"Good-bye, Mister Colonel. And I would lend you my beasts an' fings, because I know you wouldn't bweak them?"

"See that Berta has her share in them meanwhile. Off with you, now!"

Later, in the seclusion of the connubial bedchamber, said Captain Bingo, dressing for dinner, the last time for many months, as it was to prove:

"What do you suppose was the Chief's next move, after the engine and tender got in, and the crowd hoorayed him back from the Railway Works? No use your guessin', though. Even a woman wouldn't have expected to find him playin' Noah's Ark in the coffee-room with the Mayor's two kids!"

"I like that!" said Lady Hannah meditatively, arranging the Pompadour transformation, not apparently the worse for the candle-accident of the previous night.

"Because you're a woman and sentimental," said her spouse, wrestling with a cuff-link.

"No; because I am a woman whose instinct tells her that nothing will seem too big for a man for whom nothing is too small. And--what an incident for a paragraph!"

He grinned: "With headin's in thunderin' big capitals.... 'The Soldier Hero Sports With A Babbling Babe.... The Defender Of British Prestige At Gueldersdorp Puts In Half an Hour At Cat's-Cradle Ere The Armoured Train Toddles Out With The B.S.A.P. To Give Beans To The Blooming Boer!'"

She darted at him, caught him by the lapels ... made him look at her.

"It's true? You really mean it? The ball begins?"

"Upon the honour of a henpecked husband--before daybreak to-morrow, you'll hear the music."

She sparkled with delight.

"Oh, poor, unlucky, humdrum women at home in England, walking with the shooters, or lolling in hammocks under trees, and trying to flirt with fat City financiers or vapid young attaches of Legation! I shall take the Irish mare, and borrow an orderly, and ride out to see a Real Action!"

His round pink face grew long. "The devil you will!"

"The devil I won't, you mean. Why, for what else under the sky did I come out here but the glorious chance of War?" Her impatient foot tapped the floor. He recognised the warning of domestic battle, glowered, and gave in.

"Well, if you get chipped, don't blame me. There's about as much cover on a baccarat-table as you'll find on that small-bush veld."

"All the better for seeing things, my dear!" She gave him a radiant glance over her shoulder as she snapped her diamond necklace.

"You'll see things you won't enjoy. Mind that. Unless the whole affair ends in sheer fizzle."

"I'll pray that it mayn't!"

"I'd pray to have you much more like the ordinary woman who funks raw-head-and-b.l.o.o.d.y-bones if I thought it would be any good!"

"My poor old boy, it's thirty years too late. You ought to have begun while I was crying in the cradle. And--I _was_ under the impression that you married me because you found me different from the ruck. And besides--think of my paper!"

"d.a.m.n the rag! I think of my wife!"

She swept him a curtsy:

"Cela va sans dire!"

"And how a woman of your birth and breedin' can dream of nothin' else but doin' somethin' that'll make you notorious--set the smart crowd gabblin'

and gapin' and crushin' to stare--is more than I can understand!"

She flashed round upon him. "You have the wrong word! Notoriety--any social _divorcee_ or big-hatted music-hall high-kicker can have _that_--if only they've kicked high enough! Popularity is what I'd have if I could--and only the People can give it--as Brutus and Cromwell and Napoleon knew!"

He admitted that those old Roman johnnies who jawed in the Forum knew what they were about, but added that the Puritan chap with the wart on his nose was a thundering old humbug, ending triumphantly: "And we whacked old Bony at Waterloo! And--suppose you stop a Boer bullet and get knocked out--where do I come in?"

She jangled out her shrillest laugh. "Behind the coffin as Chief Mourner, I suppose. And you'll tack on the orthodox black sleeve-band, and look out for Number Two. And choose the ordinary kind, who funks raw-head and all the rest of it, for the next venture. But I prophesy you'll be bored. It's settled about Sheila and the orderly?"

He nodded.

"Righto! but there'll be two troopers, not one. And you'll be under the Corporal's orders about range, and distance, and keepin' out of the hands of--the other side. You don't absolutely yearn to be killed or taken prisoner, I suppose?"

Her heart beat high at the latter-named eventuality. She saw London rushing to read of the thrilling seizure and the yet more thrilling escape of the Lady War Correspondent attached to H.I.M. forces on the Frontier:

Who got clean away, mind you, with complete information of the strategic plans of the General in command of the enemy's laagers, sewn inside her corsets or hidden in her shoes!

Bingo little dreamed of the definite plan seething under his little wife's transformation coiffure. It had matured since her meeting on the railway-journey from Cape Town with an interesting personality. A big, brown-bearded Johannesburger, with light queer eyes, who had been reticent at first, but more interesting after his confidence had been gained.

Van Busch he had named himself. Of the British South African War Intelligence Bureau. That man knew how to value women. And he had proved them at what he called the risky game.

"With nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of money for palm-oil ..." Van Busch had said, and winked, signifying that there were no lengths to which a woman of Lady Hannah Wrynche's capabilities might not go. And he had slipped into her hand a card scrawled with an address where he might be got at _in case_ ...

The pencilled oblong of soiled pasteboard was yet in a secret compartment of her handbag. By letter addressed care of W. Bough, Transport Agent and Stock-dealer, Van Busch was to be communicated with at a farmstead some thirty miles north.

The spice of adventure her palate craved could be had by corresponding with Van Busch through the man Bough. After that---- Well! She had her plan ...

She tied her husband's white tie, took him by the ears, kissed him warmly on each side of his large pink face, glowing with blushes evoked by her unwonted display of affection, and led him away to dinner, her mental vision seeing prophetic broadsheets papering the kerbs of Piccadilly, the ears of her imagination making celestial melody of those raucous yells:

"Speshul Edition! Hextry Speshul Edition! 'Ere y'are, sir; on'y a 'a'penny. SPESHUL!"

XXVII

For nearly two months, from dawn until dark, Gueldersdorp had squatted on her low-topped hill in a screaming blizzard of shrapnel and Mauser bullets. Never a town of imposing size or stately architecture, see her now a battered hamlet of gaping walls, and shattered roofs, and wrecked chimneys; staring defiance through gla.s.sless windows like the blind eyeholes in the mouldered House that once has held the living thought of Man. From dawn until dark the ancient seven-pounders of her batteries had banged and grumbled, her Maxims had rattled defiance from Kopje Fort, and the Nordenfelt released its showers of effective, death-dealing little projectiles. Scant news from outside trickled into the town. Grumer, with his Brigade, was guarding the Drifts, and when the Relief might be expected was now a moss-grown topic of general conversation in Gueldersdorp.

And within her girdle of trenches, stern, grimy, haggard men lived, cheek to the heated rifle-breech, and ate, and s.n.a.t.c.hed brief spells of sleep, booted and bandoliered, and with the loaded weapon ready for gripping.

Since the attack on Maxim Kopje had choked the Hospital with wounded men and dotted the Cemetery with little white crosses, nothing of much note had occurred. The armoured train had done good service, and the Baraland Rifle Volunteers had carried out their surprise against the enemy's western camp one fine dark night, helped by a squadron of the Irregulars, with eleven wounded, and the loss of six out of fifty fighting-men.

The Convent of the Holy Way stood empty and deserted in its shrapnel-littered garden-enclosure.

From east, west, north, and south the deadly iron messengers had come, making sore havoc of this poor house of Christ. "When the walls fall about our ears, Colonel," the Mother-Superior had declared, "it will be time to leave them." They were lacework now, with a confusion of bare rafters overhead, over which streamed, as if in mockery, the Red-Cross Flag. Grim figures, like geometrical problems gone mad, were made by water and gas pipes torn from their bedding, and twisted as if by the hands of giants in cruel play. The little iron bedsteads of the Sisters, and the holy symbols over them, were the only articles missing from the cells, revealed in section by the huge gaps in the masonry.

The Tabernacle of the chapel altar, void of the Unspeakable Mystery it had housed, fluttered its rearward curtains through the wreckage of the east wall and the cheap little stained-gla.s.s window, where the Shepherds and the Magi had bowed before the Virgin Mother and the Divine Child. Within sight of their ruined home, the Sisterhood had found refuge. An underground dwelling had been dug for them in the garden before an abandoned soft-brick-and-corrugated-iron house, formerly inhabited by one of the head officials of the railway, a personage of Dutch extraction and Boer sympathies, at present sequestered beneath the yellow flag of the town gaol for their too incautious manifestation; while his wife and young family were inhabitants of the Women's Laager. And from their subterranean burrow the Sisters carried on their work of mercy as cheerfully as though their Order had been originally one of Troglodytes, nursing the sick and wounded, cooking and washing for the convalescents, comforting the bereaved, and tending the many orphans of the siege.

South lay the laager of the Refugees. To the westward within the ring of trenches and about a mile and a half from the town, was the Women's Laager, visited not seldom by the enemy's sh.e.l.l-fire, in spite of the Red-Cross Flag. Fever and rheumatism, pneumonia and diphtheria stalked among the dwellers in these tainted burrows, claiming their human toll.

Women languished and little children pined and withered, dying for lack of exercise and fresh air, with the free veld spreading away on all sides to the horizon, and the burning blue South African sky overhead. Famine had not yet appeared among the Europeans, though grisly black spectres in Kaffir blankets haunted the refuse-heaps, and fought with gaunt dogs for picked bones and empty meat-tins, and were found dead not unseldom, after full meals of strange and dreadful things. Fresh meat was still to be had, though the cattle and sheep of the Barala had been thinned by raids on the part of the enemy, and poor grazing. Sh.e.l.l and rifle-fire not infrequently spared the butcher trouble, so that your joints were sometimes weirdly shaped. But they were joints, and there was plenty of the preserved article in Kriel's Warehouse and at the Army Service Stores. Tea and coffee were becoming rare and precious, the sparkling draught of lager was to be had only in remembrance; the aromatic beer was all drunk up, and the stone-ginger was three shillings a bottle. Whisky was to be had at the price of liquid gold, brandy was treasured above rubies, and served out sparingly by the Hand of Authority, as medicine in urgent cases.