That hard taskmaster, Satan, is sometimes wonderfully indulgent to those
who serve him well. While Bough, the keeper of the tavern, was yet turning
about the open letter in his thick, short, hairy hands, weighing the
chances attending the sending of it against the chances of keeping it
back, the woman who served as mistress of the place thrust her
coarsely-waved head of yellow bleached hair and rouge-ruddled face in at
the room door, and called to him:
"Boss, the sick toff is doing a croak. Giving up the ghost for all he's
worth--he is. Better come and take a look for yourself if you don't
believe me."
Bough swore with relief and surprise, delayed only to lock away the
letter, and went to take a look. It was as he hoped, a real stroke of luck
for a man who knew how to work it.
Richard Mildare--for Bough knew now what had been the name of the
Englishman: Captain the Hon. Richard Mildare, late of the Grey
Hussars--was dead. No hand made murderous by the lust of gold had helped
him to his death. Sudden failure of the heart is common in aggravated
cases of rheumatic fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief
final pang, he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not
look at rest. There was some reflection in it of the terror that had come
upon him in the watches of that last night.
Bough stayed some time alone in the room of death. When he came out he was
extremely affable and gentle. The woman, who knew him, chuckled to herself
when he met the Kaffir serving-maid bringing back the child from an airing
in the sun, and told her to take it to the mistress. Then he went into the
bar-room to speak to the Englishman's Boer driver.
Leaning easily upon the zinc-covered counter he spoke to the man in the
Taal, with which he was perfectly familiar:
"Your Baas has gone in, as my wife and I expected."
Smoots Beste growled in his throat:
"He was no Baas of mine, the verdoemte rooinek! I drove for him for pay,
that is all. There is wage owing me still, for the matter of that--and
where am I to get it now that the heathen has gone to the burning?"
Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly got drunk, not
only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt virtuously certain that the
Englishman had gone to Hell.
Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad Cape brandy, and
pushed it across the counter.
"You shall get the money, every tikkie. Only listen to me."
Smoots Beste tossed off the fiery liquid, and returned in a tone less
surly:
"I am listening, Baas."
Said Bough, speaking with the thickish lisp and slurring of the consonants
that distinguished his utterance when he sought to appear more simple and
candid than usual:
"This dead toff, with his flash waggon and fine team, and Winchester
repeating-rifles, had very little money. He has died in my debt for the
room and the nursing, and the good nourishment, for which I trusted him
all these three weeks, and I am a poor man. The dollars I have paid you
and the Kaffir and the Cape boys on his account came out of my own pocket.
Rotten soft have I behaved over him, that's the God's truth, and when I
shall get back my own there's no knowing. But, of course, I shall act
square."
The Boer's thick lips parted in a grin, showing his dirty, greenish-yellow
teeth. He scratched his shaggy head, and said, his tongue lubricated to
incautiousness by the potent liquor:
"The waggons, and the oxen, and the guns and ammunition, and the stores in
the second waggon are worth good money. And the woman that is dead had
jewels--I have seen them on her--diamonds and rubies in rings and
bracelets fit for the vrouw of King Solomon himself. The Englishman did
not bury them with her under that verdoemte kopje that he built with his
two hands, and they are not in the boxes in the living-waggon."
"Did he not?" asked Bough, looking the Boer driver full in the face with a
pleasant smile. "Are they not?"
Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-room, looked up at the
ceiling, down at the floor, anywhere but into Bough's. He spat, and said
in a much more docile tone:
"What do you want me to do?"
Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially:
"Just this, friend. I want you to inspan, and take one of the waggons up
to Gueldersdorp, with a letter from me to the Civil Commissioner. I will
tell him how the man is dead, and he will send down a magistrate's clerk
to put a seal on the boxes and cases, and then he will go through the
letters and papers in the pocket-book, and write to the people of the dead
man over in England, supposing he has any, for I have heard him tell my
wife there was not a living soul of his name now, except the child----"
"But what good will all this do you and me, Baas?" asked the Boer
subserviently.
Bough spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders.
"Why, when the magistrates and lawyers have hunted up the man's family,
there will be an order to sell the waggons and oxen and other property to
pay the expenses of his burying, and the child's keep here and passage
from Cape Town, if she is to be sent to England ... and what is left over,
see you, after the law expenses have been paid, will go to the settlement
of our just claims. They will never let honest men suffer for behaving
square, sure no, they'll not do that!"
But though Bough's words were full of faith in the fair dealing of the
lawyers and magistrates, his tone implied doubt.
"Boer lawyers are slim rogues at best, and Engelsch lawyers are duyvels as
well as rogues," said Smoots Beste, with a dull flash of originality.
Bough nodded, and pushed another glass of liquor across the bar.
"And that's true enough. I've a score to settle with one or two of 'em. By
gum! I call myself lucky to be in this with a square man like you. There's
the waggon, brand-new--you know what it cost at Cape Town--and the team, I
trust you to take up to Gueldersdorp, and who's to hinder a man who hasn't
the fear of the Lord in him from heading north-east instead of north-west,
selling the waggon and the beasts at Kreilstad or Schoenbroon, and living
on a snug farm of your own for the rest of your life under another man's
name, where the English magistrates and the police will never find you,
though their noses were keener than the wild dogs?"
"Alamachtig!" gasped Smoots Beste, rendered breathless by the alluring,
tempting prospect. Surely the devil spoke with the voice of the
tavern-keeper Bough, when, in human form, he tempted children of men.
Sweat glistened on Smoots' flabby features, his thick hands trembled, and
his bowels were as water. But his purpose was solidifying in his brain as
he said innocently, looking over Bough's left shoulder at the wooden
partition that divided off the bar from the landlord's dwelling-room:
"Aye, I am no dirty schelm that cannot be trusted. Therefore would it not
be better if I took both teams and waggons, and all the rooinek's goods
with me up to Gueldersdorp, and handed it over to the Engelsch landrost
there?"
The fish was hooked. Bough said, steadily avoiding those twirling eyes:
"A good notion, but the lawyer chaps at Gueldersdorp will want to look at
the Englishman's dead body to be able to satisfy his people that he did
not die of a gunshot, or of a knife-thrust; we must bury him, of course,
but not too deep for them to dig him up again. And they will want to
ferret in all the corners of the room where he died, and make sure that
his bags and boxes have not been tampered with--and then there is the
child. In a way"--he spoke slowly and apologetically--"the kid and the
goods are my security for getting my own back again--if ever I do. So you
will inspan one of the waggons--the best if you like, with a team of six
beasts, and you will trek up to Gueldersdorp--you will travel light enough
with only the grub you will need, and the Cape boys, and you will hand
over the letter to the Resident Magistrate, and bring back the man who
will act as his deputy."
But at this point Smoots Beste set down his splay foot. He would undertake
to deliver the letter, but he objected to the company of the coloured
voor-loopers or the Kaffir driver. He was firm upon that and, finding his
most honeyed persuasions of no avail, Bough said no more. He would pay off
the niggers and dismiss them, or get rid of them without paying; there
were ways and means. He sent up country, and the team came down, six thin,
overworked creatures, with new scars upon their slack and baggy hides, and
hollow flanks, and ribs that showed painfully. Smoots Beste was about to
grumble, but he changed his mind, and took the letter, buttoning it up in
the flapped pocket of his tan-cord jacket, and the long whip cracked like
a revolver as the lash hissed out over the backs of the wincing oxen, and
the white tilt rocked over the veld, heading to the nor'-west.
"When will the Dutchy be back, boss?" asked the woman, with a knowing
look.
Bough played the game up to her. He answered quite seriously: "In three
weeks' time."
Then he strolled out, smoking a cigar, his hat tilted at an angle that
spoke of satisfaction. His walk led him past the oblong cairn of ironstone
boulders in the middle of the sandy patch of ground enclosed with zinc
wire-netting. At the foot of the cairn was a new grave.
For the lover did not even lie beside his beloved, as he had vowed once,
promised and planned, but couched below her feet, waiting, like some
faithful hound that could not live without the touch of the worshipped
hand, for the dead to rise again.
Why is it that Failure is the inevitable fate of some men and women?
Despite brilliant prospects, positions that seem assured, commanding
talents nobly used, splendid opportunities that are multiplied as though
in mockery, the result is Nothing from first to last; while the bad
flourish and the evil prosper, and the world honours the stealer of the
fruit of the brains that have been scattered in frenzied despair, or have
become so worn out from the constant effort of creation that the worker
has sunk into hopeless apathy and died.
Bough was not one of those men whose plans come to nothing. He had
prospered as a rogue of old in England, really his native country, though
he called himself an Afrikander. Reared in the gutters of the Irish
quarter of Liverpool, he had early learned to pilfer for a living, had
prospered in prison as sharp young gaol-birds may prosper, and returned to
it again and again, until, having served out part of a sentence for
burglary and obtained his ticket-of-leave, he had shifted his convict's
skin, and made his way out to Cape Colony under a false name and
character. He had made a mistake, it was true, enlisting as a trooper of
Colonial Police, but the step had been forced upon him by circumstances.
Then he had deserted, and had since been successful as a white-slave
dealer at Port Elizabeth, and as a gold-miner in the Transvaal, and he had
done better and better still at that ticklish trade of gun-running for Oom
Paul. Though, get caught--only once get caught--and the Imperial
Government authorities, under whose noses you had been playing the game
with impunity for years, made it as hot as Hell for you. Bough, however,
did not mean ever to get caught. There was always another man, a
semi-innocent dupe, who would appear to have been responsible for
everything, and who would get pinched.
Such a dupe now trudged at the head of the meagre three-span ox-team.
When, after a hard day's toil, he at length outspanned, the waggon-pole
still faithfully pointed to the north-west. But before it was yet day the
waggon began to move again, and it was to the north-east that the
waggon-pole pointed thenceforwards, and the letter Bough had given Smoots
Beste for the Chief Resident Magistrate at Gueldersdorp was saved from the
kindling of the camp-fire by a mere accident.
The cat's-paw could not read, or the illegible, meaningless ink scrawl
upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope would have aroused his
suspicions at the outset. So well had Bough, that expert in human frailty,
understood his subject, that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud, not
elaborate--a mere stage property, nothing more. But yet he gave it in full
belief that it would be burned, and that, the boats of Smoots Beste being
consumed with it, according to the thick judgment of the said Smoots, it
would be as a pillar of fire behind that slim child of the old
voortrekkers, hastening his journey north-eastwards. It is typical of the
class of Smoots that it never once occurred to him to go north.
But Smoots Beste never bought a farm with the price of the oxen and the
high-bulwarked, teak-built, waterproof-canvas tilted waggon that had cost
such a good round sum. There was a big rainfall on the third day. It began
with the typical African thunderstorm--deafening, continuous rolls and
crashes of heavy cloud-artillery, and lightning that blazed and darted
without intermission, and ran zigzagging in a horrible, deadly, playful
fashion over the veld, as though looking for dishonest folks to shrivel.
One terrible flash struck the wheel-oxen, a thin double tongue of blue
flame sped flickering from ridge to ridge of the six gaunt backs ... there
was a smell of burning hair--a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched
dead on the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long
horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to bloat and
swell in the swift decomposition that follows death by the electric fluid.
Smoots Beste crawled under the waggon, and, remembering all he had heard
his father spell out from the Dutch Bible about the Judgment Day, and the
punishment of sinners in everlasting flame, felt very ill at ease. The
storm passed over, and the rain poured all through the night, but dawn
brought in a clear blue day; and with it a train of eight
transport-waggons, and several wearied, muddy droves of sheep and cattle,
the property of the Imperial Government Commissariat Department,
Gueldersdorp, being taken from Basutoland East up to Gueldersdorp, under
convoy of an escort of B.S.A. Police. To the non-commissioned officer in
command Smoots Beste, resigned to the discharge of a trust, handed the
letter for the Civil Commissioner.
The sergeant, sitting easily in the saddle, looked at the boldly-written
direction on the envelope, and smelt no rats--at least until he coolly
opened the supposed letter. The scrawled sheet of paper it contained was a
surprise, but he did not let Smoots see that. Then the following brief
dialogue took place:
"You were trekking up to Gueldersdorp," he said to the decidedly nervous
Smoots, "to fetch down a Deputy Civil Commissioner to deal with the
effects of a dead English traveller, at a house kept by the man who wrote
this letter--that is, three days' trek over the veld to the southward, and
called the Free State Hotel?"
Smoots nodded heavily. The dapper sergeant cocked his felt smasher hat,
and turned between pleasantly smiling lips the cigar he was smoking. Then
he pointed with his riding-whip, a neatly varnished sjambok, with a smart
silver top, to the north-west.
"There lies Gueldersdorp. Rum that when the lightning killed the ox-team
you should have been trekking north-east, isn't it?"
Smoots Beste agreed that it was decidedly rum.
The sergeant said, without a change in his agreeable smile:
"All right; you can inspan six of our drove-bullocks, and drive the waggon
with us to Gueldersdorp."
"Thank you, Baas!" said Smoots, without enthusiasm.
"If you like to take the risk," added the sergeant, who had not quite
finished. He ended with an irrepressible outburst of honest indignation:
"Why, you blasted, thieving Dutch scum, do you think I don't _know_ you
were stealing that span and waggon?"
And as Smoots, sweating freely, unyoked the dead oxen, he decided in his
heavy mind that he would be missing long before the convoy got to
Gueldersdorp.
Nine waggons rolled on where only eight had been before. The mounted men
hurried on the daubed and wearied droves of Commissariat beasts. Smoots
Beste drove the scratch team of bullocks, but his heart was as water
within his belly, and there was no resonance in the smack of his whip.
When the convoy came to a town, he vanished, and the story thenceforth
knows him no more. The discreet sergeant of police did not even notice
that he was missing until several days later, when the end of the journey
was near at hand. He was a sober, careful man, and a good husband. He
shortly afterwards made quite a liberal remittance to his wife, and his
troopers pushed Kruger half-sovereigns across most of the bars in
Gueldersdorp shortly after the purchase by a Dopper farmer of a teak-built
Cape waggon that a particular friend of the sergeant's had got to sell.
And they were careful, at first, not to wag loose tongues. But as time
went on the story of the English traveller who had brought the body of the
woman to the Free State Hotel, so many days' trek to the southwards from
Gueldersdorp, trickled from lip to lip. And years later, years too late,
it came to the ears of a friend of dead Richard Mildare.
The sergeant maintained silence. He was a careful officer, and a discreet
man, and, what is more, religious. In controversial arguments with the
godless he would sometimes employ a paraphrase of the story of Smoots
Beste to strengthen his side.
"A chap's a blamed fool that doesn't believe in God, I tell you. I was
once after a bung-nosed Dutch thief of a transport-driver, that had
waltzed away with a brand-new Cape cart and a team of first-class mules.
Taking 'em up to Pretoria on the quiet, to sell 'em to Oom Paul's
burghers, he was. Ay, they were worth a tidy lump! A storm came on--a
regular Vaal display of sky-fireworks. The rain came down like
gun-barrels, the veld turned into a swamp, but we kept on after the
Dutchman, who drove like gay old Hell. Presently comes a blue blaze and a
splitting crack, as if a comet had come shouldering into the map of South
Africa, and knocked its head in. We pushed on, smelling sulphur, burnt
flesh, and hair. 'By gum!' said I; 'something's got it'; and I was to
rights. The Cape cart stood on the veld, without a scratch on the
paintwork. The four mules lay in their traces, deader than pork. The
Dutchman sat on the box, holding the lines and his voorslag, and grinning.
He was dead, too--struck by the lightning in the act of stealing
those mules and that Cape cart. Don't let any fellow waste hot air after
that trying to persuade me that there isn't such a thing as an overruling
Providence!"
Thus the sergeant: and his audience, whether Free-thinkers, Agnostics, or
believers, would break up, feeling that one who has the courage of his
opinions is a respectable man.
As for Bough, in whose hands even the astute sergeant had been as a peeled
rush, we may go back and find him counting money in gold and notes that
had been taken from the belt of the dead English traveller.
Seventeen hundred pounds, hard cash--a pretty windfall for an honest man.
The honest man whistled softly, handling the white crackling notes, and
feeling the smooth, heavy English sovereigns slip between his fingers.
There were certificates of Rand stock, also a goodly number of Colonial
Railway shares, and some foreign bonds, all of which could be realised on,
but at a distance, and by a skilled hand. There were jewels, as the Boer
waggon-driver had said, that had belonged to the dead woman--diamond
rings, and a bracelet or two; and there were silk dresses of lovely hues
and texture, and cambric and linen dresses, and tweed dresses, in the
trunks; and a great cloak of sables, trimmed with many tails, and
beautiful underclothing of silk and linen, trimmed with real lace, over
which the mouth of the woman of the tavern watered. She got some of the
dresses and all the undergarments when Bough had dexterously picked out
the embroidered initials. He knew diamonds and rubies, but he had never
been a judge of lace.
There was a coronet upon one or two handkerchiefs that had been overlooked
when the dead woman had burned the others four years previously. Bough
picked this out too, working deftly with a needle.
He was clever, very clever. He could take to pieces a steam-engine or a
watch, and put it together again. He knew all there is to know about
locks, and how they may best be opened without their keys. He could alter
plate-marks with graving tools and the jeweller's blow-pipe, and test
metals with acids, and make plaster-cast moulds that would turn out
dollars and other coins, remarkably like the real thing. He was not a
clever forger; he had learned to write somewhat late in life, and the
large, bold round hand, with the capital letters that invariably began
with the wrong quirk or twirl, was too characteristic, though he wrote
anonymous letters sometimes, risking detection in the enjoyment of what
was to him a dear delight, only smaller than that other pleasure of
moulding bodies to his own purposes, of malice, or gain, or lust.