The Dop Doctor Part 67

The antiphon followed the _Gloria_, and then the soft womanly voices chanted the twenty-third Psalm:

"_Quis ascendit in montem Domini?_"--"Who shall ascend to the Mount of the Lord, and who shall dwell in His holy Sanctuary? Those who do no ill and are pure.... Who do not give their heart to vain desires, or deceive their neighbour with false oaths."

Or deceive ... with false oaths. To marry a man, letting him think you ...

something you were not ... did not that amount to deceiving by a false oath?

Lynette lay very still. The last "Hail, Mary!" over, the Sisters returned silently to bed. Wire mattresses creaked under superimposed weight. Long breaths of wakefulness changed into the even breathing of slumber. The only one who snored was Sister Tobias, a confirmed nasal soloist, whose customary cornet-solo was strangely missing. Was Sister Tobias lying awake and remembering too?

Sister Tobias was the only other person in the Convent besides the Mother, who knew. She had helped her faithfully and tenderly to nurse Lynette through the long illness that had followed the finding of that lost lamb upon the veld. She was a homely creature of saintly virtues, the Mother's staff and right hand. And it was she who had asked Lynette if she was happy?

Somebody was moving. The grey light of dawn was filtering down the drain-pipe ventilators and through the c.h.i.n.ks in the tarpaulins overhead.

A formless pale figure came swiftly to Lynette's bedside. She guessed who it must be. She sat up wide awake, and with her heart beating wildly in her throat.

"Dearie!" The whisper was Sister Tobias's. She could make out the glimmer of the white, plain nightcap framing the narrow face with the long, sagacious nose and wise, kindly, patient eyes. "Are you awake, dearie?"

"Yes," Lynette whispered back, shuddering. The dry, warm, hard hand felt about for her cold one, and found and took it. Lips came close to her ear, and breathed:

"Dearie, this grand young gentleman you're engaged to be married to ..."

"Yes?"

"_Has he been told? Does he know?_"

The long, plain face was close to Lynette's. In the greying light she could see it clearly. Her heart beat in heavy, sickening thuds. Her teeth chattered, and whole body shook as if with ague, as she faltered:

"The Mother says--he is not to be told."

There was a dead silence. It was as if an iron shutter had suddenly been pulled down and clamped home between them. Then Sister Tobias said in a tone devoid of all expression:

"The Mother knows best, dearie, of course. Lie down and go to sleep."

Then silence settled back upon the Convent bombproof, but sleep did not come to everybody there.

XLIII

The Mother was kneeling, as she had knelt the whole night through, before the dismantled altar in the battered little chapel of the Convent, with the big white stars looking down upon her through the gaps in the sh.e.l.l-torn roof. When it was the matin-hour she rose and rang the bell.

Matins over, she still knelt on. When it was broad day she broke her fast with the Sisters, and went about the business of the day calmly, collectedly, capably as ever. Only her face was white and drawn, and great violet circles were about her great tragical grey eyes.

"The blessed Saint she is!" whispered the nuns one to the other.

If she had heard them, it would have added yet another iron point to the merciless scourge of her self-scorn.

A Saint, in that stained garment! What tears of bitterness had fallen that night upon the shameful blots that marred its whiteness! But for Richard's child, even though she herself should become a castaway, she must go on to the end. All the chivalry in her rose in arms to defend the young, shame-burdened, blameless head.

Ah! if she had known?...

Cold, light, cruel eyes had watched from across the river that day as her tall, imposing figure, side by side with the slender, more lightly-clad one, moved between the mimosa-bushes and round the river-bend. When the two were fairly out of sight, the jungle of tree-fern and cactus had rustled and cracked. Then the burly, thickset, powerful figure of a bearded man pushed through, traversed the reed-beds, and, leaping from boulder to boulder, crossed the river. Before long the man was standing on the patch of trodden gra.s.s and flowers in the lee of the great boulder, shutting up a little single-barrelled, bra.s.s-mounted field-gla.s.s that had served him excellently well.

He was Bough, _alias_ Van Busch, otherwise the man who had come in through the enemy's lines as a runner from Diamond Town, bringing the letter from a hypothetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist. His light eyes, that were set flat in their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked about and all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of black-brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. Van Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and picked up a little tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink flowers. The daintiness of the little glove brought home to Bough more forcibly than anything else, that the Kid had become a lady.

For it was the girl, sure. No error about that little white face of hers, with the pointed chin, and the topaz-coloured eyes, and the reddish hair.

The gla.s.s had brought her near enough to make that quite certain. He had been too far off to hear a word, but he had made out what had been going on very well. First, she had been giddying with the tall young English swell, drawing him on while he seemed courting her, as all women knew how to, and then the tall Sister of Mercy had come and rowed her; and she had cried, thrown down there among the gra.s.s and flowers, exactly as if somebody had beaten her with a sjambok to cure her of the G. D.'d obstinacy that had to be thrashed out of women, if you would have them get to heel when you chose it, or come at your call when you chose again.

Suppose he chose again. When a man with brains in his holy head once set them to work, there were few things he could not do. He could scare others off his property, for certain. He could exercise upon the girl herself the unlimited power of Fear. He must lie doggo because of the Doctor. It was a thundering queer chance the Doctor turning up in this place. And as one of the bosses, helping to run the show, and powerful enough to pay off old scores, if he should chance to recognise in the densely bearded face of the man from Diamond Town the features of the Princ.i.p.al Witness in the once-famous Old Bailey Criminal Case: "The Crown _v._ Saxham."

Bough would lie low, and watch, and wait, and then spring, as the tarantula springs. He had cleverly blurred all trails leading back to the tavern on the veld, and he knew enough of girls and women to believe that this girl had kept secret what had happened there. He would pick up with her, anyway, and offer to marry her and make an honest girl of her. If she had a snivelling fancy for the dandy swell who had made love to her and kissed her, he would threaten to tell the fellow the truth unless she gave him up. Or he would blow on her to the nuns she lived with, and they would have nothing more to do with her.

Voor den donder! suppose they knew already? The plan wanted careful working out. A false step, and Gueldersdorp might become unhealthy for the man who had brought the letter from Diamond Town to oblige Mrs. Casey.

Suppose the spoor that led back to the tavern on the veld and the grave by the Little Kopje, not as well hidden as Bough had thought, those jewels and securities and the one thousand seven hundred pounds cash might get an honest man into trouble yet, even after the lapse of seventeen years. He breathed heavily, and the pupils of his strange light eyes dilated, and the sweat rolled off his forehead and cheeks until the skin shone like copper. He had been a reckless, easy-going young chap of twenty-six seventeen years ago. Forty-three years of life had taught him that when you are least expecting them to, buried secrets are sure to resurrect. No, Gueldersdorp was not a healthy place for Bough or for Van Busch! That chattering little paroquet of a woman with the sharp black eyes might use them one day, to the detriment of the philanthropist who had brought in the letter from Diamond Town for Mrs. Casey.

Then the girl!... He grinned in his bushy beard, thinking how thundering scared she would look if she encountered him by chance, and recognised him. The beard would not hide him from her eyes. No, no! And he smelled at the little tan glove, that had a slight, clean, delicate perfume about it, and thrust it into his breeches-pocket, and crossed the river again, making his way back to the native town by devious native paths that snaked and twined and twisted through the tangled bush, as he himself made his tortuous progress through the world.

He was in an evil mood, made blacker by the prospect of spending a lonely night without the solace of liquor or woman. For Vice was at a low ebb in Gueldersdorp just now, and the commonest dop was barely obtainable at the price of good champagne, and it would not do for the man from Diamond Town to seem flush of dollars.

Sure, no, that would never do! He must make out with the tobacco he still had left, and the big lump of opium he carried in a tin box in a pocket of the heavy money-belt he wore under his miner's flannel s.h.i.+rt. He groped for the tin box, and got it, and bit off a corner of the sticky brown lump, and ate it as he went along, and his laboured breathing calmed, and the chilly sweat dried upon his copper-burned skin, that had the purplish-black tinge in it that comes of saturation with iodide of pota.s.sium. And the pupils of his colourless eyes dwindled to pin-points, and his thick hands ceased to shake. He was not the man he had been; and he had learned the opium-habit from a woman who had managed a joint at Johannesburg, and it grew upon him--the need of the soothing, supporting deadener. He went along now, under the influence of it, scarcely feeling the ground under his heavy leather veldschoens.

He trod on something presently, lying on the path. It moved and whimpered.

He struck a match with a steady hand, and held the glimmering blue phosphorus-flame downwards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the Barala, who had crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-gut and a sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The Barala, though they were sorely pinched, like their European fellow-men, did not starve. They earned pay and rations. They helped to keep the enemy out on the south and west sides of the town, and dug most of the trenches--often under fire--and ran the despatches, and sometimes brought in fresh meat. But their slaves, and the native hangers-on at the kraals, suffered horribly.

They ate the dogs that had been shot, and the other kind of dog, and fought with the live ones for bones, and picked up empty meat-tins and licked them. They stalked about the town and the native stad like living skeletons. They dropped and died on the dust-heaps they had been rummaging for offal. Soup-kitchens were started later on, when it was found how things were going with them, and hides and bones and heads of horses and mules were boiled down into soup, and they were fed. But a time was to come when even that soup was wanted to keep the life in white people. You saw the famine-stricken black spectres crawling from refuse-pile to refuse-pile, and dying in that pitiless, beautiful suns.h.i.+ne, under the blue, blue February sky, because white people had got to keep on living.

The native girl had been too weak to kill anything. Death had come upon her in the midst of the teeming life of the jungle, and she had fallen down there in her ragged red blanket among the tree-roots that arched and knotted over the path. Her eyes were already rolled up and set. They stared blindly, horribly, out of the ashen-black face. When she heard the steps of a shod person the last spark of life glimmered feebly up in her.

Her wild, keen, savage power of scent yet remained. She smelled a white man, and her cracked and swollen lips moved, and a voice like the sound made by the rubbing of dry canes together uttered the word that is the same in Dutch and English:

"Water!"

Bough's pale, flat, scintillating eyes were quite expressionless, but his thick lips parted, and his strong yellow teeth showed in his thick brake of beard. With the caution of one who knows that a single glowing match-end dropped among dry vegetation may cause a devastating conflagration, he blew out the lingering flame, and rolled the little charred stick between his tough-skinned fingers before he threw it down.

Then he raised himself up, and stepped over the dying creature, and went upon his way, humming a dance-tune he liked. He was not changed. It was still a joy to him to have feebler beings in his power, and taunt and torture and use them at his will.

He had a.s.sumed the skin of the man from Diamond Town in the well-paid service of that bright boy of Brounckers', who had, it may be remembered, a plan.

The plan involved a feint from the eastward, and an attack upon that weakest spot in the girdle of Gueldersdorp's defences, the native stad.

The Barala might be incorruptible; the weak spot was the native village, nevertheless. And the business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his to excellent purpose, and storing his retentive memory--for it would not do for a stranger to be caught putting pencil to paper in a town under Martial Law, and bristling with suspicion--with the information indispensable for the putting in effect of young Schenk Eybel's ingenious plan.

The jackal had had to yield his bone to the hungry lion. Still, it was wise to be in good odour with the Republics; that was why Van Busch had taken on the job. He had not been impelled to risk his skin, and get shut up in this stinking, starving hole by anything the sharp-eyed little Englishwoman, so unpleasantly awake at last regarding the genuine aims and real character of the chivalrous Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg, had dropped. h.e.l.l, no! That unripe nectarine had been plucked and eaten years ago. And yet how the ripe fruit allured him to-day, seen against its background of dull green leaves, its smooth cheeks glowing under the kisses of the sun.

The swell English officer had kissed them too. As she meant, the sly little devil, slipping away for her bit of fun. Grown a beauty, too, as anybody but a thundering, juicy, d.a.m.ned fool might have known she would!

He swore bitterly, thinking what a gold-mine a face and figure like that might have proved to an honest speculator up Johannesburg way.

His case, he thought, was somewhat similar to that of old Baas Jacobs, the Boer who found the first great South African diamond on his farm near Hopetown, and threw it down beside the door, with other pretty s.h.i.+ning pebbles, for his child to play with. The child's mother tossed it to Van Niekirk as a worthless gift. Van Niekirk pa.s.sed it on to J. O'Reilly. When the English Government mineralogist p.r.o.nounced the stone a diamond, and the Colonial Secretary and the French Consul sent it to the Paris Exhibition, and the Governor of the Colony bought the jewel, old Baas Jacobs must have felt mighty sick. All the world hungering, and admiring, and coveting the beautiful thing he had thrown down on the ground....

Small wonder that to the end of his days he had talked as a robbed man.