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 aspy, 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 lungsbubbled 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.
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 throughshallow 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 lookingat 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 Lorenço 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 hadmoulded 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,aliasVan 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 Gueldersdorpen routefor 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 forstuff 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. TheAdvance 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 khâki 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 kitchenwhistling 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 khâki-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.
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, andwomen 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 continuallywith 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 allthis. 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 dayitwas 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: "TheSiege Gazettehad 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 whenthe 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 againsther——"
"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 meantpunishment 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. Butshe, 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 dreadfullestscream. '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 forher"—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 violentlywhen 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 khâki 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 mingledlove 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.
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, andit 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 grimymen 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 bearershalted 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 overthe 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.