Part 10

Mildred was just eighteen when he had wooed and won her. She had been slight and willowy and pale, with round, surprised brown eyes, an indeterminate nose, and a little mouth of the rosebud kind. Her neck had been long and swanlike, her waist long and slim, her hands and feet long and narrow. He had desired her with all the indiscriminating passion of early manhood. He had planned to pass his life by her side. He had hoped that she might bear him children--he had wrought in a frenzy of intellectual and physical endeavour to take rank in his chosen profession, that Success might make life sweeter for Mildred--his wife.

She had seemed to love him, and he had been happy in that seeming. Then the shadow of a tragic error had fallen blackly across his path. From the omission to copy in his memorandum-book a prescription made up by himself in a sudden emergency had sprung the branding suspicion that culminated in the Old Bailey Criminal Case of the Crown _v._ Saxham. His acquittal restored to him freedom of movement. He left the Court without a stain on his professional reputation, but socially and financially a ruined man.

Friends and patients fell away from Saxham--acquaintances dropped him. Mildred--his Mildred--was one of the rats that scurried from the sinking ship. She had thrown him over and married David, his brother. Her betrayal had been the wreath of nightshade crowning Saxham's cup of woe. Those vertical lines graven on his broad white forehead, those others that descended from the outer angles of the deep-cut nostrils to the corners of that stern mouth of his, and yet those others at the angles of the lower jaw, were chiefly Mildred's handiwork. They told of past excess, a desperate effort to drown Memory and hasten longed-for death on the part of a man who had quarrelled with his God.

The demons of pride and self-will, defiance and scorn had been cast out. An ordeal such as few men are called upon to endure had purified, cleansed, and regenerated the drunkard. Friendship had taken the desperate man by the hand, plucked his feet from the morass, led him into the light and set his feet once more on firm ground. His profession was his again to follow. Love, real love, had come to him and folded her rose-white wings beside his hearth.

Years of pure domestic happiness, of successful work, had passed, and now--the July sunshine had no warmth in it, though it streamed in through the open window over the tops of the pot-roses. The Dop Doctor's head was bowed upon his hands, his great shoulders shook as though he strove with a mortal rigour, the wood of the table where his elbows leaned, the boards beneath the thick carpet on which his feet rested, creaked as the long shudders convulsed him at intervals.

It had seemed to Saxham--in whom the seed of Faith had germinated and put forth leaves in one great night of storm following upon years of arid dryness--that Almighty God must have forgiven those five worse than wasted years.

Fool! he now cried in his heart. The Divine Mercy is boundless as the ocean of air in which our planet swims, and for the cleansing of our spotted souls the Blood of the Redeemer flowed on Calvary. But He who said in His wrath that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children, does not break, even for those repentant prodigals whom He has taken to His Heart again--the immutable laws of Nature. Nature, of all forces most conservative, wastes nothing, loses nothing, pardons nothing, avenges everything.

The shouted curse, like the whispered blessing, is carried on the invisible wings of Air forever. Thus, the deformed limb, the devouring cancer, the loathsome ulcer, and the degrading vice, are perpetuated and reproduced as diligently and faithfully as the beautiful feature, the noble quality, the wit that charms, the genius that dominates. Nay, since Nature turns out some millions of fools to one Dante or Shakespeare or Moliere or Cervantes, it would appear that she prefers the fools.

So it is. Divine Grace has reached and saved the sinner. The ugly vice, the base appetite, have been eradicated by prayer and mortification, by years of self-control and watchfulness. Free will, moral and physical force, self-command and self-respect are yours again. And with sobs of gratitude the erstwhile slave of Hell gives thanks to Heaven.

Saved. Cured. Great words and true in Saxham's case as in many others. But though they are saved and cured they cannot ever forget. Their eyes have a characteristic look of alert, suspicious watchfulness. For wheresoever they move about the world, in the drawing-rooms of what is called Society, in the business circles of the City, in the barracks or the mining-camp, on the ship's heaving deck or the floor of the Pullman carriage; amidst the sands of the Desert or the golden-rod of the prairie, or the red sand and dry karroo scrub of the lone veld, they will hear, when they least expect it, the thin, shrill hiss of the Asp that once bit them to the bone. Or supposing that they have forgotten in reality--so cleverly has the world pretended to!--with what a pang of mortal anguish Memory awakens. When you recognise the devil that once entered and possessed you, looking out of the eyes of your child.

When Saxham lifted up his ashen face and looked at the portrait in the third leaf of the triptych frame and met the clear, candid gaze of his son's blue eyes, you know what he was seeking, and praying not to find.

To have given Lynette a drunkard for her son would be the most terrible penalty that could be exacted by merciless Nature for those five sodden, wasted years.

Ah! to have had a clean, unspotted life to share with Bawne's fair mother. That his priceless pearl of womanhood should gleam upon a drunkard's hand--his spotless Convent lily have opened to fullest bloom in a drunkard's holding, had been from the outset of their married life, verjuice in Saxham's cup by day, and a thorn in his pillow by night.

But never before had it occurred to the man of science, the great surgeon, the learned biologist, that relentless Nature might be saving up for him, Saxham, a special rod in saltest brine.

Bawne.... He sat in silence with set teeth, asking himself the bitter question:

"How could I have forgotten--Bawne?"

*CHAPTER XIX*

*BAWNE*

As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded his well-known thump upon the door-panel. When had the Dop Doctor ever cried, "Come in!" with such a leaden sinking of the heart?

The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong for his twelve years. You saw him attired in the dress with which we are all familiar--the loose shirt of khaki-brown, with its knotted silk neckerchief of dark blue, the lanyards ending in clasp-knife and whistle, the roomy shorts upheld by a brown leather pouch-belt supporting a serviceable axe, the dark blue stockings turned over at the knee, fitting close to the slim muscular legs, the light strong shoes, the brown smasher hat with the chin-strap, completed the picture of a Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed. He carried his light staff at the trail, and entering, brought it to an upright position, and saluted smartly. The salute formally acknowledged, he came straight to the table and stood at his father's elbow, waiting, as Saxham feigned to blot a written line. Outwardly composed, the drumming of the man's heart deafened him, and a mist before his eyes blurred the page they were bent upon. Fatherhood gripped him by the throat as in the first moment of his son's separate existence. A thing we prize is never so poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of its ruin or loss.

"Father, you aren't generally pleased when I come bothering you in consulting hours, but this time it is really serious business, no kid, and Honour bright!"

Saxham answered with equal gravity:

"If you have a reasonable excuse for coming, I have said that you may come."

The boy was like him. You saw it as he stood waiting. The vivid gentian-blue eyes were Saxham's, as were the thick throat and prominent under-jaw and the square facial outline. But the plume of hair that swept over the broad forehead was red-brown like Lynette's. The delicate, irregular profile and a sensitive sweetness about the lips were gifts from his mother. The directness of his look, and the tinge of brusqueness in his speech were unconsciously modelled on the father's, as he said, sacrificing sufficient of manly independence to come within the curve of the Doctor's strong arm:

"First, I wanted to show you my new badge."

Saxham's left hand squeezed the arm most distant from him, where a familiar device was displayed upon the sleeve, midway, between the shoulder and elbow, below the six-inch length of colours distinctive of this Scout's Patrol.

"Turn round and show it, then!"

"Father, you're larking. That's my General Scout Badge. I've had it ever since I passed my Second Class tests. Before then, you know, when I was a Tenderfoot, I'd only the top-part--the _fleur-de-lis_ without the motto, and you wear that in your left pocket button-hole. But this is something special, don't you see?"

Saxham eyed the row of little enamelled circles on the sleeve next him with respectful gravity. The boy went on, trying to control the gleeful tremor in his voice:

"I've got the Ambulance Badge!--look at the Geneva Cross!--and the Signaller's Badge--this is it--with the crossed flags--and the Interpreter's Badge--the one with the two hands holding. But this is the very latest. Our Scoutmaster gave it to me after parade to-day. It's the Airman's Badge--" He caught his breath, the secret was coming in a moment.... He went on: "To get it you must have made a model aeroplane. Not a flying-stick, any kid of nine can make one--but a model that will really fly. That's my special reason for coming. Mother was out--and--and next to her I wanted to tell you!"

"And next after me?"

The boy considered a moment before he looked up to answer:

"Cousin Pat, because she can keep a secret so tightly."

Saxham patted the sturdy square shoulders.

"You are fond of Cousin Patrine, aren't you?"

"Rather!"

"Just tell me why?"

"Because"--the young brows were puckered--"because she's so big and so--beautiful. And she'd just die for you and Mother.... She comes in my prayers next after you two."

"And--the Chief Scout?"

"Father, wouldn't it be--a bit cheeky to go and pray for a man like that?"

A spark of laughter wakened in Saxham's sombre eyes.

"Not quite respectful, you think? Is that it? Why so, when you're taught to pray for the Holy Father, Mother Church, and the King and Queen?"

The boy's puckered brows smoothed. The question was settled.

"Of course. I forgot. Then the Chief Scout must come in after Cousin Patrine. Because a gentleman must always give place to a lady. That's what Mother says."

"Suppose Cousin Patrine never came to see you any more, what would you do then?"

Bawne straightened the sturdy body and proclaimed:

"I would go and find her and bring her back!"

"Suppose she did not want to come?"

Bawne said instantly:

"I would tell her Mother was wanting her. For Mother would be, you know. And Cousin Pat wouldn't keep her waiting. Not much, sir, she wouldn't!"

"She cares so?"

"Doesn't she! Why, have you forgotten when I was a little shaver and Mother was so ill?"

Saxham, with a certain tightening of the muscles of the throat, recalled the wan, red-eyed spectre that had haunted the landing outside the guarded bedroom where Lynette lay, white and strengthless, while her husband fought for her with Death.

"Well, well. Go on loving Patrine and praying for her! Now tell me of your model."

The boy said, controlling his exultation:

"It has to be left at our District Headquarters until to-morrow. You see--it's rather a special affair. It's not a flying stick, like the things I used to make when I was a shaver, nor a glider--you see men in spectacles flying those every day to please the kids on Hampstead Heath and in Kensington Gardens, but a model of a Bristol monoplane with a span of thirty inches, and a main-plane-area of a hundred and fifty"--he caught his breath and with difficulty kept his eager words from tumbling over one another as he reached the thrilling climax--"and I built up her fuselage with cardboard and sticking-plaster out of the First Aid case you gave me to carry in my belt-pouch, and cut the propeller out of a tin toy engine I've had ever since I was a kid--and made the planes of big sheets of stiff foolscap strengthened with thin strips of glued wood, and her spars, sir!--the upright ones are quills, and her stays and struts I made of copper wire and she's weighted with lead ribbon like what you wrap about the gut when you're bottom-fishing for tench or barbel--and her motor-power is eighteen inches of square elastic twisted--and father"--he broke into a war-dance of ecstasy unrestrained--"when Roddy Wrynche and me went on a secret expedition to Primrose Hill to test her--she flew, sir! First go-off--by George!"

"Really flew? ... You are certain?"

"Upon my life, sir, and that's my Honour. Scout's Honour and life are the same thing. That's what the Oath rubs into us." He squared his shoulders and lowered his voice as a boy speaking of high matters that must be dealt with reverently. "I think it's--ripping. I can say it. Would you like me to?"

Saxham nodded without speaking, because of that choking something sticking in his throat. That something Lear called "the mother." And, dammed away behind his eyes, were scalding tears that only men may shed. As the young voice said:

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to be loyal to God and the King.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to Help other people at all times.

"On my Honour I promise that I will do my best to obey the Scout Law.... You see"--the boyish arm was on Saxham's shoulder now, the ruddy-fair cheek pressed against the pale, close-shaven face--"you see, Father, when a Scout says 'On my Honour' it's just as if he swore on the Crucifix!"

Saxham said, crushing down the fierce emotion that had almost mastered him:

"It is--just the same! For the man who breaks a promise will never keep an oath.... I have a friend of whom I have told you.... I think he would like to hear about your model aeroplane.... May I tell him, or would you prefer to tell him yourself?"

Bawne's fair face glowed. He gasped in ecstasy:

"_Father_.... You mean Mr. Sherbrand--your Flying Man who's in the Hospital?"

"My Flying Man--but he is well again and back at work at Hendon. There was not much the matter with him; a slight obstruction in one of the nasal passages that prevented him from breathing with his mouth shut as he should. Now he has asked me--this afternoon if I am at leisure--to bring my little son to the aerodrome and see him make a flight."

"And go up in his aeroplane with him? Father, say Yes! Do, please do!"

As the little figure bobbed up and down beside him in joyous excitement, Saxham answered, not without an inward tug:

"If your mother says 'Yes' I shall not say No! Now off with you, my son!"

The boy saluted and went. Even his bright obedience wrung his father's heart. The man looked haggard and old. He hid his careworn face in his hands for a minute. His lips were still moving when he looked up and made the Sign so well known to many of us upon his forehead and breast. Prayer, that most powerful of all therapeutic agents, so often prescribed by Saxham for his patients, was his own tonic and sedative in moments of bodily exhaustion and mental overstrain.

He had prayed, he, the sceptic, on that unforgettable night at Gueldersdorp, when he wrestled with his possessing fiend.... Lynette had taught him the habit of prayer. And even as she, a friendless, neglected waif, had learned to look up and see the shining Faces of our Divine Redeemer and His Virgin Mother through the features of a pure and tender woman; so her husband, looking in the eyes of Lynette, had found the gift of Faith lost years before.

"Oh! ... Prayer!" you say--"Faith!" ... and I see you shrug and sneer a little, you who are intellectual and highly educated, and have ceased to believe in what you term the Hebraic myth or the Christian legend--since you learned to point out the weak places in the First Book of Genesis, and sneer at the discrepancies between the statements of the Gospel narrators--though you will hear such testimonies sworn to in good faith, wherever witnesses are examined in a Court of Law.

But no! you tell me, you are not an Agnostic. You credit the existence of Almighty God, but prayer is the parson's affair. Well, because a man wears a straight black coat, will you abandon to him so inestimable a privilege? Is it not a marvellous thing that you or I should lift up our earth-made, earth-begrimed hands, and that He who set this tiny planet to spin out its aeons of cycles amidst the innumerable millions of systems wheeling through His Universe should stoop to hear the words we utter? Feeble cries, drowned by the orchestras of the winds, and the chorus of the Spheres revolving in their orbits, or silent utterances imperceptible to any Ear save His alone.

*CHAPTER XX*

*THE MODERN HIPPOCRATES*

Patients rapidly succeeded one another in the chair that faced the window. There were confirmed invalids who were really healthy men and women, and certain others who came in smilingly to talk about the weather and the newest Russian Opera, who bore upon their faces the unmistakable stamp of mortal disease. The wife or the husband, the father or the mother had worried for nothing.... Would the Doctor prescribe a little tonic to buck them, or the surgeon alleviate a little trouble of the local kind? Really nothing--but--Death's knock at the door. And there were cases--open or unacknowledged--of the liquor-habit and the drug-mania. To these, instead of dropping out bromide of potassium and throwing in the chloral hydrates with strychnine and the chloride of the metal that is crushed and assayed out of the quartz reef near Johannesburg, or pick-axed out of the frozen ground of the Klondyke, Saxham dealt out that savage tonic Truth, in ladlesful.

The secret dipsomaniac or druggard could not deceive this man's keen scrutiny, or escape his unerring diagnosis. When, beaten, they admitted the fact, Saxham said to them as to the others:

"You say you cannot conquer the craving. I myself once thought so. Your moral power can be restored, even as was mine. In your case the habit is barely as ingrained as in the case I quote to you. I drank alcohol to excess for a period of five years."

Some of the sufferers--elderly women and mild-mannered old gentlemen--were horrified. Others thought such candour brutal--but attractively so. Yet others responded to the sympathy masked by the stern, impassive face, and the blunt, brusque manner.

"At any rate the man's no humbug!" such and such an one would stutter. "And seems to have any amount of Will. Think I shall put myself in his hands for a bit." Adding with a rueful twinkle: "He knows how the dog bites, if anyone does!"

He did, and those hands of his were strong, prompt and unfaltering. Since the grip of human sympathy had fastened on the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, and drawn him up out of the depths into sunlight and free air, and set his feet once more on the firm ground, how many of his fellow-sufferers had Saxham not hauled reeking and squelching out of the abysmal sludge, whose secrets shall only be revealed upon the Last Day.

Yet Saxham realised that the grand majority of these twentieth-century men and women really wanted little more of the physician and surgeon than the thirteenth-century patient desired of the apothecary or the leech. A patient hearing given to their category of evils--a little hocus-pocus, and a nostrum or so.

We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men of the Dark Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt and toe of frog, the salted earthworms, and the _Pulvis Bezoardicus Magistralis_ or _Pulvis Sanctus_, dissolved in the liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious conjunction of their ruling planets with the Moon--have but given place to extract of the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries of the guinea-pig, the spinal cord and brain of rabbits and mice and other small mammalia, with--instead of broth of vipers, liquor distilled from the parotid secretion of the tropical toad; identical with the reptile administered in boluses to Pagan patients by the Greek Hippocrates. With other remedies hideously akin to the hell-brews that whipped the sated desires of Tiberius and Nero.... Such as the pastelloids frequently prescribed by bland-mannered, frock-coated, twentieth-century physicians--professing Christians who pay West-End pew-rents, and deplore the abnormal drop in the birth-rate--for the spurring of the sense of debilitated Hedonists.

Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We have harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia's silver chariot. In Surgery the Short Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get on, at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to existence. Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human machine, alive and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be detected and photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The electro-magnet automatically carried out the removal of such fragments, provided only that they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has even weighed the Soul.

Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate--consider.... This quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham's breast and in yours and mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator--this Ego for whose eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man, weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.

The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders, when the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable air; when the last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in ponderability shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling matter. Will the result proportionate with the moribund's sixteenth of an ounce?

It seemed to Saxham, that without a moral and social upheaval upon a vaster scale than historian ever recorded or visionary ever dreamed; a cataclysmic cleansing, a purging as by fire; the regeneration of the human race, the reconstitution of the human mind, the renaissance of the Divine Ideal, could never be brought about. Unconsciously he sought for the decadent world some such ordeal as he himself had passed through. You looked at him and saw the scars of suffering. The soil of his nature had been rent by volcanic convulsions and seared by the upburst of fierce abysmal fires, before the green herb clothed the sides of the frowning steeps, the jagged peaks were wreathed with gentle clouds; the pure springs gathered and ran; the valleys became fruitful and the plains carpeted themselves with flowers.

A miracle had been wrought for Saxham the Man, and he saw the need of one for the World, and said in his heart that, though holy men might pray, it would not, could not, ever be vouchsafed. And all the while the miracle was ripening, the Day was coming, the Great Awakening was at hand.

*CHAPTER XXI*

*MARGOT LOOKS IN*