The Dop Doctor Part 64

A rush of savage blood darkened his face; his hand quivered near the b.u.t.t of his revolver, and his eyes blazed murder. But with a frightful effort he controlled himself, lifted his hat slightly to Lynette, turned and leaped back to the stone he had quitted, strode through the reed-beds, and plunged back into the tangled boscage. That he did not continue his walk, but turned back towards the town, was plain, for his retreat could be traced by the shaking of the thick bush and the high gra.s.ses through which he forced his way. It did him good to battle even with these vegetable forces, and the hooked thorns that tore his clothes and rent his flesh left nothing like the traces that those few words of dismissal, spoken by a girl's voice, and the hateful taunt that had followed, had left upon his heart.

It was over. Over--over, the brief, sweet season of hope. Nothing was left now but his loyalty to the friend who believed in him. If that man had not stood between Saxham and his despair, Gueldersdorp would have got back her Dop Doctor that night. For the Hospital stores included a cherished case or two of Martell and Kinahan, and all these things were under Saxham's hand.

The heavy footsteps crashed out of hearing. The startled finches settled down again, except at that point, higher up on the opposite bank, to which Beauvayse's attention had first been directed. There the little birds yet hovered like a cloud of b.u.t.terflies, but, practised scout as Beauvayse was, he paid no heed to their distress. She had declared for him. The Doctor's discomfiture enhanced his triumph. Gad! how like an angry buffalo the fellow was! The sort of beast who would put down his head and charge at a stone wall as confidently as at a mud one. It was a confounded nuisance that he had seen what he had seen. But a man who had eventually cut so poor a figure, had been snubbed so thoroughly and completely, might prefer to hold his tongue. And if he did not, here in Gueldersdorp, while no letters got through, while no news filtered in from the big humming world outside, it would be possible to carry things bravely off for a long time. He had told Bingo, to be sure, about--about Lessie. But Bingo, though he might bl.u.s.ter and barge about dishonourable conduct, would never give away a man who had trusted him. To be sure, it was not quite fair, not altogether square; it was not playing the game as it should be played, to gain her promise as a free man. Should he make a clean breast of it, and tell her the whole wretched story now?

Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender green-and-white, nymph-like figure, against the background of sun-hot, shadow-flecked, lichened stone, looking at him. The rosy light bathed her in its radiance.

And as she looked, it seemed to him that something was dawning in that face of hers. He watched it, breathless with the realisation of his dreams, his hopes, his desires. The prize was his. Every other baser memory was drowning within him. It seemed to him that her purity, as he bathed in it, washed him clean of stain. He forgot everything but the secret that those sweet eyes told at last.

"My beloved! I'm not good enough to tie your blessed little shoes, and yet no other man shall ever have you, hold you, call you his own....

Lynette, Lynette! Dear one, isn't there a single kiss? And I might get shot to-morrow."

It was characteristic of him that his brave, gay mouth should laugh even in the utterance of the appeal that melted her. She gave a little sob, and raised her sweet face to his, flushing loveliest rosy red. She lifted her slender arms and laid them about his strong young throat, and kissed him very quietly and purely. He had meant to s.n.a.t.c.h her to his leaping heart and cover her with eager, pa.s.sionate caresses. But the strong impulse was quelled. He said, almost with a sob:

"Is this your promise? Does this mean that you belong to me?"

Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered:

"Yes."

He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to know himself her chosen. Ah! why was he not free? Why had Chance and Luck and Fate forced him to play a part like this?

"I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago!" he broke out impulsively.

"Half-a-dozen years ago--only you'd have been a mere kid--too young to understand what Love means.... Why, Lynette darling! what is the matter?

What have I said that hurt?"

Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank away from him. He drew back, shocked into silence by the sudden, dreadful change in her. Her eyes, curiously dulled and faded, looked at Beauvayse as though they saw not him, but another man, through him and behind him. Her face was peaked and pinched; her supple, youthful figure contracted and bent like that of a woman withered by some wasting sickness, her dainty garments seemed to lose their colouring and their freshness, and hang on her, by some strange illusion wrought by the working of her mind upon his, like sordid rags.

Against the splendid riot of life and colour over and under and about her, she looked like some slender sapling ringed and blighted, and ruined by the inexorable worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She was recalling what had been--realising what must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in alarm:

"Lynette dearest! what is the matter? Why do you look at me like that?

Lynette!"

She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind, and stared through him and beyond him into the Past. That was all. There was a rustling of leaves and branches higher on the bank, and the sound of thick woollen draperies trailing through gra.s.s. The bush on the edge of the cleared s.p.a.ce that was about the great boulder was parted by a white, strong hand and a black-sleeved arm, and the Mother-Superior moved out into the open, and came down with those long, swift steps of hers to where they were. Her eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, fastened on the drooping, stricken figure of the girl, read the altered face, and then she turned them on the boy, and they were stern as those of some avenging Angel, and her white wimple, laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands of Sister Tobias, framed a face as white.

"What is the reason of--this? What has pa.s.sed between you to account for it? Has your mother's son no sense of honour, sir?"

The icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He drew himself to his splendid height, and answered, his brave young eyes boldly meeting the stern eyes that questioned him:

"Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable of dishonourable conduct. The fact is, that I have just asked Miss Mildare to be my wife.

And she consents."

A spasm pa.s.sed over the pale face. So easily they leave us whom we have reared and tended, when the strange hand beckons and the new voice calls.

But the Mother-Superior was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew her black nun's robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said calmly, holding out her hand to him:

"You will forgive me if I was unjust, knowing that she is dear to me. And now I shall ask you to leave us. Please tell the Sisters"--from habit she glanced at her worn gold watch--"we shall join them in ten minutes' time."

He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the gra.s.s, and took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her pa.s.sive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand imperiously motioned him away. He expostulated:

"Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, without protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging about."

"If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. But go now."

He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the reed-beds on the foresh.o.r.e. She watched the tall, athletic figure until it swung round a bend and was lost to sight.

Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the touch Lynette dropped as though she had been shot, and lay among the trodden gra.s.ses and the flaunting cowslips face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from the m.u.f.fled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed like a crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that could be seen and the little ears that her clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and sometimes covered were one burning, shameful red.

"Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn with a very agony of tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and began with gentle strength to untwine those clutching hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in one of hers, and pa.s.sed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silently until a moan, more articulate than the rest, voiced:

"Mother!"

"It is Mother. She holds you; she will not let you go."

The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the rigor lessen. The moaning ceased, and the tortured heart began to leap and strain against her own, as though some invisible hand lashed it with an unseen thong.

There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping of the heart that shook her whole body. And it seemed to the Mother that her own heart wept tears of blood. The hour had come at last, as always she had known it would. The love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette. She knew now the full value of the lost heritage, and realised the glory of the jewel that had been s.n.a.t.c.hed by the brutal hand of a thief. Ah, Lord! the pity of it!

The pity of it! She, the stainless one, could have stripped off her own white robe of virgin purity, had it been possible, to clothe the despoiled young shoulders of Richard's daughter, cowering prostrate under her burden of guiltless shame, crushed by the terrible knowledge that ruined innocence must always pay the penalty, whether the destroyer is punished or goes free.

The penalty! Suppose at the price of a lie from lips that had never lied yet it could be evaded? The Mother's face contracted with a spasm of mental pain. A dull flush mounted to her temples, and died out in olive paleness; her lips folded closely, and her black brows frowned over the sombre grey fires burning in their hollow caves. She rebuked a sinner at that moment, and the culprit was herself.

She, the just mistress and wise ruler of so many Sisters in the religious profession; she, so slow to judge and condemn others, was unsparing in austerity towards herself. She had always recognised her greatest weakness in her love for this adopted daughter that might have been her own if Richard Mildare had not played traitor. She had never once yielded to the clinging of those slight hands about her heart, but she had exacted forfeit from herself, and rigorously. So much for excess of partiality, so much for over-consideration, so much for lack of faith in over-anxiety, so much more of late for the keen mother-jealousy that had quickened in her to anguish at the thought that another would one day usurp her undivided throne, and claim and take the lion's share of the love that had been all hers. Her spiritual director was far too lenient, in her opinion. She was all the more exacting towards herself. What right had a nun to be so bound by an earthly tie? It was defrauding her Saviour and her Spouse to love with such excess of maternal pa.s.sion the child He had given. Yet she loved on.

She reviewed all her shortcomings, even while the girl's head lay helplessly against her, and the scalding tears that had at last begun to gush from those shut, quivering eyelids wetted her breast. She had esteemed and valued perfect candour above all things. And yet of what concealments had she not been guilty in the shielding of this dearest head?

She had deceived, for Richard's child, Richard's friend, in the deft interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole plausible fabric. She knew that, if necessary, she would deceive again, trailing her wings, fluttering on before, as the golden plover lures the footsteps of the stranger from her nest.

Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the mental const.i.tution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to her Master and her Lord.

And she had always known, it seemed to her, that this terrible hour would come. When the two young figures had moved away together into the green gloom of the trees, she had felt a premonitory chill that streamed over her whole body like icy water, paralysing and numbing her strength. She had read their secret in their faces, unconscious of her scrutiny, and watched them out of sight, praying, as only such a mother can, that it might not be as she feared. This was her beloved's great hour; she would not have stretched out a finger to delay its coming,--she who had known Love, and could not forget! It might be that in this splendid boy, who was as beautiful as the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard, lay the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white would not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe and veil. And yet--and yet, in Lynette's place she knew that she could never have looked into the face of a rosy, smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past.

Was it wise that another should be made to share that vision? She put that question to herself, looking with great agonised, unseeing eyes over the head that lay upon her bosom, out across the slowly moving water, stained with amber from ironstone beds through which it had wound its way, tinged with ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the sky, from the western horizon to the zenith, and from thence to the serried peaks and frowning bastions of purple-black cloud that lowered in the north, was all orange-crimson now, and the moon, then at the ending of her second quarter, swung like a pale lamp of electrum at the eastward corner of the flaming tent.

"Was it wise?" She seemed to hear her own voice echoing back out of the past. And it said:

"The only just claim to your entire confidence in all that concerns your past life will rest in the hands of the man who may one day be your husband."

The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to her in gusts of intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness. She glanced round and saw it on her right, clasping in its luxuriant embrace a slender young bush that it was killing. The thick, juicy green stems and succulent green leaves, the greedily embracing tendrils and great fleshy-white, hanging flowers revolted her. The creeper seemed the symbolisation of l.u.s.t battening upon Innocence.

Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her. From a mossy cranny in a stone a hairy tarantula leaped upon a little lizard that sunned itself, not thinking Death so near. A lightning-quick pounce of the bloated thing with the fierce, bright eyes and the relentless, greedy claws, and the little reptile vanished. She shuddered, thinking of its fate.

The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and the bushes that grew about were ragged and torn with sh.e.l.l and shrapnel-ball. Chips and flinders had been knocked by the same forces from the boulders and the rocks. Amongst the flowers near her shone something bright. It was an unexploded Maxim-sh.e.l.l, a pretty little messenger of Death, girt with bright copper bands and gaily painted. And a ninety-four-pound projectile, exploded, had scattered the sh.o.r.e with its fragments, and doubtless the river-bed was strewn thick with others. You had only to look to see them.

Once Lynette's lover knew everything there was to know, the trees and rocks and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns the right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would be marred and broken, scorched and spoiled, like these.

Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former scruples. They sailed from her on the faint hot breeze lightly as thistledown. And now the tear-blurred face was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoa.r.s.e and weak and trembling, appealed:

"Mother, you are not angry? I never meant to be underhand, or to hide--anything from you."

"No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realise how much had been concealed between the lines that she had read so often. "You did not mean to." The trembling voice went on:

"He never spoke to me as though we were strangers. Never, from the first.