LIV

A deadly lassitude, both physical and mental, had settled down upon the

men and women of the garrison. They knew that Brounckers had gone south,

leaving General Huysmans in command of the investing forces. They knew

that the rainy season brought them fever, for they shivered and burned

with it, and they knew that the scanty rations of coarse and unpalatable

food were getting smaller every day.

But they were conscious of these things in a dull way, and as though they

affected people who were a long distance off. One day, when for the

thousandth time word came that the advance-guard of the Relief was in

sight, when the commotion visible in the enemy's laagers suggested a

poked-up ant-hill, and seemed to confirm the report, there was a brief

flicker of excitement. Mounted men rode out in force, guns were limbered

up and galloped out north and west, to divert General Huysmans' attention,

and give Grumer, conjectured to be waiting for it, the opportunity for an

eagle-like swoop down upon the harassed tortoise sprawling on her

sand-hills. But the rainy dark came down upon the clatter of artillery,

and the shining dawn crept up and brought the cruel news that the allies

had really been beaten back; and if there was any doubt of that, it was

dissipated at the day's end when one of the Red Cross waggons came

rumbling back out of the sloppy twilight, bringing Three Messengers to

confirm the tale.

They were eloquent enough, even in their speechlessness, those three dead

troopers, whose boots and coats were missing, and whose pockets had been

turned inside out. Not a man of them was known to any member of the

beleaguered garrison. Yet every man and woman there was the poorer by

three friends and one more hope.

We know what was happening while Gueldersdorp ate her patient heart out.

It has been written in the History of Successful Strategy how Lord

Williams of Afghanistan, landing at Cape Town in January, found Muller on

his way from Port Christmas, Whittaker at Bergstorm, Parris at Kooisberg,

Ruthven on the Brodder, and everybody and everything at a deadlock. And

being too old and wise to disdain the wisdom of others, the keen old brain

under the frosty thatch recalled to mind the story of Stonewall Jackson,

collected what forces he could muster, slipped in between two of the

columns held immovable, and having established his lines of communication

to the south, launched himself on Groenfontein, and created the necessary

diversion. A mighty wave rolled back to protect the menaced Free State

capital, the paralysed columns moved again, Diamond Town was relieved by

Sir George Parris, and Commandant Selig Brounckers was captured at

Pijlberg.

Doubtless he was a bully and a tyrant, that roaring-voiced, truculent man.

But those angry, red-veined grey eyes of his could look Death squarely in

the face, and the brain behind them could conceive and plan stratagems and

tactics that were masterly, and devise works that were marvels of

Defensive Art. And the heavy hand that patted Mevrouw Brounckers' head, as

that devoted woman sat disconsolate in the river-bed, surrounded by her

children, and pots, and bundles, and the roaring voice that softened to

speak words of consolation, even as the trap so ingeniously set to catch a

Tartar closed in--North, South, East, West--belonged to a man who knew not

only how to fight and win and how to fight and lose, but how to love and

pity.

There came the faint dawn of a day in May when the plan of that bright

young man Schenk Eybel was tried, and tried successfully.... The line

between two forts that lay far apart on the south and south-west was

pierced, while the incessant roll of rifles made a mile-long fringe of

jagged yellowish flame along the enemy's eastern trenches. Even before the

feint sputtered out the rush had been made, the stratagem had developed,

and at the bidding of twenty incendiary torches, the daub-and-wattle huts

of the Barala town leaped skyward in one roaring conflagration.

We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that day of fire and blood.

It is marked with a white stone in the History of the Siege of

Gueldersdorp, and the chapter is headed "The Turning of the Tables." It

gives a spirited description of the prudent retreat of General Huysmans,

the unconditional surrender of Commandant Eybel, and winds up with a

pen-and-ink sketch of Brounckers' bright boy breaking the chaff-bread of

captivity in the quarters of that slim duyvel, the Engelsch Commandant.

But while the Boer was yet top-dog in the scuffle, and held the Barala

stad, and the fort that had lately done duty as headquarters for the

Irregulars, holding captive their commanding officer, several of his

juniors, and some fifteen troopers, with a handful of Town Guards; and all

the fighting men who could be spared from the trenches were being posted

between the menacing danger and the town, and a couple of field-guns were

being hurried into position, and it had not yet occurred to Commandant

Schenk Eybel that the cautious Huysmans might leave him in the lurch,

things looked very bad indeed for the doughty defenders of little

Gueldersdorp--certainly up to afternoon-tea time, when a couple of Scotch

girls crossed the two hundred yards of veld that lay between the Fort and

the town, carrying cans of steaming tea for the parching Britons penned up

there.

You are to see those calm, unconscious heroines start, fixing their

hairpinned braids with quick, deft touches, pinning up their skirts as for

the crossing of a wimpling burn rather than for the fording of Death's

black river. They measured the distance with cool, keen eyes, took up a

can in each hand, exchanged a word, and started. The remaining can they

left behind, saying they would come back for it. And they meant to, and

would have, but for a pale young woman in curling-pins, crowned by the

deplorable wreck of a large and flowery hat, and wearing a pink cotton

gown of deplorable limpness, through the washed-out material of which her

sharpened collar-bones and thin shoulders threatened to pierce. For 'ow

are you to take to call a proper pride in yourself when you 'aven't got no

'art for anythink any more?

You are to understand that Emigration Jane 'ad bin 'in 'Orspital along of

what the doctors called the Triphoid Fever, months an' months; and 'ad bin

orful bad, an' sent back again after being discharged, on accounts of an

Elapse, and kep' a dreadful time at the Women's Combalescent, through her

blood being nothink but water--and now you may guess the reason of that

fruitless search on the part of W. Keyse.

She tried to run at first, but the can was full and heavy, and her knees

shook under her at the screaming of the bullets over that cross-swept

field. Her pore 'art beat somethink crooil, and there was a horrible kind

of swishing in her years, but to give up, and chuck away the can, and

scuttle back to cover, with Them Two stepping along in front as cool--and

more than halfway over, was what Emigration Jane could not demean herself

to do. And at last they passed her coming back, and the Fort loomed up

before her, as suddenly as though it had sprouted up mushroom-fashion

under her dazzled eyes. And grimy men were leaning over the

sandbag-parapet applauding her, and blackened hands attached to hairy arms

reached down and grabbed the can, and it was taken up into the air and

vanished, she never knew how. And then she was staring up into the lean,

brickdust-coloured face of a Corporal of the Town Guard, whose head was

swathed in a bloody bandage, and in all the world there was only Her and

Him.

"You fust-class little Nailer. You A1 bit o' frock----" W. Keyse began.

Then his pale eyes bolted and his jaw fell, and his overwhelming joy and

relief took on the aspect of horrified consternation.

"Watto!" he was beginning weakly, but she tore her gaze from his, and with

a rending sob, covered her face with her hands, and ran blindly. He

remained petrified and staring. And then a bullet struck him full in the

face, and he screamed like a shot rock-rabbit, and threw up his arms and

fell back, smothering in his own blood, behind the breastwork. And she

never knew the cruel trick that Fate had played her, as she ran....

She learned it later, when Young Eybel and his party were marched

prisoners into town, and cheer upon cheer went up from British throats,

and bells were ringing joyfully, and "God Save the Queen!" bellowed in

every imaginable key, was heard from every possible quarter.

It was while the Barala were wailing over their suffocated women and

piccaninns, and the acrid fumes of burning yet hung heavy in the

powder-tainted air, and the R.A.M.C. men and their volunteer helpers were

bringing in the wounded and the dead, that Emigration Jane saw a face upon

a stretcher that was being carried through the rejoicing crowd, and

screamed at the sight, and fell tooth and nail upon the human barrier that

interposed between herself and it, and got through--how, she never could

'a' told you.

Rather a dreadful face it was, with wide-open, staring eyes protruding

through a stiffening mask of gore. The teeth grinned, revealed by the

livid, drawn-back lips, and how she knew him again in such a orful styte

she couldn't tell you--not if you offered her pounds and pounds to say----

She was only Emigration Jane, but when the bearers halted with the

stretcher, it was in obedience to the gesture and the look of a young

woman who had risen above herself into the keen and piercing atmosphere of

High Tragedy.

"Put that down, you two blokes. Wot for?" Her thin throat swelled visibly

before the scream came: "'Cos 'e belongs to me! 'Ain't that enough?

Then--I belongs to 'im! Dead or livin'--oh, my darlin'! my darlin'!"

The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their burden down. It was not

heavy, for Corporal W. Keyse, even when not living under conditions of

semi-starvation, was a short man and a spare. _Had been_, one was tempted

to say, in regard to his condition: "For," said one of the R.A.M.C. men to

a sympathetic bystander, "the chap has had a tremendous wipe over the head

with a revolver-butt or a gun-stock, and he has been shot in the face

besides. There's the hole plain where the bullet went in under his near

nostril, and came out at the left-hand corner of his off eye. And unless a

kind o' miracle happens, I should say, myself, that it would be a saving

of time to carry him straight to the Cemetery."

"Don't let the poor girl hear you!" said the sympathetic bystander. But

Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing anything but the damaged head

upon the canvas pad, as she beat her breast and cried out to it wildly,

dropping on her knees beside it:

"O my own, own, try an' know me! Come back for long enough to s'y one

word! O Gawd, if You let 'im, I'll pray to You all my days. O pore, pore

darlin' 'ead that wicked men 'ave 'urt so crooil----"

It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under the limp and

shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that called W. Keyse to come back

from the very threshold of the Otherwhere was the voice of true, true

love.

It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's stiffened eyelids

quivered and came down halfway, and the martial spirit of its owner

flickered up long enough for W. Keyse to sputter out:

"Cripps, it's 'Er! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven--on somebody else's pass?"

"Born to be hung, I should say," commented the R.A.M.C. man aside to his

mate. "Chuck some water over the young woman, one of you," he added, as

the stretcher was lifted. "And tell her, when she comes to, that we've

taken her sweetheart to Hospital instead of to the other place."

"Rum critters, women," commented another bystander, not untender in his

manner of sprinkling the dubious liquid known in Gueldersdorp as water out

of a cracked tin dipper over the face of the young woman who sat upon the

ground in the centre of a circular palisade of interested human legs.

"Look at this one, for instance. Lively as a vink as long as she believes

her chap a corpse, and does a solid flop as soon as she finds out he has a

kick in him. Help her up, you on the other side. Do you think you could

walk now, miss, if you tried to?"

She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook under her. Her clasped

hands shook, too, as she held them out, beseeching those about her to be

pitiful, and tell her where "they" had taken him. Then, when she was told,

and because she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the way to the

Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him.

Saxham stitched up the split scalp of W. Keyse, and grimly congratulated

him upon the thickness of the skull beneath it. The bullet had, as has

already been indicated, gone in under the left nostril, and emerged below

the inner corner of the right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound

notoriety as well as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight permanent

cast....

"You shall git well, deer," Emigration Jane would tell her patient twenty

times a day. "You carn't 'elp it, becos I means to myke you."

"A' right," her hero would snuffle. One day he added, with a weakly swoop

of one lean arm in the direction of her waist: "Mend me an' marry me.

That's wot I call a Fair Division o' Labour. Twig?"

She crimsoned, gasping:

"You don't never mean it?"

"Stryte I mean it," declared W. Keyse. "Wot d'you tyke me for?"

His bed was in a corner, and a screen baffled prying eyes. She hung over

him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful, faltering:

"S'y it agyne, darlin'! Upon yer solemn natural----"

He said it with the lean arm round her.

"An' it's me--me wot you wants--an' not that Other One?----"

He swore it.

"You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy Cripps!"

"An' you've forgiven me--abart them letters?" Her face was coming

close....

"Every time I blooming well kissed 'em, arter I bin an' picked 'em up," he

declared.

"You did--that?" she quavered, marvelling at the greatness of his nature.

"Look in me jacket pocket if you think I'm spinnin' you fairy ones." His

close arm slackened a little. "Now there's somethin' I got to up an' tell,

if you never tips me the 'Ow Do no more."

"Wot is it, deer?" Her heart beat painfully. Was this something the reason

why he had not yet kissed her?

"It's got to do with the Dutchy wot landed me this slip over the

cokernut"--he indicated some plaster strappings that decorated the seat of

intelligence--"with a revolver-butt, when they rushed the Fort. After 'e'd

plugged at me wiv' 'is last cartridge an' missed." The Adam's apple in his

thin throat worked up above the collar of the grey flannel Hospital

jacket. "I--I outed 'im!" said W. Keyse.

"O' course you did, deer." Her heart thrilled with pride in her hero. "An'

serve 'im glad--the narsty, blood-thirsty, murderin'----"

He interrupted:

"'Old 'ard! Wait till you knows 'oo it was." He gulped, and the Adam's

apple jerked in the old way. "That 'ulkin' big Dopper you was walkin' out

along of, when I----"

"Walt! It was--Walt?"

She shuddered and grew pale.

"That's the bloke I means. I 'ad to 'ave 'im," explained W. Keyse, "or

'e'd 'ave 'ad me. So I sent 'im in. With my one, two, an' the Haymaker's

Lift. Right in the middle of 'is dirty weskit. F'ff!" He blew a sigh. "Now

it's out, an' I suppose you 'ates me?"

She panted.

"It's 'orrible, deer, but--but--you 'ad to. An'--an'--if I 'ave to s'y it,

I'd a bloomin' sight rather it was 'Im than You!"

"I'll 'ave my kiss now," said the lordly W. Keyse. And took it from her

willing lips.