"And he ... what does ...?" She could get out nothing more.

"He agrees. Mevrouw Vrynks"—"Dutch for Wrynche," thought Lady Hannah dizzily—"you will now pay the Mevrouw Kink what is owing for her amiable entertainment, and you will start for Gueldersdorp in ten minutes' time."

The roaring voice of the stern, fierce-eyed man, sounded lovelier than the swan-song of De Rezke. She faltered, with her joyful heart leaping at the gates of utterance:

"The—mare and spider. You will be so kind as to return them——?"

His face became as a human countenance rudely carved in seasoned oak.

"I know nothing of a mare and spider," blared the great voice.

She looked him straight between the hot fierce eyes, and spoke out pluckily.

"They are not my property. I hired the trap and the trotter from a hotel-keeper at Gueldersdorp. And Mr. Van Busch tells me that they have recently been commandeered for the service of the United Forces of the Transvaal and Orange Free State."

"So!... Well, that is what I would have done, if they were worth having. Where is Van Busch?" The angry glance pounced on that patriot in the remote corner to which he had modestly retired. Van Busch cringed forwards, hat in hand, explaining:

"The English Mevrouw mistakes, Myjnheer. Sure, now, I never told her anything of that kind. How could I, when there was no mare and no spider? Didn't I drive her and the other woman over from Haargrond, with Bough's little beast pulling in a cart of my own? Call the other woman, and she will tell you it was as I say."

Lady Hannah, supremely disdainful, turned her back upon the liar....

"So, then, you are not willing to go back in a veld waggon?" demanded the bullying voice.

"I'm willing to go back in anything that isn't a coffin," she declared.

He gave the wooden chuckle, swung about and trampled to the door, calling to Van Busch in the tone of a dog's master:

"Here, you ...!"

Van Busch followed, wriggling as obsequiously as the dog with a stolen mutton-chop upon his conscience. The door slammed, the key turned roughly in the lock. Lady Hannah, oblivious of the absence of outdoor footwear, flew joyously to cram a few belongings into her travelling-bag and resume her discarded hat.



Outside in the street, the motley crowd having melted away upon his appearance, General Selig Brounckers was saying to Van Busch:

"It is a pity that the Engelschwoman's story was not true about that mare and spider. For if a mare and spider there had been, you might perhaps have kept them for your trouble——"

—"Now I come to think of it, Myjnheer Commandant," said Van Busch in a hurry, "perhaps the woman was not lying, after all. Bough has a mouse-coloured trotter in the stables at Haargrond Plaats, and a spider stands under the waggon-shed in the yard. If they are hers, I'll let Bough know Myjnheer Commandant said I was to have them. He'll make no bones about parting then. Sure, no! he'll never dare to."

"I will send a couple of my burghers with you to take care he does not," said the Commandant, in what was for the redoubtable Brounckers an easy tone. "It is unlucky," he added less pleasantly, "that you were such a verdoemte clever knave as to tell the Engelschwoman I had commandeered both beast and vehicle for Republics' use. Because now I will do it, look you! No Boer's son that lives, by the Lord! will I suffer to make Selig Brounckers out a liar." He added, as Van Busch salaamed and squirmed with more than Oriental submissiveness, "Least of all a sneaking Africander schelm like you. And now, about the money?"

"Excellentie——" lisped Van Busch, smiling his oily brown face into ingratiating creases ...

"I am no Excellentie.... Of how much money, properly belonging to the Republics' war-chest, have you cheated this little fool of an Engelschwoman?"

"Five weeks back, Myjnheer Commandant," bleated Van Busch, "I had from her one hundred and fifty pounds, which I swear as an honest man has been handed over to Myjnheer Blinders——"

"He has accounted to me."

"Five weeks back——?" Van Busch hinted.

"He has accounted for it five weeks back."

There are men who possess all the will to be rogues, but have not the requisite courage. Such a man was Blinders, who emerged plus a sweetheart, the approval of his Commandant, and the eclat of having chaffed the British Lion, out of the affair that was to prove so expensive to Mr. Van Busch.

"And"—the big voice trumpeted, as Van Busch, like a stout pinned butterfly, quivered, transfixed by the glare of the savage eyes—"you will now account to me for the rest."

Van Busch faltered with a sickly smile:

"Fifty more, Myjnheer, that I was bringing you myself——"

"One hundred and fifty you have paid me, and fifty you were going to pay me. Ik wil het—but where are the other hundreds you have paid Van Busch?" bellowed the roaring voice. "Does not my old man-baboon at home pouch six walnuts for every one that his wife gets to share with her youngster? When I want to make the big thief spit them out, I squeeze him by the neck. So, voor den donder! will I do to you. Only, geloof mij, I will not do it in play. Pay Blinders the other five hundred pounds before kerk-time. If you haven't got the cash about you, he and young Schenk Eybel shall ride with you to Haargrond, where lives your friend Bough. They can bring back the money and the mare and spider, too. Moreover, Eybel, who is a bright boy, and has a head upon his shoulders, wants a slim rogue of a fellow that talks Engelsch to worm himself in over yonder"—he jerked his gnarled thumb in the direction of Gueldersdorp—"and bring back a plan of the defences on the west, where the native stad lies. Perhaps I will let you keep two hundred of that five hundred if you are the man to go.... But whether you go or stay, by the Lord! you will find it best to be square with Selig Brounckers."

And the redoubtable Brounckers stumped off. Verily, in times of scarcity, when the lion is a-hungered, the jackal must lose his bone.

It would be well, thought the dispirited jackal ruefully, to remove the unfavourable impression made, by a valuable service rendered to the United Republics. It would be a good thing to stand well with Myjnheer Schenk Eybel, who would, when Brounckers went south, be left in sole command. It would be as well, also, to get a look at that girl that was living with the nuns at Gueldersdorp.

"Mildare ..." That was the puzzle—her having the name so pat. But these little frightened, white-faced things were sly, and kids remembered more than you thought for....

Grown up a beauty, too, and with the manners of a lady. He swore again, the thing seemed so incredible, and spat upon the dust. A pretty green shining beetle crawled there. He set his heavy foot upon the insect, and its beauty was no more.



XXXVII

As the Captain's heavy cavalry stride shakes Nixey's roof, the upright, lightly-built soldierly figure in khaki turns and comes towards him, giving the binoculars in charge to the Sergeant-Major of Irregulars, who is his orderly of the day.

"I want a word with you, Wrynche. Rawlings will take the glasses. Come in here under cover."

He leads the way. The cover is a canvas shelter, perhaps a protection from the blazing sun, but none at all from shell and bullets. There are a couple of wooden chairs under its flimsy spread and a little table. The Chief sits down astride on one of the chairs, accepts a cigar from Captain Bingo's enormous crocodile-leather case, and says, as the first ring of blue smoke goes wavering upwards:

"You'll be glad to know that Monboia's Barala runner has got through with good news for you." The last two words are rather strongly emphasised. "Just before dawn and after Beauvayse relieved you at Staff Bombproof South."

Captain Bingo swallows violently, runs a thick finger round inside his collar, and his big face goes through several changes of complexion, ranging from boiled suet-dumpling paleness to beetroot red. He looks away and blinks before he says in a voice that wobbles:

"Then my wife's—all right?"

"Lady Hannah and her German attendant, as far back as the day before yesterday, when Monboia's man saw them, were in the enjoyment of excellent health."

"Poof!" Captain Bingo blows a genuine sigh of relief, and the latent lugubriousness departs from him. "Good hearing. I've had—call it hippopotamus on the chest this two months, and you'll about hit the mark. Uncertainty and suspense get on a man's nerves, in the long-run. Bound to. And never a word—the deuce a line—all these—— Poof!" He blows again, and beams. The Colonel, watching him out of the corner of one keen eye, says, with a twitching muscle in the cheek that is turned away from him:

"My good news being told, I have a slice of bad for you. But first let me make an admission. Since Nixey's pony pulled Nixey's spider out of Gueldersdorp with Lady Hannah and her maid in it, I have had three communications from your wife."

"You're pullin' my leg, sir, ain't you?" queries Bingo doubtfully.

"Not a bit of it."

In confirmation of the statement he takes out a shabby pocket-book, fat with official documents, and, unstrapping it, selects three, and hands them to Bingo. They are flimsy sheets of tissue-paper covered with spidery characters in violet ink, and Bingo, taking them, recognises the handwriting, and is, as he states without hesitation, confoundedly flabbergasted.

"For they are in my wife's wild scrawl," he splutters at last. "How on earth did they reach you, sir?"

"The first was brought in by a native boy who said he belonged to the kraals at Tweipans," says the Chief. "Boiled small and stuffed into a quill stuck through his ear in the usual way. He trumped up a glib story about his cow having been killed and his new wife beaten by Brounckers' men, and his desire to be revenged, and oblige the English lady who'd been kind to him——"

"Umph! Native gratitude don't run to being skinned alive with sjamboks—not much!" the other comments. "Chap must have been lyin', or a kind of nigger Phoenix."

"Exactly. So I couldn't find it in my heart to part with him. He's on the coloured side of the gaol now, with two others, who subsequently landed in with the documents you have in hand there."

"Am I to read 'em?" Bingo queries.

His commanding officer nods, with the muscle in his lean cheek twitching.

"Certainly. Aloud, if you'll be so good."

Bingo reads, with haltings on the way, for the tissue sheets stick to his large fingers, which are damp with suppressed agitation:

"HAARGROND PLAATS, "NEAR TWEIPANS, "October 30th.

"To the Colonel Commanding Her Majesty's Forces in Gueldersdorp.

"SIR,—I beg to report myself arrived at the above address, twelve miles distant from the head laager of the Boer Commandant, General Brounckers. I have to inform you that an attack will be made on Maxim Kopje South by a large force of the enemy with guns in the beginning of November.

"I have the honour to be, "On Secret Service, "Yours most obediently, "H. WRYNCHE."



Bingo stares blankly at his Chief, the sheets of crumpled tissue wavering between his thick, agitated fingers.

"I got that letter exactly a week after the attack had been made and successfully resisted," says the Colonel's dry, quiet voice. "Read the four lines in a different hand and ink, that are underlined at the bottom, and tell me what you think of 'em."

Bingo obeyed, and read:

"Lady's information perfectly correct. We hope this intelligence will reach you in time to be useful.

"I have the honour to be, "P. BLINDERS, "Acting-Secretary to General "Brounckers."



"By the Living Tinker!" exploded Bingo.

"Don't be prodigal of emotion," the Colonel's quiet voice warns the excited husband. "There are two more letters following. Read 'em in the proper sequence. That one with the inky design at the top, that might be the pattern for a pair of fancy pyjamas—that's the next."

Bingo reads as follows:

"KINK'S HOTEL, "TWEIPANS, "November 28th.

"To the Colonel Commanding H. M. Forces in Gueldersdorp.

"SIR,—I beg to report myself arrived at Tweipans. I have the honour to enclose herewith a sketch-plan of the village and the disposition of General Brounckers' laager. Trusting you may find it useful,

"I have the honour to be, "On Secret Service, "Yours most obediently, "H. WRYNCHE."



The sarcastic P. Blinders had appended an italicised comment:

"His Honour considers the above sketch-plan remarkably faithful. The building next the Gerevormed Kerk, indicated by an X, is the gaol. Comfortable cells at your disposal, which we are keeping vacant.

"P. BLINDERS."



"D-a-a——"

The Chief does not happen to be looking Bingo's way as the infuriated husband menaces with a large clenched fist an imaginary countenance attached to the conjectural personality of the sportive P. Blinders.

"Swear—it will bring the blood down from your head," advises the dry, quiet voice. "But don't tear up the papers!—they're too amusing to lose."

"Amusin'!" growls Bingo, with smarting eyes, and a lumpy throat, and a tingling in his large muscles which P. Blinders, being out of reach, can afford to provoke. "You wouldn't think it amusin', sir, if it were your wife, making herself a—a figure of fun for those Dutch bounders to shy at."

This is the third letter:

"December 23rd.

"To the Colonel Commanding, Gueldersdorp.

"SIR,—I have to report that the sortie you have planned to take place on the morning of the 26th, for the capture of the enemy's big gun, is known to General Brounckers, and that the menaced position will be strengthened and manned to resist you.

"Obediently, "H. WRYNCHE."



Underneath is the sarcastic comment:

"December 27th.

"Nice if you had got this in time, eh? And we wanted those boots and badges.

"P. B."



"She got hold of a nugget that once, anyway," says Captain Bingo, blowing his nose emphatically; "and—by the Living Tinker! if it had reached us in time, we'd have saved a loss of twenty-one killed and stripped, and twenty-two wounded, and the stingin' shame of a whippin' into the bargain."

"Perhaps," says the Colonel, with a careworn shadow on the keen, sagacious face, and both men are silent, remembering an assault the desperate, reckless valour of which deserves to be bracketed in memory with the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, "If Defeat is ever shame, perhaps, Wrynche. But if you could put the question to each of that handful of brave men sleeping side by side over there"—he nods in the direction of the Cemetery, where the aftermath of Death's red harvest has sprung up in orderly rows of little white crosses—"they would tell you it can be more glorious than victory."

"Of course, you're right, sir. I gather now what your bad news is," says Bingo, who has been dejectedly rubbing his finger along the bristly edges of his sandy moustache, for a minute past. "Judgin' by the marginal annotations of this man Blinders—brute I'd kick to Cape Town with pleasure—my wife's a prisoner in Brounckers' hands?"

"An unconscious prisoner—yes. Give 'em their due, Wrynche. I shouldn't have credited 'em with the sense of humour they have displayed in their dealings with her."

If it were possible for Bingo to grow redder in the face, one would say that he has done so, as he bursts out, in a violent perspiration, striding up and down over Nixey's sheet-leaded roof.

"Confound their humour! It's the humour of tom-cats playin' with a—a dashed little silly dicky-bird. It's the humour of aasvogels watchin' a shot rock-rabbit kick. It's the humour of the battledore and the shuttlecock. And I'm the dicky-bird's mate and the bunny's better-half, and the other shuttlecock of the pair, and may I be blessed if I can take it smilin'!" He mops his scarlet and dripping face, and puffs and blows like a large military walrus on dry land.

"Perhaps you'll manage a smile when you've read this?"

Bingo stops in his stride, wheels, and receives an official document on blue paper. Under the date of the previous day, it runs as follows:

"HEAD LAAGER, "TWEIPANS, "January —th.

"To the Colonel Commanding the British Forces in Gueldersdorp.

"SIR,—In reply to your communication I am instructed by General Brounckers to inform you that our prisoner, the Englishwoman who came here in the character of a German drummer's refugee-widow to act as your spy, will be exchanged for a free Boer of the Transvaal Republic, by name, Myjnheer W. Slabberts, who is at present confined under the Yellow Flag in Gueldersdorp gaol. The exchange will be effected by parties under the White Flag at a given point North-East between the lines of investment and defence one hour before Kerk-time to-morrow, being the Sabbath.

"I have the honour to be yours truly,

"P. BLINDERS, "Acting-Secretary to General "Brounckers."

"P.S.—The young lady of German extraction who accompanied the Englishwoman has entered into an engagement to remain here.

"P. B."

"P.SS.—The engagement is with yours truly, the young lady having conformed to the faith of the Gerevormed Kerk. We are to be married next Sunday. Would you like us to send you some wedding-cake?

"P. B."



Blinders has certainly had the last dig, but his principal victim fails this time to wince or bellow under the point of his humour. With his big face changing from red to white, and from white to crimson half a dozen times in as many seconds, Captain Bingo says, refolding the paper and returning it with a shaky hand:

"Then she—she——"

A lump in his throat slides down and sticks.

"Gerevormed Kerk-time is eleven o'clock." The Colonel looks at his shabby Waterbury, as the brisk clatter of cantering horse-hoofs breaks up the Sabbath stillness of the Market Square, and an orderly, leading an officer's charger, halts before Nixey's door. "The B.S.A. escort, with their man, are due to leave the gaol in ten minutes' time. Here's your orderly with your mount, and you've eight minutes to change in."

"One minute, sir," Captain Bingo utters with an effort. "This man—this Slabberts—is a well-known spy—a trump card in Brounckers' hand, or he wouldn't be so anxious to get hold of him. And therefore—by this exchange—and a woman's dashed ambitious folly—you may lose heavily in the end...."

"I don't deny it." The haggard shadow is again upon the Colonel's face, or is it that Bingo's radiance dulls neighbouring surfaces by comparison? "But don't let the thought of it spoil your good hour." The smile in the eyes that have so many lines about them is kind, if the mouth under the red-brown moustache is stern and sorrowful. "We don't have many of 'em. Off with you and meet her!"

Captain Bingo tries to say something more, but makes a hash of it; and with eyes that fairly run over, can only grip the kindly hand again and again, assuring its owner, with numerous references to the Living Tinker, that he is the most thundering brick on earth. Then, overthrowing the small table and one of the chairs, he plunges down the narrow iron stairway to get into what he calls his kit. Six minutes later, correct to a buckle and a puttee-fold, he salutes his commanding officer, nodding pleasantly to him from Nixey's roof, and buckets down the street at a tremendous gallop, the happiest man in Gueldersdorp, with this shout following him:

"My regards to Lady Hannah. And tell her that the Staff dine on gee-gee at six o'clock sharp, and I shall be charmed if she'll join us."



XXXVIII

The little Olopo River, a mere branch of the bigger river that makes fertile British Baraland, runs from east to west, along the southern side of Gueldersdorp, swelled by innumerable thready water-courses, dry in the blistering winter heat, that the wet season disperses among the foothills that bristle with Brounckers' artillery. Seen from the altitude of a balloon or a war-kite, the course of the beer-coloured stream, flowing lazily between its high banks sparsely wooded with oak and blue gum, and lavishly clothed with cactus, mimosa, and tree-fern, tall grasses, and thorny creepers, would have looked like a verdant ribbon meandering over the dun-and-ochre-coloured veld, where patches of bluish-green are beginning to spread. The south bank, where the bush grows thinnest, was frequently patronised by picnic-parties, and at all times a place of resort for strolling sweethearts. The north bank, much more precipitous, was clothed with a tangled luxuriance of vegetation, and threaded only by native paths, so narrow as to prove discouraging to pedestrians desirous of walking side by side. Where the outermost line of defences impinged upon the river-bed, the trees had been cut down and the bush levelled. But east of Maxim Outpost South, and the rifle-pits that flanked Fort Ellerslie, all was as it had been for hundreds of years, in the remembrance of the great granite boulder that stood on the south shore.

The great boulder had known changes since the old Plutonic forces cast it upwards, a mere bubble of melted red granite, solidifying as it went into a stone acorn thirty feet high, which the glacier brought down in a slow journey of countless ages, and set upright like a phallic symbol, amongst other boulders of lesser size. The channel the glacier had chiselled was now full of shining honey-coloured water, hurrying over the granite stones and blocks of quartz and pretty vari-coloured pebbles, while the boulder sat high and dry, with the tall-plumed grasses, and the graceful tree-fern, and the yellow-tasselled mimosa crowding about its knees; and remembered old times, long before the little Bushfellow had outlined the koodoo and the buffalo, and the hunter-man with the spear, in black pigments on its smooth flank, ere he ground up the coprolites gathered from the river-bed for red and yellow paint to colour the drawings. On the western side the great boulder was dressed in crimson lake and yellow-umber-hued lichens from base to summit, and in August, when the aloes flowered in magnificent fiery clusters upon its crown and at its base; and in May, when the sweet-scented clematis wreathed it in exquisite trails, and white and rose and purple pelargoniums made a carpet for its feet; and in July, when the yellow everlastings bloomed in every cranny of the rocks, King Solomon in all his glory held less magnificence of state.

Insects and beasts and birds loved the boulder. The sun-beetle and the orange-tip and peacock butterflies loved to bask on its hottest side, while the old dog-faced baboon squatted on top and chattered wisdom to his numerous family, and the finches and love-birds built in its crannies and bred their young, too often as food for the giant tarantula and the tree-snake; while the francolin and grouse dusted themselves in the hot sand at the base of its throne of rocks, and the springbok and the wart-hogs came down at night to drink; and the woolly cheetah and the red lynx came after the springbok and the wart-hog.



The boulder had seen War—War between black-skinned men and brown-skinned men, adventurers with great hooked noses and curled beards, with tassels of silk and gold plaited into them and into the hair of their heads, terrible warriors, mighty hunters, and great miners, who came for slaves and ivory and gold, and hollowed strongholds out of the mountains, and worshipped strange bird-beaked gods, and passed away. Yet again, when these ceased to be, there had been War; and this time the black men of the soil fought with white strangers, who wanted the same things—slaves, and skins, and ivory, and the yellow metal of the river-sands and of the rocks.



Now white men fought with white. The black men owned little of the country: they hid in the kloofs and thickets in terror, while the European conquerors shed each other's blood for gold, and land, and power. The boulder was so very old. It could afford to wait patiently until these men, like all that went before, had passed.



Every seventh day the guns ceased bellowing and throwing iron things that burst and scattered Death broadcast, and the rifles stopped crack-cracking and spitting steel and lead. Then the scared birds came back: the waxbills, and love-birds, and finches, and sparrows darted in and out among the bushes, and the partridge, and quail, and francolin ventured down to drink. The old baboon had retired to the hills with his family; the springbok and the wart-hog had moved up Bulawayo way; the cheetah and the lynx had followed them....

But as long as human lovers came and whispered to each other, standing beside the big boulder, or sitting in its shadow, the boulder would be content. They spoke the old language that it had learned when the world was comparatively young. Black or yellow or white, African or Oriental or European, this speech of theirs was always the same; their looks and actions never varied. Either they met and kissed and were happy, or they met and quarrelled and were miserable. When no more lovers should come, the boulder knew that would be the end of the world.

There was a gaudily dressed, white-faced young woman waiting now beside the big stone upon this seventh day. Her blue eyes were large and wistful. She had taken off her big flaunting hat and hung it on a bush, and her face was not unpretty, topped by its aureole of frizzy yellow curls. She leaned against the sun-warmed granite, and cried a little. That was the way of women when the man was late at the tryst. Then she dried her eyes and hummed a song, and, finally, taking a stump of pencil from her pocket, she began to scribble on the smooth red stone—all part of the old play, the boulder knew. The first woman whom he remembered had drawn a figure meant for a portrait of her lover, with a sharpened flake of flint.

The young woman, as she sucked her lead-pencil, was quite unconscious that the boulder thought at all. She wrote in an unformed hand, and in letters that began by being large and round, and tailed off into a slanting niggle. "W. Keyse, Esquer." Then she bit the pencil awhile, and dreamed dreams. Then she wrote again, "Jane Keyse" and "Mrs. W. Keyse," and blushed furiously, and then grew pale again in anticipation of the Awful Ordeal to come. For she had made up her mind to tell him all, and chance it.

Yesterday had been his birthday. She had sent him, per John Tow, a costly gift. The four-ounce packet of honeydew, cheap at five dollars in these days of scarcity, had been opened, and the new pipe filled. A slip of paper coquettishly intimated that the sender had rendered the recipient this delicate little service. She meant to sign "Jane Harris," but her courage failed her, and her trembling pen faltered for the last time, "Fare Air."

Oh! how she hated that Other One, whom, perhaps, he liked the best, though he had never kissed her! She would be done with the creature, she thanked her Gawd, after to-day! Oh, how many times she had made up her mind to tell him the truth, and never done it! But if she took and died of it, tell him she would this time.

How would he take the revelation? Possibly swearing. Probably he would be angry enough to hit her, when he knew. If he only would, and make it up afterwards! Oh! how cruel she did suffer! She thought she would not tell him just yet. It was too hard. And then it seemed quite easy, and then she cried out in agony: "Is that 'im comin'? Oh, my Gawd, it is!"

She clasped her hands over a brand-new blowse, with something under it that jumped and fluttered orful. Mother used to 'ave such palpitytions when her and father 'ad 'ad what you might call a jar. And he was coming, coming....

Surely W. Keyse looked stern and imposingly tall of stature, seen from her lower level, as he appeared among the blue gum-trees on the top of the bank, and began to descend into the ferny gorge where the great boulder sat and sunned himself beside the beer-coloured river, whose barbel kept on rising at the flies. Something W. Keyse dragged behind him, not by a rope, but by a pigtail; an animated bundle of clean blue cotton, topped by the impassive, almond-eyed countenance of John Tow, the letter-carrying Chinaman, who in the unlawful pursuit of tikkies, finding the letter written by the foreign lady-devil to the male one eagerly paid for on the nail, had offered for half as much again to induce her for the future to write two instead of one. Towing Tow, the smarting victim of feminine duplicity came crashing down upon the guilty girl who had betrayed him.

"See 'ere! You know this 'ere young lady, and you remember what you've bin and told me. Say it over again now," thundered W. Keyse, "so as she can 'ear you. Tell me before 'er as wot she wrote them—these letters"—he rapped himself dramatically upon the breast-pocket—"and how you see her doing of it, before I kick your backbone through your hat."

All was lost. The Chinaman had up an' give Emigration Jane away. Certainly he had saved her trouble, but what was he sayin' now, the 'orrible slant-eyed 'eathen? She could hardly hear him for the roaring in her poor bewildered head.

"S'pose John tell, can catchee more tikkie? Plenty tikkie want to buy chow, allee so baddee times."

"Always on the make, ain't you?" commented W. Keyse. With a strong, imperious shove, he dumped the blue bundle down among the cowslips in which the feet of the guilty fair were hidden, saying sternly: "I give you three minutes to git it off your chest, else kickie is wot you'll catch instead o' tikkie." He furnished a moderate sample on account.

"Oh, ki—ah. Oh, ki—ah!" moaned the tingling John.

"Don't you be 'ard on him, William"—he hardly knew the voice, it was so weak and small—"it's Gawspel truth. To pay you out—at first, for juggin' Walt, I did write them letters—every bloomin' screeve."

"An' sent the pipe and baccy for a birthday present, to make a blushin' fool o' me?" yelled the infuriated Keyse. "All for the crimson sake of a fat 'og of a Dutchman!"

The patriot to whom he referred, mounted on an attenuated mule, and escorted by a Sergeant and six men of the B.S.A., under the superintendence of a large pink officer of the Staff, was at that moment being conducted at a sharp trot out of the lines, to meet a smallish waggon pulled by a span of four that was being brought down from Tweipans by half a dozen Boers in weathered tan-cord and velveteen, battered pot-hats and ragged shooting-jackets, carrying very carefully-tended rifles, mounted on well-fed, wiry little horses, and accompanied by a White Flag. If she had known, what would it have mattered to her? All her thoughts were centred in this furious little man, whose pale, ugly eyes fairly blazed at her, as he repeated:

"To pay—me out. You brawsted little Treachery, you——"

She crimsoned to her hair; you could see the red blood rushing and rushing up from under the peekaboo embroidery in front of the tawdry blowse, in a hurry to tell her tingling ears what cruel names he called her.

"To pay you out at first it was. An' afterwards"—her throat hurt her, and her eyes did smart and burn so—"afterwards I—I wanted ... O Gawd!..." she shook all over—"you'll never walk out wi' me no more after this!"

"You may take your dyin' oath I won't." He was bitterly sarcastic. "Strite, an' no kid, didn't you know when you done—that—I'd never forgive you as long as I lived?"

He plucked the stout package of letters signed "Fare Air" from his indignant bosom, and threw them at her feet, with the new pipe, her hapless gift. His wrath was infinitely more terrible than she had imagined. Her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth. Everything kep' a-spinnin' so, she couldn't 'ardly tell whether she was on 'er 'ead or 'er 'eels. She will remember that day to the last breath she draws....

"Didn't you know it?" the voice of her judge demanded again.

John Tow, finding himself no longer an object of attention, had discreetly vanished.

"Oh, I did, I did!" Her agony was frantic. "Oh, let me go away and hide and die somewhere! Oh, crooil, to break a pore gal's 'art! Wot—wot loves the bloomin' earth under your feet!"

"Garn!"—the scorn of W. Keyse was something awful—"you an' your love——"

She wrenched the cotton lace away from her thin throat, and tore some of her hair out in the strenuous hysteria of her class, and screamed at him:

"Me an' my love!... Go on!... Frow it in me face, an' 'ave no pity! Me an' my love!... Sneer at it, take an' spit on it—ain't it yours all the syme? Oh, for Gawd's syke forgive me!"

He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered:

"So 'elp me Jiminy Cripps, I never will!"

She knew that the oath was irrevocable, and with a faint moan, turned to the great boulder that was behind her, and clung to its hard red bosom as if it had been a mother's. She moaned to him as her thin figure flattened itself against the stone, to let her go away and die somewhere. He stood a moment looking at her, and exulting in his power, meaning her to suffer yet a little longer ere he relented. Secretly, he knew relief that the golden pigtail and the provoking blue eyes of Miss Greta Du Taine had vanished out of Gueldersdorp before the first Act of War. He would have felt them in the way now. Those shining, tearful eyes and the mouth that kissed and clung to his had done their work on the night of the Grand Variety entertainment in the empty Government store. He would pretend to go away and leave her. He would come back, enjoy her astonishment, be melted by renewed entreaties, stoop to relent, overwhelm her with his magnanimity, and then proceed to love-making.

But as a preliminary he swung round upon his heel and strode upwards through the short bush and the tall grasses, the scandalised flowers thrashing his boots. She saw him, although her back was turned. If he could have known how tall he seemed to Emigration Jane as he strode away, W. Keyse would have been tickled to the core. But he turned when he felt sure he was well out of sight, and hurried back.

She was not there.

He was indifferent at first, then angry, then anxious, then disconsolate. Repentance followed fast on the heels of all these moods. He picked up the packet of letters and the rejected pipe, cursing his own cruelty, and sought her up and down the banks, calling her in tones that were urgent, affectionate, upbraiding, appealing; but not for all his luring would the flown bird come back to fist. No more beside the river, or in other places where they had been wont to meet, did W. Keyse encounter Emigration Jane again.



XXXIX

But even without W. Keyse and the vanished author of "Fare Air's" letters the ferny tree-fringed kloof at the bottom of which the beer-coloured river ran over its granite boulders and quartz pebbles, was not empty and void. On Sundays, when the birds returned from the hills, to which they had been scared by the hideous tumult of War, thither after High Mass in the battered little Roman Catholic church in the stad, the Mother-Superior and the Sisters would come, bringing with them such poor food as they had, and picnic soberly. All the week through they had laboured, nursed, and tended the sick and wounded in the Hospitals, and washed and fed and taught the numberless orphans of the siege, and upon this day the Mother-Superior had ruled that they were to be together. And all the week through the thought of it kept them going, as she had hoped. You are to see her holding her little court beside the river upon a certain February afternoon, receiving friends in her sweet, stately fashion, and dispensing hospitality out of the largest and most battered Britannia-metal teapot that ever brewed, what was later originally referred to in the weekly "Social Jottings" column of the Gueldersdorp Siege Gazette as the cheering infusion. The Siege Gazette was an intermittent daily, issued from a subterranean printing-office, for the dissemination of general orders and latest news, fluctuations in the weight and quality of the meat-rations, and the rise and fall of the free-soup level, being also recorded. To its back-files I must refer those who seek a fuller account of the function described by the brilliant journalist who signed herself "Gold Pen," as highly successful. She gives you to understand that the company was distinguished, and the conversation vivid and unflagging. And when you realise that everybody present was suffering more or less from the active pinch of hunger, that social gathering of men and women of British blood becomes heroic and historic and fine.

"Dr Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, was observed," we read. "Gold Pen" also notes "the presence of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, son of the Bishop of H——, and second curate—on leave—of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street; now happily recovered, thanks to the skill of Dr. Saxham, from an illness, held at no recent date to be incurable. Mr. Fraithorn has undertaken the onerous duties of Chaplain to the Hospitals in charge of the Military Staff. It was gratifying to observe," she continues, "that the Colonel commanding graced the occasion by his martial presence. He was attended by his junior aide, Lieutenant Lord Beauvayse. We also saw Lady Hannah Wrynche with her distinguished husband, Captain Bingham Wrynche, Royal Bay Dragoons, Acting Senior Aide," etc., etc.

"Late apricots from the garden of the ruined Convent, and peaches from its west wall, gathered in the dead of night by Sister Cleophee and Sister Tobias," "Gold Pen" goes on to say, "were greatly appreciated by the guests, each of whom brought his or her own bread."

A most villainous kind of bannock of unleavened mealie-meal and crushed oats, calculated to try the strongest teeth and trouble the toughest digestion, "Gold Pen" might have added. But the game was to make believe you rather enjoyed it than otherwise. If you had no teeth and no digestion, you were allowed a pint and a half of sowens porridge instead; and thus helped your portion of exhausted cavalry mount or your bit of tough mule-meat down. And so you went on like your neighbours, playing the game, while your eyes grew larger and your girth less, and your cheekbones more in evidence with every day that dawned.

Cheekbones have a strange, unnatural effect when they appear in childish faces. There was a child in a rusty double perambulator that had been a stylish baby-carriage only a little while ago, whose wizened face and shrunken hands were pitiable to see. He was wheeled by a sallow woman, with hollow, grey-blue eyes—a woman whose black alpaca gown hung loosely on her wasted figure, and whose shabby, crape-trimmed hat was pinned on anyhow. Siege confinement and siege terrors, siege smells and siege diet, had made strange havoc of the plump comeliness of a matronly lady who once rustled in purple satin befitting a Mayor's wife. She had lost one of her children through diphtheria, and she knew, unless a miracle happened, that she would also lose the boy.

Only look at him! She told you in that dull, toneless voice of hers how sturdy he had been, how strong and masterful—how pretty, too, with his plume of fair hair tumbling into his big, shining, grey eyes! The eyes were bigger than ever now, but the light and the life had sunk out of them, and his round face was pinched, and the colour of old wax. And the arm that hung idly over the side of the little carriage was withered and shrunken—the hand of an old man, and not of a child. The other, under the light shawl that tucked him in, hugged something that bulged under the coverlet.

"His father can't bear to look at him," the Mayor's wife said, glancing at the Mayor's carefully-averted back. "And I'm sure it's no wonder. He just lies like this, day and night, and doesn't want to move, or answer when you speak to him, and he won't eat. The food is dreadful, but still he might try, just to comfort his mother——"

"I does twy," piped Hammy weakly, "and ven my tummy shuts, and it isn't no use twying any more."

The Mother-Superior brought a gaily-coloured little china cup of that rare luxury, new milk, and bent over him, saying cheerfully, as she held it to the colourless mouth, "Not always, Hammy. Taste this."

"No, fank you." He turned his head away, tightly shutting his eyes.

"It's real milk, Hammy, not condensed," the soft voice pleaded. He shook his head again, and knit his childish brows.

"I saided it wasn't no use. My tummy just shuts."

"I think I would not bother him any more just now," Saxham interposed, noting the droop of the piteous, flaccid mouth, and feeling the flutter of the uneven pulse. The Mayor's wife broke into helpless sobbing. The Mother-Superior drew her swiftly out of the sick child's hearing and sight. And a shadow fell upon the thin light coverlet, and a crisp, decided voice said:

"Then Hammy's tummy is a mutinous soldier, and must be taught to obey the Word of Command."

"Mister Colonel ..." The dull, childish eyes grew a very little brighter, and the claw-like hand went up in shaky salute to the limp plume of fair hair, not glistening and silky now, but dull and unkempt, that fell over the broad, darkly-veined waxen forehead.—"It is Mister Colonel.... And I haven't seen you for ever an' ever so long. An' Berta's deaded, an', an'——" The whisper was almost inaudible.... "Vere's something I did so want to tell!" The hidden arm came from under the coverings "It's about my Winocewus, vis beast what you gived me, ever so long ago." He displayed the treasured toy.

"You shall tell me about Berta and the rhinoceros when I have told you something. A Certain Person can come out of this vehicle, I suppose, Saxham? It will make no difference, in the long-run, to a Certain Person's health?"

"Why, nothing in Heaven or upon earth will make any difference at this juncture," returned Saxham, speaking in the same tone, "unless a Certain Person can be roused to the necessary pitch of desiring food. To administer it forcibly would, in my opinion, be worse than useless."

The Certain Person was lifted out of his cramped quarters by vigorous but gentle hands. The Colonel Commanding sat down with him upon a camp-stool, and as the wasted legs dangled irresponsibly from his supporting knees, and the hot head rolled helplessly against the row of coloured bits of medal-ribbon that were sewn on the left breast of the khaki jacket, he began to talk, holding the limp little body with a kind, sustaining arm.

"You've seen how my men obey me, Hammy? Well, your brain and your eyes, your arms and legs, and hands and feet, as well as your tummy, are your soldiers. And it's mutiny if they refuse to carry out the Officer's orders. And you're the Officer, you know."

"Am I ve Officer, weally?"

Interest was quickening in the heavy eyes.

"You're the Officer. And I'm the Colonel in Command. And when I say to you, 'Lieutenant Hammy, drink this milk,' why, you'll pass along the order to Sergeant Brain and Corporal Eyes and Privates Hands and Mouth and Tummy, and see that they carry it out. Where is——? Ah! thank you, ma'am; that was what I wanted."

For the Mother-Superior had deftly put the gaily-coloured little china cup into the lean, brown, outstretched hand, and, seeing what was coming, the Lieutenant shed an unsoldierly tear and raised a feeble whimper.

"Please, no, Mister Colonel! My tummy——"

"Private Tummy is a shirker, who doesn't want to do his duty. But it's your duty as his Commanding Officer to show him that it must be done. And that's the game we're playing. You'll employ tact before you have recourse to stringent measures. Not make the fellow dogged or furious by angry words or threats. When it's necessary to shoot, shoot straight. But, first, you give the order."

"Oughtn't ve officer to have a wevolver?"

"Wait a second, and you shall have mine."

The deft fingers twirled out and pocketed the cartridge-packed chambers, and put the harmless weapon into the childish hands.

"It's veway heavy," Hammy said dolefully, as the shining Army Smith & Wesson wobbled in his feeble clutches, then wavered and sank ingloriously down upon his lap.

"If you had drunk the milk you might have found it lighter. Suppose we try now. Attention!"

—"'Tention!" piped Hammy.

"Hands, catch hold. Mouth, do your duty. And if Private Tummy disobeys, he'll have to take the consequences."

"Please, what are ve confequences?"

"Drink down the milk, and then I'll tell you."

The gay little china cup was slowly emptied. Hammy blinked eyes that were already growing sleepy, and sucked the moustache of white from his upper-lip with relish, remarking:

"I dwinked it all, and my tummy never shut. Now tell me what are ve confequences?"

"A mother without a son, for one thing." The keen, hawk-eyes were gentle. "But drink plenty of milk and eat plenty of bread and porridge and minced meat, and you'll live to see the Relief marching into Gueldersdorp one fine morning, boy."

"Unless I get deaded like Berta. And that weminds me what I wanted to tell so bad." The lips began to quiver, and the eyes brimmed. "Soldiers mustn't cwy, must vey?"

"Not while there's work to be done, Hammy. Would you like to wait now and tell me another day?" For the little round head was nodding against the row of medal-ribbons stitched on the khaki jacket, and the big round eyes kept open with difficulty.

"No, please. It's about the beasts—my beasts what you gived me. Winocewus, an' Lion, an' Tawantula, an' Tsetse, an' Black Bee—just like a weal Bee, only not so sharp at ve end.... Don't you wemember, Mister Colonel?"

"Of course I remember. The toy beasts I brought down from Rhodesia and gave to a little boy."

"I was the boy. And—you saided I was to let Berta have her share wof dem. And I did let her play wif all ve ovvers. But Winocewus had to be tooked such care wof for fear of bweaking his horn—an' Berta was such a little fing, vat—vat——"

"That you wouldn't let her play with Rhinoceros. And you think it wasn't quite fair, or quite kind, and now you're sorry?"

Hammy sniffed dolorously, and two large tears splashed down.

"I'm sowwy. An' I fought if I was deaded too, like Berta, I could go an' tell her I never meaned to be gweedy. An' I wouldn't eat my bweakfust, nor my dinner, nor nothing—and at last my tummy shut, and I didn't want nuffing more."

The Mother-Superior and the Colonel Commanding exchanged a glance over the little round head before the man's voice answered the child.

"That wouldn't have made Bertha happy. She might have thought you a little coward for running away and leaving your mother and all the other ladies behind, shut up in Gueldersdorp. For an officer and a gentleman must go on living and fighting while he has anything left to fight for, Hammy. Remember that."

"Yes, Mister Colonel...." The drowsy eyes closed, the little head nodded off into slumber against the kind, strong shoulder. The Mother-Superior wheeled the perambulator near, and the Colonel, rising, laid the now soundly-sleeping boy back upon his cushions.

"What mysteries children are!" he said, as the Mother replaced the light covering, screening the sleeping face with tender, careful hands from sun and flies. "Imagine remorse for an act of selfishness leading a boy of six to such a determination—and a normal, healthy boy, if ever I met one."

"He has been living for some time under abnormal conditions," the Mother said softly, looking at the quiet rise and fall of the light shawl covering. "He will take a turn for the better now."

"And forget his trouble and its cause." The Chief's observant glance had lighted on Rhinoceros, lying upside down in a little clump of flowering sword-grass, into which he had been whisked as the Mother shook out the little shawl. "I think," he said, and pocketed the horned one, "that this gentleman had better go into the fire."

"Perhaps. And yet it would be a continual reminder to conquer selfishness in great as in little things." She smiled, meeting the keen hazel eyes with her great pure grey ones.

"If you think so, I will leave it."

"I will not take the responsibility of advising you to. You have already shown more tact than I can lay claim to in dealing with children. And that has been the business of the greater part of my life, remember."

He looked at her full, and said:

"I may possess and employ tact when dealing with men and with children, possibly. But not long ago I was guilty of—and have since bitterly reproached myself for, I beg you to believe me! a gross and lamentable blunder as regards a woman——"

She put out her fine hand with a quick, protesting gesture, as if she would have begged him to say no more. He went on:

"She is a lady whom you intimately know, and whom I have, like everyone else in this town, learned to esteem highly and to profoundly respect. For the terrible shock and the deep pain I must have given that lady in breaking to her ignorantly and hastily the news of the death of a friend who was dear to me, and infinitely dearer to—another with whom she is acquainted—I humbly entreat her pardon."

He had not known her eyes were of so deep a purple-grey as to be nearly black. Perhaps they seemed so by contrast with the absolute whiteness of her face. The eyes winced, and the mouth contracted as she entreated, voicelessly:

"I beg you, say no more!"

"I have but little more to say," he returned. "I will only add that if at any time you wished in kindness to make me forget what I did that day, you would apply to me in some difficulty, honour me with some confidence, trust me in any unforeseen emergency in which I might be of use to you. Or to—anyone who is dear to you, and in whom for the sake of old associations and old ties I might even otherwise be deeply interested."

He had spoken with intention, and now his deliberate glance dropped to the level of the strip of sandy shore beside the river, where the giant Convent kettle boiled upon a disproportionately little fire, and Sister Hilda-Antony presided in the Reverend Mother's place at the trestle-supported tray where the Britannia-metal teapot brooded, as doth the large domestic hen, over an immense family of cups and saucers. Busy as ants, the other Sisters hurried backwards and forwards, attending to the wants of their guests, who sat about on rocks and boulders, or with due precautions taken against puff-adders and tarantulas, lay upon the grass of the high bank in the shade of the fern and bush. And as vivid by contrast with their black-robed, white-wimpled figures, as a slender dragon-fly among a bevy of homely gnats, the graceful, prettily-clad figure of Lynette showed, as she shared the Sister's hospitable labours.

She had her share of girlish vanity. She had put on a plain tailor-made skirt of fine dark green cloth, short enough to show the dainty little brown buckled shoes that she specially affected, and a thin white silk shirt and knitted croquet-jacket of white wool. A scarlet leather belt girt her slender waist, and a silver chatelaine jingled a gay tune at her side, and about her white slim throat was a band of scarlet velvet, and her wide-brimmed straw hat had a knot of purple and white clematis in it, and a broad, vivid, emerald-green wing-quill thrust under the knot. And the hair under the green-plumed hat gleamed bronze in the sunshine that filtered through the thick foliage of the blue gum-trees that grew on either bank of the river, and stretched their branches out to clasp across the stream, like hands. She was too pale and too thin, and her eyes were feverishly bright, but she looked happy, carrying her tray of steaming teacups in spite of Beauvayse's anxious attempts to relieve her of the burden, and the Chaplain's diffident entreaties that she should entrust it to him. Their voices, mingled in gay argument, were borne by a warm puff of spice-scented air to the ears of the elder people, standing in the shade of the trees at the summit of the high, sloping bank, with the rusty perambulator between them.

"I thank you," the Mother said, in her full, round tones. The eyes of both, travelling back from that delicate, slight young figure, had met once more. "Believing that you speak in perfect sincerity, I thank you, and shall not hesitate to call upon you, should the need arise."

Her voice was very calm, and her discreet glance told nothing. He would not have been a man of woman born if he had not been a little piqued. He said, with an air of changing the subject:

"Miss Mildare strikes me as a very beautiful girl."

"Is she not?"

Her eyes grew tender, and her whole face was irradiated by the splendour of her smile. She looked down the bushed and grass-covered slope to where Lynette, all the guests supplied, had thrown herself down to rest on a stone under a tree. She had taken off her hat, and her hair was flecked with sunshine as she leaned her head back with a little air of lassitude and weariness against the scarred bark. But in spite of weariness she was smiling and content. The rest was delicious, the peaceful quiet enchanting, the air sweet after the fetid odours of the town; and it was sweet, too, whenever she glanced at the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who was lying at her feet, or Beauvayse, who fanned her alternately with a leafy branch and the tea-tray, to behold her own beauty reflected in the admiring eyes of two young and handsome men.

The Mother had never seen her thus before. She had been absent from the scenes of Lynette's little social triumphs. Now a great tenderness swelled in her bosom, and a great pity gripped her throat, and wrung the bitter, slow tears into her eyes.

"She is happy," she whispered in her heart. "She has forgotten just for a little while, and her kingdom of womanhood is hers, unspoiled, and the present moment is sweet, and the future she has no thought of. My poor, poor love! Let her go on forgetting, even if it is only for a day."

His voice beside her made her start. He was still speaking of Lynette.

"Her type is unusual—amongst Colonials."

She returned: "She was born in the Colony, I believe."

"Ah! but of British parents, surely? I once knew an English lady," he went steadily on, "whom she resembles strikingly."

Her eyes were inscrutable, and her lips were folded close.

"She was the wife of the Colonel commanding my old Regiment—Sir George Hawting. A grand old warrior, and something of a martinet. He married a third daughter of the Duke of Runcorn—Lady Lucy Briddwater."

She said without the betraying flicker of an eyelash: "I have seen the lady named...."

He said, with a prick of self-reproach for having again turned the barb that festered in her bosom:

"Lady Lucy was a very lovely creature, and a very impulsive one. She lived not happily, and she died tragically."

There was the ring of steel and the coldness of ice in the Mother's words:

"She met the fate she chose."

He thought, looking at her:

"What a woman this is! How silent, how resourceful, how calm, how immeasurably deep! And why does she think of me as an opponent?" He went on, stung by that quiet marshalling of all her forces against him:

"Unhappily, the fate we choose for ourselves sometimes involves others. The death of that unhappy woman and the father of her child left an innocent creature at the mercy of sordid, evil hands."

"In evil hands, indeed, judging by—what you have told me."

"I would give much to be able to trace her." There was a heavy line between his eyebrows, and his eyes were stern and sad. "It would be something to know what had become of her, even if she were dead, or worse than dead."

A violent, sudden scarlet dyed her to the edge of the white starched coif. Her mouth writhed as though words were bursting from her; but she nipped her lips together, and controlled her eyes. And still her silence angered and defied him. He went on:

"If I seem to you to harp painfully upon this subject, pardon me. You have my word that, without encouragement from you, I will not refer to it after to-day." His close-clipped brown moustache was straightened by the tension of the muscles of his mouth. He passed his palm over it, and continued speaking without moving a muscle of his face or taking his searching eyes from the Mother's.

"The name of the young lady who is so fortunate as to be your ward, and even more, the striking likeness I spoke of just now, have led me to hope that my dead friend's daughter was led by a Hand, in whose Divine guidance I humbly believe, to find the very shelter he would have chosen for her. Pray answer, acquitting me in your own mind of persistence or inquisitiveness. Am I right or wrong?"

She might have been a statue of black marble, with wimple and face and hands of alabaster, she stood so breathlessly still. Her heart did not seem to beat; her blood was stagnant in her veins. She felt no faintness. Her observation was unnaturally keen, her mind dazzlingly clear; her brain seemed to work with twice its ordinary power. She thought. He glanced at the shabby watch he wore upon the steel lip-strap, and waited. She was aware of the action, though she never turned her head. She was weighing the question, to tell or not to tell? Her soul hung poised like a seagull in the momentary shelter of a giant wave-crest. Another moment, and the battle with the raging gale and the driving halberds of the sleet would begin again.

She looked again towards Lynette, and in an instant her purpose crystallised, her line of action was made clear. She saw a little bunch of wax-belled white heath fall from the girl's scarlet belt in the act of rising. She saw Beauvayse snatch it greedily from the grass and read the glance that passed between the golden-hazel and the green-grey eyes, and understood with a great pang of jealous mother-pain that she was no longer first in her beloved's heart. Then came a throb of unselfish joy at the knowledge that Richard's girl had come into her kingdom, that the divine right and heritage and crown of Womanhood were hers at last.

Were hers? Not yet, but might be hers, if every clue that led back to that tavern upon the veld could be broken or tangled in such wise that the keenest and most subtle seeker should be baffled and lost. It all lay clear before her now, the manipulation of events, the deft rearrangement of actual fact that might best be used to this end. As her clear brain planned, her bleeding heart trailed wings in the dust, seeking to lead the searcher away from the hidden nest, and now her motherhood and her pride and all the diplomacy acquired in her long years of rule rose up in arms to meet him.

They were not of equal height. Her great, changeful eyes, purple-grey now, dropped to encounter his. She regarded him quietly, and said:

"No one of your wide experience needs to be reminded that resemblances between persons who are not allied by blood exist, and are strangely misleading. But since you have conveyed to me in unmistakable terms your conviction that Miss Mildare is the daughter of—a mutual friend who bore that surname—is actually identified in your idea with that most unhappy child who was left orphaned some seventeen years ago—at—I think you said a veld hotel in the Orange Free State?"

He bowed assent, biting the short hairs of his moustache in vexation and embarrassment.

"Hardly an hotel—a wretched shanty of the usual corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the cattle-grazing country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein. And—it seems my fate to be continually bringing our conversation back to a—most unhappy and painful theme."

"I acquit you of the intention to pain or wound. When I have finished what I have to say, we will revert to the subject no more. It will be buried between us for ever, though the memory of the Dead live in our pardoning and loving thoughts, and in our prayers."

The vivid colour that had flamed in her cheeks had sunk and left them marble. The humid mist of tears that veiled her eyes gave them a wonderful beauty.

He answered her:

"Your thoughts could not be otherwise than noble and generous. Prayers as pure as yours could not be unheard."

"No prayers are unheard, though all are not granted."

She made the slight gesture with her large, beautiful hand that put unnecessary speech from her, and let the hand drop again by her side. Her bosom rose and fell quietly with her even speaking. None could have guessed the tumult within, and the doubts and convictions and apprehensions that battled together, and the religious fears and scruples that rent and tore her suffering soul. But for the sake of Richard's daughter she rallied her grand forces, and nerved herself to carry out her hated task.

"I will tell you how I came to be interested in the young lady who is now my adopted daughter, and whom you know as Lynette Mildare. At the end of the winter of 18— the Reverend Mother of our Convent died, and I was sent up from the Mother-House at Natal, by order of the Bishop, to take her place as Superior. Two Sisters came with me. It was the usual slow journey of many weeks. The wet season had begun. Perhaps that was why we did not encounter many other waggons on the way. But one party of emigrants of the labouring class—we never really learned where bound—trekked on before us, and generally outspanned within sight. There were three rough Englishmen—two middle-aged and one quite old—a couple of tawdry women, and a young girl. They used to ill-treat the girl. We heard her crying often, and one of the Kaffir voor-loopers of their two waggons told a Cape boy who was in our service that the old Baas would kill the little white thing one of these days. She was used as a drudge by them all—a servant, unpaid, ill-fed, worse-clothed than the Kaffirs—but the old man, according to our informant, bore her a special grudge, and lost no opportunity of wreaking his malice on her."

"I understand," he said. She went on:

"We would have helped the child if we could have reached her; but it was not possible. If she had run away and taken refuge with us, and the men had followed her, I do not think we should have given her up for any threats of theirs, or even for threats carried out in action."

"I know you never would have."

She made the slight gesture with her hand that put all inferred praise aside.

"The waggons of the emigrants were no longer in sight, one morning when we inspanned. They had headed south as if for the Diamond Mines, and we were trekking west...." There was a slight hesitation, and her lashes flickered, then she took up her story. "Perhaps we were a hundred and fifty miles from Gueldersdorp, perhaps more, when we came upon what we believed at first to be the dead body of a young girl, almost a child, lying among the karroo bush, face downwards, upon the sand. She had been cruelly beaten with the sjambok—she bears the scars of that terrible ill-usage to-day.... We judged that she had fainted and fallen from one of the emigrants' trek-waggons. Months afterwards, when her wounds were healed"—her steady lips quivered slightly—"and she had recovered from an attack of brain-fever brought on by alarm and anxiety and the ill-usage, she told me that she had run away from people who were cruel to her—from a man who——"

"This distresses you. I am grieved——"

He noted the sickness of horror in her face, and the starting of innumerable little shining points of moisture on her white, broad forehead and about her lips. She drew out her handkerchief and wiped them away with a hand that shook a little.

"I have very little more to say. She was quite crushed and broken by cruelty and ill-usage. No native child could have been more ignorant—she could not even tell us her name when we asked it. She probably had never had one. And Father Wix, who is our Convent Chaplain, and has charge of the Catholic Mission here, baptised her at my instance, giving her two names that were dear to me in that old life that I left behind so long ago. She is Lynette Mildare.... Are you surprised that in seven years a young creature so neglected should have become what you see? Those powers were inherent in her which training can but develop. We found in her great natural capacity, an intelligence keen and quick, a taste naturally refined, a sweet and gentle disposition, a pure and loving heart——" Her voice broke. Her eyes were blinded by a sudden rush of tears. She moved her hand as though to say: "There is no more to tell."

"You shut the door upon my hope," he said.

It was to her veritably as though the gates of her own deed clashed behind her with the closing of the sentence. For she had stated the absolute truth, and yet left much untold. She saw disappointment and reluctant conviction in his face, coupled with an immense faith in her that stung her to an agony of shame and self-reproach. What had she suppressed?

Nothing, but that the waggons of the emigrants had turned south for Diamond Town a fortnight before the finding of that lost lamb upon the veld. And her scrupulous habit of truth, her crystal honour, her keen, clear judgment no less than her rigorous habit of self-examination, told her that the half-truth was no better than falsehood, and that she, Christ's Bride and Mary's Daughter, had deliberately deceived this man.

Yet for his own sake, was it not best that he should never know the truth! And for the sake of Richard's daughter, was it not her sacred maternal duty to shield that dearest one from shame? She steeled herself with that as he bared his head before her.

"Ma'am, you have more than honoured me with your confidence, and I need not say that it is sacred in my eyes, and shall be kept inviolate. And for the rest——"



XL

"Reverend Mother," sounded from below.

"They are calling us," she said, as though awakened from a dream.

"May I take you down?"

He offered his arm with deference, and she touching it lightly, they went down together. Lynette came to them laughing, a cup in either hand, her aides-de-camp following with plates that held the siege apology for bread and butter and familiar-looking cubes of something....

"Thank you, Miss Mildare. What have you here, Beau? Cake, upon my word! Or is it a delusion born of long and painful abstinence from any form of pastry?"

"Cake it is, sir, and thundering good cake," proclaimed Beauvayse. "Made from Sister Tobias's special siege recipe, without candied peel or plums or carraways, or any of the other what-do-you-call-'ems that go into the ordinary article. Go in and win, sir. I've had three whacks. Haven't I, Miss Mildare?"

He spoke with the infectious enjoyment of a schoolboy, and Lynette's laugh, sweet and gay as a thrush's sudden trill of melody, answered:

"I think you have had four."

She flushed as she met the Colonel's eyes, reading in them masculine appreciation of her delicate, vivid beauty, and put her freed hand into the lean palm he held out, saying, with a shy, sweet smile that lifted one corner of the sensitive mouth higher than the other:

"I didn't come to say How do you do? before, because I saw you were busy talking to Mother." Her quick glance read something amiss in another face. "Mother, how tired you look! Please bring that little camp-stool, Mr. Fraithorn. Oh, thank you, Dr. Saxham; that one with arms is more comfortable. Colonel, we're all under your command. Won't you please order the Mother to sit down and rest? She will be so tired to-morrow. Dearest, you know you will."

She took the Mother's hand, confidently, caressingly. The end of the thin black veil, that was shabby now, and had darns in many places, was wafted across her face by a vagrant puff of cooled air from the river, and she kissed it, bringing the tears very near the deep, sad eyes that looked at her, and then turned away. Saxham, in default of any excuse for lingering near her, went back to Lady Hannah, who had been diligently mining in him with the pick and shovel of Our Special Correspondent, and getting nothing out, and sat himself doggedly upon a stone beside her.

"That is a sweet girl." She nibbled bannock, sparsely margarined, and sipped her sugarless, milkless tea, sitting on a little bushy knoll, warranted free from puff-adders and tarantulas. Saxham answered stiffly:

"Many people here seem to be under—the same impression."

"Don't you share it? Don't you think her sweet?"

"I have seen young ladies who were—less deserving of the adjective."

Lady Hannah jangled a triumphant laugh. She wore the tailored garb the average Englishwoman looks best in, at home and abroad, an alpaca coat and skirt of cool grey; what the American belle terms a "shirt-waist" with pearl studs, and a big grey hat with a voluminous blue silk veil. Her small face was smaller than ever, but her eyes were as round and as bright as a mouse's or a bird's, and her talk was full of glitter and vivacity.

"'Praise from Dr. Saxham.' ... If I were a man," she declared, "I should perdre la boule over that girl. I don't wonder where she gets her lovely manners from, with such a model of grace and good breeding as Biddy Bawne before her eyes, but I do ask how she came by that type of beauty? And Biddy——"

"Biddy?" repeated Saxham, at a loss.

Her laugh shrilled out.

"I forgot. She is the Reverend Mother-Superior of the Convent to all of you. But I was at school with her, and I can't forget she used to be Biddy. She was one of the great girls, and I was a sprat of ten, but she condescended to let me adore her, and I did, like everybody else. To be adored is her metier. The Sisters swear by her, and that girl worships the ground under her feet. If I had a daughter I should like her to look at me in that way—heart in her eyes, don't you know, and what eyes! Topaz-coloured, aren't they? She has no conversation, of course. I hadn't at her age—nineteen or twenty, if I am any guesser. What she will be at thirty, if she don't go off! That little Greek head, and all those waves of rusty-coloured hair. Quite wonderful! And her hands and feet and skin—marvellous! And that small-boned slenderness of build that is so perfectly enchanting. Paquin would delight to dress her. And"—her jangling laugh rang out, waking echoes from hollow places—"it looks—do you know?—it looks as though he would get the chance."

"Why does it?" demanded Saxham, turning his square face full upon Lady Hannah, and lowering his heavy brows.

"Mercy upon us, Doctor, do you want me to be definite and literal? Can't you do as I do, and use your eyes?" Her own round, sparkling black ones were full of provocation. "They look as if they could see rather farther into a mud wall than most people's. Please get me one of those peaches. No, I won't have a plate. I am beginning to find out that most of the things Society regards as indispensable can be done without. I'm beginning to revert to Primitive Simplicity. Isn't there a prehistoric flair about most of us? If there isn't, there ought to be. For what are we from week-end to week-end but grimy male and female Troglodytes, eating minced horse and fried locusts in underground burrows by the light of paraffin lamps! Another peach.... Thanks. Can't you see those dear things, the Sisters, gathering them by lantern-light, and being shelled by Brounckers' German gunners. Wretches! Beasts! Horrors!"

"I hope," said Saxham, with rather heavy irony, "that you acquainted them with your opinion of them while you had the opportunity?"

She gaily flipped him with the loose tan gloves she had drawn off. Her bangles clashed, and her eyes snapped sparks under the brim of her hat, whose feathers nodded and swished, and her jangling laugh brought more echoes from the high banks.

"Ha, ha, ha! Do you know, Doctor, I call that thoroughly nasty—to remind me, on such a fine day too, of the Frightful Fiasco. When my own husband hasn't ventured to breathe a hint even.... Do you know, when he rode out to meet me with the Escort, all he said was, 'Hullo, old lady; is that you? The Chief wants to know if you'll peck with us at six, and I told him I thought you'd be agreeable.' And when we met, he—— Why do handkerchiefs invariably hide when people want to sneeze behind them?" She found the ridiculous little square of filmy embroidered cambric, and blew her thin little nose, and furtively whisked away a tear-drop. "He never moved a muscle; Just shook hands in his kind, hearty way, and began to tell the news of the town.... Never, by look or word or sign, helped to rub in what a beetle-headed idiot I'd been." She gulped. "I could have put my head down on the tablecloth and cried gallons"—she blew her nose again—"knowing 'd lost him a rook at least. For, of course, that flabby Slabberts creature counted for something in the game, or Brounckers wouldn't have wanted him. And Captain—my Captain!..." She threw a sparkling eye-dart tipped with remorseful brine at the spare, soldierly figure and the lean, purposeful face. "If you were to say to me this minute, 'Hannah Wrynche, jump off the end of that high rock-bluff there, down on those uncommonly nasty-looking stones below,' I vow I'd do it!"

Saxham's blue eyes were kind. Here was a fellow hero-worshipper.

"I believe you would do it, and—that he believes it too."

She tapped him on the sleeve with the long cherry-wood stick of her white green-lined umbrella.

"Thank you. But don't get to making a habit of saying charming things, because the role of Bruin suits you. Your Society women-patients used to enjoy being bullied, tremendously, I remember. We're made like that." Her shrill laugh came again. "To sauter a pieds joints on people who are used to being deferred to, or made much of, is the best way to command their cordial gratitude and sincere esteem, isn't it? Don't all you successful professional men know that?"

"The days of my professional successes are past and gone," said Saxham, "and my very name must be strange in the ears of the men and women who were my patients. It is natural and reasonable that when a man falls out of the race, he should be forgotten—at least, I hold it so."

"You have a patient not very far away who lauds you to the skies." Lady Hannah indicated the slender pepper-and-salt clad figure of Julius Fraithorn with the cherry-wood umbrella-stick. "You know his father, the Bishop of H——? Such a dear little trotty old man, with the kind of rosy, withered-apple face that suggests a dear little trotty old woman, disguised in an episcopal apron and gaiters, and with funny little bits of white fur glued on here and there for whiskers and eyebrows. We met him with Mrs. Fraithorn at the Hotel Schwert at Appenbad one June. Do you know Appenbad? Views divine: such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of Constance and the Rhine Valley. To quote Bingo, who suffered hideously from the whey-cure, every prospect pleases, and only man is bile—and woman, too, if seeing black spots in showers like smuts in a London fog, only sailing up instead of coming down, means a disturbed gastric system. I'm not sure now that the Bishop did not mention your name. Can he have done so, or am I hashing things? Do set my mind at rest?"

Saxham said with stiffness:

"It would be possible that the Bishop would remember me. I operated on him for the removal of the appendix in 18—"

"If you had taken away his Ritualistic prejudices at the same time, you would have made his wife a happy woman. Her soul yearns for incense and vestments, candles, and acolytes, and most of all for her boy. Well, she will thank you herself for him one day, Doctor." The little dry hand, glittering with magnificent rings, touched Saxham's gently. "In the meantime let a woman who hasn't got a son shake hands with you for her."

"You make too much of that affair." Saxham took the offered hand. It pressed his kindly, and the little lady went on:

"You're still a prophet in your own country, you know, though it pleases you to make yourself out a—a kind of medical Rip Van Winkle. In June last year—when I did not guess that I should ever know you—I heard a woman say: 'If Owen had been here, the child wouldn't have died.' And the woman was your sister-in-law, Mrs. David Saxham."

Saxham's blue eyes shot her a steely look. The wings of his mobile nostrils quivered as he drew quickened breath. He waited, with his obstinate under-lip thrust out, for the rest. If he did not fully grasp the real and genuine kindliness that prompted the little woman, at least he did her the justice of not shutting her up as an impudent chatterbox. She went on, a little nervously:

"I don't think I ever mentioned to you before that I had met your brother and his wife? She is still a very attractive person, but—it is not the type to wear well, and the boy's death cut them both up terribly."

"There was a boy—who died?"

"In the spring of last year. Of—meningitis, I think his mother said, and she declared over and over that if you had been there, you would have saved him."

"At least, I should have done my best."

She had turned her eyes away in telling him, or she would have seen the relief in his face. He understood now why his mother's trustees had prompted the solicitors' advertisement. He was his nephew's heir, under the late Mrs. Saxham's will. Seven thousand in Consols and Home Rails, and the little freehold property in North Wales, that brought in, when the house was let, about one hundred and fifty pounds a year, counted as wealth to a man who had possessed nothing. He lifted his square head and threw back his heavy shoulders with the air of one from whom a heavy burden has been taken. His vivid eyes lightened, his heavy brows smoothed out their puckers, and the tense lines about his lips relaxed. His own words came back to him:

"The Past is done with. Why should not the Future be fair?"

He knew, as he looked towards Lynette Mildare, who personified the Future for him, and his mood changed. He had loved her without hope. Now a faint grey began to show in the blackness of his mental horizon. It might be a false dawn, but what a lightening of the heavy heart—what a leap of the stagnant blood—answered to it! He was no longer penniless. He had never loved money or thirsted for estate, but the thought of that sum of seven thousand pounds solidly invested, and the house that stood in its walled garden on the cliffs at Herion, looking out on the wild, tumbling grey-white waters of Nantavon Bay, was dear to him.



Plas Bendigaid had been a Convent once. Its grey, stone-tiled, steep-pitched roof and solid walls of massive stone had sheltered his mother's infancy and girlhood. Perhaps they might cover a lovelier head, and echo to the voices of his wife and his children. He gave sweet fancies the rein, as Lady Hannah chattered beside him. He dreamed of that Future that might be fair, even as he filled up the little lady's pauses with "Yes's" and "No's."

Love at first sight. He had laughed the possibility to scorn, in other days, holding the passion to be the sober child of propinquity, sympathy, consonance of ideas, similar tastes, and pursuits, and fanned into flame, after due time to kindle, by the appearance of a rival.

A rival! He laughed silently, grimly, remembering the resentful, jealous impulse that had prompted his interruption when the boyish, handsome face of Beauvayse had leaned so near to hers, and the blush that dyed her white-rose cheeks had answered, no doubt, to some hackneyed, stereotyped, garrison compliment.

He had seen them together since then: once crossing the veld from the Women's Laager on foot, in the company of the Mother-Superior; once here beside the river, under the chaperonage of all the Sisters; once in the Market Square, and always the sight had roused in him the same intolerable resentment and gnawing pain that rankled in him now as he watched them.

What was Beauvayse whispering, so close to the delicate little ear that nestled under the red-brown hair-waves? Something that set his grey-green eyes gleaming dangerously, and lifted the wings of the fine nostrils, and opened the boldly-curved mouth in audacious laughter, under the short golden hairs of the clipped moustache. Somehow that laughter stung Saxham. His muscular hand gripped the old hunting-crop that he carried by habit even when he did not ride, and his black brows were thunderous as he vainly tried to listen to the little woman who chattered beside him.

"Look about you," she bade him, putting up her tortoiseshell-rimmed eyeglasses as though she were in a picture-gallery or at a theatre. "Wouldn't the ordinary unimaginative person suppose that Love would be the last flower to blossom in the soil of this battered little bit of debatable ground? But we know better. So does Miss Wiercke, the German oculist's daughter, and so does that tallow-candle-locked young man who plays the harmonium at the Catholic Church. And that other pretty girl—I don't know her name—who used to keep the book-registers at the Public Library. She is going to marry that young mining-engineer—a Cornishman, judging by his blue eyes and black hair—do you happen to be Cornish, too?—next Sunday. And the uncertainty about living till then or any time after Monday morning will make quite a commonplace wedding into something tremendously romantic. But you don't even pretend to look when you're told. Aha!" she cried; "I've caught you. You were watching another pair of lovers—the couple I kept for the last."

"Not at all," said Saxham, inexpressibly wearied by the voluble little woman's discourse. Ignoring the conventional disclaimer, Lady Hannah went on:

"They're in the early stage—the First Act of the dear old play. Pretty to watch, isn't it? Though it makes one feel chilly and grown old, as Browning or somebody says. Only the other day one was tipping that boy at Eton, and he looking such a Fourth of June darling as you never saw, got up in duck trousers and a braided blue jacket, and a straw hat with a wreath of white and crimson Banksia roses round it for the Procession of Boats. And now"—she sighed drolly—"he's a long-legged Lieutenant of Hussars, with a lady-killing reputation. Though, in the present instance, I'm ready to back my opinion that the biter is fairly bit. What regiments of women will tear their hair—real or the other thing—when Beau becomes a Benedick."

Saxham saw red, but he gave no sign. She turned down her little thumb with a twinkle of triumph.

"Habet! And I'm not sorry he has got it badly. His leitmotif in the music-play has been 'See the Conquering Hero' up to now; one isn't sorry to see one's sex avenged. But one is sorry for Mary Fraithorn's boy." She indicated the Chaplain with a twirl of her eyeglasses. "She used to visit him with the Sisters when he was ill, and, of course, he has been bowled over. But il n'a pas un radis, unless the Bishop comes round, and don't you think that little Greek head of hers is aware that a great deal of money goes with the Foltlebarre title, and that the family diamonds would suit it to a marvel?"

Saxham said gratingly, and with a hostile look:

"Do you infer that Miss Mildare is vain and mercenary?"

"Good mercy, my dear man!" she screamed; "don't pounce. I infer nothing, except that Miss Mildare happens to be a live girl, with eyes and the gift of charm, and that the young men are attracted to her as naturally as drones to a honey-pot. Also, that, if she's wise, she will dispose of her honey to the best advantage." Her beady bright eyes snapped suddenly at Saxham, and her small face broke up into laughter. "Ha, ha, ha! Why, I do believe ..." She screamed at him triumphantly. "You, too! You've succumbed. She carries your scalp at her pretty waist with the rest of 'em. How perfectly delightful!"

Possibly Saxham had always been a bear, as her little ladyship had stated, but the last five years had certainly scraped off whatever social veneer had adhered to his manners. The power of facial self-control, the common tact that would have carried things off with a laugh and a jest, were his no longer, if he had ever possessed them. He got upon his feet and stood before the woman whose six ounces less of brain-matter had been counterbalanced by so large an allowance of intuition, dumbly furious with her, and so unspeakably savage with himself for not being able to hide his anger and annoyance that, as he stood before her with his hulking shoulders hunched and his square, black head sullenly lowered, and his eyes blazing under their heavy brows, he suggested to Lady Hannah's nimble wit and travelled experience the undeniable analogy between a chaffed and irate Doctor and a baited Spanish bull, goaded by the stab of the gaudy paper-flagged dart in his thick neck, and bewildered by the subsequent explosion of the cracker. He only wanted a tail to lash, she mentally said, and had pigeon-holed the joke for Bingo when it became none.

"Do, please, forgive me!... What you must think of me!..." she began contritely.

Repentance gave place to resentment. Saxham, without even an abrupt inclination of the head, had swung about and left her. She saw the heavily-shouldered, muscularly-built figure crossing the drift a little way down, stepping from boulder to boulder with those curiously small, neat feet, twirling his old horn-handled hunting-crop as he went, with a decidedly vicious swish of the doubled thong. Now he was knee-deep in the reeds of the north shore; now he was climbing the bank. A black-and-white crow flew up heavily, and was lost among the intertwining branches of the oaks and the blue-gums, and a cloud of finches and linnets rose as the covert of tree-fern and cactus and tall grass, knitted with thorny-stemmed creeper, received him and swallowed him. She saw by the shaking of the foliage that he turned up the stream, and then no more of him. Feather-headed idiot that she had been! Inconsiderate wretch! How, in Heaven's name, after reminding the man of the perfidy of that underbred passee little person with the passion for French novels and sulphonal tabloids, who had thrown the Doctor over, years before, in favour of his brother the Dragoon—how could she have charged him with being a victim to the charms of another young woman? If Mrs. David's desertion rankled still, as no doubt it did, there being no accounting for masculine taste, he would, of course, resent the accusation almost as an insult. Men were such Conservatives in love. And, besides, she had just been telling him about the child. She loathed herself for having perpetrated such a blunder. Saxham had murdered politeness by quitting her abruptly; but hadn't she deserved the snub? She deserved snubbing. She would go, for the health of her soul, and talk to dearest Biddy, who always made you feel even smaller than you had thought yourself before.

She stood up, shaking the sand-grams and grass-burrs from her dress and the folds of the white umbrella. It was nearing six o'clock. The heat was lessening, and the pale turquoise sky overhead was flecked and dappled with little puffs of rosy cloud, bulking in size and deepening in colour to the westward, where their upper edges were pure gold. And the river looked like a stream of liquid honey, upon which giant rose-leaves had been scattered, and a breeze was stirring in the grasses and among the leaves. The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss Wiercke, and her lank-haired young organist, sat under a bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of lovers in the second stage, while the young lady who had kept the registers at the Public Library was teaching her Cornish mining-engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin basin—a process which resulted in the entanglement of fingers of different sexes, and made Sister Tobias pause over her task of wiping crockery to shake her head and laugh.