"Lovely, quite lovely!" trilled the sweet little voice. "And what an exquie kiddy!"
"Then you do not dislike children?" Saxham asked, as his visitor's husband had done not long ago.
"On the contrary," the little lady assured him, "I rather cotton to them. But"--she shrugged her little shoulders prettily and quoted boldly from another woman--"but the fag of having them doesn't--appeal!"
The Doctor replaced the threefold frame and turned his regard back upon his visitor.
"These photographs speak for themselves ..." he said quietly. "She--the mother of the boy you see, was, when she first knew that she was to be a mother, fragile and delicate in body, and in mind highly-strung and sensitive. As a child she had known neglect and unkind usage. Twice she had sustained an overwhelming shock, physical and mental; she had rallied, passed through a crisis and regained lost ground. But the possibility of a relapse was not to be blinked at. It was a lion in the path!"
The slight form of the listener was convulsed by a shudder. The pretty face lost its wild-rose tint. The lion in the path ... Margot saw him crouching, his tawny eyes aflame, his great jaws slavering, his tail lashing the dust, his great muscles tightening for the fearful spring. And Saxham went on:
"She maintained from the first a sweet, sane mental standpoint. She tamed her lion by sheer force of will. Her courage was her own: she did not owe it to the physician and surgeon. But he advised as he knew best, and she followed his advice implicitly, as to wholesome diet and regular exercise, thus keeping her body in health. She surrounded herself with objects that were beautiful in form and colour. She made a point of hearing great music and of re-reading the works of great poets, essayists, and novelists. She wished her child to owe much to pre-natal influences. For that these----"
The speaker faltered for a moment, before he resumed the thread of his discourse.
"--That these form character for good or evil no physiologist can deny. Therefore while she did not flee from, she avoided the sight of deformity or ugliness, as she shunned active infection, or tainted air. It was desirable that her child should be healthy, strong, and beautiful. But the love of loveliness, though one of the dominants of her character, scales lowest of the triad. Human love, the love of mother, husband, and friend rank above it, and first of all stands the love of God."
"How awfully good she must be!"
"She took the child, first and last, as a gift from God to her. If she lived or died, and she longed inexpressibly to live--Death, like Life, would be the fulfilment of the Divine Will. Fortified by the Sacraments of her Church she lay down upon her bed of pain as though it were an altar. She suffered intensely----"
His voice broke.
"She suffered inexpressibly. Not until the actual crisis did I have recourse to chloroform. When I was about to use it she said to me: '_Not yet! ... I will wear it a little longer... this mother's crown of thorns._' To-day the crown is one of roses. Does not this appeal to you?"
The Doctor's supple hand displayed the third portrait in the triptych, and Margot saw the same assured joy, rounded with a richer and more deep content. The exquisite face was fuller, the outlines of the form displayed the ripeness of early maturity, the slender palm was now a stately tree. The girl of twenty was merged in the woman of thirty, rich in all feminine graces, beautiful exceedingly, with the beauty that is not only of line and proportion, form and colour, but shines from within, irradiating the perishable living clay with the immortal radiance of the soul. Her boy stood at her side, a manly square-headed young British twelve-year-old, wearing a simple, distinctive dress; familiar to us all.
"Y-yes. But I'm afraid you have forgotten: I told you at the beginning, or I meant to.... My--my own mother died when I was born!"
"And that sad fact increases your natural fear and repugnance. Naturally. It will strike you as a curious point of resemblance between your case and that of the--patient whose portrait I have shown you, when I tell you that her mother did not survive the birth of a later child. May I tell you further that the possibility of some inherited weakness does not render you more promising--regarded as a subject for the treatment of Wolfenbuchel and Krauss."
Margot was beginning to hate this stern-faced man who set forth things so clearly. He had bored her almost to weeping. Why on earth had she come? The fact that Franky's sister Trix's boy Ronald had been helped into the world by Saxham thirteen years ago and recently operated on for the removal of the appendix, was no reason that Franky's wife should regard him as infallible. She glanced at her tiny jewelled wrist-watch. Ten whole minutes had gone. She rose.
"You have been so kind, and I have been so much interested. But I must go now!" she said, like a weary child pleading to be let out of school. "Franky--my husband--will be waiting. I have promised to lunch with him at the Club."
"If he is here, perhaps Lord Norwater would like to speak to me," Saxham suggested.
Margot lied badly. She reddened as she answered:
"Oh, what a pity that he did not come!"
*CHAPTER XXII*
*MARGOT IS SQUARE*
She was in what she would have termed "a blue funk" for fear that Saxham would accompany her to the threshold. But he merely bowed her out of the consulting-room and smartly shut his door. Then she tripped to the waiting-room and beckoned forth Franky with an air of buoyant, fictitious cheerfulness. Her eyes were radiant, her little face was dressed in artful smiles....
"Did I seem long? Were you getting the hump?" she asked of Franky, who rose and hurried to meet her, dropping _Punches_ all over the place. His smooth hair was almost rumpled and his brown eyes begged like a retriever's. He asked in the kind of whisper that travels miles:
"Yes--no! Did you pull off the interview? What does the Doctor----"
"S-sh!" She glanced anxiously towards the one remaining patient. "Tell you when we get out. Impossible here!"
He urged: "But is it all right?"
"As right as rain!"
"Good egg!" She had got him out of the room and as far as the hall door. "Stop! ... Wait! Oughtn't I to go and thank----"
"No--no!" The door was open, the neat little landau-limousine that had brought them was waiting by the kerb-stone. Before Franky knew it, Margot had plucked him down the steps, pulled him into the car, and given the chauffeur the signal. They were in Hanover Square before he recovered his breath.
"Oh come, I say, Kittums! That sort of Sandow business can't be good for you. Why you're in such a thundering hurry to get me away, I'd rather like to know?"
Her heart shook her, but she lied again bravely.
"Didn't you want to hear what the Doctor told me about the 'Purple Dreams' treatment?"
"More than anything in the world. That drug with the freak name! ... Can it do any harm--to you and----"
"Not a scrap!"
She planted a flying kiss between his ear and his collar. He greatly appreciated the attention, though it tickled him horribly.
"Dr. Saxham said it was a frightfully clever, practicable method. Absolutely harmless, and the patient doesn't suffer--not that much!" She measured off an infinitesimal bit of finger-nail and showed him, and went on as he caught the little hand and gratefully mumbled it: "You don't know a thing that happens. You simply go to bye-bye. And--there's always the baby when you wake up!"
"A first-class baby?" His harping maddened her. "A healthy little buffer to send to Eton and represent us in the Regiment, and inherit the title presently when his poor old Pater pops? Just look me in the face like the little sport you are, Margot, and tell me that you're playing square with me. For this--for this is the game of Life!"
He had both her hands. He made her look at him. She met his eager stare with limpid eyes. And all the while that sentence of Saxham's about the pre-natal poisoning of the springs of existence, drummed, drummed at the back of her brain. "_What a little beast I am!_" she mentally commented, hearing her own voice answering:
"I've told you No, and that I am playing square with you!" She grasped the fact that Franky had suffered, by the grunt of relief with which he loosed her hands. "And so it's settled I go to Berlin about the middle of--September, say?"
"Wow-wow! It's us for the gay life! Just when the beastly hole's as dusty as the Sahara and as hot as hell!"
"You won't be in the beastly hole, and perhaps I needn't go before the beginning of October. You can go down to Brakehills and slay away at the pheasants, and run over when I cable, to bring me back----"
"With my boy! Our boy, Kittums!"
His simple, kind face was quivering. He put out a strong brown hand and laid it on hers, and she gave the hand a little affectionate nip:
"Hullo!" Perhaps he talked on to cover up the momentary lapse into sentiment. "Pipe old St. George's, where we did the deed! Hardly seems close on six months since we got spliced, does it? And there's the Bijou Cottage...." Franky thus irreverently designated the large, drab, stucco-faced, eminently respectable if mousey mansion on the Square's east side, where Margot's bachelor Uncle Derek lived with his collection of moths and beetles. "Shall we stop and give the old gentleman a cheero? Is he at all likely to be in?"