Richard Dehan - The Dop Doctor

Boom! In the heart of a still, foggy night, following a day of lashing rain, and the boy Owen Saxham, whom the Dop Doctor remembered, would wake upon his lavender-scented pillow in the low-pitched room with the heavy ceiling-beams and the shallow diamond-paned casements, and call out to David, dreaming in the other white bed, to plan an excursion with the breaking of the day, to see how much more of their kingdom had toppled over on those wave-smoothed rock-pavements far below, that were studded with great and little fossils, as the schoolroom suet-pudding with the frequent raisin.

More faces came. The boys' father, fair and florid, bluff, handsome, and kindly, an English country gentleman of simple affectionate nature and upright life. He came in weather-stained velveteen and low-crowned felt, with the red setter-bitch at his heels, and the old sporting Manton carried in the crook of his elbow, where the mother used to sew a leather patch, always cut out of the palm-piece of one of the right-hand gloves that were never worn out, never being put on. A dark-eyed, black-haired Welsh mother, hot-tempered, keen-witted, humorous, sarcastic, passionately devoted to her husband and his boys, David and Owen.

David and Owen. David was the elder, fair like the father, destined for Harrow, Sandhurst, and the Army. Owen had dreamed of the Merchant Service, until, having succeeded in giving the Persian kitten, overfed to repletion by an admiring cook, a dose of castor-oil, and being allowed to aid the local veterinary in setting the fox-terrier's broken leg, the revelation of the hidden gift was vouchsafed to this boy. How he begged off Harrow, much to the disgust of the Squire, and went to Westward Ho, faithfully plodded the course laid down by the Council of Medical Education, became a graduate of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and took his degree brilliantly; registered as a student at St. Stephen's Hospital; won an Entrance Scholarship in Science, and secured the William Brown Exhibition in his second year. Thenceforward the world was an oyster, to be opened with scalpel and with bistoury by Owen Saxham.

Oh, the good days! the delectable years of intellectual development, and arduous study, and high hope, and patient, strenuous endeavour! The man sitting with knitted hands and tense brain and staring eyes there in the darkening room groaned aloud as he looked back. Nobody envied that broad-shouldered, lean-flanked, bright-eyed young fellow his successes. Companions shared his triumphs, lecturers and professors came down from their high pedestals of dignity to help him on. When he obtained his London University diploma with honours for a thesis of exceptional merit, he had already held the post of principal anæsthetist at St. Stephen's Hospital for a year. Now, a vacancy occurring upon the Junior staff of surgeons to the Hospital's in-patient Department, Owen Saxham, M.D., was chosen to fill it. This brought Mildred very near.

For he was very much in love. The hot red blood in his veins had carried him away sometimes upon a mad race for pleasure, but he was clean of soul and free from the taint of vice, inherited or acquired, and the Briton's love of home was strong in him. And wedded love had always seemed to him a beautiful and gracious thing; and fatherhood a glorious privilege. Stern as he seemed, grave and quiet and undemonstrative as he was, the youngest and shyest children did not shrink from him. The pink rose-leaf tongue peeped from between the budding rows of teeth, and the innocent considering eyes questioned him only a moment before the smile came. To be the father of Mildred's children seemed the lofty end of all desire that was not mere worldly ambition.

Mildred was the elder daughter of a county neighbour down in Dorsetshire. She had known Owen Saxham from her school-days, but never until he took to calling at the house in Pont Street, to which Mildred, with her family – mere satellites revolving in the orbit of that shining star of Love – migrated in the Season. She was tall, slight, and willowy, with a sweet head that drooped a little, and round brown eyes that were extremely pretty and wore a perpetual expression of surprise. She was rather anæmic, preferred croquet to lawn-tennis – then the rage – and kept a journal, after the style of an American model. But the space which Mary McMullins cribbed from Mary McMullins to devote to a description of the bathroom in which the ablutions of her family were performed, and a vivid word-picture of their tooth-brushes ranged in a row, and their recently wrung-out garments in the act of taking the air upon the back-garden clothes-line, was all devoted to Mildred in Mildred's journal. In it Owen found a place. He was described as a blend between "Rochester" in "Jane Eyre" and "Bazarov" in Turgenev's "Fathers and Children." In one specially high-flown passage he was referred to as a grim granite rock, to which the delicate clematis-like nature of Mildred, clinging, was to envelop it with leaf and blossom. She read him the passage one day. Their faces were very close together as they sat upon the sofa in the pretty Pont Street drawing-room, and his newly-bought engagement-ring gleamed on her long white hand… The remembrance of that day made the Dop Doctor laugh out harshly in the midst of his anguish. So trivial and so weak a thing had been that love of hers on which he had founded the castle of his hopes and desires.

Now the aspiring young man bought a practice with some thousands advanced by his father out of the younger son's portion that should be his one day. It lay just where Hyde Park merges into Paddington. Here a medical man may feel the pulse of Dives for gold, and look at the tongue of Lazarus for nothing, and supply medicine into the bargain, if he be of kindly soul, and this hopeful, rising surgeon and physician had an open hand and an unsuspecting nature.

God! how much the worse for him. The sweat-drops ran down into the Dop Doctor's eyes as he remembered that.

He set up his bachelor tent in Chilworth Street, furnishing the rooms he meant to inhabit with a certain sober luxury. By-and-by the house could be made pretty, unless Mildred should insist upon his moving to Wigmore Street, or to Harley Street, that Mecca of the ambitious young practitioner. Probably Mildred's people would insist upon Harley Street. They were wealthy; their daughter would be quite an heiress, "another instance of Owen's luck," as David, long ago gazetted to a crack Cavalry regiment, would say, and Owen would laugh, and admit that, though he would have been glad enough to take his young fair love without dower and plenishing, it was pleasant enough to know that his wife would have an independent fortune of her own. It was one of David's best jokes that Owen was marrying Mildred for her money. David's ideas of humour were crude and elemental. On the other hand, his manners were admirable, and his physical beauty perfect of its type, though men and women turned oftenest to look at the younger brother, whom the women called "plain, but so interesting," and the men "an uncommonly attractive sort of fellow, and as clever as they make them." When the great crash came Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., was about twenty-nine.

Do you care for a description of the man at his prime?

He was probably five feet ten in height, but his scholar's stoop robbed him of an inch or more. The great breadth of the slightly-bowed shoulders, the immense depth and thickness of the chest, gave his upper figure a false air of clumsiness. His arms were long and powerful, terminating in strong, supple, white hands, the hands of the skilled surgical operator; his thick, smooth, opaque, white skin covered an admirable structure of bone, knit with tough muscles, clothed with healthful flesh. One noticed, seeing him walk, that his legs were bowed a little, because he had been accustomed to the saddle from earliest childhood, though he rode but seldom now, and one saw also that his small muscular feet gripped the ground vigorously, through the glove-thin boots he liked to wear. He showed no tendency to dandyism. His loosely-cut suits of fine, silky black cloth were invariably of the same fashion. In abhorring jewellery, in preferring white cashmere shirts, and strictly limiting the amount of starch in the thin linen cuffs and collars, perhaps he showed a tendency to faddism. David told him that he dressed himself like a septuagenarian Professor. Mildred would have preferred dear Owen to pay a little more attention to style and cut, and all that, though one did not, of course, expect a man of science to look like a man of fashion. One couldn't have everything, at least, not in this world…