TO-MORROW ... PREPARE!
Krool did not sleep. What he read in a letter he had found in a
hallway, what he knew of those dark events in South Africa, now to
culminate in a bitter war, and what, with the mysterious psychic
instinct of race, he divined darkly and powerfully, all kept his eyes
unsleeping and his mind disordered. More than any one, he knew of the
inner story of the Baas' vrouw during the past week and years; also he
had knowledge of what was soon to empty out upon the groaning earth the
entrails of South Africa; but how he knew was not to be discovered.
Even Rudyard, who thought he read him like a book, only lived on the
outer boundaries of his character. Their alliance was only the durable
alliance of those who have seen Death at their door, and together have
driven him back.
Barry Whalen had regarded Krool as a spy; all Britishers who came and
went in the path to Rudyard's door had their doubts or their dislike of
him; and to every servant of the household he was a dark and isolated
figure. He never interfered with the acts of his fellow-servants,
except in so far as those acts affected his master's comfort; and he
paid no attention to their words except where they affected himself.
"When you think it's a ghost, it's only Krool wanderin' w'ere he ain't
got no business," was the angry remark of the upper-housemaid, whom his
sudden appearance had startled in a dim passage one day.
"Lor'! what a turn you give me, Mr. Krool, spookin' about where there's
no call for you to be," she had said to him, and below stairs she had
enlarged upon his enormities greatly.
"And Mrs. Byng, she not like him better as we do," was the comment of
Lablanche, the lady's maid. "A snake in the grass--that is what Madame
think."
Slowly the night passed for Krool. His disturbed brain was like some
dark wood through which flew songless birds with wings of night;
through which sped the furtive dwellers of the grass and the
earth-covert. The real and the imaginative crowded the dark purlieus.
He was the victim of his blood, his beginnings off there beyond the
Vaal, where the veld was swept by the lightning and the storm, the home
of wild dreams, and of a loneliness terrible and strange, to which the
man who once had tasted its awful pleasures returned and returned
again, until he was, at the last, part of its loneliness, its woeful
agitations and its reposeless quiet.
It was not possible for him to think or be like pure white people, to
do as they did. He was a child of the kopje, the spruit, and the dun
veld, where men dwelt with weird beings which were not men--presences
that whispered, telling them of things to come, blowing the warnings of
Destiny across the waste, over thousands and thousands of miles. Such
as he always became apart and lonely because of this companionship of
silence and the unseen. More and more they withdrew themselves,
unwittingly and painfully, from the understanding and companionship of
the usual matter-of-fact, commonplace, sensible people--the settler,
the emigrant, and the British man. Sinister they became, but with the
helplessness of those in whom the under-spirit of life has been
working, estranging them, even against their will, from the rest of the
world.
So Krool, estranged, lonely, even in the heart of friendly, pushing,
jostling London, still was haunted by presences which whispered to him,
not with the old clearness of bygone days, but with confused utterances
and clouded meaning; and yet sufficient in dark suggestion for him to
know that ill happenings were at hand, and that he would be in the
midst of them, an instrument of Fate. All night strange shapes trooped
past his clouded eyes, and more than once, in a half-dream, he called
out to his master to help him as he was helped long ago when that
master rescued him from death.
Long before the rest of the house was stirring, Krool wandered hither
and thither through the luxurious rooms, vainly endeavouring to occupy
himself with his master's clothes, boots, and belongings. At last he
stole into Byng's room and, stooping, laid something on the floor; then
reclaiming the two cables which Rudyard had read, crumpled up, and
thrown away, he crept stealthily from the room. His face had a sombre
and forbidding pleasure as he read by the early morning light the
discarded messages with their thunderous warnings--"To-morrow...
Prepare!"
He knew their meaning well enough. "To-morrow" was here, and it would
bring the challenge from Oom Paul to try the might of England against
the iron courage of those to whom the Vierkleur was the symbol of
sovereignty from sea to sea and the ruin of the Rooinek.
"Prepare!" He knew vastly more than those responsible men in position
or in high office, who should know a thousand times as much more. He
knew so much that was useful--to Oom Paul; but what he knew he did not
himself convey, though it reached those who welcomed it eagerly and
grimly. All that he knew, another also near to the Baas also knew, and
knew it before Krool; and reaped the reward of knowing.
Krool did not himself need to betray the Baas direct; and, with the
reasoning of the native in him, he found it possible to let another be
the means and the messenger of betrayal. So he soothed his conscience.
A little time before they had all gone to Glencader, however, he had
discovered something concerning this agent of Paul Kruger in the heart
of the Outlander camp, whom he employed, which had roused in him the
worst passions of an outcast mind. Since then there had been no
trafficking with the traitor--the double traitor, whom he was now
plotting to destroy, not because he was a traitor to his country, but
because he was a traitor to the Baas. In his evil way, he loved his
master as a Caliban might love an Apollo. That his devotion took forms
abnormal and savage in their nature was due to his origin and his
blood. That he plotted to secure the betrayal of the Baas' country and
the Outlander interest, while he would have given his life for the
Baas, was but the twisted sense of a perverted soul.
He had one obsession now--to destroy Adrian Fellowes, his agent for
Paul Kruger in the secret places of British policy and in the house of
the Partners, as it were. But how should it be done? What should be the
means? On the very day in which Oom Paul would send his ultimatum, the
means came to his hand.
"Prepare!" the cable to the Baas had read. The Baas would be prepared
for the thunderbolt to be hurled from Pretoria; but he would have no
preparation for the thunderbolt which would fall at his feet this day
in this house, where white roses welcomed the visitor at the door-way
and the beauty of Titians and Botticellis and Rubens' and Goyas greeted
him in the luxuriant chambers. There would be no preparation for that
war which rages most violently at a fireside and in the human heart.