XLII…

XLII

The tall, soldierly young figure was standing motionless and stiff, as though on guard, on the river-shore beyond the bend. Whatever apprehensions, whatever regrets, whatever fears may have warred within Beauvayse, whatever consciousness may have been his of having taken an irrevocable step, bound to bring disgrace and reproach, sorrow, and repentance upon the innocent as upon the guilty, he showed no sign as he came to meet them, and lifted the Service felt from his golden head, and held out an eager hand for Lynette's. She gave it shyly, and with the thrill of contact Beauvayse's last scruple fled. He turned his beautiful, flushed face and shining eyes upon the Mother, and asked with grave simplicity:

"Ma'am, is not this mine?"

"First tell me, do you know that there is nothing in it?"

Her stern eyes searched his. He laughed and said, as he kissed the slender hand:

"It holds everything for me!"

"Another question. Are you aware that my ward is a Catholic?"

"My wife will be of my mother's faith. I would not have her of any other."

The Mother gave Beauvayse her own hand then, that was marred by many deeds of charity, but still beautiful.

Those two, linked together for a moment in their mutual love of her, made for Lynette a picture never to be forgotten. Then Beauvayse said, in the boyish tone that made the man irresistible:

"You have made me awfully happy!"

"Make her happy," the Mother answered him, with a tremble in her rich, melancholy tones, "and I ask no more."

Her own heart was bleeding, but she drew her black draperies over the wound with a resolute hand. Was not here a Heaven-sent answer to all her prayers for her beloved? she asked herself, as she looked at the girl. Eyes that beamed so, cheeks that burned with as divine a rose, had looked back at Lady Biddy Bawne out of her toilet-glass, upon the night of that Ascot Cup-Day, when Richard had asked her to be his wife. But Richard's eyes had never worn the look of Beauvayse's. Richard's hand had never so trembled, Richard's face had never glowed like this. Surely here was Love, she told herself, as they went back to the place of trodden grass where the tea-making had been.

The Sisters, basket and trestle-laden, were already in the act of departure. The black circle of the dead fire marked where the giant kettle had sung its hospitable song. Little Miss Wiercke and her long-locked organist, the young lady from the Free Library and her mining-engineer, had strolled away townwards, whispering, and arm-in-arm; the Mayor's wife was laying the dust with tears of joy as she trudged back to the Women's Laager beside a husband who pushed a perambulator containing a small boy, who had waked up hungry and wanted supper; the Colonel and Captain Bingo Wrynche had been summoned back to Staff Headquarters, and a pensive little black-eyed lady in tailor-made alpaca and a big grey hat, who was sitting on a tree-stump knocking red ants out of her white umbrella, as those three figures moved out of the shadows of the trees, jumped up and hurried to meet them, prattling:

"I couldn't go without saying a word.... You have been so beset with people all the afternoon that I never got a chance to put my oar in. Dear Reverend Mother, everything has gone off so well. No clergyman will ever preach again about Providence spreading a table in the wilderness without my coming back in memory to to-day. May we walk back together? I am a mass of ants, and mosquito-bitten to a degree, but I don't think I ever enjoyed myself so much. No, Lord Beauvayse, the path is narrow, and I have a perfect dread of puff-adders. Please go on before us with Miss Mildare. No!... Oh, what ...? You haven't ...?"

It was then that Lady Hannah dropped the white umbrella and clapped her hands for joy. Something of mastery and triumph in the young man's face, something in the pale radiance of the girl's, something of the mingled joy and anguish of the pierced maternal heart shining in the Mother's great grey eyes, had conveyed to the exultant little woman that the plant that had thriven upon the arid soil of Gueldersdorp had borne a perfect blossom with a heart of ruby red.

"Oh, you dears! you two beautiful dears! how happy you look!" she crowed. "I must kiss you both!" She did it. "Say that this isn't to be kept secret!" She clasped her tiny hands with exaggerated entreaty. "For the sake of the Gueldersdorp Siege Gazette, and its seven hundred subscribers all perishing for news, tell me I may let the cat out of the bag in my next Weekly Column. Only say that people may know!"

As her black eyes snapped at Beauvayse, and her tiny hands dramatically entreated, he had an instant of hesitation, palpable to one who stood by. In an instant he pulled himself together.

"The whole world may know, as far as I am concerned."

"It is best," said the Mother's soft, melodious voice, "that our world, at least, should know."

"And when--oh, when Is It To Be?" begged Lady Hannah.

Confound the woman! Why could she not let well alone? A sullen anger burned in Beauvayse as he said, and not in the tone of the ardent lover:

"As soon as we can possibly manage it."

The Mother's voice said, coldly and clearly:

"I do not approve of long engagements. If the marriage takes place, it must be soon."

With the consciousness of one who is impelled to take a desperate leap, Beauvayse found himself saying:

"It cannot be too soon."

"Then ... before the Relief?" cried Lady Hannah, and Beauvayse heard himself answering:

"If Lynette agrees?"

The rapture of submission in her look was intoxicating. He reached out his hand and laid it lightly on her shoulder. Then, without another word, they went on together, and the tall, soldierly figure in brown, and the slender shape in the green skirt and little white coat, with the dainty plumed hat crowning the squirrel-coloured hair, were seen in darkening relief against the flaming orange of the sky.

"A Wedding under Fire. Bridal Ceremony in a Beleaguered City," murmured the enthusiastic journalist. Her gold fountain-pen, hanging at her chatelaine, seemed to wriggle like a thing of life, as she imagined herself aiding, planning, assisting at, and finally sitting down to describe the ceremony and the wedding-veil on the little Greek head. She babbled as her quick, bird-like gait carried her along beside the tall, stately-moving figure in the black habit:

"Dear Bridget ... I may call you that for the sake of old days?"

"If you like."

"This must make you very happy. Society mothers of marriageable daughters will tear their transformations from their heads, and dance upon them in despair, when they hear that Beau s'est range. But that I don't hold forth to worldly ears I would enlarge upon the immense social advantages of such a union for that dear child."

"Of course, I am aware that it is an excellent match."

Were her ears so unworldly? The phrase rankled in her conscience like a thorn. And in what respect were those Society mothers less managing than the nun? she asked herself. Could any of them have been more astute, more eager, more bent on hooking the desirable parti for their girls than she had shown herself just now? And was this, again, an unworldly voice whispering to her that the publicity ensured by a paragraph penned by this gossip-loving little lady would fix him even more securely, bind him more strongly, make it even less possible for him to retreat, should he desire it--by burning his boats behind him, so that he had no alternative but to go on? She sickened with loathing of herself. But for her there was no retreat either. Here Lady Hannah helped her unawares. With a side-glance at the noble face beside her, pale olive-hued, worn and faded beyond the age of the woman by her great labours and her greater griefs, the arched black eyebrows sprinkled of late with grey, the eyelids thin over the mobile eyeballs, purpled with lack of sleep and secret, bitter weeping, the close-folded, deeply cut, eloquent mouth withered like a japonica-bloom that lingers on in frost, the strong, salient chin framed in the snowy, starched guimpe, she faltered:

"You don't shy at the notion of the par--the announcement in the Siege Gazette, I mean?..."

"Upon the contrary, I approve of it," said the Mother, and walked on very fast, for the bells of the Catholic Church were ringing for Benediction.

"Is it good-night, or may I come in?" Beauvayse whispered to Lynette in the porch.

She dipped her slender fingers in the little holy-water font beside the door, and held them out to him.

"Come in," she answered, and held white, wet fingers out to him. He touched them with a puzzled smile.

"Am I to----? Ah, I remember!"

Their eyes met, and the golden radiance in hers passed into his blood. He bared his high, fair head as she made the sign of the Cross, and followed her in and up the nave as Father Wix, in purple Lenten stole over the snowy cotta starched and ironed by Sister Tobias's capable hands, began to intone the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. The Sisters were already in their places--a double row of black-draped figures, the Mother at the end of the first row, Lady Hannah in the chair beside her, where Lynette had always sat until now. It was not without a pang that the one saw her place usurped by a stranger; it was piercing pain to the other to feel the strange presence at her side. But something had already come between these two, dividing them. Something invisible, impalpable as air, but nevertheless thrusting them apart with a force that might not be resisted.

Only the elder of the two as yet knew clearly what it meant. The younger was too dizzy with her first heady draught from the cup of joy, held to her lips by the strong, beautifully-shaped brown hand that rested on Beauvayse's knee as he sat, or propped up Beauvayse's chin as he knelt, stiff as a young crusader on a monument, beside her. But the Mother knew. Would not the God Who had been justly offended in her, His vowed servant, that day, exact to the last tittle the penalty? She knew He would.

Rosary ended, the thin, kind-eyed little elderly priest preached, taking for the text of his discourse the Introit from the Office of Quinquagesima.

"Esto mihi in Deum protectorum, et in locum refugii, ut salvum me facias."

"Be Thou unto me a God, a protector, and a place of refuge, to save me: for Thou art my strength...."

Then the O Salutaris was sung, and followed by the Litany of the Holy Name.

The church was crowded. A Catholic congregation is always devout, but these people, well-dressed or ill-dressed, prosperous or poor, pale-faced and hollow-eyed every one, joined in the office with passion. The responses came like the beating of one wave of human anguish upon the Rock of Ages.

"Have mercy on us!"

Hungry, they cried to One Who had hungered. Sinking with weariness, they appealed to One Who had known labours, faintings, agonies, and desolations.

"Have mercy on us!"

He had drunk of Death for them, had been buried and had risen again.

Death was all about them. They could hear the beating of his wings, could see the red sweep of his blood-wet, dripping scythe. And they prayed as they had never prayed before these things befell:

"Have mercy on us!"

They sang the Tantum Ergo, and the cloud of incense rose from the censer in the priest's hand. Then, at the thin, sweet tinkle of the bell, and the first white gleam of the Unspeakable Mystery upheld by the servant of the Altar, the heads bowed and sank as when a sudden wind sweeps over a field of ripened corn. Only one or two remained unmoved, one of these a man's head, young and crisply-waved, and golden....

And then came the orderly crowding to the door, and they were outside under the great violet sky, throbbing with splendid stars, breathing the tainted air that came from the laagers and the trenches. But oh, was there ever a sweeter night, following upon a sweeter day?

Beauvayse's hand found and pressed Lynette's. She looked up and saw his eyes shining in the starlight. He looked down and saw the Convent lily transformed into a very rose of womanhood.

"I am on duty at Staff Bombproof South to-night. What I would give to be free to walk home with you!"

Lady Hannah's jangling laugh came in.

"Haven't you had the whole day? Greedy, unconscionable young man! Say good-night to her, and be off and get some food into you. Don't say you haven't any appetite. I am hungry enough to be interested even in minced mule and spatch-cocked locusts, after all this. Good-night! I must kiss you again, child! I hope you don't mind?"

Lynette gave her cheek, asking:

"Where is the Mother?"

The voice of Sister Tobias answered out of the purplish darkness:

"She has gone on with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophee, dearie. She is going to sleep at the Convent with them, and I was to give you her love, and say good-night."

Say good-night! On this of all nights was Lynette to be dismissed without even the Mother's kiss? She gave back Beauvayse's parting hand-pressure almost mechanically. Then she heard his voice, close at her ear, say pantingly:

"No one will see.... Please, dearest!"

She turned her head, and their lips met under cover of the pansy-coloured darkness.... Then he was gone with Lady Hannah, and Lynette was walking home to the Convent bombproof, explaining to the astonished Sisters that the Mother knew; that the Mother approved of her engagement to Lord Beauvayse; and that they would probably be married very soon. Before the Relief ...

"'Before the Relief.' Well, no one but Our Lord knows when that's to be.... And so you're very happy, are you, dearie?"

Even as she gave her shy assent in answer to Sister Tobias's question, its commonplace homeliness, like the feeling of the thick dust and the scattered debris underfoot, brought back Lynette for a moment out of the golden, diamond-dusted, pearl-gemmed dream-world in which she had been straying, to wonder, Was she really very happy?

She asked herself the question sitting with the Sisters at their little scanty supper. She asked herself as she knelt with them in prayer, as she lay in bed, the Mother's place vacant beside her--Was she happy after all?

She had drunk sweetness, but there had been a tang of something in the cup that cloyed the palate and sickened the soul. She had learned the love of man, and in a measure it had cast out fear, that had been her earlier lesson.

To be held and taken and made his completely, what must it be like? She glowed in the darkness at the thought. And then the recollection of a ruthless strength that had rent away the veil of innocence from a woman-child surged back upon her.

Just think. Suppose you laid your hand in the warm, strong clasp that thrilled delight to every nerve, and set your heart beating, beating, and, drawn by the shining grey-green jewel-eyes and the mysterious, wooing smile upon the beautiful lips, and the coaxing, caressing tones of the voice that so allured, you gave up all else that had been so dear, and went away with him? What then? Suppose----

Suppose the smiling face of Love should turn out to be nothing but a mask hiding the gross and brutal leer of Lust, what then? She saw that other man's dreadful face, painted in hot and living colours upon the darkness. She writhed as if to tear her lips from the savage, furious mouth. She shuddered and grew cold there in the sultry heat. The clasp of the protecting mother-arms might have driven away her terror, but she was alone. It would have been sweet to be alone that night if she had been happy.

Why had the Mother shunned her? She knew that she had. Why had she felt, even with the glamour of his presence about her, and the music of his voice in her ears, that all was not well?

Why, even with the lifting of her burden, in the unutterable relief of hearing, from the lips that had been her law, that her dreadful secret need never be revealed, had she felt consternation and alarm? The words were written in fiery letters, on the murky dark of the bombproof, where the tiny lamp that had hung before the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel now burned, a twinkling red star, before the silver Crucifix that hung upon the east wall.

"He is not to be told. I command you never to tell him!"

The doubt germinated and presently pushed through a little spear. Had those lips given right counsel or wrong? Ought he to be told? Was it dishonest, was it traitorous, to hide the truth? And yet, what are the lives of even the upright, and clean, and continent among men, compared with the life of a girl bred as she had been? The sin had not been hers. She, the victim, was blameless. And yet, and yet ...

To this girl, who had learned to see the Face of Christ and of His Mother reflected in one human face that had smiled down upon her, waking in the little white bed in the Convent infirmary from the long, recuperating sleep that turns the tide of brain-fever, the thought that a shadow of deceit could mar its earnest, candid purity was torture. Months back they had said to her--the lips that had given her the first kiss she had received since a dying woman's cold mouth touched the sleeping face of a yellow-haired baby held to her in a strong man's shaking hands, as the trek-waggon rolled and rumbled over the veld:

"The man who may one day be your husband will have the right to know."

It was a different voice to the one that had commanded, "You are never to tell him!" Lynette lay listening to those two voices until the alarm-clock belled and the Sisters rose at midnight for matins. Then she lay listening to the soft murmur of voices in the dark, as the red lamp glimmered before the silver Christ upon the wall. The nuns needed no light, knowing the office by heart:

"Delicta quis intelligit? ab occultis meis munda me, et ab alienis parce servo tuo"--"Who can comprehend what sin is? Cleanse me from my hidden sins, and from those of others save Thy servant."

The antiphon followed the Gloria, and then the soft womanly voices chanted the twenty-third Psalm:

"Quis ascendit in montem Domini?"--"Who shall ascend to the Mount of the Lord, and who shall dwell in His holy Sanctuary? Those who do no ill and are pure.... Who do not give their heart to vain desires, or deceive their neighbour with false oaths."

Or deceive ... with false oaths. To marry a man, letting him think you ... something you were not ... did not that amount to deceiving by a false oath?

Lynette lay very still. The last "Hail, Mary!" over, the Sisters returned silently to bed. Wire mattresses creaked under superimposed weight. Long breaths of wakefulness changed into the even breathing of slumber. The only one who snored was Sister Tobias, a confirmed nasal soloist, whose customary cornet-solo was strangely missing. Was Sister Tobias lying awake and remembering too?

Sister Tobias was the only other person in the Convent besides the Mother, who knew. She had helped her faithfully and tenderly to nurse Lynette through the long illness that had followed the finding of that lost lamb upon the veld. She was a homely creature of saintly virtues, the Mother's staff and right hand. And it was she who had asked Lynette if she was happy?

Somebody was moving. The grey light of dawn was filtering down the drain-pipe ventilators and through the chinks in the tarpaulins overhead. A formless pale figure came swiftly to Lynette's bedside. She guessed who it must be. She sat up wide awake, and with her heart beating wildly in her throat.

"Dearie!" The whisper was Sister Tobias's. She could make out the glimmer of the white, plain nightcap framing the narrow face with the long, sagacious nose and wise, kindly, patient eyes. "Are you awake, dearie?"

"Yes," Lynette whispered back, shuddering. The dry, warm, hard hand felt about for her cold one, and found and took it. Lips came close to her ear, and breathed:

"Dearie, this grand young gentleman you're engaged to be married to ..."

"Yes?"

"Has he been told? Does he know?"

The long, plain face was close to Lynette's. In the greying light she could see it clearly. Her heart beat in heavy, sickening thuds. Her teeth chattered, and whole body shook as if with ague, as she faltered:

"The Mother says--he is not to be told."

There was a dead silence. It was as if an iron shutter had suddenly been pulled down and clamped home between them. Then Sister Tobias said in a tone devoid of all expression:

"The Mother knows best, dearie, of course. Lie down and go to sleep."

Then silence settled back upon the Convent bombproof, but sleep did not come to everybody there.

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XLIII

The Mother was kneeling, as she had knelt the whole night through, before the dismantled altar in the battered little chapel of the Convent, with the big white stars looking down upon her through the gaps in the shell-torn roof. When it was the matin-hour she rose and rang the bell. Matins over, she still knelt on. When it was broad day she broke her fast with the Sisters, and went about the business of the day calmly, collectedly, capably as ever. Only her face was white and drawn, and great violet circles were about her great tragical grey eyes.

"The blessed Saint she is!" whispered the nuns one to the other.

If she had heard them, it would have added yet another iron point to the merciless scourge of her self-scorn.

A Saint, in that stained garment! What tears of bitterness had fallen that night upon the shameful blots that marred its whiteness! But for Richard's child, even though she herself should become a castaway, she must go on to the end. All the chivalry in her rose in arms to defend the young, shame-burdened, blameless head.

Ah! if she had known?...

Cold, light, cruel eyes had watched from across the river that day as her tall, imposing figure, side by side with the slender, more lightly-clad one, moved between the mimosa-bushes and round the river-bend. When the two were fairly out of sight, the jungle of tree-fern and cactus had rustled and cracked. Then the burly, thickset, powerful figure of a bearded man pushed through, traversed the reed-beds, and, leaping from boulder to boulder, crossed the river. Before long the man was standing on the patch of trodden grass and flowers in the lee of the great boulder, shutting up a little single-barrelled, brass-mounted field-glass that had served him excellently well.

He was Bough, alias Van Busch, otherwise the man who had come in through the enemy's lines as a runner from Diamond Town, bringing the letter from a hypothetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist. His light eyes, that were set flat in their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked about and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. Van Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The daintiness of the little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly than anything else, that the Kid had become a lady.

For it was the girl, sure. No error about that little white face of hers, with the pointed chin, and the topaz-coloured eyes, and the reddish hair. The glass had brought her near enough to make that quite certain. He had been too far off to hear a word, but he had made out what had been going on very well. First, she had been giddying with the tall young English swell, drawing him on while he seemed courting her, as all women knew how to, and then the tall Sister of Mercy had come and rowed her; and she had cried, thrown down there among the grass and flowers, exactly as if somebody had beaten her with a sjambok to cure her of the G. D.'d obstinacy that had to be thrashed out of women, if you would have them get to heel when you chose it, or come at your call when you chose again.

Suppose he chose again. When a man with brains in his holy head once set them to work, there were few things he could not do. He could scare others off his property, for certain. He could exercise upon the girl herself the unlimited power of Fear. He must lie doggo because of the Doctor. It was a thundering queer chance the Doctor turning up in this place. And as one of the bosses, helping to run the show, and powerful enough to pay off old scores, if he should chance to recognise in the densely bearded face of the man from Diamond Town the features of the Principal Witness in the once-famous Old Bailey Criminal Case: "The Crown v. Saxham."

Bough would lie low, and watch, and wait, and then spring, as the tarantula springs. He had cleverly blurred all trails leading back to the tavern on the veld, and he knew enough of girls and women to believe that this girl had kept secret what had happened there. He would pick up with her, anyway, and offer to marry her and make an honest girl of her. If she had a snivelling fancy for the dandy swell who had made love to her and kissed her, he would threaten to tell the fellow the truth unless she gave him up. Or he would blow on her to the nuns she lived with, and they would have nothing more to do with her.

Voor den donder! suppose they knew already? The plan wanted careful working out. A false step, and Gueldersdorp might become unhealthy for the man who had brought the letter from Diamond Town to oblige Mrs. Casey.

Suppose the spoor that led back to the tavern on the veld and the grave by the Little Kopje, not as well hidden as Bough had thought, those jewels and securities and the one thousand seven hundred pounds cash might get an honest man into trouble yet, even after the lapse of seventeen years. He breathed heavily, and the pupils of his strange light eyes dilated, and the sweat rolled off his forehead and cheeks until the skin shone like copper. He had been a reckless, easy-going young chap of twenty-six seventeen years ago. Forty-three years of life had taught him that when you are least expecting them to, buried secrets are sure to resurrect. No, Gueldersdorp was not a healthy place for Bough or for Van Busch! That chattering little paroquet of a woman with the sharp black eyes might use them one day, to the detriment of the philanthropist who had brought in the letter from Diamond Town for Mrs. Casey.

Then the girl!... He grinned in his bushy beard, thinking how thundering scared she would look if she encountered him by chance, and recognised him. The beard would not hide him from her eyes. No, no! And he smelled at the little tan glove, that had a slight, clean, delicate perfume about it, and thrust it into his breeches-pocket, and crossed the river again, making his way back to the native town by devious native paths that snaked and twined and twisted through the tangled bush, as he himself made his tortuous progress through the world.

He was in an evil mood, made blacker by the prospect of spending a lonely night without the solace of liquor or woman. For Vice was at a low ebb in Gueldersdorp just now, and the commonest dop was barely obtainable at the price of good champagne, and it would not do for the man from Diamond Town to seem flush of dollars.

Sure, no, that would never do! He must make out with the tobacco he still had left, and the big lump of opium he carried in a tin box in a pocket of the heavy money-belt he wore under his miner's flannel shirt. He groped for the tin box, and got it, and bit off a corner of the sticky brown lump, and ate it as he went along, and his laboured breathing calmed, and the chilly sweat dried upon his copper-burned skin, that had the purplish-black tinge in it that comes of saturation with iodide of potassium. And the pupils of his colourless eyes dwindled to pin-points, and his thick hands ceased to shake. He was not the man he had been; and he had learned the opium-habit from a woman who had managed a joint at Johannesburg, and it grew upon him--the need of the soothing, supporting deadener. He went along now, under the influence of it, scarcely feeling the ground under his heavy leather veldschoens.

He trod on something presently, lying on the path. It moved and whimpered. He struck a match with a steady hand, and held the glimmering blue phosphorus-flame downwards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the Barala, who had crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-gut and a sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The Barala, though they were sorely pinched, like their European fellow-men, did not starve. They earned pay and rations. They helped to keep the enemy out on the south and west sides of the town, and dug most of the trenches--often under fire--and ran the despatches, and sometimes brought in fresh meat. But their slaves, and the native hangers-on at the kraals, suffered horribly. They ate the dogs that had been shot, and the other kind of dog, and fought with the live ones for bones, and picked up empty meat-tins and licked them. They stalked about the town and the native stad like living skeletons. They dropped and died on the dust-heaps they had been rummaging for offal. Soup-kitchens were started later on, when it was found how things were going with them, and hides and bones and heads of horses and mules were boiled down into soup, and they were fed. But a time was to come when even that soup was wanted to keep the life in white people. You saw the famine-stricken black spectres crawling from refuse-pile to refuse-pile, and dying in that pitiless, beautiful sunshine, under the blue, blue February sky, because white people had got to keep on living.

The native girl had been too weak to kill anything. Death had come upon her in the midst of the teeming life of the jungle, and she had fallen down there in her ragged red blanket among the tree-roots that arched and knotted over the path. Her eyes were already rolled up and set. They stared blindly, horribly, out of the ashen-black face. When she heard the steps of a shod person the last spark of life glimmered feebly up in her. Her wild, keen, savage power of scent yet remained. She smelled a white man, and her cracked and swollen lips moved, and a voice like the sound made by the rubbing of dry canes together uttered the word that is the same in Dutch and English:

"Water!"

Bough's pale, flat, scintillating eyes were quite expressionless, but his thick lips parted, and his strong yellow teeth showed in his thick brake of beard. With the caution of one who knows that a single glowing match-end dropped among dry vegetation may cause a devastating conflagration, he blew out the lingering flame, and rolled the little charred stick between his tough-skinned fingers before he threw it down. Then he raised himself up, and stepped over the dying creature, and went upon his way, humming a dance-tune he liked. He was not changed. It was still a joy to him to have feebler beings in his power, and taunt and torture and use them at his will.

He had assumed the skin of the man from Diamond Town in the well-paid service of that bright boy of Brounckers', who had, it may be remembered, a plan.

The plan involved a feint from the eastward, and an attack upon that weakest spot in the girdle of Gueldersdorp's defences, the native stad. The Barala might be incorruptible; the weak spot was the native village, nevertheless. And the business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his to excellent purpose, and storing his retentive memory--for it would not do for a stranger to be caught putting pencil to paper in a town under Martial Law, and bristling with suspicion--with the information indispensable for the putting in effect of young Schenk Eybel's ingenious plan.

The jackal had had to yield his bone to the hungry lion. Still, it was wise to be in good odour with the Republics; that was why Van Busch had taken on the job. He had not been impelled to risk his skin, and get shut up in this stinking, starving hole by anything the sharp-eyed little Englishwoman, so unpleasantly awake at last regarding the genuine aims and real character of the chivalrous Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg, had dropped. Hell, no! That unripe nectarine had been plucked and eaten years ago. And yet how the ripe fruit allured him to-day, seen against its background of dull green leaves, its smooth cheeks glowing under the kisses of the sun.

The swell English officer had kissed them too. As she meant, the sly little devil, slipping away for her bit of fun. Grown a beauty, too, as anybody but a thundering, juicy, damned fool might have known she would! He swore bitterly, thinking what a gold-mine a face and figure like that might have proved to an honest speculator up Johannesburg way.

His case, he thought, was somewhat similar to that of old Baas Jacobs, the Boer who found the first great South African diamond on his farm near Hopetown, and threw it down beside the door, with other pretty shining pebbles, for his child to play with. The child's mother tossed it to Van Niekirk as a worthless gift. Van Niekirk passed it on to J. O'Reilly. When the English Government mineralogist pronounced the stone a diamond, and the Colonial Secretary and the French Consul sent it to the Paris Exhibition, and the Governor of the Colony bought the jewel, old Baas Jacobs must have felt mighty sick. All the world hungering, and admiring, and coveting the beautiful thing he had thrown down on the ground.... Small wonder that to the end of his days he had talked as a robbed man.

The jewel Bough had left on the veld had belonged to him once. Well, it should be his again. He swore that with a blasphemous oath. Thenceforward he proceeded warily, feeling his way, formulating his plan, a human tarantula, evil-eyed and hairy-clawed, calculating the sudden leap upon its prey; an adder coiled, waiting the moment to strike....

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XLIV

Saxham was shooting on the veld, north of the Clayfields, in a ginger-hued dust-wind and a grilling sun. Upon his right showed the raw red ridge of the earthworks, where two ancient seven-pounders were entrenched in charge of a handful of Cape Police. The pits of the sniping riflemen scarred across the river-bed some fifty yards in advance. Upon his left, some two hundred yards farther north, the recently resurrected ship's gun, twelve feet of honeycombed metal, stamped on the flank "No. 6 Port," and casting solid shot of eighteenth-century pattern, projected a long black nose from Fort Ellerslie, and every time the venerable weapon went off without bursting, the Town Guards occupying the Fort and manning the eastern entrenchments raised a cheer.

Saxham, emptying and filling the magazine with cool, methodical regularity, kept changing his position with a restlessness and recklessness puzzling alike to friends and foes. Now he aimed and fired, lying "doggo" behind his favourite stone, while bullets from the enemy's trenches flattened themselves upon it, or buried themselves harmlessly in the dry hot soil. Now he moved from cover, and shot squatting on his heels, or sprawled lizard-like in the open, courting the King of Terrors with a calm indifference that was commented upon by those who witnessed it according to their lights.

"Begob!" said Kildare, ex-driver of Engine 123, who, with the Cardiff man, his stoker of old, was doing duty at Fort Ellerslie vice two Town Guardsmen permanently resting, "'tis a great perfawrumance the Doc is afther givin' as this day!" He coolly borrowed the gunner's sighting-glasses, and, with his keen eyes glued to them and his ragged elbows propped on the Fort parapet, he scanned the distant solitary figure, dropping the words out slowly one by one. "Twice have I seen the fur fly off av' wan av' thim hairy baboons av' Boers since he starrtud, an' supposin' the air a taste thicker, 'tis punched wid bullet-holes we'd be seem' ut all round 'um, the same as a young lady in the sky-in-terrific dhressmakin' line would be afther jabbin' out the pattern av' a shoot av' clothes."

"And look you now, if the man is not lighting a pipe," objected the Cardiff stoker, whose religious tendencies were greatly fostered by the surroundings and conditions of siege life. "Sitting on a stone, with the rifle between his knees and the match between his two hands, as if the teffel was got tired of waiting, and had curled up and gone to sleep." The speaker sucked in his breath and solemnly shook his head, adding: "It is a temptation of the Tivine Providence, so it is!"

"Sorra a timpt," rejoined Kildare, reluctantly surrendering the glasses to the gunner, a grey ex-sergeant of R.F.A., "sorra a timpt, knowin', as the Docthur knows, that do what he will and thry as he may, no bullut will do more than graze the hide av him, or sing in his ear."

"And how will he know that, maybe you would be telling?" demanded the Cardiff stoker incredulously.

"I seen his face," said Kildare, jerking a blackened thumb towards the gunner's sighting-glasses, "minnits back through thim little jiggers, an' to man or mortal that's as sick wid the hate av Life, an' as sharp-set with the hunger for Death as the Docthur is this day, no harrum will come. 'Tis quare, but thrue."

"I've 'ad a try at several kinds of 'ungers," said the R.E. Reserve man, who acted as gunner's mate. "There's the 'unger for glory, combined with a smart uniform wot'll make the gals stare, as drives a man to 'list. There's the 'unger for kisses an' canoodlin' wot makes yer want to please the gals. There's the 'unger for revenge, wot drives yer to bash in a bloke's face, and loses you yer stripes if 'e 'appens to be your Corp'ril. Then there's the 'unger for gettin' under cover when you're bein' sniped, an' the 'unger for blood, when you've got the Hafridis, or the Fuzzies, or the Dutchies, at close quarters, and the bay'nits are flickerin' in an' out of the dirty caliker shirts or the dirty greatcoats like Jimmy O! There's the 'unger for freedom and fresh hair when you're shut up in a filthy mud cattle-pound like this 'ere Fort, or a stinkin' trench, with a 'andful of straw to set on by day an' a ragged blanket to kip in by nights. But the 'unger to die is a 'unger I ain't acquainted with. I'm for livin' myself."

"I was hungry when you began to jaw," snarled the man who had been clerk to the County Court. His lips were black and cracking with fever, and his teeth chattered despite the fierce sunshine that baked the red clay parapet against which he leaned his thin back. "I'm hungrier now, and thirsty as well. Give the bucket over here." He drank of the thick, yellowish, boiled water eagerly and yet with disgust, spilling the liquid on his tattered clothing through the shaking of his wasted hands. Then he turned to the wall, and lay down sullenly, scowling at the lantern-jawed sympathiser who tried to thrust a rolled-up coat under his aching head.

"They'll be bringin' us our foddher at twelve av the clock," said Kildare, with a twinkle of inextinguishable humour in his hollow eyes. "Shuperannuated cavalry mount stuped in warrum kettle-gravy, wid a block av baked sawdust for aich man that can get ut down. 'Tis an insult to the mimory av the boiled bacon an' greens I would be aiting this day at Carricknavore, to say nothin' av' the porther an' whisky that would be washing ut down. Lashin's and lavin's there 'ud be for ivery wan, an' what was over, me fadher--God be good to the ould boy alive or dead!--would be disthributin' amongst the poor forninst the dure----"

"Beg pardon, sir." Another of the famine-bitten, ragged little garrison addressed the question to the officer in charge of the Fort battery, as he stepped down from the lookout with his field-glass in his hand. "Can you tell us the difference of time between South Africa and England?"

"Two hours at Capetown. I'm not quite sure about the difference at Gueldersdorp." The Lieutenant went over to the ancient smooth-bore, and conferred with the gunners standing at her breech. The winches groaned, the heavy mass of metal tilted on the improvised mounting, as the man to whom the Lieutenant had replied said, with a quaver of longing in his voice:

"'Two hours! My God, suppose it only took that time to get home!"

"It 'ud be a sight easier to 'ang on 'ere," said the R.E. Reserve man who acted as gunner's mate, "if there was such a thing as a plug o' baccy to be 'ad. Wot gives me the reg'lar sick is to see them well-fed Dutchies chawin' an' blowin', blowin' an' chawin', from mornin' till night----" He spat disgustedly.

"When honust men," groaned Kildare, "would swop a year av life for a twist av naygurhead. Wirra-wirra!"

There was a dry and mirthless laugh, showing teeth, white or discoloured, in haggard and bristly faces. Then a short young Corporal, who had been leaning back in an angle of the earthwork, hugging his sharp knees and staring at nothing in particular with pale-coloured, ugly, honest eyes, grew painfully crimson through his crust of sun-tan and grime, and said something that made the lean bodies in ragged, filthy tan-cord and dilapidated khaki, or torn and muddy tweed, slew round upon the unclean straw on which they squatted. All eyes, were they hunger-dull or fever-bright, sought the Corporal's face.

"Dessay you'll think me a greedy 'ound," said the Corporal, with a painful effort that set the prominent Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking, "when you tyke in wot I've got to s'y. It makes me want to git into me own pocket and 'ide, to 'ave to tell it. For me an' you, we've shared an' shared alike, wotever we 'ad, while we 'ad anythink--except in one partic'lar." The Adam's apple jumped up and down as he gulped. He was burning crimson now to the roots of his ragged, light-brown hair, and the tips of his flat-rimmed, jutting ears, and the patch of thin bare chest that showed where his coarse grey back shirt was unbuttoned at the neck.

All those eyes, feverishly bright or sickly dull, watched him as he put his hand into the bulging breast-pocket, and slowly fished out a shining brown briar-root with a stem unchewed as yet by any smoker.

"Twig this 'ere noo pipe. It was sent me by a--by a friend, along of a packet of 'Oneydew, for a--for a kind o' birthday present." His voice wobbled strangely; there was scalding water dammed up behind his ugly honest eyes. "She--she bin an' opened the packet and filled the pipe, an' I shared out the 'Oneydew in the trenches as far as it went, but I bin an' kep' the pipe, sayin' to myself I'd smoke it when she lighted it wiv 'er own 'ands, an' not--not before. Next day we"--the Adam's apple went up and down again--"we 'ad words, an' parted. I--I never set eyes on 'er dial since."

The voice of W. Keyse ended in an odd kind of squeak. Nobody looked at him as he bit his thin lips furiously, and blinked the unmanly tears away. Then he went on: "It's--it's near on two months I bin lookin' for 'er. She--she--sometimes I think she's made a way out of the lines after another bloke--a kind o' Dutchy spy 'oo was a pal of 'ers, or--or else she's dead. There's times I've dreamed I seen 'er dead!" His voice bounded up in that queer squeak again. The word "dead" was wrung out of him like a long-fanged double molar. His lips were drawn awry in a grimace of anguish, and the pipe he held shook in his gaunt and grimy hand, so perilously that half a dozen other hands, as gaunt and even grimier, shot out as by a single impulse to save it from falling. "Tyke it an' smoke it between you," said W. Keyse, and the Adam's apple jerked again as he gulped. "But read the writin' on the bit o' pyper first, and mind you--mind you give it back." He resigned the treasure, and turned his face away.

"Blessed Mary!" came in the accent of Kildare, breaking the silence, "let me hould ut in me han's!"

"Spell out the screeve," ordered the R.E. Reserve man imperiously.

The Town Guard who had questioned the officer about the difference of time, deciphered the blotty writing on the slip of paper pinned round the stem of the new briar-root. It ran thus:

"i ope yu wil Engoy this Pip Deer; i Fild it A Purpus with Love and Menney Apey Riturnse. from

"FARE AIR."

"'Is gal?" interrogated the Reserve man.

"His girl," assented the man who had read.

"And he never saw her no more, so he did not!" commented the Cardiff stoker as the pipe travelled from hand to hand to be smelt at, dandled, worshipped by every man in turn. Only the Sergeant-gunner, the grey-headed ex-Royal Field Artilleryman, maintained self-command by dint of looking very hard the other way. Then said Kildare impetuously:

"Take ut back, Corp'ril Keyse. 'Tis little wan poipe av tobacca wud count for betune six starvin' savigees."

"Wot I wants," growled the Reserve man, "is to over-'aul a bacca factory afire, and clap my mouth to 'er chimbley-shaft. So take it back, Corporal. It's no manner o' good to me!"

All the other voices joined in the chorus, and the be-papered pipe was thrust back upon its owner. W. Keyse thanked them soberly, and put the gift of his lost love away.

His pale, unbeautiful eyes had the anguish of despair in them, and the tooth of that sharp death-hunger of which Kildare had spoken was gnawing what he would have termed with simplicity "his inside." For if Emigration Jane were dead, what had Life left for him?

After his first superb assumption of cold indifference had broken down he had sought her, feverishly at first, then doggedly, then with a dizzy sickness of terror and apprehension that made the letters of the type-written casualty-lists posted outside the Staff Headquarters in the Market Square turn apparent somersaults as he strove to read them. This was his punishment, that he should hunger as she had hungered, and still be disappointed, and learn by fellowship in keenest suffering what her pain had been.

The "Fare Air" letters were some comfort. In the trench at night, when fever and rheumatism kept him from the dog-sleep that other men were snatching, he would hear her crying over and over: "Oh, cruel, to break a poor girl's heart!" And when sleep came he would track her through strange places, calling her to come back--to come back and be forgiven. And when he awakened from such dreams there would be tears upon his face. And each day he consulted the lists of killed and wounded, and once had staggered white-lipped to the mortuary-shed to identify a Jane Harris, and found her--oh, with what unutterable relief!--to be a coloured lady who had married a Rifleman. After that he had perked up, and continued his quest for the beloved needle lost in the haystack of Gueldersdorp with renewed belief in the ultimate possibility of finding it. Then, in the middle of one awful night, the darkness of his mental state had been luridly illuminated by the conviction that she had joined Slabberts. Now strange voices whispered always in his ears, saying that she was dead, and urging him to follow by the same dark road over which her trembling feet had stumbled.

He heard those voices as he wrought and sweated with the gun-team at the levers, and the ponderous muzzle-loader rolled back upon the grooves of her improvised mounting. He heard it as they sponged the antique monster out, and fed it with a three-pound bolus of cordite, and a ten-pound ball of ancient pattern with the date of 1770. He heard it now again as he kneeled at a loophole in the parapet, watching Saxham. Those pale, ugly eyes of Billy Keyse were extraordinarily keen. He saw a grimy hand carefully balance an old meat-tin on the top of the parapet of the enemy's western entrenchment. He saw Saxham kneeling, aim and fire, and with the sharp rap of the exploding cartridge came a howl from the owner of the hand, who had not withdrawn it with sufficient quickness.

Half a dozen rifle-muzzles came nosing through the loopholes at that yell. There was quite a little fusillade, and the sharp cracks and flashes in Saxham's vicinity told of the employment of explosive bullets. But not one hit the man. An unkempt Boer head bobbed up, looking for his corpse. The Winchester cracked, and the unkempt head fell forwards, its chin over the edge of the parapet, and stayed there staring until the comrades of its late owner pulled the dead man down by the heels.

There was a cheer from the rifle-pits in the river-bed, and another from Fort Ellerslie, where eager, excited spectators jostled at the loopholes. A minute later the Fort's ancient bow-chaser barked loudly, and pitched a solid shot. The metal spheroid hit the ploughed-up ground some ninety feet in front of the parapet where the bloody head had hung, and over which those explosive bullets had been fired, rose in a cloud of dust, and literally jumped the trench. There was a roar of distant laughter as the ball began to roll, and shaggy heads of curious Boers, inured only to the latest inventions in lethal engineering, bobbed up to watch. More laughter accompanied the progress of the ball. But presently it encountered a mound of earth, behind which certain patriots were taking coffee, and rolled through, and the laughter ceased abruptly. There was a baggage-waggon beyond through which it also rolled, and behind the waggon a plump, contented pony was wallowing in the sand. When the ancient cannon-ball rolled through the pony, the owner spoke of witchcraft. But the patriots who had been sitting behind the mound made no comment then or thenceforward.

At this juncture, and with almost a sensation of pleasure, Saxham saw his old acquaintance Father Noah climb out of his particular trench, briskly for one well stricken in years, and toddle out, laden with rifle, biltong bag, and coffee-can, to his favourite sniping-post, where a bush rose beside a rock, which was shaded by a small group of blue-gums. Soon the smoke of the veteran's pipe rose above his lurking-place, and as Saxham, with a grunt of satisfaction, stretched himself upon his stomach on the hot, sandy earth and pulled the lever, a return bullet sheared a piece off his boot-heel, and painfully jarred his ankle-bone.

No one else was shooting at the big rooinek now. It was understood that Father Noah had a prior claim. And the old man peered hopefully up to see the result of his shot, and rubbed his eyes. For the hulking dief was standing, voor den donder! standing as he emptied his magazine, and the bullets sang about Father Noah as viciously as hornets roused to anger by the stripping of a decayed thatch. The magazine of the repeating-rifle emptied, Saxham calmly refilled it, causing the puzzled patriarch to waste many cartridges in wild shooting at that erect, indifferent mark, and finally to abandon the level-headed caution to which he owed his venerable years, and climb a tree to obtain a better view of the tactics of the enemy.

Saxham laughed as the invisible hornets sang in the air about him. The battered solar helmet he wore was pierced through the hinder brim, and he was bleeding from a bullet-graze upon the knuckle of the second finger of his left hand. Since that Sunday afternoon beside the river, when he learned the madness of his hope and the hopelessness of his madness, he had taken risks like this daily, not in the deliberate desire of death, but as a man consulting Fate negatively.

Father Noah would decide, one way or the other: the issue of their protracted duel should determine things for Saxham. If he sent the old man in, then there was Hope, if the superannuated, short-stocked Martini, with that steady old finger on the trigger, and that sharp old eye at the backsight, ended by accounting for Saxham, then there would be an end to this burning torment for ever. Strangely, he did not believe that he could be killed by any other hand than Father Noah's. Doubtless the long overstrain was telling upon him mentally, though physically the man seemed of wrought steel.

"To-day will settle it, one way or the other. To-day----"

As the thought passed through his mind, and he brought the sights into line with the mark, a scrap of white, fluttering some twenty inches lower down, caught his eye. He dropped the tip of the Winchester's foresight to the bottom of the backsight's V, and knew, almost before the shot rang out, and an ownerless Martini tumbled out of the tree-crotch, that Fate had decided for Saxham.

Then he went back to the Hospital, grim-jawed and inscrutable as ever. A dirty white rag was being hoisted on a pole by one of the relatives of the deceased. Father Noah, with the long ends of his dirty grey beard raggedly bannering in the dust-wind, was still waiting for the bearers of the hastily improvised stretcher of sticks and green reims, as Saxham, having obtained a strip of black cloth with a needle and thread from the Matron, pulled off his jacket and sat down upon the end of the cot-bed in his little room, and neatly tacked a mourning-band upon the upper part of the left sleeve.

It was his nature to absorb himself in whatever work he undertook. As he stitched, the crowded Hospital buzzed about him like a hive, the moans of sick men and the rattling breaths of the dying beat in waves of sound upon his brain, for the long rows of beds stood upon either side of the corridors now, with barely a foot of room between them. In the necessarily open space before the Doctor's door a woman's hurrying footsteps paused, there came a rustling, and a sheet of printed paper folded in half was thrust underneath.

"The Siege Gazette, Doctor," called the Matron's pleasant womanly voice, as, simultaneously with the utterance of Saxham's brief word of thanks, she passed on. In the famine for news that possessed him, as every other human being in the town, the sight of the little badly-printed sheet was welcome, although it could hardly contain anything to satisfy his need. He set the last stitches, fastened and cut the thread, reached down a long arm from the foot of the bed, and took up the paper.

The Latest Information had whiskers. The General Orders announced an issue of paper currency in small amounts, owing to the deplorable shortage of silver, congratulated those N.C.O.'s and men of the Baraland Irregulars who, under Lieutenant Byass, occupying the advanced Nordenfeldt position, had brought so effective a fire to bear upon the enemy's big gun that Meisje had been compelled to abandon her commanding position, and take up her quarters in a spot less advantageous, from the enemy's point of view. A reduction in the Forage ration was hinted at, and a string of Social Jottings followed, rows of asterisks exploding like squibs under every paragraphic utterance of the Gold Pen.

Not for nothing had Captain Bingo dolefully boasted that his wife exuded Journalese from her very finger-ends. Saxham recognised in the style, the very table-Moselle of Fashionable Journalism. So like the genuine article in the shape of the bottle, the topping of gilt-foil, the arrangement of wire and string, that as the stinging foam overflowed the goblet, snapping in iridescent bubbles at the cautious sipper's nose, and evaporated, leaving nothing in particular at the bottom, it was barely possible to believe the vintage other than the genuine article from Fleet Street. Stay.... The French quotations were not enclosed in inverted commas. That let Lady Hannah out.

"Society in Gueldersdorp," she wrote, "bubbles with interested expectation of the public announcement of a matrimonial engagement with which the intimate friends of the happy lovers profess etre aux anges.

* * * * *

"Not for worlds would we draw the veil of delightful mystery completely aside from the secret of two young, charming and popular people. Yet it may be hinted that the elder son of a representative English House and heir of a sixteenth-century Marquisate, who is one of the most gallant and dashing among the many heroic defenders of our beleaguered town, proposes at no very distant date to lead to the altar one of the loveliest among the many lovely girls who grace Gueldersdorp's social functions.

* * * * *

"Both bride-elect and bridegroom-to-be attended High Mass at the Catholic Church on Sunday, when the Rev. Father Wix, in apprising parishioners of the near approach of Lent, caused an irresistible smile to ripple over the faces of his hearers. Toujours perdrix may sate in the long-run, but perpetually to faire maigre is attended with even greater discomfort.

* * * * *

"We have pleasure in announcing the approaching marriage of Lieutenant the Right Hon. Viscount Beauvayse, Grey Hussars, Junior Aide to the Colonel Commanding H.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, to Miss Lynette Bridget-Mary Mildare, ward of the Mother-Superior, Convent of the Holy Way, North Veld Road."

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XLV

Saxham has not been staring at the printed words because they have struck him to the heart with their intelligence, but--or so it seems to him--because they convey nothing. There is an aching pain at the back of his neck, and his mind is curiously dull and sluggish. But after a little he becomes aware that somebody is knocking at his door.

"Who is it----"

The Doctor thinks he utters these words, but in reality he has only made a harsh croaking sound that might mean anything. The door opens and shows the Chaplain standing smiling on the threshold.

The Reverend Julius Fraithorn, no longer a worn and wasted pilgrim stumbling amongst the thorns and sharp stones of the Valley of the Shadow, appears in these days as a perfectly sound and healthy, if rather too narrow-shouldered, young Anglican clergyman, not unbecomingly arrayed, in virtue of his official position under martial authority, in a suit of Service khaki such as Saxham wears, with the black Maltese Cross on the collar and the band of the wide-peaked cap. Yellow puttees conceal the unduly spare proportions of his active legs, and the brown boots upon his long slender feet are dusty, as, indeed, is the rest of him, not with the reddish dust of the veld that powders Saxham to the very eyelashes, and lies in light drifts in every wrinkle of his garments, but with the yellowish dust of the town.

"I rather thought," the Chaplain says, hesitating, as Saxham, without lifting his eyes, turns his square, white face upon the visitor, "that you said 'Come in'?"

"Come in, and shut the door, and sit down," says Saxham heavily and thickly. And Julius does so, and, occupying the single cane-seated chair the bedroom boasts, glows upon Saxham with a sincerity of affection and a simplicity of admiration pleasant to see, and asks in his thin, sweet voice how things are going.

"Things are going," Saxham returns, seeming to wake from a heavy brown study. "You could not put it better or more clearly. Will you smoke?" He pitches a rubber tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the treasured box of matches that comes after, and as one man sparingly fills a well-browned meerschaum, and the other a blackened briar-root, with the weed that grows more rare and precious with every hour of these days of dearth: "That's one of the things that are going quickest after perchloride of mercury, carbolic, and extract of beef. As a fact, we are using formaldehyde as an anaesthetic in minor operations; and violet powder and starch, upon the external use of which I laid an embargo weeks ago, to the great indignation of the younger nurses, are being employed instead of arrowroot. And the more the medical stores diminish, the more the patients come rolling in."

"And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty that crops up, finds in you the man to meet it and overcome it," says the Chaplain fervently. He is disposed to make a hero of this brilliant surgeon who has saved his life, and his enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's painfully-apparent lack of belief in certain vital spiritual truths that are the daily bread of fervent Christian souls. Now that he has become aware of the black band upon the sleeve of the jacket that lies across Saxham's knees, where he sits upon the end of the cot-bed that, with a tiny chest of drawers and a hanging bookshelf laden with volumes and instrument-cases, completes the furnishing of the narrow room, he says, with sympathy in his gentle voice and in the brown eyes that have the soft lustre of a deer's or of a beautiful woman's:

"I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a friend?"

"Lost a friend?"

Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the Chaplain in a strange, dull way, and then forgets him for a minute or more. Baths are not to be had in Gueldersdorp in these days, and though it is not Sunday, when bathing in the river becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes that the Doctor's thick, close-cropped black hair is wet, and that broad streaks of shining moisture are upon his pale, square face, and that he breathes as though he had been running. But perhaps he has been sluicing his head in the washstand basin, thinks the Chaplain. No; the basin has not recently been used. And then it occurs to Julius, but not until he has noticed the starting veins and corded muscles on the backs of the hands that are clenched upon the jacket, that Saxham is suffering.

"I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted himself to show," reflects the man of Religion looking at the man of Medicine. "And the absence of belief in Divine Redemption and a Future State must terribly intensify the pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to comfort him!" And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of sympathy, when the Funeral is to be.

"Perhaps about the midday coffee-drinking," says Saxham heavily, "they would scrape a hole and dump him in. But they're not over fond of risks, and they would probably leave him where he is till nightfall."

Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence and inspiration were his to employ in the healing of the man who has raised himself almost from the dead. But he can only falter something about the inscrutable designs of Providence, and not a sparrow falling to the ground unnoticed. And he expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope that Saxham's friend was prepared to meet his end.

"I don't exactly suppose he expected it. He had a right to count upon pulling off the match," says Saxham, with a dreary shadow of a grin, "because a better man behind a gun than Father Noah you wouldn't easily meet. And Boers are fine shots, as a rule."

"Boers.... A Boer.... I thought you told me you had lost a friend?" Mild astonishment is written on the Chaplain's face. And Saxham looks up, and the other sees that his eyeballs are heavily injected with blood, and that the vivid blue of their irises has strangely faded.

"I gave him every opportunity to be my friend," says the dull voice heavily, "by moving out from cover, even by standing up. But no good. He suspected a ruse, and it worried him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his bandolier at me from a perch of vantage among the branches, and had started to refill it from a fresh package, when I got the chance, and brought him down spreadeagled. And so ends Father Noah."

The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and shudders. A blue line marks itself about his mouth; he is conscious of a qualm of positive nausea as he says:

"You--you don't mean you have been talking of a man you have shot?"

"Just so," assents Saxham, and the sentence that follows is not uttered aloud. "And I wish with all my soul that the man had shot me!"

"And this is War," says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls out his handkerchief and wipes his damp forehead and the beady blue lines about his mouth, and the crack and rattle of rifle-fire sweeping over the veld and through the town, and the ping, ping, ping! of Mauser bullets flattening on the iron gutter-pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof above them seem to answer "Certainly, War."

"Why, you look sick, man," says Saxham the surgeon, whose keen professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's pallor, though the other Saxham is still dazed and blind, and stupefied by the blow that has been dealt him by Lady Hannah's gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and lightly touches one of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting him of a touch of fever, or town-water dysentery. But Julius jerks the wrist away.

"I am perfectly well. It was--the way in which you spoke just now that rather--rather----"

"Revolted you, eh?" says Saxham, again with the dim shadow of a smile. "Revealed me as a brute and a savage. Well, and why not, if I choose to be one or the other, or both? You Churchmen believe in the power of choice, don't you? Prove to a man that there is something worth having in the bowels of the earth, he burrows like a mole and gets it. Let him once see utility in flying, give him time and opportunity, and he will fly. So if it is to his interests to be clean-lived, high-minded, exemplary, he will be all these things to admiration. Or, if he should happen to have lost the gout for virtue, if he determines that Evil shall be his good, he will make it so." He smiled dourly. "Deprive him of a solid reason for living, he can die. Hold up before his dying eyes the prospect of continued existence under hopeful conditions, he takes up his bed and walks, like the moribund paralytic in the Gospel you preach. You're a living proof of the human power of working miracles.... Granted I cut away a tumour from under your breast-bone more skilfully than a certain percentage of surgeons could have done it. But what brought you safely through the operation, healed your wound by the first intention, and set you on your legs again? I'll trouble you to tell me?"

"The mercy and the grace of God," says the Chaplain, "manifested in His unworthy servant through your science and your skill."

"You employ the technical terminology of your profession," Saxham answers, with a shrug.

The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out of his eyes, and his voice is less dull and toneless. He is coming back to his outward self again, even while the inner man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that tremendous broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the gold pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue with the Chaplain. He gets off the bed and slips on his jacket, takes a turn or two across the narrow floor-space, then leans against the distempered wall beside the window, puffing at his jetty briar-root, his muscular arms folded on his great chest, his powerful shoulders bowed, his square, black head thrust forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying Julius as he talks.

"Let me--without rubbing your cloth the wrong way--put the case in mine. Your belief in a Power that my reason tells me is non-existent stimulated your nervous centres, roused and sustained in you the determination without which my science and my skill--and I do not value them lightly, I assure you--would have availed you nothing. You said to yourself, 'If God will it, I shall get over this,' and because you willed it, it was so. Were I a drunkard, an outcast, the very refuse of humanity, tainted with vice to the very centre of my being, I have but to will to be sober and live decently, and while I continue to will it, I shall be what I desire to be."

Saxham's eyes hold Julius's, and challenge them. But no shadow of a Dop Doctor who once reeled the streets of Gueldersdorp rises from those clear brown depths as the speaker ends, "Don't underestimate the power of the Human Will, Fraithorn, for it can remove mountains, and raise the living dead."

"Nor do you venture to deny the Power of the Almighty Hand, Saxham," answers the thin, sweet voice of the Churchman; "because It strewed the myriad worlds in the Dust of the The Infinite, and set the jewelled feathers in the butterfly's wing, and forged the very intellect whose power you misuse in uttering the boast that denies It. Think again. Can you assure me with truth that you have never, in the stress of some great mental or physical crisis, cried to Heaven for help when the struggle was at its worst? Think again, Saxham."

But Saxham obstinately shakes his head, still smiling. As he stands there transfigured by the dark, fierce spirit that has come upon him and possessed him, there is something about the hulking man with the square, black head and the powerful frame, that breathes of that superb and terrible Prince of the Heavenly Hierarchy who fell through a kindred sin, and the priest in Julius shudders, recognising the tremendous power of such a nature as this, whether turned towards Evil or bent to achieve Good. The while, in letters of delicate, keen flame, the denier sees written on the tables of his inward consciousness the utterance that once broke from him, as, racked and tortured in body and in soul, he wrestled with his devil on that unforgettable night.

"O God! if indeed Thou Art, and I must perforce return to live the life of a man amongst men, help me to burst the chains that fetter me. Help me--oh, help me to be free!"

And in his heart he knows that the desperate prayer has been granted. But in this new-born, curious mood of his he will not yield, but combats his own innermost conviction, being, in a strange, perverted way, even prouder of this Owen Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the strength of his own will from among the hideous things that hang suspended and drifting in the primeval sludge, than he ever was of the man before his fall. His is a combative nature, and the great blow he has sustained this day in the wreck and ruin of his raft of hope has left him quivering to the centre of his being with resentment that strikes back.

"Think again yourself. Ask yourself whether the Deity who creates, preserves, blesses, punishes, slays, and raises up, is the natural outcome of man's need of such a Being, or His own desire of Himself? And which conception is the greater--that the God in whom you Churchmen and the millions of lay-folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers believe, should have commanded, 'Let the universe exist,' and have been obeyed, or that the stupendous pigmy Man should have dared to say, 'Let there be God,' and so created Him?"

He laughs jarringly as he knocks the ashes out of the blackened pipe upon the corner of the window-ledge.

"Give credit to the human imagination and the human will for inventing a personage so useful to the Christian Churches as the Devil. For as in the beginning it was necessary for Man to build up Heaven and set his God therein, so, to throw His unimaginable purity and inconceivable perfection into yet more glorious relief, it was required that Hell should be delved out and the objective personality of Satan conceived and kennelled there, and given just sufficient power to pay the marplot where the Divine plans are concerned, and just enough malevolence to find amusement in the occupation. What should we do, where should we be, without our Satanic souffre-douleur--our horned scapegoat, our black puppet, without whose suggestions we should never have erred, whose wooden head we bang when things go wrong with us," says Saxham bitterly. He reaches out a hand for the tobacco-pouch and his glance falls upon the day's issue of the Siege Gazette lying on the parquet linoleum, where it has fallen from his hand a little while ago. He stoops and picks it up, and offers it to Julius.

"There's the announcement of an engagement here----" He smooths the crumpled sheet, holds it under the Chaplain's eye, and points to the two last paragraphs of the "Social Jottings" column. "Take it as an instance.... Did Heaven play the matchmaker here, or has Hell had a finger in the matrimonial pie? Or has the blind and crazy chance that governs this desolate world for me, tipped the balance in favour of one young rake, who may be saved and purified and renewed by such a marriage, while his elder in iniquity is doomed to be wrecked upon it, ruined by it, destroyed through it, damned socially and morally because of it ..."

The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He resents the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as he utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall. And the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He is aflame, from the edge of his collar--a patent clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' emporium in the Strand--to the thin, silky rings of dark hair that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and stutters angrily in saying:

"This is a lie--a monstrous misstatement which shall be withdrawn to-morrow!"

"How do you know that?"

The Chaplain crushes the Siege Gazette into a ball, pitches it into a corner of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and the cane he carries in lieu of the carbine or rifle without which the male laity of Gueldersdorp and a good many of the women do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for the door. He meets there Saxham, whose square face and powerful figure bar his flaming exit.

"It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass."

"What are you going to do?"

The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with the clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers something about unwarrantable liberty and a lady's reputation! And Saxham recognises that Saxham is not the only sufferer from the festering smart of jealousy, and that the vivid red-and-white carnation-tinted beauty of the delicate face in its setting of red-brown hair has grievously disturbed, if it has not altogether dissipated, the pale young Anglican's views of the celibate life.

Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on the same amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy in the Dop Doctor.

He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet intently, as in the old Hospital days he might have studied the expression of a monkey or a guinea-pig, or other organism upon which he was experimenting with some new drug. And the Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity:

"What are you staring at? Do you imagine that the colour of my cloth debars me from--from taking the part of a lady whose name has been dragged before the public? I shall call at the office where this rag is published, and insist upon a contradiction of this--this canard!"

"Don't you know who edits the rag?" asks Saxham raspingly. "Do you suppose that any unauthorised announcement, or statement that has not been officially corroborated would be allowed to pass? The paragraph comes from an authoritative source, you may be sure!"

"I am in a position to disprove it, from whatever source it comes!" cried the Chaplain hotly. "He shall contradict it himself, if there is necessity. He may be a prodigal and a rake--he bears that reputation--but at least he is not a liar and a scoundrel."

"Who?" Saxham's heart is drubbing furiously. A cool, vivifying liquid like ether seems to have passed into his blood. His quiet, set, determined face and masterful, observant eyes oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation, as if these were waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of granite. "Who is not a liar and a scoundrel?"

"I speak of Lord Beauvayse," says the Reverend Julius Fraithorn in the high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. "He is a married man, Saxham; I have incontrovertible testimony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman who was his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape Town. He----"

There is a strange rattling noise in the throat of the man who listens. Julius looks at him, and his own resentment appears, even to himself, as impotent and ridiculous as the anger of a child. If just before it has seemed to him that he has heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking with Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in Saxham's, the face of the primal murderer. And being, as well as a sincere and simple-hearted clergyman, something of a weakling, he is shocked to silence.

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XLVI

An instant, and Saxham's own face looks calmly at the dazed Chaplain, and the curt, brusque voice demands:

"What is this incontrovertible testimony?"

"A letter," says Julius breathlessly, "from a person who saw the entry of the marriage at the Registrar's office where it took place."

"Is anyone else in possession of this information?"

"With the exception of the Registrar and the witnesses of the marriage, up to the middle of last September, when the letter was written, nothing had leaked out. I received the communication by the last mail from England that was delivered at the Hospital before I underwent the operation."

"That was the last mail that got through. Who was your correspondent?"

"One of the senior officiating priests of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street, the London church where I did duty as junior curate."

"Have you kept the letter?"

"It is in my desk at my hotel, with some other correspondence of Father Tatham's. You may see it if you wish."

"I will see it. In the meanwhile, let me have the pith of it. This clergyman--happening to visit a Registrar's office---- Where was the office?"

"At Cookham-on-Thames, where Father Tatham has established a Holiday Rest Home for the benefit of our London working lads"--the Chaplain begins. He is sitting on the end of the bed, weak and worn and exhausted with the emotions that have torn him in the last half-hour. Beads of perspiration thickly stud the high temples, out of which the flushing colour has sunk; his cheeks are pallid and hollow. His eyes have lost their fire; his muscles are flaccidly relaxed; his sloping shoulders stoop; his long, limp hands hang nervelessly at his sides.

"One moment." Saxham glances at the gold chronometer that was a presentation from the students of St. Stephen's years ago. It is rather typical of the man that, even when under stress of his heroic thirst he has pawned the watch for money wherewith to buy whisky, he should have only borrowed upon it such small sums as are easily repaid. He has yet another five minutes to bestow in listening to the Chaplain's story, yet even as he returns the chronometer to its pocket, his quick ear catches the frou-frou of feminine petticoats outside the door. He opens it, frowning. A nurse is standing there with a summons in her face. She delivers her low-toned message, receives a brusque reply, and rustles down the corridor between the long lines of pallets as Saxham draws back his head and shuts the door, and, setting his great shoulders against it, and facing Julius, orders:

"Go on!"

Julius goes on:

"At Roselawn Cottage--a pretty place of the toy-residence description, standing in charming gardens not far from the Holiday Rest Home, lived a lady--an actress very popular in Musical Comedy--who was known to be the mistress of Lord Beauvayse. I need hardly tell you the Father touched on the unpleasant features of the story as delicately as possible----"

"Without doubt. But--get on a little quicker," says Saxham grimly, jerking his head towards the door. "For I am wanted. And don't speak loud, for there are people on the other side there. With regard to this woman--actress, or whatever she may be----?"

"With all her moral laxities," goes on Julius, "Miss Lessie Lavigne----"

"Ah, I know the name," says Saxham sharply. "On with you to the end. 'With all her moral laxities----'"

"Miss Lessie Lavigne is a generous, kindly, charitable young woman," goes on Julius. "And the Holiday Home has benefited largely by her purse. She is known to the Matron; and Father Tatham--having occasion to visit the Registrar's office at Cookham on the 29th of last June, for the purpose of looking up the books, with the Registrar's consent, and satisfying himself of the existence of the entry regarding a marriage between one of our young fellows then at the Home and a girl he very foolishly married when on a hopping excursion in the autumn of the previous year--Father Tatham encountered Miss Lavigne--or Lady Beauvayse, to give her her proper title----"

"In the Registrar's office?"

"In the act of quitting the Registrar's outer office," says the burnt-out Julius in a weary voice, "in the company of Lord Beauvayse, and followed by his valet and a woman who probably were witnesses; for when the Father entered the inner office the register was lying open on the table, the entry of the marriage still wet upon the page."

"And your religious correspondent pried first," says Saxham, with savage irony, "and afterwards tattled?"

"And afterwards, seeing in the Times that Lord Beauvayse was under orders for South Africa, mentioned his accidental discovery when writing to me," says Julius Fraithorn wearily.

"That will do. When can I see the letter at your hotel? The sooner the better," says Saxham, with a curious smile, "for all purposes. Can you walk there with me now? Very well"--as Julius assents--"that is arranged, then."

"What is to be done, Saxham?" Julius stumbles up. The fires that burned in him a few moments ago are quenched; his slack hand trembles irresolutely at his beautiful weak mouth, and his deer-like eyes waver.

"I advise you," says Saxham, "to leave the doing of what is to be done to me." His own blue eyes have so strange a flare in them, and his heavy form seems so alive and instinct with threatening and dangerous possibilities, that Julius falters:

"You believe Lord Beauvayse has been a party to--has wilfully compromised Miss Mildare? You--you mean to remonstrate with him? Do you--do you think that he will listen to a remonstrance?"

"He will find it best in this instance," says Saxham dourly.

"Do not--do not be tempted to use any violence, Saxham," urges the Chaplain nervously, looking at the tense muscles of the grim, square face and the purposeful right hand that hovers near the butt of the Doctor's revolver. "For your own sake as much as for his!"

Saxham's laugh is ugly to hear.

"Do you think that Lord Beauvayse would wind up as top-dog if it came to a struggle between us?"

"It must not come to a struggle, Saxham," says the Chaplain, very pale. "We--we are under Martial Law. He is your superior officer." (Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, holds the honorary rank of Lieutenant in Her Majesty's Army.) "Remember, if Carslow--the man who killed Vickers, of the Pittsburg Trumpeter"--he refers to a grim tragedy of the beginning of the siege--"had not been medically certified insane, they would have taken him out and shot him."

Saxham shrugs his massive shoulders, and with the utter unmelodiousness that distinguishes the performance of a man devoid of a musical ear, whistles a fragment of a little tune. It is often on the lips of another man, and the Doctor has picked it up unconsciously, with one or two other characteristic habits and phrases, and has fallen into the habit of whistling it as he goes doggedly, unwearyingly, upon his ever-widening round of daily duties. It helps him, perhaps, though it gets upon the nerves of other people, making the younger nurses, not unmindful of his arbitrary action in the matter of the violet powder, want to shriek.

"The Military Executive would be perfectly welcome to take me out and shoot me, if first I might be permitted to look in at Staff Bomb proof South, and render Society the distinguished service of ridding it of Lord Beauvayse. Who's there?"

Saxham reopens the door, at which the nurse, now returned, has knocked. The tired but cheerful-faced young woman, in an unstarched cap and apron, and rumpled gown of Galatea cotton-twill, informs the Doctor that they have telephoned up from Staff Bomb proof South Lines, and that the password for the day is "Honour."

"You are going to him now?" asks the Chaplain anxiously and apprehensively.

"Oddly enough, I have been sent for to attend to a shell casualty," says Saxham, picking up and putting on his Service felt, and moving to take down the canvas wallet that is his inseparable companion, from the hook on which it hangs. "Or, rather, Taggart was; and as he has thirty diphtheria cases for tracheotomy at the Children's Hospital, and McFadyen's hands are full at the Refugees' Infirmary, the Major asks if I will take the duty. It's an order, I suppose, couched in a civil way."

He swings the heavy wallet over his shoulders, and picks up his worn hunting-crop.

"And so, let's be moving," he says, his hand upon the door-knob. "Your hotel is on my way. I may need that letter, or I may not. And in any case I prefer to have seen it before I meet the man."

"One moment." The Chaplain speaks with a strained look of anxiety, squeezing a damp white handkerchief into a ball between his palms. "You have taken upon yourself the duty of bringing Lord Beauvayse to book over this--very painful matter.... I should like ... I should wish you to leave the task of enlightening Miss Mildare to me."

"To you. And why?"

Saxham waits for the answer, a heavy figure filling up the doorway, with scowling brows, and sullen eyes that carefully avoid the Chaplain's face.

"Because I--because in inflicting upon her what must necessarily be a--a painful humiliation"--the Rev. Julius clears his throat, and laboriously rolls the damp handkerchief-ball into a sausage--"I wish to convince Miss Mildare that my respect and my--esteem for her have--not diminished."

"And how do you propose to drive this conviction home?"

The Reverend Julius flushes to the ear-tips. The coldness of the questioning voice gives him a nervous shudder. He says with an effort, looking at the thick white, black-fringed lids that bide the Doctor's queer blue eyes:

"By offering Miss Mildare the honourable protection of my name. My views, as regarding the celibacy incumbent upon an anointed servant of the altar, have, since I knew her, undergone a--a change.... And it occurs to me, when she has got over the first shock of hearing that she has been deceived and played with by a person of Lord Beauvayse's lack of principle----"

"That she may be induced to look with favour on the parson's proposal?" comments Saxham with an indifference to the feelings of the person he addresses that is positively savage. The raucous tones flay Julius's sensitive ears, the terrible blue eyes blaze upon him, scorch him. He falters:

"I--I trust my purpose is pure from vulgar self-seeking? I hope my attitude towards Miss Mildare is not unchivalrous--or ungenerous?"

"In manipulating her disadvantage to serve your own interests," says Saxham's terrible voice, "you would undoubtedly be playing a very low-down game."

Julius laughs, shortly and huffily.

"A low-down game!... Ha, ha, ha! You don't mince your words, Doctor!"

"I can phrase my opinion even more plainly, if you desire it," returns Saxham brutally. "To bespatter a rival for the gaining of an advantage by contrast is a Yahoo's trick to which no decent gentleman would stoop."

"At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of being sarcastic, "your 'decent gentleman' would be likely to remember the old adage, 'All's fair in Love and----'"

"Exactly. All is fair," returns Saxham, squaring his dogged jaws at the other, and folding his great arms upon his deep wide chest. "And all shall be, please to understand it. It is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss Mildare should be undeceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the painful duty of opening her eyes will be undertaken by that"--the break before the designation is scathingly contemptuous--"by that--distinguished nobleman himself, and by no other."

"How can you compel the man to give himself away?" demands the Reverend Julius incredulously. Saxham answers, mechanically opening and closing his small, muscular surgeon's hand, and watching the flexions and extensions of the supple fingers with an ugly kind of interest:

"I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the moment. What matters is--your parole of honour that you will never by word, or deed, or sign disclose to Miss Mildare that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged himself to marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonial proposals. Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty to further your own views as may seem good to you. The plan of campaign that I, in your place, should choose might not find favour in your eyes...."

His look bears upon the younger man with intolerable weight, his heavily-shouldered figure seems to swell and fill the room. Julius is clearly conscious of hating his saviour, and the consciousness is acid on his palate as he asks, with a wry smile:

"What would your plan be if you were in my place?"

"To praise where a rival was worthy of praise; to be silent where it would be easy to depreciate; to win her from him, not because of my own greater worth, but in spite of the worst she could know of me. That would, in my opinion, be a conquest worthy of a man."

The pupils of the speaker's flaming blue eyes have dwindled to mere pin-points, a rush of blood has darkened the square pale face, to sink away again and leave it opaquely colourless, as Saxham says with cool distinctness:

"And now, before we leave this room, I must trouble you for that promise--oath, if you feel it would be more in your line of business. I don't possess a copy of the Scriptures, but I think that is a Crucifix you wear upon your watch-chain?"

It is. And when the Reverend Julius has kissed the sacred symbol with shaking lips, and taken the oath as Saxham dictates, his heart tattooing furiously under the baggy khaki jacket, and an angry pulse beating in his thin cheek, Saxham adds, with the flickering shadow of a smile, as he opens the door, and signs to the Chaplain to pass out before him:

"You observe, I have turned the weapons of your profession against you. Exactly as--replying to your question of a moment back with regard to compelling--exactly as I intend to do in the case of Lord Beauvayse!"

He motions to the other to pass out before him, and locks the door upon his stuffy little sanctum whose shelves are piled with a heterogeneous confusion of tubes and bottles, books and instruments, specimens of foodstuffs under the process of analysis for values, and carefully-sealed watch-glasses containing choice cultures of deadly microbes in bouillon, before he leads his way down the long corridor, where narrow pallets, upon which sick men and boys are stretched, range along the walls upon either hand, and the air is heavy with the taint of suppurating wounds, and the hot, sickly breath of fever and malaria.

He walks quickly, his keen blue eyes glancing right and left with the effect of carelessness, yet missing nothing. He stops, and loosens the bandage, and relieves the swollen limb. He delays to kneel a moment beside one low pillow, and turn gently to the light a face that is ghastly, with its bristly beard and glassy, staring eyes, and its pallor that is of the hue of old wax, and lay it gently back again as he beckons to the nurse to bring the screens, and hide the Dead from the sight of the living.

He is in his element; salient and masterful and strong. But the haggard eyes that turn upon him do not shine with gratitude. He has not reached these hearts. They accuse him, quite unjustly, of a liking for cutting and carving. They suspect him, quite correctly, of being in no hurry for the ending of the siege. How should he be, when, these strenuous days once over, he sees nothing before him but the murky blackness of the night out of which he came, from which he has emerged for one brief draught of renewed joy in living before the dark shall close over him again, and wrap him round for ever?

He has suffered horribly of late. But at the worst his work has never failed to bring relief and distraction. Pure loyalty to a man in whom he believes, has been the main-spring of his unflagging strength. He is not liked or popular in any way, though Surgeon-Major Taggart upholds him manfully, and McFadyen is loyal to the old bond. His harshness repels regard, his coldness blights confidence, and so, though he is admired for his dazzling skill in surgery, for his dogged perseverance and unremitting power of application, for his fine horsemanship and iron nerve; he is not regarded with affection.

He is not in the least aware of it, to do him justice, when his rough ironies and his brusque repartees give offence. In the heyday of his London success he has not truckled to Rank, or Influence, or Affluence. The owner of a gouty or a varicose leg has never had the more civil tongue from Saxham that the uneasy limb or its fellow was privileged upon State occasions to wear the Garter. He trod upon corns then, as he treads upon them now, without being aware of it, as he goes upon his way.

Julius goes with him, rent by apprehensions, stealing nervous side-glances at the impassive, opaque-skinned face as Saxham swings along with his powerful, rather lurching gait over the ploughed and littered waste that divides the Hospital from the town beyond it. He speaks once or twice, but Saxham seems not to hear.

The Doctor is listening to a dialogue that is as yet unspoken. He is crushing a resistance that has not yet been made. In imagination his small, strong, muscular hands are gripped about the throat of the man who has lied to her and deceived her; and he is listening with joy to the gurgling, choking efforts to phrase a prayer for mercy, or utter a final defiance; and he sees with grim pleasure how the fine skin blackens under his deadly hold, and how the lazy, beautiful, grey-green eyes, no longer sleepy or defiant, but staring and horribly bloodshot, are already rolling upwards in the death-agony. The primitive savage that is in every man lusts at a juncture such as this, to kill with the bare hands rather than to slay with any weapon known to civilisation.

"Let him look to it how he deals with her! Let him look to it!"

How long it seems since Saxham muttered those words, turning sullenly away to recross the stepping-stones, leaping from boulder to boulder as the river wimpled and laughed in mockery of his clumsy tender of protection and her rejection of it, and Beauvayse's tall figure stood, erect and triumphant, on the flower-starred bank, waiting to recommence his wooing until the intruder should be gone, divining, as Saxham had instinctively known, the hidden passion that rent and tortured him, glowing with the consciousness of secret mastery....

If this meek, thin-blooded young clergyman who walks beside him might have won her, it seems to Saxham that he could have borne it. But that Beauvayse of all others should venture to approach her, presume to rear an image of himself in the shrine of her pure breast; win her from her high aims and lofty ideals with a bold look and a few whispered words, and, having thrown his honourable name into the lap of a light woman as indifferently as a jewelled trinket, should dare to offer Lynette Mildare dishonour, is monstrous, hideous, unbearable....

How comes it that she of all women should be so easily allured, so lightly drawn aside? Was there no baser conquest within reach that this white, virginal, slender saint should become his prey? Shall she be made even as those others of whom she spoke, when the veil of a girlish innocence was drawn aside, and strange and terrible knowledge looked out of those clear eyes, and she said, in answer to his question:

"They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer upon earth. For they are the slaves, and the victims, and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures of men...."

Of men like Beauvayse.

Not only swart and shaggy, or pale and bloated beast-men, or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates, limbed like the gods and fauns of the old Greek sculptors; soft of skin, golden of hair, with sleepy eyes like green jewels, soft persuasive voices with which to pour poisoned words into innocent and guileless ears, and the bold, brave blood of old-time heroes running in their veins, prompting them to the doing of dashing, reckless, gallant deeds, no less than sins of lust and luxury.

Let him look to it, this splendid young soldier with the ancient name, hope of his House, pride of his Regiment. Let him look to it how he has dealt with her, who had no thought or dream but to save others from the fate he destines for her, until his cursed, beautiful face smiled down into her own. For every lying oath he has sworn to her, for every false promise made to the wrecking of her maiden peace, for every kiss those innocent lips have been despoiled of, for every touch of his that has soiled her, for every breath of his that has scorched the white petals of the Convent-reared lily, he shall pay the price.

Silently Saxham registers this oath upon that beloved red-brown head, since he denies its Maker His honour, and the whirling blackness that is within him is rent and cloven, for one blinding instant, by the levin-fires of Hell. He knows thenceforward what he will do, as he walks with the pale Chaplain between the shell-torn houses, and along the littered streets, where men and women and children, thin and haggard and listless with hunger, and the deadly inertia of long confinement, pass and repass as indifferently as though no guns were battering and growling from the low grey hills south and east, and the incessant rattle of rifle-fire were the innocent expenditure of blank cartridge incidental to a sham fight.

They reach the Chaplain's hotel, and go to his room. Saxham waits silently while Julius searches for and finds Father Tatham's letter, takes it and reads it attentively, puts it carefully away in a worn notecase, restores the notecase to the inner pocket of his jacket, and, without a nod or word of farewell, is gone.

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XLVII

To the remarkably complete system of underground wires installed by the Garrison Telephone Corps, Lady Hannah Wrynche, on duty at the Convalescent Hospital that was once the Officers' Club, was, upon the Thursday that saw the publication of the string of paragraphs previously quoted from the Siege Gazette, indebted for what she afterwards described with ruefulness as a "heckled morning."

Once a week the "Social Jottings," bubbling from the effervescent Gold Pen, descended like rain upon the parched soil of drouthy Gueldersdorp. To make gossip where there is none is as difficult as making bricks without clay, or trimming a hat when you are a member of the Wild Birds' Protection Society, and plumage is Fashion's latest cry. Under the circumstances a genuine item of general and public interest was a pearl of price. And yet something had told the little lady that the ruthless Blue Pencil of Supreme Authority would deprive her of the supreme joy of casting it before the readers of the Siege Gazette. She seemed to hear him saying, in the pleasant voice she knew so well:

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

He had said that on Sunday, when she had pleaded for a freer hand. Well, he could hardly call the announcement of an engagement a personality, and, supposing he did, how easy to convince him that it was nothing of the kind!

She dashed off her description of the Convent kettledrum, and added the paragraphs we know of, each one accentuated by an explosion of asterisks, and gave the blotty sheets to Young Evans, who combined in his sole person the offices of sub-editor, engineer, chief-compositor, feeder, and devil.

Young Evans, who, next to the single-cylinder printing-press driven by the little oil-engine that had sustained a shell-casualty at the beginning of the siege, adored Lady Hannah, vanished behind the corrugated partition that separated the office from the printing-room, and presently came back in inky shirt-sleeves with a smear of lubricating-oil upon his forehead, and laid the wet slips upon the Editorial table. Then he went back, and fell to tinkering at his machine. Lady Hannah corrected her proof. When she had done she looked at her wrist-watch. In ten minutes Supreme Authority would descend the ladder, wield the Blue Pencil, and depart. Would he have mercy and not sacrifice? The suspense was torturing.

Then a simple plan occurred to her by which Supreme Authority might be--she dared not use the word "circumvented." "Got round" was even worse; "evaded" sounded nicest. To resist the promptings of her own feminine ingenuity required a greater storage of cold moral force than Lady Hannah desired to possess. She took the editorial scissors, and daintily cut off the three paragraphs from the bottom of the slip.

The thing was done, and the snipped-off paragraphs concealed, as a pair of brown boots, with steel jack-spurs attached, came neatly down the ladder. The Chief gave her his cheery "Good-morning," and congratulated her on looking well. Her cheeks burned and her heart rat-tatted against the hidden paper, as he ran his keen eye down slip after slip, and initialled them for the press. She almost shrieked as he took up the "Social Jottings." The underground office whirled about her as the blue pencil steadily travelled down. Then--he was gone--and the initialled proof lay before her. She had nothing to do but neatly and delicately paste on the bit she had snipped off. This done, she gathered up her various small belongings, swept them into her bag, and went, leaving the passed proof of the "Social Jottings" column waiting for Young Evans with the rest.

In the middle of the night she realised what she had done. But even in a beleaguered town under the sway of Martial Law you cannot hang a lady, or order her out and shoot her for Mutiny and Treason combined. There would be a reprimand; what Bingo pleasantly termed "an official wigging," unless the Blue Pencil could, by any feminine art, be persuaded that it had passed those pars.

But, of course, she would never stoop to such a deception. The ruse she had employed was culpable. The other thing would be infamous. And--he would be sure to see that the end of the proof-slip had been pasted on.

She slept jerkily, rose headachy, and set out for the Convalescent Hospital in that stage of penitence that immediately precedes hysterical breakdown. She experienced a crisis of the nerves upon meeting a man, who, regardless of quite a brisk bombardment that happened to be going on just then, was walking along reading the Siege Gazette. Shirt-sleeved Young Evans had worked until daylight getting the Thursday's issue out. And there was a tremendous run upon copies. Every other person Lady Hannah encountered upon the street seemed to have got one, and to find it unusually interesting. The women especially. None of them were dull, or languid, or dim-eyed this morning. The siege crawl was no longer in evidence. They walked upon springs. Upon the stoep of the Hospital, where the long rows of convalescents were airing, every patient appeared plunged in perusal. Those who had not the paper were waiting, with watering mouths, until those who had would part. A reviving breath seemed to have passed over them, and spots of colour showed in their yellow, haggard faces. They talked and laughed....

Lady Hannah passed in, conscious of an agreeable tingling all down her spine. The hall-porter, a brawny, one-armed ex-Irregular, who had lost what he was wont to term his "flapper" at the outset of hostilities, was too deeply absorbed in spelling out a paragraph of the "Social Jottings" column to salute her. Inside you heard little beyond the crackling of the flimsy sheet, mingled with the comments, exclamations, anticipations, expectations that went off on all sides, met each other, and rebounded, exploding in coruscations of sparks. Something had happened, something was going to happen, after months and months of eventless monotony. It warmed the thin blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their faded appetites like some salt breath from the far-distant sea.

The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial Tokay, be sensed but once in a lifetime, but you can never forget that once. Out of her gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah had spurted a little ink upon the famished Gueldersdorpians, and their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine must be paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even as she tied on a bibbed apron, and superintended the serving and distribution of the patients' one-o'clock dinner.

Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two slivered carrots to the gallon, formed the menu to-day. There was no more white bread, and a villainous bannock of crushed oats had to be soaked in your porringer if you had no strength to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed, and upon this the now apologetic but smiling porter, with the intelligence that her ladyship was wanted at the wall-jigger in the Matron's room.

The ring-up came from Hotchkiss Outpost North, where Captain Bingo was this day on duty, via the Staff Headquarter office in Market Square, and the voice that filtered to the ear of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of her spouse, and tinged with a gruffness as unusual as ominous.

"Hullo. Is that you?"

"Qu'il ne vous en deplaise!"

Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside:

"And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber French through a telephone?"

"A Frenchwoman would, possibly."

"Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what made you shove such a whacking bouncer into the Siege Gazette?"

"Please put that into English." She underwent a quaking at the heart.

"I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare filly is all my eye."

"It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully-authorised fact."

"Rot!"

"Paix et peu! Say rot, if it pleases you!"

"You'll have to withdraw and apologise."

"I can't make out what you're saying."

"It will end in your eating humble-pie. Can you hear that?"

"I can hear that you are in a bearish temper."

"I've reason to be. If a man had written what you have I should punch his head."

"Say that again!"

"I say, if a stranger of the kickable sex had told such a pack of infernal----"

Click!

Lady Hannah hung up the receiver, blew a contemptuous kiss into the gape of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to go. There was another ring-up as she reached the door.

"Hallo. Are you the Convalescent Hospital?"

"Yes. Who are you?"

"Staff Bombproof South. I want to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."

"I'm here, Lord Beauvayse."

"I say, I'm going to rag you frightfully. Why on earth have you given us away in that beastly paper?"

"Whom do you mean by 'us'?"

"Well, me and Miss Mildare."

"Didn't you tell me on Sunday that you were engaged?" she demanded indignantly.

"I did." The answer came back haltingly.

"And that you didn't care who knew it?"

"Fact."

"And that you two were going to be married as soon as you could pull off the event?"

"Yes." The voice was palpably embarrassed. "But----"

"Well?"

"But--things you don't mind people knowing look beastly in cold print."

"If I were in your shoes I should think they looked beautiful."

Nothing but a faint buzz came back. Lady Hannah went on:

"If I were in your shoes, and such a pearl and prize and paragon as Lynette Mildare had consented to marry me, I should want the whole world to envy me my colossal good luck. I should go about in sandwich-boards advertising it. I should buy a megaphone, and proclaim it through that. I should----"

There was no response beyond the buzzing of the wire. Beauvayse had evidently hung up the receiver.

"Is there any creature upon earth more cowardly than a man engaged?" Lady Hannah demanded of space. There was a futile struggle inside the telephone-box. Somebody else was trying to ring up. She put the receiver back upon the crutches, and--

"Ting--ting--ting!" said the bell in a high, thin voice.

"Who is it?" she asked.

The answer came back with official clearness:

"Officer of the day, Staff Headquarters. If you're the Convalescent Hospital, the Colonel would like to speak to Lady Hannah Wrynche."

Her knees became as jelly, and her heart seemed to turn a somersault. She answered in a would-be jaunty voice that wobbled horribly:

"Here--here--is Lady Hannah."

"Hold on a minute, please!"

She held on. She had not shuddered at the end of the wire for more than a minute when the well-known, infinitely-dreaded voice said in her ear, so clearly that she jumped:

"Lady Hannah there? How d'you do?"

She gulped, and quavered:

"It--it depends on what you're going to say."

"I see." There was the vibration of a stifled laugh, and her heart jumped to meet it. "So you anticipated a hauling over the coals?"

Revived, she shrugged her little shoulders.

"Have I deserved one?"

The voice said, with unmistakable displeasure in it:

"Thoroughly. Why were not the last three paragraphs of the weekly 'Social Jottings' column submitted to me yesterday with the rest?"

She heard herself titter imbecilely. Then a voice, which she could hardly believe her own, said, with a pitiable effort to be gay and natural:

"Weren't they? Perhaps you overlooked them?"

"You know I did not overlook them."

This was the cold, incisive, cutting, rasping voice which Bingo was wont to describe as razors and files. Her ears burned like fire, and her bright, birdlike eyes were round and scared. She gasped:

"Oh ... do you really----"

"I want the truth, please, without quibbling." The voice was harsh and cold, and inexorably compelling. "Why were those paragraphs not shown to me?"

She winked away her tears.

"Because I was sure you'd blue-pencil them out of existence. And a genuine bit of news is such a roc's egg in these times of scarcity."

"Genuine!"

There was incredulity in the tone.

"Upon my honour as the wife of a British Dragoon."

He said crisply:

"Precipitate publication, even of authentic information, is likely to be resented by the persons concerned."

She remembered, with a sinking at the heart, that one person concerned had already objected.

"Both of them authorised the insertion."

"And the official consent to it was obtained by a trick."

She whispered, her heart in the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes:

"Please--please don't call it that!"

"How can I call it anything else? Besides, has it occurred to you that, should any copies of to-day's issue get through these lines, the Foltlebarres will be thrown into a state of volcanic eruption?"

"If the Foltlebarres aren't absolute beetles they'll jump for joy. How could their boy possibly do better?"

"I don't see how myself."

"Ah, if you're going to back up Toby, the day is as good as won."

"You're very kind to say so."

The red was dying out of Lady Hannah's ear-tips. That "You're very kind" had a gratified sound. The most rigorous and implacable of men can be buttered, she thought, if the emollient be dexterously applied. And a bright spark of naughty triumph snapped in each of her birdlike black eyes.

"Thanks." He was speaking again. "Apologies for keeping you. You're up to your eyes in Hospital work, I don't doubt."

"There is enough to keep one going."

"Without the additional tax of literary labour." She was conscious of a premonitory, apprehensive chill that travelled from the roots of her hair down her spine, and apparently made its exit at the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes. "So the 'Social Jottings' column will not appear in the Siege Gazette after to-day. Good-morning."

"Is that my punishment for insubordination?"

Not a sound in reply. "He must have hung up the receiver and gone away. Oh, horrid, horrid male superiority!" thought Lady Hannah. "To have been put under arrest, even to have been ordered out and shot, would be preferable to being figuratively spanked and put in the corner." She winked away some more tears, and sniffed a little dejectedly. "And only the other day he seemed quite pleased with me," she added pensively. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and rang up the Head Hospital, North Veld Road.

"Who you-e?"

It was the sing-song voice of the Barala hall-boy.

"I'm Lady Hannah Wrynche. Is the Reverend Mother on duty in the wards to-day?"

"I go see. You hang-e on."

Lady Hannah hung on until her small remaining stock of patience deserted her. As she stamped her small feet, longing to accelerate the languid movements of the hall-boy with a humanely-wielded hatpin, a whisper in the velvet voice she knew stole across the distance.

"Hannah. Is it you?"

"It's me, Biddy dear."

There was a soft laugh that ended in a sigh. "It is so long since anybody called me that."

"I wouldn't dare to with you looking at me."

"Am I so formidable of aspect? But go on."

"It's not so easy. But I've had an awful morning. Everybody I like best down on me like bricks and m----" The speaker gulped a sob.

"You are crying, dear!"

"Not a drop. But if you join in the heckling I shall dribble away and dissolve in salt water. It's all about those wretched paragraphs of mine in the Siege Gazette. But perhaps you haven't seen it?"

"I have seen it."

"You were quite willing that the fiancailles should be made public.... Indeed, you gave me to understand you desired it."

"I was quite willing. I did wish it."

"Yes.... Thank you, dear; that was what I wanted to hear from you. I understand now what the one clapping pair of hands must mean to the actor who is booed by all the rest of the audience. Good-bye, dear."

"Stay.... Who are the persons who disapprove of the announcement?"

"My Bingo, for one. Not that anything the dear old stupid says matters in the slightest. And--and Toby."

"'Toby'?"

"I mean Lord Beauvayse."

"Tell him I quite approve. He should know that in this matter it was for me to decide."

"Certainly, dear."

"Whose is the other objecting voice?"

"The Chief thinks I ... we ... it ... I rather fancy that he used the word 'precipitate' in expressing his opinion."

"Refer him to me if he expresses it again."

"Of course, dear, since you ..."

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye, dear. If Biddy Bawne hadn't been a nun," reflected Lady Hannah, as she went out of the Matron's office and back to her patients, who had long ago dined, "I think she would have made rather a despotic Empress. 'Refer him to me,' indeed. What is it, Sergeant? Don't say I'm rung up again."

But the one-armed porter was positive on the subject, and her little ladyship went back. This last communication proved a puzzling one.

"You there?"

"I am Lady Hannah Wrynche. Where are you?"

There was a brief hesitation. A thickish man's voice said:

"I don't know as that matters."

"Who are you?"

There was another hesitation. Then the stranger parried with a question:

"You write them weekly screeds in the Siege Gazette?"

"I am responsible for some of the social paragraphs. Kindly say who is speaking?"

"Nobody that matters much. Can you tell me where Miss Mildare lives?"

"Not without knowing who you are."

"You may call me an old friend of hers," aid the thickish, lisping voice, with a sluggish chuckle in it that the little woman at the other end of the wire had heard ... where?...

"If you are an old friend of the young lady you mention, how is it you don't know her address?" she demanded.

"Keep her address all you want to. Only next time you come alongside her give her a message for me. Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?"

Lady Hannah repeated:

"'And Bough, who was her friend.' You are Bough----?"

"Click!" Somebody had hung up the receiver.

Lady Hannah spent another bad night, not wholly due to the indigestible nature of a dinner of mule colloped, and locusts fried in batter by Nixey's chef. Staggering in the course of disturbed and changeful dreams, under the impact of sufficient bricks and mortar to rebuild toppledown Gueldersdorp, being hauled over mountains of coals, and getting into whole Gulf Streams of hot water, she was slumberously conscious that these nightmares were less harassing than one nasty, perplexing little vision that kept cropping up among the others. It had no beginning and no end. In it the Matron's room at the Convalescent Hospital and Kink's Family Hotel at Tweipans were somehow mixed up, and the ingenuous Mr. Van Busch, that Afrikander gentleman of British sympathies, whose chivalrous and patriotic sentiments had prompted and urged him to the imperilling of his own skin and the risking of his own liberty in the interests of an English lady masquerading for political reasons as the refugee-widow of a German drummer, was oddly confused in identity with an uncomfortably mysterious individual who possessed neither features nor name.

"Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, three days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend?" the voice would say..

"You are Bough?" she would find herself asking.

There would be a little guttural, horrible laugh, and nothing would answer but the buzzing of the wire.

And then she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, with a thumping heart. She was no longer in any doubt as to the identity of the owner of the voice. Van Busch was in Gueldersdorp ... and however he came, and whatever disguise of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence boded no good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs hat respectfully before the superiority of feminine intuition.

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XLVIII

Saxham, shouldering out of Julius's hotel upon his way to Staff Bombproof South, is made aware that the hundred-foot-high dust-storm that has raged and swirled throughout the morning is in process of being beaten down into a porridge of red mud by a downpour of February rain.

Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedestrians who have grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under cover, adding to the wretchedness of life in trench or bombproof as nothing else can. And the Doctor, biting hard upon the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes swinging along through the hissing deluge with his chin upon his breast and his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even more vividly than upon Sunday, the angry buffalo of Lady Hannah's apt analogy.

He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a minute or two. So is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges him at the bridge that carries the single-gauge railway southward over the Olopo, in spite of his ragged waterproof and an additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted officer of the Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognises Captain Bingo Wrynche, as he goes by at a furious gallop, spurring, and jagging savagely at the mouth of the handsome if attenuated brown charger, who sends stones and mud and water flying from his furious iron-shod hoofs. So is the Barala on guard by the wattled palisade of the native village--a muddy-legged and goose-fleshy warrior, in a plumed, brimless bowler and leopard-skin kaross, whose teeth can be heard chattering as he stands to attention and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The Chinamen working in the patches of market-garden, where the scant supply of vegetables that command such famine-prices are raised, are certainly sheltered from the wet by their colossal umbrella-hats, but the splashed-up red gruel has imbrued them to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully, hoeing scattered shell-fragments out of their potato-drills and removing incrusted masses of bullets that incommode the young kidney-beans, and arranging this ironmongery and metal-ware in tidy piles, possibly with a view to future commerce. And so, with another challenge from a picket, posted between the Barala village and the south trenches, where many of the loyal natives are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous tongue of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the Staff Bombproof is situated.

As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white flash leaps from a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and one of Meisje's great shells goes screaming and winnowing westwards. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a battered, shaggy, berry-brown trooper, standing knee-deep in a hole, burrowed in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his shelter, challenges for the last time.

"'Alt! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a man whose wounded arm was dressed, one blazing day last January, outside the Convent bombproof. "But you'll 'ave to give the countersign. Pass Honour and all's well. But"--the sentry's nostrils twitch as the savour of Saxham's pipe reaches them, and his whisper of appeal is as piercing as a yell--"if you left a pipeful be'ind you, it wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't pull your pouch out, sir; the lookout officer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it by the feel, an' drop a pinch by the stone near your toe. I'll get it when they relieve me."

Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly over the little brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing to sponginess under the downpour from the skies. The long mound of raw red earth, crusted with greenish-yellow streaks of lyddite from the bursting-charges, rises now immediately before him. At its eastern end is a flagstaff displaying the Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which the flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps that are used for signalling at night.

Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an officer in dripping waterproofs, who is looking steadily through a telescope out between the long driving lances of the rain, beyond Maxim Kopje South to those mysterious hills, swathed in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so desolate, and whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant life as the blanket of an unwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a little below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, showing above the edge of the turned-up collar and below the brim of the Field-Service cap, prove him to be not Beauvayse. And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire, varied by brisk bursts of cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the Destroyer sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary way. But even women and children have grown indifferent to these things, and the men have long ceased to be aware of them.

A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of a stable rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the fierce and clamorous smells of the native village. The ground slopes under his feet. He goes down the inclined way that ends in the horses' quarters, and the orderly, who is sitting on an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin that screens off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the salute, receives a brief message, and disappears within.

Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut hindquarters of half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or fidgeting before their emptied mangers. Against the division of a loose-box that holds a fine brown charger, still saddled and steaming, and heavily splashed with mud, there leans a stretcher, which, by the ominous red stains and splashes upon it, has been recently in use.

Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and file. Here several gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are sitting on rough benches at a trestle-table, playing dominoes and draughts, or poring over tattered books by the light of the flickering oil-lamps, with tin reflectors, that hang against the earth walls. None of them are smoking, though several are sucking vigorously at empty pipes; and the rapacious light that glares in every eye as Saxham mechanically knocks out the ashes from his smoked-out briar-root against the side-post of the entrance is sufficient witness to the pangs that they endure.

Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell of revengeful fury seething in his heart, and a legion of devils unloosed and shrieking, prompting him to murder, he should have paused to relieve the tobacco-famine of the sentry, and be moved to a further sacrifice of his sole luxury by the sight of those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch, pitched by a cricketer's hand, flies in among the domino-players, and rebounds from a pondering head, as the orderly comes back, and lifts one corner of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly reproduce the scene Saxham leaves behind him. The trestle-table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthen floor, when the scandalised orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, and thenceforward joins the rioters.

They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from among the rest, clutching the prize, and grinning a three-cornered grin because his upper lip is split, divides the tobacco fairly to the last thread. They even share out the indiarubber pouch, and chew the pieces as long as the flavour lasts. When the thick, fragrant smoke curls up from the lighted pipes, it steals round the edges of the tarpaulin that has dropped behind Saxham, passing in to the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief whose profane and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of the Convent garden.

Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with the lust to kill tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will soon stand in the presence of his enemy, and hers. As he thinks of this, suddenly a bell rings. The sound comes from the north, so it cannot be the bell of the Catholic Church, or that of the Protestant Church, or the bell of the Wesleyan meeting-house, or of the Dutch Kerk.

"Clang-clang! clang-clang! Clang----"

The last clang is broken off suddenly, as though the rope has been jerked from the ringer's hands, but Saxham is not diverted by it from his occupation. With that curious fatuity to which the most logical of us are prone, he has been conning over the brief, scorching sentences with which he means to strip the other man's deception bare to the light, and make known his own self-appointed mission to avenge her.

"They telephoned for me, and I have come, but not in the interests of your sick or wounded man. Because it was imperative that I should say this to you: Your engagement to Miss Mildare and your approaching marriage to her were announced in to-day's Siege Gazette. You have received many congratulations. Now take mine--liar, and coward, and cheat!"

And with each epithet, delivered with all the force of Saxham's muscular arm, shall fall a stinging blow of the heavy old hunting-crop. There will be a shout, an angry oath from Beauvayse, staggering back under the unexpected, savage chastisement, red bars marring the insolent, high-bred beauty of the face that has bewitched her. Saxham will continue:

"You approached this innocent, inexperienced girl as a lover. You represented yourself to her and to her mother-guardian as a single man. All this when you had already a wife at home in England--a gaudy stage butterfly sleek with carrion-juices, whose wings are jewelled by the vices of men; and who is worthy of you, as you are of her. I speak as I can prove. Here is the written testimony of a reliable witness to your marriage with Miss Lavigne. And now you will go to her and show yourself to her in your true colours. You will undeceive her, or----"

There is a foggy uncertainty about what is to follow after that "or." But the livid flames of the burning hell that is in Saxham throw upon the greyness a leaping reflection that is red like blood. A fight to the death, either with weapons, or, best of all, with the bare hands, is what Saxham secretly lusts for, and savours in anticipation as he goes.

Let the humanitarian say what he pleases. Man is a manslayer by instinct and by will.

And within the little area of this beleaguered town do not men kill, and are not men killed, every day? The conditions are mediaeval, fast relapsing into the primeval. The modern sanctity and inviolability attending and surrounding human life are at a discount. Even for children, the grim King of Terrors had become a bugaboo to laugh at; red wounds and ghastly sights are things of everyday experience; there is a slump in mortality.

In those old, far-distant Chilworth Street days, two men who engaged in a battle to the death about a woman desired might have seemed merely savages to Saxham. Here things are different. The elemental bed-rock of human nature has been laid bare, and the grim, naked scars upon it, testifying to the combat of Ice and Fire for the round world's supremacy, will never be quite hidden under Civilisation's green mantle of vegetation, or her toadstool-growths of bricks and mortar, any more.

And the men are well matched. Saxham knows himself the more muscular, but Beauvayse has the advantage of him in years, and is lithe, and strong, and supple as the Greek wrestler who served the sculptor Polycleitos as a model for the Athlete with the Diadem.

It will be a fight worth having. No quarter. And Saxham's breath comes heavily, and his blue eyes have in them a steely glitter, and, as the tarpaulin falls behind him, he shifts to a better grip on the strong old hunting-crop.

Overhead the rain drums deafeningly on the tarpaulins. The long bombproof is heterogeneously furnished with full and empty ammunition-boxes marked A.O.S., a leathern sofa-divan, tattered by spurs and marked by muddy boots, several cane or canvas deck-chairs, and others of the Windsor pattern common to the barrack-room. Arms and accoutrements are in rude racks against the corrugated-iron-panelled walls; a trestle-table covered with oilcloth runs down the middle. It is lighted by a couple of acetylene lamps hanging by their chains from iron bars that cross the trench above, and there is another lamp, green-shaded, upon a bare deal table that stands, strewn with papers, against the farther wall.

A man in shirt-sleeves sits there writing. Another man is busy at a telephone that is fixed against the wall beyond the writing-table. There is something fateful and ominous about the heavy silence in which they do their work. It is broken only by a strange sound that comes almost continuously from--where Saxham does not trouble to ask. It is the groaning, undoubtedly, of the wounded man to whose aid he has been summoned, with the added injunction, "Bring morphia," showing that little further can be done for him, whoever he may be, than to smooth his passage into the Beyond by the aid of the Pain Slayer.

Let him wait, however sore his need, until Saxham has dealt with his enemy. He is resentfully impatient in the knowledge that neither of the men present is Beauvayse.

Then, as he stands sullen and lowering, the man who has been writing gets up and comes to him. Saxham recognises the keen-featured face with the rusty-brown moustache, and the grip of the lean, hard hand that hauled a Dop Doctor out of the Slough of Despair is familiar. The pleasant voice he likes says something about somebody being very wet. It is Saxham, from whose soaked garments the water is running in streams, and whose boots squelch as he crosses the carpet that has been spread above the floor-tarpaulin. The friendly hand pours out and offers him a sparing measure of that rare stimulant, whisky.

"As preventive medicine. We can't have our Medical Staff men on the sick-list."

Some such commonplace words accompany the proffered hospitality.

"I shall not suffer, thanks. You have a shell-casualty, you have 'phoned us, but before I see your man it is imperative that I should speak to Lord Beauvayse. Where is he?"

"He is here."

"My business with him is urgent, sir."

The man at the telephone makes a sound indicative that a message is coming through. The Chief is beside him instantly, with the receiver at his ear. He looks round for an instant at Saxham as he waits for the intelligence, and the muscles of his face twitch as if under the influence of some strong, repressed emotion, and the Doctor's practised glance notes the unsteadiness of the uplifted hand. Then he is saying to the officer in charge at Maxim Kopje South:

"The ammunition comes up to-night. Tell Gaylord that we are short-handed here, and shall want him to help on night duty.... Practically as soon as he can join us. No, no better. All for the present ... thanks! Saxham, please come this way."

There is a sleeping-place at the end of the long, narrow, lamp-lit perspective, curtained off from the rude bareness of the outer place. Light shows between the curtains, and they are of plush, in hue a rich, deep red. As that strong colour sinks into his brain, through his intent and glittering eyes, Saxham the man has a sudden furious impulse to tear the deep folds back, with a clash of brazen rings on iron rods, and call to the betrayer who lurks behind them to come out and be dealt with. But that hollow, feeble moaning sounds continuously from the other side, and Saxham the surgeon stays his hand and follows the Colonel in. There are two camp-beds in the small sleeping-place, and a washstand and a folding-chair. A lamp hangs above, and its light falls full upon the face of the man whom he is seeking.

Ah! where are they? His furious anger and his deadly hate, where are they now? Like snow upon the desert they vanish away. How can one rage against this shattered thing, stretched on the pallet of the low cot-bed from which the blankets have been stripped away? First Aid bandages have been not ineffectually applied. Fragments of packing-case have been employed as splints for the broken arm and shattered hand, but, in spite of all that has been done, the beautiful young life is sinking, waning, flowing out with that ruddy tide that will not be stayed.

The greenish pallor and the sweat of mortal agony are upon the face of Beauvayse, thrown back upon the pillow, and looking upwards to where the deluging rain makes thunder on the tarpaulined roof. The atmosphere is heavy with the sour-sickly smell of blood, and lamp-fumes; he draws each breath laboriously, and exhales it with a whistling sound. Through his clenched teeth, revealed by the lips that are dragged back in the semi-grin of desperate agony, that dumb, ceaseless moaning makes its way despite the gallant effort to restrain it. The one uninjured arm hangs downwards, its restless fingers picking at the bloodstained matting that covers the loose boards of the floor. A sheet has been lightly laid over him. It is dabbled with the prevailing hue, and sinks in an ominous hollow below the breast. And beyond the bottom of it splashed leggings and muddy boots with spurs on them stick out with helpless stiffness.

A flask of brandy--a precious restorative treasured for use in such desperate need as this--stands with a tumbler and a jug of water on the camp washstand that is between the two cot-beds. Upon the second bed sits a big and stoutish man, whose large face, not pink just now, is hidden in his thick, quivering hands. It is Captain Bingo Wrynche, heavy Dragoon, and honest, single-hearted gentleman, to whom belongs the blown and muddy charger drooping in the loose-box outside. The telephone has summoned him in haste from Hotchkiss Outpost North, to see the last of a friend.

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XLIX

"It was just before the rainstorm that it happened. He was on the lookout. They have been moving the big gun and the 16-pounder Krupps again, and some of the laagers seem to be shifting, so we have kept an extra eye open of late, by night as well as by day. He was very keen always...."

Already he is spoken of by those who have known and loved him as one who was and has been.

"He had relieved me at 10 a.m. He might have been up over an hour when it happened. The orderly-sergeant had got his mouth at the speaking-tube, in the act of sending down a message; he did not see him hit. It was a shell from their Maxim-Nordenfelt. And when we got to him, the first glance told us there was little hope."

"There is none at all," says Saxham curtly, as is his wont. "A splinter has shattered the lower portion of the spine. The agony can be deadened with an opiate, and the ruptured arteries ligatured. Beyond that there is nothing else to do, though he may live till morning."

"He managed to ask for Wrynche before he swooned, so we 'phoned him at Hotchkiss Outpost North. He got here ten minutes ago, badly cut up, but there has been no recognition of him. Do what you can, Saxham, in the case. Every moment may bring Wrynche's recall. There is another person I should have expected the poor boy to ask for.... That young girl, Saxham, whose heart has to be broken with the news, sooner or later. Perhaps about nightfall, when it will be safe for her to venture. I ought to send an escort for Miss Mildare?"

The slow, dusky colour rises in Saxham's set, pale face, and as slowly sinks out again. He has been standing in low-toned colloquy with the Chief outside the heavy plush curtains. He turns silently upon his heel and vanishes behind them.

"Ting--ting--ting!"

The telephone-bell heralds an urgent recall from Hotchkiss Outpost North. And a beckoning hand summons Captain Bingo from the bedside of his dying friend ere ever the word of parting has been spoken.

"It is for you, Wrynche, as I expected."

"I am ready, sir. Orderly, get my damned brute out!"

The sorrow and love that swell the big man's heart to bursting find rather absurd expression in his savage objurgation of the innocent brown charger. But Captain Bingo, when he stoops over the camp-bed where lies Beauvayse, kisses him solemnly and clumsily upon the forehead, and then goes heavily striding out of the death-chamber with his bulldog jowl well down upon his chest; and a moment later when he is seen bucketing the lean brown charger through the thrashing hailstorm that is jagged across by the white-green fires of bursting shell, is rather a tragic figure, or so it seems to me.

Meanwhile, what of the man who lies upon the bed? Since Bingo's face came between and receded into, those thick grey mists that gather about the dying, he has lost consciousness of present things. Fever is rising in those wellnigh empty veins of his, his skin is drawing and creeping; it seems as though innumerable ants were running over him. The hand that is not powerless tries to brush them away. Sometimes he thinks he is in Hospital, and that the man in the next bed is groaning, and then he is aware that the groans are his own. He is conscious that a needle-prick in the sound wrist has been followed by sensible relief. The unspeakable grinding agonies subside; he is able to murmur, "Thanks, Nurse," as he gulps some liquid from the glass a strange hand holds to his lips....

The groans are sighs now, and the clogged brain, spurred by morphia, shakes off its lethargy. The fever goes on rising, and he begins, silently, for his powers fail of speech, to wander over all the past. Could Saxham, sitting motionless and vigilant on the folding-chair, his keen eyes quick to note each change, his deft hand prompt to do all that can be done--could Saxham hear, he would behold, anatomised before his mental vision, the soul of this his fellow-man.

"Coming straight for me--five round black spots punched in the grey. If they go by, luck's on my side, and I marry her. If not ... hit--and done for!"

Exactly thus has Saxham made of the unconscious Father Noah, of the Boer sharp shooters behind their breastwork, the arbiters of Fate.

"Send for Bingo!" flashes across the dying brain "Something to say to Bingo. Don't bring her. Who'd want a woman who loved him to remember him like this? What was it the Mahometan syce the musth elephant killed at Bhurtpore said about his wife? 'Let her cool my grave with tears.' Until she finds out ... until someone tells her. Ah--'h!" There is a groan, and a convulsive shudder, and the beautiful dim eyes roll up in agony, and the blue, swollen lips are wrung as the feeble voice whispers: "Nurse, this hurts like--hell! Some more--that stuff!"

Saxham gives another subcutaneous injection of morphia. The curtains part, and the Colonel, in waterproof and a dreadnought cap, comes noiselessly in. "No change," Saxham answers to the mute inquiry. "I anticipate none before midnight. Of course, the weakness is progressive."

"Of course." The Chief touches the cold, flaccid wrist. There are hollows in his lean cheeks, and deep crow's-feet at the corners of the kindly hazel eyes, and the brown moustache is ominously straight and curveless. "Tell him, if he recovers consciousness, that I thought it best to send for her. Chagrave has gone with a couple of the men. It's a desperate night for a woman to be out in, but they took an Ambulance sling-chair with them. They'll wrap her in tarpaulins, and carry her in that."

He nods and goes up on the lookout with a night-glass, and the wearied officer he relieves comes down. As he has said, it is a desperate night of driving sleet and swirling blackness, illuminated only with the malignant coruscations of lyddite bursting-charges. But the tempest without is nothing to the tempest that rages in the soul of the quiet man in sodden khaki who watches by the dying.

She has been sent for.... She is coming.... To kneel by the low cot and weep over him who lies there; kiss the tortured lips and the beautiful dim eyes, and hold the unwounded head upon her breast.... How shall Saxham bear it without crying out to tell her? He clenches his hands, and sets his strong jaw, and the sweat breaks out upon his broad, pale forehead. The man upon the bed, mentally clear, though incapable of coherent speech, is now listening to comments that shall ere long be made by living men upon one who very soon shall be numbered with the dead.

"Well, well, don't be hard on the poor beggar!" he hears them saying. "Give the devil his due: not a bad chap--take him all round. Got carried away and lost his head. She's as lovely as they make 'em, and he ... always a fool where a pretty woman was concerned--poor old Toby!"

He pleads unconsciously, with his most merciless judge, in his utter incapacity to plead at all....

And so the time goes by. There has been coming and going in the place outside. The guard has relieved the double sentries, the official lamp burns redly under the little penthouse. A reconnoitring-patrol ride out, the horses' hoofs sounding hollow on the earth-covered boards of the sloping way. The business of War goes on in its accustomed grooves, and the business of Life will soon be over for Beauvayse. Yet she has not come. And Saxham looks at his watch.

Nine o'clock. He has not eaten since early morning. He is wet to the skin and stiff with long sitting. But when the savoury odours of hot horse-soup and hot bean-coffee, accompanied by the clinking of crockery and tin pannikins, announce a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to the curtains and anxiously beg him to take food, he merely shakes his square black head and falls again to watching the unconscious face of Beauvayse. The conscious brain behind its blankly-staring eyes is thinking:

"Those paragraphs.... In black and white the thing looked damnable. And think of the gossip and tongue-wagging. Whatever they say about me ... she'll be the one to suffer. They're never so hard on ... the man!"

He has uttered these last words audibly; they pierce to the heart's core of the mute, impassive watcher. Strong antipathy is as clairvoyant as strong sympathy, and with a leap of understanding, and a fresh surge of fierce resentment, Saxham acknowledges the deadly truth contained in those few halting words. She will be the one to suffer. Beside the martyrdom inevitably to be endured by the white saint, the agony of the sinner's death-bed pales and dwindles. There is a savage struggle once again between Saxham the man and Saxham the surgeon beside the bed of death.

His sudden irrepressible movement has knocked the tumbler from the little iron washstand at his elbow. It falls and shivers into fragments at his feet. And then--the upturned face slants a little, and the eyes that have been blankly staring at the roof-tarpaulins come down to the level of his own. He and her fallen enemy regard each other silently for a moment. Then Beauvayse says weakly, in the phantom of the old gay, boyish voice that wooed and won her:

"Thought it was Wrynche. Where is----"

The question ends in a groan.

Saxham the man shrinks from him with unutterable loathing. But Saxham the surgeon stoops over him, saying, in distinct, even tones:

"Captain Wrynche was here. He has been recalled to Hotchkiss Outpost North. Drink this." This is a little measure of brandy-and-water, in which some tabloids of morphia have been dissolved. And Beauvayse obeys, panting:

"All right. But ... more a job for the Chaplain than the Doctor, isn't it?"

"Do you wish the Chaplain sent for?"

There is a glimmer of the old lazy, defiant humour in the beautiful dim eyes.

"What could he do?"

Saxham answers--how strangely for him, the Denier:

"He would probably pray beside you, and talk to you of God."

There is a pause. The faint, almost breathless whisper asks:

"It's night, isn't it?"

"It is dark and stormy night."

Beauvayse says, in the whispering voice interrupted by long, gasping sighs that are beginning to have a jarring rattle in them:

"Before to-morrow.... I shall know more of God ... than the whole Bench of Bishops."

There is silence. And she does not come. The man on the bed makes a painful effort, gathering his nearly-spent forces for something he wants to say:

"Doctor!"

"Let me wipe your forehead. Yes?"

"I ... insulted you frightfully the other day."

"You need not recall that. I have forgotten it."

"I ... beg your pardon! Will you ... shake hands?... My left, if you don't mind. The other one's ... no good."

He tries to lift the heavy arm that lies beside him. There is only a faint movement of the finger-tips, and he gives up the effort with a fluttering sob. And the square white face with the burning eyes under the lowering brows opposes itself to his. Words are crowding to Saxham's lips:

"I would gladly shake the hand of the man who insulted me and who has apologised. And I honour the brave officer who meets Death upon the field. But with the would-be betrayer of an innocent girl, the dancing-woman's husband who proposed himself as mate for Lynette Mildare, I have nothing but contempt and abhorrence. He is to me a leper. Worse, for the leper I would touch to cure!"

He does not utter the words, nor does his rugged, unconquerable sincerity admit of his taking the hand. He fights with his hatred in silence. And she has not come. What is he saying in that weak voice with the rattling breaths between?

"Listen, Saxham.... There's ... something I want you ... say to Miss Mildare."

The grey mists that gather about him shut out a clear view of Saxham's terrible face. The feeble whisper struggles on, broken by those rattling gasps.

"Tell her forget me. Say when I ... asked her ... to marry me...."

Silence. He is falling, falling into an abyss of vast uncertainties. The blue lips dabbled with foam can frame no more coherent words. Only the brain behind the dying eyes is alive to understand when Saxham approaches his own livid face and blazing eyes to the face upon the pillow, and says:

"Do not try to speak. Close your eyes when you mean 'Yes.' I know what you wish me to tell Miss Mildare. It is that when you asked her to marry you, you were already the husband of another woman. Am I correct?"

The affirmative signal comes.

"You were married to Miss Lavigne at the Registrar's office, Cookham-on-Thames, last June, before you sailed. The witnesses were your valet and a female servant at Roselawn Cottage. And knowing that you were not free, you deceived and cheated her. That is what I am to tell Miss Mildare? Signal if I am right."

The dying eyes are brimming with tears. When the lids shut, signifying "Yes," slow, heavy drops are forced between them.

"Very well. Now hear. I will not tell her!"

The eyes open wide with surprise.

"I will never tell her," says Saxham again. "I will not blacken any man's reputation to further my own interests." The vital strength and the white-hot passion of him, contrasted with the spent and utter laxity of the dissolving thing of clay upon the bed, seem superhuman. "Do you hear me?" he demands again. "Listen once more. Knowing the truth of you, I came here to force you to undeceive her. Had you refused, I would certainly have killed you. But I would never have betrayed you!"

That "never" of Saxham's carries conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again to say:

"Doctor, you're a ... damned good sort!" And then there is a long, long silence, broken only by those painful rattling breaths, never by her coming.

The end comes, and she is not there. A pale blink in the wild sky eastward hints to the night lookouts of hot drink, food, and welcome rest. The Chief stands beside the comfortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old House is flickering out. The Doctor holds the wet and icy wrist, where the pulse has ceased to be perceptible. The sheet above the labouring breast rises and falls with those panting, rattling gasps; the beautiful eyes are rolled up and inwards. The light is very nearly out, when, with a last effort, the flame leaps up. He thinks that what is the barely perceptible whisper of a tongue already clay is a loud and ringing cheer. He thinks that he is shouting, his strong young voice topping a hundred other voices. It seems to him who, for the bribe of all the beauty he has coveted, and all the love that is yet unwon, could not speak one audible word or move a finger, that he waves his hat again and again. Oh! glorious moment when the white moonbeams blink on the grey dust-wall rolling down from the North, and the horsemen of the Advance ride out of it, and clustering enemies that have rallied again to the attack waver, and disperse, and scatter....

"Hurrah! They're running--running for their lives! Give it 'em with shrapnel! Oh, pepper 'em like hell! The Relief! The Relief! Hurrah!"

It is all over with the opening of the day-eye in the east. When they leave him, beautiful, and stern, and calm in that deep slumber from which only the Angel with the Trumpet may awaken him, and pass out between the curtains, the dark, short officer who was on the lookout when the Doctor came, stands very pale and muddy, and steaming with damp, waiting to report. And two troopers of the Irregulars, wet and muddy and steaming too, are waiting also, just inside the tarpaulins of the outer doorway. And she is not there.

A few rapid words, an exclamation from the Chief, shaken for once out of his steely composure, and quivering from head to foot with mingled rage and grief:

"My God, how unutterably horrible!"

Saxham shoulders his way into the ring of white faces that have gathered about the dark little muddy officer.

"What has happened to Miss Mildare----?"

The little officer answers, panting:

"The Sisters could not make her understand. She----"

The Chief speaks for him:

"She had been previously stunned by the shock of--a terrible calamity."

"What calamity?"

"The Mother-Superior has been killed. Two of the Sisters and Miss Mildare found her in the Convent chapel. They got there before evening. She must have been dead some hours. She had been shot through the lungs."

"By a stray bullet?"

"By a bullet from a revolver, fired close enough to scorch the clothes. Foul murder, and by God who saw it done----"

The lean clenched hand, thrown upwards in a savage gesture, the blazing eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the writhen mouth, the furious, jarring voice, leave little doubt of the vengeance that will be wreaked when he shall track down the murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the telephone. The swift, imperative orders volt from fort to fort; the circuit of vigilance is made complete, the human bloodhounds unleashed upon the trail, in a few instants, thanks to the buzzing wire that brings the mouth of a man to the ear of another across a void of miles.

But Bough, primed with knowledge as to which are dummy rifle-pits and which are real, aided by acquaintance with the ground, and covered by that wuthering night of storm, has already pierced the lines. Subsequently that excellent Afrikander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Brounckers' bright boy at Tweipans, with information that decides the date of Schenk Eybel's Feint from the East.

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L

She had gone about her Master's business all Monday, calm and composed, and inexorably gentle. She did not meet Richard's daughter before nightfall. "She will not suffer now," she thought, even as she sent the message that was to allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her whereabouts in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-wrecked shanty at the south end of the town, where some Lithuanian emigrants herded together in indescribable filth and misery. A woman who had been recently confined lay there raving in puerperal fever. Until nightfall, when she was removed to the Isolation Hospital on the veld, near the Women's Laager, the Mother-Superior remained with the patient.

A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a peculiarly dark skin and strange steely eyes, passing the broken window, caught sight of the noble profile and the stately shoulders stooping above the miserable bed. Going home at dark, the Mother heard a stealthy footstep following behind her.

Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the trenches, many people, revisiting their deserted dwellings, had found them plundered of movable possessions, and, losing the fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale evaporation of their worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to protect them. Instances there had been of robbery from the person by thieves not all tracked down by Martial Justice and made examples of.

The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human jackal, whose sole end is money and money's worth, have no terrors for Holy Poverty. But there are other creatures of prey more terrible than these. And the padding footsteps that followed, hurrying when she hurried and slackening when she went more slowly, and stopping dead when she paused and looked round, conveyed to her a haunting sense of something sinister, and at the same time greedy and guileful, that bided its time to spring.

She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black robes sweeping noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the well-known ground, her course kept unfalteringly; but her heart shook her, and she gasped as the Convent bomb proof neared in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more of late, and she knew herself less strong than she had been. When the blue light that hung from a post by the ladder-hole blinked "Home" through the mirk of a night of thin rain and mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite relief. Her great eyes were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's, and her bosom heaved with her panting breaths. She paused a moment to regain her composure before she went down.

The nuns who were not on night-duty were gathered together about the trestle-table sewing, while the lay-Sisters prepared the scanty evening meal. Lynette was there, sitting pale and quiet on her corner-stool. Richard's daughter had been watching and waiting for her Mother. Ah! to see the relief and gladness leap into the dear face, and shine in the beautiful wistful eyes that had shed such tears, dear God!--such tears of anguish upon Sunday--and then had dried at the utterance of her decree--

"You are never to tell him!"

--And changed into radiant stars of joy, by whose light the darkness of her own wickedness and misery seemed almost bearable.

"It is the Mother. Mother----"

Lynette sprang up, and would have hurried to her, but the Mother lifted a warning hand, and calling Sister Tobias to her, passed aside into a curtained-off and precautionary cave that had been hollowed out behind the ladder. This was the custom when the ladies of the Holy Way returned from doubtful or infectious cases. Lynette sighed, and went back to her stool to wait. The busy needles had not ceased stitching.

That humble saint, Sister Tobias, hurried to her diligent ministry of purification. When she came in with hot water and carbolic spray, she brought a letter with her. It was directed to the Mother in a coarse round-hand.

"Somebody dropped this down the ladder-hole as I came by with my kettle," said Sister Tobias. "It's the first letter-box I ever knew that was as wide as the door. Maybe 'twill bring in a new fashion, for all we know." She made her homely joke with a sore heart for the sorrow she read in the Mother's beloved face, and trotted away to fetch clean towels, saying--a favourite saying with Sister Tobias--that her head would never save her heels.

The Mother opened the letter. It was anonymous, and utterly vile. Had the pen been dipped in liquid ordure, the thing written could not have been more defiling to the touch than its meaning was to this pure woman's chaste eyes. Had a puff-adder writhed out of the envelope, and struck its fangs into her beautiful hand, it would have poisoned her less certainly. And every beat of the obscene words upon her brain, strangely enough, awakened an echo of those long padding footsteps that had followed in the dark. And the writer knew of all that had happened at the tavern on the veld, when a human brute had triumphed in his bestiality, and a girl-child had been helpless, and the great white stars had looked down unmoved and changeless upon Innocence destroyed.

The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning to the infamous end. She had been sorely wrought upon of late. She tried to pray, but she knew the Ear Above must be averted from one who had lied and was in deadly sin.... When Sister Tobias came back she found her lying in a swoon.

The little old crooked, nimble Sister, with the long, pale sheep-face, dropped on her knees beside that prone column of stately womanhood, removed the Mother's hooded mantle, loosened the guimpe and habit, and worked strenuously to revive her, dropping tears.

"My beautiful, my poor lamb!" she crooned. "What's come to her? What wicked shadow's black on all of us? What's brooding near us--Mary be our guardian!--that's struck at her to-night!"

The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from the unconscious hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and might lie. If the Mother willed to tell its contents, she would tell. If not, the little old nun, her faithful daughter, would never ask or seek to know.

She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the tender, wrinkled ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the close white linen wimple.

"Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said, and rose. Sister Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it to her. There was a Boer mutton-fat candle flaring draughtily in an iron sconce upon the wall. The Mother moved across the little room, and burned the letter to the last blank corner, and trod the fallen ashes into impalpable powder. Then she helped Sister Tobias to remove every trace left, and obviate every danger that might result from her late toil, and rejoined her quiet family of daughters as though nothing had happened.

They recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid she had seemed that night. Her smile had a heart-breaking sweetness, and her voice made wonderful melody even in their accustomed ears.

They supped on the little that they had, and chatted, said the night-prayers, and went, aching, all of them, with unsatisfied hunger, to bed. You may conjecture the orderly, modest method of retiring, each Sister vanishing in turn behind a curtained screen to disrobe, lave, and vest herself for sleep, emerging in due time in the loose, full conventual night-garment of thick white twilled linen, high-throated, monkish-sleeved, and girdled with a thin cotton cord, her face, plain or pretty, young or elderly, framed in the close little white drawn cap of many tucks.

Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin pulled over its hole, the lights were extinguished, and only the subdued crimson glow of the tiny lamp that burned before the silver Crucifix that had stood above the Tabernacle on the altar of the Convent chapel burned ruby in the thick, hot dark, where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a narrow, white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row of quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every Sister's pillow, and her beads about her wrist.

The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous sentences of the anonymous letter written in hellish characters of mocking flame on the background of the dark. She prayed as the wrecked may when the ship beneath their feet is going down. Beside her Lynette, not daring to disturb the silence, suddenly grown rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living on the other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly yawned between.

She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister Cleophee. She had not seen Beauvayse. But a note had come from him, that had warmed the heart she hid it near. His dearest, he called her--his own beautiful beloved. He could not snatch a minute from duty even to kiss his darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday they would be together all day. And would she not meet him at the Convent on Thursday, at twilight, when the shelling stopped, and it would be safe for his beloved to venture there? She must not come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was hers in life and death.

Lynette's first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It laid a hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and strong. The hand said "Mine!"

His. She would be his one day--soon; and there would be no more mysteries between the man and the woman welded by God's ordinance into husband and wife. She shivered a little at the thought of that intimate, peculiar, utter oneness. And then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart, she realised that, however well such a secret as that she guarded might be hidden before the priest and the clergyman made they twain One, it must be known of both afterwards, or else be for ever threatening to start through the burying earth, crying, "I am here. How came you to forget?"

She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon, and deaf when voices spoke to her. She was thinking.... How if she might be mistaken in Beauvayse, even now? He was beautiful and brave and alluring to her woman's sense in what she knew of him and what was yet to know. He called her and drew her. Nothing noble awakened in her at the smile on the gay, bold lips and in the grey-green, jewel-bright eyes. When he had held her to his heart, she had not felt her soul merge with another, its fellow, and yet stronger and greater, in that embrace. He and she were not bodiless spirits floating in pure ether, but an earth-made girl and boy, very much athirst for the common cup of human rapture, hungry for the banquet of mortal bliss.

It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the one? How if her hasty gift of herself robbed both in the long end? How if his headlong passion and tempestuous love should be torn from him like rags in the first instant of that discovery that must almost inevitably be made? She heard his boyish voice crying, "Hateful!... You have deceived me!" and was stabbed with quick anguish, knowing him in the right.

Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some unwritten code of that strange lawgiver, the World, they were absolved of the necessity of spotlessness. They might slake their thirst at muddy sources unrebuked. And the more each wallowed, the more he demanded of the woman he wedded that she should be immaculate in thought and deed--if in knowledge, that was all the better.

What a cloud of doubts assailed her, swarming like bees, settling in every blossomed branch of her mind, and blotting out the sweetness with angry buzzing, furry bodies, armed with sharp stings for punishment or revenge. She had seen a little peach-tree weighed down and bowed to the red earth at its roots with the weight of such a swarm. She felt at this juncture very like the tree. A little more, only a slight increase of the burden, and the slender trunk would have snapped. When the native bee-master came and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives, the little tree stayed crooked. It did not regain its beautiful, healthful uprightness for a long time.

The Mother had commanded her never to tell Beauvayse. She realised that in this one sorrowful instance she was wiser than her teacher. If unutterable misery was not to result from their union, he must be told the truth before ...

Once he knew it, would he love her any longer? Would he desire to make her his wife? She knitted her brows and her fingers in anguish, and set her little teeth. Possibly not. Probably not.

And supposing all went well and they were married. She had not realised clearly, even when she talked of travelling abroad into the unknown, conjectured world, what it would mean to go out from this, the first home she had ever known, and leave the Mother. She caught her breath, and her heart stopped at the thought of waking up one morning in a new, strange country, and knowing that dear face thousands of miles away.

The loneliness drove her to daring. She reached out a timid hand, and laid it upon the breast of the still, rigid, immovable figure beside her. Ah, what a leaping, striving, throbbing prisoner was caged there! A faint sob of surprise broke from her. Ah! what was it? what could it mean?

The faint sound she uttered plucked at the strings of that tortured heart. The Mother turned, rose upon her elbow, leaned over the low dividing barrier, took the slight body in her arms, and gathered it closely to her, shielding it from the fangs of that coiled, formless Terror that threatened in the dark. She felt how thin and light it was, and how frail the arms were that clung about her, and how wasted was the face that pressed against the coarse, conventual linen, covering the broad, deep bosom whose chaste and hidden beauties Famine had not spared.

She would be a real mother once--just once. God would not grudge her that. She bared her breast to the cheek with a sudden half-savage, wholly maternal gesture, and drew it close and pillowed it and rocked it. Had Heaven wrought a miracle and unsealed those white fountains of her spotless womanhood, she would have found it sweet to give of herself to Richard's starving child. But she had nothing but her great, indignant pity and her boundless agony of love. Long hours after the face lay hushed in sleep above her heart, and while the long, soft breaths of slumber went and came, she lay staring out into the sinister blackness over the beloved, menaced head.

Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-hole, falling in heavy, sullen gouts and splashes on the beaten earth below as blood drips from a desperate wound. That image rose, and the blackness seemed all red--red with those lines of fiery writing on it, smoking and crawling, flickering and blazing, climbing, and licking with thin, greenish tongues of hell-begotten flame.

Then the midnight hour struck, and it was time to rise for Matins. Long after the Sisters had gone back to bed the Mother knelt on, a motionless figure wrestling in silent prayer before the silver Crucifix upon the wall. Dawn found her still kneeling. No ray of heavenly light had found her soul, that weltered in darkness, crying to One Who seemed not to hear.

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LI

She did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital next day, but secretly charged Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony to carry her whithersoever they went, and not once to let her out of sight. This done, she knew herself impotently helpless to do more. This strong and salient woman, lapped in unseen, impalpable serpent-coils that tightened every hour, was waxing weak. By her own deed she had barred out help and put counsel far from her. She had known the punishment would not be long in coming, when, for the sake of Richard's daughter, she had lied to Richard's friend.

Now she knew, poor, noble, suffering soul, that it would have been wiser to have saved her spotless garment from the smirch by telling him the truth. Then she could have fought this invisible tarantula Thing, with the conjectural hairy claws, the baleful, glittering eyes, and the padding feet that dogged her in the dark, with a strong man's arm to aid her. God was in Heaven, and in Him were her faith and trust, but the comfort of a human counsellor would have been unspeakable.

In a purely spiritual difficulty she would have gone to Father Wix. The kindly, fussy, feeble little old priest could hardly help her in this extremity. She had never told him what had happened at the tavern on the veld. Deep in her pitying woman's heart the child's cruel secret had been buried, once learned. Sister Tobias was the only one who shared it.

Meanwhile she was followed that night and the next night; and on the morning of the Thursday, when she rose from her sleepless bed, another letter weighted with a stone had been dropped down the ladder-hole. She was to give the anonymous writer a meeting and receive a message, unless she wished them that chose to be nameless to lay in wait for the girl. Most likely that would be the better way. She could choose.

She burned the second letter before she went to the Hospital. She found there the single sheet of the Siege Gazette fluttering in every hand. Even her dignified reserve could not ward off the well-meant congratulations, the eager questions, the interested comments on the news contained in the three last paragraphs of the column that was signed "Gold Pen." Then came the telephone message from Lady Hannah. We know what words of hers the wire carried back. All the more firm, all the more courageous, all the more determined that her knees shook, and her heart was as water within her. For the Thing that coiled in the dark would surely strike now.

Perhaps it was some premonition of approaching death that made her, always gracious, always infinitely kind, untiring in helpful deeds, move about among the sick that day, with such a sorrowful-sweet tenderness for them in her noble face and in her gentle touch, and in that wood-dove's voice of hers, that they spoke of it long afterwards with bated breath. A perfume as of rare incense was wafted from the folds of her veil, they said, and a pale aureole of light shone about her white-banded forehead, and her eyes---- Ah! who that met their look could ever forget those eyes?

It was before twilight when she left the Hospital and went to the Convent, a tall, upright, mantled and hooded figure, stepping through the heavy rain that had fallen since noon, under a quaint monster of a cotton umbrella with ribs of ancient whale,--Tragedy carrying Farce.

It was not the custom to linger in the neighbourhood of the Convent, even among those who were most indifferent to shot and shell. No one was visible in its vicinity, except one burly, bushy-bearded, dark-skinned man in tan-cords and a moleskin jacket. He lounged against a bent and twisted lamp-post, near the broken entrance-gates, cutting up a lump of something that might have been cake-tobacco upon his broad, thick palm with a penknife.

She passed him as she went in. His slouched hat made shadow for his eyes. But so curiously shallow and flat and rusty pale were they against the purplish-brown of the full-blooded, bearded face, that their sharp, sly, sudden look as she went by was as though the adder-fangs had slashed at her. She knew it was the man who had written those two letters. And something else she knew, but did not dare to admit her knowledge even to herself as yet.

She mustered all her forces to meet what was coming as she went up the broken stairs. The wind and the long, driving lances of the rain came at her through the gaps in the walls. The sky was a driving hurry of muddy vapours. The grey hills were blotted out by mist and fog. Long flashes of white fire leaped from them, and the heavy boom of cannon followed. Then all would be still again. She passed down the whitewashed, matted, sodden corridor, and drew out the heavy key of the chapel door from a deep pocket under her black habit, and went in.

Rain beat in here through jagged holes in the soft brickwork and poured through the broken roof, whose rubbish littered the floor. Whiter squares on the whitewashed walls, sodden now with damp, and peeling, showed where the pictures of the Stations of the Cross had hung; with them all draperies had been stripped away and hidden. The crimson-velvet-covered ropes that had done duty instead of altar-rails had been removed, their brass supports unscrewed from the floor. The naked altar-stone was covered with fragments of cheap stained-glass from the little east window of which the Sisters had been so proud. The Tabernacle gaped empty; sandy, reddish-grey dust filled the tiny piscina, and lay thick upon the altar-stone and the shallow wooden altar-steps, and wherever else the rain had not reached it to turn it into yellow mud.

Why had she come here? Because she felt as though the Presence that had housed under the veil of the Consecrated Element were still guarding Its desecrated home. And near the door of the tiny sacristy dangled the rope communicating with the bell that hung, as yet uninjured, in the little wooden cupola upon the roof. The bell could be rung, should need arise. She did not formulate in thought what need. But the recollection of those poisonous adder-eyes stirred even in that proud, dauntless woman's bosom a cold and creeping fear. And when she heard the padding, stealthy footsteps whose sound seemed burned in upon her brain, traversing the soaked matting of the corridor, she caught her breath, and an icy dew of anguish moistened her shuddering flesh.

Then slowly, cautiously, the door opened. He came in, shutting it noiselessly after him. It was the man she had seen loafing by the lamp-post. And, standing tall and forbidding on the bare altar's carpetless steps, she threw out her white hand in a quick, imperious gesture, forbidding his nearer approach.

For an instant the dignity and authority of the tall, black-robed figure gave pause even to Bough. Then he touched his wide-brimmed felt hat to her with a civility that was the very essence of insolence, and took it off and shook the wet from it, and dropped it back upon his head again. He leaned against the wall by the door where there was a little holy-water font, and stuck his gross thumbs in his belt, and waited for her to begin. Always he followed that plan when the woman was angry. Nothing remained for any bloke to teach Bough about the sex. You let her row a bit, and when she had done herself out, you put in what you had got to say. That was Bough's way with them always.

"You have written letters to me and followed me."

His grinning red mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showed in the beard. He looked at her and waited.

"Why have you done this? And, now that you have brought yourself into my sight, quitting the safe shelter of darkness and anonymity, what is to hinder me from handing you over to those who administer and enforce Martial Law in this town, and will deal with you as you deserve?"

His light eyes glittered. His teeth showed again in the brown bush. He spat upon the floor of the sacred place, and answered:

"That's all blow. How do I know what you mean about writing letters and following? Who has seen me doing it? Not one of the mob. I'm just a man that has come in off the road out of the rain. Maybe I have no business in this crib? That's for you to say.... Maybe I have a message for somebody you know. So you don't choose to give it, then that's for her to hear."

He swung about in pretended haste, and laid his hand upon the door.

"Stop," she said, with white lips. "You will not molest the person to whom you refer. You will give your message--if it be one--to me, and to me alone."

"High and mighty," the ugly, wordless smile that faced round on her again seemed to say. "But in a little I'll bring you down off that...." He spat again upon the Chapel floor, and scratched his head under his hat, and began, like a simple, good-natured fellow, a rough miner with a heart of gold:

"No offence is meant, lady, and why should it be taken?"

She seemed to grow in height as she folded her arms in their flowing black sleeves, and looked down upon him silently. The boiling whirlpool in her breast mounted as it spun, stifling her. But she was outwardly calm. He went smoothly on, with an occasional display of red mouth and grinning teeth in the big beard, and always that baleful glitter in his strange light eyes:

"I'm a man that, in the goodness of his heart, is always doing jobs for other people, and never getting thanked for it. I started to push my way up here, two hundred miles from Diamond Town, three weeks back, with a letter from a woman to her husband. She couldn't pay me nothing, poor old girl. Said she'd pray for me to her dying day. There was a pal of mine put up the grubstake. His name"--his evil eyes were glued upon her face--"was Bough. You've heard that name before!"

It was an assertion, not a question. The fierce rush of crimson to her brow, and the flame that leaped into her eyes, had already spoken to her knowledge. She was deadly quiet, gathering all her superb forces for a sudden lioness-spring. He went on:

"He's a widower now, Bough, and well-to-do. Getting on for rich. Got religion too, highly respected. Says Bough to me, 'There's a young woman at the Convent at Gueldersdorp that's not the sort for holy, praying ladies to have under their roof, for all the glib slack-jaw she may have given them.'"

Her great eyes burned on him.

"Say what you have to say, and be brief. Go on."

He shifted from one foot to the other, and licked his fleshy lips.

"I've got to tell the story my own way, lady. Don't you quarrel with it. Says Bough: 'They picked her up on the veld seven years ago, a runaway in rags. As pretty a girl she was,' says he, 'as you'd see in a month's trek, and from what I hear they've made a lady of her.'"

Still silent and watchful, and her eyes upon him, searching him. He went on:

"'However the years have changed her,' says Bough, 'you'll spot her by her little feet and hands, and her slender shape, and her big eyes, like yellow diamonds, and her hair, the colour of dried tobacco-leaf in the sun....'"

She quivered in every limb, and longed to shut her eyes and bar out the intolerable sight of him, leering and lying there. Had she not interrupted, she must have cried out. She said:

"You tell me this man Bough is at Diamond Town?"

"I said he was there when I left. The young woman he talked of was brought up at his place in Orange Free State, a nice respectable boarding-house and hotel for travelling families on the veld between Driepoort and Kroonfontein. Bough was good to the girl, and so was his wife, that's dead since. Uncommon! Not that they had much of the dibs to spend in those days. But, being an honest Christian man, Bough treated the girl like his own. And right down bad she served him."

He licked his thick lips again, and the flattish, light-hued adder-eyes glittered.

"There was a bloke that used to hang around the place--kind of coloured loafer, with Dutch blood, overgiven to Squareface and whisky. He got going gay with the girl----"

She stood like a statue of ebony and ivory. Only by the deep breaths that heaved her broad bosom could you tell she lived--by that, and by the unswerving watchfulness of those burning eyes.

"And Bough, when he caught them together, got mad, being a respectable man, and let her taste the sjambok. Then she ran away."

He coughed, and shifted again from one foot to the other. He would have preferred a woman who had loaded him with invectives, and told him that he lied like hell.

"The man that had left her to Bough's guardianship was a sort of broken-down English officer by the name of Mildare----"

Her bosom heaved more stormily, but her intense and scorching regard of him never wavered.

"--Mildare. He left a hundred pounds with Bough, to be kept for her till she was twenty. There was a waggon and team Bough was to have had to sell, and use the money for the girl's keep, but a thief of a Dutch driver waltzed with them--took 'em up Johannesburg way, and melted 'em into dollars. Bough got nothing for all his kindness--not a tikkie. But he's ready to hand over the hundred, her being so nigh come to age. There's a locket with a picture in it, and brilliants round, that may be worth seventy pounds more. All Bough wants is to do the square thing. This is the message he sends her now. The money and the jewels will be handed over, as in duty bound; and, since she's turned respectable and got education, I was to say there's an honest man--widower now, and well off--that's ready to hang up his hat for her, and wipe all old scores off the slate in the regular proper way...."

She said in tones that were of ice:

"Bough is the honest man?..."

"Just Bough.... 'Maybe, in my decent anger at her goings on,' he says, 'I went a bit too far. Well! I'm ready to make amends by making her my wife.'"

The lioness crouched and leapt.

"You are Bough! You are the evil man, the servant of Satan, who wrought abomination upon a helpless child!"

The onslaught came so suddenly that he was staggered. Then he swore.

"Not me, by G----!"

She pointed her long arm at him, and some strange force seemed to be wielded by that unweaponed woman-hand that struck him and pierced him through flesh, and bone and marrow....

"You are the man!" She stretched her arms to the wild, hurrying clouds that looked in upon her through the yawning rifts in the roof, and called upon her Maker for vengeance. "How long wilt Thou delay, O Lord, righteous in judgment? Fulfil Thy promise! Bind Thou Thy millstone about the neck of this wretch, hated and accursed of Thee, and let it drag him down to the uttermost depths of the Lake of Fire, where such as he shall wallow and howl throughout Eternity!----"

She was infinitely more terrible than the lioness who has licked her murdered cubs. No Pythoness at the dizziest height of the sacred frenzy, no Demeter wrought to delirium by maternal bereavement, was ever imagined by poet or painter as half so grand, and terrible, and awe-inspiring, as this furious cursing nun.

"--Delay not Thou, O Lord!" she prayed....

Rain fell in a curtain of gleaming crystal rods between them. Seen through it, she appeared supernaturally tall, her garments streaming like black flames, her face a white-hot furnace, her eyes intolerable, merciless, grey lightnings, her voice a fiery sword that cleft the guilty to the soul.

The voice of Conscience was dumb in him. He knew no remorse, and made a jest of God. But his callous heart had been filled from the veins of generations of Irish Catholic peasants, and, in spite of himself, the blood in his veins ran cold with superstitious fear.

Yet, when no palpable answer came from that Heaven to which she cried, he rallied, remembering that, after all, she was a woman, and alone with him in the place. She had sunk back against the altar that was behind her. Her eyes were closed, her face a white mask of anguish; she looked as though about to swoon. Bough hailed the symptoms as favourable. Fainting was the prelude to caving in, with the women he knew. But when he stirred, her eyes were wide and preternaturally bright, and held him. He snarled:

"You'll not take the girl my message, then?"

She reared up her tall form, and laughed awfully.

"Did you dream I would defile her ears with it? Now that I know you, you will be wise to leave this place; for it is a spot where your sins may find you out!"

He jeered:

"That flash bounce doesn't go down with me. The trouble'll be at your end of the house, unless you listen to reason and stop giving off hot air. What's to hinder me making a clean breast to that swell toff she's wheedled into asking her to marry him? What's to hinder me from standing up before the whole mob, saying as I've repented what I done years back, and I've come to make an honest girl of her at last?"

The whirling waters of bitterness in her breast were rising, drowning her.... He realised her momentary weakness, and moved a step or two nearer, keeping well between the woman and the door.

"What's to hinder me, I say?"

Her rapier of keen womanly intuition flashed out at him again, and drew the blood.

"Your fear will hinder you. You are here in an assumed character, and under a false name." The long arm shot out, the white hand pointed at him again. "You never came here from Diamond Town. That letter was a forgery. You have papers on you now that would prove you to be a spy, if you were taken. Ah, I can see it written in your coward's face!"

The devil was at the woman's ear, prompting her. Or was it----? Bough's dark, full-blooded face bleached to muddy-pale as her terrible voice rang through the desolate place, and echoed among the broken rafters.

"You boast yourself ready to admit your infamy. You shall be compelled! Everything shall be made known! I will go to Lord Beauvayse now, and tell him all--all! And if he loves her, he will marry her. And you who have secrets upon your soul even more perilous, if less vile and hideous"--again the terrible hand pointed, and that sense of a supernatural force that it wielded knocked his knees together and dried up his mouth--"I see the millstone round your neck!..."

The clarion voice mounted on a great note of triumph. With her inspired face, and with her floating veil, she looked like a Prophetess of old. "The Lord is not mocked! He will avenge His little one as He has promised! Move aside, you lost, and branded, and miserable wretch! Do you dare to dream you can hinder Me from doing what I have said?"

He was at the bottom of the altar-steps as the tall, imperious figure came sweeping down. The curtain of rain no longer fell between them, but behind him. He must silence that railing voice that cried in the house-top--put out the light of those intolerable eyes....

He drew out his revolver with a blasphemous oath. At the gleam of steel in the thickening twilight she dropped her upraised arms, and made a swift rush to the rope of the bell, and set it clanging. Two double strokes rang out; the third was broken in the middle.... For as she swung round, panting and tugging at the rope, he shot her in the back above the line of the white wimple from which the veil streamed aside, and ran to the door as she cried out and swayed forward, still clinging to the vibrating rope, and turned there and fired a second shot, that struck her in the body.

Then he was gone, and the walls were crowding in on her to crush her, and then receding to immeasurable distances, and the blood and air from her pierced lungs bubbled through the bullet-holes in the serge stuff and the scorched linen.

She stumbled a few steps blindly, then fell and lay choking, with that strange gurgling and whispering in her ears, the rushing blood mingling with the water of the puddles that the rain had made upon the littered floor. She faltered out the name of her Master and Spouse, and commended her pure soul to Him in utter humility. Death would have been a welcome loosing of her bonds but for the Beloved left behind, at the mercy of the merciless.

The stab of that remembrance lent her strength to struggle up upon her knees. Ah, cruel! cruel!... But she must submit. Was it not the Holy Will? She signed the Cross upon her bosom, with fingers already growing stiff, and made a piteous little act of charity, forgiving the sin of the man against herself, but not his crime against dead Richard's child. And she stretched out long black-sleeved arms gropingly in the thick, numbing darkness that hemmed her in, and moaned to the Mother of the motherless to have pity!... pity!...

She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column, and lay with outspread arms upon the altar-step.

"Jesu.... Mary.... The child!..."

The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last two words were nearly her last sigh. Thenceforward there was no sound at all in the Convent chapel, save the dull splash of rain, falling through the holes in the broken roof upon the sodden floor, where the dead woman lay, face downwards.

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LII

No one had heeded the revolver-shot. The detonation of a cartridge or so when a bombardment is going on, what does it count for? And yet, when the burly figure of the runner from Diamond Town slipped out of the Convent doorway and stole across the shrapnel-littered garden, and crossed the veld towards the native town, it had been barely twilight--a twilight of heavy, drenching rain, to be sure. Still, in it he had encountered those who might have suspected afterwards....

Perhaps it would have been better had he stopped in Gueldersdorp and mugged it out. But that sharp, prompt, swift, unsparing thing called Martial Law is not a power to play with with impunity, and of the man who wielded it in Gueldersdorp, Bough had conceived a wholesome dread. Best that he had fled, although his going tagged him with suspicion. That cursed stupid game of his with the telephone at the Headquarters of the Baraland Rides might cost him more than the bit of twist with which he had bribed the orderly, left for a moment in sole charge, and demoralised by the sight of tobacco.

Opium played you tricks like that, when, for the gratification of a sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the stuff, you would risk everything. In excess it played hell with the nerves. That was why those eyes of hers.... Damn them! Why couldn't a man put them out of mind and out of sight?

It was not to be done. The obsession held him. A black shadow on the floor would be the long body, lying face downwards on the altar-steps, with outspread, crucified arms. He heard her stifled crying upon the Name, and the gurgling outrush of mingled air and blood that followed each deep sob for breath....

And then he would be running through the lashing, bucketing wet, circumventing the sentry-posts, wriggling over the veld on his belly like a snake. He would be pushing through the dripping covert of the north bank of the river--for that, he had decided, was the safest way out or in--leaving fragments of his garments on the thorny cacti that grabbed at him with their green hands. And then he would find himself lying doggo between two great stones, waiting for it to be quite dark before he essayed to pass the rifle-pits that angled across either shore. Two hours he had lain so, and it had hailed, and sheet lightning had smitten greenish-blue glares from the hissing, clattering whiteness, and he had remembered with a shudder those eyes....

Then it had been dark enough to risk passing between the angles of the rifle-pits, where lay men who kept their eyes skinned and their weapons handy by day and night. And again Bough had wriggled like a snake, but through shallow water instead of grass and red mud. He had swam the deep pools, and once got entangled in barbed-wire, and went under, gurgling and drowning, three times before he wrenched himself loose. It had seemed as though a dead woman's hands had seized him, and were dragging him down. But he tore free and passed safely. There was not a single shot--the Devil was so obliging! And then, lest Brounckers' pickets should mistake a friend in the darkness, he waited for light in a little thorny kloof beyond their advanced outposts; and the dawn came, with an awful gush of crimson dyeing all the eastern sky, so that the pools about his feet--even the drops of wet upon the stones and bushes--caught the ruddy reflection, and all the world seemed dripping with new-shed blood.

Then up had rushed the sun, and smitten a glorious rainbow out of fog and vapour, and one end of it seemed to be in Gueldersdorp, resting in a golden mist upon the Convent's shattered roof, while the other vanished in mid-heaven. It had seemed to the murderer like a ladder by which the dead woman's soul went climbing, up and up, to tell his crime to God....

He had killed her, that woman in black, to stop her from blowing on him. Who would have dreamed a meek, sober nun could be transformed like that? A lioness whose cub has been shot, straightway becomes a beast-devil. She, standing on the naked steps of the bare altar, with upraised, black-sleeved arms and black funereal robes, demanding Heaven's vengeance for that deed of old, calling down the judgment of God upon its doer, had been infinitely more terrible than the lioness. Lightning had flashed from her great eyes, and subtle electric forces had darted from her outspread finger-tips. While she looked at him and spoke she enmeshed him, helpless, in a net of terror. It was only when she had turned her back that Bough had had the nerve to shoot. And he was no novice in bloodshed--not he. There were things safely hidden and put away and buried, that might some day put a rope round some man's neck. But the man would never be Bough. There had always been a scapegoat to suffer until now.

He ate more opium now than ever, because he could not forget that woman's awful eyes. He would see them looking at him in the dark, when he could not sleep. Her voice haunted him, terrible in its clarion-note of wrath, its organ-roll of denunciation. The hand that had pointed to the millstone about his neck had conjured it there. He felt it dragging him down.

Maar--that was the gold! You can carry a goodly amount of the precious metal upon your single person, if you are clever enough to stow it and muscular enough to walk lightly under the weight. And a great deal of the yellow stuff, gathered and stored by the mining companies, leaked about this time out of the hiding-places skilfully contrived for it into the pockets of Van Busch and his pals. It is weighty, as well as precious, stuff, and when you inter it, there must be bearers as well as a gravedigger, and when you carry away a great deal of it at a time, confederates must aid you.

Oom Paul, when, like some elderly black humble-bee, with crooked thighs deep laden with the metallic yellow pollen, he buzzed heavily off for Lorenco Marques, deplored the deceitfulness of riches less bitterly than their non-portableness.

Van Busch, by a series of clever expedients, overcame that difficulty. The cartridges that weighed down his bandolier were of cast gold, cleverly painted; the gun he carried was a hollow sham packed with raw gold; also, his garments were lined and padded with the same material. At Cape Town he would disburden himself, and one of the women who were his confederates would take the stuff to England, and sell it in London, and bank the money in the name of Van Busch. He so managed that there was always a woman coming and a woman going. Women had been his tools, and his slaves, and his victims, ever since he had been born. When the old were worn out and useless, he shook them off, and fresh instruments rose up to take their places.

He never trusted men in money matters. He knew too much of the power of that yellow pollen that breeds madness in the male. But there is one thing that most women desire more than the possession of much money, and that is absolute possession of one man.

Bough understood women of a certain class. He had moulded them to his will, and bent them to his whim, all his life long. He was a man of manifold experience as regards the sex.

Lately he had added to his stock. He had stood face to face with a woman, unarmed and in a lonely place, and had tasted Fear. He had seen--from afar off--a woman whose slight, vivid beauty had roused in him a desire that was torture.

It was as though the Minotaur were in love with Ariadne; it was Caliban thirsting for the beauty of Miranda. Prospero had not come in time; the satyr had surfeited upon the unripe grapes, and now was ahungered for the purple cluster, tied up out of reach of those gross, greedy, wicked hands.

The locket with a picture in it and brilliants round, "that might be worth seventy," the dainty, pearly miniature on ivory by Daudin, of the dead woman who lay buried under the Little Kopje, and which Bough had taken from the body of the English traveller, together with the signet-ring and everything else of value that Richard Mildare had owned, possessed a strange fascination for the thief. It was extraordinarily like.... He hung it by its slender gold chain about his thick neck, and gloated over and grudged the beauty that it recalled.

It is horrible to speak of love in connection with the man Bough, but if ever he had known it, it was now. His victim of old time had become his tyrant. Replete with vile pleasures, he longed for her the more.

He even became sentimental at times, telling himself that all he had sought was to repair the wrong, and make an honest woman of the Kid. She should have been lapped in luxury, worn jewels equalling any Duchess's. He was a man of money now. A little delay, to become yet more rich, and arrange for the safe burying of Bough--then Van Busch, of Johannesburg, capitalist and financier, would descend upon London in a shower of gold, furnish a house in Hyde Park or Mayfair in topping style; own four-in-hands, and motor-cars, and opera-boxes, and see all Society fluttering to his feet to pick up scattered crumbs of the golden pudding.

It really seemed as though the dream would be realised. The gross, squarely-built man with the bushy whiskers and the light strange eyes, found success attend his every enterprise from that hour in which he had spilt life upon the pavement of the Convent chapel. The tarantula-pounce never missed a prey. Every knavish venture brought in money or money's worth, every base plot was carried through triumphantly. Bough, alias Van Busch, was not ordinarily a superstitious man, but his run of luck made him almost afraid at times.

He scented the Relief before the besiegers, undertook to scout for Young Eybel in the direction of Diamond Town, and ingeniously warned Colonel Cullings of a Boer plan for cutting off the Flying Column on the scorching western plains, which resulted in the capture of two waggon-loads of burghers, their rations, ammunition, and Mausers--a most satisfying haul. He placed before the leader of the British Force intercepted telegrams which threw invaluable light on Dutch moves. No more single-minded, ingenuous, and patriotic British South African ever drew breath than Mr. Van Busch, of Johannesburg. And verily he reaped his reward, in an officially countersigned railway pass, which would enable the patriot to render some further services to British arms, and a great many more to Van Busch, of Johannesburg.

He had his knavish headquarters still at the Border homestead known as Haargrond Plaats. Something drew him back to the place, and kept on drawing him. From thence he could observe and conduct his operations, and gather news of the besieged in Gueldersdorp. He was there at the time when the Division--Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, with a half battalion of Town Guards, converted into mounted infantry by the simple process of putting beasts underneath men who could ride them--marched out of Gueldersdorp en route for Frostenberg.

The slatternly Dutchwoman and the coloured man who had charge of the Plaats were too surely his creatures to betray Bough Van Busch. "Let the dogs smell around the place," he thought, when by the sounds that reached him in his hiding-place he knew the Advance had halted. "They'll tire of the game before they smell out me!"

His hiding-place was a safe retreat and storehouse for stuff that it was necessary to conceal. No one knew of it save Bough Van Busch and the draggle-tailed woman. It was in the great stone-built chimney of the disused, half-ruined farmhouse kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared by the stout hands of the old voortrekkers of 1836, its walls, three feet in thickness, embracing the wide hearth about which the family life of the homestead had concentrated itself in the past.

There may have been a mill on the farm in the old days. Or possibly, meaning to build one, those robust pioneers of the Second Exodus had dragged the two huge stones into the wilderness, and then abandoned their plan. The lower millstone paved the hearth, the upper, the diameter of its shaft-hole increased by chipping to the size of a musk-melon, had been set by some freak of the farmer-architect's heavy fancy as a coping on the top of the big stone shaft. From thence, as Lady Hannah Wrynche had said in one of her descriptive letters, dated from "My Headquarters at the Seat of War," it dominated the landscape as a Brobdingnagian stone mushroom might have done.

The wide black throat of the chimney half-way up was choked by a platform of beams and masonry, reaching not quite across, so that even a bulky man who had climbed up--divers rusty iron stanchions driven in between the stones, and certain chinks affording secure foothold--might wriggle between the platform and the chimney-wall, and so lie hid securely. Through the hole in the round stone above came air and light. Crevices cunningly enlarged afforded opportunities for viewing the surrounding country, as for seeing without being seen, and hearing also all that took place in the low-walled courtyard that was used as a cattle-kraal. You had also a bird's-eye view of the lower end of the farm kitchen, where the wall had cracked, and bulged, and spit out some of its stones.

To this eyrie Bough Van Busch retreated when the wall of dust to the south-west gave up the dim shapes of the Advance, and the beat of many iron-shod hoofs, and the roll of many iron-shod wheels made distant thunder, coming nearer, always nearer....

Maar! How the trot of the squadron-columns, the roll of the oncoming batteries, shook the crazy building. The Advance rode into the yard, dismounted, and began to ask questions of the coloured man and the slipshod woman. Neither knew anything. The woman cursed the Englishmen freely, at which they laughed, and lighted fresh cigarettes. The man was dumb as stone.

The Division snaked out of the dust presently, a huge brown centipede that had been chopped in bits, and moved with intervals between its travelling sections. There was no halt; it rolled on, a vision of innumerable moving legs and tanned, wearied faces, over the greening veld to the north-east. The dust grew hotter and thicker, and more stifling, as it rolled.

It drifted in through every chink and cranny in the great chimney, with the smell of hot human flesh and sweating horsehide, and Bough Van Busch longed to, but dared not sneeze. Bits of mortar fell about him, and dislodged tarantulas galloped over his boots. He shook the loathsome, hairy, bright-eyed insects off, shuddering at them with a horror somewhat misplaced, considering the affinity between his own methods and theirs.

Roll, roll, roll! The English voices of the chatting men crouched upon their beasts' withers or sprawling on the limbers, the trampling and snorting of the horses, the sharp signal-whistles of the leaders, the curt utterances of command, mingled with the stream of thought that raced through the busy brain of Bough Van Busch. It had struck him when the Colonel and his Staff rode up and halted by the gateway of the littered courtyard, that here would be a chance for a nervy man, with a set purpose, to venture back, cleverly disguised, to Gueldersdorp. He knew he would be risking his neck, but the sting of desire galled him to hardihood. She was there. Red mist gathered in his brain, red sparks snapped before his eyes, the thick red blood surged fiercely through his veins--drummed deafeningly in his gross ears at the thought of seeing her again....

And the tail of the Division was going by. A Field Telegraph Company, a searchlight company, the Ambulances, and a train of transport-waggons, with the mounted infantry, brought up the rear. The Advance had galloped forwards in haste, the group at the gate lingered. A voice rang out clearly, giving some order. It said:

"And if abandoned, carry out instructions, previously warning the inmates of the farm to retire out of----"

The lean, eagle-eyed, keen-faced Colonel bent lower in the saddle to reach the ear of the dismounted officer of Royal Engineers, who stood with one dogskin gloved hand resting on the sweating withers of the brown Waler. He answered, saluted, and drew away. Then the Staff rode on, into the ginger yellow dust-cloud, leaving the officer of Engineers standing in the beaten tracks of many iron-shod hoofs and many iron-shod wheels.

He was not left alone. A little cluster of mounted Cape Police had detached itself from the rear of the Division. They were deeply-burned, hard-bitten men, emaciated to a curious uniformity, mounted on horses as gaunt as their riders. A sergeant was in command of the party, and a drab-painted wooden cart drawn by a high-rumped, goose-necked chestnut mare, pitifully lame on the near fore, had an Engineer for driver. His mate sat on the rear locker, and a mounted comrade rode by the mare's lame side. The rider's stirrup-leather was lashed about the cart-shaft, and thus the mare was helped along.

Obeying some order unheard of the man who was hiding in the old stone chimney, the party of Cape Police divided into two. One half patrolled the outward precincts of the homestead. The rest, dismounting in the courtyard, thoroughly searched the place. The Engineer officer took no part in the search. He stood by the stone-coloured cart, busy at the locker, the sapper who had sat upon it being his aid. Very soon he returned to the yard, and stood in the middle of the litter motionless as a little figure of pale, dusty bronze, holding a cigar-box carefully in both his dogskin-gloved hands. In spite of his patched khaki and ragged puttees there was something dandified about him. His red moustache, waxed to a fine point, jutted like the whiskers of a watchful cat, the whites of his eyes gleamed like silver as he turned them this way and that, following the movements of the men who went in and out of the farm-buildings as directed by their sergeant. The sergeant was an expert in his business, and yet, after a hasty glance up the black yawning gullet of the chimney where Bough Van Busch lay perdu, he had gone out of the dismantled kitchen whistling a tune. Two of his men remained lounging near the threshold. Like the sergeant they had stooped, hands on spread knees, necks twisted awry in the effort to pierce the thick mirk beneath the ragged arch of masonry that spanned the wide hearth where the ashes of long-dead fires lay in powdery grey drifts, and, like the sergeant, they had seen nothing. When you covered the man-hole between the platform-edge and the chimney-wall with the sooty board and the old sack, it was impossible for anyone below to see anything. The inside of the old chimney was as black as hell.

The inquisition ended. The khaki-clad figures came hurrying out of the house, pursued by the Dutchwoman's shrill recriminations. The non-commissioned officer made a report to the officer of Engineers. The men who had been deputed to search mounted at an order, and fell in with the patrol, and sat upon their saddles outside the courtyard wall exchanging furtive winks as the mevrouw devoted their souls and bodies to everlasting perdition.

A quiet utterance from the little red-haired officer checked the torrent of the woman's anger. She screeched in dismay, raising thick hands to heaven. The coloured man's stolid silence was suddenly swept away in a spate of oaths and protestations. Suddenly, looking in the officer's unmoved face, they realised the uselessness of words, turned and ran between the gateless posts, out upon, away over, the dusty, hoof-tracked, wheel-scored veld. And their ungainly hurry and awkward gestures of terror somehow reminded the peering Bough Van Busch of an engraving he had seen by chance in a Dopper Bible, in which Lot and his two daughters, fearfully foreshortened by the artist, scuttled in as grotesque an insect hurry from the doomed vicinity of Sodom, Queen City of the Plain.

The officer of Engineers hardly glanced after the retreating couple. He stepped across the threshold of the disused farm-kitchen, holding the little wooden box carefully in both his dogskin-gloved hands. He crossed to the hearth, stubbing his toe against a jutting floor-brick, and as he did so he caught his breath. Then he stepped down under the yawning gape of the chimney, and seemed to grope and fumble at the back of the hearth. He raised himself then, stepped back, and called out sharply in the Taal:

"Wie is daar?"

The man's voice dropped back dead out of the choked-up chimney-throat. A little sooty dust fell. There was no other answer. The voice was lifted again, speaking this time in English:

"Is anyone hiding here?"

No one replied, and the little officer seemed to give up. He lingered a moment longer, struck a match as though to light a cigarette, then went quickly out of the kitchen. An orderly waited with his horse outside the gateway. Bough Van Busch, listening with strained ears, heard the clink of spur against stirrup, the creak of the saddle receiving a rider's weight. There was a short sharp whistle, followed by the sound of cantering hoofs, and the rattle of hurrying wheels dying out over the veld to the north-east. The unwelcome intruders had gone. Bough Van Busch, after a cautious interval, deemed it safe to descend.

He was red-smeared with veld dust and white-smeared with mortar, and black with old soot. His bulky body oscillated as he let himself down from beam to stanchion, finding sure foothold in the crevices, and hand-grip in the stout iron hooks from which plump mutton-hams and beef sausages had hung ripening in the pungent smoke of burning wood and dried dung. There was a smell in his nostrils like charring wool and saltpetre. He hung over the wide hearth now. A short drop of not more than a foot or two would bring him safely to the ground.

Van Busch did not drop. He dangled by the hands and sweated. He blasphemed in an agony of terror, though it seemed to him that he prayed.

For the dandy little Engineer officer had left the cigar-box lying empty among the powdery ashes in the wide, old-world hearthplace. An innocent-looking parcel it had contained, wrapped in a bit of old canvas, and, further secured with copper wire and string, was wedged in a chink between the blackened stones at the back of the hearth. From it a fuse hung down; a short length nearly consumed by the crepitating fiery spark at its loose end. It burned with a little purring sound, as though it liked the business it was engaged upon. Bough Van Busch knew that in another moment the detonation would take place....

He heard nothing of it when it came.... Nor did he know it when the walls of Cyclopean masonry bulged and opened about him like the petals of a flowering lily. He was beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent and torn as though the devils it had housed had wreaked their fury on their dwelling, lay sandwiched between the wreckage of the great chimney and the millstone that had paved its hearth, now a yawning cavity, some six feet deep. Leaning on its side in a trench its own weight had dug in the stony earth of the dirty courtyard was the huge stone that had topped the shaft. Something ugly was wedged in the central hole that had been made bigger to let out the smoke. And the murderer's soul, light as a dried leaf fluttering through the illimitable spaces of Eternity, went wandering on its way to the Balances of God.

* * * * *

The party of Cape Police who had searched Haargrond Plaats, with the drab-painted cart, the three Engineers, and the dandified little officer, had only ridden to a safe distance. They halted, and, concealed from observation by a fold of the grassy veld, waited for the explosion of the dynamite cartridge. When it came, the Engineer officer shut his binoculars, and gave the signal to return.

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