Part 139

She yelled with all the power of her Celtic lungs, plucked off her downtrodden shoes, slapped their soles together smartly, and, with a gesture of royal prodigality, tossed them right and left into the air, performed a caper of surprising agility on elephantine, blue-yarn-stocking-covered feet, and was carried away by a roaring surge of the joyous crowd, vociferating.

Saxham felt the slender hand of his charge tighten upon his arm, and his heart leaped as he noted the working of the sensitive face and the heaving of the small, nymph-like bosom under the thin material of her dress. He hoped, he believed that a change was taking place in her. He said to himself that the delicate mechanism of her brain, clogged and paralysed by a great mental shock, was revitalising, storing energy, gaining power; that the lesion was healing; that she would recover--must recover.

Then his quick eye saw fatigue in her. They took her back out of the dust and the clamour and the crowd, back to the quiet of the Cemetery.

It happened there. For as she stood again beside the long, low mound beneath which the heart that had cherished her lay mouldering, they saw that the tears were running down her face, and that her whole body was shaken with sobbing. And then, as a wild tornado of cheering, mingled with drifts of martial music, swept northwards from Market Square, she fell upon her knees beside the grave, and cried as if to living ears:

"Mother;--oh! Mother, the Relief! They're here! Oh, my own darling--to be glad without you!..."

She lay there prone, and wept as though all the tears pent up in her since that numbing double stroke of the Death Angel's sword were flowing from her now. And Sister Tobias, glancing doubtfully up at Saxham's face, saw it transfigured and irradiated with a great and speechless joy. For he knew that the light had come back to the beautiful eyes he loved, and that the Future might yield its harvest of joy yet, even yet, for the Dop Doctor, he believed in his own blindness.

LVI

They were standing together in the same place two months later when he told her all, and asked her to be his wife in his own brusque characteristic way.

"You have been so good, so kind," she said, in rather formal phrase, but with her sweet eyes shining through tears and her sensitive lips trembling. "You have shown yourself to be so noble in your unselfish care for others, in your unsparing efforts for the good and benefit of everyone----"

"Put that by," said Saxham rather roughly, "and please to look at me, Miss Mildare."

He had never called her Lynette since her recovery, or touched the pretty hand he coveted unless in formal greeting.

"Put all that by. You see me to-day as you have seen me for months past, conscientious and cleanly, sober and sane, in body as in mind, discharging my duty at the Hospital and elsewhere as well as any other man possessing the special qualifications it demands. Pray understand that I am not a philanthropist, and have never posed as one. For the sake, first of a man who believed in me, and secondly of a woman whom I love--and you are she--I have done what I have."

He squared his great shoulders and stood up before her, and, though his face had never had any charm for her, its power went home to her and its passion thrilled.

"I play no part. The man I seem to be I am. But up to seven months ago, before the siege began, I was known in this town, and with reason, as the Dop Doctor."

He saw recollection waken in her eyes, and nerved himself to the sharp ordeal of changing it to repulsion and disgust.

"You have heard that name applied to me. It conveyed nothing loathsome to your innocent mind. You once repeated it to me, and were about to ask its meaning. I had it in my mind then to enlighten you, and for the mean and cowardly baseness that shrank from the exposure I have to pay now in the"--a muscle in his pale face twitched--"the exquisite pain it is to me to tell you to-day."

"Then do not tell me." She said it almost in a whisper. "Dr. Saxham, I beg you most earnestly to spare yourself." She dropped her eyes under the fierce earnestness of his, and knitted her cold little hands in one another. "Please leave the rest unsaid," she begged, without looking at him.

"It cannot be," said Saxham. "Miss Mildare, the Dop Doctor was only another nickname for the Town Drunkard. And now you know what you should have known before if I had not been a coward and a knave."

She turned her eyes softly upon him, and they could not rest, it seemed to her, upon a man of braver and more lofty bearing.

"I was the Town Drunkard," Saxham went on, in the cold, clear voice that cut like a knife to the intelligence. "Known in every liquor-saloon, and familiar to every constable, and a standing butt for the clumsy jests that the most utter dolt of a Police Magistrate might splutter from the Bench." His jarring laugh hurt her. "The Man in the Street, and the Woman of the Street, for that matter--pardon me if I offend your ears, but the truth must be told--were my godfather and my godmother, and they gave me that name between them. You are trembling, Miss Mildare. Sit down upon that balk, and I will finish."

There was a remnant of timber lying near that had been used in the construction of a gun-mounting. She moved to it and sat down, and the Doctor went on:

"I am not going to weary you with the story of how I came to be--what I have told you. But that I had lived a clean and honourable and temperate life up to thirty years of age--when my world caved in with me--I swear is the very truth!"

She said gently: "I can believe it, Dr. Saxham."

"Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And then, at the height of my success, and on the brink of a marriage that I dreamed would bring me the fulfilment of every hope a man may cherish, one impulse of pity and charity towards a wretched little woman brought me ruin, ruin, ruin!"

Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about. She was glad to see the Saxham of her knowledge in that Saxham whom she had not known. He folded his great arms upon his broad breast and went on:

"Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Rehabilitation in the eyes of the Law--for I gained that much--did not clear me in the eyes of Society--that hugs the guilt-stained criminal to its heart in the full consciousness of what his deeds are, and shudders at the innocent man upon whom has once fallen the shadow of that grim and bloody Idol that civilisation misnames Justice. I was cast out. Even by the brother I had trusted and the woman I had loved. I had in a vague way believed in God until then; I know I used to pray to Him to bless those I loved, and help me to achieve great things for their sakes. But nothing at all was left of that except a dull aching desire to throw back in the face of the Deity the little He had left to me. My health, and my intellectual powers, and my self-respect...."

Her voice came to his ears in the half-whispered words:

"Had He left you so little, after all?"