Part 134

Her lips shaped the word. Her voice was barely audible. His heart beat thickly as he went on:

"Quite right, but something else besides a man. A man with a name. Tell me the name, or shall I tell it you?"

She nodded, and her eyes were great and timorous, but there was no terror of him in them now.

"My name is Saxham--Owen Saxham. Say the name after me."

For a wonder she obeyed. Sister Tobias caught a breath of surprise, but her subdued exclamation was silenced in mid-utterance by Saxham's look.

"Dr. Owen Saxham--Doctor because I try to cure sick people. You have seen me trying at the hospitals. You have helped me many times----"

She puckered her delicate, bewildered brows, and held her head on one side. To be made to think, and recall, and remember, hurt.

"--Many times, and the sick people were grateful. They often ask me now, How is Miss Mildare?"

Her attention had wandered to the bronzed buttons on the Doctor's khâki coat. She was trying to count them, it seemed, by the movement of her lips. Saxham went on with inexorable patience:

"Never mind the buttons. Look at me. Think of the patients at the Hospital who are asking when Lynette Mildare is coming back again. Tell me what I am to say to them, Lynette?"

His voice shook over the beloved name. In spite of his grim effort to fight down the overmastering emotion, his eyes brimmed over, and a drop splashed, hot and heavy, upon the wandering hand that crept out to finger the buttons that would not let themselves be counted right. She looked up at the eyes that wept for her, and their mingled love and anguish touched even her dulled mind to pity. She held her slender hand up against the light, and looked at the splash of wet upon it.

"You--cry?"

There was a glimmer of something in the eyes that redeemed their vagueness. A rushlight seen shining through a night of mist upon a desolate mountain-side might have meant as little or as much to eyes that saw it. Saxham saw it, and it meant much to him. His great chest lifted on a wave of hope as he answered her:

"I cry for somebody who cannot cry for herself. Shall I tell you her name? It is Lynette Mildare. When tears come to her, then it will be for those who love her to cry again for joy, for she will be given back to them...."

"Lord grant it!" breathed Sister Tobias behind them. But Saxham had forgotten her. The fountains of his deep were broken up and words came rushing from him.

"I think that day will come, Lynette. I believe that day will come," he said, holding the beautiful vague gaze with his. "If every drop in these veins of mine, poured out, could bring it more quickly, it should be hastened so; if every faculty of my body, every cell in my brain, bent to the achievement of one end, expended to the last unit of energy, in the restoration of what is infinitely dearer to me than life--than a hundred lives, if I had them to devote!--could insure its dawning, and bring the light of Reason and Memory and Hope into these beloved eyes again----"

A sob tore its way through the Doctor's great frame. He rose up abruptly and hurried away.

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.