XXXIII…

XXXIII

Roasting hot Christmas has gone by, with its services and celebrations, its sports and entertainments, its meagre feasting, and its hearty cheer, a bloodless triumph followed by the regrettable defeat sustained in the battle of Big Tree Fort. To-day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the flagstaff that rears its slender height over Nixey's, and the new year is some weeks old. The blue, blue sky of January is without a single puff of cloud, and the taint from the trenches is less sickening, unmingled with the poisonous fumes of the lyddite bursting-charges, and the acrid odour of smokeless powder. It is Sunday, when Briton and Boer hold the Truce of God, and the church-bells ring to call and not to warn the people, and sweet Peace and blessed Silence brood over the shrapnel-scarred veld. The aasvogels feast undisturbed on bloated carcasses of horses and cattle lying on the debatable ground between the Line of Investment and the Line of Defence, the barbel in the river leap at the flies, and partridge and wild guinea-fowl drink in the shallows, and bathe in the dry hot sand between the boulder-stones.

The Market Square is populous with a chatting, sauntering crowd of people, who enjoy the luxury of using their limbs without being called on to displays of acrobatic agility in dodging trundling shell. There are Irregulars and B.S.A.P., Baraland Rifles and Town Guardsmen. There are the Native Contingent from the stad, and a company of Zulus, and the Kaffirs and the Cape Boys with their gaspipe rifles that do good service in default of better, and bring down Oom Paul's Scripturally-flavoured denunciations upon Englishmen, who arm black and coloured folk to do battle for their own sable or brown or yellow rights. These have donned odd garments and quaint bits of finery to mark the holiday, and every white man has indulged in the luxury of a comprehensive wash, a shave with hot water, and a change of clothing, if it is obtainable. Also, drooping feminine vanity revives in hair-waves and emerges from underground burrows of Troglodytic type, arrayed in fluttering muslins, and crowned with coquettish hats, which walk about in company with ragged khaki and clay-stained duck and out-at-elbows tweed, and are proud to be seen in its brave company.

Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, lovers and sweethearts, meet after the week whose separating days have seemed like weeks, and visit the houses whose pierced walls and roofs, that let the white-hot sunshine in through many jagged holes, may one day, so they whisper, holding one another closely, shelter them again in peace. Home has become a sweet word, even to those who thought little of home before. And many who were sinful have found conviction of sin and the saving grace of repentance, and many more who denied their God have learned to know Him, in this village town of battered dwellings, whose streets are littered with all the grim debris of War.

Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The stately brick chimneys of the kitchen and coffee-room have been broken off like carrots, and replaced by tin funnels. Patches of the universal medium, corrugated iron, indicate where one of Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles recently plumped in through the soft brick of the east wall end, and departed by the west frontage, leaving two holes that might have accommodated a chest of drawers, and carrying a window with it. Mrs. Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the back-yard. The waiters have developed a grasshopper-like nimbleness, otherwise things go on as usual.

It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long, but less bulky, are extended in a couple of long bamboo chairs on Nixey's longish front verandah. The blue, fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over their supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre modicum of inferior whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the bamboo nests cunningly devised for their accommodation in the chair-arms.

It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and almost too fresh to have spent the greater part of the night, the younger upon advanced patrol-duty, and the elder at the Staff bombproof in the Southern Lines, where messages come in and where messages go out, and where reports are received and from whence orders are despatched from sunset to the peep of day, and from peep of day to sunset.

The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by active service, but their originally white flannel trousers, if patched, discoloured, and shrunken by amateur lavations, boast the cut of Bond Street; their shirts, if a trifle ragged, are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has rummaged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the day, with a knitted silk necktie of his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match is wound about his narrow, springy waist, and knotted to perfection. Both men might be basking on an English river-bank after a stiff pull up-stream, or resting after a bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for the revolver-lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the butts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the bandoliers and belts that lie handy on a table, and the Lee-Metford carbines that lean in an angle made by the house-wall and the verandah end. Also, but for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it plain that, though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them unexpectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things. It is a look that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped on every face in Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even unsentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmosphere of this January day, may, in an instant's space, give place to the red signal of danger; the bugle, now silent, may at any moment blare out its loud and dismal note of warning; the bells that call with peaceful insistence, "Come to church! come to church!" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging scared townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You never know. For General Brounckers, though a God-fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday gun-practice, quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence, even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.

Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by knocking the lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing his opinion that the weed might be a worse one.

"Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down to me for at Kreils' auction yesterday," states Captain Bingo, "it's simply smokin' gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-six runs me into, how much apiece?" He yawns cavernously, and gives the calculation up. "Always was a duffer at figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the act of throwing the nearly smoked-out cigar-butt away, he pulls himself up, and, economically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.

"Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be no balm left in Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking a grey-green eye at him in sleepy derision, "and no tobacco in Gueldersdorp."

"Kreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the box of a hundred now," says Captain Bingo; "and I've a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em. We smoked tea in the Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the very devil with the nerves. All jumps and twitches, you know, after a pipe or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder where my wife is?"

He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. Beauvayse responds with the air of one who has suffered boredom from the too frequent enumeration of this conjecture. "Not knowing, can't say." And there is another silence.

"How she got the maggot into her head," presently resumes Lady Hannah's spouse, "I can't think. I did suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora Corr--woman who managed to burn her own and a lot of other people's fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid business--had been quenched for good that mornin' you took those fifty chaps of the Irregulars out for what she would call their 'baptism of fire.'"

"That's newspaperese," yawns Beauvayse, his supple brown hands knitted at the back of his sleek golden head. "Goes with 'the tented field' and casus belli: cherchez la femme and cui bono?"

"She's got the lingo at her finger-ends and in her blood, or we wouldn't be cherchaying now," says Bingo dolorously. "I asked her if she was particularly keen on gettin' killed...."

"Shouldn't have done that. Put her on her mettle not to show funk if she felt it," mumbles Beauvayse.

"A man can't always be diplomatic," grumbles Bingo. "Anyhow, she'd seen a bit of a scrap at the outset of affairs, when the B.S.A. went out with the Armoured Train, and was wild with me for wantin' to deprive her of another 'glorious experience.' ... And next morning she rides out with a Corporal and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible of their responsibility, and wishin' her at Cape Town, she in toppin' spirits and as keen as mustard. It was about six o'clock, morning, and she hadn't been gone five minutes before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein' pounded at like Jimmy O! I was on the roof with the Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the binoculars, until the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under 'em, and hoverin' troopers. But I did make out that your party had got into difficulties----"

"We opened on 'em at a thousand yards, and pushed to within five hundred, and if the fellows in charge of the Hotchkiss could have got her into play," Beauvayse interrupts rather huffily, "we'd have been as right as rain."

"Possibly. If I hadn't been on special duty that day, and as nervous as a cat in a thunderstorm, I'd have volunteered to bring No. 2 Troop of A out to the rescue, instead of Heseltine. As it was, I nearly fell off the roof when I saw my wife coming, one trooper, as pale with fright as a piece of soap, supportin' her on his saddle, another man leading the mare, dead lame and the Corporal's hairy. Plugged in the upper works, the Corporal, poor beggar! but he'd managed to stick on somehow until they got to the Hospital. Have you ever had to deal with a woman in hysterics?"

Beauvayse nods sagely.

"Once or twice."

"Once is an experience that lasts a man all his lifetime. Phew!" Captain Bingo mops his large pink face. "Never had such a dressing-down in my life."

"But what had you to do with the Corporal getting chipped?"

"The Lord only knows!" says Bingo piously. "But, if you'd heard her, all the rest of the day and half through the night!..."

"I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. "Mine's the next bedroom to yours, you know."

"'Oh, the blood! Oh, the blood!' ..." Not unsuccessfully does the spouse of Lady Hannah attempt to render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping screech of hysteria. "'Damn it, my dear!' I said, tryin' to reason with her, 'what else did you expect the fellow had got in him? Sawdust?' That seemed to rouse her like nothing else.... Turned on me like a tigress, by the living Tinker!--called me everything she could lay her tongue to, and threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued to outrage every feeling of decency that association with such a thundering brute hadn't uprooted from her nature."

"Whe--ew!"

Beauvayse's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.

"Of course, her nerves were knocked to smithereens, and a man can overlook a lot, under the circumstances. She was a mere jelly when the bombardment began----" goes on rueful Captain Bingo.

"--Rather!" confirms Beauvayse.--"Lived in the hotel cellar for the first fortnight, only emergin' from among the beer-barrels and wine-casks and liqueur-cases after dark----"

"--To blow me up and forgive me, turn and turn about, until daylight did appear. Luckily," reflects Bingo, with a rather dreary chuckle, "I had plenty of night-duty on just then, and so escaped a lot."

"That gave her her chance to shoot the moon!" hints Beauvayse, in accents muffled by his long tumbler.

"By the Living Tinker!" asseverates Captain Bingo, jerked out of his reclining attitude by vigorous utterance of the expletive, "you could have bowled me over with a scent-squirter when I came back to brekker and found her gone, and a cocked-hat note of farewell left for me on the dressing-table pincushion, in regular elopement style; and another for the Chief, sayin'--he read it to me--that she'd gone to retrieve the Past, with a capital 'P,' and hoped to convince him ere long that one of her despised sex--underlined, 'despised sex'--can be useful to her country."

"'Can be useful to her country,'" repeats Beauvayse "Question is, in what way?"

"Damme if I can imagine!" bursts explosively from the deserted husband. "All I know up to date, and all you know, is that before it was quite light she drove out of our lines in Nixey's spider, his mouse-coloured trotter pullin', and her German maid sittin' behind, wavin' a white towel tied to the end of a walkin'-stick of mine, and went straight over to the enemy. We hear in the course of things from a Kaffir despatch-runner that she's stayin' in a hotel of sorts at Tweipans, where Brounckers has had his headquarters since he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein. And for any further information we may knock our rotten heads against a brick wall and twiddle our thumbs. Never you marry, Toby, my boy!"

A V-shaped vein swells and darkens between the handsome grey-green eyes and on the broad forehead, white as a girl's where the sun-tan leaves off. Beauvayse takes his cigar again from his mouth, and knocks the ash off deliberately before he responds:

"Thanks for the advice."

"Be warned," says Captain Bingo sententiously, "by me. Know when you're well off, as I didn't. Take the advice of your seniors, as I was too pig-headed a fool to do, and don't put it in the power of any woman to make you as rottenly wretched as I am at this minute."

"Why! women can make you rottenly wretched," admits Beauvayse, with a confirmatory creak of the bamboo chair. "But, on the other hand, they can make you awfully happy--what?"

Captain Bingo throws his long legs off their resting-place, and sits sideways, staring rather owlishly at his young friend. He shakes his head in a dismal way several times, and sucks hard at his cigar as he shakes it.

"For a bit, but does it last? When I came down to hunt you up last June at the cottage at Cookham----"

"Look here, old man!" The bamboo chair creaks angrily as Beauvayse in his turn sits up and drops his own long legs on either side of it, and drives the foot-rest back under the table seat with a vicious punch. "Don't remind me of the cottage at Cookham, will you? It's one of the things I want to forget just now."

"You were as proud as Punch of it last June. Have you let it?" pursues Bingo, ignoring his junior's request.

Beauvayse yawns with ostentatious weariness of the subject.

"No; I haven't let it."

"Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised. Somethin' like this: 'To let, Roselawn Cottage, Cookham: a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence. Small grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat, stables, a pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duodecimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by Rellis. Ideal nest for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have become the real thing if owner hadn't been whisked off in time to South Africa.' And a dashed good job for him. For you've had a decentish lot of narrow escapes, Toby, my boy!" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo, disregarding his junior's forbidding scowl, "and come out of a goodish few tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so, more through luck than wit; but that little entanglement I'm delicately alludin' to was one of the closest things on record in the career of a Prodigal Son."

"Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day." Beauvayse pitches away his cigar, knocks a feather of ash from his clean silk shirt, and folds his arms resignedly on his broad flat chest.

"Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever strike you," goes on Captain Bingo doggedly, "that if that wire from the Chief asking for your address hadn't found me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you out at the--I won't repeat the name of the place, since you don't seem to like it--you'd have been married and done for, old chap--any date you like to name between then and the beginning of the war? And, to put things mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with your people."

"Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily; "there would have been an awful lot of bother with my people."

"Not that I object to the stage myself," Captain Bingo says, waving a large, tolerant hand; "and it seems getting to be rather the fashion to recruit the female ranks of the Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a prettier and cleverer little woman than Lessie ... What are you stoppin' your ears for?"

"I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. "It's a--twinge of toothache."

"All I've got to say is," declares Captain Bingo, "that marriage with one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes a blank draw, but marriage with one's inferior is a howling error. And if you had done as I'd stake my best hat you would have done, supposin' you'd been left to loll in the lap of the lovely Lessie----"

Beauvayse jumps up in a rage.

"Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on listening to this? You're simply maundering, man, and my nerves won't stand it."

"Oh, very well! But you haven't the ghost of a right to lay claim to nerves," Captain Bingo obstinately asseverates. "Now look at me."

"I'm hanged if I want to!" declares Beauvayse. "You're not a cheering object." He drops back into the bamboo chair again.

"Flyblown, do I look?" inquires Bingo, with dispassionate interest.

"Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without removing his eyes from the whitewashed verandah-pillar at which they blankly stare.

"Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy under 'em?" Captain Bingo demands of his young friend with unmistakable relish. "'Yes' again? And I grouse and maunder? Of course I do, my dear chap! How can I help it? A married man who, for all he knows, may be a widower----"

"I wish to God I knew I was one!"

"My good fellow?"

"You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his shoulder.

Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling knees, regards his junior with circular eyes staring out of a large, kind, rather foolish face of utter consternation.

"That you wished to God you were a widower?"

"Well, I mean it."

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XXXIV

"Good Lord!"

There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain Bingo says heavily:

"Then you did marry the Lavigne after all? When was it----"

"We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's a fortnight before you came down with--his wire."

"By the Living Tinker, then it was a genuine honeymoon after all!" A faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's large perturbed face.

"Don't be epigrammatic, Wrynche." The dull weariness in the young voice gives place to quick affront. "And keep the secret. Don't give me away."

"Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted me, away? Tell me that."

Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the deck-chairs with a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on the averted shoulder.

"Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman who responds to some display of solicitude or affection on the part of a comrade. "Don't mind my rotting like this. There are times when one must let off steam or explode."

"I thought--and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em--that South Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," says Captain Bingo, smoking vigorously, and driving his hands very deep into his pockets. "Confoundedly odd how taken in we were! I could have sworn, my part, that you'd just stopped short at----"

"At making a blithering idiot of myself," interpolates Beauvayse. "If you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, instead of standing behind me rattlin' keys and coins in your pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on my head, I'll tell you how it happened. Nobody listening?"

"Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a noiseless prowl to the coffee-room window.

Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely that they crack again.

"I--I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago----"

"So were a lot of other young idiots."

"That's a pleasant reflection. They were."

"Of course, I"--Bingo's large face becomes very red--"I inferred nothing in any way against Miss Lavigne's chara---- Dash it, I beg your pardon! I ought to call her Lady Beauvayse."

"Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would rub things in rather too much," says Beauvayse, paling as the other has reddened.

"Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, "to get used to it?"

"No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. "And don't assume a delicacy in speaking of the--the lady, because it's unnecessary. As I've said, I was very much in love. She had--kept house with a man I knew, before we came together, and there may have been other affairs--for all I can tell, at least--I should say most probably." Something in Captain Bingo's face seems to say "uncommonly probably," though he utters no word. "But she was awfully pretty, and I lost my head." He shuts his eyes and leans back, and the lines of his young face are strained and wan. "I--I lost my head."

"It's--it's natural enough," volunteers Captain Bingo.

There is another short interval of silence in which the two men on Nixey's verandah see the same vision--lime-lights of varying shades and colours thrown from different angles across a darkened garden-scene where impossible tropical flowers expand giant petals, and a spangled waterfall tumbles over the edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus of a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a dazzling human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms like quivering antennae, flashing back the coloured lights from the diamonds that are in her hair and on her bosom, are clasped about her rounded waist and wrists, gleam like fireflies from the folds of her diaphanous skirts, and sparkle on her fingers. A provoking, beguiling Impertinence with great stage eyes encircled by blue rims, a small mouth painted ruby-red, a complexion of theatrical lilies and roses, and tiny, twinkling feet that beat out a measure to which Beauvayse's pulses have throbbed madly and now throb no more.

"It began in the usual way," he goes on, waking from that stage day-dream, "with suppers and stacks of flowers, and a muff-chain of turquoise and brilliants, and ended up with----"

"With an electric motor-brougham and a flat in Mayfair. Oh Lord, what thunderin' donkeys we fellows are!" groans Captain Bingo, rubbing his head, which has hair of a gingery hue, close-cropped until the scalp blushes pinkly through it, and rubbing nothing in the way of consolation into the brain inside it.

"I bought the cottage at Cookham as a surprise for her birthday," goes on the boy. "She's a year or two older than me----"

"And the rest," blurts out Captain Bingo. But he drowns the end of the sentence in a giant sneeze. "Must have caught cold last night without knowin' it. Dashed treacherous climate this," he murmurs behind the refuge of a pocket-handkerchief. "And so you bought the cottage for Lessie? Another nibble out of the golden cheese that the old man's nursing up for you,--what? And in thingumbob retirement by the something-or-other stream you hit on the notion of splicing the lovely Lessie Lavigne. Poetry, by the Living Tinker!"

"Do you want to hear how I came to cut my own throat?" snarls the boy, with white, haggard anger alternating with red misery and shame in his young, handsome face; "because if you do, leave off playing the funny clown and listen."

"Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. 'Pon my word, I assure you!" asseverates Bingo. "You're simply a bundle of irritable nerves, my dear chap, and that's the truth."

"You wouldn't wonder if you knew ... Oh, damn it, Wrynche!"--the young voice breaks in a miserable sob--"I'm so thundering miserable. And all because there--there was a kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its mother."

"Whew!" Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to a long, piercing, dismal whistle, which so upsets a gaunt mongrel prowling vainly for garbage in the gutters of Market Square that he puts up his nose and howls in answer. "Was that how you fell into the----" He is obviously going to say "trap," but with exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state." And wonders at the thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when confounded newspapers won't let you call your soul your own.

"That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward Tobart,'" explains Beauvayse; "and because the Registrar--a benevolent old cock in a large white waistcoat, like somebody's father in a farcical comedy--wasn't sufficiently up in the Peerage to be impressed."

"Weren't there witnesses of sorts?" hints Bingo.

"Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my man Saunders--the discreet Saunders who's with me here. And a fortnight later came the appointment," goes on the boy. "And--I was gladder than I cared to know at getting away. She--Lessie--meant to play her part in the 'Chiffon Girl' up to the end of the Summer Season, and then rest until ..." He does not finish the sentence.

"I suppose she's fond of you--what?" hazards Captain Bingo.

"She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully cut up at my going, and I provided for her thoroughly well, of course, though she has heaps of money of her own. And when I went to stay with my people for a night before sailing, I'd have broken the--the truth to my mother then, only something in her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge, the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' like a snowball. But on the voyage out"--a change comes into the weary, level voice in which Beauvayse has told his story--"I forgot to grouse, and by the time we'd lifted the Southern Cross I wasn't so much regretting what I'd done as wondering whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done it? Up in Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne air, and the rousing hard work, the keen excitement and the tingling expectation of things that were going to happen by-and-by, that have been happening about as since October, were like pleasant drugs that keep you from thinking. I only remembered now and then, when I saw Lessie's photograph hanging on the wall of my quarters, and the portrait she had set in the back of my sovereign-case, that she and me were husband and wife." He gives a mirthless laugh. "It makes so little impression on a fellow's mind somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with a woman and answer a question or two put by a fat, middle-aged duffer who's smiling himself into creases, and give your name and say, 'No, there's no impediment,' and put on the ring and pay a fee--I believe it was seven-and-six--and take a blotchy certificate and walk out--married."

"It never does take long, by Gad!" agrees Captain Bingo with fervour, "to do any of the things that can't be undone again."

"Undone ...!" Beauvayse sits up suddenly and turns his miserable, beautiful, defiant eyes full on the large, perturbed face of his listener. "Wrynche, Wrynche! I've felt I'd gladly give my soul to be able to undo it, ever since I first set eyes on Lynette Mildare!"

Captain Bingo gives vent to another of his loud, dismal whistles. Then he gets out of his chair, large, clumsy, irate, and begins:

"I might have known it, with a chap like you. Another woman's at the bottom of all your bellowing. You're not a bit sick at having brought an outsider--a rank outsider, by Gad!--into the family stud; you're not a rap ashamed at havin' disappointed the old man's hopes of you, for you know as well as I do that when you'd done sowin' your wild oats and had your fling, you'd have come in when he rang the bell and married Lady Mary Menzies. You're not a damned scrap sorry at having broken your mother's heart, though you know in the bottom of your soul that she scented this marriage in the wind, and had an interview with the Chief, and went down on her knees to him--her knees, by the Living Tinker!--to give you the chance of breakin' off an undesirable connection!"

Beauvayse is out of his chair now. "Is that true--about my mother?" he demands, blazing.

"I'm not in the habit of lyin', Lord Beauvayse!" states Captain Bingo huffily.

"Don't fly off like a lunatic, Bingo, old man. How did you find--that--out?"

"Your cousin Townham told me."

"Damn my cousin Townham for a dried-up, wiggy, pratin' little scandalmonger!"

Captain Bingo retorts irately:

"Damn him if you please; he's no friend of mine. As yours, what I ask you is, between man and man, how far have you gone in this fresh affair?"

Beauvayse drives his hands deep into the pockets of his patched flannels, and says, adjusting a footstool with his toe over a crack in the board-flooring, as though the operation were a delicate one upon which much depended:

"I've told her how I feel where she's concerned, and that I care for her as I never cared yet, and never shall care, for anyone else."

The faint grin dawns again on Captain Wrynche's large, kindly, worried face.

"How many times have you met?"

"Only four or five times in all," says Beauvayse. "I'd set eyes on her twice before I was introduced. I couldn't rest for thinking about her. She drew me and drew me.... And when we did meet, there was no strangeness between us, even from the first minute. She just seemed waiting for what I had to own up. And when I spoke, I--I seemed to be only saying what I was meant to say.... From the beginning of the world! And you'd understand better if you'd seen her near----"

"I have seen her in the distance, walking with the Mother-Superior of the Convent. A tall, slight girl. Looks like a lady," says Bingo, "and has jolly hair."

"It's the colour of dead leaves in autumn sunshine or a squirrel's back," raves the boy, "and she's beautiful, Wrynche. My God! so beautiful that your heart stops beating when you look into her face, and nearly jumps out of your body when a fold of her gown brushes against you. And I swear there's no other woman for me in life or death!"

"I shouldn't be in such a cast-iron hurry to swear if I were you," Captain Bingo replies judicially. "And--I've heard you say the same about the others----"

"It was never true before. And she's a lady," pleads Beauvayse hotly. "A lady in manners, and education, and everything. The sort of girl one respects; the sort of girl one can talk to about one's mother and sisters----"

"You'd talk about your mother to a Kaffir washerwoman," Captain Bingo blurts out. "Better you should, than go hanging about a Convent-bred schoolgirl and telling her you'll never care for anybody else, when you've got a legal wife, and, for all you know, a family of twins at home in England."

The footstool, impelled by a scientific lift of Beauvayse's toe, flies to the other end of Nixey's verandah. "Is one mistake to ruin a man's life? I'll get a divorce from my wife. I will, by Heaven!"

"You told me not to maunder just now," says Bingo, with ponderous sarcasm. "Who is the maunderer, I'd like to know? By the Living Tinker, I should have thought that this siege life would have put iron into a man's blood instead of--of Creme de Menthe. Are you takin' those dashed morphia tabloids of Taggart's for bad-water collywobbles again? Yes? I thought as much. Chuck 'em to the aasvogels; stick to your work--you can't complain of its lackin' interest or variety--and let this girl alone. She's a lady, and the adopted daughter of an old friend of my wife's, and don't you forget it!" Bingo's gills are red, and he puffs and blows as large, excited, fleshy men are wont to. "If you do you'll answer to me!"

"I tell you," Beauvayse cries, white-hot with passion, and raising his voice incautiously, "that I mean to marry her. I tell you again that I will div----"

"Do you want the man in the street and every soul in the hotel to know your private affairs?" demands Bingo. "If so, go on shoutin'. As to your bein' a widower, the chances are on the other side.... Gueldersdorp ain't exactly what you would call a healthy place just now. And as to divorcin' your wife, how do you know she'll ever be accommodatin' enough to give you reason? And if she did, do you think a girl brought up in a Catholic Convent would marry you, even if you called to ask her with a copy of the decree absolute pasted on your chest? Hang it, man, your mother's son you ought to know better! And--oh come, I say!"

For Beauvayse sits down astride an iron chair, and lays his shirt-sleeved arms on the back-rail, and his golden, crisply-waved head upon them.

"I--I love her so, Wrynche. And to stand by and see another man cut in and win what I've lost by my own rotten folly hurts so--so damnably." His mouth is twisted with pain.

"Is there another chap who wants to cut in?" Bingo demands.

"You know one gets a bit clairvoyant when one is mad about a woman," says Beauvayse, lifting his shamed wet eyes and haggard young face from the pillow of his folded arms. "Well, I'm dead certain that there is another man who--who is as badly hit as me."

"Who is the other man?"

"Saxham!"

"The Doctor! Shouldn't have supposed a fellow of that type would be susceptible now," says Bingo. "Gives an uncompromisin' kind of impression, with his chin like the bows of an Armoured Destroyer, and his eyebrows like another chap's moustaches."

"And eyes like a pair of his own lancets underneath 'em. But he's a frightfully clever beast," says Beauvayse. "And what he wants in looks he makes up in brains. And--and if he knew there was a scratch against me, he might force the running and win hands down. So hang on to my secret by your eyelids, old fellow, and don't give me reason to be sorry I told----"

"You have my word, haven't you? And, talking about scratch entries," says Bingo, inspired by a sudden rush of recollection, "I ain't so sure that the Doctor--though, mind you, this is between ourselves--is the sort of wooer a parent of strict notions would be likely to encourage. Do you happen to have come across a goggle-eyed, potty little Alderman Brooker?--a Town Guardsman who runs a general store in the Market Place--that's his place of business with the boarding up, and the end butted in by a Creusot shell that didn't burst, luckily for Brooker. Well, this beast buttonholed me months ago, and began to spin a cuffer about Saxham."

"What had the dirty little bounder got to say?" asked Beauvayse, stiffening in disgust, "about a man he isn't fit to black the boots of?"

"Nothing special nice. Said Saxham had lost his London connection through getting involved in a mess with a woman," says the big Dragoon.

"Don't we all get into messes of that kind? What more?" demands Beauvayse.

"Said the Doctor had kicked over the traces pretty badly here. Pitched me a tale of his--Brooker's--having often acted as the Mayor's Deputy on the Police Court Bench, Brooker being an Alderman, and swore that he'd had Saxham up before him a dozen times at least in the last three years, along with the Drunks and Disorderlies."

"It sounds like a hanged lie!"

"If I didn't say as much to Brooker," responds Captain Bingo, "I shut him up like a box by referrin' politely to glass houses, knowin' Brooker had been squiffy himself one night on guard, and by remindin' him that men who talk scandal of their superior officers under circumstances like the present are liable to be Court-Martialled and given beans. And as the Chief, and Saxham with him, dropped on Brooker in the act of smuggling lush into the trenches the other day, I fancy Brooker's teeth are fairly drawn. Though he swore to me that there isn't a saloon-keeper or a saloon-loafer in the town that doesn't know Saxham by the nickname of the Dop Doctor."

"The man don't exist who objects to hear of the disqualifications, mental and physical, of a fellow who he's thought likely to enter the lists with him in the--in the dispute for a woman's favour," says Beauvayse, with a pleasant air of candour. "And though the story sounds like a lie, as I've said, there's a possibility of its being the other thing. I'm sorry for Saxham--that goes without sayin'--though I don't like his overbearin' scientific side and his sledge-hammer manner. But that a man with a record of that kind should set his heart upon a girl like Lynette Mildare is horrible, intolerable, Wrynche; and while, for the man's own sake, I should respect his beastly secret, for her sake and in her interests, and if I consider that he's putting himself forward at the risk of my--my prospects and my hopes, I shall make use of what I know."

"You don't mean you'd split on the man!" splutters Bingo; "because, if you do----"

"All's fair in Love and War," says Beauvayse, with a ring of defiance in his pleasant, boyish voice, and a gleam of triumph in his beautiful sleepy eyes. "And this is Love in War. You've put a trump card in my hand against Saxham, whether you meant to or not, and when the time comes, I shall play it."

He gets up and lounges away. And Captain Bingo, emitting another wailing whistle as he slews round to stare after the tall, retreating figure with the crisp, golden head, is sure of nothing so certainly as that Beauvayse will play that trump card. He is repentant for having broached the Doctor's secret as he climbs up by the narrow iron stair that leads out upon the roof of Nixey's Hotel, to relieve his commanding officer at the binoculars.

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XXXV

You are invited, the very Sunday upon which the previously-recorded conversation took place, to make the acquaintance of the sprightly P. Blinders, Acting-Secretary to Commandant Selig Brounckers, Head Laager, Transvaal Republic and Orange Free State's United Forces, Tweipans.

P. Blinders, a long-bodied, short-legged young Dutch apothecary of the Free State, with short-sighted eyes behind hugely magnifying spectacles, and many fiery pimples bursting through the earthy crust of him, possibly testifying to the presence of volcanic fires beneath, had acted in the clerkly capacity to the Volksraad at Groenfontein. When Government did not sit at the Raad Zaal, Blinders, as calmly as any ordinary being might have done, dispensed jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the counter of his store. These are the three heroic besoms employed by enlightened and conscientious Boer housewives for sweeping out the interiors of their families.

Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete. The thrifty mother buys a foot or so, and pinches off a bolus of the required magnitude thrice in the year. No dosing is allowed in between; the members of the family get it when the proper time comes round. To everyone his or her share, not forgetting the baby.

When P. Blinders came away, he left his grandfather to keep store, previously explaining to the aged man the difference between hydrocyanic acid and almond-essence for cake-flavouring, powders of corrosive sublimate and Gregory's. By a subtle transition the apothecary-clerk then became the epistolary right-hand of General Brounckers, whose wife, son, and grandson, with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos reigned and Confusion prevailed, and disputes in many tongues--English severely excepted--made Babel. And, side by side with the domestic, decent virtues weltered all the vices rampant in the Cities of The Plain.

It goes without saying that the fresh site of Head Laager had been cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped plateau among low, flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans bounded it upon the east, and a rocky ridge upon the western side that might have been the vertebra of some huge reptile of the Diluvian Period, protected camp and village from British shell-practice.

Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered timbers and fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and guns dismounted from their carriages, were to be seen, near the dismembered or disembowelled bodies of the beasts that had drawn them. Dead horse or mule or bullock, decomposing in the sun, seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight, or yolk of egg spilt upon a war-map.

Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches where each fighting unit had his separate box of provisions sunk in the earth beside him, and his cooking-fire of chips and dry dung, and ate and slept and smoked and shot as he thought good. And in despite of such fires, the unrestricted space and pure hill-air notwithstanding, the noisome ditches wherein the cribbed, cabined, and confined defenders of Gueldersdorp alternately grilled and soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, marvels of sanitary purity compared with the works of the besiegers, and the abominable camps, where, in the absence of a nocturnally active Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers, stench took you by the throat and nose, while filth absorbed you over the ankles.

A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you, made you turn away, and then the immense disorder of the camp seized and held your eyes.

Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of provisions and boxes of ammunition, were piled about in mountainous heaps. Of military organisation, discipline, authority, law, as these are understood by civilised nations, there was nothing whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens and felt billycocks, hobnobbed with men in the gaudiest uniforms ever evolved by the theatrical costumier. Green velvet and gold lace, topped by cocked hats that had despoiled the ostrich to make a human biped vainly ridiculous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had no rigiments belongun' to 'um at all at all! and had come over from the Distressful Country to make a bould bid for glory, with the experience of warfare acquired while lurking behind hedges with shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour with the Land League.

Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of sixteen fought side by side with the fine flower and the lusty prime of Boer manhood, and many had their wives and children with them under the Transvaal colours, and not a few had brought their mothers. When an officer had any order to give his men, he prefaced it with the Boer equivalent for "Hi!" When the men had heard as much as they considered necessary, they would say, "Come on; let's be going," and slouch away.

P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded smells no more than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes occurred to him as odd that the duties of a Secretary should embrace the peeling of potatoes and the performance of other duties of the domestic kind.

He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's living-waggon, polishing off the last of a panful, when Van Busch came along. English being an unpopular language, the big Johannesburger and the little Free Stater exchanged greetings in the Taal.

"Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk a piece with me," said Van Busch. "I have something to say to you about my sister that married the German drummer, and is stopping at Kink's Hotel."

You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat, and knocking the sweat from the leather lining-band. He was dressed in a black broadcloth tailed-coat, flannel shirt, and cord breeches, wore heavy veldschoens, and carried a Mauser rifle, as did everybody else, and had a long hunting-knife as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas pouch-belt, and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus panoplied, he accurately resembled ten thousand other men.

But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was not that of an agriculturist, and the strange light eyes, rust-coloured like those of an adder, and, like the ophidian's, set flush with the oddly-flattened edges of their orbits, were at variance with the high, rounded, benevolent temples crowned with a thinning brake of curly hair. The rapacious mouth, with the thick scarlet lips, belonged to the eyes.

He had put on his hat again, but he swept it off in a flourishing bow, as Mevrouw Brounckers, in high-kilted wincey, a man's hat of coarse straw perched on her weather-beaten, sandy-grey head, came stumping down the waggon-ladder, calling for her potatoes. What was that lazy bedelaar of a Secretary about, and it nearly eleven of the clock? Didn't he know that her Commandant liked his meals on time?

Mevrouw received the politeness less graciously than the potatoes. That man with the eyes and the greedy red mouth was a woman-eater, she knew. Not for sheep and bear would she, grandmother as she was, trust herself in house barn alone with a klant like that. But her Commandant had uses for him, the twinkling-eyed, soft-mannered, big rogue. She watched him walking off with P. Blinders, for whom she entertained a distaste grounded on the knowledge that no good ever came of these double-tongued Free Staters.

And this one could write in the accursed shibboleth of England as well as in the Taal. She shook her head as the potatoes rattled into the big pot hanging over the fire. And he walked out on Sundays with the young German woman who was maid to the refugee-widow staying at Kink's Hotel, and who never showed her nose inside the Gerevormed Kerk, the godless thing! or went out except by bat-light. Of that one the Mevrouw Brounckers had her opinion also. And time would show who was right.

Meanwhile, Van Busch and P. Blinders, who had left the dorp behind them, and strolled up the almost dry bed of a sluit leading up amongst the hills, conversed, in Sabbath security from English artillery, and reassuring remoteness from Dutch eavesdroppers. And their theme was the German drummer's refugee-widow who never went to kerk.

Van Busch, who found it helpful in his business never to forget faces, had met her on the rail, months back, travelling up first-class from Cape Town. Early in October it was, while the road was still open. And men who kept their eyes skinned went backwards and forwards and round and about, getting the hang of things, and laying up accurate mental notes, because the other kind were even more risky to carry than the nuggets and raw dust that are hidden in the padded linings of the gold-smugglers' heavy garments.

The lady, small, dark, stylishly-tailored, and with bright black, bird-like eyes, was not a German drummer's widow when Van Busch and she first met. She had chatted in her native English with her square, bulky, sleek-looking fellow-passenger, well-dressed in grey linen drill frock-coat and trousers, with blazing diamonds studding the bosom of his well-starched shirt and linking his cuffs.

The wide felt hat he politely removed as he came into the carriage revealed to Lady Hannah a tall, expansive, well-developed forehead. Below the line of the hat-rim he was burned coffee-brown, like many another British Colonial. The observant eye of "Gold Pen" took in the man's vulgarly handsome features and curiously light eyes, and twinkled at the flaring jewellery and the whiskers of obsolete Dundreary pattern that stood out on either side the jewelled one's full, smooth chin. His large, bold, over-red mouth, with the curling outward flange to it, gave her a disagreeable impression. One would have been grateful for a beard that hid that mouth.

Lady Hannah found it curiously disquieting until her fellow-traveller began to talk, in a thick, lisping voice, with curiously candid and simple intonations. He presented himself, and she accepted him at his own valuation, as a British Johannesburger, and influential member of the Chamber of Mines, possessing vast interests among the tall chimneys and white dumping-heaps of the Rand.

Van Busch called his efforts to be ingratiating "sucking up to" the lady. He sucked up, thinking at first she might be the wife of the English field officer who had been ordered down from the north to take over the Gueldersdorp command. Then he found she was only the grey mare of an officer of the Staff....

She plied Van Busch in his triple character of politician, patriot, and mine-owner with questions. Thought she was juicing a lot of information, whereas Van Busch was the one who learned things. Kind of playing at being newspaper-woman she was, and taking notes for London newspaper articles all the time. Had laid out to be a little tin imitation of Dora Corr, or, say, nickel-plated, with cast chasings. Was burning for an opening in the diplomatic go-betweening line; wanted to dabble in War Correspondence, and so on. But Van Busch gathered that the biggest egg in the little lady's nest of ambitions was the desire to do a flutter on the Secret Service lay.

She wanted to be what he termed a "slew," and she would have called a spy. He fiddled to her dancing, and wearied before she did.

"What Woman has done Woman may do!" was the burden of her ceaseless song. And when she left the train at Gueldersdorp, "Au revoir" said she with a flash of her bright black eyes, nodding to the big Colonial, who was so excessively civil about handing out her dressing-case and travelling-bag. "Many thanks, and don't give me away if you should happen to meet me in a different skin one of these fine days, Mr. Van Busch."

"Sure, no; not I," said the burly Johannesburger, with an effusion of what looked like genuine admiration. "By thunder! when it comes to playing the risky game there's no daring to beat a woman's. Give me a petticoat, say I, for a partner every time."

"Bravo!" Her eyes snapped approvingly. She waved a little hand towards a large pink officer of the British Imperial Staff, who was looking into all the first-class compartments in search of a wife who had been vainly entreated to remain at Cape Town. "There's my husband, who entertains the precisely opposite opinion. But he hasn't your experience--only a theory worn thin by generations of ancestors, all chivalrous Conservative noodles, who kept their females in figurative cotton-wool. Do let me introduce you. I'd simply love to have him hear you talk."

Van Busch did not pant to make the acquaintance of the Military Authorities. He thanked the impulsive Lady Hannah, but made haste to climb back into the train. The big pink officer recognised the object of his search, and strode down the platform bellowing a welcome. As Lady Hannah waved in reply, the Johannesburger made a long arm from the window, and thrust a pencil-scrawled card into the tiny gloved hand.

"S's'h! Shove that away somewhere safe," said Van Busch, in a thrillingly mysterious whisper; "and, remember, any time you want to learn the lay of the land and follow up the spoor of movements on the quiet, that Van Busch, of the British South African Secret War-Intelligence-Bureau, is the man to put you on. A line to that address, care of W. Bough, will always get me. And with nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for palm-oil...." His greedy mouth made a grinning red gash in the smug brown face with the fine whiskers of blackish-brown. His cold eyes scintillated and twinkled unspeakable things at the little lady as the train carried him away.

Assuredly Van Busch understood women no less thoroughly than his near relative, Bough. He knew that you could bait for and catch the sex with things that were not tangible. Men wanted to be made sure of money or money's worth. And for the co-operation of P. Blinders in the adroit little game by which the German drummer's refugee-widow who stayed at Kink's Hotel, and only went out after dark, had been relieved of a handsome sum, Van Busch had had to part with nearly one-third of the swag. No wonder he felt and talked like a robbed man.

"All very well to talk," said P. Blinders, scratching his newest pimple, and looking with exaggerated moonish simplicity at nobody in particular through his large round magnifying spectacles. "But what could you have done without me, once the little Englishwoman smelled the porcupine in the barrel? When she drove out to your friend Bough's plaats at Haarsgrond in that spider, pretending she was your sister that had married a Duitscher drummer in Gueldersdorp, and buried him, and was afraid to be shut up in the stad with all those lustful rooineks, you thought it would be enough to tell her Staats Police or Transvaal burghers were after her to make her creep into a mousehole and pay you to keep her hid. And it did work nicely--for a while. Then the Englishwoman got angry--oh, very angry!--and told you things that were not nice. Either you should put her in the way of getting the information she wanted, or good-bye to her dear brother, Hendryk Van Busch, and his friend Bough."

"For a pinch of mealies I'd have let the little shrew go, by thunder!" said the affectionate relative. "But my good heart stopped me. The country wasn't safe for a couple of women to go looping about," he added. "And one of them with two hundred pounds in Bank of England notes stitched into the front of her stays...."

"Five hundred pounds," said the Secretary, with pleasantly twinkling spectacles. Van Busch's stare was admirable in its incredulity.

"Sure, no, brother; not so much as that?"

"Trudi told me," smirked P. Blinders.

"You and her seem to be great and thick together," said Van Busch, with a flattering leer. The little ex-apothecary placed his hand upon his chest, and said, with a gleam of tenderness lighting up his spectacles:

"I have sighed, and she has smiled." He went on, "If your friend Bough had been brave enough to try and take away that wad of banknotes from the little Englishwoman, he would have met trouble. For in a pocket of her gown she carries a revolver, and sleeps with it under her pillow by night; that is another thing that Trudi has told me." He kissed his fingers, and waved them in the direction of Kink's Hotel. "She is a lovely maiden!" He blew his nose without the assistance of a pocket-handkerchief, and continued:

"Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the Englishwoman's coffee that would have made her sleep while he stole that money, or he might even have killed her quietly, and buried her on the farm. But a man who does that is not so clever and so wise as the man who makes a plan that gets the money and keeps friends all round, and makes everybody happy--is he, now? And that man is me, and that plan was mine. From P. Blinders you have genuine information to sell the Englishwoman, and when she has bought it, paying well for it, and written it all down in her despatches to the Commandant at Gueldersdorp, she hands the letters back to you to be smuggled through the lines, and pays through the nose for that also. And who shall say she is cheated? For the letters do get through"--the pimply countenance of P. Blinders was quite immobile, but the eyes behind the great spectacles twirled and twinkled with infinite meaning--"a week or so after date, perhaps, but what is that? Nothing--nothing at all."

"Nothing," agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled pleasantly in each other's faces for a minute more. Then said Van Busch, with a loud sigh:

"But what I have to tell you now is something. The Englishwoman has got no more money. Ask Trudi, if you think I lie. And, of course, the plan was a good plan, and you were a smart fellow to hit on it; but now the two hundred pounds is gone----"

"Three hundred remain to get." P. Blinders briskly held up five stumpy red fingers and tucked down the thumb and little finger, leaving a trio of mute witnesses to the correctness of his arithmetic.

"No more remains to get. The cow has run dry."

The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise.

"Hoe? What is this I hear?" he demanded with indignation. "Nothing left, and I have not had but a hundred and fifty out of the five hundred. There has been dishonesty somewhere. There have been tricks, unbefitting the dealings of scrupulous Christian men. Foei, foei!"

Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled amiably down into the indignant eyes behind the spectacles. Then he said, with his most candid look and simplest lisp:

"No tricks, brother; all fair and above-board. Ask the Commandant whether Van Busch is square or not? He knows that the hundred and fifty was paid you honestly on his account, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And you're not the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no, you'll never do that, never! Go and see him now, and settle up. I had a talk with young Schenk Eybel this morning, and he says the answer to the screeve you wrote to the Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp--to patch up an exchange of the Englishwoman for that slim kerel of a Boer's son they got their claws on at the beginning of the siege--has come in under the white flag this morning. Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without Walt Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old man on his grey pony near the Field Hospital."

The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The ex-apothecary faltered:

"What--what is this you say? The money paid me on the Commandant's account--when it was to be a secret between us.... Foei, foei! This is unfair. And suppose I have spent it, how shall I replace it? Do you wish to ruin an honest man?"

Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly. At least, it seemed so, for he turned sharp round, and trotted off with sorrowfully-drooping black coat-tails, in search of the meek grey pony and the terrible old man.

But the front view of the Secretary displayed a countenance whose pimples radiated satisfaction, and spectacles that were alight with joy. Much--very much--would P. Blinders have liked to have kept that hundred and fifty, but his fear had proved greater than his desire.

He had paid every tikkie of the money faithfully to Brounckers, and his hands were metaphorically clean, and his neck comfortably safe. He was the poorer by a hundred and fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and experience; and--he chuckled at the thought of this--in the joy of knowing himself, in postscripts appended to those despatches of the Englishwoman's, to have poked sly sarcasm at the British Lion. Whose spiny tail P. Blinders imagined to be lashing, even then, at the prick of the goad.

For another thing, very pleasant to think of, he had successfully pitted the cunning behind his giant spectacles against the superior villainy of Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg.

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XXXVI

The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered, blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch--"a sister indeed!" snorted Mevrouw Kink; and never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and skirt-bands, had fashionable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it--good Nederlands measure--who did not know that she was an English prisoner-of-war.

Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hardships, as its alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on having accomplished something of what she had set out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of days when she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial sympathies. But his valuable services had been rendered for so much more than nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was wont to describe as "stony." She had sent for Van Busch to tell him that the position was untenable. She would evacuate it, when he could manage to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.

A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear the mouse-coloured trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony ground, and the crack, crack of the sentries' Mausers, followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches.... She could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on the greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn-down blinds:

"STIRRING STORY FROM THE SEAT OF HOSTILITIES: LADY WAR-CORRESPONDENT RUNS THE GAUNTLET OF BOER RIFLES."

"Speshul. Hextry Speshul!"

* * * * *

Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got through the lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the splashboard, and sink into the arms of the husband loved better than aught save Glory, gasping, as her heroic spirit fled----

* * * * *

"Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots on?"

Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable of the two forbidding beds Kink's principal guest-chamber boasted, and ran her unoccupied needles through her interminable knitting, a thick white cotton sofa-cover or counterpane of irritating pattern--and stood over against her employer in an attitude of sulky submission. She was a square-shouldered, sturdily-built young woman of twenty-five, with round eyes of pinky-blue garnished with white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a superb and aggressively-brilliantined head of fair hair elaborately dressed, waved, and curled.

The hair was all attached to Trudi's scalp. Lady Hannah had lain in bed morning after morning, for weary weeks, and watched her "doing it," and wondered that any young feminine creature with such arms, such skin, and such hair should be so utterly unattractive. But she had lived all these weeks in this one room with Trudi, had languished under her handmaid's lack of intelligence, had seen her eat, wielding her knife with marvellous dexterity, and, wakeful, tossed the while she snored.

And every morning, after Mevrouw Kink had brought in coffee, snorting whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous eye, or whenever the German drummer's widow struck her as being more foreign of manners and appearance than usual, Lady Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself as for a promenade outdoors, lift the corner of a blind, steal a glance at the seething, stenching single street of Tweipans between the slats of the green shutters, and--unpin her veil and take off her hat without a word....

By eleven o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated, wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the unwilling Trudi, was accustomed to venture out for what she called, with some exaggeration, "A whiff of fresh air."

Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the pickets at either end of it, and the sentries posted at longish intervals all down its length, the street of new brick and tin, and old wooden houses that made Tweipans, belonged to Lady Hannah then. Accompanied by Trudi, whose quality of being what I have heard called "deaf-nosed" with regard to noisy smells, she arrived at the pitch of envying, she would stumble up and down amongst the rubbish, or wade through the slush if it had been wet, and stop at favourable points to search with her night-glass for the greenish-blue glow-worm twinkles of distant Gueldersdorp, and wonder whether anybody there was thinking of her under the white stars or the drifting scud?...

But what was Trudi saying?

"The gracious one cannot have her boots."

"Why not?" asked Lady Hannah, with languid interest. Trudi struck the blow.

"Because she has none."

"No boots? Well, then, the walking-shoes."

Trudi smiled all over her large face. This placidity should not long endure.

"The gracious one has no shoes either. Boots and shoes--all have been taken away. Nothing remains except the quilted bedroom slippers the gracious one is wearing. And it is impossible to walk out in bedroom slippers."

"I suppose it is." Lady Hannah yawned. "Well, suppose you go and look for the boots. They may have been carried away by mistake, like----" She wondered afresh what could have become of that transformation coiffure?

"There is no mistake." Trudi announced. "And--the gracious lady forgot her little gun beneath her pillow this morning. That also is missing," volunteered Trudi, who had had her instructions and scrupulously acted up to them.

"My revolver has been stolen?" Lady Hannah sprang from her chair, made rapid search, and was convinced. The Browning revolver had been certainly spirited away.

Red patches burned in her thin little face, and her round black eyes regained some of their lost brightness. Nothing like a spice of excitement for bringing you up to the mark. Just now she had felt positively mouldy, and here she was, herself again.

"Nobody came into the room in the night. I sleep with the key round my neck, and if they had opened the door with another, I should have awakened on the instant. Nobody has been in the room to-day except the Frau Kink"--you will remember that a German drummer's widow would naturally converse in her defunct spouse's native language--"the Frau Kink, with the coffee-tray. She did not come near the bed...." The suddenness and force of the suspicion that shot up in Lady Hannah's mind lifted her up out of her chair, and set her upon her feet. "It must have been you. Was it you?"

She looked hard at Trudi, and Trudi sank upon her bed and dissolved in noisy weeping.

"Ach, the wickedness!" she moaned. "To suspect of such shamelessness a poor young maiden brought up in honesty.... Ach, ach!"

But Lady Hannah went on:

"Yesterday morning, when you were so long in coming back with hot water, and I opened the door and looked out into the passage, I saw you whispering with a little stumpy, pimply man, in a long-tailed black coat and large spectacles. Who is he, and of what were you talking?"

Trudi did not at all regard the verbal sketch of P. Blinders as a correct one, but though her love was blind to his pimples and ignored his stumpiness, she could not deny the spectacles, which were to her as peepholes affording visions of a blissful married future.

"He is a Herr who brought me news from my Mutti at home in Germany. She is sick, and my father also, and all my little brothers and sisters are sick too," gulped Trudi, sobbing and wallowing and rasping her flushed features against the knobbly counterpane of the most uncomfortable of the two beds, "because they hear that I am in this place, and they so greatly fear that I will be dead."

"You aren't dead yet. And you told me when I engaged you that you were an orphan brought up by an aunt."

"Pay me my vage," demanded Trudi, lifting a defiant and perfectly dry countenance, and launching the utterance in the forbidden English language, "and I vill now go. I vish not to stop here longer."

"Very well, but where are you going?"

"That," remarked Trudi, tossing her elaborately-dressed head and relapsing into her native language, "has nothing to do with the gracious lady."

There was insolent triumph and unveiled spite in the large face attached to the elaborate coiffure. The gracious lady, realising that Trudi formed the one link between herself and the rough, strange, suspicious, unfriendly male world outside, pocketed her pride to temporise. Let Trudi remain as companion and attendant to the German refugee-widow yet another week, and the month's due of wages, already trebled in virtue of a service involving risk, should be substantially increased.... But Trudi only snorted and shook her head, and Lady Hannah found herself confronting not only a rat determined upon abandoning a sinking ship, but malignantly inclined to hasten the vessel's foundering.

What was to be done? It is quite possible to be brave, adventurous, and daring without a revolver, its absence may even impart a faint sense of relief to one, as being no longer under the necessity of shooting somebody with it at a pinch, but without boots or shoes, and a Trudi to put them on, Lady Hannah found herself at a nonplus. To conceal the fact from the rejoicing Trudi, she moved to the window and drew the blind aside, and was instantly confronted with a row of round, staring eyes, the nose belonging to each pair being flattened eagerly against the glass.

"Oh!" exclaimed Lady Hannah, dropping the blind in consternation at this manifestation of public interest. A snorting chuckle from the malignant Trudi fanned the little lady's waning courage into flame. She crossed the room and turned the door-handle.

The door was locked from the outside, the key having been removed to accommodate the eye of Mevrouw Kink, who reluctantly removed it to unlock the door, and announce that Myjnheer Van Busch had asked to see his sister, as she ushered the visitor in.

Sisters are not sensitive as a rule to subtle alterations in the regard of their brothers, but the German drummer's refugee-widow could not but read in the face and demeanour of her relative a perceptible diminution of interest in a woman who had no more money.... He kept on his broad-brimmed hat and pulled at his bushy whiskers as he exchanged a palpable wink with Trudi, who was accustomed, when the gracious lady's brother called, to retire with her knitting behind the shiny American cloth-covered screen that coyly shielded the washstand from a visitor's observation.

Those flat, light eyes of the visitor's twinkled oddly as Lady Hannah's indignant whisper told of the missing footgear and the vanished revolver, and her conviction that the screened knitter was the active agent in their spiriting away.

"You believe the girl's slewed on you, eh, and that things are going to pan out rough? Well, sure, that's a pity!" The big man lolled against the deal table, covered with a cloth reproducing in crude aniline colours, trying to the complexion, but gratifying to the patriotic soul of Mevrouw Kink, the red, white, and blue stripes of the Vierkleur, with the green staff-line carried all round as an ornamental border. "And I'd not wonder but you were right." He stuck his thumbs in his belt, and asked, with his hatted head on one side and a jeering grin on his bold red mouth: "So, now, and what did you think to do?"

Lady Hannah controlled an impulse to knock off the big man's broad-brimmed felt, and even smiled back in the grinning face.... One very little lady can hold a great deal of anger and resentment without spilling any over, if she is thoroughly convinced that it would be imprudent as well as useless to display either.

"As you gather, I intend returning to Gueldersdorp to-morrow at latest. I shall not take my maid, as she wishes for her own reasons to remain behind. Please have the mare and spider here by mid-day coffee-time. We can drive north towards Haargrond and double back when we're beyond the lines, as the coursed hare would do."

Van Busch's red mouth gleamed, curved back from his tobacco-stained teeth. He said with meaning:

"Boers shoot hares--not run them."

"They may shoot or not shoot," proclaimed Lady Hannah. "I start to-morrow."

"Without boots or shoes?" asked the red-edged, yellow-fanged smile.

"Barefoot if I must," she answered, with all the more spirit that she felt like the hare struggling in a wire. "Please send for the mare and the trap. I leave this place to-morrow."

"The mare and the spider have been commandeered for the use of the United Republics," said Van Busch. As the angry colour flamed up in Lady Hannah's small, pale cheeks, he added, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his hands: "Bough did his best to save them for you, no bounce! But could one man do anything against so many? Sure no, nothing at all!"

She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its quilted satin slipper.

"Do you suppose I haven't guessed by this time that Bough the Africander and Van Busch the British-Johannesburger are one Boer when it suits them both?"

His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks of old tattooing obliterated by an acid burn, jerked as he raised it to stroke and feel his whiskers. Something else upon the hand, in the sharpened state of all her senses, struck out a spark of old association, and recalled a name once known. She went on.

"How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough? You provoke the question when I see you wearing the Mildare crest and coat-of-arms."

He had turned the deeply-engraved sard with his brown thumb and clenched his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed his mind, and took off the ring and handed it to her.

"I had this ring off Bough, that's a real live man, and a thundering good pal of mine, for all your funning. The chap it belonged to died at a farm Bough owned once. Somewhere in Natal it might have been. And the bloke who died there was a big bug in England, Bough always thought. But he came tramping, and hauled up with hardly duds to his back or leather to his feet. Sick, too, and coughing like a sheep with the rinderpest. Bough was kind to him, but he got worse and worse. One night Bough was sitting up with him reading the Bible, when he made signs. 'Take this ring off of my finger and keep it,' says he. 'I've got nothing else to give you, but I reckon the Almighty'll foot your bill, for you're a first-class Christian, if ever there was one.' Then he went in, and Bough buried him in regular fancy style----"

"And sent the girl to the nuns at Gueldersdorp, or was she there already?"

Van Busch was in the act of taking back the sardonyx signet-ring. His hand jerked again, so sharply that the ring was jerked into the air, fell to the floor, and rolled under the table. He stooped and reached for it, and asked, with his face hidden by the patriotic tablecloth:

"What girl do you mean?"

His dark face was purple-brown with the exertion of stooping as he rose up. Lady Hannah answered:

"The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp has an orphan ward, a singularly lovely girl of nineteen or twenty, whose surname is Mildare. And it struck me just now--I don't know why now, and never before--that she might be----"

"Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What like is this one?" Van Busch twisted the ring about his little finger, and spoke with a more sluggish lisp and slurring of the consonants than even was usual with him. "Is she short and square, with black hair and round blue eyes, and red cheeks and thick ankles?"

Lady Hannah, despite all her recently-gained experience of Van Busch, had not yet mastered his method of eliciting information.

"Miss Mildare is absolutely the opposite of your description," she declared. "She is quite tall, and very slight and pale, with slender hands and feet, and reddish-bronze hair, and eyes the colour of yellow topaz or old honey, with wonderful black lashes.... I have never seen anything to compare----" She stopped.

What strange eyes the man had, full of lines radiating from the pin-point pupils, scintillating like a snake's.... He said, in his thick, lisping way:

"A beauty, eh? And how long might the nuns have had her?"

"The Mayor's wife told me she has been under the care of the Convent ladies for some seven years."

His brown full face looked solid, and his eyes veiled themselves behind a glassy film. He was thinking, as he said:

"And her name is Mildare, eh? And you know her?"

"I have met her once. She was introduced to me as Miss Lynette Mildare. But just now I find my own affairs unpleasantly absorbing. I am suspected in this place, Mr. Van Busch, and if not actually a prisoner, am certainly under restraint. For how much money down will you undertake to extricate me from this position, and convey me back to Gueldersdorp?"

He shook his head, and for once the scent of gain did not rouse his predatory appetite. He was wondering how it should never have occurred to him before that the scared little white-faced thing might have fallen into kindly hands, and been nursed and cockered up and made a lady of? He was puzzled to account for her remembering the name that had belonged to the man whose grave was at the foot of the Little Kopje. He was conscious of an itching curiosity to find out for his friend Bough whether it really was the Kid or no? What was the little fool of a woman saying in her shrill voice?

"It would be burning your boats, I am quite aware. But if it pays to burn them----" she suggested, with her black eyes probing vainly in the shallow ones.

He roused himself.

"A thousand pounds, English. You've not the money here?"

"No."

"Or a cheque?"

Her laugh jangled contemptuously.

"Do you Boer spies carry cheque-books--upon Secret Service?"

"I am no Boer, but an honest, square-dealing Britisher. How often have I to tell you that? Do you suppose you are a prisoner here because I slewed on you? Wrong, by God! Perhaps I kept things back a bit for fear you would cut up, as women do, and go into screeching-fits. Sure now, that's what any man would have done." His tone of injury was excellently feigned, and his lisp was simplicity itself. "And to call me a dirty spy, when I got you first-hand information, and ran your letters through to Gueldersdorp, at the risk of my blooming neck.... Well, you'll be ashamed when you get back there and see those letters, that's what you will, sure!"

"The letters got through--yes. But did they get through in time to be of use?"

The little she-devil suspected the truth. He stroked his whiskers and scraped his foot upon the floor, and said in his blandest lisp:

"They got through in useful time. I'll kiss the Book and swear it, if you want me."

How deal with a knave like this, who popped in and out of holes like a rabbit, and wriggled and writhed like a snake? Lady Hannah knew an immense yearning for the absent Bingo, husband of limited intellectual capacity, man of superior muscular development, doughty in the use of that primitive weapon of punishment, the doubled human fist.

"In useful time? Useful Gueldersdorp time or useful Tweipans time? That is what I want to get at."

"Oh, hell! how do I know?" He had turned sulky and scowling, but her blood was fairly up.

"I know that you have successfully swindled me out of five hundred pounds. I know that when I met you on the train four months back you shaped your plans and baited a trap----"

"To catch a silly woman." His scarlet lips rolled back from his tobacco-stained teeth. His jeering eyes were intolerable. "Ay, maybe I did. And what's to say now?"

"I say you are a blackguard, Mr. Bough Van Busch!"

The dark face with the light eyes underwent a murderous change. He glanced over his shoulders right and left, and took a step towards her, carrying out the movement suddenly, as a tarantula darts upon its prey. Before the thick brown muscular fingers had choked the scream that rose in her throat, the key crashed in the lock, and the door was violently kicked open, admitting ...

No portrait is required of that burly, bald-browed, sharp-eyed, grizzle-bearded, square-jawed farmer, of the bronzed and sun-cracked countenance, implacable under the slouch-hat with the orange-leather band. We know the old green overcoat, and coarse corduroy breeches, and roughly tanned leather boots, with heavy, old-fashioned spurs, to have been the husk of a fierce, and indomitable, and relentless warrior, twinned with a quiet family-man of bucolic tastes and patriarchal habits.

Van Busch, broader by inches and taller by half a head, dwindled, seen in juxtaposition with this man of the iron will and the leader's temperament, to a flabby, dwarfish, and petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in, and read him, and dropped him, and fastened on the little Englishwoman, as the great boots tramped heavily across the floor, and the great voice roared, speaking in the Taal:

"Pull up that blind! Voor den donder! Shall we be mice, that sit and squeak in the dark?"

Down came the Mevrouw Kink's square of glazed yellow calico, roller, cord, and all, at the impatient wrench of the big, heavy hand.... The window was blocked with heavy bodies, topped by brown, white, or yellow faces; the street was a sea of them, all staring with greedy, curious eyes at the little Englishwoman who was a prisoner, and the big man who ruled them by Fear. His angry grey eyes blazed at the gapers, and the crowd surged back a foot or two. Then the fierce eyes darted back at pale Lady Hannah, and the roaring voice began again:

"You who came here in disguise, with a false story and false hair----"

Lady Hannah jumped in her bedroom slippers, and crimsoned to her natural coiffure, as the missing transformation, appallingly out of wave, was plucked from the baggy pocket of the old green overcoat, and brandished before her astonished eyes. Struggling to restrain the dual impulse to shriek and clutch, no wonder she appeared a conscience-stricken creature in that great man's watchful eyes. His big voice shook her and shook the room as he thundered:

"Woman, you are no widow of a Duitscher drummer, but the vrouw of a field-cornet of the Army of Groot Brittanje. He holds a graafschap in Engeland"--a mistake on the part of the General's informant--"and is hand-in-glove with the Colonel Commandant at Gueldersdorp." Not so far from the truth! thought Lady Hannah. "Would he spy out the land, let him come himself next time. Boers hide not behind their wives' petticoats when there is such business to be done!"

In defence of blameless Bingo the hysterical little woman found voice to say:

"He--didn't know I was coming."

"What says she?"

Before Van Busch could bestir himself to interpret, Lady Hannah had repeated her words in faulty Dutch.

"So! Engelsch mevrouws disobey their husbands, it seems?" Were the fierce, bloodshot grey eyes really capable of a twinkle? "We Boers have a cure for that. Green reim, well laid on, after the third caution, teaches our wives to fib and deceive no more."

"You're wrong, sir."

"Wrong, do you say? Hoe?"

"What the green reim does teach them," explained Lady Hannah, secretly aghast at her own temerity, "is, not to be found out next time."

He gave a wooden chuckle, but his regard was as menacing and his voice as gruff as ever.

"I make no mouth-play with words. I talk in men and guns, and there are half a dozen among the Engelsch, niet mier, that know how to talk back. There are one or two others that are duyvels, and not men. And the worst duyvel of all"--he waved the big hand westward--"is he over there at Gueldersdorp."

She mentally registered the compliment.

"You are a woman who writes for the Engelsch newspapers that are full of shameless tales about the Boers." He spat copiously upon the floor, and the big voice became a bellow. "Lies, lies! I have had them read to me, and the people who make them should be shot. Hear you now. You shall write to them and say: 'Selig Brounckers is a merciful man and a just. He is not as zwart as he is painted. He caught me mousing round his hoofd laager at Tweipans--and what does he do?'" The pause was impressive. Then the roaring voice resumed:

"'He sends me marching down to the gaol at Groenfontein, that is packed with dirty white and dirty coloured schelms until there is not room for one more----"

He named the homely parasite hymned by Burns ...

--"'Or he packs me up to Oom Paul at Pretoria, chained to the waggon-tail like the others.' ..."

Lady Hannah wondered, while the stuffy room spun round her, who the others were.

"Geen, I will tell you what he does." He pitched the crumpled transformation contemptuously into the corner. "He writes to the Engelsch Commandant at Gueldersdorp and says: 'I have here a silly female thing that is no use to me. Take her you, and give me in exchange a man of mine.' ..."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Here, you ...!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He has accounted to me."

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

"He has accounted for it five weeks back."

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

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

Van Busch faltered with a sickly smile:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XXXVII

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

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

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

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

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

"Then my wife's--all right?"

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

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

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

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

"Not a bit of it."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bingo obeyed, and read:

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

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

"By the Living Tinker!" exploded Bingo.

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

Bingo reads as follows:

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

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

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

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

The sarcastic P. Blinders had appended an italicised comment:

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

"P. BLINDERS."

"D-a-a----"

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

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

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

This is the third letter:

"December 23rd.

"To the Colonel Commanding, Gueldersdorp.

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

"Obediently, "H. WRYNCHE."

Underneath is the sarcastic comment:

"December 27th.

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

"P. B."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"_To the Colonel Commanding the British Forces in Gueldersdorp._

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

"I have the honour to be yours truly,

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

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

"P. B."

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

"P. B."

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

"Then she--she----"

A lump in his throat slides down and sticks.

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

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

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

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

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

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XXXVIII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered:

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

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

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

She was not there.

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

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XXXIX

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Am I ve Officer, weally?"

Interest was quickening in the heavy eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--"'Tention!" piped Hammy.

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

"Please, what are ve confequences?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hammy sniffed dolorously, and two large tears splashed down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He looked at her full, and said:

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

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

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

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

"I beg you, say no more!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is she not?"

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

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

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

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

"Her type is unusual--amongst Colonials."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She met the fate she chose."

He thought, looking at her:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He answered her:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know you never would have."

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

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

"This distresses you. I am grieved----"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XL

"Reverend Mother," sounded from below.

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

"May I take you down?"

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

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

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

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

"I think you have had four."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Biddy?" repeated Saxham, at a loss.

Her laugh shrilled out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saxham said with stiffness:

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

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

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

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

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

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

"There was a boy--who died?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saxham said gratingly, and with a hostile look:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little Miss Wiercke was to lose her lank-haired organist a few days later, the prevalent complaint of shrapnelitis carrying him off. And the girl who screamed coquettishly as the mining-engineer amorously squeezed her wet fingers under the soapsuds was shortly to be represented in the Cornishman's memory by another white cross in the Cemetery, a trunk full of pathetic feminine fripperies, and a wedding-ring that had been worn barely two months. But they did not know this, and they were happy. We should never love or laugh if we knew.

Two other people had passed along the path that ran by the margin of the sand and reed-patches, and were lost to sight. Lady Hannah glanced towards the Mother-Superior, who was being gracious to Captain Bingo and the Chaplain, and hoped Biddy would not miss the owner of the little Greek head and the enchanting willowy figure quite yet.

Nuns were frightfully scrupulous and gimlet-eyed where their charges were concerned. And certainly, if young people never got away together without qu'il ne vous en deplaise! there would be fewer engagements. And Biddy must know that it was a Heaven-sent chance for the girl.

The Foltlebarres had sat too long on thorns to grumble at Beau's marrying a girl without a dot, who was not only lovely enough to set Society screaming over her, but modest and a lady. Up to the present his tendency had been to exalt Beauty above Breed, and personal attractiveness above moral immaculateness.

As in the most recent case of that taking but extremely terrible little person with the toothy, photographic smile, Miss Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity Theatre, the affair with whom might be counted, it was to be hoped, as the last furrow of a heavy sowing of wild oats. As this would be a match d'egal a egal--in point of blood and education, at any rate--certainly the Foltlebarres would have reason to bless their stars.

Somebody came over to her just then, saying:

"Bingo seems in excellent spirits."

She looked, a little apprehensively, across to where the Mother Superior and the wistful-eyed, pepper-and-salt-clad Chaplain were patiently listening to the recital of one of Bingo's stock anecdotes.

"What is he telling the Reverend Mother?" Her tone was anxious. "I do hope not that story about the unwashed Boer and the cake of soap!"

"Don't be alarmed. It's a recent and completely harmless anecdote about the despatch-runner from Diamond Town who got in this morning."

Her eyes sparkled.

"Really ...? And with news worth having?"

"Mr. Casey might be disposed to think so."

"Who is Mr. Casey?"

"That's a question nobody can answer satisfactorily."

"But is the intelligence absolutely useless to anybody who doesn't happen to be Mr. Casey?" she insisted.

"Not unless they happened to be deeply interested in Mrs. Casey."

"There is a Mrs. Casey, then?"

"So says the man who travelled two hundred miles to bring her letters and the message that she is, as Mr. Micawber would put it, in statu quo."

"I understand." The bright black eyes were compassionate. "She has written to her husband--she doesn't know that he has been killed----"

"Nor do we. As far as we can ascertain, the garrison has never included a Casey."

"Then you think----"

"I think"--he glanced aside as a stentorian bellow of laughter reached them--"that, judging by what I hear, Bingo has got to the soapy story."

She frowned anxiously.

"Bingo ought to remember that nuns aren't ordinary women. I shall have to go and gag him." She took a dubious step.

"Why? The Reverend Mother does not seem at all shocked, and Fraithorn is evidently amused." He added, as Bingo's rapturous enjoyment of his own anecdote reached the stamping and eye-mopping stage: "And undoubtedly Bingo is happy."

"He has got out of hand lately. One can't keep a husband in a proper state of subjection who may be brought home to one a corpse at any hour of the day." Her laugh jangled harshly, and broke in the middle. "The soil of Gueldersdorp being so uncommonly favourable just now to the production of weeds of the widow's description."

"It grows other things." His eyes were very kind. "Brave, helpful, unselfish women, for instance."

"There is one!"

She indicated the tall, black-robed figure of the Mother with a quick gesture of her little jewelled hand.

"And here is another." He touched her sleeve lightly with a finger-tip.

"Brave.... Helpful." Her voice was choky. "Do you think I shall ever forget the hindrance I have been to you? Didn't I lose you your Boer spy?"

"Granted you did." His moustache curved cheerfully at the corners. "But that's Ancient History, and look what you brought back!"

"A unit of the despised majority who is thoroughly convinced of her own superfluousness. Hannah Wrynche, with the conceit so completely taken out of her that she feels, say, like a deflated balloon; Hannah Wrynche, who believed herself born to be a War Correspondent, and has come down to scribbling gossipy paragraphs for a little siege newspaper printed in a damp cellar."

He laughed.

"Collectors will pay fancy prices for copies of that same little siege newspaper, at auctions yet to be."

"I've thought of that," she confessed. "But, oh! I could make it so much more spicy if you'd only give me a freer hand."

His hazel eyes had a smile in them. "I know you think me an editorial martinet."

"You blue-pencil out of my poor paragraphs everything that's interesting."

"No personalities shall be published in a paper I control."

"The Reading Public adore personalities and puerilities."

"They can go to the Daily Whale for them, then."

"Isn't that rather a personal remark?"

"Let me say that if you are occasionally personal, you are never, under any circumstances, anything but clever."

"Thank you. But, oh! the difference between what I am and what I aspired to be!"

"And, ah! the difference between what I have done and what I meant to do!" he said.

Her black eyes flashed. "You have never really felt it. Achievement with you has never hit below the mark. You, of all men living, are least fitted to enter into the rueful regrets and dismal disillusions of a Hannah Wrynche."

"Hannah Wrynche, who is content to do a woman's work and fill a woman's place; Hannah Wrynche, who has atoned for a moment of ambitious--shall I say imprudence?--splendidly and nobly, has no reason to be rueful or regretful. Don't shake your head. Do you think I don't know what you are doing, day after day, to help and cheer those poor fellows at the Convalescent Hospital?"

Her eyes were full of tears. "You make too much of my poor efforts. You underestimate the effect of praise from you."

"I said very little in the last cipher despatch that got through to Colonel Rickson at Malamye, but what I did say was very much to the purpose, believe me."

She gasped, staring at him with circular eyes of incredulity. "You've mentioned--me--in your despatches. ME?"

"Just so!" he said, and left her groping for the ridiculous little gossamer handkerchief to dry the tears of pride and gratitude that were tumbling down her cheeks.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

XLI

"Clang--clang--clang!"

A man and a girl came back out of Paradise when the Catholic church-bell rang the Angelus. The girl's sweet flushed face had paled at the first three strokes. When the second triple clanged out, her colour came back. She rose from her seat upon a lichened slab of granite in the cool shadow of the great boulder, and bent her lovely head, Beauvayse watching her lips as they moved, soundlessly repeating the Angelic Salutation:

"Ave Maria, gratia plena; Dominus tecum! Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus."

The wonderful simplicity of the Chosen One's reply followed, and the announcement of the Unspeakable Mystery. The little prayer followed, and the rapid signing with the Cross, and she dropped her slight hand from her bosom, and turned her eyes back upon his.

"You remind me of my mother," he told her. "She is Catholic, you know."

"And not you?"

"We fellows, my brothers Levestre and Daltham and myself, were brought up as pillars of the Established Church." His sleepy, grey-green eyes twinkled, his white teeth showed in the laugh. "The girls are of my mother's faith. It was a family agreement. Are you quite sure you have come down to earth again? Because there's such an awful lot I want to say to you that I don't know where to begin."

Though his mouth laughed, his eyes had wistful shadows under them. He had tossed aside his Service felt when she had taken off her hat, and the sunshine, piercing the thick foliage overhead, dappled the scaly trunks of the blue-gum trees, and dripped gold upon the red-brown head and the crisp-waved golden one.

"I am here. I am listening."

She stood before him with meekly drooping eyelids, feeling his ardent gaze like a palpable weight, under which her knees trembled and her whole body swayed. The great boulder rose upon her left hand like a beneficent presence. Delicate ferns and ice-plants sprang from its chinks and crannies. The long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her small, brown-shod feet, some bearing seed-pods, others rows of pink bells, or yellow--a fairy chime. In the damper hollows iris bloomed, and the gold and scarlet sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, and gaily-plumaged finches were sidling on overhanging boughs, or dipping and drinking in the shallows. The wattled starlings whistled to each other, or fought as starlings will. A grey partridge was bathing in the hot dry sand between the reed-beds and the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel were rising at the flies. There was no sound but the running water. The spicy smell of aromatic leaves and the honeyed perfume of a great climbing trumpet-flower made the air languorous with sweetness.

He answered her now.

"You are here, and I am here. And for me that means everything. And I feel that I want nothing more, and, still, such a tremendous lot besides."

He breathed as though he had been running, and his sharply-cut nostrils quivered. His white teeth gleamed under the clipped golden moustache.

Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresistible that in these days of storm, and stress, and hardship and peril, his handsome face was never without its gay, confident smile. His tall, athletic figure, in the neat workmanlike Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards her eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the direct simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her a delicious terror. The perfume of youth and health, of vigour and virility, that exhaled from him, came to her mingled with the scent of the crushed spice-leaves and the perfume of the waxen-belled heaths and the breath of the giant trumpet-flower. She was turning dizzy. She could scarcely stand.

"I--I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the grasses at the foot of the great granite slab and prodded in chinks and crannies for snakes and tarantulas; and when she sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw himself at her feet with a careless, powerful grace, and lay there looking up at her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through the thick dark eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under them, and her little pointed chin.

The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat peeped under the hem of her green cloth skirt; below there was a glimpse of slender, crossed ankles in brown silk hose, and the little brown shoes laced with wide silk ties. She drew off one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed back a straying lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing him murmur in his caressing voice:

"Take off the other glove, too."

She was well aware how beautiful her hands were--small, and slender, and ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled, with little babyish nicks at the wrists, and at the inner edges of the rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails, of the true almond shape. She thought little of her face, though she knew it to be charming; but she ingenuously admired her slender feet, that were quite as pretty without the silk stockings and little brown shoes, and the delicate hands she bared for him now. He looked at them with ardent longing, and said:

"How dear of you to do that, because I asked you! And do you realise that we're here together alone, you and me, for the first time? Nobody saw us steal away but Sister Cleophee, and I've a notion she wouldn't tell, blessed old soul!"

Her eyes smiled.

"You would not call the Mother that?"

"No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of Wales. And a snubbing from the Religious would be rather worse, on the whole, than a snubbing from the Royalty."

"The Princess never snubbed you?"

"Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to hear about it? She had sent away her brougham while the giddy old Dean and Chapter were showing her round St. Paul's. And--acting as Extra Equerry--I'd got instructions to call her a hack conveyance, and--being young and downy, I'd picked H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been bred and born here. You don't even know what a growler is. And in five years' time there won't be one left in London."

"Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. And a growler is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so ignorant...."

"You sweetest!" he burst out passionately. "I wish I knew all that you could teach me!"

He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his arms to clasp her then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying at full length in the grass, leaning upon his elbow, he rested his head upon his hand, and drank her in with thirsty eyes. And that something emanating from him enveloped her, delicately and yet forcefully, constraining and urging and compelling her to meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower came to her in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and the monotonous buzzing of the black honey-bees mingled with the drumming of the crickets, and the flowing of the river, and the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her blood. She leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said in a voice that shook a little:

"Tell me about the snubbing."

"It was High Art. Three words--and I knew I'd behaved like a bounder of the worst--I had to go back and get the other cab, with a broken front window and a cabby...." He chuckled. "I've met red noses enough but you could have seen that chap's glowing through the thickest fog that ever blanketed Ludgate Hill and wrapped the Strand in greasy mystery. Don't move, please!... There's a ray of sunshine touching your head that makes your hair look the colour of a chestnut when the prickly green hull first cracks to let it out. Or ... there's a rose grows on the pergola at home at Foltlebarre Royal, with a coppery sheen on the young leaves.... I wondered why I kept thinking of it as I looked at you. But I know now. And your skin is creamy white like the flower. Oh, if I could only gather the girl-rose and carry it home to the others!"

She was pink as the loveliest La France now.

"You ought not to talk to me in that way."

"Don't I know it?" Beauvayse groaned out. He turned over upon his face in the grass, and lay quite still. A shuddering sigh heaved the strong young shoulders from time to time, and his hands clenched and tore at the grasses, "Don't I know it? Lynette, Lynette!"

She longed to touch the close-cropped golden head. Unseen by him, she stretched out a hand timidly and drew it back again, unsatisfied.

"Lynette, Lynette! I'm paying at this moment for every rotten act of headlong folly I've ever committed in my life, and you're making me!" He caught at a fold of her skirt and drew it to him and hid his face in it, kissing it again and again. It was one of the caresses she had been used herself to offer where she most loved. To find yourself being worshipped instead of worshipping is an experience. She touched the golden head now, as the Mother had often touched her own. He caught the hand.

"No, no!" She grew deadly pale, and shivered. "Please let me go. I--I did not----"

She tried to release the hand. He raised himself, and she started at the warm, quivering pressure of his beautiful mouth, scarcely shaded by the young, wheat-golden moustache, upon her cool, sweet flesh. She snatched her hand away with a faint cry, and sprang to her feet, and her cheeks blazed anew as she turned to go.

"You want to leave me? You would punish me like that--just for a kissed hand?"

He barred her way, taller than herself, though he stood upon the sloping lower level. She had learned always to be true in thought and speech.

"I--don't--like to be touched." She said it without looking at him.

"You put your hand upon my head. Why did you do it if you hate me so?"

"I--don't hate you!"

"I love you! My rose, my dove, my star, my joy! Queen of all the girls that ever I saw or dreamed of, say that you could love me back again!"

"I--must not."

Her bosom heaved. He could see the delicate white throat vibrating with the tumultuous beating of her heart.

"Why not? Nobody has told you anything against me? Nobody has said to you that I have no right to love you?" he demanded.

"No."

"Look at me."

The golden hazel, dark-lashed eyes she shyly turned to his were full of exquisite, melting tenderness. Her lips parted to speak, and closed again. He leaned towards her--hung over her, his own lips irresistibly attracted to those sweetest ones....

"Lord Beauvayse----" she began, and stopped.

He begged:

"Please, not the duffing title, but 'Beauvayse' only. Tell me you love me. Tell me that you'll wait until I'm able to come to you and say: 'My beloved, the way's clear. Be my wife to-morrow!'"

His tone was masterful. His ardent eyes thrilled her. She murmured:

"Beauvayse ...!"

She swayed to him, as a young palm sways before a breeze, and he caught her in his strenuous, young embrace, and held her firmly against him. Her old terrors wakened, and dreadful, unforgettable things stirred in the darkness, where they had lain hidden, and lifted hydra-heads. She cried out wildly, and strove to thrust him from her, but he held her close. There was a shaking among the tangled growths of bush and cactus high up on the opposite bank, and Lynette realised that Beauvayse's arms no longer held her. She leaned back against the boulder, panting and trembling, and saw Beauvayse's revolver glitter in his steady hand, as something came crashing down through the tangled jungle upon the edge of the farther shore, and a heavily-built man in khaki pushed through the shoulder-high growth of reeds, and leaped upon a rock that had a swirl of water round it. It was Saxham.

"Miss Mildare!" called the strong, vibrating voice.

She faltered:

"It--it is Dr. Saxham."

"And what the devil does Dr. Saxham want?" was written in Beauvayse's angry face. But he called out as he lowered his revolver-hand:

"You've had rather an escape of getting shot, Saxham, do you know? You might have been a Boer or a buffalo. Better be more careful next time, if you're anxious to avert accidents."

Saxham was a little like the buffalo as he lowered his head and surveyed the alert, virile young figure and the insolent, high-bred face from under ominously scowling brows. He made no answer; only laid one finger upon the butt of his own revolver, and the slight action fanned Beauvayse's annoyance and resentment to a white-heat, as perhaps Saxham had intended. He sprang upon another boulder that was in the mid-swirl of the current, and spoke again.

"Miss Mildare, I was walking on one of the native paths that have been made in the bush there"--he indicated the bank behind him--"when I heard you cry out. I am here, at your service, to offer you any help or protection that is in my power to give."

Lynette looked at him vaguely. Beauvayse, crimson to the crisp waves upon his forehead and the white collar-line above the edge of his jacket, answered for her.

"Miss Mildare does not require any help or protection other than what I am privileged to place at her disposal. You had better go on with your walk, Doctor. You know the old adage about two being company?"

He laughed, but his voice had quivered with fury, and the hand that held the revolver shook too. And his eyes seemed colourless as water against the furious crimson of his face. Still ignoring him, Saxham said, his own square, pale face turned full upon Lynette, and his vivid blue eyes constraining her:

"Miss Mildare, I am at your commands. Tell me to cross the river and take you back to the ladies of the Convent, or order me to continue my walk. In which case I shall understand that the familiarities of Lord Beauvayse are not unwelcome to you."

"By God ...! You----"

Beauvayse choked, then suddenly remembered where and how to strike. But he waited, and Saxham waited, and still she did not speak.

"Am I to go or stay? Kindly answer, Miss Mildare!"

Beauvayse's eyes were on her. He said to her below his breath:

"Tell him to go!"

She stammered:

"Th--thank you. But--I--I--had rather you went on."

Beauvayse saw his opportunity, and added, with an intolerable smile:

"My 'familiarities,' as you are pleased to term them, being more acceptable to a lady than the attentions of the Dop Doctor."

Saxham started as though an adder had flashed its fangs through his boot. A rush of savage blood darkened his face; his hand quivered near the butt of his revolver, and his eyes blazed murder. But with a frightful effort he controlled himself, lifted his hat slightly to Lynette, turned and leaped back to the stone he had quitted, strode through the reed-beds, and plunged back into the tangled boscage. That he did not continue his walk, but turned back towards the town, was plain, for his retreat could be traced by the shaking of the thick bush and the high grasses through which he forced his way. It did him good to battle even with these vegetable forces, and the hooked thorns that tore his clothes and rent his flesh left nothing like the traces that those few words of dismissal, spoken by a girl's voice, and the hateful taunt that had followed, had left upon his heart.

It was over. Over--over, the brief, sweet season of hope. Nothing was left now but his loyalty to the friend who believed in him. If that man had not stood between Saxham and his despair, Gueldersdorp would have got back her Dop Doctor that night. For the Hospital stores included a cherished case or two of Martell and Kinahan, and all these things were under Saxham's hand.

The heavy footsteps crashed out of hearing. The startled finches settled down again, except at that point, higher up on the opposite bank, to which Beauvayse's attention had first been directed. There the little birds yet hovered like a cloud of butterflies, but, practised scout as Beauvayse was, he paid no heed to their distress. She had declared for him. The Doctor's discomfiture enhanced his triumph. Gad! how like an angry buffalo the fellow was! The sort of beast who would put down his head and charge at a stone wall as confidently as at a mud one. It was a confounded nuisance that he had seen what he had seen. But a man who had eventually cut so poor a figure, had been snubbed so thoroughly and completely, might prefer to hold his tongue. And if he did not, here in Gueldersdorp, while no letters got through, while no news filtered in from the big humming world outside, it would be possible to carry things bravely off for a long time. He had told Bingo, to be sure, about--about Lessie. But Bingo, though he might bluster and barge about dishonourable conduct, would never give away a man who had trusted him. To be sure, it was not quite fair, not altogether square; it was not playing the game as it should be played, to gain her promise as a free man. Should he make a clean breast of it, and tell her the whole wretched story now?

Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender green-and-white, nymph-like figure, against the background of sun-hot, shadow-flecked, lichened stone, looking at him. The rosy light bathed her in its radiance. And as she looked, it seemed to him that something was dawning in that face of hers. He watched it, breathless with the realisation of his dreams, his hopes, his desires. The prize was his. Every other baser memory was drowning within him. It seemed to him that her purity, as he bathed in it, washed him clean of stain. He forgot everything but the secret that those sweet eyes told at last.

"My beloved! I'm not good enough to tie your blessed little shoes, and yet no other man shall ever have you, hold you, call you his own.... Lynette, Lynette! Dear one, isn't there a single kiss? And I might get shot to-morrow."

It was characteristic of him that his brave, gay mouth should laugh even in the utterance of the appeal that melted her. She gave a little sob, and raised her sweet face to his, flushing loveliest rosy red. She lifted her slender arms and laid them about his strong young throat, and kissed him very quietly and purely. He had meant to snatch her to his leaping heart and cover her with eager, passionate caresses. But the strong impulse was quelled. He said, almost with a sob:

"Is this your promise? Does this mean that you belong to me?"

Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered:

"Yes."

He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to know himself her chosen. Ah! why was he not free? Why had Chance and Luck and Fate forced him to play a part like this?

"I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago!" he broke out impulsively. "Half-a-dozen years ago--only you'd have been a mere kid--too young to understand what Love means.... Why, Lynette darling! what is the matter? What have I said that hurt?"

Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank away from him. He drew back, shocked into silence by the sudden, dreadful change in her. Her eyes, curiously dulled and faded, looked at Beauvayse as though they saw not him, but another man, through him and behind him. Her face was peaked and pinched; her supple, youthful figure contracted and bent like that of a woman withered by some wasting sickness, her dainty garments seemed to lose their colouring and their freshness, and hang on her, by some strange illusion wrought by the working of her mind upon his, like sordid rags. Against the splendid riot of life and colour over and under and about her, she looked like some slender sapling ringed and blighted, and ruined by the inexorable worm. For she was remembering the tavern on the veld. She was recalling what had been--realising what must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, and the blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in alarm:

"Lynette dearest! what is the matter? Why do you look at me like that? Lynette!"

She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind, and stared through him and beyond him into the Past. That was all. There was a rustling of leaves and branches higher on the bank, and the sound of thick woollen draperies trailing through grass. The bush on the edge of the cleared space that was about the great boulder was parted by a white, strong hand and a black-sleeved arm, and the Mother-Superior moved out into the open, and came down with those long, swift steps of hers to where they were. Her eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, fastened on the drooping, stricken figure of the girl, read the altered face, and then she turned them on the boy, and they were stern as those of some avenging Angel, and her white wimple, laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands of Sister Tobias, framed a face as white.

"What is the reason of--this? What has passed between you to account for it? Has your mother's son no sense of honour, sir?"

The icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He drew himself to his splendid height, and answered, his brave young eyes boldly meeting the stern eyes that questioned him:

"Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable of dishonourable conduct. The fact is, that I have just asked Miss Mildare to be my wife. And she consents."

A spasm passed over the pale face. So easily they leave us whom we have reared and tended, when the strange hand beckons and the new voice calls. But the Mother-Superior was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew her black nun's robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said calmly, holding out her hand to him:

"You will forgive me if I was unjust, knowing that she is dear to me. And now I shall ask you to leave us. Please tell the Sisters"--from habit she glanced at her worn gold watch--"we shall join them in ten minutes' time."

He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and had laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her passive hand, and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her side lifelessly when he released it. Her face was a mask void of life. He looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand imperiously motioned him away. He expostulated:

"Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, without protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging about."

"If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. But go now."

He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the reed-beds on the foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic figure until it swung round a bend and was lost to sight.

Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the touch Lynette dropped as though she had been shot, and lay among the trodden grasses and the flaunting cowslips face downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from the muffled mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed like a crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that could be seen and the little ears that her clutching, twining fingers sometimes bared and sometimes covered were one burning, shameful red.

"Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn with a very agony of tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and began with gentle strength to untwine those clutching hands from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in one of hers, and passed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silently until a moan, more articulate than the rest, voiced:

"Mother!"

"It is Mother. She holds you; she will not let you go."

The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the rigor lessen. The moaning ceased, and the tortured heart began to leap and strain against her own, as though some invisible hand lashed it with an unseen thong.

There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping of the heart that shook her whole body. And it seemed to the Mother that her own heart wept tears of blood. The hour had come at last, as always she had known it would. The love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette. She knew now the full value of the lost heritage, and realised the glory of the jewel that had been snatched by the brutal hand of a thief. Ah, Lord! the pity of it!

The pity of it! She, the stainless one, could have stripped off her own white robe of virgin purity, had it been possible, to clothe the despoiled young shoulders of Richard's daughter, cowering prostrate under her burden of guiltless shame, crushed by the terrible knowledge that ruined innocence must always pay the penalty, whether the destroyer is punished or goes free.

The penalty! Suppose at the price of a lie from lips that had never lied yet it could be evaded? The Mother's face contracted with a spasm of mental pain. A dull flush mounted to her temples, and died out in olive paleness; her lips folded closely, and her black brows frowned over the sombre grey fires burning in their hollow caves. She rebuked a sinner at that moment, and the culprit was herself.

She, the just mistress and wise ruler of so many Sisters in the religious profession; she, so slow to judge and condemn others, was unsparing in austerity towards herself. She had always recognised her greatest weakness in her love for this adopted daughter that might have been her own if Richard Mildare had not played traitor. She had never once yielded to the clinging of those slight hands about her heart, but she had exacted forfeit from herself, and rigorously. So much for excess of partiality, so much for over-consideration, so much for lack of faith in over-anxiety, so much more of late for the keen mother-jealousy that had quickened in her to anguish at the thought that another would one day usurp her undivided throne, and claim and take the lion's share of the love that had been all hers. Her spiritual director was far too lenient, in her opinion. She was all the more exacting towards herself. What right had a nun to be so bound by an earthly tie? It was defrauding her Saviour and her Spouse to love with such excess of maternal passion the child He had given. Yet she loved on.

She reviewed all her shortcomings, even while the girl's head lay helplessly against her, and the scalding tears that had at last begun to gush from those shut, quivering eyelids wetted her breast. She had esteemed and valued perfect candour above all things. And yet of what concealments had she not been guilty in the shielding of this dearest head?

She had deceived, for Richard's child, Richard's friend, in the deft interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole plausible fabric. She knew that, if necessary, she would deceive again, trailing her wings, fluttering on before, as the golden plover lures the footsteps of the stranger from her nest.

Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt morbid. Even the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend and enter fully into the mental constitution of the Religious. This was a nun, to whom a blur upon the crystal of the soul kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily reception of the Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to her Master and her Lord.

And she had always known, it seemed to her, that this terrible hour would come. When the two young figures had moved away together into the green gloom of the trees, she had felt a premonitory chill that streamed over her whole body like icy water, paralysing and numbing her strength. She had read their secret in their faces, unconscious of her scrutiny, and watched them out of sight, praying, as only such a mother can, that it might not be as she feared. This was her beloved's great hour; she would not have stretched out a finger to delay its coming,--she who had known Love, and could not forget! It might be that in this splendid boy, who was as beautiful as the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard, lay the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white would not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe and veil. And yet--and yet, in Lynette's place she knew that she could never have looked into the face of a rosy, smiling, wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and orange-blossom garland the leering satyr-face of the Past.

Was it wise that another should be made to share that vision? She put that question to herself, looking with great agonised, unseeing eyes over the head that lay upon her bosom, out across the slowly moving water, stained with amber from ironstone beds through which it had wound its way, tinged with ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the sky, from the western horizon to the zenith, and from thence to the serried peaks and frowning bastions of purple-black cloud that lowered in the north, was all orange-crimson now, and the moon, then at the ending of her second quarter, swung like a pale lamp of electrum at the eastward corner of the flaming tent.

"Was it wise?" She seemed to hear her own voice echoing back out of the past. And it said:

"The only just claim to your entire confidence in all that concerns your past life will rest in the hands of the man who may one day be your husband."

The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to her in gusts of intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness. She glanced round and saw it on her right, clasping in its luxuriant embrace a slender young bush that it was killing. The thick, juicy green stems and succulent green leaves, the greedily embracing tendrils and great fleshy-white, hanging flowers revolted her. The creeper seemed the symbolisation of Lust battening upon Innocence.

Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her. From a mossy cranny in a stone a hairy tarantula leaped upon a little lizard that sunned itself, not thinking Death so near. A lightning-quick pounce of the bloated thing with the fierce, bright eyes and the relentless, greedy claws, and the little reptile vanished. She shuddered, thinking of its fate.

The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and the bushes that grew about were ragged and torn with shell and shrapnel-ball. Chips and flinders had been knocked by the same forces from the boulders and the rocks. Amongst the flowers near her shone something bright. It was an unexploded Maxim-shell, a pretty little messenger of Death, girt with bright copper bands and gaily painted. And a ninety-four-pound projectile, exploded, had scattered the shore with its fragments, and doubtless the river-bed was strewn thick with others. You had only to look to see them. Once Lynette's lover knew everything there was to know, the trees and rocks and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns the right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would be marred and broken, scorched and spoiled, like these.

Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, seeing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reticence, this rending of the veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an innocent young head? None. Not the shadow of a claim. She tossed away her former scruples. They sailed from her on the faint hot breeze lightly as thistledown. And now the tear-blurred face was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoarse and weak and trembling, appealed:

"Mother, you are not angry? I never meant to be underhand, or to hide--anything from you."

"No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realise how much had been concealed between the lines that she had read so often. "You did not mean to." The trembling voice went on:

"He never spoke to me as though we were strangers. Never, from the first. And to-day, he----" Her heart's throbbing shook her. The Mother said:

"He has told me what has passed. He said that he had asked you to marry him, and you had--agreed." The bitterness of her wounded love was in her tone.

"I--had forgotten," she panted, "that--until one little careless thing he said brought it all back to me in such a flood. It was like drowning. Then you came, and--and----" The quavering, pitiful voice rose to a cry: "Mother, must I tell him everything?" She cowered down in the enfolding arms. "Mother, Mother, must I tell him?"

A great wave of pity surged out from the deep mother-heart that throbbed against her own. The deep, melodious voice answered with one word:

"No."

Amazement sat on the uplifted, woebegone face of the girl. The sorrowful eyes questioned the Mother's incredulously.

"You mean that you----"

She folded the slight figure to her. Her sorrowful eyes, under their great jetty arches, looked out like stars through a night of storm. Her greyish pallor seemed a thin veil of ashes covering incandescent furnace-fires. She rose up, lifting the slender figure. She said, looking calmly in the face:

"I mean that you are not to tell him. Upon your obedience to me I charge you not to tell him. Upon your love for me I command you--never to tell him! Kiss me, and dry these dear eyes. Put up your hair; a coil is loosened. He is waiting for us! Come!"

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