The Mother was kneeling, as she had knelt the whole night through, before
the dismantled altar in the battered little chapel of the Convent, with
the big white stars looking down upon her through the gaps in the
shell-torn roof. When it was the matin-hour she rose and rang the bell.
Matins over, she still knelt on. When it was broad day she broke her fast
with the Sisters, and went about the business of the day calmly,
collectedly, capably as ever. Only her face was white and drawn, and great
violet circles were about her great tragical grey eyes.
"The blessed Saint she is!" whispered the nuns one to the other.
If she had heard them, it would have added yet another iron point to the
merciless scourge of her self-scorn.
A Saint, in that stained garment! What tears of bitterness had fallen that
night upon the shameful blots that marred its whiteness! But for Richard's
child, even though she herself should become a castaway, she must go on to
the end. All the chivalry in her rose in arms to defend the young,
shame-burdened, blameless head.
Ah! if she had known?...
Cold, light, cruel eyes had watched from across the river that day as her
tall, imposing figure, side by side with the slender, more lightly-clad
one, moved between the mimosa-bushes and round the river-bend. When the
two were fairly out of sight, the jungle of tree-fern and cactus had
rustled and cracked. Then the burly, thickset, powerful figure of a
bearded man pushed through, traversed the reed-beds, and, leaping from
boulder to boulder, crossed the river. Before long the man was standing on
the patch of trodden grass and flowers in the lee of the great boulder,
shutting up a little single-barrelled, brass-mounted field-glass that had
served him excellently well.
He was Bough, _alias_ Van Busch, otherwise the man who had come in through
the enemy's lines as a runner from Diamond Town, bringing the letter from
a hypothetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist. His light
eyes, that were set flat in their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked
about and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of
black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. Van
Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little
tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The daintiness of the
little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly than anything else, that
the Kid had become a lady.
For it was the girl, sure. No error about that little white face of hers,
with the pointed chin, and the topaz-coloured eyes, and the reddish hair.
The glass had brought her near enough to make that quite certain. He had
been too far off to hear a word, but he had made out what had been going
on very well. First, she had been giddying with the tall young English
swell, drawing him on while he seemed courting her, as all women knew how
to, and then the tall Sister of Mercy had come and rowed her; and she had
cried, thrown down there among the grass and flowers, exactly as if
somebody had beaten her with a sjambok to cure her of the G. D.'d
obstinacy that had to be thrashed out of women, if you would have them get
to heel when you chose it, or come at your call when you chose again.
Suppose he chose again. When a man with brains in his holy head once set
them to work, there were few things he could not do. He could scare others
off his property, for certain. He could exercise upon the girl herself the
unlimited power of Fear. He must lie doggo because of the Doctor. It was a
thundering queer chance the Doctor turning up in this place. And as one of
the bosses, helping to run the show, and powerful enough to pay off old
scores, if he should chance to recognise in the densely bearded face of
the man from Diamond Town the features of the Principal Witness in the
once-famous Old Bailey Criminal Case: "The Crown _v._ Saxham."
Bough would lie low, and watch, and wait, and then spring, as the
tarantula springs. He had cleverly blurred all trails leading back to the
tavern on the veld, and he knew enough of girls and women to believe that
this girl had kept secret what had happened there. He would pick up with
her, anyway, and offer to marry her and make an honest girl of her. If she
had a snivelling fancy for the dandy swell who had made love to her and
kissed her, he would threaten to tell the fellow the truth unless she gave
him up. Or he would blow on her to the nuns she lived with, and they would
have nothing more to do with her.
Voor den donder! suppose they knew already? The plan wanted careful
working out. A false step, and Gueldersdorp might become unhealthy for the
man who had brought the letter from Diamond Town to oblige Mrs. Casey.
Suppose the spoor that led back to the tavern on the veld and the grave by
the Little Kopje, not as well hidden as Bough had thought, those jewels
and securities and the one thousand seven hundred pounds cash might get an
honest man into trouble yet, even after the lapse of seventeen years. He
breathed heavily, and the pupils of his strange light eyes dilated, and
the sweat rolled off his forehead and cheeks until the skin shone like
copper. He had been a reckless, easy-going young chap of twenty-six
seventeen years ago. Forty-three years of life had taught him that when
you are least expecting them to, buried secrets are sure to resurrect. No,
Gueldersdorp was not a healthy place for Bough or for Van Busch! That
chattering little paroquet of a woman with the sharp black eyes might use
them one day, to the detriment of the philanthropist who had brought in
the letter from Diamond Town for Mrs. Casey.
Then the girl!... He grinned in his bushy beard, thinking how thundering
scared she would look if she encountered him by chance, and recognised
him. The beard would not hide him from her eyes. No, no! And he smelled at
the little tan glove, that had a slight, clean, delicate perfume about
it, and thrust it into his breeches-pocket, and crossed the river again,
making his way back to the native town by devious native paths that snaked
and twined and twisted through the tangled bush, as he himself made his
tortuous progress through the world.
He was in an evil mood, made blacker by the prospect of spending a lonely
night without the solace of liquor or woman. For Vice was at a low ebb in
Gueldersdorp just now, and the commonest dop was barely obtainable at the
price of good champagne, and it would not do for the man from Diamond Town
to seem flush of dollars.
Sure, no, that would never do! He must make out with the tobacco he still
had left, and the big lump of opium he carried in a tin box in a pocket of
the heavy money-belt he wore under his miner's flannel shirt. He groped
for the tin box, and got it, and bit off a corner of the sticky brown
lump, and ate it as he went along, and his laboured breathing calmed, and
the chilly sweat dried upon his copper-burned skin, that had the
purplish-black tinge in it that comes of saturation with iodide of
potassium. And the pupils of his colourless eyes dwindled to pin-points,
and his thick hands ceased to shake. He was not the man he had been; and
he had learned the opium-habit from a woman who had managed a joint at
Johannesburg, and it grew upon him--the need of the soothing, supporting
deadener. He went along now, under the influence of it, scarcely feeling
the ground under his heavy leather veldschoens.
He trod on something presently, lying on the path. It moved and whimpered.
He struck a match with a steady hand, and held the glimmering blue
phosphorus-flame downwards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the
Barala, who had crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-gut and
a sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The Barala, though they
were sorely pinched, like their European fellow-men, did not starve. They
earned pay and rations. They helped to keep the enemy out on the south and
west sides of the town, and dug most of the trenches--often under
fire--and ran the despatches, and sometimes brought in fresh meat. But
their slaves, and the native hangers-on at the kraals, suffered horribly.
They ate the dogs that had been shot, and the other kind of dog, and
fought with the live ones for bones, and picked up empty meat-tins and
licked them. They stalked about the town and the native stad like living
skeletons. They dropped and died on the dust-heaps they had been rummaging
for offal. Soup-kitchens were started later on, when it was found how
things were going with them, and hides and bones and heads of horses and
mules were boiled down into soup, and they were fed. But a time was to
come when even that soup was wanted to keep the life in white people. You
saw the famine-stricken black spectres crawling from refuse-pile to
refuse-pile, and dying in that pitiless, beautiful sunshine, under the
blue, blue February sky, because white people had got to keep on living.
The native girl had been too weak to kill anything. Death had come upon
her in the midst of the teeming life of the jungle, and she had fallen
down there in her ragged red blanket among the tree-roots that arched and
knotted over the path. Her eyes were already rolled up and set. They
stared blindly, horribly, out of the ashen-black face. When she heard the
steps of a shod person the last spark of life glimmered feebly up in her.
Her wild, keen, savage power of scent yet remained. She smelled a white
man, and her cracked and swollen lips moved, and a voice like the sound
made by the rubbing of dry canes together uttered the word that is the
same in Dutch and English:
"Water!"
Bough's pale, flat, scintillating eyes were quite expressionless, but his
thick lips parted, and his strong yellow teeth showed in his thick brake
of beard. With the caution of one who knows that a single glowing
match-end dropped among dry vegetation may cause a devastating
conflagration, he blew out the lingering flame, and rolled the little
charred stick between his tough-skinned fingers before he threw it down.
Then he raised himself up, and stepped over the dying creature, and went
upon his way, humming a dance-tune he liked. He was not changed. It was
still a joy to him to have feebler beings in his power, and taunt and
torture and use them at his will.
He had assumed the skin of the man from Diamond Town in the well-paid
service of that bright boy of Brounckers', who had, it may be remembered,
a plan.
The plan involved a feint from the eastward, and an attack upon that
weakest spot in the girdle of Gueldersdorp's defences, the native stad.
The Barala might be incorruptible; the weak spot was the native village,
nevertheless. And the business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge
about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his to excellent
purpose, and storing his retentive memory--for it would not do for a
stranger to be caught putting pencil to paper in a town under Martial Law,
and bristling with suspicion--with the information indispensable for the
putting in effect of young Schenk Eybel's ingenious plan.
The jackal had had to yield his bone to the hungry lion. Still, it was
wise to be in good odour with the Republics; that was why Van Busch had
taken on the job. He had not been impelled to risk his skin, and get shut
up in this stinking, starving hole by anything the sharp-eyed little
Englishwoman, so unpleasantly awake at last regarding the genuine aims and
real character of the chivalrous Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg, had
dropped. Hell, no! That unripe nectarine had been plucked and eaten years
ago. And yet how the ripe fruit allured him to-day, seen against its
background of dull green leaves, its smooth cheeks glowing under the
kisses of the sun.
The swell English officer had kissed them too. As she meant, the sly
little devil, slipping away for her bit of fun. Grown a beauty, too, as
anybody but a thundering, juicy, damned fool might have known she would!
He swore bitterly, thinking what a gold-mine a face and figure like that
might have proved to an honest speculator up Johannesburg way.
His case, he thought, was somewhat similar to that of old Baas Jacobs, the
Boer who found the first great South African diamond on his farm near
Hopetown, and threw it down beside the door, with other pretty shining
pebbles, for his child to play with. The child's mother tossed it to Van
Niekirk as a worthless gift. Van Niekirk passed it on to J. O'Reilly. When
the English Government mineralogist pronounced the stone a diamond, and
the Colonial Secretary and the French Consul sent it to the Paris
Exhibition, and the Governor of the Colony bought the jewel, old Baas
Jacobs must have felt mighty sick. All the world hungering, and admiring,
and coveting the beautiful thing he had thrown down on the ground....
Small wonder that to the end of his days he had talked as a robbed man.
The jewel Bough had left on the veld had belonged to him once. Well, it
should be his again. He swore that with a blasphemous oath. Thenceforward
he proceeded warily, feeling his way, formulating his plan, a human
tarantula, evil-eyed and hairy-clawed, calculating the sudden leap upon
its prey; an adder coiled, waiting the moment to strike....