Bough, as soon as it was dawn, sent three of the Kaffirs from the kraals,
in different directions, to search for her, and, mounted on a fresh pony,
took the fourth line of search himself.
He had chosen the right direction for riding down the quarry. At broad
high noon he came upon her, in a bare, stony place tufted with milk-bush.
She was crouching under a prickly-pear shrub, that threw a distorted blue
shadow on the sun-baked, sun-bleached ground, trying to eat the fruit in
the native way with two sticks. But she had no knife, and her mouth was
bleeding. Bough gave the tired pony both spurs when the prey he hunted
came in sight. She leaped up like a wild cat when the mounted man rode
down upon her, and ran, doubling like a hare. When overtaken, she fell
upon her face in the sand, and lay still, only shaken by her long pants.
Bough dismounted and caught her by the wrist and dragged her up with his
bandaged right hand. He beat her about her cheeks with his hard, open
left. Then he threw her across his saddle, but she writhed down, and lay
under the pony's feet.
He kicked her then, for giving so much trouble, lifted her again, and
tried to mount, holding her in one arm. But the frightened pony swerved
and backed, and the girl writhed, and struggled, and scratched like a wild
cat. She did not know what mercy meant, but she saw by the look that came
into those light eyes that this man would have none upon her. She fought
and bit and screamed.
Bough took an ox-reim then, that was coiled behind his saddle, and bound
her hands. He tied the end of the leather rope to the iron ring behind his
saddle, and remounted, and spurred his weary beast into a canter. The
little one was forced to run behind. Again and again she fell, and each
time she was jerked up and forced to run again upon her bleeding feet,
leaving rags of her garments upon the karroo-bushes and blood-marks on the
stones. And at last she fell, and rose no more, showing no sign of life
under the whip and the spur-rowel. Then Bough bent over and drew his long
hunting-knife and cut the reim, leaving her hands still bound. If any
spark of life remained in he girl, he could not tell. Her knees were drawn
in towards her body; her eyes were open, and rolled upwards; there was
foam upon her torn and bleeding mouth. She was as good as dead, anyway,
and the wild dogs would be sure to come by-and-by. Already an aasvogel
was hovering above; a mere speck, the great bird poised upon widespread
wings, high up in the illimitable blue.
Presently there would be a flock of these carrion feeders, that are not
averse to fresh-killed meat when it is to be had.
Bough remounted, and, humming a dance tune that was often on his lips,
rode away over the veld.
The great vulture wheeled. Then he dropped like a falling stone for a
thousand yards or so, and hovered and dropped again, getting nearer--ever
so much nearer--with each descent. And where he had hovered at the first
were now a dozen specks of black upon the hot, bright blue.
A wild dog crept down from a cone-topped spitzkop, and stood, sniffing the
blood-tainted air eagerly, whining a little in its throat.
The great vulture dropped lower. His comrades of the flock, eagerly
following his gyrations and descents, had begun to wheel and drop also.
Another wild dog appeared on the cone-shaped kop. Other furry, sharp-eared
heads, with eager, sniffing noses, could be seen amongst the grass and
bush.
Then suddenly the higher vultures rose. They wheeled and soared and flew,
a bevy of winged black specks hurrying to the north. They had seen
something approaching over the veld. The great bird hanging motionless,
purposeful, lower down, became aware of his comrades' change of tactics.
With one downward stroke of his powerful wings, he shot upwards, and with
a hoarse, croaking cry took flight after the rest.
The wild dogs stole back, hungry, to covert, as a big light blue waggon,
drawn by a well-fed team of eight span, came lumbering over the veld.
Would the ox-team veer in another direction? Would the big blue waggon
with the new white tilt roll by?
The Hottentot driver cracked his giant whip, and, turning on the box-seat,
spoke to a figure that sat beside him. It was a woman in loose black
garments, with a starched white coif like a Dutchwoman's kapje, covered
with a floating black veil. At her side dangled and clashed a long rosary
of brown wooden beads, with a copper crucifix attached. There were two
other women in the big waggon, dressed in the same way. They were Roman
Catholic nuns--Sisters of Mercy coming up from Natal, by the order of the
Bishop of Bellmina, Vicar-Apostolic, at the request of the Bishop of
Paracos, suffragan to North-East Baraland, to swell the numbers of the
Community already established in Gueldersdorp at the Convent of the Holy
Way.
The oxen halted some fifty yards from that inanimate ragged little body,
lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the
hot sand. Little crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on
the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if
the waggon had passed on.
One white-coifed, tall, black-clad figure sprang lightly down from the
waggon-box, and hurried across to where the body was lying. A mellow,
womanly cry of pity came from under the starched coif. She turned and
beckoned. Then she knelt down by the girl's side, opened the torn
garments, and felt with compassionate, kindly touches about the still
heart.
The other two black figures came hurrying over then, stumbling amongst the
stones and karroo-bushes in their haste. Lifting her, they turned the
white, bloodless young face to the blue sky. It was cut and scratched, but
not otherwise disfigured. Her bound arms, dragged upwards before it, had
shielded it from the thorns and the sharp stones. They were raw from the
elbows to the wrists.
They listened at the torn childish bosom with anxious ears. They got a few
drops of brandy between the clenched little teeth. The sealed lips
quivered; the heart fluttered feebly, like a dying bird. They gave her
more stimulant, and waited, while the Hottentot driver dozed, and the
sleek, well-fed oxen chewed the cud patiently, standing in the sun.
Then the Sisters lifted her, with infinite care, and carried her to the
waggon. The twenty-four-foot whip-lash cracked, and the patient beasts
moved on. Very soon the big white tilt was a mere retreating speck upon
the veld. The ants were still busy when the wild dogs came out and
sniffed regretfully at those traces on the ground.
Coincidence, did you say, lifting your eyebrows over the book, as the blue
waggon of the Sisters rolled lumberingly into the story? The long arm of
coincidence stretched to aching tenuity by the dramatist and the novelist!
Nay! but the thing happened, just as I have told.
What is the thing we are agreed to call coincidence?
Once I was passing over one of the bridges that span the unclean London
ditch called the Regent's Canal. I had walked all the way from Piccadilly
Circus to Gloucester Crescent, haunted by the memory of a man I had once
known. He was the broken-down, drunken, studio-drudge of a great artist, a
splendid Bohemian, who had died some years before. Why did the thought of
the palette-scraper, the errand-goer, the drunken creature with the
cultivated voice and the ingratiating, gentlemanly manners, possess me as
I went? I recalled his high, intellectual, pimply forehead, and large
benevolent nose, in a chronic state of inflammation, and seedy
semi-clerical garb, for the thing had been an ordained clergyman of the
Church of England, and I grinned, remembering how, when a Royal visitor
was expected at the great man's studio, the factotum had been bidden to
wash his face, and had washed one half of it, leaving the other half in
drab eclipse, like the picture-restorers' trade-advertisement of a canvas
partially cleansed.
Idly I tossed the butt of a finished cigar over the bridge balustrade.
Idly my eye followed it down to the filthy, sluggishly-creeping water that
flows round the bend, under the damp rear-garden walls below.
A policeman and a bargeman were just taking the body of an old man out of
that turbid canal-stream. It was dressed in pauper's garments, and its
stiffened knees were bent, and its rigid elbows crooked, and a
dishonoured, dripping beard of grey hung over the soulless breast.
The dreadful eyes were open, staring up at the leaden March sky. His face,
with the dread pallor of Death upon it, and the mud-stains wiped away by a
rough but not unkindly hand, was cleaner than I had ever seen it in life.
Nevertheless, I recognised in the soaked body in its workhouse livery the
very man the thought of whom had haunted me, the great Bohemian painter's
drunken studio-drudge.