The Man Who Won
BY
MRS. BAILLIE REYNOLDS
(G. M. ROBINS)
AUTHOR OF
"PHOEBE IN FETTERS," "THE DREAM AND THE MAN," ETC.
"Let a man contend to the uttermost
For his life's set prize, be it what it may."
--ROBERT BROWNING,
LONDON
HUTCHINSON & CO.
PATERNOSTER ROW
1905
_Printed by Cowan & Co., Limited, Perth._
To
M. ADELINE HUGHES
UNTIRING SYMPATHISER
TENDER CRITIC
DEAR FRIEND
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I LUTWYCHE'S
II MILLIE
III THE RIVALS
IV THE GUARDIANSHIP OF CAROL MAYNE
V A BOER BURYING
VI THE FLINGING OF THE GAGE
VII IN THE GARRET
VIII THE RESCUE
IX THE SCANDALISING OF SLABBERT'S POORT
X FRANSDALE
XI MELICENT'S COUSINS
XII THE JARRING ELEMENT
XIII LANCE BURMESTER IS CONSCIOUS OF A PERSONALITY
XIV THE BREAKING-IN OF MELICENT
XV A CLEVESHIRE TEA-PARTY
XVI BREAKING BOUNDS
XVII A CRISIS AT THE VICARAGE
XVIII A NEW HOME
XIX AN UNMARKED FESTIVAL
XX CAPTAIN BROOKE
XXI MIRAGE
XXII RECOGNITION
XXIII REBELLION
XXIV UNREST
XXV THE WAY OUT
XXVI THE END OF THE FIRST ROUND
XXVII THREE MONTHS' TRUCE
XXVIII THE GATES OF SPRING ARE OPENED
XXIX THE FRIENDSHIP GROWS
XXX TREACHERY
XXXI REPUDIATION
XXXII THE FRANSDALE SPORTS
XXXIII CALUMNY
XXXIV THE DISCOMFITURE OF OTIS
XXXV CONFESSION
XXXVI WHAT CHANCED UPON THE MOORS
XXXVII THE HOUSE IS BUILT
THE MAN WHO WON
CHAPTER I
LUTWYCHE'S
"Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held,
More than they said. I was ware, and watched.
I was the scapegrace, this rat belled
The cat, this fool got his whiskers scratched."
--ROBERT BROWNING.
The talk had waxed political, and the audience was frankly bored.
The man who had been haranguing his mates was hurt at the somewhat
too obvious lack of appreciation which his truly democratic
sentiments received.
"Ef yer could quit twinin' yerself araound that thar' post a spell,
an' listen to a bit o' horse-sense"--he broke off angrily.
"It's usually hoarse when you take the floor, Amurrica," was the
surly reply; "but it's blasted little sense I've ever heard come
outer your head."
"Ef you was to listen, it 'ud make a powerful deal o' difference to
what you heard," snapped Amurrica, whose eloquence was his chief
vanity.
"I ain't good at listening," indifferently replied the blond and
bearded giant, who was "twinin' hisself araound the post," "onless a
man's talkin'; an' that's a fact."
There was a giggle of appreciation among the half-dozen men and
youths collected at the gate of the farm enclosure.
"No good, Amurrica; chuck it! Bert'll git there every time," said
someone cheerfully.
Amurrica snorted.
"Talkin', indeed! Why, you low-downers in this all-fired continent
of Africa, you don' know what talkin' means!"
"Usually means lyin' over in America, don't it?" said Bert casually.
His eyes were fixed on vacancy as he spoke; the chatter of the group
around him was nothing but a weariness, like the buzzing of flies.
His mind was fixed upon what was going on in the low frame house,
with the corrugated iron roof, that stood within the enclosure. He
was experiencing something more like anxiety than he had ever felt
before in all his four-and-twenty years.
It was oppressively hot. For miles and miles, the pitiless sun lit
up the endless veldt, which undulated all around the little township:
wild, yet with a dreadful sameness in it.
"As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be," seemed
written upon the face of the desert; yet here and there its dignity
was scarred, its monotony interfered with, by the ugliness and
meanness of human habitation. The beginnings of civilisation,
without simplicity as they were without harmony, jarred every sense.
The places seemed to be devoid of self-respect or privacy; to
consist, in fact, entirely of back premises. Rows of dingy linen
flapped upon lines, on ground where the grass was irregularly worn
away here and there by the treading of feet. Collections of old meat
tins, old kettles, old shoes, heaped upon kitchen refuse, burdened
the stale air with miasma. A wretched-looking, lean-to building bore
a huge board with the flaunting inscription:
MOUNT PLEASANT BOARDING-HOUSE FOR
GENTLEMEN
The gentlemen who boarded there were mostly assembled to-night at the
gate of "Lutwyche's."
A little farther away the Vierkleur Hotel fluttered its flag in the
heavy air, and rang at night to the coarse laughter and oaths of a
set of idlers, attracted to what had been a purely agricultural
district by the finding of diamonds.
Lutwyche's lay silent, sweltering in the heat. Round the stoep of
the farm-house hungry poultry were congregated; to-day they were
being neglected, and they were wisely determined not to suffer in
silence.
It was a critical moment in history. All Europe was waiting to know
what President Kruger was going to do. It was the period which
preceded the sending of his historical ultimatum. The town for days
had been buzzing with rumours of war, and Amurrica had spoken great
things in the saloon of the Vierkleur. But local interests are
strong, and it was not of British supremacy that the men were
thinking now.
The sun was going down. They had all, as Amurrica said, quit work,
and they were assembled by the barbed wire fence to gather news of
the Englishman who lay dying under the corrugated iron roof of
Lutwyche's.
Even the quarrelling was listless. It could be seen that Bert's
heart was not in it. Where the heart of the huge young Boer was was
matter of pretty common knowledge, though there was not a man in the
settlement who would have dared to tell him so, except Amurrica, who
had his own reasons for not indulging in the perilous amusement.
Presently the door of the silent house opened, and a Kaffir girl came
out, with a dirty rug in her hand, from which she proceeded to shake
clouds of stifling acrid dust.
"Here, Minnie, Topsy, Hattie, whoever you are, how's the boss--eh?"
called one of the loungers.
The girl showed all her teeth in an apparently endless grin.
"You young gentlemen carled to inquire?" she cried, in high
appreciation of the family importance. "You brought yo'
visitin'-cards--eh?"
"Shut it," said Bert savagely. "How is Mr. Lutwyche?"
"He don' seem not just the right thing to-day, sir, with missus's
compulments," grinned the girl, wildly elated by her momentary
distinction.
To her intense delight, this last sally caused a giggle among the
loafers. She edged nearer to the barbed wire fencing, to prolong
this truly delightful conversation; and for a minute or two, idiotic
questions and answers pattered across the farm boundary, while Bert's
brow grew blacker and blacker.
Suddenly a silence, instant and deep, fell on the gathering. The
Kaffir girl scuttled behind a shed with noiseless celerity. From the
door of the farm issued two people--Tante Wilma, the Englishman's
Boer wife, and striding beside her corpulent bulk, the slim,
energetic figure of Carol Mayne, the English mission priest in charge
of the station. Tante Wilma wore her most repulsive expression, her
sandy eyebrows lowering over her cunning little eyes. Ten years ago
she had been a handsome woman, in a redundant style; but six children
and an invalid husband had reduced her form to shapelessness and her
temper to rags and tatters.
She hated the English cleric, and could not bear that he should come
and see her husband. The Boer Predikant would have sat and
sympathised with her over his coffee for a couple of hours after his
professional visit to the sick man. Carol Mayne never seemed to have
an adequate idea of the importance of this woman, who owned half
Slabbert's Poort, and had married her English overseer, a widower
with a little girl of his own.
She was evidently accompanying the young man from the house much
against her will. About half way across the yard, becoming perhaps
aware of the audience at the gate, the clergyman halted, just out of
earshot. He seemed earnestly recommending some particular course of
conduct to Mrs. Lutwyche, who stood sullenly before him, hostility in
every line of her coarse face.
The group of men at the gate dropped away silently, singly or in
pairs, avoiding the parson; and Bert was left alone, his sullen scowl
fixed upon the house, as though willing it to render up the face he
had stood there for hours longing to see.
After a while, Mr. Mayne, having finished his colloquy with Tante
Wilma, lifted his hat with that unconscious English University manner
which had piqued her in her husband, but which now she hated as only
the ignorant can hate the thing that they can never understand. The
young Englishman's parting salutation, delivered so entirely as a
matter of course, belonged to an order of things which, had she been
able, Tante Wilma would have destroyed, ravaged, trampled under her
gross feet.
She stood glowering upon him as he made straight for the gate by
which Bert still lounged. And she was pleased to note that the young
man made no effort to open it for his passage.
"Good evening, Mestaer!" said Mr. Mayne, as he reached the gate.
"How's the world treating you?"
"I'm ---- if I care how it treats me," was the engaging response.
The smile that passed over Mayne's face was particularly humorous and
winning.
"Don't care came to a bad end," he said, "and that's what I
particularly hope won't happen to you. Are you going my way?"
"No; I'm staying here, if you're so mighty curious to know my plans,"
was the answer, given with a discourtesy so studied that to notice it
would be to allow the speaker to fancy that he had "scored."
The rudeness must, of course, have been obvious to the priest, but he
disregarded it entirely. A smile again flickered over his face, as
of one who holds a trump card. "Well, then, good-night!" he said
briskly, opening the gate at once, and passing through it with an air
of having no time to waste.
Bert cast another look at the silent house. Nobody was in sight but
the big Boer woman slouching back to the doorway. He lowered the
point of his rapier, so to speak.
"Say--how's he goin' on?" he asked.
Mr. Mayne at once dropped his appearance of hurry, and closed the
gate slowly.
"Well," he said, "he's just lingering. It may last two or three
weeks yet. God help him!"
Bert beat his clenched fist softly on the top bar of the gate.
"Look here!" he burst out, as if the words were torn from him, "they
let you go in and out--you can tell--you oughter know. Is she givin'
that girl hell?"
"I think things are going on much as they have done this last six
months," said Mayne, speaking reluctantly.
"But what'll it be when he's gone? I ask you that? What kind of a
life's she goin' to lead then?"
Mayne hesitated. "I don't know," he said at length, with a touch of
reserve.
"You know how the she-devil hates her," hissed Bert. "She won't keep
her, never fear. She'll chuck her out to any of these blanked scum
around the town, and then say the girl's disgraced her, and she'll
have no more to do with her! I know Tante Wilma!"
Mayne looked keenly and kindly at the excited speaker. He was sorry
for him, from the bottom of his heart; but what to say he did not
know, without betraying confidence.
"I think you see things in too black a light," he said at last.
"Mrs. Lutwyche is not without a sense of duty, though we know she is
not good-tempered. And Millie is not friendless, nor incapable of
taking her own part."
Bert lifted his leonine head, and pointed with a gesture of his hand
towards the house.
"He told me, with his blanky British pride, that he'd sooner see her
in her coffin than married to a man with an ounce of Boer blood in
him--him that let a Boer woman marry him," he growled. "He knows my
mother was English; I told him. I'd take care of her."
Mr. Mayne was able to follow the trend of the jerky, disconnected
sentences.
"Millie's young yet to think of marriage," he said.
"She'll have to think about something worse, before he's cold in his
grave, or I'm much mistaken," said Bert, scowling.
The clergyman pondered.
"Do you want me to speak to her father for you?" he presently asked,
point-blank.
Bert hesitated; he grew red, then pale.
"Don't like to be beholden to me, do you?" said Mayne cheerfully.
"Well, I sympathise with you. But you and I are just walking round
the question, you know, Mestaer. The whole point is, what does
Millie say? Will she have you?"
The colour again rushed over the crestfallen face of Bert. "Gals
like that don' know what they want," he grunted.
"Then it would be very wrong to push her into a life-long contract."
"She don' know what's good for her," repeated Bert. "She'd oughter
be arranged for; that's the way to do it. She'd not repent it if she
married me."
"Well, look here; I'll make a bargain. If Millie comes to me and
says she's willing to marry you, I'll speak to Mr. Lutwyche; but you
know quite as well as I do, he would never hear of it against her
will."
Hereupon Bert damned first British pride, then his own Boer ancestry,
then Tante Wilma, who had caused her husband to contemn all Boers for
her sake.
"Swear-words won't help your cause, be sure of that," observed Mayne
drily. "English girls aren't going to be won that way."
"Think I'd say words like that to her?"
"More than probably. Well, good-night! I'm due at the Mission; not
coming, are you?"
"No," breathed Bert, and said no more; for his eyes were fixed upon a
little shadowy figure, moving under the shadow of the stoep.
Mayne saw it too, and walked quietly away.