The Dop Doctor
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"I remember quite well." It was the voice he had imagined for her – low, and round, and clear, with just an undernote of plaintiveness matching the wistful appeal of her eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of exquisite delight went through 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 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 opportunity 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 utilising 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 like 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?"
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 little 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 – 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 infinitely 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 believe I ought to be very angry with you."
His whisper touched her ear like a kiss, and set her trembling.
"But you're not?"
"I – "
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 thunderingly 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.
"And I may know your Christian name?" he persisted, "I've thought of everything in the world, 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 conversation, "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 bullets had begun to hit the ground under the horses' bellies, spirting little 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 revoir, Miss Mildare. Please get under cover at once." The proprietorship in 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 imagination, in search of the loved one believed to inhabit the Convent bomb-proof, was recalled 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 staunchly in their wake with his five Town Guardsmen, became ghostlike, enveloped in an African replica 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-rein, and wrenched the brute down. She recognised 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 with 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," Lynette told him with her clear eyes on the stern, 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, and 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 he said very coldly and distinctly:
"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, though Lynette'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 bleeding. "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 …?"
"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 will 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 where 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? 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.
XXX
A long-legged, thinnish officer, riding a khâki-coloured bicycle over a dusty stretch of shrapnel-raked ground, carrying 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 off 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 khâki 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 who was not Swiss.
"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 Swiss baker.
"You remember me, Colonel?"
Haggard, despairing eyes rolled up at the Chief appealingly. He had met the gaze of those oyster-orbs before. He recognised Alderman Brooker, proprietor of the grocery stores in 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?" He knelt down beside the prostrate form.
"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 went 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 indiarubber hot-water bottle, a ductile vessel that, buttoned inside the khâki tunic, had adapted itself not uncomfortably to the still existing rotundities of the Alderman's figure. A hyæna-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 it saved your life? Stand him on his legs, men; he's as right as rain. Now, Brooker?"
Brooker, without volition, assumed the 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, with an irrepressible chuckle – "a syrupy one. And – have I your word of honour that this is a non-alcoholic beverage?"
"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 resuscitated Brooker flying rags of sanguine stain. Then the stern 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! Tartaglia 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 dying 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 to impress me with his gallantry and devotion, or die in the attempt. He's the most admirably unconscious humbug I've ever yet met. Sands his sugar and brown-papers his teas philanthropically, for the good of the public, and denounces men who put in Old Squareface and whisky-pegs, as he fuddles himself with his loquat brandy 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 Government 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 over to the Women's Laager. I'll walk with you, and say my say as I go. I'm on my way to Nordenfeldt Fort West. Something has gone wrong with 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 again. 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, picking at the scanty grass, 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 myself, though at the outset of affairs 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 realisation. Up to the present" – the humorous, keen eyes were wrinkled at the corners – "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?"
"None of 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, lie in wait 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 minus 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 – quite a beauty still, even by daylight, with her three veils on, and an 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?' would meet the case. We have Musical Comedy now in place of what used to be Burlesque in your London days, Saxham, with a Leading Lady instead of a Principal Boy, and a Chorus in long skirts."