers.
" I got that letter exactly a week after the attack had
been made and successfully resisted," says the Colonel's
dry, quiet voice. " Read the four lines in a different hand
and ink, that are underlined at the bottom, and tell me
what you think of 'em."
Bingo obeyed, and read :
" Lady's information perfectly correct. We hope this
intelligence will reach you in time to he useful.
" / have ike honour to he,
" P. Blinders,
**Actvn/g-Secretary to General
"Brounckers."
" By the Living Tinker !" exploded Bingo.
" Don't be prodigal of emotion," the Colonel's quiet
voice warns the excited husband. " There are two more
letters following. Read 'em in the proper sequence.
That one with the inky design at the top, that might be
the pattern for a pair of fancy pyjamas — that's the next."
Bingo reads as follows :
" Ejnk's Hotel,
"tweipans,
'' N</vember 2Uh.
* To the Colonel Commanding H. M. Forces in Oueldersdorp.
" Sm, — I beg to report myself arrived at Tweipans.
I have the honour to enclose herewith a sketch-plan of
the village and the disposition of General Brounckers'
laager. Trusting you may find it useful,
" I have the honour to be,
" On Secret Service,
" Yours most obedientlv,
"H. Wbynchk."
352 THE DOP DOCTOR
The sarcastic P. Blinders had appended an italicised
comment :
" His Honour considers the above sketch-plan remarkably
faithfvl. The. building next the Oerevormed Kerk, indicated
by an X, is the gaol. Gom^fortdble cells at your disposal,
which we are keeping vacant.
" P. Blinders."
« B-a-a "
The Chief does not happen to be looking Bingo's way as
the infuriated husband menaces with a large clenched fist
;in imaginary countenance attached to the conjectural
personality of the sportive P. Blinders.
" Swear — it will bring the blood down from your head,"
advises the dry, quiet voice. " But don't tear up the papers !
— they're too amusing to lose."
" Amusin' !" growls Bingo, with smarting eyes, and a
lumpy throat, and a tingling in his large muscles which
P. Blinders, being out of reach, can afford to provoke.
" You wouldn't think it amusin', sir, if it were your wife,
making herself a — a figure of fim for those Dutch bounders
to shy at."
Tliis is the third letter :
" December 23rd.
" To the Colonel Commanding, Ghieldersdorp.
" Sir, — I have to report that the sortie you have plaimed
to take place on the morning of the 26th, for the capture
of the enemy's big gun, is known to General Brounckers,
and that the menaced position will be strengthened and
manned to resist you.
•' Obediently,
"H. Weynohe."
Underneath is the sarcastic comment :
" December 27th.
" Nice if you had got this in time, eh ? And we wanted
those boots and badges.
" P. B."
" She got hold of a nugget that once, anyway," says
Captain Bingo, blowing his nose emphatically ; " and —
THE DOP DOCTOR 353
by the Living Tinker ! if it had reached us in time, we'd
have saved a loss of twenty-one killed and stripped, and
twenty-two wounded, and the stingin' shame of a whippin'
into the bargain."
" Perhaps," says the Colonel, with a careworn shadow
on the keen, sagacious face, and both men are silent,
remembering an assault the desperate, reckless valour of
which deserves to be bracketed in memory with the Charge
of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, " If Defeat is ever
shame, perhaps, Wrynche. But if you could put the
question to each of that handful of brave men sleeping side
by side over there " — he nods in the direction of the
Cemetery, where the aftermath of Death's red harvest has
sprung up in orderly rows of little white crosses — " they
would tell you it can be more glorious than victory."
" Of course, you're right, sir. I gather now what your
bad news is," says Bingo, who has been dejectedly rubbing
his finger along the bristly edges of his sandy moustache,
for a minute past. " Judgin' by the marginal annotations
of this man Blinders — brute I'd kick to Cape Town with
pleasure — my wife's a prisoner in Brounckers' hands ?"
" An unconscious prisoner — ^yes. Give 'em their due,
Wrynche. I shouldn't have credited 'em with the sense
of humour they have displayed in their dealings with her."
If it were possible for Bingo to grow redder in the face,
one would say that he has done so, as he bursts out, in
a violent perspiration, striding up and down over Nixcy's
sheet-leaded roof.
" Confound their humour ! It's the humour of tom-cats
playin' with a — a dashed little silly dicky-bird. It's the
humour of aasvogels watchin' a shot rock-rabbit kick.
It's the humour of the battledore and the shuttlecock.
And I'm the dicky-bird's mate and the bunny's better-half,
and the other shuttlecock of the pair, and may T be blessed
if I can take it smilin' !" He mops his scarlet and dripping
face, and puffs and blows lilce a large military walrus on
dry land.
** Perhaps you'll manage a smile when you've read this ?"
Bingo stops in his stride, wheels, and receives an officio I
document on blue paper. Under the date of tho previous
day, it nms as follows :
23
354 THE DOP DOCTOR
"Head Laauer,
"tweipans,
" January — (h,
" To the Colonel Commavding the British Forces in
Oueldersdorp.
" Sir, — In reply to your communication I am instructed
by General Brounckers to inform you that our prisoner,
the Englishwoman who came here in the character of a
German drummer's refugee - widow to act as your spy,
will be exchanged for a free Boer of the Transvaal Republic,
by name, Myjnheer W. Slabberts, who is at present con-
fined under the Yellow Flag in Gueldersdorp gaol. The
exchange will be efifected by parties under the White Flag
at a given point North-East between the lines of invest-
ment and defence one hour before Kerk-time to-morrow,
being the Sabbath.
" I have the honour to be yours truly,
" P. Blindeks,
"Acting -Secretary to General
"BroiMickers."
<<
P.S. — The youvig lady of German extraction who accom-
panied the Englishwoman has entered into an engagement
P. b:
to remain here. « r> d >»
*' P.SS. — The engagement is with yours truly, the young
lady having conformed to the faith of the Gerevormed Kerk.
We are to be married next Sunday. Would you like us to
send you some wedding-cake ? "PR"
Blinders has certainly had the last dig, but his principal
victim fails this time to wince or bellow under the point
of his humour. With his big face changing from red
to white, and from white to crimson half a dozen times in
as many seconds, Capt.-in Bingo says, refolding the paper
and returning it with a shaky hand :
" Then she— she "
A lump in his throat slides down and sticks.
" Grerevormed Kerk-time is eleven o'clock." The Colonel
looks at his shabby Waterbury, as the brisk clatter of
cantering horsp'-hoof'i breaks up the Sabbath stillness of
the Market Square, and an orderly, leading an officer's
THE DOP DOCTOR 355
charger, halts before Nixey's door. " The B.S.A. escort,
with their man, are due to leave the gaol in ten minutes'
time. Here's your orderly with your mount, and you've
eight minutes to change in."
" One minute, sir," Captain Bingo utters with an effort.
" This man — this Slabberts — is a well-known spy — a trump
card in Brounckers' hand, or be wouldn't be so anxious
to get hold of him. And therefore — by this exchange —
and a woman's dashed ambitious folly — you may lose
heavily in the end. ..."
" I don't deny it." The haggard shadow is again upon
the Colonel's face, or is it that Bingo's radiance dulls neigh-
bouring surfaces by comparison ? " But don't let the
thought of it spoil your good hour." The smile in the eyes
that have so many lines about them is kind, if the mouth
under the red- brown moustache is stem and sorrowful.
" We don't have many of 'em. Off with you and meet her !"
Captain Bingo tries to say something more, but
makes a hash of it ; and with eyes that fairly run over,
can only grip the kindly hand again and again, assuring
its owner, with numerous references to the Living Tinker,
that he is the most thundering brick on earth. Then,
overthrowing the small table and one of the chairs, he
plunges down the narrow iron stairway to get into what he
calls his kit. Six minutes later, correct to a buclde and
a puttee-fold, he salutes his commanding officer, nodding
pleasantly to him from Nixey's roof, and buckets down
the street at a tremendous gallop, the happiest man in
Oueldersdorp, with this shout following him :
" My regards to Lady Hannah. And tell her that the
Staff dine on gee-gee at six o'clock sharp, and I shall be
charmed if she'll join us."
XXXVIII
The little Olopo River, a mere branch of the bigger rivef
that makes fertile British Baraland, runs from east to west,
along the southern side of (Jueldersdorp, swelled by in-
numerable thready water-courses, dry in the blistering
winter heat, that the wet season disperses among the
23—2
:?56 THE DOP BOOrOR
foothills that bristle with Brounckers' artillery. Seen from
the altitude of a balloon or a war-kite, the course of the
beer-coloured stream flowing lazily between its high
banks sparsely wooded with oak and blue gum, and lavishly
clothed with cactus, mimosa, and tree-fern, tall grasses,
and thorny creepers, would have looked like a verdant
ribbon meandering over the dun-and-ochre-coloured veld,
where patches of bluish-green are beginning to spread.
The south bank, where the bush grows thinnest, was fre-
quently patronised by picnic-parties, and at all times a
place of resort for strolling sweethearts. The north bank,
much more precipitous, was clothed with a tangled luxuri-
ance of vegetation, and threaded only by native paths, so
narrow as to prove discouraging to pedestrians desirous
of walking side by side. Where the outermost line of
defences impinged upon the river-bed, the trees had been
cut down and the bush levelled. But east of Maxim Out-
post South, and the rifle-pits that flanked Fort Ellerslie,
all was as it had been for hundreds of years, in the
remembrance of the great granite boulder that stood on
the south shore.
The great boulder had known changes since the old
Plutonic forces cast it upwards, a mere bubble of melted
red granite, sohdifying as it went into a stone acorn thirty
feet high, which the glacier brought down in a slow journey
of countless ages, and set upright like a phallic symbol,
amongst other boulders of lesser size. The channel the
glacier had chiselled was now full of shining honey-coloured
water, hurrying over the granite stones and blocks of quartz
and pretty vari-coloured pebbles, while the boulder sat
high and dry, with the tall-plumed grasses, and the graceful
tree-fern, and the yellow-tasselled mimosa crowding about
its knees ; and remembered old times, long before the little
Bushfellow had outlined the koodoo and the buffalo, and
the hunter-man with the spear, in black pigments on its
smooth flank, ere he ground up the coprolites gathered from
the river-bed for red and yellow paint to colour the draw-
ings. On the western side the great boulder was dressed
in crimson lake and yellow-umber-hued lichens from base
to summit, and in August, when the aloes flowered in mag-
nificent fiery clusters upon its crown and at its base ; and
THE DOP DOCTOR 357
in May, when the sweet-scented clematis wreathed it in
exquisite trails, and white and rose and purple pelargoniums
made a carpet for its feet ; and in July, when the yellow
everlastings bloomed in every cranny of the rocks, King
Solomon in all his glory held less magnificence of
state.
Insects and beasts and biids loved the boulder. The
sun-beetle and the orange-tip and peacock butterflies
loved to bask on its hottest side, while the old dog-faced
baboon squatted on top and chattered wisdom to his nu-
merous family, and the finches and love-birds built in its
crannies and bred their young, too often as food for the
giant tarantula and the tree-snake ; while the francolin
and grouse dusted themselves in the hot sand at the base
of its throne pf rocks, and the springbok and the wart-hogs
came down at night to drink ; and the woolly cheetah
and the red lynx came after the springbok and the
wart-hog.
The boulder had seen War — War between black-skinned
men and brown-skinned men, adventurers with great
hooked noses and curled beards, with tassels of silk and
gold plaited into them and into the hair of their heads,
terrible warriors, mighty hunters, and great miners, who
came for slaves and ivory and gold, and hollowed strong-
holds out of the mountains, and worshipped strange bird-
beaked gods, and passed away. Yet again, when these
ceased to bo, there had been War ; and this time the black
men of the soil fought with white strangers, who wanted
the same things — slaves, and skins, and ivory, and the
yellow metal of the river-sands and of the rocks.
Now white men fought with white. The black men owned
little of the country : they hid in the kloofs and thickets
in terror, while the European conquerors shed each other's
blood for gold, and land, and power. The boulder was so
very old. It could afford to wait patiently until these
men, like all that went before, had passed.
Every seventh day the guns ceased bellowing and throw-
ing iron things that burst and scattered Death broadcast,
368 THE DOP DOCTOR
and the rifles stopped crack-cracking and spitting steel and
lead. Then the scared birds came back : the waxbills. and
love-birds, and finches, and sparrows darted in and out
among the bushes, and the partridge, and quail, and
francoiin ventured down to drink. The old baboon had
retired to the lulls with his family ; the springbok and the
wart-hog had moved up Bulawayo way ; the cheetah and
the lynx had followed them. . . .
But as long as human lovers came and whispered to each
other, standing beside the big boulder, or sitting in its
shadow, the boulder would be content. They spoke the
old language that it had learned when the world was com-
paratively young. Black or yellow or white, African or
Oriental or European, this speech of theirs was always the
same ; their looks and actions never varied. Either they
met and kissed and were happy, or they met and quarrelled
and were miserable. When no more lovers should come,
the boulder knew that would be the end of the world.
There was a gaudily dressed, white-faced young woman
waiting now beside the big stone upon this seventh day.
Her blue eyes were large and wistful. She had taken off
her big flaunting hat and hung it on a bush, and her face
was not unpretty, topped by its aureole of frizzy yellow
curls. She leaned against the sun- warmed gianite,and cried
a little. That was the way of w omen when the man was
late at the tryst. Then she dried her eyes and hummed a
song, and, finally, taking a stump of pencil from her pocket,
she began to scribble on the smooth red stone — all part
of the old play, the boulder knew. The first woman whom
he remembered had drawn a figure meant for a portrait of
her lover, with a sharpened flake of flint.
The young woman, as she sucked her lead-pencil, was
quite unconscious that the boulder thought at all. She
wrote in an unformed hand, and in letters that began b}^
being large and round, and tailed off into a slanting niggle.
" W. Keyse, Esquer." Then she bit the pencil awhile, and
dreamed dreams. Then she wrote again, " Jane Keyse "
and " Mrs. W. Keyse," and blushed furiously, and then grew
pale again in anticipation of the Awful Ordeal to come.
For she had made up hei mind to tell him all, and chance it.
Yesterday had been his birthday. She had sent him,
THE DOP DOCTOR 359
per John Tow, a costly gift. The four-ounce packet of
honeydew, cheap at five dollars in these days of scarcity,
had been opened, and the new pipe filled. A slip of paper
coquettishly intimated that the sender had rendered the
recipient this delicate little service. She meant to sign
" Jane Harris," but her courage failed her, and her trem-
bling pen faltered for the last time, " Fare Air."
Oh ! how she hated that Other One, whom, perhaps, he
liked the best, though he had never kissed her ! She
would be done with the creature, she thanked her Gawd,
after to-day ! Oh, how many times she had made up her
mind to tell him the truth, and never done it ! But if she
took and died of it, tell him she would this time.
How would he take the revelation ? Possibly swearing.
Probably he would be angry enough to hit her, when he
knew. If he only would, and make it up afterwards !
Oh ! how cruel she did sufEer ! She thought she would
not tell him just yet. It was too hard. And then it seemed
quite easy, and then she cried out in agony : " Is that 'im
comin' ? Oh, my Gawd, it is !"
She clasped her hands over a brand-new blowse, with
something under it that jumped and fluttered orful.
Mother used to 'ave such palpitytions when her and
father 'ad 'ad what you might call a jar. And he was
coming, coming
Surely W. Keyse looked stern and imposingly tall of
stature, seen from her lower level, as he appeared among
the blue gum-trees on the top of the bank, and began to
descend into the ferny gorge where the great boulder sat
and sunned himself beside the beer-coloured river, whose
barbel kept on rising at the flies. Something W. Keyse
dragged behind him, not by a rope, but by a pigtail ; an
animated bundle of clean blue cotton, topped by the im-
passive, almond-eyed countenance of John Tow, the
letter-carr3ang Chinaman, who in the unlawful pursuit of
tikkies, finding the letter Avritten by the foreign lady-devil
to the male one eagerly paid for on the nail, had offered
for half as much again to induce her for the future to write
two instead of one. Towing Tow, the smarting victim of
feminine duplicity came crashing down upt^n the guilty
girl who had betrayed him.
360 THE DOP DOCTOR
<c
See 'ere ! You know this 'ere young lady, and you re-
member what you've bin and told me. Say it over again
now," thundered W. Keyse, " so as she can 'ear you. Tell
me before 'er as wot she wrote them — these letters " — he
rapj)od himself dramatically upon the breast-pocket — " and
how you see her doing of it, before I kick your backbone
through your hat."
All was lost. The Chinaman had up an' give Emigra-
tion Jane away. Certainly he had saved her trouble, but
what was he sayin' now, the 'orrible slant-eyed 'eathen ?
She could hardly hear him for the roaring in her poor
bewildered head.
" S'pose John tell, can catchee more tikkie ? Plenty
fcikkie want to buy chow, allee so baddee times."
" Always on the make, ain't you ?" commented W. Keyse.
With a strong, imperious shove, he dumped the blue bundle
down among the cowsUps in which the feet of the guilty fair
were hidden, sajdng sternly : " I give you three minutes to
git it off your chest, else kickie is wot you'll catch instead
o' tikkie." He furnished a moderate sample on account.
" Oh, ki — ah. Oh, ki — ah !" moaned the tingling John.
" Don't you be 'ard on him, William " — he hardly knew
the voice, it was so weak and small — " it's Gawspel truth.
To pay you out — at first, for Juggin' Walt, I did write
them letters — every bloomin' screeve."
" An' sent the pipe and baccy for a birthday present, to
make a blushin' fool o' me ?" yelled the infuriated Keyse.
" All for the crimson sake of a fat 'og of a Dutchman !"
The patriot to whom he referred, mounted on an attenu-
ated mule, and escorted by a Sergeant and six men of the
B.S.A., under the superintendence of a large pink officer
of the Staff, was at that moment being conducted at a
sharp trot out of the lines, to meet a smallish waggon
pulled by a span of four that was being brought down from
Tweipans by half a dozen Boers in weathered tan-cord and
velveteen, battered pot-hats and ragged shooting- jackets,
caitying very carefully-tended rifles, mounted on well-fed,
wiry little horses, and accompanied by a White Flag. If
she had known, what would it have mattered to her ? All
her thoughts were centred in this furious little man, whose
pale, ugly eyes fairly blazed at her, as he repeated :
THE DOP DOCTOR 361
" To pay — me out. You brawsted little Treachery,
you "
She crimsoned to her hair ; you could see the red blood
rushing and rushing up from under the peekaboo em-
broidery in front of the tawdry blowse, in a hurry to tell
her tingling ears what cruel names he called her.
" To pay you out at j6b:^t it was. An' afterwards " —
her throat hurt her, and her eyes did smart and bum so —
" afterwards I — I wanted ... Gawd ! . . ." she shook all
over — " you'll never walk out wi' me no more after kMs !"
" You may take your dyin' oath I won't." He was
bitterly sarcastic. " Strite, an* no kid, didn't you know when
you done — that — I'd never forgive you as long as I lived ?"
He plucked the stout package of letters signed " Fare
Ail " from his indignant bosom, and threw them at her
feet, with the new pipe, her hapless gift. His wrath was
infinitely more terrible than she had imagined. Her
tongue clave to the roof of her mouth. Everything kep'
a-spinnin' so, she couldn't 'ardly tell whether she was on
'er 'ead or 'er 'eels. She will remember that day to the
last breath she draws. . . .
" Didn't you know it ?" the voice of her Judge demanded
again.
John Tow, finding himself no longer an object of atten-
tion, had discreetly vanished.
" Oh, I did, I did !" Her agony was frantic. " Oh, let
me go away and hide and die somewhere ! Oh, crooil, to
break a pore gal's 'art ! Wot — wot loves the bloomin'
earth under your feet !"
" Gam !" — the scorn of W. Keyse was something awful —
" you an' your love "
She wrenched the cotton lace away from her thin throat,
and tore some of her hair out in the strenuous hysteria of
her class, and screamed at him :
" Me an' my love ! . . . Go on ! . . . Frow it in me face,
an' 'ave no pity ! Me an' my love ! . . . Sneer at it, take
an' spit on it — ain't it yours all the syme % Oh, for
Gawd's syke forgive me !"
He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered :
" So 'elp me Jiminy Cripps, I never will !"
She knew that the oath was irrevocable, and with a faint
362 THE DOP DOCTOR
moan, turned to the great boulder that was behind her,
and clung to its hard red bosom as if it had been a mother's.
She moaned to him as her thin figure flattened itself against
the stone, to let her go away and die somewhere. He stood
a moment looking at her, and exulting in his power, mean-
ing her to suffer yet a little longer ere he relented. Secretly,
he knew relief that the golden pigtail and the provoking
blue eyes of Miss Greta Du Taine had vanished out of
Gueldersdorp before the first Act of War. He would have
felt them in the waj' now. Those shining, tearful eyes and
the mouth that kissed and clung to his had done their work
on the night of the Grand Variety entertainment in the
empty Government store. He would pretcmd to go away and
leave her. He would come back, enjoy her astonishment,
be melted by renewed entreaties, stoop to relent, overwhelm
her with his magnanimity, and then proceed to love-making.
But as a preliminary he swung round upon his heel and
strode upwards through the short bush and the tall grasses,
the scandalised flowers thrashing his boots. She saw him,
although her back v/as turned. If he could have kno\\T]i
how tall he seemed to Emigration Jane as he strode away,
W. Keyse would have been tickled to the core. But he
turned when he felt sure he was well out of sight, and
hurried back.
She was not there.
He was indifferent at first, then angry, then anxious, then
disconsolate. Repentance followed fast on the heels of all
these moods. He picked up the packet of letters and the
rejected pipe, cursing his own cruelty, and sought her up
and down the banks, calling her in tones that were urgent,
affectionate, upbraiding, appealing ; but not for all his
luring would the flown bird come back to fist. No more
beside the river, or in other places where they had been
wont to meet, did W. Keyse encounter Emigration Jane
again.
XXXIX
But even without W. Keyse and the vanished author of
" Fare Air's " letters the ferny tree-fringed kloof at the
bottom of which the beer-coioured river ran over its granite
THE DOP DOCTOR 363
boulders and quartz pebbles, was not empty and v^oid. On
Sundays, when the birds returned from the hills, to wliich
they had been scared by the hideous tumult of War,
thither after High Mass in the battered little Roman
Catholic church in the stad, the Mother-Superior and the
Sisters would come, bringing with them siich poor food as
they had, and picnic soberly. All the week through they
had laboured, nursed, and tended the sick and wounded in
the Hospitals, and washed and fed and taught the number-
less orphans of the siege, and upon this daj^ the ]\Iother-
Superior had ruled that they w ere to be together. And all
the week through the thought of it kept them going, as she
had hoped. You are to see her holding her httle court beside
the river upon a certain February afternoon, receiving
friends in her sweet, stately fashion, and dispensing hos-
pitahty out of the largest and most battered Britannia-
metal teapot that ever brewed, what was later originally
referred to in the weekly " Social Jottings " column of the
Guddersdorp Siege Gazette as the cheering infusion. The
Siege Gazette was an intermittent daily, issued from a sub-
terranean printing-office, for the dissemination of general
orders and latest news, fluctuations in the weight and
quality of the meat-rations, and the rise and fall of the
free-soup level, being also recorded. To its back-files 1
must refer those who seek a fuller account of the function
described by the brilliant journalist who signed herself
" Gold Pen," as highly successful. She gives you to
understand that the company was distinguished, and the
conversation vivid and unflagging. And when you realise
that everybody present was suffering more or less from the
active pinch of himger, that social gathering of men and
women of British blood becomes heroic and historic and fine.
" Dr Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, was observed,'*
we read. " Gold Pen " also notes " the presence of the
Reverend Julius Fraithorn, son of the Bishop of H , and
second curate — on leave — of St. Margaret's, Wendish
Street ; now happily recovered, thanks to the skill of Dr.
Saxham, from an illness, held at no recent date to be in-
curable. Mr. Fraithorn has undertaken the onerous duties
of Chaplain to the Hospitals in charge of the Mihtary Staff.
It was gratifying to observe," she continues, " that the
364 THE DOP DOCTOR
Colonel commanding graced the occasion bj"^ his martial
presence. He was attended by his junior aide, lieutenant
Lord Beauvayse. We also saw Lady Hannah Wrynche
with her distinguished husband, Captain Bingham Wrynche,
Royal Bay Dragoons, Acting Senior Aide," etc., etc.
" Late apricots from the garden of the ruined Convent,
and peaches from its west wall, gathered in the dead of night
by Sister Cleophee and Sister Tobias," " Gold Pen " goes
on to say, " were greatly appreciated by the guests, each
of whom brought his or her own bread."
A most villainous kind of bannock of unleavened mealie-
meal and crushed oats, calculated to try the strongest teeth
and trouble the toughest digestion, " Gold Pen " might have
added. But the game was to make believe you rather
enjoyed it than otherwise. If you had no teeth and no
digestion, you were allowed a pint and a half of sowens
porridge instead ; and thus helped your portion of exhausted
cavalry mount or your bit of tough mule-meat down. And
so you went on like your neighbours, playing the game,
while your eyes grew larger and your girth less, and your
cheekbones more in evidence with every day that dawned.
Cheekbones have a strange, unnatural effect when they
appear in childish faces. There was a child in a rusty
double perambulator that had been a stylish baby-carriage
only a little while ago, whose wizened face and shrunken
hands were pitiable to see. He was wheeled by a sallow
woman, with hollow, grey-blue eyes — a woman whose black
alpaca gown hung loosely on her wasted figure, and whose
shabby, crape-trimmed hat was pinned on anyhow. Siege
confinement and siege terrors, siege smells and siege diet,
had made strange havoc of the plump comeliness of a
matronly lady who once rustled in purple satin befitting a
Mayor's wife. She had lost one of her children through
diphtheria, and she knew, unless a miracle happened, that
she would also lose the boy.
Only look at him ! She told you in that dull, toneless
voice of hers how sturdy he had been, how strong and
masterful — how pretty, too, with his plume of fair hair
tumbling into his big, shining, grey eyes ! The eyes were
bigger than ever now, but the light and the life had sunk
out of them, and his round face was pinched, and the colour
THE DOP DOCTOR 365
of old wax. And the arm that hung idly over the side of
the little carriage was withered and shrunken — the hand
of an old man, and not of a child. The other, under the
light shawl that tucked him in, hugged something that
bulged under the coverlet.
" His father can't bear to look at him," the Mayor's wife
said, glancing at the Mayor's carefully - averted back.
" And I'm sure it's no wonder. He just lies like this, day
and night, and doesn't want to move, or answer when you
speak to him, and he won't eat. The food is dreadful, but
still he might try, Just to comfort his mother "
" I does twy," piped Hammy weakly, " and ven my
tummy shuts, and it isn't no use twying any more."
The Mother-Superior brought a gaily-coloured little china
cup of that rare luxury, new milk, and bent over him, saying
cheerfully, as she held it to the colourless mouth, " Not
always, Hammy. Taste this."
" No, fank you." He turned his head away, tightly
shutting his eyes.
"It's real milk, Hammy, not condensed," the soft voice
pleaded. He shook his head again, and knit his childish
brows.
" I saided it wasn't no use. My tummy just shuts."
" I think I would not bother him any more just now,"
Saxham interposed, noting the droop of the piteous, flaccid
mouth, and feeling the flutter of the uneven pulse. The
Mayor's wife broke into helpless sobbing. The Mother-
Superior drew her swiftly out of the sick child's hearing
and sight. And a shadow fell upon the thin light coverlet,
and a crisp, decided voice said :
" Then Hammy's tummy is a mutinous soldier, and nmst
be taught to obey the Word of Command."
" Mister Colonel . , ." The dull, childish eyes grew a
very little brighter, and the claw-like hand went up in
shaky salute to the limp plume of fair hair, not gUstening
and silky now, but dull and unkempt, that fell over the
broad, darkly-veined waxen forehead. — " It is Mister
Colonel. . . . And I haven't seen you for ever an' ever so
long. An' Berta's deeded, an', an' " The whisper
was almost inaudible. ... " Vore's something I did so want
to tell !" The hidden arm came from under the coverings.
366 THE DOP DOCTOR
" It's about my Winocewus, vis beast what you givcd
me, ever so long ago." He displayed the treasured toy.
" You shall tell me about Berta and the rhinoceros when
I have told you something. A Certain Person can come
out of this vehicle, I suppose, Saxham ? It will make no
diflFerence, in the long-run, to a Certain Person's health ?"
" Why, nothing in Heaven or upon earth will make any
difference at tliis juncture," returned Saxham, speaking in
the same tone, " unless a Certain Person can be roused to
the necessary pitch of desiring food. To administer it
forcibly would, in my opinion, be worse than useless."
The Certain Person was lifted out of his cramped quarters
by vigorous but gentle hands. The Colonel Commanding
sat down with him upon a camp-stool, and as the wasted
legs dangled irresponsibly from his supporting knees, and
the hot head rolled helplessly against the row of coloured
bits of medal-ribbon that were sewn on the left breast of
the khaki jacket, he began to talk, holding the limp little
body with a kind, sustaining arm.
" You've seen how my men obey me, Hammy ? Well,
your brain and your eyes, your arms and legs, and hands
and feet, as well as your tummy, are your soldiers. And
it's mutiny if they refuse to carry out the Officer's orders.
And you're the Officer, you know."
" Am I ve Officer, weally 1"
Interest was quickening in the heavy eyes.
" You're the Officer. And I'm the Colonel in Command.
And when I say to you, ' Lieutenant Hammy, drink this
milk,' why, you'll pass along the order to Sergeant Brain
and Corporal Eyes and Privates Hands and Mouth and
Tummy, and see that they carry it out. Where is ?
Ah ! thank you, ma'am ; that was what I wanted."
For the Mother-Superior had deftly put the gaily-coloured
little china cup into the lean, brown, outstretched hand,
and, seeing what was coming, the Lieutenant shed an un-
soldierlj'^ tear and raised a feeble whimper.
" Please, no. Mister Colonel ! My tummy '*
" Private Tummy is a shirker, who doesn't want to do
his duty. But it's your duty as his Commanding Officer to
show him that it must be done. And that's the game we're
playing. You'll employ tact before you have recourse to
11
THE DOP DOCTOR 367
stringent measures. Not make the fellow dogged or furious
by angry words or threats. When it's necessary to shoot,
shoot straight. But, first, you give the order."
" Oughtn't ve officer to have a wevolver 1"
" Wait a second, and you shall have mine."
The deft fingers twirled out and pocketed the cartridge-
packed chambers, and put the harmless weapon into the
childish hands.
" It's veway heavy," Hammy said dolefully, as the
shining Army Smith & Wesson wobbled in his feeble
clutches, then wavered and sank ingloriously down upon
his lap.
" If you had drunk the milk you might have found it
lighter. Suppose we try now. Attention !"
— " 'Tention !" piped Hammy.
" Hands, catch hold. Mouth, do your duty. And if
Private Tummy disobeys, he'll have to take the conse-
quences."
" Please, what are ve confequences ?"
" Brink down the milk, and then I'll tell you."
The gay little china cup was slowly emptied. Hammy
blinked eyes that were already growing sleepy, and sucked
the moustache of white from his upper-lip with relish,
remarking :
" I dwinked it all, and my tummy never shut. Now
tell me what are ve confequences ?"
" A mother without a son, for one thing." The keen,
hawk-eyes were gentle. " But drink plenty of milk and
eat plenty of bread and porridge and minced meat, and
you'll live to see the Relief marching into Oueldersdorp one
fine morning, boy."
" Unless I get deaded like Berta. And that weminds me
what I wanted to tell so bad." The lips began to quiver, and
the eyes brimmed. " Soldiers mustn't cwy, must vey ?"
" Not while there's work to be done, Hammy. Would
you like to wait now and tell me another day ?" For the
little round head was nodding against the row of medal-
ribbons stitched on the khaki jacket, and the big round
eyes kept open with ditticulty.
" No, please. It's about the beasts — my beasts what
you gived me. Winocewus. an' Lion, an' Tawantula,
368 THE DOP DOCTOR
an' Tsetse, an' Black Bee — just like a weal Bee, only not
80 sharp at ve end. . . . Don't you wemember. Mister
Colonel ?"
" Of course I remember. The toy beasts I brought
down from Rhodesia and gave to a little boy."
" I was the boy. And — you saided I was to let Berta
have her share wof dem. And I did let her play wif all
ve owers. But Winocewus had to be tooked such care
wof for fear of bweaking his horn — an' Berta was such a
little fing, vat — vat "
" That you wouldn't let her play with Rhinoceros. And
you think it wasn't quite fair, or quite kind, and now you're
sorry ?"
Hammy sniffed dolorously, and two large tears splashed
down.
" I'm sowwy. An' I fought if I was deaded too, like
Berta, I could go an' tell her I never meaned to be gweedy.
An' I wouldn't eat my bweakfust, nor my dinner, nor
nothing — and at last my tummy shut, and I didn't want
nuffing more."
The Mother- Superior and the Colonel Commanding ex-
changed a glance over the little round head before the
man's voice answered the child.
" That wouldn't have made Bertha happy. She might
have thought you a little coward for running away and
leaving your mother and all the other ladios behind, shut
up in Gueldersdorp. For an officer and a gentleman must
go on living and j&ghting while he has anything left to fight
for, Hammy. Remember that."
" Yes, Mister Colonel. . . ." The drowsy eyes closed, the
Uttle head nodded off into slumber against the kind,
strong shoulder. The Mother - Superior wheeled the
perambulator near, and the Colonel, rising, laid the now
soundly- sleeping boy back upon his cushions.
" What mysteries children are !" he said, as the Mother
replaced the light covering, screening the sleeping face with
tender, careful hands from sun and flies. " Imagine re-
morse for an act of selfishness leading a boy of six to such a
determination — and a normal, healthy boy, if ever I
met one."
" He has been living for some time under abnormal con-
THE DOP DOCTOR 369
ditions," the Mother said softly, looking at the quiet rise
and fall of the light shawl covering. " He will take a turn
for the better now."
" And forget his trouble and its cause." The Chief's
observant glance had lighted on Rhinoceros, lying upside
down in a little clump of flowering sword-grass, into which
he had been whisked as the Mother shook out the little
shawl. " I think," he said, and pocketed the homed one,
" that this gentleman had better go into the fire."
" Perhaps. And yet it would be a continual reminder to
conquer selfishness in great as in little things." She smiled,
meeting the keen hazel eyes with her great pure grey ones.
" If you think so, I will leave it."
" I will not take the responsibility of advising you to.
You have already shown more tact than I can lay claim to
in dealing with children. And that has been the business
of the greater part of my life, remember."
He looked at her full, and said :
" I may possess and employ tact when dealing with men
and with children, possibly. But not long ago I was guilty
of — and have since bitterly reproached myself for, I beg
you to believe me ! a gross and lamentable blunder as re-
gards a woman "
She put out her fine hand with a quick, protesting ges-
ture, as if she would have begged him to say no more. He
went on :
" She is a lady whom you intimately know, and whom I
have, like everyone else in this town, learned to esteem
highly and to profoundly respect. For the terrible shock
and the deep pain I must have given that lady in breaking
to her ignorantly and hastily the news of the death of a
friend who was dear to me, and infinitely dearer to —
another with whom she is acquainted — I humbly entreat
her pardon."
He had not known her eyes were of so deep a purple-grey
as to be nearly black. Perhaps they seemed so by contrast
with the absolute whiteness of her face. The eyes winced,
and the mouth contracted as she entreated, voicelessly :
" I beg you, say no more !"
" I have but little more to say," he returned. " I will
only add that if at any time you wished in kindness to
24
370 THE DOP DOCTOR
make me forget what I did that day, you would apply to
me in some difficulty, honour me ^vith some confidence,
trust me in any unforeseen emergency in which I might
be of use to you. Or to — anyone who is dear to you, and
in whom for the sake of old associations and old ties I
might even otherwise be deeply interested."
He had spoken with intention, and now his deliberate
glance dropped to the level of the strip of sandy shore beside
the river, where the giant Convent kettle boiled upon a dis-
proportionately little fire, and Sister Hilda-Antony pre-
sided in the Reverend Mother's place at the trestle-sup-
ported tray where tho Britannia- metal teapot brooded, as
doth the large domestic hen, over an immense family of
cups and saucers. Busy as ants, the other Sisters hurried
backwards and forwards, attending to the wants of theii-
guests, who sat about on rocks and boulders, or with due
precautions taken against puii-adders and tarantulas, lay
upon the grass of the high bank in the shade of the fern
and bush. And as vivid by contrast with their black-
robed, white-wimpled figures, as a slender di'agon-fly
among a bevy of homely gnats, the graceful, prettily-clad
figure of Lynette showtxi, as she shared the Sister's hos-
pitable labours.
She had her share of girlish vanity. She had put on a
plain tailor-made skirt of fine dark green cloth, short
enough to show the dainty little brown buckled shoes that
she specially afiEected, and a thin white silk shirt and knitted
croquet- jacket of white wool. A scarlet leather belt girt
her slender waist, and a silver chatelaine jingled a gay tune
at her side, and about her white slim throat was a band of
scarlet velvet, and her wide- brimmed straw hat had a knot of
purple and white clematis in it, and a broad, vivid, emerald-
green wing-quill thrust under the knot. And the hair under
the green-plumed hat gleamed bronze in the sunshine that
filtered through the thick foliage of the blue gum-trees that
grew on either bank of the river, and stretched their
branches out to clasp across the stream, like hands. She
was too pale and too thin, and her eyes were feverishly
bright, but she looked happy, carrying her tray of steaming
teacups in spite of Beauvayse's anxious attempts to relieve
her of the burden, and the Chaplain's diilident entreaties
THE DOP DOCTOR 371
that she should entrust it to him. Their voices, mingled
in gay argument, were bomo by a warm puff of spice-
scented air to the ears of the elder people, standing in the
shade of the trees at the summit of the high, sloping bank,
with the rusty perambulator between them.
" I thank you," the Mother said, in her full, round tones.
The eyes of both, travelling back from that delicate, slight
young figure, had met once more. " Believing that you
speak in perfect sincerity, I thank you, and shall not hesi-
tate to call upon you, should the need arise."
Her voice was very calm, and her discreet glance told
nothing. He would not have been a man of woman born
if he had not been a little piqued. He said, with an air of
changing the subject :
" Miss Mildare strikes me as a very beautiful girl."
" Is she not ?"
Her eyes grew tender, and her whole face was irradiated
by the splendour of her smile. She looked down the
bushed and grass-covered slope to where Lynette, all the
guests supplied, had thrown herself down to rest on a stone
under a tree. She had taken off her hat, and her hair was
flecked with sunshine as she leaned her head back with a
little air of lassitude and weariness against the scarred
bark. But in spito of weariness she was smiling and con-
tent. The rest was dehcious, the peaceful quiet enchanting,
the air sweet after the fetid odours of the town ; and it
was sweet, too, whenever she glanced at the Reverend
Julius Fraithom, who was lying at her feet, or Beauvayse,
who fanned her alternately with a leafy branch and the tea-
tray, to behold her own beauty reflected in the admiring
eyes of two young and handsome men.
The Mother had never seen her thus before. She had
been absent from the scenes of Lynette's little social
triumphs. Now a great tenderness swelled in her bosom,
and a great pity gripped her throat, and wrung the bitter,
slow tears into her eyes.
'* She is happy," she whispered in her heart. " She has
forgotten just tor a little while, and her kingdom of woman-
hood is hers, unspoiled, and the present moment is sweet,
and the future she has no thought of. My poor, pocr
love ! Let her go on forgetting, even if it is only for a day."
2'i— 2
372 TRE DOP DOCTOR
His voice beside her made her start. He was still
speaking of Lynette.
" Her type is unusual — amongst Colonials."
She returned : " She was born in the Colony, I believe."
" Ah ! but of British parents, surely ? I once knew
an English lady," he went steadily on, " whom she re-
sembles strikingly."
Her eyes were inscrutable, and her lips were folded close.
" She was the wife of the Colonel commanding my old
Regiment — Sir George Hawting. A grand old warrior, and
something of a martinet. He married a third daughter of
the Duke of Runcorn — Lady Lucy Bridd water."
She said without the betraying flicker of an eyelash : "I
have seen the lady named. . . ."
He said, with a prick of self-reproach for having again
turned the barb that festered in her bosom :
" Lady Lucy was a very lovely creature, and a very im-
pulsive one. She lived not happily, and she died tragically."
There was the ring of steel and the coldness of ice in the
Mother's words :
" She met the fate she chose."
He thought, looking at her :
" What a woman this is ! How silent, how resourceful,
how calm, how immeasurably deep ! And why does she
think of me as an opponent 1" He went on, stung by
that quiet marshalling of all her forces against him :
" Unhappily, the fate we choose for ourselves sometimes
involves others. The death of that unhappy woman and
the father of her child left an innocent creature at the mercy
of sordid, evil hands."
" hi evil hands, indeed, judging by — what you have
told me."
" I would give much to be able to trace her." There
was a heavy line between his eyebrows, and his eyes were
stem and sad. " It would be something to know what had
become of her, even if she were dead, or worse than dead."
A violent, sudden scarlet dyed her to the edge of the
white starched coif. Her mouth writhed as though words
were bursting from her ; but she nipped her lips together,
and controlled her eyes. And still her silence angered and
deiied him. He went on :
THE DOP DOCTOR 373
*' If 1 seem to you to harp painfully upon this subject,
pardon me. You have my word that, without encourage-
ment from you, I will not refer to it after to-day." His
close- clipped brown moustache was straightened by the
tension of the muscles of his mouth. He passed his palm
over it, and continued speaking without moving a muscle
of his face or taking his searching eyes from the Mother's.
" The name of the young lady who is so fortunate as to
be your ward, and even more, the striking likeness I spoke
of just now, have led me to hope that my dead friend's
daughter was led by a Hand, in whose Divine guidance I
humbly believe, to find the very shelter he would have
chosen for her. Pray answer, acquitting me in your
own mind of persistence or inquisitiveness. Am I right
or wrong ?"
She might have been a statue of black marble, with
wimple and face and hands of alabaster, she stood so
breathlessly still. Her heart did not seem to beat ; her
blood was stagnant in her veins. She felt no faintness.
Her observation was unnaturally keen, her mind dazzlingly
clear ; her brain seemed to work with twice its ordinary
power. She thought. He glanced at the shabby watch he
wore upon the steel lip-strap, and waited. She was aware
of the action, though she never turned her head. She was
weighing the question, to tell or not to tell ? Her soul
hung poised like a seagull in the momentary shelter of a
giant wave-crest. Another moment, and the battle with
the raging gale and the driving halberds of the sleet would
begin again.
She looked again towards Lynette, and in an instant her
purpose crystallised, her line of action was made clear.
She saw a little bunch of wax-belled white heath fall from
the girl's scarlet belt in the act of rising. She saw Beau-
vayse snatch it greedily from the grass and read the glance
that passed between the golden- hazel and the green-grey
eyes, and understood with a great pang of jealous mother-
pain that she was no longer first in her beloved's heart.
Then came a throb of unselfish joy at the knowledge that
Richard's girl had come into her kingdom, that the divine
right and heritage and crown of Womanhood were hers
at last.
374 THE DOP DOCTOR
Were hera ? Not yet, but might be hers, if every clue
that led back to that tavern upon the veld could be broken
or tangled in such wise that the keenest and most subtle
seeker should be baffled and lost. It all lay clear before
her now, the manipulation of events, the deft rearrange-
ment of actual fact that might best be used to this end.
As her clear brain plaimed, her bleeding heart trailed wings
in the dust, seeking to lead the searcher away from the
hidden nest, and now her motherhood and her pride and all
the diplomacy acquired in her long years of rule rose up in
arms to meet him.
They were not of equaJ height. Her great, changeful
eyes, purple-grey now, dropped to encounter his. She re-
garded him quietly, and said :
" No one csf your wide experience needs to be reminded
that resemblances between persons who are not allied by
blood exist, and are strangely misleading. But since you
have conveyed to me in unmistakable terms your con-
viction that Miss Mildare is the daughter of — a mutual
friend who bore that surname — is actually identified in
your idea with that most unhappy child who was left
orphaned some seventeen years ago — at — I think you said
a veld hotel in the Orange Free State ?"
He bowed assent, biting the short hairs of his moustache
in vexation and embarrassment.
" Hardly an hotel — a wretched shanty of the usual
corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the cattle-grazing
country between Driepoort and Kjoonfontein. And — it
seems my fate to be continually bringing our conversation
back to a — most unhappy and painful theme."
" I acquit you of the intention to pain or wound. When
I have finished what I have to say, we will revert to the
subject no more. It will be buried between us for ever,
though the memory of the Dead live in our pardoning and
loving thoughts, and in our prayers."
The vivid colour that had flamed in her cheeks had sunk
and left them marble. The humid mist of tears that
veiled her eyes gave them a wonderful beauty.
He answered her :
" Your thoughts could not be otherwise thsua noble and
generous. Prayers as pure as yours could not be unheard."
THE DOP DOCTOR 375
" No prayers are unheard, though all are not granted."
She made the slight gesture with her large, beautiful
band that put unnecessary speech from her, and let the
hand drop again by her side. Her bosom rose and fell
quietly with her even speaking. None could have guessed
the tumult within, and the doubts and convictions and
apprehensions that battled together, and the religious fears
and scruples that rent and tore her suffering soul. But
for the sake of Richard's daughter she rallied her grand
forces, and nerved herself to carry out her hated task.
" I will tell you how I came to be interested in the young
lady who is now my adopted daughter, and whom you know
as Lynette Mildare. At the end of the winter of 18 — the
Reverend Mother of our Convent died, and I was sent up
from the Mother-House at Natal, by order of the Bishop,
to take her place as Superior. Two Sisters came with me. It
was the usual slow Journey of many weeks. The wet season
had begun. Perhaps that was why we did not encounter
many other waggons on the way. But one party of emi-
grants of the labouring class — we never really learned where
bound — trekked on before ua, and generally outspanned
within sight. There were three rough Englishmen — two
middle-aged and one quite old — a couple of tawdry women,
and a young girl. They used to ill-treat the girl. We heard
her crying often, and one of the Kafi^r voor-loopers of their
two waggons told n. Cape boy who was in our service that the
old Baas would kill the little white thing one of these days.
She was used as a drudge by them all — a servant, unpaid,
ill-fed, worse-clothed than the Kaffirs — but the old man,
according to our informant, bore her a special grudge, tind
lost no opportunity of wreaking his malice on her."
" I understand," he said. She \^ ent on :
" We would have helped the child if we could have
reached her ; but it was not possible. If she had run away
and taken refuge with us, and the men had followed her, I
do not think we should have given her up for any threats
of theirs, or even for threats carried out in action."
" I know you never would have."
She made the slight gesture with her hand that put all
inferred praise aside.
" The waggons of the emigrants were no longer in sight.
376 THE DOP DOCTOR
one morning when we inspanned. They had headed south aa
if for the Diamond Mines, a-nd we were trekking west. . . ."
There was a slight hesitation, and her lashes flickered, then
she took up her story. " Perhaps we were a hundred and
fifty miles from Gueldersdorp, perhaps more, when we came
upon what we beHeved at first to be the dead body of a
young girl, almost a child, lying among the karroo bush, face
downwards, upon the sand. She had been cruelly beaten
with the sjambok — she bears the scars of that terrible
ill-usage to-day. . . . We Judged that she had fainted
and fallen from one of the emigrants' trek - waggons.
Months afterwards, when her wounds were healed " — her
steady Ups quivered slightly — " and she had recovered from
an attack of brain-fever brought on by alarm and anxiety
and the ill-usage, she told me that she had run away from
people who were cruel to her — from a man who "
" This distresses you. I am grieved "
He noted the sickness of horror in her face, and the
starting of innumerable little shining points of moisture on
her white, broad forehead and about her lips. She drew
out her handkerchief and wiped them away with a hand
that shook a little.
" I have very little more to say. She was quite crushed
and broken by cruelty and ill-usage. No native child could
have been more ignorant — she could not even tell us her
name when we asked it. She probably had never had
one. And Father Wix, who is our Convent Chaplain, and
has charge of the Catholic Mission here, baptised her at
my instance, giving her two names that were dear to
me in that old fife that I left behind so long ago. She is
Lynette MUdare. . . . Are you surprised that in seven
years a young creature so neglected should have become
what you see ? Those powers were inherent in her which
training can but develop. We found in her great natural
capacity, an intelligence keen and quick, a taste naturally
refined, a sweet and gentle disposition, a pure and loving
heart " Her voice broke. Her eyes were blinded by
a sudden rush of tears. She moved her hand as though
to say : " There is no more to tell."
" You shut the door upon my hope," he said.
It was to her veritably as though the gates of her own
THE DOP DOCTOR 377
deed clashed behind her with the closing of the sentence.
For she haxi stated the absolute truth, and yet left much
untold. She saw disappointment and reluctant conviction
in his face, coupled with an immense faith in her that stung
her to an agony of shame and self-reproach. What had
she suppressed ?
Nothkig, but that the waggons of the emigrants had
turned south for Diamond Town a fortnight before the
finding of that lost lamb upon the veld. And her scrupulous
habit of truth, her crystal honour, her keen, clear Judgment
no less than her rigorous habit of self-examination, told her
that the half-truth was no better than falsehood, and that
she, Christ's Bride and Mary's Daughter, had deHberately
deceived this man.
Yet for his own sake, was it not best that he should never
know the truth ! And for the sake of Richard's daughter,
was it not her sacred maternal duty to shield that dearest
one from shame 1 She steeled herself with that as he bared
his head before her.
" Ma'am, you have more than honoured me with your
confidence, and I need not say that it is sacred in my eyes,
and shall be kept inviolate. And for the rest "
XL
" Reverend Mother," sounded from below.
" They are calling us," she said, as though awakened
from a dream.
" May I take you down ?"
He offered his arm with deference, and she touching it
lightly, they went down together. Lynette came to them
laughing, a cup in either hand, her aides-de-camp following
with plates that held the siege apology for bread and butter
and familiar-looking cubes of something. . . .
" Thank you, INIiss Mildare. What have you here,
Beau 1 Cake, upon my word ! Or is it a delusion born of
long and painful abstinence from any form of pastry ?"
" Cake it is, sir, and thundering good cake," proclaimed
Beauvayse. " Made from Sister Tobias's special siege recipe,
without candied peel or plums or carraways, or any of the
378 THE DOP DOCTOR
other what-do-you-call-'ems that go into the ordinary article.
Gro in and win, sir. I've had three whacks. Haven't I,
Miss Mildare 1"
He spoke with the infectious enjoyment of a schoolboy,
and Lynette's laugh, sweet and gay as a thrush's sudden
trill of melody, answered :
" I think you have had four."
She flushed as she met the Colonel's eyes, reading in them
masculine appreciation of her delicate, vivid beauty, and
put her freed hand into the lean palm he held out, saying,
with a shy, sweet smile that lifted one comer of the sensitive
mouth higher than the other :
" I didn't come to say How do you do 1 before, because
I saw you were busy talking to Mother." Her quick glance
read something amiss in another face. " Mother, how tired
you look ! Please bring that little camp-stool, Mr. Fraithorn.
Oh, thank you. Dr. Saxham ; that one with arms is more
comfortable. Colonel, we're all under your command.
Won't you please order the Mother to sit down and rest ?
She will be so tired to-morrow. Dearest, you know you will."
She took the Mother's hand, confidently, caressingly.
The end of the thin black veil, that was shabby now, and
had dams in many places, was wafted across her face by a
vagrant puff of cooled air from the river, and she kissed it,
bringing the tears very near the deep, sad eyes that looked
at her, and then turned away. Saxham, in default of any
excuse for lingering near her, went back to Lady Hannah,
who had been diligently mining in him with the pick and
shovel of Our Special Correspondent, and getting nothing
out, and sat himself doggedly upon a stone beside her.
- " That is a sweet girl." She nibbled bannock, sparsely
margarined, and sipped her sugarless, milkless tea, sitting
on a little bushy knoll, warranted free from pufE-adders
and tarantulas. Saxham answered stiffly :
" Many people here seem to be under — the same im-
pression."
" Don't you share it ? Don't you think her sweet ?"
" I have seen young ladies who were — less deserving of
the adjective."
Lady Hannah Jangled a triumphant laugh. She wore
the tailored garb the average Englishwoman looks best in.
THE DOP DOCTOR 379
at home and abroad, an alpaca coat and skirt of cool grey ;
what the American belle terms a " shirt-waist " with pearl
studs, and a big grey hat with a voluminous blue silk veil.
Her small face was smaller than ever, but her eyes were
as round and as bright as a mouse's or a bird's, and her talk
was full of glitter and vivacity.
" ' Praise from Dr. Saxham.' ... If I were a man," she
declared, " I should verdre la boule over that girl. I don't
wonder where she gets her lovely manners from, with such
a model of grace and good breeding as Biddy Bawne
before her eyes, but I do ask how she came by that type of
beauty ? And Biddy "
" Biddy ?" repeated Saxham, at a loss.
Her laugh shrilled out.
" I forgot. She is the Reverend Mother-Superior of the
Convent to all of you. But I was at school \\dth her, and
I can't forget she used to be Biddy. She was one of the
great girls, and I was a sprat of ten, but she condescended
to let me adore her, and I did, like everybody else. To
be adored is her metier. The Sisters swear by her, and that
girl worships the ground under her feet. If I had a daughter
I should lilce her to look at me in that way — heart in her
eyes, don't you know, and what eyes ! Topaz-coloured,
aren't they ? She has no conversation, of course. /
hadn't at her age — nineteen or twenty, if I am any guesser.
What she will be at thirty, if she don't go off ! That little
Greek head, and all those waves of rusty-coloured hair.
Quite wonderful ! And her hands and feet and skin —
marvellous ! And that small-boned slenderness of build
that is so perfectly enchanting. Paquin would delight to
dress her. And " — her jangling laugh rang out. waking
echoes from hollow places — " it looks — do you know ? — it
looks as though he would get the chance."
" Why does it 1" demanded Saxham, turning his square
face full upon Lady Hannah, and lowering his heavy, brows.
" Mercy upon us, Doctor, do you want me to be definite
and literal ? Can't you do as I do, and use your eyes ?"
Her own roimd, sparkling black ones were full of provoca-
tion. " They look as if they could see rather farther into
a mud wall than most people's. Please get me one of those
peaches. No, I won't have a plate. I am beginning to
380 THE DOP DOCTOR
find out that most of the things Society regards as Indis-
pensable can be done without. I'm beginning to revert to
Primitive Simplicity. Isn't there a prehistoric flair about
most of us ? If there isn't, there ought to be. For what
are we from week-end to week-end but grimy male and
female Troglodytes, eating minced horse and fried locusts
in underground burrows by the light of parafl&n lamps !
Another peach. . . . Thanks. Can't you see those dear
things, the Sisters, gathering them by lantern-light, and
being shelled by Brounckers' German gunners. Wretches !
Beasts ! Horrors !"
" I hope," said Saxham, with rather heavy irony, " that
you acquainted them with your opinion of them while
you had the opportunity ?"
She gaily flipped him with the loose tan gloves she had
drawn off. Her bangles clashed, and her eyes snapped
sparks under the brim of her hat, whose feathers nodded and
swished, and her jangling laugh brought more echoes from
the high banks.
" Ha, ha, ha ! Do you know. Doctor, I call that thoroughly
nasty — to remind me, on such a fine day too, of the Frightful
Fiasco. When my own husband hasn't ventured to breathe
a hint even. . . . Do you know, when he rode out to meet
me with the Escort, all he said was, ' Hullo, old lady ; is
that you ? The Chief wants to know if you'll peck with
us at six, and I told him I thought you'd be agreeable.'
And when we met, he Why do handkerchiefs in-
variably hide when people want to sneeze behind them ?"
She found the ridiculous little square of filmy embroidered
cambric, and blew her thin httle nose, and furtively
whisked away a tear-drop. " He never moved a muscle ;
Just shook hands in his kind, hearty way, and began to tell
the news of the town. . . . Never, by look or word or sign,
helped to rub in what a beetle-headed idiot I'd been."
She gulped. " I could have put my head down on the
tablecloth and cried gallons " — she blew her nose again —
" knowing I'd lost him a rook at least. For, of course,
that flabby Slabberts creature counted for something in the
game, or Brounckers wouldn't have wanted him. And
Captain — my Captain ! . . ." She threw a sparkling eye-dart
tipped with remorseful brine at the spare, soldierly figure
THE DOP DOCTOR 381
and the lean, purposeful face, " If you were to say to me
this minute, ' Hannah Wrynche, Jump off the end of that
high rock-bluff there, down on those imcommonly nasty-
looking stones below,' I vow I'd do it !"
Saxham's blue eyes were kind. Here was a fellow hero-
worshipper.
" I believe you would do it, and — that he believes it too."
She tapped him on the sleeve with the long cherry-wood
stick of her white green-lined umbrella.
" Thank you. But don't get to making a habit of saying
charming things, because the role of Bruin suits you. Your
Society women-patients used to enjoy being bullied,
tremendously, I remember. We're made like that."
Her shrill laugh came again. " To sauter a pieds joirds on
people who are used to being deferred to, or made much of,
is the best way to command their cordial gratitude and
sincere esteem, isn't it ? Don't all you successful profes-
sional men know that ?"
" The days of my professional successes are past and
gone," said Saxham, " and my very name must be strange
in the ears of the men and women who were my patients.
It is natural and reasonable that when a man falls out of
the race, he should be forgotten — at least, I hold it so."
" You have a patient not very far away who lauds you
to the skies." Lady Hannah indicated the slender pepper-
and-salt clad figure of Julius Fraithorn with the cherry-
wood umbrella-stick. " You know his father, the Bishop
of H ? Such a dear Httle trotty old man, with the
kind of rosy, withered-apple face that suggests a dear little
trotty old woman, disguised in an episcopal apron and
gaiters, and with funny little bits of white fur glued on
here and there for whiskers and eyebrows. We met him
\vith Mrs. Fraithorn at the Hotel Schwert at Appenbad
one June. Do you know Appenbad 1 Views divine :
such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of Constance and the
Rhine Valley. To quote Bingo, who suffered hideously
from the whey-cure, every prospect pleases, and only
man is bile — and woman, too, if seeing black spots in
showers like smuts in a London fog, only sailing up instead
of coming down, means a disturbed gastric system. I'm
not sure now that the Bishop did not mention your name.
382 THE DOP DOCTOR
Can he have done so, or am I hashing things ? Do set
my mind aft rest ?"
Saxham said with stiffness :
" It would be possible that' the Bishop would remember
me. I operated on him for the removal of the appendix
in 18—"
" If you had taken away his Ritualistic prejudices at
the same time, you would have made his wife a happy
woman. Her soul yearns for incense and vestments,
candles, and acolytes, and most of all for her boy. Well,
she will thank you herself for him one day. Doctor." The
little dry hand, gUttering with magnificent rings, touched
Saxham's gently. " In the meantime let a woman who
hasn't got a son shake hands Avith you for her."
" You make too much of that affair." Saxham took the
offered hand. It pressed his kindly, and the little lady
went on :
" You're still a prophet in your own country, you know,
though it pleases you to make yourself out a — a kind of
medical Rip Van Winkle. In June last year — when I did
notguessthat I should ever knowyou — ^I heard a woman say:
' If Owen had been here, the child wouldn't have died.'
And the woman was your sister-in-law, Mrs. David Saxham."
Saxham's blue eyes shot her a steely look. The wings
of his mobile nostrils quivered as he drew quickened breath.
He waited, with his obstinate under-lip thrust out, for the
rest. If he did not fully grasp the real and genuine kindli-
ness that prompted the little woman, at least he did her
the justice of not shutting her up as an impudent chatter-
box. She went on, a little nervously :
" I don't think I ever mentioned to you before that I
had met your brother and his wife ? She is still a very
attractive person, but — it is not the type to wear well,
and the boy's death cut them both up terribly."
" There was a boy — who died ?"
"In the spring of last year. Of — meningitis, I think
his mother said, and she declared over and over that if
you had been there, you would have saved him."
" At least, I should have done my best."
She had turned her eyes away in telling him, or she
would have seen the rehef in his face. He underatood
THE DOP DOCTOR 383
now why his mother's trustees had prompted the solicitors*
advertisement. He was his nephew's heir, under the late
Mrs. Saxham's will. Seven thousand in Consols and Home
Rails, and the little freehold property in North Wales,
that brought in, when the house was let, about one hundred
and fifty pounds a year, counted as wealth to a man who
had possessed nothing. He lifted his square head and
threw back his heavy shoulders with the air of one from
whom a heavy burden has been taken. His vivid eyes
lightened, his heavy brows smoothed out their puckers,
and the tense lines about his hps relaxed. His own words
came back to him :
" The Past is done with. Why should not the Future
be fair ?"
He knew, as he looked towards Lynette Mildare, who
personified the Future for him, and his mood changed.
He had loved her without hope. Now a faint grey began
to show in the blackness of his mental horizon. It might
be a false dawn, but what a lightening of the heavy heart —
what a leap of the stagnant blood — answered to it ! He
was no longer penniless. He had never loved monej' or
thirsted for estate, but the thought of that sum of seven
thousand pounds sohdly invested, and the house that
stood in its walled garden on the cliffs at Herion, looking
out on the wild, tumbling grey-white waters of Nantavon
Bay, was dear to him.
Plas Bendigaid had been a Convent once. Its grey,
stone-tiled, steep-pitched roof and solid walls of massive
stone had sheltered his mother's infancy and girlhood.
Perhaps they might cov er a loveher head, and echo to the
voices of his wife and his childi-en. He gave sweet fancies
the rein, as Lady Hannah chattered beside him. He
dreamed of that Futm-e that might be fail-, even as he filled
up the little lady's pauses with " Yes's " and " No's."
Love at first sight. He had laughed the possibility to
scorn, in other days, holding the passion to be the sober
child of propinquity, sympathy, consonance of ideas,
sunilar tastes, and pursuits, and fanned into flame, after
due time to kindle, by the appearance of a rival.
A rival ! He laughed silently, grimly, remembering the
384 THE DOP DOCTOR
resentful, Jealous impulse that had prompted his interrup-
tion when the boyish, handsome face of Beauvayse had
leaned so near to hers, and the blush that dyed her white-
rose cheeks had answered, no doubt, to some hackneyed,
stereotyped, garrison compliment.
He had seen them together since then : once crossing the
veld from the Women's Laager on foot, in the company of
the Mother-Superior ; once here beside the river, under
the chaperonage of all the Sisters ; once in the Market
Square, and always the sight had roused in him the same
intolerable resentment and gnawing pain that rankled in
him now as he watched them.
What was Beauvayse whispering, so close to the delicate
little ear that nestled under the red-brown hair-waves ?
Something that set his grey-green eyes gleaming dangerously,
and lifted the wings of the fine nostrils, and opened the boldly-
curved mouth in audacious laughter, under the short golden
hairs of the cHpped moustache. Somehow that laughter
stung Saxham. His muscular hand gripped the old hunting-
crop that he carried by habit even when he did not ride, and
his black brows were thunderous as he vainly tried to listen
to the Uttle woman who chattered beside him.
" Look about you," she bade him, putting up her
tortoiseshell-rimmed eyeglasses as though she were in a
picture-gallery or at a theatre. " Wouldn't the ordinarj'
unimaginative person suppose that Love would be the last
flower to blossom in the soil of this battered little bit of
debatable ground ? But we know better. So does Miss
Wiercke, the German ocuHst's daughter, and so does that
tallow-candle-locked young man who plays the 'harmonium
at the Catholic Church. And that other pretty girl — I
don't know her name — who used to keep the book-registers
at the Public Library. She is going to marry that young
mining- engineer — a Cornishman, Judging by his blue eyes
and black hair — do you happen to be Cornish, too 1 — next
Sunday. And the imcertainty about living till then or any
time after Monday morning will make quite a commonplace
wedding into something tremendously romantic. But you
don't even pretend to look when you're told. Aha !" she
cried ; "I've caught you. You were watching another
pair of lovers — the couple I kept for the last."
THE DOP DOCTOR 385
" Not at all," said Saxham, inexpressibly wearied by the
voluble little woman's discourse. Ignoring the conven-
tional disclaimer, Lady Hannah went on :
" They're in the early stage — the First Act of the
dear old play. Pretty to watch, isn't it ? Though it
makes one feel chilly and grown old, as Browning or
somebody says. Only the other day one was tipping
that boy at Eton, and he looking such a Fourth of June
darling as you never saw, got up in duck trousers and a
braided blue jacket, and a straw hat with a wreath of
white and crimson Banksia roses round it for the Proces-
sion of Boats. And now " — she sighed drolly — " he's a
long-legged Lieutenant of Hussars, with a lady-kilHng
reputation. Though, in the present instance, I'm ready
to back my opinion that the biter is fairly bit. Wliat
regiments of women will tear their hair — real or the other
thing — when Beau becomes a Benedick."
Saxham saw red, but he gave no sign. She turned down
her Httle thumb with a twinkle of triumph.
" Hahet ! And I'm not sorry he has got it badly. His
leitmotif in the music-play has been * See the Conquering
Hero ' up to now ; one isn't sorry to see one's sex avenged.
But one is sorry for Mary Fraithorn's boy." She indicated
the Chaplain with a twirl of her eyeglasses. " She used to
visit him with the Sisters when he was ill, and, of course, he
has been bowled over. But il n'a pas un radis, unless the
Bishop comes round, and don't you think that little Greek
head of hers is aware that a great deal of money goes with
the Foltlebarre title, and that the family diamonds would
suit it to a marvel ?"
Saxham said gratingly, and with a hostile look :
" Do you infer that Miss Mildare is vain and mercenary ?"
" Good mercy, my dear man !" she screamed ; " don'ft
pounce, I infer nothing, except that Miss Mildare happens
to be a live girl, -tvith eyes and the gift of charm, and that
the young men are attracted to her as naturally as drones
to a honey-pot. Also, that, if she's wise, she Mill dispose
of her honey to the best advantage." Her beady bright
eyes snapped suddenly at Saxham, and her small face broke
up into laughter. " Ha. ha, ha ! Why, I do beheve . . ."
She screamed at him triumphantly. " You, too ! You've
23
l\S6 THE DOP DOCTOR
succumbed. She carries your scalp at her pretty waist
with the rest of 'em. How perfectly delightful !"
Possibly Saxham h?id always been a bear, as her little
ladyship had stated, but the last five years had certainly
scraped off whatever social veneer had adhered to his
manners. The power of facial self-control, the common tact
that would have: carried things off with a laugh and a jest,
were his no longer, if he had ever possessed them. He got
upon his feet and stood before the woman whose six ounces
less oi brain-matter had been counterbalanced by so large
an allowance of intuition, dumbly furious with her, and so
unspeakably savage with himself for not being able to hide
his ?inger and annoyance that, as he stood before her with
his hulking shoulders hunched and his square, black head
sullenly lowered, and his eyes blazing under their heavy
brows, he suggested to Lady Hannah's nimble wit and
travelled experience the undeniable analogy between a
chaffed an^ irate Doctor and a baited Spanish bull, goaded
by the stab of the gaudy paper-flagged dart in his thick
neck, £\.nd bewildered by the subsequent explosion of the
cracker. He only wanted a tail to lash, she mentally said, and
had pigeon-holed the joke ifor Bingo when it became none.
" Dp, please, forgive me ! . . . What you must think of
me I . . ." she began contritely.
Repentance gave place to resentment. Saxham, without
even an abrupt inclination of the head, had swimg about and
left her. She saw the heavily-shouldered, muscularly-built
figure crossing the drift a little way down, stepping from
boulder ^p bo^:^lder with those curiously small, neat feet,
twirling his old horn-handled hunting-crop as he went, with
a decidedly vicious swish of the doubled thong. Now he
was knee-deep in the reeds of the north shore ; now he
was climbing the bank. A black-and-white crow flew up
heavily, and was lost among the intertwining branches of
the oaks and the blue-gums, and a cloud of finches and
linnets rose as the covert of tree-fern and cactus and tall
gras§, knitted with thorny- stemmed creeper, received him
and swallowed him. She saw by the shaking of the fohage
that he turned up the stream, and then no more of him.
Feather-headed idiot that she had been ! Inconsiderate
wretcjj ! How, in Heaven's name, after reminding the man
THE DOP DOCTOR 387
of the perfidy of that; underbred passee little person with
the passion for French novels and sulphonal tabloids, who
had throAvn the Doctor over, years before, in favour of
his brother the Dragoon — how cou^d she have charged him
with being a victim to the charms of another young
woman ? If Mrs. Da^dd's desertion rankled still, as no
doubt it 4id, there be^^g no accounting for masculine
taste, \\e would, of course, resient the accusation almost as
an insult. Men were such Conseorvatives in love. And,
besides, she had Just been telling him ^bout the child. She
loathed herself for having perpetrated such a blunder.
Saxham had murdered politeness by quitting her abruptly ;
but hadn't she deserved the snub ? She deserve^i snubbing.
She would go, for the jjaealth of her soul, and talk to dearest
Biddy, \Yho always made you feel even smaller than you
had thought yourself before.
She stood up. shaking the sand-grains and grass-burrs
from her dress and the folds of the white umbrella. It was
nearing six o'clock. The heat was lessening, and the pale
turquoise sky overhead was flecked and dappled with little
puffs of rosy cloud, bulking in size g-nd deepening in colour
to the westward, where their upper edges were pure gold.
And the river looked like a stream of liquid honey, upon
which giant rose-leaves had b^en scattered, and a breeze
was stirring in the grasses and among t^ie leaves. Th^
Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss
Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a
bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of
lovers in the second stage, while the yoi^pg lady who had
kept the registers at the Public Library ^va8 teaching her
Comit<h mining-engineer ^o wash up ci^ps and saucers in a
tin basin — a process which result<^d in the entanglement of
fingers of diSerent sexes, arxd rnade Siste^" Tobias pause over
her task of wiping crockery to shake h^r head and laugh-
Little Miss Wiercke was to lose her lank-baired organist
a few days later, the preyalent complaint of shrapnelitis
carrying him off. And the girl who screamed coouettishly
as the mining- etigipiCei^ amorously squeezed her wet fingers
under the soapsuds was shortly to be represented in the
Comishman's memory by another white cro^s in the
Cemetery, a trunk full of pathetic feminine fripperies, and
26—2
388 THE DOP DOCTOR
a wedding-ring that had been worn barely two months.
But they did not Imow this, and they were happy. We
should never love or laugh if we knew.
Two other people had passed along the path that ran by
the margin of the sand and reed-patches, and were lost to
sight. Lady Hannah glanced towards the Mother-Superior,
who was being gracious to Captain Bingo and the Chaplain,
and hoped Biddy would not miss the owner of the little
Greek head and the enchanting willowy figure quite yet.
Nuns were frightfully scrupulous and gimlet-eyed where
their charges were concerned. And certainly, if young
people never got away together without qu^il ne vous en
deplaise f there would be fewer engagements. And Biddy
must know that it was a Heaven-sent chance for the girl.
The Foltlebarres had sat too long on thorns to grumble
at Beau's marrying a girl without a dot, who was not only
lovely enough to set Society screaming over her, but modest
and a lady. Up to the present his tendency had been to
exalt Beauty above Breed, and personal attractiveness
above moral immaculateness.
As in the most recent case of that taking but extremely
terrible little person with the toothy, photographic smile,
Miss Lessie Lavigne of the JolHty Theatre, the affair with
whom might be counted, it was to be hoped, as the last
furrow of a heavy sowing of wild oats. As this would be
a match d'egcd a egal — in point of blood and education, at
any rate— certainly the Foltlebarres would have reason to
bless their stars.
Somebody came over to her Just then, saying :
" Bingo seems in excellent spirits."
She looked, a httle apprehensively, across to where the
Mother Snperior and the wistful-eyod, pepper-and-salt-clad
Chaplain were patiently listening to the recital of one of
Bingo's stock anecdotes.
" What is he telling the Reverend Mother ?" Her tone
was anxious. " I do hope not that story about the un-
washed Boer and the cake of soap !"
" Don't be alarmed. It's a recent and completely harm-
less anecdote about the despatch-runner from Diamond
Town who got in this morning."
Her eyes sparkled.
THE DOP DOCTOR 389
" Really . . . ? And with news worth having ?"
" Mr. Casey might be disposed to think so."
" Who is Mr. Casey ?"
" That's a question nobody can answer satisfactorily."
" But is the inbi Iligence absolutely useless to anybody
who doesn't happei to be Mr. Casey ?" she insisted.
" Not unless they happened to be deeply interested in
Mrs. Casey."
" There is a IMrs. Casey, then ?"
" So says the man who travelled two hundred miles to
bring her letters and the message that she is, as Mr.
Micawber would put it, in statu quo."
" I understand." The bright black eyes were com-
passionate. " She has written to her husband — she
doesn't know that he has been killed "
" Nor do we. As far as we can ascertain, the garrison
has never included a Casey."
" Then you think "
" I think " — he glanced aside as a stentorian bellow of
laughter reached them — " that. Judging by what I hear,
Bingo has got to the soapy story."
She frowned anxiously.
" Bingo ought to remember that nuns aren't ordinary
women. I shall have to go and gag him." She took a
dubious step.
" Why ? The Reverend Mother does not seem at all
shocked, and Fraithom is evidently amused." He added,
as Bingo's rapturous enjoyment of his own anecdote
reached the stamping and eye-mopping stage : " And un-
doubtedly Bingo is happy."
" He has got out of hand lately. One can't keep a hus-
band in a proper state of subjection who may be brought
home to one a corpse at any hour of the day." Her laugh
Jangled harshly, and broke in the middle. " The soil of
Gueldersdorp being so uncommonly favourable Just now
to the production of weeds of the widow's description."
" It grows other things." Hjs eyes were very kind.
" Brave, helpful, unselfish women, for instance."
" There is one !"
She indicated the tall, black-robed figure of the Mother
with a quick gesture of her little Jewelled hand.
390 ^i. THE DOP DOCTOR
" And here is another." He toUchied her sleeve lightly
with a finger-tip.
" Brave. . . . Helpful." Her voice was choky. " Do
you think I shall ever forget the hindrance I have been to
you ? Didn't I los^ you your Boor spy '"
" Granted you did." His moustache curved cheerfully
at the comefs. " But that's Ancient History, and look
what you brought back !"
" A unit of the despised majority who is thoroughly con-
vinced of her own superfluousness. Hannah Wryhche,
with the conceit so completely taken out of her that she
feels, say, like a deflated balloOh ; Hannah Wrynche, who
beheved herself born to be a War Correspondent, and has
come down to scribbling gossipy paragraphs for a Httle
siege newspaper printed in a damp celldt."
He laughed.
" Collectors will pay fancy prices for copies of that saitie
Uttle siege newspaper, 'at auctions yet to be."
" I've thought of that," she bdnfessed. " But, oh ! I
ccitild make it so much more spicy if you'd only give rae a
freer hand."
His hazel eyes had a smile in them. " I know you think
nie an editorial martinet."
" You blue-pencil out of my poor paragraphs everything
that's interesting."
" No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."
" I'he Reading PiibUc adorie personalities aiid puerilities."
" They cdh go to the D'aUy Whale for them, then."
" Isii't that rather- a personal remark ?"
" Let me say that if you are occasionally pet-sonal, ybii
ai-fej hever, under aiiy circumstances, anything but clever."
" Thank you. But, oh ! the difference between wh^t I
am and what I aspired to be !"
" And, ah ! the differehce betweeii what I hiiv^ iioile and
what I iheant to do !" he said.
Her black eyes flashed. " You have never feally felt it.
Abhieveiiient with you has never hit below the mkrk. You,
of all men living, Are least fitted to enter ihto the rueful
regrets and dismal disillusions of a Hannah Wrynche."
" Hannah WrjTjiche, who id content to do a. trbmah's
work and fill A woman'iS place ; Hannah Wrynche, who has
THE DOP DOCTOR 391
atoned for a moment of ambitious — shall I say impru-
dence ? — splendidly and nobly, has no reason to be rueful
or regretful. Don't shake your head. Do you think I
don't know what you are doing, day after day, to help and
cheer those poor fellows at the Convalescent Hospital ?"
Her eyes were full of tears. " You make too much of
my poor efforts. You underestimate the effect of praise
from you."
" I said very little in the last cipher despatch that got
through to Colonel Rickson at Malamye, but what I did
say was very much to the purpose, beUeve me."
She gasped, staring at him with circular eyes of in-
credulity. " You've mentioned — me — in your despatches.
Me ?"
" Just so !" he said, and left her groping for the ridiculous
Httle gossamer handkerchief to dry the tears of pride and
gratitude that were tumbling down her cheeks.
XLI
" Clang — clang — clang !"
A man and a gii'l came back out of Paradise when the
Catholic church-bell rang the Angelus. The girl's sweet
flushed face had paled at the first three strokes. When the
second triple clanged out, her colour came back. She
rose from her seat upon a lichened slab of granite in the
cool shadow of the great boulder, and bent her lovely
head, Beauvayse watching her lips as they moved, sound-
lessly repeating the Angelic Salutation :
" Ave Maria, gratia plena ; Dominus tecum ! Benedicta
tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris lui, Jesus."
The wonderful simplicity of the Chosen One's reply
followed, and the announcement of the Unspeakable
Mystery. The httle prayer followed, arid the rapid signing
with the Cross, and she dropped her slight hand from her
bosom, and turned her eyes back upon his.
" You remind me of riiy mother," he told her. " She
is Catholic, you know."
" And not you T'
*' We fellows, my brothers Leveetre and rialthSm and
392 THE DOP DOCTOR
myself, were brought up as pillars of the Established
Church." His sleepy, grey-green eyes twinkled, his white
teeth showed in the laugh. " The girls are of my mother's
faith. It was a family agreement. Are you quite sure
you have come down to earth agaia ? Because there's
such an awful lot I want to say to you that I don't know
where to begin."
Though his mouth laughed, his eyes had wistful shadows
under them. He had tossed aside his Service felt when she
had taken off her hat, and the sunshine, piercing the thick
fohage overhead, dappled the scaly trunks of the blue-gum
trees, and dripped gold upon the red-brown head and the
crisp-waved golden one.
" I am here. I am listening."
She stood before him with meekly drooping eyelids, feel-
ing his ardent gaze like a palpable weight, under which her
knees trembled and her whole body swayed. The great
boulder rose upon her left hand like a beneficent presence.
Delicate ferns and ice-plants sprang from its chinks and
crannies. The long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her
small, brown-shod feet, some bearing seed-pods, others
rows of pink bells, or yellow — a fairy chime. In the
damper hollows iris bloomed, and the gold and scarlet
sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, and gaily-plumaged
finches were sidling on overhanging boughs, or dipping and
drinking in the shallows. The wattled starlings whistled
to each other, or fought as starlings will. A grey partridge
was bathing in the hot dry sand between the reed-beds and
the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel were rising at
the flies. There was no sound but the running water.
The spicy smell of aromatic leaves and the honeyed per-
fume of a great chmbing trumpet- flower made the air
languorous with sweetness.
He answered her now.
" You are here, and I am here. And for me that means
everything. And I feel that I want nothing more, and,
still, such a tremendous lot besides."
He breathed as though he had been running, and his
sharply-cut nostrils quivered. His white teeth gleamed
under the clipped golden moustache.
Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresis-
J
THE DOP DOCTOR 303
tible that in these days of storm, and stress, and hardship
and peril, his handsome face was never without its gay,
confident smile. His tall, athletic figure, in the neat work-
manlike Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards
her eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the
direct simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her
a delicious terror. The perfume of youth and health, of
vigour and virility, that exhaled from him, came to her
mingled with the scent of the crushed spice-leaves and the
perfume of the waxen-belled heaths and the breath of the
giant trumpet-flower. She was turning dizzy. She could
scarcely stand.
" I — I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the
grasses at the foot of the great granite slab and prodded
in chinks and crannies for snakes and tarantulas ; and when
she sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw himself at her
feet with a careless, powerful grace, and lay there looking up
at her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through
the thick dark eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under
them, and her little pointed chin.
The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat
peeped under the hem of her green cloth skirt ; below there
was a gUmpse of slender, crossed ankles in brown silk hose,
and the little brown shoes laced with wide silk ties. She
drew off one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed
back a strajdng lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing
him murmur in his caressing voice :
" Take off the other glove, too."
She was well aware how beautiful her hands were — small,
and slender, and ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled,
with httle babyish nicks at the wrists, and at the imier
edges of the rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails, of the
true almond shape. She thought Httle of her face, though
she knew it to be charming ; but she ingenuously admired
her slender feet, that were quite as pretty without the
silk stockings and Uttle brown shoes, and the delicate
hands she bared for him now. He looked at them with
ardent longing, and said :
" How dear of you to do that, because I asked you !
And do you realise that we're here together alone, you and
me, for the first time ? Nobody saw us steal away but Sister
394 THE DOP DOCTOR
Cleophee, and I've a notioh she woul<lh't tell, blessed old
soul !"
Her eyes diniled.
" You would not call the Mother that ?"
" No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of
Wales. And a snubbing from the Religious would be rather
worse, on the whole, than a snubbing from the Royalty."
" The Princess never snubbed you ?"
" Didn't she ? Tremeiidously, once. Do you want to
hear about it ? She had sent away her brougham while the
giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing her round
St. Paul's. And — acting as Extra Equerry — I'd got instruc-
tions to call her a hack conveyance, and — being young and
downy, I'd picked H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank.
But you've been bred and born here. You don't even know
what a growler is. And in five years' time there won't be
one left in London."
" Perhaps I shall see London before Ihe five years are
over. And a growler is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm
not so ignorant. . . ."
" You sweetest !" he burst out passionately. " I wish
I knew all that you could teach me !"
He niight have frightened her if he had stretched out his
arms to clasp her then. But he mastered himself so far.
Lying at full length in the grass, leaning upon his elbow, he
rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in with
thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him
enveloped her, delicately and yet forcefully, constraining
and urging and compelling her to meet his gaze. And the
perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her in waves
of sweetness, growing in strehgth, and the monotonous
buzzing of the black honey-bees mingled with the drum-
ming of the crickets, and the flowiiig of the riv^er, and the
beating of her heart, and the rushing of her blood. She
leafaed her fair head back against the great boulder, and
said in a voice that shook a Httle :
" Tell me about the siiubbihg."
" It was High Art. Three words — arid I kiiew I'd be-
hd,ved like a bouridier of the worst — t ha<l to go back and
get the other cab, with A, broken front window iahd a
cabby. . . ." He chuckled. ' I've met red, noses enough,
THE DOP DOCTOR 395
but you could have seen that chap's glowing through the
thickest fog that ever blanketed Ludgate Hill and wrapped
the Strand in greasy mystery. Don't move, please ! . . .
There's a ray of suiishine touching your head that makes
yotu" hair look the colour of a chestnut when the prickly
green hull first cracks to let it out. Or . . . there's a rose
grows on the pergola at home at Foltlebarre Royal, with a
coppery sheen on the young leaves. ... I wondered why I
kept thinking of it as I looked at you. But I know now.
And your skin is creamy white like the flower. Oh, if I
could only gather the girl-rose arid carry it home to the
others !"
She was pink as the loveliest La France now.
" You ought not to talk to me in that way."
" Don't I know it ?" Beauvayse groaned out. He turned
over upon his face in the grass, and lay quite still. A
shuddering sigh heaved the strong young shoulders from
time to time, and his hands clenched and tore at the grasses.
" Don't I know it ? Lynette, Lynette !"
She loiiged to touch the close-cropped golden head. Un-
seen by him, she stretched out a hand timidly and drew it
back again, unsatisfied.
" Lynette, Lyliette ! I'm paying at this moment for
every rotten act of headlong folly I've ever committed in
my life, and you're making rUe !" He caught at a fold of
her skirt and drew it to him and hid his face in it, kissing
it again and again. It was one of the caresses she had been
used herself to offer where she most loved. Ttt find your-
self being worshipped instead of worshipping is an experi-
ence. She touched the golden head now, as the Mother had
often touched her own. He caught the hand.
" No, no !" She grew deadly pale, and shivered.
" Please let me gu. I — ^I did not "
She tried to release the hd.nd. He raised himself, and
she started at the wartn, quiveriag pressiil-e of his beautiful
mouth, scarcely shaded by the young, wheat-golden mous-
tache, upon her cool, sweet flesh. She snatched her hand
away with a faint cry, and sprang to hoi- feet, and her
cheeks blazed anew as she turned to go.
" You want to leave tile ? You Would punish me like
that — Just for a kissed hand ?"
((
396 THE DOP DOCTOR
He barred her way, taller than herself, though he stood
upon the sloping lower level. She had learned always to
be true in thought and speech.
" I — don't — like to be touched." She said it without
looking at him.
" You put your hand upon my head. Why did you do
it if you hate me so ?"
I — don't hate you !"
I love you ! My rose, my dove, my star, my Joy !
Queen of all the girls that ever I saw or dreamed of, say
that you could love me back again !"
" I— must not."
Her bosom heaved. He could see the delicate white
throat vibrating with the tumultuous beating of her heart.
" Why not ? Nobody has told you anything against
me ? Nobody has said to you that I have no right to love
you ?" he demanded.
" No."
" Look at me."
The golden hazel, dark-lashed eyes she shyly turned to
his were full of exquisite, melting tenderness. Her lips
parted to speak, and closed again. He leaned towards her
— hung over her, his own hps irresistibly attracted to those
sweetest ones. . . .
" Lord Beauvayse " she began, and stopped.
He begged :
" Please, not the duflSng title, but ' Beauvayse ' only.
Tell me you love me. Tell me that you'll wait until I'm
able to come to you and say : ' My beloved, the way's
clear. Be my wife to-morrow !' "
His tone was masterful. His ardent eyes thrilled her.
She murmured :
" Beauvayse . . . !"
She swayed to him, as a young palm sways before a
breeze, and he caught her in his strenuous, young embrace,
and held her firmly against him. Her old terrors wakened,
and dreadful, unforgettable things stirred in the darkness,
where they had lain hidden, and lifted hydra-heads. She
cried out wildly, and strove to thrust him from her, but he
held her close. There was a shaking among the tangled
growths of bush and cactus high up on the opposite bank,
THE DOP DOCTOR 397
and Lynette realised that Beauvayse's arms no longer
held her. She leaned back against the boulder, panting and
trembling, and saw Beauvayse's revolver glitter in his steady
hand, as something came crashing down through the tangled
jungle upon the edge of the farther shore, and a heavily-
built man in khaki pushed through the shoulder-high
growth of reeds, and leaped upon a rock that had a swirl
of water round it. It was Saxham.
" Miss ]\Iildare !" called the strong, vibrating voice.
She faltered :
" It— it is Dr. Saxham."
" And what the devil does Dr. Saxham want ?" was
written in Beauvayse's angry face. But he called out as
he lowered his revolver-hand :
" You've had rather an escape of getting shot, Saxham,
do you know ? You might have been a Boer or a buffalo.
Better be more careful next time, if you're anxious to
avert accidents."
Saxham was a little like the buffalo as he lowered his
head and surveyed the alert, virile young figure and the
insolent, high-bred face from under ominously scowling
brows. He made no answer ; only laid one finger upon the
butt of his own revolver, and the shght action fanned
Beauvayse's annoyance and resentment to a white-heat,
as perhaps Saxham had intended. He sprang upon another
boulder that was in the mid-swirl of the current, and spoke
again.
" Miss Mildare, I was walking on one of the native paths
that have been made in the bush there " — he indicated the
bank behind him — " when I heard you cry out. I am
here, at your service, to offer you any help or protection
that is in my power to give."
Lynette looked at him vaguely. Beauvayse, crimson to
the crisp waves upon his forehead and the white collar-line
above the edge of his jacket, answered for her.
" IMiss Mildare does not require any help or protection
other than what I am privileged to place at her disposal.
You had better go on with your walk, Doctor. You know
the old adage about two being company ?"
He laughed, but his voice had quivered with fury, and
the hand that held the revolver shook too. And his eyes
398 THE DOP DOOTOR
seemed colourless as water against the furious crimson of
his face. Still ignoring him, Saxham said, his own square,
pale faoe turned full upon Lyne^te, and his vivid blue eyes
constraining her :
" IVIiss Mildare, I am at your comnpiands. Tell me to
cross the river and take you back to the ladies of the Con-
vent, or order me to continue my walk. In which case I
shall understand that the familiarities of Lord Beauvayse
are not unwelcome to vou."
" By God ... ! You "
Beauvayse choked, then suddenly remembered where
an4 how to strike. But he waited, and Saxham waited, and
still she did not speak.
" Am I to go or stay 1 Kindly answer, Miss Mildare !"
Beauvayse's eyes were on her. He said to her below his
breath :
" Tell him to go !"
She stammered :
" Th — thank you. But — I — I — had rather you went on."
Beauvayse saw his opportunity, and added, with an in-
tolerable smile '
" My ' familiarities,' as you are pleased to term them,
being more acceptable to a lady than the attentions of the
Dop Doctor."
Saxham started as though an adder had flashed its fangs
through his boot. A rush of savage blood darkened his
face ; his hand quivered near the butt of his revolver, and
his eyes blazed murder. But Avith a frightful effort ho con-
trolled himself, lifted his hat slightly to Lynette, turned
and leaped back to the stone he had quitted, strode through
the reed-beds, and plunged back into the tangled boscage.
That he did not continue his walk, but turned back towards
the town, was plain, for his retreat could be traced by the
shaking of the thick bush and the high grasses through
which he forced his way. It did him good to battle even
with these vegetable forces, and the hooked thorns that tore
his clothes and rent his flesh left nothing like the traces that
those few words of disroissal, spoken by a girl's voice, and
the hateful taimt that had followed, had. left upon his heart.
It was over. Over — over, the brief, sweet season of hope
Nothing was left now but his loyalty to the friend who be-
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 399
Ueved in him. If that man Ipjad not stood between Saxham
and his despair, Gueldersdorp would have got back her
Dop Doctor that night. For the Hospital stores included
a cherished case or two of Martell and Kinahan, and all
these things were under Saxham's hand.
Th^ heavy footsteps crashed out of hearing. The startled
finches settled down again, except at that point, higher up on
the opposite bank, to which Beauvayse's attention had first
been directed. There the little birds yet hovered like a cloud
of butterflies, but, practised scout as Beauvayse was, he paid
no heed to ^h^ir distress. She hadl declare^ for him. The
Doctor's discomfiture enhanced his. triumph. Gad ! how
like an angry buffalo the fellow was ! The sort of beast who
would put down his head and charge at a stone wall a.s
confidently as at a mud one. It was a confounded nuisance
that he had seen what he had seen. But a man who had
eventually cut so poor a figure, had been snubbed so
thoroughly and completely, might prefer to hold his tongue.
And if he did not, here in Gueldersdorp, while no letters got
through, while no newKS filtered in from the big humming
world outside, it would be possible to carry things bravely
off for a long time. He had told Bingo, to be sure, about —
about Lessie. But Bingo^ though he might bluster and
barge about dishonourable conduct, would never give away
a man Avho had trusted him. To be sure, it wa» not quite
fair, not altogether square ; it was not playing the game as
it should be played, to gain her promise as a free m.an.
Should he make a clean breast of it, and tell her the whole
wretched story now ?
Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender
grcen-and-white, nymph-like figure, against the background
of sun-hot, shadow- flecked, hchened stone, looking at him.
The rosy light bathed her in its radiance. And as she
looked, it seemed to him that something was dawning in
that face of hers. He watched it, breathless with the
realisation of his dreams, his hopes, his desires. The prize
was his. Every other baser memory was drowning within
him. It seemed to him that her purity, as he bathed in it,
washed him clean of stain. He forgot everything but; the
secret that those sweet eyes told at laat.
" My beloved ! I'm not good enough to tie your blessed
400 THE DOP DOCTOR
little shoes, and yet no other man shall ever have you, hold
you, call you his own. . , . Lynette, Lynette ! Dear one,
isn't there a single kiss ? And I might get shot to-morrow."
It was characteristic of him that his brave, gay mouth
should laugh even in the utterance of the appeal that
melted her. She gave a httle sob, and raised her sweet face
to his, flushing loveliest rosy red. She lifted her slender
arms and laid them about his strong young throat, and
kissed liim very quietly and purely. He had meant to
snatch her to Ms leaping heart and cover her with eager,
passionate caresses. But the strong impulse was quell6d.
He said, almost with a sob :
" Is this your promise ? Does this mean that you belong
to me ?"
Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered :
" Yes."
He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to
know himself her chosen. Ah ! why was he not free ?
Why had Chance and Luck and Fate forced him to play a
part like this ?
" I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago !" he broke
out impulsively. "Half-a-dozen years ago — only you'd
have been a mere kid — too young to understand what
Love means. . . . Why, Ljmette darling ! what is the
matter ? What have I said that hurt ?"
Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank
away from him. He drew back, shocked into silence by the
sudden, dreadful change in her. Her eyes, curiously dulled
and faded, looked at Beauvayse as though they saw not him,
but another man, through him and behind him. Her face
was peaked and pinched ; her supple, youthful figure
contracted and bent Uke that of a woman withered by some
wasting sickness, her dainty garments seemed to lose their
colouring and their freshness, and hang on her, by some
strange illusion wrought by the working of her mind upon
his, like sordid rags. Against the splendid riot of life and
colour over and under and about her, she looked like some
slender sapling ringed and blighted, and ruined by the inex-
orable worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the
veld. She was recalling what had been — realising what
must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She shuddered,
THE DOP DOOTOR 401
and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, and the
blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in alarm :
" Lynette dearest ! what is the matter ? Why do you
look at me hke that ? Lynette !"
She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind,
and stared through him and beyond him into the Past.
That was all. There was a rustling of leaves and branches
higher on the bank, and the sound of thick woollen draperies
trailing through grass. The bush on the edge of the cleared
space that was about the great boulder was parted by a
white, strong hand and a black-sleeved arm, and the
Mother -Superior moved out into the open, and came down
with those long, swift steps of hers to where they were.
Her eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, fastened on the droop-
ing, stricken figure of the girl, read the altered face, and
then she turned them on the boy, and they were stern as
those of some avenging Angel, and her white wimple,
laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands
of Sister Tobias, framed a face as white.
" What is the reason of — this ? What has passed be-
tween you to account for it ? Has your mother's son no
sense of honour, sir ?"
The icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He
drew himself to his splendid height, and answered, his brave
young eyes boldly meeting the stern eyes that questioned
him :
" Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable
of dishonourable conduct. The fact is, that I have just
asked Miss Mildare to be my wife. And she consents."
A spasm passed over the pale face. So easily they leave
us whom we have reared and tended, when the strange
hand beckons and the new voice calls. But the Mother -
Superior was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew
her black nun's robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said
calmly, holding out her hand to him :
" You will forgive me if I way unjust, knowing that she
is dear to me. And now I shall ask you to leave us.
Please tell the Sisters " — from habit she glanced at her worn
gold watch — " we shall join them in ten minutes' time."
He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and
took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and
402 THE DOP DOCTOR
had laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her passive
hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her
side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask
void of life. He looked towards the Tviother in distress.
Her white hand imperiously motioned him away. He ex-
postulated :
" Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town,
without protection ? Natives or white loafers may be
hanging about."
" K you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a
call. But go now."
He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between
the reed-beds on the foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic
figure until it swung round a bend and was lost to sight.
Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the
touch Lynette dropped as though she had been shot, and
lay among the trodden grasses and the flaunting cowslips
face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from
the muffled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair.
She writhed like a crushed snake, and all of her slender
neck and face that could be seen and the little ears that her
clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and sometimes
covered were one bu rnin g, shameful red.
'' Lynette ! My dear one !" The Mother, wrung and
torn with a very agony of tenderness and pity, knelt beside
her, and began with gentle strength to untwine those
clutcliing hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in
one of hers, and passed the other arm beneath the slender
rigid body, and lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace,
silently until a moan, more articulate than the rest, voiced :
" Mother !"
" It is Mother. She holds you ; she will not let you go."
The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the
rigor lessen. The moaning ceased, and the tortured heart
began to leap and strain against her own, as though some
invisible hand lashed it with an unseen thong.
There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping
of the heart that shook her whole body. And it seemed to
the Mother that her own heart wept tears of blood. The
hour had come at last, as always she had known it would.
The love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette.
THE DOP DOCTOR 403
She knew now the full value of the lost heritage, and
realised the glory of the Jewel that had been snatched by
the brutal hand of a thief. Ah, Lord ! the pity of it !
The pity of it ! She, the stainless one, could have
stripped off her own white robe of virgin purity, had it been
possible, to clothe the despoiled young shoulders of
Richard's daughter, cowering prostrate under her burden of
guiltless shame, crushed by the terrible knowledge that
ruiaed innocence must always pay the penalty, whether
the destroyer is punished or goes free.
The penalty ! Suppose at the price of a lie from lips
that had never lied yet it could be eva ted ? The Mother's
face contracted with a spasm of mental pain. A dull flush
mounted to her temples, and died out ia oUve paleness ; her
Ups folded closely, and her black brows frowned over the
sombre grey fixes burning in their hollow caves. She re-
buked a sinner at that moment, and the culprit was herself.
She, the Just mistress and wise ruler of so many Sisters
in the religious profession ; she, so slow to Judge and con-
demn others, was unsparing in austerity towards herself.
She had always recognised her greatest weakness in her love
for this adopted daughter that might have been her own
if Richard Mildare had not played traitor. She had never
once yielded to the clingiag of those shght hands about her
heart, but she had exacted forfeit from herself, and rigor-
ously. So much for excess of partiality, so much for over-
consideration, so much for lack of faith in over-anxiety, so
much more of late for the keen mother- Jealousy that had
quickened in her to anguish at the thought that another
would one day usurp her undivided throne, and claim and
take the lion's share of the love that had been all hers.
Her spiritual director was far too lenient, in her opinion.
She was all the more exacting towards herself. What right
had a nun to be so bound by an earthly tie ? It was de-
frauding her Saviour and her Spouse to love with such
excess of maternal passion the child He had given. Yet
she loved on.
She reviewed all her shortcomings, even while the girl's
head lay helplessly agaiast her, and the scalding tears that
had at last begun to gnsh from those shut, quivering eyeUds
wetted her breast. She had esteemed and valued perfect
26—2
404 THE DOP DOCTOR
candour above all things. And yet of what concealments had
she not been guilty in the shielding of this dearest head ?
She had deceived, for Richard's child, Richard's friend,
in the deft interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole
plausible fabric. She knew that, if necessary, she would
deceive again, trailing her wings, fluttering on before, as
the golden plover lures the footsteps of the stranger from
her nest.
Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt
morbid. Even the lay Catholic can with difficulty com-
prehend and enter fully into the mental constitution of the
Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon the
crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the
daily reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement,
outrage, insult, to her Master and her Lord.
And she had always Jinown, it seemed to her, that this
terrible hour would come. When the two young figures
had moved away together into the green gloom of the trees,
she had felt a premonitory chill that streamed over her
whole body like icy water, paralysing and numbing her
strength. She had read their secret in their faces, un-
conscious of her scrutiny, and watched them out of sight,
praying, as only such a mother can, that it might not be as
she feared. This was her beloved's great hour ; she would
not have stretched out a finger to delay its coming, — she
who had known Love, and could not forget ! It might be
that in this splendid boy, who was as beautiful as the Greek
Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard, lay the
answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white
would not be a blasphemy, hke the young nun's snowy robe
and veil. And yet — and yet, in Lynette's place she knew
that she could never have looked into the face of a rosy,
smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and
orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past.
Was it wise that another should be made to share that
vision 1 She put that question to herself, looking with
great agonised, unseeing eyes over the head that lay upon
her bosom, out across the slowly moving water, stained with
amber from ironstone beds through which it had wound its
way, tinged with ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the
sky, from the western horizon lo the zenith, and from
THE DOP DOCTOR 405
fchence to the serried peaks and frowning bastions of
purple-black cloud that lowered in the north, was all orange-
crimson now, and the moon, then at the ending of her
second quarter, swung Uke a pale lamp of electrum at the
eastward comer of the flaming tent.
" Was it wise ?" She seemed to hear her own voice
echoing back out of the past. And it said :
" The only just claim to your entire confidence in all
f that concerns your past life will rest in the hands of the
man who may one day be your husband."
The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to
her in gusts of intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness.
She glanced round and saw it on her right, clasping in its
luxuriant embrace a slender young bush that it was killing.
The thick, juicy green stems and succulent green leaves,
the greedily embracing tendrils and great fleshy-white,
hanging flowers revolted her. The creeper seemed the
symbolisation of Lust battening upon Innocence.
Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her.
From a mossy cranny in a stone a hairy tarantula leaped
upon a little lizard that sunned itself, not thinking Death
so near. A lightning- quick pounce of the bloated thing
yith the fierce, bright eyes and the relentless, greedy claws,
and the little reptile vanished. She shuddered, thinking
of its fate.
The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and
the bushes that grew about were ragged and torn with
shell and shrapnel - ball. Chips and flinders had been
Icnocked by the same forces from the boulders and the
rocks. Amongst the flowers near her shone something
bright. It was an unexploded Maxim-shell, a pretty little
messenger of Death, girt with bright copper bands and
gaily painted. And a ninety-four-pound projectile, ex-
ploded, had scattered the shore with its fragments, and
doubtless the river-bed was strewn thick with others.
You had only to look to see them. Once Lynette's lover
knew everything there was to know, the trees and rocks
and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns
the right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would
be marred and broken, scorched and spoiled, like these.
Purblind that she had been. What claim had any
406 THE DOP DOCTOR
man, seeing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful
sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the veil of merciful,
wise secrecy from an innocent young head ? None, Not
the shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former
scruples. They sailed from her on the faint hot breeze
lightly as thistledown. And now the tear-blurred face
was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoarse and weak
and trembling, appealed :
" Mother, you are not angry ? I never meant to be
underhand, or to hide — anything from you."
" No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realise
how much had been concealed between the lines that she
had read so often. " You did not mean to." The trem-
bling voice went on :
" He never spoke to me as though we were strangers.
Never, from the first. And to-day, he " Her heart's
throbbing shook her. The Mother said :
" He has told me what has passed. He said that he
had asked you to marry him, and you had — agreed."
The bitterness of her wounded love was in her tone.
"I — had forgotten," she panted, '''that — until one
little careless thing he said brought it all back to me in
such a flood. It was like drowning. Then you came,
and — and " The quavering, pitiful voice rose to a cry :
" Mother, must I tell him everything ?" She cowered down
in the enfolding arms. " Mother, Mother, must I tell him ?"
A great wave of pity surged out from the deep mother-
heart that throbbed against her own. The deep, melodious
voice answered with one word :
" No."
Amazement sat on the uplifted, woebegone face of the
girl. The sorrowful eyes questioned the Mother's in-
credulously.
" You mean that you "
She folded the slight figure to her. Her sorrowful
eyes, under their great jetty arches, looked out like stars
through a night of storm. Her greyish pallor seemed a
thin veil of ashes covering incandescent furnace-fires.
She rose up, lifting the slender figure. She said, looking
calmly in the face :
; " I mean that you are not to tell him. Upon your
THE DOP DOCTOR 407
obedience to me I charge you not to teli him. Upon your
love for me I command you — never to tell him ! Eass me,
and dry these dear eyes. Put up your hair ; a coil is
loosened. He is waiting for us ! Come !"
XLII
The tall, soldierly young figure was standing motionless
and stiff, as though on guard, on the river-shore beyond the
bend. Whatever apprehensions, whatever regrets, what-
ever fears may have warred within Beauvayse, whatever
consciousness may have been his of having taken an irre-
vocable step, bound to bring disgrace and reproach, sorrow,
and repentance upon the innocent as upon the guilty, he
showed no sign as he came to meet them, and lifted the
Service felt from his golden head, and held out an eager
hand for L3naette'8. She gave it shyly, and with the
thrill of contact Beauvayse's last scruple fled. He turned
his beautiful, flushed face and shining eyes upon the
Mother, and asked with grave simplicity :
" Ma'am, is not this mine ?"
" First tell me, do you know that there is nothing in it ?"
Her stern eyes searched his. He laughed and said,
as he kissed the slender hand :
" It holds everything for me !"
" Another question. Are you aware that my ward is a
Catholic ?"
" My wife will be of my mother's faith. I would not
have her of any other."
The Mother gave Beauvayse her own hand then, that
was marred by many deeds of charity, but still beautiful.
Those two, Unked together for a moment in their mutual
love of her, made for Lynette a picture never to be for-
gotten. Then Beauvayse said, in the boyish tone thai
made the man irresistible :
" You have made me awfully happy !"
" Make her happy," the Mother answered him, with a
tremble in her rich, melancholy tones, " and I ask no
more."
Her own heart was bleeding, but she drew her black
408 THE BOP DOCTOR
draperies over the wound with a resolute hand. Was
not here a Heaven-sent answer to all her prayers for her
beloved ? she asked herself, as she looked at the girl. Eyes
that beamed so, cheeks that burned with as divine a rose,
had looked back at Lady Biddy Bawne out of her toilet-
glass, upon the night of that Ascot Cup-Day, when Richard
had asked her to be his wife. But Richard's eyes had
never worn the look of Beauvayse's. Richard's hand had
never so trembled, Richard's face had never glowed like this.
Surely here was Love, she told herself, as they went back to
the place of trodden grass where the tea-making had been.
The Sisters, basket and trestle-laden, were already in
the act of departure. The black circle of the dead fire
marked where the giant kettle had sung its hospitable
song. Little Miss Wiercke and her long-locked organist,
the young lady from the Free Library and her mining-
engineer, had strolled away townwards, whispering, and
arm-in-arm ; the Mayor's wife was laying the dust with
tears of joy as she trudged back to the Women's Laager
beside a husband who pushed a perambulator containing
a small boy, who had waked up hungry and wanted supper ;
the Colonel and Captain Bingo Wrynche had been sum-
moned back to Staff Headquarters, and a pensive little
black-eyed lady in tailor-made alpaca and a big grey hat,
who was sitting on a tree-stump knocking red ants out of
her white umbrella, as those three figures moved out of
the shadows of the trees, jumped up and hurried to meet
them, prattling :
" I couldn't go without saying a word. . . . You have
been so beset with people all the afternoon that I never
got a chance to put my oar in. Dear Reverend Mother,
everything has gone off so well. No clergyman will ever
preach again about Providence spreading a table in the
wilderness without my coming back in memory to to-day.
May we walk back together ? I am a mass of ants, and
mosquito-bitten to a degree, but I don't think I ever enjoyed
myself so much. No, Lord Beauvayse, the path is narrow,
and I have a perfect dread of puff-adders. Please go on
before us with Miss Mildare. No ! . . . Oh, what. . . ?
You haven't . . . ?"
It was then that Lady Hannah dropped the white umbrella
THE DOP DOCTOR 409
and clapped her hands for joy. Something of mastery
and triumph in the young man's face, something in the
pale radiance of the girl's, something of the mingled Joy
and anguish of the pierced maternal heart shining in the
Mother's great grey eyes, had conveyed to the exultant
little woman that the plant that had thriven upon the
arid soil of Gueldersdorp had borne a perfect blossom with
a heart of ruby red.
" Oh, you dears ! you two beautiful dears ! how happy
you look!" she crowed. "I must kiss you, both!" She
did it. " Say that this isn't to be kept secret !" She clasped
her tiny hands with exaggerated entreaty. " For the
sake of the Gueldersdorp Siege Gazette, and its seven hundred
subscribers all perishing for news, tell me I may let the
cat out of the bag in my next Weekly Column. Only
say that people may know !"
As her black eyes snapped at Beauvayse, and her tiny
hands dramatically entreated, he had an instant of hesita-
tion, palpable to one who stood by. In an instant he
pulled himself together.
" The whole world may know, as far as I am concerned."
" It is best," said the Mother's soft, melodious voice,
" that our world, at least, should know."
" And when — oh, when Is It To Be ?" begged Lady
Hannah.
Confound the woman ! Why could she not let well
alone ? A sullen anger burned in Beauvayse as he said,
and not in the tone of the ardent lover :
" As soon as we can possibly manage it."
The Mother's voice said, coldly and clearly :
" I do not approve of long engagements. If the marriage
takes place, it must be soon."
With the consciousness of one who is impelled to take
a desperate leap, Beauvayse found himself saying :
" It cannot be too soon."
" Then . . . before the Relief ?" cried Lady Hannah,
and Beauvayse heard himself answering :
" If Lynette agrees ?"
The rapture of submission in her look was intoxicating.
He reached out his hand and laid it lightly on her shoulder.
Then, without another word, they went on together, and
410 THE DOP DOCTOR
the tall, soldierly figure in brown, and the slender shape
in the green skirt and little white coat, with the dainty
plumed hat crowning the squirrel-coloured hair, were seen
in darkening relief against the flamiug orange of the sky.
" A Wedding under Fire. Bridal Ceremony in a Be-
leaguered City," murmured the enthusiastic journalist.
Her gold fountain-pen, hanging at her chatelaine, seemed
to wriggle like a thing of life, as she imagined herself aiding,
planning, assisting at, and finally sitting down to describe
the ceremony and the wedding- veil on the little Greek head.
She babbled as her quick, bird-like gait carried her along
beside the tall, stately-moving figure in the black habit :
" Dear Bridget ... I may call you that for the sake of
old days V
" If you like."
" This must make you very happy. Society mothers
of marriageable daughters will tear their transformations
from their heads, and dance upon them in despair, when they
hear that Beau s^est rangL But that I don't hold forth
to worldly ears I would enlarge upon the immense social
advantages of such a union for that dear child."
" Of course, I am aware that it is an excellent match."
Were her ears so unworldly ? The phrase rankled in
her conscience like a thorn. And in what respect were
those Society mothers less managing than the nun 1 she
asked herself. Could any of them have been more astute,
more eager, more bent on hooking the desirable 'parti for
their girls than she had shown herself just now ? And
was this, agaia, an unworldly voice whisperiug to her
that the publicity ensured by a paragraph penned by this
gossip-loving Uttle lady would fix him even more securely,
bind him more strongly, make it even less possible for him
to retreat, should he desire it — by burning his boats behind
him, so that he had no alternative but to go on ? She
sickened with loathing of herself. But for her there was
no retreat either. Here Lady Hannah helped her unawares.
With a side-glance at the noble face beside her, pale olive-
hued, worn and faded beyond the age of the woman by
her great labours and her greater griefs, the arched black
eyebrows sprinkled of late with grey, the eyelids thin over
the mobile eyeballs, purpled with lack of sleep and secret,
THE DOP DOCTOR 411
bitter weeping, the close-folded, deeply cut, eloquent
mouth wither^ like a Japonica-bloom that lingers on in
' frost, the strong, salient chin framed in the snoMy, starched
guimpe, she faltered :
" You don't shy at the notion of the par — the announce-
ment in the Siege Gazette, I mean ? . . ."
" Upon the contrary, I approve of it," said the Mother,
\ and walked on very fast, for the bells of the Catholic
Church were ringing for Benediction.
" Is it good-night, or may I come in 1" Beauvayse whis-
pered to Lynette in the porch.
She dipped her slender fingers in the little holy-water
font beside the door, and held them out to him.
" Come in," she answered, and held white, wet fingers
out to him. He touched them with a puzzled smile.
" Am I to ■ ? Ah, I remember !"
Their eyes met, and the golden radiance in hers passed
into his blood. He bared his high, fair head as she made
the sign of the Cross, and followed her in and up the nave
as Father Wix, in purple Lenten stole over the snowy
cotta starched and ironed by Sister Tobias's capable hands,
began to intone the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.
The Sisters were already in their places — a double row
of black-draped figures, the Mother at the end of the first
row, Lady Hannah in the chair beside her, where Lynette
had always sat until now. It was not without a pang
that the one saw her place usurped by a stranger ; it was
piercing pain to the other to feel the strange presence at
her side. But something had already come between
these two, dividing them. Something inWsible, impal-
pable as air, but nevertheless thrusting them apart with
a force that might not be resisted.
Only the older of the two as yet knew clearly what it
meant. The yotmger was too dizzy with her first heady
draught from the cup of joy, held to her lips by the strong,
beautifully-shaped brown hand that rested on Beauvayse's
knee as he sat, or propped up Beauvayse's chin as he knelt,
stiff as a young crusader on a monument, beside her. But
the Mother knew. Would not the God Who had been
Justly offended in her. His vowed servant, that day, exact
to the last tittle the penalty ? She knew He would.
412 THE DOP DOCTOR
Rosary ended, the thin, kind-eyed h'ttle elderly priest
preached, taking for the text of his discourse the Introit
from the Office of Quinquagesima.
" Esto mihi in Deum protectorum, et in locum refugii, ut
salvum me facias.^*
" Be Thou unto me a God, a protector, and a place of
refuge, to save me : for Thou art my strength. . . ."
Then the Salutaris was sung, and followed by the
Litany of the Holy Name.
The church was crowded. A Catholic congregation is
always devout, but these people, well-dressed or ill-dressed,
prosperous or poor, pale-faced and hollow-eyed every one.
Joined in the office with passion. The responses came like
the beating of one wave of human anguish upon the Rock
of Ages.
" Have mercy on us /"
Hungry, they cried to One Who had hungered. Sinking
with weariness, they appealed to One Who had known
labours, faintings, agonies, and desolations.
" Have mercy on v^ /"
He had drunk of Death for them, had been buried and
had risen again.
Death was all about them. They could hear the beating
of his wings, could see the red sweep of his blood-wet,
dripping scythe. And they prayed as they had never
prayed before these things befell :
" Have mercy on us /"
They sang the Tantum Ergo, and the cloud of incense
rose from the censer in the priest's hand. Then, at the
thin, sweet tinkle of the bell, and the first white gleam of
the Unspeakable Mystery upheld by the servant of the
Altar, the heads bowed and sank as when a sudden wind
sweeps over a field of ripened com. Only one or two
remained unmoved, one of these a man's head, young and
crisply-waved, and golden. . . .
And then came the orderly crowding to the door, and they
were outside under the great violet sky, throbbing with
splendid stars, breathing the tainted air that came from
the laagers and the trenches. But oh, was there ever a
sweeter night, following upon a sweeter day ?
Beauvayse's hand found and pressed Lynette's. She
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 413
looked up and saw his eyes shining in the starlight. He
looked down and saw the Convent lily transformed into a
very rose of womanhood.
" I am on duty at Staff Bombproof South to-night.
Wliat I would give to be free to walk home with you !"
Lady Hannah's jangling laugh came in.
" Haven't you had the whole day ? Greedy, uncon-
scionable young man ! Say good-night to her, and be off
and get some food into you. Don't say you haven't any
appetite. I am hungry enough to be interested even in
minced mule and spatch-cocked locusts, after all this. Good-
night ! I must kiss you again, child ! I hope you don't mind?"
Lynette gave her cheek, asking :
" Where is the Mother ?"
The voice of Sister Tobias answered out of the purplish
darkness :
" She has gone on with Sister Hilda- Antony and Sister
Cleophee, dearie. She is going to sleep at the Convent
with them, and I was to give you her love, and say good-
night."
Say good-night ! On this of all nights was Lynette to
be dismissed without even the Mother's kiss ? She gave back
Beauvayse's parting hand-pressure almost mechanically.
Then she heard his voice, close at her ear, say pantingly :
" No one will see. . . . Please, dearest !"
She turned her head, and their lips met under cover of
the pansy-coloured darkness. . . . Then he was gone with
Lady Hannah, and Lynette was walking home to the
Convent bombproof, explaining to the astonished Sisters
that the Mother knew ; that the Mother approved of her
engagement to Lord Beauvayse ; and that they would
probably be married very soon. Before the Relief . . .
" ' Before the Relief.' Well, no one but Our Lord knows
when that's to be. . . . And so you're very happy, are you,
dearie ?"
Even as she gave her shy assent in answer to Sister
Tobias's question, its commonplace homeliness, Uke the
feeling of the thick dust and the scattered debris underfoot,
brought back Lynette for a moment out of the golden,
diamond-dusted, pearl-gemmed dream-world in which she
had been straying, to wonder, Was she really very happy ?
414 THE DOP DOCTOR
She asked herself the question sitting with the Sisters
at their little scanty supper. She asked herself as she
knelt with them in prayer, as she lay in bed, the Mother's
place vacant beside her — Was she happy after all ?
She had drunk sweetness, but there had been a tang of
something in the cup that cloyed the palate and sickened
the soul. She had learned the love of man, and in a
measure it had cast out fear, that had been her earlier
lesson.
To be held and taken and made his completely, what must
it be like ? She glowed in the darkness at the thought.
And then the recollection of a ruthless strength that had
rent away the veil of innocence from a woman-child surged
back upon her.
Just think. Suppose you laid your hand in the warm,
strong clasp that thrilled delight to every nerve, and set
your heart beating, beating, and, drawn by the shining
grey-green Jewel-eyes and the mysterious, wooing smile
upon the beautiful lips, and the coaxing, caressing tones
of the voice that so allured, you gave up all else that had
been so dear, and went away with him ? What then ?
Suppose
Suppose the smiling face of Love should turn out to be
nothing but a mask hiding the gross and brutal leer of
Lust, what then ? She saw that other man's dreadful
face, painted in hot and living colours upon the darkness.
She writhed as if to tear her hps from the savage, furious
mouth. She shuddered and grew cold there in the
sultry heat. The clasp of the protecting mother-arms
might have driven away her terror, but she was alone.
It would have been sweet to be alone that night if she had
been happy.
Why had the Mother shunned her ? She knew that
she had. Why had she felt, even with the glamour of his
presence about her, and the music of hia voice in her ears,
that all was not well ?
Why, even with the lifting of her burden, in the un-
utterable relief of hearing, from the lips that had been her
law, that her dreadful secret need never be revealed,
had she felt consternation and alarm ? The words were
THE DOP DOCTOR 415
written in fiery letters, on the murky dark of the bomb-
proof, where the tiny lamp that had hung before the
Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel now burned,
a twinkling red star, before the silver Crucifix that hung
upon the east wall.
"He is not to be told. I command you never to tell him !"
The doubt germinated and presently pushed through a
little spear. Had those lips given right counsel or wrong ?
Ought he to be told ? Was it dishonest, was it traitorous,
to hide the truth ? And yet, what are the lives of even the
upright, and clean, and continent among men, compared
with the life of a girl bred as she had been ? The sin had
not been hers. She, the victim, was blameless. And yet,
and yet . . .
To this girl, who had learned to see the Face of Christ
and of His Mother reflected in one human face that had
smiled down upon her, waking in the little white bed in
the Convent infirmary from the long, recuperating sleep
that turns the tide of brain-fever, the thought that a shadow
of deceit could mar its earnest, candid purity was torture.
Months back they had said to her — the lips that had given
her the first kiss she had received since a dying woman's
cold mouth touched the sleeping face of a yellow-haired
baby held to her in a strong man's shaking hands, aa the
trek-waggon rolled and rumbled over the veld :
" The man who may one day be your husband will have
the right to know."
It was a different voice to the one that had commanded,
" You are never to tell him I" Lynette lay hstening to
those two voices until the alarm-clock belled and the
Sisters rose at midnight for matins. Then she lay hstening
to the soft murmur of voices in the dark, as the red lamp
glimmered before the silver Christ upon the wall. The
nuns needed no light, knowing the office by heart :
" Delicta quis intelligit ? ab occultis meis munda ine, et ab
alienis parce servo t'UA> " — " Who can comprehend what sin
is ? Cleanse me from my hidden sins, and from those of
others save Thy servant."
The antiphon followed the Gloria, and then the soft
womanly voices chanted the twenty-third Psalm :
■' Quift asctndit in montem Domini 1" — " Who shall ascend
416 THE DOP DOCTOR
to the Mount of the Lord, and who shall dwell in His holy
Sanctuary ? Those who do no ill and are pure. . . . who
do not give their heart to vain desires, or deceive their
neighbour with false oaths."
Or deceive . . . with false oaths. To marry a man, letting
him think you . . . something you were not . . . did not that
amount to deceiving by a false oath ?
Lynette lay very still. The last " Hail, Mary !" over,
the Sisters returned silently to bed. Wire mattresses
creaked under superimposed weight. Long breaths of
wakefulness changed into the even breathing of slumber.
The only one who snored was Sister Tobias, a confirmed
nasal soloist, whose customary comet-solo was strangely
missing. Was Sister Tobias lying awake and remembering
too ?
Sister Tobias was the only other person in the Convent
besides the Mother, who knew. She had helped her faith-
fully and tenderly to nurse Lynette through the long illness
that had followed the finding of that lost lamb upon the
veld. She was a homely creature of saintly virtues, the
Mother's stafif and right hand. And it was she who had
asked Ljmette if she was happy ?
Somebody was moving. The grey light of dawn was
filtering down the drain-pipe ventilators and through the
chinks in the tarpaulins overhead. A formless pale figure
came swiftly to Lynette's bedside. She guessed who it
must be. She sat up wide awake, and with her heart
beating wildly in her throat.
" Dearie !" The whimper was Sister Tobias's. She could
make out the ghmmer uf the white, plain nightcap framing
the narrow face with the long, sagacious nose and wise,
kindly, patient eyes. " Are you awake, dearie ?"
" Yes," Lynette whispered back, shuddering. The dry,
warm, hard hand felt about for her cold one, and found and
took it. Lips came close to her ear, and breathed :
" Dearie, this grand young gentleman you're engaged to
be married to . . ."
" Yes ?"
" Has he been told ? Does he know .?"
The long, plain face was close to Lynette's. In the
greying light she could see it clearly. Her heart beat in
THE DOP DOCTOR 417
heavy, sickening thuds. Her teeth chattered, and her
whole body shook as if with ague, as she faltered :
" The Mother says — he is not to be told."
There was a dead silence. It was as if an iron shutter
had suddenly been pulled down and clamped home between
them. Then Sister Tobias said in a tone devoid of all
expression :
" The Mother knows best, dearie, of course. Lie down
and go to sleep."
Then silence settled back upon the Convent bomb-
proof, but sleep did not come to everybody there.
XLIII
The Mother was kneeling, as she had knelt the whole night
through, before the dismantled altar in the battered little
chapel of the Convent, with the big white stars looking
down upon her through the gaps lq the shell-torn roof.
When it was the matin-hour she rose and rang the bell.
Matins over, she still knelt on. When it was broad day
she broke her fast with the Sisters, and went about the
business of the day calmly, collectedly, capably as ever.
Only her face was white and drawn, and great violet circles
were about her great tragical grey eyes.
" The blessed Saint she is !" whispered the nuns one to
the other.
If she had heard them, it would have added yet another
iron point to the merciless scourge of her self- scorn.
A Saint, in that stained garment ! What tears of bitter-
ness had fallen that night upon the shameful blots that
marred its whiteness ! But for Richard's child, even
though she herself should become a castaway, she must
go on to the end. All the chivalry in her rose in arms
to defend the young, shame-burdened, blameless head.
Ah ! if she had known ? . . .
Cold, Ught, cruel eyes had watched from across the river
that day as her tall, imposing figure, side by side with the
slender, more lightly-clad one, moved betw een the mimosa-
bushes and round the river-bend. When the two were
fairly out of sight, the jungle of tree-fern and cactus had
27
418 THE DOP DOCTOR
rustled and cracked. Then the burly, thickset, powerful
figure of a bearded man pushed through, traversed the reed-
beds, and, leaping from boulder to boulder, crossed the
rivci. Before long the man was standing on the patch of
trodden grass and flowers in the lee of the great boulder,
shutting up a little single- barrelled, brass-niounted ^ejd-
glass that had served him excellently well.
He was Bough, alias Van Busch, otherwise the man
who had come in through the enemy's hues as a runner
from Diamond Town, bringing the letter from a hypo-
thetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist.
His light eyes, that were set flat in their shallow orbits like
an adder's, looked about and all around the place, as he
stroked the dense brake of black-brown beard that cleverly
filled in the interval between Mr. Van Busch' s luxuriant
whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little tan-
leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The dainti-
ness of the little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly
than anything else, that the Kid had become a lady.
For it was the girl, sure. No error about that little white
face of hers, with the pointed chin, and the topaz-coloured
eyes, and the reddish hair. The glass had brought her
near enough to make that quite certain. He had been too
far oS to hear a word, but he had made out what had been
going on very well. First, she had been giddying with the
tall young English swell, drawing him on while he seemed
courting her, as all women knew how to, and then the
tall Sister of Mercy had come and rowed her ; and she had
cried, thrown down there among the grass and flowers,
exactly as if somebody had beaten her with a sjambok
to cure her of the G. D.'d obstinacy that had to be thrashed
out of women, if you would have them get to heel when
you chose it, or come at your call when you chose again.
Suppose he chose again. When a man with brains in
his holy head once set them to work, there were few things
he could not do. He could scare others off his property,
for certain. He could exercise upon the girl herself the
unlimited power of Fear. He must lie doggo because of
the Doctor. It was a thxindering queer chance the Doctor
turning up in this place. And as one of the bosses, helping
THE DOP DOCTOR 419
to run the show, and powerful enough to pay off old scores,
if he should chance to recognise in the densely bearded face
of the man from Diamond Town the features of the Prin-
cipal Witness in the once-famous Old Bailey Criminal
Case : *' The Crown v. Saxham."
Bough would lie low, and watch, apd wait, and then
spring, as the tarantula springs. He had cleverly blurred
all trails leading back to the tavern on the veld, and h©
knew enough of girls and women to believe that this girl
had kept secret what haxi happened there. He would pick
up with her, anyway, and ofier to marry her and make an
honest girl of her. If she had a snivelling fancy for the
dandy swell who had made love to her and kissed her, he
would threaten to tell the fellow the truth unless she gave
him up. Or he would blow on her to the nxma she lived
with, and they would have nothing more to do with her.
Voor den donder ! suppose they knew already ? The
plan wanted careful working out. A false step, and Guel-
dersdorp might become unhealthy for the man who had
brought the letter from Diamond Town to oblige Mrs. Casey.
Suppose the spoor that led back to the tavern on the
veld and the grave by the Little Kopje, not as well hidden
as Bough had thought, those jewels and securities and the
one thousand seven hundred pounds cash might get an
honest man into trouble yet, even after the lapse of seven-
teen years. He breathed heavily, and the pupils of his
strange light eyes dilated, and the sweat rolled off his fore-
head and cheeks until the skin shone like copper. He had
been a reckless, easy-going young chap of twenty-six seven-
teen years ago. Forty-three years of life had taught him that
when you are least expecting them to, buried secrets are
sure to resurrect. No, Gueldersdorp was not & healthy place
for Bough or for Van Busch ! That chattering little paroquet
of a woman with the sharp black eyes might use them one
day, to the detriment of the philanthropist who had brought
in the letter from Diamond Town for Mrs. Casey.
Then the girl ! . . , He grinned iik his bushy btard,
thinking how thundering scared she would look if she en-
countered him by chance, and recognised him. The beaz'd
would not hide him from her eyes. No, no ! And he
smelled at the little tan glove, tha^ had a slight, clean,
27—2
420 THE DOP DOCTOR
delicate perfume about it, and thrust it into his breeches-
pocket, and crossed the river again, making his way back
to the native town by devious native paths that snaked
and twined and twisted through the tangled bush, as he
himself made his tortuous progress through the world.
He was in an evil mood, made blacker by the prospect of
spending a lonely night without the solace of liquor or
woman. For Vice was at a low ebb in Gueldersdorp just
now, and the commonest dop was barely obtainable at the
price of good champagne, and it would not do for the man
from Diamond Town to seem flush of dollars.
Sure, no, that would never do ! He must make out with
the tobacco he still had left, and the big lump of opium he
carried in a tin box in a pocket of the heavy money- belt he
wore under his miner's flannel shirt. He groped for the
tin box, and got it, and bit off a corner of the sticky brown
lump, and ate it as he went along, and his laboured breathing
calmed, and the chilly sweat dried upon his copper-burned
skin, that had the purplish-black tinge in it that comes of
saturation with iodide of potassium. And the pupils of his
colourless eyes dwindled to pin-points, and his thick hands
ceased to shake. He was not the man he had been ; and he
had learned the opium - habit from a woman who had
managed a joint at Johannesburg, and it grew upon him —
the need of the soothing, supporting deadener. He went
along now, under the influence of it, scarcely feeling the
ground under his heavy leather veldschoens.
He trod on something presently, lying on the path. It
moved and whimpered. He struck a match with a steady
hand, and held the glimmering blue phosphorus-flame
doT\Tiwards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the Barala,
who had crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-
gut and a sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The
Barala, though they were sorely pinched, like their European
fellow -men, did not starve. They earned pay and rations.
They helped to keep the enemy out on the south and west
sides of the town, and dug most of the trenches — often
under fire- — and ran the despatches, and sometimes brought
in fresh meat. But their slaves, and the native hangers-
on at the kraals, suffered horribly. They ate the dogs that
had been shot, and the other kind of dog, and fought with
THE DOP DOCTOR 421
the live ones for bones, and picked up empty meat- tins
and licked them. They stalked about the town and the
native stad like living skeletons. They dropped and died
on the dust-heaps they had been rummaging for offal.
Soup-kitchens were started later on, when it was found how
things were going with them, and hides and bones and heads
of horses and mules were boiled down into soup, and they
were fed. But a time was to come when even that soup
was wanted to keep the life in white people. You saw the
famine-stricken black spectres crawling from refuse-pile to
refuse-pile, and dying in that pitiless, beautiful sunshine,
under the blue, blue February sky, because white people
had got to keep on living.
The native girl had been too weak to kill anything. Death
had come upon her in the midst of the teeming life of the
jungle, and she had fallen down there in her. ragged red
blanket among the tree-roots that arched and knotted over
the path. Her eyes were already rolled up and set. They
stared blindly, horribly, out of the ashen-black face. When
she heard the steps of a shod person the last spark of life
glimmered feebly up in her. Her wild, keen, savage power
of scent yet remained. She smelled a white man, and her
cracked and swollen lips moved, and a voice like the sound
made by the rubbing of dry canes together uttered the word
that is the same in Dutch and English :
" Water !"
Bough's pale, flat, scintillating eyes were quite expres-
sionless, but his thick lips parted, and his strong yellow
teeth showed in his thick brake of beard. With the caution
of one who knows that a single glowing match-end dropped
among dry vegetation may cause a devastating conflagra-
tion, he blew out the lingering flame, and rolled the little
charred stick between his tough-skinned fingers before he
threw it down. Then he raised himself up, and stepped
over the dying creature, and went upon his way, humming
a dance-tune he liked. He was not changed. It was still
a joy to him to have feebler beings in his power, and taunt
and torture and use them at his will.
He had assumed the skin of the man from Diamond Town
in the well-paid service of that bright boy of Brounckers',
who had, it may be remembered, a plan.
422 THE DOP DOCTOR
The pla,n involved a feint from the eastward, and an
attack upon that weakest spot in the girdle of Guelders-
dorp's defences, the native stad. The Barala might be
incorruptible ; the weak spot was the native village, never-
theless. And the business of the tnan from Diamond
Town was to lounge about its neighbourhood, using those
sharp light eyes of his to excellent purpose, and storing his
retentive memory — for it would not do for a stranger to be
caught putting pencil to paper in a town Under Martial Law,
and bristling with suspicion — with the information indis-
pensable for the putting in elBFect of young Schenk Eybel's
ingenious plan.
The Jackal had had to yield his bone to the hungry lion.
StUl, it was wise to be in good odour with the Republics ;
that was why Van Busch had taken on the Job. He had
not been impelled to risk his skin, and get shut up in this
stinking, starving hole by anything the sharp-eyed little
Englishwoman, so unpleasantly awake at last regarding the
genuine aims and real character of the chivalrous Mr. Van
Busch of Johannesburg, had dropped. Hell, no ! That
Unripe nectarine had been plucked and eaten years ago.
And yet how the ripe fruit allured him to-day, seen against
its background of dull green leaves, its smooth cheeks
glowing under the kisses of the sun.
The swell English officer had kissed them too. As she
meant, the sly little devil, slipping away for her bit of fun.
Grown a beauty, too, as an3'body but a thundering, Juicy,
damned fool might have known she would ! He swore
bitterly, thinking what a gold-mine a face and figure like
that might have proved to an honest speculator up
Johannesburg way.
His case, he thought, was somewhat similar to that of
old Baas Jacobs, the Boer who found the first great South
African diamond on his farm near Hopetown, and threw it
down beside the door, with other pretty shining pebbles,
for his child to play with. The child's mother tossed it to
Van Niekirk as a worthless gift. Van Niekirk passed it on
to J. O'Reilly. When the English Government mineralo-
gist pronounced the stone a diamond, and the Colonial
Secretary and the French Consul sent it to the Paris
Exhibition, and the Governor of the Colony bought the
THE DOP DOCTOR 423
Jewel, old Baas Jacobs must have felt mighty sick. AD the
world hungering, and admiring, and coveting the beautiful
thing he had thrown down on the ground. . . . Small wonder
that to the end of his days he had talked as a robbed man.
The jewel Bough had left on the veld had belonged to him
once. Wdl, it should be his again. He swore that with a
blasphetnous oath. Thenceforward he proceeded warily,
feeling his way, formulating his plan, a human tarantula,-
evil-eyed and hairy-clawed, calculating the sudden leaipi
upon its prey; an adder coiled, waiting the moment to
strike. . . .
XLIV
Saxham was shooting on the veld, north of the Clayfields,
in a ginger-hued dust-wind and a grilling sun. Upon hia
right showed the raw red ridge of the earthworks, where two
ancient seven-pounders were entrenched in charge of a hand-
ful of Cape Police. The pits of the sniping riflemen scarred
across the river-bed some fifty yards in advance. Upon his
left, some two hundred yards farther north, the recently
resurrected ship's gun, twelve feet of honeycombed metal,
stamped on the flank " No. 6 Port," and ca.sting solid shot
of eighteenth- century pattern, projected a long black nose
from Fort Ellerslie, and every time the venerable weapon
went off without bursting, the Toa^ti Guards occupying the
Fort and manning the eastern entrenchments raised a cheer.
Saxham, emptying and filling the magazine with cool,
methodical regularity, kept changing his position with ei
restlessness and recklessness puzzling alike to friends and
foes. Now he aimed and fired, lying " doggo " behind his
favourite stone, while bullets from the enemy's trenched
flattened themselves upon it, or buried themselves harm-
lessly in the dry hot soil. Now he moved from cover, and
shot squatting on his heels, or sprawled lizard-like in the
open, courting the King of Terrors with a calm indifference
that was commented upon by those who witnessed it
according to their lights.
" Begob !" said Kjldare, ex-driver of Engine 123, who,
with the Cardiff man, hie stoker of old, was doing duty at
Fort Ellerslie vice two Town Guardsmen permanently
424 THE DOP DOCTOR
resting, " 'tis a great perfawrumance the Doc is afther givia'
us this day !" He coolly borrowed the gunner's sighting-
glasses, and, with his keen eyes glued to them and his ragged
elbows propped on the Fort parapet, he scanned the distant
solitary figure, dropping the words out slowly one by one.
" Twice have I seen the fur fly o£F av' wan av' thim hairy
baboons av' Boers since he starrtud, an' supposin' the air a
laste thicker, 'tis punched wid bullet-holes we'd be seein'
ut all round 'um, the same as a young lady in the sky-in-
terrific dhressmakin' line would be afther Jabbin' out the
pattern av' a shoot av' clothes."
" And look you now, if the man is not lighting a pipe,"
objected the Cardiff stoker, whose religious tendencies were
greatly fostered by the surroundings and conditions of
siege life. " Sitting on a stone, with the rifle between his
knees and the match between his two hands, as if the teffel
was got tired of waiting, and had curled up and gone to
sleep." The speaker sucked in his breath and solemnly
shook his head, adding : " It is a temptation of the Tivine
Providence, so it is !"
" Sorra a timpt," rejoined Kjldare, reluctantly sur-
rendering the glasses to the gunner, a grey ex-sergeant of
R.F.A., " sorra a timpt, knowin', as the Docthur knows,
that do what he will and thry as he may, no bullut will do
more than graze the hide av him, or sing in his ear."
" And how will he know that, maybe you would be
telling 1" demanded the Cardiff stoker incredulously.
" I seen his face," said Ealdare, Jerking a blackened
thumb towards the gunner's sighting-glasses, " minnits
back through thim little Jiggers, an' to man or mortal that's
as sick wid the hate av Life, an' as sharp-set with the hunger
for Death as the Docthur is this day, no hamim will come.
'Tis quare, but thrue."
•' I've 'ad a try at several kinds of 'ungers," said the R.E.
Reserve man, who acted as gunner's mate. " There's the
'unger for glory, combined with a smart uniform wot'U
make the gals stare, as drives a man to 'list. There's the
'unger for kisses an' canoodlin' wot makes yer want to
please the gals. There's the 'unger for revenge, wot drives
yer to bash in a bloke's face, and loses you yer stripes if 'e
'appens to be your Corp'ril. Then there's the 'unger for
THE DOP DOCTOR 425
gettin' under cover when you're bein' sniped, an' the 'unger
for blood, when you've got the Hafridis, or the Fuzzies, or
the Dutchies, at close quarters, and the bay' nits are flickerin'
in an' out of the dirty caliker shirts or the dirty greatcoats
like Jimmy ! There's the 'unger for freedom and fresh
hair when you're shut up in a filthy mud cattle-pound like
this 'ere Fort, or a stinldn' trench, with a 'aJidful of straw
to set on by day an' a ragged blanket to kip in by nights.
But the 'unger to die is a 'unger / ain't acquainted with.
I'm for livin' myself."
" I was hungry when you began to jaw," snarled the
man who had been clerk to the County Court. His lips
were black and cracking with fever, and his teeth chattered
despite the fierce sunshine that baked the red day parapet
against which he leaned his thin back. "I'm hungrier
now, and thirsty as well. Give the bucket over here."
He drank of the thick, yellowish, boUed water eagerly and
yet with disgust, spilling the liquid on his tattered clothing
through the shaking of his wasted hands. Then he turned
to the wall, and lay down sullenly, scowling at the lantern-
jawed sympathiser who tried to thrust a rolled-up coat
under his aching head.
" They'll be bringin' us our foddher at twelve av the
clock," said Kildare, with a twinkle of inextinguishable
humour in his hollow eyes. " Shuperannuated cavalry
mount stuped in warrum kettle-gravy, wid a block av baked
sawdust for aich man that can get ut down. 'Tis an insult
to the mimory av the boiled bacon an' greens I would be
aiting this day at Canicknavore, to say nothin' av' the
porther an' whisky that would be washing ut down. Lashin's
and lavin's there 'ud be for ivery wan, an' what was over, me
fadher — God be good to the ould boy alive or dead ! — would
be disthributin' amongst the poor forninst the dure "
" Beg pardon, sir." Another of the famine- bitten, ragged
little garrison addressed the question to the officer in charge
of the Fort battery, as he stepped down from the lookout
with his field-glass in his hand. " Can you tell us the
difference of time between South Africa and England ?"
" Two hours at Capetown. I'm not quite sure about the
difference at Gueldersdorp." The Lieutenant went over to
the ancient smooth-bore, and conferred with the gunnexa
426 THE DOP DOCTOR
standing at her breech. The winches groaned, the heavy-
mass of metal tilted on the improvised mounting, as the man
to whom the Lieutenant had replied said, 'with a quaver of
longing in his voice :
" ' Two hours ! My God, suppose it only took that time
to get home !"
" It 'ud be a sight easier to 'ang on 'ere," said the R.E.
Reserve man who acted as gunner's mate, " if there was
such a thing as a plug o' baccy to be 'ad. Wot gives me the
reg'lar sick is to see them well-fed Dutchies chawin' an'
blowin', blowin' an' chawin', from momin' till night "
He spat disgustedly.
" When honust men," groaned Kildare. " would swop a
year av life for a twist av naygurhead. Wirra-wirra !"
There was a dry and mirthless laugh, showing teeth,
white or discoloured, in haggard and bristly faces. Then a
short young Corporal, who had been leaning back in an
angle of the earthwork, hugging his sharp knees and staring
at nothing in particular with pale-coloured, ugly, honest
eyes, grew painfully crimson through his crust of sun-tan
and grime, and said something that made the lean bodies in
ragged, filthy tan-cord and dilapidated khaki, or torn and
muddy tweed, slew round upon the unclean straw on which
they squatted. All eyes, were they hunger-dull or fever-
bright, sought the Corporal's face.
" Dessay you'll think me a greedy 'ound," said the
Corporal, with a painful effort that set the prominent
Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking, " when you tyke
in wot I've got to s'y. It makes me want to git into me own
pocket and 'ide, to 'ave to tell it. For me an' you, we've
shared an' shared alike, wotever we 'ad, while we 'ad
anythink — except in one partic'lar." The Adam's apple
jumped up and down as he gulped. He was burning
crimson now to the roots of his ragged, light-brown hair,
and the tips of his flat-rimmed, jutting ears, and the patch
of thin bare chest that showed where his coarse greyback
shirt was unbuttoned at the necki
All those eyes, feverishly bright or sickly dull, watched
him as he put his hand into the bulging breast-pocket, and
slowly fished out a shining brown briar-root with a stem
anchewed as yet by any smoker.
THE DOP DOCTOR 427
" Twig this 'ere noo pipe. It was sent me by a — by a
friend, along of a packet of 'Oneydew, for a — for a kind o'
birthday present." His voice wobbled strangely ; there
was scalding water dammed up behind his ugly honest eyes.
" She — she bin an' opened the packet and filled the pipe,
an' I shared out the 'Oneydew in the trenches as far as it
went, but I bin an' kep' the pipe, sayia' to myself I'd smoke
it when she lighted it wiv 'er own 'ands, an' not — not
before. Next day we " — the Adam's apple went up and
do^^-n again — " we 'ad words, an' parted. I — I never set
eves on 'er dial since."
The voice of W. Keyse ended in an odd kind of squeak.
Nobody looked at him as he bit his thin lips furiously, and
blinked the immanly tears away. Then he went on : " It's
— it's near on two months I bin lookin' for 'er. She — she —
sometimes I think she's made a way out of the lines after
another bloke — a kind o' Dutchy spy 'oo was a pal of 'ers,
or — or else she's dead. There's times I've dreamed I seen 'er
dead !" His voice bounded up in that queer squeak again.
The word " dead " was wrung out of him like a long-fanged
double molar. His lips were drawn OMTy in a grimace of
anguish, and the pipe he held shook in his gaunt and grimy
heind, so perilously that half a dozen other hands, as gaunt
and even grimier, shot out as by a single impulse to save
it from falling. " Tyke it an' smoke it between you," said
W. Keyse, and the Adam's apple jerked again as he
gulped. " But read the writin' m the bit o' pyper first,
and mind you — mind you give it back." He resigned the
treasure, and turned his face away.
" Blessed Mary !" came in the accent of Kildare, breaking
the silence, " let me houJd ut in me ban's !"
" Spell out the screeve," ordered the R.E. Reserve man
imperiously.
The Town Guard who had questioned the officer about
the difference of time, deciphered the blotty writing on the
slip of paper pinned round the stem of the new briar- root.
It ran thus :
" i ope 3^1 wil Engoy this Pip Deer ; i Fild it A Purpua
with Love and Mfenney Apey Ritumse. from
" Fabb Aib."
428 THE DOP DOCTOR
" 'Is gal 1" interrogated the Reserve man.
" His girl," assented the man who had read.
" And he never saw her no more, so he did not !" com-
mented the Cardifif stoker as the pipe travelled from hand
to hand to be smelt at, dandled, worshipped by every man
in turn. Only the Sergeant-guimer, the grey-headed ex-
Royal Field Artilleryman, maintained self-command by
dint of looking very hard the other way. Then said
Kildare impetuously :
" Take ut back, Corp'ril Keyse. 'Tis little wan poipe av
tobacca wud count for betune six starvin' savigees."
" Wot I wants," growled the Reserve man, " is to over-
*aul a bacca factory afire, and clap my mouth to 'er chimbley-
shaft. So take it back, Corporal. It's no manner o' good
to me !"
All the other voices joined in the chorus, and the be-
papered pipe was thrust back upon its owner. W. Keyse
thanked them soberly, and put the gift of his lost love away.
His pale, unbeautiful eyes had the anguish of despair in
them, and the tooth of that sharp death-hunger of which
Kildare had spoken was gnawing what he would have
termed with simplicity " his inside." For if Emigration
Jane were dead, what had Life left for him ?
After his first superb assumption of cold indifference had
broken down he had sought her, feverishly at first, then
doggedly, then with a dizzy sickness of terror and appre-
hension that made the letters of the type-written casualty-
lists posted outside the Staff Headquarters in the Market
Square turn apparent somersaults as he strove to read them.
This was his punishment, that he should hunger as she had
hungered, and still be disappointed, and learn by fellowship
in keenest suffering what her pain had been.
The " Fare Air " letters were some comfort. In the
trench at night, when fever and rheumatism kept him from
the dog-sleep that other men were snatching, he would hear
her crying over and over : " Oh, cruel, to break a poor girl's
heart !" And when sleep came he would track her through
strange places, calling her to come back — to come back and
be forgiven. And when he awakened from such dreams
there would be tears upon his face. And each day he
consulted the lists of killed and wounded, and once had
THE DOP DOCTOR 429
staggered white-lipped to the mortuary-shed to identify a
Jane Harris, and found her — oh, with what unutterable
relief ! — to be a coloured lady who had married a Rifleman.
After that he had perked up, and continued his quest for the
beloved needle lost in the haystack of Gueldersdorp with
renewed belief in the ultimate possibility of finding it.
Then, in the middle of one awful night, the darkness of his
mental state had been luridly illuminated by the con-
viction that she had Joined Slabberts. Now strange voices
whispered always in his ears, saying that she was dead, and
urging him to follow by the same dark road over which her
trembling feet had stumbled.
He heard those voices as he wrought and sweated with
the gun-team at the levers, and the ponderous muzzle-
loader rolled back upon the grooves of her improvised
mounting. He heard it as they sponged the antique
monster out, and fed it v/ith a three- pound bolus of cordite,
and a ten-pound ball of ancient pattern with the date of
1770. He heard it now again as he kneeled at a loophole in
the parapet, watching Saxham. Those pale, ugly eyes of
Billy Keyse were extraordinarily keen. He saw a grimy
hand carefully balance an old meat-tin on the top of the
parapet of the enemy's western entrenchment. He saw
Saxham kneeling, aim and fire, and with the sharp rap of
the exploding cartridge came a howl from the owner of the
hand, who had not withdrawn it with sufficient quickness.
Half a dozen rifle-muzzles came nosing through the loop-
holes at that yell. There was quite a little fusillade, and
the sharp cracks and flashes in Saxham's vicinity told of
the employment of explosive bullets. But not one hit the
man. An unkempt Boer head bobbed up, looking for
his corpse. The Winchester cracked, and the unkempt
head fell forwards, its chin over the edge of the parapet, and
stayed there staring until the comrades of its late owner
pulled the dead man do\vn by the heels.
There was a cheer from the rifle-pits in the river-bed, and
another from Fort EUerslie, where eager, excited spectators
jostled at the loopholes. A minute later the Fort's
ancient bow-chaser barked loudly, and pitched a solid
shot. The metal spheroid hit the ploughed-up ground
some ninety feet in front of the parapet where the bloody
430 THE DOP DOCTOR
head had hung, and over which those explosive bullets had
been fired, rose in a cloud of dust, and literally Jumped the
trench. There was a roar of distant laughter as the ball
began to roll, and shaggy heads of curious Boers, inured
only to the latest inventions in lethal engineering, bobbed
up to watch. More laughter accompanied the progress of
the ball. But presently it encountered a mound of earth,
behind which certain patriots were taking coffee, and rolle'4
through, and the laughter ceased abruptly. There was a
baggage-waggon beyond through which it also rolled, and
behind the waggon a plump, contented pony was wallowing
in the sand. When the ancient cannon-ball rolled through
the pony, the owner spoke of witchcraft. But the patriots
who had been sitting behind the mound made no commei:^t
then or thenceforward.
At this juncture, and with almost a sensation of pleasure,
Saxham saw his old acquaintance Father Noah climb out
of his particular trench, briskly for one well stricken in years,
and toddle out, laden with rifle, biltong bag, and coffee-can,
to his favourite sniping-post, where a bush rose beside a
rock, which was shaded by a small group of blue-gums.
Soon the smoke of the veteran's pipe rose above his lurking-
place, and aa Saxham, with a grunt of satisfaction, stretched
himself upon his stomach on the hot, sandy earth and pulled
the lever, a return bullet sheared a piece off his boot-heel,
and painfully jarred his ankle- bone.
No one else was shooting at the big rooinek now. It was
understood that Father Noah had a prior claim. And the
old man peered hopefully up to see the result of his shot,
and rubbed his eyes. For the hulking dief was standing,
voor den donder ! standing as he emptied his magazine,
and the bullets sang about Father Noah as vjqiously ap
hornets roused to anger by the stripping of a decayed thatch.
The magazine of the repeating- rifle emptied, Saxham
calmly refilled it, causing the puzzled patriarch to waste
many cartridges in wild shooting at that erect, indifferent
mark, and finally to abandon the level-headed caution to
which he owed his venerable years, and climb a tree to
obtaia a better view of the tactics of the enemy.
Saxham laughed as the invisible hornets sang in the air
about him. The battered solar helmet he wore was pierced
1
THE DOP DOCTOR 431
through the hinder brim, and he was bleeding from a
bullet-graze upon the knuckle of the second finger of his left
hand. Since that Sunday afternoon beside the river, when
he learned the madness of his hope and the hopelessness of
his madness, he had taken risks like this daily, not in the
deliberate desire of death, but as a man consulting Fate
negatively.
Father Noah would decide, one way or the other : the
issue of their protracted duel should determine things for
Saxham. If he sent the old man iu, then there was Hope,
if the superannuated, short-stocked Martini, with that
steady old finger on the trigger, and that sharp old eye at
the backsight, ended by accounting for Saxham, then there
would be an end to tlys burning torment for ever. Strangely,
he did not believe that he could be killed by any other
hand than Father Noah's. Doubtless the long overstrain
was telling upon him mentally, though physically the
man seemed of wrought steel.
" To-day will settle it, one way or the other. To-day "
As the thought passed through his mind, and he
brought the sights into line with the mark, a scrap of
white, fluttering some twenty inches lower down, caught
his eye. He dropped the tip of the Winchester's foresight
to the bottom of the backsight's V, and knew, almost
before the shot rang out, and an ownerless Martini tumbled
out of the tree-crotch, that Fate had decided for Saxham.
Then he went back to the Hospital, grim- jawed and
inscrutable as ever. A dirty white rag was being hoisted
on a pole by one of the relatives of the deceased. Father
Noah, with the long ends of his dirty grey beard raggedly
bannering in the dust- wind, was still waiting for the bearers
of the hastily improvised stretcher of sticks and green
reims, as Sa^diam, having obtained a strip of black cloth
with a needle and thread from the Matron, pulled ofE his
jacket and sat down upon the end of the cot- bed in his
little room, and neatly tacked a mourning-band upon the
upper part of the left sleeve.
It was his nature to absorb himself in whatever work
he undertook. As he stitched, the crowded Hospital
buzzed about him like a hive, the moans of sick men and
the rattling breaths of the dying beat in waves of sound
432 THE DOP DOCTOR
upon his brain, for the long rows of beds stood upon either
side of the corridors now, with barely a foot of room between
them. In the necessarily open space before the Doctor's
door a woman's hurrying footsteps paused, there came a
rustling, and a sheet of printed paper folded in half was
thrust underneath.
" The Siege Gazette, Doctor," called the Matron's pleasant
womanly voice, as, simultaneously with the utterance of
Saxham's brief word of thanks, she passed on. In the
famine for news that possessed him, as every other human
being in the town, the sight of the Uttle badly-printed sheet
was welcome, although it could hardly contain anything
to satisfy his need. He set the last stitches, fastened
and cut the thread, reached down a long arm from the foot
of the bed, and took up the paper.
The Latest Information had whiskers. The General
Orders announced an issue of paper currency in small
amounts, owing to the deplorable shortage of silver, con-
gratulated those N.C.O.'s and men of the Baraland Irregu-
lars who, under Lieutenant Byass, occupying the advanced
Nordenfeldt position, had brought so effective a fire to
bear upon the enemy's big gun that Meisje had been com-
pelled to abandon her commanding position, and take up
her quarters in a spot less advantageous, from the enemy's
point of view. A reduction in the Forage ration was hinted
at, and a string of Social Jottings followed, rows of asterisks
exploding Uke squibs under every paragraphic utterance of
the Gold Pen.
Not for nothing had Captain Bingo dolefully boasted
that his wife exuded journalese from her very finger-ends.
Saxham recognised in the style, the very table-Moselle of
Fashionable Journalism. So like the genuine article in
the shape of the bottle, the topping of gilt-foil, the arrange-
ment of wire and string, that as the stinging foam over-
flowed the goblet, snapping in iridescent bubbles at the
cautious sipper's nose, and evaporated, leaving nothing
in particular at the bottom, it was barely possible to
believe the vintage other than the genuine article from
Fleet Street. Stay. . . . The French quotations were
not enclosed in inverted commas. That let Lady Hannah
out.
THE DOP DOCTOR 433
" Society in Gueldersdorp," she wrote, " bubbles with
interested expectation of the public announcement of a
matrimonial engagement with which the intimate friends
of the happy lovers profess etre aiix anges.
* » * * »
" Not for worlds would we draw the veil of delightful
mystery completely aside from the secret of two young,
charming and popular people. Yet it may be hinted that
the elder son of a representative English House and heir
of a sixteenth -century Marquisate, who is one of the most
gallant and dashing among the many heroic defenders of
our beleaguered town, proposes at no very distant date
to lead to the altar one of the loveliest among the many
lovely girls who grace Gueldersdorp's social functions.
* ♦ » * *
" Both bride-elect and bridegroom-to-be attended High
Mass at the Catholic Church on Sunday, when the Rev.
Father Wix, in apprising parishioners of the near approach
of Lent, caused an ii-resistible smile to ripple over the faces
of his hearers. Toujours perdrix may sate in the long-nm,
but perpetually to faire maigre is attended with even
greater discomfort.
* ♦ » » *
" We have pleasure in announcing the approaching
marriage of Lieutenant the Right Hon. Viscount Beauvayse,
Grey Hussars, Junior Aide to the Colonel Commanding
H.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, to Miss Ljmette Bridget-Mary
IVGldare, ward of the Mother-Superior, Convent of the Holy
Way, North Veld Road."
XLV
Saxham has not been staring at the printed words because
they have struck him to the heart with their intelligence,
but — or so it seems to him— because they convey nothing.
There is an aching pain at the back of his neck, and his
mind is curiously dull and sluggish. But after a Uttle
he becomes aware that somebody is knocking at his door.
" Who is it "
The Doctor thinks he utters these words, but in reality
28
434 THE DOP DOCTOR
he has only made a harsh croaking sound that might mean
anything. The door opens and shows the Chaplain standing
smiling on the threshold.
The Reverend Julius Fraithorn, no longer a worn and
wasted pilgrim stumbling amongst the thorns and sharp
stones of the Valley of the Shadow, appears in these days
as a perfectly sound and healthy, if rather too narrow-
shouldered, young Anglican clergyman, not unbecomingly
arrayed, in virtue of his official position under martial
authority, in a suit of Service khaki such as Saxham wears,
with the black Maltese Cross on the collar and the band of
the wide-peaked cap. Yellow puttees conceal the unduly
spare proportions of his active legs, and the brown boots
upon his long slender feet are dusty, as, indeed, is the rest
of him, not with the reddish dust of the veld that powders
Saxham to the very eyelashes, and lies in light drifts in
every wrinkle of his garments, but with the yellowish dust
of the town.
" I rather thought," the Chaplain says, hesitating, as
Saxham, without lifting his eyes, turns his square, white
face upon the visitor, " that you said ' Come in ' 1"
" Come in, and shut the door, and sit down," says
Saxham heavily and thickly. And Juhus does so, and,
occupying the single cane-seated chair the bedroom boasts,
glows upon Saxham with a sincerity of affection and a
simplicity of admii'ation pleasant to see, and asks in his
thin, sweet voice how things are goLug.
" Things are going," Saxham returns, seeming to wake
from a heavy broun study. " You could not put it better
or more clearly. Will you smoke ?" He pitches a rubber
tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the
treasured box of matches that comes after, and as one
man sparingly fills a well-browned meerschaum, and the
other a blackened briar-root, with the weed that grows
more rare and precious with everj^ hour of these days of
dearth : " That's one of the things that are going quickest
after perchloride of mercury, carboUc, and extract of beef.
As a fact, we are using formaldehyde as an anaisthetic in
minor operations ; and violet powder and starch, upon the
external use of which I laid an embargo weeks ago, to the
great indignation of the younger nurses, are being employed
1
THE DOP DOCTOR 435
insteaa jf arrowroot. And the more the medical stores
dimmish, the more the patients come rolhng in."
" And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty
that crops up, finds in you the man to meet it and over-
come it," says the Chaplain fervently. He is disposed
to make a hero of this brilhant surgeon who has saved his
life, and his enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's
painfully-apparent lack of belief in certain vital spiritual
truths that are the daily bread of fervent Christian souls.
Now that he has become aware of the black band upon the
sleeve of the jacket that Kes across Saxham's knees, where
he sits upon the end of the cot-bed that, Mdth a tiny chest
of drawers and a hanging bookshelf laden with volumes and
instrument-cases, completes the furnishing of the narrow
room, he says, with sympathy in his gentle voice and in
the brown eyes that have the soft lustre of a deer's or oi a
beautiful woman's :
" I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a
friend ?"
" Lc^'it a friend .?"
Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the
Chaplain in a strange, dull way, and then forgets liim for
a minute or more. Baths are not to be had in Gueldcrsdorp
in these days, and though it is not Sunday, when bathing
in the river becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes
that the Doctor's thick, close-cropped black hair is wet,
and that broad streaks of shining moisture are upon his
pale, square face, and that he breathes as though he had
been running. But perhaps he has been sluicing his head
in the washstand basin, thinks the Chaplain. No ; the basin
has not recently been used. And then it occurs to Juhus,
but not until he has noticed the starting veins and corded
musclCvS on the backs of the hands that are clenched upon
the jacket, that Saxham is suffering.
" I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted
himself to show," reflects the man of Religion looking at
the man of Medicine. " And the absence of beUef in Divine
Redemption and a Future State must terribly intensify
the pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to comfort
him !" And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of
sympathy, when the Funeral is to be.
26—2
436 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Perhaps about the midday cofEee-drinking," says
Saxham heavily, " they would scrape a hole and dump
him in. But they're not over fond of risks, and they would
probably leave him where he is till nightfall."
Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence
and inspiration were his to employ in the healing of the
man who has raised himself almost from the dead. But he
can only faker something about the inscrutable designs of
Providence, and not a sparrow falling to the ground un-
noticed. And he expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope
that Saxham's friend was prepared to meet his end.
" I don't exactly suppose he expected it. He had a
right to count upon pulling ofiE the match," says Saxham,
with a dreary shadow of a grin, " because a better man
behind a gun than Father Noah you wouldn't easily meet.
And Boers are fine shots, as a rule."
" Boers. ... A Boer. ... I thought you told me you
had lost a friend ?" Mild astonishment is written on the
Chaplain's face. And Saxham looks up, and the other
sees that his eyeballs are heavily injected with blood, and
that the vivid blue of their irises has strangely faded.
" I gave him every opportunity to be my friend," says
the dull voice heavily, " by moving out from cover,
even by standing up. But no good. He suspected a ruse,
and it worried him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his
bandolier at me from a perch of vantage among the branches,
and had started to refill it from a fresh package, when I got
the chance, and brought him down spreadeagled. And so
ends Father Noah."
The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and
shudders. A blue line marks itself about his mouth ; he
is conscious of a qualm of positive nausea as he says :
" You — ^you don't mean you have been talking of a man
you have shot ?"
" Just so," assents Saxham, and the sentence that follows
is not uttered aloud. " And I wish with all my soul that
the man had shot me !"
" And this is War," says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls
out his handkerchief and wipes his damp forehead and
the beady blue lines about his mouth, and the craclv and
rattle of rifle-fire sweeping over the veld and through tlio
THE DOP DOCTOR 437
town, and the ping, ping, ping ! of Mauser bullets flattening
on the iron gutter-pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof
above them seem to answer " Certainly, War."
" Why, you look sick, man," says Saxham the surgeon,
whose keen professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's
pallor, though the other Saxham is still dazed and blind,
and stupefied by the blow that has been dealt bim by
Lady Hannah's gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and
lightly touches one of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting
him of a touch of fever, or town-water dysentery. But
JuUus jerks the wrist away.
" I am perfectly well. It was — the way in which you
spoke just now that rather — rather "
" Revolted you, eh ?" says Saxham, again with the dim
shadow of a smile. " Revealed me as a brute and a savage.
Well, and why not, if I choose to be one or the other, or
both ? You Churchmen beUeve in the power of choice,
don't you ? Prove to a man that there is something
worth having in the bowels of the earth, he burrows like
a mole and gets it. Let him once see utility in flying,
give bim time and opportunity, and he will fly. So if it
is to hia interests to be clean-lived, high-minded, exemplary,
he will be all these things to admiration. Or, if he should
happen to have lost the gout for virtue, if he determines
that Evil shall be his good, he will make it so." He smiled
dourly. " Deprive him of a solid reason for living, he
can die. Hold up before his dying eyes the prospect of
continued existence under hopeful conditions, he takes up
his bed and walks, like the moiibund paralytic in the
Gospel you preach. You're a living proof of the human
power of working miracles. . . . Granted I cut away a
tumour from under your breast-bone more skilfully than
a certain percentage of surgeons could have done it. But
what brought you safely through the operation, healed
your wound by the first intention, and set you on youi
legs again ? I'll trouble you to tell me ?"
" The mercy and the grace of God," says the Chaplain,
" manifested in His unworthy servant through your science
and your skill."
" You employ the technical terminology of youi
profession," Saxham answers, with a shrug.
438 THE DOP DOCTOR
The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out
of his eyes, and his voice is less dull and toneless. He is
coming back to his outward self again, even while the inner
man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that tremendous
broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the
gold pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue
with the Chaplain. He gets off the bed and slips on hia
Jacket, takes a turn or two across the narrow floor-space,
then leans against the distempered wall beside the window,
puffing at his jetty briar -root, his muscular arms folded on
his great chest, his powerful shoulders bowed, Ms square,
black head thrust forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying
Julius as he talks.
" Let me — without rubbing your cloth the wrong way —
put the case in mine. Your belief in a Power that my
reason tells me is non-existent stimulated your nervous
centres, roused and sustained in you the determination
without which my science and my skill — and I do not
value them lightly, I assure you — would have availed
you nothing. You said to yourself, ' If God will it, I shall
get over this,' and because you willed it, it was so. Were
I a drimkard, an outcast, the very refuse of humanity,
tainted with vice to the very centre of my being, I have
but to will to be sober and live decently, and while I
continue to will it, I shall be what I desire to be."
Saxham's eyes hold JuUus's, and challenge them. But
no shadow of a Dop Doctor who once reeled the streets
of Gueldersdorp rises from those clear brown depths as the
speaker ends, " Don't underestimate the power of the
Human Will, Fraithom, for it can remove mountains, and
raise the hving dead."
" Nor do you venture to deny the Power of the Almighty
Hand, Saxham," answers the thin, sweet voice of the
Churchman ; " because It strewed the myriad worlds in
the Dust of the The Infinite, and set the jewelled feathers
in the butterfly's wing, and forged the very intellect
whose power you misuse in uttericig the boast that denies
It. Think again. Can you assure me with truth that
you have never, in the stress of some great mental or
physical crisis, cried to Heaven for help when the
Struggle was at its worst ? Think again, Saxham,"
THE DOP DOCTOR 439
But Saxham obstinately shakes his head, still smiling.
As he stands there transfigured by the dark, fierce spirit
that has come upon him and possessed him, there is some-
thing about the hulking man with the square, black head
and the powerful frame, that breathes of that superb and
terrible Prince of the Heavenly Hieraichy who fell through
a kindred sin, and the priest in Julius shudders, recognising
the tremendous power of such a nature as this, whether
turned towards Evil or bent to achieve Good. The while, in
letters of delicate, keen flame, the denier sees written on the
tables of his inward consciousness the utterance that once
broke from him, as, racked and tortured in body and in
soul, he wrestled with his devil on that unforgettable night.
*' God ! if indeed Thou Art, and I must perforce return
to live the life of a man amongst men, help me to burst the
chains that fetter me. Help me — oh, help me to be free !'^
And in his heart he knows that the desperate prayer has
been granted. But in this new-born, curious mood of his
he will not yield, but combats his own innermost conviction,
being, ia a strange, perverted way, even prouder of this
Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the
muddiest depths of moral and physical decadence, and come
up of the strength of his own will from among the hideous
things that hang suspended and drifting in the primeval
sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His
is a combative nature, and the great blow he has sustained
this day in the wreck and ruin of his raft of hope has left
him quivering to the centre of his being with resentment
that strikes back.
" Think again yourself. Ask yourself whether the Deity
who creates, preserves, blesses, punishes, slays, and raises up,
is the natural outcome of man's need of such a Being, or His
own desire of Himself 1 And which conception is the greater —
that the God in whom you Churchmen and the millions of lay-
folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers be-
lieve, should have commanded, " Let the universe exist," and
have been obeyed, or that the stujiendous pigmy Man should
have dared to say, ' Let there be God,' and so created Him ?"
He laughs jarringly as he knocks the ashes out of the
blackened pipe upon the corner of the window-ledge.
" Give credit to the human imagination and the human
440 THE DOP DOCTOR
will for inventing a personage so useful to the Christian
Churches as the Devil. For as in the beginning it was
necessary for Man to build up Heaven and set his God
therein, so, to throw His unimaginable purity and incon-
ceivable perfection into yet more glorious relief, it was
required that Hell should be delved out and the objective
personality of Satan conceived and kennelled there, and
given Just sufficient power to pay the marplot where the
Divine plans are concerned, and just enough malevolence
to find amusement in the occupation. What should we do,
where should we be, without our Satanic souffre-dotUeur —
our horned scapegoat, our black puppet, without whose
suggestions we should never have erred, whose wooden
head we bang when things go wrong with us," says Saxham
bitterly. He reaches out a hand for the tobacco-pouch
and his glance falls upon the day's issue of the Siege Gazette
lying on the parquet linoleum, where it has fallen from his
hand a little while ago. He stoops and picks it up, and
offers it to Julius.
" There's the announcement of an engagement here "
He smooths the crumpled sheet, holds it under the
Chaplain's eye, and points to the two last paragraphs of
the " Social Jottings " column. " Take it as an instance.
. . . Did Heaven play the matchmaker here, or has Hell
had a finger in the matrimonial pie ? Or has the blind and
crazy chance that governs this desolate world for me, tipped
the balance in favour of one young rake, who may be saved
and purified and renewed by such a marriage, while his
3lder in iniquity is doomed to be wrecked upon it, ruined
by it, destroyed through it, damned socially and morally
because of it . . ."
The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He
resents the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even
as he utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall.
And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is re-
markable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with
indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar — a
patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased
at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand — to the
thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high,
p?ile temples. He says, and stutters angrily in saying :
THE DOP DOCTOR 441
" This is a lie — a monstrous misstatement which shall
be withdrawn to-morrow !"
" How do you know that ?"
The Chaplain crushes the Siege Gazette into a ball, pitches
it into a comer of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and
the cane he carries in lieu of the carbine or rifle with(jut
which the male laity of Gueldersdorp and a good many of
the women do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for the
door. He meets there Saxham, whose square face and
powerful figure bar his flaming exit.
"It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass."
" What are you going to do ?"
The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with
the clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers
something about unwarrantable liberty and a lady's
reputation ! And Saxham recognises that Saxham is not
the only sufferer from the festering smart of Jealousy, and
that the vivid red-and-white carnation- tinted beauty of the
delicate face in its setting of red- brown hair has grievously
disturbed, if it has not altogether dissipated, the pale
young Anglican's views of the celibate life.
Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split
on the same amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no
sympathy in the Dop Doctor.
He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet
intently, as in the old Hospital days he might have studied
the expression of a monkey or a guinea-pig, or other organ-
ism upon which he was experimenting with some new drug.
And the Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity :
" What are you staring at ? Do you imagine that the
colour of my cloth debars me from — from taking the part of
a lady whose name has been dragged before the public ? I
shall call at the office where this rag is published, and insist
upon a contradiction of this — this canard /"
" Don't you know who edits the rag ?" asks Saxham
raspingly. " Do you suppose that any unauthorised an-
nouncement, or statement that has not been ufficially cor-
roborated would be allowed to pass ? The paragraph comes
from an authoritative source, you may be sure !"
" I am in a position to disprove it, from whatever source it
eomes !" cried the Chaplain hotly. " He shall contradict il
442 THE DOP DOCTOR
himself, if there is necessity. He may be a prodigal and a
rake — he bears that reputation — but at least he is not a
liar and a scoundrel."
"Who?" Saxham's heart ia drubbing furiously. A cool,
vdvifying liquid like ether seems to have passed into his
blood. His quiet, set, determined face and masterful, ob-
servant eyes oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation, as
if these were waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of
granite. " Who is not a liar and a scoundrel 1"
" I speak of Lord Beauvayse," says the Reverend Julius
Fraithom in the high-pitched voice that shakes with rage.
" He is a married man, Saxham ; I have incontrovertible
testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman
who was his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape Town.
He "
There is a strange rattling noise in the throat of the man
who listens. Julius looks at him, and his own resentment
appears, even to himself, as impotent and ridiculous as the
anger of a child. If just before it has seemed to him that he
has heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking with
Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in
Saxham's, the face of the primal murderer. And beiug, as
well as a sincere and simple-hearted clergyman, something
of a weakling, he is shocked to silence.
XLVI
An instant, and Saxham's own face looks calmly at the
dazed Chaplain, and the curt, brusque voice demands :
" What is this incontrovertible testimony ?"
" A letter," says Julius breathlessly, " from a person who
saw the entry of the marriage at the Registrar's o£fice where
it took place."
" Is anyone else in possession of this information 1"
" With the exception of the Registrar and the witnesses
of the marriage, up to the middle of last September, when
the letter was written, nothing had leaked out. I received
the communication by the last mail from England that
was delivered at the Hospital before I underwent the
operation."
THE DOP DOCTOR 443
" Tliat was the last mail that got through. Who was
your correspondent V
" One of the senior officiating priests of St. Margaret's,
Wendish Street, the London church where I did duty ..s
Junior curate."
" Have you kept the letter ?"
" It is in my desk at my hotel, with some other correspon-
dence of Father Tatham's. You may see it if you wish."
" I will see it. In the meanwhile, let me have the pitVi r*
it. This clergyman — happening to visit a Registrar's
office Where was the office ?"
" At Cookham-on-Thames, where Father Tatham has
established a Holiday Rest Home for the benefit of our
London working lads " — the Chaplain begins. He is sitting
on the end of the bed, weak and worn and exhausted with
the emotions that have torn him in the last half-hour.
Beads of perspiration thickly stud the high temples, out of
which the flushing colour has sunk ; his cheeks are pallid
and hollow. His eyes have lost their fire ; his muscles are
flaccidly relaxed ; his sloping shoulders stoop ; his long,
limp hands hang nervelessly at his sides.
" One moment." Saxham glances at the gold chronometer
that was a presentation from the students of St. Stephen's
years ago. It is rather typical of the man that, even when
under stress of his heroic thirst he has pawned the watch for
money wherewith to buy whisky, he should have only
borrowed upon it such small sums as are easily repaid. He
hcvS yet another five minutes to bestow in listening to the
Chaplain's story, yet even as he returns the chronometer
to its pocket, his quick ear catches the frou-frou of feminine
petticoats outside the door. He opens it, frowning. A
nurse is standing there with a sunmions in her face. She
delivers her low-toned message, receives a brusque reply,
and rustles do\\Ti the corridor between the long lines of
pallets as Saxham draws back his head and shuts the door,
and, setting lus great shoulders against it, and facing Julius,
orders :
" Go on !"
Julius goes on :
" At Roselawn Cottage — a pretty place of the toy-resi-
dence description, standing in charming gardens not fax
444 THE DOP DOCTOR
from the Holiday Rest Home, lived a lady — an actress very
popular in Musical Comedy — who was known to be the mis-
tress of Lord Beauvayse. I need hardly tell you the Father
touched on the unpleasant features of the story as delicately
as possible "
" Without doubt. But — get on a little quicker," says
Saxham grimly, jerking his head towards the door. " For
I am wanted. And don't speak loud, for there are people
on the other side there. With regard to this woman —
actress, or whatever she may be ?"
" With all her moral Ifkxities," goes on Julius, " Miss
Lessie Lavigne "
" Ah, I know the name," says Saxham sharply. " On
with you to the end. ' With all her moral laxities ' "
" Miss Lessie Lavigne is a generous, kindly, charitable
young woman," goes on Julius. " And the Holiday Home
has benefited largely by her purse. She is known to the
Matron ; and Father Tatham — having occasion to visit the
Registrar's office at Cookham on the 29th of last June, for
the purpose of looking up the books, with the Registrar's
consent, and satisfying himself of the existence of the entry
regarding a marriage between one of our young fellows
then at the Home and a girl he very foolishly married when
on a hopping excursion in the autumn of the previous year
— ^Father Tatham encountered Miss Lavigne — or Lady
Beauvayse, to give her her proper title "
" In the Registrar's office ?"
" In the act of quitting the Registrar's outer office," says
the bumt-out Julius in a weary voice, " in the company of
Lord Beauvayse, and followed by his valet and a woman
who probably were witnesses ; for when the Father entered
the inner office the register was lying open on the table,
the entry of the marriage still wet upon the page."
" And your religious correspondent pried first," says
Saxham, with savage irony, " and afterwards tattled ?"
" And afterwards, seeing in the Times that Lord Beau-
vayse was under orders for South Africa, mentioned his
accidental discovery when writing to me," says Julius
Fraithorn wearily.
" That will do. When can I see the letter at your hotel ?
The sooner the better," says Saxham, with a curious smile,
THE DOP DOCTOR 445
" for all purposes. Can you walk there with me now ?
Very well " — as Julius assents — " that is arranged, then."
" What is to be done, Saxham ?" Julius stumbles up.
The fires that btrned in him a few moments ago are
quenched ; his slack hand trembles irresolutely at his beau-
tiful weak mouth, and his deer-like eyes waver.
" I advise you," says Saxham, " to leave the doing of
what is to be done to me." His own blue eyes have so
strange a flare in them, and his heavy form seems so alive
and instinct with threatening and dangerous possibilities,
that Julius falters :
" You believe Lord Beauvayse has been a party to — has
wilfully compromised Miss Mildare ? You — you mean to
remonstrate with him ? Do you — do you think that he will
listen to a remonstrance '?"
" He will fimd it best in this instance," says Saxham
dourly.
" Do not — do not be tempted to use any violence, Sax-
ham," urges the Chaplain nervously, looking at the tense
muscles of the grim, square face and the purposeful right
hand that hovers near the butt of the Doctor's revolver.
*' For your own sake as much as for his !"
Saxham's laugh is ugly to hear.
" Do you tliink that Lord Beauvayse would wind up as
top-dog if it came to a struggle between us ?"
" It must not come to a struggle, Saxham," says the
Chaplain, very pale. " We — we are under Martial Law.
He is your superior officer." (Saxham, Attached Medical
Staff, holds the honorary rank of Lieutenant in Her Majesty's
Army.) " Remember, if Carslow — the man who killed
Vickers, of the Pittsburg Trumpeter " — he refers to a grim
tragedy of the beginning of the siege — " had not been medi-
cally certified insane, they would have talcen him out and
shot him."
Saxham shrugs his massive shouders, and with the
utter unmelodiousness that distinguishes the performance
of a man devoid of a musical ear, whistles a fragment of a
little tune. It is often on the lips of anotlier man, and
the Doctor has picked it up unconsciously, with one or two
other characteristic habits and phrases, and has fallen into
the habit of whistling it as he goes doggedly, uuwoaiyingly,
446 THE DOP DOCTOR
upon his ever-widoning round of daily duties. It helps him,
perhaps, though it gets upon the nerves of other people,
making the younger nurses, not unmindful of his arbitrary
action in the matter of the violet powder, want to shriek.
" The Military Executive would be perfectly welcome to
take me out and shoot me, if first I might be permitted to
look in at Staff Bomb proof South, and render Society the
distinguished service of ridding it of Lord Beauvayse.
Who's there ?"
Saxham reopens the door, at which the nurse, now re-
turned, has knocked. The tired but cheerful-faced young
woman, in an unstarched cap and apron, and rumpled gown
of Galatea cotton-twill, informs the Doctor that they have
telephoned up from Staff Bomb proof South Lines, and that
the password for the day is " Honour."
" You are going to him now V* asks the Chaplain
anxiously and apprehensively.
" Oddly enough, I have been sent for to attend to a shell
casualty," says Saxham, picking up and putting on his
Service felt, and moving to take down the canvas wallet
that is his inseparable companion, from the hook on which
it hangs. " Or, rather, Taggart was ; and as he has thirty
diphtheria cases for tracheotomy at the Children's Hospital,
and McFadyen's hands are full at the Refugees' Infirmary,
the Major asks if I will take the duty. It's an order, I sup-
pose, couched in a civil way."
He swings the heavy wallet over his shoulders, and picks
up his worn hunting-crop.
" And so, let's be moving," he says, his hand upon the
door-knob. " Your hotel is on my way. I may need that
letter, or I may not. And in any case I prefer to have seen
it before I meet the man."
" One moment." The Chaplain speaks with a strained
look of anxiety, squeezing a damp white handkerchief into
a ball between his palms. " You have taken upon yourself
the duty of bringing Lord Beauvayse to book over this — very
painful matter. ... I should like ... I should \vish you to
leave the task of enUghtening Misa Mildare to me."
" To you. And why ?"
Saxham waits for the answer, a heavy figure filling up the
THE DOP DOCTOR 447
doorway, with scowling brows, and sullen eyes that care-
fully avoid the Chaplain's face.
" Because I — because in inflicting upon her what must
necessarily be a — a painful humiliation " — the Rev.
Julius clears his throat, and laboriously rolls the damp
handkerchief-ball into a sausage — " I wish to convince Miss
Mildare that my respect and my — esteem for her have —
not diminished."
" And how do you propose to drive this conviction home ?"
The Reverend Julius flushes to the ear-tips. The cold-
ness of the questioning voice gives him a nervous shudder.
He says with an effort, looking at the thick white, black-
fringed lids that hide the Doctor's q\iecr blue eyes :
" By offering Miss Mildare the honourable protection of
my name. M}' views, as regarding the celibacy incumbent
upon an anointed servant of the altar, have, since I knew
her, undergone a — a change. . . . And it occurs to me, when
she has got over the first shock of hearing that she has been
deceived and played w ith by a person of Lord Beauvayse's
lack of principle "
" That she may be induced to look with favour on the
parson's proposal ?" comments Saxham with an indifference
to the feelings of the person he addresses that is positively
savage. The raucous tones flay Julius's sensitive ears, the
terrible blue eye^ blaze upon him, scorch him. He falters :
" I — I trust my purpose is pure from vulgar self-seeking ?
I hope my attitude towards Ivliss Mildare is not unchivalrous
— or ungenerous ?"
" In manipulating her disadvantage to serve your own
interests," says Saxham's terrible voice, " you would un-
doubtedly bo playing a very low-dowTi game."
Julius laughs, shortly and huffily.
" A low-do\\'n game ! . . . Ha, ha, ha ! You don't mince
your words, Doctor !"
" I can phrase my opinion oven more plainly, if you desire
it," returns Saxham brutally. " To bespatter a rival for
the gaining of an advantage by contrast is a Yahoo's trick
to which no decent gentleman would stoop."
" At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of
being sarcastic, " your ' decent gentleman ' would be likely
to remember the old adage, ' '^^I's fair in Love and ' "
448 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Exactly. All is fair," returns Saxham, squaring his
dogged Jaws at the other, and foldiag his great arms upon
his deep wide chest. " And all shall be, please to under-
stand it. It is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss Mildaro
should be undeceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the
painful duty of opening her eyes will be undertaken by
that " — the break before the designation is scathingly con-
temptuous—" by that— distinguished nobleman himself,
and by no other."
" How can you compel the man to give himself away ?"
demands the Reverend Julius incredulously. Saxham
answers, mechanically opening and closing his small, mus-
cular surgeon's hand, and watching the flexions and exten-
sions of the supple fingers with an ugly kind of interest :
" I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the
moment. What matters is — ^your parole of honour that
you will never by word, or deed, or sign disclose to Miss
Mildare that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged
himself to marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonial
proposals. Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty
to further your own views as may seem good to you. The
plan of campaign that I, in your place, should choose
might not find favour in your eyes. . . ."
His look bears upon the younger man with intolerable
weight, his heavily-shouldered figure seems to swell and
fill the room. Julius is clearly conscious of hatkig his
saviour, and the consciousness is acid on his palate as he
asks, with a wry smile :
" What would your plan be if you were in my place ?"
" To praise where a rival was worthy of praise ; to be
silent where it would be easy to depreciate ; to win her
from him, not because of my own greater worth, but in
spite of the worst she could know of me. That would, in
my opinion, be a conquest worthy of a man."
The pupils of the speaker's flaming blue eyes have
dwindled to mere pin-points, a rush of blood has darkened
the square pale face, to sink away again and leave it
opaquely colourless, as Saxham says with cool distinctness :
" And now, before we leave this room, I must trouble you
for that promise — oath, if you feel it would be more iv
your line of business. I don't possess a copy of the Scrip
THE DOP DOCTOR 449
tures, but I think that is a Crucifix you wear upon your
^ watch-chain ?"
It is. And when the Reverend Julius has kissed the sacred
symbol with shaking lips, and taken the oath as Saxham
dictates, his heart tattooing furiously under the baggy khaki
jacket, and an angry pulse beating in his thin cheek, Saxham
adds, with the flickerkig shadow of a smile, as he opens the
I door, and signs to the Chaplain to pass out before him :
" You observe, I have turned the weapons of your pro-
fession against you. Exactly as — ^replying to your ques-
tion of a moment back with regard to compelling — exactly
as I intend to do in the case of Lord Beauvayse !"
He motions to the other to pass out before him, and locks
the door upon his stuffy httle sanctum whose shelves are
piled with a heterogeneous confusion of tubes and bottles,
books and instruments, specimens of foodstuffs under the
process of analysis for values, and carefully-sealed watch-
glasses containing choice cultures of deadly microbes in
bouillon, before he leads his way down the long corridor,
where narrow pallets, upon which sick men and boys are
stretched, range along the wrJls upon either hand, and the
air is heavy with the taint of -uppurating wounds, and the
hot, sickly breath of fever and malaria.
He walks quickly, his keen blue eyes glancing right and
left with the effect of carelessness, yet missing nothing.
He stops, and loosens the bandage, and reUeves the
swollen Hmb. He delays to kneel a moment beside one
low pillow, and turn gently to the hght a face that is ghastly,
with its bristly beard and glassy, staring eyes, and its pallor
that Ls of the hue of old wax, and lay it gently back again
as he beckons to the nurse to bring the screens, and hide
the Dead from the sight of the hving.
He is in his element ; sahent and masterful and strong.
But the haggard eyes that turn upon him do not shine with
gratitude. He has not reached these hearts. They accuse
him, quite unjustly, of a liking for cutting and carving.
They suspect him, quite correctly, of being ia no hurry for
the ending of the siege. How should he be, when, these
strenuous days once over, he sees nothing before him but
the murky blackness of the night out of which he came,
from which he has emerged for one brief draught of renewt;d
29
450 THE DOP DOCTOR
Joy in living before the dark shall close over him again, and
wrap liim round for ever ?
He has suffered horribly of late. But at the worst his
work has never failed to bring relief and distraction. Pure
loyalty to a man in whom he believes, has been the main-
spring of his unflagging strength. He is not liked or
popular in any way, though Surgeon-Major Taggart up-
holds him manfully, and McFadyen is loyal to the old bond.
His harshness repels regard, his coldness blights confidence,
and so, though he is admired for Ms dazzling skill in surgery,
for his dogged perseverance and unremitting power of
application, for his fine horsemanship and iron nerve ; he is
not regarded with affection.
He is not in the least aware of it, to do him justice, when
his rough ironies and his brusque repartees give offence. In
the heyday of his London success he has not truckled to
Rank, or Influence, or Affluence. The owner of a gouty or
a varicose leg has never had the more civil tongue from
Saxham that the uneasy limb or its fellow was privileged
upon State occasions to wear the Garter. He trod upon
corns then, as he treads upon them now, without being
aware of it, as he goes upon his way.
JuUus goes with him, rent by apprehensions, stealing
nervous side-glances at the impassive, opaque-skinned face
as Saxham swings along with his powerful, rather lurching
gait over the ploughed and Httered waste that divides the
Hospital from the town beyond it. He speaks once or
tmce, but Saxham seems not to hear.
The Doctor is listening to a dialogue that is as yet un- I
spoken. He is crushing a resistance that has not yet been 1
made. In imagination his small, strong, muscular hands
are gripped about the throat of the man who has lied to her
and deceived her ; and he is listening with joy to the gurgling,
choking efforts to phrase a prayer for mercy, or utter a final
defiance ; and he sees with grim pleasure how the fine skin
blackens under his deadly hold, and how the lazy, beautiful,
grey-green eyes, no longer sleepy or defiant, but staring
and horribly bloodshot, are already rolling upwards in the
death-agony. The primitive savage that is in every man
lusts at a juncture such as this, to kill with the bare hands
rather than to slay with any weapon known to civilisation.
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 451
" Let him look to it how he deals with her ! Let him
look to it !"
How long it seems since Saxham muttered those words,
turning sullenly away to recross the stepping-stones,
leaping from boulder to boulder as the river wimpled and
laughed in mockery of his clumsy tender of protection and
her rejection of it, and Beauvayse's tall figure stood, erect
and triumphant, on the flower-starred bank, waiting to
recommence his wooing until the intruder should be gone,
divining, as Saxham had instinctively known, the hidden
passion that rent and tortured him, glowing with the con-
sciousness of secret mastery. . . .
If this meek, thin-blooded young clergyman who walks
beside him might have won her, it seems to Saxham that he
could have borne it. But that Beauvayse of all others should
venture to approach her, presume to rear an image of him-
self in the shrine of her pure breast ; win her from her high
aims and lofty ideals with a bold look and a few whispered
words, and, having thrown his honourable name into the
lap of a light woman as indifferently as a jewelled trinket,
should dare to offer Lynette Mildare dishonour, is mon-
strous, hideous, unbearable. . . .
How comes it that she of all women should be so easily
allured, so lightly dra-wTi aside ? Was there no baser con-
quest within reach that this white, virginal, slender saint
should become his prey ? Shall she be made even as those
others of whom she spoke, when the veil of a girlish inno-
cence was drawn aside, and strange and terrible knowledge
looked out of those clear eyes, and she said, in answer to his
question :
" They are the moat unhappy of all the souls that suffer
upon earth. For they are the slaves, and the victims, and
the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures
of men. . . ."
Of men like Beauvayse.
Not only swart and shagg}', or pale and bloated beast -
men, or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown
venerable in vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates,
limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek sculptors :
soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes Uke green
Jewels, soft persuasive voices with which to pour poisoned
29—2
452 THE DOP DOCTOR
words into innocent and guileless ears, and the bold, brave
blood of old-time heroes running in their veins, prompting
them to the doing of dashing, reckless, gallant deeds, no less
than sins of lust and luxury.
Let him look to it, this splendid young soldier with the
ancient name, hope of his House, pride of his Regiment.
Let him look to it how he has dealt with her, who had no
thought or dream but to save others from the fate he
destines for her, until his cursed, beautiful face smiled dowu
into her own. For every lying oath he has sworn to her,
for every false promise made to the wrecking of her maiden
peace, for every kiss those innocent lips have been despoiled
of, for every touch of his that has soiled her, for every
breath of his that has scorched the white petals of the
Convent-reared lily, he shall pay the price.
Silently Saxham registers this oath upon that beloved
red-brown head, since he denies its Maker BQs honour, and
the wliirling blackness that is vpithin him is rent and cloven,
for one blinding instant, by the ]e\Tn-fires of Hell. He
knows thenceforward what he will do, as he walks with the
pale Chaplain between the shell-tom houses, and along the
littered streets, where men and women and children, thin
and haggard and listless with hunger, and the deadly inertia
of long confinement, pass and repass as indifferently as
though no guns were battering and growling from the low
grey hills south and east, and the incessant rattle of rifle-fire
were the innocent expenditure of blank cartridge incidental
to a sham fight.
They reach the Chaplain's hotel, and go to his room.
Saxham waits silently while Julius searches for and finds
Father Tatham's letter, takes it and reads it attentively,
puts it carefully away in a worn notecase, restores the note-
case to the inner pocket of his jacket, and, without a nod
or word of farewell, is gone.
XLVII
To the remarkably complete system of underground wires
installed by the Garrison Telephone Corps, Lady Hannah
Wrynche, on duty at the Convalescent Hospital that was
THE DOP DOCTOU 453
once the Officers' Club, was, upon the Thursday that saw
the publication of the string of paragraphs previously
quoted from the Sieqe Gazette, indebted for what she after-
wards described with ruefulness as a " heckled morning."
Once a week the " Social Jottings," bubbling from the
effervescent Gold Pen, descended like rain upon the parched
soil of drouthy Gueldersdorp. To make gossip where there
is none is as difficult as making bricks without clay, or
trimming a hat when you are a member of the Wild Birds'
Protection Society, and plumage is Fashion's latest cry.
Under the circumstances a genuine item of general and
public interest was a pearl of price. And yet something had
told the little lady that the ruthless Blue Pencil of Supreme
Authority would deprive her of the supreme joy of casting
it before the readers of the Siege Gazette. She seemed to
hear him saying, in the pleasant voice she knew so well :
" No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."
He had said that on Sunday, when she had pleaded for a
freer hand. Well, he could hardly call the announcement
of an engagement a personality, and, supposing he did, how
easy to convince him that it was nothing of the kind !
She dashed off her description of the Convent kettledrum,
and added the paragraphs we know of, each one accentuated
by an explosion of asterisks, and gave the blotty sheets to
Young Evans, who combined in his sole person the offices
of sub-editor, engineer, chief-compositor, feeder, and devil.
Young Evans, who, next to the single-cylinder printing-
press driven by the little oil-engine that had sustained a
shell-casualty at the beginning of the siege, adored Lady
Hannah, vanished behind the corrugated partition that
separated the office from the printing-room, and presently
came back in inky shirt-sleeves with a smear f»f lubricating-
oil upon his forehead, and laid the \\et slips upon the
Editorial table. Then he went back, and fell to tinkering at
his machine. Lady Hannah corrected her proof. When
she had done she looked at her wrist-watch. In ten
minutes Supreme Authority would descend the ladder,
wield the Blue Pencil, and depart. Would he have mercy
and not sacrifice ? The suspense was torturing.
Then a simple plan occurred to her by which Supreme
Authority might be — she dared not use the word " ciroum-
454 THE DOP DOCTOR
vented." " Got round " was even worse ; " evaded "
sounded nicest. To resist the promptings of her own
feminine ingenuity required a greater storage of cold moral
force than Lady Hannah desired to possess. She took the
editorial scissors, and daintily cut off the three paragraphs
from the bottom of the slip.
The thing was done, and the snipped-o£f paragraphs con-
cealed, as a pair of brown boots, with steel jack-spurs at-
tached, came neatly down the ladder. The Chief gave her his
cheery " Good-morning," and congratulated her on looking
well. Her cheeks burned and her heart rat- tatted against
the hidden paper, as he ran his keen eye down slip after
slip, and initialled them for the press. She almost shrieked
as he took up the " Social Jottings." The underground
office whirled about her as the blue pencil steadily travelled
down. Then — he was gone — and the initialled proof lay
before her. She had nothing to do but neatly and deli-
cately paste on the bit she had snipped o£F. This done, she
gathered up her various small belongings, swept them into
her bag, and went, leaving the passed proof of the " Social
Jottings " column waiting for Young Evans with the rest.
In the middle of the night she realised what she had done.
But even in a beleaguered town under the sway of Martial
Law you cannot hang a lady, or order her out and shoot her
for Mutiny and Treason combined. There would be a
reprimand ; what Bingo pleasantly termed " an official
wigging," unless the Blue PencU could, by any feminine
art, be persuaded that it had passed those pars.
But, of course, she would never stoop to such a deception.
The ruse she had employed was culpable. The other thing
would be infamous. And — he \^ ould be sure to see that the
end of the proof-slip had been pasted on.
She slept jerkily, rose headachy, and set out for the
Convalescent Hospital in that stage of penitence that
immediately precedes hysterical breakdown. She experi-
enced a crisis of the nerves upon meeting a man, who,
regardless of quite a brisk bombardment that happened to
be going on just then, was walking along reading the
Siege Gazette. Shirt-sleeved Young Evans had worked until
daylight getting the Thursday's issue out. And there was
a tremendous run upon copies. Every other person Lady
THE DOP DOCTOR 455
Hannah encountered upon the street seemed to have got
one, and to find it unusuaUy interesting. The women
especially. None of them were dull, or languid, or dim-
eyed this morning. The siege crawl was no longer in
evidence. They walked upon springs. Upon the stoep of
the Hospital, where the long rows of convalescents were
airing, every patient appeared plunged in perusal. Those
who had not the paper were waiting, with watering mouths,
until those who had would part. A reviving breath seemed
to have passed over them, and spots of colour showed in
their yellow, haggard faces. They talked and laughed. . . .
Lady Hannah passed in, conscious of an agreeable
tingling all down her spine. The hall-porter, a brawTiy,
one-armed ex-Irregular, who had lost what he was wont
to term his " flapper " at the outset of hostilities, was too
deeply absorbed in spelling out a paragraph of the " Social
Jottings " column to salute her. Inside you heard little
beyond the crackling of the flimsy sheet, mingled with the
comments, exclamations, anticipations, expectations that
went off on all sides, met each other, and rebounded,
exploding in coruscations of sparks. Something had hap-
pened, something was going to happen, after months and
months of eventless monotony. It warmed the thin blood
in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their
faded appetites like some salt breath from the far-distant sea.
The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial
Tokay, be sensed but once in a lifetime, but you can never for-
get that once. Out of her gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah
had spurted a little ink upon the famished Gueldersdorpians,
and their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine
must be paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even
as she tied on a bibbed apron, ajid superintended the serving
and distribution of the patients' one-o'clock dinner.
Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two
slivered carrota to the gallon, formed the menu to-day.
There was no more white bread, and a villainous bannock
of crushed oats had to be soaked in your porringer if you
had no strength to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed,
and upon this the now apologetic but smiling porter, with
the intelligence that her ladyship was wanted at the wall-
Jigger in the Matron's room.
456
THE DOP DOCTOR
The ring-up came from HotchMss Outpost North, « here
Captain Bingo was this day on duty, via the Staff Head-
quarter office in Market Square, and the voice that filtered
to the ear of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of her
spouse, and tinged with a grufifness as unusual as ominous.
" Hullo. Is that you ?"
" Qu'ii ne vous en deplaise !"
Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside :
" And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber
French through a telephone ?"
" A Frenchwoman would, possibly."
" Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what
made you shove such a whacking bouncer into the Siege
Gazette .?"
" Please put that into English." She underwent a
quaking at the heart.
" I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare
filly is all my eye."
" It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully-authorised
fact."
" Rot !"
" Paix et peu ! Say rot, if it pleases you !"
" You'll have to withdraw and apologise."
" I can't make out what you're saying."
" It will end in your eating humble-pie. Can you hear
that ?"
" I can hear that you are in a bearish temper."
"I've reason to be. If a man had written what you
have I should punch his head."
" Say that again !"
" I say, if a stranger of the kickable sex had told such a
pack of infernal "
Click !
Lady Hannah hung up the receiver, blew a contemptuous
kiss into the gape of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to
go. There was another ring-up as she reached the door.
" Hallo. Are you the Convalescent Hospital ?"
" Yes. Who are you ?"
" Stafif Bombproof South. I want to speak to Lady
Hannah Wrynche."
" I'm here. Lord Beauvayse."
THE DOP DOCTOR 457
" I say, I'm going to rag you frightfully. Why on earth
have you given us away in that beastly paper ?"
" Whom do you mean by ' us ' 1"
" Well, me and Miss Mildare."
" Didn't you tell me on Sunday that you were engaged ?"
she demanded indignantly.
" I did." The answer came back haltingly.
" And that you didn't care who knew it ?"
" Fact."
" And that you two were going to be married as soon as
you could pull off the event ?"
"Yes." The voice was palpably embarrassed. "But
" WeU ?"
" But — things you don't mind people knowing look
beastly in cold print."
" If I were in your shoes I should think they looked
beautiful."
Nothing but a faint buzz came back. Lady Hannah
went on :
" If I were in your shoes, and such a pearl and prize and
paragon as Lynette Mildare had consented to marry me, I
should want the whole world to envy me my colossal good
luck. I should go about in sandwich-boards advertising it.
I should buy a megaphone, and proclaim it through that.
I should "
There was no response beyond the buzzing of the wire.
Beauvayse had evidently hung up the receiver.
" Is there any creature upon earth more cowardly than a
man engaged ?" Lady Hannah demanded of space. There
was a futile struggle inside the telephone-box. Somebody
else was trying to ring up. She put the receiver back upon
the crutches, and —
" Ting — ting — ting /" said the beU in a high, thin voice.
" Who is it ?" she asked.
The answer came back with official clearness :
" Officer of the day. Staff Headquarters. If you're the
Convalescent Hospital, the Colonel would like to speak to
Lady Hannah Wrynche."
Her knees became as jelly, and her heart seemed to turn
a somersault. She answered in a would-be jaunty voice
fchafc wobbled horribly :
458
THE DOP DOCTOR
" Fere — here — is Lady Hannah."
" Hold on a minute, please !"
She held on. She had not shuddered at the end of
tho wire for more than a minute when the well-known,
infinitely-dreaded voice said in her ear, so clearly that she
Jumped :
" Lady Hannah there ? How d'you do ?'*
She gulped, and quavered :
" It — it depends on what you're going to say."
" I see." There was the vibration of a stifled laugh, and
her heart Jumped to meet it. " So you anticipated a
hauling over the coals V
Revived, she shrugged her little shoulders.
" Have I deserved one V
The voice said, with unmistakable displeasure in it :
" Thoroughly. Why were not the last three paragraphs
of the weekly ' Social Jottings ' column submitted to me
yesterday with the rest V
She heard herself titter imbecilely. Then a voice, which
she could hardly believe her own, said, with a pitiable effort
to be gay and natural :
" Weren't they ? Perhaps you overlooked them ?"
" You know I did not overlook them."
This was the cold, incisive, cutting, rasping voice which
Bingo was wont to describe as razors and files. Her ears
burned like fire, and her bright, birdlike eyes were round
and scared. She gasped :
" Oh ... do you really "
" I want the truth, please, without quibbling." The
voice was harsh and cold, and inexorably compelling.
" Why were those paragraphs not shown to me ?"
She winked away her tears.
" Because I was sure you'd blue-pencil them out of
existence. And a genuine bit of news is such a roc's egg in
these times of scarcity."
" Genuine !"
There was incredulity in the tone.
" Upon my honour as the wife of a British Dragoon."
He said crisply :
" Precipitate publication, even of authentic information.
ie likely to be resented by the persons concerned."
THE DOP DOCTOR 459
She remembered, with a sinking at the heart, that one
person concerned had already objected.
" Both of them authorised the insertion."
" And the oflficial consent to it was obtained by a trick."
She whispered, her heart in the heels of her Louis Quinze
shoes :
" Please — please don't call it that !"
" How can I call it anything else ? Besides, has it
occurred to you that, should any copies of to-day's issue
get through these lines, the Foltlebarres will be thrown
into a state of volcanic eruption ?"
" If the Foltlebarres aren't absolute beetles they'll jump
for joy. How could their boy possibly do better ?"
" I don't see how myself."
" Ah, if you're going to back up Toby, the day is as good
as won."
" You're very kind to say so."
The red was dying out of Lady Hannah's ear-tips. That
" You're very kind " had a gratified sound. The most
rigorous and implacable of men can be buttered, she
thought, if the emollient be dexterously applied. And a
bright spark of naughty triumph snapped in each of her
birdhke black eyes.
" Thanks." He was speaking again. " Apologies for
keeping you. You're up to your eyes in Hospital work, I
don't doubt."
" There is enough to keep one going."
" Without the additional tax of Uterary labour." She
was conscious of a premonitory, apprehensive chill that
travelled from the roots of her hair down her spine, and ap-
parently made its exit at the heels of her Louis Quinze
shoes. " So the ' Social Jottings ' column will not appear
in the Siege Gazette after to-day. Good-moming."
" Is that my punishment for insubordination ?"
Not a sound lq reply. " He must have himg up the re-
ceiver and gone away. Oh, horrid, horrid male superiority !"
thought Lady Haimah. " To have been put imder arrest,
even to have been ordered out and shot, would be preferable
to being figuratively spanked and put in the corner." She
winked away some more tears, and sniffed a little deject-
edly. " And only the other day he seemed quite pleaaed
4C0 THE DOP DOCTOR
with me/' she added pensively. Then she shrugged her
shoulders, and rang up the Head Hospital, North Veld Road.
" Who you-e ?"
It was the sing-song voice of the Barala hall- boy.
" I'm Lady Hannah Wrynche. Is the Reverend Mother
on duty in the wards to-day ?"
" I go see. You hang-e on."
Lady Hannah hung on until her small remaining stock of
patience deserted her. As she stamped her small feet,
longing to accelerate the languid movements of the call-
boy with a humanely-wield<^ hatpin, a whisper in the
velvet voice she knew stole across the distance.
" Hannah. Is it you ?"
" It's me, Biddy dear."
There was a soft laugh that ended in a sigh. " It is so
long since anybody called me that."
" I wouldn't dare to with you looking at me."
" Am I so formidable of aspect ? But go on."
" It's not so easy. But I've had an awful morning.
Everybody I like best down on me like bricks and m "
The speaker gulped a sob.
" You are crying, dear !"
" Not a drop. But if you Join in the heckling I shall
dribble away and dissolve in salt water. It's all about
those wretched paragraphs of mine in the Siege Gazette.
But perhaps you haven't seen it ?"
" I have seen it."
" You were quite willing that the fiancailles should be
made public. . . . Indeed, you gave me to understand
you desired it."
" I was quite willing. I did wish it."
" Yes. . . . Thank you, dear ; that was what I wanted
to hear from you. I understand now what the one clapping
pair of hands must mean to the actor who is booed by all
the rest of the audience. Good-bye, dear."
" Stay. . . . Who are the persons who disappiove of the
announcement ?"
" My Bingo, for one. Not that anything the dear old
stupid says matters in the sUghtest. And — and Toby."
" ' Toby ' ?"
. " I mean Lord Beauvayse."
THE DOP BOCTOR 461
" Tell him I quite approve. He should know that in this
matter it was for me to decide."
" Certainly, dear."
" Whose is the other objecting voice ?"
" The Chief thinks I ... we ... it .. . I rather fancy
that he used the word ' precipitate ' in expressing his
opinion."
" Refer him to me if he expresses it again."
" Of course, dear, since you . . ."
" Good-bye."
" Good-bye, dear. If Biddy Bawne hadn't been a nun,"
reflected Lady Hannah, as she went out of the Matron's
office and back to her patients, who had long ago dined, " I
think she would have made rather a despotic Empress.
' Refer him. to me,' indeed. What is it. Sergeant ? Don't
say I'm rung up again."
But the one-armed porter was positive on the subject,
and her little ladyship went back. This last communica-
tion proved a puzzling one.
" You there ?"
" I am Lady Harmah Wrynche. Where are you ?"
There was a brief hesitation. A thickish man's voice
said :
" I don't know as that matters."
" Who are you ?"
There was another hesitation. Then the stranger
parried with a question :
" You write them weekly screeds in the Siege Gazette ?"
" I am responsible for some of the social paragraphs.
Kindly say who is spealdng ?"
" Nobody that matters much. Can you teU me where
Miss IMildare lives ?"
" Not without knowing who you are."
" You may call me an old friend of hers," said the tliickish,
lisping voice, with a sluggish chuckle in it that the little
woman at the other end of the wire had heard . . .
where ? . . .
" If you are an old friend of the young lady you mention,
how is it you don't know her address ?" she demanded.
" Keep her address all you want to. Only next time yon
come alongside her give her a message for me. Aak her if
462 THE DOP DOCTOR
she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days'
trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend ?"
Lady Hannah repeated :
" ' And Bough, who was her friend.' You are
Bough ?"
"Click /" Somebody had hung up the receiver.
Lady Hannah spent another bad night, not wholly due to
the indigestible nature of a dinner of mule colloped, and
locusts fried in batter by Nixey's chef. Staggering in the
course of disturbed and changeful dreams, under the im-
pact of sufficient bricks and mortar to rebuild toppledown
Gueldersdorp, being hauled over mountains of coals, and
getting into whole Gulf Streams of hot water, she was
slumberously conscious that these nightmares were less
harassing than one nasty, perplexing little vision that kept
cropping up among the others. It had no beginning and
no end. In it the Matron's room at the Convalescent Hos-
pital and Kink's Family Hotel at Tweipans were somehow
mixed up, and the ingenuous Mr. Van Busch, that Afri-
kander gentleman of British sympa.thies, whose chivalrous
and patriotic sentiments had prompted and urged him to
the imperilling of his own skin and the risking of his own
liberty in the interests of an English lady masquerading
for political reasons as the refugee-widow of a German
drummer, was oddly confused in identity with an uncomfort-
ably mysterious individual who possessed neither features
nor name.
*' Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the
veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was
her friend ?" the voice would say.
" You are Bough ?" she would find herself asking.
There would be a little guttural, horrible laugh, and
nothing would answer but the buzzing of the wire.
And then she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, with
a thumping heart. She was no longer in any doubt as to
the identity of the owTaer of the voice. Van Busch was in
Gueldersdorp . . . and however he came, and whatever
disguise of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence
boded no good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs
hat respectfully before the superiority of feminine intuition.
THE DOP DOCTOR 463
XLVIII
SaxhaM, shouldering out of Julius's hotel upon his way to
Staff Bombproof South, is made aware that the hundred-
foot-high dust-storm that has raged and s\\irled throughout
the momiag is in process of being beaten down into a por-
ridge of red mud by a downpour of February rain.
Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedes-
trians who have grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle
under cover, adding to the wretchedness of life in trench or
bombproof as nothing else can. And the Doctor, biting
hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes
swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin
upon his breast and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the
goal ahead, recalls, even more vividly than upon Sunday,
the angry buffalo of Lady Hannah's apt analogy.
He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a
minute or two. So is the Railway Volunteer, who chal-
lenges him at the bridge that carries the single-gauge railway
southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ragged waterproof
and an additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted
officer of the Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognises
Captain Bingo Wrynche, as he goes by at a furious gallop,
spurring, and jagging savagely at the mouth of the hand-
some if attenuated brown charger, who sends stones and
mud and water flying from his furious iron-shod hoofs. So
is the Barala on guard by the wattled palisade of the native
village — a muddy-legged and goose-fleshy warrior, in a
plumed, brimless bowler and leopard-skin kaross, whose
teeth can be heard chattering as he stands to attention
and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The Chinamen
working in the patches of market-garden, where the scant
supply of vegetables that command such famine-prices are
raised, are certainly sheltered from the wet by their colossal
umbrella-hats, but the splashed-up red gruel has imbrued
them to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully,
hoeing scattered shell-fragments out of their potato-drills
and removing incrusted masses of bullets that incommode
the young kidney-beans, and arranging this ironmongery
and metal-ware in tidy piles, possibly with a view to future
464 THE DOP DOCTOR
commerce. And so, with another challenge from a picket,
posted between the Barala village and the south trenches,
where many of the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham
finds himself on the perilous tongue of land that lies behind
Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff Bombproof is
situated.
As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white
flash leaps from a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and
one of Meisje's great shells goes screaming and winnowing
westwards. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a battered,
shaggy, berry-brown trooper, standing Imee-deep in a hole,
burrowed in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his
shelter, challenges for the last time.
" 'Alt ! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a
man whose wounded arm was dressed, one blazing day last
January, outside the Convent bombproof. " But you'll
'ave to give the countersign. Pass Honour and all's well.
But " — ^the sentry's nostrils twitch as the savour of Sax-
ham's pipe reaches them, and his whisper of appeal is as
piercing as a yell— " if you left a pipeful be'ind you, it
wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't pull your pouch out, sir ; the
lookout orficer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it by the feel, an'
drop a pinch by the stone near your toe. I'll get it when
they relieve me."
Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly
over the little brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly
reducing to sponginess under the downpour from the skies.
The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with greenish-
yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises
now immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flag-
staff displaying the Union Jack. Under the roof of the
little penthouse foom which the flagstaff rises are sheltered
the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are used for signal-
ling at night.
Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an
officer in dripping waterproofs, who is looking steadily
through a telescope out between the long driving
lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those
mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud,
that look so desolate, and whose folds are yet as full
of swarming, active, malignant life as the blanket of an
THE DOP DOCTOR 465
unwashed KaJ0&r. An N.C.O. is posted a little below the
officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing
above the edge of the tumed-up collar and below the brim
of the Field-Service cap, prove him to be not Beauvayse.
And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire, varied >)y brisk bursts
of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the De-
stroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in
the customary way. But even women and children have
grown indifferent to these things, and the men have long
ceased to be aware of them.
A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhala-
tions of a stable rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently
saluted by the fierce and clamorous smells of the native
village. The ground slopes under his feet. He goes down
the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the
orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside
the tarpauhn that screens off the interior of the officer's
shelter, stiffens to the salute, receives a brief message, and
disappears within.
Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut
hindquarters of half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing
or fidgeting before their emptied mangers. Against the
division of a loose-box that holds a fine brown charger, still
saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud,
there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains
and splashes upon it, has been recently in use.
Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and
file. Here several gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers
are sitting on rough benches at a trestle-table, playing
dominoes and draughts, or poring over tattered books by
the hght of the flickering oil- lamps, with tin reflectors, that
hang against the earth walls. None of them are smoking,
though several are sucking vigorously at empty pipes ; and
the rapacious light that glares in every eye as Saxham
mechanically knocks out the ashes from his smoked-out
briar-root against the side-post of the entrance is sufficient
witness to the pangs that they endure.
Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell
of revengeful fury seething in his heart, and a legion of
devils unloosed and shrieking, prompting him to murder,
he should have paused to relieve the tobacco-famine of the
30
466 THE DOP DOCTOR
sentry, and be moved to a further sacrifice of his sole luxury
by the sight of those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch,
pitched by a cricketer's hand, flies in among the domino-
players, and rebounds from a pondering head, as the orderly
comes back, and lifts one corner of the tarpaulin for the
Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over
an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the
scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and
benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and
dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor,
when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell
the riot, and thenceforward joins the rioters.
They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from
among the rest, clutching the prize, and grinning a three-
cornered grin because his upper lip is split, divides the
tobacco fairly to the last thread. They even share out
the indiarubber pouch, and chew the pieces as long as
the flavour lasts. When the thick, fragrant smoke curls
up from the lighted pipes, it steals round the edges of the
tarpaulin that has dropped behind Saxham, passing in to
the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief whose profane
and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of the Convent
garden.
Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with
the lust to kill tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will
soon stand in the presence of his enemy, and hers. As
he thinks of this, suddenly a bell rings. The sound
comes from the north, so it cannot be the bell of
the Catholic Church, or that of the Protestant Church,
or the bell of the Wesleyan meeting-house, or of the
Dutch Kerk.
" Clang-clang I clang-clang ! Clang "
The last clang is broken ofl^ suddenly, as though the rope
has been jerked from the ringer's hands, but Saxham is
not diverted by it from his occupation. With that curious
fatuity to which the most logical of us are prone, he has
been conning over the brief, scorching sentences with which
he means to strip the other man's deception bare to the
light, and make known his own self-appointed mission to
avenge her.
" They telephoned for me, and I have come, but not
THE DOP DOCTOR 467
in the interests of your sick or wounded man. Because
it was imperative that I should say this to you : Your
engagement to Miss Mildare and your approaching marriage
to her were announced in to-day's Siege Gazette. You
have received many congratulations. Now take mine —
liar, and coward, and cheat !"
And with each epithet, delivered with all the force of
Saxham's musciilar arm, shall fall a stinging blow of the
heavy old hunting-crop. There will be a shout, an angry
oath from Beauvayse, staggering back under the unex-
pected, savage chastisement, red bars marring the insolent,
high-bred beauty of the face that has bewitched her.
Saxham will continue :
" You approached this iimocent, inexperienced girl as
a lover. You represented yourself to her and to. her mother-
guardian as a single man. All this when you had already
a wife at home in England — a gaudy stage butterfly sleek
with carrion-juices, whose wings are jewelled by the vices
of men ; and who is worthy of you, as you are of her.
I speak as I can prove. Here is the written testimony of
a reliable witness to your marriage with Miss Lavigne.
And now you will go to her and show yourself to her in
your true colours. You will undeceive her, or "
There is a foggy uncertainty about what is to follow
after that " or," But the livid flames of the burning hell
that is in Saxham throw upon the greyness a leaping reflec-
tion that is red like blood. A fight to the death, either
with weapons, or, best of all, with the bare hands, is what
Saxham secretly lusts for, and savours in anticipation as
he goes.
Let the humanitarian say what he pleases. Man is a
manslayer by instinct and by will.
And within the little area of this beleagiiered town do
not inen kill, and are not men killed, every day ? The
conditions are medieval, fast relapsing into the primeval.
The modem sanctity and inviolability attending and sur-
rounding human life are at a discount. Even for children,
the grim King of Terrors had become a bugaboo to laugh
at ; red wounds and ghastly sights are things of everyday
experience ; there is a slump in morcality.
30—2
468 THE DOP DOCTOR
In those old. far-distant Cliilworth Street days, two men
oho engaged in a battle to the death about a woman desired
might have seemed merely savages to Saxham. Here
things are different. The elemental bed-rock of human
nature has been laid bare, and the grim, naked scars upon
it, testifying to the combat of Ice and Fire for the round
world's supremacy, will never be quite hidden under
Civilisation's green mantle of vegetation, or her toadstool-
growths of bricks and mortar, any more.
And the men are well matched. Saxham knows himself
the more muscular, but Beauvayse has the advantage of
him in years, and is lithe, and strong, and supple as the
Greek wrestler who served the sculptor Polycleitos as a
model for the Athlete with the Diadem.
It will be a fight worth having. No quarter. And
Saxham' s breath comes heavily, and his blue eyes have
in them a steely glitter, and, as the tarpaulin falls behind
him, he shifts to a better grip on the strong old hunting-
crop.
Overhead the rain drums deafeningly on the tarpaulins.
The long bombproof is heterogeneously furnished with
full and empty ammunition - boxes marked A.O.S., a
leathern sofa-divan, tattered by spurs and marked by
muddy boots, several cane or canvas deck-chairs, and others
of the Windsor pattern common to the barrack- room.
Arms and eiccoutrements are in rude racks against the
corrugated-iron-panelled walls ; a trestle-table covered with
oilcloth runs down the middle. It is lighted by a couple
of acetylene lamps hanging by their chains from iron bars
that cross the trench above, and there is another lamp,
green-shaded, upon a bare deal table that stands, strewn
with papers, against the farther wall.
A man in shirt-sleeves sits there writing. Another man
is busy at a telephone that is fixed against the wall beyond
the writing-table. There is something fateful and ominous
about the heavy silence in which they do their work. It
is broken only by a strange sound that comes almost
continuously from — where Saxham does not trouble to ask.
It is the groaning, undoubtedly, of the wounded man to
whose aid he has been summoned, with the added injunc-
tion, " Bring morphia," showing that little further can be
THE DOP DOCTOR 469
[done for him, whoever he may be, than to smooth his
passage into the Beyond by the aid of the Pain Slayer.
Let him wait, however sore his need, until Saxham has
dealt with his enemy. He is resentfully impatient in the
knowledge that neither of the men present is Beauvayse.
Then, as he stands sullen and lowering, the man who
has been writing gets up and comes to him. Saxham
recognises the keen-featured face with the rusty-brown
moustache, and the grip of the lean, hard hand that hauled
a Dop Doctor out of the Slough of Despair is familiar.
The pleasant voice he likes says something about some-
body being very wet. It is Saxham, from whose soaked
garments the water is i-unning in streams, and whose boots
squelch as he crosses the carpet that has been spread
above the floor- tarpaulin. The friendly hand pours out and
offers him a sparing measure of that rare stimulant, whisky.
" As preventive medicine. We can't have our Medical
Staff men on the sick-list."
Some such commonplace words accompany the proffered
hospitality.
" I shall not suffer, thanks. You have a shell-casualty, you
have 'phoned us, but before I see your man it is imperative
that I should speak to Lord Beauvayse. Where is he 1"
" He is here."
" My business with him is urgent, sir."
The man at the telephone makes a sound indicative that
a message is coming through. The Chief is beside him
instantly, with the receiver at his ear. He looks round for
an instant at Saxham as he waits for the intelligence, and
the muscles of his face twitch as if under the influence of
some strong, repressed emotion, and the Doctor's practised
glance notes the unsteadiness of the uplifted hand. Then
he is saying to the officer in charge at Maxim Kopje South :
" The ammunition comes up to-night. Tell Gaylord
that we are short-handed here, and shall want him to help
on night duty. . . . Practically as soon as he can Join us.
No, no better. All for the present . . . thanks ! Saxham,
please come this way."
There is a sleeping- place at the end of the long, narrow,
lamp-lit perspective, curtained off from the rude bareness
of the outer place. Light shows between the curtains.
470 THE DOP DOCTOR
and they are of plush, in hue a rich, deep red. As that
strong colour smks into his brain, through his intent and
glittering eyes, Saxham the man has a sudden furious
impulse to tear the deep folds back, with a clash of brazen
rings on iron rods, and call to the betrayer who lurks behind
them to come out and be dealt with. But that hollow,
feeble moaning sounds continuously from the other side,
and Saxham the surgeon stays his hand and follows the
Colonel in. There are two camp-beds in the small sleep-
ing-place, and a ■« ashstand and a folding-chair. A lamp
hangs above, and its light falls full upon the face of the
man whom he is seeking.
Ah ! where are they ? His furious anger and his deadly
hate, where are they now ? Like snow upon the desert
they vanish a^\ ay. How can one rage against this shattered
thing, stretched on the pallet of the low cot-bed from which
the blankets have been strij)ped away ? First Aid band-
ages have been not ineffectually applied. Fragments of
packing-case have been employed as splints for the broken
arm and shattered hand, but, in spite of all that has been
done, the beautiful yoimg life is sinking, waning, flowing
out with that ruddy tide that will not be stayed.
The greenish pallor and the sweat of mortal agony are
upon the face of Beauvayse, thrown back upon the pillow,
and looking upwards to \^'here the deluging rain makes
thunder on the tarpaulined roof. The atmosphere is heavy
with the sour-sickly smell of blood, and lamp-fumes ; he
draws each breath laboriously, and exhales it with a
whistling sound. Tluough his clenched teeth, revealed by
the lips that are dragged back in the semi-grin of desperate
agony, that dumb, ceaseless moaning makes its way despite
the gallant effort to restrain it. The one uninjured arm
hangs downwards, its restless fingers picking at the blood-
stained matting that covers the loose boards of the floor.
A sheet has been lightly laid over him. It is dabbled
with the prevailing hue, and sinks in an ominous hollow
below the breast. And beyond the bottom of it splashed
leggings and muddy boots with spurs on them stick out
with helpless stiffness.
A flask of brandy — a precious restorative treasured for
use in such desperate need as this — stands with a tumbler
THE DOP DOCTOR 471
and a jug of water on the camp washstand that is between
the two cot-beds. Upon the second bed sits a big and
stoutish man, whose large face, not pink just now, is hidden
in his thick, quivering hands. It is Captain Bingo Wrynche,
heavy Dragoon, and honest, single-hearted gentleman,
to whom belongs the blowna and muddy charger drooping
in the loose-box outside. The telephone has summoned
him in haste from Hotchkiss Outpost North, to see the last
of a friend.
XLIX
" It was just before the rainstorm that it happened. He
was on the lookout. They have been moving the big gun
and the 16-pounder Krupps again, and some of the laagers
seem to be shifting, so we have kept an extra eye open of
late, by night as well as by day. He was very keen
always. ..."
Already he is spoken of by those who have known and
loved him as one who was and has been.
" He had relieved me at 10 a.m. He might have been
up over an hour when it happened. The orderly- sergeant
had got his mouth at the speaking-tube, in the act of sending
down a message ; he did not see him hit. It was a shell
frorn their Maxim-Nordenfelt. Apd when we got to him,
the first glance told us there was little hope."
" There is none at all," says Saxham curtly, as is his
wont. " A splinter has shattered the lower portion of the
spine. The agony can be deadened with an opiate, and the
ruptured arteries ligatured. Beyond that there is nothing
else to do, though he may live tUl morning."
" He managed to ask for Wrynche before he swooned,
so we 'phoned him at Hotchldss Outpost North. He got
here ten minutes ago, badly cut up, but there has been
no recognition of him. Do what you can, Saxham, in the
case. Every moment may bring VVrynche's recall. There
is another person I should have expected the poor boy to
ask for. . . . That young girl, Saxhant, whose heart ha^
to be broken with the news, sooner or later. Perhaps
about nightfall, when it will be safe for her to venture,
I ought to send an escort for Miss IVIildare ?"
472 THE DOP DOCTOR
The slow, dusky colour rises in Saxham's set, pale face,
and as slowly sinks out again. He has been standing in
low-toned colloquy with the Chief outside the heavy
plush curtains. He turns silently upon his heel and
vanishes behind them.
" Ting— ting— ting /"
The telephone- bell heralds an urgent recall from Hotch-
kiss Outpost North. And a beckoning hand summons
Captain Bingo from the bedside of his dying friend ere
ever the word of parting has been spoken.
" It is for you, Wrynche, as I expected."
" I am ready, sir. Orderly, get my damned brute out !"
The sorrow and love that swell the big man's heart to
bursting find rather absurd expression in his savage
objurgation of the innocent brown charger. But Captain
Bingo, when he stoops over the camp-bed where lies
Beauvayse, kisses him solemnly and clumsily upon the
forehead, and then goes heavily striding out of the death-
chamber with his bulldog jowl well down upon his chest ;
and a moment later when he is seen bucketing the lean
brown charger through the thrashing hailstorm that is
jagged across by the white-green fires of bursting shell, is
rather a tragic figure, or so it seems to me.
Meanwhile, what of the man who lies upon the bed ?
Since Bingo's face came between and receded into, those
thick grey mists that gather about the dying, he has lost
consciousness of present things. Fever is rising id those
wellnigh empty veins of his, his skin is drawing and
creepiag ; it seems as though innumerable ants were running
over him. The hand that is not powerless tries to brush
them away. Sometimes he thinks he is in Hospital, and
that the man in the next bed is groaning, and then he is
aware that the groans are his own. He is conscious that
a needle-prick in the sound wrist has been followed by
sensible relief. The unspeakable grinding agonies subside ;
he is able to murmur, " Thanks, Nurse," as he gulps some
liquid from the glass a strange hand holds to his lips. . . .
The groans are sighs now, and the clogged brain, spurred
by mori^hia, shakes off its lethargy. The fever goes on
rising, and he begins, silently, for his powers fail of speech,
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 473
to wander over all the past. Could Saxham, sitting
motionless and vigilant on the folding-chair, his keen eyes
(luick to note each change, his deft hand prompt to do all
that can be done — could Saxham hear, he would behold,
anatomised before bis ment/al vision, the soul of this his
fellow-man.
" Coming straight for me — five round black spots punched
in the grey. If they go by, luck's on my side, and I marry
her. If not . . . hit — and done for !"
Exactly thus has Saxham made of the imconscious Father
Noah, of the Boer sharp shooters behind their breastwork,
the arbiters of Fate.
" Send for Bingo !" flashes across the dying brain.
" Something to say to Bingo. Don't bring her. Who'd
want a woman who loved him to remember him like this ?
What was it the Mahometan syce the miisth elephant killed
at Bhurtpore said about his wife ? ' Lei her cool my grave
with tears.' Until she finds out . . . until someone tells
her. Ah — 'h !" There is a groan, and a convulsive shudder,
and the beautiful dim eyes roll up in agony, and the blue,
swollen lips are wrung as the feeble voice whispers : " Nurse,
this hurts like — hell ! Some more — that stuff !"
Saxham gives another subcutaneous injection of morpliia.
The curtains part, and the Colonel, in waterproof and a
dreadnought cap, comes noiselessly in. " No change,"
Saxham answers to the mute inquiry. " I anticipate none
before midnight. Of course, the weakness is progressive."
" Of course." The Chief touches the cold, flaccid wrist.
There are hollows in his lean cheeks, and deep crow's-feet
at the corners of the kindly hazel eyes, and the brown
moustache is ominously straight and curveless. " Tell
him, if he recovers consciousness, that I thought it best to
send for her. Chagrave has gone with a couple of the
men. It's a desperate night for a woman to be out in, but
they took an Ambulance sling-chair with them. They'll
wrap her in tarpaulins, and carry her in that."
He nods and goes up on the lookout with a night-glass,
and the wearied officer he relieves comes down. As he
has said, it is a desperate night of driving sleet and swirl-
ing blackness, illuminated only with the malignant corusca-
tions of lyddite bursting-charges. But the tt-mpest without
474 THE DOP DOCTOR
is nothing to the tempest that rages in the soul of tlie
quiet man in sodden khaki who watches by the dying.
She has been sent for. . . . She is coming. ... To kneel by
the low cot and weep over him who lies there ; kiss the tor-
tured lips and the beautiful dim eyes, and hold the un-
wounded head upon her breast. . . . How sliall Saxham bear
it without crying out to tell her ? He clenches his hands,
and sets his strong jaw, and the sweat breaks out upon his
broad, pale forehead. The man upon the bed, mentally
clear, though incapable of coherent speech, is now listening
to comments that shall ere long be made by living men
upon one who very soon shall be numbered with the dead.
" Well, well, don't be hard on the poor beggar !" he hears
them saying. " Give the devil his due : not a bad chap —
take him all round. Got carried away and lost his head.
She's as lovely as they make 'em, and he . . . always a
fool where a pretty woman was concerned — poor old Toby !"
He pleads unconsciously, with his most merciless judge,
in his utter incapacity to plead at all. . . .
And so the time goes by. There has been coming and
going in the place outside- The guard has relieved the
double sentries, the official lamp burns redly under the
little penthouse. A reconnoitring-patrol ride out, the
horses' hoofs soundiiig hollow on the earth-covered boards
of the sloping way. The business of War goes on in its
accustomed grooves, and the business of Life wUl soon be
over for Beauvayse. Yet she has not come. And Saxham
looks at liis watch.
Nine o'clock. He has not eaten since early morning.
He is wet to the skin and stiff with long sitting. But when
the savoury odours of hot horse-soup and hot bean-coffee,
accompanied by the clinking of crockery and tin pannikins,
announce a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to
the curtains and anxiously beg him to take food, he merely
shakes his square black head and falls again to watching
the unconscious face of Beauvayse. The conscious brain
beliind its blankly-staring eyes is thinking :
" Those paragraphs. ... In black and white the thing
looked damnable. And think of the gossip and tongue-
wagging. Whatever they say about me . . . she'll be the
one to suffer. They're never so hard on . . . the man !"
THE DOP DOCTOR 476
He has uttered these last words audibly ; they pierce to
the heart's core of the mute, impassive watcher. Strong
antipathy is as clairvoyant as strong sympathy, and witli a
leap of understanding, and a fresh surge of fierce resentment,
Saxham acknowledges the deadly truth contained in those
few halting words. She will be the one to suffer. Beside
the martyrdom inevitably to be endured by the white
saint, the agony of the sinner's death-bed pales and d\\indles.
There is a savage struggle once again between Saxham
the man and Saxham the surgeon beside the bed of death.
His sudden irrepressible movement has knocked the
tumbler from the little iron washstand at his elbow. It
falls and shivers into fragments at his feet. And then —
the upturned face slants a little, and the eyes that have
been blankly staring at the roof-tarpaulins come down
to the level of his own. He and her fallen enemy regard
each other silently for a moment. Then Beauvaj'se says
weakly, in the phantom of the old gay, boyish voice that
wooed and won her :
" Thought it was WrjTiche. Where is "
The question ends in a groan.
Saxham the man shrinks from him with unutterable
loathing. But Saxham tlie surgeon stoops over him,
saiydng, in distinct, even tones :
" Captain Wrjoiche w as here. He has been recalled to
Hotchkiss Outpost North. Brink this." This is a little
measure of brandy-and- water, in which some tabloids of mor-
pliia have been dissolved. And Beauvayse obeys, panting :
" All right. But . . . more a job for the Chaplain than
the Doctor, isn't it ?"
" Do you wish the Chaplain sent for ?"
There is a glimmer of the old lazy, defiant humour in
the beautiful dim eyes.
" What could he do ?"
Saxham answers — how strangely for him, the Denier :
" He would probably pray beside you, and talk to you
of God."
There is a pause. The faint, almost breathless whispei
asks :
" It's night, isn't it ?"
" It is dark and stormy night."
((
476 THE DOP DOCTOR
Beauvayse says, in the whispering voice interrupted by
long, gasping sighs that are beginning to have a jarring
rattle in them :
" Before to-morrow, ... I shall know more of God . . .
than the whole Bench of Bishops."
There is silence. And she does not come. The man on
the bed makes a painful effort, gathering his nearly -spent
forces for something he wants to say :
" Doctor !"
Let me wipe your forehead. Yes ?"
I . . . insulted you frightfiilly the other day."
" You need not recall that. I have forgotten it."
" I . . . beg your pardon ! Will you . . . shake hands ? . . .
My left, if you don't mind. The other one's ... no good."
He tries to lift the heavy arm that lies beside him. There
is only a faint movement of the finger-tips, and he gives
up the efifort with a fluttering sob. And the square white
face with the burning eyes under the loM^ering brows
opposes itself to his. Words are crowding to Saxham's lips :
" / would gladly shake the hand of the man who insulted
me and who has apologised. And I honour the brave officer
who meets Death upon the field. But with the would-be
betrayer of an innocent girl, the dancing-woman^ s husband
who proposed himself as mate for Lynette Mildare, I have
nothing but contempt and abhorrence. He is to me a leper.
Worse, for the leper I would touch to cure f"
He does not utlor the words, nor does his rugged, un-
conquerable sincerity admit of his taking the hand. He
fights with his liatred in silence. And she has not come.
What is he saying in that weak voice with the rattling
breaths between ?
" Listen, Saxham. . . . There's . . . something I wane
you . . . say to Miss Mildare."
The grey mists that gather about him shut out a clear
view of Saxham's terrible face. The feeble whisper
struggles on, broken by those rattling gasps.
" Tell her forget me. Say when I . . . asked her ... to
marry me. . . ."
Silence. He is falling, falling into an abyss of vast un-
certainties. The blue lips dabbled with foam can frame
no more coherent words. Only the brain behind the dying
f
THE DOP DOCTOR 477
eyes is alive to understand when Saxham approaches his
own Uvid faoe and blazing eyes to the face upon the pillow,
and says :
" Do not try to speak. Close your eyes when you mean
' Yea.' I know what you wish me to tell Miss Mildare. It
is that when you asked her to marry you, you were already
the husband of another woman. Am I correct ?"
The afl&rmative signal comes.
" You were married to Miss Lavigne at the Registrar's
office, Cookham-on-Thames, last June, before you sailed.
The witnesses were your valet and a female servant at
Roselawn Cottage. And knowing that you were not free,
you deceived and cheated her. That is what I am to tell
Miss INIildare ? Signal if I am right."
The dying eyes are brimming with tears. When the lids
shut, signifying " Yes," slow, heavy drops are forced
between them.
" Very well. Now hear. I will not tell her !"
The eyes open wide with surprise.
" I will never tell her," says Saxham again. " I will
not blacken any man's reputation to further my own
interests." The vital strength and the white-hot passion
of him, contrasted with the spent and utter laxity of the
dissolving thing of clay upon the bed, seem superhuman.
" Do you hear me ?" he demands again. " Listen once
more. KJaowing the truth of you, I came here to force you
to undeceive her. Had you refused, I would certainly have
killed you. But I would never have betrayed you !"
That " never " of Saxham's carries conviction. The
pale ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of
Beauvayse's old voice comes back again to say :
" Doctor, you're a . . . damned good sort !" And then
there is a long, long silence, broken only by those painful
rattling breaths, never by her coming.
The end comes, and she is not there. A pale blink in the
wild sky eastward hints to the night lookouts of hot drink,
food, and welcome rest. The Chief stands beside the com-
fortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old House is
flickering out. The Doctor holds the wet and icy wrist,
where the pulse has ces/sed to be perceptible. The sheet
above the labouiing breast rises and falls with those panting,
478 THE DOP DOCTOR
rattling gasps ; the beautiful eyes are rolled up and inwards.
The light is very nearly out, when, with a last effort, the
flame leaps up. Ho thinks that what is the barely per-
ceptible whisper of a tongue already clay is a loud and
ringing cheer. He thinks that he is shouting, his strong
young voice topping a hundred other voices. It seems to
him who, for the bribe of all the beauty he has coveted, and
all the love that is yet unwon, could not speak one audible
word or move a finger, that he waves his hat again and
again. Oh ! glorious moment when the white moonbeams
blink on the grey dust-wall rolling down from the North,
and the horsemen of the Advance ride out of it, and cluster-
ing enemies that have rallied again to the attack waver,
and disperse, and scatter. . . .
" Hurrah ! They're rurming — running for their lives !
Give it 'em with shrapnel ! Oh, pepper 'em like hell ! The
Relief ! The Relief ! Hurrah !"
It is all over with the opening of the day-eye in the east.
When they leave hitn, beautiful, and stem, and calm in that
deep slumber from which only the Angel with the Trumpet
may awaken him, and pass out between the curtains, the
dark, short officer who was on the lookout when the Doctor
came, stands very pale and muddy, and steaming with
damp, waiting to report. And two troopers of the Irregu-
lars, wet and muddy and steaming too, are waiting also.
Just inside the tarpaulins of the outer doorway. And she
is not there.
A few rapid words, an exclamation from the Chief, shaken
for once out of his steely composure, and quivering from
head to foot with mingled rage and grief :
" My God, how unutterably horrible !"
Saxham shoulders his way into the ring of white faces
that have gathered about the dark little muddy officer.
" What has happened to Miss Mildare ?"
The little officer answers, panting :
" The Sisters could not make her understand. She "
The Chief speaks for him :
" She had been previously stunned by the shodt of — a
terribb calamity."
" What calamity i"
THE DOP DOCTOR 479
" The Mother-Superior has been killed. Two of the
Sisters and IMiss IVIildare found her in the Convent chapel.
They got there before evening. She must have been dead
some hours. She had been shot through the lungs."
" By a stray bullet ?"
" By a bullet from a revolver, fixed close enough to scorch
the clothes. Foul murder, and by God who saw it done "
The lean clenched hand, thrown upwards in a savage
gesture, the blazing eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the
\vrithen mouth, the furious, jarring voice, leave little doubt
of the vengeance that will be wreaked when he shall track
down the murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the
telephone. The swift, imperative orders volt from fort to
fort ; the circuit of vigilance is made complete, the human
bloodhounds unleashed upon the trail, in a few instants,
thanks to the buzzing wire that brings the moiith of a man
to the ear of another across a void of miles.
But Bough, primed with knowledge as to which are
dummy rifle-pits and w^hich are real, aided by acquaintance
with the ground, and covered by that \vuthering night of
storm, has already pierced the lines. Subsequently that
excellent Afrikander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Brounckers'
bright boy at Tweipans, with information that decides the
date of Schenk Eybel's Feint from the East.
She had gone about her Master's business all Monday, calm
and composed, and inexorably gentle. She did not meet
Richard's daughter before nightfall. " She will not suffer
now," she thought, even as she sent the message that was
to allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her where-
abouts in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-
wrecked shanty at the south end of the tov\Ti. where some
Lithuanian emigrants herded together in indescribable
filth and misery. A woman who had bfeen recently con-
fined lay there raving in puerperal fever. Until nightfall,
when she was removed to the Isolation Hospital on the
veld, near the Women's Laager, the Mother-Superior
remained with the patient.
480 THE DOP DOCTOR
A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a pecuUarly dark skin
and strange steely eyes, passing the broken window, caught
sight of the noble profile and the stately shoulders stooping
above the miserable bed. Going home at dark, the Mother
heard a stealthy footstep following behind her.
Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the
trenches, many people, revisiting their deserted dwellings,
had found them plundered of movable possessions, and,
losing the fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale evapora-
tion of their worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to
protect them. Instances there had been of robbery from
the person by thieves not all tracked down by Martial
Justice and made examples of.
The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human
Jackal, whose sole end is money and money's worth, have
no terrors for Holy Poverty. But there are other creatures
of prey more terrible than these. And the padding foot-
steps that followed, hurrying when she hurried and slacken-
ing when she went more slowly, and stopping dead when
she paused and looked round, conveyed to her a haunting
sense of something sinister, and at the same time greedy
and guileful, that bided its time to spring.
She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black
robes sweeping noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the
well-known ground, her course kept unfalteringly ; but her
heart shook her, and she gasped as the Convent bomb proof
neared in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more
of late, and she knew herself less strong than she had been.
When the blue light that hung from a post by the ladder-
hole blinked " Home " through the mirk of a night of
thin rain and mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite rehef .
Her great eyes were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's,
and her bosom heaved with her panting breaths. She paused
a moment to regain her composure before she went down.
The nuns who were not un night-duty were gathered
together about the trestle-table sewing, while the lay-Sisters
prepared the scanty evening meal. Lynette was there,
sitting pale and quiet on her corner-stool. Richard's
daughter had been watching and waiting for her Mother.
Ah ! to see the relief and gladness leap into the dear face,
and shine in the beautiful wistful eyes that had shed such
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 481
tears, dear God ! — such tears of anguish upon Sunday — and
then had dried at the utterance of her decree —
" You are never to tell him !"
— And changed into radiant stars of Joy, by whose light the
darkness of her own wickedness and misery seemed almost
bearable.
" It is the Mother. Mother "
Lynette sprang up, and would have hurried to her, but
the Mother lifted a warning hand, and calling Sister Tobias
to her, passed aside into a curtained-off and precautionary
cave that had been hollowed out behind the ladder. This
was the custom when the ladies of the Holy Way returned
from doubtful or infectious cases. Lynette sighed, and
went back to her stool to wait. The busy needles had not
ceased stitching.
That humble saint. Sister Tobias, hurried to her diligent
ministry of purification. When she came in with hot water
and carbolic spray, she brought a letter with her. It was
directed to the Mother in a coarse round-hand.
" Somebody dropped this down the ladder-hole as I came
by with my kettle," said Sister Tobias. " It's the first
letter-box I ever knew that was as wide as the door. Maybe
'twill bring in a new fashion, for all we Imow." She made
her homely joke with a sore heart for the sorrow she read in
the Mother's beloved face, and trotted away to fetch clean
towels, sajring — a favourite saying with Sister Tobias —
that her head woiild never save her heels.
The Mother opened the letter. It was anonymous, and
utterly vile. Had the pen been dipped in hquid ordure, the
thing written could not have been more defiling to the
touch than its meaning was to this pure woman's chaste
eyes. Had a puff-adder writhed out of the envelope, and
struck its fangs into her beautiful hand, it would have
poisoned her less certainly. And every beat of the obscene
words upon her brain, strangely enough, awakened an echo
of those long padding footsteps that had followed in the
dark. And the wiiter Imew of all that had happened at the
tavern on the veld, when a human brute had triumphed in
hia bestiahty, and a girl-child had been helpless, and the
great white stars had looked down unmoved and changeless
upon Innocence destroyed.
31
482 THE DOP DOCTOR
The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning
to the infamous end. She had been sorely wrought upon
of late. She tried to pray, but she knew the Ear Above
must be ayertod from one who had lied and was in deadly
sin. . . . When Sister Tobias came back she found her
lying in a swoon.
The little old crooked, nimble Sister, with the long, pale
sheep-face, dropped on her knees beside that prone column
of stately womanhood, removed the Mother's hooded mantle,
loosened the yuimpe and habit, and worked strenuously to
revive her, dropping tears.
" My beautiful, my poor lamb !" she crooned. " What's
come to her '< What wicked shadow's black on all of us ?
What's brooding near us — Mary be our guardian ! — that's
struck at her to-night ?"
The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from
the unconscious hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and
might lie. If the Mother willed to tell its contents, she
would tell. If not, the httle old nun, her faithful daughter,
would never ask or seek to know.
She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the
tender, wrinkled ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the
close white linen wimple.
*' Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said,
and rose. Sister Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it
to her. There was a Boer mutton-fat candle flaring
draughtily in an iron sconce upon the wall. The Mother
moved across the Uttle room, and bui-ned the letter to the
last blank cox-ner, and trod the fallen ashes into impalpable
powder. Then she helped Sister Tobias to remove every
trace left, and obviate every danger that might result from
her late toil, and rejoined her quiet family of daughters aa
though nothing had happened.
Tkey recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid
she had seemed that night. Her smile had a heart-breaking
sweetness, and her voice made wonderful melody even in
their accustomed ears.
They supped on the little that they had, and chatted,
said the night-prayers, and went, aching, all of them, with
unsatisfied hunger, to bed. Vou may conjecture the
orderly, modest method of retiring, each Sister vanishing in
THE DOP DOCTOR 483
turn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and vest
herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose., ful)
conventual night-garment of thick white twilled linep, high-
throated, monldsh-sleeved, and girdled with a thjin potton
cord, her face, plain or pretty, young or elderly, framed in
the close little white drawn cap of many tucks.
Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin
pulled over its hole, the lights were extinguishfid, and only
the subdued crimson glow of the tiny lamp that burned
before the silver Crucifix that had stood above the Taber-
nacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in
the thick, hot dark, where, upon the Uttle iron beds, each
divided by a narrow, white-cotton-covered board into
two constricted berths, the row of quiet figui'cs lay out-
stretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow, and hei
beads about her wrist.
The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences
of the anonymous letter written in helhsh characters of
mocking flame on the background of the dark. She prayed
as the wrecked may when the ship beneath their feet is
going down. Beside her Ljnaette, not daring to disturb thx**
silence, suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with
the loneliness of living on the other side of the wide gulf of
division that had suddenly yawTied between.
She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-
Antony and Sister Cleophee. She had not seen Beauvayse.
But a note had come from him, that had warmed the heart
she hid it near. His dearest, he called her — his own
beautiful beloved. He could not snatch a minute from
duty even to kiss his darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday
they would be together all day. And would she not meet
him at the Convent on Thursday, at twilight, when the
shelling stopped, and it would be safe for his beloved to
venture there ? She must not ccme alone. Dear old
Sister Tobias would bring her, and play Mrs. Grundy's pa rt.
And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and death.
Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beauti-
ful. It laid a hand upon her heart that thrilled, and waa
wBj-m and strong. The hand said " Mine !"
His. She would be his one day — soon ; and there
would be no more mysteries between the mau and She
31—2
4S4 THE DOP DOCTOR
woman welded by Grod's ordinance into husband and wife.
She shivered a Uttle at the thought of that intimate, pecu-
liar, utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible
sinking of the heart, she realised that, however well such
a yecret as that she guarded might be hidden before the
priest and the clergyman made they twain One, it must
be known of both afterwards, or else be for ever threaten-
ing to start through the burying earth, crjdng, " I am here.
How came you to forget 1"
She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon,
and deaf when voices spoke to her. She was thinking. . . .
How if she might be mistaken in Beauvayse, even now ?
He was beautiful and brave and alluring to her woman's
sense in what she knew of him and what was yet to know.
He called her and drew her. Nothing noble awakened in
her at the smile on the gay, bold lips and in the grey-green,
jewel-bright eyes. When he had held her to his heart, she
had not felt her soul merge with another, its fellow, and yet
stronger and greater, in that embrace. He and she were
not bodiless spirits floating in pure ether, but an earth-
made girl and boy, very much athirst for the common cup
of human rapture, hungry for the banquet of mortal bliss.
It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the
one ? How if her hasty gift of herself robbed both in the
long end ? How if his headlong passion and tempestuous
love should be torn from him like rags in the first instant
of that discovery that must almost iaevitably be made ?
She heard his boyish voice crying, " Hateful ! . . . You
have deceived me !" and was stabbed with quick anguish,
knowing him in the right.
Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some un-
written code of that strange lawgiver, the World, they
were absolved of the necessity of spotlessness. They
might slake their thirst at muddy sources unrebuked.
And the more each wallowed, the more he demanded of the
woman he wedded that she should be immaculate in thought
and used — if ia knowledge, that was all the better.
What a cloud of doubts assailed her, swarming like
bees, settling in every blossomed branch of her mind, and
blotting out the sweetness with angry buzzing, furry bodies,
armed with sharp stings for punishment or revenge. She
THE DOP DOCTOR 485
had seen a little peach-tree weighed down and bowed to the
red earth at its roots with the weight of such a swarm. She
felt at this juncture very like the tree. A little more, only
a shght increase of the burden, and the slender trunk
would have snapped. When the native bee-master came
and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives., the
little tree stayed crooked. It did not regain its beautiful,
healthful uprightness for a long time.
The Mother had commanded her never to tell Beauvayse.
She realised that in this one sorrowful instance she was wiser
than her teacher. If unutterable misery was not to result
from their union, he must be told the truth before . . .
Once he knew it, would he love her any longer 1 Would
he desire to make her his wife ? She knitted her brows
and her fingers in anguish, and set her little teeth. Possibly
not. Probably not.
And supposing all went well and they were married.
She had not realised clearly, even when she talked of
travelling abroad into the unknown, conjectmred world,
what it would mean to go out from this, the first home she
had ever known, and leave the Mother. She caught her
breath, and her heart stopped at the thought of waking
up one morning in a new, strange country, and knowing
that dear face thousands of miles away.
The loneliness drove her to daring. She reached out
a timid hand, and laid it upon the breast of the still, rigid,
immovable figure beside her. Ah, what a leaping, striving,
throbbing prisoner was caged there ! A faint sob of surprise
broke from her. Ah ! what was it 1 what could it mean ?
The faint sound she uttered plucked at the strings of
that tortured heart. The Mother turned, rose upon her
elbow, leaned over the low dividing barrier, took the
slight body in her arms, and gathered it closely to her,
shielding it from the fangs of that coiled, formless Terror
that threatened in the dark. She felt how thin and light
it was, and how frail the arms were that clung about her,
and how wasted was the face that pressed against the coarse,
conventual linen, covering the broad, deep bosom whose
chaste and hidden beauties Famine had not spared.
She would be a real mother once — Just once. God
would not grudge her that. iShe bared her breast to the
486 THE DOP DOCTOR
cheek with a sudden half-savage, wholly maternal gesture,
and drew it close and pillowed it and rocked it. Had
Heaven wrought a miracle and unsealed those white
fountains of her spotless womanhood, she would have
found it sweet to give of herself to Richard's starving
child. But she had nothing but her great, indignant pity
and her boundless agony of love. Long hours after the
face lay hushed in sleep above her heart, and while the long,
soft breaths of slumber went and came, she lay staring out
into the sinister blackness over the beloved, menaced head.
Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-
hble, falling in heavy, sullen gouts and splashes on the
beaten earth below as blood drips from a desperate wound.
That image rose, and the blackness seemed all red — red
with those lines of iiery writing on it, smoking and crawling,
flickering and blazing, climbing, and licking with thin,
greenish tongues of hell-begotten flame.
Then the midnight hour struck, and it was time to rise
for Matins. Long after the Sisters had gone back to bed
the Mother knelt on, a motionless figure wrestling in silent
prayer before the silver Crucifix upon the wall. Dawn
found her still kneeling. No ray of heavenly light had
found her soul, that weltered in darkness, crying to One Who
deemed not to hear.
LI
Shb did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital
next day, but secletly charged Sister Tobias and Sister
Hilda- Antony to carry her whithersoever they went, and
nbt once to let her out of sight. This done, she knew herself
impotently helpless to do more. This strong and salient
woman, lapped in unseen, impalpable serpent-coils that
tightened every hour, was waxing weak. By her o^noi
deed she had barred out help and put counsel far from her.
She had known the punishment would not be long in coming,
when, for the sake of Richard's daughter, she had lied to
Richard's friend.
Now she knew, poor, noble, suffering soul, that it would
have been wiser to have saved her spotless garment from the
H
THE DOP DOCTOtv 487
smirch by telling him the truth. Then she could have fought
this invisible tarantula Thing, with the conjectural hairy
claws, the baleful, glittering eyes, and the padding feet
that dogged her in the dark, with a strong man's arm to aid
her. God was in Heaven, and in Him were her faith and
trust, but the comfort of a human counsellor would have
been unspeakable.
In a purely spiritual difficulty she would have gone to
Father Wix. The kindly, fussy, feeble little old priest
could hardly help her in this ext^emit3^ She had never
told him what had happened at the tavern on the veld.
Deep in her pitying woman's heart the child's cruel secret
had been buried, once learned. Sister Tobias was the only
one who shared it.
Meanwhile she was followed that night and the next
night ; and on the morning of the Thursday, when she rose
from her sleepless bed, another letter weighted with a stone
had been dropped down the ladder-hole. She was to give
the anonymous writer a meeting and receive a message,
unless she wished them that chose to be nameless to lay
in wait for the girl. Most likely that would be the better
way. She could choose.
She burned the second letter before she went to the
Hospital. She found there the single sheet of the Sieqe.
Gazette fluttering in every hand. Even her dignified reserve
could not ward off the well-meant congratulations, the
eager questions, the interested comments on the news
contained in the three last paragraphs of the colunm that
was signed " Gold Pen." Tlien came the telephone
message from Lady Hannah. We know what words of
hers the wire carried back. All the more firm, all the more
courageous, all the more determined that her kn('*\«t shook,
and her heart was as water \vithin her. For the Thing that
coiled in the dark would surely strike new.
Perhaps it was some premonition of approaching dtath
that made her, always gracious, always infinitely kind,
untiring in helpful deeds, move about among the sick that
day, with such a sorrowful-sweet tenderness for them in her
noble face and in her gentle touch, and in that wood-dove's
voice of bora, that they spoke of it long afterwards with
bated breath. A perfume as of rare inceuao was waited
488 THE DOP DOCTOR
from the folds of her veil, they said, and a pale aureole of
light shone about her white-banded forehead, and her
eyes Ah ! who that met their look could ever forget
those eyes ?
It was before twilight when she left the Hospital and went
to the Convent, a tall, upright, mantled and hooded figure,
stepping through the heavy rain that had fallen since noon,
under a quaint monster of a cotton umbrella with ribs of
ancient whale, — ^Tragedy carrying Farce.
It was not the custom to linger in the neighbourhood of
the Convent, even among those who were most indifferent
to shot and shell. No one was visible in its vicinity, except
one burly, bushy-bearded, dark-skinned man in tan-cords
and a moleskin jacket. He lounged against a bent and
twisted lamp-post, near the broken entrance-gates, cutting
up a lump of something that might have been cake-tobacco
upon his broad, thick palm with a penknife.
She passed him as she went in. His slouched hat made
shadow for his eyes. But so curiously shallow and flat
and rusty pale were they against the purplish-brown of the
full-blooded, bearded face, that their sharp, sly, sudden
look as she went by was as though the adder-fangs had
slashed at her. She knew it was the man who had written
those two letters. And something else she knew, but did
not dare to admit her knowledge even to herself as yet.
She mustered all her forces to meet what was coming
as she went up the broken stairs. The wind and the long,
driving lances of the rain came at her through the gaps in
the walls. The sky was a driving hmry of muddy vapours.
The grey hills were blotted out by mist and fog. Long
flashes of white fire leaped from them, and the heavy
boom of cannon followed. Then all would be still again.
She passed down the whitewashed, matted, sodden cor-
ridor, and drew out the heavy key of the chapel door from
a deep pocket under her black habit, and went in.
Rain beat in here through jagged holes in the soft
brickwork and poured through the broken roof, whose
rubbish littered the floor. Whiter squares on the white-
washed walls, sodden now with damp, and peeling, showed
where the pictures of the Stations of the Cross had hung ;
with them all draperies had been stripped away and hidden.
THE DOP DOCTOR 489
The crimson- velvet-covered ropes that had done duty
instead of altar-rails had been removed, their brass
supports unscrewed from the floor. The naked altar-stone
was covered with fragments of cheap stained-glass from
the little east window of which the Sisters had been so
proud. The Tabernacle gaped empty ; sandy, reddish-
grey dust filled the tiny piscina, and lay thick upon the
altar-stone and the shallow wooden altar-steps, and
wherever else the rain had not reached it to turn it into
yellow mud.
WTiy had she come here ? Because she felt as though
the Presence that had housed under the veil of the Con-
secrated Element were still guarding Its desecrated home.
And near the door of the tiny sacristy dangled the rope
communicating with the bell that hung, as yet uninjured,
in the Uttle wooden cupola upon the roof. The bell could
be rung, should need arise. She did not formulate in thought
what need. But the recollection of those poisonous adder-
eyes stirred even in that proud, dauntless woman's bosom
a cold and creeping fear. And when she heard the padding,
stealthy footsteps whose sound seemed burned in upon
her brain, traversing the soaked matting of the corridor,
she caught her breath, and an icy dew of anguish moistened
her shuddering flesh.
Then slowly, cautiously, the door opened. He came in,
shutting it noiselessly after him. It was the man she had
seen loafing by the lamp-post. And, standing tall and
forbidding on the bare altar's carpetless steps, she threw
out her white hand in a quick, imperious gesture, forbidding
his nearer approach.
For an instant the dignity and authority of the tall,
black-robed figure gave pause even to Bough. Then he
touched his wide-brimmed felt hat to her with a civility
that was the very essence of insolence, and took it off and
shook the wet from it, and dropped it back upon his head
again. He leaned against the wall by the door where there
was a little holy-water font, and stuck his gross thumbs in
bis belt, and waited for her to begin. Always he followed
that plan when the woman was angry. Nothing remained
for any bloke to teach Bough about the sex. You let her
row a bit, and when she had done herself out, you put in
490 THE DOP DOCTOR
what you had got to say. That was Bough's way with
them always.
" You have written letters to me and followed me."
His gritming red mouth and toba'Cco-stained teeth
8h.>w»>d in the beard. He looked at her and waited.
" Why have you done this ? And, now that you have
brought yourself into my sight, quitting the safe shelter
of darkness and anonymity, what is to hinder me from
handing you over to those who administer and enforce
Martial Law in this town, and will deal with you as you
deserve ?"
His light eyes glittered. His teeth showed again in the
brown bush. He spat upon the floor of the sacred place,
and answered :
" That's all blow. How do I know what you mean about
writing letters and following ? Who has seen me doing it ?
Not one of the mob. I'm just a man that has come in
off the road out of the rain. Maybe I have no business in
this crib ? That's for you to say. . . . Maybe I have a
message for somebody you know. So you don't choose
to give it, then that's for her to hear."
He swung about in pretended haste, and laid his hand
upon the door.
" Stop," she said, with white lips. " You will not
molest the person to whom you refer. You will give your
message — if it be one — to me, and to me alone."
" High and mighty," the ugly, wordless smile that faced
round on her again seemed to say. "But in a little I'll
bring you down off that. . . ." He spat again upon the
Chapel floor, and scratched, his head under his hat, and
began, like a simple, good-natured follow, a rough miner
with a heart of gold :
" No offence is meant, lady, and Why should it be
taken ?"
She seemed to grow in height as she folded her arms in
their flowing black sleeves, and looked down upon him
silently. The boiling whirlpool in her breast mounted as
it spun, stifling her. But she was outwardly calm. He
went smoothly on, with an occasional display of red mouth
and grinning teeth in the big beard, and always that baleful
glitter in his strange light eyes :
THE DOP DOCTOR 491
"I'm a man that, in the goodness of his heart, is always
doing Jobs for other people, and never getting thanked for
it. I started to push my way up here, two hundred miles
from Diamond Town, three weeks back, with a letter from
a woman to her husband. She couldn't pay me nothing,
poor old girl. Said she'd pray for me to her dying day
There was a pal of mine put up the grubstake. His
name " — his evil eyes were glued upon her face — " wag
Bough. You've heard that name before !"
It was an assertion, not a question. The fierce rush of
crimson to her brow, and the flame that leaped into her
eyes, had already spoken to her knowledge. She was
deadly quiet, gathering all her superb forces for a sudden
lioness-spring. He went on :
" He's a widower now, Bough, and well-to-do. Getting
on for rich. Got religion tOo, highly respected. Says
Bough to me, ' There's a young woman at the Convent at
Gueldersdorp that's not the sort for holy, praying ladied
to have under their roof, for all the glib slack- J aw she may
have given them.' "
Her great eyes burned on him.
" Say what you have to say, and be brief. Go on."
He shifted from one foot to the other, and licked hia
fleshy lips.
" I've got to tell the story my own way, lady. Don't
you quarrel with it. Says Bough : ' They picked her up on
the veld seven years ago, a runaway in rags. As pretty a
girl she was,' says he, ' as you'd see in a month's trek, and
from what I hear they've made a laxiy of her.' "
Still silent and watchful, and her eyes upon him, search-
ing him. He went on :
" ' However the years have changed her,' says Bough,
* you'll spot her by her little feet and hands, and her
slender shape, and her big eyes, like yellow diamonds,
and her hair, the colour of dried tobaoco-leaf in the
sun. . . .' "
She quivered in every limb, and longed to shut her eyea
and bar out the intolerable bight of him, leering and lying
there. Had she not interrupted, she must have cried out.
She said :
" You tell me this man Bough is at Diamond Towti !"
492 THE DOP DOCTOR
" I said he was there when I left. The young woman he
talked of was brought up at his place in Orange River
Colony, a nice respectable boarding-house and hotel for
travelling families on the veld between Driepoort and
Kroonfontein. Bough was good to the girl, and so was
his wife, that's dead since. Uncommon ! Not that they
had much of the dibs to spend in those days. But, being
an honest Christian man. Bough treated the girl like his
own. And right down bad she served him."
He licked his thick lips again, and the flattish, light-hued
adder-eyes glittered.
" There was a bloke that used to hang around the place —
kind of coloured loafer, with Dutch blood, overgiven to
Squareface and whisky. He got going gay with the
girl "
She stood like a statue of ebony and ivory. Only by
the deep breaths that heaved her broad bosom could you
tell she lived — by that, and by the unswerving watchfulness
of those burning eyes.
" And Bough, when he caught them together, got mad,
being a respectable man, and let her taste the sjambok.
Then she ran away."
He coughed, and shifted again from one foot to the other.
He would have preferred a woman who had loaded him
with invectives, and told him that he lied like hell.
" The man that had left her to Bough's guardianship
was a sort of broken-down English ofiicer by the name of
Mildare "
Her bosom heaved more stormily, but her intense and
scorching regard of him never wavered.
" — Mildare. He left a hundred pounds with Bough,
to be kept for her till she was twenty. There was a waggon
and team Bough was to have had to sell, and use the
money for the girl's keep, but a thief of a Dutch driver
waltzed with them — took 'em up Johannesburg way, and
melted 'em into dollars. Bough got nothing for all his
kindness — ^not a tikkie. But he's ready to hand over the
hundred, her being so nigh come to age. There's a locket
with a picture in it, and briUiauts round, that may be
worth seventy pounds more. All Bough wants is to do
the square thing. This is the message he sends her now.
THE DOP DOCTOR 493
The money and the Jewels will be handed over, as in duty
bound ; and, since she's turned respectable and got educa-
tion, I was to say there's an honest man — ^widower now, and
well off — that's ready to hang up his hat for her, and wipe
all old scores off the slate in the regular proper way. . . ."
She said in tones that were of ice :
" Bough is the honest man ?...'*
" Just Bough. ... ' Maybe, in my decent anger at her
goings on,' he says, * I went a bit too far. Well ! I'm
ready to make amends by making her my wife.' "
The lioness crouched and leapt.
" You are Bough ! You are the evil man, the servant
of Satan, who wrought abomination upon a helpless child !"
The onslaught came so suddenly that he was staggered.
Then he swore.
" Not me, by G !"
She pointed her long arm at him, and some strange force
seemed to be wielded by that unweaponed woman-hand
that struck him and pierced him through flesh, and bone
and marrow. . . .
" You are the man !" She stretched her arms to the
wild, hurrying clouds that looked in upon her through the
yawning rifts in the roof, and called upon her Maker for
vengeance. " How long wUt Thou delay, Lord, righteous
in judgment ? Fulfil Thy promise ! Bind Thou Thy mill-
stone about the neck of this wretch, hated and accursed of
Thee, and let it drag him down to the uttermost depths
of the Lake of Fire, where such as he shall wallow and howl
throughout Eternity ! '*
She was infinitely more terrible than the lioness who
has licked her murdered cubs. No Pythoness at the
dizziest height of the sacred frenzy, no Demeter wrought
to delirium by maternal bereavement, was ever imagined
by poet or painter as half so grand, and terrible, and awe-
inspiring, as this furious cursing nun.
" —Belay not Thou, Lord !" she prayed. . . .
Rain fell in a curtain of gleaming crystal rods between
them. Seen through it, she appeared supernaturally tall,
her garments streaming like black flames, her face a \\ liite-
hot furnace, her eyes intolerable, merciless, grey lightnings,
her voice a fiery sword that cleft the guilty to the soiil.
494 THE DOP DOCTOR
The voice of Conscience was dumb in him. He knew
no remorse, and made a Jest of God. But bis callous heart
had been filled from the veins of generajiions of Irish
Catholic peasants, and, in spite of himself, the blood in
his veins ran cold with superstitious fear.
Yet, when no palpable answer came from that Heaven to
which she cried, he rallied, remembering t^at, after all,
she was a woman, and alone with him in t)^ plg-ce. She
had sunk back against the altar that was behind her.
Her eyes were closed, her face a white mask of anguish ;
she looked as though about to swoou. Pofigh hailed the
symptoms as favourable. Fainting was the prelude to
caving in, with the women he knew. But whepi he stirred,
her eyes were wide and preterniq.tuj"i^yy bright, and held
him. He snarled :
" You'll not take the girl my message, then ?"
She reared up her tall form, and laughed awfully.
" Did you dream I would defile her ears with it ? Now
that I know you, you will be wise to leave this place ; for
it is a spot where your sins may find you out !"
He jeered :
" That flash bounce doesn't go down with me. The
trouble '11 be at your end of the house, unless you listen to
reason and stop giving off hot air. What's to hinder me
making a clean breast to that swell toff she's wheedled
into asking her to marry Ijim ? What's to hinder me from
standing up before the whole mob, saying as I've repented
what I done years back, and I've come to ^lake an honest
girl of her at last ?"
The whirling waters of bitterness in her breast were
rising, drowning her. . . . He realised her momentary
weakness, and moved a step or two nearer, keeping well
between the woman and the door.
" What's to hinder me, I say ?"
Her rapier of keen womanly intuition flashed out at him
again, and drew the blood.
" Your fear will hinder you. You are here in an assumed
character, and under a false name." The long arm shot
out, the white hand pointed at him again. " You never
came here from J^iamond Town. That letter was a forgery.
You have papers on you now that would proye you to be ^
THE DOP DOCTOR 495
spy, if you were taken. Ah, I can see it written in your
coward's face !"
The devil was at the woman's ear, prompting her. Or
was it ? Bough's dark, full-blooded face bleached to
muddy-pale as her terrible voice rang through the desolate
place, and echoed among the broken rafters,
" You boast yourself ready to admit your infamy. You
shall be compelled ! Everything shall be made known !
I will go to Lord Beauvayse now, and tell him all — all !
And if he loves her, he will marry her. And you who have
secrets upon your soul even more perilous, if less vile and
hideous " — again the terrible hand pointed, and that
sense of a supernatural force that it wielded knocked his
knees together and dried up his mouth — " I see the mill-
stone round your neck ! . . ."
The clarion voice mounted on a great note of triumph.
With her inspired face, and with her floating veil, she
looked like a Prophetess of old. '" The Lord is not mocked I
He will avenge His little one as He has promised ! Move
aside, you lost, and branded, and miserable wretch !
Do you dare to dream you can hinder Me from doing what
I have said ?"
He was at the bottom of the altar-steps as the tall,
imperious figure came sweeping down. The curtain of
rain no longer fell between them, but behind him. He
must silence that railing voice that cried in the house-
top — put out the light of those intolerable eyes. . . .
He drew out his revolver with a blasphemous oath. At
the gleam of steel in the thickening t\\'ilight she dropped
her upraised arms, and made a swift rush to the rope of
the bell, and set it clanging. Two double strokes rang out ;
the third was broken in the middle. . . . For as she swung
round, panting and tugging at the rope, he shot her in the
back above the line of the white wimpK' from which the veil
streamed aside, and ran to the door as she cried out and
swayed forward, still clinging to the vibrating rope, and
turned there and lired a second shot, that struck her in the
body.
Then he was gone, and the walls were crowding in on
her to crush her, and then recedijog to immeasurable dis-
tances, and the blood and air from her pierced lungs
496 THE DOP DOCTOR
bubbled through the bullet- holes in the serge stuff and the
scorched linen.
She stumbled a few steps blindly, then fell and lay
choking, with that strange gurgling and whispering in her
ears, the rushing blood mingling with the water of the
puddles that the rain had made upon the littered floor.
She faltered out the name of her Master and Spouse, and
commended her pure soul to Him in utter humility. Death
would have been a welcome loosing of her bonds but for
the Beloved left behind, at the mercy of the merciless.
The stab of that remembrance lent her strength to
struggle up upon her knees. Ah, cruel ! cruel ! . . . But she
must submit. Was it not the Holy Will ? She signed the
Cross upon her bosom, with fingers already growing stiff,
and made a piteous little act of charity, forgiving the sin
of the man against herself, but not his crime against dead
Richard's child. And she stretched out long black-sleeved
arms gropingly in the thick, numbing darkness that
hemmed her in, and moaned to the Mother of the mother-
less to have pity ! . . . pity ! . . .
She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column,
and lay with outspread arms upon the altar-step.
" Jesu. . . . Mary. . . . The child ! . . ."
The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last
two words were nearly her last sigh. Thenceforward there
was no sound at all in the Convent chapel, save the dull
splash of rain, falling through the holes in the broken roof
upon the sodden floor, where the dead woman lay, face
downwards.
Ln
No one had heeded the revolver-shot. The detonation of a
cartridge or so when a bombardment is going on, what does
it count for ? And yet, when the burly figure of the runner
froHi Diamond Town slipped out of the Convent doorway
and stole across the shrapnel-httered garden, and crossed
the veld towards the native town, it had been barely
twilight — a twihght of heavy, drenching rain, to be sure.
Still, in it he had encountered those who might have sus-
pected afterwards. . . .
THE DOP DOCTOR 497
Perhaps it would have been better had he stopped in
Gueldersdorp and mugged it out. But that sharp, prompt,
s'O'ift, unsparing thing called Martial Law is not a power to
play with with impunity, and of the man who wielded it in
Gueldersdorp, Bough had conceived a wholesome dread.
Best that he had fled, although his going tagged him with
suspicion. That cursed stupid game of his with the tele-
phone at the Headquarters of the Baraland Rifles might
cost him more than the bit of twist with which he had
bribed the orderly, left for a moment in sole charge, and
demoralised by the sight of tobacco.
Opium played you tricks like that, when, for the grati-
fication of a sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, bom and
bred of the stufi, you would risk everything. In exce?^. it
played hell wdth the nerves. That was why those eyes of
hers. . . . Damn them ! Why couldn't a man put them
out of mind and out of sight ?
It was not to be done. The obsession held him. A
black shadow on the floor would be the long body, lying
face downwards on the altar-steps, with outspread, crucifled
arms. He heard her stifled crying upon the Name, and
the gurgling outrush of mingled air and blood that followed
each deep sob for breath. . . .
And then he would be running through the lashing,
bucketing wet, circumventing the sentry-posts, wriggling
over the veld on his belly like a snake. He would be
pushing through the dripping covert of the north bank of
the river — for that, he had decided, was the safest way cut
or in — leaving fragments of his garments on the thorny
cacti that grabbed at him with their green hands. And
then he would find himself lying doggo between two great
stones, waiting for it to be quite dark before he essayed to
pass the rifle-pits that angled across either shore. Two hours
he had lain so, and it had hailed, and sheet Lightning had
smitten greenish-blue glares from the hissing, clattering
whiteness, and he had remembered with a shudder those
eyes. . . .
Then it had been dark enough to risk passing between
the angles of the rifle-pits, where lay men who kept their
eyes skinned and their weapons handy by day and night.
AnH again Bough had wriggled like a snake, but through
32
498 THE DOP DOCTOR
shallow water instead of grass and red nmd. Ho had swum
the deep pools, and once got entangled in barbed- wire,
and went under, gurgling and drowning, three times before
he wrenched liimself loose. It had seemed as though a
dead woman's hands had seized him, and were dragging
him down. But he tore free and passed safely. There
was not a single shot — the Devil was so obliging ! And
then, lest Brounckers' pickets should mistake a friend in
the darkness, he waited for light in a little thorny kloof
beyond their advanced outposts ; and the dawn came,
with an awful gush of crimson dyeing all the eastern sky,
so that the pools about his feet — even the drops of wet
upon the stones and bushes — caught the ruddy reflection,
and all the world seemed dripping with new-shed blood.
Then up had rushed the sun, and smitten a glorious
rainbow out of fog and vapour, and one end of it seemed
to be in Gueldersdorp, resting in a golden mist upon the
Convent's shattered roof, while the other vanished in mid-
heaven. It had seemed to the murderer like a ladder by
which the dead woman's soul went climbing, up and up,
to tell his crime to God. . . .
He had killed her, that woman in black, to stop her from
blowing on him. Who would have dreamed a meek, sober
nun could be transformed like that ? A lioness whose cub
has been shot, straightway becomes a beast-devil. She,
standing on the naked steps of the bare altar, with up-
raised, black-sleeved arms and black funereal robes,
demanding Heaven's vengeance for that deed of old, calling
down the judgment of God upon its doer, had been infinitely
more terrible than the lioness. Lightning had flashed from
her great eyes, and subtle electric forces had darted from
her outspread finger-tips. While she looked at him and
8p<;ke she enmeshed him, helpless, in a net of terror. It
was only when she had turned her back that Bough had
had the nerve to shoot. And he was no novice in blood-
shed — not he. There were things safely hidden and put
away and buried, that might some day put a rope round
some man's neck. But the man would never be Bough.
There had always been a scapegoat to suffer until now.
He ate more opium now than ever, because he could not
forget that woman's awful eyes. He would see them look-
THE DOP DOCTOR 499
ing at him in the dark, when he could not sleep. Her voice
haunted him, terrible in its clarion-note of wrath, its organ-
roll of denunciation. The hand that had pointed to the
millstone about his neck had conjured it there. He felt
it dragging him down.
Maar — that was the gold ! You can cayry a goodly amount
of the precious metal upon your single person, if you are
clever enough to stow it and muscular enough to walk
lightly under the weight. And a great deal of the yellow
stuff, gathered and stored by the mining companies, leaked
about this time out of the hiding-places skilfully contrived
for it into the pockets of Van Busch and his pals. It is
weighty, as well as precious, stuff, and when you inter it,
there must be bearers as well as a gravedigger, and when
you carry away a great deal of it at a time, confederates
must aid you.
Oom Paul, when, like some elderly black humble-bee.
with crooked thighs deep laden with the metallic yellow
pollen, he buzzed heavily off for Loren90 Marques, deplored
the deceitfulness of riches less bitterly than their non-
portableness.
Van Busch, by a series of clever expedients, overcame
that difficulty. The cartridges that weighed do^^'n his
bandolier were of cast gold, cleverly painted ; the gun he
carried was a hollow sham packed with raw gold ; also, his
garments were lined and padded with the same material.
At Cape Town he would disburden himself, and one of the
women who were his confederates would take the stuff to
England, and sell it in London, and bank the money in
the name of Van Busch. He so managed that there was
always a woman coming and a woman going. Women had
been his tools, and his slaves, and his victims, ever since
he had been bom. When the old were worn out and use-
less, he shook them off, and fresh instruments rose up to
take their places.
He never trusted men in money matters. He knew too
much of the power of that yeUow pollen that bre<.'ds mad-
ness in the male. But there is one thing that most womcQ
desire more than the possession of much money, and that
is absolute possession of one man.
Bough understood women of a qertain class. He had
32—2
600 THE DOP DOCTOR
moulded them to his will, and bent them to his whim, all
his life long. He was a man of manifold experience as
regards the sex.
Lately he had added to his stock. He had stood face
to face with a woman, unarmed and in a lonely place, and
had tasted Fear. He had seen — from afar off — a woman
whose slight, vivid beauty had roused in him a desire
that was torture.
It was as though the Minotaur v, ere in love with Ariadne ;
it was Caliban thirsting for the beauty of IMiranda.
Prospero had not come in time ; the satyr had surfeited
upon the unripe grapes, and now was ahungered for the
purple cluster, tied up out of reach of those gross, greedy,
wicked hands.
The locket \vith a picture in it and brilliants round, " that
might be worth seventy," the dainty, pearly miniature on
ivory by Daudin, of the dead woman who lay buried under
the Little Kopje, and which Bough had taken from the
body of the English traveller, together with the signet-ring
and everything else of value that Richard Mildare had
owned, possessed a strange fascination for the thief. It
was extraordinarily like. . . . He hung it by its slender gold
chain about his thick neck, and gloated over and grudged
the beauty that it recalled.
It is horrible to speak of love in connection with the man
Bough, but if ever he had known it, it was now. His
victim of old time had become his tyrant. Replete with
vile pleasures, he longed for her the more.
He even became sentimental at times, telling himself that
all ho had sought was to repair the wrong, and make an
honest woman of the Kid. She should have been lapped
in luxury, worn jewels equalling any Duchess's. He was
a man of money now. A Httle delay, to become yet more
rich, and arrange for the safe burying of Bough — then Van
Busch, of Johannesburg, capitalist and financier, would
descend upon London in a shower of gold, furnish a house
in Hyde Park or Mayfair in topping style ; own four-in-
hands, and motor-cars, and opera- boxes, and see all Society
fluttering to his feet to pick up scattered crumbs of the
golden pudding.
It really seemed as though the dream would be realised.
THE DOP DOCTOR 501
The gross, squarely-built man with the bushy wMskers and
the Hght strange eyes, found success attend his every enter-
prise from that hour in which he had spilt hfe upon the
pavement of the Convent chapel. The tarantula-pounce
never missed a prey. Every knavish venture brought in
money or money's worth, every base plot was carried
through triumphantly. Bough, alia,s Van Busch, was not
ordinarily a superstitious man, but liis run of luck made him
almost afraid at times.
He scented the ReUef before the besiegers, undertook to
scout for Young Eybel in the direction of Diamond Town,
and ingeniously warned Colonel Culliugs of a Boer plan
for cutting off the Flying Column on the scorching western
plains, which resulted in the capture of two waggon-loads
of burghers, their rations, ammunition, and Mausers — a
most satisfying haul. He placed before the leader of the
British Force intercepted telegrams which threw invaluable
light on Dutch moves. No more siugle-minded, ingenuous,
and patriotic British South African ever drew breath than
Mr. Van Busch, of Johannesburg. And verily he reaped
his reward, in an officially countersigned railway pass, which
would enable the patriot to render some further services
to British arms, and a great many more to Van Busch, of
Johannesburg.
He had his knavish headquarters still at the Border
homestead known as Haargrond Plaats. Something diew
him back to the place, and kept on drawing him. From
thence he could observe and conduct his operations, and
gather news of the besieged in Gueldersdorp. He was
there at the time when the Division — Irregular Horse and
Baraland Rifles, with a half battaUon of Town Guards,
converted into mounted infantry by the simple process of
puttuig beasts underneath men who could ride them —
marched out of Gueldersdorp en route for Frostenberg.
The slatternly Dutchwoman and the coloured man who
had charge of the Plaats were too surely his creatures to
betray Bough Van Busch. " Let the dugs smell around the
place," he thought, when by the sounds that reached liim
in his hiding-place he knew the Advance had halted.
" They'll tire of the game before they smell out me !"
His hiding-place was a safe retreat and storehouse for
802 THE DOP DOCTOR
stuff that it was necessary to conceal. No one knew of it
save Bough Van Busch and the draggle-tailed woman. It
was in the great stone-built chimney of the disused, half-
ruined farmhouse kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared
by the stout hands of the old voortrekkers of 1836, its
walls, three feet in thickness, embracing the wide hearth
about which the family life of the homestead had concen-
trated itself in the past.
There may have been a mill on the farm in the old days.
Or possibly, meaning to build one, those robtist pioneers
of the Second Exodus had dragged the two huge stones into
the wilderness, and then abandoned their plan. The lower
millstone paved the hearth, the upper, the diameter of its
shaft-hole increased by chipping to the size of a musk-
melon, had been set by some freak of the farmer-architect's
heavy fancy as a coping on the top of the big stone shaft.
From thence, as Lady Hannah Wrynche had said in one
of her descriptive letters, dated from " My Headquarters
at the Seat of War," it dominated the landscape as a
Brobdiagnagian stone mushroom might have done.
The wide black throat of the chimney half-way up was
choked by a platform of beams and masonry, reaching not
quite across, so that even a bulky man who had climbed up
— divers rusty iron stanchions driven in between the
stones, and certain chinks affording secure foothold — might
wriggle between the platform and the chimney-wall, and
so he hid securely. Through the hole in the round stone
above came air and light. Crevices cunningly enlarged
afforded opportunities for viewing the surrounding country,
as for seeing without being seen, and hearing also all that
took place in the low-walled courtyard that was used as a
cattle-kiaal. You had also a bird's-eye view of the lower
end of the farm kitchen, where the wall had cracked, and
bulged, and spit out some of its stones.
To this eyrie Bough Van Busch retreated when the wall
of dust to the south-west gave up the dim shapes of the
Advance, and the beat of many iron-shod hoofs, and the
roll of many iron-shod wheels made distant thunder,
coming nearer, always nearer. . . .
Maar ! How the trot of the squsuiron-columns, the roll
of the oncoming batteries, shook the crazy buildiag. The
THE DOP DOCTOR 603
Advance rode into the yard, dismounted, and began to ask
questions of the coloured man and the slipshod woman.
Neither knew anything. The woman cursed the English-
men freely, at which they laughed, and lighted fresh
cigarettes. The man was dumb as stone.
The Division snaked out of the dust presently, a huge
brown centipede that had been chopped in bits, and moved
with intervals between its travelling sections. There was
no halt ; it rolled on, a vision of iimumerable moving legs
and tanned, wearied faces, over the greening veld to the
north-east. The dust grew hotter and thicker, and more
stifling, as it rolled.
It drifted in through every chink and cranny in the ^ceat
chimney, with the smell of hot human flesh and sweating
horsehide, and Bough Van Busch longed to, but dared not
sneeze. Bits of mortar fell about him, and dislodged
tarantulas g&llopexi over his boots. He shook the loath-
some, hairy, bright-eyed iiisectri ojff, shuddering at thum
with a horror somewhat misplaced, considering the affinity
between his own methods and theirs.
Roll, roll, roll ! The English voices of the chatting men
crouched upon their beasts' withers or sprawling on the
Umbers, the trampling and snorting of the horses, the sharp
signal-whistles of the leaders, the curt utterances of com-
mand, mingled with the stream of thoiight that raced
through the busy brain of Bough Van Busch. It had struck
him when the Colonel and his Staff rode up and halted by
the gateway of the littered courtyard, that here would be a
chance for a nervy man, with a set purpose, to vc\ ture
back, cleverly disguised, to Gueldersdorp. He knew he
would be risking his neck, but the sting of desire galled him
to hardihood. She was there. Red mist gathered in his
brain, red sparks snapped before his eyes, the thick red
blood surged fiercely through his veins—drummed deafei:-
ingly in his gross ears at the thought of seeing her again. . . .
And the tail of the Division was going by. A Field
Telegraph Company, a searchlight company, the Ambu-
lances, and a train of transport-waggons, with the mounted
infantry, brought up the rear. The Advance had galloptd
forwards in haste, the grouj) at the gate Imgered. A vdioft
rang out clearly, giving some order. It said :
504 THE DOP DOCTOR
'■ And if abandoned, carry out instructions, previously
warning the inmates of the farm to retire out of "
The lean, eagle-eyed, keen-faced Colonel bent lower in
the saddle to reach the ear of the dismounted officer of
Royal Engineers, who stood with one dogskin gloved hand
resting on the sweating withers of the brown Waler. Ho
answered, saluted, and drew away. Then the Staff rode on,
into the ginger yellow dust-cloud, leaving the officer of
Engineers standing in the beaten tracks of many iron-shod
hoofs and many iron-shod wheels.
He was not left alone. A little cluster of mounted Cape
Police had detached itself from the rear of the Division.
They were deeply-burned, hard-bitten men, emaciated to a
curious uniformity, mounted on horses as gaunt as their
riders, A sergeant was in command of the party, and a
drab-painted wooden cart drawn by a high-rumped, goose-
necked chestnut mare, pitifully lame on the near fore, had
an Engineer for driver. His mate sat on the rear locker,
and a mounted comrade rode by the mare's lame side. The
rider's stirrup-leather was lashed about the cart-shaft, and
thus the mare was helped along.
Obeying some order unheard of the man who was hiding
in the old stone chimney, the party of Cape Police divided
into two. One half patrolled the outward precincts of the
homestead. The rest, dismounting in the courtyard,
thoroughly searched the place. The Engineer officer took
no part in the search. He stood by the stone-coloured cart,
busy at the locker, the sapper who had sat upon it being his
aid. Very soon he returned to the yard, and stood in the
middle of the litter motionless as a little figure of pale,dusty
bronze, holding a cigar-box carefully in both his dogskin-
gloved hands. In spite of his patched khaki and ragged
puttees there was sometliing dandified about him. His red
moustache, waxed to a fine point, jutted like the whiskers
of a watchful cat, the whites of his eyes gleamed like silvei
as he turned them this way and that, following the move-
ments of the men who went in and out of the farm-buildings
as directed by their sergeant. The sergeant was an expert
in his business, and yet, after a hasty glance up the black
yawning gullet of the chimney where Bough Van Busch
ay perdu, he had gone out of the dismantled kitchen
THE DOP DOCTOR 505
whistling a tune. Two of his men remained lomiging near
the threshold. Like the sergeant they had stooped, hands
on spread knees, necks twisted awry in the effort to pierce
the thick mirk beneath the ragged arch of masonry that
spanned the wide hearth where the ashes of long-dead fires
lay in powdery grey drifts, and, like the sergeant, they had
seen nothing. When you covered the man-hole between the
platform-edge and the chimney-wall with the sooty board
and the old sack, it was impossible for anyone below to see
anything. The inside of the old chimney was as black as hell.
The inquisition ended. The khaki-clad figures came
hurrying out of the house, pursued by the Dutchwoman's
shrill recriminations. The non-commissioned officer made
a report to the officer of Engineers. The men who had been
deputed to search mounted at an order, and fell in with the
patrol, and sat upon their saddles outside the courtyard
wall exchanging furtive winks as the mevrouw devoted
their souls and bodies to everlasting perdition.
A quiet utterance from the little red-haired officer checked
the torrent of the woman's anger. She screeched in dismay,
raising thick hands to heaven. The coloured man's stolid
silence was suddenly swept away in a spate of oaths and
protestations. Suddenly, looking in the officer's unmoved
face, they realised the uselessness of words, turned and ran
between the gateless posts, out upon, away over, the dusty,
hoof -tracked, wheel-scored veld. And their ungainly hurry
and awkward gestures of terror somehow reminded the
peering Bough Van Busch of an engraving he had seen by
chance in a Dopper Bible, in Avhich Lot and hia two
daughters, fearfully foreshortened by the artist, scuttled in
as grotesque an insect hurry from the doomed vicinity of
Sodom, Queen City of the Plain.
The officer of Engineers hardly glanced after the retreat-
ing couple. He stepped across the threshold of the disused
farm-kitchen, holding the little wooden box carefully in
both his dogskin-gloved hands. He crossed to the iu-arth,
stubbing his toe against a jutting floor-brick, and as he did
80 he caught his breath. Then he stepped down under the
yawning gape of the chimney, and seemed to grope and
fumble at the back of the hearth. He raised himself then,
stepped back, and called out sharply in the Taal ;
606 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Wie is daar ?"
The man's voice dropped back dead out of the choked-up
chinmey-throat. A little sooty dust fell. There was no
other answer. The voice was lifted again, speaking this
time in English :
" Is anyone hiding here ?"
No one replied, and the little oflScer seemed to give up.
He lingered a moment longer, struck a match as though to
light a cigarette, then went quickly out of the kitchen. An
orderly waited with his horse outside the gateway. Bough
Van Busch, listening with strained ears, heard the clink of
spur against stirnip, the creak of the saddle receiving a
rider's weight. There was a short sharp whistle, followed
by the sound of cantering hoofs, and the rattle of hurrying
wheels dying out over the veld to the north-east. The
unwelcome intruders had gone. Bough Van Busch, after a
cautious interval, deemed it safe to descend.
He was red-smeared with veld dust and white-smeared
with mortar, and black with old soot. His bulky body
oscillated as he let himself doAvn from beam to stanchion,
finding sure foothold in the crevices, and hand-grip in the
stout iron hooks from which plump mutton-hams and beef
sausages had hung ripening in the pungent smoke of burning
wood and dried dung. There was a smell in his nostrils Uke
charring wool and saltpetre. He hung over the wide hearth
now. A short drop of not more than a foot or two would
bring him safely to the ground.
Van Busch did not drop. He dangled by the hands and
sweated. He blasphemed in an agony of terror, though it
seemed to him that he prayed.
For the dandy little Engineer officer had left the cigar-
box lying empty among the powdery ashes in the wide, old-
world hearthplace. An innocent- looking parcel it had
contained, wrapped in a bit of old canvas, and, further
secured with copper wire and string, was wedged in a chink
between the blackened stones at the back of the heaith.
From it a fuse hung down ; a short length nearly consumed
by the crepitating fiery spark at its loose end. It burned
with a little purring sound, as though it liked the business
it was engaged upon. Bough Van Busch knew that in
another moment the detonation would tak ^ place, . . .
1
THE DOP DOCTOR 507
He heard nothing of it when it came. . . . Nor did he
know it when the walls of Cyclopean masonry bulged and
opened about him like the petals of a flowering lily. He
was beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent aud
torn as though the devils it had housed had wreaked their
fury on their dwelling, lay sandwiched between the
wreckage of the great chimney and the millstone that had
paved its hearth, now a yawning cavity, some six feet deep.
Leaning on its side in a trench its own weight had dug in
the stony earth of the diity com-tyard was the huge stone
that had topped the shaft. Something ugly was wedged
in the central hole that had been made bigger to let out the
smoke. And the murderer's soul, light as a dried leaf
fluttering through the illimitable spaces of Eternity, went
wandering on its way to the Balances of God.
*****
The party of Cape Police who had searched Haargrond
Plaats, with the drab-painted cart, the three Engineers, and
the dandified little ofiicer, had only ridden to a safe dis-
tance. They halted, and, concealed from observation by a
fold of the grassy veld, waited for the explosion of the
dynamite cartridge. When it came, the Engineer officer
shut his binoculars, and gave the signal to return.
LIII
There weio two funerals in the Cemetery at Gtieldersdorp,
upon a J ;ght that no one will forget who stood in the
packed tnrong of shadowy mourners about each of those
open graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the
vault of heaven might have been hollowed out of the
darkling depths of an amethyst of inconceivable splendour
and planetary size. Myriads of stars, dazzlingly wliite,
swung under this, the Mother's fitting canopy, shared with
another, not like her holy, not noble or unselfish or devoted,
but like her in that he was brave and much beloved.
Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowd-
ing faces about tke harrow open trench where the Reverend
Julius Fraithom read the Burial Setvice by lantern-light
without being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet, and
508 THE DOP DOCTOR
women sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful
and so merry and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed
women ; the men praised him for having been such a swords-
man, horseman, shot. Everyone spoke of him as the life
and soul of the garrison, the idol of his brother- ofl&cers, and
worsliipped by the men under his command. Everyone
had something to tell of dead Beauvayse that was pleasant
to hear.
But the great bulk of the crowd was massed behind the
black-robed, white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling
rigid and immovable about the second open grave, where
the Mother-Superior lay in her snow-white cofi&n, fully
habited and mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on
which the plain gold ring of her Divine espousals shone, the
parchment formula of the vows she took when admitted to
her Order nineteen years before, lying under those meekly-
folded hands upon her breast. So she had lain, feet to the
altar, in the Convent chapel that her daughters in Religion
had draped and decked for her, keeping their loving vigils
about her from twilight to dawn, from dawn to twilight,
until this hour when they must yield all that was mortal
of her to Earth's guardianship and the unsleeping watch-
fulness of God.
Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and
strangely quiet. The women's faces white and haggard
and tearless, the men's drawn and deeply lined. Not even
muffled groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence
as the solemn rite drew to its singularly simple and impres-
sive close. As the fragrant incense rose from the censer
and the holy water sprinkled the snow-white pall that bore
the Red Cross, one dreadful word lurked sinister in every
thought :
Murdered ! . . .
Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose
hands had staunched the bleeding wounds of many present,
whose arm had lifted and pillowed the dying heads of
others dear to them ; who had stood through long nights of
fever and delirium beside their Hospital pallets, minister-
ing as a very Angel from Heaven to tortured bodies and
suffering souls — murdered !
The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched con-
THE DOP DOCTOR 609
tinually with her lamp prepared, that at the first summons
of the Heavenly Bridegroom she might enter with Him into
the marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had
come to her by the bloodstained hand of an assassin ? It
was so. And — ah ! the horror of it !
The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he
moved round the grave within the enclosing wall of kneeling
Sisters. But no answering sob came from the vast assem-
blage. They were as dumb — stricken to stone. They could
not yet contemplate the felicity of the pure soul of the
martyred saint, carried by God's Angels into the Land of
the ever-living, admitted to the unspeakable reward of the
Beatific Vision. They could only realise that somebody had
killed her.
But when the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead
broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the multi-
tude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their
forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in
due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested
priest and her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from
the grave, and left her earthly body, how wonderful in its
marble, hushed, close-folded, mysterious beauty none who
had looked upon it ever could forget, waiting for the second
coming of her Master and her Lord, a great sob mounted,
and broke from every breast, and every face wa.s drenched
with sudden tears. Perhaps God let her see how much they
loved her in that parting hour. And then the bugle
sounded " Last Post " over both the open graves, softly for
fear of Brounckers' German gunners, and the great crood
melted away, and all was done and over.
I have said that all the people wept. There was a girl in
white, for she would not let the Sisters put black garments
on her, kneeling between Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-
Antony. This girl did not weep at all. Chief mourner at
both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact. She
knew that Beauvayso was on duty at Maxim Outpost
South, and could not get away, and that the Reverend
Mother was vexed with her, and was hiding at the Convent,
pretending that she had gone somewhere, and would never
come back.
She was especially clear of mind when she thought all
610 THE DOP DOCTOR
this. At other times she was not Lynette, and kpew no
one, and had never known anybody of the name. She was
the ragged Kid, crouching on the Little Kopje in the gather-
ing twilight or on the long mound that ita eastward shadow
covered. Or she was lying under the tattered horse-blanket
on the foul straw pallet in the outhouse, waiting for the
Lady to come with the great, kind, covering dark.
Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned
cube-sugar box beside the green rep sofa where Boiigh lolled
oxx wet days or stormy nights, her great eyes wild with
apprehension, her every nerve tense and strained with terror
of the master in his condescending moods, when he would
make pretence of teaching her to scrawl coarse pothooks
and hangers on the greasy slate that usually hung below the
glass-and-bottle shelf. Or — and at these times the Sisters
foimd her difficult to manage — she was crouching upon one
side of a locked door, and a long thin wire was feeling its
way into the keyhole on the other side, and the man who
manipulated it laughed as the agile pliers nipped the end of
the key and turned it in the wards of the lock. . . .
And then she would be ruiming through the night, any-
where, nowhere, and Bough would be riding after. She
could hear the short wheezing gallop of the tired pony when
she laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok,
wielded by a strong and brutal hand, would bite into the
quivering flesh of the child, and she would shriek for mercy,
and presently fall upon the ground and lie there like one dead
— acting that old tragedy over and over again.
God was very kind to you. Reverend Mother, if He hid
that sight from one to whom she was so dear. But if His
Blessed in Heaven have cognisance of what takes place in
this dull, distant speck of Earth, I think some salt tears
must needs have fallen from the starry eyes of one of Christ's
saintly maiden-spouses, glorious under the dual crown of
Virginity and Martyrdom, and yet a mother as truly as
His Own.
That swift unerring Judgment of Saxham's had pointed,
months ago, to some such mental and physical collapse, as
the resxilt of shock, crowning long-continued nervous over-
strain. He had said to the Mother that such a result would
be easier to avert than to deal with.
i
THE BOP DOCTOR 611
There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that
he did not employ in dealing -wath it now.
Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she t^old Saxham then, the
story of the Finding. She was always a plain woman of few
words.
" The last charge the Mother laid on us — Sister Hjlda-
Antony and me — was to keep our eyes upon the child. The
very day it was done she told us, and 1 saw that something
had made her anxious by the look that was in her eyes."
She dried her own mth a coarse blue cotton handkerchief
before she took up her tale. " She went alone to the Head
Hospital that day. None of us were to be surprised, she
said, if she came home extra late. Sister Hilda- Antony and
me were on duty at the Railway Institute. We took
Lynette with us. — There ! . . . Didn't she look up, Just for
the one second, as if she remembered her name ?"
She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool
in her old corner of the Convent bombproof, but she did not
heed the shattering crashes of the bombardment any more.
She had only moved to push out of her eyes the dulled and
faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and
bent over her little slate again. Before that, and a pencil had
been given her she had been restless and uneasy. Now she
would be occupied for long hours, making rude attempts at
drawing houses and figures such as a child represents, with
round " O's " of different sizes for heads and bodies, and
pitchforks for legs and arms. . . .
Sister Tobias went on : " The Siege Gazette had come out
that day, with the news of " — she dropped her voice to a
whisper — " of her being likely to be married before long to
him that's gone. May Our Lord give him rest !" Sister
Tobias's well-accustomed fingers pattered over the bib of
her blue-checked apron, maldng the Sign. " And Sister
Hilda- Antony and me had the world's work with all the
people who stopped us in the street and came ^-ound us at the
Institute to say how glad they were. Talk of a stone
plopped in a duckp<md ! You'd have thought by the crazy
way folks carried on that two pretty yovmg people htul never
went and got engaged before." Sister Tobias was never
coldly grammatical in speech. " But the child was happy,
poor dear, in hearing even strangers praise him ; and when
512 THE DOP DOCTOR
the firing stopped and we were on our way home, she begged
us to turn out of it and call in at the Convent, where he'd
begged her to meet him, if only for a minute, not having
seen her since the Sunday when "
" Yes— yes !"
Saxham, who writhed inwardly, remembering that
Sunday, nodded, bending his heavy brows. His ears were
given to Sister Tobias, his eyes to the slight figure that
somehow, in the skirt some impatient movement had
wrenched from the gathers and the shirt-bodice that was
buttoned awry, had the air of a ragged, neglected child.
And she held up her scrawled slate to ward off his look, and
peeped at him round the side of it.
Big strong men like that could be cruel when they were
angry. The Ivid knew that so well.
" We went to the Convent with the child," Sister Tobias
continued : " We hadn't the heart to deny her, though we
thought the Mother might be vexed that we hadn't come
straight home. A queer thing happened as we crossed the
road and went up along the fence towards the gates with
the child between us. . . . A big, heavy man, dressed as
the miners dress, with a great black beard and his hat
pulled down over his eyes, came along in such a hurry
that he knocked Sister Hilda- Antony off the kerb into the
road, and brushed close up against her "
" Against Miss IMildare ? Did it occur to you that the
man had come out of the Convent enclosure ?" Saxham
asked quickly.
Sister Tobias shook her head.
" No ; but I did think he meant stopping and speaking to
the child, and then changed his mind and hurried on.
' Did he hurt you, dearie V I asked her, seeing her shaking
and quite flustered-like. And she answers, * I don't
know. . . .' And ' Was it anN'one you knew ?' I puts to her
again, and ' I can't tell,' says she, like as if she was answer-
ing in her sleep. Do you thinks she understands we're
talking about her, poor lamb ?"
They both looked at her, and she, having been taught by
painful experience that to be the object of simultaneous
observation on the part of the man and woman meant
THE DOP DOCTOR 513
punishment involving stripes, began to tremble and hung her
head. From under her tangled hair she peeped from side to
side, wondering what it was she had left undone ? Ah ! — tha
broom, standing in the comer. She had forgotten to sweep
out the house-place and the bar. When the dreaded eyes
turned from her, she got up and went softly to the corner
where Sister Tobias's besom stood, and took it and began to
sweep, casting terrified glances through her hair at her two
Fates.
Something gripped Saxham by the heart and wrung it.
The scalding tears were bitter in his throat. Bo what he
would to keep them free, his eyes were dimmed and blinded,
and Sister Tobias wiped her own openly with the blue cotton
handkerchief.
" We thought the young gentleman would be waiting
near the Convent," said Sister Tobias, " or in one of the
ground-floor rooms, but he wasn't there. Me and Sister
Hilda- Antony looked at one another. ' Early days for a
young girl's sweetheart to be late at the meeting-place !'
eays Sister Hilda- Antony's eyes to me, and mine said back,
' The Lord grant no harm's come to him !' We waited five
minutes by the school clock, that's never been let run down,
and then another five, and still he didn't come. He had
got iiis death- wound, though we didn't know it, hours
before."
" The Angel of Death had spread his wings over the
Convent. Both me and Sister Hilda-Antony felt there was
a strange and awful stillness and solemnness about the
place. At last me and her told the child that go we must.
We'd wait no longer. But she, knowing we'd never leave
without her, ran upstairs. W^e heard her light feet going
over the wet matting and down the long passage to the
chapel door. Then "
Sister Tobias sobbed for another moment in the blue
handkerchief. The child, who had been diligLntly sweep-
ing, looked at the woman and at the big man who had made
her cry, with great dilated eyes of fear. She put the broom
back noiselessly in its comer, and stole back to her stool.
Who knew what might happen next ?
" Then," said Sister Tobias, " we heard the drea<ilullcst
6U THE DOP DOCTOR
scream. ' Mother !' just once, an(J after it dead silence.
Then — I don't know how we got there, it was so like a cruel
dream — but we were in the chapel, trying to raise them up.
That dear Saint — may the Peace of God and the Bliss of
His Vision be upon her for ever ! — lay dead on the altar-
steps where the wicked, murdering hand had shot her
down. . . . And the child lay across her, just where she had
dropped in trying to lift her. And the strength of me and
the Sister, and the strength of them that came after, wasn't
equal to unloose those slender little hands you're watching."
The slender little hands were busy \n*th the slate and
pencil as Saxham looked at them.
" Those that came and helped us had been sent on from
the Convent bombproof, where they'd been to look for her "
— Sister Tobias glanced sorrowfully at the o\\Tier of those
little busy hands — " with an Ambulance chair and a story
of more trouble. But Our Lady had had pity on the child.
She was past understanding why they'd come to fetch
her. . . . The brain can soak up trouble till it won't hold a
drop more. But she was quiet and happy kneeling by that
blessed Saint, waiting till the Lady should wake up, she
said. . . . And, 'deed and 'deed, but it looked like the
blessedest sleep "
Sister Tobias broke dowTi and cried outright. The
child eyed her half suspiciously, half wonderingly. Her
groat terrified eyes had not seen the man strike, but he
must have hurt the woman. Therefore, she looked sharply
at the man between tjie tangled masses of the hair that
could not be liept pinned up, and saw two great slow tears
ooze over his thick underlids, and glitter as they hung there,
and then fall. Others followed them, tumbling down the
square white face, and the stern mouth was wrenched with
a strange spasm, and the grim, chin trembled curiously. . . .
Somebody had hurt the man. ... It is not possible to
follow up the workings of the disordered intelhgence, and
spell out the blurred letters of the confused mind. It is
enough that her terror of him abated. She sUpped from
her stool to the floor, under the pretence of picking up her
slate-pencil, threw back the hair that prevented her seeing
clearly, nnd peered up in that working face of Saxham's
with curiosity, crouching near. She did not recoil violently
THE DOP DOCTOR 616
when the strange, sorrowful face bent towards her ; she
only shrank back as Saxham asked :
" You remember me ? You know my name ?"
She nodded, eyeing him warily. If his hand had moved,
she would have sprung backwards. But it did not stir.
" Tell me who I am, then ?"
" Man."
Her Ups shaped the word. Her voice was barely audible.
His heart beat thickly as he went on :
" Quite right, but something else besides a man. A
man with a name. Tell me the name, or shall I tell it
you ?"
She nodded, and her eyes were great and timorous, but
there was no terror of him in them now.
" My name is Saxham — Owen Saxham. Say the name
after me."
For a wonder she obeyed. Sister Tobias caught a breath
of surprise, but her subdued exclamation was silenced in
mid-utterance by Saxham's look,
" Dr. Owen Saxham — Doctor because I try to cure sick
people. You have seen me trying at the hospitals. You
have helped me many times "
She puckered her dehcate, bewildered brows, and held
her head on one side. To be made to think, and recall,
and remember, hurt.
" — Many times, and the sick people were grateful.
They often ask me now. How is Miss Mildare ?"
Her attention had wandered to the bronzed buttons on
the Doctor's khald coat. She was trying to count them,
it seemed, by the movement of her lips. Saxham went on
with inexorable patience :
" Never mind the l^uttons. Look at me. Think of the
patients at the Hospital who are asking when Lynette
Mildare is coming back again. Tell mo what I am to
say to them, Lynette ?"
His voice shook over the beloved name. La spite of his
glim effort to fight down the overmastering emotion, his eyes
brimmed over, and a drop splashed, hot and heavy, upon
the wandering hand that crept out to finger tho buttons
that would not let themselves be counted right. She
looked up at the eyes that wept for her, and their mingled
53—2
516 THE DOP DOCTOR
love and anguish touched even her dulled mind to pity.
She held her slender hand up against the light, and looked
at the splash of wet upon it.
" You— cry ?"
There was a gUmmer of something in the eyes that re-
deemed their vagueness. A rushlight seen shicdng through
a night of mist upon a desolate mountain-side might have
meant as little or as much to eyes that saw it. Saxham
saw it, and it meant much to him. His great chest lifted
on a wave of hope as he answered her :
" I cry for somebody who cannot cry for herself. Shall
I tell you her name ? It is Lynette Mildare. When tears
come to her, then it will be for those who love her to cry
again for Joy, for she will be given back to them. . . ."
" Lord grant it !" breathed Sister Tobias behind them.
But Saxham had forgotten her. The fountains of his deep
were broken up and words came rushing from him.
" I think that day will come, Lynette. I believe that
day will come," he said, holding the beautiful vague gaze
\vith his. " If every drop in these veins of mine, poured out,
could bring it more quickly, it should be hastened so ;
if every faculty of my body, every cell in my brain, bent
to the achievement of one end, expended to the last unit of
energy, in the restoration of what is infinitely dearer to me
than life — than a hundred lives, if I had them to devote ! —
could insure its dawning, and bring the Ught of Reason
and Memory and Hope into these beloved eyes again "
A sob tore its way through the Doctor's great frame.
He rose up abruptly and hurried away.
LIV
A DEADLY lassitude, both physical and mental, had settled
down upon the men and women of the garrison. They
knew that Brounckers had gone south, leaving General
Huysmans in command of the investing forces. They
knew that the rainy season brought them fever, for they
shivered and burned with it, and they knew that the scanty
rations of coarse and unpalatable food were getting smaller
every day.
THE DOP DOCTOR 617
But they were conscious of these things in a dull way,
and as though they affected people who were a long distance
off. One day, when for the thousandth time word came
that the advance-guard of the Relief was in sight, when
the commotion visible in the enemy's laagers suggested a
poked-up ant-hill, and seemed to confirm the report, there
was a brief flicker of excitement. Mounted men rode out
in force, guns were limbered up and galloped out north
and west, to divert General Huysmans' attention, and give
Grumer, conjectured to be waiting for it, the opportunity
for an eagle-like swoop down upon the harassed tortoise
sprawling on her sand-hills. But the rainy dark came
down upon the clatter of artiller5% and the shining dawn
crept up and brought the cruel news that the allies had
really been beaten back ; and if there was any doubt of that,
it was dissipated at the day's end when one of the Red
Cross waggons came rumbling back out of the sloppy
twilight, bringing Three Messengers to confirm the tale.
They M'ere eloquent enough, even in their speechlessness,
those three dead troopers, whose boots and coats were
missing, and whose pockets had been turned inside out.
Not a man of them was known to any member of the
beleaguered garrison. Yet every man and woman there
was the poorer by three friends and one more hope.
We know what was happening while Gueldersdorp ate
her patient heart out. It has been Avritten in the History
of Successful Strategy how Lord WilUams of Afghanistan,
landLQg at Cape Town in January, found Muller on his way
from Port Christmas, Whittaker at Bergstorm, Parria
at Kooisberg, Ruthven on the Brodder, and everybody
and everything at a deadlock. And being too old and
wise to disdain the wisdom of others, the keen old brain
under the frosty thatch recalled to mind the story of Stone-
wall Jackson, collected what forces he could muster, shppcd
in between two of the columns held immovable, and having
established his lines of communication to the south,
launched himself on Groenfontein, and created the necessary
diversion. A mighty wave rolled back to prot*>ct the
menaced Free State capital, the paralysed columns moved
again. Diamond Town was relieved by Sir George Parris. and
Commandant Selig Brounckers was captured at Pijlberg.
618 THE DOP DOCTOR
Doubtless he was a bully and a tyrant, that roaring- voiced,
truculent man. But those angry, red- veined grey eyes of
his could look Death squarely in the face, and the brain
behind them could conceive and plan stratagems and
tactics that were masterly, and devise works that were
marvels of Defensive Art. And the heavy hand that patted
Mevrouw Brounckers' head, as that devoted woman sat
disconsolate in the river-bed, surrounded by her children,
and pots, and bundles, and the roaring voice that softened
to speak words of consolation, even as the trap so in-
geniously set to catch a Tartar closed in — North, South,
East, West — belonged to a man who knew not only how
to fight and win and how to fight and lose, but how to love
and pity.
There came the faint dawn of a day in May when the
plan of that bright young man Schenk Eybel was tried, and
tried successfully The fine between two forts that lay
far apart on the south and south-west was pierced, while
the incessant roll of rifies made a mile-long fringe of Jagged
yellowish flame along the enemy's eastern trenches. Even
before the feint sputtered out the rush had been made,
the stratagem had developed, and at the bidding of twenty
incendiary torches, the daub-and-wattle huts of the Barala
town leaped skyward in one roaring conflagration.
We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that
day of fire and blood. It is marked \vith a white stone in
the History of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, and the chapter
is headed " The Turning of the Tables." It gives a spirited
description of the prudent retreat of General Huysmans,
the unconditional surrender of Commandant Eybel, and
winds up with d. pen-and-ink sketch of BroUnckers' bright
boy brealdng the chaff-bread of captivity in the quartera
of that slim duyvel, the Engelsch Commandant.
But while the Boer was yet top-dog in the scuffle, and
held the Barala stad, and the fort that had lately done
duty as headquarters for the Irregulars, holding captive
their commanding ofiicer, several of his juniors, and some
fifteen troopers, Avith a handful of Town Guards ; and all the
fighting men who could be spared from the trenches were
being posted between the menacing danger and the town, and
h couple of field-guiis were being hurried into position, and
THE DOP DOCTOR 519
It had ildt yet occurred to Commandant Schenk Eybel that
the cautious Huysmans might leave him in the lurch, things
looked very bad indeed for the doughty defenders of little
Gueldersdorp — certainly up to afternoon-tea time, when a
couple of Scotch girls crossed the two hundred yards of
veld that lay between the Fort and the town, carrying cans
of steaming tea for the parching Britons penned up there.
You are to see those calm, unconscious heroines start,
fixing their hairpinned braids with quick, deft touches,
pinning up their skirts as for the crossing of a wimpling
bum rather than for the fording of Death's black river.
They measured the distance with cool, keen eyes, took up a
can in each hand, exchanged a word, and started. The re-
maining can they left behind, saying they would come back
for it. And they meant to, and would have, but for a pale
young woman in curling-phis, crowned by the deplorable
wreck of a large and flowery hat, and wearing a pink cotton
gown of deplorable limpness, through the washed-out
material of which her sharpened collar-bones and thin
shoulders threatened to pierce. For 'ow are you to take
to call a proper pride in yourself when you 'aven't got no
'art for anytlnnk any more 1
You are to understand that Emigration Jane 'ad bin
'in 'Orspital along of what the doctors called the Triphoid
Fever, months an' months ; and 'ad bin orful bad, an'
sent back again after beiag discharged, on accounts of an
Elapse, and kep' a dreadful time at the Women's Com-
balescent, through her blood being nothink but water —
and now you may guesa the reason of that fruitless search
on the part of W. Keyse.
She tried to run at first, but the can was full and heavy,
and her knees shook under her at the screaming of the
bullets over that cross-swept field. Her pore 'art beat
somethink crooil, and there was a horrible kiad of swishing
in her years, but to give up, and chuck away the can, and
scuttle back to cover, wdth Them Two stepping along in
front as cool — and more than halfway over, was what
Emigration Jane could not demean herself to do. And
at last they passed her coming back, and the Fort loomed
up before her, as suddenly as though it had sprouted up
mushroom-fashion under her dazzled eyee. And gritny
620 THE DOP DOCTOR
men were leaning over the sandbag-parapet applauding
her, and blackened hands attached to hairy arms reached
down and grabbed the can, and it was taken up into the
air and vanished, she never knew how. And then she was
staring up into the lean, brickdust-coloured face of a Cor-
poral of the Town Guard, whose head was swathed in a
bloody bandage, and in all the world there was only Her
and Him.
" You fust-class little Nailer. You Al bit o' frock "
W. Keyse began. Then his pale eyes bolted and his Jaw
fell, and his overwhelming joy and relief took on the aspect
of horrified consternation.
" Watto !" he was beginning weakly, but she tore her
gaze from his, and with a rending sob, covered her face
with her hands, and ran blindly. He remained petrified
and staring. And then a bullet struck him full in the face,
and he screamed like a shot rock-rabbit, and threw up his
arms and fell back, smothering in his own blood, behind the
breastwork. And she never knew the cruel trick that
Fate had played her, as she ran. . . .
She learned it later, when Young Eybel and his party
were marched prisoners into town, and cheer upon cheer
went up from British throats, and bells were ringing Joy-
fully, and " God Save the Queen !" bellowed in every
imaginable key, was heard from every possible quarter.
It was while the Barala were wailing over their suffocated
women and piccaninns, and the acrid fumes of burning
yet himg heavy in the powder- tainted air, and the R.A.M.C,
men and their volunteer helpers were bringing in the wounded
and the dead, that Emigration Jane saw a face upon a
stretcher that was being carried through the rejoicing
orowd, and screamed at the sight, and fell tooth and nail
upon the human barrier that interposed between herself
and it, and got through — how, she never could 'a' told you.
Rather a dreadful face it was, with -wide-open, staring
eyes protruding through a stiffening mask of gore. The
teeth grinned, revealed by the livid, drawn-back lips, and
how she knew him again in such a orful styte she couldn't
tell you — not if you offered her pounds and pounds to
Bay
She was only Emigration Jane, but when the bearers
THE DOP DOCTOR 621
halted with the stretcher, it was in obedience to the gesture
and the look of a young woman who had risen above herself
into the keen and piercing atmosphere of High Tragedy.
" Put that down, you two blokes. Wot for ?" Her thin
throat swelled visibly before the scream came : " 'Cos *e
belongs to me ! 'Ain't that enough ? Then— I belongs to
'im ! Dead or livin' — oh, my darlin' ! my darlin' !"
The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their
burden down. It was not heavy, for Corporal W. Keyse,
even when not living under conditions of semi-starvation,
was a short man and a spare. Had been, one was tempted
to say, in regard to his condition : " For," said one of the
R.A.M.C. men to a sympathetic bystander, " the chap has
had a tremendous wipe over the head with a revolver-butt
or a gun-stock, and he has been shot in the face besides.
There's the hole plain where the bullet went in under his
near nostril, and came out at the left-hand corner of his
off eye. And unless a kind o' miracle happens, I should
say, myself, that it would be a saving of time to carry him
straight to the Cemetery."
*' Don't let the poor girl hear you !" said the sympathetic
bystander. But Emigration Jane was past hearing or
seeing anything but the damaged head upon the canvas
pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly,
dropping on her knees beside it :
" O my own, own, try an' know me ! Come back for
long enough to s'y one word ! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll
pray to You all my days. pore, pore darlin' 'ead that
wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil "
It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under
the limp and shabby cotton print gown. And the voice
that called W. Keyse to come back from the very threshold
of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true love.
It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's
stiflFened eyelids quivered and came do\vTi halfway, and
the martial spirit of its owner flickered up long enough for
W. Keyse to sputter out :
" Cripps, it's 'Er ! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven — on
somebody else's pass ?"
" Bom to be hung, I should say," commented the
R.A.M.C. man aside to his mate. " Chuck some water over
622 THE DOP DOCTOR
the young woman, one of you," he added, as the stretcher
was lifted. " And tell her, when she comes to, that we've
taken her sweetheart to Hospital instead of to the other
place."
" Rum critters, women," commented another bystander,
not untender in his maimer of sprinkling the dubious liquid
known in Gueldersdorp as water out of a cracked tin dipper
over the face of the young woman who sat upon the ground
in the centre of a circular palisade of interested human
legs. " Look at this one, for instance. Lively as a vink
as long as she believes her chap a corpse, and does a solid
flop as soon as she finds out he has a kick in him. Help
her up, you on the other side. Do you think you could
walk now, miss, if you tried to ?"
She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook imder
her. Her clasped hands shook, too, as she held them out,
beseeching those about her to be pitiful, and tell her where
" they " had taken him. Then, when she was told, and
because she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the
way to the Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him.
Saxham stitched up the spht scalp of W. Keyse, and
grimly congratulated him upon the thickness of the skull
beneath it. The bullet had, as has already been indicated,
gone in under the left nostril, and emerged below the inner
corner of the right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound
notoriety as well as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight
permanent cast. . . .
" You shall git well, deer," Emigration Jane would tell
her patient twenty times a day. " You carn't 'elp it,
becos I means to myke you."
" A' right," her hero would snuffle. One dtty he added,
with a weakly swoop of one lean arm in the direction of her
waist : '* Mend me an' marry me. That's wot I call a Fair
Division o' Labour. Twig ?"
She crimsoned, gasping :
" You don't never mean it ?"
" Stryte I mean it," declared W. Keyse. " Wot d'yoU
tyke me for ?"
His bed was in a comer, and a screen baffled prying eyes.
She hung over him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful,
faltering :
THE DOP DOCTOR 623
'* S'y it agyne, darlin' ! Upon yer solemn natural "
He said it with the lean arm round her.
" An' it's me — me wot you wants — an' not that Other
One ? "
He swore it.
" You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy
Cripps !"
" An' you've forgiven me — abart them letters ?** Her
face was coming close. ...
" Every time I blooming well kissed *em, arter I bin an'
picked 'em up," he declared.
" You did — that ?" she quavered, marvelling at the
greatness of his nature.
" Look in me jacket pocket if you think Fm spiimin'
you fairy ones." His close arm slackened a little. " Now
there's somethin' I got to up an' tell, if you never tips me
the 'Ow Do no more."
" Wot is it, deer ?" Her heart beat painfully. Was
this something the reason why he had not yet kissed her ?
" It's got to do with the Dutchy wot landed me this
clip over the cokernut " — he indicated some plaster strap-
pings that decorated the seat of intelUgence — "with a
revolver-butt, when they rushed the Fort. After 'e'd
plugged at me wiv' 'is last cartridge an' missed." The
Adam's apple in his thin throat worked up above the collar
of the grey flannel Hospital jacket. "I — I outed'im!"
said W. Keyse.
" O' course you did, deer." Her heart thrilled with
pride in her hero. " An' serve 'im glad — the narsty,
blood-thirsty, murderin' "
He interrupted :
"'Old'ard! Wait till you knows 'oo it was." Ho gulped,
and the Adam's apple jerked in the old way. " That 'ulldn'
big Dopper you was walkin' out along of, when I "
" Walt ! It was— Walt ?"
She shuddered and grew pale.
" That's the bloke I means. I 'ad to *ave 'im," explained
W. Keyse, " or 'e'd 'ave 'ad me. 80 I sent 'im in. With
my one, two, tin' the Haymaker's Lift. Right in the
middle of 'is dirty weskit. VS. !" He blew a sigh. *' Now
it'8 out, an' I suppo^ie you 'ates me V
524 THE DOP DOCTOR
She panted.
" It's 'orrible, deer, but — but — you 'ad fco. An' — an' —
if I 'ave to s'y it, I'd a bloomin' sight rather it was 'Im
than You !"
" I'll 'ave my kiss now," said the lordly W. Keyse. And
took it from her willing lips.
LV
There was no perceptible change in Lynette, either at
the time of young Eybel's frustrated coup, or for long after.
She was to Live as much as possible in the open air, Saxham
had insisted, and so you would find the girl, with a Sister
in charge of her, sitting in the Cemetery, where the crop
of little white crosses thickened every day. The little
blue and wliite irises had bloomed upon those two graves
where her adopted mother and her brave young lover lay,
before the dawning of that day the nuns prayed and
Saxham hoped for.
It was his bitter-sweet joy to be with her constantly,
striving with all his splendid powers of brain and body
to brace the shattered nerves, and restore the exhausted
strength, and lead the darkened mind back gently and by
degrees towards the light.
She did not shrink from him now, but would answer his
questions submissively, and give him her hand mechanically
at meeting and parting. Saxham had not the magnetic
influence over shy and backward children that another man
possessed. She would smile and brighten when she saw the
Colonel coming, upright and alert as ever, though bearing
heavy traces now in the haggard lines and deep hollows of
his face, in the greying hairs above his temples and in the
close-clipped brown moustache, as in the Quixote-like
gauntness of the figure that had never carried much flesh,
of the long struggle of close on seven months' duration.
The pleasant little whistle would die upon his lips when
he saw her sitting by the Mother's grave, plaiting grasses
while the Sister sewed, or making clumsy babyish attempts
at drawing on her little slate. From this she disliked to be
parted, so her gentle nurses fastened it to one end of a
THE DOP DOCTOR 525
long ribbon, and its pencil to the other, and tied the ribbon
about her waist.
One day, as the Colonel stooped to speak to her, his keen
glance noted that the wavering outline of a house stood
upon the little slate. The living descendant of the primi-
tive savage who had outlined the forms of men and beasts
upon the flank of the great boulder when this old world
was young, would have scorned the drawing, and with good
reason. It was so feeble and wavering an attempt to
convey, in outline, the idea of a white man's dwelling.
The roof sagged wonderfully, and the chimneys were
at frenzied angles with the sides of the irregular cube, with
its four windows of impossibly varjdng size, and the oblong
patch that meant a door between them. Above the door
was another oblong, set transversely, and rather suggesting
a tavern-sign.
There were some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly
sheds and stables of daub and wattle, eking out the ram-
shackle house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls
that might have been meant for trees. An enclosiu-e of
spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And
there were things in the middle distance, also to the left,
that you might accept as beehives or as native kraals.
The man who looked at them knew they were native
kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold be-
tween his eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the clumsy
drawing on the slate. Without those rude lines in the
foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a little
kopje of boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the
drawing would have meant nothing at all, even to the eye
of a practised scout, except a tavern on the lonely veld.
The grave at the foot of the little kopje located the spot.
" A veld hotel in the Orange Free State — a \vretched
shanty of the usual corrugated-iron and mud-wall type,
in the grass country between Driepoort and Kroon-
fontein."
He heard the wraith of his own voice speaking to the
dead woman who lay under the blossoming' irises at hi.s feet.
He saw her \vith the mental vision quite clearly. Her groat
purple-grey eyes were bent on his from their superior level,
628 THE DOP BOOTOR
and they were inscrutable in their strange, secret defiance,
and indomitable in the determination of their regard.
Why had she been so bent upon hiding the trail ? Why
had she distrusted him ?
He bent upon one knee in the grass beside the slender,
shrinking figure, woman's and yet child's, and held out the
little slate to her, and said, with the smile that even back-
ward children could not resist :
" Did you draw this ?"
She nodded, with great wistful eyes, looking shyly up
at him from under their sweeping black lashes. He went
on, pointing with a slender grass-blade to each object as
he named it :
" It is a house, and these are sheds and stables, and this
is an orchard, and here the Kafl&rs live. But who lives in
the house ?"
She whispered, with a look of secret fear :
" The man livas there. And the woman."
" Tell me the man's name."
She breathed, after a hesitation that was full of troubled
apprehension :
'• Bough."
A red flush mounted in his thin cheek, and he drew his
breath in sharply. He asked :
" Does anyone else live in the house 1"
She reflected with a knitted brow. He helped her.
" I do not moan the travellers — the men and women
who come driving up in Cape-carts and transport- waggons.
and drive away again, but someone who lives with Bough
and the woman. She has been at the tavern a long, long
time, though she is so young and so httle. Try to remember
her name."
The knitted brow relaxed, and the beautiful dim eyes
had almost a smile in them.
" It is ' the I^d.' "
" Try and think. Has she no other name ?"
She shook her head. He gave up that trail as lost, and
moved the grass- blade to another part of the drawing on
the slate.
" Tell me what this ia 1"
She answered at ono« :
THE DOP DOCTOR 527
" It is the Little Kopje. The EngUsh traveller made it
when he put the dead woman in the ground."
His heart beat heavily, and the hand that pointed with
the grass-blade shook a little.
" Where is the man who buried the dead woman and
built the Little Kopje ?"
She pointed to the rude oblong that was meant for a
grave.
" There." The slender finger climbed the heap of
boulders. " And there is where the Kid sits when she
is a bad girl and runs away." She peeped up in his face
almost slyly. " Then they call her : ' You Kid, come here !
Dirty Httle slut, take the broom and sweep out the bar !
Idle little devil, fetch water for the kitchen !' " Her smile
was peaked and elfish. She laid a cunning finger beside
her pursed-up lips. " But though they scold and call bad
names, they never come and fetch her down off the Little
Kopje. Beat her when she comes in, and serve her right,
the impudent little scum ! But never come near the
Little Kopje, because of the spook the Barala boy saw
there one night when the moon was big and shining."
He said, with infinite pity in his tone, and a compas-
sionate mist rising in those keen bright eyes of his :
" They are cruel to the Kad, both Bough and the woman ?"
She began to shake. The guardian Sister, who sat sew-
ing a httle way behind her, looked up anxiously at her
charge. He pacified her wdth a glance, and, taking one
of the slender trembling hands in a firm, kind clasp, re-
peated his question :
" Always cruel, cruel ! But Bough "
A spasm contracted her face. At the base of the slender
throat something throbbed and throbbed. She whispered
brokenly :
" When the woman went away "
Her slender fingers closed desperately upon his. Her
heart shook her, and Fear was in her eyes. Her voice
vibrated and shuddered at her white Ups as a catight moth
vibrates and shudders in a spider-web. She began again :
" When the woman went away. Bough "
Her eyes quailed and flickered ; her pale and quivering
face was convulsed by a sudden opasm of a^vful fear. The
528 THE DOP DOCTOR
muscles of her whole body stiffened in the immovable rigor
of terror. Only her head Jerked from side to side, like
that of some timid creature of the wilds held captive in
crushing folds or crunching fangs. And he comprehended
all ; and understood all, in one lightning leap of intuition,
as he saw.
" Hush !" He stopped her with his authoritative eyes
and the firm, reassuring pressure of his hand. " Forget
that — speak of it no more. Try and tell me who lies here,
under these grasses and flowers that you water every day ?"
He moved the hand he held to touch the grave, and the
spasm that contracted her features relaxed, and the terror
died out of her eyes, as though some soothing, healing virtue
were conveyed to her by the mere contact with that sacred
earth. He went on :
" She was very noble, very pure, and very beautiful.
Everyone loved her, and her life was spent in doing good.
You were dear to her — inexpressibly dear to her. She used
to call you her beloved daughter. Tell me who she was ?"
Her face quivered, and in the depths of her dim, vague
eyes a beam of the golden hght of old was rekindled.
" She was the Lady. When will she come again ?"
He raised his hand and pointed to the sky.
" When that is rolled away, and the Sign of the Cross
shines from the east to the west, and from the north to
the south, and the King of Glory comes with His Angels
and His Saints, we shall see her again, Lynette "
His voice broke. He laid the cool, delicate, nerveless
hand back upon her knee, and rose, for the Sister was
folding up her sewing. He looked long after the girlish
figure as it was led away.
He understood everything now. He knew why the
mother-plover had trailed her wing in the dust, striving to
lead the footsteps of the stranger aside from the hidden nest.
He stooped and gathered a blade or two of grass, and a few
crumbs of red, sandy earth, from the grave at his feet, and
kissed them, and folded them reverently in an envelope,
and hid the httle packet in his breast before he went.
That evening there were pillars and banks of dust on
the north-west horizon, and the flashes of lyddite and the
booming of artillery told patient Gueldersdorp that the
1
THE DOP DOCTOR 52«
hour of deliverance was near. A few hours later the Relief
had lamp-signalled brief details of the battle with Huys-
mans, ending with " Good-night " and the promise to fight
a way in next morning. Later still, eight troopers in khaki,
Jaunty ostrich-tips in their smasher hats, rode into the
little battered village town that huddled on the low , sandy
mound, and all the waiting world was gladdened with the
news. And London called on a quiet elderly lady, to tell
her what the man, her boy, had done.
The name of that little hamlet town has, cruelly enough,
passed into a byword — a synonym for everything that is
rowdy, vulgar, apish in the English character, with the
dregs stirred up. But yet it will ring down the silver
grooves of Time as long as Time shall be.
Do I wander from the thread of my story — I who have
dressed my puppets in the brave deeds of those who strove
and endured and suffered, to what a glorious end ?
Great writers lay down plans, formulate elaborate
synopses. Not so I, who, out of all the wreaths that
Fame holds yet in her lap to give away, shall never call
one laurel mine. . . .
A wandering wind came sighing past my ears one night
upon the Links at Herion, burdened with this story it had
to tell. Before then it had only blo%^Ti in fitful gusts.
Then again it blew steadily. I had caught some whispers
from it years before. On the deck of the great, populous,
electric-hghted ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across
the Atlantic, racing the porpoise-schools to get to New
York City ; and later at Washington, when the red sunset
fires burned low behind the Capitol, it spoke to me in the
wonderful, beloved voice I shall never hear on earth any
more. Yet once more the -ndnd came faintly sighing, in
the giant blue shadow of Table Mountain ; i*-. blew at
Johannesburg, six thousand feet above sea-level, in a raging
cyclone of red gritty dust. Again it came, stirring the
celadon-green carpet of veld that is spread at the feet of
the Magahesberg Ranges, that were turquoise-blue as the
Bcillas growing in the South Welsh garden that lies before
the window where I write, this variable spring day. But
it blew with a most insistent note on the dumpy moimd
where they have rebuilt the ridiculous, glorious village that
34
530 THE DOP DOCTOR
gave birth to deeds worthy of the Age Heroic, about whose
sand-bagged defences nightly patrolled a Sentinel who
never slept.
Gueldersdorp tumbled out of bed at three-thirty, to see
the troops march in by the cold white morning moonlight
that painted long indigo-blue shadows of marching horse-
men and rolling guns, drawn by many horses, and huge-
teamed baggage-waggons, eastward over the bleached dust.
I dare not attempt to describe the indescribable. Zulu
and Barala, Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each
after his own manner, and were glad and rejoiced. But
of these haggard men and emaciated women of British
race I can but say that in them human joy attained the
climax of a sacred frenzy — that human gratitude and
enthusiasm, loyalty and patriotism, reached the pitch at
which the mercury in the thermometer of human emotion
ceases to record altitudes.
At its height, when the last fort had fallen to England
and the flag of the United Republics had fluttered down
from the tree whence it had waved so long, and the Union
Jack went up to frantic cheering, and the retreating cloud
of dust on the horizon told of the exit of the enemy from
the Theatre of War, Saxham played his one trump card
in the game that meant life and death to him, and life, and
everything that made life worth living, to one other.
* * ♦ ♦ ♦
You are to see the hulking Doctor with the square-
cut face, his grim under-jaw more squarely set than ever,
his blue eyes smouldering anxiety under their glooming
brows, trying to coax a pale, bewildered girl to take a walk
with him. She would at length, provided Sister Tobias
walked on '^.he other side and held her hand. So this party
of three plunged into the boiling whirlpool of joyous
Gueldersdorp.
People were singing " Grod Save the Queen," and " The
Red, White, and Blue," " Auld Lang Syne " and " Rule,
Britannia," all at once and all together, and playing the
times of them on mouth-organs and concertinas. They were
shaking hands with one another and everybody else, and
shedding tears of Joy, and borrowing the pocket-handker-
chiefs of sympathetic strangers k) dry ihem, or leaving
THE DOP DOCTOR 631
Ihem undried. They were crowding the Government
kitchens, drinking the healths of the officers and men of
Great Britain's Union Brigade in hot soup and hot coffee.
They were clustered like bees upon the most cHmbable
house-tops, watching those retiring dust-clouds in the dis-
tance, and the nearer movements of their friends and allies ;
they were hearing the experiences of dust-stained and
travel- worn Imperialists, and telling their own ; and one
and all, they were thanking God Who had led them,
through bodily fear, and mental anguish, and bitter
privations, to hail the dawn of this most blessed day.
The electrical atmosphere, the surge of the multitude, the
roar of thousands of voices, the gaze of thousands of eyes,
had its effect upon the girl. vShe trembled and flushed
and paled. Her breath came quick and short. She threw
back her head and gasped for air. But she did not wish
to be taken back to the Convent bombproof. She shook her
head when Sister Tobias suggested that they should return.
And then some of the women whom she had helped to
nurse in hospital saw her, and recognised her, and came
about her with pitiful words and compassionate looks — not
only for her own sake, but for that dead woman's whose
adopted daughter they knew her to have been.
" You poor, blessed, innocent lamb !" They crowded
about her, kissing her hands and her dress, and Sister
Tobias's shabby black habit. " Lord help you !" they
mourned over her. " Christ pity you, and bring you to
yourself again !"
" Why are you so sorry ?" Lynette asked them, knitting
her delicate brows, and peering curiously in their tearful
smiling faces. " No !" she corrected herself ; " I mean why
are you so glad ?"
" Glad is ut, honey !" screamed a huge Irishwoman,
throwing a brawny red arm about the shrinking figure and
hugging it. '* Begob, wid the Holy Souls dancin' Jigs in
Purgatory, an' the Blessed Saints clappin' their ban's in
Heaven, we have rayson to be glad ! Whirroosh ! Ould
Erin for ever — an' God save the Cornel !"
She yelled with all the power of her Celtic lungs, plucked
off her downtrodden shoes, slapped their soles together
■martly, and, with a gestvire of royal prodigaUty, tossed
34—2
532 THE DOP DOCTOR
them right and left into the air, performed a caper of
surprising agility on elephantine, blue -yam- stocking -
covered feet, and was carried away by a roaring surge of
the joyous crowd, vociferating.
Saxham felt the slender hand of his charge tighten upon
his arm, and his heart leaped as he noted the working of
the sensitive face and the heaving of the small, nymph-like
bosom under the thin material of her dress. He hoped, he
believed that a change was taking place in her. He said
to himself that the delicate mechanism of her brain, clogged
and paralysed by a great mental shock, was revitalising,
storing energy, gaining power ; that the lesion was healing ;
that she would recover — must recover.
Then his quick eye saw fatigue in her. They took her
back out of the dust and the clamour and the crowd, back
to the quiet of the Cemetery.
It happened there. For as she stood again beside the
long, low mound beneath which the heart that had cherished
her lay mouldering, they saw that the tears were running
down her face, and that her whole body was shaken with
sobbing. And then, as a wild tornado of cheering, mingled
with drifts of martial music, swept northwards from Market
Square, she fell upon her knees beside the grave, and cried
as if to living ears :
" Mother ;— oh ! Mother, the Relief ! They're here ! Oh,
my own darling — to be glad without you ! . . ."
She lay there prone, and wept as though all the tears
pent up in her since that numbing double stroke of the
Death Angel's sword were flowing from her now. And
Sister Tobias, glancing doubtfully up at Saxham's face, saw
it transfigured and irradiated with a great and speechless
Joy. For he knew that the light had come back to the
beautiful eyes he loved, and that the Future might yield its
harvest of Joy yet, even yet, for the Dop Doctor, he believed
in his own blindness.
LVI
They were standing together in the same place two months
later when he told her all, and asked her to be his wife in
his own brusque characteristic way.
4
THE DOP DOCTOR 633
" You have been so good, so kind," she said, in rather
formal phrase, but with her sweet eyes shining through
tears and her sensitive lips trembling. " You have shown
yourself to be so noble in your unselfish care for others, in
your unsparing efforts for the good and benefit of every-
one "
" Put that by," said Saxham rather roughly, " and please
to look at me. Miss Mildare."
He had never called her Lynette since her recovery, or
touched the pretty hand he coveted unless in formal
greeting.
" Put all that by. You see me to-day as you have seen
me for months past, conscientious and cleanly, sober and
sane, in body as in mind, discharging my duty at the
Hospital and elsewhere as well as any other man possessing
the special qualifications it demands. Pray understand
that I am not a philanthropist, and have never posed as
one. For the sake, first of a man who believed in me, and
secondly of a woman whom I love — and you are she — I
have done what I have."
He squared his great shoulders and stood up before her,
and, though his face had never had any charm for her, its
power went home to her and its passion thrilled.
" I play no part. The man I seem to be I am. But up
to seven months ago, before the siege began, I was known
in this town, and with reason, as the Dop Doctor."
He saw recollection waken in her eyes, and nerved himself
to the sharp ordeal of changing it to repulsion and
disgust.
" You have heard that name applied to me. It conveyed
nothing loathsome to your innocent mind. You once
repeated it to me, and were about to ask its meaning. I
had it in my mind then to enlighten you, and for the mean
and cowardly baseness that shrank from the exposure I
have to pay now in the "—a muscle in his pale face
twitched — " the exquisite pain it is to me to tell you
to-day."
" Then do not tell me." She said it almost in a whisper.
" Dr. Saxham, I beg you most earnestly to spare yourself,"
She dropped her eyes under the fierce earnestness of his,
and knitted her oold little hands in one another. " Please
634 THE DOP DOCTOR
leave the rest unsaid," she begged, without looking at
him.
" It cannot be," said Saxham. " Miss IVlildare, the Dop
Doctor was only another nickname for the Town Drunkard.
And now you know what you should have known before if
I had not been a coward and a knave."
She turned her eyes softly upon hiiH, and they could not
rest, it seemed to her, upon a man of braver and more lofty
bearing.
" I was the Town Drunkard," Saxham went on, in the
cold, clear voice that cut like a knife to the intelligence.
'* Known in every liquor-saloon, and familiar to every
constable, and a standing butt for the clumsy Jests tliat the
most utter dolt of a Police Magistrate might splutter from
the Bench." His Jarring laugh hurt lier. " The Man in
the Street, and tlie Woman of the Street, for that matter —
pardon me if I offend your ears, but the truth must be told
— were my godfather and my godmother, and they gave
me that name between them. You are trembling, Miss
Mildaro. Sit down upon that balk, and I will finish."
There was a remnant of timber lying near that had been
used in the construction of a gun- mounting. She moved to
it and sat down, and the Doctor went on :
" I am not going to weary you with the story of how I
came to be — what I have told you. But that I had lived
a clean and honourable and temperate life up to thirty
years of age — when my world caved in with me — I swear is
the very truth !"
She said gently : " I can believe it. Dr. Saxham."
" Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And
then, at the lieight of my success, and on the Ijrink of a
marriage tliat I dreamed would bring me the fulfilment of
every hope a man may cherish, one impulse of pity and
charity towards a wretched little woman brought me ruin,
ruin, ruin !"
Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about.
She was glad to see the Saxham of her knowledge in that
Saxham whom she had not known. He folded his great
arms upon his broad breast and went on :
" Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Re-
habilitation in the eyes of the Law — for I gained that
THE DOP DOCTOR 636
much — did not clear me in the eyes of Society— that hugs
the guilt-stained criminal to its lieart in tlie full conscious-
ness of what his deeds are, and shudders at tlie innocent
man upon whom has once fallen the shadow of that grim
and bloody Idol that civilisation misnames Justice. I was
cast out. Even by the brother I had trusted and the
woman I had loved. I had in a vague way believed in God
tintil then ; I know I used to pray to Him to bless those I
loved, and help me to achieve great things for their sakes.
But nothing at all was left of that except a dull aching
desire to throw back in the face of the Deity the little He
had left to me. My health, and my intellectual powers, and
my self-respect. . . ."
Her voice came to his ears in the half-whispered words :
" Had He left you so little, after all ?"
" Little enough," said Saxham doggedly, " compajed
with whfilt I had lost. And as it is the privilege of the
Christian to blame either the Almighty or the devil for what
ever ills are brought on him by his own blind, reckless
challenging of the Inevitable — termed Fate and Destiny
by classical Paganism, — so I found myself at odds with
One I had been taught to call my Maker."
In His own acre, close to her beloved dead, with all those
little white crosses marking where other dust that had once
praised Him with the human voice lay waiting for the sum-
mons of the Resurrection, it was incredibly awful to her to
hear Him thus denied. She. grew pale and shuddered, and
Saxham saw.
" You see that I wish to be honest with you, and open
and above-board. I would not ever have you say to your-
self, ' This man deceived — this man misled me, wisliing mo
to think him better than he was.' Tliere is not much more
to tell you — save that I took what money remained to me
at the bank and from the sale of my last possessions —
about a thousand pounds — and ihook the dust off from
my shoes, and came out here, drunk, to carry out my
purpose of self-degradation to the uttermost. And 1
became a foul beast among beasts that were even fouler, but
less vile and less sliameful because their mental and moral
standard was infinitely lower than my own. And they
gave me the name you know of." His voice had the ring
630 THE DOP DOCTOR
of steel smitten on steel. He drew himself up with a move-
ment of almost savage pride, and the knotted veins swelled
on his broad white foreliead, and his blue eyes blazed under
his thunderous smudge of black eyebrows.
" The name you know. It used to be called after me
when I reeled the streets — they whispered it afterw ards as
I rode by. To-day it is forgotten." His nostrils quivered,
and he threw out his hands as if with that action he tossed
something worthless to the winds. " Miss Mildare, I have
not touched Drink — the stuff that was my nourishment
and my sustenance, my comfort and my bane, my deadliest
enemy and my only friend — since that hour when with the
last effort of my will I rallied all my mental and bodily
forces to resist its base allurement."
" I know it, Dr. Saxham. I am sure of it." She rose and
held out her hands to him, but he foldedhis arms more closely
over his starving, famished heart, and would not see them yet.
'* You can be sure of it. Alcohol is no longer my master
and my god. I stand before you a free man, because I
willed to be free." There was a little blob of foam at one
corner of his mouth, but the square pale face was composed,
even impassive. *' Once, not so long ago, I filled a place of
standing in the professions of Surgery and Medicine ; I
knew what it was to be esteemed and respected by the
world. For your dear sake I promise to regain what I have
lost ; be even more than I used to be, achieve greater things
than are done by other men of equal powers with mine. I
am not a man to pledge my word lightly, Miss Mildare. . . ."
His voice shook now and his blue eyes glistened. " If you
would be so — so unutterably kind as to become my wife,
I promise you a worthy husband. I swear to you upon
what I hold dearest and most sacred — your own life, your
own honour, your own happiness, never to give you cause
to regret marrying me ! For I may die, indeed, but living
I will never fail you !"
There was a lump in her throat choking her. Her eyes
had gone to that other grave some fifty paces distant from
the Catholic portion of the Cemetery. There were freshly-
gathered flowers upon it, as upon the grave that lay so
near, and two gorgeous butterflies were hovering about the
blooms, in mingled dalliance and greediness.
THE DOP DOCTOR 637
" You loved him," said Saxham, following the Journey
of her wistful eyes. " Love him still ; remember him for
every trait and quality of his that was worthy of love from
you. But give me the hope of one day gaining from you
some shadow of — of return for what I feel for you. Is it
Passion ? I hardly know. Whether it is Love, in the
sense in which that word is employed by many of the women
and nearly all the men I have met, I do not know either.
But that it is the life of my life to me and the breath of my
being — you cannot look at me and doubt !'*
She was not looking at him. Her eyes were on the little
white cross above the Mother's grave ; there was an anxious
fold between the slender dark eyebrows.
" You — you wish to marry a Catholic — you, who tell me
that you were once a Christian and are now Agnostic V*
" If I have not what is called Faith," said Saxham, " I
may at least lay claim to the quality of reverence. And I
honour the religion that has made you what you are.
Cleave to your Church, child — hold to your pure beliefs,
and keep a little love back, Lynette, from your Holy Family
and your Saints in Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs
it desperately !"
The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than
beautiful in its compassion. She said :
" I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day
our Lord will give you back the faith that you have lost."
*' Thank you, dear !" said Saxliam humbly. She was
opening her lips to speak again when he lifted his hand and
stopped her,
" There is one other thing I should like to make clear.
I — am not rich. But neither am I absolutely poor.
Letters that I have received from a firm of solicitors acting
for the trustees and executors of — a near relative deceased,
will prove to you that lara possessed of some small property,
bringing in an annual income of something like two hundred
pounds, and funds sufficient to settle a few thousands upon
my wife by way of marriage-jointure. Believe me," he
added, in answer to her look, " I know you to be incapable
of a mercenary thought. But what I should have ex-
plained to " — he pointed to the grave that lay so near — " to
her, I must make clear to you. It could not be otherwise."
638 THE DOP DOCTOR
She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid
her pure cheek upon it, and spoke to the Dead in a low,
murmuring tone. Saxham knew as he watched her,
breathing heavily, that the consent of the Mother would
never have been given to the marriage he proposed. That
other obstacle in the road of his desire, the lover who had
deceived, had been swept away, ^^ith the stem and tender
guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He went back in
thought to the ending of his long shooting-match d outrance
with Father Noah, and remembered how he had promised
himself that all should go well with Saxham provided
Saxliam's bullet got home first.
Were not things going better than he had hoped ? She
had not even recoiled from him when he had told her of
those degraded days of wastrelhood. Surely things were
going well for Saxham, he said, as he waited with his hun-
gering eyes upon his heart's desire. What it cost him not
to step over to her, snatch her from the ground, and crush
her upon his heart with hot and passionate kisses and wild
words of worship, he knew quite well. But iti that he tras
able to exercise such a mastery over himself and keep that
other Saxham down, Saxham gave praise to that strange
god he had set up, and worshipped, and bowed down before,
calling it The Omnipotent Human Will.
She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands,
thinking. It was very still, and the air was sweet and
balmy, and beyond the lines of the defence-works miles upon
miles of sunht veld rolled away to the hills that were mantled
in clear hyacinth-colour and hooded with pale rose.
" If I married you, you would take me away from this
country and these people who have killed her ?"
She had the thought of ^another in her heart and the
name of another upon her lips. But only her eyes spoke,
travelling to that more distant grave where the butterflies
were hovering above the flowers, as Saxham answered :
" I would take you away, if you wished it."
" To England ?"
" Back to England."
" I should see London, and the hotise whetia Mother
lived. ..." She seemed to have forgotten Saxham, and to
be uttering her thoughts aloud. " I might even see the
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 639
green mountains of Conriemara in Ireland — her own moun-
tains she used to call them. I might one day meet people
who are of her blood and name— — "
" And of Ai«," thought Saxham, following her eyes'
wistful Journey to that other grave.
" But," she went on, " it would all depend " — she
breathed with agitation and knitted her slim white fingers
together, and looked round at him with that anxious
wrinkle between her fine eyebrows — " upon how much you
asked of me! Suppose I " His intent and burning ej^es
confused her, and she dropped her own beneath them. " If
I were to marry you, would you leave me absolutely free 1"
" Absolutely," said Saxham. " With the most com-
plete freedom a wife could possibly desire."
" I meant — a different kind of freedom from a wife's."
She knitted and unknitted her hands. " It is difficult to
explain. Would you be willing to ask nothing of me that
a friend or a sister might not give 1 Would you be
content "
Her transparent skin glowed crimson with the rush of
blood. Her bosom laboured with the hurry of her breathing.
Her white lids veiled her eyes, or the sudden terrible change
in Saxham'a face might have wrung from her a cry of
terror and alarm. But he mastered the raging jealousy that
tore him, and said, with a jarring note of savage irony in
the voice that had always spoken to her gently until then :
" Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner,
into a marriage that should be practically no marriage at
all — a formal contract that is not wedlock ? That might
never change; as Time went on, and alter into the close union
that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and
women who love ? Is that what you tisk me, Miss Mildare?"
She looked at him full and bent her head. And the
man's heart, that had throbbed so wildly, stopped beating
with a sudden jerk, and the divine fire that burned and
tingled in his blood died out, and the cold sickness of
baffled hope weighed on him like a mantle of lead. And
the voice that had whispered to him so alluringly, telling
him that it was not too late, that he might even yet win
this virginal pure, sweetly- budding maiden, and know the
bliss of being loved at last, sank into silence. His face waa
640 THE DOP DOCTOR
set like granite, and as grey. His eyes burned darkly
under his heavy brows. He waited, sombrely and hope-
lessly, for her to speak again.
" There are such marriages ?"
The question was diffidently and timidly put. He
answered :
" Assuredly there are. But not between those who are —
physically and mentally, sane and healthy men and women,
— at least, in my experience. One case, of three I am at
liberty to quote, was that of an aged and wealthy woman
of position and a young and rising public man."
" Were — weren't they happy ?"
The face of the inward, unseen Saxham was twisted in a
miserable grin, but the outward man preserved immobility.
" He enjoyed life. She sat by, and saw, every day
coming nearer, her death, that was to leave him free."
" And the others ?"
She asked it with an indrawn breath of anxiety.
" The second case was that of a man, middle-aged and
helplessly paralysed by an accident in the hunting-field,
and of a beautiful and high-spirited young woman —
almost a girl. She took a romantic interest in him — talked
of his ruined career and blighted life, and all that sort of
thing. And — they married, and she found her bondage
intolerable. ... It ended in his divorcing her. The decree
nisi was made absolute a few days before I left London.
The third case bears more analogy to yours and mine."
" Please go on."
" There was no great disparity of age between these two
people. They were sympathetic, cultured, independent
both. Their views upon many subjects — including the
sex question — were identical," said Saxham slowly. " And
they entered into a bond of union that had for its ultimate
aim the culture of the intellect and the development of
what they called the Soul. The Flesh had nothing in it ;
the Body," said Saxham, with a grating sarcasm, " was
utterly ignored. I forget whether they were Agnostics,
Buddhists, or Christians. They certainly suffered for
their creed. But " — his voice softened and deepened —
" at any rate, the woman suffered most !"
Her lips parted, her eyes were intent upon him.
THE DOP DOCTOR 641
" 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. Ener-
getic, 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 supematurally 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 ho did !"
He heard her pant softly, and saw her hand move up-
ward to her beating heart. His deadly earnestness appalled
her. Was he not fighting for what was more than life
to him 1 He folded his arms over his great chest, and said :
" For ten years he and she lived together in a imion
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 whole-
542 THE DOP DOCTOR
some 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 ex-
quisite 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 anti-
pathy ? Am I physically repulsive to you, or disagree-
able ? 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 oven 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 per-
THE DOP DOCTOR 543
plexity came between the dark fine eyebrows ; the Bweet
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 beckon-
ing 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, un-
dulating 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 alliuement 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 forgetfulneas. 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 1"
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 autenne,
544 THE DOP DOCTOR
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. " / an
example of Hght 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 re-
member telUng 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 Wind-
mills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of
Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own ? Mad-
ness — madness on the face of it !" But, madness or
sanity, he could not choose but love her.
" Yoiu: life-work ! . . . It was to be carried out among
those others whose voices you heard calling you. See," lie
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-lidfl. She put up both her Uttle hands, and rubbed
the salt drops away with her knuckles, Uke a child.
" When I have told you, you will alter — ^you cannot help
but alter your opinion !"
THE DOP DOOrOR 545
" 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 leam 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 con-
scious 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 sun-
shine, 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 — ! 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,
measvu-ed 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 \nth 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 eaxjh of them set up and worshipped —
I who shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice,
35
546 THE DOP DOCTOR
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 co min g nearer and
nearer, and at last "
She swept the tears from her face with the paJms 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 tiTapped me in a net of exquisite sweet softness, that
held me like a cage of steel. I gave myself up to the blissful-
ness 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 tilings — 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 ctoilched
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 happi-
ness — nothing but restless misery and burning pain. It
makes j'^ou 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 com-
mand 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 wen* back to
THE DOP DOCTOR 547
that other's giave, 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 hJTn — oh,
Beau ! Beau !"
Saxham's face waa 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, imcontrollable, 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 Uly
lay trodden in the mire 1 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 hap-
pened 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 beUef
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,"
ho 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-shouJdered Doctor proved his posses-
sion of the quaUty. Devouring desire, riotous passion, were,
if not killed in him, at least quelled and overthrown and
35—2
548 THE DOP DOCTOR
bound. Pure pity and tenderness awakened in him. And
Chivalry, all cap-d-jne 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 maimers 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 Uttle prig of
twenty- two, who as a Peer and Privy Councillor of L-eland,
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
THE DOP DOCTOR 549
beauty, Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne ? Well, that was the
very person, who had been Abbess, or Prioress, or some-
thing-else-ess of a Roman Catholic Sisterhood at Guelders-
dorp, 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 L3mette. He had made such
provision for her himself as his means permitted. His books
had been selling steadily for the past six years, his pub-
lishers 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
gi\-ing 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 sa^j 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 pro-
longed and punctuated his verl)al utterance — from his late
550 THE DOP DOCTOR
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 C!ouncillor had here to stop
and dry his eyes, that were frankly overflowing. Though
short, and not at all distinguished of appearance, having
derived from his mother, the Dowager Countess, nee Miss
Nancy Mclleev^y, of Mclleevystown, 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 pro-
posed to invest ia 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 Castle-
clare — might be got over — if I may employ the expression,
by our settling the money upon your children 1"
" 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 Uttle cUcking
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, Jookingr the
THE DOP DOCTOR 551
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 CrowTi t?. Saxham, had never developed
into ugly, sinister shape xinder 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 'l\\he 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.
])rawny navvies, progressed incessantly and at all hours
through the thoroughfares of the metropolis behind huge,
552 THE DOP DOCTOR
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, wdth more groanings and
more clankings, deplorable shrieks of steam-sirens and
hellish flares that might have been reflections from a
burning Tophet, cast upon yet bigger and denser clouds of
the oily-smelling steam.
Yes ! the big black opulent city was greatly changed.
But the change in the people, affecting all ranks and every
class, was even greater. There were compensations, if you
could balance against the decay of good manners the
improvements in sanitation, or set against the crop of evil
sown by the dissemination of the vilest literature in the
cheapest printed forms, the attainability, by the poorest,
of the noblest productions of literary genius. Or if in
congratulating yourself upon the marvellous progress of
Scientific Inventions, hailing from the keen-brained West,
you could condone the degradation of the English language
in the mouths of Shakespeare's countrymen and country-
women by the use of American slang phrases, common,
vulgar, coarse, alternating with choice expressions culled
from the vocabulary of the East End costermonger.
Privacy and reticence had become unfashionable,
impossible in this, the era of the guinea- hunting Press-
Interviewer. The barriers of social exclusiveness had given
way before the push of the plutocrat. The Rubicon be-
tween good Society and bad Society had become invisible.
Racial suicide and sexual licence most hideously prevailed,
spreading like some vile disease from rank to rank, and
class to class. Woman had become less womanly, man
more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer
any meaning. Religion had decayed ; the fear of God
had been forgotten. But Socialism was springing up, a
rank and lusty weed, in crude neglected soil that might
have been tilled to good purpose ; and a cheap and rowdy
form of patriotism was in a very healthy state, although
the Union Jack had not yet replaced the Bible in the
Board Schoola.
THE DOP DOCTOR 653
Yes, things had changed, and not for the better ! There
was a tang upon the moral atmosphere that made the
material petrol-fumes of the motor-omnibus almost accept-
able by comparison. The air of Gueldersdorp had been
cleaner, even with that taint from the crowded trenches
heavy on it. Things had changed ; and in the midst of all
these changes, the last sands of the Great Victorian Age
were running out of the glass.
That wonderful life was drawing to its simple, peaceful,
noble, profoundly touching close, this January of 1901.
And its ending had been hastened by the War.
Truly of her it has been said, and shall be ; even when
scholars of another race and another civilisation, springing
from the ashes of this, wrest from the reUcs of a history
of to-day the secrets of an ancient Past :
" She was not only the Sovereign, but the Mother of her
people."
* * « • •
Saxham turned into Cavendish Square, and was in
Harley Street. The white-enamelled door of a prosperous-
looking corner-house bore a soHd brass plate with his name.
He thought, as he opened the door with his Yale key, how
strange it was that this, the very house he had planned
to live in with Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and
decorated for her, should have been offered for his inspection
by the first West End house-agent he applied to upon
returning to London, whose dust he had shaken ofi the
soles of his feet forever, barely six years before.
The practitioner who occupied the house — not the
same man who had taken over the lease and fittings from
Saxham — was ready to give it up, with all its costly appur-
tenances and up-to-date appointments, together with the
practice, for quite a moderate slice of that legacy of
thousands that had come to Saxham from Mildred's dead
boy. Saxham, diagnosing the man's fever to realise
and depart, wondered what secret, desperate motive lay at
the back of his hurry ? The reason was soon evident. Like
thousands of other men, professional and private, the
physician had been a dabbler on the Stock Exchange, and
had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock, and
had been ruined by the War.
554 THE DOP DOCTOR
It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Washing-
ton P. Jukes and Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-
blooded buck niggers, elegantly scented, white-gloved, and
arrayed in evening garments of Bond Street cut, danced the
newly-imported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and
reception-saloons, with laughter on its reddened lips, and
paste imitations of its family jewels in its waved coiffure and
on its powdered bosom, and Ruin in its heart.
Great manufacturing enterprises, paralysed by lack of
funds and lack of hands, were ruined. Managers producing
plays to empty houses were ruined. Publishers publishing
books that nobody cared any longer to buy, were ruined.
Painters expending time, and money, and toil, upon pictures
that no longer foiind purchasers were ruined. ]\Iillions of
smaller folks were ruined by the ruin of their betters.
Only the great Mourning Warehouses prospered exceed-
ingly, like the Liquor Trade and the Drug Trade. And the
Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army-Contractors,
flourished as the green bay-tree.
Saxham's motor-brougham had gone on in advance,
twisting knowingly in and out of various corkscrew
thoroughfares. It was waiting outside the house in Lower
Harley Street as the Doctor reached the door. The
chauifeur, a spare, short young man, punctiliously buttoned
up in a long dark green, white-faced livery overcoat, a cap
with a white-glazed peak shading a lean, brickdust-coloured
face, with ugly, honest eyes that are familiar to the reader,
cocked one of the eyes inquii'ingly at his employer, and
receiving a sign implying that his services would not be
required for some space of time to come, pulled up the lever,
moved on, and turned down the side-street where were the
entrance-gates of the stable-yard that had been turned
into a garage. He had been in Saxham's employment
nearly two months.
W. Keyse, late Corporal, Gueldersdorp Town Guards,
had learned to clean, manage, and drive a motor-car belong-
ing to an officer of the Garrison in spare hours during the
Siege. This accomplishment, with some other learning
gained in those strenuous and bracing times, had Justified
him in answering a Times advertisement for a sober, active,
THE DOP DOCTOR 655
and intelligent young man, possessing the requisite know-
ledge of London — " Cripps !" said W. Keyse, " as if I
couldn't pick my way about the Bally Old Dustbin blind-
folded !" — to act in the capacity of chauffeur to a West End
medical practitioner.
An acquaintance who was a waiter at a Pall Mall Club
gave him the tip, and the chance came in the nick of time,
for Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse were up against it, and no gay
old error. " If you was to offer to blooming-well work for
people for nothing," said Mrs, Keyse, " my belief is, they
wouldn't 'ave you at the price !"
The Old Shop, as W. Keyse affectionately called his
native island, had drawn the exiles home. Good-bye to the
bronzed, ungirdled vastness of veld and karroo, and the
clear, dark, distant blue of level-topped mountains bathed
in the pure stimulating atmosphere that braces like cham
pagne. Old England called with a voice there was no
resisting, great draggle-tailed, grimy London beckoned to
her boy and girl, as the big grey liner, with the scarlet
smoke-stacks, engulfed her mails and passengers, dipped
the Red Ensign in farewell to Table Mountain, and sped
homewards on even keel over the heaving sappliire plain.
Southampton Dock was a pure delight to Mr. and ^Ira. W.
Keyse. The Waterloo Arrival platform sent thrills through
their boot-soles to the roots of their hair. They sat in the
Pit at the Oxford that night, and there was a South African
sketch on with two of the chronic-est jossers you ever see,
gassing away in khaki behind earthworks of sacks stuffed
with straw, and standing up to chuck sentimental and
patriotic ballads off their chests, while the Enemy, who had
kept up an intermittent rifle-practice at the wing, left off —
presumably to listen. " After being used to the Reel Thing,"
W. Keyse said, " it was enough to make you up and blub !"
That was the first disillusion. Others followed. The
aunt who had inhabited one of the ginger- brick almshouses
over aginst 'Ighgyte Cemetery was dead when they took
her a whole pound of tea and three-quarters of best cooked
ham, and the delicacies had to be given to the old woman
next door, with whom the deceased had always had words.
You couldn't 'ave expected the old gaJ to last much longer,
but still it was a blow.
556 THE DOP DOCTOR
Lobster had long ago given 'Melia the go-by, they
learned, in return for the ham and the tea ; and they got her
address and hunted her up in a back-street behind the
Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise his
charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to
a sweated German in the baking-trade and mother of two
of the dirtiest kids you ever ! And Mrs. Keyse, to
whom her William had expatiated upon the subject of his
family, maintained a portentous dumbness, punctuated
with ringing sniffs, during the visit, and was sarcastic on
the bus, and tearfully penitent when they got back to the
Waterloo Road lodging that was cheap at the weekly rent,
she said, if you were paying for dirt and live-stock.
You couldn't spend your time enjoying yourself for ever,
she added a little later on, as their small Joint purse of
savings dwindled and that pale ghost that men call Want
began to hover about their hired bolster. W. Keyse had
thought of soliciting a re-engagement at the fried-fish shop
in the High Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept
away in favour of an establishment where they mended
your boots while you waited. So he sought elsewhere.
The War had drained away so many men, one would have
thought employment could be had by any chap who took
the trouble to walk about and look for it. But the soles of
W. Keyse's boots were worn to their last thickness of brown
paper, and all his clothes and Emigration Jane's, with the
exception of the things him and her had on, had been
pawned before it occurred to the man that that kind of
walking ended in the Workhouse. The woman had known
it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of W.
Keyse stood him in no good stead. London was stiff with
liars who boasted of having been through the Siege, and their
lies were more ornamental and sparkling than his truths.
Mrs. W. Keyse would have took a situation as General,
and glad, but there were family reasons against that. She
had broke down and cried somethink dreadful on her
William's shabby tweed shoulder the morning he went out
to answer the West End Doctor's advertisement. He
kissed her and told her to keep her hair on, but she was so
hysterical that he was fair afryde to leave 'er. So he took
lier along, and his good Angel must have suggested thai.
THE DOP DOCTOR 557
Cripps ! — when the manservant in plain clothes said,
" Step this way, upstairs please " — W. Keyse and wife
having applied at the area-door — " and Dr. Saxham will see
you." the name, not having been mentioned in the adver-
tisement, which gave only the address and an initial, im-
parted to both an electrical shock of surprise. They had
looked a very small and very shabby and very lost and
lonely little couple under those high-moulded ceilings and
upon the Turkey carpets that covered the polished parquet
of the handsomely-furnished and well-appointed consulting-
room that the practitioner who had caved in through South
African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate setting for
his bald-browed and portly presence. Now both curved
backbones assumed the perpendicular, and their wide
Cockney mouths were wreathed in joyful smiles.
The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing-
table that matched it, the man with the black head and
square pale face and heavy muscular shoulders, who looked
up from among his papers and notebooks with the receiver
of a telephone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them
with a kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a
word or forgot a face. And here were two faces from
Gueldersdorp. He shook the hands that belonged to them,
and said in his curt way :
" How are you, Mrs. Keyse ? And you, Keyse ? You
may guess when I heard that somebody had called to
answer my advertisement I hardly imagined that two old
patients had dropped down on me from the skies !"
The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth
agape and the tears trickling do\^Ti her hollow cheeks. The
young man swallowed something with a violent effort, and
blurted out :
" Lumme, Doctor ! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out
of the Other Shop — an' landin' in tlie middle of New Jeru-
salem ! Weeks along " — he picked up the shabby bowler
that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet — " for weeks
along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi'
me ! Now I knows ! I've bin 'omesick — fair old 'ome-
sick for a sniffer of the very plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appi-
ness to git away out of four months back. Good old
Gueldersdorp !" He winked the wet out of his eyes and
558 THE DOP DOCTOR
pointed to Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. " An' look at 'er !
Doin' a blub on the strength of it ! That's wot it is to be a
woman ! Ain't it, sir ?"
Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the
thin girl in the mended Jacket and the large and feathered
hat that topped the colossal structure of fair, frizzled hair,
even as she dried her eyes with a twopenny handkerchief
edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took the
lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple
fingers, and turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to
the light, and said, touching the little round blue scar left
by the enemy's bullet at the angle of the wide left nostril
and the other mark of its egress below the inner comer of
the right eye :
" You found out what a woman can be, my man, when
she helped to nurse you at the Hospital."
" Gawd knows I did !" affirmed W. Keyse. " An' since
she's bin' my wife " The prominent Adam's apple in
his thin throat jerked. He gulped a ^^ob down as he looked
at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her
eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her
mate, there shone the answering light of love. And Sax-
ham's face dark3ned with angry blood, and his strong,
supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage impulse to
dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows
Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his owti
beggary.
Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that
sweet fire in answer to the challenge of his own ! Empty,
empty the heart whose chambers were swept and decked
and garlanded for a guest who never came ! Lonely, lonely,
desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her,
touch of her — dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was
yet to man !
He had said to her : " But come to me, and I shall be
content — even happy. Live under my roof, take the shelter
of my name — I ask no more !"
He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be
companioned, in the silence that would never be broken by
Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He was not content ; his
craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and gnawed
THE DOP DOCTOR 659
his heart like some voracious, sharp-ianged, predatory
animal. Happy — was he ? Happy as one who sits beside
a stream of living water and yet must perish of drought.
He could only imagine one greater misery, one more ex-
cruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than
this happiness she had conferred upon him — and that was
to be without her.
He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling
misery, and kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the
absurd little couple. W. Keyse was tested, proved capable
of manipulating the steering-wheel, duly certificated, and
engaged. There were a couple of living-rooms over the
coach-house that was now a garage. Saxham sent in some
plain furniture, and behold an Eden ! Pots of ferns pur-
chased from a street hawker showed gieenly behind the tidiest
muslin blinds you ever sor ! and Mrs. William Keyse, ex-
pectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and
as she patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn —
and whether they're let out on hire to parties wanting such
things or whether the mice eat 'oles in 'em, who can say ?
but the styte in wliich they come back from Them Plyces
is something chronic ! — she sang, sometimes " Come, Buy
My Coloured 'Erring," which they learned you along of the
Tonic Sofa at the Board School in Kentish Towti ; and some-
times " The Land Where Dreams Come True !"
This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two
rooms — one of them opening upon nothing by a loft-door —
over a garage tliat had been a coach-house, at the end of the
paved yard looking towards the rear of the tall, drab-
stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows
were shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens
of silk muslin rurming on polished brass rods. But when
the electric lights were switched on, before the inner blinds
were drawn down, you could see quite plain into the con-
sulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat
at his big writing-table tliat was heaped with notebooks and
papers and had a telephone on it, and all sorts of mysterious
instruments in shining brass and silver, as brightly polished
as the gleaming thing with a lid, shaped like a violin-case
and with a spirit-lamp underneath it, in which all sorts of
wicked-looking knives and forceps were boiled when they
560 THE DOP DOCTOR
were taken out of the black bag ; or into Mrs. Saxham's
bedroom, that was on the floor above, and was done up in
the loveliest style you ever ! " Not that Missis W. Keyse
would exchange 'er present quarters for Buckin'am Palace,"
she declared, pouring out her William's tea, " if invited to
do so by 'er Majesty the Queen 'erself."
William stopped blowing at his smoking saucer.
" They s'y She's dyin' !" His face lengthened. He put
the saucer down. " They 'ave it in the evenin' pypers !"
Mrs. Keyse had a flash of inspiration.
" I reckon it don't seem dpn' to 'Er !"
" Wot are you gettin' at ?" asked the man in bewilder-
ment.
" I'm gettin' at it like this," said the lighter brain. " All
'er long life she's 'ad to be a queen first, £in' a wife after.
Now she lays there she's no more than a wife — a wife wots
goin' to meet 'er 'usband agin after yeers an' yeers o'
waitin'. For 'er Crown she leaves be'ind 'er for 'er son,
but 'er weddin' ring goes wiv' 'er in 'er coffin ! See ?"
" I pipe. Wonder wot 'Er an' 'Im '11 s'y to on© another
fust thing they meet ?"
" They won't s'y nothink," said the visionary, soberly
taking tea. " But I shouldn't be surprised but wot they'd
stand an' look in one another's fyces wivout s'yin' a word,
for a week or so by the Time Above, an' the tears a-runnin'
down an' never stoppin' !"
" Garn ! There ain't no cryin' in 'Eaven," said W.
Keyse, beginning on the bread-and-butter. " The Bible
tells you so !"
" That's right enough. But I lay Gawd lets folks do a
bit o' blub — Just once," said Emigration Jane, " before 'E
wipes their eyes, becos you don't begin to know wot
'appiness means until you've cried for Joy !"
" I pretty near did when the Doctor give me this chauf-
feur-ing Job, and so I tell you stryte," affirmed her lord
" D'you know I 'ad a shy at thankin' 'im agyne, an' got my
'ead bit orf. ' Shut your damned mouth !' — that's wot the
Doctor s'ys to me. Well, I 'ave shut it !" He closed his
Jaws upon an inch-thick slice. " But wot I s'y to myself
is," he continued, masticating, " that makes the Third
Time, an' the Third Time's the Charm !"
THE DOP DOCTOR 661
" Wot do you mean by the third time, deer ?" asked Mrs,
Keyse, putting more hot water in the teapot.
" The First," said W. Keyse, with an air of mystery,
" was in a saloon-bar full o' Transvaal an' Free State
Dutchies at Gueldersdorp."
" Lor' ! You don't ever mean " began his wife, and
stopped short. The scene of her j&rst meeting with W.
Keyse flashed back upon her mental vision. She saw the
big man waking up out of his drunken stupor and lurching
to the rescue of the little one. " Was it 'im ?" she panted,
as the teapot ran over on the clean coarse cloth. " Was
it Dr. Saxham ?"
" You may tyke it from me it was." W. Keyse rescued
the kettle, restored it to the hob, returned to his place, and
shook his finger at her warningly. " And if you go to
remind me as wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e
did " He looked portentous warnings.
" I never would. Oh, William !"
" Mind as you never do, that's all ! . . . I tried to thank
'im then," went on W. Keyse, " an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it.
I tried to thank 'im agyne at the Hospital — an' e' wouldn't
'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is own doorstep,
an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is — Wait !
When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a
fairy tyle in the Third Standard Class Reader, all about a
Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a Louse, an' 'ow the Louse
laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion back. . . ."
" I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse.
" But it was a mouse " — she repressed a shudder — " an'
not the — thing you said."
" Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse
with burning eyes. " And the Doctor's goin' to find it
does." He held up his lean right hand and swore it. " So
'elp me, Jiminy Cripps !"
Lvin
Lynettb Saxham came into the consulting-room that was
on the ground-floor of the house in Harley Street, behind
the room where patients waited their turn. Her quick,
light step and the silken rustling of the lining of her gown
30
562 THE DOP DOCTOR
broke the spell that had bound the man who sat motionless
in the armchair before the Sheraton writing-table, staring
with fixed eyes and gripping the arms of his chair with un-
conscious force. . . .
A faint, pleasant odour of Russia leather and camphor-
wood came from the dwarf bookcases that dadoed the walls.
The room was quite dark ; the two high windows, screened
by clear muslin blinds running on gilded rods, showed pale
parallelograms of cold twilight. The coachhouse and stable
building at the end of the paved yard showed as a cube of
blackness. One window in the centre of the wall \A'as
lighted up, and on its white cotton blind the shadows of a
man and woman acted a Domestic Play.
Perhaps Saxham had been watching this ? The shadow-
man seemed to sit at a table reading a newspaper by the
light of the lamp behind him, the shadow womui sat
nearer the window, employed upon some homely kind of
needlework. Her outline when she rose, showed that the
woman's great, mysterious ordeal, the sacrament of keenest
anguish by which her dearest and most sacred joy is won,
was very close upon her. She passed behind the man as if
to fetch something, stopped behind his chair, and drew her
arm about his neck, leaning her cheek down to his so that
their two shadows became one.
The starving waif outside the window of the cook-shop
knows no more excruciating aggravation of his pangs than
to look at food, and yet keeps on looking. It may have
been like this with Saxham, empty of all love, and gnawed
by the tooth of a sharper hunger than that which is merely
physical. He started out of his lethargy when his wife's
voice reached him.
" Owen ! . . . Why, you are sitting in the dark !"
Lynette heard someone moving among the shadows. The
electric reading-lamp upon the writing-table diffused a
mellow radiance under its green silk shade. Two other
globes sprang into shining life, and showed her, smiling,
and shrinking a Uttle from the sudden incursion of light,
as Saxham, with the quiet, unhurried, scrupulous courtesy
he always showed towards his wife, received the heavy
driving-mantle of sables that she dropped from her shoulders,
and laid it over a chair. A frosty breath from the outer
THE DOP DOCTOR 563
atmosphere clung to it, but the silkeii linin g was pene-
tratingly warm, and instinct with the sweetness of the
woman, so much so that it was agony to the man. . . .
She wore a white cloth gown of elegantly-simple cut,
that revealed with unostentatious art the lovely lines of
the slender shape. A knot of white and golden freesias,
exhaling a clean, delicate perfume, was fastened at her
breast ; her wonderful red-brown hair was shaded by a
broad-brimmed brown felt hat of Vandyke shape, with
creamy drooping plumes. The rare promise of her beauty
had fulfilled itself in the last six months. She was be-
wilderingly lovely.
She drew out the Jewelled pins that fastened her hat,
and threw it down, and took a favourite seat of hers beside
the fire, and looked across at the man who was her hus-
band, smiling faintly as she held her little foot, deUcately
shod, high-arched and slim, to the blaze of the wood-fire.
" Do I interfere with your work ? Are any patients
waiting ?"
"It is past my hour for seeing patients," said Saxham,
with a smile. " And if anyone were waiting, you are an
older client, and have the prior claim."
" We will have tea in here, then," she said, and touched
the bell, adding : " I am fond of this room."
It was Just now a place that was dear to Saxham. He
came across to the hearth and stirred the fire to a ruddier
blaze, and stood at the opposite side of it, leaning an arm
upon the mantelshelf. The shining mirror above it re-
flected a square black head that was getting grizzled, and
the profile of a face that was haggard and worn.
The servant came with tea, and drew down the upper
bhnds, shutting out that mocking shadow- play at wliich
Saxham had been staring. As Lynette busied herself with
the shining silver and deHcate Japanese porcelain, there
was a chance of studying, unobserved, the beloved book
of her face — a locked book to Saxham since that day in
the Cemetery at Guelder sdorp.
Ah, what a face it was ! It fascinated and held him.
Such long, thick, shadowy eyelashes, sweeping the white
cheeks ! Such a low, wide, perfectly modelled forehead
above them, with fine arched eyebrows, much darker than
564 THE DOP DOCTOR
the richly rippling, parted hair that was coiled and twisted
and roped into a mass behind the small, delicate ears, as
though its owner were impatient of its luxuriance. Such
a close-folded, mysterious mouth, with deep-cut curves,
hiding the pure white, rather overlapping teeth. An
irregular nose, rather square-ended, with eager nostrils ; a
rounded chin, with a little cleft in it, went to the making of
the face that Saxham and many others thought so beautiful.
Only something was wanting to it. " Animation," the
physiognomist would have said. " Vitality, mobility."
" Health," might have thought the ordinary observer, mis-
taking the bluish shadows under the drooped eyelids and
about the mouth and nostrils for the usual signals of
debility.
But Saxham, when he looked into the golden-hazel eyes,
so often hidden by the thick white eyelids, with their deep
fringe of black-brown lashes, said to himself with bitterness :
" She is quite well. Nothing on earth is wrong with her,
except that she is not happy ! I can give her everything
else on earth, it seems, but what she needs most of all !"
Let Joy, that radiant torch of the soul, illuminate those
dim windows, let Happiness sink Uke sweet rain into the
dry heart, and the whole woman would awaken into vivid
glowing beauty, like the parched South African veld after
the spring rains. Red tulips would bloom between the
boulders ; exquisite glowing pelargoniums and snow-white or
pale-blue iris would clothe the baked earth. The ice-plant
would no longer be the only green thing growing in the
crannies of the rock. Delicate ferns and dew-gemmed
pitcher-plants would quiver there, and the spikes of the
many-coloured gladioli would thrust from the earth like
spears ; and the sweet-scented clematis and the passion-
vine would trail and blossom in rose and white and purple
on the edges of the kloofs and gorges, every stem and leaf
and bud and blossom growing and rejoicing in the balmy
breeze and the glorious June sunshine ; the cruel, lashing
rains, the devastating floods, and the burning droughts for-
gotten as though they had never been.
Meanwhile the heavy fringe of dark lashes drooped wearily
on Lynette's white cheeks, and ihe long-limbed, slight, supple
body letmed back in the favourite chair by the fireside
THE DOP DOCTOB, 565
with a little air of languor that only added to her allure.
And Saxham, looking at her, said again in his heart :
" Her children — let them settle the money upon her
children !"
She had learned to love, and thrilled at the touch of
passion. Well, Beauvayse was dead, but Love would come
again. He would read its resurrection in the radiance of
those eyes. Then, exit Saxham ! Such a marriage as theirs
could be easily dissolved, but he would not take the easy
road. He had decided. His should be the strait and
narrow way of death. His death was a debt he owed her.
You are to learn why !
While he reviewed, for the thousandth time, this deter-
mination of his, and told himself again how the thing
should be done, his tea had grown quite cold. She leaned
forwards and touched his sleeve in drawing his attention
to the neglected cup, and flushed because he started and
looked at her so strangely.
He never, if it could be avoided, touched her. Her old
shrinking from him had worn away. His companionship,
though he did not guess it, was to her desirable — even dear.
The light, firm tread of his small muscular feet, the curt,
decided utterance, made welcome music in her ears. She
would watch him without his knowledge when they went
abroad together. The esteem in which his peers and
seniors held him, the deference with which his opinions
were solicited and listened to gave her strange delightful
throbs of pride.
She had felt the first stirring of that pride in him when
the man who had been the thinking brain and the beating
heart of beleaguered Gueldersdorp had said, wTinging her
husband's hand :
" ' // ' you have been of any use to me. ... ' If '. , , .
You have been my right hand and my mainstay from first
to last, Saxham, and while I Uve I shall remember it !"
Brave words — heartsome words for the hearing of a
woman who had loved him. Lynette was almost sorry
that she did not.
He did not believe that he had won any hearts in Guel-
dersdorp. His curtness, his roughness, his harshness had
been unfavourably commented upon many and many a
566 THE DOP DOCTOR
time. Yet when he left them, how the people cheered !
What volumes of roaring sound from lusty throats had
bidden him good-bye and God-speed !
" Hurrah for the Doctor ! Three cheers for Saxham !
Don't forget us, Doc ! Come back again ! God bless you,
Saxham! Bravo, Saxham ! Saxham! Saxham! Hurrah!"
A woman who had loved him would have wept for Joy.
A pity his wife did not !
How strangely Owen had looked at her Just now, when
she had brushed his sleeve lightly with her finger-tip !
How curious it was that he never touched her if he could
help it ! She had quite forgotten having told him that,
while she liked to know him near, she could not endure the
thought of being taken by him, caressed by him, held in
his embrace. . . . That had been the frank, truthful
expression of her feelings at the time. She did not recoil
so from his contact now. She had not realised how deeply
her words had wounded the man's great, suffering, patient
heart. Spoken, they had passed from her memory. It is
so natural for a fair, sweet woman to forget ! It is so
impossible for a man who has been stabbed to help re-
membering, with the deep, bleeding wound unclosed !
There was another thing that Saxham did not know.
Although, as time went on, the beloved image of the
Mother, cherished in the innermost shrine of her adopted
daughter's heart, suffered no change in the clear, firm
beauty of its outlines or deterioration in the richness of
its tender and austere and gracious colouring ; and each
new day supplied some fresher garland of old imperishable
memories to grace it with ; — that Shape with the grey-green
Jewel-eyes and the gay mouth that laughed had faded —
faded ! She would not own it even to herself, but the keen
edge of her grief for Beauvayse was blunted. The anniver-
sary of his death, occurring in the coming month of February,
was to be a solemn retreat of sacred prayer for her. But
it was the Mother's death-day also, when to the palm of
martyrdom had been added the Saint's crown. She was
going to spend three days at the Kensington Convent,
where the dead nun had taken the vows. She told Saxham
now of the arrangement she had made through Lady
Castleclare, who was intimate with the Superior.
THE DOP DOCTOR 667
" It will be a little like old times," she said to Saxham,
" living in a Convent again. And there are many Sisters
there who knew Mother, and loved her '*
Her eyes swam in sudden tears. And Saxham, as he looked
at her, felt his heart contract in a spasm of bitter jealousy.
All that love for the dead, and not a crumb for the living !
He saw Beauvayse, his rival still, stretching a hand from the
grave to keep her from him. And he could have cried
aloud :
" Those tears are for a trickster who cheated you
into loving him. Listen, now, and I, who have never
lied, even to win you, will show him to you as he really
was ! . . ."
But he did not yield to the temptation to enlighten her.
A vision rose up before him of a dying man on a camp-
bed, and he heard Ms own voice saying :
" I will never tell her ! I will not blacken any man's
reputation W further my own interests !"
She was speaking, telling him something. He came
back out of the fierce mental struggle to listen to the voice
that was so sweet and clear, and yet so cold, so cold. . . .
" Imagine it ! I met an old friend to-day at my dress-
maker's in Conduit Street. Not a man. A girl who was a
pupil at the Convent at Gueldersdorp — or, rather, I should
say a woman, for she is married."
Saxham asked :
" Is she an Englishwoman or a Colonial ?"
" She is of mingled French and Dutch blood. She was
a Miss Du Taine. Her father was a member of the Volks-
raad at Pretoria. He controls large interests on the Kand,
and has an estate near Johannesburg. She is married to
an English gentleman. He is very rich, and has a title.
She told it me, but I have forgotten it. She asked me
to drive home and lunch with her. . . ." She hesitated.
" I did not want to go," she said.
" Well, and what happened then ?" Saxham asked.
" I made some kind of excuse, and hailed a hansom, and
drove to Lady Castleclare's. I lunched with her. She is
always very kind. She thought the pearls were beautiful.
But — but surely they cost you a great deal of money 1"
568 THE DOP DOCTOR
She touched a string of the gleaming, milky things that
encircled her white throat above the lace cravat. Saxham
said, smiling :
" They did not cost more than I could afford to pay.
I am glad you liked them. I told Marie to put them on
your dressing-table, where you would be likely to see them
in the morning."
" You are too good to me !" she said, with quivering
lips, looking at him. Her white hand wavered in the air,
as though she meant to stretch it out to him.
" It is not possible to be too good — to you !" said Sax-
ham curtly. He would not see the outstretched hand.
She drew it back, and faltered :
" You give me everything "
" You have given me what I most wanted in the world !"
he lied bravely.
"But " — she rose and stood beside him on the hearth-
rug, tall, and fair, and slender, and oh ! most seductively,
maddeningly sweet to his adoring thought — " but you take
nothing for yourself. That bedroom of yours at the top
of the house is wretchedly bare and comfortless ; and then,
those absurd pictures !"
She laughed ruefully, recalling the row of pictorially-
illustrated nursery rhymes that adorned the brown-paper
dado of Saxham's third-floor bedroom, the previous tenant
having been a family man.
" — Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy ; the Four-and-
Twenty Blackbirds, and the Cow that jumped over the
Moon. How can you endure them ?"
She looked at him, and was startled by the set grimness
of his face and the thunderous lowering of the black smudge
of eyebrow. He said :
" You went to my room to-day. Why ?"
She crimsoned, and stammered :
" It was this morning, after you had gone out. I — it
struck me that your linen ought to be overlooked and put
to rights from time to time. How did you know ?"
He did not explain that the perfume of her hair, of her
breath, of her dress, had lingered when she had gone, to
tempt and taunt and torture him. He said nothing of the
little knot of violets that had dropped from her breast upon
THE DOP DOCTOR 669
fehe floor, and he had found there. His heart beat against
it even then. He answered :
" You told me yourself. And, as for the linen, let it be.
The housekeeper knows that she is expected to attend to it."
" She isn't your wife !"
- Her golden eyes flashed at him rebelliously. He was
provoking her, in his innocence of all intention, as a subtle
wooer might have planned to do.
" I am extremely glad that she is not." His mouth re-
laxed in a smile, and his thunderous brows smoothed them-
selves. " And now, don't you think you ought to go and
dress ? You are dining with Lady Harmah and Major
Wrynche at The Carlton at seven, and going on to a
theatre." He held his watch out. " Six-thirty now," he
said, and restored the chronometer to his waistcoat pocket.
" Very well." She moved a step or two in the direction
of the door, and turned her head as gracefully as a young
deer, and looked back at him. " But you are coming,
too ?" she said, and her eyes were very soft.
He shook his head.
" It is impossible. I have several urgent cases to visit,
and there is an article for the Scientific Review." He moved
his hand slightly in the direction of some sheets of manu-
script that lay upon the blotting-paper, " I have a heavy
night's work before me with that alone. My excuses have
already been telephoned to Lady Hannah."
" Owen !"
She spoke his name in a whisper.
— " Owen !"
" Yes ?"
" Couldn't I ? — would you care to have me ? — may I
stay and dine at home with you ?"
" And disappoint your friends ! . . . Most certainly not.
Unless, indeed " — his tone warmed to interest — " unless
you are not feeling well ?"
" I am perfectly well, thanks !" she said coldly.
" Then go to your dinner and your play, child," said
Saxham, with the smile that changed and softened his
harsh features almost into beauty. " I will drive with you
to The Carlton, and fetch you from the play. Which of
the theatres have you decided to patronise ?"
570 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Lady Hannah and the Major left the choice to me," she
said, wdth a little touch of girlish importance, " so I tele-
phoned to Nickalls in Bond Street for a box at The
Leicester. He had not got one ; he sent me three stalls
for " The Chiffon Girl " at The Variety instead. It Is a
revival. I don't quite know what that means," she added,
rather puzzled by Saxham's silence and the grimness of
his face. " You do not mind at all ? You do not think
it is the kind of play the Mother would not have liked me
to see ?"
" No !" said Saxham curtly, and with averted eyes.
She bent her head to him as he opened the door, and went
away to her own rooms on the floor above, the drawing-
room that was upholstered and hung with delicate, green-
and- white, rose-garlanded Pompadour brocade, and graceful
water-colours from famous hands, and furnished with every
luxury and elegance that the heart of woman could desire; the
charming boudoir, pink as a sea-shell, and full of new books
and old china; the bedroom, with the blue-and- white decora-
tions, where an ivory Crucifix that had always stood upon
the Mother's writing-table hung above the dainty bed. . . .
" I think he is a little hard on me at times," she said, as
she passed through the warm, firelit, perfumed rooms that
were fragrant with the narcissi and violets and lilies that
were sent in by his orders, and strewn with the costly,
pretty trifles that she, who had been used to the barrack-
like bareness of the Convent, delighted in like a child, and
the gleaming mirrors gave her back her loveliness. " He
treats me as if I were a stranger. And, after all, I am bis
wife "
Saxham's patients foimd him even curter and more
brusque in manner than usual that evening, and the article
for the Scientific Review made little way. He threw down
his pen at last, and leaned his head upon his hands and
wondered, staring at the unfinished page of manuscript with
eyes that saw no meaning in the sentences, whether any
man born of woman had ever been so great a fool as the
man who had written them ?
To have made that promise of secrecy to the dead traitor
was an act of sheer, quixotic folly. To have kept it was
madness, nothing less. And yet Saxham knew that he
THE DOP DOCTOR 671
would keep it always. That if she ever learned the truth,
it would be hinted by the chance remark of some stranger,
gathered from a paragraph in some newspaper. There
was a small-print line at the bottom of the quarter-column
devoted by the compilers of Whittinger's " Peerage " to
the Marquisate of Foltlebarre, which might have en-
hghtened her. He turned to it now, and read :
" Viscountess Beanvayse, Esther, dau: of Samuel Levah, Esq., of Fins-
bury, E.G., mar: June, 1899, the late John Basil Edward Tobart, Lieut.
Grey Hussars, 11th Viscount Beauvayse. Killed in action during the
defence of Gueldersdorp, Feb., 1900, while atta: as Junior aide to the
Staff of Colonel Commanding H.M. Forces, leaving issue one dau: The
Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart, now aged eighteen months."
At the Clubs, Service and Civil, Saxham had heard the
impromptu marriage of the late John Basil Edward Tobart
freely discussed. The story of his subsequent entangle-
ment " with some girl or other at Gueldersdorp " had been
mooted in his presence a dozen times by Society chatterers,
whose enjoyment of the scandal would have been pleasantly
stimulated by the knowledge that " Saxham, M.D.,
r.R.C.S., late Attached Medical Staff," was married to the
girl. But they did not know, and she . . .
What use — what use in her knoA\ing ? Of what avail
could be the melting of the ice about her heart, the loosen-
ing of the fetters of her tongue, the quickening of her nature,
the miracle vouchsafed ? Of none, now, for a reason !
Saxham told himself, in those hours when he propped his
bm'ning forehead on his hands and looked into the starless
night of his desolate soul, that he had ceased even to desire
that she should come to love him. Far better that she
should never know !
It was growing late, and he had promised to fetch her
from the theatre. The silver clock upon the mantelshelf
chimed ten. He had stretched his hand to the telephone
to ring up his motor-brougham from the garage, when he
heard the click of her latchkey in the outer door and the
silken whisper of her garments passing quickly through
the hallway. Then came a knock at the consulting-room
door — sharp, quick, imperious, oddly unlike Lynette's soft
tap. ... At the summons Saxham made two strides across
the carpet and opened to her, a question on his lips.
572 THE DOP DOCTOR
" Why have you come back so early ? Has anything
happened ?"
Even as he asked, her look told why. She knew. . . .
She knew. . . . Her face was rigid, a pure white mask of
ivory ; there was not a trace of colour even in the set lips.
Her eyes burned upon him, twin flames of dark amber,
steady under levelled brows. She was wrapped in a long
ermine-caped and bordered black brocade mantle, that
gleamed with jet passementerie ; a scarf of white lace covered
her head. It hid the red-brown hair with the Clytie ripple
in it, and the great silken coils, transfixed by a sapphire
and diamond dagger, that were massed at the nape of the
slender neck. Seen so, she was nunlike in her chaste
severity, but for those stern, resentful eyes.
" I have come to tell you that I am no longer in ignorance.
I have found out what you have hidden from me so long —
what the Wrynches knew and would not tell me ; what the
world has known while I sat in the dark. ..."
A spasm wrung her mouth. Saxham rolled a chair
towards her. He said guardedly, avoiding her eyes :
" Until you acquaint me in detail with what you
have heard, I cannot explain or defend myself. Will
you not sit down ? You are looking pale and over-
wrought."
She laid one slight gloved hand upon the chair-back, and
leaned upon it.
" I would rather stand, if you have no objection, whilst I
tell you what I have learned to-night. I dined alone with
Lady Hannah at the Carlton ; we went together to the
theatre — ]\Iajor Wrynche had had a summons to attend at
Marlborough House."
She untied the knot of lace beneath her chin, and stripped
away the long gloves with nervous haste and impatience,
and tossed them with the scarf upon the chair beside her,
and went on :
" I had heard much of ' The Chiffon Girl.' I wanted to
see it. When the First Act began I wondered very much
why they called it a Musical Comedy, when the noise the
orchestra made could hardly be called music ; and there
was no comedy — only slang expressions and stupid jokes.
But the actress who sang and danced in the principal
THE DOP DOCTOR 573
part . . . Miss Lavigne . . ." She had loosened her mantle ;
now she let it drop upon the Eastern carpet, emerging from
its blackness as a slender, supple, upright shape in clinging,
creamy- white draperies ; her exquisite arms bare to the
shoulder, and clasped midway by heavy, twisted bracelets
of barbaric gold, her nymph-like bosom swelling from the
folded draperies of the low-cut bodice like a twin- budded
narcissus flowering from the pale calyx, her sweet throat
clasped about with Saxham's gift of pearls.
" She could not sing, though the people applauded and
encored her " — there was a gleam of disdain in the golden
eyes — " but she was very pretty . . . she danced with
wonderful grace and lightness ... it was like a swallow
dipping and darting over the shallows of the river-shore —
like a branch of red pomegranate-blossoms swayed and
svmng by a spring breeze. ... I admired her, and yet I
was sorry for her. ... To have to pose and bound and
whirl before all those rows and rows of staring faces night
after night ! . . ."
Saxham did not smile. But a muscle twitched in his
cheek as he said :
" She would hardly thank you for pitying her."
" She would be right to resent my pity !" L3mette burst
out with sudden vehemence. " She has been injured, and
I was the cause ! Oh ! how could you be so cruel as to let
me go on loving him ? Was it kind ? Was it fair to
yourself and me ?"
Saxham's square, pale face was perfectly expressionless.
He waited in silence to hear the rest.
" You know of whom I speak . . ." said Lynette. " He
was gay and beautiful and winning — not chivalrous, as I
believed him ; not honest, or sincere, or true. Months
before we met at Gueldersdorp he was the husband of this
actress — the woman I saw upon the stage to-night. And
you knew all this, and never told me ! You knew that liis
memory was sacred in my heart. A woman I was introduced
to here in London once tried to blacken it. She said she
wished to act towards me as a friend. I remember that I
laughed in her faice as I turned and left her. ' You
thought to make me hate him,' I said. ' You have failed
miserably. If it were possible to love him better — if I could
574 THE DOP DOCTOR
honour his memory more than I do now, I would, because
of the evil you have spoken of my dead !' "
She heard Saxham draw breath heavily. She went on
with increased passion, and gathering resentment :
" All my life long I might have gone on in my blindness,
honouring the dishonourable, cherisliing the base, but for
the idle gossip of two strangers in the theatre to-night — a
man and a woman in the stalls behind us. They talked all
the louder when the lights went down. They wondered
' why the Lavigne did not star on the programme as a Vis-
countess V but, of course, they said, ' the Foltlebarres would
never stand that ! They were nearly wild when that hand-
some scamp of theirs married her — poor Beauty Beauvayse,
of the Grey Hussars.' He and she had kept house together ;
there was a kiddie coming ; they said the little woman played
her cards uncommonly well ! . . . The marriage was pulled
off on the quiet at a Registrar's a week or so before Beau got
his appointment on the Staff. Straight of the fellow, but
afterwards, at Gueldersdorp, didn't he kick over the matri-
monial pole ? Somebody had seen his engagement to a
Miss Something-or-other announced in a Siege newspaper,
published the very day he got killed. . . . Poor beggar !
Rough on him, and rough on the Foltlebarres, and a facer
for Lessie . . . and what price the girl ?' And I was the
girl ! . . . It was of me they were talking ! . . ."
Her lips writhed back from her white teeth. She winced
and shuddered. " Oh ! can't you see me sitting and listen-
ing, and every word vitriol, burning to the bone ?"
" Why did you remain," said Saxham, wrung by pity,
" to be toftuied by such prurient prattlers ? Why did you
not get up and leave the place ?"
" I could not move," she said. ... "I could only sit and
listen. Then the First Act ended, and the Ughts went up,
and Lady Hannah touched my arm. I knew when our
eyes met that she had heard as I had. She got up, saying,
' I think we have had enough of this V and then we came
away."
She caught her breath and bit her underlip, and he saw
her eyes grow misty.
" She sent a Commissionaire to call a hansom. . . . She
took my hand as we stood waiting in the empty vestibule.
THE DOP DOCTOR 57fl
She said : ' Those chattering pies behind us have saved me
some bad half -hours ! Your husband, for some reason of
his own, has never told you. And it has more than once
occurred to me that if I were the true friend I want to be
to both of you, I'd have proved it before now by telling
you myself. But I've learned to be doubtful of my own
inspirations ! . . .* I asked her then if all they had said was
true ? She shrugged her shoulders and nodded : " Pour
tout dire, they let Beau down rather gently. . . . But if he
never could tell the truth to a woman, he never went back
on a man ; and, after all, these things run in the blood.
Passons Veponge Id-dessus. Forget him, and thank your
good Angel you're married to an honourable man !' "
Saxham's eyes were on the carpet. He did not raise
them or move a muscle of his face.
" She told me to forget him. It is easier to forgive him ;
there are deceits that smirch the soul of the deceived no
less than the deceiver. He lied to the Mother — that I
cannot pardon ! Perhaps some day — but I do not know.
Lady Hannah called you honourable. ... I needed no
one to tell me what you are and have always been ! You
hide the things that other men boast of . . . . You are loyal
even to those you scorn. You kept his secret. I have
reproached you to-night for keeping it, even while I
honoured you in my heart !"
" Do not honour me," said Saxham harshly, ** for
behaving with common decency ! Can a man tell tales on
anotlier who is dead ? To commit murder would be a
crime less cowardly. I do myself mere justice when I say
that I am incapable of an act so vile ! Nor would I blacken
a living man to make myself show whiter in any man's — or
woman's eyes !"
She was no longer pale. A lovely colour flushed her, and
her eyes were wistful and very kind. Her draperies rustled
as she moved towards liim. " Owen ..." she said, and
her white hands were held out to him, and her sweet mouth
quivered, and her voice was a sigh, " I am alivo at last to
your infinite generosity. I beg you to forgive me for being
blind before !"
" Generosity," said Saxham, " does not enter into the
question. My silence has no merits whatever. What good
576 THE DOP DOCTOR
could I have gained by telling you ?" He lifted his eyes,
and met hers full, dropping tlie words coldly one by one.
" The advantage one has ceased to desire can hardly be
called gain, in any sense of the word. And — I have left
off crying for the moon. Even were you willing to give it
me, I have ceased to wish for your love !"
She looked at him with piteous, incredulous wistfulness,
as he told the hardy lie. His mask of a face revealed
nothing, but he could not disguise the rage of hunger for
her that ravened in his famished eyes. They were upon
her lips, her throat, the lovely curves of her young bosom
even as he spoke ; she felt them as the kisses of a fierce,
possessive mouth, and glowed with sudden shame, and
something more. He saw her beauty change from the
pale rose to the fire-hearted crimson, tore away his eyes,
and mastered himself. He stepped back, and the still out-
stretched, quivering hands dropped nervelessly at her sides.
" You have asked me to pardon you," he said, " for
some fancied lack of perception. It is I who owe an
apology to you. Try and forgive me for having married
you. ... I should have known from the first that no good
or happiness could ever come of a contract like ours."
" Have I ever said I was unhappy ?" she demanded.
Her breath came quick and short.
" Your face has said so very often," returned Saxham,
looking at it, " though you were too considerate to tell me
so in words. But I ask you on this night that sees you freed
from an illusion, to have courage and not yield to depres-
sion. Your fetters may be broken sooner than you think !"
" Owen ! . . ."
She was paler than before, if that could be possible. She
swayed a little, and caught at the back of a chair that
was near, and there was terror in her darkened, dilated
eyes. . . .
" Do you say this to prepare me ? Have you any ill-
ness ? Do you mean that you are going to die ?"
" I meant nothing . . ." answered Saxham, " except that
men are mortal, sometimes fortunately for the women who
are bound to them ! Gro to bed, my child ; to sleep will do
you good."
** Goodnight," she waid. and dropped her head, and
THE DOP DOCTOR 577
went away. He opened the door for ker, and locked it
after her, and went back to the writing-table, and sat in
his chair. He gripped the arms of it in anguish, and the
sweat of agony stood on the broad forehead where a woman
who had loved him would have laid her lips.
He had repelled her, slighted her, wounded her. , . . He
knew what it had cost him not to take those offered hands.
, . . He was tortured and wrung in body and in soul as he
took a key that himg upon his chain and unlocked a deep
drawer, and took a flask from it that gurgled as if some
mocking sprite had laughed aloud when he shook it close
to his ear. He whom she had praised as honourable was a
traitor no less than the dead man. He had said to her,
months ago in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp :
" I may die, but I will never fail you !"
He had not died, and he had failed her. The Dop
Doctor of Gueldersdorp was drinking hard again.
LIX
Befohe you turn away in loathing of the man whose ex-
perience of Life's game of football had been chiefly gained
from the ball's point of view, hear how it happened that
the work of all those months of stern self- repression and
strenuous denial had been rendered useless.
In the previous July, when Sir Danvers Muller was visiting
Lord WilHams of Afghanistan at Pretoria, Owen Saxham,
M.p., F.R.C.S., had been married to Lynette Bridget-Mary
Miidare at the Registrar's Office, Gueldersdorp, and at the
Catholic Church. One hour after the ceremony the happy
pair left by the mail for Cape Town.
Gueldersdorp turned out to do them honour. We have
heard the people cheer. Three days and three nights of
the Express, delayed in places by the wrecking of the line,
and then the Alpine mountain-ranges sank and dwindled
with the mercury in the thermometer. The little wliite
towns succeeded each other like pearls on a green string.
Humpy blue liills gave way to the flats, and then in
tlie shadow of Table Mountain — Babel's confusion of
tongues — and the stalwart flower of many nations,
37
578 THE DOP DOCTOR
arrayed and armed for battle, and the glory, and pomp,
and power of War.
The grey and white transports disgorged them, ants of
sober, neutral colours, marching in columns to attack other
ants. They grew upon the vision and filled it, and the
sound of their feet was louder than the beating of the surf on
Sea Point, and although martial music beat and blew them
on — a brazen whirhvind dominating the mind, blaring at the
ears — the trampling of men's feet and the hoofs of horses, and
the rolling of iron-shod wheels, triumphed in the long-run.
Saxham engaged rooms at the Trafalgar Hotel, a hand-
some caravanserai standing in its own gardens at the top
of Imperial Avenue, for himself and his wife, and the savage
irony that can be conveyed in the terra struck him, not
for the first time since he had laid gold and silver on the
open book, and endowed a woman with the gift of liimself
and all liis worldly goods.
It was early in the forenoon. They were to sail next day.
The big building was crammed, not only with officers
under orders for the Front, and their \nves, who had come
to see them start. Society had descended like a flock of
chattering, gaudily-plumaged paroquets upon the sjwt
Avhere new and exciting sensations were to be had. For the
trampling feet and the rolling wheels that ceaselessly went
North imparted one set of thrills, and the long trains of
wounded and dying that met and passed them, coming down
as they went up, gave another kind. Amongst the poor
dears in the trucks, and waggons, and Ambulance-carriages
you might eventually find a man you knew. . . . The
sporting odds were given and taken on these exciting
chances ; and the fluttering and screaming paroquets that
crowded the Railway Stations, in spite of their gay feathers,
bore no little resemblance to carrion-feeding birds of prey.
Saxham, Recently Attached IVfedical Staff, Gueldersdorp,
suffered from the notoriety inseparable from the name of
a man who has been thrice mentioned in Despatches, and
has been publicly thanked by the representatives of an
Imperial Government. The Interviewer yapped at his
heels whithersoever he went, and the Correspondent strove
to lure him into confidences, and Society fluttered at him
with shrill squawkiugs, and wanted to know, don't you
THE DOP DOCTOR 579
know ? It must have been " devey " and " twee " to have
gone through all those experiences. It was the year when
'* devey," and " twee," and similar abbreviations first
became fashionable.
There were pleasanter episodes than these, when soldierly,
bronzed warriors and simple, unaffected men of great
affairs, expressed to Saxham in few words their belief that
he liad done his duty. The approval of these warmed liim
and helped to raise him higher. It was a little creature, a
human insect no bigger than a bar-tender, that brought
about the mischief.
Tliere was an American bar on the ground-floor of the
Trafalgar. Saxham stood upon the threshold of the place,
replying to the questions of a group of ColonioJ officers.
New South Wales Mounted Engineers and Canadian
Rangers, when somebody suggested Drinks, and led the
way in. Invited to make his choice from a long list of
alcoholic mixtures, beginning with Whisky Straight, and
ending with Bosom Caresser and Gin Sour, Saxham said
that he would take a glass of ice- water.
" Well, boss, since you're on the Temporance Walk," said
the Australian, liis would-be host, a little huffily, " you'll
please yourself, I suppose ?" He collected the preferences
of liis other guests, and gave the orders to the man behind
the bar.
The barman had the misfortune to be a joker of the
practical kind. Seeing Saxham held in conversation by
one of the other men, he winked portentously at the New
South Waler, and whispered in his ear.
The Australian understood. A reason for Saxham's
abstinence had been given Ixim. Tlie new made bridegroom
as a rule shuns Alcohol. And in p)oportion to his desii-e to
avoid, grows the determination of other men to compel him
to drink. Tlie bridegroom is fair game all the world over
for the Rabelaisian jest and the clown's horseplay.
The bar-tender, hoisting his eyebrows to his scollops of
gummed hair, winked at the New South Waler with infinite
meaning, and pointed to a cut-glass carafe that stood on
the shining nickel-plated counter. It appeared to contain
pure sparkling water, but the liquor it held was knock-ou»
whisky, a tintless drink of exceeding potency, above proof.
580 THE DOP DOCTOR
The Australian shook his head. But he laughed under his
neat moustache as he turned away, and the bar-tender
concluded to carry his joke through. He dealt out the
drinks to their respective owners, and with a dexterous
sweep of a shirt-sleeved arm brought the innocent-seeming
carafe and a gleaming, polished tumbler immediately
before the square-faced hulking doctor with the queer blue
eyes, whose pretty bride of three days was waiting for him
in their room upon the third floor of the humming, over-
crowded caravanserai. Saxham, absorbed by the thought
of her, poured out a tumblerful of the clear, sparkling stuff,
and had half emptied it before he realised the trick. His
eyes grew red with injected blood, and his hair bristled on
his head. He struck out once across the narrow counter.
The long wall-mirror behind the bar-tender cracked and
starred with the crashing impact of the joker's skull, and
the man fell senseless, bleeding from the mouth and nostrils.
Another attendant came running at the crash, and the
exclamations of those who had seen the swift retaliation
wreaked. Saxham, leaving a banknote lying on the counter,
wheeled abruptly, and went out of the bar.
His brain was on fire. His blood ran riot in his burning
veins, and the vice he had deemed dead stirred in the
depths of his being, lifted its slender head, and hissed,
quivered a forked tongue, and struck with poisoned fangs.
He went out into the purple night that wedded lovers would
have found so perfect. The great white stars winked down
at him jeeringly, and a little mocking breeze sniggered
among the mimosas and palms of the hotel gardens. He
passed out of them into the many-tongued Babel of the
streets, packed with humanity, throbbing with virile life,
and tramped the magnificent avenues and wide electric-
lighted streets of Cape Town with the thousands who had no
beds at all, and the ten thousand who had, but preferred not
to occupy them. To liis narrow couch in the dressing-room
adjoining Lynette's bedroom her husband dared not go.
So he wore the night out, doggedly wrestling with the
demon that boils the blood of strong fierce men to forgetful-
ness of compacts and breach of oaths. Daybreak touched
him with a chilly shivering finger, a hulking figure dozing
on one of the white-painted iron seats near the AtbJetio
THE DOP DOCTOR 5«]
Ground on Greenpoint Common. The last lingering star
throbbed itself out, a white moth dying in the marvellous
rose and orange fires of dawn, and the overwhelming,
brooding bulk of Table Mountain gleamed, an emerald and
sapphire splendour against the rising sun, and the two lesser
peaks that are the mountain's bodyguard shone glowing in
golden mail as Saxham got to his feet, and shook some order
into the disorder of his dress, and faced hotelwards.
Despair was in the heart of the Dop Doctor, and for him
the wonder of the dawn, the marvel of the sunrise meant no
more than if he had been born blind. A menial's trick had
wrought him confusion ; his will, in the saving strength of
which he had trusted, was a leaf in the wind of his desire.
Even now his throat and tongue were parched, his being
thirsted for the liquor he had abjured.
What was to bo done ? What was to happen in the future ?
He asked himself in vain. As Mouille Point shut its fixed
red eye in apparent derision, and the Greenpoint Light
winked a thirteen-mile wink and went out, unlike the Hope
that had burned in Saxham, and would be rekindled never
more.
LX
Pity the man now as he sat brooding alone in the con-
sulting-room, consumed by the thirst he shuddered at,
once more an unwilling slave to the habit he abhorred.
He unscrewed the large flask and drank, and his lips
curled back with loathing of the whisky, and his gorge rose
at it as it went down. Then he put the flask back and
locked the drawer, and laid his head down upon his folded
arms in silence. No help anywhere ! No hope, no joy,
no love !
Death must come. Death should come, before the
shadow of disgrace fell upon the Beloved, of whose love
he knew now that he had never been worthy. Well for
Lynette that he had never won it ! Happy for her that she
had never even learned to care for him a little !
« * * * •
A few days more, and the great Victorian Age had
drawn its last breath.
582 THE DOP DOCTOR
The people went about the London streets softly, as
though their footsteps led them through the stately, grand,
and solemn chamber where lay the august, illustrious Dead.
A subdued, busy hum of preparation was perceptible to
the ear. The eye saw the thoroughfares being covered
with sand, the draperies of purple rising at the bidding of
the pulley and the rope, the carta laden with wreaths and
garlands of laurel, passing from point to point, discharging
their loads, often renewed.
A lady was ushered into Saxham's consulting-room as
a long procession of those carts went creaking by. She
was a dainty, piquante, golden-haired, blue-eyed little
woman, quite beautifully dressed. Her gown was of black,
in deference to the national mourning, but it glittered ^vdth
sequins, and huge diamonds scintillated in her tiny ears,
and she wore a mantle of royal ermine, that reached to
the high heels of her little shoes. Her hat was of the
toque description. Ermine and lace and artificial blooms
from Parisian shop-window-gardens went to make up the
delicious effect. A titled name adorned her card, which
bore a Mayfair address. She seemed in radiant health.
As Saxham waited, leaning forward in his consulting-
chair, to receive the would-be patient's confidence, you can
imagine those blue eyes of his, once so hard and keen,
looking out of their hollowing caves with a sorrowful, clear
sympathy that was very different from their old regard.
To his women-patients he was exquisitely considerate.
Only to one class of patient was he merciless and unsparing.
Upon the woman who desired to rid herself of her
sex-priiilege, upon the wedded wanton who sought to
make of her body, designed by her Maker to be the cradle
of an unborn generation, its sepulchre, Saxham's glance
fell like a sharp curved sword. He wasted few words upon
her, but each sentence, as it fell from his grim mouth,
shrivelled and corroded, as vitriol dropped on naked human
flesh. He listened now in silence that grew grimmer and
grimmer, and as in flute-like accents, their smooth course 1
hampered by the very slightest diffidence, the little lady '
explained, those heavy brows of his grew thunderous.
Ah, the tragic errand, the snaky purpose, coiled behind
those graceful, ambiguous forms of spe-ech ! Not new the
THE DOP DOCTOR 583
tale to the man who sat and heard. She admired the
black-haired, powerful head, and the square, pale face
wth its short, aquiline, rather heavily-modelled features,
and the broad, white forehead that the single smudge of
eyebrow barred pleased her, a-s it did most women. Only
the man's vivid blue eyes were impleasantly hard and
fixed in their regard, and his mouth frightened her, it was
so stora and set.
She was not as robust as she appeared, she said. When
she had been manned, the family physician had mentioned
toher mother that it would hardly bo advisable. . . . Delay
for a year or two would be wise. And her husband did
not care for cLildren. He was quite willing. He had
sent her to Saxham, in fact. Of course, the Profession of
Surgery had made such hvige strides that risk need not
enter into consideration for a moment. . . . And heaps
of her women friends did the same. And expense was
absolutely no object, and would not Dr. Saxham
Saxham struck a boll that was upon his table, and rose
up with his piercing eyes upon h«r and crossed the room
in two strides. He flung the door wide. He bowed to
her with cool, withering, ironical courtesy as he stood
waiting for her to depart.
She hesitated, laughed with the ring of hysteria, fluttered
into speech.
" You are not, of course, aware of it, but I happen to be
an old schoolfellow of your wife's." Her prt-tty, inquisi-
tive eyes went back to the writing-table, where stood a
photograph of Lynette, recently taken- — an exquisite,
delicate, pearly-toned portrait in a heavy silver-gilt frame.
" We used to be great fri( nds. Du Taine was my maiden
name. Surely Mrs. Saxham has spoken to you of Greta
Du Taine ? I left GueJdersdorp at the beginning of the
siege. Later, we went to Cape Town. I met my hijsbaud
there. He is Sir Philip Atherlcij^h, Baronet." She italicised
the word. " He was with his regiment, going to the Front.
We were married almost directly. It was a case of love at
first sight. Now wo are staying at our town house in
Werkeley Square. Mrs. Saxham must visit us — my hus-
band is dying to know her."
"I regret that the desire cannot be gratified, madam."
584 THE DOP DOCTOR
The angry blood darkened his face. His tone, evrn mr re
plainly than his words, told her that the boasted friend-
ship was at an end.
Greta reddened too, and her turquoise-hued eyes dealt
him a glance of bitter hatred.
" I did not stay long at the Convent at Gueldersdorp.
Nuns are good, simple creatures, and easily imposed upon.
And — mother did not wish me to be educated with strays
and foundlings — dressed up like young ladies — actually
allowed to mingle upon equal terms with them "
It was Cornelius Agrippa, I think, who once materialised
the Devil as an empty purse. The necromancer should
have evoked the Spirit of Evil in the shape of a spiteful
woman. Greta went on :
" — Such Society as there was, I should say. You were
at Gueldersdorp tliroughout the siege, and for some time
before it, I think. Dr. Saxham ?"
Two pairs of blue eyes met, the man's hard as shining
stones, the woman's dancing with malicious intention.
Saxham stiffly bent his head. But her fear of him had
evaporated in her triumph. Those inquisitive, turquoise
eyes had an excellent memory behind them. Something
in the shape of the square black head and hulking shoulders
quickened it now.
"It's odd " Her smile was a grin that showed
sharp little white teeth ready to bite, and her speech was
pointed with venomed meaning. " I used to go out a great
deal in such Society as the place possessed. Yet I do not
remember ever having met you !"
Saxham's cold eyes clashed with the malicious turquoises.
" I did not mingle in Society at Gueldersdorp."
He signed to the waiting manservant to open the hall-
door. She drew her snowy ermines about her and rustled
over the threshold. But in the hall she turned and dealt
her thrust.
" No ? You were too busy attending cases. Police-
Court cases. . . "
Her light laugh fluttered mockingly about his ears.
" I remember the funny headings of some of the news-
paper reports. . . . ' Another Rampant Drunk ! The
To^\Ti Painted Red Again by the Dop Doctor !' "
THE DOP DOCTOR 585
" Door !" said Saxham. shaping the word with stiff grey
lips. His face was the face of Death, who had come close
up and touched him. Her little ladyship went out to her
waiting auto- brougham, and her Ught, malignant laugh
fluttered back as the servant shut the hall -door.
Saxham went back into the consulting-room. The
Spring sunshine poured in through the tall muslin-screened
window. There was a cheerful play of light and colour in
the place. But to the man who sat there it was full of
shadows, dark and gloomy, threatening and grim. And
not the least formidable among them was the shadow of
the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, looming portentously
over that fair face within the silver-gilt frame upon the
wi'itiug-table, stretching out long octopus-arms to drag
down shame upon it, and heap ashes of humi]ia,tion vmde-
served upon the lovely head, and mock her with the solemn
altar- vows that bound her to the drunkard.
LXI
The Great Victjorian Age was laid to rest.
The great pageant of mortality had wound along the
officially-appointed route, under the cold grey sky, an
apparently endless, slowly-marching column of Infantry,
Artillery, and Cavalry of the Line, progressing pace by pace
between the immovable barriers of great-coated soldiers,
and the surging, restless sea of black-clad men and women
pent up on either hand behind them. The long rolling of
muffled drums, and the dull boom of cannon ; the baring
of men's heads ; the wail of the Funeral March, the flash
of suddenly whitened faces turned one way to greet Her as
She passed, borne to Her rest upon a gim-carriage, as fitting
an aged warrior Queen ; drawTi to her w edded couch within
tlie tomb by the willing, faitliiul hands of her sons of the
twin Services, who shall forget, that heard and witnessed ?
Who shall forget ?
The Royal Standard draped across the satin-white,
gold-fringed pall, where on rich crimson cushions rested the
Three Emblems of Sovereignty. The diccnified, kingly
figure of a man, no longer young, bowed with sorrow under
586 THE DOP DOCTOR
the Imperial heritage, preceding the splendid sombre com-
pany of crowned heads ; the blaze of uniforms and orders,
the clank of SAvord and bridle, the potent ring of steel
on steel, the sumptuously-trapped, shining horses pacing
slowly, drawing the rmurning- carriages of State, their closed
windows, frosted with chilly fog, yielding scant glimpses
of well-known faces. One most beloved, most lovely, and
no less so in sorrow than in joy. "'Did you set her?^^ the
women asked of one another, as the pageant passed and
vanished, and one good soul, all breathless from the crash,
gasped as she straightened her battered bonnet and tv/itched
her trodden skirt : " There never was a better than the
blessed soul that's gone, but there couldn't bo a sweeter nor
a beautifuUer Queen than the one she leaves behind her !"
The la-st wail of the Funeral March having died away
into silence, the last cannon-shot gone booming out, down
came the foggy dusk on bereaved London. A chill rime
settled on the swaying laurel Avreaths, and on the folds of
the fluttering purple draperies at the close of the dismal day.
The shops were shut, and many of the restaurants, but the
windows of the Clubs gleamed radiantly do\vn Piccadilly,
and every refreshment- bar and public -house was thronged
to bursting. Noon changed to evening, and evening length-
ened into night, and the pavements began to be crowded.
The Flesh Bazaar was being held in Piccadilly, and all up
Regent Street and all down the Haymarket the chaffering
went on for bodies and for souls.
A deadly physical and mental lassitude weighed on
Saxham. His soul was sick with the long, hopeless struggle.
He would end it. He would die, and take away the shadow
from Lynette's pure life, and leave her free. His will devised
to her everything he possessed, leaving her untrammelled.
Let her learn to love once more, let her marry a better man,
and be happy in her husband and her children. . . .
# * * * »
He turned in at one of the chemist's shops. One or two
gaudily-dressed, haggard women were at the distant end
of the counter, in conference with an assistant. Saxham
spoke to the chemist, a grey- whiskered, fatherly individual,
who listened, bending his sleek bald head. The chemist
bowed, but as he had not the honour of knowing his
1
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 587
customer, would the gentleman oblige by signing the
poison-book, in compliance with Schedule F of the Phar-
macy Act, 1868 ?
Stixham nodded. The chemist produced the register,
and opened it on the counter before Saxham, and supplied
him with pen and ink. Then he found that he had business
at the other end of the shop, and when he returned he
smartly closed the book, without even satisfying himself
whether the client had written down his name and address,
or merely pretended to. Then he filled a two-ounce vial
with the fragrant, deadly acid, and put on a yellow label
that named the poison, but not the vendor, and stoppered
and capsuled, and sealed, and made it into a neat little
parcel, and Saxham paid, and put the parcel in his inner
breast-pocket, and turned to leave the shop.
It was crowded now ; the roaring business of the little
hours was in full swing. The three assistants ran about
like busy ants ; the chemist joined his merry men at tlie
game of making money, serving alcoholic liquors, mixing
pick-me-ups, dispensing little bottles of tabloids and little
boxes of jujubes, taking cash and giving change.
The crush was terrific. Saxham, his hat pulled low over
his broad brows, his great chest stemming the tide of
humanity that incessantly rolled over the threshold, was
slowly making his way to the door, when he felt the
arresting touch of a hand up(m his arm.
The OMTier of the hand belonged, as ninety per cent, of the
women in the place belonged, to Fran9ois Villon's liberal
sisterhood. Something in the pale square face and mas-
sive shoulders had attracted her vagrant fancy. She had
quitted her comparuons — t^vo gaily-dressed, be-rouged
women and a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, moustached young
German, whose stripy tweeds, vociferously-patterned linen,
necktie of too obvious pattern, and higli-crowned bowler
bat, advertised the Berlin tailor and haberdasher and
hatter at their customer's expense, as Saxhum went by.
Now she looked up into the strange, sorrowful eyes tliat
were shaded by his tilted hat-brim, and twined her thin
htmds caressingly about his arm, asking :
" Why do you look so queer, dear ? Is anything wrong ?
— excuse me asking — or is it the Funeral has given you the
68S THE DOP DOCTOR
blue hump ? It did me ! I've not felt so bad since
mother " She broke o£E. Then as a shrill peal of
laughter from one of her female companions followed a
comment made by the other — " One of those . . ." — she
jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an unprintable
epithet in the direction of her lady friends — " says you're
ugly. I don't think so. I like your face !" Her own was
cruelly, terribly young, even under the white cream of
zinc, the rouge, end the rice-powder. " Were you looking
for a friend, dear ?" she asked tightening the clasp of her
tliin, feverish hands.
" Yes," said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no
illumination in his sombre face. " For Death ! There is
no better friend than Death, my child, either for you
or me !"
Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him,
and turned and pushed his way out through the noisy,
raving, chaffering, patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone,
swallowed up in the roaring torrent of humanity that
foamed down Piccadilly, leaving her frozen and stricken
and staring.
Lxn
Months went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made
towards a more familiar friendship had ceased since
that rebuff of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in
his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet and
Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme
characters, attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of
inartistic, frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of
the brown-paper dado, and flourished on the fireplace-tiles.
Only a few weeks more, he said to himself, and he would
set her free. Before the natural craving for love, and life,
and happiness should brim the cup of her fair sweet woman-
hood to overflowing ; before her sex should rise in desperate
revolt against himself her gaoler. Death should unlock her
prison-doors ajid strike the fetters from those slender
wrists, and point to Hope beckoning her to cross the
threshold of a new life.
Soon, verv soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the
THE BOP DOCTOR 689
swift dismissing pang was in the locked drawer of the
writing-table beside the whisky-flask. When he was alone
and undisturbed — for Lynette seldom came to his con-
sulting-room now — Saxham would take it out and dandle
it, and hold it in his hands.
He would put the vial back presently, and lock the
drawer, and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light
his lamp that he might torture himself with looking at that
pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet,
common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in
those two rooms over the garage at the bottom of the yard.
There was a third performer in the shadow-play now.
You could hear him roaring lustily at mom and noon and
milky eve. The Wonderfullest Baby you ever !
When W. Keyse was invited by Saxham to inspect his
son and heir, crimson, and pulpy, and squirming in a
flannel wrap, the Adam's apple in the lean throat of the
proud father jumped, and his ugly, honest eyes blinked
behind salt water. The nipper had grabbed at his ear as
he stooped down. And that made the Fourth Time, and
he hadn't even thanked the Doctor yet !
A date, he hoped, would arrive when a chalk or two of
that mounting score might be wiped oft" the board. He
said so to Mrs, Keyse, the first time she was allowed to sit
up and play at doing a bit of needlework. Not that she did
a stitch, and chaince it ! With her eyes — beautiful eyes,
with that new look of mother-love in them ; proud eyes,
with that inexhaustible store of riches all her own, — wor-
shipping the crinkly red snub nose and the funny moving
mouth, and the little downy head, and everything else
that goes to make up a properly-constituted Baby.
" I think the time'll come, deer. Watch out, an' one
d'y you'll see !"
" I'll watch it !" affirmed W, Keyse. " And wot are
you cranin' your neck for, tryin' to look out o' winder ?
Blessed if I ever see such a precious old Dutch ! "
The song was in the mouths of the people that year.
She laughed, and rubbed her pale check against his.
" You be my eyes, deer. Peep and see if the Doctor is
in '^"'^ room."
It was ten o'clock on a shining May morning, and the
590 THE DOP DOCTOR
clouds that raced over great grimy London were white,
and there were patcliea of blue between. The trees in the
squares were dressed in new green leaves, and the irises and
ranunculuses in the parks were out, and the policemen had
shed their heavy uniforms, and instead of hyacinths be-
hind the glass there were pots of tulips in bloom upon the
window-sills of the two rooms over the garage. And the
Doctor, who had been seeing patients ever since nine, was
sitting at the writing-table, said W. Keyse, \vith his 'ead
upon Ms 'ands.
" Like as if 'e was tired, deer, or un'appy ? Or tired an'
un'appy both ?"
" Stryte, you 'ave it !" admitted W. Keyse, after cautious
inspection.
" The Doctor — don't let 'im see you lookin' at 'im, dar-
lin', or 'e miglit think, which Good Gracious know how
wrong it 'ud be, as you was a kind o' Peepin' Pry — the
Doctor 'ave fell orf an' chynged a good deal lately — in 'is
looks, I mean !" said Mrs. Keyse, tucking in the corner of
the flannel over t'ne little downy head. " Wasted in 'is
flesh, like — got 'oiler round the eyes "
" So 'e 'as !" W. Keyse whistled and slapped his leg.
" An' I bin' noticin' it on me own for a long while back —
now I come to think of it. Woddyou pipe's the matter
wiv 'im ? Not ill ? Lumme ! if 'e was ill " The eyes
of W. Keyse Ijecame circular with consternation.
" No, no, deer !" She reassured him, in his ignorance
that the maladies of the soul are more agonising far than
those that afflict the body. " Down'arted, like, an'
'opeless an' — an' lonely "
Do\\Tihearted, and hopeless, and lonely ! The jaw of
W. Keyse dropped, and liis ugly eyes became circular with
sheer astonisliment.
" Him / Wiv a beautiful 'ouse to live in — an' Carriage
Toffs with Titles fair beggin' 'im to come an' feel their
pulses an' be pyde for it, an' Scientific Institooshuns an*
'Orspital Committees fightin' to git 'im on their staffs — an'
all the pypers praisin' 'im for wot 'e done at Guoldersdorp,
an' Government tippin' 'im the 'Ow Do ? an' thank you
kindly, IVIister ! — an' " W. Keyse could only suppose
that Mrs. Keyse waa playing a bit of gaff on hers truly —
THE DOP DOCTOR 591
" and him with a wife, too ! Married an' 'appy, an' goin'
to be 'appier yet !" He pointed to the httle red snub nose
peeping between the folds of the flannel. " When a little
nipper like that comes -'*
She reddened, paled, burst out crying.
" William ! William "
Her William kissed her, and dried her tears. He called
it mopping her dial, but you have not forgotten that, as the
upper house-and-parlour-maid had at first said, both Her
and Him were plainly descended from the Lowest Circles.
She had melted afterwards, on learning that Mrs. Keyse
had been actually mentioned in Despatches for carrying
tea under fire to the prisoners at the Fort ; had sought her
society, lent paper- patterns, and imparted, in confidence,
what she knew of the secret of Saxham's wedded life.
" Dear William ! My good, kind Love ! Best I should
*urt you, deer, if 'urt you 'ave to be. You see them three
large winders covered wiv lovely lace 1"
" 'Ers — Mrs. Saxham's !" He nodded, trying to look wise.
" Yes, darlin'. Mrs. Saxham's bedroom and dressin'-
room they belongs to. I've bin inside the bedroom wiv
the upper 'ouse-an'-parlour-myde, an' a Fairy Princess
in a Drury Lane Pantomime might 'ave a bigger place to
sleep in — but not a beautif uller. When the Foreign Young
Person come in of evenin's to git 'er lady dressed for dinner,
she snaps up the lights, bein' a kind soul, before slie draws
the blinds, to give me a charnst like, to see in." She stroked
the tweed sleeve. " An' once or twice Mi's. Saxham 'as
come in before they'd bin pull down, an' then — O William !
— there Avas every thinlc in that room on (Jawd's good earth
a 'usband could ask for to make 'im 'appy, except the
wife's 'art beatin' warm and lo\iu' in the middle of it all !"
"Cripps! . . . You don't never mean . . . ?" He
gasped. " Wot ? Don't the Doctor make no odds to
'er ? A Man Like That ?" ...
She clung to the heart that loved her, and told him what
she had heard. . . . And if Saxham had laiown how tu<:>
of the unconscious actors in Ids shadow-play pitied him,
the knowledge would have been aj8 vitriol poured into an
open wound.
592 THE DOP DOCTOR
LXin
The card of Major Bingham Wrynche, C.B., was brought
to Saxham one morning, as, his early-calling patients seen
and dismissed, the Doctor was going out to his waiting
motor- brougham.
Bingo, following what he was prone to call his paste-
board, presented himself — a large, cool, well-bred, if
rather stupid-looking, man, arrayed in excellently-fitting
clothes, saying :
'* You were goin' out ? Don't let me keep you. Look
in again !" — even as he deposited a tightly-rolled silk
umbrella in the waste-paper basket, and tenderly balanced
his gleaming hat upon the edge of the writing-table, and
chose, by the ordeal of punch, a comfortably chair, as a
man prepared to remain. Saxham, pushing a cigar-box
across the consulting-room table, asked after Lady
Hannah.
" First-rate ! Seems to agree with her, having a one-
armed husband to fuss over !"
" She won't have a one-armed husband long," returned
Saxham, not unkindly, glancing at the bandaged and
strapped-up limb that had been shattered by an expanding
bullet, and was neatly suspended in its cut sleeve in the
shiny black sling.
" By the Living Tinker ! she's had him long enough for
me !" exploded Bingo, who seemed larger and fussier than
ever, if a thought less pink. " So'd you say if they tucked
a napkin imder your chin at meals, and cut your meat up
into dice for you, and you'd ever tried to fold up your
newspaper with one hand, or had to stop a perfect stranger
in the street, as I did just now outside your door, and a.sk
him to fish a cab-fare out of your right-hand trouser-
pocket if he'd be so good ? because your idiot of a man
ought to have put your money in the other one."
" You're lookin' at my head," pursued the Major, " and
I don't wonder. She's been and given me a fringe again.
'Stonishing thing the Feminine Touch is. Let your servant
part your hair and knot your necktie, and you simply look a
filthy bounder. Your wife does it — and you hardly know
THE DOP DOCTOR 59?
yourself in the glass, and wonder why they didn't christen
you Anna-Maria. Not bad weeds these, by half ! You
remember those cigars of Kjeil's and the thunderin' price
me and Beauvayse paid for 'em, biddin' against each other
for fun ?" The big man blew a heavy sigh with the light
blue smoke-wreath, and added : " And before the last box
was dust and ashes, poor old Toby was ! And that chap
Levestre — never fit to brown his shoes — is wearing 'em ;
and '11 be Marquess of Foltlebarre when the old man
goes. Queer thing, Luck is — when you come to think
of it ?"
Saxham nodded and looked at the clock. A dull impa-
tience of this large, bland, prosperous personage was grow-
ing in him. From the rim the top-hat had left upon his
shining forehead to the tightly-screwed eyeglass that as-
sisted his left eye ; from the pink Malmaison carnation in
the buttonhole of his frock-coat to the buff spats that
matched his expansive waistcoat in shade, the large Major
was the personification of luxurious, pampered, West End
swelldom, the type of a class Saxham abhorred. He had
seen the heavy dandy under other conditions, in circum-
stances strenuous, severe, even tragic. Then he had borne
himself after a simple, manly fashion. Now he had back-
slidden, retrograded, relaxed. Saxham, always destitute
of the saving sense of humour, frowned as he looked upon
the pampered son of Clubland, and the sullen lowering of the
Doctor's heavy smudge of black eyebrow suggested to the
Major that his regrets for " poor old Toby !" had been mis-
placed. The man who had married Miss Mildare could
hardly be expected to join with heartiness in deploring the
untimely decease of his predecessor.
" Not that it could have come to anything between poor
Toby and her if the dear old chap had lived," reflected
Bingo, and wondered if the Doctor knew about — about
Lessie ? " Bound to," he mentally decided, " if he keeps his
ears only half as open as other men keep theirs. Didn't a
brace of bounders of the worst discuss the story in all its
bearin's, sittin' behind my wife and Mrs. Saxham in the
stalls at the theatre the other night ! Everybody is dis-
cussin' it now that the T^oltlebarres have k>ft oil payin'
Lessie not to talk, and pri>%ided for her and the youngster
38
594 THE DOP DOCTOR
out of the ^tate, and Whittinger's given her a back seat
in the family. . . . That family, too ! . . . Lord ! what a
rum thing Luck is !"
The musing Major cleared his throat, and his large,
i-ather stupid, blonde face was perfectly stolid as he smoked
and stared at his host, reminding himself that Beauvayse
had been jealous of Saxham, Attached Medical Staff,
Gueldersdorp, and had feared that, ii the fellow knew of the
scratch against him, ho might force the running ; and re-
calling, with a tingling of the shamed blood in his expansive
countenance, how he — Wrynche— had let Beauvaysfe into
the sordid secret that Alderman Brooker had blabbed. He
wondered, looking at the square, set face, whether Saxham
had ever really earned the degrading nickname that he
could not get quite right. The ' Peg Doctor,' was it ? — or
the ' Lush Doctor ?' Something in that way. . . . Not that
Saxham looked like a man given to lifting his elbow with
undue frequency. . . .
" — But you never know," thought experienced Bingo
sagely, even as, in his heavy fashion, he went pounding on :
" The Chief's contirmin' the Work of Pacification, and
acceptin' the surrender of arms — any date of manufacture
you lilte between the chassepot of 1870 and the leather-
breeched firelock of Oliver Ct-omAvell's time. The modem
kind, you find by emplopn' the Divinin' Rod " — the large
narrator bestowed a wink on Saxham and added — " on
the backs of the fellows who buried the guns. Never fails —
used in that way. And — as it chances — I have a com-
munication to make t<'> you."
" A communication — a message — from the Chief to me V
Saxham's face changed, and softened, and brightened
curiously and pleasantly.
Major Bingo nodded and cleared his throat. He re-
balanced his shiny hat upon the table comer, and said with
his eyes engaged in this way :
" I was to remind you — from him — that — not long before
the ending of the Siege, a lady who is now a near connection
of yours sustained a terrible bereavement through the —
infernally dastardly crime of a — person then unknown !"
Saxham's vivid eyes leaped at the speaker's as if to drag
out the knowledge he witliheld. But Bingo was balancing
THE DOP DOCTOR 595
the glossy triumph of a Bond Street hatter, and looked at
it and not at the Doctof , who said :
" You refer to the murder of the Mother-Superior at the
Convent of the Holy Way on February the — th, 1900. And
you say a person then unknown. . . . Has the murderer
been arrested ?"
Major Bingo shook his head.
" He hasn't been arrested, but his name is known. You
remember the runner who came in from Diamond To\vn
with a letter for a man called Casey ? Not long after — after
my wife was exchanged for a spy of Brounckers' ?"
" I did not see the man myself," returned Saxham, " but
I perfectly recollect his getting through."
Major Bingo said :
" 1 thought you would. Well, the letter was a blind ; the
bearer an agent of the firm of Huysmaus and Eybel, sent
to make certain of oiu: weakest points before they put in
the attack on the Barala town ; and — that's the man who
committed the murder !"
" The man who committed the murder T'
Saxham's vivid eyes were intent upon the Major's face.
The Major coughed, and went on :
" My wife came across that man at Tweipans under
curious circumstances, which I'm here to ])ut before you aa
plainly as may be. . . . She'd met him before the 8icge,
travelling up from Cape Town. He scraped acquaintance,
called himself a loyal Johannesburger, and an Agent of the
British South African VVar-IutelUgence-ljureiui. Not that
there ever was such a Bureau." Major Bingo blinked
nervously, and ran a tliick finger round the inside of his
collar as he added : " The beggar spoofed Lady Hannah uj)
hill and down dale with that, and she believed him. And
when she subsequently Hew the coo^j — dash thia cold of
mine ! . . ."
The Major drew out a very large pink cambric pocket-
handkercMef, and performed behind its shelter an elaborate
but unconvincing sneeze :
'* — When she shot the moon with NiXcy's mare and
spider, it waa by private arrangement with this oil}-, lying
blackguard, who had given her an address — a farm on the
Transvaal Border, known aa Haargrond Plaats — where
38—2
596 THE DOP DOCTOR
she might communicate with him through another scoundrel
in the Transport Agency line, supposin' she chose to do a
little business on her own in Secret Intelligence "
Saxham interrupted :
" I shall say nothing to my wife of this, and I trust you
will impress upon Lady Hannah that it would be highly
inadvisable for her to do so."
'■ She won't, you may depend on it." Major Bingo
palpably grew warm, and mopped the dew from his large,
kind, rather stupid countenance with the pink cambric
handkerchief — " She's awfully afraid, as it is, that a word or
two she dropped quite innocently, to that infernal liar and
swindler, who'd bled her of a monkey, good English cash —
paid for procurin' and forwardin' items i information that
he took damned good care should reach us at Gueldersdorp
too late to be of use, led up to — to the crime ! . . . By the
Living Tinker ! it's out at last !"
The big man, so cool and nonchalant a minute or so
before, fanned himself with the pocket-handkerchief, and
turned red, and went white, and went red, and timied
white half a dozen times, in twice as many beats of his
flurried pulse.
" — Out at last, Saxham, and that's why I've been gulpin'
and blunderin' and bogglin' for the last ten minutes.
Poof !" Major Bingo exhaled a vast breath of relief.
" Tellin' tales on a woman — and her yom* wife — even when
she's begged you to, isn't the sweetest job a man can
tackle !"
" Let me have this story in detail once and for all," said
Saxham, turning a stem, white face, and hard, compelling
eyes upon the embarrassed Major, " What utterance of
Lady Hannah's do you suppose to have led to the tragedy
in the Convent Chapel ? Upon this point I must and shall
be clear before you leave me !"
" You shall have things as clearly as I can put 'em. This
pretended Secret Agent of the War- Intelligence-Bureau that
never existed, and who called himseK Van Busch — a name
that's as common among Boers as Murphy is among Irish-
men — arranged to pass off my wife as his sister, a refugee
from Gueldersdorp, who'd married a Grerman drummer, and
buried him not long before. Women are so dashed fond of
I
THE BOP DOCTOR 697
play-actin' ! Kids, Saxham, — that's what they are m their
weakness for dressin' up and makin'-believe ! And my
wife "
The large Major was in a violent lather as he ran the
thick finger round inside his collar, and swallowed at the
lump in his throat.
" — My wife saw Van Busch at Kink's hotel at Tweipans
from time to time. He came, I've already explaiaed,ito sell
bogus information for good money. And as the boodle ran
low, the cloven hoof began to show, and the brute became
downright insolent."
" As might have been expected," said Saxham, coldly.
" — Kept his hat on in my wife's room, talked big, and
twiddled a signet-ring he wore," went on the Major.
" And, bein' quick, you know, and sharp as they make
'em, you know, my wife recognised the crest of an old
acquaintance cut upon the stone. I knew the man my-
self " — declared Major Bingo — " and a better never stepped
in leather. A brother-officer of the Chief's, too, and a
rippin' good fellow ! — Dicky IVIildare, of the Grey Hussars."
" Mildare !" repeated Saxham.
" You understand, Saxham, the name did it. My wife
had seen the present Mrs. Saxham at Gueldersdorp, and,
not knowin' that the surname of Mildare had been taken
by her at the wish of her adopted mother, supposed — got
the maggot into her head that the Mother-Superior's ward
might possibly be a — a daughter of the man the seal-
ring had belonged to, knowing — Lord ! what a mull I'm
making of it ! — that Mildare had at one time been engaged
to marry that " — the Major boggled horribly — " that un-
commonly brave and noble lady, and had, in fact, thrown
her over, and made a bolt of it with the wife of his Regi-
mental C.O., Colonel Sir George Hawtmg."
The faint staiQ of colour that had showed through
Saxham's dead- white skin faded. He waited with strained
attention for what was couiing,
" South Africa Lady Lucy and IMildare bolted to," went
on Bingo, " and now you know the kind of mare's-nest
her ladyship had scratched up. And," declared Bingo,
" rather than have htui to spin this yarn, I'd have faced a
Court-Martial of Inquiry respectin' my conduct in the Field.
598 THE DOP DOCTOR
For my wife has a kind heart and a. keen sense of honour,
and rather tlian bring harm upon Miss Mildare that was, or
anyone connected with her, she'd have stood up to be shot !
By G !" trumpeted Bingo, " I know she would !"
Saxham's face was blue-white now, and looked oddly
shrunken. His voice came in a rasping croak from his
ashen lips as he said :
" Lady Hannah mentioned my wife to this man. thinking
that she might prove to be the daughter of the owner of
the ring. What could possibly lead her to infer such a
relationship ?"
" You must understand that the blackguard had given
my wife details of Mildare's death at a farm OA^med by a
friend of his in Natal, and that Hannah — that my wife
knew poor little Lucy Hawting had had a child by IMil'are. '
Major Bingo spluttered. " That was why she asked Van
Busch outright whether the girl with the nuns at Guelders-
dorp was — could be — the same cluld, grown up ? By the
Living Tinker ! — I never was in such a lather in my life !
The better the light I try to put the thing in, the dirtier it
looks. And I'm not half through yet, that's the worst of it !"
He mopped and mopped, and took several violent turns
about the room, and subsided in a chair at length, and went
on, waving the large pink cambric handkerchief, now a
damp rag, in the air, at intervals, to dry it.
" She says — Lady Hannah says — that the eagerness and
curiosity with which the brut^ snapped up the hint she'd
never meant to drop, warned her to shunt him off on
another line, and give no more information. They got on
money matters ; and, seeing plain how she'd been bilked,
my wife gave the welsher a bit of her mitod, and he showed
his teeth in a way that meant Murder. Just in time —
before he could wring her neck round — and he'd startexl in
to do it, you understand — Brounckers came stormin' and
bullyin' in, to tell the prisoner she was exchanged, and
would be sent down to Gueldersdorp. . . . They packed
her back that very day. . . . And not a week after, the
pretended runner came in from Diamond Town with the
bogus letter from Mrs. Casey."
Saxham had thought. He said now ;
** This man, this rascally Van Busch, acting as a spy
THE BOP DOCTOR 699
for Brounckers, was disguised as the runner ? Is that what
has been proved ? Did Lady Hannah see the man and
recognise him ?"
Bingo leaned forward to answer.
" Lady Hannah never set eyes on the man from Diamond
Town. But the day the Siege Gazette came out, with a
blithering paragraph in it that never ought to have ap-
peared, announein' " — he coughed and crimsoned — " Lord
Beauvayse's formal engagement to Miss Mildare ; — my wife
was rung up at the Convalescent Hospital by a caller who
wouldn't say where he telephoned from. And the message
that came througJi — couched in queer, ambiguous lan-
guage, and purportin' to come from an old friend — was
a message for the young lady who is now Mrs. Saxham !"
Saxham's eyes flickered dangerously. He said not a
word. The Major went on :
" My wife didn't then and there identify the voice with
Van Busch's. She remembered the name given her as
that of the owner of the farm at which Mildare died, a place
which by rights was in what's now the Orange River
Colony, and not Natal at all. She asked plump and plain :
* Are you So-and-So V There was no answer to the
question. But seven hours later the Mother-Superior was
shot ; and the nuns and Miss Mildare, on their way to the
Convent, were passed by a thickset, bearded man, who ran
into one of the Sisters in his hurry, and nearly Icnocked
her down."
" That," said Saxham, ** has always been regarded as a
suspicious circumstance. But the man was never subse-
quently traced."
" No ! Because," said Bingo, " the runner from Dia
mond Town evaporated that night."
Saxham said, with his grim imder Jaw tlirust out :
" Surely that circumstance, when reported to tlie Officer
commanding the Garrison, might then have awakened his
suspicions V
" Naturally," agreed Bingo, " and therefore hr kept 'em
dark. As for my wife, the shock of the murder, accom-
panied with her own secret conviction that, in some indirect
way, she'd helped to set a malicious, lurking, watchful,
dangerous Force of some kind working against your wife —
600 THE DOP DOCTOR
when she dropped that hint I've told you of — bowled her
over with a nervous fever."
" I remember," said Saxham, who had been called in.
" Consequently, it wasn't until some days after the
Relief — a bare hour or two before the Division — Irregular
Horse and Baraland Rifles, and a company or so of Civilian
Johnnies that had made believe they were genuine fightin'
Tommies till they couldn't get out of the notion — marched
out of Gueldersdorp for Frostenberg, that her ladyship got
a chance of makin' a clean breast to the Chief. Hold on a
minute, Doctor "
For Saxham would have spoken.
" — The Chief had had his own private opinion, from the
very first. He heard what my wife had to say. As you
may guess, she'd worked herself up into a regular cooker of
remorse and anxiety — told him she was ready to go any-
where and do anything — he'd only got to give her orders,
and all that sort of thing ! He charged her with the
simple but difficult role of holdin' her tongue, and keepin'
her oar out, and findin' him — if by good luck she'd got it
by her — a specimen of the handwritin' of the clever
scoundrel who'd played at bein' a War Intelligence Agent,
and waltzed with her five hundred pounds, which sample, as
it chanced, she was able to supply. And the fist of the man
who'd swindled her, and the writin' of the Mrs. Casey who'd
sent a letter per despatch- runner from Diamond Town to a
husband who didn't exist, tallied to an upstroke and the
crossin' of a ' < ' !"
" Is it beyond doubt that the letter from the supposed Mrs,
Casey was not a genuine communication ?" Saxham asked.
" Beyond doubt. As a fact, the neatly-directed envelope
had simply got a sheet of blank paper inside. Another odd
fact brought to light was, that the person who communicated
with my wife at the Convalescent Hospital about half-past
twelve on the day of the murder, rang her up on the
telephone belongin' to the orderly-room at the Head-
quarters of the Baraland Rifles. We had up the orderly,
and after some solid lyin', he owned that the man from
Diamond Town had bribed him with 'baccy to let him put
a message through. And that's another link in the evi-
dence, I take it ?" said Major Bingo.
!
THE DOP DOCTOR 601
" Undoubtedly !"
" There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo,
" that the first march of the Division on its route to
Frostenberg led past the Border farm called Haargrond
Plaats. It looked deserted and half-ruined, with only a
slipshod woman and a coloured man in charge ; but some-
thing was known of what had gone on there, and might be
going on still, and the Boers are clever stage-managers, and
it don't do to trust to appearances ! So the Chief detached
a party with dynamite cartridges and express orders to
make the ruin real. Our men searched the place thoroughly
before they blew it up ; and hidden in a disused chimney —
a solid bit of old Dutch masonry big enough to accommo-
date a baker's dozen of sweeps — were a few things calcu-
lated to facilitate that search for the needle in the hay-
stack — you understand ? Disguises of various kinds — a suit
of clothes lined with chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin'
— a good deal of the raw stuff itself, scattered all over the
shop by the blow-up — and in a rusty cashbox a diary or
private ledger, posted up in a clumsy Idnd of thieves' cipher,
impossible to make out, but with the name written on it
of the identical man my wife suspected and the Cliief
believed to be the murderer of Miss Mildare's adopted
mother ! And that's what you may call the Clue Direct,
Saxham, I rather fancy ?"
Major Bingo Wrynche leaned back with an air of some
finality, and with some little difficulty extracted a biggish
square envelope from the left inner pocket of the ac-
curately-fitting frock-coat. He lightly placed the envelope
upon the blotter before Saxham; reached out and took
the shiny top-hat off the writing-table, fitted it with
peculiar care on his pinkish, sandy, close-cropped head,
and said, looking at Saxham with a pleasant smile :
" Perhaps you wouldn't mind thro win' your eye over the
contents of that envelope ? There are three photographs
of handwritin' inside, marked on the backs respectively."
He waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the big
envelope, examining the polisli of his own varnished patent-
leather boots with a fastidious air of anxiety that was
extremely well assumed, if it was not strictly genuine. Hia
large face was as bland and expressionless as the face of
602 THE DOP DOCTOR
the grandfather-clock in the Sheraton case that ticked
against the wainscot behind liim, as he advised :
" Take 'em in numerical sequence. No. 1 is the photo-
graphed facainiile of the cover of the bogus letter to Mr.
Casey. No. 2 " — tlie speaker lightly touched it with a
large round finger-tip — " that's the replica — also photo-
graphed — of a card the man we're after wrote on and gave
to Lady Hannah, in case she found herself inclined to
invest a hundred or so in the kind of wares he professed
to supply. Photo No. 3 is a reproduction of an autograph
and address that's written on the inside cover of the ledger
— posted up in thieves' cipher — that was in the cashbox
found at Haargrond Plaats." He waited, screwing pain-
fully at the still, waxed ends of the scrubby moustache.
Saxham took the photographs in their order. The
envelope of the bogus letter brought by the supposed
runner from Diamond Town had been addressed in a big
bold black round hand^\ith curiously malformed capitals, to
" ]Mr. Barney Casey,
" Commercial Traveller,
" Gueldersdorp.
" Care of the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces."
" — Don't put it back in the envelope," said Major Bingo.
" Compare the writin' with No. 2."
No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was
written in ink, in the same bold hand :
" Mr. Hendryk Van Busch,
" C/o Mr. W. Bough,
" Transport Agent,
" Haargrond Plaats,
" Near Matambani,
" Transvaal."
LXIV
There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by
street noises filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the
ticking of the Sheraton grandfather clock, and the breath-
ing of two people. Saxham glanced at Major Bingo with f|
THE DOP DOCTOR 603
eyes that seemed to have been bleached of colour, and laid
the second calligraphic specimen beside the first, and took
up No. 3, and read in the same large flourishing round hand :
" W. Bough.
" Free State Hotel,
" 60 m. from Driepoort,
" Orange Free State."
After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and
the faint, far-off street noises came through the intervening
screens, but only one of the men in the room seemed to be
breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips moved. He said
in a ho)rible clicldng whi.^per :
" Van Busch and Bough are — one ?"
Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative.
But it was as expressionless as the grandfather clock's.
" One man ! — and that's what I may call the pith of my
verbal Despatch for you !"
Saxham said with hard composure :
" Van Busch is a Dutch surname that, as you say, is
common in South Africa. With the name of Bough, as the
Cliief is aware, I have — associations. It was, in fact, one
of the many aliases used by the Axitnesa for Regina in
an Old Bailey case in which I M'as concerned nearly seven
years ago."
The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity :
" Same man !"
Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was
the same man. The tense muscles of his face told nothing.
Bingo added :
" — But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough
amount to little compared with the wrong and injury
inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham ! That Good Lord !
what's the matter ?"
For Saxham, with a madman's face, hjid leapt to his feet,
knocking over his cliair, and stuttered with foam on his blue
lips :
" What wrong ? What injury ? What — what are you
hinting at ? "
" Hinting !" Tlie astonishment in the Major's round
light blue eyes was so palpably genuine that the crazy
604 THE DOP DOCTOR
flame died out of the Doctor's, and his clenched hand
dropped. " I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of
your wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch,
that's all !"
" I beg your pardon, Major !" Saxham picked up his
chair and sat down on it, inwardly cursing his lack of self-
control. " My nerves have been giving trouble of late."
Going by the evidence of the haggard fa^ce and fever-
bright eyes, the Doctor looked like that — uncommonly
like that ! And the big Major, remembering Alderman
Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the stiff,
blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might
not have reverted to the old vice 1 " Bad for the girl he's
married if he has !" he thought, even as he said :
" Overworked. Get away for a bit. No thin' like
relievin' the tension, don't you know ? Norway in June,
or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind and go !"
" I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling
bitterly, as he remembered the little phial with the yellow
label that lay beside the whisky-flask in the drawer beneath
his hand. " I shall go very soon now !"
" But not immediately ?"
" Not immediately." There was something strange,
almost exalted, in the look that accompanied the words.
Saxham added : " If you could give me an approximate
date as regards the finding of that — needle in the hay-
stack of South Africa, it would — facilitate my departure
more than you can guess !"
" Would it, by George !" Bingo slipped the thumb and
forefinger of the useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket.
Sometliing sparkled in the big pink palm he extended to
Saxham — something sparkled, and spurted white and green
and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. Tiie
something was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold
chain, broken, dangled from its enamelled bow. From
within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful face of a young,
refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all Ms iron
self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement
and a stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.
. For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.
With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an un-
THE DOP DOCTOR 606
epeakable rage and horror seething in him, he took the
portrait from the Major's palm, and held it with a steady
hand, in a favourable light.
Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face !
The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey,
the squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive
mouth sensuous as well, the little chin pointed. She might
have been a few years under thirty ; the arrangement of
the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have indicated the
height of the latest fashion — say, twenty-two or even three
years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the
dull gold of the inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the
diamonds that surroimded it. Saxham deciphered : " Lucy,
to Richard Mildare. For ever ! 1879."
« * * « «
The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's
opaque skin had given place to pallor. His face was sharp
and thin, and of waxen whiteness, like the fa,ce of one
newly dead. EKs blue eyes burned ominously in their caves
under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice
was very quiet as he asked : " How did you come by this ?"
" It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo
measuredly, " with the bits of evidence I've told you of,
and a few others, when the big stone chimney at Haar-
grond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other
bits of evidence were bits of a man — two men you might
call him ! And, by the Living Tinker, considerin' how he
was mixed up with the rest of the rubbish, he might have
been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch !"
" He had this upon him ? He — wore it round liis
neck ?" Saxham asked the question in a grating whisper,
dropping the clenched hand that held the diamond-set
miniature upon the arm of his chair.
" I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly,
" when he had a neck to boast of." He added, as he got
up to take his leave : " The thing has been carefully cleaned.
The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked in one place,
but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd
hand it over to — anybody it belongs to ? Hope I haven't
mulled many professional appointments. Remember me to
Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully ! So long !"
606 THE DOP DOCTOR
LXV
In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, writteh by a
man with whom he had been fairly intimate at Gu elders-
dorp during the stienuoua days of the Siege — tt man who
would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those
days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent
letter, written by an unsteady hand.
Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the ^(^aste-paper
basket with a contemptuous shrug. But he had made a
mental note of the address, and drove there that afternoon.
The Doctor's motor- brougham stopped at the door of
the grimy stucco Clergy- House that is attached to St. Mar-
garet's in Wendish Street, West. Saxham rang a loud
bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged passages,
and brought a little bouneted woman in rusty black to
answer the door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius
Fraithorn was at home and able to receive a visitor ?
The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry,
and wore one eyebrow several inches higher than the other,
shook her rusty crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as
she informed Saxham in a husky voice 8tr(mgly flavoured
with cloves that Father Julius 'ad befen in the Confessional
all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the Ascen-
sion, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she
could do, she inferred, with quite a third-hand air of
clerical responsibility, she would be happy to oblige the
gentleman.
" I shall be obliged by your conveying my caM to ]\Ir.
Fraithorn. You see that I am a doctor," said Saxham,
with unsmiling gravity, " and not an ordinary caller on
business connected with religion."
The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snortnd as
scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a
cream-washed, brown -distemper-dadoed passage, smelling
of kippered haddocks and incense, to a sitting-room at the
rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a view of
mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor,
and a washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design
suggestive of a ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.
THE BOP DOCTOR 607
Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library ;
chromo-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas
by Old Masters hung above. The Philistine School of
Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug ; three
Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor ; a
table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of
green baize ; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly
bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin,
black clad figure of the Reverend JuUus Fraithora, who
was lying down.
" I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the
prone figure, a single stride having taken him to the side
of the sofa, " to prescribe for a man whose nerves are play-
ing him tricks. I have torn up your letter— the epistle
in which you ask me to afford you an opportunity of
making an avowal which will prove to what depths of
infamy a man may descend at the bidding of his lower
nature. Lower nature ! If I am any judge of a man's
physical condition, a lower nature is what you want !" He
thiew down his hat and stick upon the green-baize-covered
table, took one of the Windsor chairs, and crashed it do\vn
beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big body on it, and
reached out and captiu-ed the thin wrist of his victim, who
mustered breath to stammer :
"■ There is nothing whatever the matter with my health.
I am well — that is, bodily." He got up from the sofa, and
crossed to the Zoological hearthiug, and poked the smoky
little file buraing in the narrow grate, for the May day was
wet and chilly. "I shall be better, mentally," he said,
with an effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham,
" when you have heard what I have to tell." He rose up,
and turned round, hia thin face flaming. '* Mind, I'm
not to be gagged by your not wanting to," for Saxham had
impatiently waved his hand. " Hear you shall, and mu^t !"
He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that
couched on a field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove
his hands down deep into his pocketw, and the painful
scarlet surged over the rim of his Roman collar and dyed
his thin, sensitive, beautiful face and high, white forehead
to the roots of hi« dark, curling hair.
*' Perhaps you may recall an oath I Hwor<d at your insti-
608 THE DOP DOCTOR
gation one day in your room at the Hospital at Guelders-
dorp ?"
" Yes — no ! What does it matter ?" said Saxham
thickly, with his angry, brooding eyes upon the floor.
" It matters," said Julius doggedly, " in the present case.
I need hardly tell you that I have kept that oath. K the
man had not been dead, I might have ended by breaking it
— who knows ? What I have to tell you is that, some two
months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady
who is now your wife was first made pubUc, I, impelled and
prompted by a despicable envy of the great good-fortune
that had fallen — deservedly fallen — to your lot, sought out
Miss IMildare, and told her — something I had learned to j^our
detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling, worthless
creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength
of a seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."
Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall
now instead of the floor, and breathed unevenly and
quickly. His right hand, resting on the table near which
he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its
supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhj^thmical move-
ment. He waited to hear more. And Juhus groaned out,
with his elbows on the painted wooden mantelshelf, and
his shamed face hidden :
" I knew that the man lied — on my soul, I knew it ! But
the opportunity he had given me of lowering your value
in — ^Ln another's eyes was too tempting to resist. The
man had told me "
" In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard,"
said Saxham ; " and, as it happens, he told the truth !"
He added : " And what I was then I am now. There is no
change in me, though once I thought it !"
" Saxham ! . . . For God's sake, Saxham !" stuttered
JuUus. But Saxham, hunching his great shoulders, and
lowering his square, black head, not at all unlike the savage
bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went on :
"It is a drimken world we live in. Parson, for all our
sham of abstinence and sobriety. But there are nice
degrees and various grades in our drunkenness, as in our
other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises the
common drunkard ; and the sippers of ether look down
THE DOP DOCTOR 609
with infinite contempt — or, more ludicrous still, with
tender, pitying sorrow, upon the toper and the slave of
morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing the oxy-
genated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxy-
genated racehorse run for the Cup ! A year or so, and the
Transatlantic oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equip-
ment of the British athlete. Even to-day the professional
footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer, inhale oxygen
as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that is
born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The
man who scales an Alpine summit winds himself up with
a whiff or so ; the orator, inspired by oxygen, astonishes
the House of Commons or the Bar. And the actor, de-
lirious with oxygen, rushes on the stage ; and the clergy-
man, drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit to preach a
Temperance sermon. And the Dop Doctor of Guelders-
dorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying tipplers ; and
there is not an honest man to rise up and say : ' Phy-
sician, heal thyself !' "
The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure
as he got up. His fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken
caves as he took his hat and stick from the table.
" What more have you to ' confess ' ? You did not
wrong me. Moralists would say that you acted con-
scientiously — played the part of a true friend in telling —
her — what you Ivnew !"
" Of my benefactor — the man who had saved my life !"
Julius moistened his dry lips. " Your approving moralist
would be the devil's advocate. But I have not forgotten
what your own opinion is of the man who tries to enhance
his own virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the
vices of a rival. And, if you will t)eli(>'e me, I was punished
for the attempt. Her look of surprise . . . the tone in
which she said, ' Did he not save your life V that was
enough ! . . . Then I — I lost my head, and told her that
I loved her — entreated her to be my wiff\ only to learn
that she never had — never could " Julius's thin
white fingers knotted themselves painfully at the back of
his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks between his
gritted teeth : " It was revolting to her — a girl reared
39
610 THE DOP DOCTOR
among nuns in a Catholic Convent — that a man calling
himself a priest should speak to her of love. There was
absolute horror in her look as she learned the truth." He
groaned. " I have never met her eyes since that day
without seeing — or imagining I saw — some reflection of
that horror in them !"
" Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations ?"
said Saxham, not unkindly.
He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure,
when Julius stopped him.
" One moment. Has — has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to
you of — this that I have told you ?"
" Never !" answered Saxham, pausing at the door.
" One moment more ! Saxham, is it hopeless 1 Could
you not by a desperate effort break this habit that may —
that must— inevitably bring misery to your wife ? In the
name of her love for you — in the names of the children
that may be bom of it "
— " Unless you want me to murder you," advised Sax-
ham, facing the passionate emotion of the yoimger man as
a basalt chff might oppose a breaking wave, " you had
better be silent !"
" My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, " is better
than you know. When I endeavoured — unsuccessfully —
to injure you, I robbed myself of my belief in myself. But
you — ^you who gave me back my earthly life, you have
robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal God. Do
you know the effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a
faithful soul ? It is a choking fungus, a dry rot, a creeping
palsy ! Since that day at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp,
when you said to me, ' The Human Will is even more
omnipotent than the Deity, because it has created Him, out
of its own need !' I have done my daily duty as a priest to
the numbing burden of that utterance — I have preached
the Grospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrimg his
hands, that were wet as though they had, been dipped in
water. " I have tended souls as mechanically as a gar-
dener might water pots in which there w^ nothing but
dead sticks and dry earth !"
" Try to credit mo when I tell you," said Saxham,
wrung by the suffering in the thin young face and in the
THE DOP DOCTOR 611
beautiful haggard eyes, " that I never meant the harm that
I appear to have done ! Nor can I recall that I have
habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any
Christian man's. I remember that I was suffering, phy-
sically and mentally, upon the day you particularly refer
to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen
an announcement in the Siege Gazette that ... I dare say
you understand ?" He laughed harshly. " As to my
theory of the Omnipotence of Human Will, it is blown and
exploded, and all the King's horses and all the King's men
will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from.
I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is
left in me ! Of how far Will, in another man, may carry
him, I dare not judge or calculate. My own is a dead leaf,
doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows !"
He tookup the walking-stick he had leaned against a book-
case, and said, pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes :
" The best of us are bad in spots, Parson : the worst
of us are good in patches. You Churchmen don't recog-
nise that fact sufficiently. . . . And I think no worse of
you for what you have told me ! If I have anything to
forgive — why, it is forgiven ! Do you try, on the other
hand, to think leniently of a man who broke your staff of
faith for you, and has nothing of his own to lean upon.
As for my wife, in whose interests I know you to be honestly
soUcitous, I will tell you this much : She will be spared the
* inevitable misery ' of which you spoke Just now !"
" How ? Have you decided to undergo a cure ? I
have heard," hesitated Julius, " that these things are not
always successful — that they sometimes fail !"
"Mine is the only ciu-e that never fails," returned Saxham.
A vision of the little blue-glass, yellow-labelled vial that
held the swift dismissing pang, floated before him. He
shook hands with Julius, and went upon his lonely way.
LXVI
Even the saintly of this earth are prone to rare, occaaional
displays of temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her
deacenl from Eve by stamping her slender foot at her
a 0—2
612 THE DOP DOCTOR
n
hulking Doctor ; had, after a sudden outburst of pas-
sionate, unreasonable upbraiding, risen from the dinner-
table and run out of the room, to hide a petulant, remorseful
shower of tears. ^1
Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst — merely II
an invitation from Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were
settled for the London summer season in Eaton Square,
for Owen and his wife to spend the scorching months of
August and September at the old home, perched on the
South Dorset clififs, among its thrush-haunted shrubberies
of ilex and oleander and rose — nothing more.
But Mrs. Owen Saxham had passionately resented the
idea. Why never occurred to Saxham. He had long ago
forgiven and forgotten Mildred's old treachery. If David's
beti'ayal had brought him shame and anguish, it had borne
him fruit of joy as well. And if the fruit might never be
gathered, if its divine juices might never solace her hus-
band's bitter thirst, at least, while he lived, it was his — to
look at and long for. He owed that cruel bliss to his brother
and that brother's wife. And their meeting had been,
upon his side, free of constraint, unshadowed by the recol-
lection of what had once appeared to him a base betrayal — a
gross, foul, unpardonable wrong.
Suppose he had married IMildred, and been uneventfully
happy and successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would
never have seen and l^nown Lynette. She would never have
come to him and laid in his the slight hand whose touch
thrilled him to such piercing agony of yearning for the
little more that would have meant so much — so much. . . .
Ah, yes ! he was even grateful to MiJdred. She had not
worn well. She had grown thin and passee, and nervous and
hysterical. But she was amiable, even demonstrative in
her professions of admiration and enthusiasm for Owen's
wife. Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the
sisterliness of its expression when he was present, if in
his absence it was tempered by a regretful sigh — even by
a reference to the time :
" When poor dear Owen thought me the only vjoman
worth looking at in thf whole world. Ah, well ! that is
all over, long ago !" Mildred would say, with an inflection
<Jiat was meant to be tenderly reassuring. And she would
THE DOP DOCTOR 613
tilt her still pretty head on one side and smile with pensive
kindness at her successor upon the throne of poor dear
Owen's heart.
These gentle, retrospective references were never made
in the Doctor's hearing. With truly feminine tact they
were reserved for Mrs. Owen's delectation. And possibly
they might have rankled in those pretty shell-like ears, if
their owner had loved Saxham.
But Saxham knew that she did not ; — had even ceased
to wish that the miracle might be wrought. Brainy men
can be very dense. When she stamped her foot and cried,
" I decline to accept IMrs. Saxham' s invitation, either
with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream
of asking me to ! If you can forget how hideously she
and your brother have treated you, I cannot ! I loathe
treachery ! I abominate ingratitude and deceit ! And I
hate her — and I shall not go !" Saxham opened his eyes,
as well he might. He had never before seen his wife other-
wise than gentle and submissive. He found his own bitter
explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among
the debris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table.
Her fetters were galling her to agony, he knew ! His
square pale face grew more Rhadamanthine than ever, and
the glass he had been filling with, port overflowed unnoticed
on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure
before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light
silken draperies passed over the soft carpet. The door opened
and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As
Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding llguro, mechanically
sipping at his port, and staring at the "^mpty place opposite,
where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushcd-
back chair, and the serviette that made a white streak on the
dark crimson carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her
departure, he said to himself that the West End upholsterer
who had the contract for refurnishing Plas 13endigaid
must be warned to complete his work without delay.
For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had
been a Convent in the fifteenth century, and probably lung
before, the South Welsh home of his mother's girlhood,
perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a wide shelf
of the headland that coimuiLuds the treacheroua shoals and
614 THE BOP DOCTOR
snowy shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nant-
madoc Bay . . . Plas Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested
money, was to be Saxham's bequest to his young widow.
Everytliing that loving care and forethought could plan
had already been done to make the old home pleasant and
charming. Nothing was needed but the upholsterer's finish-
ing touches. Saxham had planued that Lynette should
be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping
that promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little
more than a year before.
He had always meant to keep it, but not when the
north-east gales of winter and spring should be sweeping
over the mountain- passes and lashing the waves to mad-
ness ; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should
have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-
black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves be-
littled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours,
and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the
soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of
snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.
When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled
in sweetness, Saxham would keep his promise. When the
swallows should hatch out their yomig broods between the
huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust
cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope
and the groaning crane, to rear with them upon the Jut of
the rugged headland two hundred feet above the waves that
now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower, now merged in
the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over
Herion. When thor~ blocks of cyclopaean masonry should
be tufted with the golden wallflower and the perfumed wild
geranium, and starred with the delicate blossom of the
lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little
blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the
big whisky-flask sliould come into use.
When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be
covered for leagues by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread
by the broom and tlie furze; when the innumerable little
yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly bushes,
thrusting pertly tlirough the powdery white sand, and
every hollow and hillock should be gay with the star con-
1
THE DOP DOCTOR 615
volvulus and the flaunting scarlet poppies — then Death
should come, borne on winged feet, and bearing the sword
of keenness, to sever the iron bonds of Andromeda chained
to the rock. And here was Summer, knocking at the door !
Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out
and ask the reason of her strange display of emotion.
Only a husband could do that who had the right to take
her in his arms and kiss the last remaining traces of het
tears away. Saxham went to his consulting-room, and
while all the clocks of London made time, and the moon
veered southward, and the stars rose and set, he toiled
over his notes and case-books in the brilliant circle cast by
the shaded electric lamp upon liis writing-table, and the
tide in the big whisky-flask in tlie table-drawer ebbed low.
Hours hence he laid down liis pen. The flask had long
been emptied ; the alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey
chambers of his brain. Weariness of life weighed on him
like a leaden panoply. He had almost stretched his hand
to take the little blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting
in the deep table-drawer beside the drained flask before
sleep overcame him. His head sank against the chair-
back. His was a sudden, heavy lapsing into forgetfulness,
unmarred by dreams.
Time sped. The silver table-clock, the clock upon the
mantelshelf, and the grandfather clock in the comer, ran a
race with the chronometer in the i)ocket of the sleeping
man. The brilliant unwavering circle of electric light did
not reach the face of the Dop Doctor. It bathed his hands,
that hung lax over the arms of the Sheraton chair, and
tipped his lifted chin, leaving the strong brow and closed
eyes in shadow. But as the pale glinuner of dawn began
to outline the edges of the blinds, and stretched at length
a broad, pointing finger across the quiet room, the sleeping
face showed greyish pale and luminous as a drawing by
Whistler in silver-point.
The dawn had not rested on it long before there came a
knock upon the panel of the consulting-room door. It was
so faint and diffident a knock, no wonder it passed un-
heeded. Then the door opened timidly, and a slender
616 THE BOP DOCTOR
figure in pale flowing di-aperies of creamy embroidered
cashmere stole upon small, noiseless, slippered feet over the
thick Turkey carpet.
It was Lynette. She had risen from her bed, and looked
out from the landing into the hall below, and, seeing the
light of the unextinguished lamp shining under the lintej
of the consulting-room door, had stolen timidly down to
ask Owen's jjardon. Why had she behaved so badly ? She
could not explain. Only she was sorry. She must tell
him so. His name was upon her lips, when she saw the
Dop Doctor sleeping in his chair.
Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side.
And then — it was to her as though she looked upon her
husband's face for the first time.
There was no stain of his secret excess upon it — no
bloating of the features. You would have said this was a
sane and strong and temperate man, upon whom the
mighty brother of all -conquering Death had come, like one
armed, and overthrown in the heat and stress of the life-
battle. Only the sorrow of a suffering soul was written
as deeply on that pale mask of human flesh as though the
sculptor-slaves of a Pharao, dead seven thousand years
agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, resistless temper
in the diamond-hard Egyptian granite.
He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle
twitched as Lynette bent over and looked at him. A
mass of her red-brown hair, heavy with the weight of its
own glossy luxuriance, slipped from her half- bared bosom
as she leaned over him, and fell upon his breast. A sudden
blush burned over her as it fell. He never stirred. But as
though the rod of Moses had touched the rock in Horeb, one
slow tear oozed from between Saxham's black fringed, close-
sealed eyelids, and hung there, a burnished, trembling point
of steely light. And the deep, still, manly anguish of his
face cried out to the reawakening womanhood in Lynette,
and a strange, new, overwhelming emotion seized and
shook her as a stream of white and liquid fire seemed to
pass into her veins and mingle with her blood.
She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart
and bated breath, upon the living page before her eyes.
In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, that
THE DOP DOCTOR 617
face of Saxham's pleaded with her. In its stem acceptance
of suffering and disappointment for Saxham, in its rugged
confrontation of the inevitable ; in its resolute long-suffering
and grim patience ; in its silent abnegation of any claim
upon her gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness,
the face was more than eloquent to-night. In the pride
that would never stoop to beg for pity — would rather die
hungered than accept one crumb of grudged and measured
love ; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to that
promise given to a dead man ; in the nobility of its refusal
to shine brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the
revelation of that other man's mean baseness ; in its almost
paternal solicitude ; in its agony of love for her, insensible and
careless ; in the sick despair that had given up and left off
hoping : even in the pride that had — or so it seemed to her
— asserted itself at the last, and said, " I have left off cry-
ing for the moon ; I wish for your love no longer !" — it
pleaded — pleaded. . . . Words struggled for ajiswering
utterance in her, but none came. . . , She leaned nearer,
drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips
lightly upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of
black meeting eyebrow smudged across it, and then, with
a sudden leap and thrill, she knew. . . .
All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only
this man mattered who sat sleeping in the chair. How
easy to awaken him with a touch, and tell him all ! She
dared not, though she longed to.
He was her master as well as her mate. When he had
said to her that he had ceased to care, his eyes had given
his words the lie. He had looked at her. . . . She
shivered deliciously at the recollection of that look. If he
were to open those stern, ardent eyes now, he would know
her his. His — all his, to deal with as he chose ! . . . His
alone !
If Saxham had awakened then. . . . But he slept on.
She did not dare to kiss that broad white buckler of liis
forehead again. She kissed the sleeve of his coat instead,
and, scared by a sudden sigh and movement of one of the
hands that hung over the chair-arms, gathered her draperies
around her, and stole as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam, out
of the room.
618 THE DOP DOCTOR
Lxvn
It was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at
Herion is wont to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper
of angry \vdnd and lashing rain. Lynette, who had risen
from her bed and thrown her dressing-gown about her, to
kneel on the broad window-seat and look out upon this
strange new world, shivered, standing barefoot on the
mossy carpet. Then she looked round the room, and smiled
with delight. For she had found it, upon her arrival of
the previous night, a reproduction, down to the smallest
detail, of her blue-and-white bedroom at Harley Street,
with this notable difference — that on the wall facing the
bed-head hung a fine copy of a Millais portrait that was
,one of the treasures of Ba\vne House. Lady Bridget-Mary,
in the glory of her beautiful youth, shone from the canvas
splendid as a star.
How kind, how kind of Owen ! . . . Her eyes filled as
she gazed, comparing the glowang, radiant face upon the
canvas with the enlarged photograph of the Mother in her
habit that stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little
table beside the bed. A worn " Garden of the Soul " lay
near, and the " Imitation " of inspired A Kempis. Both
had been the Mother's gifts. The Breviary and the Little
Office of Our Lady had belonged to the dead. Lynette had
brought these treasured possessions with her from Harley
Street, leaving the ivory Crucifix hanging in its place above
the vacant pillow. So many sleepless nights she had known
of late upon that pillow that there were faint bluish-shaded
hollows under the beautiful eyes, and wistful lines about
the mouth.
Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when
the heavy tress of hair dropped from her bosom upon the un-
conscious breast above which she bent, an insurmountable
wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and of stern,
self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up
between them, dwarfiLng the barrier that was already there.
His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights,
but she had never ventured upon another stolen visit to
Saxham's consulting-room. The memory of that kiss she
THE DOP DOCTOR 619
had put upon the velvety-smooth space above the broad
meeting eyebrows stung in her like a sense of guilt, and
yet it had its sweetness. She had claimed her right.
The man was hers, though slie might never be his. . . .
To know it was to realise at once her riches and her poverty.
Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain
had come to her the knowledge of the true herb needed for
her healing. The unsated hunger for sympathy and love
and loveliness, the loneliness that gnawed him, she com-
prehended now. And as she looked about her at the dainty,
carefully-chosen furniture, and the exquisite old-world-
patterned chintz draperies, recognising what his care had
been to please her, and how every little taste and preference
of hers had been remembered and gratified, a sense of her
own ingratitude pierced her to the quick.
She had parted from Owen without one tender word,
without even one glance of greater kindness than she
would have bestowed upon a stranger. She ached Avdth
futile remorse at the recollection of that frigid, distant
good-bye at Euston Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill
laugh had jangled through I\Iajor Bingo's blustering
admonitions to perspiring porters to put the luggage in
one compartment, to stow canvas bags of golf -clubs and
fishing-rods in the racks, and to damage bicycles at their
personal peril, since the company evaded hability.
It had been Saxham's wish that Lady Hannah and Major
Wrynche should be his wife's guests at Plas Bendigaid.
Looking from her bedroom casements over the syringas and
lilacs and larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and holhoa
of the low-walled garden that ended at the sheer clitJ-edge,
from whence you looked down upon the tops of the pines
and chestnuts, whose green foliage hid the shining metals
of the iron way, and made a sea of verdure in place of the
salt blue waves that once had lapped and sighed there —
gazing across the powdery sand-dunes that were prickly
with sea-holly and gay with fiauuting poppies and purple
scabious, the pink and white convolvulus, atid the thorny
yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds nourishment in the
pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white breakers
that rose and fell more than a mile away, Lynette sighed
a small sigh of resignation at the prospect of long weeks to
620 THE DOP DOCTOR
be spent in the society of these pleasant, well-bred, rather
fidgety people Owen had chosen to bear her company.
Of course, Owen could not leave his patients ! He had
explained that, and Lady Hannah and her big Major were
old friends of hers and his. And the little woman with
the jangling laugh and the snapping black eyes had known
the Mother in her youth. . . .
At that remembrance Lynette's eyes went lovingly to
the copy of the Millais portrait, and as the sun burst
through the streaming wind-chased clouds, and smote
bright diamond-rays from the dripping window-panes, the
film lips seemed to curve in the rare, sudden smile, the
great grey eyes to gleam with life and tenderness.
Ah, to spend a long, sweet summer here, alone with that
dearest of all companions ! Lynette's white throat swelled
at the thought, and a mist blotted out the noble face,
cro^vned with its diadem of rich black tresses. She wiped
the tears away, and beheld a world miraculously changed.
For land and sea were drenched in radiant sunshine.
She unlatched the casements and threw them wide,
and clean, salt, sweet air came streaming in, bringing the
fragrance of mignonette and wallflower and sweetbriar, and
the aromatic smells of the larch and pine. She leaned her
white arms upon the grey stone window-sill, and drank the
freshness and fragrance. And it seemed to her that this
ancient grange, perched on the cliil-ledge in the tremendous
shadow of Herion Castle, looking across the restless grey-
blue waters of Nantmadoc Bay to St. Tirlan's Roads, was
an ideal place to spend a honeymoon in, supposing you
loved the man you had married, and were loved by him ?
Her bosom heaved and her wild heart fell to throbbing.
A blush burned over her, and she drove the thought away.
It came back, whispering like a guest who wishes not to be
dismissed. It pleaded and urged and compelled. Some-
thing like a strong hand closed upon her heart and drew
her, drew her. ... A voice called to her in the silence
that was only broken by the voices of birds, and the rustling
of wind-stirred leaves, and the crying of the gulls above
the white restless breakers. And the voice was Owen's.
How strangely he had looked and spoken in that last
momejifc of their parting ! It came back in every detail
THE DOP DOCTOR 621
for the hundredth time, as she leaned her white arms upon
the window-sill and looked out with wistful eyes upon the
beauty of the blossoming world.
" Good-bye, good-bye ! Be happy — and forget !"
The train had begun to move as he uttered the words
He had gripped her hand painfully and released it. As he
drew his arm sharply away, a button, hanging loosely by
a thread or two, became detached from his coat-cu3, and fell
upon the rubber matting of the corridor. She was con-
scious of the button as Saxham and the crowded, grimy
platform receded from her view. And before she went
back to her seat in the compartment that had been reserved
for herself and her fellow-travellers, she picked up the tiny
disc of black horn, and secretly kissed it, and slipped it
into her purse. She was silent and preoccupied during the
eleven hours' journey, turning over and over in her mind,
mentally repeating wdth every shade of expression that could
vary their meaning, Saxham's strange words of farewell.
She repeated them now aloud. They were tossed to
and fro in her heart on waves of wonder and regret and
apprehension. Did Owen really believe that to be happy
she must forget him ? Did he comprehend that she had
long arrived at the conclusion that this loveless. Joyless
companionship, mocked by the name of marriage, was a
miserable mistake ?
He had never been under any illusion as concerned it.
He had accepted the iron terms of the contract she offered
him with open eyes and full knoAvledge. She heard his
voice again, as it had spoken in the Cemetery at Guelders-
dorp, saying :
" Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner,
into a marriage that should be practically no marriage at
all — a formal contract that is not wedlock ? That might
never change as Time went on, and ripen into the close
union that physically and mentally makes happiness for
men and women who love ? Is that what you ask me,
Miss Mildare ?"
That was just what she had asked. He had accepted
her iron conditions, and stipulated for nothing. He had
given his all. What had she given him ? Nothing but
suffering, being rendered pitiless by the ache and stiug in Ler
622 THE DOP DOCTOR
own bosom — absorbed, swallowed up by her agony of grief
for the Mother, her passion of regret for dead Beauvayse.
Beauvayse. . . . Suppose he and Owen Saxham stood
side by side down there on the green short grass beneath
her windows, which of the two men would to-day be the
dearer and the more desired ? The tall, soldierly young
figure, with the sunburnt, handsome face, the gay, amorous,
challenging glance, the red mouth that laughed under the
golden moustache, and the shallow brain under the close-
clipped golden curls, or the black-haired, hulking Doctor,
with the square-cut, powerful face and the stern blue eyes,
the man of heart and intellect, whose indomitable, patient
tenderness had led a stricken girl back from the borders of
that strange land where the brain-sick dwell, to wholesome
consciousness of common things, and renewed healthful-
ness of body and of mind 1
She had hardly thanked him. She realised, with tears
of shame, that this inestimable service she had accepted as
matter of course. It was the way of Saxham's world to
take of him and render nothing ; he who was worthy to
be a King among his fellow-men had been their servant as
long as she had known him.
To call him hard and stern, and seek his aid and sym-
pathy at every pinch ; to deem him cold and grudging, and
accept his sacrifices as matter of course — that was the way
of the world with grim- jawed, tender-hearted Owen Sax-
ham. And she, who had done like the rest, knew him
now, and valued him for what he was, and — loved him !
For this was love that had come upon her like a strong
man armed, not as he had shown himself to her before —
laughing and merry, playful and sweet. . . . This was
no ephemeral, girlish passion, evoked by the beauty of
gay, wanton, grey-green jewel-eyes and a bold, smiling
mouth. This was a love that drew you with irresistible
strength, and knitted you to the soul, and the heart, and
the flesh of another, until his breath became your breath,
and his life your life. It called you with a voice that
plucked at the secret chords of your being, and was stem
and compelling rather than sweet to implore. It drew you
to the beloved, not with ribbons of silk, but with ropea of
THE DOP DOCTOR 623
tempered steel. It was potent and resistless as death, and
infinitely deeper than the grave. It reached out aspiring
hands beyond the grave, into Eternity. And, newly born
as it rose in the heart of this woman, it was yet as old as
Eden, where Heavenly Love created the earthly love, that
is more than half-divine.
Why, why had he sent her away, bidding her be happy
and forget him ? . . . The memory of his hollow eyes
and haggard face pierced her to the quick. He was ill —
he was in trouble ; he had sent her away that he might
bear the burden solely. ... Or ... an iron hand closed
upon her heart, and wrung it until points of moisture
started upon her fair temples under the fine tendrils of
her hair . . . could the reason be — another woman ?
Another woman ? . . . She set her little teeth and drove
the unworthy thought away. But it came again and
again — a persistent mental gadfly. Was Owen not worthy
of love ? Suppose another sweeter, gentler creature had
found a throne in the heart that his wife had prized so
lightly, would it be so very strange, after all ? Perhaps
that was why he had asked her to forgive him for having
married her a little while ago !
She dropped her head upon her folded arms, and sobbed
at the thought. Then she dried her tears and rang for her
maid, and presently came down to breakfast with Lady
Hannah, smiling and composed, cheerful and attentive as
a hostess ought to be. But her reddened eyelids told tales.
" Misses her Doctor, no doubt," thought Lady Haimah,
as she commended the country eggs and butter, and was
enthusiastic over the thyme-scented Welsh mountain-
honey, and apologetic over the absence of her Bingo from
the board.
She would carry her nuisance Ma brt aldast with her oami
hands, she vowed, as he had left his man bchiad, on hearing
from the Doctor that the house was a small one.
" But why ?" asked Lynette. " There is Marie, my
maid, and the red-cheeked parlourmaid, whose name I
don't yet know, and Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper . . ."
" Who was Dr. Saxham's nurse when he was a little boy,
and adores him. And Mrs. Pugh's husband, who is
gardener, and handy-man, and coachman when required."
624 THE DOP DOCTOR
Lady Hannah's laugh Jangled out over the capacious
tray, containing the comprehensive assortment of viands
representing what the invalid was wont to term his
" brekker." " But I'm not to be deprived of my privilege,
for all that. Do you suppose you young married creatures
are the only wives who enjoy cosseting their husbands 1
There ! it's out, and I ought to be ashamed of myself, I
suppose, but I'm not. Is that collared bra^vn on the side-
board ? Bingo has a devouring passion for collared brawTi."
She added a goodly slice to the contents of the tray.
" I warn you, if you regard the billing and cooing of a
middle-aged couple as indecent," she went on, " to look
the other way a great deal while we're here. For I was
for the first time seriously smitten with my husband when
he rode out to meet me, returning from ignoble captivity
in the tents of Brounckers, eighteen months ago. When I
nursed him through enteric in the Hospital at Frostenberg
— I won't disguise it — I fell in love ! With a bag of bones,
for he was nothing else : but genuine passion is indifferent
to the personal appearance of the beloved object, though
I hadn't suspected it before. The wound completed my
conquest, and since then I'm madly Jealous if another
woman looks at him ! . . . I see red — green would be a
better colour — because he prefers to have his valet brush
his hair. I don't know that I didn't reduce the holding
capacity of this house by a storey—there's a pun for you !
— so as to engineer my hated rival being left at home in
Wilton Place. Is that lovely murrey-coloured stuff in the
cut-glass Jar quince marmalade ? No ! I won't pamper
Bingo, if he is the idol of my soul. And please don't wait
for me. He likes me to take off the tops of his eggs for
him, and he usually eats three. . . ."
Lady Hannah tripped off with her load, and deposited
it before the idol, who was sitting up in a Japanese bed-
jacket of wadded pink satin, left-handedly reading the
Herion newspaper that comes out once a week, and is pub-
lished at St. Tirlan's, twenty miles away.
" I've made a discovery," she announced. " No, don't
look frightened. It's only that poor Biddy's belle trou-
vaille has got a heart. She's not the tinted Canova-nymph,
the piece of correct inanity, I honestly believed her. . . .
THE DUP DOCTOK 625
She idolised Biddy— small credit, for who could help it ?
She submitted to be adored by that poor foolish boy who's
dead. . , . Now she's her black-avised Doctor's humble
worshipper and slave."
" Can't understand a woman worshippin' a chap with
a chin like the bows of an armoured Destroyer, and eye-
brows like another man's moustaches," Bingo objected.
" Chin or no chin, eyebrows or not a hair, what does that
count to a woman in love ?" She placed the laden tray
before him, and with a maternal air proceeded to tuck a
napkin under his chin. He grumbled :
'* There's no knowin' what will take the female fancy.
But even if you haven't harked away on a wrong scent,
slave's a dash too strong. Struck me they parted un-
common chilly and off-hand at Euston yesterday momin',
considerin' they've not been married much above a year !
Do take this thing from round my neck ! Makes me feel
like Little Willie !"
Lady Haimah unpinned the napkin that framed the
bulldog - Jowl, and said, patting the sandy-pink bullet-
head :
" That's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in amatory
affairs. No Eyes sees two people part, ' uncommon off-
hand and chilly.' " She mimicked Bingo's tone. " Eyes
sees that and something more ! A man's coat- button
dropped on the floor of a railway carriage, for instance, and
a young woman who slyly picks it up — silly little (jage
d' amour — and kisses it when a considerate observer pre-
tends not to be looking, and hides it away ! Is that
evidence, Major Mole ?"
" By the Living Tinker !" he thundered, " I wouldn't
have believed it of her !"
*' Of course you wouldn't !" She rummaged in an open
suit-case. " VVhat necktie do you want to wear to-day ?"
He mumbled ruefully, eyeing her over the colTce-cup :
" Any of 'em. It don't matter which. They're all
alike when you've tied 'em !"
She beamed at what seemed to her a <2;allant speech.
" SaTM compliment ? You really mean it ? And you
won't miss Grindlay so frightfully, after alH"
He shook his head ambiguously.
40
626 THE 1)0P DOCTOR
" I shan't begin really to suffer for Grindlay — not till it
comes to tubbin' with one fin."
" Mercy upon us !" She gasped in consternation. He
said, controlling his features from wreathing into tri-
unxphant smiles :
" You were so cast-iron certain you could fill his place,
you know !"
Her bright black eyes were hidden under abashed and
drooping eyelids. Blushes played hide-and-seek in the
small cheeks that were usually pale.
" In — in everything essential," she stammered, avoiding
his intolerable gaze.
" Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in
ordinary, eveiyday affairs !" The man pursued liis ad-
vantage pitilessly. " Didn't you regard it as essential that
I sliould wash ?''
She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him.
" Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that
decided me on marrying you was that you were invariably
•propre cornme un sou neufy
" I thought, on mature reflection," said Bingo, lying
down under the lightened tray with a replete and satisfied
air, " that you would prefer a clean husband to a dirty
one. Therefore I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay at the
Herion Arms. That's his knock. Come in !"
The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing
respectfully at sight of her ladyship, who gave him a gracious
good- morning, dissembling the intense relief experienced
at sight of liis smug, clean-shaven countenance.
" Good-morning, Grindlay. 1 hope the Hotel people
made you comfortable. And now you have arrived to take
responsibility off my hands," she announced, " I'll go and
get some breakfast."
" Haven't you . . . You're Joking !" The tray shot from
the bed into Grindlay's saving clutch ap Bingo suddenly
assumed the perpendicular. " You don't mean to say
that you've been starving all the time I've been gorging
myself like — ^like a boa-constrictor ?" he demanded
furiously. " Why on earth are women sucli blessed "
" — Idiots ?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to
launch her Parthian shaft. " Because if they were intel-
THE DOP DOCTOR 627
lectual, logical beings they would know better than to
lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative, heart-
less, dull dolts of men !"
The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's
face was a study in immobility. Bingo, after a little
more meditation, ponderingly rose and submitted himself
to the hands of the attendant. When the .Major's toilet had
reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself fron>
hi^ reflections with a sigh.
" Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her
ladyship to be good enough to step up here. Tell her that
your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I want a little
more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will
you ?"
" Lord ! What a liar I am !" he murmured fervently,
addressing his reflection in the glass. His wife's face
appeared over his shoulder, bright, alert, and pleased. She
said, as she adroitly assumed the office vacated by tlie dis-
carded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance
on the scene :
" So you can't get on, it appears, without your ' blessed
idiot ' ?"
" Blessed angel, you mean !" said mendacious Bingo,
blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. " You
banged the door before I'd got out tlie word !"
" If I could believe that !" she sighed, and the ivory-
backed hair-bru.shes played rather a tremulous fantasia
upon her idol's head, " perhaps I might be induced to con-
fide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."
" Concemin' ?"
" Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."
" Well, what of her ?"
She took him by the chin and began to part his hair.
But her eyes were misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.
" This of her. She o\vned to you, months and months
back, that in your place she wouldn't have been one-
millionth part as patient with a restless, ambitious woman
cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and
other people into hot water." She made a little affected
grimace that masked a genuine smart. " Not liob watet
only — boiling lava aometimes — fizzling vitriol "
40 -2
628 THE DOP DOCTOR
He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and
quivering chin :
" Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know,
like gout and the rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, how-
ever much you try. It's like shavin' a Danish carriage-
dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts ; Ms spots
are in his skin ! See ?"
" Merci du compliment /" Her jangling laugh rang out
as if a stick had been smartly rattled down the keys of a
piano. But her eyes were wet. His own eyes reverted to
his reflection in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden bellow
made her drop tlic comb.
" My Aunt Maria ! See what you've been and done !
Made a Loop Railway down the middle of my head, imless
my liver's making me see things curly. Don't swot at it
any more ; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once. . . .
By the Living Tiiilcer ! you're cryin'. Don't go and say
I've been a brute !" he pleaded.
" Darling ! — dearest ! — you haven't — ^you've never ! . . .
The boot's on the other leg, though wild horses wouldn't
get you to o^.v•n as much !" His strong left arm was round
her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's
bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his tliroat in his ponderous,
scraping way, admitting :
" Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so — of
nights in bed at Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof
South, between ring-ups on the telephone when the off-
duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the blessed
earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not ?"
" There were people ready to tell you — ^years before we
saw Gueldersdorp — that the one you'd got was as good as
none. . . ."
" Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their
opinions !" She felt his great muscles swell as the big liand
tightened on her waist. " Though, mind you, there have
been times when for your own sake, by Jingo ! I'd have
given all I was worth to have you a bit more like other
women "
" Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win
distinction as War Correspondents. Who funk raw-head
and bloody bonus " — she shook with a nervous giggle — ■
THE DOP DOCTOR 629
" and all that sort of thing. . . . Would it please you to
know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have
been cut to the last quill — that henceforth my sole aim is
to rival the domestic Partlet, clucking of barnyard matters
in the discreet retirement of the coop ?"
" You've said as much before !" he objected.
" But now I mean it ! Put me to the test. Let the
house in Wilton Place — we'll live at Wrynche Rodelands, if
you think you won't be bored ?"
He bellowed Joyously !
" Me bored ! With ten thousand acres arable and wood
and moorland to farm and preserve and shoot over, two
first-class packs meetin' within a fifty-mile radius of my
doorstep, the Committee of the local Polo Association
shriekin' for a President, and the whole County beggin'
me with tears in its eyes to take the hint a Certain Person
dropped when he gave me my C.B., and accept the Crown
Commission as Lord-Lieutenant ! * Bored ' — I like that !"
" If you would like it, be it !" she flashed. " Trust me to
back you up. I can and I will ! I'll help you entertain
the military authorities and their women, keep the Rolls,
sit on the Bench when you weigh in as Chief Magistrate,
and prompt you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things
to one man — and you shall be the man ! Only " — slie
laughed hysterically, her face hidden against his big
shoulder — *' I don't quite know how far these things are
compatible with ray new role !"
" Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home
Coop." His big hand patted her almost paternally.
" Leave cluckin' to hens with families. Do you suppose
I'm such a pachydermatous ass that I can't understand
that home is a make-believe to a real woman, when — when
there isn't even one chicken to tuck under her wing !
Worse luck for me and you !"
She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to
him. Her black eyes were shining through the tears that
rose and brimmed over and fell.
" If I told you that the luck had changed, would that
make you happy ?"
He cried out with a great oath :
" Yes, by G !" and caught her to his loapinc: heart.
630 THE DOP DOCTOR
LXVIII
In the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many
interviews held with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch
and dinner, learned much anent the difficulty of obtaining
fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as regards the Satanic
duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist butcher
will substitute New Zealand Iamb for the native animal,
and still more about Saxham.
Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the
Doctor's grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's
worth of Master Owen, from the first time she set eyes on
him in a white frock, with a sausage-roll curl and diamond-
patterned socks. She had a venerable and spotty photo-
graph of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a
velvet suit and lace collar, and another photograph,
coloured by hand, taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for
out of his owTQ pocket-money, to send to Janellan, who had
nursed him through a holiday scarlet-fever. And regularly
had her blessed boy remembered her and Tafydd, said
Janellan, until the Cruel Time came, and he was lost sight
of in Foreign Parts. Tlien Mrs. Saxham died, and the
Captain — mentioned by Janellan with the ringing sni£E that
speaks volumes of disparagement — had turned her and her
old man out of the Plas " without as much as that !" — here
Janellan snapped her strong thumb-nail against her re-
maining front tooth — in recognition of their forty years of
faithful service.
But Master Owen, coming to his own again,'" and 'deed
an' 'deed, but the Plas ought to have been his from the
beginning !" had sought out the old couple, living in decent
poverty at St. Tirlan's, and reinstated them in their old
home. And well might Tafydd, who was a better Judge
of the points of a pig than any man in Herion — or in all
Wales for the matter of that — well might Tafydd declare
that the Lord never made a better man than Dr. Owen
Saxham ! What grand things they had said of him in the
papers ! No doubt the young mistress would have plenty
more to tell that had not got into print ?
" I can tell you many things of the Doctor," said
THE DOP DOCTOR 631
Lynette, smiling in the black-eyed, streaky-apple face,
" that you and Tafydd will be proud and glad to hear."
She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule,
but this morning she stooped and kissed the red-veined,
wrinkled cheek within Janellan's white-quilled cap-border.
Then, her household duties done, she pinned a rough, shady
straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose chamois-
leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were
perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from
the hall-rack, ran down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the
spidery, red-nisted iron foot-bridge that spanned the
railway-line, descended upon the farther side of the wood
of chestnut and larch that made green shadows at the base
of the cliff, and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the
free, undulating gait she had acquired from the Mother,
towards the restless line of white breakers that rose and
fell a mile away.
She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom-com-
pany ; a new hope gave her strength. She drank in long
draughts of the strong, salt, fragrant air, and as it filled her
lungs, knew her soul brimmed with fresh delight in the
beauty of the world. And a renewed and quickened sense
of the joy of life made music of the beating of her pulses
and the throbbing of her heart.
She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a
daughter of this sea-girt Britain : the blue, restless waves
beyond that line of white frothing breakers washed the
shores of the Mother's beloved green island, Emerald
Airinn, set in silver foam. A few miles, St. George's
Chamiel spanned — then straight as the crow flies over Wick-
low, Queen's County, King's County, taking Calway at the
acute angle of the wild mallard's flight ; and tliere would
be the chained lakes and winding silver rivers, the grey-green
mountains and the beetling cliffs, the dreamy vafleys and
wild glens of Connemara, with the ancient towers of Castle-
clare rising from its mossed la%vns studded witli immemorial
oaks. And Loch Ivilbawne among the wild highlands, and
Lochs Innsa and Barre, and Ballybarron Harbour, with its
Titanic breakwater, and three beacons, and the dun- brown
islands hidden in their veil of surf-edged spindrift, shaken
by the voices of hidden waters roaring in their secret caveia,
632 THE DOP DOCTOR
A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden
eyes dreamed as she walked on swiftly, a slender figure
dressed in a plain skirt of rough grey-blue, and a loose-
sleeved blouse of thick white silk, her slight waist belted
with a silver-mounted lizard-sMn girdle, a pleasant tinlde
of silver chatelaine appendages accompanying her steps.
And those steps were to her no longer uncompanioned.
It was as though the Mother were living, so enfolding a.nd
close was the sense of her presence to-day. God was in
His Heaven, and the world. His footstool, bore the visible
impress of His Feet. And it seemed to Lynette, who had
learned to see the faces of Christ and of His Mother Mary
through the lineaments of the earthly face that had first
looked love upon herself in her terrible abandonment, that
those Divine and glorious countenances looked down on
her and smiled. And her chilled faith spread quivering
wings, basking in their ineffable mild radiance as the little
blue and tortoiseshell butterflies basked in the glorious
sunsliine that had followed the morning's storm.
The tangible presence seemed to move beside her, through
the white powdery sand. Over the knotted grasses, between
the tufts of poppies and the prickly little yellow roses that
fringed tJie hollows, the garments of another seemed to
sweep beside her own. The folds of a thin veil upborne
on the elastic breeze fluttered beside her cheek, blew against
her lips, bringing the rare delicate fragrance — the familiar
perfume that clung to everything the Mother habitually
wore and used and touched. She did not look round, or
stretch out her hand. She walked along, drinking in
blissfulness and companionship at every pore of her thirsty
soul, joyfully realising that this would last ; that by-and-by
the great void of loneliness would not close in on her again.
Only the night before, upon the brink of the supreme
discovery that the dead in Christ are not only living in Him,
but for us also who are His, she had liesitated and doubted.
Before the sunrise of this glorious day she had learned to
doubt no more.
♦ ♦ » » «
She had been restless and unliappy. Saxham had not
written for a week. She bitterly missed the short, cold,
kind letters in the clear, small, firm handwriting, that had
THE DOP DOCTOR 633
reached her at intervals of three days, to be answered bv
her constrained and timid notes, hoping that he was well
and not overworking, describing the place and her pleasure
in it, without mention of her loneliness ; giving details of
Major Wrynche's progress towards recovery, and left-
handed attempts at golf, winding up -^^dth messages from
Lady Hannah and dutiful remembrances from Tafydd and
JanelJan, and signed, his affectionate wife, Lynette Saxham.
Trite and laboured and schoolgirlish enough those epistles
seemed to their writer. To Saxham they were drops of
rain upon the parching soil of his heart, the one good that
life had for him in this final lap of the race. And yet he
had ceased to write that they might come no more.
If he had known how his own letters to her were wel-
comed, how tenderly they were read and re-read, how
sweetly kept and cherished. . . . But he did not know !
He could only look ahead, and strain on to the nearing goal
with the great, dim., mysterious curtain hanging beyond it,
Jiearing the thudding of his wearied heart, and the whistling
of those sharp breaths in his strained lungs, and tlie mea-
sured sound of his own footfalls bearing him on to the end,
wliile night closed in on her, fevered and wakeful in her
bed, thinking of him, praying for him. longing for the sight
and sound of him. Sleep, when it came now, brought her
dreams less crystal than of old. Hued with the fiery rose
of opals some, because in these he loved her ; and that
shadowy woman, in whose existence she only half-believed,
had no part in him at all. But on the night preceding
the revelation she had not dreamed.
She awakened in the grey of dawn, when the thrushes
were calling, and lay straight and still, listening to the glad
bird-voices from the garden, her soft, fringed eyelids closed,
her white breasts gently heaving, her small feet crossed,
her slender, bare arms pillowing the little Greek head ; a
heavy plait of th^ silken wealth that crowned it drawn
down on either side of the sweet, pale face ;ind the pure
throat, intensifying their virginal beauty. The dull smart
of loneliness, the famished ache of loss, were gone alto-
gether. She felt strangely peaceful and calm and glad.
Then she knew she was not at Herion ; she was not even in
London. . . . She was back at the Convent, in the little
634 "THE DOP DOCTOR
wliitewashed room with the stained deal furniture — the
room with the pleasant outlook on the gardens that had
been hers from the first. Surely it was past the rising
hour ? Ah, yes ! but she had had a touch of fever. That
was why she was lying here so quietly, with the Mother
sitting by the bed.
There could be no doubt. . . . The light firm, pres-
sure that she knew of old was upon her bosom, just
above the beating of her heart. . . . That was always the
Mother's way of waking you. She sat beside you, and
looked at you, and touched you, and presently your eyes
opened, that was all ! . . . Thinking this, a streak of gold
glimmered between Lynette's thick dusky lashes ; her lips
wore a smile of infinite content. She stole a glance, and
there it was, the large, beautiful, lightly clenched hand.
The loose sleeve of thin black serge flowed away from the
strong, finely moulded wrist ; the white starched yuimpe
showed snowy between the drooping folds of the nun's
veil. . . . These familiar things Lynette drank in with a
sense of unspeakable content and pleasure. Then — her
eyes opened widely, and she knew.
She was looking into eyes that had seen the Beatific
Vision — great grey eyes that were unfathomable lakes of
heavenly tenderness and love divine. And the face that
framed them was a radiant pale splendour, indescribable in
its glorious beauty, unfathomable in its fulfilled peace. Her
own eyes drank peace from them, deeply, insatiably, while
the Herion thrushes sang their dewy matins, and the scent
of mignonette and sweet-peaa and early roses mingled
with the smell of the sea, stole in at the open casement
where the white blind swelled out like a breeze-filled sail.
How long Lynette lay there storing up content and
rapture she did not know, or want to know. But at last
the wonder of those eyes came nearer — nearer ! She
felt the dear pressure of the familiar lipa upon her own.
A fragrance enveloped her, an exquisite Joy overbrimmed
her, as a voice— the beloved, unforgotten voice of match-
less music — spoke. It said :
" Love your husband as I loved Richard I Be to a child of
his what I have been to youf
# # » • •
THE DOP DOCTOR 635
Eyes and face and voice, white hand and flowing veil,
were all gone then. Lynette sat up, sobbing for joy, and
blindly holding out her arms, and the riaing sun looked
over the mountains eastward, and drew one hushing, golden
finger over the lips of the cold, grey, whispering sea.
LXIX
A THIN, subterraneous screech, accompanied by a whii!
of cinder-flavoured steam, heralded the Down Express
as it plimged out of the cliff-tunnel, flashed across an in-
tervening space, and was lost among the chestnuts and
larches. A metallic rattle and scroop told that the official in
the box on the other side of the Castle bluff had opened the
points. And hearing the clanking bustle of the train's
arrival in the station, Lynette reminded herself with a sigh
of relief that her maid was packing, that she would presently
make her excuses to Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, and
that the midnight up-mail should take her home to Owen.
Her course lay clear now, pointed out by the beloved,
lost hand. But for this Heaven-sent light that had been
cast upon her way, Lynette knew that she might have
wandered on in doubt and darkness to the very end.
She was not of the race of hero- women, who deserve the
most of men, and are doomed to receive in grudging measure.
A pliant, dependent, essentially feminine creature, she was
made to lean and look up, to be swayed and influenced by
the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and led, and to
love the guide.
Her nature had flowered : sim and breeze and dew had
worked their miracle of form and fragrance and colour,
the ripened carpels waited, conscious of the crown of tall
golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of
the homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven,
the air vibrated yet with the beating of celestial wings.
She was going to Saxham to ask Ixim to forgive her, lo
throw do^vn the pitiless barrier she had reared between them
in her ignorance of herself and of him. She would humble
herself to entreat for that rejected crown of wifehood.
Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen
636 THE DOP DOCTOR
from her, she said to herself that she would win him back
again.
She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where
the frothing line of foam-borses reared and wallowed.
The prints of her little bro"vvn shoes were brimmed with
sea- water, she lifted her sldrt daintily, and went forward
still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scat-
tered over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny
bivalves, wonderfully tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow,
tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was as though a lapful of
blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden,
had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge.
Lynette cried out with pleasure at their beauty, stooped
and gathered a palmful, then dropped them. She stood
a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging freshness,
then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen
companion at her side.
The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save
for a distant golf -player with the inevitable ragged follow-
ing, seemed bare of human figures. The veering breeze
shepherded flocks of white clouds across the harebell-tinted
meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in
Lynette's little roae-tipped ears. And innumerable larks
carolled, building spiral towers of melody on fields of
buoyant air. And suddenly a human note mingled with
their music and with the thick drone of the little, black-
and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And
Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.
It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little
brown shoes upon the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette
looked do-mi. A pearly-pale cup fringed with blazing
poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping mother —
a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old,
arrayed in expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled
whiteness, the divine human peach served up in whipped
cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes. Absorbed in
deUghtful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled ;
then, as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and
womanly pity for her isolation broke from Lynette, she
looked up and laughed roguishly in the stranger's face,
narrowing her eyes.
THE DOP DOCTOR 637
Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green,
long-shaped and thick-lashed ; bold red, laughing mouth — •
where had Lynette seen them before 1 With a strange sense
of renewing an experience she ran down into the hollow,
and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught
it up and kissed it soundly.
" Where do you come from, sweet ?" she asked, between
the kisses. " Where are mother and nurse ?"
" Ga !" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering
of pearly-golden brows, and a little querulous cry of im-
patience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart squirmed out
of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the
most cherubic of pink legs, and the loveUest silk socks and
kid shoes, and wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once
re-established there, she answered no more questions, but
with truly aristocratic composure resumed her interrupted
task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and
quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more,
she had arranged to fill her shoe : she was perfectly clear upon
the point of having no other engagement so absorbing.
Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question.
Perhaps the missing guardians of this lost jewel were quite
near after all, sitting with books and work and other babies
in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from whence
this daring adventurer had escaped unseen. . . . She ran up
the steep side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the
sky, and the white sand streamed back from under the little
brown shoes that had trodden upon Saxham's heart so
heavily.
No one was near. Only in the distance, toiUng over the
dry waves of the sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by
which the hilly main street of Herion may be gained, went
a white perambulator, canopied with white, and propelled
by a niu'se in starched white skuts and flying white bonnet-
strings — a nurse who kept her head well down, and was
evidently reading a novel as she went. Some yards in
advance a red umbrella bobbed against the breeze like
a giant poppy on a very short stem. The lady who carried
the flaming object was young ; that much was plain, for
the flutterinc; heliotrope chiffons of her gown wore held at
a high, perhaps at an xmnecessarily l<iity, altitude above
638 THE DOP DOCTOR
the powdery sand, and her plumply-fillcd and gleaming
stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred with black, and
her damty little high-heeled shoes were very much in
evidence as thoy topped a rising crest. Then they dis-
appeared over the farther edge, the red umbrella followed,
and the nurse, in charging up the steep after her mistress,
discovered, perhaps by a glance of investigation under-
neath the canopy, prompted by a too tardy realisation of
the suspicious lightness of the perambulator, that the shell
was void of the pearl.
Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek,
glimpsed the red umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-
crest, comprehended the horrible consternation of mistress
and maid. She must signal to them — cry out. . . . Involun-
tarily she gave the call of the Kaffir herd : the shrill, pro-
longed ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop
across the miles of karroo or high-grass veld between. And
she impinned her hat and waved it, standing amongst the
thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high crest
of the sand-wave, while her shadow — a squat, blue dwarf
with arms out of all proportion — flourished and gesticu-
lated at her feet.
LXX
It is Fate who comes hurrying to Lynette under the
becoming shadow of a red umbrella, on the starched and
rustling skirts of the agitated nurse, whose mouth is seen to
be shaping sentences long before she can be heard panting :
" Did you call, 'm ? Her ladyship thought you did,
and might have found . . . Oh, ma'am ! have you seen a
baby ? We've lost ours !"
Lynette nods and laughs reassuringly, pointing down
into the hollow. The nurse, -ndth a squawk of relief, leaves
her perambulator bogged in the sand, flutters up the powdery
rise like some large species of seagull, squawks again, and
swoops to retrieve her lost charge. Miss Baby, perfectly
contented until the scarlet face and whipping ribbons of
her attendant appear over the edge of her Paradise, throws
herself backwards, strikes out with kicking, dimpled legs,
and sets up an indignant roar.
THE DOP DOCTOR 639
" There now — there ! 'A was a pessus !" vociferates
the owner of the streaming ribbons and the scarlet coun-
tenance. " And did she tumble out of her pram, the duck,
and wicked Polly never see her ? And thank Good
Gracious, not a bruise on her blessed Uttle body-woddy,
nor nothing but the very tiddiest scratch !"
" Which is not j-^oiir fault, Watkins, I am compelled
to say it," pronounces the Red Umbrella, arriving breath-
less and decidedly indignant, on the scene. " The idea
of a person of your class being so wrapped up in a rotten
penny novel that you can't even keep your eye upon the
darling entrusted to yom- charge is too perfectly shameful for
words. Baby, don't cry," she continues, as the repentant
Polly appears, bearing the retrieved treasure. " Come
to mummy and kiss her, and tell her all about it. do !"
" 1 sa-t !" bellows Baby, now keenly alive to the pathos
of the situation, and digging a sandy pink list into either
eye.. .
" Don't, then, you obstinate little pig !" returns Red
Umbrella, with maternal asperity. She looks up to the
fair vision that stands on liigh amongst the poi)pies, and
nods and smiles. "However I am to thank you! . . .
Such a turn when we missed her ! . . ." She utters these
incoherencies with a great deal of eye-play, pressing a small,
plump, jewelled hand, with short, broad fingers, and squat,
though elaborately rouged and poli.shed, nails, upon the
bountiful curve of a Parisian corsage. " My heart did a
double flip-flap . . . hasn't done thum})ing yet. Am I
pale still, Watkins ? She appeals to the recroant Watldns,
who is busily repacking Baby in her luxurious perambu-
lator. " I felt to go as white as chalk !"
" Perfect gassly, my lady !" agrees Watkins, and it occurs
to Lynette that the process of blanching must, ta]<mg into
consideration the artificial blushes that bloom so thickly
upon the pretty, piquante face under the red umbrella,
have been attended with some difliculty.
Everything in round in the coquettish face, shaded by
a hat that is an expensive triumj)h of Parisian millinery,
trimmed with a whole branch of wistaria in bloom. The
big brown eyes are round, so is the cherry-stained mouth,
so is the pert, button nose. The thick, dark eyebrows are
640 THE DOP DOCTOR
like inky half-moons, in the middle of the httle round chin
a cii-cular dimple is cunningly set. Round, pinky-olive
shoulders and rounded arms gleam temptingly through
the bodice of heliotrope chiffon. Other roundnesses,
artfully exaggerated by the Parisian modiste, are liberally
suggested, as Red Umbrella gathers her frothy draperies
about her hips, lifting her multitudinous frills to reveal
black and scarlet openwork silk stockings, bedecking her
plump legs and tiny feet, whose high-heeled silver-buckled
shoes are sinking in the hot, white, powdery sand.
" Please don't go on ! I haven't half thanked you," 8h(^
pleads, still pressing the podgy httle bejewelled paw upon
the heaving corsage. Then she sinks, with an air of grace-
ful languor, down upon a long, prostrate monolith of granite,
tho.t is thickly crusted with velvety orange lichen and grey-
green moss, starred with infinitesimal yellow flowers. And
Lynette, habitually courteous and rather amused, and
not at all unwilling to know a little mc>re of the affected,
slangy, overdressed little woman, sits do\\Ti upon the other
end of the sprawling stone column, and says, smiling at
Baby, who is clutching at a hovering butterfly with her
eager, dimpled hands :
" Of course, it was a terrible shock to you when you
missed her. She is such a darling ! Aren't you, Baby ?"
Baby, her long, grey-green eyes melting and gleaming
dangerously, her golden head tilted coquettishly, and a
o-ay, provoking laugh on the bold red mouth, makes another
snatch, captures the hovering blue butterfly, opens the
rosy hand, and with a wry face of disgust, drops the
crushed morsel over the edge of the perambulator. The
superb, unconscious cruelty of the act gives Lynette a
httle pang even as she goes on :
" She was not in the least shy. I think we should soon
be very great friends. May her nurse bring her to see me
sometimes ? Most babies love flowers, and there is a garden
full of them where I am stayiug. Do you Hve here V"
" Live here ? Gracious, no !" Red Umbrella opens the
round, brown eyes that Baby's are so unlike in shape and
expression, and shrugs her pretty shoulders as high as the
big ruby buttons that blaze in her pretty ears. " Me and
Baby are only visiting — stopping with her nurse a-nd my
THE DOP DOCTOR Ml
fcwo maids for a change at the Herion Arms— mf having
been recommended sea-air by the doctors for tonsils in
the throat. The house is advertised as an up-to-date
hotel in the ABC Railway Guide, but diggings more
wretched I never struck, and you do fetch up in some queer
places on tour in the Provinces, let alone the States," says
Red Umbrella, tossing the wistaria- wreathed hat, '' \Vhich
may be a surprise to people who think it must be nothing
but jam for those ladies and gentlemen that have made
their mark in the Profession."
" Yes ?"
Lynette's golden eyes smile back into the laughing
brown ones with pleasant friendliness, combined with an
irritating lack of comprehension. And Red Umbrella,
who derives a considerable income from percentages upon
the sale of her photographs, and is conscious that her ce-le-
brated features are figuring upon several of the postcard.s
that hang up for sale ia the window of the only stationer
in Herion, is a little nettled.
" I refer to the stage, of course." She fingers a long
neck-chain of sapphires, and tinkles her innumerable
bangles wnth their load of jingling charms. " But perhaps
you're not a Londoner 1 Or yoii don't patronise the
theatre ?"
" Oh yes. We have a house in Harley Street. And I
am very fond of the Opera," says Lynette, smiling stiL.
" and of seeiag plays too ; and I often go to the theatre
with Lord and Lady Castleclare, or Major Wrynche and
Lady Hannah, when my husband is too much engaged to
take me. One of the last pieces we saw before we left
town was ' The Chiffon Girl ' at The Variety," she atlds.
" Indeed ! And how did you like ' The Chiffon (rirl '?"
asKS the lady of the red umbrella, with a gracious and
encouraging smile. Unconscious tribute rendered to one's
beauty and one's genius is ever well worth the having.
And the editor of the Keyhole, a certain weckl}^ Jouinal of
caterings for the curious, will gladly publish any little
anecdote which will serve the dual purpose of amusing
his readers and keeping the name of Miss Lcssio Lavigne
before the pubhc eye. " How did you enjoy the prrform-
ano« of the lady who played the part ?"
41
642 THE DOP DOCTOR
Lynette ponders, and her Gne brows knit. Vexed and
indignant, Red Umbrella, scanning the thoughtful face,
admits its youth, its high-breeding, its delicate, chiselled
beauty, and the slender grace of the supple figure in the
grey-blue serge skirt and white silk blouse ; nor is she slow
to appreciate the value of the diamond keeper on the slight,
fine, ungloved hand that rests upon the sun- hot moss between
them.
" I think I felt rather sorry for her," says the soft
cultured voice with the exquisite, precise inflections. The
golden eyes look dreamily out over the undulating sand-
dunes beyond the crisp line of foam to the silken shimmer
of the smoothing water. The little wind has fallen. It
is very still. The nurse, sitting on a hillock of bents in
dutiful nearness to the perambulator, has taken out her
paper-covered volume, and is deep in a story of blood and
woe. And Baby, a sleepy, pink rosebud, dozes among her
white embroidered pillows, undisturbed by Red Umbrella's
shrill exclamation :
" Sorry for her ! Why on earth should you be ?"
The shriek startles Lj'^mtte. She brings back her grave
syes from the distance, flushing faint coral pink to the red-
brown waves at her fair temples.
" She — she had on so few clothes !" she says. And there
is a profound silence, broken by Lessie's saying with icy
dignity :
" If the Lord Chamberlain opined I'd got enough on,
I expect that ought to do for you !"
" I — don't quite understand."
Lynette opens her golden eyes in sincere wonder at the
marvellous change that has been wrought in the little lady
who sits beside her.
" / am Miss Lessie Lavigne," says the little lady, with an
angry toss of the pretty head, adorned with the wistaria-
trimmed hat. " At least, that is the name I am known
by in the profession."
" I beg your pardon," Lynette falters. " I did not recog-
nise you. I am afraid you must tliink me rather rude !"
" Oh, pray don't mention it !" cries the owner of the red
umbrella,. " Rude ? — not in the least !"
Mere rudeness would be preferable, infinitely, to the
THE DOP DOCTOR 643
outrage the little lady has suffered. She, Lessie Lavigne,
the original exponent of the role of " The Chiffon Girl,"
the idol of the pit and gallery, Queen regnant over the
hearts beating beliind the polished shirt-fronts in the stalls,
has lived to hear herself pitied — not envied, but com-
miserated — for the scantiness of the costume in which it is
alike her privilege and her joy to trill and caper seven times
in the week before her patrons and adorers. Small wonder
that she feels her carefully-manicured nails elongating with
the desire to scratch and rend.
Then she reveals the chief arrow in her quiver. Not for
nothing is she the widow of an English nobleman. With
all the hereditary dignities of the Foltlebarres she will arm
herself, and reduce this presuming stranger to the level of
the dust. At the thought of the humiliation it Is in her
power to inflict she smiles quite pleasantly, displaying a
complete double row of beautifully stopped teeth. And
she says, as she fumbles in a chatelaine bag of golden links,
studded with turquoises, and with elaborately ostentatious
dignity produces therefrom a card-case, as precious as
regards material, and emblazoned with a monogram and
coronet, enriched with diamonds and pearls :
" I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbour-
hood ? May I know who I have the a — pleasure of being
indebted to for finding my daughter to-day ?"
" I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone
house up there on the cliff. ' Plas Bendigaid,* they call
it," explains Lynette, a little nervously, as her reluctant
eyes scan the face and figure of the woman who owns the
legal right to beax Beauvayse's name. The encounter is
distasteful to her. She is painfully conscious of an acute
sensation of antagonism and dislike. " The house belongs
to my husband, and this is my first visit to Herina," she
adds hurriedly, " because we — my husband and I — have
not been very long married. But I like the place. And
the house is charming, and there is a liall that was once
the chapel, when it was a Convent. It shall be a chapel
again ; that is" — the u-ild-roso colour deepens on the lovely
face — " if my husbamd agrees ? To have it so restored
would make the Plas seem more like a home, because I
was brought up in a Convent, though n<it in England."
41—2
644 THE DOP DOCTOR
Her eyes stray back to tlie sun-kissed beauty of Nant-
madoc Bay and the dotted line of white spots that indicate
the town of St. Tudwalls at the base of the green promon-
tory beyond the Roads. She forgets that this little over-
dressed person is Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the
moment that she herself is Saxham's. She is back in the
beloved past with the Mother.
" It was in South Africa, my Convent . . . more than
a thousand miles from Cape Towti, in British Baraland, on
the Transvaal Border — in a little village-town, dumped
down in the middle of the veld."
" What on earth is the veld ?" asks the lady of the red
umbrella, with acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word
in the papers, and nobody seems to know what it means."
Lynette's soft voice answers :
" You can never know what it means until you have
lived its life, and it has become part of yours. It spreads
away farther than your eyes can follow it, for miles and
miles. It is Jade colour in spring, blue-green in early
summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with
dreadful black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to
let the young grass grow up. There is hardly a tree ; there
is scarcely a bird, except a vulture, a black speck high in
the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped mountains and
cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or mauve-
coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that
is all !"
" All ?"
" All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking
you through and through."
" But there is not always sunshine ? It must be some-
times nightj?" argues Lessie, a little peevishly.
" There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars,"
Lynette answers. " There are storms of dust and rain,
lightning and thunder, such as are only read of here. . . .
There are plots, conspiracies, raids, robberies, murders,
slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are
rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have
been wars ; there is war to-day, and there will be war
again in tha days that are yet to come !"
. She has almosi forgotten the little woman beside her,
f
THE DOP DOCTOR 545
staring at her with big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now
she turns to her with her rare and lovely smile :
" The war that is going on now began at the little village-
town where I was a Convent schoolgirl. V7e were shut for
months \vdthin the lines. But, of course, you have read
the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp ? I
am only telling you what you know !"
Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant,
mirthless little tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of
crushed ice rattled in a champagne-glass.
" What I have good reason to know !"
Her podgy, Jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching
in her heliotrope chiffon lap ; there is a well-defined scowl
between the black arched eyebrows, and the murky light
of battle gleams in the eyes that no longer languish between
their bistred eyelids as she scans the pure pale face under
the sweep of her heavily blackened lashes. She would almost
give the ruby buttons out of her ears to see it wince and
quiver, and crimson into angry blushes. And yet Lessie is
rather amiable thtm otherwise in her attitude towards other
women. True, she has never before met one who had the
insolence to pity her to her face.
" So quite too interesting !" she says, with an exaggerated
affectation of amiability, and in high, fashionable accents,
" you having been at Gueldersdorp through the Siege and
all. Were you ever — I suppose you must have been some-
times — shot at with a gun ?"
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
comer of her veil "
" Weren't you in a petrified fright V demands Lessie.
" I was with her !'*
" Who was she ?"
A swift change of sudden, quickening, jM)ignant emotion
passes over tlie still face. A sudden swelling of the white
throat, a rising mist in the golden eyes, suggests to Lessie
d48 THE DOP DOCTOR
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 fisliing in the shallows beyond the foam-
line, rise up affrighted by the shrill peal of triumpliant
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 boimce 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
I
THE DOP DOCTOR 647
sleeping on embroidered pillows, and a rush of blood cf)lours
her to the hair. His child — Ids cliild by the dancer — this
dimpled creature she has clasped and Idssed ! 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. Sax-
ham — 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 montlis 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 clotiies 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
648 THE DOP DOCTOR
the truth to a woman ! — that's Ms character, and it pretty
well sizes him up !"
Lessiestops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, Jewelled
hand clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical in-
stinct 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 Statf . 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 tliousands 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
iVIildare. 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
THE DOP DOCTOR 649
I did to 'em !" She snarls with a sudden access of tigerish-
ness. " 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, bom 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 liita her little head proudly.
" He never once liinted at the truth. Nor was it through
him I learned ill"
650 THE DOP DOCTOR
" 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 1
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 1 . . .
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, yoimgish 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 under-
sized, lean young man, in the chauffeur's doubtful- weather
THE DOP DOCTOR 651
panoply of black %\aterproof 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 tliick
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 Ms 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. " Ale
an' my wife, that is. Bfcin' 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' tlie 'Ow Do."
He breatlred hard, and rivulets of perspiration began to
trickle down from under the preposterous cap, converting
the dust that filled the haggard lines of his tliin face into
mud. " An' payin' our respects." His eye slewed
appealingly at his companion, as Icing 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 Uttle Cockney couple. The sur-
prise that had checked the beating of her heart had passed.
It was pleasant to see the^e fat;es from Harley Street. She
answered :
" I understand. My husband has given you a holiday.
Is he well V She flushed, realising that it was pain to have
662 THE DOP DOCTOR
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
afSjmative with such explosive suddenness that the hand
upon his arm must have nipped hard.
' 1 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 over 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 IVIiss 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 bia Joined by a Dutch dodger and settled down
on a Vaal sheep-farm, if the order 'adn't come 'ummin'
along the wire from 'Ead quarters that said, ' Jane 'Arris,
you're to 'ave this bloke, and no other. Till Death do you
part. Everlasting — Amen !' "
There was so stroag a ilavour of Church about the final
THE DOP DOCTOR 663
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, care-
fully 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 re-
peated 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 ''.an 'appen
to a three-an'-a-'arf 'orse-power Baby Jimot 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 tiery chariot — an' come on 'ere
by tryne."
Lynette looked at the man in silence. She even re-
peated after him, rather dully :
" You came on here — by train ?"
" Slow Parliamentary — stoppin' at every 'arf-dozen
stytions," explained W. Keyse, " for collectors in vel-
veteens 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 tou» and giving you the — the message
what we've come 'ere to bring !"
654 THE DOP DOCTOR
" From my husband ? From Dr. Saxham ?"
W. Keyse shifted from one foofc to the other, and coughed
an embarrassed cough.
" Not exac'Iy from Dr. Saxham."
Lynette looked at W. Keyse, and it seemed to her that
the little sallow Cockney face had Fa,te 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. Some-
thing 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 vidth 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." Lynetbe 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 with-
out 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 vrrung 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
impreasive was the earnestness of her appeal.
THE DOP DOCTOR 665
" 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 ges-
ture, 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 kLss 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 tvords 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' throb bin' !
. . . 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, Avhat 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, 'o gits ingratitude —
the dirtiest egg the Devil ever hatched !"
" Cripps !" gasped W. Keyse, awe-stricken bj- this lofty
flight of rhetoric. Ignoring him. she pursued her way.
" You're a lieautiful young lydy " — her tone softened
from its strenuous pitch — " wot 'ave 'ad a disappyntment,
like many of us 'ave at the start. You'd sot 3'our 'art on
Another One. 'E got killed, an' you married the Doctor —
658 THE DOP 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 1"
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 wom:.n
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 Aa
'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 teara were ruiming down
her face, and her voice lost its raucous shrillness, and be-
came plaintive, and even soft.
"I'm to tell you every think I've seen, an' Imow 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 x see 'im come up to your
bedroom. 'E switched on the hght. 'E forgot the blinds
was up. 'E looked round, all 'aggard an' lost an' "'ild-
Uke, before 'e dropped down cryin' beside the bed."
She sobbed, and dropped on her own knees in the sand
THE DOP DO(Tr(^Ft 65?
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 cry in' 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 pypera
call a Domestic Tragedy. Or at the best the break-up of
a 'Ome. That's wot my wife she kep' on stufl&n' 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 !' "
" On a voyage ! Where ?"
" Oh, cam't you guess ?" cried the woman on the ground,
desperately looking up with tragic eyes out of a swollen,
tear-stained face.
A mist came before Lynette's vision, and a sudden
tremor shook her like a reed. She swayed as though the
ground had heaved beneath her, but she would not fall.
She choked back the cry that had risen in her throat.
This was the time to act, not the time to weep for him. She
knelt an instant by the woman on the ground, put her arms
round her, kissed her wet cheek, and then rose up, pale and
calm and collected, saying to VV. Keyse :
" Take her to the Plas. Ask for Mrs. Pugh, the house-
keeper. She is to prepare a room for you ; you are to
breakfast, and rest all day, and return to London by the
night mail. Good-bye ! Grod ble-aa you both ! I wa.s
going to him to-night at latest. ... I am going to him now.
. . . Pray that he is alive when I reach him ! But he will
be. Grod is good !"
Her face was transfigured by the new light that shone in
it. She was strong, salient, resourceful — no longer the sliy
willowy girl. She was moving from them with her long
swift step, when W. Key8<i recovered himself.
*' 'Old 'ard ! Beg pardon, ma'am ! but 'ave von the
42
668 THE DOP DOCTOR
spondulios ?" He blushed at her puzzled look, and amended :
" 'Ave you money enough upon you to pay the railway-fare V
She lifted a little gold-netted purse attached to her neck-
ohain.
" Five pounds. My maid is to follow. You know Marie ?
You will let her travel with you ?"
' Righto ! But you'll want a wi'ap, coat or shawl, or
somethink. Midnight before you gits in — if you catch this
next up-Express. . . . Watto ! Give us 'old o' this 'ere,
Missus ! You can 'ave mine instead."
" Please, no ! I need notliing . . . nothing !" She
stayed his savage attack on the buttons of Mrs. Keyse's
green-and-yellow ulster by holding out her watch. " How
much time have I left to catch the up-Express ?"
" Eight minutes. By Cripps ! you'll 'ave to run for it."
She waved her white hand, and was gone, swiftly as a bird
or a deer,
" They've signalled !" W. Keyse announced after a breath-
less interval, dui'ing which the slender flying figure grew
smaller upon the straining sight. It vanished, and a thin,
nearing screech announced the up-Express. His wife jumped
up and clutched him.
" William ! Suppose she's lost it !"
" Gam ! No fear !" scoffed W. Keyse.
As he scoffed he was full of fear. They heard the clank-
ing stoppage, the shrill whistle of departure. They looked
breathlessly towards the green wood that fringed the cliff-
base under the Castle head. The iron way ran through the
belt of trees. The Express rushed through, broke roaring
upon their unimpeded vision, devoured the gleaming line
of metals that lay between wood and tunnel, and left them
with the taste of cindery steam in their open mouths, and
the memory of a white handkerchief waved at a carriage-
window by a slender hand.
" It's a'right, old gal !" said W. Keyse, beaming. " Come
on up to the 'ouse. I could do wiv a bit o' peck, an' I lay
so could you. Lumme !" His triumphant face fell by
the fraction of an inch. " What' 11 she do when she lands
in 'ome, wivout a woman to git a cup o' tea for 'er ? Or
curl 'or 'air, or undo 'er st'yl'yces an' things V*
THE DOP DOCTOR 669
" She'll do wot other young wimmen does under eim'lar
circumstances," said Mrs. Keyse enigmatically. She
added : " If she 'as luck, she'll 'ave a man for' er maid,
an' if she 'as sense, she'll reckon the swop a good one !"
Lxxn
Until the actual moment of their parting at Euston, Sax-
ham had never fully realised the anguish of the last moment
when Lynette's face should pass for ever out of his thirsting
sight.
It was going. . . . He quickened his long strides to keep
up with it. He must have called to her, for she came
hurriedly to the corridor-window, her sweet cheeks suffused
with lovely glowing colour, her sweet eyes shining, her small
gloved hand held frankly out. He gripped it, uttered some
incoherency — what, he could not remember — was shouted
at by a porter with a greasy lamp-truck, cannoned heavily
against a man with a basket of papers, awakened with a
great pang to the knowledge that she was gone. And the
great, bare, dirty, populous glass-hive of Euston, that has
been the forcing-house of so many sorrowful partings, held
another breaking heart.
In the days that followed he saw his private patients as
usual, and operated upon a regular mid-week morning at
St. Stephen's, whose senior surgeon had recently resigned.
The rest of the time he spent in malcing his arrangements.
Sanely, logically, methodicall}', everything had been
thought out. Major Wrynche was to be her guardian,
co-trustee with Lord Castleclare, and executor of the Will.
It left her, simply and unconditionally, everything of
which Saxham was possessed. She would live with the
Wrynches until she married again. His agents were in-
structed to iind a tenant for the house, and privately a
purchaser for the practice. They wTote to him of a client
already found, blatters were progressing steadily. Very
soon now the desired end.
TTi« table-lamp burned through the nights ns he made up
his ledgers and settled his accounts. In Ici.suro momenta
he read in the intolerable book of the Past. Of all its sor-
42—2
860 THE DOP DOCTOR
rows and failures, ifcs frantic follies and its besotted sins.
Memory omitted nothing. Not a blot upon those sordid
pages was spared him. It was not possible for an instant
to turn away iiis eyes. His mental clarity was unrelieved
by weariness. No shadow dimmed the keen crystal of his
brain. He was at tension, like a bowstring that is stretched
continually. He realised this, thinking : " Presently I will
cut the bow-string, and the bow shall have rest ! Even if
my once-boasted will-power reasserted itself — even if I rose
triumphant for the second time, cured of my vile craving,
I do not the less owe my debt to the woman I have married.
I promised her that I would die rather than fail her. I
failed her ! There is no excuse !"
LXXIII
The West End pavements were shining wet. Belated cabs
spun homewards with sleepy revellers. Neat motor-
broughams slid between the kerbs and rounded corners
at unrebuked excess-speeds, winking their blazing head-
lights at drowsy poHcemen muflfled in oilskin capes. On
all these accustomed things the blue- white arc-lights shone.
The most belated of all the hansom cabs in London
stopped at the door of the house in Harley Street as the
narrow strip of sky between the grim, drab-faced houses
began to be dappled with the leaden grey of dawn. A faint
moon reeled northwards, hunted by sable shapes of scream-
ing terror, pale Venus clinging to her tattered robe. The
house was all black and silent, a dead face with blinded
windows. Did Saxham wake behind them ? Or did he
sleep, not to wake again ?
Lynette tried her latchkey. The unchained door
swung backwards. She parsed into the house silently, a
tall, slender shape. A light was shining under the con-
sulting-room door. Her heart leaped to greet it. She
kissed her hand to it, and turned, moving noiselessly, and
put up the chain of the hall-door. She felt for the switch
of the electric light, and snapped it on.
She was jarred and aching and weary with her Journey ;
but it was a very fair woman whom she 8a\v reflected in the
THE DOP DOCTOR 861
hall-mirror as she unpinned her hat and tossed it upon the
hall-table, and passed on to the consulting-room door — a
woman whose face was strange to herself, with that new
fire, and decision, and strength of purpose in it ; a woman
with glowing roses of colour in her cheeks, and eager,
shining eyes.
All through the long hours of the journey she had pic-
tured him, her husband, bending over his work, sleeping
in his chair, or in his bed. Yet behind these pictures was
another image that started through their lines and colours
dreadfully, persistently, and the image was that of a dead
man. She thrust it from her for the hundredth time, as
the door-handle yielded to her touch. She went into the
room. Saxham was not there.
The lamp shed its circle of light upon the consulting-room
writing-table. The armchair stood aside, as though hastily
pushed back. . . . Signs of his recent presence were visible.
The fireplace was heaped high with the ashes of burned
papers ; the acrid smell of their burning hung still on the
close air.
She glanced back at the table. All its drawers stood
open. Ledgers and case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed.
A thick packet, heavily sealed, was addressed in Saxham's
small, firm handwTiting to Major Bingham Wrynche, Plaa
Bendigaid, Herion, South Wales. There were other letters
in an orderly pile.
She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name.
She took it and kissed it, and put it in her breast. There
was an enclosure, heavy, and of oval shape. She won-
dered what it might be ? As she did so, she looked at the
letter hers had covered, and read what was written on the
cover in the small, firm hand :
" ' To the Coroner.' . . . Merciful God ! . . ."
The cry broke from her \<athout her knowledge. The
room rang with it as she turned and ran. With the night-
mare-feeling of running up dream-stairs, of feeling nothing
tangible under her footsteps, with the dreadful certainty
that of all those crowding pictures of him soon through the
long hours in the racing Express, only the one that she had
not dared to look at was the real, true picture of Saxham now.
Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted
662 THE DOP DOCTOR
like tho dream- woman in her dream. From solid cubes of
darkness to grey landing - glimmers. To the third-story
bedroom that had never been done up. In the company
of Little IVIiss Muffet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds,
and Georgy Porgy, would he be lying, cold and ghastly,
with a wound across his throat ?
But the room was unoccupied ; the bed had not been slept
in. Pale dawn peeping in at the corners of the scanty blinds
assured her of that. Where might she find him ? Where
seek him ?
Fool ! said a voice vtdthin her ; there is but one answer
to such a question ! Where has he gone night after night ?
Coward, you knew, and yet avoided ! . . . What threshold
has he crossed when the world was sleeping round him ?
By whose vacant pillow has his broken heart sought vain
relief lq tears ?
She passed downstairs, gliding noiselessly over the thick
carpets, and went into the room it had been his pleasure to
furnish and decorate as his wife's boudoir. Its seashell
pinkness was merged in darkness, faintly striped by the
grey dawn-glimmer, but the door of the bedroom that
opened from it was ajar. Light edged the heavy fold of the
portiere curtain and made a pool upon the carpet. She
held her breath as she stole to the door, and, trembling,
looked in. He was there, kneeling by the bed. His
heavily-shouldered black figure made a blotch upon the
dakity white and azure draperies ; his arms were outflung
upon the silken counterpane.
A rush of thanks sprang from her full heart to Heaven as
she heard the heavy sighing breaths that proved him
living yet.
She would have gone to him and touched him then, but
the sound of his voice took comage from her, and drew her
strength away. Ho spoke, lifting his face to the ivory
Crucifix that hung upon the wall above the bed-head. It
was a voice of groanings rather than the quiet voice with
which she was familiar. She comprehended that a soul in
mortal anguish was speaking aloud to God.
" I cannot live !" groaned Saxham. " I am weary, body
and spirit. What I have borne I have borne in the hope of
laying my burden down. Everytking is ready 1 Ihav©cle«ured
THE DOP DOCTOR 663
the way ; my loins are girded for departure. All I asked was
to lie down in the earth and wake again no more. All I
asked — and what happens ? My dead faith quickens
again in me. I must bow my neck once more to the yoke
of the Inconceivable ! I must perforce believe in Thee
again ! I hear the voice of the pale thorn-crowned Victim,
saying, ' I am Thy God who lived and suflFercd and died
for thee ! Live on, then, and suffer also, and pass to the
Life Eternal when thine hour comes !' O God ! — my God !
have I not earned deliverance ? Have I not borne anguish
enough ?"
His fierce, upbraiding voice died out in inarticulate
mutterings. His head fell forwards upon his arms. Pres-
ently he lifted it, and cried out, as if replying to some
unseen speaker :
" If a self -sought death entails eternal torment, ami not
in hell here upon earth ? How else, when to live is to hold
her in bondage, knowing that she longs and pines to be
free ? And yet, to go out into the dark and leave her !
never again to see her ! never more to feel the light of hei
eyes flow into me ! Never to hear her voice — to be of my
own deed separate from her throughout Eternity — that
were of all the Judgments that are Thine to scourge with
the most terrible that Thou couldst lay upon my soul !"
A sob tore him. He moaned out brokenly :
" Give me a sign, if Thou art indeed merciful ! Show
me that there is relenting in Thee ! Grant me the hope, at
least, that my great renunciation may open a gate by which,
after cycles of expiatory suffering, I may at last pass
through to where she dwells in Thy Brightness. Give me
to see her face with a smile on it — to touch her hand —
after all — after all ! The lips I have never kissed, may
they not be mine, God — mine one day in Heaven ? If
Thou art Love, there should be love there."
She glided over the deep carpet, stretched out a timid
hand, and touched his shoulder. He lifted his great
square head, and slowly looked round. The black hair,
mingled with wlxite, clung damp to the broad forehead.
His eyes were bloodshot, strained, and haggard, and wild
Sorrow was charted deep upon the haggard fiatures.
Amazement struck them into folly as he started up,
664 THE DOP DOCTOR
stammering out her name, and clutching for support at the
brass rail that was at the foot of the bed.
" Lynette ! You. ... It is you ? . . ." He shook,
staring at her with dilated eyes.
" Owen, you are ill. You speak and look so strangely.
It is me — really me !" she said, trying to speak calmly
through the tumult of her heart.
" I am not ill. How is it that you are here ?"
He lifted a hand to his strained and smarting eyes and
moved it to and fro before them. He was staring at her
still, but with pupils that were less dilated, and the veins
upon his broad forehead were no longer purple now.
" Have I talked nonsense ? I had dozed, and you
startled me coming upon me. . . . Why have you ? . . ."
He strove to speak and look as usual. " Has anything
happened, that you have come back ?"
She pressed her hands together, wrestling for collected
thought and clear, expUcit utterance, though the room
rocked about her, and the floor seemed to rise and fall
beneath her feet.
" Somethmg happened. I have come back from Wales
to tell you that I ... I cannot live upon your friendship any
longer ! I — I must have more, or I shall die !"
He knew all. She had met the man whose look and
breath and touch had revealed to her her own misery.
Chained to her harsh yoke-fellow ; denied Love's bread and
wine of life ! He looked at her, and answered coldly :
" You shall not die. You shall be free ! If you had
waited until to-morrow "
" It is already day," she told him, and, as though to
confirm her, a neighbouring steeple-clock clanged twice.
He moved uneasily as his eyes fell on the disordered cover-
let, half dragged from the bed and trailing on the floor.
They shunned hers as he said, a dark flush rising thi-ough
his haggard pallor :
" I beg your pardon for the intrusion here. But you
were away I could not sleep, and the house was lonely.
... Is your maid with you ? Surely you are not alone ?"
She bent her head with a faint smile.
" Quite alone. I did not wish for a companion."
" Xt wft8 not wise " he began, and took a step door-
THE DOP DOCTOR 666
wards. " I will call one of the servants," he juided, and was
going, when he remembered, and stopped, saying hoarsely :
" I forgot. They are gone. I have sent them all away !"
She looked at him in silence. He continued :
" I have paid and dismissed them. You will think it
curious — ^you will know the reason later — I have written
to you to explain."
" 1 found upon your table a letter addressed to me," she
said. He started, knitting his black brows.
. " You have not read it ?" he asked, breathing quickly.
" Not yet." She touched her bosom, where the letter
lay. " I have it here."
" Please do not open it ! Give me back the letter !" He
stretched out his hand to take it, and breathed more freely
when she drew it out and gave it to him. And a sweet ^^'ild
pang shot through him ; the paper was so warm and frag-
rant from the nest where it had lain so short a time. But
he mastered the emotion and tore open the envelope. He
took from it the enclosure, wrapped in folds of tissue-paper,
and put it in her hand, saying, as he thrust the letter in
his coat-pocket :
" There is something that by right is yours."
" Mine ? . . ." She unrolled the tissue-paper, and the
brilliants that were set about the miniature sent spurts of
white and green and rosy fire between the slender, ivory-
hued fingers that turned it about. She gave a little gasping
cry of recognition :
" It is — me ! How could you have managed ?"
Then, as the sweet grey eyes of fair deed Lucy smiled up
into her own : " I do not know how I am sure of it," she
said, with a catching in her breath, " but this must be my
mother !"
Saxham bent his head in answer to her look. His eyes
bade her question no further. She faltered :
" May 1 not know how it came into your hands ?"
" Through the death," Saxham answered, " of an evil
man. You know his name. He probably robbed your
father of that miniature with other things ; but I can only
surmise this. I cannot positively say."
" You speak of my father." Her face was quivering, her
eyes entreated. " Tell me what you know of him. and
666 THE DOP DOCTOR
of " — she kissed the miniature, and held it to her cheek —
" of my mother ?"
" Your father," said Saxham, " was an officer and a
gentleman. The surname that you exchanged for mine,
poor child ! was really his. His Christian name is engraved
there " — he pointed to the inner rim of the band of brilliants
— " with that of the lady who was your mother. She was
beautiful ; she was tender and devoted ; she loved y'^)ur
father well enough to give up every social aim and every
worldly advantage for his sake. She died loving him. He
died — I should not wonder if he died of sorrow for her
loss. For hearts can break, though the Faculty deny it !"
He swung about to leave the room. She was murmuring
over her new-found treasure.
" ' Lucy to Richard ' . . . ' Richard ' . . ." she repeated.
A wave of roseate colour broke over her with the memory
of the hand that had touched and the voice that had
spoken to her in her Heaven-sent vision of the previous
morning, when the Beloved had come back from Paradise
to lay a charge upon her child.
" My father knew the Mother?" It was not a question,
it was a statement of the fact. Saxham wondered at the
assured tone, as he told her :
" It is true. They had been friends — in the world they
both gave up afterwards — the man for the love that is of
earth, the woman for the love of Heaven."
" She never told mo then, but she must have known who
I was from the beginning," Lynette ventured. " She gave
me the surname of Mildare because it belonged to me !
Do not you think so too 1"
Saxham made no answer. He swung about to leave the
room. She slipped the miniature into her bosom, where
his letter had lain, and asked :
" Where are you going ?"
He answered, with his eyes avoiding hers :
" You have been travelling all night ; you must be tired
and hungry. Go to bed and try to rest, while I forage for
you downstairs. You shall not suffer for lack of attendance.
I am quite a good cook, as you shall find presently. When
you have eaten you must sleep, and then we will talk of
your returning home to your friends."
THE DOP DOCTOR 667
" Are not you my chief friend ?" she asked. " Is not
this my home ?"
He avoided her look, replying awkwardly :
" Hardly, when there are no servants to wait upon
you !"
" May I not know why you sent thcra away ?"
He said, his haggard profile turned to her, a muscle of
his pale cheek twitching :
" I am going away myself : that is the reason why. All
debts are paid. I have completed all the arrangements,
entailing the minimum of annoyance upon you."
" May I not come with you upon your voyage ?"
His eyes were still averted as his grey lips answered :
" No ! I am going where you cannot come !"
" Owen, tell me where you are going ?"
Her tone of entreaty knocked at the door of his barred
heart. He winced palpably. " Excuse me," he said, and
took another step towards the door. She stopped him
with :
" You are not excused from answering my question !"
" I am going, first to get you some breakfast," said
Saxham curtly, " and then to find a woman to attend upon
you here."
" I need no breakfast, thanks ! I want no attendant !"
" You must have someone," said Saxham brusquely.
" I must have your answer," she said in a tone quite new
to him. " What is your secret purpose ? What are you
hiding from me in that closed hand ?"
Ho moved his left hand sUghtly, undoing the fingers and
giving a glimpse of the empty palm.
"Not that hand. The other!" She pointed to the
clenched right. How tall she had grown, and how womanly !
" Love has done this !" was his aching thought. She
seemed a princess of faery, fresh from a bath of magic
waters. Her very gait was changed, her every gesture
seemed new. Purpose and decision and quiet self-control
breathed from her ; her voice had tones in it unheard of
him before. Her eyes were radiant as he had never yet
seen them, golden stars, centred and rimmed with night,
shining in a pale glory that was her face. . . .
All that for the other man ! Well, let him have it !"
c<
668 THE DOP DOCTOR
thought Saxham, and involuntarily glanced at his clenched
right hand.
" Please open it and show me what you have there !"
she begged him.
Her tones were full of pleading music. His face hardened
grimly to withstand. His muscular fingers closed in a
vice-like grip over what he held. But she moved to him
with a whisper of soft trailing garments, and took the shut
hand in both her own. She bent her exquisite head and
kissed it, and Saxham' s fingers of iron were no more than
wax. Something clicked in his throat as they opened, that
was like the turning of a rusty lock. And the Uttle blue
phial, with the yellow poison-label, gave up his deadly in-
tention to her eyes. She cried out and snatched it, and
flung it away from her. It fell soundlessly on the soft
carpet, and rolled \inder a chair.
" Owen ! You would have . . . done that ! . . ."
Divine reproach was in her face. He snarled :
" It would have been done by now if you had not come
back !"
" I thank our Lord I came ! . . . It is His doing !
Once He had sent me knowledge, I could not stay away.
For, Owen ... I have made a discovery. . . ."
" Yes." He laughed harshly. " As I knew you would
one day ! Never was I fool enough to doubt what would
come !'*
She put both her hands to her lips and kissed them, and
held them out to him. He cried :
" What is this ? What interlude of folly are you play-
ing ? It was your freedom you came to demand. You
have not told me who the man you love is. I do not ask — I
will not oven know ! He is your choice ; that is enough !"
" He is my choice !" Her bosom heaved to the measure of
her quickened breathing. The splendid colour rose over
the edge of the lace scarf that was loosely knotted about
her sweet throat, and surged to the pure temples, and
climbed to the line of the rich red-brown hair.
" You will soon be free to tell the world so. Marry
him," said Saxham, " and forget the dreary months dragged
out beside the sot ! For I who promised you I would never
fail you ; I who lold you so confidently that I was cured
THE DOP DOCTOH 669
of the accursed liquor-crave ; I — well, I reckoned without
my host "
His laugh Jarred her heartstrings. She cried out hotly :
'* You did not deceive me wilfully ! You believed what
you said !"
" I believed . . . and the first snare set for me tripped
up my heels," said Saxham. " I paid the penalty of being
cocksure. And I had not the common decency to die then
and release you. True, there were reasons — they are
swept away now ! . . . I sent you to Wales that I might
be free of the sight of you, that I might end the sordid
comedy and have done. You have come too soon ! There's
no more to be said than that !"
" There is this to be said."
She came towards him, her tender eyes wooing his. Her
lips were parted, her breath came in sighs.
" What you have told me is sorrowful, but not hopeless.
You were cured once — you will be cured again ! And I
will help you — comfort you — suffer with you and pray for
you. You shall never be alone, my husband, any more !"
He was melting. His hard blue eyes had the softening
gleam of tears. He stretched out his hands and took hers,
holding them close. He stooped, and let his burning lips
rest on the cool, fragrant flesh, and said tenderly :
" Dear saint, sweet would-be martyr, you shall not sacri-
fice your long life's happiness to me. Rather than live on
sane and sober, to see you famishing beside me for the want
of Love, I would die a thousand deaths, Lynette ! Try to
believe it. You shall be free ! You must be free, my
child !"
She winced as though he had stabbed her, and cried out :
" Why do you harp continually upon your death ? I
will not listen to you ! If I do not desire to be 'free,' as
you term it, what barrier is there between us now 1"
He said, amazed :
" What barrier ? Do you ask what barrier ! Your love
— for that other man !"
" There is no other man !" She looked him full in the
eyes now, with a lovely colour dyeing her sweet cheeks,
and an exquisite quivering wistfulneas about her mouth.
She moved so near that her fragrant breath fanned warm
670 THE DOP DOCTOR
upon his eyelids. " There is no man but you — fehere will
never be any other man ! . . . Dearest " — her hands were
on his shoulders ; her bosom rose and fell close to his broad
breast — " 1 have been very slow at learning. But —
Owen ! — I love you as your wife should love !"
" You cannot !" He stepped back sharply, and her
hands fell from him. " You shall not ! I am not worthy.
I thought so once. ... I know better now. Do not
deceive yourself. Love cannot be compelled at will, and
I have ceased to wish — to desire yours ! All I want now is
rest and silence and forgetfulness — where alone they may
be found !" He drew a breath of weariness.
" If you have ceased to wish for love from me, that is
my punishment," she said, very pale. " For without yours
I cannot hve ! God hears me speak the truth !"
"Lynette! . . ."
He swayed like a tree cut through and falling. She
caught his hands, and drew them to her heart.
" I have been blind and deaf and senseless. I am
changed. I am altered — I am awake at last ! I know how
great and precious is the love you have given me. . . . Do
not tell me it is mine no longer ! Owen, if you do that, it
is I who shall die !"
A sob tore its way through him. His great frame
quivered. His mask-like immobility broke up . . . was
gone. Her own tears falling, she stretched her arms to
him ; yet while his eyes devoured her, his arms hungered for
her, he delayed, knitting his brows. She caught a word or
two, whispered brokenly. He asked himself : " Can this
be Love ?"
" It is Love ! Owen, I kissed you one night when I
found you sleeping ! When will you kiss me back again ?"
He cried out wildly upon Grod, and fell down upon his
knees before her. He reached out groping, desperate arms,
and snatched her close. His deep, shuddering breaths
vibrated through her ; her own knees were trembling, her
bosom in storm. She swayed like a young palm. Nearer —
nearer ! he felt her hands about his neck, her tears upon
his face. . . .
" Dear love, dearest husband, I have a message for you 1
Owen, shall I tell you what it is ?"
THE BOP DOCTOR 671
" Tell me, my heart's beloved," said Saxham in a whisper.
Their looks united in azure fire and golden. Their
breath mingled, their lips were very near. She felt his
strength about her ; he drank in her sweetness. The kiss,
the supreme boon, was as yet withheld.
She whispered. . . .
" I awakened in the light of the early morning — the
morning of the day I came to you. She sat beside me —
the Mother, Owen ! her dear hand on my heart, her dear
eyes waiting for mine. She stooped and kissed me ... it
was real ... I felt it ! She said : ' Love your husband
as I loved Richard ! Be to a child of his what I have been
to you !' "
His arms wrapped round her, gathered her, enfolded her.
His scalding tears wetted her white bosom as she drew the
square black head to rest there, and drooped her cheek
upon the broad brow. Her rich hair, loosed from its coils,
fell in a heavy silken rope upon his shoulder . . . their Ups
met in the nuptial, sacramental kiss. . . .
THE END
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