Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a bombproof in the back-yard. The waiters have developed a gra.s.shopper-like nimbleness, otherwise things go on as usual.

It being Sunday, a large long man and another as long, but less bulky, are extended in a couple of long bamboo chairs on Nixey's longish front verandah. The blue, fragrant smoke of two long cigars curls upwards over their supine heads, and two long drinks containing a very meagre modic.u.m of inferior whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the bamboo nests cunningly devised for their accommodation in the chair-arms.

It is hot, but both the men look cool and lazy, and almost too fresh to have spent the greater part of the night, the younger upon advanced patrol-duty, and the elder at the Staff bombproof in the Southern Lines, where messages come in and where messages go out, and where reports are received and from whence orders are despatched from sunset to the peep of day, and from peep of day to sunset.

The wardrobes of both warriors are much impaired by active service, but their originally white flannel trousers, if patched, discoloured, and shrunken by amateur lavations, boast the cut of Bond Street; their shirts, if a trifle ragged, are immaculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas shoes are disguised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has rummaged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the day, with a knitted silk necktie of his Regimental colours, and a kamarband to match is wound about his narrow, springy waist, and knotted to perfection. Both men might be basking on an English river-bank after a stiff pull up-stream, or resting after a bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for the revolver-lanyards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the b.u.t.ts of Smith and Wesson's revolvers of Service calibre, the bandoliers and belts that lie handy on a table, and the Lee-Metford carbines that lean in an angle made by the house-wall and the verandah end. Also, but for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness on both faces, making it plain that, though resting and reposeful, they are neither of them unexpectant of a summons to be the opposite of these things. It is a look that, at different degrees of intensity, is stamped on every face in Gueldersdorp. And the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even unsentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the summit of its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmosphere of this January day, may, in an instant's s.p.a.ce, give place to the red signal of danger; the bugle, now silent, may at any moment blare out its loud and dismal note of warning; the bells that call with peaceful insistence, "Come to church! come to church!" in the twinkling of an eye may be clanging scared townsfolk to their burrowed hiding-places. You never know. For General Brounckers, though a G.o.d-fearing man, sometimes goes in for Sunday gun-practice, quite unintentionally, as he afterwards explains. Hence, even on the Sabbath, it is as well to be prepared.

Beauvayse is the first to break the drowsy silence by knocking the lengthened ash off his cigar, and expressing his opinion that the weed might be a worse one.

"Considerin' the price the box of fifty was knocked down to me for at Kreils' auction yesterday," states Captain Bingo, "it's simply smokin'

gold. Nine pound fifteen-and-six runs me into, how much apiece?" He yawns cavernously, and gives the calculation up. "Always was a duffer at figures," he says, and relapses into silence until, in the act of throwing the nearly smoked-out cigar-b.u.t.t away, he pulls himself up, and, economically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more whiffs.

"Against the Lenten days to come, when there will be no balm left in Gilead," says Beauvayse, c.o.c.king a grey-green eye at him in sleepy derision, "and no tobacco in Gueldersdorp."

"Kreils' are sellin' dashed bad cigarettes at a pound the box of a hundred now," says Captain Bingo; "and I've a notion of layin' in a stock of 'em.

We smoked tea in the Sudan, and I had a shot at hemp, but it plays the very devil with the nerves. All jumps and twitches, you know, after a pipe or two. Nervous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder where my wife is?"

He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. Beauvayse responds with the air of one who has suffered boredom from the too frequent enumeration of this conjecture. "Not knowing, can't say." And there is another silence.

"How she got the maggot into her head," presently resumes Lady Hannah's spouse, "I can't think. I did suppose her vaultin' ambition to rival Dora Corr--woman who managed to burn her own and a lot of other people's fingers by meddlin' in South African politics over the Raid business--had been quenched for good that mornin' you took those fifty chaps of the Irregulars out for what she _would_ call their 'baptism of fire.'"

"That's newspaperese," yawns Beauvayse, his supple brown hands knitted at the back of his sleek golden head. "Goes with 'the tented field' and _casus belli: cherchez la femme_ and _cui bono_?"

"She's got the lingo at her finger-ends and in her blood, or we wouldn't be cherchaying now," says Bingo dolorously. "I asked her if she was particularly keen on gettin' killed...."

"Shouldn't have done that. Put her on her mettle not to show funk if she felt it," mumbles Beauvayse.

"A man can't always be diplomatic," grumbles Bingo. "Anyhow, she'd seen a bit of a sc.r.a.p at the outset of affairs, when the B.S.A. went out with the Armoured Train, and was wild with me for wantin' to deprive her of another 'glorious experience.' ... And next morning she rides out with a Corporal and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible of their responsibility, and wishin' her at Cape Town, she in toppin' spirits and as keen as mustard.

It was about six o'clock, morning, and she hadn't been gone five minutes before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein' pounded at like Jimmy O! I was on the roof with the Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the binoculars, until the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under 'em, and hoverin'

troopers. But I did make out that your party had got into difficulties----"

"We opened on 'em at a thousand yards, and pushed to within five hundred, and if the fellows in charge of the Hotchkiss could have got her into play," Beauvayse interrupts rather huffily, "we'd have been as right as rain."

"Possibly. If I hadn't been on special duty that day, and as nervous as a cat in a thunderstorm, I'd have volunteered to bring No. 2 Troop of A out to the rescue, instead of Heseltine. As it was, I nearly fell off the roof when I saw my wife coming, one trooper, as pale with fright as a piece of soap, supportin' her on his saddle, another man leading the mare, dead lame and the Corporal's hairy. Plugged in the upper works, the Corporal, poor beggar! but he'd managed to stick on somehow until they got to the Hospital. Have you ever had to deal with a woman in hysterics?"

Beauvayse nods sagely.

"Once or twice."

"Once is an experience that lasts a man all his lifetime. Phew!" Captain Bingo mops his large pink face. "Never had such a dressing-down in my life."

"But what had you to do with the Corporal getting chipped?"

"The Lord only knows!" says Bingo piously. "But, if you'd heard her, all the rest of the day and half through the night!..."

"I did," Beauvayse says with a faint grin. "Mine's the next bedroom to yours, you know."

"'Oh, the blood! Oh, the blood!' ..." Not unsuccessfully does the spouse of Lady Hannah attempt to render the recurrent hiccough and the whooping screech of hysteria. "'d.a.m.n it, my dear!' I said, tryin' to reason with her, 'what else did you expect the fellow had got in him? Sawdust?' That seemed to rouse her like nothing else.... Turned on me like a tigress, by the living Tinker!--called me everything she could lay her tongue to, and threatened that she'd apply for a separation if I continued to outrage every feeling of decency that a.s.sociation with such a thundering brute hadn't uprooted from her nature."

"Whe--ew!"

Beauvayse's comment is a shrill-toned whistle.

"Of course, her nerves were knocked to smithereens, and a man can overlook a lot, under the circ.u.mstances. She was a mere jelly when the bombardment began----" goes on rueful Captain Bingo.

"--Rather!" confirms Beauvayse.--"Lived in the hotel cellar for the first fortnight, only emergin' from among the beer-barrels and wine-casks and liqueur-cases after dark----"

"--To blow me up and forgive me, turn and turn about, until daylight did appear. Luckily," reflects Bingo, with a rather dreary chuckle, "I had plenty of night-duty on just then, and so escaped a lot."

"_That_ gave her her chance to shoot the moon!" hints Beauvayse, in accents m.u.f.fled by his long tumbler.

"By the Living Tinker!" a.s.severates Captain Bingo, jerked out of his reclining att.i.tude by vigorous utterance of the expletive, "you could have bowled me over with a scent-squirter when I came back to brekker and found her gone, and a c.o.c.ked-hat note of farewell left for me on the dressing-table pincushion, in regular elopement style; and another for the Chief, sayin'--he read it to me--that she'd gone to retrieve the Past, with a capital 'P,' and hoped to convince him ere long that one of her _despised s.e.x_--underlined, 'despised s.e.x'--can be useful to her country."

"'Can be useful to her country,'" repeats Beauvayse "Question is, in what way?"

"Damme if I can imagine!" bursts explosively from the deserted husband.

"All I know up to date, and all _you_ know, is that before it was quite light she drove out of our lines in Nixey's spider, his mouse-coloured trotter pullin', and her German maid sittin' behind, wavin' a white towel tied to the end of a walkin'-stick of mine, and went straight over to the enemy. We hear in the course of things from a Kaffir despatch-runner that she's stayin' in a hotel of sorts at Tweipans, where Brounckers has had his headquarters since he shifted Chief Laager from Geitfontein. And for any further information we may knock our rotten heads against a brick wall and twiddle our thumbs. Never you marry, Toby, my boy!"

A V-shaped vein swells and darkens between the handsome grey-green eyes and on the broad forehead, white as a girl's where the sun-tan leaves off.

Beauvayse takes his cigar again from his mouth, and knocks the ash off deliberately before he responds:

"Thanks for the advice."

"Be warned," says Captain Bingo sententiously, "by me. Know when you're well off, as I didn't. Take the advice of your seniors, as I was too pig-headed a fool to do, and don't put it in the power of any woman to make you as rottenly wretched as I am at this minute."

"Why! women _can_ make you rottenly wretched," admits Beauvayse, with a confirmatory creak of the bamboo chair. "But, on the other hand, they can make you awfully happy--what?"

Captain Bingo throws his long legs off their resting-place, and sits sideways, staring rather owlishly at his young friend. He shakes his head in a dismal way several times, and sucks hard at his cigar as he shakes it.

"For a bit, but does it last? When I came down to hunt you up last June at the cottage at Cookham----"

"Look here, old man!" The bamboo chair creaks angrily as Beauvayse in his turn sits up and drops his own long legs on either side of it, and drives the foot-rest back under the table seat with a vicious punch. "Don't remind me of the cottage at Cookham, will you? It's one of the things I want to forget just now."

"You were as proud as Punch of it last June. Have you let it?" pursues Bingo, ignoring his junior's request.

Beauvayse yawns with ostentatious weariness of the subject.

"No; I haven't let it."

"Ought to go off like smoke, properly advertised. Somethin' like this: 'To let, Roselawn Cottage, Cookham: a charmin' Thames-side bijou residence.

Small grounds and large cellar, a boathouse and a houseboat, stables, a pigeon-cote, and a private post-box. Duodecimo oak dinin'-room, boudoir by Rellis. Ideal nest for a honeymoon, real thing or imitation. Might have become the real thing if owner hadn't been whisked off in time to South Africa.' And a dashed good job for him. For you've had a decentish lot of narrow escapes, Toby, my boy!" pursues the oracular Captain Bingo, disregarding his junior's forbidding scowl, "and come out of a goodish few tight places, and you've got out of 'em, if I may say so, more through luck than wit; but that little entanglement I'm delicately alludin' to was one of the closest things on record in the career of a Prodigal Son."

"Thanks. You're uncommonly complimentary to-day." Beauvayse pitches away his cigar, knocks a feather of ash from his clean silk shirt, and folds his arms resignedly on his broad flat chest.

"Upon my word, I didn't mean to be. Does it ever strike you," goes on Captain Bingo doggedly, "that if that wire from the Chief asking for your address hadn't found me at the Club, and if I hadn't run down and dug you out at the--I won't repeat the name of the place, since you don't seem to like it--you'd have been married and done for, old chap--any date you like to name between then and the beginning of the war? And, to put things mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with your people."

"Yes," Beauvayse agrees rather dreamily; "there would have been an awful lot of bother with my people."

"Not that I object to the stage myself," Captain Bingo says, waving a large, tolerant hand; "and it seems getting to be rather the fashion to recruit the female ranks of the Peerage from Musical Comedy, and a prettier and cleverer little woman than Lessie ... What are you stoppin'