Читать книгу: «The Dop Doctor», страница 48

"By the Living Tinker!" he thundered, "I wouldn't have believed it of her!"

"Of course you wouldn't!" She rummaged in an open suit-case. "What necktie do you want to wear to-day?"

He mumbled ruefully, eyeing her over the coffee-cup:

"Any of 'em. It don't matter which. They're all alike when you've tied 'em!"

She beamed at what seemed to her a gallant speech.

"Sans compliment? You really mean it? And you won't miss Grindlay so frightfully, after all?"

He shook his head ambiguously.

"I shan't begin really to suffer for Grindlay – not till it comes to tubbin' with one fin."

"Mercy upon us!" She gasped in consternation. He said, controlling his features from wreathing into triumphant smiles:

"You were so cast-iron certain you could fill his place, you know!"

Her bright black eyes were hidden under abashed and drooping eyelids. Blushes played hide-and-seek in the small cheeks that were usually pale.

"In – in everything essential," she stammered, avoiding his intolerable gaze.

"Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in ordinary, everyday affairs!" The man pursued his advantage pitilessly. "Didn't you regard it as essential that I should wash?"

She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him.

"Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that decided me on marrying you was that you were invariably propre comme un sou neuf."

"I thought, on mature reflection," said Bingo, lying down under the lightened tray with a replete and satisfied air, "that you would prefer a clean husband to a dirty one. Therefore I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay at the Herion Arms. That's his knock. Come in!"

The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing respectfully at sight of her ladyship, who gave him a gracious good-morning, dissembling the intense relief experienced at sight of his smug, clean-shaven countenance.

"Good-morning, Grindlay. I hope the Hotel people made you comfortable. And now you have arrived to take responsibility off my hands," she announced, "I'll go and get some breakfast."

"Haven't you … You're joking!" The tray shot from the bed into Grindlay's saving clutch as Bingo suddenly assumed the perpendicular. "You don't mean to say that you've been starving all the time I've been gorging myself like – like a boa-constrictor?" he demanded furiously. "Why on earth are women such blessed – "

" – Idiots?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch her Parthian shaft. "Because if they were intellectual, logical beings they would know better than to lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative, heartless, dull dolts of men!"

The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's face was a study in immobility. Bingo, after a little more meditation, ponderingly rose and submitted himself to the hands of the attendant. When the Major's toilet had reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his reflections with a sigh.

"Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her ladyship to be good enough to step up here. Tell her that your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I want a little more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will you!"

"O Lord! What a liar I am!" he murmured fervently, addressing his reflection in the glass. His wife's face appeared over his shoulder, bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she adroitly assumed the office vacated by the discarded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance on the scene:

"So you can't get on, it appears, without your blessed idiot?"

"Blessed angel, you mean!" said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out the word!"

"If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, "perhaps I might be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."

"Concernin' – ?"

"Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."

"Well, what of her?"

She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But her eyes were misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.

"This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, that in your place she wouldn't have been one-millionth part as patient with a restless, ambitious woman cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and other people into hot water." She made a little affected grimace that masked a genuine smart. "Not hot water only – boiling lava sometimes – fizzling vitriol – "

He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and quivering chin:

"Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like gout and the rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, however much you try. It's like shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts; his spots are in his skin! See?"

"Merci du compliment!" Her jangling laugh rang out as if a stick had been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. But her eyes were wet. His own eyes reverted to his reflection in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden bellow made her drop the comb.

"My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! Made a Loop Railway down the middle of my head, unless my liver's making me see things curly. Don't swot at it any more; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once… By the Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a brute!" he pleaded.

"Darling! – dearest! – you haven't – you've never!.. The boot's on the other leg, though wild horses wouldn't get you to own as much!" His strong left arm was round her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his throat in his ponderous, scraping way, admitting:

"Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so – of nights in bed at Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof South, between ring-ups on the telephone when the off-duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the blessed earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not?"

"There were people ready to tell you – years before we saw Gueldersdorp – that the one you'd got was as good as none…"

"Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their opinions!" She felt his great muscles swell as the big hand tightened on her waist. "Though, mind you, there have been times when for your own sake, by Jingo! I'd have given all I was worth to have you a bit more like other women – "

"Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win distinction as War Correspondents. Who funk raw-head and bloody bones" – she shook with a nervous giggle – "and all that sort of thing… Would it please you to know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last quill – that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic Partlet, clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement of the coop?"

"You've said as much before!" he objected.

"But now I mean it! Put me to the test. Let the house in Wilton Place – we'll live at Wrynche Rodelands, if you think you won't be bored?"

He bellowed joyously!

"Me bored! With ten thousand acres arable and wood and moorland to farm and preserve and shoot over, two first-class packs meetin' within a fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, the Committee of the local Polo Association shriekin' for a President, and the whole County beggin' me with tears in its eyes to take the hint a Certain Person dropped when he gave me my C.B., and accept the Crown Commission as Lord-Lieutenant! 'Bored' – I like that!"

"If you would like it, be it!" she flashed. "Trust me to back you up. I can and I will! I'll help you entertain the military authorities and their women, keep the Rolls, sit on the Bench when you weigh in as Chief Magistrate, and prompt you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things to one man – and you shall be the man! Only" – she laughed hysterically, her face hidden against his big shoulder – "I don't quite know how far these things are compatible with my new rôle!"

"Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home Coop." His big hand patted her almost paternally. "Leave cluckin' to hens with families. Do you suppose I'm such a pachydermatous ass that I can't understand that home is a make-believe to a real woman, when – when there isn't even one chicken to tuck under her wing! Worse luck for me and you!"

She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to him. Her black eyes were shining through the tears that rose and brimmed over and fell.

"If I told you that the luck had changed, would that make you happy?"

He cried out with a great oath:

"Yes, by G – !" and caught her to his leaping heart.

LXVIII

In the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many interviews held with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch and dinner, learned much anent the difficulty of obtaining fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as regards the Satanic duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist butcher will substitute New Zealand lamb for the native animal, and still more about Saxham.

Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the Doctor's grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's worth of Master Owen, from the first time she set eyes on him in a white frock, with a sausage-roll curl and diamond-patterned socks. She had a venerable and spotty photograph of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a velvet suit and lace collar, and another photograph, coloured by hand, taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for out of his own pocket-money, to send to Janellan, who had nursed him through a holiday scarlet-fever. And regularly had her blessed boy remembered her and Tafydd, said Janellan, until the Cruel Time came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then Mrs. Saxham died, and the Captain – mentioned by Janellan with the ringing sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement – had turned her and her old man out of the Plas "without as much as that!" – here Janellan snapped her strong thumb-nail against her remaining front tooth – in recognition of their forty years of faithful service.

But Master Owen, coming to his own again, "and 'deed an' 'deed, but the Plas ought to have been his from the beginning!" had sought out the old couple, living in decent poverty at St. Tirlan's, and reinstated them in their old home. And well might Tafydd, who was a better judge of the points of a pig than any man in Herion – or in all Wales for the matter of that – well might Tafydd declare that the Lord never made a better man than Dr. Owen Saxham! What grand things they had said of him in the papers! No doubt the young mistress would have plenty more to tell that had not got into print?

"I can tell you many things of the Doctor," said Lynette, smiling in the black-eyed, streaky-apple face "that you and Tafydd will be proud and glad to hear."

She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule but this morning she stooped and kissed the red-veined, wrinkled cheek within Janellan's white-quilled cap-border. Then, her household duties done, she pinned a rough, shady straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose chamois-leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were, perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from the hall-rack, ran down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the spidery, red-rusted iron foot-bridge that spanned the railway-line, descended upon the farther side of the wood of chestnut and larch that made green shadows at the base of the cliff, and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the free, undulating gait she had acquired from the Mother, towards the restless line of white breakers that rose and fell a mile away.

She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom-company; a new hope gave her strength. She drank in long draughts of the strong, salt, fragrant air, and as it filled her lungs, knew her soul brimmed with fresh delight in the beauty of the world. And a renewed and quickened sense of the joy of life made music of the beating of her pulses and the throbbing of her heart.

She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a daughter of this sea-girt Britain: the blue, restless waves beyond that line of white frothing breakers washed the shores of the Mother's beloved green island, Emerald Airinn, set in silver foam. A few miles, St. George's Channel spanned – then straight as the crow flies over Wicklow, Queen's County, King's County, taking Galway at the acute angle of the wild mallard's flight; and there would be the chained lakes and winding silver rivers, the grey-green mountains and the beetling cliffs, the dreamy valleys and wild glens of Connemara, with the ancient towers of Castleclare rising from its mossed lawns studded with immemorial oaks. And Loch Kilbawne among the wild highlands, and Lochs Innsa and Barre, and Ballybarron Harbour, with its Titanic breakwater, and three beacons, and the dun-brown islands bidden in their veil of surf-edged spindrift, shaken by the voices of hidden waters roaring in their secret caves.

A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden eyes dreamed as she walked on swiftly, a slender figure dressed in a plain skirt of rough grey-blue, and a loose-sleeved blouse of thick white silk, her slight waist belted with a silver-mounted lizard-skin girdle, a pleasant tinkle of silver châtelaine appendages accompanying her steps.

And those steps were to her no longer uncompanioned. It was as though the Mother were living, so enfolding and close was the sense of her presence to-day. God was in His Heaven, and the world, His footstool, bore the visible impress of His Feet. And it seemed to Lynette, who had learned to see the faces of Christ and of His Mother Mary through the lineaments of the earthly face that had first looked love upon herself in her terrible abandonment, that those Divine and glorious countenances looked down on her and smiled. And her chilled faith spread quivering wings, basking in their ineffable mild radiance as the little blue and tortoiseshell butterflies basked in the glorious sunshine that had followed the morning's storm.

The tangible presence seemed to move beside her, through the white powdery sand. Over the knotted grasses, between the tufts of poppies and the prickly little yellow roses that fringed the hollows, the garments of another seemed to sweep beside her own. The folds of a thin veil upborne on the elastic breeze fluttered beside her cheek, blew against her lips, bringing the rare delicate fragrance – the familiar perfume that clung to everything the Mother habitually wore and used and touched. She did not look round, or stretch out her hand. She walked along, drinking in blissfulness and companionship at every pore of her thirsty soul, joyfully realising that this would last; that by-and-by the great void of loneliness would not close in on her again.

Only the night before, upon the brink of the supreme discovery that the dead in Christ are not only living in Him, but for us also who are His, she had hesitated and doubted. Before the sunrise of this glorious day she had learned to doubt no more.

* * * * *

She had been restless and unhappy. Saxham had not written for a week. She bitterly missed the short, cold, kind letters in the clear, small, firm handwriting, that had reached her at intervals of three days, to be answered by her constrained and timid notes, hoping that he was well and not overworking, describing the place and her pleasure in it, without mention of her loneliness; giving details of Major Wrynche's progress towards recovery, and left-handed attempts at golf, winding up with messages from Lady Hannah and dutiful remembrances from Tafydd and Janellan, and signed, his affectionate wife, Lynette Saxham.

Trite and laboured and schoolgirlish enough those epistles seemed to their writer. To Saxham they were drops of rain upon the parching soil of his heart, the one good that life had for him in this final lap of the race. And yet he had ceased to write that they might come no more.

If he had known how his own letters to her were welcomed, how tenderly they were read and re-read, how sweetly kept and cherished… But he did not know! He could only look ahead, and strain on to the nearing goal with the great, dim, mysterious curtain hanging beyond it, hearing the thudding of his wearied heart, and the whistling of those sharp breaths in his strained lungs, and the measured sound of his own footfalls bearing him on to the end, while night closed in on her, fevered and wakeful in her bed, thinking of him, praying for him, longing for the sight and sound of him. Sleep, when it came now, brought her dreams less crystal than of old. Hued with the fiery rose of opals some, because in these he loved her; and that shadowy woman, in whose existence she only half-believed, had no part in him at all. But on the night preceding the revelation she had not dreamed.

She awakened in the grey of dawn, when the thrushes were calling, and lay straight and still, listening to the glad bird-voices from the garden, her soft, fringed eyelids closed, her white breasts gently heaving, her small feet crossed, her slender, bare arms pillowing the little Greek head; a heavy plait of the silken wealth that crowned it drawn down on either side of the sweet, pale face and the pure throat, intensifying their virginal beauty. The dull smart of loneliness, the famished ache of loss, were gone altogether. She felt strangely peaceful and calm and glad. Then she knew she was not at Herion; she was not even in London… She was back at the Convent, in the little whitewashed room with the stained deal furniture – the room with the pleasant outlook on the gardens that had been hers from the first. Surely it was past the rising hour? Ah, yes! but she had had a touch of fever. That was why she was lying here so quietly, with the Mother sitting by the bed.

There could be no doubt… The light firm, pressure that she knew of old was upon her bosom, just above the beating of her heart… That was always the Mother's way of waking you. She sat beside you, and looked at you, and touched you, and presently your eyes opened, that was all!.. Thinking this, a streak of gold glimmered between Lynette's thick dusky lashes; her lips wore a smile of infinite content. She stole a glance, and there it was, the large, beautiful, lightly clenched hand. The loose sleeve of thin black serge flowed away from the strong, finely moulded wrist; the white starched guimpe showed snowy between the drooping folds of the nun's veil… These familiar things Lynette drank in with a sense of unspeakable content and pleasure. Then – her eyes opened widely, and she knew.

She was looking into eyes that had seen the Beatific Vision – great grey eyes that were unfathomable lakes of heavenly tenderness and love divine. And the face that framed them was a radiant pale splendour, indescribable in its glorious beauty, unfathomable in its fulfilled peace. Her own eyes drank peace from them, deeply, insatiably, while the Herion thrushes sang their dewy matins, and the scent of mignonette and sweet-peas and early roses mingled with the smell of the sea, stole in at the open casement where the white blind swelled out like a breeze-filled sail.

How long Lynette lay there storing up content and rapture she did not know, or want to know. But at last the wonder of those eyes came nearer – nearer! She felt the dear pressure of the familiar lips upon her own. A fragrance enveloped her, an exquisite joy overbrimmed her, as a voice – the beloved, unforgotten voice of matchless music – spoke. It said:

"Love your husband as I loved Richard! Be to a child of his what I have been to you!"

* * * * *

Eyes and face and voice, white hand and flowing veil, were all gone then. Lynette sat up, sobbing for joy, and blindly holding out her arms, and the rising sun looked over the mountains eastward, and drew one hushing, golden finger over the lips of the cold, grey, whispering sea.

LXIX

A thin, subterraneous screech, accompanied by a whiff of cinder-flavoured steam, heralded the Down Express as it plunged out of the cliff-tunnel, flashed across an intervening space, and was lost among the chestnuts and larches. A metallic rattle and scroop told that the official in the box on the other side of the Castle bluff had opened the points. And hearing the clanking bustle of the train's arrival in the station, Lynette reminded herself with a sigh of relief that her maid was packing, that she would presently make her excuses to Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, and that the midnight up-mail should take her home to Owen.

Her course lay clear now, pointed out by the beloved, lost hand. But for this Heaven-sent light that had been cast upon her way, Lynette knew that she might have wandered on in doubt and darkness to the very end.

She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the most of men, and are doomed to receive in grudging measure. A pliant, dependent, essentially feminine creature, she was made to lean and look up, to be swayed and influenced by the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and led, and to love the guide.

Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet with the beating of celestial wings.

She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw down the pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her ignorance of herself and of him. She would humble herself to entreat for that rejected crown of wifehood. Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her, she said to herself that she would win him back again.

She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the frothing line of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints of her little brown shoes were brimmed with sea-water, she lifted her skirt daintily, and went forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden, had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging freshness, then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen companion at her side.

The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a distant golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled, building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.

It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown shoes upon the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked down. A pearly-pale cup fringed with blazing poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping mother – a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes. Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled; then, as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and womanly pity for her isolation broke from Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the stranger's face, narrowing her eyes.

Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green, long-shaped and thick-lashed; bold red, laughing mouth – where had Lynette seen them before? With a strange sense of renewing an experience she ran down into the hollow, and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it up and kissed it soundly.

"Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the kisses. "Where are mother and nurse?"

"Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of pearly-golden brows, and a little querulous cry of impatience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart squirmed out of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the most cherubic of pink legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she answered no more questions, but with truly aristocratic composure resumed her interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more, she had arranged to fill her shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of having no other engagement so absorbing.

Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Perhaps the missing guardians of this lost jewel were quite near after all, sitting with books and work and other babies in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from whence this daring adventurer had escaped unseen… She ran up the steep side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the sky, and the white sand streamed back from under the little brown shoes that had trodden upon Saxham's heart so heavily.

No one was near. Only in the distance, toiling over the dry waves of the sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by which the hilly main street of Herion may be gained, went a white perambulator, canopied with white, and propelled by a nurse in starched white skirts and flying white bonnet-strings – a nurse who kept her head well down, and was evidently reading a novel as she went. Some yards in advance a red umbrella bobbed against the breeze like a giant poppy on a very short stem. The lady who carried the flaming object was young; that much was plain, for the fluttering heliotrope chiffons of her gown were held at a high, perhaps at an unnecessarily lofty, altitude above the powdery sand, and her plumply-filled and gleaming stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred with black, and her dainty little high-heeled shoes were very much in evidence as they topped a rising crest. Then they disappeared over the farther edge, the red umbrella followed, and the nurse, in charging up the steep after her mistress, discovered, perhaps by a glance of investigation underneath the canopy, prompted by a too tardy realisation of the suspicious lightness of the perambulator, that the shell was void of the pearl.

Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek, glimpsed the red umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-crest, comprehended the horrible consternation of mistress and maid. She must signal to them – cry out… Involuntarily she gave the call of the Kaffir herd: the shrill, prolonged ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across the miles of karroo or high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved it, standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow – a squat, blue dwarf with arms out of all proportion – flourished and gesticulated at her feet.