Part 19

The little Irish novice had rung the chapel bell for Sext and None. She could hear, from the nuns' end of the big rambling, two-storied house, the rustling habits sweeping along the passage. She hurried to the door, and tore it open, frantically as though that ravening breath had been hot upon her neck, saw the dear black figure of the Mother sweeping towards her, and rushed into the arms that were held out, hiding from that burning, scorching, hideous memory in the bosom that dead Richard Mildare had turned from in his blindness.

Just as Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the Mayor's promise to introduce him to the loveliest girl he had ever seen in his life, or ever should see, mentally registered a vow that he would keep the old buffer up to that, by listening to his interminable hunting-stories, and laughing at his venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War, sharpened a fellow's faculties....

"It's rum to reflect," Beauvayse said, conscious of perpetrating an epigram, "that from time immemorial the fellow who wants to make up to a young woman has always had to begin by getting round an old man!"

He looked round for the old man, whom the title would have estranged for ever. He had buttonholed the Chief, and was gassing away--joy!--upon the very subject.

"I fancy the ladies of the Convent, who occasionally visit the Hospital, were coming in at this gate. The short nun, I noticed, had a little basket in her hand. Probably they went round to the side entrance, seeing the--ha, ha!--the stoep garrisoned by Her Majesty's Imperial Forces. Certainly.... Without doubt. We respect the Mother-Superior highly. A most gifted, most estimable person in every way, if rather stern and reserved.... Unapproachable, my wife calls her. But Miss Mildare, her ward----"

XXIV

"Miss Mildare!"

The Chief's keen eyes had lightened suddenly. The whole face had darkened and narrowed, and the clipped brown moustache lost its smiling curve, and straightened into a hard line.

"Miss _Mildare_?"

"Why, yes, that is her name.... An orphan, I have heard, and with no living relatives. But she seems happy enough at the Convent, judging by what Mrs. Greening says."

The hearer experienced a momentary feeling of relief and of anger--relief to think that dead Dick Mildare's daughter should have found refuge in such a woman's heart; anger that the woman should have concealed from him the girl's identity, knowing her the object of his own anxious search.

Then he understood. His anger died as suddenly as it had been kindled. He recalled something that he had seen when the rearing horse had inclined perilously towards the footway--that protecting maternal gesture, that swift interposition of the tall, active, black-robed figure between the white-clad, flower-faced, girlish creature and those threatening iron-shod hoofs....

"She loves the girl--Dick Mildare's daughter by the treacherous friend who stole him from her. Is there a doubt? With poor little Lady Lucy Hawting's willowy figure and the same nymph-like droop of the little head, with its rich twists and coils of dead-leaf-coloured hair, shaded by the big black hat. That woman has taken her to her heart, however she came by her; the

## parting would be agony, stern, proud, tender creature that she is! I

suppose she will be doing thundering penance for not having told me, a fellow who simply walked into the place and assegaied her with my death-news. Here's a marrowy bone of gossip Lady Hannah shall never crack. And yet I wouldn't swear there's not an angel husked inside that dried-up little chrysalis. For God made all women, though He only turned out a few of 'em perfect, and some only just a little better than the ruck."

He roused himself from the brown study that brought into relief many lurking lines and furrows in the thin, keen face, as the Chief Medical Officer, fixing him through suspicious eyeglasses, demanded:

"Ye got your full allowance o' sleep last nicht?"

He nodded.

"Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was born not only with eyes and ears, like other infants, but with the capacity for using 'em."

"Ay. It's remarr'kable how many men will daudle complacently through life, from the cradle to the grave, wi'out the remotest consciousness that they're practically blind and no better than deaf, as far as regards real seeing and hearing. But who's your prodeegy?"

"One of Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. They put him on at the Convent with another sentry, their first experience of a night on guard. By not being in a hurry to challenge, and keeping his ears open while a conversation of the confidentially-affectionate kind was going on between a Dutchman--a fellow employed in the booking-office at the railway, on whom I've had my eye for some little time past--and his sweetheart, my townie found out for himself something that most of us knew before, and something else that we wanted to know particularly badly...."

"Namely?"

"For one thing, that the town is a hotbed of spies, and that our friends in laager outside are nightly communicated with by means of flash-signals."

"And that's an indeesputable fact. Toch!" No other combination of letters may convey the guttural, "Have I no' seen the lamps at warr'k mysel', after darr'k, at the end o' the roads that debouch upon the veld! The Dutchman would be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking."

"He will have plenty of time to think where he is at present. When the sentry interfered he was instructing the young woman in a simple but effective code of match-flare signals, by means of which she was to communicate with him when he had cleared out. And he had announced his intention of doing that without delay."

"An' skipping to his freends upo' the Borr'der.... Toch!" The network of wrinkles tightened about the sharp little blue-grey eyes of the Chief Medical Officer. "That would gie a thochtfu' man a kind o' notion that a reese in the temperature may be expectit shortly. An' so you--slept soundly on the strength o' many wakeful nichts to come? Ay, that would be the kind o' information ye were badly wanting!"

"You're wrong, Major. The bit of information was this--from the spy to his friends outside: '_No--news--to-night._'" The keen hazel eyes conveyed something into the Northern blue ones that was not said in words: "'No news to-night.' And the sender of that message was a railway man!"

The wiry hairs of the Chief Medical Officer's red moustache bristled like a cat's.

"Toch! Colonel, you will have reason to be considering me dull in the uptake, but I see through the mud wall now. And so the knowledge that ye have no equal at hiding your deeds o' darkness even in the licht o' the railway-yard was as good to ye as Daffy's Elixir. And when micht we reckon on getting notification from what I may presume to ca' your double surpreese-packet?"

He looked at his watch--a well-used Waterbury, worn upon the silvered steel lip-strap of a cavalry bridle, and said:

"Ten o'clock. At a quarter past eleven I think we may count upon something. The driver of Engine 123 has given me the word of an Irishman from County Kildare; and the stoker, a Cardiff man, and the guard, who hails from Shoreditch, are quite as keen as Kildare."

"You're sending the stuff up North?"

"In the direction of the stretch of railway-line they're busy wrecking, in the hope that it may come in useful."

"Weel, I will gie ye the guid wish that the affair may go off exactly as ye are hoping."

"Thanks, Major! You could hardly word the sentence more happily."

They exchanged a laugh as the Mayor bustled up, rubicund, important, and with a Member of the Committee to introduce.

"Colonel, you'll permit me to present Alderman Brooker, one of our most energetic and valued townsmen, President of the Gas Committee, and an Assistant Borough Magistrate. One of Major Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. Was on sentry-go last night not far from here, and had a most extraordinary experience. Worth your hearing, if you can spare time to listen to my friend's account of it."

"With pleasure, Mr. Mayor."

Brooker, a stout and flabby man, with pouches under biliously tinged eyes, bowed and broke into a violent perspiration, not wholly due to the shiny black frock-coat suit of broadcloth donned for the occasion.

"Sir, I humbly venture to submit that I have been the victim of a conspiracy!"

"Indeed? Step this way, Mr. Brooker."

Brooker, soothed by the courteous affability of the reception, his sense of importance magnified by being led aside, apart from the others, into the official privacy of the stoep-corner, began to be eloquent. He knew, he said, that the story he had to relate would appear almost incredible, but a soldier, a diplomat, a master of strategy, such as the personage to whom he now addressed himself, would understand--none better--how to unravel the tangled web, and follow up the clue to its ending in a den of secret, black, and midnight conspiracy. A blob of foam appeared upon his under-lip. He waved his hands, thick, short-fingered, clammy members....

"My story is as follows, sir...."

"I shall have pleasure in listening to it, Mr. Brooker, on condition that you will do me first the favour of listening to a story of mine?"

Deferred Brooker protested willingness.

"Last night, Mr. Brooker, at about eleven-thirty to a quarter to twelve, I was returning from a little tour of inspection"--the slight riding sjambok the Chief carried pointed over the veld to the northward--"out there, when, passing the south angle of the enclosure of the Convent, where, by my special orders, a double sentry of the Town Guard had been posted, I heard a sound that I will endeavour to reproduce:

"_Gr'rumph! Honk'k! Gr'rumph!_"

Brooker bounded in his Oxford shoes.

The face upon which he glued his bulging eyes was grave to sternness. He stuttered, interrogated by the judicial glance:

"It--it sounds something like a snore."

"It was a snore, Mr. Brooker, and it proceeded from one of the sentries upon guard."

"Sir ... I ... I can expl----"

"Oblige me by not interrupting, Mr. Brooker. This sentry sat upon a short post, his back fitted comfortably into an angle of the Convent fence, his head thrown back, and his mouth wide open. From it, or from the organ immediately above, the snore proceeded. He was having a capital night's rest--in the Service of his Country. And as I halted in front of him, fixing upon him a gaze which was coldly observant, he shivered and ceased to snore, and said":--the wretched Brooker heard his own voice, rendered with marvellous fidelity, speaking in the muffled tone of the sleeper--"'_Annie, it's damned cold to-night; and you've got all the blanket._'"

"Sir ... sir!" The stricken Brooker babbled hideously.... "Colonel ... for mercy's sake!..."

"I could not oblige the gentleman with a blanket, Mr. Brooker, but I relieved him of his rifle and left him, to tell his picket a cock-and-bull story of having been drugged and hypnotised by Boer spies. And--I will overlook it upon the present occasion, but in War-time, Mr. Brooker, men have been shot for less. I think I need not detain you further. Your rifle has been sent to your headquarters--with my card and an explanation. One word more, Mr. Brooker----"

Brooker, grey, streaky, and desperately wretched, was blind to the laughter brimming the keen hazel eyes.

"I am entrusted by the Imperial Government with the preservation of Public Morality in Gueldersdorp, as well as with the maintenance of the Public Safety--and I should be glad of an assurance from you that Mrs. Brooker's Christian name is really Annie?"

"I--I swear it, Colonel!"

Brooker fled, leaving the preserver of public morality to have his laugh out before he rejoined the Staff, glancing at the Waterbury on the short steel chain. Half-past ten. Would the Dop Doctor turn up to appointment, or had the battle with habit and the deadly craving born of indulgence ended in defeat? As his eyes moved from the dial, they lighted upon the man:

"_Clothed and in his right mind...._"

His own words of the night before recurred to memory as he came forwards with his long, light step, greeting the new-comer with the easy, cordial grace of high-breeding.

"Ah, Dr. Saxham, obliged to you for being punctual. Let me introduce you to Major Lord Henry Leighbury, D.S.O., Grenadier Guards, our D.A.A.G. Dr. Saxham, Colonel Ware, Baraland Rifles, and Sir George Wendysh, Wessex Regiment, commanding the Irregular Horse; Captain Bingham Wrynche, Royal Bay Dragoons, my senior aide-de-camp, and his junior, Lieutenant Lord Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars. And Dr. Saxham, Major Taggart, R.A.M.C., our Chief Medical Officer."

He watched the man keenly as he made the introductions, saying to himself that this was better than he had hoped. The ragged black moustache had been shaved away; the frayed but spotless suit of white drill fitted the heavy-shouldered, thin-flanked, muscular figure perfectly; the faded blue flannel shirt, with the white double collar and narrow black tie; the shabby black kamarband about his waist, the black-ribboned Panama, maintaining respectability in extremest old age, as that expensive but lasting headgear is wont to do, possessed, as worn by the Dop Doctor, a certain _cachet_ of style. His slight, curt, almost frowning salutations displayed a well-graduated recognition of the official status of each individual to whom he was made known, betokening the man accustomed to move in circles where such knowledge and the application of it was indispensable, and who knew, too, that slight from him would have given chagrin. But another moment, and the junior Medical Officer, a black-avised little Irishman from County Meath, had gripped him by both hands, and was exclaiming in his juicy brogue, real delight beaming in his round, rosy face:

"Saxham! Saxham of St. Stephens, and the grand ould days! Deny me now, to my face. Say, 'Tom McFadyen, I don't know you,' if you dare."

The blue eyes shone out vivid gentian-colour in the kindly smile that illumined them, the stern lips parted in a laugh that showed the sound white closely-set teeth.

"Tom McFadyen, I do know you. But if you offer to pay me that cab-fare you owe me, I shall say I'm wrong, and that it's another man."

"Hould your tongue, jewel," drolled the little junior, who delighted in exaggerating the brogue that tripped naturally off his Irish tongue. "Don't be after giving me away to the Chief and the Senior that believe me, by me own account, to be descended from Ollamh Fodla, that was King of Tara, and owned the cow-grazing from Trim to Athboy, and ate boiled turnips off shields of gold before potatoes were invented, when the bog-oaks were growing as acorns on the tree. And as to the cab-fare, sure I hailed the hansom out of politeness to your honour's glory, the day that saw me going off to the Army Medical School at Netley, wid all my worldly belongin's in wan ould hat-box and the half of a carpet-bag. Wirra, wirra! but it's some folks have luck, says I, as the train took me out av' Waterloo in a third-class smoker, while you were left on the platform sheddin' half-crowns out av every pore for the newspaper boys an' porters to pick up, and smilin' like a baby dhramin' av the bottle. You'd passed your exam in Anatomy wid wan hand held behind you an' a glove on the other, you'd got your London University Scholarship in Physiology, and you'd fallen head over ears in love with the prettiest and sweetest girl that ever wore out shoe-leather. You wrote to me two years later to say you'd been appointed an in-surgeon on the Junior Staff, an' that you were engaged to be married. But divil the taste of weddin'-cake did I ever get off you. What----"

The little Irishman, thoughtlessly rattling on, pulled up in an instant, seeing the ghastly unmistakable change upon the other's face. He remembered the grim black reason for the change in Saxham, and for once, his habitual tact deserted him. His rosy gills purpled, even as had the Mayor's on the Dop Doctor's entrance. His eyes winced under the heavy petrifying, unseeing stare of Saxham's blue ones....

"Sorry to stem the flood of your reminiscences, McFadyen, but we're going to overhaul the Hospital now."

It was the voice of the visitor who had come to the Harris Street house on the previous night, the tall, loosely-built, closely-knit figure in the easily fitting Service-dress that now stepped across the gulf that had suddenly opened between the two old friends, and laid a hand in pleasant, familiar fashion upon Saxham's heavy, rather bowed shoulders. But for that scholar's stoop they would have been of equal height. He went on: "You will be able to give us points, Saxham, where they will be needed most. Can't expect Colonial institutions, even at the best, to keep abreast of London."

The blue eyes met his almost defiantly.

"As I think I remember telling you, sir, it is five years since I saw London."

"Well, I don't blame you for taking a long holiday while it was procurable. There are a few of us who would benefit by a gallop without the halter, eh, Taggart?"

Saxham would not stoop even to benefit indirectly by the shrewd, kindly tact. He drew himself to his full height, and the words were spoken with such ringing clearness that they arrested the attention of every man present.

"My holiday was compulsory. I underwent--innocently--a legal prosecution for malpractice. The Crown Jury decided in my favour, but my West End connection was ruined. I resigned my Hospital and other appointments, and left England."

"Ay!" It was the Chief Medical Officer's broad Scots tongue that droned out the bagpipe note. "Weel, Doctor, it's an ill wind blaws naebody guid, and ye canna expect Captain McFadyen or mysel' to sympatheese overmuch wi' the West End for a loss that is our gain. And, Colonel, it's in my memory that ye had set your mind on beginnin' wi' the Operating Theatre?..."

XXV

The chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers of the Garrison Staff were making the rounds, and was stricken to the soul by the discovery that the Reverend Julius Fraithorn had had no breakfast. Occupying a small, single-cotted, electric-bell-less room in the outlying ward--brick-lined and corrugated-iron-built like the greater building, and reserved for infectious cases--the Reverend Julius might have been said to be marooned, had not his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted young face created such hot competition among the nurses for the privilege of attending on him, that he had frequently received breakfast and dinner in duplicate, and once three teas. Some of the probationers, reared in the outer darkness of Dissent, knew no better than to term him "the minister." To the matron, who was High Church, he existed as "Father Fraithorn." Julius is hardly complete to the reader without an intimation that he very dearly loved to be dubbed "Father." The matron had never failed in this.

A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Margaret's, lay under the bony hand--a mere bunch of fleshless fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had been a man's arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say that, after a bright, enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen band of West-Central London barrow-boys at a Rest Home at Cookham-on-Thames, he has started his Friday evening Confirmation classes for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and obtained a record attendance by the simple plan of rewarding punctual attendance and ultimate mastery gained over the Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs of trousers. Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that the first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners would be as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean-smelling, airy Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearning for the stuffy West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew of London roughs hulking and hustling on the benches, learning per medium of "the dodger," that one's duty to one's neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to refrain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-raiding, hustling, and jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or iron knuckle-dusters, and not to get drunk before Saturday night.

He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of physicians--honestly-meaning wiseacres--ignorant of the shifts, the fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the panting, tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company with the hale traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, protracted journeys, the neglect and discomfort of the inns and taverns and boarding-houses, where Kaffirs are the servants, and dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them because he must, and struggled on, learning by painful experience that fever-patches are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to the man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was getting better, and would be one day able to go back to the Clergy House, and take up his mission in the West and West-Central districts, and begin work again.

Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light chair slipped in behind them, hospital-fashion, he looked beyond the whitewashed walls northwards, to grimy London. He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still apologising about the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the sacred place, and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered roof, the organ pealed ... then the ward seemed to fill with men in khaki Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of quiet movements and well-bred gestures, obviously stamped with the _cachet_ of authority. Upright, alert, well-knit, and strong, the visitors exhaled the compound fragrance of healthy virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the poor sufferer yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing about his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in which his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally smote his breast and repented. What was he, the unworthy servant of Heaven, that he should dare to oppose the Holy Will?

"Weel now, and how are we the day?" said the Chief Medical Officer, presented by the Resident Surgeon to the occupant of the bed. He read approaching death in the sunken face against the pillows, and in the feeble pulse as he touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon, catching the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting information that was not needed.

"It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the conventional answer," said Julius Fraithorn. "To be plain and brief, I am suffering from tuberculous lung-disease, and I am advised that I have not many days to live."

He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon.

"Everything that can be done for me here is done. I cannot be too thankful. But I should have liked--I should have wished to have been spared to return to England, if not to live a little longer among my friends, at least to ..." He broke off panting, and his rattling breaths seemed to shake him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; he wheezed like the mildewed harmonium in the Hospital chapel, on which he had once tried to play. When he had spoken, his voice had had the flat, deadly softness of the exhausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved he had suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced the wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin.

"I can't!" he gasped out. "You see----"