Part 86 (1/2)
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! Whirroos.h.!.+ 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 s.h.i.+ning 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.”