Beaumaroy Home from the Wars Part 4

"Much safer not, sir, as long as we're not driven to it. After all, though I believe the fellow is out to redeem his character, his isn't an unblemished record."

"But the work--the physical labour--entailed on you, Hector!"

"Make yourself easy about that, sir. I'm as strong as a horse. The work's good for me. Remember I've had four years' service."

Mr. Saffron smiled pensively. "It would have been funny if we'd met--over there, you and I!"

"It would, sir," laughed Beaumaroy. "But that could hardly have happened without some very curious accident."

The old man harked back. "Yes, a few more good consignments, and we can think in earnest of your start." He was warming his hands--thin yellowish hands--at the fire now, and his gaze was directed into it.

Looking down on him, Beaumaroy allowed a smile to appear on his lips--a queer smile, which seemed to be compounded of affection, pity, and amus.e.m.e.nt.

"The difficulties there remain considerable for the present," he remarked.

"They must be overcome." Once again the old man's voice became sharp and even dictatorial.

"They shall be, sir--depend on it." Beaumaroy's air was suddenly confident, almost braggart. Mr. Saffron nodded approvingly. "But, anyhow, I can't very well start till favourable news comes from----"

"Hus.h.!.+" There was a knock on the door.

"Mrs. Wiles--to lay the table, I suppose."

"Yes! Come in!" He added hastily to Beaumaroy, in an undertone, "Yes, we must wait for that."

Mrs. Wiles entered as he spoke. She was a colourless, negative kind of a woman, fair, fat, flabby, and forty or thereabouts. She had been the ill-used slave of a local carpenter, now deceased by reason of over-drinking; her nature was to be the slave of the nearest male creature, not from affection (her affections were anaemic), but rather, as it seemed, from an instinctive desire to shuffle off from herself any responsibility. But at all events she was entirely free from Miss Delia Wall's proclivity.

Mr. Saffron rose. "I'll go and wash my hands. We'll dine just as we are, Hector." Beaumaroy opened the door for him; he acknowledged the attention with a little nod, and pa.s.sed out to the staircase in the narrow pa.s.sage. Beaumaroy appeared to consider himself absolved from any preparations, for he returned to the big chair and, sinking into it, lit another cigarette. Meanwhile Mrs. Wiles laid the table, and presently Sergeant Hooper appeared with a bottle of golden-tinted wine.

"That, at least, is the real stuff," thought Beaumaroy, as he eyed it in pleasurable antic.i.p.ation. "Where the dear old man got it, I don't know; but in itself it's almost worth all the racket."

And really, in its present stages, so far as its present developments went, the "racket" pleased him. It amused his active brain, besides (as he had said to Mr. Saffron) exercising his active body, though certainly in a rather grotesque and bizarre fas.h.i.+on. The attraction of it went deeper than that. It appealed to some of those tendencies and impulses of his character which had earned such heavy censure from Major-General Punnit and had produced so grave an expression on Captain Alec's handsome face--without, however, being, even in that officer's exacting judgment, disgraceful. And, finally, there was the lure of unexplored possibilities--not only material and external, but psychological; not only touching what others might do or what might happen to them, but raising also speculation as to what he might do, or what might happen to him at his own hands; for example, how far he would flout authority, defy the usual, and deny the accepted. The love of rebellion, of making foolish the wisdom of the wise, of hampering the orderly and inexorable treatment of people just as, according to the best modern lights, they ought to be treated--this lawless love was strong in Beaumaroy. Not as a principle; it was the stronger for being an instinct, a wayward instinct that might carry him--he scarce knew where.

Mr. Saffron came back, greeted again by Beaumaroy's courtly bow and Hooper's vaguely reminiscent but slovenly military salute. The pair sat down to a homely beefsteak; but the golden-tinted wine gurgled into their gla.s.ses. But, before they fell to, there was a little incident. A sudden, but fierce, anger seized old Mr. Saffron. In his harshest tones he rapped out at the Sergeant, "My knife! You careless scoundrel, you haven't given me my knife!"

Beaumaroy sprang to his feet with a muttered exclamation: "It's all my fault, sir. I forgot to give it to Hooper. I always lock it up when I go out." He went to a little oak sideboard and unlocked a drawer, then came back to Mr. Saffron's side. "Here it is, and I humbly apologize."

"Very good! Very good!" said the old man testily, as he took the implement.

"Ain't anybody going to apologize to me?" asked Hooper, scowling.

"Oh, get out, Sergeant!" said Beaumaroy good-naturedly. "We can't bother about your finer feelings." He glanced anxiously at Mr. Saffron. "All right now, aren't you, sir?" he inquired.

Mr. Saffron drank his gla.s.s of wine. "I am perhaps too sensitive to any kind of inattention; but it's not wholly unnatural in my position, Hector."

"We both desire to be attentive and respectful, sir. Don't we, Hooper?"

"Oh my, yes!" grinned the Sergeant, showing his very ugly teeth. "It's only owing that we 'aven't quite been brought up in royal pallises."

CHAPTER IV

PROFESSIONAL ETIQUETTE

Dr. Irechester was a man of considerable attainments and an active, though not very persevering, intellect. He was widely read both in professional and general literature, but had shrunk from the arduous path of specialism. And he shrank even more from the drudgery of his calling. He had private means, inherited in middle life; his wife had a respectable portion; there was, then, nothing in his circ.u.mstances to thwart his tastes and tendencies. He had soon come to see in the late Dr. Evans a means of relief rather than a threat of rivalry; even more easily he slipped into the same way of regarding Mary Arkroyd, helped thereto by a lingering feeling that, after all and in spite of all, when it came to really serious cases, a woman could not, at best, play more than second fiddle. So, as has been seen, he patronized and encouraged Mary; he told himself that, when she had thoroughly proved her capacity--within the limits which he ascribed to it--to take her into partners.h.i.+p would not be a bad arrangement. True, he could pretty well choose his patients now; but as senior partner he would be able to do it completely. It was wellnigh inconceivable that, for example, the Naylors--great friends--should ever leave him; but he would like to be quite secure of the pick of new patients, some of whom might, through ignorance or whim, call in Mary. There was old Saffron, for instance. He was, in Irechester's private opinion--or, perhaps it should be said, in his private suspicions--an interesting case; yet, just for that reason, unreliable, and evidently ready to take offence. It was because of cases of that kind that he contemplated offering partners.h.i.+p to Mary; he would both be sure of keeping them and able to devote himself to them.

But his wife laughed at Mary--or at that development of the feminist movement which had produced her and so many other more startling phenomena. The doctor was fond of his wife--a sprightly, would-be fas.h.i.+onable, still very pretty woman. But her laughter, and the opinion it represented, were to him the merest crackling of thorns under a pot.

The fine afternoon had come--a few days before Christmas--and he sat, side by side with Mr. Naylor, both warmly wrapped in coats and rugs, watching the lawn tennis at Old Place. Doctor Mary and Beaumaroy were playing together, the latter accustoming himself to a finger short in gripping his racquet, against Cynthia and Captain Alec. The Captain could not cover the court yet in his old fas.h.i.+on, but his height and reach made him formidable at the net, and Cynthia was very active. Ten days of Inkston air had made a vast difference to Cynthia. And something else was helping. It required no common loyalty to lost causes and ruined ideals--it is surely not harsh to indicate Captain Cranster by these terms?--to resist Alec Naylor. In fact he had almost taken Cynthia's breath away at their first meeting; she thought that she had never seen anything quite so magnificent, or all round and from all points of view--so romantic; his stature, handsomeness, limp, renown.

Who can be surprised at it? Moreover, he was modest and simple, and no fool within the bounds of his experience.

"She seems a nice little girl, that, and uncommonly pretty," Naylor remarked.

"Yes, but he's a queer fish, I fancy," the Doctor answered, also rather absently. Their minds were not running on parallel lines.

"My boy a queer fish?" Naylor expostulated humorously.

Irechester smiled; his lips shut close and tight, his smile was quick but narrow. "You're match-making. I was diagnosing," he said.

Naylor apologized. "I've a desperate instinct to fit all these young fellows up with mates as soon as possible. Isn't it only fair?"

"And also extremely expedient. But it's the sort of thing you can leave to them, can't you?"

"As to Beaumaroy--I suppose you meant him, not Alec--I think you must have been talking to old Tom Punnit--or, rather, hearing him talk."

"Punnit's general view is sound enough, I think, as to the man's characteristics; but he doesn't appreciate his cunning."

"Cunning?" Naylor was openly astonished. "He doesn't strike me as a cunning man, not in the least."

"Possibly--possibly, I say--not in his ends, but in his means and expedients. That's my view. I just put it on record, Naylor. I never like talking too much about my cases."

"Beaumaroy's not your patient, is he?"

"His employer--I suppose he's his employer--Saffron is. Well, I thought it advisable to see Saffron alone. I tried to. Saffron was reluctant, this man here openly against it. Next time I shall insist. Because I think--mind you, at present I no more than think--that there's more in Saffron's case than meets the eye."

Naylor glanced at him, smiling. "You fellows are always starting hares,"

he said.

"Game and set!" cried Captain Alec, and--to his partner--"Thank you very much for carrying a cripple."

But Irechester's attention remained fixed on Beaumaroy--and consequently on Doctor Mary; for the partners did not separate at the end of their game, but, after putting on their coats, began to walk up and down together on the other side of the court, in animated conversation, though Beaumaroy did most of the talking, Mary listening in her usual grave and composed manner. Now and then a word or two reached Irechester's ears--old Naylor seemed to have fallen into a reverie over his cigar--and it must be confessed that he took no pains not to overhear. Once at least he plainly heard "Saffron" from Beaumaroy; he thought that the same lips spoke his own name, and he was sure that Doctor Mary's did. Beaumaroy was speaking rather urgently, and making gestures with his hands; it seemed as though he were appealing to his companion in some difficulty or perplexity. Irechester's mouth was severely compressed and his glance suspicious as he watched.

The scene was ended by Gertie Naylor calling these laggards in to tea, to which meal the rest of the company had already betaken itself.

At the tea-table they found General Punnit discoursing on war, and giving "idealists" what idealists usually get. The General believed in war; he pressed the biological argument, did not flinch when Mr. Naylor dubbed him the "British Bernhardi," and invoked the support of "these medical gentlemen" (this with a smile at Doctor Mary's expense) for his point of view. War tested, proved, braced, hardened; it was nature's crucible; it was the antidote to softness and sentimentality; it was the vindication of the strong, the elimination of the weak.

"I suppose there's a lot in all that, sir," said Alec Naylor, "but I don't think the effect on one's character is always what you say. I think I've come out of this awful business a good deal softer than I went in." He laughed in an apologetic way. "More--more sentimental, if you like--with more feeling, don't you know, for human life, and suffering, and so on. I've seen a great many men killed, but the sight hasn't made me any more ready to kill men. In fact, quite the reverse."