"An' I'll owe you a dollar whisky-peg for the good turn," muttered the
perforated musician, as he handed over the cherished concertina to the
volunteer, "till next Sunday that I see you in the stad."
"Righto!" said Corporal Keyse, accepting the sacred charge.
"Look here, though," came from Beauvayse, "there's one thing you must
remember--what's your name?"
"Keyse, sir--Corporal, A Company, Gueldersdorp Town Guard."
"Well, Keyse, you've heard Meisje hiccoughing ninety-four-pound
projectiles all the morning, haven't you?"
"Couldn't possibly miss 'er, sir"--the pale eyes twinkled as the Corporal
finished--"not as long as she misses me."
"She has a talent for missing, otherwise a good many of us fellows would
have heard the Long Call before now. But most of her delicate little
attentions--with the exception of one shell she sent over the Women's
Laager, to show the people there that she doesn't mind killin' females and
children if she can't get men--most of 'em are meant for Maxim Outpost
South; and one of 'em may get home sometimes, when the German gunner isn't
thinking of his sweetheart. Then, if you find yourself soarin' heavenwards
in a kind of scattered anatomical puzzle-map of little bits, don't blame
me for obligin' you, that's all."
There was a guffaw from the listeners. W. Keyse saluted, cheerfully
joining in.
"I shan't s'y a word, sir."
"By George, I believe you!" said Beauvayse. "What's up? Seen a ghost?"
Saxham had swung his wallet round, producing carbolic, antiseptic gauze,
First Aid bandages, and other surgical indispensables from its recesses,
as by legerdemain, and a tall, stately black figure, followed by a tall,
slender white figure, had risen from the bowels of the earth. The
Mother-Superior, taking in the situation and the need of her at a glance,
called a brief order down the ladder stairway, and went swiftly over to
Saxham, whipping a blue apron out of a big pocket, tying it about her, and
pulling on a pair of sleeves of the same stuff as she went. Lynette turned
to take the basin of hot water that the arm of Sister Tobias extended from
below, and the jaws of W. Keyse snapped together. Until he twigged the
bronze-red coils of hair under the broad, rough straw hat, he had thought
... Cripps!
We know how the dancing, provoking mischievous blue eyes and adorable
wrist-thick golden pigtail of Greta du Taine dwelt in his love-stricken
remembrance. Her worshipped image had got a little rubbed and dimmish of
late to be sure, but breathe on the colours, and you saw them come out
clear, and oh! bewilderingly lovely.
Billy Keyse had never even beheld the enchantress since that
never-to-be-forgotten morning when he had seen her pass at the head of the
serpentine procession of pupils, slowly winding across the Market Square.
But he knew she was still in Gueldersdorp. He felt her, for one thing. We
know that in his case Love's clairvoyant instinct had got its nightcap on.
We saw Greta depart on the train bound North and branch off East for the
Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg. But if she were not in Gueldersdorp,
why did the left breast-pocket of the now soiled and heavily-patched khaki
tunic bulge so? There were six letters inside there, tied up with a frayed
bit of blue ribbon. Hers? 'Strewth, they were! And each what you might
call a Regular One-er of a love-letter. Never mind the paper being
thumb-marked as well as cheaply inferior, one cannot expect all the
refinements of civilisation in a beleaguered town. It was the spelling
that--although we know W. Keyse to be no cold orthographist--occasionally
gave him pause as he perused and re-perused the greasy but passionate
page. And why did she sign herself "Fare Air?" The sense of ingratitude
pierced him even as he wondered. Why shouldn't she if she chose? What a
proper beast he was to grumble! Him, that ought to be proud of her
demeaning herself to stoop to a young chap in a lower station, so to call.
And her a Regular Swell.
He hugged the letters against him with the arm belonging to the hand that
held the concertina. Beloved missives, where was the worshipped writer
now? Sitting by a tapestry-frame, for he could not imagine her peeling
potatoes, down in the Convent bombproof, dreaming of him, weeping over his
last letter, or blushfully aware of his vicinity, panting at the bottom of
the ladder, listening for the beloved accents of the man who ... Hold
hard, though! she had never heard the voice of W. Keyse; or he hers for
that matter, but he would have recognised it among a thousand. He had told
her so, writing with ink pencil, of the kind that when sucked in moments
of forgetfulness tastes peculiarly horrible, and tinges the saliva with
violet, at spare moments in the trench. A phlegmatic Chinaman acted as
Love's postman, handing in the envelopes that were addressed to Mr. W.
Keyse, Esquer, in caligraphy that began in the top left-hand corner, and
trickled gradually down into the right-hand bottom one. Pumping the
Celestial was no use. John Tow sabee'd only that a fair foreign devil gave
the one missive, with a tikkie for delivery, and 'spose one time Tow makee
plenty good walkee back with anulla paper some pidgin bime-bye catchee
more tikkie. If walkee back no paper, too muchee John catchee hellee,
reaping only reproaches and no tikkie at all.
Judge how the heart of W. Keyse bumped against the concertina when the
slender vision in the holland skirt and white blouse and broad straw hat
appeared from underground. It was not she, though, Queen of heroic
thoughts, inspirer of deeds of daring yet to be done, who followed the
Mother-Superior.
It was the loveliest girl Beauvayse had ever seen, or ever would see. The
girl who had stood up in defence of three nuns against a threatening gang
of rowdy Transvaalers, one day in the Recreation Ground,--the girl who had
passed as the Staff dismounted at the Hospital gate on the day of
appropriation. The Mayor had had no chance of fulfilling his promise of an
introduction. The Mayor's wife, with her two children, was an inmate of
the Women's Laager. But at last the kind little genii that deal with
happenings and chances had brought Beauvayse and his divinity face to
face. Now she rose out of the Convent dug-out, in the waste that had been
the railway-official's front-garden, like a fair white Psyche-statue,
delivered in the course of some convulsion of Nature from the matrix of
the earth. And she was even more exquisite than his remembrance of her,
even more ...
Beauvayse descended abruptly from an empyrean flight of poetic imagery to
remember his torn and soiled silk polo-shirt with its rolled-up sleeves,
his earth-stained cords, girt with a belt of vari-coloured webbing, his
muddy leather leggings and boots with their caked and dusty spurs, telling
of hard service and unresting activity.
But he looked radiantly handsome as he leapt to the ground and came
forward, his tall athletic figure, trained by arduous toil and incessant
work until the last superfluous ounce of flesh had vanished, looking the
personification of manliness, his tanned face, still clean-shaven save for
the slight fair moustache, one to set any maiden dreaming of its straight
clean-cut features and lazy, long-shaped grey-green eyes. The wide felt
hat he touched in salute sat with a jaunty air on the close-cropped golden
head. Here was a gallant, heartsome vision to greet Lynette, stepping
after the Mother into that outer world, where fire belched warning from
iron mouths, and steel destruction sped through the skies, and bullets
sang like hornets past your head, or hit the ground near your feet,
sending up little bushy columns and spirts of dust.
The wounded man, now carbolised, plugged, and bandaged by Saxham's
dexterous hands, took the hastily-scrawled admission-order, included his
officer, the ladies, and the Doctor in a left-handed salute, distributed a
parting wink among his comrades, counselled W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper
to go tender on the off-side G of the instrument he dandled, and trudged
sturdily away in the direction of the Hospital.
"Thank you, ma'am. There's no stealing a march on you," Beauvayse said to
the Mother-Superior, touching his hat with his gay, swaggering grace, as
she emptied a bowl of red water on the ground, and whisked the blue apron
and sleeves back into the vast recesses of the mysterious pocket. "But
you're spoiling us. Hot water isn't on tap, as a rule, for
Field-dressings, and--and won't you----" He reddened to the fair untanned
skin upon his temples. "Mayn't I ask, ma'am, to be introduced to Miss
Mildare?"
The Mother complied with his request, smiling indulgently. She had known
and loved this bright boy's mother in her early married days. The Dark
Rose of Ireland and the White Rose of Devon, a noted Society phrasemonger
had dubbed them, seeing them together on the lawn one Ascot Cup Day, their
light draperies and delicate ribbons whip-whipping in the pleasant June
breeze, ivory-skinned, jetty-locked Celtic beauty and blue-eyed,
flaxen-locked Saxon fairness in charming, confidential juxtaposition under
one lace sunshade, lined with what has been the last new fashionable
colour under twenty names, since then; only that year they called it _Rose
fane_. Richard Mildare had praised the sunshade, a Paris affair supplied
by Worth with his creation, Lady Biddy Bawne's beautiful gown. He asked
Lady Biddy to marry him at the back of the box on the Grand Stand when
Verneuil was winning the Cup. Who shall dare say that he was not then a
sincere lover? thought the Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way.
And then she recalled her wandering thoughts, and turned them to the One
Lover who never betrays His chosen. And her rapt eyes looking up, seemed
to pierce beyond the flaming sky-vault overhead. She forgot all else,
suddenly snatched from earthly consciousness to beatific realisation of
the Divine.
There had been for some minutes now a lull in the bombardment from the
ridges. The enemy's guns were silent a space, and the hot batteries of
harassed Gueldersdorp snatched a brief respite while Boers gathered for
the nine o'clock coffee-drinking round their little snapping fires of
dried dung and tindery bush. Now and then a rifle cracked, and a bullet
sang past or whitted in the dust. But comparative peace brooded over the
shattered hamlet of wrecked homes and ploughed-up, littered roads, and raw
earthworks blistering in the pitiless sun.
"Miss Mildare." Beauvayse was speaking in that pleasant, boyish voice of
his, standing close to Lynette, his tall head bending for a glimpse of the
eyes of golden hazel, that were shaded by the broad, rough straw hat; "if
you knew how I've waited for this. Nearly seven weeks since one day in
early October, when I saw you on the Recreation Ground, where some brutes
were annoying you, and a day or so later you went by the Hospital as I
rode up with the Chief. But, of course, you don't remember?" His eyes
begged her to say she did.
"I remember quite well." It was the voice he had imagined for her--low,
and round, and clear, with just an undernote of plaintiveness matching the
wistful appeal of her eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of
exquisite delight went through him, as though she had touched him with her
slender white, bare hand on the naked breast.
"Thank you for not quite forgetting. You don't know what it means to me,
being kept in mind by you."
"I do not know that I kept you in mind." There was a touch of girlish
dignity in her utterance. "I only said that I remembered quite well."
He bent his head nearer, and lowered his pleasant voice to a coaxing,
confidential tone.
"You'll think me a presumptuous kind of fellow for talking like this,
won't you, Miss Mildare? But the circumstances are exceptional, aren't
they? We're shut up away from the big world outside in a little world of
our own, and--such chances fall to every man and most of the women here: a
shrapnel bullet or a shell-splinter might stop me before another hour goes
by, from ever saying--what I've felt for weeks on end had got to be
said--what I'd risk a dozen lives, if I had 'em, to get the opportunity of
saying to you." His hot eagerness frightened her. Her downcast eyelids
quivered, and her flushed maiden-face shrank from him.
"Oh, don't be angry! Don't move away!" Beauvayse entreated; for Lynette's
anxious glance had gone in search of the Mother-Superior, with whom Saxham
was now discussing the nuns' idea of utilising the Convent as a
Convalescent Hospital. In another instant she would have taken refuge by
her side. "If you knew how I have thought of you and dreamed of you since
I saw you! If you could only understand how I shall think of you now! If
you could only realise how awfully, utterly strange it is to feel as I am
feeling!" His voice was a tremulous, fervent whisper. His eyes gleamed
like emeralds in the shadow of the wide-brimmed felt hat. "And if I die
to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long for you, and
worship you wherever I am!"
"Oh, why do you talk to me like this?"
Lynette's whisper was as tremulous as Beauvayse's own. Her eyes lifted to
the glowing, ardent face for one shy instant, and found it good to look
upon. Men, young and not undesirable, had tried to make love to her
before, at dances and parties and picnics to which she had been chaperoned
by the Mayor's wife. But the first hot glance, the first word that carried
the vibration of a passionate meaning, had wakened the old terror in her,
and bidden her escape. The nymph had always taken flight at the first step
upon the bank, the first rustle of the sedges. She had never lingered to
feel the air stirred by another burning breath. She had never asked any
one of those other men why he talked like that. Beauvayse went on:
"Perhaps I even seem a little mad to you--fellows have told me lately that
I went on as if I had a tile off. Perhaps I'm what the Scotch call 'fey.'
I've got Highland blood in me, anyhow. And you have set it on fire, I
think--started it boiling and racing and leaping in my veins as no woman
ever did before. You slender white witch! you fay of mist and moonlight,
you've woven a spell, and tangled my soul in it, and nothing in Life or in
Death will ever loose me again." His tone changed, became infinitely
caressing. "How sweet and dear you are to be so patient with me, while I'm
sending the Conventionalities to the rightabout and terrifying the
Proprieties. Forgive me, Miss Mildare."
The pleading in his face was exquisite. She felt as a bee might feel
drowning in honey, as she wreathed her white fingers together upon the
silver buckle of the brown leather belt she wore, and said confusedly:
"I ... I believe I ought to be very angry with you."
His whisper touched her ear like a kiss, and set her trembling.
"But you're not?"
"I----"
She caught her breath as he came nearer. There was a fragrance from him--a
perfume of youth and health and vitality--that was powerful, heady,
intoxicating as the first warm, flower-scented wind of Spring, blowing
down a mountain-kloof from the high ranges. Her white-rose cheeks took
sudden warmth of hue, and her pale nostrils quivered. A faint, mysterious
smile dawned upon her lips. Something of the old terror was upon her
still, and yet--it was delicious to be afraid of him!
"Say that you aren't angry with me for being so thunderingly presumptuous.
Please be kind to me and say it."
Her lips began to utter disjointed phrases. "What can it matter really?...
Oh, very well, then ... if my saying so is of such ... importance...."
"More important than anything in the world!" he declared.
"Very well, then, I am not angry--not furiously so, at least." The bud of
a smile repressed pouted her lips.
"And," he begged, "you'll let what I've said to you be our secret?
Promise."
"Very well."
"You sweetest, kindest, loveliest----"
"Please don't," she entreated.
"And I may know your Christian name?" he persisted, "I've thought of
everything in the world, and nothing's good enough to fit you."
"Oh, how silly!" Her eyes gleamed with laughter. "It is Lynette."
He caught at it with rapture. "Perfect! The last touch.... The scent of
the rose, or say the dewdrop on it. By George, I'm in earnest!"
He had spoken incautiously loud. A grating voice addressing him pulled his
head round.
"Lord Beauvayse ..."
"Did you speak to me, Doctor? As I was saying, Miss Mildare," he went on,
continuing the blameless conversation, "dust-storms and flies are the twin
curses of South Africa."
The harsh voice spoke to him again. He looked round, and met Saxham's
eyes, hard and cold as blue stones. The Doctor said grimly:
"You may not be aware that your men are drawing fire."
It was undeniable fact. The bullets had begun to hit the ground under the
horses' bellies, spirting little columns of dust and flattening against
the stones. Coffee-drinking was over in the enemy's trenches, and the
business of the day had begun again. Beauvayse bade the ladies
good-morning, and swung himself into the saddle.
"Au revoir, Miss Mildare. Please get under cover at once." The
proprietorship in the tone stung Saxham to wincing. "Good-morning, ma'am,"
he cried to the Mother-Superior, "we know you ignore bullets. So long,
Doctor. Hope I shan't count one in your day's casualty-bag. Ready, boys?"
The chatting troopers sprang to alert attention. W. Keyse, pensively
boring the sandy earth with the pneumatic auger of imagination, in search
of the loved one believed to inhabit the Convent bomb-proof, was recalled
to the surface by the curtly-uttered command, and knew the thrill of
hero-worship as Beauvayse threw out his lightly-clenched hand, and the
troopers, answering the signal, broke into a trot. The hot dust scurried
at the horses' retreating heels. Corporal Keyse, trudging staunchly in
their wake with his five Town Guardsmen, became ghostlike, enveloped in an
African replica of the ginger-coloured type of London fog. And the
Mother-Superior looked at her well-worn watch.
"My child, we must be moving if you are coming with me to the Women's
Laager. I am nearly an hour late as it is."
"I am ready, Mother dear."
Lynette's eyes came back from following that dust-cloud in the distance to
meet the hungry, jealous fires of Saxham's gaze.
He had seen Beauvayse's ardent look, and her shy heart's first leaf
unfolded in the answering blush, and a spasm of intolerable anger gripped
him as he saw. He turned away silently, cursing his own folly, and
unhitched his horse's bridle from the broken gatepost. With the act a
crowd rose up before Lynette and a frightened horse reared, threatening to
fall upon three women who were hurrying along the sidewalk outside the
Hospital, and a heavy-shouldered, black-haired man in shabby white drills
stepped out of the throng and seized the flying bridoon-rein, and wrenched
the brute down. She recognised the horse and the man again, and exclaimed:
"Why ... Mother, don't you remember the rearing horse outside the Hospital
that day in October? It was Dr. Saxham who caught him, and saved us from
getting hurt."
"And we never even thanked you." The Mother-Superior turned to Saxham with
outstretched hand and the smile that made her grave face beautiful. "What
you must have thought!..."
"I looked for the person who had been so prompt, but you had
vanished--where, nobody seemed to know," Lynette told him with her clear
eyes on the stern, square face. "And then a man in the crowd called out,
'It's the Dop Doctor!' And I thought what an odd nickname!..." She broke
off in dismay. Saxham had become livid. His grim jaws clamped themselves
together, and the blue eyes grew hard as stone. One instant he stood
immovable, the Waler's bridle on his left arm, his right hand clenched
upon the old hunting-crop. Then he said very coldly and distinctly:
"As you observe, it is a queer nickname. But, at any rate, I had fairly
earned----"
The bugle from the Staff headquarters sounded, drowning the rest of the
sentence. The Catholic Church bell tolled. The other bells took up the
warning, and the sentries called again from post to post:
"'Ware gun, Number Two! Southern Quarter, 'ware!"
The Krupp bellowed from the enemy's north position, and cleverly lobbed a
seven-pound shell not far behind that rapidly-moving, distant pillar of
dust, the nucleus of which was a little troop of cantering Irregulars, and
not far in front of the lower, slower-moving cloud, the heart of which was
a little knot of tramping Town Guardsmen. The shell burst with a splitting
crack, earth and flying stones mingled with the deadly green flame and the
poisonous chemical fumes of the lyddite. Figures scurried hither and
thither in the smoke and smother; one lay prone upon the ground....
At the instant of the explosion Saxham had leaped forwards, setting his
body and the horse's as a bulwark between Death and the two women. Now,
though Lynette's rough straw hat had been whisked from her head by a force
invisible, he saw her safe, caught in the Mother-Superior's embrace,
sheltered by the tall, protecting figure as the sapling is sheltered by
the pine.
"We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her cheek had been cut by
a flying flake of flint, and was bleeding. "But look ... over there!" She
pointed over the veld to the prostrate brown figure, and a cry of alarm
broke from Lynette.
"Oh, Mother, who ...?"
"It is a Town Guardsman," Saxham answered, his cold blue eyes meeting the
wild frightened gaze of the pale girl. "Lord Beauvayse and the Irregulars
got off scot-free. Reverend Mother, do not think of coming. Please go on
to the Women's Laager. I will see to the wounded man, and follow
by-and-by."
He mounted, refusing all offers of aid, and rode off. Looking back an
instant, he saw the black figure of the woman and the white figure of the
girl setting out upon their perilous journey over the bare patch of ground
where Death made harvest every day. They kissed each other before they
started, and again Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. If Ruth had been only
one half as lovely as this Convent-grown lily, Boaz was decidedly a lucky
man. But he had been a respectable, sober, steady-going farmer, and not a
man of thirty-six without a ten-pound note in the world, with a blighted
career to regret, and five years of drunken wastrelhood to be ashamed of.
And yet ... the drunken wastrel had been a man of mark once, and earned
his thousands. And the success that had been achieved, and lost, could be
rewon, and the career that had been pursued and abandoned could be
his--Saxham's--again. And what were his publishers doing with those
accumulated royalties? For he knew from Taggart and McFadyen that his
books still sold.
"The Past is done with," he said aloud. "Why should not the Future be
fair?"
And yet he had nearly yielded to the impulse to own to those degraded
years, and claim the nickname they had earned him, and take her loathing
and contempt in exchange. What sudden madness had possessed him, akin to
that unaccountable, overmastering surge of emotion that he had known just
now when he saw her tears?
We know the name of the divine madness, but we know not why it comes.
Suddenly, after long years, in a crowded place or in a solitude where two
are, it is upon you or upon me. The blood is changed to strange, ethereal
ichor, the pulse beats a tune that is as old as the Earth itself, but yet
eternally new. Every breath we draw is rapture, every step we take leads
us one way. One voice calls through all the voices, one hand beckons
whether it will or no, and we follow because we must. With the Atlantic
rolling between us I can feel your heart beat against mine, and your lips
breathe into me your soul. The light that was upon your face, the look
that was in your eyes as you gave the unforgettable, immemorial kiss, the
clasp of your hands, the rising and falling of your bosom, like a wave
beneath a sea-bird, like a sea-bird above a wave, shall be with me always,
even to the end of time and beyond it.
For there are many loves, but one Love.