Part 15 (2/2)
It lay just where Hyde Park merges into Paddington. Here a medical man may feel the pulse of Dives for gold, and look at the tongue of Lazarus for nothing, and supply medicine into the bargain, if he be of kindly soul, and this hopeful, rising surgeon and physician had an open hand and an unsuspecting nature.
G.o.d! how much the worse for him. The sweat-drops ran down into the Dop Doctor's eyes as he remembered that.
He set up his bachelor tent in Chilworth Street, furnis.h.i.+ng the rooms he meant to inhabit with a certain sober luxury. By-and-by the house could be made pretty, unless Mildred should insist upon his moving to Wigmore Street, or to Harley Street, that Mecca of the ambitious young pract.i.tioner. Probably Mildred's people would insist upon Harley Street.
They were wealthy; their daughter would be quite an heiress, ”another instance of Owen's luck,” as David, long ago gazetted to a crack Cavalry regiment, would say, and Owen would laugh, and admit that, though he would have been glad enough to take his young fair love without dower and plenis.h.i.+ng, it was pleasant enough to know that his wife would have an independent fortune of her own. It was one of David's best jokes that Owen was marrying Mildred for her money. David's ideas of humour were crude and elemental. On the other hand, his manners were admirable, and his physical beauty perfect of its type, though men and women turned oftenest to look at the younger brother, whom the women called ”plain, but so interesting,”
and the men ”an uncommonly attractive sort of fellow, and as clever as they make them.” When the great crash came Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., was about twenty-nine.
Do you care for a description of the man at his prime?
He was probably five feet ten in height, but his scholar's stoop robbed him of an inch or more. The great breadth of the slightly-bowed shoulders, the immense depth and thickness of the chest, gave his upper figure a false air of clumsiness. His arms were long and powerful, terminating in strong, supple, white hands, the hands of the skilled surgical operator; his thick, smooth, opaque, white skin covered an admirable structure of bone, knit with tough muscles, clothed with healthful flesh. One noticed, seeing him walk, that his legs were bowed a little, because he had been accustomed to the saddle from earliest childhood, though he rode but seldom now, and one saw also that his small muscular feet gripped the ground vigorously, through the glove-thin boots he liked to wear. He showed no tendency to dandyism. His loosely-cut suits of fine, silky black cloth were invariably of the same fas.h.i.+on. In abhorring jewellery, in preferring white cashmere s.h.i.+rts, and strictly limiting the amount of starch in the thin linen cuffs and collars, perhaps he showed a tendency to faddism. David told him that he dressed himself like a septuagenarian Professor. Mildred would have preferred dear Owen to pay a little more attention to style and cut, and all that, though one did not, of course, expect a man of science to look like a man of fas.h.i.+on. One couldn't have everything, at least, not in this world....
She said that one day, standing beside the writing-table in the Chilworth Street study, with David's portrait in her hand. It usually stood there, in a silver frame--a coloured photograph of a young man of thirty, stupid, and beautiful as the Praxitelean Hermes, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen stood upon the hearthrug, for once in Mildred's company, and not thinking of Mildred. And with tears rising in her round, pretty, foolish eyes the girl looked from the face and figure enclosed within the silver frame, to the face and bust that had for background the high mantel-mirror in its carved frame of Spanish oak.
There was the square black head bending forwards--”poking,” she termed it--upon the ma.s.sive, bowed shoulders; the white face, square too, with its short, blunt, hooked nose and grim, determined mouth and jaws, showing the bluish grain of the strong beard and moustache that Owen kept closely shaven. The heavy forehead, the s.m.u.tty brows overshadowing eyes of clear, vivid, startling Alpine blue, the close small ears, the thick white throat, were very, very unattractive in Mildred's eyes--at least, in comparison with the three-volume-novel charms of the grey-eyed, golden-moustached, cla.s.sically-featured, swaggering young military dandy in the coloured photograph. David had been with his regiment in India when Owen had first seemed to be a good deal attracted to Pont Street. He had wooed Mildred with dogged persistency, and won her without perceptible triumph, and Mildred had been immensely flattered at first by the conquest of this man, whom everybody said was going to be famous, great, distinguished ... and now ... the wedding-day was coming awfully near. And how on earth was it possible for a girl to tell a man with Owen's dreadfully grim, sarcastic mouth, and those terrible blue eyes that sometimes looked through and through you--that she preferred his brother?
Poor, dear, beautiful, devoted David! so honourable, so shocked at the discovery that his pa.s.sion was reciprocated, so very romantically in love.
Only the day previously, calling in at Pont Street at an hour unusual for him, Owen had found them together, Mildred and David, who, having been unexpectedly relieved of duty by an accommodating brother-officer, had, as he rather laboriously explained, run up from Spurhambury for the day. It was an awfully near thing, the guilty ones agreed afterwards, but Owen had suspected nothing. These swell scientific men were often a little bit slow in the uptake....
But to-day--to-day their dupe saw clearly. He recalled the Pont Street incident, and the flushed faces of the couple. He saw once more the silver-framed photograph in the girl's hand, he felt the mute disparagement of her glance, and was conscious of the relief with which it left him to settle on the portrait again. Ah, how unsuspicious he had been whom they were duping! Doubtless Mildred would not have had the courage to own the truth, doubtless she would have married him but for the scandal of the Trial. He wrenched his knitted hands together until the joints cracked. She would have married him, and forgotten David. He, the man of will, and power, and patience would have possessed her, stamped himself like a seal upon her heart and mind, given her other interests, other hopes, other desires, children, and happiness. But for the Trial the little germinating seed of treachery would never have grown up and borne fruit.
Had it been treachery, after all? Far, far too grand the word. Who would expect a modern woman to practise the obsolete virtue of Fidelity? Fool, do you expect your miniature French bulldog or your toy-terrier to dive in and swim out to you, and hold your drowning carcase up, should you happen to become cramped while bathing in the sea? The little, feeble, pretty, feather-brained thing, what can it do but whimper on the sh.o.r.e while you are sinking, perhaps be consoled upon a friendly stranger's lap while your last bubbles are taking upward flight, and your knees are drawing inwards in the final contraction? Happy for the little creature if the kindly stranger carry it away!
Poor, pretty, foolish Mildred, whose gentle predilections were as threads of gossamer compared with the cable-ropes of stronger women's pa.s.sions!
She had nestled into the strong protecting arm, and dried her tears for the old master on the sleeve of the new one, whimpering a little, gently, just like the toy-terrier b.i.t.c.h or the miniature bull.
And yet he had once seen a creature tinier and feebler than either of these, a mere handful of yellow floss-silk curls, defend its insensible master with frenzy, as the sick man lay in the deadly stupor of cerebral congestion, from those who sought to aid. Valet and nurse and doctor were held at bay until that snapping, foaming, raging speck of love and devotion and fidelity had been whelmed in a travelling-rug, and borne away to a distant room, from whence its shrill, defiant, imploring barks and yelps could be heard night and day until, its owner being at last conscious and out of danger, the tiny creature was set free.
Ergo, there are small things and small things. Beside that epic atom Mildred dwindled inconceivably.
And David ... David, who had shaken his handsome head sorrowfully over his brother's ruined career, who had been horribly sick at the scandal, shudderingly alive to the disgrace, sorrowfully, regretfully compelled to admit that the evidence of guilt was overwhelming ... he did not trust himself to think of David overmuch. That way of thought led to Cain's portion in the very pit of h.e.l.l. For six months subsequently to the finding of the Jury in the well-known criminal case, The Crown _v._ Saxham, David had married Mildred. If she had been innocent of actual treachery, here was the smooth, brotherly betrayer, unmasked and loathly in the sight of the betrayed.
How quietly the storm-clouds had piled up on his bright horizon at the close of his second year of active, brilliant, successful work!
The first lightning-flash, the first faint mutter of thunder, had pa.s.sed almost unnoticed. Then the tempest broke, and the building wrought by a strong man's labours, and toils, and hopes, and joys, and dolours had been lifted, and torn, and rent, and scattered as a hill-bothy of poles and straw-bundles, or a moorland shelter of heather and bushes is scattered by the fury of a northern mountain-blast.
His practice had become a large and, despite the many claims of Lazarus at the gates, a lucrative one by the commencement of his third year of residence in Chilworth Street. It was the end of April. He was to be married to Mildred in July. That move to Harley Street had been decided upon, the house taken and beautified. Though his love for her was not demonstrative or romantic, it was deep, and tender, and strong, and hopeful, and Life to this man had seemed very sweet--five years ago. He was successful professionally and socially. He had been chosen to a.s.sist a surgeon of great eminence in the performance of a critical operation upon a semi-Royalty. He had written, and publishers had published, a remarkable work. ”The Diseases of Civilisation” had been greeted by the scientific reviewers with a chorus of praise, pa.s.sed through four or five editions--had been translated into several European languages; and his ”Text-Book of Clinical Surgery” had been recommended to advanced students by the leading professors of the Medical Schools when the horrible thing befell.
XIV
It was in '94, when even the electro-motor was not in general use, and the petrol-driven machine was slowly convincing Paris and New York of its magnificent possibilities. Saxham used a smart, well-horsed, hired brougham for day-visits, and for night work a motor-tricycle. There were no stables to the house in Chilworth Street. He left the motor-tricycle at the place where he had bought it second-hand. The machine was cleaned and kept in order, and brought to his door by one of the employes at a certain hour, for a fixed weekly sum paid to the proprietor of the establishment, Bough by name, an Englishman born in the Transvaal, who had quite recently, or so he gave out, emigrated from South Africa, and set up in London as a cycle-seller and repairer, though there were not many cycles at the shop. Heavy packing-cases and crates were always being delivered there, and always being despatched from thence, via Cape Town and Port Elizabeth and Delagoa Bay to the Transvaal, Bough being agent, or so he said, for several South African firms engaged in the transport of agricultural machines. Bough had a wife, a large-eyed, delicate-looking, pretty little woman, who seemed afraid of the big, muscular, tanned fellow of thirty-eight or so, with the odd light eyes, and the smooth manner, and the ready smile, and the short, expert, hairy, cruel-looking hands. He had seen life, had Bough, at the goldfields and at the diamond-mines, and as a trooper through the Zulu and Matabele campaigns, and he was ready to talk about what he had seen. Still there were reservations about Bough, and mysteries. The Doctor suspected him of being brutal to his wife, and would not have been surprised any morning upon receiving the news of the man's arrest as one of a gang of forgers, or coiners, or burglars. But he lived and let live, and whatever else the big Afrikander may have been, he was an excellent workman at his trade.
One evening Bough rode round on the motor-tricycle himself, and mentioned casually that his wife was ailing. The Doctor, in the act of mounting the machine, put a brief question or two, registered the replies in the automatic sub-memory he kept for business, and told the man to send her round at ten o'clock upon the following morning.
She came, punctual to the hour, and was shown into Owen's consulting-room--a little woman with beautiful, melancholy eyes and a pretty figure. Illiterate, common, affected, and vain to a degree, hideously misusing the English language in that low, dulcet voice of hers, ludicrous in her application of the debatable aspirate to words in the spelling of which it has no part.
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