"Wouldn't what?" asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in tropical sleeping attire.

Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose, replied to her reflection in the looking-gla.s.s:

"You wouldn't see him. Like the flea in the American story, when you've got your finger on him is the time he isn't there."

"But he is there for you?"

Bingo shook his head, holding the candle near the gla.s.s and regarding his leading feature with interest.

"Not if he don't choose to be. By the living Tinker! if I go on brownin'

and chippin' at this rate, I shall do for the Etruscan Antiquity Room at the British Museum. Piff, what a smell of burning! It's the hair-thing hangin' on the lookin'-gla.s.s."

Male Society began to practise the shedding of its final g's, you will remember, about the time that Female Society took to wearing transformation coiffures. Lady Hannah, her active little figure rustling in the thinnest of silk drapery, jumped nimbly out of bed, and rushed to save her property.

"Idiot!" she shrieked.

"Frightfully sorry! But you're lumps prettier without," said Bingo.

"Don't pile insult on injury."

"Couldn't flatter for nuts!"

"I'll forgive you if you'll tell me how _he_ manages--to attain invisibility?"

Bingo struck an att.i.tude and began to declaim:

"As the sable shades of Night were broodin' over the beleaguered town of Gueldersdorp, the manly form of a mysterious bearded stranger in grey reach-me-downs and a felt slouch might have been observed directin' its steps from one to the other of the various outlyin' pickets posted on the veld ..."

"Once for all, I decline to believe such theatrical rubbish! A beard, indeed! Why not a paper nose and a Pierrot's cap?"

"Why not?" acquiesced placid Bingo, getting into bed. But the eye concealed by the pillow winked; for he had told her the absolute truth; and woman-like, that was just what she wouldn't swallow, as he said to Beauvayse next morning.

XXII

"The Town Guard," according to W. Keyse, Esquire, who kept a Betts'

Journal, one shilling net, including Rail and Ocean Accident Insurance, was "a kind of amachoor copper, swore in to look after the dorp, stand guard, and do sentry-go, and tumble to arms, just as the town dogs leave off barkin', an' the old gal in the room next yours is startin' to snore like a Kaffir sow."

Later on, even more was asked of the townie, and he rose to the demand.

The smasher hat was not unbecoming to the manly brow it shaded, when W.

Keyse put it on and anxiously consulted the small greenish swing looking-gla.s.s that graced the chest of drawers, the most commanding article of furniture in his room at Filliter's Boarding-House. It was Mrs.

Filliter who snored in the room on the other side of the thin part.i.tion.

Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers, she was hara.s.sed by the demands of her resident gentlemen in connection with gravy; but, unlike Mrs. Todgers, she never supplied even browned and heated water as an equivalent. And the mutton was wonderfully lean, and the fowls, but for difference in size, might have been ostriches, they were so wiry of muscle, especially as regarded the legs. A time was to come when Mrs. Filliter was to cook shrapnel-killed mule and exhausted cavalry charger for her gentlemen, and when they were to bear up better than most sufferers from this tough and lasting form of diet, because of not having previously been pampered, as Mrs. Filliter expressed it, with delicacies and kickshaws.

The bandolier was heavy upon the thin shoulders and hollow chest of a pale young c.o.c.kney, who had drifted down from Southampton in the steerage, and roared and rattled up from Cape Town by the three foot six inch gauge railway, eight hundred and seventy miles, to Gueldersdorp, that he might find his crown of manhood waiting there. The second-hand Sam Browne belt was distinctly good; the yellow puttees, worn with his own brown lace-up boots, took trouble to adjust. And it was barely possible, even by standing the small swing looking-gla.s.s on the floor, and tilting it excessively, to see how one's legs looked. W. Keyse suffered from the conviction that these limbs were over-thin. Behind the counter of a fried-fish shop in High Street, Camden Town, serving slabs of browned hake, and skate, and penn'orths of fried eels and chips to the hungry customers who surge in tempestuously to be fed on their homeward way from the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, or the theatre at the junction of Gower Street and the Hampstead Road--one develops acuteness of observation, one gains experience, there being always the bloke who cuts and runs without paying, or eats and shows reversed trouser-pockets in default of settlement, to deal with.... But one does not develop muscle, the thing above all that W. Keyse most longed to possess. When he went into the printing-business and bent all day over the formes of type in the composing-room, hand-setting up the columns of the North London _Half-penny Herald_, to the tune of three-and-eightpence a day, the hollow chest grew hollower, and he developed a "corf." The physician in charge of the out-patients' department at University College Hospital said there was lung-trouble, and a man at the printing-office who had never been there, said South Africa was the cure for that. And W. Keyse had thirty pounds in the Post-Office Savings Bank, earned by the sweat of a brow which was his best feature, and the steamships were advertising ten-pound third-cla.s.s single fares to Cape Town. One of the Societies for the Aid of Emigrants would have helped him, but while W. Keyse 'ad a bit of 'is own, no Blooming Paupery, said he, for him! His sole living relative, an aunt who inhabited one of a row of ginger-brick Virginia-creeper-clad almshouses "over aginst 'Ighgyte Cimitery," sniffled a little when he called to say good-bye, bringing in a parting present of a half-pound of Liphook's Luscious Tea and a screw of snuff.

"I shan't never see you no more, William."

"Ow yes, you will, mother! Don't be such a silly!" William's step cousin 'Melia, in service as general in Adelaide Road, Chalk Farm end, had said; and she had looked coldly upon William immediately afterwards, bestowing an amorous ogle upon Lobster, who sat well forward upon a backless Windsor chair, sucking the silver top of his swagger cane,--Lobster, who was six foot high and in the Grenadier Guards, and had supplanted William in 'Melia's affections, for they 'ad used to walk out regularly on Sundays and holidays before Lobster came along.... How William loved Lobster now!

Why, but for him he might have been married to 'Melia to-day;--doomed to tread in the ways of commonplace, ordinary married life, fated to live and die without once having peeped into Paradise, without ever having looked upon the 'only woman in the world!' Greta, of the glorious golden pigtail, the entrancing figure and the bewitching, twinkling, teasing eyes of blue!

Suppose--only suppose--the silent threatening Thing across the border, jewelled with the glowing Argus-eyes of many camp-fires, conjecturable in dark ma.s.ses flecked with the white of waggon-tilts, and sometimes giving out the dull gleam of iron or the sparkle of steel, were to choose this, W. Keyse's first night on guard, for an attack! Even to the inexperience of W. K. the sand-bagged earthworks built about Gueldersdorp, the barricades of trek-waggons and railway-trucks blocking up the roads debouching on the veld, the extending lines of trenches, the watchdog forts, the sentinelled pickets, the noiseless, continually moving patrols, all the various parts of the marvellous machinery of defence, controlled by one master-hand upon the levers, would count for nothing against that overwhelming onrush of armed thousands, that flood of men dammed up above the town, and waiting the signal to roll down and overwhelm her, and----Cripps! what a chance to make a glorious, heroic splash in Greta's sight! Die, perhaps, in saving her from them Dutchies. To be sure, she, divine creature, was a Dutchy too. But no matter--a time would come ...

Confident in the coming of that time, W. Keyse took the brown rifle tenderly from the corner, and replaced the meagre little looking-gla.s.s upon the yellow chest of drawers. In the act of bestowing a final glance of scrutiny upon his upper lip, whose manly crop had unaccountably delayed, he caught sight of a cheap paper-covered book lying beside the tin candlestick whose tallow dip had aided perusal of the volume o'

nights. The red surged up in his thin cheeks as he picked up the thing.

There were horrible woodcuts in it, coloured with liberal splashes of red and blue and yellow, and the print contained matter more lurid still. Vice mopped and mowed and slavered, obscene and hideous, within those gaudy covers.

He looked round the mean, poor, ugly room, the volume in his hand; a photograph of the dubious sort leered from the wall beside the bed....

"If they rushed us to-night, an' I got shot in the sc.r.a.p, an' they brought me back 'ere, dyin', and She came ... an' saw _that_ ...!" His ears were scarlet as he dashed at the leering photograph and tore it down. Oh, W.

Keyse, it is pitiful to think you had to blush, but good to know you had not forgotten how to. There was a little rusty fireplace in the room. W.

Keyse burned something in it that left nothing but a feathery pile of ashes, and a little shameful heap of mud in the corner of a boy's memory, before he hurried to the Town Guardhouse, where other bandoliers were mustering, and fell in. As though the Powers deigned to reward an act of virtue on the very night of its performance, he was posted by his picket in the shadow of the high corrugated iron fence of the tree-bordered tennis-ground behind the Convent, as "Lights Out" sounded from the camp of the Irregulars, beyond the Railway-sheds and storehouses.

It was glorious to be there, taking care of Her, though it would have been nicer if one had been allowed to smoke. The moon of William's pa.s.sion-inspired verse was not shining o'er South Africa's plain upon this the very night for her. It was dark and close and stiflingly hot. A dust-wind had blown that day, and the suspended particles thickened the atmosphere, to the oppression of the lungs and the hiding of the stars. He knew his picket posted a quarter of a mile away on the other side of the Cemetery; his fellow-sentry was on the opposite flank of the Convent. He was a stout, middle-aged tradesman, with a large wife and a corresponding family, and it wrung the heart of W. Keyse to think that a tricky fate might have placed that insensible man on the side where Her window was!

Through the boughs of the peach and orange trees, heavily burdened with unripe fruit, you could get an occasional glimpse of whitewashed brick walls, darkened by the outline of shuttered oblongs here and there. And Imagination could blow her cloud of fragrant vapour, though tobacco were denied you.

"They're all Her windows while she's there behind them walls," was the reflection in which W. Keyse found comfort.

She was not there. She was at that moment being kissed on the stoep of the Du Taine homestead near Johannesburg, by a young officer of Staats Artillery, to whom she had agreed to be clandestinely engaged, though Papa Du Taine had other views.

W. Keyse was spared this tragic knowledge. But if the moon, shining beautifully over the Du Taine gardens and orange-groves, had chosen to tell tales!

It was still--still and quiet; a blue radiance of electric light burned here and there; at the Staff Office on the Market Square, and at other centres of purposeful activity. Aromatic-beer cellars and whisky-saloons gave out a yellow glare of gas-jets; the red lamp of an apothecary showed a wakeful eye. Gueldersdorp sprawled in the outline of a sleeping turtle on her squat hillock of gravelly earth and sand. In smoke-coloured folds, closely matching the lowering dim canopy of vapour brooding overhead, the prairie spread about her, deepening to a basined valley in the middle distances, sweeping to a rise beyond, so that the edges of the basin looked down upon the town. High on the hill-ranges in the South more chains of red sparks burned ... he knew them for the watch-fires of the Boer outposts, and the raised edges of the basin East and West were set thickly with similar twinkling jewels where the laagers were; while smaller groups shone nearer, marking the situation of isolated vedettes.

The sickly taint upon the faint breeze told of ma.s.sed and cl.u.s.tered humanity. 'Strewth, how they stunk, the brutes! He hoped there was enough of 'em, lying doggo up there, waiting the word to roll down and swallow the blooming dorp! His palate grew dry, as the sweat broke out upon his temples and trickled down the back of his neck, and the palms of his hands were moist and clammy. Also, under the buckle of the Sam Browne belt was a sinking, all-gone sensation excessively unpleasant to feel. Perhaps its wearer had a touch of fever! Then the stout tradesman on the other side of the Convent sneezed suddenly, and W. Keyse, with every nerve in his body jarring from the shock, knew that he was simply suffering from funk.

Staggering from the shock of the horrible self-revelation, he gritted his teeth. There was a Billy Keyse who was a blooming coward inside the other who was not. He told the sickening, white-gilled little skulker what he thought of him. He only wished--that is, one of him only wished--that a gang of the Dutchies would come along now!

He drew a lurid picture for the benefit of the trembler, and when the young soldier had fired into the brown of them and seen the whites of their eyes, and fallen, pierced by a hundred wounds, in the successful defence of the Convent, he was carried in, and laid on a sofa, and n.o.body could recognise him, along of all the blood, until She came, with her white little feet peeping from the hem of a snowy nightgown, and her unbraided pigtail swamping the white with gold, and knew that it was her lover, and knelt by the hero's side. Soft music from the Orchestra, please! as with his final breath W. Keyse implores a last, first kiss.

Even as William No. 1 thrilled to the rapture of that imagined osculation, Billy No. 2 experienced a ghastly fright.

For out of the enfolding velvety darkness ahead of him, and looking towards those firefly sparks shining on the heights, came the sound of stealthy measured footsteps and m.u.f.fled voices talking Dutch. The enemy had made a sortie. The defences had been rushed, the town surrounded! Yet there were only two of them--a big, slouching villain and a short thin one, who wore a giant hat. The chirping sound of a kiss damped the fierce martial ardour of William, and greatly rea.s.sured Billy. It was only a townsman taking a night walk with his girl!

Crushed and discouraged, W. Keyse relaxed his grip upon the trusty rifle, and slunk back into the shadow, as the tall and the short figures halted at the angle of the fence.

"'Ain't it a 'eavenly night?" came from the short figure, who leaned against the tall one affectionately. "An' me got to go in. A crooil shyme, I call it. 'Ain't it, deer? Leggo me wyste, there's a love. You've no notion 'ow I shall cop it for bein' lyte."

He sportively declined to release her. There was the sound of a soft slap, followed by the smack of a kiss. She was very angry.

"Leggo, I tell you! Where's your manners, 'orlin' me abart! If that's the way you be'ayve with your Dutch ones ...!"

He spat and a.s.severated:

"Neen! I no other girls but you heb got."