The Dop Doctor Part 51

"I have sighed, and she has smiled." He went on, "If your friend Bough had been brave enough to try and take away that wad of banknotes from the little Englishwoman, he would have met trouble. For in a pocket of her gown she carries a revolver, and sleeps with it under her pillow by night; that is another thing that Trudi has told me." He kissed his fingers, and waved them in the direction of Kink's Hotel. "She is a lovely maiden!" He blew his nose without the a.s.sistance of a pocket-handkerchief, and continued:

"Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the Englishwoman's coffee that would have made her sleep while he stole that money, or he might even have killed her quietly, and buried her on the farm. But a man who does that is not so clever and so wise as the man who makes a plan that gets the money and keeps friends all round, and makes everybody happy--is he, now? And that man is me, and that plan was mine. From P. Blinders you have genuine information to sell the Englishwoman, and when she has bought it, paying well for it, and written it all down in her despatches to the Commandant at Gueldersdorp, she hands the letters back to you to be smuggled through the lines, and pays through the nose for that also. And who shall say she is cheated? For the letters do get through"--the pimply countenance of P. Blinders was quite immobile, but the eyes behind the great spectacles twirled and twinkled with infinite meaning--"a week or so after date, perhaps, but what is that? Nothing--nothing at all."

"Nothing," agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled pleasantly in each other's faces for a minute more. Then said Van Busch, with a loud sigh:

"But what I have to tell you now is something. The Englishwoman has got no more money. Ask Trudi, if you think I lie. And, of course, the plan was a good plan, and you were a smart fellow to hit on it; but now the two hundred pounds is gone----"

"Three hundred remain to get." P. Blinders briskly held up five stumpy red fingers and tucked down the thumb and little finger, leaving a trio of mute witnesses to the correctness of his arithmetic.

"No more remains to get. The cow has run dry."

The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise.

"Hoe? What is this I hear?" he demanded with indignation. "Nothing left, and I have not had but a hundred and fifty out of the five hundred. There has been dishonesty somewhere. There have been tricks, unbefitting the dealings of scrupulous Christian men. Foei, foei!"

Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled amiably down into the indignant eyes behind the spectacles. Then he said, with his most candid look and simplest lisp:

"No tricks, brother; all fair and above-board. Ask the Commandant whether Van Busch is square or not? He knows that the hundred and fifty was paid you honestly on his account, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And you're not the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no, you'll never do that, never! Go and see him now, and settle up. I had a talk with young Schenk Eybel this morning, and he says the answer to the screeve you wrote to the Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp--to patch up an exchange of the Englishwoman for that slim kerel of a Boer's son they got their claws on at the beginning of the siege--has come in under the white flag this morning. Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without Walt Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old man on his grey pony near the Field Hospital."

The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The ex-apothecary faltered:

"What--what is this you say? The money paid me on the Commandant's account--when it was to be a secret between us.... Foei, foei! This is unfair. And suppose I have spent it, how shall I replace it? Do you wish to ruin an honest man?"

Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly. At least, it seemed so, for he turned sharp round, and trotted off with sorrowfully-drooping black coat-tails, in search of the meek grey pony and the terrible old man.

But the front view of the Secretary displayed a countenance whose pimples radiated satisfaction, and spectacles that were alight with joy.

Much--very much--would P. Blinders have liked to have kept that hundred and fifty, but his fear had proved greater than his desire.

He had paid every tikkie of the money faithfully to Brounckers, and his hands were metaphorically clean, and his neck comfortably safe. He was the poorer by a hundred and fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and experience; and--he chuckled at the thought of this--in the joy of knowing himself, in postscripts appended to those despatches of the Englishwoman's, to have poked sly sarcasm at the British Lion. Whose spiny tail P. Blinders imagined to be las.h.i.+ng, even then, at the p.r.i.c.k of the goad.

For another thing, very pleasant to think of, he had successfully pitted the cunning behind his giant spectacles against the superior villainy of Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg.

x.x.xVI

The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered, blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch--"_a sister indeed!_" snorted Mevrouw Kink; and never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and skirt-bands, had fas.h.i.+onable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it--good Nederlands measure--who did not know that she was an English prisoner-of-war.

Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hards.h.i.+ps, as its alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on having accomplished something of what she had set out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of days when she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial sympathies. But his valuable services had been rendered for so much more than nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was wont to describe as "stony." She had sent for Van Busch to tell him that the position was untenable. She would evacuate it, when he could manage to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.

A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear the mouse-coloured trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony ground, and the crack, crack of the sentries' Mausers, followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches....

She could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on the greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn-down blinds:

"STIRRING STORY FROM THE SEAT OF HOSTILITIES: LADY WAR-CORRESPONDENT RUNS THE GAUNTLET OF BOER RIFLES."

"Speshul. Hextry Speshul!"

Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got through the lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the splashboard, and sink into the arms of the husband loved better than aught save Glory, gasping, as her heroic spirit fled----

"Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots on?"

Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable of the two forbidding beds Kink's princ.i.p.al guest-chamber boasted, and ran her unoccupied needles through her interminable knitting, a thick white cotton sofa-cover or counterpane of irritating pattern--and stood over against her employer in an att.i.tude of sulky submission. She was a square-shouldered, st.u.r.dily-built young woman of twenty-five, with round eyes of pinky-blue garnished with white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a superb and aggressively-brilliantined head of fair hair elaborately dressed, waved, and curled.

The hair was all attached to Trudi's scalp. Lady Hannah had lain in bed morning after morning, for weary weeks, and watched her "doing it," and wondered that any young feminine creature with such arms, such skin, and such hair should be so utterly unattractive. But she had lived all these weeks in this one room with Trudi, had languished under her handmaid's lack of intelligence, had seen her eat, wielding her knife with marvellous dexterity, and, wakeful, tossed the while she snored.

And every morning, after Mevrouw Kink had brought in coffee, snorting whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous eye, or whenever the German drummer's widow struck her as being more foreign of manners and appearance than usual, Lady Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself as for a promenade outdoors, lift the corner of a blind, steal a glance at the seething, stenching single street of Tweipans between the slats of the green shutters, and--unpin her veil and take off her hat without a word....

By eleven o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated, wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the unwilling Trudi, was accustomed to venture out for what she called, with some exaggeration, "A whiff of fresh air."

Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the pickets at either end of it, and the sentries posted at longish intervals all down its length, the street of new brick and tin, and old wooden houses that made Tweipans, belonged to Lady Hannah then. Accompanied by Trudi, whose quality of being what I have heard called "deaf-nosed" with regard to noisy smells, she arrived at the pitch of envying, she would stumble up and down amongst the rubbish, or wade through the slush if it had been wet, and stop at favourable points to search with her night-gla.s.s for the greenish-blue glow-worm twinkles of distant Gueldersdorp, and wonder whether anybody there was thinking of her under the white stars or the drifting scud?...

But what was Trudi saying?

"The gracious one cannot have her boots."

"Why not?" asked Lady Hannah, with languid interest. Trudi struck the blow.

"Because she has none."

"No boots? Well, then, the walking-shoes."

Trudi smiled all over her large face. This placidity should not long endure.

"The gracious one has no shoes either. Boots and shoes--all have been taken away. Nothing remains except the quilted bedroom slippers the gracious one is wearing. And it is impossible to walk out in bedroom slippers."

"I suppose it is." Lady Hannah yawned. "Well, suppose you go and look for the boots. They may have been carried away by mistake, like----" She wondered afresh what could have become of that transformation coiffure?

"There is no mistake." Trudi announced. "And--the gracious lady forgot her little gun beneath her pillow this morning. That also is missing,"

volunteered Trudi, who had had her instructions and scrupulously acted up to them.

"My revolver has been stolen?" Lady Hannah sprang from her chair, made rapid search, and was convinced. The Browning revolver had been certainly spirited away.

Red patches burned in her thin little face, and her round black eyes regained some of their lost brightness. Nothing like a spice of excitement for bringing you up to the mark. Just now she had felt positively mouldy, and here she was, herself again.

"n.o.body came into the room in the night. I sleep with the key round my neck, and if they had opened the door with another, I should have awakened on the instant. n.o.body has been in the room to-day except the Frau Kink"--you will remember that a German drummer's widow would naturally converse in her defunct spouse's native language--"the Frau Kink, with the coffee-tray. She did not come near the bed...." The suddenness and force of the suspicion that shot up in Lady Hannah's mind lifted her up out of her chair, and set her upon her feet. "It must have been you. Was it you?"

She looked hard at Trudi, and Trudi sank upon her bed and dissolved in noisy weeping.

"Ach, the wickedness!" she moaned. "To suspect of such shamelessness a poor young maiden brought up in honesty.... Ach, ach!"

But Lady Hannah went on:

"Yesterday morning, when you were so long in coming back with hot water, and I opened the door and looked out into the pa.s.sage, I saw you whispering with a little stumpy, pimply man, in a long-tailed black coat and large spectacles. Who is he, and of what were you talking?"