Upon that same night in October nearly five weeks following the breaking of the Woe Wave, Lynette Saxham had a strange dream.
It seemed to her that she saw piled up in one colossal heap the riches of all the world, the world we know and the world we have forgotten; the treasures of all ages piled up higher than Kilimanjaro, or Aconcagua, or the cloud-mantled peak of Mount Everest. To her feet as she stood spell-bound amongst the foothills, rolled jewelled crowns, and huge barbaric torques and diadems of rough gold, precious cups, vases, and chargers; outpoured treasures of precious stones and wrought gems of inconceivable beauty and vileness, wondrous fabrics, marvels of sculpture, weapons, armour and coins of age beyond the ages—rude discs of tarnished gold, stamped with the effigies of forgotten kings. Orders, decorations, the paraphernalia of Pomp, the stage-properties of Power, the symbols of every religion, save One, were mingled in the stupendous pile, and a terrible Voice cried:
"Gone is the age of pride in possession! Chattels and fardels are no more! The days have spilt like pearls from a broken necklace! Time has eaten the years as the moth a garment of wool! Foredone, foregone, finished! Who now will gather riches from the Dustheap of the World?" And as new avalanches of treasure rolled downwards to the reverberation of that thunderous shout, a Hand of Titanic proportions hurled down upon the heap a war-chariot of beaten gold, with great scythed wheels, and jewelled harness; and that vision changed, and the dreamer was drowning, deep down in clear green seas, under the rushing keel of a huge barbaric War-galley that was all of gold, arabesqued and bossed with jewels, and coral, and pearl.
And the sense of suffocation passed, and a wonderful cool peace flowed in upon Lynette. She seemed to be led by a beloved hand that had been dust for years, into a bare walled place through which a thin breeze piped shrilly. Someone was there, doing some manual labour. He turned, and with a shock of unutterable rapture Lynette was looking in the face of her lost boy.
Bawne had grown thin and seemed taller. His temples had hollowed, his plume of tawny-gold hair hung unkempt over his wide white forehead. But his blue eyes were as sweet as ever. She had never realised how like they were to Saxham's in shape and colour, and in expression, until now. He thrust his lower jaw out and knit his brows slightly, as though her face were fading from his vision, and he wished to fix in mind the memory of its well-loved features:
"Stay, Mother! Oh! Mother, don't leave me!" he cried, and stretched out his hands to her, and she awakened, weeping for sorrow and joy.
It was broad day. Her husband was not there. She rose and bathed in the cold water she loved, and dressed in the simple Quaker-like grey that set off her fairness, and went out to Mass.... The day's Preparation was taken from the noble prayer of St. Ambrose, Bishop and Confessor:
"And now before Thee, O Lord, I lay the troubles of the poor; the sorrows of nations, and the groanings of those in bondage; the desolation of the fatherless; the weariness of wayfarers; the helplessness of the sick; the struggles of the dying; the failing strength of the aged; the ambitious hopes of young men; the high desires of maidens; and the widow's tears. For Thou, O Lord, art full of pity for all men: nor hatest aught of that which Thou hast made."
He even loved von Herrnung, who had taken her boy, and kept him in slavery, and robbed the joyous light from his sweet eyes, and set amongst his red-brown hair one sinister streak of white. She saw the bleached forelock dangling before her eyes when she shut them and tried to pray for the Enemy:
"Oh God! forgive that evil man, and turn his heart towards mercy and pitifulness, and give me back Thy precious gift, for the love of Her who is Thy Mother!"
It was yet early when she returned to Harley Street and passed at once into the Doctor's consulting-room. There, where her lips had first kissed him, sleeping in his chair, she found Saxham sitting at his table, with his sorrow of heart revealed in the stoop of his great shoulders, and his greying head resting upon his hands. Not a sound did he utter, but the attitude was more than eloquent:
"Oh my son!" it said. "Oh me!—my little son!"
"Owen!" she said, coming to his side and touching him. Then, as he started and looked up: "Bawne is alive!" she cried. "I have seen him in a dream, and he has spoken to me. He was in a bare high place with corrugated iron walls, whitened. It made me think of the Hospital at Gueldersdorp in the old days, and of a hangar.... His clothes were soiled and torn, and his hands were blackened. One other thing I saw—but I will not wring your heart by telling you.... It is enough that I have seen our boy.... alive. Oh! thank God!" She stopped, and the rose of joy faded from her cheeks, and only the tears were left there. Her eyes widened with a terrible doubt. "You knew! ... It is in your face! You had heard ... something, and you did not tell me!"
"I had not the courage. Despise me, for I deserve it! I had news of Bawne at the end of August. He is with that man who stole him—" He clenched the hand that rested on the table until the knuckles showed white upon it and his hair was wet upon his forehead and his mouth was twisted awry. "Taken with him on errands of aërial reconnaissance—carried helplessly into battle as a Teddy bear or a golliwog might be fastened on the front of a racing-plane. And, when I remember that I bade him risk that journey—" Saxham broke off, and turned his face away. She came nearer to him and said:
"But he is alive!—alive, even though he be in danger. My dream was sent to tell me so. Did not the Mother come to me in my sleep and lead me to him? Just as when she came and sent me here to you. Now I will atone for these days of selfish grieving. Only give me work to do!"
"Have you not enough upon your hands already? Too much, I have sometimes feared."
"Only the Hospice and the Schools," she answered eagerly, "and the Training Houses for the elder women. And, thanks to you, these are excellently staffed. If I were to die it would make little difference. Things would go on just the same."
"Would they?"
She stooped, lifted his hand to her lips and kissed it. He looked at her keenly as she did so, and the over-bright flush upon the thin cheeks and the hollows about the beautiful eyes, like the burning touch of her hand and of her lips, told him their tale of woe.
"Not for you. Nothing would ever be the same for you or for Bawne. Therefore—give me more work."
"There is plenty of work, unhappily," he said, "because of this calamity that has fallen upon the nation. We have notice that a hundred wounded men from the Front—many of them cot-cases—will arrive at SS. Stanislaus and Theresa's at three this afternoon."
"I shall be there!"
"I am not going to try to dissuade you. I will not keep back what God has given to me from those who have given so much for England. There is another quarter where you will be of use." His eyes were on the triptych frame before him. "I speak of that little Lady Norwater—Patrine's friend—I think you have not met?"
"Oh, but I have. We were made acquainted with each other some weeks ago at the Club." Her delicate face contracted. "That day when the news came about the British losses. Just before that poor child Brenda Helvellyn blurted out the dreadful truth. Owen, it was tragic. She had known it from the beginning——"
"And the sister forbade her to breathe a hint of it. That is the attitude of the fashionable Sadducean," said Saxham bitterly, "who not only denies the Atonement and the Resurrection, but will not admit of Death."
"But," she asked him, "what of Lady Norwater? Patrine tells me she is ill."
"She is ill. Lord Norwater—at first reported missing after an action north of Ypres on the —th is now said to have been killed."
Lynette was silent. Her husband knew why her head was bent and her white fingers sought a little Crucifix she wore. She was praying for the dead man. Presently she said:
"He was very brave, I believe?'
"He had been recommended for the Victoria Cross for a special service of great gallantry—rendered during the Battle of the Aisne. He was a brave and simple young man, and very lovable. His wife received the official intelligence of his death yesterday. They 'phoned Patrine, as you know, and sent for me later. Lady Norwater is expecting her confinement at the end of November—and they were alarmed for her."
"Poor little soul! Her baby will be a comfort to her!"
Saxham remembered under what circumstances he had made the acquaintance of Lady Norwater, and his look was rather grim. In his mind's ear he heard again the sweet little voice saying in its fashionable slang jargon:
"Oh no! I rather cotton to kiddies. It's the bother of having 'em doesn't appeal. It puts everything in the cart for the Autumn Season."
Still, the recent remembrance of her piteousness softened the Doctor's never very adamantine heart towards her, the humming-bird broken on the wheel of implacable Fate. Not unnatural, after all. More of a woman than one would have thought her. How she had clasped her tiny hands together and entreated him, when the worst was feared for her, to save, to save her child.
"Franky's child. Perhaps—the boy he hoped for. Oh! to have to say hoped, hurts so dreadfully. Yes, yes! I will be brave and good and quiet.... I will do everything that you say. Ah, now I know why all these days I have felt Franky near me, and seen his eyes looking at me out of every stranger's face."
Margot did not cry out in her pain and loneliness for her friend Patrine to come to her, though she sent loving, grateful messages whenever Pat called or 'phoned. But she had said to Saxham, only that morning: "Doctor, I met your wife at the Club not long ago. She is more beautiful, but so much sadder than the portrait you showed me. Ah, yes! I remember why. When I am better, would she come and see me? Perhaps it is inconsiderate that I should ask. But the world is so huge and coarse and noisy and empty"—the little lip had quivered—"and there is something in her face that is so sweet, I have been fancying that it would"—-she hesitated—"be good for me and for my baby if she would sometimes visit me. Do you think she would mind?"
Saxham had answered:
"I will ask her." Now he gave the piteous message, and Lynette warmly agreed:
"Of course I will go. Whenever you say I may!"
"Not for some days. She is to see no one yet, and your hands are full with Madame van der Heuvel and Marienne and Simonne." The Doctor referred to an exiled Belgian lady and her young daughters, who had been received at Harley Street as guests. "And—there is the Hospital—and to-night you have to address this Meeting of Suffragists at the Royal Hall. It is the only decision of yours, let me tell you," said Saxham, "that I ever felt tempted to dispute. My wife upon the same platform with Mrs. Carrie Clash and Fanny Leaven! A triple force of Metropolitan Police on duty, and detectives at all the exits and amongst the audience. It's—" Words failed Saxham.
"It is unspeakably hateful in your eyes. Dear Owen, I know it. But I should be hateful in my own sight if I were to break my word. On the day I first met you we spoke of these views of mine. I hold them still. Marriage has not altered them. It is not in me," said Lynette, "to change!"
"You are the soul of faithfulness in all things!"
"Then do not be grieved that I keep to my given promise. Those who have honoured me by asking me to address them are aware that my convictions are opposed to theirs at points. But while I oppose I admire their ruthless devotion and their magnificent, unswerving policy of self-sacrifice——"
"But these felonies," he protested, "these incendiary attacks upon property——"
"In nine cases out of ten, and I believe the authorities know it as well as the W.S.S.S., such outrages have not been committed by Suffragists at all."
"By whom, then?"
"Have we no enemies without our gates even now when we are at War?"
"Germans...." A light broke in upon Saxham. "It's not impossible. As for scattered literature being evidence—that can be bought anywhere. But granted the blackest sheep of the W.S.S.S. to be proved—piebald, that will not make me less anxious for you to-night."
He touched a heavy plait of the red-brown hair with a tender hand and said to her:
"I grudge that the pearls of my wife's eloquence should be thrown before Suffragists."
"We disagree, dear love," she said to him, "but we do not love the less for it. When the Franchise is accorded to Women, should I vote for one Party and you for another, will that matter a whit to you?"
"Not a whit," he said, as he kissed her. "You may give your vote to whom you choose, so long as the voter remains mine. Who was that?" Saxham's quick ear had heard a footstep in the hall. "Madame van der Heuvel coming back from Mass?"
"It is Patrine!"
"Patrine off and away at this hour?"
"I told her I would explain to you."
"She has explained to you," said Saxham, "and that should be enough."
"Dear Owen! ... I am sure she wished you to know of it.... She has gone down to Seasheere, a little Naval Flying-station on the South-East coast, to meet Alan Sherbrand on the home-flight from Somewhere in France."
"I see in to-day's Wire that he has been gazetted Lieutenant," said Saxham. "One rather wonders, all things considered, that it has not happened before."
For not once nor twice in the past weeks the big smudgy contents-bills hung upon railings and worn as a chest-protector by newspaper-vendors, since paper became too scarce an article to line street-gutters with, had trumpeted the name of Sherbrand; and the big black-capitalled headings had set forth his deeds of daring. Only to-day they had announced:
"SHERBRAND OF THE R.F.C. STRAFES ANOTHER HUN-BIRD. BAG BROUGHT UP TO NINE, AND TWO ENEMY KITE-BALLOONS. POPULAR YOUNG AVIATOR NOW VISCOUNT NORWATER, HEIR-PRESUMPTIVE TO BRITISH EARL."
"He may be sent back to the Front at any moment—it is natural that they should wish to be together, don't you think?" The speaker added, as Saxham made no immediate rejoinder: "As they are engaged to be married, and what is more, engaged with your consent."
"She has told you so?"
"No!" A shadow of the old smile hovered upon the sensitive mouth. "I told her, and she could not deny it.... Oh, Owen! Do you really believe I have been blind all this time?"
"I should have known that women have clairvoyance in these matters. But Patrine feared that you would think her unfeeling or inconsiderate——"
"And why? Because when God sent me a great grief He gave my poor girl a great happiness? The best earthly happiness, save one, that He holds in His gift."
"I thank Him that you still think so, after thirteen years of marriage!"
"I shall always think so, Owen. And it is a great thing that Patrine has chosen so well. He is true and brave, and loves my dear sincerely. And her love is beautiful and disinterested. There is no taint of baseness in her——"
"She has nothing of Mildred or of David, then," flashed through the Doctor's mind. Lynette went on:
"No one will ever be able to charge her with venality or mercenariness. The succession that they will talk of in the newspapers was not dreamed of when she and Alan fell in love."
"The succession! Ah, of course!" the Doctor said; "There is a possible succession to a Viscounty now that Lord Norwater's death is proved fact, but only in case Lady Norwater bears no male child. But a title would not spoil Sherbrand, and I agree with you that it has never influenced Patrine."
"How tired you look!" Lynette said, noting the look of heavy care and the deep lines of weariness traced on the stern visage.
"I have several critical private cases, and a long list of operations for this morning at SS. Stanislaus and Theresa's. Now go and dress, my sweet, for I have work to do."
And Lynette went with a happier look than she had worn since the crushing blow fell. And Saxham shot the bolt of his consulting-room door and went back to his chair at the big writing-table, and leaned his head upon his hands.
An Atlas burden of care cracked the sinews of the Doctor's huge shoulders. It had not occurred to Saxham when Patrine had gulped out her pitiful story, and he had heartened her by bidding her forget, that forgetfulness would speedily be accomplished at the cost of an honest man.
Now, what to do? Must Sherbrand take the stranger's leavings or David's girl be twice the loser by the stranger's lustful theft? It was a problem to thrash the brain to jelly of grey matter, thought the Dop Doctor, drilling his fingertips into his aching temples—were there no cause for anxiety elsewhere.
Ah! how much more stuffed the pack that burdened the big shoulders. The boy had been taken and the mother would die of grief. You could see her withering like a white rose held near the blast of a smelting-furnace. Yet there was nothing to do but look on and play the game. A bitter spasm gripped the man by the throat, and slow tears, wrung from the depths of him by mortal anguish, splashed on the paper between his elbows and raised great blisters there. Truly, when the spark of Hope burns dimmest, when the grain of Faith is a thousand times smaller than the mustard-seed—when God seems most far away, He is nearest. We have learned this with other truths, in the War. Blood and tears mingle in the collyrium with which our eyes have been bathed, that we might see.
Saxham battled down his weakness, and rose up and went to duty. None might guess, looking at the Dop Doctor, that those hard, bright eyes had wept an hour ago. Later on, a moment serving, he went to the telephone.
"Halloa! Is this New Scotland Yard? M.P.O.? Halloa! ... I am Dr. Saxham, speaking from SS. Stanislaus and Theresa's Hospital, N.W. Can I get word with Superintendent-on-the-Executive, Donald Kirwall? Halloa! ... Thanks, I'll hold the line."
He waited a minute, and the Superintendent answered:
"Halloa! Dr. Saxham? Anything we can do for you, sir?"
"Yes. Put me on six good plain-clothes men at this Mass Meeting of Suffragists at the Royal Hall to-night. Can you? ... Halloa! ... I could do with eight or ten!"
"Halloa! ... Well, sir, we'll do what we can. We'll be pretty strong in force there, as it happens, Marylebone and Holborn and St. James's Divisions...." Something like an official chuckle came over the line. "Mrs. Petrell in the chair, and the Clash and Fanny Higgins. We've learned to look for trouble when they get up to speak. Halloa! Beg pardon! I didn't quite hear! ..."
Saxham had cursed the popular leaders.
"Yes, I was aware they'd prevailed on Mrs. Saxham to address 'em.... Indeed, they're advertising her all over the shop.... Halloa? ... Certainly we'll put you on the plain-clothes men you ask for. But even without Police to protect her, Mrs. Saxham don't run much risk. Halloa! ... Why! ... Oh! because an uncommon big percentage of the audience on these packed nights are out-and-out loose women. Soho and Leicester Square, and all that lot.... Others come up from Poplar and Stepney and Bethnal Green and Deptford to hear Fanny Higgins. Halloa? Do they want the Vote? Well, naturally these gay women like the idea of being Represented in Parliament. If respectable females are going to get good of it, naturally the prostitutes want the Franchise. They hold that Woman Suffrage 'ud improve their conditions. Halloa! ... You don't know but what the gay women have as good a right to vote as the gay men who employ 'em? No more don't I! But whatever they are, they appreciate those who spend their lives in trying to help the unfortunate. And, West or East-Enders—the most chronic cases among 'em wouldn't suffer a finger to be laid on your wife. All the same, I'll attend to your instructions. Doors at 7. The men shall be there. Don't worry yourself! Four ready back of the Platform and four more posted right and left of the proscenium. Don't mention it! Very proud to.... Good-afternoon!"
"Good-afternoon and thanks, Superintendent!"
And Saxham rang off, more relieved in mind than he would have cared to own. Then the horn of a motor sounded below in the Hospital courtyard, and another and another followed. Tyres crackled on gravel. The running feet of men pattered on pavement. The hall-porter whistled up the speaking-tube into the Medical Officer's Room, and Saxham went down, meeting the black-robed Mother Prioress and the Sister Superintendent on their way to the great vestibule.