In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom
he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of
the Siege--a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those
days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written
by an unsteady hand.
Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a
contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and
drove there that afternoon.
The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco
Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West.
Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged
passages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the
door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and
able to receive a visitor?
The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one
eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty
crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky
voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the
Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the
Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she
inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she
would be happy to oblige the gentleman.
"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see
that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an
ordinary caller on business connected with religion."
The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as
scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream-washed,
brown-distemper-dadoed passage, smelling of kippered haddocks and incense,
to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a
view of mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a
washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a
ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.
Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library;
chrome-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by Old Masters
hung above. The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological
hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a
table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a
slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion,
supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius
Fraithorn, who was lying down.
"I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the prone figure, a
single stride having taken him to the side of the sofa, "to prescribe for
a man whose nerves are playing him tricks. I have torn up your letter--the
epistle in which you ask me to afford you an opportunity of making an
avowal which will prove to what depths of infamy a man may descend at the
bidding of his lower nature. Lower nature! If I am any judge of a man's
physical condition, a lower nature is what you want!" He threw down his
hat and stick upon the green-baize-covered table, took one of the Windsor
chairs, and crashed it down beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big
body on it, and reached out and captured the thin wrist of his victim, who
mustered breath to stammer:
"There is nothing whatever the matter with my health. I am well--that is,
bodily." He got up from the sofa, and crossed to the Zoological hearthrug,
and poked the smoky little fire burning in the narrow grate, for the May
day was wet and chilly. "I shall be better, mentally," he said, with an
effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham, "when you have heard
what I have to tell." He rose up, and turned round, his thin face flaming.
"Mind, I'm not to be gagged by your not wanting to," for Saxham had
impatiently waved his hand. "Hear you shall, and must!"
He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that couched on a
field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove his hands down deep into his
pockets, and the painful scarlet surged over the rim of his Roman collar
and dyed his thin, sensitive, beautiful face and high, white forehead to
the roots of his dark, curling hair.
"Perhaps you may recall an oath I swore at your instigation one day in
your room at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp?"
"Yes--no! What does it matter?" said Saxham thickly, with his angry,
brooding eyes upon the floor.
"It matters," said Julius doggedly, "in the present case. I need hardly
tell you that I have kept that oath. If the man had not been dead, I might
have ended by breaking it--who knows? What I have to tell you is that,
some two months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is
now your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by a
despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen--deservedly
fallen--to your lot, sought out Miss Mildare, and told her--something I
had learned to your detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling,
worthless creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength of a
seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."
Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall now instead of the
floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His right hand, resting on the
table near which he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its
supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to
hear more. And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the parted wooden
mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden:
"I knew that the man lied--on my soul, I knew it! But the opportunity he
had given me of lowering your value in--in another's eyes was too tempting
to resist. The man had told me----"
"In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," said Saxham;
"and, as it happens, he told the truth!" He added: "And what I was then I
am now. There is no change in me, though once I thought it!"
"Saxham!... For God's sake, Saxham!" stuttered Julius. But Saxham,
hunching his great shoulders, and lowering his square, black head, not at
all unlike the savage bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went
on:
"It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham of abstinence
and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and various grades in our
drunkenness, as in our other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises
the common drunkard; and the sippers of ether look down with infinite
contempt--or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the
toper and the slave of morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing
the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxygenated
racehorse run for the Cup! A year or so, and the Transatlantic
oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equipment of the British athlete.
Even to-day the professional footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer,
inhale oxygen as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that
is born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The man who
scales an Alpine summit winds himself up with a whiff or so; the orator,
inspired by oxygen, astonishes the House of Commons or the Bar. And the
actor, delirious with oxygen, rushes on the stage; and the clergyman,
drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit to preach a Temperance sermon. And the
Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying
tipplers; and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: 'Physician,
heal thyself!'"
The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure as he got up. His
fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken caves as he took his hat and stick
from the table.
"What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrong me. Moralists would
say that you acted conscientiously--played the part of a true friend in
telling--_her_--what you knew!"
"Of my benefactor--the man who had saved my life!" Julius moistened his
dry lips. "Your approving moralist would be the devil's advocate. But I
have not forgotten what your own opinion is of the man who tries to
enhance his own virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the vices of a
rival. And, if you will believe me, I was punished for the attempt. Her
look of surprise ... the tone in which she said, 'Did he not save your
life?' that was enough!... Then I--I lost my head, and told her that I
loved her--entreated her to be my wife, only to learn that she never
had--never could----" Julius's thin white fingers knotted themselves
painfully at the back of his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks
between his gritted teeth: "It was revolting to her--a girl reared among
nuns in a Catholic Convent--that a man calling himself a priest should
speak to her of love. There was absolute horror in her look as she learned
the truth." He groaned. "I have never met her eyes since that day without
seeing--or imagining I saw--some reflection of that horror in them!"
"Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations?" said Saxham, not
unkindly.
He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure, when Julius stopped
him.
"One moment. Has--has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to you of--this that I have
told you?"
"Never!" answered Saxham, pausing at the door.
"One moment more! Saxham, is it hopeless? Could you not by a desperate
effort break this habit that may--that must--inevitably bring misery to
your wife? In the name of her love for you--in the names of the children
that may be born of it----"
--"Unless you want me to murder you," advised Saxham, facing the
passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a
breaking wave, "you had better be silent!"
"My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, "is better than you know.
When I endeavoured--unsuccessfully--to injure you, I robbed myself of my
belief in myself. But you--you who gave me back my earthly life, you have
robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal God. Do you know the
effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It is a choking
fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that day at the Hospital at
Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 'The Human Will is even more omnipotent
than the Deity, because it has created Him, out of its own need!' I have
done my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utterance--I
have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrung his hands,
that were wet as though they had been dipped in water. "I have tended
souls as mechanically as a gardener might water pots in which there was
nothing but dead sticks and dry earth!"
"Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung by the suffering in
the thin young face and in the beautiful haggard eyes, "that I never
meant the harm that I appear to have done! Nor can I recall that I have
habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I
remember that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you
particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen
an announcement in the _Siege Gazette_ that ... I dare say you
understand?" He laughed harshly. "As to my theory of the Omnipotence of
Human Will, it is blown and exploded, and all the King's horses and all
the King's men will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from.
I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me! Of how
far Will, in another man, may carry him, I dare not judge or calculate. My
own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows!"
He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a bookcase, and said,
pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes:
"The best of us are bad in spots, Parson: the worst of us are good in
patches. You Churchmen don't recognise that fact sufficiently.... And I
think no worse of you for what you have told me! If I have anything to
forgive--why, it is forgiven! Do you try, on the other hand, to think
leniently of a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothing
of his own to lean upon. As for my wife, in whose interests I know you to
be honestly solicitous, I will tell you this much: She will be spared the
'inevitable misery' of which you spoke just now!"
"How? Have you decided to undergo a cure? I have heard," hesitated Julius,
"that these things are not always successful--that they sometimes fail!"
"Mine is the only cure that never fails," returned Saxham.
A vision of the little blue-glass, yellow-labelled vial that held the
swift dismissing pang, floated before him. He shook hands with Julius, and
went upon his lonely way.