Part 92

"Don't you be 'ard on him, William"--he hardly knew the voice, it was so weak and small--"it's Gawspel truth. To pay you out--at first, for juggin' Walt, I did write them letters--every bloomin' screeve."

"An' sent the pipe and baccy for a birthday present, to make a blushin' fool o' me?" yelled the infuriated Keyse. "All for the crimson sake of a fat 'og of a Dutchman!"

The patriot to whom he referred, mounted on an attenuated mule, and escorted by a Sergeant and six men of the B.S.A., under the superintendence of a large pink officer of the Staff, was at that moment being conducted at a sharp trot out of the lines, to meet a smallish waggon pulled by a span of four that was being brought down from Tweipans by half a dozen Boers in weathered tan-cord and velveteen, battered pot-hats and ragged shooting-jackets, carrying very carefully-tended rifles, mounted on well-fed, wiry little horses, and accompanied by a White Flag. If she had known, what would it have mattered to her? All her thoughts were centred in this furious little man, whose pale, ugly eyes fairly blazed at her, as he repeated:

"To pay--me out. You brawsted little Treachery, you----"

She crimsoned to her hair; you could see the red blood rushing and rushing up from under the peekaboo embroidery in front of the tawdry blowse, in a hurry to tell her tingling ears what cruel names he called her.

"To pay you out at first it was. An' afterwards"--her throat hurt her, and her eyes did smart and burn so--"afterwards I--I wanted ... O Gawd!..." she shook all over--"you'll never walk out wi' me no more after this!"

"You may take your dyin' oath I won't." He was bitterly sarcastic. "Strite, an' no kid, didn't you know when you done--that--I'd never forgive you as long as I lived?"

He plucked the stout package of letters signed "Fare Air" from his indignant bosom, and threw them at her feet, with the new pipe, her hapless gift. His wrath was infinitely more terrible than she had imagined. Her tongue clave to the roof of her mouth. Everything kep' a-spinnin' so, she couldn't 'ardly tell whether she was on 'er 'ead or 'er 'eels. She will remember that day to the last breath she draws....

"Didn't you know it?" the voice of her judge demanded again.

John Tow, finding himself no longer an object of attention, had discreetly vanished.

"Oh, I did, I did!" Her agony was frantic. "Oh, let me go away and hide and die somewhere! Oh, crooil, to break a pore gal's 'art! Wot--wot loves the bloomin' earth under your feet!"

"Garn!"--the scorn of W. Keyse was something awful--"you an' your love----"

She wrenched the cotton lace away from her thin throat, and tore some of her hair out in the strenuous hysteria of her class, and screamed at him:

"Me an' my love!... Go on!... Frow it in me face, an' 'ave no pity! Me an' my love!... Sneer at it, take an' spit on it--ain't it yours all the syme? Oh, for Gawd's syke forgive me!"

He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered:

"So 'elp me Jiminy Cripps, I never will!"

She knew that the oath was irrevocable, and with a faint moan, turned to the great boulder that was behind her, and clung to its hard red bosom as if it had been a mother's. She moaned to him as her thin figure flattened itself against the stone, to let her go away and die somewhere. He stood a moment looking at her, and exulting in his power, meaning her to suffer yet a little longer ere he relented. Secretly, he knew relief that the golden pigtail and the provoking blue eyes of Miss Greta Du Taine had vanished out of Gueldersdorp before the first Act of War. He would have felt them in the way now. Those shining, tearful eyes and the mouth that kissed and clung to his had done their work on the night of the Grand Variety entertainment in the empty Government store. He would pretend to go away and leave her. He would come back, enjoy her astonishment, be melted by renewed entreaties, stoop to relent, overwhelm her with his magnanimity, and then proceed to love-making.

But as a preliminary he swung round upon his heel and strode upwards through the short bush and the tall grasses, the scandalised flowers thrashing his boots. She saw him, although her back was turned. If he could have known how tall he seemed to Emigration Jane as he strode away, W. Keyse would have been tickled to the core. But he turned when he felt sure he was well out of sight, and hurried back.

She was not there.

He was indifferent at first, then angry, then anxious, then disconsolate. Repentance followed fast on the heels of all these moods. He picked up the packet of letters and the rejected pipe, cursing his own cruelty, and sought her up and down the banks, calling her in tones that were urgent, affectionate, upbraiding, appealing; but not for all his luring would the flown bird come back to fist. No more beside the river, or in other places where they had been wont to meet, did W. Keyse encounter Emigration Jane again.

XXXIX

But even without W. Keyse and the vanished author of "Fare Air's" letters the ferny tree-fringed kloof at the bottom of which the beer-coloured river ran over its granite boulders and quartz pebbles, was not empty and void. On Sundays, when the birds returned from the hills, to which they had been scared by the hideous tumult of War, thither after High Mass in the battered little Roman Catholic church in the stad, the Mother-Superior and the Sisters would come, bringing with them such poor food as they had, and picnic soberly. All the week through they had laboured, nursed, and tended the sick and wounded in the Hospitals, and washed and fed and taught the numberless orphans of the siege, and upon this day the Mother-Superior had ruled that they were to be together. And all the week through the thought of it kept them going, as she had hoped. You are to see her holding her little court beside the river upon a certain February afternoon, receiving friends in her sweet, stately fashion, and dispensing hospitality out of the largest and most battered Britannia-metal teapot that ever brewed, what was later originally referred to in the weekly "Social Jottings" column of the Gueldersdorp Siege Gazette as the cheering infusion. The Siege Gazette was an intermittent daily, issued from a subterranean printing-office, for the dissemination of general orders and latest news, fluctuations in the weight and quality of the meat-rations, and the rise and fall of the free-soup level, being also recorded. To its back-files I must refer those who seek a fuller account of the function described by the brilliant journalist who signed herself "Gold Pen," as highly successful. She gives you to understand that the company was distinguished, and the conversation vivid and unflagging. And when you realise that everybody present was suffering more or less from the active pinch of hunger, that social gathering of men and women of British blood becomes heroic and historic and fine.

"Dr Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, was observed," we read. "Gold Pen" also notes "the presence of the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, son of the Bishop of H----, and second curate--on leave--of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street; now happily recovered, thanks to the skill of Dr. Saxham, from an illness, held at no recent date to be incurable. Mr. Fraithorn has undertaken the onerous duties of Chaplain to the Hospitals in charge of the Military Staff. It was gratifying to observe," she continues, "that the Colonel commanding graced the occasion by his martial presence. He was attended by his junior aide, Lieutenant Lord Beauvayse. We also saw Lady Hannah Wrynche with her distinguished husband, Captain Bingham Wrynche, Royal Bay Dragoons, Acting Senior Aide," etc., etc.

"Late apricots from the garden of the ruined Convent, and peaches from its west wall, gathered in the dead of night by Sister Cleophée and Sister Tobias," "Gold Pen" goes on to say, "were greatly appreciated by the guests, each of whom brought his or her own bread."

A most villainous kind of bannock of unleavened mealie-meal and crushed oats, calculated to try the strongest teeth and trouble the toughest digestion, "Gold Pen" might have added. But the game was to make believe you rather enjoyed it than otherwise. If you had no teeth and no digestion, you were allowed a pint and a half of sowens porridge instead; and thus helped your portion of exhausted cavalry mount or your bit of tough mule-meat down. And so you went on like your neighbours, playing the game, while your eyes grew larger and your girth less, and your cheekbones more in evidence with every day that dawned.

Cheekbones have a strange, unnatural effect when they appear in childish faces. There was a child in a rusty double perambulator that had been a stylish baby-carriage only a little while ago, whose wizened face and shrunken hands were pitiable to see. He was wheeled by a sallow woman, with hollow, grey-blue eyes--a woman whose black alpaca gown hung loosely on her wasted figure, and whose shabby, crape-trimmed hat was pinned on anyhow. Siege confinement and siege terrors, siege smells and siege diet, had made strange havoc of the plump comeliness of a matronly lady who once rustled in purple satin befitting a Mayor's wife. She had lost one of her children through diphtheria, and she knew, unless a miracle happened, that she would also lose the boy.

Only look at him! She told you in that dull, toneless voice of hers how sturdy he had been, how strong and masterful--how pretty, too, with his plume of fair hair tumbling into his big, shining, grey eyes! The eyes were bigger than ever now, but the light and the life had sunk out of them, and his round face was pinched, and the colour of old wax. And the arm that hung idly over the side of the little carriage was withered and shrunken--the hand of an old man, and not of a child. The other, under the light shawl that tucked him in, hugged something that bulged under the coverlet.

"His father can't bear to look at him," the Mayor's wife said, glancing at the Mayor's carefully-averted back. "And I'm sure it's no wonder. He just lies like this, day and night, and doesn't want to move, or answer when you speak to him, and he won't eat. The food is dreadful, but still he might try, just to comfort his mother----"