Floss gave her a final hug. 'I do love you,' she said.
'My baby,' murmured the mother. Floss shook back her straight hair and climbed off the bed and got into her own.
'But I'm not going to let that Challis off,' she said. 'I'll just have to take it out of her.'
CHAPTER XVII
Crossing the Veldt
'Why criest them for thy hurt? Thy pain is incurable.'
'Truly this is my grief, and I must bear it.'
'Thus saith the Lord, Such as are for death, to death
and such as are for the sword, to the sword.'
Jeremiah.
His good horse under him, a thunder-clouded sky above, a strange country astretch on every side, Mortimer was off, despatches in his pocket from his own colonel to the colonel of an Imperial regiment stationed some hundred and thirty miles away.
The day hung heavy from the sky, the land lay sad hearted and patient-eyed beneath it.
Yet now for the first time in all the weeks he had been on African soil Mortimer felt at home with his surroundings, even happy in them. The tumultuous days that lay behind him—he felt that some other, not he, had been living them. The frantic excitement of the send-off, the days at sea, the storm or two, the troubles with the horses, the uneventful landing on the unfamiliar shores, the hurried packing off up country by train, the feverish days and nights in camp at the bewildered little village that saw the armies of the greatest nation on earth swarming about its quiet fields, his first patrol and the fierce whizz and rattle of marvellously harmless bullets from a deserted-looking kopje, his first battle, with its horrid nightmare of flashing lights and thundering guns, its pools of blood, its contorted human faces, its agonised horses writhing in the dust—these were all nothing to him now, but the coloured bits of glass one shakes about in a kaleidoscope.
The smell of tents and of spent gunpowder was no longer in his nostrils; the brown earth alone sent up its homely odour, and he drew the breath of it in with thankfulness. Such a quiet country; silent little farms asleep in the afternoon's sunshine, their crops long since ready, but gathered only by the birds. The cottages, some of them empty of all signs of habitation, some of them with their doors carefully locked on all a woman's treasure of furniture and homely things.