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 knew better than Owen Saxham, called of men in
Gueldersdorp 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 "Dispensary," opened, and a long, thin
Dutchman, dressed in respectable 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 though the question had been asked:
"No, there is no telegram from Cape Town."
Then he shut the glazed door, and returned to the very congenial
occupation in which he had been engaged, and Owen Saxham went heavily 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-Williams 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. The 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 of large calibre, in addition to
the weapon 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,
American-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 little haggard about the eyes and twitchy about the mouth, and
sitting calmly waiting for patients in the respectably-appointed
consulting-room of De Boursy-Williams, 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 those lying capitals, were a member of the London
Pharmaceutical Society and properly-qualified dentist, which perhaps might
be the case, he certainly possessed no other claim upon the confidence of
his fellow-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 wreaths 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 with quinine and
cathartics, ready at a case of simple rubeola; hideously, secretly,
helplessly perplexed between the false diphtheria and the true; treating
internal cancer and fibrous tumours as digestive derangements 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 drink-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 Established Churchman, 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 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 boys' father, fair and florid, bluff, 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.
David and Owen. David was the elder, fair like the father, destined for
Harrow, Sandhurst, and the Army. Owen had dreamed of the Merchant 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 Brown 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 obtained 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 pleasure, 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 fatherhood a glorious privilege. Stern
as he seemed, grave and quiet and undemonstrative as he was, the youngest
and shyest children did not shrink from him. The pink rose-leaf tongue
peeped from between the budding rows of teeth, and the 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, with a
sweet head that drooped a little, and round brown eyes that were extremely
pretty and wore a perpetual expression of surprise. She was rather anaemic,
preferred croquet to lawn-tennis--then the rage--and kept a journal, after
the style of an American model. But the space which Mary McMullins 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 Mildred 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 Children." In one specially high-flown passage he
was referred to as a grim granite rock, to which the delicate
clematis-like nature of Mildred, 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 his 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 gold, and look at the tongue 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
unsuspecting 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 Chilworth 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
practitioner. 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 height, 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, terminating 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 muscles, 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, 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 abhorring jewellery, in
preferring white cashmere shirts, and strictly limiting the amount of
starch in the thin linen cuffs and collars, perhaps he showed a tendency
to faddism. David told him that he dressed himself like a septuagenarian
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 Mildred's company, and not thinking 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-moustached, classically-featured, swaggering 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 without perceptible
triumph, and Mildred had been immensely 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, Mildred 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 near 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 she would have married him but for the scandal of
the Trial. He wrenched his knitted hands together until the joints
cracked. She would have married him, and forgotten David. He, the man of
will, and power, 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. Who 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 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 Mildred, 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 travelling-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 things. Beside that epic atom
Mildred dwindled 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 innocent of actual
treachery, here was the smooth, brotherly betrayer, unmasked and loathly
in the sight 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!
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 Chilworth 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 performance 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.