The Dop Doctor Part 28

"The Colonel--and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along of 'im--with the red shoulder-straps and brown leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o'

the Staff, they are. An' them others in khaki with puttees--syme as wot I've got on--they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-boneses--twig? You can tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with a serpint climbin' up a stick inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot they carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know about these things, being a sort of Service man meself."

Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid additions had certainly been made to the martial outfit of the previous day. The tweed Norfolk had been replaced by a khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and obligingly taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence of over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, had been sewn upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing it, and it burned the arm that bore it like a vaccination-pustule on the fifth day.

"Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse. He twitched the stripe carelessly into sight. "C'manding orficer marked me down for this to-day," he continued, with elaborate indifference, "along of a Favourable Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much--little turn-up with a 'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be a spy."

In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he recognised the face under the Panama hat worn by the big neighbour in white drill, and blushes swamped his yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face, no longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the previous day, where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly that the heroic leading att.i.tude of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor role of the juvenile walking-gentleman. "Watto!" he began. "It's you, Mister! I bin wantin' to say thank----" But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse against the green-painted iron railings surrounding a munic.i.p.al gum-tree, and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as well that the acquaintance made under conditions remote from respectability should not be renewed. But W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer.

The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a moment, to the disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton and the Colonial of British race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs and the Barala, who antic.i.p.ated a big indaba. The little party of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-drive between the carefully-tended gra.s.s plats to the stoep where the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and several prominent members of the Committee--including Alderman Brooker, puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest--waited. Military Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done.

Inspection followed.

"The warr'ds, said ye?" The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw-boned personage, very evidently hailed from North of the Tweed. "I'm obliged to ye, ma'am," he addressed the fl.u.s.tered matron, "but the warr'ds an' the contents o' the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance--at least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll tak' a look at the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing plant, and the sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff at the kitchens, there would be a moment to spend in ganging through the warr'ds. Unless the Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them?" He turned a small, twinkling pair of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief.

"Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask five minutes more grace in the interests of the friend I spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I made an appointment at the half-hour."

"You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 'The Diseases of Civilisation,' are ye, Colonel? I mind a sentence in it that must have been a douse of cauld watter--toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd--in the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. '_Young men_,' he ca'ed them, as if he was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led to take up Surgery by the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn its scienteefic principles--showy operators, who diagnose wi' the knife an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to a.s.sist her.' And yet Saxham could daur! 'I shall prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out exceesion,' he said, or they say he said in the _Lancet_ report o' the operation on the Grand Duke Waldimir--I cam' across a reprint o' it no'

lang ago--when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' the sweat o' mortal terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He cut a hole in the Duke's stomach, ye will understand, in front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller intesteene, spliced the twa together wi' a Collins b.u.t.ton, and by a successful deveece o' plumbing--naething less--earned the eterr'nal grat.i.tude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists.

All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a hair's-breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or improve upon perfection. Toch!... Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin'

for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day!"

"Rejoice then, Major, and be exceeding glad, for I believe this is the man who wrote the book and plugged--or was it plumbed--the potentate."

The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. "I promise myself a crack or twa wi' him, then.... But how is it a busy chiel like that can get awa'

from his private patients and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter Season Ahem! ahem!"

By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing the conversation, it was plain that he had recalled the circ.u.mstances under which the "busy chiel" had turned his back upon the private patients and the Hospital wards. "Colonel," he went on, "I could be wis.h.i.+ng this varry creeditable-appearing inst.i.tution--judging from the ootside o't--were twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe or so to the back of that."

"My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and happy but once, and that was when we had fifty men down with dysentery and fever in a tin-roofed Railway goods-shed, and a hundred and seventy more under leaky canvas, and you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could get no milk."

"That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the male an' the female character. A man will no' keep on dithering for what he kens he canna' get. A woman, especially a young an' pretty----" He broke off to say: "Toch! will ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the s.e.x sets that lad rampaging."

"Beautiful! I tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp was emphatically a.s.suring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, "the loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see--bar none! I saw her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day she pa.s.sed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my hat to her as the Staff dismounted at the gate."

"Another _rara avis_, Beau?" the Colonel called across the intervening group of talkers. The group of khaki-clad figures separated, and turned first to the Chief, then to the bright-eyed, bright-faced enthusiast.

White teeth flashed in tanned faces, chaff began:

"In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?"

"Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that pretty 'Jollity'

girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, and the postcard grin."

"Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moonless night on the Cape Town Hotel verandah!"

"_She_ turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?"

"Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed...."

"She was neither," the crimson boy declared. "She was simply a lady, quiet and high-bred and simple enough to have been a Princess of the blood, or to look a fellow in the face and pa.s.s him by without the slightest idea--I'd swear to it--that she'd fairly taken his breath away."

"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a t.i.tle.

"Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is--I may say the word--in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce you, unless the Colonel entertains objections ..."

"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian p.r.i.c.kly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."

"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-cla.s.s long-distance eyesight."

There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are ... here she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pa.s.s them."

The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff had congregated.

Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching feminine shapes should pa.s.s across the open s.p.a.ce. One or two Staff monocles went up. The Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his steel-rimmed eyegla.s.ses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose.

They came and pa.s.sed--the white figure and the two black ones. Of these one was very tall, one short and dumpy--veiled and mantled, their hands hidden in their ample sleeves, they went by with their eyes upon the ground. But the girl with them--a slight, willowy creature in a creamy cambric dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and bowed, upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide strings of muslin under her delicate round chin--looked with innocent, candid interest at the group of men outside the Hospital. The tanned faces, the simple workman-like Service dress, setting off the well-knit, alert figures, the quiet, soldierly bearing, even the distant sound of the well-bred voices, pleased her, even as the whiff of cigars and Russian leather that the breeze brought down from the stoep struck some latent chord of subconscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed golden hazel eyes. And cognisant of every fleeting change of expression in those lovely eyes, the taller of her two companions thought, with a stab of pain:

"_Your father was that man's friend, and the comrade of others like him._"

"Now, then!" challenged Beauvayse, as the three figures moved out of sight.

"The 'Girl With the Golden Eyes'?" said somebody.

"You wouldn't speak of her in the same breath with that brainless beast of Balzac's, hang it all!" expostulated the champion. He turned eagerly to the Colonel. "Now you've seen her, sir, would you?"

"Not exactly. And I'm bound to say, I regard your claim to the possession of good taste as completely established.... 'Ware the horse, there! Look out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted orderly before the gates, and rendered nervous by the pressure of the crowd, s.h.i.+ed at the towering _panache_ of imitation gra.s.s-made ostrich feathers trailing from the aged and crownless pot-hat worn by a headman of the Barala in holiday attire, jerked the bridle from the hand of the trooper, and backed, rearing, in the direction of the three women pa.s.sing on the sidewalk. The other horses s.h.i.+ed, frustrating the efforts of the orderly to catch the flying bridle, and the danger from the huge, towering brown body and dangling iron-shod hoofs was very real, seemed inevitable, when a man in white drill and wearing a Panama hat ran out of the crowd, sprang up and deftly caught the loose bridoon-rein, mastered the frightened beast, and dragged it back into the roadway, in time to avert harm.

"Cleverly done, but a close thing," the Chief said, as he turned away. "_I wish I had had that fellow's chance!_" was written in Beauvayse's face. To have won a look of grat.i.tude from those wonderful black-fringed eyes, brought a flush of admiration into those white-rose cheeks, would have been worth while. The slight, tall, girlish figure in its dainty creamy draperies had pa.s.sed out of sight now between its two black-robed guardians. And had not Luck, that mutable-minded deity, given the golden chance to a hulking stranger in white drill, his, Beauvayse's, might have been the hand to intervene in the matter of the Colonel's restive charger, and his the ears to receive Beauty's acknowledgments.

If he had known that her eyes had been too full of his own resplendent, virile, glowing young personality, to even see the man who had stepped in between her and possible danger! The most innocent girl will have her ideal of a lover and thrill at the imagined touch, and furnish the dumb image with a dream-voice that woos her in impossible, elaborate, impa.s.sioned sentences, very unlike the real utterances of Love when he comes. The blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, golden-locked St. Michael portrayed in celestial-martial splendour upon one of the panels of the triptych over the altar in the Convent chapel, had, as he bent stern young brows over the writhing demon with the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of the young soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and profane, Sister Cleophee or Sister Ruperta would have said, to liken a handsome, stupid, young lieutenant of Hussars to the immortal Captain of the Armies of Heaven.

But she knew another who would understand. There was no flaw in the perfect sympathy that maintained between Lynette and the Mother-Superior, though, certainly, since the Colonel's visit of the previous day, the Mother had seemed strangely preoccupied and sad.... Her good-night kiss, invariably so warm and tender, had been the merest brush of lips against the girl's soft cheek; her good-morning had been even more perfunctory; her eyes, those great maternal radiances, turned their light elsewhere.

Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a n.o.ble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the slender white figure leaning from her chamber-cas.e.m.e.nt, whispering, with outstretched hands, and eyes that gleamed through the darkness:

"_Open the door! Do you hear, you Kid? Open the door!_"

Her heart beat once, heavily, and seemed to stop. A cold breath seemed to blow upon the little silken hair-tendrils at the nape of her white neck, spreading a creeping, stiffening horror through her body, deadening sensation, paralysing every limb.

The close approach of any man, even the thought of such contact, turned her deadly faint, checked her pulses, stopped her breath. At picnics and parties and dances to which the Mayor's wife or the mothers of some of the pupils would invite or chaperon her, her vivid, delicate, fragile beauty would draw, first men's eyes, and then their owners, not all unhandsome or undesirable; while showier girls looked in vain for partners or companions. The little triumph, the consciousness of being admired and sought after, would quicken Lynette's pulses, and heighten the radiance of her eyes, and lend animation to her girlish chatter and gaiety to her laughter--at first. Then some over-bold advance, some hot look or whispered word, would bring quick recollection leaping into the lovely eyes, and drive the vivid colour from the virginal transparent face, and stamp the smiling mouth into pale, breathless lines of Fear. That night in the tavern on the veld had branded a child with premature knowledge of the ferocious, ravening, devouring Beast that lies in Man concealed. Again she felt the scorching breath of l.u.s.t upon her; she quailed under the intolerable touch; she shook like a reed in the brutal hands of the evil, dominating power that would brook no resistance and knew no mercy. The horrible obsession came upon her now, all the stronger for those moments of forgetfulness:

"_Clang--clang--clang!_"

The little Irish novice had rung the chapel bell for s.e.xt and None. She could hear, from the nuns' end of the big rambling, two-storied house, the rustling habits sweeping along the pa.s.sage. She hurried to the door, and tore it open, frantically as though that ravening breath had been hot upon her neck, saw the dear black figure of the Mother sweeping towards her, and rushed into the arms that were held out, hiding from that burning, scorching, hideous memory in the bosom that dead Richard Mildare had turned from in his blindness.

Just as Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the Mayor's promise to introduce him to the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life, or ever should see, mentally registered a vow that he would keep the old buffer up to that, by listening to his interminable hunting-stories, and laughing at his venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War, sharpened a fellow's faculties....

"It's rum to reflect," Beauvayse said, conscious of perpetrating an epigram, "that from time immemorial the fellow who wants to make up to a young woman has always had to begin by getting round an old man!"

He looked round for the old man, whom the t.i.tle would have estranged for ever. He had b.u.t.tonholed the Chief, and was ga.s.sing away--joy!--upon the very subject.

"I fancy the ladies of the Convent, who occasionally visit the Hospital, were coming in at this gate. The short nun, I noticed, had a little basket in her hand. Probably they went round to the side entrance, seeing the--ha, ha!--the stoep garrisoned by Her Majesty's Imperial Forces.