The Dop Doctor Part 88

"Tell me," he said at length, "do I inspire you with antipathy? Am I physically repulsive to you, or disagreeable? Answer me frankly, for in that case I would--cease to urge my suit with you, and go upon my way, wherever it might lead me."

She looked at him, and there was no shrinking in her regard--only a gentle friendliness, as far removed from the feeling he would have roused in her as the North is from the South.

"I will tell you exactly how I feel towards you." He writhed under the knowledge that it was possible to her to a.n.a.lyse and to explain. "I like you, Dr. Saxham. I am deeply grateful to you----"

"Grat.i.tude!" He shrugged his shoulders. "You owe me none; and even if you did, what use is grat.i.tude to a man who asks for love?"

"I trust you; I rely upon you," she said. "It is--pleasant to me to know that you are near." A line of perplexity came between the dark fine eyebrows; the sweet colour in her face wavered and sank. "But--if you were to touch me--to take me in your arms--I----" She s.h.i.+vered.

"You need not say more!" If she was pale, Saxham's stern, square face was ashen. His eyes glowered and fell under hers, and a purple vein swelled in the middle of his broad white forehead. "I understand!"

"You do not understand quite yet." She moved away from the Mother's grave, saying to him with a slight beckoning gesture of the hand, "Please come!..."

Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of that other Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His covetous, despairing eyes dwelt on her and clung about her. Ah! the exquisite poise of the little head, with its red-brown waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of shape, like a young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with which she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous, delicate care among the little crowding white-painted crosses; the atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that breathed from her and environed her!...

His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at his ear.

"You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation.

Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break your promise to that dead man, and tell her--as he would have had you tell her, remember!--as he would have had you tell her!--that when he asked her hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of the dancer, Lessie Lavigne!"

He knew where she was leading him--to Beauvayse's grave. The voice kept whispering, urging as they went. He saw and heard as a man sees and hears in a dream the pair of b.u.t.terflies that hovered yet about the fresh flowers her hands had gathered and placed there. One jewel-winged, diamond-eyed insect rose languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light footsteps drew near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed, waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quivering antennae, sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead man had drunk of the joy of life.

Now she was speaking:

"Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have something to tell you that _he_"--her face quivered--"should have been told. When you spoke a little while ago of openness and candour--when you said that you would never mislead or deceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the worst of you together with the best--you held up before me, quite unknowingly, an example that showed me--that proved to me"--her voice wavered and broke--"how much I am your inferior in honesty and truth!"

"_You_ my inferior!" Saxham almost laughed. "_I_ an example of light and leading, elevated for your guidance! If you were capable of irony----"

He broke off, for she went on as though he had not spoken:

"When first we met--I mean yourself and me--I remember telling you, upon a sudden impulse of confidence and trust in you, what I had determined my life-work was to be----"

"Dear, innocent-wise enthusiast," thought Saxham, "dreaming over your impossible plan for regenerating the world! Beloved child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Madness--madness on the face of it!" But, madness or sanity, he could not choose but love her.

"Your life-work!... It was to be carried out among _those others_ whose voices you heard calling you. See," he said, with the shadow of a smile, "how I remember everything you say, or have ever said, in my hearing!"

"You think too well of me," she broke out, with sudden energy.

"It is not possible to think too well of you!"

"You think so now, perhaps, but when you know----"

Her eyes brimmed and the tears welled over her white under-lids. She put up both her little hands, and rubbed the salt drops away with her knuckles, like a child.

"When I have told you, you will alter--you cannot help but alter your opinion!"

"No!" denied Saxham; and the monosyllable seemed to drop from his grim lips like a stone. Her bosom heaved with short, quick sobs.

"I meant to go out into the world, and meet those women who think and work for women, and hear all they have to say, and learn all they have to teach. Then----"

She was Beatrice again, as she turned her face full on Saxham, and once more the virginal veil fell, and he was conscious of strange abysses of knowledge opening in those eyes.

"--Then I meant to seek out those women and girls and children of whom I spoke to you, those who lie fettered with chains that wicked men have riveted, in the dark dungeons that their tyrants and torturers have quarried out of the living rock, out of the reach of fresh air and suns.h.i.+ne, beyond the reach of those who would pity and help ... I meant to go down to them, and comfort them, and raise them up. I meant to have said: 'Trust me, believe me, listen to me, follow me! For my sorrow is your sorrow, and my wrong your wrong, and my shame yours--O! my poor, poor unhappy sisters!...'"

There was a great drumming and surging of the blood in Saxham's ears. His heart beat in heavy laboured, measured strokes, like the tolling of a death-bell. He saw her cover her face with her hands, and drop upon her knees amongst the gra.s.ses that greenly clothed the red soil. He saw the b.u.t.terfly, startled from its feast, rise and waver away. And he saw, too, his veiled nymph, his virginal white G.o.ddess, his chaste, veiled maiden Artemis, toppled from her pedestal and lying in the gutter.

Her sorrow the sorrow of those spotted ones! her wrong theirs, and theirs her shame!... So this was the sordid secret that haunted the depths of those eyes--the eyes of Beatrice! He turned his head away, so as not to look upon her, and his face grew dark with the rush of blood. But still he heard her speaking, as a man hears in a dream.

"At school all the older girls thought and talked of nothing but Love, and most of the younger ones did the same.... And I, who knew the dreadful, cruel, hideous side of the thing that each of them set up and wors.h.i.+pped--I who shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice, and a man's face came near--I said in my heart that Love should never find a dupe and a slave and a tool in me. I meant to live for the Mother, and be to those poor sisters of mine what she was--oh, my darling! my darling!--to me! And all the while Love was coming nearer and nearer, and at last----"

She swept the tears from her face with the palms of her slight open hands, and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and went on brokenly, with sobs between the gasped-out sentences:

"--At last it came. I never tried to struggle against it; it wrapped me in a net of exquisite sweet softness, that held me like a cage of steel. I gave myself up to the blissfulness and the joy of it. I was unfaithful to those others--I forgot them for Beauvayse! Oh, why should Love make it so easy to do unlovely things? to be unworthy, to break promises, and to be false to vows? You are in earnest when you make them ... you are proud to be so sure that nothing shall change or turn you.... Then eyes that are like strange jewels look deep into yours. A voice that is like no other voice whispers at your ear. It says strange, sweet, secret things--things that come back and burn you--and his breath upon your cheek drowns out your scruples in wave upon wave of magical, thrilling, wonderful sensation!..." She shuddered. "And everything else is blotted out, and no one else matters! You are not even sorry that you have left off caring....

Love has made you indifferent as well as unkind!"

She looked up at Saxham from where she crouched down at his feet among the gra.s.ses, and her distress melted some of the ice that was closing round his heart.

"Love cannot be good. It brings no peace, no happiness--nothing but restless misery and burning pain. It makes you even willing to deceive _him_." Her lids fluttered and she caught her breath. "When another to whom I was dear, and who knew, said, 'Never tell him! I command you never to tell him!' I pretended to myself that the words had not been spoken out of pity, because my darling loved me too well to see me suffer; and I told myself that it was right to obey."

Saxham, following the yearning look that went back to that other's grave, heard the unforgettable voice uttering the command.

"_He_ never dreamed of my miserable secret. He was so free, so frank, so open himself. He had nothing to hide--he was incapable of deceit! It never occurred to him--oh, Beau! Beau!"

Saxham's face was set like a mask carved in granite, but that other Saxham, within the man she saw through her tears, was wrung and twisted and wrenched in spasms and gusts of insane, uncontrollable, helpless laughter.

"_Nothing to hide--incapable of deceit!_" It seemed to him that the dead man, all that way down under the red earth and the gra.s.s and the flowers, must be laughing, too, at the Dop Doctor who was fool enough not to speak out and end the farce for ever.

Should he? Why not? But for what reason now, and to what end, since his virginal-pure, dew-pearled, Convent lily lay trodden in the mire? And yet, to look in those eyes....

They did not falter or droop under his again, as she told him in few and simple words the story of what had happened in the tavern on the veld.

"Now you know all!" she said; "now you understand!... Sister Tobias knows, too, and there is one other.... I do not speak of ..."--she shuddered and grew pale--"but of a man whom all of us here have learned to look up to, and believe in, and trust. No confidence has ever pa.s.sed between us. I cannot give you any reason for this belief of mine in his knowledge of my story. I only feel that it is no secret to the Colonel, whenever he looks at me with those wise, kind, pitying eyes."

There was a look in Saxham's eyes that was not pity. The sunbeam that shone through the loose plait of her coa.r.s.e straw hat, and gilded the edges of the red-brown hair-waves, aureoled again for him the head of Beatrice.

"I have no faith left, but I am capable of reverence," he had said to her.

Now, as he knelt down in the gra.s.s before the little brown shoes, and lifted the hem of her linen gown and kissed it, the hulking-shouldered Doctor proved his possession of the quality. Devouring desire, riotous pa.s.sion, were, if not killed in him, at least quelled and overthrown and bound. Pure pity and tenderness awakened in him. And Chivalry, all _cap-a-pie_ in silver mail, rose up to do battle for her against the world and against that other Saxham.

"I accept the trust you are willing should be mine. Take my name--take all I have to give! I make no reservations. I stipulate no conditions. I ask for nothing in return, except the right to be your brother and guardian and defender. Trust me! The life-work you have chosen shall be yours; as far as lies in my power, I will help you in it. Your pure ends and n.o.ble aims shall never be thwarted or hindered. And have no fear of me, my sweet saint, my little sister. For I may die," said Saxham once again, "but, living, I will never fail you!"

LVII

Saxham, of St. Stephen's, had long ago faded from the recollection of London Society, but Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., Late Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, and frequently mentioned in Despatches from that bit of debatable soil, while it was in process of debating, was distinctly a person to cultivate. Not that it was in the least easy--the man was almost quite a bear, but his brevity of speech and brusqueness of manner gave him a cachet that Society found distinguished. He was married, too--so romantic! married to a girl who was shut up with him in Gueldersdorp all through the Siege. Quite too astonis.h.i.+ngly lovely, don't you know? and with manners that really suggested the Faubourg St. Germain. Where she got her style--brought up among Boers and blacks--was to be wondered at, but these problems made people all the more interesting. And one met her with her husband at all the best houses since the Castleclares had taken them up. Indeed, Mrs. Saxham was a relative--was it a cousin? No--now it all came back! Adopted daughter, that was it, of an aunt--no, a step-sister of Lord Castleclare, that ineffable little prig of twenty-two, who as a Peer and Privy Councillor of Ireland, and a Lord-in-Waiting to boot, was nevertheless a personage to be deferred to.