Even the saintly of this earth are prone to rare, occasional displays of
temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her descent from Eve by stamping
her slender foot at her hulking Doctor; had, after a sudden outburst of
passionate, unreasonable upbraiding, risen from the dinner-table and run
out of the room, to hide a petulant, remorseful shower of tears.
Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst--merely an invitation from
Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were settled for the London summer season in
Eaton Square, for Owen and his wife to spend the scorching months of
August and September at the old home, perched on the South Dorset cliffs,
among its thrush-haunted shrubberies of ilex and oleander and
rose--nothing more.
But Mrs. Owen Saxham had passionately resented the idea. Why never
occurred to Saxham. He had long ago forgiven and forgotten Mildred's old
treachery. If David's betrayal had brought him shame and anguish, it had
borne him fruit of joy as well. And if the fruit might never be gathered,
if its divine juices might never solace her husband's bitter thirst, at
least, while he lived, it was his--to look at and long for. He owed that
cruel bliss to his brother and that brother's wife. And their meeting had
been, upon his side, free of constraint, unshadowed by the recollection of
what had once appeared to him a base betrayal--a gross, foul, unpardonable
wrong.
Suppose he had married Mildred, and been uneventfully happy and
successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would never have seen and known
Lynette. She would never have come to him and laid in his the slight hand
whose touch thrilled him to such piercing agony of yearning for the little
more that would have meant so much--so much....
Ah, yes! he was even grateful to Mildred. She had not worn well. She had
grown thin and _passee_, and nervous and hysterical. But she was amiable,
even demonstrative in her professions of admiration and enthusiasm for
Owen's wife. Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the sisterliness
of its expression when he was present, if in his absence it was tempered
by a regretful sigh--even by a reference to the time:
"_When poor dear Owen thought me the only woman worth looking at in the
whole world._ Ah, well! that is all over, long ago!" Mildred would say,
with an inflection that was meant to be tenderly reassuring. And she
would tilt her still pretty head on one side and smile with pensive
kindness at her successor upon the throne of poor dear Owen's heart.
These gentle, retrospective references were never made in the Doctor's
hearing. With truly feminine tact they were reserved for Mrs. Owen's
delectation. And possibly they might have rankled in those pretty
shell-like ears, if their owner had loved Saxham.
But Saxham knew that she did not;--had even ceased to wish that the
miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be very dense. When she stamped
her foot and cried, "I decline to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either
with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to!
If you can forget how hideously she and your brother have treated you, I
cannot! I loathe treachery! I abominate ingratitude and deceit! And I hate
her--and I shall not go!" Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had
never before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He found
his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among the
debris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table. Her fetters were
galling her to agony, he knew! His square pale face grew more
Rhadamanthine than ever, and the glass he had been filling with port
overflowed unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure
before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light silken draperies
passed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette
had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure,
mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite,
where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and
the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked
the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West
End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must
be warned to complete his work without delay.
For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent
in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home
of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a
wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy
shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas
Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest
to his young widow.
Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been
done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but
the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette
should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that
promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year
before.
He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of
winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-passes and lashing
the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds
should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black
ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous
heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur
and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of
snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.
When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham
would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young
broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust
cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the
groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two
hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower,
now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion.
When those blocks of cyclopaean masonry should be tufted with the golden
wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate
blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little
blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask
should come into use.
When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be covered for leagues
by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread by the broom and the furze; when the
innumerable little yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly
bushes, thrusting pertly through the powdery white sand, and every hollow
and hillock should be gay with the star convolvulus and the flaunting
scarlet poppies--then Death should come, borne on winged feet, and bearing
the sword of keenness, to sever the iron bonds of Andromeda chained to the
rock. And here was Summer, knocking at the door!
Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out and ask the reason of
her strange display of emotion. Only a husband could do that who had the
right to take her in his arms and kiss the last remaining traces of her
tears away. Saxham went to his consulting-room, and while all the clocks
of London made time, and the moon veered southward, and the stars rose and
set, he toiled over his notes and case-books in the brilliant circle cast
by the shaded electric lamp upon his writing-table, and the tide in the
big whisky-flask in the table-drawer ebbed low.
Hours hence he laid down his pen. The flask had long been emptied; the
alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey chambers of his brain. Weariness
of life weighed on him like a leaden panoply. He had almost stretched his
hand to take the little blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting in the
deep table-drawer aside the drained flask before sleep overcame him. His
head sank against the chair-back. His was a sudden, heavy lapsing into
forgetfulness, unmarred by dreams.
Time sped. The silver table-clock, the clock upon the mantelshelf, and the
grandfather clock in the corner, ran a race with the chronometer in the
pocket of the sleeping man. The brilliant unwavering circle of electric
light did not reach the face of the Dop Doctor. It bathed his hands, that
hung lax over the arms of the Sheraton chair, and tipped his lifted chin,
leaving the strong brow and closed eyes in shadow. But as the pale glimmer
of dawn began to outline the edges of the blinds and stretched at length a
broad, pointing finger across the quiet room, the sleeping face showed
greyish pale and luminous as a drawing by Whistler in silver-point.
The dawn had not rested on it long before there came a knock upon the
panel of the consulting-room door. It was so faint and diffident a knock,
no wonder it passed unheeded. Then the door opened timidly, and a slender
figure in pale flowing draperies of creamy embroidered cashmere stole upon
small, noiseless, slippered feet over the thick Turkey carpet.
It was Lynette. She had risen from her bed, and looked out from the
landing into the hall below, and, seeing the light of the unextinguished
lamp shining under the lintel of the consulting-room door, had stolen
timidly down to ask Owen's pardon. Why had she behaved so badly? She could
not explain. Only she was sorry. She must tell him so. His name was upon
her lips, when she saw the Dop Doctor sleeping in his chair.
Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side. And then--it was to
her as though she looked upon her husband's face for the first time.
There was no stain of his secret excess upon it--no bloating of the
features. You would have said this was a sane and strong and temperate
man, upon whom the mighty brother of all-conquering Death had come, like
one armed, and overthrown in the heat and stress of the life-battle. Only
the sorrow of a suffering soul was written as deeply on that pale mask of
human flesh as though the sculptor-slaves of a Pharao, dead seven thousand
years agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, resistless temper in the
diamond-hard Egyptian granite.
He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle twitched as Lynette bent
over and looked at him. A mass of her red-brown hair, heavy with the
weight of its own glossy luxuriance, slipped from her half-bared bosom as
she leaned over him, and fell upon his breast. A sudden blush burned over
her as it fell. He never stirred. But as though the rod of Moses had
touched the rock in Horeb, one slow tear oozed from between Saxham's black
fringed, close-sealed eyelids, and hung there, a burnished, trembling
point of steely light. And the deep, still, manly anguish of his face
cried out to the reawakening womanhood in Lynette, and a strange, new,
overwhelming emotion seized and shook her as a stream of white and liquid
fire seemed to pass into her veins and mingle with her blood.
She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart and bated
breath, upon the living page before her eyes.
In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, that face of Saxham's
pleaded with her. In its stern acceptance of suffering and disappointment
for Saxham, in its rugged confrontation of the inevitable; in its resolute
long-suffering and grim patience; in its silent abnegation of any claim
upon her gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness, the face was
more than eloquent to-night. In the pride that would never stoop to beg
for pity--would rather die hungered than accept one crumb of grudged and
measured love; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to that
promise given to a dead man; in the nobility of its refusal to shine
brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that
other man's mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony
of love for her, insensible and careless; in the sick despair that had
given up and left off hoping: even in the pride that had--or so it seemed
to her--asserted itself at the last, and said, "I have left off crying for
the moon; I wish for your love no longer!"--it pleaded--pleaded.... Words
struggled for answering utterance in her, but none came.... She leaned
nearer, drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips lightly
upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of black meeting eyebrow
smudged across it, and then, with a sudden leap and thrill, she knew....
All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only this man mattered who
sat sleeping in the chair. How easy to awaken him with a touch, and tell
him all! She dared not, though she longed to.
He was her master as well as her mate. When he had said to her that he had
ceased to care, his eyes had given his words the lie. He had looked at
her.... She shivered deliciously at the recollection of that look. If he
were to open those stern, ardent eyes now, he would know her his. His--all
his, to deal with as he chose!... His alone!
If Saxham had awakened then.... But he slept on. She did not dare to kiss
that broad white buckler of his forehead again. She kissed the sleeve of
his coat instead, and, scared by a sudden sigh and movement of one of the
hands that hung over the chair-arms, gathered her draperies around her,
and stole as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam, out of the room.