The Dop Doctor. Richard Dehan
iron bed.
He had had the waggon brought close up to the wired enclosure. All the time he worked he kept a watch upon it. Did claws scrape the wide wheels or scurrying feet patter across the shadows, he left off work until the voracious creatures of the night were driven away.
The pale dawn came, and the east showed a lake of yellow… When the great South African sun rose and flooded the veld with miraculous liquid ambers and flaming, melted rubies, the deep, wide grave at last was done.
He climbed out of it by the waggon ladder, struggling under the weight of the last great basketful of stones and sandy earth. He dumped that down by the graveside, and went to the waggon and removed all stains of toil, and then set about making the last toilette of the beautiful woman who had so loved that everything that touched her should be pure, and dainty, and sweet.
He had dressed her silken, plentiful, squirrel-brown hair many times, for the sheer love of its loveliness. With what care he now combed and brushed and arranged the perfumed locks! He laid reverent kisses on the sealed eyelids that his own hands had closed for ever; he whispered words of passionate love, vows of undying gratitude and remembrance, in the shell-like ears. He bathed with fresh water and reclad in fragrant linen the exquisite body, upon which faint discolouring patches already heralded the inevitable end. When he had done, he swathed her in a sheet, and fetched a bolt of new white canvas from the store-waggon, and lined the grave with that.
And then he placed a narrow mattress in it, and freshly covered pillows, and brought her from the waggon, and to the grave, and carried her down the light wooden ladder, and laid her in her last earthly home, with a kiss from the lips that had never been her husband's. It was so cruel to think of that. It was so hard to cover up the cold, sweet face again, but he did it, and lapped the sheet over her and brought the canvas down. Remained now to fill in her grave and fetch the man whose mouth should speak over it the words that are of God.
But first – fill in the grave.
The cold sweat drenched him at the thought of heaping back those tons of earth and stone above her, crushing with a frightful weight of inert matter the bodily beauty that he adored. He felt as though her soul hovered about him, wailing to him not to be so cruel, tugging at his garments with imploring, impalpable hands.
The thing must be done, though, before the sordid life stirred again under the roof of the tavern, before the vulgar faces, with their greedy, prying eyes, should be there to snigger and spy.
He loaded a great basket with fine gravelly sand, and carried it down and laid it on her by handfuls. What were his livid, parched lips muttering? Over and over, only this:
"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …"
Soon the white swathed-up form was hidden with the sandy gravel. That was a terrible pang. It wrenched the first groan from him, but he worked on.
More and more of the sandy gravel, but for precaution the stones must lie above. Should the voracious creatures of the night come, they must find the treasure in impregnable security. That thought helped him to lay in the first, and the second, and then greater and greater stones. He was spent and breathless, but still he laboured. He tottered, and at times the tavern and the veld, and the waggons on it, and the flat-topped distant mountains that merged in the horizon, swung round him in a wild, mad dance. Then the warm salt taste of blood was in his mouth, and he gasped and panted, but he never rested until the grave was filled in.
Then he built up over it an oblong cairn of the ironstone boulders, made a rude temporary cross out of a spare waggon-pole, working quite methodically with saw and hammer and nails, and set it up, under the curious eyes he hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt down stiffly, and made, with rusty, long unpractised fingers, the sacred sign upon his face and breast. He heard her still, asking him in that nearly extinguished voice of hers, to pray for her.
"Dicky!.."
Ah! the tragedy of the foolish little nickname, faltered by stiffening lips upon the bed of death!
"Catholics pray for the souls of dead people, don't they? Pray for mine by-and-by. It will comfort me to know you are praying, darling, even if God is too angry with us to hear!"
He held her to his bursting heart, groaning.
"If He is angry, it cannot be with you. The sin was mine – all mine. He must know!"
Later she awakened from a troubled sleep to murmur:
"Richard, I dreamed of Bridget-Mary. She was all in black, but there was white linen about her face and neck, and it was dabbled dreadfully with blood." The weak, slight body shuddered in his embrace. "She said our wickedness had brought her death, but that she would plead for us in Heaven."
"She is not dead, my beloved; I heard of her before we left Cape Colony. She has taken the veil. She is well, and will be happy in her religion, as those good women always are."
"I was not one of those good women, Richard – "
He strained her to him in silence. She panted presently:
"You might have been happy – with her – if I had never come between you!"
He found some words to tell her that these things were meant to be. From the beginning …
"Was it meant that I should die on these wild, wide, desolate plains, and leave you, Richard?"
He cried out frantically that he would die too, and follow her. Her dying whisper fluttered at his lips:
"You cannot! Think! – the child!"
He had forgotten the child, and now, with a great stabbing pang, remembered it. She asked for it, and he brought it, and she tried to kiss it; and even in that Death foiled her, and her head fell back and her eyes rolled up, and she died.
He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer, without which she could not have borne to have him leave her.
The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door to see him praying – a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling there in the face of day.
But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have dared to jeer at openly. Too rich, with all that money in the valise in the locked-up waggon-chest; too strong, with that sharp hunting-knife, the Winchester repeating-rifle, and the revolver he carried at his hip.
"Our Father Who art in Heaven…"
He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there was no One beyond the burning blue vault of ether Who heard … and yet, for her sake, supposing, after all, some great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even now…
"Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come…"
And if it came, should those have any part in it who had lived together unwed in open sin?
"Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven…"
The words stuck in his dried throat. Be done, that Will that left him desolate and laid her away, a still fair, fast-corrupting thing, under the red earth and the great ironstone boulders!
"Give us this day our daily bread…"
Her love, her presence, her voice, her touch, had been the daily bread of life to him, her fellow-sinner. Oh, how many base, sordid, loveless marriages had not that illicit bond of theirs put to shame! And yet as a boy he had learned the Seventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." Had she not believed all along that the price of such sweet sinning must be paid, if not in this life, then in the life hereafter, and could it – could it be that her soul was even now writhing in fires unquenchable, whither he, who would have gladly died in torment to save her from outrage or death, had thrust her?
"Forgive us our trespasses…"
O Man of Sorrows, pitying Son of Mary, before Whom the Scribes and Pharisees brought the woman taken in adultery, forgive her, pardon her! If a soul must writhe in those eternal fires they preach of, in justice let it be mine! Thou Who didst pity that woman of old time, standing white and shameful in the midst of the evil, jeering crowd, with the wicked fingers pointing at her, say to this other woman, lifting up Thyself before her terrified, desperate soul, confronted with the awful mystery