The guards laid their hands upon the old man’s shoulders, and he turned and went with them without a word. Through her crack in the wall Bessie watched him go till the dear old head with its fringe of white hairs and the bent frame were no more visible. Then at last, benumbed and exhausted by the horrors she was passing through, her faculties failed her, and she fell forward in a faint there upon the sacks.
Meanwhile Muller was writing the death-warrant on a sheet of his pocket-book. At the foot he left a space for his own signature, but for reasons of his own he did not sign. What he did do was to pass the book round to be countersigned by all who had formed the court in this mock trial, his object being to implicate every one there present in the judicial murder by the direct and incontrovertible evidence of his sign-manual. Now, Boers are simple pastoral folk, but they are not quite so simple as to be deceived by a move like this, and hereon followed a very instructive little scene. To a man they had been willing enough to give their verdict for the execution of Silas, but they were by no means prepared to record it in black and white. As soon as they understood the object of their feared and respected commandant, a general desire manifested itself to make themselves individually and collectively scarce. Suddenly they found that they had business outside, to which each and all of them must attend. Already they had escaped from their extemporised jury-box, and, headed by the redoubtable Hans, were approaching the entrance to the waggon-house, when Frank Muller perceived their design, and roared in a voice of thunder:
“Stop! Not a man leaves this place till the warrant is signed.”
Instantly they halted, and began to look innocent and converse.
“Hans Coetzee, come here and sign,” said Muller again, whereon that unfortunate advanced with as good a grace as he could muster, murmuring to himself curses, not loud but deep, upon the head of “that devil of a man, Frank Muller.”
However, there was no help for it, so, with a sickly smile, he put his name to the fatal document in big and shaky letters. Then Muller called another man, who instantly tried to shirk on the ground that his education had been neglected, and that he could not write, an excuse which availed him little, for Frank Muller quietly wrote his name for him, leaving a space for his mark. After this there was no more trouble, and in five minutes the back of the warrant was covered with the sprawling signatures of the various members of the court.
One by one the men went, till at last Muller was left alone, seated on the saw-bench, his head sunk upon his breast, in one hand holding the warrant, while with the other he stroked his golden beard. Presently he ceased stroking his beard and sat for some minutes perfectly still—so still that he might have been carved in stone. By this time the afternoon sun had sunk behind the hill and the deep waggon-house was full of shadow that seemed to gather round him and invest him with a sombre, mysterious grandeur. He looked like a King of Evil, for Evil has her princes as well as Good, whom she stamps with an imperial seal of power, and crowns with a diadem of her own, and among these Frank Muller was surely great. A little smile of triumph played upon his beautiful cruel face, a little light danced within his cold eyes and ran down the yellow beard. At that moment he might have sat for a portrait of his master, the devil.
Presently he awoke from his reverie. “I have her!” he said to himself; “I have her in a vice! She cannot escape me; she cannot let the old man die! Those curs have served my purpose well; they are as easy to play on as a fiddle, and I am a good player. Yes, and now we are getting to the end of the tune.”
CHAPTER XXX.
“WE MUST PART, JOHN”
Jess and her companion stood in awed silence and gazed at the blackening and distorted corpses of the thunder-blasted Boers. Then they passed by them to the tree which grew some ten paces or more on the other side of the place of death. There was some difficulty in leading the horses by the bodies, but at last they came with a wheel and a snort of suspicion, and were tied up to the tree by John. Meanwhile Jess took some of the hard-boiled eggs out of the basket and vanished, remarking that she should take her clothes off and dry them in the sun while she ate her breakfast, and that she advised him to do likewise. Accordingly, so soon as she was well out of sight behind the shelter of the rocks she set to work to free herself from her sodden garments, a task of no little difficulty. Then she wrung them out and spread them one by one on the flat water-washed stones around, which were by now thoroughly warmed with the sun. Next she climbed to a pool under the shadow of the steep bank, in the rock-bed of the river, where she bathed her bruises and washed the sand and mud from her hair and feet. Her bath finished, she returned and sat herself on a slab of flat stone out of the glare of the sun, and ate her breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, reflecting meanwhile on the position in which she found herself. Her heart was very sore and heavy, and almost could she wish that she were lying deep beneath those rushing waters. She had counted upon death, and now she was not dead; indeed, she with her shame and trouble might yet live for many a year. She was as one who in her sleep had seemed to soar on angels’ wings far into the airy depths, and then awakened with a start to find that she had tumbled from her bed. All the heroic scale, all the more than earthly depth of passion, all the spiritualised desires that sprang into being beneath the shadow of the approaching end, had come down to the common level of an undesirable attachment, along which she must drag her weary feet for many a year. Nor was this all. She had been false to Bessie; more, she had broken Bessie’s lover’s troth. She had tempted him and he had fallen, and now he was as bad as she. Death would have justified all this; never would she have done it had she thought that she was doomed to live; but now Death had cheated her, as is his fashion with people to whom his presence is more or less desirable, leaving her to cope with the spirit she had invoked when his sword was quivering over her.