CHAPTER XVHeart to Heart'We will not speak of years to-night;For what have years to bring,But larger floods of love and light,And sweeter songs to sing?'They were in a quiet room at the hotel at last. They had lost sight of the tall-hatted gentleman and one musician entirely; the other had said thoughtfully that he would not intrude.'This is not the way we meant to welcome your daughter, Mrs. Cameron,' he said, laughing, as he clung by one hand to the timber, 'but, as you see, we're all mad together to-day. By to-morrow we shall have calmed down a little, and there will be a deputation and everything in order. You'll be at the Australia, of course?''Yes, I have rooms waiting for them,' Cameron said quietly.So the pleasant, long-haired fellow drifted away, and Cameron, at the first chance, steered his little family out of the thinning crowd, and found a cab to take them to the peace of the hotel.They took their hats off. Waiters seemed to think eating was a necessity, and brought in a meal, and stood, two of them, to help serve.Mrs. Cameron turned her head.'We would rather wait on ourselves,' she said. 'We have everything that we shall need, thank you, so you may go.'Cameron drew a relieved breath, though he would as soon have thought of dismissing the men himself as of calmly ordering one of those magnificent colonels out of his way during the afternoon.'Now we can be cosy,' Challis said, and sat down on her father's knee, instead of using the chair the waiter had placed for her. 'Are we like what you thought?' she asked. 'Someway I can't think now how I could have fancied you would be any different. Oh, I'm sure you're just like what I thought, only——' She paused then, and a little sensitive flush ran up into her cheeks. She had almost said, 'Only your beard is grey.'But her eyes had gone to its greyness.'Yes,' he said a little sadly, 'I didn't wait for you, Molly, did I? We always said we would grow old together, but I have left you far behind.'He hardly knew his wife. Time seemed to have turned back for her. There was not a wrinkle on her skin, the sharp winters had given a bloom like girlhood's to her cheeks, and the varied life and rest from domestic worries had brought the spring back into her blood.The wife who had gone away had been shrinking, careworn; she had worn shabby bonnets of her own trimming, dresses she had turned and turned about again. This one had the quiet, assured manner of a woman accustomed to travel. She wore a tailor-made fawn coat and skirt, whose very severity accentuated their style. There was the hall-mark of Paris on her bonnet of violets.Cameron sent a fleeting thought of gratitude to Mortimer, who had made it possible for his own clothes not to blush beside such garments. They were a quiet little party, and Challis did most of the talking. Cameron looked at his wife when she was occupied with the tea-cups; her searching eyes fastened on him when he turned to speak to his little daughter.Once, when he passed a plate to Challis, she noticed his hands against the snow of the tablecloth—hands she did not know at all, so rough and weather-marked and deeply brown they were. But she asked no question; instinctively she felt there was something to be told to her, and she hung back from the knowledge, knowing the telling would be pain to him.'Oh dear,' said Challis, 'if only you had brought Bart down, too, daddie, and he was sitting just here on this chair next to me!''I thought it was Hermie you wanted most,' the mother said.'Ah, Hermie! I want Hermie to sleep with. No, not to sleep with, for we sha'n't shut our eyes at all, but just to lie in the dark and talk and talk.''Roly wanted to come,' Cameron said. 'He's war mad, of course. He's painted the name Transvaal Vale on the sliprails.''On the what?' said Mrs. Cameron.Cameron went darkly red.'The—gate,' he said.'What else does he do? I want to know about Roly,' Challis said eagerly.'He wears a football jersey most of the time,' said the father, 'and is to be met at any hour of the day hung all over with the table-knives and the tin-opener and the cork-screw and the sharpening-steel. Also, he carries round his neck a string of what I think he calls double bungers. These are his cartridges. And he came possessed of an old tent in some way—the railway navvies gave it to him, I believe—and he has pitched it just outside the back door, and sleeps in it all night.''Oh dear, oh dear! The night air; he will catch a dreadful chill!' cried the mother, used now to English nights.'Not he! He's a hardy little chap,' said Cameron.'More, more,' said Challis. 'He's great fun, I think. Tell some more about him, daddie.''A neighbour, young Stevenson—you remember the Stevensons of Coolooli, Molly?—gave him half a crown the other day, and of course he went off to Wilgandra and laid in a stock of crackers. He made a rather ingenious fortification that he called Spion Kop, and invited us all out to see it. You don't know Darkie, the cattle dog, of course—we've only had him four years; Darkie naturally came too. He's rather a curiosity in his way, old Darkie; seems to have a natural love for fire, and goes off his head with excitement whenever a cracker is let off or the boys make a bonfire. Well, he made enough noise barking and yelping over Roly's display to satisfy even that young man. Presently Roly Put a whole packet of his double bungers on the top of his fort, and—what he did not tell me till afterwards—a quantity of blasting powder he had purloined from the navvies. Then he put a lighted match near a long piece of string, and cut down to us as hard as he could. Just at the critical moment, when we were getting our ears ready for the big explosion, Darkie gave a frantic bark of delight, bounded to the fort and seized the whole packet in his mouth. There wasn't time even to shout at him; there came a tremendous explosion, and the air seemed full of stones and earth and Darkie. The old fellow must have been blown six feet up in the air. I think we all shut our eyes, not liking the thought of seeing the poor old dog descend in a thousand pieces. But when we opened them he was down on the ground barking and yelping with more furious delight than ever, and except for a badly singed coat and a burnt tongue, not a bit the worse for his elevation.'Mrs. Cameron was looking disturbed.'He seems to do very dangerous things,' she said.Cameron laughed.'That's what Miss Browne says,' he answered; 'but he always turns up safe and sound.''Miss Browne?' repeated Mrs. Cameron.Cameron's eyes dropped to his plate, and he drank deeply at his tea, to put off the moment of his answer.'Who is Miss Browne?' his wife asked again.Cameron moved his eyes to a button on her coat.'I was obliged to change lady-helps,' he said.Mrs. Cameron's face expressed absolute alarm.'Miss Macintosh—is not Miss Macintosh still with you? You did not tell me. Why did she go? How long has she been gone?'Cameron looked white. 'Some—little time,' he said; 'she—went to be married.''And is this other—is Miss Browne as good? Oh, it would almost be impossible. Have you had to change much?'Cameron reassured her on that point. Miss Browne had been with them ever since Miss Macintosh left.'But how long is that? You don't tell me,' she cried.Cameron looked at a lower button.'Some—time,' he repeated faintly.'Jim,' she cried, and almost sharply, 'have you been keeping things from me? How long has Miss Macintosh been gone?'He lifted his eyes and looked at her. The day of reckoning had come.'She left six months after you went,' he answered.The news held Mrs. Cameron speechless for three minutes.'This other person—Miss Browne—is she as good?' she asked at length.Cameron breathed hard, and cut a slice of bread.'She does her best,' he said, 'but she is not—very capable.''Jim,' said Mrs. Cameron, 'is there anything else? Have you lost your position?'He bent his head a little. He merely nodded, and she might have thought it a careless nod, only her eyes suddenly saw the trembling of his work-marked hands.'Challis,' she said, 'go away—leave us alone.'The child put down her spoon and fork, and vanished.Cameron stood up, looking fixedly at the carpet, waiting with bowed head for her questions.[image]'HAVE YOU HIDDEN ANYTHING ELSE?' SAID MRS. CAMERON.'Have you hidden anything else?' she said, 'Are any of the children dead?''None of them are dead,' he said.'Are any of them deformed or hurt in any way?''None of them are hurt—they are in good health,' he said.'Have you ceased to love me?'—her voice was losing the note of fear that made it hard and unnatural.He looked at her, and his eyes swam.Her arms were round him, she was kissing him, kissing his wet eyes, his trembling lips, stroking his cheeks, crying over him.'You are afraid to tell me—me, your own little wife—something that does not matter at all. What can anything matter? We are all alive, and we love each other as we have done always. Darling, darling, don't look like that! Put down your head here, here on my breast—my husband, my darling! This is Molly, who went all through the ups and downs with you; you never used to be afraid to tell her anything.'He tried to speak, but sobs shook him instead.'Hush!' she said. 'There, don't talk, don't try to tell me. I know, darling. You lost the position, and you couldn't get another, and you're all as poor as poor can be. Pooh! what does that matter? You have none of you starved, since you are all alive, and the end has come. Poor hands, poor hands,'—her kisses and tears covered them,—'have they been breaking stones that the children might have bread?''Molly,' he said, anguished, 'your worst thought cannot picture what I have brought them to.'She trembled a little—Hermie, little Floss, the boys!But she laughed.'They are alive—they are together, and not in the Benevolent Asylum. My darling, I don't mind in the very least.''Molly,' he cried, 'you cannot dream how bad it is! It is Dunks' selection; we have been there four years!'She trembled again, for she had seen Dunks' selection, and the memory of it was yet in her mind.But again she laughed.'It will have made them all hardy,' she said; 'I can see it has done so, or Roly wouldn't be sleeping out of doors.''My wife,' he said, 'my wife, my wife!'They clung together.'The past is gone,' she whispered. 'I will never leave you again.''My wife, my wife!''Together now till death; nothing else shall part us, nothing else.''My wife!'Her tears rained down, mingled with his, and fell away into the greyness of his beard.They clung together, and the room and the world faded. They clung together, and there was no one in all space but themselves and God—God who had given them into each other's arm once more.Challis came to the door—she had knocked twice, to tell them that the luggage had come from the ship—then she turned the handle, for she thought they had gone out.But those faces! Those faces of the father and mother, wet, uplifted, almost divine!Very softly she closed the door again, and stole away.CHAPTER XVIThe RoseryThey cling in the moonlight, they kiss each other."Child, my child!" and "Mother, mother!"'Bart was on Wilgandra Station to meet them—Bart, healthy-looking and sinewy, if thin; he wore white flannel trousers, a white linen coat, and a new straw hat with a new fly-veil attached. Mrs. Cameron had looked when her husband cried, 'There's Bart,' with eyes that expected to see an out-at-elbow lad, possibly barefoot, probably ill-developed. But there was nothing she would have changed.'Of course they all wanted to come to meet you,' the boy said, when the first glad greetings were over, and the great panting, shrieking train had become just a quiet black thread climbing the side of the next rise. 'But I didn't want to crowd the buggy.''The buggy!' his father said. 'I was just going into the hotel to get one. I'm glad you thought to order it.''It's Mr. Stevenson's,' Bart said. 'He sent it down this morning for me to meet you in,' and he led them with much satisfaction to the handsome roomy sociable he had in waiting. Their own solitary equipage, the shabby cart drawn by Tramby and driven by young Daly, was in readiness for the many boxes.Once, in carrying the luggage to the cart, Bart and his father found themselves alone on the station for a moment. Bart gave a laughing glance from his father's to his own apparel.'Isn't it a lark?' he said. 'I feel quite shy of myself, don't you?''Do the girls look nice?' Cameron said anxiously.'Spiffin,' said Bart, 'and Miss Browne's got a new dress, and even curled her hair. I say, have you told mother about Miss Browne?''Yes, she is quite prepared.''And she knows about the selection?''She knows about the selection.''We've—we've been tidying up a bit, dad. I think you'll find it's a bit—er—tidier.' There was a flush on the boy's cheek, a look of suppressed excitement in his eyes. 'Let's get on now; the horse doesn't like to stand, and everything's in.'They drove up the road that wound out of civilised Wilgandra away to parts where the bush took on its wild character again, and rolled either side of them in unbroken severity and loneliness for miles.But it was early winter now, and the thankful land lay smiling and happy-eyed beneath a cooler sky. Even the newest clearings flaunted rich carpets of grass, green as grass only springs where a bush fire has purged the ground for it. The air was fragrant with the bush scents that rise after rain. A cool, quiet breeze swayed the boughs of the ocean-waste of trees, here and there it lifted the long string of warm-coloured bark—autumn's royal rags—that hung from the silvered trunks.Cameron was driving, and mechanically turned the horse's head at the place where he had always turned for the sliprails of his selection.And there were no sliprails!He turned an astonished glance at Bart, but the boy's eyes only danced.'I'll get down and open the gate,' he said demurely, and jumped down while his father stared at the neat white gate with The Rosery painted on in black letters. Could this be Dunks' selection that stretched before the head of the horse that bore them slowly along? This the grey, dreary place that had cast its colour over the souls of those who looked at it. A drive ran up from the gate to the house, not a smooth, red gravelled drive by any means, but it was cleared and stumped now all its length and width, and went with pleasant windings between the trees.A low white two-rail fence divided the bush and sheep ground from the land about the house; the small orchard showed freshly ploughed up and trenched between the trees; a vegetable garden was laid out, and the peas and beans were above the ground already. The flower-beds near the house were dug and weeded, as if they had been beds in the Botanical Gardens; and dahlias, little sunflowers, and cosmea of all shades made a gay mass of colour. The pixies' hands had even attacked the cottage; Cameron himself had given it a coat of red paint that had much altered its forlorn aspect; these new hands had carried the coat of paint even over the dreary galvanised iron roof, had 'picked out' the chimneys, and windows, and verandah-posts with white, added a seven-foot verandah all round, and knocked a French window into the walls here and there.'Why,' cried Challis, 'it's the sweetest, darlingest little place I ever saw! Oh, I never want to go away from it again!'Mrs. Cameron was looking with eyes full of pleased surprise.'Why, Jim,' she said, 'why, dearest, it is really very nice, very nice indeed, so peaceful-looking. You did not prepare me for anything like this.'Cameron swallowed a lump in his throat.'I didn't prepare myself,' he began; but his wife's hand was fluttering to the fastening of the sociable door, and her ears were no longer for him, for Hermie and Roly were running out to meet her.Such a rushing into arms, such kissings, such a choking of laughter and tears! Mrs. Cameron held Hermie to her and from her, and to her again, and marvelled to find her almost a woman.'My pretty girl, my pretty girl!' she said, the fond tears starting, and Hermie blushed herself into even lovelier colour than before.Challis kissed her sister and clung to her a moment, then stood away shy and pink, almost crying. Hermie's hair was done 'on top,' her dress was long, so long; she was very pretty and sweet-looking; but oh, there would never be any whispering and whispering in bed—she was far too grown up for that.Roly came up to the sister and submitted the edge of his left ear to her kiss. He looked at her critically.'Did the Queen cry when you came away?' he said.'I didn't notice,' said Challis. 'She was in the garden when I went to say good-bye, and she waved her handkerchief when I got back to the house—perhaps she had been crying into it.''Floss, Floss! I want my baby,' the mother's voice was saying.Hermie looked about her distressed.'Will you take no notice just yet, darling?' she said. 'She is very—shy, but she won't be able to stay away long; she's hiding somewhere.''Well, look here,' Roly said, 'I suppose she'll be wanting to come out here and see you——''Who?' said Challis, who also was looking longingly for the little girl she was going to put to bed at night.'That Queen-woman, of course,' said Roly. 'Look here, you can tell her straight before she comes I'm not going to take my tent down for her. You can let her have Miss Browne's bedroom, and you can't see it from that window. Miss Browne's got a cheek. Wanted me to take it down just for you and mother, cos she says it's untidy.''Why, we're dying to see the tent, aren't we, mother?' Challis said.Mrs. Cameron's arm went round her boy's shoulder, and her lips down to his round, closely cropped head. He dodged skilfully.'Come and see the tent,' he said. Then a gush of gentler feeling came up in his little boy-heart, and he moved up to her again and rubbed his head on her arm. 'If you like,' he said, 'I'll let you sleep out in it to-night, but not her,' and he pointed a finger at Challis; 'she'd get messing about and trying to tidy up.'He dragged them round to the back of the cottage, where the tent stood, a most dilapidated spread of ragged canvas.'Look here,' the owner said, nearly bursting with pride, 'up there, that's the fly, keeps it cool. I can sit in it on the hottest day.''No one else could,' laughed Bart.Roly took no heed of the depreciation.'See that? That's my water-bag; hang it in a draught, and it's as cool as you like.''No,' said Bart again, 'only asyoulike.''See this? Keep my meat in it, flies can't get in, hang it up out of the way. Here's my gridiron—here's my frying-pan.''Why,' cried Hermie, 'Miss Browne's been looking for the frying-pan all the morning!''Let her cook her things in the oven,' said Roly. 'See this? It's my bunk, made it myself—just legs of trees, and you stretch canvas on it. No sheets for me, only this blue blanket——'The blanket moved convulsively, a little brown bare foot was sticking out of one end of it, a strand of straight light hair showed at the other.'Flossie!' the mother cried, and made a rush at the bunk.The small girl sat up.'Go away!' she said. 'Go away! I won't be kissed. I'm not your girl. Keep your old dolls for yourself.''Flossie,' cried the mother, 'Flossie!' and tried to gather her up as if she had been two instead of seven, and tried to kiss her; but Floss covered her face tightly with her bony little hands.'Floss,' said Cameron, 'don't be ridiculous. Kiss your mother, and why are you not dressed?'Hermie was looking ready to cry. Had she not herself put the child a clean white frock on, and tried to curl her hair and seen her into shoes and stockings? And here was the naughty little thing barefoot, and in a ragged print frock!'Kiss your mother,' Cameron said sternly, the surprised pain on his wife's face angering him against the child.Floss turned a sullen little face to her mother, but her lips did not move.'Now kiss Challis,' the father said; for the mother, stooping over the child, had hidden it from him that he had only been half obeyed. Challis came forward to put a loving arm round the ragged shoulder. But Floss struggled to the ground, dived under the bunk, dragged at one of the tent-pegs, and was out and flying off to the bush like a wild rabbit before any one could stop her.'Go and fetch her back, Bart,' Cameron said, extreme annoyance in his tone.'It was to be expected,' Mrs. Cameron said, but she looked a little white. 'We mustn't force her; you must let me lay siege to the fortress my own way.'They went into the cottage, and Miss Browne showed herself—Miss Browne, with her usual strands of hair in little tight curls round her forehead, and a ready-made blouse and skirt of white pique vainly endeavouring to accommodate itself to her figure.'Oh dear!' she said, 'most ashamed, most grieved, Floss, peculiar disposition, soon come round, hope a pleasant journey, hot, dusty, must be hungry, Roly, ashamed, grieved, most untidy tent, unwilling to take it down, like to wash and take hats off, bedroom, show the way, dinner, hoped they would like it, not what they were accustomed to, holes in curtains, had not had time to mend them, must excuse table, afraid not a good manager, ignorant many things.''Everything is very nice,' Mrs. Cameron said. 'I am quite sure you have always done your best. Mr. Cameron has told me how hard you have worked, and you must let me thank you for it. There, there, I am afraid you have overtired yourself preparing for us. Don't trouble any more, we are going to shake down into place at once, Challis and I, and forget we have ever been away.''Oh, my love,' said Miss Browne, 'my dear, oh, my love!' and went away into the kitchen, and wept happily all the time she helped Lizzie to dish up the dinner.'Be quick,' said Roly, as the travellers went to a bedroom to take off their hats, 'there's fowls for dinner. It's Bluey, and Speckle, and Whitey. Whitey'll be the fattest, he was mine.''Oh dear,' said Hermie, as she shut the bedroom door, 'I wish he hadn't said that. Now father won't eat any. He never eats meat at all, but he likes poultry unless any one says anything like that. He says he likes to think of dinner just as dinner, and hates to remember the things have once been walking about. Now it won't be roast fowl at all to him, but just Whitey.''I don't think he heard,' said Challis; 'he was looking at the roses on the dinner-table, and saying, "I hope they didn't break my Souvenir de Terese Levet when they plucked these."'Hermie laughed.'Dear old dad!' she said. 'Mother, I don't know how he could have done so long without you if it had not been for his roses.''I must go down and see them,' the mother said, and tossed her bonnet off hastily. 'See, he is already going out to them. Is there time before dinner, darling? Plainly he can't wait any longer.'She went through the long window on to the verandah, and caught him up.Challis was taking off her hat, brushing her hair, removing the signs of travel with a dainty deftness born of so frequent journeys. Hermie's eyes followed her everywhere. They saw a girl not tall for her fourteen years, slender, not over strong-looking. Soft light hair fell away down her back, curlless, waveless. The greyish, hazel eyes were full of quiet shining, the face was thin, yet soft and childish, the mouth sensitive, a little sad.'Oh,' she said, 'the smell of the soap, Hermie! I can see the other bedroom so well—the Wilgandra one, and your bed was near the fireplace, and mine had white tassels on, and there was a pink vase on the washstand for our tooth-brushes.'Hermie looked in slight bewilderment at the pieces of common household soap that her sister held; she did not realise that the girl had seen and smelt nothing but scented since she went away, and that this plain yellow piece was pungent with the old days.'Where am I going to sleep, Hermie?' said the little girl, and her heart throbbed with the hope that Hermie would cry, 'With me, of course.''Bart is going to sleep out in the tent with Roly,' Hermie said, hanging up the well-cut little travelling-coat with a sigh for its style. 'You'll have his room.''Where do you sleep?' Challis ventured.'Dad and Bart built me a little room across there,' said Hermie.'And Floss?''Her cot is in Miss Browne's room.'Challis was glad bed-time was still some hours off; she had never yet slept in a room all to herself, but did not like to tell Hermie so.Roly banged at the door. 'There you go,' he said, 'grabbing everything, Hermie. She wants to come out and finish looking at the tent.''Finish looking at your grandmother!' laughed Hermie, then blushed vexedly. That was such a favourite phrase of Bart's she unconsciously fell into it herself; but what would Challis think of such slang, Challis, who was used to the conversation of cultured, travelled people? Challis, who looked such a little lady in her well-cut English-looking clothes, and spoke with the clipped, clear pronunciation her mother had insisted upon all these years?Challis, of course, would think her a boor, an uneducated, unrefined Australian back-blocks girl. Well, whose fault was it if she was?' She turned to her sister coldly. 'If you have finished we may as well go.'Challis followed her meekly.'Flossie,' said the mother, going into a bedroom when it was eight o'clock at night, and the rebel had come in and put herself to bed, 'I've just been unpacking my box and found this for Hermie. Do you think it is pretty?'She held up the daintiest of hats.Flossie looked at it, then squeezed her eyes up tight.'Don't want to see it,' she said.'We are unpacking the boxes,' the mother said; 'I thought you might like to put your dressing-gown on and come and watch.''Don't want to watch,' said Floss; 'haven't got any dressing-gown.'Mrs. Cameron was standing in the bedroom doorway. She held out a box of fascinating doll's tea-things.'Those are rather pretty, aren't they?' she said. 'We almost decided on a blue set, but then these little pink flowers seemed so fresh-looking we took it.'Flossie sent a devouring gaze to the beautiful boxful through the bars of her cot. Then she squeezed her eyes up tightly again.'Wouldn't look at them,' she said.The mother went away, and the darkness deepened in the room, and Floss lay gazing with hard eyes at a patch of light thrown from the living-room lamp upon the ceiling.Her heart swelled more and more; she pictured miserable scenes in which, while the rest of the family flaunted about in silk, she, Floss, was attired in rags and had crusts only to eat.'Only,' she muttered to herself, 'I won't eat them, and then I'll die, and p'r'aps she'll be sorry.'There was a movement in the room.'I think I'll lie down quietly on your bed for an hour, Miss Browne,' the mother's voice was saying; 'it will do my head good. Yes, thank you, I have the bottle of lavender water here; I never travel without getting a bad head.'Miss Browne shook up the pillows and left her; this idea of making capital out of the headache was her own. 'Flossie never can bear any one to suffer,' she said. 'I always remember when I first came here, and she was only about three, some one cut a snake in half along the road. And what must the child do but rush from us and pick up one half—by the mercy of God, the tail half! You remember, Hermie? Bart, my love, you can't have forgotten that shocking day? She came running back to us crying dreadfully, and with that horrible thing in her hands. "Mend it, mend it!" she sobbed "oh, poor sing, poor sing, mend it twick!"'So Mrs. Cameron went to lie on the bed far from Floss, and to sigh occasionally, once or twice to moan, as indeed she could, for her headache was severe.At the sighs there were restless movements in the cot; at the first moan the little figure climbed over the rail.'I don't mind bathing your head,' she said, her voice a little unsteady. 'Is it hurting you much?''Yes,' sighed the mother, 'it is very bad.'Floss dipped her handkerchief in the water-jug, and kept laying it softly on the aching forehead. For ten minutes Mrs. Cameron allowed herself to be thus ministered to, and presently the child sat down on the bed, almost within the arm that yearned to circle her. 'Would you like me to fan it?' she whispered. 'Fanning is good.''I would rather you laid your little hand on it,' said the mother.The little hand lay there instantly.'I think a kiss on it would do it more good than anything else,' whispered the mother, 'just a little one, sweetheart, sweetheart.''I couldn't,' quavered Floss. 'I promised faithfly and somenley.''Promised who?''Me.''What do you mean?''When you say, "See my finger wet, see it dry, cut my throat suresever I die," you've got to keep to it.''And you promised yourself like that that you wouldn't kiss me—me—mamma, who has been away for years and years breaking her heart for her little baby.''Oh,' gasped Floss, the fortress nearly down, 'but we might have got dropsy, truly, dropsy and deafness, me and Roly; May Daly's mother says so; you gen'ally get them after measles.''But you didn't, you didn't, Tiny. I prayed and prayed over the seas to God to take care of you all for me, and I knew He would. See how well and strong you all are! But ah, I never thought Tiny would break my heart like this.'Her voice quivered—fell away; Floss, putting up an uncertain hand through the darkness, found the cheek above her quite wet.'Mother!' she cried, and was face downward in a minute sobbing relievedly on her mother's breast.When they had lain together happy and quiet for a little time, the mother stirred to go, for Miss Browne must come to bed.Floss gave her a final hug. 'I do love you,' she said.'My baby,' murmured the mother. Floss shook back her straight hair and climbed off the bed and got into her own.'But I'm not going to let that Challis off,' she said. 'I'll just have to take it out of her.'CHAPTER XVIICrossing the Veldt'Why criest them for thy hurt? Thy pain is incurable.''Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it.''Thus saith the Lord, Such as are for death, to deathand such as are for the sword, to the sword.'Jeremiah.His good horse under him, a thunder-clouded sky above, a strange country astretch on every side, Mortimer was off, despatches in his pocket from his own colonel to the colonel of an Imperial regiment stationed some hundred and thirty miles away.The day hung heavy from the sky, the land lay sad hearted and patient-eyed beneath it.Yet now for the first time in all the weeks he had been on African soil Mortimer felt at home with his surroundings, even happy in them. The tumultuous days that lay behind him—he felt that some other, not he, had been living them. The frantic excitement of the send-off, the days at sea, the storm or two, the troubles with the horses, the uneventful landing on the unfamiliar shores, the hurried packing off up country by train, the feverish days and nights in camp at the bewildered little village that saw the armies of the greatest nation on earth swarming about its quiet fields, his first patrol and the fierce whizz and rattle of marvellously harmless bullets from a deserted-looking kopje, his first battle, with its horrid nightmare of flashing lights and thundering guns, its pools of blood, its contorted human faces, its agonised horses writhing in the dust—these were all nothing to him now, but the coloured bits of glass one shakes about in a kaleidoscope.The smell of tents and of spent gunpowder was no longer in his nostrils; the brown earth alone sent up its homely odour, and he drew the breath of it in with thankfulness. Such a quiet country; silent little farms asleep in the afternoon's sunshine, their crops long since ready, but gathered only by the birds. The cottages, some of them empty of all signs of habitation, some of them with their doors carefully locked on all a woman's treasure of furniture and homely things.Here and there the sheep had not been driven off, but cropped placidly at the plentiful pasturage. Mortimer's heart went out to the brown soft things.On and on he rode, finding his way with a bushman's instinct for the right path.The sky grew grey and more grey.Up from the west rolled a great woollen cloud that drooped lower and lower till it burst with a sudden fury over the land, as if shrapnel shells charged with hail had exploded in mid-air. Mortimer put up his collar, and ducked his head to the heavy ice-drops that struck him on every side. He looked in vain for shelter; the veldt rolled smooth and gently undulating in all directions, and no tree was anywhere. To the left a kopje loomed in the darkness ahead, to the right he had seen when on the last rise the white gleaming palings and lights of a farm. He pulled his watch out, and just made out in the rapidly falling darkness that it was eight o'clock. His colonel had advised him to camp for the night somewhere, lest he should lose his way in the darkness, and start off again at earliest dawn. He rapidly resolved to make the farm his halting-place, should, as was most likely, it prove to be unoccupied. The rumour that two lines of defence would join across this part of the country had swiftly cleared the sparsely occupied place. The thought of camping among the rocks of the kopje he did not entertain, having by this the same firmly rooted distrust of that kind of geological formation that the British soldier will carry henceforth in all ages. He forced his plunging horse along; the terrified beast was trembling in every limb with fright at the blinding lightning.The sound of voices on the road made him push forward harder than ever, his hand going swiftly to the pocket that held his revolver; then he found it was women's voices he heard, a woman's cry of anguish came after him. He wheeled his horse round, and went back slowly, almost feeling his way in the darkness.A flash of lightning showed him a cart with a fallen horse, an old man, and three girls.'What's wrong?' he asked.The old man began to explain rapidly in Dutch, but a girl who was stooping over the horse rose up and came to him.'Our horse has been struck,' she said in perfectly good English; 'one wheel was struck too, and blazed for a minute, but the rain has put it out.''Are none of you hurt?' said Mortimer.'None; it is wonderful!' said the girl.'Then run along all of you as hard as you can,' said Mortimer. 'There's a farm and shelter I think quite close. I'll take the old man up on my horse.''We can't leave the cart,' said the girl.'Oh, confound the cart!' said Mortimer, struggling with his plunging horse. 'You can get it after the storm is over.''We have some one in it,' said the unemotionable voice of the girl. 'He is dead.'Again the anguished cry of one of the other girls rose through the rain.Mortimer rode round the cart twice before he could think what to do.'Whose farm is it? Is any one living on it?' he said.'It is ours,' said the girl; 'we were almost home.''Who is at the farm—how many?' Mortimer said, having no inclination to run the risk of being made a prisoner before his despatches were safe.'My mother, we girls, our grandfather here, and some children.''I think I had better put up my horse in the shafts,' said Mortimer, 'though I much doubt if he'll go.''It is no use, the wheel is broken,' said the girl. 'We were just going to carry him home, only they will not do anything but cry. Anna, Emma, for shame! What use are tears? Come, we are strong; let us carry him out of this rain.' The girls still moaned and wept, however, and she spoke sharply again to them, this time in Dutch, the language in which their lamentations had been.'See here,' said Mortimer, 'I will take him up on my saddle.' He dismounted and went to the cart and felt about nervously. The English-speaking girl lifted up a rug, and there on pillows on the cart lay a dead young Boer.'Are you sure he's dead?' Mortimer said. The hands, though wet with rain, were hardly stiff, the body had some faint warmth.The girl was helping him to lift.'He is quite dead,' she said. 'He was wounded and going down by train to a Hospital. But as he passed this place, his home, he made them put him out on the station, and send for us to take him home. We brought the cart and pillows, but he had died in the waiting-shed before we got there. We are taking him home to bury.' The other girls shrilled loudly again. 'Anna, Emma,' she said, with more sharp words in Dutch. Then, excusingly, to Stevenson, and with pity in her voice, 'He was to have married one of them, the other is his sister.'Mortimer got the dead man up before him, held him with one arm and rode slowly, the girls and the old man hurrying by his side. The farm lay about a quarter of a mile away. The English-speaking girl opened the gate.'There is a ditch all the way up; don't stumble in it,' she said. 'I must go on and warn his mother.' She ran forward in the darkness. A turn in the path, and the lamplight from the farmhouse sent out its rays into the night. Some children, small boys chiefly, clustered at the door; in front of them stood the girl and another woman, fifty or sixty years old.Mortimer with their aid lifted his burden down, and laid it on a bed in an inner room. He gave a fearful glance at the elder woman, the man's mother. She was a big woman, not fat, like the Boer women generally are, but of angular outline, and with sharp high cheek-bones, and brown piercing eyes.She was of English parentage, married in early girlhood to a Boer farmer, and become mother of one daughter and six sons. Her husband had fallen with the handful at Jameson's Raid; two sons had with their life-blood helped on the British reverse at Modder River, one lay buried on the field at Elandslaagte, one at Magersfontein, one had been flung in the river at Jacobsdal, here was the sixth come home to her.She turned from the bed a moment to her niece, the English-speaking girl, who had been a teacher in Johannesburg, but had come to her aunt for refuge at the beginning of the war, and remained as mainstay of the farm.'Take those shrieking girls out of my hearing, Linda!' she said. 'Let no one come in to me.' She closed the door of the bedroom in their faces.Linda turned away.'I must get some hot drinks,' she said. 'Grandfather and the girls will take cold. Where are you going?''Oh, I'll get along now,' said Mortimer.'Nonsense!' said the girl; 'you must dry yourself and eat and drink.' She moved towards the kitchen.'Oh,' said Mortimer, 'I'd better go. Just think, I might have been one of the lot who knocked that poor chap over.''We cannot stay to think of that,' the girl answered. 'You helped us; you must stay till the storm is over.''But,' urged Mortimer again, 'how willshefeel?' and he glanced at the closed bedroom door.'Oh, she understands,' said Linda; 'her feeling is not against individuals. Your soldiers have eaten and rested here three or four times, for we are almost the only people left. We stay because we have nowhere to go, and we none of us care what happens.'Mortimer went to the door.'I must see to my poor horse,' he said presently.The girl summoned the stolid-faced little boys—sons they were of the sons who were slain. She gave them a lantern, and bade them show the strange guest the stables. Then she ran to the kitchen herself.Mortimer was twenty minutes drying down his horse, feeding it, making it comfortable, for the fate of his despatches rested on its welfare. Then he went back to the kitchen.The mother was there. She had left her dead after a few minutes, to busy herself with the task of getting all the wet figures into dry garments. She was mixing drinks, hot, strong drinks that made the girls blink and choke even while it restored them. She had the grandfather wrapped in rugs, sitting closest of all to the fire.When Mortimer stood in the doorway, dripping helmet, dripping khaki suit, she moved towards him.'Drink this,' she said, and gave him a deep mug of hot liquid.He swallowed it gratefully, for the cold seemed in his very bones.'Here are some clothes,' she said, and picked up a rough farming-suit that she had laid in readiness on a chair—'here is a room.' She stepped across the passage. 'Change at once, and hand me your wet things to dry.'Mortimer obeyed her, and, after doing so, sat down on the bed to await the call to eat of the food the girl Linda was preparing.And then outraged nature took her revenge. He had not slept for fifty-six hours; he had been in the saddle eighteen hours of yesterday, and twelve of to-day. It was three hours before he knew anything more, and then it was only his cramped position on the bed that woke him; except for that he would have slept the clock round.He sat up numbed, his heart beating suffocatingly. Where were his despatches? What clothes were these he wore? He fell to his feet, a groan of horror bursting from him. What was this he had done—raw, careless, culpable soldier that he was? He had never taken the envelopes from the clothes he had handed the woman—the woman whose sons' and husband's deaths lay at his country's door, still unavenged! Two strides took him down the hall to the kitchen, his face was like ashes. All the little house lay still as the tall, thin young farmer who, in the front room, was taking his rest for ever from the ploughing of fields, the sowing and reaping of crops, the blind and strenuous guarding of his land and liberty at the command of those in the high places.The fire still burnt brightly in the grate. Linda sat before it so plunged in mournful thought she did not hear the young bushman's footfall.Across one side of the fire a clothes-horse stood holding the draggled skirts of the girls, the grandfather's moleskin clothes, the familiar khaki of the uniform he had disgraced.His hand clutched the coat convulsively; beads of sheer terror stood on his forehead. Then he sat down suddenly, the passion of relief bringing the tears of relief to his eyes.The papers were there untouched; the long envelopes with the red army seal upon them stuck up out of his breast-pocket in full view! That woman, the mother whose sons were dead, that clear-headed young girl, they must both have known the importance of the papers, yet neither had laid a finger upon them, since he was their guest, their helper!Linda smiled at him in a pale way.'You have come to say you are hungry,' she said. 'I went to your room twice, but you slept so soundly I thought the food might wait.' She put a dish before him, meat and vegetables mixed up together. 'This is hot, at least, and nourishing,' she said.He thanked her, his voice still thick from agitation, then ate while she went back to her morbid gazing at the glowing fire.'Do you know it is twelve o'clock?' he said presently. 'Won't you go to bed? I am afraid you have sat up to keep this fire alight for the food.'She pushed back the thick hair from her forehead. No one could call her pretty, but the clear eyes and the patience and strength of the young mouth struck one.'I think I was trying to see the end of the war,' she said, sighing; 'but it takes better sight than mine.''You?' he said pityingly. 'Have you lost any one very near—nearer than these cousins?'She blenched a moment.'One of them,' she said. 'I had been married to one of them—a week. We will not speak of that.'He begged her pardon, his throat thick again.She fought her lip quiet.'Oh,' she said, 'it is the same everywhere; our lovers, our husbands, our sons—all gone from us! Some will come back, of course, but crushed and mutilated. A little time, and your army will only have a handful of women to contend against.''We, too,' he said, 'we have lost our brothers, our fathers, our sons. Everywhere we have women mourning.''Yes,' she said, 'I suppose so.' She sat silent a little time. 'But then it was you who came,' she urged again. 'We used to be quiet and happy in our own way, even if we were unprogressive and unintelligent. It seems, to a woman, we might have been left alone.''Ah, but,' he said, 'there were bigger issues than that at stake. You have read—I can see that you have read—you must know why we are fighting.''Somewhere at the top,' she said, with a wan smile, 'there may be a few—a very few—on both sides who know. But our men don't know. They have been told they will lose their liberty and homes if they don't fight; that is all any of my cousins knew, and they went off to death, not cheerfully, but because there was nothing else to be done. Your men, of course they come because they are sent, and they fight their best because they are brave and obey orders. We have been insolent—isn't that what you say of us?—and we must be crushed. But some of you must know the rights of it all. Think how much wiser you are than we. You read while we plough. Those of you who know should stay behind.''No,' he smiled; 'that is not our way either. We are no different from you. We pay a few great men to do the thinking for us, and if they say it's got to be fighting, then, whatever it seems to us individually, collectively we just shoot.'The fire burnt lower and lower; it was the only light in the room, for the oil-lamp, exhausted, had died out. Outside the rain still fell in straight soaking sheets over the thatched roof of the little house. A wind moaned restlessly over the empty country; you fancied it was lost and full of woe, because it had no trees to wander through. Once or twice a horse whinnied, once or twice there came through the night the inexpressibly mournful sound of the bleat of a sheep. You felt the rain was like no other rain at all; it seemed as if the land, swollen-eyed, was weeping in the quiet of midnight for its unutterable woes.The girl's head drooped back against the wall. Sleep had claimed her; but, by the anguish of the mouth and the pitiful stirring of the breast, you knew it was but to show her the body of her young husband, cast with a score of others in a trench, all wet with red.Stevenson sat, a cold sweat upon his brow; he felt he was the only soul awake on all the frightful continent.Then through the silence of the house came a woman's voice reading the Bible—the mother seated a foot away from her quiet son. The thin wood offered no resistance to the sound of her voice.'"Gather up thy wares out of the land, O thou that abidest in the siege. For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will sling out the inhabitants of the land at this time, and will distress them, that they may feel it. Woe is me for my hurt! My wound is grievous: but I said, Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it."'The sound of the voice pierced into Linda's wretched slumbers. She opened dilated eyes, and stared wildly at Mortimer. And the voice went on again:'"My tent is spoiled, and all my cords are broken: my children are gone forth of me, and they are not: there is none to stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains. For the shepherds are become brutish, and have not inquired of the Lord: therefore they have not prospered, and all their flocks are scattered. The voice of a rumour, behold it cometh, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah a desolation, a dwelling-place of jackals."''Oh,' said the girl with a sobbing breath, 'it is only aunt, of course; she often reads aloud like that. But, oh, I have had such dreams—such frightful dreams!'The voice went on.'"O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. O Lord, correct me"'—the tone of the voice fell a little—'"but with judgment; not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me—to nothing."''I dreamt—I dreamt,' said the girl, pressing both hands on her throbbing heart—'ah, I could never tell you what I dreamt!''Hush,' said Mortimer, 'don't try, don't try! Won't you go to your room, and try to sleep in comfort?'She looked at him with distended eyes.'I daren't,' she said. 'O God, I never shall dare to sleep again!'The voice rose; the horrible exultant thrill in it made the flesh creep.'"Pour out Thy fury upon the heathen that know Thee not, and upon the families that call not on Thy name: for they have devoured Jacob, yea, they have devoured him and consumed him, and have laid waste his habitation."'The girl staggered to her feet.'I will go and sit with her,' she said; 'she should not be alone.'
CHAPTER XV
Heart to Heart
'We will not speak of years to-night;For what have years to bring,But larger floods of love and light,And sweeter songs to sing?'
'We will not speak of years to-night;For what have years to bring,But larger floods of love and light,And sweeter songs to sing?'
'We will not speak of years to-night;
For what have years to bring,
For what have years to bring,
But larger floods of love and light,
And sweeter songs to sing?'
And sweeter songs to sing?'
They were in a quiet room at the hotel at last. They had lost sight of the tall-hatted gentleman and one musician entirely; the other had said thoughtfully that he would not intrude.
'This is not the way we meant to welcome your daughter, Mrs. Cameron,' he said, laughing, as he clung by one hand to the timber, 'but, as you see, we're all mad together to-day. By to-morrow we shall have calmed down a little, and there will be a deputation and everything in order. You'll be at the Australia, of course?'
'Yes, I have rooms waiting for them,' Cameron said quietly.
So the pleasant, long-haired fellow drifted away, and Cameron, at the first chance, steered his little family out of the thinning crowd, and found a cab to take them to the peace of the hotel.
They took their hats off. Waiters seemed to think eating was a necessity, and brought in a meal, and stood, two of them, to help serve.
Mrs. Cameron turned her head.
'We would rather wait on ourselves,' she said. 'We have everything that we shall need, thank you, so you may go.'
Cameron drew a relieved breath, though he would as soon have thought of dismissing the men himself as of calmly ordering one of those magnificent colonels out of his way during the afternoon.
'Now we can be cosy,' Challis said, and sat down on her father's knee, instead of using the chair the waiter had placed for her. 'Are we like what you thought?' she asked. 'Someway I can't think now how I could have fancied you would be any different. Oh, I'm sure you're just like what I thought, only——' She paused then, and a little sensitive flush ran up into her cheeks. She had almost said, 'Only your beard is grey.'
But her eyes had gone to its greyness.
'Yes,' he said a little sadly, 'I didn't wait for you, Molly, did I? We always said we would grow old together, but I have left you far behind.'
He hardly knew his wife. Time seemed to have turned back for her. There was not a wrinkle on her skin, the sharp winters had given a bloom like girlhood's to her cheeks, and the varied life and rest from domestic worries had brought the spring back into her blood.
The wife who had gone away had been shrinking, careworn; she had worn shabby bonnets of her own trimming, dresses she had turned and turned about again. This one had the quiet, assured manner of a woman accustomed to travel. She wore a tailor-made fawn coat and skirt, whose very severity accentuated their style. There was the hall-mark of Paris on her bonnet of violets.
Cameron sent a fleeting thought of gratitude to Mortimer, who had made it possible for his own clothes not to blush beside such garments. They were a quiet little party, and Challis did most of the talking. Cameron looked at his wife when she was occupied with the tea-cups; her searching eyes fastened on him when he turned to speak to his little daughter.
Once, when he passed a plate to Challis, she noticed his hands against the snow of the tablecloth—hands she did not know at all, so rough and weather-marked and deeply brown they were. But she asked no question; instinctively she felt there was something to be told to her, and she hung back from the knowledge, knowing the telling would be pain to him.
'Oh dear,' said Challis, 'if only you had brought Bart down, too, daddie, and he was sitting just here on this chair next to me!'
'I thought it was Hermie you wanted most,' the mother said.
'Ah, Hermie! I want Hermie to sleep with. No, not to sleep with, for we sha'n't shut our eyes at all, but just to lie in the dark and talk and talk.'
'Roly wanted to come,' Cameron said. 'He's war mad, of course. He's painted the name Transvaal Vale on the sliprails.'
'On the what?' said Mrs. Cameron.
Cameron went darkly red.
'The—gate,' he said.
'What else does he do? I want to know about Roly,' Challis said eagerly.
'He wears a football jersey most of the time,' said the father, 'and is to be met at any hour of the day hung all over with the table-knives and the tin-opener and the cork-screw and the sharpening-steel. Also, he carries round his neck a string of what I think he calls double bungers. These are his cartridges. And he came possessed of an old tent in some way—the railway navvies gave it to him, I believe—and he has pitched it just outside the back door, and sleeps in it all night.'
'Oh dear, oh dear! The night air; he will catch a dreadful chill!' cried the mother, used now to English nights.
'Not he! He's a hardy little chap,' said Cameron.
'More, more,' said Challis. 'He's great fun, I think. Tell some more about him, daddie.'
'A neighbour, young Stevenson—you remember the Stevensons of Coolooli, Molly?—gave him half a crown the other day, and of course he went off to Wilgandra and laid in a stock of crackers. He made a rather ingenious fortification that he called Spion Kop, and invited us all out to see it. You don't know Darkie, the cattle dog, of course—we've only had him four years; Darkie naturally came too. He's rather a curiosity in his way, old Darkie; seems to have a natural love for fire, and goes off his head with excitement whenever a cracker is let off or the boys make a bonfire. Well, he made enough noise barking and yelping over Roly's display to satisfy even that young man. Presently Roly Put a whole packet of his double bungers on the top of his fort, and—what he did not tell me till afterwards—a quantity of blasting powder he had purloined from the navvies. Then he put a lighted match near a long piece of string, and cut down to us as hard as he could. Just at the critical moment, when we were getting our ears ready for the big explosion, Darkie gave a frantic bark of delight, bounded to the fort and seized the whole packet in his mouth. There wasn't time even to shout at him; there came a tremendous explosion, and the air seemed full of stones and earth and Darkie. The old fellow must have been blown six feet up in the air. I think we all shut our eyes, not liking the thought of seeing the poor old dog descend in a thousand pieces. But when we opened them he was down on the ground barking and yelping with more furious delight than ever, and except for a badly singed coat and a burnt tongue, not a bit the worse for his elevation.'
Mrs. Cameron was looking disturbed.
'He seems to do very dangerous things,' she said.
Cameron laughed.
'That's what Miss Browne says,' he answered; 'but he always turns up safe and sound.'
'Miss Browne?' repeated Mrs. Cameron.
Cameron's eyes dropped to his plate, and he drank deeply at his tea, to put off the moment of his answer.
'Who is Miss Browne?' his wife asked again.
Cameron moved his eyes to a button on her coat.
'I was obliged to change lady-helps,' he said.
Mrs. Cameron's face expressed absolute alarm.
'Miss Macintosh—is not Miss Macintosh still with you? You did not tell me. Why did she go? How long has she been gone?'
Cameron looked white. 'Some—little time,' he said; 'she—went to be married.'
'And is this other—is Miss Browne as good? Oh, it would almost be impossible. Have you had to change much?'
Cameron reassured her on that point. Miss Browne had been with them ever since Miss Macintosh left.
'But how long is that? You don't tell me,' she cried.
Cameron looked at a lower button.
'Some—time,' he repeated faintly.
'Jim,' she cried, and almost sharply, 'have you been keeping things from me? How long has Miss Macintosh been gone?'
He lifted his eyes and looked at her. The day of reckoning had come.
'She left six months after you went,' he answered.
The news held Mrs. Cameron speechless for three minutes.
'This other person—Miss Browne—is she as good?' she asked at length.
Cameron breathed hard, and cut a slice of bread.
'She does her best,' he said, 'but she is not—very capable.'
'Jim,' said Mrs. Cameron, 'is there anything else? Have you lost your position?'
He bent his head a little. He merely nodded, and she might have thought it a careless nod, only her eyes suddenly saw the trembling of his work-marked hands.
'Challis,' she said, 'go away—leave us alone.'
The child put down her spoon and fork, and vanished.
Cameron stood up, looking fixedly at the carpet, waiting with bowed head for her questions.
[image]'HAVE YOU HIDDEN ANYTHING ELSE?' SAID MRS. CAMERON.
[image]
[image]
'HAVE YOU HIDDEN ANYTHING ELSE?' SAID MRS. CAMERON.
'Have you hidden anything else?' she said, 'Are any of the children dead?'
'None of them are dead,' he said.
'Are any of them deformed or hurt in any way?'
'None of them are hurt—they are in good health,' he said.
'Have you ceased to love me?'—her voice was losing the note of fear that made it hard and unnatural.
He looked at her, and his eyes swam.
Her arms were round him, she was kissing him, kissing his wet eyes, his trembling lips, stroking his cheeks, crying over him.
'You are afraid to tell me—me, your own little wife—something that does not matter at all. What can anything matter? We are all alive, and we love each other as we have done always. Darling, darling, don't look like that! Put down your head here, here on my breast—my husband, my darling! This is Molly, who went all through the ups and downs with you; you never used to be afraid to tell her anything.'
He tried to speak, but sobs shook him instead.
'Hush!' she said. 'There, don't talk, don't try to tell me. I know, darling. You lost the position, and you couldn't get another, and you're all as poor as poor can be. Pooh! what does that matter? You have none of you starved, since you are all alive, and the end has come. Poor hands, poor hands,'—her kisses and tears covered them,—'have they been breaking stones that the children might have bread?'
'Molly,' he said, anguished, 'your worst thought cannot picture what I have brought them to.'
She trembled a little—Hermie, little Floss, the boys!
But she laughed.
'They are alive—they are together, and not in the Benevolent Asylum. My darling, I don't mind in the very least.'
'Molly,' he cried, 'you cannot dream how bad it is! It is Dunks' selection; we have been there four years!'
She trembled again, for she had seen Dunks' selection, and the memory of it was yet in her mind.
But again she laughed.
'It will have made them all hardy,' she said; 'I can see it has done so, or Roly wouldn't be sleeping out of doors.'
'My wife,' he said, 'my wife, my wife!'
They clung together.
'The past is gone,' she whispered. 'I will never leave you again.'
'My wife, my wife!'
'Together now till death; nothing else shall part us, nothing else.'
'My wife!'
Her tears rained down, mingled with his, and fell away into the greyness of his beard.
They clung together, and the room and the world faded. They clung together, and there was no one in all space but themselves and God—God who had given them into each other's arm once more.
Challis came to the door—she had knocked twice, to tell them that the luggage had come from the ship—then she turned the handle, for she thought they had gone out.
But those faces! Those faces of the father and mother, wet, uplifted, almost divine!
Very softly she closed the door again, and stole away.
CHAPTER XVI
The Rosery
They cling in the moonlight, they kiss each other."Child, my child!" and "Mother, mother!"'
They cling in the moonlight, they kiss each other."Child, my child!" and "Mother, mother!"'
They cling in the moonlight, they kiss each other.
"Child, my child!" and "Mother, mother!"'
Bart was on Wilgandra Station to meet them—Bart, healthy-looking and sinewy, if thin; he wore white flannel trousers, a white linen coat, and a new straw hat with a new fly-veil attached. Mrs. Cameron had looked when her husband cried, 'There's Bart,' with eyes that expected to see an out-at-elbow lad, possibly barefoot, probably ill-developed. But there was nothing she would have changed.
'Of course they all wanted to come to meet you,' the boy said, when the first glad greetings were over, and the great panting, shrieking train had become just a quiet black thread climbing the side of the next rise. 'But I didn't want to crowd the buggy.'
'The buggy!' his father said. 'I was just going into the hotel to get one. I'm glad you thought to order it.'
'It's Mr. Stevenson's,' Bart said. 'He sent it down this morning for me to meet you in,' and he led them with much satisfaction to the handsome roomy sociable he had in waiting. Their own solitary equipage, the shabby cart drawn by Tramby and driven by young Daly, was in readiness for the many boxes.
Once, in carrying the luggage to the cart, Bart and his father found themselves alone on the station for a moment. Bart gave a laughing glance from his father's to his own apparel.
'Isn't it a lark?' he said. 'I feel quite shy of myself, don't you?'
'Do the girls look nice?' Cameron said anxiously.
'Spiffin,' said Bart, 'and Miss Browne's got a new dress, and even curled her hair. I say, have you told mother about Miss Browne?'
'Yes, she is quite prepared.'
'And she knows about the selection?'
'She knows about the selection.'
'We've—we've been tidying up a bit, dad. I think you'll find it's a bit—er—tidier.' There was a flush on the boy's cheek, a look of suppressed excitement in his eyes. 'Let's get on now; the horse doesn't like to stand, and everything's in.'
They drove up the road that wound out of civilised Wilgandra away to parts where the bush took on its wild character again, and rolled either side of them in unbroken severity and loneliness for miles.
But it was early winter now, and the thankful land lay smiling and happy-eyed beneath a cooler sky. Even the newest clearings flaunted rich carpets of grass, green as grass only springs where a bush fire has purged the ground for it. The air was fragrant with the bush scents that rise after rain. A cool, quiet breeze swayed the boughs of the ocean-waste of trees, here and there it lifted the long string of warm-coloured bark—autumn's royal rags—that hung from the silvered trunks.
Cameron was driving, and mechanically turned the horse's head at the place where he had always turned for the sliprails of his selection.
And there were no sliprails!
He turned an astonished glance at Bart, but the boy's eyes only danced.
'I'll get down and open the gate,' he said demurely, and jumped down while his father stared at the neat white gate with The Rosery painted on in black letters. Could this be Dunks' selection that stretched before the head of the horse that bore them slowly along? This the grey, dreary place that had cast its colour over the souls of those who looked at it. A drive ran up from the gate to the house, not a smooth, red gravelled drive by any means, but it was cleared and stumped now all its length and width, and went with pleasant windings between the trees.
A low white two-rail fence divided the bush and sheep ground from the land about the house; the small orchard showed freshly ploughed up and trenched between the trees; a vegetable garden was laid out, and the peas and beans were above the ground already. The flower-beds near the house were dug and weeded, as if they had been beds in the Botanical Gardens; and dahlias, little sunflowers, and cosmea of all shades made a gay mass of colour. The pixies' hands had even attacked the cottage; Cameron himself had given it a coat of red paint that had much altered its forlorn aspect; these new hands had carried the coat of paint even over the dreary galvanised iron roof, had 'picked out' the chimneys, and windows, and verandah-posts with white, added a seven-foot verandah all round, and knocked a French window into the walls here and there.
'Why,' cried Challis, 'it's the sweetest, darlingest little place I ever saw! Oh, I never want to go away from it again!'
Mrs. Cameron was looking with eyes full of pleased surprise.
'Why, Jim,' she said, 'why, dearest, it is really very nice, very nice indeed, so peaceful-looking. You did not prepare me for anything like this.'
Cameron swallowed a lump in his throat.
'I didn't prepare myself,' he began; but his wife's hand was fluttering to the fastening of the sociable door, and her ears were no longer for him, for Hermie and Roly were running out to meet her.
Such a rushing into arms, such kissings, such a choking of laughter and tears! Mrs. Cameron held Hermie to her and from her, and to her again, and marvelled to find her almost a woman.
'My pretty girl, my pretty girl!' she said, the fond tears starting, and Hermie blushed herself into even lovelier colour than before.
Challis kissed her sister and clung to her a moment, then stood away shy and pink, almost crying. Hermie's hair was done 'on top,' her dress was long, so long; she was very pretty and sweet-looking; but oh, there would never be any whispering and whispering in bed—she was far too grown up for that.
Roly came up to the sister and submitted the edge of his left ear to her kiss. He looked at her critically.
'Did the Queen cry when you came away?' he said.
'I didn't notice,' said Challis. 'She was in the garden when I went to say good-bye, and she waved her handkerchief when I got back to the house—perhaps she had been crying into it.'
'Floss, Floss! I want my baby,' the mother's voice was saying.
Hermie looked about her distressed.
'Will you take no notice just yet, darling?' she said. 'She is very—shy, but she won't be able to stay away long; she's hiding somewhere.'
'Well, look here,' Roly said, 'I suppose she'll be wanting to come out here and see you——'
'Who?' said Challis, who also was looking longingly for the little girl she was going to put to bed at night.
'That Queen-woman, of course,' said Roly. 'Look here, you can tell her straight before she comes I'm not going to take my tent down for her. You can let her have Miss Browne's bedroom, and you can't see it from that window. Miss Browne's got a cheek. Wanted me to take it down just for you and mother, cos she says it's untidy.'
'Why, we're dying to see the tent, aren't we, mother?' Challis said.
Mrs. Cameron's arm went round her boy's shoulder, and her lips down to his round, closely cropped head. He dodged skilfully.
'Come and see the tent,' he said. Then a gush of gentler feeling came up in his little boy-heart, and he moved up to her again and rubbed his head on her arm. 'If you like,' he said, 'I'll let you sleep out in it to-night, but not her,' and he pointed a finger at Challis; 'she'd get messing about and trying to tidy up.'
He dragged them round to the back of the cottage, where the tent stood, a most dilapidated spread of ragged canvas.
'Look here,' the owner said, nearly bursting with pride, 'up there, that's the fly, keeps it cool. I can sit in it on the hottest day.'
'No one else could,' laughed Bart.
Roly took no heed of the depreciation.
'See that? That's my water-bag; hang it in a draught, and it's as cool as you like.'
'No,' said Bart again, 'only asyoulike.'
'See this? Keep my meat in it, flies can't get in, hang it up out of the way. Here's my gridiron—here's my frying-pan.'
'Why,' cried Hermie, 'Miss Browne's been looking for the frying-pan all the morning!'
'Let her cook her things in the oven,' said Roly. 'See this? It's my bunk, made it myself—just legs of trees, and you stretch canvas on it. No sheets for me, only this blue blanket——'
The blanket moved convulsively, a little brown bare foot was sticking out of one end of it, a strand of straight light hair showed at the other.
'Flossie!' the mother cried, and made a rush at the bunk.
The small girl sat up.
'Go away!' she said. 'Go away! I won't be kissed. I'm not your girl. Keep your old dolls for yourself.'
'Flossie,' cried the mother, 'Flossie!' and tried to gather her up as if she had been two instead of seven, and tried to kiss her; but Floss covered her face tightly with her bony little hands.
'Floss,' said Cameron, 'don't be ridiculous. Kiss your mother, and why are you not dressed?'
Hermie was looking ready to cry. Had she not herself put the child a clean white frock on, and tried to curl her hair and seen her into shoes and stockings? And here was the naughty little thing barefoot, and in a ragged print frock!
'Kiss your mother,' Cameron said sternly, the surprised pain on his wife's face angering him against the child.
Floss turned a sullen little face to her mother, but her lips did not move.
'Now kiss Challis,' the father said; for the mother, stooping over the child, had hidden it from him that he had only been half obeyed. Challis came forward to put a loving arm round the ragged shoulder. But Floss struggled to the ground, dived under the bunk, dragged at one of the tent-pegs, and was out and flying off to the bush like a wild rabbit before any one could stop her.
'Go and fetch her back, Bart,' Cameron said, extreme annoyance in his tone.
'It was to be expected,' Mrs. Cameron said, but she looked a little white. 'We mustn't force her; you must let me lay siege to the fortress my own way.'
They went into the cottage, and Miss Browne showed herself—Miss Browne, with her usual strands of hair in little tight curls round her forehead, and a ready-made blouse and skirt of white pique vainly endeavouring to accommodate itself to her figure.
'Oh dear!' she said, 'most ashamed, most grieved, Floss, peculiar disposition, soon come round, hope a pleasant journey, hot, dusty, must be hungry, Roly, ashamed, grieved, most untidy tent, unwilling to take it down, like to wash and take hats off, bedroom, show the way, dinner, hoped they would like it, not what they were accustomed to, holes in curtains, had not had time to mend them, must excuse table, afraid not a good manager, ignorant many things.'
'Everything is very nice,' Mrs. Cameron said. 'I am quite sure you have always done your best. Mr. Cameron has told me how hard you have worked, and you must let me thank you for it. There, there, I am afraid you have overtired yourself preparing for us. Don't trouble any more, we are going to shake down into place at once, Challis and I, and forget we have ever been away.'
'Oh, my love,' said Miss Browne, 'my dear, oh, my love!' and went away into the kitchen, and wept happily all the time she helped Lizzie to dish up the dinner.
'Be quick,' said Roly, as the travellers went to a bedroom to take off their hats, 'there's fowls for dinner. It's Bluey, and Speckle, and Whitey. Whitey'll be the fattest, he was mine.'
'Oh dear,' said Hermie, as she shut the bedroom door, 'I wish he hadn't said that. Now father won't eat any. He never eats meat at all, but he likes poultry unless any one says anything like that. He says he likes to think of dinner just as dinner, and hates to remember the things have once been walking about. Now it won't be roast fowl at all to him, but just Whitey.'
'I don't think he heard,' said Challis; 'he was looking at the roses on the dinner-table, and saying, "I hope they didn't break my Souvenir de Terese Levet when they plucked these."'
Hermie laughed.
'Dear old dad!' she said. 'Mother, I don't know how he could have done so long without you if it had not been for his roses.'
'I must go down and see them,' the mother said, and tossed her bonnet off hastily. 'See, he is already going out to them. Is there time before dinner, darling? Plainly he can't wait any longer.'
She went through the long window on to the verandah, and caught him up.
Challis was taking off her hat, brushing her hair, removing the signs of travel with a dainty deftness born of so frequent journeys. Hermie's eyes followed her everywhere. They saw a girl not tall for her fourteen years, slender, not over strong-looking. Soft light hair fell away down her back, curlless, waveless. The greyish, hazel eyes were full of quiet shining, the face was thin, yet soft and childish, the mouth sensitive, a little sad.
'Oh,' she said, 'the smell of the soap, Hermie! I can see the other bedroom so well—the Wilgandra one, and your bed was near the fireplace, and mine had white tassels on, and there was a pink vase on the washstand for our tooth-brushes.'
Hermie looked in slight bewilderment at the pieces of common household soap that her sister held; she did not realise that the girl had seen and smelt nothing but scented since she went away, and that this plain yellow piece was pungent with the old days.
'Where am I going to sleep, Hermie?' said the little girl, and her heart throbbed with the hope that Hermie would cry, 'With me, of course.'
'Bart is going to sleep out in the tent with Roly,' Hermie said, hanging up the well-cut little travelling-coat with a sigh for its style. 'You'll have his room.'
'Where do you sleep?' Challis ventured.
'Dad and Bart built me a little room across there,' said Hermie.
'And Floss?'
'Her cot is in Miss Browne's room.'
Challis was glad bed-time was still some hours off; she had never yet slept in a room all to herself, but did not like to tell Hermie so.
Roly banged at the door. 'There you go,' he said, 'grabbing everything, Hermie. She wants to come out and finish looking at the tent.'
'Finish looking at your grandmother!' laughed Hermie, then blushed vexedly. That was such a favourite phrase of Bart's she unconsciously fell into it herself; but what would Challis think of such slang, Challis, who was used to the conversation of cultured, travelled people? Challis, who looked such a little lady in her well-cut English-looking clothes, and spoke with the clipped, clear pronunciation her mother had insisted upon all these years?
Challis, of course, would think her a boor, an uneducated, unrefined Australian back-blocks girl. Well, whose fault was it if she was?' She turned to her sister coldly. 'If you have finished we may as well go.'
Challis followed her meekly.
'Flossie,' said the mother, going into a bedroom when it was eight o'clock at night, and the rebel had come in and put herself to bed, 'I've just been unpacking my box and found this for Hermie. Do you think it is pretty?'
She held up the daintiest of hats.
Flossie looked at it, then squeezed her eyes up tight.
'Don't want to see it,' she said.
'We are unpacking the boxes,' the mother said; 'I thought you might like to put your dressing-gown on and come and watch.'
'Don't want to watch,' said Floss; 'haven't got any dressing-gown.'
Mrs. Cameron was standing in the bedroom doorway. She held out a box of fascinating doll's tea-things.
'Those are rather pretty, aren't they?' she said. 'We almost decided on a blue set, but then these little pink flowers seemed so fresh-looking we took it.'
Flossie sent a devouring gaze to the beautiful boxful through the bars of her cot. Then she squeezed her eyes up tightly again.
'Wouldn't look at them,' she said.
The mother went away, and the darkness deepened in the room, and Floss lay gazing with hard eyes at a patch of light thrown from the living-room lamp upon the ceiling.
Her heart swelled more and more; she pictured miserable scenes in which, while the rest of the family flaunted about in silk, she, Floss, was attired in rags and had crusts only to eat.
'Only,' she muttered to herself, 'I won't eat them, and then I'll die, and p'r'aps she'll be sorry.'
There was a movement in the room.
'I think I'll lie down quietly on your bed for an hour, Miss Browne,' the mother's voice was saying; 'it will do my head good. Yes, thank you, I have the bottle of lavender water here; I never travel without getting a bad head.'
Miss Browne shook up the pillows and left her; this idea of making capital out of the headache was her own. 'Flossie never can bear any one to suffer,' she said. 'I always remember when I first came here, and she was only about three, some one cut a snake in half along the road. And what must the child do but rush from us and pick up one half—by the mercy of God, the tail half! You remember, Hermie? Bart, my love, you can't have forgotten that shocking day? She came running back to us crying dreadfully, and with that horrible thing in her hands. "Mend it, mend it!" she sobbed "oh, poor sing, poor sing, mend it twick!"'
So Mrs. Cameron went to lie on the bed far from Floss, and to sigh occasionally, once or twice to moan, as indeed she could, for her headache was severe.
At the sighs there were restless movements in the cot; at the first moan the little figure climbed over the rail.
'I don't mind bathing your head,' she said, her voice a little unsteady. 'Is it hurting you much?'
'Yes,' sighed the mother, 'it is very bad.'
Floss dipped her handkerchief in the water-jug, and kept laying it softly on the aching forehead. For ten minutes Mrs. Cameron allowed herself to be thus ministered to, and presently the child sat down on the bed, almost within the arm that yearned to circle her. 'Would you like me to fan it?' she whispered. 'Fanning is good.'
'I would rather you laid your little hand on it,' said the mother.
The little hand lay there instantly.
'I think a kiss on it would do it more good than anything else,' whispered the mother, 'just a little one, sweetheart, sweetheart.'
'I couldn't,' quavered Floss. 'I promised faithfly and somenley.'
'Promised who?'
'Me.'
'What do you mean?'
'When you say, "See my finger wet, see it dry, cut my throat suresever I die," you've got to keep to it.'
'And you promised yourself like that that you wouldn't kiss me—me—mamma, who has been away for years and years breaking her heart for her little baby.'
'Oh,' gasped Floss, the fortress nearly down, 'but we might have got dropsy, truly, dropsy and deafness, me and Roly; May Daly's mother says so; you gen'ally get them after measles.'
'But you didn't, you didn't, Tiny. I prayed and prayed over the seas to God to take care of you all for me, and I knew He would. See how well and strong you all are! But ah, I never thought Tiny would break my heart like this.'
Her voice quivered—fell away; Floss, putting up an uncertain hand through the darkness, found the cheek above her quite wet.
'Mother!' she cried, and was face downward in a minute sobbing relievedly on her mother's breast.
When they had lain together happy and quiet for a little time, the mother stirred to go, for Miss Browne must come to bed.
Floss gave her a final hug. 'I do love you,' she said.
'My baby,' murmured the mother. Floss shook back her straight hair and climbed off the bed and got into her own.
'But I'm not going to let that Challis off,' she said. 'I'll just have to take it out of her.'
CHAPTER XVII
Crossing the Veldt
'Why criest them for thy hurt? Thy pain is incurable.''Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it.''Thus saith the Lord, Such as are for death, to deathand such as are for the sword, to the sword.'Jeremiah.
'Why criest them for thy hurt? Thy pain is incurable.''Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it.''Thus saith the Lord, Such as are for death, to deathand such as are for the sword, to the sword.'Jeremiah.
'Why criest them for thy hurt? Thy pain is incurable.'
'Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it.'
'Thus saith the Lord, Such as are for death, to death
and such as are for the sword, to the sword.'Jeremiah.
and such as are for the sword, to the sword.'
Jeremiah.
Jeremiah.
His good horse under him, a thunder-clouded sky above, a strange country astretch on every side, Mortimer was off, despatches in his pocket from his own colonel to the colonel of an Imperial regiment stationed some hundred and thirty miles away.
The day hung heavy from the sky, the land lay sad hearted and patient-eyed beneath it.
Yet now for the first time in all the weeks he had been on African soil Mortimer felt at home with his surroundings, even happy in them. The tumultuous days that lay behind him—he felt that some other, not he, had been living them. The frantic excitement of the send-off, the days at sea, the storm or two, the troubles with the horses, the uneventful landing on the unfamiliar shores, the hurried packing off up country by train, the feverish days and nights in camp at the bewildered little village that saw the armies of the greatest nation on earth swarming about its quiet fields, his first patrol and the fierce whizz and rattle of marvellously harmless bullets from a deserted-looking kopje, his first battle, with its horrid nightmare of flashing lights and thundering guns, its pools of blood, its contorted human faces, its agonised horses writhing in the dust—these were all nothing to him now, but the coloured bits of glass one shakes about in a kaleidoscope.
The smell of tents and of spent gunpowder was no longer in his nostrils; the brown earth alone sent up its homely odour, and he drew the breath of it in with thankfulness. Such a quiet country; silent little farms asleep in the afternoon's sunshine, their crops long since ready, but gathered only by the birds. The cottages, some of them empty of all signs of habitation, some of them with their doors carefully locked on all a woman's treasure of furniture and homely things.
Here and there the sheep had not been driven off, but cropped placidly at the plentiful pasturage. Mortimer's heart went out to the brown soft things.
On and on he rode, finding his way with a bushman's instinct for the right path.
The sky grew grey and more grey.
Up from the west rolled a great woollen cloud that drooped lower and lower till it burst with a sudden fury over the land, as if shrapnel shells charged with hail had exploded in mid-air. Mortimer put up his collar, and ducked his head to the heavy ice-drops that struck him on every side. He looked in vain for shelter; the veldt rolled smooth and gently undulating in all directions, and no tree was anywhere. To the left a kopje loomed in the darkness ahead, to the right he had seen when on the last rise the white gleaming palings and lights of a farm. He pulled his watch out, and just made out in the rapidly falling darkness that it was eight o'clock. His colonel had advised him to camp for the night somewhere, lest he should lose his way in the darkness, and start off again at earliest dawn. He rapidly resolved to make the farm his halting-place, should, as was most likely, it prove to be unoccupied. The rumour that two lines of defence would join across this part of the country had swiftly cleared the sparsely occupied place. The thought of camping among the rocks of the kopje he did not entertain, having by this the same firmly rooted distrust of that kind of geological formation that the British soldier will carry henceforth in all ages. He forced his plunging horse along; the terrified beast was trembling in every limb with fright at the blinding lightning.
The sound of voices on the road made him push forward harder than ever, his hand going swiftly to the pocket that held his revolver; then he found it was women's voices he heard, a woman's cry of anguish came after him. He wheeled his horse round, and went back slowly, almost feeling his way in the darkness.
A flash of lightning showed him a cart with a fallen horse, an old man, and three girls.
'What's wrong?' he asked.
The old man began to explain rapidly in Dutch, but a girl who was stooping over the horse rose up and came to him.
'Our horse has been struck,' she said in perfectly good English; 'one wheel was struck too, and blazed for a minute, but the rain has put it out.'
'Are none of you hurt?' said Mortimer.
'None; it is wonderful!' said the girl.
'Then run along all of you as hard as you can,' said Mortimer. 'There's a farm and shelter I think quite close. I'll take the old man up on my horse.'
'We can't leave the cart,' said the girl.
'Oh, confound the cart!' said Mortimer, struggling with his plunging horse. 'You can get it after the storm is over.'
'We have some one in it,' said the unemotionable voice of the girl. 'He is dead.'
Again the anguished cry of one of the other girls rose through the rain.
Mortimer rode round the cart twice before he could think what to do.
'Whose farm is it? Is any one living on it?' he said.
'It is ours,' said the girl; 'we were almost home.'
'Who is at the farm—how many?' Mortimer said, having no inclination to run the risk of being made a prisoner before his despatches were safe.
'My mother, we girls, our grandfather here, and some children.'
'I think I had better put up my horse in the shafts,' said Mortimer, 'though I much doubt if he'll go.'
'It is no use, the wheel is broken,' said the girl. 'We were just going to carry him home, only they will not do anything but cry. Anna, Emma, for shame! What use are tears? Come, we are strong; let us carry him out of this rain.' The girls still moaned and wept, however, and she spoke sharply again to them, this time in Dutch, the language in which their lamentations had been.
'See here,' said Mortimer, 'I will take him up on my saddle.' He dismounted and went to the cart and felt about nervously. The English-speaking girl lifted up a rug, and there on pillows on the cart lay a dead young Boer.
'Are you sure he's dead?' Mortimer said. The hands, though wet with rain, were hardly stiff, the body had some faint warmth.
The girl was helping him to lift.
'He is quite dead,' she said. 'He was wounded and going down by train to a Hospital. But as he passed this place, his home, he made them put him out on the station, and send for us to take him home. We brought the cart and pillows, but he had died in the waiting-shed before we got there. We are taking him home to bury.' The other girls shrilled loudly again. 'Anna, Emma,' she said, with more sharp words in Dutch. Then, excusingly, to Stevenson, and with pity in her voice, 'He was to have married one of them, the other is his sister.'
Mortimer got the dead man up before him, held him with one arm and rode slowly, the girls and the old man hurrying by his side. The farm lay about a quarter of a mile away. The English-speaking girl opened the gate.
'There is a ditch all the way up; don't stumble in it,' she said. 'I must go on and warn his mother.' She ran forward in the darkness. A turn in the path, and the lamplight from the farmhouse sent out its rays into the night. Some children, small boys chiefly, clustered at the door; in front of them stood the girl and another woman, fifty or sixty years old.
Mortimer with their aid lifted his burden down, and laid it on a bed in an inner room. He gave a fearful glance at the elder woman, the man's mother. She was a big woman, not fat, like the Boer women generally are, but of angular outline, and with sharp high cheek-bones, and brown piercing eyes.
She was of English parentage, married in early girlhood to a Boer farmer, and become mother of one daughter and six sons. Her husband had fallen with the handful at Jameson's Raid; two sons had with their life-blood helped on the British reverse at Modder River, one lay buried on the field at Elandslaagte, one at Magersfontein, one had been flung in the river at Jacobsdal, here was the sixth come home to her.
She turned from the bed a moment to her niece, the English-speaking girl, who had been a teacher in Johannesburg, but had come to her aunt for refuge at the beginning of the war, and remained as mainstay of the farm.
'Take those shrieking girls out of my hearing, Linda!' she said. 'Let no one come in to me.' She closed the door of the bedroom in their faces.
Linda turned away.
'I must get some hot drinks,' she said. 'Grandfather and the girls will take cold. Where are you going?'
'Oh, I'll get along now,' said Mortimer.
'Nonsense!' said the girl; 'you must dry yourself and eat and drink.' She moved towards the kitchen.
'Oh,' said Mortimer, 'I'd better go. Just think, I might have been one of the lot who knocked that poor chap over.'
'We cannot stay to think of that,' the girl answered. 'You helped us; you must stay till the storm is over.'
'But,' urged Mortimer again, 'how willshefeel?' and he glanced at the closed bedroom door.
'Oh, she understands,' said Linda; 'her feeling is not against individuals. Your soldiers have eaten and rested here three or four times, for we are almost the only people left. We stay because we have nowhere to go, and we none of us care what happens.'
Mortimer went to the door.
'I must see to my poor horse,' he said presently.
The girl summoned the stolid-faced little boys—sons they were of the sons who were slain. She gave them a lantern, and bade them show the strange guest the stables. Then she ran to the kitchen herself.
Mortimer was twenty minutes drying down his horse, feeding it, making it comfortable, for the fate of his despatches rested on its welfare. Then he went back to the kitchen.
The mother was there. She had left her dead after a few minutes, to busy herself with the task of getting all the wet figures into dry garments. She was mixing drinks, hot, strong drinks that made the girls blink and choke even while it restored them. She had the grandfather wrapped in rugs, sitting closest of all to the fire.
When Mortimer stood in the doorway, dripping helmet, dripping khaki suit, she moved towards him.
'Drink this,' she said, and gave him a deep mug of hot liquid.
He swallowed it gratefully, for the cold seemed in his very bones.
'Here are some clothes,' she said, and picked up a rough farming-suit that she had laid in readiness on a chair—'here is a room.' She stepped across the passage. 'Change at once, and hand me your wet things to dry.'
Mortimer obeyed her, and, after doing so, sat down on the bed to await the call to eat of the food the girl Linda was preparing.
And then outraged nature took her revenge. He had not slept for fifty-six hours; he had been in the saddle eighteen hours of yesterday, and twelve of to-day. It was three hours before he knew anything more, and then it was only his cramped position on the bed that woke him; except for that he would have slept the clock round.
He sat up numbed, his heart beating suffocatingly. Where were his despatches? What clothes were these he wore? He fell to his feet, a groan of horror bursting from him. What was this he had done—raw, careless, culpable soldier that he was? He had never taken the envelopes from the clothes he had handed the woman—the woman whose sons' and husband's deaths lay at his country's door, still unavenged! Two strides took him down the hall to the kitchen, his face was like ashes. All the little house lay still as the tall, thin young farmer who, in the front room, was taking his rest for ever from the ploughing of fields, the sowing and reaping of crops, the blind and strenuous guarding of his land and liberty at the command of those in the high places.
The fire still burnt brightly in the grate. Linda sat before it so plunged in mournful thought she did not hear the young bushman's footfall.
Across one side of the fire a clothes-horse stood holding the draggled skirts of the girls, the grandfather's moleskin clothes, the familiar khaki of the uniform he had disgraced.
His hand clutched the coat convulsively; beads of sheer terror stood on his forehead. Then he sat down suddenly, the passion of relief bringing the tears of relief to his eyes.
The papers were there untouched; the long envelopes with the red army seal upon them stuck up out of his breast-pocket in full view! That woman, the mother whose sons were dead, that clear-headed young girl, they must both have known the importance of the papers, yet neither had laid a finger upon them, since he was their guest, their helper!
Linda smiled at him in a pale way.
'You have come to say you are hungry,' she said. 'I went to your room twice, but you slept so soundly I thought the food might wait.' She put a dish before him, meat and vegetables mixed up together. 'This is hot, at least, and nourishing,' she said.
He thanked her, his voice still thick from agitation, then ate while she went back to her morbid gazing at the glowing fire.
'Do you know it is twelve o'clock?' he said presently. 'Won't you go to bed? I am afraid you have sat up to keep this fire alight for the food.'
She pushed back the thick hair from her forehead. No one could call her pretty, but the clear eyes and the patience and strength of the young mouth struck one.
'I think I was trying to see the end of the war,' she said, sighing; 'but it takes better sight than mine.'
'You?' he said pityingly. 'Have you lost any one very near—nearer than these cousins?'
She blenched a moment.
'One of them,' she said. 'I had been married to one of them—a week. We will not speak of that.'
He begged her pardon, his throat thick again.
She fought her lip quiet.
'Oh,' she said, 'it is the same everywhere; our lovers, our husbands, our sons—all gone from us! Some will come back, of course, but crushed and mutilated. A little time, and your army will only have a handful of women to contend against.'
'We, too,' he said, 'we have lost our brothers, our fathers, our sons. Everywhere we have women mourning.'
'Yes,' she said, 'I suppose so.' She sat silent a little time. 'But then it was you who came,' she urged again. 'We used to be quiet and happy in our own way, even if we were unprogressive and unintelligent. It seems, to a woman, we might have been left alone.'
'Ah, but,' he said, 'there were bigger issues than that at stake. You have read—I can see that you have read—you must know why we are fighting.'
'Somewhere at the top,' she said, with a wan smile, 'there may be a few—a very few—on both sides who know. But our men don't know. They have been told they will lose their liberty and homes if they don't fight; that is all any of my cousins knew, and they went off to death, not cheerfully, but because there was nothing else to be done. Your men, of course they come because they are sent, and they fight their best because they are brave and obey orders. We have been insolent—isn't that what you say of us?—and we must be crushed. But some of you must know the rights of it all. Think how much wiser you are than we. You read while we plough. Those of you who know should stay behind.'
'No,' he smiled; 'that is not our way either. We are no different from you. We pay a few great men to do the thinking for us, and if they say it's got to be fighting, then, whatever it seems to us individually, collectively we just shoot.'
The fire burnt lower and lower; it was the only light in the room, for the oil-lamp, exhausted, had died out. Outside the rain still fell in straight soaking sheets over the thatched roof of the little house. A wind moaned restlessly over the empty country; you fancied it was lost and full of woe, because it had no trees to wander through. Once or twice a horse whinnied, once or twice there came through the night the inexpressibly mournful sound of the bleat of a sheep. You felt the rain was like no other rain at all; it seemed as if the land, swollen-eyed, was weeping in the quiet of midnight for its unutterable woes.
The girl's head drooped back against the wall. Sleep had claimed her; but, by the anguish of the mouth and the pitiful stirring of the breast, you knew it was but to show her the body of her young husband, cast with a score of others in a trench, all wet with red.
Stevenson sat, a cold sweat upon his brow; he felt he was the only soul awake on all the frightful continent.
Then through the silence of the house came a woman's voice reading the Bible—the mother seated a foot away from her quiet son. The thin wood offered no resistance to the sound of her voice.
'"Gather up thy wares out of the land, O thou that abidest in the siege. For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will sling out the inhabitants of the land at this time, and will distress them, that they may feel it. Woe is me for my hurt! My wound is grievous: but I said, Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it."'
The sound of the voice pierced into Linda's wretched slumbers. She opened dilated eyes, and stared wildly at Mortimer. And the voice went on again:
'"My tent is spoiled, and all my cords are broken: my children are gone forth of me, and they are not: there is none to stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains. For the shepherds are become brutish, and have not inquired of the Lord: therefore they have not prospered, and all their flocks are scattered. The voice of a rumour, behold it cometh, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah a desolation, a dwelling-place of jackals."'
'Oh,' said the girl with a sobbing breath, 'it is only aunt, of course; she often reads aloud like that. But, oh, I have had such dreams—such frightful dreams!'
The voice went on.
'"O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. O Lord, correct me"'—the tone of the voice fell a little—'"but with judgment; not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me—to nothing."'
'I dreamt—I dreamt,' said the girl, pressing both hands on her throbbing heart—'ah, I could never tell you what I dreamt!'
'Hush,' said Mortimer, 'don't try, don't try! Won't you go to your room, and try to sleep in comfort?'
She looked at him with distended eyes.
'I daren't,' she said. 'O God, I never shall dare to sleep again!'
The voice rose; the horrible exultant thrill in it made the flesh creep.
'"Pour out Thy fury upon the heathen that know Thee not, and upon the families that call not on Thy name: for they have devoured Jacob, yea, they have devoured him and consumed him, and have laid waste his habitation."'
The girl staggered to her feet.
'I will go and sit with her,' she said; 'she should not be alone.'