From assiduous letter-writing friends David heard reports of his brother that grieved him deeply. He told these things to Mildred, and they shook their heads over them and sighed together. Poor Owen! It was most fortunate for his family that the Jury had taken so lenient a view of the case … otherwise …! They were quite certain in their own minds that poor Owen had been culpable, if not guilty. They were married six months later. The Directoire hats were out of date, of course, but Louis Quinze, with Watteau trimmings suited the six bridesmaids marvellously, and the "Non Angli sed Angeli" choir rendered the Anthem and the "Voice that Breathed" to perfection.
And Mildred, who never omitted her nightly prayers, made a special petition for the reformation of poor misguided Owen upon her wedding-night.
"Because we are so happy," she told David, who had found her kneeling, white and exquisitely virginal in her lace and cambric draperies by the bedside. "And he must be so miserable. And you know, though I never really cared for him, he was perfectly devoted to me."
"Who could help it?" cooed enamoured David, and knelt and kissed his bride's white feet. The white feet would show no ugly stains, although to reach the bridal bed, towards which her husband now drew her, they must tread upon his brother's bleeding heart.
XVIII
The Dop Doctor lifted his head as the bell of the front door rang loudly at the back passage-end. Two mounted officers of the Military Staff at Gueldersdorp had trotted up the street with an orderly behind them a moment before. The elder of the two had pulled sharply up in front of the green door whose brass-plate flamed in the last rays of sunset. He had dismounted lightly and gone up the steps and rung, saying something to his companion. The other officer had saluted and ridden on, as though to carry out some order: the orderly had come up and got off his horse and taken the bridle of the officer's, as the Dutch dispensary-attendant, Koets, had plodded heavily along the passage and opened the door, and now slouched heavily back, ushering in a presumable patient.
"Light the lamp," said the Dop Doctor in Dutch to the factotum, as he rose up heavily out of his chair. "It will be dark directly."
"There is no need of more light, I am obliged to you," said the stranger, cool, alert, brown of face as of dress: a thin man, distinct of speech, quiet of manner, and with singularly vivid eyes of light hazel. "In the actual dark I can see quite clearly. A matter of training and habit, because I began life as a short-sighted lad. Do we need your assistant further?"
In indirect answer to the pointed question, the Dop Doctor turned to the Dutch dispensary-assistant, and said curtly:
"Ga uit!"
Koets went, not without a scowl at the visitor.
"A sulky man and a surly master," thought the stranger, scanning with those observant eyes of his the gaunt figure in the shabby tweed suit. "Has seen trouble and lived hard," he added, mentally noting the haggard lines of the square face under the massive forehead, over which a plume of badly-brushed hair, black with threads of grey in it, fell awkwardly.
"English and a University man, I should say. Those clothes were cut by a Bond Street tailor in the height of fashion about five years ago. And the man is in the second stage of recovery from a bout of drunkenness – unless he drugs?" But even while the visitor was taking these memoranda, he was saying in the customary tone of polite inquiry:
"I have, I think, the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Williams?"
"Sir, you have not. Dr. De Boursy-Williams has left for Cape Town with his family. You are speaking to his temporary substitute." The bloodshot blue eyes met his own indifferently.
"Indeed! Well, I do not grudge the family if, as I believe is the case, it chiefly ranks upon the distaff side. But the Doctor will miss a good deal of interesting practice. As to yourself, you will allow the inquiry… Are you a surgeon as well as a medical practitioner?"
"If I were not, I should not be here."
"I will put my question differently. I trust you will not consider its repetition offensive. Have you an extensive experience in dealing with gunshot wounds?"
Saxham said roughly:
"I have experience to a certain extent. I will go no further than to say so. I am not undergoing examination as to my professional capabilities that I am aware of, and if you doubt them you are perfectly at liberty to seek medical advice elsewhere."
"My good sir, I have been elsewhere, and the other doctor, when he learned the purport of my visit, relished it as little as your principal is likely to do. With the imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are making …" The speaker, slipping one hand behind him, moved a step backwards and nearer to the room-door. "As I said, sir, with the imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are making a house-to-house requisition… Ah, I thought as much!"
The door-knob had been quietly turned, the door suddenly pulled open, bringing with it Koets, the Dutch dispensary-attendant, whose large red ear had been glued to the outer keyhole.
"Your Dutch factotum has been listening. Pick yourself off the mat, Jan, and take yourself out of earshot." The stranger whistled the beginning of a pleasant little tune, with a flavour of Savoy Opera about it.
"Ik heb not the neem of Jan," snarled the detected Koets, retiring in disorder.
The whistler left off in the middle of a deftly-executed embellishment to say: "Unfortunate; because I don't know the Dutch word for spy." The keen hazel eyes and the haggard blue ones met, and there was the faint semblance of a smile on the grim mouth of the Dop Doctor. Keeping the door open, the visitor went on:
"I have some notes here – entries copied from the Railway freight-books. Three weeks ago twenty carboys of carbolic acid, with a considerable consignment of other antiseptics, surgical necessaries, drugs, and so forth were delivered to Dr. Williams' order at this address. Frankly, as the officer commanding Her Majesty's troops on this border, I am here to make a sequestration of the things I have mentioned, with all other medical and surgical requisites stored upon the premises, that are likely to be of use to us at the Hospital. In the name of the Imperial Government."
The smile died out on the grim mouth. A sombre anger burned in the blue eyes of the haggard man in shabby tweeds.
"Damn the Imperial Government!" said the Dop Doctor.
The stranger nodded in serious assent. "Certainly, damn it! It is your privilege and mine, shared in common with all other Britons, to damn our Government, as long as we remain loyal to our Queen and country."
The other man quivered with a sudden uncontrollable spasm of hate, rage, and loathing. He clenched his hand and shook it in the air as he cried:
"You employ the stock phrases of your profession. They have long ceased to mean anything to me. I have been the victim and the sacrifice of British laws. I have been formally pardoned by the State for a crime I never committed. I have been robbed, plundered, ruined, betrayed, by the monstrous thing that bears the name of British Justice. And as I loathe and hate it, so do I cast off and repudiate the name of Englishman. You speak of the imminent prospect of a siege. What other causes have operated to bring it about but British greed, and the British lust for paramountcy and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your political machinery by bombast and bribes and