Part 145

"Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out of the Other Shop--an' landin' in the middle of New Jerusalem! Weeks along"--he picked up the shabby bowler that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet--"for weeks along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me! Now I knows! I've bin 'omesick--fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of the very plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of four months back. Good old Gueldersdorp!" He winked the wet out of his eyes and pointed to Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?"

Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said, touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the inner corner of the right eye:

"You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you at the Hospital."

"Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since she's bin' my wife----" The prominent Adam's apple in his thin throat jerked. He gulped a sob down as he looked at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her mate, there shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face darkened with angry blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage impulse to dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his own beggary.

Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet fire in answer to the challenge of his own! Empty, empty the heart whose chambers were swept and decked and garlanded for a guest who never came! Lonely, lonely, desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of her--dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was yet to man!

He had said to her: "But come to me, and I shall be content--even happy. Live under my roof, take the shelter of my name--I ask no more!"

He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be companioned, in the silence that would never be broken by Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He was not content; his craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and gnawed his heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal. Happy--was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this happiness she had conferred upon him--and that was to be without her.

He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling misery, and kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the absurd little couple. W. Keyse was tested, proved capable of manipulating the steering-wheel, duly certificated, and engaged. There were a couple of living-rooms over the coach-house that was now a garage. Saxham sent in some plain furniture, and behold an Eden! Pots of ferns purchased from a street hawker showed greenly behind the tidiest muslin blinds you ever sor! and Mrs. William Keyse, expectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and as she patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn--and whether they're let out on hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat 'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come back from Them Plyces is something chronic!--she sang, sometimes "Come, Buy My Coloured 'Erring," which they learned you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board School in Kentish Town; and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come True!"

This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two rooms--one of them opening upon nothing by a loft-door--over a garage that had been a coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin running on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights were switched on, before the inner blinds were drawn down, you could see quite plain into the consulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat at his big writing-table that was heaped with notebooks and papers and had a telephone on it, and all sorts of mysterious instruments in shining brass and silver, as brightly polished as the gleaming thing with a lid, shaped like a violin-case and with a spirit-lamp underneath it, in which all sorts of wicked-looking knives and forceps were boiled when they were taken out of the black bag; or into Mrs. Saxham's bedroom, that was on the floor above, and was done up in the loveliest style you ever! "Not that Missis W. Keyse would exchange 'er present quarters for Buckin'am Palace," she declared, pouring out her William's tea, "if invited to do so by 'er Majesty the Queen 'erself."

William stopped blowing at his smoking saucer.

"They s'y She's dyin'!" His face lengthened. He put the saucer down. "They 'ave it in the evenin' pypers!"

Mrs. Keyse had a flash of inspiration.

"I reckon it don't seem dyin' to 'Er!"

"Wot are you gettin' at?" asked the man in bewilderment.

"I'm gettin' at it like this," said the lighter brain. "All 'er long life she's 'ad to be a queen first, an' a wife after. Now she lays there she's no more than a wife--a wife wots goin' to meet 'er 'usband agin after yeers an' yeers o' waitin'. For 'er Crown she leaves be'ind 'er for 'er son, but 'er weddin' ring goes wiv' 'er in 'er coffin! See?"

"I pipe. Wonder wot 'Er an' 'Im 'll s'y to one another fust thing they meet?"

"They won't s'y nothink," said the visionary, soberly taking tea. "But I shouldn't be surprised but wot they'd stand an' look in one another's fyces wivout s'yin' a word, for a week or so by the Time Above, an' the tears a-runnin' down an' never stoppin'!"

"Garn! There ain't no cryin' in 'Eaven," said W. Keyse, beginning on the bread-and-butter. "The Bible tells you so!"

"That's right enough. But I lay Gawd lets folks do a bit o' blub--just once," said Emigration Jane, "before 'E wipes their eyes, becos you don't begin to know wot 'appiness means until you've cried for joy!"

"I pretty near did when the Doctor give me this chauffeuring job, and so I tell you stryte," affirmed her lord. "D'you know I 'ad a shy at thankin' 'im agyne, an' got my 'ead bit orf. 'Shut your damned mouth!'--that's wot the Doctor s'ys to me. Well, I 'ave shut it!" He closed his jaws upon an inch-thick slice. "But wot I s'y to myself is," he continued, masticating, "that makes the Third Time, an' the Third Time's the Charm!"

"Wot do you mean by the third time, deer?" asked Mrs. Keyse, putting more hot water in the teapot.

"The First," said W. Keyse, with an air of mystery, "was in a saloon-bar full o' Transvaal an' Free State Dutchies at Gueldersdorp."

"Lor'! You don't ever mean----" began his wife, and stopped short. The scene of her first meeting with W. Keyse flashed back upon her mental vision. She saw the big man waking up out of his drunken stupor and lurching to the rescue of the little one. "Was it 'im?" she panted, as the teapot ran over on the clean coarse cloth. "Was it Dr. Saxham?"

"You may tyke it from me it was." W. Keyse rescued the kettle, restored it to the hob, returned to his place, and shook his finger at her warningly. "And if you go to remind me as wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e did----" He looked portentous warnings.

"I never would. Oh, William!"

"Mind as you never do, that's all!... I tried to thank 'im then," went on W. Keyse, "an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im agyne at the Hospital--an' e' wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is own doorstep, an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is--Wait! When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion back...."

"I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse, "But it was a mouse"--she repressed a shudder--"an' not the--thing you said."

"Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse with burning eyes. "And the Doctor's goin' to find it does." He held up his lean right hand and swore it. "So 'elp me, Jimmy Cripps!"