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Updated: June 6, 2025
Saxham's square, pale face was perfectly expressionless. He waited in silence to hear the rest. "You know of whom I speak ..." said Lynette. "He was gay and beautiful and winning not chivalrous, as I believed him; not honest, or sincere, or true. Months before we met at Gueldersdorp he was the husband of this actress the woman I saw upon the stage to-night.
The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the hapless victim, dressed in deep mourning and neatly handled by Counsel, evoked a display of handkerchiefs upon his every appearance in the witness-box, from the smart Society women seated near the Bench. Many of them had been Saxham's patients.
All its drawers stood open. Ledgers and case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed. A thick packet, heavily sealed, was addressed in Saxham's small, firm handwriting to Major Bingham Wrynche, Plas Bendigaid, Herion, South Wales. There were other letters in an orderly pile. She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name. She took it and kissed it, and put it in her breast.
There was quite a little fusillade, and the sharp cracks and flashes in Saxham's vicinity told of the employment of explosive bullets. But not one hit the man. An unkempt Boer head bobbed up, looking for his corpse.
And the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying tipplers; and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: 'Physician, heal thyself!" The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure as he got up. His fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken caves as he took his hat and stick from the table. "What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrong me.
I'd have faced a Court-Martial of Inquiry respectin' my conduct in the Field. For my wife has a kind heart and a keen sense of honour, and rather than bring harm upon Miss Mildare that was, or anyone connected with her, she'd have stood up to be shot! By G !" trumpeted Bingo, "I know she would!" Saxham's face was blue-white now, and looked oddly shrunken.
His glance, as well as Saxham's, had followed the tall black figure and the slender white figure on their journey through Death's harvest-field. But his trained eye had been first to see the little jets and puffs of sickly hot, reddish dust rising about their perilous path. They walked quickly, but without hurry, keeping a pace apart, and holding one another by the hand.
The wounded man, now carbolised, plugged, and bandaged by Saxham's dexterous hands, took the hastily-scrawled admission-order, included his officer, the ladies, and the Doctor in a left-handed salute, distributed a parting wink among his comrades, counselled W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper to go tender on the off-side G of the instrument he dandled, and trudged sturdily away in the direction of the Hospital.
Even to an observation less skilled than that of the expert medical practitioner the signs of swift and speedy dissolution were written on the insignificant, once pretty, little face. Dying, the miserable little creature had ridden to Chilworth Street, hastening her own inevitable end by the stupendous act of folly, and ensuring Saxham's.
"Will you not go down?" Saxham asked her. She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting face in prayerful silence, not stirring save to make the Sign of the Cross. And as the long white fingers fluttered over the bosom of the black habit, the faint cry that Saxham's quick ear had heard before floated up from the populous depths below. "What is that?"
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