They went to him, and took up and carried him into the tavern, and laid
him down upon a frowzy bed in the room where the child lay upon the
iron-framed cot.
He lay there groaning in the fierce clutches of rheumatic fever. They
tended him in a rude way. A valise and an iron-bound leather lady's trunk
had been brought from the waggon by his orders, and set in the room where
he was in his sight. These contained her clothes and jewels, and he
guarded them jealously even in delirium. About his wasted body was buckled
a heavy money-belt. Bough could feel that when he helped the woman of the
tavern to lift the patient. He winked to her pleasantly across the bed.
But the time was not ripe yet. They must wait awhile. The English
traveller was not always delirious. There were intervals of consciousness,
and though he seemed at death's door, who knew? That strong purpose of his
might even yet lift him from the soiled and comfortless bed, and send him
on the trek again. Meanwhile the oxen were hired out to work for a farmer
fifty miles away. That was called sending them to graze and gain strength
for more work; and there was the keep of two Cape boys, and the Kaffir and
the Boer driver, and the cost of nursing and sick man's diet, and the care
of the child. A heavy bill of charges was mounting up against the English
traveller. Much of what the belt contained would honestly be Bough's.
There was no doctor and no medicine save the few drugs the sick man had
carried, as all travellers do. The milk for which he asked for himself and
the child, which was procured from the native cattle-kraals for a tikkie a
pint, and for which Bough charged at the price of champagne, kept him
alive. Broth or eggs he sickened at and turned from, and, indeed, the one
was greasy and salt, the others of appalling mustiness. He would regularly
swallow the tabloids of quinine or lithia, and fall back on the hard,
coarse pillow, exhausted by the mere effort of unscrewing the nickel-cap
of the little phial, and tell himself that he was getting stronger.
Sometimes he really was so, and then the child sat on his wide hollow
chest, and played with the beard that was now all grey and unkempt and
matted, until some word in her baby prattle, some look of wondering
inquiry in the innocent eyes, golden-hazel and black-lashed, like his own,
that were almost too beautiful to be a man's, people used to say, like the
weak, passionate, gentle mouth under the heavy moustache, would bring back
all the anguish of his loss, and waken anew that torturing voice that
accused him of being false to his compact with the dead. Then he would
call, and send the child away, borne in the arms of the Hottentot
chambermaid to breathe the fresh air upon the veld. And, left alone, he
would draw up the rough sheets over his head, with gaunt clutching
fingers, and weep, though sometimes no tears came to moisten his haggard,
staring eyes.
One night, while the flat gold hunting-watch ticked above his head in the
little embroidered chamois-leather pouch dead hands had worked, Knowledge
came to him with a sudden rigor of the muscles of the wasted body, and a
bursting forth from every pore of the dank, dark-hued sweat of coming
dissolution.
He was not ever going to get well, and fetch the clergyman to pray over
and bless her resting-place. He was going to die and lie beside her there,
under the red earth topped by the boulder-cairn. He smiled. What an easy
solution of the problem! He had been too intent upon gratifying her last
desire to entertain for a moment the thought of suicide. He had always
held self-destruction as the last resource of the coward and the criminal,
and besides there was the child.
The child!...
With a pang of dread and terror unfelt by him before, he raised his gaunt
head with an effort from the uneasy pillow, and looked towards where she
lay, with staring, haunted eyes. The window was open a little way at the
top, and for fear of the night-chill his fine leopard-skin kaross had been
spread over her.... One dimpled, rounded, bare arm lay upon the soft
dappled fur, the babyish fingers curled one upon the other. Rosy human
tendrils that should never twine again in a mother's hair. Her child, her
daughter!... Born of her body, sharing her nature and her sex, soon to be
orphaned. For he who could not even lift himself from bed, and drag his
body across the floor to cover that lovely babyish arm, would soon be no
better protector than the restless ghost that tugged at his heart with its
unseen hands. He knew now why it could not rest.
What would become of the child! Another fiery scourge, wielded by the Hand
Unseen, bit deep into his shrinking conscience, into his writhing soul.
His own act had brought this about. Be a cur, and accuse Destiny, blame
Fate, lay the onus upon God, as so many defaulters do--he could not. He
lay looking his deed in the foul face until the dawn crept up the sky, and
learning how it may be that the sins of their fathers are visited on the
children.
He called for ink and paper as soon as the house was awake, and with
infinite labour and many pauses to recover spent strength and breath, for
he was greedy of life now, for the reason that we know--he wrote a letter
home to England, to a relative who was the head of his family, and bore a
great historic title--so great that those who spelled it out upon the
envelope were half afraid to slip the heated knife under the crested seal.
But Bough did it, and opened, and read.
It was not going to be the soft snap he had thought, but it would be good
enough. Wires might be pulled from Downing Street that would set the
Government at Cape Town working to trace the tall thin Englishman who had
travelled up with two waggons from Cape Colony in the company of a child
and the woman now dead, and for whose sake he had given up those almighty
swell connections. What a fool--what a thundering, juicy, damned fool the
man had been! whose gaunt eyes were even now making out the landfall of
Kingdom Come through the gathering mists of death.
The letter worried Bough. To have the English Government smelling at your
heels is no joke, thought he. Any moment the mastiff may grip, and then,
if you happen to be an ex-convict and deserter from their Colonial Police,
and supposing you have one or two other little things against you ... the
most honest of speculators being occasionally compelled to dirty his
hands, if only to tone down those immaculate extremities to something
approaching the colour of other people's--then what becomes of the risky
but profitable business of gun-running from the English ports through to
the Transvaal?
For by men like Bough and his associates vast supplies of munitions and
engines of war were wormed through. The machine-guns in carefully numbered
parts came in cases as "agricultural implements," the big guns travelled
in the boilers of locomotives, the empty cases of the shells, large and
small, were packed in piano-cases, or in straw-filled crates as
"hardware"; the black powder and the cordite and the lyddite came in round
wooden American cheese-boxes, with a special mark; and the Mauser
cartridges were soldered in tins like preserved meat. How handsomely that
business paid only Bough and his merry men, and Oom Paul and his burghers
of the Volksraad, knew.
But Her Majesty's Government, bound about with red-tape, hoodwinked by
Dutch Assistant-Commissioners of British Colonies, and deceived by
traitorous English officials, were blind and deaf to the huge traffic in
arms and munitions. Not that there were no warnings. To the very end they
were shouted in deaf ears.
What of that letter sent from the Resident Commissioner's office at
Gueldersdorp, that little frontier hamlet on the north-east corner of
British Baraland, September 4, 1899, little more than a month before the
war broke out, the war that was to leave Britain and her Colonies bleeding
at every vein?
The Boers were in laager over the Border. A desperate appeal for help had
been made to the Powers that were, and the reply received to the now
historic telegram, through the Resident Commissioner, has equally become a
matter of history.
"All that was possible" was being done by the Imperial authorities, His
Excellency assured the inquirer, to safeguard the lives and property of
the inhabitants of the Gold-Reef Town in the event of an attack by a
hostile force.
Also the military armament of the place was about to be materially
increased.
And yet up to the little frontier town upon which so much depended not a
single modern gun had been despatched.
An easy prey had the little town upon the flat-topped hill, set in the
middle of a basin, proved to the Boer General and his commandos but for
one thing. For weeks after the bursting of the first shell over
Gueldersdorp three sides of the beleaguered town were so many open doors
for the enemy. Only upon the threshold of each door stood Fear, and
guarded and held the citadel.