Part 131

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 Lorenço 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.