Chapter 12

The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the hapless victim, dressed in deep mourning and neatly handled by Counsel, evoked a display of handkerchiefs upon his every appearance in the witness-box, from the smart Society women seated near the Bench. Many of them had been Saxham's patients. Several had made love to him, nearly all of them had made much of him, and quite an appreciable number of them had asked him to be accommodating, and render them temporarily immune against the menace of Maternity. These had received a curt refusal, accompanied with wholesome advice, for which they revenged themselves now, in graceful womanly fashion, by being quite sure the wretched man was guilty. More than possible, was it not? they whispered behind their palm-leaf fans: it was sultry weather, and the vendors of these made little fortunes, hawking them outside. Was it not more than possible that he had been the dead woman's lover? The Crown Counsel improved on this idea. Wretched little Mrs. Bough, of infinitesimal account in Life, had become through Death a person of importance. Much was made out of the fact that she had gone to Chilworth Street some days previously to her deplorable ending, and remained closeted with Dr. Saxham for some time. He had supplied her with a bottle of medicine upon her leaving--medicine of which no memorandum was to be found in his notes for the day. She had taken the first dose then and there. According to the testimony of the Accused, the bottle had contained a harmless bromide sedative. Upon the oath of the Public Analyst, the same bottle, handed by the husband of the deceased woman to the Police upon the night of her death, and now produced in Court with two or three doses of dark liquid remaining in it, contained a powerful solution of ergotoxine--a much less innocent drug. Who should presume to doubt its administration by the Prisoner, when the label bore directions in his own characteristic handwriting? Who should dare to affirm his innocence, seeing that to him his victim had hastened, almost in the act of death, begging him, with her expiring breath, "not to be hard on a woman," who had ignorantly trusted him, Gentlemen of the Jury! only to find, too late, the deceptive nature of his specious promises? A whip, cried the Bard of Avon, England's glorious, immortal Shakespeare, should be placed in every honest hand to lash such scoundrels naked through the world! Let that whip, in the honest hands of twelve good Britons, be--the verdict of guilt! The Counsel for the Crown, red-hot and perspiring, sat down mopping his streaming face, for it was tropical weather, with the white handkerchief of a blameless life. Irrepressible applause followed, round upon round thudding against the dingy yellow-white walls, beating against the dirty barred skylight of the stifling, close-packed Court. Then the Judge interposed, and the clapping of hands and thumping of stick and sunshade ferrules upon the dirty floor died down, and the Counsel for the Defence got up to plead for his man, who, by the way, he firmly believed to be guilty.

That remembrance made the Dop Doctor merry again, this scorching night in Gueldersdorp, five years later. But it was ugly mirth, especially when he recalled his agony of sympathy upon hearing, through her mother, that Mildred was ill in bed. Ah! how he hated the simpering, whispering, sneering, giggling women in Court when he pictured her, his innocent darling, his sweet girl, suffering for love of him and sorrow for him. David, detained by onerous duties at Regimental Headquarters throughout the whole of the Case, wrote chilly but fraternally expressed letters on blue official paper. Of his mother, of his father, Owen dared not think. Innocent as he was, the shame of his position, the obloquy of the Trial, must be a branding shame to them for ever.

It had killed them, the Dop Doctor remembered, within a few years of each other--the hale old Squire and Madam, his Welsh wife, feared by the South Dorset village folks for her caustic tongue, beloved for her generous heart, her liberal nature. It was Mildred who he had believed would die if the Verdict went against him--Mildred, who had consoled herself so quickly and so well--Mildred, whom he had held a spotless blossom of Paradise, a young saint in purity and singleness of heart, in comparison with those other women.

Bah! what a besotted idiot he had been! She was as they were. The nodding of their towering hats was before his eyes; the subdued titter that accompanied their whispered comments was in his ears; the lavender, white rose, and violet essences with which they perfumed their baths and sprinkled their clothes were in his nostrils; suffocatingly, as his Counsel went on pleading. The intention of his trenchant cross-questioning of Bough, who had lied from the beginning, like a true son of the Devil, his father, showed plainly now. Little by little the evidence accumulated.

Here, free and unsuspect and doing his best to send another man to Penal Servitude, was the man who had all to gain by fixing the guilt upon the Accused. He had sent the woman, his mistress, to the prisoner; he had resented the prisoner's refusal to commit or to abet a dangerous and illegal operation. He had compelled his hapless victim to submit herself to the hands of a wretch who lived by such deeds. Possibly he had sickened of his poor toy--he had told her as much. Possibly he had determined, by a bold and daring stroke, to free himself of a wearisome burden, and let another man pay the penalty for his own crime. The substitution of the lethal drug found in the bottle for the harmless bromide mixture given to Mrs. Bough by Dr. Saxham would naturally suggest itself to such a wretch, whose calculating cleverness had been crowned with success by the culminating masterstroke, admirable in its simplicity, damnable in its fiendish cunning, of sending the unhappy woman whose deliberate murder he had really planned and carried out, to die upon the threshold of the innocent victim of this diabolical plot. Let those who heard hesitate before they played into the hands of a villain by condemning the blameless to suffer! Let them look at the young man before them, whose hard work had won him, early in life, his brilliant position as one of the recognised pioneers of the new School of Surgery, as an admitted authority on Clinical Medicine, whose wedding-bells--the handkerchiefs came out at this--had rung to-morrow but for this harrowing and bitter stroke of adverse Destiny. Which would they have? Let the Jury decide for Christ or Barabbas! He spoke in all reverence, because the upright, innocent, charitable, self-denying life of a diligent healer of men would support the analogy of Christ-likeness beside that of the principal witness in this Case, the evil liver, the slanderer, the ex-thief and burglar, the English ticket-of-leave man who had emigrated to South Africa eighteen years previously, had enlisted under a false name in the Cape Mounted Police, had deserted, been traced to Kimberley, and there lost sight of, and who, under the name of Bough, had recently returned to England, giving himself out as an Afrikander, and setting up in business in London upon the accumulated savings of a career most probably in keeping with his abominable record.

Warders from Wormwood Scrubbs and Portland Prisons were there to swear to the identity of Abraham Brake, _alias_ Lister, _alias_ Bough, whose photographs, thumb-prints, and measurements an official from the Criminal Identification Department of Scotland Yard was prepared to place before the Court, for whose re-arrest, as a ticket-of-leave man who had failed to keep in proper touch with the Police, an officer with a warrant waited. What, then, was to be the Verdict of the Jury? Was Dr. Owen Saxham innocent or guilty? If innocent, then, in the name of God, let him go forth from bondage, to the unutterable relief of those who waited in anguish for the Verdict. His father, his mother, and the fair young girl--the Court was drowned in tears at this last touching reference, even his Lordship the Judge being observed to remove and wipe eyeglasses that were gemmy with emotion, as Counsel dwelt upon the touching picture of the sorrowing bride-elect, whose orange-blossoms had been blighted by the breath of this hideous, this unbearable, this most unfounded charge....

XVI

The Judge summed up, with an evident bias in favour of the Accused. An old advocate in criminal causes, his Lordship had formed his own opinion of the principal witness for the Crown, though there was no evidence to prove the guilt of the astute Mr. Abraham Brake, _alias_ Lister, _alias_ Bough.

The Jury retired, to return immediately. The Verdict "Not Guilty" was received with applause and cheers. Bough departed, to pay the prison penalty of not keeping in touch with the Police.... More cheers, strongly deprecated by the Judge. The Dop Doctor could hear that ironical clapping and braying five years off. It was over, over! He was free! Oh, the mockery of the word!

His Counsel shook his hand warmly, and several old friends and colleagues pressed round him with hearty congratulations. Then a telegram was handed to him.

"No bad news, I hope," said the advocate who had defended, seeing Saxham's lips blanch. "You have had enough trouble to last for some time, I imagine?"

"It appears as if my measure was not quite full enough," said Saxham quietly. "My father died suddenly last night, down at our place in South Dorset. The wire says, 'An attack of cerebral haemorrhage,' probably brought on by worry and distress of mind over this damned affair of mine." He ground his teeth together, and went on: "I must go to my mother without delay. How soon can I get away from here?"

It was oddly difficult to realise that all the doors were open, and that the following shadow of the Man In Blue would no longer dog his footsteps. It was strange to drive home in the brougham of a friend to Chilworth Street, and let himself into the dusty, neglected, close-smelling, shut-up house. All the servants were out; probably they had been making holiday through all the weeks that had preceded the Trial. His man returned as the master finished packing a portmanteau for that journey down to Dorsetshire. Saxham left him to finish while he changed his clothes and scrawled a letter to Mildred. Nothing else but this death could have kept him from hurrying to the embrace of those dear arms. As it was, he half expected her to rush in upon him, stammering, weeping, clinging to him in her overwhelming relief and gladness.... At every rumble and stoppage of wheels in the street, at every ring, he made sure that she was coming. But she did not come, and he sent his man to Pont Street with his letter, and went down into Dorsetshire by special train from Waterloo, and found the dead man's dogcart waiting for him, with the old bay cob in harness, and the old coachman who had taught him to ride his pony, waiting, with a band of crape about his sleeve, and drove through the deep, ferny lanes to the old home standing in its mantle of midsummer leafage and blossom in the wide gardens whose myrtle and lavender hedges overhung the beach below. There was a little, old, bent, white-haired woman in a shabby black gown and white India shawl waiting for him on the threshold, and only by the indomitable, unquailing spirit that looked out of her bright black eyes did Owen Saxham recognise his mother. She called him her David's dearest son, and her own boy, and took both his hands, and drew his head down, and kissed him solemnly upon the forehead.

"That is for your father, my dear," she said. "He never doubted you for one moment, Owen. And this is for myself. We have both believed in you implicitly throughout. We would not even write and tell you so. It would have seemed, your father thought, like admitting, tacitly, that we doubted our son. But other people believed you guilty, and oh! Owen, I think it killed him!"

"I know that it has killed him," Owen Saxham said simply. The early morning light showed to the mother's eyes the ravages wrought in her son's face by the mental anguish and the physical strain of those terrible weeks that were over, and Mrs. Saxham, for the first time since the Squire's death, burst into a passion of weeping. Owen's eyes were dry, even when he stooped to kiss the high, broad forehead of the grand old grey head that lay upon the snowy, lavender-scented pillow in the cool, airy death-chamber, where the perfume of the climbing roses that flowered about the open casements came in drifts across the sharp, clean odour of disinfectant.

Captain Saxham arrived late that night. His greeting of his brother was stiff and constrained; his grey eyes avoided Owen's blue ones; he did not refer to the events of the past ten weeks. He had always had a habit of twisting and biting at one of the short, thick ends of his frizzy light brown moustache. Now he wrenched and gnawed at it incessantly, and his usually florid complexion had deteriorated to a muddy pallor. Black mufti did not suit the handsome martial figure, and there is no dwelling so wearisome as a house of mourning, when the servants move about on tiptoe, wearing faces of funereal solemnity, and the afternoon tea-tray is carried in in state, like the corpse of a domestic usage on its way to the cemetery, with the silver spirit-kettle bubbling behind it as chief mourner. But, as the elder son, there was plenty to occupy Captain Saxham. There was business to be transacted with the Squire's solicitor, with his bailiff, with one or two of the principal tenants. There were the arrangements to be made for the Funeral, and for the extension of hospitality to relatives and friends who came from a distance to attend it. When it was over and the long string of County carriages had driven home to their respective coach-houses, Owen Saxham returned to town.

"Give my dear love to Mildred. Tell her, if she grudged the first sight of you to me, she will forgive me when she has a son of her own," his mother said.

"You talk as though she were my wife!" he said, the bitter lines about his set mouth softening in a smile.

"She would be but for what is past," said Mrs. Saxham. "She must be soon, for your sake. Your father would have wished that there should be as little delay as possible. Marry quietly at once, and take her abroad. If she loves you, as I know she does, and must, she will not regret the wedding-gown from Paquin's and the six bridesmaids in Directoire hats."

For that deferred wedding was to have been a gorgeous and impressive function at St. George's, Hanover Square, with a Bishop in lawn sleeves to pronounce the nuptial benediction, palms, Japanese lilies, smilax, and white Rambler roses everywhere, while the celebrated "Non Angli sed Angeli" choir of boy-choristers had been specially engaged to render the anthem with proper fervour and give due effect to "The Voice that Breathed."

Owen promised and went back to London. There were cards and envelopes upon the salver in the hall, but not one from Mildred. That stabbed him to the heart.... Not a line, O God!--not a written line, in answer to that letter in which he told her of the acquittal, and of his father's death, and of his own anguish at having to answer the stern call of filial duty, and leave dear Love uncomforted by even one kiss after all these weeks of famine, and hurry away to lay that grand grey head in the vault that covered so many Saxhams. Not a line. But here was the letter, which his idiot of a servant, demoralised by the recent catastrophe, had forgotten to send on lying waiting upon the writing-table in his study. He snatched at it in desperate haste, and tore the envelope open.

Her letter bore the date of that day. She said she had written before and torn the confession up ... it was so difficult to be just to him and true to herself.... It was a roundabout, involved, youthfully grandiloquent epistle in which Mildred announced that her love for Owen was dead, that nothing could ever resuscitate it; that she could not, would not, ever marry him, and that she had returned in an accompanying packet his ring, and presents, and letters, and would ever remain _his friend_ (underlined) Mildred. In a rather wobbly postscript, she begged him not to write or to attempt to see her, because her decision was irrevocable. She spelt the word with only one _r_.

Saxham read the letter three times deliberately. The walls of the castle he had built, and fondly believed to be a work of Cyclopean masonry, had come tumbling about his ears, and lo! the huge blocks were only bits of painted card, and the Lady of the Castle, his true love, was the false Queen, after all. He folded up the letter and put it away in his pocket-book, and went over to the mantel-glass and looked steadily at the reflection of his own square face, haggard and drawn and ghastly, with eyes of startling blue flaring out from under a scowling smudge of meeting black eyebrows. He laughed harshly, and a mocking devil looked out of those desperate eyes, and laughed back. He unlocked an oak-carved, silver-mounted cellaret, and got out a decanter of brandy, and filled a tumbler, and drank the liquor off. It numbed the unbearable mental agony, though it had apparently no other effect. But probably he was drunk when he rang the bell and said quietly to his man:

"Tait, do you believe there is a God?"

Tait's smooth, waxy countenance did not easily express surprise. He answered, as though the question had been the most commonplace and ordinary of queries:

"Can't say I do, sir. I reckon the parsons are responsible for floating 'Im, and that they made a precious good thing out of bearin' stock in Heaven until the purchasers began to ask for delivery, and after that...." He chuckled dryly. "I've lived with one or two of 'em, and, if I may say so, sir--I know the breed!"

"He knows ... the breed ..." repeated Saxham heavily.

He asked another question, in the same thick, hesitating way, as he moved across the carpet to the oak-and-silver cellaret.

"Tait, when things went damned badly with you, when that other man let you in for the bill you backed for him, and that girl you were to have married went off with someone else, what did you do to keep yourself from brooding? Because you must have done something, man, as you're alive to-day!"

Tait looked at his master dubiously as he poured out more brandy, and went over and stood upon the hearthrug with his back to the empty fireplace, drinking it in gulps. "I did what you're doing now, sir: I took a sight of drink to keep the trouble down. And----" He hesitated.

"Go on," said Saxham, nodding over the tumbler.

"You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said smooth Tait, "and that makes me 'esitate in saying it. But I took on a gay, agreeable young woman of the free-and-easy sort, and went in for a bit o' pleasure, and more drink along with it. One nail drives out another, you know, sir. And if the young lady have thrown you hover----"

"Why, you damned, white-gilled, prying brute! you must have been reading my correspondence," said Saxham thickly, as he lifted the tumbler to his mouth.

Tait grinned. He could venture to tell his master, drunk, what he would not have dared to tell him sober.

"No need for that, sir. I've come and gone between this house and Pont Street too often not to know what was in the wind. Why, Captain Saxham was there with her often and often when you never suspected...."

The tumbler fell from Saxham's hand, and struck the fender, and smashed into a hundred glittering bits.

"Go!" said Tait's master, perfectly, suddenly, dangerously sober, and pointing to the door. The man delayed to finish his sentence.

"While you were in Holloway, sir, and all through the Trial...."

The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been left open. He vanished through it with harlequin-like agility as a terrible, white-faced black figure seemed to leap upon him....

"I've 'ad an escape for my life!" he said, having reached in a series of bounds the safer regions below stairs.

"Of the Doctor?... Go on with your rubbishing nonsense!" said the cook.

"What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear?" demanded the housemaid, who was more imaginative, and cherished the buddings of a romantic passion for one who should be for ever nameless:

"Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by--that's what she've done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his dewy brow. "And seeing the Doctor for the first time since I've been in his service a bit overtook with liquor, and more free and easy like than customary--being a gentleman you or me would 'esitate to take a liberty with in the ordinary way o' things--I thought I'd let 'im know about the Goings On."

"Of them two...." interpolated the cook--"Her and the Captain?"

"Shameless, I call 'em!" exclaimed the incandescent housemaid as Tait signified assent.

"'Aven't they kep' it dark, though!" wondered the cook.

"They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite got over the desertion of the young woman he was to have married, and who had gone off with somebody else, "a precious downy couple. And what I say is--it's a Riddance!"

"How did 'e take it, pore dear?" gulped the housemaid.

"Like he's took everythink--that is, up to the present moment," admitted Tait. "But this is about the last straw."

The housemaid dissolved in tears.

"He'll get another young lady," said the cook confidently. "And him so 'andsome an' so clever, an' with such heaps of carriage-swells for patients."

Tait shook his prim, respectable head.

"The swells'll show their tongues to another man now, my gal, who 'asn't the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coat-sleeve. Whistle for patients now, that's what the doctor may. Why, every one of 'em has paid their bills, and them that haven't have asked for their accounts to be sent in. And it's 'Lady So-and-so presents her compliments,' instead of 'Dear Dr. Saxham.' Done for, he is, at least as far as the West End's concerned.... Mind, I don't set up to be infallible, but experience justifies a certain amount of cocksureness, and what I say is--Done for! Best he can do is--sell the practice, and lease, and plate, and pictures, furniture, and so on, for whatever he can get--the movables would have provoked spirited biddin' at auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under the circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their valoo--and go Abroad." Tait's gesture was large and vague.

"Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel!" sighed the cook.

"And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he don't do away with hisself," sobbed the housemaid. "I do, reely!"

"With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles handy," added the cook.

"Not him!" said Tait. "I'm ready to lay any man the sporting odd against him committing sooicide. He's not the sort. Lord! what was that?"

That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs.

XVII

While the servants talked in the kitchen the master had been sitting quietly in the darkening study. All without and within the man was eddying, swirling blackness. Heat beat and glowed upon his forehead, like the radiation from molten metal; there was a winnowing and fanning as of giant wings or leaping of furnace-fires. The blood in his throbbing temples sang a dull, tuneless song. But presently he became aware of another kind of singing.

It was a little hissing voice that came from the inside of the oak-and-silver cellaret. And it sang a song that the man who sat near had never heard before.