XXV…

XXV

The chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers of the Garrison Staff were making the rounds, and was stricken to the soul by the discovery that the Reverend Julius Fraithorn had had no breakfast. Occupying a small, single-cotted, electric-bell-less room in the outlying ward--brick-lined and corrugated-iron-built like the greater building, and reserved for infectious cases--the Reverend Julius might have been said to be marooned, had not his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created such hot competition among the nurses for the privilege of attending on him, that he had frequently received breakfast and dinner in duplicate, and once three teas. Some of the probationers, reared in the outer darkness of Dissent, knew no better than to term him "the minister." To the matron, who was High Church, he existed as "Father Fraithorn." Julius is hardly complete to the reader without an intimation that he very dearly loved to be dubbed "Father." The matron had never failed in this.

A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under the bony hand--a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday evening Confirmation classes for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record attendance by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs of trousers. Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that the first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners would be as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the stuffy West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew of London roughs hulking and hustling on the benches, learning per medium of "the dodger," that one's duty to one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to refrain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-raiding, hustling, and jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or iron knuckle-dusters, and not to get drunk before Saturday night.

He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of physicians--honestly-meaning wiseacres--ignorant of the shifts, the fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the panting, tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company with the hale traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, protracted journeys, the neglect and discomfort of the inns and taverns and boarding-houses, where Kaffirs are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them because he must, and struggled on, learning by painful experience that fever-patches are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to the man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting better, and would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and take up his mission in the West and West-Central districts, and begin work again.

Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light chair slipped in behind them, hospital-fashion, he looked beyond the whitewashed walls northwards, to grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered roof, the organ pealed ... then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the cachet of authority. Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally smote his breast and repented. What was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should dare to oppose the Holy Will?

"Weel now, and how are we the day?" said the Chief Medical Officer, presented by the Resident Surgeon to the occupant of the bed. He read approaching death in the sunken face against the pillows, and in the feeble pulse as he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon, catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting information that was not needed.

"It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the conventional answer," said Julius Fraithorn. "To be plain and brief, I am suffering from tuberculous lung-disease, and I am advised that I have not many days to live."

He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.

"Everything that can be done for me here is done. I cannot be too thankful. But I should have liked--I should have wished to have been spared to return to England, if not to live a little longer among my friends, at least to ..." He broke off panting, and his rattling breaths seemed to shake him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; he wheezed like the mildewed harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he had once tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the flat, deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved he had suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced the wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin.

"I can't!" he gasped out. "You see----"

A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft, muffled voice trailed away into a whisper, blue shadows gathered about his large, mobile, sensitive mouth, much like that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and his head fell back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted.

"Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red shoulder-straps and brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to another, a fair, handsome, young giant who leaned against the opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse hurried to take away the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the shorter of the two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a glass with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse, stooped over the pale figure on the bed;

"No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. Should grouse myself if I was in his shoes--or bed-socks would be the proper word--what?"

Beauvayse agreed. "He looks like a chap I saw once get into a coffin at the Cabaret de l'Enfer--that shady restaurant place in the Boulevard de Clichy. When they turned on the lights ..." He shrugged. "The women of the party thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick."

Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea during a similar experience. "But women'll stand anything," he said, "particularly if they've been told it's chic. My own part, I can stand any amount of dead men--healthy dead men, don't you know? But--give you my word--a cadaverous spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, and breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks like the Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors!"

Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with solid shoulders, until the C.M.O., turning his head, addressed them brusquely, curtly:

"Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse to the passage, myself and my colleagues here would be the better obliged to ye."

"Pleasure!" They removed, with a simultaneous clink of scabbards and a ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement.

The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group of five. The chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal, a rigid statue of capped and aproned discipline, upright in the corner.

"Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and produced a cigar-case. "Well out of that, my boy. All jumps this morning; wouldn't take the odds you're not as bad?"

"Rather!" Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's attention, with a look, to the strong young hand that held a choice Havana just accepted from the offered case. "Shaky, isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the champagne much last night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels before riding a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning. Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Expeditions--from Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up some North-West Frontier tribes that had lumped themselves together against British Authority--up to now. But I'm looking out for the chance of something better worth having, like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light!"

"By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth! Where d'you think I'd give a cool fifty to be this minute? Not cooling my heels in a brick-paved passage while a pack of doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a moribund young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin' North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears pricked for--you know what!"

Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? And the Chief must be ten times worse. How he keeps his countenance--demure as my grandmother's cat lappin' cream.... I say, the Transvaal Dutch; they call themselves the true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of Cloud, or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks containin' the raw material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in among the dynamite? It makes me feel good all over, as the American women say, when I think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel, masquerading in Service kit.

Within the room the fainting man was coming back to consciousness, his dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain Bingo Wrynche's similitude regarding husks and shavings, rings of blue fire swimming before his darkened vision, and a dull roaring in his ears.... The Royal Army Medical Corps wrought over him; the nurse lent a deft helping hand; the Resident Surgeon talked eagerly to the Colonel; and he, lending ear, scarcely heard the reiterated, stereotyped parrot-phrases, so taken up was his attention with the man in shabby white drill clothes, who leaned over the foot of the bed, his square face set into an expressionless mask, his gentian-blue, oddly vivid eyes fixed upon the wasted, waxy-yellow face of the sick man, his head bent, as he listened with profound, absorbed attention to the husky, rattling, laboured breaths.

Suddenly he straightened himself and spoke, addressing himself to the Resident Surgeon.

"The patient has told us, sir, that he is suffering from tuberculous disease of the lungs. May I ask, was that the conclusion arrived at by a London consulting physician, and whether your own diagnosis has confirmed the assertion?"

The Resident Surgeon nodded with patronising indifference. He was not going to waste civilities upon this rowdy, drunken remittance-man, whom he had seen reeling through the streets of the stad as he went upon his own respectable way.

"Phthisis pulmonalis." He addressed his reply to the Chief. "And the process of lung-destruction is, as you will observe, sir, nearly complete."

He encountered from the Chief a look of cool displeasure that flushed him to the top of his knobby forehead, and set him blinking nervously behind his big round spectacles.

"Dr. Saxham asked you, sir, unless I mistake, whether you had ascertained by your own diagnosis, the ..." Lady Hannah's words came back to him. He recalled the "bit of information wormed out of the nurse," and ended with "the presence of the bacillus?"

Saxham's blue eyes thrust their rapier-points at him, and then plunged into the oyster-like orbs behind the spectacles of the Resident Surgeon, who rapidly grew from scarlet to purple, and from purple to pale green. Major Taggart and the Irishman exchanged a look of intelligence.

"Koch's bacillus, sir, were this a case of tuberculosis proper, would be present in the expectoration of the patient, and easy of demonstration under the microscope." Saxham's voice was cold as ice and cutting as tempered steel. "May we take it that you can personally testify to its presence here?" He pointed to the bed.

"And varra possibly," put in Taggart, "ye could submit a culture for present inspection? It would be gratifeeying to me and Captain McFadyen here, as weel as to our friend an' colleague Dr. Saxham, late of St. Stephen's-in-the-West, London, to varrafy the correctness o' your diagnosis."

"And it would that!" the Irishman chimed in. "So trot out your bacillus, by all manner of means!"

The Resident Surgeon babbled something incoherent, and melted out of the room.

"Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said McFadyen, coming back from the door.

"He'll no be in sic a sweatin' hurry to come back," pronounced the canny Scot, shedding a wink from a dry, red-fringed eyelid. He produced from the roomy breast-pocket of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed stethoscope, and put it silently into the hand Saxham had mechanically stretched out for it. Then he drew back, his eyes, like those of the other two spectators of the strange scene that was beginning, fixed upon the chief actor in it. One other, weak after his swoon as a new-born child, lay passively, helplessly upon the bed.

Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a noiseless, feline, padding step towards the prone victim. A gleam of apprehension shot into Julius Fraithorn's great dark eyes, reopening now to consciousness. They fixed themselves, with an instinct born of that sudden thrill of fear, upon the lightly-closed right hand. Instantly comprehending, Saxham lifted the hand, showed that it held no instrument save the stethoscope, and dropped it again by his side, drawing nearer. Then the massive, close-cropped black head sank to the level of Julius Fraithorn's breast, revealed in its ghastly, emaciated nakedness by the open nightshirt. The massive shoulders bowed, the supple body curved, the keen ear joined itself to the heaving surface. In a moment more the agonising, hacking, rending cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising him deftly and tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who hurried to him, answering his low questions in whispers, giving aid where he indicated it required.

Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled over the lung area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching for silent spaces, sucking evidence into the assimilative brain behind the eyes that saw nothing but the man upon the bed, the locked human casket housing the secret that was slowly, surely coming to light. In the fierce determination to gain it, he threw the stethoscope away, and glued his avid ear to the man again.

"Toch! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittie o' Kruger sovereigns!" the Chief Medical Officer whispered to his colleague from Meath. And McFadyen whispered back:

"Nor me, for your shoes. 'Ssh!"

Saxham was lifting up the great stooping shoulders, and beginning to speak in a voice totally different from that of the man known in Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear, ringing, concise, the sentences left his lips:

"Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involuntary simulation of the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary tuberculosis by a patient suffering from a grave disease of totally different and possibly much less malignant character. Oblige me by stepping nearer!"

They crowded about the bed like eager students.

"In order to show what false conclusions loose modes of reasoning and the habitual reliance upon precedent may lead to, take the instance of the consulting physician to whom some years ago this young man, now barely thirty, and reduced, as you may see for yourselves, to the final extremity of physical decline, resorted."

"I would gie five shillin' if the man could hear his ain judgment!" murmured the Chief Medical Officer; for he had gleaned from a whispered answer of Julius's the omnipotent name of Sir Jedbury Fargoe. "Toch!" He chuckled dryly. Saxham went on:

"The consulting patient suffers from cough, painful and racking, from impaired digestive power, from increasing debility, fever, and night-sweats. He visits the specialist, convinced that he is consumptive, he receives confirmation of his convictions, and you see him to-day presenting the appearance, and reproducing all the symptoms of a patient in consumption's final stage. Possibly the germs of tuberculosis may be dormant in his organisation, waiting the opportunity to develop into activity! Possibly--a very remote possibility--the disease may have already attacked some organ of his body! But--and upon this point I can take my stand with the confidence of absolute certainty--the lungs of this so-called pulmonary sufferer are absolutely sound!"

"My certie! Send I may live to foregather wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe!" the Chief Medical Officer prayed inaudibly. "He will gang to the next International Consumption Congress wi' a smaller conceit of himsel', or my name's no Duncan Taggart!"

The lecturer, absorbed in his subject, lifted his hand to silence the murmur, and pursued:

"From what disease, then, is this man suffering? Logical and progressive conclusions drawn from experience, and based upon the local enlargement which the physicians previously consulted have apparently failed to perceive, lead me to diagnose the presence of a tumour in the mediastinum, extending its claws into the lungs, and seriously impeding their action and the action of the heart. An operation, serious and necessarily involving danger, is imperative. The growth may be benign or malignant; in the latter case I doubt whether the life of the patient is to be saved. But in the former case he has good hopes. Understand, I speak with certainty. Upon the presence of the growth, simple or otherwise, I am ready to stake my credit, my good name, my professional reputation----"

Ah! It rushed upon Saxham with a sickening shock of recollection that he was bankrupt in these things, and shame and anger strove for the mastery in his face, and anguish wrung a sob from him, despite his iron composure.

He wrenched at the collar about his swelling throat, as he turned away blindly towards the window, seeing nothing, fighting desperately with the horrible despair that had gripped him, and the mad, wild frenzy of yearning for the old, glorious life of strenuous effort and conscious power. Lost! lost! all that had been won.

"I ... I had forgotten ...!" he muttered; and then a hard, vigorous hand found his and gripped it.

"Go on forgetting, Saxham!" said a voice in his ear--a voice he knew, instantly steadying--such virtue is there in honest, heartfelt, comprehending sympathy between man and his fellow-man--the spinning brain, and quieting the leaping pulses, and giving him back, as nothing else could have done, his lost self-control. "You have earned the right!"

"Man, you're a wonder!" groaned the enraptured Chief Medical Officer. He added, with a relapse into the national caution: "That is, ye will be if your prognosis proves correc'. But the Taggarts are a' of the canny breed of Doobtin' Tammas, an sae I'll just keep a calm sugh till I see what the knife lays bare."

"Use the knife now, sir. At once--without delay!"

It was the weak, muffled voice of the patient on the bed. Saxham wheeled sharply about, and the stern blue eyes and the great lustrous pleading brown ones, looked into each other.

The pale Julius spoke again:

"I entreat you, Doctor!"

Saxham spoke in his curt way:

"You are aware that there is risk?"

Julius Fraithorn stretched out his transparent hands.

"What risk can there be to a man in my state? Look at these; and did I not hear you say ..."

"Whatever I may have said, sir, and however urgent I may admit the necessity for immediate operation, you must wait until to-morrow morning."

"I am fasting, sir, and fed. I received Holy Communion this morning, and have not yet breakfasted."

The return of the chart-nurse followed by a probationer carrying a laden tray provoked an exclamation from the little Irishman.

"Signs on it, the boy's as empty as a drum. The devil a wonder he went off like he did a bit back. And you can't deny him, Saxham?"

"I wad gie him the chance, Saxham"--this from Surgeon-Major Taggart--"in your place; and maybe I'm putting in six worrds for mysel' as well as half a dozen for the patient. For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe, aboot a Regimental patient he slew for me, three years back, wi' his jawbone of a Philistine ass."

Saxham spoke to Fraithorn authoritatively, kindly.

"You have no near relative to sign the Hospital Register?"

"My family are all in England, sir. I have not thought it necessary to distress them with the knowledge of my state."

"I think Lady Hannah Wrynche, who is now in Gueldersdorp, happens to be an acquaintance of theirs, if not a friend?"

Julius turned eagerly to the Colonel.

"It is true, she did come here yesterday. But I should hardly wish ... Surely, being of mature age and in the full possession of all my faculties"--there was a smile on the pale lips--"I may be allowed to sign the book myself?"

The doctors interchanged a look. The Colonel said to the patient:

"Mr. Fraithorn, if the idea is not unwelcome to you, I myself will sign the book, and"--he stooped over the bed and laid his hard, soldierly hand kindly on the pale one--"in the event of a less fortunate termination than that we hope for"--the faces of the three surgeons were a study in inscrutability--"I will communicate, as soon as any communication is rendered possible, with the Bishop and Mrs. Fraithorn."

The cough shook Julius as a terrier shakes a rat before he could gasp out:

"Thank you, sir. With all my heart I thank you!"

"You shall thank me when you get well!" The Chief shook the pale hand, crossed the bare boards to Saxham, who stood staring at them sullenly, and took him by the arm. They went out of the ward together, talking in low tones. The medical officers followed. Then the chart-nurse and the probationer who had been banished with the tray, came bustling back with towels, and razors, and a soapy solution in a basin, having a carbolic smell.

Dr. Saxham had gone to take a disinfecting bath, the nurse said, as she went about her minute preparations; and the Commanding Officer had gone with the Staff, and now her poor dear must let himself be got ready.

They wrapped the gaunt skeleton in a white blanket-robe with a heavy monkish cowl to it, and drew thick padded blanket-stockings over the ligament-tied, skin-covered bones that served the wasted wretch for legs, and wheeled in a high, narrow, rubber-wheeled, leather-cushioned stretcher, and laid him on it, light to lift, a very handful of humanity, and wheeled him, hooded and head-first, through the tile-floored passage and out into the golden African sunshine, that baked him gloriously through the coverings, and so into the main building and down a tile-floored passage there.

He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with blinded, cowled eyes, through double doors at the end....

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XXVI

The operation was over, and the two Celts, self-appointed to the temporary posts of assistant-surgeon and anaesthetist, expressed their emotions in characteristic manner....

"Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision an' the last stitch.... Och, Owen, the jewel you are! Give me the loan of your fist, man, this minute."

"What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo? The auld-farrant, scraichin', obstinate grey gander. A hand I will tak' at him ower the head o' this, or I'm no Taggart of Taggartshowe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was a pretty operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quickness. And I'm sorry there are no' a baker's dozen o' patients for ye to deal wi'. It's a gran' treat to see a borrn genius use the knife."

"You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time."

"Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna! I doubt but we Army billies are better at puttin' men thegither than at takin' them to pieces in the long run.... Gently now, porter, wi' liftin' the patient.... Ay, McFadyen, that's richt, gie the man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no' fine to luik at? A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse is better than I would have expeckit. Wheel him awa', nurse; he'll no come round for another hour...."

They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward. The porter followed. The three surgeons standing by that grim table in the rubber-floored central space of the amphitheatre, fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for half a dozen whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and aproned with sterilised material, masked, rubber-gloved, and slippered, and splashed with the same ominous stains that were on the table and upon the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered figure was as ominous and sinister as ever played a part in mediaeval torture-chamber, or figured in a nightmare-tale of Poe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a lethal array of sharp and gleaming implements in a glass bath of carbolic; Taggart, standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled and movable, like everything else for use, and laden with rolls of lint and bandaging, and blue-glass bottles of peroxide of hydrogen and mercurial perchloride, daintily returning reels of silk-worm-gut and bobbins of silver wire to their velvet-lined case.

"You're no' fatigued? You would no' like a steemulant?"

Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been staring with dull intensity of desire at the brandy-decanter, forgotten by the matron, whose usual charge it was. And the sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart followed the glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal.

"Fatigued? I hardly think so!"

He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remembering the lengthy line of patients operated on in a single mid-week morning at St. Stephen's. And yet his steady hand shook a little, and a curious soft, subtle dulness of sensation was stealing over him. He had gone to bed sober, had risen after three hours of blessed, unexpected, helpful sleep, to battle with his desperate craving until morning. When the old woman left in charge of the housekeeping arrangements had come to his door with hot water and his usual breakfast--a mug of strong coffee with milk and a roll--he had gulped down the reviving, steadying draught thirstily, and swallowed a mouthful or two of the bread; and when he was shaved and tubbed and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone down to the dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric ether and strychnine, strong enough to brace his jarred nerves for the coming ordeal.

Not that Saxham habitually drugged: that craving was not yet known to him. But the habitual intemperance had exacted even from his iron constitution its forfeit of shakiness in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the man suffering and unstrung.

Looking about him as the dose began its work of stringing the lax nerves and stimulating the action of the heart, he saw that many of the drawers were open, a costly set of graduated scales missing, with their plush-lined box....

With a certain premonition of what would next be missing, he went into the surgery. A case of silver-mounted surgical instruments had vanished from a shelf, with a presentation loving-cup, given by admirers among De Boursy-Williams's patients to that gifted practitioner. A roll-top desk was partly broken open, but not rifled, the American boltlocks having defied the clumsy efforts of the thief, Koets, the Dutch dispensarist, who had cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the previous night, crossing, with the portable property reft from the accursed Englander, the barbed-wire fence that formed the line of demarcation between the British Imperial Forces and the Army of the United Republics. He had meant to wait yet another day, and take many things more, but the coming of those verdoemte soldiers of the Engelsch Commandant to fetch away the carboys of carbolic acid and the other medical stores had roused him to prompt action.

Later, wearing the brass badge of a Surgeon on the sleeve of his greasy black tail-coat, Koets ruled a Boer Field-Hospital, fearlessly slashing his way into the confidence of the United Republics through the tough, wincing brawn and muscle of Free Stater and Transvaaler. It speaks for the enduring qualities of the Boer constitution to say that many of his patients survived.

* * * * *

But the brandy in the decanter....

How it beckoned and allured and tempted. And the throat and palate of the man were parched with the desire of it. And yet, a moment before, with the toils about his feet, Saxham had wondered at the thought of these degraded years of bondage. He shook his head sullenly as Taggart repeated his question, and went away to wash and get dressed.

Then he meant to shake off his companions and go where he could quench that inward fire. He loathed them as they followed, chatting pleasantly....

But above the hissing of the hot water from the faucets over the basins came presently another sound, most familiar to the ears of the gossiping Celts....

"Rifle-fire! Out on the veld over yonder." McFadyen's towel waved North. "Do ye hear it?"

"Ay, do I! First bluid has been drawn. And to which side?"

Boom!...

The Hospital quivered to its foundations at the tremendous detonation. Shattered glass fell in showers of fragments from the roof of the operating-theatre, as the force of the explosion passed beneath the buildings in a surging of the ground on which they stood, a slow wave rolling southwards, without a backward draw.

The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in earthquakes. Saxham tore it open, and the three shirt-sleeved, ensanguined men ran through the theatre, strewn with the debris from the roof, and through the double glazed doors communicating with the passage, populous with patients who should have been in bed, pursued by nurses as pale and shaken as their stampeding charges. The rear of the Hospital faces North, and they ran down a corridor full of dust, ending in more glazed doors, and tore out upon the back stoep, wide and roomy, and full of deck chairs and wicker lounges.

"Do ye see it? Ten thousand salted South African deevils! Do ye no' see it?" the Surgeon-Major yelled, pointing to a monstrous milk-white soap-bubble-shaped cloud that slowly rose up in the hot blue sky to the North and hung there, sullenly brooding.

"What is it, Major?" shouted Saxham, for behind them the Hospital was full of clamour. Nurses and dressers were running out into the grounds to listen and question and conjecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the palings was black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered, and carrying guns of every kind and calibre, from the venerable gaspipe of the native and the aged but still useful Martini-Henry of the citizen, to the Lee-Metford repeating-carbine, and the German magazine rifle of latest delivery to the troops of Imperial Majesty at Berlin. Men were clustered like bees on the flat tin roofs of the sheds at the Railway Works; men had climbed the signal-posts and were looking out from them over the sea of veld; the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured from their temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were massed on the top of their sand-bag mounds. A fair, handsome Staff officer, the younger of the two men who had accompanied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while the pot-hat and truncheon of a scared native constable emerged timidly from the gaping jaws of a rusty water-cistern, long dismissed from Hospital use, and exiled to the open with other rubbish waiting transference to the scrap-heap; and far out upon the railway-line that vanished in the yellowing sea of veld an unseen engine screeched and screeched....

The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, lowered his binoculars as the persistent whistle kept open. The lines about his keen eyes and mouth curved into a cheerful smile. The sound was coming nearer, and presently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile or so from waiting, expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting, raced at full speed for her home in the railway-yard. Her driver was the young Irishman from the County Kildare, and her guard hailed from Shoreditch. And both of them had a tale to tell of what Taggart had called the Colonel's double surprise-packet, to a tall man whom they found waiting on the metals by the upper Signal Cabin.

"Six mile from the start, sorra a yard more or less, sorr! I sees a comp'ny o' thim divils mustered on the bog, I mane the veld, sorr--smokin' their pipes an' passin' the bottle, an' givin' the overlook to a gang av odthers, that was rippin' up the rails undher the directions av a head-gaffer wid a hat brim like me granny's tay-thray, an' a beard like the Prophet Moses."

"I sor 'is whoppin' big 'at myself, though we was two mile off when we picked the beggars out," the guard objected; "but 'ow could you twig 'is beard or that the other blokes was smokin'?"

"Did ye ever know a Dutch boss av any kind clane-shaved an' not hairy-faced?" was Kildare's just retort, "or see a crowd av Doppers gathered together that the blue smoke av the Blessed Creature was not curlin' out av their mouths an' ears an' noses, an' Old Square Face or Van der Hump makin' the rounds?"

"You thought the blokes on the metals was a workin' gang of our chaps at the fust go off," complained the guard, "an' you opened the whistle to warn 'em!"

"He did that for sure," put in the Cardiff stoker. "But he was tipping me the wink while he did it, so he was; as much as to say he knew they were Boers all the time."

"Would they have stopped where they was, well widin range, av I had let on I knew they was a parcel av unwashed Dutchmen?" demanded Kildare hotly. "Would they have hung on as I pushed her towards thim--would they have stopped to watch me uncouplin' the two thrucks, smilin' wid simple interest in their haythen faces, av they had not taken me for a suckin' lamb in oily overalls that took themselves for sheep av the same fold?"

"They got a bit suspicious when we steamed orf," said the guard; "more than a bit suspicious, they did."

"They took the thrucks for the Armoured Thrain," recounted Kildare, with a radiant smile illuminating a countenance of surpassing griminess, "an' they rode to widin range, an' got off their hairies, an' dhropped in a volley just to insinse them they took to be squattin' down inside them insijious divizes, into what they would be gettin' if they put up the heads av them." He mopped his brimming eyes with a handful of cotton waste, not innocent of lubricating fluid. "Tower av Ivory! 'twas grand to see the contimpt av thim when the cowards widin did not reply. 'Donder!' says the gaffer in the tay-thray hat and the beard like the grandfather av all the billygoats. 'Is this,' he says, 'the British pluck they talk about? Show thim verdant English a Dutchman behind a geweer,' he says, an' that's what they call a gun in their dirty lingo--'an' they lie down wid all four legs in the air like a puppy that sees the whip. Plug thim again, my sons,' says he, 'an' wid the blessin' av Heaven, we'll stiffen the lot!'"

"You could never hear him, so you could not, not at all that distance," the Cardiff stoker objected.

"Could I not see him, ye blind harper, swearin' in dumb show, an' urgin' thim to shoot sthraight for the honour av the Republics an' give the rooi batchers Jimmy O! Ga-lant-ly they respondid, battherin' the sides av the mysterious locomotive containin' the bloody an' rapacious soldiery av threacherous England wid nickel-plated Mauser bullets, ontil she hiccoughs indacintly, an' wid a bellow to bate St. Fin Barr's bull, kicks herself to pieces!"

"She did so, surely," affirmed the Cardiff stoker. "Surely she did so."

"Tell the Colonel 'ow the engine jumped right off the metals," advised the guard.

"Clane she did," went on Kildare jubilantly, "an' rattled Davis an' me inside the cab like pays in an iron pod. See the funny-bone I sthripped agin' the side av her!" He exhibited a raw elbow for the inspection of the Chief. "An' when Davis gets the betther av the rest av the black that's on him wid soft soap an' hot wather, there's an oi he'll not wash off."

"The brake-handle did that, it did so," said Davis, touching the optic tenderly. But Kildare was answering a question of the Chiefs.

"Killed! Wisha, yarra! av I'd left a dozen an twenty to the back av that sthretched on the bog behind me, it's a glad man I'd be to have it to tell ye, sorr. But barrin' they wor' blown to smithereens entirely, not a livin' man or horse av thim did I see dead at all, at all. But the Sergeant an' the Reconnoithrin' Party will asy know the place--asy--by the thundherin' big hole that's knocked in the permanent way there, sizable enough to bury...." He paused, for once at a loss.

"Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," suggested Davis, who, as a Bible Baptist, had a fund of Scripture knowledge upon which he occasionally drew, "with their families and their pavilions and all their substance...."

"Av Cora was there," said Kildare, "she was disguised as a Dutchman, for sorrow an' oi I clapped on any human baste that was not a square-buttocked Boer in tan-cord throusers. Thank you, sorr, your Honour, an' good luck to yourself an' all av us! An' we'll dhrink your Honour's health wid it."

"We will so!" agreed Davis, as the sovereign, dropped into his own twice-greased palm, vanished in the recesses of his black and oleaginous overalls.

"Thankee, sir. You're a gentleman, sir!" the guard acknowledged, touching his cap and concealing the gold coin slid into his own ready hand with professional celerity.

"Begob! an' you might have tould the Colonel somethin' that was news," commented Kildare, as the tall, active figure stepped lightly over the metals and passed up the ramp, and 123 trundled on, and backed into the engine-shed amidst a salvo of cheers and hand-clapping.

The Colonel whistled his pleasant little tune quite through as, the Reconnoitring Party despatched to the scene of the explosion, he went contentedly back to luncheon at Nixey's. True, Kildare had said, and as the Sergeant in command regretfully testified later, said correctly, that neither Boer nor beast had been put out of action by the flying debris. A poor reprisal had been made, in the opinion of some malcontents, for the act of War committed by the forces of the Republics in crossing the Border, in cutting the telegraph lines, and destroying the railway-bridge. But the moral result was anything but trifling, in its effect upon the Boer mind. The "new square gun" became a proverb of dread, inspiring a salutary fear of more traps of the same kind, "set by that slim duyvel, the English Commandant," and threw over the innocent stretch of veld outside those trivial sand-bagged defences the glamour of the Mysterious and the Unknown. No solid Dutchman welcomed the idea of soaring skywards in a multitude of infinitesimal fragments, in company with other Free Staters or sons of the Transvaal Republic similarly reduced.

No more boasts on the part of Brounckers, General in command of those massed, menacing, united laagers on the Border, seven miles from Gueldersdorp as the crow flew. No more imaginative promises with reference to the taking of the small, defiant hamlet before breakfast, wiping out the garrison to a rooinek, and starting on the homeward march refreshed with coffee and biltong, and driving the towns-people before them as prisoners of War. The desperate perils presented by the conjectural and largely non-existent mine were thenceforth to loom largely and luridly in the telegrams that went up to Pretoria.

"There's a lot in bluff, you know," that "slim duyvel," the Commandant of the rooineks, said long afterwards. "And we bluffed about the Mines, real and dummy, for all we were worth!"

So, possibly with premonition of the telegram that was even then clicking out its message at Pretoria, there was a note of satisfaction in his whistle out of keeping with the execution actually done, as Nixey's Hotel came in sight with the Union Jack floating over it, denoting that all was well. That flagstaff, with its changing signals, was to dominate the popular pulse ere long. But in these days it merely denoted Staff Quarters, and War, with its grim accompanying horrors, seemed a long way off.

A white-gowned European nursemaid on the opposite street-corner waved and shrieked to her deserting elder charges, and the Chief's quick eye noted that the small, sunburned, active, bare legs of the boy and girl in cool sailor-suits of blue-and-white linen twill, were scampering in his direction. He knew his fascination for children, and instinctively slackened his stride as they came up, abreast now, and shyly hand in hand:

"Mister Colonel ...?" The speaker touched the expansive brim of a straw sailor hat with a fine assumption of adult coolness.

"Quite right, and who are you?"

The small boy hesitated, plainly at a nonplus. The round-eyed girl tugged at the boy's sailor jumper, whispering:

"I saided he wouldn't know you!"

"I fought he would. Because Mummy said he wemembered our names ve uvver night at ve Hotel ... when he promised ... about ve animals from Wodesia ... all made of mud, an' feavers, and bits of fur ..."

Memory gave up the missing names, helped by those boyish replicas of the candid clear grey eyes of the Mayor's wife, shining under the drooping plume of fair hair.

"Mummy was quite right, Hammy, and Berta was wrong, because I remember your names quite well, you see. And the birds and beasts and insects are in a box at my quarters. Come and get them."

"If Anne doesn't kick up a wow?" hesitated Hammy, his small brown hand already in the larger one.

"We'll arrange it with Anne." He waited for the arrival of the white-canopied perambulator and its fluttering-ribboned guardian to say, with a tone and smile that won her instant suffrages: "I'm going to borrow these children for a minute or so. Will you come into the shade and rest? I promise not to keep you long."

Beauvayse and Lady Hannah's Captain Bingo, relieved from lookout duty, and descending in quest of food from the Chief's particular eyrie on the roof of Nixey's Hotel, heard shrieks of infant laughter coming from the coffee-room. Knives, forks, and glasses had been ruthlessly swept from the upper end of one of the tables laid for the Staff luncheon, and across the fair expanse of linen, pounded into whiteness and occasional holes by the vigorous thumpers of the Kaffir laundry-women, meandered a marvellous procession of quagga and koodoo, rhino and hartebeest, lion and giraffe, ostrich and elephant, modelled by the skilful hands of Matabele toy-makers. Tarantula, with wicked bright eyes of shining berries, brought up the rear, with the bee, and the mole-cricket, and, with bulgy brown, white-striped body and long wings importantly crossed behind its back, a tsetse of appallingly gigantic size....

"Oh, fank you, Mister Colonel," Hammy was saying, with shining eyes of rapture fixed upon the glorious ones; "and is they weally my own, my vewy own, for good?"

"Yours and Berta's, really and for good."

"And won't you"--Hammy's magnificent effort at disinterestedness brought the tears into his eyes--"won't you want vem to play wif, ever yourself?"

The deft hands swept the birds and beasts, with tarantula and tsetse, into the wooden box, and lifted the children from their chairs, as Captain Bingo and Beauvayse, following the D.A.A.G., came in, brimming with various versions of what had happened out there on the veld....

"I have other things to play with just now, Hammy. Run along with Berta now. You'll find your nurse in the hall."

Berta put up her face confidently to be kissed. Hammy, in manly fashion, offered a hand--the left--the right arm being occupied with the box of toys. As Berta's little legs scampered through the door, he delayed to ask:

"What are your playfings, Mister Colonel?"

"Live men and big guns, just now, Hammy; and chances and issues, and results and risks."

The plume of fair hair fell back, clearing the candid grey eyes as Hammy lifted up his face, confidently lisping:

"I don't quite fink I know what wesults and wisks are, but I'd like to play wif the live men an' the big guns too sometimes ... if you didn't want vem always?"

"We'll see about it, Hammy, when you're grown up."

"Good-bye, Mister Colonel. And I would lend you my beasts an' fings, because I know you wouldn't bweak them?"

"See that Berta has her share in them meanwhile. Off with you, now!"

Later, in the seclusion of the connubial bedchamber, said Captain Bingo, dressing for dinner, the last time for many months, as it was to prove:

"What do you suppose was the Chief's next move, after the engine and tender got in, and the crowd hoorayed him back from the Railway Works? No use your guessin', though. Even a woman wouldn't have expected to find him playin' Noah's Ark in the coffee-room with the Mayor's two kids!"

"I like that!" said Lady Hannah meditatively, arranging the Pompadour transformation, not apparently the worse for the candle-accident of the previous night.

"Because you're a woman and sentimental," said her spouse, wrestling with a cuff-link.

"No; because I am a woman whose instinct tells her that nothing will seem too big for a man for whom nothing is too small. And--what an incident for a paragraph!"

He grinned: "With headin's in thunderin' big capitals.... 'The Soldier Hero Sports With A Babbling Babe.... The Defender Of British Prestige At Gueldersdorp Puts In Half an Hour At Cat's-Cradle Ere The Armoured Train Toddles Out With The B.S.A.P. To Give Beans To The Blooming Boer!'"

She darted at him, caught him by the lapels ... made him look at her.

"It's true? You really mean it? The ball begins?"

"Upon the honour of a henpecked husband--before daybreak to-morrow, you'll hear the music."

She sparkled with delight.

"Oh, poor, unlucky, humdrum women at home in England, walking with the shooters, or lolling in hammocks under trees, and trying to flirt with fat City financiers or vapid young attaches of Legation! I shall take the Irish mare, and borrow an orderly, and ride out to see a Real Action!"

His round pink face grew long. "The devil you will!"

"The devil I won't, you mean. Why, for what else under the sky did I come out here but the glorious chance of War?" Her impatient foot tapped the floor. He recognised the warning of domestic battle, glowered, and gave in.

"Well, if you get chipped, don't blame me. There's about as much cover on a baccarat-table as you'll find on that small-bush veld."

"All the better for seeing things, my dear!" She gave him a radiant glance over her shoulder as she snapped her diamond necklace.

"You'll see things you won't enjoy. Mind that. Unless the whole affair ends in sheer fizzle."

"I'll pray that it mayn't!"

"I'd pray to have you much more like the ordinary woman who funks raw-head-and-bloody-bones if I thought it would be any good!"

"My poor old boy, it's thirty years too late. You ought to have begun while I was crying in the cradle. And--I was under the impression that you married me because you found me different from the ruck. And besides--think of my paper!"

"Damn the rag! I think of my wife!"

She swept him a curtsy:

"Cela va sans dire!"

"And how a woman of your birth and breedin' can dream of nothin' else but doin' somethin' that'll make you notorious--set the smart crowd gabblin' and gapin' and crushin' to stare--is more than I can understand!"

She flashed round upon him. "You have the wrong word! Notoriety--any social divorcee or big-hatted music-hall high-kicker can have that--if only they've kicked high enough! Popularity is what I'd have if I could--and only the People can give it--as Brutus and Cromwell and Napoleon knew!"

He admitted that those old Roman johnnies who jawed in the Forum knew what they were about, but added that the Puritan chap with the wart on his nose was a thundering old humbug, ending triumphantly: "And we whacked old Bony at Waterloo! And--suppose you stop a Boer bullet and get knocked out--where do I come in?"

She jangled out her shrillest laugh. "Behind the coffin as Chief Mourner, I suppose. And you'll tack on the orthodox black sleeve-band, and look out for Number Two. And choose the ordinary kind, who funks raw-head and all the rest of it, for the next venture. But I prophesy you'll be bored. It's settled about Sheila and the orderly?"

He nodded.

"Righto! but there'll be two troopers, not one. And you'll be under the Corporal's orders about range, and distance, and keepin' out of the hands of--the other side. You don't absolutely yearn to be killed or taken prisoner, I suppose?"

Her heart beat high at the latter-named eventuality. She saw London rushing to read of the thrilling seizure and the yet more thrilling escape of the Lady War Correspondent attached to H.I.M. forces on the Frontier:

Who got clean away, mind you, with complete information of the strategic plans of the General in command of the enemy's laagers, sewn inside her corsets or hidden in her shoes!

Bingo little dreamed of the definite plan seething under his little wife's transformation coiffure. It had matured since her meeting on the railway-journey from Cape Town with an interesting personality. A big, brown-bearded Johannesburger, with light queer eyes, who had been reticent at first, but more interesting after his confidence had been gained.

Van Busch he had named himself. Of the British South African War Intelligence Bureau. That man knew how to value women. And he had proved them at what he called the risky game.

"With nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for palm-oil ..." Van Busch had said, and winked, signifying that there were no lengths to which a woman of Lady Hannah Wrynche's capabilities might not go. And he had slipped into her hand a card scrawled with an address where he might be got at in case ...

The pencilled oblong of soiled pasteboard was yet in a secret compartment of her handbag. By letter addressed care of W. Bough, Transport Agent and Stock-dealer, Van Busch was to be communicated with at a farmstead some thirty miles north.

The spice of adventure her palate craved could be had by corresponding with Van Busch through the man Bough. After that---- Well! She had her plan ...

She tied her husband's white tie, took him by the ears, kissed him warmly on each side of his large pink face, glowing with blushes evoked by her unwonted display of affection, and led him away to dinner, her mental vision seeing prophetic broadsheets papering the kerbs of Piccadilly, the ears of her imagination making celestial melody of those raucous yells:

"Speshul Edition! Hextry Speshul Edition! 'Ere y'are, sir; on'y a 'a'penny. SPESHUL!"

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XXVII

For nearly two months, from dawn until dark, Gueldersdorp had squatted on her low-topped hill in a screaming blizzard of shrapnel and Mauser bullets. Never a town of imposing size or stately architecture, see her now a battered hamlet of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and wrecked chimneys; staring defiance through glassless windows like the blind eyeholes in the mouldered House that once has held the living thought of Man. From dawn until dark the ancient seven-pounders of her batteries had banged and grumbled, her Maxims had rattled defiance from Kopje Fort, and the Nordenfelt released its showers of effective, death-dealing little projectiles. Scant news from outside trickled into the town. Grumer, with his Brigade, was guarding the Drifts, and when the Relief might be expected was now a moss-grown topic of general conversation in Gueldersdorp.

And within her girdle of trenches, stern, grimy, haggard men lived, cheek to the heated rifle-breech, and ate, and snatched brief spells of sleep, booted and bandoliered, and with the loaded weapon ready for gripping. Since the attack on Maxim Kopje had choked the Hospital with wounded men and dotted the Cemetery with little white crosses, nothing of much note had occurred. The armoured train had done good service, and the Baraland Rifle Volunteers had carried out their surprise against the enemy's western camp one fine dark night, helped by a squadron of the Irregulars, with eleven wounded, and the loss of six out of fifty fighting-men.

The Convent of the Holy Way stood empty and deserted in its shrapnel-littered garden-enclosure.

From east, west, north, and south the deadly iron messengers had come, making sore havoc of this poor house of Christ. "When the walls fall about our ears, Colonel," the Mother-Superior had declared, "it will be time to leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion of bare rafters overhead, over which streamed, as if in mockery, the Red-Cross Flag. Grim figures, like geometrical problems gone mad, were made by water and gas pipes torn from their bedding, and twisted as if by the hands of giants in cruel play. The little iron bedsteads of the Sisters, and the holy symbols over them, were the only articles missing from the cells, revealed in section by the huge gaps in the masonry.

The Tabernacle of the chapel altar, void of the Unspeakable Mystery it had housed, fluttered its rearward curtains through the wreckage of the east wall and the cheap little stained-glass window, where the Shepherds and the Magi had bowed before the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child. Within sight of their ruined home, the Sisterhood had found refuge. An underground dwelling had been dug for them in the garden before an abandoned soft-brick-and-corrugated-iron house, formerly inhabited by one of the head officials of the railway, a personage of Dutch extraction and Boer sympathies, at present sequestered beneath the yellow flag of the town gaol for their too incautious manifestation; while his wife and young family were inhabitants of the Women's Laager. And from their subterranean burrow the Sisters carried on their work of mercy as cheerfully as though their Order had been originally one of Troglodytes, nursing the sick and wounded, cooking and washing for the convalescents, comforting the bereaved, and tending the many orphans of the siege.

South lay the laager of the Refugees. To the westward within the ring of trenches and about a mile and a half from the town, was the Women's Laager, visited not seldom by the enemy's shell-fire, in spite of the Red-Cross Flag. Fever and rheumatism, pneumonia and diphtheria stalked among the dwellers in these tainted burrows, claiming their human toll. Women languished and little children pined and withered, dying for lack of exercise and fresh air, with the free veld spreading away on all sides to the horizon, and the burning blue South African sky overhead. Famine had not yet appeared among the Europeans, though grisly black spectres in Kaffir blankets haunted the refuse-heaps, and fought with gaunt dogs for picked bones and empty meat-tins, and were found dead not unseldom, after full meals of strange and dreadful things. Fresh meat was still to be had, though the cattle and sheep of the Barala had been thinned by raids on the part of the enemy, and poor grazing. Shell and rifle-fire not infrequently spared the butcher trouble, so that your joints were sometimes weirdly shaped. But they were joints, and there was plenty of the preserved article in Kriel's Warehouse and at the Army Service Stores. Tea and coffee were becoming rare and precious, the sparkling draught of lager was to be had only in remembrance; the aromatic beer was all drunk up, and the stone-ginger was three shillings a bottle. Whisky was to be had at the price of liquid gold, brandy was treasured above rubies, and served out sparingly by the Hand of Authority, as medicine in urgent cases.

You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who continued to cultivate onions, cabbages, potatoes, and melons in the market-gardens about the town, imperturbable under shot and shell, his large straw hat affording an admirable target from the Boer sniper's point of view, as metaphorically he gathered his fat harvest of dollars from the soil. What you could not get for any amount of dollars was peace and rest, clean air, and space to stretch your cramped-up limbs in, until Sunday came, bringing the Truce of God for Englishman and Transvaaler.

The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had sprung from the parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre had been turned into a ward where the lane between the beds just gave room for a surgeon or a nurse to pass, and hourly the cry went up: "Room, more room for the wounded and the sick!" And among these Saxham worked, night and day, like a man upheld by forces superhuman.

"By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they urged him to take rest, and would bend his black brows, and hunch those great shoulders of his to the work again.

"Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the R.A.M.C., himself a haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the red fields of pain. "At three o' the smalls ye got to your bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye were dealing with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot casualties--our friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when refreshed by a guid nicht's sleep; at eight ye had had your bit o' breakfast, and got doon your gun an' gane oot for an hour o' calm, invigorating sniping on the veld before returning punctually at ten o' the clock to attack the business o' the day, wi' a bag o' twa Boers to your creedit."

"I only got one, Major. The other chap hobbled down bandaged, upon crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at me as I lay doggo behind my particular stone. I put up my hat on a stick, and--see!" Saxham gravely exhibited a felt Service smasher with a clean hole through it, an inch above the lining-edge. "He's a snowy-locked, hoary-bearded, Father Noah-hatted patriarch of seventy at least, and very proud of his shooting, and I've let him think he got me this time, just to make him happy for one night. To-morrow he is to make the painful discovery that I am still in the flesh."

"Aweel, aweel! But I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the antediluvian headgear to-morrow."

Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in that wounded heart of his, would not only be with the patriarch. And the great puzzle, Life, would be solved for good.

Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could have answered that only by hard, unceasing, unremitting work, or, when no more work was there to do, by the fierce excitement of those grilling hours spent lying behind the stone, was the demon to be kept out. Of all things he dreaded inactivity, and though he would drop upon his cot in the tiny bedroom that had been a Hospital ward-pantry, and sleep the heavy sleep of weariness the moment his head touched the pillow, yet he would start awake after an hour or two, parched with that savage, unquenched thirst, and drink great draughts of the brackish well-water, boiled for precaution's sake, and tramp the confined space until the grip of desire grew slack. But he had never once yielded since the night when a man with the eye and voice of a leader among men had come to the house in Harris Street and taken him by the hand.

Do you say impossible, that the man in whom the habit of vice had formed should be able to cast off his degrading weakness, like a shameful garment, by sheer force of will, and be sane and strong and masterful again? I say, possible with this man. You see him plucked from the slough by the strong hand of manly fellowship, and nerved and strengthened, if only for a little while, to play the game for the sake of that other's belief in him. Such influence have such men among their fellows for good or for ill.

You can see the Dop Doctor upon this brilliant November morning mounting a charger lent him by his friend, a handsome Waler full of mettle and spirit--oats not being yet required for the support of humans--and calling au revoir to Taggart as he rides away from the Hospital gates followed by an orderly of the R.A.M.C. in a spider, pulled by a wiry, shabby little Boer mare.

"The man rides like a fox-hunter," commented Taggart, noticing the ease of the seat, the light handling of the rein, the way in which the fidgety, spirited beast Saxham rode answered to the gentling hand and the guiding pressure of the rider's knee, as a sharp storm of rifle-fire swept from the enemy's northern trenches, and the Mauser bullets spurted sand between the wheels of the spider and under the horses' bellies.

Saxham spurred ahead, the spider following. The bullet-pierced, grey felt smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque headgear, sat on the man's close-cropped head with a soldierly air becoming to the square, opaque-skinned face that had power and strength and virility in every line of it. The blue eyes, under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were clear now, and the short aquiline nose, rough-hewn but not coarse, and the grimly-tender mouth were no longer thickened and swollen and reddened by intemperance. The figure, perfect in its manliness, if marred by the too heavy muscular development of the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders, looked well in the jacket of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and puttees and spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white drills, the blue shirt and shabby black kamarband and canvas shoes. Looking at Saxham, even with knowledge of his past, you could not have associated a personality so striking and distinguished, an individuality so original and so strong, with the idea of the tipsy wastrel, wallowing like a hog in self-chosen degradation.

The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out of her underground abode as the horseman and the attendant spider drew near, thought of Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you see him, last of the great Condottieri, in the bronze by great Verrochio at Venice to-day. In armour, complete in the embossed morion, one with the great Flemish war-horse, he sat to the sculptor, the baton of Captain-General, given him by the Doge of Venice, in the powerful hand that only a little while before aided his picked men of the infantry to pack and harden snow about the granite boulders of the mountains in the Val Seriana, and sent the giant snow-balls thundering down, crushing bloody lanes through the ranks of the Venetian cavalry massed in the narrow defile below, and striking chill terror to the hearts of Doge and Prince and Senate.

Only the baton was a well-worn staghorn-handled crop, Squire Saxham's gift, together with a hunter, to his boy Owen, at seventeen. It was one of the few relics of home that had stayed by Saxham during his wanderings.

He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with marked respect.

"Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours?"

She answered with unusual hesitation:

"All the Sisters are well, thank you. But--if you could spare me a minute, Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should like to ask."

"As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your day for the Hospital, I think?"

"Ah, no!" she said, with the velvety South of Ireland vowel-inflection. "We keep Wednesday for the Women's Laager, always. Many of them are so miserable, poor souls, about their husbands and sons and brothers who are in the trenches, or who have been killed, and then there are the children to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege orphans, but so many who have sick or neglectful mothers. It takes us the whole day once we get there."

Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of a blue cotton-covered washing-basket impelled from below by an ascending Sister. The spider pulled up under cover of the brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by the railway-official, as another short storm of riflery cracked and rattled among the eastern foothills, and a whistling hurry of the sharp-nosed little messengers of death passed through Gueldersdorp. Some of them hit and flattened on the gable of the railway-official's house, one went through the leathern splashboard of the spider. Saxham moved instinctively to place himself between the closely-standing group of nuns and possible danger.

"No, no!" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheerful tones taking a shade of anxiety. "You must not do that!"

"I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at them with the smile that made his stern face changed and gentle.

"I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way of things. We take our chance of them," the Mother-Superior answered. But she pressed her lips together and grew pale as a faint cry came up from the subterranean dwelling, roofed with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon steel rails, and made bombproof with bags of earth. And Saxham, looking at the fine face, with its worn lines of fatigue and over-exertion, and noting the deep shadowy caves that housed the great luminous grey eyes, said:

"I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be having my best helper on my hands as a patient. And that won't do, you know."

"No, it would not do," she said, looking fully and seriously at him. "And therefore I think our Lord will not permit it. But if He should, be sure another will rise up to fill my place."

"Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham sincerely, "she would not fulfil my ideal of an absolutely efficient nurse, as you do. So from the personal, if not the altruistic point of view, let me beg you to be careful."

"I take all reasonable care," she told him. "It is true, the work has been heavy this week; but to-morrow is Sunday, and we shall rest all day and sleep at the Convent. Indeed, some of us have taken it in turn to be on guard there every night, or nothing would be left us."

"I understand."

He knew how prowlers and night-thieves made harvest in the darkness among the deserted dwellings since Police and Town Guardsmen had been requisitioned to man the trenches. She went on:

"The upper story of the house is sheer wreck, as you may see, but the ground-floor is quite habitable. So much so that if the shells did not strike the poor dear place so often, I should suggest your turning it into a Convalescent Home."

"We may have to try the plan yet," said Saxham. "The Railway Institute is frightfully overcrowded."

"And," she told him, "a shell struck there yesterday evening, and burst in the larger ward."

"I had not heard of it," he said. "Was anybody hurt?"

"No one, thank God! But the fire was difficult to put out, until one of the Sisters thought of sand."

"It was an incendiary shell?" Disgust and contempt swelled his deep-cut nostrils and flamed from his vivid blue eyes. "And yet these Kaiser's gunners, in their blue-and-white Death or Glory uniforms, can hardly pretend ignorance of the Geneva Convention. But--your question?"

"It is--Children!" She beckoned to the two nuns, who stood at a little distance apart holding the washing-basket between them. "I will ask you to go on slowly before me with the basket. I will overtake you when I have spoken to Dr. Saxham."

"Surely, Reverend Mother." One tall, pale, and thin, the other round and rosy, they were alike in the placid, cheerful serenity of their good eyes and readily smiling lips. "And won't we be after taking the bundle?"

"No, no! It is heavy, and I am as strong as both of you together."

"Very well, Reverend Mother."

They were obediently moving on.

"A moment." Saxham stopped them. "If you two ladies have no objection to a little crowding, the spider will hold both of you as well as the bundle and the basket of washing. At least, it looks like a basket of washing."

All three laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundrywoman or Hindu dhobi would go down any more to the washing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that Stygian flood of blackness rivalling their own, supposing, as Beauvayse once suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers and persons of colour? And from the waterworks on the Eastern side of the town the supply had been cut off by the enemy, so that the taps of Gueldersdorp had ceased to yield.

Old wells and springs had been reopened, cleaned, and brought into use for drinking purposes, so that of a water-famine there could be no fear. But the element became expensive when retailed by the tin bucketful, a bath a rare luxury when the contents of the said bucket might be spilled or thrown away in the course of the gymnastics wherewith the sable or coffee-brown bearer sought to evade the travelling unexploded shell or the fan-shaped charge of shrapnel. Therefore, the Sisters had turned laundry-women. You could hear the sound of Sister Tobias's smoothing-iron coming up from below, thump-thumping on the blanketed board.

"And where do you think we get the water, now?" the rosy Sister, in process of being packed into the spider, leaned over the wheel to ask.

"Not from the Convent?" Saxham thought of the strip of veld between there and the Hospital, even more fraught with peril than the patch he had just traversed, or the distance yet to be covered between the Sisters' bombproof and the Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his fleshless hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall.

"From the Convent, carrying it across after dark. And no well there, either, that you'd get the fill of a teaspoon out of"--a "tayspoon" it was in the rosy Sister's Dublin brogue--"and yet there's water there."

"But how----" Saxham began. The Mother-Superior shook her head, and the rosy Sister was silent.

"There is no mystery about the water at all. It is very simple." Standing there with her head held high and the fine, free, graceful lines of her tall figure outlined by the heavy folds of the now worn and darned black habit, and her hands, still beautiful, though roughened by toil, calmly folded upon her scapular, she was as remarkable and noble a figure, it seemed to Saxham, as the golden sunlight could fall upon anywhere in the world. And besides, she was his right hand at the Hospital. A capable, watchful, untiring nurse--and beauty would have decked her in his surgeon's eyes if she had been physically ugly or deformed.

"There is no mystery whatever, only when the bombardment first began I thought of the waterworks, and that one of my first cares, supposing I had been General Brounckers"--she smiled slightly--"would have been to operate there. So I set the Sisters to work at filling every empty barrel and bucket and tub in the Convent with water from the taps. And as we happened to have plenty of empty barrels and tubs, why, there is water to be had there now, and will be for some time to come. Go now, my children."

The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted with his whip and drove on in obedience to Saxham's nod.

"Of course, the Sisters are aware," he said, meeting the Mother's grave glance, "that if it is quicker to drive, it is safer to walk?"

She nodded with the gay, sweet smile that had belonged to Lady Biddy.

"They know, of course. But danger is in the day's work. We do not seek it. We are prepared for it, and it comes and passes. If one day it does not pass without the cost of life, we are prepared for that, and God's Will is done always."

"You are very brave," he said. It was the first time in his life that he had used the phrase to any woman, and the words came out almost grudgingly.

"Oh no, not brave," she told him; "only obedient." Her veil fluttered in the hot November breeze that bore with it the heavy fetid taint from the overcrowded trenches that ringed Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the cordite; though the air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the befouled atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded wards at the Hospital, in spite of all that disinfectants could do. She went on:

"And we are very grateful to you for the lift. Sister Ruperta was on duty last night, and Sister Hilda Antony--the rosy Sister--is not as well as she would have us believe. Ah----"

With her grave eyes screened by her lifted hand, she had been watching the progress of the spider westward over the dun-yellow veld. Now the long wailing notes of the headquarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the Assembly, and in the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's hotel, where the red lamp signalled danger by night and the Red Flag gave its warning by day, the scarlet danger-signal fluttered in the breeze. Once, twice, again, the deep bell of the Catholic Church tolled. A dozen other bells echoed the warning, signifying danger by the number of their iron-tongue strokes to the threatened quarter of the town.

"'Ware big gun!" called the sentries. "West quarter, 'ware!"

The Mother-Superior grew pale, for the Women's Laager, towards which the little Boer mare was steadily trotting with the laden spider, lay in the menaced quarter, with a bare stretch of veld between it and the Camp of the Irregular Horse, whose white tents and dug-out shelters were pleasantly shaded by ancient blue gums, picturesque and stately in spite of broken boughs and foliage torn by shrapnel and seared by the chemical fumes of bursting charges innumerable.

"Will you not go down?" Saxham asked her.

She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting face in prayerful silence, not stirring save to make the Sign of the Cross. And as the long white fingers fluttered over the bosom of the black habit, the faint cry that Saxham's quick ear had heard before floated up from the populous depths below.

"What is that?"

Before the question had left Saxham's lips, the monster gun spoke out in deafening thunder from the enemy's position at East Point, nearly two miles away. The heavy grey smoke-pillar of the driving-charge towered against the sunbright distance, and simultaneously with the crack of the discharge, sounding as though all the pent-up forces of Hell had burst the brazen gates of Terror, and rushed forth to annihilate and destroy, the ninety-four pound projectile passed overhead, sweeping half the corrugated-iron roof from the railway-official's late dwelling with a fiendish clatter and din, as it passed harmlessly over the Women's Laager, and, wrecking a sentry's shelter on the western line of defences, burst harmlessly upon the veld beyond, blotting out the low hills behind a curtain of acrid green vapour.

"Get under cover, quick!" Saxham had shouted to his companion, as deafened by the tremendous concussion, and dazed and half-asphyxiated by the poisonous fumes, he strove for mastery with his maddened horse. This regained, he looked for the figure in the black habit and white coif, and knew a shock of horror in seeing it prone upon the ground.

"No, no, I am not hurt!" she cried, lightly rising as he hurried towards her. The tremendous air-concussion had thrown her down, and beyond a scratch upon her hand and some red dust on the black garments she was in nothing the worse.

"I don't know how I kept my own legs," Saxham said, laughing.

"It went by like twenty avalanches," she agreed. "And blessed be our Lord, excepting for the damage to the roof, no more seems to have been done. I can see the spider stopping near the Women's Laager." She peered out earnestly over the shimmering waste of dusty yellow-brown, and cried out joyfully: "Ah, Sister Hilda Antony and Sister Ruperta are getting out. All is well with them; all is well."

"But not with the washing."

Saxham had swung round his binoculars, and brought them to bear upon the vehicle and its late occupants. A grim smile played about his mouth as he handed her the glasses, and heard her cry of womanly distress as she beheld the fruit of late labour scattered on the veld and the Sisters' agonised activity displayed in the gathering up of sheets, pillow-slips, handkerchiefs, babies' shirts and petticoats, with other garments of a strictly feminine and private character. Her grave, discreet eyes avoided his as she handed back the binoculars, but a dimple showed near the edge of the white coif.

"And now," Saxham said, glancing at his watch, "may I know in what I can be of service?" It had seemed to him that the Mother-Superior hesitated to broach the subject. Nor had he been mistaken. The dimple vanished. Her calm eyes became troubled, and she asked, with a slight catching of the breath:

"Yes, there was something.... Doctor, is it possible for a person to die of fear?"

He answered promptly:

"In circumstances like the present? Certainly. Undoubtedly possible. I have seen twenty deaths from pure fright since the bombardment began, and I expect to see more before the siege ends, or people get callous to the possibilities of sudden extermination that are afforded them a hundred times a day. Is the person to whom you refer a woman or a child?"

"A young girl----" she was beginning, when a buxom little figure, black veiled and habited like herself, rose up as if from the bowels of the earth.

"I vill look. But I can see nozing," she called to someone invisible below. "It must be that you vait until my eyes shall become more strong." She shaded them, newly brought from semi-darkness and blinking in the hot, white sunlight. The Mother-Superior hurried to her, saying with a note of anxiety in her usually calm voice:

"Sister--Sister Cleophee; is anything the matter?"

"Mon Dieu! It is ze Reverend Mozer!" ejaculated the other, relief and joy expressed in the rapid movements of pliant hands and expressive eyes. "Nozing is ze matter, Reverend Mozer, if only you are safe."

"Quite safe, and so are the Sisters. Only the linen was upset."

"My 'eavens, but a miraculous escapement!" The supple hands and the expressive eyes and shoulders of Sister Cleophee made great play. "Me and Sister Tobias, 'ow we pray when we 'ear ze great gun, vith knowledge zat you and ze Sisters were upon the vay to ze Women's Laager. My faith, it vas terrible! Me, if I 'ad not make to ascend and learn how it go vid you, Lynette vould 'ave come running up to make discovery for herself. She behave like a little crazy, a little mad sing--I forget your vord for she zat have lost 'er vits! Sister Tobias and me, we 'ave to 'old 'er." The fine, expressive eyes went past the Mother-Superior, and lighted with evident relief on Saxham. "Ah, Monsieur le Docteur, it is incredible vat zat poor child she suffer. Madame 'ave told you----"

"Madame was about to tell me, my Sister," Saxham said, in his smooth, fluent French, "when you appeared upon the scene."

Sister Cleophee launched, unwitting of the Mother-Superior's gesture of vexation, into voluble explanations in that native language which M. le Docteur spoke so well.

Mademoiselle Mildare, the ward of Madame the Mother-Superior, was no coward. But no! the child had courage in plenty--it was the suspense that devoured her in the absence of the Mother, to whom Mademoiselle was most tenderly attached, that reduced her to a state of the most pitiable. The Sisters left at home each day would talk of the work and the fine weather--anything to distract the mind, that presented itself to them--but now, nothing was of any use. When the Reverend Mother came back at nightfall, behold a transformation. Mademoiselle would laugh and sing and chatter. Her eyes would shine like stars, she would be happy, said Sister Cleophee, with dramatic emphasis and gesture, as a soul in Paradise. Next day, taking her guardian from her side, would bring the terrors back, find redoubled the nervous sufferings of Mademoiselle, to-day reaching such a height that Sister Cleophee felt convinced that something must be done.

"Ah, my Sister, if I could do anything!" the Mother-Superior said, with the velvet Southern Irish inflection in the breathing aspirate, and the soft melodious cadence that made her pure, cultivated utterance so exquisite. The voice broke and faltered, and a spasm of mother-anguish wrung the firm mouth, and as a slow tear dimmed each of her underlids and splashed on the white guimpe she put out her hand blindly, and the sympathetic little Frenchwoman took it in both her own.

"Reverend Mozer, you can do zis. You can bring Monsieur le Docteur to see Lynette. You can 'ave his advice upon 'er case, and you can----"

Another fusillade of rifle-fire, sweeping from the west over Gueldersdorp, brought a repetition of the faint moaning cry from below. Saxham consulted the Reverend Mother with a look. She bent her head in silent assent. He hitched the horse's bridle to what had been the gatepost of the railway-official's front-garden, as she signed to him to descend the ladder leading to the Sisters' underground abode. And he went down to meet his Fate there.

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XXVIII

The temporary Convent was a roomy trench dug out of the red gravelly sand, lined with the inevitable sheets of corrugated iron, and roofed with the same material, supported by a solid frame of steel rails. Wide chinks between the metal sheets gave admission to light and air, and earthen drain-pipes made ventilators in the walls. But the sunlight penetrated like spears of burning flame, and the air was stifling hot. The paraffin stove that heated irons for Sister Tobias smelled clamorously, and the droning of myriads of flies, not the least of the seven plagues of Gueldersdorp, kept up a persistent bass to the shrill singing of the little tin kettle. Later, when the April rains began, and the tarpaulins were pulled over the sand-bagged roof, tin lamps burning more paraffin did battle with Cimmerian darkness.

Saxham's professional approval was won by the marvellous cleanliness and neatness of the place, divided into living-room and dormitory by a heavy green baize curtain, that at the Convent had shut off the noise of the great classroom from the rest of the house. The curtain was drawn, hiding the little iron cots brought from the Sisters' cells, ascetic couches whose narrow wire mattresses must afford scant room for repose to double sleepers now, where all were crowded, and Conventual rules must be in abeyance. The outer place held a deal table, the oil cooking-stove; some household utensils shining with cleanliness were ranged upon a shelf, and several pictures hung upon the walls. Upon a bracket the silver Crucifix from the altar of the Convent chapel gleamed against the background of a snowy, lace-bordered linen cloth. There were orderly piles of cleaned and mended clothes, military and civilian, the garments of sick and wounded male patients, who would leave the Hospital without a thought of the unselfish women who had foregone sleep to patch jackets and sew on missing buttons. There were haversacks of coarse canvas for the Volunteers, finished and partly made, with ammunition-pouches and bandoliers. And Sister Tobias stood ironing at the deal table, partly screened by a line of drying linen, while Sister Mary-Joseph turned the mangle, and the little brisk novice, her round cheeks no longer rosy, folded with active hands. The Dop Doctor's keen quick glance took note of the patient cheerful weariness written on the three faces, then rested on one other face there.

Its wild white-rose fairness had dulled into the pallor of old ivory. There were deep, bluish shadows about the eyes and round the mouth, and the hollow at the base of the throat, where the pulse throbbed and fluttered visibly, had grown deep. Her red-brown hair had lost its burnished beauty. It had become dull like her skin, and her garments hung loosely upon the form whose soft roundnesses had fallen away. But her eyes had changed most. Their golden-hazel irises had faded to pale bronze, the full, fair eyelids had shrunk, the pupils were distended to twice their natural size. She sat upon a stool in a corner, a slight girlish figure in a holland skirt and white cambric blouse-bodice, her slender waist girdled with a belt of brown leather, the colour of her little shoes. Huddled up against the corrugated-iron wainscot of the rough earth wall, the obsession of fear that dilated her eyes and parched her lips shook her in recurrent gusts of trembling, whenever the guns of the Gueldersdorp batteries spoke in thunder, whenever the Boer artillery bellowed Death from the heights above. For since the great gun had spoken from East Point, Death's red sickle had not ceased to ply its task.

Some work, one of the coarse canvas haversacks made by the nuns for Gueldersdorp's enrolled defenders, lay at the girl's feet. Her right hand, horrible to see in its incessant, mechanical activity, made continually the motion of sewing. Her eyes stared blankly, unwinkingly at the opposite wall, and the gusts of trembling went over her without cessation. At a more deafening crash than ordinary, an irrepressible scream would break from her, and her hand would snatch at an invisible garment as though she plucked back its imaginary wearer from peril by main force.

"She sees nobody. She hear nozing when we speak--she vould feel nozing, if you should pinch or shake her. Was I not right, Reverend Mozer, to say it is time zat somesing should be done?"

The shrill whisper came from Sister Cleophee. The Mother-Superior made a sign in assent. Beyond words, her heart was crying--Oh, misery and joy in one mingled draught to have won such love as this from Richard's child! But her face was impassive and stern, and her eyes, looking over Saxham's great shoulder as he stood silently watching at the bottom of the ladder stairway, imposed silence on the busy, observant, tactful Sisters, who continued their labours without a break, as the sewing hand went diligently to and fro, and the recurrent convulsive shudders shook the girl's slight frame, and the irrepressible cry of anguish was wrung from her at each ear-splitting shellburst. And yet, with all her agony of love intensifying her gaze, the Mother did not see as much as Saxham, who took in every detail and symptom with skilled, consummate ease, realizing the desperate effort that strove for self-command, noting the exhaustion of suspense in the dropped lines of the half-open, colourless mouth, the incipient mental breakdown in the vacant stare of the dilated eyes, the mechanical action of the stitching needle-hand, the convulsive shudder that rippled through the slight figure at each boom, or crash, or fusillade of rifle-fire that drifted over the shrapnel-torn veld and through the battered town. He threw a swift whisper over his shoulder presently, that only reached the ear of the Mother-Superior, standing behind him, her tall shape concealed from the sufferer's sight by his great form.

"How long has this been going on?"

She whispered back: "I am told ever since the bombardment began. Every day, and at night too, should duty detain me at one or another of the Hospitals."

He added in the same low tone:

"She has a morbid terror of death under ordinary circumstances?"

The Mother-Superior murmured, a hand upon the ache in her bosom:

"Not of death for herself. For--another."

His purely scientific attitude must have already abandoned him when he knew gladness that Self was not the dominant note in this dumb threnody of fear. But he wore the professional mask of the physician as he ordered:

"Let one of the Sisters speak to her."

The Mother-Superior glanced at the nun who was ironing, and then at the figure on the stool. The Sister was about to obey when the Boer Maxim-Nordenfelt on the southern position rattled. There was a hissing rush overhead, and as a series of sharp, splitting cracks told that a group of the shining little copper-banded shells had burst, and that their splinters were busily hunting far and wide for somebody to kill, the stitching hand dropped by the girl's side. A new wave of shuddering went over the desolate young figure, pitiable and horrible to see. Dull drops of sweat broke out upon her temples in the shadow of her red-brown hair.

"How are you getting on with your work, dearie?"

Sister Tobias had spoken to her gently. She moved her head and her fixed eyes in a blind way, and the stitching hand resumed its mechanical task, but she gave no answer, except with the shudderings that shook her, as a lily is shaken in an autumn blast.

Then Saxham stepped backwards noiselessly, climbed the steep ladder stairway, and stood waiting for the Mother-Superior in the blazing yellow sunshine, beside the post to which his horse was hitched. The Mother followed instantly. He was making some pencil memoranda in a shabby notebook, and kept his eyes upon his writing, and made a mere mask of his square, pale face as he began:

"It--the case presents a very interesting development. The subject has at one time or other--probably the critical period of girlhood--sustained a severe physical and mental shock?"

The great grey eyes swam in sudden tears that were not to be repressed, as the Mother-Superior remembered the finding of that lost lamb on the veld seven years before. She bowed her head in silent assent.

"You would wish candour," Saxham said, looking away from her emotion. "And I should tell you that this is grave."

"I know it," her desperate eyes said more plainly than her scarcely moving lips. "But so many others are suffering in the same way, and there is nothing that can be done for any of them."

He answered with emphasis that struck her cold. "Some measures must be taken in the case, and without delay. This state of things must not go on." He saw that the Mother-Superior caught her breath and wrung her hands together in the loose, concealing sleeves as she said, with a breath of anguish:

"If she only had more self-control."

"She has self-control." He echoed the word impatiently. "She is using every ounce she has for all she is worth. She has used it too long and too persistently."

"I will say then, if she only had more faith!"

"I know nothing of faith," Saxham said curtly; "I deal in common-sense."

She could have asked if it were commonly sensible for a creature made by God, and existing but by His will, to live without Him? But she put the temptation past her. No cordial flame of mutual esteem and liking ever sprang up between these two, often brought together in their mutual work of help and healing. She recognised Saxham's power, she admitted his skill. But, as his practised eye had diagnosed in the beloved of her heart the signs of physical and mental crisis, so her clear gaze deciphered in his face the story written by those unbridled years of vice and dissipation, and knew him diseased in soul. She may have been fully acquainted with all Gueldersdorp had learned of him, going here, there, and everywhere, as was her wont, in obedience to her Spouse's call. But if so, she never betrayed Saxham. There was no resentment, only delicate irony in the curve of her finely-modelled lips as she queried:

"Am I so deficient in the quality of common-sense?"

"Madam," he said, "you have manifested it in each of the many instances where I have been brought in contact with you. But in your solicitude for this young girl you have shown, for the first time in my experience of you, some lack of good judgment, and have inflicted, and do inflict, severe suffering on her."

Her eyes flashed grey fire under her stern brows as she demanded:

"How, pray?"

"It is out of the question, I suppose," Saxham said coldly, "that you should slacken in your ministrations among the sick and wounded, and keep out of daily and hourly danger--for her sake?"

"Impossible," her voice answered, and her heart added unheard: "Impossible, unless I should be false to my Heavenly Bridegroom out of love for the child He gave."

"Then," said Saxham bluntly, "unless these recurrent nerve-storms are to culminate in cerebral lesion and mental and physical collapse--a result more easy to avert than to deal with--take the girl about with you."

"But----" the Mother uttered in irrepressible dismay. "I--we go everywhere!"

It was most true. He had a vision, as she said it, of the black-robed, white-coifed, cheerful Sisters passing in couples through the shrapnel-littered streets, between houses of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and glassless windows, cheerful, serene, helpful, bringing comfort to the dying, and assistance to the sick, oblivious of whistling bullets and bursting shells. And the most arduous duties, the most repulsive tasks, the most danger-fraught errands, were hers, always by right, and claim, and choice. What a woman it was! A very Judith in Israel. He knew that Judith did not like him, but unconcealed admiration was in his blue eyes as he looked at her.

"I know it. Let her go everywhere. It is the sole chance, and--you spoke of faith just now.... If you have it for yourself and the religious women of your Order, who go about doing good in confidence of the protection--I do not speak in mockery--of an Almighty Hand, why can't you have it for her?"

She had never seemed so noble in his eyes as when she took that implied rebuke of his, with meek bending of her proud head, and candid self-condemnation in the eyes that were lowered and then raised to his, and beautiful humility in her speech:

"Sir, your reproach is just; it is I who have been lacking in faith. And--it shall be as you advise."

The distant bugle blared out its warning. The bell tolled twice, stopped, and tolled four; the smaller bells echoed. The voices of the sentries came to their ears, loudly at first, then more distant, then reduced to the merest spider-thread of sound:

"'Ware big gun! South quarter, 'ware!"

"I must go to her," the Mother-Superior said, and passed him swiftly and went down the ladder. Saxham followed. The white figure on the stool had not stirred, apparently. Its blank eyes still stared at the wall, and the mechanical hand moved, sewing at nothing, as diligently as ever.

"Lynette!"

The fixed, blindly-staring eyes came to life. Colour throbbed back into the wan ivory cheeks. The mouth lost its vacant droop. She rose up from the stool with a joyful cry, and, stumbling in her haste, ran into the outstretched arms. As they wrapped about her, clinging to her sole earthly friend and guardian as though she could never let go, came the crash of the driving-charge, the yelling Brocken-hunt of the passage of the huge projectile, the ear-splitting din of the shellburst. She lifted up a radiant face of laughing defiance, and then choked and quivered and burst out crying, leaning her panting young bosom against the black habit, and weeping as though her whole being must dissolve, Undine-like, in tears.

Ah, the lovely feminine woman who weeps and clings! She will never lose her dominion over the sons of men. The appealing glances of her beautiful wet eyes melt the stoniest male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of her arms about the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have had power to change it back into a breathing human being once more, if Lot had looked back, instead of his helpmeet. Her sterner sisters may feel as keenly, love as tenderly, sorrow even more bitterly than she. Who will believe it among the sons of dead old Adam, who first felt the heaving bosom pant against his own, and saw the first bright tear-showers fall--forerunners of what oceans of world-sorrow to be shed hereafter, when the Angel of the flaming sword drove the peccant pair from Paradise. Ah, the fair, weak woman who weeps and clings!

And Owen Saxham, watching Lynette from the ladder-foot, and the Mother-Superior, clasping her and murmuring soft comfort into the delicate, fragile ear under the heaped waves of red-brown hair, shared the same thought.

How this trembling, vibrating, emotional creature will love one day, when the man arrives to whom imperious Nature shall bid her render up her all!

In whom, prayed the unselfish mother-heart, willing to be bereft of even the Heaven-sent consolation for the sake of the beloved, in whom may she find not only the earthly mate-fellow, but the kindred soul. For, all-pitying Mother of Mercy! should she, too, be doomed to stake all upon a wavering, unstable, headlong Richard, what will happen then?

Looking at the pair, Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. Lynette's tears had been dried quickly, like all joy-drops that the eyes shed. She was talking low and earnestly, pleading her cause with clinging hands and wistful looks and coaxing tones that were broken sometimes by a sob and sometimes by a little peal of girlish laughter.

"Mother, I am not made of sugar to be melted in the sun, or Dresden china to be broken. I am strong enough to take my share of the work; I am brave enough to bear anything--anything," she urged, "if only I may be with you. But to sit cooped up here day after day, safe and sheltered, sewing powder-bags or giving Katie French lessons, or helping Sister Tobias, and listening to the guns"--the blood fled from her cheeks and the great pupils of her eyes dilated until they looked all black in her face of whiteness--"the dreadful guns, and wondering where you are when the shells are bursting"--her voice rose in anguish--"I can't bear it! Mother, do you hear?" She threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and the pulses in her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, and her slight hands were desperate in their clutch upon the arms that held her. "I want my share of the risk, whatever it is. I will have it! It is my right. I have tried to be good and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this any more!"

Her voice broke upon a sob, and Saxham said from the doorway that was filled by his great shoulders from post to post:

"You will not have to stand it any more. The Reverend Mother has reconsidered her decision. She will take you to the Hospital and elsewhere from to-day."

The man's curt manner and authoritative tone brought Lynette for the first time to knowledge of his presence. Her glance went to him, and joy was mingled with surprise in the face she turned towards the Mother-Superior.

"Really, Mother?"

The Mother-Superior, though her own still face had flushed with quick, irrepressible resentment at Saxham's tone, said cheerfully:

"It is true, my child. Dr. Saxham thinks it will be best for you. Dr. Saxham, this is my ward, Miss Mildare."

Saxham made his little brusque bow. Lynette, bending her lovely head, gave a grateful glance at the khaki-clad figure with the great hulking shoulders, standing under the patch of hot blue sky that the top of the ladder vanished in, and a strange shock and thrill went through the man's whole frame. His odd, gentian-coloured eyes under the heavy thunder-cloud of black eyebrows lightened so suddenly in reply that the girl felt repelled and half frightened. She was conscious of a curious oppression. As for Saxham, a delicate, stinging fire ran newly in his veins. Something stirred in the secret depths of him, and came to life with an awakening thrill exquisitely poignant and sweet. For this slight, unsophisticated, Convent-bred creature, slender as a lily, reared in innocence among the blameless, was rich as her frail, lovely mother had been before her in the mysterious allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget-Mary at the zenith of her stately beauty had never possessed one-tenth of the seductive charm that emanated from this young girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if unconsciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded nymph among the sedges may awaken the primal desire of Pan among the reeds.... Saxham, even in the years of his degradation, had scarcely sunk to the level of the crook-shinned, hairy-thighed, hoofed satyr. But he had built his nest with the birds of night, and slaked his thirst at impure sources, and only now did he realise how his mad dream of vengeance upon the Power that had cast him down and wrecked his future was to recoil upon himself. "I have done with Love," he had said, "and with Hope, and with Life as it is known of the honourable and the upright and the cleanly among men for ever!"

And now ... his thoughts were tipped with fire as he drank in the suddenly-awakened, vivid, delicate beauty of Lynette Mildare. Now he realised the depths of his own mad folly. Oh, to have had the right to hope again, to love again, to live again, and be grateful to David, who had betrayed him, and Mildred, who had deserted him--to this end! Oh, never to have lost the honourable claim to woo such loveliness as this and win such purity, and wear both as a talisman upon his heart for ever! He drew breath heavily as he looked at the girl, transformed and glowing under the touch she loved, shining from within like some frail, transparent alabaster lamp with the light that he had helped to rekindle. And as his great chest expanded with deep draughts of the subtle, intoxicating atmosphere of her, and the blood hummed through his veins to that new measure, the last link of his old fetters fell clanking to the ground. And then, with a sting of intolerable remorse, came the memory of his shameful five years' Odyssey spent as a hog among other hogs of the human kind. It had not been an overthrow. It had been a surrender of all that was noble and strong in him to all in him that was despicable and weak and vile. And his soul shuddered, and his heart contracted in the sickening clutch of shame.

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XXIX

He awakened from that lost moment of enthralment to the pang and the shock of self-discovery, and to the knowledge that somebody was hailing him by name from the top of the ladder.

"Saxham! Doctor! Are you below there?"

It was the gay, fresh voice of Beauvayse, halted with a handful of Irregulars, bandoliered, carrying their rifles and the day's provisions, wearing their bayonets on their hips, and sitting their wiry little horses with the ease of old troopers in the lee-side of the piled-up mound of sandbags that roofed the underground convent. Five men and a Corporal of the Town Guard, similarly burdened and accoutred--we know the pale Cockney eyes and the thin face of the Corporal, whose freckles have long ago vanished in a uniform gingerbread hue--had also taken momentary shelter from one of the intermittent blizzards of Mauser bullets that drifted through Gueldersdorp.

One Irregular was sitting on an earth-filled packing-case, swearing softly, nursing a disabled right arm, and looking at the corded network of hairy, sunburned muscles that were delicately outlined in the bright red stream that trickled from beneath the rolled-up shirt-sleeve of raspy "greyback."

"We saw your hairy tied up outside, Doctor, and 'sensed' your whereabouts, as McFadyen says. Can the ladies spare you for a moment? Sorry to be a nuisance, but one of my fellows has got winged on our way to relieve the garrison at Maxim Outpost South, and though he swears he is as fit as a fiddle, I don't believe he ought to come on."

"I'm all right, Sir, 'pon me Sam I am!" protested the dismounted trooper. "It's a bit stiff, but the bleedin' 'll take that off. I shan't shoot a tikkie the worse for it. Lay anybody 'ere a caulker I don't!"

Nobody took up the bet, fortunately for the sportsman, as surgical examination proved that the bullet had gone sheer through the fleshy part of the upper arm, breaking the bone, just missing the artery, and leaving a clean hole.

"You'll have to go to Hospital, my man," pronounced Saxham.

The face of the wounded Irregular lengthened in disgust. "My crimson luck! And I'd made up my mind to pick off a brace o' them blasted Dutch wart 'ogs over that there bad job of pore Bob Ellis."

He blinked violently, and gulped down something that rose in his brown, muscular throat as the voice of a comrade, middle-aged like himself, coffee-baked as a Colonial, and also speaking with the accents of the English barrack-room, took up the tale.

"Bob Ellis was 'is pal, Sir, and mine, too. We was in the same battery of 'Orse Artillery at Ali Musjid, an' we went up along of Lord Kitchener to Khartoum. An' they shot Bob yesterday. Through the 'ead, clean, an' 'e never spoke another word."

"Through the loop-'ole o' the parapet, it was," went on the wounded man. "Bein' in the advance trench, we've got on neighbourly terms like, with the Dutchies, and Tom Kelly, wot 'as just bin speakin', 'eard Bob Ellis promisin' this bloke as 'ow if 'e'd on'y 'urry up an' git killed soon enough, Bob would 'ave 'is farm and 'is frow when 'e come marchin' along to Pretoria. 'Oppin' mad the Dopper was at that, an' the names 'e called pore Bob was something disgraceful. An' when 'e got Bob through the loop-'ole, me an' Kelly made our minds up to show a bit o' fancy shootin' and lay 'im out in turn. That's 'ow it was, Sir. An' now"--the voice grew shaky--"they've corked me. Corked me, by God I--an' there's not a bloke among the lot of us but me can play the concertina." With his undamaged arm he swung round his haversack, bulging at the top with a cheap, bone-keyed, rosewood-veneered, gaudy-paper-sided instrument of German make, and hung his head over it in silence.

"But what on earth has the concertina got to do with it?" Saxham was frankly puzzled, and Beauvayse, with all his professional knowledge of "Tommy," was for once nonplussed.

"You'd better explain to the Doctor, Corporal Leash. I'm out of the running when it comes to killing men with concertinas. And--you don't play as badly as all that, do you?"

"On the contrywise, Sir," explained the comrade Kelly, "plays uncommon well, he does--all the tunes of the latest music-'all and patriotic songs."

"An' them blasted Doppers are uncommon fond o' music, d'ye see, Sir," explained the wounded trooper. "They can't keep their ugly 'eads down behind the sand-bags when they hears it. Up they pops 'em over the edge and then--you take care they don't pop down no more."

The gay young laughter of Beauvayse was infectious, while white teeth showed, or teeth that were not white, in the tanned faces of Irregulars and Town Guardsmen. Even the mourning comrades grinned, and Saxham smiled grimly as Beauvayse cried:

"By George, a more original method of reprisal I never came across! But it's clear if you can't shoot with that drilled arm of yours you can't play the concertina. Wish I could knock a tune out of the thing, Leash, for your sake--enough to make a Boer put his head up. But I'm a duffer at musical instruments--always was. What do you say, my man?"

"Beg pardon, Sir." The Corporal with the Town Guardsmen saluted, making the most of his five feet two inches. "I can pl'y the squiffer--I mean the concertina, Sir--a fair treat for a hammatore. And if I might be let to tyke this man's plyce at Maxim Outpost South, Sir, I could 'elp serve the gun, too, Sir--we've bin' attendin' Artillery Drill in spare hours."

"I shouldn't think you had any spare hours to spare?" Beauvayse looked at the thin, tanned face with liking, and the keen pale eyes met his fairly.

"We haven't, Sir, but we manage some'ow."

"But what about your own duty?"

"I'm tykin' these men over, Sir." He indicated a solid family grocer, a clerk of the County Court, a pseudo-Swiss baker, and two Navy Reserve men reduced to the ranks for aggressive intemperance of the methylated-spirit kind, which, in the absence of other liquor, had prevailed among a certain class, until the intoxicating medium was confiscated by Government.

"Captain Thwaite 'as spared us from the Cemetery Works to relieve Corporal Brice an' 'is little lot at Angle VII. South Trenches. A telephone-message come from our Colonel to say Brice's men was bad with rheumatism and dysentery--but Brice is all right an' fit, Sir--and"--the pale eyes pleaded out of the brickdust-coloured face--"I'd like the charnce o' gettin' nearer to the enemy, Sir--an' that's the truth."

Beauvayse conceded. "Very well. I'll square things with your commanding officer as we go along, and explain matters to the Colonel per telephone from Maxim Outpost South. Come on there when you've handed over your men to Brice."

The pale eyes danced. "Thank you, Sir."

"An' I'll owe you a dollar whisky-peg for the good turn," muttered the perforated musician, as he handed over the cherished concertina to the volunteer, "till next Sunday that I see you in the stad."

"Righto!" said Corporal Keyse, accepting the sacred charge.

"Look here, though," came from Beauvayse, "there's one thing you must remember--what's your name?"

"Keyse, sir--Corporal, A Company, Gueldersdorp Town Guard."

"Well, Keyse, you've heard Meisje hiccoughing ninety-four-pound projectiles all the morning, haven't you?"

"Couldn't possibly miss 'er, sir"--the pale eyes twinkled as the Corporal finished--"not as long as she misses me."

"She has a talent for missing, otherwise a good many of us fellows would have heard the Long Call before now. But most of her delicate little attentions--with the exception of one shell she sent over the Women's Laager, to show the people there that she doesn't mind killin' females and children if she can't get men--most of 'em are meant for Maxim Outpost South; and one of 'em may get home sometimes, when the German gunner isn't thinking of his sweetheart. Then, if you find yourself soarin' heavenwards in a kind of scattered anatomical puzzle-map of little bits, don't blame me for obligin' you, that's all."

There was a guffaw from the listeners. W. Keyse saluted, cheerfully joining in.

"I shan't s'y a word, sir."

"By George, I believe you!" said Beauvayse. "What's up? Seen a ghost?"

Saxham had swung his wallet round, producing carbolic, antiseptic gauze, First Aid bandages, and other surgical indispensables from its recesses, as by legerdemain, and a tall, stately black figure, followed by a tall, slender white figure, had risen from the bowels of the earth. The Mother-Superior, taking in the situation and the need of her at a glance, called a brief order down the ladder stairway, and went swiftly over to Saxham, whipping a blue apron out of a big pocket, tying it about her, and pulling on a pair of sleeves of the same stuff as she went. Lynette turned to take the basin of hot water that the arm of Sister Tobias extended from below, and the jaws of W. Keyse snapped together. Until he twigged the bronze-red coils of hair under the broad, rough straw hat, he had thought ... Cripps!

We know how the dancing, provoking mischievous blue eyes and adorable wrist-thick golden pigtail of Greta du Taine dwelt in his love-stricken remembrance. Her worshipped image had got a little rubbed and dimmish of late to be sure, but breathe on the colours, and you saw them come out clear, and oh! bewilderingly lovely.

Billy Keyse had never even beheld the enchantress since that never-to-be-forgotten morning when he had seen her pass at the head of the serpentine procession of pupils, slowly winding across the Market Square. But he knew she was still in Gueldersdorp. He felt her, for one thing. We know that in his case Love's clairvoyant instinct had got its nightcap on. We saw Greta depart on the train bound North and branch off East for the Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg. But if she were not in Gueldersdorp, why did the left breast-pocket of the now soiled and heavily-patched khaki tunic bulge so? There were six letters inside there, tied up with a frayed bit of blue ribbon. Hers? 'Strewth, they were! And each what you might call a Regular One-er of a love-letter. Never mind the paper being thumb-marked as well as cheaply inferior, one cannot expect all the refinements of civilisation in a beleaguered town. It was the spelling that--although we know W. Keyse to be no cold orthographist--occasionally gave him pause as he perused and re-perused the greasy but passionate page. And why did she sign herself "Fare Air?" The sense of ingratitude pierced him even as he wondered. Why shouldn't she if she chose? What a proper beast he was to grumble! Him, that ought to be proud of her demeaning herself to stoop to a young chap in a lower station, so to call. And her a Regular Swell.

He hugged the letters against him with the arm belonging to the hand that held the concertina. Beloved missives, where was the worshipped writer now? Sitting by a tapestry-frame, for he could not imagine her peeling potatoes, down in the Convent bombproof, dreaming of him, weeping over his last letter, or blushfully aware of his vicinity, panting at the bottom of the ladder, listening for the beloved accents of the man who ... Hold hard, though! she had never heard the voice of W. Keyse; or he hers for that matter, but he would have recognised it among a thousand. He had told her so, writing with ink pencil, of the kind that when sucked in moments of forgetfulness tastes peculiarly horrible, and tinges the saliva with violet, at spare moments in the trench. A phlegmatic Chinaman acted as Love's postman, handing in the envelopes that were addressed to Mr. W. Keyse, Esquer, in caligraphy that began in the top left-hand corner, and trickled gradually down into the right-hand bottom one. Pumping the Celestial was no use. John Tow sabee'd only that a fair foreign devil gave the one missive, with a tikkie for delivery, and 'spose one time Tow makee plenty good walkee back with anulla paper some pidgin bime-bye catchee more tikkie. If walkee back no paper, too muchee John catchee hellee, reaping only reproaches and no tikkie at all.

Judge how the heart of W. Keyse bumped against the concertina when the slender vision in the holland skirt and white blouse and broad straw hat appeared from underground. It was not she, though, Queen of heroic thoughts, inspirer of deeds of daring yet to be done, who followed the Mother-Superior.

It was the loveliest girl Beauvayse had ever seen, or ever would see. The girl who had stood up in defence of three nuns against a threatening gang of rowdy Transvaalers, one day in the Recreation Ground,--the girl who had passed as the Staff dismounted at the Hospital gate on the day of appropriation. The Mayor had had no chance of fulfilling his promise of an introduction. The Mayor's wife, with her two children, was an inmate of the Women's Laager. But at last the kind little genii that deal with happenings and chances had brought Beauvayse and his divinity face to face. Now she rose out of the Convent dug-out, in the waste that had been the railway-official's front-garden, like a fair white Psyche-statue, delivered in the course of some convulsion of Nature from the matrix of the earth. And she was even more exquisite than his remembrance of her, even more ...

Beauvayse descended abruptly from an empyrean flight of poetic imagery to remember his torn and soiled silk polo-shirt with its rolled-up sleeves, his earth-stained cords, girt with a belt of vari-coloured webbing, his muddy leather leggings and boots with their caked and dusty spurs, telling of hard service and unresting activity.

But he looked radiantly handsome as he leapt to the ground and came forward, his tall athletic figure, trained by arduous toil and incessant work until the last superfluous ounce of flesh had vanished, looking the personification of manliness, his tanned face, still clean-shaven save for the slight fair moustache, one to set any maiden dreaming of its straight clean-cut features and lazy, long-shaped grey-green eyes. The wide felt hat he touched in salute sat with a jaunty air on the close-cropped golden head. Here was a gallant, heartsome vision to greet Lynette, stepping after the Mother into that outer world, where fire belched warning from iron mouths, and steel destruction sped through the skies, and bullets sang like hornets past your head, or hit the ground near your feet, sending up little bushy columns and spirts of dust.

The wounded man, now carbolised, plugged, and bandaged by Saxham's dexterous hands, took the hastily-scrawled admission-order, included his officer, the ladies, and the Doctor in a left-handed salute, distributed a parting wink among his comrades, counselled W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper to go tender on the off-side G of the instrument he dandled, and trudged sturdily away in the direction of the Hospital.

"Thank you, ma'am. There's no stealing a march on you," Beauvayse said to the Mother-Superior, touching his hat with his gay, swaggering grace, as she emptied a bowl of red water on the ground, and whisked the blue apron and sleeves back into the vast recesses of the mysterious pocket. "But you're spoiling us. Hot water isn't on tap, as a rule, for Field-dressings, and--and won't you----" He reddened to the fair untanned skin upon his temples. "Mayn't I ask, ma'am, to be introduced to Miss Mildare?"

The Mother complied with his request, smiling indulgently. She had known and loved this bright boy's mother in her early married days. The Dark Rose of Ireland and the White Rose of Devon, a noted Society phrasemonger had dubbed them, seeing them together on the lawn one Ascot Cup Day, their light draperies and delicate ribbons whip-whipping in the pleasant June breeze, ivory-skinned, jetty-locked Celtic beauty and blue-eyed, flaxen-locked Saxon fairness in charming, confidential juxtaposition under one lace sunshade, lined with what has been the last new fashionable colour under twenty names, since then; only that year they called it Rose fane. Richard Mildare had praised the sunshade, a Paris affair supplied by Worth with his creation, Lady Biddy Bawne's beautiful gown. He asked Lady Biddy to marry him at the back of the box on the Grand Stand when Verneuil was winning the Cup. Who shall dare say that he was not then a sincere lover? thought the Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way. And then she recalled her wandering thoughts, and turned them to the One Lover who never betrays His chosen. And her rapt eyes looking up, seemed to pierce beyond the flaming sky-vault overhead. She forgot all else, suddenly snatched from earthly consciousness to beatific realisation of the Divine.

There had been for some minutes now a lull in the bombardment from the ridges. The enemy's guns were silent a space, and the hot batteries of harassed Gueldersdorp snatched a brief respite while Boers gathered for the nine o'clock coffee-drinking round their little snapping fires of dried dung and tindery bush. Now and then a rifle cracked, and a bullet sang past or whitted in the dust. But comparative peace brooded over the shattered hamlet of wrecked homes and ploughed-up, littered roads, and raw earthworks blistering in the pitiless sun.

"Miss Mildare." Beauvayse was speaking in that pleasant, boyish voice of his, standing close to Lynette, his tall head bending for a glimpse of the eyes of golden hazel, that were shaded by the broad, rough straw hat; "if you knew how I've waited for this. Nearly seven weeks since one day in early October, when I saw you on the Recreation Ground, where some brutes were annoying you, and a day or so later you went by the Hospital as I rode up with the Chief. But, of course, you don't remember?" His eyes begged her to say she did.

"I remember quite well." It was the voice he had imagined for her--low, and round, and clear, with just an undernote of plaintiveness matching the wistful appeal of her eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of exquisite delight went through him, as though she had touched him with her slender white, bare hand on the naked breast.

"Thank you for not quite forgetting. You don't know what it means to me, being kept in mind by you."

"I do not know that I kept you in mind." There was a touch of girlish dignity in her utterance. "I only said that I remembered quite well."

He bent his head nearer, and lowered his pleasant voice to a coaxing, confidential tone.

"You'll think me a presumptuous kind of fellow for talking like this, won't you, Miss Mildare? But the circumstances are exceptional, aren't they? We're shut up away from the big world outside in a little world of our own, and--such chances fall to every man and most of the women here: a shrapnel bullet or a shell-splinter might stop me before another hour goes by, from ever saying--what I've felt for weeks on end had got to be said--what I'd risk a dozen lives, if I had 'em, to get the opportunity of saying to you." His hot eagerness frightened her. Her downcast eyelids quivered, and her flushed maiden-face shrank from him.

"Oh, don't be angry! Don't move away!" Beauvayse entreated; for Lynette's anxious glance had gone in search of the Mother-Superior, with whom Saxham was now discussing the nuns' idea of utilising the Convent as a Convalescent Hospital. In another instant she would have taken refuge by her side. "If you knew how I have thought of you and dreamed of you since I saw you! If you could only understand how I shall think of you now! If you could only realise how awfully, utterly strange it is to feel as I am feeling!" His voice was a tremulous, fervent whisper. His eyes gleamed like emeralds in the shadow of the wide-brimmed felt hat. "And if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long for you, and worship you wherever I am!"

"Oh, why do you talk to me like this?"

Lynette's whisper was as tremulous as Beauvayse's own. Her eyes lifted to the glowing, ardent face for one shy instant, and found it good to look upon. Men, young and not undesirable, had tried to make love to her before, at dances and parties and picnics to which she had been chaperoned by the Mayor's wife. But the first hot glance, the first word that carried the vibration of a passionate meaning, had wakened the old terror in her, and bidden her escape. The nymph had always taken flight at the first step upon the bank, the first rustle of the sedges. She had never lingered to feel the air stirred by another burning breath. She had never asked any one of those other men why he talked like that. Beauvayse went on:

"Perhaps I even seem a little mad to you--fellows have told me lately that I went on as if I had a tile off. Perhaps I'm what the Scotch call 'fey.' I've got Highland blood in me, anyhow. And you have set it on fire, I think--started it boiling and racing and leaping in my veins as no woman ever did before. You slender white witch! you fay of mist and moonlight, you've woven a spell, and tangled my soul in it, and nothing in Life or in Death will ever loose me again." His tone changed, became infinitely caressing. "How sweet and dear you are to be so patient with me, while I'm sending the Conventionalities to the rightabout and terrifying the Proprieties. Forgive me, Miss Mildare."

The pleading in his face was exquisite. She felt as a bee might feel drowning in honey, as she wreathed her white fingers together upon the silver buckle of the brown leather belt she wore, and said confusedly:

"I ... I believe I ought to be very angry with you."

His whisper touched her ear like a kiss, and set her trembling.

"But you're not?"

"I----"

She caught her breath as he came nearer. There was a fragrance from him--a perfume of youth and health and vitality--that was powerful, heady, intoxicating as the first warm, flower-scented wind of Spring, blowing down a mountain-kloof from the high ranges. Her white-rose cheeks took sudden warmth of hue, and her pale nostrils quivered. A faint, mysterious smile dawned upon her lips. Something of the old terror was upon her still, and yet--it was delicious to be afraid of him!

"Say that you aren't angry with me for being so thunderingly presumptuous. Please be kind to me and say it."

Her lips began to utter disjointed phrases. "What can it matter really?... Oh, very well, then ... if my saying so is of such ... importance...."

"More important than anything in the world!" he declared.

"Very well, then, I am not angry--not furiously so, at least." The bud of a smile repressed pouted her lips.

"And," he begged, "you'll let what I've said to you be our secret? Promise."

"Very well."

"You sweetest, kindest, loveliest----"

"Please don't," she entreated.

"And I may know your Christian name?" he persisted, "I've thought of everything in the world, and nothing's good enough to fit you."

"Oh, how silly!" Her eyes gleamed with laughter. "It is Lynette."

He caught at it with rapture. "Perfect! The last touch.... The scent of the rose, or say the dewdrop on it. By George, I'm in earnest!"

He had spoken incautiously loud. A grating voice addressing him pulled his head round.

"Lord Beauvayse ..."

"Did you speak to me, Doctor? As I was saying, Miss Mildare," he went on, continuing the blameless conversation, "dust-storms and flies are the twin curses of South Africa."

The harsh voice spoke to him again. He looked round, and met Saxham's eyes, hard and cold as blue stones. The Doctor said grimly:

"You may not be aware that your men are drawing fire."

It was undeniable fact. The bullets had begun to hit the ground under the horses' bellies, spirting little columns of dust and flattening against the stones. Coffee-drinking was over in the enemy's trenches, and the business of the day had begun again. Beauvayse bade the ladies good-morning, and swung himself into the saddle.

"Au revoir, Miss Mildare. Please get under cover at once." The proprietorship in the tone stung Saxham to wincing. "Good-morning, ma'am," he cried to the Mother-Superior, "we know you ignore bullets. So long, Doctor. Hope I shan't count one in your day's casualty-bag. Ready, boys?"

The chatting troopers sprang to alert attention. W. Keyse, pensively boring the sandy earth with the pneumatic auger of imagination, in search of the loved one believed to inhabit the Convent bomb-proof, was recalled to the surface by the curtly-uttered command, and knew the thrill of hero-worship as Beauvayse threw out his lightly-clenched hand, and the troopers, answering the signal, broke into a trot. The hot dust scurried at the horses' retreating heels. Corporal Keyse, trudging staunchly in their wake with his five Town Guardsmen, became ghostlike, enveloped in an African replica of the ginger-coloured type of London fog. And the Mother-Superior looked at her well-worn watch.

"My child, we must be moving if you are coming with me to the Women's Laager. I am nearly an hour late as it is."

"I am ready, Mother dear."

Lynette's eyes came back from following that dust-cloud in the distance to meet the hungry, jealous fires of Saxham's gaze.

He had seen Beauvayse's ardent look, and her shy heart's first leaf unfolded in the answering blush, and a spasm of intolerable anger gripped him as he saw. He turned away silently, cursing his own folly, and unhitched his horse's bridle from the broken gatepost. With the act a crowd rose up before Lynette and a frightened horse reared, threatening to fall upon three women who were hurrying along the sidewalk outside the Hospital, and a heavy-shouldered, black-haired man in shabby white drills stepped out of the throng and seized the flying bridoon-rein, and wrenched the brute down. She recognised the horse and the man again, and exclaimed:

"Why ... Mother, don't you remember the rearing horse outside the Hospital that day in October? It was Dr. Saxham who caught him, and saved us from getting hurt."

"And we never even thanked you." The Mother-Superior turned to Saxham with outstretched hand and the smile that made her grave face beautiful. "What you must have thought!..."

"I looked for the person who had been so prompt, but you had vanished--where, nobody seemed to know," Lynette told him with her clear eyes on the stern, square face. "And then a man in the crowd called out, 'It's the Dop Doctor!' And I thought what an odd nickname!..." She broke off in dismay. Saxham had become livid. His grim jaws clamped themselves together, and the blue eyes grew hard as stone. One instant he stood immovable, the Waler's bridle on his left arm, his right hand clenched upon the old hunting-crop. Then he said very coldly and distinctly:

"As you observe, it is a queer nickname. But, at any rate, I had fairly earned----"

The bugle from the Staff headquarters sounded, drowning the rest of the sentence. The Catholic Church bell tolled. The other bells took up the warning, and the sentries called again from post to post:

"'Ware gun, Number Two! Southern Quarter, 'ware!"

The Krupp bellowed from the enemy's north position, and cleverly lobbed a seven-pound shell not far behind that rapidly-moving, distant pillar of dust, the nucleus of which was a little troop of cantering Irregulars, and not far in front of the lower, slower-moving cloud, the heart of which was a little knot of tramping Town Guardsmen. The shell burst with a splitting crack, earth and flying stones mingled with the deadly green flame and the poisonous chemical fumes of the lyddite. Figures scurried hither and thither in the smoke and smother; one lay prone upon the ground....

At the instant of the explosion Saxham had leaped forwards, setting his body and the horse's as a bulwark between Death and the two women. Now, though Lynette's rough straw hat had been whisked from her head by a force invisible, he saw her safe, caught in the Mother-Superior's embrace, sheltered by the tall, protecting figure as the sapling is sheltered by the pine.

"We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her cheek had been cut by a flying flake of flint, and was bleeding. "But look ... over there!" She pointed over the veld to the prostrate brown figure, and a cry of alarm broke from Lynette.

"Oh, Mother, who ...?"

"It is a Town Guardsman," Saxham answered, his cold blue eyes meeting the wild frightened gaze of the pale girl. "Lord Beauvayse and the Irregulars got off scot-free. Reverend Mother, do not think of coming. Please go on to the Women's Laager. I will see to the wounded man, and follow by-and-by."

He mounted, refusing all offers of aid, and rode off. Looking back an instant, he saw the black figure of the woman and the white figure of the girl setting out upon their perilous journey over the bare patch of ground where Death made harvest every day. They kissed each other before they started, and again Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. If Ruth had been only one half as lovely as this Convent-grown lily, Boaz was decidedly a lucky man. But he had been a respectable, sober, steady-going farmer, and not a man of thirty-six without a ten-pound note in the world, with a blighted career to regret, and five years of drunken wastrelhood to be ashamed of. And yet ... the drunken wastrel had been a man of mark once, and earned his thousands. And the success that had been achieved, and lost, could be rewon, and the career that had been pursued and abandoned could be his--Saxham's--again. And what were his publishers doing with those accumulated royalties? For he knew from Taggart and McFadyen that his books still sold.

"The Past is done with," he said aloud. "Why should not the Future be fair?"

And yet he had nearly yielded to the impulse to own to those degraded years, and claim the nickname they had earned him, and take her loathing and contempt in exchange. What sudden madness had possessed him, akin to that unaccountable, overmastering surge of emotion that he had known just now when he saw her tears?

We know the name of the divine madness, but we know not why it comes. Suddenly, after long years, in a crowded place or in a solitude where two are, it is upon you or upon me. The blood is changed to strange, ethereal ichor, the pulse beats a tune that is as old as the Earth itself, but yet eternally new. Every breath we draw is rapture, every step we take leads us one way. One voice calls through all the voices, one hand beckons whether it will or no, and we follow because we must. With the Atlantic rolling between us I can feel your heart beat against mine, and your lips breathe into me your soul. The light that was upon your face, the look that was in your eyes as you gave the unforgettable, immemorial kiss, the clasp of your hands, the rising and falling of your bosom, like a wave beneath a sea-bird, like a sea-bird above a wave, shall be with me always, even to the end of time and beyond it.

For there are many loves, but one Love.

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XXX

A long-legged, thinnish officer, riding a khaki-coloured bicycle over a dusty stretch of shrapnel-raked ground, carrying a riding-whip tucked under his arm and wearing steel jack-spurs, might have been considered a laughter-provoking object elsewhere, but the point was lost for Gueldersdorp. He got off his metal steed amongst the zipping bullets, and came over to the little group of Town Guards that were gathered round Saxham, who had just ridden up, and their prostrate comrade, who writhed and groaned lustily.

"You have a casualty. Serious?"

Saxham looked up, and his hard glance softened in recognition of the Chief.

"I'll tell you in a moment, sir."

The earth-stained khaki jacket was torn down the left side and drenched with ominous red. A little pool of the same colour had gathered under the sufferer.

"He looks gassly, don't him?" muttered one of the Town Guardsmen, the Swiss baker who was not Swiss.

"Makes plenty of noise," said the County Court clerk hypercritically, "for a dying man."

"Oh Lord! oh Lord!"

The subject had bellowed with sonority, testifying at least to the possession of an uninjured diaphragm, as Saxham begun to cut away the jacket.

"Oh, come now!" said a brisk, pleasant, incisive voice that sent an electric shock volting through the presumably shattered frame. "That's not so bad!"

"I told you so," muttered the County Court clerk to the Swiss baker.

"You remember me, Colonel?"

Haggard, despairing eyes rolled up at the Chief appealingly. He had met the gaze of those oyster-orbs before. He recognised Alderman Brooker, proprietor of the grocery stores in Market Square, victim of the outrage perpetrated on a sentry near the Convent on a certain memorable night in October last.

"Yes, my man. Anything I can do?" He knelt down beside the prostrate form.

"You can tell my country, sir, that I died willingly," panted the moribund.

"With pleasure, when you're dead. But you're not yet, you know, Brooker." His keen glance was following the run of the Doctor's surgical scissors through the brown stuff and revelling in discovery. And Saxham's set, square face and stern eyes were for once all alight with laughter. The dying man went on:

"It's a privilege, sir, an inestimable privilege, to have shed one's blood in a great cause."

"It is, Mr. Brooker, but this is different stuff." His keen face wrinkled with amusement as he sniffed, and dipped a finger in the crimson puddle. "Too sticky." He put the finger to his tongue--"and too sweet. Show him the bottle, Saxham."

The Doctor, imperturbably grave, held forth at the end of the scissors the ripped-up ruins of a small-sized indiarubber hot-water bottle, a ductile vessel that, buttoned inside the khaki tunic, had adapted itself not uncomfortably to the still existing rotundities of the Alderman's figure. A hyaena-yell of laughter broke from each of the crowding heads. Brooker's face assumed the hue of the scarlet flannel chest-protector exposed by the ruthless steel.

"What the--what the----?" he stuttered.

"Yes, that's the question. What the devil was inside it, Brooker, when the shell-splinter hit you in the tummy and it saved your life? Stand him on his legs, men; he's as right as rain. Now, Brooker?"

Brooker, without volition, assumed the perpendicular, and began to babble:

"To tell the truth, sir, it was loquat syrup. Very soothing to the chest, and, upon my honour, perfectly wholesome. Mrs. Brooker makes it regularly every year, and--we sell a twenty-gallon barrel over the counter, besides what we keep for ourselves. And if I am to be exposed to mockery when Providence has snatched me from the verge of the grave ..."

"Not a watery grave, Brooker," came from the Chief, with an irrepressible chuckle--"a syrupy one. And--have I your word of honour that this is a non-alcoholic beverage?"

"Sir, to be candid with you, I won't deny but what it might contain a certain proportion of brandy. And the nights in the trench being particularly cold and myself constitutionally liable to chill ... I--I find a drop now and then a comfort, sir."

"Ah, and have you any more of this kind of comfort at your place of business or elsewhere?"

"Why--why ..." the Alderman faltered, "there might be a little keg, sir, in the shop, under the desk in the counting-house."

"Requisitioned, Mr. Brooker, as a Government store. You may feel more chilly without it; you'll certainly sleep more lightly. As far as I can see, it has been more useful outside of you than ever it was in. And--the safety of this town depends on the cool heads of the defenders who man the trenches. A fuddled man behind a gun is worse than no man to me."

The voice rang hard and clear as a gong. "I'm no teetotaller. Abstinence is the rule I enforce, by precept and example. While men are men they'll drink strong liquor. But as long as they are not fool-men and brute-men, they can be trusted not to lap when they're on duty. Those I find untrustworthy I mark down, and they will be dealt with rigorously. You understand me, Brooker? You look as if you did. You've had a narrow squeak. Be thankful for it that nothing but a bruise over the ribs has come of it. Corporal, fall in your men, and get to your duty."

W. Keyse and his martial citizens tramped on, the resuscitated Brooker flying rags of sanguine stain. Then the stern face of the Chief broke up in laughter. The crinkled-up eyes ran over with tears of mirth.

"Lord, that fellow will be the death of me! Tartaglia in the flesh--how old Gozzi would have revelled in him! Those pathetic, oyster-eyes, that round, flabby face, that comic nose, and the bleating voice with the sentimental quaver in it, reeling off the live man's dying speech...." He wiped his brimming eyes. "Since the time when Boer spies hocussed him on guard--you remember that lovely affair?--he's registered a vow to impress me with his gallantry and devotion, or die in the attempt. He's the most admirably unconscious humbug I've ever yet met. Sands his sugar and brown-papers his teas philanthropically, for the good of the public, and denounces men who put in Old Squareface and whisky-pegs, as he fuddles himself with his loquat brandy after shop-hours in the sitting-room back of the store. But let us be thankful that Providence has sent Brooker on a special mission to play Pantaloon in this grimmish little interlude of ours. For we'll want every scrap of Comic Relief we can get by-and-by, Saxham, if the other one doesn't turn up--say by the middle of January."

"I understand, sir." Saxham, to whom this man's face was as a book well loved, read in it that the Commissariat was caving. "There has been another Boer cattle-raid?"

The face that was turned to his own in reply had suddenly grown deeply-lined and haggard. "There has been a lot of cattle-shooting. Lobbing shrapnel at grazing cows was always quite a favourite game with Brounckers. But his gunners hit oftener than they used to. And the Government forage won't hold out for ever." He patted the brown Waler, who pricked his sagacious ears and threw up his handsome bluntish head in acknowledgment of his master's caress. "Presently we shall be killing our mounts to save their lives--and ours. Oats and horseflesh will keep life in men--and in children and women.... The devil of it is, Saxham, that there are such a lot of women."

"And seventy-five out of a hundred of them stayed out of pure curiosity," came grimly from Saxham.

"To see what a siege would be like. Well, poor souls, they know now! You were going over to the Women's Laager. I'll walk with you, and say my say as I go. I'm on my way to Nordenfeldt Fort West. Something has gone wrong with the telephone-wire between there and Staff headquarters, and I can't get anything through but Volapuk or Esperanto. And those happen to be two of the languages I haven't studied." The dry, humorous smile curved the reddish-brown moustache again. The pleasant little whistle stirred the short-clipped hairs of it as the two men turned in the direction of the Women's Laager, over which the Red-cross flag was fluttering, and where the spider with the little Boer mare, picking at the scanty grass, waited outside the earthworks. Saxham's eyes did not travel so far. They were fastened upon a tall black figure and a less tall and more slender white figure that were by this time halfway upon their perilous journey across the patch of veld, bare and scorched by hellish fires, and ploughed by shrapnel ball into the furrows whence Death had reaped his harvest day by day.

"There goes one of the women we couldn't have done without," commented his companion, wheeling his bicycle beside Saxham, leading the brown Waler.

"It is the Mother-Superior," Saxham said, "with her ward, Miss Mildare."

"Ah! My invariable reply to Beauvayse--you know my junior A.D.C., who daily clamours for an introduction to Miss Mildare--is, that I have not yet had one myself, though at the outset of affairs I encountered the young lady under rather trying circumstances, in which she showed plenty of pluck. I thought I had told you. No? Well, it was one morning on the Recreation Ground. The School was out walking, a trio of nuns in charge, and some Dutch loafers mobbed them--threatened to lay hands on the Sisters--and Miss Mildare stood up in defence--head up, eyes blazing, a slim, tawny-haired young lioness ready to spring. And Beauvayse was with me, and ever since then has been dead-set upon making her acquaintance."

Saxham's blood warmed to the picture. But he said, and his tone was not pleasant: "Lord Beauvayse attained the height of his ambition a few minutes ago."

"Did he? Well, I hope disillusion was not the outcome of realisation. Up to the present"--the humorous, keen eyes were wrinkled at the corners--"all the boy's swans have been geese, some of 'em the sable kind."

Saxham answered stiffly: "I should say that in this case the swan decidedly predominates."

The other whistled a bar of his pleasant little tune before he spoke again. "It is a capital thing for Beauvayse, being shut up here, out of the way of women."

"Are there no women in Gueldersdorp?"

"None of the kind Beauvayse's canoe is given to capsizing on." The line in his senior's cheek flickered with a hinted smile. "None of the kind that run after him, lie in wait for him, buzz round him like wasps about a honey-bowl. I've developed muscle getting the boy out of amatory scrapes, with the Society octopus, with the Garrison husband-hunter, with the professional man-eater, theatrical or music-hall; and the latest, most inexpressible She, is always the loveliest woman in the world. Queer world!"

"A damned queer world!" agreed Saxham.

"I'd prefer to call it a blessed queer one, because, with all its chaotic, weltering incongruities--there's a Carlyleism for you--I love it! I couldn't live without loving it and laughing at it, any more than Beauvayse could get on minus an affair of the heart. Ah, yes, that amatory lyre of his is an uncommonly adaptable instrument. I've known it thrummed to the praises of a middle-aged Duchess--quite a beauty still, even by daylight, with her three veils on, and an Operatic soprano, with a mascot cockatoo, not to mention a round dozen of frisky matrons of the kind that exploit nice boys. Just before we came out, it could play nothing but that famous song-and-dance tune that London went mad over at the Jollity in June--is raving over still, I believe! Can't give you the exact title of the thing, but 'Darling, Will You Meet Me In The Centre Of The Circle That The Limelight Makes Upon The Floor, Tiddle-e-yum?' would meet the case. We have Musical Comedy now in place of what used to be Burlesque in your London days, Saxham, with a Leading Lady instead of a Principal Boy, and a Chorus in long skirts."

Saxham admitted with a cynical twitch of the mouth:

"There's nothing so short as a long skirt--properly managed."

"You're right. And Lessie Lavigne and the rest of the nimble sisterhood devote their gifts--Thespian and Terpsichorean--to demonstrating the fact. Oh, damned cowardly hounds!" The voice jarred and clanged with irrepressible anger. "Saxham, can't you see? Brouncker's sharpshooters are sniping at the women--the Sister of Mercy and the girl!"

His glance, as well as Saxham's, had followed the tall black figure and the slender white figure on their journey through Death's harvest-field. But his trained eye had been first to see the little jets and puffs of sickly hot, reddish dust rising about their perilous path. They walked quickly, but without hurry, keeping a pace apart, and holding one another by the hand. Saxham, watching them, said, with dry lips and a deadly sickness at the heart:

"And we can do nothing?"

"Nothing! It's one of those things a man has got to look on at, and wonder why the Almighty doesn't interfere? Oh, to have the fellows triced up for three dozen of the best apiece--good old-fashioned measure. See, they're getting near the laager now. They'll soon be under cover. But--I wonder the Convent cares to risk its ewe lamb on that infernal patch of veld?"

"It is my doing." Saxham's eyes were glued on the black figure and the white figure nearing, nearing the embrasure in the earthwork redoubt, and his face was of an ugly blue-white, and dabbled with sweat.

"Your doing?"

"Mine. I was called in, to find Miss Mildare breaking down from suspense, and the overstrain of inaction. And--to avert even worse evils, I prescribed the tonic of danger. There was no choice---- In at last!"

The Sister of Mercy and the girl had vanished behind the dumpy earth-bag walls. He thought the white figure had glanced back, and waved its hand, and then a question from his companion startled him beyond his ordinary stolid self-control.

"By the way ... with reference to Miss Mildare, have you any idea whether she proposes taking the veil?"

"How should I have ideas upon the possibility?" The opaque, smooth skin of the square, pale face was dyed with a sudden rush of dark blood. The Colonel did not look at it, but said, as a bullet sang upon a stone near his boot, and flattened into a shiny star of lead:

"I would give something to hear you laugh sometimes, Saxham. You're too much in earnest, my dear fellow. Burnt Njal himself could hardly have been more grim."

Saxham answered:

"That fellow in the Saga, you mean. He laughed only at the end, I think, when the great roof-beam burned through and the hall fell in. But my castle tumbled about my ears in the beginning, and I laughed then, I remember."

"And, take it from me, you will live to laugh again and again," said the kindly voice, "at the man who took it for granted that everything was over, and did not set to work by dawn of the next day building up the hall greater than before. Those old Vikings did, 'and each time the high seat was dight more splendidly, and the hangings of the closed beds woven more fair.' They never knew when they were beaten, those grand old fellows, and so it came about that they never were. By the way, I have something here that concerns you."

"Concerns me?"

"I think I may say, nearly concerns you. A paragraph in this copy of the Cape Town Mercury, which, by the way, is three weeks old."

A rubbed and shabby newspaper, folded small, came out of the baggy breast-pocket of the khaki jacket. Saxham received it with visible annoyance.

"Some belated notice of one of my books." The scowl with which he surveyed the paper testified to a strong desire to pitch it to the winds.

"Not a bit of it. It's an advertisement inserted by a London firm of solicitors--Donkin, Donkin, and Judd, Lincoln's Inn. Possibly you are acquainted with Donkin, if not with Judd?"

"They are the solicitors for the trustees of my mother's property, sir. I heard from them three years ago, when I was at Diamond Town. They returned my last letter to her, and told me of her death."

"They state in the usual formula that it will be to your advantage to communicate with them. May I, as a friend, urge on you the necessity of doing so?"

Saxham's grim mouth shut close. His eyes brooded sullenly.

"I will think it over, sir."

"You haven't much time. A despatch-runner from Koodoosvaal got through the enemy's lines last night with some letters and this paper. No, no word of the Relief. His verbal news was practically nil. He goes out at midnight with some cipher messages. And, if you will let me have your reply to the advertisement with the returned paper by eleven at latest, I will see that it is sent." The rather peremptory tone softened--became persuasive; "You must build up the great hall again, Saxham, and building can't be done without money. And--it occurs to me that this may be some question of a legacy."

"My father was not a wealthy man," Saxham said. "He gave me a costly education, and later advanced four thousand pounds for the purchase of a West End practice, upon the understanding that I was to expect no more from him, and that the bulk of his property, with the exception of a sum left as provision for my mother, should be strictly entailed upon my brother and his heirs, if he should marry. The arrangement was most just, as I was then in receipt of a considerable income from my profession, and my father died before my circumstances altered for the worse. Independently of the provision he made for her, my mother possessed a small jointure, a freehold estate in South Wales, bringing in, when the house is let, about a hundred and fifty pounds a year. That was to have been left to me as the younger son. But her trustees informed me, through these solicitors, that she had changed her mind, as she had a perfect right to do, and bequeathed everything she possessed to my brother's son, a child who"--Saxham's voice was deadly cold--"may be about four years old."

"A later will may have been found. If I have any influence with you, Saxham, I would use it in urging you to reply to the advertisement."

Saxham agreed unwillingly: "Very well."

The other knew the point gained, and adroitly changed the conversation. It grew severely technical, bristling with scientific terms, dealing chiefly with food-values. The black cloud cleared from Saxham's forehead as he lectured on the energy-fuels, and settled the minimum of protein, fat, starch, and sugar necessary to keep the furnace of Life burning in the human body.

Milk, that precious fluid, could henceforth only be given to invalids and children. Margarine and jam were severely relegated to the list of luxuries. Sardines, tinned salmon, and American canned goods had entirely given out. And flour, the staff of life, was vanishing.

The joy of battle lightened in their faces as they talked, forging weapons that should make men enduring, and Saxham warmed. His icy armour of habitual silence melted and broke up. He became eloquent, pouring out his treasured projects, suggesting substitutes for this, and makeshifts for that and the other. He was in his element--he knew the ground he trod. He thrust out his grim under-jaw, and hulked with his heavy shoulders as he talked to this man who understood; and every supple movement of his surgeon's hand pointed out some fresh expedient, as the singing bullets went by or whit-whitted about them in the dust, and now and then a shell burst over patient Gueldersdorp.

They parted at the Women's Laager, and as the khaki bicycle grew small in the distance, Saxham realised with a shock that he was happy, that life had suddenly become sweet, and opened out anew before him in a vista, not of shining promise, but with one golden gleam of hope in it, to a man freed by the force of Will from the bondage of the accursed liquor-thirst. Freed! If freed in truth, why should the sight and smell even of Brooker's sticky loquat-brandy have set the long-denied palate craving? Saxham put that question from him with both hands.

And then he frowned, thinking of that adaptable instrument that had thrummed an accompaniment to the arias of the Opera soprano, as to the Society drawing-room duets sung with the frisky married ladies who liked nice boys, and had made tinkling music for the twinkling small feet, and the strident voice of Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity Theatre, and now must serenade outside a Convent-close in beleaguered Gueldersdorp, where the whitest of maiden lilies bloomed, tall and pure and slender and unharmed, in a raging tempest of fire and steel and lead.

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XXXI

Pray give a thought to the spy, Walt Slabberts, languishing in durance vile under the yellow flag. Several times the first-class, up-to-date, effective artillery of his countrymen, being brought to bear upon the gaol, had caused the captive to bound like the proverbial parched pea, and to curse with curses not only loud but fervent the indiscriminating zeal of his brother patriots.

He was, though lost to sight behind the walls of what Emigration Jane designated the jug, still fondly dear to one whose pliant affections, rudely disentangled by the hand of perfidy from the person of That There Green, had twined vigorously about the slouching person of the young Boer. Letters were received, but not forwarded to suspects enjoying the hospitality of the Government, so communication with the object of her dreams was painfully impossible. Stratagems were not successful. A passionate missive concealed in a plum-pudding--before it was put on to boil--had become incorporated with the individuality of a prison official, who objected on principle to waste.

On Sundays, when you could go out without your 'art in your mouth an account of them 'orful shellses, a fair female form in a large and flamboyant hat, whose imitation ostridge tips were now mere bundles of quill shavings, and whose flowers were as wilted as the other blossoms of her heart, wandered disconsolately round her Walt's place of bondage, waving a lily hand on the chance of being seen and recognised. Tactics productive of nothing but blown kisses on the part of extra-susceptible warders, and one or two troopers of the B.S.A., who ought to have known better. These advances Walt's bereaved betrothed rejected with ringing sniffs of scorn, yet, of such conflicting elements is the feminine heart composed, found them strangely solacing.

She 'ad 'ad 'er month's notice from Sister Tobias upon the morning following the night of the tragedy, another score to the account of the traitor Keyse. Arriving unseemly late, and in an agitated state of mind--and could you wonder, after her young man had been pinched and took away?--she had mechanically accounted for her late return in the well-worn formula of Kentish Town, explaining to the surprised Sisters that there 'ad bin a haccident on the Underground between the Edgeware Road and 'Ammersmiff, an' that her sister Hemmaline had bin took bad in consequence, the second being looked for at the month's end; and to leave that pore dear in that state--her 'usband being at his Social Club--was more than Emigration Jane 'ad 'ad the 'art to do. She received her dismissal to bed, and the advice to examine her conscience carefully before retiring, with defiance, culminating in an attack of whooping hysteria. Nor was she repentant, but defiantly elated by the knowledge that nobody had slept in the Convent that night, until she had run down. The character supplied by Sister Tobias to her next employer specified terminological inexactitude among her failings, combined with lack of emotional self-control; but laid stress on an affectionate disposition, and a tendency to intermittent attacks of hard work.

She was now, with her new mistress and the kids, pigging--you couldn't call it nothink else, not to be truthful you couldn't--at the Women's Laager, along of them there dirty Dutch frows. She refrained from too candid criticism of her Walt's countrywomen, but it was proper 'ard all the same not to call crock and muck by their right names!

Languishing in seclusion, week and week about, cooking scant meals of the Commissariat beef, moistened with gravy made from them patent packets of Consecrated Soup, can you wonder that her burden of bitterness against W. Keyse, author of all her wrongs, instrument most actively potential in the jogging of her young man, bulked larger every day? She was not one to 'ave the world's 'eel upon 'er without turning like a worm. No Fear, and Chance it! Her bosom heaved under the soiled two-and-elevenpenny peek-a-boo "blowse" as she registered her vow. That there Keyse--the conduct of the faithless Mr. Green appeared almost blonde in complexion beside the sable villainy of the other--That There Keyse should Rue the Day!

How to make him?--that was the question. Then came the dazzling flash of inspiration--but not until they had met again.

She was circulating hungry-hearted about the brick-built case that held her jewel--the man who had held out that vista of a home, and called her his good little Boer-wife to be. We know it was a mere bait designed to allure and dazzle--the Boer spy had caught many women with it before. Do you despise her and those others for the predominance of the primal instinct, the sacred passion for the inviolate hearth? Not so much they yearned for the man as for the roof-tree, whose roots are twined about the heart-strings of the natural woman, the spreading rafter-branches of which shelter little downy heads.

She encountered the traitor, I say, and her eyes darted fire beneath a bristling palisade of iron curling-pins. She had not the heart in these days to free her imprisoned tresses. The villain had the perishing nerve to accost her, jauntily touching the smasher hat.

"'Day, Miss! 'Aven't seen you since when I can't think."

She replied with a ringing sniff and a glance of infinite scorn that she would trouble him not to think; and that she regarded low, interfering, vulgar fellows as the dirt under her feet. So there!

"Cripps!" He was took aback, but not to the extent of taking hisself off, which he ought to. "You're fair mad with me, an' no mistyke." His pale eyes were unmistakably good-natured; the loss of the yellow freckles, swamped in a fine, uniform, brick-dust colour, was an improvement, she could not help thinking. "But I only did my duty, Miss, same as another chap would 'ave 'ad to. Look 'ere! Come and 'ave a split gingerade."

The delicious beverage was three shillings the bottle. She frowned, but hesitated. He persisted; she ended by giving in. Weeks and weeks since she had walked with a young man! The Dutchman's saloon was closed and barricaded; its owner had made tracks to his Transvaal friends at the beginning of the siege. But the aromatic-beer cellar was one of the places open. They went in there. Oh! the deliciousness of that first sip of the stinging, fizzling beverage! He lifted his glass in the way that she remembered, and drank a toast.

"'Er 'ealth! If you knew how I bin wantin' to git word of 'er! She's well, isn't she, Miss? Lumme! the Fair Old Knock-out I got when I see the Convent standin' empty.... Gone into laager near the railway works now, you 'ave, I know. Safe, if not stric'ly luxurious. But--I git the Regular Hump when I think of--of a Angel like 'Er 'avin' to live an' eat an' sleep in a--a--in a bloomin' rabbit-'ole." He sighed as he wiped the pungent froth from his upper lip.

"Pity you can't tell 'er so!" The sarcasm would have its way, but it failed of his great simplicity.

"That's why I bin lookin' out for you." He blushed through the brick-dust hue as he extracted a fatigued-looking letter from a baggy left breast-pocket in which it had sojourned in company with a tobacco-pouch, a pipe which must not be smoked in the trenches if a man would prefer to do without a bullet through his brain, a handful of screws not innocent of lubricating medium, a clasp-knife, a flat tin box of carbolised vaseline, a First-Aid bandage, and a ration of bread and cheese wrapped in old newspaper. The bread was getting deplorable, for even the dusty seconds flour was fast dribbling out.

"You'll give 'er this, won't you, Miss, and tell her I bin thinkin' of 'er night and d'y? Fair live in the trenches now; and when I do git strollin' round the stad, blimme if I ever see 'er. But she's there--an 'ere's a ticker beatin' true to 'er." He rapped a little awkwardly upon the bulging left breast-pocket, "To the bloomin' end, wotever it may be!"

"Oh, you--silly, you!"

She found him ridiculous and tragic, and so touching all at once that the gibe ended in a sob. It was not the stinging effervescence of the gingerade that made her choke and brought the smarting tears to her eyes. It was envy of that other girl. And then she noticed, under his left eye, a tiny scar, and she knew how he came by it, and remembered what she owed him, and saw that the chance had come for her revenge. She could pierce the heart beating under the khaki breast-pocket to its very core with three words as easily as she had jabbed his face with her hat pin on that never-to-be-forgotten night. She would tell him that the lady of his love had gone up to Johannesburg weeks and weeks ago. Oh, but it would be sweet to see the duped lover's face! She would give him a bit of her mind, too--perhaps tear up the letter.

Then flashed across the murky-black night of her stormy mind the forked-lightning inspiration of what the real revenge would be. To take his letter--write him another back, and yet others, fool him to the top of his bent, and presently tell him, tossing at his feet a sheaf of billets. "And serve you glad--and no more than your deservings! Who put away my Walt?"

She accepted the letter, only permitting herself one scornful sniff, and put the missive in her pocket. Next day John Tow, the Chinaman, serenely fatalistic, smilingly perpendicular in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping bullets, brought to the trench a reply, signed "Fare Air."

The writer Toke the Libberty of Hopeing W. Keyse was as it Left her at preasent. She was Mutch obblig for his Dear Leter Witch it 'ad made her Hapey to Know a Brave Man fiteing for her Saik.

"Cr'r----!" ejaculated W. Keyse, below his breath. His face was radiant as he read. Her spelling was a bit off, it was impossible to deny. But--Cripps!--to be called a brave man by the owner of the maddening blue eyes, and that great thick golden pigtail. The letter went on:

"Dear mr. Keyse yu will be Plese to Kno Jane is Sutch a Cumfut to me in Trubel. As it is Selldom Fathful Frends are To be Fownd But Jane is trew as Stele & Cold be Trustid with lbs & lbs. no More at Preasent from yr afexn Swetart.

"X X X X

"FARE AIR."

His senses reeled, as under pretence of masking a sneeze he pressed his burning lips to those osculatory crosses. He wrote her a flaming answer, begging a Sunday rendezvous. She appointed a place and an hour. He went there on the wings of love, but nobody turned up except the Jane who could be trusted with pounds and pounds.

She hurried to him trembling and quite pale, her blue eyes--he had never noticed that they were blue and really pretty--wide with fright under her yellow fringe of curls newly released from steely fetters. Her lips were apart, but he failed to observe that the teeth they revealed were creditably white; her cotton-gloved hand repressed her fluttering heart, but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing. He gulped as he said, with a fallen jaw and a look of abject misery that pierced her to the quick:

"She--couldn't come, then?"

"No, pore deer!" gasped the comfort in trouble, casting about for something to tell him. She had made up her mind as she came along; she would have her revenge there and then, and chance it. Something kept her from laying the candle-flame to the time-fuse. She did not know what it was yet. But, oh! the sharp look of terror in the thin, eager face pierced her through and through.

"My Gawd! She's not bin killed?" he cried. "Don't tell me she's bin----"

"Lor', gracious goodness, no! What will you think of next?" She lied, rallying him, with jealousy eating at her own poor heart. "Can't git away, that's all. Them Sisters are so precious sharp. An'--'Go an' tell 'im,' she says, ''e'll 'ave to put up with you this once. An' you'll come back an' tell me all about 'im!'"

He swallowed the bait, and her spirits revived. Emigration Jane, if not the rose, lived with it. Strictly speaking, they spent a pleasant Sunday, though when he found himself forgetting the absent one, he pulled himself sharply up. He saw her part of the way home; more she would not allow.

"And--and"--she whispered at their parting, her eyes avoiding his--"if she can't git out next Sunday--an' it's a chance whether she does, that Sister Tobias being such a watchful old cat--would you like to 'ave me meet you an' tell you all about 'er?"

W. Keyse assented, even eagerly, and so it began. Behold the poor deceiver drinking perilous joys, and learning to shudder at the thought of discovery. Think of her cherishing his letters, those passionate epistles addressed to the owner of the golden pigtail.

Think of her pouring out her poor full heart in those wildly-spelt missives that found their way to him, and be a little pitiful.

She did not thirst for that revenge now. But, oh! the day would come when he would find out and have his, in casting her off, with what contempt and loathing of her treachery she wept at night to picture. This feeling, that lifted you to Heaven one instant, and cast you down to Hell the next, was Love. Passion for the man, not yearning for the hearth-place, and the sheltering roof, and the security of marriage.

She left off walking round the gaol--indeed, rather avoided the vicinity of the casket that for her had once held a treasure. What would the Slabberts think of his little Boer-wife that was to have been? What would he say and do when they let him out? She took to losing breath and colour at the sound of a heavy step behind her, and would shrink close to the martial figure of W. Keyse when any hulking form distantly resembling the Boer's loomed up in the distance.

Oh, shame on her, the doubly false! But--but--she had never been so orful 'appy. Oh, what a queer thing was Love! If only---- But never, never would he. She was mistaken.

There came a moment when W. Keyse swerved from the path of single-hearted devotion to the unseen but ever-present wearer of the golden pigtail.

As Christmas drew near, and Gueldersdorp, not yet sensible of the belly-pinch of famine, sought to relieve its tense muscles and weary brains by getting up an entertainment here and there, W. Keyse escorted his beloved--by proxy, as usual--to a Sunday smoking-concert, given in a cleared-out Army Service Stores shed, lent by Imperial Government to the promoters of the entertainment.

Oh, the first delicious sniff of an atmosphere tinged with paint and acetylene from the stage-battens and footlights, and so flavoured with crowded humanity as to be strongly reminiscent of the lower troop-deck in stormy weather, when all the ports are shut and all the hatches are battened down! The excess of brilliancy which must not stream from the windows had been boarded in, and a tarpaulin was drawn over the skylight, in case the gunners of Meisje should be tempted to rouse the monster from her Sabbath quiet, and send in a ninety-four-pound shell to break up an orgy of godless Englanders. But the stuffiness made it all the snugger. You could fancy yourself in the pit of the Theayter of Varieties, 'Oxton, or perched up close to the blue starred ceiling-dome of the Pavilion, Mile End, on a Saturday night, when every gentleman sits in shirt-sleeves, with his arm round the waist of a lady, and the faggots and sausage-rolls and stone-gingers are going off like smoke, and the orange-peel rains from the upper circle back-benches, and the nut-cracking runs up and down the packed rows like the snapping of the breech-bolts in the trenches when the fire is hottest....

Ah! that brought one back to Gueldersdorp at once.

Meanwhile, a pale green canvas railway-truck cover, marked in black, "Light Goods--Destructible," served as a drop-curtain. Another, upon which the interior of an impossible palace had been delineated in a bewildering perspective of red and blue and yellow paint-smudges, served as a general back-scene for the performance.

The orchestra piano had been wounded by shell-fire, and had a leg in splints. Many members of the crowded audience were in strapping and bandages. Drink did not flow plentifully, but there was something to wet your whistle with, and the tobacco-cloud that hung above the trestle-benches, packed with black and yellow faces, as well as brown and white, could almost have been cut with a knife.

It was a long, rambling programme, scrawled in huge, black-paint characters on a white planed board, hung where everyone could read it. There were comic songs and Christy Minstrel choruses by people who had developed vocal talent for this occasion only, and a screaming display of conjuring tricks by an amateur of legerdemain who had forgotten the art, if ever he had mastered it. At every new mistake or blunder, and with each fresh change of expression on the entertainer's streaky face, conveying the idea of his being under the influence of a bad dream, and hoping to wake up in his own quarters by-and-by, to find that he had never really undertaken to make a pudding in a hat, and smash a gentleman's watch and produce it intact from some unexpected place of concealment, the spectators rocked and roared. Then there was a Pantomimic Interlude, with a great deal of genuine knockabout, and, the crowning item of the entertainment, a comic song and stump-speech, announced to be given by The Anonymous Mammoth Comique--an incognito not dimly suspected to conceal the identity of the Chief himself, being delayed by the Mammoth's character top-hat--a fondly cherished property of the Stiggins brand--and the cabbage umbrella that went with it, having been accidentally left behind at the Mammoth's hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished by the jib-sail collar and shiny burnt-cork complexion of the corner-man, was sent to the front to ask if any lady or gentleman in the audience would kindly oblige with a ten-minute turn?

"All right, Mister!"

A soiled cotton glove waved, a flowery hat nodded to the appeal from behind the acetylene footlights. The faces in the front rows of seats, pale and brick-dust, gingerbread and cigar-browned European, African countenances with rolling eyes and shining teeth; and here and there the impassive, almond-eyed, yellow mask of the Asiatic, slewed round as Emigration Jane rose up in the place beside W. Keyse, a little pale, and with damp patches in the palms of the washed white cotton gloves, as she said: If the gentleman pleased, she could sing--just a little!

No, thank you! She wasn't afryde, not she; they was all friends there. And do 'er best she would. She took off the big flowery hat quite calmly, giving it to W. Keyse to keep. The panic came on later, when the Christy-minstrel-collared, burnt-corked Master of the Revels was gallantly helping her up the short side-ladder, and culminated when he retreated, and left her there, standing on the platform in the bewildering glare of the acetylene footlights, a little, rather slight and flat-chested figure of a girl, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, in a washed-out flowery "blowse," and a "voylet" delaine skirt that had lost its pristine beauty, and showed faded and shabby in the yellow gas-flare.

Oh! 'owever 'ad she dared? That dazzling sea of faces, with the eyes all fixed on her, was terrifying. A big lump grew in her throat, and the crowded benches tilted, and the flaming lights leaped to the roof as the helpless, timid tears welled into her blue eyes.

And then the miracle happened.

W. Keyse sat on a back-bench, the thin Cockney face a little raised above the others, because he had slipped a rolled-up overcoat under him, pretending that it was to get it out of the way, you understand. Always very sensitive about his shortness, W. Keyse. And she saw his face, as plain as you please, and with a look in the pale, eager eyes, that for once was for Emigration Jane, her very own self, and not for That There Other One. She knew in that moment of revelation that she had always been jealous. Oh, wasn't it strynge? Her heart surged out to W. Keyse across the gulf of crowded faces. And her eyes had in them, all at once, the look that is born of Love.

Ah! who can mistake it? It begets a solitude in a vast thronged assemblage for you and for me. It sends its silent, wordless, eloquent message thrilling to the heart of the Beloved, and wins its passionate answer back. Ah! who can err about the look of Love?

She drew a deep breath that was her longing sigh for him, infinitely dear, and never to belong to her, and began her song. She sang it quite simply and naturally, in an untutored but sweet and plaintive voice, and with the Cockney accent that spoke of home to nearly all that heard. And her eyes never moved from his face as she sang.

The song was, I dare say, a foolish, trivial thing. But the air was pretty, and the words were simple, and it had a haunting refrain. To this effect, that the world is a big place and a hard place, with scant measure of joy in it, for you or for me. Bitter herbs grow side by side with the flowers in our Earth gardens. Salt tears mingle with our laughter; Night comes down in blotting darkness--perhaps in drenching rain,--at the close of every short, bright day of sunshine. But Life gone by, its hopes and fears and sorrows laid with our once-beating hearts in the good grey dust to rest, I shall meet with you again, in the Land where dreams come true.

"The Land Where Dreams Come True." That was the title of the song and its refrain, and somehow it caught the listeners by the heart strings, making the women sob aloud, and wringing bright sudden drops from the bold eyes of rough, strong, hardy men. You are to remember how the people stood: that scarcely one was there that had not lost brother or sister, mother or husband, child or friend or comrade since the beginning of the siege; and thus the touch of Nature made itself felt, and the simple pathos went home to the sore quick. They sang the refrain with her, fervently, and when the song was done, they sat in touched silence but one moment--and then the applause came down. As it fell upon her like a wall, she screamed in terror, and ran away behind the scene, and was found by W. Keyse a minute later, sobbing hysterically, with her head jammed into an angle of the wall of un-plastered brick-work.

None saw. He put his arms manfully about the waistline of the flowery blouse.

"Oh, let me go! Oh, what a wicked, wicked girl I've bin! Oh, it's all come over me on a sudden, like a flood! Don't touch me--I'm not good enough! Oh! how can you, can you?"

She sobbed the words out, and W. Keyse had kissed her. He did not get another utterance of her that night. She parted from him in tingling silence. His own uneasy sense of faithlessness to One immeasurably beloved, to whom he had pledged inviolable and eternal fidelity, nearly prompted him to ask her not to up and tell. But he manfully kept silence.

The worst of one kiss of that kind is that it begets the desire for others like it. She had turned her mouth to his in that whirling, breathless moment, and it was small, and warm, and clung. He tried to shake off the remembrance, but it haunted persistently.

He knew he had behaved like a regular beast--a low cur, in fact. To kiss one girl and mean it for another was, in the Keysian Code of morals, to be guilty of a baseness. The worst of it was that he knew, given the chance, he would do the same thing again.

For he could not shake off the memory of the blushing face, wetted with streaming tears from the wide bright eyes that pleaded so. They were blue, too, and the fringe above them might, by a not too exhausting stretch of the imagination, be termed golden. He heard her voice crying to him, "How can you, can you?" And he trembled at the thought of the mouth that kissed and clung.

He had known bought kisses, of the kind that brand the lips and shame the buyer as the seller. Never the kiss of Love, until now.

And now--was any other worth the taking?

"Cr'ripps!" said W. Keyse. "Not much!"

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XXXII

It was Wednesday again, and Saxham came riding through the embrasure in the oblong earthwork, and down the gravelly glacis that led into the Women's Laager. An obsequious Hindu, in an unclean shirt and a filthy red turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet, and took the bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.

It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-river, with spare lengths of steel railway-line borne across from bank to bank, covered with beams and sheets of corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide chinks to let in the much-needed air and light. A line of living-waggons, crowded with women and children--English, American, Irish, Dutch, and half-caste--ran down the centre of the giant trench. In each of its sloping faces a row of dug-out habitations gave accommodation to twice the number that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp cooking-places had been arranged in military fashion, but the Dutchwomen's little coffee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung and chips burned everywhere, and possibly they did something towards purifying the air. For, to be frank, it vied with the native village in the compound and variegated nature of its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly, frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen, the energetic Americans, and the sturdier Africanders, after making what headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to the lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to strive. A few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with the demon of Uncleanliness.

But the first April rainfall would turn the dry ditch into an open sewer--a vast trough of muddy water--in which draggled women would paddle for submerged household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But the majority stayed, of choice or of necessity, incubating sickness in that fetid place where nothing would thrive but fierce social and political hatreds, and petty grudges, and rankling jealousies, and shrieking quarrels that burst out and raged a hundred times in a day.

From one of the dug-out refuges Saxham now saw Lynette Mildare coming, making her swift way between the knots of frowsy refugees, the negro women-servants squatting over the little cooking-fires, the pallid children swarming on the narrow pathways.

"Dr. Saxham." Her simple brown holland skirt and thin linen blouse hung loosely upon her. Her face, too, had grown thinner, and looked tired. But the eyes were no longer unnaturally dilated, and the face had a more healthful pallor. "Mrs. Greening begged me to look out for you. She is so anxious about Berta. We have been doing everything we can, but I am afraid the child is seriously ill. It is the third shelter from the end, south side." She pointed out the place.

He had lifted his hat with his short, brusque salute. His vivid eyes wore a preoccupied look, his mobile nostrils angrily sniffed the villainous air.

"I'll come directly, Miss Mildare. But--who can expect children to keep healthy under conditions as insanitary as these?"

"It is--horrible!" Disgust was in her face. "But many of the women are as ignorant as the Kaffirs and Cape boys, and they and the coolie sweepers won't carry away refuse any more unless they're paid."

"You are sure of this?" His tone was curt and official.

"I am almost certain," she told him. "I have heard some of the women complaining that the charges grew higher every day. And, when I asked one of the boys why he did not do the work properly, he was--rude.... Oh, don't punish him!"

He had not said a word, but a white-hot spark had darted from his blue eye, and his grim jaws had clamped ominously together.

"It is my duty to put down insubordination, and chastise inefficiency where I encounter it. May I ask you to point out the fellow who behaved insolently?"

She said: "I--I think he is head of the carting-gang. A Kaffir boy they call Jim Gubo."

"That will do, thank you, Miss Mildare. You are not alone here?"

Her glad smile assured him of that. "Oh no, I am with the Mother. I go everywhere with her, and I think I am of use. I am not at all afraid of sickness, you know, or--the other things."

"But yet," Saxham said, "you must be careful of your health."

"You have no idea how tremendously strong I am," she answered him, and he broke into laughter in spite of himself. She looked so tender, so delicately frail a creature to be there in that malodorous Gehenna, ministering to the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say: "I did not thank you the other day, after all."

"The Krupp shell came along and changed the subject of the conversation." He added: "Were you alarmed? You had rather an escape."

"I was with Mother."

"You love her very dearly?" The words had escaped him unconsciously. They were his spoken thought. She flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness in her clear girlish tones:

"More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe God Himself will be angry with me that I have always seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's shining through hers and beyond it; for He knows as no one else can ever know what she has been since they brought me to the Convent years and years ago."

"They" were her people, presumably. It was odd--Saxham supposed it the outcome of that Convent breeding--that she should speak of God as simply, to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared in the Christian faith by a pious Welsh mother, but there had always been a little awkwardness about domestic references to the Deity. In times of sadness or bereavement He was frequently referred to. But always in a deprecatory tone.

"Your family is not Colonial?" he asked.

She shook her lovely red-brown head.

"I--don't know."

"Mildare is an unusual surname."

"You think it pretty?"

He thought her very pretty as she stood there, a slender willowy creature with the golden shadow of her rough straw-hat intensifying the clear amber of her thoughtful eyes.

"Very."

She looked him in the face and smiled.

"So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it belonged to someone she used to know, and her mother was Lynette. So they baptised me Lynette Mildare. It seems rather strange not having a name of one's own, but really I never had one."

"Never had one?"

Saxham echoed her half-consciously, revelling in the play of light and shadow over the delicate face, and the gleaming as of golden dust upon the outer edges of the waves of red-brown hair drawn carelessly back over the little ears.

"Not to my knowledge. Of course, I may have had one once." She added, as he looked at her in suddenly roused surprise, "I must have had one once." She was looking beyond him at a broad ray of moted white-hot sunshine that slanted through one of the wide openings above, and cleft the thick atmosphere of the crowded place like a fiery sword. "I have often wondered what it really is, and whether I should like it if I heard it? To exchange Lynette Mildare for Eliza Smith ... that would be horrible. Don't you think so?"

Saxham smiled. "I think you are joking, and that a young lady who can do so under the present circumstances deserves to be commended."

She looked at him full.

"I am not joking." Borne by a waft of the sickly air a downy winged seed came floating towards her, a frail gossamer courier coming from the world above with tidings that Dame Nature, in spite of all the destruction wreaked by men, was carrying on her business. "And--I do not even know that I am a young lady. See there"--she blew a little puff of breath at the moving messenger, and it wafted away upon a new air-pilgrimage, and, rising, caught a stronger current, and soared out of sight--"that is me. It came from somewhere, and it is going somewhere. That is all I know about myself; perhaps as much as I shall ever know. Why do you look so glad?"

His lips were sealed. The throb of selfish triumphant exultation came of the belief that the gulf between them was less wide and deep than he had thought it. A wastrel may woo and wed a waif, surely, without many questions being asked. And then, at the clear, innocent questioning of her eyes, rushed in upon him, scalding, the memories he had thrust away. He saw the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, his short daily stint of labour done, settling down to drink himself into hoggish oblivion in his accustomed corner of the Dutchman's liquor-saloon. He beheld him, his purpose accomplished, sleeping stertorously, spilled out like the very dregs of manhood in the sawdust of that foul place; he shuddered as the bloated, dishevelled thing roused and reeled homewards, trickling at the mouth, as the clear primrose day peeped over the flat-topped eastern hills. And he sickened at the thing he had been.

"I felt glad," he lied, with looks that shunned Lynette's, "that in your need you found so good a friend as the Mother-Superior. Yours must have been a sorrowful, lonely childhood."

Her own vision rose before her, blotting out his face. She saw the little kopje with the grave at its foot. She saw a ragged child sitting there watching for the earliest flush of dawn or the solemn folding of night's wide wing over the lonely veld, and the coming of the great white stars....

"She is much, much more than a friend. She is the Mother." Her loyal heart was in her face. "I have no secrets from her. I tell her everything."

Was that deeper flush born of the remembrance of a secret unshared? And how strange that every change of colour and expression in the delicate face should mean so much, so soon. He said, with a hungry flash of the gentian-blue eyes:

"Your love and confidence repay her richly."

"I can do so little." There was an anxious fold between the slender eyebrows. "Only follow her and be near her; only look on as she spends herself for others, never resting, never sparing, never discouraged or cast down." Great tears brimmed the white, darkly-fringed underlids, and ran over. "And she only laughs at me at night when I cry at the sight of her dear, blistered feet."

"You will be able to laugh with her when this is over," Saxham said rather clumsily.

"Shall I? Perhaps." Still that fold between the fine, delicate eyebrows.

"You have seen War," Saxham went on, his own voice sounding strange to him. "And that is a terrible experience for a woman, young or old, but you will be the richer by it in the end, believe me, Miss Mildare. Richer in courage and endurance and calmness in the presence of danger and death, and in sympathy with the pain and suffering inevitable under such circumstances."

"Sympathy? They had all my sympathy before." Her fair throat swelled against its encircling band of moss-green velvet, her voice rang, her eyes flashed golden fire under the shadow of the wide straw hat. "Do you think it needed War to teach me how hideously women suffer? How they have suffered since the world began, and how they will suffer until its end, unless they rise up in revolt once for all, against the wickedness of men?"

She was transformed under Saxham's eyes. The slender virginal body increased in stature and proportions as he gazed, and what obscure emotions seemed striving in her face!

"Look at them," she said, indicating with a slight revealing gesture the swarming, dowdy, listless occupants of the crowded trench. "How patient they are, how resigned to the dreadful life they drag on here from day to day, full of the horror and the pain and the suffering that you say is inevitable. Why should it be inevitable? Did these women who are the chief victims of it and the greatest losers by it, choose that there should be War? See that poor soul with the rag of crape upon her hat, who sits at her door peeling potatoes. Did she desire it? Yet her young husband was shot in the trenches a week ago and her little baby died of fever this morning.... And, did those other women whose homes have been wrecked and ruined, whose sons and husbands and fathers may be shot, and whose children may sicken with the same fever before night, demand of their Governments, Imperial or Republican, that there should be War? You see them patient and submissive because they neither realise their wrongs or understand their rights. But a day will come when they will understand, and then"--her eyes grew dreamy--"I do not know exactly what will happen. But these international questions, with others, will be decided by a general plebiscite, the women will vote as well as the men; and as women are in the majority, and every woman will vote for Peace--how can there be War?"

"You are an advocate of Universal Suffrage, then? You believe that there must be absolute sex-equality before the world can be--I think 'finally regenerated' is the stock phrase of the militant apostle of Women's Rights? I have heard this outcry from many feminine throats in London, but Gueldersdorp," said Saxham drily, "is about the last place one would expect to ring with it."

"'Universal Suffrage, Sex-Equality, Women's Rights....'" The shibboleth that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"--there was a sombre shadow in her glance--"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and in New York, who have devoted their lives to the study of such questions. Who write and speak and labour to teach their fellow-women that they have only to band themselves together to be powerful, only to be powerful to be feared, only to will it to be free. When I am twenty-four I mean to go out into the world and meet those leader-women. Some of them, I am told, have suffered loss and ill-usage; some of them have even undergone imprisonment for the sake of what they believe and teach. Well, I will hear what they have to say, and then they will listen to me. For until my work is done, theirs will never be accomplished, Something tells me that with a most certain voice."

"And until that time comes?" said Saxham.

Her eyes grew bright again, a smile played about her exquisite lips.

"Until that time comes I will study and gather more knowledge, and capacity to fit myself for a struggle with the world."

"You 'struggle with the world'!"

Her girlish pride in her high purpose being sensitive, she mistook the brusque tenderness in Saxham's face and voice for irony.

"Yes. Perhaps you may not believe it, but I know a great many useful things. Latin and French and German and Italian, well enough to teach and translate. I am well grounded in History and Science and Mathematics. I can take a temperature and make a poultice, or sweep a room and cook a dinner." She nodded at Saxham with a little spark of laughter underlying the sweet earnestness of her look. "Also, I have learned book-keeping and typewriting, and shorthand. I earn enough now, by bookbinding, to pay for my clothes. The Mother says that I am competent to earn my living anywhere, and to teach others to earn theirs. But I am not to begin until I am twenty-four. That is our agreement."

Saxham understood the fine maternal tact that never set this ardent young enthusiast chafing at the tightened rein. But he said roughly:

"The Mother.... How can she approve your joining the ranks of the Shrieking Sisterhood?"

"She knows," Lynette explained, with adorable gravity, "that I should never shriek."

"How will you bear parting from her? And how will she endure parting from you?"

The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous amber eyes were dimmed with moisture as she said:

"It will not be losing me. Nor could I ever bear to leave her if I did not know that I should come back. But I shall come back. And she will ask me what I have done. And I shall tell her: 'This, and this, and all the rest, my Mother, for the love of you, and for the sake of those others who once sat in darkness and the Shadow of Death, and now have found the Way of Peace.'"

"And those others, Beatrice?"

Saxham knew now the secret of the haunting familiarity of the beautiful girlish face. The delicate oval outline, the pale wild-rose colouring, the reddish-brown of the fine, glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the wistful, brilliant eyes, reproduced to a wonderful degree the modelling and tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped head in the Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Bertolotti and the Edinburgh Review, will always be associated with the name of the sorrowful-sweet heroine of the most sombre of sex-tragedies.

"Why do you call me Beatrice?" she asked, with that sudden darkening of those luminous eyes. He told her:

"Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Shelley used to be my favourite among the English poets, and when I first went to Rome, years ago, the first thing I did was to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery; and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done justice to it. One could not forget it if one tried."

"I am glad I am like Beatrice," she said slowly. "I have always loved and pitied her. I pray to her as my friend among the Blessed Souls in Paradise, and she always hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go out into the world----"

"To look for those others," Saxham interpolated. "Tell me who they are?"

She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell from her, and there was strange and terrible knowledge in her eyes.

"They are women, and girls, and children," she answered him. "They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer on earth. For they are the slaves and the victims and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift them up, and say to them, 'You are free!' And one day I will do it."

There was a dull burning under Saxham's opaque skin, and a drumming in his ears. His authority and knowledge fell from him as that virginal veil had fallen from her; he stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her eyes, that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an avenging Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct estimate of himself and his fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than many men, he felt himself beside this girl a moral leper.

"Unclean, unclean!"

While that voice yet echoed in the desert places of his soul, he heard her saying:

"I don't know why I should talk to you of these plans and projects of mine. I never have spoken of them yet to anyone except the Mother. But--you spoke of sympathy with those who suffer. I think you have it, Dr. Saxham, and that you have suffered yourself. It is in your face. And--you are not to suppose that I believe all men to be----"

He ended for her: "To be devouring beasts. No; but we are bad enough, the best of us, if the truth must be told. And--I have suffered, Miss Mildare, at the hands of men and women, and through the unwritten laws, as through the accepted institutions of what is called Society, most brutally. I would not soil and scorch your ears with the recital of my experiences, for all that a miracle could give me back. I swear to you that I would not!"

She touched the little ears with a smile that had pathos in it.

"They have heard much that is evil, these ears of mine."

"And the evil has left them undefiled," said Saxham.

"Thank you!"

She begged him again not to forget the sick child at Mrs. Greening's shelter, and hurried away, keeping her face from Saxham. He knew that there was no hope for him, that there never would be any. And he loved her--hungrily, hopelessly loved her. Dear innocent, wise enthusiast, with her impossible scheme for cleansing the Augean stable of this world! Chivalrous child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, whose sails are whirled by burning blasts from Hell, and whose millstones grind the souls of Eve's lost daughters into the dust that makes the devil's daily bread--how should the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp dare to love her? But he did not cease to, for all the height of his self-knowledge and all the depth of his self-scorn.

He seemed to Lynette a strange, harsh man, but there was something in him that won her liking. He had a stern mouth, she thought, and sorrowful, angry eyes, with that thunder-cloud of black, lowering eyebrow above them. And he looked at her as though she reminded him of someone he knew. Perhaps he had sisters, though they could hardly be very young. Or it was not a sister. He must be quite old--the Mother had thought him certainly thirty-five--but possibly he had a young wife in England--or somewhere else? And she had spoken to him of her great project. She wondered now at that impulse of confidence. Perhaps she had yielded to it to convince herself that her enthusiasm was as strong, her purpose still as clear, as ever, in the mirror of the Future; that no gay, youthful reflection had ever risen up of late days between it and her wistful eyes when she peeped in. The remembered image of the handsome face that had laughed, even as Beauvayse had declared:

"Even if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long for you, and worship you wherever I am."

The thought of Beauvayse's dying was horrible, intolerable. His name came after the Mother's in her prayers. He had asked her to keep the secret--his and hers--and called her such exquisite, impossible things for promising that the mere remembrance of his words and his eyes as he said them in that low, passionate, eager voice, took her breath deliciously.

"Sweetest, kindest, loveliest...." She whispered them to herself as she hurried back to comfort worried Mrs. Greening with the news that the doctor was coming.

Meanwhile Saxham went on his accustomed way between the long line of waggons and the corrugated-iron lined huts on the other hand, in a cross-fire of appeals, requests, complaints. Nothing escaped him. He would pass by, with the most casual glance and nod, women who volubly protested themselves dying, and single out the face that bore the dull, scorched flush of fever or the yellow or livid stamp of rheumatism, or ague, or liver-trouble, with a beckon of his hand, and the owner of such a face, invariably declaring herself a well woman, would be summarily dealt with, and dosed with tabloid or tincture out of the inexhaustible wallet he carried, slung about his shoulders by its webbing band.

"Dokter," screeched a portly Tante in a soiled cotton bedgown and flapping kappje, appearing, copper stewpan in hand, from between the canvas tilt-curtains of a living-waggon. "You are come at last; the Lord be thanked for it! I have much, much trouble inside." She groaned, and laid her fat, unoccupied hand upon the afflicted area, adding: "I feel I shall not be quite wholesome here."

"Wat scheelt er aan, Tante?" He spoke the Taal with ease.

The large Tante snorted:

"What is the matter? Do you ask me what is the matter? As if a dokter oughtn't to tell me that! But the Engelsch are regular devils for asking questions. Since you must know, I have a mighty wallowing under my apron-band, and therewith a pain. How is it begun? It is begun since middageten yesterday. And little Dierck here has the belly-ache, and is giddy in the head."

"Little Dierck will have something worse than the belly-ache, and you also, if you eat of broth or vegetables cooked in a vessel as unclean as that, mevrouw."

"Hoe?" The large flabby face under the expansive kappje became red as the South African sunset. She flourished the venerable copper stewpan, its rim liberally garnished with verdigris, ancient deposit of fatty matters accumulated at the bottom. "Do you call my good stewpan, that my mother cooked beef and succotash and pottage-herbs in before me, an unclean vessel--you? And were the pan otherwise than clean as my hand--as my apron!"--a double comparison of the unfortuitous kind--"how should I alter matters in a heathen place like this?" Her large bosom rocked tumultuously. "Dwelling at the bottom of a mud-hole like a frog, O God of my fathers! with bullets as big as pumpkins trundling overhead, ready to whip your head off your body if you as much as stick your nose above ground--the accursed things!"

"They are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen, Tante, so you ought to speak of them more civilly. And--scour the pot with a double-handful of clean sand; it will be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here, jongen--give me a look at the little tongue." The boy went to him confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with innocent wide eyes in the square, powerful face, as Saxham swung round his wallet, continuing, "Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a cup of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting----"

"Alamachtig!" she protested. "Is that the Engelsch way of doctoring? To put another belly-grief on the top of the one you have got, what sense is in that?"

"It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old one. Give the boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water, and remember to scour the pans."

Saxham passed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-booted, spurred feet between the dung and chip fires curling up in blue smoke-spirals, and the sprawling children, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catching up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the eruption was innocent ere he passed on, visiting every waggon-dwelling and cave-refuge, rating the inhabitants of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging from three or four of the stuffy, ill-smelling places with a heavy frown that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine had not yet begun to gnaw the vitals of those immured in Gueldersdorp, Disease had here and there sprung into active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded community with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the hospitals were to be crowded to the doors, to remain crowded for many months to come; and the cry, "Room for the sick! more room!" was to go up unceasingly.

Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day, and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction to the mild-faced Sister who had assumed charge of the sick. Then his voice rang out above all the feminine and childish Babel, strong, resonant, masculine:

"Where are the head-boys of the gangs that I told off to clean up and carry ash-buckets to the dumping-place?"

Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste were carted to the destructor in connection with the Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to be shattered by one of Meisje's shells. There was no answer. Saxham took the worn hunting-crop from under his arm, and with an easy movement shook out the twisted thong.

"Where are those two boys? Jim Gubo! Rasu!"

A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked up knowingly. "They won't carry away a cabbage-leaf unless they're bribed, and they open their mouths wider every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."

The young woman went back to her potatoes. The offenders, visibly quaking, crept from under a waggon, where they had been gambling with dry mealies for ill-gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and the crownless brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned, blue dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his fellow-countryman being scrupulously performed.

The Presence made short work of Kaffir and Hindu. Shrill feminine clamours filled the air as the singing lash performed its work of castigation; and while Saxham scored repentance upon the hide of his blacker brother, holding him writhing, shouting, and bellowing at the full stretch of one muscular arm, as he plied the other he kept a foot on Rasu the Sweeper, so as to have him handy when his turn came. Meanwhile, the Oriental, with tears and lamentable howlings, wound about the doctor's leg, a vocal worm, deprecating tyranny.

"Your Honour is my father and mother. Let the hand of justice refrain from excoriating the person of the unfortunate, wreaking double vengeance upon the hubshi, who is but fuel for Hell, like all his accursed race, and full explanation shall be made."

He was jerked upward by the scruff, as, smarting, blubbering Africa retired to the shadow of the waggons.

"Well, what have you got to say?"

The bellow of the town batteries, with the clack--clack--clack! of the Hotchkiss that had been removed from the armoured train and mounted on the North Fort, reduced the tirade to pantomime.

"This is a bad, a very bad, place for the son of my mother." The lean brown right hand swept upwards to the thick canopy of white smoke that the shifting breeze rolled back from the Cemetery Earthworks. "The food of coarse grain is diet for camels, and the water stinks very greatly. Moreover, it is better for thy slave to die amongst defilements than to carry buckets and be chased by devils in iron pots thirsting for the blood of men. Aie--aie!"

One of the enemy's Maxim-Nordenfelts had loosed off a group of the gaily-painted little shells. With the reduplicated rattle of the detonation, they passed over the laager, bursting as they went, sending their fan-shaped showers of splinters broadcast. Slatternly women and scared children bolted for their burrows. Rasu the Sweeper dived frantically between the fore and hind wheels of a waggon, praying to all the gods of the low-caste to ward off those wicked little bits of rending metal....

"Anyone hurt?" called Saxham.

"No one, I think," called back the strong sweet voice of the Mother-Superior, who had come out of a hovel, where she was tending some sick. There was a glint in her deep eyes as she regarded Saxham's thorough handiwork that told her approval of castigation well deserved. Then:

"Maharaj! Oh, Maharaj! Succour in calamity! Aid for the dying! Hai, hai, behold how I bleed!"

The red-turbaned martyr rolled in the unclean litter, elevating a stick-like brown leg, in the lean, muscular calf of which one of the smallest of the wicked little splinters had, as Rasu the Sweeper dived for the waggon, found a home.

"That has saved you a well-earned hiding, so thank your stars for it. Let the Kaffir see to it that he insults no more English ladies, or he shall pay for every word with an inch of skin. Now put up your leg." Saxham whipped out the splinter with a little pair of tweezers, deftly cleansed and dressed the wound, bandaged it, and, dismissing Rasu the Sweeper with a caution, was coming across to the Reverend Mother when a chorus of cries and piercing shrieks broke forth:

"Mijn jongen! mijn jongen!"

She was a bulky Dutch vrouw, with a dishevelled head of coarse black hair, and a dirty cotton gown, and dirty bare feet in bulgy shoes that were trodden down at heel. But with her livid, purple face and protruding, bloodshot eyeballs uplifted to the drifting cloud of greenish lyddite vapour that thinned away overhead, she was great and terrible, and the very incarnation of Maternity Bereft.

One huge arm gripped the little body to her broad, panting bosom. She had called him, and he had not answered; she had sought and found him, just as he had slidden off the box-seat, where he had been playing driver of the ox-span, lying curled up against the dashboard, the little whip of stick and string he had been at pains to make only yesterday fallen from the lax, childish hand. The fair hair on the left temple was dabbled in blood, that trickled from the tiny three-cornered bluish hole. His eyes were open, as if in wonder at the sudden darkness that had fallen at bright midday; the smile had frozen on the parted, innocent lips....

Oh, look at this, Premier and President! Look at this, my Lords and Commons and militant Burghers of Republican States! Grave Ministers who decide in Cabinet Councils that the prestige of the Government you represent is at stake, and that the bedraggled honour of the Country can only be washed clean in one red river, flowing from the veins of Humanity, look, look here! You who lust for Sovereignty, hiding rapacious Ambitions and base lust for gold behind the splendid ermined folds of the Imperial purple. You who resented Suzerainty, coveting to keep in your hands riches that you could not use, resources that your ignorance could not develop, greedy to have and hold what you wrested from the Sons of Ham, lest white men should snatch it back from you again; and prating of Liberty and Freedom while the necks of three races of men were bending under the yoke of an oligarchy more imperious, more pitiless, more covetous, besotted, brutal, and ignorant than any other that the spotted records of History can show--look here, look here!

Nations that rush to dreadful War, loosing the direful threefold plague of Iron, Fire, and Disease to scourge and brand and desolate the once smiling face of your Mother Earth, pause as you roll onwards in desolating cataclysms of armed and desperate men, and forgetting the bloodstained she-devil you misname Glory, look here, in the Name of One who loved and suffered little children, rating their innocent bodies and spotless souls at such high value that Little Dierck and his countless brother-and-sister-babes that have perished of Iron, Fire, and Disease, as of Terror and Famine, Death's twin henchmen, shall weigh in the balance against Crowned Heads and Lords and Commons and Presidents and Representatives and Deputies, until they kick the beam!

Should there be War? Of course there should be War! you say.

Have you seen War? Perhaps, even as I have. And, having seen it, dare you justify the shedding, by men who hold the Christian Faith, of these spilled-out oceans of Christian blood?

That question will be settled when the Trumpet of the Great Angel sounds, and the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead, and everyone shall answer for his deeds before the Throne of God. And until then, look to it that if you war in any cause, the cause be a just one.

"My Dierck! My little Dierck! O God! God!----"

Standing with that tragic purple mask turned upwards to the silent sky, and the wild eyes blazing, and the great fist at the end of the uplifted arm brandished in the Face of Heaven itself, the Boer mother demanded of her Maker why this thing had been done?

"He was so good. Never a fib since last I gave him the ox-reim end to taste. Never a lump of sugar or a cookie or a plum pilfered--he would take them as bold as brass before your face if you didn't give. He said the night-prayer regularly. For the morning, Lord, Thou knowest boys want to be up and at mischief as soon as they have rubbed the sleep out of their eyes--'tis only natural. And the father a God-fearing man, and me a woman of piety. For when have I backslidden before Thee? If any of mine have hung back when I told them to loop and do a thing, or sneaked off and hid when we were inspanned for the kerk-going, did I fail to whack them as a mother should? Nooit, nooit! And now--Death has fallen out of the sky upon the Benjamin of my bosom. Oh, blasted be the eyesight and withered be the hand of the man that sighted and laid and fired the gun!"

She cursed the Kaiser's blue-and-white-uniformed gunner in every function of his body and every corner of his soul, waking and sleeping, dying and dead, with fluent Scriptural curses. The crowded faces about her went white. Some of the women were crying, others shook their heads:

"Thim that puts the Bad Black Wish on odhers finds sorra knock harrd at their dure," said an Irish voice oracularly. "An' who but herself did be callin' down all manner av' misfortune on ivery wan that crassed her?"

"It's a judgment--my opinion," agreed the thin young woman who had been peeling potatoes, and who wore a wisp of draggled crape round a soiled rush hat. "Never a shell busted but you'd a-heered her say she hoped that one had sent another parcel of verdant rooineks to Hell. And me sitting over against her with crape on for my husband and baby. 'Tis a judgment, that's what I say."

"Oh, hush, Mrs. Lennan!" said the Mother-Superior. "Be pitiful and forget. She did not think--she had not suffered. Be pitiful, now that her hour has come!"

The thick voice of the Boer woman broke out again:

"Did ever I miss of the Nachtmaal? Alamachtig, no! Virtuous as Sarah have I lain in the marriage-bed--never a sly look for another, and my husband with dropsy-legs as thick as boomstammen, and sixty years upon his loins. Thou knewest, and yet the joy of my life is taken from me. Where wert Thou, O God of Israel, when they killed my little Dierck?"

The Mother-Superior leaned to her, and threw a strong, tender arm about the fleshy shoulders. She said, speaking in the Taal:

"Hush, hush! Remember that He gave the joy before He sent the sorrow. And we must submit ourselves to the Holy Will."

The Boer woman snorted:

"As if I didn't know that better than a Papist. Look you, have I shed one tear?" She blinked hard bright eyes defiantly. The Mother went on in that velvet voice of hers, making the uncouth dialect sound like the cooing of an Irish dove:

"Better that you had tears, poor mother! Ah! best to weep. Did not our Lord weep over His dearest city, and for His beloved friend? And when He pitied the Widow of Nain, do you think His eyes were dry? Ah! best to weep."

She strove to wrench herself away, shouting:

"He raised Lazarus from the dead for Mary his sister, and she had been a shameless wench. And He gave the other back her boy. What has He done for me?"

The sisterly arm held her fast; the great grey eyes looked into hers, wet with the tears that were denied to her.

"He has given you an Angel to pray for you in Heaven."

She snorted rebelliously:

"His mother wants him down here.... And what is Heaven to little Dierck, when he could be sailing his boat in the river-pools, and playing at driving the span?"

But she let the Mother-Superior take him from her, and dropped her great arms doggedly at her sides, watching still dry-eyed as they laid him down, and Saxham stooped above him, feeling at the pulseless heart. She saw the doktor shake his head and lay down the little hand. She saw the Mother-Superior coax down the eyelids with tender, skilful fingers, and put a kiss on each, making the Sign of the Cross on the still, childish breast, and murmuring a little prayer. She would have screamed to avert the defiling, heathen thing from him, but the memory of the sister-embrace and the sister-look held her dumb.

It was only when they were stripping him for the last sad toilet, and the cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized marbles rolled out of the pocket in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that Little Dierck should be coffined in his new black Sabbath suit.

"But you old maids have no sense, no more than so many cabbages. Little angels in the hemel can fly about in clean nightgowns--look in the grandfather's big picture-Bible if you don't believe me. But live boys can't loop about without breeches. So I'll lay these by for the next one."

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