The Judge summed up, with an evident bias in favour of the Accused. An old
advocate in criminal causes, his Lordship had formed his own opinion of
the principal witness for the Crown, though there was no evidence to prove
the guilt of the astute Mr. Abraham Brake, _alias_ Lister, _alias_ Bough.
The Jury retired, to return immediately. The Verdict "Not Guilty" was
received with applause and cheers. Bough departed, to pay the prison
penalty of not keeping in touch with the Police.... More cheers, strongly
deprecated by the Judge. The Dop Doctor could hear that ironical clapping
and braying five years off. It was over, over! He was free! Oh, the
mockery of the word!
His Counsel shook his hand warmly, and several old friends and colleagues
pressed round him with hearty congratulations. Then a telegram was handed
to him.
"No bad news, I hope," said the advocate who had defended, seeing Saxham's
lips blanch. "You have had enough trouble to last for some time, I
imagine?"
"It appears as if my measure was not quite full enough," said Saxham
quietly. "My father died suddenly last night, down at our place in South
Dorset. The wire says, 'An attack of cerebral haemorrhage,' probably
brought on by worry and distress of mind over this damned affair of mine."
He ground his teeth together, and went on: "I must go to my mother without
delay. How soon can I get away from here?"
It was oddly difficult to realise that all the doors were open, and that
the following shadow of the Man In Blue would no longer dog his footsteps.
It was strange to drive home in the brougham of a friend to Chilworth
Street, and let himself into the dusty, neglected, close-smelling, shut-up
house. All the servants were out; probably they had been making holiday
through all the weeks that had preceded the Trial. His man returned as the
master finished packing a portmanteau for that journey down to
Dorsetshire. Saxham left him to finish while he changed his clothes and
scrawled a letter to Mildred. Nothing else but this death could have kept
him from hurrying to the embrace of those dear arms. As it was, he half
expected her to rush in upon him, stammering, weeping, clinging to him in
her overwhelming relief and gladness.... At every rumble and stoppage of
wheels in the street, at every ring, he made sure that she was coming. But
she did not come, and he sent his man to Pont Street with his letter, and
went down into Dorsetshire by special train from Waterloo, and found the
dead man's dogcart waiting for him, with the old bay cob in harness, and
the old coachman who had taught him to ride his pony, waiting, with a band
of crape about his sleeve, and drove through the deep, ferny lanes to the
old home standing in its mantle of midsummer leafage and blossom in the
wide gardens whose myrtle and lavender hedges overhung the beach below.
There was a little, old, bent, white-haired woman in a shabby black gown
and white India shawl waiting for him on the threshold, and only by the
indomitable, unquailing spirit that looked out of her bright black eyes
did Owen Saxham recognise his mother. She called him her David's dearest
son, and her own boy, and took both his hands, and drew his head down, and
kissed him solemnly upon the forehead.
"That is for your father, my dear," she said. "He never doubted you for
one moment, Owen. And this is for myself. We have both believed in you
implicitly throughout. We would not even write and tell you so. It would
have seemed, your father thought, like admitting, tacitly, that we doubted
our son. But other people believed you guilty, and oh! Owen, I think it
killed him!"
"I know that it has killed him," Owen Saxham said simply. The early
morning light showed to the mother's eyes the ravages wrought in her
son's face by the mental anguish and the physical strain of those terrible
weeks that were over, and Mrs. Saxham, for the first time since the
Squire's death, burst into a passion of weeping. Owen's eyes were dry,
even when he stooped to kiss the high, broad forehead of the grand old
grey head that lay upon the snowy, lavender-scented pillow in the cool,
airy death-chamber, where the perfume of the climbing roses that flowered
about the open casements came in drifts across the sharp, clean odour of
disinfectant.
Captain Saxham arrived late that night. His greeting of his brother was
stiff and constrained; his grey eyes avoided Owen's blue ones; he did not
refer to the events of the past ten weeks. He had always had a habit of
twisting and biting at one of the short, thick ends of his frizzy light
brown moustache. Now he wrenched and gnawed at it incessantly, and his
usually florid complexion had deteriorated to a muddy pallor. Black mufti
did not suit the handsome martial figure, and there is no dwelling so
wearisome as a house of mourning, when the servants move about on tiptoe,
wearing faces of funereal solemnity, and the afternoon tea-tray is carried
in in state, like the corpse of a domestic usage on its way to the
cemetery, with the silver spirit-kettle bubbling behind it as chief
mourner. But, as the elder son, there was plenty to occupy Captain Saxham.
There was business to be transacted with the Squire's solicitor, with his
bailiff, with one or two of the principal tenants. There were the
arrangements to be made for the Funeral, and for the extension of
hospitality to relatives and friends who came from a distance to attend
it. When it was over and the long string of County carriages had driven
home to their respective coach-houses, Owen Saxham returned to town.
"Give my dear love to Mildred. Tell her, if she grudged the first sight of
you to me, she will forgive me when she has a son of her own," his mother
said.
"You talk as though she were my wife!" he said, the bitter lines about his
set mouth softening in a smile.
"She would be but for what is past," said Mrs. Saxham. "She must be soon,
for your sake. Your father would have wished that there should be as
little delay as possible. Marry quietly at once, and take her abroad. If
she loves you, as I know she does, and must, she will not regret the
wedding-gown from Paquin's and the six bridesmaids in Directoire hats."
For that deferred wedding was to have been a gorgeous and impressive
function at St. George's, Hanover Square, with a Bishop in lawn sleeves to
pronounce the nuptial benediction, palms, Japanese lilies, smilax, and
white Rambler roses everywhere, while the celebrated "Non Angli sed
Angeli" choir of boy-choristers had been specially engaged to render the
anthem with proper fervour and give due effect to "The Voice that
Breathed."
Owen promised and went back to London. There were cards and envelopes upon
the salver in the hall, but not one from Mildred. That stabbed him to the
heart.... Not a line, O God!--not a written line, in answer to that letter
in which he told her of the acquittal, and of his father's death, and of
his own anguish at having to answer the stern call of filial duty, and
leave dear Love uncomforted by even one kiss after all these weeks of
famine, and hurry away to lay that grand grey head in the vault that
covered so many Saxhams. Not a line. But here was the letter, which his
idiot of a servant, demoralised by the recent catastrophe, had forgotten
to send on lying waiting upon the writing-table in his study. He snatched
at it in desperate haste, and tore the envelope open.
Her letter bore the date of that day. She said she had written before and
torn the confession up ... it was so difficult to be just to him and true
to herself.... It was a roundabout, involved, youthfully grandiloquent
epistle in which Mildred announced that her love for Owen was dead, that
nothing could ever resuscitate it; that she could not, would not, ever
marry him, and that she had returned in an accompanying packet his ring,
and presents, and letters, and would ever remain _his friend_ (underlined)
Mildred. In a rather wobbly postscript, she begged him not to write or to
attempt to see her, because her decision was irrevocable. She spelt the
word with only one _r_.
Saxham read the letter three times deliberately. The walls of the castle
he had built, and fondly believed to be a work of Cyclopean masonry, had
come tumbling about his ears, and lo! the huge blocks were only bits of
painted card, and the Lady of the Castle, his true love, was the false
Queen, after all. He folded up the letter and put it away in his
pocket-book, and went over to the mantel-glass and looked steadily at the
reflection of his own square face, haggard and drawn and ghastly, with
eyes of startling blue flaring out from under a scowling smudge of meeting
black eyebrows. He laughed harshly, and a mocking devil looked out of
those desperate eyes, and laughed back. He unlocked an oak-carved,
silver-mounted cellaret, and got out a decanter of brandy, and filled a
tumbler, and drank the liquor off. It numbed the unbearable mental agony,
though it had apparently no other effect. But probably he was drunk when
he rang the bell and said quietly to his man:
"Tait, do you believe there is a God?"
Tait's smooth, waxy countenance did not easily express surprise. He
answered, as though the question had been the most commonplace and
ordinary of queries:
"Can't say I do, sir. I reckon the parsons are responsible for floating
'Im, and that they made a precious good thing out of bearin' stock in
Heaven until the purchasers began to ask for delivery, and after that...."
He chuckled dryly. "I've lived with one or two of 'em, and, if I may say
so, sir--I know the breed!"
"He knows ... the breed ..." repeated Saxham heavily.
He asked another question, in the same thick, hesitating way, as he moved
across the carpet to the oak-and-silver cellaret.
"Tait, when things went damned badly with you, when that other man let you
in for the bill you backed for him, and that girl you were to have married
went off with someone else, what did you do to keep yourself from
brooding? Because you must have done something, man, as you're alive
to-day!"
Tait looked at his master dubiously as he poured out more brandy, and went
over and stood upon the hearthrug with his back to the empty fireplace,
drinking it in gulps. "I did what you're doing now, sir: I took a sight of
drink to keep the trouble down. And----" He hesitated.
"Go on," said Saxham, nodding over the tumbler.
"You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said smooth Tait,
"and that makes me 'esitate in saying it. But I took on a gay, agreeable
young woman of the free-and-easy sort, and went in for a bit o' pleasure,
and more drink along with it. One nail drives out another, you know, sir.
And if the young lady have thrown you hover----"
"Why, you damned, white-gilled, prying brute! you must have been reading
my correspondence," said Saxham thickly, as he lifted the tumbler to his
mouth.
Tait grinned. He could venture to tell his master, drunk, what he would
not have dared to tell him sober.
"No need for that, sir. I've come and gone between this house and Pont
Street too often not to know what was in the wind. Why, Captain Saxham was
there with her often and often when you never suspected...."
The tumbler fell from Saxham's hand, and struck the fender, and smashed
into a hundred glittering bits.
"Go!" said Tait's master, perfectly, suddenly, dangerously sober, and
pointing to the door. The man delayed to finish his sentence.
"While you were in Holloway, sir, and all through the Trial...."
The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been left open. He
vanished through it with harlequin-like agility as a terrible, white-faced
black figure seemed to leap upon him....
"I've 'ad an escape for my life!" he said, having reached in a series of
bounds the safer regions below stairs.
"Of the Doctor?... Go on with your rubbishing nonsense!" said the cook.
"What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear?" demanded the housemaid,
who was more imaginative, and cherished the buddings of a romantic passion
for one who should be for ever nameless:
"Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by--that's what she've
done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his dewy brow. "And seeing the Doctor
for the first time since I've been in his service a bit overtook with
liquor, and more free and easy like than customary--being a gentleman you
or me would 'esitate to take a liberty with in the ordinary way o'
things--I thought I'd let 'im know about the Goings On."
"Of them two...." interpolated the cook--"Her and the Captain?"
"Shameless, I call 'em!" exclaimed the incandescent housemaid as Tait
signified assent.
"'Aven't they kep' it dark, though!" wondered the cook.
"They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite got over the
desertion of the young woman he was to have married, and who had gone off
with somebody else, "a precious downy couple. And what I say is--it's a
Riddance!"
"How did 'e take it, pore dear?" gulped the housemaid.
"Like he's took everythink--that is, up to the present moment," admitted
Tait. "But this is about the last straw."
The housemaid dissolved in tears.
"He'll get another young lady," said the cook confidently. "And him so
'andsome an' so clever, an' with such heaps of carriage-swells for
patients."
Tait shook his prim, respectable head.
"The swells'll show their tongues to another man now, my gal, who 'asn't
the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coat-sleeve. Whistle for patients now,
that's what the doctor may. Why, every one of 'em has paid their bills,
and them that haven't have asked for their accounts to be sent in. And
it's 'Lady So-and-so presents her compliments,' instead of 'Dear Dr.
Saxham.' Done for, he is, at least as far as the West End's concerned....
Mind, I don't set up to be infallible, but experience justifies a certain
amount of cocksureness, and what I say is--Done for! Best he can do
is--sell the practice, and lease, and plate, and pictures, furniture, and
so on, for whatever he can get--the movables would have provoked spirited
biddin' at auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under the
circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their valoo--and go
Abroad." Tait's gesture was large and vague.
"Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel!" sighed the cook.
"And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he don't do away with
hisself," sobbed the housemaid. "I do, reely!"
"With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles handy," added the cook.
"Not him!" said Tait. "I'm ready to lay any man the sporting odd against
him committing sooicide. He's not the sort. Lord! what was that?"
That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs.