Part 85

She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its quilted satin slipper.

"Do you suppose I haven't guessed by this time that Bough the Africander and Van Busch the British-Johannesburger are one Boer when it suits them both?"

His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks of old tattooing obliterated by an acid burn, jerked as he raised it to stroke and feel his whiskers. Something else upon the hand, in the sharpened state of all her senses, struck out a spark of old association, and recalled a name once known. She went on.

"How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough? You provoke the question when I see you wearing the Mildare crest and coat-of-arms."

He had turned the deeply-engraved sard with his brown thumb and clenched his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed his mind, and took off the ring and handed it to her.

"I had this ring off Bough, that's a real live man, and a thundering good pal of mine, for all your funning. The chap it belonged to died at a farm Bough owned once. Somewhere in Natal it might have been. And the bloke who died there was a big bug in England, Bough always thought. But he came tramping, and hauled up with hardly duds to his back or leather to his feet. Sick, too, and coughing like a sheep with the rinderpest. Bough was kind to him, but he got worse and worse. One night Bough was sitting up with him reading the Bible, when he made signs. 'Take this ring off of my finger and keep it,' says he. 'I've got nothing else to give you, but I reckon the Almighty'll foot your bill, for you're a first-class Christian, if ever there was one.' Then he went in, and Bough buried him in regular fancy style----"

"And sent the girl to the nuns at Gueldersdorp, or was she there already?"

Van Busch was in the act of taking back the sardonyx signet-ring. His hand jerked again, so sharply that the ring was jerked into the air, fell to the floor, and rolled under the table. He stooped and reached for it, and asked, with his face hidden by the patriotic tablecloth:

"What girl do you mean?"

His dark face was purple-brown with the exertion of stooping as he rose up. Lady Hannah answered:

"The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp has an orphan ward, a singularly lovely girl of nineteen or twenty, whose surname is Mildare. And it struck me just now--I don't know why now, and never before--that she might be----"

"Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What like is this one?" Van Busch twisted the ring about his little finger, and spoke with a more sluggish lisp and slurring of the consonants than even was usual with him. "Is she short and square, with black hair and round blue eyes, and red cheeks and thick ankles?"

Lady Hannah, despite all her recently-gained experience of Van Busch, had not yet mastered his method of eliciting information.

"Miss Mildare is absolutely the opposite of your description," she declared. "She is quite tall, and very slight and pale, with slender hands and feet, and reddish-bronze hair, and eyes the colour of yellow topaz or old honey, with wonderful black lashes.... I have never seen anything to compare----" She stopped.

What strange eyes the man had, full of lines radiating from the pin-point pupils, scintillating like a snake's.... He said, in his thick, lisping way:

"A beauty, eh? And how long might the nuns have had her?"

"The Mayor's wife told me she has been under the care of the Convent ladies for some seven years."

His brown full face looked solid, and his eyes veiled themselves behind a glassy film. He was thinking, as he said:

"And her name is Mildare, eh? And you know her?"

"I have met her once. She was introduced to me as Miss Lynette Mildare. But just now I find my own affairs unpleasantly absorbing. I am suspected in this place, Mr. Van Busch, and if not actually a prisoner, am certainly under restraint. For how much money down will you undertake to extricate me from this position, and convey me back to Gueldersdorp?"

He shook his head, and for once the scent of gain did not rouse his predatory appetite. He was wondering how it should never have occurred to him before that the scared little white-faced thing might have fallen into kindly hands, and been nursed and cockered up and made a lady of? He was puzzled to account for her remembering the name that had belonged to the man whose grave was at the foot of the Little Kopje. He was conscious of an itching curiosity to find out for his friend Bough whether it really was the Kid or no? What was the little fool of a woman saying in her shrill voice?

"It would be burning your boats, I am quite aware. But if it pays to burn them----" she suggested, with her black eyes probing vainly in the shallow ones.

He roused himself.

"A thousand pounds, English. You've not the money here?"

"No."

"Or a cheque?"

Her laugh jangled contemptuously.

"Do you Boer spies carry cheque-books--upon Secret Service?"