CHAPTER XXVIII

"THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM"

Slowly Jasmine returned to her boudoir. Laying the sjambok on the table

among the books in delicate bindings and the bowls of flowers, she

stood and looked at it with confused senses for a long time. At last a

wan smile stole to her lips, but it did not reach her eyes. They

remained absorbed and searching, and were made painfully sad by the

wide, dark lines under them. Her fair skin was fairer than ever, but it

was delicately faded, giving her a look of pensiveness, while yet there

was that in her carriage and at her mouth which suggested strength and

will and new forces at work in her. She carried her head, weighted by

its splendour of golden hair, as an Eastern woman carries a goulah of

water. There was something pathetic yet self-reliant in the whole

figure. The passion slumbering in the eyes, however, might at any

moment burst forth in some wild relinquishment of control and

self-restraint.

"He did what I should have liked to do," she said aloud. "We are not so

different, after all. He is primitive at bottom, and so am I. He gets

carried away by his emotions, and so do I."

She took up the whip, examined it, felt its weight, and drew it with a

swift jerk through the air.

"I did not even shrink when Krool came stumbling down the stairs, with

this cutting his flesh," she said to herself. "Somehow it all seemed

natural and right. What has come to me? Are all my finer senses dead?

Am I just one of the crude human things who lived a million years ago,

and who lives again as crude as those; with only the outer things

changed? Then I wore the skins of wild animals, and now I do the same,

just the same; with what we call more taste perhaps, because we have

ceased to see the beauty in the natural thing."

She touched the little band of grey fur at the sleeve of her clinging

velvet gown. "Just a little distance away--that is all."

Suddenly a light flashed up in her eyes, and her face flushed as though

some one had angered her. She seized the whip again. "Yes, I could have

seen him whipped to death before my eyes--the coward, the abject

coward. He did not speak for me; he did not defend me; he did not deny.

He let Ian think--death was too kind to him. How dared he hurt me so!

... Death is so easy a way out, but he would not have taken it. No, no,

no, it was not suicide; some one killed him. He could never have taken

his own life--never. He had not the courage.... No; he died of poison

or was strangled. Who did it? Who did it? Was it Rudyard? Was it...?

Oh, it wears me out--thinking, thinking, thinking!"

She sat down and buried her face in her hands. "I am doomed--doomed,"

she moaned. "I was doomed from the start. It must always have been so,

whatever I did. I would do it again, whatever I did; I know I would do

it again, being what I was. It was in my veins, in my blood from the

start, from the very first days of my life."

All at once there flashed through her mind again, as on that night so

many centuries ago, when she had slept the last sleep of her life as it

was, Swinburne's lines on Baudelaire:

"There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar; Not

all our songs, oh, friend, can make death clear Or make life

durable...."

"'There is no help for these things,'" she repeated with a sigh which

seemed to tear her heart in twain. "All gone--all. What is there left

to do? If death could make it better for any one, how easy! But

everything would be known--somehow the world would know, and every one

would suffer more. Not now--no, not now. I must live on, but not here.

I must go away. I must find a place to go where Rudyard will not come.

There is no place so far but it is not far enough. I am twenty-five,

and all is over--all is done for me. I have nothing that I want to

keep, there is nothing that I want to do except to go--to go and to be

alone. Alone, always alone now. It is either that, or be Jezebel, or--"

The door opened, and the servant brought a card to her. "His

Excellency, the Moravian ambassador," the footman said.

"Monsieur Mennaval?" she asked, mechanically, as though scarcely

realizing what he had said.

"Yes, ma'am, Mr. Mennaval."

"Please say I am indisposed, and am sorry I cannot receive him to-day,"

she said.

"Very good, ma'am." The footman turned to go, then came back.

"Shall I tell the maid you want her?" he asked, respectfully.

"No, why should you?" she asked.

"I thought you looked a bit queer, ma'am," he responded, hastily. "I

beg your pardon, ma'am."

She rewarded him with a smile. "Thank you, James, I think I should like

her after all. Ask her to come at once."

When he had gone she leaned back and shut her eyes. For a moment she

was perfectly motionless, then she sat up again and looked at the card

in her hand.

"M. Mennaval--M. Mennaval," she said, with a note so cynical that it

betrayed more than her previous emotion, to such a point of despair her

mind had come.

M. Mennaval had played his part, had done his service, had called out

from her every resource of coquetry and lure; and with wonderful art

she had cajoled him till he had yielded to influence, and Ian had

turned the key in the international lock. M. Mennaval had been used

with great skill to help the man who was now gone from her forever,

whom perhaps she would never see again; and who wanted never to see her

again, never in all time or space. M. Mennaval had played his game for

his own desire, and he had lost; but what had she gained where M.

Mennaval had lost? She had gained that which now Ian despised, which he

would willingly, so far as she was concerned, reject with contempt....

And yet, and yet, while Ian lived he must still be grateful to her

that, by whatever means, she had helped him to do what meant so much to

England. Yes, he could not wholly dismiss her from his mind; he must

still say, "This she did for me--this thing, in itself not commendable,

she did for me; and I took it for my country."

Her eyes were open, and her garden had been invaded by those

revolutionaries of life and time, Nemesis, Penalty, Remorse. They

marauded every sacred and secret corner of her mind and soul. They came

with whips to scourge her. Nothing was private to her inner self now.

Everything was arrayed against her. All life doubled backwards on her,

blocking her path.

M. Mennaval--what did she care for him! Yet here he was at her door

asking payment for the merchandise he had sold to her: his judgment,

his reputation as a diplomatist, his freedom, the respect of the

world--for how could the world respect a man at whom it laughed, a man

who had hoped to be given the key to a secret door in a secret garden!

As Jasmine sat looking at the card, the footman entered again with a

note.

"His Excellency's compliments," he said, and withdrew.

She opened the letter hesitatingly, held it in her hand for a moment

without reading it, then, with an impulsive effort, did so. When she

had finished, she gave a cry of anger and struck her tiny clinched hand

upon her knee.

The note ran:

"Chere amie, you have so much indisposition in these days. It is all

too vexing to your friends. The world will be surprised, if you allow a

migraine to come between us. Indeed, it will be shocked. The world

understands always so imperfectly, and I have no gift of explanation.

Of course, I know the war has upset many, but I thought you could not

be upset so easily--no, it cannot be the war; so I must try and think

what it is. If I cannot think by tomorrow at five o'clock, I will call

again to ask you. Perhaps the migraine will be better. But, if you will

that migraine to be far away, it will fly, and then I shall be near. Is

it not so? You will tell me to-morrow at five, will you not, belle amie?

"A toi, M. M."

The words scorched her eyes. They angered her, scourged her. One of

life's Revolutionaries was insolently ravaging the secret place where

her pride dwelt. Pride--what pride had she now? Where was the room for

pride or vanity? ... And all the time she saw the face of a dead man

down by the river--a face now beneath the sod. It flashed before her

eyes at moments when she least could bear it, to agitate her soul.

M. Mennaval--how dare he write to her so! "Chere amie" and "A toi"--how

strange the words looked now, how repulsive and strange! It did not

seem possible that once before he had written such words to her. But

never before had these epithets or others been accompanied by such

meaning as his other words conveyed.

"I will not see him to-morrow. I will not see him ever again, if I can

help it," she said bitterly, and trembling with agitation. "I shall go

where I shall not be found. I will go to-night."

The door opened. Her maid entered. "You wanted me, madame?" asked the

girl, in some excitement and very pale.

"Yes, what is the matter? Why so agitated?" Jasmine asked.

The maid's eyes were on the sjambok. She pointed to it. "It was that,

madame. We are all agitated. It was terrible. One had never seen

anything like that before in one's life, madame--never. It was like the

days--yes, of slavery. It was like the galleys of Toulon in the old

days. It was--"

"There, don't be so eloquent, Lablanche. What do you know of the

galleys of Toulon or the days of slavery?"

"Madame, I have heard, I have read, I--"

"Yes, but did you love Krool so?"

The girl straightened herself with dramatic indignation. "Madame, that

man, that creature, that toad--!"

"Then why so exercised? Were you so pained at his punishment? Were all

the household so pained?"

"Every one hated him, madame," said the girl, with energy.

"Then let me hear no more of this impudent nonsense," Jasmine said,

with decision.

"Oh, madame, to speak to me like this!" Tears were ready to do needful

service.

"Do you wish to remain with me, Lablanche?"

"Ah, madame, but yes--"

"Then my head aches, and I don't want you to make it worse.... And,

see, Lablanche, there is that grey walking-suit; also the mauve

dressing-gown, made by Loison; take them, if you can make them fit you;

and be good."

"Madame, how kind--ah, no one is like you, madame--!"

"Well, we shall see about that quite soon. Put out at once every gown

of mine for me to see, and have trunks ready to pack immediately; but

only three trunks, not more."

"Madame is going away?"

"Do as I say, Lablanche. We go to-night. The grey gown and the mauve

dressing-gown that Loison made, you will look well in them. Quick, now,

please."

In a flutter Lablanche left the room, her eyes gleaming.

She had had her mind on the grey suit for some time, but the mauve

dressing-gown as well--it was too good to be true.

She almost ran into Lady Tynemouth's arms as the door opened. With a

swift apology she sped away, after closing the door upon the visitor.

Jasmine rose and embraced her friend, and Lady Tynemouth subsided into

a chair with a sigh.

"My dear Jasmine, you look so frail," she said. "A short time ago I

feared you were going to blossom into too ripe fruit, now you look

almost a little pinched. But it quite becomes you, mignonne--quite. You

have dark lines under your eyes, and that transparency of skin--it is

quite too fetching. Are you glad to see me?"

"I would have seen no one to-day, no one, except you or Rudyard."

"Love and duty," said Lady Tynemouth, laughing, yet acutely alive to

the something so terribly wrong, of which she had spoken to Ian

Stafford.

"Why is it my duty to see you, Alice?" asked Jasmine, with the dry

glint in her tone which had made her conversation so pleasing to men.

"You clever girl, how you turn the tables on me," her friend replied,

and then, seeing the sjambok on the table, took it up. "What is this

formidable instrument? Are you flagellating the saints?"

"Not the saints, Alice."

"You don't mean to say you are going to scourge yourself?"

Then they both smiled--and both immediately sighed. Lady Tynemouth's

sympathy was deeply roused for Jasmine, and she meant to try and win

her confidence and to help her in her trouble, if she could; but she

was full of something else at this particular moment, and she was not

completely conscious of the agony before her.

"Have you been using this sjambok on Mennaval?" she asked with an

attempt at lightness. "I saw him leaving as I came in. He looked rather

dejected--or stormy, I don't quite know which."

"Does it matter which? I didn't see Mennaval today."

"Then no wonder he looked dejected and stormy. But what is the history

of this instrument of torture?" she asked, holding up the sjambok again.

"Krool."

"Krool! Jasmine, you surely don't mean to say that you--"

"Not I--it was Rudyard. Krool was insolent--a half-caste, you know."

"Krool--why, yes, it was he I saw being helped into a cab by a

policeman just down there in Piccadilly. You don't mean that Rudyard--"

She pushed the sjambok away from her.

"Yes--terribly."

"Then I suppose the insolence was terrible enough to justify it."

"Quite, I think." Jasmine's voice was calm.

"But of course it is not usual--in these parts."

"Rudyard is not usual in these parts, or Krool either. It was a touch

of the Vaal."

Lady Tynemouth gave a little shudder. "I hope it won't become

fashionable. We are altogether too sensational nowadays. But,

seriously, Jasmine, you are not well. You must do something. You must

have a change."

"I am going to do something--to have a change."

"That's good. Where are you going, dear?"

"South.... And how are you getting on with your hospital-ship?"

Lady Tynemouth threw up her hands. "Jasmine, I'm in despair. I had set

my heart upon it. I thought I could do it easily, and I haven't done

it, after trying as hard as can be. Everything has gone wrong, and now

Tynie cables I mustn't go to South Africa. Fancy a husband forbidding a

wife to come to him."

"Well, perhaps it's better than a husband forbidding his wife to leave

him."

"Jasmine, I believe you would joke if you were dying."

"I am dying."

There was that in the tone of Jasmine's voice which gave her friend a

start. She eyed her suddenly with a great anxiety.

"And I'm not jesting," Jasmine added, with a forced smile. "But tell me

what has gone wrong with all your plans. You don't mind what Tynemouth

says. Of course you will do as you like."

"Of course; but still Tynie has never 'issued instructions' before, and

if there was any time I ought to humour him it is now. He's so intense

about the war! But I can't explain everything on paper to him, so I've

written to say I'm going to South Africa to explain, and that I'll come

back by the next boat, if my reasons are not convincing."

In other circumstances Jasmine would have laughed. "He will find you

convincing," she said, meaningly.

"I said if he found my reasons convincing."

"You will be the only reason to him."

"My dear Jasmine, you are really becoming sentimental. Tynie would

blush to discover himself being silly over me. We get on so well

because we left our emotions behind us when we married."

"Yours, I know, you left on the Zambesi," said Jasmine, deliberately.

A dull fire came into Lady Tynemouth's eyes, and for an instant there

was danger of Jasmine losing a friend she much needed; but Lady

Tynemouth had a big heart, and she knew that her friend was in a mood

when anything was possible, or everything impossible.

So she only smiled, and said, easily: "Dearest Jasmine, that umbrella

episode which made me love Ian Stafford for ever and ever without even

amen came after I was married, and so your pin doesn't prick, not a

weeny bit. No, it isn't Tynie that makes me sad. It's the Climbers who

won't pay."

"The Climbers? You want money for--"

"Yes, the hospital-ship; and I thought they'd jump at it; but they've

all been jumping in other directions. I asked the Steuvenfeldts, the

Boulters, the Felix Fowles, the Brutons, the Sheltons, and that fellow

Mackerel, who has so much money he doesn't know what to do with it and

twenty others; and Mackerel was the only one who would give me anything

at all large. He gave me ten thousand pounds. But I want fifty--fifty,

my beloved. I'm simply broken-hearted. It would do so much good, and I

could manage the thing so well, and I could get other splendid people

to help me to manage it--there's Effie Lyndhall and Mary Meacham. The

Mackerel wanted to come along, too, but I told him he could come out

and fetch us back--that there mustn't be any scandal while the war was

on. I laugh, my dear, but I could cry my eyes out. I want something to

do--I've always wanted something to do. I've always been sick of an

idle life, but I wouldn't do a hundred things I might have done. This

thing I can do, however, and, if I did it, some of my debt to the world

would be paid. It seems to me that these last fifteen years in England

have been awful. We are all restless; we all have been going,

going--nowhere; we have all been doing, doing--nothing; we have all

been thinking, thinking, thinking--of ourselves. And I've been a

playbody like the rest; I've gone with the Climbers because they could

do things for me; I've wanted more and more of everything--more

gadding, more pleasure, more excitement. It's been like a brass-band

playing all the time, my life this past ten years. I'm sick of it. It's

only some big thing that can take me out of it. I've got to make some

great plunge, or in a few years more I'll be a middle-aged peeress with

nothing left but a double chin, a tongue for gossip, and a string of

pearls. There must be a bouleversement of things as they are, or

good-bye to everything except emptiness. Don't you see, Jasmine,

dearest?"

"Yes yes, I see." Jasmine got up, went to her desk, opened a drawer,

took out a book, and began to write hastily. "Go on," she said as she

wrote; "I can hear what you are saying."

"But are you really interested?"

"Even Tynemouth would find you interesting and convincing. Go on."

"I haven't anything more to say, except that nothing lies between me

and flagellation and the sack cloth,"--she toyed with the

sjambok--"except the Climbers; and they have failed me. They won't

play--or pay."

Jasmine rose from the desk and came forward with a paper in her hand.

"No, they have not failed you, Alice," she said, gently. "The Climbers

seldom really disappoint you. The thing is, you must know how to talk

to them, to say the right thing, the flattering, the tactful, and the

nice sentimental thing,--they mostly have middle-class

sentimentality--and then you get what you want. As you do now.

There...."

She placed in her friend's hand a long, narrow slip of paper. Lady

Tynemouth looked astonished, gazed hard at the paper, then sprang to

her feet, pale and agitated.

"Jasmine--you--this--sixty thousand pounds!" she cried. "A cheque for

sixty thousand pounds--Jasmine!"

There was a strange brilliance in Jasmine's eyes, a hectic flush on her

cheek.

"It must not be cashed for forty-eight hours; but after that the money

will be there."

Lady Tynemouth caught Jasmine's shoulders in her trembling yet strong

fingers, and looked into the wild eyes with searching inquiry and

solicitude.

"But, Jasmine, it isn't possible. Will Rudyard--can you afford it?"

"That will not be Rudyard's money which you will get. It will be all my

own."

"But you yourself are not rich. Sixty thousand pounds--why?"

"It is because it is a sacrifice to me that I give it; because it is my

own; because it is two-thirds of what I possess. And if all is needed

before we have finished, then all shall go."

Alice Tynemouth still held the shoulders, still gazed into the eyes

which burned and shone, which seemed to look beyond this room into some

world of the soul or imagination. "Jasmine, you are not crazy, are

you?" she asked, excitedly. "You will not repent of this? It is not a

sudden impulse?"

"Yes, it is a sudden impulse; it came to me all at once. But when it

came I knew it was the right thing, the only thing to do. I will not

repent of it. Have no fear. It is final. It is sure. It means that,

like you, I have found a rope to drag myself out of this stream which

sweeps me on to the rapids."

"Jasmine, do you mean that you will--that you are coming, too?"

"Yes, I am going with you. We will do it together. You shall lead, and

I shall help. I have a gift for organization. My grandfather? he--"

"All the world knows that. If you have anything of his gift, we shall

not fail. We shall feel that we are doing something for our

country--and, oh, so much for ourselves! And we shall be near our men.

Tynie and Ruddy Byng will be out there, and we shall be ready for

anything if necessary. But Rudyard, will he approve?" She held up the

cheque.

Jasmine made a passionate gesture. "There are times when we must do

what something in us tells us to do, no matter what the consequences. I

am myself. I am not a slave. If I take my own way in the pleasures of

life, why should I not take it in the duties and the business of life?"

Her eyes took on a look of abstraction, and her small hand closed on

the large, capable hand of her friend. "Isn't work the secret of life?

My grandfather used to say it was. Always, always, he used to say to

me, 'Do something, Jasmine. Find a work to do, and do it. Make the

world look at you, not for what you seem to be, but for what you do.

Work cures nearly every illness and nearly every trouble'--that is what

he said. And I must work or go mad. I tell you I must work, Alice. We

will work together out there where great battles will be fought."

A sob caught her in the throat, and Alice Tynemouth wrapped her round

with tender arms. "It will do you good, darling," she said, softly. "It

will help you through--through it all, whatever it is."

For an instant Jasmine felt that she must empty out her heart; tell the

inner tale of her struggle; but the instant of weakness passed as

suddenly as it came, and she only said--repeating Alice Tynemouth's

words: "Yes, through it all, through it all, whatever it is." Then she

added: "I want to do something big. I can, I can. I want to get out of

this into the open world. I want to fight. I want to balance things

somehow--inside myself...."

All at once she became very quiet. "But we must do business like

business people. This money: there must be a small committee of

business men, who--"

Alice Tynemouth finished the sentence for her. "Who are not Climbers?"

"Yes. But the whole organization must be done by ourselves--all the

practical, unfinancial work. The committee will only be like careful

trustees."

There was a new light in Jasmine's eyes. She felt for the moment that

life did not end in a cul de sac. She knew that now she had found a way

for Rudyard and herself to separate without disgrace, without

humiliation to him. She could see a few steps ahead. When she gave

Lablanche instructions to put out her clothes a little while before,

she did not know what she was going to do; but now she knew. She knew

how she could make it easier for Rudyard when the inevitable hour

came,--and it was here--which should see the end of their life

together. He need not now sacrifice himself so much for her sake.

She wanted to be alone, and, as if divining her thought, Lady Tynemouth

embraced her, and a moment later there was no sound in the room save

the ticking of the clock and the crackle of the fire.

How silent it was! The world seemed very far away. Peace seemed to have

taken possession of the place, and Jasmine's stillness as she sat by

the fire staring into the embers was a part of it. So lost was she that

she was not conscious of an opening door and of a footstep. She was

roused by a low voice.

"Jasmine!"

She did not start. It was as though there had come a call, for which

she had waited long, and she appeared to respond slowly to it, as one

would to a summons to the scaffold. There was no outward agitation now,

there was only a cold stillness which seemed little to belong to the

dainty figure which had ever been more like a decoration than a living

utility in the scheme of things. The crisis had come which she had

dreaded yet invited--that talk which they two must have before they

went their different ways. She had never looked Rudyard in the eyes

direct since the day when Adrian Fellowes died. They had met, but never

quite alone; always with some one present, either the servants or some

other. Now they were face to face.

On Rudyard's lips was a faint smile, but it lacked the old bonhomie

which was part of his natural equipment; and there were still sharp,

haggard traces of the agitation which had accompanied the expulsion of

Krool.

For an instant the idea possessed her that she would tell him

everything there was to tell, and face the consequences, no matter what

they might be. It was not in her nature to do things by halves, and

since catastrophe was come, her will was to drink the whole cup to the

dregs. She did not want to spare herself. Behind it all lay something

of that terrible wilfulness which had controlled her life so far. It

was the unlovely soul of a great pride. She did not want to be forgiven

for anything. She did not want to be condoned. There was a spirit of

defiance which refused to accept favours, preferring punishment to the

pity or the pardon which stooped to make it easier for her. It was a

dangerous pride, and in the mood of it she might throw away everything,

with an abandonment and recklessness only known to such passionate

natures.

The mood came on her all at once as she stood and looked at Rudyard.

She read, or she thought she read in his eyes, in his smile, the

superior spirit condescending to magnanimity, to compassion; and her

whole nature was instantly up in arms. She almost longed on the instant

to strip herself bare, as it were, and let him see her as she really

was, or as, in her despair, she thought she really was. The mood in

which she had talked to Lady Tynemouth was gone, and in its place a

spirit of revolt was at work. A certain sullenness which Rudyard and no

one else had ever seen came into her eyes, and her lips became white

with an ominous determination. She forgot him and all that he would

suffer if she told him the whole truth; and the whole truth would, in

her passion, become far more than the truth: she was again the egoist,

the centre of the universe. What happened to her was the only thing

which mattered in all the world. So it had ever been; and her beauty

and her wit and her youth and the habit of being spoiled had made it

all possible, without those rebuffs and that confusion which fate

provides sooner or later for the egoist.

"Well," she said, sharply, "say what you wish to say. You have wanted

to say it badly. I am ready."

He was stunned by what seemed to him the anger and the repugnance in

her tone.

"You remember you asked me to come, Jasmine, when you took the sjambok

from me."

He nodded towards the table where it lay, then went forward and picked

it up, his face hardening as he did so.

Like a pendulum her mood swung back. By accident he had said the one

thing which could have moved her, changed her at the moment. The savage

side of him appealed to her. What he lacked in brilliance and the

lighter gifts of raillery and eloquence and mental give-and-take, he

had balanced by his natural forces--from the power-house, as she had

called it long ago. Pity, solicitude, the forced smile, magnanimity,

she did not want in this black mood. They would have made her cruelly

audacious, and her temper would have known no license; but now,

suddenly, she had a vision of him as he stamped down the staircase, his

coat off, laying the sjambok on the shoulders of the man who had

injured her so, who hated her so, and had done so over all the years.

It appealed to her.

In her heart of hearts she was sure he had done it directly or

indirectly for her sake; and that was infinitely more to her than that

he should stoop from the heights to pick her up. He was what he was

because Heaven had made him so; and she was what she was because Heaven

had forgotten to make her otherwise; and he could not know or

understand how she came to do things that he would not do. But she

could know and understand why his hand fell on Krool like that of Cain

on Abel. She softened, changed at once.

"Yes, I remember," she said. "I've been upset. Krool was insolent, and

I ordered him to go. He would not."

"I've been a fool to keep him all these years. I didn't know what he

was--a traitor, the slimmest of the slim, a real Hottentot-Boer. I was

pigheaded about him, because he seemed to care so much about me. That

counts for much with the most of us."

"Alice Tynemouth saw a policeman help him into a cab in Piccadilly and

take him away. Will there be trouble?"

A grim look crossed his face. "I think not," he responded. "There are

reasons. He has been stealing information for years, and sending it to

Kruger, he and--"

He stopped short, and into his face came a look of sullen reticence.

"Yes, he and--and some one else? Who else?" Her face was white. She had

a sudden intuition.

He met her eyes. "Adrian Fellowes--what Fellowes knew, Krool knew, and

one way or another, by one means or another, Fellowes knew a great

deal."

The knowledge of Adrian Fellowes' treachery and its full significance

had hardly come home to him, even when he punished Krool, so shaken was

he by the fact that the half-caste had been false to him. Afterwards,

however, as the Partners all talked together up-stairs, the enormity of

the dead man's crime had fastened on him, and his brain had been

stunned by the terrible thought that directly or indirectly Jasmine had

abetted the crime. Things he had talked over with her, and with no one

else, had got to Kruger's knowledge, as the information from South

Africa showed. She had at least been indiscreet, had talked to Fellowes

with some freedom or he could not have known what he did. But directly,

knowingly abetted Fellowes? Of course, she had not done that; but her

foolish confidences had abetted treachery, had wronged him, had helped

to destroy his plans, had injured England.

He had savagely punished Krool for insolence to her and for his

treachery, but a new feeling had grown up in him in the last half-hour.

Under the open taunts of his colleagues, a deep resentment had taken

possession of him that his work, so hard to do, so important and

critical, should have been circumvented by the indiscretions of his

wife.

Upon her now this announcement came with crushing force. Adrian

Fellowes had gained from her--she knew it all too well now--that which

had injured her husband; from which, at any rate, he ought to have been

immune. Her face flushed with a resentment far greater than that of

Rudyard's, and it was heightened by a humiliation which overwhelmed

her. She had been but a tool in every sense, she, Jasmine Byng, one who

ruled, had been used like a--she could not form the comparison in her

mind--by a dependent, a hanger-on of her husband's bounty; and it was

through her, originally, that he had been given a real chance in life

by Rudyard.

"I am sorry," she said, calmly, as soon as she could get her voice. "I

was the means of your employing him."

"That did not matter," he said, rather nervously. "There was no harm in

that, unless you knew his character before he came to me."

"You think I did?"

"I cannot think so. It would have been too ruthless--too wicked."

She saw his suffering, and it touched her. "Of course I did not know

that he could do such a thing--so shameless. He was a low coward. He

did not deserve decent burial," she added. "He had good fortune to die

as he did."

"How did he die?" Rudyard asked her, with a face so unlike what it had

always been, so changed by agitation, that it scarcely seemed his. His

eyes were fixed on hers.

She met them resolutely. Did he ask her in order to see if she had any

suspicion of himself? Had he done it? If he had, there would be some

mitigation of her suffering. Or was it Ian Stafford who had done it?

One or the other--but which?

"He died without being made to suffer," she said. "Most people who do

wrong have to suffer."

"But they live on," he said, bitterly.

"That is no great advantage unless you want to live," she replied. "Do

you know how he died?" she added, after a moment, with sharp scrutiny.

He shook his head and returned her scrutiny with added poignancy. "It

does not matter. He ceases to do any more harm. He did enough."

"Yes, quite enough," she said, with a withered look, and going over to

her writing-table, stood looking at him questioningly. He did not speak

again, however.

Presently she said, very quietly, "I am going away."

"I do not understand."

"I am going to work."

"I understand still less."

She took from the writing-table her cheque-book, and handed it to him.

He looked at it, and read the counterfoil of the cheque she had given

to Alice Tynemouth.

He was bewildered. "What does this mean?" he asked.

"It is for a hospital-ship."

"Sixty thousand pounds! Why, it is nearly all you have."

"It is two-thirds of what I have."

"Why--in God's name, why?"

"To buy my freedom," she answered, bitterly.

"From what?"

"From you."

He staggered back and leaned heavily against a bookcase.

"Freedom from me!" he exclaimed, hoarsely.

He had had terribly bitter and revengeful feelings during the last

hour, but all at once his real self emerged, the thing that was deepest

in him. "Freedom from me? Has it come to that?"

"Yes, absolutely. Do you remember the day you first said to me that

something was wrong with it all,--the day that Ian Stafford dined after

his return from abroad? Well, it has been all wrong--cruelly wrong. We

haven't made the best of things together, when everything was with us

to do so. I have spoiled it all. It hasn't been what you expected."

"Nor what you expected?" he asked, sharply.

"Nor what I expected; but you are not to blame for that."

Suddenly all he had ever felt for her swept through his being, and

sullenness fled away. "You have ceased to love me, then.... See, that

is the one thing that matters, Jasmine. All else disappears beside

that. Do you love me? Do you love me still? Do you love me, Jasmine?

Answer that."

He looked like the ghost of his old dead self, pleading to be

recognized.

His misery oppressed her. "What does one know of one's self in the

midst of all this--of everything that has nothing to do with love?" she

asked.

What she might have said in the dark mood which was coming on her again

it is hard to say, but from beneath the window of the room which looked

on Park Lane, there came the voice of a street-minstrel, singing to a

travelling piano, played by sympathetic fingers, the song:

"She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps, And lovers

around her are sighing--"

The simple pathos of the song had nothing to do with her own experience

or her own case, but the flood of it swept through her veins like

tears. She sank into a chair and listened for a moment with eyes

shining, then she sprang up in an agitation which made her tremble and

her face go white.

"No, no, no, Rudyard, I do not love you," she said, swiftly. "And

because I do not love you, I will not stay. I never loved you, never

truly loved you at any time. I never knew myself--that is all that I

can say. I never was awake till now. I never was wholly awake till I

saw you driving Krool into the street with the sjambok."

She flung up her hands. "For God's sake, let me be truthful at last. I

don't want to hurt you--I have hurt you enough, but I do not love you;

and I must go. I am going with Alice Tynemouth. We are going together

to do something. Maybe I shall learn what will make life possible."

He reached out his arms towards her with a sudden tenderness.

"No, no, no, do not touch me," she cried. "Do not come near me. I must

be alone now, and from now on and on.... You do not understand, but I

must be alone. I must work it out alone, whatever it is."

She got up with a quick energy, and went over to the writing-table

again. "It may take every penny I have got, but I shall do it, because

it is the thing I feel I must do."

"You have millions, Jasmine," he said, in a low, appealing voice.

She looked at him almost fiercely again. "No, I have what is my own, my

very own, and no more," she responded, bitterly. "You will do your

work, and I will do mine. You will stay here. There will be no scandal,

because I shall be going with Alice Tynemouth, and the world will not

misunderstand."

"There will be no scandal, because I am going, too," he said, firmly.

"No, no, you cannot, must not, go," she urged.

"I am going to South Africa in two days," he replied. "Stafford was

going with me, but he cannot go for a week or so. He will help you, I

am sure, with forming your committee and arranging, if you will insist

on doing this thing. He is still up-stairs there with the rest of them.

I will get him down now, I--"

"Ian Stafford is here--in this house?" she asked, with staring eyes.

What inconceivable irony it all was! She could have shrieked with that

laughter which is more painful far than tears.

"Yes, he is up-stairs. I made him come and help us--he knows the

international game. He will help you, too. He is a good friend--you

will know how good some day."

She went white and leaned against the table.

"No, I shall not need him," she said. "We have formed our committee."

"But when I am gone, he can advise you, he can--"

"Oh--oh!" she murmured, and swayed forward, fainting.

He caught her and lowered her gently into a chair.

"You are only mad," he whispered to ears which heard not as he bent

over her. "You will be sane some day."

BOOK IV

CHAPTER XXIX

THE MENACE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Far away, sharply cutting the ether, rise the great sterile peaks and

ridges. Here a stark, bare wall like a prison which shuts in a city of

men forbidden the blithe world of sun and song and freedom; yonder, a

giant of a lost world stretched out in stony ease, sleeping on, while

over his grey quiet, generations of men pass. First came savage,

warring, brown races alien to each other; then following, white races

with faces tanned and burnt by the sun, and smothered in unkempt beard

and hair--men restless and coarse and brave, and with ancient sins upon

them; but with the Bible in their hands and the language of the

prophets on their lips; with iron will, with hatred as deep as their

race-love is strong; they with their cattle and their herds, and the

clacking wagons carrying homes and fortunes, whose women were

housewives and warriors too. Coming after these, men of fairer aspect,

adventurous, self-willed, intent to make cities in the wilderness; to

win open spaces for their kinsmen, who had no room to swing the hammer

in the workshops of their far-off northern island homes; or who, having

room, stood helpless before the furnaces where the fires had left only

the ashes of past energies.

Up there, these mountains which, like Marathon, look on the sea. But

lower the gaze from the austere hills, slowly to the plains below.

First the grey of the mountains, turning to brown, then the bare bronze

rock giving way to a tumbled wilderness of boulders, where lizards lie

in the sun, where the meerkat startles the gazelle. Then the bronze

merging into a green so deep and strong that it resembles a blanket

spread upon the uplands, but broken by kopjes, shelterless and lonely,

rising here and there like watch-towers. After that, below and still

below, the flat and staring plain, through which runs an ugly rift

turning and twisting like a snake, and moving on and on, till lost in

the arc of other hills away to the east and the south: a river in the

waste, but still only a muddy current stealing between banks baked and

sterile, a sinister stream, giving life to the veld, as some gloomy

giver of good gifts would pay a debt of atonement.

On certain Dark Days of 1899-1900, if you had watched these turgid

waters flow by, your eyes would have seen tinges of red like blood; and

following the stain of red, gashed lifeless things, which had been torn

from the ranks of sentient beings.

Whereupon, lifting your eyes from the river, you would have seen the

answer to your question--masses of men mounted and unmounted, who

moved, or halted, or stood like an animal with a thousand legs

controlled by one mind. Or again you would have observed those myriad

masses plunging across the veld, still in cohering masses, which shook

and broke and scattered, regathering again, as though drawn by a

magnet, but leaving stark remnants in their wake.

Great columns of troops which had crossed the river and pushed on into

a zone of fierce fire, turn and struggle back again across the stream;

other thousands of men, who had not crossed, succour their wounded, and

retreat steadily, bitterly to places of safety, the victims of blunders

from which come the bloody punishment of valour.

Beyond the grey mountains were British men and women waiting for

succour from forces which poured death in upon them from the malevolent

kopjes, for relief from the ravages of disease and hunger. They waited

in a straggling town of the open plain circled by threatening hills,

where the threat became a blow, and the blow was multiplied a million

times. Gaunt, fighting men sought to appease the craving of starvation

by the boiled carcasses of old horses; in caves and dug-outs, feeble

women, with undying courage, kept alive the flickering fires of life in

their children; and they smiled to cheer the tireless, emaciated

warriors who went out to meet death, or with a superior yet careful

courage stayed to receive or escape it.

When night came, across the hills and far away in the deep blue, white

shaking streams of light poured upward, telling the besieged forces

over there at Lordkop that rescue would come, that it was moving on to

the mountain. How many times had this light in the sky flashed the same

grave pledge in the mystic code of the heliograph, "We are gaining

ground--we will reach you soon." How many times, however, had the

message also been, "Not yet--but soon."

Men died in this great camp from wounds and from fever, and others went

mad almost from sheer despair; yet whenever the Master Player called,

they sprang to their places with a new-born belief that he who had been

so successful in so many long-past battles would be right in the end

with his old rightness, though he had been wrong so often on the

Dreitval.

Others there were who were sick of the world and wished "to be well out

of it"--as they said to themselves. Some had been cruelly injured, and

desire of life was dead in them; others had given injury, and remorse

had slain peace. Others still there were who, having done evil all

their lives, knew that they could not retrace their steps, and yet

shrank from a continuance of the old bad things.

Some indeed, in the red futile sacrifice, had found what they came to

find; but some still were left whose recklessness did not avail.

Comrades fell beside them, but, unscathed, they went on fighting.

Injured men were carried in hundreds to the hospitals, but no wounds

brought them low. Bullets were sprayed around them, but none did its

work for them. Shells burst near, yet no savage shard mutilated their

bodies.

Of these was Ian Stafford.

Three times he had been in the fore-front of the fight where Death came

sweeping down the veld like rain, but It passed him by. Horses and men

fell round his guns, yet he remained uninjured.

He was patient. If Death would not hasten to meet him, he would wait.

Meanwhile, he would work while he could, but with no thought beyond the

day, no vision of the morrow.

He was one of the machines of war. He was close to his General, he was

the beloved of his men, still he was the man with no future; though he

studied the campaign with that thoroughness which had marked his last

years in diplomacy.

He was much among his own wounded, much with others who were comforted

by his solicitude, by the courage of his eye, and the grasp of his

firm, friendly hand. It was at what the soldiers called the Stay Awhile

Hospital that he came in living touch again with the life he had left

behind.

He knew that Rudyard Byng had come to South Africa; but he knew no

more. He knew that Jasmine had, with Lady Tynemouth, purchased a ship

and turned it into a hospital at a day's notice; but as to whether

these two had really come to South Africa, and harboured at the Cape,

or Durban, he had no knowledge. He never looked at the English

newspapers which arrived at Dreitval River. He was done with that old

world in which he once worked; he was concerned only for this narrow

field where an Empire's fate was being solved.

Night, the dearest friend of the soldier, had settled on the veld. A

thousand fires were burning, and there were no sounds save the

murmuring voices of myriads of men, and the stamp of hoofs where the

Cavalry and Mounted Infantry horses were picketed. Food and fire, the

priceless comfort of a blanket on the ground, and a saddle or kit for a

pillow gave men compensation for all the hardships and dangers of the

day; and they gave little thought to the morrow.

The soldier lives in the present. His rifle, his horse, his boots, his

blanket, the commissariat, a dry bit of ground to sleep on--these are

the things which occupy his mind. His heroism is incidental, the

commonplace impulse of the moment. He does things because they are

there to do, not because some great passion, some exaltation, seizes

him. His is the real simple life. So it suddenly seemed to Stafford as

he left his tent, after he had himself inspected every man and every

horse in his battery that lived through the day of death, and made his

way towards the Stay Awhile Hospital.

"This is the true thing," he said to himself as he gazed at the wide

camp. He turned his face here and there in the starlight, and saw human

life that but now was moving in the crash of great guns, the shrieking

of men terribly wounded, the agony of mutilated horses, the bursting of

shells, the hissing scream of the pom-pom, and the discordant cries of

men fighting an impossible fight.

"There is no pretense here," he reflected. "It is life reduced down to

the bare elements. There is no room for the superficial thing. It's all

business. It's all stark human nature."

At that moment his eye caught one of those white messages of the sky

flashing the old bitter promise, "We shall reach you soon." He forgot

himself, and a great spirit welled up in him.

"Soon!" The light in the sky shot its message over the hills.

That was it--the present, not the past. Here was work, the one thing

left to do.

"And it has to be done," he said aloud, as he walked on swiftly, a

spring to his footstep. Presently he mounted and rode away across the

veld. Buried in his thoughts, he was only subconsciously aware of what

he saw until, after near an hour's riding, he pulled rein at the door

of the Stay Awhile Hospital, which was some miles in the rear of the

main force.

As he entered, a woman in a nurse's garb passed him swiftly. He

scarcely looked at her; he was only conscious that she was in great

haste. Her eyes seemed looking at some inner, hidden thing, and, though

they glanced at him, appeared not to see him or to realize more than

that some one was passing. But suddenly, to both, after they had

passed, there came an arrest of attention. There was a consciousness,

which had nothing to do with the sight of the eyes, that a familiar

presence had gone by. Each turned quickly, and their eyes came back

from regarding the things of the imagination, and saw each other face

to face. The nurse gave an exclamation of pleasure and ran forward.

Stafford held out a hand. It seemed to him, as he did it, that it

stretched across a great black gulf and found another hand in the

darkness beyond.

"Al'mah!" he said, in a voice of protest as of companionship.

Of all those he had left behind, this was the one being whom to meet

was not disturbing. He wished to encounter no one of that inner circle

of his tragic friendship; but he realized that Al'mah had had her

tragedy too, and that her suffering could not be less than his own. The

same dark factor had shadowed the lives of both. Adrian Fellowes had

injured them both through the same woman, had shaken, if not shattered,

the fabric of their lives. However much they two were blameworthy, they

had been sincere, they had been honourable in their dishonour, they had

been "falsely true." They were derelicts of life, with the comradeship

of despair as a link between them.

"Al'mah," he said again, gently. Then, with a bitter humour, he added,

"You here--I thought you were a prima donna!"

The flicker of a smile crossed her odd, fine, strong face. "This is

grand opera," she said. "It is the Nibelungen Ring of England."

"To end in the Twilight of the Gods?" he rejoined with a hopeless kind

of smile.

They turned to the outer door of the hospital and stepped into the

night. For a moment they stood looking at the great camp far away to

right and left, and to the lone mountains yonder, where the Boer

commandoes held the passes and trained their merciless armament upon

all approaches. Then he said at last: "Why have you come here? You had

your work in England."

"What is my work?" she asked.

"To heal the wounded," he answered.

"I am trying to do that," she replied.

"You are trying to heal bodies, but it is a bigger, greater thing to

heal the wounded mind."

"I am trying to do that too. It is harder than the other."

"Whose minds are you trying to heal?" he questioned, gently.

"'Physician heal thyself' was the old command, wasn't it? But that is

harder still."

"Must one always be a saint to do a saintly thing?" he asked.

"I am not clever," she replied, "and I can't make phrases. But must one

always be a sinner to do a wicked thing? Can't a saint do a wicked

thing, and a sinner do a good thing without being called the one or the

other?"

"I don't think you need apologize for not being able to make phrases. I

suppose you'd say there is neither absolute saintliness nor absolute

wickedness, but that life is helplessly composite of both, and that

black really may be white. You know the old phrase, 'Killing no

murder.'"

She seemed to stiffen, and her lips set tightly for a minute; then, as

though by a great effort, she laughed bitterly.

"Murder isn't always killing," she replied. "Don't you remember the

protest in Macbeth, 'Time was, when the brains were out the man would

die'?" Then, with a little quick gesture towards the camp, she added,

"When you think of to-day, doesn't it seem that the brains are out, and

yet that the man still lives? I'm not a soldier, and this awful

slaughter may be the most wonderful tactics, but it's all beyond my

little mind."

"Your littleness is not original enough to attract notice," he replied

with kindly irony. "There is almost an epidemic of it. Let us hope we

shall have an antidote soon."

There was a sudden cry from inside the hospital. Al'mah shut her eyes

for a moment, clinched her fingers, and became very pale; then she

recovered herself, and turned her face towards the door, as though

waiting for some one to come out.

"What is the matter?" he asked. "Some bad case?"

"Yes--very bad," she replied.

"One you've been attending?"

"Yes."

"What arm--the artillery?" he asked with sudden interest.

"Yes, the artillery."

He turned towards the door of the hospital again. "One of my men? What

battery? Do you know?"

"Not yours--Schiller's."

"Schiller's! A Boer?"

She nodded. "A Boer spy, caught by Boer bullets as he was going back."

"When was that?"

"This morning early."

"The little business at Wortmann's Drift?"

She nodded. "Yes, there."

"I don't quite understand. Was he in our lines--a Boer spy?"

"Yes. But he wore British uniform, he spoke English. He was an

Englishman once."

Suddenly she came up close to him, and looked into his face steadily.

"I will tell you all," she said scarce above a whisper. "He came to

spy, but he came also to see his wife. She had written to ask him not

to join the Boers, as he said he meant to do; or, if he had, to leave

them and join his own people. He came, but not to join his

fellow-countrymen. He came to get money from his wife; and he came to

spy."

An illuminating thought shot into Stafford's mind. He remembered

something that Byng once told him.

"His wife is a nurse?" he asked in a low tone.

"She is a nurse."

"She knew, then, that he was a spy?" he asked.

"Yes, she knew. I suppose she ought to be tried by court-martial. She

did not expose him. She gave him a chance to escape. But he was shot as

he tried to reach the Boer lines."

"And was brought back here to his wife--to you! Did he let them"--he

nodded towards the hospital--"know he was your husband?"

When she spoke again her voice showed strain, but it did not tremble.

"Of course. He would not spare me. He never did. It was always like

that."

He caught her hand in his. "You have courage enough for a hundred," he

said.

"I have suffered enough for a hundred," she responded.

Again that sharp cry rang out, and again she turned anxiously towards

the door.

"I came to South Africa on the chance of helping him in some way," she

replied. "It came to me that he might need me."

"You paid the price of his life once to Kruger--after the Raid, I've

heard," he said.

"Yes, I owed him that, and as much more as was possible," she responded

with a dark, pained look.

"His life is in danger--an operation?" he questioned.

"Yes. There is one chance; but they could not give him an anaesthetic,

and they would not let me stay with him. They forced me away--out

here." She appeared to listen again. "That was his voice--that crying,"

she added presently.

"Wouldn't it be better he should go? If he recovers there would only

be--"

"Oh yes, to be tried as a spy--a renegade Englishman! But he would

rather live in spite of that, if it was only for an hour."

"To love life so much as that--a spy!" Stafford reflected.

"Not so much love of life as fear of--" She stopped short.

"To fear--silence and peace!" he remarked darkly, with a shrug of his

shoulders. Then he added: "Tell me, if he does not die, and if--if he

is pardoned by any chance, do you mean to live with him again?"

A bitter laugh broke from her. "How do I know? What does any woman know

what she will do until the situation is before her! She may mean to do

one thing and do the complete opposite. She may mean to hate, and will

end by loving. She may mean to kiss and will end by killing. She may

kiss and kill too all in one moment, and still not be inconsistent. She

would have the logic of a woman. How do I know what I would do--what I

will do!"

The door of the hospital opened. A surgeon came out, and seeing Al'mah,

moved towards the two. Stafford went forward hurriedly, but Al'mah

stood like one transfixed. There was a whispered word, and then

Stafford came back to her.

"You will not need to do anything," he said.

"He is gone--like that!" she whispered in an awed voice. "Death,

death--so many die!" She shuddered.

Stafford passed her arm through his, and drew her towards the door of

the hospital.

A half-hour later Stafford emerged again from the hospital, his head

bent in thought. He rode slowly back to his battery, unconscious of the

stir of life round him, of the shimmering white messages to the

besieged town beyond the hills. He was thinking of the tragedy of the

woman he had left tearless and composed beside the bedside of the man

who had so vilely used her. He was reflecting how her life, and his

own, and the lives of at least three others, were so tangled together

that what twisted the existence of one disturbed all. In one sense the

woman he had just left in the hospital was nothing to him, and yet now

she seemed to be the only living person to whom he was drawn.

He remembered the story he had once heard in Vienna of a man and a

woman who both had suffered betrayal, who both had no longer a single

illusion left, who had no love for each other at all, in whom indeed

love was dead--a mangled murdered thing; and yet who went away to Corfu

together, and there at length found a pathway out of despair in the

depths of the sea. Between these two there had never been even the

faint shadow of romance or passion; but in the terrible mystery of pain

and humiliation, they had drawn together to help each other, through a

breach of all social law, in pity of each other. He apprehended the

real meaning of the story when Vienna was alive with it, but he

understood far, far better now.

A pity as deep as any feeling he had ever known had come to him as he

stood with Al'mah beside the bed of her dead renegade man; and it

seemed to him that they two also might well bury themselves in the

desert together, and minister to each other's despair. It was only the

swift thought of a moment, which faded even as it saw the light; but it

had its origin in that last flickering sense of human companionship

which dies in the atmosphere of despair. "Every man must live his dark

hours alone," a broken-down actor once said to Stafford as he tried to

cheer him when the last thing he cared for had been taken from him--his

old, faded, misshapen wife; when no faces sent warm glances to him

across the garish lights. "It is no use," this Roscius had said, "every

man must live his dark hours alone."

That very evening, after the battle of the Dreitval, Jigger, Stafford's

trumpeter, had said a thing to him which had struck a chord that rang

in empty chambers of his being. He had found Jigger sitting

disconsolate beside a gun, which was yet grimy and piteous with the

blood of men who had served it, and he asked the lad what his trouble

was.

In reply Jigger had said, "When it 'it 'm 'e curled up like a bit o'

shaving. An' when I done what I could 'e says, 'It's a speshul for one

now, an' it's lonely goin',' 'e says. When I give 'im a drink 'e says,

'It 'd do me more good later, little 'un'; an' 'e never said no more

except, 'One at a time is the order--only one.'"

Not even his supper had lifted the cloud from Jigger's face, and

Stafford had left the lad trying to compose a letter to the mother of

the dead man, who had been an especial favourite with the trumpeter

from the slums.

Stafford was roused from his reflections by the grinding, rumbling

sound of a train. He turned his face towards the railway line.

"A troop-train--more food for the dragons," he said to himself. He

could not see the train itself, but he could see the head-light of the

locomotive, and he could hear its travail as it climbed slowly the last

incline to the camp.

"Who comes there!" he said aloud, and in his mind there swept a

premonition that the old life was finding him out, that its invisible

forces were converging upon him. But did it matter? He knew in his soul

that he was now doing the right thing, that he had come out in the open

where all the archers of penalty had a fair target for their arrows. He

wished to be "Free among the dead that are wounded and that lie in the

grave and are out of remembrance;" but he would do no more to make it

so than tens of thousands of other men were doing on these

battle-fields.

"Who comes there!" he said again, his eyes upon the white, round light

in the distance, and he stood still to try and make out the black,

winding, groaning thing.

Presently he heard quick footsteps.

A small, alert figure stopped short, a small, abrupt hand saluted. "The

General Commanding 'as sent for you, sir."

It was trumpeter Jigger of the Artillery.

"Are you the General's orderly, then?" asked Stafford quizzically.

"The orderly's gone w'ere 'e thought 'e'd find you, and I've come w'ere

I know'd you'd be, sir."

"Where did he think he'd find me?"

"Wiv the 'osses, sir."

A look of gratification crossed Stafford's face. He was well known in

the army as one who looked after his horses and his men. "And what made

you think I was at the hospital, Jigger?"

"Becos you'd been to the 'osses, sir."

"Did you tell the General's orderly that?"

"No, your gryce--no, sir," he added quickly, and a flush of

self-reproach came to his face, for he prided himself on being a real

disciplinarian, a disciple of the correct thing. "I thought I'd like

'im to see our 'osses, an' 'ow you done 'em, an' I'd find you as quick

as 'e could, wiv a bit to the good p'r'aps."

Stafford smiled. "Off you go, then. Find that orderly. Say, Colonel

Stafford's compliments to the General Commanding and he will report

himself at once. See that you get it straight, trumpeter."

Jigger would rather die than not get it straight, and his salute made

that quite plain.

"It's made a man of him, anyhow," Stafford said to himself, as he

watched the swiftly disappearing figure. "He's as straight as a nail,

body and mind--poor little devil.... How far away it all seems!"

A quarter of an hour later he was standing beside the troop-train which

he had seen labouring to its goal. It was carrying the old regiment of

the General Officer Commanding, who had sent Stafford to its Colonel

with an important message. As the two officers stood together watching

the troops detrain and make order out of the chaos of baggage and

equipment, Stafford's attention was drawn to a woman some little

distance away, giving directions about her impedimenta.

"Who is the lady?" he asked, while in his mind was a sensible stir of

recognition.

"Ah, there's something like the real thing!" his companion replied.

"She is doing a capital bit of work. She and Lady Tynemouth have got a

hospital-ship down at Durban. She's come to link it up better with the

camp. It's Rudyard Byng's wife. They're both at it out here."

"Who comes there!" Stafford had exclaimed a moment before with a sense

of premonition.

Jasmine had come.

He drew back in the shadow as she turned round towards them.

"To the Stay Awhile--right!" he heard a private say in response to her

directions.

He saw her face, but not clearly. He had glimpse of a Jasmine not so

daintily pretty as of old, not so much of a dresden-china shepherdess;

but with the face of a woman who, watching the world with understanding

eyes, and living with an understanding heart, had taken on something of

the mysterious depths of the Life behind life. It was only a glimpse he

had, but it was enough. It was more than enough.

"Where is Byng?" he asked his fellow-officer.

"He's been up there with Tain's Brigade for a fortnight. He was in

Kimberley, but got out before the investment, went to Cape Town, and

came round here--to be near his wife, I suppose."

"He is soldiering, then?"

"He was a Colonel in the Rand Rifles once. He's with the South African

Horse now in command of the regiment attached to Tain. Tain's out of

your beat--away on the right flank there."

Presently Stafford saw Jasmine look in their direction; then, on seeing

Stafford's companion, came forward hastily. The Colonel left Stafford

and went to meet her.

A moment afterwards, she turned and looked at Stafford. Her face was

now deadly pale, but it showed no agitation. She was in the light of an

electric lamp, and he was in the shadow. For one second only she gazed

at him, then she turned and moved away to the cape-cart awaiting her.

The Colonel saw her in, then returned to Stafford.

"Why didn't you come and be introduced?" the Colonel asked. "I told her

who you were."

"Hospital-ships are not in my line," Stafford answered casually. "Women

and war don't go together."

"She's a nurse, she's not a woman," was the paradoxical reply.

"She knows Byng is here?"

"I suppose so. It looks like a clever bit of strategy--junction of

forces. There's a lot of women at home would like the chance she

has--at a little less cost."

"What is the cost?"

"Well, that ship didn't cost less than a hundred thousand pounds."

"Is that all?"

The Colonel looked at Stafford in surprise: but Stafford was not

thinking of the coin.

CHAPTER XXX

"AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET!"

As the cape-cart conveying Jasmine to the hospital moved away from the

station, she settled down into the seat beside the driver with the

helplessness of one who had received a numbing blow. Her body swayed as

though she would faint, and her eyes closed, and stayed closed for so

long a time, that Corporal Shorter, who drove the rough little pair of

Argentines, said to her sympathetically:

"It's all right, ma'am. We'll be there in a jiffy. Don't give way."

This friendly solicitude had immediate effect. Jasmine sat up, and

thereafter held herself as though she was in her yellow salon yonder in

London.

"Thank you," she replied serenely to Corporal Shorter. "It was a long,

tiring journey, and I let myself go for a moment."

"A good night's rest'll do you a lot of good, ma'am," he ventured. Then

he added, "Beggin' pardon, ain't you Mrs. Colonel Rudyard Byng?"

She turned and looked at the man inquiringly. "Yes, I am Mrs. Byng."

"Thank you, ma'am. Now how did I know? Why," he chuckled, "I saw a big

B on your hand-bag, and I knew you was from the hospital-ship--they

told me that at the Stay Awhile; and the rest was easy, ma'am. I had a

mate along o' your barge. He was one of them the Boers got at Talana

Hill. They chipped his head-piece nicely--just like the 4.7's flay the

kopjes up there. My mate's been writing to me about you. We're a long

way from home, Joey and me, and a bit o' kindness is a bit of all right

to us."

"Where is your home?" Jasmine asked, her fatigue and oppression lifting.

He chuckled as though it were a joke, while he answered: "Australia

onct and first. My mate, Joey Clynes, him that's on your ship, we was

both born up beyond Bendigo. When we cut loose from the paternal leash,

so to speak, we had a bit of boundary-riding, rabbit-killing, shearing

and sun-downing--all no good, year by year. Then we had a bit o' luck

and found a mob of warrigals--horses run wild, you know. We stalked 'em

for days in the droughttime to a water-course, and got 'em, and coaxed

'em along till the floods come; then we sold 'em, and with the hard tin

shipped for to see the world. So it was as of old. And by and by we

found ourselves down here, same as all the rest, puttin' in a bit o'

time for the Flag."

Jasmine turned on him one of those smiles which had made her so many

friends in the past--a smile none the less alluring because it had lost

that erstime flavour of artifice and lure which, however hidden, had

been part of its power. Now it was accompanied by no slight drooping of

the eyelids. It brightened a look which was direct and natural.

"It's a good thing to have lived in the wide distant spaces of the

world," she responded. "A man couldn't easily be mean or small where

life is so simple and so large."

His face flushed with pleasure. She was so easy to get on with, he said

to himself; and she certainly had a wonderfully kind smile. But he felt

too that she needed greater wisdom, and he was ready to give it--a

friendly characteristic of the big open spaces "where life is so simple

and so large."

"Well, that might be so 'long o' some continents," he remarked, "but it

wasn't so where Joey Clynes and me was nourished, so to speak. I

tripped up on a good many mean things from Bendigo to Thargomindah and

back around. The back-blocks has its tricks as well as the towns, as

you would see if you come across a stock-rider with a cheque to be

broke in his hand. I've seen six months' wages go bung in a day with a

stock-rider on the gentle jupe. But again, peradventure, I've seen a

man that had lost ten thousand sheep tramp fifty miles in a blazing sun

with a basket of lambs on his back, savin' them two switherin' little

papillions worth nothin' at all, at the risk of his own life--just as

mates have done here on this salamanderin' veld; same as Colonel Byng

did to-day along o' Wortmann's Drift."

Jasmine had been trying to ask a question concerning her husband ever

since the man had mentioned his name, and had not been able to do so.

She had never spoken of him directly to any one since she had left

England; had never heard from him; had written him no word; was, so far

as the outer acts of life were concerned, as distant from him as

Corporal Shorter was from his native Bendigo. She had been busy as she

had never before been in her life, in a big, comprehensive, useful way.

It had seemed to her in England, as she carried through the

negotiations for the Valoria, fitted it out for the service it was to

render, directed its administration over the heads of the committee

appointed, for form's sake, to assist Lady Tynemouth and herself, that

the spirit of her grandfather was over her, watching her, inspiring

her. This had become almost an obsession with her. Her grandfather had

had belief in her, delight in her; and now the innumerable talks she

had had with him, as to the way he had done things, gave her confidence

and a key to what she had to do. It was the first real work; for what

she did for Ian Stafford in diplomacy was only playing upon the

weakness of human nature with a skilled intelligence, with an

instinctive knowledge of men and a capacity for managing them. The

first real pride she had ever felt soothed her angry soul.

Her grandfather had been more in her mind than any one else--than

either Rudyard or Ian Stafford. Towards both of these her mind had

slowly and almost unconsciously changed, and she wished to think about

neither. There had been a revolution in her nature, and all her tragic

experience, her emotions, and her faculties, had been shaken into a

crucible where the fire of pain and revolt burned on and on and on.

From the crucible there had come as yet no precipitation of life's

elements, and she scarcely knew what was in her heart. She tried to

smother every thought concerning the past. She did not seek to find her

bearings, or to realize in what country of the senses and the emotions

she was travelling.

One thing was present, however, at times, and when it rushed over her

in its fulness, it shook her as the wind shakes the leaf on a tree--a

sense of indignation, of anger, or resentment. Against whom? Against

all. Against Rudyard, against Ian Stafford; but most of all, a thousand

times most against a dead man, who had been swept out of life, leaving

behind a memory which could sting murderously.

Now, when she heard of Rudyard's bravery at Wortmann's Drift, a curious

thrill of excitement ran through her veins, or it would be truer to say

that a sensation new and strange vibrated in her blood. She had heard

many tales of valour in this war, and more than one hero of the

Victoria Cross had been in her charge at Durban; but as a child's heart

might beat faster at the first words of a wonderful story, so she felt

a faint suffocation in the throat and her brooding eyes took on a

brighter, a more objective look, as she heard the tale of Wortmann's

Drift.

"Tell me about it," she said, yet turned her head away from her eager

historian.

Corporal Shorter's words were addressed to the smallest pink ear he had

ever seen except on a baby, but he was only dimly conscious of that. He

was full of a man's pride in a man's deed.

"Well, it was like this," he recited. "Gunter's horse bolted--Dick

Gunter's in the South African Horse same as Colonel Byng--his lot. Old

Gunter's horse gits away with him into the wide open. I s'pose there'd

been a hunderd Boers firing at the runaway for three minutes, and at

last off comes Gunter. He don't stir for a minute or more, then we see

him pick himself up a bit quick, but settle back again. And while we

was lookin' and tossin' pennies like as to his chances out there, a

grey New Zealand mare nips out across the veld stretchin' every string.

We knowed her all right, that grey mare--a regular Mrs. Mephisto, w'ich

belongs to Colonel Byng. Do the Boojers fire at him? Don't they! We

could see the spots of dust where the bullets struck, spittin',

spittin', spittin', and Lord knows how many hunderd more there was that

didn't hit the ground. An' the grey mare gets there. As cool as a

granadillar, down drops Colonel Byng beside old Gunter; down goes the

grey mare--Colonel Byng had taught her that trick, like the Roosian

Cossack hosses. Then up on her rolls old Gunter, an' up goes Colonel

Byng, and the grey mare switchin' her bobtail, as if she was havin' a

bit of mealies in the middle o' the day. But when they was both on,

then the band begun to play. Men was fightin' of course, but it looked

as if the whole smash stopped to see what the end would be. It was a

real pretty race, an' the grey mare takin' it as free as if she was

carryin' a little bit of a pipkin like me instead of twenty-six stone.

She's a flower, that grey mare! Once she stumbled, an' we knowed it

wasn't an ant-bear's hole she'd found in the veld, and that she'd been

hurt. But they know, them hosses, that they must do as their Baases do;

and they fight right on. She come home with the two all right. She

switched round a corner and over a nose of land where that crossfire

couldn't hit the lot; an' there was the three of 'em at 'ome for a cup

o' tea. Why, ma'am, that done the army as much good to-day, that little

go-to-the-devil, you mud-suckers! as though we'd got Schuster's Hill.

'Twas what we needed--an' we got it. It took our eyes off the nasty

little fact that half of a regiment was down, an' the other half with

their job not done as it was ordered. It made the S.A.'s and the

Lynchesters and the Gessex lot laugh. Old Gunter's all right. He's in

the Stay Awhile now. You'll be sure to see him. And Colonel Byng's all

right, too, except a little bit o' splinter--"

"A bit of splinter--" Her voice was almost peremptory.

"A chip off his wrist like, but he wasn't thinkin' of that when he got

back. He was thinkin' of the grey mare; and she was hit in three

places, but not to mention. One bullet cut through her ear and through

Colonel Byng's hat as he stooped over her neck; but the luck was with

them. They was born to do a longer trek together. A little bit of the

same thing in both of 'em, so to speak. The grey mare has a temper like

a hunderd wildcats, and Colonel Byng can let himself go too, as you

perhaps know, ma'am. We've seen him let loose sometimes when there was

shirkers about, but he's all right inside his vest. And he's a good

feeder. His men get their tucker all right. He knows when to shut his

eyes. He's got a way to make his bunch--and they're the hardest-bit

bunch in the army--do anything he wants 'em to. He's as hard himself as

ever is, but he's all right underneath the epidermotis."

All at once there flashed before Jasmine's eyes the picture of Rudyard

driving Krool out of the house in Park Lane with a sjambok. She heard

again the thud of the rhinoceros-whip on the cringing back of the Boer;

she heard the moan of the victim as he stumbled across the threshold

into the street; and again she felt that sense of suffocation, that

excitement which the child feels on the brink of a wonderful romance,

the once-upon-a-time moment.

They were nearing the hospital. The driver silently pointed to it. He

saw that he had made an impression, and he was content with it. He

smiled to himself.

"Is Colonel Byng in the camp?" she asked.

"He's over--'way over, miles and miles, on the left wing with Kearey's

brigade now. But old Gunter's here, and you're sure to see Colonel Byng

soon--well, I should think."

She had no wish to see Colonel Byng soon. Three days would suffice to

do what she wished here, and then she would return to Durban to her

work there--to Alice Tynemouth, whose friendship and wonderful

tactfulness had helped her in indefinable ways, as a more obvious

sympathy never could have done. She would have resented one word which

would have suggested that a tragedy was slowly crushing out her life.

Never a woman in the world was more alone. She worked and smiled with

eyes growing sadder, yet with a force hardening in her which gave her

face a character it never had before. Work had come at the right moment

to save her from the wild consequences of a nature maddened by a series

of misfortunes and penalties, for which there had been no warning and

no preparation.

She was not ready for a renewal of the past. Only a few minutes before

she had been brought face to face with Ian Stafford, had seen him look

at her out of the shadow there at the station, as though she was an

infinite distance away from him; and she had realized with overwhelming

force how changed her world was. Ian Stafford, who but a few short

months ago had held her in his arms and whispered unforgettable things,

now looked at her as one looks at the image of a forgotten thing. She

recalled his last words to her that awful day when Rudyard had read the

fatal letter, and the world had fallen:

"Nothing can set things right between you and me, Jasmine," he had

said. "But there is Rudyard. You must help him through. He heard

scandal about Mennaval last night at De Lancy Scovel's. He didn't

believe it. It rests with you to give it all the lie. Good-bye."

That had been the end--the black, bitter end. Since then Ian had never

spoken a word to her, nor she to him; but he had stood there in the

shadow at the station like a ghost, reproachful, unresponsive,

indifferent. She recalled now the day when, after three years' parting,

she had left him cool, indifferent, and self-contained in the doorway

of the sweet-shop in Regent Street; how she had entered her carriage,

had clinched her hands, and cried with wilful passion: "He shall not

treat me so. He shall show some feeling. He shall! He shall!"

Here was indifference again, but of another land. Hers was not a

woman's vanity, in fury at being despised. Vanity, maybe, was still

there, but so slight that it made no contrast to the proud turmoil of a

nature which had been humiliated beyond endurance; which, for its

mistakes, had received accruing penalties as precise as though they had

been catalogued; which had waked to find that a whole lifetime had been

an error; and that it had no anchor in any set of principles or

impelling habits.

And over all there hung the shadow of a man's death, with its black

suspicion. When Ian Stafford looked at her from the shadow of the

railway-station, the question had flashed into his mind, Did she kill

him? Around Adrian Fellowes' death there hung a cloud of mystery which

threw a sinister shadow on the path of three people. In the middle of

the night, Jasmine started from her sleep with the mystery of the man's

death torturing her, and with the shuddering question, Which? on her

fevered lips. Was it her husband--was it Ian Stafford? As he galloped

over the veld, or sat with his pipe beside the camp-fire, Rudyard Byng

was also drawn into the frigid gloom of the ugly thought, and his mind

asked the question, Did she kill him? It was as though each who had

suffered from the man in life was destined to be menaced by his shade,

till it should be exorcised by that person who had taken the useless

life, saying, "It was I; I did it!"

As Jasmine entered the hospital, it seemed to her excited imagination

as though she was entering a House of Judgment: as though here in a

court of everlasting equity she would meet those who had played their

vital parts in her life.

What if Rudyard was here! What if in these few days while she was to be

here he was to cross her path! What would she say? What would she do?

What could be said or done? Bitterness and resentment and dark

suspicion were in her mind--and in his. Her pride was less wilful and

tempestuous than on the day when she drove him from her; when he said

things which flayed her soul, and left her body as though it had been

beaten with rods. Her bitterness, her resentment had its origin in the

fact that he did not understand--and yet in his crude big way he had

really understood better than Ian Stafford. She felt that Rudyard

despised her now a thousand times more than ever he had hinted at in

that last stifling scene in Park Lane; and her spirit rebelled against

it. She would rather that he had believed everything against her, and

had made an open scandal, because then she could have paid any debt due

to him by the penalty most cruel a woman can bear. But pity,

concession, the condescension of a superior morality, were impossible

to her proud mind.

As for Ian Stafford, he had left her stripped bare of one single

garment of self-respect. His very kindness, his chivalry in defending

her; his inflexible determination that all should be over between them

forever, that she should be prevailed upon to be to Rudyard more than

she had ever been--it all drove her into a deeper isolation. This

isolation would have been her destruction but that something bigger

than herself, a passion to do things, lifted to idealism a mind which

in the past had grown materialistic, which, in gaining wit and mental

skill, had missed the meaning of things, the elemental sense.

Corporal Shorter's tale of Rudyard's heroism had stirred her; but she

could not have said quite what her feeling was with regard to it. She

only knew vaguely that she was glad of it in a more personal than

impersonal way. When she shook hands with the cheerful non-com. at the

door of the hospital, she gave him a piece of gold which he was loth to

accept till she said: "But take it as a souvenir of Colonel Byng's

little ride with 'Old Gunter.'"