The Dop Doctor Part 86

I dare not attempt to describe the indescribable. Zulu and Barala, Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each after his own manner, and were glad and rejoiced. But of these haggard men and emaciated women of British race I can but say that in them human joy attained the climax of a sacred frenzy--that human grat.i.tude and enthusiasm, loyalty and patriotism, reached the pitch at which the mercury in the thermometer of human emotion ceases to record alt.i.tudes.

At its height, when the last fort had fallen to England and the flag of the United Republics had fluttered down from the tree whence it had waved so long, and the Union Jack went up to frantic cheering, and the retreating cloud of dust on the horizon told of the exit of the enemy from the Theatre of War, Saxham played his one trump card in the game that meant life and death to him, and life, and everything that made life worth living, to one other.

You are to see the hulking Doctor with the square-cut face, his grim under-jaw more squarely set than ever, his blue eyes smouldering anxiety under their glooming brows, trying to coax a pale, bewildered girl to take a walk with him. She would at length, provided Sister Tobias walked on the other side and held her hand. So this party of three plunged into the boiling whirlpool of joyous Gueldersdorp.

People were singing "G.o.d Save the Queen," and "The Red, White, and Blue,"

"Auld Lang Syne" and "Rule, Britannia," all at once and all together, and playing the tunes of them on mouth-organs and concertinas. They were shaking hands with one another and everybody else, and shedding tears of joy, and borrowing the pocket-handkerchiefs of sympathetic strangers to dry them, or leaving them undried. They were crowding the Government kitchens, drinking the healths of the officers and men of Great Britain's Union Brigade in hot soup and hot coffee. They were cl.u.s.tered like bees upon the most climbable house-tops, watching those retiring dust-clouds in the distance, and the nearer movements of their friends and allies; they were hearing the experiences of dust-stained and travel-worn Imperialists, and telling their own; and one and all, they were thanking G.o.d Who had led them, through bodily fear, and mental anguish, and bitter privations, to hail the dawn of this most blessed day.

The electrical atmosphere, the surge of the mult.i.tude, the roar of thousands of voices, the gaze of thousands of eyes, had its effect upon the girl. She trembled and flushed and paled. Her breath came quick and short. She threw back her head and gasped for air. But she did not wish to be taken back to the Convent bombproof. She shook her head when Sister Tobias suggested that they should return.

And then some of the women whom she had helped to nurse in hospital saw her, and recognised her, and came about her with pitiful words and compa.s.sionate looks--not only for her own sake, but for that dead woman's whose adopted daughter they knew her to have been.

"You poor, blessed, innocent lamb!" They crowded about her, kissing her hands and her dress, and Sister Tobias's shabby black habit. "Lord help you!" they mourned over her. "Christ pity you, and bring you to yourself again!"

"Why are you so sorry?" Lynette asked them, knitting her delicate brows, and peering curiously in their tearful smiling faces. "No!" she corrected herself; "I mean why are you so glad?"

"Glad is ut, honey!" screamed a huge Irishwoman, throwing a brawny red arm about the shrinking figure and hugging it. "Begob, wid the Holy Souls dancin' jigs in Purgatory, an' the Blessed Saints clappin' their han's in Heaven, we have rayson to be glad! Whirroosh! Ould Erin for ever--an' G.o.d save the Cornel!"

She yelled with all the power of her Celtic lungs, plucked off her downtrodden shoes, slapped their soles together smartly, and, with a gesture of royal prodigality, tossed them right and left into the air, performed a caper of surprising agility on elephantine, blue-yarn-stocking-covered feet, and was carried away by a roaring surge of the joyous crowd, vociferating.

Saxham felt the slender hand of his charge tighten upon his arm, and his heart leaped as he noted the working of the sensitive face and the heaving of the small, nymph-like bosom under the thin material of her dress. He hoped, he believed that a change was taking place in her. He said to himself that the delicate mechanism of her brain, clogged and paralysed by a great mental shock, was revitalising, storing energy, gaining power; that the lesion was healing; that she would recover--must recover.

Then his quick eye saw fatigue in her. They took her back out of the dust and the clamour and the crowd, back to the quiet of the Cemetery.

It happened there. For as she stood again beside the long, low mound beneath which the heart that had cherished her lay mouldering, they saw that the tears were running down her face, and that her whole body was shaken with sobbing. And then, as a wild tornado of cheering, mingled with drifts of martial music, swept northwards from Market Square, she fell upon her knees beside the grave, and cried as if to living ears:

"Mother;--oh! Mother, the Relief! They're here! Oh, my own darling--to be glad without you!..."

She lay there p.r.o.ne, and wept as though all the tears pent up in her since that numbing double stroke of the Death Angel's sword were flowing from her now. And Sister Tobias, glancing doubtfully up at Saxham's face, saw it transfigured and irradiated with a great and speechless joy. For he knew that the light had come back to the beautiful eyes he loved, and that the Future might yield its harvest of joy yet, even yet, for the Dop Doctor, he believed in his own blindness.

LVI

They were standing together in the same place two months later when he told her all, and asked her to be his wife in his own brusque characteristic way.

"You have been so good, so kind," she said, in rather formal phrase, but with her sweet eyes shining through tears and her sensitive lips trembling. "You have shown yourself to be so n.o.ble in your unselfish care for others, in your unsparing efforts for the good and benefit of everyone----"

"Put that by," said Saxham rather roughly, "and please to look at me, Miss Mildare."

He had never called her Lynette since her recovery, or touched the pretty hand he coveted unless in formal greeting.

"Put all that by. You see me to-day as you have seen me for months past, conscientious and cleanly, sober and sane, in body as in mind, discharging my duty at the Hospital and elsewhere as well as any other man possessing the special qualifications it demands. Pray understand that I am not a philanthropist, and have never posed as one. For the sake, first of a man who believed in me, and secondly of a woman whom I love--and you are she--I have done what I have."

He squared his great shoulders and stood up before her, and, though his face had never had any charm for her, its power went home to her and its pa.s.sion thrilled.

"I play no part. The man I seem to be I am. But up to seven months ago, before the siege began, I was known in this town, and with reason, as the Dop Doctor."

He saw recollection waken in her eyes, and nerved himself to the sharp ordeal of changing it to repulsion and disgust.

"You have heard that name applied to me. It conveyed nothing loathsome to your innocent mind. You once repeated it to me, and were about to ask its meaning. I had it in my mind then to enlighten you, and for the mean and cowardly baseness that shrank from the exposure I have to pay now in the"--a muscle in his pale face twitched--"the exquisite pain it is to me to tell you to-day."

"Then do not tell me." She said it almost in a whisper. "Dr. Saxham, I beg you most earnestly to spare yourself." She dropped her eyes under the fierce earnestness of his, and knitted her cold little hands in one another. "Please leave the rest unsaid," she begged, without looking at him.

"It cannot be," said Saxham. "Miss Mildare, the Dop Doctor was only another nickname for the Town Drunkard. And now you know what you should have known before if I had not been a coward and a knave."

She turned her eyes softly upon him, and they could not rest, it seemed to her, upon a man of braver and more lofty bearing.

"I _was_ the Town Drunkard," Saxham went on, in the cold, clear voice that cut like a knife to the intelligence. "Known in every liquor-saloon, and familiar to every constable, and a standing b.u.t.t for the clumsy jests that the most utter dolt of a Police Magistrate might splutter from the Bench."

His jarring laugh hurt her. "The Man in the Street, and the Woman of the Street, for that matter--pardon me if I offend your ears, but the truth must be told--were my G.o.dfather and my G.o.dmother, and they gave me that name between them. You are trembling, Miss Mildare. Sit down upon that balk, and I will finish."

There was a remnant of timber lying near that had been used in the construction of a gun-mounting. She moved to it and sat down, and the Doctor went on:

"I am not going to weary you with the story of how I came to be--what I have told you. But that I had lived a clean and honourable and temperate life up to thirty years of age--when my world caved in with me--I swear is the very truth!"

She said gently: "I can believe it, Dr. Saxham."

"Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And then, at the height of my success, and on the brink of a marriage that I dreamed would bring me the fulfilment of every hope a man may cherish, one impulse of pity and charity towards a wretched little woman brought me ruin, ruin, ruin!"

Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about. She was glad to see the Saxham of her knowledge in that Saxham whom she had not known. He folded his great arms upon his broad breast and went on:

"Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Rehabilitation in the eyes of the Law--for I gained that much--did not clear me in the eyes of Society--that hugs the guilt-stained criminal to its heart in the full consciousness of what his deeds are, and shudders at the innocent man upon whom has once fallen the shadow of that grim and b.l.o.o.d.y Idol that civilisation misnames Justice. I was cast out. Even by the brother I had trusted and the woman I had loved. I had in a vague way believed in G.o.d until then; I know I used to pray to Him to bless those I loved, and help me to achieve great things for their sakes. But nothing at all was left of that except a dull aching desire to throw back in the face of the Deity the little He had left to me. My health, and my intellectual powers, and my self-respect...."

Her voice came to his ears in the half-whispered words:

"Had He left you so little, after all?"

"Little enough," said Saxham doggedly, "compared with what I had lost. And as it is the privilege of the Christian to blame either the Almighty or the devil for whatever ills are brought on him by his own blind, reckless challenging of the Inevitable--termed Fate and Destiny by cla.s.sical Paganism,--so I found myself at odds with One I had been taught to call my Maker."

In His own acre, close to her beloved dead, with all those little white crosses marking where other dust that had once praised Him with the human voice lay waiting for the summons of the Resurrection, it was incredibly awful to her to hear Him thus denied. She grew pale and shuddered, and Saxham saw.

"You see that I wish to be honest with you, and open and above-board. I would not ever have you say to yourself, 'This man deceived--this man misled me, wishing me to think him better than he was.' There is not much more to tell you--save that I took what money remained to me at the bank and from the sale of my last possessions--about a thousand pounds--and shook the dust off from my shoes, and came out here, drunk, to carry out my purpose of self-degradation to the uttermost. And I became a foul beast among beasts that were even fouler, but less vile and less shameful because their mental and moral standard was infinitely lower than my own.

And they gave me the name you know of." His voice had the ring of steel smitten on steel. He drew himself up with a movement of almost savage pride, and the knotted veins swelled on his broad white forehead, and his blue eyes blazed under his thunderous smudge of black eyebrows.

"The name you know. It used to be called after me when I reeled the streets--they whispered it afterwards as I rode by. To-day it is forgotten." His nostrils quivered, and he threw out his hands as if with that action he tossed something worthless to the winds. "Miss Mildare, I have not touched Drink--the stuff that was my nourishment and my sustenance, my comfort and my bane, my deadliest enemy and my only friend--since that hour when with the last effort of my will I rallied all my mental and bodily forces to resist its base allurement."

"I know it, Dr. Saxham. I am sure of it." She rose and held out her hands to him, but he folded his arms more closely over his starving, famished heart, and would not see them yet.

"You can be sure of it. Alcohol is no longer my master and my G.o.d. I stand before you a free man, because I willed to be free." There was a little blob of foam at one corner of his mouth, but the square pale face was composed, even impa.s.sive. "Once, not so long ago, I filled a place of standing in the professions of Surgery and Medicine; I knew what it was to be esteemed and respected by the world. For your dear sake I promise to regain what I have lost; be even more than I used to be, achieve greater things than are done by other men of equal powers with mine. I am not a man to pledge my word lightly, Miss Mildare...." His voice shook now and his blue eyes glistened. "If you would be so--so unutterably kind as to become my wife, I promise you a worthy husband. I swear to you upon what I hold dearest and most sacred--your own life, your own honour, your own happiness, never to give you cause to regret marrying me! For I may die, indeed, but living I will never fail you!"

There was a lump in her throat choking her. Her eyes had gone to that other grave some fifty paces distant from the Catholic portion of the Cemetery. There were freshly-gathered flowers upon it, as upon the grave that lay so near, and two gorgeous b.u.t.terflies were hovering about the blooms, in mingled dalliance and greediness.

"You loved him," said Saxham, following the journey of her wistful eyes.

"Love him still; remember him for every trait and quality of his that was worthy of love from you. But give me the hope of one day gaining from you some shadow of--of return for what I feel for you. Is it Pa.s.sion? I hardly know. Whether it is Love, in the sense in which that word is employed by many of the women and nearly all the men I have met, I do not know either.

But that it is the life of my life to me and the breath of my being--you cannot look at me and doubt!"