Rather an absurd little person, Mrs. Bough. Yet, a tragic little person, in Saxham's eyes at least, by the time she had made her errand plain.

He heard her tell the tale that was not new to him. Cultured, highly-bred women had made such appeals to him before, and without shame. How should this little vulgar creature be expected to have more conscience than they?

They beat about the bush longer, they put the thing more prettily. They spoke of their frail physical health and their husbands' great anxiety, and quoted the long-ago expressed opinion of ancient family physicians, who possibly turned uneasily in their decent graves. But the gist of the whole was, that they did not want children, and Dr. Saxham had such a great and justly-earned reputation in skilful and delicate operations ...

and, in short, would he not be compliant and oblige? They would pay anything. Money was positively no object.

How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of young, rising professional men, who are hampered by honourable debts which threaten to impede and drag them down; who are possessed of high ideals and moral scruples, which, not being essentially, fundamentally embedded and ingrained in the conscience of the man, may possibly be argued away; who have not implanted in their souls and hearts the high reverence for motherhood and the deep tenderness for helpless infancy that distinguished Owen Saxham!

He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others. He began as he had begun with every one of them--the delicate, t.i.tled aristocrats, the ambitious Society beauties, the popular actresses, the women who envied these and read about them in the ill.u.s.trated interviews published in the fashion-papers, and sighed to be interviewed also--to not one of these had he weighed out one drachm less of the bitter salutary medicine that he now administered to Mrs. Bough.

He invariably began with the personal peril and the inevitable risk.

Strange how they ignored it, blinded themselves to it, thrust it, the grinning, threatening Death's-head, on one side. Of course, he talked like that! It was most candid of him, and most conscientious. But if they were willing to take the risk--and antiseptic surgery had made such _huge_ strides in these days that the risk was a mere nothing.... Besides, there was not really need for anything like an operation, was there? He could prescribe the kind of dose that ought to be taken, and everything would then be all right.

He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race, tombs and sepulchres--to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp, trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical knife, cut to heal. When they argued with him, saying that the thing was done, that everybody knew it was done, and that it always would be done, by other men as brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the homilist; he admitted the force of their arguments. Let other men of his great calling pile up and ama.s.s wealth, if they chose, by tampering with the unclean thing. Owen Saxham would none of it. At this juncture the woman would have hysterics of the weeping or the scolding kind, or would be convinced of the righteousness of the forlorn cause he championed, or would pretend the hysterics or the conviction. Generally she pretended to the latter, and swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to mask the rage and hatred in her haggard eyes, and went to that other man. Then, after a brief absence accounted for as a "rest cure," she would shine forth again upon her world, smiling, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had begun to make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had pa.s.sed through the Valley of the Shadow, with only her own rod and staff of vanity and pride to comfort her, she would emerge from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and take to pegging or chloral or spiritualism. Most rarely she would not emerge at all, and then her women friends would send wreaths for the coffin and carriages to the funeral, and would whisper mysteriously together in their boudoirs, and look askance upon the doctor who had attended her. For of course he had bungled shockingly, or everything would have gone off as right as rain for that poor dear thing!

Little Mrs. Bough was of the type of woman that pretends to be convinced.

She had cried bitterly in the beginning, as she confessed to Saxham that she was not really married to Bough, and that the said Bough, whom Saxham had always suspected of being a scoundrel, would certainly go off with "one of them other women and leave her if she went and 'ad a byby." She cried even more bitterly afterwards, as she wondered how she ever could 'a dreamed o' being that wicked! Bough might kill her--that he might!--or go back to South Africa without her; she never would give in, not now. Never now--the Doctor might depend upon that, she a.s.sured him, drying her swollen eyes with a cheap lace-edged handkerchief loaded with patchouli.

She was shaken and nervous, and in need of a sedative, and Saxham, having the drugs at hand, made her up a simple draught, unluckily omitting to make a memorandum of the prescription in his pocket-book, and gave her the first dose of it before she went away, profuse in thanks, and carrying the bottle.

And he saw his waiting patients, and stepped into his waiting brougham, and, having for once no urgent call upon his professional attention, dined with Mildred at Pont Street, and was coaxed into promising to take her to the opening performance of a cla.s.sic play which was to be revived three nights later at a fashionable West End theatre. Mildred had set her heart upon being seen in a box at this particular function, and Saxham had had some trouble to gratify her wish.

He remembered with startling clearness every remote detail of that night at the theatre. Mildred had looked exquisitely fair and girlish in her white dress, with a necklace of pearls he had given her rising and falling on the lovely virginal bosom, where the lover's eyes dwelt and lingered in the masterful hunger of his heart. Soon, soon, that hunger of his for possession would be gratified! It was April, and at the end of July, when work was growing slack, they would be married. They were going North for the honeymoon. A wealthy and grateful patient of Saxham's had placed at his disposal a grey, historic Scotch turret-mansion, standing upon mossy lawns, with woods of larch and birch and ancient Spanish chestnuts all about it, looking over the silver Tweed. In the heat and hurry of his daily round of work, Saxham, who had spent an autumn holiday at this place, would find himself dreaming about it. The smell of the heather would spice the air that was no longer hot and sickly with the effluvia of the city, and the hum of the drowsy black bees, and the cooing of the wood-pigeons would replace the din of the London traffic, and Mildred's eyes would be looking into his, and her cool, fragrant lips would be freely yielded, and her arms would be about his neck, and all those secret aspirations and yearnings and dreams of wedded joy would be realised at last.

He grinned to himself sitting there in the hot darkness of the South African night, the great white stars and the vast purple dome they throbbed in shut out of sight by the miserable little gaily-papered ceiling with its cornice of gilt wood, remembering that everything had ended there. Thenceforth no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom Fate and Destiny, hitherto propitious and obliging, had conspired to lash with scourges, and drive with goads, and hound with despairs and horrors to the sheer brink where Madness waits to hurl the desperate over upon the jagged rocks below.

He supped with them at Pont Street. Mildred came down to say good-night at the door.

"Have you been happy?" he had asked, framing the sweet young face in tender hands, and looking in the pretty, gentle brown eyes.

"You have been so very dear and kind to-night," she had answered, "how could I have helped being happy? And He"--she meant the Semitic actor-manager, whom she romantically adored; whose thick, flabby features and pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eyebrowed with brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately, but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy--"He was so great!

Don't you agree with me--marvellously great?"

Saxham had laughed and kissed the enthusiast. It had appeared to him a dreary performance enough, or it would have, had it not been for Mildred and the dear glamour with which her presence had invested the great gilded auditorium, with its rows of bored, familiar, notable faces in the stalls, representing Society, Art, Literature, Music, and Finance; its pit and gallery crowded with organised bodies of theatre-goers, one party certain to boo where the other applauded, riot and disorder the inevitable result, unless by a coincidence rare as snow at Midsummer the rival a.s.sociations might be won upon to display a unanimity of approval, upon which the dramatic Press-critics would rapturously descant in the newspapers next morning.

XV

Saxham said his lingering sweet good-night, and shut Mildred into the warm, lighted hall, and ran down the steps, and hailed a pa.s.sing hansom, and was driven back to Chilworth Street. It had rained, and the heat, excessive for April, had abated, and the wise, experienced stars looked down between drifting veils of greyish vapour upon the little human lives pa.s.sing below.

As he jumped down at his door and paid his cabman, his quick eye noticed a bicycle leaning against the area-railings. One of his poorer patients was waiting for the Doctor. Or a messenger had been sent to summon him. He let himself into the lighted hall, whistling the pretty plaintive melody of Ophelia's song.

A woman sat on the oak bench under the electric globe, her little huddled-up figure making rather a sordid blotch of drab against the strong, rich background of the wall, coloured Pompeian red, and hung with fine old prints in black frames. Her tawdry hat lay beside her, her haggard eyes were set, staring at the opposite wall; her lower jaw hung lax; the saliva dribbled from the corner of her underlip; her yellow, rigid hands gripped the edge of the bench. It was the woman who pa.s.sed as the wife of the man Bough. And in instant, vivid, wrathful realisation of the desperate reason of her being there, Saxham cried out so loudly that the servant who had let her in and was waiting up for his master in the bas.e.m.e.nt heard the words:

"Are you mad? What do you mean by coming here? Haven't I told you that I will have nothing to do with you and your affairs...."

The voice that issued from her blue lips might have been a scream, judging by the wrung anguish of the awful face she turned upon him; but it was no more than a dry, clicking whisper that the now listening servant could barely hear:

"Don't be 'ard on a woman ... hin trouble, Doctor."

"Hard on you.... On the contrary, I have been too considerate," he said, steeling his heart against pity. "You must go home to your husband, Mrs.

Bough, or apply elsewhere for medical advice. I have none to give you."

His square face was very stern as he took the cab-whistle from the hall-salver, that was packed with cards and notes, and letters that had come by the last post, and a telegram or two. She moaned as he laid his hand on the k.n.o.b of the hall-door.

"It wasn't my doings, Doctor.... Hi told Bough what you said. Hi did, faithful ... an' 'e swore if you wasn't the man to do what 'e wanted, 'e'd be d.a.m.ned but 'e'd find a woman as would! And she come next night--a little, shabby, white-faced, rat-nosed hold thing, shiverin' an' shakin'.

Five pounds she 'ad of Bough, shakin' an' shiverin'. An' he wasn't to send no more to the haddress he knew, because she wouldn't be there. Always move hout ... she says, after a fresh job! Oh, my Gawd! An' Bough, he hordered me, an' Hi 'ad to give in. An' to-night Hi reckoned Hi was dyin'

an' 'e said Hi best harsk you, 'e was about fed up with women an' their blooming sicknesses. So Hi biked 'ere because Hi couldn't walk. An'

now!..." She groaned: "Hi _ham_ dyin', aren't Hi?"

Even to an observation less skilled than that of the expert medical pract.i.tioner the signs of swift and speedy dissolution were written on the insignificant, once pretty, little face. Dying, the miserable little creature had ridden to Chilworth Street, hastening her own inevitable end by the stupendous act of folly, and ensuring Saxham's. That certainty had pierced him, even as the first horrible convulsion seized her and wrenched her sideways off the bench. He caught her, and shouted for his man, and they carried her into the consulting-room, and laid her on a sofa, and he did what might be done, knowing that his mercy on her involved swift and pitiless retribution upon himself. Mrs. Bough died three hours later, as the grey dawn straggled through the blinds, and the men with the district ambulance waited at the door, and Dr. Owen Saxham went about his work that day with a strange sensation of expecting some heavy blow that was about to fall. It fell upon the day following the Coroner's Inquest. He was sitting down to breakfast when a Superintendent of Police arrested him upon a warrant from Scotland Yard.

His servant, very pale, had announced that the Superintendent wished to see the Doctor. The Superintendent was in the room, courteously saluting Saxham, before the man had fairly got out the words.

"Good-morning, sir. A pleasant day!"

"Unlike the business that brings you here, I think, Mr. Superintendent?"

said Saxham, with his square jaw set. His man spilt the coffee and hot milk over the cloth in trying to fill his master's cup. "You are nervous, Tait. You had better go downstairs, I think, unless----" Saxham looked interrogatively at the burly, officially-clad figure of the Law.

"No, sir, thank you. We do not at present require your man, but it is my duty to tell him that he had better not be out of the way, in case his testimony is wanted."

"You hear?" said Saxham; and as white-faced Tait fled, trembling, to the lower regions: "Of course, you are here," he went on, pouring out the coffee himself with a firm hand, and looking steadily at the Superintendent, "with regard to the case of Mrs. Bough? I have expected that a magistrate's inquiry would follow the Inquest. It seemed only natural----"

The Superintendent interrupted, holding up a large hand.

"It is my duty to tell you, Dr. Saxham, that everything you say will be taken down and used against you in evidence."

"Naturally," said Saxham, putting sugar in his coffee. The sugar was used against him. It amused him now to remember that. The Superintendent had never seen a gentleman more cool, he told the magistrate.

"You see, sir, this Case has been fully considered by the authorities, and it has an ugly look; and it has therefore been decided to charge you with causing the death of the woman Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in your consulting-room, on the twentieth instant, when she visited you ..."

"For the first time," put in Saxham quietly.

"That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent. "You were often at her husband's place of business, you know, and may have seen her or not seen her."

"As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a great many of the man's customers besides myself did see her," Saxham went on, eating his breakfast.

"One of my men out there in the hall--I've noticed you looking towards the door----" began the Superintendent.

"Wondering what the shuffling and breathing at the keyhole meant?" said Saxham quietly. "Thank you for explaining."

"One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished breakfast, and then, sir," said the Superintendent, "I am afraid I must trouble you to come with me to Paddington Police Station."

"Very well," said Saxham, frowning, "unless you object to using my brougham, which will be at the door"--he looked at his silver table-clock, a present from a grateful patient--"in ten minutes' time."

"I don't at all mind that, sir," agreed the obliging Superintendent; "and the men can follow in the cab. Any objection?"