It was Wednesday again, and Saxham came riding through the embrasure in the oblong earthwork, and down the gravelly glacis that led into the Women's Laager. An obsequious Hindu, in an unclean shirt and a filthy red turban, rose up salaaming, almost under his horse's feet, and took the bridle. He dismounted and went his rounds.

It might have been the dry bed of a high-banked placer-river, with spare lengths of steel railway-line borne across from bank to bank, covered with beams and sheets of corrugated iron and tarpaulins, with wide chinks to let in the much-needed air and light. A line of living-waggons, crowded with women and children—English, American, Irish, Dutch, and half-caste—ran down the centre of the giant trench. In each of its sloping faces a row of dug-out habitations gave accommodation to twice the number that the waggons held. At the eastern end a line of camp cooking-places had been arranged in military fashion, but the Dutchwomen's little coffee-pipkin-bearing fires of dung and chips burned everywhere, and possibly they did something towards purifying the air. For, to be frank, it vied with the native village in the compound and variegated nature of its smells, without the African muskiness of odour that is perceptible in the vicinity of our sable brother. The fat, slatternly, frankly dirty vrouws had not the remotest idea of sanitation; the Germans and Irish, blandly or doggedly impervious to savage smells, pursued their unsavoury way in defiance of the clamorous necessity for hygienic measures, until the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen, the energetic Americans, and the sturdier Africanders, after making what headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of filth, had yielded to the lethargy bred of despair and lack of exercise, and ceased to strive. A few, worthy of honour, still stoutly battled with the demon of Uncleanliness.

But the first April rainfall would turn the dry ditch into an open sewer—a vast trough of muddy water—in which draggled women would paddle for submerged household gods. Many would prefer to tramp back to the town at night and sleep in their own shrapnel-riddled homes. But the majority stayed, of choice or of necessity, incubating sickness in that fetid place where nothing would thrive but fierce social and political hatreds, and petty grudges, and rankling jealousies, and shrieking quarrels that burst out and raged a hundred times in a day.

From one of the dug-out refuges Saxham now saw Lynette Mildare coming, making her swift way between the knots of frowsy refugees, the negro women-servants squatting over the little cooking-fires, the pallid children swarming on the narrow pathways.

"Dr. Saxham." Her simple brown holland skirt and thin linen blouse hung loosely upon her. Her face, too, had grown thinner, and looked tired. But the eyes were no longer unnaturally dilated, and the face had a more healthful pallor. "Mrs. Greening begged me to look out for you. She is so anxious about Berta. We have been doing everything we can, but I am afraid the child is seriously ill. It is the third shelter from the end, south side." She pointed out the place.

He had lifted his hat with his short, brusque salute. His vivid eyes wore a preoccupied look, his mobile nostrils angrily sniffed the villainous air.

"I'll come directly, Miss Mildare. But—who can expect children to keep healthy under conditions as insanitary as these?"

"It is—horrible!" Disgust was in her face. "But many of the women are as ignorant as the Kaffirs and Cape boys, and they and the coolie sweepers won't carry away refuse any more unless they're paid."

"You are sure of this?" His tone was curt and official.

"I am almost certain," she told him. "I have heard some of the women complaining that the charges grew higher every day. And, when I asked one of the boys why he did not do the work properly, he was—rude.... Oh, don't punish him!"

He had not said a word, but a white-hot spark had darted from his blue eye, and his grim jaws had clamped ominously together.

"It is my duty to put down insubordination, and chastise inefficiency where I encounter it. May I ask you to point out the fellow who behaved insolently?"

She said: "I—I think he is head of the carting-gang. A Kaffir boy they call Jim Gubo."

"That will do, thank you, Miss Mildare. You are not alone here?"

Her glad smile assured him of that. "Oh no, I am with the Mother. I go everywhere with her, and I think I am of use. I am not at all afraid of sickness, you know, or—the other things."

"But yet," Saxham said, "you must be careful of your health."

"You have no idea how tremendously strong I am," she answered him, and he broke into laughter in spite of himself. She looked so tender, so delicately frail a creature to be there in that malodorous Gehenna, ministering to the wants of slatternly vrouws and stalwart, down-at-heel Irishwomen. His smile emboldened her to say: "I did not thank you the other day, after all."

"The Krupp shell came along and changed the subject of the conversation." He added: "Were you alarmed? You had rather an escape."

"I was with Mother."

"You love her very dearly?" The words had escaped him unconsciously. They were his spoken thought. She flushed, and said with a thrill of tenderness in her clear girlish tones:

"More dearly than it is possible to say. I don't believe God Himself will be angry with me that I have always seen His Face and Our Blessed Lady's shining through hers and beyond it; for He knows as no one else can ever know what she has been since they brought me to the Convent years and years ago."

"They" were her people, presumably. It was odd—Saxham supposed it the outcome of that Convent breeding—that she should speak of God as simply, to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, as though He were her grandfather. Saxham had been reared in the Christian faith by a pious Welsh mother, but there had always been a little awkwardness about domestic references to the Deity. In times of sadness or bereavement He was frequently referred to. But always in a deprecatory tone.

"Your family is not Colonial?" he asked.

She shook her lovely red-brown head.

"I—don't know."

"Mildare is an unusual surname."

"You think it pretty?"

He thought her very pretty as she stood there, a slender willowy creature with the golden shadow of her rough straw-hat intensifying the clear amber of her thoughtful eyes.

"Very."

She looked him in the face and smiled.

"So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it belonged to someone she used to know, and her mother was Lynette. So they baptised me Lynette Mildare. It seems rather strange not having a name of one's own, but really I never had one."

"Never had one?"

Saxham echoed her half-consciously, revelling in the play of light and shadow over the delicate face, and the gleaming as of golden dust upon the outer edges of the waves of red-brown hair drawn carelessly back over the little ears.

"Not to my knowledge. Of course, I may have had one once." She added, as he looked at her in suddenly roused surprise, "I must have had one once." She was looking beyond him at a broad ray of moted white-hot sunshine that slanted through one of the wide openings above, and cleft the thick atmosphere of the crowded place like a fiery sword. "I have often wondered what it really is, and whether I should like it if I heard it? To exchange Lynette Mildare for Eliza Smith ... that would be horrible. Don't you think so?"

Saxham smiled. "I think you are joking, and that a young lady who can do so under the present circumstances deserves to be commended."

She looked at him full.

"I am not joking." Borne by a waft of the sickly air a downy winged seed came floating towards her, a frail gossamer courier coming from the world above with tidings that Dame Nature, in spite of all the destruction wreaked by men, was carrying on her business. "And—I do not even know that I am a young lady. See there"—she blew a little puff of breath at the moving messenger, and it wafted away upon a new air-pilgrimage, and, rising, caught a stronger current, and soared out of sight—"that is me. It came from somewhere, and it is going somewhere. That is all I know about myself; perhaps as much as I shall ever know. Why do you look so glad?"

His lips were sealed. The throb of selfish triumphant exultation came of the belief that the gulf between them was less wide and deep than he had thought it. A wastrel may woo and wed a waif, surely, without many questions being asked. And then, at the clear, innocent questioning of her eyes, rushed in upon him, scalding, the memories he had thrust away. He saw the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, his short daily stint of labour done, settling down to drink himself into hoggish oblivion in his accustomed corner of the Dutchman's liquor-saloon. He beheld him, his purpose accomplished, sleeping stertorously, spilled out like the very dregs of manhood in the sawdust of that foul place; he shuddered as the bloated, dishevelled thing roused and reeled homewards, trickling at the mouth, as the clear primrose day peeped over the flat-topped eastern hills. And he sickened at the thing he had been.

"I felt glad," he lied, with looks that shunned Lynette's, "that in your need you found so good a friend as the Mother-Superior. Yours must have been a sorrowful, lonely childhood."

Her own vision rose before her, blotting out his face. She saw the little kopje with the grave at its foot. She saw a ragged child sitting there watching for the earliest flush of dawn or the solemn folding of night's wide wing over the lonely veld, and the coming of the great white stars....

"She is much, much more than a friend. She is the Mother." Her loyal heart was in her face. "I have no secrets from her. I tell her everything."

Was that deeper flush born of the remembrance of a secret unshared? And how strange that every change of colour and expression in the delicate face should mean so much, so soon. He said, with a hungry flash of the gentian-blue eyes:

"Your love and confidence repay her richly."

"I can do so little." There was an anxious fold between the slender eyebrows. "Only follow her and be near her; only look on as she spends herself for others, never resting, never sparing, never discouraged or cast down." Great tears brimmed the white, darkly-fringed underlids, and ran over. "And she only laughs at me at night when I cry at the sight of her dear, blistered feet."

"You will be able to laugh with her when this is over," Saxham said rather clumsily.

"Shall I? Perhaps." Still that fold between the fine, delicate eyebrows.

"You have seen War," Saxham went on, his own voice sounding strange to him. "And that is a terrible experience for a woman, young or old, but you will be the richer by it in the end, believe me, Miss Mildare. Richer in courage and endurance and calmness in the presence of danger and death, and in sympathy with the pain and suffering inevitable under such circumstances."

"Sympathy? They had all my sympathy before." Her fair throat swelled against its encircling band of moss-green velvet, her voice rang, her eyes flashed golden fire under the shadow of the wide straw hat. "Do you think it needed War to teach me how hideously women suffer? How they have suffered since the world began, and how they will suffer until its end, unless they rise up in revolt once for all, against the wickedness of men?"

She was transformed under Saxham's eyes. The slender virginal body increased in stature and proportions as he gazed, and what obscure emotions seemed striving in her face!

"Look at them," she said, indicating with a slight revealing gesture the swarming, dowdy, listless occupants of the crowded trench. "How patient they are, how resigned to the dreadful life they drag on here from day to day, full of the horror and the pain and the suffering that you say is inevitable. Why should it be inevitable? Did these women who are the chief victims of it and the greatest losers by it, choose that there should be War? See that poor soul with the rag of crape upon her hat, who sits at her door peeling potatoes. Did she desire it? Yet her young husband was shot in the trenches a week ago and her little baby died of fever this morning.... And, did those other women whose homes have been wrecked and ruined, whose sons and husbands and fathers may be shot, and whose children may sicken with the same fever before night, demand of their Governments, Imperial or Republican, that there should be War? You see them patient and submissive because they neither realise their wrongs or understand their rights. But a day will come when they will understand, and then"—her eyes grew dreamy—"I do not know exactly what will happen. But these international questions, with others, will be decided by a general plebiscite, the women will vote as well as the men; and as women are in the majority, and every woman will vote for Peace—how can there be War?"

"You are an advocate of Universal Suffrage, then? You believe that there must be absolute sex-equality before the world can be—I think 'finally regenerated' is the stock phrase of the militant apostle of Women's Rights? I have heard this outcry from many feminine throats in London, but Gueldersdorp," said Saxham drily, "is about the last place one would expect to ring with it."

"'Universal Suffrage, Sex-Equality, Women's Rights....'" The shibboleth that Saxham quoted was evidently unfamiliar to the girl. "I know"—there was a sombre shadow in her glance—"what Women's Wrongs are, but I am not very well informed about the things you speak of. The Mother tells me that there are many well-educated women in London and Paris, in Berlin and in New York, who have devoted their lives to the study of such questions. Who write and speak and labour to teach their fellow-women that they have only to band themselves together to be powerful, only to be powerful to be feared, only to will it to be free. When I am twenty-four I mean to go out into the world and meet those leader-women. Some of them, I am told, have suffered loss and ill-usage; some of them have even undergone imprisonment for the sake of what they believe and teach. Well, I will hear what they have to say, and then they will listen to me. For until my work is done, theirs will never be accomplished, Something tells me that with a most certain voice."

"And until that time comes?" said Saxham.

Her eyes grew bright again, a smile played about her exquisite lips.

"Until that time comes I will study and gather more knowledge, and capacity to fit myself for a struggle with the world."

"You 'struggle with the world'!"

Her girlish pride in her high purpose being sensitive, she mistook the brusque tenderness in Saxham's face and voice for irony.

"Yes. Perhaps you may not believe it, but I know a great many useful things. Latin and French and German and Italian, well enough to teach and translate. I am well grounded in History and Science and Mathematics. I can take a temperature and make a poultice, or sweep a room and cook a dinner." She nodded at Saxham with a little spark of laughter underlying the sweet earnestness of her look. "Also, I have learned book-keeping and typewriting, and shorthand. I earn enough now, by bookbinding, to pay for my clothes. The Mother says that I am competent to earn my living anywhere, and to teach others to earn theirs. But I am not to begin until I am twenty-four. That is our agreement."

Saxham understood the fine maternal tact that never set this ardent young enthusiast chafing at the tightened rein. But he said roughly:

"The Mother.... How can she approve your joining the ranks of the Shrieking Sisterhood?"

"She knows," Lynette explained, with adorable gravity, "that I should never shriek."

"How will you bear parting from her? And how will she endure parting from you?"

The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous amber eyes were dimmed with moisture as she said:

"It will not be losing me. Nor could I ever bear to leave her if I did not know that I should come back. But I shall come back. And she will ask me what I have done. And I shall tell her: 'This, and this, and all the rest, my Mother, for the love of you, and for the sake of those others who once sat in darkness and the Shadow of Death, and now have found the Way of Peace.'"

"And those others, Beatrice?"

Saxham knew now the secret of the haunting familiarity of the beautiful girlish face. The delicate oval outline, the pale wild-rose colouring, the reddish-brown of the fine, glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the wistful, brilliant eyes, reproduced to a wonderful degree the modelling and tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped head in the Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Bertolotti and the Edinburgh Review, will always be associated with the name of the sorrowful-sweet heroine of the most sombre of sex-tragedies.

"Why do you call me Beatrice?" she asked, with that sudden darkening of those luminous eyes. He told her:

"Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Shelley used to be my favourite among the English poets, and when I first went to Rome, years ago, the first thing I did was to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery; and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done justice to it. One could not forget it if one tried."

"I am glad I am like Beatrice," she said slowly. "I have always loved and pitied her. I pray to her as my friend among the Blessed Souls in Paradise, and she always hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go out into the world——"

"To look for those others," Saxham interpolated. "Tell me who they are?"

She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell from her, and there was strange and terrible knowledge in her eyes.

"They are women, and girls, and children," she answered him. "They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer on earth. For they are the slaves and the victims and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift them up, and say to them, 'You are free!' And one day I will do it."

There was a dull burning under Saxham's opaque skin, and a drumming in his ears. His authority and knowledge fell from him as that virginal veil had fallen from her; he stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her eyes, that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an avenging Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct estimate of himself and his fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than many men, he felt himself beside this girl a moral leper.

"Unclean, unclean!"

While that voice yet echoed in the desert places of his soul, he heard her saying:

"I don't know why I should talk to you of these plans and projects of mine. I never have spoken of them yet to anyone except the Mother. But—you spoke of sympathy with those who suffer. I think you have it, Dr. Saxham, and that you have suffered yourself. It is in your face. And—you are not to suppose that I believe all men to be——"

He ended for her: "To be devouring beasts. No; but we are bad enough, the best of us, if the truth must be told. And—I have suffered, Miss Mildare, at the hands of men and women, and through the unwritten laws, as through the accepted institutions of what is called Society, most brutally. I would not soil and scorch your ears with the recital of my experiences, for all that a miracle could give me back. I swear to you that I would not!"

She touched the little ears with a smile that had pathos in it.

"They have heard much that is evil, these ears of mine."

"And the evil has left them undefiled," said Saxham.

"Thank you!"

She begged him again not to forget the sick child at Mrs. Greening's shelter, and hurried away, keeping her face from Saxham. He knew that there was no hope for him, that there never would be any. And he loved her—hungrily, hopelessly loved her. Dear innocent, wise enthusiast, with her impossible scheme for cleansing the Augean stable of this world! Chivalrous child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, whose sails are whirled by burning blasts from Hell, and whose millstones grind the souls of Eve's lost daughters into the dust that makes the devil's daily bread—how should the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp dare to love her? But he did not cease to, for all the height of his self-knowledge and all the depth of his self-scorn.

He seemed to Lynette a strange, harsh man, but there was something in him that won her liking. He had a stern mouth, she thought, and sorrowful, angry eyes, with that thunder-cloud of black, lowering eyebrow above them. And he looked at her as though she reminded him of someone he knew. Perhaps he had sisters, though they could hardly be very young. Or it was not a sister. He must be quite old—the Mother had thought him certainly thirty-five—but possibly he had a young wife in England—or somewhere else? And she had spoken to him of her great project. She wondered now at that impulse of confidence. Perhaps she had yielded to it to convince herself that her enthusiasm was as strong, her purpose still as clear, as ever, in the mirror of the Future; that no gay, youthful reflection had ever risen up of late days between it and her wistful eyes when she peeped in. The remembered image of the handsome face that had laughed, even as Beauvayse had declared:

"Even if I die to-day, it won't end there. I shall think of you, and long for you, and worship you wherever I am."

The thought of Beauvayse's dying was horrible, intolerable. His name came after the Mother's in her prayers. He had asked her to keep the secret—his and hers—and called her such exquisite, impossible things for promising that the mere remembrance of his words and his eyes as he said them in that low, passionate, eager voice, took her breath deliciously.

"Sweetest, kindest, loveliest...." She whispered them to herself as she hurried back to comfort worried Mrs. Greening with the news that the doctor was coming.

Meanwhile Saxham went on his accustomed way between the long line of waggons and the corrugated-iron lined huts on the other hand, in a cross-fire of appeals, requests, complaints. Nothing escaped him. He would pass by, with the most casual glance and nod, women who volubly protested themselves dying, and single out the face that bore the dull, scorched flush of fever or the yellow or livid stamp of rheumatism, or ague, or liver-trouble, with a beckon of his hand, and the owner of such a face, invariably declaring herself a well woman, would be summarily dealt with, and dosed with tabloid or tincture out of the inexhaustible wallet he carried, slung about his shoulders by its webbing band.

"Dokter," screeched a portly Tante in a soiled cotton bedgown and flapping kappje, appearing, copper stewpan in hand, from between the canvas tilt-curtains of a living-waggon. "You are come at last; the Lord be thanked for it! I have much, much trouble inside." She groaned, and laid her fat, unoccupied hand upon the afflicted area, adding: "I feel I shall not be quite wholesome here."

"Wat scheelt er aan, Tante?" He spoke the Taal with ease.

The large Tante snorted:

"What is the matter? Do you ask me what is the matter? As if a dokter oughtn't to tell me that! But the Engelsch are regular devils for asking questions. Since you must know, I have a mighty wallowing under my apron-band, and therewith a pain. How is it begun? It is begun since middageten yesterday. And little Dierck here has the belly-ache, and is giddy in the head."

"Little Dierck will have something worse than the belly-ache, and you also, if you eat of broth or vegetables cooked in a vessel as unclean as that, mevrouw."

"Hoe?" The large flabby face under the expansive kappje became red as the South African sunset. She flourished the venerable copper stewpan, its rim liberally garnished with verdigris, ancient deposit of fatty matters accumulated at the bottom. "Do you call my good stewpan, that my mother cooked beef and succotash and pottage-herbs in before me, an unclean vessel—you? And were the pan otherwise than clean as my hand—as my apron!"—a double comparison of the unfortuitous kind—"how should I alter matters in a heathen place like this?" Her large bosom rocked tumultuously. "Dwelling at the bottom of a mud-hole like a frog, O God of my fathers! with bullets as big as pumpkins trundling overhead, ready to whip your head off your body if you as much as stick your nose above ground—the accursed things!"

"They are pumpkins sent by your own countrymen, Tante, so you ought to speak of them more civilly. And—scour the pot with a double-handful of clean sand; it will be for your health as well as the kind's. Come here, jongen—give me a look at the little tongue." The boy went to him confidently, and stuck it out, looking up with innocent wide eyes in the square, powerful face, as Saxham swung round his wallet, continuing, "Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take half of it, stirred in a cup of warm water, to-morrow morning fasting——"

"Alamachtig!" she protested. "Is that the Engelsch way of doctoring? To put another belly-grief on the top of the one you have got, what sense is in that?"

"It is the new nail, Tante, that drives out the rusty old one. Give the boy a teaspoonful in half a cup of water, and remember to scour the pans."

Saxham passed on, stepping neatly with his small, tan-booted, spurred feet between the dung and chip fires curling up in blue smoke-spirals, and the sprawling children, seeming as though he did not notice them, yet catching up one that had a rash, and satisfying himself that the eruption was innocent ere he passed on, visiting every waggon-dwelling and cave-refuge, rating the inhabitants of some, dosing the occupants of others, emerging from three or four of the stuffy, ill-smelling places with a heavy frown that boded ill for somebody. For though Famine had not yet begun to gnaw the vitals of those immured in Gueldersdorp, Disease had here and there sprung into active, threatening, infectious being, menacing the crowded community with invisible, maleficent forces. Soon the hospitals were to be crowded to the doors, to remain crowded for many months to come; and the cry, "Room for the sick! more room!" was to go up unceasingly.

Coming out of a miserable habitation, where lay a woman in rheumatic fever, whose three children had developed measles on the previous day, and, seeing about the door of a neighbouring hovel a particularly noisome aggregation of garbage and waste, he paused but to give a brief direction to the mild-faced Sister who had assumed charge of the sick. Then his voice rang out above all the feminine and childish Babel, strong, resonant, masculine:

"Where are the head-boys of the gangs that I told off to clean up and carry ash-buckets to the dumping-place?"

Whence, under cover of night, the garbage and waste were carted to the destructor in connection with the Acetylene Gas Company's plant, soon to be shattered by one of Meisje's shells. There was no answer. Saxham took the worn hunting-crop from under his arm, and with an easy movement shook out the twisted thong.

"Where are those two boys? Jim Gubo! Rasu!"

A pale young woman peeling potatoes at her door looked up knowingly. "They won't carry away a cabbage-leaf unless they're bribed, and they open their mouths wider every day. It's a tikkie a bucket now."

The young woman went back to her potatoes. The offenders, visibly quaking, crept from under a waggon, where they had been gambling with dry mealies for ill-gotten tikkies. A big Kaffir boy in ragged tan-cords and the crownless brim of an Oxford straw, with a red-turbaned, blue dungaree-clad, supple Oriental of the coolie class. Jim Gubo, with liberal display of ivory, assured the Baas, in defiance of the Baas's own eyes and the organ in juxtaposition, that the work had been regularly done. Rasu the Sweeper, with many oaths and protestations, assured the Presence that such neglect as was apparent was owing to the incapacity of the hubshi and his myrmidons, Rasu's own share of the labour and that of his fellow-countryman being scrupulously performed.

The Presence made short work of Kaffir and Hindu. Shrill feminine clamours filled the air as the singing lash performed its work of castigation; and while Saxham scored repentance upon the hide of his blacker brother, holding him writhing, shouting, and bellowing at the full stretch of one muscular arm, as he plied the other he kept a foot on Rasu the Sweeper, so as to have him handy when his turn came. Meanwhile, the Oriental, with tears and lamentable howlings, wound about the doctor's leg, a vocal worm, deprecating tyranny.

"Your Honour is my father and mother. Let the hand of justice refrain from excoriating the person of the unfortunate, wreaking double vengeance upon the hubshi, who is but fuel for Hell, like all his accursed race, and full explanation shall be made."

He was jerked upward by the scruff, as, smarting, blubbering Africa retired to the shadow of the waggons.

"Well, what have you got to say?"

The bellow of the town batteries, with the clack—clack—clack! of the Hotchkiss that had been removed from the armoured train and mounted on the North Fort, reduced the tirade to pantomime.

"This is a bad, a very bad, place for the son of my mother." The lean brown right hand swept upwards to the thick canopy of white smoke that the shifting breeze rolled back from the Cemetery Earthworks. "The food of coarse grain is diet for camels, and the water stinks very greatly. Moreover, it is better for thy slave to die amongst defilements than to carry buckets and be chased by devils in iron pots thirsting for the blood of men. Aie—aie!"

One of the enemy's Maxim-Nordenfelts had loosed off a group of the gaily-painted little shells. With the reduplicated rattle of the detonation, they passed over the laager, bursting as they went, sending their fan-shaped showers of splinters broadcast. Slatternly women and scared children bolted for their burrows. Rasu the Sweeper dived frantically between the fore and hind wheels of a waggon, praying to all the gods of the low-caste to ward off those wicked little bits of rending metal....

"Anyone hurt?" called Saxham.

"No one, I think," called back the strong sweet voice of the Mother-Superior, who had come out of a hovel, where she was tending some sick. There was a glint in her deep eyes as she regarded Saxham's thorough handiwork that told her approval of castigation well deserved. Then:

"Maharaj! Oh, Maharaj! Succour in calamity! Aid for the dying! Hai, hai, behold how I bleed!"

The red-turbaned martyr rolled in the unclean litter, elevating a stick-like brown leg, in the lean, muscular calf of which one of the smallest of the wicked little splinters had, as Rasu the Sweeper dived for the waggon, found a home.

"That has saved you a well-earned hiding, so thank your stars for it. Let the Kaffir see to it that he insults no more English ladies, or he shall pay for every word with an inch of skin. Now put up your leg." Saxham whipped out the splinter with a little pair of tweezers, deftly cleansed and dressed the wound, bandaged it, and, dismissing Rasu the Sweeper with a caution, was coming across to the Reverend Mother when a chorus of cries and piercing shrieks broke forth:

"Mijn jongen! mijn jongen!"

She was a bulky Dutch vrouw, with a dishevelled head of coarse black hair, and a dirty cotton gown, and dirty bare feet in bulgy shoes that were trodden down at heel. But with her livid, purple face and protruding, bloodshot eyeballs uplifted to the drifting cloud of greenish lyddite vapour that thinned away overhead, she was great and terrible, and the very incarnation of Maternity Bereft.

One huge arm gripped the little body to her broad, panting bosom. She had called him, and he had not answered; she had sought and found him, just as he had slidden off the box-seat, where he had been playing driver of the ox-span, lying curled up against the dashboard, the little whip of stick and string he had been at pains to make only yesterday fallen from the lax, childish hand. The fair hair on the left temple was dabbled in blood, that trickled from the tiny three-cornered bluish hole. His eyes were open, as if in wonder at the sudden darkness that had fallen at bright midday; the smile had frozen on the parted, innocent lips....

Oh, look at this, Premier and President! Look at this, my Lords and Commons and militant Burghers of Republican States! Grave Ministers who decide in Cabinet Councils that the prestige of the Government you represent is at stake, and that the bedraggled honour of the Country can only be washed clean in one red river, flowing from the veins of Humanity, look, look here! You who lust for Sovereignty, hiding rapacious Ambitions and base lust for gold behind the splendid ermined folds of the Imperial purple. You who resented Suzerainty, coveting to keep in your hands riches that you could not use, resources that your ignorance could not develop, greedy to have and hold what you wrested from the Sons of Ham, lest white men should snatch it back from you again; and prating of Liberty and Freedom while the necks of three races of men were bending under the yoke of an oligarchy more imperious, more pitiless, more covetous, besotted, brutal, and ignorant than any other that the spotted records of History can show—look here, look here!

Nations that rush to dreadful War, loosing the direful threefold plague of Iron, Fire, and Disease to scourge and brand and desolate the once smiling face of your Mother Earth, pause as you roll onwards in desolating cataclysms of armed and desperate men, and forgetting the bloodstained she-devil you misname Glory, look here, in the Name of One who loved and suffered little children, rating their innocent bodies and spotless souls at such high value that Little Dierck and his countless brother-and-sister-babes that have perished of Iron, Fire, and Disease, as of Terror and Famine, Death's twin henchmen, shall weigh in the balance against Crowned Heads and Lords and Commons and Presidents and Representatives and Deputies, until they kick the beam!

Should there be War? Of course there should be War! you say.

Have you seen War? Perhaps, even as I have. And, having seen it, dare you justify the shedding, by men who hold the Christian Faith, of these spilled-out oceans of Christian blood?

That question will be settled when the Trumpet of the Great Angel sounds, and the Sea and the Earth shall give up their dead, and everyone shall answer for his deeds before the Throne of God. And until then, look to it that if you war in any cause, the cause be a just one.

"My Dierck! My little Dierck! O God! God!—--"

Standing with that tragic purple mask turned upwards to the silent sky, and the wild eyes blazing, and the great fist at the end of the uplifted arm brandished in the Face of Heaven itself, the Boer mother demanded of her Maker why this thing had been done?

"He was so good. Never a fib since last I gave him the ox-reim end to taste. Never a lump of sugar or a cookie or a plum pilfered—he would take them as bold as brass before your face if you didn't give. He said the night-prayer regularly. For the morning, Lord, Thou knowest boys want to be up and at mischief as soon as they have rubbed the sleep out of their eyes—'tis only natural. And the father a God-fearing man, and me a woman of piety. For when have I backslidden before Thee? If any of mine have hung back when I told them to loop and do a thing, or sneaked off and hid when we were inspanned for the kerk-going, did I fail to whack them as a mother should? Nooit, nooit! And now—Death has fallen out of the sky upon the Benjamin of my bosom. Oh, blasted be the eyesight and withered be the hand of the man that sighted and laid and fired the gun!"

She cursed the Kaiser's blue-and-white-uniformed gunner in every function of his body and every corner of his soul, waking and sleeping, dying and dead, with fluent Scriptural curses. The crowded faces about her went white. Some of the women were crying, others shook their heads:

"Thim that puts the Bad Black Wish on odhers finds sorra knock harrd at their dure," said an Irish voice oracularly. "An' who but herself did be callin' down all manner av' misfortune on ivery wan that crassed her?"

"It's a judgment—my opinion," agreed the thin young woman who had been peeling potatoes, and who wore a wisp of draggled crape round a soiled rush hat. "Never a shell busted but you'd a-heered her say she hoped that one had sent another parcel of verdant rooineks to Hell. And me sitting over against her with crape on for my husband and baby. 'Tis a judgment, that's what I say."

"Oh, hush, Mrs. Lennan!" said the Mother-Superior. "Be pitiful and forget. She did not think—she had not suffered. Be pitiful, now that her hour has come!"

The thick voice of the Boer woman broke out again:

"Did ever I miss of the Nachtmaal? Alamachtig, no! Virtuous as Sarah have I lain in the marriage-bed—never a sly look for another, and my husband with dropsy-legs as thick as boomstammen, and sixty years upon his loins. Thou knewest, and yet the joy of my life is taken from me. Where wert Thou, O God of Israel, when they killed my little Dierck?"

The Mother-Superior leaned to her, and threw a strong, tender arm about the fleshy shoulders. She said, speaking in the Taal:

"Hush, hush! Remember that He gave the joy before He sent the sorrow. And we must submit ourselves to the Holy Will."

The Boer woman snorted:

"As if I didn't know that better than a Papist. Look you, have I shed one tear?" She blinked hard bright eyes defiantly. The Mother went on in that velvet voice of hers, making the uncouth dialect sound like the cooing of an Irish dove:

"Better that you had tears, poor mother! Ah! best to weep. Did not our Lord weep over His dearest city, and for His beloved friend? And when He pitied the Widow of Nain, do you think His eyes were dry? Ah! best to weep."

She strove to wrench herself away, shouting:

"He raised Lazarus from the dead for Mary his sister, and she had been a shameless wench. And He gave the other back her boy. What has He done for me?"

The sisterly arm held her fast; the great grey eyes looked into hers, wet with the tears that were denied to her.

"He has given you an Angel to pray for you in Heaven."

She snorted rebelliously:

"His mother wants him down here.... And what is Heaven to little Dierck, when he could be sailing his boat in the river-pools, and playing at driving the span?"

But she let the Mother-Superior take him from her, and dropped her great arms doggedly at her sides, watching still dry-eyed as they laid him down, and Saxham stooped above him, feeling at the pulseless heart. She saw the doktor shake his head and lay down the little hand. She saw the Mother-Superior coax down the eyelids with tender, skilful fingers, and put a kiss on each, making the Sign of the Cross on the still, childish breast, and murmuring a little prayer. She would have screamed to avert the defiling, heathen thing from him, but the memory of the sister-embrace and the sister-look held her dumb.

It was only when they were stripping him for the last sad toilet, and the cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized marbles rolled out of the pocket in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a prodigally-minded spinster relative who had proposed that Little Dierck should be coffined in his new black Sabbath suit.

"But you old maids have no sense, no more than so many cabbages. Little angels in the hemel can fly about in clean nightgowns—look in the grandfather's big picture-Bible if you don't believe me. But live boys can't loop about without breeches. So I'll lay these by for the next one."