The Judgment House

by Gilbert Parker

BOOK IV

CHAPTER XXIX

THE MENACE OF THE MOUNTAIN

Far away, sharply cutting the ether, rise the great sterile peaks and ridges. Here a stark, bare wall like a prison which shuts in a city of men forbidden the blithe world of sun and song and freedom; yonder, a giant of a lost world stretched out in stony ease, sleeping on, while over his grey quiet, generations of men pass. First came savage, warring, brown races alien to each other; then following, white races with faces tanned and burnt by the sun, and smothered in unkempt beard and hair—men restless and coarse and brave, and with ancient sins upon them; but with the Bible in their hands and the language of the prophets on their lips; with iron will, with hatred as deep as their race-love is strong; they with their cattle and their herds, and the clacking wagons carrying homes and fortunes, whose women were housewives and warriors too. Coming after these, men of fairer aspect, adventurous, self-willed, intent to make cities in the wilderness; to win open spaces for their kinsmen, who had no room to swing the hammer in the workshops of their far-off northern island homes; or who, having room, stood helpless before the furnaces where the fires had left only the ashes of past energies.

Up there, these mountains which, like Marathon, look on the sea. But lower the gaze from the austere hills, slowly to the plains below. First the grey of the mountains, turning to brown, then the bare bronze rock giving way to a tumbled wilderness of boulders, where lizards lie in the sun, where the meerkat startles the gazelle. Then the bronze merging into a green so deep and strong that it resembles a blanket spread upon the uplands, but broken by kopjes, shelterless and lonely, rising here and there like watch-towers. After that, below and still below, the flat and staring plain, through which runs an ugly rift turning and twisting like a snake, and moving on and on, till lost in the arc of other hills away to the east and the south: a river in the waste, but still only a muddy current stealing between banks baked and sterile, a sinister stream, giving life to the veld, as some gloomy giver of good gifts would pay a debt of atonement.

On certain Dark Days of 1899-1900, if you had watched these turgid waters flow by, your eyes would have seen tinges of red like blood; and following the stain of red, gashed lifeless things, which had been torn from the ranks of sentient beings.

Whereupon, lifting your eyes from the river, you would have seen the answer to your question—masses of men mounted and unmounted, who moved, or halted, or stood like an animal with a thousand legs controlled by one mind. Or again you would have observed those myriad masses plunging across the veld, still in cohering masses, which shook and broke and scattered, regathering again, as though drawn by a magnet, but leaving stark remnants in their wake.

Great columns of troops which had crossed the river and pushed on into a zone of fierce fire, turn and struggle back again across the stream; other thousands of men, who had not crossed, succour their wounded, and retreat steadily, bitterly to places of safety, the victims of blunders from which come the bloody punishment of valour.

Beyond the grey mountains were British men and women waiting for succour from forces which poured death in upon them from the malevolent kopjes, for relief from the ravages of disease and hunger. They waited in a straggling town of the open plain circled by threatening hills, where the threat became a blow, and the blow was multiplied a million times. Gaunt, fighting men sought to appease the craving of starvation by the boiled carcasses of old horses; in caves and dug-outs, feeble women, with undying courage, kept alive the flickering fires of life in their children; and they smiled to cheer the tireless, emaciated warriors who went out to meet death, or with a superior yet careful courage stayed to receive or escape it.

When night came, across the hills and far away in the deep blue, white shaking streams of light poured upward, telling the besieged forces over there at Lordkop that rescue would come, that it was moving on to the mountain. How many times had this light in the sky flashed the same grave pledge in the mystic code of the heliograph, "We are gaining ground—we will reach you soon." How many times, however, had the message also been, "Not yet—but soon."

Men died in this great camp from wounds and from fever, and others went mad almost from sheer despair; yet whenever the Master Player called, they sprang to their places with a new-born belief that he who had been so successful in so many long-past battles would be right in the end with his old rightness, though he had been wrong so often on the Dreitval.

Others there were who were sick of the world and wished "to be well out of it"—as they said to themselves. Some had been cruelly injured, and desire of life was dead in them; others had given injury, and remorse had slain peace. Others still there were who, having done evil all their lives, knew that they could not retrace their steps, and yet shrank from a continuance of the old bad things.

Some indeed, in the red futile sacrifice, had found what they came to find; but some still were left whose recklessness did not avail. Comrades fell beside them, but, unscathed, they went on fighting. Injured men were carried in hundreds to the hospitals, but no wounds brought them low. Bullets were sprayed around them, but none did its work for them. Shells burst near, yet no savage shard mutilated their bodies.

Of these was Ian Stafford.

Three times he had been in the fore-front of the fight where Death came sweeping down the veld like rain, but It passed him by. Horses and men fell round his guns, yet he remained uninjured.

He was patient. If Death would not hasten to meet him, he would wait. Meanwhile, he would work while he could, but with no thought beyond the day, no vision of the morrow.

He was one of the machines of war. He was close to his General, he was the beloved of his men, still he was the man with no future; though he studied the campaign with that thoroughness which had marked his last years in diplomacy.

He was much among his own wounded, much with others who were comforted by his solicitude, by the courage of his eye, and the grasp of his firm, friendly hand. It was at what the soldiers called the Stay Awhile Hospital that he came in living touch again with the life he had left behind.

He knew that Rudyard Byng had come to South Africa; but he knew no more. He knew that Jasmine had, with Lady Tynemouth, purchased a ship and turned it into a hospital at a day's notice; but as to whether these two had really come to South Africa, and harboured at the Cape, or Durban, he had no knowledge. He never looked at the English newspapers which arrived at Dreitval River. He was done with that old world in which he once worked; he was concerned only for this narrow field where an Empire's fate was being solved.

Night, the dearest friend of the soldier, had settled on the veld. A thousand fires were burning, and there were no sounds save the murmuring voices of myriads of men, and the stamp of hoofs where the Cavalry and Mounted Infantry horses were picketed. Food and fire, the priceless comfort of a blanket on the ground, and a saddle or kit for a pillow gave men compensation for all the hardships and dangers of the day; and they gave little thought to the morrow.

The soldier lives in the present. His rifle, his horse, his boots, his blanket, the commissariat, a dry bit of ground to sleep on—these are the things which occupy his mind. His heroism is incidental, the commonplace impulse of the moment. He does things because they are there to do, not because some great passion, some exaltation, seizes him. His is the real simple life. So it suddenly seemed to Stafford as he left his tent, after he had himself inspected every man and every horse in his battery that lived through the day of death, and made his way towards the Stay Awhile Hospital.

"This is the true thing," he said to himself as he gazed at the wide camp. He turned his face here and there in the starlight, and saw human life that but now was moving in the crash of great guns, the shrieking of men terribly wounded, the agony of mutilated horses, the bursting of shells, the hissing scream of the pom-pom, and the discordant cries of men fighting an impossible fight.

"There is no pretense here," he reflected. "It is life reduced down to the bare elements. There is no room for the superficial thing. It's all business. It's all stark human nature."

At that moment his eye caught one of those white messages of the sky flashing the old bitter promise, "We shall reach you soon." He forgot himself, and a great spirit welled up in him.

"Soon!" The light in the sky shot its message over the hills.

That was it—the present, not the past. Here was work, the one thing left to do.

"And it has to be done," he said aloud, as he walked on swiftly, a spring to his footstep. Presently he mounted and rode away across the veld. Buried in his thoughts, he was only subconsciously aware of what he saw until, after near an hour's riding, he pulled rein at the door of the Stay Awhile Hospital, which was some miles in the rear of the main force.

As he entered, a woman in a nurse's garb passed him swiftly. He scarcely looked at her; he was only conscious that she was in great haste. Her eyes seemed looking at some inner, hidden thing, and, though they glanced at him, appeared not to see him or to realize more than that some one was passing. But suddenly, to both, after they had passed, there came an arrest of attention. There was a consciousness, which had nothing to do with the sight of the eyes, that a familiar presence had gone by. Each turned quickly, and their eyes came back from regarding the things of the imagination, and saw each other face to face. The nurse gave an exclamation of pleasure and ran forward.

Stafford held out a hand. It seemed to him, as he did it, that it stretched across a great black gulf and found another hand in the darkness beyond.

"Al'mah!" he said, in a voice of protest as of companionship.

Of all those he had left behind, this was the one being whom to meet was not disturbing. He wished to encounter no one of that inner circle of his tragic friendship; but he realized that Al'mah had had her tragedy too, and that her suffering could not be less than his own. The same dark factor had shadowed the lives of both. Adrian Fellowes had injured them both through the same woman, had shaken, if not shattered, the fabric of their lives. However much they two were blameworthy, they had been sincere, they had been honourable in their dishonour, they had been "falsely true." They were derelicts of life, with the comradeship of despair as a link between them.

"Al'mah," he said again, gently. Then, with a bitter humour, he added, "You here—I thought you were a prima donna!"

The flicker of a smile crossed her odd, fine, strong face. "This is grand opera," she said. "It is the Nibelungen Ring of England."

"To end in the Twilight of the Gods?" he rejoined with a hopeless kind of smile.

They turned to the outer door of the hospital and stepped into the night. For a moment they stood looking at the great camp far away to right and left, and to the lone mountains yonder, where the Boer commandoes held the passes and trained their merciless armament upon all approaches. Then he said at last: "Why have you come here? You had your work in England."

"What is my work?" she asked.

"To heal the wounded," he answered.

"I am trying to do that," she replied.

"You are trying to heal bodies, but it is a bigger, greater thing to heal the wounded mind."

"I am trying to do that too. It is harder than the other."

"Whose minds are you trying to heal?" he questioned, gently.

"'Physician heal thyself' was the old command, wasn't it? But that is harder still."

"Must one always be a saint to do a saintly thing?" he asked.

"I am not clever," she replied, "and I can't make phrases. But must one always be a sinner to do a wicked thing? Can't a saint do a wicked thing, and a sinner do a good thing without being called the one or the other?"

"I don't think you need apologize for not being able to make phrases. I suppose you'd say there is neither absolute saintliness nor absolute wickedness, but that life is helplessly composite of both, and that black really may be white. You know the old phrase, 'Killing no murder.'"

She seemed to stiffen, and her lips set tightly for a minute; then, as though by a great effort, she laughed bitterly.

"Murder isn't always killing," she replied. "Don't you remember the protest in Macbeth, 'Time was, when the brains were out the man would die'?" Then, with a little quick gesture towards the camp, she added, "When you think of to-day, doesn't it seem that the brains are out, and yet that the man still lives? I'm not a soldier, and this awful slaughter may be the most wonderful tactics, but it's all beyond my little mind."

"Your littleness is not original enough to attract notice," he replied with kindly irony. "There is almost an epidemic of it. Let us hope we shall have an antidote soon."

There was a sudden cry from inside the hospital. Al'mah shut her eyes for a moment, clinched her fingers, and became very pale; then she recovered herself, and turned her face towards the door, as though waiting for some one to come out.

"What is the matter?" he asked. "Some bad case?"

"Yes—very bad," she replied.

"One you've been attending?"

"Yes."

"What arm—the artillery?" he asked with sudden interest.

"Yes, the artillery."

He turned towards the door of the hospital again. "One of my men? What battery? Do you know?"

"Not yours—Schiller's."

"Schiller's! A Boer?"

She nodded. "A Boer spy, caught by Boer bullets as he was going back."

"When was that?"

"This morning early."

"The little business at Wortmann's Drift?"

She nodded. "Yes, there."

"I don't quite understand. Was he in our lines—a Boer spy?"

"Yes. But he wore British uniform, he spoke English. He was an Englishman once."

Suddenly she came up close to him, and looked into his face steadily. "I will tell you all," she said scarce above a whisper. "He came to spy, but he came also to see his wife. She had written to ask him not to join the Boers, as he said he meant to do; or, if he had, to leave them and join his own people. He came, but not to join his fellow-countrymen. He came to get money from his wife; and he came to spy."

An illuminating thought shot into Stafford's mind. He remembered something that Byng once told him.

"His wife is a nurse?" he asked in a low tone.

"She is a nurse."

"She knew, then, that he was a spy?" he asked.

"Yes, she knew. I suppose she ought to be tried by court-martial. She did not expose him. She gave him a chance to escape. But he was shot as he tried to reach the Boer lines."

"And was brought back here to his wife—to you! Did he let them"—he nodded towards the hospital—"know he was your husband?"

When she spoke again her voice showed strain, but it did not tremble. "Of course. He would not spare me. He never did. It was always like that."

He caught her hand in his. "You have courage enough for a hundred," he said.

"I have suffered enough for a hundred," she responded.

Again that sharp cry rang out, and again she turned anxiously towards the door.

"I came to South Africa on the chance of helping him in some way," she replied. "It came to me that he might need me."

"You paid the price of his life once to Kruger—after the Raid, I've heard," he said.

"Yes, I owed him that, and as much more as was possible," she responded with a dark, pained look.

"His life is in danger—an operation?" he questioned.

"Yes. There is one chance; but they could not give him an anaesthetic, and they would not let me stay with him. They forced me away—out here." She appeared to listen again. "That was his voice—that crying," she added presently.

"Wouldn't it be better he should go? If he recovers there would only be—"

"Oh yes, to be tried as a spy—a renegade Englishman! But he would rather live in spite of that, if it was only for an hour."

"To love life so much as that—a spy!" Stafford reflected.

"Not so much love of life as fear of—" She stopped short.

"To fear—silence and peace!" he remarked darkly, with a shrug of his shoulders. Then he added: "Tell me, if he does not die, and if—if he is pardoned by any chance, do you mean to live with him again?"

A bitter laugh broke from her. "How do I know? What does any woman know what she will do until the situation is before her! She may mean to do one thing and do the complete opposite. She may mean to hate, and will end by loving. She may mean to kiss and will end by killing. She may kiss and kill too all in one moment, and still not be inconsistent. She would have the logic of a woman. How do I know what I would do—what I will do!"

The door of the hospital opened. A surgeon came out, and seeing Al'mah, moved towards the two. Stafford went forward hurriedly, but Al'mah stood like one transfixed. There was a whispered word, and then Stafford came back to her.

"You will not need to do anything," he said.

"He is gone—like that!" she whispered in an awed voice. "Death, death—so many die!" She shuddered.

Stafford passed her arm through his, and drew her towards the door of the hospital.

A half-hour later Stafford emerged again from the hospital, his head bent in thought. He rode slowly back to his battery, unconscious of the stir of life round him, of the shimmering white messages to the besieged town beyond the hills. He was thinking of the tragedy of the woman he had left tearless and composed beside the bedside of the man who had so vilely used her. He was reflecting how her life, and his own, and the lives of at least three others, were so tangled together that what twisted the existence of one disturbed all. In one sense the woman he had just left in the hospital was nothing to him, and yet now she seemed to be the only living person to whom he was drawn.

He remembered the story he had once heard in Vienna of a man and a woman who both had suffered betrayal, who both had no longer a single illusion left, who had no love for each other at all, in whom indeed love was dead—a mangled murdered thing; and yet who went away to Corfu together, and there at length found a pathway out of despair in the depths of the sea. Between these two there had never been even the faint shadow of romance or passion; but in the terrible mystery of pain and humiliation, they had drawn together to help each other, through a breach of all social law, in pity of each other. He apprehended the real meaning of the story when Vienna was alive with it, but he understood far, far better now.

A pity as deep as any feeling he had ever known had come to him as he stood with Al'mah beside the bed of her dead renegade man; and it seemed to him that they two also might well bury themselves in the desert together, and minister to each other's despair. It was only the swift thought of a moment, which faded even as it saw the light; but it had its origin in that last flickering sense of human companionship which dies in the atmosphere of despair. "Every man must live his dark hours alone," a broken-down actor once said to Stafford as he tried to cheer him when the last thing he cared for had been taken from him—his old, faded, misshapen wife; when no faces sent warm glances to him across the garish lights. "It is no use," this Roscius had said, "every man must live his dark hours alone."

That very evening, after the battle of the Dreitval, Jigger, Stafford's trumpeter, had said a thing to him which had struck a chord that rang in empty chambers of his being. He had found Jigger sitting disconsolate beside a gun, which was yet grimy and piteous with the blood of men who had served it, and he asked the lad what his trouble was.

In reply Jigger had said, "When it 'it 'm 'e curled up like a bit o' shaving. An' when I done what I could 'e says, 'It's a speshul for one now, an' it's lonely goin',' 'e says. When I give 'im a drink 'e says, 'It 'd do me more good later, little 'un'; an' 'e never said no more except, 'One at a time is the order—only one.'"

Not even his supper had lifted the cloud from Jigger's face, and Stafford had left the lad trying to compose a letter to the mother of the dead man, who had been an especial favourite with the trumpeter from the slums.

Stafford was roused from his reflections by the grinding, rumbling sound of a train. He turned his face towards the railway line.

"A troop-train—more food for the dragons," he said to himself. He could not see the train itself, but he could see the head-light of the locomotive, and he could hear its travail as it climbed slowly the last incline to the camp.

"Who comes there!" he said aloud, and in his mind there swept a premonition that the old life was finding him out, that its invisible forces were converging upon him. But did it matter? He knew in his soul that he was now doing the right thing, that he had come out in the open where all the archers of penalty had a fair target for their arrows. He wished to be "Free among the dead that are wounded and that lie in the grave and are out of remembrance;" but he would do no more to make it so than tens of thousands of other men were doing on these battle-fields.

"Who comes there!" he said again, his eyes upon the white, round light in the distance, and he stood still to try and make out the black, winding, groaning thing.

Presently he heard quick footsteps.

A small, alert figure stopped short, a small, abrupt hand saluted. "The General Commanding 'as sent for you, sir."

It was trumpeter Jigger of the Artillery.

"Are you the General's orderly, then?" asked Stafford quizzically.

"The orderly's gone w'ere 'e thought 'e'd find you, and I've come w'ere I know'd you'd be, sir."

"Where did he think he'd find me?"

"Wiv the 'osses, sir."

A look of gratification crossed Stafford's face. He was well known in the army as one who looked after his horses and his men. "And what made you think I was at the hospital, Jigger?"

"Becos you'd been to the 'osses, sir."

"Did you tell the General's orderly that?"

"No, your gryce—no, sir," he added quickly, and a flush of self-reproach came to his face, for he prided himself on being a real disciplinarian, a disciple of the correct thing. "I thought I'd like 'im to see our 'osses, an' 'ow you done 'em, an' I'd find you as quick as 'e could, wiv a bit to the good p'r'aps."

Stafford smiled. "Off you go, then. Find that orderly. Say, Colonel Stafford's compliments to the General Commanding and he will report himself at once. See that you get it straight, trumpeter."

Jigger would rather die than not get it straight, and his salute made that quite plain.

"It's made a man of him, anyhow," Stafford said to himself, as he watched the swiftly disappearing figure. "He's as straight as a nail, body and mind—poor little devil.... How far away it all seems!"

A quarter of an hour later he was standing beside the troop-train which he had seen labouring to its goal. It was carrying the old regiment of the General Officer Commanding, who had sent Stafford to its Colonel with an important message. As the two officers stood together watching the troops detrain and make order out of the chaos of baggage and equipment, Stafford's attention was drawn to a woman some little distance away, giving directions about her impedimenta.

"Who is the lady?" he asked, while in his mind was a sensible stir of recognition.

"Ah, there's something like the real thing!" his companion replied. "She is doing a capital bit of work. She and Lady Tynemouth have got a hospital-ship down at Durban. She's come to link it up better with the camp. It's Rudyard Byng's wife. They're both at it out here."

"Who comes there!" Stafford had exclaimed a moment before with a sense of premonition.

Jasmine had come.

He drew back in the shadow as she turned round towards them.

"To the Stay Awhile—right!" he heard a private say in response to her directions.

He saw her face, but not clearly. He had glimpse of a Jasmine not so daintily pretty as of old, not so much of a dresden-china shepherdess; but with the face of a woman who, watching the world with understanding eyes, and living with an understanding heart, had taken on something of the mysterious depths of the Life behind life. It was only a glimpse he had, but it was enough. It was more than enough.

"Where is Byng?" he asked his fellow-officer.

"He's been up there with Tain's Brigade for a fortnight. He was in Kimberley, but got out before the investment, went to Cape Town, and came round here—to be near his wife, I suppose."

"He is soldiering, then?"

"He was a Colonel in the Rand Rifles once. He's with the South African Horse now in command of the regiment attached to Tain. Tain's out of your beat—away on the right flank there."

Presently Stafford saw Jasmine look in their direction; then, on seeing Stafford's companion, came forward hastily. The Colonel left Stafford and went to meet her.

A moment afterwards, she turned and looked at Stafford. Her face was now deadly pale, but it showed no agitation. She was in the light of an electric lamp, and he was in the shadow. For one second only she gazed at him, then she turned and moved away to the cape-cart awaiting her. The Colonel saw her in, then returned to Stafford.

"Why didn't you come and be introduced?" the Colonel asked. "I told her who you were."

"Hospital-ships are not in my line," Stafford answered casually. "Women and war don't go together."

"She's a nurse, she's not a woman," was the paradoxical reply.

"She knows Byng is here?"

"I suppose so. It looks like a clever bit of strategy—junction of forces. There's a lot of women at home would like the chance she has—at a little less cost."

"What is the cost?"

"Well, that ship didn't cost less than a hundred thousand pounds."

"Is that all?"

The Colonel looked at Stafford in surprise: but Stafford was not thinking of the coin.

CHAPTER XXX

"AND NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET!"

As the cape-cart conveying Jasmine to the hospital moved away from the station, she settled down into the seat beside the driver with the helplessness of one who had received a numbing blow. Her body swayed as though she would faint, and her eyes closed, and stayed closed for so long a time, that Corporal Shorter, who drove the rough little pair of Argentines, said to her sympathetically:

"It's all right, ma'am. We'll be there in a jiffy. Don't give way."

This friendly solicitude had immediate effect. Jasmine sat up, and thereafter held herself as though she was in her yellow salon yonder in London.

"Thank you," she replied serenely to Corporal Shorter. "It was a long, tiring journey, and I let myself go for a moment."

"A good night's rest'll do you a lot of good, ma'am," he ventured. Then he added, "Beggin' pardon, ain't you Mrs. Colonel Rudyard Byng?"

She turned and looked at the man inquiringly. "Yes, I am Mrs. Byng."

"Thank you, ma'am. Now how did I know? Why," he chuckled, "I saw a big B on your hand-bag, and I knew you was from the hospital-ship—they told me that at the Stay Awhile; and the rest was easy, ma'am. I had a mate along o' your barge. He was one of them the Boers got at Talana Hill. They chipped his head-piece nicely—just like the 4.7's flay the kopjes up there. My mate's been writing to me about you. We're a long way from home, Joey and me, and a bit o' kindness is a bit of all right to us."

"Where is your home?" Jasmine asked, her fatigue and oppression lifting.

He chuckled as though it were a joke, while he answered: "Australia onct and first. My mate, Joey Clynes, him that's on your ship, we was both born up beyond Bendigo. When we cut loose from the paternal leash, so to speak, we had a bit of boundary-riding, rabbit-killing, shearing and sun-downing—all no good, year by year. Then we had a bit o' luck and found a mob of warrigals—horses run wild, you know. We stalked 'em for days in the droughttime to a water-course, and got 'em, and coaxed 'em along till the floods come; then we sold 'em, and with the hard tin shipped for to see the world. So it was as of old. And by and by we found ourselves down here, same as all the rest, puttin' in a bit o' time for the Flag."

Jasmine turned on him one of those smiles which had made her so many friends in the past—a smile none the less alluring because it had lost that erstime flavour of artifice and lure which, however hidden, had been part of its power. Now it was accompanied by no slight drooping of the eyelids. It brightened a look which was direct and natural.

"It's a good thing to have lived in the wide distant spaces of the world," she responded. "A man couldn't easily be mean or small where life is so simple and so large."

His face flushed with pleasure. She was so easy to get on with, he said to himself; and she certainly had a wonderfully kind smile. But he felt too that she needed greater wisdom, and he was ready to give it—a friendly characteristic of the big open spaces "where life is so simple and so large."

"Well, that might be so 'long o' some continents," he remarked, "but it wasn't so where Joey Clynes and me was nourished, so to speak. I tripped up on a good many mean things from Bendigo to Thargomindah and back around. The back-blocks has its tricks as well as the towns, as you would see if you come across a stock-rider with a cheque to be broke in his hand. I've seen six months' wages go bung in a day with a stock-rider on the gentle jupe. But again, peradventure, I've seen a man that had lost ten thousand sheep tramp fifty miles in a blazing sun with a basket of lambs on his back, savin' them two switherin' little papillions worth nothin' at all, at the risk of his own life—just as mates have done here on this salamanderin' veld; same as Colonel Byng did to-day along o' Wortmann's Drift."

Jasmine had been trying to ask a question concerning her husband ever since the man had mentioned his name, and had not been able to do so. She had never spoken of him directly to any one since she had left England; had never heard from him; had written him no word; was, so far as the outer acts of life were concerned, as distant from him as Corporal Shorter was from his native Bendigo. She had been busy as she had never before been in her life, in a big, comprehensive, useful way. It had seemed to her in England, as she carried through the negotiations for the Valoria, fitted it out for the service it was to render, directed its administration over the heads of the committee appointed, for form's sake, to assist Lady Tynemouth and herself, that the spirit of her grandfather was over her, watching her, inspiring her. This had become almost an obsession with her. Her grandfather had had belief in her, delight in her; and now the innumerable talks she had had with him, as to the way he had done things, gave her confidence and a key to what she had to do. It was the first real work; for what she did for Ian Stafford in diplomacy was only playing upon the weakness of human nature with a skilled intelligence, with an instinctive knowledge of men and a capacity for managing them. The first real pride she had ever felt soothed her angry soul.

Her grandfather had been more in her mind than any one else—than either Rudyard or Ian Stafford. Towards both of these her mind had slowly and almost unconsciously changed, and she wished to think about neither. There had been a revolution in her nature, and all her tragic experience, her emotions, and her faculties, had been shaken into a crucible where the fire of pain and revolt burned on and on and on. From the crucible there had come as yet no precipitation of life's elements, and she scarcely knew what was in her heart. She tried to smother every thought concerning the past. She did not seek to find her bearings, or to realize in what country of the senses and the emotions she was travelling.

One thing was present, however, at times, and when it rushed over her in its fulness, it shook her as the wind shakes the leaf on a tree—a sense of indignation, of anger, or resentment. Against whom? Against all. Against Rudyard, against Ian Stafford; but most of all, a thousand times most against a dead man, who had been swept out of life, leaving behind a memory which could sting murderously.

Now, when she heard of Rudyard's bravery at Wortmann's Drift, a curious thrill of excitement ran through her veins, or it would be truer to say that a sensation new and strange vibrated in her blood. She had heard many tales of valour in this war, and more than one hero of the Victoria Cross had been in her charge at Durban; but as a child's heart might beat faster at the first words of a wonderful story, so she felt a faint suffocation in the throat and her brooding eyes took on a brighter, a more objective look, as she heard the tale of Wortmann's Drift.

"Tell me about it," she said, yet turned her head away from her eager historian.

Corporal Shorter's words were addressed to the smallest pink ear he had ever seen except on a baby, but he was only dimly conscious of that. He was full of a man's pride in a man's deed.

"Well, it was like this," he recited. "Gunter's horse bolted—Dick Gunter's in the South African Horse same as Colonel Byng—his lot. Old Gunter's horse gits away with him into the wide open. I s'pose there'd been a hunderd Boers firing at the runaway for three minutes, and at last off comes Gunter. He don't stir for a minute or more, then we see him pick himself up a bit quick, but settle back again. And while we was lookin' and tossin' pennies like as to his chances out there, a grey New Zealand mare nips out across the veld stretchin' every string. We knowed her all right, that grey mare—a regular Mrs. Mephisto, w'ich belongs to Colonel Byng. Do the Boojers fire at him? Don't they! We could see the spots of dust where the bullets struck, spittin', spittin', spittin', and Lord knows how many hunderd more there was that didn't hit the ground. An' the grey mare gets there. As cool as a granadillar, down drops Colonel Byng beside old Gunter; down goes the grey mare—Colonel Byng had taught her that trick, like the Roosian Cossack hosses. Then up on her rolls old Gunter, an' up goes Colonel Byng, and the grey mare switchin' her bobtail, as if she was havin' a bit of mealies in the middle o' the day. But when they was both on, then the band begun to play. Men was fightin' of course, but it looked as if the whole smash stopped to see what the end would be. It was a real pretty race, an' the grey mare takin' it as free as if she was carryin' a little bit of a pipkin like me instead of twenty-six stone. She's a flower, that grey mare! Once she stumbled, an' we knowed it wasn't an ant-bear's hole she'd found in the veld, and that she'd been hurt. But they know, them hosses, that they must do as their Baases do; and they fight right on. She come home with the two all right. She switched round a corner and over a nose of land where that crossfire couldn't hit the lot; an' there was the three of 'em at 'ome for a cup o' tea. Why, ma'am, that done the army as much good to-day, that little go-to-the-devil, you mud-suckers! as though we'd got Schuster's Hill. 'Twas what we needed—an' we got it. It took our eyes off the nasty little fact that half of a regiment was down, an' the other half with their job not done as it was ordered. It made the S.A.'s and the Lynchesters and the Gessex lot laugh. Old Gunter's all right. He's in the Stay Awhile now. You'll be sure to see him. And Colonel Byng's all right, too, except a little bit o' splinter—"

"A bit of splinter—" Her voice was almost peremptory.

"A chip off his wrist like, but he wasn't thinkin' of that when he got back. He was thinkin' of the grey mare; and she was hit in three places, but not to mention. One bullet cut through her ear and through Colonel Byng's hat as he stooped over her neck; but the luck was with them. They was born to do a longer trek together. A little bit of the same thing in both of 'em, so to speak. The grey mare has a temper like a hunderd wildcats, and Colonel Byng can let himself go too, as you perhaps know, ma'am. We've seen him let loose sometimes when there was shirkers about, but he's all right inside his vest. And he's a good feeder. His men get their tucker all right. He knows when to shut his eyes. He's got a way to make his bunch—and they're the hardest-bit bunch in the army—do anything he wants 'em to. He's as hard himself as ever is, but he's all right underneath the epidermotis."

All at once there flashed before Jasmine's eyes the picture of Rudyard driving Krool out of the house in Park Lane with a sjambok. She heard again the thud of the rhinoceros-whip on the cringing back of the Boer; she heard the moan of the victim as he stumbled across the threshold into the street; and again she felt that sense of suffocation, that excitement which the child feels on the brink of a wonderful romance, the once-upon-a-time moment.

They were nearing the hospital. The driver silently pointed to it. He saw that he had made an impression, and he was content with it. He smiled to himself.

"Is Colonel Byng in the camp?" she asked.

"He's over—'way over, miles and miles, on the left wing with Kearey's brigade now. But old Gunter's here, and you're sure to see Colonel Byng soon—well, I should think."

She had no wish to see Colonel Byng soon. Three days would suffice to do what she wished here, and then she would return to Durban to her work there—to Alice Tynemouth, whose friendship and wonderful tactfulness had helped her in indefinable ways, as a more obvious sympathy never could have done. She would have resented one word which would have suggested that a tragedy was slowly crushing out her life.

Never a woman in the world was more alone. She worked and smiled with eyes growing sadder, yet with a force hardening in her which gave her face a character it never had before. Work had come at the right moment to save her from the wild consequences of a nature maddened by a series of misfortunes and penalties, for which there had been no warning and no preparation.

She was not ready for a renewal of the past. Only a few minutes before she had been brought face to face with Ian Stafford, had seen him look at her out of the shadow there at the station, as though she was an infinite distance away from him; and she had realized with overwhelming force how changed her world was. Ian Stafford, who but a few short months ago had held her in his arms and whispered unforgettable things, now looked at her as one looks at the image of a forgotten thing. She recalled his last words to her that awful day when Rudyard had read the fatal letter, and the world had fallen:

"Nothing can set things right between you and me, Jasmine," he had said. "But there is Rudyard. You must help him through. He heard scandal about Mennaval last night at De Lancy Scovel's. He didn't believe it. It rests with you to give it all the lie. Good-bye."

That had been the end—the black, bitter end. Since then Ian had never spoken a word to her, nor she to him; but he had stood there in the shadow at the station like a ghost, reproachful, unresponsive, indifferent. She recalled now the day when, after three years' parting, she had left him cool, indifferent, and self-contained in the doorway of the sweet-shop in Regent Street; how she had entered her carriage, had clinched her hands, and cried with wilful passion: "He shall not treat me so. He shall show some feeling. He shall! He shall!"

Here was indifference again, but of another land. Hers was not a woman's vanity, in fury at being despised. Vanity, maybe, was still there, but so slight that it made no contrast to the proud turmoil of a nature which had been humiliated beyond endurance; which, for its mistakes, had received accruing penalties as precise as though they had been catalogued; which had waked to find that a whole lifetime had been an error; and that it had no anchor in any set of principles or impelling habits.

And over all there hung the shadow of a man's death, with its black suspicion. When Ian Stafford looked at her from the shadow of the railway-station, the question had flashed into his mind, Did she kill him? Around Adrian Fellowes' death there hung a cloud of mystery which threw a sinister shadow on the path of three people. In the middle of the night, Jasmine started from her sleep with the mystery of the man's death torturing her, and with the shuddering question, Which? on her fevered lips. Was it her husband—was it Ian Stafford? As he galloped over the veld, or sat with his pipe beside the camp-fire, Rudyard Byng was also drawn into the frigid gloom of the ugly thought, and his mind asked the question, Did she kill him? It was as though each who had suffered from the man in life was destined to be menaced by his shade, till it should be exorcised by that person who had taken the useless life, saying, "It was I; I did it!"

As Jasmine entered the hospital, it seemed to her excited imagination as though she was entering a House of Judgment: as though here in a court of everlasting equity she would meet those who had played their vital parts in her life.

What if Rudyard was here! What if in these few days while she was to be here he was to cross her path! What would she say? What would she do? What could be said or done? Bitterness and resentment and dark suspicion were in her mind—and in his. Her pride was less wilful and tempestuous than on the day when she drove him from her; when he said things which flayed her soul, and left her body as though it had been beaten with rods. Her bitterness, her resentment had its origin in the fact that he did not understand—and yet in his crude big way he had really understood better than Ian Stafford. She felt that Rudyard despised her now a thousand times more than ever he had hinted at in that last stifling scene in Park Lane; and her spirit rebelled against it. She would rather that he had believed everything against her, and had made an open scandal, because then she could have paid any debt due to him by the penalty most cruel a woman can bear. But pity, concession, the condescension of a superior morality, were impossible to her proud mind.

As for Ian Stafford, he had left her stripped bare of one single garment of self-respect. His very kindness, his chivalry in defending her; his inflexible determination that all should be over between them forever, that she should be prevailed upon to be to Rudyard more than she had ever been—it all drove her into a deeper isolation. This isolation would have been her destruction but that something bigger than herself, a passion to do things, lifted to idealism a mind which in the past had grown materialistic, which, in gaining wit and mental skill, had missed the meaning of things, the elemental sense.

Corporal Shorter's tale of Rudyard's heroism had stirred her; but she could not have said quite what her feeling was with regard to it. She only knew vaguely that she was glad of it in a more personal than impersonal way. When she shook hands with the cheerful non-com. at the door of the hospital, she gave him a piece of gold which he was loth to accept till she said: "But take it as a souvenir of Colonel Byng's little ride with 'Old Gunter.'"

With a laugh, he took it then, and replied, "I'll not smoke it, I'll not eat it, and I'll not drink it. I'll wear it for luck and God-bless-you!"

CHAPTER XXXI

THE GREY HORSE AND ITS RIDER

It was almost midnight. The camp was sleeping. The forces of destruction lay torpid in the starry shadow of the night. There was no moon, but the stars gave a light that relieved the gloom. They were so near to the eye that it might seem a lancer could pick them from their nests of blue. The Southern Cross hung like a sign of hope to guide men to a new Messiah.

In vain Jasmine had tried to sleep. The day had been too much for her. All that happened in the past four years went rushing past, and she saw herself in scenes which were so tormenting in their reality that once she cried out as in a nightmare. As she did so, she was answered by a choking cry of pain like her own, and, waking, she started up from her couch with poignant apprehension; but presently she realized that it was the cry of some wounded patient in the ward not far from the room where she lay.

It roused her, however, from the half wakefulness which had been excoriated by burning memories, and, hurriedly rising, she opened wide the window and looked out into the night. The air was sharp, but it soothed her hot face and brow, and the wild pulses in her wrists presently beat less vehemently. She put a firm hand on herself, as she was wont to do in these days, when there was no time for brooding on her own troubles, and when, with the duties she had taken upon herself, it would be criminal to indulge in self-pity.

Looking out of the window now into the quiet night, the watch-fires dotting the plain had a fascination for her greater than the wonder of the southern sky and its plaque of indigo sprinkled with silver dust and diamonds. Those fires were the bulletins of the night, telling that around each of them men were sleeping, or thinking of other scenes, or wondering whether the fight to-morrow would be their last fight, and if so, what then? They were to the army like the candle in the home of the cottager. Those little groups of men sleeping around their fires were like a family, where men grow to serve each other as brother serves brother, knowing each other's foibles, but preserving each other's honour for the family's pride, risking life to save each other.

As Jasmine gazed into the gloom, spattered with a delicate radiance which did not pierce the shadows, but only made lively the darkness, she was suddenly conscious of the dull regular thud of horses' hoofs upon the veld. Troops of Mounted Infantry were evidently moving to take up a new position at the bidding of the Master Player. The sound was like the rub-a-dub of muffled hammers. The thought forced itself on her mind that here were men secretly hastening to take part in the grim lottery of life and death, from which some, and maybe many, would draw the black ticket of doom, and so pass from the game before the game was won.

The rumbling roll of hoofs grew distinct. Now they seemed to be almost upon her, and presently they emerged into view from the right, where their progress had been hidden by the hospital-building. When they reached the hospital there came a soft command and, as the troop passed, every face was turned towards the building. It was men full of life and the interest of the great game paying passing homage to their helpless comrades in this place of healing.

As they rode past, a few of the troopers had a glimpse of the figure dimly outlined at the window. Some made kindly jests, cheffing each other—"Your fancy, old sly-boots? Arranged it all, eh? Watch me, Lizzie, as I pass, and wave your lily-white hand!"

But others pressed their lips tightly, for visions of a woman somewhere waiting and watching flashed before their eyes; while others still had only the quiet consciousness of the natural man, that a woman looks at them; and where women are few and most of them are angels,—the battle-field has no shelter for any other—such looks have deep significance.

The troop went by steadily, softly and slowly. After they had all gone past, two horsemen detached from the troop came after. Presently one of them separated from his companion and rode on. The other came towards the hospital at a quick trot, drew bridle very near Jasmine's window, slid to the ground, said a soft word to his charger, patted its neck, and, turning, made for the door of the hospital. For a moment Jasmine stood looking out, greatly moved, she scarcely knew why, by this little incident of the night, and then suddenly the starlight seemed to draw round the patient animal standing at attention, as it were.

Then she saw it was a grey horse.

Its owner, as Corporal Shorter predicted, had come to see "Old Gunter," ere he went upon another expedition of duty. Its owner was Rudyard Byng.

That was why so strange a coldness, as of apprehension or anxiety, had passed through Jasmine when the rider had come towards her out of the night. Her husband was here. If she called, he would come. If she stretched out her hand, she could touch him. If she opened a door, she would be in his presence. If he opened the door behind her, he could—

She stepped back hastily into the room, and drew her night-robe closely about her with sudden flushing of the face. If he should enter her room—she felt in the darkness for her dressing-gown. It was not on the chair beside her bed. She moved hastily, and blundered against a table. She felt for the foot of the bed. The dressing-gown was not there. Her brain was on fire. Where was her dressing-gown? She tried to button the night-dress over her palpitating breast, but abandoned it to throw back her head and gather her golden hair away from her shoulders and breast. All this in the dark, in the safe dusk of her own room.... Where was her dressing-gown? Where was her maid? Why should she be at such a disadvantage! She reached for the table again and found a match-box. She would strike a light, and find her dressing-gown. Then she abruptly remembered that she had no dressing-gown with her; that she had travelled with one single bag—little more than a hand-bag—and it contained only the emergency equipment of a nurse. She had brought no dressing-gown; only the light outer rain-proof coat which should serve a double purpose. She had forgotten for a moment that she was not in her own house, that she was an army-woman, living a soldier's life. She felt her way to the wall, found the rain-proof coat, and, with trembling fingers, put it on. As she did so a wave of weakness passed over her, and she swayed as though she would fall; but she put a hand on herself and fought her growing agitation.

She turned towards the bed, but stopped abruptly, because she heard footsteps in the hall outside—footsteps she knew, footsteps which for years had travelled towards her, day and night, with eagerness; the quick, urgent footsteps of a man of decision, of impulse, of determination. It was Rudyard's footsteps outside her door, Rudyard's voice speaking to some one; then Rudyard's footsteps pausing; and afterwards a dead silence. She felt his presence; she imagined his hand upon her door. With a little smothered gasp, she made a move forward as though to lock the door; then she remembered that it had no lock. With strained and startled eyes, she kept her gaze turned on the door, expecting to see it open before her. Her heart beat so hard she could hear it pounding against her breast, and her temples were throbbing.

The silence was horrible to her. Her agitation culminated. She could bear it no longer. Blindly she ran to another door which led into the sitting-room of the matron, used for many purposes—the hold-all of the odds and ends of the hospital life; where surgeons consulted, officers waited, and army authorities congregated for the business of the hospital. She found the door, opened it and entered hastily. One light was burning—a lamp with a green shade. She shut the door behind her quickly and leaned against it, closing her eyes with a sense of relief. Presently some movement in the room startled her. She opened her eyes. A figure stood between the green lamp and the farther door.

It was her husband.

Her senses had deceived her. His footsteps had not stopped before her bedroom-door. She had not heard the handle of the door of her bedroom turn, but the handle of the door of this room. The silence which had frightened her had followed his entrance here.

She hastily drew the coat about her. The white linen of her night-dress showed. She thrust it back, and instinctively drew behind the table, as though to hide her bare ankles.

He had started back at seeing her, but had instantly recovered himself. "Well, Jasmine," he said quietly, "we've met in a queer place."

All at once her hot agitation left her, and she became cold and still. She was in a maelstrom of feeling a minute before, though she could not have said what the feeling meant; now she was dominated by a haunting sense of injury, roused by resentment, not against him, but against everything and everybody, himself included. All the work of the last few months seemed suddenly undone—to go for nothing. Just as a drunkard in his pledge made reformation, which has done its work for a period, feels a sudden maddening desire to indulge his passion for drink, and plunges into a debauch,—the last maddening degradation before his final triumph,—so Jasmine felt now the restrictions and self-control of the past few months fall away from her. She emerged from it all the same woman who had flung her married life, her man, and her old world to the winds on the day that Krool had been driven into the street. Like Krool, she too had gone out into the unknown—into a strange land where "the Baas" had no habitation.

Rudyard's words seemed to madden her, and there was a look of scrutiny and inquiry in his eyes which she saw—and saw nothing else there. There was the inquisition in his look which had been there in their last interview when he had said as plainly as man could say, "What did it mean—that letter from Adrian Fellowes?"

It was all there in his eyes now—that hateful inquiry, the piercing scrutiny of a judge in the Judgment House, and there came also into her eyes, as though in consequence, a look of scrutiny too.

"Did you kill Adrian Fellowes? Was it you?" her disordered mind asked.

She had mistaken the look in his eyes. It was the same look as the look in hers, and in spite of all the months that had gone, both asked the same question as in the hour when they last parted. The dead man stood between them, as he had never stood in life—of infinitely more importance than he had ever been in life. He had never come between Rudyard and herself in the old life in any vital sense, not in any sense that finally mattered. He had only been an incident; not part of real life, but part of a general wastage of character; not a disintegrating factor in itself. Ah, no, not Adrian Fellowes, not him! It enraged her that Rudyard should think the dead man had had any sway over her. It was a needless degradation, against which she revolted now.

"Why have you come here—to this room?" she asked coldly.

As a boy flushes when he has been asked a disconcerting question which angers him or challenges his innocence, so Rudyard's face suffused; but the flush faded as quickly as it came. His eyes then looked at her steadily, the whites of them so white because of his bronzed face and forehead, the glance firmer by far than in his old days in London. There was none of that unmanageable emotion in his features, the panic excitement, the savage disorder which were there on the day when Adrian Fellowes' letter brought the crisis to their lives; none of the barbaric storm which drove Krool down the staircase under the sjambok. Here was force and iron strength, though the man seemed older, his thick hair streaked with grey, while there was a deep fissure between the eyebrows. The months had hardened him physically, had freed him from all superfluous flesh; and the flabbiness had wholly gone from his cheeks and chin. There was no sign of a luxurious life about him. He was merely the business-like soldier with work to do. His khaki fitted him as only uniform can fit a man with a physique without defect. He carried in his hand a short whip of rhinoceros-hide, and as he placed his hands upon his hips and looked at Jasmine meditatively, before he answered her question, she recalled the scene with Krool. Her eyes were fascinated by the whip in his hand. It seemed to her, all at once, as though she was to be the victim of his wrath, and that the whip would presently fall upon her shoulders, as he drove her out into the veld. But his eyes drew hers to his own presently, and even while he spoke to her now, the illusion of the sjambok remained, and she imagined his voice to be intermingling with the dull thud of the whip on her shoulders.

"I came to see one of my troop who was wounded at Wortmann's Drift," he answered her.

"Old Gunter," she said mechanically.

"Old Gunter, if you like," he returned, surprised. "How did you know?"

"The world gossips still," she rejoined bitterly.

"Well, I came to see Gunter."

"On the grey mare," she said again like one in a dream.

"On the grey mare. I did not know that you were here, and—"

"If you had known I was here, you would not have come?" she asked with a querulous ring to her voice.

"No, I should not have come if I had known, unless people in the camp were aware that I knew. Then I should have felt it necessary to come."

"Why?" She knew; but she wanted him to say.

"That the army should not talk and wonder. If you were here, it is obvious that I should visit you."

"The army might as well wonder first as last," she rejoined. "That must come."

"I don't know anything that must come in this world," he replied. "We don't control ourselves, and must lies in the inner Mystery where we cannot enter. I had only to deal with the present. I could not come to the General and go again, knowing that you were here, without seeing you. We ought to do our work here without unnecessary cross-firing from our friends. There's enough of that from our foes."

"What right had you to enter my room?" she rejoined stubbornly.

"I am not in your room. Something—call it anything you like—made us meet on this neutral ground."

"You might have waited till morning," she replied perversely.

"In the morning I shall be far from here. Before daybreak I shall be fighting. War waits for no one—not even for you," he added, with more sarcasm than he intended.

Her feelings were becoming chaos again. He was going into battle. Bygone memories wakened, and the first days of their lives together came rushing upon her; but her old wild spirit was up in arms too against the irony of his last words, "Not even for you." Added to this was the rushing remembrance that South Africa had been the medium of all her trouble. If Rudyard had not gone to South Africa, that one five months a year and more ago, when she was left alone, restless, craving for amusement and excitement and—she was going to say romance, but there was no romance in those sordid hours of pleasure-making, when she plucked the fruit as it lay to her hand—ah, if only Rudyard had not gone to South Africa then! That five months held no romance. She had never known but one romance, and it was over and done. The floods had washed it away.

"You are right. War does not wait even for me," she exclaimed. "It came to meet me, to destroy me, when I was not armed. It came in the night as you have come, and found me helpless as I am now."

Suddenly she clasped her hands and wrung them, then threw them above her head in a gesture of despair. "Why didn't God or Destiny, or whatever it is, stop you from coming here! There is nothing between us worth keeping, and there can never be. There is a black sea between us. I never want to see you any more."

In her agitation the coat had fallen away from her white night-dress, and her breast showed behind the parted folds of the linen. Involuntarily his eyes saw. What memories passed through him were too vague to record; but a heavy sigh escaped him, followed, however, by a cloud which gathered on his brow. The shadow of a man's death thrust itself between them. This war might have never been, had it not been for the treachery of the man who had been false to everything and every being that had come his way. Indirectly this vast struggle in which thousands of lives were being lost had come through his wife's disloyalty, however unintentional, or in whatever degree. Whenever he thought of it, his pulses beat faster with indignation, and a deep resentment possessed him.

It was a resentment whose origin was not a mere personal wrong to him, but the betrayal of all that invaded his honour and the honour of his country. The map was dead—so much. He had paid a price—too small.

And Jasmine, as she looked at her husband now, was, oppressed by the same shadow—the inescapable thing. That was what she meant when she said, "There is a black sea between us."

What came to her mind when she saw his glance fall on her breast, she could not have told. But a sudden flame of anger consumed her. The passion of the body was dead in her—atrophied. She was as one through whose veins had passed an icy fluid which stilled all the senses of desire, but never had her mind been so passionate, so alive. In the months lately gone, there had been times when her mind was in a paroxysm of rebellion and resentment and remorse; but in this red corner of the universe, from which the usual world was shut out, from which all domestic existence, all social organization, habit or the amenities of social intercourse were excluded, she had been able to restore her equilibrium. Yet now here, all at once, there was an invasion of this world of rigid, narrow organization, where there was no play; where all men's acts were part of a deadly mortal issue; where the human being was only part of a scheme which allowed nothing of the flexible adaptations of the life of peace, the life of cities, of houses: here was the sudden interposition of a purely personal life, of domestic being—of sex. She was conscious of no reasoning, of no mental protest which could be put into words: she was only conscious of emotions which now shook her with their power, now left her starkly cold, her brain muffled, or again aflame with a suffering as intense as that of Procrustes on his bed of iron.

This it was that seized her now. The glance of his eyes at her bared breast roused her. She knew not why, except that there was an indefinable craving for a self respect which had been violated by herself and others; except that she longed for the thing which she felt he would not give her. The look in his eye offered her nothing of that.

That she mistook what really was in his eyes was not material, though he was thinking of days when he believed he had discovered the secret of life—a woman whose life was beautiful; diffusing beauty, contentment, inspiration and peace. She did not know that his look was the wistful look backward, with no look forward; and that alone. She was living a life where new faculties of her nature were being exercised or brought into active being; she was absorbed by it all; it was part of her scheme for restoring herself, for getting surcease of anguish; but here, all at once, every entrenchment was overrun, the rigidity of the unit was made chaos, and she was tossed by the Spirit of Confusion upon a stormy sea of feeling.

"Will you not go?" she asked in a voice of suppressed passion. "Have you no consideration? It is past midnight."

His anger flamed, but he forced back the words upon his lips, and said with a bitter smile: "Day and night are the same to me always now. What else should be in war? I am going." He looked at the watch at his wrist. "It is half-past one o'clock. At five our work begins—not an eight-hour day. We have twenty-four-hour days here sometimes. This one may be shorter. You never can tell. It may be a one-hour day—or less."

Suddenly he came towards her with hands outstretched. "Dear wife—Jasmine—" he exclaimed.

Pity, memory, a great magnanimity carried him off his feet for a moment, and all that had happened seemed as nothing beside this fact that they might never see each other again; and peace appeared to him the one thing needful after all. The hatred and conflict of the world seemed of small significance beside the hovering presence of an enemy stronger than Time.

She was still in a passion of rebellion against the inevitable—that old impatience and unrealized vanity which had helped to destroy her past. She shrank back in blind misunderstanding from him, for she scarcely heard his words. She mistook what he meant. She was bewildered, distraught.

"No, no—coward!" she cried.

He stopped short as though he had been shot. His face turned white. Then, with an oath, he went swiftly to the window which opened to the floor and passed through it into the night.

An instant later he was on his horse.

A moment of dumb confusion succeeded, then she realized her madness, and the thing as it really was. Running to the window, she leaned out.

She called, but only the grey mare's galloping came back to her awe-struck ears.

With a cry like that of an animal in pain, she sank on her knees on the floor, her face turned towards the stars.

"Oh, my God, help me!" she moaned.

At least here was no longer the cry of doom.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE WORLD'S FOUNDLING

At last day came. Jasmine was crossing the hallway of the hospital on her way to the dining-room when there came from the doorway of a ward a figure in a nurse's dress. It startled her by some familiar motion. Presently the face turned in her direction, but without seeing her. Jasmine recognized her then. She went forward quickly and touched the nurse's arm.

"Al'mah—it is Al'mah?" she said.

Al'mah's face turned paler, and she swayed slightly, then she recovered herself. "Oh, it is you, Mrs. Byng!" she said, almost dazedly.

After an instant's hesitation she held out a hand. "It's a queer place for it to happen," she added.

Jasmine noticed the hesitation and wondered at the words. She searched the other's face. What did Al'mah's look mean? It seemed composite of paralyzing surprise, of anxiety, of apprehension. Was there not also a look of aversion?

"Everything seems to come all at once," Al'mah continued, as though in explanation.

Jasmine had no inkling as to what the meaning of the words was; and, with something of her old desire to conquer those who were alien to her, she smiled winningly.

"Yes, things concentrate in life," she rejoined.

"I've noticed that," was the reply. "Fate seems to scatter, and then to gather in all at once, as though we were all feather-toys on strings."

After a moment, as Al'mah regarded her with vague wonder, though now she smiled too, and the anxiety, apprehension, and pain went from her face, Jasmine said: "Why did you come here? You had a world to work for in England."

"I had a world to forget in England," Al'mah replied. Then she added suddenly, "I could not sing any longer."

"Your voice—what happened to it?" Jasmine asked.

"One doesn't sing with one's voice only. The music is far behind the voice."

They had been standing in the middle of the hallway. Suddenly Al'mah caught at Jasmine's sleeve. "Will you come with me?" she said.

She led the way into a room which was almost gay with veld everlastings, pictures from illustrated papers, small flags of the navy and the colonies, the Boer Vierkleur and the Union Jack.

"I like to have things cheerful here," Al'mah said almost gaily. "Sometimes I have four or five convalescents in here, and they like a little gaiety. I sing them things from comic operas—Offenbach, Sullivan, and the rest; and if they are very sentimentally inclined I sing them good old-fashioned love-songs full of the musician's tricks. How people adore illusions! I've had here an old Natal sergeant, over sixty, and he was as cracked as could be about songs belonging to the time when we don't know that it's all illusion, and that there's no such thing as Love, nor ever was; but only a kind of mirage of the mind, a sort of phantasy that seizes us, in which we do crazy things, and sometimes, if the phantasy is strong enough, we do awful things. But still the illusions remain in spite of everything, as they did with the old sergeant. I've heard the most painful stories here from men before they died, of women that were false, and injuries done, many, many years ago; and they couldn't see that it wasn't real at all, but just phantasy."

"All the world's mad," responded Jasmine wearily, as Al'mah paused.

Al'mah nodded. "So I laugh a good deal, and try to be cheerful, and it does more good than being too sympathetic. Sympathy gets to be mere snivelling very often. I've smiled and laughed a great deal out here; and they say it's useful. The surgeons say it, and the men say it too sometimes."

"Are you known as Nurse Grattan?" Jasmine asked with sudden remembrance.

"Yes, Grattan was my mother's name. I am Nurse Grattan here."

"So many have whispered good things of you. A Scottish Rifleman said to me a week ago, 'Ech, she's aye see cheery!' What a wonderful thing it is to make a whole army laugh. Coming up here three officers spoke of you, and told of humorous things you had said. It's all quite honest, too. It's a reputation made out of new cloth. No one knows who you are?"

Al'mah flushed. "I don't know quite who I am myself. I think sometimes I'm the world's foundling."

Suddenly a cloud passed over her face again, and her strong whimsical features became drawn.

"I seem almost to lose my identity at times; and then it is I try most to laugh and be cheerful. If I didn't perhaps I should lose my identity altogether. Do you ever feel that?"

"No; I often wish I could."

Al'mah regarded her steadfastly. "Why did you come here?" she asked. "You had the world at your feet; and there was plenty to do in London. Was it for the same reason that brought me here? Was it something you wanted to forget there, some one you wanted to help here?"

Jasmine saw the hovering passion in the eyes fixed on her, and wondered what this woman had to say which could be of any import to herself; yet she felt there was something drawing nearer which would make her shrink.

"No," Jasmine answered, "I did not come to forget, but to try and remember that one belongs to the world, to the work of the world, to the whole people, and not to one of the people; not to one man, or to one family, or to one's self. That's all."

Al'mah's face was now very haggard, but her eyes were burning. "I do not believe you," she said straightly. "You are one of those that have had a phantasy. I had one first fifteen years ago, and it passed, yet it pursued me till yesterday—till yesterday evening. Now it's gone; that phantasy is gone forever. Come and see what it was."

She pointed to the door of another room.

There was something strangely compelling in her tone, in her movements. Jasmine followed her, fascinated by the situation, by the look in the woman's face. The door opened upon darkness, but Jasmine stepped inside, with Almah's fingers clutching her sleeve. For a moment nothing was visible; then, Jasmine saw, dimly, a coffin on two chairs.

"That was the first man I ever loved—my husband," Al'mah said quietly, pointing at the coffin. "There was another, but you took him from me—you and others."

Jasmine gave a little cry which she smothered with her hand; and she drew back involuntarily towards the light of the hallway. The smell of disinfectants almost suffocated her. A cloud of mystery and indefinable horror seemed to envelop her; then a light flooded through her brain. It was like a stream of fire. But with a voice strangely calm, she said, "You mean Adrian Fellowes?"

Al'mah's face was in the shadow, but her voice was full of storm. "You took him from me, but you were only one," she said sharply and painfully. "I found it out at last. I suspected first at Glencader. Then at last I knew. It was an angry, contemptuous letter from you. I had opened it. I understood. When everything was clear, when there was no doubt, when I knew he had tried to hurt little Jigger's sister, when he had made up his mind to go abroad, then, I killed him. Then—I killed him."

Jasmine's cheek was white as Al'mah's apron; but she did not shrink. She came a step nearer, and peered into Al'mah's face, as though to read her inmost mind, as though to see if what she said was really true. She saw not a quiver of agitation, not the faintest horror of memory; only the reflective look of accomplished purpose.

"You—are you insane?" Jasmine exclaimed in a whisper. "Do you know what you have said?"

Al'mah smoothed her apron softly. "Perfectly. I do not think I am insane. I seem not to be. One cannot do insane things here. This is the place of the iron rule. Here we cure madness—the madness of war and other madnesses."

"You had loved him, yet you killed him!"

"You would have killed him though you did not love him. Yes, of course—I know that. Your love was better placed; but it was like a little bird caught by the hawk in the upper air—its flight was only a little one before the hawk found it. Yes, you would have killed Adrian, as I did if you had had the courage. You wanted to do it, but I did it. Do you remember when I sang for you on the evening of that day he died? I sang, 'More Was Lost at Mohacksfield.' As soon as I saw your face that evening I felt you knew all. You had been to his rooms and found him dead. I was sure of that. You remember how La Tosca killed Scarpia? You remember how she felt? I felt so—just like that. I never hesitated. I knew what I wanted to do, and I did it."

"How did you kill him?" Jasmine asked in that matter-of-fact way which comes at those times when the senses are numbed by tragedy.

"You remember the needle—Mr. Mappin's needle? I knew Adrian had it. He showed it to me. He could not keep the secret. He was too weak. The needle was in his pocket-book—to kill me with some day perhaps. He certainly had not the courage to kill himself.... I went to see him. He was dressing. The pocket-book lay on the table. As I said, he had showed it to me. While he was busy I abstracted the needle. He talked of his journey abroad. He lied—nothing but lies, about himself, about everything. When he had said enough,—lying was easier to him than anything else—I told him the truth. Then he went wild. He caught hold of me as if to strangle me.... He did not realize the needlepoint when it caught him. If he did, it must have seemed to him only the prick of a pin.... But in a few minutes it was all over. He died quite peacefully. But it was not very easy getting him on the sofa. He looked sleeping as he lay there. You saw. He would never lie any more to women, to you or to me or any other. It is a good thing to stop a plague, and the simplest way is the best. He was handsome, and his music was very deceiving. It was almost good of its kind, and it was part of him. When I look back I find only misery. Two wicked men hurt me. They spoiled my life, first one and then another; and I went from bad to worse. At least he"—she pointed to the other room—"he had some courage at the very last. He fought, he braved death. The other—you remember the Glencader Mine. Your husband and Ian Stafford went down, and Lord Tynemouth was ready to go, but Adrian would not go. Then it was I began to hate him. That was the beginning. What happened had to be. I was to kill him; and I did. It avenged me, and it avenged your husband. I was glad of that, for Rudyard Byng had done so much for me: not alone that he saved me at the opera, you remember, but other good things. I did his work for him with Adrian."

"Have you no fear—of me?" Jasmine asked.

"Fear of—you? Why?"

"I might hate you—I might tell."

Al'mah made a swift gesture of protest. "Do not say foolish things. You would rather die than tell. You should be grateful to me. Some one had to kill him. There was Rudyard Byng, Ian Stafford, or yourself. It fell to me. I did your work. You will not tell; but it would not matter if you did. Nothing would happen—nothing at all. Think it out, and you will see why."

Jasmine shuddered violently. Her body was as cold as ice.

"Yes, I know. What are you going to do after the war?"

"Back to Covent Garden perhaps; or perhaps there will be no 'after the war.' It may all end here. Who knows—who cares!"

Jasmine came close to her. For an instant a flood of revulsion had overpowered her; but now it was all gone.

"We pay for all the wrong we do. We pay for all the good we get"—once Ian Stafford had said that, and it rang in her ears now. Al'mah would pay, and would pay here—here in this world. Meanwhile, Al'mah was a woman who, like herself, had suffered.

"Let me be your friend; let me help you," Jasmine said, and she took both of Almah's hands in her own.

Somehow Jasmine's own heart had grown larger, fuller, and kinder all at once. Until lately she had never ached to help the world or any human being in all her life; there had never been any of the divine pity which finds its employ in sacrifice. She had been kind, she had been generous, she had in the past few months given service unstinted; but it was more as her own cure for her own ills than yearning compassion for all those who were distressed "in mind, body, or estate."

But since last evening, in the glimmer of the stars, when Rudyard went from her with bitter anger on his lips, and a contempt which threw her far behind him,—since that hour, when, in her helplessness, she had sunk to the ground with an appeal to Something outside herself, her heart had greatly softened. Once before she had appealed to the Invisible—that night before her catastrophe, when she wound her wonderful hair round her throat and drew it tighter and tighter, and had cried out to the beloved mother she had never known. But her inborn, her cultivated, her almost invincible egoism, had not even then been scattered by the bitter helplessness of her life.

That cry last night was a cry to the Something behind all. Only in the last few hours—why, she knew not—her heart had found a new sense. She felt her soul's eyes looking beyond herself. The Something that made her raise her eyes to the stars, which seemed a pervading power, a brooding tenderness and solicitude, had drawn her mind away into the mind of humanity. Her own misery now at last enabled her to see, however dimly, the woes of others; and it did not matter whether the woes were penalties or undeserved chastisement; the new-born pity of her soul made no choice and sought no difference.

As the singing-woman's hands lay in hers, a flush slowly spread over Al'mah's face, and behind the direct power of her eyes there came a light which made them aglow with understanding.

"I always thought you selfish—almost meanly selfish," Al'mah said presently. "I thought you didn't know any real life, any real suffering—only the surface, only disappointment at not having your own happiness; but now I see that was all a mask. You understand why I did what I did?"

"I understand."

"I suppose there would be thousands who would gladly see me in prison and on the scaffold—if they knew—"

Pain travelled across Jasmine's face. She looked Al'mah in the eyes with a look of reproof and command. "Never, never again speak of that to me or to any living soul," she said. "I will try to forget it; you must put it behind you." ... Suddenly she pointed to the other room where Al'mah's husband lay dead. "When is he to be buried?" she asked.

"In an hour." A change came over Al'mah's face again, and she stood looking dazedly at the door of the room, behind which the dead man lay. "I cannot realize it. It does not seem real," she said. "It was all so many centuries ago, when I was young and glad."

Jasmine admonished her gently and drew her away.

A few moments later an officer approached them from one of the wards. At that moment the footsteps of the three were arrested by the booming of artillery. It seemed as though all the guns of both armies were at work.

The officer's eyes blazed, and he turned to the two women with an impassioned gesture.

"Byng and the S.A.'s have done their trick," he said. "If they hadn't, that wouldn't be going on. It was to follow—a general assault—if Byng pulled it off. Old Blunderbuss has done it this time. His combination's working all right—thanks to Byng's lot."

As he hurried on he was too excited to see Jasmine's agitation.

"Wait!" Jasmine exclaimed, as he went quickly down the hallway. But her voice was scarcely above a whisper, and he did not hear.

She wanted to ask him if Rudyard was safe. She did not realize that he could not know.

But the thunder of artillery told her that Rudyard had had his fighting at daybreak, as he had said.

CHAPTER XXXIII

"ALAMACHTIG!"

When Rudyard flung himself on the grey mare outside Jasmine's window at the Stay Awhile Hospital, and touched her flank with his heel, his heart was heavy with passion, his face hard with humiliation and defeat. He had held out the hand of reconciliation, and she had met it with scorn. He had smothered his resentment, and let the light of peace in upon their troubles, and she had ruthlessly drawn a black curtain between them. He was going upon as dangerous a task as could be set a soldier, from which he might never return, and she had not even said a God-be-with-you—she who had lain in his bosom, been so near, so dear, so cherished:

"For Time and Change estrange, estrange—
And, now they have looked and seen us,
Oh, we that were dear, we are all too near,
With the thick of the world between us!"

How odd it seemed that two beings who had been all in all to each other, who in the prime of their love would have died of protesting shame, if they had been told that they would change towards each other, should come to a day when they would be less to each other than strangers, less and colder and farther off! It is because some cannot bear this desecration of ideals, this intolerable loss of life's assets, that they cling on and on, long after respect and love have gone, after hope is dead.

There had been times in the past few months when such thoughts as these vaguely possessed Rudyard's mind; but he could never, would never, feel that all was over, that the book of Jasmine's life was closed to him; not even when his whole nature was up in arms against the injury she had done him.

But now, as the grey mare reached out to achieve the ground his troopers had covered before him, his brain was in a storm of feeling. After all, what harm had he done her, that he should be treated so? Was he the sinner? Why should he make the eternal concession? Why should he be made to seem the one needing forgiveness? He did not know why. But at the bottom of everything lay a something—a yearning—which would not be overwhelmed. In spite of wrong and injury, it would live on and on; and neither Time nor crime, nor anything mortal could obliterate it from his heart's oracles.

The hoofs of the grey mare fell like the soft thud of a hammer in the sand, regular and precise. Presently the sound and the motion lulled his senses. The rage and humiliation grew less, his face cooled. His head, which had been bent, lifted and his face turned upwards to the stars. The influence of an African night was on him. None that has not felt it can understand it so cold, so sweet, so full of sleep, so stirring with an underlife. Many have known the breath of the pampas beyond the Amazon; the soft pungency of the wattle blown across the salt-bush plains of Australia; the friendly exhilaration of the prairie or the chaparral; the living, loving loneliness of the desert; but yonder on the veld is a life of the night which possesses all the others have, and something of its own besides; something which gets into the bones and makes for forgetfulness of the world. It lifts a man away from the fret of life, and sets his feet on the heights where lies repose.

The peace of the stars crept softly into Rudyard's heart as he galloped gently on to overtake his men. His pulses beat slowly once again, his mind regained its poise. He regretted the oath he uttered, as he left Jasmine; he asked himself if, after all, everything was over and done.

How good the night suddenly seemed! No, it was not all over—unless, unless, indeed, in this fight coming on with the daybreak, Fate should settle it all by doing with him as it had done with so many thousands of others in this war. But even then, would it be all over? He was a primitive man, and he raised his face once more to the heavens. He was no longer the ample millionaire, sitting among the flesh-pots; he was a lean, simple soldier eating his biscuit as though it were the product of the chef of the Cafe Voisin; he was the fighter sleeping in a blanket in the open; he was a patriot after his kind; he was the friend of his race and the lover of one woman.

Now he drew rein. His regiment was just ahead. Daybreak was not far off, and they were near the enemy's position. In a little while, if they were not surprised, they would complete a movement, take a hill, turn the flank of the foe, and, if designed supports came up, have the Boers at a deadly disadvantage. Not far off to the left of him and his mounted infantry there were coming on for this purpose two batteries of artillery and three thousand infantry—Leary's brigade, which had not been in the action the day before at Wortmann's Drift.

But all depended on what he was able to do, what he and his hard-bitten South Africans could accomplish. Well, he had no doubt. War was part chance, part common sense, part the pluck and luck of the devil. He had ever been a gambler in the way of taking chances; he had always possessed ballast even when the London life had enervated, had depressed him; and to men of his stamp pluck is a commonplace: it belongs as eyes and hands and feet belong.

Dawn was not far away, and before daybreak he must have the hill which was the key to the whole position, which commanded the left flank of the foe. An hour or so after he got it, if the artillery and infantry did their portion, a great day's work would be done for England; and the way to the relief of the garrison beyond the mountains would be open. The chance to do this thing was the reward he received for his gallant and very useful fight at Wortmann's Drift twenty-four hours before. It would not do to fail in justifying the choice of the Master Player, who had had enough bad luck in the campaign so far.

The first of his force to salute him in the darkness was his next in command, Barry Whalen. They had been together in the old Rand Rifles, and had, in the words of the Kaffir, been as near as the flea to the blanket, since the day when Rudyard discovered that Barry Whalen was on the same ship bound for the seat of war. They were not youngsters, either of them; but they had the spring of youth in them, and a deep basis of strength and force; and they knew the veld and the veld people. There was no trick of the veldschoen copper for which they were not ready; and for any device of Kruger's lambs they were prepared to go one better. As Barry Whalen had said, "They'll have to get up early in the morning if they want to catch us."

This morning the Boers would not get up early enough; for Rudyard's command had already reached the position from which they could do their work with good chances in their favour; and there had been no sign of life from the Boer trenches in the dusk—naught of what chanced at Magersfontein. Not a shot had been fired, and there would certainly have been firing if the Boer had known; for he could not allow the Rooinek to get to the point where his own position would be threatened or commanded. When Kruger's men did discover the truth, there would be fighting as stiff as had been seen in this struggle for half a continent.

"Is it all right?" whispered Rudyard, as Barry Whalen drew up by him.

"Not a sound from them—not a sign."

"Their trenches should not be more than a few hundred yards on, eh?"

"Their nearest trenches are about that. We are just on the left of Hetmeyer's Kopje."

"Good. Let Glossop occupy the kopje with his squadrons, while we take the trenches. If we can force them back on their second line of trenches, and keep them there till our supports come up, we shall be all right."

"When shall we begin, sir?" asked Barry.

"Give orders to dismount now. Get the horses in the lee of the kopje, and we'll see what Brother Boer thinks of us after breakfast."

Rudyard took out a repeating-watch, and held it in his closed palm. As it struck, he noted the time.

His words were abrupt but composed. "Ten minutes more and we shall have the first streak of dawn. Then move. We shall be on them before they know it."

Barry Whalen made to leave, then turned back. Rudyard understood. They clasped hands. It was the grip of men who knew each other—knew each other's faults and weaknesses, yet trusted with a trust which neither disaster nor death could destroy.

"My girl—if anything happens to me," Barry said.

"You may be sure—as if she were my own," was Rudyard's reply. "If I go down, find my wife at the Stay Awhile Hospital. Tell her that the day I married her was the happiest day of my life, and that what I said then I thought at the last. Everything else is straightened out—and I'll not forget your girl, Barry. She shall be as my own if things should happen that way."

"God bless you, old man," whispered Barry. "Goodbye." Then he recovered himself and saluted. "Is that all, sir?"

"Au revoir, Barry," came the answer; then a formal return of the salute. "That is all," he added brusquely.

They moved forward to the regiment, and the word to dismount was given softly. When the forces crept forward again, it was as infantrymen, moving five paces apart, and feeling their way up to the Boer trenches.

Dawn. The faintest light on the horizon, as it were a soft, grey glimmer showing through a dark curtain. It rises and spreads slowly, till the curtain of night becomes the veil of morning, white and kind. Then the living world begins to move. Presently the face of the sun shines through the veil, and men's bodies grow warm with active being, and the world stirs with busy life. On the veld, with the first delicate glow, the head of a meerkat, or a springbok, is raised above the gray-brown grass; herds of cattle move uneasily. Then a bird takes flight across the whitening air, another, and then another; the meerkat sits up and begs breakfast of the sun; lizards creep out upon the stones; a snake slides along obscenely foraging. Presently man and beast and all wild things are afoot or a-wing, as though the world was new-created; as though there had never been any mornings before, and this was not the monotonous repetition of a million mornings, when all things living begin the world afresh.

But nowhere seems the world so young and fresh and glad as on the sun-warmed veld. Nowhere do the wild roses seem so pure, or are the aloes so jaunty and so gay. The smell of the karoo bush is sweeter than attar, and the bog-myrtle and mimosa, where they shelter a house or fringe a river, have a look of Arcady. It is a world where any mysterious thing may happen—a world of five thousand years ago—the air so light, so sweetly searching and vibrating, that Ariel would seem of the picture, and gleaming hosts of mailed men, or vast colonies of green-clad archers moving to virgin woods might belong. Something frightens the timid spirit of a springbok, and his flight through the grass is like a phrase of music on a wilful adventure; a bird hears the sighing of the breeze in the mimosa leaves or the swaying shrubs, and in disdain of such slight performance flings out a song which makes the air drunken with sweetness.

A world of light, of commendable trees, of grey grass flecked with flowers, of life having the supreme sense of a freedom which has known no check. It is a life which cities have not spoiled, and where man is still in touch with the primeval friends of man; where the wildest beast and the newest babe of a woman have something in common.

Drink your fill of the sweet intoxicating air with eyes shut till the lungs are full and the heart beats with new fulness; then open them upon the wide sunrise and scan the veld so full of gracious odour. Is it not good and glad? And now face the hills rising nobly away there to the left, the memorable and friendly hills. Is it not—

Upon the morning has crept suddenly a black cloud, although the sun is shining brilliantly. A moment before the dawn all was at peace on the veld and among the kopjes, and only the contented sighing of men and beasts broke the silence, or so it seemed; but with the glimmer of light along the horizon came a change so violent that all the circle of vision was in a quiver of trouble. Affrighted birds, in fluttering bewilderment, swept and circled aimlessly through the air with strange, half-human cries; the jackal and the meerkat, the springbok and the rheebok, trembled where they stood, with heads uplifted, vaguely trying to realize the Thing which was breaking the peace of their world; useless horses which had been turned out of the armies of Boers and British galloped and stumbled and plunged into space in alarm; for they knew what was darkening the morning. They had suffered the madness of battle, and they realized it at its native first value.

There was a battle forward on the left flank of the Boer Army. Behind Hetmeyer's Kopje were the horses of the men whom Rudyard Byng had brought to take a position and hold it till support came and this flank of the Farmer's Army was turned; but the men themselves were at work on the kopjes—the grim work of dislodging the voortrekker people from the places where they burrowed like conies among the rocks.

Just before dawn broke Byng's men were rushing the outer trenches. These they cleared with the wild cries of warriors whose blood was in a tempest. Bayonets dripped red, rifles were fired at hand-to-hand range, men clubbed their guns and fought as men fought in the days when the only fighting was man to man, or one man to many men. Here every "Boojer" and Rooinek was a champion. The Boer fell back because he was forced back by men who were men of the veld like himself; and the Briton pressed forward because he would not be denied; because he was sick of reverses; of going forward and falling back; of taking a position with staggering loss and then abandoning it; of gaining a victory and then not following it up; of having the foe in the hollow of the hand and hesitating to close it with a death-grip; of promising relief to besieged men, and marking time when you had gained a foothold, instead of gaining a foothold farther on.

Byng's men were mostly South-Africans born, who had lived and worked below the Zambesi all their lives; or else those whose blood was in a fever at the thought that a colony over which the British flag flew should be trod by the feet of an invader, who had had his own liberty and independence secured by that flag, but who refused to white men the status given to "niggers" in civilized states. These fighters under Byng had had their fill of tactics and strategy which led nowhere forward; and at Wortmann's Drift the day before they had done a big thing for the army with a handful of men. They could ride like Cossacks, they could shoot like William Tell, and they had a mind to be the swivel by which the army of Queen Victoria should swing from almost perpetual disaster, in large and small degree, to victory.

From the first trenches on and on to the second trenches higher up! But here the Boer in his burrow with his mauser rifle roaring, and his heart fierce with hatred and anger at the surprise, laid down to the bloody work with an ugly determination to punish remorselessly his fellow-citizens of the veld and the others. It was a fire which only bullet-proof men could stand, and these were but breasts of flesh and muscle, though the will was iron.

Up, up, and up, struggled these men of the indomitable will. Step by step, while man after man fell wounded or dead, they pushed forward, taking what cover was possible; firing as steadily as at Aldershot; never wasting shots, keeping the eye vigilant for the black slouch hat above the rocks, which told that a Boer's head was beneath it, and might be caught by a lightning shot.

Step by step, man by man, troop by troop, they came nearer to the hedges of stone behind which an inveterate foe with grim joy saw a soldier fall to his soft-nosed bullet; while far down behind these men of a forlorn hope there was hurrying up artillery which would presently throw its lyddite and its shrapnel on the top of the hill up where hundreds of Boers held, as they thought, an impregnable position. At last with rushes which cost them almost as dearly in proportion as the rush at Balaclava cost the Light Brigade, Byng's men reached the top, mad with the passion of battle, vengeful in spirit because of the comrades they had lost; and the trenches emptied before them. As they were forsaken, men fought hand to hand and as savagely as ever men fought in the days of Rustum.

In one corner, the hottest that the day saw, Rudyard and Barry Whalen and a scattered handful of men threw themselves upon a greatly larger number of the enemy. For a moment a man here and there fought for his life against two or three of the foe. Of these were Rudyard and Barry Whalen. The khaki of the former was shot through in several places, he had been slashed in the cheek by a bullet, and a bullet had also passed through the muscle of his left forearm; but he was scarcely conscious of it. It seemed as though Fate would let no harm befall him; but, in the very moment, when on another part of the ridge his men were waving their hats in victory, three Boers sprang up before him, ragged and grim and old, but with the fire of fanaticism and race-hatred in their eyes. One of them he accounted for, another he wounded, but the wounded voortrekker—a giant of near seven feet clubbed his rifle, and drove at him. Rudyard shot at close quarters again, but his pistol missed fire.

Just as the rifle of his giant foe swung above him, Byng realized that the third Boer was levelling a rifle directly at his breast. His eyes involuntarily closed as though to draw the curtain of life itself, but, as he did so, he heard a cry—the wild, hoarse cry of a voice he knew so well.

"Baas! Baas!" it called.

Then two shots came simultaneously, and the clubbed rifle brought him to the ground.

"Baas! Baas!"

The voice followed him, as he passed into unconsciousness.

Barry Whalen had seen Rudyard's danger, but had been unable to do anything. His hands were more than full, his life in danger; but in the instant that he had secured his own safety, he heard the cry of "Baas! Baas!" Then he saw the levelled rifle fall from the hands of the Boer who had aimed at Byng, and its owner collapse in a heap. As Rudyard fell beneath the clubbed rifle he heard the cry, "Baas! Baas!" again, and saw an unkempt figure darting among the rocks. His own pistol brought down the old Boer who had felled Byng, and then he realized who it was had cried out, "Baas!"

The last time he had heard that voice was in Park Lane, when Byng, with sjambok, drove a half-caste valet into the street.

It was the voice of Krool. And Krool was now bending over Rudyard's body, raising his head and still murmuring, "Baas—Baas!"

Krool's rifle had saved Rudyard from death by killing one of his own fellow-fighters. Much as Barry Whalen loathed the man, this act showed that Krool's love for the master who had sjamboked him was stronger than death.

Barry, himself bleeding from slight wounds, stooped over his unconscious friend with a great anxiety.

"No, it is nothing," Krool said, with his hand on Rudyard's breast. "The left arm, it is hurt, the head not get all the blow. Alamachtig, it is good! The Baas—it is right with the Baas."

Barry Whalen sighed with relief. He set about to restore Rudyard, as Krool prepared a bandage for the broken head.

Down in the valley the artillery was at work. Lyddite and shrapnel and machine-guns were playing upon the top of the ridge above them, and the infantry—Humphrey's and Blagdon's men—were hurrying up the slope which Byng's pioneers had cleared, and now held. From this position the enemy could be driven from their main position on the summit, because they could be swept now by artillery fire from a point as high as their own.

"A good day's work, old man," said Barry Whalen to the still unconscious figure. "You've done the trick for the Lady at Windsor this time. It's a great sight better business than playing baccarat at DeLancy Scovel's."

Cheering came from everywhere, cries of victory filled the air. As he looked down the valley Barry could see the horses they had left behind being brought, under cover of the artillery and infantry fire, to the hill they had taken. The grey mare would be among them. But Rudyard would not want the grey mare yet awhile. An ambulance-cart was the thing for him.

Barry would have given much for a flask of brandy. A tablespoonful would bring Rudyard back. A surgeon was not needed, however. Krool's hands had knowledge. Barry remembered the day when Wallstein was taken ill in Rudyard's house, and how Krool acted with the skill of a Westminster sawbones.

Suddenly a bugle-call sounded, loud and clear and very near them. Byng had heard that bugle call again and again in this engagement, and once he had seen the trumpeter above the trenches, sounding the advance before more than a half-dozen men had reached the defences of the Boers. The same trumpeter was now running towards them. He had been known in London as Jigger. In South Africa he was familiarly called Little Jingo.

His face was white as he leaned over Barry Whalen to look at Rudyard, but suddenly the blood came back to his cheek.

"He wants brandy," Jigger said.

"Well, go and get it," said Barry sharply.

"I've got it here," was the reply; and he produced a flask.

"Well, I'm damned!" said Barry. "You'll have a gun next, and fire it too!"

"A 4.7," returned Jigger impudently.

As the flask was at Rudyard's lips, Barry Whalen said to Krool, "What do you stay here as—deserter or prisoner? It's got to be one or the other."

"Prisoner," answered Krool. Then he added, "See—the Baas."

Rudyard's eyes were open.

"Prisoner—who is a prisoner?" he asked feebly.

"Me, Baas," whispered Krool, leaning over him.

"He saved your life, Colonel," interposed Barry Whalen.

"I thought it was the brandy," said Jigger with a grin.

CHAPTER XXXIV

"THE ALPINE FELLOW"

To all who fought in the war a change of some sort had come. Those who emerged from it to return to England or her far Dominions, or to stay in the land of the veld, of the kranz and the kloof and the spruit, were never the same again. Something came which, to a degree, transformed them, as the salts of the water and the air permeate the skin and give the blood new life. None escaped the salt of the air of conflict.

The smooth-faced young subaltern who but now had all his life before him, realized the change when he was swept by the leaden spray of death on Spion Kop, and received in his face of summer warmth, or in his young exultant heart, the quietus to all his hopes, impulses and desires. The young find no solace or recompense in the philosophy of those who regard life as a thing greatly over-estimated.

Many a private grown hard of flesh and tense of muscle, with his scant rations and meagre covering in the cold nights, with his long marches and fruitless risks and futile fightings, when he is shot down, has little consolation, save in the fact that the thing he and his comrades and the regiment and the army set out to do is done. If he has to do so, he gives his life with a stony sense of loss which has none of the composure of those who have solace in thinking that what they leave behind has a constantly decreasing value. And here and there some simple soul, more gifted than his comrades, may touch off the meaning of it all, as it appears to those who hold their lives in their hands for a nation's sake, by a stroke of mordant comment.

So it was with that chess-playing private from New Zealand of whom Barry Whalen told Ian Stafford. He told it a few days after Rudyard Byng had won that fight at Hetmeyer's Kopje, which had enabled the Master Player to turn the flank of the Boers, though there was yet grim frontal work to do against machines of Death, carefully hidden and masked on the long hillsides, which would take staggering toll of Britain's manhood.

"From behind Otago there in New Zealand, he came," began Barry, "as fine a fella of thirty-three as ever you saw. Just come, because he heard old Britain callin'. Down he drops the stock-whip, away he shoves the plough, up he takes his little balance from the bank, sticks his chess-box in his pocket, says 'so-long' to his girl, and treks across the world, just to do his whack for the land that gave him and all his that went before him the key to civilization, and how to be happy though alive.... He was the real thing, the ne plus ultra, the I-stand-alone. The other fellas thought him the best of the best. He was what my father used to call 'a wide man.' He was in and out of a fight with a quirk at the corner of his mouth, as much as to say, 'I've got the hang of this, and it's different from what I thought; but that doesn't mean it hasn't got to be done, and done in style. It's the has-to-be.' And when they got him where he breathes, he fished out the little ivory pawn and put it on a stone at his head, to let it tell his fellow-countrymen how he looked at it—that he was just a pawn in the great game. The game had to be played, and won, and the winner had to sacrifice his pawns. He was one of the sacrifices. Well, I'd like a tombstone the same as that fella from New Zealand, if I could win it as fair, and see as far."

Stafford raised his head with a smile of admiration. "Like the ancients, like the Oriental Emperors to-day, he left his message. An Alexander, with not one world conquered."

"I'm none so sure of that," was Barry's response. "A man that could put such a hand on himself as he did has conquered a world. He didn't want to go, but he went as so many have gone hereabouts. He wanted to stay, but he went against his will, and—and I wish that the grub-hunters, and tuft-hunters, and the blind greedy majority in England could get hold of what he got hold of. Then life 'd be a different thing in Thamesfontein and the little green islands."

"You were meant for a Savonarola or a St. Francis, my bold grenadier," said Stafford with a friendly nod.

"I was meant for anything that comes my way, and to do everything that was hard enough."

Stafford waved a hand. "Isn't this hard enough—a handful of guns and fifteen hundred men lost in a day, and nothing done that you can put in an envelope and send 'to the old folks at 'ome?'"

"Well, that's all over, Colonel. Byng has turned the tide by turning the Boer flank. I'm glad he's got that much out of his big shindy. It'll do him more good than his millions. He was oozing away like a fat old pine-tree in London town. He's got all his balsam in his bones now. I bet he'll get more out of this thing than anybody, more that's worth having. He doesn't want honours or promotion; he wants what 'd make his wife sorry to be a widow; and he's getting it."

"Let us hope that his wife won't be put to the test," responded Stafford evenly.

Barry looked at him a little obliquely. "She came pretty near it when we took Hetmeyer's Kopje."

"Is he all right again?" Stafford asked; then added quickly, "I've had so much to do since the Hetmeyer business that I have not seen Byng."

Barry spoke very carefully and slowly. "He's over at Brinkwort's Farm for a while. He didn't want to go to the hospital, and the house at the Farm is good enough for anybody. Anyhow, you get away from the smell of disinfectants and the business of the hospital. It's a snigger little place is Brinkwort's Farm. There's an orchard of peaches and oranges, and there are pomegranate hedges, and plenty of nice flowers in the garden, and a stoep made for candidates for Stellenbosch—as comfortable as the room of a Rand director."

"Mrs. Byng is with him?" asked Stafford, his eyes turned towards Brinkwort's Farm miles away. He could see the trees, the kameel-thorn, the blue-gums, the orange and peach trees surrounding it, a clump or cloud of green in the veld.

"No, Mrs. Byng's not with him," was the reply.

Stafford stirred uneasily, a frown gathered, his eyes took on a look of sombre melancholy. "Ah," he said at length, "she has returned to Durban, then?"

"No. She got a chill the night of the Hetmeyer coup, and she's in bed at the hospital."

Stafford controlled himself. "Is it a bad chill?" he asked heavily. "Is she dangerously ill?" His voice seemed to thicken.

"She was; but she's not so bad that a little attention from a friend would make her worse. She never much liked me; but I went just the same, and took her some veld-roses."

"You saw her?" Stafford's voice was very low.

"Yes, for a minute. She's as thin as she once wasn't," Barry answered, "but twice as beautiful. Her eyes are as big as stars, and she can smile still, but it's a new one—a war-smile, I expect. Everything gets a turn of its own at the Front."

"She was upset and anxious about Byng, I suppose?" Stafford asked, with his head turned away from this faithfulest of friends, who would have died for the man now sitting on the stoep of Brinkwort's house, looking into the bloom of the garden.

"Naturally," was the reply. Barry Whalen thought carefully of what he should say, because the instinct of the friend who loved his friend had told him that, since the night at De Lancy Scovel's house when the name of Mennaval had been linked so hatefully with that of Byng's wife, there had been a cloud over Rudyard's life; and that Rudyard and Jasmine were not the same as of yore.

"Naturally she was upset," he repeated. "She made Al'mah go and nurse Byng."

"Al'mah," repeated Stafford mechanically. "Al'mah!" His mind rushed back to that night at the opera, when Rudyard had sprung from the box to the stage and had rescued Al'mah from the flames. The world had widened since then.

Al'mah and Jasmine had been under the same roof but now; and Al'mah was nursing Jasmine's husband—surely life was merely farce and tragedy.

At this moment an orderly delivered a message to Barry Whalen. He rose to go, but turned back to Stafford again.

"She'd be glad to see you, I'm certain," he said. "You never can tell what a turn sickness will take in camp, and she's looking pretty frail. We all ought to stand by Byng and whatever belongs to Byng. No need to say that to you; but you've got a lot of work and responsibility, and in the rush you mightn't realize that she's more ill than the chill makes her. I hope you won't mind my saying so in my stupid way."

Stafford rose and grasped his hand, and a light of wonderful friendliness and comradeship shone in his eyes.

"Beau chevalier! Beau chevalier!" was all he said, and impulsive Barry Whalen went away blinking; for hard as iron as he was physically, and a fighter of courage, his temperament got into his eyes or at his lips very easily.

Stafford looked after him admiringly. "Lucky the man who has such a friend," he said aloud—"Sans peur et sans reproche! He could not betray a "—the waving of wings above him caught his eye—"he could not betray an aasvogel." His look followed the bird of prey, the servitor of carrion death, as it flew down the wind.

He had absorbed the salt of tears and valour. He had been enveloped in the Will that makes all wills as one, the will of a common purpose; and it had changed his attitude towards his troubles, towards his past, towards his future.

What Barry had said to him, and especially the tale of the New Zealander, had revealed the change which had taken place. The War had purged his mind, cleared his vision. When he left England he was immersed in egoism, submerged by his own miseries. He had isolated himself in a lazaretto of self-reproach and resentment. The universe was tottering because a woman had played him false. Because of this obsession of self, he was eager to be done with it all, to pay a price which he might have paid, had it been possible to meet Rudyard pistol or sword in hand, and die as many such a man has done, without trying to save his own life or to take the life of another. That he could not do. Rudyard did not know the truth, had not the faintest knowledge that Jasmine had been more to himself than an old and dear friend. To pay the price in any other way than by eliminating himself from the equation was to smirch her name, be the ruin of a home, and destroy all hope for the future.

It had seemed to him that there was no other way than to disappear honourably through one of the hundred gates which the war would open to him—to go where Death ambushed the reckless or the brave, and take the stroke meant for him, on a field of honour all too kind to himself and soothing to those good friends who would mourn his going, those who hoped for him the now unattainable things.

In a spirit of stoic despair he had come to the seat of war. He had invited Destiny to sweep him up in her reaping, by placing himself in the ambit of her scythe; but the sharp reaping-hook had passed him by.

The innumerable exits were there in the wall of life and none had opened to him; but since the evening when he saw Jasmine at the railway station, there had been an opening of doors in his soul hitherto hidden. Beyond these doors he saw glimpses of a new world—not like the one he had lived in, not so green, so various, or tumultuous, but it had the lure of that peace, not sterile or somnolent, which summons the burdened life, or the soul with a vocation, to the hood of a monk—a busy self-forgetfulness.

Looking after Barry Whalen's retreating figure he saw this new, grave world opening out before him; and as the vision floated before his eyes, Barry's appeal that he should visit Jasmine at the hospital came to him.

Jasmine suffered. He recalled Barry's words: "She's as thin as she once wasn't, but twice as beautiful. Her eyes are as big as stars, and she can smile still, but it's a new one—a war-smile, I expect. Everything gets a turn of its own at the Front."

Jasmine suffered in body. He knew that she suffered in mind also. To go to her? Was that his duty? Was it his desire? Did his heart cry out for it either in pity—or in love?

In love? Slowly a warm flood of feeling passed through him. It was dimly borne in on him, as he gazed at the hospital in the distance, that this thing called Love, which seizes upon our innermost selves, which takes up residence in the inner sanctuary, may not be dislodged. It stays on when the darkness comes, reigning in the gloom. Even betrayal, injury, tyranny, do not drive it forth. It continues. No longer is the curtain drawn aside for tribute, for appeal, or for adoration, but It remains until the last footfall dies in the temple, and the portals ate closed forever.

For Stafford the curtain was drawn before the shrine; but love was behind the curtain still.

He would not go to her as Barry had asked. There in Brinkwort's house in the covert of peaches and pomegranates was the man and the only man who should, who must, bring new bloom to her cheek. Her suffering would carry her to Rudyard at the last, unless it might be that one or the other of them had taken Adrian Fellowes' life. If either had done that, there could be no reunion.

He did not know what Al'mah had told Jasmine, the thing which had cleared Jasmine's vision, and made possible a path which should lead from the hospital to the house among the orchard-trees at Brinkwort's Farm.

No, he would not, could not go to Jasmine—unless, it might be, she was dying. A sudden, sharp anxiety possessed him. If, as Barry Whalen suggested, one of those ugly turns should come, which illnesses take in camp, and she should die without a friend near her, without Rudyard by her side! He mounted his horse, and rode towards the hospital.

His inquiries at the hospital relieved his mind. "If there is no turn for the worse, no complications, she will go on all right, and will be convalescent in a few days," the medicine-man had said.

He gave instructions for a message to be sent to him if there was any change for the worse. His first impulse, to tell them not to let her know he had inquired, he set aside. There must not be subterfuge or secrecy any longer. Let Destiny take her course.

As he left the hospital, he heard a wounded Boer prisoner say to a Tommy who had fought with him on opposite sides in the same engagement, "Alles zal recht kom!" All will come right, was the English of it.

Out of the agony of conflict would all come right—for Boer, for Briton, for Rudyard, for Jasmine, for himself, for Al'mah?

As he entered his tent again, he was handed his mail, which had just arrived. The first letter he touched had the postmark of Durban. The address on the envelope was in the handwriting of Lady Tynemouth.

He almost shrank from opening it, because of the tragedy which had come to the husband of the woman who had been his faithful friend over so many years. At an engagement a month before, Tynemouth had been blinded by shrapnel, and had been sent to Durban. To the two letters he had written there had come no answer until now; and he felt that this reply would be a plaint against Fate, a rebellion against the future restraint and trial and responsibility which would be put upon the wife, who was so much of the irresponsible world.

After a moment, however, he muttered a reproach against his own darkness of spirit and his lack of faith in her womanliness, and opened the envelope.

It was not the letter he had imagined and feared. It began by thanking him for his own letter, and then it plunged into the heart of her trouble:

".... Tynie is blind. He will never see again. But his face seems to me quite beautiful. It shines, Ian: beauty comes from within. Poor old Tynie, who would have thought that the world he loved couldn't make that light in his face! I never saw it there—did you? It is just giving up one's self to the Inevitable. I suppose we mostly are giving up ourselves to Ourselves, thinking always of our own pleasure and profit and pride, never being content, pushing on and on.... Ian, I'm not going to push on any more. I've done with the Climbers. There's too much of the Climbers in us all—not social climbing, I mean, but wanting to get somewhere that has something for us, out in the big material world. When I look at Tynie—he's lying there so peaceful—you might think it is a prison he is in. It isn't. He's set free into a world where he had never been. He's set free in a world of light that never blinds us. If he'd lived to be a hundred with the sight of his eyes, he'd never have known that there's a world that belongs to Allah,—I love that word, it sounds so great and yet so friendly, so gentler than the name by which we call the First One in our language and our religion—and that world is inside ourselves.... Tynie is always thinking of other people now, wondering what they are doing and how they are doing it. He was talking about you a little while ago, and so admiringly. It brought the tears to my eyes. Oh, I am so glad, Ian, that our friendship has always been so much on the surface, so 'void of offence'—is that the phrase? I can look at it without wincing; and I am glad. It never was a thing of importance to you, for I am not important, and there was no weight of life in it or in me. But even the butterfly has its uses, and maybe I was meant to play a little part in your big life. I like to think it was so. Sometimes a bright day gets a little more interest from the drone of the locust or the glow of a butterfly's wings. I'm not sure that the locust's droning and the bright flutter of the butterfly's wings are not the way Nature has of fastening the soul to the meaning of it all. I wonder if you ever heard the lines—foolish they read, but they are not:

"'All summer long there was one little butterfly,
Flying ahead of me,
Wings red and yellow, a pretty little fellow,
Flying ahead of me.
One little butterfly, one little butterfly,
What can his message be?—
All summer long, there was one little butterfly
Flying ahead of me.'

"It may be so that the poet meant the butterfly to mean the joy of things, the hope of things, the love of things flying ahead to draw us on and on into the sunlight and up the steeps, and over the higher hills.

"Ian, I would like to be such a butterfly in your eyes at this moment; perhaps the insignificant means of making you see the near thing to do, and by doing it get a step on towards the Far Thing. You used always to think of the Far Thing. Ah, what ambition you had when I first knew you on the Zambesi, when the old red umbrella, but for you, would have carried me over into the mist and the thunder! Well, you have lost that ambition. I know why you came out here. No one ever told me. The thing behind the words in your letter tells me plainer than words. The last time I saw you in London—do you remember when it was? It was the day that Rudyard Byng drove Krool into Park Lane with the sjambok. Well, that last time, when I met you in the hall as we were both leaving a house of trouble, I felt the truth. Do you remember the day I went to see you when Mr. Mappin came? I felt the truth then more. I often wondered how I could ever help you in the old days. That was an ambition of mine. But I had no brains—no brains like Jasmine's and many another woman; and I was never able to do anything. But now I feel as I never felt anything before in my life. I feel that my time and my chance have come. I feel like a prophetess, like Miriam,—or was it Deborah?—and that I must wind the horn of warning as you walk on the edge of the precipice.

"Ian, it's only little souls who do the work that should be left to Allah, and I don't believe that you can take the reins out of Allah's hands,—He lets you do it, of course, if you insist, for a wilful child must be taught his lesson—without getting smashed up at a sharp corner that you haven't learnt to turn. Ian, there's work for you to do. Even Tynie thinks that he can do some work still. He sees he can, as he never did before; and he talks of you as a man who can do anything if you will. He says that if England wanted a strong man before the war she will want a stronger man afterwards to pick up the pieces, and put them all together again. He says that after we win, reconstruction in South Africa will be a work as big as was ever given to a man, because, if it should fail, 'down will go the whole Imperial show'—that's Tynie's phrase. And he says, why shouldn't you do it here, or why shouldn't you be the man who will guide it all in England? You found the key to England's isolation, to her foreign problem,—I'm quoting Tynie—which meant that the other nations keep hands off in this fight; well, why shouldn't you find another key, that to the future of this Empire? You got European peace for England, and now the problem is how to make this Empire a real thing. Tynie says this, not me. His command of English is better than mine, but neither of us would make a good private secretary, if we had to write letters with words of over two syllables. I've told you what Tynie says, but he doesn't know at all what I know; he doesn't see the danger I see, doesn't realize the mad thing in your brain, the sad thing weighing down your heart—and hers.

"Ian, I feel it on my own heart, and I want it lifted away. Your letter has only one word in it really. That word is Finis. I say, it must not, shall not, be Finis. Look at the escapes you have had in this war. Is not that enough to prove that you have a long way to go yet, and that you have to 'make good' the veld as you trek. To outspan now would be a crime. It would spoil a great life, it would darken memory—even mine, Ian. I must speak the truth. I want you, we all want you, to be the big man you are at heart. Do not be a Lassalle. It is too small. If one must be a slave, then let it be to something greater than one's self, higher—toweringly unattainably higher. Believe me, neither the girl you love nor any woman on earth is entitled to hold in slavery the energies and the mind and hopes of a man who can do big things—or any man at all.

"Ian, Tynie and I have our trials, but we are going to live them down. At first Tynie wanted to die, but he soon said he would see it through—blind at forty. You have had your trials, you have them still; but every gift of man is yours, and every opportunity. Will you not live it all out to the end? Allah knows the exit He wants for us, and He must resent our breaking a way out of the prison of our own making.

"You've no idea how this life of work with Jasmine has brought things home to me—and to Jasmine too. When I see the multitude of broken and maimed victims of war, well, I feel like Jeremiah; but I feel sad too that these poor fellows and those they love must suffer in order to teach us our lesson—us and England. Dear old friend, great man, I am going to quote a verse Tynie read to me last night—oh, how strange that seems! Yet it was so in a sense, he did read to me. Tynie made me say the words from the book, but he read into them all that they were, he that never drew a literary breath. It was a poem Jasmine quoted to him a fortnight ago—Browning's 'Grammarian,' and he stopped me at these words:

"'Thither our path lies; wind we up the heights:
Wait ye the warning?
Our low life was the level's and the night's;
He's for the morning.'

"Tynie stopped me there, and said, 'That's Stafford. He's the Alpine fellow!' ..."

A few sentences more and then the letter ended on a note of courage, solicitude and friendship. And at the very last she said:

"It isn't always easy to find the key to things, but you will find it, not because you are so clever, but because at heart you are so good.... We both send our love, and don't forget that England hasn't had a tenth of her share of Ian Stafford...."

Then there followed a postscript which ran:

"I always used to say, 'When my ship comes home,' I'd have this or that. Well, here is the ship—mine and Jasmine's, and it has come Home for me, and for Jasmine, too, I hope."

Stafford looked out over the veld. He saw the light of the sun, the joy of summer, the flowers, the buoyant hills, where all the guns were silent now; he saw a blesbok in the distance leaping to join its fellows of a herd which had strayed across the fields of war; he felt that stir of vibrant life in the air which only the new lands know; and he raised his head with the light of resolve growing in his eyes.

"Don't forget that England hasn't had a tenth of her share of Ian Stafford," Alice Tynemouth had said.

Looking round, he saw men whose sufferings were no doubt as great as his own or greater; but they were living on for others' sakes. Despair retreated before a woman's insight.

"The Alpine fellow" wanted to live now.

CHAPTER XXXV

AT BRINKWORT'S FARM

"What are you doing here, Krool?" The face of the half-caste had grown more furtive than it was in the London days, and as he looked at Stafford now, it had a malignant expression which showed through the mask of his outward self-control.

"I am prisoner," Krool answered thickly.

"When—where?" Stafford inquired, his eye holding the other's.

"At Hetmeyer's Kopje."

"But what are you—a prisoner—doing here at Brinkwort's Farm?"

"I was hurt. They take me hospital, but the Baas, he send for me."

"They let you come without a guard?"

"No—not. They are outside"—Krool jerked a finger towards the rear of the house—"with the biltong and the dop."

"You are a liar, Krool. There may be biltong, but there is no dop."

"What matters!" Krool's face had a leer. He looked impudently at Stafford, and Stafford read the meaning behind the unveiled insolence: Krool knew what no one else but Jasmine and himself knew with absolute certainty. Krool was in his own country, more than half a savage, with the lust of war in his blood, with memories of a day in Park Lane when the sjambok had done its ugly work, and Ian Stafford had, as Krool believed, placed it in the hands of the Baas.

It might be that this dark spirit, this Nibelung of the tragedy of the House of Byng, would even yet, when the way was open to a reconstructed life for Jasmine and Rudyard, bring catastrophe.

The thought sickened him, and then black anger took possession of him. The look he cast on the bent figure before him in the threadbare frock-coat which had been taken from the back of some dead Boer, with the corded breeches stuck in boots too large for him, and the khaki hat which some vanished Tommy would never wear again, was resolute and vengeful.

Krool must not stay at Brinkwort's Farm. He must be removed. If the Caliban told Rudyard what he knew, there could be but one end to it all; and Jasmine's life, if not ruined, must ever be, even at the best, lived under the cover of magnanimity and compassion. That would break her spirit, would take from her the radiance of temperament which alone could make life tolerable to her or to others who might live with her under the same roof. Anxiety possessed him, and he swiftly devised means to be rid of Krool before harm could be done. He was certain harm was meant—there was a look of semi-insanity in Krool's eyes. Krool must be put out of the way before he could speak with the Baas.... But how?

With a great effort Stafford controlled himself. Krool must be got rid of at once, must be sent back to the prisoners' quarters and kept there. He must not see Byng now. In a few more hours the army would move on, leaving the prisoners behind, and Rudyard would presently move on with the army. This was Byng's last day at Brinkwort's Farm, to which he himself had come to-day lest Rudyard should take note of his neglect, and their fellow-officers should remark that the old friendship had grown cold, and perhaps begin to guess at the reason why.

"You say the Baas sent for you?" he asked presently.

"Yes."

"To sjambok you again?"

Krool made a gesture of contempt. "I save the Baas at Hetmeyer's Kopje. I kill Piet Graaf to do it."

There was a look of assurance in the eyes of the mongrel, which sent a wave of coldness through Stafford's veins and gave him fresh anxiety.

He was in despair. He knew Byng's great, generous nature, and he dreaded the inconsistency which such men show—forgiving and forgetting when the iron penalty should continue and the chains of punishment remain.

He determined to know the worst. "Traitor all round!" he said presently with contempt. "You saved the Baas by killing Piet Graaf—have you told the Baas that? Has any one told the Baas that? The sjambok is the Baas' cure for the traitor, and sometimes it kills to cure. Do you think that the Baas would want his life through the killing of Piet Graaf by his friend Krool, the slim one from the slime?"

As a sudden tempest twists and bends a tree, contorts it, bows its branches to the dust, transforms it from a thing of beauty to a hag of Walpurgis, so Stafford's words transformed Krool. A passion of rage possessed him. He looked like one of the creatures that waited on Wotan in the nether places. He essayed to speak, but at first could not. His body bent forward, and his fingers spread out in a spasm of hatred, then clinched with the stroke of a hammer on his knees, and again opened and shut in a gesture of loathsome cruelty.

At length he spoke, and Stafford listened intently, for now Caliban was off his guard, and he knew the worst that was meant.

"Ah, you speak of traitor—you! The sjambok for the traitor, eh? The sjambok—fifty strokes, a hunderd strokes—a t'ousand! Krool—Krool is a traitor, and the sjambok for him. What did he do? What did Krool do? He help Oom Paul against the Rooinek—against the Philistine. He help the chosen against the children of Hell.

"What did Krool do? He tell Oom Paul how the thieves would to come in the night to sold him like sheep to a butcher, how the t'ousand wolves would swarm upon the sheepfold, and there would be no homes for the voortrekker and his vrouw, how the Outlander would sit on our stoeps and pick the peaches from our gardens. And he tell him other things good for him to hear."

Stafford was conscious of the smell of orchard blossoms blown through the open window, of the odour of the pomegranate in the hedge; but his eyes were fascinated by the crouching passion of the figure before him and the dissonance of the low, unhuman voice. There was no pause in the broken, turgid torrent, which was like a muddy flood pouring over the boulders of a rapid.

"Who the traitor is? Is it the man that tries to save his homeland from the wolf and the worm? I kill Piet Graaf to save the Baas. The Baas an' I, we understand—on the Limpopo we make the unie. He is the Baas, and I am his slave. All else nothing is. I kill all the people of the Baas' country, but I die for the Baas. The Baas kill me if he will it. So it was set down in the bond on the Limpopo. If the Baas strike, he strike; if he kill, he kill. It is in the bond, it is set down. All else go. Piet Graaf, he go. Oom Paul, he go. Joubert, Cronje, Botha, they all go, if the Baas speak. It is written so. On the Limpopo it is written. All must go, if the Baas speak—one, two, three, a t'ousand. Else the bond is water, and the spirits come in the night, and take you to the million years of torment. It is nothing to die—pain! But only the Baas is kill me. It is written so. Only the Baas can hurt me. Not you, nor all the verdomde Rooineks out there"—he pointed to the vast camp out on the veld—"nor the Baas' vrouw. Do I not know all about the Baas' vrouw! She cannot hurt me..." He spat on the ground. "Who is the traitor? Is it Krool? Did Krool steal from the Baas? Krool is the Baas' slave; it is only the friend of the Baas that steal from him—only him is traitor. I kill Piet Graaf to save the Baas. No one kills you to save the Baas! I saw you with your arms round the Baas' vrouw. So I go tell the Baas all. If he kill me—it is the Baas. It is written."

He spat on the ground again, and his eyes grown red with his passion glowered on Stafford like those of some animal of the jungle.

Stafford's face was white, and every nerve in his body seemed suddenly to be wrenched by the hand of torture. What right had he to resent this abominable tirade, this loathsome charge by such a beast? Yet he would have shot where he stood the fellow who had spoken so of "the Baas' vrouw," if it had not come to him with sudden conviction that the end was not to be this way. Ever since he had read Alice Tynemouth's letter a new spirit had been working in him. He must do nothing rash. There was enough stain on his hands now without the added stain of blood. But he must act; he must prevent Krool from telling the Baas. Yonder at the hospital was Jasmine, and she and her man must come together here in this peaceful covert before Rudyard went forward with the army. It must be so.

Two sentries were beyond the doorway. He stepped quickly to the stoep and summoned them. They came. Krool watched with eyes that, at first, did not understand.

Stafford gave an order. "Take the prisoner to the guard. They will at once march him back to the prisoners' camp."

Now Krool understood, and he made as if to spring on Stafford, but a pistol suddenly faced him, and he knew well that what Stafford would not do in cold blood, he would do in the exercise of his duty and as a soldier before these Rooinek privates. He stood still; he made no resistance.

But suddenly his voice rang out in a guttural cry—"Baas!"

In an instant a hand was clapped on his mouth, and his own dirty neckcloth provided a gag.

The storm was over. The native blood in him acknowledged the logic of superior force, and he walked out quietly between the sentries. Stafford's move was regular from a military point of view. He was justified in disposing of a dangerous and recalcitrant prisoner. He could find a sufficient explanation if he was challenged.

As he turned round from the doorway through which Krool had disappeared, he saw Al'mah, who had entered from another room during the incident.

A light came to Stafford's face. They two derelicts of life had much in common—the communion of sinners who had been so much sinned against.

"I heard his last words about you and—her," she said in a low voice.

"Where is Byng?" he asked anxiously.

"In the kloof near by. He will be back presently."

"Thank God!"

Al'mah's face was anxious. "I don't know what you are going to say to him, or why you have come," she said, "but—"

"I have come to congratulate him on his recovery."

"I understand. I want to say some things to you. You should know them before you see him. There is the matter of Adrian Fellowes."

"What about Adrian Fellowes?" Stafford asked evenly, yet he felt his heart give a bound and his brain throb.

"Does it matter to you now? At the inquest you were—concerned."

"I am more concerned now," he rejoined huskily.

He suddenly held out a hand to her with a smile of rare friendliness. There came over him again the feeling he had at the hospital when they talked together last, that whatever might come of all the tragedy and sorrow around them they two must face irretrievable loss.

She hesitated a moment, and then as she took his outstretched hand she said, "Yes, I will take it while I can."

Her eyes went slowly round the room as though looking for something—some point where they might rest and gather courage maybe, then they steadied to his firmly.

"You knew Adrian Fellowes did not die a natural death—I saw that at the inquest."

"Yes, I knew."

"It was a poisoned needle."

"I know. I found the needle."

"Ah! I threw it down afterwards. I forgot about it."

Slowly the colour left Stafford's face, as the light of revelation broke in upon his brain. Why had he never suspected her? His brain was buzzing with sounds which came from inner voices—voices of old thoughts and imaginings, like little beings in a dark forest hovering on the march of the discoverer. She was speaking, but her voice seemed to come through a clouded medium from a great distance to him.

"He had hurt me more than any other—than my husband or her. I did it. I would do it again.... I had been good to him.... I had suffered, I wanted something for all I had lost, and he was ..."

Her voice trailed away into nothing, then rose again presently. "I am not sorry. Perhaps you wonder at that. But no, I do not hate myself for it—only for all that went before it. I will pay, if I have to pay, in my own way.... Thousands of women die who are killed by hands that carry no weapon. They die of misery and shame and regret.... This one man died because ..."

He did not hear, or if he heard he did not realize what she was saying now. One thought was ringing through his mind like bells pealing. The gulf of horrible suspicion between Rudyard and Jasmine was closed. So long as it yawned, so long as there was between them the accounting for Adrian Fellowes' death, they might have come together, but there would always have been a black shadow between—the shadow that hangs over the scaffold.

"They should know the truth," he said almost peremptorily.

"They both know," she rejoined calmly. "I told him this evening. On the day I saw you at the hospital, I told her."

There was silence for a moment, and then he said: "She must come here before he joins his regiment."

"I saw her last night at the hospital," Al'mah answered. "She was better. She was preparing to go to Durban. I did not ask her if she was coming, but I was sure she was not. So, just now, before you came, I sent a message to her. It will bring her.... It does not matter what a woman like me does."

"What did you say to her?"

"I wrote, 'If you wish to see him before the end, come quickly.' She will think he is dying."

"If she resents the subterfuge?"

"Risks must be taken. If he goes without their meeting—who can tell! Now is the time—now. I want to see it. It must be."

He reached out both hands and took hers, while she grew pale. Her eyes had a strange childishly frightened look.

"You are a good woman, Al'mah," he said.

A quivering, ironical laugh burst from her lips. Then, suddenly, her eyes were suffused.

"The world would call it the New Goodness then," she replied in a voice which told how deep was the well of misery in her being.

"It is as old as Allah," he replied.

"Or as old as Cain?" she responded, then added quickly, "Hush! He is coming."

An instant afterwards she was outside among the peach trees, and Rudyard and Stafford faced each other in the room she had just left.

As Al'mah stood looking into the quivering light upon the veld, her fingers thrust among the blossoms of a tree which bent over her, she heard horses' hoofs, and presently there came round the corner of the house two mounted soldiers who had brought Krool to Brinkwort's Farm. Their prisoner was secured to a stirrup-leather, and the neckcloth was still binding his mouth.

As they passed, Krool turned towards the house, eyes showing like flames under the khaki trooper's hat, which added fresh incongruity to the frock-coat and the huge top-boots.

The guard were now returning to their post at the door-way.

"What has happened?" she asked, with a gesture towards the departing Krool.

"A bit o' lip to Colonel Stafford, ma'am," answered one of the guard. "He's got a tongue like a tanner's vat, that goozer. Wants a lump o' lead in 'is baskit 'e does."

"'E done a good turn at Hetmeyer's Kopje," added the Second. "If it hadn't been for 'im the S.A.'s would have had a new Colonel"—he jerked his head towards the house, from which came the murmur of men's voices talking earnestly.

"Whatever 'e done it for, it was slim, you can stake a tidy lot on that, ma'am," interjected the First. "He's the bottom o' the sink, this half-caste Boojer is."

The Second continued: "If I 'ad my way 'e'd be put in front at the next push-up, just where the mausers of his pals would get 'im. 'E's done a lot o' bitin' in 'is time—let 'im bite the dust now, I sez. I'm fair sick of treatin' that lot as if they was square fighters. Why, 'e'd fire on a nurse or an ambulanche, that tyke would."

"There's lots like him in yonder," urged the First, as a hand was jerked forward towards the hills, "and we're goin' to get 'em this time—goin' to get 'em on the shovel. Their schanses and their kranzes and their ant-bear dugouts ain't goin' to help them this mop-up. We're goin' to get the tongue in the hole o' the buckle this time. It's over the hills and far away, and the Come-in-Elizas won't stop us. When the howitzers with their nice little balls of lyddite physic get opening their bouquets to-morrow—"

"Who says to-morrow?" demanded the Second.

"I says to-morrow. I know. I got ears, and 'im that 'as ears to 'ear let 'im 'ear—that's what the Scripture saith. I was brought up on the off side of a vicarage."

He laughed eagerly at his own joke, chuckling till his comrade followed up with a sharp challenge.

"I bet you never heard nothin' but your own bleatin's—not about wot the next move is, and w'en it is."

The First made quick retort. "Then you lose your bet, for I 'eard Colonel Byng get 'is orders larst night—w'en you was sleepin' at your post, Willy. By to-morrow this time you'll see the whole outfit at it. You'll see the little billows of white rolling over the hills—that's shrapnel. You'll hear the rippin', zippin', zimmin' thing in the air wot makes you sick; for you don't know who it's goin' to 'it. That's shells. You'll hear a thousand blankets being shook—that's mausers and others. You'll see regiments marching out o' step, an' every man on his own, which is not how we started this war, not much. And where there's a bit o' rock, you say, 'Ere's a friend, and you get behind it like a man. And w'en there's nothing to get behind, you get in front, and take your chances, and you get there—right there, over the trenches, over the bloomin' Amalakites, over the hills and far away, where they want the relief they're goin' to get, or I'm a pansy blossom."

"Well, to-morrow can't come quick enough for me," answered the Second. He straightened out his shoulders and eyed the hills in front of him with a calculating air, as though he were planning the tactics of the fight to come.

"We'll all be in it—even you, ma'am," insinuated the First to Al'mah with a friendly nod. "But I'd ruther 'ave my job nor yours. I've done a bit o' nursin'—there was Bob Critchett that got a splinter o' shell in 'is 'ead, and there was Sergeant Hoyle and others. But it gits me where I squeak that kind o' thing do."

Suddenly they brought their rifles to the salute, as a footstep sounded smartly on the stoep. It was Stafford coming from the house.

He acknowledged the salute mechanically. His eyes were fastened on the distance. They had a rapt, shining look, and he walked like one in a pleasant dream. A moment afterwards he mounted his horse with the lightness of a boy, and galloped away.

He had not seen Al'mah as he passed.

In her fingers was crushed a bunch of orange blossoms. A heavy sigh broke from her lips. She turned to go within, and, as she did so, saw Rudyard Byng looking from the doorway towards the hospital where Jasmine was.

"Will she come?" Al'mah asked herself, and mechanically she wiped the stain of the blossoms from her fingers.

CHAPTER XXXVI

SPRINGS OF HEALING

Dusk had almost come, yet Jasmine had not arrived at Brinkwort's Farm, the urgency of Al'mah's message notwithstanding. As things stood, it was a matter of life and death; and to Al'mah's mind humanity alone should have sent Jasmine at once to her husband's side. Something of her old prejudice against Jasmine rose up again. Perhaps behind it all was involuntary envy of an invitation to happiness so freely laid at Jasmine's feet, but withheld from herself by Fate. Never had the chance to be happy or the obvious inducement to be good ever been hers. She herself had nothing, and Jasmine still had a chance for all to which she had no right. Her heart beat harder at the thought of it. She was of those who get their happiness first in making others happy—as she would have done with Blantyre, if she had had a chance; as even she tried to do with the man whom she had sent to his account with the firmness and fury of an ancient Greek. The maternal, the protective sense was big in her, and indirectly it had governed her life. It had sent her to South Africa—to protect the wretch who had done his best to destroy her; it had made her content at times as she did her nurse's work in what dreadful circumstances! It was the source of her revolt at Jasmine's conduct and character.

But was it also that, far beneath her criticism of Jasmine, which was, after all, so little in comparison with the new-found affection she really had for her, there lay a kinship, a sympathy, a soul's rapprochement with Rudyard, which might, in happier circumstances, have become a mating such as the world knew in its youth? Was that also in part the cause of her anxiety for Rudyard, and of her sharp disapproval of Jasmine? Did she want to see Rudyard happy, no matter at what cost to Jasmine? Was it the everlasting feminine in her which would make a woman sacrifice herself for a man, if need be, in order that he might be happy? Was it the ancient tyrannical soul in her which would make a thousand women sacrifice themselves for the man she herself set above all others?

But she was of those who do not know what they are, or what they think and feel, till some explosion forces open the doors of their souls and they look upon a new life over a heap of ruins.

She sat in the gathering dusk, waiting, while hope slowly waned. Rudyard also, on the veranda, paced weakly, almost stumblingly, up and down, his face also turning towards the Stay Awhile Hospital. At length, with a heavy sigh, he entered the house and sat down in a great arm-chair, from which old Brinkwort the Boer had laid down the law for his people.

Where was Jasmine? Why did she not hasten to Brinkwort's Farm?

A Staff Officer from the General Commanding had called to congratulate Jasmine on her recovery, and to give fresh instructions which would link her work at Durban effectively with the army as it now moved on to the relief of the town beyond the hills. Al'mah's note had arrived while the officer was with Jasmine, and it was held back until he left. It was then forgotten by the attendant on duty, and it lay for three hours undelivered. Then when it was given to her, no mention was made of the delay.

When the Staff Officer left her, he had said to himself that hers was one of the most alluring and fascinating faces he had ever seen; and he, like Stafford, though in another sphere—that of the Secret Intelligence Department—had travelled far and wide in the world. Perfectly beautiful he did not call her, though her face was as near that rarity as any he had known. He would only have called a woman beautiful who was tall, and she was almost petite; but that was because he himself was over-tall, and her smallness seemed to be properly classed with those who were pretty, not the handsome or the beautiful. But there was something in her face that haunted him—a wistful, appealing delicacy, which yet was associated with an instant readiness of intellect, with a perspicuous judgment and a gift of organization. And she had eyes of blue which were "meant to drown those who hadn't life-belts," as he said.

In one way or another he put all this to his fellow officers, and said that the existence of two such patriots as Byng and Jasmine in one family was unusual.

"Pretty fairly self-possessed, I should say," said Rigby, the youngest officer present at mess. "Her husband under repair at Brinkwort's Farm, in the care of the blue-ribbon nurse of the army, who makes a fellow well if he looks at her, and she studying organization at the Stay Awhile with a staff-officer."

The reply of the Staff Officer was quick and cutting enough for any officers' mess.

"I see by the latest papers from England, that Balfour says we'll muddle through this war somehow," he said. "He must have known you, Rigby. With the courage of the damned you carry a fearsome lot of impedimenta, and you muddle quite adequately. The lady you have traduced has herself been seriously ill, and that is why she is not at Brinkwort's Farm. What a malicious mind you've got! Byng would think so."

"If Rigby had been in your place to-day," interposed a gruff major, "the lady would surely have had a relapse. Convalescence is no time for teaching the rudiments of human intercourse."

Pale and angry, Rigby, who was half Scotch and correspondingly self-satisfied, rejoined stubbornly: "I know what I know. They haven't met since she came up from Durban. Sandlip told me that—"

The Staff Officer broke the sentence. "What Sandlip told you is what Nancy would tell Polly and Polly would tell the cook—and then Rigby would know. But statement number one is an Ananiasism, for Byng saw his wife at the hospital the night before Hetmeyer's Kopje. I can't tell what they said, though, nor what was the colour of the lady's pegnoir, for I am neither Nancy nor Polly nor the cook—nor Rigby."

With a maddened gesture Rigby got to his feet, but a man at his side pulled him down. "Sit still, Baby Bunting, or you'll not get over the hills to-morrow," he said, and he offered Rigby a cigar from Rigby's own cigar-case, cutting off the end, handing it to him and lighting a match.

"Gun out of action: record the error of the day," piped the thin precise voice of the Colonel from the head of the table.

A chorus of quiet laughter met the Colonel's joke, founded on the technical fact that the variation in the firing of a gun, due to any number of causes, though apparently firing under the same conditions, is carted officially "the error of the day" in Admiralty reports.

"Here the incident closed," as the newspapers say, but Rigby the tactless and the petty had shown that there was rumour concerning the relations of Byng and his wife, which Jasmine, at least, imagined did not exist.

When Jasmine read the note Al'mah had sent her, a flush stole slowly over her face, and then faded, leaving a whiteness, behind which was the emanation, not of fear, but of agitation and of shock.

It meant that Rudyard was dying, and that she must go to him. That she must go to him? Was that the thought in her mind—that she must go to him?

If she wished to see him again before he went! That midnight, when he was on his way to Hetmeyer's Kopje, he had flung from her room into the night, and ridden away angrily on his grey horse, not hearing her voice faintly calling after him. Now, did she want to see him—the last time before he rode away again forever, on that white horse called Death? A shudder passed through her.

"Ruddy! Poor Ruddy!" she said, and she did not remember that those were the pitying, fateful words she used on the day when Ian Stafford dined with her alone after Rudyard made his bitter protest against the life they lived. "We have everything—everything," he had said, "and yet—"

Now, however, there was an anguished sob in her voice. With the thought of seeing him, her fingers tremblingly sought the fine-spun strands of hair which ever lay a little loose from the wonder of its great coiled abundance, and then felt her throat, as though to adjust the simple linen collar she wore, making exquisite contrast to the soft simplicity of her dark-blue gown.

She found the attendant who had given her the letter, and asked if the messenger was waiting, and was only then informed that he had been gone three hours or more.

Three hours or more! It might be that Rudyard was gone forever without hearing what she had to say, or knowing whether she desired reconciliation and peace.

She at once gave orders for a cape-cart to take her over to Brinkwort's Farm. The attendant respectfully said that he must have orders. She hastened to the officer in charge of the hospital, and explained. His sympathy translated itself into instant action. Fortunately there was a cart at the door. In a moment she was ready, and the cart sped away into the night across the veld.

She had noticed nothing as she mounted the cart—neither the driver nor the horses; but, as they hurried on, she was roused by a familiar voice saying, "'E done it all right at Hetmeyer's Kopje—done it brown. First Wortmann's Drift, and then Hetmeyer's Kopje, and he'll be over the hills and through the Boers and into Lordkop with the rest of the hold-me-backs."

She recognized him—the first person who had spoken to her of her husband on her arrival, the cheerful Corporal Shorter, who had told her of Wortmann's Drift and the saving of "Old Gunter."

She touched his arm gently. "I am glad it is you," she said in a low tone.

"Not so glad as I am," he answered. "It's a purple shame that you should ha' been took sick when he was mowed down, and that some one else should be healin' 'is gapin' wounds besides 'is lawful wife, and 'er a rifle-shot away! It's a fair shame, that's wot it is. But all's well as ends well, and you're together at the finish."

She shrank from his last words. Her heart seemed to contract; it hurt her as though it was being crushed in a vise. She was used to that pain now. She had felt it—ah, how many times since the night she found Adrian Fellowes' white rose on her pillow, laid there by the man she had sworn at the altar to love, honor, and obey! Her head drooped. "At the finish"—how strange and new and terrible it was! The world stood still for her.

"You'll go together to Lordkop, I expeck," she heard her companion's voice say, and at first she did not realize its meaning; then slowly it came to her. "At the finish" in his words meant the raising of the siege of Lordkop, it meant rescue, victory, restoration. He had not said that Rudyard was dead, that the Book of Rudyard and Jasmine was closed forever. Her mind was in chaos, her senses in confusion. She seemed like one in a vague shifting, agonizing dream.

She was unconscious of what her friendly Corporal was saying. She only answered him mechanically now and then; and he, seeing that she was distraught, talked on in a comforting kind of way, telling her anecdotes of Rudyard, as they were told in that part of the army to which he belonged.

What was she going to do when she arrived? What could she do if Rudyard was dead? If Rudyard was still alive, she would make him understand that she was not the Jasmine of the days "before the flood"—before that storm came which uprooted all that ever was in her life except the old, often anguished, longing to be good, and the power which swept her into bye and forbidden paths. If he was gone, deaf to her voice and to any mortal sound, then—there rushed into her vision the figure of Ian Stafford, but she put that from her with a trembling determination. That was done forever. She was as sure of it as she was sure of anything in the world. Ian had not forgiven her, would never forgive her. He despised her, rejected her, abhorred her. Ian had saved her from the result of Rudyard's rash retaliation and fury, and had then repulsed her, bidden her stand off from him with a magnanimity and a chivalry which had humiliated her. He had protected her from the shame of an open tragedy, and then had shut the door in her face. Rudyard, with the same evidence as Ian held,—the same letter as proof—he, whatever he believed or thought, he had forgiven her. Only a few nights ago, that night before the fight at Hetmeyer's Kopje, he had opened his arms to her and called her his wife. In Rudyard was some great good thing, something which could not die, which must live on. She sat up straight in the seat of the cart, her hands clinched.

No, no, no, Rudyard was not dead, and he should not die. It mattered not what Al'mah had written, she must have her chance to prove herself; his big soul must have its chance to run a long course, must not be cut off at the moment when so much had been done; when there was so much to do. Ian should see that she was not "just a little burst of eloquence," as he had called her, not just a strumpet, as he thought her; but a woman now, beyond eloquence, far distant from the poppy-fields of pleasure. She was young enough for it to be a virtue in her to avoid the poppy-fields. She was not twenty-six years of age, and to have learned the truth at twenty-six, and still not to have been wholly destroyed by the lies of life, was something which might be turned to good account.

She was sharply roused, almost shocked out of her distraction. Bright lights appeared suddenly in front of her, and she heard the voice of her Corporal saying: "We're here, ma'am, where old Brinkwort built a hospital for one, and that one's yours, Mrs. Byng."

He clucked to his horses and they slackened. All at once the lights seemed to grow larger, and from the garden of Brinkwort's house came the sharp voice of a soldier saying:

"Halt! Who goes there?"

"A friend," was the Corporal's reply.

"Advance, friend, and give the countersign," was brusquely returned.

A moment afterwards Jasmine was in the sweet-smelling garden, and the lights of the house were flaring out upon her.

She heard at the same time the voices of the sentry and of Corporal Shorter in low tones of badinage, and she frowned. It was cruel that at the door of the dead or the dying there should be such levity.

All at once a figure came between her and the light. Instinctively she knew it was Al'mah.

"Al'mah! Al'mah!" she said painfully, and in a voice scarce above a whisper.

The figure of the singing-woman bent over her protectingly, as it might almost seem, and her hands were caught in a warm clasp.

"Am I in time?" Jasmine asked, and the words came from her in gasps.

Al'mah had no repentance for her deception. She saw an agitation which seemed to her deeper and more real than any emotion ever shown by Jasmine, not excepting the tragical night at the Glencader Mine and the morning of the first meeting at the Stay Awhile Hospital. The butterfly had become a thrush that sang with a heart in its throat.

She gathered Jasmine's eyes to her own. It seemed as though she never would answer. To herself she even said, why should she hurry, since all was well, since she had brought the two together living, who had been dead to each other these months past, and, more than all, had been of the angry dead? A little more pain and regret could do no harm, but only good. Besides, now that she was face to face with the result of her own deception, she had a sudden fear that it might go wrong. She had no remorse for the act, but only a faint apprehension of the possible consequences. Suppose that in the shock of discovery Jasmine should throw everything to the winds, and lose herself in arrant egotism once more! Suppose—no, she would suppose nothing. She must believe that all she had done was for the best.

She felt how cold were the small delicate hands in her own strong warm fingers, she saw the frightened appeal of the exquisite haunting eyes, and all at once realized the cause of that agitation—the fear that death had come without understanding, that the door had been forever shut against the answering voices.

"You are in time," she said gently, encouragingly, and she tightened the grasp of her hands.

As the volts of an electric shock quivering through a body are suddenly withdrawn, and the rigidity becomes a ghastly inertness, so Jasmine's hands, and all her body, seemed released. She felt as though she must fall, but she reasserted her strength, and slowly regained her balance, withdrawing her hands from those of Al'mah.

"He is alive—he is alive—he is alive," she kept repeating to herself like one in a dream. Then she added hastily, with an effort to bear herself with courage: "Where is he? Take me."

Al'mah motioned, and in a moment they were inside the house. A sense of something good and comforting came over Jasmine. Here was an old, old room furnished in heavy and simple Dutch style, just as old Elias Brinkwort had left it. It had the grave and heavy hospitableness of a picture of Teniers or Jan Steen. It had the sense of home, the welcome of the cradle and the patriarch's chair. These were both here as they were when Elias Brinkwort and his people went out to join the Boer army in the hills, knowing that the verdomde Rooinek would not loot his house or ravage his belongings.

To Jasmine's eyes, it brought a new strange sense, as though all at once doors had been opened up to new sensations of life. Almost mechanically, yet with a curious vividness and permanency of vision, her eyes drifted from the patriarch's chair to the cradle in the corner; and that picture would remain with her till she could see no more at all. Unbidden and unconscious there came upon her lips a faint smile, and then a door in front of her was opened, and she was inside another room—not a bedroom as she had expected, but a room where the Dutch simplicity and homely sincerity had been invaded by something English and military. This she felt before her eyes fell on a man standing beside a table, fully dressed. Though shaken and worn, it was a figure which had no affinity with death.

As she started back Al'mah closed the door behind her, and she found herself facing Rudyard, looking into his eyes.

Al'mah had miscalculated. She did not realize Jasmine as she really was—like one in a darkened room who leans out to the light and sun. The old life, the old impetuous egoism, the long years of self were not yet gone from a character composite of impulse, vanity and intensity. This had been too daring an experiment with one of her nature, which had within the last few months become as strangely, insistently, even fanatically honest, as it had been elusive in the past. In spite of a tremulous effort to govern herself and see the situation as it really was—an effort of one who desired her good to bring her and Rudyard together, the ruse itself became magnified to monstrous proportions, and her spirit suddenly revolted. She felt that she had been inveigled; that what should have been her own voluntary act of expiation and submission, had been forced upon her, and pride, ever her most secret enemy, took possession of her.

"I have been tricked," she said, with eyes aflame and her body trembling. "You have trapped me here!" There was scorn and indignation in her voice.

He did not move, but his eyes were intent upon hers and persistently held them. He had been near to death, and his vision had been more fully cleared than hers. He knew that this was the end of all or the beginning of all things for them both; and though anger suddenly leaped at the bottom of his heart, he kept it in restraint, the primitive thing of which he had had enough.

"I did not trick you, Jasmine," he answered, in a low voice. "The letter was sent without my knowledge or permission. Al'mah thought she was doing us both a good turn. I never deceived you—never. I should not have sent for you in any case. I heard you were ill and I tried to get up and go to you; but it was not possible. Besides, they would not let me. I wanted to go to you again, because, somehow, I felt that midnight meeting in the hospital was a mistake; that it ended as you would not really wish it to end."

Again, with wonderful intuition for a man who knew so little of women, as he thought, he had said the one thing which could have cooled the anger that drowned the overwhelming gratitude she felt at his being alive—overwhelming, in spite of the fact that her old mad temperament had flooded it for the moment.

He would have gone to her—that was what he had said. In spite of her conduct that midnight, when he was on his way to Hetmeyer's Kopje, he would have come again to her! How, indeed, he must have loved her; or how magnanimous, how impossibly magnanimous, he was!

How thin and worn he was, and how large the eyes were in the face grown hollow with suffering! There were liberal streaks of grey also at his temples, and she noted there was one strand all white just in the centre of his thick hair. A swift revulsion of feeling in her making for peace was, however, sharply arrested by the look in his eyes. It had all the sombreness of reproach—of immitigable reproach. Could she face that look now and through the years to come? It were easier to live alone to the end with her own remorse, drinking the cup that would not empty, on and on, than to live with that look in his eyes.

She turned her head away from him. Her glance suddenly caught a sjambok lying along two nails on the wall. His eyes followed hers, and in the minds of both was the scene when Rudyard drove Krool into the street under just such a whip of rhinoceros-hide.

Something of the old spirit worked in her in spite of all. Idiosyncrasy may not be cauterized, temperament must assert itself, or the personality dies. Was he to be her master—was that the end of it all? She had placed herself so completely in his power by her wilful waywardness and errors. Free from blame, she would have been ruler over him; now she must be his slave!

"Why did you not use it on me?" she asked, in a voice almost like a cry, though it had a ring of bitter irony. "Why don't you use it now? Don't you want to?"

"You were always so small and beautiful," he answered, slowly. "A twenty-stamp mill to crush a bee!"

Again resentment rose in her, despite the far-off sense of joy she had in hearing him play with words. She could forgive almost anything for that—and yet she was real and had not merely the dilettante soul. But why should he talk as though she was a fly and he an eagle? Yet there was admiration in his eyes and in his words. She was angry with herself—and with him. She was in chaos again.

"You treat me like a child, you condescend—"

"Oh, for God's sake—for God's sake!" he interrupted, with a sudden storm in his face; but suddenly, as though by a great mastery of the will, he conquered himself, and his face cleared.

"You must sit down, Jasmine," he said, hurriedly. "You look tired. You haven't got over your illness yet."

He hastily stepped aside to get her a chair, but, as he took hold of it, he stumbled and swayed in weakness, born of an excitement far greater than her own; for he was thinking of the happiness of two people, not of the happiness of one; and he realized how critical was this hour. He had a grasp of the bigger things, and his talk with Stafford of a few hours ago was in his mind—a talk which, in its brevity, still had had the limitlessness of revelation. He had made a promise to one of the best friends that man—or woman—ever had, as he thought; and he would keep it. So he said to himself. Stafford understood Jasmine, and Stafford had insisted that he be not deceived by some revolt on the part of Jasmine, which would be the outcome of her own humiliation, of her own anger with herself for all the trouble she had caused. So he said to himself.

As he staggered with the chair she impulsively ran to aid him.

"Rudyard," she exclaimed, with concern, "you must not do that. You have not the strength. It is silly of you to be up at all. I wonder at Al'mah and the doctor!"

She pushed him to a big arm-chair beside the table and gently pressed him down into the seat. He was very weak, and his hand trembled on the chair-arm. She reached out, as if to take it; but, as though the act was too forward, her fingers slipped to his wrist instead, and she felt his pulse with the gravity of a doctor.

Despite his weakness a look of laughter crept into his eyes and stayed there. He had read the little incident truly. Presently, seeing the whiteness of his face but not the look in his eyes, she turned to the table, and pouring out a glass of water from a pitcher there, held it to his lips.

"Here, Rudyard," she said, soothingly, "drink this. You are faint. You shouldn't have got up simply because I was coming."

As he leaned back to drink from the glass she caught the gentle humour of his look, begotten of the incident of a moment before.

There was no reproach in the strong, clear eyes of blue which even wounds and illness had not faced—only humour, only a hovering joy, only a good-fellowship, and the look of home. She suddenly thought of the room from which she had just come, and it seemed, not fantastically to her, that the look in his eyes belonged to the other room where were the patriarch's chair and the baby's cradle. There was no offending magnanimity, no lofty compassion in his blameless eyes, but a human something which took no account of the years that the locust had eaten, the old mad, bad years, the wrong and the shame of them. There was only the look she had seen the day he first visited her in her own home, when he had played with words she had used in the way she adored, and would adore till she died; when he had said, in reply to her remark that he would turn her head, that it wouldn't make any difference to his point of view if she did turn her head! Suddenly it was all as if that day had come back, although his then giant physical strength had gone; although he had been mangled in the power-house of which they had spoken that day. Come to think of it, she too had been working in the "power-house" and had been mangled also; for she was but a thread of what she was then, but a wisp of golden straw to the sheaf of the then young golden wheat.

All at once, in answer to the humour in his eyes, to the playful bright look, the tragedy and the passion which had flown out from her old self like the flame that flares out of an opened furnace-door, sank back again, the door closed, and all her senses were cooled as by a gentle wind.

Her eyes met his, and the invitation in them was like the call of the thirsty harvester in the sunburnt field. With an abandon, as startling as it was real and true to her nature, she sank down to the floor and buried her face in her hands at his feet. She sobbed deeply, softly.

With an exclamation of gladness and welcome he bent over her and drew her close to him, and his hands soothed her trembling shoulders.

"Peace is the best thing of all, Jasmine," he whispered. "Peace."

They were the last words that Ian had addressed to her. It did not make her shrink now that both had said to her the same thing, for both knew her, each in his own way, better than she had ever known herself; and each had taught her in his own way, but by what different means!

All at once, with a start, she caught Rudyard's arm with a little spasmodic grasp.

"I did not kill Adrian Fellowes," she said, like a child eager to be absolved from a false imputation. She looked up at him simply, bravely.

"Neither did I," he answered gravely, and the look in his eyes did not change. She noted that.

"I know. It was—"

She paused. What right had she to tell!

"Yes, we both know who did it," he added. "Al'mah told me."

She hid her head in her hands again, while he hung over her wisely waiting and watching.

Presently she raised her head, but her swimming eyes did not seek his. They did not get so high. After one swift glance towards his own, they dropped to where his heart might be, and her voice trembled as she said:

"Long ago Alice Tynemouth said I ought to marry a man who would master me. She said I needed a heavy hand over me—and the shackles on my wrists."

She had forgotten that these phrases were her own; that she had used them concerning herself the night before the tragedy.

"I think she was right," she added. "I had never been mastered, and I was all childish wilfulness and vanity. I was never worth while. You took me too seriously, and vanity did the rest."

"You always had genius," he urged, gently, "and you were so beautiful."

She shook her head mournfully. "I was only an imitation always—only a dresden-china imitation of the real thing I might have been, if I had been taken right in time. I got wrong so early. Everything I said or did was mostly imitation. It was made up of other people's acts and words. I could never forget anything I'd ever heard; it drowned any real thing in me. I never emerged—never was myself."

"You were a genius," he repeated again. "That's what genius does. It takes all that ever was and makes it new."

She made a quick spasmodic protest of her hand. She could not bear to have him praise her. She wanted to tell him all that had ever been, all that she ought to be sorry for, was sorry for now almost beyond endurance. She wanted to strip her soul bare before him; but she caught the look of home in his eyes, she was at his knees at peace, and what he thought of her meant so much just now—in this one hour, for this one hour. She had had such hard travelling, and here was a rest-place on the road.

He saw that her soul was up in battle again, but he took her arms, and held them gently, controlling her agitation. Presently, with a great sigh, her forehead drooped upon his hands. They were in a vast theatre of war, and they were part of it; but for the moment sheer waste of spirit and weariness of soul made peace in a turbulent heart.

"It's her real self—at last," he kept saying to himself, "She had to have her chance, and she has got it."

Outside in a dark corner of the veranda, Al'mah was in reverie. She knew from the silence within that all was well. The deep peace of the night, the thing that was happening in the house, gave her a moment's surcease from her own problem, her own arid loneliness. Her mind went back to the night when she had first sung "Manassa" at Covent Garden. The music shimmered in her brain. She essayed to hum some phrases of the opera which she had always loved, but her voice had no resonance or vibration. It trailed away into a whisper.

"I can't sing any more. What shall I do when the war ends? Or is it that I am to end here with the war?" she whispered to herself.... Again reverie deepened. Her mind delivered itself up to an obsession. "No, I am not sorry I killed him," she said firmly after a long time, "If a price must be paid, I will pay it."

Buried in her thoughts, she was scarcely conscious of voices near by. At last they became insistent to her ears, They were the voices of sentries off duty—the two who had talked to her earlier in the evening, after Ian Stafford had left.

"This ain't half bad, this night ain't," said one. "There's a lot o' space in a night out here."

"I'd like to be 'longside o' some one I know out by 'Ampstead 'Eath," rejoined the other.

"I got a girl in Camden Town," said the First victoriously.

"I got kids—somewheres, I expect," rejoined the Second with a flourish of pride and self-assertion.

"Oh, a donah's enough for me!" returned the First.

"You'll come to the other when you don't look for it neither," declared his friend in a voice of fatality.

"You ain't the only fool in the world, mate, of course. But 'struth, I like this business better. You've got a good taste in your mouth in the morning 'ere."

"Well, I'll meet you on 'Ampstead 'Eath when the war is over, son," challenged the Second.

"I ain't 'opin' and I ain't prophesyin' none this heat," was the quiet reply. "We've got a bit o' hell in front of us yet. I'll talk to you when we're in Lordkop."

"I'll talk to your girl in Camden Town, if you 'appen to don't," was the railing reply.

"She couldn't stand it not but the once," was the retort; and then they struck each other with their fists in rough play, and laughed, and said good-night in the vernacular.

CHAPTER XXXVII

UNDER THE GUN

They had left him for dead in a dreadful circle of mangled gunners who had fallen back to cover in a donga, from a fire so stark that it seemed the hillside itself was discharging myriad bolts of death, as a waterwheel throws off its spray. No enemy had been visible, but far away in front—that front which must be taken—there hung over the ridge of the hills veils of smoke like lace. Hideous sounds tortured the air—crackling, snapping, spitting sounds like the laughter of animals with steel throats. Never was ill work better done than when, on that radiant veld, the sky one vast turquoise vault, beneath which quivered a shimmer of quicksilver light, the pom-poms, the maulers, and the shrapnel of Kruger's men mowed down Stafford and his battery, showered them, drowned them in a storm of lead.

"Alamachtig," said a Rustenburg dopper who, at the end of the day, fell into the hands of the English, "it was like cutting alfalfa with a sickle! Down they tumbled, horses and men, mashed like mealies in the millstones. A damn lot of good horses was killed this time. The lead-grinders can't pick the men and leave the horses. It was a verdomde waste of good horses. The Rooinek eats from a bloody basin this day."

Alamachtig!

At the moment Ian Stafford fell the battle was well launched. The air was shrieking with the misery of mutilated men and horses and the ghoulish laughter of pom-poms. When he went down it seemed to him that human anger had reached its fullest expression. Officers and men alike were in a fury of determination and vengeance. He had seen no fear, no apprehension anywhere, only a defiant anger which acted swiftly, coolly. An officer stepped over the lacerated, shattered body of a comrade of his mess with the abstracted impassiveness of one who finds his way over a puddle in the road; and here were puddles too—puddles of blood. A gunner lifted away the corpse of his nearest friend from the trail and strained and wrenched at his gun with the intense concentration of one who kneads dough in a trough. The sobbing agony of those whom Stafford had led rose up from the ground around him, and voices cried to be put out of pain and torture. These begrimed men around him, with jackets torn by bullets, with bandaged head stained with blood or dragging leg which left a track of blood behind, were not the men who last night were chatting round the camp-fires and making bets as to where the attack would begin to-day.

Stafford was cool enough, however. It was as though an icy liquid had been poured into his veins. He thought more clearly than he had ever done, even in those critical moments of his past when cool thinking was indispensable. He saw the mistake that had been made in giving his battery work which might have been avoided, and with the same result to the battle; but he also saw the way out of it, and he gave orders accordingly. When the horses were lashed to a gallop to take up the new position, which, if they reached, would give them shelter against this fiendish rain of lead, and also enable them to enfilade the foe at advantage, something suddenly brought confusion to his senses, and the clear thinking stopped. His being seemed to expand suddenly to an enormity of chaos and then as suddenly to shrink, dwindle, and fall back into a smother—as though, in falling, blankets were drawn roughly over his head and a thousand others were shaken in the air around him. And both were real in their own way. The thousand blankets flapping in the air were the machine guns of the foe following his battery into a zone of less dreadful fire, and the blankets that smothered him were wrappings of unconsciousness which save us from the direst agonies of body and mind.

The last thing he saw, as his eyes, with a final effort of power, sought to escape from this sudden confusion, was a herd of springboks flinging themselves about in the circle of fire, caught in the struggle of the two armies, and, like wild birds in a hurricane, plunging here and there in flight and futile motion. As unconsciousness enwrapped him the vision of these distraught denizens of the veld was before his eyes. Somehow, in a lightning transformation, he became one with them and was mingled with them.

Time passed.

When his eyes opened again, slowly, heavily, the same vision was before him—the negative left on the film of his sight by his last conscious glance at the world.

He raised himself on his elbow and looked out over the veld. The springboks were still distractedly tossing here and there, but the army to which he belonged had moved on. It was now on its way up the hill lying between them and the Besieged City. He was dimly conscious of this, for the fight round him had ceased, the storm had gone forward. There was noise, great noise, but he was outside of it, in a kind of valley of awful inactivity. All round him was the debris of a world in which he had once lived and moved and worked. How many years—or centuries—was it since he had been in that harvest of death? There was no anomaly. It was not that time had passed; it was that his soul had made so far a journey.

In his sleep among the guns and the piteous, mutilated dead, he had gone a pilgrimage to a Distant Place and had been told the secret of the world. Yet when he first waked, it was not in his mind—only that confusion out of which he had passed to nothingness with the vision of the distracted springboks. Suddenly a torturing thirst came, and it waked him fully to the reality of it all. He was lying in his own blood, in the swath which the battle had cut.

His work was done. This came to him slowly, as the sun clears away the mists of morning. Something—Some One—had reached out and touched him on the shoulder, had summoned him.

When he left Brinkwort's Farm yesterday, it was with the desire to live, to do large things. He and Rudyard had clasped hands, and Rudyard had made a promise to him, which gave him hope that the broken roof-tree would be mended, the shattered walls of home restored. It had seemed to him then that his own mistake was not irreparable, and that the way was open to peace, if not to happiness.

When he first came to this war he had said, "I will do this," and, "I will do that," and he had thought it possible to do it in his own time and because he willed it. He had put himself deliberately in the way of the Scythe, and had thrown himself into its arc of death.

To have his own way by tricking Destiny into giving him release and absolution without penalty—that had been his course. In the hour when he had ceased to desire exit by breaking through the wall and not by the predestined door, the reply of Destiny to him had been: "It is not for you to choose." He had wished to drink the cup of release, had reached out to take it, but presently had ceased to wish to drink it. Then Destiny had said: "Here is the dish—drink it."

He closed his eyes to shut out the staring light, and he wished in a vague way that he might shut out the sounds of the battle—the everlasting boom and clatter, the tearing reverberations. But he smiled too, for he realized that his being where he was alone meant that the army had moved on over that last hill; and that there would soon be the Relief for which England prayed.

There was that to the good; and he had taken part in it all. His battery, a fragment of what it had been when it galloped out to do its work in the early morning, had had its glorious share in the great day's work.

He had had the most critical and dangerous task of this memorable day. He had been on the left flank of the main body, and his battery had suddenly faced a terrific fire from concealed riflemen who had not hitherto shown life at this point. His promptness alone had saved the battery from annihilation. His swift orders secured the gallant withdrawal of the battery into a zone of comparative safety and renewed activity, while he was left with this one abandoned gun and his slain men and fellow-officers.

But somehow it all suddenly became small and distant and insignificant to his senses. He did not despise the work, for it had to be done. It was big to those who lived, but in the long movement of time it was small, distant, and subordinate.

If only the thirst did not torture him, if only the sounds of the battle were less loud in his ears! It was so long since he waked from that long sleep, and the world was so full of noises, the air so arid, and the light of the sun so fierce. Darkness would be peace. He longed for darkness.

He thought of the spring that came from the rocks in the glen behind the house, where he was born in Derbyshire. He saw himself stooping down, kneeling to drink, his face, his eyes buried in the water, as he gulped down the good stream. Then all at once it was no longer the spring from the rock in which he laved his face and freshened his parched throat; a cool cheek touched his own, lips of tender freshness swept his brow, silken hair with a faint perfume of flowers brushed his temples, his head rested on a breast softer than any pillow he had ever known.

"Jasmine!" he whispered, with parched lips and closed eyes. "Jasmine—water," he pleaded, and sank away again into that dream from which he had but just wakened.

It had not been all a vision. Water was here at his tongue, his head was pillowed on a woman's breast, lips touched his forehead.

But it was not Jasmine's breast; it was not Jasmine's hand which held the nozzle of the water-bag to his parched lips.

Through the zone of fire a woman and a young surgeon had made their way from the attending ambulance that hovered on the edge of battle to this corner of death in the great battle-field. It mattered not to the enemy, who still remained in the segment of the circle where they first fought, whether it was man or woman who crossed this zone of fire. No heed could be given now to Red Cross work, to ambulance, nurse, or surgeon. There would come a time for that, but not yet. Here were two races in a life-and-death grip; and there could be no give and take for the wounded or the dead until the issue of the day was closed.

The woman who had come through the zone of fire was Al'mah. She had no right to be where she was. As a nurse her place was not the battle-field; but she had had a premonition of Stafford's tragedy, and in the night had concealed herself in the blankets of an ambulance and had been carried across the veld to that outer circle of battle where wait those who gather up the wreckage, who provide the salvage of war. When she was discovered there was no other course but to allow her to remain; and so it was that as the battle moved on she made her way to where the wounded and dead lay.

A sorely wounded officer, able with the help of a slightly injured gunner to get out of the furnace of fire, had brought word of Stafford's death but with the instinct of those to whom there come whisperings, visions of things, Al'mah felt she must go and find the man with whose fate, in a way, her own had been linked; who, like herself, had been a derelict upon the sea of life; the grip of whose hand, the look of whose eyes the last time she saw him, told her that as a brother loves so he loved her.

Hundreds saw the two make their way across the veld, across the lead-swept plain; but such things in the hour of battle are commonplaces; they are taken as part of the awful game. Neither mauser nor shrapnel nor maxim brought them down as they made their way to the abandoned gun beside which Stafford lay. Yet only one reached Stafford's side, where he was stretched among his dead comrades. The surgeon stayed his course at three-quarters of the distance to care for a gunner whose mutilations were robbed of half their horror by a courage and a humour which brought quick tears to Al'mah's eyes. With both legs gone the stricken fellow asked first for a match to light his cutty pipe and then remarked: "The saint's own luck that there it was with the stem unbroke to give me aise whin I wanted it!

"Shure, I thought I was dead," he added as the surgeon stooped over him, "till I waked up and give meself the lie, and got a grip o' me pipe, glory be!"

With great difficulty Al'mah dragged Stafford under the horseless gun, left behind when the battery moved on. Both forces had thought that nothing could live in that gray-brown veld, and no effort at first was made to rescue or take it. By every law of probability Al'mah and the young surgeon ought to be lying dead with the others who had died, some with as many as twenty bullet wounds in their bodies, while the gunner, who had served this gun to the last and then, alone, had stood at attention till the lead swept him down, had thirty wounds to his credit for England's sake. Under the gun there was some shade, for she threw over it a piece of tarpaulin and some ragged, blood-stained jackets lying near—jackets of men whose wounds their comrades had tried hastily to help when the scythe of war cut them down.

There was shade now, but there was not safety, for the ground was spurting dust where bullets struck, and even bodies of dead men were dishonoured by the insult of new wounds and mutilations.

Al'mah thought nothing of safety, but only of this life which was ebbing away beside her. She saw that a surgeon could do nothing, that the hurt was internal and mortal; but she wished him not to die until she had spoken with him once again and told him all there was to tell—all that had happened after he left Brinkwort's Farm yesterday.

She looked at the drawn and blanched face and asked herself if that look of pain and mortal trouble was the precursor of happiness and peace. As she bathed the forehead of the wounded man, it suddenly came to her that here was the only tragedy connected with Stafford's going: his work was cut short, his usefulness ended, his hand was fallen from the lever that lifted things.

She looked away from the blanched face to the field of battle, towards the sky above it. Circling above were the vile aasvogels, the loathsome birds which followed the track of war, watching, waiting till they could swoop upon the flesh blistering in the sun. Instinctively she drew nearer to the body of the dying man, as though to protect it from the evil flying things. She forced between his lips a little more water.

"God make it easy!" she said.

A bullet struck a wheel beside her, and with a ricochet passed through the flesh of her forearm. A strange look came into her eyes, suffusing them. Was her work done also? Was she here to find the solution of all her own problems—like Stafford—like Stafford? Stooping, she reverently kissed the bloodless cheek. A kind of exaltation possessed her. There was no fear at all. She had a feeling that he would need her on the journey he was about to take, and there was no one else who could help him now. Who else was there beside herself—and Jigger?

Where was Jigger? What had become of Jigger? He would surely have been with Stafford if he had not been hurt or killed. It was not like Jigger to be absent when Stafford needed him.

She looked out from under the gun, as though expecting to find him coming—to see him somewhere on this stricken plain. As she did so she saw the young surgeon, who had stayed to help the wounded gunner, stumbling and lurching towards the gun, hands clasping his side, and head thrust forward in an attitude of tense expectation, as though there was a goal which must be reached.

An instant later she was outside hastening towards him. A bullet spat at her feet, another cut the skirt of her dress, but all she saw was the shambling figure of the man who, but a few minutes before, was so flexible and alert with life, eager to relieve the wounds of those who had fallen. Now he also was in dire need.

She had almost reached him when, with a stiff jerk sideways and an angular assertion of the figure, he came to the ground like a log, ungainly and rigid.

"They got me! I'm hit—twice," he said, with grey lips; with eyes that stared at her and through her to something beyond; but he spoke in an abrupt, professional, commonplace tone. "Shrapnel and mauler," he added, his hands protecting the place where the shrapnel had found him. His staring blue eyes took on a dull cloud, and his whole figure seemed to sink and shrink away. As though realizing and resisting, if not resenting this dissolution of his forces, his voice rang out querulously, and his head made dogmatic emphasis.

"They oughtn't to have done it," the petulant voice insisted. "I wasn't fighting." Suddenly the voice trailed away, and all emphasis, accent, and articulation passed from the sentient figure. Yet his lips moved once again. "Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace—first floor," he said mechanically, and said no more.

As mechanically as he had spoken, Al'mah repeated the last words. "Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace, first floor," she said slowly.

They were chambers next to those where Adrian Fellowes had lived and died. She shuddered.

"So he was not married," she said reflectively, as she left the lifeless body and went back to the gun where Stafford lay.

Her arm through which the bullet had passed was painful, but she took no heed of it. Why should she? Hundreds, maybe thousands, were being killed off there in the hills. She saw nothing except the debris of Ian Stafford's life drifting out to the shoreless sea.

He lived still, but remained unconscious, and she did not relax her vigil. As she watched and waited the words of the young surgeon kept ringing in her ears, a monotonous discord, "Ninety-nine Adelphi Terrace—first floor!" Behind it all was the music of the song she had sung at Rudyard Byng's house the evening of the day Adrian Fellowes had died—"More was lost at Mohacksfield."

The stupefaction that comes with tragedy crept over her. As the victim of an earthquake sits down amid vast ruins, where the dead lie unnumbered, speechless, and heedless, so she sat and watched the face of the man beside her, and was not conscious that the fire of the armies was slackening, that bullets no longer spattered the veld or struck the gun where she sat; that the battle had been carried over the hills.

In time help would come, so she must wait. At least she had kept Stafford alive. So far her journey through Hades had been justified. He would have died had it not been for the water and brandy she had forced between his lips, for the shade in which he lay beneath the gun. In the end they would come and gather the dead and wounded. When the battle was over they would come, or, maybe, before it was over.

But through how many hours had there been the sickening monotony of artillery and rifle-fire, the bruit of angry metal, in which the roar of angrier men was no more than a discord in the guttural harmony. Her senses became almost deadened under the strain. Her cheeks grew thinner, her eyes took on a fixed look. She seemed like one in a dream. She was only conscious in an isolated kind of way. Louder than all the noises of the clanging day was the beating of her heart. Her very body seemed to throb, the pulses in her temples were like hammers hurting her brain.

At last she was roused by the sound of horses' hoofs.

So the service-corps were coming at last to take up the wounded and bury the dead. There were so many dead, so few wounded!

The galloping came nearer and nearer. It was now as loud as thunder almost. It stopped short. She gave a sigh of relief. Her vigil was ended. Stafford was still alive. There was yet a chance for him to know that friends were with him at the last, and also what had happened at Brinkwort's Farm after he had left yesterday.

She leaned out to see her rescuers. A cry broke from her. Here was one man frantically hitching a pair of artillery-horses to the gun and swearing fiercely in the Taal as he did so.

The last time she had seen that khaki hat, long, threadbare frock-coat, huge Hessian boots and red neckcloth was at Brinkwort's Farm. The last time she had seen that malevolent face was when its owner was marched away from Brinkwort's Farm yesterday.

It was Krool.

An instant later she had dragged Stafford out from beneath the gun, for it was clear that the madman intended to ride off with it.

When Krool saw her first he was fastening the last hook of the traces with swift, trained fingers. He stood dumfounded for a moment. The superstitious, half-mystical thing in him came trembling to his eyes; then he saw Stafford's body, and he realized the situation. A look of savage hatred came into his face, and he made a step forward with sudden impulse, as though he would spring upon Stafford. His hand was upon a knife at his belt. But the horses plunged and strained, and he saw in the near distance a troop of cavalry.

With an obscene malediction at the body, he sprang upon a horse. A sjambok swung, and with a snort, which was half a groan, the trained horses sprang forward.

"The Rooinek's gun for Oom Paul!" he shouted back over his shoulder.

Most prisoners would have been content to escape and save their skins, but a more primitive spirit lived in Krool. Escape was not enough for him. Since he had been foiled at Brinkwort's Farm and could not reach Rudyard Byng; since he would be shot the instant he was caught after his escape—if he was caught—he would do something to gall the pride of the verdomde English. The gun which the Boers had not dared to issue forth and take, which the British could not rescue without heavy loss while the battle was at its height—he would ride it over the hills into the Boers' camp.

There was something so grotesque in the figure of the half-caste, with his copper-coat flying behind him as the horses galloped away, that a wan smile came to Al'mah's lips. With Stafford at her feet in the staring sun she yet could not take her eyes from the man, the horses, and the gun. And not Al'mah alone shaded and strained eyes to follow the tumbling, bouncing gun. Rifles, maxims, and pom-poms opened fire upon it. It sank into a hollow and was partially lost to sight; it rose again and jerked forward, the dust rising behind it like surf. It swayed and swung, as the horses wildly took the incline of the hills, Krool's sjambok swinging above them; it struggled with the forces that dragged it higher and higher up, as though it were human and understood that it was a British gun being carried into the Boer lines.

At first a battery of the Boers, fighting a rear-guard action, had also fired on it, but the gunners saw quickly that a single British gun was not likely to take up an advance position and attack alone, and their fire died away. Thinking only that some daring Boer was doing the thing with a thousand odds against him, they roared approval as the gun came nearer and nearer.

Though the British poured a terrific fire after the flying battery of one gun, there was something so splendid in the episode; the horses were behaving so gallantly,—horses of one of their own batteries daringly taken by Krool under the noses of the force—that there was scarcely a man who was not glad when, at last, the gun made a sudden turn at a kopje, and was lost to sight within the Boer lines, leaving behind it a little cloud of dust.

Tommy Atkins had his uproarious joke about it, but there was one man who breathed a sigh of relief when he heard of it. That was Barry Whalen. He had every reason to be glad that Krool was out of the way, and that Rudyard Byng would see him no more. Sitting beside the still unconscious Ian Stafford on the veld, Al'mah's reflections were much the same as those of Barry Whalen.

With the flight of Krool and the gun came the end of Al'mah's vigil. The troop of cavalry which galloped out to her was followed by the Red Cross wagons.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

"PHEIDIPPIDES"

At dawn, when the veld breathes odours of a kind pungency and fragrance, which only those know who have made it their bed and friend, the end came to the man who had lain under the gun.

"Pheidippides!" the dying Stafford said, with a grim touch of the humour which had ever been his. He was thinking of the Greek runner who brought the news of victory to Athens and fell dead as he told it.

It almost seemed from the look on Stafford's face that, in very truth, he was laying aside the impedimenta of the long march and the battle, to carry the news to that army of the brave in Walhalla who had died for England before they knew that victory was hers.

"Pheidippides," he repeated, and Rudyard Byng, whose eyes were so much upon the door, watching and waiting for some one to come, pressed his hand and said: "You know the best, Stafford. So many didn't. They had to go before they knew."

"I have my luck," Stafford replied, but yet there was a wistful look in his face.

His eyes slowly closed, and he lay so motionless that Al'mah and Rudyard thought he had gone. He scarcely seemed to notice when Al'mah took the hand that Rudyard had held, and the latter, with quick, noiseless steps, left the room.

What Rudyard had been watching and waiting for was come.

Jasmine was at the door. His message had brought her in time.

"Is it dangerous?" she asked, with a face where tragedy had written self-control.

"As bad as can be," he answered. "Go in and speak to him, Jasmine. It will help him."

He opened the door softly. As Jasmine entered, Al'mah with a glance of pity and friendship at the face upon the bed, passed into another room.

There was a cry in Jasmine's heart, but it did not reach her lips.

She stole to the bed and laid her fingers upon the hand lying white and still upon the coverlet.

At once the eyes of the dying man opened. This was a touch that would reach to the farthest borders of his being—would bring him back from the Immortal Gates. Through the mist of his senses he saw her. He half raised himself. She pillowed his head on her breast. He smiled. A light transfigured his face.

"All's well," he said, with a long sigh, and his body sank slowly down.

"Ian! Ian!" she cried, but she knew that he could not hear.

CHAPTER XXXIX

"THE ROAD IS CLEAR"

The Army had moved on over the hills, into the valley of death and glory, across the parched veld to the town of Lordkop, where an emaciated, ragged garrison had kept faith with all the heroes from Caractacus to Nelson. Courageous legions had found their way to the petty dorp, with its corrugated iron roofs, its dug-outs, its improvised forts, its fever hospitals, its Treasure House of Britain, where she guarded the jewels of her honour.

The menace of the hills had passed, heroes had welcomed heroes and drunk the cup of triumph; but far back in the valleys beyond the hills from which the army had come, there were those who must drink the cup of trembling, the wine of loss.

As the trumpets of victory attended the steps of those remnants of brigades which met the remnants of a glorious garrison in the streets of Lordkop, drums of mourning conducted the steps of those who came to bury the dust of one who had called himself Pheidippides as he left the Day Path and took the Night Road.

Gun-carriage and reversed arms and bay charger, faithful comrades with bent heads, the voice of victory over the grave—"I am the resurrection and the life"—the volleys of honour, the proud salut of the brave to the vanished brave, the quivering farewells of the few who turn away from the fresh-piled earth with their hearts dragging behind—all had been; and all had gone. Evening descended upon the veld with a golden radiance which soothed like prayer.

By the open window at the foot of a bed in the Stay Awhile Hospital a woman gazed into the saffron splendour with an intentness which seemed to make all her body listen. Both melancholy and purpose marked the attitude of the figure.

A voice from the bed at the foot of which she stood drew her gaze away from the sunset sky to meet the bright, troubled eyes.

"What is it, Jigger?" the woman asked gently, and she looked to see that the framework which kept the bedclothes from a shattered leg was properly in its place.

"'E done a lot for me," was the reply. "A lot 'e done, and I dunno how I'll git along now."

There was great hopelessness in the tone.

"He told me you would always have enough to help you get on, Jigger. He thought of all that."

"'Ere, oh, 'ere it ain't that," the lad said in a sudden passion of protest, the tears standing in his eyes. "It ain't that! Wot's money, when your friend wot give it ain't 'ere! I never done nothing for 'im—that's wot I feel. Nothing at all for 'im."

"You are wrong," was the soft reply. "He told me only a few days ago that you were like a loaf of bread in the cupboard—good for all the time."

The tears left the wide blue eyes. "Did 'e say that—did 'e?" he asked, and when she nodded and smiled, he added, "'E's 'appy now, ain't 'e?" His look questioned her eagerly.

For an instant she turned and gazed at the sunset, and her eyes took on a strange mystical glow. A colour came to her face, as though from strong flush of feeling, then she turned to him again, and answered steadily:

"Yes, he is happy now."

"How do you know?" the lad asked with awe in his face, for he believed in her utterly. Then, without waiting for her to answer, he added: "Is it, you hear him say so, as I hear you singin' in my sleep sometimes—singin', singin', as you did at Glencader, that first time I ever 'eerd you? Is it the same as me in my sleep?"

"Yes, it is like that—just like that," she answered, taking his hand, and holding it with a motherly tenderness.

"Ain't you never goin' to sing again?" he added.

She was silent, looking at him almost abstractedly.

"This war'll be over pretty soon now," he continued, "and we'll all have to go back to work."

"Isn't this work?" Al'mah asked with a smile, which had in it something of her old whimsical self.

"It ain't play, and it ain't work," he answered with a sage frown of intellectual effort. "It's a cut above 'em both—that's my fancy."

"It would seem like that," was the response. "What are you going to do when you get back to England?" she inquired.

"I thought I'd ask you that," he replied anxiously. "Couldn't I be a scene-shifter or somefink at the opery w'ere you sing?"

"I'm going to sing again, am I?" she asked.

"You'd have to be busy," he protested admiringly.

"Yes, I'll have to be busy," she replied, her voice ringing a little, "and we'll have to find a way of being busy together."

"His gryce'd like that," he responded.

She turned her face slowly to the evening sky, where grey clouds became silver and piled up to a summit of light. She was silent for a long time.

"If work won't cure, nothing will," she said in a voice scarce above a whisper. Her body trembled a little, and her eyes closed, as though to shut out something that pained her sight.

"I wish you'd sing somethin'—same as you did that night at Glencader, about the green hill far away," whispered the little trumpeter from the bed.

She looked at him for a moment meditatively, then shook her head, and turned again to the light in the evening sky.

"P'raps she's makin' up a new song," Jigger said to himself.

On a kopje overlooking the place where Ian Stafford had been laid to sleep to the call of the trumpets, two people sat watching the sun go down. Never in the years that had gone had there been such silence between them as they sat together. Words had been the clouds in which the lightning of their thoughts had been lost; they had been the disguises in which the truth of things masqueraded. They had not dared to be silent, lest the truth should stalk naked before them. Silence would have revealed their unhappiness; they would not have dared to look closely and deeply into each other's face, lest revelation should force them to say, "It has been a mistake; let us end it." So they had talked and talked and acted, and yet had done nothing and been nothing.

Now they were silent, because they had tossed into the abyss of Time the cup of trembling, and had drunk of the chalice of peace. Over the grave into which, this day, they had thrown the rock-roses and sprigs of the karoo bush, they had, in silence, made pledges to each other, that life's disguises should be no more for them; that the door should be wide open between the chambers where their souls dwelt, each in its own pension of being, with its own individual sense, but with the same light, warmth, and nutriment, and with the free confidence which exempts life from its confessions. There should be no hidden things any more.

There was a smile on the man's face as he looked out over the valley. With this day had come triumph for the flag he loved, for the land where he was born, and also the beginning of peace for the land where he had worked, where he had won his great fortune. He had helped to make this land what it was, and in battle he had helped to save it from disaster.

But there had come another victory—the victory of Home. The coincidence of all the vital values had come in one day, almost in one hour.

Smiling, he laid his hand upon the delicate fingers of the woman beside him, as they rested on her knee. She turned and looked at him with an understanding which is the beginning of all happiness; and a colour came to her cheeks such as he had not seen there for more days than he could count. Her smile answered his own, but her eyes had a sadness which would never wholly leave them. When he had first seen those eyes he had thought them the most honest he had ever known. Looking at them now, with confidence restored, he thought again as he did that night at the opera the year of the Raid.

"It's all before us still, Jasmine," he said with a ring of purpose and a great gentleness in his tone.

Her hand trembled, the shadows deepened in her eyes, but determination gathered at her lips.

Some deep-cherished, deferred resolve reasserted itself.

"But I cannot—I cannot go on until you know all, Rudyard, and then you may not wish to go on," she said. Her voice shook, and the colour went from her lips. "I must be honest now—at last, about everything. I want to tell you—"

He got to his feet. Stooping, he raised her, and looked her squarely in the eyes.

"Tell me nothing, Jasmine," he said. Then he added in a voice of finality, "There is nothing to tell." Holding both her hands tight in one of his own, he put his fingers on her lips.

"A fresh start for a long race—the road is clear," he said firmly.

Looking into his eyes, she knew that he read her life and soul, that in his deep primitive way he understood her as she had been and as she was, and yet was content to go on. Her head drooped upon his breast.

A trumpet-call rang out piercingly sweet across the valley. It echoed and echoed away among the hills.

He raised his head to listen. Pride, vision and power were in his eyes.

"It's all before us still, Jasmine," he said again.

Her fingers tightened on his.

THE END

GLOSSARY:
AASVOGEL Vulture.
ALFALFA Lucerne.
BILTONG Strips of dried meat.
DISSELBOOM The single shaft of an ox-wagon.
DONGA A gulley or deep fissure in the soil.
DOPPER A dissenter from the Dutch Reformed Church, but generally
applied to Dutchmen in South Africa.
DORP Settlement or town.
KAROO The highlands of the interior of South Africa.
KOPJE A rounded hillock.
KLOOF A gap or pass in mountains.
KRAAL Native hut; also a walled inclosure for cattle.
KRANZES Rocky precipices.
MEERKAT A species of ichneumon.
ROOINEK Literally, "red-neck"; term applied to British soldiers by the
Boers.
SCHANSES Intrenchments (or fissures on hills).
SJAMBOK A stick or whip made from hippopotamus or rhinoceros hide.
SPRUIT A small stream.
STOEP Veranda of a Dutch house.
TAAL South African Dutch.
TREK To move from place to place with belongings.
VELD An open grassy plain.
VELDSCHOEN Rough untanned leather shoes.
VERDOMDE Damned.
VIERKLEUR The national flag (four colours) of the late South African
Republics.
VOORTREKKER Pioneer.
VROUW Wife.