That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
countenance this German in taking Patrine to such an infamous place?"
"'Infamous!' Really, Owen, your notions are too old-fashioned for
anything." Her laughter broke out, and her chains and bangles jingled
an accompaniment. "Do," she urged, "come out of your shell. Dine with
us on Thursday. We have a box for the 'Ministers' Theatre. We'll go on,
you and I, George and Irma, from there to the cabaret supper at the
'Rocroy.' We can't afford the 'Upas,' the subscription is too fearfully
prohibitive. But the entertainment at the 'Rocroy' is really
_chic_--the dancing is as good--everyone says--as they have it at
Maxim's. Do come! Of course, you can trust us not to blab to your
wife! Mercy! how severe you look!" Her tone changed, became wheedling,
her made-up eyes languished tenderly. "Odd! how we poor, silly women
prefer the men who bully us. Come! One chance more. Dine Thursday and
see 'Squiffed' at the 'Ministers'--try a whiff of Paris at the 'Rocroy'
after midnight, 'twill buck you up like nothing else--take my word!
Won't you?"
"I will not!"
"Why not?"
"I have told you why not. Because these places are centres of
corruption, schools for the inculcation and practice of vice in every
form. Men and women, young or old, those who take part in or witness
one of these loathsome dances, hot and reeking from the brothels and
voodoo-houses of Cuba and the Argentine are equally degraded. I had
rather see my niece Patrine dead and in her coffin than know her capable
of appreciating such abominable exhibitions, pernicious in their
effects, as I, and others of my profession have grave reason to
know!--ruinous in their results to body, mind, and soul!"
"Intolerable!"
Her plump, middle-aged face was leaden grey beneath her violet veil as
she screamed at him:
"You have insulted me! Horribly--abominably! ... How dare you tell me
that I frequent infamous places, and encourage my daughter to visit
schools of vice! And it is not for Irma you are so rottenly scrupulous,
but for Patrine, your wife's favourite! Who will do as she pleases, and
marry whom she prefers without 'by your leave' or with mine! She is a
mule for self-will and obstinacy--another point of resemblance to
yourself! ..."
He had recovered his stern self-possession. His face was granite as he
said:
"I have not insulted you, but if you will set no example to your
daughters in avoiding these evils, it is my duty to expostulate."
She reared like an angry cobra, then spat her jet of scalding venom.
"I take leave to think my present example quite harmless to Irma and
Patrine. Now yours--of a few years ago--was certainly calculated to
damage the bodily and worldly prospects of your son." She added, as
Saxham silently put out his hand to touch the bell: "No! please don't
ring. I know my way out. Good-morning.... Pray remember me to Bawne
and your wife!"
*CHAPTER XVIII*
*SAXHAM PAYS*
Thus, having shot her bolt, Mildred departed. The Dop Doctor standing
in the open doorway, watched the gaily-accoutred, middle-aged figure in
the peg-top skirt and bouffante tunic of green taffeta patterned with a
violet grape-vine, moving down the white-panelled corridor.
Saxham watched her out of sight before he shut the door and went back to
his chair. There he sat thinking.... No one would disturb the Doctor
until he touched his electric bell.
Ah! if the truth were told, not all of us find solace in the thought
that in the niches of Heaven are safely stored our ancient idols. To
Owen Saxham it was gall and verjuice to remember that for love of this
woman, weak, vain, silly, spiteful, he, the man of intellect and
knowledge, had gone down, quick, to the very verge of Hell.
Mildred was just eighteen when he had wooed and won her. She had been
slight and willowy and pale, with round, surprised brown eyes, an
indeterminate nose, and a little mouth of the rosebud kind. Her neck
had been long and swanlike, her waist long and slim, her hands and feet
long and narrow. He had desired her with all the indiscriminating
passion of early manhood. He had planned to pass his life by her side.
He had hoped that she might bear him children--he had wrought in a
frenzy of intellectual and physical endeavour to take rank in his chosen
profession, that Success might make life sweeter for Mildred--his wife.
She had seemed to love him, and he had been happy in that seeming. Then
the shadow of a tragic error had fallen blackly across his path. From
the omission to copy in his memorandum-book a prescription made up by
himself in a sudden emergency had sprung the branding suspicion that
culminated in the Old Bailey Criminal Case of the Crown _v._ Saxham.
His acquittal restored to him freedom of movement. He left the Court
without a stain on his professional reputation, but socially and
financially a ruined man.
Friends and patients fell away from Saxham--acquaintances dropped him.
Mildred--his Mildred--was one of the rats that scurried from the sinking
ship. She had thrown him over and married David, his brother. Her
betrayal had been the wreath of nightshade crowning Saxham's cup of woe.
Those vertical lines graven on his broad white forehead, those others
that descended from the outer angles of the deep-cut nostrils to the
corners of that stern mouth of his, and yet those others at the angles
of the lower jaw, were chiefly Mildred's handiwork. They told of past
excess, a desperate effort to drown Memory and hasten longed-for death
on the part of a man who had quarrelled with his God.
The demons of pride and self-will, defiance and scorn had been cast out.
An ordeal such as few men are called upon to endure had purified,
cleansed, and regenerated the drunkard. Friendship had taken the
desperate man by the hand, plucked his feet from the morass, led him
into the light and set his feet once more on firm ground. His
profession was his again to follow. Love, real love, had come to him
and folded her rose-white wings beside his hearth.
Years of pure domestic happiness, of successful work, had passed, and
now--the July sunshine had no warmth in it, though it streamed in
through the open window over the tops of the pot-roses. The Dop
Doctor's head was bowed upon his hands, his great shoulders shook as
though he strove with a mortal rigour, the wood of the table where his
elbows leaned, the boards beneath the thick carpet on which his feet
rested, creaked as the long shudders convulsed him at intervals.
It had seemed to Saxham--in whom the seed of Faith had germinated and
put forth leaves in one great night of storm following upon years of
arid dryness--that Almighty God must have forgiven those five worse than
wasted years.
Fool! he now cried in his heart. The Divine Mercy is boundless as the
ocean of air in which our planet swims, and for the cleansing of our
spotted souls the Blood of the Redeemer flowed on Calvary. But He who
said in His wrath that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the
children, does not break, even for those repentant prodigals whom He has
taken to His Heart again--the immutable laws of Nature. Nature, of all
forces most conservative, wastes nothing, loses nothing, pardons
nothing, avenges everything.
The shouted curse, like the whispered blessing, is carried on the
invisible wings of Air forever. Thus, the deformed limb, the devouring
cancer, the loathsome ulcer, and the degrading vice, are perpetuated and
reproduced as diligently and faithfully as the beautiful feature, the
noble quality, the wit that charms, the genius that dominates. Nay,
since Nature turns out some millions of fools to one Dante or
Shakespeare or Moliere or Cervantes, it would appear that she prefers
the fools.
So it is. Divine Grace has reached and saved the sinner. The ugly vice,
the base appetite, have been eradicated by prayer and mortification, by
years of self-control and watchfulness. Free will, moral and physical
force, self-command and self-respect are yours again. And with sobs of
gratitude the erstwhile slave of Hell gives thanks to Heaven.
Saved. Cured. Great words and true in Saxham's case as in many others.
But though they are saved and cured they cannot ever forget. Their eyes
have a characteristic look of alert, suspicious watchfulness. For
wheresoever they move about the world, in the drawing-rooms of what is
called Society, in the business circles of the City, in the barracks or
the mining-camp, on the ship's heaving deck or the floor of the Pullman
carriage; amidst the sands of the Desert or the golden-rod of the
prairie, or the red sand and dry karroo scrub of the lone veld, they
will hear, when they least expect it, the thin, shrill hiss of the Asp
that once bit them to the bone. Or supposing that they have forgotten
in reality--so cleverly has the world pretended to!--with what a pang of
mortal anguish Memory awakens. When you recognise the devil that once
entered and possessed you, looking out of the eyes of your child.
When Saxham lifted up his ashen face and looked at the portrait in the
third leaf of the triptych frame and met the clear, candid gaze of his
son's blue eyes, you know what he was seeking, and praying not to find.
To have given Lynette a drunkard for her son would be the most terrible
penalty that could be exacted by merciless Nature for those five sodden,
wasted years.
Ah! to have had a clean, unspotted life to share with Bawne's fair
mother. That his priceless pearl of womanhood should gleam upon a
drunkard's hand--his spotless Convent lily have opened to fullest bloom
in a drunkard's holding, had been from the outset of their married life,
verjuice in Saxham's cup by day, and a thorn in his pillow by night.
But never before had it occurred to the man of science, the great
surgeon, the learned biologist, that relentless Nature might be saving
up for him, Saxham, a special rod in saltest brine.
Bawne.... He sat in silence with set teeth, asking himself the bitter
question:
"How could I have forgotten--Bawne?"
*CHAPTER XIX*
*BAWNE*
As so often happens, the thought of the beloved heralded his well-known
thump upon the door-panel. When had the Dop Doctor ever cried, "Come
in!" with such a leaden sinking of the heart?
The boy who came in was alert, upright, slim, and strong for his twelve
years. You saw him attired in the dress with which we are all
familiar--the loose shirt of khaki-brown, with its knotted silk
neckerchief of dark blue, the lanyards ending in clasp-knife and
whistle, the roomy shorts upheld by a brown leather pouch-belt
supporting a serviceable axe, the dark blue stockings turned over at the
knee, fitting close to the slim muscular legs, the light strong shoes,
the brown smasher hat with the chin-strap, completed the picture of a
Scout of whom no patrol need be ashamed. He carried his light staff at
the trail, and entering, brought it to an upright position, and saluted
smartly. The salute formally acknowledged, he came straight to the
table and stood at his father's elbow, waiting, as Saxham feigned to
blot a written line. Outwardly composed, the drumming of the man's
heart deafened him, and a mist before his eyes blurred the page they
were bent upon. Fatherhood gripped him by the throat as in the first
moment of his son's separate existence. A thing we prize is never so
poignantly precious as when we contemplate the possibility of its ruin
or loss.
"Father, you aren't generally pleased when I come bothering you in
consulting hours, but this time it is really serious business, no kid,
and Honour bright!"
Saxham answered with equal gravity: