Saxham said his lingering sweet good-night, and shut Mildred into the
warm, lighted hall, and ran down the steps, and hailed a passing hansom,
and was driven back to Chilworth Street. It had rained, and the heat,
excessive for April, had abated, and the wise, experienced stars looked
down between drifting veils of greyish vapour upon the little human lives
passing below.
As he jumped down at his door and paid his cabman, his quick eye noticed a
bicycle leaning against the area-railings. One of his poorer patients was
waiting for the Doctor. Or a messenger had been sent to summon him. He let
himself into the lighted hall, whistling the pretty plaintive melody of
Ophelia's song.
A woman sat on the oak bench under the electric globe, her little
huddled-up figure making rather a sordid blotch of drab against the
strong, rich background of the wall, coloured Pompeian red, and hung with
fine old prints in black frames. Her tawdry hat lay beside her, her
haggard eyes were set, staring at the opposite wall; her lower jaw hung
lax; the saliva dribbled from the corner of her underlip; her yellow,
rigid hands gripped the edge of the bench. It was the woman who passed as
the wife of the man Bough. And in instant, vivid, wrathful realisation of
the desperate reason of her being there, Saxham cried out so loudly that
the servant who had let her in and was waiting up for his master in the
basement heard the words:
"Are you mad? What do you mean by coming here? Haven't I told you that I
will have nothing to do with you and your affairs...."
The voice that issued from her blue lips might have been a scream, judging
by the wrung anguish of the awful face she turned upon him; but it was no
more than a dry, clicking whisper that the now listening servant could
barely hear:
"Don't be 'ard on a woman ... hin trouble, Doctor."
"Hard on you.... On the contrary, I have been too considerate," he said,
steeling his heart against pity. "You must go home to your husband, Mrs.
Bough, or apply elsewhere for medical advice. I have none to give you."
His square face was very stern as he took the cab-whistle from the
hall-salver, that was packed with cards and notes, and letters that had
come by the last post, and a telegram or two. She moaned as he laid his
hand on the knob of the hall-door.
"It wasn't my doings, Doctor.... Hi told Bough what you said. Hi did,
faithful ... an' 'e swore if you wasn't the man to do what 'e wanted, 'e'd
be damned but 'e'd find a woman as would! And she come next night--a
little, shabby, white-faced, rat-nosed hold thing, shiverin' an' shakin'.
Five pounds she 'ad of Bough, shakin' an' shiverin'. An' he wasn't to send
no more to the haddress he knew, because she wouldn't be there. Always
move hout ... she says, after a fresh job! Oh, my Gawd! An' Bough, he
hordered me, an' Hi 'ad to give in. An' to-night Hi reckoned Hi was dyin'
an' 'e said Hi best harsk you, 'e was about fed up with women an' their
blooming sicknesses. So Hi biked 'ere because Hi couldn't walk. An'
now!..." She groaned: "Hi _ham_ dyin', aren't Hi?"
Even to an observation less skilled than that of the expert medical
practitioner the signs of swift and speedy dissolution were written on the
insignificant, once pretty, little face. Dying, the miserable little
creature had ridden to Chilworth Street, hastening her own inevitable end
by the stupendous act of folly, and ensuring Saxham's. That certainty had
pierced him, even as the first horrible convulsion seized her and wrenched
her sideways off the bench. He caught her, and shouted for his man, and
they carried her into the consulting-room, and laid her on a sofa, and he
did what might be done, knowing that his mercy on her involved swift and
pitiless retribution upon himself. Mrs. Bough died three hours later, as
the grey dawn straggled through the blinds, and the men with the district
ambulance waited at the door, and Dr. Owen Saxham went about his work that
day with a strange sensation of expecting some heavy blow that was about
to fall. It fell upon the day following the Coroner's Inquest. He was
sitting down to breakfast when a Superintendent of Police arrested him
upon a warrant from Scotland Yard.
His servant, very pale, had announced that the Superintendent wished to
see the Doctor. The Superintendent was in the room, courteously saluting
Saxham, before the man had fairly got out the words.
"Good-morning, sir. A pleasant day!"
"Unlike the business that brings you here, I think, Mr. Superintendent?"
said Saxham, with his square jaw set. His man spilt the coffee and hot
milk over the cloth in trying to fill his master's cup. "You are nervous,
Tait. You had better go downstairs, I think, unless----" Saxham looked
interrogatively at the burly, officially-clad figure of the Law.
"No, sir, thank you. We do not at present require your man, but it is my
duty to tell him that he had better not be out of the way, in case his
testimony is wanted."
"You hear?" said Saxham; and as white-faced Tait fled, trembling, to the
lower regions: "Of course, you are here," he went on, pouring out the
coffee himself with a firm hand, and looking steadily at the
Superintendent, "with regard to the case of Mrs. Bough? I have expected
that a magistrate's inquiry would follow the Inquest. It seemed only
natural----"
The Superintendent interrupted, holding up a large hand.
"It is my duty to tell you, Dr. Saxham, that everything you say will be
taken down and used against you in evidence."
"Naturally," said Saxham, putting sugar in his coffee. The sugar was used
against him. It amused him now to remember that. The Superintendent had
never seen a gentleman more cool, he told the magistrate.
"You see, sir, this Case has been fully considered by the authorities, and
it has an ugly look; and it has therefore been decided to charge you with
causing the death of the woman Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in
your consulting-room, on the twentieth instant, when she visited you ..."
"For the first time," put in Saxham quietly.
"That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent. "You were often at
her husband's place of business, you know, and may have seen her or not
seen her."
"As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a great many of
the man's customers besides myself did see her," Saxham went on, eating
his breakfast.
"One of my men out there in the hall--I've noticed you looking towards the
door----" began the Superintendent.
"Wondering what the shuffling and breathing at the keyhole meant?" said
Saxham quietly. "Thank you for explaining."
"One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished breakfast, and
then, sir," said the Superintendent, "I am afraid I must trouble you to
come with me to Paddington Police Station."
"Very well," said Saxham, frowning, "unless you object to using my
brougham, which will be at the door"--he looked at his silver table-clock,
a present from a grateful patient--"in ten minutes' time."
"I don't at all mind that, sir," agreed the obliging Superintendent; "and
the men can follow in the cab. Any objection?"
Saxham had winced and flushed scarlet to the hair.
"For God's sake, don't make a procession of it! Let things be kept as
quiet as possible for the sake of my--family--and--my friends." He thought
with agony of Mildred. They were to be married in July, unless----
The Superintendent coughed behind his glove. "The question of Bail will
rest with the magistrate, of course," he said. "But I should expect that
it would be admitted, upon responsible persons entering into the customary
recognisances."
Saxham rose. He had drunk the coffee, but he could not eat. "Like all the
rest of them, in spite of his show of coolness," thought the
Superintendent.
"I will ask you for time to telephone to some friends who will, I have no
doubt, be willing to give the required undertaking, and arrange for a
colleague to visit my patients. You will take a glass of wine while I step
into the next room? The telephone is there, on the writing-table."
"And a loaded revolver in the drawer underneath, and poisons of all kinds
handy on the shelves of a neat little cabinet," thought the
Superintendent. But he said: "With pleasure, sir, only I must trouble you
to put up with my company."
A tingling thrill of revulsion ran through Saxham. He set his teeth, and
conquered the furious, momentary impulse to knock down this big, burly,
smooth-spoken blue-uniformed official.
"Ah, very well. The usual procedure in cases of this kind. Please come
this way. But take a glass of wine first. There are glasses on the
sideboard there, and claret and port in those decanters."
"To your very good health, Dr. Saxham, sir, and a speedy and favourable
ending to--the present--difficulty." The Superintendent emptied a bumper
neatly, and with discreet relish, and followed Saxham into the
consulting-room, and once more, at the sound of the measured footfall
padding behind him over the thick carpet, the suspect's blood surged madly
to his temples, and his hands clenched until the nails drove deep into the
palms. For from that moment began the long, slow torture of watching and
following, and dogging by the suspicious, vigilant, observant Man In Blue.
A Treasury Prosecution succeeded the Police-Court Inquiry, and the accused
was formally arrested upon the criminal charge, and committed to Holloway
pending the Trial. The Trial took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in the
following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in the thrashing
out of that vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D.,
F.R.C.S. who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and
slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude. Who was
conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the cell to the dock by
warders and policemen, rumbling through back streets and unfrequented ways
in a shiny prison-van. Who came at last to look upon the Owen Saxham of
this hideous prison nightmare, the man of whom the Counsel for the Crown
reared up, day by day, a monstrously-distorted figure, as quite a
different person from the other innocent man whom the defending advocate
described in flowery, pathetic sentences as a martyr and the victim of an
unheard-of combination of adverse circumstances.
Things went badly. The case against the prisoner looked extremely black.
That monstrous figure of Owen Saxham, based upon an ingenious hypothesis
of guilt, and plastered over with a marvellous mixture of truths and
falsities, facts and conjectures, grew uglier and more sinister every day.
The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the hapless victim, dressed
in deep mourning and neatly handled by Counsel, evoked a display of
handkerchiefs upon his every appearance in the witness-box, from the smart
Society women seated near the Bench. Many of them had been Saxham's
patients. Several had made love to him, nearly all of them had made much
of him, and quite an appreciable number of them had asked him to be
accommodating, and render them temporarily immune against the menace of
Maternity. These had received a curt refusal, accompanied with wholesome
advice, for which they revenged themselves now, in graceful womanly
fashion, by being quite sure the wretched man was guilty. More than
possible, was it not? they whispered behind their palm-leaf fans: it was
sultry weather, and the vendors of these made little fortunes, hawking
them outside. Was it not more than possible that he had been the dead
woman's lover? The Crown Counsel improved on this idea. Wretched little
Mrs. Bough, of infinitesimal account in Life, had become through Death a
person of importance. Much was made out of the fact that she had gone to
Chilworth Street some days previously to her deplorable ending, and
remained closeted with Dr. Saxham for some time. He had supplied her with
a bottle of medicine upon her leaving--medicine of which no memorandum was
to be found in his notes for the day. She had taken the first dose then
and there. According to the testimony of the Accused, the bottle had
contained a harmless bromide sedative. Upon the oath of the Public
Analyst, the same bottle, handed by the husband of the deceased woman to
the Police upon the night of her death, and now produced in Court with two
or three doses of dark liquid remaining in it, contained a powerful
solution of ergotoxine--a much less innocent drug. Who should presume to
doubt its administration by the Prisoner, when the label bore directions
in his own characteristic handwriting? Who should dare to affirm his
innocence, seeing that to him his victim had hastened, almost in the act
of death, begging him, with her expiring breath, "not to be hard on a
woman," who had ignorantly trusted him, Gentlemen of the Jury! only to
find, too late, the deceptive nature of his specious promises? A whip,
cried the Bard of Avon, England's glorious, immortal Shakespeare, should
be placed in every honest hand to lash such scoundrels naked through the
world! Let that whip, in the honest hands of twelve good Britons, be--the
verdict of guilt! The Counsel for the Crown, red-hot and perspiring, sat
down mopping his streaming face, for it was tropical weather, with the
white handkerchief of a blameless life. Irrepressible applause followed,
round upon round thudding against the dingy yellow-white walls, beating
against the dirty barred skylight of the stifling, close-packed Court.
Then the Judge interposed, and the clapping of hands and thumping of stick
and sunshade ferrules upon the dirty floor died down, and the Counsel for
the Defence got up to plead for his man, who, by the way, he firmly
believed to be guilty.
That remembrance made the Dop Doctor merry again, this scorching night in
Gueldersdorp, five years later. But it was ugly mirth, especially when he
recalled his agony of sympathy upon hearing, through her mother, that
Mildred was ill in bed. Ah! how he hated the simpering, whispering,
sneering, giggling women in Court when he pictured her, his innocent
darling, his sweet girl, suffering for love of him and sorrow for him.
David, detained by onerous duties at Regimental Headquarters throughout
the whole of the Case, wrote chilly but fraternally expressed letters on
blue official paper. Of his mother, of his father, Owen dared not think.
Innocent as he was, the shame of his position, the obloquy of the Trial,
must be a branding shame to them for ever.
It had killed them, the Dop Doctor remembered, within a few years of each
other--the hale old Squire and Madam, his Welsh wife, feared by the South
Dorset village folks for her caustic tongue, beloved for her generous
heart, her liberal nature. It was Mildred who he had believed would die if
the Verdict went against him--Mildred, who had consoled herself so quickly
and so well--Mildred, whom he had held a spotless blossom of Paradise, a
young saint in purity and singleness of heart, in comparison with those
other women.
Bah! what a besotted idiot he had been! She was as they were. The nodding
of their towering hats was before his eyes; the subdued titter that
accompanied their whispered comments was in his ears; the lavender, white
rose, and violet essences with which they perfumed their baths and
sprinkled their clothes were in his nostrils; suffocatingly, as his
Counsel went on pleading. The intention of his trenchant cross-questioning
of Bough, who had lied from the beginning, like a true son of the Devil,
his father, showed plainly now. Little by little the evidence accumulated.
Here, free and unsuspect and doing his best to send another man to Penal
Servitude, was the man who had all to gain by fixing the guilt upon the
Accused. He had sent the woman, his mistress, to the prisoner; he had
resented the prisoner's refusal to commit or to abet a dangerous and
illegal operation. He had compelled his hapless victim to submit herself
to the hands of a wretch who lived by such deeds. Possibly he had sickened
of his poor toy--he had told her as much. Possibly he had determined, by a
bold and daring stroke, to free himself of a wearisome burden, and let
another man pay the penalty for his own crime. The substitution of the
lethal drug found in the bottle for the harmless bromide mixture given to
Mrs. Bough by Dr. Saxham would naturally suggest itself to such a wretch,
whose calculating cleverness had been crowned with success by the
culminating masterstroke, admirable in its simplicity, damnable in its
fiendish cunning, of sending the unhappy woman whose deliberate murder he
had really planned and carried out, to die upon the threshold of the
innocent victim of this diabolical plot. Let those who heard hesitate
before they played into the hands of a villain by condemning the blameless
to suffer! Let them look at the young man before them, whose hard work had
won him, early in life, his brilliant position as one of the recognised
pioneers of the new School of Surgery, as an admitted authority on
Clinical Medicine, whose wedding-bells--the handkerchiefs came out at
this--had rung to-morrow but for this harrowing and bitter stroke of
adverse Destiny. Which would they have? Let the Jury decide for Christ or
Barabbas! He spoke in all reverence, because the upright, innocent,
charitable, self-denying life of a diligent healer of men would support
the analogy of Christ-likeness beside that of the principal witness in
this Case, the evil liver, the slanderer, the ex-thief and burglar, the
English ticket-of-leave man who had emigrated to South Africa eighteen
years previously, had enlisted under a false name in the Cape Mounted
Police, had deserted, been traced to Kimberley, and there lost sight of,
and who, under the name of Bough, had recently returned to England, giving
himself out as an Afrikander, and setting up in business in London upon
the accumulated savings of a career most probably in keeping with his
abominable record.
Warders from Wormwood Scrubbs and Portland Prisons were there to swear to
the identity of Abraham Brake, _alias_ Lister, _alias_ Bough, whose
photographs, thumb-prints, and measurements an official from the Criminal
Identification Department of Scotland Yard was prepared to place before
the Court, for whose re-arrest, as a ticket-of-leave man who had failed to
keep in proper touch with the Police, an officer with a warrant waited.
What, then, was to be the Verdict of the Jury? Was Dr. Owen Saxham
innocent or guilty? If innocent, then, in the name of God, let him go
forth from bondage, to the unutterable relief of those who waited in
anguish for the Verdict. His father, his mother, and the fair young
girl--the Court was drowned in tears at this last touching reference,
even his Lordship the Judge being observed to remove and wipe eyeglasses
that were gemmy with emotion, as Counsel dwelt upon the touching picture
of the sorrowing bride-elect, whose orange-blossoms had been blighted by
the breath of this hideous, this unbearable, this most unfounded
charge....