"The mare and the spider have been commandeered for the use of the United Republics," said Van Busch. As the angry colour flamed up in Lady Hannah's small, pale cheeks, he added, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his hands: "Bough did his best to save them for you, no bounce! But could one man do anything against so many? Sure no, nothing at all!"
She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its quilted satin slipper.
"Do you suppose I haven't guessed by this time that Bough the Africander and Van Busch the British-Johannesburger are one Boer when it suits them both?"
His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks of old tattooing obliterated by an acid burn, jerked as he raised it to stroke and feel his whiskers. Something else upon the hand, in the sharpened state of all her senses, struck out a spark of old association, and recalled a name once known. She went on.
"How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough? You provoke the question when I see you wearing the Mildare crest and coat-of-arms."
He had turned the deeply-engraved sard with his brown thumb and clenched his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed his mind, and took off the ring and handed it to her.
"I had this ring off Bough, that's a real live man, and a thundering good pal of mine, for all your funning. The chap it belonged to died at a farm Bough owned once. Somewhere in Natal it might have been. And the bloke who died there was a big bug in England, Bough always thought. But he came tramping, and hauled up with hardly duds to his back or leather to his feet. Sick, too, and coughing like a sheep with the rinderpest. Bough was kind to him, but he got worse and worse. One night Bough was sitting up with him reading the Bible, when he made signs. 'Take this ring off of my finger and keep it,' says he. 'I've got nothing else to give you, but I reckon the Almighty'll foot your bill, for you're a first-class Christian, if ever there was one.' Then he went in, and Bough buried him in regular fancy style——"
"And sent the girl to the nuns at Gueldersdorp, or was she there already?"
Van Busch was in the act of taking back the sardonyx signet-ring. His hand jerked again, so sharply that the ring was jerked into the air, fell to the floor, and rolled under the table. He stooped and reached for it, and asked, with his face hidden by the patriotic tablecloth:
"What girl do you mean?"