The Dop Doctor Part 62

"Collectors will pay fancy prices for copies of that same little siege newspaper, at auctions yet to be."

"I've thought of that," she confessed. "But, oh! I could make it so much more spicy if you'd only give me a freer hand."

His hazel eyes had a smile in them. "I know you think me an editorial martinet."

"You blue-pencil out of my poor paragraphs everything that's interesting."

"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."

"The Reading Public adore personalities and puerilities."

"They can go to the _Daily Whale_ for them, then."

"Isn't that rather a personal remark?"

"Let me say that if you are occasionally personal, you are never, under any circ.u.mstances, anything but clever."

"Thank you. But, oh! the difference between what I am and what I aspired to be!"

"And, ah! the difference between what I have done and what I meant to do!"

he said.

Her black eyes flashed. "You have never really felt it. Achievement with you has never hit below the mark. You, of all men living, are least fitted to enter into the rueful regrets and dismal disillusions of a Hannah Wrynche."

"Hannah Wrynche, who is content to do a woman's work and fill a woman's place; Hannah Wrynche, who has atoned for a moment of ambitious--shall I say imprudence?--splendidly and n.o.bly, has no reason to be rueful or regretful. Don't shake your head. Do you think I don't know what you are doing, day after day, to help and cheer those poor fellows at the Convalescent Hospital?"

Her eyes were full of tears. "You make too much of my poor efforts. You underestimate the effect of praise from you."

"I said very little in the last cipher despatch that got through to Colonel Rickson at Malamye, but what I did say was very much to the purpose, believe me."

She gasped, staring at him with circular eyes of incredulity. "You've mentioned--me--in your despatches. ME?"

"Just so!" he said, and left her groping for the ridiculous little gossamer handkerchief to dry the tears of pride and grat.i.tude that were tumbling down her cheeks.

XLI

"Clang--clang--clang!"

A man and a girl came back out of Paradise when the Catholic church-bell rang the Angelus. The girl's sweet flushed face had paled at the first three strokes. When the second triple clanged out, her colour came back.

She rose from her seat upon a lichened slab of granite in the cool shadow of the great boulder, and bent her lovely head, Beauvayse watching her lips as they moved, soundlessly repeating the Angelic Salutation:

"_Ave Maria, gratia plena; Dominus tec.u.m! Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus._"

The wonderful simplicity of the Chosen One's reply followed, and the announcement of the Unspeakable Mystery. The little prayer followed, and the rapid signing with the Cross, and she dropped her slight hand from her bosom, and turned her eyes back upon his.

"You remind me of my mother," he told her. "She is Catholic, you know."

"And not you?"

"We fellows, my brothers Levestre and Daltham and myself, were brought up as pillars of the Established Church." His sleepy, grey-green eyes twinkled, his white teeth showed in the laugh. "The girls are of my mother's faith. It was a family agreement. Are you quite sure you have come down to earth again? Because there's such an awful lot I want to say to you that I don't know where to begin."

Though his mouth laughed, his eyes had wistful shadows under them. He had tossed aside his Service felt when she had taken off her hat, and the sunshine, piercing the thick foliage overhead, dappled the scaly trunks of the blue-gum trees, and dripped gold upon the red-brown head and the crisp-waved golden one.

"I am here. I am listening."

She stood before him with meekly drooping eyelids, feeling his ardent gaze like a palpable weight, under which her knees trembled and her whole body swayed. The great boulder rose upon her left hand like a beneficent presence. Delicate ferns and ice-plants sprang from its c.h.i.n.ks and crannies. The long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her small, brown-shod feet, some bearing seed-pods, others rows of pink bells, or yellow--a fairy chime. In the damper hollows iris bloomed, and the gold and scarlet sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, and gaily-plumaged finches were sidling on overhanging boughs, or dipping and drinking in the shallows.

The wattled starlings whistled to each other, or fought as starlings will.

A grey partridge was bathing in the hot dry sand between the reed-beds and the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel were rising at the flies.

There was no sound but the running water. The spicy smell of aromatic leaves and the honeyed perfume of a great climbing trumpet-flower made the air languorous with sweetness.

He answered her now.

"You are here, and I am here. And for me that means everything. And I feel that I want nothing more, and, still, such a tremendous lot besides."

He breathed as though he had been running, and his sharply-cut nostrils quivered. His white teeth gleamed under the clipped golden moustache.

Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresistible that in these days of storm, and stress, and hardship and peril, his handsome face was never without its gay, confident smile. His tall, athletic figure, in the neat workmanlike Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards her eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the direct simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her a delicious terror.

The perfume of youth and health, of vigour and virility, that exhaled from him, came to her mingled with the scent of the crushed spice-leaves and the perfume of the waxen-belled heaths and the breath of the giant trumpet-flower. She was turning dizzy. She could scarcely stand.

"I--I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the gra.s.ses at the foot of the great granite slab and prodded in c.h.i.n.ks and crannies for snakes and tarantulas; and when she sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw himself at her feet with a careless, powerful grace, and lay there looking up at her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through the thick dark eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under them, and her little pointed chin.

The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat peeped under the hem of her green cloth skirt; below there was a glimpse of slender, crossed ankles in brown silk hose, and the little brown shoes laced with wide silk ties. She drew off one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed back a straying lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing him murmur in his caressing voice:

"Take off the other glove, too."

She was well aware how beautiful her hands were--small, and slender, and ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled, with little babyish nicks at the wrists, and at the inner edges of the rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails, of the true almond shape. She thought little of her face, though she knew it to be charming; but she ingenuously admired her slender feet, that were quite as pretty without the silk stockings and little brown shoes, and the delicate hands she bared for him now. He looked at them with ardent longing, and said:

"How dear of you to do that, because I asked you! And do you realise that we're here together alone, you and me, for the first time? n.o.body saw us steal away but Sister Cleophee, and I've a notion she wouldn't tell, blessed old soul!"

Her eyes smiled.

"You would not call the Mother that?"

"No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of Wales. And a snubbing from the Religious would be rather worse, on the whole, than a snubbing from the Royalty."

"The Princess never snubbed you?"

"Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to hear about it? She had sent away her brougham while the giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing her round St. Paul's. And--acting as Extra Equerry--I'd got instructions to call her a hack conveyance, and--being young and downy, I'd picked H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been bred and born here. You don't even know what a growler is. And in five years' time there won't be one left in London."

"Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. And a growler is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so ignorant...."

"You sweetest!" he burst out pa.s.sionately. "I wish I knew all that you could teach me!"

He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his arms to clasp her then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying at full length in the gra.s.s, leaning upon his elbow, he rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her, delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and the monotonous buzzing of the black honey-bees mingled with the drumming of the crickets, and the flowing of the river, and the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her blood. She leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said in a voice that shook a little: