XXIII

You are to imagine Dawn, trailing weary-footed over the interminable

plain, to find Gueldersdorp, lonely before, and before threatened, now

isolated like some undaunted coral rock in mid-Pacific, crested with

screaming sea-birds, girt with roaring breakers, set in the midst of

waters haunted by myriads of hungry sharks. Ringed with silent menace, she

squatted on her low hill, doggedly waiting the event.

It was known that on the previous day the telegraph wires north of Beaton

had been cut, and this day was to sever the last link with Cape Town at

Maripo, some forty miles south. The railway bridge that crossed the Olopo

River might go next. Staat's Engineers had been busy there overnight.

Rumour had it, Heaven knows how, that the armoured train that had been

sent up from the Cape with two light guns of superseded pattern--a

generous contribution towards the collection of obsolete engines now

bristling from the sand-bagged ramparts--had been seized by a commando,

with the officer and the men in charge. This was to be confirmed later by

the arrival of an engine-driver minus five fingers and some faith in the

omnipotence of British arms. But at the beginning of this chapter he was

hiding in a sand-hole, chewing the cud of his experiences, in default of

other pabulum, and did not get in before dark of the long blazing day.

Crowds gathered on the barely-reclaimed veld at the northern end of the

town to see the Military Executive take over the Hospital. But that the

streets were barricaded with waggons and every able-bodied male citizen

carried a rifle, it might have been mistaken for an occasion of national

rejoicing or civic festivity. The leaves of the pepper-trees fringing the

thoroughfares and clumped in the Market Square rustled in the faint hot

breeze. By-and-by they were to stand scorched and seared and naked under

the iron hail that beat in blizzards upon them, and die in the noxious

lyddite fumes dispersed by bursting shells.

The variegated crowd cheered as the Staff dismounted at the white-painted

iron gates of the railed-in Hospital grounds. It was not the acclamation

of admiration, it was the cheer expectant. They wanted to know what the

Officer in Command was going to do? Intolerable suspense racked them.

Wherever it was known that he would be, there they followed at this

juncture--solid masses of humanity, bored with innumerable ear-holes, and

enamelled with patient, glittering, expectant eyes. His own keen, kindly

glance swept over them as he touched his grey felt hat in acknowledgment

of their dubious greeting, that half-hearted but well-meant cheer. He read

the mute question written upon all the faces. Part of his answer to the

interrogation was standing in the Railway-yard, but they would have to

wait a little while longer yet--just a little longer. He whistled his

pleasant melodious little tune as the porter hurried to open the gates.

One pair of pale, rather ugly eyes in the crowd were illumined with pure

hero-worship. "That's 'im," explained their owner, nudging a big man in

shabby white drill, who was shouldering a deliberate way through the

press.

"The Colonel--and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along of 'im--with the red

shoulder-straps and brown leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o'

the Staff, they are. An' them others in khaki with puttees--syme as wot

I've got on--they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-boneses--twig? You

can tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with a serpint

climbin' up a stick inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their

caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot they

carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know about these things,

being a sort of Service man meself."

Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid additions had

certainly been made to the martial outfit of the previous day. The tweed

Norfolk had been replaced by a khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and

obligingly taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's

stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence of

over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, had been sewn

upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing

it, and it burned the arm that bore it like a vaccination-pustule on the

fifth day.

"Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse. He twitched the

stripe carelessly into sight. "C'manding orficer marked me down for this

to-day," he continued, with elaborate indifference, "along of a Favourable

Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much--little turn-up with a

'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be a spy."

In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he recognised the face

under the Panama hat worn by the big neighbour in white drill, and blushes

swamped his yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face, no

longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had

stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the previous day,

where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly that the heroic leading

attitude of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor role of the

juvenile walking-gentleman. "Watto!" he began. "It's you, Mister! I bin

wantin' to say thank----" But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse

against the green-painted iron railings surrounding a municipal gum-tree,

and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as well that the

acquaintance made under conditions remote from respectability should not

be renewed. But W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer.

The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a moment, to the

disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton and the Colonial of British

race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs and the Barala, who anticipated a big

indaba. The little party of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-drive

between the carefully-tended grass plats to the stoep where the Mayor of

Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and several

prominent members of the Committee--including Alderman Brooker,

puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest--waited. Military

Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done.

Inspection followed.

"The warr'ds, said ye?" The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw-boned

personage, very evidently hailed from North of the Tweed. "I'm obliged to

ye, ma'am," he addressed the flustered matron, "but the warr'ds an' the

contents o' the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance--at

least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll tak' a look at

the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing plant, and the

sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff at the kitchens, there

would be a moment to spend in ganging through the warr'ds. Unless the

Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them?" He turned a small, twinkling pair

of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief.

"Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask five minutes more

grace in the interests of the friend I spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I

made an appointment at the half-hour."

"You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 'The Diseases of

Civilisation,' are ye, Colonel? I mind a sentence in it that must have

been a douse of cauld watter--toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd--in

the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. '_Young men_,' he ca'ed them, as

if he was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led to take up Surgery by

the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn

its scienteefic principles--showy operators, who diagnose wi' the knife

an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to assist her.' And yet Saxham

could daur! 'I shall prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out

exceesion,' he said, or they say he said in the _Lancet_ report o' the

operation on the Grand Duke Waldimir--I cam' across a reprint o' it no'

lang ago--when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' the sweat o' mortal

terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He cut a hole in the Duke's stomach,

ye will understand, in front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller

intesteene, spliced the twa together wi' a Collins button, and by a

successful deveece o' plumbing--naething less--earned the eterr'nal

gratitude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists.

All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a

hair's-breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or improve

upon perfection. Toch!... Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin'

for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day!"

"Rejoice then, Major, and be exceeding glad, for I believe this is the

man who wrote the book and plugged--or was it plumbed--the potentate."

The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. "I promise myself a crack or

twa wi' him, then.... But how is it a busy chiel like that can get awa'

from his private patients and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter

Season Ahem! ahem!"

By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing the conversation,

it was plain that he had recalled the circumstances under which the "busy

chiel" had turned his back upon the private patients and the Hospital

wards. "Colonel," he went on, "I could be wishing this varry

creeditable-appearing institution--judging from the ootside o't--were

twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe or so to the back of that."

"My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and happy but once, and

that was when we had fifty men down with dysentery and fever in a

tin-roofed Railway goods-shed, and a hundred and seventy more under leaky

canvas, and you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could get no

milk."

"That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the male an' the

female character. A man will no' keep on dithering for what he kens he

canna' get. A woman, especially a young an' pretty----" He broke off to

say: "Toch! will ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the sex sets that

lad rampaging."

"Beautiful! I tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp

was emphatically assuring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, "the

loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see--bar none! I saw

her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards

insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day she

passed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my hat to her as the

Staff dismounted at the gate."

"Another _rara avis_, Beau?" the Colonel called across the intervening

group of talkers. The group of khaki-clad figures separated, and turned

first to the Chief, then to the bright-eyed, bright-faced enthusiast.

White teeth flashed in tanned faces, chaff began:

"In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?"

"Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that pretty 'Jollity'

girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, and the postcard grin."

"Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moonless night on the

Cape Town Hotel verandah!"

"_She_ turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?"

"Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord

Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would

have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff

Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the

enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed...."

"She was neither," the crimson boy declared. "She was simply a lady, quiet

and high-bred and simple enough to have been a Princess of the blood, or

to look a fellow in the face and pass him by without the slightest

idea--I'd swear to it--that she'd fairly taken his breath away."

"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a title.

"Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is--I may

say the word--in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than

Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce

you, unless the Colonel entertains objections ..."

"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian

prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint

in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."

"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-class long-distance eyesight."

There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her

before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are ... here

she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's

view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass

them."

The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff had congregated.

Men quietly fell aside, making place for him, so that he stood with

Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle of figures attired like his own, in

Service browns and drabs and umbers, waiting until the three approaching

feminine shapes should pass across the open space. One or two Staff

monocles went up. The Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his

steel-rimmed eyeglasses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose.

They came and passed--the white figure and the two black ones. Of these

one was very tall, one short and dumpy--veiled and mantled, their hands

hidden in their ample sleeves, they went by with their eyes upon the

ground. But the girl with them--a slight, willowy creature in a creamy

cambric dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and

bowed, upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide strings of

muslin under her delicate round chin--looked with innocent, candid

interest at the group of men outside the Hospital. The tanned faces, the

simple workman-like Service dress, setting off the well-knit, alert

figures, the quiet, soldierly bearing, even the distant sound of the

well-bred voices, pleased her, even as the whiff of cigars and Russian

leather that the breeze brought down from the stoep struck some latent

chord of subconscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between

the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed golden hazel

eyes. And cognisant of every fleeting change of expression in those lovely

eyes, the taller of her two companions thought, with a stab of pain:

"_Your father was that man's friend, and the comrade of others like him._"

"Now, then!" challenged Beauvayse, as the three figures moved out of

sight.

"The 'Girl With the Golden Eyes'?" said somebody.

"You wouldn't speak of her in the same breath with that brainless beast of

Balzac's, hang it all!" expostulated the champion. He turned eagerly to

the Colonel. "Now you've seen her, sir, would you?"

"Not exactly. And I'm bound to say, I regard your claim to the possession

of good taste as completely established.... 'Ware the horse, there! Look

out! look out!" His eyes had followed the tall figure of the

Mother-Superior, moving with the superlative grace and ease that comes of

perfect physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing the

flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. And the next

instant, his charger, held with some others by a mounted orderly before

the gates, and rendered nervous by the pressure of the crowd, shied at the

towering _panache_ of imitation grass-made ostrich feathers trailing from

the aged and crownless pot-hat worn by a headman of the Barala in holiday

attire, jerked the bridle from the hand of the trooper, and backed,

rearing, in the direction of the three women passing on the sidewalk. The

other horses shied, frustrating the efforts of the orderly to catch the

flying bridle, and the danger from the huge, towering brown body and

dangling iron-shod hoofs was very real, seemed inevitable, when a man in

white drill and wearing a Panama hat ran out of the crowd, sprang up and

deftly caught the loose bridoon-rein, mastered the frightened beast, and

dragged it back into the roadway, in time to avert harm.

"Cleverly done, but a close thing," the Chief said, as he turned away. "_I

wish I had had that fellow's chance!_" was written in Beauvayse's face. To

have won a look of gratitude from those wonderful black-fringed eyes,

brought a flush of admiration into those white-rose cheeks, would have

been worth while. The slight, tall, girlish figure in its dainty creamy

draperies had passed out of sight now between its two black-robed

guardians. And had not Luck, that mutable-minded deity, given the golden

chance to a hulking stranger in white drill, his, Beauvayse's, might have

been the hand to intervene in the matter of the Colonel's restive charger,

and his the ears to receive Beauty's acknowledgments.

If he had known that her eyes had been too full of his own resplendent,

virile, glowing young personality, to even see the man who had stepped in

between her and possible danger! The most innocent girl will have her

ideal of a lover and thrill at the imagined touch, and furnish the dumb

image with a dream-voice that woos her in impossible, elaborate,

impassioned sentences, very unlike the real utterances of Love when he

comes. The blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, golden-locked St. Michael portrayed

in celestial-martial splendour upon one of the panels of the triptych over

the altar in the Convent chapel, had, as he bent stern young brows over

the writhing demon with the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of

the young soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and profane,

Sister Cleophee or Sister Ruperta would have said, to liken a handsome,

stupid, young lieutenant of Hussars to the immortal Captain of the Armies

of Heaven.

But she knew another who would understand. There was no flaw in the

perfect sympathy that maintained between Lynette and the Mother-Superior,

though, certainly, since the Colonel's visit of the previous day, the

Mother had seemed strangely preoccupied and sad.... Her good-night kiss,

invariably so warm and tender, had been the merest brush of lips against

the girl's soft cheek; her good-morning had been even more perfunctory;

her eyes, those great maternal radiances, turned their light elsewhere.

Unloved and neglected, the Convent's spoiled darling hugged her

abandonment, weaving a very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a

noble and beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the

corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its fringe of

pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, strode towards the slender white

figure leaning from her chamber-casement, whispering, with outstretched

hands, and eyes that gleamed through the darkness:

"_Open the door! Do you hear, you Kid? Open the door!_"

Her heart beat once, heavily, and seemed to stop. A cold breath seemed to

blow upon the little silken hair-tendrils at the nape of her white neck,

spreading a creeping, stiffening horror through her body, deadening

sensation, paralysing every limb.

The close approach of any man, even the thought of such contact, turned

her deadly faint, checked her pulses, stopped her breath. At picnics and

parties and dances to which the Mayor's wife or the mothers of some of the

pupils would invite or chaperon her, her vivid, delicate, fragile beauty

would draw, first men's eyes, and then their owners, not all unhandsome or

undesirable; while showier girls looked in vain for partners or

companions. The little triumph, the consciousness of being admired and

sought after, would quicken Lynette's pulses, and heighten the radiance of

her eyes, and lend animation to her girlish chatter and gaiety to her

laughter--at first. Then some over-bold advance, some hot look or

whispered word, would bring quick recollection leaping into the lovely

eyes, and drive the vivid colour from the virginal transparent face, and

stamp the smiling mouth into pale, breathless lines of Fear. That night in

the tavern on the veld had branded a child with premature knowledge of the

ferocious, ravening, devouring Beast that lies in Man concealed. Again she

felt the scorching breath of lust upon her; she quailed under the

intolerable touch; she shook like a reed in the brutal hands of the evil,

dominating power that would brook no resistance and knew no mercy. The

horrible obsession came upon her now, all the stronger for those moments

of forgetfulness:

"_Clang--clang--clang!_"

The little Irish novice had rung the chapel bell for Sext and None. She

could hear, from the nuns' end of the big rambling, two-storied house, the

rustling habits sweeping along the passage. She hurried to the door, and

tore it open, frantically as though that ravening breath had been hot upon

her neck, saw the dear black figure of the Mother sweeping towards her,

and rushed into the arms that were held out, hiding from that burning,

scorching, hideous memory in the bosom that dead Richard Mildare had

turned from in his blindness.

Just as Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the Mayor's promise

to introduce him to the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life, or

ever should see, mentally registered a vow that he would keep the old

buffer up to that, by listening to his interminable hunting-stories, and

laughing at his venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War,

sharpened a fellow's faculties....

"It's rum to reflect," Beauvayse said, conscious of perpetrating an

epigram, "that from time immemorial the fellow who wants to make up to a

young woman has always had to begin by getting round an old man!"

He looked round for the old man, whom the title would have estranged for

ever. He had buttonholed the Chief, and was gassing away--joy!--upon the

very subject.

"I fancy the ladies of the Convent, who occasionally visit the Hospital,

were coming in at this gate. The short nun, I noticed, had a little

basket in her hand. Probably they went round to the side entrance, seeing

the--ha, ha!--the stoep garrisoned by Her Majesty's Imperial Forces.

Certainly.... Without doubt. We respect the Mother-Superior highly. A most

gifted, most estimable person in every way, if rather stern and

reserved.... Unapproachable, my wife calls her. But Miss Mildare, her

ward----"