Part 11

Up from the west rolled a great woollen cloud that drooped lower and lower till it burst with a sudden fury over the land, as if shrapnel shells charged with hail had exploded in mid-air. Mortimer put up his collar, and ducked his head to the heavy ice-drops that struck him on every side. He looked in vain for shelter; the veldt rolled smooth and gently undulating in all directions, and no tree was anywhere. To the left a kopje loomed in the darkness ahead, to the right he had seen when on the last rise the white gleaming palings and lights of a farm. He pulled his watch out, and just made out in the rapidly falling darkness that it was eight o'clock. His colonel had advised him to camp for the night somewhere, lest he should lose his way in the darkness, and start off again at earliest dawn. He rapidly resolved to make the farm his halting-place, should, as was most likely, it prove to be unoccupied. The rumour that two lines of defence would join across this part of the country had swiftly cleared the sparsely occupied place. The thought of camping among the rocks of the kopje he did not entertain, having by this the same firmly rooted distrust of that kind of geological formation that the British soldier will carry henceforth in all ages. He forced his plunging horse along; the terrified beast was trembling in every limb with fright at the blinding lightning.

The sound of voices on the road made him push forward harder than ever, his hand going swiftly to the pocket that held his revolver; then he found it was women's voices he heard, a woman's cry of anguish came after him. He wheeled his horse round, and went back slowly, almost feeling his way in the darkness.

A flash of lightning showed him a cart with a fallen horse, an old man, and three girls.

'What's wrong?' he asked.

The old man began to explain rapidly in Dutch, but a girl who was stooping over the horse rose up and came to him.

'Our horse has been struck,' she said in perfectly good English; 'one wheel was struck too, and blazed for a minute, but the rain has put it out.'

'Are none of you hurt?' said Mortimer.

'None; it is wonderful!' said the girl.

'Then run along all of you as hard as you can,' said Mortimer. 'There's a farm and shelter I think quite close. I'll take the old man up on my horse.'

'We can't leave the cart,' said the girl.

'Oh, confound the cart!' said Mortimer, struggling with his plunging horse. 'You can get it after the storm is over.'

'We have some one in it,' said the unemotionable voice of the girl. 'He is dead.'

Again the anguished cry of one of the other girls rose through the rain.

Mortimer rode round the cart twice before he could think what to do.

'Whose farm is it? Is any one living on it?' he said.

'It is ours,' said the girl; 'we were almost home.'

'Who is at the farm--how many?' Mortimer said, having no inclination to run the risk of being made a prisoner before his despatches were safe.

'My mother, we girls, our grandfather here, and some children.'

'I think I had better put up my horse in the shafts,' said Mortimer, 'though I much doubt if he'll go.'

'It is no use, the wheel is broken,' said the girl. 'We were just going to carry him home, only they will not do anything but cry. Anna, Emma, for shame! What use are tears? Come, we are strong; let us carry him out of this rain.' The girls still moaned and wept, however, and she spoke sharply again to them, this time in Dutch, the language in which their lamentations had been.

'See here,' said Mortimer, 'I will take him up on my saddle.' He dismounted and went to the cart and felt about nervously. The English-speaking girl lifted up a rug, and there on pillows on the cart lay a dead young Boer.

'Are you sure he's dead?' Mortimer said. The hands, though wet with rain, were hardly stiff, the body had some faint warmth.

The girl was helping him to lift.

'He is quite dead,' she said. 'He was wounded and going down by train to a Hospital. But as he passed this place, his home, he made them put him out on the station, and send for us to take him home. We brought the cart and pillows, but he had died in the waiting-shed before we got there. We are taking him home to bury.' The other girls shrilled loudly again. 'Anna, Emma,' she said, with more sharp words in Dutch. Then, excusingly, to Stevenson, and with pity in her voice, 'He was to have married one of them, the other is his sister.'

Mortimer got the dead man up before him, held him with one arm and rode slowly, the girls and the old man hurrying by his side. The farm lay about a quarter of a mile away. The English-speaking girl opened the gate.

'There is a ditch all the way up; don't stumble in it,' she said. 'I must go on and warn his mother.' She ran forward in the darkness. A turn in the path, and the lamplight from the farmhouse sent out its rays into the night. Some children, small boys chiefly, clustered at the door; in front of them stood the girl and another woman, fifty or sixty years old.

Mortimer with their aid lifted his burden down, and laid it on a bed in an inner room. He gave a fearful glance at the elder woman, the man's mother. She was a big woman, not fat, like the Boer women generally are, but of angular outline, and with sharp high cheek-bones, and brown piercing eyes.

She was of English parentage, married in early girlhood to a Boer farmer, and become mother of one daughter and six sons. Her husband had fallen with the handful at Jameson's Raid; two sons had with their life-blood helped on the British reverse at Modder River, one lay buried on the field at Elandslaagte, one at Magersfontein, one had been flung in the river at Jacobsdal, here was the sixth come home to her.

She turned from the bed a moment to her niece, the English-speaking girl, who had been a teacher in Johannesburg, but had come to her aunt for refuge at the beginning of the war, and remained as mainstay of the farm.

'Take those shrieking girls out of my hearing, Linda!' she said. 'Let no one come in to me.' She closed the door of the bedroom in their faces.

Linda turned away.

'I must get some hot drinks,' she said. 'Grandfather and the girls will take cold. Where are you going?'

'Oh, I'll get along now,' said Mortimer.

'Nonsense!' said the girl; 'you must dry yourself and eat and drink.' She moved towards the kitchen.

'Oh,' said Mortimer, 'I'd better go. Just think, I might have been one of the lot who knocked that poor chap over.'

'We cannot stay to think of that,' the girl answered. 'You helped us; you must stay till the storm is over.'

'But,' urged Mortimer again, 'how will _she_ feel?' and he glanced at the closed bedroom door.

'Oh, she understands,' said Linda; 'her feeling is not against individuals. Your soldiers have eaten and rested here three or four times, for we are almost the only people left. We stay because we have nowhere to go, and we none of us care what happens.'

Mortimer went to the door.

'I must see to my poor horse,' he said presently.

The girl summoned the stolid-faced little boys--sons they were of the sons who were slain. She gave them a lantern, and bade them show the strange guest the stables. Then she ran to the kitchen herself.

Mortimer was twenty minutes drying down his horse, feeding it, making it comfortable, for the fate of his despatches rested on its welfare. Then he went back to the kitchen.

The mother was there. She had left her dead after a few minutes, to busy herself with the task of getting all the wet figures into dry garments. She was mixing drinks, hot, strong drinks that made the girls blink and choke even while it restored them. She had the grandfather wrapped in rugs, sitting closest of all to the fire.

When Mortimer stood in the doorway, dripping helmet, dripping khaki suit, she moved towards him.

'Drink this,' she said, and gave him a deep mug of hot liquid.

He swallowed it gratefully, for the cold seemed in his very bones.

'Here are some clothes,' she said, and picked up a rough farming-suit that she had laid in readiness on a chair--'here is a room.' She stepped across the passage. 'Change at once, and hand me your wet things to dry.'

Mortimer obeyed her, and, after doing so, sat down on the bed to await the call to eat of the food the girl Linda was preparing.

And then outraged nature took her revenge. He had not slept for fifty-six hours; he had been in the saddle eighteen hours of yesterday, and twelve of to-day. It was three hours before he knew anything more, and then it was only his cramped position on the bed that woke him; except for that he would have slept the clock round.

He sat up numbed, his heart beating suffocatingly. Where were his despatches? What clothes were these he wore? He fell to his feet, a groan of horror bursting from him. What was this he had done--raw, careless, culpable soldier that he was? He had never taken the envelopes from the clothes he had handed the woman--the woman whose sons' and husband's deaths lay at his country's door, still unavenged! Two strides took him down the hall to the kitchen, his face was like ashes. All the little house lay still as the tall, thin young farmer who, in the front room, was taking his rest for ever from the ploughing of fields, the sowing and reaping of crops, the blind and strenuous guarding of his land and liberty at the command of those in the high places.

The fire still burnt brightly in the grate. Linda sat before it so plunged in mournful thought she did not hear the young bushman's footfall.

Across one side of the fire a clothes-horse stood holding the draggled skirts of the girls, the grandfather's moleskin clothes, the familiar khaki of the uniform he had disgraced.

His hand clutched the coat convulsively; beads of sheer terror stood on his forehead. Then he sat down suddenly, the passion of relief bringing the tears of relief to his eyes.

The papers were there untouched; the long envelopes with the red army seal upon them stuck up out of his breast-pocket in full view! That woman, the mother whose sons were dead, that clear-headed young girl, they must both have known the importance of the papers, yet neither had laid a finger upon them, since he was their guest, their helper!

Linda smiled at him in a pale way.

'You have come to say you are hungry,' she said. 'I went to your room twice, but you slept so soundly I thought the food might wait.' She put a dish before him, meat and vegetables mixed up together. 'This is hot, at least, and nourishing,' she said.

He thanked her, his voice still thick from agitation, then ate while she went back to her morbid gazing at the glowing fire.

'Do you know it is twelve o'clock?' he said presently. 'Won't you go to bed? I am afraid you have sat up to keep this fire alight for the food.'

She pushed back the thick hair from her forehead. No one could call her pretty, but the clear eyes and the patience and strength of the young mouth struck one.

'I think I was trying to see the end of the war,' she said, sighing; 'but it takes better sight than mine.'

'You?' he said pityingly. 'Have you lost any one very near--nearer than these cousins?'

She blenched a moment.

'One of them,' she said. 'I had been married to one of them--a week. We will not speak of that.'

He begged her pardon, his throat thick again.

She fought her lip quiet.

'Oh,' she said, 'it is the same everywhere; our lovers, our husbands, our sons--all gone from us! Some will come back, of course, but crushed and mutilated. A little time, and your army will only have a handful of women to contend against.'

'We, too,' he said, 'we have lost our brothers, our fathers, our sons. Everywhere we have women mourning.'

'Yes,' she said, 'I suppose so.' She sat silent a little time. 'But then it was you who came,' she urged again. 'We used to be quiet and happy in our own way, even if we were unprogressive and unintelligent. It seems, to a woman, we might have been left alone.'

'Ah, but,' he said, 'there were bigger issues than that at stake. You have read--I can see that you have read--you must know why we are fighting.'

'Somewhere at the top,' she said, with a wan smile, 'there may be a few--a very few--on both sides who know. But our men don't know. They have been told they will lose their liberty and homes if they don't fight; that is all any of my cousins knew, and they went off to death, not cheerfully, but because there was nothing else to be done. Your men, of course they come because they are sent, and they fight their best because they are brave and obey orders. We have been insolent--isn't that what you say of us?--and we must be crushed. But some of you must know the rights of it all. Think how much wiser you are than we. You read while we plough. Those of you who know should stay behind.'

'No,' he smiled; 'that is not our way either. We are no different from you. We pay a few great men to do the thinking for us, and if they say it's got to be fighting, then, whatever it seems to us individually, collectively we just shoot.'

The fire burnt lower and lower; it was the only light in the room, for the oil-lamp, exhausted, had died out. Outside the rain still fell in straight soaking sheets over the thatched roof of the little house. A wind moaned restlessly over the empty country; you fancied it was lost and full of woe, because it had no trees to wander through. Once or twice a horse whinnied, once or twice there came through the night the inexpressibly mournful sound of the bleat of a sheep. You felt the rain was like no other rain at all; it seemed as if the land, swollen-eyed, was weeping in the quiet of midnight for its unutterable woes.

The girl's head drooped back against the wall. Sleep had claimed her; but, by the anguish of the mouth and the pitiful stirring of the breast, you knew it was but to show her the body of her young husband, cast with a score of others in a trench, all wet with red.

Stevenson sat, a cold sweat upon his brow; he felt he was the only soul awake on all the frightful continent.

Then through the silence of the house came a woman's voice reading the Bible--the mother seated a foot away from her quiet son. The thin wood offered no resistance to the sound of her voice.

'"Gather up thy wares out of the land, O thou that abidest in the siege. For thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will sling out the inhabitants of the land at this time, and will distress them, that they may feel it. Woe is me for my hurt! My wound is grievous: but I said, Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it."'

The sound of the voice pierced into Linda's wretched slumbers. She opened dilated eyes, and stared wildly at Mortimer. And the voice went on again:

'"My tent is spoiled, and all my cords are broken: my children are gone forth of me, and they are not: there is none to stretch forth my tent any more, and to set up my curtains. For the shepherds are become brutish, and have not inquired of the Lord: therefore they have not prospered, and all their flocks are scattered. The voice of a rumour, behold it cometh, and a great commotion out of the north country, to make the cities of Judah a desolation, a dwelling-place of jackals."'

'Oh,' said the girl with a sobbing breath, 'it is only aunt, of course; she often reads aloud like that. But, oh, I have had such dreams--such frightful dreams!'

The voice went on.

'"O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps. O Lord, correct me"'--the tone of the voice fell a little--'"but with judgment; not in Thine anger, lest Thou bring me--to nothing."'

'I dreamt--I dreamt,' said the girl, pressing both hands on her throbbing heart--'ah, I could never tell you what I dreamt!'

'Hush,' said Mortimer, 'don't try, don't try! Won't you go to your room, and try to sleep in comfort?'

She looked at him with distended eyes.

'I daren't,' she said. 'O God, I never shall dare to sleep again!'

The voice rose; the horrible exultant thrill in it made the flesh creep.

'"Pour out Thy fury upon the heathen that know Thee not, and upon the families that call not on Thy name: for they have devoured Jacob, yea, they have devoured him and consumed him, and have laid waste his habitation."'

The girl staggered to her feet.

'I will go and sit with her,' she said; 'she should not be alone.'

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*A Skirmish by the Way*

At earliest dawn Mortimer was up and away again.

Linda had risen up and prepared breakfast for him; quiet, capable, busied with frying-pan, fire, the setting of a place at table; he looked at her as she moved about the kitchen, and wondered had not the sight of her face of agony last night been a dream? She even rallied him a little.

'You must eat well,' she said, as she put fried eggs and bacon before him--the pleasantest meal he had eaten since he had left Sydney; 'you don't want to be out another night with those despatches of yours loose.'

'I want shooting,' he said, his forehead burning.

'Oh no,' she said, 'you are young yet to it all; you will have plenty of time to learn carefulness before the war is over.'

'I hope so,' he said.

'I am afraid so,' she assented.

Something struck him. That soldier-farmer in the quiet front room--who was to bury him? who dig his grave?

'If I had thought,' he said, 'I would have done it myself the--the grave, you know--instead of having breakfast. You girls cannot do it. Is the old man strong enough? I would do it now, but my time is not my own.' He looked at his watch.

'I have sent the three little boys to Du Toit's farm,' she said, 'five miles away, to ask them to send two of their Kaffir boys down. All of ours have gone off.'

He shook hands with her when he was going, thanked her for all she had done.

'It is nothing,' she said; 'we have to thank you, yet we don't, you notice. It is war-time. Good-bye.'

The grey air freshened as the sun climbed foot by foot up over the great kop to the east. The night's storm had left the veldt fragrant as our own bush after rain. The deserted farms looked at him, a mist of sleep and forgetfulness in their eyes. Those every-day fences, those gates made for farmers to pass through, farmers' daughters to lean on watching for their lovers, farmers' children to swing on--was it possible half a dozen regiments had gone crashing through and over them, hastening to headquarters only a week before?

Mortimer looked at the healthy land with a bushman's appreciative eyes. He wondered now many sheep the farms held. A Boer prisoner at the camp had told him the country carried a sheep to six acres, an ostrich to twelve, and a horse to twenty. He speculated loosely on the chances there would be for an army of drought-ruined Australian settlers to come here after the war with modern implements and knowledge, and astonish these pastoralists, who were a century at least behind Europe in the way of agriculture.

'Even Cameron's ahead of them,' Mortimer thought, his mind reverting sadly to the poor little selection at Wilgandra that bounded Hermie's life.

A heavy waggon went past drawn by a span of mules, and driven by a Kaffir, who cracked a whip of such length that the ordinary stockwhip was nowhere beside it.

A bent old man, with a cart of vegetables and a horse too decrepit for the war, crept by. Smoke in a place or two went up from the chimneys of the scattered farmhouses. The continent was awake.

Riding yesterday, Mortimer had never known when he might run into a Boer picket, but the farther he went now the danger lessened--in another dozen miles he ought to be somewhere about the beginning of the line the British had made to defend a railway. And after that his ride would lie through country dotted over by the British army.

He pushed on; his horse was fresh and ready again after the night's rest and a couple of good feeds; his own spirits, chiefly owing to his excellent breakfast, began to rise again and push his carelessness from the chief place in his mind; he grew aflame for a chance to prove his courage, and respect himself once more. Before he left the camp it had been held that a big engagement was certain in a very few days; his mind leapt forward to it now with a keenly sharpened appetite, and he beheld himself making famous his country's name by impossible feats of strength.

Crack! To the left of him a firearm went off; the bullet passed clear over his head, and rattled on some loose stones as it fell.

He glanced round less in fear than astonishment. At the spot the veldt was singularly clear, and the nearest kopje was far beyond rifle-range. Whir! A second shot struck his helmet, a third grazed his shoulder! His horse plunged and reared; he spun it round and faced a clump of karoo bushes twenty yards to his left, the only place from which the shots could have come, and even these seemed absurd, for no shrub was more than two or three feet high. He raised his revolver; his finger was at the trigger. Then he saw three small faces over the edge of one of the bushes--three that he knew; they were the stolid, secret-looking little boys who had lighted him to the stable last night.

'The little sweeps!' he muttered, but moved his finger from the trigger, even though he kept the revolver cocked at them.

'Do you want me to blow the brains of all three of you out?' he called. 'Lay down those guns this minute, or I will.' He was close up to them, and a sharp glance among the sparse bushes showed him that beyond these small youths he had no other attackers. At the sight of British might in the concrete form of a mounted soldier standing right over them, two of the lads instantly laid down their ponderous old style weapons. The third essayed another shot, but his rifle kicked and the bullet went wild.

'You young beggar!' said Stevenson; 'put it down this instant.'

The lad obeyed sullenly; he was the eldest of the three, and yet not more than twelve; a thickset boy with a heavy, brooding face and fine eyes.

'And what's the meaning of this little performance?' said Mortimer.

Two of the boys had very little knowledge of English, but the eldest had been quick to pick it up from his grandmother and Linda, who had just become his aunt.

'You killed our fathers,' he said doggedly. 'They've taken all the good guns with them, or we wouldn't have missed like this.'

Mortimer had no doubt of it; as it was, the shots had landed so near to the mark that it was plain what was the Boer boys' pastime at present. There was something about the three small lads that reminded Mortimer irresistibly of Roly--Roly, hung all over with the kitchen cutlery, or prowling about the bush with a broken-barrelled gun, Roly lying face downward behind a great ant-bed and picking off his foes at a lightning rate. He found it hard not to smile.

'Hand me up those guns,' he said to the eldest boy.

The boy gave him a stubborn glance, and it needed the discharge of a cartridge over his head to bring him to obedience. Then he handed the poor old musket up sullenly to the conqueror.

'See here,' Mortimer said, 'you'll make fine soldiers by-and-by. Don't go and get yourselves into trouble while you're young, and so ruin your chances. If it had happened to be some one less in a hurry than I am, he'd have marched you over and seen you among the prisoners, just to keep you out of mischief.'

'He'd have to catch us first,' said the boy, with a defiant smile.

'There is such a thing as putting a bullet into the legs,' said Mortimer gravely. 'But now cut along and fetch those Kaffirs for your aunt.'

The boys turned round and struck off dejectedly in a new direction; they had come three miles off the road their aunt had sent them by to execute this plot, secretly formed by the eldest boy, for killing off one at least of the enemy.