The Dop Doctor Part 91

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, wringing her husband's hand:

"'_If_' 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 live 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 Gueldersdorp. His curtness, his roughness, his harshness had been unfavourably commented upon many and many a time. Yet when he left them, how the people cheered!

What volumes of roaring sound from l.u.s.ty throats had bidden him good-bye and G.o.d-speed!

"Hurrah for the Doctor! Three cheers for Saxham! Don't forget us, Doc!

Come back again! G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed 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 remembering, 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 anniversary 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.

"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 his own voice saying:

"I will never tell her! I will not blacken any man's reputation to 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 dressmaker'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 Volksraad at Pretoria. He controls large interests on the Rand, and has an estate near Johannesburg. She is married to an English gentleman. He is very rich, and has a t.i.tle. 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?"

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 Saxham 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 hearthrug, 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-ill.u.s.trated nursery rhymes that adorned the brown-paper dado of Saxham's third-floor bedroom, the previous tenant having been a family man.

"--Little Miss m.u.f.fet 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 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 relaxed in a smile, and his thunderous brows smoothed themselves. "And now, don't you think you ought to go and dress? You are dining with Lady Hannah 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 ma.n.u.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!"