Part 94 (2/2)
A chill rime settled on the swaying laurel wreaths, and on the folds of the fluttering purple draperies at the close of the dismal day. The shops were shut, and many of the restaurants, but the windows of the Clubs gleamed radiantly down Piccadilly, and every refreshment-bar and public-house was thronged to bursting. Noon changed to evening, and evening lengthened into night, and the pavements began to be crowded. The Flesh Bazaar was being held in Piccadilly, and all up Regent Street and all down the Haymarket the chaffering went on for bodies and for souls.
A deadly physical and mental la.s.situde weighed on Saxham. His soul was sick with the long, hopeless struggle. He would end it. He would die, and take away the shadow from Lynette's pure life, and leave her free. His will devised to her everything he possessed, leaving her untrammelled. Let her learn to love once more, let her marry a better man, and be happy in her husband and her children....
He turned in at one of the chemist's shops. One or two gaudily-dressed, haggard women were at the distant end of the counter, in conference with an a.s.sistant. Saxham spoke to the chemist, a grey-whiskered, fatherly individual, who listened, bending his sleek bald head. The chemist bowed, but as he had not the honour of knowing his customer, would the gentleman oblige by signing the poison-book, in compliance with Schedule F of the Pharmacy Act, 1868?
Saxham nodded. The chemist produced the register, and opened it on the counter before Saxham, and supplied him with pen and ink. Then he found that he had business at the other end of the shop, and when he returned he smartly closed the book, without even satisfying himself whether the client had written down his name and address, or merely pretended to. Then he filled a two-ounce vial with the fragrant, deadly acid, and put on a yellow label that named the poison, but not the vendor, and stoppered and capsuled, and sealed, and made it into a neat little parcel, and Saxham paid, and put the parcel in his inner breast-pocket, and turned to leave the shop.
It was crowded now; the roaring business of the little hours was in full swing. The three a.s.sistants ran about like busy ants; the chemist joined his merry men at the game of making money, serving alcoholic liquors, mixing pick-me-ups, dispensing little bottles of tabloids and little boxes of jujubes, taking cash and giving change.
The crush was terrific. Saxham, his hat pulled low over his broad brows, his great chest stemming the tide of humanity that incessantly rolled over the threshold, was slowly making his way to the door, when he felt the arresting touch of a hand upon his arm.
The owner of the hand belonged, as ninety per cent. of the women in the place belonged, to Francois Villon's liberal sisterhood. Something in the pale square face and ma.s.sive shoulders had attracted her vagrant fancy.
She had quitted her companions--two gaily-dressed, be-rouged women and a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, moustached young German, whose stripy tweeds, vociferously-patterned linen, necktie of too obvious pattern, and high-crowned bowler hat, advertised the Berlin tailor and haberdasher and hatter at their customer's expense, as Saxham went by. Now she looked up into the strange, sorrowful eyes that were shaded by his tilted hat-brim, and twined her thin hands caressingly about his arm, asking:
”Why do you look so queer, dear? Is anything wrong?--excuse me asking--or is it the Funeral has given you the blue hump? It did me! I've not felt so bad since mother----” She broke off. Then as a shrill peal of laughter from one of her female companions followed a comment made by the other--”One of those ...”--she jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an unprintable epithet in the direction of her lady friends--”says you're ugly. I don't think so. I like your face!” Her own was cruelly, terribly young, even under the white cream of zinc, the rouge, and the rice-powder.
”Were you looking for a friend, dear?” she asked tightening the clasp of her thin, feverish hands.
”Yes,” said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no illumination in his sombre face. ”For Death! There is no better friend than Death, my child, either for you or me!”
Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him, and turned and pushed his way out through the noisy, raving, chaffering, patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone, swallowed up in the roaring torrent of humanity that foamed down Piccadilly, leaving her frozen and stricken and staring.
LXII
Months went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made towards a more familiar friends.h.i.+p had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss m.u.f.fet and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters, attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic, frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and flourished on the fireplace-tiles.
Only a few weeks more, he said to himself, and he would set her free.
Before the natural craving for love, and life, and happiness should brim the cup of her fair sweet womanhood to overflowing; before her s.e.x should rise in desperate revolt against himself her gaoler, Death should unlock her prison-doors and strike the fetters from those slender wrists, and point to Hope beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life.
Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the swift dismissing pang was in the locked drawer of the writing-table beside the whisky-flask. When he was alone and undisturbed--for Lynette seldom came to his consulting-room now--Saxham would take it out and dandle it, and hold it in his hands.
He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp that he might torture himself with looking at that pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet, common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in those two rooms over the garage at the bottom of the yard.
There was a third performer in the shadow-play now. You could hear him roaring l.u.s.tily at morn and noon and milky eve. The Wonderfullest Baby you ever!
When W. Keyse was invited by Saxham to inspect his son and heir, crimson, and pulpy, and squirming in a flannel wrap, the Adam's apple in the lean throat of the proud father jumped, and his ugly, honest eyes blinked behind salt water. The nipper had grabbed at his ear as he stooped down.
And that made the Fourth Time, and he hadn't even thanked the Doctor yet!
A date, he hoped, would arrive when a chalk or two of that mounting score might be wiped off the board. He said so to Mrs. Keyse, the first time she was allowed to sit up and play at doing a bit of needlework. Not that she did a st.i.tch, and charnce it! With her eyes--beautiful eyes, with that new look of mother-love in them; proud eyes, with that inexhaustible store of riches all her own,--wors.h.i.+pping the crinkly red snub nose and the funny moving mouth, and the little downy head, and everything else that goes to make up a properly-const.i.tuted Baby.
”I think the time'll come, deer. Watch out, an' one d'y you'll see!”
”I'll watch it!” affirmed W. Keyse. ”And wot are you cranin' your neck for, tryin' to look out o' winder? Blessed if I ever see such a precious old Dutch!----”
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