No one had heeded the revolver-shot. The detonation of a cartridge or so
when a bombardment is going on, what does it count for? And yet, when the
burly figure of the runner from Diamond Town slipped out of the Convent
doorway and stole across the shrapnel-littered garden, and crossed the
veld towards the native town, it had been barely twilight--a twilight of
heavy, drenching rain, to be sure. Still, in it he had encountered those
who might have suspected afterwards....
Perhaps it would have been better had he stopped in Gueldersdorp and
mugged it out. But that sharp, prompt, swift, unsparing thing called
Martial Law is not a power to play with with impunity, and of the man who
wielded it in Gueldersdorp, Bough had conceived a wholesome dread. Best
that he had fled, although his going tagged him with suspicion. That
cursed stupid game of his with the telephone at the Headquarters of the
Baraland Rides might cost him more than the bit of twist with which he had
bribed the orderly, left for a moment in sole charge, and demoralised by
the sight of tobacco.
Opium played you tricks like that, when, for the gratification of a
sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the stuff, you would
risk everything. In excess it played hell with the nerves. That was why
those eyes of hers.... Damn them! Why couldn't a man put them out of mind
and out of sight?
It was not to be done. The obsession held him. A black shadow on the floor
would be the long body, lying face downwards on the altar-steps, with
outspread, crucified arms. He heard her stifled crying upon the Name, and
the gurgling outrush of mingled air and blood that followed each deep sob
for breath....
And then he would be running through the lashing, bucketing wet,
circumventing the sentry-posts, wriggling over the veld on his belly like
a snake. He would be pushing through the dripping covert of the north bank
of the river--for that, he had decided, was the safest way out or
in--leaving fragments of his garments on the thorny cacti that grabbed at
him with their green hands. And then he would find himself lying doggo
between two great stones, waiting for it to be quite dark before he
essayed to pass the rifle-pits that angled across either shore. Two hours
he had lain so, and it had hailed, and sheet lightning had smitten
greenish-blue glares from the hissing, clattering whiteness, and he had
remembered with a shudder those eyes....
Then it had been dark enough to risk passing between the angles of the
rifle-pits, where lay men who kept their eyes skinned and their weapons
handy by day and night. And again Bough had wriggled like a snake, but
through shallow water instead of grass and red mud. He had swam the deep
pools, and once got entangled in barbed-wire, and went under, gurgling and
drowning, three times before he wrenched himself loose. It had seemed as
though a dead woman's hands had seized him, and were dragging him down.
But he tore free and passed safely. There was not a single shot--the Devil
was so obliging! And then, lest Brounckers' pickets should mistake a
friend in the darkness, he waited for light in a little thorny kloof
beyond their advanced outposts; and the dawn came, with an awful gush of
crimson dyeing all the eastern sky, so that the pools about his feet--even
the drops of wet upon the stones and bushes--caught the ruddy reflection,
and all the world seemed dripping with new-shed blood.
Then up had rushed the sun, and smitten a glorious rainbow out of fog and
vapour, and one end of it seemed to be in Gueldersdorp, resting in a
golden mist upon the Convent's shattered roof, while the other vanished in
mid-heaven. It had seemed to the murderer like a ladder by which the dead
woman's soul went climbing, up and up, to tell his crime to God....
He had killed her, that woman in black, to stop her from blowing on him.
Who would have dreamed a meek, sober nun could be transformed like that? A
lioness whose cub has been shot, straightway becomes a beast-devil. She,
standing on the naked steps of the bare altar, with upraised,
black-sleeved arms and black funereal robes, demanding Heaven's vengeance
for that deed of old, calling down the judgment of God upon its doer, had
been infinitely more terrible than the lioness. Lightning had flashed from
her great eyes, and subtle electric forces had darted from her outspread
finger-tips. While she looked at him and spoke she enmeshed him, helpless,
in a net of terror. It was only when she had turned her back that Bough
had had the nerve to shoot. And he was no novice in bloodshed--not he.
There were things safely hidden and put away and buried, that might some
day put a rope round some man's neck. But the man would never be Bough.
There had always been a scapegoat to suffer until now.
He ate more opium now than ever, because he could not forget that woman's
awful eyes. He would see them looking at him in the dark, when he could
not sleep. Her voice haunted him, terrible in its clarion-note of wrath,
its organ-roll of denunciation. The hand that had pointed to the millstone
about his neck had conjured it there. He felt it dragging him down.
Maar--that was the gold! You can carry a goodly amount of the precious
metal upon your single person, if you are clever enough to stow it and
muscular enough to walk lightly under the weight. And a great deal of the
yellow stuff, gathered and stored by the mining companies, leaked about
this time out of the hiding-places skilfully contrived for it into the
pockets of Van Busch and his pals. It is weighty, as well as precious,
stuff, and when you inter it, there must be bearers as well as a
gravedigger, and when you carry away a great deal of it at a time,
confederates must aid you.
Oom Paul, when, like some elderly black humble-bee, with crooked thighs
deep laden with the metallic yellow pollen, he buzzed heavily off for
Lorenco Marques, deplored the deceitfulness of riches less bitterly than
their non-portableness.
Van Busch, by a series of clever expedients, overcame that difficulty. The
cartridges that weighed down his bandolier were of cast gold, cleverly
painted; the gun he carried was a hollow sham packed with raw gold; also,
his garments were lined and padded with the same material. At Cape Town he
would disburden himself, and one of the women who were his confederates
would take the stuff to England, and sell it in London, and bank the money
in the name of Van Busch. He so managed that there was always a woman
coming and a woman going. Women had been his tools, and his slaves, and
his victims, ever since he had been born. When the old were worn out and
useless, he shook them off, and fresh instruments rose up to take their
places.
He never trusted men in money matters. He knew too much of the power of
that yellow pollen that breeds madness in the male. But there is one thing
that most women desire more than the possession of much money, and that is
absolute possession of one man.
Bough understood women of a certain class. He had moulded them to his
will, and bent them to his whim, all his life long. He was a man of
manifold experience as regards the sex.
Lately he had added to his stock. He had stood face to face with a woman,
unarmed and in a lonely place, and had tasted Fear. He had seen--from afar
off--a woman whose slight, vivid beauty had roused in him a desire that
was torture.
It was as though the Minotaur were in love with Ariadne; it was Caliban
thirsting for the beauty of Miranda. Prospero had not come in time; the
satyr had surfeited upon the unripe grapes, and now was ahungered for the
purple cluster, tied up out of reach of those gross, greedy, wicked hands.
The locket with a picture in it and brilliants round, "that might be worth
seventy," the dainty, pearly miniature on ivory by Daudin, of the dead
woman who lay buried under the Little Kopje, and which Bough had taken
from the body of the English traveller, together with the signet-ring and
everything else of value that Richard Mildare had owned, possessed a
strange fascination for the thief. It was extraordinarily like.... He hung
it by its slender gold chain about his thick neck, and gloated over and
grudged the beauty that it recalled.
It is horrible to speak of love in connection with the man Bough, but if
ever he had known it, it was now. His victim of old time had become his
tyrant. Replete with vile pleasures, he longed for her the more.
He even became sentimental at times, telling himself that all he had
sought was to repair the wrong, and make an honest woman of the Kid. She
should have been lapped in luxury, worn jewels equalling any Duchess's. He
was a man of money now. A little delay, to become yet more rich, and
arrange for the safe burying of Bough--then Van Busch, of Johannesburg,
capitalist and financier, would descend upon London in a shower of gold,
furnish a house in Hyde Park or Mayfair in topping style; own
four-in-hands, and motor-cars, and opera-boxes, and see all Society
fluttering to his feet to pick up scattered crumbs of the golden pudding.
It really seemed as though the dream would be realised. The gross,
squarely-built man with the bushy whiskers and the light strange eyes,
found success attend his every enterprise from that hour in which he had
spilt life upon the pavement of the Convent chapel. The tarantula-pounce
never missed a prey. Every knavish venture brought in money or money's
worth, every base plot was carried through triumphantly. Bough, _alias_
Van Busch, was not ordinarily a superstitious man, but his run of luck
made him almost afraid at times.
He scented the Relief before the besiegers, undertook to scout for Young
Eybel in the direction of Diamond Town, and ingeniously warned Colonel
Cullings of a Boer plan for cutting off the Flying Column on the scorching
western plains, which resulted in the capture of two waggon-loads of
burghers, their rations, ammunition, and Mausers--a most satisfying haul.
He placed before the leader of the British Force intercepted telegrams
which threw invaluable light on Dutch moves. No more single-minded,
ingenuous, and patriotic British South African ever drew breath than Mr.
Van Busch, of Johannesburg. And verily he reaped his reward, in an
officially countersigned railway pass, which would enable the patriot to
render some further services to British arms, and a great many more to Van
Busch, of Johannesburg.
He had his knavish headquarters still at the Border homestead known as
Haargrond Plaats. Something drew him back to the place, and kept on
drawing him. From thence he could observe and conduct his operations, and
gather news of the besieged in Gueldersdorp. He was there at the time when
the Division--Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, with a half battalion
of Town Guards, converted into mounted infantry by the simple process of
putting beasts underneath men who could ride them--marched out of
Gueldersdorp _en route_ for Frostenberg.
The slatternly Dutchwoman and the coloured man who had charge of the
Plaats were too surely his creatures to betray Bough Van Busch. "Let the
dogs smell around the place," he thought, when by the sounds that reached
him in his hiding-place he knew the Advance had halted. "They'll tire of
the game before they smell out me!"
His hiding-place was a safe retreat and storehouse for stuff that it was
necessary to conceal. No one knew of it save Bough Van Busch and the
draggle-tailed woman. It was in the great stone-built chimney of the
disused, half-ruined farmhouse kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared by
the stout hands of the old voortrekkers of 1836, its walls, three feet in
thickness, embracing the wide hearth about which the family life of the
homestead had concentrated itself in the past.
There may have been a mill on the farm in the old days. Or possibly,
meaning to build one, those robust pioneers of the Second Exodus had
dragged the two huge stones into the wilderness, and then abandoned their
plan. The lower millstone paved the hearth, the upper, the diameter of its
shaft-hole increased by chipping to the size of a musk-melon, had been set
by some freak of the farmer-architect's heavy fancy as a coping on the top
of the big stone shaft. From thence, as Lady Hannah Wrynche had said in
one of her descriptive letters, dated from "My Headquarters at the Seat of
War," it dominated the landscape as a Brobdingnagian stone mushroom might
have done.
The wide black throat of the chimney half-way up was choked by a platform
of beams and masonry, reaching not quite across, so that even a bulky man
who had climbed up--divers rusty iron stanchions driven in between the
stones, and certain chinks affording secure foothold--might wriggle
between the platform and the chimney-wall, and so lie hid securely.
Through the hole in the round stone above came air and light. Crevices
cunningly enlarged afforded opportunities for viewing the surrounding
country, as for seeing without being seen, and hearing also all that took
place in the low-walled courtyard that was used as a cattle-kraal. You had
also a bird's-eye view of the lower end of the farm kitchen, where the
wall had cracked, and bulged, and spit out some of its stones.
To this eyrie Bough Van Busch retreated when the wall of dust to the
south-west gave up the dim shapes of the Advance, and the beat of many
iron-shod hoofs, and the roll of many iron-shod wheels made distant
thunder, coming nearer, always nearer....
Maar! How the trot of the squadron-columns, the roll of the oncoming
batteries, shook the crazy building. The Advance rode into the yard,
dismounted, and began to ask questions of the coloured man and the
slipshod woman. Neither knew anything. The woman cursed the Englishmen
freely, at which they laughed, and lighted fresh cigarettes. The man was
dumb as stone.
The Division snaked out of the dust presently, a huge brown centipede that
had been chopped in bits, and moved with intervals between its travelling
sections. There was no halt; it rolled on, a vision of innumerable moving
legs and tanned, wearied faces, over the greening veld to the north-east.
The dust grew hotter and thicker, and more stifling, as it rolled.
It drifted in through every chink and cranny in the great chimney, with
the smell of hot human flesh and sweating horsehide, and Bough Van Busch
longed to, but dared not sneeze. Bits of mortar fell about him, and
dislodged tarantulas galloped over his boots. He shook the loathsome,
hairy, bright-eyed insects off, shuddering at them with a horror somewhat
misplaced, considering the affinity between his own methods and theirs.
Roll, roll, roll! The English voices of the chatting men crouched upon
their beasts' withers or sprawling on the limbers, the trampling and
snorting of the horses, the sharp signal-whistles of the leaders, the curt
utterances of command, mingled with the stream of thought that raced
through the busy brain of Bough Van Busch. It had struck him when the
Colonel and his Staff rode up and halted by the gateway of the littered
courtyard, that here would be a chance for a nervy man, with a set
purpose, to venture back, cleverly disguised, to Gueldersdorp. He knew he
would be risking his neck, but the sting of desire galled him to
hardihood. She was there. Red mist gathered in his brain, red sparks
snapped before his eyes, the thick red blood surged fiercely through his
veins--drummed deafeningly in his gross ears at the thought of seeing her
again....
And the tail of the Division was going by. A Field Telegraph Company, a
searchlight company, the Ambulances, and a train of transport-waggons,
with the mounted infantry, brought up the rear. The Advance had galloped
forwards in haste, the group at the gate lingered. A voice rang out
clearly, giving some order. It said:
"And if abandoned, carry out instructions, previously warning the inmates
of the farm to retire out of----"
The lean, eagle-eyed, keen-faced Colonel bent lower in the saddle to reach
the ear of the dismounted officer of Royal Engineers, who stood with one
dogskin gloved hand resting on the sweating withers of the brown Waler. He
answered, saluted, and drew away. Then the Staff rode on, into the ginger
yellow dust-cloud, leaving the officer of Engineers standing in the beaten
tracks of many iron-shod hoofs and many iron-shod wheels.
He was not left alone. A little cluster of mounted Cape Police had
detached itself from the rear of the Division. They were deeply-burned,
hard-bitten men, emaciated to a curious uniformity, mounted on horses as
gaunt as their riders. A sergeant was in command of the party, and a
drab-painted wooden cart drawn by a high-rumped, goose-necked chestnut
mare, pitifully lame on the near fore, had an Engineer for driver. His
mate sat on the rear locker, and a mounted comrade rode by the mare's lame
side. The rider's stirrup-leather was lashed about the cart-shaft, and
thus the mare was helped along.
Obeying some order unheard of the man who was hiding in the old stone
chimney, the party of Cape Police divided into two. One half patrolled the
outward precincts of the homestead. The rest, dismounting in the
courtyard, thoroughly searched the place. The Engineer officer took no
part in the search. He stood by the stone-coloured cart, busy at the
locker, the sapper who had sat upon it being his aid. Very soon he
returned to the yard, and stood in the middle of the litter motionless as
a little figure of pale, dusty bronze, holding a cigar-box carefully in
both his dogskin-gloved hands. In spite of his patched khaki and ragged
puttees there was something dandified about him. His red moustache, waxed
to a fine point, jutted like the whiskers of a watchful cat, the whites of
his eyes gleamed like silver as he turned them this way and that,
following the movements of the men who went in and out of the
farm-buildings as directed by their sergeant. The sergeant was an expert
in his business, and yet, after a hasty glance up the black yawning gullet
of the chimney where Bough Van Busch lay perdu, he had gone out of the
dismantled kitchen whistling a tune. Two of his men remained lounging
near the threshold. Like the sergeant they had stooped, hands on spread
knees, necks twisted awry in the effort to pierce the thick mirk beneath
the ragged arch of masonry that spanned the wide hearth where the ashes of
long-dead fires lay in powdery grey drifts, and, like the sergeant, they
had seen nothing. When you covered the man-hole between the platform-edge
and the chimney-wall with the sooty board and the old sack, it was
impossible for anyone below to see anything. The inside of the old chimney
was as black as hell.
The inquisition ended. The khaki-clad figures came hurrying out of the
house, pursued by the Dutchwoman's shrill recriminations. The
non-commissioned officer made a report to the officer of Engineers. The
men who had been deputed to search mounted at an order, and fell in with
the patrol, and sat upon their saddles outside the courtyard wall
exchanging furtive winks as the mevrouw devoted their souls and bodies to
everlasting perdition.
A quiet utterance from the little red-haired officer checked the torrent
of the woman's anger. She screeched in dismay, raising thick hands to
heaven. The coloured man's stolid silence was suddenly swept away in a
spate of oaths and protestations. Suddenly, looking in the officer's
unmoved face, they realised the uselessness of words, turned and ran
between the gateless posts, out upon, away over, the dusty, hoof-tracked,
wheel-scored veld. And their ungainly hurry and awkward gestures of terror
somehow reminded the peering Bough Van Busch of an engraving he had seen
by chance in a Dopper Bible, in which Lot and his two daughters, fearfully
foreshortened by the artist, scuttled in as grotesque an insect hurry from
the doomed vicinity of Sodom, Queen City of the Plain.
The officer of Engineers hardly glanced after the retreating couple. He
stepped across the threshold of the disused farm-kitchen, holding the
little wooden box carefully in both his dogskin-gloved hands. He crossed
to the hearth, stubbing his toe against a jutting floor-brick, and as he
did so he caught his breath. Then he stepped down under the yawning gape
of the chimney, and seemed to grope and fumble at the back of the hearth.
He raised himself then, stepped back, and called out sharply in the Taal:
"Wie is daar?"
The man's voice dropped back dead out of the choked-up chimney-throat. A
little sooty dust fell. There was no other answer. The voice was lifted
again, speaking this time in English:
"Is anyone hiding here?"
No one replied, and the little officer seemed to give up. He lingered a
moment longer, struck a match as though to light a cigarette, then went
quickly out of the kitchen. An orderly waited with his horse outside the
gateway. Bough Van Busch, listening with strained ears, heard the clink of
spur against stirrup, the creak of the saddle receiving a rider's weight.
There was a short sharp whistle, followed by the sound of cantering hoofs,
and the rattle of hurrying wheels dying out over the veld to the
north-east. The unwelcome intruders had gone. Bough Van Busch, after a
cautious interval, deemed it safe to descend.
He was red-smeared with veld dust and white-smeared with mortar, and black
with old soot. His bulky body oscillated as he let himself down from beam
to stanchion, finding sure foothold in the crevices, and hand-grip in the
stout iron hooks from which plump mutton-hams and beef sausages had hung
ripening in the pungent smoke of burning wood and dried dung. There was a
smell in his nostrils like charring wool and saltpetre. He hung over the
wide hearth now. A short drop of not more than a foot or two would bring
him safely to the ground.
Van Busch did not drop. He dangled by the hands and sweated. He blasphemed
in an agony of terror, though it seemed to him that he prayed.
For the dandy little Engineer officer had left the cigar-box lying empty
among the powdery ashes in the wide, old-world hearthplace. An
innocent-looking parcel it had contained, wrapped in a bit of old canvas,
and, further secured with copper wire and string, was wedged in a chink
between the blackened stones at the back of the hearth. From it a fuse
hung down; a short length nearly consumed by the crepitating fiery spark
at its loose end. It burned with a little purring sound, as though it
liked the business it was engaged upon. Bough Van Busch knew that in
another moment the detonation would take place....
He heard nothing of it when it came.... Nor did he know it when the walls
of Cyclopean masonry bulged and opened about him like the petals of a
flowering lily. He was beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent and
torn as though the devils it had housed had wreaked their fury on their
dwelling, lay sandwiched between the wreckage of the great chimney and the
millstone that had paved its hearth, now a yawning cavity, some six feet
deep. Leaning on its side in a trench its own weight had dug in the stony
earth of the dirty courtyard was the huge stone that had topped the shaft.
Something ugly was wedged in the central hole that had been made bigger to
let out the smoke. And the murderer's soul, light as a dried leaf
fluttering through the illimitable spaces of Eternity, went wandering on
its way to the Balances of God.
* * * * *
The party of Cape Police who had searched Haargrond Plaats, with the
drab-painted cart, the three Engineers, and the dandified little officer,
had only ridden to a safe distance. They halted, and, concealed from
observation by a fold of the grassy veld, waited for the explosion of the
dynamite cartridge. When it came, the Engineer officer shut his
binoculars, and gave the signal to return.