Part 140

"Little enough," said Saxham doggedly, "compared with what I had lost. And as it is the privilege of the Christian to blame either the Almighty or the devil for whatever ills are brought on him by his own blind, reckless challenging of the Inevitable--termed Fate and Destiny by classical Paganism,--so I found myself at odds with One I had been taught to call my Maker."

In His own acre, close to her beloved dead, with all those little white crosses marking where other dust that had once praised Him with the human voice lay waiting for the summons of the Resurrection, it was incredibly awful to her to hear Him thus denied. She grew pale and shuddered, and Saxham saw.

"You see that I wish to be honest with you, and open and above-board. I would not ever have you say to yourself, 'This man deceived--this man misled me, wishing me to think him better than he was.' There is not much more to tell you--save that I took what money remained to me at the bank and from the sale of my last possessions--about a thousand pounds--and shook the dust off from my shoes, and came out here, drunk, to carry out my purpose of self-degradation to the uttermost. And I became a foul beast among beasts that were even fouler, but less vile and less shameful because their mental and moral standard was infinitely lower than my own. And they gave me the name you know of." His voice had the ring of steel smitten on steel. He drew himself up with a movement of almost savage pride, and the knotted veins swelled on his broad white forehead, and his blue eyes blazed under his thunderous smudge of black eyebrows.

"The name you know. It used to be called after me when I reeled the streets--they whispered it afterwards as I rode by. To-day it is forgotten." His nostrils quivered, and he threw out his hands as if with that action he tossed something worthless to the winds. "Miss Mildare, I have not touched Drink--the stuff that was my nourishment and my sustenance, my comfort and my bane, my deadliest enemy and my only friend--since that hour when with the last effort of my will I rallied all my mental and bodily forces to resist its base allurement."

"I know it, Dr. Saxham. I am sure of it." She rose and held out her hands to him, but he folded his arms more closely over his starving, famished heart, and would not see them yet.

"You can be sure of it. Alcohol is no longer my master and my god. I stand before you a free man, because I willed to be free." There was a little blob of foam at one corner of his mouth, but the square pale face was composed, even impassive. "Once, not so long ago, I filled a place of standing in the professions of Surgery and Medicine; I knew what it was to be esteemed and respected by the world. For your dear sake I promise to regain what I have lost; be even more than I used to be, achieve greater things than are done by other men of equal powers with mine. I am not a man to pledge my word lightly, Miss Mildare...." His voice shook now and his blue eyes glistened. "If you would be so--so unutterably kind as to become my wife, I promise you a worthy husband. I swear to you upon what I hold dearest and most sacred--your own life, your own honour, your own happiness, never to give you cause to regret marrying me! For I may die, indeed, but living I will never fail you!"

There was a lump in her throat choking her. Her eyes had gone to that other grave some fifty paces distant from the Catholic portion of the Cemetery. There were freshly-gathered flowers upon it, as upon the grave that lay so near, and two gorgeous butterflies were hovering about the blooms, in mingled dalliance and greediness.

"You loved him," said Saxham, following the journey of her wistful eyes. "Love him still; remember him for every trait and quality of his that was worthy of love from you. But give me the hope of one day gaining from you some shadow of--of return for what I feel for you. Is it Passion? I hardly know. Whether it is Love, in the sense in which that word is employed by many of the women and nearly all the men I have met, I do not know either. But that it is the life of my life to me and the breath of my being--you cannot look at me and doubt!"

She was not looking at him. Her eyes were on the little white cross above the Mother's grave; there was an anxious fold between the slender dark eyebrows.

"You--you wish to marry a Catholic--you, who tell me that you were once a Christian and are now Agnostic?"

"If I have not what is called Faith," said Saxham, "I may at least lay claim to the quality of reverence. And I honour the religion that has made you what you are. Cleave to your Church, child--hold to your pure beliefs, and keep a little love back, Lynette, from your Holy Family and your Saints in Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs it desperately!"

The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than beautiful in its compassion. She said:

"I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day our Lord will give you back the faith that you have lost."

"Thank you, dear!" said Saxham humbly. She was opening her lips to speak again when he lifted his hand and stopped her.

"There is one other thing I should like to make clear. I--am not rich. But neither am I absolutely poor. Letters that I have received from a firm of solicitors acting for the trustees and executors of--a near relative deceased, will prove to you that I am possessed of some small property, bringing in an annual income of something like two hundred pounds, and funds sufficient to settle a few thousands upon my wife by way of marriage-jointure. Believe me," he added, in answer to her look, "I know you to be incapable of a mercenary thought. But what I should have explained to"--he pointed to the grave that lay so near--"to her, I must make clear to you. It could not be otherwise."

She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid her pure cheek upon it, and spoke to the Dead in a low, murmuring tone. Saxham knew as he watched her, breathing heavily, that the consent of the Mother would never have been given to the marriage he proposed. That other obstacle in the road of his desire, the lover who had deceived, had been swept away, with the stern and tender guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He went back in thought to the ending of his long shooting-match à outrance with Father Noah, and remembered how he had promised himself that all should go well with Saxham provided Saxham's bullet got home first.

Were not things going better than he had hoped? She had not even recoiled from him when he had told her of those degraded days of wastrelhood. Surely things were going well for Saxham, he said, as he waited with his hungering eyes upon his heart's desire. What it cost him not to step over to her, snatch her from the ground, and crush her upon his heart with hot and passionate kisses and wild words of worship, he knew quite well. But in that he was able to exercise such a mastery over himself and keep that other Saxham down, Saxham gave praise to that strange god he had set up, and worshipped, and bowed down before, calling it The Omnipotent Human Will.

She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands, thinking. It was very still, and the air was sweet and balmy, and beyond the lines of the defence-works miles upon miles of sunlit veld rolled away to the hills that were mantled in clear hyacinth-colour and hooded with pale rose.

"If I married you, you would take me away from this country and these people who have killed her?"

She had the thought of another in her heart and the name of another upon her lips. But only her eyes spoke, travelling to that more distant grave where the butterflies were hovering above the flowers, as Saxham answered:

"I would take you away, if you wished it."

"To England?"

"Back to England."

"I should see London, and the house where Mother lived...." She seemed to have forgotten Saxham, and to be uttering her thoughts aloud. "I might even see the green mountains of Connemara in Ireland--her own mountains she used to call them. I might one day meet people who are of her blood and name----"

"And of his," thought Saxham, following her eyes' wistful journey to that other grave.

"But," she went on, "it would all depend"--she breathed with agitation and knitted her slim white fingers together, and looked round at him with that anxious wrinkle between her fine eyebrows--"upon how much you asked of me! Suppose I----" His intent and burning eyes confused her, and she dropped her own beneath them. "If I were to marry you, would you leave me absolutely free?"

"Absolutely," said Saxham. "With the most complete freedom a wife could possibly desire."

"I meant--a different kind of freedom from a wife's." She knitted and unknitted her hands. "It is difficult to explain. Would you be willing to ask nothing of me that a friend or a sister might not give? Would you be content----"