Kitabı oku: «The Dop Doctor», sayfa 35

XLVII

To the remarkably complete system of underground wires installed by the Garrison Telephone Corps, Lady Hannah Wrynche, on duty at the Convalescent Hospital that was once the Officers' Club, was, upon the Thursday that saw the publication of the string of paragraphs previously quoted from the Siege Gazette, indebted for what she afterwards described with ruefulness as a "heckled morning."

Once a week the "Social Jottings," bubbling from the effervescent Gold Pen, descended like rain upon the parched soil of drouthy Gueldersdorp. To make gossip where there is none is as difficult as making bricks without clay, or trimming a hat when you are a member of the Wild Birds' Protection Society, and plumage is Fashion's latest cry. Under the circumstances a genuine item of general and public interest was a pearl of price. And yet something had told the little lady that the ruthless Blue Pencil of Supreme Authority would deprive her of the supreme joy of casting it before the readers of the Siege Gazette. She seemed to hear him saying, in the pleasant voice she knew so well:

"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."

He had said that on Sunday, when she had pleaded for a freer hand. Well, he could hardly call the announcement of an engagement a personality, and, supposing he did, how easy to convince him that it was nothing of the kind!

She dashed off her description of the Convent kettledrum, and added the paragraphs we know of, each one accentuated by an explosion of asterisks, and gave the blotty sheets to Young Evans, who combined in his sole person the offices of sub-editor, engineer, chief-compositor, feeder, and devil.

Young Evans, who, next to the single-cylinder printing-press driven by the little oil-engine that had sustained a shell-casualty at the beginning of the siege, adored Lady Hannah, vanished behind the corrugated partition that separated the office from the printing-room, and presently came back in inky shirt-sleeves with a smear of lubricating-oil upon his forehead, and laid the wet slips upon the Editorial table. Then he went back, and fell to tinkering at his machine. Lady Hannah corrected her proof. When she had done she looked at her wrist-watch. In ten minutes Supreme Authority would descend the ladder, wield the Blue Pencil, and depart. Would he have mercy and not sacrifice? The suspense was torturing.

Then a simple plan occurred to her by which Supreme Authority might be – she dared not use the word "circumvented." "Got round" was even worse; "evaded" sounded nicest. To resist the promptings of her own feminine ingenuity required a greater storage of cold moral force than Lady Hannah desired to possess. She took the editorial scissors, and daintily cut off the three paragraphs from the bottom of the slip.

The thing was done, and the snipped-off paragraphs concealed, as a pair of brown boots, with steel jack-spurs attached, came neatly down the ladder. The Chief gave her his cheery "Good-morning," and congratulated her on looking well. Her cheeks burned and her heart rat-tatted against the hidden paper, as he ran his keen eye down slip after slip, and initialled them for the press. She almost shrieked as he took up the "Social Jottings." The underground office whirled about her as the blue pencil steadily travelled down. Then – he was gone – and the initialled proof lay before her. She had nothing to do but neatly and delicately paste on the bit she had snipped off. This done, she gathered up her various small belongings, swept them into her bag, and went, leaving the passed proof of the "Social Jottings" column waiting for Young Evans with the rest.

In the middle of the night she realised what she had done. But even in a beleaguered town under the sway of Martial Law you cannot hang a lady, or order her out and shoot her for Mutiny and Treason combined. There would be a reprimand; what Bingo pleasantly termed "an official wigging," unless the Blue Pencil could, by any feminine art, be persuaded that it had passed those pars.

But, of course, she would never stoop to such a deception. The ruse she had employed was culpable. The other thing would be infamous. And – he would be sure to see that the end of the proof-slip had been pasted on.

She slept jerkily, rose headachy, and set out for the Convalescent Hospital in that stage of penitence that immediately precedes hysterical breakdown. She experienced a crisis of the nerves upon meeting a man, who, regardless of quite a brisk bombardment that happened to be going on just then, was walking along reading the Siege Gazette. Shirt-sleeved Young Evans had worked until daylight getting the Thursday's issue out. And there was a tremendous run upon copies. Every other person Lady Hannah encountered upon the street seemed to have got one, and to find it unusually interesting. The women especially. None of them were dull, or languid, or dim-eyed this morning. The siege crawl was no longer in evidence. They walked upon springs. Upon the stoep of the Hospital, where the long rows of convalescents were airing, every patient appeared plunged in perusal. Those who had not the paper were waiting, with watering mouths, until those who had would part. A reviving breath seemed to have passed over them, and spots of colour showed in their yellow, haggard faces. They talked and laughed…

Lady Hannah passed in, conscious of an agreeable tingling all down her spine. The hall-porter, a brawny, one-armed ex-Irregular, who had lost what he was wont to term his "flapper" at the outset of hostilities, was too deeply absorbed in spelling out a paragraph of the "Social Jottings" column to salute her. Inside you heard little beyond the crackling of the flimsy sheet, mingled with the comments, exclamations, anticipations, expectations that went off on all sides, met each other, and rebounded, exploding in coruscations of sparks. Something had happened, something was going to happen, after months and months of eventless monotony. It warmed the thin blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their faded appetites like some salt breath from the far-distant sea.

The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial Tokay, be sensed but once in a lifetime, but you can never forget that once. Out of her gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah had spurted a little ink upon the famished Gueldersdorpians, and their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine must be paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even as she tied on a bibbed apron, and superintended the serving and distribution of the patients' one-o'clock dinner.

Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two slivered carrots to the gallon, formed the menu to-day. There was no more white bread, and a villainous bannock of crushed oats had to be soaked in your porringer if you had no strength to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed, and upon this the now apologetic but smiling porter, with the intelligence that her ladyship was wanted at the wall-jigger in the Matron's room.

The ring-up came from Hotchkiss Outpost North, where Captain Bingo was this day on duty, vià the Staff Headquarter office in Market Square, and the voice that filtered to the ear of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of her spouse, and tinged with a gruffness as unusual as ominous.

"Hullo. Is that you?"

"Qu'il ne vous en déplaise!"

Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside:

"And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber French through a telephone?"

"A Frenchwoman would, possibly."

"Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what made you shove such a whacking bouncer into the Siege Gazette?"

"Please put that into English." She underwent a quaking at the heart.

"I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare filly is all my eye."

"It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully-authorised fact."

"Rot!"

"Paix et peu! Say rot, if it pleases you!"

"You'll have to withdraw and apologise."

"I can't make out what you're saying."

"It will end in your eating humble-pie. Can you hear that?"

"I can hear that you are in a bearish temper."

"I've reason to be. If a man had written what you have I should punch his head."

"Say that again!"

"I say, if a stranger of the kickable sex had told such a pack of infernal – "

Click!

Lady Hannah hung up the receiver, blew a contemptuous kiss into the gape of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to go. There was another ring-up as she reached the door.

"Hallo. Are you the Convalescent Hospital?"

"Yes. Who are you?"

"Staff Bombproof South. I want to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."

"I'm here, Lord Beauvayse."

"I say, I'm going to rag you frightfully. Why on earth have you given us away in that beastly paper?"

"Whom do you mean by 'us'?"

"Well, me and Miss Mildare."

"Didn't you tell me on Sunday that you were engaged?" she demanded indignantly.

"I did." The answer came back haltingly.

"And that you didn't care who knew it?"

"Fact."

"And that you two were going to be married as soon as you could pull off the event?"

"Yes." The voice was palpably embarrassed. "But – "

"Well?"

"But – things you don't mind people knowing look beastly in cold print."

"If I were in your shoes I should think they looked beautiful."

Nothing but a faint buzz came back. Lady Hannah went on:

"If I were in your shoes, and such a pearl and prize and paragon as Lynette Mildare had consented to marry me, I should want the whole world to envy me my colossal good luck. I should go about in sandwich-boards advertising it. I should buy a megaphone, and proclaim it through that. I should – "

There was no response beyond the buzzing of the wire. Beauvayse had evidently hung up the receiver.

"Is there any creature upon earth more cowardly than a man engaged?" Lady Hannah demanded of space. There was a futile struggle inside the telephone-box. Somebody else was trying to ring up. She put the receiver back upon the crutches, and —

"Ting – ting – ting!" said the bell in a high, thin voice.

"Who is it?" she asked.

The answer came back with official clearness:

"Officer of the day, Staff Headquarters. If you're the Convalescent Hospital, the Colonel would like to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."

Her knees became as jelly, and her heart seemed to turn a somersault. She answered in a would-be jaunty voice that wobbled horribly:

"Here – here – is Lady Hannah."

"Hold on a minute, please!"

She held on. She had not shuddered at the end of the wire for more than a minute when the well-known, infinitely-dreaded voice said in her ear, so clearly that she jumped:

"Lady Hannah there? How d'you do?"

She gulped, and quavered:

"It – it depends on what you're going to say."

"I see." There was the vibration of a stifled laugh, and her heart jumped to meet it. "So you anticipated a hauling over the coals?"

Revived, she shrugged her little shoulders.

"Have I deserved one?"

The voice said, with unmistakable displeasure in it:

"Thoroughly. Why were not the last three paragraphs of the weekly 'Social Jottings' column submitted to me yesterday with the rest?"

She heard herself titter imbecilely. Then a voice, which she could hardly believe her own, said, with a pitiable effort to be gay and natural:

"Weren't they? Perhaps you overlooked them?"

"You know I did not overlook them."

This was the cold, incisive, cutting, rasping voice which Bingo was wont to describe as razors and files. Her ears burned like fire, and her bright, birdlike eyes were round and scared. She gasped:

"Oh … do you really – "

"I want the truth, please, without quibbling." The voice was harsh and cold, and inexorably compelling. "Why were those paragraphs not shown to me?"

She winked away her tears.

"Because I was sure you'd blue-pencil them out of existence. And a genuine bit of news is such a roc's egg in these times of scarcity."

"Genuine!"

There was incredulity in the tone.

"Upon my honour as the wife of a British Dragoon."

He said crisply:

"Precipitate publication, even of authentic information, is likely to be resented by the persons concerned."

She remembered, with a sinking at the heart, that one person concerned had already objected.

"Both of them authorised the insertion."

"And the official consent to it was obtained by a trick."

She whispered, her heart in the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes:

"Please – please don't call it that!"

"How can I call it anything else? Besides, has it occurred to you that, should any copies of to-day's issue get through these lines, the Foltlebarres will be thrown into a state of volcanic eruption?"

"If the Foltlebarres aren't absolute beetles they'll jump for joy. How could their boy possibly do better?"

"I don't see how myself."

"Ah, if you're going to back up Toby, the day is as good as won."

"You're very kind to say so."

The red was dying out of Lady Hannah's ear-tips. That "You're very kind" had a gratified sound. The most rigorous and implacable of men can be buttered, she thought, if the emollient be dexterously applied. And a bright spark of naughty triumph snapped in each of her birdlike black eyes.

"Thanks." He was speaking again. "Apologies for keeping you. You're up to your eyes in Hospital work, I don't doubt."

"There is enough to keep one going."

"Without the additional tax of literary labour." She was conscious of a premonitory, apprehensive chill that travelled from the roots of her hair down her spine, and apparently made its exit at the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes. "So the 'Social Jottings' column will not appear in the Siege Gazette after to-day. Good-morning."

"Is that my punishment for insubordination?"

Not a sound in reply. "He must have hung up the receiver and gone away. Oh, horrid, horrid male superiority!" thought Lady Hannah. "To have been put under arrest, even to have been ordered out and shot, would be preferable to being figuratively spanked and put in the corner." She winked away some more tears, and sniffed a little dejectedly. "And only the other day he seemed quite pleased with me," she added pensively. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and rang up the Head Hospital, North Veld Road.

"Who you-e?"

It was the sing-song voice of the Barala hall-boy.

"I'm Lady Hannah Wrynche. Is the Reverend Mother on duty in the wards to-day?"

"I go see. You hang-e on."

Lady Hannah hung on until her small remaining stock of patience deserted her. As she stamped her small feet, longing to accelerate the languid movements of the hall-boy with a humanely-wielded hatpin, a whisper in the velvet voice she knew stole across the distance.

"Hannah. Is it you?"

"It's me, Biddy dear."

There was a soft laugh that ended in a sigh. "It is so long since anybody called me that."

"I wouldn't dare to with you looking at me."

"Am I so formidable of aspect? But go on."

"It's not so easy. But I've had an awful morning. Everybody I like best down on me like bricks and m – " The speaker gulped a sob.

"You are crying, dear!"

"Not a drop. But if you join in the heckling I shall dribble away and dissolve in salt water. It's all about those wretched paragraphs of mine in the Siege Gazette. But perhaps you haven't seen it?"

"I have seen it."

"You were quite willing that the fiançailles should be made public… Indeed, you gave me to understand you desired it."

"I was quite willing. I did wish it."

"Yes… Thank you, dear; that was what I wanted to hear from you. I understand now what the one clapping pair of hands must mean to the actor who is booed by all the rest of the audience. Good-bye, dear."

"Stay… Who are the persons who disapprove of the announcement?"

"My Bingo, for one. Not that anything the dear old stupid says matters in the slightest. And – and Toby."

"'Toby'?"

"I mean Lord Beauvayse."

"Tell him I quite approve. He should know that in this matter it was for me to decide."

"Certainly, dear."

"Whose is the other objecting voice?"

"The Chief thinks I … we … it … I rather fancy that he used the word 'precipitate' in expressing his opinion."

"Refer him to me if he expresses it again."

"Of course, dear, since you …"

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye, dear. If Biddy Bawne hadn't been a nun," reflected Lady Hannah, as she went out of the Matron's office and back to her patients, who had long ago dined, "I think she would have made rather a despotic Empress. 'Refer him to me,' indeed. What is it, Sergeant? Don't say I'm rung up again."

But the one-armed porter was positive on the subject, and her little ladyship went back. This last communication proved a puzzling one.

"You there?"

"I am Lady Hannah Wrynche. Where are you?"

There was a brief hesitation. A thickish man's voice said:

"I don't know as that matters."

"Who are you?"

There was another hesitation. Then the stranger parried with a question:

"You write them weekly screeds in the Siege Gazette?"

"I am responsible for some of the social paragraphs. Kindly say who is speaking?"

"Nobody that matters much. Can you tell me where Miss Mildare lives?"

"Not without knowing who you are."

"You may call me an old friend of hers," aid the thickish, lisping voice, with a sluggish chuckle in it that the little woman at the other end of the wire had heard … where?..

"If you are an old friend of the young lady you mention, how is it you don't know her address?" she demanded.

"Keep her address all you want to. Only next time you come alongside her give her a message for me. Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?"

Lady Hannah repeated:

"'And Bough, who was her friend.' You are Bough – ?"

"Click!" Somebody had hung up the receiver.

Lady Hannah spent another bad night, not wholly due to the indigestible nature of a dinner of mule colloped, and locusts fried in batter by Nixey's chef. Staggering in the course of disturbed and changeful dreams, under the impact of sufficient bricks and mortar to rebuild toppledown Gueldersdorp, being hauled over mountains of coals, and getting into whole Gulf Streams of hot water, she was slumberously conscious that these nightmares were less harassing than one nasty, perplexing little vision that kept cropping up among the others. It had no beginning and no end. In it the Matron's room at the Convalescent Hospital and Kink's Family Hotel at Tweipans were somehow mixed up, and the ingenuous Mr. Van Busch, that Afrikander gentleman of British sympathies, whose chivalrous and patriotic sentiments had prompted and urged him to the imperilling of his own skin and the risking of his own liberty in the interests of an English lady masquerading for political reasons as the refugee-widow of a German drummer, was oddly confused in identity with an uncomfortably mysterious individual who possessed neither features nor name.

"Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?" the voice would say..

"You are Bough?" she would find herself asking.

There would be a little guttural, horrible laugh, and nothing would answer but the buzzing of the wire.

And then she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, with a thumping heart. She was no longer in any doubt as to the identity of the owner of the voice. Van Busch was in Gueldersdorp … and however he came, and whatever disguise of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence boded no good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs hat respectfully before the superiority of feminine intuition.

XLVIII

Saxham, shouldering out of Julius's hotel upon his way to Staff Bombproof South, is made aware that the hundred-foot-high dust-storm that has raged and swirled throughout the morning is in process of being beaten down into a porridge of red mud by a downpour of February rain.

Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedestrians who have grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even more vividly than upon Sunday, the angry buffalo of Lady Hannah's apt analogy.

He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a minute or two. So is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges him at the bridge that carries the single-gauge railway southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ragged waterproof and an additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted officer of the Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognises Captain Bingo Wrynche, as he goes by at a furious gallop, spurring, and jagging savagely at the mouth of the handsome if attenuated brown charger, who sends stones and mud and water flying from his furious iron-shod hoofs. So is the Barala on guard by the wattled palisade of the native village – a muddy-legged and goose-fleshy warrior, in a plumed, brimless bowler and leopard-skin kaross, whose teeth can be heard chattering as he stands to attention and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The Chinamen working in the patches of market-garden, where the scant supply of vegetables that command such famine-prices are raised, are certainly sheltered from the wet by their colossal umbrella-hats, but the splashed-up red gruel has imbrued them to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully, hoeing scattered shell-fragments out of their potato-drills and removing incrusted masses of bullets that incommode the young kidney-beans, and arranging this ironmongery and metal-ware in tidy piles, possibly with a view to future commerce. And so, with another challenge from a picket, posted between the Barala village and the south trenches, where many of the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous tongue of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff Bombproof is situated.

As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white flash leaps from a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and one of Meisje's great shells goes screaming and winnowing westwards. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a battered, shaggy, berry-brown trooper, standing knee-deep in a hole, burrowed in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his shelter, challenges for the last time.

"'Alt! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a man whose wounded arm was dressed, one blazing day last January, outside the Convent bombproof. "But you'll 'ave to give the countersign. Pass Honour and all's well. But" – the sentry's nostrils twitch as the savour of Saxham's pipe reaches them, and his whisper of appeal is as piercing as a yell – "if you left a pipeful be'ind you, it wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't pull your pouch out, sir; the lookout officer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it by the feel, an' drop a pinch by the stone near your toe. I'll get it when they relieve me."

Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly over the little brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing to sponginess under the downpour from the skies. The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with greenish-yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises now immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flagstaff displaying the Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which the flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are used for signalling at night.

Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an officer in dripping waterproofs, who is looking steadily through a telescope out between the long driving lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so desolate, and whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant life as the blanket of an unwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a little below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing above the edge of the turned-up collar and below the brim of the Field-Service cap, prove him to be not Beauvayse. And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire, varied by brisk bursts of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the Destroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary way. But even women and children have grown indifferent to these things, and the men have long ceased to be aware of them.

A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of a stable rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the fierce and clamorous smells of the native village. The ground slopes under his feet. He goes down the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin that screens off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the salute, receives a brief message, and disappears within.

Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut hindquarters of half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or fidgeting before their emptied mangers. Against the division of a loose-box that holds a fine brown charger, still saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud, there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains and splashes upon it, has been recently in use.

Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and file. Here several gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are sitting on rough benches at a trestle-table, playing dominoes and draughts, or poring over tattered books by the light of the flickering oil-lamps, with tin reflectors, that hang against the earth walls. None of them are smoking, though several are sucking vigorously at empty pipes; and the rapacious light that glares in every eye as Saxham mechanically knocks out the ashes from his smoked-out briar-root against the side-post of the entrance is sufficient witness to the pangs that they endure.

Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell of revengeful fury seething in his heart, and a legion of devils unloosed and shrieking, prompting him to murder, he should have paused to relieve the tobacco-famine of the sentry, and be moved to a further sacrifice of his sole luxury by the sight of those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch, pitched by a cricketer's hand, flies in among the domino-players, and rebounds from a pondering head, as the orderly comes back, and lifts one corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and thenceforward joins the rioters.

They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from among the rest, clutching the prize, and grinning a three-cornered grin because his upper lip is split, divides the tobacco fairly to the last thread. They even share out the indiarubber pouch, and chew the pieces as long as the flavour lasts. When the thick, fragrant smoke curls up from the lighted pipes, it steals round the edges of the tarpaulin that has dropped behind Saxham, passing in to the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief whose profane and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of the Convent garden.

Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with the lust to kill tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will soon stand in the presence of his enemy, and hers. As he thinks of this, suddenly a bell rings. The sound comes from the north, so it cannot be the bell of the Catholic Church, or that of the Protestant Church, or the bell of the Wesleyan meeting-house, or of the Dutch Kerk.

"Clang-clang! clang-clang! Clang —"

The last clang is broken off suddenly, as though the rope has been jerked from the ringer's hands, but Saxham is not diverted by it from his occupation. With that curious fatuity to which the most logical of us are prone, he has been conning over the brief, scorching sentences with which he means to strip the other man's deception bare to the light, and make known his own self-appointed mission to avenge her.

"They telephoned for me, and I have come, but not in the interests of your sick or wounded man. Because it was imperative that I should say this to you: Your engagement to Miss Mildare and your approaching marriage to her were announced in to-day's Siege Gazette. You have received many congratulations. Now take mine – liar, and coward, and cheat!"

And with each epithet, delivered with all the force of Saxham's muscular arm, shall fall a stinging blow of the heavy old hunting-crop. There will be a shout, an angry oath from Beauvayse, staggering back under the unexpected, savage chastisement, red bars marring the insolent, high-bred beauty of the face that has bewitched her. Saxham will continue:

"You approached this innocent, inexperienced girl as a lover. You represented yourself to her and to her mother-guardian as a single man. All this when you had already a wife at home in England – a gaudy stage butterfly sleek with carrion-juices, whose wings are jewelled by the vices of men; and who is worthy of you, as you are of her. I speak as I can prove. Here is the written testimony of a reliable witness to your marriage with Miss Lavigne. And now you will go to her and show yourself to her in your true colours. You will undeceive her, or – "

There is a foggy uncertainty about what is to follow after that "or." But the livid flames of the burning hell that is in Saxham throw upon the greyness a leaping reflection that is red like blood. A fight to the death, either with weapons, or, best of all, with the bare hands, is what Saxham secretly lusts for, and savours in anticipation as he goes.

Let the humanitarian say what he pleases. Man is a manslayer by instinct and by will.

And within the little area of this beleaguered town do not men kill, and are not men killed, every day? The conditions are mediæval, fast relapsing into the primeval. The modern sanctity and inviolability attending and surrounding human life are at a discount. Even for children, the grim King of Terrors had become a bugaboo to laugh at; red wounds and ghastly sights are things of everyday experience; there is a slump in mortality.