  "It was just before the rainstorm that it happened. He was on the lookout. They have been moving the big gun and the 16-pounder Krupps again, and some of the laagers seem to be shifting, so we have kept an extra eye open of late, by night as well as by day. He was very keen always...." Already he is spoken of by those who have known and loved him as one who was and has been. "He had relieved me at 10 a.m. He might have been up over an hour when it happened. The orderly-sergeant had got his mouth at the speaking-tube, in the act of sending down a message; he did not see him hit. It was a shell from their Maxim-Nordenfelt. And when we got to him, the first glance told us there was little hope." "There is none at all," says Saxham curtly, as is his wont. "A splinter has shattered the lower portion of the spine. The agony can be deadened with an opiate, and the ruptured arteries ligatured. Beyond that there is nothing else to do, though he may live till morning." "He managed to ask for Wrynche before he swooned, so we 'phoned him at Hotchkiss Outpost North. He got here ten minutes ago, badly cut up, but there has been no recognition of him. Do what you can, Saxham, in the case. Every moment may bring Wrynche's recall. There is another person I should have expected the poor boy to ask for.... That young girl, Saxham, whose heart has to be broken with the news, sooner or later. Perhaps about nightfall, when it will be safe for her to venture. I ought to send an escort for Miss Mildare?" The slow, dusky colour rises in Saxham's set, pale face, and as slowly sinks out again. He has been standing in low-toned colloquy with the Chief outside the heavy plush curtains. He turns silently upon his heel and vanishes behind them. "Ting—ting—ting!" The telephone-bell heralds an urgent recall from Hotchkiss Outpost North. And a beckoning hand summons Captain Bingo from the bedside of his dying friend ere ever the word of parting has been spoken. "It is for you, Wrynche, as I expected." "I am ready, sir. Orderly, get my damned brute out!" The sorrow and love that swell the big man's heart to bursting find rather absurd expression in his savage objurgation of the innocent brown charger. But Captain Bingo, when he stoops over the camp-bed where lies Beauvayse, kisses him solemnly and clumsily upon the forehead, and then goes heavily striding out of the death-chamber with his bulldog jowl well down upon his chest; and a moment later when he is seen bucketing the lean brown charger through the thrashing hailstorm that is jagged across by the white-green fires of bursting shell, is rather a tragic figure, or so it seems to me. Meanwhile, what of the man who lies upon the bed? Since Bingo's face came between and receded into, those thick grey mists that gather about the dying, he has lost consciousness of present things. Fever is rising in those wellnigh empty veins of his, his skin is drawing and creeping; it seems as though innumerable ants were running over him. The hand that is not powerless tries to brush them away. Sometimes he thinks he is in Hospital, and that the man in the next bed is groaning, and then he is aware that the groans are his own. He is conscious that a needle-prick in the sound wrist has been followed by sensible relief. The unspeakable grinding agonies subside; he is able to murmur, "Thanks, Nurse," as he gulps some liquid from the glass a strange hand holds to his lips.... The groans are sighs now, and the clogged brain, spurred by morphia, shakes off its lethargy. The fever goes on rising, and he begins, silently, for his powers fail of speech, "Coming straight for me—five round black spots punched in the grey. If they go by, luck's on my side, and I marry her. If not ... hit—and done for!" Exactly thus has Saxham made of the unconscious Father Noah, of the Boer sharp shooters behind their breastwork, the arbiters of Fate. "Send for Bingo!" flashes across the dying brain "Something to say to Bingo. Don't bring her. Who'd want a woman who loved him to remember him like this? What was it the Mahometan syce the musth elephant killed at Bhurtpore said about his wife? 'Let her cool my grave with tears.' Until she finds out ... until someone tells her. Ah—'h!" There is a groan, and a convulsive shudder, and the beautiful dim eyes roll up in agony, and the blue, swollen lips are wrung as the feeble voice whispers: "Nurse, this hurts like—hell! Some more—that stuff!" Saxham gives another subcutaneous injection of morphia. The curtains part, and the Colonel, in waterproof and a dreadnought cap, comes noiselessly in. "No change," Saxham answers to the mute inquiry. "I anticipate none before midnight. Of course, the weakness is progressive." "Of course." The Chief touches the cold, flaccid wrist. There are hollows in his lean cheeks, and deep crow's-feet at the corners of the kindly hazel eyes, and the brown moustache is ominously straight and curveless. "Tell him, if he recovers consciousness, that I thought it best to send for her. Chagrave has gone with a couple of the men. It's a desperate night for a woman to be out in, but they took an Ambulance sling-chair with them. They'll wrap her in tarpaulins, and carry her in that." He nods and goes up on the lookout with a night-glass, and the wearied officer he relieves comes down. As he has said, it is a desperate night of driving sleet and swirling blackness, illuminated only with the malignant coruscations of lyddite bursting-charges. But the tempest without She has been sent for.... She is coming.... To kneel by the low cot and weep over him who lies there; kiss the tortured lips and the beautiful dim eyes, and hold the unwounded head upon her breast.... How shall Saxham bear it without crying out to tell her? He clenches his hands, and sets his strong jaw, and the sweat breaks out upon his broad, pale forehead. The man upon the bed, mentally clear, though incapable of coherent speech, is now listening to comments that shall ere long be made by living men upon one who very soon shall be numbered with the dead. "Well, well, don't be hard on the poor beggar!" he hears them saying. "Give the devil his due: not a bad chap—take him all round. Got carried away and lost his head. She's as lovely as they make 'em, and he ... always a fool where a pretty woman was concerned—poor old Toby!" He pleads unconsciously, with his most merciless judge, in his utter incapacity to plead at all.... And so the time goes by. There has been coming and going in the place outside. The guard has relieved the double sentries, the official lamp burns redly under the little penthouse. A reconnoitring-patrol ride out, the horses' hoofs sounding hollow on the earth-covered boards of the sloping way. The business of War goes on in its accustomed grooves, and the business of Life will soon be over for Beauvayse. Yet she has not come. And Saxham looks at his watch. Nine o'clock. He has not eaten since early morning. He is wet to the skin and stiff with long sitting. But when the savoury odours of hot horse-soup and hot bean-coffee, accompanied by the clinking of crockery and tin pannikins, announce a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to the curtains and anxiously beg him to take food, he merely shakes his square black head and falls again to watching the unconscious face of Beauvayse. The conscious brain behind its blankly-staring eyes is thinking: "Those paragraphs.... In black and white the thing looked damnable. And think of the gossip and tongue-wagging. Whatever they say about me ... she'll be the one to suffer. They're never so hard on ... the man!" He has uttered these last words audibly; they pierce to the heart's core of the mute, impassive watcher. Strong antipathy is as clairvoyant as strong sympathy, and with a leap of understanding, and a fresh surge of fierce resentment, Saxham acknowledges the deadly truth contained in those few halting words. She will be the one to suffer. Beside the martyrdom inevitably to be endured by the white saint, the agony of the sinner's death-bed pales and dwindles. There is a savage struggle once again between Saxham the man and Saxham the surgeon beside the bed of death. His sudden irrepressible movement has knocked the tumbler from the little iron washstand at his elbow. It falls and shivers into fragments at his feet. And then—the upturned face slants a little, and the eyes that have been blankly staring at the roof-tarpaulins come down to the level of his own. He and her fallen enemy regard each other silently for a moment. Then Beauvayse says weakly, in the phantom of the old gay, boyish voice that wooed and won her: "Thought it was Wrynche. Where is——" The question ends in a groan. Saxham the man shrinks from him with unutterable loathing. But Saxham the surgeon stoops over him, saying, in distinct, even tones: "Captain Wrynche was here. He has been recalled to Hotchkiss Outpost North. Drink this." This is a little measure of brandy-and-water, in which some tabloids of morphia have been dissolved. And Beauvayse obeys, panting: "All right. But ... more a job for the Chaplain than the Doctor, isn't it?" "Do you wish the Chaplain sent for?" There is a glimmer of the old lazy, defiant humour in the beautiful dim eyes. "What could he do?" Saxham answers—how strangely for him, the Denier: "He would probably pray beside you, and talk to you of God." There is a pause. The faint, almost breathless whisper asks: "It's night, isn't it?" "It is dark and stormy night." Beauvayse says, in the whispering voice interrupted by long, gasping sighs that are beginning to have a jarring rattle in them: "Before to-morrow.... I shall know more of God ... than the whole Bench of Bishops." There is silence. And she does not come. The man on the bed makes a painful effort, gathering his nearly-spent forces for something he wants to say: "Doctor!" "Let me wipe your forehead. Yes?" "I ... insulted you frightfully the other day." "You need not recall that. I have forgotten it." "I ... beg your pardon! Will you ... shake hands?... My left, if you don't mind. The other one's ... no good." He tries to lift the heavy arm that lies beside him. There is only a faint movement of the finger-tips, and he gives up the effort with a fluttering sob. And the square white face with the burning eyes under the lowering brows opposes itself to his. Words are crowding to Saxham's lips: "I would gladly shake the hand of the man who insulted me and who has apologised. And I honour the brave officer who meets Death upon the field. But with the would-be betrayer of an innocent girl, the dancing-woman's husband who proposed himself as mate for Lynette Mildare, I have nothing but contempt and abhorrence. He is to me a leper. Worse, for the leper I would touch to cure!" He does not utter the words, nor does his rugged, unconquerable sincerity admit of his taking the hand. He fights with his hatred in silence. And she has not come. What is he saying in that weak voice with the rattling breaths between? "Listen, Saxham.... There's ... something I want you ... say to Miss Mildare." The grey mists that gather about him shut out a clear view of Saxham's terrible face. The feeble whisper struggles on, broken by those rattling gasps. "Tell her forget me. Say when I ... asked her ... to marry me...." Silence. He is falling, falling into an abyss of vast uncertainties. The blue lips dabbled with foam can frame no more coherent words. Only the brain behind the dying "Do not try to speak. Close your eyes when you mean 'Yes.' I know what you wish me to tell Miss Mildare. It is that when you asked her to marry you, you were already the husband of another woman. Am I correct?" The affirmative signal comes. "You were married to Miss Lavigne at the Registrar's office, Cookham-on-Thames, last June, before you sailed. The witnesses were your valet and a female servant at Roselawn Cottage. And knowing that you were not free, you deceived and cheated her. That is what I am to tell Miss Mildare? Signal if I am right." The dying eyes are brimming with tears. When the lids shut, signifying "Yes," slow, heavy drops are forced between them. "Very well. Now hear. I will not tell her!" The eyes open wide with surprise. "I will never tell her," says Saxham again. "I will not blacken any man's reputation to further my own interests." The vital strength and the white-hot passion of him, contrasted with the spent and utter laxity of the dissolving thing of clay upon the bed, seem superhuman. "Do you hear me?" he demands again. "Listen once more. Knowing the truth of you, I came here to force you to undeceive her. Had you refused, I would certainly have killed you. But I would never have betrayed you!" That "never" of Saxham's carries conviction. The pale ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beauvayse's old voice comes back again to say: "Doctor, you're a ... damned good sort!" And then there is a long, long silence, broken only by those painful rattling breaths, never by her coming. The end comes, and she is not there. A pale blink in the wild sky eastward hints to the night lookouts of hot drink, food, and welcome rest. The Chief stands beside the comfortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old House is flickering out. The Doctor holds the wet and icy wrist, where the pulse has ceased to be perceptible. The sheet above the labouring breast rises and falls with those panting, "Hurrah! They're running—running for their lives! Give it 'em with shrapnel! Oh, pepper 'em like hell! The Relief! The Relief! Hurrah!" It is all over with the opening of the day-eye in the east. When they leave him, beautiful, and stern, and calm in that deep slumber from which only the Angel with the Trumpet may awaken him, and pass out between the curtains, the dark, short officer who was on the lookout when the Doctor came, stands very pale and muddy, and steaming with damp, waiting to report. And two troopers of the Irregulars, wet and muddy and steaming too, are waiting also, just inside the tarpaulins of the outer doorway. And she is not there. A few rapid words, an exclamation from the Chief, shaken for once out of his steely composure, and quivering from head to foot with mingled rage and grief: "My God, how unutterably horrible!" Saxham shoulders his way into the ring of white faces that have gathered about the dark little muddy officer. "What has happened to Miss Mildare——?" The little officer answers, panting: "The Sisters could not make her understand. She——" The Chief speaks for him: "She had been previously stunned by the shock of—a terrible calamity." "What calamity?" "The Mother-Superior has been killed. Two of the Sisters and Miss Mildare found her in the Convent chapel. They got there before evening. She must have been dead some hours. She had been shot through the lungs." "By a stray bullet?" "By a bullet from a revolver, fired close enough to scorch the clothes. Foul murder, and by God who saw it done——" The lean clenched hand, thrown upwards in a savage gesture, the blazing eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the writhen mouth, the furious, jarring voice, leave little doubt of the vengeance that will be wreaked when he shall track down the murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the telephone. The swift, imperative orders volt from fort to fort; the circuit of vigilance is made complete, the human bloodhounds unleashed upon the trail, in a few instants, thanks to the buzzing wire that brings the mouth of a man to the ear of another across a void of miles. But Bough, primed with knowledge as to which are dummy rifle-pits and which are real, aided by acquaintance with the ground, and covered by that wuthering night of storm, has already pierced the lines. Subsequently that excellent Afrikander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Brounckers' bright boy at Tweipans, with information that decides the date of Schenk Eybel's Feint from the East. |
|
