The Dop Doctor Part 84

"Don't let the poor girl hear you!" said the sympathetic bystander. But Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing anything but the damaged head upon the canvas pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly, dropping on her knees beside it:

"O my own, own, try an' know me! Come back for long enough to s'y one word! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll pray to You all my days. O pore, pore darlin' 'ead that wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil----"

It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under the limp and shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that called W. Keyse to come back from the very threshold of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true love.

It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's stiffened eyelids quivered and came down halfway, and the martial spirit of its owner flickered up long enough for W. Keyse to sputter out:

"Cripps, it's 'Er! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven--on somebody else's pa.s.s?"

"Born to be hung, I should say," commented the R.A.M.C. man aside to his mate. "Chuck some water over the young woman, one of you," he added, as the stretcher was lifted. "And tell her, when she comes to, that we've taken her sweetheart to Hospital instead of to the other place."

"Rum critters, women," commented another bystander, not untender in his manner of sprinkling the dubious liquid known in Gueldersdorp as water out of a cracked tin dipper over the face of the young woman who sat upon the ground in the centre of a circular palisade of interested human legs.

"Look at this one, for instance. Lively as a vink as long as she believes her chap a corpse, and does a solid flop as soon as she finds out he has a kick in him. Help her up, you on the other side. Do you think you could walk now, miss, if you tried to?"

She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook under her. Her clasped hands shook, too, as she held them out, beseeching those about her to be pitiful, and tell her where "they" had taken him. Then, when she was told, and because she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the way to the Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him.

Saxham st.i.tched up the split scalp of W. Keyse, and grimly congratulated him upon the thickness of the skull beneath it. The bullet had, as has already been indicated, gone in under the left nostril, and emerged below the inner corner of the right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound notoriety as well as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight permanent cast....

"You shall git well, deer," Emigration Jane would tell her patient twenty times a day. "You carn't 'elp it, becos I means to myke you."

"A' right," her hero would snuffle. One day he added, with a weakly swoop of one lean arm in the direction of her waist: "Mend me an' marry me.

That's wot I call a Fair Division o' Labour. Twig?"

She crimsoned, gasping:

"You don't never mean it?"

"Stryte I mean it," declared W. Keyse. "Wot d'you tyke me for?"

His bed was in a corner, and a screen baffled prying eyes. She hung over him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful, faltering:

"S'y it agyne, darlin'! Upon yer solemn natural----"

He said it with the lean arm round her.

"An' it's me--me wot you wants--an' not that Other One?----"

He swore it.

"You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy Cripps!"

"An' you've forgiven me--abart them letters?" Her face was coming close....

"Every time I blooming well kissed 'em, arter I bin an' picked 'em up," he declared.

"You did--that?" she quavered, marvelling at the greatness of his nature.

"Look in me jacket pocket if you think I'm spinnin' you fairy ones." His close arm slackened a little. "Now there's somethin' I got to up an' tell, if you never tips me the 'Ow Do no more."

"Wot is it, deer?" Her heart beat painfully. Was this something the reason why he had not yet kissed her?

"It's got to do with the Dutchy wot landed me this slip over the c.o.kernut"--he indicated some plaster strappings that decorated the seat of intelligence--"with a revolver-b.u.t.t, when they rushed the Fort. After 'e'd plugged at me wiv' 'is last cartridge an' missed." The Adam's apple in his thin throat worked up above the collar of the grey flannel Hospital jacket. "I--I outed 'im!" said W. Keyse.

"O' course you did, deer." Her heart thrilled with pride in her hero. "An'

serve 'im glad--the narsty, blood-thirsty, murderin'----"

He interrupted:

"'Old 'ard! Wait till you knows 'oo it was." He gulped, and the Adam's apple jerked in the old way. "That 'ulkin' big Dopper you was walkin' out along of, when I----"

"Walt! It was--Walt?"

She shuddered and grew pale.

"That's the bloke I means. I 'ad to 'ave 'im," explained W. Keyse, "or 'e'd 'ave 'ad me. So I sent 'im in. With my one, two, an' the Haymaker's Lift. Right in the middle of 'is dirty weskit. F'ff!" He blew a sigh. "Now it's out, an' I suppose you 'ates me?"

She panted.

"It's 'orrible, deer, but--but--you 'ad to. An'--an'--if I 'ave to s'y it, I'd a bloomin' sight rather it was 'Im than You!"

"I'll 'ave my kiss now," said the lordly W. Keyse. And took it from her willing lips.

LV

There was no perceptible change in Lynette, either at the time of young Eybel's frustrated coup, or for long after. She was to live as much as possible in the open air, Saxham had insisted, and so you would find the girl, with a Sister in charge of her, sitting in the Cemetery, where the crop of little white crosses thickened every day. The little blue and white irises had bloomed upon those two graves where her adopted mother and her brave young lover lay, before the dawning of that day the nuns prayed and Saxham hoped for.

It was his bitter-sweet joy to be with her constantly, striving with all his splendid powers of brain and body to brace the shattered nerves, and restore the exhausted strength, and lead the darkened mind back gently and by degrees towards the light.

She did not shrink from him now, but would answer his questions submissively, and give him her hand mechanically at meeting and parting.

Saxham had not the magnetic influence over shy and backward children that another man possessed. She would smile and brighten when she saw the Colonel coming, upright and alert as ever, though bearing heavy traces now in the haggard lines and deep hollows of his face, to the greying hairs above his temples and to the close-clipped brown moustache, as in the Quixote-like gauntness of the figure that had never carried much flesh, of the long struggle of close on seven months' duration.

The pleasant little whistle would die upon his lips when he saw her sitting by the Mother's grave, plaiting gra.s.ses while the Sister sewed, or making clumsy babyish attempts at drawing on her little slate. From this she disliked to be parted, so her gentle nurses fastened it to one end of a long ribbon, and its pencil to the other, and tied the ribbon about her waist.

One day, as the Colonel stooped to speak to her, his keen glance noted that the wavering outline of a house stood upon the little slate. The living descendant of the primitive savage who had outlined the forms of men and beasts upon the flank of the great boulder when this old world was young, would have scorned the drawing, and with good reason. It was so feeble and wavering an attempt to convey, in outline, the idea of a white man's dwelling.

The roof sagged wonderfully, and the chimneys were at frenzied angles with the sides of the irregular cube, with its four windows of impossibly varying size, and the oblong patch that meant a door between them. Above the door was another oblong, set transversely, and rather suggesting a tavern-sign.

There were some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly sheds and stables of daub and wattle, eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them knew they were native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the clumsy drawing on the slate. Without those rude lines in the foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a little kopje of boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the drawing would have meant nothing at all, even to the eye of a practised scout, except a tavern on the lonely veld. The grave at the foot of the little kopje located the spot.

"A veld hotel in the Orange Free State--a wretched shanty of the usual corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the gra.s.s country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein."

He heard the wraith of his own voice speaking to the dead woman who lay under the blossoming irises at his feet. He saw her with the mental vision quite clearly. Her great purple-grey eyes were bent on his from their superior level, and they were inscrutable in their strange, secret defiance, and indomitable in the determination of their regard.