Lucian flung his gloves into the corner of the room with a hearty curse. He stroked the satiny skin under which his muscle rippled smoothly. He had the arm of a blacksmith, and had always been proud of it. The remark of the drunken man came back to him. That was what they thought of him, was it?—that he was a mere slinger of ink, afraid of spilling his blood or suffering discomfort for the courage of his convictions? Well, they should see. England had gone mad with the lust of blood and domination, and after all he was not her son. He had discharged whatever debt he owed her. To the real England, the true England that had fallen on sleep, he would explain everything, when the awakening came. It would be no crime to shoulder a rifle and strap a bandolier around one’s shoulders in order to help the weak against the strong. He had fought with his pen, taking what he believed to be the right and honest course, in the endeavour to convert people who would not be converted, and who regarded his efforts as evidences of enmity. Very well: there seemed now to be but one straight path, and he would take it.
It was remembered afterwards as a great thing in Lucian’s favour that he made no fuss about his next step. He left London very quietly, and no one knew that he was setting out to join the men whom he honestly believed to be fighting for the best principles of liberty and freedom.
CHAPTER XXXI
When the war broke out, Saxonstowe and his wife, after nearly three years of globe-trotting, were in Natal, where they had been studying the conditions of native labour. Saxonstowe, who had made himself well acquainted with the state of affairs in South Africa, knew that the coming struggle would be long and bitter. He and his wife entered into a discussion as to which they were to do: stay there, or return to England. Sprats knew quite well what was in Saxonstowe’s mind, and she unhesitatingly declared for South Africa. Then Saxonstowe, who had a new book on hand, put his work aside, and set the wires going, and within a few hours had been appointed special correspondent of one of the London newspapers, with the prospect of hard work and exciting times before him.
‘And what am I to do?’ inquired Lady Saxonstowe, and answered her own question before he could reply. ‘There will be sick and wounded—in plenty,’ she said. ‘I shall organise a field-hospital,’ and she went to work with great vigour and spent her husband’s money with inward thankfulness that he was a rich man.
Before they knew where they were, Lord and Lady Saxonstowe were shut up in Ladysmith, and for one of them at least there was not so much to do as he had anticipated, for there became little to record but the story of hope deferred, of gradual starvation, and of death and disease. But Sprats worked double tides, unflinchingly and untiringly, and almost forgot that she had a husband who chafed because he could not get more than an occasional word over the wires to England. At the end of the siege she was as gaunt as a far-travelled gypsy, and as brown, but her courage was as great as ever and her resolution just as strong. One day she received an ovation from a mighty concourse that sent her, frightened and trembling, to shelter; when she emerged into the light of day again it was only to begin reorganising her work in preparation for still more arduous duties. The tide of war rolled on northwards, and Sprats followed, picking up the bruised and shattered jetsam which it flung to her. She had never indulged in questionings or speculations as to the rights or wrongs of the war. Her first sight of a wounded man had aroused all the old mothering instinct in her, and because she had no baby of her own she took every wounded man, Boer or Briton, into her arms and mothered him.
CHAPTER XXXII
A huddled mass of fugitives—men, women, children, horses, cattle—crowded together in the dry bed of a river, seeking shelter amongst rocks and boulders and under shelving banks, subjected continually to a hurricane of shot and shell, choked by the fumes of the exploding Lyddite, poisoned by the stench of blood, saturated all through with the indescribable odour of death. Somewhere in its midst, caged like a rat, but still sulkily defiant, the peasant general fingered his switch as he looked this way and that and saw no further chance of escape. In the distance, calmly waiting the inevitable end, the little man with the weather-beaten face and the grey moustaches listened to the never-ceasing roar of his cannon demanding insistently the word of surrender that must needs come.
Saxonstowe, lying on a waterproof sheet on the floor of his tent, was writing on a board propped up in front of him. All that he wrote was by way of expressing his wonder, over and over again, that Cronje should hold out so long against the hell of fire which was playing in and around his last refuge. He was trying to realise what must be going on in the river bed, and the thought made him sick. Near him, writing on an upturned box, was another special correspondent who shared the tent with him; outside, polishing tin pannikins because he had nothing else to do, was a Cockney lad whom these two had picked up in Ladysmith and had attached as body-servant. He was always willing and always cheerful, and had a trick of singing snatches of popular songs in a desultory and disconnected way. His raucous voice came to them under the booming of the guns.
‘Ow, ’ee’s little but ’ee’s wise,
’Ee’s a terror for ’is size,
An’ ’ee does not hadvertise:
Do yer, Bobs?’