An instant, and Saxham's own face looks calmly at the dazed Chaplain, and
the curt, brusque voice demands:
"What is this incontrovertible testimony?"
"A letter," says Julius breathlessly, "from a person who saw the entry of
the marriage at the Registrar's office where it took place."
"Is anyone else in possession of this information?"
"With the exception of the Registrar and the witnesses of the marriage, up
to the middle of last September, when the letter was written, nothing had
leaked out. I received the communication by the last mail from England
that was delivered at the Hospital before I underwent the operation."
"That was the last mail that got through. Who was your correspondent?"
"One of the senior officiating priests of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street,
the London church where I did duty as junior curate."
"Have you kept the letter?"
"It is in my desk at my hotel, with some other correspondence of Father
Tatham's. You may see it if you wish."
"I will see it. In the meanwhile, let me have the pith of it. This
clergyman--happening to visit a Registrar's office---- Where was the
office?"
"At Cookham-on-Thames, where Father Tatham has established a Holiday Rest
Home for the benefit of our London working lads"--the Chaplain begins. He
is sitting on the end of the bed, weak and worn and exhausted with the
emotions that have torn him in the last half-hour. Beads of perspiration
thickly stud the high temples, out of which the flushing colour has sunk;
his cheeks are pallid and hollow. His eyes have lost their fire; his
muscles are flaccidly relaxed; his sloping shoulders stoop; his long, limp
hands hang nervelessly at his sides.
"One moment." Saxham glances at the gold chronometer that was a
presentation from the students of St. Stephen's years ago. It is rather
typical of the man that, even when under stress of his heroic thirst he
has pawned the watch for money wherewith to buy whisky, he should have
only borrowed upon it such small sums as are easily repaid. He has yet
another five minutes to bestow in listening to the Chaplain's story, yet
even as he returns the chronometer to its pocket, his quick ear catches
the frou-frou of feminine petticoats outside the door. He opens it,
frowning. A nurse is standing there with a summons in her face. She
delivers her low-toned message, receives a brusque reply, and rustles down
the corridor between the long lines of pallets as Saxham draws back his
head and shuts the door, and, setting his great shoulders against it, and
facing Julius, orders:
"Go on!"
Julius goes on:
"At Roselawn Cottage--a pretty place of the toy-residence description,
standing in charming gardens not far from the Holiday Rest Home, lived a
lady--an actress very popular in Musical Comedy--who was known to be the
mistress of Lord Beauvayse. I need hardly tell you the Father touched on
the unpleasant features of the story as delicately as possible----"
"Without doubt. But--get on a little quicker," says Saxham grimly, jerking
his head towards the door. "For I am wanted. And don't speak loud, for
there are people on the other side there. With regard to this
woman--actress, or whatever she may be----?"
"With all her moral laxities," goes on Julius, "Miss Lessie Lavigne----"
"Ah, I know the name," says Saxham sharply. "On with you to the end. 'With
all her moral laxities----'"
"Miss Lessie Lavigne is a generous, kindly, charitable young woman," goes
on Julius. "And the Holiday Home has benefited largely by her purse. She
is known to the Matron; and Father Tatham--having occasion to visit the
Registrar's office at Cookham on the 29th of last June, for the purpose of
looking up the books, with the Registrar's consent, and satisfying himself
of the existence of the entry regarding a marriage between one of our
young fellows then at the Home and a girl he very foolishly married when
on a hopping excursion in the autumn of the previous year--Father Tatham
encountered Miss Lavigne--or Lady Beauvayse, to give her her proper
title----"
"In the Registrar's office?"
"In the act of quitting the Registrar's outer office," says the burnt-out
Julius in a weary voice, "in the company of Lord Beauvayse, and followed
by his valet and a woman who probably were witnesses; for when the Father
entered the inner office the register was lying open on the table, the
entry of the marriage still wet upon the page."
"And your religious correspondent pried first," says Saxham, with savage
irony, "and afterwards tattled?"
"And afterwards, seeing in the _Times_ that Lord Beauvayse was under
orders for South Africa, mentioned his accidental discovery when writing
to me," says Julius Fraithorn wearily.
"That will do. When can I see the letter at your hotel? The sooner the
better," says Saxham, with a curious smile, "for all purposes. Can you
walk there with me now? Very well"--as Julius assents--"that is arranged,
then."
"What is to be done, Saxham?" Julius stumbles up. The fires that burned in
him a few moments ago are quenched; his slack hand trembles irresolutely
at his beautiful weak mouth, and his deer-like eyes waver.
"I advise you," says Saxham, "to leave the doing of what is to be done to
me." His own blue eyes have so strange a flare in them, and his heavy form
seems so alive and instinct with threatening and dangerous possibilities,
that Julius falters:
"You believe Lord Beauvayse has been a party to--has wilfully compromised
Miss Mildare? You--you mean to remonstrate with him? Do you--do you think
that he will listen to a remonstrance?"
"He will find it best in this instance," says Saxham dourly.
"Do not--do not be tempted to use any violence, Saxham," urges the
Chaplain nervously, looking at the tense muscles of the grim, square face
and the purposeful right hand that hovers near the butt of the Doctor's
revolver. "For your own sake as much as for his!"
Saxham's laugh is ugly to hear.
"Do you think that Lord Beauvayse would wind up as top-dog if it came to a
struggle between us?"
"It must not come to a struggle, Saxham," says the Chaplain, very pale.
"We--we are under Martial Law. He is your superior officer." (Saxham,
Attached Medical Staff, holds the honorary rank of Lieutenant in Her
Majesty's Army.) "Remember, if Carslow--the man who killed Vickers, of the
_Pittsburg Trumpeter_"--he refers to a grim tragedy of the beginning of
the siege--"had not been medically certified insane, they would have taken
him out and shot him."
Saxham shrugs his massive shoulders, and with the utter unmelodiousness
that distinguishes the performance of a man devoid of a musical ear,
whistles a fragment of a little tune. It is often on the lips of another
man, and the Doctor has picked it up unconsciously, with one or two other
characteristic habits and phrases, and has fallen into the habit of
whistling it as he goes doggedly, unwearyingly, upon his ever-widening
round of daily duties. It helps him, perhaps, though it gets upon the
nerves of other people, making the younger nurses, not unmindful of his
arbitrary action in the matter of the violet powder, want to shriek.
"The Military Executive would be perfectly welcome to take me out and
shoot me, if first I might be permitted to look in at Staff Bomb proof
South, and render Society the distinguished service of ridding it of Lord
Beauvayse. Who's there?"
Saxham reopens the door, at which the nurse, now returned, has knocked.
The tired but cheerful-faced young woman, in an unstarched cap and apron,
and rumpled gown of Galatea cotton-twill, informs the Doctor that they
have telephoned up from Staff Bomb proof South Lines, and that the
password for the day is "Honour."
"You are going to him now?" asks the Chaplain anxiously and
apprehensively.
"Oddly enough, I have been sent for to attend to a shell casualty," says
Saxham, picking up and putting on his Service felt, and moving to take
down the canvas wallet that is his inseparable companion, from the hook on
which it hangs. "Or, rather, Taggart was; and as he has thirty diphtheria
cases for tracheotomy at the Children's Hospital, and McFadyen's hands are
full at the Refugees' Infirmary, the Major asks if I will take the duty.
It's an order, I suppose, couched in a civil way."
He swings the heavy wallet over his shoulders, and picks up his worn
hunting-crop.
"And so, let's be moving," he says, his hand upon the door-knob. "Your
hotel is on my way. I may need that letter, or I may not. And in any case
I prefer to have seen it before I meet the man."
"One moment." The Chaplain speaks with a strained look of anxiety,
squeezing a damp white handkerchief into a ball between his palms. "You
have taken upon yourself the duty of bringing Lord Beauvayse to book over
this--very painful matter.... I should like ... I should wish you to leave
the task of enlightening Miss Mildare to me."
"To you. And why?"
Saxham waits for the answer, a heavy figure filling up the doorway, with
scowling brows, and sullen eyes that carefully avoid the Chaplain's face.
"Because I--because in inflicting upon her what must necessarily be a--a
painful humiliation"--the Rev. Julius clears his throat, and laboriously
rolls the damp handkerchief-ball into a sausage--"I wish to convince Miss
Mildare that my respect and my--esteem for her have--not diminished."
"And how do you propose to drive this conviction home?"
The Reverend Julius flushes to the ear-tips. The coldness of the
questioning voice gives him a nervous shudder. He says with an effort,
looking at the thick white, black-fringed lids that bide the Doctor's
queer blue eyes:
"By offering Miss Mildare the honourable protection of my name. My views,
as regarding the celibacy incumbent upon an anointed servant of the altar,
have, since I knew her, undergone a--a change.... And it occurs to me,
when she has got over the first shock of hearing that she has been
deceived and played with by a person of Lord Beauvayse's lack of
principle----"
"That she may be induced to look with favour on the parson's proposal?"
comments Saxham with an indifference to the feelings of the person he
addresses that is positively savage. The raucous tones flay Julius's
sensitive ears, the terrible blue eyes blaze upon him, scorch him. He
falters:
"I--I trust my purpose is pure from vulgar self-seeking? I hope my
attitude towards Miss Mildare is not unchivalrous--or ungenerous?"
"In manipulating her disadvantage to serve your own interests," says
Saxham's terrible voice, "you would undoubtedly be playing a very low-down
game."
Julius laughs, shortly and huffily.
"A low-down game!... Ha, ha, ha! You don't mince your words, Doctor!"
"I can phrase my opinion even more plainly, if you desire it," returns
Saxham brutally. "To bespatter a rival for the gaining of an advantage by
contrast is a Yahoo's trick to which no decent gentleman would stoop."
"At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of being sarcastic,
"your 'decent gentleman' would be likely to remember the old adage, 'All's
fair in Love and----'"
"Exactly. All _is_ fair," returns Saxham, squaring his dogged jaws at the
other, and folding his great arms upon his deep wide chest. "And all shall
be, please to understand it. It is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss
Mildare should be undeceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the painful
duty of opening her eyes will be undertaken by that"--the break before the
designation is scathingly contemptuous--"by that--distinguished nobleman
himself, and by no other."
"How can you compel the man to give himself away?" demands the Reverend
Julius incredulously. Saxham answers, mechanically opening and closing his
small, muscular surgeon's hand, and watching the flexions and extensions
of the supple fingers with an ugly kind of interest:
"I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the moment. What
matters is--your parole of honour that you will never by word, or deed, or
sign disclose to Miss Mildare that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged
himself to marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonial proposals.
Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty to further your own
views as may seem good to you. The plan of campaign that I, in your place,
should choose might not find favour in your eyes...."
His look bears upon the younger man with intolerable weight, his
heavily-shouldered figure seems to swell and fill the room. Julius is
clearly conscious of hating his saviour, and the consciousness is acid on
his palate as he asks, with a wry smile:
"What would your plan be if you were in my place?"
"To praise where a rival was worthy of praise; to be silent where it would
be easy to depreciate; to win her from him, not because of my own greater
worth, but in spite of the worst she could know of me. That would, in my
opinion, be a conquest worthy of a man."
The pupils of the speaker's flaming blue eyes have dwindled to mere
pin-points, a rush of blood has darkened the square pale face, to sink
away again and leave it opaquely colourless, as Saxham says with cool
distinctness:
"And now, before we leave this room, I must trouble you for that
promise--oath, if you feel it would be more in your line of business. I
don't possess a copy of the Scriptures, but I think that is a Crucifix
you wear upon your watch-chain?"
It is. And when the Reverend Julius has kissed the sacred symbol with
shaking lips, and taken the oath as Saxham dictates, his heart tattooing
furiously under the baggy khaki jacket, and an angry pulse beating in his
thin cheek, Saxham adds, with the flickering shadow of a smile, as he
opens the door, and signs to the Chaplain to pass out before him:
"You observe, I have turned the weapons of your profession against you.
Exactly as--replying to your question of a moment back with regard to
compelling--exactly as I intend to do in the case of Lord Beauvayse!"
He motions to the other to pass out before him, and locks the door upon
his stuffy little sanctum whose shelves are piled with a heterogeneous
confusion of tubes and bottles, books and instruments, specimens of
foodstuffs under the process of analysis for values, and carefully-sealed
watch-glasses containing choice cultures of deadly microbes in bouillon,
before he leads his way down the long corridor, where narrow pallets, upon
which sick men and boys are stretched, range along the walls upon either
hand, and the air is heavy with the taint of suppurating wounds, and the
hot, sickly breath of fever and malaria.
He walks quickly, his keen blue eyes glancing right and left with the
effect of carelessness, yet missing nothing. He stops, and loosens the
bandage, and relieves the swollen limb. He delays to kneel a moment beside
one low pillow, and turn gently to the light a face that is ghastly, with
its bristly beard and glassy, staring eyes, and its pallor that is of the
hue of old wax, and lay it gently back again as he beckons to the nurse to
bring the screens, and hide the Dead from the sight of the living.
He is in his element; salient and masterful and strong. But the haggard
eyes that turn upon him do not shine with gratitude. He has not reached
these hearts. They accuse him, quite unjustly, of a liking for cutting and
carving. They suspect him, quite correctly, of being in no hurry for the
ending of the siege. How should he be, when, these strenuous days once
over, he sees nothing before him but the murky blackness of the night out
of which he came, from which he has emerged for one brief draught of
renewed joy in living before the dark shall close over him again, and
wrap him round for ever?
He has suffered horribly of late. But at the worst his work has never
failed to bring relief and distraction. Pure loyalty to a man in whom he
believes, has been the main-spring of his unflagging strength. He is not
liked or popular in any way, though Surgeon-Major Taggart upholds him
manfully, and McFadyen is loyal to the old bond. His harshness repels
regard, his coldness blights confidence, and so, though he is admired for
his dazzling skill in surgery, for his dogged perseverance and unremitting
power of application, for his fine horsemanship and iron nerve; he is not
regarded with affection.
He is not in the least aware of it, to do him justice, when his rough
ironies and his brusque repartees give offence. In the heyday of his
London success he has not truckled to Rank, or Influence, or Affluence.
The owner of a gouty or a varicose leg has never had the more civil tongue
from Saxham that the uneasy limb or its fellow was privileged upon State
occasions to wear the Garter. He trod upon corns then, as he treads upon
them now, without being aware of it, as he goes upon his way.
Julius goes with him, rent by apprehensions, stealing nervous side-glances
at the impassive, opaque-skinned face as Saxham swings along with his
powerful, rather lurching gait over the ploughed and littered waste that
divides the Hospital from the town beyond it. He speaks once or twice, but
Saxham seems not to hear.
The Doctor is listening to a dialogue that is as yet unspoken. He is
crushing a resistance that has not yet been made. In imagination his
small, strong, muscular hands are gripped about the throat of the man who
has lied to her and deceived her; and he is listening with joy to the
gurgling, choking efforts to phrase a prayer for mercy, or utter a final
defiance; and he sees with grim pleasure how the fine skin blackens under
his deadly hold, and how the lazy, beautiful, grey-green eyes, no longer
sleepy or defiant, but staring and horribly bloodshot, are already rolling
upwards in the death-agony. The primitive savage that is in every man
lusts at a juncture such as this, to kill with the bare hands rather than
to slay with any weapon known to civilisation.
"Let him look to it how he deals with her! Let him look to it!"
How long it seems since Saxham muttered those words, turning sullenly away
to recross the stepping-stones, leaping from boulder to boulder as the
river wimpled and laughed in mockery of his clumsy tender of protection
and her rejection of it, and Beauvayse's tall figure stood, erect and
triumphant, on the flower-starred bank, waiting to recommence his wooing
until the intruder should be gone, divining, as Saxham had instinctively
known, the hidden passion that rent and tortured him, glowing with the
consciousness of secret mastery....
If this meek, thin-blooded young clergyman who walks beside him might have
won her, it seems to Saxham that he could have borne it. But that
Beauvayse of all others should venture to approach her, presume to rear an
image of himself in the shrine of her pure breast; win her from her high
aims and lofty ideals with a bold look and a few whispered words, and,
having thrown his honourable name into the lap of a light woman as
indifferently as a jewelled trinket, should dare to offer Lynette Mildare
dishonour, is monstrous, hideous, unbearable....
How comes it that she of all women should be so easily allured, so lightly
drawn aside? Was there no baser conquest within reach that this white,
virginal, slender saint should become _his_ prey? Shall she be made even
as those others of whom she spoke, when the veil of a girlish innocence
was drawn aside, and strange and terrible knowledge looked out of those
clear eyes, and she said, in answer to his question:
"They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer upon earth. For
they are the slaves, and the victims, and the martyrs of the unrelenting,
merciless, dreadful pleasures of men...."
Of men like Beauvayse.
Not only swart and shaggy, or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired,
toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful,
youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek
sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green
jewels, soft persuasive voices with which to pour poisoned words into
innocent and guileless ears, and the bold, brave blood of old-time heroes
running in their veins, prompting them to the doing of dashing, reckless,
gallant deeds, no less than sins of lust and luxury.
Let him look to it, this splendid young soldier with the ancient name,
hope of his House, pride of his Regiment. Let him look to it how he has
dealt with her, who had no thought or dream but to save others from the
fate he destines for her, until his cursed, beautiful face smiled down
into her own. For every lying oath he has sworn to her, for every false
promise made to the wrecking of her maiden peace, for every kiss those
innocent lips have been despoiled of, for every touch of his that has
soiled her, for every breath of his that has scorched the white petals of
the Convent-reared lily, he shall pay the price.
Silently Saxham registers this oath upon that beloved red-brown head,
since he denies its Maker His honour, and the whirling blackness that is
within him is rent and cloven, for one blinding instant, by the
levin-fires of Hell. He knows thenceforward what he will do, as he walks
with the pale Chaplain between the shell-torn houses, and along the
littered streets, where men and women and children, thin and haggard and
listless with hunger, and the deadly inertia of long confinement, pass and
repass as indifferently as though no guns were battering and growling from
the low grey hills south and east, and the incessant rattle of rifle-fire
were the innocent expenditure of blank cartridge incidental to a sham
fight.
They reach the Chaplain's hotel, and go to his room. Saxham waits silently
while Julius searches for and finds Father Tatham's letter, takes it and
reads it attentively, puts it carefully away in a worn notecase, restores
the notecase to the inner pocket of his jacket, and, without a nod or word
of farewell, is gone.