The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty c.r.a.pe-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she would be happy to oblige the gentleman.

"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an ordinary caller on business connected with religion."

The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as scenting G.o.dlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream-washed, brown-distemper-dadoed pa.s.sage, smelling of kippered haddocks and incense, to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a view of mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.

Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library; chrome-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by Old Masters hung above. The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a k.n.o.bbly bolster and a patchwork cushion, supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who was lying down.

"I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the p.r.o.ne figure, a single stride having taken him to the side of the sofa, "to prescribe for a man whose nerves are playing him tricks. I have torn up your letter--the epistle in which you ask me to afford you an opportunity of making an avowal which will prove to what depths of infamy a man may descend at the bidding of his lower nature. Lower nature! If I am any judge of a man's physical condition, a lower nature is what you want!" He threw down his hat and stick upon the green-baize-covered table, took one of the Windsor chairs, and crashed it down beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big body on it, and reached out and captured the thin wrist of his victim, who mustered breath to stammer:

"There is nothing whatever the matter with my health. I am well--that is, bodily." He got up from the sofa, and crossed to the Zoological hearthrug, and poked the smoky little fire burning in the narrow grate, for the May day was wet and chilly. "I shall be better, mentally," he said, with an effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham, "when you have heard what I have to tell." He rose up, and turned round, his thin face flaming.

"Mind, I'm not to be gagged by your not wanting to," for Saxham had impatiently waved his hand. "Hear you shall, and must!"

He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that couched on a field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove his hands down deep into his pockets, and the painful scarlet surged over the rim of his Roman collar and dyed his thin, sensitive, beautiful face and high, white forehead to the roots of his dark, curling hair.

"Perhaps you may recall an oath I swore at your instigation one day in your room at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp?"

"Yes--no! What does it matter?" said Saxham thickly, with his angry, brooding eyes upon the floor.

"It matters," said Julius doggedly, "in the present case. I need hardly tell you that I have kept that oath. If the man had not been dead, I might have ended by breaking it--who knows? What I have to tell you is that, some two months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is now your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by a despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen--deservedly fallen--to your lot, sought out Miss Mildare, and told her--something I had learned to your detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling, worthless creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength of a seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."

Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall now instead of the floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His right hand, resting on the table near which he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to hear more. And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the parted wooden mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden:

"I knew that the man lied--on my soul, I knew it! But the opportunity he had given me of lowering your value in--in another's eyes was too tempting to resist. The man had told me----"

"In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," said Saxham; "and, as it happens, he told the truth!" He added: "And what I was then I am now. There is no change in me, though once I thought it!"

"Saxham!... For G.o.d's sake, Saxham!" stuttered Julius. But Saxham, hunching his great shoulders, and lowering his square, black head, not at all unlike the savage bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went on:

"It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham of abstinence and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and various grades in our drunkenness, as in our other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises the common drunkard; and the sippers of ether look down with infinite contempt--or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the toper and the slave of morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxygenated racehorse run for the Cup! A year or so, and the Transatlantic oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equipment of the British athlete.

Even to-day the professional footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer, inhale oxygen as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that is born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The man who scales an Alpine summit winds himself up with a whiff or so; the orator, inspired by oxygen, astonishes the House of Commons or the Bar. And the actor, delirious with oxygen, rushes on the stage; and the clergyman, drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit to preach a Temperance sermon. And the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying tipplers; and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: 'Physician, heal thyself!'"

The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure as he got up. His fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken caves as he took his hat and stick from the table.

"What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrong me. Moralists would say that you acted conscientiously--played the part of a true friend in telling--_her_--what you knew!"

"Of my benefactor--the man who had saved my life!" Julius moistened his dry lips. "Your approving moralist would be the devil's advocate. But I have not forgotten what your own opinion is of the man who tries to enhance his own virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the vices of a rival. And, if you will believe me, I was punished for the attempt. Her look of surprise ... the tone in which she said, 'Did he not save your life?' that was enough!... Then I--I lost my head, and told her that I loved her--entreated her to be my wife, only to learn that she never had--never could----" Julius's thin white fingers knotted themselves painfully at the back of his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks between his gritted teeth: "It was revolting to her--a girl reared among nuns in a Catholic Convent--that a man calling himself a priest should speak to her of love. There was absolute horror in her look as she learned the truth." He groaned. "I have never met her eyes since that day without seeing--or imagining I saw--some reflection of that horror in them!"

"Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations?" said Saxham, not unkindly.

He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure, when Julius stopped him.

"One moment. Has--has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to you of--this that I have told you?"

"Never!" answered Saxham, pausing at the door.

"One moment more! Saxham, is it hopeless? Could you not by a desperate effort break this habit that may--that must--inevitably bring misery to your wife? In the name of her love for you--in the names of the children that may be born of it----"

--"Unless you want me to murder you," advised Saxham, facing the pa.s.sionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a breaking wave, "you had better be silent!"

"My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, "is better than you know.

When I endeavoured--unsuccessfully--to injure you, I robbed myself of my belief in myself. But you--you who gave me back my earthly life, you have robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal G.o.d. Do you know the effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It is a choking fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that day at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 'The Human Will is even more omnipotent than the Deity, because it has created Him, out of its own need!' I have done my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utterance--I have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrung his hands, that were wet as though they had been dipped in water. "I have tended souls as mechanically as a gardener might water pots in which there was nothing but dead sticks and dry earth!"

"Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung by the suffering in the thin young face and in the beautiful haggard eyes, "that I never meant the harm that I appear to have done! Nor can I recall that I have habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I remember that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen an announcement in the _Siege Gazette_ that ... I dare say you understand?" He laughed harshly. "As to my theory of the Omnipotence of Human Will, it is blown and exploded, and all the King's horses and all the King's men will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from.

I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me! Of how far Will, in another man, may carry him, I dare not judge or calculate. My own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows!"

He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a bookcase, and said, pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes:

"The best of us are bad in spots, Parson: the worst of us are good in patches. You Churchmen don't recognise that fact sufficiently.... And I think no worse of you for what you have told me! If I have anything to forgive--why, it is forgiven! Do you try, on the other hand, to think leniently of a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothing of his own to lean upon. As for my wife, in whose interests I know you to be honestly solicitous, I will tell you this much: She will be spared the 'inevitable misery' of which you spoke just now!"

"How? Have you decided to undergo a cure? I have heard," hesitated Julius, "that these things are not always successful--that they sometimes fail!"

"Mine is the only cure that never fails," returned Saxham.

A vision of the little blue-gla.s.s, yellow-labelled vial that held the swift dismissing pang, floated before him. He shook hands with Julius, and went upon his lonely way.

LXVI

Even the saintly of this earth are p.r.o.ne to rare, occasional displays of temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her descent from Eve by stamping her slender foot at her hulking Doctor; had, after a sudden outburst of pa.s.sionate, unreasonable upbraiding, risen from the dinner-table and run out of the room, to hide a petulant, remorseful shower of tears.

Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst--merely an invitation from Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were settled for the London summer season in Eaton Square, for Owen and his wife to spend the scorching months of August and September at the old home, perched on the South Dorset cliffs, among its thrush-haunted shrubberies of ilex and oleander and rose--nothing more.

But Mrs. Owen Saxham had pa.s.sionately resented the idea. Why never occurred to Saxham. He had long ago forgiven and forgotten Mildred's old treachery. If David's betrayal had brought him shame and anguish, it had borne him fruit of joy as well. And if the fruit might never be gathered, if its divine juices might never solace her husband's bitter thirst, at least, while he lived, it was his--to look at and long for. He owed that cruel bliss to his brother and that brother's wife. And their meeting had been, upon his side, free of constraint, unshadowed by the recollection of what had once appeared to him a base betrayal--a gross, foul, unpardonable wrong.

Suppose he had married Mildred, and been uneventfully happy and successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would never have seen and known Lynette. She would never have come to him and laid in his the slight hand whose touch thrilled him to such piercing agony of yearning for the little more that would have meant so much--so much....

Ah, yes! he was even grateful to Mildred. She had not worn well. She had grown thin and _pa.s.see_, and nervous and hysterical. But she was amiable, even demonstrative in her professions of admiration and enthusiasm for Owen's wife. Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the sisterliness of its expression when he was present, if in his absence it was tempered by a regretful sigh--even by a reference to the time:

"_When poor dear Owen thought me the only woman worth looking at in the whole world._ Ah, well! that is all over, long ago!" Mildred would say, with an inflection that was meant to be tenderly rea.s.suring. And she would tilt her still pretty head on one side and smile with pensive kindness at her successor upon the throne of poor dear Owen's heart.

These gentle, retrospective references were never made in the Doctor's hearing. With truly feminine tact they were reserved for Mrs. Owen's delectation. And possibly they might have rankled in those pretty sh.e.l.l-like ears, if their owner had loved Saxham.

But Saxham knew that she did not;--had even ceased to wish that the miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be very dense. When she stamped her foot and cried, "I decline to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to!

If you can forget how hideously she and your brother have treated you, I cannot! I loathe treachery! I abominate ingrat.i.tude and deceit! And I hate her--and I shall not go!" Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had never before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He found his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among the debris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table. Her fetters were galling her to agony, he knew! His square pale face grew more Rhadamanthine than ever, and the gla.s.s he had been filling with port overflowed unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light silken draperies pa.s.sed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure, mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite, where the overset flower-gla.s.s, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must be warned to complete his work without delay.

For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy sh.e.l.l-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas Bendigaid, with that h.o.a.rded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest to his young widow.

Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year before.

He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-pa.s.ses and lashing the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.

When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower, now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion.