For two weeks, the fever held Weldon in its grip. For two weeks, he
was prostrate, first with the halting column, then at the base
hospital at Kroonstad. The fever was never very high, nor was it
intermittent. It merely hung about him and ate away his strength.
For the time being, he was content to lie quiet and stare up at the
electric lights scattered through the tent and wonder about Ethel.
Now and then some sight in the hospital set him to thinking about
the Captain, wondering if he were happy in his new life of rest and
peace, he who had so often been in the thick of the fiercest fight.
Or he thought of Paddy, brave, merry little Irishman who, fighting
like an angry wolf, had died with a joke still hanging on his lips.
Then his mind went back again to Ethel.
In vain they urged him to sleep; in vain they gave him bromides. The
body was at rest; but the wheels of the brain whirred as busily as
ever, and as logically. No hint of delirium mingled with his thought
processes. It might have saved something if there had.
Then, one day, Weldon sat up for an hour. The next day, he was put
into his clothes and, three days later, supported on the strong arm
of Kruger Bobs, he crawled into a hospital train bound for Cape
Town. It was an order, and he obeyed. Nevertheless, he shrank from
the very mention of Cape Town. It had been the core of his universe;
but now the core had gone bad. But his time of service had expired.
Red tape demanded that he receive the papers for his discharge from
the Cape Town citadel. That done, he would take the first outgoing
steamer for London. Afterwards, he would leave his life in the hands
of Fate. He took no note of the fact that Fate might step into the
game earlier than he then foresaw.
For full seven hundred miles, the train lumbered on to the
southward. It was tedious, exhausting; yet Weldon found a certain
interest in the jar of the rolling wheels to which he fitted the
measure of his whirring thoughts. As long as the rhythm of the
wheels lasted, his thoughts slowed down to meet their time. When the
train halted, his thoughts dashed off again; but they resumed their
slower course as soon as the wheels began once more. He took no note
of the country about him, as they passed from veldt to karroo, from
karroo to the coast plateau, and from the coast plateau down across
the Cape Flats, sparsely covered with pipe grass and acacias. Then,
as Table Mountain and the Devil's Peak lifted themselves on his
right hand, he knew that Cape Town was near, and he braced himself
to go through what was before him.
Kruger Bobs eyed him anxiously.
"Boss sick," he announced for the dozenth time, as the train drew in
at the Adderley Street station. "Boss berry sick mans. Boss go hotel
soon."
But Weldon shook his head. Even now, rest had scant space in his
plans, least of all, rest in Cape Town.
"I can do it," he asserted resolutely. "Steady me till I get
started, Kruger Bobs. Then I shall astonish you by my agility."
"Boss go hotel," Kruger Bobs muttered in low-voiced mutiny. "Boss
too sick to trek."
"No fear. Did you ever know me to give out, when there was something
still to be done, Kruger Bobs?"
"What Boss do?"
"My discharge. My banker. My passage home."
The arm of Kruger Bobs tightened about the bony figure of his
master, but the pressure of his strong arm was only gentle and
reassuring, and the great, white-ringed eyes glittered wet. This was
not the boy master to whom Kruger Bobs had sworn allegiance. This
was an older man, and weak withal. But the weaker grew the master,
the stronger grew the loyal, loving allegiance of the man.
After the wide, deserted stretches of open veldt, the roar of
Adderley Street seemed to Weldon like the maddening tumult of
Piccadilly. The noise stunned him; the hurrying crowd filled him
with terror. Even inside the cab, he still clung to the arm of the
faithful Kruger Bobs. Still clinging to that faithful arm, he came
out from the citadel, no longer Trooper Weldon, but Mr. Harvard
Weldon once more, honorably discharged from the South African Light
Horse. Kruger Bobs was invisible behind the spreading limits of his
smile; but Weldon had scarcely heeded the words which had been
addressed to him. All at once, like a watch about to run down, the
wheels of his brain were moving slowly and ever more slowly. His
whole resolution now centered in keeping them in motion long enough
to go to his banker and to the office of the steamship company. Once
on the steamer and sliding out across Table Bay, he could leave the
rest to the ship's doctor and to Fate.
Even in the multitude of strangers who had passed through Cape Town,
in those latter months, he was remembered at the bank and greeted
with a word of congratulation on his record in the field. At the
word, a man beside him, hearing, turned to look, looked again, and
then held out his hand. It was the father of Ethel Dent.
That night, the Dents dined alone. Over the roast, Mr. Dent looked
up suddenly.
"Whom do you think I saw, to-day, Ethel?"
"Who now?" she asked, smiling. "You can't expect me to guess, when
you are constantly running up against the most impossible people."
"Not this time. It was quite possible; but it gave me a shock. It
was Mr. Weldon."
The smile died from her lips. Nevertheless, she asked, with a forced
lightness,--
"What shocked you?"
"His looks. He was ghastly, thin to a shadow and burning up with
fever. I was in the bank, and I heard some one speak his name; but I
had to look at him for a second time, before I could recognize him.
The man is a wreck. He looked sixty years old, as he went crawling
off, on the arm of his Kaffir boy. I'm sorry. I always liked
Weldon."
A bit of bread lay by Ethel's plate. For an instant, her finger tips
vanished inside its yielding surface. Then she looked up.
"Too bad! He was a good fellow," she said quietly. Then she lifted
her hand to her throat. "Dear me! Have I lost my diamond pin?" she
added hastily. "I was sure I put it on. Please excuse me, while I
see if I left it in my room." And she ran swiftly out of the room.
Mrs. Dent broke the pause.
"Where was Mr. Weldon going?"
"To his hotel. I came out, just as they drove away, and I heard the
boy give the order to the driver."
"Which hotel was it?"
"I--Really, I don't remember. He used to go to the Grand."
"He seemed ill?"
"He seemed--" For an instant, Mr. Dent held the word in suspension.
Then he let it drop with a slow quietness which added tenfold to its
weight--"dead."
His wife's gentle eyes clouded.
"I am sorry. I liked the boy. He was good to me."
"I had thought Ethel liked him, too," her husband added a little
inconsequently.
"So she did in a way. But there have been so many others." The
mother sighed slightly. In her young days, there had been but one.
Now, remembering that one and watching him in the present, she found
it hard to comprehend Ethel's free-handed distribution of social
favors among so great a throng of admirers. There had always been
many; now, since her recent return from Johannesburg, the many had
become a multitude, and each of the multitude could show proof of
her liking. But Mrs. Dent recurred to the fact of Weldon's illness.
"Poor boy! Fancy being really ill, so far from home and in a hotel!"
she added slowly.
"It is one of the risks of a soldier," her husband reminded her.
"Yes, and the soldiers fought for us. Where would your mines have
been without them?" she suggested in return. "I really wish you
would telephone to the hotel and find out something more definite
about him."
Her husband looked covetously at the entree, just appearing in
sight.
"Now?" he asked.
She ignored the mockery of his tone.
"Yes, please," she assented quietly. "It will only take you a
minute."
It took him ten. When he came back into the room, his hat was in his
hand.
"I think I will go over to the Grand for a minute," he explained. "I
don't quite like what I hear."
"What did you hear?"
In the dim upper hallway, a girlish figure leaned far over the
railing and strained her ears for the reply. Then, noiselessly, the
door of her room shut again behind her.
"They tell me," Mr. Dent was saying; "that Weldon is there,
unconscious in his room. The boy brought him into the house in his
arms, and they have sent for Dr. Wright. It is a bad case of
enteric, mixed with some trouble with the brain. He appears to be
suffering from nervous shock, they say, increased by a long strain
of anxiety."
Half an hour later, he was called from Weldon's room to speak to his
wife at the telephone.
"Yes," he answered her. "It is as bad as I heard, as bad as it can
be. You think so? Are you strong enough? Sure? Hold the wire, then,
till I ask the doctor." The interval was short; and he went on
again, "The doctor says he can be moved now, but not later. It may
be a matter of weeks. How soon can you be ready? Very well. Will you
be sure to save yourself all you can? In an hour, then. And the
doctor will have a nurse waiting there? And can you put the boy into
some corner? He would be frantic, if we tried to leave him behind.
Very well. Yes." And the telephone rang off.
It was midnight before the Dent household was fully reconstructed.
Upstairs in the great eastern front room, a white-capped nurse was
bending above the unconscious man in the bed; downstairs in the
kitchen, the tears of Kruger Bobs were mingling with the cold roast
beef on the table before him. The doctor had just gone away, and in
the room underneath the sickroom, Mr. Dent and his wife were quietly
laying plans to meet the needs of the changed routine which had
fallen upon their home. He looked up, as Ethel came slowly into the
room.
"By the way, Ethel, I forgot to ask you before; but did you find
your pin?"
She looked at him wonderingly. Her face was pale and drawn; but her
eyes were shining like the gems she had professed to miss.
"What pin do you mean?" she asked blankly.