The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered,
blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer
Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch--"_a sister indeed!_" snorted Mevrouw Kink; and
never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before
dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the
impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and
skirt-bands, had fashionable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was
the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it--good
Nederlands measure--who did not know that she was an English
prisoner-of-war.
Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hardships, as its
alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on having accomplished
something of what she had set out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of
days when she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had
behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial
sympathies. But his valuable services had been rendered for so much more
than nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was
wont to describe as "stony." She had sent for Van Busch to tell him that
the position was untenable. She would evacuate it, when he could manage
to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the
care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.
A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear the mouse-coloured
trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony ground, and the crack, crack of
the sentries' Mausers, followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches....
She could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on
the greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn-down
blinds:
"STIRRING STORY FROM THE SEAT OF HOSTILITIES: LADY WAR-CORRESPONDENT RUNS
THE GAUNTLET OF BOER RIFLES."
"Speshul. Hextry Speshul!"
* * * * *
Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got through the
lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the splashboard, and sink
into the arms of the husband loved better than aught save Glory, gasping,
as her heroic spirit fled----
* * * * *
"Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots on?"
Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable of the two
forbidding beds Kink's principal guest-chamber boasted, and ran her
unoccupied needles through her interminable knitting, a thick white cotton
sofa-cover or counterpane of irritating pattern--and stood over against
her employer in an attitude of sulky submission. She was a
square-shouldered, sturdily-built young woman of twenty-five, with round
eyes of pinky-blue garnished with white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a
superb and aggressively-brilliantined head of fair hair elaborately
dressed, waved, and curled.
The hair was all attached to Trudi's scalp. Lady Hannah had lain in bed
morning after morning, for weary weeks, and watched her "doing it," and
wondered that any young feminine creature with such arms, such skin, and
such hair should be so utterly unattractive. But she had lived all these
weeks in this one room with Trudi, had languished under her handmaid's
lack of intelligence, had seen her eat, wielding her knife with
marvellous dexterity, and, wakeful, tossed the while she snored.
And every morning, after Mevrouw Kink had brought in coffee, snorting
whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous eye, or whenever the German
drummer's widow struck her as being more foreign of manners and appearance
than usual, Lady Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself as for a
promenade outdoors, lift the corner of a blind, steal a glance at the
seething, stenching single street of Tweipans between the slats of the
green shutters, and--unpin her veil and take off her hat without a
word....
By eleven o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have
ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated,
wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their
womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the
unwilling Trudi, was accustomed to venture out for what she called, with
some exaggeration, "A whiff of fresh air."
Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the pickets at either end of it,
and the sentries posted at longish intervals all down its length, the
street of new brick and tin, and old wooden houses that made Tweipans,
belonged to Lady Hannah then. Accompanied by Trudi, whose quality of being
what I have heard called "deaf-nosed" with regard to noisy smells, she
arrived at the pitch of envying, she would stumble up and down amongst the
rubbish, or wade through the slush if it had been wet, and stop at
favourable points to search with her night-glass for the greenish-blue
glow-worm twinkles of distant Gueldersdorp, and wonder whether anybody
there was thinking of her under the white stars or the drifting scud?...
But what was Trudi saying?
"The gracious one cannot have her boots."
"Why not?" asked Lady Hannah, with languid interest. Trudi struck the
blow.
"Because she has none."
"No boots? Well, then, the walking-shoes."
Trudi smiled all over her large face. This placidity should not long
endure.
"The gracious one has no shoes either. Boots and shoes--all have been
taken away. Nothing remains except the quilted bedroom slippers the
gracious one is wearing. And it is impossible to walk out in bedroom
slippers."
"I suppose it is." Lady Hannah yawned. "Well, suppose you go and look for
the boots. They may have been carried away by mistake, like----" She
wondered afresh what could have become of that transformation coiffure?
"There is no mistake." Trudi announced. "And--the gracious lady forgot her
little gun beneath her pillow this morning. That also is missing,"
volunteered Trudi, who had had her instructions and scrupulously acted up
to them.
"My revolver has been stolen?" Lady Hannah sprang from her chair, made
rapid search, and was convinced. The Browning revolver had been certainly
spirited away.
Red patches burned in her thin little face, and her round black eyes
regained some of their lost brightness. Nothing like a spice of excitement
for bringing you up to the mark. Just now she had felt positively mouldy,
and here she was, herself again.
"Nobody came into the room in the night. I sleep with the key round my
neck, and if they had opened the door with another, I should have awakened
on the instant. Nobody has been in the room to-day except the Frau
Kink"--you will remember that a German drummer's widow would naturally
converse in her defunct spouse's native language--"the Frau Kink, with the
coffee-tray. She did not come near the bed...." The suddenness and force
of the suspicion that shot up in Lady Hannah's mind lifted her up out of
her chair, and set her upon her feet. "It must have been you. Was it you?"
She looked hard at Trudi, and Trudi sank upon her bed and dissolved in
noisy weeping.
"Ach, the wickedness!" she moaned. "To suspect of such shamelessness a
poor young maiden brought up in honesty.... Ach, ach!"
But Lady Hannah went on:
"Yesterday morning, when you were so long in coming back with hot water,
and I opened the door and looked out into the passage, I saw you
whispering with a little stumpy, pimply man, in a long-tailed black coat
and large spectacles. Who is he, and of what were you talking?"
Trudi did not at all regard the verbal sketch of P. Blinders as a correct
one, but though her love was blind to his pimples and ignored his
stumpiness, she could not deny the spectacles, which were to her as
peepholes affording visions of a blissful married future.
"He is a Herr who brought me news from my Mutti at home in Germany. She is
sick, and my father also, and all my little brothers and sisters are sick
too," gulped Trudi, sobbing and wallowing and rasping her flushed features
against the knobbly counterpane of the most uncomfortable of the two beds,
"because they hear that I am in this place, and they so greatly fear that
I will be dead."
"You aren't dead yet. And you told me when I engaged you that you were an
orphan brought up by an aunt."
"Pay me my vage," demanded Trudi, lifting a defiant and perfectly dry
countenance, and launching the utterance in the forbidden English
language, "and I vill now go. I vish not to stop here longer."
"Very well, but where are you going?"
"That," remarked Trudi, tossing her elaborately-dressed head and relapsing
into her native language, "has nothing to do with the gracious lady."
There was insolent triumph and unveiled spite in the large face attached
to the elaborate coiffure. The gracious lady, realising that Trudi formed
the one link between herself and the rough, strange, suspicious,
unfriendly male world outside, pocketed her pride to temporise. Let Trudi
remain as companion and attendant to the German refugee-widow yet another
week, and the month's due of wages, already trebled in virtue of a service
involving risk, should be substantially increased.... But Trudi only
snorted and shook her head, and Lady Hannah found herself confronting not
only a rat determined upon abandoning a sinking ship, but malignantly
inclined to hasten the vessel's foundering.
What was to be done? It is quite possible to be brave, adventurous, and
daring without a revolver, its absence may even impart a faint sense of
relief to one, as being no longer under the necessity of shooting somebody
with it at a pinch, but without boots or shoes, and a Trudi to put them
on, Lady Hannah found herself at a nonplus. To conceal the fact from the
rejoicing Trudi, she moved to the window and drew the blind aside, and
was instantly confronted with a row of round, staring eyes, the nose
belonging to each pair being flattened eagerly against the glass.
"Oh!" exclaimed Lady Hannah, dropping the blind in consternation at this
manifestation of public interest. A snorting chuckle from the malignant
Trudi fanned the little lady's waning courage into flame. She crossed the
room and turned the door-handle.
The door was locked from the outside, the key having been removed to
accommodate the eye of Mevrouw Kink, who reluctantly removed it to unlock
the door, and announce that Myjnheer Van Busch had asked to see his
sister, as she ushered the visitor in.
Sisters are not sensitive as a rule to subtle alterations in the regard of
their brothers, but the German drummer's refugee-widow could not but read
in the face and demeanour of her relative a perceptible diminution of
interest in a woman who had no more money.... He kept on his broad-brimmed
hat and pulled at his bushy whiskers as he exchanged a palpable wink with
Trudi, who was accustomed, when the gracious lady's brother called, to
retire with her knitting behind the shiny American cloth-covered screen
that coyly shielded the washstand from a visitor's observation.
Those flat, light eyes of the visitor's twinkled oddly as Lady Hannah's
indignant whisper told of the missing footgear and the vanished revolver,
and her conviction that the screened knitter was the active agent in their
spiriting away.
"You believe the girl's slewed on you, eh, and that things are going to
pan out rough? Well, sure, that's a pity!" The big man lolled against the
deal table, covered with a cloth reproducing in crude aniline colours,
trying to the complexion, but gratifying to the patriotic soul of Mevrouw
Kink, the red, white, and blue stripes of the Vierkleur, with the green
staff-line carried all round as an ornamental border. "And I'd not wonder
but you were right." He stuck his thumbs in his belt, and asked, with his
hatted head on one side and a jeering grin on his bold red mouth: "So,
now, and what did you think to do?"
Lady Hannah controlled an impulse to knock off the big man's
broad-brimmed felt, and even smiled back in the grinning face.... One very
little lady can hold a great deal of anger and resentment without spilling
any over, if she is thoroughly convinced that it would be imprudent as
well as useless to display either.
"As you gather, I intend returning to Gueldersdorp to-morrow at latest. I
shall not take my maid, as she wishes for her own reasons to remain
behind. Please have the mare and spider here by mid-day coffee-time. We
can drive north towards Haargrond and double back when we're beyond the
lines, as the coursed hare would do."
Van Busch's red mouth gleamed, curved back from his tobacco-stained teeth.
He said with meaning:
"Boers shoot hares--not run them."
"They may shoot or not shoot," proclaimed Lady Hannah. "I start
to-morrow."
"Without boots or shoes?" asked the red-edged, yellow-fanged smile.
"Barefoot if I must," she answered, with all the more spirit that she felt
like the hare struggling in a wire. "Please send for the mare and the
trap. I leave this place to-morrow."
"The mare and the spider have been commandeered for the use of the United
Republics," said Van Busch. As the angry colour flamed up in Lady Hannah's
small, pale cheeks, he added, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his
hands: "Bough did his best to save them for you, no bounce! But could one
man do anything against so many? Sure no, nothing at all!"
She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its quilted satin
slipper.
"Do you suppose I haven't guessed by this time that Bough the Africander
and Van Busch the British-Johannesburger are one Boer when it suits them
both?"
His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks of old tattooing
obliterated by an acid burn, jerked as he raised it to stroke and feel his
whiskers. Something else upon the hand, in the sharpened state of all her
senses, struck out a spark of old association, and recalled a name once
known. She went on.
"How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough? You provoke the question
when I see you wearing the Mildare crest and coat-of-arms."
He had turned the deeply-engraved sard with his brown thumb and clenched
his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed his mind, and took off the ring
and handed it to her.
"I had this ring off Bough, that's a real live man, and a thundering good
pal of mine, for all your funning. The chap it belonged to died at a farm
Bough owned once. Somewhere in Natal it might have been. And the bloke who
died there was a big bug in England, Bough always thought. But he came
tramping, and hauled up with hardly duds to his back or leather to his
feet. Sick, too, and coughing like a sheep with the rinderpest. Bough was
kind to him, but he got worse and worse. One night Bough was sitting up
with him reading the Bible, when he made signs. 'Take this ring off of my
finger and keep it,' says he. 'I've got nothing else to give you, but I
reckon the Almighty'll foot your bill, for you're a first-class Christian,
if ever there was one.' Then he went in, and Bough buried him in regular
fancy style----"
"And sent the girl to the nuns at Gueldersdorp, or was she there already?"
Van Busch was in the act of taking back the sardonyx signet-ring. His hand
jerked again, so sharply that the ring was jerked into the air, fell to
the floor, and rolled under the table. He stooped and reached for it, and
asked, with his face hidden by the patriotic tablecloth:
"What girl do you mean?"
His dark face was purple-brown with the exertion of stooping as he rose
up. Lady Hannah answered:
"The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp has an
orphan ward, a singularly lovely girl of nineteen or twenty, whose surname
is Mildare. And it struck me just now--I don't know why now, and never
before--that she might be----"
"Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What like is this one?"
Van Busch twisted the ring about his little finger, and spoke with a more
sluggish lisp and slurring of the consonants than even was usual with him.
"Is she short and square, with black hair and round blue eyes, and red
cheeks and thick ankles?"
Lady Hannah, despite all her recently-gained experience of Van Busch, had
not yet mastered his method of eliciting information.
"Miss Mildare is absolutely the opposite of your description," she
declared. "She is quite tall, and very slight and pale, with slender hands
and feet, and reddish-bronze hair, and eyes the colour of yellow topaz or
old honey, with wonderful black lashes.... I have never seen anything to
compare----" She stopped.
What strange eyes the man had, full of lines radiating from the pin-point
pupils, scintillating like a snake's.... He said, in his thick, lisping
way:
"A beauty, eh? And how long might the nuns have had her?"
"The Mayor's wife told me she has been under the care of the Convent
ladies for some seven years."
His brown full face looked solid, and his eyes veiled themselves behind a
glassy film. He was thinking, as he said:
"And her name is Mildare, eh? And you know her?"
"I have met her once. She was introduced to me as Miss Lynette Mildare.
But just now I find my own affairs unpleasantly absorbing. I am suspected
in this place, Mr. Van Busch, and if not actually a prisoner, am certainly
under restraint. For how much money down will you undertake to extricate
me from this position, and convey me back to Gueldersdorp?"
He shook his head, and for once the scent of gain did not rouse his
predatory appetite. He was wondering how it should never have occurred to
him before that the scared little white-faced thing might have fallen into
kindly hands, and been nursed and cockered up and made a lady of? He was
puzzled to account for her remembering the name that had belonged to the
man whose grave was at the foot of the Little Kopje. He was conscious of
an itching curiosity to find out for his friend Bough whether it really
was the Kid or no? What was the little fool of a woman saying in her
shrill voice?
"It would be burning your boats, I am quite aware. But if it _pays_ to
burn them----" she suggested, with her black eyes probing vainly in the
shallow ones.
He roused himself.
"A thousand pounds, English. You've not the money here?"
"No."
"Or a cheque?"
Her laugh jangled contemptuously.
"Do you Boer spies carry cheque-books--upon Secret Service?"
"I am no Boer, but an honest, square-dealing Britisher. How often have I
to tell you that? Do you suppose you are a prisoner here because I slewed
on you? Wrong, by God! Perhaps I kept things back a bit for fear you would
cut up, as women do, and go into screeching-fits. Sure now, that's what
any man would have done." His tone of injury was excellently feigned, and
his lisp was simplicity itself. "And to call me a dirty spy, when I got
you first-hand information, and ran your letters through to Gueldersdorp,
at the risk of my blooming neck.... Well, you'll be ashamed when you get
back there and see those letters, that's what you will, sure!"
"The letters got through--yes. But did they get through in time to be of
use?"
The little she-devil suspected the truth. He stroked his whiskers and
scraped his foot upon the floor, and said in his blandest lisp:
"They got through in useful time. I'll kiss the Book and swear it, if you
want me."
How deal with a knave like this, who popped in and out of holes like a
rabbit, and wriggled and writhed like a snake? Lady Hannah knew an immense
yearning for the absent Bingo, husband of limited intellectual capacity,
man of superior muscular development, doughty in the use of that primitive
weapon of punishment, the doubled human fist.
"In useful time? Useful Gueldersdorp time or useful Tweipans time? That is
what I want to get at."
"Oh, hell! how do I know?" He had turned sulky and scowling, but her blood
was fairly up.
"I know that you have successfully swindled me out of five hundred pounds.
I know that when I met you on the train four months back you shaped your
plans and baited a trap----"
"To catch a silly woman." His scarlet lips rolled back from his
tobacco-stained teeth. His jeering eyes were intolerable. "Ay, maybe I
did. And what's to say now?"
"I say you are a blackguard, Mr. Bough Van Busch!"
The dark face with the light eyes underwent a murderous change. He glanced
over his shoulders right and left, and took a step towards her, carrying
out the movement suddenly, as a tarantula darts upon its prey. Before the
thick brown muscular fingers had choked the scream that rose in her
throat, the key crashed in the lock, and the door was violently kicked
open, admitting ...
No portrait is required of that burly, bald-browed, sharp-eyed,
grizzle-bearded, square-jawed farmer, of the bronzed and sun-cracked
countenance, implacable under the slouch-hat with the orange-leather band.
We know the old green overcoat, and coarse corduroy breeches, and roughly
tanned leather boots, with heavy, old-fashioned spurs, to have been the
husk of a fierce, and indomitable, and relentless warrior, twinned with a
quiet family-man of bucolic tastes and patriarchal habits.
Van Busch, broader by inches and taller by half a head, dwindled, seen in
juxtaposition with this man of the iron will and the leader's temperament,
to a flabby, dwarfish, and petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in,
and read him, and dropped him, and fastened on the little Englishwoman, as
the great boots tramped heavily across the floor, and the great voice
roared, speaking in the Taal:
"Pull up that blind! Voor den donder! Shall we be mice, that sit and
squeak in the dark?"
Down came the Mevrouw Kink's square of glazed yellow calico, roller, cord,
and all, at the impatient wrench of the big, heavy hand.... The window was
blocked with heavy bodies, topped by brown, white, or yellow faces; the
street was a sea of them, all staring with greedy, curious eyes at the
little Englishwoman who was a prisoner, and the big man who ruled them by
Fear. His angry grey eyes blazed at the gapers, and the crowd surged back
a foot or two. Then the fierce eyes darted back at pale Lady Hannah, and
the roaring voice began again:
"You who came here in disguise, with a false story and false hair----"
Lady Hannah jumped in her bedroom slippers, and crimsoned to her natural
coiffure, as the missing transformation, appallingly out of wave, was
plucked from the baggy pocket of the old green overcoat, and brandished
before her astonished eyes. Struggling to restrain the dual impulse to
shriek and clutch, no wonder she appeared a conscience-stricken creature
in that great man's watchful eyes. His big voice shook her and shook the
room as he thundered:
"Woman, you are no widow of a Duitscher drummer, but the vrouw of a
field-cornet of the Army of Groot Brittanje. He holds a graafschap in
Engeland"--a mistake on the part of the General's informant--"and is
hand-in-glove with the Colonel Commandant at Gueldersdorp." Not so far
from the truth! thought Lady Hannah. "Would he spy out the land, let him
come himself next time. Boers hide not behind their wives' petticoats when
there is such business to be done!"
In defence of blameless Bingo the hysterical little woman found voice to
say:
"He--didn't know I was coming."
"What says she?"
Before Van Busch could bestir himself to interpret, Lady Hannah had
repeated her words in faulty Dutch.
"So! Engelsch mevrouws disobey their husbands, it seems?" Were the fierce,
bloodshot grey eyes really capable of a twinkle? "We Boers have a cure for
that. Green reim, well laid on, after the third caution, teaches our wives
to fib and deceive no more."
"You're wrong, sir."
"Wrong, do you say? Hoe?"
"What the green reim does teach them," explained Lady Hannah, secretly
aghast at her own temerity, "is, not to be found out next time."
He gave a wooden chuckle, but his regard was as menacing and his voice as
gruff as ever.
"I make no mouth-play with words. I talk in men and guns, and there are
half a dozen among the Engelsch, niet mier, that know how to talk back.
There are one or two others that are duyvels, and not men. And the worst
duyvel of all"--he waved the big hand westward--"is he over there at
Gueldersdorp."
She mentally registered the compliment.
"You are a woman who writes for the Engelsch newspapers that are full of
shameless tales about the Boers." He spat copiously upon the floor, and
the big voice became a bellow. "Lies, lies! I have had them read to me,
and the people who make them should be shot. Hear you now. You shall write
to them and say: 'Selig Brounckers is a merciful man and a just. He is not
as zwart as he is painted. He caught me mousing round his hoofd laager at
Tweipans--and what does he do?'" The pause was impressive. Then the
roaring voice resumed:
"'He sends me marching down to the gaol at Groenfontein, that is packed
with dirty white and dirty coloured schelms until there is not room for
one more----"
He named the homely parasite hymned by Burns ...
--"'Or he packs me up to Oom Paul at Pretoria, chained to the waggon-tail
like the others.' ..."
Lady Hannah wondered, while the stuffy room spun round her, who the others
were.
"Geen, I will tell you what he does." He pitched the crumpled
transformation contemptuously into the corner. "He writes to the Engelsch
Commandant at Gueldersdorp and says: 'I have here a silly female thing
that is no use to me. Take her you, and give me in exchange a man of
mine.' ..."
"And he ... what does ...?" She could get out nothing more.
"He agrees. Mevrouw Vrynks"--"Dutch for Wrynche," thought Lady Hannah
dizzily--"you will now pay the Mevrouw Kink what is owing for her amiable
entertainment, and you will start for Gueldersdorp in ten minutes' time."
The roaring voice of the stern, fierce-eyed man, sounded lovelier than the
swan-song of De Rezke. She faltered, with her joyful heart leaping at the
gates of utterance:
"The--mare and spider. You will be so kind as to return them----?"
His face became as a human countenance rudely carved in seasoned oak.
"I know nothing of a mare and spider," blared the great voice.
She looked him straight between the hot fierce eyes, and spoke out
pluckily.
"They are not my property. I hired the trap and the trotter from a
hotel-keeper at Gueldersdorp. And Mr. Van Busch tells me that they have
recently been commandeered for the service of the United Forces of the
Transvaal and Orange Free State."
"So!... Well, that is what I would have done, if they were worth having.
Where is Van Busch?" The angry glance pounced on that patriot in the
remote corner to which he had modestly retired. Van Busch cringed
forwards, hat in hand, explaining:
"The English Mevrouw mistakes, Myjnheer. Sure, now, I never told her
anything of that kind. How could I, when there was no mare and no spider?
Didn't I drive her and the other woman over from Haargrond, with Bough's
little beast pulling in a cart of my own? Call the other woman, and she
will tell you it was as I say."
Lady Hannah, supremely disdainful, turned her back upon the liar....
"So, then, you are not willing to go back in a veld waggon?" demanded the
bullying voice.
"I'm willing to go back in anything that isn't a coffin," she declared.
He gave the wooden chuckle, swung about and trampled to the door, calling
to Van Busch in the tone of a dog's master:
"Here, you ...!"
Van Busch followed, wriggling as obsequiously as the dog with a stolen
mutton-chop upon his conscience. The door slammed, the key turned roughly
in the lock. Lady Hannah, oblivious of the absence of outdoor footwear,
flew joyously to cram a few belongings into her travelling-bag and resume
her discarded hat.
Outside in the street, the motley crowd having melted away upon his
appearance, General Selig Brounckers was saying to Van Busch:
"It is a pity that the Engelschwoman's story was not true about that mare
and spider. For if a mare and spider there had been, you might perhaps
have kept them for your trouble----"
--"Now I come to think of it, Myjnheer Commandant," said Van Busch in a
hurry, "perhaps the woman was not lying, after all. Bough has a
mouse-coloured trotter in the stables at Haargrond Plaats, and a spider
stands under the waggon-shed in the yard. If they are hers, I'll let Bough
know Myjnheer Commandant said I was to have them. He'll make no bones
about parting then. Sure, no! he'll never dare to."
"I will send a couple of my burghers with you to take care he does not,"
said the Commandant, in what was for the redoubtable Brounckers an easy
tone. "It is unlucky," he added less pleasantly, "that you were such a
verdoemte clever knave as to tell the Engelschwoman I had commandeered
both beast and vehicle for Republics' use. Because now I will do it, look
you! No Boer's son that lives, by the Lord! will I suffer to make Selig
Brounckers out a liar." He added, as Van Busch salaamed and squirmed with
more than Oriental submissiveness, "Least of all a sneaking Africander
schelm like you. And now, about the money?"
"Excellentie----" lisped Van Busch, smiling his oily brown face into
ingratiating creases ...
"I am no Excellentie.... Of how much money, properly belonging to the
Republics' war-chest, have you cheated this little fool of an
Engelschwoman?"
"Five weeks back, Myjnheer Commandant," bleated Van Busch, "I had from her
one hundred and fifty pounds, which I swear as an honest man has been
handed over to Myjnheer Blinders----"
"He has accounted to me."
"Five weeks back----?" Van Busch hinted.
"He has accounted for it five weeks back."
There are men who possess all the will to be rogues, but have not the
requisite courage. Such a man was Blinders, who emerged plus a sweetheart,
the approval of his Commandant, and the _eclat_ of having chaffed the
British Lion, out of the affair that was to prove so expensive to Mr. Van
Busch.
"And"--the big voice trumpeted, as Van Busch, like a stout pinned
butterfly, quivered, transfixed by the glare of the savage eyes--"you will
now account to me for the rest."
Van Busch faltered with a sickly smile:
"Fifty more, Myjnheer, that I was bringing you myself----"
"One hundred and fifty you have paid me, and fifty you were going to pay
me. Ik wil het--but where are the other hundreds you have paid Van Busch?"
bellowed the roaring voice. "Does not my old man-baboon at home pouch six
walnuts for every one that his wife gets to share with her youngster? When
I want to make the big thief spit them out, I squeeze him by the neck. So,
voor den donder! will I do to you. Only, geloof mij, I will not do it in
play. Pay Blinders the other five hundred pounds before kerk-time. If you
haven't got the cash about you, he and young Schenk Eybel shall ride with
you to Haargrond, where lives your friend Bough. They can bring back the
money and the mare and spider, too. Moreover, Eybel, who is a bright boy,
and has a head upon his shoulders, wants a slim rogue of a fellow that
talks Engelsch to worm himself in over yonder"--he jerked his gnarled
thumb in the direction of Gueldersdorp--"and bring back a plan of the
defences on the west, where the native stad lies. Perhaps I will let you
keep two hundred of that five hundred if you are the man to go.... But
whether you go or stay, by the Lord! you will find it best to be square
with Selig Brounckers."
And the redoubtable Brounckers stumped off. Verily, in times of scarcity,
when the lion is a-hungered, the jackal must lose his bone.
It would be well, thought the dispirited jackal ruefully, to remove the
unfavourable impression made, by a valuable service rendered to the United
Republics. It would be a good thing to stand well with Myjnheer Schenk
Eybel, who would, when Brounckers went south, be left in sole command. It
would be as well, also, to get a look at that girl that was living with
the nuns at Gueldersdorp.
"Mildare ..." That was the puzzle--her having the name so pat. But these
little frightened, white-faced things were sly, and kids remembered more
than you thought for....
Grown up a beauty, too, and with the manners of a lady. He swore again,
the thing seemed so incredible, and spat upon the dust. A pretty green
shining beetle crawled there. He set his heavy foot upon the insect, and
its beauty was no more.