The Dop Doctor
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"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 little 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 little room, and burned the letter to the last blank corner, 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 as though nothing had happened.
They 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. You may conjecture the orderly, modest method of retiring, each Sister vanishing in turn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and vest herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose, full conventual night-garment of thick white twilled linen, high-throated, monkish-sleeved, and girdled with a thin cotton 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 extinguished, and only the subdued crimson glow of the tiny lamp that burned before the silver Crucifix that had stood above the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in the thick, hot dark, where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a narrow, white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row of quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow, and her beads about her wrist.
The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences of the anonymous letter written in hellish 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 Lynette, not daring to disturb the 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 yawned between.
She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophée. 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 come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and death.
Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It laid a hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and strong. The hand said "Mine!"
His. She would be his one day – soon; and there would be no more mysteries between the man and the woman welded by God's ordinance into husband and wife. She shivered a little at the thought of that intimate, peculiar, utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart, she realised that, however well such a secret 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 threatening to start through the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"
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 inevitably 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 unwritten 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 deed – if in 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 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 slight 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? 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, conjectured 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? 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. She bared her breast to the 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-hole, 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 fiery 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 seemed not to hear.
LI
She did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital next day, but secretly charged Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony to carry her whithersoever they went, and not 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 own 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 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 extremity. 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 Siege 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 column that was signed "Gold Pen." Then 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 knees shook, and her heart was as water within her. For the Thing that coiled in the dark would surely strike now.
Perhaps it was some premonition of approaching death 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 hers, that they spoke of it long afterwards with bated breath. A perfume as of rare incense was wafted 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 hurry 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 corridor, 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 whitewashed 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 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.
Why had she come here? Because she felt as though the Presence that had housed under the veil of the Consecrated 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 little 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 his 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 what you had got to say. That was Bough's way with them always.
"You have written letters to me and followed me."
His grinning red mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showed 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 fellow, 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:
"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 – "was 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 ladies to have under their roof, for all the glib slack-jaw 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 his 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 lady of her.'"
Still silent and watchful, and her eyes upon him, searching 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 tobacco-leaf in the sun…'"
She quivered in every limb, and longed to shut her eyes and bar out the intolerable sight 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 Town?"
"I said he was there when I left. The young woman he talked of was brought up at his place in Orange Free State, 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 officer 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 brilliants 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 money and the jewels will be handed over, as in duty bound; and, since she's turned respectable and got education, 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 wilt Thou delay, O Lord, righteous in judgment? Fulfil Thy promise! Bind Thou Thy millstone 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.