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+The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Dop Doctor, by Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Dop Doctor
+
+
+Author: Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
+
+
+
+Release Date: February 2, 2009  [eBook #27966]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOP DOCTOR***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Julie Barkley, Christine D., and the Project Gutenberg
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)
+
+
+
+THE DOP DOCTOR
+
+by
+
+RICHARD DEHAN
+
+Author of
+  "Between Two Thieves," "The Headquarter Recruit,"
+  "The Cost of Wings"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Popular Edition
+
+London: William Heinemann Ltd.
+
+First printed 6s. Edition, April, 1910.
+
+New Impressions, May (three times), July, August, September, October,
+November, 1910; January, July, October, 1911; New Edition, May, 1912; New
+Impressions, September, October, December, 1912; February, May, 1913.
+
+Popular Edition, July, August, September, 1913; April, 1914; June, 1915;
+July, September, 1916; September, 1917; February, October, 1918; January,
+1920; January, 1922; July, 1924; January, 1927; February, 1930; May, 1932;
+March, 1934, March 1936
+
+Printed in Great Britain
+The Windmill Press, Kingswood, Surrey
+
+
+
+
+TO ONE ACROSS THE SEA
+
+
+_What have the long years brought me since first, with this pen for
+pickaxe, I bowed my loins to quarry from the living rock of my world about
+me, bread and a home where Love should smile beside the hearthplace, and
+chiefly for Love's dear sake, that men should honour you who, above all on
+earth, I hold most in honour--a name among the writers of books that
+live!_
+
+_What have the long years brought me! Well, not the things I hoped. Just
+bread and clothing, fire, and a little roof-tree; the purchased soil to
+make a grave, and a space of leisure, before that grave be needed, to
+write, myself, this book for me and for you. Hope has spread her
+iridescent Psyche-wings and left me; Ambition long ago shed hers to become
+a working-ant. Love never came to sit in the chair beside the ingle. An
+ocean heaves between us, only for nightly dreams and waking thoughts to
+span. Were those dear eyes to see me as I am to-day, I wonder whether they
+would know me? For I grow grey, and furrows deepen in the forehead the
+dear hand will never smooth again. Remember me, then, only as I used to
+be; my heart is the same always; in it the long, long years have wrought
+no change._
+
+_But what have the long years brought me? Experience, that savoury salt,
+left where old tears have dried upon the shores of Time. Knowledge of my
+fellow men and women, of all sorts and conditions, and the love of them.
+Patience to bear what may yet have to be borne. Courage to encounter what
+may yet have to be encountered. Fortitude to meet the end, where faith
+holds up the Cross. Much have the long years brought me--besides your
+first smile and your last kiss. For your next, I look past Death, God
+aiding me, to the Eternal Life beyond...._
+
+SOUTH WALES,
+
+_April 22, 1909._
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Upon a day near the end of August, one long, brilliant South African
+winter, when the old Vierkleur waved over the Transvaal, and what is now
+the Orange River Colony was the Orange Free State, with the Dutch canton
+still showing on the staff-head corner of its tribarred flag, two large,
+heavily-laden waggons rolled over the grass-veld, only now thinking about
+changing from yellow into green. Many years previously the wheels of the
+old voortrekkers had passed that way, bringing from Cape Colony, with the
+household gods, goods and chattels, language and customs of the Dutch, the
+slips of the pomegranate and peach and orange trees, whose abundant
+blossoming dressed the orchards of the farms tucked away here and there in
+the lap of the veld, with bridal white and pink, and hung their girdling
+pomegranate hedges with stars of ruby red. But days and days, and nights
+and nights of billowing, spreading, lonely sky-arched veld intervened
+between each homestead.
+
+The flat-topped bills were draped and folded in the opal haze of distance;
+the sky was perfect turquoise; the rounded kopjes shone like pink topaz,
+unclothed as yet with the young pale green bush. To the south there was a
+veld fire leaping and dancing, with swirling columns of white smoke edged
+with flame. But it was many miles away, and the north-west wind blew
+strongly, driving some puffs of gold cloud before it. Perhaps there would
+be rain ere long. There had been rain already in the foremost waggon, not
+from the clouds, but from human eyes.
+
+The broad wheels crashed on, rolling over the yellow grass and the dry
+bushes. Lizards and other creeping creatures scuttled across their wide
+tracks. The patient oxen toiled under the yoke, their dappled nostrils
+widespread, their great dewy eyes strained and dim with weariness. They
+dumbly wondered why they must labour in the daytime when all night long
+they had travelled without rest. The glorious sunrise had flamed in
+crimson and gold behind the eastern ranges full five hours before. They
+were weary to death, and no dorp or farm was yet in sight. The Cape boys
+who tramped, each leading a fore-ox by the green reim bound about the
+creature's wide horns, had no energy left even to swear at their beasts.
+
+The Boer driver was wearied like the ox-team and the Cape boys. His
+bestial face was drawn, and his eyes were red-rimmed for lack of sleep.
+The long whip, with the fourteen-foot stock and the lash of twenty-three
+feet, had not smacked for a long time; the sjambok had not been used upon
+the long-suffering wheelers. Huddled up in his ill-fitting clothes of tan
+cord, he sat on the waggon-box and slept, his head nodding, his elbows on
+his knees. He was dreaming of the bad Cape brandy that had been in the
+bottle, and would be, with luck, again, when the waggon reached a tavern
+or a store.
+
+A Kaffir drove the second waggon. It held stores and goods in bales, and
+some trunks and other baggage belonging to the Englishman, for you would
+have set down the tall, thin, high-featured, reddish-bearded,
+soft-speaking man who owned the waggons as English, even though he had
+called himself by a Dutch name. The child of three years was his. And his
+had been the dead body of the woman lying on the waggon-bed, covered with
+a new white sheet, with a stillborn boy baby lying on her breast.
+
+For this the man who had loved and taken her, and made her his, had wept
+such bitter, scalding tears. For this his dead love, with Love's blighted
+bud of fruit upon her bosom, had given up her world, her friends, her
+family--her husband, first and last of all. They had played the straight
+game, and gone away openly together, to the immense scandal of Society
+that is so willing to wink at things done cleverly under the rose. They
+were to be married the instant the injured husband obtained his decree
+absolute. The State sanctioned the re-marriage of the divorced if the
+Churches did not. Their church should thenceforwards be the State. But
+there was no _decree nisi_ even, the injured husband possessing a legal
+heir by a previously-deceased wife. Besides, in a cold way it gave him
+pleasure to think of that purpose foiled. He soon knew that his wife's
+lover had sold his commission in the Army, and he learned, later, through
+a communication forwarded through a London firm of solicitors, that
+although he had chosen to ignore a certain appointment offered upon the
+opposite side of the Channel, the other man would merely consider it
+deferred until a suitable opportunity should occur. Meanwhile the writer
+was travelling in South Africa, not alone.
+
+Never to be alone again, she had promised him that not quite four years
+ago. And to-day he sat on a box beside the waggon-bed where she lay dead
+with her dead boy, and the only thing left to him that had the dear living
+fragrance and sweet warmth of her slept smiling on his knees--their
+daughter.
+
+The long fine beard that he had grown swept the soft flushed cheek of the
+little creature, and mingled with her yellow curls. Within the last few
+hours--hours packed with the anguish of a lifetime for him--there were
+sprinklings of white upon his high temples, where the hair had grown thin
+under the pressure of the Hussar's furred busby, the khaki-covered helmet
+of foreign service, or the forage-cap, before these had given place to the
+Colonial smasher of felt, and the silky reddish-brown beard had in it
+wide, ragged streaks of grey. He had worshipped the woman who had given up
+all for him; they had lived only for, and in one another during four
+wonderful years. Hardly a passing twinge of regret, never a scorpion-sting
+of remorse, spoiled their union.
+
+But they never stayed long in any town or even in any village. Some sound
+or shape from the old unforgotten world beyond the barrier, some English
+voice that had the indefinable tone and accent of high breeding, some
+figure of Englishman or Englishwoman whose rough, careless clothing had
+the unmistakable cut of Bond Street, some face recognised under the grey
+felt or the white Panama, would spur them to the desire of leaving it
+behind them. Then the valises would be repacked, the oxen would be hastily
+inspanned, and their owners would start again upon that never-ending
+journey in search of something that the woman was to be the first to find.
+
+At last, when the sun was high and the worn-out beasts were almost
+sinking, a group of low buildings came in sight a few miles away beyond a
+kloof edged with a few poplar-like trees and the kameelthorn. A square,
+one-storey house of corrugated iron, with a mud-walled hovel or two near
+it, had a sprawling painted board across its front, signifying that the
+place was the Free State Hotel. Behind it were an orchard and some fields
+under rude cultivation, and a quarter of a mile to the north were the
+native kraals.
+
+At the sight the Boer shook himself fully awake, and sent the long lash
+cracking over the thin, sweat-drenched backs of the ox-team. They laboured
+with desperation at the yoke, and the waggon rumbled on.
+
+The Englishman, hidden with his sorrow under the canvas waggon-tilt,
+roused himself at the accelerated motion. He rose, and, holding the
+sleeping child upon one arm, pushed back the front flap and looked out. He
+spoke to the taciturn driver, who shook his head. How did he, Smoots
+Beste, know whether a minister of the Church of England, or even a Dutch
+predikant, was to be found at the place beyond? All he hoped for was that
+he would be able to buy there tobacco and brandy cheap, and sleep drunken,
+to wake and drink again.
+
+The waggon halted on the brink of the kloof. Little birds of gay and
+brilliant plumage, blue and crimson and emerald-green, rose in flocks from
+the bush and grasses that clothed the sides of the coomb; the hollows were
+full of the tree-fern; the grass had little white and purple flowers in
+it. At the valley-bottom a little stream, that would be a river after the
+first rains, wimpled over sandstone boulders, the barbel rose at flies.
+There was a drift lower down. It was all the goaded, worn-out oxen could
+do to stay the huge creaking waggons down the steep bank, and drag them
+over the river-bed of sand and boulders, through the muddied, churned-up
+water that they were dying for, yet not allowed to taste, and toil with
+them up the farther side.
+
+The Englishman was not cruel. He was usually humane and merciful to man
+and beast, but just now he was deaf and blind. Beside him there was her
+corpse, beyond him was her grave, beyond that....
+
+Both he and she, in that world that lay beyond the barrier had observed
+the outward forms of Christianity. They had first met in the Park, one May
+morning, after a church parade. They sat on a couple of green-painted
+chairs while Society, conscious of the ever-present newspaper-reporter,
+paraded past them in plumage as gorgeous as that of the gay-coloured birds
+that flocked among the tree-fern or rose in frightened clouds as the
+waggons crashed by. And they discussed--together with the chances of the
+runners entered for the second Spring Meeting at Newmarket, and the merits
+of the problem play, and the newest farcical comedy--the Immortality of
+the Soul.
+
+She wore a brown velvet gown and an ostrich-feather boa in delicate shades
+of cream and brown, and a cavalier hat with sweeping white plumes. Her
+hair was the colour of autumn leaves, or a squirrel's back in the
+sunshine, and she had grey eyes and piquant, irregular features, ears like
+shells, and a delicate, softly-tinted skin undefiled by cosmetics. She
+thought it wicked to doubt that one waked up again after dying,
+Somewhere--a vague Somewhere, with all the nice people of one's set about
+one. He said that Agnosticism and all that kind of thing was bad form. Men
+who had religion made the best soldiers. Like the Presbyterian Highlanders
+of the Black Watch and the "Royal Irish" Catholics--but, of course, she
+knew that. And she said yes, she knew; meeting his admiring eyes with her
+own, that were so grey and sweet and friendly, the little gloved hand that
+held the ivory and gold-bound Church Service lying in her lap. He longed
+to take that little white, delicate hand. Later on he took it, and a
+little later the heart that throbbed in its pulses, and the frail,
+beautiful body out of which the something that had been she had gone with
+a brief gasping struggle and a long shuddering sigh....
+
+He kept the beloved husk and shell of her steady on the waggon-bed with
+one arm thrown over it, and held the awakened, fretting child against his
+breast with the other, as the sinking oxen floundered up the farther side
+of the kloof. Amidst the shouting and cursing of the native voor-loopers
+and the Boer and Kaffir drivers, the rain of blows on tortured, struggling
+bodies, and the creaking of the teak-built waggon-frames, he only heard
+her weakly asking to be buried properly in some churchyard, or cemetery,
+with a clergyman to read the Service for the Dead.
+
+Before his field-glass showed him the sprawling hotel-sign he had hoped
+that the buildings in sight might prove to mask the outskirts of a native
+village with an English missionary station, or a Dutch settlement
+important enough to own a corrugated iron Dopper church and an
+oak-scrub-hedged or boulder-dyked graveyard, in charge of a pastor whose
+loathing of the Briton should yield to the mollifying of poured-out gold.
+
+But Fate had brought him to this lonely veld tavern. He watched it growing
+into ugly, sordid shape as the waggon drew nearer. To this horrible place,
+miscalled the Free State Hotel--a mere jumble of corrugated-iron
+buildings, wattle and mud-walled stables for horses, and a barbed-wire
+waggon-enclosure--he had brought his beloved at the end of their last
+journey together. He shuddered at the thought.
+
+The waggons were halted and outspanned before the tavern. The drivers went
+in to get drink, and Bough, the man who sold it, leaving the women to
+serve them, came forth. He ordinarily gave himself out as an Afrikander.
+You see in him a whiskered, dark-complexioned, good-looking man of
+twenty-six, but looking older, whose regard was either insolent or
+cringing, according to circumstances, and whose smile was an evil leer.
+The owner of the waggons stood waiting near the closed-up foremost one,
+the yellow-haired child on his arm. He looked keenly at the landlord,
+Bough, and the man's hand went involuntarily up in the salute, to its
+owner's secret rage. Did he want every English officer to recognise him as
+an old deserter from the Cape Mounted Police? Not he--and yet the cursed
+habit stuck. But he looked the stranger squarely in the face with that
+frank look that masked such depth of guile, and greeted him with the
+simple manner that concealed so much, and the English officer lifted his
+left hand, as though it raised a sword, and began to talk. Presently
+Bough called someone, and a smart, slatternly young woman came out and
+carried the child, who leaned away from her rouged face, resisting, into
+the house.
+
+The English traveller would take no refreshment. He needed nothing but to
+know of a graveyard and men to dig a grave, and a minister or priest to
+read the Burial Service. He would pay all that was asked. He learned that
+the nearest village-town might be reached in three days' trek across the
+veld, and that the landlord did not know whether it had a pastor or not.
+
+Three days' trek! He waved the twinkling-eyed, curious landlord back, and
+went up into the foremost waggon, drawing the canvas close. He faced the
+truth in there, and realized with a throe of mortal anguish that the
+burial must be soon--very soon. To prison what remained of her in a
+hastily knocked-together coffin, and drag it over the veld, looking for
+some plot of consecrated earth to put it in, was desecration, horror. He
+would bury her, and fetch the minister or clergyman or priest to read
+prayers. Later, if it cost him all he had, the spot should be consecrated
+for Christian burial. He came forth from the waggon and held parley with
+the landlord of the tavern. There was a wire-fenced patch of sandy red
+earth a hundred yards from the house, a patch wherein the white woman who
+was mistress at the tavern had tried to grow a few common English
+flower-seeds out of a gaily-covered packet left by a drummer who had
+passed that way. She had grown tired of the trouble of watering and
+tending them, so that some of them had withered, and the lean fowls had
+flown over the fence and scratched the rest up.
+
+That patch of sandy earth brought a handsome price, paid down in good
+English sovereigns--the coinage that is welcome in every corner of the
+earth, save among the scattered islands of the Aleutian Archipelago, where
+gin, tobacco, and coffee are more willingly taken in exchange for goods or
+souls.
+
+The Englishman was business-like. He fetched pen and ink and paper out of
+that jealously closed-up waggon, drew up the deed of sale, and had it
+witnessed by the Boer driver and the white woman at the hotel.
+
+He had made up his mind. He would bury her, since it must be, and then
+fetch the clergyman. Knowing him on the road, or returning to the
+fulfilment of his promise, she would not mind lying there unblessed and
+waiting for six lonely days and nights. He whispered in her deaf ears how
+it was going to be, and that she could not doubt him. He swore--not
+dreaming how soon he should keep one vow--to visit the grave often, often,
+with his child and hers, and to lie there beside her when kind Death
+should call him too.
+
+Then he left her for a moment, and sent for the Kaffir driver and the Boer
+to come, and, with him, dig her grave....
+
+But Smoots Beste was already in hog-paradise, lying grunting on a bench in
+the bar, and the Kaffir had gone to the kraals with the Cape boys. The
+English officer looked at the rowdy landlord and the loafing men about the
+tavern, and made up his mind. No hands other than his own should prepare a
+last bed for her, his dearest.
+
+So, all through the remainder of the long day, streaming and drenched with
+perspiration, which the cold wind dried upon him, he wrought at a grave
+for her with spade and pick.
+
+It should be deep, because of the wild-cat and the hungry Kaffir dogs. It
+should be wide, to leave room for him. The ground was hard, with boulders
+of ironstone embedded in it. What did that matter? All the day through,
+and all through the night of wind-driven mists and faint moonlight, he
+wrought like a giant possessed, whilst his child, lulled with the
+condensed milk and water, in which biscuits had been sopped, lay sleeping
+in the tavern upon a little iron bed.
+
+
+
+
+He had had the waggon brought close up to the wired enclosure. All the
+time he worked he kept a watch upon it. Did claws scrape the wide wheels
+or scurrying feet patter across the shadows, he left off work until the
+voracious creatures of the night were driven away.
+
+The pale dawn came, and the east showed a lake of yellow.... When the
+great South African sun rose and flooded the veld with miraculous liquid
+ambers and flaming, melted rubies, the deep, wide grave at last was done.
+
+He climbed out of it by the waggon ladder, struggling under the weight of
+the last great basketful of stones and sandy earth. He dumped that down
+by the graveside, and went to the waggon and removed all stains of toil,
+and then set about making the last toilette of the beautiful woman who had
+so loved that everything that touched her should be pure, and dainty, and
+sweet.
+
+He had dressed her silken, plentiful, squirrel-brown hair many times, for
+the sheer love of its loveliness. With what care he now combed and brushed
+and arranged the perfumed locks! He laid reverent kisses on the sealed
+eyelids that his own hands had closed for ever; he whispered words of
+passionate love, vows of undying gratitude and remembrance, in the
+shell-like ears. He bathed with fresh water and reclad in fragrant linen
+the exquisite body, upon which faint discolouring patches already heralded
+the inevitable end. When he had done, he swathed her in a sheet, and
+fetched a bolt of new white canvas from the store-waggon, and lined the
+grave with that.
+
+And then he placed a narrow mattress in it, and freshly covered pillows,
+and brought her from the waggon, and to the grave, and carried her down
+the light wooden ladder, and laid her in her last earthly home, with a
+kiss from the lips that had never been her husband's. It was so cruel to
+think of that. It was so hard to cover up the cold, sweet face again, but
+he did it, and lapped the sheet over her and brought the canvas down.
+Remained now to fill in her grave and fetch the man whose mouth should
+speak over it the words that are of God.
+
+But first--fill in the grave.
+
+The cold sweat drenched him at the thought of heaping back those tons of
+earth and stone above her, crushing with a frightful weight of inert
+matter the bodily beauty that he adored. He felt as though her soul
+hovered about him, wailing to him not to be so cruel, tugging at his
+garments with imploring, impalpable hands.
+
+The thing must be done, though, before the sordid life stirred again under
+the roof of the tavern, before the vulgar faces, with their greedy, prying
+eyes, should be there to snigger and spy.
+
+He loaded a great basket with fine gravelly sand, and carried it down and
+laid it on her by handfuls. What were his livid, parched lips muttering?
+Over and over, only this:
+
+"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust ..."
+
+Soon the white swathed-up form was hidden with the sandy gravel. That was
+a terrible pang. It wrenched the first groan from him, but he worked on.
+
+More and more of the sandy gravel, but for precaution the stones must lie
+above. Should the voracious creatures of the night come, they must find
+the treasure in impregnable security. That thought helped him to lay in
+the first, and the second, and then greater and greater stones. He was
+spent and breathless, but still he laboured. He tottered, and at times the
+tavern and the veld, and the waggons on it, and the flat-topped distant
+mountains that merged in the horizon, swung round him in a wild, mad
+dance. Then the warm salt taste of blood was in his mouth, and he gasped
+and panted, but he never rested until the grave was filled in.
+
+Then he built up over it an oblong cairn of the ironstone boulders, made a
+rude temporary cross out of a spare waggon-pole, working quite
+methodically with saw and hammer and nails, and set it up, under the
+curious eyes he hated so, and wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt down
+stiffly, and made, with rusty, long unpractised fingers, the sacred sign
+upon his face and breast. He heard her still, asking him in that nearly
+extinguished voice of hers, to pray for her.
+
+
+
+
+"Dicky!..."
+
+Ah! the tragedy of the foolish little nickname, faltered by stiffening
+lips upon the bed of death!
+
+"Catholics pray for the souls of dead people, don't they? Pray for mine
+by-and-by. It will comfort me to know you are praying, darling, even if
+God is too angry with us to hear!"
+
+He held her to his bursting heart, groaning.
+
+"If He is angry, it cannot be with you. The sin was mine--all mine. He
+must know!"
+
+Later she awakened from a troubled sleep to murmur:
+
+"Richard, I dreamed of Bridget-Mary. She was all in black, but there was
+white linen about her face and neck, and it was dabbled dreadfully with
+blood." The weak, slight body shuddered in his embrace. "She said our
+wickedness had brought her death, but that she would plead for us in
+Heaven."
+
+"She is not dead, my beloved; I heard of her before we left Cape Colony.
+She has taken the veil. She is well, and will be happy in her religion, as
+those good women always are."
+
+"I was not one of those good women, Richard----"
+
+He strained her to him in silence. She panted presently:
+
+"You might have been happy--with her--if I had never come between you!"
+
+He found some words to tell her that these things were meant to be. From
+the beginning ...
+
+"Was it meant that I should die on these wild, wide, desolate plains, and
+leave you, Richard?"
+
+He cried out frantically that he would die too, and follow her. Her dying
+whisper fluttered at his lips:
+
+"You cannot! Think!--the child!"
+
+He had forgotten the child, and now, with a great stabbing pang,
+remembered it. She asked for it, and he brought it, and she tried to kiss
+it; and even in that Death foiled her, and her head fell back and her eyes
+rolled up, and she died.
+
+He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer, without which she
+could not have borne to have him leave her.
+
+The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door to see him
+praying--a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling there in the face of day.
+
+But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have dared to jeer at
+openly. Too rich, with all that money in the valise in the locked-up
+waggon-chest; too strong, with that sharp hunting-knife, the Winchester
+repeating-rifle, and the revolver he carried at his hip.
+
+"_Our Father Who art in Heaven...._"
+
+He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there was no One beyond the
+burning blue vault of ether Who heard ... and yet, for her sake,
+supposing, after all, some great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even
+now....
+
+_"Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come...."_
+
+And if it came, should those have any part in it who had lived together
+unwed in open sin?
+
+_"Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven...."_
+
+The words stuck in his dried throat. Be done, that Will that left him
+desolate and laid her away, a still fair, fast-corrupting thing, under the
+red earth and the great ironstone boulders!
+
+_"Give us this day our daily bread...."_
+
+Her love, her presence, her voice, her touch, had been the daily bread of
+life to him, her fellow-sinner. Oh, how many base, sordid, loveless
+marriages had not that illicit bond of theirs put to shame! And yet as a
+boy he had learned the Seventh Commandment: "Thou shalt not commit
+adultery." Had she not believed all along that the price of such sweet
+sinning must be paid, if not in this life, then in the life hereafter, and
+could it--could it be that her soul was even now writhing in fires
+unquenchable, whither he, who would have gladly died in torment to save
+her from outrage or death, had thrust her?
+
+_"Forgive us our trespasses...."_
+
+O Man of Sorrows, pitying Son of Mary, before Whom the Scribes and
+Pharisees brought the woman taken in adultery, forgive her, pardon her! If
+a soul must writhe in those eternal fires they preach of, in justice let
+it be mine! Thou Who didst pity that woman of old time, standing white and
+shameful in the midst of the evil, jeering crowd, with the wicked fingers
+pointing at her, say to this other woman, lifting up Thyself before her
+terrified, desperate soul, confronted with the awful mystery that lies
+behind the Veil....
+
+_"Neither do I condemn thee...."_
+
+And do with me what Thou wilt!
+
+The ragged, wild-eyed man who had been kneeling rigid and immovable before
+the wooden symbol reared upon the new-raised cairn of boulders swayed a
+little. His head fell forward heavily upon his breast. His eyes closed in
+spite of his desperate effort to shake off the deadly, sickening collapse
+of will and brain and body that was mastering him. He fell sideways, and
+lay in a heap upon the ground.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+They went to him, and took up and carried him into the tavern, and laid
+him down upon a frowzy bed in the room where the child lay upon the
+iron-framed cot.
+
+He lay there groaning in the fierce clutches of rheumatic fever. They
+tended him in a rude way. A valise and an iron-bound leather lady's trunk
+had been brought from the waggon by his orders, and set in the room where
+he was in his sight. These contained her clothes and jewels, and he
+guarded them jealously even in delirium. About his wasted body was buckled
+a heavy money-belt. Bough could feel that when he helped the woman of the
+tavern to lift the patient. He winked to her pleasantly across the bed.
+But the time was not ripe yet. They must wait awhile. The English
+traveller was not always delirious. There were intervals of consciousness,
+and though he seemed at death's door, who knew? That strong purpose of his
+might even yet lift him from the soiled and comfortless bed, and send him
+on the trek again. Meanwhile the oxen were hired out to work for a farmer
+fifty miles away. That was called sending them to graze and gain strength
+for more work; and there was the keep of two Cape boys, and the Kaffir and
+the Boer driver, and the cost of nursing and sick man's diet, and the care
+of the child. A heavy bill of charges was mounting up against the English
+traveller. Much of what the belt contained would honestly be Bough's.
+
+There was no doctor and no medicine save the few drugs the sick man had
+carried, as all travellers do. The milk for which he asked for himself and
+the child, which was procured from the native cattle-kraals for a tikkie a
+pint, and for which Bough charged at the price of champagne, kept him
+alive. Broth or eggs he sickened at and turned from, and, indeed, the one
+was greasy and salt, the others of appalling mustiness. He would regularly
+swallow the tabloids of quinine or lithia, and fall back on the hard,
+coarse pillow, exhausted by the mere effort of unscrewing the nickel-cap
+of the little phial, and tell himself that he was getting stronger.
+Sometimes he really was so, and then the child sat on his wide hollow
+chest, and played with the beard that was now all grey and unkempt and
+matted, until some word in her baby prattle, some look of wondering
+inquiry in the innocent eyes, golden-hazel and black-lashed, like his own,
+that were almost too beautiful to be a man's, people used to say, like the
+weak, passionate, gentle mouth under the heavy moustache, would bring back
+all the anguish of his loss, and waken anew that torturing voice that
+accused him of being false to his compact with the dead. Then he would
+call, and send the child away, borne in the arms of the Hottentot
+chambermaid to breathe the fresh air upon the veld. And, left alone, he
+would draw up the rough sheets over his head, with gaunt clutching
+fingers, and weep, though sometimes no tears came to moisten his haggard,
+staring eyes.
+
+One night, while the flat gold hunting-watch ticked above his head in the
+little embroidered chamois-leather pouch dead hands had worked, Knowledge
+came to him with a sudden rigor of the muscles of the wasted body, and a
+bursting forth from every pore of the dank, dark-hued sweat of coming
+dissolution.
+
+He was not ever going to get well, and fetch the clergyman to pray over
+and bless her resting-place. He was going to die and lie beside her there,
+under the red earth topped by the boulder-cairn. He smiled. What an easy
+solution of the problem! He had been too intent upon gratifying her last
+desire to entertain for a moment the thought of suicide. He had always
+held self-destruction as the last resource of the coward and the criminal,
+and besides there was the child.
+
+The child!...
+
+With a pang of dread and terror unfelt by him before, he raised his gaunt
+head with an effort from the uneasy pillow, and looked towards where she
+lay, with staring, haunted eyes. The window was open a little way at the
+top, and for fear of the night-chill his fine leopard-skin kaross had been
+spread over her.... One dimpled, rounded, bare arm lay upon the soft
+dappled fur, the babyish fingers curled one upon the other. Rosy human
+tendrils that should never twine again in a mother's hair. Her child, her
+daughter!... Born of her body, sharing her nature and her sex, soon to be
+orphaned. For he who could not even lift himself from bed, and drag his
+body across the floor to cover that lovely babyish arm, would soon be no
+better protector than the restless ghost that tugged at his heart with its
+unseen hands. He knew now why it could not rest.
+
+What would become of the child! Another fiery scourge, wielded by the Hand
+Unseen, bit deep into his shrinking conscience, into his writhing soul.
+His own act had brought this about. Be a cur, and accuse Destiny, blame
+Fate, lay the onus upon God, as so many defaulters do--he could not. He
+lay looking his deed in the foul face until the dawn crept up the sky, and
+learning how it may be that the sins of their fathers are visited on the
+children.
+
+He called for ink and paper as soon as the house was awake, and with
+infinite labour and many pauses to recover spent strength and breath, for
+he was greedy of life now, for the reason that we know--he wrote a letter
+home to England, to a relative who was the head of his family, and bore a
+great historic title--so great that those who spelled it out upon the
+envelope were half afraid to slip the heated knife under the crested seal.
+But Bough did it, and opened, and read.
+
+It was not going to be the soft snap he had thought, but it would be good
+enough. Wires might be pulled from Downing Street that would set the
+Government at Cape Town working to trace the tall thin Englishman who had
+travelled up with two waggons from Cape Colony in the company of a child
+and the woman now dead, and for whose sake he had given up those almighty
+swell connections. What a fool--what a thundering, juicy, damned fool the
+man had been! whose gaunt eyes were even now making out the landfall of
+Kingdom Come through the gathering mists of death.
+
+The letter worried Bough. To have the English Government smelling at your
+heels is no joke, thought he. Any moment the mastiff may grip, and then,
+if you happen to be an ex-convict and deserter from their Colonial Police,
+and supposing you have one or two other little things against you ... the
+most honest of speculators being occasionally compelled to dirty his
+hands, if only to tone down those immaculate extremities to something
+approaching the colour of other people's--then what becomes of the risky
+but profitable business of gun-running from the English ports through to
+the Transvaal?
+
+For by men like Bough and his associates vast supplies of munitions and
+engines of war were wormed through. The machine-guns in carefully numbered
+parts came in cases as "agricultural implements," the big guns travelled
+in the boilers of locomotives, the empty cases of the shells, large and
+small, were packed in piano-cases, or in straw-filled crates as
+"hardware"; the black powder and the cordite and the lyddite came in round
+wooden American cheese-boxes, with a special mark; and the Mauser
+cartridges were soldered in tins like preserved meat. How handsomely that
+business paid only Bough and his merry men, and Oom Paul and his burghers
+of the Volksraad, knew.
+
+But Her Majesty's Government, bound about with red-tape, hoodwinked by
+Dutch Assistant-Commissioners of British Colonies, and deceived by
+traitorous English officials, were blind and deaf to the huge traffic in
+arms and munitions. Not that there were no warnings. To the very end they
+were shouted in deaf ears.
+
+What of that letter sent from the Resident Commissioner's office at
+Gueldersdorp, that little frontier hamlet on the north-east corner of
+British Baraland, September 4, 1899, little more than a month before the
+war broke out, the war that was to leave Britain and her Colonies bleeding
+at every vein?
+
+The Boers were in laager over the Border. A desperate appeal for help had
+been made to the Powers that were, and the reply received to the now
+historic telegram, through the Resident Commissioner, has equally become a
+matter of history.
+
+"All that was possible" was being done by the Imperial authorities, His
+Excellency assured the inquirer, to safeguard the lives and property of
+the inhabitants of the Gold-Reef Town in the event of an attack by a
+hostile force.
+
+Also the military armament of the place was about to be materially
+increased.
+
+And yet up to the little frontier town upon which so much depended not a
+single modern gun had been despatched.
+
+An easy prey had the little town upon the flat-topped hill, set in the
+middle of a basin, proved to the Boer General and his commandos but for
+one thing. For weeks after the bursting of the first shell over
+Gueldersdorp three sides of the beleaguered town were so many open doors
+for the enemy. Only upon the threshold of each door stood Fear, and
+guarded and held the citadel.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+That hard taskmaster, Satan, is sometimes wonderfully indulgent to those
+who serve him well. While Bough, the keeper of the tavern, was yet turning
+about the open letter in his thick, short, hairy hands, weighing the
+chances attending the sending of it against the chances of keeping it
+back, the woman who served as mistress of the place thrust her
+coarsely-waved head of yellow bleached hair and rouge-ruddled face in at
+the room door, and called to him:
+
+"Boss, the sick toff is doing a croak. Giving up the ghost for all he's
+worth--he is. Better come and take a look for yourself if you don't
+believe me."
+
+Bough swore with relief and surprise, delayed only to lock away the
+letter, and went to take a look. It was as he hoped, a real stroke of luck
+for a man who knew how to work it.
+
+Richard Mildare--for Bough knew now what had been the name of the
+Englishman: Captain the Hon. Richard Mildare, late of the Grey
+Hussars--was dead. No hand made murderous by the lust of gold had helped
+him to his death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggravated
+cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief
+final pang, he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not
+look at rest. There was some reflection in it of the terror that had come
+upon him in the watches of that last night.
+
+Bough stayed some time alone in the room of death. When he came out he was
+extremely affable and gentle. The woman, who knew him, chuckled to herself
+when he met the Kaffir serving-maid bringing back the child from an airing
+in the sun, and told her to take it to the mistress. Then he went into the
+bar-room to speak to the Englishman's Boer driver.
+
+Leaning easily upon the zinc-covered counter he spoke to the man in the
+Taal, with which he was perfectly familiar:
+
+"Your Baas has gone in, as my wife and I expected."
+
+Smoots Beste growled in his throat:
+
+"He was no Baas of mine, the verdoemte rooinek! I drove for him for pay,
+that is all. There is wage owing me still, for the matter of that--and
+where am I to get it now that the heathen has gone to the burning?"
+
+Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly got drunk, not
+only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt virtuously certain that the
+Englishman had gone to Hell.
+
+Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad Cape brandy, and
+pushed it across the counter.
+
+"You shall get the money, every tikkie. Only listen to me."
+
+Smoots Beste tossed off the fiery liquid, and returned in a tone less
+surly:
+
+"I am listening, Baas."
+
+Said Bough, speaking with the thickish lisp and slurring of the consonants
+that distinguished his utterance when he sought to appear more simple and
+candid than usual:
+
+"This dead toff, with his flash waggon and fine team, and Winchester
+repeating-rifles, had very little money. He has died in my debt for the
+room and the nursing, and the good nourishment, for which I trusted him
+all these three weeks, and I am a poor man. The dollars I have paid you
+and the Kaffir and the Cape boys on his account came out of my own pocket.
+Rotten soft have I behaved over him, that's the God's truth, and when I
+shall get back my own there's no knowing. But, of course, I shall act
+square."
+
+The Boer's thick lips parted in a grin, showing his dirty, greenish-yellow
+teeth. He scratched his shaggy head, and said, his tongue lubricated to
+incautiousness by the potent liquor:
+
+"The waggons, and the oxen, and the guns and ammunition, and the stores in
+the second waggon are worth good money. And the woman that is dead had
+jewels--I have seen them on her--diamonds and rubies in rings and
+bracelets fit for the vrouw of King Solomon himself. The Englishman did
+not bury them with her under that verdoemte kopje that he built with his
+two hands, and they are not in the boxes in the living-waggon."
+
+"Did he not?" asked Bough, looking the Boer driver full in the face with a
+pleasant smile. "Are they not?"
+
+Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-room, looked up at the
+ceiling, down at the floor, anywhere but into Bough's. He spat, and said
+in a much more docile tone:
+
+"What do you want me to do?"
+
+Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially:
+
+"Just this, friend. I want you to inspan, and take one of the waggons up
+to Gueldersdorp, with a letter from me to the Civil Commissioner. I will
+tell him how the man is dead, and he will send down a magistrate's clerk
+to put a seal on the boxes and cases, and then he will go through the
+letters and papers in the pocket-book, and write to the people of the dead
+man over in England, supposing he has any, for I have heard him tell my
+wife there was not a living soul of his name now, except the child----"
+
+"But what good will all this do you and me, Baas?" asked the Boer
+subserviently.
+
+Bough spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Why, when the magistrates and lawyers have hunted up the man's family,
+there will be an order to sell the waggons and oxen and other property to
+pay the expenses of his burying, and the child's keep here and passage
+from Cape Town, if she is to be sent to England ... and what is left over,
+see you, after the law expenses have been paid, will go to the settlement
+of our just claims. They will never let honest men suffer for behaving
+square, sure no, they'll not do that!"
+
+But though Bough's words were full of faith in the fair dealing of the
+lawyers and magistrates, his tone implied doubt.
+
+"Boer lawyers are slim rogues at best, and Engelsch lawyers are duyvels as
+well as rogues," said Smoots Beste, with a dull flash of originality.
+
+Bough nodded, and pushed another glass of liquor across the bar.
+
+"And that's true enough. I've a score to settle with one or two of 'em. By
+gum! I call myself lucky to be in this with a square man like you. There's
+the waggon, brand-new--you know what it cost at Cape Town--and the team, I
+trust you to take up to Gueldersdorp, and who's to hinder a man who hasn't
+the fear of the Lord in him from heading north-east instead of north-west,
+selling the waggon and the beasts at Kreilstad or Schoenbroon, and living
+on a snug farm of your own for the rest of your life under another man's
+name, where the English magistrates and the police will never find you,
+though their noses were keener than the wild dogs?"
+
+"Alamachtig!" gasped Smoots Beste, rendered breathless by the alluring,
+tempting prospect. Surely the devil spoke with the voice of the
+tavern-keeper Bough, when, in human form, he tempted children of men.
+Sweat glistened on Smoots' flabby features, his thick hands trembled, and
+his bowels were as water. But his purpose was solidifying in his brain as
+he said innocently, looking over Bough's left shoulder at the wooden
+partition that divided off the bar from the landlord's dwelling-room:
+
+"Aye, I am no dirty schelm that cannot be trusted. Therefore would it not
+be better if I took both teams and waggons, and all the rooinek's goods
+with me up to Gueldersdorp, and handed it over to the Engelsch landrost
+there?"
+
+The fish was hooked. Bough said, steadily avoiding those twirling eyes:
+
+"A good notion, but the lawyer chaps at Gueldersdorp will want to look at
+the Englishman's dead body to be able to satisfy his people that he did
+not die of a gunshot, or of a knife-thrust; we must bury him, of course,
+but not too deep for them to dig him up again. And they will want to
+ferret in all the corners of the room where he died, and make sure that
+his bags and boxes have not been tampered with--and then there is the
+child. In a way"--he spoke slowly and apologetically--"the kid and the
+goods are my security for getting my own back again--if ever I do. So you
+will inspan one of the waggons--the best if you like, with a team of six
+beasts, and you will trek up to Gueldersdorp--you will travel light enough
+with only the grub you will need, and the Cape boys, and you will hand
+over the letter to the Resident Magistrate, and bring back the man who
+will act as his deputy."
+
+But at this point Smoots Beste set down his splay foot. He would undertake
+to deliver the letter, but he objected to the company of the coloured
+voor-loopers or the Kaffir driver. He was firm upon that and, finding his
+most honeyed persuasions of no avail, Bough said no more. He would pay off
+the niggers and dismiss them, or get rid of them without paying; there
+were ways and means. He sent up country, and the team came down, six thin,
+overworked creatures, with new scars upon their slack and baggy hides, and
+hollow flanks, and ribs that showed painfully. Smoots Beste was about to
+grumble, but he changed his mind, and took the letter, buttoning it up in
+the flapped pocket of his tan-cord jacket, and the long whip cracked like
+a revolver as the lash hissed out over the backs of the wincing oxen, and
+the white tilt rocked over the veld, heading to the nor'-west.
+
+"When will the Dutchy be back, boss?" asked the woman, with a knowing
+look.
+
+Bough played the game up to her. He answered quite seriously: "In three
+weeks' time."
+
+Then he strolled out, smoking a cigar, his hat tilted at an angle that
+spoke of satisfaction. His walk led him past the oblong cairn of ironstone
+boulders in the middle of the sandy patch of ground enclosed with zinc
+wire-netting. At the foot of the cairn was a new grave.
+
+For the lover did not even lie beside his beloved, as he had vowed once,
+promised and planned, but couched below her feet, waiting, like some
+faithful hound that could not live without the touch of the worshipped
+hand, for the dead to rise again.
+
+Why is it that Failure is the inevitable fate of some men and women?
+Despite brilliant prospects, positions that seem assured, commanding
+talents nobly used, splendid opportunities that are multiplied as though
+in mockery, the result is Nothing from first to last; while the bad
+flourish and the evil prosper, and the world honours the stealer of the
+fruit of the brains that have been scattered in frenzied despair, or have
+become so worn out from the constant effort of creation that the worker
+has sunk into hopeless apathy and died.
+
+Bough was not one of those men whose plans come to nothing. He had
+prospered as a rogue of old in England, really his native country, though
+he called himself an Afrikander. Reared in the gutters of the Irish
+quarter of Liverpool, he had early learned to pilfer for a living, had
+prospered in prison as sharp young gaol-birds may prosper, and returned to
+it again and again, until, having served out part of a sentence for
+burglary and obtained his ticket-of-leave, he had shifted his convict's
+skin, and made his way out to Cape Colony under a false name and
+character. He had made a mistake, it was true, enlisting as a trooper of
+Colonial Police, but the step had been forced upon him by circumstances.
+Then he had deserted, and had since been successful as a white-slave
+dealer at Port Elizabeth, and as a gold-miner in the Transvaal, and he had
+done better and better still at that ticklish trade of gun-running for Oom
+Paul. Though, get caught--only once get caught--and the Imperial
+Government authorities, under whose noses you had been playing the game
+with impunity for years, made it as hot as Hell for you. Bough, however,
+did not mean ever to get caught. There was always another man, a
+semi-innocent dupe, who would appear to have been responsible for
+everything, and who would get pinched.
+
+Such a dupe now trudged at the head of the meagre three-span ox-team.
+When, after a hard day's toil, he at length outspanned, the waggon-pole
+still faithfully pointed to the north-west. But before it was yet day the
+waggon began to move again, and it was to the north-east that the
+waggon-pole pointed thenceforwards, and the letter Bough had given Smoots
+Beste for the Chief Resident Magistrate at Gueldersdorp was saved from the
+kindling of the camp-fire by a mere accident.
+
+The cat's-paw could not read, or the illegible, meaningless ink scrawl
+upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope would have aroused his
+suspicions at the outset. So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty,
+understood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud, not
+elaborate--a mere stage property, nothing more. But yet he gave it in full
+belief that it would be burned, and that, the boats of Smoots Beste being
+consumed with it, according to the thick judgment of the said Smoots, it
+would be as a pillar of fire behind that slim child of the old
+voortrekkers, hastening his journey north-eastwards. It is typical of the
+class of Smoots that it never once occurred to him to go north.
+
+But Smoots Beste never bought a farm with the price of the oxen and the
+high-bulwarked, teak-built, waterproof-canvas tilted waggon that had cost
+such a good round sum. There was a big rainfall on the third day. It began
+with the typical African thunderstorm--deafening, continuous rolls and
+crashes of heavy cloud-artillery, and lightning that blazed and darted
+without intermission, and ran zigzagging in a horrible, deadly, playful
+fashion over the veld, as though looking for dishonest folks to shrivel.
+One terrible flash struck the wheel-oxen, a thin double tongue of blue
+flame sped flickering from ridge to ridge of the six gaunt backs ... there
+was a smell of burning hair--a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched
+dead on the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long
+horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to bloat and
+swell in the swift decomposition that follows death by the electric fluid.
+
+Smoots Beste crawled under the waggon, and, remembering all he had heard
+his father spell out from the Dutch Bible about the Judgment Day, and the
+punishment of sinners in everlasting flame, felt very ill at ease. The
+storm passed over, and the rain poured all through the night, but dawn
+brought in a clear blue day; and with it a train of eight
+transport-waggons, and several wearied, muddy droves of sheep and cattle,
+the property of the Imperial Government Commissariat Department,
+Gueldersdorp, being taken from Basutoland East up to Gueldersdorp, under
+convoy of an escort of B.S.A. Police. To the non-commissioned officer in
+command Smoots Beste, resigned to the discharge of a trust, handed the
+letter for the Civil Commissioner.
+
+The sergeant, sitting easily in the saddle, looked at the boldly-written
+direction on the envelope, and smelt no rats--at least until he coolly
+opened the supposed letter. The scrawled sheet of paper it contained was a
+surprise, but he did not let Smoots see that. Then the following brief
+dialogue took place:
+
+"You were trekking up to Gueldersdorp," he said to the decidedly nervous
+Smoots, "to fetch down a Deputy Civil Commissioner to deal with the
+effects of a dead English traveller, at a house kept by the man who wrote
+this letter--that is, three days' trek over the veld to the southward, and
+called the Free State Hotel?"
+
+Smoots nodded heavily. The dapper sergeant cocked his felt smasher hat,
+and turned between pleasantly smiling lips the cigar he was smoking. Then
+he pointed with his riding-whip, a neatly varnished sjambok, with a smart
+silver top, to the north-west.
+
+"There lies Gueldersdorp. Rum that when the lightning killed the ox-team
+you should have been trekking north-east, isn't it?"
+
+Smoots Beste agreed that it was decidedly rum.
+
+The sergeant said, without a change in his agreeable smile:
+
+"All right; you can inspan six of our drove-bullocks, and drive the waggon
+with us to Gueldersdorp."
+
+"Thank you, Baas!" said Smoots, without enthusiasm.
+
+"If you like to take the risk," added the sergeant, who had not quite
+finished. He ended with an irrepressible outburst of honest indignation:
+"Why, you blasted, thieving Dutch scum, do you think I don't _know_ you
+were stealing that span and waggon?"
+
+And as Smoots, sweating freely, unyoked the dead oxen, he decided in his
+heavy mind that he would be missing long before the convoy got to
+Gueldersdorp.
+
+Nine waggons rolled on where only eight had been before. The mounted men
+hurried on the daubed and wearied droves of Commissariat beasts. Smoots
+Beste drove the scratch team of bullocks, but his heart was as water
+within his belly, and there was no resonance in the smack of his whip.
+When the convoy came to a town, he vanished, and the story thenceforth
+knows him no more. The discreet sergeant of police did not even notice
+that he was missing until several days later, when the end of the journey
+was near at hand. He was a sober, careful man, and a good husband. He
+shortly afterwards made quite a liberal remittance to his wife, and his
+troopers pushed Kruger half-sovereigns across most of the bars in
+Gueldersdorp shortly after the purchase by a Dopper farmer of a teak-built
+Cape waggon that a particular friend of the sergeant's had got to sell.
+And they were careful, at first, not to wag loose tongues. But as time
+went on the story of the English traveller who had brought the body of the
+woman to the Free State Hotel, so many days' trek to the southwards from
+Gueldersdorp, trickled from lip to lip. And years later, years too late,
+it came to the ears of a friend of dead Richard Mildare.
+
+The sergeant maintained silence. He was a careful officer, and a discreet
+man, and, what is more, religious. In controversial arguments with the
+godless he would sometimes employ a paraphrase of the story of Smoots
+Beste to strengthen his side.
+
+"A chap's a blamed fool that doesn't believe in God, I tell you. I was
+once after a bung-nosed Dutch thief of a transport-driver, that had
+waltzed away with a brand-new Cape cart and a team of first-class mules.
+Taking 'em up to Pretoria on the quiet, to sell 'em to Oom Paul's
+burghers, he was. Ay, they were worth a tidy lump! A storm came on--a
+regular Vaal display of sky-fireworks. The rain came down like
+gun-barrels, the veld turned into a swamp, but we kept on after the
+Dutchman, who drove like gay old Hell. Presently comes a blue blaze and a
+splitting crack, as if a comet had come shouldering into the map of South
+Africa, and knocked its head in. We pushed on, smelling sulphur, burnt
+flesh, and hair. 'By gum!' said I; 'something's got it'; and I was to
+rights. The Cape cart stood on the veld, without a scratch on the
+paintwork. The four mules lay in their traces, deader than pork. The
+Dutchman sat on the box, holding the lines and his voorslag, and grinning.
+He was dead, too--struck by the lightning in the act of stealing
+those mules and that Cape cart. Don't let any fellow waste hot air after
+that trying to persuade me that there isn't such a thing as an overruling
+Providence!"
+
+Thus the sergeant: and his audience, whether Free-thinkers, Agnostics, or
+believers, would break up, feeling that one who has the courage of his
+opinions is a respectable man.
+
+As for Bough, in whose hands even the astute sergeant had been as a peeled
+rush, we may go back and find him counting money in gold and notes that
+had been taken from the belt of the dead English traveller.
+
+Seventeen hundred pounds, hard cash--a pretty windfall for an honest man.
+The honest man whistled softly, handling the white crackling notes, and
+feeling the smooth, heavy English sovereigns slip between his fingers.
+
+There were certificates of Rand stock, also a goodly number of Colonial
+Railway shares, and some foreign bonds, all of which could be realised on,
+but at a distance, and by a skilled hand. There were jewels, as the Boer
+waggon-driver had said, that had belonged to the dead woman--diamond
+rings, and a bracelet or two; and there were silk dresses of lovely hues
+and texture, and cambric and linen dresses, and tweed dresses, in the
+trunks; and a great cloak of sables, trimmed with many tails, and
+beautiful underclothing of silk and linen, trimmed with real lace, over
+which the mouth of the woman of the tavern watered. She got some of the
+dresses and all the undergarments when Bough had dexterously picked out
+the embroidered initials. He knew diamonds and rubies, but he had never
+been a judge of lace.
+
+There was a coronet upon one or two handkerchiefs that had been overlooked
+when the dead woman had burned the others four years previously. Bough
+picked this out too, working deftly with a needle.
+
+He was clever, very clever. He could take to pieces a steam-engine or a
+watch, and put it together again. He knew all there is to know about
+locks, and how they may best be opened without their keys. He could alter
+plate-marks with graving tools and the jeweller's blow-pipe, and test
+metals with acids, and make plaster-cast moulds that would turn out
+dollars and other coins, remarkably like the real thing. He was not a
+clever forger; he had learned to write somewhat late in life, and the
+large, bold round hand, with the capital letters that invariably began
+with the wrong quirk or twirl, was too characteristic, though he wrote
+anonymous letters sometimes, risking detection in the enjoyment of what
+was to him a dear delight, only smaller than that other pleasure of
+moulding bodies to his own purposes, of malice, or gain, or lust.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+There was a child in the tavern on the veld; it lay in an old orange-box,
+half-filled with shavings, covered with a thin, worn blanket, in the
+daub-and-wattle outhouse, where the Hottentot woman, called the
+chambermaid, and the Kaffir woman, who was cook, slept together on one
+filthy pallet. Sometimes they stayed up at the tavern, drinking and
+carousing with the Dutch travellers who brought the supplies of Hollands
+and Cape brandy and lager beer, and the American or English gold-miners
+and German drummers who put up there from time to time. Then the child lay
+in the outhouse alone. It was a frail, puny creature, always frightened
+and silent. It lived on a little mealie pap and odd bits of roaster-cakes
+that were thrown to it as though it were a dog. When the coloured women
+forgot to feed it, they said: "It does not matter. Anyhow, the thing will
+die soon!" But it lived on when another child would have died.... There
+was something uncanny about its great-eyed silence and its tenacious hold
+on life.
+
+It had only been able to toddle when brought to the tavern. The rains and
+thunderstorms of spring went by, the summer passed, and it could walk
+about. It was a weakly little creature, with great frightened eyes,
+amber-brown, with violet flecks in their black-banded irises, and dark,
+thick lashes; and the delicately-drawn eyebrows were dark too, though its
+hair was soft yellow--just the colour of a chicken's down. Many a cuff it
+got, and many a hard word, when its straying feet brought it into the way
+of the rough life up at the tavern. But still the scrap of food was tossed
+to it, and the worn-out petticoat roughly cobbled into a garment for its
+little body; for Bough was a charitable man.
+
+It was a poor orphan, he explained to people, the child of a consumptive
+emigrant Englishman who had worked for the landlord of the tavern, and
+left this burden for other shoulders when he died. Charitable travellers
+frequently left benefactions towards the little one's clothing and keep.
+Bough willingly took charge of the money. The child strayed here, there,
+and everywhere. It was often lost, but nobody looked for it, and it always
+came back. It liked to climb the cairn of boulders, or to sit on the long,
+low hillock at the cairn's foot. The wire fencing had long been removed
+from the enclosure; it had gone to make a chicken-pen in a more suitable
+spot. The cross had been taken down when a prop was wanted for the
+clothes-line.
+
+The child, often beaten by Bough and the woman of the tavern, might have
+been even worse treated by the coloured servants but for those two graves
+out on the veld. Black blood flows thick with superstition, and both the
+Kaffir cook and the snuff-coloured Hottentot chambermaid nourished a
+wholesome dread of spooks. Who knew but that the white woman's ghost would
+rise out of the kopje there, some dark night, and pinch and cuff and thump
+and beat people who had ill-used her bantling? As for the dead man buried
+at her feet, his dim shape had often been seen by one of the Barala
+stablemen, keeping guard before the heap of boulders, in the white blaze
+of the moon-rays, or the paler radiance of a starry night, or more often
+of a night of mist and rain; not moving as a sentry moves, but upright and
+still, with shining fiery eyes in his shadowy face, and with teeth that
+showed, as the dead grin. After that none of the servants would pass near
+these two graves later than sundown, and Bough welted the Barala boy with
+an ox-reim for scaring silly jades of women with lying tales. But then
+Bough avoided the spot by day as well as by night. Therefore, it became a
+constant place of refuge for the child, who now slept in the outhouse
+alone.
+
+In the long, brilliant winter nights she would leave the straw-stuffed
+sack that had been her bed ever since the orange-box had been broken up,
+and climb the stone-heaps, and look over the lonely veld, and stare up at
+the great glowing constellation of the Southern Cross. In spring, when
+pools and river-beds were full of foaming beer-coloured water, and every
+kloof and donga was brimmed with flowers and ferns, she would be drawn
+away by these, would return, trailing after her armfuls of rare blooms,
+and thenceforward, until these faded, the ridgy grave-mound and the heaped
+cairn of boulders would be gay with them. She never took them to the
+house. It might have meant a beating--so many things did.
+
+Late in November, when the apricots and plums and peaches were ripening on
+the laden, starling-haunted boughs, she would wander in the orchard
+belonging to the house, while the heavy drenching rains drummed on the
+leaves overhead, and sudden furious thunderstorms rent the livid-coloured
+clouds above with jagged scythes and reaping-hooks of white electric fire,
+or leaping, dancing, playing, vanishing tongues of thin blue. Once this
+fire struck a krantz, under the lee of which the child was sheltering, and
+made a black scorched mark all down the cliff-face, but left the child
+unscathed.
+
+No one had ever taught her anything; no one had ever laid a gentle hand
+upon her. When she first saw mother and daughter, friend and friend,
+sweetheart and sweetheart kiss, it seemed to her that they licked each
+other, as friendly dogs do. She had no name that she knew of.
+
+"You kid, go there. You kid, fetch this or bring that. You kid, go to the
+drift for water, or take the besom and sweep the stoep, or scrub out the
+room there--do you hear, you kid?" These orders came thick and fast when
+at last she was old enough to work; and she was old enough when she was
+very young, and did work like a little beast of burden. A real mother's
+heart--all mothers are not real ones--would have ached to see the dirt and
+bruises on the delicate childish limbs, and the vermin that crawled under
+the yellow rings of hair. How to be clean and tidy nobody had ever shown
+her, though she had learned by instinct other things.
+
+That it was best to bear hunger and pain in silence, lest worse befell.
+That a truth for which one suffers is not as good as a lie for which one
+gets a bigger roaster-cake, or the scrapings of the syrup-can. That to
+little, weak, and feeble creatures of their race grown human beings can be
+marvellously cruel. That the devil lived down in the kraals with the
+natives, and that God was a swear. It is a wonder that she had not sunk
+into idiocy, or hopelessly sickened and died, neglected, ill-used,
+half-starved as she was. But when the little one might have been six years
+of age, the Lady began coming. And after the first time, with very brief
+intervals of absence, she came every night.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+As soon as you lay down on the sack of straw in the corner of the
+outhouse, slipping out of the ragged frock if the weather were hot, or
+pulling the thin old horse-blanket over you if the night were a cold one,
+keeping your eyes tight shut, for this was quite indispensable, you looked
+into the thick dark, shot with gleams of lovely colours, sometimes with
+whirling rings of stars, and gradually, as you looked, all these
+concentrated into two stars, large and not twinkling, but softly radiant,
+and you were happy, for you knew that the Lady was coming.
+
+For she always came, even when you had been most wicked: when you were
+sent to bed without even the supper-crust to gnaw, and when your body and
+arms and legs were bruised and aching from the beating they told you you
+deserved. The stars would go a long way off, and while you tingled and
+trembled and panted with expectation, would come back again as eyes.
+Looking up into them, you saw them clearly; the rest of the person they
+belonged to arrived quite a little while after her eyes were there. Such
+eyes--neither grey, nor brown, nor violet, but a mingling of all these
+colours, and deepening as you gazed up into them into bottomless lakes of
+love.
+
+Then her face, framed in a soft darkness, which was hair--the Kid never
+knew of what colour--her face formed itself out of the darkness that
+framed those eyes, and a warm, balmy breath came nearer, and you were
+kissed. No other lips, in your short remembrance, had ever touched you.
+You had learned the meaning of a kiss only from her, and hers was so long
+and close that your heart left off beating, and only began again when it
+was over. Then arms that were soft and warm, and strong and beautiful,
+came round you and gathered you in, and you fell asleep folded closely in
+them, or you lay awake, and the Lady talked to you in a voice that was
+mellow as honey and soft as velvet, and sounded like the cooing of the
+wild pigeons that nested in the krantzes, or the sighing of the wind among
+the high veld grasses, and the murmur of the little river playing among
+the boulders and gurgling between the roots of the tree-fern. You talked,
+too, and told her everything. And no matter how bad you had been, though
+she was sorry, because she hated badness, she loved you just as dearly as
+she did when you were good. And oh! how you loved her--how you loved her!
+
+"Please," you said that night when she came first--you remember it quite
+well, though it is so long ago--"please, why did you never come before?"
+
+And she answered, with her cool, sweet, fragrant lips upon your eyelids,
+and your head upon her breast:
+
+"Because you never wanted me so much as now."
+
+"Please take me back home with you," you begged, holding her fast. And she
+answered in the voice that is always like the sigh of the wind amongst the
+tree-tops and the murmur of the river:
+
+"I cannot yet--but I will come again."
+
+And she does come, and again and again. By degrees, though she comes to
+you only at night, when the outhouse is dark, or lighted only by the stars
+or the moonshine, you learn exactly what the Lady is like.
+
+She wears a silken, softly-rustling gown that is of any lovely colour you
+choose. The hue of the blue overarching sky at midday, or the tender rose
+of dawn, or of the violet clouds that bar the flaming orange-ruby of the
+sunset: or the mysterious robe of twilight drapes her, or her garment is
+sable as the Night. The grand sweep of her shoulders and the splendid
+pillar of her throat reveal the beauty of her form even to the eyes of an
+untaught, neglected child. Her face is pale, but as full of sunlight as of
+shadow, and her eyes are really grey and deep as mountain lakes. The
+sorrow of all the world and all its joy seem to have rolled over her like
+many waters, and when she smiles the sweetness of it is always almost more
+than the Kid can bear.
+
+Who is the Lady!
+
+She has no other name than that. She is very, very good, as well as
+beautiful, and you can bear to tell her when you have been most wicked,
+because she is so sorry for you. She can play with you, and laugh so
+softly and clearly and gaily that you, who have never learned but to dread
+grown people's cruel merriment, join in and laugh too. When she laughs the
+corners of her eyes crinkle so like the corners of her lips that you have
+to kiss them, and there are dimples that come with the laughter, and make
+her dearer than ever.
+
+Who is the Lady, tall, and strong, and tender? That dead woman lying out
+there under the Little Kopje was small, and slight, and frail. Who may the
+Lady be? Is she a dream or a mere illusion born of loneliness and
+starvation, physical and mental? Or has Mary, the Mother of Pity, laid
+aside her girdle of decades of golden roses, her mantle of glory, and her
+diadem of stars, and come stepping fair-footed down the stairway that
+Night builds between Earth and Heaven, to comfort a desolate child lying
+in a stable who never heard the story of the Christ-Babe of Bethlehem?
+
+You ask no questions--you to whom she comes. You call her softly at night,
+stretching out your arms, and the clasp of her arms answers at once. You
+whisper how you love her, with your face hidden in her neck. The great
+kind dark that brings her is your real, real daytime in which you live and
+are glad. Each morning to which you waken, bringing its stint of hunger
+and abuse and blows renewed, is only a dreadful dream, you say to
+yourself, and so can face your world.
+
+Oh, deep beyond fathoming, mysterious beyond comprehension is the hidden
+heart of a child!
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+One afternoon when the Kid was quite as tall as the broom she swept the
+stoep with she had gone to the drift for water. It was a still, bright,
+hot day. Little puffs of rosy cloud hung motionless under the burning blue
+sky-arch; small, gaily-plumaged birds twittered in the bushes; the tiny
+black ants scurried to and fro in the pinkish sand of the river beach. She
+waded into the now clear, sherry-pale water to cool her hot bare limbs,
+and, bending over, stared down into the reflected eyes that looked back
+out of the pool.
+
+Such a dirty little, large-eyed, wistful face, crowned by a curling tousle
+of matted, reddish-brown-gold hair. Such a neglected, sordid little
+figure, with thin drab shoulders sticking out of a ragged calico frock.
+She was quite startled. She had never seen herself in any glass before,
+though a cheap, square, wooden-framed mirror hung on the wall of the
+bar-room, with a dirty clothes-brush on a hook underneath, and there were
+swing toilet-glasses in the tawdry bedrooms at the inn. Something stirred
+in her, whispering in the grimy little ear, "_It is good to be clean_,"
+and with the awakening of the maidenly instinct the womanly purpose
+framed.
+
+She put off her horrible rags, and washed herself from head to foot in the
+warm clear water. She took fine sand, and scrubbed her head. She dipped
+and wrung and rinsed her foul tatters of garments, standing naked in the
+shallows, the hot sunshine drying her red-gold curls, and warming her
+slight girlish body through and through as she spread her washed rags to
+dry on the big hot stones.
+
+There was a man's step on the bank above her, there was a rustling sound
+among the green bushes. She had never heard of modesty, but she cowered
+down among the boulders, and the heavy footstep passed by. She hid among
+the fern while her clothes were drying, put them on tidily, and went back
+with her filled water-bucket to the hotel. How could she know what injury
+the kind peremptory voice, bidding her be foul no longer, had done her!
+But thenceforwards a new cruelty, a fresh peril, attended her steps.
+
+Bough and the white woman of the inn had quarrels often. She was no wife
+of his. He had not brought her from Cape Colony. When the hotel was built
+he had gone up to Johannesburg on business and on pleasure, and brought
+her back with him from an establishment he knew. He was generally not
+brutal to her except when she was ailing, when he gave her medicine that
+made her worse, much worse--so very ill that she would lie groaning upon a
+foul neglected bed for weeks, while Bough caroused with the coloured women
+and the customers in the bar. Then, still groaning, she would drag herself
+up and be about her work again. She did not want to go back to the house
+at Johannesburg. She loved the man Bough in her fashion, poor bought
+wretch.
+
+She had quarrelled with him many times for many things, and been silenced
+with blows, or curses, or even caresses, were he in the mood. But she had
+never quarrelled with him about the Kid before. Now when he bought some
+coloured print and a Boer sunbonnet, and some shifts and stockings of a
+traveller in drapery and hosiery, and ordered her thenceforwards to see
+that the girl went properly clothed, a new terror, a fresh torture, was
+added to the young life. The woman had ignored, neglected, sometimes
+ill-used her, but she had never hated her until now.
+
+And Bough, the big, burly, dark-skinned man with the strange light eyes,
+and the bold, cruel, red mouth, and the bushy brown whiskers, why did he
+follow her about with those strange eyes, and smile secretly to himself?
+She was no longer fed on scraps; she must sit and eat at table with the
+man and his mistress, and learn to use knife and fork.
+
+She outgrew the dress Bough had bought her, and another, and another, and
+this did not make Bough angry; he only smiled. A man having some secret
+luxury or treasure locked away in a private cupboard will smile so. He
+knows it is there, and he means to go to the hiding-place one day, but in
+the meantime he waits, licking his lips.
+
+The girl had always feared Bough, and shrunk from his anger with
+unutterable terror. But the blow of his heavy hand was more bearable than
+his smile and his jesting amiability. Now, when she went down to the
+kraals on an errand, or to the orchard or garden for fruit or vegetables,
+or to the river for water as of old, she heard his light, cautious,
+padding footsteps coming after her, and would turn and pass him with
+downcast eyes, and go back to the inn, and take a beating for not having
+done her errand. Beating she comprehended, but this mysterious change in
+the man Bough filled her with sick, secret loathing and dread. She did not
+know why she bolted the door of the outhouse now when she crept to her
+miserable bed.
+
+Once Bough dropped into her lap a silver dollar, saying with a smile that
+she was getting to be quite a little woman of late. She leaped to her feet
+as though a scorpion had stung her, and stood white to the very lips, and
+speechless, while the big silver coin rolled merrily away into a distant
+corner, and lay there. The frowzy woman with the bleached hair happened to
+come in at that moment; or had she been spying through a crack of the
+door? Bough pretended he had accidentally dropped the coin, picked it up,
+and went away.
+
+
+
+
+That night he and the woman quarrelled fiercely. She could hear them
+raging at each other as she lay trembling. Then came shrieks, and the dull
+sound of the sjambok cutting soft human flesh. In the morning the woman
+had a black eye; there were livid weals on her tear-blurred face. She
+packed her boxes, snivelling. She was going back along up to Johannesburg
+by the next thither-bound transport-waggon-train that should halt at the
+hotel--thrown off like an old shoe after all these years. And she was not
+young enough for the old life, what with hard work and hard usage and
+worry, and she knew to whom she owed her dismissal....
+
+Ay, and if she could have throttled or poisoned the little sly devil she
+would have done it! Only--there would have been Bough to reckon with
+afterwards. For of God she made a jest, and the devil was an old friend of
+hers, but she was horribly afraid of the man with the brown bushy whiskers
+and the light, steely eyes. Yet she threw herself upon him to kiss him,
+blubbering freely, when at the week's end the Johannesburg
+transport-rider's waggons returning from the district town not yet linked
+up to the north by the railway came in sight.
+
+Bough poured her out a big glass of liquor, his universal panacea, and
+another for the transport-rider, with many a jovial word. He would be
+running up to Johannesburg before she had well shaken down after the
+journey. Then they would have a rare old time, going round the bars and
+doing the shows. Though, perhaps if she had got fixed up with a new
+friend, some flash young fellow with pots of money, she would not be
+wanting old faces around?
+
+Then he turned aside to pay the transport-rider, and the exile dabbed her
+swollen face with a rouge-stained, lace-edged handkerchief, and went out
+to get into the waggon.
+
+The girl stood by the stoep, staring, puzzled, overwhelmed, afraid. A
+piece of her world was breaking off. As long as she could remember
+anything she had known this woman. She had never received any kindness
+from her; of late she had been malignant in her hate, but--she wished she
+was not going. Instinctively she had felt that her presence was some
+slight protection. Keeping close in the shadow of this creature's frowzy
+skirts, she had not so feared and dreaded those light eyes of Bough's, and
+the padding, following footsteps had kept aloof. As the woman passed her
+now, a rage of unspeakable, agonising fear rose in her bosom. She cried
+out to her, and clutched at her shabby gay mantle.
+
+The woman snatched the garment from her hold. Her distorted mouth and
+blazing eyes were close to the white young face. She could have spat upon
+it. But she snarled at her three words ... no more, and passed her, and
+got into the waggon.
+
+"Halloa, there!" said Bough, coming forward threateningly, "what you
+rowing about, eh?" But no one answered. The girl had fled to the
+boulder-cairn, and the woman sat silent in the waggon, until the weary,
+goaded teams moved on, and the transport-train of heavy, broad-beamed
+vehicles lumbered away.
+
+But the little figure on the cairn of boulders covering the dust of the
+bosom from whence it had first drunk life sat there immovable until the
+sun went down, pondering.
+
+"_Missis now, eh!_"
+
+What did those three words mean?
+
+Then Bough called her, and she had to run. She served as waitress of the
+bar that day, and the men who drove or rode by and stopped for drinks,
+chatting in the dirty saloon, or sitting in the bare front room, with the
+Dutch stove, and the wooden forms and tables in it, that they called the
+coffee-room, to discuss matters relative to the sale of cattle, or sheep,
+or merchandise, stared at her, and several made her coarse compliments.
+She refused to touch the loathly-smelling liquor they offered her. Her
+heart beat like a little terrified bird's. And she was horribly conscious
+of those light eyes of Bough's following, following her, with that
+inscrutable look.
+
+When the crowd had thinned he came to her. He caught her arm, and pulled
+her near him, and said between his teeth:
+
+"You will sleep in the mistress's room to-night."
+
+Then he went away chuckling to himself, thinking of that frightened look
+in her eyes. Later, he went out on horseback, and did not return.
+
+The slatternly bedchamber, with its red turkey twill window-curtains and
+cheap gaudy wallpaper, which had belonged to the ruddled woman with the
+bleached hair, was a palace to the little one. But she could not breathe
+there. Late that night she rose from the big feather bed, and unfastened
+the inner window shutters, and drew the cotton blind and opened the
+window, though the paint had stuck, and looked out upon the veld. The
+great stars throbbed in the purple velvet darkness overhead. The falling
+dew wetted the hand she stretched out into the cool night air. She drew
+back the hand and touched her cheek with it, and started, for the fresh,
+cool, fragrant touch seemed like that of some other hand whose touch she
+once had known. She thought for the first time that if the woman who had
+been her mother, and who slept out there in the dark under the
+boulder-cairn, had lived, she might have touched her child so. Then she
+closed the window quickly, for she heard, afar off, the gallop of a
+hard-ridden horse drawing nearer--nearer. And she knew that Bough was
+coming back.
+
+He came.
+
+She heard him dismount before the door, give the horse to the sleepy
+Barala ostler, and let himself into the bar. She heard him clink among the
+glasses and bottles. She heard his foot upon the three-step stair, and on
+the landing. It did not pass by. It stopped at the locked door of the room
+where she was.
+
+Then his voice bade her rise and open the door. She could not speak or
+move.
+
+She was dumb and paralysed with deadly terror. She heard his coaxing voice
+turn angry; she listened in helpless terrified silence to his oaths and
+threats; then she heard him laugh softly, and the laugh was followed by
+the jingle of a bunch of skeleton keys. He always carried them; they saved
+trouble, he used to say.
+
+They saved him trouble now. When the bent wire rattled in the lock, and
+the key fell out upon the floor, she screamed, and his coarse chuckle
+answered. She was cowering against the wall in a corner of the room when
+he came in and picked up the key and locked the door. But when his
+stretched-out, grasping hand came down upon her slight shoulder, she
+turned and bit it like some savage, desperate little animal, drawing the
+blood. Bough swore at the sudden sting of the sharp white teeth. So the
+little beast showed fight, eh? Well, he would teach her that the master
+will have his way.
+
+There was no one else in the house, and if there had been it would have
+served her not at all. God sat in timeless Eternity beyond these mists of
+earth, and saw, and made no sign. It was not until the man Bough slept the
+heavy sleep of liquor and satiety that the thought of flight was born in
+her with desperate courage to escape him. The shutters had been left
+unbolted, and the window was yet a little way open. She sprang up and
+threw it wide, leaped out upon the stoep, and from thence to the ground,
+and fled blindly, breathlessly over the veld into the night.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+Bough, as soon as it was dawn, sent three of the Kaffirs from the kraals,
+in different directions, to search for her, and, mounted on a fresh pony,
+took the fourth line of search himself.
+
+He had chosen the right direction for riding down the quarry. At broad
+high noon he came upon her, in a bare, stony place tufted with milk-bush.
+She was crouching under a prickly-pear shrub, that threw a distorted blue
+shadow on the sun-baked, sun-bleached ground, trying to eat the fruit in
+the native way with two sticks. But she had no knife, and her mouth was
+bleeding. Bough gave the tired pony both spurs when the prey he hunted
+came in sight. She leaped up like a wild cat when the mounted man rode
+down upon her, and ran, doubling like a hare. When overtaken, she fell
+upon her face in the sand, and lay still, only shaken by her long pants.
+Bough dismounted and caught her by the wrist and dragged her up with his
+bandaged right hand. He beat her about her cheeks with his hard, open
+left. Then he threw her across his saddle, but she writhed down, and lay
+under the pony's feet.
+
+He kicked her then, for giving so much trouble, lifted her again, and
+tried to mount, holding her in one arm. But the frightened pony swerved
+and backed, and the girl writhed, and struggled, and scratched like a wild
+cat. She did not know what mercy meant, but she saw by the look that came
+into those light eyes that this man would have none upon her. She fought
+and bit and screamed.
+
+Bough took an ox-reim then, that was coiled behind his saddle, and bound
+her hands. He tied the end of the leather rope to the iron ring behind his
+saddle, and remounted, and spurred his weary beast into a canter. The
+little one was forced to run behind. Again and again she fell, and each
+time she was jerked up and forced to run again upon her bleeding feet,
+leaving rags of her garments upon the karroo-bushes and blood-marks on the
+stones. And at last she fell, and rose no more, showing no sign of life
+under the whip and the spur-rowel. Then Bough bent over and drew his long
+hunting-knife and cut the reim, leaving her hands still bound. If any
+spark of life remained in he girl, he could not tell. Her knees were drawn
+in towards her body; her eyes were open, and rolled upwards; there was
+foam upon her torn and bleeding mouth. She was as good as dead, anyway,
+and the wild dogs would be sure to come by-and-by. Already an aasvogel
+was hovering above; a mere speck, the great bird poised upon widespread
+wings, high up in the illimitable blue.
+
+Presently there would be a flock of these carrion feeders, that are not
+averse to fresh-killed meat when it is to be had.
+
+Bough remounted, and, humming a dance tune that was often on his lips,
+rode away over the veld.
+
+The great vulture wheeled. Then he dropped like a falling stone for a
+thousand yards or so, and hovered and dropped again, getting nearer--ever
+so much nearer--with each descent. And where he had hovered at the first
+were now a dozen specks of black upon the hot, bright blue.
+
+A wild dog crept down from a cone-topped spitzkop, and stood, sniffing the
+blood-tainted air eagerly, whining a little in its throat.
+
+The great vulture dropped lower. His comrades of the flock, eagerly
+following his gyrations and descents, had begun to wheel and drop also.
+Another wild dog appeared on the cone-shaped kop. Other furry, sharp-eared
+heads, with eager, sniffing noses, could be seen amongst the grass and
+bush.
+
+Then suddenly the higher vultures rose. They wheeled and soared and flew,
+a bevy of winged black specks hurrying to the north. They had seen
+something approaching over the veld. The great bird hanging motionless,
+purposeful, lower down, became aware of his comrades' change of tactics.
+With one downward stroke of his powerful wings, he shot upwards, and with
+a hoarse, croaking cry took flight after the rest.
+
+The wild dogs stole back, hungry, to covert, as a big light blue waggon,
+drawn by a well-fed team of eight span, came lumbering over the veld.
+
+Would the ox-team veer in another direction? Would the big blue waggon
+with the new white tilt roll by?
+
+The Hottentot driver cracked his giant whip, and, turning on the box-seat,
+spoke to a figure that sat beside him. It was a woman in loose black
+garments, with a starched white coif like a Dutchwoman's kapje, covered
+with a floating black veil. At her side dangled and clashed a long rosary
+of brown wooden beads, with a copper crucifix attached. There were two
+other women in the big waggon, dressed in the same way. They were Roman
+Catholic nuns--Sisters of Mercy coming up from Natal, by the order of the
+Bishop of Bellmina, Vicar-Apostolic, at the request of the Bishop of
+Paracos, suffragan to North-East Baraland, to swell the numbers of the
+Community already established in Gueldersdorp at the Convent of the Holy
+Way.
+
+The oxen halted some fifty yards from that inanimate ragged little body,
+lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the
+hot sand. Little crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on
+the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if
+the waggon had passed on.
+
+One white-coifed, tall, black-clad figure sprang lightly down from the
+waggon-box, and hurried across to where the body was lying. A mellow,
+womanly cry of pity came from under the starched coif. She turned and
+beckoned. Then she knelt down by the girl's side, opened the torn
+garments, and felt with compassionate, kindly touches about the still
+heart.
+
+The other two black figures came hurrying over then, stumbling amongst the
+stones and karroo-bushes in their haste. Lifting her, they turned the
+white, bloodless young face to the blue sky. It was cut and scratched, but
+not otherwise disfigured. Her bound arms, dragged upwards before it, had
+shielded it from the thorns and the sharp stones. They were raw from the
+elbows to the wrists.
+
+They listened at the torn childish bosom with anxious ears. They got a few
+drops of brandy between the clenched little teeth. The sealed lips
+quivered; the heart fluttered feebly, like a dying bird. They gave her
+more stimulant, and waited, while the Hottentot driver dozed, and the
+sleek, well-fed oxen chewed the cud patiently, standing in the sun.
+
+Then the Sisters lifted her, with infinite care, and carried her to the
+waggon. The twenty-four-foot whip-lash cracked, and the patient beasts
+moved on. Very soon the big white tilt was a mere retreating speck upon
+the veld. The ants were still busy when the wild dogs came out and
+sniffed regretfully at those traces on the ground.
+
+Coincidence, did you say, lifting your eyebrows over the book, as the blue
+waggon of the Sisters rolled lumberingly into the story? The long arm of
+coincidence stretched to aching tenuity by the dramatist and the novelist!
+Nay! but the thing happened, just as I have told.
+
+What is the thing we are agreed to call coincidence?
+
+Once I was passing over one of the bridges that span the unclean London
+ditch called the Regent's Canal. I had walked all the way from Piccadilly
+Circus to Gloucester Crescent, haunted by the memory of a man I had once
+known. He was the broken-down, drunken, studio-drudge of a great artist, a
+splendid Bohemian, who had died some years before. Why did the thought of
+the palette-scraper, the errand-goer, the drunken creature with the
+cultivated voice and the ingratiating, gentlemanly manners, possess me as
+I went? I recalled his high, intellectual, pimply forehead, and large
+benevolent nose, in a chronic state of inflammation, and seedy
+semi-clerical garb, for the thing had been an ordained clergyman of the
+Church of England, and I grinned, remembering how, when a Royal visitor
+was expected at the great man's studio, the factotum had been bidden to
+wash his face, and had washed one half of it, leaving the other half in
+drab eclipse, like the picture-restorers' trade-advertisement of a canvas
+partially cleansed.
+
+Idly I tossed the butt of a finished cigar over the bridge balustrade.
+Idly my eye followed it down to the filthy, sluggishly-creeping water that
+flows round the bend, under the damp rear-garden walls below.
+
+A policeman and a bargeman were just taking the body of an old man out of
+that turbid canal-stream. It was dressed in pauper's garments, and its
+stiffened knees were bent, and its rigid elbows crooked, and a
+dishonoured, dripping beard of grey hung over the soulless breast.
+
+The dreadful eyes were open, staring up at the leaden March sky. His face,
+with the dread pallor of Death upon it, and the mud-stains wiped away by a
+rough but not unkindly hand, was cleaner than I had ever seen it in life.
+
+Nevertheless, I recognised in the soaked body in its workhouse livery the
+very man the thought of whom had haunted me, the great Bohemian painter's
+drunken studio-drudge.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+School at the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp was breaking up,
+suddenly and without warning, very soon after the beginning of the
+Christmas term. Many of the pupils had already left in obedience to urgent
+telegrams from relatives in Cape Colony or in the Transvaal, and every
+Dutch girl among the sixty knew the reason why, but was too astute to hint
+of it, and every English girl was at least as wise, but pride kept her
+silent, and the Americans and the Germans exchanged glances of
+intelligence, and whispered in corners of impending war between John Bull
+and Oom Paul.
+
+That deep and festering political hatreds, fierce enthusiasms, inherited
+pride of race, and instilled pride in nationality, were covered by worked
+apron-bibs, and even childish pinafores, is anyone likely to doubt?
+Schoolgirls can be patriots as well as rebels, and the seminary can vie
+with the college, or possibly outdo it, occasion given. Ask Juliette Adam
+whether the bread-and-butter misses of France in the year 1847 did not
+squabble over the obstinacy of King Louis Philippe and the greed of M.
+Guizot, the claims of Louis Napoleon and the theories of Louis Blanc, of
+Odilon Barrot, and Ledru-Rollin? And I who write, have I not seen a North
+Antrim Sunday-school wrecked in a faction-fight between the Orange and the
+Green? Lord! how the red-edged hymnals and shiny-covered S.P.G. books
+hurtled through the air, to burst like hand-grenades upon the texted
+walls. In vain the panting, crimson clergyman mounted the superintendent's
+platform, and strove to shed the oil of peace upon those seething waters.
+Even the class-teachers had broken the rails out of the Windsor
+chair-backs, and joined the hideous fray, irrespective of age or sex.
+
+"Miss Maloney--Miss Geoghegan--I am shocked--appalled! In the name of
+decency I command yees to desist!"
+
+"Hit him again, Moggy Lenahan, a taste lower down!"
+
+"Serve you right, Mulcahy! why would you march wid the Green?"
+
+Thirty years ago. As I gaped in affright at the horrid scene of strife,
+small revengeful fingers twisted themselves viciously in my auburn curls,
+and wresting from my grasp a "Child's Own Bible Concordance," a birthday
+outrage received from an Evangelical aunt, Julia Dolan, aged twelve, began
+to pound me about the face with it. As a snub-nosed urchin, gifted with a
+marvellous capacity for the cold storage and quick delivery of Scripture
+genealogies and Hebrew proper and improper names, I had often reduced my
+mild, long-legged girl-neighbour to tearful confusion. Now meek Julia
+seemed as though possessed by seven devils. I had been taught the
+elementary rule that boys must not hurt girls, but the code had no precept
+helpful in the present instance, when a girl was hurting me. Casting
+chivalry to the winds, I remember that I kicked Julia's shins, and she
+fled howling; but not before she had reduced my leading feature to a state
+of ruin, which created a tremendous sensation when they led me home.
+Later, during the election riots, two young women fought in the Market
+Place, stripped to the waist, and wielding boards wrenched from the side
+of a packing-case, heavy, jagged, and full of nails. And when the soldiers
+were called out, we know how many a saddle was emptied by the stones the
+children threw....
+
+Only a day previously the centipede-like procession of girls of all ages,
+in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers, in passing over the Gueldersdorp
+Recreation-Ground, had sustained an experience with which every maiden
+bosom would have been still vibrating had not an event even more exciting
+occurred between the early morning roll-call and prayers-muster and
+breakfast.
+
+Greta Du Taine had had another love-letter!
+
+The news darted from class-room to class-room more quickly than little
+Monsieur Pilotell, the French literature professor; it spread like the
+measles, and magnified like the mumps.
+
+The Red Class, composed of the elder girls, "young ladies" who were
+undergoing the process of finishing, surged with volcanic excitement,
+hidden, but not in the least repressed. The White Class, their juniors,
+who were chiefly employed in preparing for Confirmation, should have been
+immersed in graver things, but were not. They waited on mental tiptoe for
+details, and a peep at the delicious document. The Blue Class, as became
+mere infants ranging from six to ten years old, remained phlegmatically
+indifferent to the missive, yet avid for samples of the chocolates that
+had accompanied the declaration, made to eighty girls of all ages by one
+undersized, pasty, freckled young man employed as junior clerk and
+chain-assistant in a surveyor's office, and who signed at the end of a
+long row of symbolistic crosses the unheroic name of Billy Keyse.
+
+He had seen and been helplessly stunned by the vision of Greta Du Taine
+out walking at the head of the long winding procession of English, German,
+Dutch, Dutch-French, Dutch-American, and Jewish girls. They are sent now
+to be taught in Europe, those daughters of the Rand millionaires, the
+Stock Exchange speculators, the wealthy fruit-farmers, or cereal-growers,
+or cattle and sheep breeders, who are descended themselves from the old
+pioneers and voortrekkers, but they do not get a better education than was
+to be had at the Convent school at Gueldersdorp, where the Sisters of
+Mercy took in and taught and trained coltish girl-children, born in a
+strongly stimulating climate, and accustomed to lord it over Kaffir and
+Hottentot servants to their hearts' content. These they tamed, these they
+transformed into refined, cultivated, accomplished young women, stamped
+with the indefinable seal of high breeding, possessed of the tone and
+manner that belongs to the upper world.
+
+What shall I say of the Sisters of the Convent of the Holy Way at
+Gueldersdorp, I who know but little of any Order of Religious? They are a
+Community, chiefly of ladies of high breeding and ancient family, vowed to
+feed the hungry, clothe the naked, nurse the sick, comfort the dying, and
+instruct the ignorant. Like the Fathers of the Society of Jesuits, those
+skilled, patient, wise tillers in the soil of the human mind, their daily
+task is to hoe and tend, and prune and train, and water the young green
+things growing in what to them is the Garden of God, and to other good and
+even holy people, the vineyard of the devil. Possibly both are right?
+
+I have heard the habit of the Order called ugly. But upon the stately
+person of the Mother Superior the garb was regal. The sweeping black folds
+were as imposing as imperial purple, and the starched guimpe framed a
+beauty that was grave, stern, almost severe until she smiled, and then you
+caught your breath, because you had seen what great poets write of, and
+great painters try to render, and only great musicians by their
+impalpable, mysterious tone-art can come nearest to conveying--the earthly
+beauty that has been purged of all grosser particles of dross in the white
+fires of the Divine Love. She was not altogether perfect, or one could not
+have loved her so. Her scorn of any baseness was bitterly scathing; the
+point of her sarcasm was keen as any thrusting blade of tempered steel;
+her will was to be obeyed, and was obeyed as sovereign law, else woe
+betide the disobedient. Also, though kind and gracious to all, tenderly
+solicitous for, and incessantly watchful of, the welfare of the least of
+her charges, she never feigned where she could not feel regard or love.
+Her rare kiss was coveted in the little world of the Convent school as the
+jewel of an Imperial Order was coveted in the bigger world outside it, and
+the most rebellious of the pupils held her in respect mingled with fear.
+The head-mistresses of the classes had their followers and admirers. It
+was for the Mother Superior to command enthusiasm, and to sway ambition,
+and to govern the hearts and minds of children with the personal charm and
+the intellectual powers that could have ruled a nation from a throne.
+
+
+
+
+Well, she has gone to God. It is good for many souls that she lived upon
+earth a little. There was nothing sentimental, visionary, or hysterical in
+her character. Nor, in giving her great heart with her pure soul to her
+Saviour, did she ever quite learn to despise the sweetness of earthly
+love. Not all a Saint. Yet the children of those women who most were
+swayed by her influence in youth are taught to hold her Saint as well as
+Martyr. And there is One Who knows.
+
+It was not until recess after the midday dinner that Greta Du Taine could
+exhibit her love-letter. She was a Transvaal Dutch girl with old French
+blood in her, a vivacious, sparkling Gallic champagne mingling with the
+Dopper in her dainty blue veins. Nothing could be prettier than Greta in a
+good temper, unless it might be Greta in a rage. She was in a good temper
+now, as, tossing back her superb golden hair plait, as thick as a child's
+arm, and nearly four feet long, she drew a smeary envelope from the front
+of her black alpaca school-dress, and, delicately withdrawing the epistle
+enclosed, yielded the envelope for the inspection of the Red Class.
+
+"What niggly writing!" objected Nellie Bliecker, wrinkling her snub nose
+in the disgust that masks the gnawing tooth of envy.
+
+"And the envelope is all over sticky brown," said another carping critic.
+
+"That's because _he_ put the letter inside the chocolate-box," explained
+Greta, "instead of outside. And the best chocolates--the expensive
+ones--always go squashy. Only the cheap ones don't melt--because they have
+got stuff like chalk inside. But wait till I show you as much as the
+envelope of my next letter--that's all, Julia K. Shaw!"
+
+Julia K. wilted. Greta proceeded:
+
+"It's directed 'To My Fair Addored One,' because, of course, he didn't
+know my name. I don't object to his putting a d too much in adored; I
+rather prefer it. His own name is simple, and rather pretty." She made
+haste to say that, because she felt doubtful about it. "Billy Keyse."
+
+"_Billy?_"
+
+"Billy Keyse?"
+
+"B-i-l-l-y K-e-y-s-e!"
+
+The name went the round of the Red Class. Nobody liked it.
+
+"He must, of course, have been christened William. Shakespeare was a
+William. The Emperor of Germany," stated Greta loftily, "is a William.
+Mr. Pitt and Mr. Gladstone were both Williams. Many other great men have
+been Williams."
+
+"But not Billies," said Christine Silber, provoking a giggle from the
+greedily-listening White Class.
+
+Greta scorched them into silence with a look, and continued:
+
+"He is by profession a surveyor, not exactly a partner in the firm of Gadd
+and Saxby, on Market Square, but something very near it." (Do you who read
+see W. Keyse carrying the chain and spirit-level, and sweeping out the
+office when the Kaffir boy forgets?). "He saw me walking in the Stad with
+the Centipede," Greta added.
+
+This was a fanciful name for the whole school of eighty pupils promenading
+upon its hundred and sixty legs of various nationalities in search of
+exercise and fresh air.
+
+"Go on!" said the Red Class in a breath, as the White Class giggled and
+nudged each other, and the Blue Class opened eyes and ears.
+
+"He was knocked dumb-foolish at once, he says, by my eyes and my figure
+and my hair. He is not long up from Cape Colony: came out from London
+through chest-trouble, to catch heart-trouble in Gueldersdorp" (do you
+hear hectic, coughing Billy Keyse cracking his stupid joke?). "And if I'll
+only be engaged to him, he promises to get rich, become as big a swell on
+the Rand as Marks or Du Taine--isn't that funny, his not knowing Du Taine
+is my father?--and drive me to race-meetings on a first-class English
+drag, with a team of bays in silver-mounted harness, with rosettes the
+colour of my eyes."
+
+Greta threw her golden head back and laughed, displaying a double row of
+enviable pearls.
+
+"But I've got to wait for all these things until Billy Keyse strikes
+pay-reef. Poor Billy! Hand over those chocolates, you greedy things!"
+
+Somebody wanted to know how the package had been smuggled into the
+Convent. Those lay-Sisters were so sharp....
+
+"They're perfect needles--Sister Tarsesias particularly, and Sister
+Tobias. But there's a new Emigration Jane among the housemaids. You've
+seen her--the sallow thing with the greasy light-coloured fringe in
+curlers, who walks flat-footed like a wader on the mud. I keep expecting
+to hear her quack.... Well, Billy got hold of her. She didn't know my
+name, being new, but she recognised me by Billy's description, and
+sympathised with him, having a young man herself, who doesn't speak a word
+of English, except 'damn' and 'Three of Scotch, please.' I've promised to
+translate her letters; he writes them in the Taal. And Billy gave her two
+dollars, and I've given her a hat. It's the big red one mother brought
+back from Paris--she paid a hundred francs for it at the Maison Cluny--and
+Emigration Jane thinks, though it's a bit too quiet for her taste, it'll
+do her a fair old treat when she trims it up with a bit more colour and
+one or two 'imitation ostridge' tips.... I'd give another hundred francs
+for the Maison Cluny _modiste_ to hear." Again the birdlike laugh rang
+out. "Now you know everything there is in the letter, girls, except the
+bit of poetry at the end, which only my most intimate friends may be
+permitted to read. Lynette Mildare!"
+
+Lynette, bending over a separate table-desk in the light of the north
+window of the long deal match-boarded class-room, looked up from her work
+of tooling leather, the delicate steel instrument in her hand, a little
+gilding-brush between her white teeth, a little fold of concentrated
+attention between her slender brown eyebrows.
+
+"Yes. Did you want anything?"
+
+Greta jumped up, leaving the rest of the box of chocolates to dissolve
+among the White Class, and came over, threading her way between the long
+rows of desk-stalls.
+
+"Of course I want something."
+
+"What is it?" asked Lynette, laying down the little tool.
+
+"What everyone has a right to expect from the person who is her dearest
+friend--sympathy," said Greta, jumping up and sitting on the corner of the
+desk, and biting the thick end of her long flaxen pigtail.
+
+"You have it--when there is anything to sympathise about."
+
+Greta tapped the letter, trying to frown.
+
+"Do you call this nothing?"
+
+"You have saved me from doing so."
+
+"Lynette Mildare, have you a heart inside you?"
+
+"Certainly; I can feel it beating, and it does its work very well."
+
+"Am I, then, nothing to you?"
+
+Lynette smiled, looking up at the piquant, charming face.
+
+"You are a great deal to me."
+
+"And I regard you as a bosom-friend. And the duty of a bosom-friend,
+besides rushing off at once to tell you if she hears anybody say anything
+nasty of you behind your back--a thing which you never do--is to
+sympathise with you in all your love-affairs--a thing which you do even
+seldomer."
+
+Greta stamped with the toe of the dainty little shoe that rested on the
+beeswaxed boards of the class-room, and kicked the leg of the desk with
+the heel of the other.
+
+"Please don't spill the white of egg, or upset the gold-leaf. And as I
+shall be pupil-teacher of the youngest class next term, I suppose I ought
+to tell you that 'seldomer' isn't in the English dictionary."
+
+"I'm glad of it. I like my own words to belong to me, my own self. I
+should be ashamed to owe everything I say to silly Nuttall or stupid old
+Webster. You're artful, Lynette Mildare, trying to change the
+conversation. I say you don't sympathise with me properly in my affairs of
+the heart--and you never, never tell me about yours."
+
+The beautiful black-rimmed, golden-tawny eyes laughed as some eyes can,
+though there was no quiver of a smile about the purely-modelled,
+close-folded lips.
+
+"Don't tell me you never have, or never had, any," scolded Greta. "You're
+too lovely by half. Don't try to scowl me down--you are! I'm pretty enough
+to make the Billy Keyses stand on their silly heads if I told them to, but
+you're a great deal more. Also, you have style and grace and breeding.
+Anybody could tell that you came of tremendously swell people over away in
+England, where the Dukes and Marquesses and Earls began fencing in the
+veld somewhere about the eleventh century, to keep common people from
+killing the deer, or carving their vulgar names on the castle walls, and
+coming between the wind and their nobility. There's a quotation from your
+dear Shakespeare for you! He does come in handy sometimes."
+
+"Doesn't he!" agreed Lynette, with an ardent flush.
+
+"And you're descended from some of the people he wrote about," pressed
+Greta. "Own it!"
+
+There was a faint line of sarcasm about the lovely lips.
+
+"Shakespeare wrote of clowns and churls as well as of Kings and noblemen."
+
+"If you were a clown, you wouldn't be what you are. The very shape of your
+head, and ears, and nails, bespeaks a Princess, disguised as a finished
+head-pupil, going to take over a class of grubby-fingered little
+ones--pah!--next term. And don't we all know that an English Duchess sends
+you your Christmas and Easter and birthday gifts! Come, you might as well
+speak out, when this is my last term, and we have always been such dear
+friends, and always will be," coaxed Greta, "because the Duchess lets you
+out, you know!"
+
+She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though there was a pained
+contraction between the delicate eyebrows and a vexed and sorrowful shadow
+on her face. Greta went on:
+
+"We have all of us always known that you were--a mystery. Has it got
+anything to do with the Duchess?"
+
+The round, shallow blue eyes were too greedily curious to be pretty at the
+moment. Lynette met them with a full, grave, answering denial.
+
+"No; I am nothing to the Duchess of Broads, or she to me. She is sister to
+the Mother-Superior, and she sends to me at Christmas and Easter, and on
+birthdays, by the Mother's wish. Doesn't the Mother's second sister, the
+Princesse de Dignmont-Veziers, send Katie"--Katie was a little Irish
+novice--"presents from Paris twice a year?"
+
+Greta's pretty eyebrows went up. Her blue greedy eyes became circular with
+surprise.
+
+"Yes, of course--out of charity, because Katie was a foundling, picked up
+in the Irish quarter in Cape Town."
+
+Lynette went on steadily, but, looking out of the window at the great
+wistaria that climbed upon the angle of the Convent wing in which were the
+nuns' cells.
+
+"If Katie was a foundling, I am nothing better."
+
+"Lynette Mildare, you're never in earnest?"
+
+The shocked tone and the scandalised disgust on Greta's pretty face stung
+and hurt. But Lynette went on:
+
+"I speak the truth. The Mother and the Sisters, who have always known it,
+have kept the secret. In their great considerate kindness, they have never
+once let me feel there was any difference between me and the other
+girls--not once in all these years. And I can never thank them
+enough--never be grateful enough for their great goodness--especially
+_hers_." The steady voice shook a little.
+
+"We all know that you have always been the Mother's favourite." There was
+a little cool inflection of contempt in Greta's high, sweet, birdlike
+tones that had been lacking before. "And she is the niece of a great
+English Cardinal, and the sister of a Duchess and a Princess, and her
+step-brother is an Earl." The inflection added for Greta: "_And yet she
+turns to the charity child!_"
+
+Lynette said in a low voice:
+
+"It is because she is perfect in the way of humility. She is beyond all
+pride ... greater than all prejudice ... she has been more to me than I
+can say, since she and Sister Ignatius and Sister Tobias found me on the
+veld seven years ago, when they were trekking up from Natal to join the
+Sisters who were already working here."
+
+Greta's face dimpled, and the bright, cold eyes grew greedy again. There
+was a romance, after all.
+
+"My gracious! How did you get there? Did your people lose you, or had you
+run away from home?"
+
+The delicate wild-rose colour sank out of Lynette's cheeks. Her eyes sank
+under those bold, curious, blue ones of Greta's. She said, with a painful
+effort:
+
+"I--had run away from the place that was called my home. I don't remember
+ever having lived anywhere else before."
+
+"My! And ...?"
+
+"It was a--dreadful place." A little convulsive shudder rippled through
+the girl's slight frame. Little points of moisture showed upon the
+delicate white temples, where clung the little stray rings and tendrils of
+the red-brown hair. "I wore worse rags than the children at the native
+kraals, and was worse fed. I scrubbed floors, and fetched water, and was
+beaten every day. Then"--she drew a deep, quivering breath--"I ran
+away--and--and ran until I could run no more, and fell down.... I don't
+remember being picked up. I woke up one day here at the Convent; and I was
+in bed, and my hair was cut short, and there was ice upon my head. I said,
+'Where am I?' and the Mother-Superior stooped down and looked into my
+eyes, and said, 'You are at home.' And the Convent has been my home ever
+since, and I hope with all my heart it always will be!"
+
+Greta descended from the desk. She drew her embroidered cambric skirts
+primly about her, and said in a shocked voice:
+
+"And I asked you to visit me--to come and stay with us at our place near
+Johannesburg--you who are not even respectable!"
+
+Lynette grew burning red. One moment her eyes wavered and fell. Then she
+lifted them and looked back bravely into the pretty, shallow, blue ones.
+
+"That is why I have told you--what you know now."
+
+"Of course," Greta said patronisingly, "if you wish it, I shall not tell
+the class."
+
+Lynette deliberately put away her tools and the calf-bound volume she had
+been working on, and shut and locked her desk. Then she rose. Her eyes
+swept over the long room, its lower end packed with giggling, whispering,
+squabbling, listening, gossiping, or reading girls. She said very clearly:
+
+"It will be best that you should tell the class. Do it now. The girls can
+think it over while they are away, and make up their minds whether they
+will speak to me or not when they come back. Make no delay."
+
+Then she went, moving with the long, smooth, light step and upright,
+graceful carriage that she had somehow caught from the Mother-Superior,
+out of the room. Curious eyes followed her; sharp ears, that had caught
+fragments of the colloquy, wanted the rest; eager tongues plied Greta with
+questions, as she stood reticent, knowing, bursting with information
+withheld, in the middle of the class-room, where honours she coveted had
+been won and prizes gained by the charity-bred foundling.
+
+You may be sure that Greta told the story. It lost nothing by her telling,
+be equally sure. But all that heard it did not take it in Greta's way. The
+stamp of the woman who ruled this place was upon many minds and intellects
+and hearts here, and her teaching was to bear fruit in bitter, stormy,
+bloodstained years of days that were waiting at the very threshold.
+
+"I tell you," said Christine Silber, the handsome Jewess, with a fierce
+flash of her black Oriental eyes, "foundling or charity girl, or whatever
+else you choose to call her, Lynette Mildare is the pride of the school."
+
+Silber's father was President of the Groenfontein Legislative Council. A
+hum of assent followed on her utterance, and an English girl got up upon a
+form. She was the niece of a High Commissioner, daughter of a Secretary of
+Imperial Government, at Cape Town, who wrote K.C.M.G. after his name.
+
+"Silber speaks the truth. Not a girl here is a patch on the shoes of
+Lynette Mildare. I am going home to London next winter to be presented,
+and we shall have a house in Chesterfield Gardens for the season, and if
+Lynette will come and visit us, I can tell her that she will be treated as
+an honoured guest. As for you, Greta Du Taine, who are always bragging
+about your father and his money, tell me which three letters of the
+alphabet you would find tattooed upon his conscience--if the strongest
+microscope ever made could find his conscience out? Shall _I_ tell you
+them?" She held up her finger. "Shall I tell you how he bought those
+orange-groves at Rustenburg--and the country seat near Johannesburg--and
+the drag with the silver-mounted harness and the team of blood bays?"
+
+"No, please!" begged Greta, flinching from the torture.
+
+But the English girl was pitiless. She checked the letters off upon her
+fingers:
+
+"I. D. B."
+
+A shout went up from the Red Class.
+
+Greta turned and ran.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+The cell was a large, light, airy room on the first-floor of the big
+two-storied Convent building that stood in its spacious, tree-shaded,
+high-fenced gardens beyond the Hospital at the north end of the town. Tall
+stained-wood presses full of papers and account-files covered the wall
+upon one side. There also stood a great iron safe, with heavy ledgers
+piled upon it. Upon the other three sides of the room were bookshelves,
+doubly and trebly laden, with Latin tomes of the Fathers of the Church,
+and the works and writings of modern theologians, many of them categorised
+upon the "Index Expurgatorius." Rows there were of English, French,
+German, Italian, and Spanish classical authors, and many volumes of
+recently-published scientific works. It might have been the room of a
+business man who was at the same time a priest and a scholar. There were
+roller maps upon the walls, and two or three engravings, Bougereau's
+"Virgin of Consolation," the "Madonna dei Ansidei" of Raffaelle, and a
+"Crucifixion" over the chimneypiece, which had three little statuettes in
+tinted alabaster--a St. Ignatius at one end, a St. Anthony of Padua at the
+other; in the middle, the Virgin bearing the Child.
+
+The Mother-Superior sat writing at a bare solid deal table of the kitchen
+kind, with stained legs to add to its ugliness, and stained black-knobbed
+fronts to the drawers in it. Her pen flew over the paper.
+
+Seated though she was, you could see her to be of noble figure, tall and
+finely proportioned. The habit of the nun does not hide everything that
+makes for beauty and for grace. The pure outlines of the small,
+perfectly-shaped head showed through the thin black veil that fell over
+the white starched coif. The small, high-instepped foot could not be
+hidden in walking; the make of the thick shoe might not disguise its form.
+The delicate whiteness and smooth, supple beauty of her hands, larger than
+the hands of ordinary women, their owner being of more heroic build, as of
+ampler mind and keener intellect, betrayed her to be a woman not yet old,
+though there were some deep lines and many fine ones on the attentive
+face that bent over the large square sheet of paper.
+
+It was a curious face; its olive skin bleached to dull whiteness, its
+expression stern almost to severity. I have heard it likened to a
+Westmoreland hill-landscape. Lonely tarns lie under the black brows of the
+precipice; one feels chilly, and a little afraid. But the sun shines out
+suddenly from behind concealing mists, and everything is transformed to
+loveliness. I can in no other words describe the change wrought in her by
+her rare, sudden, illuminating smile. Her voice was the softest and the
+clearest I ever heard, a sigh made most audible speech; but in her just
+anger, only turned to wrath by the baser faults, the fouler vices, it
+could roll in organ-tones of thunder, or ring like a silver trumpet. And
+her eye made the lightning for such thunder, and the sword-thrust that
+followed the clarion-note of war.
+
+She could have ruled an empire or a court, this woman who managed the
+thronged, buzzing Convent with the lifting of her finger, with the softest
+tone of her soft West of Ireland voice, devoid of all trace of the
+unbeautiful brogue, cultured, elegant, refined. As I have said, the
+lessons that she taught bore great fruit during that red time of war that
+was coming, and will bear greater fruit hereafter.
+
+A little is known to me of the personal history of Lady Bridget-Mary
+Bawne--in religion known as Mother Mary of Bethlehem--that may be here set
+down. Some twenty-three years previously that devout Irish Catholic
+nobleman, the Right Honourable James Dominic Bawne, tenth Earl of
+Castleclare, Baron Kilhail, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and D.L. for
+West Connemara, not contented with the possession of three very tall, very
+handsome, very popular daughters--the Right Honourable Ladies
+Bridget-Mary, Alyse, and Alethea Bawne--consulted his favourite spiritual
+director, and, as advised, offered his thin white hand and piously
+regulated affections to Miss Nancy McIleevy, niece and heiress of McIleevy
+of McIleevystown, the eminent County Down brewer, so celebrated for his
+old Irish ales and nourishing bottled porter.
+
+This lady, being sufficiently youthful, of good education and manners,
+and of like faith with her elderly wooer, undertook, in return for an
+ancient name and the title of Countess of Castleclare, to find the widower
+in conjugal affection for the rest of his mortified life, and to do her
+best to supply him with the grievously-needed heir. There was no wicked
+fairy at Lord Castleclare's wedding, distinguished by the black-browed
+beauty of the three bridesmaids, his daughters; and two years later saw
+the beacons at the entrance of Ballybawne Harbour, on the West Connemara
+coast, illuminated by the Castleclare tenants in honour of the arrival of
+the desired heir, upon whom before his birth so much wealth had been
+expended by Lord Castleclare in pilgrimages, donations, foundations, and
+endowments that, some months after it, his lordship conveyed to his three
+daughters that, in the interests of the Viscount, to whose swollen gums a
+gold-set pebble enclosing a pious relic of an early Christian martyr was
+at that moment affording miraculous relief, he, their father, would be
+obliged by their providing themselves as soon as possible with husbands of
+suitable rank, corresponding religion, and sufficient means to dispense
+with the customary marriage portion.
+
+Lady Alyse saw the justice of her father's views, and married the Duke of
+Broads, an English Catholic peer; her younger sister, Alethea, went
+obediently to the altar with the aged and enormously wealthy Prince de
+Dignmont-Veziers. Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne, eldest and handsomest of the
+three, pleaded--if a creature so stormy and imperious could be said to
+plead--a previous engagement to an Ineligible.
+
+"We have all heard of Captain Mildare of the Grey Hussars, my dear child,"
+said Lord Castleclare, going to the door to make sure that those shrieks
+that had proceeded from the Viscount's sumptuous suite of apartments,
+situated at the top of the staircase rising at the end of the corridor
+leading from his father's library, were stilled at the maternal fountain.
+Finding that it was so, he ambled back to the centre of the worn Bokhara
+rug that had been under the _prie-Dieu_ in the oratory of James II. at
+Dublin Castle, and resumed. "We have all heard of Captain Mildare. At the
+taking of Ali Musjid--arah!--at Futtehabad, with Gough--arah!--and at
+Ahmed Khel, where Stewart cut up the Afghans so tremendously, Mildare
+earned great distinction as well as the Victoria Cross, which I am
+delighted to see, in glancing through the _Army and Navy Gazette_, Her
+Majesty has been pleased to confer upon him. As a gentleman and a soldier
+he presents all that is desirable; as a member of an old Catholic family,
+he certainly commands my suffrages. But as the husband of my eldest
+daughter I cannot look upon a younger son with--arah!--toleration.
+Honourable reputation is much, bravery is much, but my son-in-law must
+possess--arah!--other--other qualifications." The old gentleman stuttered
+pitiably.
+
+"_One_ other qualification, you mean, father, if that term can be given to
+the possession of a certain amount of money," said Lady Bridget-Mary,
+standing very straight and looking very proudly at her father. "Will you
+object to telling me plainly for how much you would be content to sell
+your stock, with goodwill?"
+
+Lord Castleclare was a thin, courtly old gentleman, who had conquered, he
+humbly trusted, all his passions, except the passion for early Catholic
+Theological Fathers and the passion for Spanish snuff. But he was stung by
+the irony. He spilt quite a quantity of choice mixture over the long,
+ivory-yellow nail of his lean, delicate thumb as he looked consciously
+aside from the great scornful grey eyes that judged and questioned and
+condemned him as a mercenary old gentleman. And he caught himself wishing
+that this fine fiery creature had been born a boy. He looked back again at
+his eldest daughter. Her white arms were folded upon her bosom, her
+pearl-coloured silk evening gown was swept aside from the fire, to whose
+warmth she held an arched and exquisite foot. Her noble head, with its
+rich coronet of silken black coils, was bent; her broad brows had ceased
+to be stormy. With a half-dreamy smile upon her beautiful firm mouth, she
+was looking at a green flashing ring she wore on the third finger of her
+left hand. And the sight of her so sent a sudden pang of remembrance
+leaping through the old man's heart. He forgot his spoiled pinch of snuff,
+and stepped over to her, and took the hand, and looked at the emerald ring
+with her in silence.
+
+"My dear daughter," he said, more simply and more sweetly than Lady
+Bridget-Mary had ever heard him speak before, "I think you love this brave
+gentleman sincerely?"
+
+His daughter's large, beautifully-shaped hand closed strongly over the old
+ivory fingers. The great brilliant dark grey eyes looked at him through a
+sudden mist of tears, though she lifted her head and held it high. She
+said in a low, clear voice:
+
+"Father, you remember how my mother loved you? And Richard is as dear to
+me as you were to her. I want words when it comes to speaking of so great
+a thing as the love I feel for him. But it is my life.... I seem to
+breathe with his breath, and think his thoughts, and speak with his voice,
+since we found out our secret, and we are each other's for Time and for
+Eternity." Then she added, with a lovely smile that had a touch of humour
+in it: "And he will be quite content to take me with only my share of
+mother's money."
+
+"Tschah!" said the old father. "Nonsense! Of course, St. Barre will be
+delighted to provide for you. Excuse me ... I must go."
+
+St. Barre, in the Castleclare nursery, had set up another squeal.
+
+Thenceforwards the course of true love might have been expected to run
+smoothly for Lady Bridget-Mary and her gallant lover. But she had
+reckoned, not without her host, but without her Grey Hussar. In love there
+is always one who loves the more, and Lady Bridget-Mary, that fine,
+enthusiastic, tempestuous creature, was far from realising that she was
+less to her Richard than he was to her. The reason was not farther to seek
+than a few doors off in London, when the Ladies Bawne occupied their
+sombre old corner-house in Grosvenor Square. It was Lady Bridget-Mary's
+dearest Lucy and bosom-friend, who had married that handsome,
+grey-moustached martinet, Richard's Colonel. In Lady Lucy Hawting's
+drawing-room Lord Castleclare's elder daughter had met Captain Mildare,
+the hero of Futtehabad and Ahmed Khel. The Colonel's wife was a pretty,
+delicate, graceful creature, some three years older than her black-browed
+handsome friend, and much more learned, as, of course, befitted a married
+woman, in the ways of the world. And Lady Lucy saw the budding of young
+passion in the heart of her junior ... and it occurred to her that it
+would furnish a very excellent excuse for the constant presence of Captain
+Mildare, if ...! the sweetest and most limpid women have their turbid
+depths, their muddy secrets--and she had confided everything to dearest
+Bridget-Mary, except the one thing that mattered!
+
+Well! We all know for what reason Le Roi Soleil addressed himself to the
+wooing of La Valliere. Louis fell genuinely in love with the decoy, not
+quite so Richard. But sometimes, when those proud lips meekly gave back
+his kisses, and that lofty beauty humbled itself to obey his will, he
+almost wished that he had never met the other. A day came when the secret
+orchard he had joyed in with that other was threaded with a golden clue,
+and the hidden bower unveiled to the cold-eyed staring day.
+
+Captain Mildare and Lady Lucy Hawting went away together, and from Paris
+Richard wrote and broke to the girl who loved him, and had been his
+betrothed wife, the common, vulgar, horrible little truth. Bridget-Mary
+had been deceived by both of them from the very beginning. Estimate the
+numbing, overwhelming weight of that blow, delivered by a hand so
+worshipped, upon so proud a heart. Those who saw her, and should have
+honoured her great grief with decent reticence, say that she was mad for a
+while; that she grovelled on the earth in her abandonment, calling upon
+God and man to be merciful and kill her. Pass over this. I cannot bear to
+think that the mere love of a Richard Mildare should bring that lofty head
+so low.
+
+While the scandal lived in the mouths of Society, Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne
+remained unseen. She was pitied--oh, burning, intolerable shame! She was
+commiserated as a catspaw, and sneered at as a dupe. Her sisters and her
+stepmother, her father and her seven aunts, her relatives, innumerable as
+stars in the Milky Way, found infinite relish in the comfortable
+conviction that every one of them had said from the very outset that
+Bridget-Mary would regret the step she had taken in engaging herself to
+that Captain Mildare. Sharp claws of steel were added to her scourge of
+humiliation by a thousand petty liberties taken with this, her great,
+sacred sorrow, as by letters of sympathy from friends, who wrote as if she
+had suffered the loss of a pet hunter, or a prize Persian cat.
+
+A suitor ventured to propose for that white rejected hand, addressing
+himself with stammering diffidence to Lord Castleclare. A young man, the
+son of an industrious father who had consolidated the sweat of his brow
+into three millions and a Peerage, hideously conscious of the raw newness
+of his title, painfully burdened with the bosom-weight of a genuine, if
+incoherent love, he seemed to Lady Bridget-Mary's family tolerable, almost
+desirable, nearly quite the thing....
+
+"He has boiled jam into sweetness for the whole civilised world," said the
+most influential and awful of Lord Castleclare's seven sisters, a
+Dowager-Duchess who was Lady-in-Waiting, and exhaled the choicest essence
+of the Middle Victorian era. She still adhered to the mushroom-shaped
+straw hats of her youth, trimmed with black velvet rosettes, in the centre
+of each of which reposed a cut jet button. She went always voluminously
+clad in black or shot-silk gowns, their skirts so swelled out by a
+multiplicity of starched cambric petticoats, adorned with tambour-work,
+that she was credited with the existence of a crinoline. She had, in
+marrying her now defunct Scots Duke, embraced Presbyterianism, and though
+her brother believed her, as far as the next world was concerned, to be
+lost beyond redemption, he entertained for her judgment in the matters of
+this planet a great esteem.
+
+"He has boiled jam enough to spread over the surface of the civilised
+globe, and now proposes to hive its concentrated extract for the benefit
+of our dearest girl, in the shape of a settlement that a Princess of the
+Blood might envy. I call the whole thing pretty," pronounced the Dowager,
+"almost romantic, or it might be made to sound so if a person of superior
+intelligence and tact would undertake to plead for the young man. His
+terrible title has quite escaped me. Lord Plumbanks? Thank you! It might
+have been Strawberrybeds, and that would have increased our difficulty. No
+time should be lost. Therefore, as you, dear Castleclare, with your wife
+and the boy, who, I am gratified to hear, has cut another, are going to
+Rome for Holy Week, perhaps you would wish me in your absence to break the
+ice with Bridget-Mary?"
+
+
+
+
+Lord Castleclare's long, solemn face and arched, lugubrious eyebrows bore
+no little resemblance to the well-known portrait of the conscientious but
+unlucky Stuart in whose service his ancestor had shed blood and money,
+receiving in lieu of both, a great many Royal promises, the Eastern carpet
+that had belonged to the monarch's Irish oratory, and the fine sard
+intaglio, brilliant-set, and representing a Calvary, that loyal servant's
+descendant wore upon his thin ivory middle finger. He twiddled the ring
+nervously as he said:
+
+"She has gone into Lenten Retreat at a Convent in Kensington. I--arah!--I
+do not think it would be advisable to disturb salutary and seasonable
+meditations with--arah!--worldly matters at this present moment."
+
+"Fiddle-faddle!" said the Dowager-Duchess sharply.
+
+Lord Castleclare lifted his melancholy arched eyebrows.
+
+"'Fiddle-faddle,' my dear Constantia?"
+
+"You have the expression!" said she. "Young women of Bridget-Mary's age
+and temperament will think of marriage in convents as much as outside
+them. Further, I dread delay, entertaining as I do the very certain
+conviction that this weak-minded man who has thrown your daughter over
+will be back, begging Bridget-Mary to forgive him and reinstate him in the
+possession of her affections before another two months are over our heads.
+That little cat-eyed, squirrel-haired woman he has run away with, and
+against whom I have warned our poor dear girl times out of number"--she
+really believed this--"is the sort of pussy, purring creature to make a
+man feel her claws, once she has got him. Therefore, although my family
+may not thank me for it, I shall continue to repeat, 'No time is to be
+lost!' Still, in deference to your religious prejudices, and although I
+never heard that the Catholic Church prohibited jam as an article of
+Lenten diet, we will defer from offering Bridget-Mary the pot until
+Easter."
+
+
+
+
+But Easter brought the news that Lady Bridget-Mary had decided upon taking
+the veil, and begged her father not to oppose her wishes. The
+Dowager-Duchess rushed to the Kensington Convent.... All the little
+straw-mats on the slippery floor of the parlour were swept like chaff
+before the hurricane of her advancing petticoats as she bore down upon the
+most disappointing, erratic, and self-willed niece that ever brought the
+grey hairs of a solicitous and devoted aunt in sorrow to the grave,
+demanding in Heaven's name what Bridget-Mary meant by this maniacal
+decision? Then she drew back, for at first she hardly credited that this
+tall, pale, quiet woman in the plain, close-fitting, black woollen gown
+could be Bridget-Mary at all. Realising that it could be nobody else, she
+began to cry quite hysterically, subsiding upon a Berlin woolwork covered
+sofa, while her niece rang the bell for that customary Convent
+restorative, a teaspoonful of essence of orange-flower in a glass of
+water, and returning to the side of her agitated relative, took her hand,
+encased in a tight one-button puce glove, saying:
+
+"Dear Aunt Constantia, what is the use of crying? I have done with it for
+good."
+
+"You are so dreadfully changed and so awfully composed, and I always was
+sensitive. And, besides, to find you like this when I expected you to beat
+your head upon the floor--or was it against the wall, they said?--and pray
+to be put out of your misery by poison, or revolver, or knife, as though
+anybody would be wicked enough to do it ..."
+
+A faint stain of colour crept into Lady Bridget-Mary's white cheeks.
+
+"All that is over, Aunt Constantia. Forget it, as I have done, and drink a
+little of this. The Sisters believe it to be calming to the nerves."
+
+"To naturally calm nerves, I suppose." The Dowager accepted the tumbler.
+"What a nice, thick, old-fashioned glass!" She sipped. "You hear how my
+teeth are chattering against the rim. That is because I have flown here in
+such a hurry of agitation upon hearing from your father that you have
+decided to enter the Novitiate at once."
+
+"It is true," said Lady Bridget-Mary, standing very tall and dark and
+straight against the background of the parlour window, that was filled in
+with ground-glass, and veiled with snowy curtains of starched
+thread-lace.
+
+"True! When not ten months ago you declared to me that you would not be a
+nun for all the world.... You begged me to befriend you in the matter of
+Captain Mildare. I undertook, alas! that office...."
+
+The Dowager-Duchess blew her nose.
+
+"A little more of the orange-flower water, dear aunt?"
+
+"'Dear aunt,' when you are trampling upon my very heart-strings! And let
+me tell you, Bridget-Mary, you have always been my favourite niece. '_For
+all the world,_' you said with your own lips, '_I would not be a nun!_'
+Three millions will buy, if not the world, at least a good slice of it....
+Figuratively, I offer them to you in this outstretched hand!" The Dowager
+extended a puce kid glove. "The husband who goes with them is a good
+creature. I have seen and spoken with him, and the dear Queen regards me
+as a judge of men. 'Consie,' she has said, 'you have perception....' What
+my Sovereign credits may not my niece believe?"
+
+Lady Bridget-Mary's black brows were stern over the great joyless eyes
+that looked out of their sculptured caves upon the world she had bidden
+good-bye to. But the fine lines of humour about the wings of the sensitive
+nostrils and the corners of the large finely-modelled mouth quivered a
+little.
+
+"Drink a little more orange-flower water, dear, and never tell me who the
+man is. I do not wish to hear. I decline to hear."
+
+The Dowager-Duchess lost her temper.
+
+"That is because you know already, and despise money that is made of jam.
+Yet coal and beer are swallowed with avidity by young women who have not
+forfeited the right to be fastidious. That is the last thing I wished to
+say, but you have wrung it from me. Have you no pride? Do you want Society
+to say that you have embraced the profession of a Religious, and intend
+henceforth to employ your talents in teaching sniffy-nosed schoolgirls
+Greek and Algebra and Mathematics, because this Mildare has jilted you?
+Again, have you no pride?" She agitated the Britannia-metal teaspoon
+furiously in the empty tumbler.
+
+Lady Bridget-Mary took the tumbler away. Why should the humble property
+of the Sisters be broken because this kind, fussy woman chose to upbraid?
+
+"You ask, Have I no pride?" she said. "Why should I have pride when Our
+Lord is so humble that He does not disdain to take for His bride the woman
+Richard Mildare has rejected?"
+
+"You are incorrigible, dearest," said the sobbing Dowager-Duchess, as she
+kissed her, "and Castleclare must use all his influence with the Holy
+Father to induce the Comtesse de Lutetia to give you the veil. All of you
+think I am damned, and possibly I may be, but if so I shall be afforded an
+opportunity (which will not be mine in this life) of giving Captain
+Mildare a piece of my mind!"
+
+So the Dowager-Duchess melted out of the story, and Lady Bridget-Mary
+Bawne became a nun.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+This is what the Mother-Superior wrote to her kinswoman, with her mobile,
+eloquent lips folded closely together as she thought, and her grave eyes
+following the swift journey of the pen as it formed the sentences:
+
+    _"Now let me speak to you of Lynette Mildare. I have never
+    thought it necessary to make the slightest disguise of my
+    great partiality for this, the dearest of all the many
+    children given me by Our Lord since I resigned my crown of
+    earthly motherhood to Him."_
+
+She stopped, remembering what another great lady, also a relative of hers,
+had remarked when it was first made public that she intended to enter the
+Novitiate:
+
+"Indeed! It would seem, then, that you are devoid of ambition, my dear,
+unlike the other people of your house."
+
+She had said, paraphrasing a retort previously made:
+
+"Does it strike you as lack of ambition that one of our family should
+prefer Christ before any earthly spouse?"
+
+What a base utterance that had seemed to her afterwards! How devoid of the
+true spirit of the religious, how hateful, petty, profane! But the great
+lady had been greatly struck by it, and had gone about quoting the words
+everywhere. She, who had spoken them, repented them with tears, and set
+the memory of them between her and ill-considered, worldly speech, for
+ever.
+
+She wrote on now:
+
+    _"She has no vocation for the life of a religious. I doubt
+    her being happy or successful as a teacher here, were I
+    removed from my post by supreme earthly authority, or by
+    death, either contingency being the expression of the Will
+    of God. She has a reserved, sensitive nature, quick to feel,
+    and eager to hide what she feels, indifferent to praise or
+    popularity among the many, anxiously desirous to please,
+    passionately devoted where she gives her love...."_
+
+The firm mouth quivered, and a mist stole before her eyes. Being human,
+she took the handkerchief that lay amongst her papers and wiped the
+crowding tears away, and went on:
+
+    _"I could wish, in anticipation of either eventuality named,
+    that provision might now be made for her. Those who love
+    me--yourself I know to be among the number--will not, I feel
+    assured, be indifferent to my wish that she should be placed
+    beyond the reach of want."_
+
+She wrote on, knowing that the implied wish would be observed as a
+command:
+
+    _"We have never been able to trace any persons who might
+    have been her parents--we have never even known her real
+    name.--Those among whom her childhood was spent called her
+    by none. As you know, I gave her in Holy Baptism one that
+    was our dear dead mother's, together with the surname of a
+    lost friend. She is, and must be always, known as Lynette
+    Mildare."_
+
+Her eyes were tearless, and her hand quite steady as she continued:
+
+    _"You must not be at all alarmed or shaken by this letter. I
+    am perfectly well in health, be quite assured; I trust I may
+    be spared to carry on my work here for many long years to
+    come. But in case it should be otherwise, I write thus:_
+
+    _"The country is greatly disturbed, in spite of the
+    reassuring reports that have been disseminated by the Home
+    Authorities. I do not, and cannot, imagine what the official
+    view may be in London at this moment, but it is certain that
+    the Transvaal and Free State are preparing for war. Every
+    hour the enmity between the Boers and the English deepens in
+    intensity. It will be to many minds a relief when the storm
+    bursts. The War Office may think meanly of the Africanised
+    Dutchman as a fighting force, but the opinion of every loyal
+    Briton in this country is that he is not a foe to be
+    despised, and that he will shed the last drop of his own
+    blood and his children's for the sake of his independence._
+
+    _"Above the petty interests of greedy capitalists looms the
+    wider question: Shall the Briton or the Dutchman rule in
+    South Africa? Here in this insignificant frontier town we
+    wait the sounding of the tocsin. The Orange Free State has
+    openly allied itself with the Transvaal Government. There
+    are said to be several commandos in laager on the Border. A
+    public meeting of citizens of this town has been held, at
+    which a vote of 'No confidence' in the Dutch Ministers has
+    been passed, and an appeal for help has been made to the
+    Government at Cape Town. It is not yet publicly known what
+    the response has been, if there is any. I think it ominous
+    that all of our Dutch pupils, save one, should have been
+    hurriedly sent for by their parents before the ending of the
+    term. Knowing my responsibility, I am sending all home,
+    except the few who happen to be resident in this town, and
+    the school will remain closed, at all events, until the
+    outlook assumes a less threatening aspect. It is a relief to
+    many that a Military Commandant has been appointed by the
+    authorities at Cape Town, and that he arrived here a week
+    ago. He is reported to be an officer of energy and decision,
+    and as he has already set the troops under his command to
+    work at putting the town into a condition of defence, and is
+    organising the civil male population into a regiment of
+    armed----"_
+
+There was a light knock at the door. She responded with the permission to
+enter, and a tall, slight girl, with red-brown hair, came in and closed
+the door, dropping her little curtsy to the Mother-Superior. She wore the
+plain black alpaca uniform of the Convent, with the ribbon of the Headship
+of the Red Class, to be resigned when she should become a pupil-teacher
+at the opening of the next term; and the rare and beautiful smile broke
+over the face of the elder woman as the younger came to her side.
+
+"Are you busy, Reverend Mother? Do you want me to go away?"
+
+"I shall have finished in another five minutes, and then there will be no
+more letters to write, my child. Sit where you choose; take a book, and be
+quiet; I shall not keep you waiting long."
+
+The words were few; the Mother-Superior's manner a little curt in speaking
+them. But where Lynette chose to sit was on the cheap drugget that covered
+the beeswaxed boards, with her squirrel-coloured hair and soft cheek
+pressed against the black serge habit.
+
+The Mother-Superior wrote on, apparently absorbed, and with knitted brows
+of attention, but her large, white, beautiful left hand dropped half
+unconsciously to the silken hair and the velvet cheek, and stayed there.
+
+There is a type of woman the lightest touch of whose hand is subtler and
+more sweet than the most honeyed kisses of others. And the Mother-Superior
+was not liberal of caresses. When Lynette turned her lips to the hand, the
+face that bent over the paper remained as stern and as absorbed as ever.
+She went on writing, directed, closed, and stamped her letter, and set it
+aside under a pebble of white quartz, lined and streaked with the faint
+silvery green of gold.
+
+"Now, my child?"
+
+The girl said, flushing scarlet:
+
+"Reverend Mother, I have told the Red Class the truth about me!"
+
+The Mother-Superior started; dismay was in her face.
+
+"Why, child?"
+
+"I--I mean"--the scarlet flush gave place to paleness--"that I have no
+name and no family, and no friends except you, dearest, and the Sisters.
+That you found me, and took me in, and have kept me out of charity."
+
+"Was it necessary to have told--anything whatever?"
+
+"I think so, Mother, and I am glad now that I have done it. There will be
+no need for deception any more."
+
+"My daughter, there has never been the slightest deception of any kind
+whatsoever upon your part, or the part of anyone else who knew. No
+interests suffered by your keeping your own secret. Who first solicited
+your confidence in this matter?"
+
+"Greta Du Taine."
+
+"Greta Du Taine." Very cold was the tone of the Mother-Superior. "May I
+ask how she received the information she had the bad taste to seek?"
+
+"Mother--she took it--not quite as I expected."
+
+"Yet she and you have always been friends, my child."
+
+Lynette rose up upon her knees. The long arm of the Mother-Superior went
+round the slight figure that leaned against her, and in the sudden gesture
+was a passion of protecting motherhood.
+
+"Mother, she does not wish to be my friend any longer. She was quite
+horrified to remember that she had invited me to stay with her at the Du
+Taine place near Johannesburg. But she said that if I liked she would not
+tell the class."
+
+"I have no fear of the rest of the class. They have honour, and good
+feeling, and warm hearts. What was your reply to Greta's obliging
+proposition?"
+
+"I told her that the sooner everybody knew the better; and I went out of
+the room, and came to you--as I always do--as I always have done, ever
+since----"
+
+Her voice broke in the first sob.
+
+"_Ah!_" cried the voice of the mother-heart she crept to, as the long arms
+in the loose black serge sleeves went out and folded her close, "_ah, if I
+might be always here for you to run to! But God knows best!_"
+
+She said aloud, gently putting the girl away:
+
+"Well, the ordeal is over, and will not have to be gone through again. And
+for the future, bear in mind that every human being has a right to regard
+his own business--or hers--as private, and to exclude the curious from
+affairs which do not concern them." She reached out quick tender hands,
+and framed the wistful, sensitive face in them, and added, in a lower
+tone: "For a little told may beget in them the desire to know more. And
+always remember this: that the only just claim to your perfect confidence
+in all that concerns your past life, and I say _all_ with meaning"--the
+girl's white eyelids fell under her earnest gaze, and the delicate lips
+began to quiver--"will rest in the man--the honourable and brave and
+worthy gentleman--who I pray may one day be your husband."
+
+"No!" she cried out sharply as if in terror, and the slight figure was
+shaken by a sudden spasm of trembling. "Oh, Mother, no! Never, never!"
+
+With a gesture of infinite pity and tenderness the Mother drew her close,
+and hid the shame-dyed face upon her bosom, and whispered, with her lips
+upon the red-brown hair:
+
+"My lamb, my dearest, my poor, poor child! It shall be never if you
+choose, Lynette. But make no rash vows, no determinations that you think
+irrevocable. Leave the future to God. Now dry these dear eyes, and put old
+thoughts and memories of sorrow and of wrong most resolutely away from
+you. Be happy, as Our Lord meant all innocent creatures of His to be. And
+do not be tempted to magnify Greta's offence against friendship. She has
+acted according to her lights, and if they are of the kind that shine in
+marshy places, a better Light will shine upon her path one day. I know
+that you have real affection for her ... though I must own I have always
+wondered in what lay the secret of her popularity in the school?"
+
+"She is so amusing--and so pretty, Mother."
+
+"She is exquisitely pretty. And beauty is one of the most excellent among
+all the gifts of God. Our sense of what is beautiful and the delight we
+have in the perception of it must linger with us from those days when
+Angels walked visibly on earth, and talked with the children of men. A
+lovely soul in a lovely body, nothing can be more excellent, but such a
+body does not always cage what St. Columb called 'the bird of beauty.' And
+we must not be swayed or led by outward and perishable things, that are
+illusions, and deceits, and snares."
+
+The Mother-Superior reached out a long arm, and took a solid
+leather-bound, red-edged volume from the table, and opened it at a page
+marked by a flamingo's feather, whose delicate pink faded at the tip into
+rosy-white.
+
+"I was reading this a little while before you came in. If you were not a
+little dunce at Greek, you would be able to construe the classic author
+for yourself."
+
+"But I am a dunce, dear, and so I leave you to read him to me," said
+Lynette triumphantly.
+
+"Well, balance this heavy book, and listen."
+
+She read:
+
+    _"'When first the Father of the Immortals fashioned with his
+    divine hands the human shape:_
+
+    _"'An image first he made of red clay from Ida, tempered
+    with pure water from the stream of Xanthos, and wine from
+    the golden kylix borne by beautiful Ganymede, and it was
+    godlike to look upon as a thing fashioned by the hands of
+    the god. But the clay was not tempered sufficiently and
+    warped in the drying. Then Zeus Pater fashioned another
+    shape with more cunning, and this was tempered well and
+    warped not. And he bent down to breathe between its lips the
+    living soul. But as he stooped, Hephaistos, jealous of the
+    divine gift about to be conferred upon the mortal race, sent
+    from his forges smoke and vapour, which obscured the vision
+    of the Almighty Workman. So that the imperfect image
+    received that which was meant for the perfect one._
+
+    _"'And Zeus Pater, being angered, said: "See what thy malice
+    has wrought. Behold, a beautiful soul has been set in a body
+    unbeauteous and through thine act, and god though I be, I
+    cannot take back the gift that I have given." Then into the
+    other image of Man the divine maker breathed a soul. But
+    Zeus being wearied with his labours, and angered by the
+    craft of Hephaistos, it was less pure than the first. And so
+    two men came into being._
+
+    _"'And he whose body had been fashioned perfectly and
+    without flaw by the hands of the divine craftsman, walked
+    the earth with gracious mien. Fair-eyed was he, with locks
+    like clustering vine-tendrils, and cheeks rosy as the apples
+    of Love; but the soul of this man was cunning, and he
+    rejoiced in evils and cruelties, and deceits and mockeries
+    were upon his lips._
+
+    _"'And he whose image had warped in the drying was
+    unbeautiful in body and swart to look upon, as though
+    blackened by the forge-fires of Hephaistos, but he dealt
+    uprightly and hated evil, and on his lips there was no
+    guile, but faithfulness and truth._
+
+    _"'And he who was imperfect in body was yet fairer in the
+    eyes of Zeus Pater than his brother; because there dwelt
+    within him a beauteous soul.'"_
+
+"And yet, Mother, if your beautiful soul had not been given beautiful
+windows to look out at, and a beautiful mouth to kiss me or scold me with,
+and beautiful hands to hold, it would have been a beastly shame!"
+
+Is there a woman living who can resist such sweet daughterly flatteries?
+This was very much a woman, and very much a mother, if very much a nun.
+She kissed the mouth distilling such dear honey.
+
+"This, not for the compliment, but because it is seven years to-day since
+I found you, lying like some poor little strayed lamb on the veld, under
+the burning sun."
+
+"That was my real birthday, dearest, dearest...."
+
+The girl pressed closer to her with dumb, vehement affection, as though
+she would have grown to the bosom that had been her shield since then.
+
+"On that day a little later, when I looked down and you looked up with big
+eyes that begged for love, I knew that we had found each other. And we
+have never lost each other since, I think?"
+
+She smiled radiantly into the loving eyes.
+
+"Never, my Mother. But if we did ... if we are ever to be estranged or
+parted, it would be better ... oh! it would be better if you had passed by
+in the waggon, and left me lying, and the aasvogels and the wild-dogs had
+done the rest."
+
+The Mother-Superior said, loosening the clinging arms, and speaking
+sternly:
+
+"Never, my daughter. You do gravely wrong to say so. Holy Baptism has been
+yours, and Confirmation, and you have shared with His Faithful in the Body
+of Christ.... Never let me hear you say that again!"
+
+"Mother, I promise you, you never shall. But I had a dream last night that
+was most vivid and strange and awful. It has haunted me ever since."
+
+The Mother-Superior started, for she also had had a strange dream. Of that
+vision had been born the written letter that now lay under the quartz
+paper-weight--the letter that was to be sent, with others, by the next
+English mail that should go out from Gueldersdorp, which said mail, being
+intercepted by the Boers, was not for many months to reach its
+destination. Supposing it had, this story need never have been written,
+or else another would have been written in its place.
+
+"Dear heart, I do not think that it is good or useful to brood upon such
+things, or to relate them. And the Church forbids us to take account of
+mere dreams, or in any way be swayed by them."
+
+"That has always puzzled me. Because, you know ... supposing St. Joseph
+had refused to credit a dream?..."
+
+"There are dreams and dreams, my dear. And the heavenly visions of the
+Saints are not to be confounded with our trivial subconscious memories.
+Besides, sweets and fruits and pastry consumed in the seniors' dormitory
+at night are not only an infringement of school rules, but an insult to
+the digestion."
+
+"Mother, how did you find out?" cried Lynette. There was something very
+like a dimple in the bleached olive of the sweet worn cheek, lurking near
+the edge of the close coif, and a twinkle of laughter in the deep grey
+eyes that you thought were black until you had learned better.
+
+"Well, though you may not find it easy to believe, I was once a girl at a
+boarding-school, and I possibly remember how we usually celebrated a
+breaking-up. There is the washing-bell; the pupils' tea-bell will ring
+directly; you must hurry, or you will be late. One moment. What of this
+unpleasant incident that took place during the afternoon walk yesterday?
+Sister Cleophee and Sister Francis-Clare have not given me a very definite
+account."
+
+Lynette's fair skin flushed poppy-red.
+
+"Mother, they hooted us on the road to the Recreation Ground."
+
+Upon the great brows of the Mother-Superior sat the majesty of coming
+tempest. Her white hand clenched, her tone was awfully stern:
+
+"Who were 'they'?"
+
+"Some drunken Boers and store-boys--at least, I think they were drunk--and
+some Dutch railway-men. They cried shame on the Dutch girls for learning
+from vile English idolaters. Then more men came up and joined them. They
+threw stones, and threatened to duck Sister Cleophee and the two other
+Sisters in the river. And they might have tried to, though we senior girls
+got round them--at least, some of us did--and said they should try that
+on us first----"
+
+"That was courageous."
+
+"We"--Lynette laughed a little nervously--"we were awfully frightened, all
+the same."
+
+"My dear, without fear there would have been no courage. Then I am told an
+English officer interposed?"
+
+"He was coming from the direction of the Hospital--a tall thin man in
+Service khaki, with a riding-sjambok under his arm. But it would have been
+as good as a sword if he had used it on those men. When he lifted it in
+speaking to them they huddled together like sheep."
+
+"You have no idea who he was, of course?"
+
+"I do not know his name, but I heard one of the Boers say, 'That slim
+duyvel with the sjambok is the new Military Commandant.' Another officer
+was with him, much younger, taller, and with fair hair. He----"
+
+"I hope I shall soon have an opportunity of thanking the Commandant
+personally. As it is, I shall write. Now go, my dear."
+
+Lynette took her familiar kiss, and dropped her formal curtsy, and went
+with the red sunset touching her squirrel-coloured hair to flame. The
+tea-bell rang as she shut the door behind her, and directly afterwards the
+gate-bell clanged, sending an iron shout echoing through the whitewashed,
+tile-paved passages, as if heralding a visitor who would not be denied. An
+Irish novice who was on duty with the Sister attendant on the gate came
+shortly afterwards to the room of the Mother-Superior, bringing a card on
+a little wooden tray.
+
+The Mother, the opening sentences of her note of thanks wet upon the sheet
+before her, took the card, and knew that the letter need not be sent.
+
+"This gentleman desired to see me?"
+
+"He did so, Reverend Mother," whispered the timid Irish girl, who stood in
+overwhelming awe of the majestic personality before her. "'Ask the
+Mother-Superior will she consent to receive me?' says he. 'If she won't,
+say that she must.' Says I: 'Sir, I'd not drame to presume give Herself a
+message that bowld, but if you'll please to wait, I'll tell her what
+you're after saying.'"
+
+"Quite right, Katie. Now go and tell Sister Tobias to show him into the
+parlour. I will be there directly."
+
+Katie bobbed and vanished. When the Mother-Superior came into the parlour,
+the visitor was standing near the fireplace, with his hands behind his
+back. One wore a shabby dogskin riding-glove. The other, lean and brown
+and knotty, held his riding-cane and the other glove, and a grey "smasher"
+hat. He was looking up quietly and intently at a framed oil-painting that
+hung above.
+
+It represented a Syrian desert landscape, pale and ghastly, under the
+light of a great white moon, with one lonely Figure standing like a
+sentinel against a towering fang of rock. Lurking forms of fierce beasts
+of prey were dimly to be distinguished amongst the shadows, and by the
+side of the patient, lonely watcher brooded with outspread bat-wings, a
+Shadow infinitely more terrible than any of these. It was rather a poor
+copy of a modern picture, but the truth and force and inspiration of the
+original had made of the copyist an artist for the time. The pure dignity
+and lofty faith and patience of the Christ-eyes, haggard with bodily
+sleeplessness and spiritual battle, the indomitable resistance breathing
+in the lines of the Christ figure, wan and gaunt with physical famine as
+with the nobler hunger of the soul, were rendered with fidelity and power.
+
+The stranger's keen ear caught the Mother's long, swift step, and the
+sweep of her woollen draperies over the shiny beeswaxed floor. He wheeled
+sharply, brought his heels together, and bowed. She returned his
+salutation with her inimitable dignity and grace. With his eyes on the
+pure, still calmness of the face framed in the white close coif, the
+Colonel commented mentally:
+
+"What a noble-looking woman!"
+
+The Mother-Superior thought, as her composed eyes swept over the tall,
+spare, broad-shouldered figure and the strong, lean, tanned face, with its
+alert, hazel eyes, nose of the falcon-beak order, and firm straight mouth
+unconcealed by the short-clipped moustache:
+
+"This is a brave man."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+The great of soul are not slow to find each other out. These two
+recognised each other at meeting. Before he had explained his errand, she
+had thanked him cordially, directly, and simply, for his timely
+interference of the previous day.
+
+"One of the lesser reasons of my visit, which I must explain is official
+in character," he said, "was to advise you that your pupils and the ladies
+in charge of them will not henceforth be safe from insult except in those
+parts of the town most frequented by our countrymen, and rarely even
+there. It would be wise of you under existing circumstances, which I shall
+explain as fully and as briefly as I may, to send your pupils without
+delay to their homes."
+
+"All that have not already left," she assured him, "with the exception of
+those whose parents reside in the town, or who have no living relatives,
+and therefore do not leave us, go North and South by early trains
+to-morrow."
+
+"Ma'am," he said, "I am heartily glad to hear it." He added, as she
+invited him to be seated: "Thank you, but I have been in the saddle since
+five this morning, and if you have no objection I should prefer to stand.
+And for another reason, I explain things better on my legs. But you will
+allow me to find you a seat, if--any of these may be moved?" His glance,
+with some perturbation in it, reviewed the stiff ranks of chairs severely
+marshalled in Convent fashion against the varnished skirting-board.
+
+"They are not fixtures," she said, with quiet amusement at his evident
+relief, and he got her a chair, the largest and most solid that the room
+offered, and planted himself opposite her, standing on the hearthrug, with
+one hand resting on the corner of the high mantelshelf, and the toe of a
+spurred riding-boot on the plain brick kerb.
+
+"I may as well say ..."--he ran a finger round the inside of the collar
+that showed above the khaki jacket--"that, though I have often had the
+pleasure, and I will add, the great advantage, of meeting ladies of--of
+your religious profession before, this is the first time that I ever was
+inside a Convent."
+
+"Or a boarding-school?" she asked, and her rare, sudden smile irradiated
+her. His hand dropped from his collar. He looked at her with a sudden
+warmth of admiration there was no mistaking. But her beauty went as
+suddenly as it had come, and her arched, black brows frowned slightly as
+she said, in tones that were very cold and very clear, and rather
+ironical:
+
+"Sir, you are good enough to waste valuable time in trying to break, with
+due consideration for the nerves of a large household of unprotected
+women, the news we have expected daily for months. You have come here to
+announce to us the bursting of the cloud of War. Is it not so?"
+
+He was taken aback, but hid it like a diplomat.
+
+"Ma'am, it is so. The public notice was posted in the town this morning.
+Forces of Boers are massed on the West Natal and East Baraland borders,
+waiting until the British fire a shot. Their secret orders are to wait
+that signal, but some unlooked-for event may cause them to anticipate
+these.... And we shall be wise to prepare for eventualities. For myself,
+having been despatched by the British Government on special service to
+report to the Home Authorities upon our defences in the North--it is an
+open secret now--I have been sent down here to put the town into a
+condition to withstand siege. And frankly, without apology for necessary
+and inevitable bluntness, one of the most important of those conditions
+is--that the women and children should be got out of it."
+
+The blow had been delivered. The angry blush that he had expected did not
+invade the pale olive of her cheeks.
+
+He added:
+
+"I hope you will understand that I say this because it is my duty. I am
+not naturally unsociable, or bearish, or a surly misogynist. Rather the
+contrary. Quite the contrary."
+
+She remembered a slim, boyish, young lieutenant of Hussars with whom she
+had danced in a famous London ball-room more than twenty years back. That
+boy a woman hater! Struggle as she would the Mother-Superior could not
+keep Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne from coming to the surface for an instant.
+But she went under directly, and left nothing but a spark of laughter in
+the beautiful grave eyes.
+
+"I understand," she said. "Woman in time of peace may add a certain
+welcome pleasantness to life. In time of war she is nothing but a helpless
+incubus."
+
+"Let me point out, ma'am, that I did not say so. But she possesses a
+capacity for being killed equal in ratio to that of the human male,
+without being equally able to defend herself. In addition to this, she
+eats; and I shall require all the rations that may be available to keep
+alive the combatant members of the community."
+
+"Eating is a habit," agreed the Mother-Superior, "which even the most
+rigid disciplinarians of the body have found difficult to break."
+
+His mouth straightened sternly under the short-clipped brown moustache.
+Here was a woman who dared to bandy words with the Officer Commanding the
+Garrison. He drew a shabby notebook from a breast-pocket, and consulted
+it.
+
+"On the eleventh, the day after to-morrow, a special train, leaving No. 2
+platform of the railway-station, will be placed by the British Government
+at the disposal of those married women, spinsters, and children who wish
+to follow the example of those who left to-day, and go down to Cape Town.
+Those who prefer to go North are advised to leave for Malamye Siding or
+Johnstown, places at a certain distance from the Transvaal Border, where
+they will be almost certain to find safety. Those who insist upon
+remaining in the town I cannot, of course, remove by force. I will make
+all possible arrangements to laager them safely, but this will entail
+heavy extra labour upon the forces at my command, and inevitable
+discomfort--possibly severe suffering and privation--upon themselves. To
+you, madam, I appeal to set a high example. Your Community numbers, unless
+I am incorrectly informed, twelve religious. Consent to take the step I
+urge upon you, retreat with your nuns to Cape Town while the opportunity
+is yours."
+
+He folded his arms, having spoken this curtly and crisply. The
+Mother-Superior rose up out of her chair. It seemed to him as though she
+would never have done rising, but at last she stood before him, very
+straight and awfully tall, with her great stern eyes an inch above the
+level of his own, and her white hands folded in her black serge sleeves.
+
+"Sir," she said, "we are here under the episcopal jurisdiction of the
+Catholic Bishop of the Diocese. We have received no order from His
+Eminence to quit our post--and until we receive it, give me leave to tell
+you, with all respect for your high official authority, that we shall
+remain in Gueldersdorp."
+
+Their looks crossed like swords. He grew crimson over the white
+unsunburned line upon his forehead, and his moustache straightened like a
+bar of rusty-red iron across his thin, tanned face. But he respected moral
+power and determination when he encountered them, and this salient woman
+provoked his respect.
+
+"Let us keep cool----" he began.
+
+"I assure you that I have never been otherwise," she said, "since the
+beginning of this interview."
+
+"Ma'am," he said, "you state the fact. Let me keep cool, and point out to
+you a few of the--peculiarities in which the present situation
+unfortunately abounds."
+
+He laid down, with a look that asked permission, his hat and cane and the
+odd glove upon the round, shining walnut-table that stood, adorned with
+mild little religious works, in the geometrical centre of the Convent
+parlour, and checked the various points off upon the fingers of the gloved
+hand with the lean, brown, bare one.
+
+"I anticipate very shortly the outbreak of hostilities." He had quite
+forgotten that he was talking to a member of the squeaking sex. "I have
+begun immediately upon my arrival here to prepare for them. The nucleus of
+a sand-bag fort-system has been formed already, mines are being laid down
+far in the front, and every male of the population who has a pair of
+capable hands has had a rifle put into them."
+
+She looked at him, and approved the male type of energy and action. "If I
+had been a man," she thought, "I should have wished to be one like this."
+But she bent her head silently, and he went on.
+
+"We have an armoured train in the railway-yard, with a Maxim and a
+Hotchkiss. We have a Nordenfeldt, a couple of Maxims more, four
+seven-pounder guns of almost prehistoric date, slow of fire, uncertain as
+regards the elevating-gear, and, I tell you plainly, as dangerous, some of
+'em, to be behind as to be in front of! One or two more we've got that
+were grey-headed in the seventies. By the Lord! I wish one or two
+Whitehall heads I know were mopping 'em out this minute. Ahem! Ahem!"
+
+He coughed, and grew red under his sun-tan. Her eyes were elsewhere.
+
+"Ma'am, you must try to recollect that the Boer forces are armed with the
+newest Krupps and other guns, and that it is more than possible they may
+attempt to shell the town. In that case artillery of tremendous range, and
+a flight almost equal to that of sound itself--I won't be too technical, I
+assure you!--will be mustered against our crazy pieces, only fit for the
+scrap-heap, or for gate ornaments. Understand, I tell you what is common
+knowledge among our friends--common jest among our enemies. And another
+thing I will tell you, ma'am. Those enemies shall never enter
+Gueldersdorp!"
+
+She was radiant now, with that smile upon her lips, and that glow in the
+great eyes that met his with such frank approval. Confound it, what
+business had a nun to be anything like so beautiful? Would she pale, would
+she tremble, when he told her the last truth of all?
+
+"Your Convent, ma'am, unluckily for your Community, happens to be, if not
+the biggest, at least the most conspicuously situated building in the
+place, lying as it does at a distance of four hundred yards from the town,
+on the north-east side. Like the Hospital, of course, it will be under the
+protection of the Red-Cross Flag. But the Boer is not chivalrous. He does
+not object to killing women or sick people, nor does he observe with any
+standing scrupulousness the Geneva Convention. Any object that shows up
+nicely on the skyline is good enough to pound away at, and the Red-Cross
+Flag has often helped him to get a satisfactory range. If they bombard us,
+as I have reason to believe they will, you'll have iron and lead in tons
+poured through these walls."
+
+She said:
+
+"When they fall about our ears, Colonel, it will be time to leave them!"
+
+He adored a gallant spirit, and here was one indeed.
+
+"Ma'am, I am disarmed, since you take things in this way."
+
+"It is the only way in which to take them," she said. "There should be no
+panic in the hearts of those who wait on the Divine Will. Moreover, I
+should wish you to understand in case of siege, and an extra demand upon
+the staffs of the Town and Field Hospitals, that we are all--or nearly
+all--certificated nurses, and would willingly place our services at your
+disposal. Let me hope that you will call upon us without hesitation if the
+necessity should arise."
+
+He thanked her, and had taken leave, when he asked with diffidence if he
+might be permitted to see the Convent chapel. She consented willingly, and
+passed on before, tall and stately, and moving with long, light, even
+steps, her flowing serge draperies whispering over the tiled passages. The
+chapel was at the end of a long whitewashed corridor upon the airy floor
+above. His keen glance took in every feature of the simple, spotless
+little sanctuary as the tall, black-clad figure swept noiselessly to the
+upper end of the aisle between the rows of rush-seated chairs, and knelt
+for an instant in veneration of the Divine Presence hidden in the
+Tabernacle.
+
+"Unfortunately situated!" he muttered, standing stiffly by the west door.
+Then he glanced right and left, a thumb and finger in the breast-pocket of
+his jacket, feeling for a worn little pigskin purse. As he passed out
+before her at the motion, and she mechanically dipped her fingers in the
+holy-water font, and made the Sign of the Cross before she closed the
+chapel door, she saw that he held out to her a five-pound note.
+
+"Ma'am, I am not a Roman Catholic, but ..."
+
+"There is no box for alms," she said, pausing outside the shut door, while
+the lay-Sister waited at the passage end, "as this is only a private
+chapel."
+
+"I observed that, ma'am. I am, as I have said, a Protestant. But in the
+behalf of a dear friend of mine, a British officer, of your own faith,
+who I have reason to believe died without benefit of his clergy, perhaps
+with this you would arrange that a service should be held in memory of the
+dead?"
+
+"I understand," said the Mother-Superior. "You suggest that Holy Mass
+should be offered for the repose of your friend's soul? Well, I will
+convey your offering to our chaplain, Father Wix, since you desire it."
+
+"I do desire it--or, rather, poor Mildare would."
+
+An awful sensation as of sinking down through the solid floors, through
+the foundations of the Convent, into unfathomable deeps possessed her. Her
+eyes closed; she forced them open, and made a desperate rally of her
+sinking forces. Unseen she put out one hand behind her, and leaned it for
+support against the iron-studded oak timbers of the chapel door. But his
+eyes were not upon her as he went on, unconsciously, to deal the last,
+worst blow.
+
+"I said, ma'am, that my dead friend ... the name is Richard Mildare,
+Captain, late of the Grey Hussars.... You are ill, ma'am. I have been
+inconsiderate, and over-tired you." He had become aware that great dark
+circles had drawn themselves round her eyes, and that even her lips were
+colourless. She said, with a valiant effort:
+
+"I assure you, with thanks, that you have been most considerate, and that
+I am perfectly well. Are you at liberty to tell me, sir, the date of
+Captain Mildare's death? For I know one who was also his friend, and
+would"--a spasm passed over her face--"take an interest in hearing the
+particulars."
+
+"Ma'am, you shall know what I know myself. About twenty years ago Captain
+Mildare, owing to certain unhappy circumstances, social, and not pecuniary
+ones, sent in his papers, sold his Commission, and left England."
+
+She waited.
+
+"I heard of him in Paris. Then, later, I heard from him. He was with her
+here in South Africa. She was a woman for whom he had given up everything.
+They travelled continually, never resting long anywhere, he, and she,
+and--their child. She died on the trek and he buried her."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+The voice was curiously toneless.
+
+"Where he buried her has only recently come to my knowledge. It was at a
+kind of veld tavern in the Orange Free State, a shanty in the
+grass-country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein, where travellers can get
+a bad lodging, and bad liquor, and worse company. 'Trekkers Plaats' they
+call the place now. But when my friend was there it was known as the 'Free
+State Hotel.'"
+
+Her lips shut as if to keep out bitter, drowning waters; her face was
+white as wax within the starched blue-white of the nun's coif; his slow
+sentences fell one by one upon her naked heart, and ate their way in like
+vitriol. Quite well, too well, she knew what was coming.
+
+"He dug her grave with his own hands. He meant to have a clergyman read
+the Burial Service over it, but before that could be arranged for he also
+died--of fever, I gather, though nothing is very clear, except that the
+two graves are there. I have seen them, and have also ascertained that
+whatever property he left was appropriated by the scoundrel who kept the
+hotel, and afterwards sold it, and cleared out of South Africa; and that
+the child is not to be found. God knows what has become of her! The man
+who robbed her father may have murdered or sold her--or taken her to
+England. A man bearing his name was mixed up in a notorious case tried at
+the Central Criminal Court five years ago. And the case, which ruined a
+well-known West End surgeon, involved the death of a young woman. I trust
+the victim may not have been the unhappy girl herself. My solicitors in
+London have been instructed to make inquiries towards the removal of that
+doubt...."
+
+If those keen eyes of his had not been averted, he must have seen the
+strong shuddering that convulsed the woman's frame, and the spasm of agony
+that wrung the lips she pressed together, and the glistening damps of
+anguish that broke out upon the broad white forehead. To save her life she
+could not have said to him, "She whom you seek is here!" But a voice
+wailed in her heart, more piercingly than Rachel's, and it cried:
+"Richard's daughter! She is Richard's daughter! The homeless thing, the
+blighted child I found upon the veld, and nursed back to life and
+happiness and forgetfulness of a hideous past; whom I took into my empty
+heart, and taught to call me Mother.... She is the fruit of my own
+betrayal! the offspring of the friend who deceived and the man who
+deserted me!"
+
+The visitor was going on, his grave gaze still turned aside. "Of course,
+the age of the unhappy girl whose death brought about the trial I speak
+of--everything depends upon that. Mildare's daughter was a child of three
+years old when she lost father and mother. If alive to-day she would be
+nineteen years of age. I wish it had been my great good fortune to trace
+and find her. She should have had the opportunity of growing up to be a
+noble woman. In this place, if it might have been, and with an example
+like yours before her eyes ... ma'am, good-afternoon."
+
+He bowed to her, and went away with short, quick, even steps, following
+the lay-Sister who was to take him to the gate.
+
+She tottered into the chapel, and sank down before the altar, and strove
+to pray. Her mind was an eddying blackness shot with the livid glare of
+electric fires. Her faith rocked like a palm in the tempest; her soul was
+tossed across raging billows like a vessel in the grip of the cyclone.
+Being so great, she suffered greatly; being so strong, she had strong
+passions to wrestle with and to subdue. Awhile, like that other Mary, who,
+unlike her, was a fleshly sinner, she strove, rent as it seemed to her, by
+seven devils. And then she fell down prone at her Master's nail-pierced
+Feet, and found there at last the healing gift of tears.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+Emigration Jane, the new under-housemaid on trial at the Convent, had a
+gathering on the top joint of the first finger of the hand that burned to
+wear Walt Slabberts' betrothal-ring, and the abscess being ripe for the
+lancet, she had an extra afternoon in the week to get it attended to. She
+found Walt waiting at the street-corner under the lamp-post, and her heart
+bounded, for by their punctuality at the trysting-place you know whether
+they are serious in their intentions towards you, or merely carrying on,
+and her other young men had invariably kept her waiting. This new one was
+class, and no mistake.
+
+"Watto, Walt!" she hailed joyously.
+
+Her Walt uttered a guttural greeting in the Taal, and displayed
+uncared-for and moss-grown teeth in the smile that Emigration Jane found
+strangely fascinating. To the eye that did not survey Walt through the
+rose-coloured glasses of affection he appeared merely as a
+high-shouldered, slab-sided young Boer, whose cheap store-clothes bagged
+where they did not crease, and whose boots curled upwards at the toes with
+mediaeval effect. His cravat, of a lively green, patterned with yellow
+rockets, warred with his tallowy complexion; his drab-coloured hair hung
+in clumps; he was growing a beard that sprouted in reddish tufts from the
+tough hide of his jaws, leaving bare patches between, like the karroo. The
+Slabberts was an assistant-clerk at the Gueldersdorp Railway-Station
+Parcels-Office, and his widowed mother, the Tante Slabberts, took in
+washing from Uitlanders, who are mad enough to change their underwear with
+frequency, and did the cleaning at the Gerevormed Kerk at Rustenberg, a
+duty which involves the emptying of spittoons. Her boy was her joy and
+pride.
+
+Young Walt, the true Boer's son that he was, did not entertain the idea of
+marrying Emigration Jane. The child of the Amalekite might never be
+brought home as bride to the Slabberts roof. But all the same, her style,
+which was that of the Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town, London, N.W., and
+her manners, which were easy, and her taste in dress, which was dazzling,
+attracted him. As regards their spoken intercourse, it had been hampered
+by the Slabbertian habit of pretending only a limited acquaintance with
+the barbarous dialect of England. But a young man who conversed chiefly by
+grunts, nudges, and signs was infinitely more welcome than no young man at
+all, and Emigration Jane knew that the language of love is universal. She
+had sent him a lovely letter in the Taal making this appointment, causing
+his pachydermatous hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only
+last Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young woman
+capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be made useful in a
+variety of ways--some of them tortuous, all of them secret, as the
+Slabbertian ways were wont to be.
+
+He advanced to her, without the needless ceremony of touching his hat,
+eagerly asking how she had acquired her new accomplishment?
+
+But the brain crowned by the big red hat that had come from the Maison
+Cluny, and cost a hundred francs, and had been smartened up with a bunch
+of pink and yellow artificial roses, and three imitation ostrich-tips of a
+cheerful blue, did not comprehend. Someone who spoke the Taal had written
+for her. The bilingual young woman who was to be of such use to Walt had
+only existed in his dreams. And yet--the disappointing creature was
+exceeding fair.
+
+"Pity you left your eyes be'ind you, Dutchy!" giggled Emigration Jane,
+deliciously conscious that those rather muddy orbs were glued on her
+admiringly.
+
+The hair crowned by the screaming hat was waved and rolled over the
+horsehair frame she had learned to call a "Pompydore"; the front locks,
+usually confined in the iron cages called "curlers," frizzled wonderfully
+about her moist, crimson face. She had on a "voylet" delaine skirt, with
+three bias bands round the bottom, and a "blowse" of transparent muslin
+stamped with floral devices. Her shoes were of white canvas; her stockings
+pink and open-worked; her gloves were of white thread, and had grown grey
+in the palms with agitation. One of them firmly grasped a crimson
+"sunshyde," with green and scarlet cherries growing out of the end of the
+stick.
+
+The young Dopper warmly grasped the other, provoking a squeal from the
+enchantress.
+
+"Mind me bad finger! Lumme! you did give us a squeeze an' a' arf."
+
+"If I shall to hurt you I been sorry, Miss!" apologized the Slabbert.
+
+"All righto, Dutchy!" smiled Emigration Jane. "Don't tear your features."
+She bestowed a glance of almost vocal disdain upon a Kaffir girl in
+turkey-red cotton twill, with a green hat savagely pinned upon her woolly
+hair. At another ebony female who advanced along the sidewalk pushing a
+white baby in a perambulator she tossed her head. "Funny," she observed,
+"when I was 'ome I used to swaller all the tales what parsons kep'
+pitchin' about that black lot 'aving souls like me an' you. When I got out
+'ere, an' took my fust place at Cape Town, an' 'eard the Missis and the
+Master continual sayin', 'Don't do this or that, it ain't Englishwomen's
+work; leave it to the Caffy,' or 'Call the 'Ottintot gal,' I felt quite
+'urt for 'em. Upon me natural, I did! But when I knoo these blackies a bit
+better, I didn't make no more bones. Monkeys, they are, rigged up in brown
+'olland an' red braid, wot 'ave immytated 'uman beings till they've come
+to talk langwidge wot we can understand, and tumble to our meanings. 'Ow
+do you like me dress, Walty dear? An' me 'at? That chap what passed with
+the red mustash said to 'is friend as I looked a bit of fair all right,
+and no mistake. But I'd rather 'ear you say so nor 'im if you 'ad enough
+English to do it with. Wot do I care about the perisher along of you?"
+
+It was hard work to talk for two, and keep the ball of courtship rolling
+after the approved fashion of Kentish Town, when the slouching young Boer
+would only grunt in reply, or twinkle at her out of his piggish eyes. But
+Emigration Jane had come out to South Africa, hearing that places at five
+shillings a day were offered you by employers, literally upon their knees,
+and that husbands were thick as orange-peel and programmes on the
+pit-floor of the Britanniar Theayter, 'Oxton, or the Camden Varieties on
+the morning after a Bank Holiday. She had left her first situation at Cape
+Town, being a girl of spirit, because her mistress had neglected to
+introduce her to eligible gentlemen acquaintances, as the pleasant-spoken
+agent at the Emigrants' Information Office in Cheapside, the young
+gentleman of Hebrew strain, whose dark eyes, waxed moustache, and diamond
+tie-pin had made a deep impression upon the susceptible heart of his
+client, had assured Jane the South African employer would take an early
+opportunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the glowing
+picture. The employer had failed in duty, the husbands-aspirant had not
+appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there had been, with a postman, with a
+trooper of the Cape Mounted Police, with an American bar-tender. But not
+one of these had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to
+borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had "bin 'ad" in that way before,
+and gone with her bleeding heart and depleted Post Office Savings-book
+before the fat, sallow magistrate at the Regent's Road County Court, and
+winced and smarted under his brutal waggeries, only to learn that the
+appropriator of her womanly affections and her fifteen sovereigns had
+already three wives.
+
+The brute, the 'artless beast! Emigration Jane wondered at herself, she
+did, as 'ad bin such a reg'ler soft as to be took in by one to whom she
+never referred in speech except as "That There Green." That she softened
+to him in her weaker moments, in spite of his remembered appetite for
+savings and his regrettable multiplicity of wives, gave her the fair hump.
+That something in the expression of this new one's muddy eyes recalled the
+loving leer of "That There Green," she admitted to herself. Womanly
+anxiety throbbed in the bosom, not too coyly hidden by the pneumonia
+blouse, as the couple passed the gilded portals of a public bar, and the
+Slabberts' elbow was thrust painfully into her side, as its owner said
+heavily:
+
+"Have you thirst?"
+
+She coyly owned to aridity, and they entered the saloon, kept by a
+Dutchman who spoke English. Two ginger-beers with a stick of Hollands were
+supplied, and the stick of Slabberts was as the rod of Moses to the other
+stick for strength and power. But as Emigration Jane daintily sipped the
+cooling beverage, giggling at the soapy bubbles that snapped at her nose,
+the restless worm of anxiety kept on gnawing under the flowery "blowse."
+Too well did she know the ways of young men who hospitably ask you if
+you're thirsty, and 'ave you in, whether or no, and order drinks as
+liberal as lords, and then discover that they're short of the bob, and
+borrow from you in a joking way.... Her heart bounded as the Slabberts put
+his hand in his pocket, saying:
+
+"Wat kost het?"
+
+The Dutch bar-keeper, who seemed to know Slabberts, answered in English,
+looking at Emigration Jane:
+
+"Half a dollar."
+
+Half a dollar is South African for eighteenpence. Slabberts rattled
+something metallic in his trousers-pocket, and said something rapidly in
+the Taal. The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and said to
+Emigration Jane:
+
+"Your young man has not got the money."
+
+They were all, all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it
+with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an
+imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish
+Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are
+really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and
+purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and
+try on feather-boas at two-and-eleven-three, plucked from the defunct
+carcase of the domestic fowl. She paid for the drinks with a florin, and
+it was quite like old times when Slabberts calmly pocketed the sixpence of
+change. The bar-keeper leaned over to her again, and said, surrounding her
+with a confidential atmosphere of tobacco and schnaps:
+
+"He is a good man, that young man of yours, and gets much money. He means
+to give you a nice present by-and-by."
+
+Her grateful heart overflowed to this friendly patronage. She showed the
+bar-keeper her gathered finger, and said it did 'urt a treat. She expected
+it would 'urt worse before Dr. de Boursy-Williams--"'adn't 'e got a toff's
+name?"--'ad done with it.
+
+"You go to that Engelsch doktor on Harris Street, eh?" said the
+bar-keeper, spitting dexterously.
+
+"Sister Tobias--that's the nun wot 'ousekeeps at the Convent--give me a
+order to see 'im, to 'ave me finger larnced," explained Emigration Jane.
+"Ain't 'e all right?"
+
+"Right enough," said the bar-keeper, winking at the Slabberts, and adding
+something in the Taal, that provoked chuckles among the bystanders and
+called forth a fine display of neglected teeth on the part of the
+personage addressed. "There are plenty other Engelsch will be wishing to
+be as right, oh, very soon! For De Boursy-Williams, he has sent his wife
+and his two daughters away on the train for Cape Town yesterday morning,
+and he has gone after them that same night, and he has left all his
+patients to the Dop Doctor."
+
+"Some red-necked baboons are wiser than others," said the Slabberts in the
+Taal, and there was a hoarse laugh, and the humorist turned his big heavy
+body away, and became one of a crowd of other Dutchmen, who were, in
+veiled hints and crooked allusions, discussing the situation across the
+Border. Emigration Jane was not sensitive to the electricity in the
+atmosphere. She knew no Dutch, and was perfect in the etiquette of the
+outing, which, when the young woman has been supplied with the one
+regulation drink, stands her up in the corner like an umbrella in dry
+weather as long as her young man is a-talking to 'is pals.
+
+"So," the bar-keeper went on, "if you shall want that bad finger of yours
+looked to, you will have to wait until the Dop Doctor wakes up. He is a
+big man, who can drink as much as three Boers.... He came in this morning
+to get drunk, and you shall not wake him now if you fire off a rifle at
+his ear. But he will get up presently and shake himself, and then he will
+be quite steady; you would not guess how drunk he had been unless you had
+seen.... He is over there, sleeping on that table in the corner, and it
+will be very bad for the man who shall wake him up. For, look you, that
+Dop Doctor is a duyvel. I have seen him break a man like a stick between
+his hands for nothing but cutting up a thieving monkey of a little Kaffir
+with the sjambok. And he took the verdoemte thing home where he lives,
+they say, and strapped up its black hide with plaster, and set its arm as
+if it had been a child of Christians. But every Engelschman is mad. Groot
+Brittanje breeds a nation of madmen."
+
+The saloon got fuller and fuller. The air solidified with the Taal and the
+tobacco, and other things less pleasant. It was not the hour for a crowd
+of customers, but nobody had seemed to be working much of late. They were
+all Transvaalers and Free Staters, tradesmen of the town, or Boers from
+outlying farms, and not a man there but was waiting a certain signal to
+clear out and leave Gueldersdorp to her fate, or remain in the place on a
+salary paid by the Republics as a spy. The English customer who came in
+knew at one whiff of the thick atmosphere that it was unhealthy, and if
+the man happened to be alone, he ordered, and paid, and drank, and went
+out quickly. If he happened to be with friends, he pointedly addressed his
+conversation to his countrymen, and left with a certain degree of swagger,
+and without the appearance of undue haste.
+
+Once the swing-doors of the saloon opened to admit a short, spare,
+hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman, whose insignificant Cockney
+countenance was splashed with orange-coloured freckles of immense size.
+Between his thin anaemic lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And
+Emigration Jane, toying with the dregs of her tumbler, recognized the
+pert, sharp, sallow face seen over the sleeve of a large burgher's
+outstretched arm. With some trouble she caught the eye of the short, pale
+young man, and he instantly became a red one. To reach her was difficult,
+but he dived and wriggled his way across the saloon, wedging his frail
+person between the blockish bodies with a cool address that reminded her
+of the first night of a "noo show" at the Camden "Theayter," and the queue
+outside the gallery door.
+
+"'Ullo, 'ullo! Thought I reckonised you, Miss." He touched his cheap
+imitation Panama with swaggering gallantry, and winked. "But seeing you
+eight sizes more of a toff than what you were when I previously 'ad the
+pleasure, I 'esitated to tip you the 'Ow Do."
+
+She tossed her imitation ostrich plumes in joyous coquetry.
+
+"As if I didn't know wot you're after. Garn! You only wants to know if I
+acted on the stryte about ..."
+
+His projecting ears burned crimson.
+
+"Well, an' suppose I do. Did she----"
+
+"Did she wot?"
+
+"You pipe well enough. Did she 'ave it?"
+
+"Ain't you anxious?"
+
+"Tyke it I am anxious. Did she? No cod?"
+
+"Did she git your letter wot you put in the box o' choc's? O' course she
+did, Mister. Wot do you tyke me for? A silly looney or a sneakin' thief?"
+
+"I'll tell you what I tyke you for. A jolly little bit of English All
+Right. Say! Do you think ..." The prominent Adam's apple jutting over the
+edge of the guillotining double collar worked emotionally. "Think she'll
+send an answer, eh?"
+
+"Reckon she will; you watch out an' see!"
+
+"You fust-clarss little brick!"
+
+"Garn!"
+
+"I mean it. Stryte. Next door to a angel--that's wot you are. She's the
+angel. Tell 'er I said so--that's if you can, you twig? And say that when
+I 'eard that nearly all the gay old crowd o' pupils 'ad gone away, day
+before yesterday, I could 'a blooming well cut me throat, thinkin' she'd
+gone too. Becos' when I swore in for the Town Guard, it was with the
+idear--mind you rub that in!--of strikin' a blow for Beauty as well as for
+Britanniar, twig?" The thin elbow in the tweed sleeve nudged her,
+provoking a joyous giggle.
+
+"I'm fly, no fear. Are you to 'ave a uniform, an' all like that?"
+
+His face fell. "The kit don't run to much beyond a smasher 'at an'
+puttees, but they're the regular Service kind, an' then there's the
+bandolier--an' the gun. She ain't the newest rifle served out to Her
+Majesty's Army, not by twenty years. Condemned Martini, a chap says, who's
+in the know--an' kicks like a mule when I let 'er off--made me nose bleed
+fust time I tried with blank. But when we gets a bit more used to each
+other, it 'll be a case of bloomin' Doppers rollin' over in the dust, like
+rock-rabbits. Don't forget to tell 'er as wot I said so."
+
+"Why ... ain't she a Dutchy 'erself? She wrote a letter for me in their
+rummy lingo to my young man!"
+
+"Cripps!" He stared in dismay. "Blessed if I 'adn't forgot. But if an
+Englishman marries a foreigner," he swelled heroic, "that puts 'er in the
+stryte runnin'. And 'art an' 'and I'm 'ers, whenever she'll 'ave me! Tell
+'er THAT--with a double row of crosses from W. Keyse! And--can you
+remember a bit o' poetry?" He recited with shamefaced rapidity:
+
+    "It is my sentry-go to-night,
+    And when I watch the moon so bright,
+    Shining o'er South Africa plain,
+    I'll think of thee, sweet Greta Du Taine."
+
+Her eyes were full of awe and wonder. "Lor! you don't mean to say you made
+up that by yourself?"
+
+The poet nodded. "Reckon about as much. Like it?"
+
+"It's perfect lovely! Better than they 'ave in the penny books."
+
+"Where Coralline and the Marquis are playin' the spooney game, and 'im
+with a Lady Reginer up 'is dirty sleeve. An' there's another thing I want
+you to let 'er know." His eyes were on hers, his breath fanned her hot
+cheeks. "There isn't another woman on the earth but her for me. Dessay
+there may be others; wot I say is--I don't see 'em!" He waved his hand,
+dismissing the ardent creatures.
+
+A pang transpierced the conscience hiding under the cheap flowery blouse.
+Emigration Jane hesitated, biting the dog's-eared finger-ends of a cotton
+glove. Should she tell this ardent, chivalrous lover that the Convent roof
+no longer sheltered the magnificent fair hair-plait and the mischievous
+blue eyes of his adored? That Miss Greta Du Taine had left for
+Johannesburg with the latest batch of departing pupils! If she told, W.
+Keyse would vanish out of her life, it might be for ever; or, if by chance
+encountered on the street, pass by with a casual greeting and a touch of
+the cheap Panama. Emigration Jane was no heroine, only a daughter of Eve.
+Arithmetic and what was termed the "tonic sofa" had been more sternly
+inculcated than the moral virtues at the Board School in Kentish Town. And
+she was not long in making up her mind that she would not tell him--not
+just yet, anyway.
+
+What was he saying, in the Cockney that cut like a knife through the thick
+gutturals of the Taal? "I shall walk past the Convent to-morrer in kit and
+'cetras, on the charnce of 'Er seein' me. Two sharp. And, look 'ere, Miss,
+you've done me a good turn. And--no larks!--if ever I can do you
+another--trust me. Stryte--I mean it! You ask chaps 'oo know me if Billy
+Keyse ever went back on a pal?"
+
+She swayed her hips, and disclaimed all obligation. But, garn! he was
+gittin' at 'er, she knew!
+
+"I ain't; I mean it! You should 'ave 'arf me 'eredittary estates--if I 'ad
+any. As I 'aven't, say wot you'll drink? Do, Miss, to oblige yours truly,
+W. Keyse, Esquire."
+
+W. Keyse plunged a royal, reckless hand into the pocket of his tweed
+riding-breeches, bought against the time when he should bestride something
+nobler than a bicycle, and produced a half-sovereign. He owed it to his
+landlady and the rest, the coin that he threw down so magnificently on the
+shiny counter, but you do not treat your good angel every day....
+Emigration Jane bridled, and swayed her hips still more. His largeness was
+intoxicating. One had dreamed of meeting such young men.
+
+"Port or sherry? Or a glass of cham, with a lump o' ice in for a cooler?
+They keep the stuff on draught 'ere, and not bad by 'arf for South Africa.
+'Ere, you, Mister! Two chams for self and the young lydy, an' look
+slippy!"
+
+The brimming glasses of sparkling, creaming fluid, juice of vines that
+never grew in the historic soil of France, were passed over the bar. A
+miniature berg clinked in each, the coldness of its contact with the
+glowing lip forcing slight rapturous shrieks from Emigration Jane.
+
+"We'll drink 'Er 'ealth!" W. Keyse raised his goblet. "And Friends at 'Ome
+in our Isle across the Sea!"
+
+He drank, pleased with the sentiment, and set down the empty glass.
+
+The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and tapped him on the arm
+with a thick, stubby forefinger.
+
+"Mister Engelschman, I think you shall best go out of here."
+
+"Me? Go out? 'Oo are you gettin' at, Myn'eer Van Dunck?" swaggered W.
+Keyse. And he slipped one thin, freckled hand ostentatiously under his
+coat of shoddy summer tweed. A very cheap revolver lurked in the
+hip-pocket of which Billy was so proud. In his third-floor back
+bed-sitting-room in Judd Street, London, W.C., he had promised himself a
+moment when that hip-pocket should be referred to, just in that way. It
+was a cheap bit of theatrical swagger, but the saloon was full, not of
+harmless theatrical pretences, but bitter racial antagonisms, seething
+animosities, fanged and venomed hatreds, only waiting the prearranged
+signal to strike and slay.
+
+Emigration Jane tugged at the hero's sleeve, as he felt for an almost
+invisible moustache, scanning the piled-up, serried faces with pert, pale,
+hardy eyes.
+
+"'E ain't coddin'. See 'ow black they're lookin'."
+
+"I see 'em, plyne enough. Waxworks only fit for the Chamber of 'Orrors,
+ain't 'em?"
+
+"It's a young woman wot arsks you to go, not a bloke! Please! For my syke,
+if you won't for your own!"
+
+Billy Keyse, with a flourish, offered the thin, boyish arm in the tweed
+sleeve.
+
+"Righto! Will you allow me, Miss?"
+
+She faltered:
+
+"I--I can't, deer. I--I'm wiv my young man."
+
+"Looks after you a proper lot, I don't think. Which is 'im? Where's 'e 'id
+'isself? There's only one other English-lookin' feller 'ere, an' 'e's
+drunk, lyin' over the table there in the corner. That ain't 'im, is it?"
+
+"Nah, that isn't 'im. That big Dutchy, lookin' this way, showin' 'is teeth
+as 'e smiles. That's my young man."
+
+She indicated the Slabberts, heavily observant of the couple with the
+muddy eyes under the tow-coloured thatch.
+
+"'Strewth!" W. Keyse whistled depreciatively between his teeth, and
+elevated his scanty eyebrows. "That tow-'eaded, bung-nosed, 'ulking, big
+Dopper. An' you a daughter of the Empire!"
+
+Oh! the thrice-retorted scorn in the sharp-edged Cockney voice! The
+scorching contempt in the pale, ugly little eyes of W. Keyse! She wilted
+to her tallest feather, and the tears came crowding, stinging the back of
+her throat, compelling a miserable sniff. Yet Emigration Jane was not
+destitute of spirit.
+
+"I ... I took 'im to please meself ... not you, nor the Hempire neither."
+
+"Reckon you was precious 'ard up for a chap. Good-afternoon, Miss."
+
+He touched the cheap Panama, and swung theatrically round on his heel.
+Between him and the saloon-door there was a solid barricade of heavy
+Dutch bodies, in moleskin, tan-cord, and greasy homespun, topped by
+lowering Dutch faces. Brawny right hands that could have choked the reedy
+crow out of the little bantam gamecock, clenched in the baggy pockets of
+old shooting-jackets. Others gripped leaded sjamboks, and others crept to
+hip-pockets, where German army revolvers were. The bar-keeper and the
+Slabberts exchanged a meaning wink.
+
+"Gents, I'll trouble you. By your leave?..."
+
+Nobody moved. And suddenly W. Keyse became conscious that these were
+enemies, and that he was alone. A little hooliganism, a few street-fights,
+one scuffle with the police, some rows in music-halls constituted all his
+experience. In the midst of these men, burly, brutal, strong, used to shed
+blood of beast and human, his cheap swagger failed him with his stock of
+breath. He was no longer the hero in an East End melodrama; his heroic
+mood had gone, and there was a feel of tragedy in the air. The Boers
+waited sluggishly for the next move. It would come when there should be a
+step forward on the part of the little Englishman. Then a clumsy foot in a
+cow-leather boot or heavy wooden-pegged veldschoen would be thrust out,
+and the boy would be tripped up and go down, and the crowd would
+deliberately kick and trample the life out of him, and no one would be
+able to say how or by whom the thing had been done. And, reading in the
+hard eyes set in the stolid yellow and drab faces that he was "up against
+it," and no mistake, W. Keyse felt singularly small and lonely.
+
+Then something happened.
+
+The drunken Englishman who had been lying in a hoggish stupor over the
+little iron table in the corner of the saloon hiccoughed, and lifted a
+crimson, puffy face, with bleary eyes in it that were startlingly blue. He
+drew back the great arms that had been hanging over the edge of his
+impromptu pillow, and heaved up his massive stooping shoulders, and got
+slowly upon his feet. Then, lurching in his walk, but not stumbling, he
+moved across the little space of saw-dusted, hard-beaten earth that
+divided him from W. Keyse, and drew up beside that insignificant minority.
+The action was not purposeless or unimpressive. The alcoholic wastrel had
+suddenly become protagonist in the common little drama that was veering
+towards tragedy. Beside the man, Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted boy, a
+steam-pinnace bobbing under the quarter of an armoured battle-ship, its
+huge mailed bulk pregnant with possibilities of destruction, its barbettes
+full of unseen, watchful eyes, and hands powerful to manipulate the levers
+of Titanic death-machines.
+
+Let it be understood that the intervener did not present the aspect of a
+hero. He had been drunk, and would be again, unless some miraculous
+quickening of the alcohol-drugged brain-centres should rouse and revivify
+the dormant will. His square face, with the heavy smudge of bushy black
+eyebrows over the fierce blue eyes, and the short, blunt, hooked nose, and
+grim-lipped yet tender mouth, from the corner of which an extinct and
+forgotten cigar-butt absurdly jutted, bore, like his great gaunt frame,
+the ravaging traces of the consuming drink-lust. His well-cut,
+loosely-fitting grey morning-coat and trousers were soiled and slovenly;
+his blue linen shirt was collarless and unbuttoned at the neck. His grey
+felt smasher hat was crammed on awry. But there was a thick lanyard round
+the muscular neck, ending in a leather revolver-pouch that was attached to
+his stout belt of webbing. A boy with a fifteen-and-sixpenny toy revolver
+you can laugh at and squelch; but, Alamachtig! a big man with a Webley and
+Scott was another thing. And the frowy barrier of thick, coarsely-clad,
+bulky bodies and scowling, yellow-tan faces, began to melt away.
+
+When a clear lane showed to the saloon door, the Dop Doctor took it,
+walking with a lurch in his long stride, but with the square head held
+upright on his great gaunt shoulders. W. Keyse, Esquire, moved in the
+shadow of him, taking two steps to one of his. The swing doors opened,
+thudded to behind them....
+
+"Outside.... Time, too!"
+
+The wide, thin-lipped Cockney mouth grinned a little consciously as W.
+Keyse jerked his thumb towards the still vibrating doors of the saloon.
+"Reg'ler 'ornets' nest o' Dutchies. And I was up agynst it, an' no
+mistyke, when you rallied up. An', Mister, you're a Fair Old Brick, an' if
+you've no objection to shykin' 'ands ...?"
+
+But the big man did not seem to see the little Cockney's offered hand. He
+nodded, looking with the bloodshot and extremely blue eyes that were set
+under his heavy straight black brows, not at W. Keyse, but over the boy's
+head, and with a surly noise in his throat that stopped short of being
+speech, swung heavily round and went down the dusty street, that was
+grilling in the full blaze of the afternoon heat, lurching a little in his
+walk.
+
+Then, suddenly, running figures of men came round the corner. Voices
+shouted, and houses and shops and saloons emptied themselves of their
+human contents. The news flew from kerb to kerb, and jumped from windows
+to windows, out of which women, European and coloured, thrust eager,
+questioning heads.
+
+The Cape Town train that had started at midday had returned to
+Gueldersdorp, having been held up by a force of armed and mounted Boers
+twenty miles down the line. And a London newspaper correspondent had
+handed in a cable at the post-office, and the operator's instrument, after
+a futile click or so, had failed to work any more.
+
+The telegraphic wire was cut. Hostilities had commenced in earnest, and
+Gueldersdorp, severed from the South by this opening act of war, must find
+her salvation thenceforwards in the cool brains and steady nerves of the
+handful of defenders behind her sand-bags, when the hour of need should
+come.
+
+History has it written in her imperishable record, that is not only
+printed upon paper, and graven upon brass, and cut in marble, but stamped
+into the minds and hearts of millions of men and women of the British
+race, how, when that hour came, the hero-spirit in their countrymen rose
+up to meet it. And for such undying memories as these, and not for the
+mere word of suzerainty, it is worth while to have paid as Britain has
+paid, in gold, and blood, and tears.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+"Dop," being the native name for the cheapest and most villainous of Cape
+brandies, has come to signify alcoholic drinks in general to men of many
+nations dwelling under the subtropical South African sun. Thus,
+apple-brandy, and peach liqueur, "Old Squareface," in the squat,
+four-sided bottles beloved no less by Dutchman and Afrikander, American
+and Briton, Paddy from Cork, and Heinrich from the German Fatherland, than
+by John Chinkey--in default of arrack--and the swart and woolly-headed
+descendant of Ham, may be signified under the all-embracing designation.
+
+It did not matter what the liquor was, the bar-tenders were aware who
+served the Dop Doctor, as long as the stuff scorched the throat and
+stupefied the brain, and you got enough of it for your money.
+
+His eyes were blood-red with brutal debauch now, as he neared the De
+Boursy-Williams dwelling, a one-storied, soft brick-built,
+corrugated-iron-roofed house on Harris Street, behind the Market Square.
+It had been a store, but green and white paint and an iron garden-fence
+had turned it into a gentlemanly residence for a medical practitioner.
+Mrs. De Boursy-Williams, a lady of refinement, stamped with the
+ineffaceable cachet of Bayswater, had hung cheap lace curtains in all the
+windows, tying them up with silk sashes of Transvaal green. Between the
+wooden pillars of the stoep dangled curtains yet other, of chopped, dyed,
+and threaded bamboo, while whitewashed drain-pipes, packed with earth and
+set on end, overflowed with Indian cress, flowering now in extravagant,
+gorgeous hues of red and brown, sulphur and orange.
+
+The Dop Doctor, left to maintain the inviolate sanctity of this English
+Colonial home, hiccoughed as he stumbled up the stately flight of three
+cement steps that led between white-painted railings, enclosing on the
+left hand a narrow strip of garden with some dusty mimosa shrubs growing
+in it, to the green door that bore the brass plate, and had the red lamp
+fitted in the hall-light above it. The plate bore this comprehensive
+inscription:
+
+  G. DE BOURSY-WILLIAMS, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.
+
+  CONSULTING-ROOM HOURS: 10 A.M. TO 12 A.M.; 6 P.M. TO 8 P.M.
+
+  MODERN DENTISTRY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES.
+
+And, scanning the inscription for perhaps the thousandth time, the grim,
+tender mouth under the ragged black moustache took a satirical twist at
+the corners, for nobody knew better than Owen Saxham, called of men in
+Gueldersdorp the "Dop Doctor," what a brazen lie it proclaimed. He heard
+the town-clock on the stad square strike five as he pulled out the
+latchkey from his pocket and let himself in, shouting:
+
+"Koets!"
+
+A glazed door at the end of the passage, advertised in letters of black
+paint upon the ground-glass as "Dispensary," opened, and a long, thin
+Dutchman, dressed in respectable black, looked out. He had been hoping
+that the drunken Englishman had been shot or stabbed in a saloon-brawl, or
+had fallen down in apoplexy in a liquor-bout, and had been brought home
+dead on a shutter at last. His long ginger-coloured face showed his cruel
+disappointment. But he said, as though the question had been asked:
+
+"No, there is no telegram from Cape Town."
+
+Then he shut the glazed door, and returned to the very congenial
+occupation in which he had been engaged, and Owen Saxham went heavily to
+the bedroom placed at the disposal of the _locum tenens_. The single
+window looked out upon a square garden with a tennis-ground, where the De
+Boursy-Williams girls had been used to play. The apricot on the south wall
+was laden with the as yet immature fruit, an abandoned household cat
+slept, unconscious of impending starvation, upon a bench under a
+pepper-tree.
+
+It was a small, sordid, shabby chamber, with a fly-spotted paper, a chest
+of drawers lacking knobs, a greenish swing looking-glass, and a narrow
+iron bedstead. His scanty belongings were scattered about. There were no
+medical books or surgical instruments. The Dop Doctor had sold all the
+tools of his trade years before. He turned to Williams's books, standard
+works which had been bought at his recommendation, when he wished to
+refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he used when to the
+entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added the alluring chink of gold
+belonged also to that generous patron. There were some old clothes in the
+ramshackle deal wardrobe; there was some linen and underclothing in the
+knobless chest of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester
+repeating-rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch,
+a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of large calibre, in addition to
+the weapon he carried, there was not an article of property of any value
+in the room. Old riding-boots with dusty spurs and a pair of veldschoens
+stood by the wall; a pair of trodden-down carpet slippers lay beside a big
+cheap zinc bath that stood there, full of cold water; some well-used pipes
+were on the chest of drawers, with a tin of Virginia; and an old brown
+camel's-hair dressing-gown hung over a castorless, shabby,
+American-cloth-covered armchair. And an empty whisky-bottle stood upon the
+washstand, melancholy witness to the drunkard's passion.
+
+Yet there were a few poor little toilet articles upon the dressing-table
+that betokened the dainty personal habits of cleanliness and care that
+from lifelong use become instinctive. The hands of the untidy, slovenly,
+big man with the drink-swollen features were exquisitely kept; and when
+the dark-red colour should go out of the square face, the skin would show
+wonderfully unblemished and healthy for a drunkard, and the blue eyes
+would be steady and clear. Excess had not injured a splendid constitution
+as yet. But Saxham knew that by-and-by ...
+
+What did he care? He pulled off his soiled, untidy garments, and soused
+his aching head in the cold, fresh water, and bathed and changed. Six
+o'clock struck, and found Dr. Owen Saxham reclothed and in his right mind,
+if a little haggard about the eyes and twitchy about the mouth, and
+sitting calmly waiting for patients in the respectably-appointed
+consulting-room of De Boursy-Williams, M.D., F.R.C.S. Lond.
+
+Usually he sat in the adjoining study, near enough to the
+carefully-curtained door to hear the patient describe in the artless
+vernacular of the ignorant, or the more cultivated phraseology of the
+educated, the symptoms, his or hers.
+
+Because the cultured man of science, the real M.D. of Cambridge University
+and owner of those other letters of attainment, was the drunken wastrel
+who had sunk low enough to serve as the impostor's ghost. If G. de
+Boursy-Williams, of all those lying capitals, were a member of the London
+Pharmaceutical Society and properly-qualified dentist, which perhaps might
+be the case, he certainly possessed no other claim upon the confidence of
+his fellow-creatures, sick or well. Yet even before the Dop Doctor
+brought his great unhealed sorrow and his quenchless thirst to
+Gueldersdorp, the smug, plump, grey-haired, pink-faced, neatly-dressed
+little humbug possessed an enviable practice.
+
+If you got well, he rubbed his hands and chuckled over you; if you died,
+he bleated about the Will of Providence, and his daughters sent flowery,
+home-made wreaths to place upon your grave, and it all went down, adding
+to the python-length of the bill for medical attendance.
+
+This world is thick with De Boursy-Williamses, throwing in bromides with a
+liberal hand, ungrudging of strychnine, happily at home with quinine and
+cathartics, ready at a case of simple rubeola; hideously, secretly,
+helplessly perplexed between the false diphtheria and the true; treating
+internal cancer and fibrous tumours as digestive derangements for happy,
+profitable years, until the specialist comes by, and dissipates with a
+brief examination and with half a dozen trenchant words the victim's faith
+in the quack.
+
+Three years before, when the Dop Doctor, coming up from Kimberley by
+transport-waggon, had stumbled in upon Gueldersdorp, the verdict of a
+specialist consulted by one of his patients, much lacking in the desirable
+article of faith, had given De Boursy-Williams's self-confidence a
+considerable shock.
+
+Does it matter how De Boursy, much reduced in bulk by a considerable
+leakage of conceit, came across the Dop Doctor? In a drink-saloon, in a
+music-hall, in a gaming-house or an opium-den, at any other of the places
+of recreation where, after consulting and visiting hours, that exemplary
+father and serious-minded Established Churchman, was to be found? It is
+enough that the bargain was proposed and accepted. Four sovereigns a week
+secured to De Boursy-Williams the stored and applied knowledge, the wide
+experience, and the unerring diagnosis of the rising young London
+practitioner, who had had a brilliant career before him when a Hand had
+reached forth from the clouds to topple down the castle of his labours and
+his hopes. For Owen Saxham the money would purchase forgetfulness. You can
+buy a great deal of his kind of forgetfulness with four pounds, and drink
+was all the Dop Doctor wanted.
+
+
+
+
+Now, as the red South African sunset burned beyond the flattened western
+ridge of the semicircle of irregular hills that fence in the unpretending
+hamlet town that lies on the low central rise, Owen Saxham sat, as for his
+miserable weekly wage he must sit, twice daily for two hours at a stretch,
+enduring torments akin to those of the damned in Hell.
+
+For these were the hours when he remembered most all that he had lost.
+
+Remembrance, like the magic carpet of the Eastern story, carried him back
+to a rambling old grey mansion, clothed with a great magnolia and many
+roses, standing in old-time gardens, and shrubberies of laurel and ilex
+and Spanish chestnut, and rhododendron, upon the South Dorset cliffs, that
+are vanishing so slowly yet so surely in the maw of the rapacious sea.
+
+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 anaesthetist 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 anaemic,
+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....
+
+She said that one day, standing beside the writing-table in the Chilworth
+Street study, with David's portrait in her hand. It usually stood there,
+in a silver frame--a coloured photograph of a young man of thirty, stupid,
+and beautiful as the Praxitelean Hermes, resplendent in the gold and blue
+and scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen stood upon the hearthrug,
+for once in Mildred's company, and not thinking of Mildred. And with tears
+rising in her round, pretty, foolish eyes the girl looked from the face
+and figure enclosed within the silver frame, to the face and bust that had
+for background the high mantel-mirror in its carved frame of Spanish oak.
+
+There was the square black head bending forwards--"poking," she termed
+it--upon the massive, bowed shoulders; the white face, square too, with
+its short, blunt, hooked nose and grim, determined mouth and jaws, showing
+the bluish grain of the strong beard and moustache that Owen kept closely
+shaven. The heavy forehead, the smutty brows overshadowing eyes of clear,
+vivid, startling Alpine blue, the close small ears, the thick white
+throat, were very, very unattractive in Mildred's eyes--at least, in
+comparison with the three-volume-novel charms of the grey-eyed,
+golden-moustached, classically-featured, swaggering young military dandy
+in the coloured photograph. David had been with his regiment in India when
+Owen had first seemed to be a good deal attracted to Pont Street. He had
+wooed Mildred with dogged persistency, and won her without perceptible
+triumph, and Mildred had been immensely flattered at first by the conquest
+of this man, whom everybody said was going to be famous, great,
+distinguished ... and now ... the wedding-day was coming awfully near. And
+how on earth was it possible for a girl to tell a man with Owen's
+dreadfully grim, sarcastic mouth, and those terrible blue eyes that
+sometimes looked through and through you--that she preferred his brother?
+
+Poor, dear, beautiful, devoted David! so honourable, so shocked at the
+discovery that his passion was reciprocated, so very romantically in love.
+Only the day previously, calling in at Pont Street at an hour unusual for
+him, Owen had found them together, Mildred and David, who, having been
+unexpectedly relieved of duty by an accommodating brother-officer, had, as
+he rather laboriously explained, run up from Spurhambury for the day. It
+was an awfully near thing, the guilty ones agreed afterwards, but Owen had
+suspected nothing. These swell scientific men were often a little bit slow
+in the uptake....
+
+But to-day--to-day their dupe saw clearly. He recalled the Pont Street
+incident, and the flushed faces of the couple. He saw once more the
+silver-framed photograph in the girl's hand, he felt the mute
+disparagement of her glance, and was conscious of the relief with which it
+left him to settle on the portrait again. Ah, how unsuspicious he had been
+whom they were duping! Doubtless Mildred would not have had the courage to
+own the truth, doubtless she would have married him but for the scandal of
+the Trial. He wrenched his knitted hands together until the joints
+cracked. She would have married him, and forgotten David. He, the man of
+will, and power, and patience would have possessed her, stamped himself
+like a seal upon her heart and mind, given her other interests, other
+hopes, other desires, children, and happiness. But for the Trial the
+little germinating seed of treachery would never have grown up and borne
+fruit.
+
+Had it been treachery, after all? Far, far too grand the word. Who would
+expect a modern woman to practise the obsolete virtue of Fidelity? Fool,
+do you expect your miniature French bulldog or your toy-terrier to dive in
+and swim out to you, and hold your drowning carcase up, should you happen
+to become cramped while bathing in the sea? The little, feeble, pretty,
+feather-brained thing, what can it do but whimper on the shore while you
+are sinking, perhaps be consoled upon a friendly stranger's lap while your
+last bubbles are taking upward flight, and your knees are drawing inwards
+in the final contraction? Happy for the little creature if the kindly
+stranger carry it away!
+
+Poor, pretty, foolish Mildred, whose gentle predilections were as threads
+of gossamer compared with the cable-ropes of stronger women's passions!
+She had nestled into the strong protecting arm, and dried her tears for
+the old master on the sleeve of the new one, whimpering a little, gently,
+just like the toy-terrier bitch or the miniature bull.
+
+And yet he had once seen a creature tinier and feebler than either of
+these, a mere handful of yellow floss-silk curls, defend its insensible
+master with frenzy, as the sick man lay in the deadly stupor of cerebral
+congestion, from those who sought to aid. Valet and nurse and doctor were
+held at bay until that snapping, foaming, raging speck of love and
+devotion and fidelity had been whelmed in a travelling-rug, and borne away
+to a distant room, from whence its shrill, defiant, imploring barks and
+yelps could be heard night and day until, its owner being at last
+conscious and out of danger, the tiny creature was set free.
+
+Ergo, there are small things and small things. Beside that epic atom
+Mildred dwindled inconceivably.
+
+And David ... David, who had shaken his handsome head sorrowfully over his
+brother's ruined career, who had been horribly sick at the scandal,
+shudderingly alive to the disgrace, sorrowfully, regretfully compelled to
+admit that the evidence of guilt was overwhelming ... he did not trust
+himself to think of David overmuch. That way of thought led to Cain's
+portion in the very pit of Hell. For six months subsequently to the
+finding of the Jury in the well-known criminal case, The Crown _v._
+Saxham, David had married Mildred. If she had been innocent of actual
+treachery, here was the smooth, brotherly betrayer, unmasked and loathly
+in the sight of the betrayed.
+
+How quietly the storm-clouds had piled up on his bright horizon at the
+close of his second year of active, brilliant, successful work!
+
+The first lightning-flash, the first faint mutter of thunder, had passed
+almost unnoticed. Then the tempest broke, and the building wrought by a
+strong man's labours, and toils, and hopes, and joys, and dolours had been
+lifted, and torn, and rent, and scattered as a hill-bothy of poles and
+straw-bundles, or a moorland shelter of heather and bushes is scattered by
+the fury of a northern mountain-blast.
+
+His practice had become a large and, despite the many claims of Lazarus at
+the gates, a lucrative one by the commencement of his third year of
+residence in Chilworth Street. It was the end of April. He was to be
+married to Mildred in July. That move to Harley Street had been decided
+upon, the house taken and beautified. Though his love for her was not
+demonstrative or romantic, it was deep, and tender, and strong, and
+hopeful, and Life to this man had seemed very sweet--five years ago. He
+was successful professionally and socially. He had been chosen to assist a
+surgeon of great eminence in the performance of a critical operation upon
+a semi-Royalty. He had written, and publishers had published, a remarkable
+work. "The Diseases of Civilisation" had been greeted by the scientific
+reviewers with a chorus of praise, passed through four or five
+editions--had been translated into several European languages; and his
+"Text-Book of Clinical Surgery" had been recommended to advanced students
+by the leading professors of the Medical Schools when the horrible thing
+befell.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+It was in '94, when even the electro-motor was not in general use, and the
+petrol-driven machine was slowly convincing Paris and New York of its
+magnificent possibilities. Saxham used a smart, well-horsed, hired
+brougham for day-visits, and for night work a motor-tricycle. There were
+no stables to the house in Chilworth Street. He left the motor-tricycle at
+the place where he had bought it second-hand. The machine was cleaned and
+kept in order, and brought to his door by one of the employes at a certain
+hour, for a fixed weekly sum paid to the proprietor of the establishment,
+Bough by name, an Englishman born in the Transvaal, who had quite
+recently, or so he gave out, emigrated from South Africa, and set up in
+London as a cycle-seller and repairer, though there were not many cycles
+at the shop. Heavy packing-cases and crates were always being delivered
+there, and always being despatched from thence, via Cape Town and Port
+Elizabeth and Delagoa Bay to the Transvaal, Bough being agent, or so he
+said, for several South African firms engaged in the transport of
+agricultural machines. Bough had a wife, a large-eyed, delicate-looking,
+pretty little woman, who seemed afraid of the big, muscular, tanned fellow
+of thirty-eight or so, with the odd light eyes, and the smooth manner, and
+the ready smile, and the short, expert, hairy, cruel-looking hands. He had
+seen life, had Bough, at the goldfields and at the diamond-mines, and as a
+trooper through the Zulu and Matabele campaigns, and he was ready to talk
+about what he had seen. Still there were reservations about Bough, and
+mysteries. The Doctor suspected him of being brutal to his wife, and would
+not have been surprised any morning upon receiving the news of the man's
+arrest as one of a gang of forgers, or coiners, or burglars. But he lived
+and let live, and whatever else the big Afrikander may have been, he was
+an excellent workman at his trade.
+
+One evening Bough rode round on the motor-tricycle himself, and mentioned
+casually that his wife was ailing. The Doctor, in the act of mounting the
+machine, put a brief question or two, registered the replies in the
+automatic sub-memory he kept for business, and told the man to send her
+round at ten o'clock upon the following morning.
+
+She came, punctual to the hour, and was shown into Owen's
+consulting-room--a little woman with beautiful, melancholy eyes and a
+pretty figure. Illiterate, common, affected, and vain to a degree,
+hideously misusing the English language in that low, dulcet voice of hers,
+ludicrous in her application of the debatable aspirate to words in the
+spelling of which it has no part.
+
+Rather an absurd little person, Mrs. Bough. Yet, a tragic little person,
+in Saxham's eyes at least, by the time she had made her errand plain.
+
+He heard her tell the tale that was not new to him. Cultured, highly-bred
+women had made such appeals to him before, and without shame. How should
+this little vulgar creature be expected to have more conscience than they?
+
+They beat about the bush longer, they put the thing more prettily. They
+spoke of their frail physical health and their husbands' great anxiety,
+and quoted the long-ago expressed opinion of ancient family physicians,
+who possibly turned uneasily in their decent graves. But the gist of the
+whole was, that they did not want children, and Dr. Saxham had such a
+great and justly-earned reputation in skilful and delicate operations ...
+and, in short, would he not be compliant and oblige? They would pay
+anything. Money was positively no object.
+
+How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of young, rising
+professional men, who are hampered by honourable debts which threaten to
+impede and drag them down; who are possessed of high ideals and moral
+scruples, which, not being essentially, fundamentally embedded and
+ingrained in the conscience of the man, may possibly be argued away; who
+have not implanted in their souls and hearts the high reverence for
+motherhood and the deep tenderness for helpless infancy that distinguished
+Owen Saxham!
+
+He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others. He began as he
+had begun with every one of them--the delicate, titled aristocrats, the
+ambitious Society beauties, the popular actresses, the women who envied
+these and read about them in the illustrated interviews published in the
+fashion-papers, and sighed to be interviewed also--to not one of these had
+he weighed out one drachm less of the bitter salutary medicine that he now
+administered to Mrs. Bough.
+
+He invariably began with the personal peril and the inevitable risk.
+Strange how they ignored it, blinded themselves to it, thrust it, the
+grinning, threatening Death's-head, on one side. Of course, he talked like
+that! It was most candid of him, and most conscientious. But if they were
+willing to take the risk--and antiseptic surgery had made such _huge_
+strides in these days that the risk was a mere nothing.... Besides, there
+was not really need for anything like an operation, was there? He could
+prescribe the kind of dose that ought to be taken, and everything would
+then be all right.
+
+He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak even more to the
+purpose. To these mothers who did not wish to be mothers, who threw the
+gift of Heaven back in the face of Heaven, preferring artificial
+barrenness to natural fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should
+have brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their race,
+tombs and sepulchres--to these he told the truth, in swift, sharp,
+trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilised blade of the surgical
+knife, cut to heal. When they argued with him, saying that the thing was
+done, that everybody knew it was done, and that it always would be done,
+by other men as brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the homilist; he
+admitted the force of their arguments. Let other men of his great calling
+pile up and amass wealth, if they chose, by tampering with the unclean
+thing. Owen Saxham would none of it. At this juncture the woman would have
+hysterics of the weeping or the scolding kind, or would be convinced of
+the righteousness of the forlorn cause he championed, or would pretend the
+hysterics or the conviction. Generally she pretended to the latter, and
+swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to mask the rage and hatred in
+her haggard eyes, and went to that other man. Then, after a brief absence
+accounted for as a "rest cure," she would shine forth again upon her
+world, smiling, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had begun to
+make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had passed through the Valley of
+the Shadow, with only her own rod and staff of vanity and pride to comfort
+her, she would emerge from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and take to
+pegging or chloral or spiritualism. Most rarely she would not emerge at
+all, and then her women friends would send wreaths for the coffin and
+carriages to the funeral, and would whisper mysteriously together in their
+boudoirs, and look askance upon the doctor who had attended her. For of
+course he had bungled shockingly, or everything would have gone off as
+right as rain for that poor dear thing!
+
+Little Mrs. Bough was of the type of woman that pretends to be convinced.
+She had cried bitterly in the beginning, as she confessed to Saxham that
+she was not really married to Bough, and that the said Bough, whom Saxham
+had always suspected of being a scoundrel, would certainly go off with
+"one of them other women and leave her if she went and 'ad a byby." She
+cried even more bitterly afterwards, as she wondered how she ever could 'a
+dreamed o' being that wicked! Bough might kill her--that he might!--or go
+back to South Africa without her; she never would give in, not now. Never
+now--the Doctor might depend upon that, she assured him, drying her
+swollen eyes with a cheap lace-edged handkerchief loaded with patchouli.
+She was shaken and nervous, and in need of a sedative, and Saxham, having
+the drugs at hand, made her up a simple draught, unluckily omitting to
+make a memorandum of the prescription in his pocket-book, and gave her the
+first dose of it before she went away, profuse in thanks, and carrying the
+bottle.
+
+And he saw his waiting patients, and stepped into his waiting brougham,
+and, having for once no urgent call upon his professional attention, dined
+with Mildred at Pont Street, and was coaxed into promising to take her to
+the opening performance of a classic play which was to be revived three
+nights later at a fashionable West End theatre. Mildred had set her heart
+upon being seen in a box at this particular function, and Saxham had had
+some trouble to gratify her wish.
+
+He remembered with startling clearness every remote detail of that night
+at the theatre. Mildred had looked exquisitely fair and girlish in her
+white dress, with a necklace of pearls he had given her rising and falling
+on the lovely virginal bosom, where the lover's eyes dwelt and lingered in
+the masterful hunger of his heart. Soon, soon, that hunger of his for
+possession would be gratified! It was April, and at the end of July, when
+work was growing slack, they would be married. They were going North for
+the honeymoon. A wealthy and grateful patient of Saxham's had placed at
+his disposal a grey, historic Scotch turret-mansion, standing upon mossy
+lawns, with woods of larch and birch and ancient Spanish chestnuts all
+about it, looking over the silver Tweed. In the heat and hurry of his
+daily round of work, Saxham, who had spent an autumn holiday at this
+place, would find himself dreaming about it. The smell of the heather
+would spice the air that was no longer hot and sickly with the effluvia of
+the city, and the hum of the drowsy black bees, and the cooing of the
+wood-pigeons would replace the din of the London traffic, and Mildred's
+eyes would be looking into his, and her cool, fragrant lips would be
+freely yielded, and her arms would be about his neck, and all those secret
+aspirations and yearnings and dreams of wedded joy would be realised at
+last.
+
+He grinned to himself sitting there in the hot darkness of the South
+African night, the great white stars and the vast purple dome they
+throbbed in shut out of sight by the miserable little gaily-papered
+ceiling with its cornice of gilt wood, remembering that everything had
+ended there. Thenceforth no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom Fate
+and Destiny, hitherto propitious and obliging, had conspired to lash with
+scourges, and drive with goads, and hound with despairs and horrors to the
+sheer brink where Madness waits to hurl the desperate over upon the jagged
+rocks below.
+
+He supped with them at Pont Street. Mildred came down to say good-night at
+the door.
+
+"Have you been happy?" he had asked, framing the sweet young face in
+tender hands, and looking in the pretty, gentle brown eyes.
+
+"You have been so very dear and kind to-night," she had answered, "how
+could I have helped being happy? And He"--she meant the Semitic
+actor-manager, whom she romantically adored; whose thick, flabby features
+and pale gooseberry orbs, thickly outlined in blue pencil, eyebrowed with
+brown grease-paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive
+hands, and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately,
+but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, moved and
+possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean Tragedy--"He was so great!
+Don't you agree with me--marvellously great?"
+
+Saxham had laughed and kissed the enthusiast. It had appeared to him a
+dreary performance enough, or it would have, had it not been for Mildred
+and the dear glamour with which her presence had invested the great
+gilded auditorium, with its rows of bored, familiar, notable faces in the
+stalls, representing Society, Art, Literature, Music, and Finance; its pit
+and gallery crowded with organised bodies of theatre-goers, one party
+certain to boo where the other applauded, riot and disorder the inevitable
+result, unless by a coincidence rare as snow at Midsummer the rival
+associations might be won upon to display a unanimity of approval, upon
+which the dramatic Press-critics would rapturously descant in the
+newspapers next morning.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+Saxham said his lingering sweet good-night, and shut Mildred into the
+warm, lighted hall, and ran down the steps, and hailed a passing hansom,
+and was driven back to Chilworth Street. It had rained, and the heat,
+excessive for April, had abated, and the wise, experienced stars looked
+down between drifting veils of greyish vapour upon the little human lives
+passing below.
+
+As he jumped down at his door and paid his cabman, his quick eye noticed a
+bicycle leaning against the area-railings. One of his poorer patients was
+waiting for the Doctor. Or a messenger had been sent to summon him. He let
+himself into the lighted hall, whistling the pretty plaintive melody of
+Ophelia's song.
+
+A woman sat on the oak bench under the electric globe, her little
+huddled-up figure making rather a sordid blotch of drab against the
+strong, rich background of the wall, coloured Pompeian red, and hung with
+fine old prints in black frames. Her tawdry hat lay beside her, her
+haggard eyes were set, staring at the opposite wall; her lower jaw hung
+lax; the saliva dribbled from the corner of her underlip; her yellow,
+rigid hands gripped the edge of the bench. It was the woman who passed as
+the wife of the man Bough. And in instant, vivid, wrathful realisation of
+the desperate reason of her being there, Saxham cried out so loudly that
+the servant who had let her in and was waiting up for his master in the
+basement heard the words:
+
+"Are you mad? What do you mean by coming here? Haven't I told you that I
+will have nothing to do with you and your affairs...."
+
+The voice that issued from her blue lips might have been a scream, judging
+by the wrung anguish of the awful face she turned upon him; but it was no
+more than a dry, clicking whisper that the now listening servant could
+barely hear:
+
+"Don't be 'ard on a woman ... hin trouble, Doctor."
+
+"Hard on you.... On the contrary, I have been too considerate," he said,
+steeling his heart against pity. "You must go home to your husband, Mrs.
+Bough, or apply elsewhere for medical advice. I have none to give you."
+
+His square face was very stern as he took the cab-whistle from the
+hall-salver, that was packed with cards and notes, and letters that had
+come by the last post, and a telegram or two. She moaned as he laid his
+hand on the knob of the hall-door.
+
+"It wasn't my doings, Doctor.... Hi told Bough what you said. Hi did,
+faithful ... an' 'e swore if you wasn't the man to do what 'e wanted, 'e'd
+be damned but 'e'd find a woman as would! And she come next night--a
+little, shabby, white-faced, rat-nosed hold thing, shiverin' an' shakin'.
+Five pounds she 'ad of Bough, shakin' an' shiverin'. An' he wasn't to send
+no more to the haddress he knew, because she wouldn't be there. Always
+move hout ... she says, after a fresh job! Oh, my Gawd! An' Bough, he
+hordered me, an' Hi 'ad to give in. An' to-night Hi reckoned Hi was dyin'
+an' 'e said Hi best harsk you, 'e was about fed up with women an' their
+blooming sicknesses. So Hi biked 'ere because Hi couldn't walk. An'
+now!..." She groaned: "Hi _ham_ dyin', aren't Hi?"
+
+Even to an observation less skilled than that of the expert medical
+practitioner the signs of swift and speedy dissolution were written on the
+insignificant, once pretty, little face. Dying, the miserable little
+creature had ridden to Chilworth Street, hastening her own inevitable end
+by the stupendous act of folly, and ensuring Saxham's. That certainty had
+pierced him, even as the first horrible convulsion seized her and wrenched
+her sideways off the bench. He caught her, and shouted for his man, and
+they carried her into the consulting-room, and laid her on a sofa, and he
+did what might be done, knowing that his mercy on her involved swift and
+pitiless retribution upon himself. Mrs. Bough died three hours later, as
+the grey dawn straggled through the blinds, and the men with the district
+ambulance waited at the door, and Dr. Owen Saxham went about his work that
+day with a strange sensation of expecting some heavy blow that was about
+to fall. It fell upon the day following the Coroner's Inquest. He was
+sitting down to breakfast when a Superintendent of Police arrested him
+upon a warrant from Scotland Yard.
+
+His servant, very pale, had announced that the Superintendent wished to
+see the Doctor. The Superintendent was in the room, courteously saluting
+Saxham, before the man had fairly got out the words.
+
+"Good-morning, sir. A pleasant day!"
+
+"Unlike the business that brings you here, I think, Mr. Superintendent?"
+said Saxham, with his square jaw set. His man spilt the coffee and hot
+milk over the cloth in trying to fill his master's cup. "You are nervous,
+Tait. You had better go downstairs, I think, unless----" Saxham looked
+interrogatively at the burly, officially-clad figure of the Law.
+
+"No, sir, thank you. We do not at present require your man, but it is my
+duty to tell him that he had better not be out of the way, in case his
+testimony is wanted."
+
+"You hear?" said Saxham; and as white-faced Tait fled, trembling, to the
+lower regions: "Of course, you are here," he went on, pouring out the
+coffee himself with a firm hand, and looking steadily at the
+Superintendent, "with regard to the case of Mrs. Bough? I have expected
+that a magistrate's inquiry would follow the Inquest. It seemed only
+natural----"
+
+The Superintendent interrupted, holding up a large hand.
+
+"It is my duty to tell you, Dr. Saxham, that everything you say will be
+taken down and used against you in evidence."
+
+"Naturally," said Saxham, putting sugar in his coffee. The sugar was used
+against him. It amused him now to remember that. The Superintendent had
+never seen a gentleman more cool, he told the magistrate.
+
+"You see, sir, this Case has been fully considered by the authorities, and
+it has an ugly look; and it has therefore been decided to charge you with
+causing the death of the woman Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in
+your consulting-room, on the twentieth instant, when she visited you ..."
+
+"For the first time," put in Saxham quietly.
+
+"That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent. "You were often at
+her husband's place of business, you know, and may have seen her or not
+seen her."
+
+"As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a great many of
+the man's customers besides myself did see her," Saxham went on, eating
+his breakfast.
+
+"One of my men out there in the hall--I've noticed you looking towards the
+door----" began the Superintendent.
+
+"Wondering what the shuffling and breathing at the keyhole meant?" said
+Saxham quietly. "Thank you for explaining."
+
+"One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished breakfast, and
+then, sir," said the Superintendent, "I am afraid I must trouble you to
+come with me to Paddington Police Station."
+
+"Very well," said Saxham, frowning, "unless you object to using my
+brougham, which will be at the door"--he looked at his silver table-clock,
+a present from a grateful patient--"in ten minutes' time."
+
+"I don't at all mind that, sir," agreed the obliging Superintendent; "and
+the men can follow in the cab. Any objection?"
+
+Saxham had winced and flushed scarlet to the hair.
+
+"For God's sake, don't make a procession of it! Let things be kept as
+quiet as possible for the sake of my--family--and--my friends." He thought
+with agony of Mildred. They were to be married in July, unless----
+
+The Superintendent coughed behind his glove. "The question of Bail will
+rest with the magistrate, of course," he said. "But I should expect that
+it would be admitted, upon responsible persons entering into the customary
+recognisances."
+
+Saxham rose. He had drunk the coffee, but he could not eat. "Like all the
+rest of them, in spite of his show of coolness," thought the
+Superintendent.
+
+"I will ask you for time to telephone to some friends who will, I have no
+doubt, be willing to give the required undertaking, and arrange for a
+colleague to visit my patients. You will take a glass of wine while I step
+into the next room? The telephone is there, on the writing-table."
+
+"And a loaded revolver in the drawer underneath, and poisons of all kinds
+handy on the shelves of a neat little cabinet," thought the
+Superintendent. But he said: "With pleasure, sir, only I must trouble you
+to put up with my company."
+
+A tingling thrill of revulsion ran through Saxham. He set his teeth, and
+conquered the furious, momentary impulse to knock down this big, burly,
+smooth-spoken blue-uniformed official.
+
+"Ah, very well. The usual procedure in cases of this kind. Please come
+this way. But take a glass of wine first. There are glasses on the
+sideboard there, and claret and port in those decanters."
+
+"To your very good health, Dr. Saxham, sir, and a speedy and favourable
+ending to--the present--difficulty." The Superintendent emptied a bumper
+neatly, and with discreet relish, and followed Saxham into the
+consulting-room, and once more, at the sound of the measured footfall
+padding behind him over the thick carpet, the suspect's blood surged madly
+to his temples, and his hands clenched until the nails drove deep into the
+palms. For from that moment began the long, slow torture of watching and
+following, and dogging by the suspicious, vigilant, observant Man In Blue.
+
+A Treasury Prosecution succeeded the Police-Court Inquiry, and the accused
+was formally arrested upon the criminal charge, and committed to Holloway
+pending the Trial. The Trial took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in the
+following July, occupying five days of oppressive heat in the thrashing
+out of that vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D.,
+F.R.C.S. who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten and drunk and
+slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow of Penal Servitude. Who was
+conveyed from the dock to the cell and from the cell to the dock by
+warders and policemen, rumbling through back streets and unfrequented ways
+in a shiny prison-van. Who came at last to look upon the Owen Saxham of
+this hideous prison nightmare, the man of whom the Counsel for the Crown
+reared up, day by day, a monstrously-distorted figure, as quite a
+different person from the other innocent man whom the defending advocate
+described in flowery, pathetic sentences as a martyr and the victim of an
+unheard-of combination of adverse circumstances.
+
+Things went badly. The case against the prisoner looked extremely black.
+That monstrous figure of Owen Saxham, based upon an ingenious hypothesis
+of guilt, and plastered over with a marvellous mixture of truths and
+falsities, facts and conjectures, grew uglier and more sinister every day.
+
+The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the hapless victim, dressed
+in deep mourning and neatly handled by Counsel, evoked a display of
+handkerchiefs upon his every appearance in the witness-box, from the smart
+Society women seated near the Bench. Many of them had been Saxham's
+patients. Several had made love to him, nearly all of them had made much
+of him, and quite an appreciable number of them had asked him to be
+accommodating, and render them temporarily immune against the menace of
+Maternity. These had received a curt refusal, accompanied with wholesome
+advice, for which they revenged themselves now, in graceful womanly
+fashion, by being quite sure the wretched man was guilty. More than
+possible, was it not? they whispered behind their palm-leaf fans: it was
+sultry weather, and the vendors of these made little fortunes, hawking
+them outside. Was it not more than possible that he had been the dead
+woman's lover? The Crown Counsel improved on this idea. Wretched little
+Mrs. Bough, of infinitesimal account in Life, had become through Death a
+person of importance. Much was made out of the fact that she had gone to
+Chilworth Street some days previously to her deplorable ending, and
+remained closeted with Dr. Saxham for some time. He had supplied her with
+a bottle of medicine upon her leaving--medicine of which no memorandum was
+to be found in his notes for the day. She had taken the first dose then
+and there. According to the testimony of the Accused, the bottle had
+contained a harmless bromide sedative. Upon the oath of the Public
+Analyst, the same bottle, handed by the husband of the deceased woman to
+the Police upon the night of her death, and now produced in Court with two
+or three doses of dark liquid remaining in it, contained a powerful
+solution of ergotoxine--a much less innocent drug. Who should presume to
+doubt its administration by the Prisoner, when the label bore directions
+in his own characteristic handwriting? Who should dare to affirm his
+innocence, seeing that to him his victim had hastened, almost in the act
+of death, begging him, with her expiring breath, "not to be hard on a
+woman," who had ignorantly trusted him, Gentlemen of the Jury! only to
+find, too late, the deceptive nature of his specious promises? A whip,
+cried the Bard of Avon, England's glorious, immortal Shakespeare, should
+be placed in every honest hand to lash such scoundrels naked through the
+world! Let that whip, in the honest hands of twelve good Britons, be--the
+verdict of guilt! The Counsel for the Crown, red-hot and perspiring, sat
+down mopping his streaming face, for it was tropical weather, with the
+white handkerchief of a blameless life. Irrepressible applause followed,
+round upon round thudding against the dingy yellow-white walls, beating
+against the dirty barred skylight of the stifling, close-packed Court.
+Then the Judge interposed, and the clapping of hands and thumping of stick
+and sunshade ferrules upon the dirty floor died down, and the Counsel for
+the Defence got up to plead for his man, who, by the way, he firmly
+believed to be guilty.
+
+That remembrance made the Dop Doctor merry again, this scorching night in
+Gueldersdorp, five years later. But it was ugly mirth, especially when he
+recalled his agony of sympathy upon hearing, through her mother, that
+Mildred was ill in bed. Ah! how he hated the simpering, whispering,
+sneering, giggling women in Court when he pictured her, his innocent
+darling, his sweet girl, suffering for love of him and sorrow for him.
+David, detained by onerous duties at Regimental Headquarters throughout
+the whole of the Case, wrote chilly but fraternally expressed letters on
+blue official paper. Of his mother, of his father, Owen dared not think.
+Innocent as he was, the shame of his position, the obloquy of the Trial,
+must be a branding shame to them for ever.
+
+It had killed them, the Dop Doctor remembered, within a few years of each
+other--the hale old Squire and Madam, his Welsh wife, feared by the South
+Dorset village folks for her caustic tongue, beloved for her generous
+heart, her liberal nature. It was Mildred who he had believed would die if
+the Verdict went against him--Mildred, who had consoled herself so quickly
+and so well--Mildred, whom he had held a spotless blossom of Paradise, a
+young saint in purity and singleness of heart, in comparison with those
+other women.
+
+Bah! what a besotted idiot he had been! She was as they were. The nodding
+of their towering hats was before his eyes; the subdued titter that
+accompanied their whispered comments was in his ears; the lavender, white
+rose, and violet essences with which they perfumed their baths and
+sprinkled their clothes were in his nostrils; suffocatingly, as his
+Counsel went on pleading. The intention of his trenchant cross-questioning
+of Bough, who had lied from the beginning, like a true son of the Devil,
+his father, showed plainly now. Little by little the evidence accumulated.
+
+Here, free and unsuspect and doing his best to send another man to Penal
+Servitude, was the man who had all to gain by fixing the guilt upon the
+Accused. He had sent the woman, his mistress, to the prisoner; he had
+resented the prisoner's refusal to commit or to abet a dangerous and
+illegal operation. He had compelled his hapless victim to submit herself
+to the hands of a wretch who lived by such deeds. Possibly he had sickened
+of his poor toy--he had told her as much. Possibly he had determined, by a
+bold and daring stroke, to free himself of a wearisome burden, and let
+another man pay the penalty for his own crime. The substitution of the
+lethal drug found in the bottle for the harmless bromide mixture given to
+Mrs. Bough by Dr. Saxham would naturally suggest itself to such a wretch,
+whose calculating cleverness had been crowned with success by the
+culminating masterstroke, admirable in its simplicity, damnable in its
+fiendish cunning, of sending the unhappy woman whose deliberate murder he
+had really planned and carried out, to die upon the threshold of the
+innocent victim of this diabolical plot. Let those who heard hesitate
+before they played into the hands of a villain by condemning the blameless
+to suffer! Let them look at the young man before them, whose hard work had
+won him, early in life, his brilliant position as one of the recognised
+pioneers of the new School of Surgery, as an admitted authority on
+Clinical Medicine, whose wedding-bells--the handkerchiefs came out at
+this--had rung to-morrow but for this harrowing and bitter stroke of
+adverse Destiny. Which would they have? Let the Jury decide for Christ or
+Barabbas! He spoke in all reverence, because the upright, innocent,
+charitable, self-denying life of a diligent healer of men would support
+the analogy of Christ-likeness beside that of the principal witness in
+this Case, the evil liver, the slanderer, the ex-thief and burglar, the
+English ticket-of-leave man who had emigrated to South Africa eighteen
+years previously, had enlisted under a false name in the Cape Mounted
+Police, had deserted, been traced to Kimberley, and there lost sight of,
+and who, under the name of Bough, had recently returned to England, giving
+himself out as an Afrikander, and setting up in business in London upon
+the accumulated savings of a career most probably in keeping with his
+abominable record.
+
+Warders from Wormwood Scrubbs and Portland Prisons were there to swear to
+the identity of Abraham Brake, _alias_ Lister, _alias_ Bough, whose
+photographs, thumb-prints, and measurements an official from the Criminal
+Identification Department of Scotland Yard was prepared to place before
+the Court, for whose re-arrest, as a ticket-of-leave man who had failed to
+keep in proper touch with the Police, an officer with a warrant waited.
+What, then, was to be the Verdict of the Jury? Was Dr. Owen Saxham
+innocent or guilty? If innocent, then, in the name of God, let him go
+forth from bondage, to the unutterable relief of those who waited in
+anguish for the Verdict. His father, his mother, and the fair young
+girl--the Court was drowned in tears at this last touching reference,
+even his Lordship the Judge being observed to remove and wipe eyeglasses
+that were gemmy with emotion, as Counsel dwelt upon the touching picture
+of the sorrowing bride-elect, whose orange-blossoms had been blighted by
+the breath of this hideous, this unbearable, this most unfounded
+charge....
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+The Judge summed up, with an evident bias in favour of the Accused. An old
+advocate in criminal causes, his Lordship had formed his own opinion of
+the principal witness for the Crown, though there was no evidence to prove
+the guilt of the astute Mr. Abraham Brake, _alias_ Lister, _alias_ Bough.
+
+The Jury retired, to return immediately. The Verdict "Not Guilty" was
+received with applause and cheers. Bough departed, to pay the prison
+penalty of not keeping in touch with the Police.... More cheers, strongly
+deprecated by the Judge. The Dop Doctor could hear that ironical clapping
+and braying five years off. It was over, over! He was free! Oh, the
+mockery of the word!
+
+His Counsel shook his hand warmly, and several old friends and colleagues
+pressed round him with hearty congratulations. Then a telegram was handed
+to him.
+
+"No bad news, I hope," said the advocate who had defended, seeing Saxham's
+lips blanch. "You have had enough trouble to last for some time, I
+imagine?"
+
+"It appears as if my measure was not quite full enough," said Saxham
+quietly. "My father died suddenly last night, down at our place in South
+Dorset. The wire says, 'An attack of cerebral haemorrhage,' probably
+brought on by worry and distress of mind over this damned affair of mine."
+He ground his teeth together, and went on: "I must go to my mother without
+delay. How soon can I get away from here?"
+
+It was oddly difficult to realise that all the doors were open, and that
+the following shadow of the Man In Blue would no longer dog his footsteps.
+It was strange to drive home in the brougham of a friend to Chilworth
+Street, and let himself into the dusty, neglected, close-smelling, shut-up
+house. All the servants were out; probably they had been making holiday
+through all the weeks that had preceded the Trial. His man returned as the
+master finished packing a portmanteau for that journey down to
+Dorsetshire. Saxham left him to finish while he changed his clothes and
+scrawled a letter to Mildred. Nothing else but this death could have kept
+him from hurrying to the embrace of those dear arms. As it was, he half
+expected her to rush in upon him, stammering, weeping, clinging to him in
+her overwhelming relief and gladness.... At every rumble and stoppage of
+wheels in the street, at every ring, he made sure that she was coming. But
+she did not come, and he sent his man to Pont Street with his letter, and
+went down into Dorsetshire by special train from Waterloo, and found the
+dead man's dogcart waiting for him, with the old bay cob in harness, and
+the old coachman who had taught him to ride his pony, waiting, with a band
+of crape about his sleeve, and drove through the deep, ferny lanes to the
+old home standing in its mantle of midsummer leafage and blossom in the
+wide gardens whose myrtle and lavender hedges overhung the beach below.
+There was a little, old, bent, white-haired woman in a shabby black gown
+and white India shawl waiting for him on the threshold, and only by the
+indomitable, unquailing spirit that looked out of her bright black eyes
+did Owen Saxham recognise his mother. She called him her David's dearest
+son, and her own boy, and took both his hands, and drew his head down, and
+kissed him solemnly upon the forehead.
+
+"That is for your father, my dear," she said. "He never doubted you for
+one moment, Owen. And this is for myself. We have both believed in you
+implicitly throughout. We would not even write and tell you so. It would
+have seemed, your father thought, like admitting, tacitly, that we doubted
+our son. But other people believed you guilty, and oh! Owen, I think it
+killed him!"
+
+"I know that it has killed him," Owen Saxham said simply. The early
+morning light showed to the mother's eyes the ravages wrought in her
+son's face by the mental anguish and the physical strain of those terrible
+weeks that were over, and Mrs. Saxham, for the first time since the
+Squire's death, burst into a passion of weeping. Owen's eyes were dry,
+even when he stooped to kiss the high, broad forehead of the grand old
+grey head that lay upon the snowy, lavender-scented pillow in the cool,
+airy death-chamber, where the perfume of the climbing roses that flowered
+about the open casements came in drifts across the sharp, clean odour of
+disinfectant.
+
+Captain Saxham arrived late that night. His greeting of his brother was
+stiff and constrained; his grey eyes avoided Owen's blue ones; he did not
+refer to the events of the past ten weeks. He had always had a habit of
+twisting and biting at one of the short, thick ends of his frizzy light
+brown moustache. Now he wrenched and gnawed at it incessantly, and his
+usually florid complexion had deteriorated to a muddy pallor. Black mufti
+did not suit the handsome martial figure, and there is no dwelling so
+wearisome as a house of mourning, when the servants move about on tiptoe,
+wearing faces of funereal solemnity, and the afternoon tea-tray is carried
+in in state, like the corpse of a domestic usage on its way to the
+cemetery, with the silver spirit-kettle bubbling behind it as chief
+mourner. But, as the elder son, there was plenty to occupy Captain Saxham.
+There was business to be transacted with the Squire's solicitor, with his
+bailiff, with one or two of the principal tenants. There were the
+arrangements to be made for the Funeral, and for the extension of
+hospitality to relatives and friends who came from a distance to attend
+it. When it was over and the long string of County carriages had driven
+home to their respective coach-houses, Owen Saxham returned to town.
+
+"Give my dear love to Mildred. Tell her, if she grudged the first sight of
+you to me, she will forgive me when she has a son of her own," his mother
+said.
+
+"You talk as though she were my wife!" he said, the bitter lines about his
+set mouth softening in a smile.
+
+"She would be but for what is past," said Mrs. Saxham. "She must be soon,
+for your sake. Your father would have wished that there should be as
+little delay as possible. Marry quietly at once, and take her abroad. If
+she loves you, as I know she does, and must, she will not regret the
+wedding-gown from Paquin's and the six bridesmaids in Directoire hats."
+
+
+
+
+For that deferred wedding was to have been a gorgeous and impressive
+function at St. George's, Hanover Square, with a Bishop in lawn sleeves to
+pronounce the nuptial benediction, palms, Japanese lilies, smilax, and
+white Rambler roses everywhere, while the celebrated "Non Angli sed
+Angeli" choir of boy-choristers had been specially engaged to render the
+anthem with proper fervour and give due effect to "The Voice that
+Breathed."
+
+Owen promised and went back to London. There were cards and envelopes upon
+the salver in the hall, but not one from Mildred. That stabbed him to the
+heart.... Not a line, O God!--not a written line, in answer to that letter
+in which he told her of the acquittal, and of his father's death, and of
+his own anguish at having to answer the stern call of filial duty, and
+leave dear Love uncomforted by even one kiss after all these weeks of
+famine, and hurry away to lay that grand grey head in the vault that
+covered so many Saxhams. Not a line. But here was the letter, which his
+idiot of a servant, demoralised by the recent catastrophe, had forgotten
+to send on lying waiting upon the writing-table in his study. He snatched
+at it in desperate haste, and tore the envelope open.
+
+
+
+
+Her letter bore the date of that day. She said she had written before and
+torn the confession up ... it was so difficult to be just to him and true
+to herself.... It was a roundabout, involved, youthfully grandiloquent
+epistle in which Mildred announced that her love for Owen was dead, that
+nothing could ever resuscitate it; that she could not, would not, ever
+marry him, and that she had returned in an accompanying packet his ring,
+and presents, and letters, and would ever remain _his friend_ (underlined)
+Mildred. In a rather wobbly postscript, she begged him not to write or to
+attempt to see her, because her decision was irrevocable. She spelt the
+word with only one _r_.
+
+Saxham read the letter three times deliberately. The walls of the castle
+he had built, and fondly believed to be a work of Cyclopean masonry, had
+come tumbling about his ears, and lo! the huge blocks were only bits of
+painted card, and the Lady of the Castle, his true love, was the false
+Queen, after all. He folded up the letter and put it away in his
+pocket-book, and went over to the mantel-glass and looked steadily at the
+reflection of his own square face, haggard and drawn and ghastly, with
+eyes of startling blue flaring out from under a scowling smudge of meeting
+black eyebrows. He laughed harshly, and a mocking devil looked out of
+those desperate eyes, and laughed back. He unlocked an oak-carved,
+silver-mounted cellaret, and got out a decanter of brandy, and filled a
+tumbler, and drank the liquor off. It numbed the unbearable mental agony,
+though it had apparently no other effect. But probably he was drunk when
+he rang the bell and said quietly to his man:
+
+"Tait, do you believe there is a God?"
+
+Tait's smooth, waxy countenance did not easily express surprise. He
+answered, as though the question had been the most commonplace and
+ordinary of queries:
+
+"Can't say I do, sir. I reckon the parsons are responsible for floating
+'Im, and that they made a precious good thing out of bearin' stock in
+Heaven until the purchasers began to ask for delivery, and after that...."
+He chuckled dryly. "I've lived with one or two of 'em, and, if I may say
+so, sir--I know the breed!"
+
+"He knows ... the breed ..." repeated Saxham heavily.
+
+He asked another question, in the same thick, hesitating way, as he moved
+across the carpet to the oak-and-silver cellaret.
+
+"Tait, when things went damned badly with you, when that other man let you
+in for the bill you backed for him, and that girl you were to have married
+went off with someone else, what did you do to keep yourself from
+brooding? Because you must have done something, man, as you're alive
+to-day!"
+
+Tait looked at his master dubiously as he poured out more brandy, and went
+over and stood upon the hearthrug with his back to the empty fireplace,
+drinking it in gulps. "I did what you're doing now, sir: I took a sight of
+drink to keep the trouble down. And----" He hesitated.
+
+"Go on," said Saxham, nodding over the tumbler.
+
+"You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said smooth Tait,
+"and that makes me 'esitate in saying it. But I took on a gay, agreeable
+young woman of the free-and-easy sort, and went in for a bit o' pleasure,
+and more drink along with it. One nail drives out another, you know, sir.
+And if the young lady have thrown you hover----"
+
+"Why, you damned, white-gilled, prying brute! you must have been reading
+my correspondence," said Saxham thickly, as he lifted the tumbler to his
+mouth.
+
+Tait grinned. He could venture to tell his master, drunk, what he would
+not have dared to tell him sober.
+
+"No need for that, sir. I've come and gone between this house and Pont
+Street too often not to know what was in the wind. Why, Captain Saxham was
+there with her often and often when you never suspected...."
+
+The tumbler fell from Saxham's hand, and struck the fender, and smashed
+into a hundred glittering bits.
+
+"Go!" said Tait's master, perfectly, suddenly, dangerously sober, and
+pointing to the door. The man delayed to finish his sentence.
+
+"While you were in Holloway, sir, and all through the Trial...."
+
+The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been left open. He
+vanished through it with harlequin-like agility as a terrible, white-faced
+black figure seemed to leap upon him....
+
+"I've 'ad an escape for my life!" he said, having reached in a series of
+bounds the safer regions below stairs.
+
+"Of the Doctor?... Go on with your rubbishing nonsense!" said the cook.
+
+"What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear?" demanded the housemaid,
+who was more imaginative, and cherished the buddings of a romantic passion
+for one who should be for ever nameless:
+
+"Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by--that's what she've
+done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his dewy brow. "And seeing the Doctor
+for the first time since I've been in his service a bit overtook with
+liquor, and more free and easy like than customary--being a gentleman you
+or me would 'esitate to take a liberty with in the ordinary way o'
+things--I thought I'd let 'im know about the Goings On."
+
+"Of them two...." interpolated the cook--"Her and the Captain?"
+
+"Shameless, I call 'em!" exclaimed the incandescent housemaid as Tait
+signified assent.
+
+"'Aven't they kep' it dark, though!" wondered the cook.
+
+"They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite got over the
+desertion of the young woman he was to have married, and who had gone off
+with somebody else, "a precious downy couple. And what I say is--it's a
+Riddance!"
+
+"How did 'e take it, pore dear?" gulped the housemaid.
+
+"Like he's took everythink--that is, up to the present moment," admitted
+Tait. "But this is about the last straw."
+
+The housemaid dissolved in tears.
+
+"He'll get another young lady," said the cook confidently. "And him so
+'andsome an' so clever, an' with such heaps of carriage-swells for
+patients."
+
+Tait shook his prim, respectable head.
+
+"The swells'll show their tongues to another man now, my gal, who 'asn't
+the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coat-sleeve. Whistle for patients now,
+that's what the doctor may. Why, every one of 'em has paid their bills,
+and them that haven't have asked for their accounts to be sent in. And
+it's 'Lady So-and-so presents her compliments,' instead of 'Dear Dr.
+Saxham.' Done for, he is, at least as far as the West End's concerned....
+Mind, I don't set up to be infallible, but experience justifies a certain
+amount of cocksureness, and what I say is--Done for! Best he can do
+is--sell the practice, and lease, and plate, and pictures, furniture, and
+so on, for whatever he can get--the movables would have provoked spirited
+biddin' at auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under the
+circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their valoo--and go
+Abroad." Tait's gesture was large and vague.
+
+"Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel!" sighed the cook.
+
+"And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he don't do away with
+hisself," sobbed the housemaid. "I do, reely!"
+
+"With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles handy," added the cook.
+
+"Not him!" said Tait. "I'm ready to lay any man the sporting odd against
+him committing sooicide. He's not the sort. Lord! what was that?"
+
+That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs.
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+While the servants talked in the kitchen the master had been sitting
+quietly in the darkening study. All without and within the man was
+eddying, swirling blackness. Heat beat and glowed upon his forehead, like
+the radiation from molten metal; there was a winnowing and fanning as of
+giant wings or leaping of furnace-fires. The blood in his throbbing
+temples sang a dull, tuneless song. But presently he became aware of
+another kind of singing.
+
+It was a little hissing voice that came from the inside of the
+oak-and-silver cellaret. And it sang a song that the man who sat near had
+never heard before.
+
+"Why think of the sharp lancet or the keen razor, why long for the swift
+dismissing pang of the fragrant acid, or the leap down upon the
+railway-track under the crushing, pulping iron wheels?" sang the little
+voice. "I can give you Forgetfulness. I can bring you Death. Not that
+death of the body which, for all you know, may mean a keener, more perfect
+capability to live and suffer on the part of the Soul, stripped from the
+earthly husk that has burdened and deadened it. The Death that is Death in
+Life.... Here am I, ready to be your minister. Drink deep, and die!"
+
+The man who heard lifted his white, wild, desperate face. The song came
+more clearly.
+
+"Wronged, outraged, betrayed of the God you blindly believed in and the
+man and the woman who had your passionate love, your absolute faith, have
+your revenge upon the One--as upon those two others. Degrade, cast down,
+deface, the image of your Maker in you. Hurl back every gift of His,
+prostitute and debase every faculty. Cease to believe, denying His Being
+with the Will He forged and freed. Your Body, is it not your own, to do
+with as you choose? Your Soul, is it not your helpless prisoner, while you
+keep it in its cage of clay? Revenge, revenge, through the body and the
+soul, upon Him who has mocked you! Do you not hear Him laugh as you sit
+there desolate in the darkness--poor, broken reed that thought itself an
+oak of might--alone, while your brother kisses the sweet lips that were
+yours. David and Mildred are laughing too, at you. Hasten to efface every
+memory of the lying kisses she has given you upon the bosoms of the
+Daughters of Pleasure! Love, revel, drink! Drink, I say, and you will be
+able to laugh at the One and the two...."
+
+The little hissing voice drove Saxham mad. He leaped up, frenzied,
+oversetting the chair. He tore open and threw wide the doors of the
+oak-and-silver cellaret, and sought in it with shaking hands. He found a
+bottle of champagne and the brandy-decanter, and a long tumbler, and
+knocked off the wired neck of the bottle against the chimneypiece, and
+crashed the foaming wine into the crystal, and filled up the glass with
+brandy, and tossed off the stinging, bubbling, hissing mixture, and
+laughed as he set the tumbler down.
+
+The thing inside the oak-and-silver cellaret laughed too.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hall-door shut heavily as Tait and the women in the kitchen sat and
+listened. They had not spoken since the crash of the falling chair in the
+room overhead. The area-door was open to the hot, sickly night air of
+London in midsummer. Tait slid noiselessly out and listened as his master
+hailed a passing hansom and jumped lightly in. The flaps banged together,
+the driver pulled open the roof-trap and leaned down to catch the shouted
+address. Tait's sharp ear caught it too, and the knowing grin that
+decorated the features of the cabman was reflected upon his decent smug
+countenance. His tongue was in his cheek as he returned to the kitchen.
+For his master had given the direction of a house of ill-fame.
+
+Thenceforwards the door would have shut for ever upon the strenuous,
+honourable, cleanly, useful life of Owen Saxham, were it not that the For
+Ever of humanity means only a little space of years with God--sometimes
+only a little space of hours. Saxham did not need the evidence of the
+shower of cheques from people who hated paying, the request from the
+Committee of his Club that he would resign membership, the averted faces
+of his acquaintances, the elaborate cordiality of his friends, to tell him
+what he knew already. As the astute Tait had said, as Society knew
+already, he was a ruined man. He had made money, but the enormous expenses
+of the Defence swallowed up thousands. By bringing an action against the
+Treasury he might have recovered a portion of the costs--so he was told,
+but he had had enough of Law. He resigned his post at the Hospital, in
+spite of a thinly-worded remonstrance from the Senior Physician. He
+dismissed his servants generously. He disposed of his lease and furniture
+and other property through a firm of auctioneers who robbed him, and sold
+what stocks he had not realised upon, and wrote a farewell letter to his
+mother, and sailed for South Africa. Thenceforwards he was to build his
+nest with the birds of night, and rise from the stertorous sleep that is
+born of drunkenness only to drink himself drunk again.
+
+From assiduous letter-writing friends David heard reports of his brother
+that grieved him deeply. He told these things to Mildred, and they shook
+their heads over them and sighed together. Poor Owen! It was most
+fortunate for his family that the Jury had taken so lenient a view of the
+case ... otherwise ...! They were quite certain in their own minds that
+poor Owen had been culpable, if not guilty. They were married six months
+later. The Directoire hats were out of date, of course, but Louis Quinze,
+with Watteau trimmings suited the six bridesmaids marvellously, and the
+"Non Angli sed Angeli" choir rendered the Anthem and the "Voice that
+Breathed" to perfection.
+
+And Mildred, who never omitted her nightly prayers, made a special
+petition for the reformation of poor misguided Owen upon her
+wedding-night.
+
+"Because we are so happy," she told David, who had found her kneeling,
+white and exquisitely virginal in her lace and cambric draperies by the
+bedside. "And _he_ must be so miserable. And you know, though I never
+_really_ cared for him, he was perfectly devoted to me."
+
+"Who could help it?" cooed enamoured David, and knelt and kissed his
+bride's white feet. The white feet would show no ugly stains, although to
+reach the bridal bed, towards which her husband now drew her, they must
+tread upon his brother's bleeding heart.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+The Dop Doctor lifted his head as the bell of the front door rang loudly
+at the back passage-end. Two mounted officers of the Military Staff at
+Gueldersdorp had trotted up the street with an orderly behind them a
+moment before. The elder of the two had pulled sharply up in front of the
+green door whose brass-plate flamed in the last rays of sunset. He had
+dismounted lightly and gone up the steps and rung, saying something to his
+companion. The other officer had saluted and ridden on, as though to carry
+out some order: the orderly had come up and got off his horse and taken
+the bridle of the officer's, as the Dutch dispensary-attendant, Koets, had
+plodded heavily along the passage and opened the door, and now slouched
+heavily back, ushering in a presumable patient.
+
+"Light the lamp," said the Dop Doctor in Dutch to the factotum, as he rose
+up heavily out of his chair. "It will be dark directly."
+
+"There is no need of more light, I am obliged to you," said the stranger,
+cool, alert, brown of face as of dress: a thin man, distinct of speech,
+quiet of manner, and with singularly vivid eyes of light hazel. "In the
+actual dark I can see quite clearly. A matter of training and habit,
+because I began life as a short-sighted lad. Do we need your assistant
+further?"
+
+In indirect answer to the pointed question, the Dop Doctor turned to the
+Dutch dispensary-assistant, and said curtly:
+
+"Ga uit!"
+
+Koets went, not without a scowl at the visitor.
+
+"A sulky man and a surly master," thought the stranger, scanning with
+those observant eyes of his the gaunt figure in the shabby tweed suit.
+"Has seen trouble and lived hard," he added, mentally noting the haggard
+lines of the square face under the massive forehead, over which a plume of
+badly-brushed hair, black with threads of grey in it, fell awkwardly.
+
+"English and a University man, I should say. Those clothes were cut by a
+Bond Street tailor in the height of fashion about five years ago. And the
+man is in the second stage of recovery from a bout of drunkenness--unless
+he drugs?" But even while the visitor was taking these memoranda, he was
+saying in the customary tone of polite inquiry:
+
+"I have, I think, the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Williams?"
+
+"Sir, you have not. Dr. De Boursy-Williams has left for Cape Town with his
+family. You are speaking to his temporary substitute." The bloodshot blue
+eyes met his own indifferently.
+
+"Indeed! Well, I do not grudge the family if, as I believe is the case, it
+chiefly ranks upon the distaff side. But the Doctor will miss a good deal
+of interesting practice. As to yourself, you will allow the inquiry....
+Are you a surgeon as well as a medical practitioner?"
+
+"If I were not, I should not be here."
+
+"I will put my question differently. I trust you will not consider its
+repetition offensive. Have you an extensive experience in dealing with
+gunshot wounds?"
+
+Saxham said roughly:
+
+"I have experience to a certain extent. I will go no further than to say
+so. I am not undergoing examination as to my professional capabilities
+that I am aware of, and if you doubt them you are perfectly at liberty to
+seek medical advice elsewhere."
+
+"My good sir, I _have_ been elsewhere, and the other doctor, when he
+learned the purport of my visit, relished it as little as your principal
+is likely to do. With the imminent prospect of a siege before us, we are
+making ..." The speaker, slipping one hand behind him, moved a step
+backwards and nearer to the room-door. "As I said, sir, with the imminent
+prospect of a siege before us, we are making a house-to-house
+requisition.... Ah, I thought as much!"
+
+The door-knob had been quietly turned, the door suddenly pulled open,
+bringing with it Koets, the Dutch dispensary-attendant, whose large red
+ear had been glued to the outer keyhole.
+
+"Your Dutch factotum has been listening. Pick yourself off the mat, Jan,
+and take yourself out of earshot." The stranger whistled the beginning of
+a pleasant little tune, with a flavour of Savoy Opera about it.
+
+"Ik heb not the neem of Jan," snarled the detected Koets, retiring in
+disorder.
+
+The whistler left off in the middle of a deftly-executed embellishment to
+say: "Unfortunate; because I don't know the Dutch word for spy." The keen
+hazel eyes and the haggard blue ones met, and there was the faint
+semblance of a smile on the grim mouth of the Dop Doctor. Keeping the door
+open, the visitor went on:
+
+"I have some notes here--entries copied from the Railway freight-books.
+Three weeks ago twenty carboys of carbolic acid, with a considerable
+consignment of other antiseptics, surgical necessaries, drugs, and so
+forth were delivered to Dr. Williams' order at this address. Frankly, as
+the officer commanding Her Majesty's troops on this border, I am here to
+make a sequestration of the things I have mentioned, with all other
+medical and surgical requisites stored upon the premises, that are likely
+to be of use to us at the Hospital. In the name of the Imperial
+Government."
+
+The smile died out on the grim mouth. A sombre anger burned in the blue
+eyes of the haggard man in shabby tweeds.
+
+"Damn the Imperial Government!" said the Dop Doctor.
+
+The stranger nodded in serious assent. "Certainly, damn it! It is your
+privilege and mine, shared in common with all other Britons, to damn our
+Government, as long as we remain loyal to our Queen and country."
+
+The other man quivered with a sudden uncontrollable spasm of hate, rage,
+and loathing. He clenched his hand and shook it in the air as he cried:
+
+"You employ the stock phrases of your profession. They have long ceased to
+mean anything to me. I have been the victim and the sacrifice of British
+laws. I have been formally pardoned by the State for a crime I never
+committed. I have been robbed, plundered, ruined, betrayed, by the
+monstrous thing that bears the name of British Justice. And as I loathe
+and hate it, so do I cast off and repudiate the name of Englishman. You
+speak of the imminent prospect of a siege. What other causes have operated
+to bring it about but British greed, and the British lust for paramountcy
+and suzerainty and possession? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or
+Unionist, the diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your
+political machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying
+promises, are swayed by one motive--governed by one desire--lands and
+diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of other men, soil that has
+been fertilised by the sweat of a nation of agriculturists, whom Great
+Britain despised until she learned that gold lay under their orchards and
+cornfields." He broke into a jarring laugh. "And it is for these, the
+robbers and desperadoes, that the British Army is to do its duty, and for
+them that De Boursy-Williams is to help pay the piper. As for his
+property, which you are about to commandeer in the name of the British
+Imperial Government, I suppose I am legally responsible, being left here
+in charge. Well, be it so!... I can only protest against what I am free to
+regard as an act of brigandage, reflecting small credit upon your Service,
+and leave you, sir, to discover the whereabouts of the carboys for
+yourself!"
+
+He waved his hand contemptuously, and swung towards the door.
+
+"A moment," said the other man, "in which to assure you that the fullest
+acknowledgments will be given in the case of the stores, and that their
+owner will be paid for them liberally and ungrudgingly. And, granting
+that much of what you have said is true, and that the leaven of
+self-seeking is to be found in every man's nature, and that greed is the
+predominating motive with those men who, more than others, work for the
+building-up of an Empire and the profitable union of Britain with her
+Colonies, don't you think that there may be something in the good old
+footballer's motto, 'Play the game, that your side may win'?"
+
+The Dop Doctor made a slight sound that might have been of indifferent
+assent or of contradiction. The other chose to take it as assent.
+
+"Take the present situation, purely as football. They have picked me as a
+forward player. And I mean--to play the game!"
+
+The Dop Doctor might or might not have heard. His square, impassive face
+looked as if carved in stone.
+
+"To play the game, Doctor. Perhaps I have my bone or two to pick
+with--several of the Institutions of my country. Possibly, but I mean to
+play the game. Fate has ridden me on a saddle-gall or two, and mixed too
+much chopped straw in proportion to the beans, but--there's the game, and
+I'm going to play it for all I'm worth. As an old University man, that way
+of looking at things ought to appeal to you."
+
+Still no answer from the big, sullen, black-haired man in the shabby worn
+clothes. But his breathing was a little quickened, and a faint,
+smouldering glow of something not yet quenched in him showed in the
+haggard blue eyes.
+
+"It's a confoundedly handicapped game, too, on the defending side. Doesn't
+that fact rather appeal to the sportsman in you, Doctor?"
+
+The other said slowly:
+
+"I gather that the struggle will be unequal. It was stated in my hearing
+yesterday afternoon that a considerable force of Boers were advancing on
+Gueldersdorp from the direction of Geitfontein, and, later, that another
+large body of them were on the march along the river-valley from the west.
+I did not attempt to verify what I had heard from my own observation. I
+was--otherwise engaged." The half-incredulous surprise that the other man
+could not keep out of his eyes stung him into adding: "Frankly, I did not
+care to trouble. It did not interest me."
+
+The Colonel said, with a dry chuckle:
+
+"No? But it will presently, though! And, seen through the glass even now,
+it's an instructive spectacle. Masses of Dutchmen, well-weaponed and
+thoroughly fed if insufficiently washed, gathering in all
+quarters--marching to the assembly points, dismounting, unlimbering, going
+into laager. Ten thousand Boers, at a rough estimate, not counting the
+blacks they have armed against us.... And, behind our railway-sleepers and
+sand-bags, eight hundred fighting European units, twenty per cent, of them
+raw civilians; and seven thousand neutral Barala and Kaffirs and Zulus in
+the native Stad--an element of danger lying dormant, waiting the spark
+that may hurry us all sky-high.... By God, Doctor, the game's worth
+playing, except by cowards and curs!"
+
+The smouldering glow in the Dop Doctor's eyes had been fanned into a fire.
+The visitor saw the flame leap, and went on:
+
+"There's a native proverb--I wonder whether you know it?--a kind of Zulu
+version of the regimental motto, _Vestigia nulla retrorsum_. It runs like
+this: '_If we go forward, we die; if we go backward, we die. Better go
+forward and die._'" He reached out a long, lean, brown right hand. "Come
+forward with us, Doctor. We can do with a man like you!"
+
+The impassive face broke up. Saxham gripped the offered hand as a drowning
+man might have done. He cried out hoarsely:
+
+"You don't know the sort of man I am, Colonel. But everybody else in this
+cursed place knows, or should know. They call me the Dop Doctor. You
+understand what that nickname implies?" He held out his shaking hands.
+"Look at these! They would tell you the truth, even if I lied. What use
+can a man like me be to you, or men like you? I am a drunkard, sir. I have
+not gone to bed sober one night in the last five years!"
+
+There was a pause before the Colonel answered, filled up in the odd way
+characteristic of the man by a softly-whistled repetition of the opening
+bars of the pleasant little tune. Then he said quietly and dryly:
+
+"There is another proverb, not Latin nor Zulu, but English, which
+impresses on us that it is never too late to mend!" He looked at a
+tarnished Waterbury watch, worn on a horse's lip-strap. "I am due to
+inspect the Hospital tomorrow at ten o'clock sharp. If you will meet me
+there punctually at the half-hour, I shall have the pleasure of
+introducing you to--your Colleagues of the Medical Staff. And now, if you
+please, as I have just five minutes left to spare, we will have a look at
+those carboys of carbolic."
+
+"They are in the old Chinese godown at the bottom of the garden," said
+Saxham. He felt in one of the baggy pockets of the old tweed coat, pulled
+out a key, and offered it silently to the conqueror, who motioned it back.
+
+
+
+
+"Keep it, if you'll be so good. We'll send a waggon and a careful man or
+two round from the Army Service Stores Department within an hour; for that
+stuff in your friend's carboys is more precious than rubies to us just
+now--a man's life in every teaspoonful. And if, as you tell me, there is
+some mercurial perchloride, Taggart and the Medical Staff will jump for
+joy. What we owe to Lister, Koch, and those fellows! You'd say so if you'd
+ever seen gangrene on War Hospital scale--in Afghanistan, in 1880, even as
+recently as the Zululand Campaign of 1888. The Pathan and the Zulu are
+slim, and the Boer is even slimmer, but the wiliest customer of 'em all is
+the Microbe. No wonder Wellington's old campaigners used to slit the
+throats of badly-wounded soldiers, or that the ambulance-men of Soult and
+Bonaparte were merciful enough to knock on the head every poor beggar who
+had been bayonetted in the body. They knew there was not the atom of a
+chance. But to-day we know how to deal with the invisible enemy. Thanks to
+Antiseptic Surgery, that younger daughter of Science and Genius, as some
+smart fellow puts it in the _National Review_."
+
+And the pleasant little tune was whistled through to its final grace-note
+as the two men went down the house-passage and crossed the garden. Verily,
+to some other men that have lived since Peter of the Nets has it been
+given to be fishers of their kind! This man said that night to an officer
+of the Staff:
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+"I landed twenty carboys of carbolic to-day, and a lot of other Hospital
+stores, by talking football to a man who knows the game, chiefly from the
+ball's point of view."
+
+"That counts to you, Colonel," called out Beauvayse, the Chief's fair,
+boyish junior aide-de-camp, from the bottom of the table, "against the
+awful failure you were grousing about this morning."
+
+"Ah! you mean when I tried to frighten some Sisters of Mercy into leaving
+the town by painting them a luridly-coloured verbal picture of the perils
+of the present situation," said the Colonel. His keen hazel eyes twinkled,
+though his mouth was grave. "I ought to have remembered that you can't
+scare a religious, be he or she Roman Catholic, Buddhist, or Mohammedan,
+by pointing to the King of Terrors. He does to frighten lay-folk, but for
+the others Death's grisly skeleton-hand holds out the Keys of Heaven."
+
+"What will it hold for some of us others, I wonder," said one of the
+dinner-guests, a moody-looking civilian, of Semitic features, whose
+evening clothes made a dull contrast with the mess-dress of the Staff
+officers gathered about their Chief's table in his quarters at Nixey's
+Hotel on the Market Square, "before this month is out?"
+
+The host leaned forward to reply:
+
+"My dear Mr. Levison ... special mention in Despatches Above, with honours
+and promotion for those of us who have been approved worthy. For others,
+who have tried and failed, a merciful overlooking of blunders, a generous
+acceptance of the intention where the performance came short.... And for
+the rest ... a grave on the yellow veld in the shadow of a rock or
+thorn-bush, with the turquoise sky of day overhead, shimmering in the
+white-hot sunshine; or an ocean of purple ether, ridden by what old Lucian
+called 'the golden galley of the regnant Moon.' That in South Africa; and
+at home in England, one's memory kept warm and living in, say, three
+hearts that recognised the best in one, and loved it. A mother's heart,
+the heart of a friend--and _hers_!"
+
+There was no insincerity of flattery in the hum of applauding comment that
+ensued. All earnest original thought has beauty; and this man could not
+only think, but clothe his thoughts in direct and simple language, and add
+to it the charm of well-modulated and musical utterance.
+
+"I call that good enough," said the senior Staff Officer, a dark,
+handsome, eagle-faced Guardsman, who bore a great historic name, "for you
+or me or any other fellow here--we're not taking into account the living
+dead ones."
+
+The Chief leaned forward in his characteristic attitude, and spoke, a
+long, lean brown forefinger emphasising the sentences, his hawk-keen
+glance driving them home. "I tell you, Leighbury, that some of those, the
+rottenest corpses among 'em, will shed their grave-clothes, and rise up
+and do the deeds of living men before, to quote Levison, this month is
+out. Never take it for granted that a man is dead until the grass is
+growing high over his bare bones, and don't make too sure even then!
+Because to-day I saw such dry bones move--and it's an instructive if an
+uncanny sight."
+
+"Whose were the bones, Colonel?" called out the handsome young aide at the
+bottom of the table.
+
+The host, his thin, brown fingers busy at the clipped moustache, was
+listening to the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, who sat upon his right. He
+withdrew his attentive eyes from that stalwart sportsman's broad, ruddy
+countenance, to glance smilingly at the fair, handsome face, and reply:
+
+"Whose? Well, up to the present they have belonged to the Dop Doctor."
+
+"That man!" The Mayor, in the act of taking another slice of the roast,
+looked round as at the mention of a name familiar, shrugging his portly
+shoulders. "Surely you know who the fellow is, Colonel? He drifted up here
+from Cape Colony three years ago. A capable--confoundedly capable man,
+handicapped by a severe muscular strain," the Mayor's twinkling eye
+heralded the resurrection of an ancient jest--"contracted in lifting a
+cask of whisky--a glass at a time!"
+
+White teeth flashed in alert tanned faces. The schoolboy laugh went round
+the table; then the Babel of talk rose up again. Most of these men were
+quite young ... their seniors barely middle-aged, not a man but was what
+they themselves would have termed both "fit" and "keen." They had wrought
+for many days in the erection of sand-bag defences, in the digging of
+trenches, in the drilling of Baraland Irregulars and Rifle Volunteers and
+the newly-enrolled Town Guard. This was the pleasant social time of lull
+before the storm, and they were not to get many more good dinners or
+peaceful nights in bed for a long siege to come. They did not show
+outwardly the tension of strung nerves that waited, as the whole world
+waited, for the echo of the first shot, rattling amongst the low hills to
+the south. Nor did it occur to them that there was anything heroic or
+dramatic in their quiet unaffected pose. Gathered together upon one little
+spot of border earth destined to be the vital, tragic, throbbing centre of
+great events and tremendous issues, actions glorious, and deeds scarce
+paralleled upon the page of History, let us look upon them, well-groomed,
+well-bred, easy-mannered, cheery, demolishing the good dishes furnished by
+the _chef_ of Nixey's Hotel, with the hungry zest of schoolboys,
+exchanging fusillades of not very brilliant chaff.
+
+Scraps of scientific and technical conversation with reference to
+telephonic and telegraphic installations between outlying forts and
+headquarters, electric communication with mines, automatic
+warning-apparatus, the most effective methods of constructing bomb-proof
+shelters, the comparative merits of Maxim and Nordenfeldt, crossed in the
+air like fragments of bursting projectiles, impelled by those admirable
+engines of destruction. Mingled with reminiscences of cricket, golf,
+tennis, polo, and motoring, then in its infancy; anecdotes new and old,
+and conjectures as to what the fellows at home were doing? Hurlingham and
+Ranelagh, Maidenhead and Henley, Eton and Oxford, Sandhurst and Aldershot,
+Piccadilly in the season, Simla in the heats, the results for Kempton Park
+and Newmarket Races--of all these they talked, with rhino and elephant
+shooting and the big battues of pheasants now taking place in the Home
+Midlands and up North. But though the watch-fires of their pickets burned
+upon the veld, and though the Boer lay in laager over the Border, of him
+they said not one word. That reticence upon the vital point was
+characteristically English. The excitable Gaul would have wept, kneaded
+his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother; the stolid Muscovite would
+have wept also, referring to his Little Father, the Czar; the Teuton would
+have poured forth oceans of turgid sentiment about the Fatherland; the
+dignified Spaniard would have recognised himself as a warrior upon the
+verge of a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical American
+would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket-handkerchief-sized
+replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner until too exhausted to agitate or
+vocalise. But to these men indulgence in sentiment was "bad form," and
+unrestrained patriotic utterance merely "gas," tainting the air with an
+odour as of election-eggs or sulphuretted hydrogen. Therefore were many
+words to be avoided.
+
+A pose, if you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance of all
+appearance of enthusiasm or excitement; showing the weak spot in the
+armour of these heroes, henceforth to be of epic fame. But Man is
+essentially a weak being. It is only when the immortal spirit of him
+nerves the frame of perishable bone and muscle that he rises to heights
+that are sublime. Such souls of fire burned within these men, that when
+the Wind of Death blew coldest and the lead-and-iron hail beat hardest,
+they only glowed more fiercely radiant; and Want and Privation, instead of
+weakening, only seemed to make them more strong;--strong to endure, strong
+to foresee plots and avert perils and oppose wit to cunning, and strategy
+to deceit; so strong that, by reason of their strength, that little
+frontier town became a fortress of Titans. And their names, other than
+those I have given them in this story, shall go ringing down the grooves
+of Time, until Time itself shall be no more.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+While they ate and drank, laughed, and chatted, the man who was to be
+their comrade, sharer in all those perils and privations yet to come, was
+tramping up and down the bare boards of the dingy bedchamber in Harris
+Street, wrestling desperately with his tragic thirst.
+
+"Why did he come and look at me, and take me by the hand, and awaken my
+deadened senses to the sting of anguish that has no name? Why could he not
+have left me alone in this living death I had attained!" he cried. "When
+first I took to the infernal, blessed liquor, it was for the sake of
+respite from mental pain, torture unbearable. Then I was a man, only
+unhappy. Now I am lower than the lowest of the sensible, cleanly, decent
+brutes, because I desire the drink for its own sake, and find
+gratification in physical degradation. O God, if Thou indeed art, and I
+must perforce return to live the life of a man amongst men, help to burst
+the chains that fetter me! Help me to be free!"
+
+He swallowed a great draught of water, and stumbled to the unused bed, and
+threw himself across it, raging and panting, and defiant of the very Power
+he invoked. And then, against hope, sleep came to him, drowning memory and
+obliterating thought, and relieving physical suffering. The lines smoothed
+out of the heavy forehead, and the grim mouth relaxed in the smile that
+his dead mother had kissed, coming in with the shaded candle to look at
+her sleeping boy.
+
+Just as the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, that stalwart Yorkshireman, mighty
+hunter of elephant, rhino, giraffe, and lion in the reckless days of
+bloodshed that were before the introduction of the Game Laws into South
+Africa, was saying to the Colonel:
+
+"Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless! A confirmed drunkard, who has soaked away
+all self-respect, who has been cautioned and warned and fined a score of
+times, by myself and other magistrates. Dr. de Boursy-Williams, our
+leading practitioner here, has taken the fellow under his wing, in a
+manner--bails him out when it is necessary, and, I believe, when the man
+is sober enough, gives him work in his dispensary and allows him to
+administer the anaesthetic when it's a question of a surgical operation.
+Wonder he trusts him, for my part! Yet De Boursy-Williams is a remarkably
+successful operator, and hardly ever loses a case. It is unfortunate that
+he should have been called away to Cape Town at this juncture."
+
+"He has left Dr. Saxham as _locum tenens_, I understand."
+
+The Mayor shrugged his portly shoulders
+
+"As to his qualifications, there's no doubt. Ranked high at one time as a
+London West End specialist. I have seen his name myself in a British
+Medical Directory of some years back as principal visiting-surgeon to St.
+Stephen's and the Ludgate Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. Has written
+books--scientific works that are quoted now. Must have been making money
+hand-over-hand when the collapse came. The usual thing--one slip--and a
+Police-court Inquiry follows, and down goes the unlucky wretch with the
+Crown on top of him, and all the Press pack yelping for soft snaps. True,
+the finding of the Jury was 'Not Guilty,' but the fact of there having
+been a prosecution was enough to ruin Saxham professionally. Ah, I thought
+you must have heard the name!"
+
+For the listener had moved suddenly. He did remember the name of the
+distinguished London practitioner who had been discreditably mixed up in
+the case of Mrs. Bough, the young, miserable, murdered creature, who might
+possibly have been the daughter of Richard Mildare. Tough and cool as his
+tried nerves were, he shuddered at the thought, and a sickly heat made the
+points of perspiration stand out upon his forehead. But the Mayor, good
+man, was prosing on:
+
+"I can't say the facts of the case are very clear in my recollection, but
+I have a file of the _Daily Wire_ at home, extending over six years back,
+so the Criminal Court proceedings must be reported in it. The woman's
+name, I do remember, was Bough. As regards her age, now you ask me"--for
+the Colonel had put a quick question--"I fancy she must have been
+twenty-two or three. Indeed, I am almost certain that was the age as
+stated by the Medical Witness for the Prosecution.... However, I'll go
+into the reports and let you know for certain."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And, in case those _Daily Wire_ files are
+bomb-proof, possibly it would be better to take the family with you--and
+stop until times improve."
+
+"Not bad, not half bad, Colonel! But to tell the truth, I wouldn't miss
+what we used to call the shindy, and these boys of yours term the 'scrap'
+for a pile of Kruger sovereigns. And--I can shoot better than most men, if
+I am in the sere and yellow sixties." The Mayor was slightly ruffled; the
+diplomatic touch smoothed him down.
+
+"My money is on you, Mr. Mayor, when it comes to stopping a Boer with a
+rifle-bullet at four hundred yards. By the way, I have a little confidence
+to repose in you. When you meet--as I am convinced you will meet--Dr.
+Saxham at the Hospital or elsewhere, metaphorically clothed and in his
+right mind, and in the active discharge of duties which no man, judging by
+your own testimony, is better fitted to perform, let him down gently."
+
+The Mayor, conscious of civic dignity and magisterial warnings from the
+Bench ignored, swelled obviously.
+
+"My dear sir, you can't let the Dop Doctor down anyhow. He is--just about
+as low as a man can get--short of being underground."
+
+"Lend him a hand up--in the first instance--by forgetting that confounded
+nickname which I was clumsy enough to blurt out just now. Be oblivious of
+what he is, because of what he has been in the past, and will be in the
+future. For there is tremendous stuff in the fellow even now--or I am a
+bad judge of men."
+
+"Colonel, you're a thundering bad judge of drunkards, from the Bench's
+point of view, but you'd be a damned good special pleader for a client in
+need of all the excuses that could be trumped up for him."
+
+"We all have something we'd like to have an excuse for, Mr. Mayor." The
+keen hawk-eyes held a twinkle in reserve. "There was a man I knew, a
+mighty hunter before the Lord--and before the Game Laws." The thin brown
+fingers of the muscular hard-palmed hand played with the stem of a
+wineglass as the sentences came out, crisp and pointed. "Well, this is the
+story of a mistake, and an old _shikari_ of your experience can find even
+more excuses for it than I can ... but perhaps I bore you?"
+
+"On the contrary--on the contrary, sir."
+
+The fish had taken the bait, remained to play the quivering captive until
+his last swirling struggle brought him within reach of the skilful dip and
+lift of the angler's net.
+
+"It was about four years ago, in the Portuguese coast-lands, South of the
+Zambesi, where elephants are to be had, and rhino, particularly the
+Keitloa variety with the long posterior horn, and a bad habit of charging
+the man behind the 600 bore...."
+
+Mr. Mayor's capacious white waistcoat was agitated by a subterranean
+chuckle. His double chin shook merrily. "A side shot through the
+head--solid bullet--is the best cure for that, Colonel. But you had to
+wait in the high swamp-grass and keep the wind of him, and make sure of
+your aim."
+
+"Quite so. This man, from the shelter of a rock, waited to make sure of
+his aim. The rhino was feeding tsetse as he dozed in the high swamp-grass.
+His biggest horn showed, and a bit of his shiny black skin. One forward
+lunge of the brute's head--and the hunter could get that side-shot. For
+that he waited, patience being, as we know, a virtue to be cultivated by
+the successful stalker of big game----"
+
+The Mayor, boiled prawn-pink to the receding boundary-line of his upright
+white hair, coughed awkwardly.
+
+"The man waited two hours. Then the unclad and obese native lady, carrying
+a long pointed grass-basket on her back, who had squatted down in the high
+grass to smoke a pipe and administer maternal refreshment to a shiny black
+piccannin of three or four----!"
+
+The Mayor, purple now, burst out:
+
+"Got up and went on! And, if these boys of yours get wind of that story, I
+shall be roasted within an inch of my life. Whoever told you? For the love
+of Heaven, don't give me away!"
+
+The keen eyes, were dancing now--the big fish had fairly got the gaff.
+
+"I promise, Mr. Mayor, upon the understanding that you don't give away my
+man.... It's a compact? Thanks tremendously! And here comes the Manager
+to be congratulated upon the haunch. I never tasted better venison, Mr.
+Nixey, though, as you say, this is rather far North for koodoo. And the
+quail were beyond praise. Waiter, a glass for Mr. Nixey.... Port--and
+we're going to ask you to join us in drinking a toast...."
+
+The beautiful, flushed boy rose solemnly, glass in hand. About the long
+board, adorned with a fine epergne full of roses, Cape jessamine and
+purple bougainvillea, spread with Nixey's best plate and linen, crystal,
+and dishes of Staffordshire china piled with golden mandarins, and
+loquats, the fruit of October; there was a great uprising of those
+phlegmatic, self-contained Britons. Straight as the flames of unblown
+torches, they burned about the table. And with a simultaneous movement all
+those eyes of varied colours turned to the lean brown face of the Chief,
+as the sweet young clarion rang out:
+
+"Gentlemen--the Queen!"
+
+The brimming glasses rose high,--one crystal wave with the crimson of
+blood in it. The resonant English and the thinner Colonial voices answered
+together with a crash. As of the wave breaking on white cliffs northwards,
+and a great surge of love and loyalty went out from all those hearts to
+England, throbbing to the steps of the Throne where She sat, bowed with
+great griefs and great joys and great triumphs and glories, and
+white-haired with the full burden of her venerable years.
+
+"The Queen!"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+They lingered not long over wine and cigars. Lady Hannah Wrynche,
+entertaining what she disdainfully termed a "hen party" in her private
+rooms at Nixey's, vacated in her honour by the landlord's wife--expected
+them to coffee. Much to the relief of the military authorities at Cape
+Town, Milady, most erratic of Society meteors, had quitted that centre of
+painstaking official misinformation, for the throbbing spot of debatable
+land whence events might be gathered as they sprang. Shooting across the
+orbit of the reddening, low-hanging War-planet, she had descended upon
+Gueldersdorp in a shower of baggage-trunks, fox-terriers, and
+interrogations. For one thing, she explained to everybody, she had
+undertaken to supply a London Daily with a series of articles, written
+from the Seat of Hostilities, and for another, Bingo was on the Staff, and
+it would be so nice for him, poor dear, to have his wife near him in case
+he happened to get ... was "chipped" the proper technical term, or
+"potted"? The articles were intended to be the real thing--racy of the
+soil, don't you know? and full of "go" and atmosphere. Let it be said here
+that they achieved raciness. The London print in which they appeared came
+to be christened by the scoffer and the incredulous the _Daily Whale_--it
+swallowed and disgorged so many of the Jonahs rejected by other editors.
+But the profits increased, and the proprietors could afford to smile at
+envy.
+
+Just now the insatiable gold fountain-pen from whence our indefatigable
+Lady Correspondent derived her literary pseudonym, was employed in
+recording merest gossip, in the absence of the longed-for opportunity for
+its wielder to prove herself the equal, if not the superior, of Dora Corr.
+Dora was the woman Lady Hannah admired and envied above all others.
+Colonial Editor to _The Thunderbolt_, War Correspondent, financial expert,
+political leader-writer, and diplomatic go-between when Cabinet Ministers
+and Empire-builders would arrive at understandings, the serfdom of sex,
+the trammels of the petticoat, may have been said to weigh as lightly upon
+this thrice-fortunate spinster as though it were no drawback to be a
+daughter of Eve.
+
+Oh! prayed Lady Hannah, for the chance of proving that another woman can
+equal this brilliant feminine Phoenix! Meanwhile her bright eyes and quick
+sense of humour took note of the toilettes of some of her guests, wives
+and daughters of notable citizens who had not hurried South at the first
+mutterings of the storm. The purple satin worn by the Mayoress tickled her
+no less than the unfeigned horror of its wearer when offered from her
+hostess's chatelaine cigarette-case the choicest of Sobranies. Lady
+Hannah's laugh was the rattling of a mischievous boy's stick across his
+sister's piano-wires, and the metallic jangle preceded her assurance that
+everybody did it--all women in Society, at least, and you were thought
+odd if you didn't. After dinner, in the most exclusive houses, the most
+rigid of hostesses invariably allowed their women guests to smoke. They
+knew people worth having wouldn't come if they weren't allowed to.
+
+"Never beneath my roof!" gasped the shocked and scandalised wearer of the
+purple splendours demanded of the wife of a Chief Magistrate. "Never at my
+table!" Of course, the agitated Mayoress went on to say, one had heard of
+the doings of the Smart Set. But one had hoped it wasn't true, or, at
+least, had been very much exaggerated by "writing-people." The Mayoress,
+though a mild woman, had her sting.
+
+Lady Hannah, immensely tickled to find the morals of Bayswater rampant, as
+she afterwards expressed it, in the centre of South Africa, cackled as she
+helped herself to a second liqueur-glass of Nixey's excellent
+apricot-brandy. Small, thin, restless, she presented a parched appearance,
+with bright, round, beady eyes continually roving in search of information
+from beneath the straggling fringe of a crumpled Pompadour transformation,
+for those horrors had recently become fashionable, and the whole world of
+women were vying with one another in the simulation of the criminal type
+of skull, with the Dolichocephalic Bulge.
+
+"My dear lady, tobacco-ash is an excellent thing for killing moth in
+carpets, and Time,--when one is compelled to bestow it upon dull people;
+and a perfectly healthy, Nonconformist conscience must be a comfortable
+lodger. But as regards the sacred roof, and the defended table, it's a
+question how long both British institutions remain intact, with those big
+guns getting into position round us...." She waved her small hand, its
+once well-tended nails superbly ignored, its sun-cracks neglected, its
+load of South African diamonds coruscating magnificently in the light of
+Nixey's electric bulbs, and shrugged her thin, vivacious shoulders.
+
+The entrance of the gentlemen relieved the situation. Lady Hannah jumped
+up and rushed at the Colonel. "As if she meant to eat the man," the
+Mayoress said afterwards, in the shadow of that threatened roof. But,
+impervious to the entreaty of the bright black eyes and the glittering
+hand that gesticulated with the urgent fan, he bowed, smiled, said a few
+pleasant words to his hostess, and walked "straight across"--as the
+Mayoress afterwards confided to the Mayor--to take a seat beside the
+large, placid, matronly figure palpitating in purple satin on an imported
+Maple sofa.
+
+Pleased and flattered, she made room for him, while Lady Hannah became the
+gossip-centre of a knot of Mess uniforms....
+
+"Both babies well?" It would have been unlike him not to have remembered
+that he had seen children at her house. "Hammy and Berta made great
+friends with me the other day.... Tell them I haven't forgotten the
+promise to rummage up some odd native toys I picked up in Rhodesia--made
+of mud and feathers and bits of fur and queerly-shaped seed-pods--the most
+enchanting collection of birds and beasts that ever came out of the Ark.
+And the Makalaka have a legend about a big flood and a wise old man who
+built a house of reeds and skins that floated.... The North American
+Indians will tell you that it was a Big Medicine Canoe, and amongst the
+tribes of the Nilghiri Hills you find exactly the same story that the
+Chaldean scribes wrote on their tablets of clay. To-day in Eastern
+Kurdistan they'll point you out the peak on which the Ark grounded. The
+Armenians hold it was Ararat.... It's curious how the root-legend crops up
+everywhere...."
+
+"But of course it must." Her good, calm eyes showed surprise, and her
+broad, white, matronly bosom was a little fluttered. "Doesn't the Bible
+teach us that the Deluge covered the whole earth? Even Hammy and Berta can
+tell you the whole story about Noah, and the raven--and the dove."
+
+He smoothed his moustache with a palm that wiped the smile out.
+
+"I must get them to tell it me one of these days." The twinkle in his eye
+was not to be repressed. "It would save such a deal of trouble to believe
+there was only one Noah, and only one Ark, don't you know?"
+
+Her motherly bosom panted.
+
+"_My_ children shall _never_ believe anything else!"
+
+He was grave and sympathetic, though a muscle in his thin cheek twitched.
+
+"I believe the toy Ark of our happy childish memories is built, if not of
+gopher-wood, at least upon the lines laid down in Scripture. Has Hammy
+ever tried to get his to float? Mine invariably used to sink--straight to
+the bottom of the bath. Perhaps that continually-recurrent catastrophe had
+something to do with the sapping of my infant faith, or the establishment
+of a sinking-fund of doubt regarding the veracity of the Noachian
+reporter?"
+
+She leaned towards him, her placid grey eyes dilating with pity for this
+man.
+
+"You ought to come and sit under our minister Mr. Oddris, on Sundays. Pray
+do. He would convince you if anybody could. Such an eloquent, able,
+well-informed man, and so _truly pious_ and _brave_!"
+
+The laugh perforce escaped him. The convincing Apostle Oddris had called
+on him at official headquarters that day, to inquire whether, as the said
+Oddris's wife and children were going to the Women's Laager, his place as
+a husband and father was not by their side? Being informed that
+able-bodied male beings were not included in the list of the defenceless,
+he had become importunate in the matter of at least a bomb-proof shelter
+to be erected in his back-yard.
+
+"I had rather sit under Hammy and hear about Noah, with Berta on the other
+knee."
+
+Her heart went out wholly to him.... 'Out of the mouths of babes.' ...
+Wasn't _that_ one of the texts with promise?...
+
+"You love children?"
+
+"Bless the little beggars!" he said heartily, "they're the jolliest
+company in the world."
+
+She leaned towards him, palpitating between her shyness of the Commander
+of the Garrison and her womanly curiosity to know more about the man.
+
+"Hammond--the Mayor has told me--I hope it is not indiscreet to mention
+it--that the first thing you did, on joining your regiment in India as a
+young subaltern, was to gather all the European children in cantonments
+together and march them through the place, playing 'The Girl I Left Behind
+Me' on the flute."
+
+His brow grew black as thunder. The utterance came, terse and sharp.
+
+"Ma'am, you have been gravely misinformed."
+
+She jumped in terror.
+
+"Oh!... Can it be?... Colonel, I do so beg you to forgive me! Let me
+assure you that neither the Mayor nor myself will ever again repeat the
+story."
+
+"Ma'am, if you do ..."
+
+"But I promise, never ..."
+
+"Ma'am, if you never do, at least remember that the flute was an ocarina."
+
+He left the good soul in an ecstasy of giggles, and crossed to Lady
+Hannah. She welcomed him with a glitter of eyes and teeth and discovered
+the reserve-chair that had been covered by her somewhat fatigued and
+wilted draperies of maize Liberty-silk, veiled with black Maltese lace.
+
+"What it is to be a man of tact! You've made that purple creature
+perfectly happy. Don't say you're going to be less kind to another woman!"
+
+She tapped with a reproachful fan the scarlet sleeve of his thin serge
+mess-jacket, her appraising eye busy with the badges worn on the dark
+green roll-collar and the miniature medals and star. If a clever woman
+could be the confidante of a Cabinet Minister, the post of right-hand to
+the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces in Gueldersdorp might be won. And then
+the world would know what Hannah Wrynche was born for. What was he saying?
+
+"I never warn my victims beforehand."
+
+"Sphinx! and I hoped to find you in the relenting mood!"
+
+"If possible, ma'am, my granite bosom is more unyielding than on the last
+occasion when ..."
+
+"Do go on!" said the fan.
+
+"When you tried to tap it."
+
+"You're all alike." She sighed. "That is, you give the keynote, and the
+others take up the tune. Even Bingo--Bingo, whom I firmly believed
+incapable of keeping a secret in which his dearest interests were
+concerned longer than ten minutes--Bingo has sprung a surprise on me. I
+shall end by falling in love with my own husband--such an indecent thing
+to do after seven years of married life!"
+
+"Fortunately, the scene of your lapse from the crooked path of custom is
+distant from the West End of London nearly seven thousand miles. And you
+can rely upon me for secrecy."
+
+"Ah, that!... If only you _did_ leak a little information now and then."
+Her eyebrows went up to the dry fringe of her Pompadour transformation.
+"For the sake of the thirsting public at home, to say nothing of my
+reputation as a Special Correspondent----"
+
+"Drive over and call on General Brounckers at Head Laager, Geitfontein, on
+the Border, early to-morrow. Perhaps he would oblige you with matter for a
+paragraph, and forward the cable by private wire?"
+
+Her birdlike eyes were bright on him.
+
+"I would go if I thought I could get anything by going. Special
+information--with reference to a Plan of Attack. Oh! if you knew how I'm
+dying to be really under fire. To hear bullets zip-zip--isn't that the
+sound?--as they strike the ground or walls, and shells scream overhead!"
+
+She clasped her sunburnt little jewelled hands in affected ecstasy. His
+eyes were stern, and the lines about his mouth deepened.
+
+"Pray to-night that you may never hear those sounds you speak of!"
+
+She struck an exaggerated attitude of horrified consternation.
+
+"But no! Why am I here?"
+
+"The Lord only knows. I've seen a hen peck at a lump of dynamite...."
+
+"Ah, you never will take me seriously. But own in your secret heart you're
+as much afraid as I am that a Relieving Column will be sent down
+from----Do tell me again where Grumer is with the Brigade? Uli, in Upper
+Rhodesia--thanks! Well, Grumer is quite a near friend of Bingo's, and an
+old flame of mine. But--to burst our lovely peacock bubble of Siege and
+let the whole situation down, _sans coup ferir_, into muddy
+commonplace--may Grumer never come!" She held up her coffee-cup, and drank
+the toast.
+
+"Only for the women and children here," he said, and his thin nostrils
+moved to the measure of his quickened breathing, and a hot spark glowed
+in his keen eyes, "I'd have joined you in that. But under the present
+circumstances--I'd give five years of life--and I love life!--if our
+lookouts could pick up Grumer's Advance by the time grey dawn creeps up
+the east again."
+
+She was incredulous.
+
+"You, who said when you got orders to sail for South Africa--I have it on
+the authority of your Henley hostess--'I hope they'll give me a warm
+corner'!"
+
+"I did say--just that. And I meant it."
+
+His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. She went on:
+
+"I've seen your preparations. The little old forts, put into such repair!
+and the armoured train, with a Maxim and a Hotchkiss, standing in the
+Railway siding, ready for business. And the earthworks! And the
+trek-waggon barricades, and the shelters panelled and roofed with
+corrugated iron. And your bomb-proof Headquarter Bureau, the iron skull
+that's to hold the working brain of the place ... with underground
+telegraphic and telephonic communications with all the forts and outposts.
+It's colossal! A masterpiece of cool, deadly, lethal forethought.... I
+thought I was incapable of the delicious shiver of expectation that the
+schoolboy enjoys, sitting in the stalls of dear Old Drury, waiting for the
+curtain to rise on the first act of the Autumn Drama. But you've given it
+to me--you and our friends out there!" She waved the dry little glittering
+hand. "And you can talk in cold blood of marching out--and leaving the
+hive--and all the honey you might have had out of it. Sweet danger,
+perilous sport, the great Game of War--played as a man like you knows how
+to play it in this little sandy world-arena, with all the Powers and
+Dominions looking on. Preserve us! Oh, to be in your shoes this minute, if
+only for one week! But as I can't, it's you I hope to see riding the
+whirlwind and directing the storm. Not only for my own sake and the
+wretched paper's--though, mind you, I don't pretend to be anything but a
+mercenary, calculating worldly creature ..."
+
+His eyes were very kind.
+
+"Bingo knows better!"
+
+Her laugh did not jangle this time.
+
+"Lady Grasby, that vitriol-tongued water-nymph, as somebody clever once
+called her, said that if Bingo got killed by any chance, I should sit down
+and write a gossipy descriptive article, dealing with his military career,
+married life, and last moments, before I ordered my widow's-weepers.
+Horrible things! They've come in again, too! Talking of gossip, which I
+know you only pretend to despise, I found the son of a mutual acquaintance
+dying in the Hospital here. You know the Bishop of H ...?"
+
+"His eldest son, Major Fraithorn, was my senior when I was Assistant
+Military Secretary at Gibraltar in '90. And the Bishop is quite a dear
+crony of my mother's."
+
+"The Bishop," she said, "was always a person of excellent good
+taste--except when he cut off his second son, Julius, with two hundred a
+year for turning Anglican, wearing a soft hat and Roman collars, and
+joining the staff at that clerical posture shop in Wendish Street West as
+Junior Curate."
+
+"St. Margaret's. I know the church. Often go there when I'm at home."
+
+"It's the Halfway House to Rome, according to the Bishop, who won't be
+content with running at every red rag of Ritualism that flutters in his
+own diocese, but keeps up the character of belligerent Broad Churchman by
+writing pamphlets and asking questions in the House of Lords with
+reference to affairs which are the business of other people. According to
+him, the red cassocks of the acolytes at St. Margaret's are cut out of the
+very skirts of the Woman of Babylon, and Father Turney and his
+curates--they're all Fathers there, and celibates by choice--are wolves in
+wool, and Mephistophelean plotters against the liberties of the Church.
+_Punch_ published a cartoon of the Bishop shutting his eyes and charging
+at a windmill in a cope and chasuble. He is sending out a string of
+Protestant-Church-Integrity vans all over England, Scotland, and Wales
+this season, with acetylene-lantern pictures from Foxe's 'Book of
+Martyrs,' and a lecturer to point the morals and adorn the tales.... But
+if he could see his Mary's boy to-day, he'd put up with any amount of
+felt-basin hats and Roman collars, and incense and altar-genuflections
+wouldn't count for a tikkie. Oh! it's been a sore with me this many a
+year, but when I saw him to-day I said, 'Thank God I never had a child!'
+Because to have seen a boy or girl grow up and wither away as that
+beautiful young fellow is withering, is a thing that a mother must shudder
+to look back upon, even when she has found her lost one again in Heaven."
+
+There was genuine feeling in her voice, usually loud, harsh, and tuneless.
+The bright black bird-eyes had a gleam as of tears. He turned to her with
+sympathetic interest.
+
+"The Bishop will be obliged to you for finding this out. No hint of it had
+reached me. I am due at the Hospital in the morning, and we'll see if
+something can't be done for the boy."
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"It's a case of tuberculous lung-disease. He developed it in the Clergy
+House at St. Margaret's, and made light of it, supposing or pretending
+that the cough and wasting and difficulty of breathing meant bronchial
+trouble, the result of London fogs. These young people who don't value
+Life--glorious gift that it is! When he broke down utterly, at the end of
+a rampant campaign against Intemperance--he wouldn't be the Bishop's son
+if he didn't gall the withers of some hobby-horse or other--the doctors
+agreed there was nothing for him but South Africa."
+
+He frowned, knowing how many sufferers had died of that deadly
+prescription. She went on:
+
+"So he came out--alone--upon the advice of the well-intentioned wiseacres,
+knowing nothing of the country, to live on his two hundred a year until
+the end. And the end is coming--in Gueldersdorp Hospital--with giant
+strides." She blinked. "They've isolated him in a small detached ward. He
+has a kind friend in the Matron, and the chart-nurse is in love with him,
+unless I'm mistaken in the symptoms of the complaint. And he looks like
+St. Francis of Assisi, wedded to Death instead of Poverty--and coughs--fit
+to tear your heart. B'rrh!" she shuddered.
+
+He repeated: "I'll see what can be done to-morrow. These cases are
+deceptive. There may be a gleam of hope."
+
+"There is one doubt about the case which might infer a hope. I don't know
+what discoveries the London doctors made, but I wormed out of the
+chart-nurse, who plainly adores him, that the doctors in Gueldersdorp
+can't scare up a bacillus for the life of them."
+
+His eyes lightened involuntary admiration, though his tone was jesting.
+
+"You're thrown away on mere journalism. Criminal Investigation or Secret
+Intelligence would offer wider fields for your abilities."
+
+"Wait!" she said, her beady eyes black diamonds. "I shall hope to prove
+one day that an English woman-journalist can be as useful as a Boer spy in
+the matter of useful information. Why, why am I not a man? You only don't
+trust me because I am a woman."
+
+He had touched the rankling point in her ambition. He applied balm as he
+knew how.
+
+"Your being a woman may have made all the difference--for Fraithorn. I
+shall set Taggart of the R.A.M.C. at him to-morrow; the Major's a bit of a
+crack at pulmonary cases. And he shall consult with Saxham, and----"
+
+"Saxham." Her eyebrows were knitted. "I thought I knew the names of your
+Medical Staff men. But I can't recall a Saxham."
+
+"This Saxham is Civilian--and rather a big pot--M.D., F.R.C.S., and lots
+more. We're lucky to have got him."
+
+She stiffened, scenting the paragraph.
+
+"Can it be that you mean the Dr. Saxham of the Old Bailey Case?"
+
+"The Jury acquitted, let me remind you."
+
+"I believe so," she said; "but--he vanished afterwards. I think an
+innocent man would have stopped and faced the music, and not beaten a
+retreat with the Wedding March almost sounding in his ears. But--who
+knows? You have met his brother, Captain Saxham, of the --th Dragoons? It
+was he who stepped into the matrimonial breach, and married the young
+woman."
+
+"The young woman?"
+
+"His brother's fiancee--an heiress of the Dorsetshire Lee-Haileys, and
+rather a pretty-faced, silly person, with a penchant for French novels and
+sulphonal tabloids. I always shall believe that she liked the handsome
+Dragoon best, and took advantage of the Doctor's being--under the cloud of
+acquittal by a British Jury, to give him what the dear Irish call 'the
+back of her hand.'"
+
+"The better luck for him!"
+
+"It was mere instinct to let go when the man was dragging them both under
+water," she asserted.
+
+"A Newfoundland bitch would have risen above it."
+
+"You hit back quick and hard."
+
+"I'm a tennis-player and a polo-player and a cricketer."
+
+"What game is there that you don't play?"
+
+"I could tell you of one or two.... But I must really go and speak to some
+of these ladies. One of them is an old friend."
+
+"I know whom you mean. If I didn't, her glare of envy would have
+enlightened me. Did I tell you that _I_ encountered an old friend--or, at
+least, a friend of old--at the Hospital yesterday?"
+
+"You mean poor Fraithorn?"
+
+"Not at all. I'm only a friend of his mother. I had only heard of the boy,
+not met him, until I tumbled over him here. But this face--severely framed
+in a starched white _guimpe_ and floating black veil--belonged to my Past
+in several ways."
+
+He showed interest.
+
+"Your friend is a nun? At the Convent here? How did you come across her?"
+
+"She called to see the Bishop's son--while I was with him. It seems that,
+judging by the poor dear boy's religious manuals and medals, and other
+High Church contraptions, the Matron had got him on the Hospital books as
+a Roman Catholic. And, consequently, when my friend looked in to visit a
+day-scholar who was to be operated on for adenoids--I've no idea what they
+are, but a thing with a name like that would naturally have to be cut out
+of one--she was told of this poor fellow, and has shed the light of her
+countenance on him occasionally since. Yesterday was one of the occasions,
+and Heavens! what a countenance it is even now! What a voice, what eyes,
+what a manner! I believed I gushed a bit.... She met me as though we'd
+only parted last week. Nuns are wonderful creatures: _she's_ unique, even
+as a nun."
+
+He said: "I believe I had the honour of meeting the lady of whom you speak
+when I called at the Convent yesterday afternoon. A remarkable, noble, and
+most interesting personality."
+
+Lady Hannah nodded. "All that. But you ought to have seen her at eighteen.
+We were at the High-School, Kensington, together, I a brat of ten in the
+Juniors' Division, she a Head Girl, cramming for Girton. She carried
+everything before her there, and emerged with a B.A. Degree Certificate in
+the days when it was thought hardly proper for a woman to go about with
+such a thing tacked to her skirts. And all the students idolised her, and
+the male lecturers worshipped the ground she trod. And when she was
+presented--what a sensation! They called her the 'Irish Rose,' and
+'Deirdre,' for her skin of cream and her grey eyes and billowing clouds of
+black hair. Society raved of her for three seasons, until the fools went
+even madder about that little Hawting woman--a stiff starched martinet's
+frisky half--who bolted with the man my glorious Biddy had given her
+beautiful hand to. And the result! She--who might have married an
+Ambassador and queened it in Petersburg with the best of 'em--she's in a
+whitewashed Convent, superintending the education of Dutch and Afrikander
+schoolgirls in Greek, Latin, French, Algebra and Mathematics,
+calisthenics, needlework, the torture of the piano, and the twiddle of the
+globes. He has something to answer for, that old crony of yours!"
+
+Lady Hannah stopped for breath, giving the listener his opportunity.
+
+"My dear lady, you have told me a great deal without enlightening me in
+the least. Who is my 'crony,' and who was your friend?"
+
+Lady Hannah opened her round beady eyes in astonishment.
+
+"Haven't I told you? She is--or was--Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne, sister of
+that high-falutin' little donkey the present Earl of Castleclare, who came
+into the title and married at eighteen. His wife has means, I understand.
+The old Dowager Duchess of Strome, a bosom friend of my mother's, was
+Biddy's aunt, and Cardinal Voisey, handsome being! is an uncle on the
+distaff side. All the Catholic world and his wife were at her taking of
+the veil of profession nineteen years ago. The Pope's Nuncio, the
+Cardinal-Bishop of Mozella, officiated, and the Comtesse de Lutetia was
+there with the Duc d'O.... They didn't cut off her beautiful black hair,
+though we outsiders were on tiptoe to see the thing done. I don't think I
+ever cried so much in my life. Had hysterics--real--when I got home, and
+mother scolded fearfully. The Duke of C---- came with his equerry, and
+after the cloister-gates had shut--crash--on beautiful Biddy in her bridal
+laces, and white satin, and ropes of pearls, and we were all waiting,
+breathless, for her to come back in the habit, I heard the Duke say, not
+that the dear old thing ever meant to be profane: 'By God! General, I'm
+damned if Captain Mildare hasn't made Heaven an uncommonly handsome
+present!' And the man he said that to was the husband of the very woman
+Dicky had run away with not quite twelve months before. Mercy on us!"
+
+"Good Heavens!" the listener had cried and started to his feet, the dark
+blood rushing to his forehead. The ivory-pale, mutely-suffering face
+against the background of whitewashed wall flashed back upon his memory,
+in a circle of dazzling light. He saw her again, leaning against the door
+of the chapel as he told her the cruel news. He heard her saying:
+
+"Are you at liberty to tell me the date of Captain Mildare's death? For I
+know--one who was also his friend--and would take an interest in the
+particulars."
+
+The particulars! And he had bludgeoned the woman with them--stabbed her to
+the heart, poor soul, unknowing....
+
+He was blameless, but he could not forgive himself.... He drove his teeth
+down savagely into his lower lip, and muttered an excuse, and went away
+abruptly, leaving Lady Hannah staring. He took leave soon after, and went
+to his own quarters with the D.A.A.G., while her ladyship, with infinite
+relief, getting rid of her feminine guests, repaired with Captain Bingham
+Wrynche, familiarly known to a wide circle of friends as "Bingo," and
+several chosen spirits to the billiard-room, for snooker-pool, and
+whisky-and-soda.
+
+"The grey wolf is on the prowl to-night," said one of the chosen spirits,
+as he chalked Lady Hannah's cue with fastidious care. He winked across the
+table at Bingo, sunset-red with dinner, champagne, and stroke-play.
+
+"S'st!" sibilated the Captain warningly, winking in the direction of his
+wife. Lady Hannah, her little thumb cocked in the air, her round, birdlike
+eyes scientifically calculating angles, paused before making a rapid
+stroke, to say:
+
+"Don't be cheaply mysterious, my dear man. Of course, the Colonel visits
+the defences and outposts and so forth regularly after dark. It's part of
+the routine, surely?"
+
+"Of course. But you don't suppose he goes alone, do you, old lady?"
+queried Captain Bingo.
+
+"I suppose he takes his A.D.C.?"
+
+"Not to mention a detachment of the B.S.A. Also a squad of the Town Guard
+in red neckties, solar topees and bandoliers; with the Rifles' Band, and D
+Squadron of the Baraland Irregular Horse. Isn't that the routine,
+Beauvayse? You're more up in these things than me, and I fancy there was a
+change in the order for the evenin'."
+
+"Rather!" assented Beauvayse, continuing, to the rapture of winking Bingo.
+"On reaching the earthworks where our obsoletes are mounted, the townies
+will now fire a salute of blank, without falling down; and the Band have
+instructions to play 'There's Death in the Old Guns Yet.' Those were the
+only material changes, except that sentries will for the future wear
+fly- and fever-belts outside instead of in."
+
+"So that he can see at a glance," Lady Hannah said approvingly, "that all
+precautions are being taken. Very sensible, I call it."
+
+"Ha, ha, haw!" Bingo's joyous explosion revealed to the outraged woman the
+fact that she had been "had." "Haw, haw! What a beggar you are to rot,
+Beauvayse! and that makes five to us."
+
+Lady Hannah, vibrating with womanly indignation, had made her long-delayed
+stroke, missed the pyramid ball, and sent Pink spinning into the pocket.
+She threw aside her cue and rubbed her fingers angrily. She hated losing,
+and they were playing for shilling lives and half-a-crown on the game.
+
+"You--schoolboys!" She threw them a glance of disdain, as Beauvayse, his
+seraphic face agrin, screwed in his supererogatory eyeglass, and lounged
+over the table. "You artless babes! Did you suppose I should be likely to
+swallow such a _feuille de chou_ without even oil and vinegar? For pity's
+sake, leave off winking, Bingo! It's a habit that dates back to the era
+when women wore ringlets and white book-muslin, and men sported shaggy
+white beaver hats and pegtop trousers, and all the world read the novels
+of Lever and Dickens."
+
+"Have Lever and Boz gone out?" asked Beauvayse, pocketing his pyramid
+ball. "I play at Blue." He hit Blue scientifically off the cushion and
+went on. "Read 'em myself over and over again, and find 'em give points in
+the way of amusement to the piffle Mudie sends out. Not that I pretend to
+be a judge of literature. Only know when I'm not bored, you know. You to
+play, Lord Henry."
+
+But the senior officer of the Staff, Lady Hannah's partner, had vanished.
+Somebody passing the open window of the billiard-room had whistled a bar
+or so of a particularly pleasant little tune. Another man took Lord
+Henry's place, and the game went on, but never finished, for one by one,
+after the same quiet, unobtrusive fashion, the male players melted
+away.... Left alone, Lady Hannah, feeling uncommonly like the idle boy in
+the nursery-story who asked the beasts and birds and insects to play with
+him, betook herself to bed.
+
+The arrogance of men! she thought as she hung her transformation Pompadour
+coiffure on the looking-glass. How cool, how unshaken in their conviction
+of superiority, in spite of all deference, courtesy, pretence of
+consideration for Queen Dolt.... But she would show them all one of these
+days, what could be achieved by a unit of the despised majority....
+
+"I should like to see him at night-work," she said afterwards, when, very
+late, her Bingo appeared in the shadow of the conjugal mosquito-curtains.
+
+"You wouldn't," was her martial lord's reply.
+
+"Wouldn't what?" asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in tropical sleeping
+attire.
+
+Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose, replied to her
+reflection in the looking-glass:
+
+"You wouldn't see him. Like the flea in the American story, when you've
+got your finger on him is the time he isn't there."
+
+"But he is there for you?"
+
+Bingo shook his head, holding the candle near the glass and regarding his
+leading feature with interest.
+
+"Not if he don't choose to be. By the living Tinker! if I go on brownin'
+and chippin' at this rate, I shall do for the Etruscan Antiquity Room at
+the British Museum. Piff, what a smell of burning! It's the hair-thing
+hangin' on the lookin'-glass."
+
+Male Society began to practise the shedding of its final g's, you will
+remember, about the time that Female Society took to wearing
+transformation coiffures. Lady Hannah, her active little figure rustling
+in the thinnest of silk drapery, jumped nimbly out of bed, and rushed to
+save her property.
+
+"Idiot!" she shrieked.
+
+"Frightfully sorry! But you're lumps prettier without," said Bingo.
+
+"Don't pile insult on injury."
+
+"Couldn't flatter for nuts!"
+
+"I'll forgive you if you'll tell me how _he_ manages--to attain
+invisibility?"
+
+Bingo struck an attitude and began to declaim:
+
+"As the sable shades of Night were broodin' over the beleaguered town of
+Gueldersdorp, the manly form of a mysterious bearded stranger in grey
+reach-me-downs and a felt slouch might have been observed directin' its
+steps from one to the other of the various outlyin' pickets posted on the
+veld ..."
+
+"Once for all, I decline to believe such theatrical rubbish! A beard,
+indeed! Why not a paper nose and a Pierrot's cap?"
+
+"Why not?" acquiesced placid Bingo, getting into bed. But the eye
+concealed by the pillow winked; for he had told her the absolute truth;
+and woman-like, that was just what she wouldn't swallow, as he said to
+Beauvayse next morning.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+"The Town Guard," according to W. Keyse, Esquire, who kept a Betts'
+Journal, one shilling net, including Rail and Ocean Accident Insurance,
+was "a kind of amachoor copper, swore in to look after the dorp, stand
+guard, and do sentry-go, and tumble to arms, just as the town dogs leave
+off barkin', an' the old gal in the room next yours is startin' to snore
+like a Kaffir sow."
+
+Later on, even more was asked of the townie, and he rose to the demand.
+
+The smasher hat was not unbecoming to the manly brow it shaded, when W.
+Keyse put it on and anxiously consulted the small greenish swing
+looking-glass that graced the chest of drawers, the most commanding
+article of furniture in his room at Filliter's Boarding-House. It was Mrs.
+Filliter who snored in the room on the other side of the thin partition.
+Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers, she was harassed by the demands of her
+resident gentlemen in connection with gravy; but, unlike Mrs. Todgers, she
+never supplied even browned and heated water as an equivalent. And the
+mutton was wonderfully lean, and the fowls, but for difference in size,
+might have been ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as
+regarded the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to cook
+shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger for her gentlemen, and
+when they were to bear up better than most sufferers from this tough and
+lasting form of diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as
+Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with delicacies and kickshaws.
+
+The bandolier was heavy upon the thin shoulders and hollow chest of a pale
+young Cockney, who had drifted down from Southampton in the steerage, and
+roared and rattled up from Cape Town by the three foot six inch gauge
+railway, eight hundred and seventy miles, to Gueldersdorp, that he might
+find his crown of manhood waiting there. The second-hand Sam Browne belt
+was distinctly good; the yellow puttees, worn with his own brown lace-up
+boots, took trouble to adjust. And it was barely possible, even by
+standing the small swing looking-glass on the floor, and tilting it
+excessively, to see how one's legs looked. W. Keyse suffered from the
+conviction that these limbs were over-thin. Behind the counter of a
+fried-fish shop in High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned
+hake, and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the hungry
+customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed on their homeward way from
+the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction
+of Gower Street and the Hampstead Road--one develops acuteness of
+observation, one gains experience, there being always the bloke who cuts
+and runs without paying, or eats and shows reversed trouser-pockets in
+default of settlement, to deal with.... But one does not develop muscle,
+the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to possess. When he went
+into the printing-business and bent all day over the formes of type in the
+composing-room, hand-setting up the columns of the North London
+_Half-penny Herald_, to the tune of three-and-eightpence a day, the hollow
+chest grew hollower, and he developed a "corf." The physician in charge of
+the out-patients' department at University College Hospital said there was
+lung-trouble, and a man at the printing-office who had never been there,
+said South Africa was the cure for that. And W. Keyse had thirty pounds in
+the Post-Office Savings Bank, earned by the sweat of a brow which was his
+best feature, and the steamships were advertising ten-pound third-class
+single fares to Cape Town. One of the Societies for the Aid of Emigrants
+would have helped him, but while W. Keyse 'ad a bit of 'is own, no
+Blooming Paupery, said he, for him! His sole living relative, an aunt who
+inhabited one of a row of ginger-brick Virginia-creeper-clad almshouses
+"over aginst 'Ighgyte Cimitery," sniffled a little when he called to say
+good-bye, bringing in a parting present of a half-pound of Liphook's
+Luscious Tea and a screw of snuff.
+
+"I shan't never see you no more, William."
+
+"Ow yes, you will, mother! Don't be such a silly!" William's step cousin
+'Melia, in service as general in Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm end, had said;
+and she had looked coldly upon William immediately afterwards, bestowing
+an amorous ogle upon Lobster, who sat well forward upon a backless Windsor
+chair, sucking the silver top of his swagger cane,--Lobster, who was six
+foot high and in the Grenadier Guards, and had supplanted William in
+'Melia's affections, for they 'ad used to walk out regularly on Sundays
+and holidays before Lobster came along.... How William loved Lobster now!
+Why, but for him he might have been married to 'Melia to-day;--doomed to
+tread in the ways of commonplace, ordinary married life, fated to live and
+die without once having peeped into Paradise, without ever having looked
+upon the 'only woman in the world!' Greta, of the glorious golden pigtail,
+the entrancing figure and the bewitching, twinkling, teasing eyes of blue!
+
+Suppose--only suppose--the silent threatening Thing across the border,
+jewelled with the glowing Argus-eyes of many camp-fires, conjecturable in
+dark masses flecked with the white of waggon-tilts, and sometimes giving
+out the dull gleam of iron or the sparkle of steel, were to choose this,
+W. Keyse's first night on guard, for an attack! Even to the inexperience
+of W. K. the sand-bagged earthworks built about Gueldersdorp, the
+barricades of trek-waggons and railway-trucks blocking up the roads
+debouching on the veld, the extending lines of trenches, the watchdog
+forts, the sentinelled pickets, the noiseless, continually moving patrols,
+all the various parts of the marvellous machinery of defence, controlled
+by one master-hand upon the levers, would count for nothing against that
+overwhelming onrush of armed thousands, that flood of men dammed up above
+the town, and waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm her,
+and----Cripps! what a chance to make a glorious, heroic splash in Greta's
+sight! Die, perhaps, in saving her from them Dutchies. To be sure, she,
+divine creature, was a Dutchy too. But no matter--a time would come ...
+
+Confident in the coming of that time, W. Keyse took the brown rifle
+tenderly from the corner, and replaced the meagre little looking-glass
+upon the yellow chest of drawers. In the act of bestowing a final glance
+of scrutiny upon his upper lip, whose manly crop had unaccountably
+delayed, he caught sight of a cheap paper-covered book lying beside the
+tin candlestick whose tallow dip had aided perusal of the volume o'
+nights. The red surged up in his thin cheeks as he picked up the thing.
+There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red
+and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice
+mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, within those gaudy
+covers.
+
+He looked round the mean, poor, ugly room, the volume in his hand; a
+photograph of the dubious sort leered from the wall beside the bed....
+
+"If they rushed us to-night, an' I got shot in the scrap, an' they brought
+me back 'ere, dyin', and She came ... an' saw _that_ ...!" His ears were
+scarlet as he dashed at the leering photograph and tore it down. Oh, W.
+Keyse, it is pitiful to think you had to blush, but good to know you had
+not forgotten how to. There was a little rusty fireplace in the room. W.
+Keyse burned something in it that left nothing but a feathery pile of
+ashes, and a little shameful heap of mud in the corner of a boy's memory,
+before he hurried to the Town Guardhouse, where other bandoliers were
+mustering, and fell in. As though the Powers deigned to reward an act of
+virtue on the very night of its performance, he was posted by his picket
+in the shadow of the high corrugated iron fence of the tree-bordered
+tennis-ground behind the Convent, as "Lights Out" sounded from the camp of
+the Irregulars, beyond the Railway-sheds and storehouses.
+
+It was glorious to be there, taking care of Her, though it would have been
+nicer if one had been allowed to smoke. The moon of William's
+passion-inspired verse was not shining o'er South Africa's plain upon this
+the very night for her. It was dark and close and stiflingly hot. A
+dust-wind had blown that day, and the suspended particles thickened the
+atmosphere, to the oppression of the lungs and the hiding of the stars. He
+knew his picket posted a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the
+Cemetery; his fellow-sentry was on the opposite flank of the Convent. He
+was a stout, middle-aged tradesman, with a large wife and a corresponding
+family, and it wrung the heart of W. Keyse to think that a tricky fate
+might have placed that insensible man on the side where Her window was!
+Through the boughs of the peach and orange trees, heavily burdened with
+unripe fruit, you could get an occasional glimpse of whitewashed brick
+walls, darkened by the outline of shuttered oblongs here and there. And
+Imagination could blow her cloud of fragrant vapour, though tobacco were
+denied you.
+
+"They're all Her windows while she's there behind them walls," was the
+reflection in which W. Keyse found comfort.
+
+She was not there. She was at that moment being kissed on the stoep of the
+Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg, by a young officer of Staats
+Artillery, to whom she had agreed to be clandestinely engaged, though Papa
+Du Taine had other views.
+
+W. Keyse was spared this tragic knowledge. But if the moon, shining
+beautifully over the Du Taine gardens and orange-groves, had chosen to
+tell tales!
+
+It was still--still and quiet; a blue radiance of electric light burned
+here and there; at the Staff Office on the Market Square, and at other
+centres of purposeful activity. Aromatic-beer cellars and whisky-saloons
+gave out a yellow glare of gas-jets; the red lamp of an apothecary showed
+a wakeful eye. Gueldersdorp sprawled in the outline of a sleeping turtle
+on her squat hillock of gravelly earth and sand. In smoke-coloured folds,
+closely matching the lowering dim canopy of vapour brooding overhead, the
+prairie spread about her, deepening to a basined valley in the middle
+distances, sweeping to a rise beyond, so that the edges of the basin
+looked down upon the town. High on the hill-ranges in the South more
+chains of red sparks burned ... he knew them for the watch-fires of the
+Boer outposts, and the raised edges of the basin East and West were set
+thickly with similar twinkling jewels where the laagers were; while
+smaller groups shone nearer, marking the situation of isolated vedettes.
+The sickly taint upon the faint breeze told of massed and clustered
+humanity. 'Strewth, how they stunk, the brutes! He hoped there was enough
+of 'em, lying doggo up there, waiting the word to roll down and swallow
+the blooming dorp! His palate grew dry, as the sweat broke out upon his
+temples and trickled down the back of his neck, and the palms of his hands
+were moist and clammy. Also, under the buckle of the Sam Browne belt was a
+sinking, all-gone sensation excessively unpleasant to feel. Perhaps its
+wearer had a touch of fever! Then the stout tradesman on the other side of
+the Convent sneezed suddenly, and W. Keyse, with every nerve in his body
+jarring from the shock, knew that he was simply suffering from funk.
+
+Staggering from the shock of the horrible self-revelation, he gritted his
+teeth. There was a Billy Keyse who was a blooming coward inside the other
+who was not. He told the sickening, white-gilled little skulker what he
+thought of him. He only wished--that is, one of him only wished--that a
+gang of the Dutchies would come along now!
+
+He drew a lurid picture for the benefit of the trembler, and when the
+young soldier had fired into the brown of them and seen the whites of
+their eyes, and fallen, pierced by a hundred wounds, in the successful
+defence of the Convent, he was carried in, and laid on a sofa, and nobody
+could recognise him, along of all the blood, until She came, with her
+white little feet peeping from the hem of a snowy nightgown, and her
+unbraided pigtail swamping the white with gold, and knew that it was her
+lover, and knelt by the hero's side. Soft music from the Orchestra,
+please! as with his final breath W. Keyse implores a last, first kiss.
+Even as William No. 1 thrilled to the rapture of that imagined osculation,
+Billy No. 2 experienced a ghastly fright.
+
+For out of the enfolding velvety darkness ahead of him, and looking
+towards those firefly sparks shining on the heights, came the sound of
+stealthy measured footsteps and muffled voices talking Dutch. The enemy
+had made a sortie. The defences had been rushed, the town surrounded! Yet
+there were only two of them--a big, slouching villain and a short thin
+one, who wore a giant hat. The chirping sound of a kiss damped the fierce
+martial ardour of William, and greatly reassured Billy. It was only a
+townsman taking a night walk with his girl!
+
+Crushed and discouraged, W. Keyse relaxed his grip upon the trusty rifle,
+and slunk back into the shadow, as the tall and the short figures halted
+at the angle of the fence.
+
+"'Ain't it a 'eavenly night?" came from the short figure, who leaned
+against the tall one affectionately. "An' me got to go in. A crooil shyme,
+I call it. 'Ain't it, deer? Leggo me wyste, there's a love. You've no
+notion 'ow I shall cop it for bein' lyte."
+
+He sportively declined to release her. There was the sound of a soft slap,
+followed by the smack of a kiss. She was very angry.
+
+"Leggo, I tell you! Where's your manners, 'orlin' me abart! If that's the
+way you be'ayve with your Dutch ones ...!"
+
+He spat and asseverated:
+
+"Neen! I no other girls but you heb got."
+
+It was the Slabberts with Emigration Jane.
+
+"Ho! So you _can_ talk English a bit--give you a charnce?"
+
+"Ja, a little now and then when it is useful. But when we are to be
+married, you shall only to me talk in my own moder Taal."
+
+"Shan't I myke a gay old 'ash of it!" Recklessly she crushed the large hat
+against the unwieldy shoulder. "There, good-night agyne, deer! Sister
+Tobias--that's what they call the one that 'ousekeeps and manages the
+kitchen--Sister Tobias 'll be sittin' up for me, thinkin' I've got meself
+lost or bin run away with." She gurgled enjoyingly.
+
+"Tell me again, before you shall go, about the Engelsch Commandant who
+came to visit at the Convent to-day?"
+
+"Lor! 'Aven't I told you a'ready? 'E stopped 'arf an 'our or more ... an'
+She--that's the Reverend Mother, as they call her--She took 'im over the
+'ouse, an' after 'e'd gone through the 'ouse, an' Sister Tobias--ain't
+that a rummy name for a nun?--Sister Tobias, she showed 'im to the gyte,
+an' 'e says to 'er as wot 'e's goin' to 'ave the flagstaff rigged up in
+the gardin fust thing to-morrow mornin', an' 'e'll undertake that the
+workin'-party detached for the purpose will know 'ow to be'ayve
+theirselves respectful. An' then 'e touches 'is 'at an' gets on 'is 'orse
+an' ..."
+
+"Listen to me." The Slabbertian command of that barbaric language of the
+Englanders evoked her surprise, but the painful squeeze he gave her arm
+compelled attention. "Next time the English Commandant to the house shall
+come, you to listen at the keyhole is."
+
+"Wot for?"
+
+"For what have you before at keyholes listened, little fool?"
+
+"To find out when they was goin' to sack me, so's to git me own notice in
+fust--see? Then you can say to the lydy at the Registry Office--and don't
+they give theirselves hairs!--as wot you're leaving because the place
+don't suit. Twiggy?"
+
+"You for yourself did listen, then. Goed. Now it is for me you listen
+will, if you a true Boer's vrouw wish to become by-and-by."
+
+She rose to the immemorial allure that is never out of season in angling
+for her simple kind.
+
+"That word you said means--wife, don't it, deer?" Her voice trembled; the
+joyous, longed-for haven of marriage--was it possible that it might be in
+sight?
+
+"It shall mean wife, if you obey me--ja!--otherwise it will be that I
+shall marry the daughter of a good countryman of mine, who many sheep has,
+and much land, and plenty of money to give his daughter when she a husband
+gets!"
+
+Her underlip dropped pitifully, and the tears welled up. It was too dark
+to see her crying, but he heard her sob, and grinned, himself unseen.
+
+"I'll do anything for you, deer! Only don't tyke an' 'ave the other One.
+She may be a Dutchy, but she won't never care for you like wot I do. Don't
+you know it, Walt?"
+
+"I shall it know when I hear what you have found out," proclaimed the
+Slabberts grimly.
+
+There was a boiling W. Keyse in the deep shadow of the tall
+corrugated-iron fence, who restrained with difficulty a snort of
+indignation.
+
+"On'y tell me, deer. I'll find out anythink you want me to." Before her
+spread a lovely vista of floors--her own floors--to scrub, and a kitchen
+range--hers, too--which should cook dinners nice enough to make any
+husband adore you.
+
+"You shall for me find out what that Commandant of the rooineks is up to
+under his Flag of the Red Cross."
+
+"He didn't say nothink about no Red Cross, darlin'."
+
+"Stilte! They will the Red Cross Flag hoist, I tell you, and it will
+cover more than a parcel of nuns and schoolgirls. That Commandant is so
+verdoemte slim! Tell me, do you cartridges well know when you shall see
+them? Little brown rolls with at one end a copper cap--and at the other a
+bullet. And gunpowder--you have that seen also?"
+
+She quavered.
+
+"Yes; but you don't want me to touch the narsty, dreadful stuff, do you,
+Walty deer?"
+
+He scoffed.
+
+"Afraid of gunpowder, Meisje, that like a whey-blooded Engelschwoman is. A
+true Boer's daughter would know how to load a gun, look you, and shoot a
+man--many men--if for the help of the Republic it should be! But you will
+learn. Watch out, I tell you, for stores that Commandant will be sending
+into the Convent. Square boxes and long boxes, and cases--some of them
+heavy as if lined with iron; painted black with white letters, and others
+stone-colour with black letters, and yet others grey with red letters; the
+letters remember--'A.O.S.'"
+
+"But wot'll be in the boxes, deer?"
+
+His English, conned from recently published Imperial Army Service manuals,
+grew severely technical:
+
+"If you could their big screws unscrew, and their big locks unlock, you
+would see, but you will not be able. What in them? Cakes! Black, square
+cakes, with in them holes; and grey, square cakes, and red cakes, light
+and crumbly, that dog-biscuits resemble; and long brown sticks, like
+peppermint-candy, in bundles tied together with string and paper. Boxes of
+stuff like the hair of horse, and packets of evil little electric
+detonators in tubes of copper. Alamachtig! who knows what he has not
+got--that Engelsch Commandant--both in the dorp and hidden in those
+thrice-accursed mines that he has laid on the veld about her. Prismatic
+powder and gun-cotton, dynamite and cordite enough to blow a dozen
+commandos of honest Booren into dust--a small, fine dust of bones and
+flesh that shall afterwards fall mingled with rain of blood. For I tell
+you that man has the wickedness of the duyvel in him, and the cunning of
+an old baboon!"
+
+She babbled:
+
+"'Ow pretty you talk English when you want to, Walty deer! 'Aven't you
+bin gittin' at me all along, makin' out ..."
+
+He swore at her savagely, and she held her tongue, worshipping this new
+development of masterful brutality in a man whom she had regarded as a
+"big softy."
+
+He went on:
+
+"Now you shall know what to look for, and when the verdoemte explosives
+come, you will know them by the boxes and the letters 'A.O.S.'--and you
+will tell me--and the guns of our Staats Artillery will not shoot that
+way, for the sake of the little woman who is going to be a true Boer's
+vrouw by-and-by."
+
+She threw her arms about his rascally neck, and laid her head upon his
+hulking shoulder, regardless of the hat she wrecked, and cried in ecstasy:
+
+"I'll do it, deer! I'll do it, Walty! But why should there be any
+shootin', lovey? At 'Ome I never could abear to see them theayter plays
+what 'ad guns an' firin' in 'em; it made me 'art beat so crooil bad."
+
+He grinned over the big hat into the darkness.
+
+"All right! I will tell the men with the guns that you do not like to hear
+them, and they will not perhaps shoot at all. But you will look out for
+the boxes with the dynamite, and send me the message when it comes?"
+
+"Course I will, deer! But 'ow am I to send the message?"
+
+The shadowy right arm of Slabberts swept out, taking in the black and void
+and formless veld with a large free gesture.
+
+"Out to there. Stand in this place when it becomes dark, looking east.
+Straight in front of us is east. The game is great fun, and very easy.
+Strike a match, and count to ten before you blow it out, and you shall not
+have done that three times before you shall see him answer."
+
+"But oo's 'im?"
+
+"He is my friend--out there upon the veld."
+
+"Lor! but where'll you be? Didn't you say as I'd be talkin' to you? I
+don't 'arf fancy wot you calls the gyme, not if I 'ave to play it with a
+strynge bloke!"
+
+The answer came, accompanied by a scraping, familiar sound.
+
+The Slabberts was striking a match of the fizzling, spluttering,
+Swedish-made non-safety kind, known to W. Keyse and his circle by the
+familiar abbreviation of "stinkers."
+
+"Voor den donder! Have I not told you I shall be there with him--after
+to-night!"
+
+Her womanly tenderness quickened at the hint of coming separation. She
+clung fondly to his arm, and the match went out, extinguished by a
+maiden's sigh. He shook her roughly off, and struck another.
+
+"I shall go away--ja--and here is the only way for you to reach me!"
+
+As the fresh match glimmered blue, he held it at arm's length in front of
+him, counting silently up to ten, then blew it out, and set his heavy boot
+upon the faintly-glowing spark, and did the thing again.
+
+Endeavouring not to breathe so as to be heard, W. Keyse flattened himself
+against the corrugated fence, and waited, looking ahead into the thick
+velvet darkness, sensing the faint human taint upon the tell-tale breeze,
+and counting with the Slabberts; and then, out in the blackness that
+concealed so much that was sinister, sprang into sudden life an answering
+bluish glimmer, and lasted for ten beats of the pulse, and went out as
+suddenly as though a human breath had blown upon it.
+
+"Is that your pal?" she whispered.
+
+"That is my pal now." He struck another match, and flared it, and screened
+it with his big hand, and showed the light again, and repeated the
+manoeuvre three times. "That is my pal now--and I have said to him 'No
+news to-night'; but to-morrow night and the night after, and so on for
+many nights to come, I shall be out there where he is, and after you have
+called me and I have answered, just as he has done, you will tell me what
+there is to tell. Can you spell your language?"
+
+"Pretty middlin', Walty deer, though not as I could wish, owin' to me
+'avin' to leave Board School in the Fif' Stannard when father sold up the
+'ome in drink after mother went orf wiv the young man lodger. Some'ow, try
+all I could, I never ..."
+
+"Hou jou smoel! With our Boer people, when men speak, the women listen;
+but you English ones chatter and chatter! Remember that this match-talk
+goes thus: For the letter A one flare, and hide the light as you saw me
+do just now. For B, two flares, and hide the light; for C, three, and
+hide; for D, four, and hide; and so on ... It is slow, of course, and
+matches will blow out when you do not want them to, and a cycle-lamp or a
+candle-lantern would be easier to deal with, but for the verdoemte
+patrols. Do you understand? Say now what I say, after me. For the letter A
+one flare and hide. For B ..."
+
+He put her through the alphabet from end to end; she laboured faithfully,
+and pleased her taskmaster. He grunted approvingly.
+
+"Zeer goed! See that you do not forget. And remember, you are to listen
+and watch, and tell me what you hear and see. If you are obedient, I will
+marry you--by-and-by."
+
+He gave her a clumsy hug in earnest of endearments to come.
+
+"But if you do not please me"--the grip of his heavy hand bruised her
+shoulder through the thin, flowery "blowse"--"I will punish you--yes, by
+the Lord! I will marry a fine Boer maiden who is the daughter of a
+landrost, and who has got much money and plenty of sheep. And you can give
+yourself to any dirty verdoemte schelm of an Engelschman you please, for I
+will have none of you! To-morrow you shall have a paper showing you how to
+tell me very many things in match-talk, and earn much money to buy
+presents for my nice little Boer vrouw. Alamachtig! what is this?"
+
+"This" was the hard, cold, polished business-end of a condemned Martini
+poked violently out of the blackness into the Slabbertian thorax.
+
+"Not in such a 'urry by 'arf, you perishin' Dopper," spluttered the
+ghastly little man in bandoliers behind the weapon. "Put up them dirty big
+'ands o' yours, or, by Cripps! I'll let 'er off, you sneakin',
+match-talkin' spy!"
+
+The arms of Slabberts soared as the tongue of Slabberts wagged in
+explanation.
+
+"This is assault and battery, Meister, upon a peaceful burgher. You shall
+answer to your officer for it, I tell you slap. Voor den donder! Is not a
+young man to light his pipe as he talks to a young woman without being
+called spy by a verdoemte sentry! Tell him, Jannje, that is all I did
+do!"
+
+W. Keyse felt a little awkward, and the rifle was uncommonly heavy. The
+Slabberts felt it tremble, and thought about taking his hands down and
+reaching for that Colts six-shooter he kept in his hip-pocket. But though
+the finger wobbled, it was at the trigger, and Walt was not fond of risks.
+
+"Tell him, Jannje!" he spluttered once more.
+
+She had not needed a second bidding.
+
+As the domestic hen in defence of her chicken will give battle to the
+wilde-kat, so Emigration Jane, with ruffled plumage, blazing, defiant
+eyes, and shrill objurgations, couched in the vernacular most familiar to
+their object, hurled herself upon the enemy.
+
+"You narsty little brute, you! To up and try an' murder my young man. With
+your jor about spies! Sauce! I'd perish you, I would, if I was 'im! Off
+the fyce o' the earth, an' charnce bein' 'ung for it! Take away that gun,
+you silly little imitation sojer--d' you 'eer?"
+
+The weapon was extremely weighty. W. Keyse's arms ached frightfully.
+Perspiration trickled into his eyes from under the tilted smasher. He felt
+damp and small, and desperately at a loss. And--as though in malice--the
+moon looked out from behind a curtain of thick, dim vapour, as he said
+with a lordly air:
+
+"You be off, young woman, and don't interfere!"
+
+Gawd! she knew him in spite of the smasher hat. Her rage burst the
+flood-gates. She screeched:
+
+"You!... It's you. 'Oo I done a good turn to--an' this is 'ow I gits it
+back?" She gasped. "Because you're arter one young woman wot wouldn't be
+seen dead in the syme street wi' you ..."
+
+Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one might be listening, W.
+Keyse lifted up his voice.
+
+"Sentry.... 'Ere!... Mister!" he cried despairingly, "You on the other
+side, can't you hear?"
+
+In vain the call. The stout fellow-townsman of W. Keyse, comfortably
+propped in an angle of the opposite fence, the bulk of the Convent and the
+width of its garden and tennis-ground being between them, continued to
+sleep and snore peacefully and undisturbed.
+
+Emigration Jane continued:
+
+"Because that sly cat wiv the yeller 'air-plait won't 'ear o' you, you try
+to git a pore servant-gal's fancy bloke pinched! Yah, greedy! Boo! You
+plate-faced, erring-backed, s'rimp-eyed little silly, with your
+love-letters an' messages! Wait till I give 'er another o' your
+screevin'--that's all!"
+
+"Patrol!" cried W. Keyse in a despairing whimper.
+
+She advanced upon him closer and closer, lashing herself as she came, to
+frenzy. How often had W. Keyse seen it outside the big gaudy pubs in the
+Tottenham Court Road, and the Britannia, Camden Town! Perhaps the
+recollection staring, newly awakened, in the pale, moonlit eyes of the
+little perspiring Town Guardsman stung her to equal memory, and provoked
+the act. Who can tell? We may only know that she plucked the weapon of
+lower-class London from her hat, and jabbed at the pale face viciously,
+and heard the victim say "Owch!" as he winced, and knew herself, as her
+Slabberts gripped the rifle-barrel, and wrested it with iron strength from
+the failing hands of W. Keyse, the equal of those dauntless Boer women who
+killed men when it was necessary. But, oh! the 'orrible, 'ideous feeling
+of 'aving stuck something into live flesh! Sick and giddy, the heroine
+shut her eyes, seeing behind their lids wondrous phantasmagoria of
+coloured pyrotechny, rivalling the most marvellous triumphs of the
+magician Brock....
+
+
+
+
+W. Keyse's beheld, at the moment when his weapon was wrenched from him,
+two long grey arms come out of the darkness and coil about the
+largely-looming form of Slabberts. Enveloped in the neutral-tinted
+tentacles of this mysterious embrace, the big Boer struggled impotently,
+and a quick, imperative voice said, between the thick pants of striving
+men:
+
+"Get the gun from him, will you, and call up your picket. Don't fire; blow
+your whistle instead!"
+
+"_Pip-ip-ip-'r'r! Pip-ip-r'r!_"
+
+The long, shrill call brought armed men hurrying out of the darkness on
+the other side of the Cemetery, and considerably quickened the arrival of
+the visiting patrol.
+
+"Communicating with persons outside the defences by flashlight signals. We
+can't shoot him for it just yet, but we _can_ gaol him on suspicion,"
+said the Commander of the picket. And Slabberts, with a stalwart escort of
+B.S.A. troopers, reluctantly moved off in the direction of the
+guard-house.
+
+"Who was the fellow who helped you, do you know?" asked the officer who
+had ridden up with the patrol. "Threw him and sat on him until the picket
+came up, you say," he commented, on hearing W. Keyse's version of the
+story. "A tall man in civilian clothes, with a dark wideawake and short
+pointed beard! H'm!"
+
+"Coming from the veld, apparently, and not from town," said the picket
+Commander. "Must have known the countersign, or the sentries out there
+would have stopped him. I--see!"
+
+He looked at the patrol-officer, who coughed again. The moonlight was
+quite bright enough for the exchange of a wink. Then:
+
+"Hold on, man, you're bleeding," said W. Keyse's Sergeant, an old Naval
+Brigade man. "How did ye get that 'ere nasty prod under the eye?"
+
+W. Keyse put up his hand, and gingerly felt the place that hurt. His
+fingers were red when they came away.
+
+"The young woman wot was with the Dutchman, she jabbed me with a 'at-pin,
+to git me to let 'im go."
+
+"There's a blindin' vixen for you!" commented the Sergeant. "Two inch
+higher, and she'd have doused your light out. Where did she come from,
+d'ye know?"
+
+"Have you any idea who she was?" asked the Commander of the picket.
+
+W. Keyse shook his head.
+
+"'Aven't the least idear, sir. Never sor 'er before in my natural!" he
+declared stoutly.
+
+"Well, you'll know her again when you meet her--or she will you," said the
+patrol-officer, about to move on, when a deplorable figure came staggering
+into the circle, and the rider reined up his horse. "What's this? Hey,
+Johnny, where's your gun?"
+
+It was W. Keyse's fellow-sentry from the opposite flank of the Convent.
+
+"And time you turned up, I don't think," commented W. Keyse. "Didn't you
+'ear me sing out to you just now?"
+
+"Come, now, what were you up to?" the Sergeant pressed. "Better up an' own
+it if you've bin asleep on guard."
+
+The eager faces crowded round. The object of interest and comment, not at
+all sympathetic or polite, was a stout, respectable tradesman, with a
+large, round, ghastly face, who saluted his officer with a trembling hand.
+
+"I--I have been the victim of an outrage, sir!"
+
+"Sorry to hear it; what's your name?"
+
+"Brooker, sir," volunteered W. Keyse's Corporal. "The other sentry we put
+on with Keyse here."
+
+"Mr. Brooker, sir, General Stores, Market Square," babbled the citizen.
+
+"Well, Private Brooker, what have you to say?"
+
+"I have been drugged or hypnotised, sir, and robbed of my gun while in a
+state of insensibility, sir--upon my honour as an Alderman and Magistrate
+of this borough! Swear me, sir, if you have any doubt of my veracity!" He
+flapped his hands like fins, and his bandolier heaved above a labouring
+bosom.
+
+The Commander of the picket looked preternaturally grave.
+
+"Very sorry, Private Brooker, but unless the Sergeant has brought his
+Testament along, you'll have to give your information in the ordinary way.
+So they drugged you or hypnotised you--or both, was it?--and took away
+your rifle. Of course you saw it done?"
+
+"No, sir, I did not see it done. When I woke up ..."
+
+"Ah, when you woke up! Please go on."
+
+The crowding faces of B.S.A. men and Town Guardsmen were grinning now. The
+patrol-officer was rocking in his saddle.
+
+"When I revived, sir, from the swoon or trance ..."
+
+"Very good, Private Brooker; we'll hear the rest of that in the morning.
+Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic
+subject before me in the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at
+large for the present, and fall in the picket."
+
+The Sergeant saluted. "Very good, sir."
+
+The bubbling Brooker boiled over frothily as the sentries were changing.
+
+"A prisoner! Good God! do they take me for a traitor? A Magistrate ... an
+Alderman, the President of the Gas Committee ..."
+
+"I should 'ave guessed you to be that if I 'adn't 'eard it, sonny," said
+the Sergeant dryly, the implied sarcasm provoking a subdued guffaw. He
+added, as the visiting patrol rode on and the picket marched back to the
+Cemetery: "Can't relieve you of your rifle, because you 'aven't got 'er.
+What in 'Eaven's name are they goin' to do to you? Well, you'll find out
+to-morrow. Left face; quick march!"
+
+Counting left-right, and keeping elbow-touch with the next man, W. Keyse
+got in a whisper:
+
+"I say, Sergeant, am I in for it as well as Ole Bulgy Weskit? You might as
+well let me know and charnce it!"
+
+The Sergeant answered with unfeeling indifference:
+
+"Since you ask, I should say you was."
+
+"That's a bit 'ard! Wot'll I git?"
+
+"Ten to one, your skater."
+
+"Wot is my skater?"
+
+"Your Corporal's stripe, you suckin' innocent! Wot for? For takin' a Boer
+spy pris'ner--that's wot for!"
+
+"Cripps!" said W. Keyse, enlightened, illuminated and glowing in the
+darkness. He added a moment later, in rather a depressed tone: "But it was
+'im, the civilian bloke with the beard, 'oo downed the Dutchy, an' sat on
+'im till the guard come up."
+
+The Sergeant was ahead of the half-company, speaking to the officer in
+charge. It was the Corporal who answered, across the man who marched upon
+the left of W. Keyse:
+
+"O' course it was. But you 'ad the Dopper fust, and," he cackled quietly,
+"the Colonel won't be jealous."
+
+The eyes and mouth of W. Keyse became circular.
+
+"The who?"
+
+"The Colonel, didn't you 'ear me say?"
+
+"That wasn't never ... _'im_"?
+
+"All right, since you know best. But him, for all that!"
+
+"Great Jiminy Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+You are to imagine Dawn, trailing weary-footed over the interminable
+plain, to find Gueldersdorp, lonely before, and before threatened, now
+isolated like some undaunted coral rock in mid-Pacific, crested with
+screaming sea-birds, girt with roaring breakers, set in the midst of
+waters haunted by myriads of hungry sharks. Ringed with silent menace, she
+squatted on her low hill, doggedly waiting the event.
+
+It was known that on the previous day the telegraph wires north of Beaton
+had been cut, and this day was to sever the last link with Cape Town at
+Maripo, some forty miles south. The railway bridge that crossed the Olopo
+River might go next. Staat's Engineers had been busy there overnight.
+Rumour had it, Heaven knows how, that the armoured train that had been
+sent up from the Cape with two light guns of superseded pattern--a
+generous contribution towards the collection of obsolete engines now
+bristling from the sand-bagged ramparts--had been seized by a commando,
+with the officer and the men in charge. This was to be confirmed later by
+the arrival of an engine-driver minus five fingers and some faith in the
+omnipotence of British arms. But at the beginning of this chapter he was
+hiding in a sand-hole, chewing the cud of his experiences, in default of
+other pabulum, and did not get in before dark of the long blazing day.
+
+Crowds gathered on the barely-reclaimed veld at the northern end of the
+town to see the Military Executive take over the Hospital. But that the
+streets were barricaded with waggons and every able-bodied male citizen
+carried a rifle, it might have been mistaken for an occasion of national
+rejoicing or civic festivity. The leaves of the pepper-trees fringing the
+thoroughfares and clumped in the Market Square rustled in the faint hot
+breeze. By-and-by they were to stand scorched and seared and naked under
+the iron hail that beat in blizzards upon them, and die in the noxious
+lyddite fumes dispersed by bursting shells.
+
+The variegated crowd cheered as the Staff dismounted at the white-painted
+iron gates of the railed-in Hospital grounds. It was not the acclamation
+of admiration, it was the cheer expectant. They wanted to know what the
+Officer in Command was going to do? Intolerable suspense racked them.
+Wherever it was known that he would be, there they followed at this
+juncture--solid masses of humanity, bored with innumerable ear-holes, and
+enamelled with patient, glittering, expectant eyes. His own keen, kindly
+glance swept over them as he touched his grey felt hat in acknowledgment
+of their dubious greeting, that half-hearted but well-meant cheer. He read
+the mute question written upon all the faces. Part of his answer to the
+interrogation was standing in the Railway-yard, but they would have to
+wait a little while longer yet--just a little longer. He whistled his
+pleasant melodious little tune as the porter hurried to open the gates.
+
+One pair of pale, rather ugly eyes in the crowd were illumined with pure
+hero-worship. "That's 'im," explained their owner, nudging a big man in
+shabby white drill, who was shouldering a deliberate way through the
+press.
+
+
+
+
+"The Colonel--and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along of 'im--with the red
+shoulder-straps and brown leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o'
+the Staff, they are. An' them others in khaki with puttees--syme as wot
+I've got on--they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-boneses--twig? You
+can tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with a serpint
+climbin' up a stick inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their
+caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot they
+carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know about these things,
+being a sort of Service man meself."
+
+Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid additions had
+certainly been made to the martial outfit of the previous day. The tweed
+Norfolk had been replaced by a khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and
+obligingly taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's
+stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence of
+over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, had been sewn
+upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing
+it, and it burned the arm that bore it like a vaccination-pustule on the
+fifth day.
+
+"Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse. He twitched the
+stripe carelessly into sight. "C'manding orficer marked me down for this
+to-day," he continued, with elaborate indifference, "along of a Favourable
+Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much--little turn-up with a
+'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be a spy."
+
+In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he recognised the face
+under the Panama hat worn by the big neighbour in white drill, and blushes
+swamped his yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face, no
+longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had
+stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the previous day,
+where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly that the heroic leading
+attitude of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor role of the
+juvenile walking-gentleman. "Watto!" he began. "It's you, Mister! I bin
+wantin' to say thank----" But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse
+against the green-painted iron railings surrounding a municipal gum-tree,
+and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as well that the
+acquaintance made under conditions remote from respectability should not
+be renewed. But W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer.
+
+The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a moment, to the
+disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton and the Colonial of British
+race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs and the Barala, who anticipated a big
+indaba. The little party of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-drive
+between the carefully-tended grass plats to the stoep where the Mayor of
+Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and several
+prominent members of the Committee--including Alderman Brooker,
+puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest--waited. Military
+Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done.
+Inspection followed.
+
+"The warr'ds, said ye?" The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw-boned
+personage, very evidently hailed from North of the Tweed. "I'm obliged to
+ye, ma'am," he addressed the flustered matron, "but the warr'ds an' the
+contents o' the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance--at
+least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll tak' a look at
+the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing plant, and the
+sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff at the kitchens, there
+would be a moment to spend in ganging through the warr'ds. Unless the
+Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them?" He turned a small, twinkling pair
+of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief.
+
+"Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask five minutes more
+grace in the interests of the friend I spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I
+made an appointment at the half-hour."
+
+"You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 'The Diseases of
+Civilisation,' are ye, Colonel? I mind a sentence in it that must have
+been a douse of cauld watter--toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd--in
+the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. '_Young men_,' he ca'ed them, as
+if he was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led to take up Surgery by
+the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn
+its scienteefic principles--showy operators, who diagnose wi' the knife
+an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to assist her.' And yet Saxham
+could daur! 'I shall prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out
+exceesion,' he said, or they say he said in the _Lancet_ report o' the
+operation on the Grand Duke Waldimir--I cam' across a reprint o' it no'
+lang ago--when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' the sweat o' mortal
+terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He cut a hole in the Duke's stomach,
+ye will understand, in front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller
+intesteene, spliced the twa together wi' a Collins button, and by a
+successful deveece o' plumbing--naething less--earned the eterr'nal
+gratitude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists.
+All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a
+hair's-breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or improve
+upon perfection. Toch!... Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin'
+for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day!"
+
+"Rejoice then, Major, and be exceeding glad, for I believe this is the
+man who wrote the book and plugged--or was it plumbed--the potentate."
+
+The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. "I promise myself a crack or
+twa wi' him, then.... But how is it a busy chiel like that can get awa'
+from his private patients and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter
+Season Ahem! ahem!"
+
+By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing the conversation,
+it was plain that he had recalled the circumstances under which the "busy
+chiel" had turned his back upon the private patients and the Hospital
+wards. "Colonel," he went on, "I could be wishing this varry
+creeditable-appearing institution--judging from the ootside o't--were
+twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe or so to the back of that."
+
+"My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and happy but once, and
+that was when we had fifty men down with dysentery and fever in a
+tin-roofed Railway goods-shed, and a hundred and seventy more under leaky
+canvas, and you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could get no
+milk."
+
+"That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the male an' the
+female character. A man will no' keep on dithering for what he kens he
+canna' get. A woman, especially a young an' pretty----" He broke off to
+say: "Toch! will ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the sex sets that
+lad rampaging."
+
+"Beautiful! I tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp
+was emphatically assuring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, "the
+loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see--bar none! I saw
+her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards
+insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day she
+passed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my hat to her as the
+Staff dismounted at the gate."
+
+"Another _rara avis_, Beau?" the Colonel called across the intervening
+group of talkers. The group of khaki-clad figures separated, and turned
+first to the Chief, then to the bright-eyed, bright-faced enthusiast.
+White teeth flashed in tanned faces, chaff began:
+
+"In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?"
+
+"Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that pretty 'Jollity'
+girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, and the postcard grin."
+
+"Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moonless night on the
+Cape Town Hotel verandah!"
+
+"_She_ turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?"
+
+"Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord
+Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would
+have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff
+Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the
+enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed...."
+
+"She was neither," the crimson boy declared. "She was simply a lady, quiet
+and high-bred and simple enough to have been a Princess of the blood, or
+to look a fellow in the face and pass him by without the slightest
+idea--I'd swear to it--that she'd fairly taken his breath away."
+
+"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a title.
+"Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is--I may
+say the word--in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than
+Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce
+you, unless the Colonel entertains objections ..."
+
+"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian
+prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint
+in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."
+
+"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-class long-distance eyesight."
+There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her
+before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are ... here
+she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's
+view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass
+them."
+
+The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff had congregated.
+Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with
+Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in
+Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching
+feminine shapes should pass across the open space. One or two Staff
+monocles went up. The Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his
+steel-rimmed eyeglasses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose.
+
+They came and passed--the white figure and the two black ones. Of these
+one was very tall, one short and dumpy--veiled and mantled, their hands
+hidden in their ample sleeves, they went by with their eyes upon the
+ground. But the girl with them--a slight, willowy creature in a creamy
+cambric dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and
+bowed, upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide strings of
+muslin under her delicate round chin--looked with innocent, candid
+interest at the group of men outside the Hospital. The tanned faces, the
+simple workman-like Service dress, setting off the well-knit, alert
+figures, the quiet, soldierly bearing, even the distant sound of the
+well-bred voices, pleased her, even as the whiff of cigars and Russian
+leather that the breeze brought down from the stoep struck some latent
+chord of subconscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between
+the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed golden hazel
+eyes. And cognisant of every fleeting change of expression in those lovely
+eyes, the taller of her two companions thought, with a stab of pain:
+
+"_Your father was that man's friend, and the comrade of others like him._"
+
+"Now, then!" challenged Beauvayse, as the three figures moved out of
+sight.
+
+"The 'Girl With the Golden Eyes'?" said somebody.
+
+"You wouldn't speak of her in the same breath with that brainless beast of
+Balzac's, hang it all!" expostulated the champion. He turned eagerly to
+the Colonel. "Now you've seen her, sir, would you?"
+
+"Not exactly. And I'm bound to say, I regard your claim to the possession
+of good taste as completely established.... 'Ware the horse, there! Look
+out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the
+Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of
+perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the
+flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next
+instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted orderly before
+the gates, and rendered nervous by the pressure of the crowd, shied at the
+towering _panache_ of imitation grass-made ostrich feathers trailing from
+the aged and crownless pot-hat worn by a headman of the Barala in holiday
+attire, jerked the bridle from the hand of the trooper, and backed,
+rearing, in the direction of the three women passing on the sidewalk. The
+other horses shied, frustrating the efforts of the orderly to catch the
+flying bridle, and the danger from the huge, towering brown body and
+dangling iron-shod hoofs was very real, seemed inevitable, when a man in
+white drill and wearing a Panama hat ran out of the crowd, sprang up and
+deftly caught the loose bridoon-rein, mastered the frightened beast, and
+dragged it back into the roadway, in time to avert harm.
+
+"Cleverly done, but a close thing," the Chief said, as he turned away. "_I
+wish I had had that fellow's chance!_" was written in Beauvayse's face. To
+have won a look of gratitude from those wonderful black-fringed eyes,
+brought a flush of admiration into those white-rose cheeks, would have
+been worth while. The slight, tall, girlish figure in its dainty creamy
+draperies had passed out of sight now between its two black-robed
+guardians. And had not Luck, that mutable-minded deity, given the golden
+chance to a hulking stranger in white drill, his, Beauvayse's, might have
+been the hand to intervene in the matter of the Colonel's restive charger,
+and his the ears to receive Beauty's acknowledgments.
+
+If he had known that her eyes had been too full of his own resplendent,
+virile, glowing young personality, to even see the man who had stepped in
+between her and possible danger! The most innocent girl will have her
+ideal of a lover and thrill at the imagined touch, and furnish the dumb
+image with a dream-voice that woos her in impossible, elaborate,
+impassioned sentences, very unlike the real utterances of Love when he
+comes. The blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, golden-locked St. Michael portrayed
+in celestial-martial splendour upon one of the panels of the triptych over
+the altar in the Convent chapel, had, as he bent stern young brows over
+the writhing demon with the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of
+the young soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and profane,
+Sister Cleophee or Sister Ruperta would have said, to liken a handsome,
+stupid, young lieutenant of Hussars to the immortal Captain of the Armies
+of Heaven.
+
+But she knew another who would understand. There was no flaw in the
+perfect sympathy that maintained between Lynette and the Mother-Superior,
+though, certainly, since the Colonel's visit of the previous day, the
+Mother had seemed strangely preoccupied and sad.... Her good-night kiss,
+invariably so warm and tender, had been the merest brush of lips against
+the girl's soft cheek; her good-morning had been even more perfunctory;
+her eyes, those great maternal radiances, turned their light elsewhere.
+Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her
+abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a
+noble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the
+corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of
+pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the slender white
+figure leaning from her chamber-casement, whispering, with outstretched
+hands, and eyes that gleamed through the darkness:
+
+"_Open the door! Do you hear, you Kid? Open the door!_"
+
+
+
+
+Her heart beat once, heavily, and seemed to stop. A cold breath seemed to
+blow upon the little silken hair-tendrils at the nape of her white neck,
+spreading a creeping, stiffening horror through her body, deadening
+sensation, paralysing every limb.
+
+The close approach of any man, even the thought of such contact, turned
+her deadly faint, checked her pulses, stopped her breath. At picnics and
+parties and dances to which the Mayor's wife or the mothers of some of the
+pupils would invite or chaperon her, her vivid, delicate, fragile beauty
+would draw, first men's eyes, and then their owners, not all unhandsome or
+undesirable; while showier girls looked in vain for partners or
+companions. The little triumph, the consciousness of being admired and
+sought after, would quicken Lynette's pulses, and heighten the radiance of
+her eyes, and lend animation to her girlish chatter and gaiety to her
+laughter--at first. Then some over-bold advance, some hot look or
+whispered word, would bring quick recollection leaping into the lovely
+eyes, and drive the vivid colour from the virginal transparent face, and
+stamp the smiling mouth into pale, breathless lines of Fear. That night in
+the tavern on the veld had branded a child with premature knowledge of the
+ferocious, ravening, devouring Beast that lies in Man concealed. Again she
+felt the scorching breath of lust upon her; she quailed under the
+intolerable touch; she shook like a reed in the brutal hands of the evil,
+dominating power that would brook no resistance and knew no mercy. The
+horrible obsession came upon her now, all the stronger for those moments
+of forgetfulness:
+
+"_Clang--clang--clang!_"
+
+The little Irish novice had rung the chapel bell for Sext and None. She
+could hear, from the nuns' end of the big rambling, two-storied house, the
+rustling habits sweeping along the passage. She hurried to the door, and
+tore it open, frantically as though that ravening breath had been hot upon
+her neck, saw the dear black figure of the Mother sweeping towards her,
+and rushed into the arms that were held out, hiding from that burning,
+scorching, hideous memory in the bosom that dead Richard Mildare had
+turned from in his blindness.
+
+Just as Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the Mayor's promise
+to introduce him to the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life, or
+ever should see, mentally registered a vow that he would keep the old
+buffer up to that, by listening to his interminable hunting-stories, and
+laughing at his venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War,
+sharpened a fellow's faculties....
+
+"It's rum to reflect," Beauvayse said, conscious of perpetrating an
+epigram, "that from time immemorial the fellow who wants to make up to a
+young woman has always had to begin by getting round an old man!"
+
+He looked round for the old man, whom the title would have estranged for
+ever. He had buttonholed the Chief, and was gassing away--joy!--upon the
+very subject.
+
+"I fancy the ladies of the Convent, who occasionally visit the Hospital,
+were coming in at this gate. The short nun, I noticed, had a little
+basket in her hand. Probably they went round to the side entrance, seeing
+the--ha, ha!--the stoep garrisoned by Her Majesty's Imperial Forces.
+Certainly.... Without doubt. We respect the Mother-Superior highly. A most
+gifted, most estimable person in every way, if rather stern and
+reserved.... Unapproachable, my wife calls her. But Miss Mildare, her
+ward----"
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+"Miss Mildare!"
+
+The Chief's keen eyes had lightened suddenly. The whole face had darkened
+and narrowed, and the clipped brown moustache lost its smiling curve, and
+straightened into a hard line.
+
+"Miss _Mildare_?"
+
+"Why, yes, that is her name.... An orphan, I have heard, and with no
+living relatives. But she seems happy enough at the Convent, judging by
+what Mrs. Greening says."
+
+The hearer experienced a momentary feeling of relief and of anger--relief
+to think that dead Dick Mildare's daughter should have found refuge in
+such a woman's heart; anger that the woman should have concealed from him
+the girl's identity, knowing her the object of his own anxious search.
+
+Then he understood. His anger died as suddenly as it had been kindled. He
+recalled something that he had seen when the rearing horse had inclined
+perilously towards the footway--that protecting maternal gesture, that
+swift interposition of the tall, active, black-robed figure between the
+white-clad, flower-faced, girlish creature and those threatening iron-shod
+hoofs....
+
+"She loves the girl--Dick Mildare's daughter by the treacherous friend who
+stole him from her. Is there a doubt? With poor little Lady Lucy Hawting's
+willowy figure and the same nymph-like droop of the little head, with its
+rich twists and coils of dead-leaf-coloured hair, shaded by the big black
+hat. That woman has taken her to her heart, however she came by her; the
+parting would be agony, stern, proud, tender creature that she is! I
+suppose she will be doing thundering penance for not having told me, a
+fellow who simply walked into the place and assegaied her with my
+death-news. Here's a marrowy bone of gossip Lady Hannah shall never crack.
+And yet I wouldn't swear there's not an angel husked inside that dried-up
+little chrysalis. For God made all women, though He only turned out a few
+of 'em perfect, and some only just a little better than the ruck."
+
+He roused himself from the brown study that brought into relief many
+lurking lines and furrows in the thin, keen face, as the Chief Medical
+Officer, fixing him through suspicious eyeglasses, demanded:
+
+"Ye got your full allowance o' sleep last nicht?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was born not only with eyes
+and ears, like other infants, but with the capacity for using 'em."
+
+"Ay. It's remarr'kable how many men will daudle complacently through life,
+from the cradle to the grave, wi'out the remotest consciousness that
+they're practically blind and no better than deaf, as far as regards real
+seeing and hearing. But who's your prodeegy?"
+
+"One of Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. They put him on at the Convent with
+another sentry, their first experience of a night on guard. By not being
+in a hurry to challenge, and keeping his ears open while a conversation of
+the confidentially-affectionate kind was going on between a Dutchman--a
+fellow employed in the booking-office at the railway, on whom I've had my
+eye for some little time past--and his sweetheart, my townie found out for
+himself something that most of us knew before, and something else that we
+wanted to know particularly badly...."
+
+"Namely?"
+
+"For one thing, that the town is a hotbed of spies, and that our friends
+in laager outside are nightly communicated with by means of
+flash-signals."
+
+"And that's an indeesputable fact. Toch!" No other combination of letters
+may convey the guttural, "Have I no' seen the lamps at warr'k mysel',
+after darr'k, at the end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld! The
+Dutchman would be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking."
+
+"He will have plenty of time to think where he is at present. When the
+sentry interfered he was instructing the young woman in a simple but
+effective code of match-flare signals, by means of which she was to
+communicate with him when he had cleared out. And he had announced his
+intention of doing that without delay."
+
+"An' skipping to his freends upo' the Borr'der.... Toch!" The network of
+wrinkles tightened about the sharp little blue-grey eyes of the Chief
+Medical Officer. "That would gie a thochtfu' man a kind o' notion that a
+reese in the temperature may be expectit shortly. An' so you--slept
+soundly on the strength o' many wakeful nichts to come? Ay, that would be
+the kind o' information ye were badly wanting!"
+
+"You're wrong, Major. The bit of information was this--from the spy to his
+friends outside: '_No--news--to-night._'" The keen hazel eyes conveyed
+something into the Northern blue ones that was not said in words: "'No
+news to-night.' And the sender of that message was a railway man!"
+
+The wiry hairs of the Chief Medical Officer's red moustache bristled like
+a cat's.
+
+"Toch! Colonel, you will have reason to be considering me dull in the
+uptake, but I see through the mud wall now. And so the knowledge that ye
+have no equal at hiding your deeds o' darkness even in the licht o' the
+railway-yard was as good to ye as Daffy's Elixir. And when micht we reckon
+on getting notification from what I may presume to ca' your double
+surpreese-packet?"
+
+He looked at his watch--a well-used Waterbury, worn upon the silvered
+steel lip-strap of a cavalry bridle, and said:
+
+"Ten o'clock. At a quarter past eleven I think we may count upon
+something. The driver of Engine 123 has given me the word of an Irishman
+from County Kildare; and the stoker, a Cardiff man, and the guard, who
+hails from Shoreditch, are quite as keen as Kildare."
+
+"You're sending the stuff up North?"
+
+"In the direction of the stretch of railway-line they're busy wrecking, in
+the hope that it may come in useful."
+
+"Weel, I will gie ye the guid wish that the affair may go off exactly as
+ye are hoping."
+
+"Thanks, Major! You could hardly word the sentence more happily."
+
+They exchanged a laugh as the Mayor bustled up, rubicund, important, and
+with a Member of the Committee to introduce.
+
+"Colonel, you'll permit me to present Alderman Brooker, one of our most
+energetic and valued townsmen, President of the Gas Committee, and an
+Assistant Borough Magistrate. One of Major Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. Was
+on sentry-go last night not far from here, and had a most extraordinary
+experience. Worth your hearing, if you can spare time to listen to my
+friend's account of it."
+
+"With pleasure, Mr. Mayor."
+
+Brooker, a stout and flabby man, with pouches under biliously tinged eyes,
+bowed and broke into a violent perspiration, not wholly due to the shiny
+black frock-coat suit of broadcloth donned for the occasion.
+
+"Sir, I humbly venture to submit that I have been the victim of a
+conspiracy!"
+
+"Indeed? Step this way, Mr. Brooker."
+
+Brooker, soothed by the courteous affability of the reception, his sense
+of importance magnified by being led aside, apart from the others, into
+the official privacy of the stoep-corner, began to be eloquent. He knew,
+he said, that the story he had to relate would appear almost incredible,
+but a soldier, a diplomat, a master of strategy, such as the personage to
+whom he now addressed himself, would understand--none better--how to
+unravel the tangled web, and follow up the clue to its ending in a den of
+secret, black, and midnight conspiracy. A blob of foam appeared upon his
+under-lip. He waved his hands, thick, short-fingered, clammy members....
+
+"My story is as follows, sir...."
+
+"I shall have pleasure in listening to it, Mr. Brooker, on condition that
+you will do me first the favour of listening to a story of mine?"
+
+Deferred Brooker protested willingness.
+
+"Last night, Mr. Brooker, at about eleven-thirty to a quarter to twelve, I
+was returning from a little tour of inspection"--the slight riding
+sjambok the Chief carried pointed over the veld to the northward--"out
+there, when, passing the south angle of the enclosure of the Convent,
+where, by my special orders, a double sentry of the Town Guard had been
+posted, I heard a sound that I will endeavour to reproduce:
+
+"_Gr'rumph! Honk'k! Gr'rumph!_"
+
+Brooker bounded in his Oxford shoes.
+
+The face upon which he glued his bulging eyes was grave to sternness. He
+stuttered, interrogated by the judicial glance:
+
+"It--it sounds something like a snore."
+
+"It was a snore, Mr. Brooker, and it proceeded from one of the sentries
+upon guard."
+
+"Sir ... I ... I can expl----"
+
+"Oblige me by not interrupting, Mr. Brooker. This sentry sat upon a short
+post, his back fitted comfortably into an angle of the Convent fence, his
+head thrown back, and his mouth wide open. From it, or from the organ
+immediately above, the snore proceeded. He was having a capital night's
+rest--in the Service of his Country. And as I halted in front of him,
+fixing upon him a gaze which was coldly observant, he shivered and ceased
+to snore, and said":--the wretched Brooker heard his own voice, rendered
+with marvellous fidelity, speaking in the muffled tone of the
+sleeper--"'_Annie, it's damned cold to-night; and you've got all the
+blanket._'"
+
+"Sir ... sir!" The stricken Brooker babbled hideously.... "Colonel ... for
+mercy's sake!..."
+
+"I could not oblige the gentleman with a blanket, Mr. Brooker, but I
+relieved him of his rifle and left him, to tell his picket a cock-and-bull
+story of having been drugged and hypnotised by Boer spies. And--I will
+overlook it upon the present occasion, but in War-time, Mr. Brooker, men
+have been shot for less. I think I need not detain you further. Your rifle
+has been sent to your headquarters--with my card and an explanation. One
+word more, Mr. Brooker----"
+
+Brooker, grey, streaky, and desperately wretched, was blind to the
+laughter brimming the keen hazel eyes.
+
+"I am entrusted by the Imperial Government with the preservation of Public
+Morality in Gueldersdorp, as well as with the maintenance of the Public
+Safety--and I should be glad of an assurance from you that Mrs. Brooker's
+Christian name is really Annie?"
+
+"I--I swear it, Colonel!"
+
+Brooker fled, leaving the preserver of public morality to have his laugh
+out before he rejoined the Staff, glancing at the Waterbury on the short
+steel chain. Half-past ten. Would the Dop Doctor turn up to appointment,
+or had the battle with habit and the deadly craving born of indulgence
+ended in defeat? As his eyes moved from the dial, they lighted upon the
+man:
+
+"_Clothed and in his right mind...._"
+
+His own words of the night before recurred to memory as he came forwards
+with his long, light step, greeting the new-comer with the easy, cordial
+grace of high-breeding.
+
+"Ah, Dr. Saxham, obliged to you for being punctual. Let me introduce you
+to Major Lord Henry Leighbury, D.S.O., Grenadier Guards, our D.A.A.G. Dr.
+Saxham, Colonel Ware, Baraland Rifles, and Sir George Wendysh, Wessex
+Regiment, commanding the Irregular Horse; Captain Bingham Wrynche, Royal
+Bay Dragoons, my senior aide-de-camp, and his junior, Lieutenant Lord
+Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars. And Dr. Saxham, Major Taggart, R.A.M.C.,
+our Chief Medical Officer."
+
+He watched the man keenly as he made the introductions, saying to himself
+that this was better than he had hoped. The ragged black moustache had
+been shaved away; the frayed but spotless suit of white drill fitted the
+heavy-shouldered, thin-flanked, muscular figure perfectly; the faded blue
+flannel shirt, with the white double collar and narrow black tie; the
+shabby black kamarband about his waist, the black-ribboned Panama,
+maintaining respectability in extremest old age, as that expensive but
+lasting headgear is wont to do, possessed, as worn by the Dop Doctor, a
+certain _cachet_ of style. His slight, curt, almost frowning salutations
+displayed a well-graduated recognition of the official status of each
+individual to whom he was made known, betokening the man accustomed to
+move in circles where such knowledge and the application of it was
+indispensable, and who knew, too, that slight from him would have given
+chagrin. But another moment, and the junior Medical Officer, a
+black-avised little Irishman from County Meath, had gripped him by both
+hands, and was exclaiming in his juicy brogue, real delight beaming in his
+round, rosy face:
+
+"Saxham! Saxham of St. Stephens, and the grand ould days! Deny me now, to
+my face. Say, 'Tom McFadyen, I don't know you,' if you dare."
+
+The blue eyes shone out vivid gentian-colour in the kindly smile that
+illumined them, the stern lips parted in a laugh that showed the sound
+white closely-set teeth.
+
+"Tom McFadyen, I do know you. But if you offer to pay me that cab-fare you
+owe me, I shall say I'm wrong, and that it's another man."
+
+"Hould your tongue, jewel," drolled the little junior, who delighted in
+exaggerating the brogue that tripped naturally off his Irish tongue.
+"Don't be after giving me away to the Chief and the Senior that believe
+me, by me own account, to be descended from Ollamh Fodla, that was King of
+Tara, and owned the cow-grazing from Trim to Athboy, and ate boiled
+turnips off shields of gold before potatoes were invented, when the
+bog-oaks were growing as acorns on the tree. And as to the cab-fare, sure
+I hailed the hansom out of politeness to your honour's glory, the day that
+saw me going off to the Army Medical School at Netley, wid all my worldly
+belongin's in wan ould hat-box and the half of a carpet-bag. Wirra, wirra!
+but it's some folks have luck, says I, as the train took me out av'
+Waterloo in a third-class smoker, while you were left on the platform
+sheddin' half-crowns out av every pore for the newspaper boys an' porters
+to pick up, and smilin' like a baby dhramin' av the bottle. You'd passed
+your exam in Anatomy wid wan hand held behind you an' a glove on the
+other, you'd got your London University Scholarship in Physiology, and
+you'd fallen head over ears in love with the prettiest and sweetest girl
+that ever wore out shoe-leather. You wrote to me two years later to say
+you'd been appointed an in-surgeon on the Junior Staff, an' that you were
+engaged to be married. But divil the taste of weddin'-cake did I ever get
+off you. What----"
+
+The little Irishman, thoughtlessly rattling on, pulled up in an instant,
+seeing the ghastly unmistakable change upon the other's face. He
+remembered the grim black reason for the change in Saxham, and for once,
+his habitual tact deserted him. His rosy gills purpled, even as had the
+Mayor's on the Dop Doctor's entrance. His eyes winced under the heavy
+petrifying, unseeing stare of Saxham's blue ones....
+
+"Sorry to stem the flood of your reminiscences, McFadyen, but we're going
+to overhaul the Hospital now."
+
+It was the voice of the visitor who had come to the Harris Street house on
+the previous night, the tall, loosely-built, closely-knit figure in the
+easily fitting Service-dress that now stepped across the gulf that had
+suddenly opened between the two old friends, and laid a hand in pleasant,
+familiar fashion upon Saxham's heavy, rather bowed shoulders. But for that
+scholar's stoop they would have been of equal height. He went on: "You
+will be able to give us points, Saxham, where they will be needed most.
+Can't expect Colonial institutions, even at the best, to keep abreast of
+London."
+
+The blue eyes met his almost defiantly.
+
+"As I think I remember telling you, sir, it is five years since I saw
+London."
+
+"Well, I don't blame you for taking a long holiday while it was
+procurable. There are a few of us who would benefit by a gallop without
+the halter, eh, Taggart?"
+
+Saxham would not stoop even to benefit indirectly by the shrewd, kindly
+tact. He drew himself to his full height, and the words were spoken with
+such ringing clearness that they arrested the attention of every man
+present.
+
+"My holiday was compulsory. I underwent--innocently--a legal prosecution
+for malpractice. The Crown Jury decided in my favour, but my West End
+connection was ruined. I resigned my Hospital and other appointments, and
+left England."
+
+"Ay!" It was the Chief Medical Officer's broad Scots tongue that droned
+out the bagpipe note. "Weel, Doctor, it's an ill wind blaws naebody guid,
+and ye canna expect Captain McFadyen or mysel' to sympatheese overmuch wi'
+the West End for a loss that is our gain. And, Colonel, it's in my memory
+that ye had set your mind on beginnin' wi' the Operating Theatre?..."
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+The chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers of the Garrison
+Staff were making the rounds, and was stricken to the soul by the
+discovery that the Reverend Julius Fraithorn had had no breakfast.
+Occupying a small, single-cotted, electric-bell-less room in the outlying
+ward--brick-lined and corrugated-iron-built like the greater building, and
+reserved for infectious cases--the Reverend Julius might have been said to
+be marooned, had not his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created
+such hot competition among the nurses for the privilege of attending on
+him, that he had frequently received breakfast and dinner in duplicate,
+and once three teas. Some of the probationers, reared in the outer
+darkness of Dissent, knew no better than to term him "the minister." To
+the matron, who was High Church, he existed as "Father Fraithorn." Julius
+is hardly complete to the reader without an intimation that he very dearly
+loved to be dubbed "Father." The matron had never failed in this.
+
+A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under
+the bony hand--a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the
+skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to
+say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen
+band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at
+Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday evening Confirmation classes
+for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record
+attendance by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and
+ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs
+of trousers. Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that
+the first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners would be
+as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy
+Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the stuffy
+West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew of London roughs hulking and
+hustling on the benches, learning per medium of "the dodger," that one's
+duty to one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to
+refrain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-raiding, hustling, and
+jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or iron knuckle-dusters, and not
+to get drunk before Saturday night.
+
+He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of
+physicians--honestly-meaning wiseacres--ignorant of the shifts, the
+fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the panting,
+tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company with the hale
+traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, protracted journeys, the
+neglect and discomfort of the inns and taverns and boarding-houses, where
+Kaffirs are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them
+because he must, and struggled on, learning by painful experience that
+fever-patches are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to
+the man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting
+better, and would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and take
+up his mission in the West and West-Central districts, and begin work
+again.
+
+Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light chair slipped
+in behind them, hospital-fashion, he looked beyond the whitewashed walls
+northwards, to grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still
+apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the
+sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the
+Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered
+roof, the organ pealed ... then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki
+Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and
+well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the _cachet_ of authority.
+Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound
+fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the
+poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing
+about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which
+his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally smote his breast and
+repented. What was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should dare
+to oppose the Holy Will?
+
+"Weel now, and how are we the day?" said the Chief Medical Officer,
+presented by the Resident Surgeon to the occupant of the bed. He read
+approaching death in the sunken face against the pillows, and in the
+feeble pulse as he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon,
+catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting
+information that was not needed.
+
+"It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the conventional
+answer," said Julius Fraithorn. "To be plain and brief, I am suffering
+from tuberculous lung-disease, and I am advised that I have not many days
+to live."
+
+He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.
+
+"Everything that can be done for me here is done. I cannot be too
+thankful. But I should have liked--I should have wished to have been
+spared to return to England, if not to live a little longer among my
+friends, at least to ..." He broke off panting, and his rattling breaths
+seemed to shake him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; he
+wheezed like the mildewed harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he
+had once tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the flat,
+deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved
+he had suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced the
+wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin.
+
+"I can't!" he gasped out. "You see----"
+
+A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft, muffled voice trailed
+away into a whisper, blue shadows gathered about his large, mobile,
+sensitive mouth, much like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and
+his head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.
+
+"Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red shoulder-straps and
+brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to another, a fair, handsome, young
+giant who leaned against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse
+hurried to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the
+shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a
+glass with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse,
+stooped over the pale figure on the bed;
+
+"No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. Should grouse myself
+if I was in his shoes--or bed-socks would be the proper word--what?"
+
+Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at
+the Cabaret de l'Enfer--that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de
+Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the
+party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."
+
+Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar
+experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if
+they've been told it's _chic_. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead
+men--healthy dead men, don't you know? But--give you my word--a cadaverous
+spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and
+breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the
+Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"
+
+Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders,
+until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:
+
+"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the passage,
+myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."
+
+"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a
+ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.
+
+The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group of five. The
+chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped
+and aproned discipline, upright in the corner.
+
+"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a
+cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't
+take the odds you're not as bad?"
+
+"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a
+look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted
+from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the
+champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels
+before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning.
+Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions--from
+Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier
+tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority--up
+to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth
+having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"
+
+"By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth! Where d'you think I'd give a
+cool fifty to be this minute? Not cooling my heels in a brick-paved
+passage while a pack of doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a
+moribund young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin'
+North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears pricked for--you
+know what!"
+
+Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? And the Chief must
+be ten times worse. How he keeps his countenance--demure as my
+grandmother's cat lappin' cream.... I say, the Transvaal Dutch; they call
+themselves the true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses
+and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud,
+or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw
+material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in
+among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women
+say, when I think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel,
+masquerading in Service kit.
+
+Within the room the fainting man was coming back to consciousness, his
+dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain Bingo Wrynche's similitude
+regarding husks and shavings, rings of blue fire swimming before his
+darkened vision, and a dull roaring in his ears.... The Royal Army Medical
+Corps wrought over him; the nurse lent a deft helping hand; the Resident
+Surgeon talked eagerly to the Colonel; and he, lending ear, scarcely heard
+the reiterated, stereotyped parrot-phrases, so taken up was his attention
+with the man in shabby white drill clothes, who leaned over the foot of
+the bed, his square face set into an expressionless mask, his
+gentian-blue, oddly vivid eyes fixed upon the wasted, waxy-yellow face of
+the sick man, his head bent, as he listened with profound, absorbed
+attention to the husky, rattling, laboured breaths.
+
+Suddenly he straightened himself and spoke, addressing himself to the
+Resident Surgeon.
+
+"The patient has told us, sir, that he is suffering from tuberculous
+disease of the lungs. May I ask, was that the conclusion arrived at by a
+London consulting physician, and whether your own diagnosis has confirmed
+the assertion?"
+
+The Resident Surgeon nodded with patronising indifference. He was not
+going to waste civilities upon this rowdy, drunken remittance-man, whom he
+had seen reeling through the streets of the stad as he went upon his own
+respectable way.
+
+"_Phthisis pulmonalis._" He addressed his reply to the Chief. "And the
+process of lung-destruction is, as you will observe, sir, nearly
+complete."
+
+He encountered from the Chief a look of cool displeasure that flushed him
+to the top of his knobby forehead, and set him blinking nervously behind
+his big round spectacles.
+
+"Dr. Saxham asked you, sir, unless I mistake, whether you had ascertained
+by your own diagnosis, the ..." Lady Hannah's words came back to him. He
+recalled the "bit of information wormed out of the nurse," and ended with
+"the presence of the bacillus?"
+
+Saxham's blue eyes thrust their rapier-points at him, and then plunged
+into the oyster-like orbs behind the spectacles of the Resident Surgeon,
+who rapidly grew from scarlet to purple, and from purple to pale green.
+Major Taggart and the Irishman exchanged a look of intelligence.
+
+"Koch's bacillus, sir, were this a case of tuberculosis proper, would be
+present in the expectoration of the patient, and easy of demonstration
+under the microscope." Saxham's voice was cold as ice and cutting as
+tempered steel. "May we take it that you can personally testify to its
+presence here?" He pointed to the bed.
+
+"And varra possibly," put in Taggart, "ye could submit a culture for
+present inspection? It would be gratifeeying to me and Captain McFadyen
+here, as weel as to our friend an' colleague Dr. Saxham, late of St.
+Stephen's-in-the-West, London, to varrafy the correctness o' your
+diagnosis."
+
+"And it would that!" the Irishman chimed in. "So trot out your bacillus,
+by all manner of means!"
+
+The Resident Surgeon babbled something incoherent, and melted out of the
+room.
+
+"Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said McFadyen, coming back
+from the door.
+
+"He'll no be in sic a sweatin' hurry to come back," pronounced the canny
+Scot, shedding a wink from a dry, red-fringed eyelid. He produced from the
+roomy breast-pocket of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed
+stethoscope, and put it silently into the hand Saxham had mechanically
+stretched out for it. Then he drew back, his eyes, like those of the other
+two spectators of the strange scene that was beginning, fixed upon the
+chief actor in it. One other, weak after his swoon as a new-born child,
+lay passively, helplessly upon the bed.
+
+Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a noiseless, feline,
+padding step towards the prone victim. A gleam of apprehension shot into
+Julius Fraithorn's great dark eyes, reopening now to consciousness. They
+fixed themselves, with an instinct born of that sudden thrill of fear,
+upon the lightly-closed right hand. Instantly comprehending, Saxham lifted
+the hand, showed that it held no instrument save the stethoscope, and
+dropped it again by his side, drawing nearer. Then the massive,
+close-cropped black head sank to the level of Julius Fraithorn's breast,
+revealed in its ghastly, emaciated nakedness by the open nightshirt. The
+massive shoulders bowed, the supple body curved, the keen ear joined
+itself to the heaving surface. In a moment more the agonising, hacking,
+rending cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising him deftly and
+tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who hurried to him, answering his
+low questions in whispers, giving aid where he indicated it required.
+
+Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled over the lung
+area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching for silent spaces, sucking
+evidence into the assimilative brain behind the eyes that saw nothing but
+the man upon the bed, the locked human casket housing the secret that was
+slowly, surely coming to light. In the fierce determination to gain it, he
+threw the stethoscope away, and glued his avid ear to the man again.
+
+"Toch! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittie o' Kruger sovereigns!"
+the Chief Medical Officer whispered to his colleague from Meath. And
+McFadyen whispered back:
+
+"Nor me, for your shoes. 'Ssh!"
+
+Saxham was lifting up the great stooping shoulders, and beginning to
+speak in a voice totally different from that of the man known in
+Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear, ringing, concise, the sentences
+left his lips:
+
+"Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involuntary simulation of
+the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary tuberculosis by a patient suffering
+from a grave disease of totally different and possibly much less malignant
+character. Oblige me by stepping nearer!"
+
+They crowded about the bed like eager students.
+
+"In order to show what false conclusions loose modes of reasoning and the
+habitual reliance upon precedent may lead to, take the instance of the
+consulting physician to whom some years ago this young man, now barely
+thirty, and reduced, as you may see for yourselves, to the final extremity
+of physical decline, resorted."
+
+"I would gie five shillin' if the man could hear his ain judgment!"
+murmured the Chief Medical Officer; for he had gleaned from a whispered
+answer of Julius's the omnipotent name of Sir Jedbury Fargoe. "Toch!" He
+chuckled dryly. Saxham went on:
+
+"The consulting patient suffers from cough, painful and racking, from
+impaired digestive power, from increasing debility, fever, and
+night-sweats. He visits the specialist, convinced that he is consumptive,
+he receives confirmation of his convictions, and you see him to-day
+presenting the appearance, and reproducing all the symptoms of a patient
+in consumption's final stage. Possibly the germs of tuberculosis may be
+dormant in his organisation, waiting the opportunity to develop into
+activity! Possibly--a very remote possibility--the disease may have
+already attacked some organ of his body! But--and upon this point I can
+take my stand with the confidence of absolute certainty--the lungs of this
+so-called pulmonary sufferer are absolutely sound!"
+
+"My certie! Send I may live to foregather wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe!" the
+Chief Medical Officer prayed inaudibly. "He will gang to the next
+International Consumption Congress wi' a smaller conceit of himsel', or my
+name's no Duncan Taggart!"
+
+The lecturer, absorbed in his subject, lifted his hand to silence the
+murmur, and pursued:
+
+"From what disease, then, is this man suffering? Logical and progressive
+conclusions drawn from experience, and based upon the local enlargement
+which the physicians previously consulted have apparently failed to
+perceive, lead me to diagnose the presence of a tumour in the mediastinum,
+extending its claws into the lungs, and seriously impeding their action
+and the action of the heart. An operation, serious and necessarily
+involving danger, is imperative. The growth may be benign or malignant; in
+the latter case I doubt whether the life of the patient is to be saved.
+But in the former case he has good hopes. Understand, I speak with
+certainty. Upon the presence of the growth, simple or otherwise, I am
+ready to stake my credit, my good name, my professional reputation----"
+
+Ah! It rushed upon Saxham with a sickening shock of recollection that he
+was bankrupt in these things, and shame and anger strove for the mastery
+in his face, and anguish wrung a sob from him, despite his iron composure.
+
+He wrenched at the collar about his swelling throat, as he turned away
+blindly towards the window, seeing nothing, fighting desperately with the
+horrible despair that had gripped him, and the mad, wild frenzy of
+yearning for the old, glorious life of strenuous effort and conscious
+power. Lost! lost! all that had been won.
+
+"I ... I had forgotten ...!" he muttered; and then a hard, vigorous hand
+found his and gripped it.
+
+"Go on forgetting, Saxham!" said a voice in his ear--a voice he knew,
+instantly steadying--such virtue is there in honest, heartfelt,
+comprehending sympathy between man and his fellow-man--the spinning brain,
+and quieting the leaping pulses, and giving him back, as nothing else
+could have done, his lost self-control. "You have earned the right!"
+
+"Man, you're a wonder!" groaned the enraptured Chief Medical Officer. He
+added, with a relapse into the national caution: "That is, ye will be if
+your prognosis proves correc'. But the Taggarts are a' of the canny breed
+of Doobtin' Tammas, an sae I'll just keep a calm sugh till I see what the
+knife lays bare."
+
+"Use the knife now, sir. At once--without delay!"
+
+It was the weak, muffled voice of the patient on the bed. Saxham wheeled
+sharply about, and the stern blue eyes and the great lustrous pleading
+brown ones, looked into each other.
+
+The pale Julius spoke again:
+
+"I entreat you, Doctor!"
+
+Saxham spoke in his curt way:
+
+"You are aware that there is risk?"
+
+Julius Fraithorn stretched out his transparent hands.
+
+"What risk can there be to a man in my state? Look at these; and did I not
+hear you say ..."
+
+"Whatever I may have said, sir, and however urgent I may admit the
+necessity for immediate operation, you must wait until to-morrow morning."
+
+"I am fasting, sir, and fed. I received Holy Communion this morning, and
+have not yet breakfasted."
+
+The return of the chart-nurse followed by a probationer carrying a laden
+tray provoked an exclamation from the little Irishman.
+
+"Signs on it, the boy's as empty as a drum. The devil a wonder he went off
+like he did a bit back. And you can't deny him, Saxham?"
+
+"I wad gie him the chance, Saxham"--this from Surgeon-Major Taggart--"in
+your place; and maybe I'm putting in six worrds for mysel' as well as half
+a dozen for the patient. For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir Jedbury
+Fargoe, aboot a Regimental patient he slew for me, three years back, wi'
+his jawbone of a Philistine ass."
+
+Saxham spoke to Fraithorn authoritatively, kindly.
+
+"You have no near relative to sign the Hospital Register?"
+
+"My family are all in England, sir. I have not thought it necessary to
+distress them with the knowledge of my state."
+
+"I think Lady Hannah Wrynche, who is now in Gueldersdorp, happens to be an
+acquaintance of theirs, if not a friend?"
+
+Julius turned eagerly to the Colonel.
+
+"It is true, she did come here yesterday. But I should hardly wish ...
+Surely, being of mature age and in the full possession of all my
+faculties"--there was a smile on the pale lips--"I may be allowed to sign
+the book myself?"
+
+The doctors interchanged a look. The Colonel said to the patient:
+
+"Mr. Fraithorn, if the idea is not unwelcome to you, I myself will sign
+the book, and"--he stooped over the bed and laid his hard, soldierly hand
+kindly on the pale one--"in the event of a less fortunate termination than
+that we hope for"--the faces of the three surgeons were a study in
+inscrutability--"I will communicate, as soon as any communication is
+rendered possible, with the Bishop and Mrs. Fraithorn."
+
+The cough shook Julius as a terrier shakes a rat before he could gasp out:
+
+"Thank you, sir. With all my heart I thank you!"
+
+"You shall thank me when you get well!" The Chief shook the pale hand,
+crossed the bare boards to Saxham, who stood staring at them sullenly, and
+took him by the arm. They went out of the ward together, talking in low
+tones. The medical officers followed. Then the chart-nurse and the
+probationer who had been banished with the tray, came bustling back with
+towels, and razors, and a soapy solution in a basin, having a carbolic
+smell.
+
+Dr. Saxham had gone to take a disinfecting bath, the nurse said, as she
+went about her minute preparations; and the Commanding Officer had gone
+with the Staff, and now her poor dear must let himself be got ready.
+
+They wrapped the gaunt skeleton in a white blanket-robe with a heavy
+monkish cowl to it, and drew thick padded blanket-stockings over the
+ligament-tied, skin-covered bones that served the wasted wretch for legs,
+and wheeled in a high, narrow, rubber-wheeled, leather-cushioned
+stretcher, and laid him on it, light to lift, a very handful of humanity,
+and wheeled him, hooded and head-first, through the tile-floored passage
+and out into the golden African sunshine, that baked him gloriously
+through the coverings, and so into the main building and down a
+tile-floored passage there.
+
+He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with blinded, cowled eyes, through
+double doors at the end....
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+The operation was over, and the two Celts, self-appointed to the temporary
+posts of assistant-surgeon and anaesthetist, expressed their emotions in
+characteristic manner....
+
+"Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision an' the last
+stitch.... Och, Owen, the jewel you are! Give me the loan of your fist,
+man, this minute."
+
+"What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo? The auld-farrant, scraichin',
+obstinate grey gander. A hand I will tak' at him ower the head o' this, or
+I'm no Taggart of Taggartshowe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was a
+pretty operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quickness. And I'm sorry
+there are no' a baker's dozen o' patients for ye to deal wi'. It's a gran'
+treat to see a borrn genius use the knife."
+
+"You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time."
+
+"Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna! I doubt but we Army billies are
+better at puttin' men thegither than at takin' them to pieces in the long
+run.... Gently now, porter, wi' liftin' the patient.... Ay, McFadyen,
+that's richt, gie the man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no' fine to
+luik at? A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse is better than I would have
+expeckit. Wheel him awa', nurse; he'll no come round for another hour...."
+
+They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward. The porter followed. The
+three surgeons standing by that grim table in the rubber-floored central
+space of the amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for
+half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and
+aproned with sterilised material, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered,
+and splashed with the same ominous stains that were on the table and upon
+the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and sinister as
+ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber, or figured in a
+nightmare-tale of Poe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and
+sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of
+sharp and gleaming implements in a glass bath of carbolic; Taggart,
+standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled and movable, like everything
+else for use, and laden with rolls of lint and bandaging, and blue-glass
+bottles of peroxide of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily
+returning reels of silk-worm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their
+velvet-lined case.
+
+"You're no' fatigued? You would no' like a steemulant?"
+
+Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been staring with dull
+intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter, forgotten by the matron, whose
+usual charge it was. And the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart
+followed the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.
+
+"Fatigued? I hardly think so!"
+
+He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remembering the lengthy
+line of patients operated on in a single mid-week morning at St.
+Stephen's. And yet his steady hand shook a little, and a curious soft,
+subtle dulness of sensation was stealing over him. He had gone to bed
+sober, had risen after three hours of blessed, unexpected, helpful sleep,
+to battle with his desperate craving until morning. When the old woman
+left in charge of the housekeeping arrangements had come to his door with
+hot water and his usual breakfast--a mug of strong coffee with milk and a
+roll--he had gulped down the reviving, steadying draught thirstily, and
+swallowed a mouthful or two of the bread; and when he was shaved and
+tubbed and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone down to the
+dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric ether and strychnine,
+strong enough to brace his jarred nerves for the coming ordeal.
+
+Not that Saxham habitually drugged: that craving was not yet known to him.
+But the habitual intemperance had exacted even from his iron constitution
+its forfeit of shakiness in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the
+man suffering and unstrung.
+
+Looking about him as the dose began its work of stringing the lax nerves
+and stimulating the action of the heart, he saw that many of the drawers
+were open, a costly set of graduated scales missing, with their
+plush-lined box....
+
+With a certain premonition of what would next be missing, he went into the
+surgery. A case of silver-mounted surgical instruments had vanished from a
+shelf, with a presentation loving-cup, given by admirers among De
+Boursy-Williams's patients to that gifted practitioner. A roll-top desk
+was partly broken open, but not rifled, the American boltlocks having
+defied the clumsy efforts of the thief, Koets, the Dutch dispensarist, who
+had cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the previous night,
+crossing, with the portable property reft from the accursed Englander, the
+barbed-wire fence that formed the line of demarcation between the British
+Imperial Forces and the Army of the United Republics. He had meant to wait
+yet another day, and take many things more, but the coming of those
+verdoemte soldiers of the Engelsch Commandant to fetch away the carboys of
+carbolic acid and the other medical stores had roused him to prompt
+action.
+
+Later, wearing the brass badge of a Surgeon on the sleeve of his greasy
+black tail-coat, Koets ruled a Boer Field-Hospital, fearlessly slashing
+his way into the confidence of the United Republics through the tough,
+wincing brawn and muscle of Free Stater and Transvaaler. It speaks for the
+enduring qualities of the Boer constitution to say that many of his
+patients survived.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the brandy in the decanter....
+
+How it beckoned and allured and tempted. And the throat and palate of the
+man were parched with the desire of it. And yet, a moment before, with the
+toils about his feet, Saxham had wondered at the thought of these degraded
+years of bondage. He shook his head sullenly as Taggart repeated his
+question, and went away to wash and get dressed.
+
+Then he meant to shake off his companions and go where he could quench
+that inward fire. He loathed them as they followed, chatting
+pleasantly....
+
+But above the hissing of the hot water from the faucets over the basins
+came presently another sound, most familiar to the ears of the gossiping
+Celts....
+
+"Rifle-fire! Out on the veld over yonder." McFadyen's towel waved North.
+"Do ye hear it?"
+
+"Ay, do I! First bluid has been drawn. And to which side?"
+
+_Boom!..._
+
+The Hospital quivered to its foundations at the tremendous detonation.
+Shattered glass fell in showers of fragments from the roof of the
+operating-theatre, as the force of the explosion passed beneath the
+buildings in a surging of the ground on which they stood, a slow wave
+rolling southwards, without a backward draw.
+
+The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in earthquakes. Saxham
+tore it open, and the three shirt-sleeved, ensanguined men ran through the
+theatre, strewn with the debris from the roof, and through the double
+glazed doors communicating with the passage, populous with patients who
+should have been in bed, pursued by nurses as pale and shaken as their
+stampeding charges. The rear of the Hospital faces North, and they ran
+down a corridor full of dust, ending in more glazed doors, and tore out
+upon the back stoep, wide and roomy, and full of deck chairs and wicker
+lounges.
+
+"Do ye see it? Ten thousand salted South African deevils! Do ye no' see
+it?" the Surgeon-Major yelled, pointing to a monstrous milk-white
+soap-bubble-shaped cloud that slowly rose up in the hot blue sky to the
+North and hung there, sullenly brooding.
+
+"What is it, Major?" shouted Saxham, for behind them the Hospital was full
+of clamour. Nurses and dressers were running out into the grounds to
+listen and question and conjecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the
+palings was black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered, and carrying
+guns of every kind and calibre, from the venerable gaspipe of the native
+and the aged but still useful Martini-Henry of the citizen, to the
+Lee-Metford repeating-carbine, and the German magazine rifle of latest
+delivery to the troops of Imperial Majesty at Berlin. Men were clustered
+like bees on the flat tin roofs of the sheds at the Railway Works; men had
+climbed the signal-posts and were looking out from them over the sea of
+veld; the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured from their
+temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were massed on the top of their
+sand-bag mounds. A fair, handsome Staff officer, the younger of the two
+men who had accompanied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted
+on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while the pot-hat and
+truncheon of a scared native constable emerged timidly from the gaping
+jaws of a rusty water-cistern, long dismissed from Hospital use, and
+exiled to the open with other rubbish waiting transference to the
+scrap-heap; and far out upon the railway-line that vanished in the
+yellowing sea of veld an unseen engine screeched and screeched....
+
+The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel,
+lowered his binoculars as the persistent whistle kept open. The lines
+about his keen eyes and mouth curved into a cheerful smile. The sound was
+coming nearer, and presently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile or so
+from waiting, expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting, raced at full speed
+for her home in the railway-yard. Her driver was the young Irishman from
+the County Kildare, and her guard hailed from Shoreditch. And both of them
+had a tale to tell of what Taggart had called the Colonel's double
+surprise-packet, to a tall man whom they found waiting on the metals by
+the upper Signal Cabin.
+
+"Six mile from the start, sorra a yard more or less, sorr! I sees a
+comp'ny o' thim divils mustered on the bog, I mane the veld, sorr--smokin'
+their pipes an' passin' the bottle, an' givin' the overlook to a gang av
+odthers, that was rippin' up the rails undher the directions av a
+head-gaffer wid a hat brim like me granny's tay-thray, an' a beard like
+the Prophet Moses."
+
+"I sor 'is whoppin' big 'at myself, though we was two mile off when we
+picked the beggars out," the guard objected; "but 'ow could you twig 'is
+beard or that the other blokes was smokin'?"
+
+"Did ye ever know a Dutch boss av any kind clane-shaved an' not
+hairy-faced?" was Kildare's just retort, "or see a crowd av Doppers
+gathered together that the blue smoke av the Blessed Creature was not
+curlin' out av their mouths an' ears an' noses, an' Old Square Face or Van
+der Hump makin' the rounds?"
+
+"You thought the blokes on the metals was a workin' gang of our chaps at
+the fust go off," complained the guard, "an' you opened the whistle to
+warn 'em!"
+
+"He did that for sure," put in the Cardiff stoker. "But he was tipping me
+the wink while he did it, so he was; as much as to say he knew they were
+Boers all the time."
+
+"Would they have stopped where they was, well widin range, av I had let on
+I knew they was a parcel av unwashed Dutchmen?" demanded Kildare hotly.
+"Would they have hung on as I pushed her towards thim--would they have
+stopped to watch me uncouplin' the two thrucks, smilin' wid simple
+interest in their haythen faces, av they had not taken me for a suckin'
+lamb in oily overalls that took themselves for sheep av the same fold?"
+
+"They got a bit suspicious when we steamed orf," said the guard; "more
+than a bit suspicious, they did."
+
+"They took the thrucks for the Armoured Thrain," recounted Kildare, with a
+radiant smile illuminating a countenance of surpassing griminess, "an'
+they rode to widin range, an' got off their hairies, an' dhropped in a
+volley just to insinse them they took to be squattin' down inside them
+insijious divizes, into what they would be gettin' if they put up the
+heads av them." He mopped his brimming eyes with a handful of cotton
+waste, not innocent of lubricating fluid. "Tower av Ivory! 'twas grand to
+see the contimpt av thim when the cowards widin did not reply. 'Donder!'
+says the gaffer in the tay-thray hat and the beard like the grandfather av
+all the billygoats. 'Is this,' he says, 'the British pluck they talk
+about? Show thim verdant English a Dutchman behind a geweer,' he says, an'
+that's what they call a gun in their dirty lingo--'an' they lie down wid
+all four legs in the air like a puppy that sees the whip. Plug thim again,
+my sons,' says he, 'an' wid the blessin' av Heaven, we'll stiffen the
+lot!'"
+
+"You could never hear him, so you could not, not at all that distance,"
+the Cardiff stoker objected.
+
+"Could I not see him, ye blind harper, swearin' in dumb show, an' urgin'
+thim to shoot sthraight for the honour av the Republics an' give the rooi
+batchers Jimmy O! Ga-_lant_-ly they respondid, battherin' the sides av the
+mysterious locomotive containin' the bloody an' rapacious soldiery av
+threacherous England wid nickel-plated Mauser bullets, ontil she hiccoughs
+indacintly, an' wid a bellow to bate St. Fin Barr's bull, kicks herself to
+pieces!"
+
+"She did so, surely," affirmed the Cardiff stoker. "Surely she did so."
+
+"Tell the Colonel 'ow the engine jumped right off the metals," advised the
+guard.
+
+"Clane she did," went on Kildare jubilantly, "an' rattled Davis an' me
+inside the cab like pays in an iron pod. See the funny-bone I sthripped
+agin' the side av her!" He exhibited a raw elbow for the inspection of the
+Chief. "An' when Davis gets the betther av the rest av the black that's on
+him wid soft soap an' hot wather, there's an oi he'll not wash off."
+
+"The brake-handle did that, it did so," said Davis, touching the optic
+tenderly. But Kildare was answering a question of the Chiefs.
+
+"Killed! Wisha, yarra! av I'd left a dozen an twenty to the back av that
+sthretched on the bog behind me, it's a glad man I'd be to have it to tell
+ye, sorr. But barrin' they wor' blown to smithereens entirely, not a
+livin' man or horse av thim did I see dead at all, at all. But the
+Sergeant an' the Reconnoithrin' Party will asy know the place--asy--by the
+thundherin' big hole that's knocked in the permanent way there, sizable
+enough to bury...." He paused, for once at a loss.
+
+"Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," suggested Davis, who, as a Bible Baptist, had
+a fund of Scripture knowledge upon which he occasionally drew, "with their
+families and their pavilions and all their substance...."
+
+"Av Cora was there," said Kildare, "she was disguised as a Dutchman, for
+sorrow an' oi I clapped on any human baste that was not a square-buttocked
+Boer in tan-cord throusers. Thank you, sorr, your Honour, an' good luck to
+yourself an' all av us! An' we'll dhrink your Honour's health wid it."
+
+"We will so!" agreed Davis, as the sovereign, dropped into his own
+twice-greased palm, vanished in the recesses of his black and oleaginous
+overalls.
+
+"Thankee, sir. You're a gentleman, sir!" the guard acknowledged, touching
+his cap and concealing the gold coin slid into his own ready hand with
+professional celerity.
+
+"Begob! an' you might have tould the Colonel somethin' that was news,"
+commented Kildare, as the tall, active figure stepped lightly over the
+metals and passed up the ramp, and 123 trundled on, and backed into the
+engine-shed amidst a salvo of cheers and hand-clapping.
+
+
+
+
+The Colonel whistled his pleasant little tune quite through as, the
+Reconnoitring Party despatched to the scene of the explosion, he went
+contentedly back to luncheon at Nixey's. True, Kildare had said, and as
+the Sergeant in command regretfully testified later, said correctly, that
+neither Boer nor beast had been put out of action by the flying debris. A
+poor reprisal had been made, in the opinion of some malcontents, for the
+act of War committed by the forces of the Republics in crossing the
+Border, in cutting the telegraph lines, and destroying the railway-bridge.
+But the moral result was anything but trifling, in its effect upon the
+Boer mind. The "new square gun" became a proverb of dread, inspiring a
+salutary fear of more traps of the same kind, "set by that slim duyvel,
+the English Commandant," and threw over the innocent stretch of veld
+outside those trivial sand-bagged defences the glamour of the Mysterious
+and the Unknown. No solid Dutchman welcomed the idea of soaring skywards
+in a multitude of infinitesimal fragments, in company with other Free
+Staters or sons of the Transvaal Republic similarly reduced.
+
+No more boasts on the part of Brounckers, General in command of those
+massed, menacing, united laagers on the Border, seven miles from
+Gueldersdorp as the crow flew. No more imaginative promises with reference
+to the taking of the small, defiant hamlet before breakfast, wiping out
+the garrison to a rooinek, and starting on the homeward march refreshed
+with coffee and biltong, and driving the towns-people before them as
+prisoners of War. The desperate perils presented by the conjectural and
+largely non-existent mine were thenceforth to loom largely and luridly in
+the telegrams that went up to Pretoria.
+
+"There's a lot in bluff, you know," that "slim duyvel," the Commandant of
+the rooineks, said long afterwards. "And we bluffed about the Mines, real
+and dummy, for all we were worth!"
+
+So, possibly with premonition of the telegram that was even then clicking
+out its message at Pretoria, there was a note of satisfaction in his
+whistle out of keeping with the execution actually done, as Nixey's Hotel
+came in sight with the Union Jack floating over it, denoting that all was
+well. That flagstaff, with its changing signals, was to dominate the
+popular pulse ere long. But in these days it merely denoted Staff
+Quarters, and War, with its grim accompanying horrors, seemed a long way
+off.
+
+A white-gowned European nursemaid on the opposite street-corner waved and
+shrieked to her deserting elder charges, and the Chief's quick eye noted
+that the small, sunburned, active, bare legs of the boy and girl in cool
+sailor-suits of blue-and-white linen twill, were scampering in his
+direction. He knew his fascination for children, and instinctively
+slackened his stride as they came up, abreast now, and shyly hand in hand:
+
+"Mister Colonel ...?" The speaker touched the expansive brim of a straw
+sailor hat with a fine assumption of adult coolness.
+
+"Quite right, and who are you?"
+
+The small boy hesitated, plainly at a nonplus. The round-eyed girl tugged
+at the boy's sailor jumper, whispering:
+
+"I _saided_ he wouldn't know you!"
+
+"I fought he would. Because Mummy said he wemembered our names ve uvver
+night at ve Hotel ... when he promised ... about ve animals from Wodesia
+... all made of mud, an' feavers, and bits of fur ..."
+
+Memory gave up the missing names, helped by those boyish replicas of the
+candid clear grey eyes of the Mayor's wife, shining under the drooping
+plume of fair hair.
+
+"Mummy was quite right, Hammy, and Berta was wrong, because I remember
+your names quite well, you see. And the birds and beasts and insects are
+in a box at my quarters. Come and get them."
+
+"If Anne doesn't kick up a wow?" hesitated Hammy, his small brown hand
+already in the larger one.
+
+"We'll arrange it with Anne." He waited for the arrival of the
+white-canopied perambulator and its fluttering-ribboned guardian to say,
+with a tone and smile that won her instant suffrages: "I'm going to borrow
+these children for a minute or so. Will you come into the shade and rest?
+I promise not to keep you long."
+
+Beauvayse and Lady Hannah's Captain Bingo, relieved from lookout duty, and
+descending in quest of food from the Chief's particular eyrie on the roof
+of Nixey's Hotel, heard shrieks of infant laughter coming from the
+coffee-room. Knives, forks, and glasses had been ruthlessly swept from the
+upper end of one of the tables laid for the Staff luncheon, and across the
+fair expanse of linen, pounded into whiteness and occasional holes by the
+vigorous thumpers of the Kaffir laundry-women, meandered a marvellous
+procession of quagga and koodoo, rhino and hartebeest, lion and giraffe,
+ostrich and elephant, modelled by the skilful hands of Matabele
+toy-makers. Tarantula, with wicked bright eyes of shining berries, brought
+up the rear, with the bee, and the mole-cricket, and, with bulgy brown,
+white-striped body and long wings importantly crossed behind its back, a
+tsetse of appallingly gigantic size....
+
+"Oh, fank you, Mister Colonel," Hammy was saying, with shining eyes of
+rapture fixed upon the glorious ones; "and is they weally my own, my vewy
+own, for good?"
+
+"Yours and Berta's, really and for good."
+
+"And won't you"--Hammy's magnificent effort at disinterestedness brought
+the tears into his eyes--"won't you want vem to play wif, _ever_
+yourself?"
+
+The deft hands swept the birds and beasts, with tarantula and tsetse, into
+the wooden box, and lifted the children from their chairs, as Captain
+Bingo and Beauvayse, following the D.A.A.G., came in, brimming with
+various versions of what had happened out there on the veld....
+
+"I have other things to play with just now, Hammy. Run along with Berta
+now. You'll find your nurse in the hall."
+
+Berta put up her face confidently to be kissed. Hammy, in manly fashion,
+offered a hand--the left--the right arm being occupied with the box of
+toys. As Berta's little legs scampered through the door, he delayed to
+ask:
+
+"What are your playfings, Mister Colonel?"
+
+"Live men and big guns, just now, Hammy; and chances and issues, and
+results and risks."
+
+The plume of fair hair fell back, clearing the candid grey eyes as Hammy
+lifted up his face, confidently lisping:
+
+"I don't quite fink I know what wesults and wisks are, but I'd like to
+play wif the live men an' the big guns too sometimes ... if you didn't
+want vem always?"
+
+"We'll see about it, Hammy, when you're grown up."
+
+"Good-bye, Mister Colonel. And I would lend you my beasts an' fings,
+because I know you wouldn't bweak them?"
+
+"See that Berta has her share in them meanwhile. Off with you, now!"
+
+Later, in the seclusion of the connubial bedchamber, said Captain Bingo,
+dressing for dinner, the last time for many months, as it was to prove:
+
+"What do you suppose was the Chief's next move, after the engine and
+tender got in, and the crowd hoorayed him back from the Railway Works? No
+use your guessin', though. Even a woman wouldn't have expected to find him
+playin' Noah's Ark in the coffee-room with the Mayor's two kids!"
+
+"I like that!" said Lady Hannah meditatively, arranging the Pompadour
+transformation, not apparently the worse for the candle-accident of the
+previous night.
+
+"Because you're a woman and sentimental," said her spouse, wrestling with
+a cuff-link.
+
+"No; because I am a woman whose instinct tells her that nothing will seem
+too big for a man for whom nothing is too small. And--what an incident for
+a paragraph!"
+
+He grinned: "With headin's in thunderin' big capitals.... 'The Soldier
+Hero Sports With A Babbling Babe.... The Defender Of British Prestige At
+Gueldersdorp Puts In Half an Hour At Cat's-Cradle Ere The Armoured Train
+Toddles Out With The B.S.A.P. To Give Beans To The Blooming Boer!'"
+
+She darted at him, caught him by the lapels ... made him look at her.
+
+"It's true? You really mean it? The ball begins?"
+
+"Upon the honour of a henpecked husband--before daybreak to-morrow, you'll
+hear the music."
+
+She sparkled with delight.
+
+"Oh, poor, unlucky, humdrum women at home in England, walking with the
+shooters, or lolling in hammocks under trees, and trying to flirt with fat
+City financiers or vapid young attaches of Legation! I shall take the
+Irish mare, and borrow an orderly, and ride out to see a Real Action!"
+
+His round pink face grew long. "The devil you will!"
+
+"The devil I won't, you mean. Why, for what else under the sky did I come
+out here but the glorious chance of War?" Her impatient foot tapped the
+floor. He recognised the warning of domestic battle, glowered, and gave
+in.
+
+"Well, if you get chipped, don't blame me. There's about as much cover on
+a baccarat-table as you'll find on that small-bush veld."
+
+"All the better for seeing things, my dear!" She gave him a radiant glance
+over her shoulder as she snapped her diamond necklace.
+
+"You'll see things you won't enjoy. Mind that. Unless the whole affair
+ends in sheer fizzle."
+
+"I'll pray that it mayn't!"
+
+"I'd pray to have you much more like the ordinary woman who funks
+raw-head-and-bloody-bones if I thought it would be any good!"
+
+"My poor old boy, it's thirty years too late. You ought to have begun
+while I was crying in the cradle. And--I _was_ under the impression that
+you married me because you found me different from the ruck. And
+besides--think of my paper!"
+
+"Damn the rag! I think of my wife!"
+
+She swept him a curtsy:
+
+"Cela va sans dire!"
+
+"And how a woman of your birth and breedin' can dream of nothin' else but
+doin' somethin' that'll make you notorious--set the smart crowd gabblin'
+and gapin' and crushin' to stare--is more than I can understand!"
+
+She flashed round upon him. "You have the wrong word! Notoriety--any
+social _divorcee_ or big-hatted music-hall high-kicker can have _that_--if
+only they've kicked high enough! Popularity is what I'd have if I
+could--and only the People can give it--as Brutus and Cromwell and
+Napoleon knew!"
+
+He admitted that those old Roman johnnies who jawed in the Forum knew what
+they were about, but added that the Puritan chap with the wart on his nose
+was a thundering old humbug, ending triumphantly: "And we whacked old
+Bony at Waterloo! And--suppose you stop a Boer bullet and get knocked
+out--where do I come in?"
+
+She jangled out her shrillest laugh. "Behind the coffin as Chief Mourner,
+I suppose. And you'll tack on the orthodox black sleeve-band, and look out
+for Number Two. And choose the ordinary kind, who funks raw-head and all
+the rest of it, for the next venture. But I prophesy you'll be bored. It's
+settled about Sheila and the orderly?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"Righto! but there'll be two troopers, not one. And you'll be under the
+Corporal's orders about range, and distance, and keepin' out of the hands
+of--the other side. You don't absolutely yearn to be killed or taken
+prisoner, I suppose?"
+
+Her heart beat high at the latter-named eventuality. She saw London
+rushing to read of the thrilling seizure and the yet more thrilling escape
+of the Lady War Correspondent attached to H.I.M. forces on the Frontier:
+
+Who got clean away, mind you, with complete information of the strategic
+plans of the General in command of the enemy's laagers, sewn inside her
+corsets or hidden in her shoes!
+
+Bingo little dreamed of the definite plan seething under his little wife's
+transformation coiffure. It had matured since her meeting on the
+railway-journey from Cape Town with an interesting personality. A big,
+brown-bearded Johannesburger, with light queer eyes, who had been reticent
+at first, but more interesting after his confidence had been gained.
+
+Van Busch he had named himself. Of the British South African War
+Intelligence Bureau. That man knew how to value women. And he had proved
+them at what he called the risky game.
+
+"With nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for palm-oil ..." Van
+Busch had said, and winked, signifying that there were no lengths to which
+a woman of Lady Hannah Wrynche's capabilities might not go. And he had
+slipped into her hand a card scrawled with an address where he might be
+got at _in case_ ...
+
+The pencilled oblong of soiled pasteboard was yet in a secret compartment
+of her handbag. By letter addressed care of W. Bough, Transport Agent and
+Stock-dealer, Van Busch was to be communicated with at a farmstead some
+thirty miles north.
+
+The spice of adventure her palate craved could be had by corresponding
+with Van Busch through the man Bough. After that---- Well! She had her
+plan ...
+
+She tied her husband's white tie, took him by the ears, kissed him warmly
+on each side of his large pink face, glowing with blushes evoked by her
+unwonted display of affection, and led him away to dinner, her mental
+vision seeing prophetic broadsheets papering the kerbs of Piccadilly, the
+ears of her imagination making celestial melody of those raucous yells:
+
+"Speshul Edition! Hextry Speshul Edition! 'Ere y'are, sir; on'y a
+'a'penny. SPESHUL!"
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+For nearly two months, from dawn until dark, Gueldersdorp had squatted on
+her low-topped hill in a screaming blizzard of shrapnel and Mauser
+bullets. Never a town of imposing size or stately architecture, see her
+now a battered hamlet of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and wrecked
+chimneys; staring defiance through glassless windows like the blind
+eyeholes in the mouldered House that once has held the living thought of
+Man. From dawn until dark the ancient seven-pounders of her batteries had
+banged and grumbled, her Maxims had rattled defiance from Kopje Fort, and
+the Nordenfelt released its showers of effective, death-dealing little
+projectiles. Scant news from outside trickled into the town. Grumer, with
+his Brigade, was guarding the Drifts, and when the Relief might be
+expected was now a moss-grown topic of general conversation in
+Gueldersdorp.
+
+And within her girdle of trenches, stern, grimy, haggard men lived, cheek
+to the heated rifle-breech, and ate, and snatched brief spells of sleep,
+booted and bandoliered, and with the loaded weapon ready for gripping.
+Since the attack on Maxim Kopje had choked the Hospital with wounded men
+and dotted the Cemetery with little white crosses, nothing of much note
+had occurred. The armoured train had done good service, and the Baraland
+Rifle Volunteers had carried out their surprise against the enemy's
+western camp one fine dark night, helped by a squadron of the Irregulars,
+with eleven wounded, and the loss of six out of fifty fighting-men.
+
+The Convent of the Holy Way stood empty and deserted in its
+shrapnel-littered garden-enclosure.
+
+From east, west, north, and south the deadly iron messengers had come,
+making sore havoc of this poor house of Christ. "When the walls fall about
+our ears, Colonel," the Mother-Superior had declared, "it will be time to
+leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion of bare rafters
+overhead, over which streamed, as if in mockery, the Red-Cross Flag. Grim
+figures, like geometrical problems gone mad, were made by water and gas
+pipes torn from their bedding, and twisted as if by the hands of giants in
+cruel play. The little iron bedsteads of the Sisters, and the holy symbols
+over them, were the only articles missing from the cells, revealed in
+section by the huge gaps in the masonry.
+
+The Tabernacle of the chapel altar, void of the Unspeakable Mystery it had
+housed, fluttered its rearward curtains through the wreckage of the east
+wall and the cheap little stained-glass window, where the Shepherds and
+the Magi had bowed before the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child. Within
+sight of their ruined home, the Sisterhood had found refuge. An
+underground dwelling had been dug for them in the garden before an
+abandoned soft-brick-and-corrugated-iron house, formerly inhabited by one
+of the head officials of the railway, a personage of Dutch extraction and
+Boer sympathies, at present sequestered beneath the yellow flag of the
+town gaol for their too incautious manifestation; while his wife and young
+family were inhabitants of the Women's Laager. And from their subterranean
+burrow the Sisters carried on their work of mercy as cheerfully as though
+their Order had been originally one of Troglodytes, nursing the sick and
+wounded, cooking and washing for the convalescents, comforting the
+bereaved, and tending the many orphans of the siege.
+
+South lay the laager of the Refugees. To the westward within the ring of
+trenches and about a mile and a half from the town, was the Women's
+Laager, visited not seldom by the enemy's shell-fire, in spite of the
+Red-Cross Flag. Fever and rheumatism, pneumonia and diphtheria stalked
+among the dwellers in these tainted burrows, claiming their human toll.
+Women languished and little children pined and withered, dying for lack of
+exercise and fresh air, with the free veld spreading away on all sides to
+the horizon, and the burning blue South African sky overhead. Famine had
+not yet appeared among the Europeans, though grisly black spectres in
+Kaffir blankets haunted the refuse-heaps, and fought with gaunt dogs for
+picked bones and empty meat-tins, and were found dead not unseldom, after
+full meals of strange and dreadful things. Fresh meat was still to be had,
+though the cattle and sheep of the Barala had been thinned by raids on the
+part of the enemy, and poor grazing. Shell and rifle-fire not infrequently
+spared the butcher trouble, so that your joints were sometimes weirdly
+shaped. But they were joints, and there was plenty of the preserved
+article in Kriel's Warehouse and at the Army Service Stores. Tea and
+coffee were becoming rare and precious, the sparkling draught of lager was
+to be had only in remembrance; the aromatic beer was all drunk up, and the
+stone-ginger was three shillings a bottle. Whisky was to be had at the
+price of liquid gold, brandy was treasured above rubies, and served out
+sparingly by the Hand of Authority, as medicine in urgent cases.
+
+You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who continued to cultivate
+onions, cabbages, potatoes, and melons in the market-gardens about the
+town, imperturbable under shot and shell, his large straw hat affording an
+admirable target from the Boer sniper's point of view, as metaphorically
+he gathered his fat harvest of dollars from the soil. What you could not
+get for any amount of dollars was peace and rest, clean air, and space to
+stretch your cramped-up limbs in, until Sunday came, bringing the Truce of
+God for Englishman and Transvaaler.
+
+The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had sprung from the
+parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre had been turned into a
+ward where the lane between the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a
+nurse to pass, and hourly the cry went up: "Room, more room for the
+wounded and the sick!" And among these Saxham worked, night and day, like
+a man upheld by forces superhuman.
+
+"By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they urged him to take rest,
+and would bend his black brows, and hunch those great shoulders of his to
+the work again.
+
+"Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a
+haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o'
+the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye
+were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot
+casualties--our friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when
+refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep; at eight ye had had your bit o'
+breakfast, and got doon your gun an' gane oot for an hour o' calm,
+invigorating sniping on the veld before returning punctually at ten o' the
+clock to attack the business o' the day, wi' a bag o' twa Boers to your
+creedit."
+
+"I only got one, Major. The other chap hobbled down bandaged, upon
+crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at me as I lay doggo behind my
+particular stone. I put up my hat on a stick, and--see!" Saxham gravely
+exhibited a felt Service smasher with a clean hole through it, an inch
+above the lining-edge. "He's a snowy-locked, hoary-bearded, Father
+Noah-hatted patriarch of seventy at least, and very proud of his shooting,
+and I've let him think he got me this time, just to make him happy for one
+night. To-morrow he is to make the painful discovery that I am still in
+the flesh."
+
+"Aweel, aweel! But I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle,
+tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the
+antediluvian headgear to-morrow."
+
+Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in that wounded heart
+of his, would not only be with the patriarch. And the great puzzle, Life,
+would be solved for good.
+
+Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could have answered that only
+by hard, unceasing, unremitting work, or, when no more work was there to
+do, by the fierce excitement of those grilling hours spent lying behind
+the stone, was the demon to be kept out. Of all things he dreaded
+inactivity, and though he would drop upon his cot in the tiny bedroom that
+had been a Hospital ward-pantry, and sleep the heavy sleep of weariness
+the moment his head touched the pillow, yet he would start awake after an
+hour or two, parched with that savage, unquenched thirst, and drink great
+draughts of the brackish well-water, boiled for precaution's sake, and
+tramp the confined space until the grip of desire grew slack. But he had
+never once yielded since the night when a man with the eye and voice of a
+leader among men had come to the house in Harris Street and taken him by
+the hand.
+
+Do you say impossible, that the man in whom the habit of vice had formed
+should be able to cast off his degrading weakness, like a shameful
+garment, by sheer force of will, and be sane and strong and masterful
+again? I say, possible with this man. You see him plucked from the slough
+by the strong hand of manly fellowship, and nerved and strengthened, if
+only for a little while, to play the game for the sake of that other's
+belief in him. Such influence have such men among their fellows for good
+or for ill.
+
+You can see the Dop Doctor upon this brilliant November morning mounting a
+charger lent him by his friend, a handsome Waler full of mettle and
+spirit--oats not being yet required for the support of humans--and calling
+au revoir to Taggart as he rides away from the Hospital gates followed by
+an orderly of the R.A.M.C. in a spider, pulled by a wiry, shabby little
+Boer mare.
+
+"The man rides like a fox-hunter," commented Taggart, noticing the ease of
+the seat, the light handling of the rein, the way in which the fidgety,
+spirited beast Saxham rode answered to the gentling hand and the guiding
+pressure of the rider's knee, as a sharp storm of rifle-fire swept from
+the enemy's northern trenches, and the Mauser bullets spurted sand between
+the wheels of the spider and under the horses' bellies.
+
+Saxham spurred ahead, the spider following. The bullet-pierced, grey felt
+smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's
+close-cropped head with a soldierly air becoming to the square,
+opaque-skinned face that had power and strength and virility in every line
+of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were
+clear now, and the short aquiline nose, rough-hewn but not coarse, and the
+grimly-tender mouth were no longer thickened and swollen and reddened by
+intemperance. The figure, perfect in its manliness, if marred by the too
+heavy muscular development of the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders,
+looked well in the jacket of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and puttees
+and spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white drills, the blue
+shirt and shabby black kamarband and canvas shoes. Looking at Saxham, even
+with knowledge of his past, you could not have associated a personality so
+striking and distinguished, an individuality so original and so strong,
+with the idea of the tipsy wastrel, wallowing like a hog in self-chosen
+degradation.
+
+The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out of her underground
+abode as the horseman and the attendant spider drew near, thought of
+Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you see him, last of the great Condottieri, in the
+bronze by great Verrochio at Venice to-day. In armour, complete in the
+embossed morion, one with the great Flemish war-horse, he sat to the
+sculptor, the baton of Captain-General, given him by the Doge of Venice,
+in the powerful hand that only a little while before aided his picked men
+of the infantry to pack and harden snow about the granite boulders of the
+mountains in the Val Seriana, and sent the giant snow-balls thundering
+down, crushing bloody lanes through the ranks of the Venetian cavalry
+massed in the narrow defile below, and striking chill terror to the hearts
+of Doge and Prince and Senate.
+
+Only the baton was a well-worn staghorn-handled crop, Squire Saxham's
+gift, together with a hunter, to his boy Owen, at seventeen. It was one of
+the few relics of home that had stayed by Saxham during his wanderings.
+
+He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with marked respect.
+
+"Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours?"
+
+She answered with unusual hesitation:
+
+"All the Sisters are well, thank you. But--if you could spare me a minute,
+Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should like to ask."
+
+"As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your day for the Hospital,
+I think?"
+
+"Ah, no!" she said, with the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection.
+"We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so
+miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are
+in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the children
+to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege orphans, but so many who
+have sick or neglectful mothers. It takes us the whole day once we get
+there."
+
+Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of a blue cotton-covered
+washing-basket impelled from below by an ascending Sister. The spider
+pulled up under cover of the brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by
+the railway-official, as another short storm of riflery cracked and
+rattled among the eastern foothills, and a whistling hurry of the
+sharp-nosed little messengers of death passed through Gueldersdorp. Some
+of them hit and flattened on the gable of the railway-official's house,
+one went through the leathern splashboard of the spider. Saxham moved
+instinctively to place himself between the closely-standing group of nuns
+and possible danger.
+
+"No, no!" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheerful tones taking a
+shade of anxiety. "You must not do that!"
+
+"I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at them with the
+smile that made his stern face changed and gentle.
+
+"I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way of things. We take
+our chance of them," the Mother-Superior answered. But she pressed her
+lips together and grew pale as a faint cry came up from the subterranean
+dwelling, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon steel rails, and
+made bombproof with bags of earth. And Saxham, looking at the fine face,
+with its worn lines of fatigue and over-exertion, and noting the deep
+shadowy caves that housed the great luminous grey eyes, said:
+
+"I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be having my best
+helper on my hands as a patient. And that won't do, you know."
+
+"No, it would not do," she said, looking fully and seriously at him. "And
+therefore I think our Lord will not permit it. But if He should, be sure
+another will rise up to fill my place."
+
+"Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham sincerely, "she would not
+fulfil my ideal of an absolutely efficient nurse, as you do. So from the
+personal, if not the altruistic point of view, let me beg you to be
+careful."
+
+"I take all reasonable care," she told him. "It is true, the work has been
+heavy this week; but to-morrow is Sunday, and we shall rest all day and
+sleep at the Convent. Indeed, some of us have taken it in turn to be on
+guard there every night, or nothing would be left us."
+
+"I understand."
+
+He knew how prowlers and night-thieves made harvest in the darkness among
+the deserted dwellings since Police and Town Guardsmen had been
+requisitioned to man the trenches. She went on:
+
+"The upper story of the house is sheer wreck, as you may see, but the
+ground-floor is quite habitable. So much so that if the shells did not
+strike the poor dear place so often, I should suggest your turning it into
+a Convalescent Home."
+
+"We may have to try the plan yet," said Saxham. "The Railway Institute is
+frightfully overcrowded."
+
+"And," she told him, "a shell struck there yesterday evening, and burst in
+the larger ward."
+
+"I had not heard of it," he said. "Was anybody hurt?"
+
+"No one, thank God! But the fire was difficult to put out, until one of
+the Sisters thought of sand."
+
+"It was an incendiary shell?" Disgust and contempt swelled his deep-cut
+nostrils and flamed from his vivid blue eyes. "And yet these Kaiser's
+gunners, in their blue-and-white Death or Glory uniforms, can hardly
+pretend ignorance of the Geneva Convention. But--your question?"
+
+"It is--Children!" She beckoned to the two nuns, who stood at a little
+distance apart holding the washing-basket between them. "I will ask you to
+go on slowly before me with the basket. I will overtake you when I have
+spoken to Dr. Saxham."
+
+"Surely, Reverend Mother." One tall, pale, and thin, the other round and
+rosy, they were alike in the placid, cheerful serenity of their good eyes
+and readily smiling lips. "And won't we be after taking the bundle?"
+
+"No, no! It is heavy, and I am as strong as both of you together."
+
+"Very well, Reverend Mother."
+
+They were obediently moving on.
+
+"A moment." Saxham stopped them. "If you two ladies have no objection to a
+little crowding, the spider will hold both of you as well as the bundle
+and the basket of washing. At least, it looks like a basket of washing."
+
+All three laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him that his
+suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu _dhobi_
+would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of
+crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing,
+as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers
+and persons of colour? And from the waterworks on the Eastern side of the
+town the supply had been cut off by the enemy, so that the taps of
+Gueldersdorp had ceased to yield.
+
+Old wells and springs had been reopened, cleaned, and brought into use for
+drinking purposes, so that of a water-famine there could be no fear. But
+the element became expensive when retailed by the tin bucketful, a bath a
+rare luxury when the contents of the said bucket might be spilled or
+thrown away in the course of the gymnastics wherewith the sable or
+coffee-brown bearer sought to evade the travelling unexploded shell or the
+fan-shaped charge of shrapnel. Therefore, the Sisters had turned
+laundry-women. You could hear the sound of Sister Tobias's smoothing-iron
+coming up from below, thump-thumping on the blanketed board.
+
+"And where do you think we get the water, now?" the rosy Sister, in
+process of being packed into the spider, leaned over the wheel to ask.
+
+"Not from the Convent?" Saxham thought of the strip of veld between there
+and the Hospital, even more fraught with peril than the patch he had just
+traversed, or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters'
+bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his
+fleshless hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall.
+
+"From the Convent, carrying it across after dark. And no well there,
+either, that you'd get the fill of a teaspoon out of"--a "tayspoon" it was
+in the rosy Sister's Dublin brogue--"and yet there's water there."
+
+"But how----" Saxham began. The Mother-Superior shook her head, and the
+rosy Sister was silent.
+
+"There is no mystery about the water at all. It is very simple." Standing
+there with her head held high and the fine, free, graceful lines of her
+tall figure outlined by the heavy folds of the now worn and darned black
+habit, and her hands, still beautiful, though roughened by toil, calmly
+folded upon her scapular, she was as remarkable and noble a figure, it
+seemed to Saxham, as the golden sunlight could fall upon anywhere in the
+world. And besides, she was his right hand at the Hospital. A capable,
+watchful, untiring nurse--and beauty would have decked her in his
+surgeon's eyes if she had been physically ugly or deformed.
+
+"There is no mystery whatever, only when the bombardment first began I
+thought of the waterworks, and that one of my first cares, supposing I had
+been General Brounckers"--she smiled slightly--"would have been to operate
+there. So I set the Sisters to work at filling every empty barrel and
+bucket and tub in the Convent with water from the taps. And as we happened
+to have plenty of empty barrels and tubs, why, there is water to be had
+there now, and will be for some time to come. Go now, my children."
+
+The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted with his whip
+and drove on in obedience to Saxham's nod.
+
+"Of course, the Sisters are aware," he said, meeting the Mother's grave
+glance, "that if it is quicker to drive, it is safer to walk?"
+
+She nodded with the gay, sweet smile that had belonged to Lady Biddy.
+
+"They know, of course. But danger is in the day's work. We do not seek it.
+We are prepared for it, and it comes and passes. If one day it does not
+pass without the cost of life, we are prepared for that, and God's Will
+is done always."
+
+"You are very brave," he said. It was the first time in his life that he
+had used the phrase to any woman, and the words came out almost
+grudgingly.
+
+"Oh no, not brave," she told him; "only obedient." Her veil fluttered in
+the hot November breeze that bore with it the heavy fetid taint from the
+overcrowded trenches that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the
+cordite; though the air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the
+befouled atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded wards at the
+Hospital, in spite of all that disinfectants could do. She went on:
+
+"And we are very grateful to you for the lift. Sister Ruperta was on duty
+last night, and Sister Hilda Antony--the rosy Sister--is not as well as
+she would have us believe. Ah----"
+
+With her grave eyes screened by her lifted hand, she had been watching the
+progress of the spider westward over the dun-yellow veld. Now the long
+wailing notes of the headquarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the
+Assembly, and in the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's
+hotel, where the red lamp signalled danger by night and the Red Flag gave
+its warning by day, the scarlet danger-signal fluttered in the breeze.
+Once, twice, again, the deep bell of the Catholic Church tolled. A dozen
+other bells echoed the warning, signifying danger by the number of their
+iron-tongue strokes to the threatened quarter of the town.
+
+"'Ware big gun!" called the sentries. "West quarter, 'ware!"
+
+The Mother-Superior grew pale, for the Women's Laager, towards which the
+little Boer mare was steadily trotting with the laden spider, lay in the
+menaced quarter, with a bare stretch of veld between it and the Camp of
+the Irregular Horse, whose white tents and dug-out shelters were
+pleasantly shaded by ancient blue gums, picturesque and stately in spite
+of broken boughs and foliage torn by shrapnel and seared by the chemical
+fumes of bursting charges innumerable.
+
+"Will you not go down?" Saxham asked her.
+
+She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting face in prayerful
+silence, not stirring save to make the Sign of the Cross. And as the long
+white fingers fluttered over the bosom of the black habit, the faint cry
+that Saxham's quick ear had heard before floated up from the populous
+depths below.
+
+"What is that?"
+
+Before the question had left Saxham's lips, the monster gun spoke out in
+deafening thunder from the enemy's position at East Point, nearly two
+miles away. The heavy grey smoke-pillar of the driving-charge towered
+against the sunbright distance, and simultaneously with the crack of the
+discharge, sounding as though all the pent-up forces of Hell had burst the
+brazen gates of Terror, and rushed forth to annihilate and destroy, the
+ninety-four pound projectile passed overhead, sweeping half the
+corrugated-iron roof from the railway-official's late dwelling with a
+fiendish clatter and din, as it passed harmlessly over the Women's Laager,
+and, wrecking a sentry's shelter on the western line of defences, burst
+harmlessly upon the veld beyond, blotting out the low hills behind a
+curtain of acrid green vapour.
+
+"Get under cover, quick!" Saxham had shouted to his companion, as deafened
+by the tremendous concussion, and dazed and half-asphyxiated by the
+poisonous fumes, he strove for mastery with his maddened horse. This
+regained, he looked for the figure in the black habit and white coif, and
+knew a shock of horror in seeing it prone upon the ground.
+
+"No, no, I am not hurt!" she cried, lightly rising as he hurried towards
+her. The tremendous air-concussion had thrown her down, and beyond a
+scratch upon her hand and some red dust on the black garments she was in
+nothing the worse.
+
+"I don't know how I kept my own legs," Saxham said, laughing.
+
+"It went by like twenty avalanches," she agreed. "And blessed be our Lord,
+excepting for the damage to the roof, no more seems to have been done. I
+can see the spider stopping near the Women's Laager." She peered out
+earnestly over the shimmering waste of dusty yellow-brown, and cried out
+joyfully: "Ah, Sister Hilda Antony and Sister Ruperta are getting out.
+All is well with them; all is well."
+
+"But not with the washing."
+
+Saxham had swung round his binoculars, and brought them to bear upon the
+vehicle and its late occupants. A grim smile played about his mouth as he
+handed her the glasses, and heard her cry of womanly distress as she
+beheld the fruit of late labour scattered on the veld and the Sisters'
+agonised activity displayed in the gathering up of sheets, pillow-slips,
+handkerchiefs, babies' shirts and petticoats, with other garments of a
+strictly feminine and private character. Her grave, discreet eyes avoided
+his as she handed back the binoculars, but a dimple showed near the edge
+of the white coif.
+
+"And now," Saxham said, glancing at his watch, "may I know in what I can
+be of service?" It had seemed to him that the Mother-Superior hesitated to
+broach the subject. Nor had he been mistaken. The dimple vanished. Her
+calm eyes became troubled, and she asked, with a slight catching of the
+breath:
+
+"Yes, there was something.... Doctor, is it possible for a person to die
+of fear?"
+
+He answered promptly:
+
+"In circumstances like the present? Certainly. Undoubtedly possible. I
+have seen twenty deaths from pure fright since the bombardment began, and
+I expect to see more before the siege ends, or people get callous to the
+possibilities of sudden extermination that are afforded them a hundred
+times a day. Is the person to whom you refer a woman or a child?"
+
+"A young girl----" she was beginning, when a buxom little figure, black
+veiled and habited like herself, rose up as if from the bowels of the
+earth.
+
+"I vill look. But I can see nozing," she called to someone invisible
+below. "It must be that you vait until my eyes shall become more strong."
+She shaded them, newly brought from semi-darkness and blinking in the hot,
+white sunlight. The Mother-Superior hurried to her, saying with a note of
+anxiety in her usually calm voice:
+
+"Sister--Sister Cleophee; is anything the matter?"
+
+"_Mon Dieu!_ It is ze Reverend Mozer!" ejaculated the other, relief and
+joy expressed in the rapid movements of pliant hands and expressive eyes.
+"Nozing is ze matter, Reverend Mozer, if only you are safe."
+
+"Quite safe, and so are the Sisters. Only the linen was upset."
+
+"My 'eavens, but a miraculous escapement!" The supple hands and the
+expressive eyes and shoulders of Sister Cleophee made great play. "Me and
+Sister Tobias, 'ow we _pray_ when we 'ear ze great gun, vith knowledge zat
+you and ze Sisters were upon the vay to ze Women's Laager. My faith, it
+vas terrible! Me, if I 'ad not make to ascend and learn how it go vid you,
+Lynette vould 'ave come running up to make discovery for herself. She
+behave like a little crazy, a little mad sing--I forget your vord for she
+zat have lost 'er vits! Sister Tobias and me, we 'ave to 'old 'er." The
+fine, expressive eyes went past the Mother-Superior, and lighted with
+evident relief on Saxham. "Ah, Monsieur le Docteur, it is incredible vat
+zat poor child she suffer. Madame 'ave told you----"
+
+"Madame was about to tell me, my Sister," Saxham said, in his smooth,
+fluent French, "when you appeared upon the scene."
+
+Sister Cleophee launched, unwitting of the Mother-Superior's gesture of
+vexation, into voluble explanations in that native language which M. le
+Docteur spoke so well.
+
+Mademoiselle Mildare, the ward of Madame the Mother-Superior, was no
+coward. But no! the child had courage in plenty--it was the suspense that
+devoured her in the absence of the Mother, to whom Mademoiselle was most
+tenderly attached, that reduced her to a state of the most pitiable. The
+Sisters left at home each day would talk of the work and the fine
+weather--anything to distract the mind, that presented itself to them--but
+now, nothing was of any use. When the Reverend Mother came back at
+nightfall, behold a transformation. Mademoiselle would laugh and sing and
+chatter. Her eyes would shine like stars, she would be happy, said Sister
+Cleophee, with dramatic emphasis and gesture, as a soul in Paradise. Next
+day, taking her guardian from her side, would bring the terrors back, find
+redoubled the nervous sufferings of Mademoiselle, to-day reaching such a
+height that Sister Cleophee felt convinced that something must be done.
+
+"Ah, my Sister, if I could do anything!" the Mother-Superior said, with
+the velvet Southern Irish inflection in the breathing aspirate, and the
+soft melodious cadence that made her pure, cultivated utterance so
+exquisite. The voice broke and faltered, and a spasm of mother-anguish
+wrung the firm mouth, and as a slow tear dimmed each of her underlids and
+splashed on the white _guimpe_ she put out her hand blindly, and the
+sympathetic little Frenchwoman took it in both her own.
+
+"Reverend Mozer, you can do zis. You can bring Monsieur le Docteur to see
+Lynette. You can 'ave his advice upon 'er case, and you can----"
+
+Another fusillade of rifle-fire, sweeping from the west over Gueldersdorp,
+brought a repetition of the faint moaning cry from below. Saxham consulted
+the Reverend Mother with a look. She bent her head in silent assent. He
+hitched the horse's bridle to what had been the gatepost of the
+railway-official's front-garden, as she signed to him to descend the
+ladder leading to the Sisters' underground abode. And he went down to meet
+his Fate there.
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII
+
+
+The temporary Convent was a roomy trench dug out of the red gravelly sand,
+lined with the inevitable sheets of corrugated iron, and roofed with the
+same material, supported by a solid frame of steel rails. Wide chinks
+between the metal sheets gave admission to light and air, and earthen
+drain-pipes made ventilators in the walls. But the sunlight penetrated
+like spears of burning flame, and the air was stifling hot. The paraffin
+stove that heated irons for Sister Tobias smelled clamorously, and the
+droning of myriads of flies, not the least of the seven plagues of
+Gueldersdorp, kept up a persistent bass to the shrill singing of the
+little tin kettle. Later, when the April rains began, and the tarpaulins
+were pulled over the sand-bagged roof, tin lamps burning more paraffin did
+battle with Cimmerian darkness.
+
+Saxham's professional approval was won by the marvellous cleanliness and
+neatness of the place, divided into living-room and dormitory by a heavy
+green baize curtain, that at the Convent had shut off the noise of the
+great classroom from the rest of the house. The curtain was drawn, hiding
+the little iron cots brought from the Sisters' cells, ascetic couches
+whose narrow wire mattresses must afford scant room for repose to double
+sleepers now, where all were crowded, and Conventual rules must be in
+abeyance. The outer place held a deal table, the oil cooking-stove; some
+household utensils shining with cleanliness were ranged upon a shelf, and
+several pictures hung upon the walls. Upon a bracket the silver Crucifix
+from the altar of the Convent chapel gleamed against the background of a
+snowy, lace-bordered linen cloth. There were orderly piles of cleaned and
+mended clothes, military and civilian, the garments of sick and wounded
+male patients, who would leave the Hospital without a thought of the
+unselfish women who had foregone sleep to patch jackets and sew on missing
+buttons. There were haversacks of coarse canvas for the Volunteers,
+finished and partly made, with ammunition-pouches and bandoliers. And
+Sister Tobias stood ironing at the deal table, partly screened by a line
+of drying linen, while Sister Mary-Joseph turned the mangle, and the
+little brisk novice, her round cheeks no longer rosy, folded with active
+hands. The Dop Doctor's keen quick glance took note of the patient
+cheerful weariness written on the three faces, then rested on one other
+face there.
+
+Its wild white-rose fairness had dulled into the pallor of old ivory.
+There were deep, bluish shadows about the eyes and round the mouth, and
+the hollow at the base of the throat, where the pulse throbbed and
+fluttered visibly, had grown deep. Her red-brown hair had lost its
+burnished beauty. It had become dull like her skin, and her garments hung
+loosely upon the form whose soft roundnesses had fallen away. But her eyes
+had changed most. Their golden-hazel irises had faded to pale bronze, the
+full, fair eyelids had shrunk, the pupils were distended to twice their
+natural size. She sat upon a stool in a corner, a slight girlish figure in
+a holland skirt and white cambric blouse-bodice, her slender waist
+girdled with a belt of brown leather, the colour of her little shoes.
+Huddled up against the corrugated-iron wainscot of the rough earth wall,
+the obsession of fear that dilated her eyes and parched her lips shook her
+in recurrent gusts of trembling, whenever the guns of the Gueldersdorp
+batteries spoke in thunder, whenever the Boer artillery bellowed Death
+from the heights above. For since the great gun had spoken from East
+Point, Death's red sickle had not ceased to ply its task.
+
+Some work, one of the coarse canvas haversacks made by the nuns for
+Gueldersdorp's enrolled defenders, lay at the girl's feet. Her right hand,
+horrible to see in its incessant, mechanical activity, made continually
+the motion of sewing. Her eyes stared blankly, unwinkingly at the opposite
+wall, and the gusts of trembling went over her without cessation. At a
+more deafening crash than ordinary, an irrepressible scream would break
+from her, and her hand would snatch at an invisible garment as though she
+plucked back its imaginary wearer from peril by main force.
+
+"She sees nobody. She hear nozing when we speak--she vould feel nozing, if
+you should pinch or shake her. Was I not right, Reverend Mozer, to say it
+is time zat somesing should be done?"
+
+The shrill whisper came from Sister Cleophee. The Mother-Superior made a
+sign in assent. Beyond words, her heart was crying--Oh, misery and joy in
+one mingled draught to have won such love as this from Richard's child!
+But her face was impassive and stern, and her eyes, looking over Saxham's
+great shoulder as he stood silently watching at the bottom of the ladder
+stairway, imposed silence on the busy, observant, tactful Sisters, who
+continued their labours without a break, as the sewing hand went
+diligently to and fro, and the recurrent convulsive shudders shook the
+girl's slight frame, and the irrepressible cry of anguish was wrung from
+her at each ear-splitting shellburst. And yet, with all her agony of love
+intensifying her gaze, the Mother did not see as much as Saxham, who took
+in every detail and symptom with skilled, consummate ease, realizing the
+desperate effort that strove for self-command, noting the exhaustion of
+suspense in the dropped lines of the half-open, colourless mouth, the
+incipient mental breakdown in the vacant stare of the dilated eyes, the
+mechanical action of the stitching needle-hand, the convulsive shudder
+that rippled through the slight figure at each boom, or crash, or
+fusillade of rifle-fire that drifted over the shrapnel-torn veld and
+through the battered town. He threw a swift whisper over his shoulder
+presently, that only reached the ear of the Mother-Superior, standing
+behind him, her tall shape concealed from the sufferer's sight by his
+great form.
+
+"How long has this been going on?"
+
+She whispered back: "I am told ever since the bombardment began. Every
+day, and at night too, should duty detain me at one or another of the
+Hospitals."
+
+He added in the same low tone:
+
+"She has a morbid terror of death under ordinary circumstances?"
+
+The Mother-Superior murmured, a hand upon the ache in her bosom:
+
+"Not of death for herself. For--another."
+
+His purely scientific attitude must have already abandoned him when he
+knew gladness that Self was not the dominant note in this dumb threnody of
+fear. But he wore the professional mask of the physician as he ordered:
+
+"Let one of the Sisters speak to her."
+
+The Mother-Superior glanced at the nun who was ironing, and then at the
+figure on the stool. The Sister was about to obey when the Boer
+Maxim-Nordenfelt on the southern position rattled. There was a hissing
+rush overhead, and as a series of sharp, splitting cracks told that a
+group of the shining little copper-banded shells had burst, and that their
+splinters were busily hunting far and wide for somebody to kill, the
+stitching hand dropped by the girl's side. A new wave of shuddering went
+over the desolate young figure, pitiable and horrible to see. Dull drops
+of sweat broke out upon her temples in the shadow of her red-brown hair.
+
+"How are you getting on with your work, dearie?"
+
+Sister Tobias had spoken to her gently. She moved her head and her fixed
+eyes in a blind way, and the stitching hand resumed its mechanical task,
+but she gave no answer, except with the shudderings that shook her, as a
+lily is shaken in an autumn blast.
+
+Then Saxham stepped backwards noiselessly, climbed the steep ladder
+stairway, and stood waiting for the Mother-Superior in the blazing yellow
+sunshine, beside the post to which his horse was hitched. The Mother
+followed instantly. He was making some pencil memoranda in a shabby
+notebook, and kept his eyes upon his writing, and made a mere mask of his
+square, pale face as he began:
+
+"It--the case presents a very interesting development. The subject has at
+one time or other--probably the critical period of girlhood--sustained a
+severe physical and mental shock?"
+
+The great grey eyes swam in sudden tears that were not to be repressed, as
+the Mother-Superior remembered the finding of that lost lamb on the veld
+seven years before. She bowed her head in silent assent.
+
+"You would wish candour," Saxham said, looking away from her emotion. "And
+I should tell you that this is grave."
+
+"I know it," her desperate eyes said more plainly than her scarcely moving
+lips. "But so many others are suffering in the same way, and there is
+nothing that can be done for any of them."
+
+He answered with emphasis that struck her cold. "Some measures must be
+taken in the case, and without delay. This state of things must not go
+on." He saw that the Mother-Superior caught her breath and wrung her hands
+together in the loose, concealing sleeves as she said, with a breath of
+anguish:
+
+"If she only had more self-control."
+
+"She has self-control." He echoed the word impatiently. "She is using
+every ounce she has for all she is worth. She has used it too long and too
+persistently."
+
+"I will say then, if she only had more faith!"
+
+"I know nothing of faith," Saxham said curtly; "I deal in common-sense."
+
+She could have asked if it were commonly sensible for a creature made by
+God, and existing but by His will, to live without Him? But she put the
+temptation past her. No cordial flame of mutual esteem and liking ever
+sprang up between these two, often brought together in their mutual work
+of help and healing. She recognised Saxham's power, she admitted his
+skill. But, as his practised eye had diagnosed in the beloved of her heart
+the signs of physical and mental crisis, so her clear gaze deciphered in
+his face the story written by those unbridled years of vice and
+dissipation, and knew him diseased in soul. She may have been fully
+acquainted with all Gueldersdorp had learned of him, going here, there,
+and everywhere, as was her wont, in obedience to her Spouse's call. But if
+so, she never betrayed Saxham. There was no resentment, only delicate
+irony in the curve of her finely-modelled lips as she queried:
+
+"Am I so deficient in the quality of common-sense?"
+
+"Madam," he said, "you have manifested it in each of the many instances
+where I have been brought in contact with you. But in your solicitude for
+this young girl you have shown, for the first time in my experience of
+you, some lack of good judgment, and have inflicted, and do inflict,
+severe suffering on her."
+
+Her eyes flashed grey fire under her stern brows as she demanded:
+
+"How, pray?"
+
+"It is out of the question, I suppose," Saxham said coldly, "that you
+should slacken in your ministrations among the sick and wounded, and keep
+out of daily and hourly danger--for her sake?"
+
+"Impossible," her voice answered, and her heart added unheard:
+"Impossible, unless I should be false to my Heavenly Bridegroom out of
+love for the child He gave."
+
+"Then," said Saxham bluntly, "unless these recurrent nerve-storms are to
+culminate in cerebral lesion and mental and physical collapse--a result
+more easy to avert than to deal with--take the girl about with you."
+
+"But----" the Mother uttered in irrepressible dismay. "I--we go
+everywhere!"
+
+It was most true. He had a vision, as she said it, of the black-robed,
+white-coifed, cheerful Sisters passing in couples through the
+shrapnel-littered streets, between houses of gaping walls, and shattered
+roofs, and glassless windows, cheerful, serene, helpful, bringing comfort
+to the dying, and assistance to the sick, oblivious of whistling bullets
+and bursting shells. And the most arduous duties, the most repulsive
+tasks, the most danger-fraught errands, were hers, always by right, and
+claim, and choice. What a woman it was! A very Judith in Israel. He knew
+that Judith did not like him, but unconcealed admiration was in his blue
+eyes as he looked at her.
+
+"I know it. Let _her_ go everywhere. It is the sole chance, and--you spoke
+of faith just now.... If you have it for yourself and the religious women
+of your Order, who go about doing good in confidence of the protection--I
+do not speak in mockery--of an Almighty Hand, why can't you have it for
+her?"
+
+She had never seemed so noble in his eyes as when she took that implied
+rebuke of his, with meek bending of her proud head, and candid
+self-condemnation in the eyes that were lowered and then raised to his,
+and beautiful humility in her speech:
+
+"Sir, your reproach is just; it is I who have been lacking in faith.
+And--it shall be as you advise."
+
+The distant bugle blared out its warning. The bell tolled twice, stopped,
+and tolled four; the smaller bells echoed. The voices of the sentries came
+to their ears, loudly at first, then more distant, then reduced to the
+merest spider-thread of sound:
+
+"'Ware big gun! South quarter, 'ware!"
+
+"I must go to her," the Mother-Superior said, and passed him swiftly and
+went down the ladder. Saxham followed. The white figure on the stool had
+not stirred, apparently. Its blank eyes still stared at the wall, and the
+mechanical hand moved, sewing at nothing, as diligently as ever.
+
+"Lynette!"
+
+The fixed, blindly-staring eyes came to life. Colour throbbed back into
+the wan ivory cheeks. The mouth lost its vacant droop. She rose up from
+the stool with a joyful cry, and, stumbling in her haste, ran into the
+outstretched arms. As they wrapped about her, clinging to her sole earthly
+friend and guardian as though she could never let go, came the crash of
+the driving-charge, the yelling Brocken-hunt of the passage of the huge
+projectile, the ear-splitting din of the shellburst. She lifted up a
+radiant face of laughing defiance, and then choked and quivered and burst
+out crying, leaning her panting young bosom against the black habit, and
+weeping as though her whole being must dissolve, Undine-like, in tears.
+
+Ah, the lovely feminine woman who weeps and clings! She will never lose
+her dominion over the sons of men. The appealing glances of her beautiful
+wet eyes melt the stoniest male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of
+her arms about the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have had power to
+change it back into a breathing human being once more, if Lot had looked
+back, instead of his helpmeet. Her sterner sisters may feel as keenly,
+love as tenderly, sorrow even more bitterly than she. Who will believe it
+among the sons of dead old Adam, who first felt the heaving bosom pant
+against his own, and saw the first bright tear-showers fall--forerunners
+of what oceans of world-sorrow to be shed hereafter, when the Angel of the
+flaming sword drove the peccant pair from Paradise. Ah, the fair, weak
+woman who weeps and clings!
+
+And Owen Saxham, watching Lynette from the ladder-foot, and the
+Mother-Superior, clasping her and murmuring soft comfort into the
+delicate, fragile ear under the heaped waves of red-brown hair, shared the
+same thought.
+
+How this trembling, vibrating, emotional creature will love one day, when
+the man arrives to whom imperious Nature shall bid her render up her all!
+
+In whom, prayed the unselfish mother-heart, willing to be bereft of even
+the Heaven-sent consolation for the sake of the beloved, in whom may she
+find not only the earthly mate-fellow, but the kindred soul. For,
+all-pitying Mother of Mercy! should she, too, be doomed to stake all upon
+a wavering, unstable, headlong Richard, what will happen then?
+
+Looking at the pair, Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. Lynette's tears had
+been dried quickly, like all joy-drops that the eyes shed. She was talking
+low and earnestly, pleading her cause with clinging hands and wistful
+looks and coaxing tones that were broken sometimes by a sob and sometimes
+by a little peal of girlish laughter.
+
+"Mother, I am not made of sugar to be melted in the sun, or Dresden china
+to be broken. I am strong enough to take my share of the work; I am brave
+enough to bear anything--anything," she urged, "if only I may be with you.
+But to sit cooped up here day after day, safe and sheltered, sewing
+powder-bags or giving Katie French lessons, or helping Sister Tobias, and
+listening to the guns"--the blood fled from her cheeks and the great
+pupils of her eyes dilated until they looked all black in her face of
+whiteness--"the dreadful guns, and wondering where you are when the shells
+are bursting"--her voice rose in anguish--"I can't bear it! Mother, do you
+hear?" She threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and the pulses in
+her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, and her slight hands were
+desperate in their clutch upon the arms that held her. "I want my share of
+the risk, whatever it is. I will have it! It is my right. I have tried to
+be good and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this any more!"
+
+Her voice broke upon a sob, and Saxham said from the doorway that was
+filled by his great shoulders from post to post:
+
+"You will not have to stand it any more. The Reverend Mother has
+reconsidered her decision. She will take you to the Hospital and elsewhere
+from to-day."
+
+The man's curt manner and authoritative tone brought Lynette for the first
+time to knowledge of his presence. Her glance went to him, and joy was
+mingled with surprise in the face she turned towards the Mother-Superior.
+
+"Really, Mother?"
+
+The Mother-Superior, though her own still face had flushed with quick,
+irrepressible resentment at Saxham's tone, said cheerfully:
+
+"It is true, my child. Dr. Saxham thinks it will be best for you. Dr.
+Saxham, this is my ward, Miss Mildare."
+
+Saxham made his little brusque bow. Lynette, bending her lovely head, gave
+a grateful glance at the khaki-clad figure with the great hulking
+shoulders, standing under the patch of hot blue sky that the top of the
+ladder vanished in, and a strange shock and thrill went through the man's
+whole frame. His odd, gentian-coloured eyes under the heavy thunder-cloud
+of black eyebrows lightened so suddenly in reply that the girl felt
+repelled and half frightened. She was conscious of a curious oppression.
+As for Saxham, a delicate, stinging fire ran newly in his veins. Something
+stirred in the secret depths of him, and came to life with an awakening
+thrill exquisitely poignant and sweet. For this slight, unsophisticated,
+Convent-bred creature, slender as a lily, reared in innocence among the
+blameless, was rich as her frail, lovely mother had been before her in the
+mysterious allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget-Mary at the zenith of her
+stately beauty had never possessed one-tenth of the seductive charm that
+emanated from this young girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen
+gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the
+senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your
+passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt
+of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the
+Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if
+unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded nymph
+among the sedges may awaken the primal desire of Pan among the reeds....
+Saxham, even in the years of his degradation, had scarcely sunk to the
+level of the crook-shinned, hairy-thighed, hoofed satyr. But he had built
+his nest with the birds of night, and slaked his thirst at impure sources,
+and only now did he realise how his mad dream of vengeance upon the Power
+that had cast him down and wrecked his future was to recoil upon himself.
+"I have done with Love," he had said, "and with Hope, and with Life as it
+is known of the honourable and the upright and the cleanly among men for
+ever!"
+
+And now ... his thoughts were tipped with fire as he drank in the
+suddenly-awakened, vivid, delicate beauty of Lynette Mildare. Now he
+realised the depths of his own mad folly. Oh, to have had the right to
+hope again, to love again, to live again, and be grateful to David, who
+had betrayed him, and Mildred, who had deserted him--to this end! Oh,
+never to have lost the honourable claim to woo such loveliness as this and
+win such purity, and wear both as a talisman upon his heart for ever! He
+drew breath heavily as he looked at the girl, transformed and glowing
+under the touch she loved, shining from within like some frail,
+transparent alabaster lamp with the light that he had helped to rekindle.
+And as his great chest expanded with deep draughts of the subtle,
+intoxicating atmosphere of her, and the blood hummed through his veins to
+that new measure, the last link of his old fetters fell clanking to the
+ground. And then, with a sting of intolerable remorse, came the memory of
+his shameful five years' Odyssey spent as a hog among other hogs of the
+human kind. It had not been an overthrow. It had been a surrender of all
+that was noble and strong in him to all in him that was despicable and
+weak and vile. And his soul shuddered, and his heart contracted in the
+sickening clutch of shame.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX
+
+
+He awakened from that lost moment of enthralment to the pang and the shock
+of self-discovery, and to the knowledge that somebody was hailing him by
+name from the top of the ladder.
+
+"Saxham! Doctor! Are you below there?"
+
+It was the gay, fresh voice of Beauvayse, halted with a handful of
+Irregulars, bandoliered, carrying their rifles and the day's provisions,
+wearing their bayonets on their hips, and sitting their wiry little horses
+with the ease of old troopers in the lee-side of the piled-up mound of
+sandbags that roofed the underground convent. Five men and a Corporal of
+the Town Guard, similarly burdened and accoutred--we know the pale Cockney
+eyes and the thin face of the Corporal, whose freckles have long ago
+vanished in a uniform gingerbread hue--had also taken momentary shelter
+from one of the intermittent blizzards of Mauser bullets that drifted
+through Gueldersdorp.
+
+One Irregular was sitting on an earth-filled packing-case, swearing
+softly, nursing a disabled right arm, and looking at the corded network of
+hairy, sunburned muscles that were delicately outlined in the bright red
+stream that trickled from beneath the rolled-up shirt-sleeve of raspy
+"greyback."
+
+"We saw your hairy tied up outside, Doctor, and 'sensed' your whereabouts,
+as McFadyen says. Can the ladies spare you for a moment? Sorry to be a
+nuisance, but one of my fellows has got winged on our way to relieve the
+garrison at Maxim Outpost South, and though he swears he is as fit as a
+fiddle, I don't believe he ought to come on."
+
+"I'm all right, Sir, 'pon me Sam I am!" protested the dismounted trooper.
+"It's a bit stiff, but the bleedin' 'll take that off. I shan't shoot a
+tikkie the worse for it. Lay anybody 'ere a caulker I don't!"
+
+Nobody took up the bet, fortunately for the sportsman, as surgical
+examination proved that the bullet had gone sheer through the fleshy part
+of the upper arm, breaking the bone, just missing the artery, and leaving
+a clean hole.
+
+"You'll have to go to Hospital, my man," pronounced Saxham.
+
+The face of the wounded Irregular lengthened in disgust. "My crimson luck!
+And I'd made up my mind to pick off a brace o' them blasted Dutch wart
+'ogs over that there bad job of pore Bob Ellis."
+
+He blinked violently, and gulped down something that rose in his brown,
+muscular throat as the voice of a comrade, middle-aged like himself,
+coffee-baked as a Colonial, and also speaking with the accents of the
+English barrack-room, took up the tale.
+
+"Bob Ellis was 'is pal, Sir, and mine, too. We was in the same battery of
+'Orse Artillery at Ali Musjid, an' we went up along of Lord Kitchener to
+Khartoum. An' they shot Bob yesterday. Through the 'ead, clean, an' 'e
+never spoke another word."
+
+"Through the loop-'ole o' the parapet, it was," went on the wounded man.
+"Bein' in the advance trench, we've got on neighbourly terms like, with
+the Dutchies, and Tom Kelly, wot 'as just bin speakin', 'eard Bob Ellis
+promisin' this bloke as 'ow if 'e'd on'y 'urry up an' git killed soon
+enough, Bob would 'ave 'is farm and 'is frow when 'e come marchin' along
+to Pretoria. 'Oppin' mad the Dopper was at that, an' the names 'e called
+pore Bob was something disgraceful. An' when 'e got Bob through the
+loop-'ole, me an' Kelly made our minds up to show a bit o' fancy shootin'
+and lay 'im out in turn. That's 'ow it was, Sir. An' now"--the voice grew
+shaky--"they've corked me. Corked me, by God I--an' there's not a bloke
+among the lot of us but me can play the concertina." With his undamaged
+arm he swung round his haversack, bulging at the top with a cheap,
+bone-keyed, rosewood-veneered, gaudy-paper-sided instrument of German
+make, and hung his head over it in silence.
+
+"But what on earth has the concertina got to do with it?" Saxham was
+frankly puzzled, and Beauvayse, with all his professional knowledge of
+"Tommy," was for once nonplussed.
+
+"You'd better explain to the Doctor, Corporal Leash. I'm out of the
+running when it comes to killing men with concertinas. And--you don't play
+as badly as all that, do you?"
+
+"On the contrywise, Sir," explained the comrade Kelly, "plays uncommon
+well, he does--all the tunes of the latest music-'all and patriotic
+songs."
+
+"An' them blasted Doppers are uncommon fond o' music, d'ye see, Sir,"
+explained the wounded trooper. "They can't keep their ugly 'eads down
+behind the sand-bags when they hears it. Up they pops 'em over the edge
+and then--you take care they don't pop down no more."
+
+The gay young laughter of Beauvayse was infectious, while white teeth
+showed, or teeth that were not white, in the tanned faces of Irregulars
+and Town Guardsmen. Even the mourning comrades grinned, and Saxham smiled
+grimly as Beauvayse cried:
+
+"By George, a more original method of reprisal I never came across! But
+it's clear if you can't shoot with that drilled arm of yours you can't
+play the concertina. Wish I could knock a tune out of the thing, Leash,
+for your sake--enough to make a Boer put his head up. But I'm a duffer at
+musical instruments--always was. What do you say, my man?"
+
+"Beg pardon, Sir." The Corporal with the Town Guardsmen saluted, making
+the most of his five feet two inches. "I can pl'y the squiffer--I mean the
+concertina, Sir--a fair treat for a hammatore. And if I might be let to
+tyke this man's plyce at Maxim Outpost South, Sir, I could 'elp serve the
+gun, too, Sir--we've bin' attendin' Artillery Drill in spare hours."
+
+"I shouldn't think you had any spare hours to spare?" Beauvayse looked at
+the thin, tanned face with liking, and the keen pale eyes met his fairly.
+
+"We haven't, Sir, but we manage some'ow."
+
+"But what about your own duty?"
+
+"I'm tykin' these men over, Sir." He indicated a solid family grocer, a
+clerk of the County Court, a pseudo-Swiss baker, and two Navy Reserve men
+reduced to the ranks for aggressive intemperance of the methylated-spirit
+kind, which, in the absence of other liquor, had prevailed among a certain
+class, until the intoxicating medium was confiscated by Government.
+
+"Captain Thwaite 'as spared us from the Cemetery Works to relieve Corporal
+Brice an' 'is little lot at Angle VII. South Trenches. A telephone-message
+come from our Colonel to say Brice's men was bad with rheumatism and
+dysentery--but Brice is all right an' fit, Sir--and"--the pale eyes
+pleaded out of the brickdust-coloured face--"I'd like the charnce o'
+gettin' nearer to the enemy, Sir--an' that's the truth."
+
+Beauvayse conceded. "Very well. I'll square things with your commanding
+officer as we go along, and explain matters to the Colonel per telephone
+from Maxim Outpost South. Come on there when you've handed over your men
+to Brice."
+
+The pale eyes danced. "Thank you, Sir."
+
+"An' I'll owe you a dollar whisky-peg for the good turn," muttered the
+perforated musician, as he handed over the cherished concertina to the
+volunteer, "till next Sunday that I see you in the stad."
+
+"Righto!" said Corporal Keyse, accepting the sacred charge.
+
+"Look here, though," came from Beauvayse, "there's one thing you must
+remember--what's your name?"
+
+"Keyse, sir--Corporal, A Company, Gueldersdorp Town Guard."
+
+"Well, Keyse, you've heard Meisje hiccoughing ninety-four-pound
+projectiles all the morning, haven't you?"
+
+"Couldn't possibly miss 'er, sir"--the pale eyes twinkled as the Corporal
+finished--"not as long as she misses me."
+
+"She has a talent for missing, otherwise a good many of us fellows would
+have heard the Long Call before now. But most of her delicate little
+attentions--with the exception of one shell she sent over the Women's
+Laager, to show the people there that she doesn't mind killin' females and
+children if she can't get men--most of 'em are meant for Maxim Outpost
+South; and one of 'em may get home sometimes, when the German gunner isn't
+thinking of his sweetheart. Then, if you find yourself soarin' heavenwards
+in a kind of scattered anatomical puzzle-map of little bits, don't blame
+me for obligin' you, that's all."
+
+There was a guffaw from the listeners. W. Keyse saluted, cheerfully
+joining in.
+
+"I shan't s'y a word, sir."
+
+"By George, I believe you!" said Beauvayse. "What's up? Seen a ghost?"
+
+Saxham had swung his wallet round, producing carbolic, antiseptic gauze,
+First Aid bandages, and other surgical indispensables from its recesses,
+as by legerdemain, and a tall, stately black figure, followed by a tall,
+slender white figure, had risen from the bowels of the earth. The
+Mother-Superior, taking in the situation and the need of her at a glance,
+called a brief order down the ladder stairway, and went swiftly over to
+Saxham, whipping a blue apron out of a big pocket, tying it about her, and
+pulling on a pair of sleeves of the same stuff as she went. Lynette turned
+to take the basin of hot water that the arm of Sister Tobias extended from
+below, and the jaws of W. Keyse snapped together. Until he twigged the
+bronze-red coils of hair under the broad, rough straw hat, he had thought
+... Cripps!
+
+We know how the dancing, provoking mischievous blue eyes and adorable
+wrist-thick golden pigtail of Greta du Taine dwelt in his love-stricken
+remembrance. Her worshipped image had got a little rubbed and dimmish of
+late to be sure, but breathe on the colours, and you saw them come out
+clear, and oh! bewilderingly lovely.
+
+Billy Keyse had never even beheld the enchantress since that
+never-to-be-forgotten morning when he had seen her pass at the head of the
+serpentine procession of pupils, slowly winding across the Market Square.
+But he knew she was still in Gueldersdorp. He felt her, for one thing. We
+know that in his case Love's clairvoyant instinct had got its nightcap on.
+We saw Greta depart on the train bound North and branch off East for the
+Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg. But if she were not in Gueldersdorp,
+why did the left breast-pocket of the now soiled and heavily-patched khaki
+tunic bulge so? There were six letters inside there, tied up with a frayed
+bit of blue ribbon. Hers? 'Strewth, they were! And each what you might
+call a Regular One-er of a love-letter. Never mind the paper being
+thumb-marked as well as cheaply inferior, one cannot expect all the
+refinements of civilisation in a beleaguered town. It was the spelling
+that--although we know W. Keyse to be no cold orthographist--occasionally
+gave him pause as he perused and re-perused the greasy but passionate
+page. And why did she sign herself "Fare Air?" The sense of ingratitude
+pierced him even as he wondered. Why shouldn't she if she chose? What a
+proper beast he was to grumble! Him, that ought to be proud of her
+demeaning herself to stoop to a young chap in a lower station, so to call.
+And her a Regular Swell.
+
+He hugged the letters against him with the arm belonging to the hand that
+held the concertina. Beloved missives, where was the worshipped writer
+now? Sitting by a tapestry-frame, for he could not imagine her peeling
+potatoes, down in the Convent bombproof, dreaming of him, weeping over his
+last letter, or blushfully aware of his vicinity, panting at the bottom of
+the ladder, listening for the beloved accents of the man who ... Hold
+hard, though! she had never heard the voice of W. Keyse; or he hers for
+that matter, but he would have recognised it among a thousand. He had told
+her so, writing with ink pencil, of the kind that when sucked in moments
+of forgetfulness tastes peculiarly horrible, and tinges the saliva with
+violet, at spare moments in the trench. A phlegmatic Chinaman acted as
+Love's postman, handing in the envelopes that were addressed to Mr. W.
+Keyse, Esquer, in caligraphy that began in the top left-hand corner, and
+trickled gradually down into the right-hand bottom one. Pumping the
+Celestial was no use. John Tow sabee'd only that a fair foreign devil gave
+the one missive, with a tikkie for delivery, and 'spose one time Tow makee
+plenty good walkee back with anulla paper some pidgin bime-bye catchee
+more tikkie. If walkee back no paper, too muchee John catchee hellee,
+reaping only reproaches and no tikkie at all.
+
+Judge how the heart of W. Keyse bumped against the concertina when the
+slender vision in the holland skirt and white blouse and broad straw hat
+appeared from underground. It was not she, though, Queen of heroic
+thoughts, inspirer of deeds of daring yet to be done, who followed the
+Mother-Superior.
+
+It was the loveliest girl Beauvayse had ever seen, or ever would see. The
+girl who had stood up in defence of three nuns against a threatening gang
+of rowdy Transvaalers, one day in the Recreation Ground,--the girl who had
+passed as the Staff dismounted at the Hospital gate on the day of
+appropriation. The Mayor had had no chance of fulfilling his promise of an
+introduction. The Mayor's wife, with her two children, was an inmate of
+the Women's Laager. But at last the kind little genii that deal with
+happenings and chances had brought Beauvayse and his divinity face to
+face. Now she rose out of the Convent dug-out, in the waste that had been
+the railway-official's front-garden, like a fair white Psyche-statue,
+delivered in the course of some convulsion of Nature from the matrix of
+the earth. And she was even more exquisite than his remembrance of her,
+even more ...
+
+Beauvayse descended abruptly from an empyrean flight of poetic imagery to
+remember his torn and soiled silk polo-shirt with its rolled-up sleeves,
+his earth-stained cords, girt with a belt of vari-coloured webbing, his
+muddy leather leggings and boots with their caked and dusty spurs, telling
+of hard service and unresting activity.
+
+But he looked radiantly handsome as he leapt to the ground and came
+forward, his tall athletic figure, trained by arduous toil and incessant
+work until the last superfluous ounce of flesh had vanished, looking the
+personification of manliness, his tanned face, still clean-shaven save for
+the slight fair moustache, one to set any maiden dreaming of its straight
+clean-cut features and lazy, long-shaped grey-green eyes. The wide felt
+hat he touched in salute sat with a jaunty air on the close-cropped golden
+head. Here was a gallant, heartsome vision to greet Lynette, stepping
+after the Mother into that outer world, where fire belched warning from
+iron mouths, and steel destruction sped through the skies, and bullets
+sang like hornets past your head, or hit the ground near your feet,
+sending up little bushy columns and spirts of dust.
+
+The wounded man, now carbolised, plugged, and bandaged by Saxham's
+dexterous hands, took the hastily-scrawled admission-order, included his
+officer, the ladies, and the Doctor in a left-handed salute, distributed a
+parting wink among his comrades, counselled W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper
+to go tender on the off-side G of the instrument he dandled, and trudged
+sturdily away in the direction of the Hospital.
+
+"Thank you, ma'am. There's no stealing a march on you," Beauvayse said to
+the Mother-Superior, touching his hat with his gay, swaggering grace, as
+she emptied a bowl of red water on the ground, and whisked the blue apron
+and sleeves back into the vast recesses of the mysterious pocket. "But
+you're spoiling us. Hot water isn't on tap, as a rule, for
+Field-dressings, and--and won't you----" He reddened to the fair untanned
+skin upon his temples. "Mayn't I ask, ma'am, to be introduced to Miss
+Mildare?"
+
+The Mother complied with his request, smiling indulgently. She had known
+and loved this bright boy's mother in her early married days. The Dark
+Rose of Ireland and the White Rose of Devon, a noted Society phrasemonger
+had dubbed them, seeing them together on the lawn one Ascot Cup Day, their
+light draperies and delicate ribbons whip-whipping in the pleasant June
+breeze, ivory-skinned, jetty-locked Celtic beauty and blue-eyed,
+flaxen-locked Saxon fairness in charming, confidential juxtaposition under
+one lace sunshade, lined with what has been the last new fashionable
+colour under twenty names, since then; only that year they called it _Rose
+fane_. Richard Mildare had praised the sunshade, a Paris affair supplied
+by Worth with his creation, Lady Biddy Bawne's beautiful gown. He asked
+Lady Biddy to marry him at the back of the box on the Grand Stand when
+Verneuil was winning the Cup. Who shall dare say that he was not then a
+sincere lover? thought the Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way.
+And then she recalled her wandering thoughts, and turned them to the One
+Lover who never betrays His chosen. And her rapt eyes looking up, seemed
+to pierce beyond the flaming sky-vault overhead. She forgot all else,
+suddenly snatched from earthly consciousness to beatific realisation of
+the Divine.
+
+There had been for some minutes now a lull in the bombardment from the
+ridges. The enemy's guns were silent a space, and the hot batteries of
+harassed Gueldersdorp snatched a brief respite while Boers gathered for
+the nine o'clock coffee-drinking round their little snapping fires of
+dried dung and tindery bush. Now and then a rifle cracked, and a bullet
+sang past or whitted in the dust. But comparative peace brooded over the
+shattered hamlet of wrecked homes and ploughed-up, littered roads, and raw
+earthworks blistering in the pitiless sun.
+
+"Miss Mildare." Beauvayse was speaking in that pleasant, boyish voice of
+his, standing close to Lynette, his tall head bending for a glimpse of the
+eyes of golden hazel, that were shaded by the broad, rough straw hat; "if
+you knew how I've waited for this. Nearly seven weeks since one day in
+early October, when I saw you on the Recreation Ground, where some brutes
+were annoying you, and a day or so later you went by the Hospital as I
+rode up with the Chief. But, of course, you don't remember?" His eyes
+begged her to say she did.
+
+"I remember quite well." It was the voice he had imagined for her--low,
+and round, and clear, with just an undernote of plaintiveness matching the
+wistful appeal of her eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of
+exquisite delight went through him, as though she had touched him with her
+slender white, bare hand on the naked breast.
+
+"Thank you for not quite forgetting. You don't know what it means to me,
+being kept in mind by you."
+
+"I do not know that I kept you in mind." There was a touch of girlish
+dignity in her utterance. "I only said that I remembered quite well."
+
+He bent his head nearer, and lowered his pleasant voice to a coaxing,
+confidential tone.
+
+"You'll think me a presumptuous kind of fellow for talking like this,
+won't you, Miss Mildare? But the circumstances are exceptional, aren't
+they? We're shut up away from the big world outside in a little world of
+our own, and--such chances fall to every man and most of the women here: a
+shrapnel bullet or a shell-splinter might stop me before another hour goes
+by, from ever saying--what I've felt for weeks on end had got to be
+said--what I'd risk a dozen lives, if I had 'em, to get the opportunity of
+saying to you." His hot eagerness frightened her. Her downcast eyelids
+quivered, and her flushed maiden-face shrank from him.
+
+"Oh, don't be angry! Don't move away!" Beauvayse entreated; for Lynette's
+anxious glance had gone in search of the Mother-Superior, with whom Saxham
+was now discussing the nuns' idea of utilising the Convent as a
+Convalescent Hospital. In another instant she would have taken refuge by
+her side. "If you knew how I have thought of you and dreamed of you since
+I saw you! If you could only understand how I shall think of you now! If
+you could only realise how awfully, utterly strange it is to feel as I am
+feeling!" His voice was a tremulous, fervent whisper. His eyes gleamed
+like emeralds in the shadow of the wide-brimmed felt hat. "And if I die
+to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long for you, and
+worship you wherever I am!"
+
+"Oh, why do you talk to me like this?"
+
+Lynette's whisper was as tremulous as Beauvayse's own. Her eyes lifted to
+the glowing, ardent face for one shy instant, and found it good to look
+upon. Men, young and not undesirable, had tried to make love to her
+before, at dances and parties and picnics to which she had been chaperoned
+by the Mayor's wife. But the first hot glance, the first word that carried
+the vibration of a passionate meaning, had wakened the old terror in her,
+and bidden her escape. The nymph had always taken flight at the first step
+upon the bank, the first rustle of the sedges. She had never lingered to
+feel the air stirred by another burning breath. She had never asked any
+one of those other men why he talked like that. Beauvayse went on:
+
+"Perhaps I even seem a little mad to you--fellows have told me lately that
+I went on as if I had a tile off. Perhaps I'm what the Scotch call 'fey.'
+I've got Highland blood in me, anyhow. And you have set it on fire, I
+think--started it boiling and racing and leaping in my veins as no woman
+ever did before. You slender white witch! you fay of mist and moonlight,
+you've woven a spell, and tangled my soul in it, and nothing in Life or in
+Death will ever loose me again." His tone changed, became infinitely
+caressing. "How sweet and dear you are to be so patient with me, while I'm
+sending the Conventionalities to the rightabout and terrifying the
+Proprieties. Forgive me, Miss Mildare."
+
+The pleading in his face was exquisite. She felt as a bee might feel
+drowning in honey, as she wreathed her white fingers together upon the
+silver buckle of the brown leather belt she wore, and said confusedly:
+
+"I ... I believe I ought to be very angry with you."
+
+His whisper touched her ear like a kiss, and set her trembling.
+
+"But you're not?"
+
+"I----"
+
+She caught her breath as he came nearer. There was a fragrance from him--a
+perfume of youth and health and vitality--that was powerful, heady,
+intoxicating as the first warm, flower-scented wind of Spring, blowing
+down a mountain-kloof from the high ranges. Her white-rose cheeks took
+sudden warmth of hue, and her pale nostrils quivered. A faint, mysterious
+smile dawned upon her lips. Something of the old terror was upon her
+still, and yet--it was delicious to be afraid of him!
+
+"Say that you aren't angry with me for being so thunderingly presumptuous.
+Please be kind to me and say it."
+
+Her lips began to utter disjointed phrases. "What can it matter really?...
+Oh, very well, then ... if my saying so is of such ... importance...."
+
+"More important than anything in the world!" he declared.
+
+"Very well, then, I am not angry--not furiously so, at least." The bud of
+a smile repressed pouted her lips.
+
+"And," he begged, "you'll let what I've said to you be our secret?
+Promise."
+
+"Very well."
+
+"You sweetest, kindest, loveliest----"
+
+"Please don't," she entreated.
+
+"And I may know your Christian name?" he persisted, "I've thought of
+everything in the world, and nothing's good enough to fit you."
+
+"Oh, how silly!" Her eyes gleamed with laughter. "It is Lynette."
+
+He caught at it with rapture. "Perfect! The last touch.... The scent of
+the rose, or say the dewdrop on it. By George, I'm in earnest!"
+
+He had spoken incautiously loud. A grating voice addressing him pulled his
+head round.
+
+"Lord Beauvayse ..."
+
+"Did you speak to me, Doctor? As I was saying, Miss Mildare," he went on,
+continuing the blameless conversation, "dust-storms and flies are the twin
+curses of South Africa."
+
+The harsh voice spoke to him again. He looked round, and met Saxham's
+eyes, hard and cold as blue stones. The Doctor said grimly:
+
+"You may not be aware that your men are drawing fire."
+
+It was undeniable fact. The bullets had begun to hit the ground under the
+horses' bellies, spirting little columns of dust and flattening against
+the stones. Coffee-drinking was over in the enemy's trenches, and the
+business of the day had begun again. Beauvayse bade the ladies
+good-morning, and swung himself into the saddle.
+
+"Au revoir, Miss Mildare. Please get under cover at once." The
+proprietorship in the tone stung Saxham to wincing. "Good-morning, ma'am,"
+he cried to the Mother-Superior, "we know you ignore bullets. So long,
+Doctor. Hope I shan't count one in your day's casualty-bag. Ready, boys?"
+
+The chatting troopers sprang to alert attention. W. Keyse, pensively
+boring the sandy earth with the pneumatic auger of imagination, in search
+of the loved one believed to inhabit the Convent bomb-proof, was recalled
+to the surface by the curtly-uttered command, and knew the thrill of
+hero-worship as Beauvayse threw out his lightly-clenched hand, and the
+troopers, answering the signal, broke into a trot. The hot dust scurried
+at the horses' retreating heels. Corporal Keyse, trudging staunchly in
+their wake with his five Town Guardsmen, became ghostlike, enveloped in an
+African replica of the ginger-coloured type of London fog. And the
+Mother-Superior looked at her well-worn watch.
+
+"My child, we must be moving if you are coming with me to the Women's
+Laager. I am nearly an hour late as it is."
+
+"I am ready, Mother dear."
+
+Lynette's eyes came back from following that dust-cloud in the distance to
+meet the hungry, jealous fires of Saxham's gaze.
+
+He had seen Beauvayse's ardent look, and her shy heart's first leaf
+unfolded in the answering blush, and a spasm of intolerable anger gripped
+him as he saw. He turned away silently, cursing his own folly, and
+unhitched his horse's bridle from the broken gatepost. With the act a
+crowd rose up before Lynette and a frightened horse reared, threatening to
+fall upon three women who were hurrying along the sidewalk outside the
+Hospital, and a heavy-shouldered, black-haired man in shabby white drills
+stepped out of the throng and seized the flying bridoon-rein, and wrenched
+the brute down. She recognised the horse and the man again, and exclaimed:
+
+"Why ... Mother, don't you remember the rearing horse outside the Hospital
+that day in October? It was Dr. Saxham who caught him, and saved us from
+getting hurt."
+
+"And we never even thanked you." The Mother-Superior turned to Saxham with
+outstretched hand and the smile that made her grave face beautiful. "What
+you must have thought!..."
+
+"I looked for the person who had been so prompt, but you had
+vanished--where, nobody seemed to know," Lynette told him with her clear
+eyes on the stern, square face. "And then a man in the crowd called out,
+'It's the Dop Doctor!' And I thought what an odd nickname!..." She broke
+off in dismay. Saxham had become livid. His grim jaws clamped themselves
+together, and the blue eyes grew hard as stone. One instant he stood
+immovable, the Waler's bridle on his left arm, his right hand clenched
+upon the old hunting-crop. Then he said very coldly and distinctly:
+
+"As you observe, it is a queer nickname. But, at any rate, I had fairly
+earned----"
+
+The bugle from the Staff headquarters sounded, drowning the rest of the
+sentence. The Catholic Church bell tolled. The other bells took up the
+warning, and the sentries called again from post to post:
+
+"'Ware gun, Number Two! Southern Quarter, 'ware!"
+
+The Krupp bellowed from the enemy's north position, and cleverly lobbed a
+seven-pound shell not far behind that rapidly-moving, distant pillar of
+dust, the nucleus of which was a little troop of cantering Irregulars, and
+not far in front of the lower, slower-moving cloud, the heart of which was
+a little knot of tramping Town Guardsmen. The shell burst with a splitting
+crack, earth and flying stones mingled with the deadly green flame and the
+poisonous chemical fumes of the lyddite. Figures scurried hither and
+thither in the smoke and smother; one lay prone upon the ground....
+
+At the instant of the explosion Saxham had leaped forwards, setting his
+body and the horse's as a bulwark between Death and the two women. Now,
+though Lynette's rough straw hat had been whisked from her head by a force
+invisible, he saw her safe, caught in the Mother-Superior's embrace,
+sheltered by the tall, protecting figure as the sapling is sheltered by
+the pine.
+
+"We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her cheek had been cut by
+a flying flake of flint, and was bleeding. "But look ... over there!" She
+pointed over the veld to the prostrate brown figure, and a cry of alarm
+broke from Lynette.
+
+"Oh, Mother, who ...?"
+
+"It is a Town Guardsman," Saxham answered, his cold blue eyes meeting the
+wild frightened gaze of the pale girl. "Lord Beauvayse and the Irregulars
+got off scot-free. Reverend Mother, do not think of coming. Please go on
+to the Women's Laager. I will see to the wounded man, and follow
+by-and-by."
+
+He mounted, refusing all offers of aid, and rode off. Looking back an
+instant, he saw the black figure of the woman and the white figure of the
+girl setting out upon their perilous journey over the bare patch of ground
+where Death made harvest every day. They kissed each other before they
+started, and again Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. If Ruth had been only
+one half as lovely as this Convent-grown lily, Boaz was decidedly a lucky
+man. But he had been a respectable, sober, steady-going farmer, and not a
+man of thirty-six without a ten-pound note in the world, with a blighted
+career to regret, and five years of drunken wastrelhood to be ashamed of.
+And yet ... the drunken wastrel had been a man of mark once, and earned
+his thousands. And the success that had been achieved, and lost, could be
+rewon, and the career that had been pursued and abandoned could be
+his--Saxham's--again. And what were his publishers doing with those
+accumulated royalties? For he knew from Taggart and McFadyen that his
+books still sold.
+
+"The Past is done with," he said aloud. "Why should not the Future be
+fair?"
+
+And yet he had nearly yielded to the impulse to own to those degraded
+years, and claim the nickname they had earned him, and take her loathing
+and contempt in exchange. What sudden madness had possessed him, akin to
+that unaccountable, overmastering surge of emotion that he had known just
+now when he saw her tears?
+
+We know the name of the divine madness, but we know not why it comes.
+Suddenly, after long years, in a crowded place or in a solitude where two
+are, it is upon you or upon me. The blood is changed to strange, ethereal
+ichor, the pulse beats a tune that is as old as the Earth itself, but yet
+eternally new. Every breath we draw is rapture, every step we take leads
+us one way. One voice calls through all the voices, one hand beckons
+whether it will or no, and we follow because we must. With the Atlantic
+rolling between us I can feel your heart beat against mine, and your lips
+breathe into me your soul. The light that was upon your face, the look
+that was in your eyes as you gave the unforgettable, immemorial kiss, the
+clasp of your hands, the rising and falling of your bosom, like a wave
+beneath a sea-bird, like a sea-bird above a wave, shall be with me always,
+even to the end of time and beyond it.
+
+For there are many loves, but one Love.
+
+
+
+
+XXX
+
+
+A long-legged, thinnish officer, riding a khaki-coloured bicycle over a
+dusty stretch of shrapnel-raked ground, carrying a riding-whip tucked
+under his arm and wearing steel jack-spurs, might have been considered a
+laughter-provoking object elsewhere, but the point was lost for
+Gueldersdorp. He got off his metal steed amongst the zipping bullets, and
+came over to the little group of Town Guards that were gathered round
+Saxham, who had just ridden up, and their prostrate comrade, who writhed
+and groaned lustily.
+
+"You have a casualty. Serious?"
+
+Saxham looked up, and his hard glance softened in recognition of the
+Chief.
+
+"I'll tell you in a moment, sir."
+
+The earth-stained khaki jacket was torn down the left side and drenched
+with ominous red. A little pool of the same colour had gathered under the
+sufferer.
+
+"He looks gassly, don't him?" muttered one of the Town Guardsmen, the
+Swiss baker who was not Swiss.
+
+"Makes plenty of noise," said the County Court clerk hypercritically, "for
+a dying man."
+
+"Oh Lord! oh Lord!"
+
+The subject had bellowed with sonority, testifying at least to the
+possession of an uninjured diaphragm, as Saxham begun to cut away the
+jacket.
+
+"Oh, come now!" said a brisk, pleasant, incisive voice that sent an
+electric shock volting through the presumably shattered frame. "That's not
+so bad!"
+
+"I told you so," muttered the County Court clerk to the Swiss baker.
+
+"You remember me, Colonel?"
+
+Haggard, despairing eyes rolled up at the Chief appealingly. He had met
+the gaze of those oyster-orbs before. He recognised Alderman Brooker,
+proprietor of the grocery stores in Market Square, victim of the outrage
+perpetrated on a sentry near the Convent on a certain memorable night in
+October last.
+
+"Yes, my man. Anything I can do?" He knelt down beside the prostrate
+form.
+
+"You can tell my country, sir, that I died willingly," panted the
+moribund.
+
+"With pleasure, when you're dead. But you're not yet, you know, Brooker."
+His keen glance was following the run of the Doctor's surgical scissors
+through the brown stuff and revelling in discovery. And Saxham's set,
+square face and stern eyes were for once all alight with laughter. The
+dying man went on:
+
+"It's a privilege, sir, an inestimable privilege, to have shed one's blood
+in a great cause."
+
+"It is, Mr. Brooker, but this is different stuff." His keen face wrinkled
+with amusement as he sniffed, and dipped a finger in the crimson puddle.
+"Too sticky." He put the finger to his tongue--"and too sweet. Show him
+the bottle, Saxham."
+
+The Doctor, imperturbably grave, held forth at the end of the scissors the
+ripped-up ruins of a small-sized indiarubber hot-water bottle, a ductile
+vessel that, buttoned inside the khaki tunic, had adapted itself not
+uncomfortably to the still existing rotundities of the Alderman's figure.
+A hyaena-yell of laughter broke from each of the crowding heads. Brooker's
+face assumed the hue of the scarlet flannel chest-protector exposed by the
+ruthless steel.
+
+"What the--what the----?" he stuttered.
+
+"Yes, that's the question. What the devil was inside it, Brooker, when the
+shell-splinter hit you in the tummy and it saved your life? Stand him on
+his legs, men; he's as right as rain. Now, Brooker?"
+
+Brooker, without volition, assumed the perpendicular, and began to babble:
+
+"To tell the truth, sir, it was loquat syrup. Very soothing to the chest,
+and, upon my honour, perfectly wholesome. Mrs. Brooker makes it regularly
+every year, and--we sell a twenty-gallon barrel over the counter, besides
+what we keep for ourselves. And if I am to be exposed to mockery when
+Providence has snatched me from the verge of the grave ..."
+
+"Not a watery grave, Brooker," came from the Chief, with an irrepressible
+chuckle--"a syrupy one. And--have I your word of honour that this is a
+non-alcoholic beverage?"
+
+"Sir, to be candid with you, I won't deny but what it might contain a
+certain proportion of brandy. And the nights in the trench being
+particularly cold and myself constitutionally liable to chill ... I--I
+find a drop now and then a comfort, sir."
+
+"Ah, and have you any more of this kind of comfort at your place of
+business or elsewhere?"
+
+"Why--why ..." the Alderman faltered, "there might be a little keg, sir,
+in the shop, under the desk in the counting-house."
+
+"Requisitioned, Mr. Brooker, as a Government store. You may feel more
+chilly without it; you'll certainly sleep more lightly. As far as I can
+see, it has been more useful outside of you than ever it was in. And--the
+safety of this town depends on the cool heads of the defenders who man the
+trenches. A fuddled man behind a gun is worse than no man to me."
+
+The voice rang hard and clear as a gong. "I'm no teetotaller. Abstinence
+is the rule I enforce, by precept and example. While men are men they'll
+drink strong liquor. But as long as they are not fool-men and brute-men,
+they can be trusted not to lap when they're on duty. Those I find
+untrustworthy I mark down, and they will be dealt with rigorously. You
+understand me, Brooker? You look as if you did. You've had a narrow
+squeak. Be thankful for it that nothing but a bruise over the ribs has
+come of it. Corporal, fall in your men, and get to your duty."
+
+W. Keyse and his martial citizens tramped on, the resuscitated Brooker
+flying rags of sanguine stain. Then the stern face of the Chief broke up
+in laughter. The crinkled-up eyes ran over with tears of mirth.
+
+"Lord, that fellow will be the death of me! Tartaglia in the flesh--how
+old Gozzi would have revelled in him! Those pathetic, oyster-eyes, that
+round, flabby face, that comic nose, and the bleating voice with the
+sentimental quaver in it, reeling off the live man's dying speech...." He
+wiped his brimming eyes. "Since the time when Boer spies hocussed him on
+guard--you remember that lovely affair?--he's registered a vow to impress
+me with his gallantry and devotion, or die in the attempt. He's the most
+admirably unconscious humbug I've ever yet met. Sands his sugar and
+brown-papers his teas philanthropically, for the good of the public, and
+denounces men who put in Old Squareface and whisky-pegs, as he fuddles
+himself with his loquat brandy after shop-hours in the sitting-room back
+of the store. But let us be thankful that Providence has sent Brooker on a
+special mission to play Pantaloon in this grimmish little interlude of
+ours. For we'll want every scrap of Comic Relief we can get by-and-by,
+Saxham, if the other one doesn't turn up--say by the middle of January."
+
+"I understand, sir." Saxham, to whom this man's face was as a book well
+loved, read in it that the Commissariat was caving. "There has been
+another Boer cattle-raid?"
+
+The face that was turned to his own in reply had suddenly grown
+deeply-lined and haggard. "There has been a lot of cattle-shooting.
+Lobbing shrapnel at grazing cows was always quite a favourite game with
+Brounckers. But his gunners hit oftener than they used to. And the
+Government forage won't hold out for ever." He patted the brown Waler, who
+pricked his sagacious ears and threw up his handsome bluntish head in
+acknowledgment of his master's caress. "Presently we shall be killing our
+mounts to save their lives--and ours. Oats and horseflesh will keep life
+in men--and in children and women.... The devil of it is, Saxham, that
+there are such a lot of women."
+
+"And seventy-five out of a hundred of them stayed out of pure curiosity,"
+came grimly from Saxham.
+
+"To see what a siege would be like. Well, poor souls, they know now! You
+were going over to the Women's Laager. I'll walk with you, and say my say
+as I go. I'm on my way to Nordenfeldt Fort West. Something has gone wrong
+with the telephone-wire between there and Staff headquarters, and I can't
+get anything through but Volapuk or Esperanto. And those happen to be two
+of the languages I haven't studied." The dry, humorous smile curved the
+reddish-brown moustache again. The pleasant little whistle stirred the
+short-clipped hairs of it as the two men turned in the direction of the
+Women's Laager, over which the Red-cross flag was fluttering, and where
+the spider with the little Boer mare, picking at the scanty grass, waited
+outside the earthworks. Saxham's eyes did not travel so far. They were
+fastened upon a tall black figure and a less tall and more slender white
+figure that were by this time halfway upon their perilous journey across
+the patch of veld, bare and scorched by hellish fires, and ploughed by
+shrapnel ball into the furrows whence Death had reaped his harvest day by
+day.
+
+"There goes one of the women we couldn't have done without," commented his
+companion, wheeling his bicycle beside Saxham, leading the brown Waler.
+
+"It is the Mother-Superior," Saxham said, "with her ward, Miss Mildare."
+
+"Ah! My invariable reply to Beauvayse--you know my junior A.D.C., who
+daily clamours for an introduction to Miss Mildare--is, that I have not
+yet had one myself, though at the outset of affairs I encountered the
+young lady under rather trying circumstances, in which she showed plenty
+of pluck. I thought I had told you. No? Well, it was one morning on the
+Recreation Ground. The School was out walking, a trio of nuns in charge,
+and some Dutch loafers mobbed them--threatened to lay hands on the
+Sisters--and Miss Mildare stood up in defence--head up, eyes blazing, a
+slim, tawny-haired young lioness ready to spring. And Beauvayse was with
+me, and ever since then has been dead-set upon making her acquaintance."
+
+Saxham's blood warmed to the picture. But he said, and his tone was not
+pleasant: "Lord Beauvayse attained the height of his ambition a few
+minutes ago."
+
+"Did he? Well, I hope disillusion was not the outcome of realisation. Up
+to the present"--the humorous, keen eyes were wrinkled at the
+corners--"all the boy's swans have been geese, some of 'em the sable
+kind."
+
+Saxham answered stiffly: "I should say that in this case the swan
+decidedly predominates."
+
+The other whistled a bar of his pleasant little tune before he spoke
+again. "It is a capital thing for Beauvayse, being shut up here, out of
+the way of women."
+
+"Are there no women in Gueldersdorp?"
+
+"None of the kind Beauvayse's canoe is given to capsizing on." The line in
+his senior's cheek flickered with a hinted smile. "None of the kind that
+run after him, lie in wait for him, buzz round him like wasps about a
+honey-bowl. I've developed muscle getting the boy out of amatory scrapes,
+with the Society octopus, with the Garrison husband-hunter, with the
+professional man-eater, theatrical or music-hall; and the latest, most
+inexpressible She, is always the loveliest woman in the world. Queer
+world!"
+
+"A damned queer world!" agreed Saxham.
+
+"I'd prefer to call it a blessed queer one, because, with all its chaotic,
+weltering incongruities--there's a Carlyleism for you--I love it! I
+couldn't live without loving it and laughing at it, any more than
+Beauvayse could get on _minus_ an affair of the heart. Ah, yes, that
+amatory lyre of his is an uncommonly adaptable instrument. I've known it
+thrummed to the praises of a middle-aged Duchess--quite a beauty still,
+even by daylight, with her three veils on, and an Operatic soprano, with a
+mascot cockatoo, not to mention a round dozen of frisky matrons of the
+kind that exploit nice boys. Just before we came out, it could play
+nothing but that famous song-and-dance tune that London went mad over at
+the Jollity in June--is raving over still, I believe! Can't give you the
+exact title of the thing, but 'Darling, Will You Meet Me In The Centre Of
+The Circle That The Limelight Makes Upon The Floor, Tiddle-e-yum?' would
+meet the case. We have Musical Comedy now in place of what used to be
+Burlesque in your London days, Saxham, with a Leading Lady instead of a
+Principal Boy, and a Chorus in long skirts."
+
+Saxham admitted with a cynical twitch of the mouth:
+
+"There's nothing so short as a long skirt--properly managed."
+
+"You're right. And Lessie Lavigne and the rest of the nimble sisterhood
+devote their gifts--Thespian and Terpsichorean--to demonstrating the fact.
+Oh, damned cowardly hounds!" The voice jarred and clanged with
+irrepressible anger. "Saxham, can't you see? Brouncker's sharpshooters are
+sniping at the women--the Sister of Mercy and the girl!"
+
+His glance, as well as Saxham's, had followed the tall black figure and
+the slender white figure on their journey through Death's harvest-field.
+But his trained eye had been first to see the little jets and puffs of
+sickly hot, reddish dust rising about their perilous path. They walked
+quickly, but without hurry, keeping a pace apart, and holding one another
+by the hand. Saxham, watching them, said, with dry lips and a deadly
+sickness at the heart:
+
+"And we can do nothing?"
+
+"Nothing! It's one of those things a man has got to look on at, and wonder
+why the Almighty doesn't interfere? Oh, to have the fellows triced up for
+three dozen of the best apiece--good old-fashioned measure. See, they're
+getting near the laager now. They'll soon be under cover. But--I wonder
+the Convent cares to risk its ewe lamb on that infernal patch of veld?"
+
+"It is my doing." Saxham's eyes were glued on the black figure and the
+white figure nearing, nearing the embrasure in the earthwork redoubt, and
+his face was of an ugly blue-white, and dabbled with sweat.
+
+"Your doing?"
+
+"Mine. I was called in, to find Miss Mildare breaking down from suspense,
+and the overstrain of inaction. And--to avert even worse evils, I
+prescribed the tonic of danger. There was no choice---- In at last!"
+
+The Sister of Mercy and the girl had vanished behind the dumpy earth-bag
+walls. He thought the white figure had glanced back, and waved its hand,
+and then a question from his companion startled him beyond his ordinary
+stolid self-control.
+
+"By the way ... with reference to Miss Mildare, have you any idea whether
+she proposes taking the veil?"
+
+"How should I have ideas upon the possibility?" The opaque, smooth skin of
+the square, pale face was dyed with a sudden rush of dark blood. The
+Colonel did not look at it, but said, as a bullet sang upon a stone near
+his boot, and flattened into a shiny star of lead:
+
+"I would give something to hear you laugh sometimes, Saxham. You're too
+much in earnest, my dear fellow. Burnt Njal himself could hardly have been
+more grim."
+
+Saxham answered:
+
+"That fellow in the Saga, you mean. He laughed only at the end, I think,
+when the great roof-beam burned through and the hall fell in. But my
+castle tumbled about my ears in the beginning, and I laughed then, I
+remember."
+
+"And, take it from me, you will live to laugh again and again," said the
+kindly voice, "at the man who took it for granted that everything was
+over, and did not set to work by dawn of the next day building up the hall
+greater than before. Those old Vikings did, 'and each time the high seat
+was dight more splendidly, and the hangings of the closed beds woven more
+fair.' They never knew when they were beaten, those grand old fellows, and
+so it came about that they never were. By the way, I have something here
+that concerns you."
+
+"Concerns me?"
+
+"I think I may say, nearly concerns you. A paragraph in this copy of the
+_Cape Town Mercury_, which, by the way, is three weeks old."
+
+A rubbed and shabby newspaper, folded small, came out of the baggy
+breast-pocket of the khaki jacket. Saxham received it with visible
+annoyance.
+
+"Some belated notice of one of my books." The scowl with which he surveyed
+the paper testified to a strong desire to pitch it to the winds.
+
+"Not a bit of it. It's an advertisement inserted by a London firm of
+solicitors--Donkin, Donkin, and Judd, Lincoln's Inn. Possibly you are
+acquainted with Donkin, if not with Judd?"
+
+"They are the solicitors for the trustees of my mother's property, sir. I
+heard from them three years ago, when I was at Diamond Town. They returned
+my last letter to her, and told me of her death."
+
+"They state in the usual formula that it will be to your advantage to
+communicate with them. May I, as a friend, urge on you the necessity of
+doing so?"
+
+Saxham's grim mouth shut close. His eyes brooded sullenly.
+
+"I will think it over, sir."
+
+"You haven't much time. A despatch-runner from Koodoosvaal got through the
+enemy's lines last night with some letters and this paper. No, no word of
+the Relief. His verbal news was practically nil. He goes out at midnight
+with some cipher messages. And, if you will let me have your reply to the
+advertisement with the returned paper by eleven at latest, I will see that
+it is sent." The rather peremptory tone softened--became persuasive; "You
+must build up the great hall again, Saxham, and building can't be done
+without money. And--it occurs to me that this may be some question of a
+legacy."
+
+"My father was not a wealthy man," Saxham said. "He gave me a costly
+education, and later advanced four thousand pounds for the purchase of a
+West End practice, upon the understanding that I was to expect no more
+from him, and that the bulk of his property, with the exception of a sum
+left as provision for my mother, should be strictly entailed upon my
+brother and his heirs, if he should marry. The arrangement was most just,
+as I was then in receipt of a considerable income from my profession, and
+my father died before my circumstances altered for the worse.
+Independently of the provision he made for her, my mother possessed a
+small jointure, a freehold estate in South Wales, bringing in, when the
+house is let, about a hundred and fifty pounds a year. That was to have
+been left to me as the younger son. But her trustees informed me, through
+these solicitors, that she had changed her mind, as she had a perfect
+right to do, and bequeathed everything she possessed to my brother's son,
+a child who"--Saxham's voice was deadly cold--"may be about four years
+old."
+
+"A later will may have been found. If I have any influence with you,
+Saxham, I would use it in urging you to reply to the advertisement."
+
+Saxham agreed unwillingly: "Very well."
+
+The other knew the point gained, and adroitly changed the conversation. It
+grew severely technical, bristling with scientific terms, dealing chiefly
+with food-values. The black cloud cleared from Saxham's forehead as he
+lectured on the energy-fuels, and settled the minimum of protein, fat,
+starch, and sugar necessary to keep the furnace of Life burning in the
+human body.
+
+Milk, that precious fluid, could henceforth only be given to invalids and
+children. Margarine and jam were severely relegated to the list of
+luxuries. Sardines, tinned salmon, and American canned goods had entirely
+given out. And flour, the staff of life, was vanishing.
+
+The joy of battle lightened in their faces as they talked, forging
+weapons that should make men enduring, and Saxham warmed. His icy armour
+of habitual silence melted and broke up. He became eloquent, pouring out
+his treasured projects, suggesting substitutes for this, and makeshifts
+for that and the other. He was in his element--he knew the ground he trod.
+He thrust out his grim under-jaw, and hulked with his heavy shoulders as
+he talked to this man who understood; and every supple movement of his
+surgeon's hand pointed out some fresh expedient, as the singing bullets
+went by or whit-whitted about them in the dust, and now and then a shell
+burst over patient Gueldersdorp.
+
+They parted at the Women's Laager, and as the khaki bicycle grew small in
+the distance, Saxham realised with a shock that he was happy, that life
+had suddenly become sweet, and opened out anew before him in a vista, not
+of shining promise, but with one golden gleam of hope in it, to a man
+freed by the force of Will from the bondage of the accursed liquor-thirst.
+Freed! If freed in truth, why should the sight and smell even of Brooker's
+sticky loquat-brandy have set the long-denied palate craving? Saxham put
+that question from him with both hands.
+
+And then he frowned, thinking of that adaptable instrument that had
+thrummed an accompaniment to the arias of the Opera soprano, as to the
+Society drawing-room duets sung with the frisky married ladies who liked
+nice boys, and had made tinkling music for the twinkling small feet, and
+the strident voice of Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity Theatre, and now must
+serenade outside a Convent-close in beleaguered Gueldersdorp, where the
+whitest of maiden lilies bloomed, tall and pure and slender and unharmed,
+in a raging tempest of fire and steel and lead.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI
+
+
+Pray give a thought to the spy, Walt Slabberts, languishing in durance
+vile under the yellow flag. Several times the first-class, up-to-date,
+effective artillery of his countrymen, being brought to bear upon the
+gaol, had caused the captive to bound like the proverbial parched pea, and
+to curse with curses not only loud but fervent the indiscriminating zeal
+of his brother patriots.
+
+He was, though lost to sight behind the walls of what Emigration Jane
+designated the jug, still fondly dear to one whose pliant affections,
+rudely disentangled by the hand of perfidy from the person of That There
+Green, had twined vigorously about the slouching person of the young Boer.
+Letters were received, but not forwarded to suspects enjoying the
+hospitality of the Government, so communication with the object of her
+dreams was painfully impossible. Stratagems were not successful. A
+passionate missive concealed in a plum-pudding--before it was put on to
+boil--had become incorporated with the individuality of a prison official,
+who objected on principle to waste.
+
+On Sundays, when you could go out without your 'art in your mouth an
+account of them 'orful shellses, a fair female form in a large and
+flamboyant hat, whose imitation ostridge tips were now mere bundles of
+quill shavings, and whose flowers were as wilted as the other blossoms of
+her heart, wandered disconsolately round her Walt's place of bondage,
+waving a lily hand on the chance of being seen and recognised. Tactics
+productive of nothing but blown kisses on the part of extra-susceptible
+warders, and one or two troopers of the B.S.A., who ought to have known
+better. These advances Walt's bereaved betrothed rejected with ringing
+sniffs of scorn, yet, of such conflicting elements is the feminine heart
+composed, found them strangely solacing.
+
+She 'ad 'ad 'er month's notice from Sister Tobias upon the morning
+following the night of the tragedy, another score to the account of the
+traitor Keyse. Arriving unseemly late, and in an agitated state of
+mind--and could you wonder, after her young man had been pinched and took
+away?--she had mechanically accounted for her late return in the well-worn
+formula of Kentish Town, explaining to the surprised Sisters that there
+'ad bin a haccident on the Underground between the Edgeware Road and
+'Ammersmiff, an' that her sister Hemmaline had bin took bad in
+consequence, the second being looked for at the month's end; and to leave
+that pore dear in that state--her 'usband being at his Social Club--was
+more than Emigration Jane 'ad 'ad the 'art to do. She received her
+dismissal to bed, and the advice to examine her conscience carefully
+before retiring, with defiance, culminating in an attack of whooping
+hysteria. Nor was she repentant, but defiantly elated by the knowledge
+that nobody had slept in the Convent that night, until she had run down.
+The character supplied by Sister Tobias to her next employer specified
+terminological inexactitude among her failings, combined with lack of
+emotional self-control; but laid stress on an affectionate disposition,
+and a tendency to intermittent attacks of hard work.
+
+She was now, with her new mistress and the kids, pigging--you couldn't
+call it nothink else, not to be truthful you couldn't--at the Women's
+Laager, along of them there dirty Dutch frows. She refrained from too
+candid criticism of her Walt's countrywomen, but it was proper 'ard all
+the same not to call crock and muck by their right names!
+
+Languishing in seclusion, week and week about, cooking scant meals of the
+Commissariat beef, moistened with gravy made from them patent packets of
+Consecrated Soup, can you wonder that her burden of bitterness against W.
+Keyse, author of all her wrongs, instrument most actively potential in the
+jogging of her young man, bulked larger every day? She was not one to 'ave
+the world's 'eel upon 'er without turning like a worm. No Fear, and Chance
+it! Her bosom heaved under the soiled two-and-elevenpenny peek-a-boo
+"blowse" as she registered her vow. That there Keyse--the conduct of the
+faithless Mr. Green appeared almost blonde in complexion beside the sable
+villainy of the other--That There Keyse should Rue the Day!
+
+How to make him?--that was the question. Then came the dazzling flash of
+inspiration--but not until they had met again.
+
+She was circulating hungry-hearted about the brick-built case that held
+her jewel--the man who had held out that vista of a home, and called her
+his good little Boer-wife to be. We know it was a mere bait designed to
+allure and dazzle--the Boer spy had caught many women with it before. Do
+you despise her and those others for the predominance of the primal
+instinct, the sacred passion for the inviolate hearth? Not so much they
+yearned for the man as for the roof-tree, whose roots are twined about the
+heart-strings of the natural woman, the spreading rafter-branches of which
+shelter little downy heads.
+
+She encountered the traitor, I say, and her eyes darted fire beneath a
+bristling palisade of iron curling-pins. She had not the heart in these
+days to free her imprisoned tresses. The villain had the perishing nerve
+to accost her, jauntily touching the smasher hat.
+
+"'Day, Miss! 'Aven't seen you since when I can't think."
+
+She replied with a ringing sniff and a glance of infinite scorn that she
+would trouble him not to think; and that she regarded low, interfering,
+vulgar fellows as the dirt under her feet. So there!
+
+"Cripps!" He was took aback, but not to the extent of taking hisself off,
+which he ought to. "You're fair mad with me, an' no mistyke." His pale
+eyes were unmistakably good-natured; the loss of the yellow freckles,
+swamped in a fine, uniform, brick-dust colour, was an improvement, she
+could not help thinking. "But I only did my duty, Miss, same as another
+chap would 'ave 'ad to. Look 'ere! Come and 'ave a split gingerade."
+
+The delicious beverage was three shillings the bottle. She frowned, but
+hesitated. He persisted; she ended by giving in. Weeks and weeks since she
+had walked with a young man! The Dutchman's saloon was closed and
+barricaded; its owner had made tracks to his Transvaal friends at the
+beginning of the siege. But the aromatic-beer cellar was one of the places
+open. They went in there. Oh! the deliciousness of that first sip of the
+stinging, fizzling beverage! He lifted his glass in the way that she
+remembered, and drank a toast.
+
+"'Er 'ealth! If you knew how I bin wantin' to git word of 'er! She's well,
+isn't she, Miss? Lumme! the Fair Old Knock-out I got when I see the
+Convent standin' empty.... Gone into laager near the railway works now,
+you 'ave, I know. Safe, if not stric'ly luxurious. But--I git the Regular
+Hump when I think of--of a Angel like 'Er 'avin' to live an' eat an' sleep
+in a--a--in a bloomin' rabbit-'ole." He sighed as he wiped the pungent
+froth from his upper lip.
+
+"Pity you can't tell 'er so!" The sarcasm would have its way, but it
+failed of his great simplicity.
+
+"That's why I bin lookin' out for you." He blushed through the brick-dust
+hue as he extracted a fatigued-looking letter from a baggy left
+breast-pocket in which it had sojourned in company with a tobacco-pouch, a
+pipe which must not be smoked in the trenches if a man would prefer to do
+without a bullet through his brain, a handful of screws not innocent of
+lubricating medium, a clasp-knife, a flat tin box of carbolised vaseline,
+a First-Aid bandage, and a ration of bread and cheese wrapped in old
+newspaper. The bread was getting deplorable, for even the dusty seconds
+flour was fast dribbling out.
+
+"You'll give 'er this, won't you, Miss, and tell her I bin thinkin' of 'er
+night and d'y? Fair live in the trenches now; and when I do git strollin'
+round the stad, blimme if I ever see 'er. But she's there--an 'ere's a
+ticker beatin' true to 'er." He rapped a little awkwardly upon the bulging
+left breast-pocket, "To the bloomin' end, wotever it may be!"
+
+"Oh, you--silly, you!"
+
+She found him ridiculous and tragic, and so touching all at once that the
+gibe ended in a sob. It was not the stinging effervescence of the
+gingerade that made her choke and brought the smarting tears to her eyes.
+It was envy of that other girl. And then she noticed, under his left eye,
+a tiny scar, and she knew how he came by it, and remembered what she owed
+him, and saw that the chance had come for her revenge. She could pierce
+the heart beating under the khaki breast-pocket to its very core with
+three words as easily as she had jabbed his face with her hat pin on that
+never-to-be-forgotten night. She would tell him that the lady of his love
+had gone up to Johannesburg weeks and weeks ago. Oh, but it would be sweet
+to see the duped lover's face! She would give him a bit of her mind,
+too--perhaps tear up the letter.
+
+Then flashed across the murky-black night of her stormy mind the
+forked-lightning inspiration of what the real revenge would be. To take
+his letter--write him another back, and yet others, fool him to the top of
+his bent, and presently tell him, tossing at his feet a sheaf of billets.
+"And serve you glad--and no more than your deservings! Who put away my
+Walt?"
+
+She accepted the letter, only permitting herself one scornful sniff, and
+put the missive in her pocket. Next day John Tow, the Chinaman, serenely
+fatalistic, smilingly perpendicular in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping
+bullets, brought to the trench a reply, signed "Fare Air."
+
+The writer Toke the Libberty of Hopeing W. Keyse was as it Left her at
+preasent. She was Mutch obblig for his Dear Leter Witch it 'ad made her
+Hapey to Know a Brave Man fiteing for her Saik.
+
+"Cr'r----!" ejaculated W. Keyse, below his breath. His face was radiant as
+he read. Her spelling was a bit off, it was impossible to deny.
+But--Cripps!--to be called a brave man by the owner of the maddening blue
+eyes, and that great thick golden pigtail. The letter went on:
+
+    "Dear mr. Keyse yu will be Plese to Kno Jane is Sutch a
+    Cumfut to me in Trubel. As it is Selldom Fathful Frends are
+    To be Fownd But Jane is trew as Stele & Cold be Trustid with
+    lbs & lbs. no More at Preasent from yr afexn Swetart.
+
+    "X X X X
+
+    "FARE AIR."
+
+His senses reeled, as under pretence of masking a sneeze he pressed his
+burning lips to those osculatory crosses. He wrote her a flaming answer,
+begging a Sunday rendezvous. She appointed a place and an hour. He went
+there on the wings of love, but nobody turned up except the Jane who could
+be trusted with pounds and pounds.
+
+She hurried to him trembling and quite pale, her blue eyes--he had never
+noticed that they were blue and really pretty--wide with fright under her
+yellow fringe of curls newly released from steely fetters. Her lips were
+apart, but he failed to observe that the teeth they revealed were
+creditably white; her cotton-gloved hand repressed her fluttering heart,
+but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing. He gulped as he said, with a
+fallen jaw and a look of abject misery that pierced her to the quick:
+
+"She--couldn't come, then?"
+
+"No, pore deer!" gasped the comfort in trouble, casting about for
+something to tell him. She had made up her mind as she came along; she
+would have her revenge there and then, and chance it. Something kept her
+from laying the candle-flame to the time-fuse. She did not know what it
+was yet. But, oh! the sharp look of terror in the thin, eager face pierced
+her through and through.
+
+"My Gawd! She's not bin killed?" he cried. "Don't tell me she's bin----"
+
+"Lor', gracious goodness, no! What will you think of next?" She lied,
+rallying him, with jealousy eating at her own poor heart. "Can't git away,
+that's all. Them Sisters are so precious sharp. An'--'Go an' tell 'im,'
+she says, ''e'll 'ave to put up with you this once. An' you'll come back
+an' tell me all about 'im!'"
+
+He swallowed the bait, and her spirits revived. Emigration Jane, if not
+the rose, lived with it. Strictly speaking, they spent a pleasant Sunday,
+though when he found himself forgetting the absent one, he pulled himself
+sharply up. He saw her part of the way home; more she would not allow.
+
+"And--and"--she whispered at their parting, her eyes avoiding his--"if she
+can't git out next Sunday--an' it's a chance whether she does, that Sister
+Tobias being such a watchful old cat--would you like to 'ave me meet you
+an' tell you all about 'er?"
+
+W. Keyse assented, even eagerly, and so it began. Behold the poor deceiver
+drinking perilous joys, and learning to shudder at the thought of
+discovery. Think of her cherishing his letters, those passionate epistles
+addressed to the owner of the golden pigtail.
+
+Think of her pouring out her poor full heart in those wildly-spelt
+missives that found their way to him, and be a little pitiful.
+
+She did not thirst for that revenge now. But, oh! the day would come when
+he would find out and have his, in casting her off, with what contempt and
+loathing of her treachery she wept at night to picture. This feeling, that
+lifted you to Heaven one instant, and cast you down to Hell the next, was
+Love. Passion for the man, not yearning for the hearth-place, and the
+sheltering roof, and the security of marriage.
+
+She left off walking round the gaol--indeed, rather avoided the vicinity
+of the casket that for her had once held a treasure. What would the
+Slabberts think of his little Boer-wife that was to have been? What would
+he say and do when they let him out? She took to losing breath and colour
+at the sound of a heavy step behind her, and would shrink close to the
+martial figure of W. Keyse when any hulking form distantly resembling the
+Boer's loomed up in the distance.
+
+Oh, shame on her, the doubly false! But--but--she had never been so orful
+'appy. Oh, what a queer thing was Love! If only---- But never, never would
+he. She was mistaken.
+
+There came a moment when W. Keyse swerved from the path of single-hearted
+devotion to the unseen but ever-present wearer of the golden pigtail.
+
+As Christmas drew near, and Gueldersdorp, not yet sensible of the
+belly-pinch of famine, sought to relieve its tense muscles and weary
+brains by getting up an entertainment here and there, W. Keyse escorted
+his beloved--by proxy, as usual--to a Sunday smoking-concert, given in a
+cleared-out Army Service Stores shed, lent by Imperial Government to the
+promoters of the entertainment.
+
+Oh, the first delicious sniff of an atmosphere tinged with paint and
+acetylene from the stage-battens and footlights, and so flavoured with
+crowded humanity as to be strongly reminiscent of the lower troop-deck in
+stormy weather, when all the ports are shut and all the hatches are
+battened down! The excess of brilliancy which must not stream from the
+windows had been boarded in, and a tarpaulin was drawn over the skylight,
+in case the gunners of Meisje should be tempted to rouse the monster from
+her Sabbath quiet, and send in a ninety-four-pound shell to break up an
+orgy of godless Englanders. But the stuffiness made it all the snugger.
+You could fancy yourself in the pit of the Theayter of Varieties, 'Oxton,
+or perched up close to the blue starred ceiling-dome of the Pavilion, Mile
+End, on a Saturday night, when every gentleman sits in shirt-sleeves, with
+his arm round the waist of a lady, and the faggots and sausage-rolls and
+stone-gingers are going off like smoke, and the orange-peel rains from the
+upper circle back-benches, and the nut-cracking runs up and down the
+packed rows like the snapping of the breech-bolts in the trenches when the
+fire is hottest....
+
+Ah! that brought one back to Gueldersdorp at once.
+
+
+
+
+Meanwhile, a pale green canvas railway-truck cover, marked in black,
+"Light Goods--Destructible," served as a drop-curtain. Another, upon which
+the interior of an impossible palace had been delineated in a bewildering
+perspective of red and blue and yellow paint-smudges, served as a general
+back-scene for the performance.
+
+The orchestra piano had been wounded by shell-fire, and had a leg in
+splints. Many members of the crowded audience were in strapping and
+bandages. Drink did not flow plentifully, but there was something to wet
+your whistle with, and the tobacco-cloud that hung above the
+trestle-benches, packed with black and yellow faces, as well as brown and
+white, could almost have been cut with a knife.
+
+It was a long, rambling programme, scrawled in huge, black-paint
+characters on a white planed board, hung where everyone could read it.
+There were comic songs and Christy Minstrel choruses by people who had
+developed vocal talent for this occasion only, and a screaming display of
+conjuring tricks by an amateur of legerdemain who had forgotten the art,
+if ever he had mastered it. At every new mistake or blunder, and with each
+fresh change of expression on the entertainer's streaky face, conveying
+the idea of his being under the influence of a bad dream, and hoping to
+wake up in his own quarters by-and-by, to find that he had never really
+undertaken to make a pudding in a hat, and smash a gentleman's watch and
+produce it intact from some unexpected place of concealment, the
+spectators rocked and roared. Then there was a Pantomimic Interlude, with
+a great deal of genuine knockabout, and, the crowning item of the
+entertainment, a comic song and stump-speech, announced to be given by The
+Anonymous Mammoth Comique--an incognito not dimly suspected to conceal the
+identity of the Chief himself, being delayed by the Mammoth's character
+top-hat--a fondly cherished property of the Stiggins brand--and the
+cabbage umbrella that went with it, having been accidentally left behind
+at the Mammoth's hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished by
+the jib-sail collar and shiny burnt-cork complexion of the corner-man, was
+sent to the front to ask if any lady or gentleman in the audience would
+kindly oblige with a ten-minute turn?
+
+"All right, Mister!"
+
+A soiled cotton glove waved, a flowery hat nodded to the appeal from
+behind the acetylene footlights. The faces in the front rows of seats,
+pale and brick-dust, gingerbread and cigar-browned European, African
+countenances with rolling eyes and shining teeth; and here and there the
+impassive, almond-eyed, yellow mask of the Asiatic, slewed round as
+Emigration Jane rose up in the place beside W. Keyse, a little pale, and
+with damp patches in the palms of the washed white cotton gloves, as she
+said: If the gentleman pleased, she could sing--just a little!
+
+No, thank you! She wasn't afryde, not she; they was all friends there. And
+do 'er best she would. She took off the big flowery hat quite calmly,
+giving it to W. Keyse to keep. The panic came on later, when the
+Christy-minstrel-collared, burnt-corked Master of the Revels was gallantly
+helping her up the short side-ladder, and culminated when he retreated,
+and left her there, standing on the platform in the bewildering glare of
+the acetylene footlights, a little, rather slight and flat-chested figure
+of a girl, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, in a washed-out flowery "blowse,"
+and a "voylet" delaine skirt that had lost its pristine beauty, and showed
+faded and shabby in the yellow gas-flare.
+
+Oh! 'owever 'ad she dared? That dazzling sea of faces, with the eyes all
+fixed on her, was terrifying. A big lump grew in her throat, and the
+crowded benches tilted, and the flaming lights leaped to the roof as the
+helpless, timid tears welled into her blue eyes.
+
+And then the miracle happened.
+
+W. Keyse sat on a back-bench, the thin Cockney face a little raised above
+the others, because he had slipped a rolled-up overcoat under him,
+pretending that it was to get it out of the way, you understand. Always
+very sensitive about his shortness, W. Keyse. And she saw his face, as
+plain as you please, and with a look in the pale, eager eyes, that for
+once was for Emigration Jane, her very own self, and not for That There
+Other One. She knew in that moment of revelation that she had always been
+jealous. Oh, wasn't it strynge? Her heart surged out to W. Keyse across
+the gulf of crowded faces. And her eyes had in them, all at once, the look
+that is born of Love.
+
+Ah! who can mistake it? It begets a solitude in a vast thronged assemblage
+for you and for me. It sends its silent, wordless, eloquent message
+thrilling to the heart of the Beloved, and wins its passionate answer
+back. Ah! who can err about the look of Love?
+
+She drew a deep breath that was her longing sigh for him, infinitely dear,
+and never to belong to her, and began her song. She sang it quite simply
+and naturally, in an untutored but sweet and plaintive voice, and with the
+Cockney accent that spoke of home to nearly all that heard. And her eyes
+never moved from his face as she sang.
+
+The song was, I dare say, a foolish, trivial thing. But the air was
+pretty, and the words were simple, and it had a haunting refrain. To this
+effect, that the world is a big place and a hard place, with scant measure
+of joy in it, for you or for me. Bitter herbs grow side by side with the
+flowers in our Earth gardens. Salt tears mingle with our laughter; Night
+comes down in blotting darkness--perhaps in drenching rain,--at the close
+of every short, bright day of sunshine. But Life gone by, its hopes and
+fears and sorrows laid with our once-beating hearts in the good grey dust
+to rest, I shall meet with you again, in the Land where dreams come true.
+
+"The Land Where Dreams Come True." That was the title of the song and its
+refrain, and somehow it caught the listeners by the heart strings, making
+the women sob aloud, and wringing bright sudden drops from the bold eyes
+of rough, strong, hardy men. You are to remember how the people stood:
+that scarcely one was there that had not lost brother or sister, mother or
+husband, child or friend or comrade since the beginning of the siege; and
+thus the touch of Nature made itself felt, and the simple pathos went home
+to the sore quick. They sang the refrain with her, fervently, and when the
+song was done, they sat in touched silence but one moment--and then the
+applause came down. As it fell upon her like a wall, she screamed in
+terror, and ran away behind the scene, and was found by W. Keyse a minute
+later, sobbing hysterically, with her head jammed into an angle of the
+wall of un-plastered brick-work.
+
+None saw. He put his arms manfully about the waistline of the flowery
+blouse.
+
+"Oh, let me go! Oh, what a wicked, wicked girl I've bin! Oh, it's all come
+over me on a sudden, like a flood! Don't touch me--I'm not good enough!
+Oh! how can you, can you?"
+
+She sobbed the words out, and W. Keyse had kissed her. He did not get
+another utterance of her that night. She parted from him in tingling
+silence. His own uneasy sense of faithlessness to One immeasurably
+beloved, to whom he had pledged inviolable and eternal fidelity, nearly
+prompted him to ask her not to up and tell. But he manfully kept silence.
+
+The worst of one kiss of that kind is that it begets the desire for others
+like it. She had turned her mouth to his in that whirling, breathless
+moment, and it was small, and warm, and clung. He tried to shake off the
+remembrance, but it haunted persistently.
+
+He knew he had behaved like a regular beast--a low cur, in fact. To kiss
+one girl and mean it for another was, in the Keysian Code of morals, to be
+guilty of a baseness. The worst of it was that he knew, given the chance,
+he would do the same thing again.
+
+For he could not shake off the memory of the blushing face, wetted with
+streaming tears from the wide bright eyes that pleaded so. They were blue,
+too, and the fringe above them might, by a not too exhausting stretch of
+the imagination, be termed golden. He heard her voice crying to him, "How
+can you, can you?" And he trembled at the thought of the mouth that kissed
+and clung.
+
+He had known bought kisses, of the kind that brand the lips and shame the
+buyer as the seller. Never the kiss of Love, until now.
+
+And now--was any other worth the taking?
+
+"Cr'ripps!" said W. Keyse. "Not much!"
+
+
+
+
+XXXII
+
+
+It was Wednesday again, and Saxham came riding through the embrasure in
+the oblong earthwork, and down the gravelly glacis that led into the
+Women's Laager. An obsequious Hindu, in an unclean shirt and a filthy red
+turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet, and took the
+bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.
+
+It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-river, with spare
+lengths of steel railway-line borne across from bank to bank, covered with
+beams and sheets of corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide chinks to
+let in the much-needed air and light. A line of living-waggons, crowded
+with women and children--English, American, Irish, Dutch, and
+half-caste--ran down the centre of the giant trench. In each of its
+sloping faces a row of dug-out habitations gave accommodation to twice the
+number that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp
+cooking-places had been arranged in military fashion, but the Dutchwomen's
+little coffee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung and chips burned everywhere,
+and possibly they did something towards purifying the air. For, to be
+frank, it vied with the native village in the compound and variegated
+nature of its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is
+perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly,
+frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans
+and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their
+unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic
+measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen,
+the energetic Americans, and the sturdier Africanders, after making what
+headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to
+the lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to strive. A
+few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with the demon of
+Uncleanliness.
+
+But the first April rainfall would turn the dry ditch into an open
+sewer--a vast trough of muddy water--in which draggled women would paddle
+for submerged household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town
+at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But the majority
+stayed, of choice or of necessity, incubating sickness in that fetid place
+where nothing would thrive but fierce social and political hatreds, and
+petty grudges, and rankling jealousies, and shrieking quarrels that burst
+out and raged a hundred times in a day.
+
+From one of the dug-out refuges Saxham now saw Lynette Mildare coming,
+making her swift way between the knots of frowsy refugees, the negro
+women-servants squatting over the little cooking-fires, the pallid
+children swarming on the narrow pathways.
+
+"Dr. Saxham." Her simple brown holland skirt and thin linen blouse hung
+loosely upon her. Her face, too, had grown thinner, and looked tired. But
+the eyes were no longer unnaturally dilated, and the face had a more
+healthful pallor. "Mrs. Greening begged me to look out for you. She is so
+anxious about Berta. We have been doing everything we can, but I am afraid
+the child is seriously ill. It is the third shelter from the end, south
+side." She pointed out the place.
+
+He had lifted his hat with his short, brusque salute. His vivid eyes wore
+a preoccupied look, his mobile nostrils angrily sniffed the villainous
+air.
+
+"I'll come directly, Miss Mildare. But--who can expect children to keep
+healthy under conditions as insanitary as these?"
+
+"It is--horrible!" Disgust was in her face. "But many of the women are as
+ignorant as the Kaffirs and Cape boys, and they and the coolie sweepers
+won't carry away refuse any more unless they're paid."
+
+"You are sure of this?" His tone was curt and official.
+
+"I am almost certain," she told him. "I have heard some of the women
+complaining that the charges grew higher every day. And, when I asked one
+of the boys why he did not do the work properly, he was--rude.... Oh,
+don't punish him!"
+
+He had not said a word, but a white-hot spark had darted from his blue
+eye, and his grim jaws had clamped ominously together.
+
+"It is my duty to put down insubordination, and chastise inefficiency
+where I encounter it. May I ask you to point out the fellow who behaved
+insolently?"
+
+She said: "I--I think he is head of the carting-gang. A Kaffir boy they
+call Jim Gubo."
+
+"That will do, thank you, Miss Mildare. You are not alone here?"
+
+Her glad smile assured him of that. "Oh no, I am with the Mother. I go
+everywhere with her, and I think I am of use. I am not at all afraid of
+sickness, you know, or--the other things."
+
+"But yet," Saxham said, "you must be careful of your health."
+
+"You have no idea how tremendously strong I am," she answered him, and he
+broke into laughter in spite of himself. She looked so tender, so
+delicately frail a creature to be there in that malodorous Gehenna,
+ministering to the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel
+Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say: "I did not thank you the
+other day, after all."
+
+"The Krupp shell came along and changed the subject of the conversation."
+He added: "Were you alarmed? You had rather an escape."
+
+"I was with Mother."
+
+"You love her very dearly?" The words had escaped him unconsciously. They
+were his spoken thought. She flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness
+in her clear girlish tones:
+
+"More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe God Himself will
+be angry with me that I have always seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's
+shining through hers and beyond it; for He knows as no one else can ever
+know what she has been since they brought me to the Convent years and
+years ago."
+
+"They" were her people, presumably. It was odd--Saxham supposed it the
+outcome of that Convent breeding--that she should speak of God as simply,
+to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as
+though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared in the Christian
+faith by a pious Welsh mother, but there had always been a little
+awkwardness about domestic references to the Deity. In times of sadness or
+bereavement He was frequently referred to. But always in a deprecatory
+tone.
+
+"Your family is not Colonial?" he asked.
+
+She shook her lovely red-brown head.
+
+"I--don't know."
+
+"Mildare is an unusual surname."
+
+"You think it pretty?"
+
+He thought her very pretty as she stood there, a slender willowy creature
+with the golden shadow of her rough straw-hat intensifying the clear amber
+of her thoughtful eyes.
+
+"Very."
+
+She looked him in the face and smiled.
+
+"So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it belonged to someone
+she used to know, and her mother was Lynette. So they baptised me Lynette
+Mildare. It seems rather strange not having a name of one's own, but
+really I never had one."
+
+"Never had one?"
+
+Saxham echoed her half-consciously, revelling in the play of light and
+shadow over the delicate face, and the gleaming as of golden dust upon the
+outer edges of the waves of red-brown hair drawn carelessly back over the
+little ears.
+
+"Not to my knowledge. Of course, I may have had one once." She added, as
+he looked at her in suddenly roused surprise, "I must have had one once."
+She was looking beyond him at a broad ray of moted white-hot sunshine that
+slanted through one of the wide openings above, and cleft the thick
+atmosphere of the crowded place like a fiery sword. "I have often wondered
+what it really is, and whether I should like it if I heard it? To exchange
+Lynette Mildare for Eliza Smith ... that would be horrible. Don't you
+think so?"
+
+Saxham smiled. "I think you are joking, and that a young lady who can do
+so under the present circumstances deserves to be commended."
+
+She looked at him full.
+
+"I am not joking." Borne by a waft of the sickly air a downy winged seed
+came floating towards her, a frail gossamer courier coming from the world
+above with tidings that Dame Nature, in spite of all the destruction
+wreaked by men, was carrying on her business. "And--I do not even know
+that I am a young lady. See there"--she blew a little puff of breath at
+the moving messenger, and it wafted away upon a new air-pilgrimage, and,
+rising, caught a stronger current, and soared out of sight--"that is me.
+It came from somewhere, and it is going somewhere. That is all I know
+about myself; perhaps as much as I shall ever know. Why do you look so
+glad?"
+
+His lips were sealed. The throb of selfish triumphant exultation came of
+the belief that the gulf between them was less wide and deep than he had
+thought it. A wastrel may woo and wed a waif, surely, without many
+questions being asked. And then, at the clear, innocent questioning of her
+eyes, rushed in upon him, scalding, the memories he had thrust away. He
+saw the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, his short daily stint of labour done,
+settling down to drink himself into hoggish oblivion in his accustomed
+corner of the Dutchman's liquor-saloon. He beheld him, his purpose
+accomplished, sleeping stertorously, spilled out like the very dregs of
+manhood in the sawdust of that foul place; he shuddered as the bloated,
+dishevelled thing roused and reeled homewards, trickling at the mouth, as
+the clear primrose day peeped over the flat-topped eastern hills. And he
+sickened at the thing he had been.
+
+"I felt glad," he lied, with looks that shunned Lynette's, "that in your
+need you found so good a friend as the Mother-Superior. Yours must have
+been a sorrowful, lonely childhood."
+
+Her own vision rose before her, blotting out his face. She saw the little
+kopje with the grave at its foot. She saw a ragged child sitting there
+watching for the earliest flush of dawn or the solemn folding of night's
+wide wing over the lonely veld, and the coming of the great white
+stars....
+
+"She is much, much more than a friend. She is the Mother." Her loyal heart
+was in her face. "I have no secrets from her. I tell her everything."
+
+Was that deeper flush born of the remembrance of a secret unshared? And
+how strange that every change of colour and expression in the delicate
+face should mean so much, so soon. He said, with a hungry flash of the
+gentian-blue eyes:
+
+"Your love and confidence repay her richly."
+
+"I can do so little." There was an anxious fold between the slender
+eyebrows. "Only follow her and be near her; only look on as she spends
+herself for others, never resting, never sparing, never discouraged or
+cast down." Great tears brimmed the white, darkly-fringed underlids, and
+ran over. "And she only laughs at me at night when I cry at the sight of
+her dear, blistered feet."
+
+"You will be able to laugh with her when this is over," Saxham said rather
+clumsily.
+
+"Shall I? Perhaps." Still that fold between the fine, delicate eyebrows.
+
+"You have seen War," Saxham went on, his own voice sounding strange to
+him. "And that is a terrible experience for a woman, young or old, but you
+will be the richer by it in the end, believe me, Miss Mildare. Richer in
+courage and endurance and calmness in the presence of danger and death,
+and in sympathy with the pain and suffering inevitable under such
+circumstances."
+
+"Sympathy? They had all my sympathy before." Her fair throat swelled
+against its encircling band of moss-green velvet, her voice rang, her eyes
+flashed golden fire under the shadow of the wide straw hat. "Do you think
+it needed War to teach me how hideously women suffer? How they have
+suffered since the world began, and how they will suffer until its end,
+unless they rise up in revolt once for all, against the wickedness of
+men?"
+
+She was transformed under Saxham's eyes. The slender virginal body
+increased in stature and proportions as he gazed, and what obscure
+emotions seemed striving in her face!
+
+"Look at them," she said, indicating with a slight revealing gesture the
+swarming, dowdy, listless occupants of the crowded trench. "How patient
+they are, how resigned to the dreadful life they drag on here from day to
+day, full of the horror and the pain and the suffering that you say is
+inevitable. Why should it be inevitable? Did these women who are the chief
+victims of it and the greatest losers by it, choose that there should be
+War? See that poor soul with the rag of crape upon her hat, who sits at
+her door peeling potatoes. Did she desire it? Yet her young husband was
+shot in the trenches a week ago and her little baby died of fever this
+morning.... And, did those other women whose homes have been wrecked and
+ruined, whose sons and husbands and fathers may be shot, and whose
+children may sicken with the same fever before night, demand of their
+Governments, Imperial or Republican, that there should be War? You see
+them patient and submissive because they neither realise their wrongs or
+understand their rights. But a day will come when they will understand,
+and then"--her eyes grew dreamy--"I do not know exactly what will happen.
+But these international questions, with others, will be decided by a
+general plebiscite, the women will vote as well as the men; and as women
+are in the majority, and every woman will vote for Peace--how can there be
+War?"
+
+"You are an advocate of Universal Suffrage, then? You believe that there
+must be absolute sex-equality before the world can be--I think 'finally
+regenerated' is the stock phrase of the militant apostle of Women's
+Rights? I have heard this outcry from many feminine throats in London, but
+Gueldersdorp," said Saxham drily, "is about the last place one would
+expect to ring with it."
+
+"'Universal Suffrage, Sex-Equality, Women's Rights....'" The shibboleth
+that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"--there
+was a sombre shadow in her glance--"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not
+very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that
+there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and in
+New York, who have devoted their lives to the study of such questions. Who
+write and speak and labour to teach their fellow-women that they have only
+to band themselves together to be powerful, only to be powerful to be
+feared, only to will it to be free. When I am twenty-four I mean to go out
+into the world and meet those leader-women. Some of them, I am told, have
+suffered loss and ill-usage; some of them have even undergone imprisonment
+for the sake of what they believe and teach. Well, I will hear what they
+have to say, and then they will listen to me. For until my work is done,
+theirs will never be accomplished, Something tells me that with a most
+certain voice."
+
+"And until that time comes?" said Saxham.
+
+Her eyes grew bright again, a smile played about her exquisite lips.
+
+"Until that time comes I will study and gather more knowledge, and
+capacity to fit myself for a struggle with the world."
+
+"_You_ 'struggle with the world'!"
+
+Her girlish pride in her high purpose being sensitive, she mistook the
+brusque tenderness in Saxham's face and voice for irony.
+
+"Yes. Perhaps you may not believe it, but I know a great many useful
+things. Latin and French and German and Italian, well enough to teach and
+translate. I am well grounded in History and Science and Mathematics. I
+can take a temperature and make a poultice, or sweep a room and cook a
+dinner." She nodded at Saxham with a little spark of laughter underlying
+the sweet earnestness of her look. "Also, I have learned book-keeping and
+typewriting, and shorthand. I earn enough now, by bookbinding, to pay for
+my clothes. The Mother says that I am competent to earn my living
+anywhere, and to teach others to earn theirs. But I am not to begin until
+I am twenty-four. That is our agreement."
+
+Saxham understood the fine maternal tact that never set this ardent young
+enthusiast chafing at the tightened rein. But he said roughly:
+
+"The Mother.... How can she approve your joining the ranks of the
+Shrieking Sisterhood?"
+
+"She knows," Lynette explained, with adorable gravity, "that I should
+never shriek."
+
+"How will you bear parting from her? And how will she endure parting from
+you?"
+
+The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous amber eyes were
+dimmed with moisture as she said:
+
+"It will not be losing me. Nor could I ever bear to leave her if I did not
+know that I should come back. But I shall come back. And she will ask me
+what I have done. And I shall tell her: 'This, and this, and all the rest,
+my Mother, for the love of you, and for the sake of those others who once
+sat in darkness and the Shadow of Death, and now have found the Way of
+Peace.'"
+
+"And those others, Beatrice?"
+
+Saxham knew now the secret of the haunting familiarity of the beautiful
+girlish face. The delicate oval outline, the pale wild-rose colouring, the
+reddish-brown of the fine, glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the
+wistful, brilliant eyes, reproduced to a wonderful degree the modelling
+and tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped head in the
+Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Bertolotti and the _Edinburgh
+Review_, will always be associated with the name of the sorrowful-sweet
+heroine of the most sombre of sex-tragedies.
+
+"Why do you call me Beatrice?" she asked, with that sudden darkening of
+those luminous eyes. He told her:
+
+"Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Shelley used to be my
+favourite among the English poets, and when I first went to Rome, years
+ago, the first thing I did was to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini
+Palace Gallery; and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done
+justice to it. One could not forget it if one tried."
+
+"I am glad I am like Beatrice," she said slowly. "I have always loved and
+pitied her. I pray to her as my friend among the Blessed Souls in
+Paradise, and she always hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go
+out into the world----"
+
+"To look for those others," Saxham interpolated. "Tell me who they are?"
+
+She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell from her, and
+there was strange and terrible knowledge in her eyes.
+
+"They are women, and girls, and children," she answered him. "They are the
+most unhappy of all the souls that suffer on earth. For they are the
+slaves and the victims and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless,
+dreadful pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift them up,
+and say to them, 'You are free!' And one day I will do it."
+
+There was a dull burning under Saxham's opaque skin, and a drumming in his
+ears. His authority and knowledge fell from him as that virginal veil had
+fallen from her; he stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her
+eyes, that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an avenging
+Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct estimate of himself and his
+fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening
+as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by
+a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and
+pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing
+knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the
+jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than many men, he
+felt himself beside this girl a moral leper.
+
+"Unclean, unclean!"
+
+While that voice yet echoed in the desert places of his soul, he heard her
+saying:
+
+"I don't know why I should talk to you of these plans and projects of
+mine. I never have spoken of them yet to anyone except the Mother.
+But--you spoke of sympathy with those who suffer. I think you have it, Dr.
+Saxham, and that you have suffered yourself. It is in your face. And--you
+are not to suppose that I believe all men to be----"
+
+He ended for her: "To be devouring beasts. No; but we are bad enough, the
+best of us, if the truth must be told. And--I _have_ suffered, Miss
+Mildare, at the hands of men and women, and through the unwritten laws, as
+through the accepted institutions of what is called Society, most
+brutally. I would not soil and scorch your ears with the recital of my
+experiences, for all that a miracle could give me back. I swear to you
+that I would not!"
+
+She touched the little ears with a smile that had pathos in it.
+
+"They have heard much that is evil, these ears of mine."
+
+"And the evil has left them undefiled," said Saxham.
+
+"Thank you!"
+
+She begged him again not to forget the sick child at Mrs. Greening's
+shelter, and hurried away, keeping her face from Saxham. He knew that
+there was no hope for him, that there never would be any. And he loved
+her--hungrily, hopelessly loved her. Dear innocent, wise enthusiast, with
+her impossible scheme for cleansing the Augean stable of this world!
+Chivalrous child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, whose sails are
+whirled by burning blasts from Hell, and whose millstones grind the souls
+of Eve's lost daughters into the dust that makes the devil's daily
+bread--how should the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp dare to love her? But he
+did not cease to, for all the height of his self-knowledge and all the
+depth of his self-scorn.
+
+He seemed to Lynette a strange, harsh man, but there was something in him
+that won her liking. He had a stern mouth, she thought, and sorrowful,
+angry eyes, with that thunder-cloud of black, lowering eyebrow above them.
+And he looked at her as though she reminded him of someone he knew.
+Perhaps he had sisters, though they could hardly be very young. Or it was
+not a sister. He must be quite old--the Mother had thought him certainly
+thirty-five--but possibly he had a young wife in England--or somewhere
+else? And she had spoken to him of her great project. She wondered now at
+that impulse of confidence. Perhaps she had yielded to it to convince
+herself that her enthusiasm was as strong, her purpose still as clear, as
+ever, in the mirror of the Future; that no gay, youthful reflection had
+ever risen up of late days between it and her wistful eyes when she peeped
+in. The remembered image of the handsome face that had laughed, even as
+Beauvayse had declared:
+
+"Even if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long
+for you, and worship you wherever I am."
+
+The thought of Beauvayse's dying was horrible, intolerable. His name came
+after the Mother's in her prayers. He had asked her to keep the
+secret--his and hers--and called her such exquisite, impossible things for
+promising that the mere remembrance of his words and his eyes as he said
+them in that low, passionate, eager voice, took her breath deliciously.
+
+"_Sweetest, kindest, loveliest...._" She whispered them to herself as she
+hurried back to comfort worried Mrs. Greening with the news that the
+doctor was coming.
+
+Meanwhile Saxham went on his accustomed way between the long line of
+waggons and the corrugated-iron lined huts on the other hand, in a
+cross-fire of appeals, requests, complaints. Nothing escaped him. He would
+pass by, with the most casual glance and nod, women who volubly protested
+themselves dying, and single out the face that bore the dull, scorched
+flush of fever or the yellow or livid stamp of rheumatism, or ague, or
+liver-trouble, with a beckon of his hand, and the owner of such a face,
+invariably declaring herself a well woman, would be summarily dealt with,
+and dosed with tabloid or tincture out of the inexhaustible wallet he
+carried, slung about his shoulders by its webbing band.
+
+"Dokter," screeched a portly Tante in a soiled cotton bedgown and flapping
+kappje, appearing, copper stewpan in hand, from between the canvas
+tilt-curtains of a living-waggon. "You are come at last; the Lord be
+thanked for it! I have much, much trouble inside." She groaned, and laid
+her fat, unoccupied hand upon the afflicted area, adding: "I feel I shall
+not be quite wholesome here."
+
+"Wat scheelt er aan, Tante?" He spoke the Taal with ease.
+
+The large Tante snorted:
+
+"What is the matter? Do you ask me what is the matter? As if a dokter
+oughtn't to tell me that! But the Engelsch are regular devils for asking
+questions. Since you must know, I have a mighty wallowing under my
+apron-band, and therewith a pain. How is it begun? It is begun since
+middageten yesterday. And little Dierck here has the belly-ache, and is
+giddy in the head."
+
+"Little Dierck will have something worse than the belly-ache, and you
+also, if you eat of broth or vegetables cooked in a vessel as unclean as
+that, mevrouw."
+
+"Hoe?" The large flabby face under the expansive kappje became red as the
+South African sunset. She flourished the venerable copper stewpan, its rim
+liberally garnished with verdigris, ancient deposit of fatty matters
+accumulated at the bottom. "Do you call my good stewpan, that my mother
+cooked beef and succotash and pottage-herbs in before me, an unclean
+vessel--you? And were the pan otherwise than clean as my hand--as my
+apron!"--a double comparison of the unfortuitous kind--"how should I alter
+matters in a heathen place like this?" Her large bosom rocked
+tumultuously. "Dwelling at the bottom of a mud-hole like a frog, O God of
+my fathers! with bullets as big as pumpkins trundling overhead, ready to
+whip your head off your body if you as much as stick your nose above
+ground--the accursed things!"
+
+"They are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen, Tante, so you ought to
+speak of them more civilly. And--scour the pot with a double-handful of
+clean sand; it will be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here,
+jongen--give me a look at the little tongue." The boy went to him
+confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with innocent wide eyes in the
+square, powerful face, as Saxham swung round his wallet, continuing,
+"Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a
+cup of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting----"
+
+"Alamachtig!" she protested. "Is that the Engelsch way of doctoring? To
+put another belly-grief on the top of the one you have got, what sense is
+in that?"
+
+"It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old one. Give the
+boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water, and remember to scour the pans."
+
+Saxham passed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-booted, spurred feet
+between the dung and chip fires curling up in blue smoke-spirals, and the
+sprawling children, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catching
+up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the eruption was
+innocent ere he passed on, visiting every waggon-dwelling and cave-refuge,
+rating the inhabitants of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging
+from three or four of the stuffy, ill-smelling places with a heavy frown
+that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine had not yet begun to gnaw
+the vitals of those immured in Gueldersdorp, Disease had here and there
+sprung into active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded
+community with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the hospitals were to be
+crowded to the doors, to remain crowded for many months to come; and the
+cry, "Room for the sick! more room!" was to go up unceasingly.
+
+Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic
+fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day,
+and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome
+aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction
+to the mild-faced Sister who had assumed charge of the sick. Then his
+voice rang out above all the feminine and childish Babel, strong,
+resonant, masculine:
+
+"Where are the head-boys of the gangs that I told off to clean up and
+carry ash-buckets to the dumping-place?"
+
+Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste were carted to the
+destructor in connection with the Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to
+be shattered by one of Meisje's shells. There was no answer. Saxham took
+the worn hunting-crop from under his arm, and with an easy movement shook
+out the twisted thong.
+
+"Where are those two boys? Jim Gubo! Rasu!"
+
+A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked up knowingly. "They
+won't carry away a cabbage-leaf unless they're bribed, and they open their
+mouths wider every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."
+
+The young woman went back to her potatoes. The offenders, visibly quaking,
+crept from under a waggon, where they had been gambling with dry mealies
+for ill-gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and the
+crownless brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned, blue
+dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal
+display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and
+the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu
+the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that
+such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and
+his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his
+fellow-countryman being scrupulously performed.
+
+The Presence made short work of Kaffir and Hindu. Shrill feminine clamours
+filled the air as the singing lash performed its work of castigation; and
+while Saxham scored repentance upon the hide of his blacker brother,
+holding him writhing, shouting, and bellowing at the full stretch of one
+muscular arm, as he plied the other he kept a foot on Rasu the Sweeper, so
+as to have him handy when his turn came. Meanwhile, the Oriental, with
+tears and lamentable howlings, wound about the doctor's leg, a vocal worm,
+deprecating tyranny.
+
+"Your Honour is my father and mother. Let the hand of justice refrain from
+excoriating the person of the unfortunate, wreaking double vengeance upon
+the hubshi, who is but fuel for Hell, like all his accursed race, and
+full explanation shall be made."
+
+He was jerked upward by the scruff, as, smarting, blubbering Africa
+retired to the shadow of the waggons.
+
+"Well, what have you got to say?"
+
+The bellow of the town batteries, with the clack--clack--clack! of the
+Hotchkiss that had been removed from the armoured train and mounted on the
+North Fort, reduced the tirade to pantomime.
+
+"This is a bad, a very bad, place for the son of my mother." The lean
+brown right hand swept upwards to the thick canopy of white smoke that the
+shifting breeze rolled back from the Cemetery Earthworks. "The food of
+coarse grain is diet for camels, and the water stinks very greatly.
+Moreover, it is better for thy slave to die amongst defilements than to
+carry buckets and be chased by devils in iron pots thirsting for the blood
+of men. Aie--aie!"
+
+One of the enemy's Maxim-Nordenfelts had loosed off a group of the
+gaily-painted little shells. With the reduplicated rattle of the
+detonation, they passed over the laager, bursting as they went, sending
+their fan-shaped showers of splinters broadcast. Slatternly women and
+scared children bolted for their burrows. Rasu the Sweeper dived
+frantically between the fore and hind wheels of a waggon, praying to all
+the gods of the low-caste to ward off those wicked little bits of rending
+metal....
+
+"Anyone hurt?" called Saxham.
+
+"No one, I think," called back the strong sweet voice of the
+Mother-Superior, who had come out of a hovel, where she was tending some
+sick. There was a glint in her deep eyes as she regarded Saxham's thorough
+handiwork that told her approval of castigation well deserved. Then:
+
+"Maharaj! Oh, Maharaj! Succour in calamity! Aid for the dying! Hai, hai,
+behold how I bleed!"
+
+The red-turbaned martyr rolled in the unclean litter, elevating a
+stick-like brown leg, in the lean, muscular calf of which one of the
+smallest of the wicked little splinters had, as Rasu the Sweeper dived for
+the waggon, found a home.
+
+"That has saved you a well-earned hiding, so thank your stars for it. Let
+the Kaffir see to it that he insults no more English ladies, or he shall
+pay for every word with an inch of skin. Now put up your leg." Saxham
+whipped out the splinter with a little pair of tweezers, deftly cleansed
+and dressed the wound, bandaged it, and, dismissing Rasu the Sweeper with
+a caution, was coming across to the Reverend Mother when a chorus of cries
+and piercing shrieks broke forth:
+
+"Mijn jongen! mijn jongen!"
+
+She was a bulky Dutch vrouw, with a dishevelled head of coarse black hair,
+and a dirty cotton gown, and dirty bare feet in bulgy shoes that were
+trodden down at heel. But with her livid, purple face and protruding,
+bloodshot eyeballs uplifted to the drifting cloud of greenish lyddite
+vapour that thinned away overhead, she was great and terrible, and the
+very incarnation of Maternity Bereft.
+
+One huge arm gripped the little body to her broad, panting bosom. She had
+called him, and he had not answered; she had sought and found him, just as
+he had slidden off the box-seat, where he had been playing driver of the
+ox-span, lying curled up against the dashboard, the little whip of stick
+and string he had been at pains to make only yesterday fallen from the
+lax, childish hand. The fair hair on the left temple was dabbled in blood,
+that trickled from the tiny three-cornered bluish hole. His eyes were
+open, as if in wonder at the sudden darkness that had fallen at bright
+midday; the smile had frozen on the parted, innocent lips....
+
+Oh, look at this, Premier and President! Look at this, my Lords and
+Commons and militant Burghers of Republican States! Grave Ministers who
+decide in Cabinet Councils that the prestige of the Government you
+represent is at stake, and that the bedraggled honour of the Country can
+only be washed clean in one red river, flowing from the veins of Humanity,
+look, look here! You who lust for Sovereignty, hiding rapacious Ambitions
+and base lust for gold behind the splendid ermined folds of the Imperial
+purple. You who resented Suzerainty, coveting to keep in your hands riches
+that you could not use, resources that your ignorance could not develop,
+greedy to have and hold what you wrested from the Sons of Ham, lest white
+men should snatch it back from you again; and prating of Liberty and
+Freedom while the necks of three races of men were bending under the yoke
+of an oligarchy more imperious, more pitiless, more covetous, besotted,
+brutal, and ignorant than any other that the spotted records of History
+can show--look here, look here!
+
+Nations that rush to dreadful War, loosing the direful threefold plague of
+Iron, Fire, and Disease to scourge and brand and desolate the once smiling
+face of your Mother Earth, pause as you roll onwards in desolating
+cataclysms of armed and desperate men, and forgetting the bloodstained
+she-devil you misname Glory, look here, in the Name of One who loved and
+suffered little children, rating their innocent bodies and spotless souls
+at such high value that Little Dierck and his countless
+brother-and-sister-babes that have perished of Iron, Fire, and Disease, as
+of Terror and Famine, Death's twin henchmen, shall weigh in the balance
+against Crowned Heads and Lords and Commons and Presidents and
+Representatives and Deputies, until they kick the beam!
+
+Should there be War? Of course there should be War! you say.
+
+Have you seen War? Perhaps, even as I have. And, having seen it, dare you
+justify the shedding, by men who hold the Christian Faith, of these
+spilled-out oceans of Christian blood?
+
+That question will be settled when the Trumpet of the Great Angel sounds,
+and the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead, and everyone shall
+answer for his deeds before the Throne of God. And until then, look to it
+that if you war in any cause, the cause be a just one.
+
+
+
+
+"My Dierck! My little Dierck! O God! God!----"
+
+Standing with that tragic purple mask turned upwards to the silent sky,
+and the wild eyes blazing, and the great fist at the end of the uplifted
+arm brandished in the Face of Heaven itself, the Boer mother demanded of
+her Maker why this thing had been done?
+
+"He was so good. Never a fib since last I gave him the ox-reim end to
+taste. Never a lump of sugar or a cookie or a plum pilfered--he would take
+them as bold as brass before your face if you didn't give. He said the
+night-prayer regularly. For the morning, Lord, Thou knowest boys want to
+be up and at mischief as soon as they have rubbed the sleep out of their
+eyes--'tis only natural. And the father a God-fearing man, and me a woman
+of piety. For when have I backslidden before Thee? If any of mine have
+hung back when I told them to loop and do a thing, or sneaked off and hid
+when we were inspanned for the kerk-going, did I fail to whack them as a
+mother should? Nooit, nooit! And now--Death has fallen out of the sky upon
+the Benjamin of my bosom. Oh, blasted be the eyesight and withered be the
+hand of the man that sighted and laid and fired the gun!"
+
+She cursed the Kaiser's blue-and-white-uniformed gunner in every function
+of his body and every corner of his soul, waking and sleeping, dying and
+dead, with fluent Scriptural curses. The crowded faces about her went
+white. Some of the women were crying, others shook their heads:
+
+"Thim that puts the Bad Black Wish on odhers finds sorra knock harrd at
+their dure," said an Irish voice oracularly. "An' who but herself did be
+callin' down all manner av' misfortune on ivery wan that crassed her?"
+
+"It's a judgment--my opinion," agreed the thin young woman who had been
+peeling potatoes, and who wore a wisp of draggled crape round a soiled
+rush hat. "Never a shell busted but you'd a-heered her say she hoped that
+one had sent another parcel of verdant rooineks to Hell. And me sitting
+over against her with crape on for my husband and baby. 'Tis a judgment,
+that's what I say."
+
+"Oh, hush, Mrs. Lennan!" said the Mother-Superior. "Be pitiful and forget.
+She did not think--she had not suffered. Be pitiful, now that her hour has
+come!"
+
+The thick voice of the Boer woman broke out again:
+
+"Did ever I miss of the Nachtmaal? Alamachtig, no! Virtuous as Sarah have
+I lain in the marriage-bed--never a sly look for another, and my husband
+with dropsy-legs as thick as boomstammen, and sixty years upon his loins.
+Thou knewest, and yet the joy of my life is taken from me. Where wert
+Thou, O God of Israel, when they killed my little Dierck?"
+
+The Mother-Superior leaned to her, and threw a strong, tender arm about
+the fleshy shoulders. She said, speaking in the Taal:
+
+"Hush, hush! Remember that He gave the joy before He sent the sorrow. And
+we must submit ourselves to the Holy Will."
+
+The Boer woman snorted:
+
+"As if I didn't know that better than a Papist. Look you, have I shed one
+tear?" She blinked hard bright eyes defiantly. The Mother went on in that
+velvet voice of hers, making the uncouth dialect sound like the cooing of
+an Irish dove:
+
+"Better that you had tears, poor mother! Ah! best to weep. Did not our
+Lord weep over His dearest city, and for His beloved friend? And when He
+pitied the Widow of Nain, do you think His eyes were dry? Ah! best to
+weep."
+
+She strove to wrench herself away, shouting:
+
+"He raised Lazarus from the dead for Mary his sister, and she had been a
+shameless wench. And He gave the other back her boy. What has He done for
+me?"
+
+The sisterly arm held her fast; the great grey eyes looked into hers, wet
+with the tears that were denied to her.
+
+"He has given you an Angel to pray for you in Heaven."
+
+She snorted rebelliously:
+
+"His mother wants him down here.... And what is Heaven to little Dierck,
+when he could be sailing his boat in the river-pools, and playing at
+driving the span?"
+
+But she let the Mother-Superior take him from her, and dropped her great
+arms doggedly at her sides, watching still dry-eyed as they laid him down,
+and Saxham stooped above him, feeling at the pulseless heart. She saw the
+doktor shake his head and lay down the little hand. She saw the
+Mother-Superior coax down the eyelids with tender, skilful fingers, and
+put a kiss on each, making the Sign of the Cross on the still, childish
+breast, and murmuring a little prayer. She would have screamed to avert
+the defiling, heathen thing from him, but the memory of the sister-embrace
+and the sister-look held her dumb.
+
+It was only when they were stripping him for the last sad toilet, and the
+cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized marbles rolled out of the
+pocket in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off
+garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her
+grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found
+resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a
+prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that Little Dierck
+should be coffined in his new black Sabbath suit.
+
+"But you old maids have no sense, no more than so many cabbages. Little
+angels in the hemel can fly about in clean nightgowns--look in the
+grandfather's big picture-Bible if you don't believe me. But live boys
+can't loop about without breeches. So I'll lay these by for the next one."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII
+
+
+Roasting hot Christmas has gone by, with its services and celebrations,
+its sports and entertainments, its meagre feasting, and its hearty cheer,
+a bloodless triumph followed by the regrettable defeat sustained in the
+battle of Big Tree Fort. To-day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the
+flagstaff that rears its slender height over Nixey's, and the new year is
+some weeks old. The blue, blue sky of January is without a single puff of
+cloud, and the taint from the trenches is less sickening, unmingled with
+the poisonous fumes of the lyddite bursting-charges, and the acrid odour
+of smokeless powder. It is Sunday, when Briton and Boer hold the Truce of
+God, and the church-bells ring to call and not to warn the people, and
+sweet Peace and blessed Silence brood over the shrapnel-scarred veld. The
+aasvogels feast undisturbed on bloated carcasses of horses and cattle
+lying on the debatable ground between the Line of Investment and the Line
+of Defence, the barbel in the river leap at the flies, and partridge and
+wild guinea-fowl drink in the shallows, and bathe in the dry hot sand
+between the boulder-stones.
+
+The Market Square is populous with a chatting, sauntering crowd of people,
+who enjoy the luxury of using their limbs without being called on to
+displays of acrobatic agility in dodging trundling shell. There are
+Irregulars and B.S.A.P., Baraland Rifles and Town Guardsmen. There are the
+Native Contingent from the stad, and a company of Zulus, and the Kaffirs
+and the Cape Boys with their gaspipe rifles that do good service in
+default of better, and bring down Oom Paul's Scripturally-flavoured
+denunciations upon Englishmen, who arm black and coloured folk to do
+battle for their own sable or brown or yellow rights. These have donned
+odd garments and quaint bits of finery to mark the holiday, and every
+white man has indulged in the luxury of a comprehensive wash, a shave with
+hot water, and a change of clothing, if it is obtainable. Also, drooping
+feminine vanity revives in hair-waves and emerges from underground burrows
+of Troglodytic type, arrayed in fluttering muslins, and crowned with
+coquettish hats, which walk about in company with ragged khaki and
+clay-stained duck and out-at-elbows tweed, and are proud to be seen in its
+brave company.
+
+Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, lovers and
+sweethearts, meet after the week whose separating days have seemed like
+weeks, and visit the houses whose pierced walls and roofs, that let the
+white-hot sunshine in through many jagged holes, may one day, so they
+whisper, holding one another closely, shelter them again in peace. Home
+has become a sweet word, even to those who thought little of home before.
+And many who were sinful have found conviction of sin and the saving grace
+of repentance, and many more who denied their God have learned to know
+Him, in this village town of battered dwellings, whose streets are
+littered with all the grim debris of War.
+
+Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The stately brick
+chimneys of the kitchen and coffee-room have been broken off like carrots,
+and replaced by tin funnels. Patches of the universal medium, corrugated
+iron, indicate where one of Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles
+recently plumped in through the soft brick of the east wall end, and
+departed by the west frontage, leaving two holes that might have
+accommodated a chest of drawers, and carrying a window with it. Mrs.
+Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the
+back-yard. The waiters have developed a grasshopper-like nimbleness,
+otherwise things go on as usual.
+
+It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long, but less bulky, are
+extended in a couple of long bamboo chairs on Nixey's longish front
+verandah. The blue, fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over
+their supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre modicum
+of inferior whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the
+bamboo nests cunningly devised for their accommodation in the chair-arms.
+
+It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and almost too fresh to
+have spent the greater part of the night, the younger upon advanced
+patrol-duty, and the elder at the Staff bombproof in the Southern Lines,
+where messages come in and where messages go out, and where reports are
+received and from whence orders are despatched from sunset to the peep of
+day, and from peep of day to sunset.
+
+The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by active service, but
+their originally white flannel trousers, if patched, discoloured, and
+shrunken by amateur lavations, boast the cut of Bond Street; their shirts,
+if a trifle ragged, are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas
+shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has
+rummaged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the day, with
+a knitted silk necktie of his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match
+is wound about his narrow, springy waist, and knotted to perfection. Both
+men might be basking on an English river-bank after a stiff pull
+up-stream, or resting after a bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for
+the revolver-lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the
+butts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the bandoliers
+and belts that lie handy on a table, and the Lee-Metford carbines that
+lean in an angle made by the house-wall and the verandah end. Also, but
+for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it
+plain that, though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them
+unexpectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things. It is a look
+that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped on every face in
+Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even
+unsentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of
+its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmosphere of this January
+day, may, in an instant's space, give place to the red signal of danger;
+the bugle, now silent, may at any moment blare out its loud and dismal
+note of warning; the bells that call with peaceful insistence, "Come to
+church! come to church!" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging scared
+townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You never know. For General
+Brounckers, though a God-fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday
+gun-practice, quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence,
+even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.
+
+Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by knocking the
+lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing his opinion that the weed
+might be a worse one.
+
+"Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down to me for at
+Kreils' auction yesterday," states Captain Bingo, "it's simply smokin'
+gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-six runs me into, how much apiece?" He yawns
+cavernously, and gives the calculation up. "Always was a duffer at
+figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the act of throwing
+the nearly smoked-out cigar-butt away, he pulls himself up, and,
+economically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.
+
+"Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be no balm left in
+Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking a grey-green eye at him in sleepy
+derision, "and no tobacco in Gueldersdorp."
+
+"Kreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the box of a hundred
+now," says Captain Bingo; "and I've a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em.
+We smoked tea in the Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the
+very devil with the nerves. All jumps and twitches, you know, after a pipe
+or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder
+where my wife is?"
+
+He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. Beauvayse
+responds with the air of one who has suffered boredom from the too
+frequent enumeration of this conjecture. "Not knowing, can't say." And
+there is another silence.
+
+"How she got the maggot into her head," presently resumes Lady Hannah's
+spouse, "I can't think. I did suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora
+Corr--woman who managed to burn her own and a lot of other people's
+fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid business--had
+been quenched for good that mornin' you took those fifty chaps of the
+Irregulars out for what she _would_ call their 'baptism of fire.'"
+
+"That's newspaperese," yawns Beauvayse, his supple brown hands knitted at
+the back of his sleek golden head. "Goes with 'the tented field' and
+_casus belli: cherchez la femme_ and _cui bono_?"
+
+"She's got the lingo at her finger-ends and in her blood, or we wouldn't
+be cherchaying now," says Bingo dolorously. "I asked her if she was
+particularly keen on gettin' killed...."
+
+"Shouldn't have done that. Put her on her mettle not to show funk if she
+felt it," mumbles Beauvayse.
+
+"A man can't always be diplomatic," grumbles Bingo. "Anyhow, she'd seen a
+bit of a scrap at the outset of affairs, when the B.S.A. went out with the
+Armoured Train, and was wild with me for wantin' to deprive her of another
+'glorious experience.' ... And next morning she rides out with a Corporal
+and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible of their responsibility, and
+wishin' her at Cape Town, she in toppin' spirits and as keen as mustard.
+It was about six o'clock, morning, and she hadn't been gone five minutes
+before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein' pounded at like Jimmy
+O! I was on the roof with the Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the
+binoculars, until the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen
+habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under 'em, and hoverin'
+troopers. But I did make out that your party had got into
+difficulties----"
+
+"We opened on 'em at a thousand yards, and pushed to within five hundred,
+and if the fellows in charge of the Hotchkiss could have got her into
+play," Beauvayse interrupts rather huffily, "we'd have been as right as
+rain."
+
+"Possibly. If I hadn't been on special duty that day, and as nervous as a
+cat in a thunderstorm, I'd have volunteered to bring No. 2 Troop of A out
+to the rescue, instead of Heseltine. As it was, I nearly fell off the roof
+when I saw my wife coming, one trooper, as pale with fright as a piece of
+soap, supportin' her on his saddle, another man leading the mare, dead
+lame and the Corporal's hairy. Plugged in the upper works, the Corporal,
+poor beggar! but he'd managed to stick on somehow until they got to the
+Hospital. Have you ever had to deal with a woman in hysterics?"
+
+Beauvayse nods sagely.
+
+"Once or twice."
+
+"Once is an experience that lasts a man all his lifetime. Phew!" Captain
+Bingo mops his large pink face. "Never had such a dressing-down in my
+life."
+
+"But what had you to do with the Corporal getting chipped?"
+
+"The Lord only knows!" says Bingo piously. "But, if you'd heard her, all
+the rest of the day and half through the night!..."
+
+"I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. "Mine's the next bedroom to
+yours, you know."
+
+"'Oh, the blood! Oh, the blood!' ..." Not unsuccessfully does the spouse
+of Lady Hannah attempt to render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping
+screech of hysteria. "'Damn it, my dear!' I said, tryin' to reason with
+her, 'what else did you expect the fellow had got in him? Sawdust?' That
+seemed to rouse her like nothing else.... Turned on me like a tigress, by
+the living Tinker!--called me everything she could lay her tongue to, and
+threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued to outrage
+every feeling of decency that association with such a thundering brute
+hadn't uprooted from her nature."
+
+"Whe--ew!"
+
+Beauvayse's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.
+
+"Of course, her nerves were knocked to smithereens, and a man can overlook
+a lot, under the circumstances. She was a mere jelly when the bombardment
+began----" goes on rueful Captain Bingo.
+
+"--Rather!" confirms Beauvayse.--"Lived in the hotel cellar for the first
+fortnight, only emergin' from among the beer-barrels and wine-casks and
+liqueur-cases after dark----"
+
+"--To blow me up and forgive me, turn and turn about, until daylight did
+appear. Luckily," reflects Bingo, with a rather dreary chuckle, "I had
+plenty of night-duty on just then, and so escaped a lot."
+
+"_That_ gave her her chance to shoot the moon!" hints Beauvayse, in
+accents muffled by his long tumbler.
+
+"By the Living Tinker!" asseverates Captain Bingo, jerked out of his
+reclining attitude by vigorous utterance of the expletive, "you could have
+bowled me over with a scent-squirter when I came back to brekker and found
+her gone, and a cocked-hat note of farewell left for me on the
+dressing-table pincushion, in regular elopement style; and another for the
+Chief, sayin'--he read it to me--that she'd gone to retrieve the Past,
+with a capital 'P,' and hoped to convince him ere long that one of her
+_despised sex_--underlined, 'despised sex'--can be useful to her country."
+
+"'Can be useful to her country,'" repeats Beauvayse "Question is, in what
+way?"
+
+"Damme if I can imagine!" bursts explosively from the deserted husband.
+"All I know up to date, and all _you_ know, is that before it was quite
+light she drove out of our lines in Nixey's spider, his mouse-coloured
+trotter pullin', and her German maid sittin' behind, wavin' a white towel
+tied to the end of a walkin'-stick of mine, and went straight over to the
+enemy. We hear in the course of things from a Kaffir despatch-runner that
+she's stayin' in a hotel of sorts at Tweipans, where Brounckers has had
+his headquarters since he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein. And for
+any further information we may knock our rotten heads against a brick wall
+and twiddle our thumbs. Never you marry, Toby, my boy!"
+
+A V-shaped vein swells and darkens between the handsome grey-green eyes
+and on the broad forehead, white as a girl's where the sun-tan leaves off.
+Beauvayse takes his cigar again from his mouth, and knocks the ash off
+deliberately before he responds:
+
+"Thanks for the advice."
+
+"Be warned," says Captain Bingo sententiously, "by me. Know when you're
+well off, as I didn't. Take the advice of your seniors, as I was too
+pig-headed a fool to do, and don't put it in the power of any woman to
+make you as rottenly wretched as I am at this minute."
+
+"Why! women _can_ make you rottenly wretched," admits Beauvayse, with a
+confirmatory creak of the bamboo chair. "But, on the other hand, they can
+make you awfully happy--what?"
+
+Captain Bingo throws his long legs off their resting-place, and sits
+sideways, staring rather owlishly at his young friend. He shakes his head
+in a dismal way several times, and sucks hard at his cigar as he shakes
+it.
+
+"For a bit, but does it last? When I came down to hunt you up last June at
+the cottage at Cookham----"
+
+"Look here, old man!" The bamboo chair creaks angrily as Beauvayse in his
+turn sits up and drops his own long legs on either side of it, and drives
+the foot-rest back under the table seat with a vicious punch. "Don't
+remind me of the cottage at Cookham, will you? It's one of the things I
+want to forget just now."
+
+"You were as proud as Punch of it last June. Have you let it?" pursues
+Bingo, ignoring his junior's request.
+
+Beauvayse yawns with ostentatious weariness of the subject.
+
+"No; I haven't let it."
+
+"Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised. Somethin' like this: 'To
+let, Roselawn Cottage, Cookham: a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence.
+Small grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat, stables, a
+pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duodecimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by
+Rellis. Ideal nest for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have
+become the real thing if owner hadn't been whisked off in time to South
+Africa.' And a dashed good job for him. For you've had a decentish lot of
+narrow escapes, Toby, my boy!" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo,
+disregarding his junior's forbidding scowl, "and come out of a goodish few
+tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so, more through
+luck than wit; but that little entanglement I'm delicately alludin' to was
+one of the closest things on record in the career of a Prodigal Son."
+
+"Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day." Beauvayse pitches away
+his cigar, knocks a feather of ash from his clean silk shirt, and folds
+his arms resignedly on his broad flat chest.
+
+"Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever strike you," goes on
+Captain Bingo doggedly, "that if that wire from the Chief asking for your
+address hadn't found me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you
+out at the--I won't repeat the name of the place, since you don't seem to
+like it--you'd have been married and done for, old chap--any date you like
+to name between then and the beginning of the war? And, to put things
+mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with your people."
+
+"Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily; "there would have been an awful
+lot of bother with my people."
+
+"Not that I object to the stage myself," Captain Bingo says, waving a
+large, tolerant hand; "and it seems getting to be rather the fashion to
+recruit the female ranks of the Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a
+prettier and cleverer little woman than Lessie ... What are you stoppin'
+your ears for?"
+
+"I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. "It's a--twinge of toothache."
+
+"All I've got to say is," declares Captain Bingo, "that marriage with
+one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes a blank draw, but marriage
+with one's inferior is a howling error. And if you had done as I'd stake
+my best hat you would have done, supposin' you'd been left to loll in the
+lap of the lovely Lessie----"
+
+Beauvayse jumps up in a rage.
+
+"Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on listening to this?
+You're simply maundering, man, and my nerves won't stand it."
+
+"Oh, very well! But you haven't the ghost of a right to lay claim to
+nerves," Captain Bingo obstinately asseverates. "Now look at me."
+
+"I'm hanged if I want to!" declares Beauvayse. "You're not a cheering
+object." He drops back into the bamboo chair again.
+
+"Flyblown, do I look?" inquires Bingo, with dispassionate interest.
+
+"Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without removing his eyes from
+the whitewashed verandah-pillar at which they blankly stare.
+
+"Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy under 'em?" Captain
+Bingo demands of his young friend with unmistakable relish. "'Yes' again?
+And I grouse and maunder? Of course I do, my dear chap! How can I help
+it? A married man who, for all he knows, may be a widower----"
+
+"I wish to God I knew I was one!"
+
+"My good fellow?"
+
+"You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his shoulder.
+
+Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling knees, regards his junior
+with circular eyes staring out of a large, kind, rather foolish face of
+utter consternation.
+
+"That you wished to God you were a widower?"
+
+"Well, I mean it."
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV
+
+
+"Good Lord!"
+
+There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain Bingo says heavily:
+
+"Then you did marry the Lavigne after all? When was it----"
+
+"We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's a fortnight before
+you came down with--_his_ wire."
+
+"By the Living Tinker, then it _was_ a genuine honeymoon after all!" A
+faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's large perturbed face.
+
+"Don't be epigrammatic, Wrynche." The dull weariness in the young voice
+gives place to quick affront. "And keep the secret. Don't give me away."
+
+"Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted me, away? Tell me
+that."
+
+Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with
+a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.
+
+"Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and
+squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some
+display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind
+my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or
+explode."
+
+"I thought--and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em--that South
+Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," says Captain Bingo,
+smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets.
+"Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that
+you'd just stopped short at----"
+
+"At making a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates Beauvayse. "If
+you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind
+me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on
+my head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening?"
+
+"Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to
+the coffee-room window.
+
+Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they
+crack again.
+
+"I--I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago----"
+
+"So were a lot of other young idiots."
+
+"That's a pleasant reflection. They were."
+
+"Of course, I"--Bingo's large face becomes very red--"I inferred nothing
+in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara---- Dash it, I beg your pardon! I
+ought to call her Lady Beauvayse."
+
+"Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would rub things in
+rather too much," says Beauvayse, paling as the other has reddened.
+
+"Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, "to get used to it?"
+
+"No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. "And don't assume a delicacy in
+speaking of the--the lady, because it's unnecessary. As I've said, I was
+very much in love. She had--kept house with a man I knew, before we came
+together, and there may have been other affairs--for all I can tell, at
+least--I should say most probably." Something in Captain Bingo's face
+seems to say "uncommonly probably," though he utters no word. "But she was
+awfully pretty, and I lost my head." He shuts his eyes and leans back, and
+the lines of his young face are strained and wan. "I--I lost my head."
+
+"It's--it's natural enough," volunteers Captain Bingo.
+
+There is another short interval of silence in which the two men on Nixey's
+verandah see the same vision--lime-lights of varying shades and colours
+thrown from different angles across a darkened garden-scene where
+impossible tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled waterfall
+tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus
+of a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a dazzling
+human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering
+antennae, flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that are in
+her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her rounded waist and wrists,
+gleam like fireflies from the folds of her diaphanous skirts, and sparkle
+on her fingers. A provoking, beguiling Impertinence with great stage eyes
+encircled by blue rims, a small mouth painted ruby-red, a complexion of
+theatrical lilies and roses, and tiny, twinkling feet that beat out a
+measure to which Beauvayse's pulses have throbbed madly and now throb no
+more.
+
+"It began in the usual way," he goes on, waking from that stage day-dream,
+"with suppers and stacks of flowers, and a muff-chain of turquoise and
+brilliants, and ended up with----"
+
+"With an electric motor-brougham and a flat in Mayfair. Oh Lord, what
+thunderin' donkeys we fellows are!" groans Captain Bingo, rubbing his
+head, which has hair of a gingery hue, close-cropped until the scalp
+blushes pinkly through it, and rubbing nothing in the way of consolation
+into the brain inside it.
+
+"I bought the cottage at Cookham as a surprise for her birthday," goes on
+the boy. "She's a year or two older than me----"
+
+"And the rest," blurts out Captain Bingo. But he drowns the end of the
+sentence in a giant sneeze. "Must have caught cold last night without
+knowin' it. Dashed treacherous climate this," he murmurs behind the refuge
+of a pocket-handkerchief. "And so you bought the cottage for Lessie?
+Another nibble out of the golden cheese that the old man's nursing up for
+you,--what? And in thingumbob retirement by the something-or-other stream
+you hit on the notion of splicing the lovely Lessie Lavigne. Poetry, by
+the Living Tinker!"
+
+"Do you want to hear how I came to cut my own throat?" snarls the boy,
+with white, haggard anger alternating with red misery and shame in his
+young, handsome face; "because if you do, leave off playing the funny
+clown and listen."
+
+"Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. 'Pon my word, I assure
+you!" asseverates Bingo. "You're simply a bundle of irritable nerves, my
+dear chap, and that's the truth."
+
+"You wouldn't wonder if you knew ... Oh, damn it, Wrynche!"--the young
+voice breaks in a miserable sob--"I'm so thundering miserable. And all
+because there--there was a kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its
+mother."
+
+"Whew!" Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to a long, piercing, dismal
+whistle, which so upsets a gaunt mongrel prowling vainly for garbage in
+the gutters of Market Square that he puts up his nose and howls in answer.
+"Was that how you fell into the----" He is obviously going to say "trap,"
+but with exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state." And wonders at the
+thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when confounded
+newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.
+
+"That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward Tobart,'" explains
+Beauvayse; "and because the Registrar--a benevolent old cock in a large
+white waistcoat, like somebody's father in a farcical comedy--wasn't
+sufficiently up in the Peerage to be impressed."
+
+"Weren't there witnesses of sorts?" hints Bingo.
+
+"Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my man Saunders--the
+discreet Saunders who's with me here. And a fortnight later came the
+appointment," goes on the boy. "And--I was gladder than I cared to know at
+getting away. She--Lessie--meant to play her part in the 'Chiffon Girl' up
+to the end of the Summer Season, and then rest until ..." He does not
+finish the sentence.
+
+"I suppose she's fond of you--what?" hazards Captain Bingo.
+
+"She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully cut up at my going,
+and I provided for her thoroughly well, of course, though she has heaps of
+money of her own. And when I went to stay with my people for a night
+before sailing, I'd have broken the--the truth to my mother then, only
+something in her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge,
+the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a
+snowball. But on the voyage out"--a change comes into the weary, level
+voice in which Beauvayse has told his story--"I forgot to grouse, and by
+the time we'd lifted the Southern Cross I wasn't so much regretting what
+I'd done as wondering whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done
+it? Up in Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne air, and the rousing
+hard work, the keen excitement and the tingling expectation of things that
+were going to happen by-and-by, that have been happening about as since
+October, were like pleasant drugs that keep you from thinking. I only
+remembered now and then, when I saw Lessie's photograph hanging on the
+wall of my quarters, and the portrait she had set in the back of my
+sovereign-case, that she and me were husband and wife." He gives a
+mirthless laugh. "It makes so little impression on a fellow's mind
+somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with a woman and answer a
+question or two put by a fat, middle-aged duffer who's smiling himself
+into creases, and give your name and say, 'No, there's no impediment,' and
+put on the ring and pay a fee--I believe it was seven-and-six--and take a
+blotchy certificate and walk out--married."
+
+"It never does take long, by Gad!" agrees Captain Bingo with fervour, "to
+do any of the things that can't be undone again."
+
+"Undone ...!" Beauvayse sits up suddenly and turns his miserable,
+beautiful, defiant eyes full on the large, perturbed face of his listener.
+"Wrynche, Wrynche! I've felt I'd gladly give my soul to be able to undo
+it, ever since I first set eyes on Lynette Mildare!"
+
+Captain Bingo gives vent to another of his loud, dismal whistles. Then he
+gets out of his chair, large, clumsy, irate, and begins:
+
+"I might have known it, with a chap like you. Another woman's at the
+bottom of all your bellowing. You're not a bit sick at having brought an
+outsider--a rank outsider, by Gad!--into the family stud; you're not a rap
+ashamed at havin' disappointed the old man's hopes of you, for you know as
+well as I do that when you'd done sowin' your wild oats and had your
+fling, you'd have come in when he rang the bell and married Lady Mary
+Menzies. You're not a damned scrap sorry at having broken your mother's
+heart, though you know in the bottom of your soul that she scented this
+marriage in the wind, and had an interview with the Chief, and went down
+on her knees to him--her knees, by the Living Tinker!--to give you the
+chance of breakin' off an undesirable connection!"
+
+Beauvayse is out of his chair now. "Is that true--about my mother?" he
+demands, blazing.
+
+"I'm not in the habit of lyin', Lord Beauvayse!" states Captain Bingo
+huffily.
+
+"Don't fly off like a lunatic, Bingo, old man. How did you
+find--that--out?"
+
+"Your cousin Townham told me."
+
+"Damn my cousin Townham for a dried-up, wiggy, pratin' little
+scandalmonger!"
+
+Captain Bingo retorts irately:
+
+"Damn him if you please; he's no friend of mine. As yours, what I ask you
+is, between man and man, how far have you gone in this fresh affair?"
+
+Beauvayse drives his hands deep into the pockets of his patched flannels,
+and says, adjusting a footstool with his toe over a crack in the
+board-flooring, as though the operation were a delicate one upon which
+much depended:
+
+"I've told her how I feel where she's concerned, and that I care for her
+as I never cared yet, and never shall care, for anyone else."
+
+The faint grin dawns again on Captain Wrynche's large, kindly, worried
+face.
+
+"How many times have you met?"
+
+"Only four or five times in all," says Beauvayse. "I'd set eyes on her
+twice before I was introduced. I couldn't rest for thinking about her. She
+drew me and drew me.... And when we did meet, there was no strangeness
+between us, even from the first minute. She just seemed waiting for what I
+had to own up. And when I spoke, I--I seemed to be only saying what I was
+meant to say.... From the beginning of the world! And you'd understand
+better if you'd seen her near----"
+
+"I have seen her in the distance, walking with the Mother-Superior of the
+Convent. A tall, slight girl. Looks like a lady," says Bingo, "and has
+jolly hair."
+
+"It's the colour of dead leaves in autumn sunshine or a squirrel's back,"
+raves the boy, "and she's beautiful, Wrynche. My God! so beautiful that
+your heart stops beating when you look into her face, and nearly jumps out
+of your body when a fold of her gown brushes against you. And I swear
+there's no other woman for me in life or death!"
+
+"I shouldn't be in such a cast-iron hurry to swear if I were you," Captain
+Bingo replies judicially. "And--I've heard you say the same about the
+others----"
+
+"It was never true before. And she's a lady," pleads Beauvayse hotly. "A
+lady in manners, and education, and everything. The sort of girl one
+respects; the sort of girl one can talk to about one's mother and
+sisters----"
+
+"You'd talk about your mother to a Kaffir washerwoman," Captain Bingo
+blurts out. "Better you should, than go hanging about a Convent-bred
+schoolgirl and telling her you'll never care for anybody else, when you've
+got a legal wife, and, for all you know, a family of twins at home in
+England."
+
+The footstool, impelled by a scientific lift of Beauvayse's toe, flies to
+the other end of Nixey's verandah. "Is one mistake to ruin a man's life?
+I'll get a divorce from my wife. I will, by Heaven!"
+
+"You told me not to maunder just now," says Bingo, with ponderous sarcasm.
+"Who is the maunderer, I'd like to know? By the Living Tinker, I should
+have thought that this siege life would have put iron into a man's blood
+instead of--of Creme de Menthe. Are you takin' those dashed morphia
+tabloids of Taggart's for bad-water collywobbles again? Yes? I thought as
+much. Chuck 'em to the aasvogels; stick to your work--you can't complain
+of its lackin' interest or variety--and let this girl alone. She's a lady,
+and the adopted daughter of an old friend of my wife's, and don't you
+forget it!" Bingo's gills are red, and he puffs and blows as large,
+excited, fleshy men are wont to. "If you do you'll answer to me!"
+
+"I tell you," Beauvayse cries, white-hot with passion, and raising his
+voice incautiously, "that I mean to marry her. I tell you again that I
+will div----"
+
+"Do you want the man in the street and every soul in the hotel to know
+your private affairs?" demands Bingo. "If so, go on shoutin'. As to your
+bein' a widower, the chances are on the other side.... Gueldersdorp ain't
+exactly what you would call a healthy place just now. And as to divorcin'
+your wife, how do you know she'll ever be accommodatin' enough to give you
+reason? And if she did, do you think a girl brought up in a Catholic
+Convent would marry you, even if you called to ask her with a copy of the
+decree absolute pasted on your chest? Hang it, man, your mother's son you
+ought to know better! And--oh come, I say!"
+
+For Beauvayse sits down astride an iron chair, and lays his shirt-sleeved
+arms on the back-rail, and his golden, crisply-waved head upon them.
+
+"I--I love her so, Wrynche. And to stand by and see another man cut in and
+win what I've lost by my own rotten folly hurts so--so damnably." His
+mouth is twisted with pain.
+
+"Is there another chap who wants to cut in?" Bingo demands.
+
+"You know one gets a bit clairvoyant when one is mad about a woman," says
+Beauvayse, lifting his shamed wet eyes and haggard young face from the
+pillow of his folded arms. "Well, I'm dead certain that there is another
+man who--who is as badly hit as me."
+
+"Who is the other man?"
+
+"Saxham!"
+
+"The Doctor! Shouldn't have supposed a fellow of that type would be
+susceptible now," says Bingo. "Gives an uncompromisin' kind of impression,
+with his chin like the bows of an Armoured Destroyer, and his eyebrows
+like another chap's moustaches."
+
+"And eyes like a pair of his own lancets underneath 'em. But he's a
+frightfully clever beast," says Beauvayse. "And what he wants in looks he
+makes up in brains. And--and if he knew there was a scratch against me, he
+might force the running and win hands down. So hang on to my secret by
+your eyelids, old fellow, and don't give me reason to be sorry I told----"
+
+"You have my word, haven't you? And, talking about scratch entries," says
+Bingo, inspired by a sudden rush of recollection, "I ain't so sure that
+the Doctor--though, mind you, this is between ourselves--is the sort of
+wooer a parent of strict notions would be likely to encourage. Do you
+happen to have come across a goggle-eyed, potty little Alderman
+Brooker?--a Town Guardsman who runs a general store in the Market
+Place--that's his place of business with the boarding up, and the end
+butted in by a Creusot shell that didn't burst, luckily for Brooker. Well,
+this beast buttonholed me months ago, and began to spin a cuffer about
+Saxham."
+
+"What had the dirty little bounder got to say?" asked Beauvayse,
+stiffening in disgust, "about a man he isn't fit to black the boots of?"
+
+"Nothing special nice. Said Saxham had lost his London connection through
+getting involved in a mess with a woman," says the big Dragoon.
+
+"Don't we all get into messes of that kind? What more?" demands Beauvayse.
+
+"Said the Doctor had kicked over the traces pretty badly here. Pitched me
+a tale of his--Brooker's--having often acted as the Mayor's Deputy on the
+Police Court Bench, Brooker being an Alderman, and swore that he'd had
+Saxham up before him a dozen times at least in the last three years, along
+with the Drunks and Disorderlies."
+
+"It sounds like a hanged lie!"
+
+"If I didn't say as much to Brooker," responds Captain Bingo, "I shut him
+up like a box by referrin' politely to glass houses, knowin' Brooker had
+been squiffy himself one night on guard, and by remindin' him that men who
+talk scandal of their superior officers under circumstances like the
+present are liable to be Court-Martialled and given beans. And as the
+Chief, and Saxham with him, dropped on Brooker in the act of smuggling
+lush into the trenches the other day, I fancy Brooker's teeth are fairly
+drawn. Though he swore to me that there isn't a saloon-keeper or a
+saloon-loafer in the town that doesn't know Saxham by the nickname of the
+Dop Doctor."
+
+"The man don't exist who objects to hear of the disqualifications, mental
+and physical, of a fellow who he's thought likely to enter the lists with
+him in the--in the dispute for a woman's favour," says Beauvayse, with a
+pleasant air of candour. "And though the story sounds like a lie, as I've
+said, there's a possibility of its being the other thing. I'm sorry for
+Saxham--that goes without sayin'--though I don't like his overbearin'
+scientific side and his sledge-hammer manner. But that a man with a record
+of that kind should set his heart upon a girl like Lynette Mildare is
+horrible, intolerable, Wrynche; and while, for the man's own sake, I
+should respect his beastly secret, for _her_ sake and in _her_ interests,
+and if I consider that he's putting himself forward at the risk of my--my
+prospects and my hopes, I shall make use of what I know."
+
+"You don't mean you'd split on the man!" splutters Bingo; "because, if you
+do----"
+
+"All's fair in Love and War," says Beauvayse, with a ring of defiance in
+his pleasant, boyish voice, and a gleam of triumph in his beautiful sleepy
+eyes. "And this is Love in War. You've put a trump card in my hand against
+Saxham, whether you meant to or not, and when the time comes, I shall play
+it."
+
+He gets up and lounges away. And Captain Bingo, emitting another wailing
+whistle as he slews round to stare after the tall, retreating figure with
+the crisp, golden head, is sure of nothing so certainly as that Beauvayse
+will play that trump card. He is repentant for having broached the
+Doctor's secret as he climbs up by the narrow iron stair that leads out
+upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, to relieve his commanding officer at the
+binoculars.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV
+
+
+You are invited, the very Sunday upon which the previously-recorded
+conversation took place, to make the acquaintance of the sprightly P.
+Blinders, Acting-Secretary to Commandant Selig Brounckers, Head Laager,
+Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State's United Forces, Tweipans.
+
+P. Blinders, a long-bodied, short-legged young Dutch apothecary of the
+Free State, with short-sighted eyes behind hugely magnifying spectacles,
+and many fiery pimples bursting through the earthy crust of him, possibly
+testifying to the presence of volcanic fires beneath, had acted in the
+clerkly capacity to the Volksraad at Groenfontein. When Government did not
+sit at the Raad Zaal, Blinders, as calmly as any ordinary being might
+have done, dispensed jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the counter of
+his store. These are the three heroic besoms employed by enlightened and
+conscientious Boer housewives for sweeping out the interiors of their
+families.
+
+Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete. The thrifty mother buys a foot
+or so, and pinches off a bolus of the required magnitude thrice in the
+year. No dosing is allowed in between; the members of the family get it
+when the proper time comes round. To everyone his or her share, not
+forgetting the baby.
+
+When P. Blinders came away, he left his grandfather to keep store,
+previously explaining to the aged man the difference between hydrocyanic
+acid and almond-essence for cake-flavouring, powders of corrosive
+sublimate and Gregory's. By a subtle transition the apothecary-clerk then
+became the epistolary right-hand of General Brounckers, whose wife, son,
+and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the
+Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and
+Confusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues--English severely
+excepted--made Babel. And, side by side with the domestic, decent virtues
+weltered all the vices rampant in the Cities of The Plain.
+
+It goes without saying that the fresh site of Head Laager had been
+cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped plateau among low,
+flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans bounded it upon the east,
+and a rocky ridge upon the western side that might have been the vertebra
+of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected camp and village
+from British shell-practice.
+
+Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered timbers and
+fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and guns dismounted from their
+carriages, were to be seen, near the dismembered or disembowelled bodies
+of the beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock,
+decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican
+noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the
+rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of
+egg spilt upon a war-map.
+
+Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches where each
+fighting unit had his separate box of provisions sunk in the earth beside
+him, and his cooking-fire of chips and dry dung, and ate and slept and
+smoked and shot as he thought good. And in despite of such fires, the
+unrestricted space and pure hill-air notwithstanding, the noisome ditches
+wherein the cribbed, cabined, and confined defenders of Gueldersdorp
+alternately grilled and soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, marvels of
+sanitary purity compared with the works of the besiegers, and the
+abominable camps, where, in the absence of a nocturnally active
+Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers, stench took you by the
+throat and nose, while filth absorbed you over the ankles.
+
+A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you, made you turn
+away, and then the immense disorder of the camp seized and held your eyes.
+
+Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of provisions and
+boxes of ammunition, were piled about in mountainous heaps. Of military
+organisation, discipline, authority, law, as these are understood by
+civilised nations, there was nothing whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens
+and felt billycocks, hobnobbed with men in the gaudiest uniforms ever
+evolved by the theatrical costumier. Green velvet and gold lace, topped by
+cocked hats that had despoiled the ostrich to make a human biped vainly
+ridiculous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had no rigiments belongun'
+to 'um at all at all! and had come over from the Distressful Country to
+make a bould bid for glory, with the experience of warfare acquired while
+lurking behind hedges with shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour
+with the Land League.
+
+Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of sixteen fought side by
+side with the fine flower and the lusty prime of Boer manhood, and many
+had their wives and children with them under the Transvaal colours, and
+not a few had brought their mothers. When an officer had any order to give
+his men, he prefaced it with the Boer equivalent for "Hi!" When the men
+had heard as much as they considered necessary, they would say, "Come on;
+let's be going," and slouch away.
+
+P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded smells no more
+than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes occurred to him as odd that the
+duties of a Secretary should embrace the peeling of potatoes and the
+performance of other duties of the domestic kind.
+
+He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's living-waggon,
+polishing off the last of a panful, when Van Busch came along. English
+being an unpopular language, the big Johannesburger and the little Free
+Stater exchanged greetings in the Taal.
+
+"Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk a piece with me,"
+said Van Busch. "I have something to say to you about my sister that
+married the German drummer, and is stopping at Kink's Hotel."
+
+You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat, and knocking the
+sweat from the leather lining-band. He was dressed in a black broadcloth
+tailed-coat, flannel shirt, and cord breeches, wore heavy veldschoens, and
+carried a Mauser rifle, as did everybody else, and had a long
+hunting-knife as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas
+pouch-belt, and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus panoplied, he
+accurately resembled ten thousand other men.
+
+But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was not that of an
+agriculturist, and the strange light eyes, rust-coloured like those of an
+adder, and, like the ophidian's, set flush with the oddly-flattened edges
+of their orbits, were at variance with the high, rounded, benevolent
+temples crowned with a thinning brake of curly hair. The rapacious mouth,
+with the thick scarlet lips, belonged to the eyes.
+
+He had put on his hat again, but he swept it off in a flourishing bow, as
+Mevrouw Brounckers, in high-kilted wincey, a man's hat of coarse straw
+perched on her weather-beaten, sandy-grey head, came stumping down the
+waggon-ladder, calling for her potatoes. What was that lazy bedelaar of a
+Secretary about, and it nearly eleven of the clock? Didn't he know that
+her Commandant liked his meals on time?
+
+Mevrouw received the politeness less graciously than the potatoes. That
+man with the eyes and the greedy red mouth was a woman-eater, she knew.
+Not for sheep and bear would she, grandmother as she was, trust herself
+in house barn alone with a klant like that. But her Commandant had uses
+for him, the twinkling-eyed, soft-mannered, big rogue. She watched him
+walking off with P. Blinders, for whom she entertained a distaste grounded
+on the knowledge that no good ever came of these double-tongued Free
+Staters.
+
+And this one could _write_ in the accursed shibboleth of England as well
+as in the Taal. She shook her head as the potatoes rattled into the big
+pot hanging over the fire. And he walked out on Sundays with the young
+German woman who was maid to the refugee-widow staying at Kink's Hotel,
+and who never showed her nose inside the Gerevormed Kerk, the godless
+thing! or went out except by bat-light. Of that one the Mevrouw Brounckers
+had her opinion also. And time would show who was right.
+
+Meanwhile, Van Busch and P. Blinders, who had left the dorp behind them,
+and strolled up the almost dry bed of a sluit leading up amongst the
+hills, conversed, in Sabbath security from English artillery, and
+reassuring remoteness from Dutch eavesdroppers. And their theme was the
+German drummer's refugee-widow who never went to kerk.
+
+Van Busch, who found it helpful in his business never to forget faces, had
+met her on the rail, months back, travelling up first-class from Cape
+Town. Early in October it was, while the road was still open. And men who
+kept their eyes skinned went backwards and forwards and round and about,
+getting the hang of things, and laying up accurate mental notes, because
+the other kind were even more risky to carry than the nuggets and raw dust
+that are hidden in the padded linings of the gold-smugglers' heavy
+garments.
+
+The lady, small, dark, stylishly-tailored, and with bright black,
+bird-like eyes, was not a German drummer's widow when Van Busch and she
+first met. She had chatted in her native English with her square, bulky,
+sleek-looking fellow-passenger, well-dressed in grey linen drill
+frock-coat and trousers, with blazing diamonds studding the bosom of his
+well-starched shirt and linking his cuffs.
+
+The wide felt hat he politely removed as he came into the carriage
+revealed to Lady Hannah a tall, expansive, well-developed forehead. Below
+the line of the hat-rim he was burned coffee-brown, like many another
+British Colonial. The observant eye of "Gold Pen" took in the man's
+vulgarly handsome features and curiously light eyes, and twinkled at the
+flaring jewellery and the whiskers of obsolete Dundreary pattern that
+stood out on either side the jewelled one's full, smooth chin. His large,
+bold, over-red mouth, with the curling outward flange to it, gave her a
+disagreeable impression. One would have been grateful for a beard that hid
+that mouth.
+
+Lady Hannah found it curiously disquieting until her fellow-traveller
+began to talk, in a thick, lisping voice, with curiously candid and simple
+intonations. He presented himself, and she accepted him at his own
+valuation, as a British Johannesburger, and influential member of the
+Chamber of Mines, possessing vast interests among the tall chimneys and
+white dumping-heaps of the Rand.
+
+Van Busch called his efforts to be ingratiating "sucking up to" the lady.
+He sucked up, thinking at first she might be the wife of the English field
+officer who had been ordered down from the north to take over the
+Gueldersdorp command. Then he found she was only the grey mare of an
+officer of the Staff....
+
+She plied Van Busch in his triple character of politician, patriot, and
+mine-owner with questions. Thought she was juicing a lot of information,
+whereas Van Busch was the one who learned things. Kind of playing at being
+newspaper-woman she was, and taking notes for London newspaper articles
+all the time. Had laid out to be a little tin imitation of Dora Corr, or,
+say, nickel-plated, with cast chasings. Was burning for an opening in the
+diplomatic go-betweening line; wanted to dabble in War Correspondence, and
+so on. But Van Busch gathered that the biggest egg in the little lady's
+nest of ambitions was the desire to do a flutter on the Secret Service
+lay.
+
+She wanted to be what he termed a "slew," and she would have called a spy.
+He fiddled to her dancing, and wearied before she did.
+
+"What Woman has done Woman may do!" was the burden of her ceaseless song.
+And when she left the train at Gueldersdorp, "_Au revoir_" said she with a
+flash of her bright black eyes, nodding to the big Colonial, who was so
+excessively civil about handing out her dressing-case and travelling-bag.
+"Many thanks, and don't give me away if you should happen to meet me in a
+different skin one of these fine days, Mr. Van Busch."
+
+"Sure, no; not I," said the burly Johannesburger, with an effusion of what
+looked like genuine admiration. "By thunder! when it comes to playing the
+risky game there's no daring to beat a woman's. Give me a petticoat, say
+I, for a partner every time."
+
+"Bravo!" Her eyes snapped approvingly. She waved a little hand towards a
+large pink officer of the British Imperial Staff, who was looking into all
+the first-class compartments in search of a wife who had been vainly
+entreated to remain at Cape Town. "There's my husband, who entertains the
+precisely opposite opinion. But he hasn't your experience--only a theory
+worn thin by generations of ancestors, all chivalrous Conservative
+noodles, who kept their females in figurative cotton-wool. Do let me
+introduce you. I'd simply love to have him hear you talk."
+
+Van Busch did not pant to make the acquaintance of the Military
+Authorities. He thanked the impulsive Lady Hannah, but made haste to climb
+back into the train. The big pink officer recognised the object of his
+search, and strode down the platform bellowing a welcome. As Lady Hannah
+waved in reply, the Johannesburger made a long arm from the window, and
+thrust a pencil-scrawled card into the tiny gloved hand.
+
+"S's'h! Shove that away somewhere safe," said Van Busch, in a thrillingly
+mysterious whisper; "and, remember, any time you want to learn the lay of
+the land and follow up the spoor of movements on the quiet, that Van
+Busch, of the British South African Secret War-Intelligence-Bureau, is the
+man to put you on. A line to that address, care of W. Bough, will always
+get me. And with nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for
+palm-oil...." His greedy mouth made a grinning red gash in the smug brown
+face with the fine whiskers of blackish-brown. His cold eyes scintillated
+and twinkled unspeakable things at the little lady as the train carried
+him away.
+
+Assuredly Van Busch understood women no less thoroughly than his near
+relative, Bough. He knew that you could bait for and catch the sex with
+things that were not tangible. Men wanted to be made sure of money or
+money's worth. And for the co-operation of P. Blinders in the adroit
+little game by which the German drummer's refugee-widow who stayed at
+Kink's Hotel, and only went out after dark, had been relieved of a
+handsome sum, Van Busch had had to part with nearly one-third of the swag.
+No wonder he felt and talked like a robbed man.
+
+"All very well to talk," said P. Blinders, scratching his newest pimple,
+and looking with exaggerated moonish simplicity at nobody in particular
+through his large round magnifying spectacles. "But what could you have
+done without me, once the little Englishwoman smelled the porcupine in the
+barrel? When she drove out to your friend Bough's plaats at Haarsgrond in
+that spider, pretending she was your sister that had married a Duitscher
+drummer in Gueldersdorp, and buried him, and was afraid to be shut up in
+the stad with all those lustful rooineks, you thought it would be enough
+to tell her Staats Police or Transvaal burghers were after her to make her
+creep into a mousehole and pay you to keep her hid. And it did work
+nicely--for a while. Then the Englishwoman got angry--oh, very angry!--and
+told you things that were not nice. Either you should put her in the way
+of getting the information she wanted, or good-bye to her dear brother,
+Hendryk Van Busch, and his friend Bough."
+
+"For a pinch of mealies I'd have let the little shrew go, by thunder!"
+said the affectionate relative. "But my good heart stopped me. The country
+wasn't safe for a couple of women to go looping about," he added. "And one
+of them with two hundred pounds in Bank of England notes stitched into the
+front of her stays...."
+
+"_Five_ hundred pounds," said the Secretary, with pleasantly twinkling
+spectacles. Van Busch's stare was admirable in its incredulity.
+
+"Sure, no, brother; not so much as that?"
+
+"Trudi told me," smirked P. Blinders.
+
+"You and her seem to be great and thick together," said Van Busch, with a
+flattering leer. The little ex-apothecary placed his hand upon his chest,
+and said, with a gleam of tenderness lighting up his spectacles:
+
+"I have sighed, and she has smiled." He went on, "If your friend Bough had
+been brave enough to try and take away that wad of banknotes from the
+little Englishwoman, he would have met trouble. For in a pocket of her
+gown she carries a revolver, and sleeps with it under her pillow by night;
+that is another thing that Trudi has told me." He kissed his fingers, and
+waved them in the direction of Kink's Hotel. "She is a lovely maiden!" He
+blew his nose without the assistance of a pocket-handkerchief, and
+continued:
+
+"Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the Englishwoman's coffee
+that would have made her sleep while he stole that money, or he might even
+have killed her quietly, and buried her on the farm. But a man who does
+that is not so clever and so wise as the man who makes a plan that gets
+the money and keeps friends all round, and makes everybody happy--is he,
+now? And that man is me, and that plan was mine. From P. Blinders you have
+genuine information to sell the Englishwoman, and when she has bought it,
+paying well for it, and written it all down in her despatches to the
+Commandant at Gueldersdorp, she hands the letters back to you to be
+smuggled through the lines, and pays through the nose for that also. And
+who shall say she is cheated? For the letters do get through"--the pimply
+countenance of P. Blinders was quite immobile, but the eyes behind the
+great spectacles twirled and twinkled with infinite meaning--"a week or so
+after date, perhaps, but what is that? Nothing--nothing at all."
+
+"Nothing," agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled pleasantly in each other's
+faces for a minute more. Then said Van Busch, with a loud sigh:
+
+"But what I have to tell you now is something. The Englishwoman has got no
+more money. Ask Trudi, if you think I lie. And, of course, the plan was a
+good plan, and you were a smart fellow to hit on it; but now the two
+hundred pounds is gone----"
+
+"Three hundred remain to get." P. Blinders briskly held up five stumpy red
+fingers and tucked down the thumb and little finger, leaving a trio of
+mute witnesses to the correctness of his arithmetic.
+
+"No more remains to get. The cow has run dry."
+
+The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise.
+
+"Hoe? What is this I hear?" he demanded with indignation. "Nothing left,
+and I have not had but a hundred and fifty out of the five hundred. There
+has been dishonesty somewhere. There have been tricks, unbefitting the
+dealings of scrupulous Christian men. Foei, foei!"
+
+Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled amiably down into the
+indignant eyes behind the spectacles. Then he said, with his most candid
+look and simplest lisp:
+
+"No tricks, brother; all fair and above-board. Ask the Commandant whether
+Van Busch is square or not? He knows that the hundred and fifty was paid
+you honestly on his account, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And
+you're not the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no, you'll never do that,
+never! Go and see him now, and settle up. I had a talk with young Schenk
+Eybel this morning, and he says the answer to the screeve you wrote to the
+Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp--to patch up an exchange of the
+Englishwoman for that slim kerel of a Boer's son they got their claws on
+at the beginning of the siege--has come in under the white flag this
+morning. Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without Walt
+Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old man on his grey
+pony near the Field Hospital."
+
+The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The ex-apothecary
+faltered:
+
+"What--what is this you say? The money paid me on the Commandant's
+account--when it was to be a secret between us.... Foei, foei! This is
+unfair. And suppose I have spent it, how shall I replace it? Do you wish
+to ruin an honest man?"
+
+Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly. At least, it seemed
+so, for he turned sharp round, and trotted off with sorrowfully-drooping
+black coat-tails, in search of the meek grey pony and the terrible old
+man.
+
+But the front view of the Secretary displayed a countenance whose pimples
+radiated satisfaction, and spectacles that were alight with joy.
+Much--very much--would P. Blinders have liked to have kept that hundred
+and fifty, but his fear had proved greater than his desire.
+
+He had paid every tikkie of the money faithfully to Brounckers, and his
+hands were metaphorically clean, and his neck comfortably safe. He was the
+poorer by a hundred and fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and
+experience; and--he chuckled at the thought of this--in the joy of knowing
+himself, in postscripts appended to those despatches of the
+Englishwoman's, to have poked sly sarcasm at the British Lion. Whose spiny
+tail P. Blinders imagined to be lashing, even then, at the prick of the
+goad.
+
+For another thing, very pleasant to think of, he had successfully pitted
+the cunning behind his giant spectacles against the superior villainy of
+Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg.
+
+
+
+
+XXXVI
+
+
+The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered,
+blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer
+Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch--"_a sister indeed!_" snorted Mevrouw Kink; and
+never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before
+dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the
+impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and
+skirt-bands, had fashionable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was
+the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it--good
+Nederlands measure--who did not know that she was an English
+prisoner-of-war.
+
+Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hardships, as its
+alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on having accomplished
+something of what she had set out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of
+days when she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had
+behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial
+sympathies. But his valuable services had been rendered for so much more
+than nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was
+wont to describe as "stony." She had sent for Van Busch to tell him that
+the position was untenable. She would evacuate it, when he could manage
+to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the
+care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.
+
+A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear the mouse-coloured
+trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony ground, and the crack, crack of
+the sentries' Mausers, followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches....
+She could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on
+the greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn-down
+blinds:
+
+"STIRRING STORY FROM THE SEAT OF HOSTILITIES: LADY WAR-CORRESPONDENT RUNS
+THE GAUNTLET OF BOER RIFLES."
+
+"Speshul. Hextry Speshul!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got through the
+lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the splashboard, and sink
+into the arms of the husband loved better than aught save Glory, gasping,
+as her heroic spirit fled----
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots on?"
+
+Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable of the two
+forbidding beds Kink's principal guest-chamber boasted, and ran her
+unoccupied needles through her interminable knitting, a thick white cotton
+sofa-cover or counterpane of irritating pattern--and stood over against
+her employer in an attitude of sulky submission. She was a
+square-shouldered, sturdily-built young woman of twenty-five, with round
+eyes of pinky-blue garnished with white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a
+superb and aggressively-brilliantined head of fair hair elaborately
+dressed, waved, and curled.
+
+The hair was all attached to Trudi's scalp. Lady Hannah had lain in bed
+morning after morning, for weary weeks, and watched her "doing it," and
+wondered that any young feminine creature with such arms, such skin, and
+such hair should be so utterly unattractive. But she had lived all these
+weeks in this one room with Trudi, had languished under her handmaid's
+lack of intelligence, had seen her eat, wielding her knife with
+marvellous dexterity, and, wakeful, tossed the while she snored.
+
+And every morning, after Mevrouw Kink had brought in coffee, snorting
+whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous eye, or whenever the German
+drummer's widow struck her as being more foreign of manners and appearance
+than usual, Lady Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself as for a
+promenade outdoors, lift the corner of a blind, steal a glance at the
+seething, stenching single street of Tweipans between the slats of the
+green shutters, and--unpin her veil and take off her hat without a
+word....
+
+By eleven o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have
+ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated,
+wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their
+womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the
+unwilling Trudi, was accustomed to venture out for what she called, with
+some exaggeration, "A whiff of fresh air."
+
+Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the pickets at either end of it,
+and the sentries posted at longish intervals all down its length, the
+street of new brick and tin, and old wooden houses that made Tweipans,
+belonged to Lady Hannah then. Accompanied by Trudi, whose quality of being
+what I have heard called "deaf-nosed" with regard to noisy smells, she
+arrived at the pitch of envying, she would stumble up and down amongst the
+rubbish, or wade through the slush if it had been wet, and stop at
+favourable points to search with her night-glass for the greenish-blue
+glow-worm twinkles of distant Gueldersdorp, and wonder whether anybody
+there was thinking of her under the white stars or the drifting scud?...
+
+But what was Trudi saying?
+
+"The gracious one cannot have her boots."
+
+"Why not?" asked Lady Hannah, with languid interest. Trudi struck the
+blow.
+
+"Because she has none."
+
+"No boots? Well, then, the walking-shoes."
+
+Trudi smiled all over her large face. This placidity should not long
+endure.
+
+"The gracious one has no shoes either. Boots and shoes--all have been
+taken away. Nothing remains except the quilted bedroom slippers the
+gracious one is wearing. And it is impossible to walk out in bedroom
+slippers."
+
+"I suppose it is." Lady Hannah yawned. "Well, suppose you go and look for
+the boots. They may have been carried away by mistake, like----" She
+wondered afresh what could have become of that transformation coiffure?
+
+"There is no mistake." Trudi announced. "And--the gracious lady forgot her
+little gun beneath her pillow this morning. That also is missing,"
+volunteered Trudi, who had had her instructions and scrupulously acted up
+to them.
+
+"My revolver has been stolen?" Lady Hannah sprang from her chair, made
+rapid search, and was convinced. The Browning revolver had been certainly
+spirited away.
+
+Red patches burned in her thin little face, and her round black eyes
+regained some of their lost brightness. Nothing like a spice of excitement
+for bringing you up to the mark. Just now she had felt positively mouldy,
+and here she was, herself again.
+
+"Nobody came into the room in the night. I sleep with the key round my
+neck, and if they had opened the door with another, I should have awakened
+on the instant. Nobody has been in the room to-day except the Frau
+Kink"--you will remember that a German drummer's widow would naturally
+converse in her defunct spouse's native language--"the Frau Kink, with the
+coffee-tray. She did not come near the bed...." The suddenness and force
+of the suspicion that shot up in Lady Hannah's mind lifted her up out of
+her chair, and set her upon her feet. "It must have been you. Was it you?"
+
+She looked hard at Trudi, and Trudi sank upon her bed and dissolved in
+noisy weeping.
+
+"Ach, the wickedness!" she moaned. "To suspect of such shamelessness a
+poor young maiden brought up in honesty.... Ach, ach!"
+
+But Lady Hannah went on:
+
+"Yesterday morning, when you were so long in coming back with hot water,
+and I opened the door and looked out into the passage, I saw you
+whispering with a little stumpy, pimply man, in a long-tailed black coat
+and large spectacles. Who is he, and of what were you talking?"
+
+Trudi did not at all regard the verbal sketch of P. Blinders as a correct
+one, but though her love was blind to his pimples and ignored his
+stumpiness, she could not deny the spectacles, which were to her as
+peepholes affording visions of a blissful married future.
+
+"He is a Herr who brought me news from my Mutti at home in Germany. She is
+sick, and my father also, and all my little brothers and sisters are sick
+too," gulped Trudi, sobbing and wallowing and rasping her flushed features
+against the knobbly counterpane of the most uncomfortable of the two beds,
+"because they hear that I am in this place, and they so greatly fear that
+I will be dead."
+
+"You aren't dead yet. And you told me when I engaged you that you were an
+orphan brought up by an aunt."
+
+"Pay me my vage," demanded Trudi, lifting a defiant and perfectly dry
+countenance, and launching the utterance in the forbidden English
+language, "and I vill now go. I vish not to stop here longer."
+
+"Very well, but where are you going?"
+
+"That," remarked Trudi, tossing her elaborately-dressed head and relapsing
+into her native language, "has nothing to do with the gracious lady."
+
+There was insolent triumph and unveiled spite in the large face attached
+to the elaborate coiffure. The gracious lady, realising that Trudi formed
+the one link between herself and the rough, strange, suspicious,
+unfriendly male world outside, pocketed her pride to temporise. Let Trudi
+remain as companion and attendant to the German refugee-widow yet another
+week, and the month's due of wages, already trebled in virtue of a service
+involving risk, should be substantially increased.... But Trudi only
+snorted and shook her head, and Lady Hannah found herself confronting not
+only a rat determined upon abandoning a sinking ship, but malignantly
+inclined to hasten the vessel's foundering.
+
+What was to be done? It is quite possible to be brave, adventurous, and
+daring without a revolver, its absence may even impart a faint sense of
+relief to one, as being no longer under the necessity of shooting somebody
+with it at a pinch, but without boots or shoes, and a Trudi to put them
+on, Lady Hannah found herself at a nonplus. To conceal the fact from the
+rejoicing Trudi, she moved to the window and drew the blind aside, and
+was instantly confronted with a row of round, staring eyes, the nose
+belonging to each pair being flattened eagerly against the glass.
+
+"Oh!" exclaimed Lady Hannah, dropping the blind in consternation at this
+manifestation of public interest. A snorting chuckle from the malignant
+Trudi fanned the little lady's waning courage into flame. She crossed the
+room and turned the door-handle.
+
+The door was locked from the outside, the key having been removed to
+accommodate the eye of Mevrouw Kink, who reluctantly removed it to unlock
+the door, and announce that Myjnheer Van Busch had asked to see his
+sister, as she ushered the visitor in.
+
+Sisters are not sensitive as a rule to subtle alterations in the regard of
+their brothers, but the German drummer's refugee-widow could not but read
+in the face and demeanour of her relative a perceptible diminution of
+interest in a woman who had no more money.... He kept on his broad-brimmed
+hat and pulled at his bushy whiskers as he exchanged a palpable wink with
+Trudi, who was accustomed, when the gracious lady's brother called, to
+retire with her knitting behind the shiny American cloth-covered screen
+that coyly shielded the washstand from a visitor's observation.
+
+Those flat, light eyes of the visitor's twinkled oddly as Lady Hannah's
+indignant whisper told of the missing footgear and the vanished revolver,
+and her conviction that the screened knitter was the active agent in their
+spiriting away.
+
+"You believe the girl's slewed on you, eh, and that things are going to
+pan out rough? Well, sure, that's a pity!" The big man lolled against the
+deal table, covered with a cloth reproducing in crude aniline colours,
+trying to the complexion, but gratifying to the patriotic soul of Mevrouw
+Kink, the red, white, and blue stripes of the Vierkleur, with the green
+staff-line carried all round as an ornamental border. "And I'd not wonder
+but you were right." He stuck his thumbs in his belt, and asked, with his
+hatted head on one side and a jeering grin on his bold red mouth: "So,
+now, and what did you think to do?"
+
+Lady Hannah controlled an impulse to knock off the big man's
+broad-brimmed felt, and even smiled back in the grinning face.... One very
+little lady can hold a great deal of anger and resentment without spilling
+any over, if she is thoroughly convinced that it would be imprudent as
+well as useless to display either.
+
+"As you gather, I intend returning to Gueldersdorp to-morrow at latest. I
+shall not take my maid, as she wishes for her own reasons to remain
+behind. Please have the mare and spider here by mid-day coffee-time. We
+can drive north towards Haargrond and double back when we're beyond the
+lines, as the coursed hare would do."
+
+Van Busch's red mouth gleamed, curved back from his tobacco-stained teeth.
+He said with meaning:
+
+"Boers shoot hares--not run them."
+
+"They may shoot or not shoot," proclaimed Lady Hannah. "I start
+to-morrow."
+
+"Without boots or shoes?" asked the red-edged, yellow-fanged smile.
+
+"Barefoot if I must," she answered, with all the more spirit that she felt
+like the hare struggling in a wire. "Please send for the mare and the
+trap. I leave this place to-morrow."
+
+"The mare and the spider have been commandeered for the use of the United
+Republics," said Van Busch. As the angry colour flamed up in Lady Hannah's
+small, pale cheeks, he added, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his
+hands: "Bough did his best to save them for you, no bounce! But could one
+man do anything against so many? Sure no, nothing at all!"
+
+She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its quilted satin
+slipper.
+
+"Do you suppose I haven't guessed by this time that Bough the Africander
+and Van Busch the British-Johannesburger are one Boer when it suits them
+both?"
+
+His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks of old tattooing
+obliterated by an acid burn, jerked as he raised it to stroke and feel his
+whiskers. Something else upon the hand, in the sharpened state of all her
+senses, struck out a spark of old association, and recalled a name once
+known. She went on.
+
+"How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough? You provoke the question
+when I see you wearing the Mildare crest and coat-of-arms."
+
+He had turned the deeply-engraved sard with his brown thumb and clenched
+his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed his mind, and took off the ring
+and handed it to her.
+
+"I had this ring off Bough, that's a real live man, and a thundering good
+pal of mine, for all your funning. The chap it belonged to died at a farm
+Bough owned once. Somewhere in Natal it might have been. And the bloke who
+died there was a big bug in England, Bough always thought. But he came
+tramping, and hauled up with hardly duds to his back or leather to his
+feet. Sick, too, and coughing like a sheep with the rinderpest. Bough was
+kind to him, but he got worse and worse. One night Bough was sitting up
+with him reading the Bible, when he made signs. 'Take this ring off of my
+finger and keep it,' says he. 'I've got nothing else to give you, but I
+reckon the Almighty'll foot your bill, for you're a first-class Christian,
+if ever there was one.' Then he went in, and Bough buried him in regular
+fancy style----"
+
+"And sent the girl to the nuns at Gueldersdorp, or was she there already?"
+
+Van Busch was in the act of taking back the sardonyx signet-ring. His hand
+jerked again, so sharply that the ring was jerked into the air, fell to
+the floor, and rolled under the table. He stooped and reached for it, and
+asked, with his face hidden by the patriotic tablecloth:
+
+"What girl do you mean?"
+
+His dark face was purple-brown with the exertion of stooping as he rose
+up. Lady Hannah answered:
+
+"The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp has an
+orphan ward, a singularly lovely girl of nineteen or twenty, whose surname
+is Mildare. And it struck me just now--I don't know why now, and never
+before--that she might be----"
+
+"Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What like is this one?"
+Van Busch twisted the ring about his little finger, and spoke with a more
+sluggish lisp and slurring of the consonants than even was usual with him.
+"Is she short and square, with black hair and round blue eyes, and red
+cheeks and thick ankles?"
+
+Lady Hannah, despite all her recently-gained experience of Van Busch, had
+not yet mastered his method of eliciting information.
+
+"Miss Mildare is absolutely the opposite of your description," she
+declared. "She is quite tall, and very slight and pale, with slender hands
+and feet, and reddish-bronze hair, and eyes the colour of yellow topaz or
+old honey, with wonderful black lashes.... I have never seen anything to
+compare----" She stopped.
+
+What strange eyes the man had, full of lines radiating from the pin-point
+pupils, scintillating like a snake's.... He said, in his thick, lisping
+way:
+
+"A beauty, eh? And how long might the nuns have had her?"
+
+"The Mayor's wife told me she has been under the care of the Convent
+ladies for some seven years."
+
+His brown full face looked solid, and his eyes veiled themselves behind a
+glassy film. He was thinking, as he said:
+
+"And her name is Mildare, eh? And you know her?"
+
+"I have met her once. She was introduced to me as Miss Lynette Mildare.
+But just now I find my own affairs unpleasantly absorbing. I am suspected
+in this place, Mr. Van Busch, and if not actually a prisoner, am certainly
+under restraint. For how much money down will you undertake to extricate
+me from this position, and convey me back to Gueldersdorp?"
+
+He shook his head, and for once the scent of gain did not rouse his
+predatory appetite. He was wondering how it should never have occurred to
+him before that the scared little white-faced thing might have fallen into
+kindly hands, and been nursed and cockered up and made a lady of? He was
+puzzled to account for her remembering the name that had belonged to the
+man whose grave was at the foot of the Little Kopje. He was conscious of
+an itching curiosity to find out for his friend Bough whether it really
+was the Kid or no? What was the little fool of a woman saying in her
+shrill voice?
+
+"It would be burning your boats, I am quite aware. But if it _pays_ to
+burn them----" she suggested, with her black eyes probing vainly in the
+shallow ones.
+
+He roused himself.
+
+"A thousand pounds, English. You've not the money here?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Or a cheque?"
+
+Her laugh jangled contemptuously.
+
+"Do you Boer spies carry cheque-books--upon Secret Service?"
+
+"I am no Boer, but an honest, square-dealing Britisher. How often have I
+to tell you that? Do you suppose you are a prisoner here because I slewed
+on you? Wrong, by God! Perhaps I kept things back a bit for fear you would
+cut up, as women do, and go into screeching-fits. Sure now, that's what
+any man would have done." His tone of injury was excellently feigned, and
+his lisp was simplicity itself. "And to call me a dirty spy, when I got
+you first-hand information, and ran your letters through to Gueldersdorp,
+at the risk of my blooming neck.... Well, you'll be ashamed when you get
+back there and see those letters, that's what you will, sure!"
+
+"The letters got through--yes. But did they get through in time to be of
+use?"
+
+The little she-devil suspected the truth. He stroked his whiskers and
+scraped his foot upon the floor, and said in his blandest lisp:
+
+"They got through in useful time. I'll kiss the Book and swear it, if you
+want me."
+
+How deal with a knave like this, who popped in and out of holes like a
+rabbit, and wriggled and writhed like a snake? Lady Hannah knew an immense
+yearning for the absent Bingo, husband of limited intellectual capacity,
+man of superior muscular development, doughty in the use of that primitive
+weapon of punishment, the doubled human fist.
+
+"In useful time? Useful Gueldersdorp time or useful Tweipans time? That is
+what I want to get at."
+
+"Oh, hell! how do I know?" He had turned sulky and scowling, but her blood
+was fairly up.
+
+"I know that you have successfully swindled me out of five hundred pounds.
+I know that when I met you on the train four months back you shaped your
+plans and baited a trap----"
+
+"To catch a silly woman." His scarlet lips rolled back from his
+tobacco-stained teeth. His jeering eyes were intolerable. "Ay, maybe I
+did. And what's to say now?"
+
+"I say you are a blackguard, Mr. Bough Van Busch!"
+
+The dark face with the light eyes underwent a murderous change. He glanced
+over his shoulders right and left, and took a step towards her, carrying
+out the movement suddenly, as a tarantula darts upon its prey. Before the
+thick brown muscular fingers had choked the scream that rose in her
+throat, the key crashed in the lock, and the door was violently kicked
+open, admitting ...
+
+No portrait is required of that burly, bald-browed, sharp-eyed,
+grizzle-bearded, square-jawed farmer, of the bronzed and sun-cracked
+countenance, implacable under the slouch-hat with the orange-leather band.
+We know the old green overcoat, and coarse corduroy breeches, and roughly
+tanned leather boots, with heavy, old-fashioned spurs, to have been the
+husk of a fierce, and indomitable, and relentless warrior, twinned with a
+quiet family-man of bucolic tastes and patriarchal habits.
+
+Van Busch, broader by inches and taller by half a head, dwindled, seen in
+juxtaposition with this man of the iron will and the leader's temperament,
+to a flabby, dwarfish, and petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in,
+and read him, and dropped him, and fastened on the little Englishwoman, as
+the great boots tramped heavily across the floor, and the great voice
+roared, speaking in the Taal:
+
+"Pull up that blind! Voor den donder! Shall we be mice, that sit and
+squeak in the dark?"
+
+Down came the Mevrouw Kink's square of glazed yellow calico, roller, cord,
+and all, at the impatient wrench of the big, heavy hand.... The window was
+blocked with heavy bodies, topped by brown, white, or yellow faces; the
+street was a sea of them, all staring with greedy, curious eyes at the
+little Englishwoman who was a prisoner, and the big man who ruled them by
+Fear. His angry grey eyes blazed at the gapers, and the crowd surged back
+a foot or two. Then the fierce eyes darted back at pale Lady Hannah, and
+the roaring voice began again:
+
+"You who came here in disguise, with a false story and false hair----"
+
+Lady Hannah jumped in her bedroom slippers, and crimsoned to her natural
+coiffure, as the missing transformation, appallingly out of wave, was
+plucked from the baggy pocket of the old green overcoat, and brandished
+before her astonished eyes. Struggling to restrain the dual impulse to
+shriek and clutch, no wonder she appeared a conscience-stricken creature
+in that great man's watchful eyes. His big voice shook her and shook the
+room as he thundered:
+
+"Woman, you are no widow of a Duitscher drummer, but the vrouw of a
+field-cornet of the Army of Groot Brittanje. He holds a graafschap in
+Engeland"--a mistake on the part of the General's informant--"and is
+hand-in-glove with the Colonel Commandant at Gueldersdorp." Not so far
+from the truth! thought Lady Hannah. "Would he spy out the land, let him
+come himself next time. Boers hide not behind their wives' petticoats when
+there is such business to be done!"
+
+In defence of blameless Bingo the hysterical little woman found voice to
+say:
+
+"He--didn't know I was coming."
+
+"What says she?"
+
+Before Van Busch could bestir himself to interpret, Lady Hannah had
+repeated her words in faulty Dutch.
+
+"So! Engelsch mevrouws disobey their husbands, it seems?" Were the fierce,
+bloodshot grey eyes really capable of a twinkle? "We Boers have a cure for
+that. Green reim, well laid on, after the third caution, teaches our wives
+to fib and deceive no more."
+
+"You're wrong, sir."
+
+"Wrong, do you say? Hoe?"
+
+"What the green reim does teach them," explained Lady Hannah, secretly
+aghast at her own temerity, "is, not to be found out next time."
+
+He gave a wooden chuckle, but his regard was as menacing and his voice as
+gruff as ever.
+
+"I make no mouth-play with words. I talk in men and guns, and there are
+half a dozen among the Engelsch, niet mier, that know how to talk back.
+There are one or two others that are duyvels, and not men. And the worst
+duyvel of all"--he waved the big hand westward--"is he over there at
+Gueldersdorp."
+
+She mentally registered the compliment.
+
+"You are a woman who writes for the Engelsch newspapers that are full of
+shameless tales about the Boers." He spat copiously upon the floor, and
+the big voice became a bellow. "Lies, lies! I have had them read to me,
+and the people who make them should be shot. Hear you now. You shall write
+to them and say: 'Selig Brounckers is a merciful man and a just. He is not
+as zwart as he is painted. He caught me mousing round his hoofd laager at
+Tweipans--and what does he do?'" The pause was impressive. Then the
+roaring voice resumed:
+
+"'He sends me marching down to the gaol at Groenfontein, that is packed
+with dirty white and dirty coloured schelms until there is not room for
+one more----"
+
+He named the homely parasite hymned by Burns ...
+
+--"'Or he packs me up to Oom Paul at Pretoria, chained to the waggon-tail
+like the others.' ..."
+
+Lady Hannah wondered, while the stuffy room spun round her, who the others
+were.
+
+"Geen, I will tell you what he does." He pitched the crumpled
+transformation contemptuously into the corner. "He writes to the Engelsch
+Commandant at Gueldersdorp and says: 'I have here a silly female thing
+that is no use to me. Take her you, and give me in exchange a man of
+mine.' ..."
+
+"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.
+
+Little Miss Wiercke was to lose her lank-haired organist a few days later,
+the prevalent complaint of shrapnelitis carrying him off. And the girl who
+screamed coquettishly as the mining-engineer amorously squeezed her wet
+fingers under the soapsuds was shortly to be represented in the
+Cornishman's memory by another white cross in the Cemetery, a trunk full
+of pathetic feminine fripperies, and a wedding-ring that had been worn
+barely two months. But they did not know this, and they were happy. We
+should never love or laugh if we knew.
+
+Two other people had passed along the path that ran by the margin of the
+sand and reed-patches, and were lost to sight. Lady Hannah glanced towards
+the Mother-Superior, who was being gracious to Captain Bingo and the
+Chaplain, and hoped Biddy would not miss the owner of the little Greek
+head and the enchanting willowy figure quite yet.
+
+Nuns were frightfully scrupulous and gimlet-eyed where their charges were
+concerned. And certainly, if young people never got away together without
+_qu'il ne vous en deplaise!_ there would be fewer engagements. And Biddy
+must know that it was a Heaven-sent chance for the girl.
+
+The Foltlebarres had sat too long on thorns to grumble at Beau's marrying
+a girl without a _dot_, who was not only lovely enough to set Society
+screaming over her, but modest and a lady. Up to the present his tendency
+had been to exalt Beauty above Breed, and personal attractiveness above
+moral immaculateness.
+
+As in the most recent case of that taking but extremely terrible little
+person with the toothy, photographic smile, Miss Lessie Lavigne of the
+Jollity Theatre, the affair with whom might be counted, it was to be
+hoped, as the last furrow of a heavy sowing of wild oats. As this would be
+a match _d'egal a egal_--in point of blood and education, at any
+rate--certainly the Foltlebarres would have reason to bless their stars.
+
+Somebody came over to her just then, saying:
+
+"Bingo seems in excellent spirits."
+
+She looked, a little apprehensively, across to where the Mother Superior
+and the wistful-eyed, pepper-and-salt-clad Chaplain were patiently
+listening to the recital of one of Bingo's stock anecdotes.
+
+"What is he telling the Reverend Mother?" Her tone was anxious. "I do hope
+not that story about the unwashed Boer and the cake of soap!"
+
+"Don't be alarmed. It's a recent and completely harmless anecdote about
+the despatch-runner from Diamond Town who got in this morning."
+
+Her eyes sparkled.
+
+"Really ...? And with news worth having?"
+
+"Mr. Casey might be disposed to think so."
+
+"Who is Mr. Casey?"
+
+"That's a question nobody can answer satisfactorily."
+
+"But is the intelligence absolutely useless to anybody who doesn't happen
+to be Mr. Casey?" she insisted.
+
+"Not unless they happened to be deeply interested in Mrs. Casey."
+
+"There is a Mrs. Casey, then?"
+
+"So says the man who travelled two hundred miles to bring her letters and
+the message that she is, as Mr. Micawber would put it, _in statu quo_."
+
+"I understand." The bright black eyes were compassionate. "She has written
+to her husband--she doesn't know that he has been killed----"
+
+"Nor do we. As far as we can ascertain, the garrison has never included a
+Casey."
+
+"Then you think----"
+
+"I think"--he glanced aside as a stentorian bellow of laughter reached
+them--"that, judging by what I hear, Bingo has got to the soapy story."
+
+She frowned anxiously.
+
+"Bingo ought to remember that nuns aren't ordinary women. I shall have to
+go and gag him." She took a dubious step.
+
+"Why? The Reverend Mother does not seem at all shocked, and Fraithorn is
+evidently amused." He added, as Bingo's rapturous enjoyment of his own
+anecdote reached the stamping and eye-mopping stage: "And undoubtedly
+Bingo is happy."
+
+"He has got out of hand lately. One can't keep a husband in a proper state
+of subjection who may be brought home to one a corpse at any hour of the
+day." Her laugh jangled harshly, and broke in the middle. "The soil of
+Gueldersdorp being so uncommonly favourable just now to the production of
+weeds of the widow's description."
+
+"It grows other things." His eyes were very kind. "Brave, helpful,
+unselfish women, for instance."
+
+"There is one!"
+
+She indicated the tall, black-robed figure of the Mother with a quick
+gesture of her little jewelled hand.
+
+"And here is another." He touched her sleeve lightly with a finger-tip.
+
+"Brave.... Helpful." Her voice was choky. "Do you think I shall ever
+forget the hindrance I have been to you? Didn't I lose you your Boer spy?"
+
+"Granted you did." His moustache curved cheerfully at the corners. "But
+that's Ancient History, and look what you brought back!"
+
+"A unit of the despised majority who is thoroughly convinced of her own
+superfluousness. Hannah Wrynche, with the conceit so completely taken out
+of her that she feels, say, like a deflated balloon; Hannah Wrynche, who
+believed herself born to be a War Correspondent, and has come down to
+scribbling gossipy paragraphs for a little siege newspaper printed in a
+damp cellar."
+
+He laughed.
+
+"Collectors will pay fancy prices for copies of that same little siege
+newspaper, at auctions yet to be."
+
+"I've thought of that," she confessed. "But, oh! I could make it so much
+more spicy if you'd only give me a freer hand."
+
+His hazel eyes had a smile in them. "I know you think me an editorial
+martinet."
+
+"You blue-pencil out of my poor paragraphs everything that's interesting."
+
+"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."
+
+"The Reading Public adore personalities and puerilities."
+
+"They can go to the _Daily Whale_ for them, then."
+
+"Isn't that rather a personal remark?"
+
+"Let me say that if you are occasionally personal, you are never, under
+any circumstances, anything but clever."
+
+"Thank you. But, oh! the difference between what I am and what I aspired
+to be!"
+
+"And, ah! the difference between what I have done and what I meant to do!"
+he said.
+
+Her black eyes flashed. "You have never really felt it. Achievement with
+you has never hit below the mark. You, of all men living, are least fitted
+to enter into the rueful regrets and dismal disillusions of a Hannah
+Wrynche."
+
+"Hannah Wrynche, who is content to do a woman's work and fill a woman's
+place; Hannah Wrynche, who has atoned for a moment of ambitious--shall I
+say imprudence?--splendidly and nobly, has no reason to be rueful or
+regretful. Don't shake your head. Do you think I don't know what you are
+doing, day after day, to help and cheer those poor fellows at the
+Convalescent Hospital?"
+
+Her eyes were full of tears. "You make too much of my poor efforts. You
+underestimate the effect of praise from you."
+
+"I said very little in the last cipher despatch that got through to
+Colonel Rickson at Malamye, but what I did say was very much to the
+purpose, believe me."
+
+She gasped, staring at him with circular eyes of incredulity. "You've
+mentioned--me--in your despatches. ME?"
+
+"Just so!" he said, and left her groping for the ridiculous little
+gossamer handkerchief to dry the tears of pride and gratitude that were
+tumbling down her cheeks.
+
+
+
+
+XLI
+
+
+"Clang--clang--clang!"
+
+A man and a girl came back out of Paradise when the Catholic church-bell
+rang the Angelus. The girl's sweet flushed face had paled at the first
+three strokes. When the second triple clanged out, her colour came back.
+She rose from her seat upon a lichened slab of granite in the cool shadow
+of the great boulder, and bent her lovely head, Beauvayse watching her
+lips as they moved, soundlessly repeating the Angelic Salutation:
+
+"_Ave Maria, gratia plena; Dominus tecum! Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et
+benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus._"
+
+The wonderful simplicity of the Chosen One's reply followed, and the
+announcement of the Unspeakable Mystery. The little prayer followed, and
+the rapid signing with the Cross, and she dropped her slight hand from her
+bosom, and turned her eyes back upon his.
+
+"You remind me of my mother," he told her. "She is Catholic, you know."
+
+"And not you?"
+
+"We fellows, my brothers Levestre and Daltham and myself, were brought up
+as pillars of the Established Church." His sleepy, grey-green eyes
+twinkled, his white teeth showed in the laugh. "The girls are of my
+mother's faith. It was a family agreement. Are you quite sure you have
+come down to earth again? Because there's such an awful lot I want to say
+to you that I don't know where to begin."
+
+Though his mouth laughed, his eyes had wistful shadows under them. He had
+tossed aside his Service felt when she had taken off her hat, and the
+sunshine, piercing the thick foliage overhead, dappled the scaly trunks of
+the blue-gum trees, and dripped gold upon the red-brown head and the
+crisp-waved golden one.
+
+"I am here. I am listening."
+
+She stood before him with meekly drooping eyelids, feeling his ardent gaze
+like a palpable weight, under which her knees trembled and her whole body
+swayed. The great boulder rose upon her left hand like a beneficent
+presence. Delicate ferns and ice-plants sprang from its chinks and
+crannies. The long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her small, brown-shod
+feet, some bearing seed-pods, others rows of pink bells, or yellow--a
+fairy chime. In the damper hollows iris bloomed, and the gold and scarlet
+sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, and gaily-plumaged finches were
+sidling on overhanging boughs, or dipping and drinking in the shallows.
+The wattled starlings whistled to each other, or fought as starlings will.
+A grey partridge was bathing in the hot dry sand between the reed-beds and
+the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel were rising at the flies.
+There was no sound but the running water. The spicy smell of aromatic
+leaves and the honeyed perfume of a great climbing trumpet-flower made the
+air languorous with sweetness.
+
+He answered her now.
+
+"You are here, and I am here. And for me that means everything. And I feel
+that I want nothing more, and, still, such a tremendous lot besides."
+
+He breathed as though he had been running, and his sharply-cut nostrils
+quivered. His white teeth gleamed under the clipped golden moustache.
+
+Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresistible that in
+these days of storm, and stress, and hardship and peril, his handsome face
+was never without its gay, confident smile. His tall, athletic figure, in
+the neat workmanlike Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards
+her eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the direct
+simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her a delicious terror.
+The perfume of youth and health, of vigour and virility, that exhaled from
+him, came to her mingled with the scent of the crushed spice-leaves and
+the perfume of the waxen-belled heaths and the breath of the giant
+trumpet-flower. She was turning dizzy. She could scarcely stand.
+
+"I--I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the grasses at the foot of
+the great granite slab and prodded in chinks and crannies for snakes and
+tarantulas; and when she sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw
+himself at her feet with a careless, powerful grace, and lay there looking
+up at her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through the thick
+dark eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under them, and her little pointed
+chin.
+
+The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat peeped under the hem
+of her green cloth skirt; below there was a glimpse of slender, crossed
+ankles in brown silk hose, and the little brown shoes laced with wide silk
+ties. She drew off one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed back a
+straying lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing him murmur in his
+caressing voice:
+
+"Take off the other glove, too."
+
+She was well aware how beautiful her hands were--small, and slender, and
+ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled, with little babyish nicks at the
+wrists, and at the inner edges of the rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails,
+of the true almond shape. She thought little of her face, though she knew
+it to be charming; but she ingenuously admired her slender feet, that were
+quite as pretty without the silk stockings and little brown shoes, and the
+delicate hands she bared for him now. He looked at them with ardent
+longing, and said:
+
+"How dear of you to do that, because I asked you! And do you realise that
+we're here together alone, you and me, for the first time? Nobody saw us
+steal away but Sister Cleophee, and I've a notion she wouldn't tell,
+blessed old soul!"
+
+Her eyes smiled.
+
+"You would not call the Mother that?"
+
+"No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of Wales. And a
+snubbing from the Religious would be rather worse, on the whole, than a
+snubbing from the Royalty."
+
+"The Princess never snubbed you?"
+
+"Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to hear about it? She had
+sent away her brougham while the giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing
+her round St. Paul's. And--acting as Extra Equerry--I'd got instructions
+to call her a hack conveyance, and--being young and downy, I'd picked
+H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been bred and born
+here. You don't even know what a growler is. And in five years' time there
+won't be one left in London."
+
+"Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. And a growler
+is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so ignorant...."
+
+"You sweetest!" he burst out passionately. "I wish I knew all that you
+could teach me!"
+
+He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his arms to clasp her
+then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying at full length in the grass,
+leaning upon his elbow, he rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in
+with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her,
+delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her
+to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her
+in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and the monotonous buzzing of
+the black honey-bees mingled with the drumming of the crickets, and the
+flowing of the river, and the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her
+blood. She leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said
+in a voice that shook a little:
+
+"Tell me about the snubbing."
+
+"It was High Art. Three words--and I knew I'd behaved like a bounder of
+the worst--I had to go back and get the other cab, with a broken front
+window and a cabby...." He chuckled. "I've met red noses enough but you
+could have seen that chap's glowing through the thickest fog that ever
+blanketed Ludgate Hill and wrapped the Strand in greasy mystery. Don't
+move, please!... There's a ray of sunshine touching your head that makes
+your hair look the colour of a chestnut when the prickly green hull first
+cracks to let it out. Or ... there's a rose grows on the pergola at home
+at Foltlebarre Royal, with a coppery sheen on the young leaves.... I
+wondered why I kept thinking of it as I looked at you. But I know now. And
+your skin is creamy white like the flower. Oh, if I could only gather the
+girl-rose and carry it home to the others!"
+
+She was pink as the loveliest La France now.
+
+"You ought not to talk to me in that way."
+
+"Don't I know it?" Beauvayse groaned out. He turned over upon his face in
+the grass, and lay quite still. A shuddering sigh heaved the strong young
+shoulders from time to time, and his hands clenched and tore at the
+grasses, "Don't I know it? Lynette, Lynette!"
+
+She longed to touch the close-cropped golden head. Unseen by him, she
+stretched out a hand timidly and drew it back again, unsatisfied.
+
+"Lynette, Lynette! I'm paying at this moment for every rotten act of
+headlong folly I've ever committed in my life, and you're making me!" He
+caught at a fold of her skirt and drew it to him and hid his face in it,
+kissing it again and again. It was one of the caresses she had been used
+herself to offer where she most loved. To find yourself being worshipped
+instead of worshipping is an experience. She touched the golden head now,
+as the Mother had often touched her own. He caught the hand.
+
+"No, no!" She grew deadly pale, and shivered. "Please let me go. I--I did
+not----"
+
+She tried to release the hand. He raised himself, and she started at the
+warm, quivering pressure of his beautiful mouth, scarcely shaded by the
+young, wheat-golden moustache, upon her cool, sweet flesh. She snatched
+her hand away with a faint cry, and sprang to her feet, and her cheeks
+blazed anew as she turned to go.
+
+"You want to leave me? You would punish me like that--just for a kissed
+hand?"
+
+He barred her way, taller than herself, though he stood upon the sloping
+lower level. She had learned always to be true in thought and speech.
+
+"I--don't--like to be touched." She said it without looking at him.
+
+"You put your hand upon my head. Why did you do it if you hate me so?"
+
+"I--don't hate you!"
+
+"I love you! My rose, my dove, my star, my joy! Queen of all the girls
+that ever I saw or dreamed of, say that you could love me back again!"
+
+"I--must not."
+
+Her bosom heaved. He could see the delicate white throat vibrating with
+the tumultuous beating of her heart.
+
+"Why not? Nobody has told you anything against me? Nobody has said to you
+that I have no right to love you?" he demanded.
+
+"No."
+
+"Look at me."
+
+The golden hazel, dark-lashed eyes she shyly turned to his were full of
+exquisite, melting tenderness. Her lips parted to speak, and closed again.
+He leaned towards her--hung over her, his own lips irresistibly attracted
+to those sweetest ones....
+
+"Lord Beauvayse----" she began, and stopped.
+
+He begged:
+
+"Please, not the duffing title, but 'Beauvayse' only. Tell me you love me.
+Tell me that you'll wait until I'm able to come to you and say: 'My
+beloved, the way's clear. Be my wife to-morrow!'"
+
+His tone was masterful. His ardent eyes thrilled her. She murmured:
+
+"Beauvayse ...!"
+
+She swayed to him, as a young palm sways before a breeze, and he caught
+her in his strenuous, young embrace, and held her firmly against him. Her
+old terrors wakened, and dreadful, unforgettable things stirred in the
+darkness, where they had lain hidden, and lifted hydra-heads. She cried
+out wildly, and strove to thrust him from her, but he held her close.
+There was a shaking among the tangled growths of bush and cactus high up
+on the opposite bank, and Lynette realised that Beauvayse's arms no
+longer held her. She leaned back against the boulder, panting and
+trembling, and saw Beauvayse's revolver glitter in his steady hand, as
+something came crashing down through the tangled jungle upon the edge of
+the farther shore, and a heavily-built man in khaki pushed through the
+shoulder-high growth of reeds, and leaped upon a rock that had a swirl of
+water round it. It was Saxham.
+
+"Miss Mildare!" called the strong, vibrating voice.
+
+She faltered:
+
+"It--it is Dr. Saxham."
+
+"And what the devil does Dr. Saxham want?" was written in Beauvayse's
+angry face. But he called out as he lowered his revolver-hand:
+
+"You've had rather an escape of getting shot, Saxham, do you know? You
+might have been a Boer or a buffalo. Better be more careful next time, if
+you're anxious to avert accidents."
+
+Saxham was a little like the buffalo as he lowered his head and surveyed
+the alert, virile young figure and the insolent, high-bred face from under
+ominously scowling brows. He made no answer; only laid one finger upon the
+butt of his own revolver, and the slight action fanned Beauvayse's
+annoyance and resentment to a white-heat, as perhaps Saxham had intended.
+He sprang upon another boulder that was in the mid-swirl of the current,
+and spoke again.
+
+"Miss Mildare, I was walking on one of the native paths that have been
+made in the bush there"--he indicated the bank behind him--"when I heard
+you cry out. I am here, at your service, to offer you any help or
+protection that is in my power to give."
+
+Lynette looked at him vaguely. Beauvayse, crimson to the crisp waves upon
+his forehead and the white collar-line above the edge of his jacket,
+answered for her.
+
+"Miss Mildare does not require any help or protection other than what I am
+privileged to place at her disposal. You had better go on with your walk,
+Doctor. You know the old adage about two being company?"
+
+He laughed, but his voice had quivered with fury, and the hand that held
+the revolver shook too. And his eyes seemed colourless as water against
+the furious crimson of his face. Still ignoring him, Saxham said, his own
+square, pale face turned full upon Lynette, and his vivid blue eyes
+constraining her:
+
+"Miss Mildare, I am at your commands. Tell me to cross the river and take
+you back to the ladies of the Convent, or order me to continue my walk. In
+which case I shall understand that the familiarities of Lord Beauvayse are
+not unwelcome to you."
+
+"By God ...! You----"
+
+Beauvayse choked, then suddenly remembered where and how to strike. But he
+waited, and Saxham waited, and still she did not speak.
+
+"Am I to go or stay? Kindly answer, Miss Mildare!"
+
+Beauvayse's eyes were on her. He said to her below his breath:
+
+"Tell him to go!"
+
+She stammered:
+
+"Th--thank you. But--I--I--had rather you went on."
+
+Beauvayse saw his opportunity, and added, with an intolerable smile:
+
+"My 'familiarities,' as you are pleased to term them, being more
+acceptable to a lady than the attentions of the Dop Doctor."
+
+Saxham started as though an adder had flashed its fangs through his boot.
+A rush of savage blood darkened his face; his hand quivered near the butt
+of his revolver, and his eyes blazed murder. But with a frightful effort
+he controlled himself, lifted his hat slightly to Lynette, turned and
+leaped back to the stone he had quitted, strode through the reed-beds, and
+plunged back into the tangled boscage. That he did not continue his walk,
+but turned back towards the town, was plain, for his retreat could be
+traced by the shaking of the thick bush and the high grasses through which
+he forced his way. It did him good to battle even with these vegetable
+forces, and the hooked thorns that tore his clothes and rent his flesh
+left nothing like the traces that those few words of dismissal, spoken by
+a girl's voice, and the hateful taunt that had followed, had left upon his
+heart.
+
+It was over. Over--over, the brief, sweet season of hope. Nothing was left
+now but his loyalty to the friend who believed in him. If that man had
+not stood between Saxham and his despair, Gueldersdorp would have got back
+her Dop Doctor that night. For the Hospital stores included a cherished
+case or two of Martell and Kinahan, and all these things were under
+Saxham's hand.
+
+The heavy footsteps crashed out of hearing. The startled finches settled
+down again, except at that point, higher up on the opposite bank, to which
+Beauvayse's attention had first been directed. There the little birds yet
+hovered like a cloud of butterflies, but, practised scout as Beauvayse
+was, he paid no heed to their distress. She had declared for him. The
+Doctor's discomfiture enhanced his triumph. Gad! how like an angry buffalo
+the fellow was! The sort of beast who would put down his head and charge
+at a stone wall as confidently as at a mud one. It was a confounded
+nuisance that he had seen what he had seen. But a man who had eventually
+cut so poor a figure, had been snubbed so thoroughly and completely, might
+prefer to hold his tongue. And if he did not, here in Gueldersdorp, while
+no letters got through, while no news filtered in from the big humming
+world outside, it would be possible to carry things bravely off for a long
+time. He had told Bingo, to be sure, about--about Lessie. But Bingo,
+though he might bluster and barge about dishonourable conduct, would never
+give away a man who had trusted him. To be sure, it was not quite fair,
+not altogether square; it was not playing the game as it should be played,
+to gain her promise as a free man. Should he make a clean breast of it,
+and tell her the whole wretched story now?
+
+Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender green-and-white,
+nymph-like figure, against the background of sun-hot, shadow-flecked,
+lichened stone, looking at him. The rosy light bathed her in its radiance.
+And as she looked, it seemed to him that something was dawning in that
+face of hers. He watched it, breathless with the realisation of his
+dreams, his hopes, his desires. The prize was his. Every other baser
+memory was drowning within him. It seemed to him that her purity, as he
+bathed in it, washed him clean of stain. He forgot everything but the
+secret that those sweet eyes told at last.
+
+"My beloved! I'm not good enough to tie your blessed little shoes, and
+yet no other man shall ever have you, hold you, call you his own....
+Lynette, Lynette! Dear one, isn't there a single kiss? And I might get
+shot to-morrow."
+
+It was characteristic of him that his brave, gay mouth should laugh even
+in the utterance of the appeal that melted her. She gave a little sob, and
+raised her sweet face to his, flushing loveliest rosy red. She lifted her
+slender arms and laid them about his strong young throat, and kissed him
+very quietly and purely. He had meant to snatch her to his leaping heart
+and cover her with eager, passionate caresses. But the strong impulse was
+quelled. He said, almost with a sob:
+
+"Is this your promise? Does this mean that you belong to me?"
+
+Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered:
+
+"Yes."
+
+He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to know himself her
+chosen. Ah! why was he not free? Why had Chance and Luck and Fate forced
+him to play a part like this?
+
+"I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago!" he broke out impulsively.
+"Half-a-dozen years ago--only you'd have been a mere kid--too young to
+understand what Love means.... Why, Lynette darling! what is the matter?
+What have I said that hurt?"
+
+Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank away from him. He drew
+back, shocked into silence by the sudden, dreadful change in her. Her
+eyes, curiously dulled and faded, looked at Beauvayse as though they saw
+not him, but another man, through him and behind him. Her face was peaked
+and pinched; her supple, youthful figure contracted and bent like that of
+a woman withered by some wasting sickness, her dainty garments seemed to
+lose their colouring and their freshness, and hang on her, by some strange
+illusion wrought by the working of her mind upon his, like sordid rags.
+Against the splendid riot of life and colour over and under and about her,
+she looked like some slender sapling ringed and blighted, and ruined by
+the inexorable worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She
+was recalling what had been--realising what must henceforth be, in its
+fullest meaning. She shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air
+in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in alarm:
+
+"Lynette dearest! what is the matter? Why do you look at me like that?
+Lynette!"
+
+She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind, and stared through
+him and beyond him into the Past. That was all. There was a rustling of
+leaves and branches higher on the bank, and the sound of thick woollen
+draperies trailing through grass. The bush on the edge of the cleared
+space that was about the great boulder was parted by a white, strong hand
+and a black-sleeved arm, and the Mother-Superior moved out into the open,
+and came down with those long, swift steps of hers to where they were. Her
+eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, fastened on the drooping, stricken figure
+of the girl, read the altered face, and then she turned them on the boy,
+and they were stern as those of some avenging Angel, and her white wimple,
+laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands of Sister Tobias,
+framed a face as white.
+
+"What is the reason of--this? What has passed between you to account for
+it? Has your mother's son no sense of honour, sir?"
+
+The icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He drew himself to
+his splendid height, and answered, his brave young eyes boldly meeting the
+stern eyes that questioned him:
+
+"Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable of dishonourable
+conduct. The fact is, that I have just asked Miss Mildare to be my wife.
+And she consents."
+
+A spasm passed over the pale face. So easily they leave us whom we have
+reared and tended, when the strange hand beckons and the new voice calls.
+But the Mother-Superior was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew her
+black nun's robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said calmly, holding
+out her hand to him:
+
+"You will forgive me if I was unjust, knowing that she is dear to me. And
+now I shall ask you to leave us. Please tell the Sisters"--from habit she
+glanced at her worn gold watch--"we shall join them in ten minutes' time."
+
+He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and took up the
+Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to
+Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It
+dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask
+void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand
+imperiously motioned him away. He expostulated:
+
+"Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, without
+protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging about."
+
+"If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. But go now."
+
+He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the reed-beds on the
+foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic figure until it swung round a
+bend and was lost to sight.
+
+Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the touch Lynette
+dropped as though she had been shot, and lay among the trodden grasses and
+the flaunting cowslips face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from
+the muffled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed like a
+crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that could be seen and
+the little ears that her clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and
+sometimes covered were one burning, shameful red.
+
+"Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn with a very agony of
+tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and began with gentle strength to
+untwine those clutching hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in
+one of hers, and passed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and
+lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silently until a moan,
+more articulate than the rest, voiced:
+
+"Mother!"
+
+"It is Mother. She holds you; she will not let you go."
+
+The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the rigor lessen. The
+moaning ceased, and the tortured heart began to leap and strain against
+her own, as though some invisible hand lashed it with an unseen thong.
+
+There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping of the heart that
+shook her whole body. And it seemed to the Mother that her own heart wept
+tears of blood. The hour had come at last, as always she had known it
+would. The love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette. She knew now
+the full value of the lost heritage, and realised the glory of the jewel
+that had been snatched by the brutal hand of a thief. Ah, Lord! the pity
+of it!
+
+The pity of it! She, the stainless one, could have stripped off her own
+white robe of virgin purity, had it been possible, to clothe the despoiled
+young shoulders of Richard's daughter, cowering prostrate under her burden
+of guiltless shame, crushed by the terrible knowledge that ruined
+innocence must always pay the penalty, whether the destroyer is punished
+or goes free.
+
+The penalty! Suppose at the price of a lie from lips that had never lied
+yet it could be evaded? The Mother's face contracted with a spasm of
+mental pain. A dull flush mounted to her temples, and died out in olive
+paleness; her lips folded closely, and her black brows frowned over the
+sombre grey fires burning in their hollow caves. She rebuked a sinner at
+that moment, and the culprit was herself.
+
+She, the just mistress and wise ruler of so many Sisters in the religious
+profession; she, so slow to judge and condemn others, was unsparing in
+austerity towards herself. She had always recognised her greatest weakness
+in her love for this adopted daughter that might have been her own if
+Richard Mildare had not played traitor. She had never once yielded to the
+clinging of those slight hands about her heart, but she had exacted
+forfeit from herself, and rigorously. So much for excess of partiality, so
+much for over-consideration, so much for lack of faith in over-anxiety, so
+much more of late for the keen mother-jealousy that had quickened in her
+to anguish at the thought that another would one day usurp her undivided
+throne, and claim and take the lion's share of the love that had been all
+hers. Her spiritual director was far too lenient, in her opinion. She was
+all the more exacting towards herself. What right had a nun to be so bound
+by an earthly tie? It was defrauding her Saviour and her Spouse to love
+with such excess of maternal passion the child He had given. Yet she loved
+on.
+
+She reviewed all her shortcomings, even while the girl's head lay
+helplessly against her, and the scalding tears that had at last begun to
+gush from those shut, quivering eyelids wetted her breast. She had
+esteemed and valued perfect candour above all things. And yet of what
+concealments had she not been guilty in the shielding of this dearest
+head?
+
+She had deceived, for Richard's child, Richard's friend, in the deft
+interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole plausible fabric. She knew
+that, if necessary, she would deceive again, trailing her wings,
+fluttering on before, as the golden plover lures the footsteps of the
+stranger from her nest.
+
+Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even
+the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the
+mental constitution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon
+the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily
+reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to
+her Master and her Lord.
+
+And she had always known, it seemed to her, that this terrible hour would
+come. When the two young figures had moved away together into the green
+gloom of the trees, she had felt a premonitory chill that streamed over
+her whole body like icy water, paralysing and numbing her strength. She
+had read their secret in their faces, unconscious of her scrutiny, and
+watched them out of sight, praying, as only such a mother can, that it
+might not be as she feared. This was her beloved's great hour; she would
+not have stretched out a finger to delay its coming,--she who had known
+Love, and could not forget! It might be that in this splendid boy, who was
+as beautiful as the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard,
+lay the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white would
+not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe and veil. And yet--and
+yet, in Lynette's place she knew that she could never have looked into the
+face of a rosy, smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and
+orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past.
+
+Was it wise that another should be made to share that vision? She put that
+question to herself, looking with great agonised, unseeing eyes over the
+head that lay upon her bosom, out across the slowly moving water, stained
+with amber from ironstone beds through which it had wound its way, tinged
+with ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the sky, from the western horizon
+to the zenith, and from thence to the serried peaks and frowning bastions
+of purple-black cloud that lowered in the north, was all orange-crimson
+now, and the moon, then at the ending of her second quarter, swung like a
+pale lamp of electrum at the eastward corner of the flaming tent.
+
+"Was it wise?" She seemed to hear her own voice echoing back out of the
+past. And it said:
+
+"The only just claim to your entire confidence in all that concerns your
+past life will rest in the hands of the man who may one day be your
+husband."
+
+The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to her in gusts of
+intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness. She glanced round and saw it
+on her right, clasping in its luxuriant embrace a slender young bush that
+it was killing. The thick, juicy green stems and succulent green leaves,
+the greedily embracing tendrils and great fleshy-white, hanging flowers
+revolted her. The creeper seemed the symbolisation of Lust battening upon
+Innocence.
+
+Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her. From a mossy cranny in
+a stone a hairy tarantula leaped upon a little lizard that sunned itself,
+not thinking Death so near. A lightning-quick pounce of the bloated thing
+with the fierce, bright eyes and the relentless, greedy claws, and the
+little reptile vanished. She shuddered, thinking of its fate.
+
+The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and the bushes that
+grew about were ragged and torn with shell and shrapnel-ball. Chips and
+flinders had been knocked by the same forces from the boulders and the
+rocks. Amongst the flowers near her shone something bright. It was an
+unexploded Maxim-shell, a pretty little messenger of Death, girt with
+bright copper bands and gaily painted. And a ninety-four-pound projectile,
+exploded, had scattered the shore with its fragments, and doubtless the
+river-bed was strewn thick with others. You had only to look to see them.
+Once Lynette's lover knew everything there was to know, the trees and
+rocks and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns the
+right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would be marred and
+broken, scorched and spoiled, like these.
+
+Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives
+of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the
+veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the
+shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former scruples. They sailed from
+her on the faint hot breeze lightly as thistledown. And now the
+tear-blurred face was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoarse and
+weak and trembling, appealed:
+
+"Mother, you are not angry? I never meant to be underhand, or to
+hide--anything from you."
+
+"No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realise how much had been
+concealed between the lines that she had read so often. "You did not mean
+to." The trembling voice went on:
+
+"He never spoke to me as though we were strangers. Never, from the first.
+And to-day, he----" Her heart's throbbing shook her. The Mother said:
+
+"He has told me what has passed. He said that he had asked you to marry
+him, and you had--agreed." The bitterness of her wounded love was in her
+tone.
+
+"I--had forgotten," she panted, "_that_--until one little careless thing
+he said brought it all back to me in such a flood. It was like drowning.
+Then you came, and--and----" The quavering, pitiful voice rose to a cry:
+"Mother, must I tell him everything?" She cowered down in the enfolding
+arms. "Mother, Mother, must I tell him?"
+
+A great wave of pity surged out from the deep mother-heart that throbbed
+against her own. The deep, melodious voice answered with one word:
+
+"No."
+
+Amazement sat on the uplifted, woebegone face of the girl. The sorrowful
+eyes questioned the Mother's incredulously.
+
+"You mean that you----"
+
+She folded the slight figure to her. Her sorrowful eyes, under their great
+jetty arches, looked out like stars through a night of storm. Her greyish
+pallor seemed a thin veil of ashes covering incandescent furnace-fires.
+She rose up, lifting the slender figure. She said, looking calmly in the
+face:
+
+"I mean that you are not to tell him. Upon your obedience to me I charge
+you not to tell him. Upon your love for me I command you--never to tell
+him! Kiss me, and dry these dear eyes. Put up your hair; a coil is
+loosened. He is waiting for us! Come!"
+
+
+
+
+XLII
+
+
+The tall, soldierly young figure was standing motionless and stiff, as
+though on guard, on the river-shore beyond the bend. Whatever
+apprehensions, whatever regrets, whatever fears may have warred within
+Beauvayse, whatever consciousness may have been his of having taken an
+irrevocable step, bound to bring disgrace and reproach, sorrow, and
+repentance upon the innocent as upon the guilty, he showed no sign as he
+came to meet them, and lifted the Service felt from his golden head, and
+held out an eager hand for Lynette's. She gave it shyly, and with the
+thrill of contact Beauvayse's last scruple fled. He turned his beautiful,
+flushed face and shining eyes upon the Mother, and asked with grave
+simplicity:
+
+"Ma'am, is not this mine?"
+
+"First tell me, do you know that there is nothing in it?"
+
+Her stern eyes searched his. He laughed and said, as he kissed the slender
+hand:
+
+"It holds everything for me!"
+
+"Another question. Are you aware that my ward is a Catholic?"
+
+"My wife will be of my mother's faith. I would not have her of any other."
+
+The Mother gave Beauvayse her own hand then, that was marred by many deeds
+of charity, but still beautiful.
+
+Those two, linked together for a moment in their mutual love of her, made
+for Lynette a picture never to be forgotten. Then Beauvayse said, in the
+boyish tone that made the man irresistible:
+
+"You have made me awfully happy!"
+
+"Make her happy," the Mother answered him, with a tremble in her rich,
+melancholy tones, "and I ask no more."
+
+Her own heart was bleeding, but she drew her black draperies over the
+wound with a resolute hand. Was not here a Heaven-sent answer to all her
+prayers for her beloved? she asked herself, as she looked at the girl.
+Eyes that beamed so, cheeks that burned with as divine a rose, had looked
+back at Lady Biddy Bawne out of her toilet-glass, upon the night of that
+Ascot Cup-Day, when Richard had asked her to be his wife. But Richard's
+eyes had never worn the look of Beauvayse's. Richard's hand had never so
+trembled, Richard's face had never glowed like this. Surely here was Love,
+she told herself, as they went back to the place of trodden grass where
+the tea-making had been.
+
+The Sisters, basket and trestle-laden, were already in the act of
+departure. The black circle of the dead fire marked where the giant kettle
+had sung its hospitable song. Little Miss Wiercke and her long-locked
+organist, the young lady from the Free Library and her mining-engineer,
+had strolled away townwards, whispering, and arm-in-arm; the Mayor's wife
+was laying the dust with tears of joy as she trudged back to the Women's
+Laager beside a husband who pushed a perambulator containing a small boy,
+who had waked up hungry and wanted supper; the Colonel and Captain Bingo
+Wrynche had been summoned back to Staff Headquarters, and a pensive little
+black-eyed lady in tailor-made alpaca and a big grey hat, who was sitting
+on a tree-stump knocking red ants out of her white umbrella, as those
+three figures moved out of the shadows of the trees, jumped up and hurried
+to meet them, prattling:
+
+"I couldn't go without saying a word.... You have been so beset with
+people all the afternoon that I never got a chance to put my oar in. Dear
+Reverend Mother, everything has gone off so well. No clergyman will ever
+preach again about Providence spreading a table in the wilderness without
+my coming back in memory to to-day. May we walk back together? I am a mass
+of ants, and mosquito-bitten to a degree, but I don't think I ever enjoyed
+myself so much. No, Lord Beauvayse, the path is narrow, and I have a
+perfect dread of puff-adders. Please go on before us with Miss Mildare.
+No!... Oh, what ...? You haven't ...?"
+
+It was then that Lady Hannah dropped the white umbrella and clapped her
+hands for joy. Something of mastery and triumph in the young man's face,
+something in the pale radiance of the girl's, something of the mingled joy
+and anguish of the pierced maternal heart shining in the Mother's great
+grey eyes, had conveyed to the exultant little woman that the plant that
+had thriven upon the arid soil of Gueldersdorp had borne a perfect blossom
+with a heart of ruby red.
+
+"Oh, you dears! you two beautiful dears! how happy you look!" she crowed.
+"I must kiss you both!" She did it. "Say that this isn't to be kept
+secret!" She clasped her tiny hands with exaggerated entreaty. "For the
+sake of the _Gueldersdorp Siege Gazette_, and its seven hundred
+subscribers all perishing for news, tell me I may let the cat out of the
+bag in my next Weekly Column. Only say that people may know!"
+
+As her black eyes snapped at Beauvayse, and her tiny hands dramatically
+entreated, he had an instant of hesitation, palpable to one who stood by.
+In an instant he pulled himself together.
+
+"The whole world may know, as far as I am concerned."
+
+"It is best," said the Mother's soft, melodious voice, "that our world, at
+least, should know."
+
+"And when--oh, when Is It To Be?" begged Lady Hannah.
+
+Confound the woman! Why could she not let well alone? A sullen anger
+burned in Beauvayse as he said, and not in the tone of the ardent lover:
+
+"As soon as we can possibly manage it."
+
+The Mother's voice said, coldly and clearly:
+
+"I do not approve of long engagements. If the marriage takes place, it
+must be soon."
+
+With the consciousness of one who is impelled to take a desperate leap,
+Beauvayse found himself saying:
+
+"It cannot be too soon."
+
+"Then ... before the Relief?" cried Lady Hannah, and Beauvayse heard
+himself answering:
+
+"If Lynette agrees?"
+
+The rapture of submission in her look was intoxicating. He reached out his
+hand and laid it lightly on her shoulder. Then, without another word, they
+went on together, and the tall, soldierly figure in brown, and the
+slender shape in the green skirt and little white coat, with the dainty
+plumed hat crowning the squirrel-coloured hair, were seen in darkening
+relief against the flaming orange of the sky.
+
+"A Wedding under Fire. Bridal Ceremony in a Beleaguered City," murmured
+the enthusiastic journalist. Her gold fountain-pen, hanging at her
+chatelaine, seemed to wriggle like a thing of life, as she imagined
+herself aiding, planning, assisting at, and finally sitting down to
+describe the ceremony and the wedding-veil on the little Greek head. She
+babbled as her quick, bird-like gait carried her along beside the tall,
+stately-moving figure in the black habit:
+
+"Dear Bridget ... I may call you that for the sake of old days?"
+
+"If you like."
+
+"This must make you very happy. Society mothers of marriageable daughters
+will tear their transformations from their heads, and dance upon them in
+despair, when they hear that Beau _s'est range_. But that I don't hold
+forth to worldly ears I would enlarge upon the immense social advantages
+of such a union for that dear child."
+
+"Of course, I am aware that it is an excellent match."
+
+Were her ears so unworldly? The phrase rankled in her conscience like a
+thorn. And in what respect were those Society mothers less managing than
+the nun? she asked herself. Could any of them have been more astute, more
+eager, more bent on hooking the desirable _parti_ for their girls than she
+had shown herself just now? And was this, again, an unworldly voice
+whispering to her that the publicity ensured by a paragraph penned by this
+gossip-loving little lady would fix him even more securely, bind him more
+strongly, make it even less possible for him to retreat, should he desire
+it--by burning his boats behind him, so that he had no alternative but to
+go on? She sickened with loathing of herself. But for her there was no
+retreat either. Here Lady Hannah helped her unawares. With a side-glance
+at the noble face beside her, pale olive-hued, worn and faded beyond the
+age of the woman by her great labours and her greater griefs, the arched
+black eyebrows sprinkled of late with grey, the eyelids thin over the
+mobile eyeballs, purpled with lack of sleep and secret, bitter weeping,
+the close-folded, deeply cut, eloquent mouth withered like a
+japonica-bloom that lingers on in frost, the strong, salient chin framed
+in the snowy, starched _guimpe_, she faltered:
+
+"You don't shy at the notion of the par--the announcement in the _Siege
+Gazette_, I mean?..."
+
+"Upon the contrary, I approve of it," said the Mother, and walked on very
+fast, for the bells of the Catholic Church were ringing for Benediction.
+
+"Is it good-night, or may I come in?" Beauvayse whispered to Lynette in
+the porch.
+
+She dipped her slender fingers in the little holy-water font beside the
+door, and held them out to him.
+
+"Come in," she answered, and held white, wet fingers out to him. He
+touched them with a puzzled smile.
+
+"Am I to----? Ah, I remember!"
+
+Their eyes met, and the golden radiance in hers passed into his blood. He
+bared his high, fair head as she made the sign of the Cross, and followed
+her in and up the nave as Father Wix, in purple Lenten stole over the
+snowy cotta starched and ironed by Sister Tobias's capable hands, began to
+intone the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. The Sisters were already in
+their places--a double row of black-draped figures, the Mother at the end
+of the first row, Lady Hannah in the chair beside her, where Lynette had
+always sat until now. It was not without a pang that the one saw her place
+usurped by a stranger; it was piercing pain to the other to feel the
+strange presence at her side. But something had already come between these
+two, dividing them. Something invisible, impalpable as air, but
+nevertheless thrusting them apart with a force that might not be resisted.
+
+Only the elder of the two as yet knew clearly what it meant. The younger
+was too dizzy with her first heady draught from the cup of joy, held to
+her lips by the strong, beautifully-shaped brown hand that rested on
+Beauvayse's knee as he sat, or propped up Beauvayse's chin as he knelt,
+stiff as a young crusader on a monument, beside her. But the Mother knew.
+Would not the God Who had been justly offended in her, His vowed servant,
+that day, exact to the last tittle the penalty? She knew He would.
+
+Rosary ended, the thin, kind-eyed little elderly priest preached, taking
+for the text of his discourse the Introit from the Office of
+Quinquagesima.
+
+"_Esto mihi in Deum protectorum, et in locum refugii, ut salvum me
+facias._"
+
+"Be Thou unto me a God, a protector, and a place of refuge, to save me:
+for Thou art my strength...."
+
+Then the _O Salutaris_ was sung, and followed by the Litany of the Holy
+Name.
+
+The church was crowded. A Catholic congregation is always devout, but
+these people, well-dressed or ill-dressed, prosperous or poor, pale-faced
+and hollow-eyed every one, joined in the office with passion. The
+responses came like the beating of one wave of human anguish upon the Rock
+of Ages.
+
+"_Have mercy on us!_"
+
+Hungry, they cried to One Who had hungered. Sinking with weariness, they
+appealed to One Who had known labours, faintings, agonies, and
+desolations.
+
+"_Have mercy on us!_"
+
+He had drunk of Death for them, had been buried and had risen again.
+
+Death was all about them. They could hear the beating of his wings, could
+see the red sweep of his blood-wet, dripping scythe. And they prayed as
+they had never prayed before these things befell:
+
+"_Have mercy on us!_"
+
+They sang the _Tantum Ergo_, and the cloud of incense rose from the censer
+in the priest's hand. Then, at the thin, sweet tinkle of the bell, and the
+first white gleam of the Unspeakable Mystery upheld by the servant of the
+Altar, the heads bowed and sank as when a sudden wind sweeps over a field
+of ripened corn. Only one or two remained unmoved, one of these a man's
+head, young and crisply-waved, and golden....
+
+And then came the orderly crowding to the door, and they were outside
+under the great violet sky, throbbing with splendid stars, breathing the
+tainted air that came from the laagers and the trenches. But oh, was there
+ever a sweeter night, following upon a sweeter day?
+
+Beauvayse's hand found and pressed Lynette's. She looked up and saw his
+eyes shining in the starlight. He looked down and saw the Convent lily
+transformed into a very rose of womanhood.
+
+"I am on duty at Staff Bombproof South to-night. What I would give to be
+free to walk home with you!"
+
+Lady Hannah's jangling laugh came in.
+
+"Haven't you had the whole day? Greedy, unconscionable young man! Say
+good-night to her, and be off and get some food into you. Don't say you
+haven't any appetite. I am hungry enough to be interested even in minced
+mule and spatch-cocked locusts, after all this. Good-night! I must kiss
+you again, child! I hope you don't mind?"
+
+Lynette gave her cheek, asking:
+
+"Where is the Mother?"
+
+The voice of Sister Tobias answered out of the purplish darkness:
+
+"She has gone on with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophee, dearie. She
+is going to sleep at the Convent with them, and I was to give you her
+love, and say good-night."
+
+Say good-night! On this of all nights was Lynette to be dismissed without
+even the Mother's kiss? She gave back Beauvayse's parting hand-pressure
+almost mechanically. Then she heard his voice, close at her ear, say
+pantingly:
+
+"No one will see.... Please, dearest!"
+
+She turned her head, and their lips met under cover of the pansy-coloured
+darkness.... Then he was gone with Lady Hannah, and Lynette was walking
+home to the Convent bombproof, explaining to the astonished Sisters that
+the Mother knew; that the Mother approved of her engagement to Lord
+Beauvayse; and that they would probably be married very soon. Before the
+Relief ...
+
+"'Before the Relief.' Well, no one but Our Lord knows when that's to
+be.... And so you're very happy, are you, dearie?"
+
+Even as she gave her shy assent in answer to Sister Tobias's question, its
+commonplace homeliness, like the feeling of the thick dust and the
+scattered debris underfoot, brought back Lynette for a moment out of the
+golden, diamond-dusted, pearl-gemmed dream-world in which she had been
+straying, to wonder, Was she really very happy?
+
+She asked herself the question sitting with the Sisters at their little
+scanty supper. She asked herself as she knelt with them in prayer, as she
+lay in bed, the Mother's place vacant beside her--Was she happy after all?
+
+She had drunk sweetness, but there had been a tang of something in the cup
+that cloyed the palate and sickened the soul. She had learned the love of
+man, and in a measure it had cast out fear, that had been her earlier
+lesson.
+
+
+
+
+To be held and taken and made his completely, what must it be like? She
+glowed in the darkness at the thought. And then the recollection of a
+ruthless strength that had rent away the veil of innocence from a
+woman-child surged back upon her.
+
+Just think. Suppose you laid your hand in the warm, strong clasp that
+thrilled delight to every nerve, and set your heart beating, beating, and,
+drawn by the shining grey-green jewel-eyes and the mysterious, wooing
+smile upon the beautiful lips, and the coaxing, caressing tones of the
+voice that so allured, you gave up all else that had been so dear, and
+went away with him? What then? Suppose----
+
+Suppose the smiling face of Love should turn out to be nothing but a mask
+hiding the gross and brutal leer of Lust, what then? She saw that other
+man's dreadful face, painted in hot and living colours upon the darkness.
+She writhed as if to tear her lips from the savage, furious mouth. She
+shuddered and grew cold there in the sultry heat. The clasp of the
+protecting mother-arms might have driven away her terror, but she was
+alone. It would have been sweet to be alone that night if she had been
+happy.
+
+Why had the Mother shunned her? She knew that she had. Why had she felt,
+even with the glamour of _his_ presence about her, and the music of his
+voice in her ears, that all was not well?
+
+Why, even with the lifting of her burden, in the unutterable relief of
+hearing, from the lips that had been her law, that her dreadful secret
+need never be revealed, had she felt consternation and alarm? The words
+were written in fiery letters, on the murky dark of the bombproof, where
+the tiny lamp that had hung before the Tabernacle on the altar of the
+Convent chapel now burned, a twinkling red star, before the silver
+Crucifix that hung upon the east wall.
+
+"He is not to be told. I command you never to tell him!"
+
+The doubt germinated and presently pushed through a little spear. Had
+those lips given right counsel or wrong? Ought he to be told? Was it
+dishonest, was it traitorous, to hide the truth? And yet, what are the
+lives of even the upright, and clean, and continent among men, compared
+with the life of a girl bred as she had been? The sin had not been hers.
+She, the victim, was blameless. And yet, and yet ...
+
+To this girl, who had learned to see the Face of Christ and of His Mother
+reflected in one human face that had smiled down upon her, waking in the
+little white bed in the Convent infirmary from the long, recuperating
+sleep that turns the tide of brain-fever, the thought that a shadow of
+deceit could mar its earnest, candid purity was torture. Months back they
+had said to her--the lips that had given her the first kiss she had
+received since a dying woman's cold mouth touched the sleeping face of a
+yellow-haired baby held to her in a strong man's shaking hands, as the
+trek-waggon rolled and rumbled over the veld:
+
+"The man who may one day be your husband will have the right to know."
+
+It was a different voice to the one that had commanded, "You are never to
+tell him!" Lynette lay listening to those two voices until the alarm-clock
+belled and the Sisters rose at midnight for matins. Then she lay listening
+to the soft murmur of voices in the dark, as the red lamp glimmered before
+the silver Christ upon the wall. The nuns needed no light, knowing the
+office by heart:
+
+"_Delicta quis intelligit? ab occultis meis munda me, et ab alienis parce
+servo tuo_"--"Who can comprehend what sin is? Cleanse me from my hidden
+sins, and from those of others save Thy servant."
+
+The antiphon followed the _Gloria_, and then the soft womanly voices
+chanted the twenty-third Psalm:
+
+"_Quis ascendit in montem Domini?_"--"Who shall ascend to the Mount of
+the Lord, and who shall dwell in His holy Sanctuary? Those who do no ill
+and are pure.... Who do not give their heart to vain desires, or deceive
+their neighbour with false oaths."
+
+Or deceive ... with false oaths. To marry a man, letting him think you ...
+something you were not ... did not that amount to deceiving by a false
+oath?
+
+Lynette lay very still. The last "Hail, Mary!" over, the Sisters returned
+silently to bed. Wire mattresses creaked under superimposed weight. Long
+breaths of wakefulness changed into the even breathing of slumber. The
+only one who snored was Sister Tobias, a confirmed nasal soloist, whose
+customary cornet-solo was strangely missing. Was Sister Tobias lying awake
+and remembering too?
+
+Sister Tobias was the only other person in the Convent besides the Mother,
+who knew. She had helped her faithfully and tenderly to nurse Lynette
+through the long illness that had followed the finding of that lost lamb
+upon the veld. She was a homely creature of saintly virtues, the Mother's
+staff and right hand. And it was she who had asked Lynette if she was
+happy?
+
+Somebody was moving. The grey light of dawn was filtering down the
+drain-pipe ventilators and through the chinks in the tarpaulins overhead.
+A formless pale figure came swiftly to Lynette's bedside. She guessed who
+it must be. She sat up wide awake, and with her heart beating wildly in
+her throat.
+
+"Dearie!" The whisper was Sister Tobias's. She could make out the glimmer
+of the white, plain nightcap framing the narrow face with the long,
+sagacious nose and wise, kindly, patient eyes. "Are you awake, dearie?"
+
+"Yes," Lynette whispered back, shuddering. The dry, warm, hard hand felt
+about for her cold one, and found and took it. Lips came close to her ear,
+and breathed:
+
+"Dearie, this grand young gentleman you're engaged to be married to ..."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"_Has he been told? Does he know?_"
+
+The long, plain face was close to Lynette's. In the greying light she
+could see it clearly. Her heart beat in heavy, sickening thuds. Her teeth
+chattered, and whole body shook as if with ague, as she faltered:
+
+"The Mother says--he is not to be told."
+
+There was a dead silence. It was as if an iron shutter had suddenly been
+pulled down and clamped home between them. Then Sister Tobias said in a
+tone devoid of all expression:
+
+"The Mother knows best, dearie, of course. Lie down and go to sleep."
+
+Then silence settled back upon the Convent bombproof, but sleep did not
+come to everybody there.
+
+
+
+
+XLIII
+
+
+The Mother was kneeling, as she had knelt the whole night through, before
+the dismantled altar in the battered little chapel of the Convent, with
+the big white stars looking down upon her through the gaps in the
+shell-torn roof. When it was the matin-hour she rose and rang the bell.
+Matins over, she still knelt on. When it was broad day she broke her fast
+with the Sisters, and went about the business of the day calmly,
+collectedly, capably as ever. Only her face was white and drawn, and great
+violet circles were about her great tragical grey eyes.
+
+"The blessed Saint she is!" whispered the nuns one to the other.
+
+If she had heard them, it would have added yet another iron point to the
+merciless scourge of her self-scorn.
+
+A Saint, in that stained garment! What tears of bitterness had fallen that
+night upon the shameful blots that marred its whiteness! But for Richard's
+child, even though she herself should become a castaway, she must go on to
+the end. All the chivalry in her rose in arms to defend the young,
+shame-burdened, blameless head.
+
+Ah! if she had known?...
+
+Cold, light, cruel eyes had watched from across the river that day as her
+tall, imposing figure, side by side with the slender, more lightly-clad
+one, moved between the mimosa-bushes and round the river-bend. When the
+two were fairly out of sight, the jungle of tree-fern and cactus had
+rustled and cracked. Then the burly, thickset, powerful figure of a
+bearded man pushed through, traversed the reed-beds, and, leaping from
+boulder to boulder, crossed the river. Before long the man was standing on
+the patch of trodden grass and flowers in the lee of the great boulder,
+shutting up a little single-barrelled, brass-mounted field-glass that had
+served him excellently well.
+
+
+
+
+He was Bough, _alias_ Van Busch, otherwise the man who had come in through
+the enemy's lines as a runner from Diamond Town, bringing the letter from
+a hypothetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist. His light
+eyes, that were set flat in their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked
+about and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of
+black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. Van
+Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little
+tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The daintiness of the
+little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly than anything else, that
+the Kid had become a lady.
+
+For it was the girl, sure. No error about that little white face of hers,
+with the pointed chin, and the topaz-coloured eyes, and the reddish hair.
+The glass had brought her near enough to make that quite certain. He had
+been too far off to hear a word, but he had made out what had been going
+on very well. First, she had been giddying with the tall young English
+swell, drawing him on while he seemed courting her, as all women knew how
+to, and then the tall Sister of Mercy had come and rowed her; and she had
+cried, thrown down there among the grass and flowers, exactly as if
+somebody had beaten her with a sjambok to cure her of the G. D.'d
+obstinacy that had to be thrashed out of women, if you would have them get
+to heel when you chose it, or come at your call when you chose again.
+
+Suppose he chose again. When a man with brains in his holy head once set
+them to work, there were few things he could not do. He could scare others
+off his property, for certain. He could exercise upon the girl herself the
+unlimited power of Fear. He must lie doggo because of the Doctor. It was a
+thundering queer chance the Doctor turning up in this place. And as one of
+the bosses, helping to run the show, and powerful enough to pay off old
+scores, if he should chance to recognise in the densely bearded face of
+the man from Diamond Town the features of the Principal Witness in the
+once-famous Old Bailey Criminal Case: "The Crown _v._ Saxham."
+
+Bough would lie low, and watch, and wait, and then spring, as the
+tarantula springs. He had cleverly blurred all trails leading back to the
+tavern on the veld, and he knew enough of girls and women to believe that
+this girl had kept secret what had happened there. He would pick up with
+her, anyway, and offer to marry her and make an honest girl of her. If she
+had a snivelling fancy for the dandy swell who had made love to her and
+kissed her, he would threaten to tell the fellow the truth unless she gave
+him up. Or he would blow on her to the nuns she lived with, and they would
+have nothing more to do with her.
+
+Voor den donder! suppose they knew already? The plan wanted careful
+working out. A false step, and Gueldersdorp might become unhealthy for the
+man who had brought the letter from Diamond Town to oblige Mrs. Casey.
+
+Suppose the spoor that led back to the tavern on the veld and the grave by
+the Little Kopje, not as well hidden as Bough had thought, those jewels
+and securities and the one thousand seven hundred pounds cash might get an
+honest man into trouble yet, even after the lapse of seventeen years. He
+breathed heavily, and the pupils of his strange light eyes dilated, and
+the sweat rolled off his forehead and cheeks until the skin shone like
+copper. He had been a reckless, easy-going young chap of twenty-six
+seventeen years ago. Forty-three years of life had taught him that when
+you are least expecting them to, buried secrets are sure to resurrect. No,
+Gueldersdorp was not a healthy place for Bough or for Van Busch! That
+chattering little paroquet of a woman with the sharp black eyes might use
+them one day, to the detriment of the philanthropist who had brought in
+the letter from Diamond Town for Mrs. Casey.
+
+Then the girl!... He grinned in his bushy beard, thinking how thundering
+scared she would look if she encountered him by chance, and recognised
+him. The beard would not hide him from her eyes. No, no! And he smelled at
+the little tan glove, that had a slight, clean, delicate perfume about
+it, and thrust it into his breeches-pocket, and crossed the river again,
+making his way back to the native town by devious native paths that snaked
+and twined and twisted through the tangled bush, as he himself made his
+tortuous progress through the world.
+
+He was in an evil mood, made blacker by the prospect of spending a lonely
+night without the solace of liquor or woman. For Vice was at a low ebb in
+Gueldersdorp just now, and the commonest dop was barely obtainable at the
+price of good champagne, and it would not do for the man from Diamond Town
+to seem flush of dollars.
+
+Sure, no, that would never do! He must make out with the tobacco he still
+had left, and the big lump of opium he carried in a tin box in a pocket of
+the heavy money-belt he wore under his miner's flannel shirt. He groped
+for the tin box, and got it, and bit off a corner of the sticky brown
+lump, and ate it as he went along, and his laboured breathing calmed, and
+the chilly sweat dried upon his copper-burned skin, that had the
+purplish-black tinge in it that comes of saturation with iodide of
+potassium. And the pupils of his colourless eyes dwindled to pin-points,
+and his thick hands ceased to shake. He was not the man he had been; and
+he had learned the opium-habit from a woman who had managed a joint at
+Johannesburg, and it grew upon him--the need of the soothing, supporting
+deadener. He went along now, under the influence of it, scarcely feeling
+the ground under his heavy leather veldschoens.
+
+He trod on something presently, lying on the path. It moved and whimpered.
+He struck a match with a steady hand, and held the glimmering blue
+phosphorus-flame downwards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the
+Barala, who had crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-gut and
+a sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The Barala, though they
+were sorely pinched, like their European fellow-men, did not starve. They
+earned pay and rations. They helped to keep the enemy out on the south and
+west sides of the town, and dug most of the trenches--often under
+fire--and ran the despatches, and sometimes brought in fresh meat. But
+their slaves, and the native hangers-on at the kraals, suffered horribly.
+They ate the dogs that had been shot, and the other kind of dog, and
+fought with the live ones for bones, and picked up empty meat-tins and
+licked them. They stalked about the town and the native stad like living
+skeletons. They dropped and died on the dust-heaps they had been rummaging
+for offal. Soup-kitchens were started later on, when it was found how
+things were going with them, and hides and bones and heads of horses and
+mules were boiled down into soup, and they were fed. But a time was to
+come when even that soup was wanted to keep the life in white people. You
+saw the famine-stricken black spectres crawling from refuse-pile to
+refuse-pile, and dying in that pitiless, beautiful sunshine, under the
+blue, blue February sky, because white people had got to keep on living.
+
+The native girl had been too weak to kill anything. Death had come upon
+her in the midst of the teeming life of the jungle, and she had fallen
+down there in her ragged red blanket among the tree-roots that arched and
+knotted over the path. Her eyes were already rolled up and set. They
+stared blindly, horribly, out of the ashen-black face. When she heard the
+steps of a shod person the last spark of life glimmered feebly up in her.
+Her wild, keen, savage power of scent yet remained. She smelled a white
+man, and her cracked and swollen lips moved, and a voice like the sound
+made by the rubbing of dry canes together uttered the word that is the
+same in Dutch and English:
+
+"Water!"
+
+Bough's pale, flat, scintillating eyes were quite expressionless, but his
+thick lips parted, and his strong yellow teeth showed in his thick brake
+of beard. With the caution of one who knows that a single glowing
+match-end dropped among dry vegetation may cause a devastating
+conflagration, he blew out the lingering flame, and rolled the little
+charred stick between his tough-skinned fingers before he threw it down.
+Then he raised himself up, and stepped over the dying creature, and went
+upon his way, humming a dance-tune he liked. He was not changed. It was
+still a joy to him to have feebler beings in his power, and taunt and
+torture and use them at his will.
+
+He had assumed the skin of the man from Diamond Town in the well-paid
+service of that bright boy of Brounckers', who had, it may be remembered,
+a plan.
+
+The plan involved a feint from the eastward, and an attack upon that
+weakest spot in the girdle of Gueldersdorp's defences, the native stad.
+The Barala might be incorruptible; the weak spot was the native village,
+nevertheless. And the business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge
+about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his to excellent
+purpose, and storing his retentive memory--for it would not do for a
+stranger to be caught putting pencil to paper in a town under Martial Law,
+and bristling with suspicion--with the information indispensable for the
+putting in effect of young Schenk Eybel's ingenious plan.
+
+The jackal had had to yield his bone to the hungry lion. Still, it was
+wise to be in good odour with the Republics; that was why Van Busch had
+taken on the job. He had not been impelled to risk his skin, and get shut
+up in this stinking, starving hole by anything the sharp-eyed little
+Englishwoman, so unpleasantly awake at last regarding the genuine aims and
+real character of the chivalrous Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg, had
+dropped. Hell, no! That unripe nectarine had been plucked and eaten years
+ago. And yet how the ripe fruit allured him to-day, seen against its
+background of dull green leaves, its smooth cheeks glowing under the
+kisses of the sun.
+
+The swell English officer had kissed them too. As she meant, the sly
+little devil, slipping away for her bit of fun. Grown a beauty, too, as
+anybody but a thundering, juicy, damned fool might have known she would!
+He swore bitterly, thinking what a gold-mine a face and figure like that
+might have proved to an honest speculator up Johannesburg way.
+
+His case, he thought, was somewhat similar to that of old Baas Jacobs, the
+Boer who found the first great South African diamond on his farm near
+Hopetown, and threw it down beside the door, with other pretty shining
+pebbles, for his child to play with. The child's mother tossed it to Van
+Niekirk as a worthless gift. Van Niekirk passed it on to J. O'Reilly. When
+the English Government mineralogist pronounced the stone a diamond, and
+the Colonial Secretary and the French Consul sent it to the Paris
+Exhibition, and the Governor of the Colony bought the jewel, old Baas
+Jacobs must have felt mighty sick. All the world hungering, and admiring,
+and coveting the beautiful thing he had thrown down on the ground....
+Small wonder that to the end of his days he had talked as a robbed man.
+
+The jewel Bough had left on the veld had belonged to him once. Well, it
+should be his again. He swore that with a blasphemous oath. Thenceforward
+he proceeded warily, feeling his way, formulating his plan, a human
+tarantula, evil-eyed and hairy-clawed, calculating the sudden leap upon
+its prey; an adder coiled, waiting the moment to strike....
+
+
+
+
+XLIV
+
+
+Saxham was shooting on the veld, north of the Clayfields, in a ginger-hued
+dust-wind and a grilling sun. Upon his right showed the raw red ridge of
+the earthworks, where two ancient seven-pounders were entrenched in charge
+of a handful of Cape Police. The pits of the sniping riflemen scarred
+across the river-bed some fifty yards in advance. Upon his left, some two
+hundred yards farther north, the recently resurrected ship's gun, twelve
+feet of honeycombed metal, stamped on the flank "No. 6 Port," and casting
+solid shot of eighteenth-century pattern, projected a long black nose from
+Fort Ellerslie, and every time the venerable weapon went off without
+bursting, the Town Guards occupying the Fort and manning the eastern
+entrenchments raised a cheer.
+
+Saxham, emptying and filling the magazine with cool, methodical
+regularity, kept changing his position with a restlessness and
+recklessness puzzling alike to friends and foes. Now he aimed and fired,
+lying "doggo" behind his favourite stone, while bullets from the enemy's
+trenches flattened themselves upon it, or buried themselves harmlessly in
+the dry hot soil. Now he moved from cover, and shot squatting on his
+heels, or sprawled lizard-like in the open, courting the King of Terrors
+with a calm indifference that was commented upon by those who witnessed it
+according to their lights.
+
+"Begob!" said Kildare, ex-driver of Engine 123, who, with the Cardiff man,
+his stoker of old, was doing duty at Fort Ellerslie _vice_ two Town
+Guardsmen permanently resting, "'tis a great perfawrumance the Doc is
+afther givin' as this day!" He coolly borrowed the gunner's
+sighting-glasses, and, with his keen eyes glued to them and his ragged
+elbows propped on the Fort parapet, he scanned the distant solitary
+figure, dropping the words out slowly one by one. "Twice have I seen the
+fur fly off av' wan av' thim hairy baboons av' Boers since he starrtud,
+an' supposin' the air a taste thicker, 'tis punched wid bullet-holes we'd
+be seem' ut all round 'um, the same as a young lady in the sky-in-terrific
+dhressmakin' line would be afther jabbin' out the pattern av' a shoot av'
+clothes."
+
+"And look you now, if the man is not lighting a pipe," objected the
+Cardiff stoker, whose religious tendencies were greatly fostered by the
+surroundings and conditions of siege life. "Sitting on a stone, with the
+rifle between his knees and the match between his two hands, as if the
+teffel was got tired of waiting, and had curled up and gone to sleep." The
+speaker sucked in his breath and solemnly shook his head, adding: "It is a
+temptation of the Tivine Providence, so it is!"
+
+"Sorra a timpt," rejoined Kildare, reluctantly surrendering the glasses to
+the gunner, a grey ex-sergeant of R.F.A., "sorra a timpt, knowin', as the
+Docthur knows, that do what he will and thry as he may, no bullut will do
+more than graze the hide av him, or sing in his ear."
+
+"And how will he know that, maybe you would be telling?" demanded the
+Cardiff stoker incredulously.
+
+"I seen his face," said Kildare, jerking a blackened thumb towards the
+gunner's sighting-glasses, "minnits back through thim little jiggers, an'
+to man or mortal that's as sick wid the hate av Life, an' as sharp-set
+with the hunger for Death as the Docthur is this day, no harrum will come.
+'Tis quare, but thrue."
+
+"I've 'ad a try at several kinds of 'ungers," said the R.E. Reserve man,
+who acted as gunner's mate. "There's the 'unger for glory, combined with a
+smart uniform wot'll make the gals stare, as drives a man to 'list.
+There's the 'unger for kisses an' canoodlin' wot makes yer want to please
+the gals. There's the 'unger for revenge, wot drives yer to bash in a
+bloke's face, and loses you yer stripes if 'e 'appens to be your Corp'ril.
+Then there's the 'unger for gettin' under cover when you're bein' sniped,
+an' the 'unger for blood, when you've got the Hafridis, or the Fuzzies, or
+the Dutchies, at close quarters, and the bay'nits are flickerin' in an'
+out of the dirty caliker shirts or the dirty greatcoats like Jimmy O!
+There's the 'unger for freedom and fresh hair when you're shut up in a
+filthy mud cattle-pound like this 'ere Fort, or a stinkin' trench, with a
+'andful of straw to set on by day an' a ragged blanket to kip in by
+nights. But the 'unger to die is a 'unger _I_ ain't acquainted with. I'm
+for livin' myself."
+
+"I was hungry when you began to jaw," snarled the man who had been clerk
+to the County Court. His lips were black and cracking with fever, and his
+teeth chattered despite the fierce sunshine that baked the red clay
+parapet against which he leaned his thin back. "I'm hungrier now, and
+thirsty as well. Give the bucket over here." He drank of the thick,
+yellowish, boiled water eagerly and yet with disgust, spilling the liquid
+on his tattered clothing through the shaking of his wasted hands. Then he
+turned to the wall, and lay down sullenly, scowling at the lantern-jawed
+sympathiser who tried to thrust a rolled-up coat under his aching head.
+
+"They'll be bringin' us our foddher at twelve av the clock," said Kildare,
+with a twinkle of inextinguishable humour in his hollow eyes.
+"Shuperannuated cavalry mount stuped in warrum kettle-gravy, wid a block
+av baked sawdust for aich man that can get ut down. 'Tis an insult to the
+mimory av the boiled bacon an' greens I would be aiting this day at
+Carricknavore, to say nothin' av' the porther an' whisky that would be
+washing ut down. Lashin's and lavin's there 'ud be for ivery wan, an' what
+was over, me fadher--God be good to the ould boy alive or dead!--would be
+disthributin' amongst the poor forninst the dure----"
+
+"Beg pardon, sir." Another of the famine-bitten, ragged little garrison
+addressed the question to the officer in charge of the Fort battery, as he
+stepped down from the lookout with his field-glass in his hand. "Can you
+tell us the difference of time between South Africa and England?"
+
+"Two hours at Capetown. I'm not quite sure about the difference at
+Gueldersdorp." The Lieutenant went over to the ancient smooth-bore, and
+conferred with the gunners standing at her breech. The winches groaned,
+the heavy mass of metal tilted on the improvised mounting, as the man to
+whom the Lieutenant had replied said, with a quaver of longing in his
+voice:
+
+"'Two hours! My God, suppose it only took that time to get home!"
+
+"It 'ud be a sight easier to 'ang on 'ere," said the R.E. Reserve man who
+acted as gunner's mate, "if there was such a thing as a plug o' baccy to
+be 'ad. Wot gives me the reg'lar sick is to see them well-fed Dutchies
+chawin' an' blowin', blowin' an' chawin', from mornin' till night----" He
+spat disgustedly.
+
+"When honust men," groaned Kildare, "would swop a year av life for a twist
+av naygurhead. Wirra-wirra!"
+
+There was a dry and mirthless laugh, showing teeth, white or discoloured,
+in haggard and bristly faces. Then a short young Corporal, who had been
+leaning back in an angle of the earthwork, hugging his sharp knees and
+staring at nothing in particular with pale-coloured, ugly, honest eyes,
+grew painfully crimson through his crust of sun-tan and grime, and said
+something that made the lean bodies in ragged, filthy tan-cord and
+dilapidated khaki, or torn and muddy tweed, slew round upon the unclean
+straw on which they squatted. All eyes, were they hunger-dull or
+fever-bright, sought the Corporal's face.
+
+"Dessay you'll think me a greedy 'ound," said the Corporal, with a painful
+effort that set the prominent Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking,
+"when you tyke in wot I've got to s'y. It makes me want to git into me own
+pocket and 'ide, to 'ave to tell it. For me an' you, we've shared an'
+shared alike, wotever we 'ad, while we 'ad anythink--except in one
+partic'lar." The Adam's apple jumped up and down as he gulped. He was
+burning crimson now to the roots of his ragged, light-brown hair, and the
+tips of his flat-rimmed, jutting ears, and the patch of thin bare chest
+that showed where his coarse grey back shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.
+
+All those eyes, feverishly bright or sickly dull, watched him as he put
+his hand into the bulging breast-pocket, and slowly fished out a shining
+brown briar-root with a stem unchewed as yet by any smoker.
+
+"Twig this 'ere noo pipe. It was sent me by a--by a friend, along of a
+packet of 'Oneydew, for a--for a kind o' birthday present." His voice
+wobbled strangely; there was scalding water dammed up behind his ugly
+honest eyes. "She--she bin an' opened the packet and filled the pipe, an'
+I shared out the 'Oneydew in the trenches as far as it went, but I bin an'
+kep' the pipe, sayin' to myself I'd smoke it when she lighted it wiv 'er
+own 'ands, an' not--not before. Next day we"--the Adam's apple went up and
+down again--"we 'ad words, an' parted. I--I never set eyes on 'er dial
+since."
+
+The voice of W. Keyse ended in an odd kind of squeak. Nobody looked at him
+as he bit his thin lips furiously, and blinked the unmanly tears away.
+Then he went on: "It's--it's near on two months I bin lookin' for 'er.
+She--she--sometimes I think she's made a way out of the lines after
+another bloke--a kind o' Dutchy spy 'oo was a pal of 'ers, or--or else
+she's dead. There's times I've dreamed I seen 'er dead!" His voice bounded
+up in that queer squeak again. The word "dead" was wrung out of him like a
+long-fanged double molar. His lips were drawn awry in a grimace of
+anguish, and the pipe he held shook in his gaunt and grimy hand, so
+perilously that half a dozen other hands, as gaunt and even grimier, shot
+out as by a single impulse to save it from falling. "Tyke it an' smoke it
+between you," said W. Keyse, and the Adam's apple jerked again as he
+gulped. "But read the writin' on the bit o' pyper first, and mind
+you--mind you give it back." He resigned the treasure, and turned his face
+away.
+
+"Blessed Mary!" came in the accent of Kildare, breaking the silence, "let
+me hould ut in me han's!"
+
+"Spell out the screeve," ordered the R.E. Reserve man imperiously.
+
+The Town Guard who had questioned the officer about the difference of
+time, deciphered the blotty writing on the slip of paper pinned round the
+stem of the new briar-root. It ran thus:
+
+    "i ope yu wil Engoy this Pip Deer; i Fild it A Purpus with
+    Love and Menney Apey Riturnse. from
+
+  "FARE AIR."
+
+
+
+"'Is gal?" interrogated the Reserve man.
+
+"His girl," assented the man who had read.
+
+"And he never saw her no more, so he did not!" commented the Cardiff
+stoker as the pipe travelled from hand to hand to be smelt at, dandled,
+worshipped by every man in turn. Only the Sergeant-gunner, the grey-headed
+ex-Royal Field Artilleryman, maintained self-command by dint of looking
+very hard the other way. Then said Kildare impetuously:
+
+"Take ut back, Corp'ril Keyse. 'Tis little wan poipe av tobacca wud count
+for betune six starvin' savigees."
+
+"Wot I wants," growled the Reserve man, "is to over-'aul a bacca factory
+afire, and clap my mouth to 'er chimbley-shaft. So take it back, Corporal.
+It's no manner o' good to me!"
+
+All the other voices joined in the chorus, and the be-papered pipe was
+thrust back upon its owner. W. Keyse thanked them soberly, and put the
+gift of his lost love away.
+
+His pale, unbeautiful eyes had the anguish of despair in them, and the
+tooth of that sharp death-hunger of which Kildare had spoken was gnawing
+what he would have termed with simplicity "his inside." For if Emigration
+Jane were dead, what had Life left for him?
+
+After his first superb assumption of cold indifference had broken down he
+had sought her, feverishly at first, then doggedly, then with a dizzy
+sickness of terror and apprehension that made the letters of the
+type-written casualty-lists posted outside the Staff Headquarters in the
+Market Square turn apparent somersaults as he strove to read them. This
+was his punishment, that he should hunger as she had hungered, and still
+be disappointed, and learn by fellowship in keenest suffering what her
+pain had been.
+
+The "Fare Air" letters were some comfort. In the trench at night, when
+fever and rheumatism kept him from the dog-sleep that other men were
+snatching, he would hear her crying over and over: "Oh, cruel, to break a
+poor girl's heart!" And when sleep came he would track her through strange
+places, calling her to come back--to come back and be forgiven. And when
+he awakened from such dreams there would be tears upon his face. And each
+day he consulted the lists of killed and wounded, and once had staggered
+white-lipped to the mortuary-shed to identify a Jane Harris, and found
+her--oh, with what unutterable relief!--to be a coloured lady who had
+married a Rifleman. After that he had perked up, and continued his quest
+for the beloved needle lost in the haystack of Gueldersdorp with renewed
+belief in the ultimate possibility of finding it. Then, in the middle of
+one awful night, the darkness of his mental state had been luridly
+illuminated by the conviction that she had joined Slabberts. Now strange
+voices whispered always in his ears, saying that she was dead, and urging
+him to follow by the same dark road over which her trembling feet had
+stumbled.
+
+He heard those voices as he wrought and sweated with the gun-team at the
+levers, and the ponderous muzzle-loader rolled back upon the grooves of
+her improvised mounting. He heard it as they sponged the antique monster
+out, and fed it with a three-pound bolus of cordite, and a ten-pound ball
+of ancient pattern with the date of 1770. He heard it now again as he
+kneeled at a loophole in the parapet, watching Saxham. Those pale, ugly
+eyes of Billy Keyse were extraordinarily keen. He saw a grimy hand
+carefully balance an old meat-tin on the top of the parapet of the enemy's
+western entrenchment. He saw Saxham kneeling, aim and fire, and with the
+sharp rap of the exploding cartridge came a howl from the owner of the
+hand, who had not withdrawn it with sufficient quickness.
+
+Half a dozen rifle-muzzles came nosing through the loopholes at that yell.
+There was quite a little fusillade, and the sharp cracks and flashes in
+Saxham's vicinity told of the employment of explosive bullets. But not one
+hit the man. An unkempt Boer head bobbed up, looking for his corpse. The
+Winchester cracked, and the unkempt head fell forwards, its chin over the
+edge of the parapet, and stayed there staring until the comrades of its
+late owner pulled the dead man down by the heels.
+
+There was a cheer from the rifle-pits in the river-bed, and another from
+Fort Ellerslie, where eager, excited spectators jostled at the loopholes.
+A minute later the Fort's ancient bow-chaser barked loudly, and pitched a
+solid shot. The metal spheroid hit the ploughed-up ground some ninety feet
+in front of the parapet where the bloody head had hung, and over which
+those explosive bullets had been fired, rose in a cloud of dust, and
+literally jumped the trench. There was a roar of distant laughter as the
+ball began to roll, and shaggy heads of curious Boers, inured only to the
+latest inventions in lethal engineering, bobbed up to watch. More laughter
+accompanied the progress of the ball. But presently it encountered a mound
+of earth, behind which certain patriots were taking coffee, and rolled
+through, and the laughter ceased abruptly. There was a baggage-waggon
+beyond through which it also rolled, and behind the waggon a plump,
+contented pony was wallowing in the sand. When the ancient cannon-ball
+rolled through the pony, the owner spoke of witchcraft. But the patriots
+who had been sitting behind the mound made no comment then or
+thenceforward.
+
+At this juncture, and with almost a sensation of pleasure, Saxham saw his
+old acquaintance Father Noah climb out of his particular trench, briskly
+for one well stricken in years, and toddle out, laden with rifle, biltong
+bag, and coffee-can, to his favourite sniping-post, where a bush rose
+beside a rock, which was shaded by a small group of blue-gums. Soon the
+smoke of the veteran's pipe rose above his lurking-place, and as Saxham,
+with a grunt of satisfaction, stretched himself upon his stomach on the
+hot, sandy earth and pulled the lever, a return bullet sheared a piece off
+his boot-heel, and painfully jarred his ankle-bone.
+
+No one else was shooting at the big rooinek now. It was understood that
+Father Noah had a prior claim. And the old man peered hopefully up to see
+the result of his shot, and rubbed his eyes. For the hulking dief was
+standing, voor den donder! standing as he emptied his magazine, and the
+bullets sang about Father Noah as viciously as hornets roused to anger by
+the stripping of a decayed thatch. The magazine of the repeating-rifle
+emptied, Saxham calmly refilled it, causing the puzzled patriarch to waste
+many cartridges in wild shooting at that erect, indifferent mark, and
+finally to abandon the level-headed caution to which he owed his venerable
+years, and climb a tree to obtain a better view of the tactics of the
+enemy.
+
+Saxham laughed as the invisible hornets sang in the air about him. The
+battered solar helmet he wore was pierced through the hinder brim, and he
+was bleeding from a bullet-graze upon the knuckle of the second finger of
+his left hand. Since that Sunday afternoon beside the river, when he
+learned the madness of his hope and the hopelessness of his madness, he
+had taken risks like this daily, not in the deliberate desire of death,
+but as a man consulting Fate negatively.
+
+Father Noah would decide, one way or the other: the issue of their
+protracted duel should determine things for Saxham. If he sent the old man
+in, then there was Hope, if the superannuated, short-stocked Martini, with
+that steady old finger on the trigger, and that sharp old eye at the
+backsight, ended by accounting for Saxham, then there would be an end to
+this burning torment for ever. Strangely, he did not believe that he could
+be killed by any other hand than Father Noah's. Doubtless the long
+overstrain was telling upon him mentally, though physically the man seemed
+of wrought steel.
+
+"To-day will settle it, one way or the other. To-day----"
+
+As the thought passed through his mind, and he brought the sights into
+line with the mark, a scrap of white, fluttering some twenty inches lower
+down, caught his eye. He dropped the tip of the Winchester's foresight to
+the bottom of the backsight's V, and knew, almost before the shot rang
+out, and an ownerless Martini tumbled out of the tree-crotch, that Fate
+had decided for Saxham.
+
+Then he went back to the Hospital, grim-jawed and inscrutable as ever. A
+dirty white rag was being hoisted on a pole by one of the relatives of the
+deceased. Father Noah, with the long ends of his dirty grey beard raggedly
+bannering in the dust-wind, was still waiting for the bearers of the
+hastily improvised stretcher of sticks and green reims, as Saxham, having
+obtained a strip of black cloth with a needle and thread from the Matron,
+pulled off his jacket and sat down upon the end of the cot-bed in his
+little room, and neatly tacked a mourning-band upon the upper part of the
+left sleeve.
+
+It was his nature to absorb himself in whatever work he undertook. As he
+stitched, the crowded Hospital buzzed about him like a hive, the moans of
+sick men and the rattling breaths of the dying beat in waves of sound
+upon his brain, for the long rows of beds stood upon either side of the
+corridors now, with barely a foot of room between them. In the necessarily
+open space before the Doctor's door a woman's hurrying footsteps paused,
+there came a rustling, and a sheet of printed paper folded in half was
+thrust underneath.
+
+"The _Siege Gazette_, Doctor," called the Matron's pleasant womanly voice,
+as, simultaneously with the utterance of Saxham's brief word of thanks,
+she passed on. In the famine for news that possessed him, as every other
+human being in the town, the sight of the little badly-printed sheet was
+welcome, although it could hardly contain anything to satisfy his need. He
+set the last stitches, fastened and cut the thread, reached down a long
+arm from the foot of the bed, and took up the paper.
+
+The Latest Information had whiskers. The General Orders announced an issue
+of paper currency in small amounts, owing to the deplorable shortage of
+silver, congratulated those N.C.O.'s and men of the Baraland Irregulars
+who, under Lieutenant Byass, occupying the advanced Nordenfeldt position,
+had brought so effective a fire to bear upon the enemy's big gun that
+Meisje had been compelled to abandon her commanding position, and take up
+her quarters in a spot less advantageous, from the enemy's point of view.
+A reduction in the Forage ration was hinted at, and a string of Social
+Jottings followed, rows of asterisks exploding like squibs under every
+paragraphic utterance of the Gold Pen.
+
+Not for nothing had Captain Bingo dolefully boasted that his wife exuded
+Journalese from her very finger-ends. Saxham recognised in the style, the
+very table-Moselle of Fashionable Journalism. So like the genuine article
+in the shape of the bottle, the topping of gilt-foil, the arrangement of
+wire and string, that as the stinging foam overflowed the goblet, snapping
+in iridescent bubbles at the cautious sipper's nose, and evaporated,
+leaving nothing in particular at the bottom, it was barely possible to
+believe the vintage other than the genuine article from Fleet Street.
+Stay.... The French quotations were not enclosed in inverted commas. That
+let Lady Hannah out.
+
+"Society in Gueldersdorp," she wrote, "bubbles with interested expectation
+of the public announcement of a matrimonial engagement with which the
+intimate friends of the happy lovers profess _etre aux anges_.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Not for worlds would we draw the veil of delightful mystery completely
+aside from the secret of two young, charming and popular people. Yet it
+may be hinted that the elder son of a representative English House and
+heir of a sixteenth-century Marquisate, who is one of the most gallant and
+dashing among the many heroic defenders of our beleaguered town, proposes
+at no very distant date to lead to the altar one of the loveliest among
+the many lovely girls who grace Gueldersdorp's social functions.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Both bride-elect and bridegroom-to-be attended High Mass at the Catholic
+Church on Sunday, when the Rev. Father Wix, in apprising parishioners of
+the near approach of Lent, caused an irresistible smile to ripple over the
+faces of his hearers. _Toujours perdrix_ may sate in the long-run, but
+perpetually to _faire maigre_ is attended with even greater discomfort.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"We have pleasure in announcing the approaching marriage of Lieutenant the
+Right Hon. Viscount Beauvayse, Grey Hussars, Junior Aide to the Colonel
+Commanding H.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, to Miss Lynette Bridget-Mary
+Mildare, ward of the Mother-Superior, Convent of the Holy Way, North Veld
+Road."
+
+
+
+
+XLV
+
+
+Saxham has not been staring at the printed words because they have struck
+him to the heart with their intelligence, but--or so it seems to
+him--because they convey nothing. There is an aching pain at the back of
+his neck, and his mind is curiously dull and sluggish. But after a little
+he becomes aware that somebody is knocking at his door.
+
+"Who is it----"
+
+The Doctor thinks he utters these words, but in reality he has only made
+a harsh croaking sound that might mean anything. The door opens and shows
+the Chaplain standing smiling on the threshold.
+
+The Reverend Julius Fraithorn, no longer a worn and wasted pilgrim
+stumbling amongst the thorns and sharp stones of the Valley of the Shadow,
+appears in these days as a perfectly sound and healthy, if rather too
+narrow-shouldered, young Anglican clergyman, not unbecomingly arrayed, in
+virtue of his official position under martial authority, in a suit of
+Service khaki such as Saxham wears, with the black Maltese Cross on the
+collar and the band of the wide-peaked cap. Yellow puttees conceal the
+unduly spare proportions of his active legs, and the brown boots upon his
+long slender feet are dusty, as, indeed, is the rest of him, not with the
+reddish dust of the veld that powders Saxham to the very eyelashes, and
+lies in light drifts in every wrinkle of his garments, but with the
+yellowish dust of the town.
+
+"I rather thought," the Chaplain says, hesitating, as Saxham, without
+lifting his eyes, turns his square, white face upon the visitor, "that you
+said 'Come in'?"
+
+"Come in, and shut the door, and sit down," says Saxham heavily and
+thickly. And Julius does so, and, occupying the single cane-seated chair
+the bedroom boasts, glows upon Saxham with a sincerity of affection and a
+simplicity of admiration pleasant to see, and asks in his thin, sweet
+voice how things are going.
+
+"Things _are_ going," Saxham returns, seeming to wake from a heavy brown
+study. "You could not put it better or more clearly. Will you smoke?" He
+pitches a rubber tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the
+treasured box of matches that comes after, and as one man sparingly fills
+a well-browned meerschaum, and the other a blackened briar-root, with the
+weed that grows more rare and precious with every hour of these days of
+dearth: "That's one of the things that are going quickest after
+perchloride of mercury, carbolic, and extract of beef. As a fact, we are
+using formaldehyde as an anaesthetic in minor operations; and violet powder
+and starch, upon the external use of which I laid an embargo weeks ago, to
+the great indignation of the younger nurses, are being employed instead
+of arrowroot. And the more the medical stores diminish, the more the
+patients come rolling in."
+
+"And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty that crops up,
+finds in you the man to meet it and overcome it," says the Chaplain
+fervently. He is disposed to make a hero of this brilliant surgeon who has
+saved his life, and his enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's
+painfully-apparent lack of belief in certain vital spiritual truths that
+are the daily bread of fervent Christian souls. Now that he has become
+aware of the black band upon the sleeve of the jacket that lies across
+Saxham's knees, where he sits upon the end of the cot-bed that, with a
+tiny chest of drawers and a hanging bookshelf laden with volumes and
+instrument-cases, completes the furnishing of the narrow room, he says,
+with sympathy in his gentle voice and in the brown eyes that have the soft
+lustre of a deer's or of a beautiful woman's:
+
+"I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a friend?"
+
+"_Lost a friend?_"
+
+Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the Chaplain in a strange,
+dull way, and then forgets him for a minute or more. Baths are not to be
+had in Gueldersdorp in these days, and though it is not Sunday, when
+bathing in the river becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes that the
+Doctor's thick, close-cropped black hair is wet, and that broad streaks of
+shining moisture are upon his pale, square face, and that he breathes as
+though he had been running. But perhaps he has been sluicing his head in
+the washstand basin, thinks the Chaplain. No; the basin has not recently
+been used. And then it occurs to Julius, but not until he has noticed the
+starting veins and corded muscles on the backs of the hands that are
+clenched upon the jacket, that Saxham is suffering.
+
+"I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted himself to
+show," reflects the man of Religion looking at the man of Medicine. "And
+the absence of belief in Divine Redemption and a Future State must
+terribly intensify the pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to
+comfort him!" And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of sympathy,
+when the Funeral is to be.
+
+"Perhaps about the midday coffee-drinking," says Saxham heavily, "they
+would scrape a hole and dump him in. But they're not over fond of risks,
+and they would probably leave him where he is till nightfall."
+
+Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence and inspiration
+were his to employ in the healing of the man who has raised himself almost
+from the dead. But he can only falter something about the inscrutable
+designs of Providence, and not a sparrow falling to the ground unnoticed.
+And he expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope that Saxham's friend was
+prepared to meet his end.
+
+"I don't exactly suppose he expected it. He had a right to count upon
+pulling off the match," says Saxham, with a dreary shadow of a grin,
+"because a better man behind a gun than Father Noah you wouldn't easily
+meet. And Boers are fine shots, as a rule."
+
+"Boers.... A Boer.... I thought you told me you had lost a friend?" Mild
+astonishment is written on the Chaplain's face. And Saxham looks up, and
+the other sees that his eyeballs are heavily injected with blood, and that
+the vivid blue of their irises has strangely faded.
+
+"I gave him every opportunity to be my friend," says the dull voice
+heavily, "by moving out from cover, even by standing up. But no good. He
+suspected a ruse, and it worried him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his
+bandolier at me from a perch of vantage among the branches, and had
+started to refill it from a fresh package, when I got the chance, and
+brought him down spreadeagled. And so ends Father Noah."
+
+The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and shudders. A blue line
+marks itself about his mouth; he is conscious of a qualm of positive
+nausea as he says:
+
+"You--you don't mean you have been talking of a man you have shot?"
+
+"Just so," assents Saxham, and the sentence that follows is not uttered
+aloud. "And I wish with all my soul that the man had shot me!"
+
+"And this is War," says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls out his handkerchief
+and wipes his damp forehead and the beady blue lines about his mouth, and
+the crack and rattle of rifle-fire sweeping over the veld and through the
+town, and the ping, ping, ping! of Mauser bullets flattening on the iron
+gutter-pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof above them seem to answer
+"Certainly, War."
+
+"Why, you look sick, man," says Saxham the surgeon, whose keen
+professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's pallor, though the other
+Saxham is still dazed and blind, and stupefied by the blow that has been
+dealt him by Lady Hannah's gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and
+lightly touches one of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting him of a
+touch of fever, or town-water dysentery. But Julius jerks the wrist away.
+
+"I am perfectly well. It was--the way in which you spoke just now that
+rather--rather----"
+
+"Revolted you, eh?" says Saxham, again with the dim shadow of a smile.
+"Revealed me as a brute and a savage. Well, and why not, if I choose to be
+one or the other, or both? You Churchmen believe in the power of choice,
+don't you? Prove to a man that there is something worth having in the
+bowels of the earth, he burrows like a mole and gets it. Let him once see
+utility in flying, give him time and opportunity, and he will fly. So if
+it is to his interests to be clean-lived, high-minded, exemplary, he will
+be all these things to admiration. Or, if he should happen to have lost
+the _gout_ for virtue, if he determines that Evil shall be his good, he
+will make it so." He smiled dourly. "Deprive him of a solid reason for
+living, he can die. Hold up before his dying eyes the prospect of
+continued existence under hopeful conditions, he takes up his bed and
+walks, like the moribund paralytic in the Gospel you preach. You're a
+living proof of the human power of working miracles.... Granted I cut away
+a tumour from under your breast-bone more skilfully than a certain
+percentage of surgeons could have done it. But what brought you safely
+through the operation, healed your wound by the first intention, and set
+you on your legs again? I'll trouble you to tell me?"
+
+"The mercy and the grace of God," says the Chaplain, "manifested in His
+unworthy servant through your science and your skill."
+
+"You employ the technical terminology of your profession," Saxham answers,
+with a shrug.
+
+The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out of his eyes, and
+his voice is less dull and toneless. He is coming back to his outward self
+again, even while the inner man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that
+tremendous broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the gold
+pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue with the Chaplain. He
+gets off the bed and slips on his jacket, takes a turn or two across the
+narrow floor-space, then leans against the distempered wall beside the
+window, puffing at his jetty briar-root, his muscular arms folded on his
+great chest, his powerful shoulders bowed, his square, black head thrust
+forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying Julius as he talks.
+
+"Let me--without rubbing your cloth the wrong way--put the case in mine.
+Your belief in a Power that my reason tells me is non-existent stimulated
+your nervous centres, roused and sustained in you the determination
+without which my science and my skill--and I do not value them lightly, I
+assure you--would have availed you nothing. You said to yourself, 'If God
+will it, I shall get over this,' and because _you_ willed it, it was so.
+Were I a drunkard, an outcast, the very refuse of humanity, tainted with
+vice to the very centre of my being, I have but to will to be sober and
+live decently, and while I continue to will it, I shall be what I desire
+to be."
+
+Saxham's eyes hold Julius's, and challenge them. But no shadow of a Dop
+Doctor who once reeled the streets of Gueldersdorp rises from those clear
+brown depths as the speaker ends, "Don't underestimate the power of the
+Human Will, Fraithorn, for it can remove mountains, and raise the living
+dead."
+
+"Nor do you venture to deny the Power of the Almighty Hand, Saxham,"
+answers the thin, sweet voice of the Churchman; "because It strewed the
+myriad worlds in the Dust of the The Infinite, and set the jewelled
+feathers in the butterfly's wing, and forged the very intellect whose
+power you misuse in uttering the boast that denies It. Think again. Can
+you assure me with truth that you have never, in the stress of some great
+mental or physical crisis, cried to Heaven for help when the struggle was
+at its worst? Think again, Saxham."
+
+But Saxham obstinately shakes his head, still smiling. As he stands there
+transfigured by the dark, fierce spirit that has come upon him and
+possessed him, there is something about the hulking man with the square,
+black head and the powerful frame, that breathes of that superb and
+terrible Prince of the Heavenly Hierarchy who fell through a kindred sin,
+and the priest in Julius shudders, recognising the tremendous power of
+such a nature as this, whether turned towards Evil or bent to achieve
+Good. The while, in letters of delicate, keen flame, the denier sees
+written on the tables of his inward consciousness the utterance that once
+broke from him, as, racked and tortured in body and in soul, he wrestled
+with his devil on that unforgettable night.
+
+"O God! if indeed Thou Art, and I must perforce return to live the life of
+a man amongst men, help me to burst the chains that fetter me. Help
+me--oh, help me to be free!"
+
+And in his heart he knows that the desperate prayer has been granted. But
+in this new-born, curious mood of his he will not yield, but combats his
+own innermost conviction, being, in a strange, perverted way, even prouder
+of this Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest
+depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the strength of his
+own will from among the hideous things that hang suspended and drifting in
+the primeval sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His is a
+combative nature, and the great blow he has sustained this day in the
+wreck and ruin of his raft of hope has left him quivering to the centre of
+his being with resentment that strikes back.
+
+"Think again yourself. Ask yourself whether the Deity who creates,
+preserves, blesses, punishes, slays, and raises up, is the natural outcome
+of man's need of such a Being, or His own desire of Himself? And which
+conception is the greater--that the God in whom you Churchmen and the
+millions of lay-folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers
+believe, should have commanded, 'Let the universe exist,' and have been
+obeyed, or that the stupendous pigmy Man should have dared to say, 'Let
+there be God,' and so created Him?"
+
+He laughs jarringly as he knocks the ashes out of the blackened pipe upon
+the corner of the window-ledge.
+
+"Give credit to the human imagination and the human will for inventing a
+personage so useful to the Christian Churches as the Devil. For as in the
+beginning it was necessary for Man to build up Heaven and set his God
+therein, so, to throw His unimaginable purity and inconceivable perfection
+into yet more glorious relief, it was required that Hell should be delved
+out and the objective personality of Satan conceived and kennelled there,
+and given just sufficient power to pay the marplot where the Divine plans
+are concerned, and just enough malevolence to find amusement in the
+occupation. What should we do, where should we be, without our Satanic
+_souffre-douleur_--our horned scapegoat, our black puppet, without whose
+suggestions we should never have erred, whose wooden head we bang when
+things go wrong with us," says Saxham bitterly. He reaches out a hand for
+the tobacco-pouch and his glance falls upon the day's issue of the _Siege
+Gazette_ lying on the parquet linoleum, where it has fallen from his hand
+a little while ago. He stoops and picks it up, and offers it to Julius.
+
+"There's the announcement of an engagement here----" He smooths the
+crumpled sheet, holds it under the Chaplain's eye, and points to the two
+last paragraphs of the "Social Jottings" column. "Take it as an
+instance.... Did Heaven play the matchmaker here, or has Hell had a finger
+in the matrimonial pie? Or has the blind and crazy chance that governs
+this desolate world for me, tipped the balance in favour of one young
+rake, who may be saved and purified and renewed by such a marriage, while
+his elder in iniquity is doomed to be wrecked upon it, ruined by it,
+destroyed through it, damned socially and morally because of it ..."
+
+The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He resents the
+betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as he utters them. But they
+are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the
+Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with
+indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar--a patent clerical
+guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers'
+emporium in the Strand--to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are
+wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and stutters angrily in
+saying:
+
+"This is a lie--a monstrous misstatement which shall be withdrawn
+to-morrow!"
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+The Chaplain crushes the _Siege Gazette_ into a ball, pitches it into a
+corner of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and the cane he carries in
+lieu of the carbine or rifle without which the male laity of Gueldersdorp
+and a good many of the women do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for
+the door. He meets there Saxham, whose square face and powerful figure bar
+his flaming exit.
+
+"It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass."
+
+"What are you going to do?"
+
+The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with the clerical
+guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers something about
+unwarrantable liberty and a lady's reputation! And Saxham recognises that
+Saxham is not the only sufferer from the festering smart of jealousy, and
+that the vivid red-and-white carnation-tinted beauty of the delicate face
+in its setting of red-brown hair has grievously disturbed, if it has not
+altogether dissipated, the pale young Anglican's views of the celibate
+life.
+
+Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same
+amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy in the Dop Doctor.
+
+He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet intently, as in
+the old Hospital days he might have studied the expression of a monkey or
+a guinea-pig, or other organism upon which he was experimenting with some
+new drug. And the Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity:
+
+"What are you staring at? Do you imagine that the colour of my cloth
+debars me from--from taking the part of a lady whose name has been dragged
+before the public? I shall call at the office where this rag is published,
+and insist upon a contradiction of this--this _canard_!"
+
+"Don't you know who edits the rag?" asks Saxham raspingly. "Do you suppose
+that any unauthorised announcement, or statement that has not been
+officially corroborated would be allowed to pass? The paragraph comes from
+an authoritative source, you may be sure!"
+
+"I am in a position to disprove it, from whatever source it comes!" cried
+the Chaplain hotly. "He shall contradict it himself, if there is
+necessity. He may be a prodigal and a rake--he bears that reputation--but
+at least he is not a liar and a scoundrel."
+
+"Who?" Saxham's heart is drubbing furiously. A cool, vivifying liquid like
+ether seems to have passed into his blood. His quiet, set, determined face
+and masterful, observant eyes oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation,
+as if these were waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of granite. "Who
+is not a liar and a scoundrel?"
+
+"I speak of Lord Beauvayse," says the Reverend Julius Fraithorn in the
+high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. "He is a married man, Saxham; I
+have incontrovertible testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman
+who was his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape Town. He----"
+
+There is a strange rattling noise in the throat of the man who listens.
+Julius looks at him, and his own resentment appears, even to himself, as
+impotent and ridiculous as the anger of a child. If just before it has
+seemed to him that he has heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking
+with Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in Saxham's,
+the face of the primal murderer. And being, as well as a sincere and
+simple-hearted clergyman, something of a weakling, he is shocked to
+silence.
+
+
+
+
+XLVI
+
+
+An instant, and Saxham's own face looks calmly at the dazed Chaplain, and
+the curt, brusque voice demands:
+
+"What is this incontrovertible testimony?"
+
+"A letter," says Julius breathlessly, "from a person who saw the entry of
+the marriage at the Registrar's office where it took place."
+
+"Is anyone else in possession of this information?"
+
+"With the exception of the Registrar and the witnesses of the marriage, up
+to the middle of last September, when the letter was written, nothing had
+leaked out. I received the communication by the last mail from England
+that was delivered at the Hospital before I underwent the operation."
+
+"That was the last mail that got through. Who was your correspondent?"
+
+"One of the senior officiating priests of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street,
+the London church where I did duty as junior curate."
+
+"Have you kept the letter?"
+
+"It is in my desk at my hotel, with some other correspondence of Father
+Tatham's. You may see it if you wish."
+
+"I will see it. In the meanwhile, let me have the pith of it. This
+clergyman--happening to visit a Registrar's office---- Where was the
+office?"
+
+"At Cookham-on-Thames, where Father Tatham has established a Holiday Rest
+Home for the benefit of our London working lads"--the Chaplain begins. He
+is sitting on the end of the bed, weak and worn and exhausted with the
+emotions that have torn him in the last half-hour. Beads of perspiration
+thickly stud the high temples, out of which the flushing colour has sunk;
+his cheeks are pallid and hollow. His eyes have lost their fire; his
+muscles are flaccidly relaxed; his sloping shoulders stoop; his long, limp
+hands hang nervelessly at his sides.
+
+"One moment." Saxham glances at the gold chronometer that was a
+presentation from the students of St. Stephen's years ago. It is rather
+typical of the man that, even when under stress of his heroic thirst he
+has pawned the watch for money wherewith to buy whisky, he should have
+only borrowed upon it such small sums as are easily repaid. He has yet
+another five minutes to bestow in listening to the Chaplain's story, yet
+even as he returns the chronometer to its pocket, his quick ear catches
+the frou-frou of feminine petticoats outside the door. He opens it,
+frowning. A nurse is standing there with a summons in her face. She
+delivers her low-toned message, receives a brusque reply, and rustles down
+the corridor between the long lines of pallets as Saxham draws back his
+head and shuts the door, and, setting his great shoulders against it, and
+facing Julius, orders:
+
+"Go on!"
+
+Julius goes on:
+
+"At Roselawn Cottage--a pretty place of the toy-residence description,
+standing in charming gardens not far from the Holiday Rest Home, lived a
+lady--an actress very popular in Musical Comedy--who was known to be the
+mistress of Lord Beauvayse. I need hardly tell you the Father touched on
+the unpleasant features of the story as delicately as possible----"
+
+"Without doubt. But--get on a little quicker," says Saxham grimly, jerking
+his head towards the door. "For I am wanted. And don't speak loud, for
+there are people on the other side there. With regard to this
+woman--actress, or whatever she may be----?"
+
+"With all her moral laxities," goes on Julius, "Miss Lessie Lavigne----"
+
+"Ah, I know the name," says Saxham sharply. "On with you to the end. 'With
+all her moral laxities----'"
+
+"Miss Lessie Lavigne is a generous, kindly, charitable young woman," goes
+on Julius. "And the Holiday Home has benefited largely by her purse. She
+is known to the Matron; and Father Tatham--having occasion to visit the
+Registrar's office at Cookham on the 29th of last June, for the purpose of
+looking up the books, with the Registrar's consent, and satisfying himself
+of the existence of the entry regarding a marriage between one of our
+young fellows then at the Home and a girl he very foolishly married when
+on a hopping excursion in the autumn of the previous year--Father Tatham
+encountered Miss Lavigne--or Lady Beauvayse, to give her her proper
+title----"
+
+"In the Registrar's office?"
+
+"In the act of quitting the Registrar's outer office," says the burnt-out
+Julius in a weary voice, "in the company of Lord Beauvayse, and followed
+by his valet and a woman who probably were witnesses; for when the Father
+entered the inner office the register was lying open on the table, the
+entry of the marriage still wet upon the page."
+
+"And your religious correspondent pried first," says Saxham, with savage
+irony, "and afterwards tattled?"
+
+"And afterwards, seeing in the _Times_ that Lord Beauvayse was under
+orders for South Africa, mentioned his accidental discovery when writing
+to me," says Julius Fraithorn wearily.
+
+"That will do. When can I see the letter at your hotel? The sooner the
+better," says Saxham, with a curious smile, "for all purposes. Can you
+walk there with me now? Very well"--as Julius assents--"that is arranged,
+then."
+
+"What is to be done, Saxham?" Julius stumbles up. The fires that burned in
+him a few moments ago are quenched; his slack hand trembles irresolutely
+at his beautiful weak mouth, and his deer-like eyes waver.
+
+"I advise you," says Saxham, "to leave the doing of what is to be done to
+me." His own blue eyes have so strange a flare in them, and his heavy form
+seems so alive and instinct with threatening and dangerous possibilities,
+that Julius falters:
+
+"You believe Lord Beauvayse has been a party to--has wilfully compromised
+Miss Mildare? You--you mean to remonstrate with him? Do you--do you think
+that he will listen to a remonstrance?"
+
+"He will find it best in this instance," says Saxham dourly.
+
+"Do not--do not be tempted to use any violence, Saxham," urges the
+Chaplain nervously, looking at the tense muscles of the grim, square face
+and the purposeful right hand that hovers near the butt of the Doctor's
+revolver. "For your own sake as much as for his!"
+
+Saxham's laugh is ugly to hear.
+
+"Do you think that Lord Beauvayse would wind up as top-dog if it came to a
+struggle between us?"
+
+"It must not come to a struggle, Saxham," says the Chaplain, very pale.
+"We--we are under Martial Law. He is your superior officer." (Saxham,
+Attached Medical Staff, holds the honorary rank of Lieutenant in Her
+Majesty's Army.) "Remember, if Carslow--the man who killed Vickers, of the
+_Pittsburg Trumpeter_"--he refers to a grim tragedy of the beginning of
+the siege--"had not been medically certified insane, they would have taken
+him out and shot him."
+
+Saxham shrugs his massive shoulders, and with the utter unmelodiousness
+that distinguishes the performance of a man devoid of a musical ear,
+whistles a fragment of a little tune. It is often on the lips of another
+man, and the Doctor has picked it up unconsciously, with one or two other
+characteristic habits and phrases, and has fallen into the habit of
+whistling it as he goes doggedly, unwearyingly, upon his ever-widening
+round of daily duties. It helps him, perhaps, though it gets upon the
+nerves of other people, making the younger nurses, not unmindful of his
+arbitrary action in the matter of the violet powder, want to shriek.
+
+"The Military Executive would be perfectly welcome to take me out and
+shoot me, if first I might be permitted to look in at Staff Bomb proof
+South, and render Society the distinguished service of ridding it of Lord
+Beauvayse. Who's there?"
+
+Saxham reopens the door, at which the nurse, now returned, has knocked.
+The tired but cheerful-faced young woman, in an unstarched cap and apron,
+and rumpled gown of Galatea cotton-twill, informs the Doctor that they
+have telephoned up from Staff Bomb proof South Lines, and that the
+password for the day is "Honour."
+
+
+
+
+"You are going to him now?" asks the Chaplain anxiously and
+apprehensively.
+
+"Oddly enough, I have been sent for to attend to a shell casualty," says
+Saxham, picking up and putting on his Service felt, and moving to take
+down the canvas wallet that is his inseparable companion, from the hook on
+which it hangs. "Or, rather, Taggart was; and as he has thirty diphtheria
+cases for tracheotomy at the Children's Hospital, and McFadyen's hands are
+full at the Refugees' Infirmary, the Major asks if I will take the duty.
+It's an order, I suppose, couched in a civil way."
+
+He swings the heavy wallet over his shoulders, and picks up his worn
+hunting-crop.
+
+"And so, let's be moving," he says, his hand upon the door-knob. "Your
+hotel is on my way. I may need that letter, or I may not. And in any case
+I prefer to have seen it before I meet the man."
+
+"One moment." The Chaplain speaks with a strained look of anxiety,
+squeezing a damp white handkerchief into a ball between his palms. "You
+have taken upon yourself the duty of bringing Lord Beauvayse to book over
+this--very painful matter.... I should like ... I should wish you to leave
+the task of enlightening Miss Mildare to me."
+
+"To you. And why?"
+
+Saxham waits for the answer, a heavy figure filling up the doorway, with
+scowling brows, and sullen eyes that carefully avoid the Chaplain's face.
+
+"Because I--because in inflicting upon her what must necessarily be a--a
+painful humiliation"--the Rev. Julius clears his throat, and laboriously
+rolls the damp handkerchief-ball into a sausage--"I wish to convince Miss
+Mildare that my respect and my--esteem for her have--not diminished."
+
+"And how do you propose to drive this conviction home?"
+
+The Reverend Julius flushes to the ear-tips. The coldness of the
+questioning voice gives him a nervous shudder. He says with an effort,
+looking at the thick white, black-fringed lids that bide the Doctor's
+queer blue eyes:
+
+"By offering Miss Mildare the honourable protection of my name. My views,
+as regarding the celibacy incumbent upon an anointed servant of the altar,
+have, since I knew her, undergone a--a change.... And it occurs to me,
+when she has got over the first shock of hearing that she has been
+deceived and played with by a person of Lord Beauvayse's lack of
+principle----"
+
+"That she may be induced to look with favour on the parson's proposal?"
+comments Saxham with an indifference to the feelings of the person he
+addresses that is positively savage. The raucous tones flay Julius's
+sensitive ears, the terrible blue eyes blaze upon him, scorch him. He
+falters:
+
+"I--I trust my purpose is pure from vulgar self-seeking? I hope my
+attitude towards Miss Mildare is not unchivalrous--or ungenerous?"
+
+"In manipulating her disadvantage to serve your own interests," says
+Saxham's terrible voice, "you would undoubtedly be playing a very low-down
+game."
+
+Julius laughs, shortly and huffily.
+
+"A low-down game!... Ha, ha, ha! You don't mince your words, Doctor!"
+
+"I can phrase my opinion even more plainly, if you desire it," returns
+Saxham brutally. "To bespatter a rival for the gaining of an advantage by
+contrast is a Yahoo's trick to which no decent gentleman would stoop."
+
+"At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of being sarcastic,
+"your 'decent gentleman' would be likely to remember the old adage, 'All's
+fair in Love and----'"
+
+"Exactly. All _is_ fair," returns Saxham, squaring his dogged jaws at the
+other, and folding his great arms upon his deep wide chest. "And all shall
+be, please to understand it. It is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss
+Mildare should be undeceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the painful
+duty of opening her eyes will be undertaken by that"--the break before the
+designation is scathingly contemptuous--"by that--distinguished nobleman
+himself, and by no other."
+
+"How can you compel the man to give himself away?" demands the Reverend
+Julius incredulously. Saxham answers, mechanically opening and closing his
+small, muscular surgeon's hand, and watching the flexions and extensions
+of the supple fingers with an ugly kind of interest:
+
+"I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the moment. What
+matters is--your parole of honour that you will never by word, or deed, or
+sign disclose to Miss Mildare that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged
+himself to marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonial proposals.
+Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty to further your own
+views as may seem good to you. The plan of campaign that I, in your place,
+should choose might not find favour in your eyes...."
+
+His look bears upon the younger man with intolerable weight, his
+heavily-shouldered figure seems to swell and fill the room. Julius is
+clearly conscious of hating his saviour, and the consciousness is acid on
+his palate as he asks, with a wry smile:
+
+"What would your plan be if you were in my place?"
+
+"To praise where a rival was worthy of praise; to be silent where it would
+be easy to depreciate; to win her from him, not because of my own greater
+worth, but in spite of the worst she could know of me. That would, in my
+opinion, be a conquest worthy of a man."
+
+The pupils of the speaker's flaming blue eyes have dwindled to mere
+pin-points, a rush of blood has darkened the square pale face, to sink
+away again and leave it opaquely colourless, as Saxham says with cool
+distinctness:
+
+"And now, before we leave this room, I must trouble you for that
+promise--oath, if you feel it would be more in your line of business. I
+don't possess a copy of the Scriptures, but I think that is a Crucifix
+you wear upon your watch-chain?"
+
+It is. And when the Reverend Julius has kissed the sacred symbol with
+shaking lips, and taken the oath as Saxham dictates, his heart tattooing
+furiously under the baggy khaki jacket, and an angry pulse beating in his
+thin cheek, Saxham adds, with the flickering shadow of a smile, as he
+opens the door, and signs to the Chaplain to pass out before him:
+
+"You observe, I have turned the weapons of your profession against you.
+Exactly as--replying to your question of a moment back with regard to
+compelling--exactly as I intend to do in the case of Lord Beauvayse!"
+
+He motions to the other to pass out before him, and locks the door upon
+his stuffy little sanctum whose shelves are piled with a heterogeneous
+confusion of tubes and bottles, books and instruments, specimens of
+foodstuffs under the process of analysis for values, and carefully-sealed
+watch-glasses containing choice cultures of deadly microbes in bouillon,
+before he leads his way down the long corridor, where narrow pallets, upon
+which sick men and boys are stretched, range along the walls upon either
+hand, and the air is heavy with the taint of suppurating wounds, and the
+hot, sickly breath of fever and malaria.
+
+He walks quickly, his keen blue eyes glancing right and left with the
+effect of carelessness, yet missing nothing. He stops, and loosens the
+bandage, and relieves the swollen limb. He delays to kneel a moment beside
+one low pillow, and turn gently to the light a face that is ghastly, with
+its bristly beard and glassy, staring eyes, and its pallor that is of the
+hue of old wax, and lay it gently back again as he beckons to the nurse to
+bring the screens, and hide the Dead from the sight of the living.
+
+He is in his element; salient and masterful and strong. But the haggard
+eyes that turn upon him do not shine with gratitude. He has not reached
+these hearts. They accuse him, quite unjustly, of a liking for cutting and
+carving. They suspect him, quite correctly, of being in no hurry for the
+ending of the siege. How should he be, when, these strenuous days once
+over, he sees nothing before him but the murky blackness of the night out
+of which he came, from which he has emerged for one brief draught of
+renewed joy in living before the dark shall close over him again, and
+wrap him round for ever?
+
+He has suffered horribly of late. But at the worst his work has never
+failed to bring relief and distraction. Pure loyalty to a man in whom he
+believes, has been the main-spring of his unflagging strength. He is not
+liked or popular in any way, though Surgeon-Major Taggart upholds him
+manfully, and McFadyen is loyal to the old bond. His harshness repels
+regard, his coldness blights confidence, and so, though he is admired for
+his dazzling skill in surgery, for his dogged perseverance and unremitting
+power of application, for his fine horsemanship and iron nerve; he is not
+regarded with affection.
+
+He is not in the least aware of it, to do him justice, when his rough
+ironies and his brusque repartees give offence. In the heyday of his
+London success he has not truckled to Rank, or Influence, or Affluence.
+The owner of a gouty or a varicose leg has never had the more civil tongue
+from Saxham that the uneasy limb or its fellow was privileged upon State
+occasions to wear the Garter. He trod upon corns then, as he treads upon
+them now, without being aware of it, as he goes upon his way.
+
+Julius goes with him, rent by apprehensions, stealing nervous side-glances
+at the impassive, opaque-skinned face as Saxham swings along with his
+powerful, rather lurching gait over the ploughed and littered waste that
+divides the Hospital from the town beyond it. He speaks once or twice, but
+Saxham seems not to hear.
+
+The Doctor is listening to a dialogue that is as yet unspoken. He is
+crushing a resistance that has not yet been made. In imagination his
+small, strong, muscular hands are gripped about the throat of the man who
+has lied to her and deceived her; and he is listening with joy to the
+gurgling, choking efforts to phrase a prayer for mercy, or utter a final
+defiance; and he sees with grim pleasure how the fine skin blackens under
+his deadly hold, and how the lazy, beautiful, grey-green eyes, no longer
+sleepy or defiant, but staring and horribly bloodshot, are already rolling
+upwards in the death-agony. The primitive savage that is in every man
+lusts at a juncture such as this, to kill with the bare hands rather than
+to slay with any weapon known to civilisation.
+
+"Let him look to it how he deals with her! Let him look to it!"
+
+How long it seems since Saxham muttered those words, turning sullenly away
+to recross the stepping-stones, leaping from boulder to boulder as the
+river wimpled and laughed in mockery of his clumsy tender of protection
+and her rejection of it, and Beauvayse's tall figure stood, erect and
+triumphant, on the flower-starred bank, waiting to recommence his wooing
+until the intruder should be gone, divining, as Saxham had instinctively
+known, the hidden passion that rent and tortured him, glowing with the
+consciousness of secret mastery....
+
+If this meek, thin-blooded young clergyman who walks beside him might have
+won her, it seems to Saxham that he could have borne it. But that
+Beauvayse of all others should venture to approach her, presume to rear an
+image of himself in the shrine of her pure breast; win her from her high
+aims and lofty ideals with a bold look and a few whispered words, and,
+having thrown his honourable name into the lap of a light woman as
+indifferently as a jewelled trinket, should dare to offer Lynette Mildare
+dishonour, is monstrous, hideous, unbearable....
+
+How comes it that she of all women should be so easily allured, so lightly
+drawn aside? Was there no baser conquest within reach that this white,
+virginal, slender saint should become _his_ prey? Shall she be made even
+as those others of whom she spoke, when the veil of a girlish innocence
+was drawn aside, and strange and terrible knowledge looked out of those
+clear eyes, and she said, in answer to his question:
+
+"They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer upon earth. For
+they are the slaves, and the victims, and the martyrs of the unrelenting,
+merciless, dreadful pleasures of men...."
+
+Of men like Beauvayse.
+
+Not only swart and shaggy, or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired,
+toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful,
+youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek
+sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green
+jewels, soft persuasive voices with which to pour poisoned words into
+innocent and guileless ears, and the bold, brave blood of old-time heroes
+running in their veins, prompting them to the doing of dashing, reckless,
+gallant deeds, no less than sins of lust and luxury.
+
+Let him look to it, this splendid young soldier with the ancient name,
+hope of his House, pride of his Regiment. Let him look to it how he has
+dealt with her, who had no thought or dream but to save others from the
+fate he destines for her, until his cursed, beautiful face smiled down
+into her own. For every lying oath he has sworn to her, for every false
+promise made to the wrecking of her maiden peace, for every kiss those
+innocent lips have been despoiled of, for every touch of his that has
+soiled her, for every breath of his that has scorched the white petals of
+the Convent-reared lily, he shall pay the price.
+
+Silently Saxham registers this oath upon that beloved red-brown head,
+since he denies its Maker His honour, and the whirling blackness that is
+within him is rent and cloven, for one blinding instant, by the
+levin-fires of Hell. He knows thenceforward what he will do, as he walks
+with the pale Chaplain between the shell-torn houses, and along the
+littered streets, where men and women and children, thin and haggard and
+listless with hunger, and the deadly inertia of long confinement, pass and
+repass as indifferently as though no guns were battering and growling from
+the low grey hills south and east, and the incessant rattle of rifle-fire
+were the innocent expenditure of blank cartridge incidental to a sham
+fight.
+
+They reach the Chaplain's hotel, and go to his room. Saxham waits silently
+while Julius searches for and finds Father Tatham's letter, takes it and
+reads it attentively, puts it carefully away in a worn notecase, restores
+the notecase to the inner pocket of his jacket, and, without a nod or word
+of farewell, is gone.
+
+
+
+
+XLVII
+
+
+To the remarkably complete system of underground wires installed by the
+Garrison Telephone Corps, Lady Hannah Wrynche, on duty at the Convalescent
+Hospital that was once the Officers' Club, was, upon the Thursday that
+saw the publication of the string of paragraphs previously quoted from the
+_Siege Gazette_, indebted for what she afterwards described with
+ruefulness as a "heckled morning."
+
+Once a week the "Social Jottings," bubbling from the effervescent Gold
+Pen, descended like rain upon the parched soil of drouthy Gueldersdorp. To
+make gossip where there is none is as difficult as making bricks without
+clay, or trimming a hat when you are a member of the Wild Birds'
+Protection Society, and plumage is Fashion's latest cry. Under the
+circumstances a genuine item of general and public interest was a pearl of
+price. And yet something had told the little lady that the ruthless Blue
+Pencil of Supreme Authority would deprive her of the supreme joy of
+casting it before the readers of the _Siege Gazette_. She seemed to hear
+him saying, in the pleasant voice she knew so well:
+
+"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."
+
+He had said that on Sunday, when she had pleaded for a freer hand. Well,
+he could hardly call the announcement of an engagement a personality, and,
+supposing he did, how easy to convince him that it was nothing of the
+kind!
+
+She dashed off her description of the Convent kettledrum, and added the
+paragraphs we know of, each one accentuated by an explosion of asterisks,
+and gave the blotty sheets to Young Evans, who combined in his sole person
+the offices of sub-editor, engineer, chief-compositor, feeder, and devil.
+
+Young Evans, who, next to the single-cylinder printing-press driven by the
+little oil-engine that had sustained a shell-casualty at the beginning of
+the siege, adored Lady Hannah, vanished behind the corrugated partition
+that separated the office from the printing-room, and presently came back
+in inky shirt-sleeves with a smear of lubricating-oil upon his forehead,
+and laid the wet slips upon the Editorial table. Then he went back, and
+fell to tinkering at his machine. Lady Hannah corrected her proof. When
+she had done she looked at her wrist-watch. In ten minutes Supreme
+Authority would descend the ladder, wield the Blue Pencil, and depart.
+Would he have mercy and not sacrifice? The suspense was torturing.
+
+Then a simple plan occurred to her by which Supreme Authority might
+be--she dared not use the word "circumvented." "Got round" was even
+worse; "evaded" sounded nicest. To resist the promptings of her own
+feminine ingenuity required a greater storage of cold moral force than
+Lady Hannah desired to possess. She took the editorial scissors, and
+daintily cut off the three paragraphs from the bottom of the slip.
+
+The thing was done, and the snipped-off paragraphs concealed, as a pair of
+brown boots, with steel jack-spurs attached, came neatly down the ladder.
+The Chief gave her his cheery "Good-morning," and congratulated her on
+looking well. Her cheeks burned and her heart rat-tatted against the
+hidden paper, as he ran his keen eye down slip after slip, and initialled
+them for the press. She almost shrieked as he took up the "Social
+Jottings." The underground office whirled about her as the blue pencil
+steadily travelled down. Then--he was gone--and the initialled proof lay
+before her. She had nothing to do but neatly and delicately paste on the
+bit she had snipped off. This done, she gathered up her various small
+belongings, swept them into her bag, and went, leaving the passed proof of
+the "Social Jottings" column waiting for Young Evans with the rest.
+
+In the middle of the night she realised what she had done. But even in a
+beleaguered town under the sway of Martial Law you cannot hang a lady, or
+order her out and shoot her for Mutiny and Treason combined. There would
+be a reprimand; what Bingo pleasantly termed "an official wigging," unless
+the Blue Pencil could, by any feminine art, be persuaded that it had
+passed those pars.
+
+But, of course, she would never stoop to such a deception. The ruse she
+had employed was culpable. The other thing would be infamous. And--he
+would be sure to see that the end of the proof-slip had been pasted on.
+
+She slept jerkily, rose headachy, and set out for the Convalescent
+Hospital in that stage of penitence that immediately precedes hysterical
+breakdown. She experienced a crisis of the nerves upon meeting a man, who,
+regardless of quite a brisk bombardment that happened to be going on just
+then, was walking along reading the _Siege Gazette_. Shirt-sleeved Young
+Evans had worked until daylight getting the Thursday's issue out. And
+there was a tremendous run upon copies. Every other person Lady Hannah
+encountered upon the street seemed to have got one, and to find it
+unusually interesting. The women especially. None of them were dull, or
+languid, or dim-eyed this morning. The siege crawl was no longer in
+evidence. They walked upon springs. Upon the stoep of the Hospital, where
+the long rows of convalescents were airing, every patient appeared plunged
+in perusal. Those who had not the paper were waiting, with watering
+mouths, until those who had would part. A reviving breath seemed to have
+passed over them, and spots of colour showed in their yellow, haggard
+faces. They talked and laughed....
+
+Lady Hannah passed in, conscious of an agreeable tingling all down her
+spine. The hall-porter, a brawny, one-armed ex-Irregular, who had lost
+what he was wont to term his "flapper" at the outset of hostilities, was
+too deeply absorbed in spelling out a paragraph of the "Social Jottings"
+column to salute her. Inside you heard little beyond the crackling of the
+flimsy sheet, mingled with the comments, exclamations, anticipations,
+expectations that went off on all sides, met each other, and rebounded,
+exploding in coruscations of sparks. Something had happened, something was
+going to happen, after months and months of eventless monotony. It warmed
+the thin blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their
+faded appetites like some salt breath from the far-distant sea.
+
+The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial Tokay, be sensed
+but once in a lifetime, but you can never forget that once. Out of her
+gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah had spurted a little ink upon the famished
+Gueldersdorpians, and their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine
+must be paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even as she tied on
+a bibbed apron, and superintended the serving and distribution of the
+patients' one-o'clock dinner.
+
+Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two slivered carrots to
+the gallon, formed the menu to-day. There was no more white bread, and a
+villainous bannock of crushed oats had to be soaked in your porringer if
+you had no strength to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed, and upon
+this the now apologetic but smiling porter, with the intelligence that her
+ladyship was wanted at the wall-jigger in the Matron's room.
+
+The ring-up came from Hotchkiss Outpost North, where Captain Bingo was
+this day on duty, _via_ the Staff Headquarter office in Market Square, and
+the voice that filtered to the ear of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of
+her spouse, and tinged with a gruffness as unusual as ominous.
+
+"Hullo. Is that you?"
+
+"Qu'il ne vous en deplaise!"
+
+Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside:
+
+"And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber French through a
+telephone?"
+
+"A Frenchwoman would, possibly."
+
+"Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what made you shove such a
+whacking bouncer into the _Siege Gazette_?"
+
+"Please put that into English." She underwent a quaking at the heart.
+
+"I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare filly is all my eye."
+
+"It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully-authorised fact."
+
+"Rot!"
+
+"Paix et peu! Say rot, if it pleases you!"
+
+"You'll have to withdraw and apologise."
+
+"I can't make out what you're saying."
+
+"It will end in your eating humble-pie. Can you hear that?"
+
+"I can hear that you are in a bearish temper."
+
+"I've reason to be. If a man had written what you have I should punch his
+head."
+
+"Say that again!"
+
+"I say, if a stranger of the kickable sex had told such a pack of
+infernal----"
+
+_Click!_
+
+Lady Hannah hung up the receiver, blew a contemptuous kiss into the gape
+of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to go. There was another ring-up
+as she reached the door.
+
+"Hallo. Are you the Convalescent Hospital?"
+
+"Yes. Who are you?"
+
+"Staff Bombproof South. I want to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."
+
+"I'm here, Lord Beauvayse."
+
+"I say, I'm going to rag you frightfully. Why on earth have you given us
+away in that beastly paper?"
+
+"Whom do you mean by 'us'?"
+
+"Well, me and Miss Mildare."
+
+"Didn't you tell me on Sunday that you were engaged?" she demanded
+indignantly.
+
+"I did." The answer came back haltingly.
+
+"And that you didn't care who knew it?"
+
+"Fact."
+
+"And that you two were going to be married as soon as you could pull off
+the event?"
+
+"Yes." The voice was palpably embarrassed. "But----"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"But--things you don't mind people knowing look beastly in cold print."
+
+"If I were in your shoes I should think they looked beautiful."
+
+Nothing but a faint buzz came back. Lady Hannah went on:
+
+"If I were in your shoes, and such a pearl and prize and paragon as
+Lynette Mildare had consented to marry me, I should want the whole world
+to envy me my colossal good luck. I should go about in sandwich-boards
+advertising it. I should buy a megaphone, and proclaim it through that. I
+should----"
+
+There was no response beyond the buzzing of the wire. Beauvayse had
+evidently hung up the receiver.
+
+"Is there any creature upon earth more cowardly than a man engaged?" Lady
+Hannah demanded of space. There was a futile struggle inside the
+telephone-box. Somebody else was trying to ring up. She put the receiver
+back upon the crutches, and--
+
+"_Ting--ting--ting!_" said the bell in a high, thin voice.
+
+"Who is it?" she asked.
+
+The answer came back with official clearness:
+
+"Officer of the day, Staff Headquarters. If you're the Convalescent
+Hospital, the Colonel would like to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."
+
+Her knees became as jelly, and her heart seemed to turn a somersault. She
+answered in a would-be jaunty voice that wobbled horribly:
+
+"Here--here--is Lady Hannah."
+
+"Hold on a minute, please!"
+
+She held on. She had not shuddered at the end of the wire for more than a
+minute when the well-known, infinitely-dreaded voice said in her ear, so
+clearly that she jumped:
+
+"Lady Hannah there? How d'you do?"
+
+She gulped, and quavered:
+
+"It--it depends on what you're going to say."
+
+"I see." There was the vibration of a stifled laugh, and her heart jumped
+to meet it. "So you anticipated a hauling over the coals?"
+
+Revived, she shrugged her little shoulders.
+
+"Have I deserved one?"
+
+The voice said, with unmistakable displeasure in it:
+
+"Thoroughly. Why were not the last three paragraphs of the weekly 'Social
+Jottings' column submitted to me yesterday with the rest?"
+
+She heard herself titter imbecilely. Then a voice, which she could hardly
+believe her own, said, with a pitiable effort to be gay and natural:
+
+"Weren't they? Perhaps you overlooked them?"
+
+"You know I did not overlook them."
+
+This was the cold, incisive, cutting, rasping voice which Bingo was wont
+to describe as razors and files. Her ears burned like fire, and her
+bright, birdlike eyes were round and scared. She gasped:
+
+"Oh ... do you really----"
+
+"I want the truth, please, without quibbling." The voice was harsh and
+cold, and inexorably compelling. "Why were those paragraphs not shown to
+me?"
+
+She winked away her tears.
+
+"Because I was sure you'd blue-pencil them out of existence. And a genuine
+bit of news is such a roc's egg in these times of scarcity."
+
+"Genuine!"
+
+There was incredulity in the tone.
+
+"Upon my honour as the wife of a British Dragoon."
+
+He said crisply:
+
+"Precipitate publication, even of authentic information, is likely to be
+resented by the persons concerned."
+
+She remembered, with a sinking at the heart, that one person concerned had
+already objected.
+
+"Both of them authorised the insertion."
+
+"And the official consent to it was obtained by a trick."
+
+She whispered, her heart in the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes:
+
+"Please--please don't call it that!"
+
+"How can I call it anything else? Besides, has it occurred to you that,
+should any copies of to-day's issue get through these lines, the
+Foltlebarres will be thrown into a state of volcanic eruption?"
+
+"If the Foltlebarres aren't absolute beetles they'll jump for joy. How
+could their boy possibly do better?"
+
+"I don't see how myself."
+
+"Ah, if you're going to back up Toby, the day is as good as won."
+
+"You're very kind to say so."
+
+The red was dying out of Lady Hannah's ear-tips. That "You're very kind"
+had a gratified sound. The most rigorous and implacable of men can be
+buttered, she thought, if the emollient be dexterously applied. And a
+bright spark of naughty triumph snapped in each of her birdlike black
+eyes.
+
+"Thanks." He was speaking again. "Apologies for keeping you. You're up to
+your eyes in Hospital work, I don't doubt."
+
+"There is enough to keep one going."
+
+"Without the additional tax of literary labour." She was conscious of a
+premonitory, apprehensive chill that travelled from the roots of her hair
+down her spine, and apparently made its exit at the heels of her Louis
+Quinze shoes. "So the 'Social Jottings' column will not appear in the
+_Siege Gazette_ after to-day. Good-morning."
+
+"Is that my punishment for insubordination?"
+
+Not a sound in reply. "He must have hung up the receiver and gone away.
+Oh, horrid, horrid male superiority!" thought Lady Hannah. "To have been
+put under arrest, even to have been ordered out and shot, would be
+preferable to being figuratively spanked and put in the corner." She
+winked away some more tears, and sniffed a little dejectedly. "And only
+the other day he seemed quite pleased with me," she added pensively. Then
+she shrugged her shoulders, and rang up the Head Hospital, North Veld
+Road.
+
+"Who you-e?"
+
+It was the sing-song voice of the Barala hall-boy.
+
+"I'm Lady Hannah Wrynche. Is the Reverend Mother on duty in the wards
+to-day?"
+
+"I go see. You hang-e on."
+
+Lady Hannah hung on until her small remaining stock of patience deserted
+her. As she stamped her small feet, longing to accelerate the languid
+movements of the hall-boy with a humanely-wielded hatpin, a whisper in the
+velvet voice she knew stole across the distance.
+
+"Hannah. Is it you?"
+
+"It's me, Biddy dear."
+
+There was a soft laugh that ended in a sigh. "It is so long since anybody
+called me that."
+
+"I wouldn't dare to with you looking at me."
+
+"Am I so formidable of aspect? But go on."
+
+"It's not so easy. But I've had an awful morning. Everybody I like best
+down on me like bricks and m----" The speaker gulped a sob.
+
+"You are crying, dear!"
+
+"Not a drop. But if you join in the heckling I shall dribble away and
+dissolve in salt water. It's all about those wretched paragraphs of mine
+in the _Siege Gazette_. But perhaps you haven't seen it?"
+
+"I have seen it."
+
+"You were quite willing that the _fiancailles_ should be made public....
+Indeed, you gave me to understand you desired it."
+
+"I was quite willing. I did wish it."
+
+"Yes.... Thank you, dear; that was what I wanted to hear from you. I
+understand now what the one clapping pair of hands must mean to the actor
+who is booed by all the rest of the audience. Good-bye, dear."
+
+"Stay.... Who are the persons who disapprove of the announcement?"
+
+"My Bingo, for one. Not that anything the dear old stupid says matters in
+the slightest. And--and Toby."
+
+"'Toby'?"
+
+"I mean Lord Beauvayse."
+
+"Tell him I quite approve. He should know that in this matter it was for
+me to decide."
+
+"Certainly, dear."
+
+"Whose is the other objecting voice?"
+
+"The Chief thinks I ... we ... it ... I rather fancy that he used the word
+'precipitate' in expressing his opinion."
+
+"Refer him to me if he expresses it again."
+
+"Of course, dear, since you ..."
+
+"Good-bye."
+
+"Good-bye, dear. If Biddy Bawne hadn't been a nun," reflected Lady Hannah,
+as she went out of the Matron's office and back to her patients, who had
+long ago dined, "I think she would have made rather a despotic Empress.
+'_Refer him to me_,' indeed. What is it, Sergeant? Don't say I'm rung up
+again."
+
+But the one-armed porter was positive on the subject, and her little
+ladyship went back. This last communication proved a puzzling one.
+
+"You there?"
+
+"I am Lady Hannah Wrynche. Where are you?"
+
+There was a brief hesitation. A thickish man's voice said:
+
+"I don't know as that matters."
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+There was another hesitation. Then the stranger parried with a question:
+
+"You write them weekly screeds in the _Siege Gazette_?"
+
+"I am responsible for some of the social paragraphs. Kindly say who is
+speaking?"
+
+"Nobody that matters much. Can you tell me where Miss Mildare lives?"
+
+"Not without knowing who you are."
+
+"You may call me an old friend of hers," aid the thickish, lisping voice,
+with a sluggish chuckle in it that the little woman at the other end of
+the wire had heard ... where?...
+
+"If you are an old friend of the young lady you mention, how is it you
+don't know her address?" she demanded.
+
+"Keep her address all you want to. Only next time you come alongside her
+give her a message for me. Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel
+on the veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her
+friend?"
+
+Lady Hannah repeated:
+
+"'And Bough, who was her friend.' You are Bough----?"
+
+"_Click!_" Somebody had hung up the receiver.
+
+
+
+
+Lady Hannah spent another bad night, not wholly due to the indigestible
+nature of a dinner of mule colloped, and locusts fried in batter by
+Nixey's chef. Staggering in the course of disturbed and changeful dreams,
+under the impact of sufficient bricks and mortar to rebuild toppledown
+Gueldersdorp, being hauled over mountains of coals, and getting into whole
+Gulf Streams of hot water, she was slumberously conscious that these
+nightmares were less harassing than one nasty, perplexing little vision
+that kept cropping up among the others. It had no beginning and no end. In
+it the Matron's room at the Convalescent Hospital and Kink's Family Hotel
+at Tweipans were somehow mixed up, and the ingenuous Mr. Van Busch, that
+Afrikander gentleman of British sympathies, whose chivalrous and patriotic
+sentiments had prompted and urged him to the imperilling of his own skin
+and the risking of his own liberty in the interests of an English lady
+masquerading for political reasons as the refugee-widow of a German
+drummer, was oddly confused in identity with an uncomfortably mysterious
+individual who possessed neither features nor name.
+
+"Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days'
+trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?" the voice would say..
+
+"You are Bough?" she would find herself asking.
+
+There would be a little guttural, horrible laugh, and nothing would answer
+but the buzzing of the wire.
+
+And then she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, with a thumping heart.
+She was no longer in any doubt as to the identity of the owner of the
+voice. Van Busch was in Gueldersdorp ... and however he came, and whatever
+disguise of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence boded no
+good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs hat respectfully before the
+superiority of feminine intuition.
+
+
+
+
+XLVIII
+
+
+Saxham, shouldering out of Julius's hotel upon his way to Staff Bombproof
+South, is made aware that the hundred-foot-high dust-storm that has raged
+and swirled throughout the morning is in process of being beaten down into
+a porridge of red mud by a downpour of February rain.
+
+Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedestrians who have
+grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the
+wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the
+Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes
+swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast
+and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even more
+vividly than upon Sunday, the angry buffalo of Lady Hannah's apt analogy.
+
+He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a minute or two. So
+is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges him at the bridge that carries
+the single-gauge railway southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ragged
+waterproof and an additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted officer
+of the Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognises Captain Bingo
+Wrynche, as he goes by at a furious gallop, spurring, and jagging savagely
+at the mouth of the handsome if attenuated brown charger, who sends stones
+and mud and water flying from his furious iron-shod hoofs. So is the
+Barala on guard by the wattled palisade of the native village--a
+muddy-legged and goose-fleshy warrior, in a plumed, brimless bowler and
+leopard-skin kaross, whose teeth can be heard chattering as he stands to
+attention and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The Chinamen working
+in the patches of market-garden, where the scant supply of vegetables that
+command such famine-prices are raised, are certainly sheltered from the
+wet by their colossal umbrella-hats, but the splashed-up red gruel has
+imbrued them to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully, hoeing
+scattered shell-fragments out of their potato-drills and removing
+incrusted masses of bullets that incommode the young kidney-beans, and
+arranging this ironmongery and metal-ware in tidy piles, possibly with a
+view to future commerce. And so, with another challenge from a picket,
+posted between the Barala village and the south trenches, where many of
+the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous
+tongue of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff
+Bombproof is situated.
+
+As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white flash leaps from
+a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and one of Meisje's great shells
+goes screaming and winnowing westwards. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a
+battered, shaggy, berry-brown trooper, standing knee-deep in a hole,
+burrowed in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his shelter,
+challenges for the last time.
+
+"'Alt! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a man whose wounded arm was
+dressed, one blazing day last January, outside the Convent bombproof. "But
+you'll 'ave to give the countersign. Pass Honour and all's well. But"--the
+sentry's nostrils twitch as the savour of Saxham's pipe reaches them, and
+his whisper of appeal is as piercing as a yell--"if you left a pipeful
+be'ind you, it wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't pull your pouch out, sir; the
+lookout officer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it by the feel, an' drop a pinch
+by the stone near your toe. I'll get it when they relieve me."
+
+Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly over the little
+brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing to sponginess under
+the downpour from the skies. The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with
+greenish-yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises now
+immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flagstaff displaying the
+Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which the
+flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are
+used for signalling at night.
+
+Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an officer in dripping
+waterproofs, who is looking steadily through a telescope out between the
+long driving lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those
+mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so
+desolate, and whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant
+life as the blanket of an unwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a little
+below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing above the
+edge of the turned-up collar and below the brim of the Field-Service cap,
+prove him to be not Beauvayse. And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire,
+varied by brisk bursts of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the
+Destroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary
+way. But even women and children have grown indifferent to these things,
+and the men have long ceased to be aware of them.
+
+A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of a stable
+rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the fierce and
+clamorous smells of the native village. The ground slopes under his feet.
+He goes down the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the
+orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin
+that screens off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the
+salute, receives a brief message, and disappears within.
+
+Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut hindquarters of
+half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or fidgeting before their
+emptied mangers. Against the division of a loose-box that holds a fine
+brown charger, still saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud,
+there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains and splashes
+upon it, has been recently in use.
+
+Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and file. Here several
+gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are sitting on rough benches at a
+trestle-table, playing dominoes and draughts, or poring over tattered
+books by the light of the flickering oil-lamps, with tin reflectors, that
+hang against the earth walls. None of them are smoking, though several are
+sucking vigorously at empty pipes; and the rapacious light that glares in
+every eye as Saxham mechanically knocks out the ashes from his smoked-out
+briar-root against the side-post of the entrance is sufficient witness to
+the pangs that they endure.
+
+Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell of revengeful
+fury seething in his heart, and a legion of devils unloosed and shrieking,
+prompting him to murder, he should have paused to relieve the
+tobacco-famine of the sentry, and be moved to a further sacrifice of his
+sole luxury by the sight of those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch,
+pitched by a cricketer's hand, flies in among the domino-players, and
+rebounds from a pondering head, as the orderly comes back, and lifts one
+corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening
+wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the
+scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset,
+and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion
+over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to
+quell the riot, and thenceforward joins the rioters.
+
+They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from among the rest,
+clutching the prize, and grinning a three-cornered grin because his upper
+lip is split, divides the tobacco fairly to the last thread. They even
+share out the indiarubber pouch, and chew the pieces as long as the
+flavour lasts. When the thick, fragrant smoke curls up from the lighted
+pipes, it steals round the edges of the tarpaulin that has dropped behind
+Saxham, passing in to the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief whose
+profane and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of the Convent
+garden.
+
+Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with the lust to kill
+tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will soon stand in the presence of
+his enemy, and hers. As he thinks of this, suddenly a bell rings. The
+sound comes from the north, so it cannot be the bell of the Catholic
+Church, or that of the Protestant Church, or the bell of the Wesleyan
+meeting-house, or of the Dutch Kerk.
+
+"_Clang-clang! clang-clang! Clang----_"
+
+The last clang is broken off suddenly, as though the rope has been jerked
+from the ringer's hands, but Saxham is not diverted by it from his
+occupation. With that curious fatuity to which the most logical of us are
+prone, he has been conning over the brief, scorching sentences with which
+he means to strip the other man's deception bare to the light, and make
+known his own self-appointed mission to avenge her.
+
+"They telephoned for me, and I have come, but not in the interests of
+your sick or wounded man. Because it was imperative that I should say this
+to you: Your engagement to Miss Mildare and your approaching marriage to
+her were announced in to-day's _Siege Gazette_. You have received many
+congratulations. Now take mine--liar, and coward, and cheat!"
+
+And with each epithet, delivered with all the force of Saxham's muscular
+arm, shall fall a stinging blow of the heavy old hunting-crop. There will
+be a shout, an angry oath from Beauvayse, staggering back under the
+unexpected, savage chastisement, red bars marring the insolent, high-bred
+beauty of the face that has bewitched her. Saxham will continue:
+
+"You approached this innocent, inexperienced girl as a lover. You
+represented yourself to her and to her mother-guardian as a single man.
+All this when you had already a wife at home in England--a gaudy stage
+butterfly sleek with carrion-juices, whose wings are jewelled by the vices
+of men; and who is worthy of you, as you are of her. I speak as I can
+prove. Here is the written testimony of a reliable witness to your
+marriage with Miss Lavigne. And now you will go to her and show yourself
+to her in your true colours. You will undeceive her, or----"
+
+There is a foggy uncertainty about what is to follow after that "or." But
+the livid flames of the burning hell that is in Saxham throw upon the
+greyness a leaping reflection that is red like blood. A fight to the
+death, either with weapons, or, best of all, with the bare hands, is what
+Saxham secretly lusts for, and savours in anticipation as he goes.
+
+Let the humanitarian say what he pleases. Man is a manslayer by instinct
+and by will.
+
+And within the little area of this beleaguered town do not men kill, and
+are not men killed, every day? The conditions are mediaeval, fast relapsing
+into the primeval. The modern sanctity and inviolability attending and
+surrounding human life are at a discount. Even for children, the grim King
+of Terrors had become a bugaboo to laugh at; red wounds and ghastly sights
+are things of everyday experience; there is a slump in mortality.
+
+In those old, far-distant Chilworth Street days, two men who engaged in a
+battle to the death about a woman desired might have seemed merely savages
+to Saxham. Here things are different. The elemental bed-rock of human
+nature has been laid bare, and the grim, naked scars upon it, testifying
+to the combat of Ice and Fire for the round world's supremacy, will never
+be quite hidden under Civilisation's green mantle of vegetation, or her
+toadstool-growths of bricks and mortar, any more.
+
+And the men are well matched. Saxham knows himself the more muscular, but
+Beauvayse has the advantage of him in years, and is lithe, and strong, and
+supple as the Greek wrestler who served the sculptor Polycleitos as a
+model for the Athlete with the Diadem.
+
+It will be a fight worth having. No quarter. And Saxham's breath comes
+heavily, and his blue eyes have in them a steely glitter, and, as the
+tarpaulin falls behind him, he shifts to a better grip on the strong old
+hunting-crop.
+
+Overhead the rain drums deafeningly on the tarpaulins. The long bombproof
+is heterogeneously furnished with full and empty ammunition-boxes marked
+A.O.S., a leathern sofa-divan, tattered by spurs and marked by muddy
+boots, several cane or canvas deck-chairs, and others of the Windsor
+pattern common to the barrack-room. Arms and accoutrements are in rude
+racks against the corrugated-iron-panelled walls; a trestle-table covered
+with oilcloth runs down the middle. It is lighted by a couple of acetylene
+lamps hanging by their chains from iron bars that cross the trench above,
+and there is another lamp, green-shaded, upon a bare deal table that
+stands, strewn with papers, against the farther wall.
+
+A man in shirt-sleeves sits there writing. Another man is busy at a
+telephone that is fixed against the wall beyond the writing-table. There
+is something fateful and ominous about the heavy silence in which they do
+their work. It is broken only by a strange sound that comes almost
+continuously from--where Saxham does not trouble to ask. It is the
+groaning, undoubtedly, of the wounded man to whose aid he has been
+summoned, with the added injunction, "Bring morphia," showing that little
+further can be done for him, whoever he may be, than to smooth his
+passage into the Beyond by the aid of the Pain Slayer.
+
+Let him wait, however sore his need, until Saxham has dealt with his
+enemy. He is resentfully impatient in the knowledge that neither of the
+men present is Beauvayse.
+
+Then, as he stands sullen and lowering, the man who has been writing gets
+up and comes to him. Saxham recognises the keen-featured face with the
+rusty-brown moustache, and the grip of the lean, hard hand that hauled a
+Dop Doctor out of the Slough of Despair is familiar. The pleasant voice he
+likes says something about somebody being very wet. It is Saxham, from
+whose soaked garments the water is running in streams, and whose boots
+squelch as he crosses the carpet that has been spread above the
+floor-tarpaulin. The friendly hand pours out and offers him a sparing
+measure of that rare stimulant, whisky.
+
+"As preventive medicine. We can't have our Medical Staff men on the
+sick-list."
+
+Some such commonplace words accompany the proffered hospitality.
+
+"I shall not suffer, thanks. You have a shell-casualty, you have 'phoned
+us, but before I see your man it is imperative that I should speak to Lord
+Beauvayse. Where is he?"
+
+"He is here."
+
+"My business with him is urgent, sir."
+
+The man at the telephone makes a sound indicative that a message is coming
+through. The Chief is beside him instantly, with the receiver at his ear.
+He looks round for an instant at Saxham as he waits for the intelligence,
+and the muscles of his face twitch as if under the influence of some
+strong, repressed emotion, and the Doctor's practised glance notes the
+unsteadiness of the uplifted hand. Then he is saying to the officer in
+charge at Maxim Kopje South:
+
+"The ammunition comes up to-night. Tell Gaylord that we are short-handed
+here, and shall want him to help on night duty.... Practically as soon as
+he can join us. No, no better. All for the present ... thanks! Saxham,
+please come this way."
+
+There is a sleeping-place at the end of the long, narrow, lamp-lit
+perspective, curtained off from the rude bareness of the outer place.
+Light shows between the curtains, and they are of plush, in hue a rich,
+deep red. As that strong colour sinks into his brain, through his intent
+and glittering eyes, Saxham the man has a sudden furious impulse to tear
+the deep folds back, with a clash of brazen rings on iron rods, and call
+to the betrayer who lurks behind them to come out and be dealt with. But
+that hollow, feeble moaning sounds continuously from the other side, and
+Saxham the surgeon stays his hand and follows the Colonel in. There are
+two camp-beds in the small sleeping-place, and a washstand and a
+folding-chair. A lamp hangs above, and its light falls full upon the face
+of the man whom he is seeking.
+
+Ah! where are they? His furious anger and his deadly hate, where are they
+now? Like snow upon the desert they vanish away. How can one rage against
+this shattered thing, stretched on the pallet of the low cot-bed from
+which the blankets have been stripped away? First Aid bandages have been
+not ineffectually applied. Fragments of packing-case have been employed as
+splints for the broken arm and shattered hand, but, in spite of all that
+has been done, the beautiful young life is sinking, waning, flowing out
+with that ruddy tide that will not be stayed.
+
+The greenish pallor and the sweat of mortal agony are upon the face of
+Beauvayse, thrown back upon the pillow, and looking upwards to where the
+deluging rain makes thunder on the tarpaulined roof. The atmosphere is
+heavy with the sour-sickly smell of blood, and lamp-fumes; he draws each
+breath laboriously, and exhales it with a whistling sound. Through his
+clenched teeth, revealed by the lips that are dragged back in the
+semi-grin of desperate agony, that dumb, ceaseless moaning makes its way
+despite the gallant effort to restrain it. The one uninjured arm hangs
+downwards, its restless fingers picking at the bloodstained matting that
+covers the loose boards of the floor. A sheet has been lightly laid over
+him. It is dabbled with the prevailing hue, and sinks in an ominous hollow
+below the breast. And beyond the bottom of it splashed leggings and muddy
+boots with spurs on them stick out with helpless stiffness.
+
+A flask of brandy--a precious restorative treasured for use in such
+desperate need as this--stands with a tumbler and a jug of water on the
+camp washstand that is between the two cot-beds. Upon the second bed sits
+a big and stoutish man, whose large face, not pink just now, is hidden in
+his thick, quivering hands. It is Captain Bingo Wrynche, heavy Dragoon,
+and honest, single-hearted gentleman, to whom belongs the blown and muddy
+charger drooping in the loose-box outside. The telephone has summoned him
+in haste from Hotchkiss Outpost North, to see the last of a friend.
+
+
+
+
+XLIX
+
+
+"It was just before the rainstorm that it happened. He was on the lookout.
+They have been moving the big gun and the 16-pounder Krupps again, and
+some of the laagers seem to be shifting, so we have kept an extra eye open
+of late, by night as well as by day. He was very keen always...."
+
+Already he is spoken of by those who have known and loved him as one who
+was and has been.
+
+"He had relieved me at 10 a.m. He might have been up over an hour when it
+happened. The orderly-sergeant had got his mouth at the speaking-tube, in
+the act of sending down a message; he did not see him hit. It was a shell
+from their Maxim-Nordenfelt. And when we got to him, the first glance told
+us there was little hope."
+
+"There is none at all," says Saxham curtly, as is his wont. "A splinter
+has shattered the lower portion of the spine. The agony can be deadened
+with an opiate, and the ruptured arteries ligatured. Beyond that there is
+nothing else to do, though he may live till morning."
+
+"He managed to ask for Wrynche before he swooned, so we 'phoned him at
+Hotchkiss Outpost North. He got here ten minutes ago, badly cut up, but
+there has been no recognition of him. Do what you can, Saxham, in the
+case. Every moment may bring Wrynche's recall. There is another person I
+should have expected the poor boy to ask for.... That young girl, Saxham,
+whose heart has to be broken with the news, sooner or later. Perhaps about
+nightfall, when it will be safe for her to venture. I ought to send an
+escort for Miss Mildare?"
+
+The slow, dusky colour rises in Saxham's set, pale face, and as slowly
+sinks out again. He has been standing in low-toned colloquy with the Chief
+outside the heavy plush curtains. He turns silently upon his heel and
+vanishes behind them.
+
+
+
+
+"_Ting--ting--ting!_"
+
+The telephone-bell heralds an urgent recall from Hotchkiss Outpost North.
+And a beckoning hand summons Captain Bingo from the bedside of his dying
+friend ere ever the word of parting has been spoken.
+
+"It is for you, Wrynche, as I expected."
+
+"I am ready, sir. Orderly, get my damned brute out!"
+
+The sorrow and love that swell the big man's heart to bursting find rather
+absurd expression in his savage objurgation of the innocent brown charger.
+But Captain Bingo, when he stoops over the camp-bed where lies Beauvayse,
+kisses him solemnly and clumsily upon the forehead, and then goes heavily
+striding out of the death-chamber with his bulldog jowl well down upon his
+chest; and a moment later when he is seen bucketing the lean brown charger
+through the thrashing hailstorm that is jagged across by the white-green
+fires of bursting shell, is rather a tragic figure, or so it seems to me.
+
+Meanwhile, what of the man who lies upon the bed? Since Bingo's face came
+between and receded into, those thick grey mists that gather about the
+dying, he has lost consciousness of present things. Fever is rising in
+those wellnigh empty veins of his, his skin is drawing and creeping; it
+seems as though innumerable ants were running over him. The hand that is
+not powerless tries to brush them away. Sometimes he thinks he is in
+Hospital, and that the man in the next bed is groaning, and then he is
+aware that the groans are his own. He is conscious that a needle-prick in
+the sound wrist has been followed by sensible relief. The unspeakable
+grinding agonies subside; he is able to murmur, "Thanks, Nurse," as he
+gulps some liquid from the glass a strange hand holds to his lips....
+
+The groans are sighs now, and the clogged brain, spurred by morphia,
+shakes off its lethargy. The fever goes on rising, and he begins,
+silently, for his powers fail of speech, to wander over all the past.
+Could Saxham, sitting motionless and vigilant on the folding-chair, his
+keen eyes quick to note each change, his deft hand prompt to do all that
+can be done--could Saxham hear, he would behold, anatomised before his
+mental vision, the soul of this his fellow-man.
+
+"Coming straight for me--five round black spots punched in the grey. If
+they go by, luck's on my side, and I marry her. If not ... hit--and done
+for!"
+
+Exactly thus has Saxham made of the unconscious Father Noah, of the Boer
+sharp shooters behind their breastwork, the arbiters of Fate.
+
+"Send for Bingo!" flashes across the dying brain "Something to say to
+Bingo. Don't bring _her_. Who'd want a woman who loved him to remember him
+like this? What was it the Mahometan _syce_ the _musth_ elephant killed at
+Bhurtpore said about his wife? '_Let her cool my grave with tears._' Until
+she finds out ... until someone tells her. Ah--'h!" There is a groan, and
+a convulsive shudder, and the beautiful dim eyes roll up in agony, and the
+blue, swollen lips are wrung as the feeble voice whispers: "Nurse, this
+hurts like--hell! Some more--that stuff!"
+
+Saxham gives another subcutaneous injection of morphia. The curtains part,
+and the Colonel, in waterproof and a dreadnought cap, comes noiselessly
+in. "No change," Saxham answers to the mute inquiry. "I anticipate none
+before midnight. Of course, the weakness is progressive."
+
+"Of course." The Chief touches the cold, flaccid wrist. There are hollows
+in his lean cheeks, and deep crow's-feet at the corners of the kindly
+hazel eyes, and the brown moustache is ominously straight and curveless.
+"Tell him, if he recovers consciousness, that I thought it best to send
+for her. Chagrave has gone with a couple of the men. It's a desperate
+night for a woman to be out in, but they took an Ambulance sling-chair
+with them. They'll wrap her in tarpaulins, and carry her in that."
+
+He nods and goes up on the lookout with a night-glass, and the wearied
+officer he relieves comes down. As he has said, it is a desperate night of
+driving sleet and swirling blackness, illuminated only with the malignant
+coruscations of lyddite bursting-charges. But the tempest without is
+nothing to the tempest that rages in the soul of the quiet man in sodden
+khaki who watches by the dying.
+
+She has been sent for.... She is coming.... To kneel by the low cot and
+weep over him who lies there; kiss the tortured lips and the beautiful dim
+eyes, and hold the unwounded head upon her breast.... How shall Saxham
+bear it without crying out to tell her? He clenches his hands, and sets
+his strong jaw, and the sweat breaks out upon his broad, pale forehead.
+The man upon the bed, mentally clear, though incapable of coherent speech,
+is now listening to comments that shall ere long be made by living men
+upon one who very soon shall be numbered with the dead.
+
+"Well, well, don't be hard on the poor beggar!" he hears them saying.
+"Give the devil his due: not a bad chap--take him all round. Got carried
+away and lost his head. She's as lovely as they make 'em, and he ...
+always a fool where a pretty woman was concerned--poor old Toby!"
+
+He pleads unconsciously, with his most merciless judge, in his utter
+incapacity to plead at all....
+
+And so the time goes by. There has been coming and going in the place
+outside. The guard has relieved the double sentries, the official lamp
+burns redly under the little penthouse. A reconnoitring-patrol ride out,
+the horses' hoofs sounding hollow on the earth-covered boards of the
+sloping way. The business of War goes on in its accustomed grooves, and
+the business of Life will soon be over for Beauvayse. Yet she has not
+come. And Saxham looks at his watch.
+
+Nine o'clock. He has not eaten since early morning. He is wet to the skin
+and stiff with long sitting. But when the savoury odours of hot horse-soup
+and hot bean-coffee, accompanied by the clinking of crockery and tin
+pannikins, announce a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to the
+curtains and anxiously beg him to take food, he merely shakes his square
+black head and falls again to watching the unconscious face of Beauvayse.
+The conscious brain behind its blankly-staring eyes is thinking:
+
+"Those paragraphs.... In black and white the thing looked damnable. And
+think of the gossip and tongue-wagging. Whatever they say about me ...
+she'll be the one to suffer. They're never so hard on ... the man!"
+
+He has uttered these last words audibly; they pierce to the heart's core
+of the mute, impassive watcher. Strong antipathy is as clairvoyant as
+strong sympathy, and with a leap of understanding, and a fresh surge of
+fierce resentment, Saxham acknowledges the deadly truth contained in those
+few halting words. She will be the one to suffer. Beside the martyrdom
+inevitably to be endured by the white saint, the agony of the sinner's
+death-bed pales and dwindles. There is a savage struggle once again
+between Saxham the man and Saxham the surgeon beside the bed of death.
+
+His sudden irrepressible movement has knocked the tumbler from the little
+iron washstand at his elbow. It falls and shivers into fragments at his
+feet. And then--the upturned face slants a little, and the eyes that have
+been blankly staring at the roof-tarpaulins come down to the level of his
+own. He and her fallen enemy regard each other silently for a moment. Then
+Beauvayse says weakly, in the phantom of the old gay, boyish voice that
+wooed and won her:
+
+"Thought it was Wrynche. Where is----"
+
+The question ends in a groan.
+
+Saxham the man shrinks from him with unutterable loathing. But Saxham the
+surgeon stoops over him, saying, in distinct, even tones:
+
+"Captain Wrynche was here. He has been recalled to Hotchkiss Outpost
+North. Drink this." This is a little measure of brandy-and-water, in which
+some tabloids of morphia have been dissolved. And Beauvayse obeys,
+panting:
+
+"All right. But ... more a job for the Chaplain than the Doctor, isn't
+it?"
+
+"Do you wish the Chaplain sent for?"
+
+There is a glimmer of the old lazy, defiant humour in the beautiful dim
+eyes.
+
+"What could he do?"
+
+Saxham answers--how strangely for him, the Denier:
+
+"He would probably pray beside you, and talk to you of God."
+
+There is a pause. The faint, almost breathless whisper asks:
+
+"It's night, isn't it?"
+
+"It is dark and stormy night."
+
+Beauvayse says, in the whispering voice interrupted by long, gasping sighs
+that are beginning to have a jarring rattle in them:
+
+"Before to-morrow.... I shall know more of God ... than the whole Bench of
+Bishops."
+
+There is silence. And she does not come. The man on the bed makes a
+painful effort, gathering his nearly-spent forces for something he wants
+to say:
+
+"Doctor!"
+
+"Let me wipe your forehead. Yes?"
+
+"I ... insulted you frightfully the other day."
+
+"You need not recall that. I have forgotten it."
+
+"I ... beg your pardon! Will you ... shake hands?... My left, if you don't
+mind. The other one's ... no good."
+
+He tries to lift the heavy arm that lies beside him. There is only a faint
+movement of the finger-tips, and he gives up the effort with a fluttering
+sob. And the square white face with the burning eyes under the lowering
+brows opposes itself to his. Words are crowding to Saxham's lips:
+
+"_I would gladly shake the hand of the man who insulted me and who has
+apologised. And I honour the brave officer who meets Death upon the field.
+But with the would-be betrayer of an innocent girl, the dancing-woman's
+husband who proposed himself as mate for Lynette Mildare, I have nothing
+but contempt and abhorrence. He is to me a leper. Worse, for the leper I
+would touch to cure!_"
+
+He does not utter the words, nor does his rugged, unconquerable sincerity
+admit of his taking the hand. He fights with his hatred in silence. And
+she has not come. What is _he_ saying in that weak voice with the rattling
+breaths between?
+
+"Listen, Saxham.... There's ... something I want you ... say to Miss
+Mildare."
+
+The grey mists that gather about him shut out a clear view of Saxham's
+terrible face. The feeble whisper struggles on, broken by those rattling
+gasps.
+
+"Tell her forget me. Say when I ... asked her ... to marry me...."
+
+Silence. He is falling, falling into an abyss of vast uncertainties. The
+blue lips dabbled with foam can frame no more coherent words. Only the
+brain behind the dying eyes is alive to understand when Saxham approaches
+his own livid face and blazing eyes to the face upon the pillow, and says:
+
+"Do not try to speak. Close your eyes when you mean 'Yes.' I know what you
+wish me to tell Miss Mildare. It is that when you asked her to marry you,
+you were already the husband of another woman. Am I correct?"
+
+The affirmative signal comes.
+
+"You were married to Miss Lavigne at the Registrar's office,
+Cookham-on-Thames, last June, before you sailed. The witnesses were your
+valet and a female servant at Roselawn Cottage. And knowing that you were
+not free, you deceived and cheated her. That is what I am to tell Miss
+Mildare? Signal if I am right."
+
+The dying eyes are brimming with tears. When the lids shut, signifying
+"Yes," slow, heavy drops are forced between them.
+
+"Very well. Now hear. I will not tell her!"
+
+The eyes open wide with surprise.
+
+"I will never tell her," says Saxham again. "I will not blacken any man's
+reputation to further my own interests." The vital strength and the
+white-hot passion of him, contrasted with the spent and utter laxity of
+the dissolving thing of clay upon the bed, seem superhuman. "Do you hear
+me?" he demands again. "Listen once more. Knowing the truth of you, I came
+here to force you to undeceive her. Had you refused, I would certainly
+have killed you. But I would never have betrayed you!"
+
+That "never" of Saxham's carries conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is
+in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again to
+say:
+
+"Doctor, you're a ... damned good sort!" And then there is a long, long
+silence, broken only by those painful rattling breaths, never by her
+coming.
+
+The end comes, and she is not there. A pale blink in the wild sky eastward
+hints to the night lookouts of hot drink, food, and welcome rest. The
+Chief stands beside the comfortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old
+House is flickering out. The Doctor holds the wet and icy wrist, where the
+pulse has ceased to be perceptible. The sheet above the labouring breast
+rises and falls with those panting, rattling gasps; the beautiful eyes
+are rolled up and inwards. The light is very nearly out, when, with a last
+effort, the flame leaps up. He thinks that what is the barely perceptible
+whisper of a tongue already clay is a loud and ringing cheer. He thinks
+that he is shouting, his strong young voice topping a hundred other
+voices. It seems to him who, for the bribe of all the beauty he has
+coveted, and all the love that is yet unwon, could not speak one audible
+word or move a finger, that he waves his hat again and again. Oh! glorious
+moment when the white moonbeams blink on the grey dust-wall rolling down
+from the North, and the horsemen of the Advance ride out of it, and
+clustering enemies that have rallied again to the attack waver, and
+disperse, and scatter....
+
+"Hurrah! They're running--running for their lives! Give it 'em with
+shrapnel! Oh, pepper 'em like hell! The Relief! The Relief! Hurrah!"
+
+
+
+
+It is all over with the opening of the day-eye in the east. When they
+leave him, beautiful, and stern, and calm in that deep slumber from which
+only the Angel with the Trumpet may awaken him, and pass out between the
+curtains, the dark, short officer who was on the lookout when the Doctor
+came, stands very pale and muddy, and steaming with damp, waiting to
+report. And two troopers of the Irregulars, wet and muddy and steaming
+too, are waiting also, just inside the tarpaulins of the outer doorway.
+And she is not there.
+
+A few rapid words, an exclamation from the Chief, shaken for once out of
+his steely composure, and quivering from head to foot with mingled rage
+and grief:
+
+"My God, how unutterably horrible!"
+
+Saxham shoulders his way into the ring of white faces that have gathered
+about the dark little muddy officer.
+
+"What has happened to Miss Mildare----?"
+
+The little officer answers, panting:
+
+"The Sisters could not make her understand. She----"
+
+The Chief speaks for him:
+
+"She had been previously stunned by the shock of--a terrible calamity."
+
+"What calamity?"
+
+"The Mother-Superior has been killed. Two of the Sisters and Miss Mildare
+found her in the Convent chapel. They got there before evening. She must
+have been dead some hours. She had been shot through the lungs."
+
+"By a stray bullet?"
+
+"By a bullet from a revolver, fired close enough to scorch the clothes.
+Foul murder, and by God who saw it done----"
+
+The lean clenched hand, thrown upwards in a savage gesture, the blazing
+eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the writhen mouth, the furious, jarring
+voice, leave little doubt of the vengeance that will be wreaked when he
+shall track down the murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the
+telephone. The swift, imperative orders volt from fort to fort; the
+circuit of vigilance is made complete, the human bloodhounds unleashed
+upon the trail, in a few instants, thanks to the buzzing wire that brings
+the mouth of a man to the ear of another across a void of miles.
+
+But Bough, primed with knowledge as to which are dummy rifle-pits and
+which are real, aided by acquaintance with the ground, and covered by that
+wuthering night of storm, has already pierced the lines. Subsequently that
+excellent Afrikander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Brounckers' bright boy at
+Tweipans, with information that decides the date of Schenk Eybel's Feint
+from the East.
+
+
+
+
+L
+
+
+She had gone about her Master's business all Monday, calm and composed,
+and inexorably gentle. She did not meet Richard's daughter before
+nightfall. "She will not suffer now," she thought, even as she sent the
+message that was to allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her
+whereabouts in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-wrecked shanty
+at the south end of the town, where some Lithuanian emigrants herded
+together in indescribable filth and misery. A woman who had been recently
+confined lay there raving in puerperal fever. Until nightfall, when she
+was removed to the Isolation Hospital on the veld, near the Women's
+Laager, the Mother-Superior remained with the patient.
+
+A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a peculiarly dark skin and strange steely
+eyes, passing the broken window, caught sight of the noble profile and the
+stately shoulders stooping above the miserable bed. Going home at dark,
+the Mother heard a stealthy footstep following behind her.
+
+Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the trenches, many people,
+revisiting their deserted dwellings, had found them plundered of movable
+possessions, and, losing the fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale
+evaporation of their worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to protect
+them. Instances there had been of robbery from the person by thieves not
+all tracked down by Martial Justice and made examples of.
+
+The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human jackal, whose sole
+end is money and money's worth, have no terrors for Holy Poverty. But
+there are other creatures of prey more terrible than these. And the
+padding footsteps that followed, hurrying when she hurried and slackening
+when she went more slowly, and stopping dead when she paused and looked
+round, conveyed to her a haunting sense of something sinister, and at the
+same time greedy and guileful, that bided its time to spring.
+
+She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black robes sweeping
+noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the well-known ground, her course
+kept unfalteringly; but her heart shook her, and she gasped as the Convent
+bomb proof neared in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more of
+late, and she knew herself less strong than she had been. When the blue
+light that hung from a post by the ladder-hole blinked "Home" through the
+mirk of a night of thin rain and mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite
+relief. Her great eyes were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's, and
+her bosom heaved with her panting breaths. She paused a moment to regain
+her composure before she went down.
+
+The nuns who were not on night-duty were gathered together about the
+trestle-table sewing, while the lay-Sisters prepared the scanty evening
+meal. Lynette was there, sitting pale and quiet on her corner-stool.
+Richard's daughter had been watching and waiting for her Mother. Ah! to
+see the relief and gladness leap into the dear face, and shine in the
+beautiful wistful eyes that had shed such tears, dear God!--such tears of
+anguish upon Sunday--and then had dried at the utterance of her decree--
+
+"You are never to tell him!"
+
+--And changed into radiant stars of joy, by whose light the darkness of
+her own wickedness and misery seemed almost bearable.
+
+"It is the Mother. Mother----"
+
+Lynette sprang up, and would have hurried to her, but the Mother lifted a
+warning hand, and calling Sister Tobias to her, passed aside into a
+curtained-off and precautionary cave that had been hollowed out behind the
+ladder. This was the custom when the ladies of the Holy Way returned from
+doubtful or infectious cases. Lynette sighed, and went back to her stool
+to wait. The busy needles had not ceased stitching.
+
+That humble saint, Sister Tobias, hurried to her diligent ministry of
+purification. When she came in with hot water and carbolic spray, she
+brought a letter with her. It was directed to the Mother in a coarse
+round-hand.
+
+"Somebody dropped this down the ladder-hole as I came by with my kettle,"
+said Sister Tobias. "It's the first letter-box I ever knew that was as
+wide as the door. Maybe 'twill bring in a new fashion, for all we know."
+She made her homely joke with a sore heart for the sorrow she read in the
+Mother's beloved face, and trotted away to fetch clean towels, saying--a
+favourite saying with Sister Tobias--that her head would never save her
+heels.
+
+The Mother opened the letter. It was anonymous, and utterly vile. Had the
+pen been dipped in liquid ordure, the thing written could not have been
+more defiling to the touch than its meaning was to this pure woman's
+chaste eyes. Had a puff-adder writhed out of the envelope, and struck its
+fangs into her beautiful hand, it would have poisoned her less certainly.
+And every beat of the obscene words upon her brain, strangely enough,
+awakened an echo of those long padding footsteps that had followed in the
+dark. And the writer knew of all that had happened at the tavern on the
+veld, when a human brute had triumphed in his bestiality, and a girl-child
+had been helpless, and the great white stars had looked down unmoved and
+changeless upon Innocence destroyed.
+
+The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning to the infamous end.
+She had been sorely wrought upon of late. She tried to pray, but she knew
+the Ear Above must be averted from one who had lied and was in deadly
+sin.... When Sister Tobias came back she found her lying in a swoon.
+
+The little old crooked, nimble Sister, with the long, pale sheep-face,
+dropped on her knees beside that prone column of stately womanhood,
+removed the Mother's hooded mantle, loosened the _guimpe_ and habit, and
+worked strenuously to revive her, dropping tears.
+
+"My beautiful, my poor lamb!" she crooned. "What's come to her? What
+wicked shadow's black on all of us? What's brooding near us--Mary be our
+guardian!--that's struck at _her_ to-night!"
+
+The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from the unconscious
+hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and might lie. If the Mother willed
+to tell its contents, she would tell. If not, the little old nun, her
+faithful daughter, would never ask or seek to know.
+
+She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the tender, wrinkled
+ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the close white linen wimple.
+
+"Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said, and rose. Sister
+Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it to her. There was a Boer
+mutton-fat candle flaring draughtily in an iron sconce upon the wall. The
+Mother moved across the little room, and burned the letter to the last
+blank corner, and trod the fallen ashes into impalpable powder. Then she
+helped Sister Tobias to remove every trace left, and obviate every danger
+that might result from her late toil, and rejoined her quiet family of
+daughters as though nothing had happened.
+
+They recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid she had seemed that
+night. Her smile had a heart-breaking sweetness, and her voice made
+wonderful melody even in their accustomed ears.
+
+They supped on the little that they had, and chatted, said the
+night-prayers, and went, aching, all of them, with unsatisfied hunger, to
+bed. You may conjecture the orderly, modest method of retiring, each
+Sister vanishing in turn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and
+vest herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose, full conventual
+night-garment of thick white twilled linen, high-throated,
+monkish-sleeved, and girdled with a thin cotton cord, her face, plain or
+pretty, young or elderly, framed in the close little white drawn cap of
+many tucks.
+
+Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin pulled over its
+hole, the lights were extinguished, and only the subdued crimson glow of
+the tiny lamp that burned before the silver Crucifix that had stood above
+the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in the
+thick, hot dark, where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a
+narrow, white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row of
+quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow,
+and her beads about her wrist.
+
+The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences of the anonymous
+letter written in hellish characters of mocking flame on the background of
+the dark. She prayed as the wrecked may when the ship beneath their feet
+is going down. Beside her Lynette, not daring to disturb the silence,
+suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living
+on the other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly yawned
+between.
+
+She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister
+Cleophee. She had not seen Beauvayse. But a note had come from him, that
+had warmed the heart she hid it near. His dearest, he called her--his own
+beautiful beloved. He could not snatch a minute from duty even to kiss his
+darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday they would be together all day. And
+would she not meet him at the Convent on Thursday, at twilight, when the
+shelling stopped, and it would be safe for his beloved to venture there?
+She must not come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play
+Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and
+death.
+
+Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It laid a
+hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and strong. The hand said
+"Mine!"
+
+His. She would be his one day--soon; and there would be no more mysteries
+between the man and the woman welded by God's ordinance into husband and
+wife. She shivered a little at the thought of that intimate, peculiar,
+utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart,
+she realised that, however well such a secret as that she guarded might be
+hidden before the priest and the clergyman made they twain One, it must be
+known of both afterwards, or else be for ever threatening to start through
+the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"
+
+She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon, and deaf when
+voices spoke to her. She was thinking.... How if she might be mistaken in
+Beauvayse, even now? He was beautiful and brave and alluring to her
+woman's sense in what she knew of him and what was yet to know. He called
+her and drew her. Nothing noble awakened in her at the smile on the gay,
+bold lips and in the grey-green, jewel-bright eyes. When he had held her
+to his heart, she had not felt her soul merge with another, its fellow,
+and yet stronger and greater, in that embrace. He and she were not
+bodiless spirits floating in pure ether, but an earth-made girl and boy,
+very much athirst for the common cup of human rapture, hungry for the
+banquet of mortal bliss.
+
+It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the one? How if her
+hasty gift of herself robbed both in the long end? How if his headlong
+passion and tempestuous love should be torn from him like rags in the
+first instant of that discovery that must almost inevitably be made? She
+heard his boyish voice crying, "Hateful!... You have deceived me!" and was
+stabbed with quick anguish, knowing him in the right.
+
+Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some unwritten code of that
+strange lawgiver, the World, they were absolved of the necessity of
+spotlessness. They might slake their thirst at muddy sources unrebuked.
+And the more each wallowed, the more he demanded of the woman he wedded
+that she should be immaculate in thought and deed--if in knowledge, that
+was all the better.
+
+What a cloud of doubts assailed her, swarming like bees, settling in every
+blossomed branch of her mind, and blotting out the sweetness with angry
+buzzing, furry bodies, armed with sharp stings for punishment or revenge.
+She had seen a little peach-tree weighed down and bowed to the red earth
+at its roots with the weight of such a swarm. She felt at this juncture
+very like the tree. A little more, only a slight increase of the burden,
+and the slender trunk would have snapped. When the native bee-master came
+and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives, the little tree stayed
+crooked. It did not regain its beautiful, healthful uprightness for a long
+time.
+
+The Mother had commanded her never to tell Beauvayse. She realised that in
+this one sorrowful instance she was wiser than her teacher. If unutterable
+misery was not to result from their union, he must be told the truth
+before ...
+
+Once he knew it, would he love her any longer? Would he desire to make her
+his wife? She knitted her brows and her fingers in anguish, and set her
+little teeth. Possibly not. Probably not.
+
+And supposing all went well and they were married. She had not realised
+clearly, even when she talked of travelling abroad into the unknown,
+conjectured world, what it would mean to go out from this, the first home
+she had ever known, and leave the Mother. She caught her breath, and her
+heart stopped at the thought of waking up one morning in a new, strange
+country, and knowing that dear face thousands of miles away.
+
+The loneliness drove her to daring. She reached out a timid hand, and laid
+it upon the breast of the still, rigid, immovable figure beside her. Ah,
+what a leaping, striving, throbbing prisoner was caged there! A faint sob
+of surprise broke from her. Ah! what was it? what could it mean?
+
+The faint sound she uttered plucked at the strings of that tortured heart.
+The Mother turned, rose upon her elbow, leaned over the low dividing
+barrier, took the slight body in her arms, and gathered it closely to her,
+shielding it from the fangs of that coiled, formless Terror that
+threatened in the dark. She felt how thin and light it was, and how frail
+the arms were that clung about her, and how wasted was the face that
+pressed against the coarse, conventual linen, covering the broad, deep
+bosom whose chaste and hidden beauties Famine had not spared.
+
+She would be a real mother once--just once. God would not grudge her that.
+She bared her breast to the cheek with a sudden half-savage, wholly
+maternal gesture, and drew it close and pillowed it and rocked it. Had
+Heaven wrought a miracle and unsealed those white fountains of her
+spotless womanhood, she would have found it sweet to give of herself to
+Richard's starving child. But she had nothing but her great, indignant
+pity and her boundless agony of love. Long hours after the face lay hushed
+in sleep above her heart, and while the long, soft breaths of slumber went
+and came, she lay staring out into the sinister blackness over the
+beloved, menaced head.
+
+
+
+
+Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-hole, falling in heavy,
+sullen gouts and splashes on the beaten earth below as blood drips from a
+desperate wound. That image rose, and the blackness seemed all red--red
+with those lines of fiery writing on it, smoking and crawling, flickering
+and blazing, climbing, and licking with thin, greenish tongues of
+hell-begotten flame.
+
+Then the midnight hour struck, and it was time to rise for Matins. Long
+after the Sisters had gone back to bed the Mother knelt on, a motionless
+figure wrestling in silent prayer before the silver Crucifix upon the
+wall. Dawn found her still kneeling. No ray of heavenly light had found
+her soul, that weltered in darkness, crying to One Who seemed not to hear.
+
+
+
+
+LI
+
+
+She did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital next day, but
+secretly charged Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony to carry her
+whithersoever they went, and not once to let her out of sight. This done,
+she knew herself impotently helpless to do more. This strong and salient
+woman, lapped in unseen, impalpable serpent-coils that tightened every
+hour, was waxing weak. By her own deed she had barred out help and put
+counsel far from her. She had known the punishment would not be long in
+coming, when, for the sake of Richard's daughter, she had lied to
+Richard's friend.
+
+Now she knew, poor, noble, suffering soul, that it would have been wiser
+to have saved her spotless garment from the smirch by telling him the
+truth. Then she could have fought this invisible tarantula Thing, with the
+conjectural hairy claws, the baleful, glittering eyes, and the padding
+feet that dogged her in the dark, with a strong man's arm to aid her. God
+was in Heaven, and in Him were her faith and trust, but the comfort of a
+human counsellor would have been unspeakable.
+
+In a purely spiritual difficulty she would have gone to Father Wix. The
+kindly, fussy, feeble little old priest could hardly help her in this
+extremity. She had never told _him_ what had happened at the tavern on the
+veld. Deep in her pitying woman's heart the child's cruel secret had been
+buried, once learned. Sister Tobias was the only one who shared it.
+
+Meanwhile she was followed that night and the next night; and on the
+morning of the Thursday, when she rose from her sleepless bed, another
+letter weighted with a stone had been dropped down the ladder-hole. She
+was to give the anonymous writer a meeting and receive a message, unless
+she wished them that chose to be nameless to lay in wait for the girl.
+Most likely that would be the better way. She could choose.
+
+She burned the second letter before she went to the Hospital. She found
+there the single sheet of the _Siege Gazette_ fluttering in every hand.
+Even her dignified reserve could not ward off the well-meant
+congratulations, the eager questions, the interested comments on the news
+contained in the three last paragraphs of the column that was signed "Gold
+Pen." Then came the telephone message from Lady Hannah. We know what words
+of hers the wire carried back. All the more firm, all the more courageous,
+all the more determined that her knees shook, and her heart was as water
+within her. For the Thing that coiled in the dark would surely strike now.
+
+Perhaps it was some premonition of approaching death that made her, always
+gracious, always infinitely kind, untiring in helpful deeds, move about
+among the sick that day, with such a sorrowful-sweet tenderness for them
+in her noble face and in her gentle touch, and in that wood-dove's voice
+of hers, that they spoke of it long afterwards with bated breath. A
+perfume as of rare incense was wafted from the folds of her veil, they
+said, and a pale aureole of light shone about her white-banded forehead,
+and her eyes---- Ah! who that met their look could ever forget those eyes?
+
+It was before twilight when she left the Hospital and went to the Convent,
+a tall, upright, mantled and hooded figure, stepping through the heavy
+rain that had fallen since noon, under a quaint monster of a cotton
+umbrella with ribs of ancient whale,--Tragedy carrying Farce.
+
+It was not the custom to linger in the neighbourhood of the Convent, even
+among those who were most indifferent to shot and shell. No one was
+visible in its vicinity, except one burly, bushy-bearded, dark-skinned man
+in tan-cords and a moleskin jacket. He lounged against a bent and twisted
+lamp-post, near the broken entrance-gates, cutting up a lump of something
+that might have been cake-tobacco upon his broad, thick palm with a
+penknife.
+
+She passed him as she went in. His slouched hat made shadow for his eyes.
+But so curiously shallow and flat and rusty pale were they against the
+purplish-brown of the full-blooded, bearded face, that their sharp, sly,
+sudden look as she went by was as though the adder-fangs had slashed at
+her. She knew it was the man who had written those two letters. And
+something else she knew, but did not dare to admit her knowledge even to
+herself as yet.
+
+She mustered all her forces to meet what was coming as she went up the
+broken stairs. The wind and the long, driving lances of the rain came at
+her through the gaps in the walls. The sky was a driving hurry of muddy
+vapours. The grey hills were blotted out by mist and fog. Long flashes of
+white fire leaped from them, and the heavy boom of cannon followed. Then
+all would be still again. She passed down the whitewashed, matted, sodden
+corridor, and drew out the heavy key of the chapel door from a deep pocket
+under her black habit, and went in.
+
+Rain beat in here through jagged holes in the soft brickwork and poured
+through the broken roof, whose rubbish littered the floor. Whiter squares
+on the whitewashed walls, sodden now with damp, and peeling, showed where
+the pictures of the Stations of the Cross had hung; with them all
+draperies had been stripped away and hidden. The crimson-velvet-covered
+ropes that had done duty instead of altar-rails had been removed, their
+brass supports unscrewed from the floor. The naked altar-stone was covered
+with fragments of cheap stained-glass from the little east window of which
+the Sisters had been so proud. The Tabernacle gaped empty; sandy,
+reddish-grey dust filled the tiny piscina, and lay thick upon the
+altar-stone and the shallow wooden altar-steps, and wherever else the rain
+had not reached it to turn it into yellow mud.
+
+Why had she come here? Because she felt as though the Presence that had
+housed under the veil of the Consecrated Element were still guarding Its
+desecrated home. And near the door of the tiny sacristy dangled the rope
+communicating with the bell that hung, as yet uninjured, in the little
+wooden cupola upon the roof. The bell could be rung, should need arise.
+She did not formulate in thought what need. But the recollection of those
+poisonous adder-eyes stirred even in that proud, dauntless woman's bosom a
+cold and creeping fear. And when she heard the padding, stealthy footsteps
+whose sound seemed burned in upon her brain, traversing the soaked matting
+of the corridor, she caught her breath, and an icy dew of anguish
+moistened her shuddering flesh.
+
+Then slowly, cautiously, the door opened. He came in, shutting it
+noiselessly after him. It was the man she had seen loafing by the
+lamp-post. And, standing tall and forbidding on the bare altar's
+carpetless steps, she threw out her white hand in a quick, imperious
+gesture, forbidding his nearer approach.
+
+For an instant the dignity and authority of the tall, black-robed figure
+gave pause even to Bough. Then he touched his wide-brimmed felt hat to her
+with a civility that was the very essence of insolence, and took it off
+and shook the wet from it, and dropped it back upon his head again. He
+leaned against the wall by the door where there was a little holy-water
+font, and stuck his gross thumbs in his belt, and waited for her to begin.
+Always he followed that plan when the woman was angry. Nothing remained
+for any bloke to teach Bough about the sex. You let her row a bit, and
+when she had done herself out, you put in what you had got to say. That
+was Bough's way with them always.
+
+"You have written letters to me and followed me."
+
+His grinning red mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showed in the beard. He
+looked at her and waited.
+
+"Why have you done this? And, now that you have brought yourself into my
+sight, quitting the safe shelter of darkness and anonymity, what is to
+hinder me from handing you over to those who administer and enforce
+Martial Law in this town, and will deal with you as you deserve?"
+
+His light eyes glittered. His teeth showed again in the brown bush. He
+spat upon the floor of the sacred place, and answered:
+
+"That's all blow. How do I know what you mean about writing letters and
+following? Who has seen me doing it? Not one of the mob. I'm just a man
+that has come in off the road out of the rain. Maybe I have no business in
+this crib? That's for you to say.... Maybe I have a message for somebody
+you know. So you don't choose to give it, then that's for her to hear."
+
+He swung about in pretended haste, and laid his hand upon the door.
+
+"Stop," she said, with white lips. "You will not molest the person to whom
+you refer. You will give your message--if it be one--to me, and to me
+alone."
+
+"High and mighty," the ugly, wordless smile that faced round on her again
+seemed to say. "But in a little I'll bring you down off that...." He spat
+again upon the Chapel floor, and scratched his head under his hat, and
+began, like a simple, good-natured fellow, a rough miner with a heart of
+gold:
+
+"No offence is meant, lady, and why should it be taken?"
+
+She seemed to grow in height as she folded her arms in their flowing black
+sleeves, and looked down upon him silently. The boiling whirlpool in her
+breast mounted as it spun, stifling her. But she was outwardly calm. He
+went smoothly on, with an occasional display of red mouth and grinning
+teeth in the big beard, and always that baleful glitter in his strange
+light eyes:
+
+"I'm a man that, in the goodness of his heart, is always doing jobs for
+other people, and never getting thanked for it. I started to push my way
+up here, two hundred miles from Diamond Town, three weeks back, with a
+letter from a woman to her husband. She couldn't pay me nothing, poor old
+girl. Said she'd pray for me to her dying day. There was a pal of mine put
+up the grubstake. His name"--his evil eyes were glued upon her face--"was
+Bough. You've heard that name before!"
+
+It was an assertion, not a question. The fierce rush of crimson to her
+brow, and the flame that leaped into her eyes, had already spoken to her
+knowledge. She was deadly quiet, gathering all her superb forces for a
+sudden lioness-spring. He went on:
+
+"He's a widower now, Bough, and well-to-do. Getting on for rich. Got
+religion too, highly respected. Says Bough to me, 'There's a young woman
+at the Convent at Gueldersdorp that's not the sort for holy, praying
+ladies to have under their roof, for all the glib slack-jaw she may have
+given them.'"
+
+Her great eyes burned on him.
+
+"Say what you have to say, and be brief. Go on."
+
+He shifted from one foot to the other, and licked his fleshy lips.
+
+"I've got to tell the story my own way, lady. Don't you quarrel with it.
+Says Bough: 'They picked her up on the veld seven years ago, a runaway in
+rags. As pretty a girl she was,' says he, 'as you'd see in a month's trek,
+and from what I hear they've made a lady of her.'"
+
+Still silent and watchful, and her eyes upon him, searching him. He went
+on:
+
+"'However the years have changed her,' says Bough, 'you'll spot her by her
+little feet and hands, and her slender shape, and her big eyes, like
+yellow diamonds, and her hair, the colour of dried tobacco-leaf in the
+sun....'"
+
+She quivered in every limb, and longed to shut her eyes and bar out the
+intolerable sight of him, leering and lying there. Had she not
+interrupted, she must have cried out. She said:
+
+"You tell me this man Bough is at Diamond Town?"
+
+"I said he was there when I left. The young woman he talked of was brought
+up at his place in Orange Free State, a nice respectable boarding-house
+and hotel for travelling families on the veld between Driepoort and
+Kroonfontein. Bough was good to the girl, and so was his wife, that's dead
+since. Uncommon! Not that they had much of the dibs to spend in those
+days. But, being an honest Christian man, Bough treated the girl like his
+own. And right down bad she served him."
+
+He licked his thick lips again, and the flattish, light-hued adder-eyes
+glittered.
+
+"There was a bloke that used to hang around the place--kind of coloured
+loafer, with Dutch blood, overgiven to Squareface and whisky. He got going
+gay with the girl----"
+
+She stood like a statue of ebony and ivory. Only by the deep breaths that
+heaved her broad bosom could you tell she lived--by that, and by the
+unswerving watchfulness of those burning eyes.
+
+"And Bough, when he caught them together, got mad, being a respectable
+man, and let her taste the sjambok. Then she ran away."
+
+He coughed, and shifted again from one foot to the other. He would have
+preferred a woman who had loaded him with invectives, and told him that he
+lied like hell.
+
+"The man that had left her to Bough's guardianship was a sort of
+broken-down English officer by the name of Mildare----"
+
+Her bosom heaved more stormily, but her intense and scorching regard of
+him never wavered.
+
+"--Mildare. He left a hundred pounds with Bough, to be kept for her till
+she was twenty. There was a waggon and team Bough was to have had to sell,
+and use the money for the girl's keep, but a thief of a Dutch driver
+waltzed with them--took 'em up Johannesburg way, and melted 'em into
+dollars. Bough got nothing for all his kindness--not a tikkie. But he's
+ready to hand over the hundred, her being so nigh come to age. There's a
+locket with a picture in it, and brilliants round, that may be worth
+seventy pounds more. All Bough wants is to do the square thing. This is
+the message he sends her now. The money and the jewels will be handed
+over, as in duty bound; and, since she's turned respectable and got
+education, I was to say there's an honest man--widower now, and well
+off--that's ready to hang up his hat for her, and wipe all old scores off
+the slate in the regular proper way...."
+
+She said in tones that were of ice:
+
+"Bough is the honest man?..."
+
+"Just Bough.... 'Maybe, in my decent anger at her goings on,' he says, 'I
+went a bit too far. Well! I'm ready to make amends by making her my
+wife.'"
+
+The lioness crouched and leapt.
+
+"You are Bough! You are the evil man, the servant of Satan, who wrought
+abomination upon a helpless child!"
+
+The onslaught came so suddenly that he was staggered. Then he swore.
+
+"Not me, by G----!"
+
+She pointed her long arm at him, and some strange force seemed to be
+wielded by that unweaponed woman-hand that struck him and pierced him
+through flesh, and bone and marrow....
+
+"You are the man!" She stretched her arms to the wild, hurrying clouds
+that looked in upon her through the yawning rifts in the roof, and called
+upon her Maker for vengeance. "How long wilt Thou delay, O Lord, righteous
+in judgment? Fulfil Thy promise! Bind Thou Thy millstone about the neck of
+this wretch, hated and accursed of Thee, and let it drag him down to the
+uttermost depths of the Lake of Fire, where such as he shall wallow and
+howl throughout Eternity!----"
+
+She was infinitely more terrible than the lioness who has licked her
+murdered cubs. No Pythoness at the dizziest height of the sacred frenzy,
+no Demeter wrought to delirium by maternal bereavement, was ever imagined
+by poet or painter as half so grand, and terrible, and awe-inspiring, as
+this furious cursing nun.
+
+"--Delay not Thou, O Lord!" she prayed....
+
+Rain fell in a curtain of gleaming crystal rods between them. Seen through
+it, she appeared supernaturally tall, her garments streaming like black
+flames, her face a white-hot furnace, her eyes intolerable, merciless,
+grey lightnings, her voice a fiery sword that cleft the guilty to the
+soul.
+
+The voice of Conscience was dumb in him. He knew no remorse, and made a
+jest of God. But his callous heart had been filled from the veins of
+generations of Irish Catholic peasants, and, in spite of himself, the
+blood in his veins ran cold with superstitious fear.
+
+Yet, when no palpable answer came from that Heaven to which she cried, he
+rallied, remembering that, after all, she was a woman, and alone with him
+in the place. She had sunk back against the altar that was behind her. Her
+eyes were closed, her face a white mask of anguish; she looked as though
+about to swoon. Bough hailed the symptoms as favourable. Fainting was the
+prelude to caving in, with the women he knew. But when he stirred, her
+eyes were wide and preternaturally bright, and held him. He snarled:
+
+"You'll not take the girl my message, then?"
+
+She reared up her tall form, and laughed awfully.
+
+"Did you dream I would defile her ears with it? Now that I know you, you
+will be wise to leave this place; for it is a spot where your sins may
+find you out!"
+
+He jeered:
+
+"That flash bounce doesn't go down with me. The trouble'll be at your end
+of the house, unless you listen to reason and stop giving off hot air.
+What's to hinder me making a clean breast to that swell toff she's
+wheedled into asking her to marry him? What's to hinder me from standing
+up before the whole mob, saying as I've repented what I done years back,
+and I've come to make an honest girl of her at last?"
+
+The whirling waters of bitterness in her breast were rising, drowning
+her.... He realised her momentary weakness, and moved a step or two
+nearer, keeping well between the woman and the door.
+
+"What's to hinder me, I say?"
+
+Her rapier of keen womanly intuition flashed out at him again, and drew
+the blood.
+
+"Your fear will hinder you. You are here in an assumed character, and
+under a false name." The long arm shot out, the white hand pointed at him
+again. "You never came here from Diamond Town. That letter was a forgery.
+You have papers on you now that would prove you to be a spy, if you were
+taken. Ah, I can see it written in your coward's face!"
+
+The devil was at the woman's ear, prompting her. Or was it----? Bough's
+dark, full-blooded face bleached to muddy-pale as her terrible voice rang
+through the desolate place, and echoed among the broken rafters.
+
+"You boast yourself ready to admit your infamy. You shall be compelled!
+Everything shall be made known! I will go to Lord Beauvayse now, and tell
+him all--all! And if he loves her, he will marry her. And you who have
+secrets upon your soul even more perilous, if less vile and
+hideous"--again the terrible hand pointed, and that sense of a
+supernatural force that it wielded knocked his knees together and dried up
+his mouth--"I see the millstone round your neck!..."
+
+The clarion voice mounted on a great note of triumph. With her inspired
+face, and with her floating veil, she looked like a Prophetess of old.
+"The Lord is not mocked! He will avenge His little one as He has promised!
+Move aside, you lost, and branded, and miserable wretch! Do you dare to
+dream you can hinder Me from doing what I have said?"
+
+He was at the bottom of the altar-steps as the tall, imperious figure came
+sweeping down. The curtain of rain no longer fell between them, but behind
+him. He must silence that railing voice that cried in the house-top--put
+out the light of those intolerable eyes....
+
+He drew out his revolver with a blasphemous oath. At the gleam of steel in
+the thickening twilight she dropped her upraised arms, and made a swift
+rush to the rope of the bell, and set it clanging. Two double strokes rang
+out; the third was broken in the middle.... For as she swung round,
+panting and tugging at the rope, he shot her in the back above the line of
+the white wimple from which the veil streamed aside, and ran to the door
+as she cried out and swayed forward, still clinging to the vibrating rope,
+and turned there and fired a second shot, that struck her in the body.
+
+Then he was gone, and the walls were crowding in on her to crush her, and
+then receding to immeasurable distances, and the blood and air from her
+pierced lungs bubbled through the bullet-holes in the serge stuff and the
+scorched linen.
+
+She stumbled a few steps blindly, then fell and lay choking, with that
+strange gurgling and whispering in her ears, the rushing blood mingling
+with the water of the puddles that the rain had made upon the littered
+floor. She faltered out the name of her Master and Spouse, and commended
+her pure soul to Him in utter humility. Death would have been a welcome
+loosing of her bonds but for the Beloved left behind, at the mercy of the
+merciless.
+
+The stab of that remembrance lent her strength to struggle up upon her
+knees. Ah, cruel! cruel!... But she must submit. Was it not the Holy Will?
+She signed the Cross upon her bosom, with fingers already growing stiff,
+and made a piteous little act of charity, forgiving the sin of the man
+against herself, but not his crime against dead Richard's child. And she
+stretched out long black-sleeved arms gropingly in the thick, numbing
+darkness that hemmed her in, and moaned to the Mother of the motherless to
+have pity!... pity!...
+
+She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column, and lay with
+outspread arms upon the altar-step.
+
+"Jesu.... Mary.... _The child!..._"
+
+The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last two words were nearly
+her last sigh. Thenceforward there was no sound at all in the Convent
+chapel, save the dull splash of rain, falling through the holes in the
+broken roof upon the sodden floor, where the dead woman lay, face
+downwards.
+
+
+
+
+LII
+
+
+No one had heeded the revolver-shot. The detonation of a cartridge or so
+when a bombardment is going on, what does it count for? And yet, when the
+burly figure of the runner from Diamond Town slipped out of the Convent
+doorway and stole across the shrapnel-littered garden, and crossed the
+veld towards the native town, it had been barely twilight--a twilight of
+heavy, drenching rain, to be sure. Still, in it he had encountered those
+who might have suspected afterwards....
+
+Perhaps it would have been better had he stopped in Gueldersdorp and
+mugged it out. But that sharp, prompt, swift, unsparing thing called
+Martial Law is not a power to play with with impunity, and of the man who
+wielded it in Gueldersdorp, Bough had conceived a wholesome dread. Best
+that he had fled, although his going tagged him with suspicion. That
+cursed stupid game of his with the telephone at the Headquarters of the
+Baraland Rides might cost him more than the bit of twist with which he had
+bribed the orderly, left for a moment in sole charge, and demoralised by
+the sight of tobacco.
+
+Opium played you tricks like that, when, for the gratification of a
+sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the stuff, you would
+risk everything. In excess it played hell with the nerves. That was why
+those eyes of hers.... Damn them! Why couldn't a man put them out of mind
+and out of sight?
+
+It was not to be done. The obsession held him. A black shadow on the floor
+would be the long body, lying face downwards on the altar-steps, with
+outspread, crucified arms. He heard her stifled crying upon the Name, and
+the gurgling outrush of mingled air and blood that followed each deep sob
+for breath....
+
+And then he would be running through the lashing, bucketing wet,
+circumventing the sentry-posts, wriggling over the veld on his belly like
+a snake. He would be pushing through the dripping covert of the north bank
+of the river--for that, he had decided, was the safest way out or
+in--leaving fragments of his garments on the thorny cacti that grabbed at
+him with their green hands. And then he would find himself lying doggo
+between two great stones, waiting for it to be quite dark before he
+essayed to pass the rifle-pits that angled across either shore. Two hours
+he had lain so, and it had hailed, and sheet lightning had smitten
+greenish-blue glares from the hissing, clattering whiteness, and he had
+remembered with a shudder those eyes....
+
+Then it had been dark enough to risk passing between the angles of the
+rifle-pits, where lay men who kept their eyes skinned and their weapons
+handy by day and night. And again Bough had wriggled like a snake, but
+through shallow water instead of grass and red mud. He had swam the deep
+pools, and once got entangled in barbed-wire, and went under, gurgling and
+drowning, three times before he wrenched himself loose. It had seemed as
+though a dead woman's hands had seized him, and were dragging him down.
+But he tore free and passed safely. There was not a single shot--the Devil
+was so obliging! And then, lest Brounckers' pickets should mistake a
+friend in the darkness, he waited for light in a little thorny kloof
+beyond their advanced outposts; and the dawn came, with an awful gush of
+crimson dyeing all the eastern sky, so that the pools about his feet--even
+the drops of wet upon the stones and bushes--caught the ruddy reflection,
+and all the world seemed dripping with new-shed blood.
+
+Then up had rushed the sun, and smitten a glorious rainbow out of fog and
+vapour, and one end of it seemed to be in Gueldersdorp, resting in a
+golden mist upon the Convent's shattered roof, while the other vanished in
+mid-heaven. It had seemed to the murderer like a ladder by which the dead
+woman's soul went climbing, up and up, to tell his crime to God....
+
+He had killed her, that woman in black, to stop her from blowing on him.
+Who would have dreamed a meek, sober nun could be transformed like that? A
+lioness whose cub has been shot, straightway becomes a beast-devil. She,
+standing on the naked steps of the bare altar, with upraised,
+black-sleeved arms and black funereal robes, demanding Heaven's vengeance
+for that deed of old, calling down the judgment of God upon its doer, had
+been infinitely more terrible than the lioness. Lightning had flashed from
+her great eyes, and subtle electric forces had darted from her outspread
+finger-tips. While she looked at him and spoke she enmeshed him, helpless,
+in a net of terror. It was only when she had turned her back that Bough
+had had the nerve to shoot. And he was no novice in bloodshed--not he.
+There were things safely hidden and put away and buried, that might some
+day put a rope round some man's neck. But the man would never be Bough.
+There had always been a scapegoat to suffer until now.
+
+He ate more opium now than ever, because he could not forget that woman's
+awful eyes. He would see them looking at him in the dark, when he could
+not sleep. Her voice haunted him, terrible in its clarion-note of wrath,
+its organ-roll of denunciation. The hand that had pointed to the millstone
+about his neck had conjured it there. He felt it dragging him down.
+
+Maar--that was the gold! You can carry a goodly amount of the precious
+metal upon your single person, if you are clever enough to stow it and
+muscular enough to walk lightly under the weight. And a great deal of the
+yellow stuff, gathered and stored by the mining companies, leaked about
+this time out of the hiding-places skilfully contrived for it into the
+pockets of Van Busch and his pals. It is weighty, as well as precious,
+stuff, and when you inter it, there must be bearers as well as a
+gravedigger, and when you carry away a great deal of it at a time,
+confederates must aid you.
+
+Oom Paul, when, like some elderly black humble-bee, with crooked thighs
+deep laden with the metallic yellow pollen, he buzzed heavily off for
+Lorenco Marques, deplored the deceitfulness of riches less bitterly than
+their non-portableness.
+
+Van Busch, by a series of clever expedients, overcame that difficulty. The
+cartridges that weighed down his bandolier were of cast gold, cleverly
+painted; the gun he carried was a hollow sham packed with raw gold; also,
+his garments were lined and padded with the same material. At Cape Town he
+would disburden himself, and one of the women who were his confederates
+would take the stuff to England, and sell it in London, and bank the money
+in the name of Van Busch. He so managed that there was always a woman
+coming and a woman going. Women had been his tools, and his slaves, and
+his victims, ever since he had been born. When the old were worn out and
+useless, he shook them off, and fresh instruments rose up to take their
+places.
+
+He never trusted men in money matters. He knew too much of the power of
+that yellow pollen that breeds madness in the male. But there is one thing
+that most women desire more than the possession of much money, and that is
+absolute possession of one man.
+
+Bough understood women of a certain class. He had moulded them to his
+will, and bent them to his whim, all his life long. He was a man of
+manifold experience as regards the sex.
+
+Lately he had added to his stock. He had stood face to face with a woman,
+unarmed and in a lonely place, and had tasted Fear. He had seen--from afar
+off--a woman whose slight, vivid beauty had roused in him a desire that
+was torture.
+
+It was as though the Minotaur were in love with Ariadne; it was Caliban
+thirsting for the beauty of Miranda. Prospero had not come in time; the
+satyr had surfeited upon the unripe grapes, and now was ahungered for the
+purple cluster, tied up out of reach of those gross, greedy, wicked hands.
+
+The locket with a picture in it and brilliants round, "that might be worth
+seventy," the dainty, pearly miniature on ivory by Daudin, of the dead
+woman who lay buried under the Little Kopje, and which Bough had taken
+from the body of the English traveller, together with the signet-ring and
+everything else of value that Richard Mildare had owned, possessed a
+strange fascination for the thief. It was extraordinarily like.... He hung
+it by its slender gold chain about his thick neck, and gloated over and
+grudged the beauty that it recalled.
+
+It is horrible to speak of love in connection with the man Bough, but if
+ever he had known it, it was now. His victim of old time had become his
+tyrant. Replete with vile pleasures, he longed for her the more.
+
+He even became sentimental at times, telling himself that all he had
+sought was to repair the wrong, and make an honest woman of the Kid. She
+should have been lapped in luxury, worn jewels equalling any Duchess's. He
+was a man of money now. A little delay, to become yet more rich, and
+arrange for the safe burying of Bough--then Van Busch, of Johannesburg,
+capitalist and financier, would descend upon London in a shower of gold,
+furnish a house in Hyde Park or Mayfair in topping style; own
+four-in-hands, and motor-cars, and opera-boxes, and see all Society
+fluttering to his feet to pick up scattered crumbs of the golden pudding.
+
+It really seemed as though the dream would be realised. The gross,
+squarely-built man with the bushy whiskers and the light strange eyes,
+found success attend his every enterprise from that hour in which he had
+spilt life upon the pavement of the Convent chapel. The tarantula-pounce
+never missed a prey. Every knavish venture brought in money or money's
+worth, every base plot was carried through triumphantly. Bough, _alias_
+Van Busch, was not ordinarily a superstitious man, but his run of luck
+made him almost afraid at times.
+
+He scented the Relief before the besiegers, undertook to scout for Young
+Eybel in the direction of Diamond Town, and ingeniously warned Colonel
+Cullings of a Boer plan for cutting off the Flying Column on the scorching
+western plains, which resulted in the capture of two waggon-loads of
+burghers, their rations, ammunition, and Mausers--a most satisfying haul.
+He placed before the leader of the British Force intercepted telegrams
+which threw invaluable light on Dutch moves. No more single-minded,
+ingenuous, and patriotic British South African ever drew breath than Mr.
+Van Busch, of Johannesburg. And verily he reaped his reward, in an
+officially countersigned railway pass, which would enable the patriot to
+render some further services to British arms, and a great many more to Van
+Busch, of Johannesburg.
+
+He had his knavish headquarters still at the Border homestead known as
+Haargrond Plaats. Something drew him back to the place, and kept on
+drawing him. From thence he could observe and conduct his operations, and
+gather news of the besieged in Gueldersdorp. He was there at the time when
+the Division--Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, with a half battalion
+of Town Guards, converted into mounted infantry by the simple process of
+putting beasts underneath men who could ride them--marched out of
+Gueldersdorp _en route_ for Frostenberg.
+
+The slatternly Dutchwoman and the coloured man who had charge of the
+Plaats were too surely his creatures to betray Bough Van Busch. "Let the
+dogs smell around the place," he thought, when by the sounds that reached
+him in his hiding-place he knew the Advance had halted. "They'll tire of
+the game before they smell out me!"
+
+His hiding-place was a safe retreat and storehouse for stuff that it was
+necessary to conceal. No one knew of it save Bough Van Busch and the
+draggle-tailed woman. It was in the great stone-built chimney of the
+disused, half-ruined farmhouse kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared by
+the stout hands of the old voortrekkers of 1836, its walls, three feet in
+thickness, embracing the wide hearth about which the family life of the
+homestead had concentrated itself in the past.
+
+There may have been a mill on the farm in the old days. Or possibly,
+meaning to build one, those robust pioneers of the Second Exodus had
+dragged the two huge stones into the wilderness, and then abandoned their
+plan. The lower millstone paved the hearth, the upper, the diameter of its
+shaft-hole increased by chipping to the size of a musk-melon, had been set
+by some freak of the farmer-architect's heavy fancy as a coping on the top
+of the big stone shaft. From thence, as Lady Hannah Wrynche had said in
+one of her descriptive letters, dated from "My Headquarters at the Seat of
+War," it dominated the landscape as a Brobdingnagian stone mushroom might
+have done.
+
+The wide black throat of the chimney half-way up was choked by a platform
+of beams and masonry, reaching not quite across, so that even a bulky man
+who had climbed up--divers rusty iron stanchions driven in between the
+stones, and certain chinks affording secure foothold--might wriggle
+between the platform and the chimney-wall, and so lie hid securely.
+Through the hole in the round stone above came air and light. Crevices
+cunningly enlarged afforded opportunities for viewing the surrounding
+country, as for seeing without being seen, and hearing also all that took
+place in the low-walled courtyard that was used as a cattle-kraal. You had
+also a bird's-eye view of the lower end of the farm kitchen, where the
+wall had cracked, and bulged, and spit out some of its stones.
+
+To this eyrie Bough Van Busch retreated when the wall of dust to the
+south-west gave up the dim shapes of the Advance, and the beat of many
+iron-shod hoofs, and the roll of many iron-shod wheels made distant
+thunder, coming nearer, always nearer....
+
+Maar! How the trot of the squadron-columns, the roll of the oncoming
+batteries, shook the crazy building. The Advance rode into the yard,
+dismounted, and began to ask questions of the coloured man and the
+slipshod woman. Neither knew anything. The woman cursed the Englishmen
+freely, at which they laughed, and lighted fresh cigarettes. The man was
+dumb as stone.
+
+The Division snaked out of the dust presently, a huge brown centipede that
+had been chopped in bits, and moved with intervals between its travelling
+sections. There was no halt; it rolled on, a vision of innumerable moving
+legs and tanned, wearied faces, over the greening veld to the north-east.
+The dust grew hotter and thicker, and more stifling, as it rolled.
+
+It drifted in through every chink and cranny in the great chimney, with
+the smell of hot human flesh and sweating horsehide, and Bough Van Busch
+longed to, but dared not sneeze. Bits of mortar fell about him, and
+dislodged tarantulas galloped over his boots. He shook the loathsome,
+hairy, bright-eyed insects off, shuddering at them with a horror somewhat
+misplaced, considering the affinity between his own methods and theirs.
+
+Roll, roll, roll! The English voices of the chatting men crouched upon
+their beasts' withers or sprawling on the limbers, the trampling and
+snorting of the horses, the sharp signal-whistles of the leaders, the curt
+utterances of command, mingled with the stream of thought that raced
+through the busy brain of Bough Van Busch. It had struck him when the
+Colonel and his Staff rode up and halted by the gateway of the littered
+courtyard, that here would be a chance for a nervy man, with a set
+purpose, to venture back, cleverly disguised, to Gueldersdorp. He knew he
+would be risking his neck, but the sting of desire galled him to
+hardihood. She was there. Red mist gathered in his brain, red sparks
+snapped before his eyes, the thick red blood surged fiercely through his
+veins--drummed deafeningly in his gross ears at the thought of seeing her
+again....
+
+And the tail of the Division was going by. A Field Telegraph Company, a
+searchlight company, the Ambulances, and a train of transport-waggons,
+with the mounted infantry, brought up the rear. The Advance had galloped
+forwards in haste, the group at the gate lingered. A voice rang out
+clearly, giving some order. It said:
+
+"And if abandoned, carry out instructions, previously warning the inmates
+of the farm to retire out of----"
+
+The lean, eagle-eyed, keen-faced Colonel bent lower in the saddle to reach
+the ear of the dismounted officer of Royal Engineers, who stood with one
+dogskin gloved hand resting on the sweating withers of the brown Waler. He
+answered, saluted, and drew away. Then the Staff rode on, into the ginger
+yellow dust-cloud, leaving the officer of Engineers standing in the beaten
+tracks of many iron-shod hoofs and many iron-shod wheels.
+
+He was not left alone. A little cluster of mounted Cape Police had
+detached itself from the rear of the Division. They were deeply-burned,
+hard-bitten men, emaciated to a curious uniformity, mounted on horses as
+gaunt as their riders. A sergeant was in command of the party, and a
+drab-painted wooden cart drawn by a high-rumped, goose-necked chestnut
+mare, pitifully lame on the near fore, had an Engineer for driver. His
+mate sat on the rear locker, and a mounted comrade rode by the mare's lame
+side. The rider's stirrup-leather was lashed about the cart-shaft, and
+thus the mare was helped along.
+
+Obeying some order unheard of the man who was hiding in the old stone
+chimney, the party of Cape Police divided into two. One half patrolled the
+outward precincts of the homestead. The rest, dismounting in the
+courtyard, thoroughly searched the place. The Engineer officer took no
+part in the search. He stood by the stone-coloured cart, busy at the
+locker, the sapper who had sat upon it being his aid. Very soon he
+returned to the yard, and stood in the middle of the litter motionless as
+a little figure of pale, dusty bronze, holding a cigar-box carefully in
+both his dogskin-gloved hands. In spite of his patched khaki and ragged
+puttees there was something dandified about him. His red moustache, waxed
+to a fine point, jutted like the whiskers of a watchful cat, the whites of
+his eyes gleamed like silver as he turned them this way and that,
+following the movements of the men who went in and out of the
+farm-buildings as directed by their sergeant. The sergeant was an expert
+in his business, and yet, after a hasty glance up the black yawning gullet
+of the chimney where Bough Van Busch lay perdu, he had gone out of the
+dismantled kitchen whistling a tune. Two of his men remained lounging
+near the threshold. Like the sergeant they had stooped, hands on spread
+knees, necks twisted awry in the effort to pierce the thick mirk beneath
+the ragged arch of masonry that spanned the wide hearth where the ashes of
+long-dead fires lay in powdery grey drifts, and, like the sergeant, they
+had seen nothing. When you covered the man-hole between the platform-edge
+and the chimney-wall with the sooty board and the old sack, it was
+impossible for anyone below to see anything. The inside of the old chimney
+was as black as hell.
+
+The inquisition ended. The khaki-clad figures came hurrying out of the
+house, pursued by the Dutchwoman's shrill recriminations. The
+non-commissioned officer made a report to the officer of Engineers. The
+men who had been deputed to search mounted at an order, and fell in with
+the patrol, and sat upon their saddles outside the courtyard wall
+exchanging furtive winks as the mevrouw devoted their souls and bodies to
+everlasting perdition.
+
+A quiet utterance from the little red-haired officer checked the torrent
+of the woman's anger. She screeched in dismay, raising thick hands to
+heaven. The coloured man's stolid silence was suddenly swept away in a
+spate of oaths and protestations. Suddenly, looking in the officer's
+unmoved face, they realised the uselessness of words, turned and ran
+between the gateless posts, out upon, away over, the dusty, hoof-tracked,
+wheel-scored veld. And their ungainly hurry and awkward gestures of terror
+somehow reminded the peering Bough Van Busch of an engraving he had seen
+by chance in a Dopper Bible, in which Lot and his two daughters, fearfully
+foreshortened by the artist, scuttled in as grotesque an insect hurry from
+the doomed vicinity of Sodom, Queen City of the Plain.
+
+The officer of Engineers hardly glanced after the retreating couple. He
+stepped across the threshold of the disused farm-kitchen, holding the
+little wooden box carefully in both his dogskin-gloved hands. He crossed
+to the hearth, stubbing his toe against a jutting floor-brick, and as he
+did so he caught his breath. Then he stepped down under the yawning gape
+of the chimney, and seemed to grope and fumble at the back of the hearth.
+He raised himself then, stepped back, and called out sharply in the Taal:
+
+"Wie is daar?"
+
+The man's voice dropped back dead out of the choked-up chimney-throat. A
+little sooty dust fell. There was no other answer. The voice was lifted
+again, speaking this time in English:
+
+"Is anyone hiding here?"
+
+No one replied, and the little officer seemed to give up. He lingered a
+moment longer, struck a match as though to light a cigarette, then went
+quickly out of the kitchen. An orderly waited with his horse outside the
+gateway. Bough Van Busch, listening with strained ears, heard the clink of
+spur against stirrup, the creak of the saddle receiving a rider's weight.
+There was a short sharp whistle, followed by the sound of cantering hoofs,
+and the rattle of hurrying wheels dying out over the veld to the
+north-east. The unwelcome intruders had gone. Bough Van Busch, after a
+cautious interval, deemed it safe to descend.
+
+He was red-smeared with veld dust and white-smeared with mortar, and black
+with old soot. His bulky body oscillated as he let himself down from beam
+to stanchion, finding sure foothold in the crevices, and hand-grip in the
+stout iron hooks from which plump mutton-hams and beef sausages had hung
+ripening in the pungent smoke of burning wood and dried dung. There was a
+smell in his nostrils like charring wool and saltpetre. He hung over the
+wide hearth now. A short drop of not more than a foot or two would bring
+him safely to the ground.
+
+Van Busch did not drop. He dangled by the hands and sweated. He blasphemed
+in an agony of terror, though it seemed to him that he prayed.
+
+For the dandy little Engineer officer had left the cigar-box lying empty
+among the powdery ashes in the wide, old-world hearthplace. An
+innocent-looking parcel it had contained, wrapped in a bit of old canvas,
+and, further secured with copper wire and string, was wedged in a chink
+between the blackened stones at the back of the hearth. From it a fuse
+hung down; a short length nearly consumed by the crepitating fiery spark
+at its loose end. It burned with a little purring sound, as though it
+liked the business it was engaged upon. Bough Van Busch knew that in
+another moment the detonation would take place....
+
+He heard nothing of it when it came.... Nor did he know it when the walls
+of Cyclopean masonry bulged and opened about him like the petals of a
+flowering lily. He was beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent and
+torn as though the devils it had housed had wreaked their fury on their
+dwelling, lay sandwiched between the wreckage of the great chimney and the
+millstone that had paved its hearth, now a yawning cavity, some six feet
+deep. Leaning on its side in a trench its own weight had dug in the stony
+earth of the dirty courtyard was the huge stone that had topped the shaft.
+Something ugly was wedged in the central hole that had been made bigger to
+let out the smoke. And the murderer's soul, light as a dried leaf
+fluttering through the illimitable spaces of Eternity, went wandering on
+its way to the Balances of God.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The party of Cape Police who had searched Haargrond Plaats, with the
+drab-painted cart, the three Engineers, and the dandified little officer,
+had only ridden to a safe distance. They halted, and, concealed from
+observation by a fold of the grassy veld, waited for the explosion of the
+dynamite cartridge. When it came, the Engineer officer shut his
+binoculars, and gave the signal to return.
+
+
+
+
+LIII
+
+
+There were two funerals in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, upon a night that
+no one will forget who stood in the packed throng of shadowy mourners
+about each of those open graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the
+vault of heaven might have been hollowed out of the darkling depths of an
+amethyst of inconceivable splendour and planetary size. Myriads of stars,
+dazzlingly white, swung under this, the Mother's fitting canopy, shared
+with another, not like her holy, not noble or unselfish or devoted, but
+like her in that he was brave and much beloved.
+
+Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowding faces about the
+narrow open trench where the Reverend Julius Fraithorn read the Burial
+Service by lantern-light without being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet,
+and women sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful and so merry
+and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed women; the men praised him for
+having been such a swordsman, horseman, shot. Everyone spoke of him as the
+life and soul of the garrison, the idol of his brother-officers, and
+worshipped by the men under his command. Everyone had something to tell of
+dead Beauvayse that was pleasant to hear.
+
+But the great bulk of the crowd was massed behind the black-robed,
+white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling rigid and immovable about
+the second open grave, where the Mother-Superior lay in her snow-white
+coffin, fully habited and mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on which
+the plain gold ring of her Divine espousals shone, the parchment formula
+of the vows she took when admitted to her Order nineteen years before,
+lying under those meekly-folded hands upon her breast. So she had lain,
+feet to the altar, in the Convent chapel that her daughters in Religion
+had draped and decked for her, keeping their loving vigils about her from
+twilight to dawn, from dawn to twilight, until this hour when they must
+yield all that was mortal of her to Earth's guardianship and the
+unsleeping watchfulness of God.
+
+Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and strangely quiet. The
+women's faces white and haggard and tearless, the men's drawn and deeply
+lined. Not even muffled groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence
+as the solemn rite drew to its singularly simple and impressive close. As
+the fragrant incense rose from the censer and the holy water sprinkled the
+snow-white pall that bore the Red Cross, one dreadful word lurked sinister
+in every thought:
+
+Murdered!...
+
+Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose hands had staunched
+the bleeding wounds of many present, whose arm had lifted and pillowed the
+dying heads of others dear to them; who had stood through long nights of
+fever and delirium beside their Hospital pallets, ministering as a very
+Angel from Heaven to tortured bodies and suffering souls--murdered!
+
+The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched continually with her lamp
+prepared, that at the first summons of the Heavenly Bridegroom she might
+enter with Him into the marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had
+come to her by the bloodstained hand of an assassin? It was so. And--ah!
+the horror of it!
+
+The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he moved round the
+grave within the enclosing wall of kneeling Sisters. But no answering sob
+came from the vast assemblage. They were as dumb--stricken to stone. They
+could not yet contemplate the felicity of the pure soul of the martyred
+saint, carried by God's Angels into the Land of the ever-living, admitted
+to the unspeakable reward of the Beatific Vision. They could only realise
+that somebody had killed her.
+
+But when the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a
+profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant
+billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And
+when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and
+her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and left her
+earthly body, how wonderful in its marble, hushed, close-folded,
+mysterious beauty none who had looked upon it ever could forget, waiting
+for the second coming of her Master and her Lord, a great sob mounted, and
+broke from every breast, and every face was drenched with sudden tears.
+Perhaps God let her see how much they loved her in that parting hour. And
+then the bugle sounded "Last Post" over both the open graves, softly for
+fear of Brounckers' German gunners, and the great crowd melted away, and
+all was done and over.
+
+I have said that all the people wept. There was a girl in white, for she
+would not let the Sisters put black garments on her, kneeling between
+Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony. This girl did not weep at all.
+Chief mourner at both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact.
+She knew that Beauvayse was on duty at Maxim Outpost South, and could not
+get away, and that the Reverend Mother was vexed with her, and was hiding
+at the Convent, pretending that she had gone somewhere, and would never
+come back.
+
+She was especially clear of mind when she thought all this. At other
+times she was not Lynette, and knew no one, and had never known anybody of
+the name. She was the ragged Kid, crouching on the Little Kopje in the
+gathering twilight or on the long mound that its eastward shadow covered.
+Or she was lying under the tattered horse-blanket on the foul straw pallet
+in the outhouse, waiting for the Lady to come with the great, kind,
+covering dark.
+
+Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned cube-sugar box beside
+the green rep sofa where Bough lolled on wet days or stormy nights, her
+great eyes wild with apprehension, her every nerve tense and strained with
+terror of the master in his condescending moods, when he would make
+pretence of teaching her to scrawl coarse pothooks and hangers on the
+greasy slate that usually hung below the glass-and-bottle shelf. Or--and
+at these times the Sisters found her difficult to manage--she was
+crouching upon one side of a locked door, and a long thin wire was feeling
+its way into the keyhole on the other side, and the man who manipulated it
+laughed as the agile pliers nipped the end of the key and turned it in the
+wards of the lock....
+
+And then she would be running through the night, anywhere, nowhere, and
+Bough would be riding after. She could hear the short wheezing gallop of
+the tired pony when she laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok,
+wielded by a strong and brutal hand, would bite into the quivering flesh
+of the child, and she would shriek for mercy, and presently fall upon the
+ground and lie there like one dead--acting that old tragedy over and over
+again.
+
+God was very kind to you, Reverend Mother, if He hid that sight from one
+to whom she was so dear. But if His Blessed in Heaven have cognisance of
+what takes place in this dull, distant speck of Earth, I think some salt
+tears must needs have fallen from the starry eyes of one of Christ's
+saintly maiden-spouses, glorious under the dual crown of Virginity and
+Martyrdom, and yet a mother as truly as His Own.
+
+That swift unerring judgment of Saxham's had pointed, months ago, to some
+such mental and physical collapse, as the result of shock, crowning
+long-continued nervous overstrain. He had said to the Mother that such a
+result would be easier to avert than to deal with.
+
+There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that he did not employ
+in dealing with it now.
+
+Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story of the
+Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words.
+
+"The last charge the Mother laid on us--Sister Hilda-Antony and me--was to
+keep our eyes upon the child. The very day _it_ was done she told us, and
+I saw that something had made her anxious by the look that was in her
+eyes." She dried her own with a coarse blue cotton handkerchief before she
+took up her tale. "She went alone to the Head Hospital that day. None of
+us were to be surprised, she said, if she came home extra late. Sister
+Hilda-Antony and me were on duty at the Railway Institute. We took Lynette
+with us.--There!... Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as if she
+remembered her name?"
+
+She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool in her old corner
+of the Convent bombproof, but she did not heed the shattering crashes of
+the bombardment any more. She had only moved to push out of her eyes the
+dulled and faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and bent
+over her little slate again. Before that, and a pencil had been given her
+she had been restless and uneasy. Now she would be occupied for long
+hours, making rude attempts at drawing houses and figures such as a child
+represents, with round "O's" of different sizes for heads and bodies, and
+pitchforks for legs and arms....
+
+Sister Tobias went on: "The _Siege Gazette_ had come out that day, with
+the news of"--she dropped her voice to a whisper--"of her being likely to
+be married before long to him that's gone. May Our Lord give him rest!"
+Sister Tobias's well-accustomed fingers pattered over the bib of her
+blue-checked apron, making the Sign. "And Sister Hilda-Antony and me had
+the world's work with all the people who stopped us in the street and came
+round us at the Institute to say how glad they were. Talk of a stone
+plopped in a duckpond! You'd have thought by the crazy way folks carried
+on that two pretty young people had never went and got engaged before."
+Sister Tobias was never coldly grammatical in speech. "But the child was
+happy, poor dear, in hearing even strangers praise him; and when the
+firing stopped and we were on our way home, she begged us to turn out of
+it and call in at the Convent, where he'd begged her to meet him, if only
+for a minute, not having seen her since the Sunday when----"
+
+"Yes--yes!"
+
+Saxham, who writhed inwardly, remembering that Sunday, nodded, bending his
+heavy brows. His ears were given to Sister Tobias, his eyes to the slight
+figure that somehow, in the skirt some impatient movement had wrenched
+from the gathers and the shirt-bodice that was buttoned awry, had the air
+of a ragged, neglected child. And she held up her scrawled slate to ward
+off his look, and peeped at him round the side of it.
+
+Big strong men like that could be cruel when they were angry. The Kid knew
+that so well.
+
+
+
+
+"We went to the Convent with the child," Sister Tobias continued: "We
+hadn't the heart to deny her, though we thought the Mother might be vexed
+that we hadn't come straight home. A queer thing happened as we crossed
+the road and went up along the fence towards the gates with the child
+between us.... A big, heavy man, dressed as the miners dress, with a great
+black beard and his hat pulled down over his eyes, came along in such a
+hurry that he knocked Sister Hilda-Antony off the kerb into the road, and
+brushed close up against _her_----"
+
+"Against Miss Mildare? Did it occur to you that the man had come out of
+the Convent enclosure?" Saxham asked quickly.
+
+Sister Tobias shook her head.
+
+"No; but I did think he meant stopping and speaking to the child, and then
+changed his mind and hurried on. 'Did he hurt you, dearie?' I asked her,
+seeing her shaking and quite flustered-like. And she answers, 'I don't
+know....' And 'Was it anyone you knew?' I puts to her again, and 'I can't
+tell,' says she, like as if she was answering in her sleep. Do you thinks
+she understands we're talking about her, poor lamb?"
+
+They both looked at her, and she, having been taught by painful experience
+that to be the object of simultaneous observation on the part of the man
+and woman meant punishment involving stripes, began to tremble, and hung
+her head. From under her tangled hair she peeped from side to side,
+wondering what it was she had left undone? Ah!--the broom, standing in the
+corner. She had forgotten to sweep out the house-place and the bar. When
+the dreaded eyes turned from her, she got up and went softly to the corner
+where Sister Tobias's besom stood, and took it and began to sweep, casting
+terrified glances through her hair at her two Fates.
+
+Something gripped Saxham by the heart and wrung it. The scalding tears
+were bitter in his throat. Do what he would to keep them free, his eyes
+were dimmed and blinded, and Sister Tobias wiped her own openly with the
+blue cotton handkerchief.
+
+"We thought the young gentleman would be waiting near the Convent," said
+Sister Tobias, "or in one of the ground-floor rooms, but he wasn't there.
+Me and Sister Hilda-Antony looked at one another. 'Early days for a young
+girl's sweetheart to be late at the meeting-place!' says Sister
+Hilda-Antony's eyes to me, and mine said back, 'The Lord grant no harm's
+come to him!' We waited five minutes by the school clock, that's never
+been let run down, and then another five, and still he didn't come. He had
+got his death-wound, though we didn't know it, hours before."
+
+
+
+
+"The Angel of Death had spread his wings over the Convent. Both me and
+Sister Hilda-Antony felt there was a strange and awful stillness and
+solemnness about the place. At last me and her told the child that go we
+must. We'd wait no longer. But _she_, knowing we'd never leave without
+her, ran upstairs. We heard her light feet going over the wet matting and
+down the long passage to the chapel door. Then----"
+
+Sister Tobias sobbed for another moment in the blue handkerchief. The
+child, who had been diligently sweeping, looked at the woman and at the
+big man who had made her cry, with great dilated eyes of fear. She put the
+broom back noiselessly in its corner, and stole back to her stool. Who
+knew what might happen next?
+
+"Then," said Sister Tobias, "we heard the dreadfullest scream. 'Mother!'
+just once, and after it dead silence. Then--I don't know how we got there,
+it was so like a cruel dream--but we were in the chapel, trying to raise
+them up. That dear Saint--may the Peace of God and the Bliss of His Vision
+be upon her for ever!--lay dead on the altar-steps where the wicked,
+murdering hand had shot her down.... And the child lay across her, just
+where she had dropped in trying to lift her. And the strength of me and
+the Sister, and the strength of them that came after, wasn't equal to
+unloose those slender little hands you're watching."
+
+The slender little hands were busy with the slate and pencil as Saxham
+looked at them.
+
+"Those that came and helped us had been sent on from the Convent
+bombproof, where they'd been to look for _her_"--Sister Tobias glanced
+sorrowfully at the owner of those little busy hands--"with an Ambulance
+chair and a story of more trouble. But Our Lady had had pity on the child.
+She was past understanding why they'd come to fetch her.... The brain can
+soak up trouble till it won't hold a drop more. But she was quiet and
+happy kneeling by that blessed Saint, waiting till the Lady should wake
+up, she said.... And, 'deed and 'deed, but it looked like the blessedest
+sleep----"
+
+Sister Tobias broke down and cried outright. The child eyed her half
+suspiciously, half wonderingly. Her great terrified eyes had not seen the
+man strike, but he must have hurt the woman. Therefore, she looked sharply
+at the man between the tangled masses of the hair that could not be kept
+pinned up, and saw two great slow tears ooze over his thick underlids, and
+glitter as they hung there, and then fall. Others followed them, tumbling
+down the square white face, and the stern mouth was wrenched with a
+strange spasm, and the grim chin trembled curiously....
+
+Somebody had hurt the man.... It is not possible to follow up the workings
+of the disordered intelligence, and spell out the blurred letters of the
+confused mind. It is enough that her terror of him abated. She slipped
+from her stool to the floor, under the pretence of picking up her
+slate-pencil, threw back the hair that prevented her seeing clearly, and
+peered up in that working face of Saxham's with curiosity, crouching near.
+She did not recoil violently when the strange, sorrowful face bent
+towards her; she only shrank back as Saxham asked:
+
+"You remember me? You know my name?"
+
+She nodded, eyeing him warily. If his hand had moved, she would have
+sprung backwards. But it did not stir.
+
+"Tell me who I am, then?"
+
+"Man."
+
+Her lips shaped the word. Her voice was barely audible. His heart beat
+thickly as he went on:
+
+"Quite right, but something else besides a man. A man with a name. Tell me
+the name, or shall I tell it you?"
+
+She nodded, and her eyes were great and timorous, but there was no terror
+of him in them now.
+
+"My name is Saxham--Owen Saxham. Say the name after me."
+
+For a wonder she obeyed. Sister Tobias caught a breath of surprise, but
+her subdued exclamation was silenced in mid-utterance by Saxham's look.
+
+"Dr. Owen Saxham--Doctor because I try to cure sick people. You have seen
+me trying at the hospitals. You have helped me many times----"
+
+She puckered her delicate, bewildered brows, and held her head on one
+side. To be made to think, and recall, and remember, hurt.
+
+"--Many times, and the sick people were grateful. They often ask me now,
+How is Miss Mildare?"
+
+Her attention had wandered to the bronzed buttons on the Doctor's khaki
+coat. She was trying to count them, it seemed, by the movement of her
+lips. Saxham went on with inexorable patience:
+
+"Never mind the buttons. Look at me. Think of the patients at the Hospital
+who are asking when Lynette Mildare is coming back again. Tell me what I
+am to say to them, Lynette?"
+
+His voice shook over the beloved name. In spite of his grim effort to
+fight down the overmastering emotion, his eyes brimmed over, and a drop
+splashed, hot and heavy, upon the wandering hand that crept out to finger
+the buttons that would not let themselves be counted right. She looked up
+at the eyes that wept for her, and their mingled love and anguish touched
+even her dulled mind to pity. She held her slender hand up against the
+light, and looked at the splash of wet upon it.
+
+"You--cry?"
+
+There was a glimmer of something in the eyes that redeemed their
+vagueness. A rushlight seen shining through a night of mist upon a
+desolate mountain-side might have meant as little or as much to eyes that
+saw it. Saxham saw it, and it meant much to him. His great chest lifted on
+a wave of hope as he answered her:
+
+"I cry for somebody who cannot cry for herself. Shall I tell you her name?
+It is Lynette Mildare. When tears come to her, then it will be for those
+who love her to cry again for joy, for she will be given back to them...."
+
+"Lord grant it!" breathed Sister Tobias behind them. But Saxham had
+forgotten her. The fountains of his deep were broken up and words came
+rushing from him.
+
+"I think that day will come, Lynette. I believe that day will come," he
+said, holding the beautiful vague gaze with his. "If every drop in these
+veins of mine, poured out, could bring it more quickly, it should be
+hastened so; if every faculty of my body, every cell in my brain, bent to
+the achievement of one end, expended to the last unit of energy, in the
+restoration of what is infinitely dearer to me than life--than a hundred
+lives, if I had them to devote!--could insure its dawning, and bring the
+light of Reason and Memory and Hope into these beloved eyes again----"
+
+A sob tore its way through the Doctor's great frame. He rose up abruptly
+and hurried away.
+
+
+
+
+LIV
+
+
+A deadly lassitude, both physical and mental, had settled down upon the
+men and women of the garrison. They knew that Brounckers had gone south,
+leaving General Huysmans in command of the investing forces. They knew
+that the rainy season brought them fever, for they shivered and burned
+with it, and they knew that the scanty rations of coarse and unpalatable
+food were getting smaller every day.
+
+But they were conscious of these things in a dull way, and as though they
+affected people who were a long distance off. One day, when for the
+thousandth time word came that the advance-guard of the Relief was in
+sight, when the commotion visible in the enemy's laagers suggested a
+poked-up ant-hill, and seemed to confirm the report, there was a brief
+flicker of excitement. Mounted men rode out in force, guns were limbered
+up and galloped out north and west, to divert General Huysmans' attention,
+and give Grumer, conjectured to be waiting for it, the opportunity for an
+eagle-like swoop down upon the harassed tortoise sprawling on her
+sand-hills. But the rainy dark came down upon the clatter of artillery,
+and the shining dawn crept up and brought the cruel news that the allies
+had really been beaten back; and if there was any doubt of that, it was
+dissipated at the day's end when one of the Red Cross waggons came
+rumbling back out of the sloppy twilight, bringing Three Messengers to
+confirm the tale.
+
+They were eloquent enough, even in their speechlessness, those three dead
+troopers, whose boots and coats were missing, and whose pockets had been
+turned inside out. Not a man of them was known to any member of the
+beleaguered garrison. Yet every man and woman there was the poorer by
+three friends and one more hope.
+
+We know what was happening while Gueldersdorp ate her patient heart out.
+It has been written in the History of Successful Strategy how Lord
+Williams of Afghanistan, landing at Cape Town in January, found Muller on
+his way from Port Christmas, Whittaker at Bergstorm, Parris at Kooisberg,
+Ruthven on the Brodder, and everybody and everything at a deadlock. And
+being too old and wise to disdain the wisdom of others, the keen old brain
+under the frosty thatch recalled to mind the story of Stonewall Jackson,
+collected what forces he could muster, slipped in between two of the
+columns held immovable, and having established his lines of communication
+to the south, launched himself on Groenfontein, and created the necessary
+diversion. A mighty wave rolled back to protect the menaced Free State
+capital, the paralysed columns moved again, Diamond Town was relieved by
+Sir George Parris, and Commandant Selig Brounckers was captured at
+Pijlberg.
+
+Doubtless he was a bully and a tyrant, that roaring-voiced, truculent man.
+But those angry, red-veined grey eyes of his could look Death squarely in
+the face, and the brain behind them could conceive and plan stratagems and
+tactics that were masterly, and devise works that were marvels of
+Defensive Art. And the heavy hand that patted Mevrouw Brounckers' head, as
+that devoted woman sat disconsolate in the river-bed, surrounded by her
+children, and pots, and bundles, and the roaring voice that softened to
+speak words of consolation, even as the trap so ingeniously set to catch a
+Tartar closed in--North, South, East, West--belonged to a man who knew not
+only how to fight and win and how to fight and lose, but how to love and
+pity.
+
+There came the faint dawn of a day in May when the plan of that bright
+young man Schenk Eybel was tried, and tried successfully.... The line
+between two forts that lay far apart on the south and south-west was
+pierced, while the incessant roll of rifles made a mile-long fringe of
+jagged yellowish flame along the enemy's eastern trenches. Even before the
+feint sputtered out the rush had been made, the stratagem had developed,
+and at the bidding of twenty incendiary torches, the daub-and-wattle huts
+of the Barala town leaped skyward in one roaring conflagration.
+
+We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that day of fire and blood.
+It is marked with a white stone in the History of the Siege of
+Gueldersdorp, and the chapter is headed "The Turning of the Tables." It
+gives a spirited description of the prudent retreat of General Huysmans,
+the unconditional surrender of Commandant Eybel, and winds up with a
+pen-and-ink sketch of Brounckers' bright boy breaking the chaff-bread of
+captivity in the quarters of that slim duyvel, the Engelsch Commandant.
+
+But while the Boer was yet top-dog in the scuffle, and held the Barala
+stad, and the fort that had lately done duty as headquarters for the
+Irregulars, holding captive their commanding officer, several of his
+juniors, and some fifteen troopers, with a handful of Town Guards; and all
+the fighting men who could be spared from the trenches were being posted
+between the menacing danger and the town, and a couple of field-guns were
+being hurried into position, and it had not yet occurred to Commandant
+Schenk Eybel that the cautious Huysmans might leave him in the lurch,
+things looked very bad indeed for the doughty defenders of little
+Gueldersdorp--certainly up to afternoon-tea time, when a couple of Scotch
+girls crossed the two hundred yards of veld that lay between the Fort and
+the town, carrying cans of steaming tea for the parching Britons penned up
+there.
+
+You are to see those calm, unconscious heroines start, fixing their
+hairpinned braids with quick, deft touches, pinning up their skirts as for
+the crossing of a wimpling burn rather than for the fording of Death's
+black river. They measured the distance with cool, keen eyes, took up a
+can in each hand, exchanged a word, and started. The remaining can they
+left behind, saying they would come back for it. And they meant to, and
+would have, but for a pale young woman in curling-pins, crowned by the
+deplorable wreck of a large and flowery hat, and wearing a pink cotton
+gown of deplorable limpness, through the washed-out material of which her
+sharpened collar-bones and thin shoulders threatened to pierce. For 'ow
+are you to take to call a proper pride in yourself when you 'aven't got no
+'art for anythink any more?
+
+You are to understand that Emigration Jane 'ad bin 'in 'Orspital along of
+what the doctors called the Triphoid Fever, months an' months; and 'ad bin
+orful bad, an' sent back again after being discharged, on accounts of an
+Elapse, and kep' a dreadful time at the Women's Combalescent, through her
+blood being nothink but water--and now you may guess the reason of that
+fruitless search on the part of W. Keyse.
+
+She tried to run at first, but the can was full and heavy, and her knees
+shook under her at the screaming of the bullets over that cross-swept
+field. Her pore 'art beat somethink crooil, and there was a horrible kind
+of swishing in her years, but to give up, and chuck away the can, and
+scuttle back to cover, with Them Two stepping along in front as cool--and
+more than halfway over, was what Emigration Jane could not demean herself
+to do. And at last they passed her coming back, and the Fort loomed up
+before her, as suddenly as though it had sprouted up mushroom-fashion
+under her dazzled eyes. And grimy men were leaning over the
+sandbag-parapet applauding her, and blackened hands attached to hairy arms
+reached down and grabbed the can, and it was taken up into the air and
+vanished, she never knew how. And then she was staring up into the lean,
+brickdust-coloured face of a Corporal of the Town Guard, whose head was
+swathed in a bloody bandage, and in all the world there was only Her and
+Him.
+
+"You fust-class little Nailer. You A1 bit o' frock----" W. Keyse began.
+Then his pale eyes bolted and his jaw fell, and his overwhelming joy and
+relief took on the aspect of horrified consternation.
+
+"Watto!" he was beginning weakly, but she tore her gaze from his, and with
+a rending sob, covered her face with her hands, and ran blindly. He
+remained petrified and staring. And then a bullet struck him full in the
+face, and he screamed like a shot rock-rabbit, and threw up his arms and
+fell back, smothering in his own blood, behind the breastwork. And she
+never knew the cruel trick that Fate had played her, as she ran....
+
+She learned it later, when Young Eybel and his party were marched
+prisoners into town, and cheer upon cheer went up from British throats,
+and bells were ringing joyfully, and "God Save the Queen!" bellowed in
+every imaginable key, was heard from every possible quarter.
+
+It was while the Barala were wailing over their suffocated women and
+piccaninns, and the acrid fumes of burning yet hung heavy in the
+powder-tainted air, and the R.A.M.C. men and their volunteer helpers were
+bringing in the wounded and the dead, that Emigration Jane saw a face upon
+a stretcher that was being carried through the rejoicing crowd, and
+screamed at the sight, and fell tooth and nail upon the human barrier that
+interposed between herself and it, and got through--how, she never could
+'a' told you.
+
+Rather a dreadful face it was, with wide-open, staring eyes protruding
+through a stiffening mask of gore. The teeth grinned, revealed by the
+livid, drawn-back lips, and how she knew him again in such a orful styte
+she couldn't tell you--not if you offered her pounds and pounds to say----
+
+She was only Emigration Jane, but when the bearers halted with the
+stretcher, it was in obedience to the gesture and the look of a young
+woman who had risen above herself into the keen and piercing atmosphere of
+High Tragedy.
+
+"Put that down, you two blokes. Wot for?" Her thin throat swelled visibly
+before the scream came: "'Cos 'e belongs to me! 'Ain't that enough?
+Then--I belongs to 'im! Dead or livin'--oh, my darlin'! my darlin'!"
+
+The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their burden down. It was not
+heavy, for Corporal W. Keyse, even when not living under conditions of
+semi-starvation, was a short man and a spare. _Had been_, one was tempted
+to say, in regard to his condition: "For," said one of the R.A.M.C. men to
+a sympathetic bystander, "the chap has had a tremendous wipe over the head
+with a revolver-butt or a gun-stock, and he has been shot in the face
+besides. There's the hole plain where the bullet went in under his near
+nostril, and came out at the left-hand corner of his off eye. And unless a
+kind o' miracle happens, I should say, myself, that it would be a saving
+of time to carry him straight to the Cemetery."
+
+"Don't let the poor girl hear you!" said the sympathetic bystander. But
+Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing anything but the damaged head
+upon the canvas pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly,
+dropping on her knees beside it:
+
+"O my own, own, try an' know me! Come back for long enough to s'y one
+word! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll pray to You all my days. O pore, pore
+darlin' 'ead that wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil----"
+
+It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under the limp and
+shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that called W. Keyse to come back
+from the very threshold of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true
+love.
+
+It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's stiffened eyelids
+quivered and came down halfway, and the martial spirit of its owner
+flickered up long enough for W. Keyse to sputter out:
+
+"Cripps, it's 'Er! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven--on somebody else's pass?"
+
+"Born to be hung, I should say," commented the R.A.M.C. man aside to his
+mate. "Chuck some water over the young woman, one of you," he added, as
+the stretcher was lifted. "And tell her, when she comes to, that we've
+taken her sweetheart to Hospital instead of to the other place."
+
+"Rum critters, women," commented another bystander, not untender in his
+manner of sprinkling the dubious liquid known in Gueldersdorp as water out
+of a cracked tin dipper over the face of the young woman who sat upon the
+ground in the centre of a circular palisade of interested human legs.
+"Look at this one, for instance. Lively as a vink as long as she believes
+her chap a corpse, and does a solid flop as soon as she finds out he has a
+kick in him. Help her up, you on the other side. Do you think you could
+walk now, miss, if you tried to?"
+
+She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook under her. Her clasped
+hands shook, too, as she held them out, beseeching those about her to be
+pitiful, and tell her where "they" had taken him. Then, when she was told,
+and because she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the way to the
+Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him.
+
+Saxham stitched up the split scalp of W. Keyse, and grimly congratulated
+him upon the thickness of the skull beneath it. The bullet had, as has
+already been indicated, gone in under the left nostril, and emerged below
+the inner corner of the right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound
+notoriety as well as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight permanent
+cast....
+
+"You shall git well, deer," Emigration Jane would tell her patient twenty
+times a day. "You carn't 'elp it, becos I means to myke you."
+
+"A' right," her hero would snuffle. One day he added, with a weakly swoop
+of one lean arm in the direction of her waist: "Mend me an' marry me.
+That's wot I call a Fair Division o' Labour. Twig?"
+
+She crimsoned, gasping:
+
+"You don't never mean it?"
+
+"Stryte I mean it," declared W. Keyse. "Wot d'you tyke me for?"
+
+His bed was in a corner, and a screen baffled prying eyes. She hung over
+him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful, faltering:
+
+"S'y it agyne, darlin'! Upon yer solemn natural----"
+
+He said it with the lean arm round her.
+
+"An' it's me--me wot you wants--an' not that Other One?----"
+
+He swore it.
+
+"You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy Cripps!"
+
+"An' you've forgiven me--abart them letters?" Her face was coming
+close....
+
+"Every time I blooming well kissed 'em, arter I bin an' picked 'em up," he
+declared.
+
+"You did--that?" she quavered, marvelling at the greatness of his nature.
+
+"Look in me jacket pocket if you think I'm spinnin' you fairy ones." His
+close arm slackened a little. "Now there's somethin' I got to up an' tell,
+if you never tips me the 'Ow Do no more."
+
+"Wot is it, deer?" Her heart beat painfully. Was this something the reason
+why he had not yet kissed her?
+
+"It's got to do with the Dutchy wot landed me this slip over the
+cokernut"--he indicated some plaster strappings that decorated the seat of
+intelligence--"with a revolver-butt, when they rushed the Fort. After 'e'd
+plugged at me wiv' 'is last cartridge an' missed." The Adam's apple in his
+thin throat worked up above the collar of the grey flannel Hospital
+jacket. "I--I outed 'im!" said W. Keyse.
+
+"O' course you did, deer." Her heart thrilled with pride in her hero. "An'
+serve 'im glad--the narsty, blood-thirsty, murderin'----"
+
+He interrupted:
+
+"'Old 'ard! Wait till you knows 'oo it was." He gulped, and the Adam's
+apple jerked in the old way. "That 'ulkin' big Dopper you was walkin' out
+along of, when I----"
+
+"Walt! It was--Walt?"
+
+She shuddered and grew pale.
+
+"That's the bloke I means. I 'ad to 'ave 'im," explained W. Keyse, "or
+'e'd 'ave 'ad me. So I sent 'im in. With my one, two, an' the Haymaker's
+Lift. Right in the middle of 'is dirty weskit. F'ff!" He blew a sigh. "Now
+it's out, an' I suppose you 'ates me?"
+
+She panted.
+
+"It's 'orrible, deer, but--but--you 'ad to. An'--an'--if I 'ave to s'y it,
+I'd a bloomin' sight rather it was 'Im than You!"
+
+"I'll 'ave my kiss now," said the lordly W. Keyse. And took it from her
+willing lips.
+
+
+
+
+LV
+
+
+There was no perceptible change in Lynette, either at the time of young
+Eybel's frustrated coup, or for long after. She was to live as much as
+possible in the open air, Saxham had insisted, and so you would find the
+girl, with a Sister in charge of her, sitting in the Cemetery, where the
+crop of little white crosses thickened every day. The little blue and
+white irises had bloomed upon those two graves where her adopted mother
+and her brave young lover lay, before the dawning of that day the nuns
+prayed and Saxham hoped for.
+
+It was his bitter-sweet joy to be with her constantly, striving with all
+his splendid powers of brain and body to brace the shattered nerves, and
+restore the exhausted strength, and lead the darkened mind back gently and
+by degrees towards the light.
+
+She did not shrink from him now, but would answer his questions
+submissively, and give him her hand mechanically at meeting and parting.
+Saxham had not the magnetic influence over shy and backward children that
+another man possessed. She would smile and brighten when she saw the
+Colonel coming, upright and alert as ever, though bearing heavy traces now
+in the haggard lines and deep hollows of his face, to the greying hairs
+above his temples and to the close-clipped brown moustache, as in the
+Quixote-like gauntness of the figure that had never carried much flesh, of
+the long struggle of close on seven months' duration.
+
+The pleasant little whistle would die upon his lips when he saw her
+sitting by the Mother's grave, plaiting grasses while the Sister sewed, or
+making clumsy babyish attempts at drawing on her little slate. From this
+she disliked to be parted, so her gentle nurses fastened it to one end of
+a long ribbon, and its pencil to the other, and tied the ribbon about her
+waist.
+
+One day, as the Colonel stooped to speak to her, his keen glance noted
+that the wavering outline of a house stood upon the little slate. The
+living descendant of the primitive savage who had outlined the forms of
+men and beasts upon the flank of the great boulder when this old world was
+young, would have scorned the drawing, and with good reason. It was so
+feeble and wavering an attempt to convey, in outline, the idea of a white
+man's dwelling.
+
+The roof sagged wonderfully, and the chimneys were at frenzied angles with
+the sides of the irregular cube, with its four windows of impossibly
+varying size, and the oblong patch that meant a door between them. Above
+the door was another oblong, set transversely, and rather suggesting a
+tavern-sign.
+
+There were some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly sheds and stables
+of daub and wattle, eking out the ramshackle house. Behind it and to the
+left of it were scrawls that might have been meant for trees. An enclosure
+of spiky lines might have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were
+things in the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as
+beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them knew they were
+native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, and the fold between his
+eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the clumsy drawing on the slate. Without
+those rude lines in the foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a
+little kopje of boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the drawing
+would have meant nothing at all, even to the eye of a practised scout,
+except a tavern on the lonely veld. The grave at the foot of the little
+kopje located the spot.
+
+
+
+
+"A veld hotel in the Orange Free State--a wretched shanty of the usual
+corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the grass country between Driepoort
+and Kroonfontein."
+
+He heard the wraith of his own voice speaking to the dead woman who lay
+under the blossoming irises at his feet. He saw her with the mental vision
+quite clearly. Her great purple-grey eyes were bent on his from their
+superior level, and they were inscrutable in their strange, secret
+defiance, and indomitable in the determination of their regard.
+
+Why had she been so bent upon hiding the trail? Why had she distrusted
+him?
+
+He bent upon one knee in the grass beside the slender, shrinking figure,
+woman's and yet child's, and held out the little slate to her, and said,
+with the smile that even backward children could not resist:
+
+"Did you draw this?"
+
+She nodded, with great wistful eyes, looking shyly up at him from under
+their sweeping black lashes. He went on, pointing with a slender
+grass-blade to each object as he named it:
+
+"It is a house, and these are sheds and stables, and this is an orchard,
+and here the Kaffirs live. But who lives in the house?"
+
+She whispered, with a look of secret fear:
+
+"The man lives there. And the woman."
+
+"Tell me the man's name."
+
+She breathed, after a hesitation that was full of troubled apprehension:
+
+"Bough."
+
+A red flush mounted in his thin cheek, and he drew his breath in sharply.
+He asked:
+
+"Does anyone else live in the house?"
+
+She reflected with a knitted brow. He helped her.
+
+"I do not mean the travellers--the men and women who come driving up in
+Cape-carts and transport-waggons, and drive away again, but someone who
+lives with Bough and the woman. She has been at the tavern a long, long
+time, though she is so young and so little. Try to remember her name."
+
+The knitted brow relaxed, and the beautiful dim eyes had almost a smile in
+them.
+
+"It is 'the Kid.'"
+
+"Try and think. Has she no other name?"
+
+She shook her head. He gave up that trail as lost, and moved the
+grass-blade to another part of the drawing on the slate.
+
+"Tell me what this is?"
+
+She answered at once:
+
+"It is the Little Kopje. The English traveller made it when he put the
+dead woman in the ground."
+
+His heart beat heavily, and the hand that pointed with the grass-blade
+shook a little.
+
+"Where is the man who buried the dead woman and built the Little Kopje?"
+
+She pointed to the rude oblong that was meant for a grave.
+
+"There." The slender finger climbed the heap of boulders. "And there is
+where the Kid sits when she is a bad girl and runs away." She peeped up in
+his face almost slyly. "Then they call her: 'You Kid, come here! Dirty
+little slut, take the broom and sweep out the bar! Idle little devil,
+fetch water for the kitchen!'" Her smile was peaked and elfish. She laid a
+cunning finger beside her pursed-up lips. "But though they scold and call
+bad names, they never come and fetch her down off the Little Kopje. Beat
+her when she comes in, and serve her right, the impudent little scum! But
+never come near the Little Kopje, because of the spook the Barala boy saw
+there one night when the moon was big and shining."
+
+He said, with infinite pity in his tone, and a compassionate mist rising
+in those keen bright eyes of his:
+
+"They are cruel to the Kid, both Bough and the woman?"
+
+She began to shake. The guardian Sister, who sat sewing a little way
+behind her, looked up anxiously at her charge. He pacified her with a
+glance, and, taking one of the slender trembling hands in a firm, kind
+clasp, repeated his question:
+
+"Always cruel, cruel! But Bough----"
+
+A spasm contracted her face. At the base of the slender throat something
+throbbed and throbbed. She whispered brokenly:
+
+"When the woman went away----"
+
+Her slender fingers closed desperately upon his. Her heart shook her, and
+Fear was in her eyes. Her voice vibrated and shuddered at her white lips
+as a caught moth vibrates and shudders in a spider-web. She began again:
+
+"When the woman went away, Bough----"
+
+Her eyes quailed and flickered; her pale and quivering face was convulsed
+by a sudden spasm of awful fear. The muscles of her whole body stiffened
+in the immovable rigor of terror. Only her head jerked from side to side,
+like that of some timid creature of the wilds held captive in crushing
+folds or crunching fangs. And he comprehended all; and understood all, in
+one lightning leap of intuition, as he saw.
+
+"Hush!" He stopped her with his authoritative eyes and the firm,
+reassuring pressure of his hand. "Forget that--speak of it no more. Try
+and tell me who lies here, under these grasses and flowers that you water
+every day?"
+
+He moved the hand he held to touch the grave, and the spasm that
+contracted her features relaxed, and the terror died out of her eyes, as
+though some soothing, healing virtue were conveyed to her by the mere
+contact with that sacred earth. He went on:
+
+"She was very noble, very pure, and very beautiful. Everyone loved her,
+and her life was spent in doing good. You were dear to her--inexpressibly
+dear to her. She used to call you her beloved daughter. Tell me who she
+was?"
+
+Her face quivered, and in the depths of her dim, vague eyes a beam of the
+golden light of old was rekindled.
+
+"She was the Lady. When will she come again?"
+
+He raised his hand and pointed to the sky.
+
+"When that is rolled away, and the Sign of the Cross shines from the east
+to the west, and from the north to the south, and the King of Glory comes
+with His Angels and His Saints, we shall see her again, Lynette----"
+
+His voice broke. He laid the cool, delicate, nerveless hand back upon her
+knee, and rose, for the Sister was folding up her sewing. He looked long
+after the girlish figure as it was led away.
+
+He understood everything now. He knew why the mother-plover had trailed
+her wing in the dust, striving to lead the footsteps of the stranger aside
+from the hidden nest. He stooped and gathered a blade or two of grass, and
+a few crumbs of red, sandy earth, from the grave at his feet, and kissed
+them, and folded them reverently in an envelope, and hid the little packet
+in his breast before he went.
+
+That evening there were pillars and banks of dust on the north-west
+horizon, and the flashes of lyddite and the booming of artillery told
+patient Gueldersdorp that the hour of deliverance was near. A few hours
+later the Relief had lamp-signalled brief details of the battle with
+Huysmans, ending with "Good-night" and the promise to fight a way in next
+morning. Later still, eight troopers in khaki, jaunty ostrich-tips in
+their smasher hats, rode into the little battered village town that
+huddled on the low, sandy mound, and all the waiting world was gladdened
+with the news. And London called on a quiet elderly lady, to tell her what
+the man, her boy, had done.
+
+The name of that little hamlet town has, cruelly enough, passed into a
+byword--a synonym for everything that is rowdy, vulgar, apish in the
+English character, with the dregs stirred up. But yet it will ring down
+the silver grooves of Time as long as Time shall be.
+
+Do I wander from the thread of my story--I who have dressed my puppets in
+the brave deeds of those who strove and endured and suffered, to what a
+glorious end?
+
+Great writers lay down plans, formulate elaborate synopses. Not so I, who,
+out of all the wreaths that Fame holds yet in her lap to give away, shall
+never call one laurel mine....
+
+A wandering wind came sighing past my ears one night upon the Links at
+Herion, burdened with this story it had to tell. Before then it had only
+blown in fitful gusts. Then again it blew steadily. I had caught some
+whispers from it years before. On the deck of the great, populous,
+electric-lighted ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across the Atlantic,
+racing the porpoise-schools to get to New York City; and later at
+Washington, when the red sunset-fires burned low behind the Capitol, it
+spoke to me in the wonderful, beloved voice I shall never hear on earth
+any more. Yet once more the wind came faintly sighing, in the giant blue
+shadow of Table Mountain; it blew at Johannesburg, six thousand feet above
+sea-level, in a raging cyclone of red gritty dust. Again it came, stirring
+the celadon-green carpet of veld that is spread at the feet of the
+Magaliesberg Ranges, that were turquoise-blue as the scillas growing in
+the South Welsh garden that lies before the window where I write, this
+variable spring day. But it blew with a most insistent note on the dumpy
+mound where they have rebuilt the ridiculous, glorious village that gave
+birth to deeds worthy of the Age Heroic, about whose sand-bagged defences
+nightly patrolled a Sentinel who never slept.
+
+Gueldersdorp tumbled out of bed at three-thirty, to see the troops march
+in by the cold white morning moonlight that painted long indigo-blue
+shadows of marching horsemen and rolling guns, drawn by many horses, and
+huge-teamed baggage-waggons, eastward over the bleached dust.
+
+I dare not attempt to describe the indescribable. Zulu and Barala,
+Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each after his own manner, and
+were glad and rejoiced. But of these haggard men and emaciated women of
+British race I can but say that in them human joy attained the climax of a
+sacred frenzy--that human gratitude and enthusiasm, loyalty and
+patriotism, reached the pitch at which the mercury in the thermometer of
+human emotion ceases to record altitudes.
+
+At its height, when the last fort had fallen to England and the flag of
+the United Republics had fluttered down from the tree whence it had waved
+so long, and the Union Jack went up to frantic cheering, and the
+retreating cloud of dust on the horizon told of the exit of the enemy from
+the Theatre of War, Saxham played his one trump card in the game that
+meant life and death to him, and life, and everything that made life worth
+living, to one other.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+You are to see the hulking Doctor with the square-cut face, his grim
+under-jaw more squarely set than ever, his blue eyes smouldering anxiety
+under their glooming brows, trying to coax a pale, bewildered girl to take
+a walk with him. She would at length, provided Sister Tobias walked on the
+other side and held her hand. So this party of three plunged into the
+boiling whirlpool of joyous Gueldersdorp.
+
+People were singing "God Save the Queen," and "The Red, White, and Blue,"
+"Auld Lang Syne" and "Rule, Britannia," all at once and all together, and
+playing the tunes of them on mouth-organs and concertinas. They were
+shaking hands with one another and everybody else, and shedding tears of
+joy, and borrowing the pocket-handkerchiefs of sympathetic strangers to
+dry them, or leaving them undried. They were crowding the Government
+kitchens, drinking the healths of the officers and men of Great Britain's
+Union Brigade in hot soup and hot coffee. They were clustered like bees
+upon the most climbable house-tops, watching those retiring dust-clouds in
+the distance, and the nearer movements of their friends and allies; they
+were hearing the experiences of dust-stained and travel-worn Imperialists,
+and telling their own; and one and all, they were thanking God Who had led
+them, through bodily fear, and mental anguish, and bitter privations, to
+hail the dawn of this most blessed day.
+
+The electrical atmosphere, the surge of the multitude, the roar of
+thousands of voices, the gaze of thousands of eyes, had its effect upon
+the girl. She trembled and flushed and paled. Her breath came quick and
+short. She threw back her head and gasped for air. But she did not wish to
+be taken back to the Convent bombproof. She shook her head when Sister
+Tobias suggested that they should return.
+
+And then some of the women whom she had helped to nurse in hospital saw
+her, and recognised her, and came about her with pitiful words and
+compassionate looks--not only for her own sake, but for that dead woman's
+whose adopted daughter they knew her to have been.
+
+"You poor, blessed, innocent lamb!" They crowded about her, kissing her
+hands and her dress, and Sister Tobias's shabby black habit. "Lord help
+you!" they mourned over her. "Christ pity you, and bring you to yourself
+again!"
+
+"Why are you so sorry?" Lynette asked them, knitting her delicate brows,
+and peering curiously in their tearful smiling faces. "No!" she corrected
+herself; "I mean why are you so glad?"
+
+"Glad is ut, honey!" screamed a huge Irishwoman, throwing a brawny red arm
+about the shrinking figure and hugging it. "Begob, wid the Holy Souls
+dancin' jigs in Purgatory, an' the Blessed Saints clappin' their han's in
+Heaven, we have rayson to be glad! Whirroosh! Ould Erin for ever--an' God
+save the Cornel!"
+
+She yelled with all the power of her Celtic lungs, plucked off her
+downtrodden shoes, slapped their soles together smartly, and, with a
+gesture of royal prodigality, tossed them right and left into the air,
+performed a caper of surprising agility on elephantine,
+blue-yarn-stocking-covered feet, and was carried away by a roaring surge
+of the joyous crowd, vociferating.
+
+Saxham felt the slender hand of his charge tighten upon his arm, and his
+heart leaped as he noted the working of the sensitive face and the heaving
+of the small, nymph-like bosom under the thin material of her dress. He
+hoped, he believed that a change was taking place in her. He said to
+himself that the delicate mechanism of her brain, clogged and paralysed by
+a great mental shock, was revitalising, storing energy, gaining power;
+that the lesion was healing; that she would recover--must recover.
+
+Then his quick eye saw fatigue in her. They took her back out of the dust
+and the clamour and the crowd, back to the quiet of the Cemetery.
+
+It happened there. For as she stood again beside the long, low mound
+beneath which the heart that had cherished her lay mouldering, they saw
+that the tears were running down her face, and that her whole body was
+shaken with sobbing. And then, as a wild tornado of cheering, mingled with
+drifts of martial music, swept northwards from Market Square, she fell
+upon her knees beside the grave, and cried as if to living ears:
+
+"Mother;--oh! Mother, the Relief! They're here! Oh, my own darling--to be
+glad without you!..."
+
+She lay there prone, and wept as though all the tears pent up in her since
+that numbing double stroke of the Death Angel's sword were flowing from
+her now. And Sister Tobias, glancing doubtfully up at Saxham's face, saw
+it transfigured and irradiated with a great and speechless joy. For he
+knew that the light had come back to the beautiful eyes he loved, and that
+the Future might yield its harvest of joy yet, even yet, for the Dop
+Doctor, he believed in his own blindness.
+
+
+
+
+LVI
+
+
+They were standing together in the same place two months later when he
+told her all, and asked her to be his wife in his own brusque
+characteristic way.
+
+"You have been so good, so kind," she said, in rather formal phrase, but
+with her sweet eyes shining through tears and her sensitive lips
+trembling. "You have shown yourself to be so noble in your unselfish care
+for others, in your unsparing efforts for the good and benefit of
+everyone----"
+
+"Put that by," said Saxham rather roughly, "and please to look at me, Miss
+Mildare."
+
+He had never called her Lynette since her recovery, or touched the pretty
+hand he coveted unless in formal greeting.
+
+"Put all that by. You see me to-day as you have seen me for months past,
+conscientious and cleanly, sober and sane, in body as in mind, discharging
+my duty at the Hospital and elsewhere as well as any other man possessing
+the special qualifications it demands. Pray understand that I am not a
+philanthropist, and have never posed as one. For the sake, first of a man
+who believed in me, and secondly of a woman whom I love--and you are
+she--I have done what I have."
+
+He squared his great shoulders and stood up before her, and, though his
+face had never had any charm for her, its power went home to her and its
+passion thrilled.
+
+"I play no part. The man I seem to be I am. But up to seven months ago,
+before the siege began, I was known in this town, and with reason, as the
+Dop Doctor."
+
+He saw recollection waken in her eyes, and nerved himself to the sharp
+ordeal of changing it to repulsion and disgust.
+
+"You have heard that name applied to me. It conveyed nothing loathsome to
+your innocent mind. You once repeated it to me, and were about to ask its
+meaning. I had it in my mind then to enlighten you, and for the mean and
+cowardly baseness that shrank from the exposure I have to pay now in
+the"--a muscle in his pale face twitched--"the exquisite pain it is to me
+to tell you to-day."
+
+"Then do not tell me." She said it almost in a whisper. "Dr. Saxham, I beg
+you most earnestly to spare yourself." She dropped her eyes under the
+fierce earnestness of his, and knitted her cold little hands in one
+another. "Please leave the rest unsaid," she begged, without looking at
+him.
+
+"It cannot be," said Saxham. "Miss Mildare, the Dop Doctor was only
+another nickname for the Town Drunkard. And now you know what you should
+have known before if I had not been a coward and a knave."
+
+She turned her eyes softly upon him, and they could not rest, it seemed to
+her, upon a man of braver and more lofty bearing.
+
+"I _was_ the Town Drunkard," Saxham went on, in the cold, clear voice that
+cut like a knife to the intelligence. "Known in every liquor-saloon, and
+familiar to every constable, and a standing butt for the clumsy jests that
+the most utter dolt of a Police Magistrate might splutter from the Bench."
+His jarring laugh hurt her. "The Man in the Street, and the Woman of the
+Street, for that matter--pardon me if I offend your ears, but the truth
+must be told--were my godfather and my godmother, and they gave me that
+name between them. You are trembling, Miss Mildare. Sit down upon that
+balk, and I will finish."
+
+There was a remnant of timber lying near that had been used in the
+construction of a gun-mounting. She moved to it and sat down, and the
+Doctor went on:
+
+"I am not going to weary you with the story of how I came to be--what I
+have told you. But that I had lived a clean and honourable and temperate
+life up to thirty years of age--when my world caved in with me--I swear is
+the very truth!"
+
+She said gently: "I can believe it, Dr. Saxham."
+
+"Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And then, at the
+height of my success, and on the brink of a marriage that I dreamed would
+bring me the fulfilment of every hope a man may cherish, one impulse of
+pity and charity towards a wretched little woman brought me ruin, ruin,
+ruin!"
+
+Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about. She was glad to see
+the Saxham of her knowledge in that Saxham whom she had not known. He
+folded his great arms upon his broad breast and went on:
+
+"Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Rehabilitation in the eyes
+of the Law--for I gained that much--did not clear me in the eyes of
+Society--that hugs the guilt-stained criminal to its heart in the full
+consciousness of what his deeds are, and shudders at the innocent man upon
+whom has once fallen the shadow of that grim and bloody Idol that
+civilisation misnames Justice. I was cast out. Even by the brother I had
+trusted and the woman I had loved. I had in a vague way believed in God
+until then; I know I used to pray to Him to bless those I loved, and help
+me to achieve great things for their sakes. But nothing at all was left of
+that except a dull aching desire to throw back in the face of the Deity
+the little He had left to me. My health, and my intellectual powers, and
+my self-respect...."
+
+Her voice came to his ears in the half-whispered words:
+
+"Had He left you so little, after all?"
+
+"Little enough," said Saxham doggedly, "compared with what I had lost. And
+as it is the privilege of the Christian to blame either the Almighty or
+the devil for whatever ills are brought on him by his own blind, reckless
+challenging of the Inevitable--termed Fate and Destiny by classical
+Paganism,--so I found myself at odds with One I had been taught to call my
+Maker."
+
+In His own acre, close to her beloved dead, with all those little white
+crosses marking where other dust that had once praised Him with the human
+voice lay waiting for the summons of the Resurrection, it was incredibly
+awful to her to hear Him thus denied. She grew pale and shuddered, and
+Saxham saw.
+
+"You see that I wish to be honest with you, and open and above-board. I
+would not ever have you say to yourself, 'This man deceived--this man
+misled me, wishing me to think him better than he was.' There is not much
+more to tell you--save that I took what money remained to me at the bank
+and from the sale of my last possessions--about a thousand pounds--and
+shook the dust off from my shoes, and came out here, drunk, to carry out
+my purpose of self-degradation to the uttermost. And I became a foul beast
+among beasts that were even fouler, but less vile and less shameful
+because their mental and moral standard was infinitely lower than my own.
+And they gave me the name you know of." His voice had the ring of steel
+smitten on steel. He drew himself up with a movement of almost savage
+pride, and the knotted veins swelled on his broad white forehead, and his
+blue eyes blazed under his thunderous smudge of black eyebrows.
+
+"The name you know. It used to be called after me when I reeled the
+streets--they whispered it afterwards as I rode by. To-day it is
+forgotten." His nostrils quivered, and he threw out his hands as if with
+that action he tossed something worthless to the winds. "Miss Mildare, I
+have not touched Drink--the stuff that was my nourishment and my
+sustenance, my comfort and my bane, my deadliest enemy and my only
+friend--since that hour when with the last effort of my will I rallied all
+my mental and bodily forces to resist its base allurement."
+
+"I know it, Dr. Saxham. I am sure of it." She rose and held out her hands
+to him, but he folded his arms more closely over his starving, famished
+heart, and would not see them yet.
+
+"You can be sure of it. Alcohol is no longer my master and my god. I stand
+before you a free man, because I willed to be free." There was a little
+blob of foam at one corner of his mouth, but the square pale face was
+composed, even impassive. "Once, not so long ago, I filled a place of
+standing in the professions of Surgery and Medicine; I knew what it was to
+be esteemed and respected by the world. For your dear sake I promise to
+regain what I have lost; be even more than I used to be, achieve greater
+things than are done by other men of equal powers with mine. I am not a
+man to pledge my word lightly, Miss Mildare...." His voice shook now and
+his blue eyes glistened. "If you would be so--so unutterably kind as to
+become my wife, I promise you a worthy husband. I swear to you upon what I
+hold dearest and most sacred--your own life, your own honour, your own
+happiness, never to give you cause to regret marrying me! For I may die,
+indeed, but living I will never fail you!"
+
+There was a lump in her throat choking her. Her eyes had gone to that
+other grave some fifty paces distant from the Catholic portion of the
+Cemetery. There were freshly-gathered flowers upon it, as upon the grave
+that lay so near, and two gorgeous butterflies were hovering about the
+blooms, in mingled dalliance and greediness.
+
+"You loved him," said Saxham, following the journey of her wistful eyes.
+"Love him still; remember him for every trait and quality of his that was
+worthy of love from you. But give me the hope of one day gaining from you
+some shadow of--of return for what I feel for you. Is it Passion? I hardly
+know. Whether it is Love, in the sense in which that word is employed by
+many of the women and nearly all the men I have met, I do not know either.
+But that it is the life of my life to me and the breath of my being--you
+cannot look at me and doubt!"
+
+She was not looking at him. Her eyes were on the little white cross above
+the Mother's grave; there was an anxious fold between the slender dark
+eyebrows.
+
+"You--you wish to marry a Catholic--you, who tell me that you were once a
+Christian and are now Agnostic?"
+
+"If I have not what is called Faith," said Saxham, "I may at least lay
+claim to the quality of reverence. And I honour the religion that has made
+you what you are. Cleave to your Church, child--hold to your pure beliefs,
+and keep a little love back, Lynette, from your Holy Family and your
+Saints in Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs it desperately!"
+
+The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than beautiful in its
+compassion. She said:
+
+"I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day our Lord will give you
+back the faith that you have lost."
+
+"Thank you, dear!" said Saxham humbly. She was opening her lips to speak
+again when he lifted his hand and stopped her.
+
+"There is one other thing I should like to make clear. I--am not rich. But
+neither am I absolutely poor. Letters that I have received from a firm of
+solicitors acting for the trustees and executors of--a near relative
+deceased, will prove to you that I am possessed of some small property,
+bringing in an annual income of something like two hundred pounds, and
+funds sufficient to settle a few thousands upon my wife by way of
+marriage-jointure. Believe me," he added, in answer to her look, "I know
+you to be incapable of a mercenary thought. But what I should have
+explained to"--he pointed to the grave that lay so near--"to _her_, I must
+make clear to you. It could not be otherwise."
+
+She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid her pure cheek
+upon it, and spoke to the Dead in a low, murmuring tone. Saxham knew as he
+watched her, breathing heavily, that the consent of the Mother would never
+have been given to the marriage he proposed. That other obstacle in the
+road of his desire, the lover who had deceived, had been swept away, with
+the stern and tender guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He went back in
+thought to the ending of his long shooting-match _a outrance_ with Father
+Noah, and remembered how he had promised himself that all should go well
+with Saxham provided Saxham's bullet got home first.
+
+Were not things going better than he had hoped? She had not even recoiled
+from him when he had told her of those degraded days of wastrelhood.
+Surely things were going well for Saxham, he said, as he waited with his
+hungering eyes upon his heart's desire. What it cost him not to step over
+to her, snatch her from the ground, and crush her upon his heart with hot
+and passionate kisses and wild words of worship, he knew quite well. But
+in that he was able to exercise such a mastery over himself and keep that
+other Saxham down, Saxham gave praise to that strange god he had set up,
+and worshipped, and bowed down before, calling it The Omnipotent Human
+Will.
+
+She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands, thinking. It was very
+still, and the air was sweet and balmy, and beyond the lines of the
+defence-works miles upon miles of sunlit veld rolled away to the hills
+that were mantled in clear hyacinth-colour and hooded with pale rose.
+
+"If I married you, you would take me away from this country and these
+people who have killed her?"
+
+She had the thought of another in her heart and the name of another upon
+her lips. But only her eyes spoke, travelling to that more distant grave
+where the butterflies were hovering above the flowers, as Saxham answered:
+
+"I would take you away, if you wished it."
+
+"To England?"
+
+"Back to England."
+
+"I should see London, and the house where Mother lived...." She seemed to
+have forgotten Saxham, and to be uttering her thoughts aloud. "I might
+even see the green mountains of Connemara in Ireland--her own mountains
+she used to call them. I might one day meet people who are of her blood
+and name----"
+
+"And of _his_," thought Saxham, following her eyes' wistful journey to
+that other grave.
+
+"But," she went on, "it would all depend"--she breathed with agitation and
+knitted her slim white fingers together, and looked round at him with that
+anxious wrinkle between her fine eyebrows--"upon how much you asked of me!
+Suppose I----" His intent and burning eyes confused her, and she dropped
+her own beneath them. "If I were to marry you, would you leave me
+absolutely free?"
+
+"Absolutely," said Saxham. "With the most complete freedom a wife could
+possibly desire."
+
+"I meant--a different kind of freedom from a wife's." She knitted and
+unknitted her hands. "It is difficult to explain. Would you be willing to
+ask nothing of me that a friend or a sister might not give? Would you be
+content----"
+
+Her transparent skin glowed crimson with the rush of blood. Her bosom
+laboured with the hurry of her breathing. Her white lids veiled her eyes,
+or the sudden terrible change in Saxham's face might have wrung from her a
+cry of terror and alarm. But he mastered the raging jealousy that tore
+him, and said, with a jarring note of savage irony in the voice that had
+always spoken to her gently until then:
+
+"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage
+that should be practically no marriage at all--a formal contract that is
+not wedlock? That might never change as Time went on, and alter into the
+close union that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women
+who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare?"
+
+She looked at him full and bent her head. And the man's heart, that had
+throbbed so wildly, stopped beating with a sudden jerk, and the divine
+fire that burned and tingled in his blood died out, and the cold sickness
+of baffled hope weighed on him like a mantle of lead. And the voice that
+had whispered to him so alluringly, telling him that it was not too late,
+that he might even yet win this virginal pure, sweetly-budding maiden, and
+know the bliss of being loved at last, sank into silence. His face was
+set like granite, and as grey. His eyes burned darkly under his heavy
+brows. He waited, sombrely and hopelessly, for her to speak again.
+
+"There are such marriages----?"
+
+The question was diffidently and timidly put. He answered:
+
+"Assuredly there are. But not between those who are--physically and
+mentally, sane and healthy men and women,--at least, in my experience. One
+case, of three I am at liberty to quote, was that of an aged and wealthy
+woman of position and a young and rising public man."
+
+"Were--weren't they happy?"
+
+The face of the inward, unseen Saxham was twisted in a miserable grin, but
+the outward man preserved immobility.
+
+"He enjoyed life. She sat by, and saw, every day joining nearer, her
+death, that was to leave him free."
+
+"And the others?"
+
+She asked it with an indrawn breath of anxiety.
+
+"The second case was that of a man, middle-aged and helplessly paralysed
+by an accident in the hunting-field, and of a beautiful and high-spirited
+young woman--almost a girl. She took a romantic interest in him--talked of
+his ruined career and blighted life, and all that sort of thing. And--they
+married, and she found her bondage intolerable.... It ended in his
+divorcing her. The _decree nisi_ was made absolute a few days before I
+left London. The third case bears more analogy to yours and mine."
+
+"Please go on."
+
+"There was no great disparity of age between these two people. They were
+sympathetic, cultured, independent both. Their views upon many
+subjects--including the sex question--were identical," said Saxham slowly.
+"And they entered into a bond of union that had for its ultimate aim the
+culture of the intellect and the development of what they called the Soul.
+The Flesh had nothing in it; the Body," said Saxham, with a grating
+sarcasm, "was utterly ignored. I forget whether they were Agnostics,
+Buddhists, or Christians. They certainly suffered for their creed.
+But"--his voice softened and deepened--"at any rate, the woman suffered
+most!"
+
+Her lips parted, her eyes were intent upon him.
+
+"You have lived with Sisters of Mercy in a Convent," went on Saxham. "You
+know of their lives even more than I--greatly to my advantage--have
+learned. Energetic, useful, stirring, active, never complaining, always
+ready to make the best of the world as they find it, and help others to do
+the same; always regarding it as the preparatory school or
+training-college for a state of being infinitely greater, nobler, and more
+glorious than anything the merely mundane imagination can conceive--you
+can realise how infinitely to the nuns' advantage is the contrast between
+them and the laywomen of Society, peevish, hysterical, neurotic, sensual,
+and bored. But before these chastened, temperate bodies, these serene and
+well-balanced minds attained the state of self-control and crossed the
+Rubicon of resignation, what struggles their owners must have
+undergone!--what ordeals of anguish they must have endured! Did that never
+strike you?"
+
+Her lips were pale, and there were shadows under her eyes. She bent her
+head.
+
+"The woman, who was not a nun, did for the sake of a man what the nun
+feels supernaturally called upon to do for her God," said Saxham. "She
+thrust her hand deep into her woman's bosom, and dragged out her woman's
+heart, and wrung from it every natural human yearning, and purged it--or
+thought she purged it--of every earthly desire, before she laid the
+pulseless, emptied thing down before his feet for him to tread upon. And
+that is what he did!"
+
+He heard her pant softly, and saw her hand move upward to her beating
+heart. His deadly earnestness appalled her. Was he not fighting for what
+was more than life to him? He folded his arms over his great chest, and
+said:
+
+"For ten years he and she lived together in a union called ideal by
+ignorant enthusiasts and high-minded cranks. Then she drooped and
+died--victim of the revolt of outraged Nature. A little before the end
+they sent for me. I said to the man: 'A child would have saved her!' And
+he--I can hear him now, answering: 'Ah! but that would have nullified all
+the use and purpose of our example for humanity.' The idiot--the abortive,
+impossible, dreary idiot! And if ever there was a woman intended by
+wholesome Nature to bear and nurture babes, it was that woman, who died
+to prove the possibility of carrying on the business of living according
+to his damned theories."
+
+His broad chest heaved; a mist came before his eyes; his deep vibrating
+voice had in it a passionate appeal to her.
+
+"The nun would tell you that in the lofty, mystical sense marriage and
+motherhood are hers, 'Christ being her Spouse.' I echo this in no spirit
+of mockery. But this woman of whom I have told you knew no vocation and
+took no vow. She merely tried to ignore the fundamental truth that every
+normal woman of healthy instincts was meant to be a mother."
+
+He added:
+
+"And every husband who loves his wife sees his manhood proved and
+perfected in her. She was dear and beloved before; she is holy,
+sacred--worshipped in his eyes, when they look upon his child in her arms,
+at her breast."
+
+Something like a sob broke from him. His heart cried:
+
+"Lynette! have pity upon yourself and upon me!"
+
+He stood and waited for her reply. She was so exquisite and so full of
+womanly allure, and yet so crystal-cold and passionless, that he knew his
+arguments thrown away, his entreaties mere dust upon the wind.
+
+"Tell me," he said at length, "do I inspire you with antipathy? Am I
+physically repulsive to you, or disagreeable? Answer me frankly, for in
+that case I would--cease to urge my suit with you, and go upon my way,
+wherever it might lead me."
+
+She looked at him, and there was no shrinking in her regard--only a gentle
+friendliness, as far removed from the feeling he would have roused in her
+as the North is from the South.
+
+"I will tell you exactly how I feel towards you." He writhed under the
+knowledge that it was possible to her to analyse and to explain. "I like
+you, Dr. Saxham. I am deeply grateful to you----"
+
+"Gratitude!" He shrugged his shoulders. "You owe me none; and even if you
+did, what use is gratitude to a man who asks for love?"
+
+"I trust you; I rely upon you," she said. "It is--pleasant to me to know
+that you are near." A line of perplexity came between the dark fine
+eyebrows; the sweet colour in her face wavered and sank. "But--if you were
+to touch me--to take me in your arms--I----" She shivered.
+
+"You need not say more!" If she was pale, Saxham's stern, square face was
+ashen. His eyes glowered and fell under hers, and a purple vein swelled in
+the middle of his broad white forehead. "I understand!"
+
+"You do not understand quite yet." She moved away from the Mother's grave,
+saying to him with a slight beckoning gesture of the hand, "Please
+come!..."
+
+Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of that other
+Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His covetous, despairing eyes
+dwelt on her and clung about her. Ah! the exquisite poise of the little
+head, with its red-brown waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of
+shape, like a young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with
+which she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous,
+delicate care among the little crowding white-painted crosses; the
+atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that breathed from her
+and environed her!...
+
+His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at
+his ear.
+
+"You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy
+in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be
+desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation.
+Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break
+your promise to that dead man, and tell her--as he would have had you tell
+her, remember!--as he would have had you tell her!--that when he asked her
+hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of the dancer, Lessie
+Lavigne!"
+
+He knew where she was leading him--to Beauvayse's grave. The voice kept
+whispering, urging as they went. He saw and heard as a man sees and hears
+in a dream the pair of butterflies that hovered yet about the fresh
+flowers her hands had gathered and placed there. One jewel-winged,
+diamond-eyed insect rose languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light
+footsteps drew near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed,
+waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quivering antennae,
+sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead man had drunk of the joy
+of life.
+
+Now she was speaking:
+
+"Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have something to tell you
+that _he_"--her face quivered--"should have been told. When you spoke a
+little while ago of openness and candour--when you said that you would
+never mislead or deceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the
+worst of you together with the best--you held up before me, quite
+unknowingly, an example that showed me--that proved to me"--her voice
+wavered and broke--"how much I am your inferior in honesty and truth!"
+
+"_You_ my inferior!" Saxham almost laughed. "_I_ an example of light and
+leading, elevated for your guidance! If you were capable of irony----"
+
+He broke off, for she went on as though he had not spoken:
+
+"When first we met--I mean yourself and me--I remember telling you, upon a
+sudden impulse of confidence and trust in you, what I had determined my
+life-work was to be----"
+
+"Dear, innocent-wise enthusiast," thought Saxham, "dreaming over your
+impossible plan for regenerating the world! Beloved child-Quixote, tilting
+at the Black Windmills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of
+Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Madness--madness on the
+face of it!" But, madness or sanity, he could not choose but love her.
+
+"Your life-work!... It was to be carried out among _those others_ whose
+voices you heard calling you. See," he said, with the shadow of a smile,
+"how I remember everything you say, or have ever said, in my hearing!"
+
+"You think too well of me," she broke out, with sudden energy.
+
+"It is not possible to think too well of you!"
+
+"You think so now, perhaps, but when you know----"
+
+Her eyes brimmed and the tears welled over her white under-lids. She put
+up both her little hands, and rubbed the salt drops away with her
+knuckles, like a child.
+
+"When I have told you, you will alter--you cannot help but alter your
+opinion!"
+
+"No!" denied Saxham; and the monosyllable seemed to drop from his grim
+lips like a stone. Her bosom heaved with short, quick sobs.
+
+"I meant to go out into the world, and meet those women who think and work
+for women, and hear all they have to say, and learn all they have to
+teach. Then----"
+
+She was Beatrice again, as she turned her face full on Saxham, and once
+more the virginal veil fell, and he was conscious of strange abysses of
+knowledge opening in those eyes.
+
+"--Then I meant to seek out those women and girls and children of whom I
+spoke to you, those who lie fettered with chains that wicked men have
+riveted, in the dark dungeons that their tyrants and torturers have
+quarried out of the living rock, out of the reach of fresh air and
+sunshine, beyond the reach of those who would pity and help ... I meant to
+go down to them, and comfort them, and raise them up. I meant to have
+said: 'Trust me, believe me, listen to me, follow me! For my sorrow is
+your sorrow, and my wrong your wrong, and my shame yours--O! my poor, poor
+unhappy sisters!...'"
+
+There was a great drumming and surging of the blood in Saxham's ears. His
+heart beat in heavy laboured, measured strokes, like the tolling of a
+death-bell. He saw her cover her face with her hands, and drop upon her
+knees amongst the grasses that greenly clothed the red soil. He saw the
+butterfly, startled from its feast, rise and waver away. And he saw, too,
+his veiled nymph, his virginal white goddess, his chaste, veiled maiden
+Artemis, toppled from her pedestal and lying in the gutter.
+
+Her sorrow the sorrow of those spotted ones! her wrong theirs, and theirs
+her shame!... So this was the sordid secret that haunted the depths of
+those eyes--the eyes of Beatrice! He turned his head away, so as not to
+look upon her, and his face grew dark with the rush of blood. But still he
+heard her speaking, as a man hears in a dream.
+
+"At school all the older girls thought and talked of nothing but Love, and
+most of the younger ones did the same.... And I, who knew the dreadful,
+cruel, hideous side of the thing that each of them set up and
+worshipped--I who shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice, and a
+man's face came near--I said in my heart that Love should never find a
+dupe and a slave and a tool in me. I meant to live for the Mother, and be
+to those poor sisters of mine what she was--oh, my darling! my
+darling!--to me! And all the while Love was coming nearer and nearer, and
+at last----"
+
+She swept the tears from her face with the palms of her slight open hands,
+and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and went on brokenly, with sobs
+between the gasped-out sentences:
+
+"--At last it came. I never tried to struggle against it; it wrapped me in
+a net of exquisite sweet softness, that held me like a cage of steel. I
+gave myself up to the blissfulness and the joy of it. I was unfaithful to
+those others--I forgot them for Beauvayse! Oh, why should Love make it so
+easy to do unlovely things? to be unworthy, to break promises, and to be
+false to vows? You are in earnest when you make them ... you are proud to
+be so sure that nothing shall change or turn you.... Then eyes that are
+like strange jewels look deep into yours. A voice that is like no other
+voice whispers at your ear. It says strange, sweet, secret things--things
+that come back and burn you--and his breath upon your cheek drowns out
+your scruples in wave upon wave of magical, thrilling, wonderful
+sensation!..." She shuddered. "And everything else is blotted out, and no
+one else matters! You are not even sorry that you have left off caring....
+Love has made you indifferent as well as unkind!"
+
+She looked up at Saxham from where she crouched down at his feet among the
+grasses, and her distress melted some of the ice that was closing round
+his heart.
+
+"Love cannot be good. It brings no peace, no happiness--nothing but
+restless misery and burning pain. It makes you even willing to deceive
+_him_." Her lids fluttered and she caught her breath. "When another to
+whom I was dear, and who knew, said, 'Never tell him! I command you never
+to tell him!' I pretended to myself that the words had not been spoken out
+of pity, because my darling loved me too well to see me suffer; and I told
+myself that it was right to obey."
+
+Saxham, following the yearning look that went back to that other's grave,
+heard the unforgettable voice uttering the command.
+
+"_He_ never dreamed of my miserable secret. He was so free, so frank, so
+open himself. He had nothing to hide--he was incapable of deceit! It never
+occurred to him--oh, Beau! Beau!"
+
+Saxham's face was set like a mask carved in granite, but that other
+Saxham, within the man she saw through her tears, was wrung and twisted
+and wrenched in spasms and gusts of insane, uncontrollable, helpless
+laughter.
+
+"_Nothing to hide--incapable of deceit!_" It seemed to him that the dead
+man, all that way down under the red earth and the grass and the flowers,
+must be laughing, too, at the Dop Doctor who was fool enough not to speak
+out and end the farce for ever.
+
+Should he? Why not? But for what reason now, and to what end, since his
+virginal-pure, dew-pearled, Convent lily lay trodden in the mire? And yet,
+to look in those eyes....
+
+They did not falter or droop under his again, as she told him in few and
+simple words the story of what had happened in the tavern on the veld.
+
+"Now you know all!" she said; "now you understand!... Sister Tobias knows,
+too, and there is one other.... I do not speak of ..."--she shuddered and
+grew pale--"but of a man whom all of us here have learned to look up to,
+and believe in, and trust. No confidence has ever passed between us. I
+cannot give you any reason for this belief of mine in his knowledge of my
+story. I only feel that it is no secret to the Colonel, whenever he looks
+at me with those wise, kind, pitying eyes."
+
+There was a look in Saxham's eyes that was not pity. The sunbeam that
+shone through the loose plait of her coarse straw hat, and gilded the
+edges of the red-brown hair-waves, aureoled again for him the head of
+Beatrice.
+
+"I have no faith left, but I am capable of reverence," he had said to her.
+
+Now, as he knelt down in the grass before the little brown shoes, and
+lifted the hem of her linen gown and kissed it, the hulking-shouldered
+Doctor proved his possession of the quality. Devouring desire, riotous
+passion, were, if not killed in him, at least quelled and overthrown and
+bound. Pure pity and tenderness awakened in him. And Chivalry, all
+_cap-a-pie_ in silver mail, rose up to do battle for her against the world
+and against that other Saxham.
+
+"I accept the trust you are willing should be mine. Take my name--take all
+I have to give! I make no reservations. I stipulate no conditions. I ask
+for nothing in return, except the right to be your brother and guardian
+and defender. Trust me! The life-work you have chosen shall be yours; as
+far as lies in my power, I will help you in it. Your pure ends and noble
+aims shall never be thwarted or hindered. And have no fear of me, my sweet
+saint, my little sister. For I may die," said Saxham once again, "but,
+living, I will never fail you!"
+
+
+
+
+LVII
+
+
+Saxham, of St. Stephen's, had long ago faded from the recollection of
+London Society, but Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., Late Attached Medical Staff,
+Gueldersdorp, and frequently mentioned in Despatches from that bit of
+debatable soil, while it was in process of debating, was distinctly a
+person to cultivate. Not that it was in the least easy--the man was almost
+quite a bear, but his brevity of speech and brusqueness of manner gave him
+a cachet that Society found distinguished. He was married, too--so
+romantic! married to a girl who was shut up with him in Gueldersdorp all
+through the Siege. Quite too astonishingly lovely, don't you know? and
+with manners that really suggested the Faubourg St. Germain. Where she got
+her style--brought up among Boers and blacks--was to be wondered at, but
+these problems made people all the more interesting. And one met her with
+her husband at all the best houses since the Castleclares had taken them
+up. Indeed, Mrs. Saxham was a relative--was it a cousin? No--now it all
+came back! Adopted daughter, that was it, of an aunt--no, a step-sister of
+Lord Castleclare, that ineffable little prig of twenty-two, who as a Peer
+and Privy Councillor of Ireland, and a Lord-in-Waiting to boot, was
+nevertheless a personage to be deferred to.
+
+One had heard, hadn't one, ages ago, of the famous beauty, Lady
+Bridget-Mary Bawne? Well, that was the very person, who had been Abbess,
+or Prioress, or something-else-ess of a Roman Catholic Sisterhood at
+Gueldersdorp, and died of pneumonia during the Siege, or did she get shot?
+That was it, poor dear thing, and how quite too horrid for her!
+
+We may know that that belated letter of the Mother's--written to her
+kinswoman when the first mutterings of the storm were yet dulled by
+distance, and the threatening clouds were beginning to build their
+blue-black bastions and frowning ramparts on the horizon--had got through
+at last. The Bawnes, true to their hereditary quality of generous loyalty,
+threw open their doors and their hearts to dead Bridget-Mary's darling;
+and Saxham was undisguisedly grateful when he saw how she warmed to them.
+But he gave no encouragement, verbal, written, or tacit to their desire to
+fulfil the dead woman's wishes in the settlement of a sum of money upon
+Lynette. He had made such provision for her himself as his means
+permitted. His books had been selling steadily for the past six years, his
+publishers had paid him a handsome sum in royalties, and a thousand
+guineas for the copyright of a new work. Plas Bendigaid was secured to his
+wife; and Saxham's life was heavily insured, and the bulk of the sum
+remaining from the purchase of the furniture and fixtures of the house in
+Harley Street, with the practice of the physician who was giving up
+tenancy, had been invested in her name with the other funds. Why should
+strangers interfere with his sole privilege of working for her?
+
+"I should prefer that the decision should be left entirely to my wife," he
+said, when the Head of the House of Bawne, with the pompous solemnity
+distinctive of a young man who takes himself and his position seriously,
+formally broached the subject.
+
+"Lady Castleclare has--arah!--already approached Mrs. Saxham on the
+question," said Lord Castleclare, tapping the shiny surface of the
+leather-covered writing-table near which he sat with the long, thin,
+ivory-hued fingers, ending in long, narrow, bluish-tinted nails, that had
+descended to him--with the peculiar sniffing drawl that prolonged and
+punctuated his verbal utterance--from his late father. "And I regret to
+hear from Lady Castleclare that Mrs. Saxham gave no encouragement to the
+suggestion. I confess myself disappointed equally with my wife and my
+elder step-sister, the Duchess of Broads, to whom the letter was
+written--the letter that you will understand conveys to the family I
+represent, the last wishes of one whose memory we hold in the most sacred
+love and reverence----"
+
+The Right Honourable Privy Councillor had here to stop and dry his eyes,
+that were frankly overflowing. Though short, and not at all distinguished
+of appearance, having derived from his mother, the Dowager Countess, nee
+Miss Nancy McIleevy, of McIleevystown, County Down, certain personal
+disadvantages to counterbalance the immense fortune amassed by her uncle,
+the brewer, this little gentleman of great affairs possessed the kindly
+heart, and the quick and sensitive nature of the paternal stock. Now he
+continued:
+
+"--Under the circumstances you will permit me to renew the proposal with a
+slight modification. The sum we proposed to invest in Government
+securities for Mrs. Saxham's benefit, carrying out a charge that we regard
+it as a privilege to--to have received--is not large, merely five thousand
+pounds." He coughed. "Well, now it has occurred to me that Mrs. Saxham's
+objection to receive what she seems to regard as a gift from people upon
+whom she has no claim--that is how she expressed herself to Lady
+Castleclare--might be got over--if I may employ the expression, by our
+settling the money upon your children?"
+
+"Upon our children----"
+
+They were sitting in Lord Castleclare's library at Bawne House, Grosvenor
+Square. Great books in gilded bindings gleamed from their covered and
+latticed shelves, and the perfume of Russia leather and cedar mingled with
+the aroma of rare tobacco in the air. A thin fog hung over the West End,
+deadening the sound of traffic, and dimming the polish of the tall
+plate-glass windows. The fire burned red behind bars of silvered steel,
+the ashes fell with a little clicking whisper. It seemed to Saxham that he
+could hear his pierced heart bleeding, drip, drip, drip! But he sat like a
+man of stone, his white, firm, supple hand clenched upon the carved knob
+of the chair-arm. Then he said, looking the Right Honourable Privy
+Councillor full in the face with those gentian-blue eyes of his, now sunk
+in caves that grew deeper day by day:
+
+"Let it be so, my lord. I am willing, if my wife consents, that the money
+should be settled upon--her children."
+
+He prescribed, at Lord Castleclare's request, for a political dyspepsia,
+and took leave in his brusque, characteristic way, and sent away his
+waiting motor-brougham, and walked home, thinking, by that new light that
+had flashed upon him.
+
+It was January, the London January of whirling dust clouds below, and
+racing, murky vapours above. They had been settled in the Harley Street
+house four months. It seemed to Saxham as though they had lived there for
+years. The routine of professional life was closing in upon him once
+again. Patients thronged to his door; Hospitals, and Societies, and
+Institutions were open to him as of old; Society courted and flattered
+him, and gushed about the beauty of Mrs. Saxham. It was as though that
+celebrated Criminal Case, The Crown _v._ Saxham, had never developed into
+ugly, sinister shape under the dirty skylight of the Old Bailey.
+
+He crossed Grosvenor Square, and turned down Brook Street, thinking as he
+went. Pretty women in furs, their make-up subdued by silk-gauze veils,
+nodded to him from motor-broughams and victorias.
+
+Though the horse-drawn hansom yet plied for hire, petrol was driving
+brute-power off the streets. The hooting and clanking of the motor-omnibus
+made Oxford Street hideous. And that St. Vitus's Dance of the Tube Railway
+swept under the pavement beneath Saxham's tread as he had passed up New
+Bond Street. Certainly London was not more beautiful or pleasanter to live
+in for the six years that had gone by.
+
+The Tube Works were responsible for much. The Companies were linking up
+the North with the West, and strings of trolleys, coupled together like
+railway-trucks, and laden with yellow clay or great balks of timber, or
+giant scales of bored armour-plating, or moleskin-clad, brawny navvies,
+progressed incessantly and at all hours through the thoroughfares of the
+metropolis behind huge, giraffe-necked, splay-wheeled, smoke-vomiting
+traction-engines. Houses and other buildings were being pulled down to
+make stations; great hoardings were up, enclosing spaces where work went
+on all day, amidst clankings and groanings of machinery, and clouds of
+oily-smelling steam, and where work went on all night, with more groanings
+and more clankings, deplorable shrieks of steam-sirens and hellish flares
+that might have been reflections from a burning Tophet, cast upon yet
+bigger and denser clouds of the oily-smelling steam.
+
+Yes! the big black opulent city was greatly changed. But the change in the
+people, affecting all ranks and every class, was even greater. There were
+compensations, if you could balance against the decay of good manners the
+improvements in sanitation, or set against the crop of evil sown by the
+dissemination of the vilest literature in the cheapest printed forms, the
+attainability, by the poorest, of the noblest productions of literary
+genius. Or if in congratulating yourself upon the marvellous progress of
+Scientific Inventions, hailing from the keen-brained West, you could
+condone the degradation of the English language in the mouths of
+Shakespeare's countrymen and countrywomen by the use of American slang
+phrases, common, vulgar, coarse, alternating with choice expressions
+culled from the vocabulary of the East End costermonger.
+
+Privacy and reticence had become unfashionable, impossible in this, the
+era of the guinea-hunting Press-Interviewer. The barriers of social
+exclusiveness had given way before the push of the plutocrat. The Rubicon
+between good Society and bad Society had become invisible. Racial suicide
+and sexual licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile
+disease from rank to rank, and class to class. Woman had become less
+womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word that had no longer any
+meaning. Religion had decayed; the fear of God had been forgotten. But
+Socialism was springing up, a rank and lusty weed, in crude neglected soil
+that might have been tilled to good purpose; and a cheap and rowdy form of
+patriotism was in a very healthy state, although the Union Jack had not
+yet replaced the Bible in the Board Schools.
+
+Yes, things had changed, and not for the better! There was a tang upon the
+moral atmosphere that made the material petrol-fumes of the motor-omnibus
+almost acceptable by comparison. The air of Gueldersdorp had been cleaner,
+even with that taint from the crowded trenches heavy on it. Things had
+changed; and in the midst of all these changes, the last sands of the
+Great Victorian Age were running out of the glass.
+
+That wonderful life was drawing to its simple, peaceful, noble, profoundly
+touching close, this January of 1901. And its ending had been hastened by
+the War.
+
+Truly of her it has been said, and shall be; even when scholars of another
+race and another civilisation, springing from the ashes of this, wrest
+from the relics of a history of to-day the secrets of an ancient Past:
+
+"She was not only the Sovereign, but the Mother of her people."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Saxham turned into Cavendish Square, and was in Harley Street. The
+white-enamelled door of a prosperous-looking corner-house bore a solid
+brass plate with his name. He thought, as he opened the door with his Yale
+key, how strange it was that this, the very house he had planned to live
+in with Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and decorated for her,
+should have been offered for his inspection by the first West End
+house-agent he applied to upon returning to London, whose dust he had
+shaken off the soles of his feet forever, barely six years before.
+
+The practitioner who occupied the house--not the same man who had taken
+over the lease and fittings from Saxham--was ready to give it up, with all
+its costly appurtenances and up-to-date appointments, together with the
+practice, for quite a moderate slice of that legacy of thousands that had
+come to Saxham from Mildred's dead boy. Saxham, diagnosing the man's fever
+to realise and depart, wondered what secret, desperate motive lay at the
+back of his hurry? The reason was soon evident. Like thousands of other
+men, professional and private, the physician had been a dabbler on the
+Stock Exchange, and had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock,
+and had been ruined by the War.
+
+It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Washington P. Jukes and
+Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-blooded buck niggers, elegantly
+scented, white-gloved, and arrayed in evening garments of Bond Street cut,
+danced the newly-imported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and
+reception-saloons, with laughter on its reddened lips, and paste
+imitations of its family jewels in its waved coiffure and on its powdered
+bosom, and Ruin in its heart.
+
+Great manufacturing enterprises, paralysed by lack of funds and lack of
+hands, were ruined. Managers producing plays to empty houses were ruined.
+Publishers publishing books that nobody cared any longer to buy, were
+ruined. Painters expending time, and money, and toil, upon pictures that
+no longer found purchasers were ruined. Millions of smaller folks were
+ruined by the ruin of their betters. Only the great Mourning Warehouses
+prospered exceedingly, like the Liquor Trade and the Drug Trade. And the
+Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army-Contractors, flourished as the
+green bay-tree.
+
+
+
+
+Saxham's motor-brougham had gone on in advance, twisting knowingly in and
+out of various corkscrew thoroughfares. It was waiting outside the house
+in Lower Harley Street as the Doctor reached the door. The chauffeur, a
+spare, short young man, punctiliously buttoned up in a long dark green,
+white-faced livery overcoat, a cap with a white-glazed peak shading a
+lean, brickdust-coloured face, with ugly, honest eyes that are familiar to
+the reader, cocked one of the eyes inquiringly at his employer, and
+receiving a sign implying that his services would not be required for some
+space of time to come, pulled up the lever, moved on, and turned down the
+side-street where were the entrance-gates of the stable-yard that had been
+turned into a garage. He had been in Saxham's employment nearly two
+months.
+
+W. Keyse, late Corporal, Gueldersdorp Town Guards, had learned to clean,
+manage, and drive a motor-car belonging to an officer of the Garrison in
+spare hours during the Siege. This accomplishment, with some other
+learning gained in those strenuous and bracing times, had justified him in
+answering a _Times_ advertisement for a sober, active, and intelligent
+young man, possessing the requisite knowledge of London--"Cripps!" said W.
+Keyse, "as if I couldn't pick my way about the Bally Old Dustbin
+blindfolded!"--to act in the capacity of chauffeur to a West End medical
+practitioner.
+
+An acquaintance who was a waiter at a Pall Mall Club gave him the tip, and
+the chance came in the nick of time, for Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse were up
+against it, and no gay old error. "If you was to offer to blooming-well
+work for people for nothing," said Mrs. Keyse, "my belief is, they
+wouldn't 'ave you at the price!"
+
+The Old Shop, as W. Keyse affectionately called his native island, had
+drawn the exiles home. Good-bye to the bronzed, ungirdled vastness of veld
+and karroo, and the clear, dark, distant blue of level-topped mountains
+bathed in the pure stimulating atmosphere that braces like champagne. Old
+England called with a voice there was no resisting, great draggle-tailed,
+grimy London beckoned to her boy and girl, as the big grey liner, with the
+scarlet smoke-stacks, engulfed her mails and passengers, dipped the Red
+Ensign in farewell to Table Mountain, and sped homewards on even keel over
+the heaving sapphire plain.
+
+Southampton Dock was a pure delight to Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse. The Waterloo
+Arrival platform sent thrills through their boot-soles to the roots of
+their hair. They sat in the Pit at the Oxford that night, and there was a
+South African sketch on with two of the chronic-est jossers you ever see,
+gassing away in khaki behind earthworks of sacks stuffed with straw, and
+standing up to chuck sentimental and patriotic ballads off their chests,
+while the Enemy, who had kept up an intermittent rifle-practice at the
+wing, left off--presumably to listen. "After being used to the Reel
+Thing," W. Keyse said, "it was enough to make you up and blub!"
+
+That was the first disillusion. Others followed. The aunt who had
+inhabited one of the ginger-brick almshouses over aginst 'Ighgyte Cemetery
+was dead when they took her a whole pound of tea and three-quarters of
+best cooked ham, and the delicacies had to be given to the old woman next
+door, with whom the deceased had always had words. You couldn't 'ave
+expected the old gal to last much longer, but still it was a blow.
+
+Lobster had long ago given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, in return for
+the ham and the tea; and they got her address and hunted her up in a
+back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, and W. Keyse failed to recognise
+his charmer of old in a red-nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated
+German in the baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you
+ever----! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated upon the
+subject of his family, maintained a portentous dumbness, punctuated with
+ringing sniffs, during the visit, and was sarcastic on the bus, and
+tearfully penitent when they got back to the Waterloo Road lodging that
+was cheap at the weekly rent, she said, if you were paying for dirt and
+live-stock.
+
+You couldn't spend your time enjoying yourself for ever, she added a
+little later on, as their small joint purse of savings dwindled and that
+pale ghost that men call Want began to hover about their hired bolster. W.
+Keyse had thought of soliciting a re-engagement at the fried-fish shop in
+the High Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept away in favour of an
+establishment where they mended your boots while you waited. So he sought
+elsewhere. The War had drained away so many men, one would have thought
+employment could be had by any chap who took the trouble to walk about and
+look for it. But the soles of W. Keyse's boots were worn to their last
+thickness of brown paper, and all his clothes and Emigration Jane's, with
+the exception of the things him and her had on, had been pawned before it
+occurred to the man that that kind of walking ended in the Workhouse. The
+woman had known it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of W. Keyse
+stood him in no good stead. London was stiff with liars who boasted of
+having been through the Siege, and their lies were more ornamental and
+sparkling than his truths.
+
+Mrs. W. Keyse would have took a situation as General, and glad, but there
+were family reasons against that. She had broke down and cried somethink
+dreadful on her William's shabby tweed shoulder the morning he went out to
+answer the West End Doctor's advertisement. He kissed her and told her to
+keep her hair on, but she was so hysterical that he was fair afryde to
+leave 'er. So he took her along, and his good Angel must have suggested
+that.
+
+Cripps!--when the manservant in plain clothes said, "Step this way,
+upstairs please"--W. Keyse and wife having applied at the area-door--"and
+Dr. Saxham will see you," the name, not having been mentioned in the
+advertisement, which gave only the address and an initial, imparted to
+both an electrical shock of surprise. They had looked a very small and
+very shabby and very lost and lonely little couple under those
+high-moulded ceilings and upon the Turkey carpets that covered the
+polished parquet of the handsomely-furnished and well-appointed
+consulting-room that the practitioner who had caved in through South
+African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate setting for his bald-browed
+and portly presence. Now both curved backbones assumed the perpendicular,
+and their wide Cockney mouths were wreathed in joyful smiles.
+
+The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing-table that matched
+it, the man with the black head and square pale face and heavy muscular
+shoulders, who looked up from among his papers and notebooks with the
+receiver of a telephone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them
+with a kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a word or forgot a
+face. And here were two faces from Gueldersdorp. He shook the hands that
+belonged to them, and said in his curt way:
+
+"How are you, Mrs. Keyse? And you, Keyse? You may guess when I heard that
+somebody had called to answer my advertisement I hardly imagined that two
+old patients had dropped down on me from the skies!"
+
+The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth agape and the tears
+trickling down her hollow cheeks. The young man swallowed something with a
+violent effort, and blurted out:
+
+"Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out of the Other
+Shop--an' landin' in the middle of New Jerusalem! Weeks along"--he picked
+up the shabby bowler that had dropped upon the Turkey carpet--"for weeks
+along I've been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me! Now I
+knows! I've bin 'omesick--fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of the very
+plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of four months back.
+Good old Gueldersdorp!" He winked the wet out of his eyes and pointed to
+Mrs. Keyse with his elbow. "An' look at 'er! Doin' a blub on the strength
+of it! That's wot it is to be a woman! Ain't it, sir?"
+
+Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin girl in the
+mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that topped the colossal
+structure of fair, frizzled hair, even as she dried her eyes with a
+twopenny handkerchief edged with cotton lace, and tried to laugh. He took
+the lean chin of W. Keyse between his white, strong, supple fingers, and
+turned the triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said,
+touching the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the
+angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress below the
+inner corner of the right eye:
+
+"You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she helped to nurse you
+at the Hospital."
+
+"Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since she's bin' my wife----"
+The prominent Adam's apple in his thin throat jerked. He gulped a sob down
+as he looked at her. And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her
+eyes, as she returned the look of him, her master and her mate, there
+shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face darkened with angry
+blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand clenched with the savage
+impulse to dash itself in the face of this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows
+Millionaire who flaunted riches in the face of his own beggary.
+
+Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet fire in answer to
+the challenge of his own! Empty, empty the heart whose chambers were swept
+and decked and garlanded for a guest who never came! Lonely, lonely,
+desolate this life lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of
+her--dearer inexpressibly than ever woman was yet to man!
+
+He had said to her: "But come to me, and I shall be content--even happy.
+Live under my roof, take the shelter of my name--I ask no more!"
+
+He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be companioned, in the
+silence that would never be broken by Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He
+was not content; his craving for her fretted the flesh from his bones and
+gnawed his heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged, predatory animal.
+Happy--was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of living water and
+yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one
+more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this
+happiness she had conferred upon him--and that was to be without her.
+
+He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling misery, and
+kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the absurd little couple. W.
+Keyse was tested, proved capable of manipulating the steering-wheel, duly
+certificated, and engaged. There were a couple of living-rooms over the
+coach-house that was now a garage. Saxham sent in some plain furniture,
+and behold an Eden! Pots of ferns purchased from a street hawker showed
+greenly behind the tidiest muslin blinds you ever sor! and Mrs. William
+Keyse, expectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and as she
+patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn--and whether they're
+let out on hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat
+'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come back from Them
+Plyces is something chronic!--she sang, sometimes "Come, Buy My Coloured
+'Erring," which they learned you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board
+School in Kentish Town; and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come True!"
+
+This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two rooms--one of
+them opening upon nothing by a loft-door--over a garage that had been a
+coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the
+tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were
+shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin
+running on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights were switched
+on, before the inner blinds were drawn down, you could see quite plain
+into the consulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat
+at his big writing-table that was heaped with notebooks and papers and had
+a telephone on it, and all sorts of mysterious instruments in shining
+brass and silver, as brightly polished as the gleaming thing with a lid,
+shaped like a violin-case and with a spirit-lamp underneath it, in which
+all sorts of wicked-looking knives and forceps were boiled when they were
+taken out of the black bag; or into Mrs. Saxham's bedroom, that was on the
+floor above, and was done up in the loveliest style you ever! "Not that
+Missis W. Keyse would exchange 'er present quarters for Buckin'am Palace,"
+she declared, pouring out her William's tea, "if invited to do so by 'er
+Majesty the Queen 'erself."
+
+William stopped blowing at his smoking saucer.
+
+"They s'y She's dyin'!" His face lengthened. He put the saucer down. "They
+'ave it in the evenin' pypers!"
+
+Mrs. Keyse had a flash of inspiration.
+
+"I reckon it don't seem dyin' to 'Er!"
+
+"Wot are you gettin' at?" asked the man in bewilderment.
+
+"I'm gettin' at it like this," said the lighter brain. "All 'er long life
+she's 'ad to be a queen first, an' a wife after. Now she lays there she's
+no more than a wife--a wife wots goin' to meet 'er 'usband agin after
+yeers an' yeers o' waitin'. For 'er Crown she leaves be'ind 'er for 'er
+son, but 'er weddin' ring goes wiv' 'er in 'er coffin! See?"
+
+"I pipe. Wonder wot 'Er an' 'Im 'll s'y to one another fust thing they
+meet?"
+
+"They won't s'y nothink," said the visionary, soberly taking tea. "But I
+shouldn't be surprised but wot they'd stand an' look in one another's
+fyces wivout s'yin' a word, for a week or so by the Time Above, an' the
+tears a-runnin' down an' never stoppin'!"
+
+"Garn! There ain't no cryin' in 'Eaven," said W. Keyse, beginning on the
+bread-and-butter. "The Bible tells you so!"
+
+"That's right enough. But I lay Gawd lets folks do a bit o' blub--just
+once," said Emigration Jane, "before 'E wipes their eyes, becos you don't
+begin to know wot 'appiness means until you've cried for joy!"
+
+"I pretty near did when the Doctor give me this chauffeuring job, and so I
+tell you stryte," affirmed her lord. "D'you know I 'ad a shy at thankin'
+'im agyne, an' got my 'ead bit orf. 'Shut your damned mouth!'--that's wot
+the Doctor s'ys to me. Well, I 'ave shut it!" He closed his jaws upon an
+inch-thick slice. "But wot I s'y to myself is," he continued, masticating,
+"that makes the Third Time, an' the Third Time's the Charm!"
+
+"Wot do you mean by the third time, deer?" asked Mrs. Keyse, putting more
+hot water in the teapot.
+
+"The First," said W. Keyse, with an air of mystery, "was in a saloon-bar
+full o' Transvaal an' Free State Dutchies at Gueldersdorp."
+
+"Lor'! You don't ever mean----" began his wife, and stopped short. The
+scene of her first meeting with W. Keyse flashed back upon her mental
+vision. She saw the big man waking up out of his drunken stupor and
+lurching to the rescue of the little one. "Was it 'im?" she panted, as the
+teapot ran over on the clean coarse cloth. "Was it Dr. Saxham?"
+
+"You may tyke it from me it was." W. Keyse rescued the kettle, restored it
+to the hob, returned to his place, and shook his finger at her warningly.
+"And if you go to remind me as wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e
+did----" He looked portentous warnings.
+
+"I never would. Oh, William!"
+
+"Mind as you never do, that's all!... I tried to thank 'im then," went on
+W. Keyse, "an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im agyne at the
+Hospital--an' e' wouldn't 'ave it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is
+own doorstep, an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is--Wait!
+When I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in the
+Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad syved the life of a
+Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do somethin' to pay the Lion
+back...."
+
+"I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse, "But it was a
+mouse"--she repressed a shudder--"an' not the--thing you said."
+
+"Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse with burning eyes.
+"And the Doctor's goin' to find it does." He held up his lean right hand
+and swore it. "So 'elp me, Jimmy Cripps!"
+
+
+
+
+LVIII
+
+
+Lynette Saxham came into the consulting-room that was on the ground-floor
+of the house in Harley Street, behind the room where patients waited their
+turn. Her quick, light step and the silken rustling of the lining of her
+gown broke the spell that had bound the man who sat motionless in the
+armchair before the Sheraton writing-table, staring with fixed eyes and
+gripping the arms of his chair with unconscious force ...
+
+A faint, pleasant odour of Russia leather and camphor-wood came from the
+dwarf bookcases that dadoed the walls. The room was quite dark; the two
+high windows, screened by clear muslin blinds running on gilded rods,
+showed pale parallelograms of cold twilight. The coachhouse and stable
+building at the end of the paved yard showed as a cube of blackness. One
+window in the centre of the wall was lighted up, and on its white cotton
+blind the shadows of a man and woman acted a Domestic Play.
+
+Perhaps Saxham had been watching this? The shadow-man seemed to sit at a
+table reading a newspaper by the light of the lamp behind him, the shadow
+woman sat nearer the window, employed upon some homely kind of needlework.
+Her outline when she rose, showed that the woman's great, mysterious
+ordeal, the sacrament of keenest anguish by which her dearest and most
+sacred joy is won, was very close upon her. She passed behind the man as
+if to fetch something, stopped behind his chair, and drew her arm about
+his neck, leaning her cheek down to his so that their two shadows became
+one.
+
+The starving waif outside the window of the cook-shop knows no more
+excruciating aggravation of his pangs than to look at food, and yet keeps
+on looking. It may have been like this with Saxham, empty of all love, and
+gnawed by the tooth of a sharper hunger than that which is merely
+physical. He started out of his lethargy when his wife's voice reached
+him.
+
+"Owen!... Why, you are sitting in the dark!"
+
+Lynette heard someone moving among the shadows. The electric reading-lamp
+upon the writing-table diffused a mellow radiance under its green silk
+shade. Two other globes sprang into shining life, and showed her, smiling,
+and shrinking a little from the sudden incursion of light, as Saxham, with
+the quiet, unhurried, scrupulous courtesy he always showed towards his
+wife, received the heavy driving-mantle of sables that she dropped from
+her shoulders, and laid it over a chair. A frosty breath from the outer
+atmosphere clung to it, but the silken lining was penetratingly warm, and
+instinct with the sweetness of the woman, so much so that it was agony to
+the man....
+
+She wore a white cloth gown of elegantly-simple cut, that revealed with
+unostentatious art the lovely lines of the slender shape. A knot of white
+and golden freesias, exhaling a clean, delicate perfume, was fastened at
+her breast; her wonderful red-brown hair was shaded by a broad-brimmed
+brown felt hat of Vandyke shape, with creamy drooping plumes. The rare
+promise of her beauty had fulfilled itself in the last six months. She was
+bewilderingly lovely.
+
+She drew out the jewelled pins that fastened her hat, and threw it down,
+and took a favourite seat of hers beside the fire, and looked across at
+the man who was her husband, smiling faintly as she held her little foot,
+delicately shod, high-arched and slim, to the blaze of the wood-fire.
+
+"Do I interfere with your work? Are any patients waiting?"
+
+"It is past my hour for seeing patients," said Saxham, with a smile. "And
+if anyone were waiting, you are an older client, and have the prior
+claim."
+
+"We will have tea in here, then," she said, and touched the bell, adding:
+"I am fond of this room."
+
+It was just now a place that was dear to Saxham. He came across to the
+hearth and stirred the fire to a ruddier blaze, and stood at the opposite
+side of it, leaning an arm upon the mantelshelf. The shining mirror above
+it reflected a square black head that was getting grizzled, and the
+profile of a face that was haggard and worn.
+
+The servant came with tea, and drew down the upper blinds, shutting out
+that mocking shadow-play at which Saxham had been staring. As Lynette
+busied herself with the shining silver and delicate Japanese porcelain,
+there was a chance of studying, unobserved, the beloved book of her
+face--a locked book to Saxham since that day in the Cemetery at
+Gueldersdorp.
+
+Ah, what a face it was! It fascinated and held him. Such long, thick,
+shadowy eyelashes, sweeping the white cheeks! Such a low, wide, perfectly
+modelled forehead above them, with fine arched eyebrows, much darker than
+the richly rippling, parted hair that was coiled and twisted and roped
+into a mass behind the small, delicate ears, as though its owner were
+impatient of its luxuriance. Such a close-folded, mysterious mouth, with
+deep-cut curves, hiding the pure white, rather overlapping teeth. An
+irregular nose, rather square-ended, with eager nostrils; a rounded chin,
+with a little cleft in it, went to the making of the face that Saxham and
+many others thought so beautiful.
+
+Only something was wanting to it. "Animation," the physiognomist would
+have said. "Vitality, mobility." "Health," might have thought the ordinary
+observer, mistaking the bluish shadows under the drooped eyelids and about
+the mouth and nostrils for the usual signals of debility.
+
+But Saxham, when he looked into the golden-hazel eyes, so often hidden by
+the thick white eyelids, with their deep fringe of black-brown lashes,
+said to himself with bitterness: "She is quite well. Nothing on earth is
+wrong with her, except that she is not happy! I can give her everything
+else on earth, it seems, but what she needs most of all!"
+
+Let Joy, that radiant torch of the soul, illuminate those dim windows, let
+Happiness sink like sweet rain into the dry heart, and the whole woman
+would awaken into vivid glowing beauty, like the parched South African
+veld after the spring rains. Red tulips would bloom between the boulders;
+exquisite glowing pelargoniums and snow-white or pale-blue iris would
+clothe the baked earth. The ice-plant would no longer be the only green
+thing growing in the crannies of the rock. Delicate ferns and dew-gemmed
+pitcher-plants would quiver there, and the spikes of the many-coloured
+gladioli would thrust from the earth like spears; and the sweet-scented
+clematis and the passion-vine would trail and blossom in rose and white
+and purple on the edges of the kloofs and gorges, every stem and leaf and
+bud and blossom growing and rejoicing in the balmy breeze and the glorious
+June sunshine; the cruel, lashing rains, the devastating floods, and the
+burning droughts forgotten as though they had never been.
+
+Meanwhile the heavy fringe of dark lashes drooped wearily on Lynette's
+white cheeks, and the long-limbed, slight, supple body leaned back in the
+favourite chair by the fireside with a little air of languor that only
+added to her allure. And Saxham, looking at her, said again in his heart:
+
+"Her children--let them settle the money upon her children!"
+
+She had learned to love, and thrilled at the touch of passion. Well,
+Beauvayse was dead, but Love would come again. He would read its
+resurrection in the radiance of those eyes. Then, exit Saxham! Such a
+marriage as theirs could be easily dissolved, but he would not take the
+easy road. He had decided. His should be the strait and narrow way of
+death. His death was a debt he owed her. You are to learn why!
+
+While he reviewed, for the thousandth time, this determination of his, and
+told himself again how the thing should be done, his tea had grown quite
+cold. She leaned forwards and touched his sleeve in drawing his attention
+to the neglected cup, and flushed because he started and looked at her so
+strangely.
+
+He never, if it could be avoided, touched her. Her old shrinking from him
+had worn away. His companionship, though he did not guess it, was to her
+desirable--even dear. The light, firm tread of his small muscular feet,
+the curt, decided utterance, made welcome music in her ears. She would
+watch him without his knowledge when they went abroad together. The esteem
+in which his peers and seniors held him, the deference with which his
+opinions were solicited and listened to gave her strange delightful throbs
+of pride.
+
+She had felt the first stirring of that pride in him when the man who had
+been the thinking brain and the beating heart of beleaguered Gueldersdorp
+had said, wringing her husband's hand:
+
+"'_If_' you have been of any use to me.... 'If'.... You have been my right
+hand and my mainstay from first to last, Saxham, and while I live I shall
+remember it!"
+
+Brave words--heartsome words for the hearing of a woman who had loved him.
+Lynette was almost sorry that she did not.
+
+He did not believe that he had won any hearts in Gueldersdorp. His
+curtness, his roughness, his harshness had been unfavourably commented
+upon many and many a time. Yet when he left them, how the people cheered!
+What volumes of roaring sound from lusty throats had bidden him good-bye
+and God-speed!
+
+"Hurrah for the Doctor! Three cheers for Saxham! Don't forget us, Doc!
+Come back again! God bless you, Saxham! Bravo, Saxham! Saxham! Saxham!
+Hurrah!"
+
+A woman who had loved him would have wept for joy. A pity his wife did
+not!
+
+How strangely Owen had looked at her just now, when she had brushed his
+sleeve lightly with her finger-tip! How curious it was that he never
+touched her if he could help it! She had quite forgotten having told him
+that, while she liked to know him near, she could not endure the thought
+of being taken by him, caressed by him, held in his embrace.... That had
+been the frank, truthful expression of her feelings at the time. She did
+not recoil so from his contact now. She had not realised how deeply her
+words had wounded the man's great, suffering, patient heart. Spoken, they
+had passed from her memory. It is so natural for a fair, sweet woman to
+forget! It is so impossible for a man who has been stabbed to help
+remembering, with the deep, bleeding wound unclosed!
+
+There was another thing that Saxham did not know. Although, as time went
+on, the beloved image of the Mother, cherished in the innermost shrine of
+her adopted daughter's heart, suffered no change in the clear, firm beauty
+of its outlines or deterioration in the richness of its tender and austere
+and gracious colouring; and each new day supplied some fresher garland of
+old imperishable memories to grace it with;--that Shape with the
+grey-green jewel-eyes and the gay mouth that laughed had faded--faded! She
+would not own it even to herself, but the keen edge of her grief for
+Beauvayse was blunted. The anniversary of his death, occurring in the
+coming month of February, was to be a solemn retreat of sacred prayer for
+her. But it was the Mother's death-day also, when to the palm of martyrdom
+had been added the Saint's crown. She was going to spend three days at the
+Kensington Convent, where the dead nun had taken the vows. She told Saxham
+now of the arrangement she had made through Lady Castleclare, who was
+intimate with the Superior.
+
+"It will be a little like old times," she said to Saxham, "living in a
+Convent again. And there are many Sisters there who knew Mother, and loved
+her----"
+
+Her eyes swam in sudden tears. And Saxham, as he looked at her, felt his
+heart contract in a spasm of bitter jealousy. All that love for the dead,
+and not a crumb for the living! He saw Beauvayse, his rival still,
+stretching a hand from the grave to keep her from him. And he could have
+cried aloud:
+
+"Those tears are for a trickster who cheated you into loving him. Listen,
+now, and I, who have never lied, even to win you, will show him to you as
+he really was!..."
+
+But he did not yield to the temptation to enlighten her. A vision rose up
+before him of a dying man on a camp-bed, and he heard his own voice
+saying:
+
+"I will never tell her! I will not blacken any man's reputation to further
+my own interests!"
+
+She was speaking, telling him something. He came back out of the fierce
+mental struggle to listen to the voice that was so sweet and clear, and
+yet so cold, so cold....
+
+
+
+
+"Imagine it! I met an old friend to-day at my dressmaker's in Conduit
+Street. Not a man. A girl who was a pupil at the Convent at
+Gueldersdorp--or, rather, I should say a woman, for she is married."
+
+Saxham asked:
+
+"Is she an Englishwoman or a Colonial?"
+
+"She is of mingled French and Dutch blood. She was a Miss Du Taine. Her
+father was a member of the Volksraad at Pretoria. He controls large
+interests on the Rand, and has an estate near Johannesburg. She is married
+to an English gentleman. He is very rich, and has a title. She told it me,
+but I have forgotten it. She asked me to drive home and lunch with
+her...." She hesitated. "I did not want to go," she said.
+
+"Well, and what happened then?" Saxham asked.
+
+"I made some kind of excuse, and hailed a hansom, and drove to Lady
+Castleclare's. I lunched with her. She is always very kind. She thought
+the pearls were beautiful. But--but surely they cost you a great deal of
+money?"
+
+She touched a string of the gleaming, milky things that encircled her
+white throat above the lace cravat. Saxham said, smiling:
+
+"They did not cost more than I could afford to pay. I am glad you liked
+them. I told Marie to put them on your dressing-table, where you would be
+likely to see them in the morning."
+
+"You are too good to me!" she said, with quivering lips, looking at him.
+Her white hand wavered in the air, as though she meant to stretch it out
+to him.
+
+"It is not possible to be too good--to you!" said Saxham curtly. He would
+not see the outstretched hand. She drew it back, and faltered:
+
+"You give me everything----"
+
+"You have given _me_ what I most wanted in the world!" he lied bravely.
+
+"But"--she rose and stood beside him on the hearthrug, tall, and fair, and
+slender, and oh! most seductively, maddeningly sweet to his adoring
+thought--"but you take nothing for yourself. That bedroom of yours at the
+top of the house is wretchedly bare and comfortless; and then, those
+absurd pictures!"
+
+She laughed ruefully, recalling the row of pictorially-illustrated nursery
+rhymes that adorned the brown-paper dado of Saxham's third-floor bedroom,
+the previous tenant having been a family man.
+
+"--Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy; the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds,
+and the Cow that jumped over the Moon. How can you endure them?"
+
+She looked at him, and was startled by the set grimness of his face and
+the thunderous lowering of the black smudge of eyebrow. He said:
+
+"You went to my room to-day. Why?"
+
+She crimsoned, and stammered:
+
+"It was this morning, after you had gone out. I--it struck me that your
+linen ought to be overlooked and put to rights from time to time. How did
+you know?"
+
+He did not explain that the perfume of her hair, of her breath, of her
+dress, had lingered when she had gone, to tempt and taunt and torture him.
+He said nothing of the little knot of violets that had dropped from her
+breast upon the floor, and he had found there. His heart beat against it
+even then. He answered:
+
+"You told me yourself. And, as for the linen, let it be. The housekeeper
+knows that she is expected to attend to it."
+
+"She isn't your wife!"
+
+Her golden eyes flashed at him rebelliously. He was provoking her, in his
+innocence of all intention, as a subtle wooer might have planned to do.
+
+"I am extremely glad that she is not." His mouth relaxed in a smile, and
+his thunderous brows smoothed themselves. "And now, don't you think you
+ought to go and dress? You are dining with Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche
+at The Carlton at seven, and going on to a theatre." He held his watch
+out. "Six-thirty now," he said, and restored the chronometer to his
+waistcoat pocket.
+
+"Very well." She moved a step or two in the direction of the door, and
+turned her head as gracefully as a young deer, and looked back at him.
+"But you are coming, too?" she said, and her eyes were very soft.
+
+He shook his head.
+
+"It is impossible. I have several urgent cases to visit, and there is an
+article for the _Scientific Review_." He moved his hand slightly in the
+direction of some sheets of manuscript that lay upon the blotting-paper.
+"I have a heavy night's work before me with that alone. My excuses have
+already been telephoned to Lady Hannah."
+
+"Owen!"----
+
+She spoke his name in a whisper.
+
+--"Owen!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"Couldn't I?--would you care to have me?--may I stay and dine at home with
+you?"
+
+"And disappoint your friends!... Most certainly not. Unless, indeed"--his
+tone warmed to interest--"unless you are not feeling well?"
+
+"I am perfectly well, thanks!" she said coldly.
+
+"Then go to your dinner and your play, child," said Saxham, with the smile
+that changed and softened his harsh features almost into beauty. "I will
+drive with you to The Carlton, and fetch you from the play. Which of the
+theatres have you decided to patronise?"
+
+"Lady Hannah and the Major left the choice to me," she said, with a little
+touch of girlish importance, "so I telephoned to Nickalls in Bond Street
+for a box at The Leicester. He had not got one; he sent me three stalls
+for 'The Chiffon Girl' at The Variety instead. It is a revival. I don't
+quite know what that means," she added, rather puzzled by Saxham's silence
+and the grimness of his face. "You do not mind at all? You do not think it
+is the kind of play the Mother would not have liked me to see?"
+
+"No!" said Saxham curtly, and with averted eyes.
+
+She bent her head to him as he opened the door, and went away to her own
+rooms on the floor above, the drawing-room that was upholstered and hung
+with delicate, green-and-white, rose-garlanded Pompadour brocade, and
+graceful water-colours from famous hands, and furnished with every luxury
+and elegance that the heart of woman could desire; the charming boudoir,
+pink as a sea-shell, and full of new books and old china; the bedroom,
+with the blue-and-white decorations, where an ivory Crucifix that had
+always stood upon the Mother's writing-table hung above the dainty bed....
+
+"I think he is a little hard on me at times," she said, as she passed
+through the warm, firelit, perfumed rooms that were fragrant with the
+narcissi and violets and lilies that were sent in by his orders, and
+strewn with the costly, pretty trifles that she, who had been used to the
+barrack-like bareness of the Convent, delighted in like a child, and the
+gleaming mirrors gave her back her loveliness. "He treats me as if I were
+a stranger. And, after all, I am his wife...."
+
+Saxham's patients found him even curter and more brusque in manner than
+usual that evening, and the article for the _Scientific Review_ made
+little way. He threw down his pen at last, and leaned his head upon his
+hands and wondered, staring at the unfinished page of manuscript with eyes
+that saw no meaning in the sentences, whether any man born of woman had
+ever been so great a fool as the man who had written them?
+
+To have made that promise of secrecy to the dead traitor was an act of
+sheer, quixotic folly. To have kept it was madness, nothing less. And yet
+Saxham knew that he would keep it always. That if she ever learned the
+truth, it would be hinted by the chance remark of some stranger, gathered
+from a paragraph in some newspaper. There was a small-print line at the
+bottom of the quarter-column devoted by the compilers of Whittinger's
+"Peerage" to the Marquisate of Foltlebarre, which might have enlightened
+her. He turned to it now, and read:
+
+    "Viscountess Beauvayse, Esther, dau: of Samuel Levah, Esq.,
+    of Finsbury, E.C., mar: June, 1899, the late John Basil
+    Edward Tobart, Lieut. Grey Hussars, 11th Viscount Beauvayse.
+    Killed in action during the defence of Gueldersdorp, Feb.,
+    1900, while atta: as Junior aide to the Staff of Colonel
+    Commanding H.M. Forces, leaving issue one dau: The Hon.
+    Alyse Rosabel Tobart, now aged eighteen months."
+
+At the Clubs, Service and Civil, Saxham had heard the impromptu marriage
+of the late John Basil Edward Tobart freely discussed. The story of his
+subsequent entanglement "with some girl or other at Gueldersdorp" had been
+mooted in his presence a dozen times by Society chatterers, whose
+enjoyment of the scandal would have been pleasantly stimulated by the
+knowledge that "Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., late Attached Medical Staff," was
+married to the girl. But they did not know, and she ...
+
+What use--what use in her knowing? Of what avail could be the melting of
+the ice about her heart, the loosening of the fetters of her tongue, the
+quickening of her nature, the miracle vouchsafed? Of none, now, for a
+reason! Saxham told himself, in those hours when he propped his burning
+forehead on his hands and looked into the starless night of his desolate
+soul, that he had ceased even to desire that she should come to love him.
+Far better that she should never know!
+
+It was growing late, and he had promised to fetch her from the theatre.
+The silver clock upon the mantelshelf chimed ten. He had stretched his
+hand to the telephone to ring up his motor-brougham from the garage, when
+he heard the click of her latchkey in the outer door and the silken
+whisper of her garments passing quickly through the hallway. Then came a
+knock at the consulting-room door--sharp, quick, imperious, oddly unlike
+Lynette's soft tap.... At the summons Saxham made two strides across the
+carpet and opened to her, a question on his lips.
+
+"Why have you come back so early? Has anything happened?"
+
+Even as he asked, her look told why. She knew....
+
+She knew.... Her face was rigid, a pure white mask of ivory; there was not
+a trace of colour even in the set lips. Her eyes burned upon him, twin
+flames of dark amber, steady under levelled brows. She was wrapped in a
+long ermine-caped and bordered black brocade mantle, that gleamed with jet
+_passementerie_; a scarf of white lace covered her head. It hid the
+red-brown hair with the Clytie ripple in it, and the great silken coils,
+transfixed by a sapphire and diamond dagger, that were massed at the nape
+of the slender neck. Seen so, she was nunlike in her chaste severity, but
+for those stern, resentful eyes.
+
+"I have come to tell you that I am no longer in ignorance. I have found
+out what you have hidden from me so long--what the Wrynches knew and would
+not tell me; what the world has known while I sat in the dark...."
+
+A spasm wrung her mouth. Saxham rolled a chair towards her. He said
+guardedly, avoiding her eyes:
+
+"Until you acquaint me in detail with what you have heard, I cannot
+explain or defend myself. Will you not sit down? You are looking pale and
+overwrought."
+
+She laid one slight gloved hand upon the chair-back, and leaned upon it.
+
+"I would rather stand, if you have no objection, whilst I tell you what I
+have learned to-night. I dined alone with Lady Hannah at the Carlton; we
+went together to the theatre--Major Wrynche had had a summons to attend at
+Marlborough House."
+
+She untied the knot of lace beneath her chin, and stripped away the long
+gloves with nervous haste and impatience, and tossed them with the scarf
+upon the chair beside her, and went on:
+
+"I had heard much of 'The Chiffon Girl.' I wanted to see it. When the
+First Act began I wondered very much why they called it a Musical Comedy,
+when the noise the orchestra made could hardly be called music; and there
+was no comedy--only slang expressions and stupid jokes. But the actress
+who sang and danced in the principal part ... Miss Lavigne ..." She had
+loosened her mantle; now she let it drop upon the Eastern carpet, emerging
+from its blackness as a slender, supple, upright shape in clinging,
+creamy-white draperies; her exquisite arms bare to the shoulder, and
+clasped midway by heavy, twisted bracelets of barbaric gold, her
+nymph-like bosom swelling from the folded draperies of the low-cut bodice
+like a twin-budded narcissus flowering from the pale calyx, her sweet
+throat clasped about with Saxham's gift of pearls.
+
+"She could not sing, though the people applauded and encored her"--there
+was a gleam of disdain in the golden eyes--"but she was very pretty ...
+she danced with wonderful grace and lightness ... it was like a swallow
+dipping and darting over the shallows of the river-shore--like a branch of
+red pomegranate-blossoms swayed and swung by a spring breeze.... I admired
+her, and yet I was sorry for her.... To have to pose and bound and whirl
+before all those rows and rows of staring faces night after night!..."
+
+Saxham did not smile. But a muscle twitched in his cheek as he said:
+
+"She would hardly thank you for pitying her."
+
+"She would be right to resent my pity!" Lynette burst out with sudden
+vehemence. "She has been injured, and I was the cause! Oh! how could you
+be so cruel as to let me go on loving him? Was it kind? Was it fair to
+yourself and me?"
+
+Saxham's square, pale face was perfectly expressionless. He waited in
+silence to hear the rest.
+
+"You know of whom I speak ..." said Lynette. "He was gay and beautiful and
+winning--not chivalrous, as I believed him; not honest, or sincere, or
+true. Months before we met at Gueldersdorp he was the husband of this
+actress--the woman I saw upon the stage to-night. And you knew all this,
+and never told me! You knew that his memory was sacred in my heart. A
+woman I was introduced to here in London once tried to blacken it. She
+said she wished to act towards me as a friend. I remember that I laughed
+in her face as I turned and left her. 'You thought to make me hate him,' I
+said. 'You have failed miserably. If it were possible to love him
+better--if I could honour his memory more than I do now, I would, because
+of the evil you have spoken of my dead!'"
+
+She heard Saxham draw breath heavily. She went on with increased passion,
+and gathering resentment:
+
+"All my life long I might have gone on in my blindness, honouring the
+dishonourable, cherishing the base, but for the idle gossip of two
+strangers in the theatre to-night--a man and a woman in the stalls behind
+us. They talked all the louder when the lights went down. They wondered
+'why the Lavigne did not star on the programme as a Viscountess?' but, of
+course, they said, 'the Foltlebarres would never stand that! They were
+nearly wild when that handsome scamp of theirs married her--poor Beauty
+Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars.' He and she had kept house together; there
+was a kiddie coming; they said the little woman played her cards
+uncommonly well!... The marriage was pulled off on the quiet at a
+Registrar's a week or so before Beau got his appointment on the Staff.
+Straight of the fellow, but afterwards, at Gueldersdorp, didn't he kick
+over the matrimonial pole? Somebody had seen his engagement to a Miss
+Something-or-other announced in a Siege newspaper, published the very day
+he got killed.... Poor beggar! Rough on him, and rough on the
+Foltlebarres, and a facer for Lessie ... and what price the girl?' And I
+was the girl!... It was of me they were talking!..."
+
+Her lips writhed back from her white teeth. She winced and shuddered. "Oh!
+can't you see me sitting and listening, and every word vitriol, burning to
+the bone?"
+
+"Why did you remain," said Saxham, wrung by pity, "to be tortured by such
+prurient prattlers? Why did you not get up and leave the place?"
+
+"I could not move," she said.... "I could only sit and listen. Then the
+First Act ended, and the lights went up, and Lady Hannah touched my arm. I
+knew when our eyes met that she had heard as I had. She got up, saying, 'I
+think we have had enough of this?' and then we came away."
+
+She caught her breath and bit her underlip, and he saw her eyes grow
+misty.
+
+"She sent a Commissionaire to call a hansom.... She took my hand as we
+stood waiting in the empty vestibule. She said: 'Those chattering pies
+behind us have saved me some bad half-hours! Your husband, for some reason
+of his own, has never told you. And it has more than once occurred to me
+that if I were the true friend I want to be to both of you, I'd have
+proved it before now by telling you myself. But I've learned to be
+doubtful of my own inspirations!...' I asked her then if all they had said
+was true? She shrugged her shoulders and nodded: '_Pour tout dire_, they
+let Beau down rather gently.... But if he never could tell the truth to a
+woman, he never went back on a man; and, after all, these things run in
+the blood. _Passons l'eponge la-dessus._ Forget him, and thank your good
+Angel you're married to an honourable man!'"
+
+Saxham's eyes were on the carpet. He did not raise them or move a muscle
+of his face.
+
+"She told me to forget him. It is easier to forgive him; there are deceits
+that smirch the soul of the deceived no less than the deceiver. He lied to
+the Mother--that I cannot pardon! Perhaps some day--but I do not know.
+Lady Hannah called you honourable.... I needed no one to tell me what you
+are and have always been! You hide the things that other men boast of....
+You are loyal even to those you scorn. You kept his secret. I have
+reproached you to-night for keeping it, even while I honoured you in my
+heart!"
+
+"Do not honour me," said Saxham harshly, "for behaving with common
+decency! Can a man tell tales on another who is dead? To commit murder
+would be a crime less cowardly. I do myself mere justice when I say that I
+am incapable of an act so vile! Nor would I blacken a living man to make
+myself show whiter in any man's--or woman's eyes!"
+
+She was no longer pale. A lovely colour flushed her, and her eyes were
+wistful and very kind. Her draperies rustled as she moved towards him.
+"Owen ..." she said, and her white hands were held out to him, and her
+sweet mouth quivered, and her voice was a sigh, "I am alive at last to
+your infinite generosity. I beg you to forgive me for being blind before!"
+
+"Generosity," said Saxham, "does not enter into the question. My silence
+has no merits whatever. What good could I have gained by telling you?" He
+lifted his eyes, and met hers full, dropping the words coldly one by one.
+"The advantage one has ceased to desire can hardly be called gain, in any
+sense of the word. And--I have left off crying for the moon. Even were you
+willing to give it me, I have ceased to wish for your love!"
+
+She looked at him with piteous, incredulous wistfulness, as he told the
+hardy lie. His mask of a face revealed nothing, but he could not disguise
+the rage of hunger for her that ravened in his famished eyes. They were
+upon her lips, her throat, the lovely curves of her young bosom even as he
+spoke; she felt them as the kisses of a fierce, possessive mouth, and
+glowed with sudden shame, and something more. He saw her beauty change
+from the pale rose to the fire-hearted crimson, tore away his eyes, and
+mastered himself. He stepped back, and the still out-stretched, quivering
+hands dropped nervelessly at her sides.
+
+"You have asked me to pardon you," he said, "for some fancied lack of
+perception. It is I who owe an apology to you. Try and forgive me for
+having married you.... I should have known from the first that no good or
+happiness could ever come of a contract like ours."
+
+"Have I ever said I was unhappy?" she demanded. Her breath came quick and
+short.
+
+"Your face has said so very often," returned Saxham, looking at it,
+"though you were too considerate to tell me so in words. But I ask you on
+this night that sees you freed from an illusion, to have courage and not
+yield to depression. Your fetters may be broken sooner than you think!"
+
+"Owen!..."
+
+She was paler than before, if that could be possible. She swayed a little,
+and caught at the back of a chair that was near, and there was terror in
+her darkened, dilated eyes....
+
+"Do you say this to prepare me? Have you any illness? Do you mean that you
+are going to die?"
+
+"I meant nothing ..." answered Saxham, "except that men are mortal,
+sometimes fortunately for the women who are bound to them! Go to bed, my
+child; to sleep will do you good."
+
+"Good-night," she said, and dropped her head, and went away. He opened
+the door for her, and locked it after her, and went back to the
+writing-table, and sat in his chair. He gripped the arms of it in anguish,
+and the sweat of agony stood on the broad forehead where a woman who had
+loved him would have laid her lips.
+
+He had repelled her, slighted her, wounded her.... He knew what it had
+cost him not to take those offered hands.... He was tortured and wrung in
+body and in soul as he took a key that hung upon his chain and unlocked a
+deep drawer, and took a flask from it that gurgled as if some mocking
+sprite had laughed aloud when he shook it close to his ear. He whom she
+had praised as honourable was a traitor no less than the dead man. He had
+said to her, months ago in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp:
+
+"I may die, but I will never fail you!"
+
+He had not died, and he had failed her. The Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp was
+drinking hard again.
+
+
+
+
+LIX
+
+
+Before you turn away in loathing of the man whose experience of Life's
+game of football had been chiefly gained from the ball's point of view,
+hear how it happened that the work of all those months of stern
+self-repression and strenuous denial had been rendered useless.
+
+In the previous July, when Sir Danvers Muller was visiting Lord Williams
+of Afghanistan at Pretoria, Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., had been married
+to Lynette Bridget-Mary Mildare at the Registrar's Office, Gueldersdorp,
+and at the Catholic Church. One hour after the ceremony the happy pair
+left by the mail for Cape Town.
+
+Gueldersdorp turned out to do them honour. We have heard the people cheer.
+Three days and three nights of the Express, delayed in places by the
+wrecking of the line, and then the Alpine mountain-ranges sank and
+dwindled with the mercury in the thermometer. The little white towns
+succeeded each other like pearls on a green string. Humpy blue hills gave
+way to the flats, and then in the shadow of Table Mountain--Babel's
+confusion of tongues--and the stalwart flower of many nations, arrayed
+and armed for battle, and the glory, and pomp, and power of War.
+
+The grey and white transports disgorged them, ants of sober, neutral
+colours, marching in columns to attack other ants. They grew upon the
+vision and filled it, and the sound of their feet was louder than the
+beating of the surf on Sea Point, and although martial music beat and blew
+them on--a brazen whirlwind dominating the mind, blaring at the ears--the
+trampling of men's feet and the hoofs of horses, and the rolling of
+iron-shod wheels, triumphed in the long-run.
+
+Saxham engaged rooms at the Trafalgar Hotel, a handsome caravanserai
+standing in its own gardens at the top of Imperial Avenue, for himself and
+his wife, and the savage irony that can be conveyed in the term struck
+him, not for the first time since he had laid gold and silver on the open
+book, and endowed a woman with the gift of himself and all his worldly
+goods.
+
+It was early in the forenoon. They were to sail next day. The big building
+was crammed, not only with officers under orders for the Front, and their
+wives, who had come to see them start. Society had descended like a flock
+of chattering, gaudily-plumaged paroquets upon the spot where new and
+exciting sensations were to be had. For the trampling feet and the rolling
+wheels that ceaselessly went North imparted one set of thrills, and the
+long trains of wounded and dying that met and passed them, coming down as
+they went up, gave another kind. Amongst the poor dears in the trucks, and
+waggons, and Ambulance-carriages you might eventually find a man you
+knew.... The sporting odds were given and taken on these exciting chances;
+and the fluttering and screaming paroquets that crowded the Railway
+Stations, in spite of their gay feathers, bore no little resemblance to
+carrion-feeding birds of prey.
+
+Saxham, Recently Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, suffered from the
+notoriety inseparable from the name of a man who has been thrice mentioned
+in Despatches, and has been publicly thanked by the representatives of an
+Imperial Government. The Interviewer yapped at his heels whithersoever he
+went, and the Correspondent strove to lure him into confidences, and
+Society fluttered at him with shrill squawkings, and wanted to know, don't
+you know? It must have been "devey" and "twee" to have gone through all
+those experiences. It was the year when "devey," and "twee," and similar
+abbreviations first became fashionable.
+
+There were pleasanter episodes than these, when soldierly, bronzed
+warriors and simple, unaffected men of great affairs, expressed to Saxham
+in few words their belief that he had done his duty. The approval of these
+warmed him and helped to raise him higher. It was a little creature, a
+human insect no bigger than a bar-tender, that brought about the mischief.
+
+There was an American bar on the ground-floor of the Trafalgar. Saxham
+stood upon the threshold of the place, replying to the questions of a
+group of Colonial officers, New South Wales Mounted Engineers and Canadian
+Rangers, when somebody suggested Drinks, and led the way in. Invited to
+make his choice from a long list of alcoholic mixtures, beginning with
+Whisky Straight, and ending with Bosom Caresser and Gin Sour, Saxham said
+that he would take a glass of ice-water.
+
+"Well, boss, since you're on the Temperance Walk," said the Australian,
+his would-be host, a little huffily, "you'll please yourself, I suppose?"
+He collected the preferences of his other guests, and gave the orders to
+the man behind the bar.
+
+The barman had the misfortune to be a joker of the practical kind. Seeing
+Saxham held in conversation by one of the other men, he winked
+portentously at the New South Waler, and whispered in his ear.
+
+The Australian understood. A reason for Saxham's abstinence had been given
+him. The new-made bridegroom as a rule shuns Alcohol. And in proportion to
+his desire to avoid, grows the determination of other men to compel him to
+drink. The bridegroom is fair game all the world over for the Rabelaisian
+jest and the clown's horseplay.
+
+The bar-tender, hoisting his eyebrows to his scollops of gummed hair,
+winked at the New South Waler with infinite meaning, and pointed to a
+cut-glass carafe that stood on the shining nickel-plated counter. It
+appeared to contain pure sparkling water, but the liquor it held was
+knock-out whisky, a tintless drink of exceeding potency, above proof. The
+Australian shook his head. But he laughed under his neat moustache as he
+turned away, and the bar-tender concluded to carry his joke through. He
+dealt out the drinks to their respective owners, and with a dexterous
+sweep of a shirt-sleeved arm brought the innocent-seeming carafe and a
+gleaming, polished tumbler immediately before the square-faced hulking
+doctor with the queer blue eyes, whose pretty bride of three days was
+waiting for him in their room upon the third floor of the humming,
+overcrowded caravanserai. Saxham, absorbed by the thought of her, poured
+out a tumblerful of the clear, sparkling stuff, and had half emptied it
+before he realised the trick. His eyes grew red with injected blood, and
+his hair bristled on his head. He struck out once across the narrow
+counter. The long wall-mirror behind the bar-tender cracked and starred
+with the crashing impact of the joker's skull, and the man fell senseless,
+bleeding from the mouth and nostrils.
+
+Another attendant came running at the crash, and the exclamations of those
+who had seen the swift retaliation wreaked. Saxham, leaving a banknote
+lying on the counter, wheeled abruptly, and went out of the bar.
+
+His brain was on fire. His blood ran riot in his burning veins, and the
+vice he had deemed dead stirred in the depths of his being, lifted its
+slender head, and hissed, quivered a forked tongue, and struck with
+poisoned fangs. He went out into the purple night that wedded lovers would
+have found so perfect. The great white stars winked down at him jeeringly,
+and a little mocking breeze sniggered among the mimosas and palms of the
+hotel gardens. He passed out of them into the many-tongued Babel of the
+streets, packed with humanity, throbbing with virile life, and tramped the
+magnificent avenues and wide electric-lighted streets of Cape Town with
+the thousands who had no beds at all, and the ten thousand who had, but
+preferred not to occupy them. To his narrow couch in the dressing-room
+adjoining Lynette's bedroom her husband dared not go.
+
+So he wore the night out, doggedly wrestling with the demon that boils the
+blood of strong fierce men to forgetfulness of compacts and breach of
+oaths. Daybreak touched him with a chilly shivering finger, a hulking
+figure dozing on one of the white-painted iron seats near the Athletic
+Ground on Greenpoint Common. The last lingering star throbbed itself out,
+a white moth dying in the marvellous rose and orange fires of dawn, and
+the overwhelming, brooding bulk of Table Mountain gleamed, an emerald and
+sapphire splendour against the rising sun, and the two lesser peaks that
+are the mountain's bodyguard shone glowing in golden mail as Saxham got to
+his feet, and shook some order into the disorder of his dress, and faced
+hotelwards.
+
+Despair was in the heart of the Dop Doctor, and for him the wonder of the
+dawn, the marvel of the sunrise meant no more than if he had been born
+blind. A menial's trick had wrought him confusion; his will, in the saving
+strength of which he had trusted, was a leaf in the wind of his desire.
+Even now his throat and tongue were parched, his being thirsted for the
+liquor he had abjured.
+
+What was to be done? What was to happen in the future? He asked himself in
+vain. As Mouille Point shut its fixed red eye in apparent derision, and
+the Greenpoint Light winked a thirteen-mile wink and went out, unlike the
+Hope that had burned in Saxham, and would be rekindled never more.
+
+
+
+
+LX
+
+
+Pity the man now as he sat brooding alone in the consulting-room, consumed
+by the thirst he shuddered at, once more an unwilling slave to the habit
+he abhorred.
+
+He unscrewed the large flask and drank, and his lips curled back with
+loathing of the whisky, and his gorge rose at it as it went down. Then he
+put the flask back and locked the drawer, and laid his head down upon his
+folded arms in silence. No help anywhere! No hope, no joy, no love!
+
+Death must come. Death should come, before the shadow of disgrace fell
+upon the Beloved, of whose love he knew now that he had never been worthy.
+Well for Lynette that he had never won it! Happy for her that she had
+never even learned to care for him a little!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A few days more, and the great Victorian Age had drawn its last breath.
+
+The people went about the London streets softly, as though their footsteps
+led them through the stately, grand, and solemn chamber where lay the
+august, illustrious Dead.
+
+A subdued, busy hum of preparation was perceptible to the ear. The eye saw
+the thoroughfares being covered with sand, the draperies of purple rising
+at the bidding of the pulley and the rope, the carts laden with wreaths
+and garlands of laurel, passing from point to point, discharging their
+loads, often renewed.
+
+A lady was ushered into Saxham's consulting-room as a long procession of
+those carts went creaking by. She was a dainty, piquante, golden-haired,
+blue-eyed little woman, quite beautifully dressed. Her gown was of black,
+in deference to the national mourning, but it glittered with sequins, and
+huge diamonds scintillated in her tiny ears, and she wore a mantle of
+royal ermine, that reached to the high heels of her little shoes. Her hat
+was of the toque description. Ermine and lace and artificial blooms from
+Parisian shop-window-gardens went to make up the delicious effect. A
+titled name adorned her card, which bore a Mayfair address. She seemed in
+radiant health. As Saxham waited, leaning forward in his consulting-chair,
+to receive the would-be patient's confidence, you can imagine those blue
+eyes of his, once so hard and keen, looking out of their hollowing caves
+with a sorrowful, clear sympathy that was very different from their old
+regard. To his women-patients he was exquisitely considerate. Only to one
+class of patient was he merciless and unsparing.
+
+Upon the woman who desired to rid herself of her sex-privilege, upon the
+wedded wanton who sought to make of her body, designed by her Maker to be
+the cradle of an unborn generation, its sepulchre, Saxham's glance fell
+like a sharp curved sword. He wasted few words upon her, but each
+sentence, as it fell from his grim mouth, shrivelled and corroded, as
+vitriol dropped on naked human flesh. He listened now in silence that grew
+grimmer and grimmer, and as in flute-like accents, their smooth course
+hampered by the very slightest diffidence, the little lady explained,
+those heavy brows of his grew thunderous.
+
+Ah, the tragic errand, the snaky purpose, coiled behind those graceful,
+ambiguous forms of speech! Not new the tale to the man who sat and heard.
+She admired the black-haired, powerful head, and the square, pale face
+with its short, aquiline, rather heavily-modelled features, and the broad,
+white forehead that the single smudge of eyebrow barred pleased her, as it
+did most women. Only the man's vivid blue eyes were unpleasantly hard and
+fixed in their regard, and his mouth frightened her, it was so stern and
+set.
+
+She was not as robust as she appeared, she said. When she had been
+married, the family physician had mentioned to her mother that it would
+hardly be advisable.... Delay for a year or two would be wise. And her
+husband did not care for children. He was quite willing. He had sent her
+to Saxham, in fact. Of course, the Profession of Surgery had made such
+huge strides that risk need not enter into consideration for a moment....
+And heaps of her women friends did the same. And expense was absolutely no
+object, and would not Dr. Saxham----
+
+Saxham struck a bell that was upon his table, and rose up with his
+piercing eyes upon her and crossed the room in two strides. He flung the
+door wide. He bowed to her with cool, withering, ironical courtesy as he
+stood waiting for her to depart.
+
+She hesitated, laughed with the ring of hysteria, fluttered into speech.
+
+"You are not, of course, aware of it, but I happen to be an old
+schoolfellow of your wife's." Her pretty, inquisitive eyes went back to
+the writing-table, where stood a photograph of Lynette, recently taken--an
+exquisite, delicate, pearly-toned portrait in a heavy silver-gilt frame.
+"We used to be great friends. Du Taine was my maiden name. Surely Mrs.
+Saxham has spoken to you of Greta Du Taine? I left Gueldersdorp at the
+beginning of the siege. Later, we went to Cape Town. I met my husband
+there. He is Sir Philip Atherleigh, Baronet." She italicised the word. "He
+was with his regiment, going to the Front. We were married almost
+directly. It was a case of love at first sight. Now we are staying at our
+town house in Werkeley Square. Mrs. Saxham must visit us--my husband is
+dying to know her."
+
+"I regret that the desire cannot be gratified, madam." The angry blood
+darkened his face. His tone, even more plainly than his words, told her
+that the boasted friendship was at an end.
+
+Greta reddened too, and her turquoise-hued eyes dealt him a glance of
+bitter hatred.
+
+"I did not stay long at the Convent at Gueldersdorp. Nuns are good, simple
+creatures, and easily imposed upon. And--mother did not wish me to be
+educated with strays and foundlings--dressed up like young
+ladies--actually allowed to mingle upon equal terms with them----"
+
+It was Cornelius Agrippa, I think, who once materialised the Devil as an
+empty purse. The necromancer should have evoked the Spirit of Evil in the
+shape of a spiteful woman. Greta went on:
+
+"--Such Society as there was, I should say. You were at Gueldersdorp
+throughout the siege, and for some time before it, I think, Dr. Saxham?"
+
+Two pairs of blue eyes met, the man's hard as shining stones, the woman's
+dancing with malicious intention. Saxham stiffly bent his head. But her
+fear of him had evaporated in her triumph. Those inquisitive, turquoise
+eyes had an excellent memory behind them. Something in the shape of the
+square black head and hulking shoulders quickened it now.
+
+"It's odd----" Her smile was a grin that showed sharp little white teeth
+ready to bite, and her speech was pointed with venomed meaning. "I used to
+go out a great deal in such Society as the place possessed. Yet I do not
+remember ever having met you!"
+
+Saxham's cold eyes clashed with the malicious turquoises.
+
+"I did not mingle in Society at Gueldersdorp."
+
+He signed to the waiting manservant to open the hall-door. She drew her
+snowy ermines about her and rustled over the threshold. But in the hall
+she turned and dealt her thrust.
+
+"No? You were too busy attending cases. Police-Court Cases ..."
+
+Her light laugh fluttered mockingly about his ears.
+
+"I remember the funny headings of some of the newspaper reports....
+'Another Rampant Drunk! The Town Painted Red Again by the Dop Doctor!'"
+
+"Door!" said Saxham, shaping the word with stiff grey lips. His face was
+the face of Death, who had come close up and touched him. Her little
+ladyship went out to her waiting auto-brougham, and her light, malignant
+laugh fluttered back as the servant shut the hall-door.
+
+Saxham went back into the consulting-room. The Spring sunshine poured in
+through the tall muslin-screened window. There was a cheerful play of
+light and colour in the place. But to the man who sat there it was full of
+shadows, dark and gloomy, threatening and grim. And not the least
+formidable among them was the shadow of the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp,
+looming portentously over that fair face within the silver-gilt frame upon
+the writing-table, stretching out long octopus-arms to drag down shame
+upon it, and heap ashes of humiliation undeserved upon the lovely head,
+and mock her with the solemn altar-vows that bound her to the drunkard.
+
+
+
+
+LXI
+
+
+The Great Victorian Age was laid to rest.
+
+The great pageant of mortality had wound along the officially-appointed
+route, under the cold grey sky, an apparently endless, slowly-marching
+column of Infantry, Artillery, and Cavalry of the Line, progressing pace
+by pace between the immovable barriers of great-coated soldiers, and the
+surging, restless sea of black-clad men and women pent up on either hand
+behind them. The long rolling of muffled drums, and the dull boom of
+cannon; the baring of men's heads; the wail of the Funeral March, the
+flash of suddenly whitened faces turned one way to greet Her as She
+passed, borne to Her rest upon a gun-carriage, as fitting an aged warrior
+Queen; drawn to her wedded couch within the tomb by the willing, faithful
+hands of her sons of the twin Services, who shall forget, that heard and
+witnessed?
+
+Who shall forget?
+
+The Royal Standard draped across the satin-white, gold-fringed pall, where
+on rich crimson cushions rested the Three Emblems of Sovereignty. The
+dignified, kingly figure of a man, no longer young, bowed with sorrow
+under the Imperial heritage, preceding the splendid sombre company of
+crowned heads; the blaze of uniforms and orders, the clank of sword and
+bridle, the potent ring of steel on steel, the sumptuously-trapped,
+shining horses pacing slowly, drawing the mourning-carriages of State,
+their closed windows, frosted with chilly fog, yielding scant glimpses of
+well-known faces. One most beloved, most lovely, and no less so in sorrow
+than in joy. "_Did you see her?_" the women asked of one another, as the
+pageant passed and vanished, and one good soul, all breathless from the
+crush, gasped as she straightened her battered bonnet and twitched her
+trodden skirt: "There never was a better than the blessed soul that's
+gone, but there couldn't be a sweeter nor a beautifuller Queen than the
+one she leaves behind her!"
+
+The last wail of the Funeral March having died away into silence, the last
+cannon-shot gone booming out, down came the foggy dusk on bereaved London.
+A chill rime settled on the swaying laurel wreaths, and on the folds of
+the fluttering purple draperies at the close of the dismal day. The shops
+were shut, and many of the restaurants, but the windows of the Clubs
+gleamed radiantly down Piccadilly, and every refreshment-bar and
+public-house was thronged to bursting. Noon changed to evening, and
+evening lengthened into night, and the pavements began to be crowded. The
+Flesh Bazaar was being held in Piccadilly, and all up Regent Street and
+all down the Haymarket the chaffering went on for bodies and for souls.
+
+A deadly physical and mental lassitude weighed on Saxham. His soul was
+sick with the long, hopeless struggle. He would end it. He would die, and
+take away the shadow from Lynette's pure life, and leave her free. His
+will devised to her everything he possessed, leaving her untrammelled. Let
+her learn to love once more, let her marry a better man, and be happy in
+her husband and her children....
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He turned in at one of the chemist's shops. One or two gaudily-dressed,
+haggard women were at the distant end of the counter, in conference with
+an assistant. Saxham spoke to the chemist, a grey-whiskered, fatherly
+individual, who listened, bending his sleek bald head. The chemist bowed,
+but as he had not the honour of knowing his customer, would the gentleman
+oblige by signing the poison-book, in compliance with Schedule F of the
+Pharmacy Act, 1868?
+
+Saxham nodded. The chemist produced the register, and opened it on the
+counter before Saxham, and supplied him with pen and ink. Then he found
+that he had business at the other end of the shop, and when he returned he
+smartly closed the book, without even satisfying himself whether the
+client had written down his name and address, or merely pretended to. Then
+he filled a two-ounce vial with the fragrant, deadly acid, and put on a
+yellow label that named the poison, but not the vendor, and stoppered and
+capsuled, and sealed, and made it into a neat little parcel, and Saxham
+paid, and put the parcel in his inner breast-pocket, and turned to leave
+the shop.
+
+It was crowded now; the roaring business of the little hours was in full
+swing. The three assistants ran about like busy ants; the chemist joined
+his merry men at the game of making money, serving alcoholic liquors,
+mixing pick-me-ups, dispensing little bottles of tabloids and little boxes
+of jujubes, taking cash and giving change.
+
+The crush was terrific. Saxham, his hat pulled low over his broad brows,
+his great chest stemming the tide of humanity that incessantly rolled over
+the threshold, was slowly making his way to the door, when he felt the
+arresting touch of a hand upon his arm.
+
+The owner of the hand belonged, as ninety per cent. of the women in the
+place belonged, to Francois Villon's liberal sisterhood. Something in the
+pale square face and massive shoulders had attracted her vagrant fancy.
+She had quitted her companions--two gaily-dressed, be-rouged women and a
+blue-eyed, yellow-haired, moustached young German, whose stripy tweeds,
+vociferously-patterned linen, necktie of too obvious pattern, and
+high-crowned bowler hat, advertised the Berlin tailor and haberdasher and
+hatter at their customer's expense, as Saxham went by. Now she looked up
+into the strange, sorrowful eyes that were shaded by his tilted hat-brim,
+and twined her thin hands caressingly about his arm, asking:
+
+"Why do you look so queer, dear? Is anything wrong?--excuse me asking--or
+is it the Funeral has given you the blue hump? It did me! I've not felt
+so bad since mother----" She broke off. Then as a shrill peal of laughter
+from one of her female companions followed a comment made by the
+other--"One of those ..."--she jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an
+unprintable epithet in the direction of her lady friends--"says you're
+ugly. I don't think so. I like your face!" Her own was cruelly, terribly
+young, even under the white cream of zinc, the rouge, and the rice-powder.
+"Were you looking for a friend, dear?" she asked tightening the clasp of
+her thin, feverish hands.
+
+"Yes," said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no illumination in his
+sombre face. "For Death! There is no better friend than Death, my child,
+either for you or me!"
+
+Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him, and turned and
+pushed his way out through the noisy, raving, chaffering,
+patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone, swallowed up in the roaring torrent
+of humanity that foamed down Piccadilly, leaving her frozen and stricken
+and staring.
+
+
+
+
+LXII
+
+
+Months went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made towards a more
+familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had
+never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet
+and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters,
+attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic,
+frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and
+flourished on the fireplace-tiles.
+
+Only a few weeks more, he said to himself, and he would set her free.
+Before the natural craving for love, and life, and happiness should brim
+the cup of her fair sweet womanhood to overflowing; before her sex should
+rise in desperate revolt against himself her gaoler, Death should unlock
+her prison-doors and strike the fetters from those slender wrists, and
+point to Hope beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life.
+
+Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the swift dismissing
+pang was in the locked drawer of the writing-table beside the
+whisky-flask. When he was alone and undisturbed--for Lynette seldom came
+to his consulting-room now--Saxham would take it out and dandle it, and
+hold it in his hands.
+
+He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it being
+dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp that he might torture himself
+with looking at that pitiless shadow-play, that humble comedy-drama of
+sweet, common, unattainable things that was every night renewed in those
+two rooms over the garage at the bottom of the yard.
+
+There was a third performer in the shadow-play now. You could hear him
+roaring lustily at morn and noon and milky eve. The Wonderfullest Baby you
+ever!
+
+When W. Keyse was invited by Saxham to inspect his son and heir, crimson,
+and pulpy, and squirming in a flannel wrap, the Adam's apple in the lean
+throat of the proud father jumped, and his ugly, honest eyes blinked
+behind salt water. The nipper had grabbed at his ear as he stooped down.
+And that made the Fourth Time, and he hadn't even thanked the Doctor yet!
+
+A date, he hoped, would arrive when a chalk or two of that mounting score
+might be wiped off the board. He said so to Mrs. Keyse, the first time she
+was allowed to sit up and play at doing a bit of needlework. Not that she
+did a stitch, and charnce it! With her eyes--beautiful eyes, with that new
+look of mother-love in them; proud eyes, with that inexhaustible store of
+riches all her own,--worshipping the crinkly red snub nose and the funny
+moving mouth, and the little downy head, and everything else that goes to
+make up a properly-constituted Baby.
+
+"I think the time'll come, deer. Watch out, an' one d'y you'll see!"
+
+"I'll watch it!" affirmed W. Keyse. "And wot are you cranin' your neck
+for, tryin' to look out o' winder? Blessed if I ever see such a precious
+old Dutch!----"
+
+The song was in the mouths of the people that year. She laughed, and
+rubbed her pale cheek against his.
+
+"You be my eyes, deer. Peep and see if the Doctor is in 'is room."
+
+It was ten o'clock on a shining May morning, and the clouds that raced
+over great grimy London were white, and there were patches of blue
+between. The trees in the squares were dressed in new green leaves, and
+the irises and ranunculuses in the parks were out, and the policemen had
+shed their heavy uniforms, and instead of hyacinths behind the glass there
+were pots of tulips in bloom upon the window-sills of the two rooms over
+the garage. And the Doctor, who had been seeing patients ever since nine,
+was sitting at the writing-table, said W. Keyse, with his 'ead upon 'is
+'ands.
+
+"Like as if 'e was tired, deer, or un'appy? Or tired an un'appy both?"
+
+"Stryte, you 'ave it!" admitted W. Keyse, after cautious inspection.
+
+"The Doctor--don't let 'im see you lookin' at 'im, darlin', or 'e might
+think, which Good Gracious know how wrong it 'ud be, as you was a kind o'
+Peepin' Pry--the Doctor 'ave fell orf an' chynged a good deal lately--in
+'is looks, I mean!" said Mrs. Keyse, tucking in the corner of the flannel
+over the little downy head. "Wasted in 'is flesh, like--got 'oller round
+the eyes----"
+
+"So 'e 'as!" W. Keyse whistled and slapped his leg. "An' I bin' noticin'
+it on me own for a long while back--now I come to think of it. Woddyou
+pipe's the matter wiv 'im? Not ill? Lumme! if 'e was ill----" The eyes of
+W. Keyse became circular with consternation.
+
+"No, no, deer!" She reassured him, in his ignorance that the maladies of
+the soul are more agonising far than those that afflict the body.
+"Down'arted, like, an' 'opeless an'--an' lonely----"
+
+Downhearted, and hopeless, and lonely! The jaw of W. Keyse dropped, and
+his ugly eyes became circular with sheer astonishment.
+
+"_Him!_ Wiv a beautiful 'ouse to live in--an' Carriage Toffs with Titles
+fair beggin' 'im to come an' feel their pulses an' be pyde for it, an'
+Scientific Institooshuns an' 'Orspital Committees fightin' to git 'im on
+their staffs--an' all the pypers praisin' 'im for wot 'e done at
+Gueldersdorp, an' Government tippin' 'im the 'Ow Do? an' thank you kindly,
+Mister!--an'----" W. Keyse could only suppose that Mrs. Keyse was playing
+a bit of gaff on hers truly--"and him with a wife, too! Married an'
+'appy, an' goin' to be 'appier yet!" He pointed to the little red snub
+nose peeping between the folds of the flannel. "When a little nipper like
+that comes----"
+
+She reddened, paled, burst out crying.
+
+"O William! William----"
+
+Her William kissed her, and dried her tears. He called it mopping her
+dial, but you have not forgotten that, as the upper house-and-parlour-maid
+had at first said, both Her and Him were plainly descended from the Lowest
+Circles. She had melted afterwards, on learning that Mrs. Keyse had been
+actually mentioned in Despatches for carrying tea under fire to the
+prisoners at the Fort; had sought her society, lent paper-patterns, and
+imparted, in confidence, what she knew of the secret of Saxham's wedded
+life.
+
+"Dear William! My good, kind Love! Best I should 'urt you, deer, if 'urt
+you 'ave to be. You see them three large winders covered wiv lovely lace?"
+
+"'Ers--Mrs. Saxham's!" He nodded, trying to look wise.
+
+"Yes, darlin'. Mrs. Saxham's bedroom and dressin'-room they belongs to.
+I've bin inside the bedroom wiv the upper 'ouse-an'-parlour-myde, an' a
+Fairy Princess in a Drury Lane Pantomime might 'ave a bigger place to
+sleep in--but not a beautifuller. When the Foreign Young Person come in of
+evenin's to git 'er lady dressed for dinner, she snaps up the lights,
+bein' a kind soul, before she draws the blinds, to give me a charnst like,
+to see in." She stroked the tweed sleeve. "An' once or twice Mrs. Saxham
+'as come in before they'd bin pull down, an' then--O William!--there was
+everythink in that room on Gawd's good earth a 'usband could ask for to
+make 'im 'appy, except the wife's 'art beatin' warm and lovin' in the
+middle of it all!"
+
+
+
+
+"Cripps!... You don't never mean ...?" He gasped. "Wot? Don't the Doctor
+make no odds to 'er? A Man Like That?" ...
+
+She clung to the heart that loved her, and told him what she had heard....
+And if Saxham had known how two of the unconscious actors in his
+shadow-play pitied him, the knowledge would have been as vitriol poured
+into an open wound.
+
+
+
+
+LXIII
+
+
+The card of Major Bingham Wrynche, C.B., was brought to Saxham one
+morning, as, his early-calling patients seen and dismissed, the Doctor was
+going out to his waiting motor-brougham.
+
+Bingo, following what he was prone to call his pasteboard, presented
+himself--a large, cool, well-bred, if rather stupid-looking, man, arrayed
+in excellently-fitting clothes, saying:
+
+"You were goin' out? Don't let me keep you. Look in again!"--even as he
+deposited a tightly-rolled silk umbrella in the waste-paper basket, and
+tenderly balanced his gleaming hat upon the edge of the writing-table, and
+chose, by the ordeal of punch, a comfortable chair, as a man prepared to
+remain. Saxham, pushing a cigar-box across the consulting-room table,
+asked after Lady Hannah.
+
+"First-rate! Seems to agree with her, having a one-armed husband to fuss
+over!"
+
+"She won't have a one-armed husband long," returned Saxham, not unkindly,
+glancing at the bandaged and strapped-up limb that had been shattered by
+an expanding bullet, and was neatly suspended in its cut sleeve in the
+shiny black sling.
+
+"By the Living Tinker! she's had him long enough for me!" exploded Bingo,
+who seemed larger and fussier than ever, if a thought less pink. "So'd you
+say if they tucked a napkin under your chin at meals, and cut your meat up
+into dice for you, and you'd ever tried to fold up your newspaper with one
+hand, or had to stop a perfect stranger in the street, as I did just now
+outside your door, and ask him to fish a cab-fare out of your right-hand
+trouser-pocket if he'd be so good? because your idiot of a man ought to
+have put your money in the other one."
+
+"You're lookin' at my head," pursued the Major, "and I don't wonder. She's
+been and given me a fringe again. 'Stonishing thing the Feminine Touch is.
+Let your servant part your hair and knot your necktie, and you simply look
+a filthy bounder. Your wife does it--and you hardly know yourself in the
+glass, and wonder why they didn't christen you Anna-Maria. Not bad weeds
+these, by half! You remember those cigars of Kreil's and the thunderin'
+price me and Beauvayse paid for 'em, biddin' against each other for fun?"
+The big man blew a heavy sigh with the light blue smoke-wreath, and added:
+"And before the last box was dust and ashes, poor old Toby was! And that
+chap Levestre--never fit to brown his shoes--is wearing 'em; and 'll be
+Marquess of Foltlebarre when the old man goes. Queer thing, Luck is--when
+you come to think of it?"
+
+Saxham nodded and looked at the clock. A dull impatience of this large,
+bland, prosperous personage was growing in him. From the rim the top-hat
+had left upon his shining forehead to the tightly-screwed eyeglass that
+assisted his left eye; from the pink Malmaison carnation in the buttonhole
+of his frock-coat to the buff spats that matched his expansive waistcoat
+in shade, the large Major was the personification of luxurious, pampered,
+West End swelldom, the type of a class Saxham abhorred. He had seen the
+heavy dandy under other conditions, in circumstances strenuous, severe,
+even tragic. Then he had borne himself after a simple, manly fashion. Now
+he had backslidden, retrograded, relaxed. Saxham, always destitute of the
+saving sense of humour, frowned as he looked upon the pampered son of
+Clubland, and the sullen lowering of the Doctor's heavy smudge of black
+eyebrow suggested to the Major that his regrets for "poor old Toby!" had
+been misplaced. The man who had married Miss Mildare could hardly be
+expected to join with heartiness in deploring the untimely decease of his
+predecessor.
+
+"Not that it could have come to anything between poor Toby and her if the
+dear old chap had lived," reflected Bingo, and wondered if the Doctor knew
+about--about Lessie? "Bound to," he mentally decided, "if he keeps his
+ears only half as open as other men keep theirs. Didn't a brace of
+bounders of the worst discuss the story in all its bearin's, sittin'
+behind my wife and Mrs. Saxham in the stalls at the theatre the other
+night! Everybody _is_ discussin' it now that the Foltlebarres have left
+off payin' Lessie not to talk, and provided for her and the youngster out
+of the estate, and Whittinger's given her a back seat in the family....
+That family, too!... Lord! what a rum thing Luck is!"
+
+The musing Major cleared his throat, and his large, rather stupid, blonde
+face was perfectly stolid as he smoked and stared at his host, reminding
+himself that Beauvayse had been jealous of Saxham, Attached Medical Staff,
+Gueldersdorp, and had feared that, if the fellow knew of the scratch
+against him, he might force the running; and recalling, with a tingling of
+the shamed blood in his expansive countenance, how he--Wrynche--had let
+Beauvayse into the sordid secret that Alderman Brooker had blabbed. He
+wondered, looking at the square, set face, whether Saxham had ever really
+earned the degrading nickname that he could not get quite right. The 'Peg
+Doctor,' was it?--or the 'Lush Doctor?' Something in that way.... Not that
+Saxham looked like a man given to lifting his elbow with undue
+frequency....
+
+"--But you never know," thought experienced Bingo sagely, even as, in his
+heavy fashion, he went pounding on: "The Chief's continuin' the Work of
+Pacification, and acceptin' the surrender of arms--any date of manufacture
+you like between the _chassepot_ of 1870 and the leather-breeched firelock
+of Oliver Cromwell's time. The modern kind, you find by employin' the
+Divinin' Rod"--the large narrator bestowed a wink on Saxham and added--"on
+the backs of the fellows who buried the guns. Never fails--used in that
+way. And--as it chances--I have a communication to make to you."
+
+"A communication--a message--from the Chief to me?"
+
+Saxham's face changed, and softened, and brightened curiously and
+pleasantly.
+
+Major Bingo nodded and cleared his throat. He rebalanced his shiny hat
+upon the table corner, and said with his eyes engaged in this way:
+
+"I was to remind you--from him--that--not long before the ending of the
+Siege, a lady who is now a near connection of yours sustained a terrible
+bereavement through the--infernally dastardly crime of a--person then
+unknown!"
+
+Saxham's vivid eyes leaped at the speaker's as if to drag out the
+knowledge he withheld. But Bingo was balancing the glossy triumph of a
+Bond Street hatter, and looked at it and not at the Doctor, who said:
+
+"You refer to the murder of the Mother-Superior at the Convent of the Holy
+Way on February the --th, 1900. And you say a person _then_ unknown....
+Has the murderer been arrested?"
+
+Major Bingo shook his head.
+
+"He hasn't been arrested, but his name is known. You remember the runner
+who came in from Diamond Town with a letter for a man called Casey? Not
+long after--after my wife was exchanged for a spy of Brounckers'?"
+
+"I did not see the man myself," returned Saxham, "but I perfectly
+recollect his getting through."
+
+Major Bingo said:
+
+"I thought you would. Well, the letter was a blind; the bearer an agent of
+the firm of Huysmans and Eybel, sent to make certain of our weakest points
+before they put in the attack on the Barala town; and--that's the man who
+committed the murder!"
+
+"The man who committed the murder?"
+
+Saxham's vivid eyes were intent upon the Major's face. The Major coughed,
+and went on:
+
+"My wife came across that man at Tweipans under curious circumstances,
+which I'm here to put before you as plainly as may be.... She'd met him
+before the Siege, travelling up from Cape Town. He scraped acquaintance,
+called himself a loyal Johannesburger, and an Agent of the British South
+African War-Intelligence-Bureau. Not that there ever was such a Bureau."
+Major Bingo blinked nervously, and ran a thick finger round the inside of
+his collar as he added: "The beggar spoofed Lady Hannah up hill and down
+dale with that, and she believed him. And when she subsequently flew the
+coop--dash this cold of mine!..."
+
+The Major drew out a very large pink cambric pocket-handkerchief, and
+performed behind its shelter an elaborate but unconvincing sneeze:
+
+"--When she shot the moon with Nixey's mare and spider, it was by private
+arrangement with this oily, lying blackguard, who had given her an
+address--a farm on the Transvaal Border, known as Haargrond Plaats--where
+she might communicate with him through another scoundrel in the Transport
+Agency line, supposin' she chose to do a little business on her own in
+Secret Intelligence----"
+
+Saxham interrupted:
+
+"I shall say nothing to my wife of this, and I trust you will impress upon
+Lady Hannah that it would be highly inadvisable for her to do so."
+
+"She won't, you may depend on it." Major Bingo palpably grew warm, and
+mopped the dew from his large, kind, rather stupid countenance with the
+pink cambric handkerchief--"She's awfully afraid, as it is, that a word or
+two she dropped quite innocently, to that infernal liar and swindler,
+who'd bled her of a monkey, good English cash--paid for procurin' and
+forwardin' items of information that he took damned good care should reach
+us at Gueldersdorp too late to be of use, led up to--to the crime!... By
+the Living Tinker! it's out at last!"
+
+The big man, so cool and nonchalant a minute or so before, fanned himself
+with the pocket-handkerchief, and turned red, and went white, and went
+red, and turned white half a dozen times, in twice as many beats of his
+flurried pulse.
+
+"--Out at last, Saxham, and that's why I've been gulpin' and blunderin'
+and bogglin' for the last ten minutes. Poof!" Major Bingo exhaled a vast
+breath of relief. "Tellin' tales on a woman--and her your wife--even when
+she's begged you to, isn't the sweetest job a man can tackle!"
+
+"Let me have this story in detail once and for all," said Saxham, turning
+a stern, white face, and hard, compelling eyes upon the embarrassed Major.
+"What utterance of Lady Hannah's do you suppose to have led to the tragedy
+in the Convent Chapel? Upon this point I must and shall be clear before
+you leave me!"
+
+"You shall have things as clearly as I can put 'em. This pretended Secret
+Agent of the War-Intelligence-Bureau that never existed, and who called
+himself Van Busch--a name that's as common among Boers as Murphy is among
+Irishmen--arranged to pass off my wife as his sister, a refugee from
+Gueldersdorp, who'd married a German drummer, and buried him not long
+before. Women are so dashed fond of play-actin'! Kids, Saxham,--that's
+what they are in their weakness for dressin' up and makin'-believe! And my
+wife----"
+
+The large Major was in a violent lather as he ran the thick finger round
+inside his collar, and swallowed at the lump in his throat.
+
+"--My wife saw Van Busch at Kink's hotel at Tweipans from time to time. He
+came, I've already explained, to sell bogus information for good money.
+And as the boodle ran low, the cloven hoof began to show, and the brute
+became downright insolent."
+
+"As might have been expected," said Saxham, coldly.
+
+"--Kept his hat on in my wife's room, talked big, and twiddled a
+signet-ring he wore," went on the Major. "And, bein' quick, you know, and
+sharp as they make 'em, you know, my wife recognised the crest of an old
+acquaintance cut upon the stone. I knew the man myself"--declared Major
+Bingo--"and a better never stepped in leather. A brother-officer of the
+Chiefs, too, and a rippin' good fellow!--Dicky Mildare, of the Grey
+Hussars."
+
+"Mildare!" repeated Saxham.
+
+"You understand, Saxham, the name did it. My wife had seen the present
+Mrs. Saxham at Gueldersdorp, and, not knowin' that the surname of Mildare
+had been taken by her at the wish of her adopted mother, supposed--got the
+maggot into her head that the Mother-Superior's ward might possibly be
+a--a daughter of the man the seal-ring had belonged to, knowing--Lord!
+what a mull I'm making of it!--that Mildare had at one time been engaged
+to marry that"--the Major boggled horribly--"that uncommonly brave and
+noble lady, and had, in fact, thrown her over, and made a bolt of it with
+the wife of his Regimental C.O., Colonel Sir George Hawting."
+
+The faint stain of colour that had showed through Saxham's dead-white skin
+faded. He waited with strained attention for what was coming.
+
+"South Africa Lady Lucy and Mildare bolted to," went on Bingo, "and now
+you know the kind of mare's-nest her ladyship had scratched up. And,"
+declared Bingo, "rather than have had to spin this yarn. I'd have faced a
+Court-Martial of Inquiry respectin' my conduct in the Field. For my wife
+has a kind heart and a keen sense of honour, and rather than bring harm
+upon Miss Mildare that was, or anyone connected with her, she'd have stood
+up to be shot! By G----!" trumpeted Bingo, "I know she would!"
+
+Saxham's face was blue-white now, and looked oddly shrunken. His voice
+came in a rasping croak from his ashen lips as he said:
+
+"Lady Hannah mentioned my wife to this man, thinking that she might prove
+to be the daughter of the owner of the ring. What could possibly lead her
+to infer such a relationship?"
+
+"You must understand that the blackguard had given my wife details of
+Mildare's death at a farm owned by a friend of his in Natal, and that
+Hannah--that my wife knew poor little Lucy Hawting had had a child by
+Mildare," Major Bingo spluttered. "That was why she asked Van Busch
+outright whether the girl with the nuns at Gueldersdorp was--could be--the
+same child, grown up? By the Living Tinker!--I never was in such a lather
+in my life! The better the light I try to put the thing in, the dirtier it
+looks. And I'm not half through yet, that's the worst of it!"
+
+He mopped and mopped, and took several violent turns about the room, and
+subsided in a chair at length, and went on, waving the large pink cambric
+handkerchief, now a damp rag, in the air, at intervals, to dry it.
+
+"She says--Lady Hannah says--that the eagerness and curiosity with which
+the brute snapped up the hint she'd never meant to drop, warned her to
+shunt him off on another line, and give no more information. They got on
+money matters; and, seeing plain how she'd been bilked, my wife gave the
+welsher a bit of her mind, and he showed his teeth in a way that meant
+Murder. Just in time--before he could wring her neck round--and he'd
+started in to do it, you understand--Brounckers came stormin' and bullyin'
+in, to tell the prisoner she was exchanged, and would be sent down to
+Gueldersdorp.... They packed her back that very day.... And not a week
+after, the pretended runner came in from Diamond Town with the bogus
+letter from Mrs. Casey."
+
+Saxham had thought. He said now:
+
+"This man, this rascally Van Busch, acting as a spy for Brounckers, was
+disguised as the runner? Is that what has been proved? Did Lady Hannah see
+the man and recognise him?"
+
+Bingo leaned forward to answer.
+
+"Lady Hannah never set eyes on the man from Diamond Town. But the day the
+_Siege Gazette_ came out, with a blithering paragraph in it that never
+ought to have appeared, announcin'"--he coughed and crimsoned--"Lord
+Beauvayse's formal engagement to Miss Mildare;--my wife was rung up at the
+Convalescent Hospital by a caller who wouldn't say where he telephoned
+from. And the message that came through--couched in queer, ambiguous
+language, and purportin' to come from an old friend--was a message for the
+young lady who is now Mrs. Saxham!"
+
+Saxham's eyes flickered dangerously. He said not a word. The Major went
+on:
+
+"My wife didn't then and there identify the voice with Van Busch's. She
+remembered the name given her as that of the owner of the farm at which
+Mildare died, a place which by rights was in what's now the Orange River
+Colony, and not Natal at all. She asked plump and plain: 'Are you
+So-and-So?' There was no answer to the question. But seven hours later the
+Mother-Superior was shot; and the nuns and Miss Mildare, on their way to
+the Convent, were passed by a thickset, bearded man, who ran into one of
+the Sisters in his hurry, and nearly knocked her down."
+
+"That," said Saxham, "has always been regarded as a suspicious
+circumstance. But the man was never subsequently traced."
+
+"No! Because," said Bingo, "the runner from Diamond Town evaporated that
+night."
+
+Saxham said, with his grim under-jaw thrust out:
+
+"Surely that circumstance, when reported to the Officer commanding the
+Garrison, might then have awakened his suspicions?"
+
+"Naturally," agreed Bingo, "and therefore he kept 'em dark. As for my
+wife, the shock of the murder, accompanied with her own secret conviction
+that, in some indirect way, she'd helped to set a malicious, lurking,
+watchful, dangerous Force of some kind working against your wife--when
+she dropped that hint I've told you of--bowled her over with a nervous
+fever."
+
+"I remember," said Saxham, who had been called in.
+
+"Consequently, it wasn't until some days after the Relief--a bare hour or
+two before the Division--Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, and a
+company or so of Civilian Johnnies that had made believe they were genuine
+fightin' Tommies till they couldn't get out of the notion--marched out of
+Gueldersdorp for Frostenberg, that her ladyship got a chance of makin' a
+clean breast to the Chief. Hold on a minute, Doctor----"
+
+For Saxham would have spoken.
+
+"--The Chief had had his own private opinion, from the very first. He
+heard what my wife had to say. As you may guess, she'd worked herself up
+into a regular cooker of remorse and anxiety--told him she was ready to go
+anywhere and do anything--he'd only got to give her orders, and all that
+sort of thing! He charged her with the simple but difficult role of
+holdin' her tongue, and keepin' her oar out, and findin' him--if by good
+luck she'd got it by her--a specimen of the handwritin' of the clever
+scoundrel who'd played at bein' a War Intelligence Agent, and waltzed with
+her five hundred pounds, which sample, as it chanced, she was able to
+supply. And the fist of the man who'd swindled her, and the writin' of the
+Mrs. Casey who'd sent a letter per despatch-runner from Diamond Town to a
+husband who didn't exist, tallied to an upstroke and the crossin' of a
+'_t_'!"
+
+"Is it beyond doubt that the letter from the supposed Mrs. Casey was not a
+genuine communication?" Saxham asked.
+
+"Beyond doubt. As a fact, the neatly-directed envelope had simply got a
+sheet of blank paper inside. Another odd fact brought to light was, that
+the person who communicated with my wife at the Convalescent Hospital
+about half-past twelve on the day of the murder, rang her up on the
+telephone belongin' to the orderly-room at the Headquarters of the
+Baraland Rifles. We had up the orderly, and after some solid lyin', he
+owned that the man from Diamond Town had bribed him with 'baccy to let him
+put a message through. And that's another link in the evidence, I take
+it?" said Major Bingo.
+
+"Undoubtedly!"
+
+"There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo, "that the first march
+of the Division on its route to Frostenberg led past the Border farm
+called Haargrond Plaats. It looked deserted and half-ruined, with only a
+slipshod woman and a coloured man in charge; but something was known of
+what had gone on there, and might be going on still, and the Boers are
+clever stage-managers, and it don't do to trust to appearances! So the
+Chief detached a party with dynamite cartridges and express orders to make
+the ruin real. Our men searched the place thoroughly before they blew it
+up; and hidden in a disused chimney--solid bit of old Dutch masonry big
+enough to accommodate a baker's dozen of sweeps--were a few things
+calculated to facilitate that search for the needle in the haystack--you
+understand? Disguises of various kinds--a suit of clothes lined with
+chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin'--a good deal of the raw stuff
+itself, scattered all over the shop by the blow-up--and in a rusty cashbox
+a diary or private ledger, posted up in a clumsy kind of thieves' cipher,
+impossible to make out, but with the name written on it of the identical
+man my wife suspected and the Chief believed to be the murderer of Miss
+Mildare's adopted mother! And that's what you may call the Clue Direct,
+Saxham, I rather fancy?"
+
+Major Bingo Wrynche leaned back with an air of some finality, and with
+some little difficulty extracted a biggish square envelope from the left
+inner pocket of the accurately-fitting frock-coat. He lightly placed the
+envelope upon the blotter before Saxham; reached out and took the shiny
+top-hat off the writing-table, fitted it with peculiar care on his
+pinkish, sandy, close-cropped head, and said, looking at Saxham with a
+pleasant smile.
+
+"Perhaps you wouldn't mind throwin' your eye over the contents of that
+envelope? There are three photographs of handwritin' inside, marked on the
+backs respectively." He waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the
+big envelope, examining the polish of his own varnished patent-leather
+boots with a fastidious air of anxiety that was extremely well assumed, if
+it was not strictly genuine. His large face was as bland and
+expressionless as the face of the grandfather-clock in the Sheraton case
+that ticked against the wainscot behind him, as he advised:
+
+"Take 'em in numerical sequence. No. 1 is the photographed facsimile of
+the cover of the bogus letter to Mr. Casey. No. 2"--the speaker lightly
+touched it with a large round finger-tip--"that's the replica--also
+photographed--of a card the man we're after wrote on and gave to Lady
+Hannah, in case she found herself inclined to invest a hundred or so in
+the kind of wares he professed to supply. Photo No. 3 is a reproduction of
+an autograph and address that's written on the inside cover of the ledger
+--posted up in thieves' cipher--that was in the cashbox found at Haargrond
+Plaats." He waited, screwing painfully at the stiff, waxed ends of the
+scrubby moustache.
+
+Saxham took the photographs in their order. The envelope of the bogus
+letter brought by the supposed runner from Diamond Town had been addressed
+in a big bold black round hand with curiously malformed capitals, to
+
+  "Mr. BARNEY CASEY,
+  "Commercial Traveller,
+  "Gueldersdorp.
+
+  "Care of the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces"
+
+"--Don't put it back in the envelope," said Major Bingo. "Compare the
+writin' with No. 2."
+
+No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was written in ink, in
+the same bold hand:
+
+  "Mr. HENDRYK VAN BUSCH,
+  "C/o Mr. W. Bough,
+  "Transport Agent,
+  "Haargrond Plaats,
+  "Near Matambani,
+  "Transvaal."
+
+
+
+
+LXIV
+
+
+There was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by street noises
+filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking of the Sheraton
+grandfather clock, and the breathing of two people. Saxham glanced at
+Major Bingo with eyes that seemed to have been bleached of colour, and
+laid the second calligraphic specimen beside the first, and took up No. 3,
+and read in the same large nourishing round hand:
+
+  "W. BOUGH,
+  "Free State Hotel,
+  "50 m. from Driepoort,
+  "Orange Free State."
+
+After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and the faint,
+far-off street noises came through the intervening screens, but only one
+of the men in the room seemed to be breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips
+moved. He said in a horrible clicking whisper:
+
+"Van Busch and Bough are--one?"
+
+Major Wrynche's large face nodded in the affirmative. But it was as
+expressionless as the grandfather clock's.
+
+"One man!--and that's what I may call the pith of my verbal Despatch for
+you!"
+
+Saxham said with hard composure:
+
+"Van Busch is a Dutch surname that, as you say, is common in South Africa.
+With the name of Bough, as the Chief is aware, I have--associations. It
+was, in fact, one of the many aliases used by the witness for Regina in an
+Old Bailey case in which I was concerned nearly seven years ago."
+
+The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity:
+
+"Same man!"
+
+Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was the same man. The
+tense muscles of his face told nothing. Bingo added:
+
+"--But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount to little compared
+with the wrong and injury inflicted upon Mrs. Saxham! That---- Good Lord!
+what's the matter?"
+
+For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, knocking over his
+chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue lips:
+
+"What wrong? What injury? What--what are you hinting at?----"
+
+"Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round light blue eyes was so
+palpably genuine that the crazy flame died out of the Doctor's, and his
+clenched hand dropped. "I didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your
+wife's adopted mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all!"
+
+"I beg your pardon, Major!" Saxham picked up his chair and sat down on it,
+inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. "My nerves have been giving
+trouble of late."
+
+Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright eyes, the
+Doctor looked like that--uncommonly like that! And the big Major,
+remembering Alderman Brooker's revelation, wondered, as he screwed at the
+stiff, blunt ends of his sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have
+reverted to the old vice? "Bad for the girl he's married if he has!" he
+thought, even as he said:
+
+"Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' the tension, don't
+you know? Norway in June, or the Higher Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind
+and go!"
+
+"I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling bitterly, as he
+remembered the little phial with the yellow label that lay beside the
+whisky-flask in the drawer beneath his hand. "I shall go very soon now!"
+
+"But not immediately?"
+
+"Not immediately." There was something strange, almost exalted, in the
+look that accompanied the words. Saxham added: "If you could give me an
+approximate date as regards the finding of that--needle in the haystack of
+South Africa, it would--facilitate my departure more than you can guess!"
+
+"Would it, by George!" Bingo slipped the thumb and forefinger of the
+useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket. Something sparkled in the big pink
+palm he extended to Saxham--something sparkled, and spurted white and
+green and scarlet points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something
+was an oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled from
+its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the lovely, wistful
+face of a young, refined, high-bred woman looked out, and with all his
+iron self-control Saxham could not restrain a sudden movement and a
+stifled exclamation of mingled anger and surprise.
+
+For at the first glance the face was Lynette's.
+
+With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an unspeakable rage and
+horror seething in him, he took the portrait from the Major's palm, and
+held it with a steady hand, in a favourable light.
+
+Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face!
+
+The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the
+squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth sensuous
+as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been a few years under
+thirty; the arrangement of the hair, the cut of the bodice, might have
+indicated the height of the latest fashion--say, twenty-two or even three
+years back. Some delicately fine inscription was upon the dull gold of the
+inner rim of the miniature-frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it.
+Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 1879."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's opaque skin had
+given place to pallor. His face was sharp and thin, and of waxen
+whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. His blue eyes burned ominously
+in their caves under the heavy bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice
+was very quiet as he asked: "How did you come by this?"
+
+"It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo measuredly, "with the
+bits of evidence I've told you of, and a few others, when the big stone
+chimney at Haargrond Plaats blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits
+of evidence were bits of a man--two men you might call him! And, by the
+Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the rest of the
+rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of Bough Van Busch!"
+
+"He had this upon him? He--wore it round his neck?" Saxham asked the
+question in a grating whisper, dropping the clenched hand that held the
+diamond-set miniature upon the arm of his chair.
+
+"I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, "when he had a
+neck to boast of." He added, as he got up to take his leave: "The thing
+has been carefully cleaned. The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked
+in one place, but otherwise it has come off wonderfully. Perhaps you'd
+hand it over to--anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled many
+professional appointments. Remember me to Mrs. Saxham. Thanks frightfully!
+So long!"
+
+
+
+
+LXV
+
+
+In the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a man with whom
+he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp during the strenuous days of
+the Siege--a man who would undoubtedly not have lived to go through those
+days but for the Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written
+by an unsteady hand.
+
+Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper basket with a
+contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental note of the address, and
+drove there that afternoon.
+
+The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the grimy stucco
+Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's in Wendish Street, West.
+Saxham rang a loud bell, that sent iron echoes pealing down flagged
+passages, and brought a little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the
+door and the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home and
+able to receive a visitor?
+
+The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, and wore one
+eyebrow several inches higher than the other, shook her rusty
+crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she informed Saxham in a husky
+voice strongly flavoured with cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the
+Confessional all the morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the
+Ascension, and was quite wore out. If there was anything she could do, she
+inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, she
+would be happy to oblige the gentleman.
+
+"I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. Fraithorn. You see
+that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with unsmiling gravity, "and not an
+ordinary caller on business connected with religion."
+
+The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as
+scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream-washed,
+brown-distemper-dadoed passage, smelling of kippered haddocks and incense,
+to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a severe apartment, commanding a
+view of mews, and had a parquet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a
+washable paper of a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a
+ranunculus with its hands in its pockets.
+
+Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library;
+chrome-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by Old Masters
+hung above. The Philistine School of Art was represented by a Zoological
+hearthrug; three Windsor chairs offered accommodation to the visitor; a
+table of the kitchen pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a
+slippery hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cushion,
+supported the long, thin, black clad figure of the Reverend Julius
+Fraithorn, who was lying down.
+
+"I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the prone figure, a
+single stride having taken him to the side of the sofa, "to prescribe for
+a man whose nerves are playing him tricks. I have torn up your letter--the
+epistle in which you ask me to afford you an opportunity of making an
+avowal which will prove to what depths of infamy a man may descend at the
+bidding of his lower nature. Lower nature! If I am any judge of a man's
+physical condition, a lower nature is what you want!" He threw down his
+hat and stick upon the green-baize-covered table, took one of the Windsor
+chairs, and crashed it down beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big
+body on it, and reached out and captured the thin wrist of his victim, who
+mustered breath to stammer:
+
+"There is nothing whatever the matter with my health. I am well--that is,
+bodily." He got up from the sofa, and crossed to the Zoological hearthrug,
+and poked the smoky little fire burning in the narrow grate, for the May
+day was wet and chilly. "I shall be better, mentally," he said, with an
+effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham, "when you have heard
+what I have to tell." He rose up, and turned round, his thin face flaming.
+"Mind, I'm not to be gagged by your not wanting to," for Saxham had
+impatiently waved his hand. "Hear you shall, and must!"
+
+He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that couched on a
+field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove his hands down deep into his
+pockets, and the painful scarlet surged over the rim of his Roman collar
+and dyed his thin, sensitive, beautiful face and high, white forehead to
+the roots of his dark, curling hair.
+
+"Perhaps you may recall an oath I swore at your instigation one day in
+your room at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp?"
+
+"Yes--no! What does it matter?" said Saxham thickly, with his angry,
+brooding eyes upon the floor.
+
+"It matters," said Julius doggedly, "in the present case. I need hardly
+tell you that I have kept that oath. If the man had not been dead, I might
+have ended by breaking it--who knows? What I have to tell you is that,
+some two months after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is
+now your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by a
+despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen--deservedly
+fallen--to your lot, sought out Miss Mildare, and told her--something I
+had learned to your detriment, from a man called Brooker, a babbling,
+worthless creature, a Gueldersdorp tradesman who, on the strength of a
+seat upon the local Bench, claimed to be informed."
+
+Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at the wall now instead of the
+floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His right hand, resting on the
+table near which he sat, softly closed and opened, opened and closed its
+supple muscular fingers, with a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to
+hear more. And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the parted wooden
+mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden:
+
+"I knew that the man lied--on my soul, I knew it! But the opportunity he
+had given me of lowering your value in--in another's eyes was too tempting
+to resist. The man had told me----"
+
+"In effect, that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," said Saxham;
+"and, as it happens, he told the truth!" He added: "And what I was then I
+am now. There is no change in me, though once I thought it!"
+
+"Saxham!... For God's sake, Saxham!" stuttered Julius. But Saxham,
+hunching his great shoulders, and lowering his square, black head, not at
+all unlike the savage bull of Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went
+on:
+
+"It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham of abstinence
+and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and various grades in our
+drunkenness, as in our other vices, and the man who is a druggard despises
+the common drunkard; and the sippers of ether look down with infinite
+contempt--or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the
+toper and the slave of morphia and cocaine, and take no shame in seeing
+the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the oxygenated
+racehorse run for the Cup! A year or so, and the Transatlantic
+oxygen-outfit will be an indispensable equipment of the British athlete.
+Even to-day the professional footballer and cricketer, runner and swimmer,
+inhale oxygen as a preliminary to effort, and bring the false energy that
+is born of it to aid them in their trial tests of strength. The man who
+scales an Alpine summit winds himself up with a whiff or so; the orator,
+inspired by oxygen, astonishes the House of Commons or the Bar. And the
+actor, delirious with oxygen, rushes on the stage; and the clergyman,
+drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit to preach a Temperance sermon. And the
+Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying
+tipplers; and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: 'Physician,
+heal thyself!'"
+
+
+
+
+The Windsor chair creaked under Saxham's heavy figure as he got up. His
+fierce blue eyes blazed in their sunken caves as he took his hat and stick
+from the table.
+
+"What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrong me. Moralists would
+say that you acted conscientiously--played the part of a true friend in
+telling--_her_--what you knew!"
+
+"Of my benefactor--the man who had saved my life!" Julius moistened his
+dry lips. "Your approving moralist would be the devil's advocate. But I
+have not forgotten what your own opinion is of the man who tries to
+enhance his own virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the vices of a
+rival. And, if you will believe me, I was punished for the attempt. Her
+look of surprise ... the tone in which she said, 'Did he not save your
+life?' that was enough!... Then I--I lost my head, and told her that I
+loved her--entreated her to be my wife, only to learn that she never
+had--never could----" Julius's thin white fingers knotted themselves
+painfully at the back of his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks
+between his gritted teeth: "It was revolting to her--a girl reared among
+nuns in a Catholic Convent--that a man calling himself a priest should
+speak to her of love. There was absolute horror in her look as she learned
+the truth." He groaned. "I have never met her eyes since that day without
+seeing--or imagining I saw--some reflection of that horror in them!"
+
+"Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations?" said Saxham, not
+unkindly.
+
+He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure, when Julius stopped
+him.
+
+"One moment. Has--has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to you of--this that I have
+told you?"
+
+"Never!" answered Saxham, pausing at the door.
+
+"One moment more! Saxham, is it hopeless? Could you not by a desperate
+effort break this habit that may--that must--inevitably bring misery to
+your wife? In the name of her love for you--in the names of the children
+that may be born of it----"
+
+--"Unless you want me to murder you," advised Saxham, facing the
+passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt cliff might oppose a
+breaking wave, "you had better be silent!"
+
+"My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, "is better than you know.
+When I endeavoured--unsuccessfully--to injure you, I robbed myself of my
+belief in myself. But you--you who gave me back my earthly life, you have
+robbed me of my faith in the Living and Eternal God. Do you know the
+effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It is a choking
+fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that day at the Hospital at
+Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 'The Human Will is even more omnipotent
+than the Deity, because it has created Him, out of its own need!' I have
+done my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utterance--I
+have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." He wrung his hands,
+that were wet as though they had been dipped in water. "I have tended
+souls as mechanically as a gardener might water pots in which there was
+nothing but dead sticks and dry earth!"
+
+"Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung by the suffering in
+the thin young face and in the beautiful haggard eyes, "that I never
+meant the harm that I appear to have done! Nor can I recall that I have
+habitually attacked your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I
+remember that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you
+particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. I had seen
+an announcement in the _Siege Gazette_ that ... I dare say you
+understand?" He laughed harshly. "As to my theory of the Omnipotence of
+Human Will, it is blown and exploded, and all the King's horses and all
+the King's men will never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from.
+I owe you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me! Of how
+far Will, in another man, may carry him, I dare not judge or calculate. My
+own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the sport of any wind that blows!"
+
+He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a bookcase, and said,
+pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes:
+
+"The best of us are bad in spots, Parson: the worst of us are good in
+patches. You Churchmen don't recognise that fact sufficiently.... And I
+think no worse of you for what you have told me! If I have anything to
+forgive--why, it is forgiven! Do you try, on the other hand, to think
+leniently of a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothing
+of his own to lean upon. As for my wife, in whose interests I know you to
+be honestly solicitous, I will tell you this much: She will be spared the
+'inevitable misery' of which you spoke just now!"
+
+"How? Have you decided to undergo a cure? I have heard," hesitated Julius,
+"that these things are not always successful--that they sometimes fail!"
+
+"Mine is the only cure that never fails," returned Saxham.
+
+A vision of the little blue-glass, yellow-labelled vial that held the
+swift dismissing pang, floated before him. He shook hands with Julius, and
+went upon his lonely way.
+
+
+
+
+LXVI
+
+
+Even the saintly of this earth are prone to rare, occasional displays of
+temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her descent from Eve by stamping
+her slender foot at her hulking Doctor; had, after a sudden outburst of
+passionate, unreasonable upbraiding, risen from the dinner-table and run
+out of the room, to hide a petulant, remorseful shower of tears.
+
+Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst--merely an invitation from
+Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were settled for the London summer season in
+Eaton Square, for Owen and his wife to spend the scorching months of
+August and September at the old home, perched on the South Dorset cliffs,
+among its thrush-haunted shrubberies of ilex and oleander and
+rose--nothing more.
+
+But Mrs. Owen Saxham had passionately resented the idea. Why never
+occurred to Saxham. He had long ago forgiven and forgotten Mildred's old
+treachery. If David's betrayal had brought him shame and anguish, it had
+borne him fruit of joy as well. And if the fruit might never be gathered,
+if its divine juices might never solace her husband's bitter thirst, at
+least, while he lived, it was his--to look at and long for. He owed that
+cruel bliss to his brother and that brother's wife. And their meeting had
+been, upon his side, free of constraint, unshadowed by the recollection of
+what had once appeared to him a base betrayal--a gross, foul, unpardonable
+wrong.
+
+Suppose he had married Mildred, and been uneventfully happy and
+successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would never have seen and known
+Lynette. She would never have come to him and laid in his the slight hand
+whose touch thrilled him to such piercing agony of yearning for the little
+more that would have meant so much--so much....
+
+Ah, yes! he was even grateful to Mildred. She had not worn well. She had
+grown thin and _passee_, and nervous and hysterical. But she was amiable,
+even demonstrative in her professions of admiration and enthusiasm for
+Owen's wife. Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the sisterliness
+of its expression when he was present, if in his absence it was tempered
+by a regretful sigh--even by a reference to the time:
+
+"_When poor dear Owen thought me the only woman worth looking at in the
+whole world._ Ah, well! that is all over, long ago!" Mildred would say,
+with an inflection that was meant to be tenderly reassuring. And she
+would tilt her still pretty head on one side and smile with pensive
+kindness at her successor upon the throne of poor dear Owen's heart.
+
+These gentle, retrospective references were never made in the Doctor's
+hearing. With truly feminine tact they were reserved for Mrs. Owen's
+delectation. And possibly they might have rankled in those pretty
+shell-like ears, if their owner had loved Saxham.
+
+But Saxham knew that she did not;--had even ceased to wish that the
+miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be very dense. When she stamped
+her foot and cried, "I decline to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either
+with you or without you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to!
+If you can forget how hideously she and your brother have treated you, I
+cannot! I loathe treachery! I abominate ingratitude and deceit! And I hate
+her--and I shall not go!" Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had
+never before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He found
+his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had burst among the
+debris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner-table. Her fetters were
+galling her to agony, he knew! His square pale face grew more
+Rhadamanthine than ever, and the glass he had been filling with port
+overflowed unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure
+before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light silken draperies
+passed over the soft carpet. The door opened and shut with a slam. Lynette
+had left the room. As Saxham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure,
+mechanically sipping at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite,
+where the overset flower-glass, and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and
+the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson carpet, marked
+the haste and emotion of her departure, he said to himself that the West
+End upholsterer who had the contract for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must
+be warned to complete his work without delay.
+
+For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had been a Convent
+in the fifteenth century, and probably long before, the South Welsh home
+of his mother's girlhood, perched in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a
+wide shelf of the headland that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy
+shell-strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay ... Plas
+Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was to be Saxham's bequest
+to his young widow.
+
+Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had already been
+done to make the old home pleasant and charming. Nothing was needed but
+the upholsterer's finishing touches. Saxham had planned that Lynette
+should be there when he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that
+promise made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year
+before.
+
+He had always meant to keep it, but not when the north-east gales of
+winter and spring should be sweeping over the mountain-passes and lashing
+the waves to madness; not when the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds
+should have piled the south-west horizon with scowling blue-black
+ramparts, topped by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous
+heights built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added grandeur
+and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and appalling precipices of
+snow-helmed Frore and her daughters.
+
+When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in sweetness, Saxham
+would keep his promise. When the swallows should hatch out their young
+broods between the huge stones that the hands of men who returned to dust
+cycles of centuries ago hauled up with the twisted hide-rope and the
+groaning crane, to rear with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two
+hundred feet above the waves that now break a mile away, the Lonely Tower,
+now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep that broods over Herion.
+When those blocks of cyclopaean masonry should be tufted with the golden
+wallflower and the perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate
+blossom of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the little
+blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the big whisky-flask
+should come into use.
+
+When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be covered for leagues
+by the perfumed cloth-of-gold spread by the broom and the furze; when the
+innumerable little yellow dwarf-roses should blossom on their prickly
+bushes, thrusting pertly through the powdery white sand, and every hollow
+and hillock should be gay with the star convolvulus and the flaunting
+scarlet poppies--then Death should come, borne on winged feet, and bearing
+the sword of keenness, to sever the iron bonds of Andromeda chained to the
+rock. And here was Summer, knocking at the door!
+
+
+
+
+Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out and ask the reason of
+her strange display of emotion. Only a husband could do that who had the
+right to take her in his arms and kiss the last remaining traces of her
+tears away. Saxham went to his consulting-room, and while all the clocks
+of London made time, and the moon veered southward, and the stars rose and
+set, he toiled over his notes and case-books in the brilliant circle cast
+by the shaded electric lamp upon his writing-table, and the tide in the
+big whisky-flask in the table-drawer ebbed low.
+
+Hours hence he laid down his pen. The flask had long been emptied; the
+alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey chambers of his brain. Weariness
+of life weighed on him like a leaden panoply. He had almost stretched his
+hand to take the little blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting in the
+deep table-drawer aside the drained flask before sleep overcame him. His
+head sank against the chair-back. His was a sudden, heavy lapsing into
+forgetfulness, unmarred by dreams.
+
+
+
+
+Time sped. The silver table-clock, the clock upon the mantelshelf, and the
+grandfather clock in the corner, ran a race with the chronometer in the
+pocket of the sleeping man. The brilliant unwavering circle of electric
+light did not reach the face of the Dop Doctor. It bathed his hands, that
+hung lax over the arms of the Sheraton chair, and tipped his lifted chin,
+leaving the strong brow and closed eyes in shadow. But as the pale glimmer
+of dawn began to outline the edges of the blinds and stretched at length a
+broad, pointing finger across the quiet room, the sleeping face showed
+greyish pale and luminous as a drawing by Whistler in silver-point.
+
+The dawn had not rested on it long before there came a knock upon the
+panel of the consulting-room door. It was so faint and diffident a knock,
+no wonder it passed unheeded. Then the door opened timidly, and a slender
+figure in pale flowing draperies of creamy embroidered cashmere stole upon
+small, noiseless, slippered feet over the thick Turkey carpet.
+
+It was Lynette. She had risen from her bed, and looked out from the
+landing into the hall below, and, seeing the light of the unextinguished
+lamp shining under the lintel of the consulting-room door, had stolen
+timidly down to ask Owen's pardon. Why had she behaved so badly? She could
+not explain. Only she was sorry. She must tell him so. His name was upon
+her lips, when she saw the Dop Doctor sleeping in his chair.
+
+Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side. And then--it was to
+her as though she looked upon her husband's face for the first time.
+
+There was no stain of his secret excess upon it--no bloating of the
+features. You would have said this was a sane and strong and temperate
+man, upon whom the mighty brother of all-conquering Death had come, like
+one armed, and overthrown in the heat and stress of the life-battle. Only
+the sorrow of a suffering soul was written as deeply on that pale mask of
+human flesh as though the sculptor-slaves of a Pharao, dead seven thousand
+years agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, resistless temper in the
+diamond-hard Egyptian granite.
+
+He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle twitched as Lynette bent
+over and looked at him. A mass of her red-brown hair, heavy with the
+weight of its own glossy luxuriance, slipped from her half-bared bosom as
+she leaned over him, and fell upon his breast. A sudden blush burned over
+her as it fell. He never stirred. But as though the rod of Moses had
+touched the rock in Horeb, one slow tear oozed from between Saxham's black
+fringed, close-sealed eyelids, and hung there, a burnished, trembling
+point of steely light. And the deep, still, manly anguish of his face
+cried out to the reawakening womanhood in Lynette, and a strange, new,
+overwhelming emotion seized and shook her as a stream of white and liquid
+fire seemed to pass into her veins and mingle with her blood.
+
+She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart and bated
+breath, upon the living page before her eyes.
+
+In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, that face of Saxham's
+pleaded with her. In its stern acceptance of suffering and disappointment
+for Saxham, in its rugged confrontation of the inevitable; in its resolute
+long-suffering and grim patience; in its silent abnegation of any claim
+upon her gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness, the face was
+more than eloquent to-night. In the pride that would never stoop to beg
+for pity--would rather die hungered than accept one crumb of grudged and
+measured love; in its secret, inscrutable, unyielding loyalty to that
+promise given to a dead man; in the nobility of its refusal to shine
+brighter in its faith and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that
+other man's mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony
+of love for her, insensible and careless; in the sick despair that had
+given up and left off hoping: even in the pride that had--or so it seemed
+to her--asserted itself at the last, and said, "I have left off crying for
+the moon; I wish for your love no longer!"--it pleaded--pleaded.... Words
+struggled for answering utterance in her, but none came.... She leaned
+nearer, drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips lightly
+upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of black meeting eyebrow
+smudged across it, and then, with a sudden leap and thrill, she knew....
+
+All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only this man mattered who
+sat sleeping in the chair. How easy to awaken him with a touch, and tell
+him all! She dared not, though she longed to.
+
+He was her master as well as her mate. When he had said to her that he had
+ceased to care, his eyes had given his words the lie. He had looked at
+her.... She shivered deliciously at the recollection of that look. If he
+were to open those stern, ardent eyes now, he would know her his. His--all
+his, to deal with as he chose!... His alone!
+
+If Saxham had awakened then.... But he slept on. She did not dare to kiss
+that broad white buckler of his forehead again. She kissed the sleeve of
+his coat instead, and, scared by a sudden sigh and movement of one of the
+hands that hung over the chair-arms, gathered her draperies around her,
+and stole as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam, out of the room.
+
+
+
+
+LXVII
+
+
+It was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at Herion is wont
+to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper of angry wind and lashing
+rain. Lynette, who had risen from her bed and thrown her dressing-gown
+about her, to kneel on the broad window-seat and look out upon this
+strange new world, shivered, standing barefoot on the mossy carpet. Then
+she looked round the room, and smiled with delight. For she had found it,
+upon her arrival of the previous night, a reproduction, down to the
+smallest detail, of her blue-and-white bedroom at Harley Street, with this
+notable difference--that on the wall facing the bed-head hung a fine copy
+of a Millais portrait that was one of the treasures of Bawne House. Lady
+Bridget-Mary, in the glory of her beautiful youth, shone from the canvas
+splendid as a star.
+
+How kind, how kind of Owen!... Her eyes filled as she gazed, comparing the
+glowing, radiant face upon the canvas with the enlarged photograph of the
+Mother in her habit that stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little
+table beside the bed. A worn "Garden of the Soul" lay near, and the
+"Imitation" of inspired A Kempis. Both had been the Mother's gifts. The
+Breviary and the Little Office of Our Lady had belonged to the dead.
+Lynette had brought these treasured possessions with her from Harley
+Street, leaving the ivory Crucifix hanging in its place above the vacant
+pillow. So many sleepless nights she had known of late upon that pillow
+that there were faint bluish-shaded hollows under the beautiful eyes, and
+wistful lines about the mouth.
+
+Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when the heavy tress of
+hair dropped from her bosom upon the unconscious breast above which she
+bent, an insurmountable wall of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and
+of stern, self-concentrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up
+between them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there.
+
+His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights, but she had never
+ventured upon another stolen visit to Saxham's consulting-room. The memory
+of that kiss she had put upon the velvety-smooth space above the broad
+meeting eyebrows stung in her like a sense of guilt, and yet it had its
+sweetness. She had claimed her right. The man was hers, though she might
+never be his.... To know it was to realise at once her riches and her
+poverty.
+
+Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain had come to her the
+knowledge of the true herb needed for her healing. The unsated hunger for
+sympathy and love and loveliness, the loneliness that gnawed him, she
+comprehended now. And as she looked about her at the dainty,
+carefully-chosen furniture, and the exquisite old-world-patterned chintz
+draperies, recognising what his care had been to please her, and how every
+little taste and preference of hers had been remembered and gratified, a
+sense of her own ingratitude pierced her to the quick.
+
+She had parted from Owen without one tender word, without even one glance
+of greater kindness than she would have bestowed upon a stranger. She
+ached with futile remorse at the recollection of that frigid, distant
+good-bye at Euston Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill laugh had jangled
+through Major Bingo's blustering admonitions to perspiring porters to put
+the luggage in one compartment, to stow canvas bags of golf-clubs and
+fishing-rods in the racks, and to damage bicycles at their personal peril,
+since the company evaded liability.
+
+It had been Saxham's wish that Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche should be his
+wife's guests at Plas Bendigaid. Looking from her bedroom casements over
+the syringas and lilacs and larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and
+hollies of the low-walled garden that ended at the sheer cliff-edge, from
+whence you looked down upon the tops of the pines and chestnuts, whose
+green foliage hid the shining metals of the iron way, and made a sea of
+verdure in place of the salt blue waves that once had lapped and sighed
+there--gazing across the powdery sand-dunes that were prickly with
+sea-holly and gay with flaunting poppies and purple scabious, the pink and
+white convolvulus, and the thorny yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds
+nourishment in the pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white
+breakers that rose and fell more than a mile away. Lynette sighed a small
+sigh of resignation at the prospect of long weeks to be spent in the
+society of these pleasant, well-bred, rather fidgety people Owen had
+chosen to bear her company.
+
+Of course, Owen could not leave his patients! He had explained that, and
+Lady Hannah and her big Major were old friends of hers and his. And the
+little woman with the jangling laugh and the snapping black eyes had known
+the Mother in her youth....
+
+At that remembrance Lynette's eyes went lovingly to the copy of the
+Millais portrait, and as the sun burst through the streaming wind-chased
+clouds, and smote bright diamond-rays from the dripping window-panes, the
+firm lips seemed to curve in the rare, sudden smile, the great grey eyes
+to gleam with life and tenderness.
+
+Ah, to spend a long, sweet summer here, alone with that dearest of all
+companions! Lynette's white throat swelled at the thought, and a mist
+blotted out the noble face, crowned with its diadem of rich black tresses.
+She wiped the tears away, and beheld a world miraculously changed. For
+land and sea were drenched in radiant sunshine.
+
+She unlatched the casements and threw them wide, and clean, salt, sweet
+air came streaming in, bringing the fragrance of mignonette and wallflower
+and sweetbriar, and the aromatic smells of the larch and pine. She leaned
+her white arms upon the grey stone window-sill, and drank the freshness
+and fragrance. And it seemed to her that this ancient grange, perched on
+the cliff-ledge in the tremendous shadow of Herion Castle, looking across
+the restless grey-blue waters of Nantmadoc Bay to St. Tirlan's Roads, was
+an ideal place to spend a honeymoon in, supposing you loved the man you
+had married, and were loved by him?
+
+Her bosom heaved and her wild heart fell to throbbing. A blush burned over
+her, and she drove the thought away. It came back, whispering like a guest
+who wishes not to be dismissed. It pleaded and urged and compelled.
+Something like a strong hand closed upon her heart and drew her, drew
+her.... A voice called to her in the silence that was only broken by the
+voices of birds, and the rustling of wind-stirred leaves, and the crying
+of the gulls above the white restless breakers. And the voice was Owen's.
+
+How strangely he had looked and spoken in that last moment of their
+parting! It came back in every detail for the hundredth time, as she
+leaned her white arms upon the window-sill and looked out with wistful
+eyes upon the beauty of the blossoming world.
+
+"Good-bye, good-bye! Be happy--and forget!"
+
+The train had begun to move as he uttered the words He had gripped her
+hand painfully and released it. As he drew his arm sharply away, a button,
+hanging loosely by a thread or two, became detached from his coat-cuff,
+and fell upon the rubber matting of the corridor. She was conscious of the
+button as Saxham and the crowded, grimy platform receded from her view.
+And before she went back to her seat in the compartment that had been
+reserved for herself and her fellow-travellers, she picked up the tiny
+disc of black horn, and secretly kissed it, and slipped it into her purse.
+She was silent and preoccupied during the eleven hours' journey, turning
+over and over in her mind, mentally repeating with every shade of
+expression that could vary their meaning, Saxham's strange words of
+farewell.
+
+She repeated them now aloud. They were tossed to and fro in her heart on
+waves of wonder and regret and apprehension. Did Owen really believe that
+to be happy she must forget him? Did he comprehend that she had long
+arrived at the conclusion that this loveless, joyless companionship,
+mocked by the name of marriage, was a miserable mistake?
+
+He had never been under any illusion as concerned it. He had accepted the
+iron terms of the contract she offered him with open eyes and full
+knowledge. She heard his voice again, as it had spoken in the Cemetery at
+Gueldersdorp, saying:
+
+"Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into a marriage
+that should be practically no marriage at all--a formal contract that is
+not wedlock? That might never change as Time went on, and ripen into the
+close union that physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women
+who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare?"
+
+That was just what she had asked. He had accepted her iron conditions, and
+stipulated for nothing. He had given his all. What had she given him?
+Nothing but suffering, being rendered pitiless by the ache and sting in
+her own bosom--absorbed, swallowed up by her agony of grief for the
+Mother, her passion of regret for dead Beauvayse.
+
+Beauvayse.... Suppose he and Owen Saxham stood side by side down there on
+the green short grass beneath her windows, which of the two men would
+to-day be the dearer and the more desired? The tall, soldierly young
+figure, with the sunburnt, handsome face, the gay, amorous, challenging
+glance, the red mouth that laughed under the golden moustache, and the
+shallow brain under the close-clipped golden curls, or the black-haired,
+hulking Doctor, with the square-cut, powerful face and the stern blue
+eyes, the man of heart and intellect, whose indomitable, patient
+tenderness had led a stricken girl back from the borders of that strange
+land where the brain-sick dwell, to wholesome consciousness of common
+things, and renewed healthfulness of body and of mind?
+
+She had hardly thanked him. She realised, with tears of shame, that this
+inestimable service she had accepted as matter of course. It was the way
+of Saxham's world to take of him and render nothing; he who was worthy to
+be a King among his fellow-men had been their servant as long as she had
+known him.
+
+To call him hard and stern, and seek his aid and sympathy at every pinch;
+to deem him cold and grudging, and accept his sacrifices as matter of
+course--that was the way of the world with grim-jawed, tender-hearted Owen
+Saxham. And she, who had done like the rest, knew him now, and valued him
+for what he was, and--loved him!
+
+
+
+
+For this was love that had come upon her like a strong man armed, not as
+he had shown himself to her before--laughing and merry, playful and
+sweet.... This was no ephemeral, girlish passion, evoked by the beauty of
+gay, wanton, grey-green jewel-eyes and a bold, smiling mouth. This was a
+love that drew you with irresistible strength, and knitted you to the
+soul, and the heart, and the flesh of another, until his breath became
+your breath, and his life your life. It called you with a voice that
+plucked at the secret chords of your being, and was stern and compelling
+rather than sweet to implore. It drew you to the beloved, not with ribbons
+of silk, but with ropes of tempered steel. It was potent and resistless
+as death, and infinitely deeper than the grave. It reached out aspiring
+hands beyond the grave, into Eternity. And, newly born as it rose in the
+heart of this woman, it was yet as old as Eden, where Heavenly Love
+created the earthly love, that is more than half-divine.
+
+Why, why had he sent her away, bidding her be happy and forget him?... The
+memory of his hollow eyes and haggard face pierced her to the quick. He
+was ill--he was in trouble; he had sent her away that he might bear the
+burden solely.... Or ... an iron hand closed upon her heart, and wrung it
+until points of moisture started upon her fair temples under the fine
+tendrils of her hair ... could the reason be--another woman?
+
+Another woman?... She set her little teeth and drove the unworthy thought
+away. But it came again and again--a persistent mental gadfly. Was Owen
+not worthy of love? Suppose another sweeter, gentler creature had found a
+throne in the heart that his wife had prized so lightly, would it be so
+very strange, after all? Perhaps that was why he had asked her to forgive
+him for having married her a little while ago!
+
+She dropped her head upon her folded arms, and sobbed at the thought. Then
+she dried her tears and rang for her maid, and presently came down to
+breakfast with Lady Hannah, smiling and composed, cheerful and attentive
+as a hostess ought to be. But her reddened eyelids told tales.
+
+"Misses her Doctor, no doubt," thought Lady Hannah, as she commended the
+country eggs and butter, and was enthusiastic over the thyme-scented Welsh
+mountain-honey, and apologetic over the absence of her Bingo from the
+board.
+
+She would carry her nuisance his breakfast with her own hands, she vowed,
+as he had left his man behind, on hearing from the Doctor that the house
+was a small one.
+
+"But why?" asked Lynette. "There is Marie, my maid, and the red-cheeked
+parlourmaid, whose name I don't yet know, and Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper
+..."
+
+"Who was Dr. Saxham's nurse when he was a little boy, and adores him. And
+Mrs. Pugh's husband, who is gardener, and handy-man, and coachman when
+required." Lady Hannah's laugh jangled out over the capacious tray,
+containing the comprehensive assortment of viands representing what the
+invalid was wont to term his "brekker." "But I'm not to be deprived of my
+privilege, for all that. Do you suppose you young married creatures are
+the only wives who enjoy cosseting their husbands? There! it's out, and I
+ought to be ashamed of myself, I suppose, but I'm not. Is that collared
+brawn on the sideboard? Bingo has a devouring passion for collared brawn."
+She added a goodly slice to the contents of the tray. "I warn you, if you
+regard the billing and cooing of a middle-aged couple as indecent," she
+went on, "to look the other way a great deal while we're here. For I was
+for the first time seriously smitten with my husband when he rode out to
+meet me, returning from ignoble captivity in the tents of Brounckers,
+eighteen months ago. When I nursed him through enteric in the Hospital at
+Frostenberg--I won't disguise it--I fell in love! With a bag of bones, for
+he was nothing else: but genuine passion is indifferent to the personal
+appearance of the beloved object, though I hadn't suspected it before. The
+wound completed my conquest, and since then I'm madly jealous if another
+woman looks at him!... I see red--green would be a better colour--because
+he prefers to have his valet brush his hair. I don't know that I didn't
+reduce the holding capacity of this house by a storey--there's a pun for
+you!--so as to engineer my hated rival being left at home in Wilton Place.
+Is that lovely murrey-coloured stuff in the cut-glass jar quince
+marmalade? No! I won't pamper Bingo, if he is the idol of my soul. And
+please don't wait for me. He likes me to take off the tops of his eggs for
+him, and he usually eats three...."
+
+Lady Hannah tripped off with her load, and deposited it before the idol,
+who was sitting up in a Japanese bed-jacket of wadded pink satin,
+left-handedly reading the Herion newspaper that comes out once a week, and
+is published at St. Tirlan's, twenty miles away.
+
+"I've made a discovery," she announced. "No, don't look frightened. It's
+only that poor Biddy's _belle trouvaille_ has got a heart. She's not the
+tinted Canova-nymph, the piece of correct inanity, I honestly believed
+her.... She idolised Biddy--small credit, for who could help it? She
+submitted to be adored by that poor foolish boy who's dead.... Now she's
+her black-avised Doctor's humble worshipper and slave."
+
+"Can't understand a woman worshippin' a chap with a chin like the bows of
+an armoured Destroyer, and eyebrows like another man's moustaches," Bingo
+objected.
+
+"Chin or no chin, eyebrows or not a hair, what does that count to a woman
+in love?" She placed the laden tray before him, and with a maternal air
+proceeded to tuck a napkin under his chin. He grumbled:
+
+"There's no knowin' what will take the female fancy. But even if you
+haven't harked away on a wrong scent, slave's a dash too strong. Struck me
+they parted uncommon chilly and off-hand at Euston yesterday mornin',
+considerin' they've not been married much above a year! Do take this thing
+from round my neck! Makes me feel like Little Willie!"
+
+Lady Hannah unpinned the napkin that framed the bulldog jowl, and said,
+patting the sandy-pink bullet-head:
+
+"That's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in amatory affairs. No Eyes sees
+two people part, 'uncommon off-hand and chilly.'" She mimicked Bingo's
+tone. "Eyes sees that and something more! A man's coat-button dropped on
+the floor of a railway carriage, for instance, and a young woman who slyly
+picks it up--silly little _gage d'amour_--and kisses it when a considerate
+observer pretends not to be looking, and hides it away! Is that evidence,
+Major Mole?"
+
+"By the Living Tinker!" he thundered, "I wouldn't have believed it of
+her!"
+
+"Of course you wouldn't!" She rummaged in an open suit-case. "What necktie
+do you want to wear to-day?"
+
+He mumbled ruefully, eyeing her over the coffee-cup:
+
+"Any of 'em. It don't matter which. They're all alike when you've tied
+'em!"
+
+She beamed at what seemed to her a gallant speech.
+
+"_Sans compliment?_ You really mean it? And you won't miss Grindlay so
+frightfully, after all?"
+
+He shook his head ambiguously.
+
+"I shan't begin really to suffer for Grindlay--not till it comes to
+tubbin' with one fin."
+
+"Mercy upon us!" She gasped in consternation. He said, controlling his
+features from wreathing into triumphant smiles:
+
+"You were so cast-iron certain you could fill his place, you know!"
+
+Her bright black eyes were hidden under abashed and drooping eyelids.
+Blushes played hide-and-seek in the small cheeks that were usually pale.
+
+"In--in everything essential," she stammered, avoiding his intolerable
+gaze.
+
+"Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in ordinary, everyday
+affairs!" The man pursued his advantage pitilessly. "Didn't you regard it
+as essential that I should wash?"
+
+She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him.
+
+"Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that decided me on
+marrying you was that you were invariably _propre comme un sou neuf_."
+
+"I thought, on mature reflection," said Bingo, lying down under the
+lightened tray with a replete and satisfied air, "that you would prefer a
+clean husband to a dirty one. Therefore I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay
+at the Herion Arms. That's his knock. Come in!"
+
+The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing respectfully at
+sight of her ladyship, who gave him a gracious good-morning, dissembling
+the intense relief experienced at sight of his smug, clean-shaven
+countenance.
+
+"Good-morning, Grindlay. I hope the Hotel people made you comfortable. And
+now you have arrived to take responsibility off my hands," she announced,
+"I'll go and get some breakfast."
+
+"Haven't you ... You're joking!" The tray shot from the bed into
+Grindlay's saving clutch as Bingo suddenly assumed the perpendicular. "You
+don't mean to say that you've been starving all the time I've been gorging
+myself like--like a boa-constrictor?" he demanded furiously. "Why on earth
+are women such blessed----"
+
+"--Idiots?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch her Parthian
+shaft. "Because if they were intellectual, logical beings they would know
+better than to lavish devotion upon stupid, selfish, unappreciative,
+heartless, dull dolts of men!"
+
+The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's face was a study in
+immobility. Bingo, after a little more meditation, ponderingly rose and
+submitted himself to the hands of the attendant. When the Major's toilet
+had reached the stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his
+reflections with a sigh.
+
+"Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her ladyship to be good enough
+to step up here. Tell her that your style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I
+want a little more imagination thrown into the thing! Hurry up, will you!"
+
+"O Lord! What a liar I am!" he murmured fervently, addressing his
+reflection in the glass. His wife's face appeared over his shoulder,
+bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she adroitly assumed the office
+vacated by the discarded Grindlay, who discreetly delayed his re-entrance
+on the scene:
+
+"So you can't get on, it appears, without your blessed idiot?"
+
+"Blessed angel, you mean!" said mendacious Bingo, blinking under a Little
+Lord Fauntleroy fringe. "You banged the door before I'd got out the word!"
+
+"If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed hair-brushes
+played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's head, "perhaps I might
+be induced to confide to you a piece of genuine Secret Intelligence."
+
+"Concernin'----?"
+
+"Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche."
+
+"Well, what of her?"
+
+She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But her eyes were
+misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily.
+
+"This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, that in your place
+she wouldn't have been one-millionth part as patient with a restless,
+ambitious woman cursed with an especial capacity for getting herself and
+other people into hot water." She made a little affected grimace that
+masked a genuine smart. "Not hot water only--boiling lava
+sometimes--fizzling vitriol----"
+
+He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and quivering chin:
+
+"Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like gout and the
+rest of it. You can't eradicate 'em, however much you try. It's like
+shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to change his colour. You can't for nuts;
+his spots are in his skin! See?"
+
+"_Merci du compliment!_" Her jangling laugh rang out as if a stick had
+been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. But her eyes were wet. His
+own eyes reverted to his reflection in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden
+bellow made her drop the comb.
+
+"My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! Made a Loop Railway down
+the middle of my head, unless my liver's making me see things curly. Don't
+swot at it any more; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once.... By
+the Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a brute!" he
+pleaded.
+
+"Darling!--dearest!--you haven't--you've never!... The boot's on the other
+leg, though wild horses wouldn't get you to own as much!" His strong left
+arm was round her slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's
+bulldog jowl. Bingo cleared his throat in his ponderous, scraping way,
+admitting:
+
+"Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so--of nights in bed at
+Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bombproof South, between ring-ups on the
+telephone when the off-duty men were snorin', and one had nothin' on the
+blessed earth to do but wonder whether one had a wife or not?"
+
+"There were people ready to tell you--years before we saw
+Gueldersdorp--that the one you'd got was as good as none...."
+
+"Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their opinions!" She felt
+his great muscles swell as the big hand tightened on her waist. "Though,
+mind you, there have been times when for your own sake, by Jingo! I'd have
+given all I was worth to have you a bit more like other women----"
+
+"Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win distinction as War
+Correspondents. Who funk raw-head and bloody bones"--she shook with a
+nervous giggle--"and all that sort of thing.... Would it please you to
+know that the plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last
+quill--that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic Partlet,
+clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement of the coop?"
+
+"You've said as much before!" he objected.
+
+"But now I mean it! Put me to the test. Let the house in Wilton
+Place--we'll live at Wrynche Rodelands, if you think you won't be bored?"
+
+He bellowed joyously!
+
+"Me bored! With ten thousand acres arable and wood and moorland to farm
+and preserve and shoot over, two first-class packs meetin' within a
+fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, the Committee of the local Polo
+Association shriekin' for a President, and the whole County beggin' me
+with tears in its eyes to take the hint a Certain Person dropped when he
+gave me my C.B., and accept the Crown Commission as Lord-Lieutenant!
+'Bored'--I like that!"
+
+"If you would like it, be it!" she flashed. "Trust me to back you up. I
+can and I will! I'll help you entertain the military authorities and their
+women, keep the Rolls, sit on the Bench when you weigh in as Chief
+Magistrate, and prompt you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things to
+one man--and you shall be the man! Only"--she laughed hysterically, her
+face hidden against his big shoulder--"I don't quite know how far these
+things are compatible with my new role!"
+
+"Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home Coop." His big hand patted
+her almost paternally. "Leave cluckin' to hens with families. Do you
+suppose I'm such a pachydermatous ass that I can't understand that home is
+a make-believe to a real woman, when--when there isn't even one chicken to
+tuck under her wing! Worse luck for me and you!"
+
+She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to him. Her black
+eyes were shining through the tears that rose and brimmed over and fell.
+
+"If I told you that the luck had changed, would that make you happy?"
+
+He cried out with a great oath:
+
+"Yes, by G----!" and caught her to his leaping heart.
+
+
+
+
+LXVIII
+
+
+In the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many interviews held
+with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch and dinner, learned much anent
+the difficulty of obtaining fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as
+regards the Satanic duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist
+butcher will substitute New Zealand lamb for the native animal, and still
+more about Saxham.
+
+Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the Doctor's
+grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's worth of Master Owen,
+from the first time she set eyes on him in a white frock, with a
+sausage-roll curl and diamond-patterned socks. She had a venerable and
+spotty photograph of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a
+velvet suit and lace collar, and another photograph, coloured by hand,
+taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for out of his own pocket-money, to
+send to Janellan, who had nursed him through a holiday scarlet-fever. And
+regularly had her blessed boy remembered her and Tafydd, said Janellan,
+until the Cruel Time came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then
+Mrs. Saxham died, and the Captain--mentioned by Janellan with the ringing
+sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement--had turned her and her old man
+out of the Plas "without as much as that!"--here Janellan snapped her
+strong thumb-nail against her remaining front tooth--in recognition of
+their forty years of faithful service.
+
+But Master Owen, coming to his own again, "and 'deed an' 'deed, but the
+Plas ought to have been his from the beginning!" had sought out the old
+couple, living in decent poverty at St. Tirlan's, and reinstated them in
+their old home. And well might Tafydd, who was a better judge of the
+points of a pig than any man in Herion--or in all Wales for the matter of
+that--well might Tafydd declare that the Lord never made a better man than
+Dr. Owen Saxham! What grand things they had said of him in the papers! No
+doubt the young mistress would have plenty more to tell that had not got
+into print?
+
+"I can tell you many things of the Doctor," said Lynette, smiling in the
+black-eyed, streaky-apple face "that you and Tafydd will be proud and glad
+to hear."
+
+She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule but this morning
+she stooped and kissed the red-veined, wrinkled cheek within Janellan's
+white-quilled cap-border. Then, her household duties done, she pinned a
+rough, shady straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose
+chamois-leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were,
+perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from the hall-rack, ran
+down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the spidery, red-rusted iron
+foot-bridge that spanned the railway-line, descended upon the farther side
+of the wood of chestnut and larch that made green shadows at the base of
+the cliff, and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the free, undulating
+gait she had acquired from the Mother, towards the restless line of white
+breakers that rose and fell a mile away.
+
+She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom-company; a new hope gave
+her strength. She drank in long draughts of the strong, salt, fragrant
+air, and as it filled her lungs, knew her soul brimmed with fresh delight
+in the beauty of the world. And a renewed and quickened sense of the joy
+of life made music of the beating of her pulses and the throbbing of her
+heart.
+
+She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a daughter of this
+sea-girt Britain: the blue, restless waves beyond that line of white
+frothing breakers washed the shores of the Mother's beloved green island,
+Emerald Airinn, set in silver foam. A few miles, St. George's Channel
+spanned--then straight as the crow flies over Wicklow, Queen's County,
+King's County, taking Galway at the acute angle of the wild mallard's
+flight; and there would be the chained lakes and winding silver rivers,
+the grey-green mountains and the beetling cliffs, the dreamy valleys and
+wild glens of Connemara, with the ancient towers of Castleclare rising
+from its mossed lawns studded with immemorial oaks. And Loch Kilbawne
+among the wild highlands, and Lochs Innsa and Barre, and Ballybarron
+Harbour, with its Titanic breakwater, and three beacons, and the dun-brown
+islands bidden in their veil of surf-edged spindrift, shaken by the voices
+of hidden waters roaring in their secret caves.
+
+A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden eyes dreamed as
+she walked on swiftly, a slender figure dressed in a plain skirt of rough
+grey-blue, and a loose-sleeved blouse of thick white silk, her slight
+waist belted with a silver-mounted lizard-skin girdle, a pleasant tinkle
+of silver chatelaine appendages accompanying her steps.
+
+And those steps were to her no longer uncompanioned. It was as though the
+Mother were living, so enfolding and close was the sense of her presence
+to-day. God was in His Heaven, and the world, His footstool, bore the
+visible impress of His Feet. And it seemed to Lynette, who had learned to
+see the faces of Christ and of His Mother Mary through the lineaments of
+the earthly face that had first looked love upon herself in her terrible
+abandonment, that those Divine and glorious countenances looked down on
+her and smiled. And her chilled faith spread quivering wings, basking in
+their ineffable mild radiance as the little blue and tortoiseshell
+butterflies basked in the glorious sunshine that had followed the
+morning's storm.
+
+The tangible presence seemed to move beside her, through the white powdery
+sand. Over the knotted grasses, between the tufts of poppies and the
+prickly little yellow roses that fringed the hollows, the garments of
+another seemed to sweep beside her own. The folds of a thin veil upborne
+on the elastic breeze fluttered beside her cheek, blew against her lips,
+bringing the rare delicate fragrance--the familiar perfume that clung to
+everything the Mother habitually wore and used and touched. She did not
+look round, or stretch out her hand. She walked along, drinking in
+blissfulness and companionship at every pore of her thirsty soul, joyfully
+realising that this would last; that by-and-by the great void of
+loneliness would not close in on her again.
+
+Only the night before, upon the brink of the supreme discovery that the
+dead in Christ are not only living in Him, but for us also who are His,
+she had hesitated and doubted. Before the sunrise of this glorious day she
+had learned to doubt no more.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She had been restless and unhappy. Saxham had not written for a week. She
+bitterly missed the short, cold, kind letters in the clear, small, firm
+handwriting, that had reached her at intervals of three days, to be
+answered by her constrained and timid notes, hoping that he was well and
+not overworking, describing the place and her pleasure in it, without
+mention of her loneliness; giving details of Major Wrynche's progress
+towards recovery, and left-handed attempts at golf, winding up with
+messages from Lady Hannah and dutiful remembrances from Tafydd and
+Janellan, and signed, his affectionate wife, Lynette Saxham.
+
+Trite and laboured and schoolgirlish enough those epistles seemed to their
+writer. To Saxham they were drops of rain upon the parching soil of his
+heart, the one good that life had for him in this final lap of the race.
+And yet he had ceased to write that they might come no more.
+
+If he had known how his own letters to her were welcomed, how tenderly
+they were read and re-read, how sweetly kept and cherished.... But he did
+not know! He could only look ahead, and strain on to the nearing goal with
+the great, dim, mysterious curtain hanging beyond it, hearing the thudding
+of his wearied heart, and the whistling of those sharp breaths in his
+strained lungs, and the measured sound of his own footfalls bearing him on
+to the end, while night closed in on her, fevered and wakeful in her bed,
+thinking of him, praying for him, longing for the sight and sound of him.
+Sleep, when it came now, brought her dreams less crystal than of old. Hued
+with the fiery rose of opals some, because in these he loved her; and that
+shadowy woman, in whose existence she only half-believed, had no part in
+him at all. But on the night preceding the revelation she had not dreamed.
+
+She awakened in the grey of dawn, when the thrushes were calling, and lay
+straight and still, listening to the glad bird-voices from the garden, her
+soft, fringed eyelids closed, her white breasts gently heaving, her small
+feet crossed, her slender, bare arms pillowing the little Greek head; a
+heavy plait of the silken wealth that crowned it drawn down on either side
+of the sweet, pale face and the pure throat, intensifying their virginal
+beauty. The dull smart of loneliness, the famished ache of loss, were gone
+altogether. She felt strangely peaceful and calm and glad. Then she knew
+she was not at Herion; she was not even in London.... She was back at the
+Convent, in the little whitewashed room with the stained deal
+furniture--the room with the pleasant outlook on the gardens that had been
+hers from the first. Surely it was past the rising hour? Ah, yes! but she
+had had a touch of fever. That was why she was lying here so quietly, with
+the Mother sitting by the bed.
+
+There could be no doubt.... The light firm, pressure that she knew of old
+was upon her bosom, just above the beating of her heart.... That was
+always the Mother's way of waking you. She sat beside you, and looked at
+you, and touched you, and presently your eyes opened, that was all!...
+Thinking this, a streak of gold glimmered between Lynette's thick dusky
+lashes; her lips wore a smile of infinite content. She stole a glance, and
+there it was, the large, beautiful, lightly clenched hand. The loose
+sleeve of thin black serge flowed away from the strong, finely moulded
+wrist; the white starched _guimpe_ showed snowy between the drooping folds
+of the nun's veil.... These familiar things Lynette drank in with a sense
+of unspeakable content and pleasure. Then--her eyes opened widely, and she
+knew.
+
+She was looking into eyes that had seen the Beatific Vision--great grey
+eyes that were unfathomable lakes of heavenly tenderness and love divine.
+And the face that framed them was a radiant pale splendour, indescribable
+in its glorious beauty, unfathomable in its fulfilled peace. Her own eyes
+drank peace from them, deeply, insatiably, while the Herion thrushes sang
+their dewy matins, and the scent of mignonette and sweet-peas and early
+roses mingled with the smell of the sea, stole in at the open casement
+where the white blind swelled out like a breeze-filled sail.
+
+How long Lynette lay there storing up content and rapture she did not
+know, or want to know. But at last the wonder of those eyes came
+nearer--nearer! She felt the dear pressure of the familiar lips upon her
+own. A fragrance enveloped her, an exquisite joy overbrimmed her, as a
+voice--the beloved, unforgotten voice of matchless music--spoke. It said:
+
+"_Love your husband as I loved Richard! Be to a child of his what I have
+been to you!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Eyes and face and voice, white hand and flowing veil, were all gone then.
+Lynette sat up, sobbing for joy, and blindly holding out her arms, and the
+rising sun looked over the mountains eastward, and drew one hushing,
+golden finger over the lips of the cold, grey, whispering sea.
+
+
+
+
+LXIX
+
+
+A thin, subterraneous screech, accompanied by a whiff of cinder-flavoured
+steam, heralded the Down Express as it plunged out of the cliff-tunnel,
+flashed across an intervening space, and was lost among the chestnuts and
+larches. A metallic rattle and scroop told that the official in the box on
+the other side of the Castle bluff had opened the points. And hearing the
+clanking bustle of the train's arrival in the station, Lynette reminded
+herself with a sigh of relief that her maid was packing, that she would
+presently make her excuses to Major Wrynche and Lady Hannah, and that the
+midnight up-mail should take her home to Owen.
+
+Her course lay clear now, pointed out by the beloved, lost hand. But for
+this Heaven-sent light that had been cast upon her way, Lynette knew that
+she might have wandered on in doubt and darkness to the very end.
+
+She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the most of men, and
+are doomed to receive in grudging measure. A pliant, dependent,
+essentially feminine creature, she was made to lean and look up, to be
+swayed and influenced by the stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and
+led, and to love the guide.
+
+Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had worked their miracle
+of form and fragrance and colour, the ripened carpels waited, conscious of
+the crown of tall golden-powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the
+homely hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated yet
+with the beating of celestial wings.
+
+She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw down the
+pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her ignorance of herself
+and of him. She would humble herself to entreat for that rejected crown of
+wifehood. Even though that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her,
+she said to herself that she would win him back again.
+
+She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the frothing line
+of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints of her little brown shoes
+were brimmed with sea-water, she lifted her skirt daintily, and went
+forward still. Numberless delicate little winged shells were scattered
+over the moist surface, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully
+tinted. Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was
+as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep-sea garden,
+had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's marge. Lynette cried out
+with pleasure at their beauty, stooped and gathered a palmful, then
+dropped them. She stood a moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging
+freshness, then turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen
+companion at her side.
+
+The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a distant
+golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed bare of human
+figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks of white clouds across the
+harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. It sang a thin, sweet song in
+Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. And innumerable larks carolled,
+building spiral towers of melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a
+human note mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the
+little, black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn-bottles. And
+Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone.
+
+It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown shoes upon
+the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked down. A pearly-pale cup
+fringed with blazing poppies held the lost treasure of some weeping
+mother--a flaxen-headed coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in
+expensive, diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human
+peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valenciennes.
+Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby crowed and gurgled; then,
+as a little cry of womanly delight in her beauty and womanly pity for her
+isolation broke from Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the
+stranger's face, narrowing her eyes.
+
+Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green, long-shaped and
+thick-lashed; bold red, laughing mouth--where had Lynette seen them
+before? With a strange sense of renewing an experience she ran down into
+the hollow, and dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it
+up and kissed it soundly.
+
+"Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the kisses. "Where are
+mother and nurse?"
+
+"Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of pearly-golden brows,
+and a little querulous cry of impatience, the Hon. Alyse Rosabel Tobart
+squirmed out of the arms that held her, exhibiting in the process the most
+cherubic of pink legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and
+wriggled back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she answered
+no more questions, but with truly aristocratic composure resumed her
+interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet of embroidered cambric and
+quilled lace with sand. When the bonnet would hold no more, she had
+arranged to fill her shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of
+having no other engagement so absorbing.
+
+Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Perhaps the missing
+guardians of this lost jewel were quite near after all, sitting with books
+and work and other babies in the shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from
+whence this daring adventurer had escaped unseen.... She ran up the steep
+side where the frieze of poppies nodded against the sky, and the white
+sand streamed back from under the little brown shoes that had trodden upon
+Saxham's heart so heavily.
+
+No one was near. Only in the distance, toiling over the dry waves of the
+sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by which the hilly main street of
+Herion may be gained, went a white perambulator, canopied with white, and
+propelled by a nurse in starched white skirts and flying white
+bonnet-strings--a nurse who kept her head well down, and was evidently
+reading a novel as she went. Some yards in advance a red umbrella bobbed
+against the breeze like a giant poppy on a very short stem. The lady who
+carried the flaming object was young; that much was plain, for the
+fluttering heliotrope chiffons of her gown were held at a high, perhaps at
+an unnecessarily lofty, altitude above the powdery sand, and her
+plumply-filled and gleaming stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred
+with black, and her dainty little high-heeled shoes were very much in
+evidence as they topped a rising crest. Then they disappeared over the
+farther edge, the red umbrella followed, and the nurse, in charging up the
+steep after her mistress, discovered, perhaps by a glance of investigation
+underneath the canopy, prompted by a too tardy realisation of the
+suspicious lightness of the perambulator, that the shell was void of the
+pearl.
+
+Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek, glimpsed the red
+umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-crest, comprehended the horrible
+consternation of mistress and maid. She must signal to them--cry out....
+Involuntarily she gave the call of the Kaffir herd: the shrill, prolonged
+ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across the miles of
+karroo or high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved it,
+standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high
+crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow--a squat, blue dwarf with arms
+out of all proportion--flourished and gesticulated at her feet.
+
+
+
+
+LXX
+
+
+It is Fate who comes hurrying to Lynette under the becoming shadow of a
+red umbrella, on the starched and rustling skirts of the agitated nurse,
+whose mouth is seen to be shaping sentences long before she can be heard
+panting:
+
+"Did you call, 'm? Her ladyship thought you did, and might have found ...
+Oh, ma'am! have you seen a baby? We've lost ours!"
+
+Lynette nods and laughs reassuringly, pointing down into the hollow. The
+nurse, with a squawk of relief, leaves her perambulator bogged in the
+sand, flutters up the powdery rise like some large species of seagull,
+squawks again, and swoops to retrieve her lost charge. Miss Baby,
+perfectly contented until the scarlet face and whipping ribbons of her
+attendant appear over the edge of her Paradise, throws herself backwards,
+strikes out with kicking, dimpled legs, and sets up an indignant roar.
+
+"There now--there! 'A was a pessus!" vociferates the owner of the
+streaming ribbons and the scarlet countenance. "And did she tumble out of
+her pram, the duck, and wicked Polly never see her? And thank Good
+Gracious, not a bruise on her blessed little body-woddy, nor nothing but
+the very tiddiest scratch!"
+
+"Which is not your fault, Watkins, I am compelled to say it," pronounces
+the Red Umbrella, arriving breathless and decidedly indignant, on the
+scene. "The idea of a person of your class being so wrapped up in a rotten
+penny novel that you can't even keep your eye upon the darling entrusted
+to your charge is too perfectly shameful for words. Baby, don't cry," she
+continues, as the repentant Polly appears, bearing the retrieved treasure.
+"Come to mummy and kiss her, and tell her all about it, do!"
+
+"I sa-t!" bellows Baby, now keenly alive to the pathos of the situation,
+and digging a sandy pink fist into either eye ...
+
+"Don't, then, you obstinate little pig!" returns Red Umbrella, with
+maternal asperity. She looks up to the fair vision that stands on high
+amongst the poppies, and nods and smiles. "However I am to thank you!...
+Such a turn when we missed her!..." She utters these incoherences with a
+great deal of eye-play, pressing a small, plump, jewelled hand, with
+short, broad fingers, and squat, though elaborately rouged and polished,
+nails, upon the bountiful curve of a Parisian corsage. "My heart did a
+double flip-flap ... hasn't done thumping yet. Am I pale still, Watkins?"
+She appeals to the recreant Watkins, who is busily repacking Baby in her
+luxurious perambulator. "I felt to go as white as chalk!"
+
+"Perfect gassly, my lady!" agrees Watkins, and it occurs to Lynette that
+the process of blanching must, taking into consideration the artificial
+blushes that bloom so thickly upon the pretty, piquante face under the red
+umbrella, have been attended with some difficulty.
+
+Everything is round in the coquettish face, shaded by a hat that is an
+expensive triumph of Parisian millinery, trimmed with a whole branch of
+wistaria in bloom. The big brown eyes are round, so is the cherry-stained
+mouth, so is the pert, button nose. The thick, dark eyebrows are like
+inky half-moons, in the middle of the little round chin a circular dimple
+is cunningly set. Round, pinky-olive shoulders and rounded arms gleam
+temptingly through the bodice of heliotrope chiffon. Other roundnesses,
+artfully exaggerated by the Parisian _modiste_, are liberally suggested,
+as Red Umbrella gathers her frothy draperies about her hips, lifting her
+multitudinous frills to reveal black and scarlet openwork silk stockings,
+bedecking her plump legs and tiny feet, whose high-heeled silver-buckled
+shoes are sinking in the hot, white, powdery sand.
+
+"Please don't go on! I haven't half thanked you," she pleads, still
+pressing the podgy little bejewelled paw upon the heaving corsage. Then
+she sinks, with an air of graceful languor, down upon a long, prostrate
+monolith of granite, that is thickly crusted with velvety orange lichen
+and grey-green moss, starred with infinitesimal yellow flowers. And
+Lynette, habitually courteous and rather amused, and not at all unwilling
+to know a little more of the affected, slangy, overdressed little woman,
+sits down upon the other end of the sprawling stone column, and says,
+smiling at Baby, who is clutching at a hovering butterfly with her eager,
+dimpled hands:
+
+"Of course, it was a terrible shock to you when you missed her. She is
+such a darling! Aren't you, Baby?"
+
+Baby, her long, grey-green eyes melting and gleaming dangerously, her
+golden head tilted coquettishly, and a gay, provoking laugh on the bold
+red mouth, makes another snatch, captures the hovering blue butterfly,
+opens the rosy hand, and with a wry face of disgust, drops the crushed
+morsel over the edge of the perambulator. The superb, unconscious cruelty
+of the act gives Lynette a little pang even as she goes on:
+
+"She was not in the least shy. I think we should soon be very great
+friends. May her nurse bring her to see me sometimes? Most babies love
+flowers, and there is a garden full of them where I am staying. Do you
+live here?"
+
+"Live here? Gracious, no!" Red Umbrella opens the round, brown eyes that
+Baby's are so unlike in shape and expression, and shrugs her pretty
+shoulders as high as the big ruby buttons that blaze in her pretty ears.
+"Me and Baby are only visiting--stopping with her nurse and my two maids
+for a change at the Herion Arms--me having been recommended sea-air by the
+doctors for tonsils in the throat. The house is advertised as an
+up-to-date hotel in the ABC Railway Guide, but diggings more wretched I
+never struck, and you do fetch up in some queer places on tour in the
+Provinces, let alone the States," says Red Umbrella, tossing the
+wistaria-wreathed hat. "Which may be a surprise to people who think it
+must be nothing but jam for those ladies and gentlemen that have made
+their mark in the Profession."
+
+"Yes?"
+
+Lynette's golden eyes smile back into the laughing brown ones with
+pleasant friendliness, combined with an irritating lack of comprehension.
+And Red Umbrella, who derives a considerable income from percentages upon
+the sale of her photographs, and is conscious that her celebrated features
+are figuring upon several of the postcards that hang up for sale in the
+window of the only stationer in Herion, is a little nettled.
+
+"I refer to the stage, of course." She fingers a long neck-chain of
+sapphires, and tinkles her innumerable bangles with their load of jingling
+charms. "But perhaps you're not a Londoner? Or you don't patronise the
+theatre?"
+
+"Oh yes. We have a house in Harley Street. And I am very fond of the
+Opera," says Lynette, smiling still, "and of seeing plays too; and I often
+go to the theatre with Lord and Lady Castleclare, or Major Wrynche and
+Lady Hannah, when my husband is too much engaged to take me. One of the
+last pieces we saw before we left town was 'The Chiffon Girl' at The
+Variety," she adds.
+
+"Indeed! And how did you like 'The Chiffon Girl'?" asks the lady of the
+red umbrella, with a gracious and encouraging smile. Unconscious tribute
+rendered to one's beauty and one's genius is ever well worth the having.
+And the editor of the _Keyhole_, a certain weekly journal of caterings for
+the curious, will gladly publish any little anecdote which will serve the
+dual purpose of amusing his readers and keeping the name of Miss Lessie
+Lavigne before the public eye. "How did you enjoy the performance of the
+lady who played the part?"
+
+Lynette ponders, and her fine brows knit. Vexed and indignant, Red
+Umbrella, scanning the thoughtful face, admits its youth, its
+high-breeding, its delicate, chiselled beauty, and the slender grace of
+the supple figure in the grey-blue serge skirt and white silk blouse; nor
+is she slow to appreciate the value of the diamond keeper on the slight,
+fine, ungloved hand that rests upon the sun-hot moss between them.
+
+"I think I felt rather sorry for her," says the soft cultured voice with
+the exquisite, precise inflections. The golden eyes look dreamily out over
+the undulating sand-dunes beyond the crisp line of foam to the silken
+shimmer of the smoothing water. The little wind has fallen. It is very
+still. The nurse, sitting on a hillock of bents in dutiful nearness to the
+perambulator, has taken out her paper-covered volume, and is deep in a
+story of blood and woe. And Baby, a sleepy, pink rosebud, dozes among her
+white embroidered pillows, undisturbed by Red Umbrella's shrill
+exclamation:
+
+"Sorry for her! Why on earth should you be?"
+
+The shriek startles Lynette. She brings back her grave eyes from the
+distance, flushing faint coral pink to the red-brown waves at her fair
+temples.
+
+"She--she had on so few clothes!" she says. And there is a profound
+silence, broken by Lessie's saying with icy dignity:
+
+"If the Lord Chamberlain opined I'd got enough on, I expect that ought to
+do for you!"
+
+"I--don't quite understand."
+
+Lynette opens her golden eyes in sincere wonder at the marvellous change
+that has been wrought in the little lady who sits beside her.
+
+"_I_ am Miss Lessie Lavigne," says the little lady, with an angry toss of
+the pretty head, adorned with the wistaria-trimmed hat. "At least, that is
+the name I am known by in the profession."
+
+"I beg your pardon," Lynette falters. "I did not recognise you. I am
+afraid you must think me rather rude!"
+
+"Oh, pray don't mention it!" cries the owner of the red umbrella.
+"Rude?--not in the least!"
+
+Mere rudeness would be preferable, infinitely, to the outrage the little
+lady has suffered. She, Lessie Lavigne, the original exponent of the role
+of "The Chiffon Girl," the idol of the pit and gallery, Queen regnant over
+the hearts beating behind the polished shirt-fronts in the stalls, has
+lived to hear herself pitied--not envied, but commiserated--for the
+scantiness of the costume in which it is alike her privilege and her joy
+to trill and caper seven times in the week before her patrons and adorers.
+Small wonder that she feels her carefully-manicured nails elongating with
+the desire to scratch and rend.
+
+Then she reveals the chief arrow in her quiver. Not for nothing is she the
+widow of an English nobleman. With all the hereditary dignities of the
+Foltlebarres she will arm herself, and reduce this presuming stranger to
+the level of the dust. At the thought of the humiliation it is in her
+power to inflict she smiles quite pleasantly, displaying a complete double
+row of beautifully stopped teeth. And she says, as she fumbles in a
+chatelaine bag of golden links, studded with turquoises, and with
+elaborately ostentatious dignity produces therefrom a card-case, as
+precious as regards material, and emblazoned with a monogram and coronet,
+enriched with diamonds and pearls:
+
+"I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbourhood? May I know who
+I have the a--pleasure of being indebted to for finding my daughter
+to-day?"
+
+"I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone house up there on the
+cliff. 'Plas Bendigaid,' they call it," explains Lynette, a little
+nervously, as her reluctant eyes scan the face and figure of the woman who
+owns the legal right to bear Beauvayse's name. The encounter is
+distasteful to her. She is painfully conscious of an acute sensation of
+antagonism and dislike. "The house belongs to my husband, and this is my
+first visit to Herion," she adds hurriedly, "because we--my husband and
+I--have not been very long married. But I like the place. And the house is
+charming, and there is a hall that was once the chapel, when it was a
+Convent. It shall be a chapel again; that is"--the wild-rose colour
+deepens on the lovely face--"if my husband agrees? To have it so restored
+would make the Plas seem more like a home, because I was brought up in a
+Convent, though not in England."
+
+Her eyes stray back to the sun-kissed beauty of Nantmadoc Bay and the
+dotted line of white spots that indicate the town of St. Tudwalls at the
+base of the green promontory beyond the Roads. She forgets that this
+little overdressed person is Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the moment
+that she herself is Saxham's. She is back in the beloved past with the
+Mother.
+
+"It was in South Africa, my Convent ... more than a thousand miles from
+Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the Transvaal Border--in a little
+village-town, dumped down in the middle of the veld."
+
+"What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red umbrella, with
+acerbity. "I'm sick of seeing the word in the papers, and nobody seems to
+know what it means."
+
+Lynette's soft voice answers:
+
+"You can never know what it means until you have lived its life, and it
+has become part of yours. It spreads away farther than your eyes can
+follow it, for miles and miles. It is jade colour in spring, blue-green in
+early summer, desolate, scorching yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful
+black tracts of cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass
+grow up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a
+vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are flat-topped
+mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale pink, or
+mauve-coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. And that is all!"
+
+"All?"
+
+"All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you through and
+through."
+
+"But there is not always sunshine? It must be sometimes night?" argues
+Lessie, a little peevishly.
+
+"There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," Lynette
+answers. "There are storms of dust and rain, lightning and thunder, such
+as are only read of here.... There are plots, conspiracies, raids,
+robberies, murders, slumps and losses, plagues and massacres. There are
+rebellions of white men, and native risings. There have been wars; there
+is war to-day, and there will be war again in the days that are yet to
+come!"
+
+She has almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring at her with
+big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns to her with her rare and
+lovely smile:
+
+"The war that is going on now began at the little village-town where I was
+a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for months within the lines. But, of
+course, you have read the newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp?
+I am only telling you what you know!"
+
+Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirthless little
+tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice rattled in a
+champagne-glass.
+
+"What I have good reason to know!"
+
+Her podgy, jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching in her heliotrope
+chiffon lap; there is a well-defined scowl between the black arched
+eyebrows, and the murky light of battle gleams in the eyes that no longer
+languish between their bistred eyelids as she scans the pure pale face
+under the sweep of her heavily blackened lashes. She would almost give the
+ruby buttons out of her ears to see it wince and quiver, and crimson into
+angry blushes. And yet Lessie is rather amiable than otherwise in her
+attitude towards other women. True, she has never before met one who had
+the insolence to pity her to her face.
+
+"So quite too interesting!" she says, with an exaggerated affectation of
+amiability, and in high, fashionable accents, "you having been at
+Gueldersdorp through the Siege and all. Were you ever--I suppose you must
+have been sometimes--shot at with a gun?"
+
+The faintest quiver of a smile comes over the lovely face her grudging
+eyes are trying to find a flaw in.
+
+"Often when I have been crossing the veld between the town and the
+Hospital, the Mauser bullets have hummed past like bees, or raised little
+spurts of dust close by my feet where they had hit the ground. And once a
+shell burst close to us, and a splinter knocked off my hat and tore a
+corner of her veil----"
+
+"Weren't you in a petrified fright?" demands Lessie.
+
+"I was with her!"
+
+"Who was she?"
+
+A swift change of sudden, quickening, poignant emotion passes over the
+still face. A sudden swelling of the white throat, a rising mist in the
+golden eyes, suggests to Lessie that she has been fortunate enough to
+touch upon a painful subject, and that possibly this presumptuous young
+woman who has pitied a Viscountess may be going to cry! But Lynette drives
+back the tears.
+
+"She was the Reverend Mother, the Mother-Superior of the Convent where I
+lived at Gueldersdorp."
+
+"Where is she now?"
+
+"She is with God."
+
+"With----"
+
+Lessie is oddly nonplussed by the calm, direct answer. People who talk in
+that strangely familiar way of--of subjects that properly belong to
+parsons are rare in her world. She hastens to put her next question.
+
+"Was yours the only Convent in Gueldersdorp where young ladies were
+taught?"
+
+"It is the only Convent there."
+
+"Did you know--among the pupils--a young person by the name of Mildare?"
+
+There is such concentrated essence of spite in Lessie's utterance of the
+name, that Lynette winces a little, and the faint, sweet colour rises in
+her cheeks.
+
+"I--know her, certainly; as far as one can be said to know oneself. My
+unmarried name was Mildare."
+
+"You--don't say so! Lord, how funny!"
+
+The seagulls fishing in the shallows beyond the foam-line, rise up
+affrighted by the shrill peal of triumphant laughter with which Lessie
+makes her discovery.
+
+"Ha, ha, ha! Talk of a situation!... On the boards I've never seen one to
+touch it!" She jumps from the boulder, with more bounce than dignity,
+dropping the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, and, extending in
+one pudgy ringed hand a highly-glazed and coroneted card, "Permit me to
+introduce myself," she says through set teeth, smiling rancorously. "My
+professional name, as I have had the honour and pleasure of explaining to
+you, is Lessie Lavigne, but in private"--the dignity of the speaker's tone
+is marred by its extreme huffiness--"in private I am Lady Beauvayse."
+
+As Lynette looks in the painted, angry, piquante face she is more than
+ever conscious of that feeling of antagonism. Then her eyes, turning from
+it, encounter the cherub rosily sleeping on embroidered pillows, and a
+rush of blood colours her to the hair. His child--his child by the
+dancer--this dimpled creature she has clasped and kissed! The icy,
+tinkling giggle of the mother breaks in upon the thought.
+
+"Of all the queer situations I ever struck, I do call this the queerest!
+Me, meeting you like this, and both of us getting quite pally! All over
+Baby, too!... Lord! isn't it enough to make you die? Don't mind me being a
+bit hysterical!" Lady Beauvayse dabs her tearful eyes with a cobwebby
+square of laced cambric. "It'll be over in a sec. And then, Miss
+Mildare--I beg pardon--Mrs. Saxham--you and me will have it out!"
+
+"I am afraid I must be going." Lynette rises, and stands beside Lessie,
+looking down in painful hesitation at the blinking, reddened eyelids and
+the working mouth. "I have guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it
+not be wise of you to go home and lie down?"
+
+The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an intolerable sting.
+Lessie jumps in her buckled Louis Quinze shoes, wheels, and confronts her
+newly-discovered enemy with glaring eyes.
+
+"Go home ... lie down!" she shrieks, so shrilly that the sleeping cherub
+awakens, and adds her frightened roars to the clamour that scares the
+gulls. "If I _had_ lain down and gone to my long home eighteen months ago,
+when you were cooped up in Gueldersdorp with my husband, it would have
+suited you both down to the ground!" She turns, with a stamp of her
+imperious little foot, upon the scared nurse, who is vainly endeavouring
+to still Baby. "Take her away! Carry her out of hearing! Do what you're
+told, you silly fool!" she orders. "And you"--she wheels again upon
+Lynette, her wistarias nodding, her chains and bangles clanking--"why do
+you stand there, like a white deer in a park--like an image cut out of
+ivory? Don't you understand that I, the woman you've pitied--my God!
+pitied, for singing and dancing on the public stage 'with so few clothes
+on'"--she savagely mimics the manner and tone--"I am the lawful wife of
+the man you tried to trap--the Right Honourable John Basil Edward Tobart!"
+The painted lips sneer savagely. "Beautiful Beau, who never went back on a
+man, or told the truth to a woman!--that's his character, and it pretty
+well sizes him up!"
+
+Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled hand
+clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical instinct in the daughter of
+the footlights has led her to work up the scene; but her rage of wounded
+love and jealousy is genuine enough, though not as real as the innocence
+in the eyes that meet hers, less poignant than the shame and indignation
+that drive the blood from those ivory cheeks.
+
+"He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cookham," goes on
+Lessie, her painted mouth twisting, "a fortnight before he was ordered out
+on the Staff. We'd been friends for over a year. There was a child coming,
+since we're by way of being plain-spoken," says Lessie, picking up the
+prostrate red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, possibly to conceal a
+blush; "and he swore he'd never look at another woman, and write by every
+mail. And so he did at first, and I used to cry over the blooming piffle
+he put into his letters, and wish I'd been a straighter woman, for his
+sake. And then the Siege began, and the letters stopped coming, and I
+cried enough to spoil my voice, little thinking how my husband was playing
+the giddy bachelor thousands of miles away. And then came the news of the
+Relief, and despatches, saying that he"--her pretty face is distorted by
+the wry grimace of genuine anguish--"_he_ was killed! And a month later I
+got a copy of a rotten Siege newspaper, sent me by I don't know who, and
+never shall, with a flowery paragraph in it, announcing his lordship's
+engagement to Miss Something Mildare. Oh! it was merry hell to know how
+he'd done me--me that worshipped the very ground he trod!... Me that had
+made a Judy of myself in crape and weepers--widow's weepers for the man
+that wished me dead!"
+
+Her voice is thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning
+coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious
+little dancer and comedian, as in this moment when she forgets her art.
+
+"Picture it, you!... Don't you fancy me in 'em? Don't you see me in my
+bedroom tearing 'em off?" She rends her flimsy cobweb of a handkerchief
+into tatters and spurns them from her. "So!... so!... that's what I did
+to 'em!" She snarls with a sudden access of tigerishness. "And if that
+white face of yours had been within reach of my ten fingers, I'd have
+ragged it into ribbons like the blooming fallals. Don't dare tell me you'd
+not have done the same! Perhaps, though, you wouldn't. You're a lady, born
+and bred," owns Lessie grudgingly, "and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that
+worked to keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while
+you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool!"
+
+She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. The swollen face
+with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might be roused to fresh
+resentment by the tenderness of pity that is dawning in Lynette's.
+
+"You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse; but I was not knowingly or
+wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it!"
+
+Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and says through
+an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric:
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"I met Lord Beauvayse out at Gueldersdorp." The voice that comes from
+Lynette's pale lips is singularly level and quiet. "He was very handsome
+and very brave; he was an officer of the Colonel's Staff. He asked me to
+marry him, and I--I believed him honourable and true, and I said, 'Yes.'
+... That was one Sunday, when we were sitting by the river. On Thursday he
+was killed, and later--nearly a year after my marriage to Dr. Saxham--I
+found out the truth."
+
+Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of the speaker
+have brought conviction. She realises that if she has been injured, her
+rival has suffered equal wrong.
+
+"You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes me. But that's
+not my business. You say you found out?" She shows her admirably preserved
+teeth in a little grin of sardonic contempt--"nearly a year after your
+marriage. Don't tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to
+Beau's angelic memory when he might have made you spit on it by telling
+you the truth!"
+
+Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly.
+
+"He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him I learned it!"
+
+"Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, "as a model
+husband. Now, my poor----"
+
+Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis:
+
+"I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath with Lord
+Beauvayse!"
+
+"He's dead--let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth twisting. Yet in
+the same breath, with another of the mental pirouettes characteristic of
+her class and type, she adds: "Do you suppose I don't know my own husband?
+Take him one way with another, you might have sifted the world for liars,
+and never found the equal of Beau."
+
+She gathers up the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case with reviving
+briskness, and shakes out her crumpled chiffons in the bright hot sun.
+
+"Me and Baby are leaving to-morrow. I don't suppose we're likely ever to
+come across you again. Good-bye! I forgive you for pitying me," she says
+frankly, holding out the plump, over-jewelled hand. "As for the other
+grudge.... What, are you going to kiss me?... Give Baby another before you
+go, dear ... and ... forgive _him_ when you can!"
+
+
+
+
+LXXI
+
+
+Lynette sat still upon the boulder, thinking, long after the red umbrella
+had departed. While it was yet visible in the white-hot distance, hovering
+like some gaudy Brobdingnagian butterfly in advance of the white
+perambulator pushed by the white-clad nurse, the heads of two little
+shabbyish, youngish people of the unmistakable Cockney tourist type rose
+over the edge of a pale sand-crest, fringed with wild chamomile and
+blazing poppies. And the female, a small draggled young woman in a large
+hat, trimmed with fatigued and dusty peonies, called out excitedly:
+
+"Oh, William, it's 'er--it's 'er!"
+
+"By Cripps, so it is!" came from the male companion of the battered
+peonies. He advanced with a swagger that was the unconvincing mask of
+diffidence assumed by an undersized, lean young man, in the chauffeur's
+doubtful-weather panoply of black waterproof jacket, breeches merging
+into knee-boots, the whole crowned with a portentous peaked cap, with
+absurd brass ventilators, and powdered with many thicknesses and shades of
+dust. His hair was dusty. The very eyelashes of the honest, ugly light
+eyes, set wide apart in the thin wedge-shaped, tanned face that the absurd
+cap shaded, were dusty as a miller's; dust lay thick in all the chinks and
+creases of his leading features, and a large black smudge of oily grime
+was upon his wide upper lip, impinging upon his nose. Nor was his
+companion much less dusty, though the checks of a travelling ulster of
+green and yellow plaid, adorned with huge steel buttons, would have
+advertised the Kentish Town Ladies' Drapery Establishment whence they
+emanated, through the medium of a Fleet Street fog.
+
+"Might we speak to you, ma'am?" The dusty young man respectfully touched
+the dusty peak of the cap with brass ventilators, and, with a shock of
+surprise, Lynette recognised Saxham's chauffeur.
+
+"Keyse!... It is Keyse!" She looked at him in surprise.
+
+"Keyse, ma'am." He touched the cap again, and made a not ungraceful
+gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather-beaten peonies and the
+green-and-yellow ulster, who clung to his thin elbow with a red,
+hard-working hand. "Me an' my wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a
+kind of Beanfeast for Two, we took the notion, being stryngers to South
+Wyles, of droppin' in 'ere an' tippin' the 'Ow Do." He breathed hard, and
+rivulets of perspiration began to trickle down from under the preposterous
+cap, converting the dust that filled the haggard lines of his thin face
+into mud. "An' payin' our respects." His eye slewed appealingly at his
+companion, asking as plainly as an eye can, "What price that?" And the
+glance that shot back from the dusty shadow of the exhausted peonies
+answered, "Not bad by 'arf--for you!"
+
+Lynette smiled at the little Cockney couple. The surprise that had checked
+the beating of her heart had passed. It was pleasant to see these faces
+from Harley Street. She answered:
+
+"I understand. My husband has given you a holiday. Is he well?" She
+flushed, realising that it was pain to have to ask others for the news of
+him that he had denied her. "I mean because he has not written.... I have
+been feeling rather anxious. Was he quite well when you left?"
+
+"'Was he----'? Yes, 'm!" W. Keyse shot out the affirmative with such
+explosive suddenness that the hand upon his arm must have nipped hard.
+
+"I am so glad!" Lynette turned to the young woman in the ulster, whose
+face betrayed no guilty knowledge of the pinch. She was small, and pale,
+and gritty, and her blue eyes had red rims to them from the fatigue of the
+journey, or some other cause. But they were honest and clear, and not
+unpretty eyes, looking out from a forest of dusty yellowish fringe,
+deplorably out of curl. Yet a fringe that had associations for Lynette,
+reaching a long way from Harley Street, and back to the old days at
+Gueldersdorp before the Siege.
+
+"Surely I know you? I must have known you at Gueldersdorp." She added as
+Mrs. Keyse's eyes said "Yes": "You used to be a housemaid at the Convent.
+How strange that I should not have remembered it until now! And your
+husband.... I do not remember ever having seen him before he came to us at
+Harley Street. But his name comes back to me in connection with a
+letter"--she knitted her brows, chasing the vague, fleeting memory--"a
+love-letter that was sent to Miss Du Taine inside a chocolate-box, just
+when school was breaking up. It was you who smuggled the box in!"
+
+"To oblige, bein' begged to by Keyse as a fyvour. 'E didn't know 'is own
+mind--them d'ys!" explained Mrs. Keyse, sweeping her husband's scorching
+countenance with a glance of withering scorn.
+
+"Nor did you," retorted W. Keyse, stung to defiance. "Walkin' out with a
+Dopper you was--if it comes to that." He spun round, mid-ankle deep in
+sand, to finish. "An' you'd 'ave bin joined by a Dutch dodger and settled
+down on a Vaal sheep-farm, if the order 'adn't come 'ummin' along the wire
+from 'Eadquarters that said, 'Jane 'Arris, you're to 'ave this bloke, and
+no other. Till Death do you part. Everlasting--Amen!'"
+
+There was so strong a flavour of Church about the final sentence that
+Mrs. Keyse could not keep admiration out of her eyes.
+
+Her own eyes dancing with mirthful amusement, Lynette looked from one to
+the other of the unexpected visitors, and, tactfully changing the subject
+of the conversation, hoped that they were enjoying their trip?--a query
+which so obviously failed to evoke an expression of pleased assent in
+either of the small, thin, wearied faces that she hastened to add:
+
+"But perhaps this is the very beginning of your holiday? When did you
+leave London?"
+
+"Yes'dy mornin' at 'arf-past six," said W. Keyse, carefully avoiding her
+eyes. A spasm contracted the tired face under the dusty peonies. Their
+wearer put her hand to the collar of the green-and-yellow ulster, and
+undid a button there.
+
+"'Yesterday morning at half-past six'!" Lynette repeated in wonder.
+
+"An' if the machine I 'ad on 'ire from a pal o' mine--chap what keeps a
+second-hand shop for 'em in the Portland Road--'adn't 'ad everythink
+'appen to 'er wot _can_ 'appen to a three-an'-a-'arf 'orse-power Baby
+Junot wot 'ad seen 'er best d'ys before automobilin' 'ad cut its front
+teeth," said W. Keyse, with bitterness, "we would 'ave bin 'ere before! As
+it is, we've left the car at a little 'Temperance Tavern' in S'rewsbury,
+kep' by a Methodist widder, 'oo thinks such new-fangled inventions
+sinful--an' only consented to take charge on account o' the Prophet Elijer
+a-going up to 'Eaven in a fiery chariot--an' come on 'ere by tryne."
+
+Lynette looked at the man in silence. She even repeated after him, rather
+dully:
+
+"You came on here--by train?"
+
+"Slow Parliamentary--stoppin' at every 'arf-dozen stytions," explained W.
+Keyse, "for collectors in velveteens and Scotch caps to ask for tickets,
+plyse? And but that the porter on the 'Erion Down Platform 'ad see you
+walkin' on the Links, and my wife knoo your dress and the colour of your
+'air 'arf a mile 'orf, we'd 'ave lost precious time in finding you, and
+giving you the--the message what we've come 'ere to bring!"
+
+"From my husband? From Dr. Saxham?"
+
+W. Keyse shifted from one foot to the other, and coughed an embarrassed
+cough.
+
+"Not exac'ly from Dr. Saxham."
+
+Lynette looked at W. Keyse, and it seemed to her that the little sallow
+Cockney face had Fate in it. A sudden terror whitened her to the lips. She
+cried out in a voice that had lost all its sweetness:
+
+"You have deceived me in saying he was well. Something has happened to
+him! He is very ill, or----?"
+
+She could not utter the word. Instinctively her eyes went past the
+stammering man to the woman who hung behind his elbow. And the wearer of
+the nodding peonies cried out:
+
+"No, no! The Doctor isn't dead--or ill, to call ill!" She turned angrily
+upon her husband. "See wot a turn you've give 'er," she snapped. "Why
+couldn't you up and speak out?"
+
+W. Keyse was plainly nonplussed. He took off the giant cap with the brass
+ventilators, and turned it round and round, looking carefully inside it.
+But he found no eloquence therein.
+
+"Why did I bring a skirt, I arsk, if I'm to do the patter?" He addressed
+himself in an audible aside to Mrs. Keyse. "You might as well 'ave stopped
+at 'ome with the nipper," he added, complainingly, "if I ain't to 'ave no
+better 'elp than this!"
+
+"You mean kindly, I know." Lynette tried to smile in saying it. "There is
+trouble that you are here to break to me; I understand that very well.
+Please tell me without delay, plainly what has happened? I am
+very--strong! I shall not faint--if that is what you are afraid of?"
+
+She caught her breath, for the woman broke out into dry sobbing and cried
+out wildly:
+
+"Oh, come back to 'im! Come back, if you're a woman! Gawd, Who made 'im,
+knows as 'ow 'e can't bear no more! Oh! if my 'art's so wrung by what I've
+seen him suffer, think what he's bore these crooil weeks an' months!"
+
+The peonies rocked in the gale of Emigration Jane's emotion. Her
+hard-worked hands went out, entreating for him; her dowdy little figure
+seemed to grow tall, so impressive was the earnestness of her appeal.
+
+"Him and you are toffs, and me and Keyse are common folks.... Flesh and
+blood's the syme, though, only covered wiv different skins. An' Human
+Nature's Human Nature, 'owever you fake 'er up an' christen 'er! An' Love
+must 'ave give an' take of Love, or else Love's got to die! Burn a lamp
+wivout oil, and see wot 'appens. It goes out!--You're left in the
+dark!"--Her homely gesture, illustrating the homely analogy, seemed to
+bring down blackness. Lynette hung speechless upon her fateful lips.
+
+"--Then, like as not, you'll overturn the table gropin'. 'Smashed!' you'll
+say, 'an' nobody but silly me to blyme! It would 'ave lighted up a 'appy
+'ome if I 'adn't been a barmy idiot. It would 'ave showed me the face of
+my 'usband leanin' to kiss me in our blessed marriage-bed, an' my baby
+smilin' in its cradle-sleep 'ard by.... Oh!--Oh!"--She choked and clutched
+her bosom, and her voice rose in the throaty screech of incipient
+hysteria--"An' I've left my own sweet, unweaned boy to come and say these
+words to you!... An' the darlin' darlin' fightin' with the bottle they're
+tryin' to give 'im, and roarin' for 'is mam.... And my breasts as 'ard as
+stones, an' throbbin'!... Gawd 'elp me!" She panted and fought and choked,
+striving for speech.
+
+"Keep your hair on!" advised W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper. She turned on
+him like a tigress, her eyes flaming under her straightened fringe.
+
+"Keep yours! I've come to speak, and speak I mean to--for the sake of the
+best man Gawd's made for a 'undred years. Bar one, you says, but bar none,
+says I, an' charnce it! Since the day 'e stood up for you in that Dutch
+saloon-bar at Gueldersdorp, what is there we don't owe to 'im--you and me,
+and all the blooming crew of us? And because 'e'll tyke no thanks, 'e gits
+ingratitude--the dirtiest egg the Devil ever hatched!"
+
+"Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse, awe-stricken by this lofty flight of rhetoric.
+Ignoring him, she pursued her way.
+
+"You're a beautiful young lydy"--her tone softened from its strenuous
+pitch--"wot 'ave 'ad a disappyntment, like many of us 'ave at the start.
+You'd set your 'art on Another One. 'E got killed, an' you married the
+Doctor--but it's never bin no real marriage. You've ate 'is bread, as the
+sayin' is, an' give 'im a stone. An' e's beat 'is pore 'art to bloody rags
+agynst it--d'y after d'y, an' night after night! I seen it, I tell you!"
+she shrilled--"I seen it wiv me own eyes! You pretty, silly kid! Don't you
+know wot 'arm you're doing? You crooil byby! do you reckon Gawd gave you
+the man to torture an' break an' spoil?"
+
+A hand, imperatively clapped over the mouth of Mrs. W. Keyse, stemmed the
+torrent of her eloquence.
+
+"Dry up! You've said enough," ordered her spouse.
+
+"Do not stop her!" Lynette said, without removing her fascinated eyes from
+the Pythoness. "Let her tell me everything that she has seen and knows."
+
+"I seen the Doctor--many, many times," the woman went on, as W. Keyse
+reluctantly ungagged her, "watchin' Keyse and me in our poor 'ome-life
+together--with the eyes of a starvin' dog lookin' at a bone. You ought to
+know 'ow starvin' 'urts...." The strenuous voice soared and quivered. "You
+learned that at Gueldersdorp! Yet you can see your 'usband dyin' of
+'unger, an' never put out your 'and! Dyin' for want of a kiss an' a bit o'
+cuddle--that's the kind o' dyin' I mean--dyin' for what Gawd gives to the
+very brutes He myde! Seems to you I talk low!... Well, there's nothink
+lower than Nature, _An' She Goes As 'Igh As 'Eaven_!" said Emigration
+Jane.
+
+The wide, sweeping gesture with which the shabby little woman took in land
+and sea and sky was quite noble and inspiring to witness. And now the
+tears were running down her face, and her voice lost its raucous
+shrillness, and became plaintive, and even soft.
+
+"I'm to tell you everythink I've seen, an' know about the Doctor.... I've
+seen 'im age, age, a bit more every d'y. I've seen 'im waste, waste, with
+loneliness and trouble--never turnin' bitter on accounts of it--never
+grudgin' 'elp that 'e could give to man or woman or kid. Late on the night
+you left 'ome I see 'im come up to your bedroom. 'E switched on the light.
+'E forgot the blinds was up. 'E looked round, all 'aggard an' lost an'
+wild-like, before 'e dropped down cryin' beside the bed."
+
+She sobbed, and dropped on her own knees in the sand among the prickly
+yellow dwarf roses, weeping quite wildly, and wringing her hands.
+
+"The mornin' found 'im there. Six weeks ago that was; an' every night
+since then it's bin the syme gyme. Never the blinds left up since that
+first time, but always light, and his shadow moves about. An' in my bed I
+wake a-cryin' so, an' don't know which of 'em I'm cryin' for--the lonely
+shadow or the lonely man----"
+
+She could not go on, and W. Keyse took up the tale.
+
+"She's told you true. Maybe we'd never 'ave come but for the feelin' that
+things was workin' up to wot the pypers call a Domestic Tragedy. Or at the
+best the break-up of a 'Ome. That's wot my wife she kep' on stuffin' into
+me," said W. Keyse. "An'--strewth! when the Doctor sent for me an' pyde me
+orf ... full wages right on up to the end o' the year, an' the syme to
+Morris an' the 'ouse'old staff, tellin' us e's goin' on a voyage, I s'ys
+to 'er, 'It's come!'"
+
+"On a voyage! Where?"
+
+"Oh, carn't you guess?" cried the woman on the ground, desperately looking
+up with tragic eyes out of a swollen, tear-stained face.
+
+A mist came before Lynette's vision, and a sudden tremor shook her like a
+reed. She swayed as though the ground had heaved beneath her, but she
+would not fall. She choked back the cry that had risen in her throat. This
+was the time to act, not the time to weep for him. She knelt an instant by
+the woman on the ground, put her arms round her, kissed her wet cheek, and
+then rose up, pale and calm and collected, saying to W. Keyse:
+
+"Take her to the Plas. Ask for Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper. She is to
+prepare a room for you; you are to breakfast, and rest all day, and return
+to London by the night mail. Good-bye! God bless you both! I was going to
+him to-night at latest.... I am going to him now.... Pray that he is alive
+when I reach him! But he will be. God is good!"
+
+Her face was transfigured by the new light that shone in it. She was
+strong, salient, resourceful--no longer the shy willowy girl. She was
+moving from them with her long swift step, when W. Keyse recovered
+himself.
+
+"'Old 'ard! Beg pardon, ma'am! but 'ave you the spondulics?" He blushed
+at her puzzled look, and amended: "'Ave you money enough upon you to pay
+the railway-fare?"
+
+
+
+
+She lifted a little gold-netted purse attached to her neck-chain.
+
+"Five pounds. My maid is to follow. You know Marie? You will let her
+travel with you?"
+
+"Righto! But you'll want a wrap, coat or shawl, or somethink. Midnight
+before you gits in--if you catch this next up-Express.... Watto! Give us
+'old o' this 'ere, Missus! You can 'ave mine instead."
+
+"Please, no! I need nothing ... nothing!" She stayed his savage attack on
+the buttons of Mrs. Keyse's green-and-yellow ulster by holding out her
+watch. "How much time have I left to catch the up-Express?"
+
+"Eight minutes. By Cripps! you'll 'ave to run for it."
+
+She waved her white hand, and was gone, swiftly as a bird or a deer.
+
+"They've signalled!" W. Keyse announced after a breathless interval,
+during which the slender flying figure grew smaller upon the straining
+sight. It vanished, and a thin, nearing screech announced the up-Express.
+His wife jumped up and clutched him.
+
+"William! Suppose she's lost it!"
+
+"Garn! No fear!" scoffed W. Keyse.
+
+As he scoffed he was full of fear. They heard the clanking stoppage, the
+shrill whistle of departure. They looked breathlessly towards the green
+wood that fringed the cliff-base under the Castle head. The iron way ran
+through the belt of trees. The Express rushed through, broke roaring upon
+their unimpeded vision, devoured the gleaming line of metals that lay
+between wood and tunnel, and left them with the taste of cindery steam in
+their open mouths, and the memory of a white handkerchief waved at a
+carriage-window by a slender hand.
+
+"It's a'right, old gal!" said W. Keyse, beaming. "Come on up to the 'ouse.
+I could do wiv a bit o' peck, an' I lay so could you. Lumme!" His
+triumphant face fell by the fraction of an inch. "What'll she do when she
+lands in 'ome, wivout a woman to git a cup o' tea for 'er? Or curl 'er
+'air, or undo 'er st'yl'yoes an' things?"
+
+"She'll do wot other young wimmen does under sim'lar circumstances," said
+Mrs. Keyse enigmatically. She added: "If she 'as luck, she'll 'ave a man
+for' er maid, an' if she 'as sense, she'll reckon the swop a good one!"
+
+
+
+
+LXXII
+
+
+Until the actual moment of their parting at Euston, Saxham had never fully
+realised the anguish of the last moment when Lynette's face should pass
+for ever out of his thirsting sight.
+
+It was going.... He quickened his long strides to keep up with it. He must
+have called to her, for she came hurriedly to the corridor-window, her
+sweet cheeks suffused with lovely glowing colour, her sweet eyes shining,
+her small gloved hand held frankly out. He gripped it, uttered some
+incoherency--what, he could not remember--was shouted at by a porter with
+a greasy lamp-truck, cannoned heavily against a man with a basket of
+papers, awakened with a great pang to the knowledge that she was gone. And
+the great, bare, dirty, populous glass-hive of Euston, that has been the
+forcing-house of so many sorrowful partings, held another breaking heart.
+
+In the days that followed he saw his private patients as usual, and
+operated upon a regular mid-week morning at St. Stephen's, whose senior
+surgeon had recently resigned. The rest of the time he spent in making his
+arrangements.
+
+Sanely, logically, methodically, everything had been thought out. Major
+Wrynche was to be her guardian, co-trustee with Lord Castleclare, and
+executor of the Will. It left her, simply and unconditionally, everything
+of which Saxham was possessed. She would live with the Wrynches until she
+married again. His agents were instructed to find a tenant for the house,
+and privately a purchaser for the practice. They wrote to him of a client
+already found. Matters were progressing steadily. Very soon now the
+desired end.
+
+His table-lamp burned through the nights as he made up his ledgers and
+settled his accounts. In leisure moments he read in the intolerable book
+of the Past. Of all its sorrows and failures, its frantic follies and its
+besotted sins. Memory omitted nothing. Not a blot upon those sordid pages
+was spared him. It was not possible for an instant to turn away his eyes.
+His mental clarity was unrelieved by weariness. No shadow dimmed the keen
+crystal of his brain. He was at tension, like a bowstring that is
+stretched continually. He realised this, thinking: "Presently I will cut
+the bow-string, and the bow shall have rest! Even if my once-boasted
+will-power reasserted itself--even if I rose triumphant for the second
+time, cured of my vile craving, I do not the less owe my debt to the woman
+I have married. I promised her that I would die rather than fail her. I
+failed her! There is no excuse!"
+
+
+
+
+LXXIII
+
+
+The West End pavements were shining wet. Belated cabs spun homewards with
+sleepy revellers. Neat motor-broughams slid between the kerbs and rounded
+corners at unrebuked excess-speeds, winking their blazing head-lights at
+drowsy policemen muffled in oilskin capes. On all these accustomed things
+the blue-white arc-lights shone.
+
+The most belated of all the hansom cabs in London stopped at the door of
+the house in Harley Street as the narrow strip of sky between the grim,
+drab-faced houses began to be dappled with the leaden grey of dawn. A
+faint moon reeled northwards, hunted by sable shapes of screaming terror,
+pale Venus clinging to her tattered robe. The house was all black and
+silent, a dead face with blinded windows. Did Saxham wake behind them? Or
+did he sleep, not to wake again?
+
+Lynette tried her latchkey. The unchained door swung backwards. She passed
+into the house silently, a tall, slender shape. A light was shining under
+the consulting-room door. Her heart leaped to greet it. She kissed her
+hand to it, and turned, moving noiselessly, and put up the chain of the
+hall-door. She felt for the switch of the electric light, and snapped it
+on.
+
+She was jarred and aching and weary with her journey; but it was a very
+fair woman whom she saw reflected in the hall-mirror as she unpinned her
+hat and tossed it upon the hall-table, and passed on to the
+consulting-room door--a woman whose face was strange to herself, with that
+new fire, and decision, and strength of purpose in it; a woman with
+glowing roses of colour in her cheeks, and eager, shining eyes.
+
+All through the long hours of the journey she had pictured him, her
+husband, bending over his work, sleeping in his chair, or in his bed. Yet
+behind these pictures was another image that started through their lines
+and colours dreadfully, persistently, and the image was that of a dead
+man. She thrust it from her for the hundredth time, as the door-handle
+yielded to her touch. She went into the room. Saxham was not there.
+
+The lamp shed its circle of light upon the consulting-room writing-table.
+The armchair stood aside, as though hastily pushed back.... Signs of his
+recent presence were visible. The fireplace was heaped high with the ashes
+of burned papers; the acrid smell of their burning hung still on the close
+air.
+
+She glanced back at the table. All its drawers stood open. Ledgers and
+case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed. A thick packet, heavily sealed,
+was addressed in Saxham's small, firm handwriting to Major Bingham
+Wrynche, Plas Bendigaid, Herion, South Wales. There were other letters in
+an orderly pile.
+
+She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name. She took it and kissed
+it, and put it in her breast. There was an enclosure, heavy, and of oval
+shape. She wondered what it might be? As she did so, she looked at the
+letter hers had covered, and read what was written on the cover in the
+small, firm hand:
+
+"'To the Coroner.' ... Merciful God!..."
+
+The cry broke from her without her knowledge. The room rang with it as she
+turned and ran. With the nightmare-feeling of running up dream-stairs, of
+feeling nothing tangible under her footsteps, with the dreadful certainty
+that of all those crowding pictures of him seen through the long hours in
+the racing Express, only the one that she had not dared to look at was the
+real, true picture of Saxham now.
+
+Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted like the
+dream-woman in her dream. From solid cubes of darkness to grey
+landing-glimmers. To the third-story bedroom that had never been done up.
+In the company of Little Miss Muffet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and
+Georgy Porgy, would he be lying, cold and ghastly, with a wound across his
+throat?
+
+But the room was unoccupied; the bed had not been slept in. Pale dawn
+peeping in at the corners of the scanty blinds assured her of that. Where
+might she find him? Where seek him?
+
+Fool! said a voice within her; there is but one answer to such a question!
+Where has he gone night after night? Coward, you knew, and yet avoided!...
+What threshold has he crossed when the world was sleeping round him? By
+whose vacant pillow has his broken heart sought vain relief in tears?
+
+She passed downstairs, gliding noiselessly over the thick carpets, and
+went into the room it had been his pleasure to furnish and decorate as his
+wife's boudoir. Its seashell pinkness was merged in darkness, faintly
+striped by the grey dawn-glimmer, but the door of the bedroom that opened
+from it was ajar. Light edged the heavy fold of the portiere curtain and
+made a pool upon the carpet. She held her breath as she stole to the door,
+and, trembling, looked in. He was there, kneeling by the bed. His
+heavily-shouldered black figure made a blotch upon the dainty white and
+azure draperies; his arms were outflung upon the silken counterpane.
+
+A rush of thanks sprang from her full heart to Heaven as she heard the
+heavy sighing breaths that proved him living yet.
+
+She would have gone to him and touched him then, but the sound of his
+voice took courage from her, and drew her strength away. He spoke, lifting
+his face to the ivory Crucifix that hung upon the wall above the bed-head.
+It was a voice of groanings rather than the quiet voice with which she was
+familiar. She comprehended that a soul in mortal anguish was speaking
+aloud to God.
+
+"I cannot live!" groaned Saxham. "I am weary, body and spirit. What I have
+borne I have borne in the hope of laying my burden down. Everything is
+ready! I have cleared the way; my loins are girded for departure. All I
+asked was to lie down in the earth and wake again no more. All I
+asked--and what happens? My dead faith quickens again in me. I must bow my
+neck once more to the yoke of the Inconceivable! I must perforce believe
+in Thee again! I hear the voice of the pale thorn-crowned Victim, saying,
+'I am Thy God who lived and suffered and died for thee! Live on, then, and
+suffer also, and pass to the Life Eternal when thine hour comes!' O
+God!--my God! have I not earned deliverance? Have I not borne anguish
+enough?"
+
+His fierce, upbraiding voice died out in inarticulate mutterings. His head
+fell forwards upon his arms. Presently he lifted it, and cried out, as if
+replying to some unseen speaker:
+
+"If a self-sought death entails eternal torment, am I not in hell here
+upon earth? How else, when to live is to hold her in bondage, knowing that
+she longs and pines to be free? And yet, to go out into the dark and leave
+her! never again to see her! never more to feel the light of her eyes flow
+into me! Never to hear her voice--to be of my own deed separate from her
+throughout Eternity--that were of all the Judgments that are Thine to
+scourge with the most terrible that Thou couldst lay upon my soul!"
+
+A sob tore him. He moaned out brokenly:
+
+"Give me a sign, if Thou art indeed merciful! Show me that there is
+relenting in Thee! Grant me the hope, at least, that my great renunciation
+may open a gate by which, after cycles of expiatory suffering, I may at
+last pass through to where she dwells in Thy Brightness. Give me to see
+her face with a smile on it--to touch her hand--after all--after all! The
+lips I have never kissed, may they not be mine, O God--mine one day in
+Heaven? If Thou art Love, there should be love there."
+
+She glided over the deep carpet, stretched out a timid hand, and touched
+his shoulder. He lifted his great square head, and slowly looked round.
+The black hair, mingled with white, clung damp to the broad forehead. His
+eyes were bloodshot, strained, and haggard, and wild. Sorrow was charted
+deep upon the haggard features. Amazement struck them into folly as he
+started up, stammering out her name, and clutching for support at the
+brass rail that was at the foot of the bed.
+
+"Lynette! You.... It is you?..." He shook, staring at her with dilated
+eyes.
+
+"Owen, you are ill. You speak and look so strangely. It is me--really me!"
+she said, trying to speak calmly through the tumult of her heart.
+
+"I am not ill. How is it that you are here?"
+
+He lifted a hand to his strained and smarting eyes and moved it to and fro
+before them. He was staring at her still, but with pupils that were less
+dilated, and the veins upon his broad forehead were no longer purple now.
+
+"Have I talked nonsense? I had dozed, and you startled me coming upon
+me.... Why have you?..." He strove to speak and look as usual. "Has
+anything happened, that you have come back?"
+
+She pressed her hands together, wrestling for collected thought and clear,
+explicit utterance, though the room rocked about her, and the floor seemed
+to rise and fall beneath her feet.
+
+"Something happened. I have come back from Wales to tell you that I ... I
+cannot live upon your friendship any longer! I--I must have more, or I
+shall die!"
+
+He knew all. She had met the man whose look and breath and touch had
+revealed to her her own misery. Chained to her harsh yoke-fellow; denied
+Love's bread and wine of life! He looked at her, and answered coldly:
+
+"You shall not die. You shall be free! If you had waited until
+to-morrow----"
+
+"It is already day," she told him, and, as though to confirm her, a
+neighbouring steeple-clock clanged twice. He moved uneasily as his eyes
+fell on the disordered coverlet, half dragged from the bed and trailing on
+the floor. They shunned hers as he said, a dark flush rising through his
+haggard pallor:
+
+"I beg your pardon for the intrusion here. But you were away.... I could
+not sleep, and the house was lonely.... Is your maid with you? Surely you
+are not alone?"
+
+She bent her head with a faint smile.
+
+"Quite alone. I did not wish for a companion."
+
+"It was not wise----" he began, and took a step door-wards. "I will call
+one of the servants," he added, and was going, when he remembered, and
+stopped, saying hoarsely:
+
+"I forgot. They are gone. I have sent them all away!"
+
+She looked at him in silence. He continued:
+
+"I have paid and dismissed them. You will think it curious--you will know
+the reason later--I have written to you to explain."
+
+"I found upon your table a letter addressed to me," she said. He started,
+knitting his black brows.
+
+"You have not read it?" he asked, breathing quickly.
+
+"Not yet." She touched her bosom, where the letter lay. "I have it here."
+
+"Please do not open it! Give me back the letter!" He stretched out his
+hand to take it, and breathed more freely when she drew it out and gave it
+to him. And a sweet wild pang shot through him; the paper was so warm and
+fragrant from the nest where it had lain so short a time. But he mastered
+the emotion and tore open the envelope. He took from it the enclosure,
+wrapped in folds of tissue-paper, and put it in her hand, saying, as he
+thrust the letter in his coat-pocket:
+
+"There is something that by right is yours."
+
+"Mine?..." She unrolled the tissue-paper, and the brilliants that were set
+about the miniature sent spurts of white and green and rosy fire between
+the slender, ivory-hued fingers that turned it about. She gave a little
+gasping cry of recognition:
+
+"It is--me! How could you have managed----?" Then, as the sweet grey eyes
+of fair dead Lucy smiled up into her own: "I do not know how I am sure of
+it," she said, with a catching in her breath, "but this must be my
+mother!"
+
+Saxham bent his head in answer to her look. His eyes bade her question no
+further. She faltered:
+
+"May I not know how it came into your hands?"
+
+"Through the death," Saxham answered, "of an evil man. You know his name.
+He probably robbed your father of that miniature with other things; but I
+can only surmise this. I cannot positively say."
+
+"You speak of my father." Her face was quivering, her eyes entreated.
+"Tell me what you know of him, and of"--she kissed the miniature, and
+held it to her cheek--"of my mother?"
+
+"Your father," said Saxham, "was an officer and a gentleman. The surname
+that you exchanged for mine, poor child! was really his. His Christian
+name is engraved there"--he pointed to the inner rim of the band of
+brilliants --"with that of the lady who was your mother. She was
+beautiful; she was tender and devoted; she loved your father well enough
+to give up every social aim and every worldly advantage for his sake. She
+died loving him. He died--I should not wonder if he died of sorrow for her
+loss. For hearts can break, though the Faculty deny it!"
+
+He swung about to leave the room. She was murmuring over her new-found
+treasure.
+
+"'Lucy to Richard' ... '_Richard_' ..." she repeated. A wave of roseate
+colour broke over her with the memory of the hand that had touched and the
+voice that had spoken to her in her Heaven-sent vision of the previous
+morning, when the Beloved had come back from Paradise to lay a charge upon
+her child.
+
+"My father knew the Mother?" It was not a question, it was a statement of
+the fact. Saxham wondered at the assured tone, as he told her:
+
+"It is true. They had been friends--in the world they both gave up
+afterwards--the man for the love that is of earth, the woman for the love
+of Heaven."
+
+"She never told me then, but she must have known who I was from the
+beginning," Lynette ventured. "She gave me the surname of Mildare because
+it belonged to me! Do not you think so too?"
+
+Saxham made no answer. He swung about to leave the room. She slipped the
+miniature into her bosom, where his letter had lain, and asked:
+
+"Where are you going?"
+
+He answered, with his eyes avoiding hers:
+
+"You have been travelling all night; you must be tired and hungry. Go to
+bed and try to rest, while I forage for you downstairs. You shall not
+suffer for lack of attendance. I am quite a good cook, as you shall find
+presently. When you have eaten you must sleep, and then we will talk of
+your returning home to your friends."
+
+"Are not you my chief friend?" she asked. "Is not this my home?"
+
+He avoided her look, replying awkwardly:
+
+"Hardly, when there are no servants to wait upon you!"
+
+"May I not know why you sent them away?"
+
+He said, his haggard profile turned to her, a muscle of his pale cheek
+twitching:
+
+"I am going away myself: that is the reason why. All debts are paid. I
+have completed all the arrangements, entailing the minimum of annoyance
+upon you."
+
+"May I not come with you upon your voyage?"
+
+His eyes were still averted as his grey lips answered:
+
+"No! I am going where you cannot come!"
+
+"Owen, tell me where you are going?"
+
+Her tone of entreaty knocked at the door of his barred heart. He winced
+palpably. "Excuse me," he said, and took another step towards the door.
+She stopped him with:
+
+"You are not excused from answering my question!"
+
+"I am going, first to get you some breakfast," said Saxham curtly, "and
+then to find a woman to attend upon you here."
+
+"I need no breakfast, thanks! I want no attendant!"
+
+"You must have someone," said Saxham brusquely.
+
+"I must have your answer," she said in a tone quite new to him. "What is
+your secret purpose? What are you hiding from me in that closed hand?"
+
+He moved his left hand slightly, undoing the fingers and giving a glimpse
+of the empty palm.
+
+"Not that hand. The other!" She pointed to the clenched right. How tall
+she had grown, and how womanly! "Love has done this!" was his aching
+thought. She seemed a princess of faery, fresh from a bath of magic
+waters. Her very gait was changed, her every gesture seemed new. Purpose
+and decision and quiet self-control breathed from her; her voice had tones
+in it unheard of him before. Her eyes were radiant as he had never yet
+seen them, golden stars, centred and rimmed with night, shining in a pale
+glory that was her face....
+
+"All that for the other man! Well, let him have it!" thought Saxham, and
+involuntarily glanced at his clenched right hand.
+
+"Please open it and show me what you have there!" she begged him.
+
+Her tones were full of pleading music. His face hardened grimly to
+withstand. His muscular fingers closed in a vice-like grip over what he
+held. But she moved to him with a whisper of soft trailing garments, and
+took the shut hand in both her own. She bent her exquisite head and kissed
+it, and Saxham's fingers of iron were no more than wax. Something clicked
+in his throat as they opened, that was like the turning of a rusty lock.
+And the little blue phial, with the yellow poison-label, gave up his
+deadly intention to her eyes. She cried out and snatched it, and flung it
+away from her. It fell soundlessly on the soft carpet, and rolled under a
+chair.
+
+"Owen! You would have ... done that!..."
+
+Divine reproach was to her face. He snarled:
+
+"It would have been done by now if you had not come back!"
+
+"I thank our Lord I came!... It is His doing! Once He had sent me
+knowledge, I could not stay away. For, Owen ... I have made a
+discovery...."
+
+"Yes." He laughed harshly. "As I knew you would one day! Never was I fool
+enough to doubt what would come!"
+
+She put both her hands to her lips and kissed them, and held them out to
+him. He cried:
+
+"What is this? What interlude of folly are you playing? It was your
+freedom you came to demand. You have not told me who the man you love is.
+I do not ask--I will not even know! He is your choice; that is enough!"
+
+"He is my choice!" Her bosom heaved to the measure of her quickened
+breathing. The splendid colour rose over the edge of the lace scarf that
+was loosely knotted about her sweet throat, and surged to the pure
+temples, and climbed to the line of the rich red-brown hair.
+
+"You will soon be free to tell the world so. Marry him," said Saxham, "and
+forget the dreary months dragged out beside the sot! For I who promised
+you I would never fail you; I who told you so confidently that I was
+cured of the accursed liquor-crave; I--well, I reckoned without my
+host----"
+
+His laugh jarred her heartstrings. She cried out hotly:
+
+"You did not deceive me wilfully! You believed what you said!"
+
+"I believed ... and the first snare set for me tripped up my heels," said
+Saxham. "I paid the penalty of being cocksure. And I had not the common
+decency to die then and release you. True, there were reasons--they are
+swept away now!... I sent you to Wales that I might be free of the sight
+of you, that I might end the sordid comedy and have done. You have come
+too soon! There's no more to be said than that!"
+
+"There is this to be said."
+
+She came towards him, her tender eyes wooing his. Her lips were parted,
+her breath came in sighs.
+
+"What you have told me is sorrowful, but not hopeless. You were cured
+once--you will be cured again! And I will help you--comfort you--suffer
+with you and pray for you. You shall never be alone, my husband, any
+more!"
+
+He was melting. His hard blue eyes had the softening gleam of tears. He
+stretched out his hands and took hers, holding them close. He stooped, and
+let his burning lips rest on the cool, fragrant flesh, and said tenderly:
+
+"Dear saint, sweet would-be martyr, you _shall_ not sacrifice your long
+life's happiness to me. Rather than live on sane and sober, to see you
+famishing beside me for the want of Love, I would die a thousand deaths,
+Lynette! Try to believe it. You shall be free! You must be free, my
+child!"
+
+She winced as though he had stabbed her, and cried out:
+
+"Why do you harp continually upon your death? I will not listen to you! If
+I do not desire to be 'free,' as you term it, what barrier is there
+between us now?"
+
+He said, amazed:
+
+"What barrier? Do you ask what barrier? Your love--for that other man!"
+
+"There is no other man!" She looked him full in the eyes now, with a
+lovely colour dyeing her sweet cheeks, and an exquisite quivering
+wistfulness about her mouth. She moved so near that her fragrant breath
+fanned warm upon his eyelids. "There is no man but you--there will never
+be any other man!... Dearest"--her hands were on his shoulders; her bosom
+rose and fell close to his broad breast--"I have been very slow at
+learning. But--Owen!--I love you as your wife should love!"
+
+"You cannot!" He stepped back sharply, and her hands fell from him. "You
+shall not! I am not worthy. I thought so once.... I know better now. Do
+not deceive yourself. Love cannot be compelled at will, and I have ceased
+to wish--to desire yours! All I want now is rest and silence and
+forgetfulness--where alone they may be found!" He drew a breath of
+weariness.
+
+"If you have ceased to wish for love from me, that is my punishment," she
+said, very pale. "For without yours I cannot live! God hears me speak the
+truth!"
+
+"Lynette!..."
+
+He swayed like a tree cut through and falling. She caught his hands, and
+drew them to her heart.
+
+"I have been blind and deaf and senseless. I am changed, I am altered--I
+am awake at last! I know how great and precious is the love you have given
+me.... Do not tell me it is mine no longer! Owen, if you do that, it is I
+who shall die!"
+
+A sob tore its way through him. His great frame quivered. His mask-like
+immobility broke up ... was gone. Her own tears falling, she stretched her
+arms to him; yet while his eyes devoured her, his arms hungered for her,
+he delayed, knitting his brows. She caught a word or two, whispered
+brokenly. He asked himself: "Can this be Love?"
+
+"It is Love! Owen, I kissed you one night when I found you sleeping! When
+will you kiss me back again?"
+
+He cried out wildly upon God, and fell down upon his knees before her. He
+reached out groping, desperate arms, and snatched her close. His deep,
+shuddering breaths vibrated through her; her own knees were trembling, her
+bosom in storm. She swayed like a young palm. Nearer--nearer! he felt her
+hands about his neck, her tears upon his face....
+
+"Dear love, dearest husband, I have a message for you! Owen, shall I tell
+you what it is?"
+
+"Tell me, my heart's beloved," said Saxham in a whisper.
+
+Their looks united in azure fire and golden. Their breath mingled, their
+lips were very near. She felt his strength about her; he drank in her
+sweetness. The kiss, the supreme boon, was as yet withheld.
+
+She whispered....
+
+"I awakened in the light of the early morning--the morning of the day I
+came to you. She sat beside me--the Mother, Owen! her dear hand on my
+heart, her dear eyes waiting for mine. She stooped and kissed me ... it
+was real ... I felt it! She said: 'Love your husband as I loved Richard!
+Be to a child of his what I have been to you!'"
+
+His arms wrapped round her, gathered her, enfolded her. His scalding tears
+wetted her white bosom as she drew the square black head to rest there,
+and drooped her cheek upon the broad brow. Her rich hair, loosed from its
+coils, fell in a heavy silken rope upon his shoulder ... their lips met in
+the nuptial, sacramental kiss....
+
+
+
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