Part 132

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 khâki 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 khâki-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.

LIII

There were two funerals in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, upon a night that no one will forget who stood in the packed throng of shadowy mourners about each of those open graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the vault of heaven might have been hollowed out of the darkling depths of an amethyst of inconceivable splendour and planetary size. Myriads of stars, dazzlingly white, swung under this, the Mother's fitting canopy, shared with another, not like her holy, not noble or unselfish or devoted, but like her in that he was brave and much beloved.

Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowding faces about the narrow open trench where the Reverend Julius Fraithorn read the Burial Service by lantern-light without being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet, and women sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful and so merry and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed women; the men praised him for having been such a swordsman, horseman, shot. Everyone spoke of him as the life and soul of the garrison, the idol of his brother-officers, and worshipped by the men under his command. Everyone had something to tell of dead Beauvayse that was pleasant to hear.

But the great bulk of the crowd was massed behind the black-robed, white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling rigid and immovable about the second open grave, where the Mother-Superior lay in her snow-white coffin, fully habited and mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on which the plain gold ring of her Divine espousals shone, the parchment formula of the vows she took when admitted to her Order nineteen years before, lying under those meekly-folded hands upon her breast. So she had lain, feet to the altar, in the Convent chapel that her daughters in Religion had draped and decked for her, keeping their loving vigils about her from twilight to dawn, from dawn to twilight, until this hour when they must yield all that was mortal of her to Earth's guardianship and the unsleeping watchfulness of God.

Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and strangely quiet. The women's faces white and haggard and tearless, the men's drawn and deeply lined. Not even muffled groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence as the solemn rite drew to its singularly simple and impressive close. As the fragrant incense rose from the censer and the holy water sprinkled the snow-white pall that bore the Red Cross, one dreadful word lurked sinister in every thought:

Murdered!...

Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose hands had staunched the bleeding wounds of many present, whose arm had lifted and pillowed the dying heads of others dear to them; who had stood through long nights of fever and delirium beside their Hospital pallets, ministering as a very Angel from Heaven to tortured bodies and suffering souls--murdered!

The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched continually with her lamp prepared, that at the first summons of the Heavenly Bridegroom she might enter with Him into the marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had come to her by the bloodstained hand of an assassin? It was so. And--ah! the horror of it!

The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he moved round the grave within the enclosing wall of kneeling Sisters. But no answering sob came from the vast assemblage. They were as dumb--stricken to stone. They could not yet contemplate the felicity of the pure soul of the martyred saint, carried by God's Angels into the Land of the ever-living, admitted to the unspeakable reward of the Beatific Vision. They could only realise that somebody had killed her.

But when the solemn strophes of the Litany for the Dead broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the multitude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their forces in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in due pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and left her earthly body, how wonderful in its marble, hushed, close-folded, mysterious beauty none who had looked upon it ever could forget, waiting for the second coming of her Master and her Lord, a great sob mounted, and broke from every breast, and every face was drenched with sudden tears. Perhaps God let her see how much they loved her in that parting hour. And then the bugle sounded "Last Post" over both the open graves, softly for fear of Brounckers' German gunners, and the great crowd melted away, and all was done and over.

I have said that all the people wept. There was a girl in white, for she would not let the Sisters put black garments on her, kneeling between Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda-Antony. This girl did not weep at all. Chief mourner at both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact. She knew that Beauvayse was on duty at Maxim Outpost South, and could not get away, and that the Reverend Mother was vexed with her, and was hiding at the Convent, pretending that she had gone somewhere, and would never come back.

She was especially clear of mind when she thought all this. At other times she was not Lynette, and knew no one, and had never known anybody of the name. She was the ragged Kid, crouching on the Little Kopje in the gathering twilight or on the long mound that its eastward shadow covered. Or she was lying under the tattered horse-blanket on the foul straw pallet in the outhouse, waiting for the Lady to come with the great, kind, covering dark.

Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned cube-sugar box beside the green rep sofa where Bough lolled on wet days or stormy nights, her great eyes wild with apprehension, her every nerve tense and strained with terror of the master in his condescending moods, when he would make pretence of teaching her to scrawl coarse pothooks and hangers on the greasy slate that usually hung below the glass-and-bottle shelf. Or--and at these times the Sisters found her difficult to manage--she was crouching upon one side of a locked door, and a long thin wire was feeling its way into the keyhole on the other side, and the man who manipulated it laughed as the agile pliers nipped the end of the key and turned it in the wards of the lock....

And then she would be running through the night, anywhere, nowhere, and Bough would be riding after. She could hear the short wheezing gallop of the tired pony when she laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok, wielded by a strong and brutal hand, would bite into the quivering flesh of the child, and she would shriek for mercy, and presently fall upon the ground and lie there like one dead--acting that old tragedy over and over again.