The Dop Doctor

LXII

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 womanhood to overflowing; before her sex should rise in desperate revolt against himself her gaoler, Death should unlock her prison-doors and strike the fetters from those slender wrists, and point to Hope beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life.

Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the 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 consulting-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 morn 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 off 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 charnce 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, – worshipping 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 cheek against his.

"You be my eyes, deer. Peep and see if the Doctor is in 'is room."

It was ten o'clock on a shining May morning, and the clouds that raced over great grimy London were white, and there were patches 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 behind 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, with his 'ead upon 'is '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, darlin', or 'e might 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 the little downy head. "Wasted in 'is flesh, like – got 'oller 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 became 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 – "

Downhearted, and hopeless, and lonely! The jaw of W. Keyse dropped, and his ugly eyes became circular with sheer astonishment.

"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 Gueldersdorp, an' Government tippin' 'im the 'Ow Do? an' thank you kindly, Mister! – an' – " W. Keyse could only suppose that Mrs. Keyse was playing a bit of gaff on hers truly – "and him with a wife, too! Married an' 'appy, an' goin' to be 'appier yet!" He pointed to the little red snub nose peeping between the folds of the flannel. "When a little nipper like that comes – "

She reddened, paled, burst out crying.

"O 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?"

"'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 beautifuller. 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 she draws the blinds, to give me a charnst like, to see in." She stroked the tweed sleeve. "An' once or twice Mrs. Saxham 'as come in before they'd bin pull down, an' then – O William! – there was everythink in that room on Gawd's good earth a 'usband could ask for to make 'im 'appy, except the wife's 'art beatin' warm and lovin' 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 known how two of the unconscious actors in his shadow-play pitied him, the knowledge would have been as vitriol poured into an open wound.

LXIII

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 pasteboard, 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 comfortable 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 under 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 ask 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 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 Kreil'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 'll 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 impatience of this large, bland, prosperous personage was growing in him. From the rim the top-hat had left upon his shining forehead to the tightly-screwed eyeglass that assisted 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 circumstances strenuous, severe, even tragic. Then he had borne himself after a simple, manly fashion. Now he had backslidden, 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 misplaced. 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 discussin' it now that the Foltlebarres have left off payin' Lessie not to talk, and provided for her and the youngster out of the estate, 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, rather 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, if the fellow knew of the scratch against him, he might force the running; and recalling, with a tingling of the shamed blood in his expansive countenance, how he – Wrynche – had let Beauvayse 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 continuin' the Work of Pacification, and acceptin' the surrender of arms – any date of manufacture you like between the chassepot of 1870 and the leather-breeched firelock of Oliver Cromwell's time. The modern kind, you find by employin' 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 communication to make to you."

"A communication – a message – from the Chief to me?"

Saxham's face changed, and softened, and brightened curiously and pleasantly.

Major Bingo nodded and cleared his throat. He rebalanced his shiny hat upon the table corner, 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 withheld. But Bingo was balancing the glossy triumph of a Bond Street hatter, and looked at it and not at the Doctor, 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 Town 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:

"I thought you would. Well, the letter was a blind; the bearer an agent of the firm of Huysmans and Eybel, sent to make certain of our 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?"

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 put before you as plainly as may be… She'd met him before the Siege, travelling up from Cape Town. He scraped acquaintance, called himself a loyal Johannesburger, and an Agent of the British South African War-Intelligence-Bureau. Not that there ever was such a Bureau." Major Bingo blinked nervously, and ran a thick finger round the inside of his collar as he added: "The beggar spoofed Lady Hannah up hill and down dale with that, and she believed him. And when she subsequently flew the coop – dash this cold of mine!.."

The Major drew out a very large pink cambric pocket-handkerchief, and performed behind its shelter an elaborate but unconvincing sneeze:

" – When she shot the moon with Nixey's mare and spider, it was by private arrangement with this oily, lying blackguard, who had given her an address – a farm on the Transvaal Border, known as Haargrond Plaats – where 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 of 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 turned 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 your 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 stern, 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 himself Van Busch – a name that's as common among Boers as Murphy is among Irishmen – arranged to pass off my wife as his sister, a refugee from Gueldersdorp, who'd married a German drummer, and buried him not long before. Women are so dashed fond of play-actin'! Kids, Saxham, – that's what they are in 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 explained, to 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 myself" – declared Major Bingo – "and a better never stepped in leather. A brother-officer of the Chiefs, too, and a rippin' good fellow! – Dicky Mildare, 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 uncommonly brave and noble lady, and had, in fact, thrown her over, and made a bolt of it with the wife of his Regimental C.O., Colonel Sir George Hawting."

The faint stain of colour that had showed through Saxham's dead-white skin faded. He waited with strained attention for what was coming.

"South Africa Lady Lucy and Mildare 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 had to spin this yarn. I'd have faced a Court-Martial of Inquiry respectin' my conduct in the Field. For my wife has a kind heart and a keen sense of honour, and rather than 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 owned by a friend of his in Natal, and that Hannah – that my wife knew poor little Lucy Hawting had had a child by Mildare," Major Bingo spluttered. "That was why she asked Van Busch outright whether the girl with the nuns at Gueldersdorp was – could be – the same child, 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 brute 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 mind, and he showed his teeth in a way that meant Murder. Just in time – before he could wring her neck round – and he'd started 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."