Chapter 17

"But if you do not please me"--the grip of his heavy hand bruised her shoulder through the thin, flowery "blowse"--"I will punish you--yes, by the Lord! I will marry a fine Boer maiden who is the daughter of a landrost, and who has got much money and plenty of sheep. And you can give yourself to any dirty verdoemte schelm of an Engelschman you please, for I will have none of you! To-morrow you shall have a paper showing you how to tell me very many things in match-talk, and earn much money to buy presents for my nice little Boer vrouw. Alamachtig! what is this?"

"This" was the hard, cold, polished business-end of a condemned Martini poked violently out of the blackness into the Slabbertian thorax.

"Not in such a 'urry by 'arf, you perishin' Dopper," spluttered the ghastly little man in bandoliers behind the weapon. "Put up them dirty big 'ands o' yours, or, by Cripps! I'll let 'er off, you sneakin', match-talkin' spy!"

The arms of Slabberts soared as the tongue of Slabberts wagged in explanation.

"This is assault and battery, Meister, upon a peaceful burgher. You shall answer to your officer for it, I tell you slap. Voor den donder! Is not a young man to light his pipe as he talks to a young woman without being called spy by a verdoemte sentry! Tell him, Jannje, that is all I did do!"

W. Keyse felt a little awkward, and the rifle was uncommonly heavy. The Slabberts felt it tremble, and thought about taking his hands down and reaching for that Colts six-shooter he kept in his hip-pocket. But though the finger wobbled, it was at the trigger, and Walt was not fond of risks.

"Tell him, Jannje!" he spluttered once more.

She had not needed a second bidding.

As the domestic hen in defence of her chicken will give battle to the wilde-kat, so Emigration Jane, with ruffled plumage, blazing, defiant eyes, and shrill objurgations, couched in the vernacular most familiar to their object, hurled herself upon the enemy.

"You narsty little brute, you! To up and try an' murder my young man. With your jor about spies! Sauce! I'd perish you, I would, if I was 'im! Off the fyce o' the earth, an' charnce bein' 'ung for it! Take away that gun, you silly little imitation sojer--d' you 'eer?"

The weapon was extremely weighty. W. Keyse's arms ached frightfully. Perspiration trickled into his eyes from under the tilted smasher. He felt damp and small, and desperately at a loss. And--as though in malice--the moon looked out from behind a curtain of thick, dim vapour, as he said with a lordly air:

"You be off, young woman, and don't interfere!"

Gawd! she knew him in spite of the smasher hat. Her rage burst the flood-gates. She screeched:

"You!... It's you. 'Oo I done a good turn to--an' this is 'ow I gits it back?" She gasped. "Because you're arter one young woman wot wouldn't be seen dead in the syme street wi' you ..."

Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one might be listening, W. Keyse lifted up his voice.

"Sentry.... 'Ere!... Mister!" he cried despairingly, "You on the other side, can't you hear?"

In vain the call. The stout fellow-townsman of W. Keyse, comfortably propped in an angle of the opposite fence, the bulk of the Convent and the width of its garden and tennis-ground being between them, continued to sleep and snore peacefully and undisturbed.

Emigration Jane continued:

"Because that sly cat wiv the yeller 'air-plait won't 'ear o' you, you try to git a pore servant-gal's fancy bloke pinched! Yah, greedy! Boo! You plate-faced, erring-backed, s'rimp-eyed little silly, with your love-letters an' messages! Wait till I give 'er another o' your screevin'--that's all!"

"Patrol!" cried W. Keyse in a despairing whimper.

She advanced upon him closer and closer, lashing herself as she came, to frenzy. How often had W. Keyse seen it outside the big gaudy pubs in the Tottenham Court Road, and the Britannia, Camden Town! Perhaps the recollection staring, newly awakened, in the pale, moonlit eyes of the little perspiring Town Guardsman stung her to equal memory, and provoked the act. Who can tell? We may only know that she plucked the weapon of lower-class London from her hat, and jabbed at the pale face viciously, and heard the victim say "Owch!" as he winced, and knew herself, as her Slabberts gripped the rifle-barrel, and wrested it with iron strength from the failing hands of W. Keyse, the equal of those dauntless Boer women who killed men when it was necessary. But, oh! the 'orrible, 'ideous feeling of 'aving stuck something into live flesh! Sick and giddy, the heroine shut her eyes, seeing behind their lids wondrous phantasmagoria of coloured pyrotechny, rivalling the most marvellous triumphs of the magician Brock....

W. Keyse's beheld, at the moment when his weapon was wrenched from him, two long grey arms come out of the darkness and coil about the largely-looming form of Slabberts. Enveloped in the neutral-tinted tentacles of this mysterious embrace, the big Boer struggled impotently, and a quick, imperative voice said, between the thick pants of striving men:

"Get the gun from him, will you, and call up your picket. Don't fire; blow your whistle instead!"

"_Pip-ip-ip-'r'r! Pip-ip-r'r!_"

The long, shrill call brought armed men hurrying out of the darkness on the other side of the Cemetery, and considerably quickened the arrival of the visiting patrol.

"Communicating with persons outside the defences by flashlight signals. We can't shoot him for it just yet, but we _can_ gaol him on suspicion," said the Commander of the picket. And Slabberts, with a stalwart escort of B.S.A. troopers, reluctantly moved off in the direction of the guard-house.

"Who was the fellow who helped you, do you know?" asked the officer who had ridden up with the patrol. "Threw him and sat on him until the picket came up, you say," he commented, on hearing W. Keyse's version of the story. "A tall man in civilian clothes, with a dark wideawake and short pointed beard! H'm!"

"Coming from the veld, apparently, and not from town," said the picket Commander. "Must have known the countersign, or the sentries out there would have stopped him. I--see!"

He looked at the patrol-officer, who coughed again. The moonlight was quite bright enough for the exchange of a wink. Then:

"Hold on, man, you're bleeding," said W. Keyse's Sergeant, an old Naval Brigade man. "How did ye get that 'ere nasty prod under the eye?"

W. Keyse put up his hand, and gingerly felt the place that hurt. His fingers were red when they came away.

"The young woman wot was with the Dutchman, she jabbed me with a 'at-pin, to git me to let 'im go."

"There's a blindin' vixen for you!" commented the Sergeant. "Two inch higher, and she'd have doused your light out. Where did she come from, d'ye know?"

"Have you any idea who she was?" asked the Commander of the picket.

W. Keyse shook his head.

"'Aven't the least idear, sir. Never sor 'er before in my natural!" he declared stoutly.

"Well, you'll know her again when you meet her--or she will you," said the patrol-officer, about to move on, when a deplorable figure came staggering into the circle, and the rider reined up his horse. "What's this? Hey, Johnny, where's your gun?"

It was W. Keyse's fellow-sentry from the opposite flank of the Convent.

"And time you turned up, I don't think," commented W. Keyse. "Didn't you 'ear me sing out to you just now?"

"Come, now, what were you up to?" the Sergeant pressed. "Better up an' own it if you've bin asleep on guard."

The eager faces crowded round. The object of interest and comment, not at all sympathetic or polite, was a stout, respectable tradesman, with a large, round, ghastly face, who saluted his officer with a trembling hand.

"I--I have been the victim of an outrage, sir!"

"Sorry to hear it; what's your name?"

"Brooker, sir," volunteered W. Keyse's Corporal. "The other sentry we put on with Keyse here."

"Mr. Brooker, sir, General Stores, Market Square," babbled the citizen.

"Well, Private Brooker, what have you to say?"

"I have been drugged or hypnotised, sir, and robbed of my gun while in a state of insensibility, sir--upon my honour as an Alderman and Magistrate of this borough! Swear me, sir, if you have any doubt of my veracity!" He flapped his hands like fins, and his bandolier heaved above a labouring bosom.

The Commander of the picket looked preternaturally grave.

"Very sorry, Private Brooker, but unless the Sergeant has brought his Testament along, you'll have to give your information in the ordinary way. So they drugged you or hypnotised you--or both, was it?--and took away your rifle. Of course you saw it done?"

"No, sir, I did not see it done. When I woke up ..."

"Ah, when you woke up! Please go on."

The crowding faces of B.S.A. men and Town Guardsmen were grinning now. The patrol-officer was rocking in his saddle.

"When I revived, sir, from the swoon or trance ..."

"Very good, Private Brooker; we'll hear the rest of that in the morning. Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring Private Keyse and the hypnotic subject before me in the morning. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at large for the present, and fall in the picket."

The Sergeant saluted. "Very good, sir."

The bubbling Brooker boiled over frothily as the sentries were changing.

"A prisoner! Good God! do they take me for a traitor? A Magistrate ... an Alderman, the President of the Gas Committee ..."

"I should 'ave guessed you to be that if I 'adn't 'eard it, sonny," said the Sergeant dryly, the implied sarcasm provoking a subdued guffaw. He added, as the visiting patrol rode on and the picket marched back to the Cemetery: "Can't relieve you of your rifle, because you 'aven't got 'er. What in 'Eaven's name are they goin' to do to you? Well, you'll find out to-morrow. Left face; quick march!"

Counting left-right, and keeping elbow-touch with the next man, W. Keyse got in a whisper:

"I say, Sergeant, am I in for it as well as Ole Bulgy Weskit? You might as well let me know and charnce it!"

The Sergeant answered with unfeeling indifference:

"Since you ask, I should say you was."

"That's a bit 'ard! Wot'll I git?"

"Ten to one, your skater."

"Wot is my skater?"

"Your Corporal's stripe, you suckin' innocent! Wot for? For takin' a Boer spy pris'ner--that's wot for!"

"Cripps!" said W. Keyse, enlightened, illuminated and glowing in the darkness. He added a moment later, in rather a depressed tone: "But it was 'im, the civilian bloke with the beard, 'oo downed the Dutchy, an' sat on 'im till the guard come up."

The Sergeant was ahead of the half-company, speaking to the officer in charge. It was the Corporal who answered, across the man who marched upon the left of W. Keyse:

"O' course it was. But you 'ad the Dopper fust, and," he cackled quietly, "the Colonel won't be jealous."

The eyes and mouth of W. Keyse became circular.

"The who?"

"The Colonel, didn't you 'ear me say?"

"That wasn't never ... _'im_"?

"All right, since you know best. But him, for all that!"

"Great Jiminy Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse.

XXIII

You are to imagine Dawn, trailing weary-footed over the interminable plain, to find Gueldersdorp, lonely before, and before threatened, now isolated like some undaunted coral rock in mid-Pacific, crested with screaming sea-birds, girt with roaring breakers, set in the midst of waters haunted by myriads of hungry sharks. Ringed with silent menace, she squatted on her low hill, doggedly waiting the event.

It was known that on the previous day the telegraph wires north of Beaton had been cut, and this day was to sever the last link with Cape Town at Maripo, some forty miles south. The railway bridge that crossed the Olopo River might go next. Staat's Engineers had been busy there overnight. Rumour had it, Heaven knows how, that the armoured train that had been sent up from the Cape with two light guns of superseded pattern--a generous contribution towards the collection of obsolete engines now bristling from the sand-bagged ramparts--had been seized by a commando, with the officer and the men in charge. This was to be confirmed later by the arrival of an engine-driver minus five fingers and some faith in the omnipotence of British arms. But at the beginning of this chapter he was hiding in a sand-hole, chewing the cud of his experiences, in default of other pabulum, and did not get in before dark of the long blazing day.

Crowds gathered on the barely-reclaimed veld at the northern end of the town to see the Military Executive take over the Hospital. But that the streets were barricaded with waggons and every able-bodied male citizen carried a rifle, it might have been mistaken for an occasion of national rejoicing or civic festivity. The leaves of the pepper-trees fringing the thoroughfares and clumped in the Market Square rustled in the faint hot breeze. By-and-by they were to stand scorched and seared and naked under the iron hail that beat in blizzards upon them, and die in the noxious lyddite fumes dispersed by bursting shells.

The variegated crowd cheered as the Staff dismounted at the white-painted iron gates of the railed-in Hospital grounds. It was not the acclamation of admiration, it was the cheer expectant. They wanted to know what the Officer in Command was going to do? Intolerable suspense racked them. Wherever it was known that he would be, there they followed at this juncture--solid masses of humanity, bored with innumerable ear-holes, and enamelled with patient, glittering, expectant eyes. His own keen, kindly glance swept over them as he touched his grey felt hat in acknowledgment of their dubious greeting, that half-hearted but well-meant cheer. He read the mute question written upon all the faces. Part of his answer to the interrogation was standing in the Railway-yard, but they would have to wait a little while longer yet--just a little longer. He whistled his pleasant melodious little tune as the porter hurried to open the gates.

One pair of pale, rather ugly eyes in the crowd were illumined with pure hero-worship. "That's 'im," explained their owner, nudging a big man in shabby white drill, who was shouldering a deliberate way through the press.

"The Colonel--and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along of 'im--with the red shoulder-straps and brown leather leggin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o' the Staff, they are. An' them others in khaki with puttees--syme as wot I've got on--they're the Medical Swells. Military Saw-boneses--twig? You can tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with a serpint climbin' up a stick inside a wreath, wot they 'ave on the fronts o' their caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the instrument-cases wot they carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a bit in the know about these things, being a sort of Service man meself."

Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid additions had certainly been made to the martial outfit of the previous day. The tweed Norfolk had been replaced by a khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and obligingly taken in by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's stripe, purchased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence of over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, had been sewn upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged an extra tikkie for doing it, and it burned the arm that bore it like a vaccination-pustule on the fifth day.

"Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse. He twitched the stripe carelessly into sight. "C'manding orficer marked me down for this to-day," he continued, with elaborate indifference, "along of a Favourable Mention in the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much--little turn-up with a 'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be a spy."

In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he recognised the face under the Panama hat worn by the big neighbour in white drill, and blushes swamped his yellow freckles. The owner of that square, powerful face, no longer bloated and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the previous day, where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly that the heroic leading attitude of W. Keyse had perforce given place to the minor role of the juvenile walking-gentleman. "Watto!" he began. "It's you, Mister! I bin wantin' to say thank----" But a surge of the crowd flattened W. Keyse against the green-painted iron railings surrounding a municipal gum-tree, and the big man was lost to view. Perhaps it was as well that the acquaintance made under conditions remote from respectability should not be renewed. But W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer.

The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a moment, to the disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton and the Colonial of British race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs and the Barala, who anticipated a big indaba. The little party of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-drive between the carefully-tended grass plats to the stoep where the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and several prominent members of the Committee--including Alderman Brooker, puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of a night's rest--waited. Military Authority saluted Civic Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done. Inspection followed.

"The warr'ds, said ye?" The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw-boned personage, very evidently hailed from North of the Tweed. "I'm obliged to ye, ma'am," he addressed the flustered matron, "but the warr'ds an' the contents o' the beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance--at least, whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll tak' a look at the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing plant, and the sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff at the kitchens, there would be a moment to spend in ganging through the warr'ds. Unless the Colonel would prefer to begin wi' them?" He turned a small, twinkling pair of blue eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief.

"Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask five minutes more grace in the interests of the friend I spoke of, Dr. Saxham; with whom I made an appointment at the half-hour."

"You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 'The Diseases of Civilisation,' are ye, Colonel? I mind a sentence in it that must have been a douse of cauld watter--toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd--in the faces o' some o' the dandy operators. '_Young men_,' he ca'ed them, as if he was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led to take up Surgery by the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae time to learn its scienteefic principles--showy operators, who diagnose wi' the knife an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and no' to assist her.' And yet Saxham could daur! 'I shall prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out exceesion,' he said, or they say he said in the _Lancet_ report o' the operation on the Grand Duke Waldimir--I cam' across a reprint o' it no' lang ago--when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' the sweat o' mortal terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He cut a hole in the Duke's stomach, ye will understand, in front o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller intesteene, spliced the twa together wi' a Collins button, and by a successful deveece o' plumbing--naething less--earned the eterr'nal gratitude o' the autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists. All that, seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a hair's-breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or improve upon perfection. Toch!... Colonel, that man would be worth the waitin' for, if he stood in your friend's shoes the day!"

"Rejoice then, Major, and be exceeding glad, for I believe this is the man who wrote the book and plugged--or was it plumbed--the potentate."

The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. "I promise myself a crack or twa wi' him, then.... But how is it a busy chiel like that can get awa' from his private patients and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter Season Ahem! ahem!"

By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing the conversation, it was plain that he had recalled the circumstances under which the "busy chiel" had turned his back upon the private patients and the Hospital wards. "Colonel," he went on, "I could be wishing this varry creeditable-appearing institution--judging from the ootside o't--were twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe or so to the back of that."

"My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and happy but once, and that was when we had fifty men down with dysentery and fever in a tin-roofed Railway goods-shed, and a hundred and seventy more under leaky canvas, and you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could get no milk."

"That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the male an' the female character. A man will no' keep on dithering for what he kens he canna' get. A woman, especially a young an' pretty----" He broke off to say: "Toch! will ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the sex sets that lad rampaging."

"Beautiful! I tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp was emphatically assuring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, "the loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see--bar none! I saw her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day she passed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my hat to her as the Staff dismounted at the gate."

"Another _rara avis_, Beau?" the Colonel called across the intervening group of talkers. The group of khaki-clad figures separated, and turned first to the Chief, then to the bright-eyed, bright-faced enthusiast. White teeth flashed in tanned faces, chaff began:

"In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?"

"Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that pretty 'Jollity' girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, and the postcard grin."

"Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moonless night on the Cape Town Hotel verandah!"

"_She_ turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?"

"Cavalry Problem No. 1. Put yourself in Lieutenant the Right Hon. the Lord Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the precautions you would have taken to insure the transport of your heart uninjured from the Staff Headquarters to the Hospital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the enemy, whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed...."

"She was neither," the crimson boy declared. "She was simply a lady, quiet and high-bred and simple enough to have been a Princess of the blood, or to look a fellow in the face and pass him by without the slightest idea--I'd swear to it--that she'd fairly taken his breath away."

"My dear Lord!" The Mayor took a great deal of comfort out of a title. "Attractive the young lady is, I certainly admit, and my wife is--I may say the word--in her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than Mrs. Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to introduce you, unless the Colonel entertains objections ..."

"To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. Mayor, like Indian prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably the best cure for the complaint in the present instance would be to meet the cause of it."

"Judge for yourself, Colonel; you've first-class long-distance eyesight." There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh voice. "You've seen her before, and it isn't the kind of face one forgets. Here they are ... here she is now, coming back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's view, but the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass them."