7^
 
 ONE BRAVER THING
 
 ONE BRAVER 
 THING 
 
 ("THE DOP DOCTOR") 
 By RICHARD DEHAN 
 
 A. L. BURT COMPANY 
 
 PUBLISHERS NEW YORK
 
 Copyright. 1910. by 
 DUFFIELD & COMPANY
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 2135317
 
 "/ have done one braver thing 
 Than all the 'worthies did; 
 And yet a braver thence doth spring^ 
 Which is, to keep that hid" 
 
 Donne
 
 One Braver Thing 
 
 UPON a day in August, near the close of the long, brilliant 
 South African winter, when the old Vierkleur waved over 
 the Transvaal, and what is now the Orange River Colony- 
 was the Orange Free State, with the Dutch canton still' 
 showing on the staff-head corner of its tribarred flag, two 
 large, heavily-laden waggons rolled over the grass veld, only 
 now thinking about changing from yellow into green. Many- 
 years previously the wheels of the old voortrekkers had passed! 
 that way, bringing from Cape Colony, with the household 
 gods, goods and chattels, language and customs of the Dutch, 
 the slips of the pomegranate and peach and orange trees, whose 
 abundant blossoming dressed the orchards of the farms tucked 
 away here and there in the lap of the veld, with bridal white 
 and pink, and hung their girdling pomegranate hedges with 
 stars of ruby red. But days and days, and nights and nights 
 of billowing, spreading, lonely sky-arched veld intervened be- 
 tween each homestead. 
 
 The flat-topped hills were draped and folded in the opal 
 haze of distance; the sky was perfect turquoise; the pinkish 
 kopjes were beginning to be newly clothed with the young 
 pale green bush. To the south there was a veld fire leaping 
 and dancing, with swirling columns of white smoke edged 
 with flame. But it was many miles away, and the north-west 
 wind blew strongly, driving some puffs of gold cloud before 
 it. Doubtless there would be rain ere long. There had been 
 rain already in the foremost waggon, not from the clouds, but 
 from human eyes. 
 
 The broad wheels crashed on, rolling over the yellow grass 
 and the dry bushes. Lizards and other creeping creatures 
 scuttled across their w r ide tracks. The patient oxen toiled 
 under the yoke, their dappled nostrils widespread, their great 
 dewy eyes strained and dim with weariness. They dumbly 
 wondered why they must labour in the daytime when all night 
 long they had travelled without rest. The glorious sunrise 
 had flamed in crimson and gold behind the eastern ranges full
 
 2 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 five hours before. They were weary to death, and no dorp 
 or farm was yet in sight. The Cape boys who tramped, each 
 leading a fore-ox by the green rein bound about the creature's 
 wide horns, had no energy left even to swear at their beasts. 
 
 The Boer driver was weaned like the ox team and the 
 Kaffirs. His bestial face was drawn, and his eyes were red- 
 rimmed for lack of sleep. The long whip, with the fourteen- 
 foot stock and the lash of twenty-three feet, had not smacked 
 for a long time; the sjambok had not been used upon the long- 
 suffering wheelers. Huddled up in his ill-fitting clothes of tan 
 cord, he sat on the waggon-box and slept, his head nodding, 
 his elbows on his knees. He was dreaming of the bad Cape 
 brandy that had been in the bottle, and would be, with luck, 
 again, when the waggon reached a tavern or a store. 
 
 A Kaffir drove the second waggon. It held stores and goods 
 in bales, and some trunks and other baggage belonging to the 
 Englishman, for you would have set down the tall, thin, 
 high-featured, reddish-bearded, soft-speaking man who owned 
 the waggons as English, even though he had called himself 
 by a Dutch name. The child of three years was his. And 
 his had been the dead body of the woman lying on the waggon- 
 bed, covered with a new white sheet, with a stillborn boy baby 
 lying on her breast. 
 
 For this the man who had loved and taken her, and made 
 her his, had wept such bitter, scalding tears. For this his dead 
 love, with Love's blighted bud of fruit upon her bosom, had 
 given up her world, her friends, her family her husband, first 
 and last of all. They had played the straight game, and gone 
 away openly together, to the immense scandal of Society that is 
 so willing to wink at things done cleverly under the rose. 
 They were to be married the instant the injured husband ob- 
 tained his decree nisi. Her Church sanctioned the remarriage 
 of the divorced if his did not, and her Church should thence- 
 forth be his. But there was no decree nisi, her husband pos- 
 sessing a legal heir by a previous wife, and being secretly 
 alarmed lest one of his mistresses should marry him were he 
 once more free. She was a very determined woman. Besides, 
 in a cold way it gave him pleasure to think of that purpose 
 foiled. He soon knew that his wife's lover had sold his com- 
 mission in the Army, and he learned, even, through a com- 
 munication forwarded through a London firm of solicitors, 
 that although he had chosen to ignore a certain appointment 
 offered upon the opposite side of the Channel, the other
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 3 
 
 man would merely consider it deferred until a suitable oppor- 
 tunity should occur. Meanwhile the writer was travelling in 
 South Africa, not alone. 
 
 Never to be alone again, she had promised him that not 
 quite four years ago. And to-day he sat on a box beside the 
 waggon-bed where she lay dead with her dead boy, and the 
 only thing left to him that had the dear living fragrance and 
 sweet warmth of her slept smiling on his knees. The long fine 
 silky beard that he had grown swept the soft rose-flushed cheek 
 of the little creature, and mingled with her yellow curls. 
 Within the last forty hours hours packed with the anguish 
 of a lifetime for him there were sprinklings of white upon 
 his high temples, where the hair had grown thin under the 
 pressure of the Hussar's furred busby, the khaki-covered 
 helmet of foreign service, or the forage-cap, before these had 
 given place to the Colonial smasher of felt, and the silky brown 
 beard had in it wide, rugged streaks of grey. He had wor- 
 shipped the woman who had given up all for him; they had 
 lived only for, and in, one another during four wonderful 
 years. Hardly a passing twinge of regret, never a scorpion 
 sting of remorse, spoiled their union. 
 
 But they never stayed long in any town or even in any 
 village. Some sound or shape from the old unforgotten world 
 beyond the barrier, some English voice that had the indefinable 
 tone and accent of high breeding, some figure of Englishman 
 or Englishwoman whose rough, careless clothing had the un- 
 mistakable cut of Bond Street, some face recognized under 
 the grey felt or the white panama, would spur them to the 
 desire of leaving it behind them. Then the valises would be 
 repacked, the waggons would be hastily inspanned, and their 
 owners would start again upon that never-ending journey in 
 search of something that she was to be the first to find. 
 
 At last, when the sun was high and the worn-out beasts were 
 almost sinking, a group of low buildings came in sight a few 
 miles away beyond a kloof edged with a few poplar-like trees 
 and the Kameelthorn. A square, one-story house of corru- 
 gated iron, with a mud-walled hovel or two near it, had a 
 sprawling painted board across its front, signifying that the 
 place was the Free State Hotel. Behind it were an orchard 
 and some fields under rude cultivation, and a quarter of a mile 
 to the north were the native kraals. 
 
 At the sight the Boer shook himself fully awake, and sent 
 the long lash cracking over the thin, sweat-drenched backs of
 
 4 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the ox-team. They laboured with desperation at the yoke, 
 md the waggon rumbled on. 
 
 The Englishman, hidden with his sorrow under the canvas 
 waggon-tilt, roused himself at the accelerated motion. He 
 rose, and, holding the sleeping child upon one arm, pushed 
 back the front flap and looked out. He spoke to the taciturn 
 driver, who shook his head. How did he, Smoots Beste, know 
 whether a minister of the Church of England, or even a Dutch 
 predikant, was to be found at the place beyond ? All he hoped 
 for was that he would be able to buy there tobacco and brandy 
 cheap, and sleep drunken, to wake and drink again. 
 
 The waggon halted on the brink of the kloof. Little birds 
 of gay and brilliant piumage, 'blue and crimson and emerald- 
 green, rose in flocks from the bush and grasses that clothed the 
 sides of the coomb ; the hollows were full of the tree-fern ; the 
 grass had little white and purple flowers in it. At the valley- 
 bottom a little river, in spate from the recent rains, wimpled 
 merrily over sandstone boulders; the barbel rose at flies. 
 There was a drift lower down. It was all the goaded, worn- 
 out oxen could do to stay the huge creaking waggons down 
 the steep bank, and drag them over the river-bed of sand and 
 boulders, through the muddied, churned-up water that they 
 were dying for, yet not allowed to taste, and toil with them 
 up the further side. 
 
 The Englishman was not cruel. He was usually humane 
 and merciful to man and beast, but just now he was deaf and 
 blind. Beside him there was her corpse, beyond him was her 
 grave, beyond that . . . 
 
 Both he and she in that world that lay beyond the barrier 
 had observed the outward forms of Christianity. They had 
 first met in the Park, one May morning, after a church parade. 
 They sat on a couple of green-painted chairs while Society, 
 conscious of the ever-present newspaper-reporter, paraded past 
 [them in plumage as gorgeous as that of the gay-coloured 
 birds that flocked among the tree-fern or rose in frightened 
 clouds as the waggons crashed by. And they discussed to- 
 gether with the chances of the runners entered for the coming 
 Spring Meeting at Newmarket, and the merits of the problem 
 play, and the newest musical comedy the Immortality of the 
 Soul. 
 
 She wore a brown velvet gown and an ostrich-feather boa 
 in delicate shades of cream and brown, and a cavalier hat with 
 sweeping white plumes. Her hair was the colour of autumn
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 5 
 
 leaves, or a squirrel's back in the sunshine, and she had grey 
 eyes and piquant, irregular features, ears like shells, and a deli- 
 cate, softly-tinted skin undefiled by cosmetics. She thought it 
 wicked to doubt that one waked up again after dying Some- 
 where a vague Somewhere, with all the nice people of one's 
 set about one. He said that Agnosticism and all that kind of 
 thing was bad form. Men who had religion made the best 
 soldiers. Like the Presbyterian Highlanders of the Black 
 Watch and the " Royal Irish " Catholics but, of course, she 
 knew that. And she said yes, she knew; meeting his admiring 
 eyes with her own, that were so grey and sweet and friendly, 
 the little gloved hand that held the ivory and gold-bound 
 Church Service lying in her lap. He longed to take that little 
 white, delicate hand. Later on he took it, and a little later 
 the heart that throbbed in its pulses, and the frail, beautiful 
 body out of which the something that had been she had gone 
 with a brief gasping struggle and a long shuddering sigh. . . . 
 
 He kept the beloved husk and shell of her steady on the 
 waggon-bed with one arm thrown over it, and held the awak- 
 ened, fretting child against his breast with the other, as the 
 sinking oxen floundered up the farther side of the kloof. 
 Amidst the shouting and cursing of the native voor-loopers and 
 the Boer and Kaffir drivers, the rain of blows on tortured, 
 struggling bodies, and the creaking of the teak-built waggon- 
 frames, he only heard her weakly asking to be buried properly 
 in some churchyard, or cemetery, with a clergyman to read 
 the Service for the Dead. 
 
 Before his field-glass showed him the sprawling hotel-sign 
 he had hoped that the buildings in sight might prove to mask 
 the outskirts of an Afrikander hamlet with an English mis- 
 sionary station, or a Dutch settlement important enough to 
 own a corrugated iron Dopper church and an oak-scrub-hedged 
 or boulder-dyked graveyard, in charge of a pastor whose loath- 
 ing of the Briton should yield to the mollifying of poured-out 
 gold. 
 
 But Fate had brought him to this lonely veld tavern. He 
 watched it growing into ugly, sordid shape as the waggon drew 
 nearer. To this horrible place, miscalled the Free State Hotel 
 a mere jumble of corrugated-iron buildings, wattle and mud- 
 walled stables for horses, and a barbed-wire waggon enclosure 
 he had brought his beloved at the end of their last journey 
 together. He shuddered at the thought. 
 
 The waggon halted and outspanned before the tavern. The
 
 6 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 drivers went in to get drink, and Bough, the man who kept it, 
 leaving the women to serve them, came out. He ordinarily 
 gave himself out as an Afrikander. You see in him a whisk- 
 ered, dark-complexioned, good-looking man of twenty-six, but 
 looking older, whose regard was either insolent or cringing, 
 according to circumstances, and whose smile was an evil leer. 
 The owner of the waggons stood waiting near the closed-up 
 foremost one, the yellow-haired child on his arm. He looked 
 keenly at the landlord, Bough, and the man's hand went in- 
 voluntarily up in the salute, to its owner's secret rage. Did 
 he want every English officer to recognize him as an old de- 
 serter from the Cape Mounted Police? Not he and yet the 
 cursed habit stuck. But he looked the stranger squarely in the 
 face with that frank look that marked such depth of will, and 
 quelled him with the simple manner that concealed so much, 
 and the English officer lifted his left hand, as though it raised 
 a sword, and began to talk. Presently Bough called someone, 
 and a smart, slatternly young woman came out and carried the 
 child, who leaned away from her rouged face, resisting, into 
 the house. 
 
 The English traveller would take no refreshment. He 
 needed nothing but to know of a graveyard and men to dig 
 a grave, and a minister or priest to read the Burial Service. 
 He would pay all that was asked. He learned that the near- 
 est village-town might be reached in five days' trek across the 
 veld, and that the landlord did not know whether it had a 
 pastor or not. 
 
 Five days' trek! He waved the twinkling-eyed, curious 
 landlord back, and went up into the waggon, drawing the 
 door-flaps close. He faced the truth in there, and realized with 
 a throe of mortal anguish that the burial must be soon very 
 soon. To prison what remained of her in a hastily knocked- 
 together coffin, and drag it over the veld, looking for some 
 plot of consecrated earth to put it in, was desecration, horror. 
 He would bury her, and fetch the minister or clergyman or 
 priest to read prayers. Later, if it cost him all he had, the 
 spot should be consecrated for Christian burial. He came 
 forth from the waggon and held parley with the landlord of 
 the tavern. There was a wire-fenced patch of sandy red 
 earth a hundred yards from the house, a patch wherein the 
 white woman who was mistress at the tavern had tried to grow 
 a few common English flower-seeds out of a gaily-covered 
 packet left by a drummer who had passed that way. She had
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 7 
 
 grown tired of the trouble of watering and tending them, so 
 that some of them had withered, and the lean fowls had flown 
 over the fence and scratched the rest up. 
 
 That patch of sandy earth brought a handsome price, paid 
 down in good English sovereigns the coinage that is welcome 
 in every corner of the earth, save at the uttermost habitable 
 limits of the Southern Arctic, where gin, tobacco, and coffee 
 are more willingly taken in exchange for goods or souls. 
 
 The Englishman was business-like. He fetched pen and 
 ink and paper out of that jealously closed-up waggon, drew up 
 the deed, and had it witnessed by the Boer driver and the white 
 woman at the hotel. 
 
 He had made up his mind. He would bury her, since it 
 must be, and then fetch the clergyman. Knowing him on the 
 road, or returning to the fulfilment of his promise, she would 
 not mind lying there unblessed and waiting for ten lonely days 
 and nights. He whispered in her deaf ears how it was going 
 to be, and that she could not doubt him. He swore not dream- 
 ing how soon he should keep the vow to visit the grave often, 
 often, with his child and hers, and to lie there beside her when 
 kind Death should call him too. 
 
 Then he left her for a moment, and sent for the Kaffir driver 
 and the Boer to come, and, with him, dig her grave. . . . 
 
 But Smoots Beste was already in hog-paradise, lying grunt- 
 ing on a bench in the bar, and the Kaffir had gone to the native 
 kraals. The English officer looked at the rowdy landlord and 
 the loafing men about the tavern, and made up his mind. No 
 hands other than his own should prepare a last bed for her, 
 his dearest. 
 
 So, all through the remainder of the long day, streaming 
 and drenched with perspiration, which the cold wind dried 
 upon him, he wrought at a grave for her with spade and pick. 
 
 It should be deep, because of the wild-cat and the hungry. 
 Kaffir dogs. It should be wide, to leave room for him. The 
 ground was hard, with boulders of ironstone embedded in it. 
 What did that matter? All the day through, and all through 
 the night of wind-driven mists and faint moonlight, he wrought 
 like a giant possessed, whilst his child, lulled with the condensed 
 milk and water, in which biscuits had been sopped, lay sleeping 
 in the tavern upon a little iron bed. 
 
 He had had the waggon brought close up to the wired en- 
 closure. All the time he worked he kept a watch upon it.
 
 8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Did claws scrape the wide wheels or scurrying feet patter across 
 the shadows, he left off work until the voracious creatures of 
 the night were driven away. 
 
 The pale dawn came, and the east showed a lake of yel- 
 low. . . . When the great South African sun rose and flooded 
 the veld with miraculous liquid ambers and flaming, melted 
 rubies, the deep, wide grave at last was done. 
 
 He climbed out of it by the waggon ladder, struggling under 
 the weight of the last great basketful of stones and sandy earth. 
 He dumped that down by the graveside, and went to the wag- 
 gon and removed all stains of toil, and then set about making 
 the last toilet of the beautiful woman who had so loved that 
 everything that touched her should be pure, and dainty, and 
 sweet. 
 
 He had dressed her silken, plentiful, golden-brown hair many 
 times, for the sheer love of its loveliness. With what care he 
 combed and brushed and arranged the perfumed locks! He laid 
 reverent kisses on the sealed eyelids that his own hands had 
 closed for ever; he whispered words of passionate love, vows of 
 undying gratitude and remembrance, in the shell-like ears. He 
 bathed with fresh w r ater and reclad in fragrant linen the ex- 
 quisite body, upon which faint discolouring patches already 
 heralded the inevitable end. When he had done, he swathed 
 her in a sheet, and fetched a bolt of new white canvas from 
 the store-waggon, and lined the grave with that. 
 
 And then he placed a narrow mattress in it, and freshly 
 covered pillows, and brought her from the waggon, and to the 
 grave, and carried her down the light wooden ladder, and laid 
 her in her last earthly home, with a kiss from the lips that 
 had never been her husband's. It was so cruel to think of 
 that. It was so hard to cover up the cold, sweet face again, 
 but he did it, and lapped the sheet over her and brought the 
 canvas down. Remained now to fill in her grave and fetch the 
 man whose mouth should speak over it the words that are of 
 God. 
 
 But first fill in the grave. 
 
 The cold sweat drenched him at the thought of heaping 
 back those tons of earth and stone above her, crushing with a 
 frightful wei'ght of inert matter the bodily beauty that he 
 adored. He felt as though her soul hovered about him, wail- 
 ing to him not to be so cruel, tugging at his garments with, 
 imploring, impalpable hands. 
 
 The thing must he .done, though, before the sordid life stirred
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 9 
 
 again under the roof of the tavern, before the vulgar faces, 
 with their greedy, prying eyes, should be there to snigger and 
 spy. 
 
 He loaded a great basket with fine gravelly sand, and carried 
 it down and laid it on her by handfuls. What were his livid, 
 parched lips muttering? Over and over, only this: 
 
 " Ashes to ashes, dust to dust . . ." 
 
 Soon the white swathed-up form was hidden with the sandy 
 gravel. That was a terrible pang. It wrenched the first 
 groan from him, but he worked on. 
 
 More and more of the sandy gravel, but for security the 
 stones must lie above. Should the voracious creatures of the 
 night come, they must find the treasure in impregnable security. 
 That thought helped him to lay in the first, and the second, 
 and then greater and greater stones. He was spent and breath- 
 less, but still he laboured. He tottered, and at times the tav- 
 ern and the veld, and the waggons on it, and the flat-topped dis- 
 tant mountains that merged in the horizon, swung round him in 
 a wild, mad dance. Then the warm salt taste of blood was 
 in his mouth, and he gasped and panted, but he never rested 
 until the grave was filled in. 
 
 Then he built, up over it an oblong cairn of the iron-stone 
 boulders, made a rude temporary cross out of a spare waggon- 
 pole, working quite methodically with saw and hammer and 
 nails, and set it up, under the curious eyes he hated so, and 
 wedged it fast and sure. Then he knelt down stiffly, and 
 made, with rusty, long unpractised fingers, the sacred sign upon 
 his face and breast. He heard her still, asking him in that 
 
 nearly extinguished voice of hers, to pray for her. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 "Dicky! . . ." 
 
 Ah! the tragedy of the foolish little nickname, faltered byj 
 stiffening lips upon the bed of death ! 
 
 " Catholics pray for the souls of dead people, don't they?! 
 Pray for mine by-and-by. It will comfort me to know you 
 are praying, darling, even if God is too angry with us to 
 hear!" 
 
 He held her to his bursting heart, groaning. 
 
 " If He is angry, it cannot be with you. The sin was mine 
 all mine. He must know ! " 
 
 Later she awakened from a troubled sleep to murmur: 
 
 " Richard, I dreamed of Bridget-Mary. She was all in 
 black, but there was white linen about her face and neck,
 
 io ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and it was dabbled dreadfully with blood." The weak, slight 
 body shuddered in his embrace. " She said our wickedness had 
 brought her death, but that she would plead for us in Heaven." 
 
 " She is not dead, my beloved ; I heard of her before we 
 left Cape Colony. She has taken the veil. She is well, and 
 will be happy in her religion, as those good women always 
 are." 
 
 " I was not one of those good women, Richard " 
 
 He strained her to him in silence. She panted presently: 
 
 "You might have been happy with her if I had never 
 COffle between you." 
 
 He found some words to tell her that these things were 
 meant to be. From the beginning . . . 
 
 " Was it meant that I should die on these wild, wide, 
 desolate plains, and leave you, Richard ? " 
 
 He cried out frantically that he would die too, and follow 
 her. Her dying whisper fluttered at his lips: 
 
 " You cannot ! Think ! the child ! " 
 
 He had forgotten the child, and now, with a great stabbing 
 pang, remembered it. She asked for it, and he brought it, and 
 she tried to kiss it; and even in that Death foiled her, and her 
 head fell back and her eyes rolled up, and she died. 
 
 He remembered all this as he tried to say the prayer, without 
 which she could not have borne to have him leave her. 
 
 The curious, mocking faces crowded at the tavern door to 
 see him praying a strange, haggard scarecrow kneeling there 
 in the face of day. 
 
 But he was not the kind of scarecrow they would have 
 dared to jeer at openly. Too rich, with all that money in the 
 valise in the locked-up waggon-chest; too strong, with that 
 sharp hunting-knife, the Winchester repeating-rifle, and the 
 revolver he carried at his hip. 
 
 " Our Father Who art in Heaven. . . /' 
 
 He knew, the man who repeated the words, that there was 
 no One beyond the burning blue* vault of ether Who 
 heard . . .and yet, for her sake, supposing, after all, some 
 great Unseen Ear listened, was listening even now. . . . 
 
 "Hallowed be Thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. . . /* 
 
 And if it came, should those have any part in it who had 
 lived together unwed in open sin? 
 
 " Thy Will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. . . ." 
 
 The words stuck in his dried throat. Be done, that Will 
 that left him desolate_gnd laid her awiay, a still fair, fast-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING n 
 
 corrupting thing, under the red earth and the great ironstone 
 boulders ! 
 
 " Give us this day our daily bread. . . ." 
 
 Her love, her presence, her voice, her touch, had been the 
 daily bread of life to him, her fellow-sinner. Oh, how many 
 base, sordid, loveless marriages had not that illicit bond of 
 theirs put to shame! And yet as a boy he had learned the 
 Sixth Commandment: "Thou shalt not commit adultery." 
 Had she not believed all along that the price of such sweet 
 sinning must be paid, if not in this life, then in the life here- 
 after, and could it could it be that her soul was even now 
 writhing in fires unquenchable, whither he, who would have 
 gladly died in torment to save her from outrage or death, had 
 thrust her? 
 
 "Forgive us our trespasses. . . ." 
 
 O Man of Sorrows, pitying Son of Mary, before whom the 
 Scribes and Pharisees brought the woman taken in adultery, 
 forgive her, pardon her! If a Soul must writhe in those eternal 
 fires they preach of, in justice let it be mine. Thou Who didst 
 pity that woman of old time, standing white and shameful 
 in the midst of the evil, jeering crowd, with the wicked fingers 
 pointing at her, say to this other woman, lifting up Thyself 
 before her terrified, desperate soul, confronted with the awful 
 mystery that lies behind the Veil . . . 
 
 " Neither do I condemn thee. . . " 
 
 And do with me what Thou wilt ! 
 
 The ragged, wild-eyed man who had been kneeling rigid 
 and immovable before the w r ooden symbol reared upon the new- 
 raised cairn of boulders swayed a little. His head fell forward 
 heavily upon his breast. His eyes closed in spite of his desper- 
 ate effort to shake off the deadly, sickening collapse of will 
 and brain and body that was mastering him. He fell sideways, 
 and lay in a heap upon the ground. 
 
 II 
 
 THEY went to him, and took up and carried him into the 
 tavern, and laid him down upon a frowzy bed in the room 
 where the child lay upon the iron-framed cot. 
 
 He lay there groaning in the fierce clutches of rheumatic 
 fever. They tended him in a rude way. A valise and an 
 iron-bound leather ladv's trunk had been brought from the
 
 12 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 waggon by his orders, and set in the room where he was in his 
 sight. These contained her clothes and jewels, and he guarded 
 them jealously even in delirium. About his wasted body was 
 buckled a heavy money-belt. Bough could feel that when he 
 helped the woman of the tavern to lift him. He winked to 
 her pleasantly across the bed. But the time was not ripe yet. 
 They must wait awhile. The English traveller was not al- 
 ways delirious. There were intervals of consciousness, and 
 though he seemed at death's door, who knew? That strong 
 purpose of his might even yet lift him from the soiled and com- 
 fortless bed, and send him on the trek again. Meanwhile the 
 oxen were hired out to work for a farmer fifty miles away. 
 That was called sending them to graze and gain strength for 
 more work ; and there was the keep of two Cape boys, and 
 the Kaffir and the Boer driver, and the cost of nursing and sick 
 man's diet, and the care of the child. A heavy bill of charges 
 was mounting up against the English traveller. Much of 
 what the belt contained would honestly be Bough's. 
 
 There was no doctor and no medicine save the few drugs 
 the sick man had carried, as all travellers do. The milk for 
 which he asked for himself and the child, which was procured 
 from the native cattle-kraals for a tikkie a pint, and for which 
 Bough charged at the price of champagne, kept him alive. 
 Broth or eggs he sickened at and turned from, and, indeed, the 
 one was greasy and salt, the others of appalling mustiness. He 
 would regularly sw'allow the tabloids of quinine or lithia, and 
 fall back on the hard, coarse pillow, exhausted by the mere ef- 
 fort of unscrewing the nickel-cap of the little phial, and tell 
 himself that he was getting stronger. Sometimes he really 
 was so, and then the child sat on his wide hollow chest, and 
 played with the beard that was now all grey and unkempt and 
 matted, until some word in her baby prattle, some look of 
 wondering inquiry in the innocent eyes, golden-hazel and black- 
 lashed, like his own, that were almost too beautiful to be a 
 man's, people used to say, like the weak, passionate, gentle 
 mouth under the heavy moustache, would bring back all the 
 anguish of his loss, and weaken anew that torturing voice that 
 accused him of being false to his compact with the dead. Then 
 he would call, and send the child away, borne in the arms 
 of the Hottentot chambermaid to breathe the fresh air upon the 
 veld. And, left alone, he would draw up the rough sheets 
 over his head, with gaunt clutching fingers, and weep, though 
 sometimes no tears came to moisten his hangard, staring eyes.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 13 
 
 One night, while the flat gold hunting-watch ticked above 
 his head in the little embroidered chamois-leather pouch her 
 hands had worked, Knowledge came to him with a sudden rigor 
 of the muscles of the wasted body, and a bursting forth from 
 every pore of the dank, dark-hued sweat of coming dissolu- 
 tion. 
 
 He was not ever going to get well, and fetch the clergyman 
 to pray over and bless her resting-place. He was going to 
 die and lie beside her there, under the red earth topped by the 
 boulder-cairn. He smiled. What an easy solution of the 
 problem ! He had been too intent upon gratifying her last de- 
 sire to entertain for a moment the thought of suicide. He had 
 always held self-destruction as the last resource of the coward 
 and the criminal, and besides there was the child. 
 
 The child! . . . 
 
 With a pang of dread and terror unfelt by him before he 
 raised his gaunt head with an effort from the uneasy pillow, 
 and looked towards where she lay, with staring, haunted eyes. 
 The window was open a little way at the top, and for fear of 
 the night-chill his fine leopard-skin kaross had been spread over 
 her. . . . One dimpled, rounded, bare arm lay upon the soft 
 dappled fur, the babyish fingers curled one upon the other. 
 Rosy human tendrils that should never twine again in a 
 mother's hair. Her child, her daughter! . . . Born of her 
 body, sharing her nature and her sex, soon to be orphaned. 
 For he who could not even lift himself from bed, and drag 
 his body across the floor to cover that lovely babyish arm, 
 would soon be no better protector than the restless ghost that 
 tugged at his heart with its unseen hands. He knew now why 
 it could not rest. 
 
 What would become of the child? Another fiery scourge, 
 wielded by the Hand Unseen, bit deep into his shrinking con- 
 science, into his writhing soul. His own act had brought this 
 about. Be a cur, and accuse Destiny, blame Fate, lay the onus 
 upon God, as so many defaulters do he could not. He lay 
 looking his deed in the foul face until the dawn crept up the 
 sky, and learning how it may be that the sins of their fathers 
 are visited on the children. 
 
 He called for ink and paper as soon as the house was awake, 
 and with infinite labour and many pauses to recover spent 
 strength and breath, for he was greedy of life now, for the 
 reason that we know he wrote a letter home to England, to 
 one who was the head of his House 4 and bore a great old name
 
 14 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 so great a name that those who spelled it out upon the en- 
 velope were half afraid to slip the heated knife under the 
 crested seal. But Bough did it, and opened, and read. 
 
 It was not going to be the soft snap he had thought, but it 
 would be good enough. Wires might be pulled from Down- 
 ing Street that would set the Government at Cape Town work- 
 ing to trace the tall thin Englishman who had travelled up 
 with two waggons from Cape Colony in the company of a child 
 and the woman now dead, and for whose sake he had given 
 up those almighty swell connections. What a fool what a 
 thundering, juicy, damned fool the man had been! whose gaunt 
 eyes were even now making out the landfall of Kingdom Come 
 beyond the distant mountain-ranges. 
 
 The letter worried Bough. To have the English Govern- 
 ment smelling at your heels is no joke. Any moment the 
 mastiff may grip, and then, if you happen to be an ex-convict 
 and deserter from their Colonial Police, and if you have one 
 or two other little things against you . . . the White Slave 
 traffic, such a profitable source of wealth to honest speculators, 
 suppose you had had to get a speedy move on you from Port 
 Elizabeth, and maybe somewhere else, all along of that? And 
 that other even more profitable business of gun-running from 
 the English ports through to the Transvaal. By men like 
 Bough and his associates vast supplies of munitions and engines 
 of war were wormed through. The machine-guns in carefully 
 numbered parts came in cases as " agricultural implements," 
 the big guns travelled in the boilers of locomotives, the empty 
 cases of the shells, large and small, were packed in piano-cases, 
 or in straw-filled crates as " hardware " ; the black powder and 
 the cordite and the lyddite came in round wooden American 
 cheese-boxes, with a special mark; and the Mauser cartridges 
 were soldered in tins like preserved meat. How handsomely 
 that business paid only Bough and his merry men, and Oom 
 Paul and his burghers of the Volksraad, knew. 
 
 But Her Majesty's Government, bound about with red-tape, 
 hoodwinked by Dutch Assistant-Commissioners of British Colo- 
 nies, and deceived by traitorous English officials, were blind 
 and deaf to the huge traffic in arms and munitions. Not that 
 there were no warnings. To the very end they were shouted in 
 deaf ears. 
 
 What of that letter sent from the Resident Commissioner's 
 office at Gueldersdorp, that little frontier hamlet on the north- 
 east corner of British Baraland, September 4, 1899, little more
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 15 
 
 than a month before the war broke out, the war that was to> 
 leave Britain and her Colonies bleeding at every vein? 
 
 The Boers were in laager over the border. A desperate ap- 
 peal for help had been made to the Powers that were, and the 
 reply received to the now historic telegram, through the Resi- 
 dent Commissioner, has equally become a matter of history. 
 
 If ever a book shall be written entitled " The History of 
 Ignorance," that is. 
 
 " All that was possible " was being done by the Imperial 
 authorities, His Excellency assured the inquirer, to safeguard 
 the lives and property of the inhabitants of the Gold-Reef 
 Town in the extent of an attack by a hostile force. 
 
 Also the military armament of the place was about to be ma- 
 terially increased. 
 
 And yet up to the little frontier town upon which so much de- 
 pended not a single modern gun had been despatched. 
 
 An easy prey had the little town upon the flat-topped hill, 
 set in the mi'ddle of a basin, proved to the Boer General and his 
 commandos but for one thing. For weeks after the bursting 
 of the first shell over Gueldersdorp three sides of the belea- 
 guered town were so many open doors for the enemy. Only 
 upon the threshold of each door stood Fear, and guarded and 
 held the citadel. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THAT hard taskmaster, Satan, is sometimes wonderfully in- 
 dulgent to those who serve him well. While Bough, the 
 keeper of the tavern, was yet turning about the open letter 
 in his thick, short, hairy hands, weighing the chances attend- 
 ing the sending of it against the chances of keeping it back, 
 the woman who served as mistress of the place thrust her 
 coarsely-waved head of yellow bleached hair and rouge-ruddled 
 face in at the room door, and called to him : 
 
 " Boss, the sick toff is doing a croak. Giving up the ghost 
 for all he's worth he is. Better come and take a look for 
 yourself if you don't believe me." 
 
 Bough swore with relief and surprise, delayed only to lock 
 away the letter, and went to take a look. It was as he hoped, 
 a real stroke of luck for a man who knew how to work it. 
 And he knew now what he would do. 
 
 Richard Mildare for Bough knew now what had been the 
 name of the Englishman: Ma lor the Hon. Richard Mildare,
 
 16 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 late of the Grey Hussars was dead. No hand made murder- 
 ous by the lust of gold had helped him to his death. Sudden 
 failure of the heart is common in aggravated cases of rheumatic 
 fever, and with one suffocating struggle, one brief final pang, 
 he had gone to join her he loved. But his dead face did not 
 look at rest. There was some reflection in it of that terror 
 that had come upon him in the watches of that last night. 
 
 Bough stayed some time alone in the room of death. When 
 he came out he was extremely affable and gentle. The woman, 
 who knew him, chuckled to herself when he met the Kaffir 
 serving-maid bringing back the child from an airing in the sun, 
 and told her to take it to the mistress. Then he went into the 
 bar-room to speak to the Englishman's Boer driver. 
 
 Leaning easily upon the zinc-covered counter he spoke to 
 the man in the Taal, with which he was perfectly familiar: 
 
 " Your Baas has gone in, as my wife and I expected." 
 
 Smoots Beste growled in his throat: 
 
 " He was no Baas of mine, the verdoemte rooinek! I drove 
 for him for pay, that is all. There is wage owing me still, 
 for the matter of that and where am I to get it now that the 
 heathen has gone to the burning? " 
 
 Smoots, who was all of a heathen himself, and regularly 
 got drunk, not only on week days, but on Sabbaths, felt virtu- 
 ously certain that the Englishman had gone to Hell. 
 
 Bough smiled and poured out a four-finger swig of bad Cape 
 brandy, and pushed it across the counter. 
 
 " You shall get the money, every tikkie. Only listen to 
 me." 
 
 Smoots Beste tossed off the fiery liquid, and returned in a tone 
 less surly: 
 
 " I am listening, Baas." 
 
 Bough told him, speaking with the thickish lisp and slurring 
 of the consonants that distinguished his speech when he sought 
 to appear more simple and candid than usual. 
 
 " This dead toff, with his flash waggon and fine team, and 
 Winchester repeating-rifles, had very little money. He has 
 died in my debt for the room and the nursing, and the good 
 nourishment, for which I trusted him all these three weeks, 
 and I am a poor man. The dollars I have paid you and the 
 Kaffir and the Cape boys on his account came out of my own 
 pocket. Rotten soft have I acted over him, that's the God's 
 truth, and when I shall get back my own there's no knowing. 
 But, of course, I shall act
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 17 
 
 The Boer's thick lips parted in a grin, showing his dirty, 
 greenish-yellow teeth. He scratched his shaggy head, and said, 
 his tongue lubricated to incautiousness by the potent liquor: 
 
 " The waggons, and the oxen, and the guns and ammunition, 
 and the stores in the second waggon are worth good money. 
 And the woman that is dead had jewels I have seen them on 
 her diamonds and rubies in rings and bracelets fit for the 
 vrouw of King Solomon himself. The Englishman did not 
 bury them with her under that verdoemte kopje that he built 
 with his two hands, and they are not in the boxes in the living- 
 wagon." 
 
 " Did he not?" asked Bough, looking the Boer driver full 
 in the eyes with a pleasant smile. " Are they not?" 
 
 Smoots Beste's piggish eyes twinkled round the bar-room., 
 looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, anywhere but into 
 Bough's face. He spat, and said in a much more docile tone: 
 
 " What do you want me to do ? " 
 
 Bough leaned over the counter, and said confidentially: 
 
 " Just this, friend. I want you to inspan, and take one of 
 the waggons up to Gueldersdorp, with a letter from me to the 
 Civil Commissioner. I will tell him how the man is dead, 
 and he will send down a magistrate's clerk to put a seal on the 
 boxes and cases, and then he will go through the letters and 
 papers in the pocket-book, and write to the people of the dead 
 man over in England, supposing he has any, for I have heard 
 him tell my wife there was not a living soul of his name now, 
 except the child " 
 
 " But what good will all this do you and me, Baas?" asked 
 the Boer subserviently. 
 
 Bough spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Why, when the magistrates and lawyers have hunted up 
 the man's family, there will be an order to sell the waggons 
 and oxen and other property to pay the expenses of his bury- 
 ing, and the child's keep here and passage from Cape Town, if 
 she is to be sent to England . . . and what is left over, see 
 you, after the law expenses have been paid, will go to the 
 settlement of our just claims. They will never let honest men 
 suffer for behaving square, sure no, they'll not do that! ' 
 
 But though Bough's words were full of faith in the fair deal- 
 ing of the lawyers and magistrates, his tone implied doubt. 
 
 " Boer lawyers are slim rogues at best, and Engelsch lawyers 
 are duyvels as well as rogues," said Smoots Beste, with a dull 
 flash of originality.
 
 i ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Bough nodded, and pushed another glass of liquor across the 
 bar. 
 
 " And that's true enough. I've a score to settle with one 
 or two of 'em. By gum! I call myself lucky to be in this 
 with a square man like you. There's the waggon, brand-new 
 you know what it cost at Cape Town and the team, I trust 
 you to take up to Gueldersdorp, and who's to hinder a man who 
 hasn't the fear of the Lord in him for heading north instead 
 of north-west, selling the waggon and the beasts at Kreilstad 
 or Schoenbroon, and living on a snug farm of your own for 
 the rest of your life under another man's name, where the 
 English magistrates and the police will never find you, though 
 their noses were keener than the wild dogs? " 
 
 " Allemachtig ! " gasped Smoots Beste, rendered breathless 
 by the alluring, tempting prospect. Surely the devil spoke 
 with the voice of the tavern-keeper Bough, when, in human 
 form, he tempted children of men. Sweat glistened on his 
 flabby features, his thick hands trembled, and his bowels were 
 as water. But his purpose was solidifying in his brain as he 
 said innocently, looking over Bough's left shoulder at the 
 wooden partition that divided off the bar from the landlord's 
 dwelling-room : 
 
 " Aye, I am no dirty schelom that cannot be trusted. There- 
 fore would it not be better if I took both teams and waggons, 
 and all the rooinek's goods with me up to Gueldersdorp, and 
 handed it over to the Engelsch landrost there ? " 
 
 The fish was hooked. Bough said, steadily avoiding those 
 twirling eyes: 
 
 " A good notion, but the lawyer chaps at Gueldersdorp will 
 want to look at the Englishman's dead body to be able to satisfy 
 his people that he did not die of a gunshot, or of a knife- 
 thrust; we must bury him, of course, but not too deep for them 
 to dig him up again. And they will want to ferret in all the 
 corners of the room where he died, and make sure that his 
 bags and boxes have not been tampered with and then there 
 is the child. In a way " he spoke slowly and apologetically 
 " the Kid and the goods are my security for getting my own 
 back again if ever I do. So you will inspan one of the 
 waggons, the best if you like, with a team of six beasts, and 
 you will trek up to Gueldersdorp you will travel light enough 
 with only the grub you will need, and the Cape boys, and you 
 will hand over the letter to the Resident Magistrate, and bring 
 back the man who will act as his deputy."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 19 
 
 But at this point Smoots Beste set down his splay foot. He 
 would undertake to deliver the letter, but he objected to the 
 company of the coloured voor-loopers or the Kaffir driver. He 
 was firm upon that and, finding his most honeyed persuasions 
 of no avail, Bough said no more. He would pay off the niggers 
 and dismiss them, or get rid of them without paying; there 
 were ways and means. He sent up country, and the team came 
 down, six thin, over-worked creatures, with new scars upon 
 their slack and baggy hides, and hollow flanks, and ribs that 
 showed painfully. Smoots Beste was about to grumble, but 
 he changed his mind, and took the letter, buttoning it up in 
 the flapped pocket of his tan-cord jacket, and the long whip 
 cracked like a revolver as the lash hissed out over the backs 
 of the wincing oxen, and the white tilt rocked over the veld, 
 heading to the nor'-west. 
 
 "When will the Dutchy be back, boss?" asked the woman, 
 with a knowing look. 
 
 Bough played the game up to her. He answered quite seri- 
 ously: "In three weeks' time." 
 
 Then he strolled out smoking a cigar, his hat tilted at an 
 angle that spoke of satisfaction. His walk led him past the 
 oblong cairn of ironstone boulders in the middle of the sandy 
 patch of ground enclosed with zinc wire-netting. At the foot 
 of the cairn was a new grave. 
 
 So the lover did not even lie beside his beloved, as he had 
 vow r ed once, promised and planned, but couched below her 
 feet, waiting, like some faithful hound that could not live with- 
 out the touch of the beloved hand, for the dead to rise again. 
 
 Why is it that Failure is the inevitable fate of some men 
 and women? Despite brilliant prospects, positions that seem 
 assured, commanding talents nobly used, splendid opportunities 
 that are multiplied as though in mockery, the result is Nothing 
 from the first to last; while the bad flourish and the evil 
 prosper, and the world honours the stealer of the fruit of the 
 brains that have been scattered in frenzied despair, or have 
 become so worn out from the constant effort of creation that 
 the worker has sunk into hopeless apathy and died. 
 
 Bough was not one of those men whose plans come to noth- 
 ing. He had prospered as a rogue of old in England, really 
 his native country, though he called himself an Afrikander. 
 Reared in the gutters of the Irish quarter of Liverpool, he had 
 early learned to pilfer for a living, had prospered in prison as 
 sharp young gaol-birds may prosper, and returned to it -again
 
 to ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and again, until, having served out part of a sentence for 
 burglary and obtained his ticket-of-leave, he hi:d shifted his 
 convict's skin, and made his way out to Cape Colony under a 
 false name and character. He had made a mistake, it was true, 
 enlisting as a trooper of Colonial Police, but the step had been 
 forced upon him by circumstances. Then he had deserted, and 
 had since been successful as a white-slave dealer at Port 
 Elizabeth, and as a gold-miner in the Transvaal, and he had 
 done better and better still at that ticklish trade of gun-running 
 for Oom Paul. For, get caught only once get caught and 
 the Imperial Government authorities, under whose noses you 
 had been playing the game with impunity for years, made it as 
 hot as Hell for you. Bough, however, did not mean ever to 
 get caught. There was always another man, a semi-innocent 
 dupe, who would appear to have been responsible for every- 
 thing, and who would get pinched. 
 
 Such a dupe now trudged at the head of the meagre three- 
 span ox-team. When, after a hard day's toil, he at length 
 outspanned, the waggon-pole still faithfully pointed to the 
 north-west. But before it was yet day the waggon began to 
 move again, and it was to the north that the waggon-pole 
 pointed thenceforwards, and the letter Bough had given Smoots 
 Beste for the City Resident Magistrate at Gueldersdorp was 
 saved from the kindling of the camp-fire by a mere accident. 
 
 The cat's-paw could not read, or the illegible, meaningless 
 ink scrawl upon the sheet within the boldly-addressed envelope 
 would have aroused his suspicions at the outset. So well had 
 Bough, that expert in human frailty, understood his subject, 
 that the letter was a bogus letter, a fraud, not elaborate a 
 mere stage property, nothing more. But yet he gave it in full 
 belief that it would be burned, and that, the boats of Smoots 
 Beste being consumed with it, according to the thick judgment 
 of the said Smoots, it would be as a pillar of fire behind that 
 slim child of the old voor-trekkers, hastening his journey north. 
 It is typical of the class of Smoots that it never once occurred 
 to Smoots to go east. 
 
 But Smoots Beste never bought a farm wifh the price of 
 the oxen and the high-bulwarked, teak-built, waterproof-canvas 
 tilted waggon that had cost such a good round sum. There 
 was a big rainfall on the third day. It began with the typical 
 African thunderstorm deafening, continuous rolls and crashes 
 of heavy cloud-artillery, and lightning that blazed and darted 
 without intermission, and ran zigzagging in a horrible, deadly,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 21 
 
 playful fashion over the veld, as though looking for dishonest 
 folks to shrivel. One terrible flash struck the wheel-oxen, a 
 thin double tongue of blue flame sped flickering from ridge to 
 ridge of the six gaunt backs . . . there was a smell of burning 
 hair a reek of sulphur. The team lay outstretched dead on 
 the veld, the heavy yoke across their patient necks, the long 
 horns curving, the thin starved bodies already beginning to 
 bloat and swell in the swift decomposition that follows death 
 by the electric fluid. 
 
 Smoots Beste crawled under the waggon, and, remembering 
 all he had heard his father spell out from the Dutch Bible 
 about the Judgment Day, and the punishment of sinners in 
 everlasting flame, felt very ill at ease. The storm passed over, 
 and the rain rained all through the night, but dawn brought 
 in a clear blue day; and with it a train of eight transport- 
 waggons, and several wearied, muddy droves of sheep and cat- 
 tle, the property of the Imperial Government Commissariat De- 
 partment, Gueldersdorp, being taken from Basutoland East up 
 to Gueldersdorp, under convoy of an escort of B.S.A. Police. 
 To the non-commissioned officer in command Smoots Beste, 
 resigned to the discharge of a trust, handed the letter for the 
 Civil Commissioner. 
 
 The sergeant, sitting easily in the saddle, looked at the illeg- 
 ible inky flymarks on the envelope, and smelt rats. Then he 
 coolly opened the supposed letter. It contained a blank sheet 
 of paper, but he did not let Smoots see that. Then the follow- 
 ing brief dialogue took place: 
 
 " You were trekking up to Gueldersdorp," he said to the 
 decidedly nervous Smoots, " to fetch down a Deputy Civil 
 Commissioner to deal with the effects of a dead English 
 traveller, at a house kept by the man who wrote this letter 
 that is, three days' trek over the veld to the southward, and 
 called the Free State Hotel ? " 
 
 Smoots nodded heavily. The dapper sergeant cocked his 
 felt smasher hat, and turned between pleasantly smiling lips 
 the cigar he was smoking. Then he pointed with his riding- 
 whip, a neatly varnished sjambok, with a smart silver top, to 
 the north-west. 
 
 " There lies Gueldersdorp. Rum that when the lightning 
 killed the ox-team you should have been trekking due north, 
 isn't it?" 
 
 Smoots Beste agreed that it was decidedly rum. 
 
 The sergeant said, without a change in his agreeable smile:
 
 22 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " All right ; you can inspan six of our drove-bullocks, and 
 drive the waggon with us to Gueldersdorp." 
 
 " Thank you, Baas ! " said Smoots, without enthusiasm. 
 
 " If you like to take the risk," added the sergeant, who had 
 not quite finished. He ended with an irrepressible outburst 
 of honest indignation: "Why, you blasted, thieving Dutch 
 scum, do you think I don't know you were stealing that span 
 and waggon ? " 
 
 And as Smoots, sweating freely, unyoked the dead oxen, he 
 decided in his heavy mind that he would be missing long be- 
 fore the convoy got to Gueldersdorp. 
 
 Nine waggons rolled on where only eight had been before. 
 The mounted men hurried on the daubed and wearied droves 
 of Commissariat beasts. Smoots Beste drove the scratch team 
 of bullocks, but his heart was as water within his belly, and 
 there \vas no resonance in the smack of his whip. When the 
 convoy came to a town, he vanished, and the story thenceforth 
 knows him no more. The discreet sergeant of police did not 
 even notice that he was missing until several days later, when 
 the end of the journey was near at hand. He was a sober, 
 careful man, and a good husband. He shortly afterwards 
 made quite a liberal remittance to his wife, and his troopers 
 pushed Kruger half-sovereigns across most of the bars in Guel- 
 dersdorp shortly after the purchase by a Dopper farmer of a 
 teak-built Cape waggon that a particular friend of the ser- 
 geant's had got to sell. And they were careful, at first, not 
 to wag loose tongues. But as time went on the story of the 
 English traveller who had brought the body of the woman to 
 the Free State Hotel, so many days' trek to the southward from 
 Gueldersdorp, trickled from lip to lip. And years later, ten 
 years too late, it came to the ears of a friend of dead Richard 
 Mildare. 
 
 The sergeant maintained silence. He was a careful officer, 
 and a discreet man, and, what is more, religious. In con- 
 troversial arguments with the godless he would sometimes 
 employ a paraphrase of the story of Smoots Beste to strengthen 
 his side. 
 
 " A chap's a blamed fool that doesn't believe in God, I tell 
 you. I was once after a bung-nosed Dutch thief of a transport- 
 driver, that had waltzed away with a brand-new Cape cart and 
 a team of first-class mules. Taking 'em up to Pretoiia on the 
 quiet, to sell 'em to Oom Paul's burghers, he was. Ay, they 
 were worth a tidy lump! A storm came on a regular Vaal
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 23 
 
 display of sky fireworks. The rain came down like gun-barrels, 
 the veld turned into a swamp, but he kept on after the Dutch- 
 man, who drove like gay old Hell. Presently comes a blue 
 blaze and a splitting crack, as if a comet had come shouldering 
 into the map of South Africa, and knocked its head in. We 
 pushed on, smelling sulphur, burnt flesh, and hair ' By gum ! ' 
 said I ; ' something's got it ' : and I was to rights. The Cape 
 cart stood on the veld, without a scratch on the paintwork. 
 The four mules lay in their traces, deader than pork. The 
 Dutchman sat on the box, holding the lines and his voorslaag, 
 and grinning. He was dead, too struck by the lightning in 
 the act of stealing those mules and that Cape cart. Don't let 
 any fellow waste hot air after that trying to persuade me that 
 there isn't such a thing as an overruling Providence." 
 
 Thus the sergeant: and his audience, whether Free-thinkers, 
 Agnostics, or believers, would break up, feeli"^ jiat one who 
 has the courage of his opinions is a respectable man- 
 As for Bough, in whose hands even the astute ^ergeant had 
 been as a peeled rush, we may go back and fini him counting 
 money in gold and notes that had been taken from the belt of 
 the dead English traveller. 
 
 Seventeen hundred pounds, good cash a pretty windfall 
 for an honest man. The honest man whistled softly, handling 
 the white crackling notes, and feeling the smooth, heavy Eng- 
 lish sovereigns slip between his ringers. 
 
 There were certificates of Rand stock, also a goodly amount 
 of Colonial Railway shares, and some foreign bonds, all of 
 which could be realized on, but at a distance, and by a skilled 
 hand. There were jewels, as the Boer waggon-driver had said, 
 that had belonged to the dead woman diamond rings, and a 
 bracelet or two ; and there were silk dresses of lovely hues and 
 texture, and cambric and linen dresses, and tweed dresses, in 
 the trunks; and a great cloak of sables, trimmed with many, 
 tails, and beautiful underclothing of silk and linen, trimmed 
 with real lace, over which the mouth of the woman of the 
 tavern watered. She got some of the dresses and all the un- 
 dergarments when Bough had dexterously picked out the em- 
 broidered initials. He knew diamonds and rubies, but he had 
 never been a judge of lace. 
 
 There was a coronet upon one or two handkerchiefs that had 
 been overlooked when the dead woman had burned the others 
 four years before. Bough picked these out too, working deftly 
 with a needle.
 
 24 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 He was clever, very clever. He could take to pieces a steam- 
 engine or a watch, and put it together again. He knew all 
 there is to know about locks, and how they may best be opened 
 without their keys. He could alter plate-marks with graving 
 tools and the jeweller's blow-pipe, and test metals with acids, 
 and make plaster-cast moulds that would turn out dollars and 
 other coins, remarkably like the real thing. He was not a 
 clever forger; he had learned to write somewhat late in life, 
 and the large, bold roundhand, with the capital letters that 
 invariably began with the wrong quirk or twirl, was too char- 
 acteristic, though he wrote anonymous letters sometimes, risk- 
 ing detection in the enjoyment of what was to him a dear de- 
 light, only smaller than that other pleasure of moulding bodies 
 to his own purposes, of lust, or gain, or malice. 
 
 IV 
 
 THERE was a child in the tavern on the veld; it lay in an 
 old orange-box, half-filled with shavings, covered with a thin, 
 worn blanket, in the daub-and-wattle outhouse, where the 
 Hottentot woman, called the chambermaid, and the Kaffir 
 woman, who was cook, slept together on one filthy pallet. 
 Sometimes they stayed up at the tavern, drinking and carous- 
 ing with the Dutch travellers who brought the supplies of 
 Hollands and Cape brandy and lager beer, and the American 
 or English gold-miners and German drummers who put up 
 there from time to time. Then the child lay in the outhouse 
 alone. It was a frail, puny creature, always frightened and 
 silent. It lived on a little mealie pap and odd bits of roasted 
 cakes that were thrown to it as though it were a dog. When 
 the coloured women forgot to feed it, they said : " It does not 
 matter. Anyhow, the thing will die soon ! " But it lived on 
 when another child would have died. . . . There was some- 
 thing uncanny about its great-eyed silence and its tenacious hold 
 on life. 
 
 It had only been able to toddle when brought to the tavern. 
 The rains and thunderstorms of spring went by, the summer 
 passed, and it could walk about. It was a weakly little crea- 
 ture, with great frightened eyes, amber-brown, with violet flecks 
 in their black-banded irises, and dark, thick lashes; and the 
 delicately-drawn eyebrows were dark too, though its hair was 
 soft yellow just the colour of a chicken's down. Many a
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 25 
 
 cuff it got, and many a hard word, when its straying feet 
 brought it into the way of the rough life up at the tavern. 
 But still the scrap of food was tossed to it, and the worn-out 
 petticoat roughly cobbled into a garment for its little body; 
 for Bough was a charitable man. 
 
 It wa$ a P r orphan, he explained to people, the child of a 
 consumptive emigrant Englishman who had worked for the 
 landlord of the tavern, and left this burden for other shoulders 
 when he died. Charitable travellers frequently left benefac- 
 tions towards the little one's clothing and keep. Bough will- 
 ingly took charge of the money. The child strayed here, there, 
 and everywhere. It was often lost, but nobody looked for it, 
 and it always came back. It liked to climb the cairn of bould- 
 ers, or to sit on the long, low hillock at the cairn's foot. The 
 wire fencing had long been removed from the enclosure; it 
 had gone to make a chicken-pen in a more suitable spot. The 
 cross had been taken down when a prop was wanted for the 
 clothes-line. 
 
 The child, often beaten by Bough and the woman of the 
 tavern, might have been even worse treated by the coloured 
 servants but for those two graves out on the veld. Black 
 blood flows thick with superstition, and both the Kaffir cook 
 and the snuff-coloured Hottentot chambermaid nourished a 
 wholesome dread of spooks. Who knew but that the white 
 woman's ghost would rise out of the kopje there, some dark 
 night, and pinch and cuff and thump and beat people who had 
 ill-used her bantling? As for the dead man buried at her 
 feet, his dim shape had often been seen by one of the Basuto 
 stablemen, keeping guard before the heap of boulders, in the 
 white blaze of the moon-rays, or the paler radiance of a starry 
 night, or more often of a night of mist and rain ; not moving 
 as a sentry moves, but upright and still, with shining fiery eyes 
 in his shadowy face, and with teeth that showed, as the dead 
 grin. After that none of the servants would pass near these 
 two graves later than sundown, and Bough welted the Basuto 
 boy with an ox-reim for scaring silly jades of women with lying 
 tales. But then Bough avoided the spot by day as well as by 
 night. Therefore, it became a constant place of refuge for the 
 child, who now slept in the outhouse alone. 
 
 In the long, brilliant winter nights she would leave the 
 straw-stuffed sack that had been her bed ever since the orange- 
 box had been broken up, and climb the stone-heaps, and look 
 over the lonely veld, and stare up at the great blazing constella-
 
 26 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 tion of the Southern Cross. In spring, when pools and river- 
 beds were full of foaming beer-coloured water, and every kloof 
 and donga was brimmed with flowers and ferns, she would be 
 drawn away by these, would return, trailing after her arm- 
 fuls of rare blooms, and thenceforward, until these faded, the 
 ridgy grave-mound and the heaped cairn of boulders would be 
 gay with them. She never took them to the house. It might 
 have meant a beating so many things did. 
 
 In August, when the little apricots and peaches were as large 
 as the dice Bough threw with customers for drinks, she would 
 wander in the orchard belonging to the house, while the heavy 
 tropical rains drummed on the leaves overhead, and sudden 
 furious thunderstorms rent the livid-coloured clouds above with 
 jagged scythes and reaping-hooks of white electric fire, or leap- 
 ing, dancing, playing, vanishing tongues of thin blue. Once 
 this fire struck a krantz, under the lee of which the child was 
 sheltering, and made a black scorched mark all down the cliff- 
 face, but left the child unscathed. 
 
 No one had ever taught her anything; no one had ever laid 
 a gentle hand upon her. When she first saw mothers and 
 daughters, friend and friend, sweetheart and sweetheart kiss, 
 it seemed to her that they licked each other, as friendly dogs 
 do. She had no name that she knew of. 
 
 " You kid, go there. You kid, fetch this or bring that. 
 You kid, go to the drift for water, or take the besom and sweep 
 the stoep, or scrub out the room there do you hear, you kid ? " 
 These orders came thick and fast when at last she was old 
 enough to work; and she was old enough when she was very 
 young, and did work like a little beast of burden. A real 
 mother's heart all mothers are not real ones would have ' 
 ached to see the dirt and bruises on the delicate childish limbs, 
 and the vermin that crawled under the yellow rings of hair. 
 How to be clean and tidy nobody had ever shown her, though 
 she had learned by instinct other things. 
 
 That it was best to bear hunger and pain in silence, lest 
 worse befell. That a truth for which one suffers is not as good 
 as a lie for which one gets a bigger roasten cake, or the scrap- 
 ings of the syrup-can. That to little, weak, and feeble crea- 
 tures of their race grown human beings can be marvellously 
 cruel. That the devil lived down in the Kraals with the 
 Kaffirs, and that God was a swear. It is a wonder that she 
 had not sunk into idiocy, or hopelessly sicken and die, neglected, 
 ill-used, half-starved as she was. But the bright intelligence
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 27 
 
 under the neglected mass of yellow curls struck out a spark 
 to save her, or He Who seemed to have forgotten her remem- 
 bered the little one. She might have been six years of age 
 when the Lady began coming. And after the first time, with 
 very brief intervals, she came every night. 
 
 As soon as you lay down on the sack of straw in the corner 
 of the outhouse, slipping out of the ragged frock if the 
 weather were hot, or pulling the thin old horse-blanket over 
 you if the night were a cold one, keeping your eyes tight shut, 
 for this was quite indispensable, you looked into the thick dark, 
 shot with gleams of lovely colours, sometimes with whirling 
 rings of stars, and gradually, as you looked, all these con- 
 centrated into two stars, large and not twinkling, but softly 
 radiant, and you w r ere happy, for you knew that the Lady was 
 coming. 
 
 For she always came, even when you had been most wicked, 
 when you were sent to bed without even the supper crust to 
 gnaw, and when your body and arms and legs were bruised and 
 aching from the beating they told you you deserved. The 
 stars would go a long way off, and while you tingled and 
 trembled and panted with expectation, would come back again 
 as eyes. Looking up into them, you saw them clearly; the 
 rest of the person they belonged to arrived quite a little while 
 after her eyes were there. Such eyes neither grey, nor brown, 
 nor violet, but a mingling of all these colours, and deepening 
 as you gazed up into them into bottomless lakes of love. 
 
 Then her face, framed in a soft darkness, which was hair 
 the Kid never knew of what colour her face formed itself 
 out of the darkness that framed those eyes, and a warm, balmy 
 breath came nearer, and you were kissed. No other lips, in 
 your short remembrance, had ever touched you. You had 
 learned the meaning of a kiss only from her, and hers was so 
 long and close that your heart left off beating, and only began 
 again when it was over. Then arms that were soft and warm, 
 and strong and beautiful, came around you and gathered you 
 in, and you fell asleep folded closely in them, or you lay awake, 
 and the Lady talked to you in a voice that was mellow as 
 honey and soft as velvet, and sounded like the cooing of the 
 wild pigeons that nested in the krantzes. or the sighing of the
 
 28 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 wind among the high veld grasses, and the murmur of the 
 little river playing among the boulders and gurgling between 
 the roots of the tree-fern. You talked, too, and told her 
 everything. * And no matter how bad you had been, though 
 she was sorry, because she hated badness, she loved you just as 
 dearly as she did when you were good. And oh! how you 
 loved her how you loved her! 
 
 " Please," you said that night when she came first you 
 remember it quite well, though it is so long ago " please, why 
 did you never come before? " 
 
 And she answered, with her cool, sweet, fragrant lips upon 
 your eyelids, and your head upon her breast: 
 
 " Because you never wanted me so much as now." 
 
 " Please take me back home with you," you said, holding 
 her fast. And she answered in the voice that is always like 
 the sigh of the wind amongst the tree-tops and the murmur 
 of the river: 
 
 " I cannot yet but I will come again." 
 
 And she does come, and again and again. By degrees, 
 though she comes to you only at night, when the outhouse is 
 dark, or lighted only by the stars or the moonshine, you learn 
 exactly what the Lady is like. 
 
 She wears a silken, softly-rustling gown that is of any lovely 
 colour you choose. The hue of the blue overarching sky at 
 midday, or the tender rose of dawn, or of the violet clouds 
 that bar the flaming orange-ruby of the sunset, or the 
 mysterious robe of twilight drapes her, or her garment sable as 
 the Night. The grand sweep of her shoulders and the 
 splendid pillar of her throat reveal the beauty of her form 
 even to the eyes of an untaught, neglected child. Her face is 
 pale, but as full of sunlight as of shadow, and her eyes are 
 really grey and deep as mountain lakes. The sorrow of all 
 the world and all its joy seem to have rolled over her like 
 many waters, and when she smiles the sweetness of it is always 
 almost more than the Kid can bear. 
 
 Who is the Lady? 
 
 She has no other name than that. She is very, very good, as 
 well as beautiful, and you can bear to tell her when you have 
 been most wicked, because she is so sorry for you. She can 
 play with you, and laugh .so softly and clearly and gaily that 
 you, who have never learned but to dread grown people's cruel 
 merriment, join in and laugh too. When she laughs the 
 corners of her eyes crinkle so like the corners of her lips that
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 29 
 
 you have to kiss them, and there are dimples that come with 
 the laughter, and make her dearer than ever. 
 
 Who is the Lady, tall, and strong, and tender? That dead 
 woman lying out there under the Little Kopje was small, and 
 slight, and frail. Who may the Lady be? Is she a dream 
 or a mere illusion born of loneliness and starvation, of physical 
 and mental? Or has Mary, the Mother of Pity, laid aside 
 her girdle of decades of golden roses, her mantle of glory, and 
 her diadem of stars, and come stepping fair-footed down the 
 stairway that Night builds between Earth and Heaven, to 
 comfort a desolate child lying in a stable who never heard the 
 story of the Christ-Babe of Bethlehem? 
 
 You ask no questions you to whom she comes. You call 
 her softly at night, stretching out your arms, and the clasp of 
 her arms answers at once. You whisper how you love her, 
 with your face hidden in her neck. The great kind Night that 
 brings her is your real, real daytime in which you live and are 
 glad. Each morning to which you waken, bringing its stint 
 of hunger and abuse and blows renewed, is only a dreadful 
 dream, you say to yourself, and so can face your world. 
 
 Oh, deep beyond fathoming, mysterious beyond comprehen- 
 sion is the hidden heart of a child 1 
 
 VI 
 
 ONE afternoon when the Kid was quite as tall as the broom 
 she swept the stoep with, she had gone to the drift for water. 
 It was a still, bright, hot day. Little puffs of rosy cloud hung 
 motionless under the burning blue sky-arch; small, gaily- 
 plumaged birds twittered in the bushes; the tiny black ants 
 scurried to and fro in the pinkish sand of the river beach. She 
 waded into the now clean, sherry-pale water to cool her hot 
 bare limbs, and, bending over, stared down into the reflected 
 eyes that looked back out of the pool. 
 
 Such a dirty little, large-eyed, wistful face, crowned by a 
 curling tousle of matted, reddish-brown-gold hair. Such a 
 neglected, sordid little figure, with thin drab shoulders sticking 
 out of a ragged calico frock. She was quite startled. She 
 had never seen herself in any glass before, though a cheap, 
 square, wooden-framed mirror hung on the wall of the bar- 
 room, with a dirty clothes-brush on a hook underneath, and 
 there were swing toilet-glasses in the bedrooms at the inn.
 
 30 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Something stirred in her, whispering in the grimy little ear, 
 " // is good to be clean" and with the awakening of the 
 maidenly instinct the womanly purpose framed. 
 
 She put off her horrible rags, and washed herself from head 
 to foot in the warm clear water. She took fine sand, and 
 scrubbed her head. She dipped and wrung and rinsed her foul 
 tatters of garments, standing naked in the shallows, the hot 
 sunshine drying her yellow curls, and warming her slight girl- 
 ish body through and through as she spread her washed rags to 
 dry on the big hot stones. 
 
 There was a man's step on the bank above her, there was 
 a rustling sound among the green bushes. She had never heard 
 of modesty, but she cowered down among the boulders, and 
 the heavy footstep passed by. She hid among the fern while 
 her clothes were drying, put them on tidily, and went back 
 with her filled water-bucket to the hotel. How could she 
 know what injury the kind peremptory voice, bidding her be 
 foul no longer, had done her? But thenceforward a new 
 cruelty, a fresh peril, attended her steps. 
 
 Bough and the white woman of the inn had quarrels often. 
 She was no wife of his. He had not brought her from Cape 
 Colony. When the hotel was built he had gone up to 
 Johannesburg on business and on pleasure, and brought her 
 back with him from an establishment he knew. He was gen- 
 erally not brutal to her except when she was ailing, when he 
 gave her medicine that made her worse, much worse so very 
 ill that she would lie groaning upon a foul neglected bed for 
 weeks, while Bough caroused with the coloured women and the 
 customers in the bar. Then, still groaning, she would drag 
 herself up and be about her work again. She did not want t& 
 go back to the house at Johannesburg. She loved the man 
 Bough in her fashion, poor bought wretch. 
 
 She had quarrelled with him many times for many things, 
 and been silenced with blows, or curses, or even caresses, were 
 he in the mood. But she had never quarrelled with him about 
 the Kid before. Now when he bought some coloured print 
 and a Boer sunbonnet, and some shifts and stockings of a 
 traveller in drapery and hosiery, and ordered her to see that 
 the girl went properly clothed thenceforward, a new terror, 
 a fresh torture, was added to the young life. The woman had 
 ignored, neglected, sometimes ill-used her, but she had never 
 hated her until now. 
 
 And Bough, the big, burly 4 dark-skinned man with the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 31 
 
 strange light eyes, and the bold, cruel, red mouth, and the 
 bushy brown whiskers, why did he follow her about with those 
 strange eyes, and smile secretly to himself ? She was no longer 
 fed on scraps; she must sit and eat at table with the man and 
 his mistress, and learn to use knife and fork. 
 
 She outgrew the dress Bough had bought her, and another, 
 and another, and this did not make Bough angry; he only 
 smiled. A man having some secret luxury or treasure locked 
 away in a secret cupboard will smile so. He knows it is there, 
 and he means to go to the hiding-place one day, but in the 
 meantime he waits, licking his lips. 
 
 The girl had always feared Bough, and shrunk from his 
 anger with unutterable terror. But the blow of his heavy 
 hand was more bearable than his smile and his jesting amiabil- 
 ity. Now, when she Went down to the Kraals on an errand, 
 or to the orchard or garden for fruit or vegetables, or to the 
 river for water as of old, she heard his long, heavy, padding 
 footsteps coming after her, and would turn and pass him with 
 downcast eyes, and go back to the inn, and take a beating for 
 not having done her errand. Beating she comprehended, but 
 this mysterious change in the man Bough filled her with sick, 
 secret loathing and dread. She did not know why she bolted 
 the door of the outhouse now when she crept to her miserable 
 bed. 
 
 Once Bough dropped into her lap a silver dollar, saying with 
 a smile that she was getting to be quite a little woman of late. 
 She leaped to her feet as though a scorpion had stung her, 
 and stood white to the very lips, and speechless, while the big 
 silver coin rolled merrily away into a distant corner, and lay 
 there. The frowzy woman with the bleached hair happened 
 to come in at that moment; or had she been spying through a 
 crack of the door? Bough pretended he had accidentally 
 dropped the coin, picked it up, and went away. 
 
 That night he and the woman quarrelled fiercely. She 
 could hear them raging at each other as she lay trembling. 
 Then came shrieks, and the dull sound of the sjambok cut- 
 ting soft human flesh. In the morning the woman had a 
 black eye; there were livid weals on her tear-blurred face. She 
 packed her boxes, snivelling. She was going back along up to 
 Johannesburg by the next western-bound transport-waggon- 
 train that should halt at the hotel thrown off like an old shoe 
 after all these years. And she was not young enough for the
 
 32 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 old life, what with hard work and hard usage and worry, and 
 she knew to whom she owed her dismissal. . . . 
 
 Ay, and if she could have throttled or poisoned the little 
 sly devil she would have done it! Only there would .have 
 been Bough to reckon with afterwards. For of God she made 
 a jest, and the devil was an old friend of hers, but she was 
 horribly afraid of the man with the brown bushy whiskers and 
 the light, steely eyes. Yet she threw herself upon him to kiss 
 him, blubbering freely, when at the week's end the Johannes- 
 burg transport-rider's waggons, returning from the district 
 town not yet linked up to the north by the railway, came in 
 sight. 
 
 Bough poured her out a big glass of liquor, his universal 
 panacea, and another for the transport-rider, with many a 
 jovial word. He would be running up to Johannesburg before 
 she had well shaken down after the journey. Then they would 
 have a rare old time, going round the bars and doing the 
 shows. Though, perhaps if she had got fixed up with a new 
 friend, some flash young fellow with pots of money, she would 
 not be wanting old faces around? 
 
 Then he turned aside to pay the transport-rider, and the 
 exile dabbed her swollen face with a rouge-stained, lace-edged 
 handkerchief, and went out to get into the waggon. 
 
 The girl stood by the stoep, staring, puzzled, overwhelmed, 
 afraid. A piece of her world was breaking off. As long as 
 she could remember anything she had known this woman. 
 She had never received any kindness from her; of late she had 
 been malignant in her hate, but she wished she was not going. 
 Instinctively she had felt that her presence was some slight 
 protection. Keeping close in the shadow of this creature's 
 frowzy skirts, she had not so feared and dreaded those light 
 eyes of Bough's, and the padding, following footsteps had kept 
 aloof. As the woman passed her now, a rage of unspeakable, 
 agonizing fear rose in her bosom. She cried out to her, and 
 clutched at her shabby gay mantle. 
 
 The woman snatched the garment from her hold. Her dis- 
 torted mouth and blazing eyes were close to the white young 
 face. She could have spat upon it. But she snarled at her 
 three words ... no more, and passed her, and got into the 
 waggon. 
 
 " Hulloa, there," said Bough, coming forward threateningly, 
 " what you rowing about, eh ? " But no one answered. The 
 girl had fled to the boulder-cairn, and the woman sat silent in
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 33 
 
 the waggon, until the weary, goaded teams moved on, and the 
 transport-train of heavy, broad-beamed vehicles lumbered away. 
 
 But the little figure on the cairn of boulders covering the 
 dust of the bosom from whence it had first drunk life sat 
 there immovable until the sun went down, pondering. 
 
 "Missis now, eh!" 
 
 What did those three words mean? 
 
 Then Bough called her, and she had to run. She served 
 as waitress of the bar that day, and the men who drove or 
 rode by and stopped for drinks, chatting in the dirty saloon, 
 or sitting in the bare front room, with the Dutch stove, and 
 the wooden forms and tables in it, that they called the coffee- 
 room, to discuss matters relative to the sale of cattle or mer- 
 chandise, stared at her hard, and several made her coarse com- 
 pliments. She refused to touch the loathly-smelling liquor they 
 offered her. Her heart beat like a little terrified bird's. And 
 she was horribly conscious of those light blue eyes of 
 Bough's following, following her, tvi'th that inscrutable look. 
 
 When the crowd had thinned he came to her. He caught 
 her arm, and pulled her near him, and said between his teeth: 
 
 " You will sleep in the mistress's room to-night." 
 
 Then he went away chuckling to himself, thinking of that 
 frightened look in her eyes. Later, he went out on horseback, 
 and did -not return. 
 
 The slatternly bedchamber, with its red turkey twill win- 
 dow-curtains and cheap gaud}' wallpaper, which had belonged 
 to the ruddled woman with the bleached hair, was a palace 
 to the little one. But she could not breathe there. Late that 
 night she rose from the big feather bed, and unfastened the 
 window shutters, and drew the blind and opened the window, 
 though the paint had stuck, and looked out upon the veld. 
 The great stars throbbed in the purple velvet darkness over- 
 head. The falling dew wetted the hand she stretched out 
 into the cool night air. She drew back the hand and touched 
 her cheek with it, and started, for the fresh, cool, fragrant 
 touch seemed like that of some other hand whose touch she 
 once had known. She thought for the first time that if the 
 woman who had been her mother, and who slept out there 
 in the dark under the boulder-cairn, had lived, she might have 
 touched her child so. Then she closed the window quickly, 
 for she heard, afar off, the gallop of a hard-ridden horse com- 
 ing nearer nearer. And she knew that. Bough was coming 
 back.
 
 34 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 He came. 
 
 She heard him dismount before the door, give the horse to 
 the sleepy Basuto ostler, and let himself into the bar. She 
 heard him clink among the glasses and bottles. She heard his 
 foot upon the stairs and upon the landing, but it did not pass 
 by. It stopped at the locked door of the room where she was. 
 
 Then his voice bade her rise and open the door. She could 
 not speak nor move. 
 
 She was dumb and paralyzed with deadly terror. She heard 
 his coaxing voice turn angry; she listened in helpless terrified 
 silence to his oaths and threats; then she heard him laugh 
 softly, and the laugh was followed by the jingle of a bunch 
 of skeleton keys. He always carried them ; they saved trouble, 
 he used to say. 
 
 They saved him trouble now. When the bent wire rattled 
 in the lock, and the key fell out upon the floor, she screamed, 
 and his coarse chuckle answered. She was cowering against 
 the wall in a corner of the room when he came in and picked 
 up the key and locked the door. But when his stretched-out, 
 grasping hand came down upon her slight shoulder, she turned 
 and bit it like some savage, desperate little animal, drawing the 
 blood. Bough swore at the sudden sting of the sharp white 
 teeth. So the little beast showed fight, eh? Well, he would 
 teach her that the master will have his way. 
 
 There was no one else in the house, and if there had been 
 it would have served her not at all. God sat in timeless 
 Eternity beyond these mists of earth, and saw, and made no 
 sign. It was not until the man Bough slept the heavy sleep 
 of liquor and satiety that the thought of flight was born in 
 her with desperate courage to escape him. The shutters had 
 been left unbolted, and the window was a little way open. She 
 sprang up and threw it wide, leaped out upon the stoep, and 
 from thence to the ground, and fled blindly, breathlessly over 
 the veld into the night. 
 
 VII 
 
 BOUGH, as soon as it was dawn, sent three of the Kaffirs 
 from the Kraals, in different directions, to search for her, and, 
 mounted on a fresh pony, took the fourth line of search him- 
 self. 
 
 He had chosen the right direction for riding down the 
 quarry. At broad high noon he came upon her, in a bare,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 35 
 
 stony place tufted with milk-bush. She was crouching under a 
 prickly-pear shrub, that threw a distorted blue shadow on the 
 sun-baked, sun-bleached ground, trying to eat the fruit in the 
 native way with two sticks. But she had no knife, and her 
 mouth was bleeding. Bough gave the tired pony both spurs 
 when the prey he hunted came in sight. She leaped up like 
 a wild cat when the mounted man rode dow*n upon her, and 
 ran, doubling like a hare. When overtaken, she fell upon her 
 face in the sand, and lay still, only shaken by her long pants. 
 Bough dismounted and caught her by the wrist and dragged 
 her up with his bandaged right hand. He beat her about her 
 cheeks with his hard, open left. Then he threw her across his 
 saddle, but she writhed down, and lay under the pony's feet. 
 
 He kicked her then, for giving so much trouble, lifted her 
 again, and tried to mount, holding her in one arm. But the 
 frightened pony swerved and backed, and the girl shrieked, 
 and struggled, and shrieked like a wild cat. She did not know 
 what mercy meant, but she saw by the look that came into 
 those light eyes that this man wbuld have none upon her. 
 She fought and bit and shrieked like a wild cat. 
 
 He took an ox-reim then, that was coiled behind his saddle, 
 and bound her hands. He tied the end of the leather rope to 
 the iron ring behind his saddle, and remounted, and spurred 
 his weary beast into a canter. The little one was forced to 
 run behind. Again and again she fell, and each time she was 
 jerked up and forced to run again upon her bleeding feet, 
 leaving rags of her garments upon the karoo-bushes and blood- 
 marks on the stones. And at last she fell, and rose no more, 
 showing no sign of life under the whip and the spur-rowel. 
 Then Bough bent over and drew his long hunting-knife and 
 cut the reim, leaving her hands still bound. If any spark of 
 life remained in the girl, he could not tell. Her knees were 
 drawn in towards her body; her eyes were open, and rolled 
 upwards; there was foam upon her torn and bleeding mouth. 
 She was as good as dead, anyway, and the wild dogs would be 
 sure to come by-and-by. Already an aasvogel was hovering 
 above; a mere speck, the great bird poised upon widespread 
 wings, high up in the illimitable blue. 
 
 Presently there would be a flock of these carrion feeders, 
 that are not averse to fresh-killed meat when it is to be had. 
 
 Bough remounted, and, humming a dance tune that was 
 often on his lips, rode away over the veld. 
 
 The great vulture wheeled. Then he dropped like a falling
 
 36 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 stone for a thousand yards or so, and hovered and dropped 
 again, getting nearer ever so much nearer with each descent. 
 And where he had hovered at the first were now a dozen 
 specks of black upon the hot, bright blue. 
 
 A wild dog crept down from a cone-topped spitzkop, and 
 stood, sniffing the blood-tainted air eagerly, whining a little 
 in its throat. 
 
 The great vulture dropped lower. His comrades of the 
 flock, eagerly following his gyrations and descents, had begun 
 to wheel and drop also. Another wild dog appeared on the 
 cone-shaped kop. Other furry, sharp-eared heads, with eager, 
 sniffing noses, could be seen amongst the grass and bush. 
 
 Then suddenly the higher vultures rose. They wheeled 
 and soared and flew, a hurrying bevy of winged black specks 
 to the north. They had seen something approaching over the 
 veld. The great bird hanging motionless, purposeful, lower 
 down became aware of his comrades' change of tactics. With 
 one downward stroke of his powerful wings, he shot upwards, 
 and with a hoarse, croaking cry took flight after the rest. 
 
 The wild dogs stole back, hungry, to covert, as a big "light 
 blue waggon, drawn by a well-fed team of eight span, came 
 lumbering over the veld. 
 
 Would the ox-team veer in another direction? Would the 
 big blue waggon with the new white tilt roll by ? 
 
 The Hottentot driver cracked his giant whip, and, turning 
 on the box-seat, spoke to a figure that sat beside him. It was 
 a woman in loose black garments, with a starched white coif 
 like a Dutchwoman's kapje, covered with a floating black veil. 
 At her side dangled and clashed a long rosary of brown wooden 
 beads, with a copper crucifix attached. There were two other 
 women in the big waggon, dressed in the same way. They 
 were Roman Catholic nuns Sisters of Mercy coming up from 
 Natal, by the order of the Bishop of Bellmina, Vicar- Apostolic, 
 at the request of the Bishop of Paracos, suffragan to North- 
 East Baraland, to swell the numbers of the Community already 
 established in Gueldersdorp at the Convent of the Holy Way. 
 
 The oxen halted some fift) r yards from that inanimate ragged 
 little body, lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby 
 bushes that sprouted in the hot sand. Little crowding tiny 
 ants already blackened the bloodstains on the ground, and the 
 wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if the 
 waggon had passed on. 
 
 One white-coifed, tall, black-clad figure sprang lightly down
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 37 
 
 from the waggon-box, and hurried across to where the body 
 was lying. A mellow, womanly cry of pity came from under 
 the starched coif. She turned and beckoned. Then she knelt 
 down by the girl's side, opened the torn garments, and felt with 
 compassionate, kindly touches about the still heart. 
 
 The other two black figures came hurrying over then, 
 stumbling amongst the stones and karoo-bushes in their haste. 
 Lifting her, they turned the white, bloodless young face to 
 the blue sky. It was cut and scratched, but not otherwise 
 disfigured. Her bound arms, dragged upwards before it, had 
 shielded it from the thorns and the sharp stones. They were 
 raw from the elbows to the wrists. 
 
 They listened at the torn childish bosom with anxious ears. 
 They got a few drops of brandy between the clenched little 
 teeth. The sealed lips quivered; the heart fluttered feebly, 
 like a dying bird. They gave her more stimulant, and waited, 
 while the Hottentot driver dozed, and the sleek, well-fed oxen 
 chewed the cud patiently, standing in the sun. 
 
 Then the Sisters lifted her, with infinite care, and carried 
 her to the waggon. The long kangaroo lash cracked, and 
 the patient beasts moved on. Very soon the big white tilt 
 was a mere retreating speck upon the veld. The ants were 
 still busy when the wild dogs came out and sniffed regretfully 
 at those traces on the ground. 
 
 Coincidence, did you say, lifting your eyebrows over the 
 book, as the blue waggon of the Sisters rolled lumbermgly into 
 the story? The long arm of coincidence stretched to aching 
 tenuity by the dramatist and the novelist! Nay! but the thing 
 happened, just as I have told. 
 
 What is the thing we are agreed to call coincidence? 
 
 Once I was passing over one of the bridges that span the 
 filthy London ditch called the Regent's Canal. I had walked 
 all the way from Piccadilly Circus to the Gloucester Gate, 
 haunted by the memory of a man I had once known. He was 
 the broken-down, drunken, studio-drudge of a great artist, a 
 splendid Bohemian, who had died some years before. Why 
 did the thought of the palette-scraper, the errand-goer, the 
 drunken creature with the cultivated voice and the ingratiating, 
 gentlemanly manners, haunt me as I went? I thought of his 
 high, intellectual, pimply forehead, and large benevolent nose, 
 in a chronic state of inflammation, and seedy semi-clerical garb, 
 for the thing had been an ordained clergyman of the Church 
 of England, and I grinned, remembering how, when a Royal
 
 3 8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 visitor was expected at the great man's studio, the factotum 
 had been bidden to wash his face, and had washed one-half 
 of it, leaving the other half in drab eclipse, like the 
 picture-restorers' trade advertisement of a canvas partially 
 cleansed. 
 
 Idly I tossed the butt of that spoiled cigar over the bridge 
 balustrade. Idly my eye followed it down to the filthy, slug- 
 gishly-creeping water that flows round the bend, under the 
 damp rear-garden walls below. 
 
 A policeman and a bargeman were just taking the body of 
 an old man out of that turbid canal-stream. It was dressed in 
 pauper's garments, and its stiffened knees were bent, and its 
 rigid elbows crooked, and a dishonoured, dripping beard of 
 grey hung over the soulless breast. 
 
 The dreadful eyes were open, staring up at the leaden March 
 sky. His face, with the dread pallor of Death upon it, and 
 the mud-stains wiped away by a rough but not unkindly hand, 
 was cleaner that I had ever seen it in life. 
 
 Because he was the very man the thought of whom had 
 haunted me, the great Bohemian painter's drunken studio- 
 drudge. 
 
 VIII 
 
 SCHOOL at the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp 
 was breaking up suddenly and without warning, very soon 
 after the beginning of the Christmas term. Many of the 
 pupils had already left in obedience to urgent telegrams from 
 relatives in Cape Colony or in the Transvaal, and every Dutch 
 Igirl among the sixty knew the reason why, but was too astute 
 'to hint of it, and every English girl was at least as wise, but 
 pn'de kept her silent, and the Americans and the Germans ex- 
 changed glances of intelligence, and whispered in corners of 
 impending war between John Bull and Oom Paul. 
 
 That deep and festering political hatreds, fierce enthusiasm, 
 hot pride of race, and lofty pride in nationality, were covered 
 by worked apron-bibs, and even childish pinafores, is anyone 
 likely to doubt? Schoolgirls can be patriots as well as rebels, 
 and the seminary can vie with the college, if not outdo it, 
 occasion given. Ask Juliette Adam whether the bread-and- 
 butter misses of France in the year 1847 did not squabble over 
 the obstinacy of King Louis Philippe and the greed of M. 
 Guizot, the claims of Louis Napoleon and the theories of Louis
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 39 
 
 Blanc, of Odilon Barrot, and Ledru Rollin. And I who write, 
 have I not seen a North Antrim Sunday-school wrecked in a 
 faction-fight between the Orange and the Green. Lord! how 
 the red-edged hymnals and shiny-covered S.P.G. books hustled 
 through the air, to burst like hand-grenades upon the texted 
 walls. In vain the panting, crimson clergyman mounted the 
 superintendent's platform, and strove to shed the oil of peace 
 upon those seething waters. Even the class-teachers had 
 broken the rails out of the Windsor chair-backs, and joined 
 the hideous fray, irrespective of age or sex. 
 
 " Miss Malcney Miss Geoghegan I am shocked 
 appalled! In the name of decency I command yees to desist. 
 . . . Hit him again, Moggy Lenahan, a taste lower down. 
 Serve you right, Mulcahy! why would you march with the 
 Green?" 
 
 Thirty years ago. As I gaped in affright at the hideous 
 scene of strife, small revengeful fingers twisted themselves 
 viciously in my auburn curls, and wresting from my grasp 
 a " Child's Own Bible Concordance," a birthday outrage re- 
 ceived from an Evangelical aunt, Julia Dolan, aged twelve, 
 began to pound me about the face with it. As a snub-nosed 
 urchin, gifted with a marvellous capacity for the cold storage 
 and quick delivery of Scripture genealogies and Hebrew proper 
 and improper names, I had often reduced my mild, long- 
 legged girl-neighbour to tearful confusion. Now meek Julia 
 seemed as though possessed by seven devils. I had been taught 
 the elementary rule that boys must not hurt girls, but the code 
 had no precept helpful in the present instance, when a girl was 
 hurting me. Casting chivalry to the winds, I remember that 
 I kicked Julia's shins, and she fled howling; but not before she 
 had reduced my leading feature to a state of ruin, which 
 created a tremendous sensation when they led me home. Later, 
 during the election riots, two young girls, modest, well-behaved 
 lasses as ever stepped, fought in the Market Place, stripped to 
 the waist, and wielding boards wrenched from the side of a 
 packing-case, heavy, jagged, and full of nails. And when the 
 soldiers were called out, we know how many a saddle was 
 emptied by the stones the women threw. "C'r'ips! " as Billy 
 Keyse would have said. 
 
 Only a day previously the centipede-like procession of girls 
 of all ages, in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers, serpentining 
 over the Gueldersdorp Recreation-Ground in search of the 
 exercise essential to clearness of the complexion and the sharp-
 
 40 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 ening of the Intelligence, had sustained an experience with 
 which every maiden bosom would have been still vibrating had 
 not an event even more exciting occurred between the early 
 morning roll-call and prayers-muster and breakfast. 
 
 Greta Du Taine had had another love-letter! 
 
 The news darted from class-room to class-room more quickly 
 than little Monsieur Pilotell, the French literature professor; 
 it spread like the measles, and enlarged like the mumps. 
 
 The Red Class, composed of the elder girls, " young ladies " 
 who were undergoing the process of finishing, surged with 
 volcanic excitement, hidden, but not in the least repressed. 
 The White Class, their juniors, who were chiefly employed in 
 preparing for confirmation, should have been immersed in 
 graver things, but were not. They waited on mental tiptoe 
 for details, and a peep at the delicious document. The Blue 
 Class, as became mere infants ranging from six to ten years 
 old, remained phlegmatically indifferent to the missive, yet 
 avid for samples of the chocolates that had accompanied the 
 declaration, made to eighty girls of all ages by one undersized, 
 pasty, freckled young man employed as junior clerk and chance 
 assistant in a surveyor's office, and who signed at the end of a 
 long row of symbolistic crosses the unheroic name of Billy 
 Keyse. 
 
 He had seen and been helplessly stunned by the vision of 
 Greta Du Taine out walking at the head of the long serpentine 
 procession of English, German, Dutch, Dutch-French, Dutch- 
 American, and Jewish girls. They are sent now to be taught 
 in Europe, these daughters of the Rand millionaires, the Stock 
 Exchange speculators, the wealthy fruit-farmers, or cereal- 
 growers, or cattle and sheep breeders, who are descended them- 
 selves from the old pioneers and voortrekkers, but they do not 
 get a better education than was to be had at the Convent 
 school at Gueldersdorp, where the Sisters of Mercy took in 
 and taught and trained coltish girl-children, born in a strongly 
 stimulating climate, and accustomed to lord it over Kaffir and 
 Hottentot servants to their hearts' content. These they tamed, 
 these they transformed into refined, cultivated, accomplished 
 young women, stamped with the indefinable seal of high breed- 
 ing, possessed of the tone and manner that belongs to the upper 
 world. 
 
 What shall I say of the Sisters of the Convent of the Holy 
 Way at Gueldersdorp, I who know but little of any Order of 
 Religious? They are a community, chiefly of ladies of high
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 41 
 
 breeding and ancient family, vowed to feed the hungry, clothe 
 the naked, nurse the sick, comfort the dying, and instruct the 
 ignorant. Like the Fathers of the Society of Jesuits, those 
 skilled, patient, wise tillers in the soil of the human mind, their 
 daily task is to hoe and tend, and prune and train, and water 
 the young green things growing in what to them is the Garden 
 of God, and to other good and even holy people, the vineyard 
 of the devil. Possibly both are right? 
 
 I have heard the habit of the Order called ugly. But upon 
 the stately person of the Mother Superior the garb was regal. 
 The sweeping black folds were as imposing as imperial purple, 
 and the starched gimple framed a beauty that was grave, stern, 
 almost severe until she smiled, and then you caught your 
 breath, because you had seen what great poets write of, and 
 great painters try to render, and only great musicians by their 
 impalpable, mysterious tone-art can come nearest to conveying 
 the earthly beauty that has been purged of all grosser 
 particles of dross in the white fires of the Divine Love. She 
 was not altogether perfect, or one could not have loved her so. 
 Her scorn of any baseness was bitterly scathing; the point of 
 her sarcasm was keen as any thrusting blade of tempered steel ; 
 her will was to be obeyed, and was obeyed as sovereign law, 
 else woe betide the disobedient. Also, though kind and 
 gracious to all, tenderly solicitous for, and incessantly watchful 
 of, the welfare of the least of her charges, she never feigned 
 where she could not feel regard or love. Her rare kiss was 
 coveted in the little world of the Convent school as the jewel 
 of an Imperial Order was coveted in the bigger world outside 
 it, and the most rebellious of the pupils held her in respect 
 mingled with fear. The head-mistresses of the classes had 
 their followers and admirers. It was for the Mother Superior 
 to command enthusiasm, and to sway these young ambitions, 
 and to govern the hearts and minds of children with the per- 
 sonal charm and the intellectual powers that could have ruled 
 a nation from a throne. 
 
 Well, she has gone to God. It is good for many souls that 
 she lived upon earth a little. She has a harvest, not of tares, 
 to gather when earth's fields are ripe for the blade. There 
 was nothing sentimental, visionary, or hysterical in her char- 
 acter. Nor, in giving her great heart with her pure soul to 
 God, did she ever quite learn to scorn and despise the sweet- 
 ness of earthly love. Not all a Saint. The children of those 
 wcmen who most were swayed by, her influence in youth have
 
 42 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 been taught to hold her Saint as well as Martyr. And there 
 is One Who knows. 
 
 It was not until recess after the midday dinner that Greta 
 Du Taine could exhibit her love-letter. She was a Transvaal 
 Dutch girl with old French blood in her, a vivacious, sparkling 
 Gallic champagne mingling with the Dopper in her dainty blue 
 veins. Nothing could be prettier than Greta in a good temper, 
 unless it might be Greta in a rage. She was in a good temper 
 now, as, tossing back her superb golden hairplait, as thick as 
 a child's arm, and nearly four feet long, she drew a smeary 
 envelope from the front of her black alpaca school-dress, and, 
 delicately withdrawing the epistle enclosed, yielded the en- 
 velope for the inspection of the Red Class, 
 
 " What niggly writing ! " objected Nellie Bliecker, wrinkling 
 her snub nose in the disgust that masks the gnawing tooth of 
 nvy. 
 
 " And the envelope is all over sticky brown," said another 
 carping critic. 
 
 " That's because he put the letter inside the chocolate-box," 
 explained Greta, " inside of outside. And the best chocolates 
 the expensive ones always so squashy. Only the cheap 
 ones don't melt because they have got stuff like chalk inside. 
 Kut wait till I show you as much as the envelope of my next 
 letter that's all, Julia K. Shaw 1 ! " 
 
 Julia K. wilted. Greta proceeded: 
 
 " It's directed ' To My Fair Addored One/ because, of 
 course, he didn't know my name. I don't object to his putting 
 a d too much in adored ; I rather prefer it. His own name is 
 simple, and rather pretty." She made haste to say that, be- 
 cause she felt doubtful about it. " Billy Keyse." 
 
 "Billy?" 
 
 "Billy Keyse?" 
 
 "B-i-1-l-y K-e-y-s-e!" 
 
 The name went the round of the Red Class. Nobody 
 liked it. 
 
 " He must, of course, have been christened William. 
 Shakespeare was a William. The Emperor of Germany," 
 stated Greta proudly, " is a William. Mr. Pitt and Mr. 
 Gladstone were both Williams. Many other great men have 
 been Williams." 
 
 " But not Billies," said Christine Silber, provoking a giggle 
 from the greedily-listening Whites. 
 
 Greta scorched them into silence with a look, and continued:
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 43 
 
 " He is by profession a surveyor, not exactly a partner in 
 the firm of Gadd and Saxby, on Market Square, but something 
 very near it." Do you who read see W. Keyse carrying the 
 chain and spirit-level, and sweeping out the office when the 
 Kaffir boy forgets ? " He saw me walking in the Stad with the 
 Centipede." 
 
 This was a fanciful name for the whole school of eighty 
 pupils promenading upon a hundred and sixty legs of various 
 nationalities in search of exercise and fresh air. 
 
 " Go on ! " said the Red Class in a breath, as the White 
 Class giggled and nudged each other, and the Blue Class 
 opened eyes and ears. 
 
 " He was knocked dumb-foolish at once, he says, by my 
 eyes and my figure and my hair. He is not long up from 
 Cape Colony: came out from London through chest-trouble, 
 to catch heart-trouble in Gueldersdorp " ( do you see hectic, 
 coughing Billy Keyse cracking his stupid joke?). "And if 
 I'll only be engaged to him, he promises to get rich, become as 
 big a swell on the Rand as Marks or Du Taine isn't that 
 funny, his not knowing Du Taine is my father? and drive 
 me to race-meetings on a first-class English drag, with a team 
 of bays in silver-mounted harness, with rosettes the colour of 
 my eyes." 
 
 Greta threw her golden head back and laughed, displaying 
 a double row of enviable pearls. 
 
 " But I've got to wait for all these things until Billy Keyse 
 strikes pay-reef. Poor Billy! Hand over those chocolates, 
 you greedy things ! " 
 
 Somebody wanted to know how the package had been 
 smuggled into the Convent. Those lay-Sisters were so 
 sharp. . . . 
 
 " They're perfect needles Sister Tarsesias particularly, and 
 Sister Tobias. But there's a new Emigration Jane among 
 the housemaids. You've seen her the sallow thing with the 
 greasy light-coloured bang in curlers, who walks flat-footed 
 like a wader on the mud. I keep expecting to hear her quack. 
 . . . Well, Billy got hold of her. She didn't know my name, 
 being new, but she recognised me by Billy's description, and 
 sympathised with him, having a young man herself, who 
 doesn't speak a word of English, except ' damn ' and ' Three of 
 Scotch, please.' I've promised to translate her letters; he 
 writes them in the Taal. And Billy gave her two dollars, 
 and I've given her a hat. It's the big red one mother brought
 
 44 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 back from Paris paid a hundred francs for it at the Maison 
 Cluny and Emigration Jane thinks, though it's a bit too 
 quiet for her taste, it'll do her a fair old treat when she trims 
 it up with a bit more colour and one or two ' imitation 
 ostridge ' tips. ... I'd give another hundred francs for the 
 Maison Cluny modiste to hear." Again the birdlike laugh 
 rang out. " Now you know everything there is in the letter, 
 girls, except the bit of poetry at the end, which only my most 
 intimate friends may be permitted to read. Lynette Mildare! " 
 
 Lynette, bending over a separate table in the light of the 
 north window of the long deal match-boarded class-room, 
 looked up from her work of tooling leather, the delicate steel 
 instrument in her hand, a little gilding-brush between her 
 white teeth, a little fold of concentrated attention between 
 her slender brown eyebrows. 
 
 "Yes. Did you want anything?" 
 
 Greta jumped up, leaving the rest of the box of chocolates 
 to dissolve among the White Class, and came over, threading 
 her way between the long rows of desk-stalls. 
 
 " Of course I want something." 
 
 "What is it?" asked Lynette, laying down the little tool. 
 
 " What everyone has a right to expect from the person who 
 is her dearest friend sympathy," said Greta, jumping up and 
 sitting on the corner of the desk, and biting the thick end of 
 her long flaxen pigtail. 
 
 " You have it when there is anything to sympathise about. " 
 
 Greta tapped the letter, trying to frown. 
 
 " Do you call this nothing? " 
 
 "You have saved me from doing so." 
 
 "Lynette Mildare, have you a heart inside you?" 
 
 " Certainly ; I can feel it beating, and it does its work very 
 well." 
 
 "Am I, then, nothing to you?" 
 
 Lynette smiled, looking up at the piquant, charming face. 
 
 " You are a great deal to me." 
 
 " And I regard you as a bosom-friend. And the duty of 
 a bosom-friend, besides rushing off at once to tell you if she 
 hears anybody say anything nasty of you behind your back 
 a thing which you never do is to sympathise with you in all 
 your love-affairs a thing which you do even seldomer." 
 
 Greta stamped with the toe of her dainty little shoe that 
 rested on the beeswaxed boards of the class-room, and kicked 
 the leg of the desk with the heel of the other.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 45 
 
 " Please don't spill the white of egg, or upset the gold-leaf. 
 And as I shall be pupil-teacher of the youngest class next term, 
 I suppose I ought to tell you that ' seldomer ' isn't in the Eng- 
 lish dictionary." 
 
 " I'm glad of it. I like my own words to belong to me, my 
 own self. I should be ashamed to owe everything I say to 
 silly Nuttall or stupid old Webster. You're artful, Lynette 
 Mildare, trying to change the conversation. I say you don't 
 sympathise with me properly in my affairs of the heart and 
 you never, never tell me about yours." 
 
 The beautiful black-rimmed, golden-tawny eyes laughed as 
 some eyes can, though there was no quiver of a smile about 
 the purely-modelled, close-folded lips. 
 
 " Don't tell me you never have, or never had, any," scolded 
 Greta. " You're too lovely by half. Don't try to scowl me 
 down you are! I'm pretty enough to make the Billy Keyses 
 stand on their silly heads if I told them to, but you're a great 
 deal more. Also, you have style and grace and breeding. 
 Anybody could tell that you came of tremendously swell people 
 over away in England, where the Dukes and Marquesses and 
 Earls began fencing in the veld somewhere about the eleventh 
 century, to keep common people from killing the deer, or carv- 
 ing their vulgar names on the castle walls, and coming between 
 the wind and their nobility. There's a quotation from your 
 dear Shakespeare for you ! He does come in handy sometimes." 
 
 " Doesn't he ! " agreed Lynette, with an ardent flush. 
 
 " And you're descended from some of the people he wrote 
 about," pressed Greta. "Own it! " 
 
 There was a faint line of sarcasm about the lovely lips. 
 
 " Shakespeare wrote of clowns and churls as well as of 
 Kings and noblemen." 
 
 " If you were a clown, you wouldn't be what you are. The 
 very shape of your head, and ears, and nails, bespeaks a 
 Princess, disguised as a finished head-pupil, going to take over 
 a class of grubby-fingered little ones pah! next term. And 
 don't we all know that an English Duchess sends you your 
 Christmas and Easter and birthday gifts! Come, you might 
 as well speak out, when this is my last term, and we have 
 always been such dear friends, and always will be," coaxed 
 Greta, "because the Duchess lets you out, you know!" 
 
 She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though there 
 was a pained contraction between the delicate eyebrows and a 
 vexed and sorrowful shadow on her face. Greta went on:
 
 46 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " We have all of us always known that you were a 
 mystery. Has it got anything to do with the Duchess? " 
 
 The round, shallow blue eyes were too greedily curious to 
 be pretty at the moment. Lynette met them with a full, 
 grave, answering denial. 
 
 " No ; I am nothing to the Duchess of Broads, or she to 
 me. She is sister to the Mother-Superior, and she sends to 
 me at Christmas and Easter, and on birthdays, by the Mother's 
 wish. Doesn't the Mother's second sister, the Princess de 
 , Digny-Veziers, send Kati'e " Katie was a little Irish novice 
 "presents from Paris twice a year?" 
 
 Greta's pretty eyebrows shot up. Her blue greedy eyes 
 became circular with surprise. 
 
 " Yes, of course out of charity, because Katie was a 
 foundling, picked up in the Irish quarter in Cape Town." 
 
 Lynette went on steadily, but looking out of the window 
 at the purple wistaria that climbed upon the angle of the Con- 
 vent wing in which were the nuns' cells. 
 
 " If Katie was a foundling, I am nothing better." 
 
 " Lynette Mildare, you're never in earnest ? " 
 
 The shocked tone and the scandalised disgust on Greta's 
 pretty face stung and hurt. But Lynette went on: 
 
 " I speak the truth. The Mother and the Sisters, who have 
 always known it, have kept the secret. In their great con- 
 siderate kindness, they have never once let me feel there was 
 any difference between me and the other girls not once in all 
 these years. And I can never thank them enough never be 
 grateful enough for their great goodness especially hers." 
 The steady voice shook a little. 
 
 " We all know that you have always been the Mother's 
 favourite." There was a little cool inflection of contempt in 
 Greta's high, sweet, birdlike tones that had been lacking be- 
 fore. "And she is the niece of a great English Cardinal, and 
 the sister of a Duchess and Princess, and her step-brother is an 
 Earl." The inflection added for Greta: And yet she turns 
 to the charity child! 
 
 Lynette said in a low voice: 
 
 " It is because she is perfect in the way of humility. She 
 is beyond all pride . . . greater than all prejudice . . . she 
 has been more to me than I can say, since she and Sister 
 Ignatius and Sister Tobias found me on the veld seven years 
 ago when they were trekking up from Natal to join the Sisters 
 who were already working here."
 
 47 
 
 Greta's face dimpled, and the bright, cold eyes grew greedy 
 again. There was a romance, after all. 
 
 " My gracious! How did you get there? Did your people 
 lose you, or had you run away from home? " 
 
 The delicate wild-rose colour sank out of Lynette's cheeks. 
 Her eyes sank under those bold, curious, blue ones of Greta's. 
 She said, with a painful effort: 
 
 " I had run away from the place that was called my home. 
 I don't remember ever having lived anywhere else before." 
 
 "My! And . . .?" 
 
 " It was a dreadful place." A little convulsive shudder 
 Tippled through the girl's slight frame. Little points of 
 moisture showed upon the delicate white temples, where the 
 little stray rings and tendrils clung of the red-brown hair. " I 
 wore worse rags than the children at the native Kraals, and 
 was worse fed. I scrubbed floors, and fetched water, and 
 was beaten every day. Then " she drew a deep, quivering 
 breath " I ran away and and ran until I could run no 
 more, and fell down. ... I don't remember being picked up. 
 I awoke one day here at the Convent ; and I was in bed, and 
 my hair was cut short, and there was ice upon my head. I 
 said, ' Where am I ? ' and the Mother-Superior stooped down 
 and looked into my eyes, and said, 'You are at home.' And 
 the Convent has been nr* home ever since, and I hope with all 
 my heart it always will be." 
 
 Greta descended from the desk. She drew her embroidered 
 cambric skirts primly about her, and said in a shocked voice: 
 
 "And I asked you to visit me to come and stay with us 
 at our place near Johannesburg you w r ho are not even respect- 
 able!" 
 
 Lynette grew burning red. One moment her eyes wavered 
 and fell. Then she lifted them and looked back bravely into 
 the pretty, shallow, and blue eyes. 
 
 ' That is why I have told you what you know now." 
 
 " Of course," Greta said patronizingly, " if you wish it, I 
 shall not tell the class." 
 
 Lynette deliberately put away her tools and the calf-bound 
 volume she had been working on, and shut and locked her 
 desk. Then she rose. Her eyes swept over the long room, 
 its lower end packed with giggling, whispering, squabbling, 
 listening, gossiping, or reading girls. She said very clearly: 
 
 " It will be best that you should tell the class. Do it now. 
 They can think it over while they are away, and make up
 
 48 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 their minds whether they will speak to me or not when they 
 come back. Make no delay." 
 
 Then she went, moving with the long, smooth, light step 
 and upright, graceful carriage that she had somehow caught 
 from the Mother-Superior, out of the room. Curious eyes 
 followed her; eager ears, that had caught fragments of the 
 colloquy, wanted the rest; eager tongues plied Greta with 
 questions, as she stood reticent, knowing, bursting with in- 
 formation withholden, in the middle of the class-room, where 
 honours she coveted had been won and prizes gained by the 
 Convent foundling. 
 
 You may be sure that Greta told the story. It lost nothing 
 by her telling, be equally sure. But all that heard it did not 
 take it in Greta's way. The stamp of the woman who ruled 
 this place was upon many minds and intellects and hearts 
 here, and her teaching was to bear fruit in bitter, stormy, 
 bloodstained years of days that were waiting at the very 
 threshold. 
 
 " I tell you," said Christine Silber, the handsome Jewess, 
 with a fierce flash of her black Oriental eyes, " foundling or 
 charity girl, or whatever else you choose to call her, Lynette 
 Mildare is the pride of the school." 
 
 Silber 's father was President of the Gisenfontein Legislative 
 Council. A hum of assent followed .n her utterance, and an 
 English girl got upon a form. She was the niece of a High 
 Commissioner, daughter of a Secretary of Imperial Govern- 
 ment, at Cape Town, who wrote K.C.M.G. after his name. 
 
 " Silber speaks the truth. Not a girl here is a patch on the 
 shoes of Mildare. I am going home to London next winter 
 to be presented, and we shall have a house in Chesterfield 
 Gardens for the season, and if Lynette will come and visit us, 
 I can tell her that she will be treated as an honoured guest. 
 As for you, Greta Du Taine, who are always bragging about 
 your father and his money, tell me what three letters of the 
 alphabet you would find tattooed upon his conscience if the 
 strongest microscope ever made could find his conscience out? 
 Shall I tell you them?" She held up her finger. "Shall I 
 tell you how he bought those orange-groves at Rustenburg 
 and the country seat near Johannesburg and the drag with 
 the silver-mounted harness and the team of blood bays ? " 
 
 " No, please ! " begged Greta, flinching from the torture. 
 
 But the English girl was pitiless. She checked the letters 
 off upon her fingers:
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 49 
 
 " I. D. B." 
 
 A shout went up from the Red Class. 
 
 Greta turned and ran. 
 
 IX 
 
 THE cell was a large, light, airy room on the first-floor of the 
 big two-storied Convent building that stood in its spacious, 
 tree-shaded, high-fenced gardens beyond the Hospital at the 
 north end of the town. Light-stained wood-presses full of 
 papers and account-files covered the wall upon one side. There 
 also stood a great iron safe, with heavy ledgers piled upon it. 
 Upon the other three sides of the room were bookshelves, doubly 
 and trebly laden, with Latin tomes of the Fathers of the 
 Church, and the works and writings of modern theologians, 
 many of them categorized upon the " Index Expurgatorius." 
 Rows there were of English, French, German, Italian, and 
 Spanish classical authors, and many volumes of recently-pub- 
 lished scientific works. It might have been the room of a 
 business man who was at the same time a priest and a scholar. 
 There were maps upon the walls, and one or two engravings. 
 Bougereau's " Virgin of Consolation," the " Madonna del An- 
 sidei " of Raffaello, and a great " Crucifixion " over the 
 chimneypiece, which had three little statuettes in tinted alabas- 
 ter a St. Ignatius at one end, a St. Anthony of Padua at the 
 other; in the middle, the Virgin bearing the Child. 
 
 The Mother-Superior sat writing at a bare solid deal table 
 of the kitchen kind, with stained legs to add to its ugliness, 
 and stained black-knobbed fronts to the drawers in it. Her pen 
 flew over the paper. 
 
 Seated though she was, you could see her to be of noble fig- 
 ure, tall and finely proportioned. The habit of the nun does 
 not hide everything that makes for beauty and for grace. The 
 pure outlines of the small, perfectly-shaped head showed 
 through the thin black veil that falls over the white starched 
 coif. The small, high-instepped foot could not be hidden in 
 walking; the make of the thick shoe might not disguise its 
 form. The delicate whiteness and smooth, supple beauty of 
 her hands, larger than the hands of ordinary women, their 
 owner being of more heroic build, as of ampler mind and keener 
 intellect, betrayed her to be a woman not yet old, though there 
 were some deep lines and many fine ones on the attentive face 
 that bent over the large square sheet of paper.
 
 50 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 It was a curious face; its olive skin bleached to dull white- 
 ness, its expression stern almost to severity. I have heard it 
 likened to a Westmorland hill-landscape. Lonely tarns lie 
 under the black brows of the precipice; one feels chilly, and a 
 little afraid. But the sun shines out suddenly from behind 
 mist, and behold! everything is transformed to loveliness. I 
 can in no other words describe the change wrought in her by 
 her rare, sudden, illuminating smile. Her voice was the softest 
 and the clearest I ever heard, a sigh made most audible 
 speech; but in her just anger, only turned to wrath by the 
 baser faults, the fouler vices, it could roll in organ-tones of 
 thunder, or ring like a silver clarion. And her eye made the 
 lightning for such thunder, and the sword-thrust that followed 
 the clarion-note of war. 
 
 She could have ruled an empire or a court, this woman who 
 managed the thronged, buzzing Convent with the lifting of 
 her finger, with the softest tone of her soft West of Ireland 
 voice, devoid of all trace of the unbeautiful brogue, cultured, 
 elegant, refined. I can only write of her as I knew her. As I 
 have said, the lessons that she taught bore great fruit during 
 that red time of war that Was coming, and will bear greater 
 fruit hereafter. 
 
 A little is known to me of the personal history of Lady 
 Bridget-Mary Bawne in religion known as Mother Mary of 
 Nazareth that may be here set down. Some twenty-three 
 years previously that devout Irish Catholic nobleman, the 
 Right Honourable James Dominic Bawne, tenth Earl of Cas- 
 tleclare, Baron Kilhail, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, 
 and D.L. for West Connemara, not contented with the pos- 
 session of three very tall, very handsome, very popular daugh- 
 ters the Ri'ght Honourable Lady Bridget-Mary, Lady Alyse, 
 and Lady Alethea Bawne consulted his spiritual director, and, 
 as advised, offered his thin white hand and piously regulated 
 affections to Miss Nancy Mclleevy, niece and heiress of Mc- 
 Ileevy of Mclleevystown, the eminent County Down brewer, 
 so celebrated for his old Irish ale and nourishing bottled porter. 
 
 This lady, being sufficiently youthful, of good education 
 and manners, and of like faith with her elderly wooer, under- 
 took, in return for an ancient name and the title of Countess 
 Castleclare, to find the widower in conjugal affection for the 
 rest of his mortified life, and to do her best to supply him 
 with the grievously-needed heir. There was no wicked fairy 
 at Lord Castleclare's wedding, distinguished by the black-
 
 browed beauty of the three bridesmaids, his daughters; and 
 two years later saw the beacons at the entrance of Ballybawne 
 Harbour, on the West Connemara coast, illuminated by the 
 Castleclare tenants in honour of the arrival of the desired 
 heir, upon whom before his birth so much wealth had been ex- 
 pended by Lord Castleclare in pilgrimages, donations, founda- 
 tions, and endowments that, some months after it, his lord- 
 ship conveyed to his three daughters that, in the interests of the 
 Viscount, to whose swollen gums a gold-set pebble enclosing 
 a pious relic of an early Christian martyr was at that moment 
 affording miraculous relief, he, their father, would be obliged 
 by their providing themselves as soon as possible with husbands 
 of suitable rank, corresponding religion, and sufficient means 
 to dispense with the customary marriage portion. 
 
 Lady Alyse saw the justice of her father's views, and married 
 the Duke of Broads, an English Catholic peer; her younger 
 sister, Alethea, went obediently to the altar with the aged and 
 enormously wealthy Prince de Dignmont-Veziers. Lady Bridget- 
 Mary Bawne, eldest and handsomest of the three, pleaded if 
 a creature so stormy and imperious could be said to plead a 
 previous engagement to an Ineligible. 
 
 " We have all heard of Captain Mildare of the Grey Hus- 
 sars, my dear child," said Lord Castleclare, going to the door 
 to make sure that those shrieks that had proceeded from the 
 Viscount's sumptuous suite of apartments, situated at the top of 
 the staircase rising at the end of the corridor leading from his 
 father's library, were stilled at the maternal fountain. Find- 
 ing that it was so, he ambled back to the centre of the worn 
 Bokhara rug that had been under the prie-Dieu in the oratory 
 of James I, at Dublin Castle, and resumed: "We have all 
 heard of Captain Mildare. At the taking of AH Musjid 
 arah! at Futtehabad, with Gough arah! and at Ahmed 
 Khel, where Stewart cut up the Afghans so tremendously, 
 Mildare earned great distinction as well as the Victoria Cross, 
 which I am delighted to see, in glancing through the Army and 
 Navy Gazette, Her Majesty has been pleased to confer upon 
 him. As a gentleman and a soldier he presents all that is de- 
 sirable; as a member of an old Catholic family, he does not 
 command my suffrages. But as the husband of my elder 
 daughter I cannot look upon a younger son with toleration. 
 Honourable reputation is much, bravery is much, but my son- 
 in-law must possess arah ! other other qualifications." The 
 old gentleman stuttered pitiably.
 
 52 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " One other qualification, you mean, father, if that term 
 can be given to the possession of a certain amount of money," 
 said Lady Bridget-Mary, standing very straight and looking 
 very proudly at her father. " Will you object to telling me 
 plainly for how much you would be content to sell your stock, 
 with goodwill ? " 
 
 Lord Castleclare was a thin, frail, courtly old gentleman, 
 who had conquered, he humbly trusted, all his passions, except 
 the passion for ancient Theological Fathers and the passion 
 for Spanish snuff. But he was stung by the irony. He spilt 
 quite a quantity of choice mixture over the long, ivory-yellow 
 nail of his lean, delicate thumb as he looked consciously aside 
 from the great scornful grey eyes that judged and questioned 
 and condemned him as a mercenary old gentleman. And he 
 caught himself wishing that this fine fiery creature had been 
 born a boy. He looked back again at his eldest daughter. 
 Her white arms were folded upon her bosom, her pearl-coloured 
 silk evening gown swept aside from the fire, to whose warmth 
 she held an arched and exquisite foot. Her noble head, with 
 its rich coronet of silken black coils, was bent ; her white bosom 
 had ceased to be stormy. With a half-dreamy smile upon her 
 beautiful firm mouth, she was looking at a green flashing ring 
 she wore on the third finger of her left hand. And the sight 
 of her so sent a sudden pang of remembrance leaping through 
 the old man's heart. He forgot his spoiled pinch of snuff, and 
 stepped over to her, and took the hand, and looked at the em- 
 erald ring with her in silence. 
 
 " My dear daughter," he said, more simply and more sweetly 
 than Lady Bridget-Mary had ever heard him speak before, " I 
 think you love this brave gentleman sincerely." 
 
 His daughter's large, beautifully-shaped hand closed strongly 
 over the old ivory fingers. The great brilliant dark grey eyes 
 looked at him through a sudden mist of tears, though she lifted 
 her head and held it high. She said in a low, clear voice: 
 
 " Father, you remember how my mother loved you ? And 
 Richard is as dear to me as you were to her. I want words 
 when it comes to speaking of so great a thing as the love I 
 feel for him. But it is my life. ... I seem to breathe with 
 his breath, and think his thoughts, and speak with his voice, 
 since we found out our secret, and we are each other's for Time 
 and for Eternity." Then she added, with a lovely smile that 
 had a touch of humour in it : " And he will be quite content 
 to take me with only my share of mother's money."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 53 
 
 "Tschah!" said the old father. "Nonsense! Of course, 
 Ballybawne will be delighted to provide for you. Excuse 
 me ... I must go." 
 
 Ballybawne, in the Castleclare nursery, had set up another 
 squeal. 
 
 Thenceforward the course of true love might have been ex- 
 pected to run smoothly for Lady Bridget-Mary and her gallant 
 lover. But she had reckoned, not without her host, but with- 
 out her Grey Hussar. In love there is always one who loves 
 the most, and Lady Bridget-Mary, that fine, enthusiastic, 
 tempestuous creature, was far from realizing that she was less 
 to her Richard than he was to her. The reason was not 
 farther to seek than a few doors off in London, when the Ladies 
 Bawne occupied their sombre old corner house in Grosvenor 
 Square. It was Lady Bridget-Mary's dearest Lucy and bosom- 
 friend who had married that handsome, grey-moustached mar- 
 tinet, Richard's Colonel. In Lady Lucy Hawting's drawing- 
 room Lord Castleclare's elder daughter had met Captain 
 Mildare, the hero of Futtehabad and Ahmed Khel. The 
 Colonel's wife was a pretty, delicate, graceful creature, some 
 three years older than her black-browed handsome friend, and 
 much more learned, as, of course, befitted a married woman, 
 in the ways of the world. And Lady Lucy saw the budding 
 of young Passion in the heart of her friend . . . and it oc- 
 curred to her that it would furnish a very excellent excuse for 
 the constant presence of Captain Mildare, if ... ! the sweet- 
 est and most limpid women have their turbid depths, their 
 muddy secrets and she had confided everything to dearest 
 Bridget, except the one thing that mattered! 
 
 Well! We all know for what reason Le Roi Soleil ad- 
 dressed himself to the wooing of La Valliere. Louis fell gen- 
 uinely in love with the decoy, not quite so Richard. But some- 
 times, when those proud lips meekly gave back his kisses, and 
 that lofty beauty humbled itself to meet his will, he almost 
 wished that he had never met the other. A day came when the 
 secret orchard he had joyed in with that other was threaded 
 with a golden clue, and the hidden bower unveiled to the cold- 
 eyed staring day. 
 
 Captain Mildare and Lady Lucy Hawting went away to- 
 gether, and from Paris Richard wrote and broke to the girl who 
 loved him, and had been his betrothed wife, the common, vulgar, 
 horrible little truth. Bridget-Mary had been deceived by both 
 of them from the very beginning. Estimate the numbing,
 
 54 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 overwhelming weight of that blow, delivered by a hand so 
 beloved, upon so proud a heart. Those who saw her, and 
 should have honoured her great grief with decent reticence, 
 say that she was mad for a while; that she grovelled on the 
 earth in her abandonment, calling upon God to be merciful 
 and kill her. Pass over this. I cannot bear for one to think 
 that the mere love of a man should bring that lofty head so 
 low. 
 
 While the scandal lived in the mouths of Society, Lady 
 Bridget-Mary Bawne remained unseen. She was pitied oh, 
 burning, intolerable shame! She was commiserated as a cat's- 
 paw, and sneered at as a dupe. Her sisters and her step- 
 mother, her father and her seven aunts, her relatives, innumer- 
 able as stars in the Milky Way, found infinite relish in the 
 comfortable conviction that every one of them had said from 
 the very outset that Bridget-Mary would regret the step she 
 had taken in engaging herself to that Captain Mi'ldare. Sharp 
 claws of steel were added to her scourge of humiliation by a 
 thousand petty liberties taken with this, her great, sacred sor- 
 row, as by letters of sympathy from friends, who wrote as if 
 she had suffered the loss of a pet hunter, or a prize Persian 
 cat. 
 
 A suitor ventured to propose for that white rejected hand, 
 addressing himself with stammering diffidence to Lord Castle- 
 clare. A young man, the son of an industrious father who 
 had consolidated the sweat of his brow into three millions and 
 a Peerage, hideously conscious of the raw newness of his title ; 
 painfully burdened with the bosom-weight of a genuine, if in- 
 coherent love, he seemed to Lady Bridget-Mary's family toler- 
 able, almost desirable, nearly quite the thing. . . . 
 
 " He has boiled jam into sweetness for the whole civilized 
 world," said the most influential and awful of Lord Castle- 
 clare's seven sisters, a Dowager-Duchess who was Lady-in- 
 Waiting, and exhaled the choicest essence of the Middle Vic- 
 torian era. She still adhered to the mushroom-shaped straw 
 hats of her youth, trimmed with black velvet rosettes, in the 
 centre of each of which reposed a cut jet button. She went 
 always voluminously clad in black or shot-silk gowns, their 
 skirts so swelled out by a multiplicity of starched cambric pet- 
 ticoats, adorned with tambour-work, that she was credited with 
 the existence of a crinoline. She had, in marrying her now de- 
 funct Scots Duke, embraced Presbyterianism, and though her 
 brother believed her, as far as the next world was concerned,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 55 
 
 to be lost beyond redemption, he entertained for her judgment 
 in the matters of this planet a great esteem. 
 
 " He has boiled jam enough to spread over the surface of 
 the civilized globe, and now proposes to hive its concentrated 
 extract for the benefit of our dearest girl, in the shape of a 
 settlement that a Princess of the blood might envy. I call 
 the whole thing pretty," pronounced the Dowager, " almost 
 romantic, or it might be made to sound so if a person of su- 
 perior intelligence and tact would undertake to plead for the 
 young man. His terrible title has quite escaped me. Lord 
 Plumbanks? Thank you! It might have been Strawberry- 
 beds, and that would have increased our difficulty. No time 
 should be lost. Therefore, as you, dear Castleclare, with your 
 wife and the boy, who, I am gratified to hear, has cut another, 
 are going to Rome for Holy Week, perhaps you would wish me 
 in your absence to break the ice with Bridget-Mary ? " 
 
 Lord Castleclare's long, solemn face and arched, lugubrious 
 eyebrows bore no little resemblance to the well-known portrait 
 of the conscientious but unlucky Stuart, in whose service his 
 ancestor had shed blood and money, receiving in lieu of both a 
 great many Royal promises, the Eastern carpet that had be- 
 longed to the monarch's Irish oratory, and the fine sard Intaglio, 
 brilliant-set, and representing a Calvary, that loyal servant's 
 descendant wore upon his thin ivory middle finger. He twid- 
 dled the ring nervously as he said: 
 
 " She has gone into Lenten Retreat at a Convent in Kensing- 
 ton. I arah! I do not think it would be advisable to dis- 
 turb salutary and seasonable meditations with arah! worldly 
 matters at this present moment." 
 
 "Fiddle-faddle!" said the Dowager Duchess sharply. 
 
 Lord Castleclare lifted the melancholy viaduct arches of his 
 eyebrows in exhortation. 
 
 ' Fiddle-faddle,' my dear Constantia? " 
 
 " You have the expression ! " said she. " Young women of 
 Bridget-Mary's age and temperament will think of marriage 
 in convents as much as outside them. Further, I dread delay, 
 entertaining as I do the very certain conviction that this weak- 
 minded man who has thrown your daughter over will be back, 
 begging Bridget-Mary to forgive him and reinstate him in 
 the possession of her affections before another two months are 
 over our heads. That little cat-eyed, squirrel-haired woman 
 he has run away with, and against whom I have warned our 
 poor dear girl times out of number " she really believed this
 
 56 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " is the sort of pussy, purring creature to make a man feel 
 her claws, once she has got him. Therefore, although my fam- 
 ily may not thank me for it, I shall continue to repeat, ' No 
 time is to be lost!' Still, in deference to your religious prej- 
 udices, and although I never heard that the Catholic Church 
 prohibited jam as an article of Lenten diet, we will defer from 
 offering Bridget-Mary the pot until Easter." 
 
 But Easter brought the news that Lady Bridget-Mary had 
 decided upon taking the veil, and begged her father not to 
 oppose her wishes. The Dowager-Duchess rushed to the Ken- 
 sington Convent. . . . All the little straw-mats on the slippery 
 floor of the parlour were swept like chaff before the hurricane 
 of her advancing petticoats as she bore down upon the most 
 disappointing, erratic, and self-willed niece that ever brought 
 the grey hairs of a solicitous and devoted aunt in sorrow to 
 the grave, demanding in Heaven's name what Bridget-Mary 
 meant, by this maniacal decision. Then she drew back, for at 
 first she hardly credited that this tall, pale, quiet woman in the 
 plain, close-fitting, black woollen gown could be Bridget-Mary 
 at all. Realizing that it could be nobody else, she began to 
 cry quite hysterically, subsiding upon a Berlin woolwork cov- 
 ered sofa, while her niece rang the bell for that customary Con- 
 vent restorative, a teaspoonful of essence of orange-flower in 
 a glass of water, and returning to the side of her agitated rela- 
 tive, took her hand, , encased in a tight one-button puce glove, 
 saying: 
 
 "Dear Aunt Constantia, what is the use of crying? I have 
 done with it for good." 
 
 " You are so dreadfully changed and so awfully composed, 
 and I always was sensitive. And, besides, to find you like this 
 when I expected you to break your head upon the floor or was 
 it against the wall, they said? and pray to be put out of your 
 misery by poison, or revolver, or knife, as though anybody 
 would be wicked enough to do it . . ." 
 
 A faint stain of colour crept into Lady Bridget-Mary's 
 white cheeks. 
 
 " All that is over, Aunt Constantia. Forget it, as I have 
 done, and drink a little of this. The Sisters believe it to be 
 calming to the nerves." 
 
 '' To naturally calm nerves, I suppose." The Dowager ac- 
 cepted the tumbler. "What a nice, thick, old-fashioned 
 glass ! " She sipped. " You hear how my teeth are chattering 
 against the rim. That is because I have flown here in such
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 57 
 
 a hurry of agitation upon hearing from your father that you 
 have decided to enter the Novitiate at once." 
 
 " It is true," said Lady Bridget-Mary, standing very tall 
 and dark and straight against the background of the parlour 
 window, that was filled in with ground-glass, and veiled with 
 snowy curtains of starched thread-lace. 
 
 " True! When not ten months ago you declared to me that 
 you would not be a nun for all the world. . . . You begged 
 me to befriend you in the matter of Captain Mildare. I un- 
 dertook, alas! that office . . ." 
 
 The Dowager-Duchess blew her nose. 
 
 "A little more of the orange-flower water, dear aunt?" 
 
 " ' Dear aunt,' when you are trampling upon my very heart- 
 strings! And let me tell you, Bridget-Mary, you have always 
 been my favourite niece. 'For all the world' you said with 
 your own lips, ' I would not be a nun/ Three millions will 
 buy, if not the world, at least a good slice of it. ... Figura- 
 tively, I offer them to you in this outstretched hand! " The 
 Dowager extended a puce kid glove. " The man who goes 
 with them is a good creature. I have seen and spoken with 
 him, and the dear Queen regards me as a judge of men. 
 ' Consie,' she has said, ' you have perception . . .' What my 
 Sovereign credits may not my niece believe?" 
 
 Lady Bridget-Mary's black brows were stern over the great 
 joyless eyes that looked out of their sculptured caves upon th** 
 world she had bidden good-bye to. But the fine lines of hu- 
 mour about the wings of the sensitive nostrils and the corners 
 of the large finely-modelled mouth quivered a little. 
 
 " Drink a little more orange-flower water, dear, and never 
 tell me who the man is. I do not wish to hear. I decline to 
 hear." 
 
 The Dowager-Duchess lost her temper. 
 
 " That is because you know already, and despise money that 
 is made of jam. Yet coal and beer are swallowed with avidity 
 by young women who have not forfeited the right to be fastid- 
 ious. That is the last thing I wished to say, but you have 
 wrung it from me. Have you no pride? Do you want So- 
 ciety to say that you have embraced the profession of a Re- 
 ligious, and intend henceforth to employ your talents in teach- 
 ing sniffy-nosed schoolgirls Greek and Algebra and mathemat- 
 ics, because this man has jilted you? Again, have you no 
 pride?" She agitated the Britannia-metal teaspoon furiously 
 in the empty tumbler.
 
 58 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Lady Bridget-Mary took the tumbler away. Why should 
 the humble property of the Sisters be broken because this kind, 
 fussy woman chose to upbraid ? 
 
 "You ask, Have I no pride?" she said. "Why should I 
 have pride when Our Lord is so humble that He does not 
 disdain to take for His bride the woman Richard Mildare has 
 rejected ? " 
 
 " You are incorrigible, dearest," said the sobbing Dowager- 
 Duchess, as she kissed her, "and Castleclare must use all his 
 influence with the Holy Father to induce the Comtesse de 
 Lutetia to give you the veil. All of you think I am damned, 
 and possibly I may be, but if so I shall be afforded an oppor- 
 tunity (which will not be mine in this life) of giving Captain 
 Mildare a piece of my mind! " 
 
 So the Dowager-Duchess melted out of the story, and Lady 
 Bridget-Mary Bawne became a nun. 
 
 THIS is what the Mother-Superior wrote to her kinswoman, 
 with her mobile, eloquent lips folded closely together as she 
 thought, and her grave eyes following the swift journey of the 
 pen as it formed the sentences: 
 
 "Now let me speak to you of Lynette Mildare. I have 
 never thought it necessary to make the slightest disguise of my 
 great partiality for this, the dearest of all the many children 
 given me by Our Lord since I gave up my crown of earthly 
 motherhood to Him" 
 
 She stopped, remembering what another great lady, a relative 
 of hers, had said to her when it was first made public that she 
 intended to enter the Novitiate: 
 
 " Indeed ! It would seem, then, that you are devoid of am- 
 bition, my dear, unlike the other people of your house." 
 
 She had said: 
 
 " Does it strike you as lack of ambition that one of my fam- 
 ily should prefer Christ before any earthly spouse? " 
 
 What a base utterance that had seemed to her afterwards! 
 How devoid of the true spirit of the religious, how hateful, 
 petty, profane! But the great lady had been greatly struck 
 by it, and went about quoting her words everywhere. She,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 59 
 
 who had spoken them, set them for ever as a bar between her 
 and ill-considered, worldly speech. 
 She wrote on: 
 
 " She has no vocation for the life of a religious, f doubt 
 her being happy or successful an a teacher here, were I removed 
 from my post by supreme earthly authority, or by death, either 
 contingency being the expression of the Will of God. She hat 
 a reserved, sensitive nature, quick to feel, and eager to hide 
 what she feels, indifferent to praise or popularity among the 
 many, anxiously desirous to please, passionately devoted where 
 she gives k:r love. . . " 
 
 The firm mouth quivered, and a mist stole before her eyes. 
 Being human, she took the handkerchief that lay amongst her 
 papers and wiped the crowding tears away, and went on: 
 
 "/ could wish, in anticipation of either of the events named, 
 that provision might now be made for her. Those who love 
 me yourself I know to be among the number will not, I feel 
 assured, be Indifferent to my wish that she should be placed 
 beyond the reach of want." 
 
 She wrote on, knowing that the implied wish would be ob- 
 served as a command: 
 
 " We have never been able to trace any persons who might 
 have been her parents we have never even known her real 
 name. Those among whom her childhood was spent called 
 her by none. As you know, I gave her In Holy Baptism one 
 that was our dear dead mother's, together with the sur-name 
 of a lost friend^ She is, and must be always, known as Lynette 
 Mlldare." 
 
 Her eyes were tearless, and her hand quite steady as she con- 
 tinued: 
 
 " You must not be at all alarmed or shaken by this letter. 1 
 am perfectly well In health; be quite assured, I trust I may be 
 spared to carry on my work here for many long years to come. 
 But In case it should be othenulse, I write thus'. 
 
 " The country is greatly disturbed, In spite of the calmlst 
 reports that have been disseminated by the Home Authorities.
 
 60 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 / do not, and cannot, imagine what the official view may be in 
 London at this moment, but it is certain that the Transvaal 
 and Free State are preparing for war. Every hour the enmity 
 between the Boers and the English deepens in intensity. It 
 will be to many minds a relief when the storm bursts. The 
 War Office may think meanly of the Africanized Dutchman 
 as a fighting force, but the opinion of every loyal Briton in 
 this country is that he is not a foe to be despised, and that he 
 will shed the last drop of his own blood and his children's for 
 the sake of his independence. 
 
 "Above the petty interests of greedy capitalists looms the 
 wider question: Shall the Briton or the Dutchman rule in 
 the South of Africa? Here in this little frontier town ive 
 wait the sounding of the tocsin. The Orange Free State has 
 openly allied itself with the Transvaal Government. There 
 are said to be several commandos in laager on the Border. A 
 public meeting of citizens of this town has been held, at which 
 a vote of c No confidence' in the Dutch Ministers has been 
 passed, and an appeal fsr help has been made to the Govern- 
 ment at Cape Town. It is not yet publicly known what the 
 response has been, if there is any. I think it ominous that all 
 of our Dutch pupils, save one, should have been hurriedly sent 
 for by their parents before the ending of the term. Knowing 
 my responsibility, I am sending all home, except the few who 
 happen to be resident in this town, and the school will remain 
 closed, at all events, until the outlook assumes a less threaten- 
 ing aspect^ It is a relief to many that a Military Commandant 
 has been appointed by the authorities of Cape Town, and that 
 he arrived here a week ago. He is reported to be an officer of 
 energy and decision, and as he has already set the troops under 
 his command to work at putting the town into a condition of 
 defence, and is organizing the civil male population into regi- 
 ment of armed " 
 
 There was a light knock at the door. She responded with 
 the permission to enter, and a tall, slight girl, with red-brown 
 hair, came in and closed the door, dropping her little curtsy 
 to the Mother-Superior. She wore the plain black alpaca uni- 
 form of the Convent, with the ribbon of the Headship of the 
 Red Class, to be resigned when she should become a pupil- 
 teacher at the opening of the next term; and the rare and 
 beautiful smile broke over the face of the elder woman as the 
 younger came to her side.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 61 
 
 " Are you busy, Reverend Mother ? Do you want me to go 
 away ? " 
 
 " I shall have finished in another five minutes, and then there 
 will be no more letters to write, my child. Sit where you 
 choose ; take a book, and be quiet ; I shall not keep you waiting 
 long." 
 
 The words were few; the Mother-Superior's manner a little 
 curt in speaking them. But where Lynette chose to sit was on 
 the cheap drugget that covered the beeswaxed boards, with her 
 squirrel-coloured hair and soft cheek pressed against the black 
 serge habit. 
 
 The Mother-Superior wrote on, apparently absorbed, and 
 with knitted brows of attention, but her large, white, beautiful 
 hand dropped half unconsciously to the silken hair and the 
 velvet cheek, and stayed there. 
 
 There is a type of woman the lightest touch of whose hand 
 is subtler and more sweet than the most honeyed kisses of 
 others. And the Mother-Superior was not liberal of caresses. 
 When Lynette turned her lips to the hand, the face that bent 
 over the paper remained as stern and as absorbed as ever. She 
 went on writing, directed, closed, and stamped her letter, and 
 set it aside under a pebble of white quartz, lined and streaked 
 with the faint silvery green of gold. 
 
 "Now, my child?" 
 
 The girl said, flushing scarlet: 
 
 " Reverend Mother, I have told the Red Class the truth 
 about me!" 
 
 The Mother-Superior started; dismay was in her face. 
 
 "Why, child?" 
 
 " I I mean " the scarlet flush gave place to paleness 
 " that I have no name and no family, and no friends except 
 you, dearest, and the Sisters. That you found me, and took 
 me in, and have kept me out of charity." 
 
 "Was it necessary to have told anything whatever?" 
 
 " I think so, Mother, and I am glad now that I have done 
 it. There will be no need for deception any more." 
 
 " My daughter, there has never been the slightest deception 
 of any kind whatsoever upon your part, or the part of anyone 
 else who knew. No interests suffered by your keeping your 
 own secret. Who first solicited your confidence in this mat- 
 ter?" 
 
 " Greta Du Taine." 
 
 " Greta Du Taine." Very cold was the tone of the Mother-
 
 62 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Superior. " May I ask how she received the information she 
 had the bad taste to seek? " 
 
 " Mother she took it not quite as I expected." 
 
 " Yet she and you have always been friends, my child." 
 
 Lynette rose up upon her knees. The long arm of the 
 Mother-Superior went round the slight figure that leaned 
 against her, and in the sudden gesture was a passion of protect- 
 ing motherhood. 
 
 " Mother, she does not wish to be my friend any longer. 
 She was quite horrified to remember that she had invited 
 me to stay with her at the Du Taine place near Johan- 
 nesburg. But she said that, if I liked she would not tell the 
 class." 
 
 " I have no fear of the rest of the class. They have honour, 
 ind good feeling, and Warm hearts. What was your reply to 
 Jjreta's obliging proposition?" 
 
 "I told her that the sooner everybody knew the better; and 
 [ went out of the room, and came to you as I always do as 
 [ always have done, ever since " 
 
 Her voice broke in the first sob. 
 
 "Ah!" cried the voice of the mother-heart she crept to, as 
 *he long arms in the loose black serge sleeves went out and 
 folded her close, " ah, if I might be always here for you to 
 run to! But God knows best!" 
 
 She said aloud: 
 
 " Well, the ordeal is over, and will not have to be gone 
 through again. And for the future, bear in mind that every 
 human being has a right to regard his own business or hers 
 as private, and to exclude the curious from affairs which do 
 not concern them." She reached out quick tender hands, and 
 framed the wistful, sensitive face in them, and added, in a 
 lower tone: "For a little told may beget in them the desire 
 to know more. And always remember this: that the only 
 just claim to your perfect confidence in all that concerns your 
 past life, and I say all with meaning " the girl's white eye- 
 lids fell under her earnest gaze, and the delicate lips began to 
 quiver " will rest in the man the honourable and brave and 
 worthy gentleman who I pray may one day be your hus- 
 band." 
 
 " No! " she cried out sharply as if in terror, and the slight 
 figure was shaken by a sudden spasm of trembling. " Oh, 
 Mother, no! Never, never!" 
 
 With a gesture of infinite pity and tenderness the Mother
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 63 
 
 drew her close, and hid the shamed eyes upon her bosom, and 
 whispered, with her lips upon the red-brown hair: 
 
 "My lamb, my dearest, my poor, poor child! It shall be 
 never if you choose, Lynette. But make no rash vows, no de- 
 terminations that you think irrevocable. Leave the future to 
 God. Now dry these dear eyes, and put old thoughts and 
 memories of sorrow and of shame most resolutely away from 
 you. Be happy, as Our Lord meant all innocent creatures of 
 His to be. And do not be tempted to magnify Greta's offence 
 against friendship. She has acted according to her lights, and 
 if they are of the kind that shine in marshy places, a better 
 Light will shine upon her path one day. I know that you have 
 real affection for her . . . though I must own I have always 
 wondered in what lay the secret of her popularity in the 
 School ? " 
 
 " She is so amusing and so pretty, Mother." 
 
 " She is exquisitely pretty. And beauty is one of the most 
 excellent among all the gifts of God. Our sense of what is 
 beautiful and the delight we have in the perception of it must 
 linger with us from those days when Angels walked visibly on 
 earth, and talked with the children of men. A lovely soul in 
 a lovely body, nothing can be more excellent, but such a body 
 does not always cage what St. Columb called ' the bird of 
 beauty.' And we must not be swayed or led by outward and 
 perishable things, that are illusions, and deceits, and snares." 
 
 The Mother-Superior reached out a long arm, and took a 
 solid leather-bound, red-edged volume from the table, and 
 opened it at a page marked by a flamingo feather, whose deli- 
 cate pink faded at the tip into rosy-white. 
 
 " I was reading this a little while before you came in. If 
 you were not a little dunce at Greek, you would be able to 
 construe the classic author for yourself." 
 
 " But I am a dunce, dear, and so I leave you to read him to 
 me," said Lynette triumphantly. 
 
 " Well, balance this heavy book, and listen." 
 
 She read: 
 
 When first the Father of the Immortals fashioned with 
 His Divine Hands the human shape: 
 
 An image first He made of red earth from Ida, tempered 
 with pure water from the stream of Xanthos, and wine from 
 the golden Kyliz borne by beautiful Ganymede, and it was 
 godlike to look upon as a thing fashioned by the hands of the
 
 64 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 god. But the clay was not tempered sufficiently and warped 
 in the drying. Then Zeus Pater fashioned another shape with 
 more cunning, and this was tempered well and warped not. 
 And He bent down to breathe between its lips the living soul* 
 But as He stooped, Hephaistos, jealous of the Divine gift 
 about to be conferred upon the mortal race, sent from his forges 
 smoke and vapour, which obscured the vision of the Almighty 
 Workman. So that the imperfect image received that which 
 was meant for the perfect one. 
 
 "'And Zeus Pater, being angered, said: "See what thy 
 malice has wrought. Behold, a beautiful soul has been set in 
 a body unbeauteous and through thine act, and God though 
 I be, I cannot take back the gift that I have given." Then into 
 the other image of Man, the Divine One breathed a soul. 
 But being wearied with His labours, and angered by the craft of 
 Hephaistos, it was less pure than the first. And so two men 
 came into being. 
 
 ''And he whose body had been fashioned perfectly and 
 without flaw by the Hands of the Divine Craftsman walked the 
 earth with gracious mien. Fair-eyed was he, with locks like 
 clustering vine-tendrils, and cheeks rosy ds the apples of Love; 
 but the soul of this man was cunning, and he rejoiced in evils 
 and cruelties, and deceits and mockeries were upon his lips. 
 
 ''And he whose image had warped in the drying was un- 
 beautiful in body and swart to look upon, as though blackened 
 by the forge-fires of Hephaistos, but he dealt uprightly and 
 hated evil, and on his lips there was no guile, but faithfulness 
 and truth. 
 
 ' 'And he who was imperfect in body was fairer in the eyes 
 of the Immortal Father than his brother; because there dwelt 
 within him a beauteous soul.' " 
 
 " And yet, Mother, if your beautiful soul had not been 
 given beautiful windows to look out at, and a beautiful mouth 
 to kiss me or scold me with, and beautiful hands to hold, it 
 would have been a beastly shame/' 
 
 Is there a woman living who can resist such sweet daughterly 
 flatteries? This was very much a woman, and very much a 
 mother, if very much a nun. She kissed the mouth distilling 
 such dear honey. 
 
 " This, not for the compliment, but because it is six years 
 to-day since I found you, lying like some poor little strayed 
 lamb on the veld, with the aasvogels hovering overhead."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 65 
 
 " That was my real birthday, dearest, dearest . . ." 
 
 The girl pressed closer to her with dumb, vehement affection, 
 as though she would have grown to the bosom that had been 
 her shield since then. 
 
 " On that day a little later, when I looked down and you 
 looked up with big eyes that begged for love, I knew that 
 \ve had found each other. And we have never lost each other 
 since, I think? " 
 
 She smiled radiantly into the loving eyes. 
 
 " Never, my Mother. But if we did ... if we are ever to 
 be estranged or parted, it would be better . . . oh, it would 
 be better if you had passed by in the waggon, and left me lying, 
 and the aasvogels and the w r ild-dogs had done the rest." 
 
 The Mother-Superior said, loosening the clinging arms, and 
 putting her gently away: 
 
 " Never, my daughter. You do gravely wrong to say so. 
 Holy Baptism has been yours, and Confirmation, and you have 
 shared with His Faithful in the Body of Christ. . . . Never 
 let me hear you say that again." 
 
 " Mother, I promise you, you never shall. But I had a 
 dream last night that was most vivid and strange and awful. 
 It has haunted me ever since." 
 
 The Mother-Superior started, for she also had had a strange 
 dream. Of that vision had been born the written letter that 
 now lay under the quartz paper-weight the letter that was 
 to be sent, with others, by the next English mail that should 
 go out from Gueldersdorp, which said mail, being intercepted 
 by the Boers, was never to reach its destination. Supposing it 
 had, this story need never have been written, or else another 
 would have been written in its place. 
 
 " Dear heart, I do not think that it is good or useful to 
 brood upon such things, or to relate them. And the Church 
 forbids us to take account of mere dreams, or in any way to be 
 swayed by them." 
 
 " That has always puzzled me. Because, you know . . , 
 supposing St. Joseph had refused to credit a dream. . . ." 
 
 " There are dreams and dreams, my dear. And the 
 heavenly visions of the Saints are not to be confounded with 
 our trivial subconscious memories. Besides, sweets and fruits 
 and pastry consumed in the Seniors' dormitory at night are 
 not only an infringement of School rules, but an insult to the 
 digestion." 
 
 '' Mother, how did you find out?" cried Lynette. There
 
 66 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 was something very like a dimple in the bleached olive of the 
 sweet worn cheek, lurking near the edge of the close coif, and a 
 twinkle of laughter in the deep grey eyes that you thought 
 were black until you had learned better. 
 
 " Well, though you may not find it easy to believe, I was 
 once a girl at a Convent school, and I possibly remember how 
 we usually celebrated a breaking-up. There is the washing- 
 bell; the school tea-bell will ring directly; you must hurry, 
 or you will be late. One moment. What of this unpleasant 
 incident that took place during the afternoon walk yesterday? 
 Sister Cleophee and Sister Francis-Clare have not given me 
 a very definite account." 
 
 Lynette's fair skin flushed poppy-red. 
 
 " Mother, they hooted us on the road to the Recreation 
 Ground." 
 
 Upon the great brows of the Mother-Superior sat the 
 majesty of coming tempest. Her white hand clenched, her 
 tone was awfully stern : 
 
 "Who were 'they'?" 
 
 " Some drunken Boers and store-boys at least, I think they 
 were drunk and some Dutch railway-men. They cried shame 
 on the Dutch girls for learning from vile English idolaters. 
 Then more men came up and joined them. They threw stones, 
 and threatened to duck Sister Cleophee and the two other 
 Sisters in the river. And they might have tried to, though 
 we senior girls got round them at least, some of us did and 
 said they should try that on us first " 
 
 " That was courageous." 
 
 " We " Lynette laughed a little nervously " we were aw- 
 fully frightened, all the same." 
 
 " My dear, without fear there would have been no courage. 
 Then I am told an English officer interfered?" 
 
 " He was coming from the direction of the Hospital a tall 
 thin man in Service khaki, with a riding-sjambok under his 
 arm. But it would have been as good as a sword if he had 
 used it on those men. When he lifted it in speaking to them 
 they huddled together like sheep." 
 
 " You had no idea who he was, of course ? " 
 
 " I do not know his name, but I heard one of the Boers say 
 *That slim duyvel with the sjambok is the new Military Com- 
 mandant.' Another officer was with him, much younger, taller, 
 and with fair hair. He " 
 
 " I hope I shall soon have an opportunity of thanking the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 67 
 
 Commandant personally. As it is, I shall write. Now go, 
 my dear." 
 
 Lynette took her familiar kiss, and dropped her formal 
 curtsy, and went with the red sunset touching her squirrel- 
 coloured hair to flame. The tea-bell rang as she shut the door 
 behind her, and directly afterwards the gate-bell clanged, 
 sending an iron shout echoing through the whitewashed, tile- 
 paved passages, as if heralding a visitor who would not be 
 denied. An Irish novice who was on duty with the Sister 
 attendant on the gate came shortly afterwards to the room 
 of the Mother-Superior, bringing a card on a little wooden 
 tray. 
 
 The Mother, the opening sentences of her note of thanks 
 wet upon the sheet before her, took the card, and knew that the 
 letter need not be sent. 
 
 "This gentleman desired to see me? " 
 
 " He did so, Reverend Mother," whispered the timid Irish 
 girl, who stood in overwhelming awe of the majestic person- 
 ality before her. " ' Ask the Mother-Superior w T ill she con- 
 sent to receive me ? ' says he. ' If she won't, say that she must.' 
 Says I : ' Sir, I'd not drame to presume to give Herself a message 
 that bowld, but if you'll please to wait, I'll tell her what you're 
 after saying.' >: 
 
 " Quite right, Katie. Now go and tell Sister Tobias to 
 show him into the parlour. I will be there directly." 
 
 Katie bobbed and vanished. When the Mother-Superior 
 came into the parlour, the visitor was standing near the fire- 
 place, with his hands behind his back. One wore a shabby 
 dogskm riding-glove. The other, lean and brown and knotty, 
 held his riding-cane and the other glove, and a grey " smasher " 
 hat. He was looking up quietly and intently at a framed oil- 
 painting that hung above. 
 
 It represented a Syrian desert landscape, pale and ghastly, 
 under the light of a great white moon, with one lonely Figure 
 standing like a sentinel against a towering fang of rock. 
 Lurking forms of fierce beasts of prey were dimly to be dis- 
 tinguished amongst the shadows, and by the side of the patient, 
 lonely watcher brooded with out-spread bat-wings a Shadow 
 infinitely more terrible than any of these. It was rather a poor 
 copy of a modern picture, but the truth and force and inspi- 
 ration of the original had made of the copyist an artist for the 
 time. The pure dignity and lofty faith and patience of the 
 Christ-eyes, haggard with bodily sleeplessness and spiritual
 
 68 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 battle, the indomitable resistance breathing in the lines of the 
 Christ figure, wan and gaunt with physical famine as with 
 the nobler hunger of the soul, were rendered with fidelity and 
 power. 
 
 The stranger's keen ear caught the Mother's long, swift 
 step, and the sweep of her woollen draperies over the shiny 
 beeswaxed floor. He wheeled sharply, brought his heels to- 
 gether, and bowed. She returned his salutation with her in- 
 imitable dignity and grace. With his eyes on the pure, still 
 calmness of the face framed in the white close guimpe, the 
 Colonel commented mentally: 
 
 " What a noble-looking woman ! " 
 
 The Mother-Superior thought, as her composed eyes swept 
 over the tall, spare, broad-shouldered figure and the strong, 
 lean, tanned face, with its alert, hazel eyes, nose of the falcon- 
 beak order, and the firm straight mouth unconcealed by the 
 short-clipped moustache : 
 
 " This is a brave man." 
 
 XI 
 
 THE great of soul are not slow to find each other out. These 
 two recognized each other at meeting. Before he had explained 
 his errand, she had thanked him cordially, directly, and sim- 
 ply, for his timely interference of the previous day. 
 
 " One of the lesser reasons of my visit, which I must ex- 
 plain is official in character," he said, " was to advise you that 
 your pupils and the ladies in charge of them will not hence- 
 forth be safe from insult except in those parts of the town most 
 frequented with our countrymen, and rarely even there. It 
 would be wise of you under existing circumstances, which I 
 shall explain as fully and as briefly as I may, to send your 
 pupils without delay to their homes." 
 
 " All that have not already left," she assured him, " with 
 the exception of those whose parents reside in the town, or who 
 have no living relatives, and therefore do not leave us, go North 
 and South by early trains to-morrow." 
 
 " Ma'am," he said, " I am heartily glad to hear it." He 
 added, as she invited him to be seated: "Thank you, but I 
 have been in the saddle since five this morning, and if you have 
 no objection I should prefer to stand. And for another reason, 
 I explain things better on my legs. But you will allow me to 
 find you a seat, if any of these may be moved? " His glance,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 69 
 
 with some perturbation in it, reviewed the stiff ranks of chairs 
 severely marshalled in Convent fashion against the varnished 
 skirting-board. 
 
 " They are not fixtures," she said, with quiet amusement at 
 his evident relief, and he got her a chair, the largest and most 
 solid that the room offered, and planted himself opposite her, 
 standing on the hearthrug, with one hand resting on the corner 
 of the high mantelshelf, and the toe of a spurred riding-boot 
 on the plain brick kerb. 
 
 " I may as well say . . ." he ran a finger round the inside 
 of the collar that showed about the khaki jacket " that, though 
 I have often had the pleasure, and I will add, the great ad- 
 vantage, of meeting ladies of of your religious profession be- 
 fore, this is the first time that I was ever inside a Convent." 
 
 " Or a boarding-school ? " she asked, and her rare, sudden 
 smile irradiated her. His hand dropped from his collar. He 
 looked at her with a sudden warmth of admiration there was no 
 mistaking. But her beauty went as suddenly as it had come, 
 and her arched, black brows frowned slightly as she said, in 
 tones that were very cold and very clear, and rather ironical : 
 
 " Sir, you are good enough to waste valuable time in trying 
 to break, with due consideration for the nerves of a large house- 
 hold of unprotected women, the news we have expected daily 
 for months. You have come here to announce to us the burst- 
 ing of the cloud of War. Is it not so ? " 
 
 He was taken aback, but hid it like a diplomat. 
 
 " Ma'am, it is so. The public notice was posted in the 
 town this morning. Forces of Boers are massed on the Natal 
 and Bechuanaland borders, waiting until the British fire a 
 shot. Their secret orders are to wait that signal, but some un- 
 looked-for event may cause them to anticipate these. . . . 
 And we shall be wise to prepare for eventualities. For my- 
 self, having been sent out by the British Government on special 
 service to report to the Home Authorities upon our defences 
 in the North it is an open secret now I have been sent on 
 here to put the town into a condition to withstand siege. And 
 frankly, without apology for necessary and inevitable bluntness, 
 one of the most important of those conditions is that the 
 women and children should be got out of it." 
 
 The blow had been delivered. The angry blush that he had 
 expected did not invade the pale olive of her cheeks. 
 
 He added: 
 
 " I hope you will understand that I say this because it is mj)
 
 70 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 duty. I am not naturally an unsociable, or bearish, or a mis- 
 ogynist. Rather the contrary. Quite the contrary." 
 
 She remembered a slim, boyish, young subaltern officer of 
 Hussars with whom she had danced in a famous London ball* 
 room more than twenty years back. That boy a woman hater! 
 Struggle as she would the Mother-Superior could not keep 
 Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne from coming to the surface for 
 an instant. But she went under directly, and left nothing but 
 a spark of laughter in the beautiful grave eyes. 
 
 " I understand," she said. " Woman in time of peace may 
 add a certain welcome pleasantness to life. In time of war she 
 is nothing but a helpless incubus." 
 
 " Let me point out, ma'am, that I did not say so. But she 
 possesses a capacity for being killed equal in ratio to that of 
 the human male, without being equally able to defend herself. 
 In addition to this, she eats, and I shall require all the rations 
 that may be available to keep alive the combatant members of 
 the community." 
 
 " Eating is a habit," agreed the Mother-Superior, " which 
 even the most rigid disciplinarians of the body have found dif- 
 ficult to break." 
 
 His mouth straightened sternly under the short-clipped 
 brown moustache. Here was a woman who dared to bandy 
 words with the Officer Commanding the Garrison. He drew 
 a shabby notebook from a breast-pocket, and consulted it. 
 
 " On the eleventh, the day after to-morrow, a special train, 
 leaving No. 2 platform of the railway-station, will be placed 
 by the British Government at the disposal of those married 
 women, spinsters, and children who wish to follow the example 
 of those who left to-day, and go down to Cape Town. Those 
 'who prefer to go North are advised to leave for Malamye 
 Siding or Johnstown, places at a short distance from the 
 iTransvaal Border, where they will be almost certain to find 
 jsafety. Those who insist upon remaining in the town I can- 
 not, of course, remove by force. I will make all possible 
 arrangements to laager them safely, but this will entail heavy 
 extra labour upon the forces at my command, and inevitable 
 discomfort possibly severe suffering and privation upon 
 yourselves. To you, madam, I appeal to set a high example. 
 Your Community numbers, unless I am incorrectly informed, 
 twelve religious. Consent to take the step I urge upon you, 
 retreat with your nuns to Cape Town while the opportunity 
 is yours."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 71 
 
 He folded his arms, having spoken this curtly and crisply. 
 The Mother-Superior rose up out of her chair. It seemed to 
 him as though she would never have done rising, but at last 
 she stood before him, very straight and awfully tall, with her 
 great stern eyes an inch above the level of his own, and her 
 white hands folded in her brown sleeves. 
 
 " Sir," she said, " we are here under the episcopal jurisdic- 
 tion of the Catholic Bishop of the Diocese. We have received 
 no order from His Eminence to quit our post and until we 
 receive it, give me leave to tell you, with all respect for your 
 high official authority, that we shall remain in Gueldersdorp." 
 
 Their looks crossed like swords. He grew crimson over 
 the white unsunburned line upon his forehead, and his 
 moustache straightened like a bar of rusty-red iron across his 
 thin, sunburnt face. But he respected moral power and deter- 
 mination when he encountered them, and this salient woman 
 provoked his respect. 
 
 " Let us keep cool " he began. 
 
 " I assure you that I have never been otherwise," she said, 
 " since the beginning of this interview." 
 
 " Ma'am," he said, " you state the fact. Let me keep cool, 
 and point out to you a few of the peculiarities in which the 
 present situation unfortunately abounds." 
 
 He laid down, with a look that asked permission, his hat 
 and cane and the odd glove upon the round, shining walnut- 
 table that stood, adorned with good little religious, works, in 
 the geometrical centre of the Convent parlour, and checked 
 the various points off upon the fingers of the gloved hand with 
 the lean, brown, bare one. 
 
 " I anticipate very shortly the outbreak of hostilities." He 
 had quite forgotten that he was talking to a member of the 
 squeaking sex. " I have begun immediately upon my arrival 
 here to prepare for them. The nucleus of a sand-bag fort 
 system has been formed already, mines are being laid down far 
 in the front, and every male of the population who has a pair 
 of capable hands has had a rifle put into them." 
 
 She looked at him, and approved the male type of energy 
 and action. " If. I had been a man," she thought, " I should 
 have wished to be one like this." But she bent her head si- 
 lently, and he went on. 
 
 " We have an armoured train in the railway-yard, with a 
 Maxim and a Hotchkiss. We have a Nordenfeldt, a couple 
 of Maxims more, four seven-pounder guns of almost prehistoric
 
 72 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 date, slow of fire, uncertain as regards the elevating-gear, and, 
 I tell you plainly, as dangerous, some of 'em, to be behind as 
 to be in front of! One or two more we've got that were 
 grey-headed in the seventies. By the Lord ! I wish one or two 
 Whitehall heads I know were mopping 'em out this minute. 
 Ahem! Ahem!" 
 
 He coughed, and grew red under his sun-tan. Her eyes 
 were elsewhere. 
 
 " Ma'am, you must try to recollect that the Boer forces are 
 armed with the newest Krupps and other guns, and that it is 
 more than possible they may attempt to shell the town. In 
 that case artillery of tremendous range, and a flight almost 
 equal to that of sound itself I won't be too technical, I 
 assure you! will be mustered against our crazy pieces, only 
 fit for the scrap-heap, or for gate ornaments. Understand, I 
 tell you what is common knowledge among our friends com- 
 mon jest among our enemies. And another thing I will tell 
 you, ma'am. Those enemies shall never enter Gueldersdorp ! " 
 
 She was radiant now, with that smile upon her lips, and 
 that glow in the great eyes that met his with such frank 
 approval. Confound it, what business had a nun to be any- 
 thing like so beautiful? Would she pale, would she tremble, 
 when he told her the last truth of all? 
 
 " Your Convent, ma'am, unluckily for your Community, 
 happens to be, if not the biggest, at least the most con- 
 spicuously situated building in the place, lying as it does at a 
 distance of four hundred yards from the town, on the north 
 side. Like the Hospital, of course, it will be under the pro- 
 tection of the Red-Cross Flag. But the Boer is not chivalrous. 
 He does not object to killing women or sick people, nor does 
 he observe with any standing scrupulousness the Geneva Con- 
 vention. Any object that shows up nicely on the skyline is 
 good enough to pound away at, and the Red-Cross Flag has 
 often helped him to get a satisfactory range. If they bom- 
 bard us, as I have reason to believe they will, you'll have iron 
 and lead in tons poured through these walls." 
 
 She said: 
 
 "When they fall about our ears, Colonel, it will be time 
 to leave them ! " 
 
 He adored a gallant spirit, and here was one indeed. 
 
 " Ma'am, I am disarmed, since you take things in this way." 
 
 " It is the only way in which to take them," she said. 
 * There should be no panic in the hearts of those who wait
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 73 
 
 on the Divine will. Moreover, I should wish you to under- 
 stand in case of siege, and an extra demand upon the staffs 
 of the town and Field Hospitals, that we are all or nearly 
 all, certificated nurses, and would willingly place our services 
 at your disposal. Let me hope that you will call upon us 
 without hesitation if the necessity should arise." 
 
 He thanked her, and had taken leave, when he asked with 
 diffidence if he might be permitted to see the Convent Chapel. 
 She consented willingly, and passed on before, tall and stately, 
 and moving with long, light, even steps, her thin, black woollen 
 garments whispering over the tiled passages. The Chapel was 
 at the end of a long whitewashed corridor upon the airy floor 
 above. His keen glance took in every feature of the simple, 
 spotless little sanctuary as the tall, black-clad figure swept 
 noiselessly to the upper end of the aisle between the rows of 
 rush-seated chairs, and knelt for an instant in .veneration of the 
 Divine Presence hidden in the Tabernacle. 
 
 " Unfortunately situated," he muttered, standing stiffly by 
 the west door. Then he glanced right and left, thumb and 
 finger in the breast-pocket of his tunic, feeling for a worn 
 little pigskin purse. As he passed out before her at the motion, 
 and she mechanically dipped her fingers in the holy-water font, 
 and made the Sign of the Cross before she closed the Chapel 
 door, she saw that he held out to her a five-pound note. 
 
 " Ma'am, I am not a Roman Catholic, but . . ." 
 
 " There is no box for alms," she said, pausing outside the 
 shut door, while the lay-Sister waited at the passage end, " as 
 this is only a private Chapel." 
 
 " I observed that, ma'am. I am, as I have said, a Prot- 
 estant. But in the behalf of a dear friend of mine, a British 
 officer, of your own faith, who I have reason to believe died 
 without benefit of his clergy, perhaps with this you would 
 arrange that a service should be held in memory of the dead ? " 
 
 " I understand," said the Mother-Superior. " You suggest 
 that a Holy Mass should be offered for the repose of your 
 friend's soul? Well, I will convey your offering to our 
 chaplain, Father Wil, since you wish it." 
 
 " I do desire it or, rather, poor Mildare would." 
 
 An awful sensation as of sinking down through the solid 
 floors, through the foundations of the Convent, into unfathom- 
 able deeps possessed her. Her eyes closed; she forced them 
 open, and made a desperate rally of her sinking forces. Un- 
 seen she put out one hand behind her, and leaned it for support
 
 74 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 against the iron-studded oak timbers of the Chapel door. But 
 his eyes were not upon her as he went on, unconsciously, to 
 deal the last, worst blow. 
 
 " I said, ma'am, that my dead friend . . . the name is 
 Richard Mildare, Captain, late of the Grey Hussars. . . . 
 You are ill, ma'am. I have been inconsiderate, and over-tired 
 you." He had become aware that great dark circles had 
 drawn themselves round her eyes, and that even her lips were 
 colourless. She said, with a valiant effort : 
 
 " I assure you, with thanks, that you have been most con- 
 siderate, and that I am perfectly well. Are you at liberty to 
 tell me, sir, the date of Captain Mildare's death? For I know 
 one who was also his friend, and would " a spasm passed 
 over her face " take an interest in knowing the particulars." 
 
 " Madam, you shall know what I know myself. About 
 twenty years ago Captain Mildare, owing to certain unhappy 
 social circumstances, not pecuniary ones, sent in his papers, 
 sold his Commission, and left England." 
 
 She waited. 
 
 " I heard of him in Paris. Then, later, I heard from him. 
 He was with her here in South Africa. She was a woman for 
 whom he had given up everything. They travelled continually, 
 never resting long anywhere, he, and she, and their child. 
 She died on the trek, and he buried her." 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 The voice was curiously toneless. 
 
 " Where he buried her has only recently come to my knowl- 
 edge. It was at a kind of veld tavern in the Orange Free 
 State, somewhere in the grass country between Driepoort and 
 Kroonfontein, where travellers can get a lodging, and bad 
 liquor, and worse company. ' Trekkers Plaats ' they call the 
 place now. But when my friend was there ft was known as 
 the ' Free State Hotel.' " 
 
 Her lips shut as if to keep out bitter, drowning waters ; her 
 face was white as wax within the starched blue-white of the 
 nun's coif; his slow sentences fell one by one upon her naked 
 heart, and ate their way in like vitriol. Quite well, too well, 
 she knew what was coming. 
 
 " He dug her grave with his own hands. He meant to 
 have a clergyman read the Burial Service over it, but before 
 that could be arranged for he also died of fever, I gather, 
 though nothing is very clear, except that the two graves are 
 there. I have seen them, and have also ascertained that what-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 75 
 
 ever property he left was appropriated by the scoundrel who 
 kept the hotel, and afterwards sold it, and cleared out of South 
 Africa; and that the child is not to be found. God knows 
 what has become of her! The man who robbed her father 
 may have murdered or sold her or taken her to England. A 
 man bearing his name was mixed up in a notorious case tried 
 at the Central Criminal Court five years ago. And the case, 
 which ruined a well-known West End surgeon, involved the 
 death of a young woman. I trust the victim may not have 
 been the unhappy girl herself. My solicitors in London have 
 been instructed to make inquiries towards the removal of that 
 doubt. . . ." 
 
 If those keen eyes of his had not been averted, he must have 
 seen the strong shuddering that convulsed the woman's frame, 
 and the spasm of agony that wrung the lips she pressed to- 
 gether, and the glistening damps of anguish that broke out 
 upon the broad white forehead. To save her life she could 
 not have said to him, " She whom you seek is here." But a 
 voice wailed in her heart, more piercingly than Rachel's, and 
 it cried: "Richard's daughter. She is Richard's daughter! 
 The homeless thing, the blighted child I found upon the veld, 
 and nursed back to life and happiness and forgetfulness of a 
 hideous past ; whom I took into my empty heart, and taught to 
 call me Mother. . . . She is the fruit of my own betrayal, 
 the offspring of the friend who deceived and the man who 
 deserted me." 
 
 The visitor was going on, his grave gaze still averted: 
 " Of course, the age of the woman whose death brought about 
 the trial I speak of everything depends upon that. Mildare's 
 daughter was a child of three years old when she lost father 
 and mother. If she is alive to-day she would be nearly twenty 
 years of age. I wish it had been my good fortune to trace and 
 find her. She should have had the opportunity of growing up 
 to be a noble woman. In this place, if it might have been, 
 and with an example like yours before her eyes . . . ma'am, 
 good-afternoon." 
 
 He bowed to her, and went away with short, quick, even 
 steps, following the lay-Sister who was to take him to the 
 gate. 
 
 She tottered into the Chapel, and sank down before the 
 Altar, and strove to pray. Her mind was an eddying black- 
 ness shot with the livid glare of electric fires. Her faith 
 rocked like a palm in the tempest; her soul was tossed across
 
 76 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 raging billows like a vessel in the grip of the cyclone. Being 
 so great, she suffered greatly; being so strong, she had strong 
 passions to wrestle with and to subdue. Awhile, like that 
 other Mary, who, unlike her, was a fleshly sinner, she strove, 
 rent as it seemed to her, by seven devils. And then she fell 
 down prone at her Master's nail-pierced Feet, and found there 
 at last the healing gift of tears. 
 
 XII 
 
 EMIGRATION JANE, the new under-housemaid on trial at the 
 Convent, had a gathering on the top joint of the first finger 
 of the hand that burned to wear Walt Slabbert's betrothal- 
 ring, and the abscess being ripe for the lancet, she had an extra 
 afternoon in the week to get it attended to. She found Walt 
 waiting at the street corner under the lamp-post, and her heart 
 bounded, for by their punctuality at the trysting-place you 
 know whether they are serious in their intentions towards you, 
 or merely carrying on, and her other young men had invariably 
 kept her waiting. This new one was class, and no mistake. 
 
 "Watto, Walt!" she hailed joyously. 
 
 Her Walt uttered a guttural greeting in the Taal, and dis- 
 played uncared-for and moss-grown teeth in the smile that 
 Emigration Jane found strangely fascinating. To the eye that 
 did not survey Walt through the rose-coloured glasses of affec- 
 tion he appeared merely as a high-shouldered, slab-sided, young 
 Boer, whose cheap store clothes bagged where they did not 
 crease, and whose boots curled upwards at the toes with 
 medieval effect. His cravat, of a lively green, patterned with 
 yellow rockets, warred with his tallowy complexion; his drab- 
 coloured hair hung in clumps; he was growing a beard that 
 sprouted in reddish tufts from the tough hide of his jaws, leav- 
 ing bare patches between, like the karroo. The Slabbert was 
 an assistant-clerk at the Gueldersdorp Railway-Station Parcels- 
 Office, and his widowed mother, the Tante Slabbert, took in 
 washing from Uitlanders who are mad enough to change their 
 underwear with frequency, and did the cleaning at the 
 Gerevormed Kerk at Rustenberg, a duty which involves the 
 emptying of spittoons. Her boy was her joy and pride. 
 
 Young Walt, the true Boer's son that he was, did not enter- 
 tain the idea of marrying Emigration Jane. The child of the 
 Amaiekite might ne^ei jjgjjrought home as bride to the Slab-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 77 
 
 bert roof. But all the same, her style, which was that of the 
 Alexandra Crescent, Kentish Town, London, N.W., and her 
 manners, which were easy, and her taste in dress, which was 
 kaleidoscopic, attracted him. As regards their spoken inter- 
 course, it had been hampered by the Slabbertian habit of pre- 
 tending only a limited acquaintance with the barbarous dialect 
 of England. But a young man who conversed chiefly by 
 grunts, nudges, and signs was infinitely more welcome than no 
 young man at all, and Emigration Jane knew that the language 
 of love is universal. She had sent him a lovely letter in the 
 Taal making this appointment, causing his pachydermatous 
 hide to know the needle-prick of curiosity. For only last 
 Sabbath she had spoken nothing but the English, and a young 
 woman capable of mastering Boer Dutch in a week might be 
 made useful in a variety of ways some of them tortuous, all 
 of them secret, as the Slabbertian ways were wont to be. 
 
 He advanced to her, without the needless ceremony of 
 touching his hat, eagerly asking how she had acquired her new 
 accomplishment? 
 
 But the brain crowned by the big red hat that had come 
 from the Maison Cluny, and cost a hundred francs, and had 
 been smartened up with a bunch of pink and yellow artificial 
 roses, and three imitation ostrich-tips of a cheerful blue, did 
 not comprehend. Someone who spoke the Taal had written 
 for her. The bilingual young woman who was to be of such 
 use to Walt had only existed in his dreams. And yet the 
 disappointing creature was exceeding fair. 
 
 " Pity you left your eyes be'ind you, Dutchy! " giggled Emi- 
 gration Jane, deliciously conscious that those rather muddy 
 orbs were glued on her admiringly. 
 
 The hair crowned by the screaming hat was waved and 
 rolled over the horsehair frame she had learned to call a 
 " Pompydore " ; the front locks, usually confined in the iron 
 cages called " curlers," frizzled wonderfully about her moist, 
 crimson face. She had on a " voylet " delaine skirt, with three 
 bias bands round the bottom, and a " blowse " of transparent 
 muslin stamped with floral devices. Her shoes were of white 
 canvas ; her stockings pink and open-worked ; her gloves were 
 of white thread, and had grown grey in the palms with agita- 
 tion. One of them firmly grasped a crimson " sunshyde," with 
 green and scarlet cherries growing out of the end of the stick. 
 
 The young Dopper warmly grasped the other, provoking a 
 squeal from the enchantress..
 
 78 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "Mind me bad finger! Lumme! you did give us a squeeze, 
 an' a 'arf." 
 
 " If I shall to hurt you I been sorry, Miss," apologized the 
 Slabbert. 
 
 " All righto, Dutchy," smiled Emigration Jane. " Don't 
 tear your features." She bestowed a glance of almost vocal 
 disdain upon a Kaffir girl in turkey-red cotton twill, with a 
 green hat savagely pinned upon her woolly hair. At another 
 ebony female who advanced along the sidewalk pushing a 
 white baby in a perambulator she tossed her head. " Funny," 
 she observed, " when I was 'ome I used to swaller all the tales 
 what parsons kep' pitchin' about that black lot 'aving souls 
 like me an' you. When I got out 'ere, an' took my fust place 
 at Cape Town, an' 'card the Missis and the Master continual 
 sayin', ' Don't do this or that, it ain't Englishwomen's work ; 
 leave it to the Caffy,' or ' Call the 'Ottintot gal,' I felt quite 
 'urt for 'em. Upon me natural, I did! But when I knoo 
 these blackies a bit better, I didn't make no more bones. 
 Monkeys, they are, rigged up in brown 'olland an' red braid, 
 wot 'ave immytated 'uman beings till they've come to talk 
 langwidge wot we can understand, and tumble to our mean- 
 ings. 'Ow do you like me dress, Walty dear? An' me 'at? 
 That chap what passed with the red mustash said to 'is friend 
 as I looked a bit of fair all right, and no mistake. But I'd 
 rather 'ear you say so nor 'im if you 'ad enough English to 
 do it with. Wot do I care about the perisher along of you." 
 
 It was hard work to talk for two, and keep the ball of 
 courtship rolling after the approved fashion of Kentish Town, 
 when the slouching young Boer would only grunt in reply, or 
 twinkle at her out of his piggish eyes. But Emigration Jane 
 had come out to South Africa, hearing that places at five 
 shillings a day were offered you by employers, literally upon 
 their knees, and that husbands were thick as orange-peel and 
 programmes on the pit-floor of the " Bntanniar Theayter," 
 " 'Oxton," or the Camden Varieties on the morning after a 
 Bank Holiday. She had left her first situation at Cape Town, 
 being a girl of spirit, because her mistress had neglected to in- 
 troduce her to eligible gentlemen acquaintances, as the pleasant- 
 spoken agent at the Emigrants' Information Office in Cheap- 
 side, the young gentleman of Hebrew strain, whose dark eyes, 
 waxed moustache, and diamond tie-pin had made a deep im- 
 pression upon the susceptible heart of his client, had assured 
 Jane the South African employer would take an early oppor-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 79 
 
 tunity of doing. The reality had not corresponded with the 
 glowing picture. The employer had failed in duty, the hus- 
 bands-aspirant had not appeared. Ephemeral flirtations there 
 had been with a postman, with a trooper of the Cape Mounted 
 Police, with an American bar-tender. But not one of these 
 had breathed of indissoluble union, though each had wanted to 
 borrow her savings. And Emigration Jane had " bin 'ad " in 
 that way before, and gone with her bleeding heart and depleted 
 Post Office Savings-book before the fat, sallow magistrate at 
 the Regent's Road County Court, and winced and smarted 
 under his brutal waggeries, only to learn that the appropriator 
 of her womanly affections and her fifteen sovereigns had already 
 three wives. 
 
 The brute, the 'artless beast! Emigration Jane wondered 
 at herself, she did, and 'ud bin such a reg'ler soft as to be took 
 in by one to whom she never referred in speech except as 
 " That There Green." That she softened to him in her 
 weaker moments, in spite of his remembered appetite for sav- 
 ings and his regrettable multiplicity of wives, gave her the 
 fair hump. That something in the expression of this new 
 one's muddy eyes recalled the loving leer of " That There 
 Green," she admitted to herself. Womanly anxiety throbbed 
 in the bosom not too coyly hidden by the pneumonia blouse, as 
 the couple passed the gilded portals of a public bar, and the 
 Slabbert elbow was thrust painfully into her side, as its owner 
 said heavily: 
 
 " Have you thirst ? " 
 
 She coyly owned to aridity, and they entered the saloon, 
 kept by a Dutchman w r ho spoke English. Two ginger-beers 
 with a stick of Hollands were supplied, and the stick of Slab- 
 bert was as the rod of Moses to the other stick for strength 
 and power. But as Emigration Jane daintily sipped the cool- 
 ing beverage, giggling at the soapy bubbles that snapped at her 
 nose, the restless worm of anxiety kept on gnawing under the 
 flowery " blowze." Too well did she know the ways of young 
 men who hospitably ask you if you're thirsty, and 'ave you in, 
 whether or no, and order drinks as liberal as lords, and then 
 discover that they're short of the bob, and borrow from you in 
 3- jokey way. , . . Her heart bounded as the Slabbert put his 
 hand in his pocket, saying: 
 
 "Watkostbret?" 
 
 The Dutch bar-keeper, who seemed to know Slabbert, an- 
 swwed in English, looking at Emigration Jane:
 
 8o ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Half a dollar." 
 
 Half a dollar is South African for eighteenpence. Slabbert 
 rattled something metallic in his trousers-pocket, and said 
 something rapidly in the Taal. The Dutch bar-keeper leaned 
 across the counter, and sai'd to Emigration Jane: 
 
 " Your young man has not got the money." 
 
 They were all, all alike. A tear rose to her eye. She 
 bravely dried it with a finger of a white cotton glove, and pro- 
 duced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver 
 affair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk through 
 odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really whiting, and 
 Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and purchase 
 whole rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and 
 cheapen feather-boas at two-and-eleven-three, plucked from the 
 defunct carcass of the domestic fowl. She paid for the drinks 
 with a florin, and it was quite like old times when Slabbert 
 calmly pocketed the sixpence of change. The bar-keeper 
 leaned over to her again, and said, surrounding her with a 
 confidential atmosphere of tobacco and schnaps: 
 
 " He is a good man, that young man of yours, and gets 
 much money. He means to give you a nice present by-and- 
 by." 
 
 Her grateful heart overflowed to this friendly patronage. 
 She showed the bar-keeper her gathered finger, and said it did 
 'urt a treat. She expected it would 'urt worse before Dr. De 
 Boursy Williams " 'adn't 'e got a toff's name?" 'ad done 
 with it. 
 
 "You go to that Engelsch doktor on Harris Street, eh?" 
 said the bar-keeper, spitting dexterously. " Wat scheelt er 
 aan ? how are you sick, eh ? " 
 
 " Sister Tobias that's the nun wot 'ousekeeps at the Con- 
 vent give me a order to see 'im, to 'ave me finger larnced," 
 explained Emigration Jane. " Ain't 'e all right ? " 
 
 " Right enough," said the bar-keeper, winking at the Slab- 
 bert, and adding something in the Taal, that provoked a fine 
 exhibition of that young man's neglected teeth. " There are 
 plenty other Engelsch will be wishing to be as right, oh, 
 very soon. For De Boursy Williams, he has sent his wife and 
 his two daughters away on the train for Cape Town yesterday 
 morning, and he has gone after them that same night, and he 
 has left all his patients to the Dop Doctor." 
 
 " Some red-necked baboons are wiser than others," said the 
 Slabbert in the Taal, and there was a hoarse laugh, and the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING Si 
 
 humourist turned his big heavy body away, and became one of 
 a crowd of other Dutchmen, who were, in veiled hints and 
 crooked allusions, discussing the situation across the Border. 
 Emigration Jane was not sensitive to the electricity in the 
 atmosphere. She knew no Dutch, and was perfect in the 
 etiquette of the outing, which, when the young woman has 
 been supplied with the one regulation drink, stands her up in 
 the corner like an umbrella in dry weather as long as her young 
 man is a-talking to 'is pals. 
 
 " So," the bar-keeper went on, " if you shall want that bad 
 finger of yours looked to, you will have to wait until the Dop 
 Doctor wakes up. He is a big man, who can drink as much 
 as three Boers. . . . He came in this morning to get drunk, 
 and you shall not wake him now if you fire off a rifle at his 
 ear. But he will get up presently and shake himself, and then 
 he will be quite steady; you would not guess how drunk he 
 had been unless you had seen. . . . He is over there, sleeping 
 on that table in the corner, and it will be very bad for the 
 man who shall wake him up. For, look you, that Dop Doctor 
 is a duyvel. I have seen him break a man like a stick between 
 his hands for nothing but cutting up a thieving monkey of a 
 little Kaffir with the sjambok. And he took the verdoemte thing 
 home where he lives, they say, and strapped up its black hide 
 with plaster, and set its arm as if it had been a child of Chris- 
 tians. But every Engelschman is mad. Groot Brittanje 
 breeds a nation of madmen." 
 
 The saloon got fuller and fuller. The air solidified with 
 the Taal and the tobacco, and other things less pleasant. It 
 was not the hour for a crowd of customers, but nobody had 
 seemed to be working much of late. They were all Trans- 
 vaalers and Free Staters, tradesmen of the town, or Boers from 
 outlying farms, and not a man there but was waiting a certain 
 signal to clear out and leave Gueldersdorp to her fate, or re- 
 main in the place on a salary paid by the Republic as a spy. 
 The English customer who came in knew at one whiff of the 
 thick atmosphere that it was unhealthy, and if the man hap- 
 pened to be alone, he ordered, and paid, and drank, and went 
 out quickly. If he happened to be with others, he pointedly 
 addressed his conversation to his countrymen, and left with a 
 certain degree of swagger, and without the appearance of undue 
 haste. 
 
 Once the swing-doors of the saloon opened to admit a short, 
 spare, hollow-chested, dapper young Englishman, whose in-
 
 82 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 significant Cockney countenance was splashed with orange- 
 coloured freckles of immense size. Between his thin anasmic 
 lips dangled the inevitable cigarette. And Emigration Jane, 
 toying with the dregs of her tumbler, recognised the pert, 
 sharp, sallow face seen over the sleeve of a large burgher's out- 
 stretched arm. With some trouble she caught the eye of the 
 short, pale young man, and he instantly became a red one. 
 To reach her was difficult, but he dived and wriggled his way 
 across the saloon, wedging his frail person between the block- 
 ish bodies with a cool address that reminded her of the first 
 night of a " noo show" at the Camden " Theayter," and the 
 queue outside the gallery door. 
 
 ' 'Ullo, 'ullo ! Thought I reckonized you, miss." He touched 
 his cheap imitation Panama with swaggering gallantry, and 
 winked. " But seeing you eight sizes more of a toff than 
 what you were when I previously 'ad the pleasure, I 'esitated 
 to tip you the 'Ow do." 
 
 She tossed her imitation ostrich plumes in joyous coquetry. 
 
 " As if I didn't know wot you're after. Garn ! You only 
 wants to know if I acted on the stryte about. . . ." 
 
 His projecting ears burned crimson. 
 
 " Well, an' suppose I do. Did she " 
 
 "Did she wot?" 
 
 "You pipe well enough. Did she 'ave it?" 
 
 "Ain't you anxious?" 
 
 ' Take it I am anxious. Did she ? No cod ? " 
 
 " Di'd she git your letter wot you put in the box o' choc's? 
 O' course she did, Mister. Wot d'jer take me for? A silly 
 looney or a sneakin' thief ? " 
 
 " I'll tell you what I tyke you for. A jolly little bit of 
 English All Right. Say! Do you think . . ." The promi- 
 nent Adam's apple jutting over the edge of the guillotining 
 double collar worked emotionally. " Think she'll send an 
 answer, eh?" 
 
 " Reckon she will ; you watch out an' see." 
 
 "You furst-clarss little brick!" 
 
 "Garn!" 
 
 " I mean it. Stryte. Next door to a angel that's wot 
 you are. She's the angel. Tell 'er I said so that's if you 
 can, you twig? And say that when I 'card that nearly all the 
 gay ole crowd o' pupils 'ad gone away, day before yesterday, 
 I could 'a blooming well cut me throat, thinkin' she'd gone 
 too. Becos' when I swore in for the Town Guard, it was the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 83 
 
 idear mind you rub that in! of strikin' a blow for Beauty 
 as well as for Britanniar, twig?" The thin elbow in the 
 tweed sleeve nudged her, provoking a joyous giggle. 
 
 " I'm fly, no fear. Are you to 'ave a uniform, an* all 
 like that?" 
 
 His face fell. "The kit don't run to much beyond a 
 smasher 'at an' putties, but they're the regular Service kind, 
 an' then there's the bandolier an' the gun. She ain't the 
 newest rifle served out to Her Majesty's army, not by twenty 
 years. Condemned Martini, a chap says, who's in the know, 
 an' kicks like a mule when I let 'er off made me nose bleed 
 fust time I tried with blank. But when we gets a bit more 
 used to each other, it '11 be a case of bloomin' Doppers rollin' 
 over in the dust, like rock-rabbits. Don't forget to tell 'er as 
 wot I said so." 
 
 " Why . . . ain't she a Dutchy herself ? She wrote a letter 
 for me in their rummy lingo to my young man! " 
 
 "Cr'rips!" He clicked dismay. "Blessed if I 'adn't for- 
 got. But if an Englishman marries a foreigner," he swelled 
 heroic, " that puts 'er in the straight runnin'. And 'art an' 
 'and I'm 'ers, whenever she'll 'ave me! Tell 'er THAT 
 with a double row of crosses from W. Keyse. And can you 
 remember a bit o' poetry?" He recited with shamefaced 
 rapidity: 
 
 "'It is my sentry-go to-night, 
 
 And when I watch the moon so bright, 
 
 Shining o'er South Africa plain, 
 
 I'll think of thee, sweet Greta Du Taine.' " 
 
 Her eyes were full of awe and wonder. " Lor ! you don't 
 mean to say you made up that by yourself? " 
 
 The poet nodded. "Reckon about as much. Like it?" 
 
 "It's perfect lovely! Better than they 'ave in the penny 
 books." 
 
 " Where Coralline and the Marquis are playin' the spooney 
 game, and 'im with a Lady Reginer up 'is dirty sleeve. An' 
 there's another thing I want you to let 'er know." His eyes 
 were on hers, his breath fanned her hot cheeks. " There isn't 
 another woman on the earth but her for me. Dessay there 
 may be others ; wot I say is I don't see 'em ! " He waved his 
 hand, dismissing the ardent creatures. 
 A pang transpierced the conscience hiding under the cheap
 
 84 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 flowery blouse. Emigration Jane hesitated, biting the dog's- 
 eared finger-ends of a cotton glove. Should she tell this 
 ardent, chivalrous lover that the Convent roof no longer 
 sheltered the magnificent fair hair-plait and the mischievous 
 blue eyes of his adored ? That Miss Greta Du Taine had left ' 
 for Johannesburg with the earliest batch of departing pupils! 
 If she told, W. Keyse would vanish out of her life, it might 
 be for ever; or, if by chance encountered on the street, pass by 
 with a casual greeting and a touch of the cheap Panama. 
 Emigration Jane was no heroine, only a daughter of Eve. 
 Arithmetic and what was termed the " tonic sofa " had been 
 more sternly inculcated than the moral virtues at the Board 
 School in Kentish Town. And she was not long in making 
 up her mind that she would not tell him not just yet, any- 
 \vay. 
 
 What was he saying, in the Cockney that cut like a knife 
 through the thick gutturals of the Taal ? "I shall walk past 
 the Convent to-morrer in kit and cetras, on the charnce of 'Er 
 seein' me. Two sharp. And, look 'ere, Miss, you've done 
 me a good turn. And no larks! if ever I can do you an- 
 other trust me. Stryte I mean it! You ask chaps 'oo 
 know me if Billy Keyse ever went back on a pal." 
 
 She swayed her hips, and disclaimed all obligation. But, 
 garn ! he was gittin' at 'er, she knew ! 
 
 "I ain't; I mean it! You should 'ave 'arf me 'eredittary 
 estates if I 'ad any. As I 'aven't, say wot you'll drink? 
 Do, Miss, to oblige yours truly, W. Keyse, Esquire." 
 
 Billy Keyse plunged a royal, reckless hand into the pocket 
 of his tweed riding-breeches, bought against the time \vhen 
 he should bestride something nobler than a bicycle, and pro- 
 duced a half-sovereign. He owed it to his landlady and the 
 rest, the coin that he threw down so magnificently on the shiny 
 counter, but you do not treat your good angel every day. . . . 
 Emigration Jane bridled, and swayed her hips still more. His 
 largeness was intoxicating. One had dreamed of meeting 
 such young meft. 
 
 " Port or sherry? Or a glass of cham, with a lump o' ice 
 in for a cooler? They keep the stuff on draught 'ere, and not 
 bad by 'arf for South Africa. 'Ere, you, Mister! Two 
 chams for self and the young lydy, an' look slippy ! " 
 
 The brimming glasses of sparkling, creaming fluid, juice of 
 vines that never grew in the historic soil of France, were 
 passed over the bar. A miniature berg clinked in each, the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 85 
 
 coldness of its contact with the glowing lip forcing slight 
 rapturous shrieks from Emigration Jane. 
 
 "We'll drink 'Er 'ealth!" Billy Keyse raised his goblet. 
 "And Friends at 'Ome in our Isle across the Sea!" 
 
 He drank, pleased with the sentiment, and set down the 
 empty glass. 
 
 The Dutch bar-keeper leaned across the counter, and tapped 
 him on the arm with a thick, stubby forefinger. 
 
 " Mister Engelschman, I think you shall best go out of 
 here." 
 
 "Me? Go out? 'Oo are you gettin' at, Myn'eer Van 
 Dunck ? " swaggered Billy Keyse. And he slipped one thin, 
 freckled hand ostentatiously under his coat of shoddy summer 
 tweed. A very cheap revolver lurked in the hip-pocket of 
 which Billy was so proud. In his fourth-floor front bed-sitting- 
 room in Judd Street, London, W.C., he had promised himself 
 a moment when that hip-pocket should be referred to, just in 
 that way. It was a cheap bit of theatrical swagger, but the sa- 
 loon was full, not of harmless theatrical pretences, but bitter 
 racial antagonisms, seething animosities, fanged and venomed 
 hatreds, only waiting the prearranged signal to strike and 
 slay. 
 
 Emigration Jane tugged at the hero's sleeve, as he felt for 
 an almost invisible moustache, scanning the piled-up, serried 
 faces with pert, pale, hardy eyes. 
 
 ' ' E ain't coddin'. See 'ow black they're lookin'." 
 
 " I see 'em, syfe enough. Waxworks only fit for the Cham- 
 ber of 'Orrors, ain't 'em?" 
 
 " It's a young woman wot arsks yer to go, not a bloke! 
 Please. For my syke, if yer won't for yer own ! " 
 
 Billy Keyse, with a flourish, offered the thin, boyish arm in 
 the tweed sleeve. 
 
 " Righto. Will you allow me, Miss?" 
 
 She faltered: 
 
 " I I can't, dear. I I'm wiv my young man." 
 
 " Looks after you a proper lot, I don't think. Which is him? 
 Where's 'e 'id 'isself? There's only one other English-lookin* 
 feller' ere, an he's drunk, lyin' over the table there in the corner. 
 That ain't 'im, is it?" 
 
 " Nah, that isn't 'im. That big Dutchy, lookin' this way, 
 showin' 'is teeth as 'e smiles. That's my young man." 
 
 She indicated the Slabbert, heavily observant of the couple 
 with the muddy eyes under the tow-coloured thatch.
 
 86 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " 'Strewth ! " W. Keyse whistled deprecatingly between his 
 teeth, and elevated his scanty eyebrows. " That tow-'eaded, 
 bung-nosed, 'ulking, big Dopper. An' you a daughter of the 
 Empire! " 
 
 Oh, the thrice-retorted scorn in the sharp-edged Cockney 
 voice! The scorching contempt in the pale, ugly little eyes of 
 Billy Keyse! She wilted to her tallest feather, and the tears 
 came crowding, stinging the back of her throat, compelling a 
 miserable sniff. Yet Emigration Jane was not destitute of 
 spirit. 
 
 "I.... I took 'im to please meself . . . .not you, nor the 
 Hempire neither." 
 
 " Reckon you was precious 'ard up for a chap. Good- 
 afternoon, miss." 
 
 He touched the cheap Panama, and swung theatrically round 
 on his heel. Between him and the saloon-door there was a 
 solid barricade of heavy Dutch bodies, in moleskin, tan-cord, 
 and greasy homespun, topped by lowering Dutch faces. Brawny 
 right hands that could have choked the reedy crow out of the 
 little bantam gamecock, clenched in the baggy pockets of old 
 shooting-jackets. Others gripped leaded sjamboks, and 
 others crept to hip-pockets, where German army revolvers 
 were. The bar-keeper and the Slabbert exchanged a meaning 
 wink. 
 
 "Gents, I'll trouble you. By yer leave? . . ." 
 
 Nobody moved. And suddenly Billy Keyse was conscious 
 that these were enemies, and that he was alone. A little hooli- 
 ganism, a few street-fights, one scuffle with the police, some 
 rows in music-halls constituted all his experience. In the midst 
 of these men, burly, brutal, strong, used to shed blood of beast 
 and human, his cheap swagger failed him with his stock of 
 breath. He was no longer the hero in an East End melodrama ; 
 his heroic mood had gone, and there was a feel of tragedy in 
 the air. The Boers waited sluggishly for the next move. It 
 would come when there should be a step forward on the part 
 of the little Englishman. Then a clumsy foot in a cow-leather 
 boot or heavy wooden-pegged veldschoen would be thrust out, 
 and the boy would be tripped up and go down, and the crowd 
 would deliberately kick and trample the life out of him, and 
 no one would be able to say how or by whom the thing had been 
 done. And, reading in the hard eyes set in the stolid yellow 
 and drab faces that he was " up against it," and no mistake, 
 Billy Keyse felt singularly small and lonely.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 87 
 
 Then something happened. 
 
 The drunken Englishman who had been lying in a hoggish 
 stupor over the little iron table in the corner of the saloon 
 hiccoughed, and lifted a crimson, puffy face, with bleary eyes 
 in it that were startlingly blue. He drew back the great arms 
 that had been hanging over the edge of his impromptu pillow, 
 and heaved up his massive stooping shoulders, and got slowly 
 upon his feet. Then, lurching in his walk, but not stumbling, 
 he moved across the little space of damp, sawdusted floor that 
 divided him from Billy Keyse, and drew up beside that in- 
 significant minority. The action was not purposeless nor un- 
 impressive. The alcoholic wastrel had suddenly become pro- 
 tagonist in the common little drama that was veering towards 
 tragedy. Beside the man, Billy Keyse dwindled to a stunted 
 boy, a steam-pinnace bobbing under the quarter of an armoured 
 battle-ship, its huge mailed bulk pregnant with possibilities of 
 destruction, in barbettes full of unseen, watchful eyes, and 
 hands powerful to manipulate the levers of titanic death- 
 machines. 
 
 Let it be understood that the intervener did not present the 
 aspect of a hero. He had been drunk, and would be again, 
 unless some miraculous quickening of the alcohol-drugged 
 brain-centres should rouse and revivify the dormant will. 
 His square face, with the heavy smudge of bushy black eye- 
 brows over the blue eyes, and the short, blunt, hooked nose, 
 and grim-lipped yet tender mouth, from the corner of which 
 an extinct and forgotten cigar-butt absurdly jutted, bore, like 
 his great gaunt frame, the ravaging traces of the consuming 
 drink-lust. His well-cut, loosely-fitting grey morning-coat and 
 trousers were soiled and slovenly; his blue linen shirt was col- 
 larless and unbuttoned at the neck. His grey felt hat was 
 dinged, and crammed on awry. But there was a thick lanyard 
 round the muscular neck, ending in a leather revolver-pouch 
 that was attached to his stout belt of webbing. A boy with a 
 fifteen-and-sixpenny toy revolver you can laugh at and squelch; 
 but, Alamachtig! a big man with a Webley and Scott was an- 
 other thing. And the frowsy barrier of thick, coarsely-clad, 
 bulky bodies and scowling, yellow-tan faces, began to melt 
 away. 
 
 When a clear lane showed to the saloon door, the Dop 
 Doctor took it, walking with a lurch in his long stride, but 
 with the square head held upright on his great gaunt shoulders.. 
 Billy Keyse moved in the shadow of him, taking two steps to
 
 88 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 one of his. The swing doors opened, thudded to behind 
 them. . . . 
 
 " Outside. . . . Time, too." 
 
 The wide, lipless Cockney mouth grinned a little consciously 
 as Billy Keyse jerked his thumb towards the still vibrating doors 
 of the saloon. " Reg'ler 'ornets' nest o' Dutchies. And I was 
 up agynst it, an' no mistyke, when you rallied up. An', Mis- 
 ter, you're a Fair Old Brick, an' if you've no objection to 
 shykin' 'ands ... ? " 
 
 But the big man did not seem to see the little Cockney's 
 offered hand. He nodded, looking with the bloodshot and ex- 
 tremely blue eyes that were set under his heavy straight black 
 brows, not at Billy Keyse, but over his head, and with a surly 
 noise in his throat that stopped short of being speech, swung 
 heavily round and went down the dusty street, that was grilling 
 in the full blaze of the afternoon heat, lurching a little in his 
 walk. 
 
 Then, suddenly, running figures of men came round the 
 corner. Voices shouted, and houses and shops and saloons 
 emptied themselves of their human contents. The news flew 
 from kerb to kerb, and jumped to upper windows, out of which 
 women, European and coloured, thrust frowsy, questioning 
 heads. 
 
 The Cape Town train that had started at midday had re- 
 turned to Gueldersdorp, having been held up by a force of 
 armed and mounted Boers twenty miles down the line. And 
 a London newspaper correspondent had handed in a cable at 
 the post-office, and the operator's instrument, after a futile click 
 or so, had failed to work any more. 
 
 The telegraphic wire was cut. Hostilities had commenced 
 
 in earnest, and Gueldersdorp, severed from the South by this 
 
 tpening act of war, must find her salvation thenceforward in 
 
 x he cool brain and steady nerves of the handful of defenders 
 
 behind her sand-bags, when the hour of need should come. 
 
 History has it written in her imperishable record, that is not 
 only printed upon paper, and graved upon brass, and cut in 
 marble, but stamped into the minds and hearts of millions of 
 men and women of the British race, how, when that hour 
 came, ihe hero-spirit in their countrymen rose up to meet it. 
 And for such undying memories as these, and not for the mere 
 word of suzerainty, it is worth while to have paid as Britain 
 has paid, in gold, and blood, and tears.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 89 
 
 XIII 
 
 ~* DOP," being the native name for the cheapest and most 
 villainous of Cape brandies, has come to signify alcoholic drinks 
 in general to men of many nations dwelling under the subtropic 
 South African sun. Thus, apple brandy, and peach liqueur, 
 " Old Squareface," the colloquial designation for Hollands gin, 
 in the squat, four-sided bottles beloved no less of burgher and 
 Afrikander, American and Briton, Paddy from Cork, and 
 Heinrich from the German Fatherland, than by John Chinkey 
 in default of arrack and the swart and woolly-headed de- 
 scendant of Ham. 
 
 It did not matter what the liquor was, the bar-tenders were 
 aware who served the Dop Doctor, as long as the stuff scorched 
 the throat and stupefied the brain, and you got enough of it 
 for your money. 
 
 His eyes were blood-red with brutal debauch now, as he 
 neared the one-storied, soft brick-built, corrugated-iron-roofed 
 house on Harris Street, behind the Market Square. It had 
 been a store, but green and white paint and an iron garden- 
 fence had turned it into a gentlemanly residence for a medical 
 practitioner. Mrs. De Boursy-Williams, a lady of refinement, 
 stamped with the ineffacable cachet of Bayswater, had hung 
 cheap lace curtains in all the windows, tying them up with 
 silk sashes of Transvaal green. Between the wooden pillars 
 of the stoep dangled curtains yet other, of chopped, dyed, and 
 threaded bamboo, while whitewashed drain-pipes, packed with 
 earth and set on end, overflowed with Indian cress, flowering 
 now in extravagant, gorgeous hues of red and brown, sulphur 
 and orange. 
 
 The Dop Doctor, left to maintain the inviolate sanctity of 
 this English Colonial home, hiccoughed as he stumbled up the 
 stately flight of three cement steps that led between white- 
 pointed railings, enclosing on the left hand a narrow strip of 
 garden with some dusty mimosa shrubs growing in it, to the 
 green door that bore the brass plate, and had the red lamp 
 fitted in the hall-light above ft. The plate bore this compre- 
 hensive inscription: 
 
 G. DE BOURSY-WILLIAMS, M.D., F.R.C.S. LOND. 
 
 CONSULTING ROOM HOURS: 10 A.M. TO 12 A.M; 6 TO 8 P.M. 
 
 MODERN DENTISTRY IN ALL ITS BRANCHES
 
 90 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 And, scanning the inscription for perhaps the thousandth 
 time, the grim, tender mouth under the rugged black moustache 
 took a satirical twist at the corners, for nobody knew better 
 than Owen Saxham, called of men in Gueldersdorp the " Dop 
 Doctor," what a brazen lie it proclaimed. He heard the town- 
 clock on the stad square strike five as he pulled out the latch- 
 key from his pocket and let himself in shouting: 
 
 "Koets!" 
 
 A glazed door at the end of the passage, advertised in let- 
 ters of black paint upon the ground-glass as " Dispensary," 
 opened, and a long, thin Dutchman, dressed in respectable 
 black, looked out. He had been hoping that the drunken 
 Englishman had been shot or stabbed in a saloon-brawl, or had 
 fallen down in apoplexy in a drunken bout, and had been 
 brought home dead on a shutter at last. His long ginger- 
 coloured face showed his cruel disappointment. But he said, 
 as though the question had been asked: 
 
 " No, there is no telegram from Cape Town." 
 
 Then he shut the glazed door, and returned to the very 
 congenial occupation in which he had been engaged, and Owen 
 Saxham went heavily to the bedroom placed at the disposal of 
 the locum tenens. The single window looked out upon a square 
 garden with a tennis-ground, where the De Boursy-Williams 
 girls had been used to play. The vine on the south wall was 
 heavy with golden ripening bunches, an abandoned household 
 cat slept, unconscious of impending starvation, upon a bench 
 under a tree. 
 
 It was a small, sordid, shabby chamber, with a fly-spotted 
 paper, a chest of drawers lacking knobs, a greenish swing look- 
 ing-glass, and a narrow iron bedstead. His scanty belongings 
 were scattered about. There were no medical books or sur- 
 gical instruments. The Dop Doctor had sold all the tools of 
 his trade years before. He turned to Williams's books, stand- 
 ard works which had been bought at his recommendation, when 
 he wished to refresh his excellent memory; the instruments he 
 used when to the entreaties of a fatherly friend Williams added 
 the alluring chink of gold belonged also to that generous patron. 
 There were some old clothes in the ramshackle deal wardrobe ; 
 there was some linen and* underclothing in the knobless chest 
 of drawers. With the exception of a Winchester repeating- 
 rifle in excellent condition, a bandolier and ammunition-pouch, 
 a hunting-knife and a Colt's revolver of large calibre, in ad- 
 dition to the weapon he carried, there was not an article of
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 91 
 
 property of any value in the room. Old riding-boots with 
 dusty spurs and a pair of veldschoen stood by the wall; a 
 pair of trodden-down carpet slippers lay beside a big cheap zinc 
 bath that stood there, full of cold water; some well-used pipes 
 were on the chest of drawers, with a tin of Virginia; and an 
 old brown camel's-hair dressing-gown hung over a castorless, 
 shabby, American-cloth-covered armchair. And a full bottle of 
 whisky stood upon the washstand, melancholy witness to the 
 drunkard's passion. 
 
 Yet there were a few poor little toilet articles upon the dress- 
 ing-table that betokened the dainty personal habits of cleanli- 
 ness and care that from lifelong use become instinctive. The 
 hands of the untidy, slovenly, big man with the drink-swollen 
 features were exquisitely kept; and when the dark-red colour 
 should go out of the square face, the skin would show wonder- 
 fully unblemished and healthy for a drunkard, and the blue 
 eyes would be steady r.nd clear. Excess had not injured a splen- 
 did constitution as yet. But Saxham knew that by-and-by . . . 
 
 What did he care? He pulled off his soiled, untidy gar- 
 ments, and soused his aching head in the cold, fresh water, 
 and bathed and changed. Six o'clock struck, and found Dr. 
 Owen Saxham reclothed and in his right mind, if a little hag- 
 gard about the eyes and twitchy about the mouth, and sitting 
 calmly waiting for patients in the study opening out of the 
 consulting-room of De Boursy-Williams, M.D., F.R.S. Lond. 
 
 Usually he sat in the study, near enough to the carefully- 
 curtained door to hear the patient describe in the witless ver- 
 nacular of the ignorant, or the more cultivated phraseology 
 of the educated, the symptoms, his or hers. 
 
 Because the cultured man of science, the real M.D. of Lon- 
 don University and owner of those other letters of attainment, 
 was the drunken wastrel who had sunk low enough to serve as 
 the impostor's ghost. If G. De Boursy-Williams, of all those 
 lying letters, were a member of the London Pharmaceutical 
 Society and properly-qualified dentist, which perhaps might be 
 the case, he certainly possessed no other claims upon the con- 
 fidence of his fellow-creatures, sick or well. Yet even before 
 the Dop Doctor brought his great unhealed sorrow and his 
 quenchless thirst to Gueldersdorp, the smug, plump, grey- 
 haired pink-faced, neatly-dressed little humbug possessed an en- 
 viable practice. 
 
 If you got well, he rubbed his hands and chuckled over you ; 
 if you died, he bleated about the Will of Providence, and his
 
 92 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 daughters sent flowery, home-made wreaths to place upon your 
 grave, and it all went down, adding to the python-length of the 
 bill for medical attendance. 
 
 This world is thick with De Boursy-Williamses, throwing 
 in bromides with a liberal hand, ungrudging of strychnine, 
 happily at home with quinine and cathartics, ready at a case 
 of simple rubeola; hideously, secretly, helplessly perplexed be- 
 tween the false diphtheria and the true; treating internal can- 
 cer and fibrous tumours as digestive derangements for happy, 
 profitable years, until the specialist comes by, and shatters with 
 a brief examination and with half a dozen trenchant words the 
 comfortable faith of years. 
 
 Three years before, when the Dop Doctor, coming up from 
 Kimberley by transport-waggon, had stumbled in upon Gueld- 
 ersdorp, the verdict of a specialist consulted by one of his pa- 
 tients, much lacking in the desirable article of faith, had given 
 De Boursy-Williams's self-confidence a considerable shock. 
 
 Does it matter how De Boursy, much reduced in bulk by a 
 considerable leakage of conceit, came across the Dop Doctor? 
 In a drink saloon, in a music-hall, in a gaming-house or an 
 opium-joint, at any other of the places of recreation where, after 
 consulting and visiting hours, that exemplary father and seri- 
 ous-minded Established Churchman, was to be found? It is 
 enough that the bargain was proposed and accepted. Five 
 sovereigns a week secured to De Boursy-Williams the stored 
 and applied knowledge, the wide experience, and the unerring 
 diagnosis of the rising young London practitioner, who had had 
 a brilliant career before him when a Hand had reached forth 
 from the clouds to topple down the castle of his labours and 
 his hopes. For Owen Saxham the money would purchase for- 
 getfulness. You can buy a great deal of his kind of forgetful- 
 ness with five pounds, and drink was all the Dop Doctor 
 wanted. 
 
 Now, as the red South African sunset burned beyond the 
 western edge of the rise in the horizon, looking from the ir- 
 regular hamlet town that lies on the low central hill, Owen 
 Saxham sat, as for his miserable weekly wage he must sit, twice 
 daily for two hours at a stretch, enduring torments akin tc those 
 of the damned in Hell. 
 
 For these were the hours when he remembered most all that 
 he had lost. 
 
 Remembrance, like the magic carpet of the Eastern story,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 93 
 
 carried him back to a rambling old grey mansion, clothed with 
 a great magnolia and many roses, standing m old-time gardens, 
 and shrubberies of laurel and ilex and Spanish chestnut, 
 rhododendron, upon the South Dorset cliffs, that are vanishing 
 so slowly yet so surely in the maw of the rapacious sea. 
 
 Boom ! In the heart of a still, foggy night, following a day 
 of lashing rain, and the boy Owen Saxham, whom the Dop 
 Doctor remembered, would wake upon his lavender-scented 
 pillow in the low-pitched room with the heavy ceiling-beams 
 and the shallow diamond-paned casements, and call out to 
 David, dreaming in the other white bed, to plan an excursion 
 with the breaking of the day, to see how much more of their 
 kingdom had toppled over on those wave-smoothed rock pave- 
 ments far below, that were studded with great and little fossils, 
 as the schoolroom suet-pudding with the frequent raisin. 
 
 More faces came. The boys' father, fair and florid, bluff, 
 handsome, and kindly, an English country gentleman of simple 
 affectionate nature and upright life. He came in weather- 
 stained velveteen and low-crowned felt, with the red setter- 
 bitch at his heels, and the old sporting Manton carried in the 
 crook of his elbow, where the mother used to sew a leather 
 patch, always cut out of the palm-piece of one of the right- 
 hand gloves that were never worn out, never being put on. A 
 dark-eyed, black-haired Welsh mother, hot-tempered, keen- 
 witted, humorous, sarcastic, passionately devoted to her hus- 
 band and his boys, David and Owen. 
 
 David and Owen. David was the eldest, fair like the father, 
 destined for Harrow, Sandhurst, and the army. Owen had 
 dreamed of the Merchant Service, until, having succeeded in 
 giving the Persian kitten, overfed to repletion by an admiring 
 cook, a dose of castor-oil, and being allowed to aid the local 
 veterinary in setting the fox-terrier's broken leg, the revelation 
 of the hidden gift was vouchsafed to this boy. How he begged 
 off Harrow, much to the disgust of the Squire, and went 
 to Westward Ho, faithfully plodded the course laid down by 
 the Council of Medical Education, became a graduate of Trin- 
 ity Hall, Cambridge, and took his degree brilliantly; registered 
 as a student at St. Stephen's Hospital ; won an Entrance 
 Scholarship in Science, and secured the William Brown Exhibi- 
 tion in his second year. Thenceforward the world was an 
 oyster, to be opened with scalpel and with bistoury by Owen 
 Saxham. 
 
 Oh, the good days! the delectable years of intellectual de-
 
 94 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 velopment, and arduous study, and high hope, and patient, 
 strenuous endeavour! The man sitting with knotted hands 
 and tense brain and staring eyes there in the darkening room 
 groaned aloud as he looked back. Nobody envied that broad- 
 shouldered, lean-flanked, bright-eyed young fellow his successes. 
 Companions shared his triumphs, lecturers and professors came 
 down from their high pedestals of dignity to help him on. 
 When he obtained his London University diploma with honours 
 for a thesis of exceptional merit, he had already held the post 
 of principal anaesthetist at St. Stephen's Hospital for a year. 
 Now, a vacancy occurring upon the junior staff of surgeons to 
 the Hospital's In-patient Department, Owen Saxham, M.D., 
 was chosen to fill it. This brought Mildred very near. 
 
 For he was very much in love. The hot red blood in his 
 veins had carried him away sometimes upon a mad race for 
 pleasure, but he was clean of soul and free from the taint of 
 vice, inherited or acquired, and the Briton's love of home was 
 strong in him. And wedded love had always seemed to him a 
 beautiful and gracious thing, and fatherhood a glorious priv- 
 ilege. Stern as he seemed, grave and quiet and undemon- 
 strative as he was, the youngest and shyest children did not 
 shrink from him. The pink rose-leaf tongue peeped from be- 
 tween the budding rows of teeth, and the innocent considering 
 eyes questioned him only a moment before the smile came. To 
 be the father of Mildred's children seemed the lofty end of all 
 desire that was not mere worldly ambition. 
 
 Mildred was the elder daughter of a country neighbour down 
 in Dorsetshire. She had known Owen Saxham from her 
 school-days, but never until he took to calling at the house in 
 Pont Street, to which Mildred, with her family mere satellites 
 revolving in the orbit of that shining star of Love migrated in 
 the Season. She was tall, slight, and willowy, with a sweet 
 head that drooped a little, and round brown eyes that were ex- 
 tremely pretty and wore a perpetual expression of surprise. She 
 was rather anaemic, preferred croquet to lawn-tennis then the 
 rage and kept a journal, after the style of an American model. 
 But the space which Mary McMullins cribbed from Mary 
 McMullins to devote to a description of the bathroom in which 
 the ablutions of her family were performed, and a vivid word- 
 picture of their tooth-brushes ranged in a row, and their re- 
 cently wrung-out garments in the act of taking the air upon the 
 back-garden clothes-line, was all devoted to Mildred in Mil- 
 dred's journal. In it Owen found a place. He was described
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 95 
 
 as a blend between " Rochester " in " Jane Eyre " and 
 " Bazarov " In Turgenev's " Fathers and Children." In one 
 specially high-flown passage he was referred to as a grim 
 granite rock, to which the delicate clematis-like nature of Mil- 
 dred, clinging, was to envelop it with leaf and blossom. She 
 read him the passage one day. Their faces were very close to- 
 gether as they sat upon the sofa in the pretty Pont Street 
 drawing-room, and his newly-bought engagement-ring gleamed 
 on her long white hand. . . . The remembrance of that day 
 made the Dop Doctor laugh out harshly in the midst of his 
 anguish. So trivial and so weak a thing had been that love of 
 hers on which he had founded the castle of his hopes and 
 desires. 
 
 Now the rising young man bought a practice with some 
 thousands advanced by his father out of the younger son's 
 portion that should be his one day. It lay just where Hyde 
 Park merges into Paddington. Here a medical man may feel 
 the pulse of Dives for gold, and look at the tongue of Lazarus 
 for nothing, and supply medicine into the bargain, if he be of 
 kindly soul, and this young, rising surgeon and physician had 
 an open hand and an unsuspecting nature. 
 
 God! how much the worse for him. The sweat-drops ran 
 down into the Dop Doctor's eyes as he remembered that. 
 
 He set up his bachelor tent in Chilworth Street, furnishing 
 the rooms he meant to inhabit with a certain sober luxury. 
 By-and-by the house could be made pretty, unless Mildred 
 should insist upon his moving to Wigmore Street, or to Harley 
 Street, that Mecca of the ambitious young practitioner. Prob- 
 ably Mildred's people would insist upon Harley Street. They 
 were wealthy; their daughter would be quite an heiress, "an- 
 other instance of Owen's luck," as David, long ago gazetted 
 to a crack Cavalry regiment, would say, and Owen would 
 laugh, and admit that, though he would have been glad enough 
 to take his young fair love without dower and plenishing, it 
 was pleasant enough to know that his wife would have an 
 independent fortune of her own. It was one of David's best 
 jokes that Owen was marrying Mildred for her money. 
 David's ideas of humour were crude and elemental. On the 
 other hand, his manners were admirable, and his physical beauty 
 perfect of its type, though men and women turned oftenest to 
 look at the younger brother, whom the women called " plain, 
 but so interesting," and the men " an uncommonly attractive 
 sort of fellow, and as clever as they make them." When the
 
 96 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 great crash came Owen Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., was about 
 twenty-nine. 
 
 Do you care for a description of the man at his prime? 
 He was probably five feet ten in height, but his scholar's 
 stoop robbed him of an inch or more. The great breadth of 
 the slightly-bowed shoulders, the immense depth and thickness 
 of the chest, gave his upper figure a false air of clumsiness. 
 His arms were long and powerful, terminating in strong, 
 supple, white hands, the hands of the skilled surgical operator; 
 his thick, smooth, opaque, white skin covered an admirable 
 structure of bone, knit with tough muscles, clothed with health- 
 ful flesh. One noticed, seeing him walk, that his legs were 
 bent a little, because he had been accustomed to the saddle from 
 earliest childhood, though he rode but seldom now, and one 
 saw also that his small muscular feet gripped the ground vigor- 
 ously, through the glove-thin boots he liked to wear. He 
 showed no tendency to dandyism. His loosely-cut suits of 
 fine, silky black cloth were invariably of the same fashion. In 
 abhorring jewellery, in preferring white cashmere shirts, and 
 strictly limiting the amount of starch in the thin linen cuffs 
 and collars, perhaps he showed a tendency to faddism. David 
 told him that he dressed himself like a septuagenarian -Profes- 
 sor. Mildred would have preferred dear Owen to pay a little 
 more attention to style and cut, and all that, though one did 
 not, of course, expect a man of science to look like a man of 
 fashion. One couldn't have everything, at least, not in this 
 world. . . . 
 
 She said that one day, standing beside the writing-table in 
 the Chilworth Street study, with David's portrait in her hand. 
 It usually stood there, in a silver frame a coloured photo- 
 graph of a young man of thirty, stupid and beautiful as the 
 Praxitelean Hermes, resplendent in the gold and blue and 
 scarlet of a crack Dragoon Regiment. Owen stood upon the 
 hearthrug, for once in Mildred's company and not thinking of 
 Mildred. And with tears rising in her round, pretty, foolish 
 eyes the girl looked from the face and figure enclosed within 
 the silver frame, to the face and bust that had for a back- 
 ground the high mantel-mirror in its carved frame of Spanish 
 oak. 
 
 There was the square black head bending forwards " pok- 
 ing," she termed it upon the massive, bowed shoulders; the 
 white face, square too, with its short, blunt, hooked nose and 
 grim, determined mouth and jaws, showing the bluish grain
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 97 
 
 of the strong beard and moustache that Owen kept closely 
 shaven. The heavy forehead, the smutty brows overshadowing 
 eyes of clear, vivid, startling Alpine blue, the close small ears, 
 the thick white throat, were very, very unattractive in Mil- 
 dred's eyes at least, in comparison with the three-volume- 
 novel charms of the grey-eyed, golden-moustached, classically- 
 featured, swaggering young military dandy in the coloured 
 photograph. David had been with his regiment in India when 
 Owen had just seemed to be a good deal attracted to Pont 
 Street. He had wooed Mildred with dogged persistency, and 
 won her without perceptible triumph, and Mildred had been 
 immensely flattered at first by the conquest of this man, whom 
 everybody said was going to be famous, great, distinguished 
 . . . and now . . . the wedding day was coming awfully near. 
 And how on earth was it possible for a girl to tell a man with 
 Owen's dreadfully grim, sarcastic mouth, and those terrible 
 blue eyes that sometimes looked through and through you 
 that she liked his brother best? 
 
 Poor, .dear, beautiful, devoted David! so honourable, so 
 shocked at the discovery that his passion was reciprocated, so 
 very romantically in love. Only the day previously, calling 
 in at Pont Street at an hour unusual for him, Owen had found 
 them together, Mildred and David, who, having been unex- 
 pectedly relieved of duty by an accommodating brother-officer, 
 had, as he rather laboriously explained, run up from Spurham- 
 bury for the day. It was an awfully near thing, the guilty 
 ones agreed afterwards, but Owen had suspected nothing. 
 These swell scientific men were* of ten a little bit slow in the 
 uptake. . . . 
 
 But to-day to-day their dupe saw clearly. He recalled the 
 Pont Street incident, and the flushed faces of the couple. He 
 saw once more the silver-framed photograph in the girl's hand, 
 he felt the mute disparagement of her glance, and was con- 
 scious of the relief with which it left him to settle on the 
 portrait again. Ah, how unsuspicious he had been whom they 
 were duping! Doubtless Mildred would not have had the 
 courage to own the truth, doubtless she would have married 
 him but for the scandal of the Trial. He wrenched his 
 knitted hands together until the joints cracked. She would 
 have married him, and forgotten David. He, the man of will, 
 and power, and patience would have possessed her, stamped 
 himself like a seal upon her heart and mind, given her other 
 interests, other hopes, other desires, children, and happiness.
 
 98 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 But for the Trial the little germinating seed of treachery would 
 never have grown up and borne fruit. 
 
 Had it been treachery, after all? Far, far too grand the 
 word. Who would expect a modern woman to practise the 
 obsolete virtue of Fidelity? Fool, do you expect your minia- 
 ture French bulldog or your toy-terrier to dive in and swim 
 out to you, and hold your drowning carcass up, should you 
 happen to become cramped while "bathing in the sea"? The 
 little, feeble, pretty, feather-brained thing, what can it do but 
 whimper on the shore while you are sinking, perhaps be con- 
 soled upon a friendly stranger's lap while your last bubbles 
 are taking upward flight, and your knees are drawing inwards 
 in the final contraction? Happy for the little creature if the 
 kindly stranger carry it away! 
 
 Poor, pretty, foolish Mildred, whose gentle predilections 
 were as threads of gossamer compared with the cable-ropes of 
 stronger women's passions! She had nestled into the strong 
 protecting arm, and dried her tears for the old master on the 
 sleeve of the new one, whimpering a little, gently, just like 
 the toy-terrier bitch or the miniature bull. 
 
 And yet he had once seen, a creature tinier and feebler than 
 either of these, a mere handful of yellow floss-silk curls, defend 
 its insensible master with frenzy, as the sick man lay in the 
 deadly stupor of cerebral congestion, from those who sought to 
 aid. Valet and nurse and doctor were held at bay until that 
 snapping, foaming, raging speck of love and devotion and 
 fidelity had been whelmed in a travelling-rug, and borne 
 away to a distant room, from-whence its shrill, defiant, implor- 
 ing barks and yelps could be heard night and day until, its 
 owner being at last conscious and out of danger, the tiny crea- 
 ture was set free. 
 
 Ergo, there are small things and small things. Beside that 
 epic creature Mildred dwindled inconceivably. 
 
 And David . . . David, who had shaken his handsome head 
 sorrowfully over his brother's ruined career, who had been 
 horribly sick at the scandal, shudderingly alive to the disgrace, 
 sorrowfully, regretfully compelled to admit that the evidence 
 of guilt was overwhelming ... he did not trust himself to 
 think of David overmuch. That way of thought led to Cain's 
 portion in the very pit of Hell. For six months subsequently 
 to the finding of the Jury in the well-known criminal case, 
 The Crown vs-. Saxham, David had married Mildred. If she 
 had been innocent of actual treachery, here was the smooth,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 99 
 
 brotherly betrayer, unmasked and loathly in the sight of the 
 betrayed. 
 
 How quietly the storm-clouds had piled up on his bright 
 horizon at the close of his second year of active, brilliant, 
 successful work! 
 
 The first lightning-flash, the first faint mutter of thunder, 
 had passed almost unnoticed. Then the tempest broke, and 
 the building wrought by a strong man's labours, and toils, 
 and hopes, and joys, and dolours had been lifted, and torn, and 
 rent, and scattered as a hill bothy of poles and straw-bundles 
 or a moorland shelter of heather and bushes is scattered by the 
 fury of a northern mountain-blast. 
 
 His practice had become a large and, despite the many 
 claims of Lazarus at the gates, a lucrative one by the com- 
 mencement of his third year of residence in Chilworth Street. 
 It was the end of April. He was to be married to Mildred 
 in June. That move to Harley Street had been decided upon, 
 the house taken and beautified. Though his love for her was 
 not demonstrative or hysterical, it was deep, and tender, and 
 strong, and hopeful, and Life to this man had seemed very 
 sweet five years ago. He was successful professionally and 
 socially. He had been chosen to assist a surgeon of great 
 eminence in the removal of the appendix of a semi-Royalty. 
 He had written, and publishers had published, a remarkable 
 work. " The Diseases of Civilization " had been greeted by 
 the scientific reviewers with a chorus of praise, passed through 
 four or five editions had been translated into several Euro- 
 pean languages ; and his " Text-Book of Clinical Surgery " had 
 been recommended to advanced students by the leading profes- 
 sors of the Medical Schools when the horrible thing befell. 
 
 XIV 
 
 IT was in '94, when even the electro-motor was not in general 
 use, and the petrol-driven machine was slowly convincing Paris 
 and New York of its magnificent possibilities. Saxham used a 
 smart, well-horsed, hired brougham for day-visits, and for 
 night work a motor-tricycle. There were no stables to the 
 house in Chilworth Street. He left the motor-tricycle at the 
 place where he had bought it second-hand. The machine was 
 cleaned and kept in order, and brought to his door by one of 
 the employes at a certain hour, for a fixed weekly sum paid 
 to the proprietor of the establishment, Bough by name, an Eng-
 
 ioo ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 lishman born in the Transvaal, who had quite recently, or so he 
 said, emigrated from South Africa, and set up in London as a 
 cycle-seller and repairer, though there were not many cycles 
 at the shop. Heavy packing-cases and crates were always be- 
 ing delivered there, and always being despatched from thence, 
 via Cape Town and Port Elizabeth and Delagoa Bay to the 
 Transvaal, Bough being agent, or so he said, for several South 
 African firms engaged in the transport of agricultural machines. 
 Bough had a wife, a large-eyed, delicate-looking, pretty woman, 
 who seemed afraid of the big, muscular, tanned fellow of thirty- 
 five or so, with the odd light eyes, and the smooth manner, and 
 the ready smile, and the deft, expert, supple, cruel-looking 
 hands. He had seen life, had Bough, at the gold-fields and at 
 the diamond-mines, and as a trooper through the Zulu and 
 Matabele campaigns, and he was ready to talk about what he 
 had seen. Still there were reservations about Bough, and 
 mysteries. The Doctor suspected him of being brutal to his 
 wife, and would not have been surprised any morning upon 
 receiving the news of the man's arrest as one of a gang of 
 forgers, or coiners, or burglars. But he lived and let live, and 
 whatever else the big Afrikander may have been, he was an 
 excellent workman at his trade. 
 
 One evening Bough rode round on the motor-tricycle himself, 
 and mentioned casually that his wife was ailing. The Doctor, 
 in the act of mounting the machine, put a brief question or 
 two, registered the replies in the automatic submemory he kept 
 for business, and told the man to send her round at ten o'clock 
 upon the following morning. 
 
 She came, punctual to the hour, and was shown into Owen's 
 consulting-room a little woman with beautiful, melancholy 
 eyes and a pretty figure. Illiterate, common, affected, and 
 vain to a degree, hideously misusing the English language in 
 that low, dulcet voice of hers, ludicrously fantastic in her use 
 and application of the debatable aspirate to words in the spell- 
 ing of which it has no part. Absurd and somehow tragic too. 
 
 Quite tragic by the time she had made plain her errand. 
 
 He heard her tell the tale that was not new to him. Cul- 
 tured, highly-bred women had made such appeals to him before, 
 and without shame. How should this little vulgar creature be 
 expected to have more conscience than they? 
 
 They beat about the bush longer, they put the thing more 
 prettily. They spoke of their frail physical health and theif 
 husband's great anxiety, and quoted the long-ago expressed
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 101 
 
 opinion of ancient family physicians, who possibly turned in 
 their decent graves uneasily. But the gist of the whole was f 
 that they did not want children, and Dr. Saxham had such a 
 great and justly-earned reputation in skilful and delicate opera- 
 tions . . . and, in short, would he not be compliant and oblige? 
 They would pay anything. Money was positively no object. 
 
 How many such tempting sirens sing in the ears of young, 
 rising professional men, who are hampered by honourable debts 
 which threaten to impede and drag them down; who are 
 possessed of high ideals and moral scruples, which, not being 
 essentially, fundamentally embedded and ingrained in the con- 
 science of the man, may possibly be argued away; who have not 
 cherished in their souls and hearts the high reverence for 
 womanhood and the deep tenderness for helpless infancy that 
 distinguished Owen Saxham! 
 
 He heard this woman out, as he had heard all the others. 
 He began as he had begun with every one of them the deli- 
 cate, titled aristocrats, the ambitious Society beauties, the 
 popular actresses, the women who envied these and read about 
 them in the illustrated interviews published in the fashion 
 papers, and sighed to be interviewed also to not one of these 
 had he weighed out one drachm less of the bitter salutary 
 medicine that he now administered to Mrs. Bough. 
 
 He invariably began with the personal peril and the in- 
 evitable risk. Strange how they ignored it, blinded themselves 
 to it, thrust it, the grinning, threatening Death's-head, on one 
 side. Of course, he talked like that! It was most candid of 
 him, and most conscientious. But if they were willing to 
 take the risk and antiseptic surgery had made such huge 
 strides in these days that the risk was a mere nothing. . . . 
 Besides, there was not really need for anything like an opera- 
 tion, was there? He could prescribe the kind of dose that 
 ought to be taken, and everything would then be all right. 
 
 He would open that grim mouth of his yet again, and speak 
 even more to the purpose. To these mothers w r ho did not 
 \vish to be mothers, who threw the gift of Heaven back in the 
 face of Heaven, preferring artificial barrenness to natural 
 fecundity, and who made of their bodies, that should have 
 brought forth healthy, wholesome sons and daughters of their 
 race, tombs and sepulchres to these he told the truth, in swift, 
 sharp, trenchant sentences, that, like the keen sterilized blade 
 of the surgical knife, cut to heal. When they argued with him, 
 saying that the thing was done, that everybody knew it was
 
 102 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 done, and that it always would be done, by other men as 
 brilliant as, and less scrupulous than, the homilist, he admitted 
 the force of their arguments. Let other men of his great call- 
 ing pile up and amass wealth, if they chose, by tampering with 
 the unclean thing. Owen Saxham would none of it. At this 
 juncture the woman would have hysterics of the weeping or 
 the scolding kind, or would be convinced of the righteousness 
 of the forlorn cause he championed, or would pretend the 
 hysterics and the convictions. Generally she pretended to the 
 latter, and swam or stumbled out, pulling down her veil to 
 mask the rage and hatred in her haggard eyes, and went to that 
 other man. Then, after a brief absence accounted for as a 
 " rest cure," she would shine forth again upon her world, smil- 
 ing, triumphant, prettier than ever, since she had begun to 
 make up a little more. Or, as a woman who had passed 
 through the Valley of the Shadow, with only her own rod and 
 staff of vanity and pride to comfort her, she would emerge 
 from that seclusion a nervous wreck, and take to pegging or 
 chloral or spiritualism. Most rarely she would not emerge 
 at all, and then her women friends would send wreaths for 
 the coffin and carriages to the funeral, and would whisper 
 mysteriously together in their boudoirs, and look askance upon 
 the doctor who had attended her. For of course he had 
 bungled shockingly, or everything would have gone off as right 
 as rain for that poor dear thing! 
 
 Little Mrs. Bough was of the type of woman that pre- 
 tended to be convinced. She had cried bitterly in the begin- 
 ning, as she confessed to him that she was not really married 
 to Bough, and that the said Bough, whom Saxham had always 
 suspected of being a scoundrel, would certainly go off with 
 " one of them other women and leave her if she went and 'ad 
 a byby." She cried even more bitterly afterwards, as she 
 wondered how she ever could 'a dreamed o' being that wicked ! 
 Bough might kill her that he might! or go back to South 
 Africa without her; she never would give in, not now. Never 
 now the Doctor might depend upon that, she assured him, 
 drying her swollen eyes with a cheap lace-edged handkerchief 
 loaded with patchouli. She was shaken and nervous, and in 
 need of a sedative, and Saxham, having the drugs at hand, 
 made her up a simple draught, omitting to make a memorandum 
 of the prescription in his pocket-book, and gave her the first 
 dose of it before she went away, profuse in thanks, and carrying 
 the bottle.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 103 
 
 And he saw his waiting patients, and stepped into his wait- 
 ing brougham, and, having for once no urgent call upon his 
 professional attention, dined with Mildred at Pont Street, and 
 was coaxed into promising to take her to the first performance 
 of a new play which was to be produced three nights later at a 
 fashionable West End theatre. Mildred had set her heart 
 upon being seen in a box at this particular function, and Sax- 
 ham had had some trouble to gratify her wish. 
 
 He remembered with startling clearness every remote detail 
 of that night at the theatre. Mildred had looked exquisitely 
 fair and girlish in her white dress, with a necklace of pearls he 
 had given her, rising and falling on the lovely virginal bosom, 
 w T here the lover's eyes dwelt and lingered in the masterful 
 hunger of his heart. Soon, soon, that hunger of his for pos- 
 session would be gratified! It was May, and at the end of 
 July, when work was growing slack, they would be married. 
 They were going North for the honeymoon. A wealthy and 
 grateful patient of Saxham's had placed at his disposal a grey, 
 historic Scotch turret-mansion, standing upon mossy lawns, with 
 woods of larch and birch and ancient Spanish chestnuts all about 
 it, looking over the silver Tweed. In the heat and hurry of 
 his daily round of work, Saxham, who had spent an autumn 
 holiday at this place, would find himself dreaming about it. 
 The smell of the heather would spice the air that was no 
 longer hot and sickly with the foetor of the city, and the hum 
 of the drowsy black bees, and the cooing of the wood-pigeons 
 would replace the din of the London traffic, and Mildred's 
 eyes would be looking into his, and her cool, fragrant lips 
 would be all his at last, and her arms would be about his neck, 
 and all those secret aspirations and yearnings and dreams of 
 wedded joy would be realized at last. 
 
 He grinned to himself sitting there in the hot darkness of 
 the South African night, the great white stars and the vast 
 purple dome they throbbed in shut out of sight by the miserable 
 little gaily-papered ceiling with its cornice of gilt wood, re- 
 membering that everything had ended that night. Thenceforth 
 no more hopes, no dreams, for the man whom Fate and Destiny* 
 hitherto propitious and obliging, had conspired to lash with 
 scourges, and drive with goads, and hound with despairs and 
 horrors to the sheer brink where Madness waits to hurl the 
 desperate over upon the jagged rocks below. 
 
 He supped with them at Pont Street. Mildred came down 
 to say good-night at the door._
 
 104 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Have you been happy?" he had asked, framing the sweet 
 .young face in tender hands, and looking in the grey-blue gentle 
 eyes. 
 
 " You have been so very dear and kind to-night," she had 
 answered, " how could I have helped being happy? And He " 
 she meant the Semitic actor-manager, whom she romantically 
 adored; whose thick, flabby features and pale gooseberry orbs, 
 thickly outlined in blue pencil, eye-browed with brown grease- 
 paint; whose long, shapeless body, eloquent, expressive hands, 
 and legs that were very good as legs go, taking them separately, 
 but did not match, had been that night, his admirers declared, 
 moved and possessed by the very spirit of Shakespearean 
 Tragedy " He was so great ! Don't you agree with me 
 marvellously great ? " 
 
 Saxham had laughed and kissed the enthusiast. It had ap- 
 peared to him a dreary performance enough, or it would have, 
 had it not been for Mildred and the dear glamour with which 
 her presence had invested the great gilded theatre, with its 
 rows of bored, familiar, notable faces in the stalls, representing 
 Society, Art, Literature, Music, and Finance, its pit and gallery 
 crowded with organized bodies of blackmailers, one party 
 bound to boo where the other applauded, riot and disorder the 
 inevitable result, unless both had been sweetened, by the tactful 
 pre-administration of cheques of corresponding value, to dis- 
 play a unanimity of approval, upon which the dramatic press 
 critics would rapturously descant in the newspapers next morn- 
 ing. 
 
 XV 
 
 SAXHAM said his lingering sweet good-night, and shut Mildred 
 into the warm, lighted hall, and ran down the steps, and 
 hailed a passing hansom, and was driven back to Chilworth 
 Street. It had rained, and the heat, excessive for May, had 
 abated, and the wise, experienced stars looked down between 
 drifting veils of greyish vapour upon the little human lives 
 passing below. 
 
 As he jumped down at his door and paid his cabman, his 
 quick eye noticed a bicycle leaning against the area-railings. 
 One of his poorer patients was waiting for the Doctor. Or 
 a messenger had been sent to summon him. He let himself 
 into the lighted hall, whistling the pretty plaintive melody of 
 Ophelia's song.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 105 
 
 A woman sat on the oak bench under the electric globe, 
 her little huddled-up figure making rather a sordid blotch of 
 drab against the strong, rich background of the wall, coloured 
 Pompeian red, and hung with fine old prints in black frames. 
 Her tawdry hat lay beside her, her haggard eyes were set, star- 
 ing at the opposite wall; her lower jaw hung lax; the saliva 
 dribbled from the corner of her underlip; her yellow, rigid 
 hands gripped the edge of the bench. It was the woman who 
 passed as the wife of the man Bough. And in instant, vivid, 
 wrathful realization of the desperate reason of her being there, 
 Saxham cried out so loudly that the servant who had let her in 
 and was waiting up for his master in the basement heard the- 
 words: 
 
 "Are you mad? What do you mean by coming here? I 
 have told you that I will have nothing to do with you and your 
 affairs. . . ." 
 
 The voice that issued from her blue lips might have been 
 a scream, judging by the wrung anguish of the awful face she 
 turned upon him; but it was no more than a dry, clicking 
 whisper that even he could barely hear: 
 
 " Don't be 'ard on a woman ... in trouble, Doctor." 
 
 " Hard on you. . . . On the contrary, I have been too 
 considerate," he said, steeling his heart against pity. " You 
 must go home to your husband, Mrs. Bough, or apply elsewhere 
 for medical advice. I have none to give you." 
 
 His square face was very stern as he took the cab-whistle- 
 from the hall-salver, that was packed with cards and notes, and 
 letters that had come by the last post, and a telegram or two. 
 She moaned as he laid his hand on the knob of the hall- 
 door. 
 
 " It wasn't my doings, Doctor. ... Hi told Bough what 
 you said. Hi did, faithful . . . an' 'e swore if you wasn't 
 the man to do wot 'e wanted, Vd be damned but 'e'd find a 
 woman as would. And she come next night a little, shabby, 
 white-faced, rat-nosed old thing, shiverin' an' shakin'. Five 
 pounds she 'ad of Bough, shakin' an' shiverin'. An' he wasn't 
 to send no more to the address he knew, because she wouldn't 
 be there. Always move out . . . she says, after a fresh job! 
 Oh, my Gawd ! An' Bough, he ordered me, an' Hi 'ad to give 
 in. An' to-night Hi reckoned Hi was dyin' an' e' said Hi 
 best arsk you, 'e was about fed up with women an' their bloom- 
 ing sicknesses. So Hi hiked 'ere because Hi couldn't walk. 
 An' now! . . ." She groaned: "Hi ham dyin', aren't Hi?"
 
 io6 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Even to an observation less skilled than that of the expert 
 medical practitioner the signs of swift and speedy dissolution 
 were written on the insignificant, once pretty, little face. 
 Dying, the miserable little creature had ridden to Chilworth 
 Street, hastening her own inevitable end by the stupendous act 
 of folly, and ensuring his. That certainty had pierced him, 
 even as the first horrible convulsion seized her and wrenched 
 her sideways off the bench. He caught her, and shouted for 
 his man, and they carried her into the consulting-room, and laid 
 her on a sofa, and he did what might be done, knowing that 
 his mercy on her involved swift and pitiless retribution upon 
 himself. Mrs. Bough died three hours later, as the grey dawn 
 straggled through the blinds, and the men with the district 
 ambulance waited at the door, and Dr. Owen Saxham went 
 about his work that day with a strange sensation of expecting 
 some heavy blow that was about to fall. It fell upon the 
 day following the Coroner's Inquest. He was sitting down 
 to breakfast when a Superintendent of Police arrested him upon 
 a warrant from Scotland Yard. 
 
 His servant, very pale, had announced that the Superin- 
 tendent wished to see the Doctor. The Superintendent was in 
 the room, courteously saluting Saxham, before the man had 
 fairly got out the words. 
 
 " Good-morning, sir. A pleasant day." 
 
 " Unlike the business that brings you here, I think, Mr. 
 Superintendent," said Saxham, with his square jaw set. His 
 man spilt the coffee and hot milk over the cloth in trying to 
 fill his master's cup. " You are nervous, Tait. You had 
 better go downstairs, I think, unless " Saxham looked in- 
 terrogatively at the burly, officially-clad figure of the Law. 
 
 " No, sir, thank you. We do not at present require your 
 man, but it is my duty to tell him that he had better not be out 
 of the way, in case his testimony is wanted." 
 
 "You hear?" said Saxham; and as white-faced Tait fled, 
 trembling, to the lower regions: "Of course, you are here," 
 he went on, pouring out the coffee himself with a firm hand, 
 and looking steadily at the Superintendent, " with regard to 
 the case of Mrs. Bough? I have expected that a magistrate's 
 inquiry would follow the Inquest. It seemed only nat- 
 ural " 
 
 The Superintendent interrupted, holding up a large hand. 
 
 " It is my duty to tell you, Dr. Saxham, that everything 
 
 you say will be taken down and used against you in evidence."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 107 
 
 " Naturally," said Saxham, putting sugar in his coffee. The 
 sugar was used against him. It amused him now to remember 
 that. The Superintendent had never seen a gentleman more 
 cool, he told the magistrate. 
 
 " You see, sir, this case has been fully considered by the 
 authorities, and it has an ugly look; and it has therefore been 
 decided to charge you with causing the death of the woman 
 Bough by an illegal act, performed here, in your consulting- 
 room, on May the twentieth, when she visited you. . ." 
 
 " For the first time," put in Saxham quietly. 
 
 " That may be or may not be," said the Superintendent. 
 " You were often at her husband's place of business, you know, 
 and may have seen her or not seen her." 
 
 " As she used to be in Bough's shop, it is possible that a great 
 many of the man's customers besides myself did see her," 
 Owen went on, eating his breakfast. 
 
 " One of my men out there in the hall. I've noticed you 
 looking towards the door " began the Superintendent. 
 
 " Wondering what the shuffling and breathing at the key- 
 hole meant?" said Saxham quietly. "Thank you for ex- 
 plaining." 
 
 " One of my men will fetch a cab when you have finished 
 breakfast, and then, sir," said the Superintendent, " I am afraid 
 I must trouble you to come with me to Paddington Police 
 Station." 
 
 " Very well," said Saxham, frowning, " unless you object 
 to using my brougham, which will be at the door " he looked 
 at his silver table-clock, a present from a grateful patient " in 
 ten minutes' time." 
 
 " I don't at all object, sir," agreed the obliging Superin- 
 tendent; "and the men can follow in the cab. Any objec- 
 tion?" 
 
 Saxham had winced and flushed scarlet to the hair. 
 
 " For God's sake, don't make a procession of it. Let things 
 be kept as quiet as possible for the sake of my family and 
 my friends." He thought with agony of Mildred. They 
 were to be married in June, unless 
 
 The Superintendent coughed behind his glove. "The 
 question of bail will rest with the magistrate, of course," he 
 said. " But I should expect that it would be admitted, 
 upon responsible persons entering into the customary recogniz- 
 ances." 
 
 Saxham rose. He had drunk the coffee, but he could not
 
 io8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 eat. " Like all the rest of them, in spite of his show of cool- 
 ness," thought the Superintendent. 
 
 " I will ask you for time to telephone to some friends who 
 will, I have no doubt, be willing to give the required under- 
 taking, and arrange for a colleague to visit my patients. You 
 will take a glass of wine while I step into the next room? The 
 telephone is there, on the writing-table." 
 
 " And a loaded revolver in the drawer underneath, and 
 poisons of all kinds handy on the shelves of a neat little cab- 
 inet," thought the Superintendent. But he said: "With 
 pleasure, sir, only I must trouble you to put up with my 
 company." 
 
 A tingling thrill of revulsion ran through Saxham. He 
 set his teeth, and conquered the furious, momentary impulse 
 to knock down this big, burly, smooth-spoken blue-uniformed 
 official. 
 
 " Ah, very well. The usual procedure in cases of this kind. 
 Please come this way. But take a glass of wine first. There 
 are glasses on the sideboard there, and claret and port in those 
 decanters." 
 
 " To your very good health, Dr. Saxham, sir, and a speedy 
 and favourable ending to the present difficulty." The 
 Superintendent emptied a bumper neatly, and with discreet 
 relish, and followed Saxham into the consulting-room, and 
 once more, at the sound of the measured footfall padding be- 
 hind him over the thick carpet, the suspect's blood surged madly 
 to his temples, and his hands clenched until the nails drove 
 deep into the palms. For from that moment began the long, 
 slow torture of watching and following, and dogging by the 
 suspicious, vigilant, observing Man In Blue. 
 
 A Treasury Prosecution succeeded the Police-Court Inquiry, 
 and the accused was formally arrested upon the criminal charge, 
 and committed to Holloway pending the Trial. The Trial 
 took place before Mr. Justice Bodmin in the following July, 
 occupying five red-hot dog-days in the thrashing out of that 
 vexed question, the guilt or innocence of Owen Saxham, M.D., 
 F.R.C.S. Who for airless, stifling years of weeks had eaten 
 and drunk and slept and waked in the Valley of the Shadow 
 of Penal Servitude. Who was conveyed from the dock to the 
 cell and from the cell to the dock by wardens and policemen, 
 rumbling through back streets and unfrequented ways in a 
 prison-van. Who came at last to look upon the Owen Sax- 
 ham of this hideous prison nightmare, the man of whom the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 109 
 
 Counsel for the Crown reared up, day by day, a monstrously- 
 distorted figure, as quite a different person from the other 
 innocent man whom the defending advocate described in flow- 
 ery, pathetic sentences as a martyr and the victim of an un- 
 heard-of combination of adverse circumstances. 
 
 Things went badly. The case against the prisoner looked 
 extremely black. That monstrous figure of Owen Saxham, 
 based upon an ingenious hypothesis of guilt, and plastered over 
 with a marvellous mixture of truths and falsities, facts and 
 conjectures, grew uglier and more sinister every day. 
 
 The principal witness, the bereaved husband of the hapless 
 victim, dressed in deep mourning and neatly handled by Coun- 
 sel, evoked a display of handkerchiefs upon his every appear- 
 ance in the w T itness-box, from the smart Society women seated 
 near the Bench. Many of them had been Saxham's patients. 
 Several had made love to him, nearly all of them had made 
 much of him, and quite an appreciable number of them had 
 asked him to be accommodating, and render them immune 
 against the menace of Maternity. These had received a curt 
 refusal, accompanied with wholesome advice, for which they 
 revenged themselves now, in graceful womanly fashion, by be- 
 ing quite sure the wretched man was guilty. More than pos- 
 sible, w r as it not? they whispered behind their palm-leaf fans: 
 it was hot weather, and the vendors of these made little for- 
 tunes, hawking them outside. Was it not more than possible 
 that he had been the dead woman's lover ? The Crown Coun- 
 sel improved on this idea. Wretched little Mrs. Bough, of in- 
 finitesimal account in Life, had become through Death a per- 
 son of importance. Much was made out of the fact that she 
 had gone to Chilworth Street some days previously to her de- 
 plorable ending, and remained closeted with Dr. Saxham for 
 some time. He had supplied her with a bottle of medicine 
 upon her leaving medicine of which no memorandum was to 
 be found in his notes for the day. She had taken the first 
 dose then and there. According to the testimony of the Ac- 
 cused, the bottle had contained a harmless bromide sedative. 
 Upon the oath of the Public Analyst, the same bottle, handed 
 by the husband of the deceased woman to the Police upon the 
 night of her death, and now produced in Court with two or 
 three doses of dark liquid remaining in it, contained a powerful 
 solution of ergotoxine a much less innocent drug. Who 
 should presume to doubt its administration by the Prisoner, 
 when the label bore directions in his own characteristic hand-
 
 I io ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 writing? Who should dare to affirm his innocence, seeing 
 that to him his victim had hastened, almost in the act of death, 
 begging him, with her expiring breath, " not to be hard on a 
 woman," who had ignorantly trusted him, Gentlemen of the 
 Jury! only to find, too late, the deceptive nature of his spe- 
 cious promises? A whip, cried the Bard of Avon, England's 
 glorious immortal Shakespeare, should be placed in every hon- 
 est hand to lash such scoundrels naked through the world! 
 Let that whip, in the honest hands of twelve good Britons, be 
 the verdict of guilt! The Counsel for the Crown, red-hot 
 and perspiring, sat down mopping his streaming face, for it was 
 now mid-June, with the white handkerchief of a blameless life. 
 Irrepressible applause followed, round upon round thudding 
 against the dingy yellow-white walls, beating against the dirty 
 barred skylight of the stifling, close-packed Court. Then the 
 Judge interposed, and the clapping of hands and thumping of 
 stick and sunshade ferrules upon the dirty floor died down, and 
 the Counsel for the Defence got up to plead for his man, who, 
 by the way, he firmly believed to be guilty. 
 
 That remembrance made the Dop Doctor merry again, this 
 scorching night in Gueldersdorp, five years later. But it was 
 ugly mirth, especially when he recalled his agony of sympathy 
 upon hearing, through her mother, that Mildred was ill in bed. 
 Christ! how he hated the simpering, whispering, sneering, gig- 
 gling women in Court when he pictured her, his innocent 
 darling, his sweet girl, suffering for love of him and sorrow 
 for him. David, detained by onerous duties at Regimental 
 Headquarters throughout the whole of the Case, wrote chilly 
 but fraternally expressed letters on blue official paper. Of his 
 mother, oi his father, he dared not think. Innocent as he was, 
 the shame of his position, the obloquy of the Trial, must be a 
 branding shame to them for ever. 
 
 It had killed them, the Dop Doctor remembered, within a 
 few years of each other the hale old Squire and Madam, his 
 Welsh wife, feared by the South Dorset village folks for her 
 caustic tongue, beloved for her generous heart, her liberal 
 nature. It was Mildred who he had believed would die if the 
 Verdict went against him Mildred, who had consoled herself 
 so quickly and so well Mildred, whom he had held a spotless 
 lily of Paradise, a young saint in purity and singleness of heart, 
 in comparison with those other women. 
 
 Bah! what a besotted idiot he had been! She was as they 
 were. The nodding of their towering hats was before his
 
 ONE BRAVER THING in 
 
 eyes; the subdued titter that accompanied their whispered com- 
 ments was in his ears, the lavender, white rose, and violet 
 essences with which they perfumed their baths and sprinkled 
 their clothes were in his nostrils; suffocatingly, as his Counsel 
 went on pleading. The intention of his trenchant cross-ques- 
 tioning of Bough, who had lied from the beginning, like a true 
 son of the Devil, his father, showed plainly now. Little by 
 little the evidence accumulated. 
 
 Here, free and unsuspected and doing his best, to send another 
 man to Penal Servitude, was the man who had all to gain by 
 fixing the guilt upon the Accused. He had sent the woman, 
 his mistress, to -the prisoner; he had resented the prisoner's re- 
 fusal to commit or to abet a dangerous and illegal operation. 
 He had compelled his private victim to submit herself to the 
 hands of a wretch wlio lived by such deeds. Possibly he had 
 sickened of his poor toy he had told her as much. Possibly 
 he had determined, by a bold and daring stroke, to free himself 
 of a wearisome burden, and let another man pay the penalty 
 for his own crime. The substitution of the lethal drug found 
 in the bottle for the harmless bromide-mixture given to Mrs. 
 Bough by Dr. Saxham would naturally suggest itself to such 
 a wretch, whose calculating cleverness had been crowned with 
 success by the culminating master-stroke, admirable in its 
 simplicity, damnable in its fiendish cunning, of sending the un- 
 happy woman whose deliberate murder he had really planned 
 and carried out, to die upon the threshold of the innocent vic- 
 tim of this diabolical plot. Let those who heard hesitate before 
 they played into the hands of a villain by condemning the blame- 
 less to suffer. Let them look at the young man before them, 
 whose hard work had won him, early in life, his brilliant posi- 
 tion as one of the recognized pioneers of the new School of 
 Surgery, as an admitted authority on Clinic Medicine, whose 
 wedding-bells the handkerchiefs came out at this had rung 
 to-morrow but for this harrowing and bitter stroke of adverse 
 Destiny. Which would they have? Let the Jury decide for 
 Christ or Barabbas! He spoke in all reverence, because the up- 
 right, innocent, charitable, self-denying life of a diligent healer 
 of men would bear the analogy of Christ-likeness beside 
 that of the principal witness in this Case, the evil liver, the 
 slanderer, the ex-thief and burglar, the English ticket-of-leave 
 man who had emigrated to South Africa eighteen years previ- 
 ously, had enlisted under a false name in the Cape Mounted 
 Police,, had deserted, been traced to Kimberley, and there lost
 
 ii2 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 sight of, and who, under the name of Bough, had recently re- 
 turned to England, giving himself out as an Afrikander, and 
 setting up in business in London upon the accumulated savings 
 of a career most probably in keeping with his abominable rec- 
 ord. 
 
 Wardens from Wormwood Scrubbs and Portland Prisons 
 were there to swear to the identity of Abraham Brake, alias 
 Lister, alias Bough, whose photographs, thumb-prints, and 
 measurements an official from the Criminal Identification De- 
 partment of Scotland Yard was prepared to place before the 
 Court, for whose rearrest, as a ticket-of-leave man who had 
 failed to keep in proper touch with the Police, an officer with 
 a warrant waited. What, then, was to be the Verdict of the 
 Jury? Was Dr. Owen Saxham innocent or guilty? If in- 
 nocent, then, in the name of God, let him go forth from bond- 
 age, to the unutterable relief of those who waited in anguish 
 for the Verdict. His father, his mother, and the fair young 
 girl the Court was drowned in tears at this last touching 
 reference, even his Lordship the Judge being observed to re- 
 move and wipe eyeglasses that were gemmy with emotion, as 
 Counsel dwelt upon the touching picture of the sorrowing 
 bride-elect, whose orange-blossoms had been blighted by the 
 breath of this hideous, this unbearable, this most unfounded 
 charge. . . . 
 
 XVI 
 
 THE Judge summed up, with an evident bias in favour of the 
 Accused. An old advocate in criminal causes, his Lordship 
 had formed his own opinion of the principal witness for the 
 Crown, though there was no evidence to prove the guilt of the 
 astute Mr. Abraham Brake, alias Lister, alias Bough. 
 
 The Jury retired, to return immediately. The Verdict 
 " Not Guilty " was received with applause and cheers. Bough 
 departed, to pay the prison penalty of not keeping in touch with 
 the Police. . . . More cheers, strongly deprecated by the 
 Judge. The Dop Doctor could hear that ironical clapping 
 and braying five years off. It was over, over! He was free! 
 Oh, the mockery of the word! 
 
 His Counsel shook his hand warmly, and several old friends 
 and colleagues pressed round him with hearty congratulations. 
 Then a telegram was handed to him. 
 
 " No bad news, I hope," said the Counsel, who had defended,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 113 
 
 seeing his lips blanch. " You have had enough trouble to last 
 for some time, I imagine ? " 
 
 " It appears as if my measure was not quite full enough," 
 said Owen quietly. " My father died suddenly last night, 
 down at our place in South Dorset. The wire says, ' An attack 
 of cerebral haemorrhage/ probably brought on by worry and 
 distress of mind over this damned affair of mine." He ground 
 his teeth together, and went on: " I must go to my mother 
 without delay. How soon can I get away from here ? " 
 
 It was oddly difficult to realize that all the doors were open, 
 and that the following shadow of the Man In Blue would no 
 longer dog his footsteps. It was strange to drive home in the 
 brougham of a friend to Chilworth Street, and let himself into 
 the dusty, neglected, close-smelling, shut-up house. All the 
 servants were out; probably they had been making holiday 
 through all the weeks that had preceded the Trial. His man 
 returned as the master finished packing a portmanteau for that 
 journey down to Dorsetshire. Saxham. left him to finish while 
 he changed his clothes and scrawled a letter to Mildred. Noth- 
 ing else but this death could have kept him from hurrying to the 
 embrace of those dear arms. As it was, he half expected her to 
 rush in upon him, stammering, weeping, clinging to him in 
 her overwhelming relief and gladness. ... At every rumble 
 and stoppage of wheels in the street, at every ring, he made 
 sure that she was coming. But she did" not come, and he sent 
 his man to Pont Street with his letter, and went down into 
 Dorsetshire by special train from Waterloo, and found the 
 dead man's dogcart waiting for him, with the old bay cob in 
 harness, and the old coachman who had taught him to ride his 
 pony waiting, with a yard of crape about his sleeve, and drove 
 through the deep, ferny lanes to the old home standing in its 
 mantle of midsummer leafage and blossom in the wide gardens 
 whose myrtle and lavender hedges overhung the beach below. 
 There was a little, old, bent, white-haired woman in a shabby 
 black gown and white India shawl waiting for him on the 
 threshold, and only by the indomitable, unquailing spirit that 
 looked out of her bright black eyes did Owen Saxham recognize 
 his mother. She called him her David's dearest son, and her 
 own boy, and took both his hands, and drew his head down, and 
 kissed him solemnly upon the forehead. 
 
 " That is for your father, my dear," she said. " He never 
 doubted you for one moment, Owen. And this is for myself. 
 We have both believed in you implicitly throughout. We
 
 114 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 would not even write and tell you so. It would have seemed, 
 your father thought, like admitting, tacitly, that we doubted 
 our son. But other people believed you guilty, and oh, Owen, 
 I think it killed him!" 
 
 " I know that it has killed him," Owen Saxham said simply. 
 The early morning light showed to the mother's eyes the rav- 
 ages wrought in her son's face by the mental anguish and the 
 physical strain of those terrible weeks of May and June, and 
 Mrs. Saxham, for the first time since the Squire's death, burst 
 into a passion of weeping. Owen's eyes were dry, even when 
 he stooped to kiss the high, broad forehead of the grand old 
 grey head that lay upon the snowy, lavender-scented pillow in 
 the cool, airy death-chamber, where the perfume of the climb- 
 ing roses that flowered about the open casements came in drifts 
 across the sharp, clean odour of disinfectant. 
 
 Captain Saxham arrived late that night. His greeting of 
 his brother was stiff and constrained; his grey eyes avoided 
 Owen's blue ones; he did not refer to the events of the past 
 six weeks. He had always had a habit of twisting and biting 
 at one of the short, thick ends of his frizzy light brown 
 moustache. Now he wrenched and gnawed at it incessantly, 
 and his usually florid complexion had deteriorated to a muddy 
 pallor. Black mufti did not suit the handsome martial figure, 
 and there is no dwelling so wearisome as a house of mourning, 
 when the servants move about on tiptoe, wearing faces of funer- 
 eal solemnity, and the afternoon tea-tray is carried in in state, 
 like the corpse of a domestic usage on its way to the cemetery, 
 with the silver spirit-kettle bubbling behind it as chief mourner. 
 But, as the elder son, there was plenty to occupy Captain Sax- 
 ham. There was business to be transacted with the Squire's 
 solicitor, with his bailiff, with one or two of the principal ten- 
 ants. There were the arrangements to be made for the fu- 
 neral, and for the extension of hospitality to relatives and friends 
 who came from a distance to attend it, When it was over and 
 the long string of County carriages had driven home to their 
 respective coach-houses, Owen Saxham returned to town. 
 
 " Give my dear love to Mildred. Tell her, if she grudged 
 the first sight of you to me, she will forgive me when she has 
 a son of her own," his mother said. 
 
 " You talk as though she were my wife ! " he said, the bitter 
 lines about his set mouth softening in a smile. 
 
 " She would be but for what is past," said Mrs. Saxham. 
 " She must be soon, for your sake. Your father would have
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 115 
 
 wished that there should be as little delay as possible. Marry 
 quietly at once, and take her abroad. If she loves you, as I 
 know she does, and must, she will not regret the wedding-gown 
 from Paquin's and the six bridesmaids in Directoire hats." 
 
 For that deferred wedding was to have been a gorgeous and 
 impressive function at St. George's, Hanover Square, with a 
 Bishop in lawn sleeves to pronounce the nuptial benediction, 
 palms, spiraea, Eucharistic lilies, and white rambler roses every- 
 where, while the celebrated " Non Angli sed Angeli " choir 
 of boy-choristers had been specially engaged to render the an* 
 them with proper fervour and give due effect to "The Voice 
 that Breathed." 
 
 Owen promised and went back to London. There were 
 cards and envelopes upon the salver in the hall, but no letter 
 from Mildred. That stabbed him to the heart. But it lay 
 waiting upon the writing-table in his study the letter her 
 letter. 
 
 He snatched at it in desperate haste. He had been deeply, 
 secretly, horribly wounded because she had not written to him 
 before. . . . Not a line, O God! not a written line, in 
 answer to that letter in which he told her of the acquittal, and 
 of his father's death, and of his own anguish at having to answer 
 the stern call of filial duty, and leave dear Love uncomforted 
 by even one kiss after all these weeks of famine, and hurry 
 away to lay that grand grey head in the vault that covered 
 so many Saxhams. Not a line. But here was the letter, 
 which his idiot of a servant, demoralized by the recent catas- 
 trophe, had forgotten to send on. 
 
 He tore the envelope open. Her letter bore the date of that 
 day. She said she had written several times and torn them 
 up ... it was so difficult to be just to him and true to her- 
 self. ... It was a roundabout, involved, youthfully grandilo- 
 quent epistle in which Mildred confessed that her love for 
 Owen was dead, that nothing could ever resuscitate it, that she 
 could not, could not, ever marry him, and that she had returned 
 in an accompanying packet his ring, and presents, and letters, 
 and would ever remain his friend (underlined) Mildred. In a 
 rather wobbly postscript, she begged him not to write or to at- 
 tempt to see her, because her decision was irrevocable. She 
 spelt the word with only one r. 
 
 Saxham read the letter three times deliberately. The walls 
 of the castle he had built, and fondly believed to be a work of 
 Cyclopean masonry, had come tumbling about his ears, and lo!
 
 ii6 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the huge blocks were only bits of painted card, and the Lady of 
 the Castle, his true love, was the false queen, after all. He 
 folded up the letter and put it away in his pocket-book, and 
 went over to the mantel-glass and looked steadily at the reflec- 
 tion of his own square face, haggard and drawn and ghastly, 
 with eyes of startling blue flaring out from under a scowling 
 smudge of meeting black eyebrows. He laughed harshly, and 
 a mocking devil looked out of those desperate eyes, and laughed 
 back. He unlocked an oak-and-silver-mounted cellaret cabinet, 
 and got out a decanter of brandy, and filled a tumbler, and 
 ; drank the liquor off. It numbed the unbearable mental agony, 
 'though it had apparently no other effect. But probably he was 
 drunk when he rang the bell and said to his man : 
 
 " Tait, do you believe there is a God?" 
 
 Tait's smooth, waxy countenance did not easily express sur- 
 prise. He answered, as if the question had been quite in the 
 commonplace, ordinary nature of his domestic duties: 
 
 " Can't say I do, sir. I reckon the parsons are responsible 
 for floating 'Im, and that they made a precious good thing out 
 of bearin' stock in Heaven until the purchasers began to ask 
 for delivery, and after that . . ." He chuckled dryly. " I've 
 lived with one or two of 'em, and, if I may say so, sir I know 
 the breed." 
 
 " He knows . . . the breed . . ." repeated Saxham heavily. 
 
 He asked another question, in the same thick, hesitating way, 
 as he moved across the carpet to the oak-and-silver cabinet. 
 
 " Tait, when things went damned badly with you, when that 
 other man let you in for the bill you backed for him, and that 
 girl you were to have married went off with someone else, 
 what did you do to keep yourself from brooding? Because you 
 must have done something, man, as you're alive today!" 
 
 Tait looked at his master dubiously as he poured out more 
 brandy, and went over and stood upon the hearthrug with his 
 back to the empty fireplace, drinking it in gulps. " I did what 
 you're doing now, sir: I took a sight of drink to keep the 
 trouble down. And " He hesitated. 
 
 " Go on," said Saxham, nodding over the tumbler. 
 
 " You're not like other gentlemen in your ways, sir," said 
 smooth Tait, " and that makes me 'esitate in saying it. But 
 I took on a gay, agreeable young woman of the free-and-easy 
 sort, and went in for a bit o' pleasure, and more drink along 
 with it. One nail drives out another, you know, sir. And if 
 the young lady have thrown you hover "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 117 
 
 "Why, you damned, white-gilled, prying brute! you must 
 have been reading my correspondence," said Saxham thickly, as 
 he lifted the tumbler to his mouth. 
 
 Tait grinned. He could venture to tell his master, drunk, 
 what he would not have dared to tell him sober. 
 
 " No need for that, sir. I've come and gone between this 
 house and Pont Street too often not to know what was in 
 the wind. Why, Captain Saxham was there with her often 
 and often when you never suspected. . . ." 
 
 The tumbler fell from Saxham's hand, and struck the fender, 
 and smashed into a hundred glittering bits. 
 
 " Go ! " said Tait's master, perfectly, suddenly, dangerously 
 sober, and pointing to the door. The man delayed to finish 
 his sentence. 
 
 " While you were in Holloway, sir, and all through the 
 Trial. . . ." 
 
 The door, contrary to Tait's discreet, usual habit, had been 
 left open. He vanished through it with harlequin-like agility 
 as a terrible, white-faced black figure seemed to leap upon 
 him. . . . 
 
 " I've 'ad an escape for my life!" he said, having reached 
 in a series of bounds the safer regions below stairs. 
 
 " Of the Doctor ? . . . Go on with your rubbishing non- 
 sense ! " said the cook. 
 
 "What did you go and do to upset 'im, pore dear?" de- 
 manded the housemaid, who was more imaginative, and cher- 
 ished the buddings of a romantic passion for one who should 
 be for ever nameless: 
 
 " Her at Pont Street has wrote to give 'im the go-by that's 
 what she've done," said pale-faced Tait, wiping his dewy brow. 
 " And seeing the Doctor for the first time since I've been in 
 his service a bit overtook with liquor, and more free and easy 
 like than customary being a gentleman you or me would 
 'esitate to take a liberty with in the ordinary way o' things I 
 thought I'd let 'im know about the Goings On." 
 
 " Of them two . . ." interpolated the cook " Her and the 
 Captain." 
 
 " Shameless, I call 'em ! " exclaimed the incandescent house- 
 maid as Tait signified assent. 
 
 " 'Aven't they kep' it dark, though ! " wondered the 
 cook. 
 
 " They're what I call," stated Tait, who had not quite got 
 over the desertion of the young woman he was to have married,
 
 u8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and who had gone off with somebody else, " a precious downy 
 couple. And what I say is it's a Riddance ! " 
 
 "How did 'e take it, pore dear?" gulped the housemaid. 
 
 " Like he's took everything that is, up to the last moment," 
 admitted Tait. " But this is about the last straw." 
 
 The housemaid dissolved in tears. 
 
 " He'll get another young lady," said the cook confidently. 
 " And him so 'andsome an' so clever, and such heaps of carriage- 
 swells for patients." 
 
 Tait shook his prim, respectable head. 
 
 " The swells '11 show their tongues to another man now, 
 my gal, who 'asn't the dirt of the Old Bailey on his coatsleeve. 
 Whistle for patients now, that's what the doctor may. Why, 
 every one of 'em has paid their bills, and them that haven't 
 have asked for their accounts to be sent in. And it's ' Lady 
 So-and-so presents her compliments,' instead of ' Dear Dr. 
 Saxham.' Dene for, he is, at least as far as the West End's 
 concerned. . . . Mind, I don't set up to be infallible, but ex- 
 perience justifies a certain amount of cocksureness, and what I 
 say is Done for! Best he can do is sell the practice, and 
 lease, and plate, and pictures, furniture, and so on, for what- 
 ever he can get the movables would have provoked spirited 
 biddin' at auction if the verdict had been Guilty, but, under 
 the circumstances, they won't bring a twentieth part of their 
 valoo and go Abroad." Tait's gesture was large and vague. 
 
 " Foreign parts. Pore dear, it do seem cruel ! " sighed the 
 cook. 
 
 " And 'is young lady false to 'im, and all. I wonder he don't 
 do away with hisself," sobbed the housemaid. " I do, reely! " 
 
 " With all them wicked knives and deadly bottles handy," 
 added the cook. 
 
 "Not him!" said Tait. "I'm ready to lay any man the 
 sporting odds against him committing sooicide. He's not the 
 sort. Lord ! what was that ? " 
 
 That was only the oversetting of a chair upstairs. 
 
 XVII 
 
 WHILE the servants talked in the kitchen the master had been 
 sitting quietly in the darkening study. All without and within 
 the man was eddying, swirling blackness. Heat beat and 
 glowed upon his forehead, like the radiation from molten metal ;
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 119 
 
 there was a winnowing and fanning as of giant wings or leap- 
 ing of furnace fires. The blood in his throbbing temples sang 
 a dull, tuneless song. But presently he became aware of an- 
 other kind of singing. 
 
 It was a little hissing voice that came from the inside of 
 the oak-and-silver liquor cabinet. And it sang a song that the 
 man who sat near had never heard before. 
 
 " Why think of the sharp lancet or the keen razor, why long 
 for the swift dismissing pang of the fragrant acid, or the leap 
 down upon the railway-track under the crushing, pulping iron 
 wheels? " sang the little voice. " I can give you Forgetfulness. 
 I can bring you Death. Not that death of the body which, for 
 all you know, may mean a keener, more perfect capability to live 
 and suffer on the part of the Soul, stripped from the earthly 
 husk that has burdened and deadened it. The Death that is 
 Death in Life. . . . Here am I, ready to be your minister. 
 Drink deep, and die! " 
 
 The man who heard lifted his white, wild, desperate face. 
 The song came more clearly. 
 
 " Wronged, outraged, betrayed of the God you blindly be- 
 lieved in and the man and the woman who had your passionate 
 love, your absolute faith, have your revenge upon the One as 
 upon those two others. Degrade, cast down, deface, the image 
 of your Maker in you. Hurl back every gift of His, prostitute 
 and debase every faculty. Your Body, is it not your own, to do 
 with as you choose ? Your Soul, is it not your helpless prisoner, 
 while you keep it in its cage of clay? Revenge, revenge, 
 through the body and the soul, upon Him who has mocked 
 you ! Do you not hear Him laugh as you sit there desolate in 
 the darkness poor, broken reed that thought itself an oak of 
 might alone, while your brother kisses the sweet lips that were 
 yours. David and Mildred are laughing too, at you. Hasten 
 to efface every memory of the lying kisses she has given you upon 
 the bosoms of the Daughters of Pleasure! Love, revel, drink! 
 Drink, I say, and you will be able to laugh at the One and the 
 two. . . ." 
 
 The little hissing voice drove Saxham mad. He leaped up, 
 frenzied, oversetting the chair. He tore open and threw wide 
 the doors of the oak-and-silver cabinet, and sought in it with 
 shaking hands. He found a bottle of champagne and the 
 brandy-decanter, and a long tumbler, and knocked off the wired 
 neck of the bottle against the chimneypiece, and crashed the 
 foaming wine into the crystal, and filled up the glass with
 
 120 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 brandy, and drank down the stinging, bubbling, hissing mixture, 
 and laughed as he set the tumbler down. 
 
 The thing inside the oak-and-silver cabinet laughed too. 
 
 ***** 
 
 The hall-door shut heavily as Tait and the women in the 
 kitchen sat and listened. They had not spoken since the crash 
 of the falling chair in the room overhead. The area-door was 
 open to the hot, sickly night air of London in Summer. Tait 
 slid noiselessly out and listened as his master hailed a passing 
 hansom and jumped lightly in. The flaps banged together, the 
 driver pulled open the roof-trap and leaned down to catch the 
 shouted address. Tait's sharp ear caught it too, and the know- 
 ing grin that decorated the features of the cabman was re- 
 flected upon his decent smug countenance. His tongue was in 
 .his cheek as he returned to the kitchen. For his master had 
 given the direction of a house of ill-fame. 
 
 Thus the door would have shut for ever upon the old, strenu- 
 ous, honourable, cleanly, useful life of Owen Saxham, were it 
 not that the For Ever of humanity means only a little space of 
 years with God sometimes only a little space of hours. Saxham 
 did not need the evidence of the shower of cheques from people 
 who hated paying, the request from the Committee of his Club 
 that he would resign membership, the averted faces of his ac- 
 quaintances, the elaborate cordiality of his friends, to tell him 
 what he knew already. As the astute Tait had said, as Society 
 knew already, he was a ruined man. He had made money, but 
 the enormous expenses of the Defence swallowed up thousands. 
 By bringing an action against the Treasury he might have re- 
 covered a portion of the costs so he was told, but he had had 
 enough of Law. He resigned his post at the Hospital, in spite 
 of a thinly-worded remonstrance from the Senior Physician. 
 He dismissed his servants generously. He sold his lease and 
 furniture and other property through a firm of auctioneers who 
 robbed him, and sold what stocks he had not realized upon, and 
 wrote a farewell letter to his mother, and sailed for South 
 Africa. Thenceforward he was to build his nest with the birds 
 of night, and rise from the stertorous sleep that is of drunken- 
 ness only to drink himself drunk again. 
 
 From assiduous letter-writing friends David heard reports 
 of his brother that grieved him deeply. He told these things 
 to Mildred, and they shook their heads over them and sighed 
 together. Poor Owen! It was most fortunate for his family 
 that the Jury had taken so lenient a view of the case . . .
 
 121 
 
 otherwise . . . ! They were quite certain in their own minds 
 that poor Owen had been culpable, if not guilty. They were 
 married six months later. The Directoire hats were out of 
 date, of course, but Louis Quinze, with Watteau trimmings, 
 suited the six bridesmaids marvellously, and the " Non Angli 
 sed Angeli " choir rendered the Anthem and the " Voice that 
 Breathed " to perfection. 
 
 And Mildred, who never omitted her nightly prayers, made 
 a special petition for the reformation of poor misguided Owen 
 upon her wedding-night. 
 
 " Because we are so happy," she told David, who had found her 
 kneeling, white and exquisitely virginal in her lace and cambric 
 draperies by the bedside. " And he must be so miserable. And 
 you know, though I never really cared for him, he was perfectly 
 devoted to me." 
 
 "Who could help it?" cooed enamoured David, and knelt 
 and kissed his bride's white feet. The white feet bore no ugly 
 stains, although to reach the bridal bed towards which he now 
 drew her they had trodden recklessly upon a wounded, bleeding 
 heart. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 THE Dop Doctor lifted his head as the bell of the front-door 
 rang loudly at the back passage end. Two mounted officers 
 of the Military Staff at Gueldersdorp had trotted up the street 
 with an orderly behind them a moment before. The elder of 
 the two had pulled sharply up in front of the green door whose 
 brass-plate flamed with the last rays of sunset. He had dis- 
 mounted lightly and gone up the steps and rung, saying some- 
 thing to his companion. The other officer had saluted and 
 ridden on, as though to carry out some order; the orderly had 
 come up and got off his horse and taken the bridle of the 
 officer's, as the Dutch dispensary attendant, Koets, had plodded 
 heavily along the passage and opened the door, and now 
 slouched heavily back, ushering in a presumable patient. 
 
 " Light the lamp," said the Dop Doctor in Dutch to the fac- 
 totum, as he rose up heavily out of his chair. " It will be dark 
 directly." 
 
 " There is no need of more light, I am obliged to you," said 
 the stranger, cool, alert, brown of face as of dress: a thin man, 
 distinct of speech, quiet of manner, and with singularly vivid 
 eyes of light hazel. " In the actual dark I can see quite clearly.
 
 122 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 A matter of training and habit, because I began life as a short- 
 sighted lad. Do we need your assistant further ? " 
 
 In indirect answer to the pointed question, the Dop Doctor 
 turned to the Dutch dispensary assistant, and said curtly: 
 
 "Gauit!" 
 
 Koets went, not without a scowl at the visitor. 
 
 " A sulky man and a surly master," thought the stranger, 
 scanning with those observant eyes of his the gaunt figure in the 
 shabby grey clothes. " Has seen trouble and lived hard," he 
 added, mentally noting the haggard lines of the square face 
 under the massive forehead, over which a plume of badly- 
 brushed hair, black with threads of grey in it, fell awkwardly. 
 
 " English and a University man, I should say. Those 
 clothes were cut by a Bond Street tailor in the height of fash- 
 ion five years back. And the man is in the second stage of 
 recovery from a bout of drunkenness unless he drugs." But 
 even while the visitor was taking these memoranda, he was 
 saying in the customary tone of polite inquiry: 
 
 " I have, I think, the pleasure of speaking to Dr. Williams? " 
 
 " Sir, you have not. Dr. De Boursy- Williams has left for 
 Cape Town with his family. You are speaking to his tem- 
 porary substitute." The bloodshot blue eyes met his own in- 
 differently. 
 
 " Indeed ! Well, I do not grudge the family if, as I believe 
 is the case, it chiefly ranks upon the distaff side. But the 
 Doctor will miss a good deal of interesting practice. As to 
 yourself, you will allow the inquiry. . . . Are you a surgeon 
 as well as a medical practitioner? " 
 
 " If I were not, I should not be here." 
 
 " I will put my question differently. I trust you will not 
 consider its repetition offensive. Have you an extensive ex- 
 perience in dealing with gunshot wounds?" 
 
 Saxham said roughly: 
 
 " I have experience to a certain extent. I will go no 
 farther than to say so. I am not undergoing examination as 
 to my professional capabilities that I am aware of, and if you 
 doubt them you are perfectly at liberty to seek medical advice 
 elsewhere." 
 
 " My good sir, I have been elsewhere, and the other doctor, 
 when he learned the purport of my visit, relished it as little as 
 your principal is likely to do. With the imminent prospect of 
 a siege before us, we are making . . ." The speaker, slipping 
 one hand behind him, moved a step backwards and nearer to
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 123 
 
 the street-door. " As I said, sir, with the imminent prospect 
 of a siege before us, we are making a house-to-house requisi- 
 tion. . . . Ah, I thought as much ! " 
 
 The door-knob had been quietly turned, the door suddenly 
 pulled open, bringing with it Koets, the Dutch dispensary at- 
 tendant, whose large red ear had been glued to the outer key- 
 hole. 
 
 " Your Dutch factotum has been listening. Pick yourself 
 off the mat, Jan, and take yourself out of earshot." The 
 stranger whistled the beginning of a pleasant little tune, with 
 a flavour of Savoy Opera about it. 
 
 " Ik heb not the neem of Jan," snarled the detected Koets, re- 
 tiring in disorder. 
 
 The whistler left off in the middle of a deftly-executed em- 
 bellishment to say: " Unfortunate; because I don't know the 
 Dutch word for spy." The keen hazel eyes and the haggard 
 blue ones met, and there was the faint semblance of a smile on 
 the grim mouth of the Dop Doctor. Keeping the door open, 
 the visitor went on: 
 
 " I have some notes here entries copied from the railway 
 freight-books. Three weeks ago twenty carboys of carbolic 
 acid, with a considerable consignment of other antiseptics, 
 surgical necessaries, drugs, and so forth were delivered to Dr. 
 Williams' order at this address. Frankly, as the officer com- 
 manding Her Majesty's troops on this border, I am here to 
 make a sequestration of the things I have mentioned, with all 
 other medical and surgical requisites stored upon the premises 
 that are likely to be of use to us at the Hospital. In the name 
 of the Imperial Government." 
 
 The smile died out on the grim mouth. A sombre anger 
 burned in the blue eyes of the haggard man in shabby grey., 
 
 " Curse the Imperial Government ! " said the Dop Doctor. 
 
 The stranger nodded in serious assent. " Certainly, curse 
 it! It is your privilege and mine, shared in common with all 
 other Britons, to damn our Government, as long as we remain 
 loyal to our Queen and country." 
 
 The other man shook with a sudden uncontrollable spasm 
 of hate, rage, and loathing. He clenched his hand and shook 
 it in the air as he cried : 
 
 " You employ the stock phrases of your profession. They 
 have long ceased to mean anything to me. I have been the 
 victim and the sacrifice of British laws. I have been formally 
 pardoned by the State for a crime I never committed. I have
 
 124 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 been robbed, plundered, ruined, betrayed, by the monstrous 
 thing that bears the name of British Justice. And as I loathe 
 and hate it, so do I cast off and repudiate the name of English- 
 man. You speak of the imminent prospect of a siege. What 
 other causes have operated to bring it about but British greed, 
 and the British lust, for paramountcy and suzerainty and posses- 
 ,sion? Liberal, or Conservative, or Radical, or Unionist, the 
 '(diplomats and lawyers and financiers who urge on your political 
 machinery by bombast and bribes and catchwords and lying 
 promises, are swayed by one motive governed by one desire 
 lands and diamonds and gold. Wealth that is the property of 
 other men, soil that has been fertilized by the sweat of a nation 
 of agriculturists, whom Great Britain despised until she learned 
 that gold lay under their orchards and cornfields." He broke 
 into a jarring laugh. " And it is for these, the robbers and 
 desperadoes, that the British Army is to do its duty, and for 
 them that De Boursy- Williams is to help pay the piper. As 
 for his property, which you are about to commandeer in the 
 name of the British Imperial Government, I suppose I am 
 legally responsible, being left here in charge. Well, be it 
 so. ... I can only protest against what I am free to regard 
 as an act of brigandage, reflecting small credit upon your Serv- 
 ice, and leave you, sir, to discover the whereabouts of the car- 
 boys for yourself ! " 
 
 He waved his hand contemptuously, and swung towards the 
 door. 
 
 " A moment," said the other man, " in which to assure you 
 that the fullest acknowledgments will be given in the case of 
 the stores, and that their owner will be paid for them liberally 
 and ungrudgingly. And, granting that much of what you have 
 said is true, and that the leaven of self-seeking is to be found 
 in every man's nature, and that greed is the predominating mo- 
 tive with those men who, more than others, work for the build- 
 ing-up of an Empire and the profitable union of Britain with 
 her Colonies, don't you think that there may be something in 
 the good old footballer's motto, ' Play the game, that your side 
 may win ' ? " 
 
 The Dop Doctor made a slight sound that might have been 
 of indifferent assent or of contradiction. The other chose to 
 take it as assent. 
 
 " Take the present situation, purely as football. They have 
 picked me as a forward player. And I mean to play the 
 game ! "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 125 
 
 The Dop Doctor might or might not have heard. His 
 square, impassive face looked as if carved in stone. 
 
 " To play the game, Doctor. Perhaps I have my bone or 
 two to pick with several of the Institutions of my country. 
 Possibly, but I mean to play the game. Fate has ridden me 
 on a saddle-gall or two, and mixed too much chopped 
 straw in proportion to the beans, but there's the game, and 
 I'm going to play it for all I'm worth. As an old Uni- 
 versity man, that way of looking at things ought to appeal 
 to you." 
 
 jStill no answer from the big, sullen, black-haired man in the 
 shabby grey clothes. But his breathing was a little quickened, 
 and a faint, smouldering glow of something not yet quenched 
 in him showed in the haggard blue eyes. 
 
 " It's a confoundedly handicapped game, too, on the defend- 
 ing side. Doesn't that fact rather appeal to the sportsman in 
 you, Doctor? " 
 
 The other said slowly: 
 
 " I gather that the struggle will be unequal. It was stated 
 in my hearing yesterday afternoon that a considerable force of 
 Boers were advancing on Gueldersdorp from the direction of 
 Geitfontein, and, later, that another body of them were on the 
 march along the river-valley from the south-west. I did not 
 attempt to verify what I had heard from my own observation. 
 I was otherwise engaged." The half-incredulous surprise 
 that the other man could not keep out of his eyes stung him into 
 adding: 
 
 " Frankly, I did not care to trouble. It did not interest me." 
 
 The Colonel said, with a dry chuckle: 
 
 "No? But it will presently, though! And, seen through 
 the glass even now, it's an instructive spectacle. Masses of 
 Dutchmen, well-weaponed and thoroughly fed if insufficiently 
 washed, gathering in all quarters marching to the assembly 
 points, dismounting, unlimbering, going into laager. Ten 
 thousand Boers, at a rough estimate, not counting the blacks 
 they have armed against us. . . . And, behind our railway- 
 sleepers and sand-bags, eight hundred fighting European units, 
 twenty per cent, of them raw civilians; and seven thousand 
 neutral Barala and Kaffirs and Zulus in the native Stad an 
 element of danger lying dormant, waiting the spark that may 
 hurry us all sky-high. ... By God, Doctor, the game's worth 
 playing, except by cowards and curs ! " 
 
 The smouldering glow in the Dop Doctor's eyes had been
 
 126 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 formed into a fire. The visitor saw the flame leap, and went 
 on: 
 
 " There's a native proverb I wonder whether you know it? 
 a kind of Zulu version of the regimental motto, Vestigia 
 nulla retrorsum. It runs like this: '// we go forward, we 
 die; if we go backward, we die. Better go forward and die' " 
 He reached out a long, lean, brown right hand. " Come for- 
 'ward with us, Doctor. We can do with a man like you ! " 
 
 The impassive face looked up. Saxham gripped the offered 
 hand as a drowning man might have done. He cried out 
 hoarsely : 
 
 " You don't know the sort of man I am, Colonel. But 
 everybody else in this cursed place knows, or should know. 
 They call me the Dop Doctor. You understand what that 
 nickname implies?" He held out his shaking hands. "Look 
 at these! They would tell you the truth, even if I lied. What 
 use can a man like me be to you, or men like you? I am 
 a drunkard, sir, who has not gone to bed sober one night in 
 the last five years ! " 
 
 There was a pause before the Colonel answered, filled up 
 in the odd way characteristic of the man by a softly-whistled 
 repetition of the opening bars of the pleasant little tune. Then 
 he said quietly and dryly: 
 
 " There is another proverb, not Latin nor Zulu, but Eng- 
 lish, which impresses on us that it is never too late to mend ! " 
 He looked at a tarnished Waterbury watch, worn on a horse's 
 lip-strap. " I am due to inspect the Hospital to-morrow at 
 ten o'clock sharp. If you will meet me there punctually at 
 the half-hour, I shall have the pleasure of introducing you to 
 your Colleagues of the Medical Staff. And now, if you 
 please, as I have just five minutes left to spare, we will have a 
 look at those carboys of carbolic." 
 
 :< They are in the old Chinese godown at the bottom of the 
 garden," said Saxham. He felt in one of the baggy pockets 
 of the shabby grey coat, pulled out a key, and offered it si- 
 lently to the conqueror, who motioned it back. 
 
 "Keep it, if you'll be so good. We'll send a waggon and 
 a careful man or two round from the Army Service Store De- 
 partment within an hour; for that stuff in your friend's car- 
 boys is more precious than rubies to us just now a man's life 
 In every teaspoonful. And if, as you tell me, there is some 
 mercurial bichloride, Taggart and the Medical Staff will jump 
 for joy. What we owe to Lister and those fellows! You'd
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 127 
 
 say so if you'd ever seen gangrene on War Hospital scale in 
 Afghanistan, in 1880, even as recently as the Zululand Cam- 
 paign of 1888. The Pathan and the Zulu are slim, and the 
 Boer is even slimmer, but the wiliest customer of 'em all is the 
 Microbe. No wonder Wellington's old campaigners used to 
 slit the throats of badly-wounded soldiers, or that the ambulance 
 men of Soult and Bonaparte w-ere merciful enough to knock on 
 the head every poor beggar who had been bayonetted in the 
 body. They knew there was not the atom of a chance. But 
 to-day we know how to deal with the invisible enemy. Thanks 
 to Aseptic Surgery, that younger daughter of Science and 
 Genius, as some smart fellow puts it in the National Review." 
 And the pleasant little tune was whistled through to its 
 final grace-note as the two men went down the house-passage 
 and crossed the garden. Verily, to some other men that have 
 lived since Peter of the Nets has it been given to be fishers of 
 their kind. This man said that night to an officer of the Staff: 
 
 XIX 
 
 " I LANDED twenty carboys of carbolic to-day, and a lot of 
 other Hospital stores, by talking football to a man who knows 
 the game, chiefly from the ball's point of view." 
 
 " That counts to you, Colonel," called out Beauclair, the 
 Chief's fair, boyish junior aide-de-camp, from the bottom of 
 the table, " against the awful failure you were grousing about 
 the other night." 
 
 " Ah ! you mean when I tried to frighten some Sisters of 
 Mercy into leaving the town by painting them a luridly-col- 
 oured verbal picture of the perils of the present situation," said 
 the Colonel. His keen hazel eyes twinkled, though his mouth 
 was grave. " I ought to have remembered that you can't scare 
 a religious, be he or she Roman Catholic, Buddhist, or 
 Mohammedan, by pointing to the King of Terrors. He does 
 to frighten lay-folk, but for the other Death's grisly skeleton- 
 hand holds out the Keys of Heaven." 
 
 "What will it hold for some of us others, I wonder?" 
 said one of the dinner-guests, a moody-looking civilian, of 
 Semitic features, whose evening clothes made a dull contrast 
 with the mess-dress of the Staff officers gathered about their 
 Chief's table in his quarters at Nixey's Hotel on the Market 
 Square.
 
 128 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 The host leaned forward to reply: 
 
 " My dear Mr. Levison . . . special mention in Despatches 
 Above, with honours and promotion for those of us who have 
 been approved worthy. For others, who have tried and 
 failed, a merciful overlooking of blunders, a generous ac- 
 ceptance of the Intention where the Performance came short. 
 And for the rest, as for all ... a grave on the yellow veld 
 in the shadow of a rock or thorn-bush, with the turquoise sky 
 of day overhead, shimmering in the white-hot sunshine; or an 
 ocean of purple ether, ridden by what old Lucian called ' the 
 golden galley of the regnant Moon.' That in South Africa; 
 and at home in England, one's memory kept warm and living 
 in, say, three hearts that recognize the best in one, and love it, 
 another's heart, the heart of a friend and hers!" 
 
 There was no insincerity of flattery in the hum of applaud- 
 ing comment that ensued. All earnest original thought has 
 beauty; and this man could not only think, but clothe his 
 thoughts in direct and simple language, and add to it the 
 charm of well-modulated and musical utterance. 
 
 " I call that good enough," said the senior Staff Officer, 
 a dark, handsome, eagle-faced Guardsman, who bore a great 
 historic name, " for you or me or any other fellow alive we're 
 not taking into account the living dead ones." 
 
 The Chief leaned forward in his characteristic attitude, and 
 spoke, a long, lean brown forefinger emphasizing the sentences, 
 his quickened glance driving them home. " I tell you, Leigh- 
 bury, that some of those, the rottenest corpses among 'em, will 
 shed their grave-clothes, and rise up and do the deeds of liv- 
 ing men before, to quote Levison, this month is out. Never 
 take it for granted that a man is dead until the grass is grow- 
 ing high over his bare bones, and don't make too sure even 
 then! Because to-day I saw such dry bones move and it's 
 an instructive if an uncanny sight." 
 
 " Whose were the bones, Colonel ? " called out the hand- 
 some young aide at the bottom of the table. 
 
 The host, his thin, brown fingers busy at the clipped 
 moustache, was listening to the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, who 
 sat upon his right. He withdrew his attentive eyes from that 
 stalwart sportsman's broad, ruddy face to glance smilingly at 
 the fair, handsome face, and reply: 
 
 "Whose? Well, up to the present they have belonged to 
 the Dop Doctor." 
 
 " That man ! " The Mayor, in the act of taking another
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 129 
 
 slice of the roast, looked round as at the mention of a name 
 familiar, shrugging his portly shoulders. " Surely you know 
 who the fellow is, Colonel? He drifted up here from Cape 
 Colony three years ago. A capable confoundedly capable 
 man, handicapped by a severe muscular strain," the Mayor's 
 twinkling eye heralded the resurrection of an ancient jest 
 "sustained in lifting a cask of whisky a glass at a time!" 
 
 White teeth flashed in alert tanned faces. The school- 
 boy laugh went round the table; then the Babel of talk went 
 up again. Most of these men were quite young . . . their 
 seniors barely middle-aged, not a man but was what they 
 themselves would have termed both " fit " and " keen." They 
 had wrought for many days in the erection of sand-bag de- 
 fences, in the digging of trenches, in the drilling of Irregulars 
 and Volunteers and the newly enrolled Town Guard. This 
 was the pleasant social time of lull before the storm, and they 
 were not to get many more good dinners or peaceful nights 
 in bed for a long siege to come. They did not show out- 
 wardly the tension of strung nerves that waited, as the whole 
 world waited, for the echo of the first shot, rattling amongst 
 the low hills to the east. Nor did it occur to them that there 
 was anything heroic or noticeably dramatic in their quiet un- 
 affected pose. Gathered together upon one little spot of 
 border earth destined to be the vital, tragic, throbbing centre 
 of great events and tremendous issues, actions glorious, and 
 deeds scarce paralleled upon the page of History, let us look 
 upon them, well-groomed, well-bred, easy-mannered, cheery, 
 demolishing the good dishes furnished by the chef of Nixey's 
 Hotel, with the hungry zest of schoolboys, exchanging 
 fusilades of not very brilliant chaff. 
 
 Scraps of scientific and technical conversation with refer- 
 ence to telephonic and telegraphic installations between outly- 
 ing forts and headquarters, electric communication with mines, 
 automatic warming apparatuses, the most effective methods of 
 constructing bomb-proof shelters, the comparative merits of 
 Maxim and Nordenfeldt, crossed in the air like fragments of 
 bursting projectiles, impelled by those admirable engines of 
 destruction. Mingled with reminiscences of cricket, golf, 
 tennis, polo, and motoring, then in its infancy, anecdotes new 
 and old, and conjectures as to what the fellows at home were 
 doing? Hurlingham and Ranelagh, Maidenhead and Henley, 
 Eton and Oxford, Sandhurst and Aldershot, Piccadilly in the 
 season, Simla in the heats, the results for the Jockey Club
 
 130 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Stakes and the Cesarewitch all of these they talked, with rhina 
 and elephant shooting and the big battues of pheasants now 
 taking place in the Home Midlands and up North. But 
 though the watch-fires of their pickets burned upon the veld, 
 and though the Boer lay in laager over the Border, of him 
 they said not one word. That reticence upon the vital point 
 was characteristically English. The Gaul would have wept, 
 kneaded his manly bosom, and alluded to his mother ; the 
 Muscovite would have wept also, referring to his Little 
 Father, the Czar; the Teuton would have poured forth oceans 
 of sentiment about the Fatherland; the Spaniard, like these, 
 would have recognized himself as a warrior upon the verge of 
 a Homeric struggle, and said so candidly; the hysterical Amer- 
 ican would have sung "Hail, Columbia!" and waved pocket- 
 handkerchief-sized replicas of the Star-Spangled Banner until 
 too exhausted to agitate or vocalize. But to these men in- 
 dulgence in sentiment was " bad form," and unrestrained 
 patriotic utterances merely " gas." The Liberal, the Social- 
 ist, and the pro-Boer of both denominations, classed by these 
 men under the heading, Bounder, gassed, tainting the air with 
 an odour as of election eggs or sulphuretted hydrogen. There- 
 fore were many words to be avoided. 
 
 A pose, if you will, an affectation, this studied avoidance of 
 all appearance of enthusiasm or excitement, showing the weak 
 spot in the armour of these heroes, henceforth to be of epic 
 fame. But Man is essentially a weak being. It is only 
 when the immortal spirit of him nerves the frame of perish- 
 able muscle that he rises to heights that are sublime. Such 
 a Promethean spark was in these men, that when the Wind of 
 Death blew coldest and the lead and iron hail beat hardest, 
 they only glowed more fiercely radiant; and Want and Priva- 
 tion, instead of sapping the energies that dwelt in them, only 
 seemed to make them more strong strong to endure, strong 
 to foresee plots and avert perils and oppose wit to cunning, 
 and strategy to deceit; so strong that, by reason of their 
 strength, that little frontier town became a stronghold. And 
 yet their names, other than those I have given them in this 
 story, shall go ringing down the grooves of Time, until Time 
 itself shall be no more. 
 
 XX 
 
 WHILE they ate and drank, laughed, and chatted, the man 
 who was to be their comrade, sharer in all those perils and
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 131 
 
 privations yet to come, was tramping up and down the bare 
 boards of the dingy bedchamber in Harris Street, wrestling 
 desperately with his tragic thirst. 
 
 " Why did he come and look at me, and take me by the 
 hand, and revive my dulled capacity for the agony that has 
 no name? Why not have left me alone in this living death 
 I had attained ? " he cried. " When first I took to the in- 
 fernal, blessed liquor, it was for the sake of relief from mental 
 pain, torture unbearable. Then I was a man, only unhappy. 
 Now I am lower than the lowest of the sensible, cleanly, 
 decent brutes, because I frantically desire the drink for its own 
 sake, and my senses find gratification in physical degradation. 
 O God, if Thou indeed art, and I must perforce return to live 
 the life of a man amongst men, help to burst the chains that 
 fetter me ! Help me to be free ! " 
 
 He swallowed a great draught of water, and stumbled to 
 the unused bed, and threw himself across it, raging and pant- 
 ing, and defiant of the very Power he invoked. And then, 
 against Hope, sleep came to him, drowning Memory and 
 obliterating Thought, and his fierce physical sufferings. The 
 lines smoothed out of the heavy forehead, and the grim mouth 
 relaxed in the smile that his dead mother had kissed, coming 
 in with the shaded candle to look at her sleeping boy. 
 
 Just as the Mayor of Gueldersdorp, that stalwart York- 
 shireman, mighty hunter of elephant, rhino, giraffe, and lion 
 in the reckless days of bloodshed that were before the introduc- 
 tion of the Game Laws into South Africa, was saying to the 
 Colonel : 
 
 "Irreclaimable, sir. Hopeless! A confirmed drunkard, 
 who has soaked away all self-respect, who has been cautioned 
 and warned and fined scores of times, by myself and other 
 magistrates. Dr. De Boursy-Williams, our leading practi- 
 tioner here, has taken the fellow under his wing, in a manner 
 'bails him out when it is necessary, and, I believe, when the 
 man is sober enough, gives him work in his dispensary and 
 allows him to administer the anaesthetic when it's a question 
 of a surgical operation. Wonder he trusts him for my part. 
 Yet De Boursy-Williams is a remarkably successful operator, 
 and hardly ever loses a case. It is unfortunate that he should 
 have been called away to Cape Town at this juncture." 
 
 " He has left Dr. Saxham as locum tenens, I understand." 
 
 The Mayor shrugged his portly shoulders. 
 
 " As to his qualifications, there's no doubt. Ranked
 
 132 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 at one time as a London West End specialist. I have seen 
 his name myself in a British Medical Directory of some years 
 back as principal visiting surgeon to St. Stephen's and the 
 Ludgate Hospital for Diseases of the Chest. Has written 
 books scientific works that are quoted now. Must have been 
 making money hand-over-hand when the collapse came. The 
 usual thing one slip and a Police-court Inquiry follows, and 
 down goes the unlucky wretch with the Crown on top of him, 
 and all the Press pack yelping for soft snaps. True, the find- 
 ing of the Jury was ' Not Guilty,' but the fact of there having 
 been a Prosecution was enough to ruin Saxham professionally. 
 'Ah, I thought you must have heard the name." 
 
 For the listener had moved suddenly. He did remember 
 the name of the distinguished London practitioner who had 
 been discreditably mixed up in the case of Mrs. Bough, the 
 young, miserable, murdered creature, who might possibly have 
 been the daughter of Richard Mildare. Tough and cool as 
 his tried nerves were, he shuddered at the thought, and a 
 sickly heat made the points of perspiration stand out upon his 
 forehead. But the Mayor, good man, was prosing on: 
 
 " I can't say the facts of the case are very clear in my 
 recollection, but I have a file of the Daily Wire at home, ex- 
 tending over six years back, so the Criminal Court proceedings 
 must be reported in it. The woman's name, I do remember, 
 was Bough. As regards her age, now you ask me " for the 
 Colonel had put a quick question " I fancy she must have 
 been twenty-two or three. Indeed, I am almost certain that 
 was the age as stated by the Medical Witness in the Prosecu- 
 tion. . . . However, I'll go into the reports and let you know 
 for certain." 
 
 "Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And, in case those files are 
 jbombproof, possibly it would be better to take the family into 
 The reports with you and stop until times improve." 
 
 "Not bad, not half bad, Colonel. But to tell the truth, 
 .1 wouldn't miss what we used to call the shindy, and those 
 boys of yours term the ' scrap ' for a pile of Kruger sovereigns. 
 And I can shoot better than most men, if I am in the sere 
 and yellow sixties." The Mayor was slightly ruffled; the 
 astute touch smoothed him down. 
 
 " My money is on you, Mr. Mayor, when it comes to 
 stopping a Boer with a rifle-bullet at four hundred yards. 
 By the way, I have a little confidence to repose in you. 
 When you meet as I am confident you will meet Dr. Sax-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 133 
 
 ham at the Hospital or elsewhere, metaphorically clothed and 
 in his right mind, and in the active discharge of duties which 
 no man, judging by your own testimony, is better fitted to 
 perform, let him down gently." 
 
 The Mayor, conscious of civic dignity and magisterial warn- 
 ings from the Bench ignored, swelled obviously. 
 
 " My dear sir, you can't let the Dop Doctor down anyhow. 
 He is just about as low as a man can get short of being 
 underground." 
 
 " Lend him a hand up in the first instance by forgetting 
 that confounded nickname which I was clumsy enough to 
 blurt out just now. Be oblivious of what he is, because of 
 what he has been in the Past, and will be in the Future. For 
 there is tremendous stuff in the fellow even now or I am a 
 bad judge of men." 
 
 " Colonel, you're a thundering bad judge of drunkards, from 
 the Bench's point of view, but you'd be a damned good special 
 pleader for a client in need of all the excuses that could be 
 trumped up for him." 
 
 " We all have something we'd like to have an excuse for, 
 Mr. Mayor." The keen hawk-eyes held a twinkle in reserve. 
 " There was a man I knew, a mighty hunter before the Lord 
 and before the Game Laws." The thin brown fingers of 
 the veined hard-palmed hand played with the stem of a wine- 
 glass as the sentences came out, crisp and pointed. " Well, 
 this is the story of a mistake, and an old shikari of your ex- 
 perience can find even more excuses for it than I can . . . but 
 perhaps I bore you?" 
 
 " On the contrary on the contrary, sir." 
 
 The fish had taken the bait, remained to play the quivering 
 captive until his last swirling struggle brought him within 
 reach of the skilful dip and lift of the angler's net. 
 
 " It was about four years ago, in the Matsamba District, 
 Portuguese East Africa, where elephants are to be had, and 
 rhino, particularly the Keitloa variety with the long posterior 
 horn, and a bad habit of charging the man behind the 600 
 bore. . . ." 
 
 Mr. Mayor's capacious white waistcoat was agitated by a 
 subterranean chuckle. His double chin shook merrily. "A 
 side shot through the head solid bullet is the best cure for 
 that, Colonel. But you had to wait in the high swamp-grass 
 and keep the wind of him, and make sure of your aim." 
 
 " Quite so. This man, from the shelter of a rock, waited
 
 134 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 to make sure of his aim. The rhino was feeding tsetse as he 
 dozed in the high swamp-grass. His biggest horn showed, and 
 a bit of his shiny black skin. One j'orward lunge of the big 
 head and Nimrod could get that side-shot. So he waited, 
 patience being, as we know, a virtue to be cultivated by the 
 successful stalker of big game " 
 
 The Mayor, boiled prawn-pink to the receding boundary- 
 line of his upright white hair, coughed awkwardly. 
 
 " So the man waited two hours. Then the unclad and 
 obese native lady, carrying a long pointed grass basket on 
 her back, who had squatted down in the high grass to smoke 
 a pipe and administer maternal refreshment to a shiny black 
 piccanni of three or four ! " 
 
 The Mayor, purple now, burst out: 
 
 " Got up and went on ! And, if these boys of yours get 
 wind of that story, I shall be roasted within an inch of my 
 life. Whoever told you? In the Lord's name, don't give 
 me away ! " 
 
 The keen eyes were dancing now the big fish had fairly 
 got the gaff. 
 
 " I promise, Mr. Mayor, upon the understanding that you 
 don't give away my man. . . . It's a compact? Thanks 
 tremendously! And here comes the Manager to be con- 
 gratulated upon the haunch. I never tasted better venison, 
 Mr. Nixey, though, as you say, this is rather far North for 
 koodoo. And the quail were beyond praise. Waiter, a glass 
 for Mr. Nixey. . . . Port and we're going to ask you to 
 join us in drinking a toast. . . ." 
 
 The beautiful, flushed boy rose solemnly, glass in hand. 
 About the long board, adorned with a fine epergne full of 
 tuberose, rose, and jasmine, spread with Nixey's best plate and 
 linen, crystal, and dishes of Staffordshire china piled with 
 grapes and mandarins and loquats, the fruit of October. 
 About the table there was a great uprising of those phlegmatic, 
 self-contained Britons. Straight as the flames of unblown 
 torches, they burned about the table. With a simultaneous 
 movement all those eyes of varied colours turned to the lean 
 brown face of the quiet man at the table-head as the sweet 
 young clarion rung out: 
 
 " Gentlemen the Queen ! " 
 
 The brimming glasses rose high one crystal wave with the 
 crimson blood in it. The English and the sharper Colonial 
 voices answered together with a crash. As of the wave break-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 135 
 
 ing on white cliffs northwards, spreading to the steps of the 
 Throne where She sate, bowed with great griefs and great 
 joys and great triumphs and glories, and white-haired with the 
 full burden of her venerable years: 
 "The Queen!" 
 
 XXI 
 
 THEY lingered not long over wine and cigars. Lady Hannah 
 Wrynche, who was entertaining what she disdainfully termed a 
 " hen party " in her private rooms at Nixey's, vacated in her 
 honour by her landlord's wife expected them to coffee. 
 Much to the relief of the military authorities at Cape Town, 
 Milady, most erratic of Society meteors, had quitted that 
 centre of painstaking official misinformation, for the throbbing 
 spot of debatable land whence events might be gathered as they 
 sprang. Shooting across the orbit of the reddening, low-hang- 
 ing War-planet, she had descended upon Nixey's in a shower 
 of baggage-trunks, fox-terriers, and interrogations. For one 
 thing, she explained to everybody, she had undertaken to 
 supply a London Daily with a series of Letters, written from 
 the Seat of Hostilities, and for another, Bingo was on the 
 Staff, and it would be so nice for him, poor dear, to have his 
 wife near him in case those wretches . . . was " chipped " the 
 proper technical term, or "potted"? The Letters were in- 
 tended to be the real thing racy of the soil, don't you know, 
 and full of " go " and atmosphere. Let it be said here that 
 they achieved raciness. The London print in which they ap- 
 peared came to be christened by the scoffer and the incredulous 
 the Daily Whale it swallowed and disgorged so many of the 
 Jonahs rejected by other editors. But the profits increased, 
 and the Proprietors could afford to smile at Envy. 
 
 Food for the insatiable gold fountain-pen of our in- 
 defatigable Lady Correspondent, stooping to occupy the in- 
 defatigable gold fountain-pen from whence she derived her 
 literary pseudonym, in recording merest gossip, in the absence 
 of the longed-for opportunity to prove herself the equal, if not 
 the superior, of Dora Corr. Dora is the woman Lady Hannah 
 respects and envies above all others. Colonial Editor to The 
 Thunderbolt, War Correspondent, financial expert, political 
 leader-writer, and diplomatic go-between, when Cabinet Min- 
 isters and Empire-builders would arrive at understanding the 
 serfdom of sex, the trammels of the petticoat weigh as lightly
 
 136 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 upon this thrice fortunate spinster as though it were no draw- 
 back to be a daughter of Eve. 
 
 Oh, prayed Lady Hannah, for the chance of proving that 
 another woman can equal this brilliant feminine Phoenix! 
 Meanwhile her bright eyes and quick sense of humour took 
 note of the toilettes of some of her guests, wives and daughters 
 of notable citizens who had not hurried South at the first 
 mutterings of the storm. The purple satin worn by the 
 Mayoress tickled her no less than the unfeigned horror of its 
 wearer when offered from her hostess's chatelaine-case the 
 choicest of Sobranies. Lady Hannah's laugh was the rattling 
 of a mischievous boy's stick across his sister's piano-wires, and 
 the metallic jangle preceded her assurance that everybody did 
 it all women in Society, at least, and you were thought odd 
 if you didn't. After dinner, in the most exclusive houses, 
 the most rigid of hostesses invariably allowed her women guests 
 to smoke. They knew people worth having wouldn't come if 
 they weren't allowed to smoke. 
 
 " Never beneath my roof ! " gasped the shocked and scandal- 
 ized wearer of the purple splendours demanded of the wife 
 of a Chief Magistrate. "Never at my table!" Of course, 
 the agitated Mayoress went on to say, one had heard of the 
 doings of the Smart Set. But one had hoped it wasn't true, 
 or, at least, had been very much exaggerated by " writing- 
 people." The Mayoress, though a mild woman, had her 
 sting. 
 
 Lady Hannah, immensely tickled to find the morals of Bays- 
 water rampant, as she afterwards expressed it, in the centre 
 of South Africa, cackled as she helped herself to a second 
 liqueur-glass of Nixey's excellent apricot-brandy. Small, thin, 
 restless, she presented a parched appearance, with bright, round, 
 beady eyes continually roving in search of information from 
 the shadow of a crumpled Pompadour transformation, for 
 those horrors had recently become fashionable, and the whole 
 world of women were vying with one another in the simulation 
 of the criminal type of skull, with the Bulge Dolichocephalic. 
 
 " My dear lady, tobacco-ash is an excellent thing for killing 
 moth in carpets, and Time, when one is compelled to bestow 
 it upon dull people; and a perfectly healthy, Nonconformist 
 conscience must be a comfortable lodger. But as regards the 
 sacred roof, and the defended table, it's a question how long 
 both British institutions remain intact, with those big guns 
 getting into position round us. . . ." She waved her small
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 137 
 
 hand, its nails superbly ignored, its sun-cracks neglected, its 
 load of South African diamonds coruscating magnificently in 
 the light of Nixey's electric bulbs, and shrugged her thin, 
 vivacious shoulders. 
 
 The entrance of the gentlemen relieved the situation. Lady 
 Hannah jumped up and rushed at the Colonel. "As If she 
 meant to eat the man," the Mayoress said afterwards, in the 
 shadow of that threatened roof. But, impervious to the en- 
 treaty of the bright black eyes and the glittering hand that 
 beckoned with the urgent fan, he bowed, smiled, said a few 
 pleasant words to his hostess, and walked " straight across " 
 as the Mayoress afterwards confided to the Mayor to take a 
 seat beside the large, placid, matronly figure palpitating in 
 purple satin on an imported Maple sofa. 
 
 Pleased and flattered, she made room for him, while Lady 
 Hannah became the gossip-centre of a knot of Mess-uni- 
 forms. . . . 
 
 " Both well ? " It would have been unlike him not to have 
 remembered that he had seen children at her house. " Hammy 
 and Berta made great friends with me the other day. . . . 
 Tell them I haven't forgotten the promise to rummage up 
 some odd native toys I picked up in Rhodesia made of mud 
 and feathers and bits of fur and queerly-shaped seed-pods the 
 most enchanting collection of birds and beasts that ever came 
 out of the Ark. And the Matabele have a legend about a 
 big flood and a wise old man who built a house of reeds and 
 skins that floated. . . . The North American Indians will 
 tell you that it was a big Medicinal Canoe, and amongst the 
 tribes of the Nilghiri Hills you find exactly the same story 
 that the Chaldean scribes wrote on their tablets of clay. To- 
 day in Eastern Kurdistan they'll point you out the peak on 
 which the Ark grounded. The Armenians hold it was Ararat. 
 . . . It's curious how the root-legend crops up every- 
 where. . . ." 
 
 " But of course it must." Her good, calm eyes showed 
 surprise, and her broad, white, matronly bosom was a little 
 fluttered. " Doesn't the Bible teach us that the Deluge cov- 
 ered the whole earth? Even Hammy and Berta can tell you 
 the whole story about Noah, and the raven and the dove." 
 
 He smoothed his moustache with a palm that wiped the 
 smile out. 
 
 " I must get them to tell it me one of these days." The 
 twinkle in his eye was not to be repressed. " It would save
 
 138 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 such a deal of trouble to believe there was only one Noah, 
 and only one Ark, don't you know?" 
 
 Her motherly cheek glowed: 
 
 " My children shall never believe anything else ! " 
 
 He was grave and sympathetic, though a muscle in his thin 
 cheek twitched. 
 
 " I believe the Ark of our happy childish memories is built, 
 if not of gopher-wood, at least upon the lines laid down in 
 Scripture. Has Hammy ever tried to get his to float? Mine 
 invariably used to sink straight to the bottom of the bath. 
 Perhaps that continually-recurrent catastrophe had something 
 to do with the sapping of my infant faith, or the establish- 
 ment of a sinking-fund of doubt regarding the veracity of the 
 Noachian reporter?" 
 
 She leaned towards him, her placid grey eyes dilating with 
 pity for this man. 
 
 " You ought to come and sit under our Minister, Mr. 
 Oddris, on Sundays. Pray do. He would convince you if 
 anybody could. Such an eloquent, able, well-informed man, 
 and so truly pious and brave." 
 
 The laugh perforce escaped him. The convincing Apostle 
 Oddris had called on him at official headquarters that day, to 
 inquire whether, as his wife and children were going to the 
 Women's Laager, his place as a Minister was not by their 
 side? Being informed that able-bodied male beings were not 
 included in the list of the defenceless, he had become im- 
 portunate in the matter of at least a bombproof shelter to be 
 erected in his back-yard. 
 
 " I had rather sit under Hammy and hear about Noah, with 
 Berta on the other knee." 
 
 Her heart went out wholly to him. ..." Out of the 
 mouths of babes." . . . Wasn't that one of the texts with 
 Promise? . . . 
 
 "You love children?" 
 
 "Bless the little beggars!" he said heartily, "they're the 
 jolliest company in the world." 
 
 She leaned towards him, palpitating between her shyness of 
 the Commander of the Garrison and her womanly curiosity 
 to know more about the man. 
 
 " Hammond the Mayor has told me I hope it is not in- 
 discreet te mention it that the first thing you did, on joining 
 your regiment in India as a young subaltern, was to gather 
 all the European children '.n cantonments together and march
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 139 
 
 them through the place, playing ' The Girl I Left Behind Me ' 
 on the flute." 
 
 His brow grew black as thunder. The utterance came, 
 terse and sharp. 
 
 " Ma'am, you have been gravely misinformed." 
 
 She jumped in terror. 
 
 " Oh ! . . . Can it be ? ... Colonel, I do so beg you to 
 forgive me. Let me assure you that neither the Mayor nor 
 myself will ever again repeat the story." 
 
 || Ma'am, if you do . . ." 
 
 " But I promise, never . . ." 
 
 " Ma'am, if you never do, at least remember that the flute 
 was an ocarina." 
 
 He left the good soul in an ecstasy of giggles, and crossed to 
 Lady Hannah. She welcomed him with a glitter of eyes and 
 teeth and discovered the reserve-chair that had been covered 
 by her somewhat fatigued and wilted draperies of maize Lib- 
 erty-silk, veiled with black Maltese lace. 
 
 " What it is to be a man of tact ! You've made that purple 
 creature perfectly happy. Don't say you're going to be less 
 kind to another woman ! " 
 
 She tapped with a reproachful fan the scarlet sleeve of his 
 thin serge mess-jacket, her appraising eyes busy with the minia- 
 ture medals and star worn on the dark green roll-collar. If 
 a clever woman could be the confidante of a Cabinet Minister, 
 the post of right-hand to the Officer Commanding H.M. 
 Forces in Gueldersdorp might be won. And then the world 
 would know what Hannah Wrynche was born for. What 
 was he saying? 
 
 " I never warn my victims beforehand." 
 
 " Sphinx ! and I hoped to find you in the relenting mood ! " 
 
 " If possible, madam, my granite bosom is more unyielding 
 than on the last occasion when . . ." 
 
 " Do go on ! " said the fan. 
 
 " When you tried to tap it." 
 
 "You're all alike." She sighed. "That is, you give the 
 keynote, and the others take up the tune. Even Bingo 
 Bingo, whom I firmly believed incapable of keeping a secret 
 in which his dearest interests were concerned longer than ten 
 minutes Bingo has sprung a surprise on me. I shall end by 
 falling in love with my own husband such an indecent thing 
 to do after seven years of married life! " 
 
 " Fortunately, the scene of your lapse from the crooked path
 
 i 4 o ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 of custom Is distant from the West End of London more than 
 six thousand miles. And you can rely upon me for secrecy." 
 
 " Ah, that ! ... If only you did leak a little information 
 now and then." Her eyebrows went up to the dry fringe of 
 her Pompadour transformation. " For the sake of the thirst- 
 ing public at home, to say nothing of my reputation as a 
 Special Correspondent " 
 
 " Drive over and call on General Bronnckers at Kloof 
 Laager, Geitfontein, on the Border, early to-morrow. Perhaps 
 he would oblige you with matter for a paragraph, and for- 
 ward the cable by private wire." 
 
 Her birdlike eyes were bright on him. 
 
 " I would go if I thought I could get anything by going. 
 Special information with reference to a Plan of Attack. Oh ! 
 if you knew how I'm dying to be really under fire. To hear 
 bullets zip-zip isn't that the sound? as they strike the 
 ground or walls, and shells scream overhead ! " 
 
 She clasped her dry little jewelled hands in affected ecstasy. 
 His eyes were stern, and the lines about his mouth deepened. 
 
 " Pray to-night that you may never hear those sounds you 
 speak of ! " 
 
 She struck an exaggerated attitude of horrified consterna- 
 tion. 
 
 "But no! Why am I here?" 
 
 "The Lord only knows. I've seen a hen peck at a lump of 
 dynamite. . . ." 
 
 " Ah, you never will take me seriously. But own in your 
 secret heart you're as much afraid as I am that a Relieving 
 
 Column will be sent down from Do tell me again where 
 
 Grumer is with the Brigade? Uli, in Upper Rhodesia 
 thanks! Well, Grumer is quite a near friend of Bingo's, and 
 an old flame of mine. But to burst our lovely peacock 
 bubble of Siege and let the whole situation down, sans coup 
 ferir, into muddy commonplace may Grumer never come ! " 
 She held up her coffee-cup, and drank the toast! 
 
 " Only for the women and children here," he said, and 
 his thin nostrils moved to the measure of his quickened breath- 
 ing, and a hot spark glowed in his keen eyes, " I'd have joined 
 you in that. But under the present circumstances I'd give 
 five years of life and I love life! if our lookouts could pick 
 up Grumer's Advance by the time grey dawn creeps up the 
 east again." 
 
 She was incredulous* .
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 141 
 
 "You, who said when you got orders to sail for South 
 Africa I have it on the authority of your Ascot hostess ' I 
 hope they'll give me a warm corner ' ! " 
 
 " I did say just that. And I meant it." 
 
 His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. She went on: 
 
 " I've been poking round. Seen your preparations. The 
 little old forts, put into such repair! and the armoured train, 
 with a Maxim and a Nordenfeldt, standing in the railway 
 siding, ready for business. And the earthworks! And the 
 shelters panelled and roofed with corrugated iron. And your 
 bomb-proof Headquarter Bureau, the iron skull that's to hold 
 the working brain of the place . . . with underground tele- 
 graphic and telephonic communications with all the forts and 
 outposts. It's colossal! A masterpiece of cool, deadly, lethal 
 forethought. ... I thought I was incapable of the delicious 
 shiver of expectation that the schoolboy enjoys, sitting in the 
 stalls of dear Old Drury, waiting for the curtain to rise on 
 the first act of the Autumn Drama. But you've given it to 
 me you and our friends out there ! " She waved the dry 
 little glittering hand. " And you can talk in cold blood of 
 marching out and leaving the hive and all the honey you 
 might have had out of it. Sweet danger, perilous sport, the 
 great Game of War played as a man like you knows how to 
 play it in this little sandy world-arena, with all the Powers 
 and Dominions looking on. Preserve us! Oh, to be in your 
 shoes this minute, if only for one week! But as I can't it's 
 you I hope to see riding the whirlwind and directing the 
 storm. Not only for my own sake and the wretched paper's 
 though, mind you, I don't pretend to be anything but a mer- 
 cenary, calculating worldly creature . . ." 
 
 His eyes were very kind. 
 
 "Bingo knows better!" 
 
 Her laugh did not jangle this time. 
 
 " Lady Grasby, the vitriol-tongued water-nymph, as some- 
 body clever once called her, said that if Bingo got killed by 
 any chance, I should sit down and write a gossipy descriptive 
 article, dealing with his military career, married life, and last 
 moments, before I ordered my widow's-weepers. Horrible 
 things! They've come in again, too! Talking of gossip, 
 which I know you only pretend to despise, I found the son of 
 a mutual acquaintance dying in the Hospital here. You know 
 the Bishop of H . . .?" 
 
 " His eldest son, Major Fraithorn, was my senior when I
 
 142 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 was Assistant Military Secretary in India in '93. And the 
 Bishop is quite a dear crony of my mother's." 
 
 " The Bishop," she said, " was always a person of excellent 
 good taste except when he cut off his second son, Julius, 
 with two hundred a year for turning Anglican, wearing a 
 soft hat and Roman collars, and joining the staff at that 
 clerical poster shop in Cavendish Street West as Junior 
 Curate." 
 
 " St. Margaret's. I know the church. Often go there when 
 I'm at home." 
 
 " It's the Halfway House to Rome, according to the Bishop, 
 who won't be content with running at every red rag of Ritual- 
 ism that flutters in his own diocese, but keeps up the character 
 of belligerent Broad Churchman by writing pamphlets and ask- 
 ing questions in the House of Lords with reference to affairs 
 which are the business of other people. According to him, the 
 red cassocks of the acolytes at St. Margaret's are cut out of 
 the very skirts of the Woman of Babylon, and Father Turney 
 and his curates they're all Fathers there, and celibates of 
 choice are wolves in wool, and Mephistophelean plotters 
 against the liberties of the Church. Punch published a 
 cartoon of the Bishop shutting his eyes and charging at a wind- 
 mill in a cope and chasuble. He is sending out a string of 
 Protestant-Church Integrity vans all over England, Scotland, 
 and Wales this season, with acetylene-lantern pictures from 
 Foxe's ' Book of Martyrs,' and a lecturer to point the morals 
 and adorn the tales. . . . But if he could see his Mary's boy 
 to-day, he'd put up with any amount of long-tailed coats and 
 Roman collars, and incense and altar genuflections wouldn't 
 count for a tikkie. Oh ! it's been a sore with me this many a 
 year, but when I saw him to-day I said ' Thank God I never 
 had a child ! ' Because to have seen a boy or girl grow up and 
 wither away as that beautiful young fellow is withering is a 
 thing that a mother must shudder to look back upon even when 
 she has found her lost one again in Heaven." 
 
 There was genuine feeling in her voice, usually loud, harsh, 
 and tuneless. The bright black beadles had a gleam as of 
 tears. He turned to her with sympathetic interest. 
 
 " He ought to be obliged to you for rinding this out. No 
 hint of it had reached me. I am due at the Hospital in the 
 morning, and we'll see if something can't be done." 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 " It's a case of tuberculous lung-disease. He developed it in
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 143 
 
 the Clergy House at St. Margaret's, and made light of it, 
 supposing or pretending that the cough and wasting and diffi- 
 culty of breathing meant bronchial trouble, the result of Lon- 
 don fogs. These young people who don't value Life glorious 
 gift that it is! When he broke down utterly, at the end of 
 a rampant campaign against Intemperance he wouldn't be 
 the Bishop's son if he didn't gall the withers of some hobby- 
 horse or other the doctors agreed there was nothing for him 
 but South Africa." 
 
 He frowned, knowing how many sufferers had died of that 
 lethal prescription. She went on: 
 
 " So he came out alone upon the advice of the well-in- 
 tentioned wiseacres, knowing nothing of the country, to live 
 on his two hundred a year until the end. And the end is 
 coming in Gueldersdorp Hospital with giant strides." She 
 blinked. "They've isolated him in a small detached ward. 
 He has a kind friend in the Matron, and the chart-nurse is in 
 love with him, unless I'm mistaken in the symptoms of the 
 complaint. And he looks like St. Francis of Assisi, wedded to 
 Death instead of Poverty and coughs fit to tear your heart. 
 B'rrh!" she shuddered. 
 
 He repeated : " I'll see what can be done to-morrow. 
 These cases are deceptive. There may be a gleam of 
 hope." 
 
 " There is one doubt about the case which might infer a 
 hope. I don't know what discoveries the London doctors 
 made, but I wormed out of the chart-nurse, who plainly adores 
 him, that the doctors in Gueldersdorp can't scare up a bacillus 
 for the life of them." 
 
 His eyes lightened in voluntary admiration, though his tone 
 was jesting. 
 
 "You're thrown away on mere journalism. Criminal In- 
 vestigation or Secret Intelligence would offer wider fields for 
 your abilities." 
 
 "Wait!" she said, her beady eyes black diamonds. "I 
 shall hope to prove one day that an English woman-journalist 
 can be as useful as a Boer spy in the matter of useful informa- 
 tion. Why, why am I not a man ? You only don't trust me 
 because I am a woman." 
 
 He had touched the rankling point in her ambition. He 
 applied balm as he knew how. 
 
 11 Your being a woman may have made all the difference 
 for Fraithorn. I shall set Taggart of the R.A.M.C. at him
 
 144 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 to-morrow; the Major's a bit of a crack at pulmonary cases. 
 And he shall consult with Saxham, and " 
 
 " Saxham." Her eyebrows were knitted. " I thought I 
 knew the names of your Medical Staff men. But I can't re- 
 call a Saxham." 
 
 " This Saxham is Civilian and rather a big pot M.D., 
 F.R.C.S., and lots more. We're lucky to have got him." 
 
 She stiffened, scenting the paragraph. 
 
 " Can it be that you mean the Doctor Saxham of the Old 
 Bailey Case?" 
 
 ' The Jury acquitted, let me remind you." 
 
 " I believe so," she said ; " but he vanished afterwards. I 
 think an innocent man would have stopped and faced the 
 music, and not beat a retreat with the Wedding March almost 
 sounding in his ears. But who knows? You know his 
 brother, Captain Saxham, of the th Dragoons? It was he 
 who stepped into the matrimonial breach, and married the 
 young woman." 
 
 ' The young woman ? " 
 
 " His brother's fiancee an heiress of the Dorsetshire Lee- 
 Haileys, and rather a pretty-faced, silly person, with a penchant 
 for French novels and sulphonal tabloids. I always shall be- 
 lieve that she liked the handsome Dragoon best, and took ad- 
 vantage of the Doctor's being under the cloud of acquittal 
 by a British Jury, to give him what the dear Irish call ' the 
 back of her hand.' " 
 
 11 The better luck for him ! " 
 
 " It was mere instinct to let go when the man was dragging 
 them both under water," she asserted. 
 
 " A Newfoundland bitch would have risen above it." 
 
 " You hit back quick and hard." 
 
 "I'm a tennis-player and a polo-player and a cricketer." 
 
 "What game is there that you don't play?" 
 
 " I could tell you of one or two. . . . But I must really 
 go and speak to some of these ladies. One of them is an old 
 friend." 
 
 " I know who you mean. If I hadn't, her glare of envy 
 would have enlightened me. Did I tell you that / encountered 
 an old friend or, at least, a friend of old at the Hospital 
 yesterday?" 
 
 "You mean poor Fraithorn?" 
 
 " Not at all. I'm only a friend of his mother. I had only 
 heard of the boy, not met him, until I tumbled over him here.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 145 
 
 But this face looking at me from a starched white gmmpe 
 and floating black veil belonged to my Past in several ways." 
 
 He showed interest. 
 
 "Your friend is a nun? At the Convent here? How did 
 you come across her? " 
 
 " She came in to see the Bishop's son while I was with 
 him. It seems that, judging by the poor dear boy's religious 
 medals, and crucifixes, and crossings, and other contraptions, 
 the Matron had got him on the books as a Roman Catholic. 
 And, consequently, when my friend looked in to visit a day- 
 scholar who was to be operated on for adenoids I've no idea 
 what they are, but a thing with a name like that would natur- 
 ally have to be cut out of one she was told of this poor 
 fellow, and has shed the light of her countenance on him oc- 
 casionally since. Yesterday was one of the occasions, and 
 Heavens! what a countenance it is even now! What a 
 voice, what eyes, what a manner! I believed I gushed a bit. 
 . . . She met me as though we'd only parted last week. Nuns 
 are wonderful creatures : she's unique, even as a nun." 
 
 He said : " I believe I had the honour of meeting the lady 
 of whom you speak when I called at the Convent yesterday 
 afternoon. A remarkable, noble, and most interesting per- 
 sonality." 
 
 Lady Hannah nodded. " All that. But you ought to have 
 seen her at eighteen. We were at the High-School, Kensing- 
 ton, together, I a brat of ten in the Third Form, she a Head 
 Girl, cramming for Girton. She carried everything before her 
 there, and emerged with a B.A. Degree Certificate in the days 
 when it was thought hardly proper for a woman to go about 
 with such a thing tacked to her tails. And all the students 
 idolized her, and the male lecturers worshipped the ground she 
 trod. And when she was presented what a sensation ! They 
 called her the ' Irish Rose,' and ' Deirdre,' for her skin of 
 cream and her grey eyes and billowing clouds of black hair. 
 Society raved of her for three seasons, until the fools went 
 even madder about that little woman Manon Lescaut in Saxe 
 biscuit who bolted with the man my glorious Biddy had 
 given her beautiful hand to. And the result! She who 
 might have married an Ambassador and queened it in Peters- 
 burg with the best of 'em she's in a whitewashed Convent, 
 superintending the education of Dutch and Afrikander school- 
 girls in Greek, Latin, French, Algebra and Mathematics, 
 Calisthenics, needlework, the torture of the piano, and the
 
 146 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 twiddle of the globes. He has something to answer for, that 
 old crony of yours ! " 
 
 Lady Hannah stopped for breath, giving the listener his 
 opportunity. 
 
 " My dear lady, you have told me a great deal without 
 enlightening me in the least. Who is my * crony,' and who 
 was your friend? " 
 
 Lady Hannah opened her round beady eyes in astonish- 
 ment. 
 
 "Haven't I told you? She is or was Lady Bridget- 
 Mary Bawne, sister of that high-falutin' little donkey the 
 present Earl of Castleclare, who came into the title and 
 married at eighteen. His wife has means, I understand. The 
 dear old Duchess of Strome, a cousin of my mother's, was her 
 aunt, and Cardinal Voisey, handsome beauty, is an uncle on 
 the distaff side. All the Catholic world and his wife were at 
 her taking of the veil of profession nineteen years ago. The 
 Pope's Nuncio, thp Cardinal-Bishop of Mozella, officiated, and 
 the Comtesse de Lutetia was there with the Due d'Or. . . . 
 They didn't cut off her beautiful black hair, though we out- 
 siders were on tiptoe to see the thing done. I don't think 
 I ever cried so much in my life. Had hysterics real when 
 I got home, and mother scolded fearfully. The Duke of 
 
 C came with his equerry, and after the cloister gates had 
 
 shut crash on beautiful Biddy in her bridal laces, and white 
 satin, and ropes of pearls, and we were all waiting, breathless, 
 for her to come back in the habit, I heard the Duke say, not 
 
 that the dear old thing ever meant to be profane: ' By G- ! 
 
 General, I'm dee'd if Captain Mildare hasn't made Heaven 
 Ian uncommonly handsome present!' And the man he said 
 'that to was the husband of the very woman Dicky had run 
 (away with not quite twelve months before. Mercy on us! " 
 
 " Good God ! " the listener had cried and started to his 
 feet, the dark blood rushing to his forehead. The ivory-pale, 
 mutety-suffering face against the background of whitewashed 
 wall flashed back upon his memory, in a circle of dazzling 
 light. He saw her again, leaning against the door of the 
 chapel as he told her the cruel news. He heard her saying: 
 
 " Are you at liberty to tell me the date of Captain Mildare's 
 death? For I know one who was also his friend and 
 would take an interest in the particulars." 
 
 The particulars! And he had bludgeoned the woman with 
 them stabbed her to the heart, poor soul, unknowing. . . .
 
 ONE BRAVER THING H7 
 
 He was blameless, but he could not forgive himself. . . . 
 He drove his teeth down savagely into his lower lip, and 
 muttered an excuse, and went away abruptly, leaving Lady 
 Hannah staring. He took leave soon after, and went to his 
 own quarters with the D.A.A.G., while her ladyship, with in- 
 finite relief, getting rid of her feminine guests, repaired with 
 Captain Bingham Wrynche, familiarly known to a wide circle 
 of friends as " Bingo," and several chosen spirits to the billiard- 
 room, for snooker, pool, and whisky-and-soda. 
 
 " The grey wolf is on the prowl to-night," said one of the 
 chosen spirits, as he chalked Lady Hannah's cue with fastidious 
 care. He winked across the table at Bingo, sunset red with 
 dinner, champagne, and stroke-play. 
 
 "S'st!" sibilated the Captain warningly, winking in the 
 direction of his wife. Lady Hannah, her little thumb cocked 
 in the air, her round, birdlike eyes scientifically calculating 
 angles, paused before making a rapid stroke, to say: 
 
 " Don't be cheaply mysterious, my dear man. Of course, 
 the Colonel visits the defences and outposts and things regularly 
 after dark. It's part of the routine, surely? " 
 
 ' Of course. But you don't suppose he goes alone, do you, 
 old lady?" queried Captain Bingo. 
 
 " I suppose he takes his A.D.C." 
 
 " Not to mention a detachment of the B.S.A. Also a squad 
 of the Town Guard in red neckties, solar topees and bandoliers ; 
 with the Rifles' Band, and D Squadron of the Baraland Ir- 
 regular Horse. Isn't that the routine, Beauvayse? You're 
 more up in these things than me, and I fancy there was a 
 change in the Order for the evenin'." 
 
 " Rather ! " assented Beauvayse, continuing, to the rapture 
 of winking Bingo. " On reaching the earthworks where our 
 obsoletes are mounted, the townies will now fire a salute of 
 blank, without falling down, and the Band have instructions 
 to play * There's Death in the Old Guns Yet.' Those were 
 the only material changes, except that sentries will for the 
 future wear fly and fever belts outside instead of in." 
 
 " So that he can see at a glance," Lady Hannah said ap- 
 provingly, " that all precautions are being taken. Very 
 sensible, I call it." 
 
 "Ha, ha, haw!" Bingo's joyous explosion revealed to the 
 outraged woman the fact that she had been " had." " Haw, 
 haw! What a beggar you are to rot, Beauvayse, and that 
 makes five to us,"
 
 148 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Lady Hannah, vibrating with womanly indignation, had 
 made her long-delayed stroke, missed the pyramid ball, and sent 
 Pink spinning into the pocket. She threw aside her cue 
 and rubbed her fingers angrily. She hated losing, and they 
 were playing for shilling lives and half-a-crown on the 
 game. 
 
 "You schoolboys!" She threw them a glance of disdain, 
 as Beauvayse, his seraphic face again screwed in his supereroga- 
 tory eyeglass, lounged over the table. " You artless babes ! 
 Did you suppose I should be likely to swallow such a feuille 
 de chou without even oil and vinegar? For pity's sake, leave 
 off winking, Bingo! It's a habit that dates back to the era 
 when women wore ringlets and white book-muslin, and men 
 sported shaggy white beaver hats and pegtop trousers, and all 
 the world read the novels of Lever and Dickens." 
 
 " Have Lever and Boz gone out?" asked Beauvayse, pocket- 
 ing his pyramid ball. " I play at Blue." He hit Blue scien- 
 tifically off the cushion and went on. " Read 'em myself over 
 and over again, and find 'em give points in the way of amuse- 
 ments to the piffle Mudie sends out. Not that I pretend to 
 be a judge of literature. Only know when I'm not bored, 
 you know. You to play, Lord Henry." 
 
 But the senior officer of the Staff, Lady Hannah's partner, 
 had vanished. Somebody passing the open window of the 
 billiard-room had whistled a bar or so of a particularly pleasant 
 little tune. Another man took the senior's place, and the 
 game went on, but never finished, for one by one, after the 
 same quiet, unobtrusive fashion, the male players melted away. 
 . . . Left alone, Lady Hannah, feeling uncommonly like the 
 idle boy in the nursery-story who asked the beasts and birds 
 and insects to play with him, betook herself to bed. 
 
 The arrogance of men! she thought as she hung her trans- 
 formation Pompadour coiffure on the looking-glass. How cool, 
 how unshaken in their conviction of superiority, in spite of all 
 deference, courtesy, pretence of consideration for Queen Dolt. 
 But she would show them all, one of these days, what could be 
 achieved by a unit of the despised majority. . . . 
 
 " I should like to see him at night-work," she said after- 
 wards, when, very late, her Bingo appeared in the shadow of 
 the conjugal mosquito-curtains. 
 
 " You wouldn't," was her martial lord's reply. 
 
 "Wouldn't what?" asked Lady Hannah, sitting up in 
 tropical sleeping attire.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 149 
 
 Bingo, applying her cold cream to a sun-cracked nose, replied 
 to her reflection in the looking-glass: 
 
 " 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 glass and 
 regarding his leading feature with interest. 
 
 " Not if he don't choose to be. By the living Tinker ! if 
 I go on browning and chipping 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'- 
 glass." 
 
 Male Society began to practice the shedding of its final g's, 
 you will remember, about the time that Female Society took 
 to wearing transformation coiffures. Lady Hannah, her ac- 
 tive 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 attitude and began to declaim: 
 
 " As the sable shades of Night were broodin' over the be- 
 leaguered town of Gueldersdorp, the manly form of a myste- 
 rious 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 posed 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 Billy Keyse, who kept a 
 Betts' Journal, one shilling net, including Rail and Ocean Ac-
 
 150 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 cident 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-glass 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 partition. 
 Like the immortal Mrs. Todgers, she was harassed by the de- 
 mands 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, es- 
 pecially 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 Cockney, 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 putties, worn 
 with his own brown lace-up boots, took trouble to adjust. And 
 it was barely possible, even by standing the small swing look- 
 ing-glass on the floor, and tilting it excessively, to see how 
 one's legs looked. Billy 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 home- 
 ward way from the Oxford or the Camden Hall of Varieties, 
 or the theatre at the junction of Gower Street and the Hamp- 
 stead Road one develops acuteness of observation in such a
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 151 
 
 service, one gains experience. There is 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 Billy most 
 longed to possess. When he went into the printing-business 
 and bent all day over the forms 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 Univer- 
 sity 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-class single fares to Cape Town. 
 One of the Societies for the Aid of Emigrants would have 
 helped him, but while Billy '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, bring 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 ! " Wil- 
 liam's cousin 'Melia, in service as general in the 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 sup- 
 planted 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 now doomed 
 to tread in the ways of commonplace, ordinary married life, to 
 live and die without once having peeped into Paradise, without 
 ever having looked upon the only woman in this world ! Owner 
 of the glorious golden pigtail, the entrancing, figure bewitch- 
 ing, twinkling, teasing eyes of blue! 
 
 Suppose only suppose the silent threatening Thing across 
 the border, jewelled with the glowing Argus-eyes of many
 
 152 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 camp-fires, conjecturable in dark masses 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-bagger earthworks built about Guelders- 
 dorp, the barricades of trek-waggons and railway-trucks block- 
 ing up the roads debouching on the veld, the extending lines 
 of trenches, the watchdog of forts, the sentinelled pickets, the 
 noiseless, continually moving patrols, all the various parts of the 
 masterly machinery of defence, controlled by one master-hand 
 upon the levers, would count for nothing against that over- 
 whelming onrush of armed thousands, that flood of men 
 dammed up above the town, and waiting the signal to roll down 
 and overwhelm her, and Cr'rips! what a chance to make 
 a glorious, heroic splash in Her 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-glass 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 terrible 
 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 scrap, 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, Billy 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. Billy 
 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 
 jther bandoliers were mustering, and fell in. As though the 
 Powers designed to reward an act of virtue on the very night
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 153 
 
 of its performance, he was posted by his picket in the lee 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, behind 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 Billy's passion-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 trades- 
 man, 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 'Er window 
 was! Through the boughs of the peach and orange trees, 
 whose unripe fruit was thimble-size, 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 'Er windows while she's there be'ind them 
 walls," was the reflection in which Billy 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 the smoke- 
 ^^ibured folds, closely matching the lowering dim sea of va- 
 puurs brooding overhead, the prairie spread about her, deepen-^ 
 ing to a basined valley in the middle distances, sweeping to a
 
 154 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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 North 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 massed arrd clustered 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 buckles of the Sam Browne belt was 
 a sinking, all-gone sensation excessively unpleasant to feel. 
 Perhaps W. Keyse 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 bloom- 
 ing coward inside the other who was not. He told the sick- 
 ening, white-gilled little coward 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 nobody could recognize 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 'Im, 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 Billy No. i 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 muffled 
 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
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 155 
 
 thin one, who wore a giant hat. The chirping sound of a kiss 
 damped the fierce martial ardour of Billy the First, and greatly 
 reassured Billy the Second. 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 5 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 yer! Where's your manners, 'orlin' me 
 abart! If that's the way you be'ayve with your Dutch 
 ones . . .!" 
 
 He spat and asseverated: 
 " Neen ! I no other girls but you heb got." 
 It was the Slabbert with Emigration Jane. 
 " Ho! So you can talk English a bit give you a chance? " 
 " Ja, a little now and then when it is useful. But when we 
 are to be married, you shall only to me talk in my own moder 
 Taal." 
 
 " Shan't I myke a gay old 'ash of it ! " Recklessly she 
 crushed the large hat against the unwieldy shoulder. " There 
 good-night, agin, deer! Sister Tobias that's what they call 
 the one that 'ousekeeps and manages the kitchens Sister To- 
 bias '11 be sittin' up for me, thinkin' I've got meself lost or bin 
 run away with." She gurgled enjoyingly. 
 
 " Tell me again, before you shall go, about the Engelsch 
 Commandant who came to visit at the Convent to-day." 
 
 "Lor! 'Aven't I told you a' ready? 'E stopped 'arf an 
 'our or more . . . an' She that's the Reverend Mother, as 
 they call her She took 'im over the 'ouse, an' after 'E'd gone 
 through the 'ouse, an' Sister Tobias ain't that a rummy name 
 for a nun? Sister Tobias, she showed 'im to the gyte, an' 'e 
 says to 'er as wot 'e's goin' to 'ave the flagstaff rigged up in 
 the gardin fust thing to-morrow mornin', an' 'e'll undertake 
 that the workin'-party detached for the purpose will know 'ow 
 to be'ayve theirselves respectful. An' then 'e touches 'is 'at 
 an' gets on 'is 'orse an' . . JL
 
 156 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Listen to me." The Slabbertian command of that barbaric 
 language of the Englanders evoked her surprise, but the pain- 
 ful squeeze he gave her arm commanded attention. " Next 
 time the English Commandant to the house shall come, you 
 to listen at the keyhole is." 
 
 "Wot for?" 
 
 " For what have you before at keyholes listened, little 
 stupid?" 
 
 "To find out when they was goin' to sack me, so's to git 
 me own notice in fust see? Then you can say to the lydy 
 at the Registry Office and don't they give theirselves hairs! 
 as wot you're leaving because the place don't suit. 
 Twiggy?" 
 
 " You for yourself did listen, then. Good. Now it is for 
 me you listen will, if you a good Boer's vrouw wish to become 
 by-and-by." 
 
 She rose to the immemorial allure that is never out of season 
 in angling for her simple kind. 
 
 "That word you said means wife, don't it, deer?" Her 
 voice trembled; the joyous, longed-for haven of marriage 
 was it possible that it might be in sight? 
 
 " It shall mean wife, if you obey me ja otherwise it will 
 be that I shall marry the daughter of a good countryman of 
 mine, who many sheep has, and much land and plenty of money 
 to give his daughter when she a husband gets! " 
 
 Her under lip dropped pitifully, and the tears welled up. It 
 was too dark to see her crying, but he heard her sob, and 
 grinned, himself unseen. 
 
 "I'll do anything for you, deer! Only don't take an' 'ave 
 the other One. She may be a Dutchy, but she won't never 
 care for yer like wot I do. Don't you know it, Walt?" 
 
 " I shall it know when I hear what you have found out," 
 proclaimed the Slabbert grimly. 
 
 There was a boiling W. Keyse in the deep shadow of the tall 
 corrugated-iron fence, who restrained with difficulty a snort 
 of indignation. 
 
 " On'y tell me, deer. I'll find out anythink you want me 
 to." Before her spread a lovely vista of floors her own floors 
 to scrub, and a kitchen range hers, too which should cook 
 dinners nice enough to make any husband adore you. 
 
 "You shall for me find out what that Commandant of the 
 rooineks is up to under his Flag of the Red Cross." 
 
 " He didn't say nothink about no Red Cross, darlin'."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 15; 
 
 " Stilte! They will the Red Cross Flag hoist, I tell you, 
 and it will cover more than a parcel of nuns and schoolgirls. 
 That Commandant is so verdoemte slim! Tell me, do you 
 cartridges well know when you shall see them? Little brown 
 rolls with at one end a copper cap and at the other a bullet. 
 And gunpowder you have that seen also ? " 
 
 She quavered. 
 
 "Yes; but you don't want me to touch the narsty, dreadful 
 stuff, do you, Wally deer?" 
 
 He scoffed. 
 
 " Afraid of gunpowder, Meisje, that like a whey-blooded 
 Engelschwoman is. A true Boer's daughter would know how 
 to load a gun, look you, and shoot a man many men if for 
 the good of the Republic it should be! But you will learn. 
 Watch out, I tell you, for stores that Commandant will be 
 sending into the Convent. Square boxes and long boxes, and 
 cases some of them heavy as if lined with iron ; painted black 
 with white letters, and others stone-colour with black letters, 
 and yet others grey with red letters; the letters remember 
 'A.O.S.'" 
 
 "But wot '11 be in the boxes, deer?" 
 
 His English, conned from recently published Imperial Army 
 Service manuals, grew severely technical: 
 
 " If you could their big screws unscrew, and their big locks 
 unlock, you would see, but you will not be able. What in 
 them? Cakes! Black, square cakes, with in them holes; and 
 grey, square cakes, and red cakes, light and crumbly, that dog- 
 biscuits resemble ; and long brown sticks, like peppermint-candy, 
 in bundles tied together with string and paper. Boxes of stuff 
 like the hair of horse, and packets of evil little electric detonat- 
 ors in tubes of copper. Alamachtig! who knows what he has 
 not got that Engelsch Commandant both in the dorp and 
 hidden in those thrice-accursed mines that he has laid on the 
 veld about her. Prismatic powder and gun-cotton, dynamite 
 and cordite enough to blow a dozen commandos of honest 
 Booren into dust a small, fine dust of bones and flesh that 
 shall afterwards fall mingled with rain of blood. For I tell 
 you that man has the wickedness of the duyvel in him, and the 
 cunning of an old baboon ! " 
 
 She babbled: 
 
 " 'Ow pretty you talk English when you want to, Walty 
 deer ! 'Aven't you bin gettin' at me all along, makin' out . . .*' 
 
 He swore at her savagely, and she held her tongue, wor-
 
 158 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 shipping this new development of masterful brutality in a man 
 whom she had regarded as a " big softy." 
 
 He went on: 
 
 " Now you know what to look for, and when the verdoemte 
 explosives come, you will know them by the boxes and the 
 letters ' A.O.S.' and you will tell me and the guns of our 
 Staats Artillery will not shoot that way, for the sake of the 
 little woman who is going to be a good Boer's wife by-and-by." 
 
 She threw her arms about his rascally neck, and laid her 
 head upon his hulking shoulder, regardless of the hat she 
 wrecked, and cried in ecstasy: 
 
 " I'll do it, deer; I'll do it, Walty! But why should there 
 be any shootin', lovey? At 'Ome I never could abear to see 
 them theaytre plays what 'ad guns an' firin' in 'em ; it made me 
 'art beat so crooil bad." 
 
 He grinned over the big hat into the darkness. 
 
 " All right ! I will tell the men with the guns that you 
 do not like to hear them, and they will not perhaps shoot at 
 all. But you will look out for the boxes with the dynamite, 
 and send me the message when it comes?" 
 
 " Course I will, deer! But 'ow am I to send the message? " 
 
 The shadowy right arm of Slabbert swept out, taking in 
 the black and void and formless veld with a large free gesture. 
 
 " Out to there. Stand in this place when it becomes dark, 
 looking east. Straight in front of us is east. The game is 
 great fun, and very easy. Strike a match, and count to ten 
 before you blow it out, and you shall not have done that three 
 times before you shall see him answer." 
 
 "But oo's 'im?" 
 
 " He is my friend out there upon the veld." 
 
 "Lor! but where '11 you be? Didn't you say as I'd be 
 talkin' to you? I don't 'arf fancy wot you calls the gyme, not 
 if I 'ave to play it with a strynge bloke! " 
 
 The answer came, accompanied by a scraping, familiar sound. 
 
 The Slabbert was striking a match of the fizzling, splutter- 
 ing, Swedish-made non-safety kind, known to W. Keyse and 
 his circle by the familiar abbreviation of " stinkers." 
 
 "Voor den donder! Have I not told you I shall be there 
 with him after to-night?" 
 
 Her womanly tenderness quickened at the hint of coming 
 separation. She clung fondly to his arm, and the match went 
 out, extinguished by a maiden's sigh. He shook her roughly 
 off, and struck another.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 159 
 
 " I shall go away ja and here is the other way for you to 
 reach me ! " 
 
 As the fresh match glimmered blue, he held it at arm's 
 length in front of him, counting silently up to ten, then blew 
 it out, and set his heavy boot upon the faintly-glowing spark, 
 and did the thing again. 
 
 Endeavouring not to breathe so as to be heard, W. Keyse 
 flattened himself against the corrugated fence, and waited, 
 looking ahead into the black velvet darkness, sensing the faint 
 human taint upon the tell-tale breeze, and counting with the 
 Slabbert; and then, out in the darkness that concealed so much 
 that was sinister, sprang into sudden life an answering bluish 
 glimmer, and lasted for ten beats of the pulse, and went out 
 as suddenly as though a human breath had blown upon it. 
 
 " Is that your pal ? " she whispered. 
 
 " That is my pal now." He struck another match, and 
 flared it, and screened it with his big hand, and showed the 
 light again, and repeated the manoeuvre three times. " That 
 is my pal now and I have said to him 'No news to-night'; 
 but to-morrow night and the night after, and so on for many 
 nights to come, I shall be out there where he is, and after you 
 have called me and I have answered, just as he has done, you 
 will tell me what there is to tell. Can you spell your 
 language? " 
 
 " Pretty middin', Walty deer, though not as I could wish, 
 owin' to me 'avin' to leave Broad School in the Fif Stannard 
 when father sold up the 'ome in drink after mother went orf 
 wiv the young man lodger. Someow, try all I could, I 
 never . . ." 
 
 " Wilt ge wel zwijgen! With my people, when men speak, 
 Boer women listen; but you English ones chatter and chatter! 
 Remember that this match-talk goes thus: For the letter A 
 one flare, and hide the light as you saw me do just now. For 
 B, two flares, and hide the light; for C, three, and hide; for 
 D, four, and hide; and so on to Z. It is slow, of course, and 
 matches will blow out when you do not want them to, and a 
 cycle-lamp or a candle-lantern would be easier to deal with, 
 but for the verdoemte patrols. Do you understand ? Say now, 
 what I say, after me. For the letter A one flare and hide. 
 For B . . ." 
 
 He put her through the alphabet from end to end; she la- 
 boured faithfully, and pleased her taskmaster. He grunted ap- 
 provingly.
 
 160 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Zeer goed ! See that you do not forget. And remember, 
 you are to listen and watch, and tell me what you hear and 
 see. If you are obedient, I will marry you by-and-by." 
 
 He gave her a clumsy hug in earnest of endearments to come. 
 
 " But if you do not please me " the grip of his heavy hand 
 bruised her shoulder through the thin, flowery " blowze " 
 " I will punish you yes, by the Lord, I will marry a fine Boer 
 maiden who is the daughter of a landrost, and who has got 
 much money and plenty of sheep. And you can give yourself 
 to any dirty verdoemte sckelm of an Engelschman you please, 
 for I will have none of you! To-morrow you shall have a 
 paper showing you how to tell me very many things in match- 
 talk, and earn much money to buy presents for my good little 
 Boer vrouw. Alamachtig! what is this?" 
 
 " This " was the hard, cold, polished business-end of a con- 
 demned Martini poked violently out of the blackness into the 
 Slabbertian thorax. 
 
 " Not in such a 'urry by 'arf, you perishin' Dopper," 
 spluttered the ghastly little man in bandoliers behind the 
 weapon. " Put up them dirty big 'ands o' yours, or, by 
 Cripps ! I'll let 'er off, you sneakin', match-talkin' spy ! " 
 
 The arms of Slabbert soared as the tongue of Slabbert 
 wagged in explanation. 
 
 " This is assault and battery, Meister, upon a peaceful 
 burgher. You shall answer to your officer for it, I tell you 
 slap. Voor den donder! Is not a young man to light his pipe 
 as he talks to a young woman without being called spy by a 
 verdoemte sentry? Tell him, Jannie, that is all I did do!" 
 
 W. Keyse felt a little awkward, and the rifle was uncom- 
 monly heavy. The Slabbert felt it tremble, and thought about 
 taking his hands down and reaching for that Colts six-shooter 
 he kept in his hip-pocket. But though the finger wobbled, it 
 was at the trigger, and Walt was not fond of risks. 
 
 " Tell him, Jannie ! " he spluttered once more. 
 
 She had not needed a second bidding. 
 
 As the domestic hen in defence of her chicken will give battle 
 to the wilde-kat, so Emigration Jane, with ruffled plumage, 
 blazing, defiant eyes, and shrill objurgations, couched in the 
 vernacular most familiar to their object, hurled herself upon the 
 enemy. 
 
 " You narsty little brute, you ! To up and try an' murder 
 my young man. With your jor about spies! Sauce! I'd 
 perish you, I would, if I was 'im! Off the fyce o' the earth,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 161 
 
 an' chance bein' 'ung for it! Take away that gun, you silly 
 little imitation sojer d'jeer?" 
 
 The weapon was extremely weighty. Billy Keyse's arms 
 ached frightfully. Perspiration trickled into his eyes from 
 under the tilted smasher. He felt damp and small, and des- 
 perately at a loss. And as though in malice the moon 
 looked out from behind a curtain of thick, dim vapour, as he 
 said with a lordly air: 
 
 "You be off, young woman, and don't interfere! " 
 
 Gawd! she knew him in spite of the smasher hat. Her 
 rage burst the flood-gates. She screeched: 
 
 " You ! . . . It's you. 'Oo I done a good turn to an' 
 this is 'ow I gits it back ? " She gasped. " Because you're 
 arter one young woman wot wouldn't be seen dead in the syme 
 street wi' you . . ." 
 
 Pierced with the awful thought that the adored one might 
 be listening, W. Keyse lifted up his voice. 
 
 " Sentry. . . . 'Ere! . . . Mister! " he cried despairingly. 
 "You on the other side, can't you hear?" 
 
 In vain the call. The stout fellow-townsman of W. Keyse, 
 comfortably propped in an angle of the opposite fence, the bulk 
 of the Convent and the width of its garden and tennis-ground 
 being between them, continued to sleep and snore peacefully 
 and undisturbed. 
 
 Emigration Jane continued: 
 
 " Because that sly cat wiv the yeller 'air-plait won't 'ear o' 
 you, you try to git a pore servant-gal's fancy bloke pinched! 
 Yah, greedy! Boo! You plate-faced, 'erring-backed, s'rimp- 
 eyed little silly, with your love-letters an' messijes! Wait till 
 I give 'er another o' your screevin' that's all! " 
 
 The unsteady rifle wobbled more and more. 
 
 " Patrol ! " cried W. Keyse in a despairing whimper. 
 
 She advanced upon him closer and closer, lashing herself as 
 she came to frenzy. How often had W. Keyse seen it outside 
 the big pubs in the Tottenham Court Road, and outside the 
 Britannia, Camden Town! Perhaps the recollection staring, 
 newly awakened, in the pale, moonlit eyes of the little perspir- 
 ing Town Guardsman stung her to equal memory, and pro- 
 voked the act. Who can tell? We may only know that she 
 plucked the weapon of lower-class London from her hat, and 
 jabbed at the pale face viciously, and heard the victim say 
 " Owch ! " as he winced, and knew herself, as her Slabbert 
 gripped the rifle-barrel, and wrested it with iron strength from
 
 162 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the failing hands of W. Keyse, the equal of those dauntless 
 Boer women who killed men when it was necessary. But, oh, 
 the 'orrible, 'ideous feeling of 'aving stuck something into live 
 flesh ! Sick and giddy, the heroine shut her eyes, seeing behind 
 their lids wondrous phantasmagoria of coloured pyrotechny, 
 rivalling the most marvellous triumphs of the magician 
 Brock. . . . 
 
 Billy's beheld, at the moment when his weapon was 
 wrenched from him, two long grey arms come out of the dark- 
 ness and coil about the largely-looming form of Slabbert. 
 Enveloped in the neutral-tinted tentacles of this mysterious 
 embrace, the big Boer struggled impotently, and a quick 
 imperative voice said, between the thick pants of striving 
 men: 
 
 " Get the gun from him, will you, and call up your picket. 
 Don't fire ; blow your whistle instead ! " 
 
 " Pip-ip-ip-Yrf Pip-ip-rr! " 
 
 The long, shrill call brought armed men hurrying out of the 
 darkness on the other side of the Cemetery, and considerably 
 quickened the arrival of the visiting patrol. 
 
 " Communicating with persons outside the defences by flash- 
 light signals. We can't shoot him for it just yet, but we can 
 gaol him on suspicion," said the Commander of the picket. 
 And Slabbert, with a stalwart escort of B.S.A. troopers, re- 
 luctantly moved off in the direction of the guard-house. 
 
 "Who was the fellow who helped you, do you know?" 
 asked the officer who had ridden up with the patrol. " Threw 
 him and sat on him until the picket came up, you say," he 
 commented, on hearing W. Keyse's version of the story. "A 
 tall man in civilian clothes, with a dark wideawake and short 
 pointed beard! H'm!" 
 
 " Coming from the veld, apparently, and not from town," 
 said the picket Commander. " Must have known the counter- 
 sign or the sentries out there would have stopped him. I 
 see! " 
 
 He looked at the patrol-officer, who coughed again. The 
 moonlight was quite bright enough for the exchange of a wink. 
 Then: 
 
 " Hold on, man, you're bleeding," said W. Keyse's sergeant, 
 an old Naval Brigade man. " How did ye get that 'ere nasty 
 prod under the eye? " 
 
 Billy put up his hand, and gingerly felt the place that hurt 
 His fingers were red when they came away.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 163 
 
 "The young woman wot was with the Dutchman, she 
 jabbed me with a 'at-pin, to git me to let 'im go." 
 
 "There's a blindin' vixen for you!" commented the Ser- 
 geant. " Two inch higher, and she'd have doused your light 
 out. Where did she come from, d'ye know?" 
 
 " Have you any idea who she was?" asked the Commander 
 of the picket. 
 
 W. Keyse shook his head. 
 
 " 'Aven't the least idear, sir. Never sor 'er before in my 
 natural ! " he declared stoutly. 
 
 " Well, you'll know her again when you meet her or she 
 will you," said the patrol-officer, about to move on, when a 
 deplorable figure came staggering into the circle, and the rider 
 reined up his horse. "What's this? Hey, Johnny, where's 
 your gun ? " 
 
 It was W. Keyse's fellow-sentry from the opposite flank of 
 the Convent. 
 
 " And time you turned up, I don't think," commented 
 W. Keyse. " Didn't you 'ear me sing out to you just 
 now?" 
 
 " Come, now, what were you up to?" the Sergeant pressed. 
 " Better up an' own it if you've bin asleep on guard." 
 
 The eager faces crowded round. The object of interest and 
 comment, not at all sympathetic or polite, was a stout, respect- 
 able tradesman, with a large, round, ghastly face, who saluted 
 his officer with a trembling hand. 
 
 "I I have been the victim of an outrage, sir!" 
 
 "Sorry to hear it; what's your name?" 
 
 "Brooker, sir," volunteered W. Keyse's Corporal. "The 
 other sentry we put on with Keyse here." 
 
 , " Mr. Brooker, sir, General Stores, Market Square,"; 
 babbled the citizen. 
 
 " Well, Private Brooker, what have you to say? " 
 
 " I have been drugged or hypnotized, sir, and robbed of 
 my gun while in a state of insensibility, sir upon my honour 
 as an Alderman and Magistrate of this borough! Swear me, 
 sir, if you have any doubt of my veracity!" He flapped his 
 hands like fins, and his bandolier heaved above a labouring 
 bosom. 
 
 The Commander of the picket looked preternaturally grave. 
 
 " Very sorry, Private Brooker, but unless the Sergeant has 
 brought his Testament along, you'll have to give your informa- 
 tion in the ordinary way. So they drugged you or hypnotized
 
 164 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 you or both, was it? and took away your rifle. Of course 
 you saw it done? " 
 
 " No, sir, I did not see it done. When I woke up . . ." 
 
 " Ah, when you woke up ! Please go on." 
 
 The crowding faces of B.S.A. men and Town Guardsmen 
 were grinning now. The patrol-officer was rocking in his 
 saddle. 
 
 " When I revived, sir, from the swoon or trance . . ." 
 
 "Very good, Private Brooker; we'll hear the rest of that 
 in the morning. Sergeant, relieve these sentries, and bring 
 Private Keyse and the hypnotic subject before me in the morn- 
 ing. Make this man Brooker a prisoner at large for the 
 present, and fall in the picket." 
 
 The Sergeant saluted. " Very good, sir." 
 
 The bubbling Brooker boiled over frothily as the sentries 
 were changing. 
 
 "A prisoner! Good God! do they take me for a traitor? 
 A Magistrate ... an Alderman, the President of the Gas 
 Committee . . ." 
 
 " I should 'ave guessed you to be that if I 'adn't 'card it, 
 sonny," said the Sergeant dryly, the implied sarcasm provoking 
 a subdued guffaw. He added, as the visiting patrol rode on 
 and the picket marched back to the Cemetery: "Can't re- 
 lieve you of your rifle, because you 'aven't got 'er. What in 
 'Eaven's name are they goin' to do to you? Well, you'll find 
 out to-morrow. Left face; quick march! " 
 
 Counting left-right, and keeping elbow-touch with the next 
 man, W. Keyse got in a whisper: 
 
 " I say, Sergeant, am I in for it as well as Ole Bulgy 
 Weskit? You might as well let me know and charnce it! " 
 
 The Sergeant answered with unfeeling indifference: 
 
 " Since you ask, I should say you was." 
 
 "That's a bit 'ard! Wot '11 I git?" 
 
 " Ten to one, your skater." 
 
 "Wot is my skater?" 
 
 "Your Corporal's stripe, you suckin' innocent! Wot for? 
 For takin' a Boer spy pris'ner 'that's wot for! " 
 
 "C'ripps!" said W. Keyse, enlightened, illuminated and 
 glowing in the darkness. He added a moment later, in rather 
 a depressed tone : " But it was 'im, the civilian bloke with the 
 beard, 'oo downed the Dutchy, an' sat on 'im till the guard 
 come up." 
 
 The Sergeant was ahead of the half-company, speaking to
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 165 
 
 the officer in charge. It was the Corporal who answered, 
 across the man who marched upon the left of W. Keyse: 
 
 " O' course it was. But you 'ad the Dopper fust, and," 
 he cackled quietly, " the Colonel won't be jealous." 
 
 The eyes and mouth of W. Keyse became circular. 
 
 "The who?" 
 
 "The Colonel, didn't you 'ear me say?" 
 
 "That wasn't never . . . 'im?" 
 
 " All right, since you know best. But him, for all that! " 
 
 " Cripps ! " gasped Billy Keyse. 
 
 XXIII 
 
 You are to imagine Dawn, trailing weary-footed over the 
 interminable plain, to find Gueldersdorp, lonely before, and 
 before threatened, now isolated like some undaunted coral 
 rock in mid-Pacific, crested with screaming sea-birds, girt with 
 roaring breakers, set in the midst of waters haunted by myriads 
 of hungry sharks. Ringed with silent menace, she squatted on 
 her low hill, doggedly waiting the event. 
 
 It was known that on the previous day the telegraph wires 
 north of Beaton had been cut, and this day was to sever the 
 last link with Cape Town at Maripo, some forty miles south. 
 The railway bridge that crossed the Olopo River might go 
 next. Staat's Engineers had been busy there overnight. 
 Rumour had it, Heaven knows how, that the armoured train 
 that had been sent up from the Cape with two light guns of 
 superseded pattern a generous contribution towards the col- 
 lection of obsolete engines now bristling from the sand-bagged 
 ramparts had been seized by a commando, with the officer 
 and the men in charge. This was to be confirmed later by the 
 arrival of an engine-driver minus five fingers and some faith 
 in the omnipotence of British arms. But at the beginning of 
 this chapter he was hiding in a sand-hole, chewing the cud of 
 his experience, in default of other pabulum, and did not get 
 in before dark of the long blazing day. 
 
 Crowds gathered on the barely-reclaimed veld at the north- 
 ern end of the town to see the Military Executive take over 
 the Hospital. But that the streets were barricaded with 
 waggons and every able-bodied male citizen carried a rifle, it 
 might have been mistaken for an occasion of national rejoic- 
 ing or civic festivity. The leaves of the pepper-trees fringing
 
 1 66 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the thoroughfares and clumped in the Market Square rustled 
 in the faint hot breeze. By-and-by they were to stand scorched 
 and seared and naked under the iron hail that beat in blizzards 
 upon them, and die in the noxious lyddite fumes dispersed 
 by bursting shells. 
 
 The variegated crowd cheered as the Staff dismounted at 
 the white-painted iron gates of railed-in Hospital grounds. It 
 was not the acclamation of admiration, it was the cheer ex- 
 pectant. They wanted to know what this man, their sole 
 hope, was going to do. Intolerable suspense racked them. 
 Wherever it was known that he would be, there they followed 
 at this juncture solid masses of humanity, bored with in- 
 numerable ear-holes, and enamelled with patient, glittering, 
 expectant eyes. His own keen, kindly glance swept over them 
 as he touched his grey felt hat in acknowledgment of their 
 dubious greeting, that half-hearted but well-meant cheer. He 
 read the mute question written upon all their faces: What 
 are you going to do? Part of his answer to the interrogation 
 was standing in the railway-yard, but they would have to wait 
 a little while longer yet just a little longer. He whistled 
 his pleasant melodious little tune as the porter hurried to open 
 the gates. 
 
 One pair of pale, rather ugly eyes in the crowd were 
 illumined with pure hero-worship. " That's 5 im," explained 
 their owner, nudging a big man in shabby white drill, who 
 was shouldering a deliberate way through the press. 
 
 "The Colonel and ain't 'e a Regular Oner! Them along 
 of 'im with the red shoulder-straps and brown leather leg- 
 gin's, they're cav'l'ry Orficers o' the Staff, they are. An' them 
 others in khaki with putties syme as wot I've got on they're 
 the Medical Swells. Military Sawboneses twig? You can 
 tell 'em, when you're near enough, by the bronze badges with 
 a serpint climbin' up a stick inside a wreath wot they 'ave 
 on the fronts o' their caps an' on their jacket-collars, an' the 
 instrument-cases wot they carries in their bres' pockets. I'm a 
 bit in the know about these things, being a sort of Service 
 man meself." 
 
 Thus delicately did W. Keyse invite comment. Splendid 
 additions had certainly been made to the martial outfit of the 
 previous day. The tweed Norfolk had been replaced by a 
 khaki jacket, evidently second-hand, and obligingly taken in 
 by the lady of the boarding-house. A Corporal's stripe, pur- 
 chased from a trooper of the B.S.A., who, as the consequence
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 167 
 
 of over-indulgence in liquor and language, had one to sell, bad- 
 been sewn upon the sleeve. The original owner had charged 
 an extra tiklcie for doing it, and it burned the arm that bore 
 it like a vaccination pustule on the fifth day. 
 
 " Being a sort of Service man meself," repeated W. Keyse. 
 He twitched the stripe carelessly into sight. " C'manding 
 orficer marked me down for this to-day," he continued, with 
 elaborate indifference, "along of a Favourable Mention in 
 the Cap'n's Guard Report. Nothin' much a little turn- 
 up with a 'ulking big Dutch bloke, 'oo turned out to be 
 a spy." 
 
 In the act of feeling for the invisible moustache, he rec- 
 ognized the face under the Panama hat worn by the big neigh- 
 bour in white drill, and blushes swamped his yellow freckles. 
 The owner of that square, powerful face, no longer bloated 
 and crimson, but pale and drawn, was the man who had 
 stepped in to the rescue at the Dutchman's saloon-bar on the 
 previous day, where Fate had stage-managed effects so badly 
 that the heroic leading attitude of W. Keyse had perforce 
 given place to the minor role of the juvenile walking-gentle- 
 man. "Watto!" he began. "It's you, mister! I bin want- 
 in* to say thank " But a surge of the crowd flattened 
 
 W. Keyse against the green-painted iron railings surrounding 
 a municipal gum-tree, and the big man was lost to view. 
 Perhaps it was as well that the acquaintance made under con- 
 ditions remote from respectability should not be renewed. But 
 W. Keyse would have preferred to thank the rescuer. 
 
 The taking over of the Hospital was accomplished in a 
 moment, to the disappointment of the ceremony-loving Briton 
 and the Colonial of British race, to say nothing of the Kaffirs 
 and the Barala, who anticipated a big indaba. The little party 
 of officers in khaki walked up the gravel-drive between thej 
 carefully-tended grass plats to the stoep where the Mayor of 
 Gueldersdorp, with the matron, house-surgeon, secretary, and 
 several prominent members of the Committee including 
 Alderman Brooker, puffy-cheeked and yellow-eyed for lack of 
 a night's rest waited. Military Authority saluted Civic 
 Dignity, shook hands, and the thing was done. Inspection 
 followed. 
 
 "The warr'ds." The Chief Medical Officer, a tall raw- 
 boned personage, very evidently hailed from North of the 
 Tweed. " I'm obliged to ye, madam," he addressed the 
 jflustered matron, "but the warr'ds an' the contents o' the
 
 1 68 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 beds in them are no' to say of the firr'st importance at least, 
 whaur I'm concerr'ned. With your permeesion we'll talc' a 
 look at the Operating Theatre, and overhaul the sterileezing 
 plant, and the sanitary arrangements, and maybe, after a gliff 
 at the kitchens, there would be a moment to spend in ganging 
 through the warr'ds. Unless the Colonel would prefer to 
 begin wi' them? " He turned a small, twinkling pair of blue 
 eyes set in dry wrinkles upon his Chief. 
 
 " Not I, Major. This is your department. But I shall ask 
 five minutes more grace in the interests of the friend I spoke 
 of, Dr. Saxham, with whom I made an appointment at the 
 half-hour." 
 
 " You're no' by any chance meaning the Saxham that wrote 
 ' The Diseases of Civilization,' are ye, Colonel ? I mind a 
 sentence in it that must have been a douse of cauld watter 
 toch! vitriol would be the better worr'd in the faces o' some 
 o' the dandy operators. ' Young men,' he ca'ed them, as if he 
 was a greybeard himsel', 'young men who, led into Surgery 
 by the houp o' gains an' notoriety, have given themselves nae 
 time to learn its scienteefic principles showy operators, who 
 diagnose wi' the knife an' endeavour to dictate to Nature and 
 no' to assist her.' And yet Saxham could daur ! ' I shall 
 prove that the gastric ulcer can be cured wi'out exceesion,' he 
 said, or they say he said in the Lancet report o' the operation 
 on the Grand Duke Waldimir I cam' across a reprint o' it 
 no' lang ago when Sir Henry McGavell sent for him, wi' 
 the sweat o' mortal terror soakin' his Gladstone collar. He 
 cut a hole in the Duke's stomach, ye will understand, in front 
 o' the ulcer, clipped off the smaller intesteene, spliced the twa 
 together wi' a Collins button, and by a successful deveece o' 
 plumbing naething less earned the eternal gratitude o' the 
 autocrat an' the everlastin' currses o' the Nihilists. All that, 
 seven years ago, an' the thing is dune the day wi'oot a hair's- 
 breadth difference. For why? Ye canna paint the lily, or 
 improve upon perfection. Toch! . . . Colonel, that man 
 would be worth the waitin' for, if he stood in your friend's 
 shoes the day! " 
 
 " Rejoice then, Major, and be exceeding glad, for I believe 
 this is the man who wrote the book and plugged or was it 
 plumbed the potentate." 
 
 The Chief Medical Officer rubbed his hands. " I promise 
 myself a crack or twa wi' him, then. . . . But how is it a 
 busy chiel like that can get awa' from his private patients
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 169 
 
 and his Hospital warr'ds in the London Winter Season? 
 Ahem ! ahem ! " 
 
 By the haste the Medical Officer developed in changing 
 the conversation, it was plain that he had recalled the cir- 
 cumstances under which the " busy chiel " had turned his 
 back upon the private patients and the Hospital wards. 
 " Colonel," he went on, " I could be wishing this varry creedit- 
 able-appearing institution judging from the ootside o't were 
 twice as big as it is, wi' maybe an Annexe or so to the back of 
 that." 
 
 " My dear Major, I never knew you really satisfied and 
 happy but once, and that was when we had fifty men down 
 w r ith dysentery and fever in a tin-roofed railway goods-shed, 
 and a hundred and seventy more under leaky canvas, and 
 you were out of chlorodyne and quinine, and could get no 
 milk." 
 
 " That goes to prove the eleementary difference between the 
 male an' the female character. A man will no' keep on dither- 
 ing for what he kens he canna' get. A woman, especially a 
 
 young an' pretty " He broke off to say: "Toch! will 
 
 ye hark to Beauvayse! The very name of the sex sets that 
 lad rampaging." 
 
 " Beautiful ! I tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired 
 young aide-de-camp was emphatically assuring that stout, 
 rubicund personage, the Mayor, " the loveliest girl I ever saw 
 in my life, or ever shall see bar none ! I saw her first on the 
 Recreation Ground, the day some Boer blackguards insulted 
 some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, and to-day 
 she passed with two other Sisters of Mercy, and I touched my 
 hat to her as the Staff dismounted at the gate." 
 
 " Another rara avis, Beau ? " the Colonel called across the 
 intervening group of talkers. The group of khaki-clad figures 
 separated, and turned first to the Chief, then to the bright- 
 eyed, bright-faced enthusiast. White teeth flashed in tanned 
 faces, chaff began. 
 
 "In love again, for the first and only time, Toby?" 
 
 " Since he lost his heart to Miss What's-her-name, that 
 pretty ' Jollity ' girl, with the double-barrelled repeating wink, 
 and the postcard grin." 
 
 " Don't forget the velvet-voiced beauty of the dark, moon- 
 less night on the Cape Town Hotel veranda." 
 
 "She turned out to be a Hottentot lady, didn't she?" 
 
 " Cavalry Problem No. I. Put yourself in Lieutenant the
 
 170 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Right Hon. Viscount Beauvayse's place, and give in detail the 
 precautions you would have taken to insure the transport of 
 your heart uninjured from the Staff Headquarters to the Hos- 
 pital Gate. Show on the map the disposition of the enemy, 
 whether desirous to enslave, or likely to be mashed. . . ." 
 
 " She was neither," the crimson boy declared. " She was 
 simply a lady, quiet and high-bred and simple enough to have 
 been a Princess of the Blood, or to look a fellow in the face and 
 pass him by without the slightest idea I'd swear to it that 
 she'd fairly taken his breath away." 
 
 " My dear Lord ! " The Mayor took a great deal of com- 
 ifort out of a title. " Attractive the young lady is, I certainly 
 admit, and my wife is I may say the word enthusiastic in 
 her praise. But you go one, or half a dozen, better than Mrs. 
 Greening, who will be perfectly willing, I don't doubt, to in- 
 troduce you, unless the Colonel entertains objections . . ." 
 
 "To Staff flirtations? Regard 'em as inevitable, Mr. 
 Mayor, like Indian prickly-heat, or fever here. And probably 
 the best cure for the complaint in the present instance would 
 be to meet the cause of it." 
 
 " Judge for yourself, Colonel ; you've first-class long-distance 
 eyesight." There was a ring of defiance in the boy's fresh 
 voice. " You've seen her before, and it isn't the kind of face 
 one forgets. Here they are . . . here she is now, coming 
 back, with the other ladies. The railing spoils one's view, but 
 the gates are open, and in another moment you'll see her pass 
 them." 
 
 The Chief moved to the front of the stoep where the Staff 
 had congregated. Men quietly fell aside, making place for 
 him, so that he stood with Beauvayse, in a clear half-circle, 
 ringed with a circle of neutral Service browns and drabs and 
 umbers, waiting until the three figures should pass across the 
 open space. One or two Staff eyeglasses went up. The 
 Chief Medical Officer removed and wiped his steel-rimmed 
 eyeglasses before replacing them on his bony aquiline nose. 
 
 They came and passed the white figure and the two black 
 ones. Of these one was very tall, one short and dumpy 
 veiled and mantled, their hands hidden in their ample sleeves, 
 they went by with their eyes upon the ground. But the girl 
 with them a slight, willowy creature in a creamy, cambric 
 dress, a wide hat of black transparent material, frilled and 
 bowed upon her dead-leaf coloured hair, and tied by wide 
 strings of muslin under her delicate round chin looked with
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 171 
 
 innocent, candid interest at the group of men outside the Hos- 
 pital. The tanned faces, the simple workmanlike Service dress, 
 setting off the well-knit, alert figures, the quiet, soldierly bear- 
 ing, even the distant sound of the well-bred voices, pleased her, 
 even as the whiff of cigars and Russian leather that the breeze 
 brought down from the stoep struck some latent chord of sub- 
 conscious memory, and brought a puzzled little frown between 
 the delicately-drawn dark eyebrows arching over black-lashed 
 golden hazel eyes. And cognizant of every fleeting change of 
 expression in those lovely eyes, the taller of her two companions 
 thought, with a stab of pain: 
 
 " Your father was that man's friend, and the comrade of 
 others like him." 
 
 " Now, then ! " challenged Beauvayse, as the three figures 
 moved out of sight. 
 
 " The ' Girl With the Golden Eyes '? " said somebody. 
 
 " You wouldn't speak of her in the same breath with that 
 brainless beast of Balzac's, hang it all ! " expostulated the 
 champion. He turned eagerly to the Colonel. " Now you've 
 seen her, sir, would you?" 
 
 " Not exactly. And I'm bound to say, I regard your claim 
 to possession of a good taste as completely established. . . . 
 'Ware the horse, there! Look out! look out!" His eyes 
 had followed the tall figure of the Mother-Superior, moving 
 with the superlative grace and ease that comes of perfect 
 physical proportion, carrying the black nun's robes, wearing 
 the flowing veil of the nun with the dignity of an ideal queen. 
 And even as he looked, his charger, held with some others by a 
 mounted orderly before the gates, and rendered nervous by 
 the presence of the crowd, shied at the towering panache of 
 imitation grass-made ostrich feathers trailing from the aged 
 and crownless pot-hat worn by a headman of the Barala in 
 holiday attire, jerked the bridle from the hand of the trooper, 
 and backed, rearing, in the direction of the three women pass- 
 ing on the sidewalk. The other horses shied, frustrating the 
 efforts of the orderly to catch the flying bridle, and the danger 
 from the huge, towering brown body and dangling iron-shod 
 hoofs was very real, seemed inevitable, when a man in white 
 drill and wearing a Panama hat ran out of the crowd, sprang 
 up and deftly caught the loose bridoon-rein, mastered the 
 frightened beast, and dragged it back into the roadway, in 
 time to avert harm. 
 
 " Cleverly done, but a close thing," the Chief said, as he
 
 172 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 turned away. "/ wish I had had that fellow's chance!" was 
 written in Beauvayse's face. To have won a look of gratitude 
 from those wonderful black-fringed eyes, brought a flush of 
 admiration into those white-rose cheeks, would have been 
 worth while. The slight, tall, girlish figure in its dainty 
 creamy draperies had passed out of sight now between its two 
 black-robed guardians. And had not Luck, that mutable- 
 minded deity, given the golden chance to a hulking stranger 
 in white drill, his, Beauvayse's, might have been the hand to 
 intervene in the matter of the Colonel's restive charger, and 
 the ears to hear her thanks. 
 
 If he had known that her eyes had been too full of his own 
 resplendent virile, glowing young personality to even see the 
 man who had stepped in between her and possible danger! 
 The most innocent girl will have her ideal of a lover and 
 thrill at the imagined touch, and furnish the dumb image with 
 a dream-voice that, woos her in impossible, elaborate, impas- 
 sioned sentences, very unlike the real utterances of Love when 
 he comes. The blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked, golden-locked St. 
 Michael portrayed in celestial-martial splendour upon one of 
 the panels of the triptych over the altar in the Convent chapel 
 had, as he bent stern young brows over the writhing demon 
 with the vainly-enveloping snake-folds, something of the young 
 soldier's look, it seemed to Lynette. Ridiculous and profane, 
 Sister Cleophee or Sister Ruperta would have said, to liken 
 a handsome, stupid, young Lieutenant of Hussars to the im- 
 mortal Captain of the Armies of Heaven. 
 
 But she knew another who would understand. There was 
 no flaw in the perfect sympathy that maintained between 
 Lynette and the Mother-Superior, though, certainly, since the 
 Colonel's visit of the previous day, the Mother had seemed 
 strangely preoccupied and sad. . . . Her good-night kiss, in- 
 variably so warm and tender, had been the merest brush of lips 
 against the girl's soft cheek; her good-morning had been even 
 more perfunctory; her eyes, those great maternal radiances, 
 turned their light elsewhere. Unloved and neglected, the Con- 
 vent's spoiled darling hugged her abandonment, weaving a 
 very pretty, ineffably silly romance, in which a noble and 
 beautiful young Hussar lover, suddenly appearing over the 
 corrugated-iron fence of the tennis-ground, the foliage of its 
 fringe of pepper-trees waving in the night-breeze, knelt no, 
 nobody ever knelt now, out of Scott's novels or Sheridan's 
 plays strode towards the slender-built figure leaning from
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 173 
 
 her chamber-casement, whispering, with outstretched hands 
 and eyes that gleamed through the darkness: 
 
 " Open the door! Do you hear, you Kid? Open the 
 door! " 
 
 Her heart went heavily, and seemed to stop. A cotd 
 breath seemed to blow upon the little silken hair-tendrils at 
 the nape of her white neck, spreading a creeping, stiffening 
 horror through her body, deadening sensation, paralyzing every 
 limb. 
 
 The close approach of any man, even the thought of such 
 contact, turned her deadly faint, checked her pulses, stopped 
 her breath. At picnics and parties and dances to which the 
 Mayor's wife or the mothers of some of the pupils would in- 
 vite or chaperon her, her vivid, delicate, fragile beauty would 
 draw first men's eyes, and then their owners, not all unhand- 
 some or undesirable, while showier girls looked in vain for 
 partners or companions. The little triumph, the consciousness 
 of being admired and sought after, would quicken Lynette's 
 pulses, and heighten the radiance of her eyes, and lend anima- 
 tion to her girlish chatter and gaiety to her laughter at first. 
 Then some over-bold advance, some hot look or whispered 
 word, would bring quick recollection leaping into the lovely 
 eyes, and drive the vivid colour from the virginal undine face, 
 and stamp the smiling mouth into pale, breathless lines of 
 Fear. That night in the tavern on the veld had branded a 
 child with premature knowledge of the incarnate ravening, 
 devouring Beast that lies in Man concealed. She felt the 
 scorching breath of lust upon her; she quailed under the in- 
 tolerable touch ; she shook like a reed in the brutal hands of 
 the evil, dominating power that would brook no resistance 
 and knew no mercy. The horrible obsession came upon her 
 now, as ever, stronger for those moments of forgetfulness: 
 
 "Clang clang clang! " 
 
 The little Irish novice had rung the Chapel-bell for Sext 
 and None. She could hear, from the nuns' end of the big 
 rambling, two-storied house, the rustling habits sweeping along 
 the passage. She hurried to the dt>or, and tore it open, and 
 ran as though that ravening breath had been hot upon her 
 neck, saw the dear black figure of the Mother sweeping toward 
 her, and rushed into the arms that were held out, and hid 
 from that burning, scorching, hideous memory in the bosom 
 that dead Richard Mildare had turned from in his blindness. 
 
 Just as Beauvayse, stimulated by the recollection of the
 
 174 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Mayor's promise to introduce him to the loveliest girl he 
 had ever seen in his life, or ever should see, mentally registered 
 a vow that he would keep the old buffer up to that, by listen- 
 ing to his interminable hunting-stories, and laughing at his 
 venerable jokes, to tears if necessary. Love, like War, sharp- 
 ened a fellow's faculties. 
 
 " It's rum to reflect," Beauvayse said, conscious of per- 
 petrating an epigram, " that from time immemorial the fellow 
 who wants to make up to a young woman has always had to 
 begin by getting round an old man." 
 
 He looked round for the old man, whom the title would have 
 estranged for ever. He had buttonholed the Chief, and was 
 gassing away joy! upon the very subject. 
 
 " I fancy the ladies of the Convent who occasionally visit 
 the Hospital were coming in at this gate. The short nun, 
 I noticed, had a little basket in her hand. Probably they 
 went round to the side entrance, seeing the ha, ha! the 
 stoep garrisoned by Her Majesty's Imperial Forces. Cer- 
 tainly. . . . Without doubt. We respect the Mother- 
 Superior highly. A most gifted, most estimable person in 
 every way, if rather stern and reserved. . . . Unapproachable, 
 my wife calls her. But Miss Mildare, her ward " 
 
 XXIV 
 
 " Miss MILDARE ! " 
 
 The Chief's keen eyes had lightened suddenly. The whole 
 face had darkened and narrowed, and the clipped brown 
 moustache lost its smiling curve, and straightened into a hard 
 line. 
 
 "Miss Mildare? " 
 
 " Why, yes, that is her name. . . . An orphan, I have heard, 
 and with no living relatives. But she seems happy enough at 
 the Convent, judging by what Mrs. Greening says." 
 
 The hearer experienced a momentary feeling of relief and 
 of anger relief to think that dead Dick Mildare's daughter 
 should have found refuge in such a woman's heart ; anger that 
 the woman should have concealed from him the girl's identity, 
 knowing her the object of his own anxious search. 
 
 Then he understood. His anger died as suddenly as it 
 had been kindled. He recalled something that he had seen 
 when the rearing horse had inclined perilously towards the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 175 
 
 footway that protecting maternal gesture, that swift inter- 
 position of the tall, active, black-robed figure beween the 
 white-clad, flower-faced, girlish creature and those threaten- 
 ing iron-shod hoofs. . . . 
 
 " She loves the girl Dick Mildare's daughter by the 
 woman-friend who stole him from her. Is there a doubt? 
 With poor little Lady Lucy Hawting's willowy figure and the 
 same nymph-like droop of the little head, \vith its rich twists 
 and coils of dead-leaf-coloured hair, shaded by the big black 
 hat. That woman has taken her to her heart, however she 
 came by her; the uprooting would be agony, stern, proud, 
 tender creature that she is! I suppose she will be doing 
 thundering penance for not having told me, a fellow who 
 simply walked into the place and assegaied her with my death- 
 news. Here's a marrowy bone of gossip Lady Hannah shall 
 never crack. And yet I wouldn't swear there's not an angel 
 husked inside that dried-up little chrysalis. For God made all 
 women, though He only turned out a few of 'em perfect, and 
 some only just a little better than the ruck." 
 
 He roused himself from the brown study that brought into 
 relief many lurking lines and furrows in the thin, keen face, 
 as the Chief Medical Officer, fixing, him through suspicious 
 eyeglasses, demanded : 
 
 " Ye got your full allowance o' sleep last nicht ? " 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 " Thanks to a Cockney babe in bandoliers, who was born 
 not only with eyes and ears, like other infants, but with the 
 capacity for using 'em." 
 
 " Ay. It's remarr'kable how many men will daudle com- 
 placently through life, from the cradle to the grave, wi'out 
 the remotest consciousness that they're practically blind and 
 no better than deaf, as far as regards rea.1 seeing and hearing. 
 But who's your prodeegy?" 
 
 " One of Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. They put him on at 
 the Convent with another sentry, their first experience of a 
 night on guard. By not being in a hurry to challenge, and 
 keeping his ears open while a conversation of the confidentially- 
 affectionate kind was going on between a Dutchman a fellow 
 employed in the booking-office at the railway, on whom I've 
 had my eye for some little time past and his sweetheart, my 
 townie found out for himself something that most of us knew 
 before, and something else that we wanted to know particularly 
 badly. . . ."
 
 176 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "Namely?" 
 
 " For one thing, that the town is a hotbed of spies, and that 
 our friends in laager outside are nightly communicated with 
 by means of flash-signals." 
 
 " And that's an indeesputable fact. Toch ! " No other 
 combination of letters may convey the guttural, " Have I no' 
 seen the lamps at warr'k mysel', after darr'k, at the end o' 
 the roads that debouch upon the veld ! The Dutchman would 
 be able to plead precedent, I'm thinking." 
 
 " He will have plenty of time to think where he is at 
 present. When the sentry interfered he was instructing the 
 young woman in a simple but effective code of match-flare 
 signals, by means of which she was to communicate with him 
 when he had cleared out. And he had announced his inten- 
 tion of doing that without delay." 
 
 " An' skipping to his freends upo' the Borr'der. . . . 
 Toch ! " The network of wrinkles tightened about the sharp 
 little blue-grey eyes of the Chief Medical Officer. " That 
 would gie a thochtfu' man a kind o' notion that a reese in the 
 temperature may be expectit shortly. An' so you slept 
 soundly on the strength o' many wakeful nichts to come? Ay, 
 that would be the kind o' information ye were badly wanting! " 
 
 " You're wrong, Major. The bit of information was this 
 from the spy to his friends outside: 'A^o news to- 
 night' " The keen hazel eyes conveyed something into the 
 Northern blue ones that was not said in words : ' ' No news 
 to-night.' And the sender of that message was a railway 
 man." 
 
 The wiry hairs of the Chief Medical Officer's red moustache 
 bristled like a cat's. 
 
 " Toch, Colonel, you will have reason to be considering me 
 dull in the uptake, but I see through the mud wall now. And 
 so the knowledge that ye have no equal at hiding your deeds o' 
 darkness even in the licht o' the railway-yard was as good to 
 ye as Daffy's Elixir. And when micht we reckon on getting 
 notification from what I may presume to ca' your double sur- 
 preese-packet ? " 
 
 He looked at his watch a well-used Waterbury, worn in 
 a leather strap upon his wrist. 
 
 " Ten o'clock. At a quarter past eleven I think we may 
 count upon something. The driver of Engine 123 has given 
 me the word of an Irishman from County Kildare; and the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 177 
 
 stoker, a Cardiff man, and the guard, who hails from Shore- 
 ditch, are quite as keen as Kildare." 
 
 " You're sending the stuff up North ? " 
 
 " In the direction of the railway-bridge they're busy wreck- 
 ing, in the hope that it may come in useful." 
 
 " Weel, I will gie ye the guid wish that the affair may go 
 off exactly as ye are hoping." 
 
 "Thanks, Major! You could hardly word the sentence 
 more happily." 
 
 They exchanged a laugh as the Mayor bustled up, rubi- 
 cund, important, and with a Member of the Committee to 
 introduce. 
 
 " Colonel, you'll permit me to present Alderman Brooker, 
 one of our most energetic and valued townsmen, President 
 of the Gas Committee, and an Assistant Borough Magistrate. 
 One of Major Panizzi's Town Guardsmen. Was on sentry- 
 go last night not far from here, and had a most extraordinary 
 experience. Worth your hearing, if you can spare time to 
 listen to my friend's account of it." 
 
 " With pleasure, Mr. Mayor." 
 
 Brooker, a stout and flabby man, with pouches under 
 biliously tinged eyes, bowed and broke into a violent per- 
 spiration, not wholly due to the shiny black frock-coat suit of 
 broadcloth donned for the occasion. 
 
 " Sir, I humbly venture to submit that I have been the 
 victim of a conspiracy!" 
 
 "Indeed? Step this way, Mr. Brooker." 
 
 Brooker, soothed by the courteous affability of the reception, 
 his sense of importance magnified by being led aside, apart 
 from the others, into the official privacy of the stoep-corner, 
 began to be eloquent. He knew, he said, that the story he had 
 to relate would appear almost incredible, but a soldier, a diplo- 
 mat, a master of strategy, such as the personage to whom he 
 now addressed himself, would understand none better how 
 to unravel the tangled web, and follow up the clue to its 
 ending in a den of secret, black, and midnight conspiracy. A 
 blob of foam appeared upon his under-lip. He waved his 
 hands, thick, short-fingered, clammy members. . . . 
 
 " My story is as follows, sir. . . ." 
 
 " I shall have pleasure in listening to it, Mr. Brooker, on 
 condition that you will do me first the favour of listening to 
 a story of mine? "
 
 1 78 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Deferred Brooker protested willingness. 
 
 " Last night, Mr. Brooker, at about eleven-thirty or a 
 quarter to twelve, I was returning from a little tour of in- 
 spection " the slight riding sjambok he carried pointed over 
 the veld to the northward " out there, when, passing the 
 south angle of the enclosure of the Convent, where, by my 
 special orders, a double sentry of the Town Guard had 
 been posted, I heard a sound that I will endeavour to repro- 
 duce." 
 
 " Gr'rumph! Honk'k! Gr'rumph!" 
 
 Brooker bounded in his Oxford shoes. 
 
 The face upon which he glued his bulging eyes was grave to 
 Sternness. He stuttered, interrogated by the judicial glance: 
 
 " It arah ! it sounds something like a snore." 
 
 " It was a snore, Mr. Brooker, and it proceeded from one 
 of the sentries upon guard." 
 
 " Sir ... I ... I can expl " 
 
 " Oblige me by not interrupting, Mr. Brooker. This sentry 
 sat upon a short post, his back fitted comfortably into an 
 angle of the Convent fence, his head thrown back, and his 
 mouth wide open. From it, or from the organ immediately 
 above, the snore proceeded. He was having a capital night's 
 rest in the Service of his Country. And as I halted in front 
 of him, fixing upon him a gaze which was coldly observant, he 
 shivered and ceased to snore, and said " : the wretched 
 Brooker heard his own voice, rendered with marvellous fidelity, 
 speaking in the muffled tone of the sleeper "" ' Annie, it's 
 damned cold to-night; and you've got all the blanket'" 
 
 "Sir . . . sir!" The stricken Brooker babbled hideously. 
 ..." Colonel . . . for mercy's sake ! . . ." 
 
 " I could not oblige the gentleman with a blanket, Mr. 
 Brooker, but I relieved him of his rifle and left him, to tell 
 his picket a cock-and-bull story of having been drugged and 
 hypnotized by Boer spies. And I will overlook it upon the 
 present, occasion, but in War-time, Mr. Brooker, men have been 
 shot for less. I think I need not detain you further. Your 
 rifle has been sent to your headquarters with my card and an 
 explanation. One word more, Mr. Brooker " 
 
 Brooker, grey, streaky, and desperate, wretched, was blind 
 to the laughter brimming the odd keen hazel eyes. 
 
 " I am entrusted by the Imperial Government with the 
 preservation of Public Morality in Gueldersdorp, as well as 
 with the maintenance of the Public Safety ami I should be
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 179 
 
 glad of an assurance from you that Mrs. Brooker's Christian 
 name is really Annie? " 
 
 "I I swear it, Colonel!" 
 
 Brooker fled, leaving the preserver of public morality to 
 have his laugh out before he rejoined the Staff, glancing at 
 the Waterbury in the shabby wristlet. Half-past ten. Would 
 the Dop Doctor turn up to appointment, or had the battle 
 with habit and the deadly craving born of indulgence ended in 
 defeat? As his eyes moved from the dial, they lighted upon 
 the man " Clothed and in his right mind^ . . ." His own 
 words of the night before recurred to memory as he came 
 forward with his long, light step, greeting the new-comer with 
 the easy, cordial grace of high-breeding. 
 
 " Ah, Dr. Saxham, obliged to you for being punctual. Let 
 me introduce you to Major Lord Henry Leighbury, D.S.O., 
 Grenadier Guards, our D.A.A.G. Dr. Saxham, Colonel 
 Ware, Baraland Rifles, and Sir George Wendysh, Wessex 
 Regiment, commanding the Irregular Horse; Captain Bingham 
 Wrynche, Royal Bay Dragoons, my senior aide-de-camp, and 
 his junior, Lieutenant Lord Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars. 
 And Dr. Saxham, Major Taggart, R.A.M.C., our Chief 
 Medical Officer." 
 
 He watched the man keenly as he made the introductions, 
 saying to himself that this was immeasurably better than he 
 had hoped. For one thing, he was both distinctive and dis- 
 tinguished. The ragged black moustache had been shaved 
 away; the frayed but spotless suit of white drill fitted the 
 heavy-shouldered, thin-flanked, muscular figure perefctly; the 
 faded blue flannel shirt, with the white double collar and 
 narrow black tie ; the shabby black kamarband about his waist, 
 the black-ribboned Panama, maintaining respectability in ex- 
 tremest old age, as that expensive but lasting headgear is wont 
 to do, possessed, as worn by this man, a certain cachet of style. 
 His slight, curt, almost frowning salutations displayed a well- 
 graduated recognition of the official status of each individual 
 to whom he was made known, betokening the man accustomed 
 to move in circles where such knowledge and the application 
 of it was indispensable, and who knew, too, that slight from 
 him would have given chagrin. But another moment, and the 
 junior Medical Officer, a blackavised little Irishman from 
 County Meath, gripped him by both hands, and was exclaim- 
 ing in his juicy brogue, real delight beaming in his round, 
 rosy face:
 
 i&> ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Saxham ! Saxham of St. Stephens, and the grand ould 
 days! Deny me now, to my face. Say, 'Tom McFadyen, 
 I don't know you,' if you dare." 
 
 The blue eyes shone out vivid gentian-colour in the kindly 
 smile that illumined them, the stern lips parted in a laugh 
 that showed the sound white closely-set teeth. 
 
 " Tom McFadyen, I do know you. But if you offer to pay 
 me that cab-fare you owe me, I shall say I'm wrong, and 
 that it's another man." 
 
 " Hould your tongue, jewel," drolled the little junior, who 
 delighted in exaggerating the brogue that tripped naturally 
 off his Irish tongue. " Don't be after giving me away to the 
 Chief and the Senior that believe me, by me own account, to 
 be descended from Ollamh Fodla, that was King of Tara, and 
 owned the cow-grazing from Trim to Athboy, and ate boiled 
 turnips off shields of gold before potatoes were invented, when 
 the bog-oaks were growing as acorns on the tree. And as to 
 the cab-fare, sure I hailed the hansom out of politeness to your 
 honour's glory, the day that saw me going off to the Army 
 Medical School at Netley, wid all my worldly belongin's in 
 wan ould hat-box and the half of a carpet-bag. Wirra, wirra! 
 but it's some folks have luck, says I, as the train took me 
 out av' Waterloo in a third-class smoker, while you were left 
 on the platform sheddin' half-crowns out av every pore for the 
 newspaper boys an' porters to pick up, and smilin' like a baby 
 dhramin' av the bottle. You'd passed your exams in Anatomy 
 wid wan hand held behind you an' a glove on the other, you'd 
 got your London University Studentship in Physiology, and 
 you'd fallen head over ears in love with the prettiest and sweet- 
 est girl that ever wore out shoe-leather. You wrote to me 
 two years later to say you'd been appointed an in-surgeon on 
 the Junior Staff, an' that you were engaged to be married. 
 But divil the taste of weddin'-cake did I ever get off you. 
 
 What " The little Irishman, thoughtlessly rattling on, 
 
 pulled up in an instant, seeing the ghastly unmistakable change 
 upon the other's face. He remembered. He knew, more per- 
 fectly than his less well-informed senior, the grim black reason 
 for the change in Saxham, and for once, his habitual tact de- 
 serted him. His rosy gills purpled, even as had the Mayor's 
 on the Dop Doctor's entrance. His eyes winced under the 
 heavy, petrifying, unseeing stare of Saxham's blue ones. 
 
 " Sorry to stem the flood of your reminiscences, McFadyen f 
 but we're going to overhaul the Hospital now."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 181 
 
 It was the voice of the visitor who had come to the Harris 
 Street house on the previous night, the tall, loosely-built, 
 closely-knit figure in the easily fitting Service-dress that now 
 stepped across the gulf that had suddenly opened between the 
 two old friends, and laid a hand in pleasant, familiar fashion 
 upon Saxham's heavy, rather bowed shoulders. But for that 
 scholar's stoop they would have been of equal height. He 
 went on : " You will be able to give us points, Saxham, where 
 they will be needed most. Can't expect Colonial institutions, 
 even at the best, to keep abreast of London." 
 
 The blue eyes met his almost defiantly. 
 
 " As I think I remember telling you, sir, it is five years since 
 I saw London." 
 
 " Well, I don't blame you for taking a long holiday while 
 it was procurable. There are a fe\v of us who would benefit 
 by a gallop without the halter, eh, Taggart? " 
 
 He would not stoop even to benefit indirectly by the 
 shrewd, kindly act. He drew himself to his full height, and 
 the words were spoken with such ringing clearness that they 
 arrested the attention of every man present. 
 
 " My holiday was compulsory. I underwent innocently 
 a legal prosecution for malpractice. The Crown Jury decided 
 in my favour, but my West End connection was ruined. I 
 resigned my Hospital and other appointments, and left Eng- 
 land." 
 
 "Ay!" It was the Chief Medical Officer's broad Aber- 
 deenian tongue that droned out the bagpipe note. " Weel, 
 Doctor, it's an ill wind blaws naebody guid, and ye canna ex- 
 pect Captain McFadyen or mysel' to sympatheese overmuch 
 wi' the West End for a loss that is our gain. And, Colonel, 
 it's in my memory that ye had set your mind on beginnin' wi' 
 the Operating Theatre? . . ." 
 
 XXV 
 
 THE chart-nurse looked in to say that the Medical officers 
 of the Garrison Staff were making the rounds, and was stricken 
 to the soul by the discovery that the Reverend Julius Fraithorn 
 had had no breakfast. Occupying a small, single-cotted, 
 electric bell-less room in the outlying ward brick-lined and 
 corrugated-iron-built like the greater building, and reserved 
 for infectious cases the Reverend Julius might have been said
 
 182 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 to be marooned, had not. his dark-eyed, transparent, wasted 
 young face created such hot competition among the nurses for 
 the privilege of attending on him, that he had frequently re- 
 ceived breakfast and dinner in duplicate, and once three teas. 
 Some of the probationers, reared in the outer darkness of Dis- 
 sent, knew no better than to term him " the minister." To 
 the matron, who was High Church, he existed as " Father 
 Fraithorn." Julius is hardly complete to the reader without 
 an intimation that he very dearly loved to be dubbed " Father." 
 The matron had never failed in this. 
 
 A letter from Father Tatham, Julius's senior at St. Mar- 
 garet's, lay under the bony hand a mere bunch of fleshless 
 fingers, in which the skin-covered stick that had been a man's 
 arm ended. Father Tatham wrote to say that, after a bright, 
 enjoyable summer holiday, spent with a chosen band of West- 
 Central London coster-boys at a Rest Home at Cookham-on- 
 Thames, he has started his Friday evening confirmation classes 
 for young costermongers in Little Schoolhouse Court, and ob- 
 tained a record attendance by the simple plan of rewarding 
 punctual attendance and ultimate mastery gained over the 
 Catechism and Athanasian Creed with pairs of trousers. 
 Julius had shaken his head over the trousers, knowing that the 
 first walk taken by the garments in company with the winners 
 would be as far as the pop-shop. But lying there in the clean- 
 smelling, airy Hospital ward, he yearned with a mighty yearn- 
 ing for the stuffy West-Central classroom, and the rowdy crew 
 of London roughs hulking and hustling on the benches, learn- 
 ing per medium of " the dodger," that one's duty to one's 
 neighbour was not to abuse him foully without cause, to re- 
 frain one's hands from pocket-picking, shop-snapping, hustling, 
 and jellying heads with brass-buckled belts or iron knuckle- 
 dusters, and not to get drunk before Saturday night. 
 
 He had come out to South Africa upon the advice of 
 physicians honestly-meaning wiseacres, ignorant of the. shifts, 
 the fatigues, the inevitable exertions and privations that the 
 panting, tottering invalid must inevitably undergo, in company 
 with the hale traveller and the sound emigrant; the rough, 
 protracted journeys, the neglect and discomfort of the inns and 
 taverns and boarding-houses, where Kaffirs are the servants, and 
 dirt and discomfort reign. He bore them because he must, and 
 struggled on, learning by painful experience that fever-patches 
 are best avoided, and finding out what dust-winds mean to a 
 man who has got sick lungs, and sometimes thinking he was
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 183 
 
 getting better, and would be one day able to go back to the 
 Clergy House, and take up his curacy in the West and West- 
 Central districts, and begin work again. 
 
 Now, lying panting on his pillows, raised high by the light 
 chair slipped in behind them, hospital-fashion, he looked be- 
 yond the whitewashed walls northwards, to grimy London. 
 He dreamed, while the chart-nurse was still apologizing about 
 the forgotten breakfast, of the High Ritual in the sacred place, 
 and the solemn joy of the vested celebrant of the Eucharistic 
 Sacrifice. The incense rose in clouds to the gilded, diapered 
 roof, the organ pealed . . . then the ward seemed to fill with 
 men in khaki Service dress, keen-eyed and tan-faced beings, of 
 quiet movements and well-bred gestures, obviously stamped 
 with the cachet of authority. Upright, alert, well-knit, and 
 strong, the visitors exhaled the compound fragrance of healthy 
 virility, clean linen, and excellent cigars; and the poor sufferer 
 yielded to a pang of envy as he looked at them, standing about 
 his bed, and thought of that resting-place even narrower, in 
 which his wasted body must soon lie. And then he mentally 
 smote his breast and repented. What was he, the unworthy 
 servant of Heaven, that he should dare to oppose the Holy 
 Will? 
 
 " Well, now, and how are we the day ? " said the Chief 
 Medical Officer, presented by the Resident Surgeon to the 
 occupant of the bed. He read approaching death in the 
 sunken face against the pillows, and in the feeble pulse as he 
 touched the skeleton wrist, and the Resident Surgeon, catch- 
 ing the Scotsman's eye, shook his head slightly, imparting in- 
 formation that was not needed. 
 
 " It is not in my power, I am afraid, sir, to return you the 
 conventional answer," said Julius Fraithorn. " To be plain 
 and brief, I am suffering from tuberculous lung-disease, and 
 I am advised that I have not many days to live." 
 
 He smiled gratefully at the Resident Surgeon. 
 
 " Everything that can be done for me here is done. I can- 
 not be too thankful. But I should have liked I should have 
 wished to have been spared to return to England, if not to 
 live a little longer among my friends, at least to . . ." He 
 broke off panting, and his rattling breaths seemed to shake 
 him. He sounded like Indian corn shaken in a gunny-bag; 
 he wheezed like the mildewed harmonium in the Hospital 
 chapel, on which he had once tried to play. When he had 
 spoken, his voice had had the flat, deadly softness of the ex-
 
 184 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 hausted phthisical sufferer's. When he had moved he had 
 suffered torture: the shoulder-blades and hip-bones had pierced 
 the wasted muscular tissues and projected through the skin. 
 
 " I can't ! " he gasped out. " You see " 
 
 A dizziness of deadly weakness seized him. His soft 
 muffled voice trailed away into a whisper, blue shadows 
 gathered about his large, mobile, sensitive mouth, much like 
 that of Keats as shown in the Death Cast, and his head fell 
 back upon the pillows. Julius had fainted. 
 
 "Poor beggar!" said a large, pink man, wearing the red 
 shoulder-straps and brown-leather leggings of the Staff, to 
 another, a fair, handsome, young giant who leaned against the 
 opposite door-post, as the chart-nurse hurried to take away 
 the pillows, and lay the patient flat, and the shorter of the 
 two medical officers dropped brandy from a flask into a glass 
 with water in it, while the tall Scot, his finger on the pulse, 
 stooped over the pale figure on the bed. 
 
 " No doubt about his next address being the Cemetery. 
 Should grouse myself if I was in his shoes or bed-socks would 
 be the proper word what ? " 
 
 Beauvayse agreed. " He looks like a chap I saw once get 
 into a coffin at the Cabaret de 1'Enfer that shady restaurant 
 place in the Boulevard de Clichy. When they turned on the 
 light . . ." He shrugged. " The women of the party 
 thought it simply ripping. I wanted to be sick." 
 
 Captain Bingo had also known the sensation of nausea dur- 
 ing a similar experience. " But women'll stand anything," he 
 said, " particularly if they've been told it's chic. My own 
 part, I can stand any amount of dead men healthy dead men, 
 don't you know? But give you my word a cadaverous 
 spectacle like that poor chap, bones stickin' out of his hide, 
 and breathin' as if he was stuffed with dry shavin's, or husks 
 like the Prodigal Son, gives me the downright horrors ! " 
 
 Thus they conferred, supporting opposite door-posts with 
 solid shoulders, until the C.M.O., turning his head addressed 
 them brusquely, curtly: 
 
 " Wrynche, if you'd transfer yourself with Lord Beauvayse 
 to the passage, myself and my colleagues here would be the 
 better obliged to ye." 
 
 "Pleasure!" They removied, with a simultaneous clink 
 of scabbards and a ring of spurred heels on the tiled pavement. 
 
 The Colonel remained, making those about the bed a group 
 of five. The chart-nurse stayed, pending the nod of dismissal,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 185 
 
 a rigid statue of capped and aproned discipline, upright in the 
 corner. 
 
 "Phew!" Captain Bingo blew a vast sigh of relief, and 
 produced a cigar-case. " Well out of that, my boy. All 
 jumps this morning; wouldn't take the odds you're not as 
 bad." 
 
 " Rather." Beauvayse nodded, and drew the elder man's 
 attention, with a look, to the strong young hand that held 
 a choice Havana just accepted from the offered case. " Shaky, 
 isn't it? and yet I didn't punish the champagne much last 
 night. It's sheer excitement, just what one feels before riding 
 a steeplechase, or going into Action early on a raw morning. 
 Not that I've been in anything but a couple of Punitive Ex- 
 peditions from Peshawar, under Wilks-Dayrell, splitting up 
 some North-West Frontier tribes that had lumped themselves 
 together against British Authority up to now. But I'm 
 looking out for the chance of something better worth having, 
 like you and all the rest of us. Trouble you for a light ? " 
 
 " By the Living Tinker, and that's the fourth ! Where 
 d'you think I'd give a cool fifty to be this minute? Not 
 cooling my heels in a brick-paved passage while a pack of 
 doctors are swoppin' dog-Latin over the body of a moribund 
 young parson, but on the roof of the Staff Quarters, lookin' 
 North, with my eyes glued to the binoculars and my ears 
 pricked for you know what ! " 
 
 Beauvayse groaned. "Isn't that what I'm suffering for? 
 And the Chief must be ten times worse. How he keeps his 
 countenance demure as my grandmother's cat lappin' cream. 
 ... I say, the Transvaal Dutch ; they call themselves the 
 true Children of Israel, don't they? Well, which did Moses 
 and his little gang come across first in the Desert, the Pillar of 
 Cloud, or the Pillar of Fire, or a couple of railway-trucks con- 
 tainin' the raw material for a sky-journey, only waitin' till 
 Brer' Boer plugs a bullet in among the dynamite? It makes 
 me feel good all over, as the American women say, when I 
 think of it." He smiled like a mischievous young archangel, 
 masquerading in Service kit. 
 
 Within the room the fainting man was coming back to con- 
 sciousness, his dry, rattling breaths bearing out Captain Bingo 
 Wrynche's similitude of a sack of shavings, rings of blue fire 
 swimming before his darkened vision, and a dull roaring in 
 his ears. . . . The Royal Army Medical Corps wrought 
 over him; the nurse lent a deft helping hand; the Resident
 
 1 86 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Surgeon talked eagerly to the Colonel; and he, lending ear, 
 scarcely heard the reiterated, stereotyped parrot-phrases, so 
 taken up was his attention with the man in shabby white drill 
 clothes, who leaned over the foot of the bed, his square face 
 set into an expressionless mask, his gentian-blue, oddly vivid 
 eyes fixed upon the wasted, waxy-yellow face of the sick man, 
 his head bent, as he listened with profound, absorbed attention 
 to the husky, rattling, laboured breaths. 
 
 Suddenly he straightened himself and spoke, addressing him- 
 self to the Resident Surgeon. 
 
 " The patient has told us, sir, that he is suffering from 
 tuberculous disease of the lungs. May I ask, was that the 
 conclusion arrived at by a London consulting physician, and 
 whether your own diagnosis has confirmed the assertion ? " 
 
 The Resident Surgeon nodded with patronizing indiffer- 
 ence. He was not going to waste civilities upon this rowdy, 
 drunken remittance-man, whom he had seen reeling through 
 the streets of the stad as he went upon his own respectable 
 way. 
 
 "Phthisis pulmonalis" He addressed his reply to the 
 Chief. " And the process of lung-destruction is, as you will 
 observe, sir, nearly complete. 
 
 He encountered from the Chief a look of cool displeasure 
 that flushed him to the top of his knobby forehead, and set him 
 blinking nervously behind his big round spectacles. 
 
 " Dr. Saxham asked you, sir, unless I mistake, whether you 
 had ascertained by your own diagnosis, the . . ." Lady 
 Hannah's words came back to him. He recalled the " bit 
 of information wormed out of the nurse," and ended with 
 " the presence of the bacillus?" 
 
 Saxham's blue eyes thrust their rapier-points at him, and 
 then plunged into the oyster-like orbs behind the spectacles of 
 the Resident Surgeon, who rapidly grew from scarlet to purple, 
 and from purple to pale green. Major Taggart and the Irish- 
 man exchanged a look of intelligence. 
 
 " Koch's bacillus, sir, were this a case of tuberculosis proper, 
 would be present in the expectoration of the patient, and easy 
 of demonstration under the microscope." Saxham's voice 
 was cold as ice and cutting as tempered steel. " May we take 
 it that you can personally testify to its presence here ? " He 
 pointed to the bed. 
 
 "And varra possibly," put in Taggart, "ye could submit 
 a culture for present inspection? It would be gratifeeying
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 187 
 
 to me and Captain McFadyen here, as weel as to our friend 
 an' colleague Dr. Saxham, late of St. Stephen's-in-the-West, 
 London, to varrafy the correctness o' your diagnosis." 
 
 " And it would that ! " the Irishman chimed in. " So trot 
 out your bacillus, by all manner of means ! " 
 
 The Resident Surgeon babbled something incoherent, and 
 melted out of the room. 
 
 " Moppin' his head as he goes down the passage," said Mc- 
 Fadyen, coming back from the door. 
 
 " He'll no be in sic a sweatin' hurry to come back," pro- 
 nounced the canny Scot, shedding a wink from a dry, red- 
 fringed eyelid. He produced from the roomy breast-pocket 
 of his khaki Service jacket a rubber-tubed stethoscope, and put 
 it silently into the hand Saxham had mechanically stretched 
 out for it. Then he drew back, his eyes, like those of the 
 other two spectators of the strange scene that was beginning, 
 fixed upon the chief actor in it. The other, weak after his 
 swoon as a new-born child, lay passively, helplessly upon the 
 bed. 
 
 Saxham, his square face stony and set, moved with a noise- 
 less, feline, padding step towards the prone victim. A gleam 
 of apprehension shot into Julius Fraithorn's great dark eyes, 
 reopening now to consciousness. They fixed themselves, with 
 an instinct born of that sudden thrill of fear, upon the lightly- 
 closed right hand. Instantly comprehending, Saxham lifted 
 the hand, showed that it held no instrument save the stetho- 
 scope, and dropped it again by his side, drawing nearer. Then 
 ; the massive, close-cropped black head sank to the level of 
 Julius Fraithorn's breast, revealed in its ghastly, emaciated 
 nakedness by the open nightshirt. The massive shoulders 
 bowed, the supple body curved, the keen ear joined itself to 
 the heaving surface. In a moment more the agonizing, hack- 
 sing, rending cough came on. Julius battled for air. Raising 
 him deftly and tenderly, Saxham signed to the nurse, who 
 hurried to him, answering his low questions in whispers, giv- 
 ing aid where he indicated it required. 
 
 Steadily, patiently, the binaural stethoscope travelled over 
 the lung area, gathering abnormal sounds, searching for silent 
 spaces, sucking evidence into the assimilative brain behind the 
 eyes that saw nothing but the man upon the bed, the locked 
 human casket housing the Secret that was slowly, surely com- 
 ing to light. In the fierce determination to gain it, he threw 
 the stethoscope away, and glued his avid ear to the man again.
 
 1 88 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Toch ! but I wouldna' have missed this for a kittle o' 
 Kruger sovereigns ! " the Chief Medical Officer whispered to 
 his colleague from Meath. And McFadyen whispered back: 
 
 " Nor me, for your shoes. 'Ssh ! " 
 
 He was lifting up the great stooping shoulders, and begin- 
 ning to speak in a voice totally different from that of the man 
 known in Gueldersdorp as the Dop Doctor. Clear, ringing, 
 concise, the sentences left his lips: 
 
 " Gentlemen, I invite your attention to a case of involun- 
 tary simulation of the symptoms distinguishing pulmonary 
 tuberculosis by a patient suffering from a grave disease of a 
 totally different and much less malignant character. Oblige 
 me by stepping nearer." 
 
 They crowded about the bed like eager students. 
 
 " In order to show what false conclusions loose modes of 
 reasoning and the habitual reliance upon precedent may lead 
 to, take the instance of the consulting physician to whom some 
 years ago this young man, now barely thirty, and reduced, as 
 you may see for yourselves, to the final extremity of physical 
 decline, resorted." 
 
 " I would gie five shillin' if the man could hear his ain 
 judgment!" murmured the Chief Medical Officer; for he had 
 gleaned from a whispered answer of Julius's the omnipotent 
 name of Sir Jedbury Fargoe. "Toch!" He chuckled dryly. 
 Saxham went on : 
 
 " The consulting patient suffers from cough, painful and 
 racking, from impaired digestive power, from increasing de- 
 bility, fever, and night-sweats. He visits the specialist, con- 
 vinced that he was consumptive, he receives confirmation of his 
 convictions, and you see him to-day presenting the appearance, 
 and reproducing all the symptoms of a patient in consump- 
 tion's final stage. Possibly the germs of tuberculosis may be 
 dormant in his organization, waiting the opportunity to de- 
 velop into activity! Possibly a very remote possibility the 
 disease may have already attacked some organ of his body! 
 But and upon this point I can take my stand with the con- 
 fidence of absolute certainty the lungs of this so-called pul- 
 monary sufferer are absolutely sound ! " 
 
 "My certie! Send I may live to foregather wi' Sir Jed- 
 bury Fargoe!" the Chief Medical Officer prayed inaudibly. 
 " He will gang to the next International Consumption Con- 
 gress wi' a smaller conceit of himsel', or my name's no 
 Duncan Taggart ! 'V
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 189 
 
 The lecturer, absorbed in his subject, lifted his hand to 
 silence, the murmur, and pursued : 
 
 "From what disease, then, is this man suffering? Logical 
 and progressive conclusions drawn from experience and based 
 upon the local enlargement which the physicians previously 
 consulted have apparently failed to perceive, lead me to 
 diagnose the presence of a tumour in the mediastinum, extend- 
 ing its claws into the lungs, and seriously impeding their ac- 
 tion and the action of the heart. An operation, serious and 
 necessarily involving danger, is imperative. The growth may 
 be benign or malignant; in the latter case I doubt whether 
 the life of the patient is to be saved. But in the former 
 case he has good hopes. Understand, I speak with certainty. 
 Upon the presence of the growth, simple or otherwise, I am 
 ready to stake my credit, my good name, my professional repu- 
 tation " 
 
 Ah! It rushed upon him with a sickening shock of recollec- 
 tion that he was bankrupt in these things, and shame and anger 
 strove for the mastery in his face, and anguish wrung a sob 
 from him, despite his iron composure. 
 
 He wrenched at the collar about his swelling throat, as he 
 turned away blindly towards the window, seeing nothing, 
 fighting desperately with the horrible despair that had gripped 
 him, and the mad, wild frenzy of yearning for the old, glor- 
 ious life of strenuous effort and conscious power. Lost! lost! 
 all that had been won. 
 
 " I ... I had forgotten . . . ! " he muttered ; and then a 
 hard, vigorous hand found his and gripped it. 
 
 " Go on forgetting, Saxham ! " said a voice in his ear a 
 voice he knew, instantly steadying such virtue is there in 
 honest, heartfelt, comprehending sympathy between man and 
 his fellow-man the spinning brain, and quieting the leap- 
 ing pulses, and giving him back, as nothing else could have 
 done, his lost self-control. " You surely have earned the 
 right!" 
 
 "Man, you're a wonder!" groaned the enraptured Chief 
 Medical Officer. He added, with a relapse into the national 
 caution : " That is, ye will be if your prognosis proves 
 correc'. But the Taggarts are a' of the canny breed of 
 Doobtin' Tammas, an sae I'll juist keep a calm sugh till I 
 see what the knife lays bare." 
 
 " Use the knife now, sir. At once without delay!" 
 
 It was the weak, muffled voice of the patient on the bed.
 
 190 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Saxham wheeled sharply about, and the stern blue eyes and the 
 great lustrous pleading brown ones, looked into each other. 
 
 The pale Julius spoke again: 
 
 "I entreat you, Doctor!" 
 
 Saxham spoke in his curt way: 
 
 "You are aware that there is risk?" 
 
 Julius Fraithorn stretched out his transparent hands. 
 
 " What risk can there be to a man in my state ? Look at 
 these; and did I not hear you say . . ." 
 
 "Whatever I may have said, sir, and however urgent I may 
 admit the necessity for immediate operation, you must wait 
 until to-morrow morning." 
 
 " I am fasting, sir, and fed. I received Holy Communion 
 this morning, and have not yet breakfasted." 
 
 The return of the chart-nurse followed by a probationer 
 carrying a laden tray provoked an exclamation from the little 
 Irishman. 
 
 " Signs on it, the boy's as empty as a drum. The devil a 
 wonder he went off like he did a bit back. And you can't 
 deny him, Saxham ? " 
 
 " I wad gie him the chance, Saxham " this from Surgeon- 
 Major Taggart " in your place ; and maybe I'm putting in 
 six worrds fer mysel' as well as half a dozen for the patient. 
 For I have an auld bone to pyke wi' Sir Jedbury Fargoe, aboot 
 a Regimental patient he slew for me, three years agone, wi' 
 his jawbone of a Philistine ass." 
 
 Saxham spoke to Fraithorn authoritatively, kindly. 
 
 " You have no near relative to sign the Hospital Register?" 
 
 " My family are all in England, sir. I have not thought 
 it necessary to distress them with the knowledge of my state." 
 
 " I think Lady Hannah Wrynche, who is now in Guelders- 
 dorp, happens to be an acquaintance of theirs, if not a friend." 
 
 Julius turned eagerly to the Colonel. 
 
 " It is true, she did come here yesterday. But I should 
 hardly wish . . . Surely, being of mature age and in the full 
 possession of all my faculties " there was a smile on the pale 
 lips " I may be allowed to sign the book myself? " 
 
 The doctors interchanged a look. The Colonel said to the 
 patient: 
 
 " Mr. Fraithorn, if the idea is not unwelcome to you, I 
 myself will sign the book, and " he stooped over the bed and 
 laid his hard, soldierly hand kindly on the pale one " in the 
 event of a less fortunate termination than that we hope for "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 191 
 
 the faces of the three surgeons were a study in inscrutability 
 " I will communicate, as soon as any communication is ren- 
 dered possible, with the Bishop and Mrs. Fraithorn." 
 
 The cough shook Julius as a terrier shakes a rat before he 
 could gasp out: 
 
 " Thank you, sir. With all my heart I thank you." 
 
 " You shall thank me when you get well ! " l he Chief 
 shook the pale hand, crossed the bare boards to Saxham, who 
 stood staring at them sullenly, and took him by the arm. 
 They went out of the ward together, talking in low tones. 
 The medical officers followed. Then the chart-nurse and the 
 probationer, who had been banished with the tray, came bus- 
 tling back with towels, and razors, and a soapy solution in a 
 basin, having a carbolic smell. 
 
 Dr. Saxham had gone to take a disinfecting bath, she said, 
 as she went about her minute preparations; and the Com- 
 manding Officer had gone with the Staff, and now her poor 
 dear must let himself be got ready. 
 
 They wrapped the gaunt skeleton in a white blanket-robe 
 with a heavy monkish cowl to it, and drew thick padded 
 blanket-stockings over the ligament-tied, skin-covered bones 
 that served the wasted wretch for legs, and wheeled in a high, 
 narrow, rubber-wheeled, leather-cushioned stretcher, and laid 
 him on it, light to lift, a very handful of humanity, and 
 wheeled him, hooded and head-first, through the tile-floored 
 passage and out into the golden African sunshine, that baked 
 him gloriously through the coverings, and so into the main 
 building and down tile-floored passages there. 
 
 He prayed silently as he was wheeled, with blinded, cowled 
 eyes, through double doors at the end. . . . 
 
 XXVI 
 
 THE operation was over, and the two Celts, self-appointed to 
 the temporary posts of assistant-surgeon and anaesthetist ex- 
 pressed their emotions in characteristic manner. . . . 
 
 " Twelve minutes to a second between the first incision an' 
 the last stitch. . . - Och, Owen, the jewel you are! Give 
 me the loan of your fist, man, this minute." 
 
 " What price Sir Jedbury Fargoe the noo ? The auld- 
 farrant scraichin', obstinate grey gander. A hand I will tak' 
 at his over the head o' this, or I'm no Taggart of Taggart-
 
 192 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 showe. Speaking wi' seriousness, Saxham, it was a pretty 
 operation, an' performed wi' extraordinary quickness. And 
 Tm sorry there are no' a baker's dozen o' patients for ye to 
 deal wi'. It's a gran' treat to see a borrn genius use the 
 kneefe." 
 
 " You could have done it yourself, Major, in less time." 
 
 " Maybe I could, and maybe I couldna' ! I doubt but we 
 Army billies are better at puttin' men thegeither than at takin' 
 them to pieces in the long run. . . . Gently now, porter, wi' 
 liftin' the patient. . . . Ay, McFadyen, that's richt, gie the 
 man a hand. See to him, Saxham, is he no' fine to luik at? 
 A wheen blue an' puffy, but the pulse is better than I would 
 have expeckit. Wheel him awa', nurse; he'll no come round 
 for another hour. . . ." 
 
 They wheeled him away, back to the distant ward. The 
 porter followed. The three surgeons standing by that grim 
 table in the rubber-floored central space of the amphitheatre, 
 fenced in by students' benches, vacant save for half a dozen 
 whispering dressers, looked at one another. Bloused and 
 aproned with sterilized material, masked, rubber-gloved, and 
 slippered, and splashed with the same ominous stains that were 
 on the table and upon the floor, Saxham's heavy-shouldered 
 figure was as ominous and sinister as ever played a part in 
 medieval torture-chamber, or figured in a nightmare tale of 
 Foe's device. You can see the other surgeons, bibbed and 
 sleeved, the Irishman, small and dark and wiry, sousing a 
 lethal array of sharp and gleaming implements in a glass bath 
 of carbolic; Taggart, standing at a glass table, rubber-wheeled 
 and movable, like everything else, for use, and laden with rolls 
 of lint and bandaging, and blue-glass bottles of peroxide of 
 hydrogen and mercurial bichlorate, daintily returning reels 
 of silkworm gut and bobbins of silver wire to their velvet- 
 lined case. 
 
 " You're no' fatigued ? You would no' like a steemulant ? " 
 
 Saxham started and withdrew his gaze. He had been star- 
 ing with dull intensity of desire at the brandy decanter, for- 
 gotten by the matron, whose usual charge it was. And the 
 sharp blue-grey eye of Surgeon-Major Taggart followed the 
 glance to its end in the golden-gleaming crystal. 
 
 "Fatigued? I hardly think so!" 
 
 He laughed, and the others joined in the laugh, remember- 
 ing the lengthy line of patients operated on in a single mid- 
 week morning at St. Stephen's. And yet his steady hand
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 193 
 
 shook a little, and a curious soft, subtle dulness of sensation 
 was stealing over him. He had gone to bed sober, had risen 
 after three hours of blessed, unexpected, helpful sleep, to battle 
 with his desperate craving until morning. When the old 
 woman left in charge of the housekeeping arrangements had 
 come to his door with hot water and his usual breakfast a 
 mug of strong coffee with milk and a roll he had gulped down 
 the reviving, steadying draught thirstily, and swallowed a 
 mouthful or two of the bread ; and when he was shaved and 
 tubbed and clothed in the shabby white drill suit, had gone 
 down to the dispensary and mixed himself a dose of chloric 
 ether and strychnine, stjong enough to brace his jarred nerves 
 for the coming ordeal. 
 
 Not that Saxham habitually drugged: that craving was not 
 yet known to him. But the habitual intemperance had ex- 
 acted even from his iron constitution, its forfeit of shakiness 
 in the morning, and the rare sobriety left the man suffering 
 and unstrung. 
 
 Looking about him as the dose began its work of stringing 
 the lax nerves and stimulating the action of the heart, he saw 
 that many of the drawers were open, a costly set of graduated 
 scales missing, with their plush-lined box. . . . 
 
 With a certain premonition of what would next be missing, 
 he went into the surgery. A case of silver-mounted surgical 
 instruments had vanished from a shelf, with a presentation 
 loving-cup, given by admirers among De Boursy-Williams's 
 patients to that gifted practitioner. A roll-top desk was partly 
 broken open, but not rifled, the American boltlocks having de- 
 fied the clumsy efforts of the thief. Koets, the Dutch dispen- 
 sarist, had cleared out of Gueldersdorp, under cover of the 
 previous night, crossing, with the portable property reft from 
 the accursed Englander, the barbed-wire fence that formed the 
 line of demarcation between the British Imperial Forces and 
 the Army of the Transvaal Republic. He had meant to wait 
 yet another day, and take many things more, but the coming 
 of those verdoemte soldiers of the Engelsch Commandant to 
 fetch away the carboys of carbolic acid and the other medical 
 stores had roused him to prompt action. 
 
 Later, wearing the brass badge of a Surgeon of the Army 
 of the Transvaal Republic, Koets ruled a Boer Field-Hospital, 
 fearlessly slashing his way into the confidence of the United 
 Republics through the tough, wincing brawn and muscle of 
 Free Stater and Transvaaler. It speaks for the enduring
 
 194 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 -qualities of the Boer constitution to say that many of his 
 
 patients survived. 
 
 ***** 
 
 But the brandy in the decanter. . . . 
 
 How it beckoned and allured and tempted. And the throat 
 and palate of the man were parched with the desire of it. And 
 yet, a moment before, with the toils about his feet, Saxham had 
 wondered at the thought of these degraded years of bondage. 
 He shook his head sullenly as Taggart repeated his question, 
 and went away to wash and get dressed. 
 
 Then he meant to shake off his companions and go where 
 he could quench that inward fire. He loathed them as they 
 followed, chatting pleasantly. . . . 
 
 But above the hissing of the hot water from the faucets over 
 trie basins came presently another sound, most familiar to the 
 ears of the gossiping Celts. . . . 
 
 " Rifle-fire! Out on the veld over yonder." MeFadyen's 
 towel waved North. " Do ye hear it?" 
 
 "Ay, do I! First bluid has been drawn. And to which 
 side?" 
 
 Boom! . . . 
 
 The Hospital quivered to its foundations at the tremendous 
 detonation. Shattered glass fell in showers of fragments 
 from the roof of the operating theatre, as the force of the 
 explosion passed beneath the buildings in a surging of the 
 ground on which they stood, a slow wave rolling southwards, 
 without a backward draw. 
 
 The lavatory door had jammed, as doors will jam in earth- 
 quakes. Saxham tore it open, and the three shirt-sleeved, 
 ensanguined men ran through the theatre, strewn with the 
 debris from the roof, and through the double doors communi- 
 cating with the passage, populous with patients who should 
 have been in bed, pursued by nurses as pale and shaken as 
 their stampeding charges. The rear of the Hospital faces 
 North, and they ran down a corridor simultaneously, ending 
 in glass doors, and tore out upon the back stoep, wide and 
 roomy, and full of deck chairs and wicker lounges. 
 
 " Do ye see it? Ten thousand salted South African deevils. 
 Do ye no see it?" the Surgeon-Major yelled, pointing to a 
 monstrous milk-white soap-bubble-shaped cloud that slowly 
 rose up in the hot blue sky of the North and hung there, 
 sullenly brooding. 
 
 "What is it, Major?" shouted Saxham, for behind them
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 195 
 
 the Hospital was full of clamour. Nurses and dressers were 
 running out into the grounds to listen and question and con- 
 jecture, the barely reclaimed veld beyond the palings was 
 black with hurrying, shouting men, bandoliered, and carrying 
 guns of every kind and calibre, from the venerable gaspipe of 
 the native and the aged but still useful Martini-Henry of the 
 citizen, to the Lee-Metford repeating carbine, and the German 
 magazine rifle of latest delivery to the troops of Imperial 
 Majesty at Berlin. Men were clustered like bees on the flat 
 tin roofs of the sheds at the Railway Works; men had climbed 
 the signal-posts and were looking out from them over the sea 
 of veld; the Volunteers garrisoning the Cemetery had poured 
 from their temporary huts and dug-out shelters, and were 
 massed on the top of their sand-bag mounds. A fair, hand- 
 some Staff officer, the younger of the two men who had ac- 
 companied the Colonel, went by at a tearing gallop, mounted 
 on a fine grey charger, and followed by an orderly, while the 
 pot-hat and truncheon of a scared native constable emerged 
 timidly from the gaping jaws of a rusty water-cistern, long 
 dismissed from Hospital use, and exiled to the open with other 
 rubbish waiting transference to the scrap-heap ; and far out 
 upon the railway-line that vanished in the yellowing sea of veld 
 an unseen engine screeched and screeched. . . . 
 
 The Chief, in his pet post of vantage upon the roof of 
 Nixey's Hotel, lowered his binoculars as the persistent whistle 
 kept open. The lines about his keen eyes and mouth curved 
 into a cheerful smile. The sound was coming nearer, and pres- 
 ently Engine 123 backed into view, a mile or so from waiting, 
 expectant Gueldersdorp, and snorting, raced at full speed for 
 her home in the railway-yard. Her driver was the young Irish- 
 man from the County Kildare, and her stoker hailed from 
 Shoreditch. And both of them had a tale to tell of what Tag- 
 gart had called the Colonel's double surprise-packet, to a tall 
 man whom they found waiting on the metals by the Signal 
 Cabin. 
 
 " Six mile from the start sorra a yard more or less, sor, I 
 sees a comp'ny o' thim divils mustered on the bog, I mane the 
 veld, sorr smokin' their pipes an' passin' the bottle, an' givin' 
 the overlook to a gang av odthers, that was rippin' up the rails 
 undher the directions av a head-gaffer wid a hat brim like me 
 granny's tay-thray, an' a beard like the Prophet Moses." 
 
 " I sor 'is whoppin' big 'at myself, though we was two mile 
 off when we picked the beggars out," the guard objected;
 
 196 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " but 'ow could you twig 'is beard or that the other blokes was 
 smokin'?" 
 
 " Did ye ever know a Dutch boss av any kind clane-shaved 
 an' not hairy-faced?" was Kildare's just retort, "or see a 
 crowd av Doppers gathered together that the blue smoke av 
 the Blessed Creature was not curlin' out av their mouths an' 
 ears an' noses, an' Old Square Face or Van der Hump makin' 
 the rounds?" 
 
 " You thought the blokes on the metals was a workin' gang 
 of our chaps at the fust go off," complained the guard, " an' 
 you opened the whistle to warn 'em ! " 
 
 " He did that for sure," put in the Cardiff stoker. " But 
 he was tipping me the wink while he did it, so he was; as much 
 as to say he knew they were Boers all the time." 
 
 " Would they have stopped where they was, well widin 
 range, av I had let on I knew they was a parcel av unwashed 
 Dutchmen?" demanded Kildare hotly. "Would they have 
 hung on as I pushed her towards thim would they have 
 stopped to watch me uncouplin' the two thrucks, smilin' wid 
 simple interest in their haythen faces, av they had not taken 
 me for a suckin' lamb in oily overalls that took themselves for 
 sheep av the same fold ? " 
 
 " They got a bit suspicious when we steamed orf," said the 
 guard; "more than a bit suspicious, they did." 
 
 " They took the thruck for the Armoured Thrain," re- 
 counted Kildare, with a radiant smile illuminating a counte- 
 nance of surpassing griminess, " an 5 they rode to widin range, 
 an' got off their hairies, an' dhropped in a volley just to insinse 
 them they took to be squattin' down inside them insijious 
 divizes, into what they would be gettin' if they put up the heads 
 av them." He mopped his brimming eyes with a handful of 
 ! cotton waste, not innocent of lubricating fluid. " Tower av 
 Ivory! 'twas grand to see the contimpt av thim when the cow- 
 ards widin did not reply. ' Donder ! ' says the gaffer in the 
 tay-thray hat and the beard like the grandfather av all the 
 billygoats, ' Is this,' he says, ' the British pluck they talk about? 
 Show thim verdant English a Dutchman behind a geweer,' he 
 says, an' that's what they call a gun in their dirty lingo ' an' 
 they lie down wid all four legs in the air like a puppy that sees 
 the whip. Plug thim again, my sons,' says he, ' an' wid the 
 blessin' av Heaven, we'll stiffen the lot ! ' ' 
 
 " You could never hear him, so you could not, not at all that 
 distance," the Cardiff stoker objected.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 197 
 
 " Could I not see him, ye blind harper, swearin' in dumb 
 show, an' urgin' thim to shoot sthraight for the honour av the 
 Republic an' give the rooibatchers Jimmy oh! Gz-lant-ly they 
 respondid, battherin' the sides av the mystarious locomotive 
 containin' the bloody an' rapacious soldiery av threacherous 
 England wid nickel-plated Mauser bullets, ontil she hiccoughs 
 indacintly an' wid a bellow to bate St. Fin Barr's bull, kicks 
 herself to pieces! " 
 
 " She did so, surely," affirmed the Cardiff stoker. " Surely 
 she did so." 
 
 " Tell the Colonel 'ow the engine jumped right off the 
 metals," advised the guard. 
 
 " Clane she did," went on Kildare jubilantly, " an' rattled 
 Davis an' me inside the cab like pays in an iron pod. See the 
 funny-bone I sthripped agin' the side av her." He exhibited 
 a raw elbow for the inspection of the Chief. " An' when 
 Davis gets the betther av the rest av the black that's on him 
 wid soft soap an' hot wather, there's an oi he'll not wash off." 
 
 " The brake-handle did that, it did so," said Davis, touching 
 the optic tenderly. But Kildare was answering a question of 
 the Chief's. 
 
 "Killed! Wisha, yarra! av Oi'd left a dozen an twenty 
 to the back av that sthretched on the bog behind me, it's a 
 glad man I'd be to have it to tell ye, sorr. But barrin' they 
 wor' blown to smithereens entirely, not. a livin' man or horse 
 av thim did I see dead at all, But the Sergeant an' the 
 Reconnoithrin' Party will asy know the place asy by the 
 thundherin' big hole that's knocked in the Permanent Way 
 there, sizable enough to bury. . . ." He paused, for once at 
 a loss. 
 
 " Korah, Dathan, and Abiram," suggested Davis, who, as 
 a Bible Baptist, had a fund of Scripture knowledge upon which 
 he occasionally drew, "with their families and their pavilions 
 and all their substance. . . ." 
 
 " Av Cora was there," said Kildare, " she was disguised as 
 a Dutchman, for sorrow, an' oi clapped on any human baste 
 that was not a square-buttocked Boer in tan-cord throusers. 
 Thank you, sorr, your Honour, an' good luck to yourself an' 
 all av us. An' we'll dhrink your Honour's health wid it." 
 
 "We will so!" agreed Davis, as the sovereign, dropped 
 into his own twice-greased palm, vanished in the recesses of his 
 black and oleaginous overalls. 
 
 " Thenkee, sir. You're a gentleman, sir!" the guard ac-
 
 198 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 knowledged, touching his cap and concealing the gold COIA 
 slid into his own ready hand with professional celerity. 
 
 " Begob ! an' you might have tould the Colonel somethin* 
 that was news," commented Kildare, as the tall, active figure 
 stepped lightly over the metals and passed up the ramp, and 
 123 trundled on over the cavities, and backed into the engine- 
 shed amidst a salvo of cheers and hand-clapping. 
 
 The Colonel whistled his pleasant little tune quite through 
 as, the Reconnoitring Party despatched to the scene of the ex- 
 plosion, he went contentedly back to luncheon at Nixey's. 
 True, Kildare had said, and as the Sergeant, in command re- 
 gretfully testified later, said correctly, that neither Boer nor 
 beasts had been put out of action bv the flying debris. A poor 
 reprisal had been made in cfle opinion of some malcontents, 
 for the act of War committed by the forces of the Republic 
 in crossing the Border, in cutting the telegraph lines, and de- 
 stroying the railway-bridge. But the moral result was any- 
 thing but trifling, in its effect upon the Boer mind. The 
 " new square gun " became a proverb of dread, inspiring a 
 salutary fear of more traps of the same kind, " set by that 
 slim duyvel, the English Commandant," and threw over the 
 innocent stretch of veld outside those trivial sand-bagged de- 
 fences the glamour of the Mysterious and the Unknown. No 
 solid Dutchman welcomed the idea of soaring skywards in a 
 multitude of infinitesimal fragments, in company with other 
 Free Staters or sons of the Transvaal Republic similarly re- 
 duced. 
 
 No more boasts on the part of Bronnckers, General in com- 
 mand of those massed, menacing, united laagers on the Border, 
 -seven miles from Gueldersdorp as the crow flies. No more 
 .imaginative promises with reference to the taking of the 
 small, defiant hamlet before breakfast, wiping out the garrison 
 ,to a rooinek, and starting <-n the homeward march refreshed 
 ;with coffee and biltong, and driving the townspeople before 
 'them as prisoners of War. The desperate perils presented by 
 the conjectural and largely non-existent mine were thence- 
 forth to loom largely and luridly in the telegrams that went 
 up to Pretoria. 
 
 "There's a lot in bluff, you know," that "slim duyvel," 
 the Commandant of the rooineks, said long afterwards. "And 
 we bluffed about the mines, real and dummy, for all we were 
 worth!" 
 
 So, possibly with premonition of the telegram that was
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 199 
 
 even then clicking out its message at Pretoria, there was a note 
 of satisfaction in the whistle out. of keeping with the execu- 
 tion actually done, as Nixey's Hotel came in sight with the 
 Union Jack floating over it, denoting that, all 'was well. That 
 flagstaff, with its changing signals, was to dominate the popular 
 pulse ere long. But in these days it merely denoted Staff 
 Quarters, and War, with its grim accompanying horrors, 
 seemed a long way off. 
 
 A white-gowned European nursemaid on the opposite 
 street-corner waved and shrieked to her deserting elder 
 charges, and the Chief's quick eye noted that the small, sun- 
 burned, active, bare legs of the boy and girl in cool sailor-suits 
 of blue-and-white linen twill, were scampering in his direc- 
 tion. He knew his fascination for children, and instinctively 
 slackened his stride as they came up, abreast now, and shyly 
 hand in hand: 
 
 " Mister Colonel . . . ? " The speaker touched the ex- 
 pansive brim of a straw sailor hat with a fine assumption of 
 adult coolness. 
 
 " Quite right, and who are you ? " 
 
 The small boy hesitated, plainly at a nonplus. The round- 
 eyed girl tugged at the boy's sailor jumper, whispering: 
 
 " I saided he wouldn't know you! " 
 
 " I fought he would. Because Mummy said he wemem- 
 bered our names ve uvver night at ve Hotel . . . when he 
 promised . . . about ve animals from Wodesia ... all made 
 of mud, an' feavers, and bits of fur . . ." 
 
 Memory gave up the missing names, helped by those boyish 
 replicas of the candid clear grey eyes of the Mayor's wife, shin- 
 ing under the drooping plume of fair hair. 
 
 " Mummy was quite right, Hammy, and Berta was wrong, 
 because I remember your names quite well, you see. And the 
 birds and beasts and insects are in a box at my quarters. Come 
 and get them." 
 
 'If Anne doesn't kick up a wow?" hesitated Hammy, his 
 small brown hand already in the larger one. 
 
 " We'll arrange it with Anne." He waited for the arrival 
 of the white-canopied perambulator and its fluttering-ribboned 
 guardian to say, with a tone and smile that won her instant 
 suffrages: " I'm going to borrow these children for a minute 
 or so. Will you come into the shade and rest? I promise not 
 to keep you long." 
 
 Beauvayse and Lady Hannah's Captain Bingo, relieved from
 
 200 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 lookout duty, and descending in quest of food from the Chief's 
 particular eyrie on the roof of Nixey's Hotel, heard shrieks 
 of infant laughter coming from the coffee-room. Knives, 
 forks, and glasses had been ruthlessly swept from the upper 
 end of one of the tables laid for the Staff luncheon, and across 
 the fair expanse of linen, pounded into whiteness and occasional 
 holes by the vigorous thumpers of the Kaffir laundry-women, 
 meandered a marvellous procession of quagga and koodoo, 
 rhino and hartebeest, lion and giraffe, ostrich and elephant, 
 modelled by the skilful hands of Matabele toy-makers. 
 Tarantula, with wicked bright eyes of shining berries, brought 
 up the rear, with the bee, and the mole-cricket, and, with 
 bulgy brown, white striped body and long wings importantly 
 crossed behind its back, a tsetse of appallingly gigantic 
 size. . . . 
 
 " Oh, fank you, Mister Colonel," Hammy was saying, with 
 shining eyes of rapture fixed upon the glorious ones ; " and is 
 they weally my own, my vewy own, for good?" 
 
 " Yours and Berta's, really and for good." 
 
 " And won't you " Hammy's magnificent, effort at disin- 
 terestedness brought the tears into his eyes " won't you want 
 vem to play wif , ever yourself ? " 
 
 The deft, hands swept the birds and beasts, with tarantula 
 and tsetse, into the wooden box, and lifted the children from 
 their chairs, as Captain Bingo and Beauvayse, following the 
 D.A.A.G., came in, brimming with various versions of what 
 had happened out there on the veld. . . . 
 
 " I have other things to play with just now, Hammy. Run 
 along with Berta now. You'll find your nurse in the 
 hall." 
 
 Berta put up her face confidently to be kissed. Hammy,' 
 in manly fashion, offered a hand the left the right arm be- 
 ing occupied with the box of toys. As Berta's little legs 
 scampered through the door, he delayed to ask: 
 
 "What are your playfings, Mister Colonel?" 
 
 "Live men and big guns, just now, Hammy; and chances 
 and issues, and results and risks." 
 
 The plume of fair hair fell back, clearing the candid grey 
 eyes as Hammy lifted up his face, confidently lisping: 
 
 " I don't quite fink I know what wesults and wisks are, but 
 I'd like to play wif the live men an' the big guns too some- 
 times ... if you didn't want vem always?" 
 
 " We'll see about it, Hammy, when you're grown up."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 201 
 
 " Good-bye, Mister Colonel. And I would lend you my 
 beasts an' tings, 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 in 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 the 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 Booming 
 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 hen-pecked husband before day- 
 break 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 at- 
 taches 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 recognized the warn- 
 ing of domestic battle, glowered^ and gave_in.
 
 202 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " 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 expedition 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-bloody-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!" 
 
 " Damn 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 and 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.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 203 
 
 " 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, abso- 
 lutely 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 Johannes- 
 burger, with light queer eyes, oddly set, 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 resting game. 
 
 " With nerve and jests 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 card was in a se- 
 cret compartment of her handbag. Under the alias 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 
 
 communicating with Van Busch 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 broad- 
 sheets papering the kerbs of Piccadilly, the ears of her imagina- 
 tion making celestial melody of those raucous yells: 
 
 " Speshul Edition! Hextry Speshul Edition! 'Ere y'are, 
 sir; on'y a 'a'penny. SPESHUL!"
 
 204 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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 glassless windows like the blind eye- 
 holes in the mouldered House that once has held the living 
 thought of man. From dawn until dark the ancient seven- 
 pounders of her batteries banged and grumbled, her Maxims 
 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 conversa- 
 tion in Gueldersdorp. 
 
 And within her girdle of trenches, stern, grimy, haggard men 
 lived, cheek to the heated rifle-breech, and ate, and snatched 
 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 slight casualties, and 
 the loss of nineteen horses out of twenty-five. 
 
 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 gaspipes torn from their bedding, and twisted 
 as if by the hands of giants in cruel play. The little iron bed- 
 steads 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..
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 205 
 
 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- 
 glass 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 Jail 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 convalescent, 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 shell-fire, in spite of the Red-Cross Flag. Fever and 
 rheumatism, pneumonia and diphtheria stalked among the 
 dwellers in these tainted asylums, 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 ap- 
 peared 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 Barotse had been thinned by raids on 
 the part of the enemy, and poor grazing. Shell 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 be- 
 coming 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 jprice of jiquid gold, brandy was
 
 206 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 treasured above rubies, and served out sparingly by the Hand 
 of Authority, as medicine in urgent cases. 
 
 You could get vegetables from the Chinaman, who con- 
 tinued to cultivate onions, cabbages, potatoes, and melons in 
 the market-gardens about the town, imperturbable under shot 
 and shell, his large straw hat affording an admirable target 
 from the Boer sniper's point of view, as metaphorically he 
 gathered his fat harvest of dollars from the soil. What you 
 could not get for any amount of dollars was peace and rest, 
 clean air, and space to stretch your cramped-up limbs in, until 
 Sunday came, bringing the Truce of God for Englishman and 
 Transvaaler. 
 
 The Hospital, like each of the smaller hospitals that had sprung 
 from the parent stalk, was crowded. The operating theatre 
 had been turned into a ward where the lane between the beds 
 just gave room for a surgeon or a nurse to pass, and hourly 
 the cry went up: "Room, more room for the wounded and 
 sick!" And among these Saxham worked, night and day, like 
 a man upheld by forces superhuman. 
 
 " By-and-by," he would say impatiently, when they urged 
 him to take rest, and bend his black brows and hunch those 
 great, shoulders of his to the work again. 
 
 " Ye have a demon, man," said Taggart, Major of the 
 R.A.M.C., himself a haggard-eyed but tireless labourer in the 
 red fields of pain. " At three o' the smalls ye got to your 
 bed, and at six ye made the rounds, at seven ye were dealing 
 with a select batch o' shell-fire an' rifle-shot casualties our 
 friends outside being a gey sicht better marksmen when re- 
 freshed by a guid nicht's sleep ; at eight ye had had your bit 
 o' breakfast, and got doon your gun an' gane oot for an hour 
 o' calm, invigorating sniping on the veld before returning 
 punctually at ten o' the clock to attack the business o' the day, 
 wi' a bag o' twa Boers to your creedit." 
 
 " I only got. one, Major. The other chap hobbled down 
 bandaged, upon crutches, to-day, and had a pot-shot at me as 
 I lay doggo behind my particular stone. I put up my hat on 
 a stick, and see ! " Saxham gravely exhibited a felt Service 
 smasher with a clean hole through it, an inch above the lining- 
 edge. " He's a snowy-locked', hoary-bearded, Fatirer Noah- 
 hatted patriarch of seventy at least, and very proud of his 
 shooting, and I've let him think he got me this time just to 
 make him happy for one night. To-morrow he is to make the 
 painful discovery that I am still in the flesh."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 207 
 
 "Aweel, awheel! But I would point out. to ye that For- 
 tune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might 
 fall to your patriarch in the antediluvian headgear to-morrow." 
 
 Then the luck of the game, thought the hearer, deep in that 
 wounded heart of his, would not only be with the patriarch. 
 And the great puzzle, Life, would be solved for good. 
 
 Taggart had said he, Saxham, had a demon. He could 
 have answered that only by hard, unceasing, unremitting work, 
 or, when no more work was there to do, by the fierce excite- 
 ment of those grilling hours spent lying behind the stone, was 
 the demon to be kept out. Of all things he dreaded inactivity, 
 and though he would drop upon his cot in the tiny bedroom 
 that had been a Hospital ward-pantry, and sleep the heavy 
 sleep of weariness the moment his head touched the pillow, 
 yet he would start awake after an hour or two, parched with 
 that savage, unquenched thirst, and drink great draughts of the 
 brackish well-water, boiled for precaution's sake, and tramp 
 the confined space until the grip of desire grew slack. But he 
 had never once yielded since the night when a man with the 
 eye and voice of a leader among men had come to the house 
 in Harris Street and taken him by the hand. 
 
 Do you say impossible, that the man in whom the habit of 
 vice had formed should be able to cast off his degrading weak- 
 ness, like a shameful garment, by sheer force of will, and be 
 sane and strong and masterful again? I say, possible with this 
 man. You see him plucked from the slough by the strong 
 hand of manly fellowship, and nerved and strengthened, if only 
 for a little while, to play the game for the sake of that other 
 man's belief in him. Such influence have such men among 
 their fellows for good or for ill. 
 
 You can see him upon this brilliant November morning 
 mounting a charger lent him by his friend, a handsome Waler 
 full of mettle and spirit oats not being yet. required for the 
 support of men and calling au revoir to Taggart as he rides 
 away from the Hospital gates followed by an orderly of the 
 R.A.M.C. in a spider, pulled by a wiry, shabby little Boer 
 mare. 
 
 "The man rides like a foxhunter," commented Taggart, 
 noticing the ease of the seat, the light handling of the rein, 
 the way in which the fidgety, spirited beast Saxham rode 
 answered to the gentling hand and the guiding pressure of the 
 rider's knee, as a sharp storm of rifle-fire swept from the 
 enemy's northern trenches, and the Mauser bullets spurted
 
 208 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 sand between the wheels of the spider and under the horses' 
 bellies. 
 
 Saxham spurred ahead, the spider following. The bullet- 
 pierced grey felt smasher hat, a manly and not unpicturesque 
 headgear, sat. on the man's close-cropped head with a soldierly 
 air becoming to the square, opaque-skinned face that had power 
 and strength and virility in every line of it. The blue eyes, 
 under their black bar of meeting eyebrows, were clear now, 
 and the short aquiline nose, rough-hewn but not coarse, and 
 the grimly-tender mouth were no longer thickened ahd swollen 
 and reddened by intemperance. The figure, perfect in its 
 manliness, if marred by the too heavy muscular development of 
 the throat and the slightly bowed shoulders, looked well in 
 the tunic of Service khaki, the Bedford cords and putties and 
 spurred brown boots that had replaced the worn white drills, 
 the blue shirt and shabby black kamarband and canvas shoes. 
 Looking at Saxham, even with knowledge of his past, you 
 could not have associated a personality so salient and striking, 
 an individuality so original and so strong, with the idea of the 
 tipsy wastrel, wallowing like a hog in self-chosen degradation. 
 
 The Mother-Superior, coming up the ladder leading out of 
 her underground abode as the horseman and the attendant 
 spider drew near, thought of Bartolomeo Colleoni, as you see 
 him, last of the great Condottieri, in the fresco at the House 
 of Charity in Bergamo to-day. In armour, complete without 
 the morion, one with the great Flemish warhorse, he sits 
 carrying the baton of Captain-General, given him by the 
 Doge of Venice, in the pov--erful hand that only a little while 
 before aided his picked men of the infantry to pack and harden 
 snow about the granite boulders of the mountains in the Val 
 Seriana, and sent the giant, snowballs thundering down, crush- 
 ing bloody lanes through the ranks of the Venetian cavalry 
 massed in the narrow defile below, and striking chill terror 
 to the hearts of Doge and Prince and Senate. 
 
 Only the batoit was a well-worn staghorn-handled crop, 
 Squire Saxham's gift, together with a hunter, to his boy Owen, 
 at seventeen. It was one of the few relics of home that had 
 stayed by Saxham during his wanderings. 
 
 He reined up now, saluting the Mother-Superior with 
 marked respect. 
 
 " Good-morning, ma'am. All well with you and yours ? " 
 
 She answered with unusual hesitation: 
 
 "All the Sisters are well, thank you. But if you could
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 209 
 
 spare me a minute, Dr. Saxham, there is a question I should 
 like to ask." 
 
 " As many minutes as you wish, ma'am. It is not your 
 day for the Hospital, I think?" 
 
 " Ah, no ! " she said, with the velvety South of Ireland 
 vowel-inflection. " We keep Wednesday for the Women's 
 Laager, always. Many of them are so miserable, poor souls, 
 about their husbands and sons and brothers who are in the 
 trenches, or w T ho have been killed, and then there are the 
 children to be cared for and washed. Not only the siege 
 orphans, but so many who have sick or neglectful mothers. It 
 takes us the whole day once we get there." 
 
 Saxham dismounted as she stooped to seize the end of a 
 blue cotton-covered washing-basket impelled from below by an 
 ascending Sister. The spider pulled up under cover of the 
 brick-and-corrugated-iron house vacated by the Railway official, 
 as another short storm of riflery cracked and rattled among 
 the northern foothills, and a whistling hurry of the sharp- 
 nosed little messengers of death passed through Gueldersdorp. 
 Some of t.hem hit and flattened on the gable of the Railway 
 official's house, one went through the leathern splashboard of 
 the spider. Saxham moved instinctively to place himself 
 between the closely-standing group of nuns and possible 
 danger. 
 
 "No, no!" they cried, as one woman, their placid, cheer- 
 ful tones taking a shade of anxiety. " You must not do 
 that." 
 
 " I know you are all well-seasoned," he said, looking at them 
 with the smile that made his stern face changed and gentle. 
 
 " I am not so sure. The bullets come in the usual way of 
 things. We take our chance of them," the Mother-Superior 
 answered. But she pressed her lips together and grew pale 
 as a faint cry came up from the subterranean dwelling, roofed 
 with sheets of corrugated iron laid upon steel rails, and made 
 bombproof with bags of earth. And Saxham, looking at the 
 fine face, with its wan lines of fatigue and over-exertion, and 
 noting the deep shadowy caves that housed the great luminous 
 grey eyes, said: 
 
 " I think we must have you take some rest, or I shall be 
 having my best helper on my hands as a patient. And that 
 won't do, you know." 
 
 " No, it. would not do," she said, looking fully and seriously 
 at him. " And therefore I think our Lord will not permit it.
 
 210 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 But If He should, be sure another will rise up to fill my 
 place." 
 
 " Whoever your successor might be," said Saxham sincerely, 
 " she will not fulfil my ideal of an absolutely efficient nurse, 
 as you do. So from the personal, if not the altruistic point 
 of view, let me beg you to be careful." 
 
 " I take all reasonable care," she told him. " It is true, 
 the work has been heavy this w r eek; but to-morrow is Sunday, 
 and we shall rest all day and sleep at the Convent. Indeed, 
 some of us have taken it in turn to be on guard there every 
 night, or nothing would be left us." 
 
 " I understand." 
 
 He knew how prowlers and night-thieves made harvest in 
 the darkness among the deserted dwellings since Police and 
 Town Guardsmen had been requisitioned to man the trenches. 
 She went on: 
 
 " The upper story of the house is sheer wreck, as you may 
 see, but the ground-floor is quite habitable. So much so that 
 if the shells did not strike the poor dear place so often, I 
 should suggest your turning it into a Convalescent Home." 
 
 " We may have to try the plan yet," said Saxham. " The 
 Railway Institute is frightfully overcrowded." 
 
 " And," she told him, " a shell struck there yesterday even- 
 ing, and burst in the larger ward." 
 
 " I had not heard of it," he said. "Was anybody hurt?" 
 
 " No one, thank God ! But the fire was difficult to put out, 
 until one of the Sisters thought of sand." 
 
 " It was an incendiary shell ? " Disgust and contempt 
 swelled his deep-cut nostrils and flamed from his vivid blue 
 eyes. " And yet these Kaiser's gunners, in their blue-and- 
 white Death or Glory uniforms, can hardly pretend ignorance 
 of the Geneva Convention. But your question?" 
 
 " It is children." She beckoned to the two nuns, who 
 stood at a little distance apart holding the washing-basket be- 
 tween them. " I will ask you to go on slowly before me with 
 the basket. I will overtake you when I have spoken to Dr. 
 Saxham." 
 
 " Surely, Reverend Mother." One tall, pale, and thin, the 
 other round and rosy, they were alike in the placid, cheerful 
 serenity of their good eyes and readily smiling lips. " And 
 won't we be after taking the bundle ? " 
 
 " No, no! It is heavy, and I am as strong as both of you 
 together."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 211 
 
 " Very well, Reverend Mother." 
 
 They were obediently moving on. 
 
 " A moment." Saxham stopped them. " If you two ladies 
 have no objection to a little crowding, the spider will hold 
 both of you as well as the bundle and the basket of washing. 
 At least, it looks like a basket of washing?" 
 
 All three laughed as they accepted his offer, assuring him 
 that his suspicions were correct. For neither Kaffir laundry- 
 woman or Hindu dhobi would go down any more to the wash- 
 ing troughs by the river, for fear of crossing that Stygian flood 
 of blackness rivalling their own, supposing, as Beauvayse once 
 suggested, that there is a third-class ferry for niggers and 
 persons of colour. And from the waterworks on the Eastern 
 side of the town the supply had been cut off by the enemy, 
 so that the taps of Gueldersdorp had ceased to yield. 
 
 Old wells and springs had been reopened, cleaned, and 
 brought into use for drinking purposes, so that of a water- 
 famine there could be no fear. But the element became ex- 
 pensive when retailed by the tin bucketful, a bath a rare 
 luxury when the contents of the said bucket might be spilled 
 or thrown away in the course of the gymnastics wherewith the 
 sable or coffee-brown bearer sought to evade the travelling 
 unexploded shell or the fan-shaped charge of shrapnel. There- 
 fore, the Sisters had turned laundrywomen. You could hear 
 the sound of Sister Tobias's smoothing-iron coming up from 
 below, thump-thumping on the blanketed board. 
 
 "And where do you think we get the water, now?" the 
 rosy Sister, in process of being packed into the spider, leaned 
 over the wheel to ask. 
 
 "Not from the Convent?" Saxham thought of the strip 
 of veld between there and the Hospital, even more fraught 
 with peril than the patch he had just traversed, or the distance 
 yet to be covered between the Sisters' bombproof and the 
 Women's Laager, where Death, with the red sickle in his flesh- 
 less hand, stalked openly from dawn to nightfall. 
 
 " From the Convent, carrying it across after dark. And 
 no well there, either, that you'd get the fill of a teaspoon out 
 of " a " tayspoon " it was in the rosy Sister's Dublin brogue 
 " and yet there's water there." 
 
 " But how " Saxham began. The Mother-Superior 
 
 shook her head, and the rosy Sister was silent. 
 
 " There is no mystery about the water at all. It is very 
 simple." Standing there with her head held high and the
 
 212 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 fine, free, graceful lines of her tall figure outlined by the 
 heavy folds of the now worn and darned black habit, and 
 her hands, still beautiful, though roughened by toil, calmly 
 folded upon her scapular, she was as remarkable and noble 
 a figure, it seemed to Saxham, as the golden sunlight could 
 fall upon anywhere in the world. And besides, she was his 
 right hand at the Hospital. A capable, watchful, untiring 
 nurse and beauty would have decked her in his surgeon's 
 eyes if she had been physically ugly or deformed. 
 
 " There is no mystery whatever, only when the bombard- 
 ment first began I thought of the waterworks, and that one of 
 my first cares, supposing I had been General Bronnckers " 
 she smiled slightly " would have been to operate there. So 
 I set the Sisters to work at filling every empty barrel and 
 bucket and tub in the Convent with water from the taps. 
 And as we happened to have plenty of empty barrels and 
 tubs, why, there is water to be had there now, and will be 
 for some time to come. Go now, my children." 
 
 The smiling Sisters waved their hands. The orderly saluted 
 with his whip and drove on in obedience to Saxham's nod. 
 
 " Of course, the Sisters are aware," he said, meeting the 
 Mother's grave glance, " that if it is quicker to drive, it is 
 safer to walk?" 
 
 She nodded with the gay, sweet smile that had belonged to 
 Lady Biddy. 
 
 " They know, of course. But danger is in the day's work. 
 We do not seek it. We are prepared for it, and it comes and 
 passes. If one day it does not pass without the cost of 
 life, we are prepared for that, and God's Will is done 
 always." 
 
 " You are very brave," he said. It was the first time in his 
 life that he had used the phrase to any woman, and the words 
 came out almost grudgingly. 
 
 " Oh no, not brave," she told him ; " only obedient." Her 
 veil fluttered in the mild November breeze that had in it the 
 heavy fetid taint from the overcrowded trenches that ringed 
 Gueldersdorp, and the acrid fumes of the cordite, though the 
 air up here on the veld was sweet compared with the befouled 
 atmosphere of the Women's Laager and the crowded wards 
 at the Hospital, in spite of all that disinfectants could do. 
 She went on : 
 
 " And we are very grateful to you for the lift. Sister 
 Ruperta was on duty last night, and Sister Hilda Antony
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 213 
 
 the rosy Sister is not as well as she would have us believe* 
 Ah " 
 
 With her grave eyes screened by her lifted hand, she had 
 been watching the progress of the spider westward over the 
 dun-yellow veld. Now the long wailing notes of the head- 
 quarter bugle sounded, in slow time, the Assembly, and in 
 the same instant, from the Staff over the Colonel's hotel, where 
 the red lamp signalled danger by night and the Red Flag 
 gave its warning by day, the scarlet danger-signal fluttered in 
 the breeze. Once, twice, again, the deep bell of the Catholic 
 Church tolled. A dozen other bells echoed the warning, 
 signifying by the number of their iron tongue-strokes the 
 threatened quarter of the town. 
 
 " 'Ware big gun ! " called the sentries. " West quarter 
 'ware!" 
 
 The Mother-Superior grew pale for the Women's Laager, 
 towards which the little Boer mare was steadily trotting with 
 the laden spider, lay in the menaced quarter, with a bare 
 stretch of veld between it and the Camp of the Irregular 
 Horse, whose white tents and dug-out shelters were pleasantly 
 shaded by ancient blue gums, picturesque and stately in spite 
 of broken boughs and foliage, torn by shrapnel and seared by 
 the chemical fumes of bursting charges innumerable. 
 
 " Will you not go down ? " 
 
 She shook her head in reply, and stood with a waiting face 
 in prayerful silence, not stirring save to make the Sign of the 
 Cross. And as the long white fingers fluttered over the bosom 
 of the black habit, the faint cry that Saxham's quick ear 
 had heard before floated up from the populous depths be- 
 low. 
 
 "What Is that?" 
 
 Before the question had left Saxham's lips, the monster 
 gun spoke out in deafening thunder from the enemy's redoubt 
 at East Point, full two miles away. The heavy grey smoke- 
 pillar of the driving-charge towered against the sunbright dis- 
 tance, and simultaneously with the crack of the discharge, 
 sounding as though all the pent-up forces of Hell had burst 
 the brazen gates of Terror, and rushed forth to annihilate and 
 destroy, the ninety-four pound projectile passed overhead* 
 sweeping half the corrugated-iron roof from the Railway of- 
 ficial's late dwelling with a fiendish clatter and din as it passed 
 harmlessly over the Women's Laager, and, wrecking a sentry's 
 shelter on the western line of defences, burst harmlessly upon
 
 2i 4 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the veld beyond, blotting out the low hills behind a curtain of 
 acrid green vapour. 
 
 "Get under cover, quick!" Saxham had shouted to his 
 companion, as deafened and dazed and half-asphyxiated by the 
 tremendous concussion, he strove for mastery with his mad- 
 dened horse. This regained, he looked for the figure in the 
 black habit and white coif, and knew a shock of horror in 
 seeing it prone upon the ground. 
 
 "No, no, I am not hurt!" she cried, lightly rising as he 
 hurried towards her. The tremendous air-concussion had 
 thrown her down, and beyond a scratch upon her hand and 
 some red dust on the black garments she was in nothing the 
 worse. 
 
 " I don't know how I kept my own legs," Saxham said, 
 laughing. 
 
 " It went by like twenty avalanches," she agreed. " And 
 blessed be our Lord, excepting for the damage to the roof, no 
 more seems to have been done. I can see the spider stopping 
 near the Women's Laager." She peered out earnestly over 
 the shimmering waste of dusty yellow-brown, and cried out 
 joyfully: "Ah, Sister Hilda Antony and Sister Ruperta are 
 getting out. All is well with them ; all is well." 
 
 " But not with the washing." 
 
 Saxham had swung round his binoculars, and brought them 
 to bear upon the vehicle and its late occupants. A grim smile 
 played about his mouth as he handed her the glasses, and heard 
 her cry of womanly distress as she beheld the fruit of late 
 labour scattered on the veld and the Sisters' agonized activity 
 displayed in the gathering up of sheets, pillow-slips, handker- 
 chiefs, babies' shirts and petticoats, with other garments of a 
 strictly feminine and private character. Her grave, discreet 
 eyes avoided his as she handed back the binoculars, but a 
 dimple showed near the edge of the white coif. 
 
 " And now," Saxham said, glancing at his watch, " may I 
 know in what I can be of service ? " It had seemed to him 
 that the Mother-Superior hesitated to broach the subject. 
 Nor had he been mistaken. The dimple vanished. Her grey 
 eyes became troubled, and she asked, with a slight catching of 
 the breath: 
 
 " Yes, there was something . . . Doctor, is it possible for 
 a person to die of fear?" 
 
 He answered promptly: 
 
 " In circumstances like the present? Certainly. Un-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 215 
 
 doubtedly possible. I have seen twenty deaths from pure 
 fright since the bombardment began, and I expect to see more 
 before the siege ends, or people get callous to the possibilities 
 of sudden extermination that are afforded them a hundred 
 times a day. Is the person to whom you refer a woman or 
 a child?" 
 
 " A young girl " she was beginning, when a buxom 
 
 little figure, black veiled and habited like herself, rose up as 
 if from the bowels of the earth. 
 
 " I vill look. But I can see nozing," she called to some- 
 one invisible below. " It must be that you vait until my eyes 
 shall become more strong." She shaded them, newly brought 
 from semi-darkness and blinking in the hot, white sunlight. 
 The Mother-Superior hurried to her, saying with a note of 
 anxiety in her usually calm voice: 
 
 "Sister Sister Cleophee; is anything the .matter?" 
 
 " Mon Dieu! It is ze Reverend Mozer!" ejaculated the 
 other, relief and joy expressed in the rapid movements of pliant 
 hands and expressive eyes. " Nozing is ze matter, Reverend 
 Mozer, if only you are safe." 
 
 " Quite safe, and so are the Sisters. Only the linen was 
 upset." 
 
 "My 'eavens, but a miraculous escapement!" The supple 
 hands and the expressive eyes and shoulders of Sister Cleophee 
 made great play. " Me and Sister Tobias, 'ow we pray when 
 we 'ear ze great gun, vith knowledge zat you and ze Sisters 
 were upon the vay to ze Women's Laager. My faith, it vas 
 terrible! Me, if I 'ad not make to ascend and learn how it 
 go vid you, la petite vould 'ave come running up to make dis- 
 covery for herself. She behave like a little crrazy, a little 
 mad sing. I forget your vord for she zat have lost 'er vits. 
 Sister Tobias and me, we 'av to 'old 'er." The fine, expres- 
 sive eyes went, past the Mother-Superior, and lighted with evi- 
 dent relief on Saxham. "Ah, Monsieur le Docteur, it is 
 incrredible vat zat poor child she suffer. Madame la Mere 
 'ave told you " 
 
 " Madame was about to tell me, my Sister," Saxham said, 
 in his smooth, fluent French, " when you appeared upon the 
 scene." 
 
 Sister Cleophee launched, unwitting of the Mother-Su- 
 perior's gesture of vexation, into voluble explanations in that 
 native language which M. le Docteur spoke so well. 
 
 Mademoiselle Mildare, the ward of Madame the Mother-
 
 216 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Superior, was no coward. But no, the child had courage in 
 plenty it was the suspense that devoured her in the absence 
 of the Mother, to whom Mademoiselle was most tenderly at- 
 tached, that reduced her to a state of the most pitiable. The 
 Sisters left at home each day would talk of the rain and the 
 fine weather anything to distract the mind that presented it- 
 self to them but now, nothing was of any use. When the 
 Reverend Mother came back at nightfall, behold a transforma- 
 tion. Mademoiselle would laugh and sing and chatter. Her 
 eyes would shine like stars, she would be happy, said Sister 
 Cleophee, with dramatic emphasis and gesture, as a soul in 
 Paradise. Next day, taking her guardian from her side, 
 would bring the terrors back, find redoubled the nervous 
 sufferings of Mademoiselle, to-day reaching such a height that 
 Sister Cleophee felt convinced that something must be done. 
 
 "As, my Sister, if I could do anything!" the Mother- 
 Superior said, with the velvet Southern Irish inflection in the 
 breathing aspirate and the soft melodious cadence that made 
 her pure, cultivated utterance so exquisite. The voice broke 
 and faltered, and a spasm of mother-anguish wrung the firm 
 mouth, and as a slow tear dimmed each of her underlids and 
 splashed on the white coif she put out her hand blindly, and 
 the sympathetic little Frenchwoman took it in both her own. 
 
 " Reverend Mozer, you can do zis. You can bring Mon- 
 sieur le Docteur to see Lynette. You can 'ave his advice upon 
 'er case, and you can " 
 
 Another fusilade of rifle-fire, sweeping from the west over 
 Gueldersdorp, brought a repetition of the faint moaning cry 
 from below. Saxham consulted the Reverend Mother with 
 a look. She bent her head in silent assent. He hitched the 
 horse's bridle to what, had been the gatepost of the Railway 
 official's front-garden, as she signed to him to descend the 
 ladder leading to the Sisters' underground abode. And he 
 went down to meet his Fate there. 
 
 XXVIII 
 
 THE temporary Convent was a roomy trench dug out of the 
 red gravelly sand, lined with the inevitable sheets of corrugated 
 iron, and roofed with the same material, supported by a solid 
 frame of steel rails. Wide chinks between the metal sheets 
 gave admission to light and air, and earthen drainpipes made
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 217 
 
 ventilators in the walls. But the light penetrated like spears 
 of burning flame, and the air was stifling hot. The paraffin 
 stove that heated irons for Sister Tobias smelled clamorously, 
 and the droning of myriads of flies, not the least of the seven 
 plagues of Gueldersdorp, kept up a persistent bass to the shrill 
 singing of the little tin kettle. Later, when the April rains 
 began, and the tarpaulins were pulled over the sand-bagged 
 roof, tin lamps burning more paraffin did battle with Cim- 
 merian darkness. 
 
 Saxham's keen, observant glance took in the marvellous 
 cleanliness and neatness of the place, divided into living-room 
 and dormitory by a heavy green baize curtain, that at the 
 Convent had shut off the noise of the great classroom from the 
 rest of the house. The curtain was drawn, hiding the little 
 iron cots brought from Sisters' cells, ascetic couches whose 
 narrow wire mattresses must afford scant room for repose to 
 double sleepers now, where all were crowded and conventual 
 rules must be in abeyance. The outer place held a deal table, 
 the oil cooking-stove; some household utensils shining with 
 cleanliness were ranged upon a shelf, and several pictures 
 hung upon the walls. Upon a bracket the silver crucifix from 
 the altar of the Convent chapel gleamed against the back- 
 ground of a snowy, lace-bordered linen cloth. There were 
 orderly piles of cleaned and mended clothes, military and 
 civilian, the garments of sick and wounded male patients, who 
 would leave the Hospital without a thought of the unselfish 
 women who had foregone sleep to patch jackets and sew on 
 missing buttons. There were haversacks of coarse canvas for 
 the Volunteers, finished and partly made, with ammunition- 
 pouches and bandoliers. And Sister Tobias stood! ironing 
 at the deal table, partly screened by a line of drying linen, 
 while Sister Mary- Joseph turned the mangle, and the little 
 brisk novice, her round cheeks no longer rosy, folded with 
 patient hands. Saxham's keen quick glance took in the place 
 and three of its occupants, and rested on one other face there. 
 
 Its wild white-rose fairness had dulled into the pallor of 
 old ivory. There were deep, bluish shadows about the eyes 
 and round the mouth, and the hollow at the base of the throat 
 where the pulse throbbing and fluttered visibly, had grown deep. 
 Her red-brown hair had lost its burnished beauty. It had 
 become dull like her skin, and her garments hung loosely upon 
 the form whose soft roundnesses had fallen away. But her 
 eyes had changed most. Their golden-hazel irises had faded
 
 218 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 to pale bronze, the full, fair eyelids had shrunk, the pupils 
 were distended to twice their natural size. She sat upon a 
 stool in a corner, a slight girlish figure in a holland skirt and 
 white cambric blouse-bodice, her slender waist girdled with a 
 belt of brown leather, the colour of her little shoes. Huddled 
 up against the corrugated-iron wainscot of the rough earth 
 wall, the obsession of fear that dilated her eyes and parched 
 her lips shook her in recurrent gusts of trembling, whenever 
 the guns of the Gueldersdorp batteries spoke in thunder, when- 
 ever the Boer artillery bellowed Death from the heights above. 
 For since the great gun had spoken from East Point Kopje, 
 Death's red sickle had not ceased to ply its task. 
 
 Some sewing, one of the coarse canvas haversacks made by 
 the nuns for Gueldersdorp 's enrolled defenders, lay at the 
 girl's feet. Her right hand, horrible to see in its incessant, 
 mechanical activity, made continually the motion of sewing. 
 Her eyes stared blankly, unwinkingly at the opposite wall, 
 and the gusts of trembling went over her without cessation. 
 At a more deafening crash than ordinary, an irrepressible scream 
 would break from her, and her hand would snatch at an in- 
 visible garment as though she plucked back its imaginary 
 wearer from peril by main force. 
 
 " She sees nobody. She hears nozing when we speak she 
 vould feel nozing, if you should pinch or shake her. Was I 
 not right, Reverend Mozer, to say it is time zat somesing 
 should be done? " 
 
 The shrill whisper came from Sister Cleophee. The 
 Mother-Superior made a sign in assent. Beyond words, her 
 heart was crying. Oh, misery and joy in one mingled draught 
 to have won such love as this from Richard's child! But 
 her face was impassive and stern, and her eyes, looking over 
 Saxham's great shoulder as he stood silently watching at the 
 bottom of the ladder stairway, imposed silence on the busy, 
 observant, tactful Sisters, who continued their labours without 
 a break, as the sewing hand went, diligently to and fro, and 
 the recurrent convulsive shudders shook the girl's slight frame, 
 and the irrepressible cry of anguish was wrung from her at 
 each ear-splitting shellburst. And yet, with all her agony of 
 love intensifying her gaze, the Mother did not see as much as 
 Saxham, who took in every detail and symptom with skilled, 
 consummate ease, realizing the desperate effort that strove for 
 self-command, noting the exhaustion of suspense in the dropped 
 lines of the half-open, colourless mouth, the incipient mental
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 219 
 
 breakdown in the vacant stare of the dilated eyes, the me- 
 chanical action of the stitching needle-hand, the convulsive 
 shudder that rippled through the slight figure at each boom, 
 or crash, or fusilade of rifle-fire that drifted over the shrapnel- 
 torn veld and through the battered town. He threw a swift 
 whisper over his shoulder presently, that only reached the ear 
 of the Mother-Superior, standing behind him, her tall shape 
 concealed from the sufferer's sight by his great form. 
 
 " How long has this been going on?" 
 
 She whispered back : " I am told ever since the bombard- 
 ment began. Every day, and at. night too, should duty detain 
 me at one or another of the Hospitals." 
 
 He added in the same low tone : 
 
 " She has a morbid terror of death under ordinary circum- 
 stances? " 
 
 The Mother-Superior murmured, a hand upon the ache in 
 her bosom: 
 
 " Not of death for herself. For another." 
 
 His purely scientific attitude must, have already abandoned 
 him when he knew gladness that Self was not the dominant 
 note in this dumb threnody of fear. But he wore the profes- 
 sional mask of the physician as he ordered: 
 
 " Let one of the Sisters speak to her." 
 
 The Mother-Superior glanced at the nun who was ironing, 
 and then at the figure on the stool. The Sister was about 
 to obey when the Maxim-Nordenfelt on the southern heights 
 rattled. There was a hissing rush overhead, and as a series 
 of sharp, splitting cracks told that a group of the shining little 
 copper-banded shells had burst, and that their splinters were 
 busily hunting far and wide for somebody to kill, the stitch- 
 ing hand dropped by the girl's side. A new wave of shudder- 
 ing went over the desolate young figure, pitiable and horrible 
 jto see. Dull drops of sweat broke out upon her temples in the 
 shadow of her red-brown hair. 
 
 " How are you getting on with your work, dearie?" 
 
 Sister Tobias had spoken to her gently. She moved her 
 head and her fixed eyes in a blind way, and the stitching hand 
 resumed its mechanical task, but she gave no answer, except 
 with the shudderings that shook her, as a lily is shaken in an 
 autumn blast. 
 
 Then Saxham stepped backwards noiselessly, climbed the 
 steep ladder stairway, and stood waiting for the Mother- 
 Superior in the blazing yellow sunshine, beside the ijost to
 
 220 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 which his horse was hitched. The Mother followed instantly. 
 He was making some pencil memoranda in a shabby note- 
 book, and kept his eyes upon his writing, and made a mere 
 mask of his square, pale face as he began: 
 
 " It the case presents a very interesting development. The 
 subject has at one time or other probably the critical period 
 of girlhood sustained a severe physical and mental shock?" 
 
 The great grey eyes swam in sudden tears that were not to 
 be repressed, as the Mother-Superior remembered the finding 
 of that lost lamb on the veld seven years before. She bowed 
 her head in silent assent. 
 
 "You would wish candour," Saxham said, looking away 
 from her emotion. " And I should tell you that this is 
 grave." 
 
 " I know it," her desperate eyes said more plainly than 
 her scarcely moving lips. " But so many others are suffering 
 in the same way, and there is nothing that can be done for any 
 of them." 
 
 He answered with emphasis that struck her cold. " Some 
 measures must be taken in the case, and without delay. This 
 state of things must not go on." He saw that the Mother- 
 Superior caught her breath and wrung her hands together 
 in the loose, concealing sleeves as she said, with a breath of 
 anguish : 
 
 " If she only had more self-control." 
 
 " She has self-control." He echoed the word impatiently. 
 " She is using every ounce she has for all she is worth. She 
 has used it too long and too persistently." 
 
 " I will say then, if she only had more faith ! " 
 
 "I know nothing of faith," Saxham said curtly: "I deal 
 in common sense." 
 
 She could have asked if it were commonly sensible for a 
 creature made by God, and existing but by His will, to live 
 without Him? But she put the temptation past her. No 
 cordial flame of mutual esteem and liking ever sprang up be- 
 tween these two, often brought together in their mutual work 
 of help and healing. She recognized Saxham's power, she ad- 
 mitted his skill. But, as his practised eye had diagnosed in the 
 beloved of her heart the signs of physical and mental crisis, so 
 her clear gaze deciphered in his face the story written by those 
 unbridled years of vice and dissipation, and knew him dis- 
 eased in soul. She may have been fully acquainted with all 
 Gueldersdorp had learned of hiir^ going here, there, and every-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 221 
 
 where, as was her wont, in obedience to her Spouse's call. 
 But if so, she never betrayed Saxham. There was no resent- 
 ment, only delicate irony in the curve of her finely-modelled 
 lips as she queried : 
 
 "Am I so deficient in the quality of common sense?" 
 
 " Madam," he said, " you have manifested it in each of the 
 many instances where I have been brought in contact with 
 you. But in your solicitude for this young girl you have 
 shown, for the first time in my experience of you, some lack 
 of good judgment, and have inflicted, and do inflict, severe 
 suffering on her." 
 
 Her eyes flashed grey fire under her stern brows as she de- 
 manded : 
 
 "How, pray?" 
 
 " It is out. of the question, I suppose," Saxham said coldly, 
 " that you should slacken in your ministrations among the 
 sick and wounded, and keep out of daily and hourly danger 
 for her sake ? " 
 
 " Impossible," her voice answered, and her heart added un- 
 heard : " Impossible, unless I should be false to my Heavenly 
 Bridegroom out of love for the child He gave." 
 
 " Then," said Saxham bluntly, " unless these recurrent 
 nerve-storms are to culminate in cerebral lesion and mental 
 and physical collapse a result more easy to avert than to 
 deal with take the girl about with you." 
 
 " But " the Mother uttered in irrepressible dismay. 
 
 " I we go everywhere!" 
 
 It was most true. He had a vision, as she said it, of the 
 black-robed, white-coifed, cheerful Sisters passing in couples 
 through the shrapnel-littered streets, between houses of gap- 
 ing walls, and shattered roofs, and glassless windows, cheer- 
 ful, serene, helpful, bringing comfort to the dying, and assist- 
 ance to the sick, oblivious of whistling bullets and bursting 
 shells. And the most arduous duties, the most repulsive tasks, 
 the most danger-fraught errands, were hers, always by right, 
 and claim, and choice. What a woman it was! A very 
 Judith in Israel. He knew that Judith did not like him, but 
 unconcealed admiration was in his blue eyes as he looiced at 
 her. 
 
 " I know it. Let her go everywhere. It is the sole chance, 
 
 and you spoke of faith just now. ... If you have it for 
 
 yourself and the religious women of your Order, who go 
 
 about doing good in confidence of the protection I do not
 
 222 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 speak in mockery of an Almighty Hand, why can't you have 
 it for her?" 
 
 She had never seemed so noble in his eyes as when she 
 took that implied rebuke of his, with meek bending of her 
 proud head, and candid self-condemnation in the eyes that 
 were lowered and then raised to his, and beautiful humility 
 in her speech: . 
 
 "Sir, your reproach is just; it is I who have been lacking 
 in faith. And it shall be as you advise." 
 
 The distant bugle blared out its warning. The bell tolled 
 twice, stopped, and tolled four; the smaller bells echoed. The 
 voices of the sentries came to their ears, loudly at first, then 
 more distant, then reduced to the merest spider-thread of 
 sound: 
 
 ' 'Ware big gun ! South quarter 'ware ! " 
 
 " I must go to her," the Mother-Superior said, and passed 
 him swiftly and went down the ladder. Saxham followed. 
 The white figure on the stool had not stirred apparently. Its 
 blank eyes still stared at the wall, and the mechanical hand 
 moved, sewing at nothing, as diligently as ever. 
 
 "Lynette!" 
 
 The fixed, blindly-staring eyes came to life. Colour 
 throbbed back into the wan ivory cheeks. The mouth lost its 
 vacant droop. She rose up from the stool with a joyful cry, 
 and, stumbling in her haste, ran into the outstretched arms. 
 As they wrapped about her, clinging to her sole earthly friend 
 and guardian as though she could never let go, came the crash 
 of the driving-charge, the yelling Brocken-hunt of the passage 
 of the huge projectile, the ear-splitting din of the shellburst. 
 She lifted up a radiant face of laughing defiance, and then 
 choked and quivered and burst out crying, leaning her panting 
 young bosom against the black habit, and weeping as though 
 her whole being must dissolve, Undine-like, in tears. 
 
 Ah, the lovely feminine woman who weeps and clings! She 
 will never lose her dominion over the sons of men. The ap- 
 pealing glances of her beautiful wet eyes melt, the stoniest 
 male hearts, the soft tendril-like wreathing of her arms about 
 the pillar of salt upon the Plain would have had power to 
 change it back into a breathing human being once more, if 
 Lot had looked back, instead of his helpmeet. Her sterner 
 sisters may feel as keenly, love as tenderly, sorrow even more 
 bitterly than she. Who will believe it among the sons of 
 dead old Adam, who first felt the heaving bosom. pant against
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 223 
 
 his own, and saw the first bright tear-showers fall forerunners 
 of what oceans of world sorrow to be shed hereafter, when the 
 Angel of the flaming sword drove the peccant pair from 
 Paradise. Ah, the fair, weak woman who weeps and clings! 
 
 And Owen Saxham, watching Lynette from the ladder- 
 ot, and the Mother-Superior, clasping her and murmuring 
 Ibft comfort into the delicate, fragile ear under the heaped 
 'waves of red-brown hair, shared the same thought. 
 
 How this trembling, vibrating, emotional creature will 
 love one day, when the man arrives to whom imperious Nature 
 shall bid her render up her all ! 
 
 In whom, prayed the unselfish mother-heart, willing to be 
 bereft of even the Heaven-sent consolation for the sake of the 
 beloved, in whom may she find not only the earthly matefellow 
 but the kindred soul. For, all-pitying Mother of Mercy, 
 should she too, be doomed for wreck upon a wavering, un- 
 stable, headlong Richard, what will happen then? 
 
 Looking at the pair, Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. 
 Lynette's tears had been dried quickly, like all joy-drops that 
 the eyes shed. She was talking low and earnestly, pleading 
 her cause with clinging hands and wistful looks and coaxing 
 tones that were broken sometimes by a sob and sometimes by 
 a little peal of girlish laughter. 
 
 " Mother, I am not made of sugar to be melted in the sun, 
 or Dresden china to be broken. I am strong enough to take 
 my share of the work; I am brave enough to bear a'nything 
 anything," she urged, " if only I may be with you. But to sit 
 cooped up here day after day, safe and sheltered, sewing 
 powder-bags or giving Katie French lessons, or helping Sister 
 Tobias, and listening to the guns " the blood fled from her 
 cheeks and the great, pupils of her eyes dilated until they 
 looked all black in her face of whiteness " the dreadful guns, 
 and wondering where you are when the shells are bursting " 
 her voice rose in anguish "I can't bear it! Mother, do you 
 hear?" She threw her beautiful head back entreatingly, and 
 the pulses in her white throat throbbed under Saxham's eyes, 
 and her slight hands were desperate in their clutch upon the 
 arms that held her. " I want my share of the risk, whatever 
 it is. I will have it. It is my right. I have tried to be good 
 and patient, but I can't, I can't, I can't stand this any more ! " 
 
 Her voice broke upon a sob, and Saxham said from the door- 
 way that was filled by his great shoulders from post to post: 
 
 " You will not have to stand it any more. The Reverend
 
 224 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Mother has reconsidered her decision. She will take you to 
 the Hospital and elsewhere from to-day." 
 
 The man's curt manner and authoritative tone brought 
 Lynette for the first time to knowledge of his presence. Her 
 glance went to him, and joy was mingled with surprise in the 
 face she turned towards the Mother-Superior. 
 
 "Really, Mother?" 
 
 The Mother-Superior, though her own still face had flushed 
 with quick irrepressible resentment at Saxham's tone, said 
 cheerfully: 
 
 " It is true, my child. Dr. Saxham thinks it will be best 
 for you. Dr. Saxham, this is my ward, Miss Mildare." 
 
 Saxham made his little brusque bow. Lynette, bending her 
 lovely head, gave a grateful glance at the khaki-clad figure 
 with the great hulking shoulders standing under the patch of 
 hot blue sky that the top of the ladder vanished in, and a 
 strange shock and thrill went through the man's whole frame. 
 His odd, gentian-coloured eyes under the heavy thunder-cloud 
 of black eyebrows lightened so suddenly in reply that the girl 
 felt repelled and half-frightened. She was conscious of a 
 curious oppression. As for Saxham, a delicate, stinging fire 
 ran newly in his veins. Something stirred in the secret depths 
 of him, and came to life with an awakening thrill exquisitely 
 poignant and sweet. For this slight, unsophisticated, Convent- 
 bred creature, pure as a lily, reared in innocence among the 
 blameless, was rich as her frail, lovely mother had been before 
 her in the mysterious allure of sex. Beautiful Lady Bridget- 
 Mary at the zenith of her stately beauty had never possessed 
 one-tenth of the seductive charm that emanated from this young 
 girl. Thoughts of the stored-up golden honey seen gleaming 
 through the translucent waxen cells of the virgin comb made 
 the senses reel as you looked at her, if you were man born of 
 woman, with your passions alive and keen-edged in you, and 
 your blood had not lost the lilt of the song that it has sung 
 in healthy veins of sons of Adam since the Woman was made 
 for and given to the Man. For Artemis may invite, if uncon- 
 sciously, the hot pursuit of the hunter; the shy, close-folded 
 nymph among the sedges may awaken the primal desire of 
 Pan among the reeds. . . . Saxham, even in the years of his 
 degradation, had scarcely sunk to the level of the crook-limbed, 
 hairy-thighed, hoofed satyr. But he had built his nest with 
 the birds of night, and slaked his thirst at impure sources, and 
 only now did he realize how his mad dream of vengeance upon
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 225 
 
 the Power that had cast him down and wrecked his future was 
 to recoil upon himself. " I have done with Love," he had said, 
 " and with Hope, and with Life as it is known of the honour- 
 able and the upright and the cleanly among men for ever." 
 
 And now ... his thoughts were tipped with fire as he 
 drank in the suddenly-awakened, vivid, delicate beauty of 
 Lynette Mildare. Now he realized the depths of his own 
 mad folly. Oh, to have had the right to hope again, to love 
 again, to live again, and be grateful to David, who had be- 
 trayed him, and Mildred, who had deserted him to this end! 
 Oh, never to have lost the honourable claim to woo such love- 
 liness as this and win such purit)', and wear both as a talis- 
 man upon his heart for ever! He drew breath heavily as he 
 looked at the girl, transformed and glowing under the touch 
 she loved, shining from within like some frail, transparent 
 alabaster lamp with the light that he had helped to rekindle. 
 And as his great chest expanded with deep draughts of the 
 subtle, intoxicating atmosphere of her, and the blood hummed 
 through his veins to that new measure, the last link of his old 
 fetters fell clanking to the ground. And then, with a sting 
 of intolerable remorse, came the memory of his shameful five 
 years' Odyssey spent as a hog among other hogs of the human 
 kind. It had not been an overthrow. It had been a sur- 
 render of all that was good and strong in him to all in him 
 that was despicable and weak and vile. And his soul shud- 
 dered, and his heart contracted in the sickening clutch of 
 shame. 
 
 XXIX 
 
 HE awakened from that lost moment of enthralment to the 
 pang and the shock of self-discovery, and to the knowledge 
 that somebody was hailing him by name from the top of the 
 ladder. 
 
 " Saxham! Doctor! Are you below there?" 
 It was the gay, fresh voice of Beauvayse, halted with a 
 handful of Irregulars, bandoliered, carrying their rifles and 
 the day's provisions, wearing their bayonets on their hips, and 
 sitting their wiry little horses with the ease of old troopers 
 in the lee of the piled-up mound of sandbags that roofed the 
 underground convent. Five men and a Corporal of the Town 
 Guard, similarly burdened and accoutred we know the pale 
 Cockney eyes and the thin face of the Corporal, whose freckles
 
 226 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 have long ago vanished in a uniform gingerbread hue had 
 also taken momentary shelter from one of the intermittent 
 blizzards of Mauser bullets that drifted through Gueldersdorp. 
 
 One Irregular was sitting on an earth-filled packing-case, 
 swearing softly, nursing a disabled right arm, and looking at 
 the corded network of hairy, sunburned muscles that were deli- 
 cately outlined in the bright red stream that trickled from be- 
 neath the rolled-up shirt-sleeve of raspy " greyback." 
 
 " We saw your hairy tied up outside, Doctor, and ' sensed ' 
 your whereabouts, as McFadyen says. Can the ladies spare 
 you for a moment? Sorry to be a nuisance, but one of my 
 fellows has got winged on our way to relieve the garrison at 
 Maxim Outpost, South, and though he swears he is as fit as a 
 fiddle, I don't believe he ought to come on." 
 
 "I'm all right, Sir, 'pon me Sam I am!" protested the dis- 
 mounted trooper. " It's a bit stiff, but the bleedin' '11 take 
 that off. I shan't shoot a tikkie the worse for it. Lay any- 
 body 'ere a caulker I don't." 
 
 Nobody took up the bet, fortunately for the sportsman, as 
 surgical examination proved that the bullet had gone sheer 
 through the fleshy part of the upper arm, breaking the bone, 
 just missing the artery, and leaving a clean hole. 
 
 "You'll have to go to Hospital, my man," pronounced 
 Saxham. 
 
 The face of the wounded Irregular lengthened in disgust. 
 "My crimson luck! And I'd made up my mind to pick off 
 a brace o' them blasted Dutch wart 'ogs over that, there bad 
 job of pore Bob Ellis." 
 
 He blinked violently, and gulped down something that rose 
 in his brown, muscular throat as the voice of a comrade, mid- 
 dle-aged like himself, coffee-baked as a Colonial, and also 
 speaking with the accents of the English barrack-room, took 
 up the tale. 
 
 " Bob Ellis was 'is pal, Sir, and mine, too. We was in 
 the same battery of 'Orse Artillery at Ali Musjid, an' we went 
 up along of Lord Kitchener to Khartoum. An' they shot 'im 
 yesterday. Through the 'ead, clean, an' 'e never spoke an- 
 other word." 
 
 " Through the loop-'ole o' the parapet, it was," went on 
 the wounded man. " Bein' in the advance trench, we've got 
 on neighbourly terms like, with the Dutchies, and Tom Kelly, 
 wot 'as just bin speakin', 'card Bob Ellis promisin' this bloke 
 as 'ow if 'e'd on'y 'urry up an' git killed soon enough, Bob
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 227 
 
 would 'ave 'is farm and 'Is frow when 'e come marchm' along- 
 to Pretoria. 'Oppin' mad the Dopper was at that, an' the 
 names 'e called pore Bob was something disgraceful. An* 
 when 'e got 'im through the loop-'ole me an' Kelly made our 
 minds up to show a bit o' fancy shootin' and lay 'im out in 
 turn. That's 'ow it was, Sir. An' now " the voice grew 
 shaky "they've corked me. Corked me, by God! an' 
 there's not a bloke among the lot of us but me can play the 
 concertina." With his undamaged arm he swung round his 
 haversack, bulging at the top with a cheap, bone-keyed, rose- 
 wood-veneered, gaudy-paper-sided instrument of German make, 
 and hung his head over it in silence. 
 
 " But what on earth has the concertina got to do with it?'* 
 Saxham was frankly puzzled, and Beauvayse, with all his pro- 
 fessional knowledge of " Tommy," was for once nonplussed. 
 
 " You'd better explain to the Doctor, Corporal Leash. I'm 
 out of the running when it comes to killing men with con- 
 certinas. And you don't play as badly as all that, da 
 you?" 
 
 " On the contrywise, Sir," explained the comrade Kelly, 
 " plays uncommon well, he does all the tunes of the latest 
 music-'alls and patriotic songs." 
 
 " An' them blasted Doppers are uncommon fond o' music, 
 d'ye see, Sir," explained the wounded trooper. "They can't 
 keep their ugly 'eads down behind the sandbags when they 
 hears it. Up they pops 'em over the edge and then you 
 take care they don't pop down no more." 
 
 The Captain's gay young laughter was infectious; white 
 teeth showed, or teeth that were not white, in the tanned faces 
 of Irregulars and Town Guardsmen. Even the mourning 
 comrades grinned, and Saxham smiled grimly as Beauvayse 
 cried : 
 
 " By George, a more original method of reprisal I never 
 came across! But it's clear if you can't shoot with that left 
 arm of yours you can't play the concertina. Wish I could 
 knock a tune out of the thing, Leash, for your sake enough 
 to make a Boer put his head up. But I'm a duffer at musical 
 instruments always was. What do you say, my man ? " 
 
 " Beg pardon, Sir." The Corporal with the Town Guards- 
 men saluted, making the most of his five feet two inches. " I 
 can pl'y the squiffer I mean the concertina, Sir a fair treat 
 for a hammatore. And if I might be let to tyke this man's 
 plyce at Maxim Outpost South, Sir, I could 'elp serve the
 
 228 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 gun, too, Sir we've bin' attendin' Artillery Drill in spare 
 hours." 
 
 " I shouldn't think you had any spare hours to spare." 
 Beauvayse looked at the thin, tanned face with liking, and the 
 keen pale eyes met his fairly. 
 
 " We haven't, Sir, but we manage some'ow." 
 
 " But what about your own duty ? " 
 
 " I'm tykin' these men over, Sir." He indicated a solid 
 family grocer, a solicitor, a clerk of the County Court, a 
 Swiss waiter, and two Navy Reserve men reduced to the 
 ranks for aggressive intemperance of the methylated spirit 
 kind, which, in the absence of other liquor, had prevailed 
 among a certain class, until the intoxicating medium was con- 
 fiscated by Government. 
 
 " Captain Thwaite 'as spared us from the Cemetery Works 
 to relieve Corporal Brice an' 'is little lot at Angle VII. South 
 Trenches. A telephone message come from our Colonel to 
 say Brice's men was bad with rheumatism and dysentery 
 but Brice is all right an' fit, Sir and " the pale eyes pleaded 
 out of the brickdust-coloured face " I'd like the charnce o* 
 gettin' nearer to the enemy, Sir an' that's the truth." 
 
 Beauvayse conceded. " Very well. I'll square things with 
 your commanding officer as we go along, and explain matters 
 to the Colonel per telephone from Maxim Outpost South. 
 Come on there when you've handed over your men to Brice." 
 
 The pale eyes danced. " Thank you, Sir." 
 
 " An' I'll owe you a dollar whisky-peg for the good turn," 
 muttered the perforated musician, as he handed over the 
 cherished concertina to the volunteer, " till next Sunday that 
 I see you in the stad." 
 
 " Righto! " said Corporal Keyse, accepting the sacred charge. 
 
 " Look here, though," came from Beauvayse, " there's one 
 thing you must remember what's your name ? " 
 
 " Keyse, sir Corporal, A Company, Gueldersdorp Town 
 Guard." 
 
 " Well, Keyse, you've heard Meisje hiccoughing ninety-three 
 pound projectiles all the morning, haven't you?" 
 
 " Couldn't possibly miss 'er, sir " the pale eyes twinkled 
 as the Corporal finished " not as long as she misses me." 
 
 " She has a talent for missing, otherwise a good many of us 
 fellows would have heard the Long Call before now. But 
 most of her delicate little attentions with the exception of 
 one shell she sent over the Women's Laager, to show the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 229 
 
 people there that she doesn't mind killin' females and children 
 if she can't get men most of 'em are meant for Maxim Out- 
 post South ; and one of 'em may get home sometimes, when the 
 German gunner isn't thinking of his sweetheart. Then, if you 
 find yourself soarin' heavenwards in a kind of scattered 
 anatomical puzzle-map of little bits, don't blame me for oblig- 
 in' you, that's all." 
 
 There was a guffaw from the listeners. W. Keyse saluted, 
 cheerfully joining in. 
 
 " I shan't s'y a word, sir." 
 
 " By George, I believe you ! " said Beauvayse. " What's 
 up ? Seen a ghost ? " 
 
 Saxham had swung his wallet round, producing carbolic, 
 antiseptic gauze, First Aid Bandages, and other surgical in- 
 dispensables from its recesses, as by legerdemain, and a tall, 
 stately black figure, followed by a tall, slender white figure, 
 had risen from the bowels of the earth. The Mother-Su- 
 perior, taking in the situation and the need of her at a glance, 
 called a brief order down the ladder stairway, and went 
 swiftly over to Saxham, whipping a blue apron out of a big 
 pocket, tying it about her, and pulling on a pair of sleeves of 
 the same stuff as she went. Lynette turned to take the basin 
 of hot water that the arm of Sister Tobias extended from 
 below, and the jaws of W. Keyse snapped together. Until 
 he twigged the bronze-red coils of hair under the broad, rough 
 straw hat, he had thought. . . . C'r'r! 
 
 We know how the dancing, provoking, mischievous blue eyes 
 and adorable wrist-thick golden pigtail of Greta du Taine 
 dwelt in his love-stricken remembrance. Her worshipped 
 image had got a little rubbed and dimmish of late to be sure, 
 but breathe on the colours, and you saw them come out clear, 
 and oh ! bewilderingly lovely. 
 
 Billy Keyse had never even beheld the enchantress since 
 that never-to-be-forgotten morning when he had seen her pass 
 at the head of the serpentine procession of pupils, slowly wind- 
 ing across the Market Square. But he knew she was still in 
 Gueldersdorp. He felt her, for one thing. We know that in 
 his case Love's clairvoyant instinct had got its nightcap on. 
 We saw Greta depart on the train bound North for the Du 
 Taine homestead near Johannesburg. But if she were not in 
 Gueldersdorp, why did the left breast-pocket of the now soiled 
 and heavily-patched khaki tunic bulge so? C'r'r! There 
 were six letters inside there, tied up with a frayed bit of blue
 
 230 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 ribbon. Hers? 'Strewth, they were! And each what you 
 might call a Regular One-er of a love-letter. Never mind the 
 paper being thumb-marked as well as cheaply inferior, one can- 
 not expect all the refinements of civilization in a beleaguered 
 town. It was the spelling that although we know W. Keyse 
 to be no cold orthographist occasionally gave him pause as 
 he perused and re-perused the greasy but passionate page. And 
 why did she sign herself " Fare Air ? " The sense of in- 
 gratitude pierced him even as he wondered. Why shouldn't 
 she if she chose? What a proper beast he was to grumble! 
 Him, that ought to be proud of her demeaning herself to stoop 
 to a young chap in a lower station, so to call. And her a 
 Regular Swell. 
 
 He hugged the letters against him with the arm belonging 
 to the hand that held the concertina. Beloved missives, where 
 was the worshipped writer now? Sitting by a tapestry-frame, 
 for he could not imagine her peeling potatoes, down in the 
 Convent bombproof, dreaming of him, weeping over his last 
 letter, or blushfully aware of his vicinity, panting at the bot- 
 tom of the ladder, listening for the beloved accents of the man 
 who . . . Hold hard, though! she had never heard the voice 
 of Billy Keyse ; or he hers for that matter, but he would have 
 recognized it among a thousand. He had told her so, writing 
 with ink pencil, of the kind that when sucked in moments of 
 forgetfulness tastes peculiarly horrible, and tinges the saliva 
 with violet, at spare moments in the trench. A phlegmatic 
 Chinaman acted as Love's postman, handing in the envelopes 
 that were addressed to Mr. W. Keyse, Esquer, in caligraphy 
 that began in the top left-hand corner, and trickled gradually 
 down into the right-hand bottom one. Pumping the Celestial 
 iwas no use. John Tow sabee'd only that a fair foreign devil 
 'gave the one missive, with a tikkie for delivery, and 'spose 
 one time Tow makee plenty good walkee back with anulla 
 paper some pidgin bime-bye catchee more tikkie. If walkee 
 back no paper, too muchee John catchee hellee, reaping only 
 reproaches and no tikkie at all. 
 
 Judge how the heart of W. Keyse bumped against the con- 
 certina when the slender vision in the holland skirt and white 
 blouse and broad straw hat appeared from underground. It 
 was not she, though, Queen of heroic thoughts, inspirer of 
 deeds of daring yet to be done, who followed the Mother- 
 Superior. 
 
 It was the loveliest girl Beauvayse had ever seen, or ever
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 231 
 
 would see. The girl who had stood up in defence of two nuns 
 against a threatening gang of rowdy Transvaalers, one day in 
 the Recreation Ground, the girl who had passed as the Staff 
 dismounted at the Hospital gate on the day of appropriation. 
 The Mayor had had no chance of fulfilling his promise of an 
 introduction. The Mayor's wife, with her two children, was 
 an inmate of the Women's Laager. But at last the kind little 
 genii that deal with happenings and chances had brought Beau- 
 vayse and his divinity face to face. Now she rose out of the 
 Convent, dug-out in the waste that had been the Railway 
 Official's front-garden, like a fair white Psyche-statue, delivered 
 in the course of some convulsion of Nature from the matrix 
 of the earth. And she was even more exquisite than his re- 
 membrance of her, even more . . . 
 
 Beauvayse descended abruptly from an empyrean flight of 
 poetic imagery to remember his torn and soiled silk polo-shirt 
 with its rolled-up sleeves, his earth-stained cords, girt with a 
 belt of vari-coloured webbing, his muddy leather leggings and 
 boots with their caked and dusty spurs, telling of hard service 
 and unresting activity. 
 
 But he looked radiantly handsome as he leapt to the ground 
 and came forward, his tall athletic figure, trained by arduous 
 toil and incessant work, until the last superfluous ounce of 
 flesh had vanished, looking the personification of manliness, 
 his tanned face, still clean-shaven save for the slight fair mous- 
 tache, one to set any maiden dreaming of its straight clean- 
 cut features and beautiful grey-green eyes. The wide felt hat 
 he touched in salute sat with a jaunty air on the close-cropped 
 golden head. Here was a gallant, heartsome vision to greet 
 Lynette, stepping after the Mother into that outer world, 
 where fire belched warning from iron mouths, and steel de- 
 struction sped through the skies, and bullets sang like hornets 
 past your head, or hit the ground near your feet, sending up 
 little bushy columns and spirts of dust. 
 
 The wounded man, now carbolized, plugged, and bandaged 
 by Saxham's dexterous hands, took the hastily-scrawled ad- 
 mission order, involved his officer, the ladies, and the Doctor 
 in a left-handed salute, distributed a parting wink among his 
 comrades, counselled W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper to go 
 tender on the off-side G. of the instrument he dandled, and 
 trudged sturdily away in the direction of the Hospital. 
 
 " Thank you, ma'am. There's no stealing a march on you," 
 Beauvayse said to the Mother-Superior, touching his hat with
 
 232 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 his gay, swaggering grace, as she emptied a bowl of red water 
 on the ground, and whisked the blue apron and sleeves back 
 into the vast recesses of the mysterious pocket. " But you're 
 spoiling us. Hot water isn't on tap, as a rule, for field-dress- 
 ings, and and won't you " He reddened to the fair un- 
 
 tanned skin upon his temples. " Mayn't. I ask, ma'am, to be 
 introduced to Miss Mildare?" 
 
 The Mother complied with his request, smiling indulgently. 
 She had known and loved this bright boy's mother in her early 
 married days. The Dark Rose of Ireland and the White Rose 
 of Devon, a noted Society phrasemonger had dubbed them, 
 seeing them together on the lawn one Ascot Cup Day, their 
 light draperies and delicate ribbons whip-whipping in the 
 pleasant June breeze, ivory-skinned, jetty-locked Celtic beauty 
 and grey-eyed, flaxen-locked Saxon fairness in charming, con- 
 fidential juxtaposition under one lace sunshade, lined with what 
 has been the last new fashionable colour under twenty names, 
 since then; only that year they called it Rose fane* Richard 
 Mildare praised the sunshade, a Paris affair supplied by Worth 
 with his creation, Lady Biddy Bawne's beautiful gown. He 
 asked Lady Biddy to marry him at the back of the box on the 
 Grand Stand when Verneuil was winning the Cup. Who 
 shall dare say that he was not then a sincere lover? thought 
 the Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way. And 
 then she recalled her wandering thoughts, and turned them to 
 the One Lover who never betrays His chosen. And her rapt 
 eyes looking up, seemed to pierce beyond the flaming sky-vault 
 overhead. She forgot all else, suddenly snatched from earthly 
 consciousness to beatific realization of the Divine. 
 
 There had been for some minutes now a lull in the bombard- 
 ment from the ridges. The enemy's guns were silent a space, 
 and the hot batteries of harassed Gueldersdorp snatched a brief 
 respite while Boers gathered for the nine o'clock coffee-drink- 
 ing round their little snapping fires of dried dung and tindery 
 bush. Now and then a rifle cracked, and a bullet sang past 
 or whitted in the dust. But comparative peace brooded over 
 the shattered hamlet of wrecked homes and ploughed-up, lit- 
 tered roads, and raw earthworks blistering in the pitiless sun. 
 
 " Miss Mildare." Beauvayse was speaking in that pleasant, 
 boyish voice of his, standing close to Lynette, his tall head 
 bending for a glimpse of the eyes of golden hazel, that were 
 shaded by the broad, rough straw hat. " If you knew how 
 I've waited for this. Nearly seven weeks since one day in
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 233 
 
 early October, when I saw you on the Recreation Ground, 
 where some brutes were annoying you, and a day or so later 
 you went by the Hospital as I rode up with the Chief. But, 
 of course, you don't remember?" His eyes begged her tx> say 
 she did. 
 
 " I remember quite well." It was the voice he had 
 imagined for her low, and round, and clear, with just an 
 undernote of plaintiveness matching the wistful appeal of her 
 eyes. At the first sound of it a shudder of exquisite delight 
 went through him, as though she had touched him with her 
 slender white, bare hand on the bared breast. 
 
 " Thank you for not quite forgetting. You don't know 
 what it means to me, being kept in mind by you." 
 
 " I do not know that I kept you in mind." There was a 
 touch of girlish dignity in her utterance. " I only said that 
 I remembered quite well." 
 
 He bent his head nearer, and lowered his pleasant voice to 
 a coaxing, confidential tone. 
 
 " You'll think me a presumptuous kind of fellow for talk- 
 ing like this, won't you, Miss Mildare? But the circum- 
 stances are exceptional, aren't they? We're shut up away 
 from the big world outside in a little world of our own, and 
 such chances fall to every man and most of the women here: 
 a shrapnel bullet or a shell-splinter might stop me before an- 
 other hour goes by from ever saying what I've felt for weeks 
 on end had got to be said what I'd risk a dozen lives, if I 
 had 'em, to get the opportunity of saying to you." His hot 
 eagerness frightened her. Her downcast eyelids quivered, and 
 her flushed maiden-face shrank from him. 
 
 "Oh, don't be angry! Don't move away!" Beauvayse en- 
 treated ; for Lynette's anxious glance had gone in search of 
 the Mother-Superior, with whom Saxham was now discussing 
 the nuns' idea of utilizing the Convent as a Convalescent Hos- 
 pital. In another instant she would have taken refuge by her 
 side. " If you knew how I have thought of you and dreamed 
 of you since I saw you! If you could only understand how 
 I shall think of you now! If you could only realize how 
 awfully, utterly strange it is to feel as I am feeling! " His 
 voice was a tremulous, fervent whisper. His eyes gleamed 
 like emeralds in the shadow of the wide-brimmed felt hat. 
 " And 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." 
 
 " Oh, why do you talk to me like this?"
 
 234 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Lynette's whisper was as tremulous as Beauvayse's own. 
 Her eyes lifted to the glowing, ardent face for one shy instant, 
 and found it good to look upon. Men, young and not undesir- 
 able, had tried to make love to her before, at dances and 
 parties and picnics to which she had been chaperoned by the 
 Mayor's wife. But the first hot .glance, the first word that 
 carried the vibration of a passionate meaning, had wakened the 
 old terror in her, and bidden her escape. The nymph had al- 
 ways taken flight at the first step upon the bank, the first 
 rustle of the sedges. She had never lingered to feel the air 
 stirred by another burning breath. She had never asked any 
 one of those other men why he talked like that. Beauvayse 
 went on: 
 
 " Perhaps I even seem a little mad to you fellows have 
 told me lately that I went on as if I had a tile off. Perhaps 
 I'm what the Scotch call ' fly.' I've got Highland blood in 
 me, anyhow. And you have set it on fire, I think started it 
 boiling and racing and leaping in my veins as no woman ever 
 did before. You slender white witch! you fay of mist and 
 moonlight, you've woven a spell, and tangled my soul in it, 
 and nothing in Life or in Death will ever loose me again." 
 His tone changed, became infinitely caressing. " How sweet 
 and dear you are to be so patient with me, while I'm sending 
 the Conventionalities to the rightabout and terrifying the 
 Proprieties. Forgive me, Miss Mildare." 
 
 The pleading in his face was exquisite. She felt as a bee 
 might feel drowning in honey, as she wreathed her white 
 fingers together upon the silver buckle of the brown leather 
 belt she wore, and said confusedly: 
 
 " I ... I believe I ought to be very angry with you." 
 
 His whisper touched her ear like a kiss, and set her trem- 
 bling. 
 
 "But you're not?" 
 
 " T " 
 
 She caught her breath as he came nearer. There was a 
 fragrance from him a perfume of youth and health and vital- 
 ity that was powerful, heady, intoxicating as the first warm, 
 flower-scented wind of Spring, blowing down a mountain- 
 kloof from the high ranges. Her white-rose cheeks took sud- 
 den warmth of hue, and her pale nostrils quivered. A faint, 
 mysterious smile dawned upon her lips. Something of the old 
 terror was upon her still, and yet it was delicious to be afraid 
 of him.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 235 
 
 " Say that you aren't angry with me for being so thunder- 
 ingly presumptuous. Please be kind to me and say it." 
 
 Her lips began to utter disjointed phrases. " What can it 
 matter really ? . . . Oh, very well, then ... if my saying so 
 is of such . . . importance. . . ." 
 
 " More important than anything in the world ! " he de- 
 clared. 
 
 " Very well, then, I am not angry not furiously so, at 
 least." The bud of a smile repressed pouted her lips. 
 
 " And," he begged, " you'll let what I've said to you be our 
 secret? Promise." 
 
 " Very well." 
 
 "You sweetest, kindest, loveliest " 
 
 " Please don't," she entreated. 
 
 " And I may know your Christian name ? " he persisted. 
 " I've thought of everything in the world, and nothing's good 
 enough to fit you." 
 
 " Oh, how silly ! " Her eyes gleamed with laughter. " It 
 is Lynette." 
 
 He caught at it with rapture. " Perfect ! The last touch. 
 . . . The scent of the rose, or say the dewdrop on it. By 
 George, I'm in earnest ! " 
 
 He had spoken incautiously loud. A grating voice address- 
 ing him pulled his head round. 
 
 " Lord Beauvayse . . ." 
 
 "Did you speak to me, Doctor? As I was saying, Miss 
 Mildare," he went on, continuing the blameless conversation, 
 " dust storms and flies are the twin curses of South Africa." 
 
 The harsh voice spoke to him again. He looked round, met 
 Saxham's eyes, hard and cold as blue stones. The Doctor said 
 grimly: 
 
 " You may not be aware that your men are drawing 
 fire." 
 
 It was undeniable fact. The bullets had begun to hit the 
 ground under the horses' bellies, spurting little columns of 
 dust and flattening against the stones. Coffee-drinking was 
 over in the enemy's trenches, and the business of the day had 
 begun again. Beauvayse bade the ladies good-morning, and 
 swung himself into the saddle. 
 
 "Au revoir, Miss Mildare. Please get under cover at 
 once." The proprietorship in the tone stung Saxham to winc- 
 ing. " Good-morning, ma'am," he cried to the Mother- 
 Superior, " we know you ignore bullets. So long, Doctor.
 
 236 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Hope I shan't count one in your day's casualty-bag. Ready, 
 boys?" 
 
 The chatting troopers sprang to alert attention. W. Keyse, 
 pensively boring the sandy earth with the pneumatic auger of 
 imagination, in search of the loved one, believed to inhabit the 
 Convent bombproof, was recalled to the surface by the curtly- 
 uttered command, and knew the thrill of hero-worship as 
 Beauvayse threw out his tightly-clenched hand, and the 
 troopers, answering the signal, broke into a trot. The hot 
 dust scurried at the horses' retreating heels. Corporal Keyse, 
 trudging staunchly in their wake with his five Town Guards- 
 men, became ghostlike, enveloped in an African replica of the 
 ginger-coloured type of London fog. And the Mother- 
 Superior looked at her well-worn watch. 
 
 " My child, we must be moving if you are coming with me 
 to the Women's Laager. I am nearly an hour late as it is." 
 
 " I am ready, Mother dear." 
 
 Lynette's eyes came back from following that dust-cloud in 
 the southern distance to meet the hungry, jealous fires of Sax- 
 ham's gaze. 
 
 He had seen Beauvayse's ardent look, and her shy heart's 
 first leaf unfolded in the answering blush, and a spasm of in- 
 tolerable anger gripped him as he saw. He turned away 
 silently, cursing his own folly, and unhitched his horse's bridle 
 from the broken gatepost. With the act a crowd rose up be- 
 fore Lynette and a frightened horse reared, threatening to 
 fall upon three women-figures hurrying along the side-walk 
 outside the Hospital, and a heavily-shouldered, black-haired 
 man in shabby white drills stepped out of the throng and 
 seized the flying bridoon-rein, and wrenched the brute down. 
 She recognized the horse and the man again, and exclaimed: 
 
 " Why . . . Mother, don't you remember the rearing horse 
 outside the Hospital that day in October? It was Dr. Sax- 
 ham who caught him, and saved us from getting hurt." 
 
 " And we never even thanked you." The Mother-Superior 
 turned to Saxham with outstretched hand and the smile that 
 made her grave face beautiful. " What you must have 
 thought! . . ." 
 
 " I looked for the person who had been so prompt, but you 
 had vanished where, nobody seemed to know," Lynette told 
 him with her clear eyes on the stern, square face. " And then 
 a man in the crowd called ^out, ' It's the Dop Doctor!' And
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 237 
 
 I thought what an odd nickname! . . ." She broke off in 
 dismay. Saxham had become livid. His grim jaws clamped 
 themselves together, and the blue eyes grew hard as stone. 
 One instant he stood immovable, the Waler's bridle on his left 
 arm, his right hand clenched upon the old hunting-crop. Then 
 he said very coldly and distinctly: 
 
 " As you observe, it is a queer nickname. But, at any rate, 
 I had fairly earned " 
 
 The bugle from the Staff headquarters sounded, drowning 
 the rest of the sentence. The Catholic Church bell tolled. 
 The other bells took up the warning, and the sentries called 
 again from post to post: 
 
 ''Ware gun, Number Two! Southern Quarter, 'ware!" 
 
 The Krupp bellowed from the enemy's north redoubt, and 
 cleverly lobbed a seven-pound shell not far behind that rapidly- 
 moving, distant pillar of dust, the nucleus of which was a 
 little troop of cantering Irregulars, and not far in front of the 
 lower, slower-moving cloud, the heart of which was a little 
 knot of tramping Town Guardsmen. The shell burst with a 
 splitting crack, earth and flying stones mingled with the deadly 
 green flame and the poisonous chemical fumes of the lyddite. 
 Figures scurried hither and thither in the smoke and smother; 
 one lay prone upon the ground. . . . 
 
 At the instant of the explosion Saxham had leaped forwards, 
 setting his body and the horse's as a bulwark between Death 
 and the two women. Now, though Lynette's rough straw 
 hat had been whisked from her head by a force invisible, he 
 saw her safe, caught in the Mother-Superior's embrace, 
 sheltered by the tall, protecting figure as the sapling is sheltered 
 by the pine. 
 
 " We are not hurt," the Mother protested, though her cheek 
 had been cut by a flying fluke of flint, and was bleeding. " But 
 look . . . over there ! " She pointed over the veld to the 
 prostrate brown figure, and a cry of alarm broke from Lynette. 
 
 " Oh, Mother, who . . . ? " 
 
 " It is a Town Guardsman," Saxham answered, his cold 
 blue eyes meeting the wild frightened gaze of the pale girl. 
 " Lord Beauvayse and the Irregulars got off scot-free. Rev- 
 erend Mother, do not think of coming. Please go on to the 
 Women's Laager. I will see to the wounded man, and follow 
 by-and-by." 
 
 He mounted, refusing all offers of aid, and rode off. Look-
 
 238 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 ing back an instant, he saw the black figure of the woman 
 and the white figure of the girl setting out. upon their perilous 
 journey over the bare patch of ground where Death made 
 harvest every day. They kissed each other before they started, 
 and again Saxham thought of Ruth and Naomi. If Ruth had 
 been only one half as lovely as this Convent-grown lily, Boaz 
 was decidedly a lucky man. But he had been a respectable, 
 sober, steady-going farmer, and not a man of thirty-six with- 
 out a ten-pound note in the world, with a blighted career to 
 regret, and five years of drunken wastrelhood to be ashamed of. 
 And yet . . . the drunken wastrel had been a man of mark 
 once, and earned his thousands. And the success that had been 
 achieved, and lost, could be rewon, and the career that had 
 been pursued and abandoned could be his Saxham's again. 
 And what were his publishers doing with those accumulated 
 royalties? For he knew from Taggart. and McFadyen that 
 his books still sold. 
 
 "The Past is done with," he said aloud. "Why should 
 not the Future be fair? " 
 
 And yet he had nearly yielded to the impulse to own to 
 those degraded years, and claim the nickname they had earned 
 him, and take her loathing and contempt in exchange. What 
 sudden madness had possessed him, akin to that unaccountable, 
 overmastering surge of emotion that he had known just now 
 when he saw her tears? 
 
 We know the name of the divine madness, but we know 
 not why it comes. Suddenly, after long years, in a crowded 
 place or in a solitude where two are, it is upon you or upon 
 me. The blood is changed to strange, ethereal idea, the pulse 
 beats a tune that is as old as the Earth itself, but yet eternally 
 new. Every breath we draw is rapture, every step we take 
 leads us one way. One voice calls through all the voices, one 
 hand beckons whether it will or no, and we follow because we 
 must. With the Atlantic rolling between us I can feel your 
 heart beat against mine, and your lips breathe into me your 
 soul. The light that was upon your face, the look that was 
 in your eyes as you gave the unforgettable, immemorial kiss, 
 the clasp of your hands, the rising and falling of your heart, 
 like a wave beneath a sea-bird, like a sea-bird above a wave, 
 shall be with me always, even to the end of time and beyond 
 it. 
 
 For there are many loves, but one Love.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 239 
 
 XXX 
 
 A LONG-LEGGED, thinnish officer, riding a khaki-coloured bicycle 
 over a dusty stretch of shrapnel-raked ground, carrying a 
 riding-whip tucked under his arm and wearing steel jack-spurs, 
 might have been considered a laughter-provoking object else- 
 where, but the point was lost for Gueldersdorp. He got off 
 his metal steed amongst the zipping bullets, and came over to 
 the little group of Town Guards that were gathered round 
 Saxham, who had just ridden up, and their prostrate comrade, 
 who writhed and groaned lustily. 
 
 "You have a casualty. Serious?" 
 
 Saxham looked up, and his hard glance softened in recog- 
 nition of the Chief. 
 
 " I'll tell you in a moment, sir." 
 
 The earth-stained khaki tunic was torn down the left side 
 and drenched with ominous red. A little pool of the same 
 colour had gathered under the sufferer. 
 
 "He looks gassly, don't him?" muttered one of the by- 
 standers, the Swiss baker who was not Swiss. 
 
 " Makes plenty of noise," said the County Court clerk 
 hypercritically, " for a dying man." 
 
 "Oh Lud! oh Lud!"' 
 
 The subject had bellowed with sonority, testifying at least 
 to the possession of an uninjured diaphragm, as Saxham began 
 to cut away the tunic. 
 
 " Oh, come now," said a brisk, pleasant, incisive voice that 
 sent an electric shock bolting through the presumably shattered 
 frame. " That's not. so bad ! " 
 
 " I told you so," muttered the County Court clerk to the 
 Swiss waiter. 
 
 " You remember me, Colonel ? " 
 
 Haggard, despairing eyes rolled up at the Chief appealingly. 
 He had met the gaze of those oyster-orbs before. He rec- 
 ognized Alderman Brooker, proprietor of the grocery stores in 
 Market Square, victim of the outrage perpetrated on a sentry 
 near the Convent on a certain memorable night in October 
 last. 
 
 "Yes, my man. Anything I can do?" He knelt down 
 beside the prostrate form. 
 
 " You can tell my country, sir, that I died willingly," panted 
 the moribund.
 
 240 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "With pleasure, when you're dead. But you're not yet, 
 you know, Brooker." His keen glance was following the run 
 of the Doctor's surgical scissors through the rough stuff and 
 revelling in discovery. And Saxham's set, square face and 
 stern eyes were for once all alight with laughter. The dying 
 man went on: 
 
 " It's a privilege, sir, an inestimable privilege, to have shed 
 one's blood in a great cause." 
 
 " It is, Mr. Brooker, but this is different stuff." His keen 
 face wrinkled with amusement as he sniffed, and dipped a 
 finger in the crimson puddle. " Too sticky." He put the 
 finger to his tongue " and too sweet. Show him the bottle, 
 Saxham." 
 
 The Doctor, imperturbably grave, held forth at the end of 
 the scissors the ripped-up ruins of a small-sized india-rubber 
 hot-water bottle, a ductile vessel that, buttoned inside the 
 khaki tunic, had adapted itself not uncomfortably to the still 
 existing rotundities of the Alderman's figure. A hyaena yell of 
 laughter broke from each of the crowding heads. Brooker's 
 face assumed the hue of the scarlet flannel chest-protector ex- 
 posed by the ruthless steel. 
 
 "What the what the ?" he stuttered. 
 
 " Yes, that's the question. What the devil was inside it, 
 Brooker, when the shell-splinter hit you in the tummy and it 
 saved your life? Stand him on his legs, men; he's as right 
 as rain. Now, Brooker?" 
 
 Brooker, without volition, assumed the perpendicular, and 
 began to babble: 
 
 " To tell the truth, sir, it was loquat syrup. Very soothing 
 to the chest, and, upon my honour, perfectly wholesome. 
 Mrs. Brooker makes it regularly every year, and we sell a 
 twenty-gallon barrel over the counter, besides what we keep 
 for ourselves. And if I am to be exposed to mock- 
 ery when Providence has snatched me from the verge of the 
 grave . . ." 
 
 " Not a watery grave, Brooker," came from the Chief, with 
 an irrepressible chuckle " a syrupy one. And have I your 
 word of honour that this is a non-alcoholic beverage ? " 
 
 " Sir, to be candid with you, I won't deny but what it might 
 contain a certain proportion of brandy. And the nights in 
 the trench being particularly cold and myself constitutionally 
 liable to chill . . . I I find a drop now and then a comfort, 
 sir."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 241 
 
 " Ah, and have you any more of this kind of comfort at 
 your place of business or elsewhere?" 
 
 " Why why . . ." the Alderman faltered, " there might 
 be a little keg, sir, in the shop, under the desk in the counting- 
 house." 
 
 " Requisitioned, Mr. Brooker, as a Government store. 
 You may feel more chilly without it; you'll certainly sleep 
 more lightly. As far as I can see, it has been more useful 
 outside of you than ever it was in. And the safety of this 
 town depends on the cool heads of the defenders who man the 
 trenches. A fuddled man behind a gun is worse than no man 
 to me." 
 
 The voice rang hard and clear as a gong. " I'm no teeto- 
 taller. Abstinence is the rule I enforce, by precept and ex- 
 ample. While men are men they'll drink strong liquor. But 
 as long as they are not fool-men and brute-men, they can be 
 trusted not to lap when they're on duty. Those I find un- 
 trustworthy I mark down, and they will be dealt with rigor- 
 ously. You understand me, Brooker? You look as if you did. 
 You've had a narrow squeak. Be thankful for it that nothing 
 but a bruise over the ribs has come of it. Corporal, fall in 
 your men, and get to your duty." 
 
 W. Keyse and his martial citizens tramped on, the re- 
 suscitated Brooker flying rags of sanguine stain. Then the 
 stern face of the Chief broke up in laughter. The crinkled-up 
 eyes ran over with tears of mirth. 
 
 "Lord, that fellow will be the death of me! Tartuglia in 
 the flesh how old Gozzi would have revelled in him ! Those 
 pathetic, osyter-eyes, that round, flabby face, that comic nose, 
 and the bleating voice with the sentimental quaver in it, reel- 
 ing off the live man's dying speech. . . ." He wiped his 
 brimming eyes. " Since the time when Boer spies hocussed 
 him on guard you remember that lovely affair? he's reg- 
 istered a vow to impress me with his gallantry and devotion, or 
 die in the attempt. He's the most admirably unconscious 
 humbug I've ever yet met. Sands his sugar and brown-papers 
 his teas philanthropically, for the good of the public, and de- 
 nounces men who put in Old Squareface and whisky-pegs, as 
 he fuddles himself with his loquat brandy after shop hours in 
 the sitting-room back of the store. But let us be thankful that 
 Providence has sent Brooker on a special mission to play 
 Pantaloon in this grimmish little interlude of ours. For we'll 
 want every scrap of Comic Relief we can get by-and-by, Sax-
 
 242 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 ham, if the other one doesn't turn up say by the middle of 
 January." 
 
 " I understand, sir." Saxham, to whom this man's face 
 was as a book well loved, read in it that the Commissariat was 
 caving. " There has been another Boer cattle-raid ? " 
 
 The face that was turned to his own in reply had suddenly 
 grown deeply-lined and haggard. " There has been a lot of 
 cattle-shooting. Lobbing shrapnel at grazing cows was always 
 quite a favourite game with Bronnckers. But his gunners hit 
 oftener than they used to. And the Government forage won't 
 hold out for ever." He patted the brown Waler, who pricked 
 his sagacious ears and threw up his handsome bluntish head in 
 acknowledgment of his master's caress. " Presently we shall 
 be killing our mounts to save their lives and ours. Oats and 
 horseflesh will keep life in men and in children and women. 
 . . . The devil of it is, Saxham, that there are such a lot 
 of women." 
 
 " And seventy-five out of a hundred of them stayed out of 
 pure curiosity," came grimly from Saxham. 
 
 " To see what a siege would be like. Well, poor souls, they 
 know now! You were going over to the Women's Laager. 
 I'll walk with you, and say my say as I go. I'm on my way 
 to Nordenfeldt Fort West. Something has gone wrong with 
 the telephone-wire between there and Staff headquarters, and 
 I can't get anything through but Volapuk or Esperanto. And 
 those happen to be two of the languages I haven't studied." 
 The dry, humorous smile curved the reddish-brown moustache 
 again. The pleasant little whistle stirred the short-clipped hairs 
 of it as the two men turned in the direction of the Women's 
 Laager, over which the Red-cross flag was fluttering, and 
 where the spider with the little Boer mare, picking at the 
 scanty grass, waited outside the earthworks. Saxham 's eyes 
 did not travel so far. They were fastened upon a tall black 
 figure and a less tall and more slender white figure that were 
 by this time halfway upon their perilous journey across the 
 patch of veld, bare and scorched by hellish fires, and ploughed 
 by shrapnel ball into furrows whence Death had reaped his 
 harvest day by day. 
 
 " There goes one of the women we couldn't have done 
 without," commented his companion, wheeling his bicycle be- 
 side Saxham, leading the brown Waler. 
 
 " It is the Mother-Superior," Saxham said, " with her ward, 
 Miss Mildare."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 243 
 
 " Ah ! My Invariable reply to Beauvayse you know my 
 junior A.D.C., who daily clamours for an introduction to Miss 
 Mildare is, that I have not yet had one myself, though at 
 the outset of affairs I encountered the young lady under rather 
 trying circumstances, in which she showed plenty of pluck. 
 I thought I had told you. No? Well, it was one morning 
 on the Recreation Ground. The School was out walking a 
 brace of nuns in charge, and some Dutch loafers mobbed them 
 threatened to lay hands on the Sisters and Miss Mildare 
 stood up in defence head up, eyes blazing, a slim, tawny- 
 haired young lioness ready to spring. And Beauvayse was 
 with me, and ever since then has been dead set upon making 
 her acquaintance." 
 
 Saxham's blood warmed to the picture. But he said, and 
 his tone was not pleasant : " Lord Beauvayse attained the 
 height of his ambition a few minutes ago." 
 
 " Did he ? Well, I hope disillusion was not the outcome 
 of realization. Up to the present " the humorous, keen eyes 
 were wrinkled at the corners " all the boy's swans have 
 been geese, some of 'em the sable kind." 
 
 Saxham answered stiffly: "I should say that in- this case 
 the swan decidedly predominates." 
 
 The other whistled a bar of his pleasant little tune before 
 he spoke again. " It is a capital thing for Beauvayse, being 
 shut up here, out of the way of women." 
 
 " Are there no women in Gueldersdorp ? " 
 
 " None of the kind Beauvayse's canoe is given to capsizing 
 on." The line in his senior's cheek flickered with a hinted 
 smile. " None of the kind that run after him, lie in wait for 
 him, buzz round him like wasps about a honey-bowl. I've de- 
 veloped muscle getting the boy out of amatory scrapes, with the 
 Society octopus, with the Garrison husband-hunter, with the 
 professional man-eater, theatrical or music-hall; and the 
 latest, most inexpressible She, is always the loveliest woman in 
 the world. Queer world ! " 
 
 " A damned queer world ! " agreed Saxham. 
 
 " I'd prefer to call it a blessed queer one, because, with all 
 its chaotic, weltering incongruities there's a Carlyleism for 
 you I love it! I couldn't live without loving it and laugh- 
 ing at it, any more than Beauvayse could get on minus an affair 
 of the heart. Ah, yes, that amatory lyre of his is an uncom- 
 monly adaptable instrument. I've known it thrummed to the 
 praises of a middle-aged Duchess quite a beauty still, even by
 
 244 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 daylight, with her three veils on, and an Operatic soprano, with 
 a mascot cockatoo, not to mention a round dozen of frisky 
 matrons of the kind that exploit nice boys. Just before we 
 came out, it could play nothing but that famous song-and-dance 
 tune that London went mad over at the Jollity in June It is 
 .raving over still, I believe. Can't give you the exact title of 
 ; the thing, but ' Darling, will You meet Me in the Centre of 
 the Circle that the Limelight Makes upon the Floor, Tiddle-e- 
 yum ? ' would meet the case. We have Musical Comedy now 
 in place of what used to be Burlesque in your London days, 
 Saxham, with a Leading Lady instead of a Principal Boy, and 
 a Chorus in long skirts." 
 
 Saxham admitted with a cynical twitch of the mouth: 
 
 " There's nothing so short as a long skirt properly man- 
 aged." 
 
 " You're right. And Lessie Lavigne and the rest of the 
 nimble sisterhood devote their gifts Thespian and Terp- 
 sichorean to demonstrating the fact. Oh, damned cowardly 
 hounds!" The voice jarred and clanged with irrepressible 
 anger. "Saxham, can't you see? Bronncker's Sharpshooters 
 are sniping at the women the Sister of Mercy and the girl." 
 
 His glance, as well as Saxham's, had followed the tall 
 black figure and the slender white figure on their journey 
 through Death's harvest-field. But his trained eye had been 
 first to see the little jets and puffs of sickly hot, reddish dust 
 rising about their perilous path. They walked quickly, but 
 without hurry, keeping a pace apart, and holding one another 
 by the hand. Saxham, watching them, said, with dry lips and 
 a deadly sickness at the heart: 
 
 " And we can do nothing? " 
 
 " Nothing ! It's one of those things a man has got to look 
 on at, and wonder why the Almighty doesn't interfere. Oh, 
 to have the fellows triced up for three dozen of the best apiece 
 good old-fashioned measure. See, they're getting near the 
 laager now. They'll soon be under cover. But I wonder the 
 Convent cares to risk its ewe lanb on that patch of veld." 
 
 " It is my doing." Saxham's eyes were glued on the black 
 figure and the white figure nearing, nearing the embrasure in 
 the earthwork redoubt, and his face was of an ugly blue-white, 
 and dabbled with sweat. 
 
 "Your doing? " 
 
 " Mine. I was called in, to find Miss Mildare breaking 
 down from suspense, and the overstrain of reaction. And to
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 245 
 
 avert even worse evils, I prescribed the tonic of danger. There 
 was no choice In at last! " 
 
 The Sister of Mercy and the girl had vanished behind the 
 dumpy earth-bag walls. He thought the white figure had 
 glanced back, and waved its hand, and then a question from his 
 companion startled him beyond his ordinary stolid self-control. 
 
 " By the way . . . with reference to Miss Mildare, have you 
 any idea whether she proposes taking the veil?" 
 
 " How should I have ideas upon the possibility?" The 
 opaque, smooth skin of the square, pale face was dyed with a 
 sudden rush of dark blood. The Colonel did not look at it, 
 but said, as a bullet sang upon a stone near his boot, and flat- 
 tened into a shiny star of lead: 
 
 " I would give something to hear you laugh sometimes, 
 Saxham. You're too much in earnest, my dear fellow. Burub 
 Njal himself could hardly have been more grim." 
 
 Saxham answered: 
 
 " That fellow in the Saga, you mean. He laughed only at 
 the end, I think, when the great roof-beam burned through and 
 the hall fell in. But my castle tumbled about my ears in the 
 beginning, and I laughed then, I remember." 
 
 " And, take it from me, you will live to laugh again and 
 again," said the kindly voice, " at the man who took it for 
 granted that everything was over, and did not set to work by 
 dawn of the next day building up the hall greater than before. 
 Those old Vikings did ' and each time the high seat was dight 
 more splendidly, and the hangings of the closed beds woven 
 more fair.' They never knew when they were beaten, those 
 grand old fellows, and so it came about that they never were. 
 By the way, I have something here that concerns you." 
 
 " Concerns me? " 
 
 " I think I may say, nearly concerns you. A paragraph in 
 this copy of the Cape Tourn Mercury, which, by the way, is 
 three weeks old." 
 
 A rubbed and shabby newspaper, folded small, came out of 
 the baggy breast-pocket of the khaki jacket. Saxham received 
 it with visible annoyance. 
 
 " Some belated notice of one of my books." The scowl with 
 which he surveyed the paper testified to a strong desire to pitch 
 it to the winds. 
 
 " Not a bit of it. It's an advertisement inserted by a London 
 f. rm of solicitors 1 Donkin, Donkin, and Judd, Lincoln's Inn. 
 Possibly you are acquainted with Donkin, if not with Judd."
 
 246 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "They are the solicitors for the trustees of my mother's 
 property, sir. I heard from them three years ago, when I 
 was at Diamond Town. They returned my last letter to her, 
 and told me of her death." 
 
 " They state in the usual formula that it will be to your ad- 
 vantage to communicate with them. May I, as a friend, urge 
 on you the necessity of doing so." 
 
 Saxham's grim mouth shut close. His eyes brooded sul- 
 lenly. 
 
 " I will think it over, sir." 
 
 " You haven't much time. A despatch-runner from 
 Koodoosvaal got. through the enemy's lines last night with 
 some letters and this paper. No, no word of the Relief. His 
 verbal news was practically nil. He goes out at midnight with 
 some cipher messages. And, if you will let me have your 
 reply to the advertisement with the returned paper by eleven 
 at latest, I will see that it is sent." The rather peremptory 
 tone softened became persuasive. "You must build up the 
 great hall again, Saxham, and building can't be done without 
 money. And it occurs to me that this may be some question 
 of a legacy." 
 
 " My father was not a wealthy man," Saxham said. " He 
 gave me a costly education, later advanced four thousand 
 pounds for the purchase of a West End practice, upon the 
 understanding that I was to expect no more from him, and 
 that the bulk of his property, with the exception of a sum left 
 as provision for my mother, should be strictly entailed upon 
 my brother and his heirs, if he should marry. The arrange- 
 ment was most just, as I was then in receipt of a considerable 
 income from my profession, and my father died before my cir- 
 cumstances altered for the worse. Independently of the pro- 
 vision he made for her, my mother possessed a small jointure, 
 a freehold estate in South Wales, bringing in, when the house 
 is let, about a hundred and fifty pounds a year. That was 
 to have been left to me as the younger son. But her trustees 
 informed me, through these solicitors, that she had changed 
 her mind, as she had a perfect right to do, and bequeathed 
 everything she possessed to my brother's son, a child who " 
 Saxham's voice was deadly cold "may be about three years 
 old." 
 
 " A later will may have been found. If I have any influ- 
 ence with you, Saxham, I would use it in urging you to reply 
 to the advertisement."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 247 
 
 Saxham agreed unwillingly : " Very well." 
 
 The other knew the point gained, and adroitly changed the 
 conversation. It grew severely technical, bristling with scien- 
 tific views, dealing chiefly with food-values. The black cloud 
 cleared from Saxham's forehead as he lectured on the energy- 
 fuels, and settled the minimum of protein, fat, starch, and 
 sugar necessary to keep the furnace of Life burning in the 
 human body. 
 
 Milk, that precious fluid, could henceforth only be given to 
 invalids and children. Margarine and jam were severely 
 relegated to the list of luxuries. Sardines, tinned salmon, and 
 American canned goods had entirely given out. And flour, the 
 staff of life, was vanishing. 
 
 The joy of battle lightened in their faces as they talked, 
 forging weapons that should make men enduring, and Saxham 
 warmed. His icy crust of habitual silence melted and broke 
 up. He became eloquent, pouring out his treasured projects, 
 suggesting substitutes for this, and makeshifts for that and the 
 other. He was in his element he knew the ground he trod. 
 He thrust out his grim under-jaw, and hulked with his heavy 
 shoulders as he talked to this man who understood; and every 
 supple movement of his surgeon's hand pointed out some fresh 
 expedient, and the singing bullets went by or whit-whitted 
 about them in the dust, and now and then a shell burst over 
 patient Gueldersdorp. 
 
 They parted at the Women's Laager, and as the khaki 
 bicycle grew small in distance, Saxham realized with a shock 
 that he was happy, that life had suddenly become sweet, and 
 opened out anew before him in a vista, not of shining promise, 
 but with one golden gleam of Hope in it, to a man freed by 
 the force of Will from the bondage of that accursed liquor 
 thirst. Freed! If freed in truth, why should the sight and 
 smell even of Brooker's sticky loquat brandy have set the long 
 denied palate craving? Saxham put that question fror?. hiru 
 with both hands. 
 
 And then he frowned, thinking of that adaptable instrument 
 that had thrummed an accompaniment to the arias of the Opera 
 soprano as to the Society drawing-room duets, sung with the 
 frisky married ladies who liked nice boys, and had made 
 tinkling music for the twinkling small feet, and the strident 
 voice of Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity Theatre, and now must 
 serenade outside a Convent close in beleaguered Gueldersdorp, 
 where the whitest of maiden lilies bloomed, tall and pure and
 
 248 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 slender and unharmed, in a raging tempest of fire and steel 
 and lead. 
 
 XXXI 
 
 PRAY give a thought to the spy, Walt Slabbert, languishing in 
 durance vile under the yellow flag. Several times the first- 
 class, up-to-date, effective artillery of his countrymen, being 
 brought to bear upon the gaol, had caused the captive to bound 
 like the proverbial parched pea, and to curse with curses not 
 only loud but fervent the indiscriminating zeal of his brother 
 patriots. 
 
 He was, though lost, to sight behind the walls of what 
 Emigration Jane designated the jug, still fondly dear to one 
 whose pliant affections, rudely disentangled by the hand of 
 perfidy from the person of That There Green, had twined 
 vigorously about the slouching person of the young Boer. 
 Letters were received, but not forwarded to suspects enjoying 
 the hospitality of the Government, so communication with the 
 object of her dreams was painfully impossible. Stratagems 
 were not successful. A passionate missive concealed in a 
 plum-pudding before it was put on to boil had become in- 
 corporated with the individuality of a prison official, who ob- 
 jected on principle to waste. 
 
 On Sundays, when you could go out without your 'art in 
 your mouth on account of them 'orful shellses, a fair female 
 form in a large and flamboyant hat, whose imitation ostridge 
 tips were now mere bundles of quill shavings, and whose 
 flowers were as wilted as tht other blossoms of her heart, 
 wandered disconsolately round her Walt's place of bondage, 
 waving a lily hand on the chance of being seen and recognized. 
 Tactics productive of nothing but blown kisses on the part 
 of extra-susceptible warders, and one or two troopers of the 
 B.S.A.P., who ought to have known better. These advances 
 Walt's bereaved betrothed rejected with ringing sniffs of 
 scorn, yet, of such conflicting elements is the feminine heart 
 composed, found them strangely solacing. 
 
 She 'ad 'ad 'er month's notice from Sister Tobias's upon the 
 morning following the night of the tragedy, another score to 
 the account of the traitor Keyse. Arriving unseemly late, and 
 in an agitated state of mind, and could you wonder, after her 
 young man had been pinched and took away? She had 
 mechanically accounted for her late return in the well-worn
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 249 
 
 formula of Kentish Town, explaining to the surprised Sisters 
 that there 'ad bin a Haccident on the Underground between 
 the Edgeware Road and 'Ammersmiff, an' that her sister 
 Hemmaline had bin took bad in consequence, the second being 
 looked for at the month's end; and to leave that pore dear in 
 that state her 'usband being at his Social Club was more 
 than Emigration Jane 'ad 'ad the 'art to do. She received her 
 dismissal to bed, and the advice to examine her conscience care- 
 fully, before retiring with defiance, culminating in an attack 
 of whooping hysteria. Nor was she other than wildly elated 
 at the knowledge that nobody slept in the Convent that night, 
 until she had run down. The character supplied by Sister 
 Tobias to her next employer specified terminological inexacti- 
 tude among her failings, combined with lack of emotional self- 
 control, but laid stress on an affectionate disposition, and a 
 tendency to intermittent attacks of hard work. 
 
 She was now with her new mistress and the kids, pigging 
 you couldn't call it nothink else, not to be truthful you couldn't 
 at the Women's Laager, along of them there dirty Dutch 
 frows. She refrained from too candid criticism of her Walt's 
 countrywomen, but it was proper 'ard all the same not to 
 call crock and muck by their right names. 
 
 Languishing in seclusion, week and week about, cooking scant 
 meals of their Commissariat beef moistened with gravy, made 
 from them patent packets of Consecrated Soup, can you won- 
 der that her burden of bitterness against W. Keyse, author of 
 all her wrongs, instrument most actively potential in the jug- 
 ging of her young man, bulked larger every day? She was not 
 one to 'ave the world's 'eel upon 'er without turning like a 
 worm. No Fear, and Chance it. Her bosom heaved under 
 the soiled two-and-elevenpenny peek-a-boo " blowze " as she 
 registered her vow. That there Keyse the conduct of the 
 faithless Mr. Green appeared almost blonde in complexion be- 
 side the suave villainy of the other That There Keyse should 
 Rue the Day! 
 
 How to make him ? that was the question. Then came the 
 dazzling flash of inspiration but not until they had met 
 again. 
 
 She was circulating hungry-hearted about the brick-built 
 case that held her jewel the man who had held out that vista 
 of a home, and called her his good little Boer-wife to be. We 
 know it was a mere bait designed to allure and dazzle the 
 Boer spy had caught many women with it before. Do you
 
 250 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 despise her and those others for the predominance of the 
 primal instinct, the sacred passion for the inviolate hearth? 
 Not so much they yearned for the man as for the roof-tree, 
 whose roots are twined about the heart-strings of the natural 
 woman, the spreading rafter-branches of which shelter little 
 downy heads. 
 
 She encountered the traitor, I say, and her eyes darted fire 
 beneath a bristling palisade of iron curling-pins. She had not 
 the heart these days to free her imprisoned tresses. The villain 
 had the perishing nerve to accost her, jauntily touching the 
 smasher hat. 
 
 ' 'Day, Miss! 'Aven't seen you since when I can't think." 
 
 She replied with a ringing sniff and a glance of infinite scorn 
 that she would trouble him not to think; and that she regarded 
 low, interfering, vulgar fellows as the dirt under her feet. 
 So there! 
 
 " Cr'r ! " He was took aback, but not to the extent of 
 taking hisself off, which he ought to. " You're fair mad with 
 me, an' no mistyke." His pale eyes were unmistakably good- 
 natured ; the loss of the yellow freckles, swamped in a fine, 
 uniform, brilliant hue, was an improvement, she could not help 
 thinking. " But I only did my duty, Miss, same as another 
 chap would have 'ad to. Look 'ere! Come and 'ave a split 
 gingerade." 
 
 The delicious beverage was three shillings the bottle. She 
 frowned, but hesitated. He persisted ; she ended by giving in. 
 Weeks and weeks since she had walked with a young man ! 
 The Dutchman's saloon was closed and barricaded ; its owner 
 had made tracks to his Transvaal friends at the beginning of 
 the siege. But the aromatic beer-cellar was one of the places 
 open. They went in there. Oh! the deliciousness of that 
 first sip of the stinging, fizzling beverage ! He lifted his glass 
 in the way that she remembered, and drank a toast. 
 
 " 'Er 'ealth ! If you knew how I bin wantin' to git word 
 of 'er! She's well, isn't she, Miss? Lumme! the Fair Old 
 Time I got when I see the Convent standin' empty. . . . 
 Gone into laager near the Railway Works now, you 'ave, I 
 know. Safe, if not stric'ly luxurious. But I git the Regu- 
 lar Hump when I think of of a Angel like 'Er 'avin' to live 
 an 'eat an' sleep in a a in a bloomin' rabbit-'ole." He 
 sighed as he wiped the stinging froth from his upper lip. 
 
 " Pity you can't tell 'er so ! " The sarcasm would have iti 
 way, out ii failed of his great simplicity.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 251 
 
 " That's why I bin lookin' out for you." He blushed 
 through the brick-dust hue as he extract a fatigued-looking 
 letter from a baggy breast-pocket in which h had sojourned in 
 company with a tobacco-pouch, a pipe which must not be 
 smoked in the trenches if a man would prefer to do without a 
 bullet through his brain, a handful of screws not innocent of 
 lubricating medium, a clasp-knife, a flat tin box of carbolized, 
 vaseline, a First-Aid bandage, and a ration of bread and cheese 
 wrapped in old newspaper. The bread was getting deplorable, 
 for even the dusty seconds flour was fast dribbling out. 
 
 "You'll give 'er this, won't you, Miss, and tell her I bin 
 thinkin' of 'er night and d'y? Fair live in the trenches now; 
 and when I do git strollin' round the stad, blimme if I ever 
 see 'er. But she's there an 'ere's a ticker beatin 'true to 'er." 
 He rapped a little awkwardly upon the bulking left breast- 
 pocket, " To the bloomin' end, wotever it may be! " 
 
 "Oh, you silly, you!" 
 
 She found him ridiculous and tragic, and so touching all at 
 once that the gibe ended in a sob. It was not the stinging 
 effervescence of the gingerade that made her choke and brought 
 the smarting tears to her eyes. It was envy of that other 
 girl. And then she noticed, under his left eye, a tiny scar, 
 and she knew how he came by it, and remembered what she 
 owed him, and saw that the chance, had come for her revenge. 
 She could pierce the heart beating under the khaki breast- 
 pocket to its very core with three words as easily as she had 
 jabbed his face with her hatpin on that never-to-be-forgotten 
 night. She would tell him that the lady of his love had gone 
 up to Johannesburg weeks and weeks ago. Oh, but it would 
 be sweet to see the duped lover's face! She would give him 
 a bit of her mind, too perhaps tear up the letter. 
 
 Then flashed across the murky-black night of her stormy 
 [mind the forked-lightning inspiration of what the real revenge 
 would be. To take his letter write him another back, and 
 yet others, fool him to the top of his bent, and presently tell 
 him, tossing at his feet a sheaf of billets. " And serve yer 
 glad and no more than your deservings. Who put away my 
 Walt?" 
 
 She accepted the letter, only permitting herself one scorn- 
 ful sniff, and put the missive in her pocket. Next day John 
 Tow, the Chinaman, serenely fatalistic, smilingly perpendicular 
 in felt-soled shoes, amidst zipping bullets, brought to the trench 
 a reply signed " Fare 'Air."
 
 252 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 The writer Toke the Libberty of Hopeing W. Keyse was 
 as it Left her at present. She was Mutch obblig for his Dear 
 Leter Witch it 'ad made her Hapey to Know a Brave Man 
 fiteing for her Saik. 
 
 " Cr'r !" ejaculated W. Keyse, below his breath. His 
 
 face was radiant as he read. Her spelling was a bit off, it 
 (Came to him to own in cooler blood. But Cr'rips! to be 
 ;called a brave man by the owner of the maddening blue eyes, 
 and that great thick golden pigtail. The letter went on: 
 
 " Dear mr. Keyse yu will be Please to Kno Jane is Sutch a 
 Cumfut to me in Trubel. As it is Selldom Fathful Frends 
 are To be Fownd But Jane is trew as Stele & Cold be Trustid 
 with Ibs & Ibs. no More at Preasent from yr afexn Swetart. 
 
 X X X X " FARE 'Am." 
 
 His senses reeled, as under pretence of making a sneeze he 
 pressed his burning lips to those osculatory crosses. He wrote 
 her a flaming answer, begging a Sunday rendezvous. She ap- 
 pointed a place and an hour. He went there on the wings 
 of love, but nobody turned up except the Jane who could be 
 trusted with pounds and pounds. 
 
 She hurried to him trembling and quite pale, her blue eyes 
 he had never noticed that they were blue and really pretty 
 wide with fright under her yellow fringe of curls newly 
 released from steely fetters. Her lips were apart, but he 
 failed to observe that the teeth they revealed were creditably 
 white; her cotton-gloved hand repressed her fluttering heart, 
 but he did not see its tumultuous throbbing. He gulped as he 
 said, with a fallen jaw and a look of abject misery that pierced 
 , her to the quick: 
 
 " She couldn't come, then ? " 
 
 "No, pore deer!" gasped the comfort in trouble, casting 
 about for something to tell him. She had made up her mind 
 as she came along; she would have her revenge there and then, 
 and chance it. Something kept her from laying the candle- 
 flame to the time-fuse. She did not know what it was yet. 
 But, oh! the sharp look of terror in the thin, eager face pierced 
 her through and through. 
 
 " My Gawd ! She's not bin killed ? " he cried. " Don't tell 
 me she's bin " 
 
 " Lor', gracious goodness, no! What will you think of 
 next?" She lied, rallying him, with jealousy eating at her
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 253 
 
 own poor heart. " Can't git away, that's all. Them Sisters 
 are so precious sharp. An' ' Go an' tell 'im,' she says, ' 'e'll 
 'ave to put up with you this once. An' you'll come back an' 
 tell me all about, 'im ! ' : 
 
 He swallowed the bait, and her spirits revived. Emigration 
 Jane, if not the rose, lived with it. Strictly speaking, they 
 spent a pleasant Sunday, though when he found himself for- 
 getting the absent one, he pulled himself sharply up. He saw 
 net part of the way home; more she would not allow. 
 
 " And and " she whispered at their parting, her eyes 
 avoiding his " if she can't git out next Sunday an* it's a 
 chance whether she does, that Sister Tobias being such a watch- 
 ful old cat would you like to 'ave me meet you an' tell you all 
 about 'er?" 
 
 W. Keyse assented, even eagerly, and so it began. Behold 
 the poor deceiver drinking perilous joys, and learning to shud- 
 der at the thought of discovery. Think of her cherishing his 
 letters, those passionate epistles addressed to the owner of the 
 golden pigtail. 
 
 Think of her pouring out her poor full heart in those 
 wildly-spelt missives that found their way to him, and be a 
 little pitiful. 
 
 She did not thirst for that revenge now. But, oh! the day 
 would come when he would find out and have his, in casting 
 her off, with what contempt and loathing of her treachery she 
 wept at night to dream of. This feeling, that lifted you to 
 Heaven one instant, and cast you down to Hell the next, was 
 Love. Passion for the Mari, not yearning for the hearth- 
 place, and the sheltering roof, and the security of marriage. 
 
 She left off walking round the gaol indeed, rather avoided 
 the vicinity of the casket that for her had once held a treasure. 
 What would the Slabbert think of his little Boer-wife that was 
 to have been ? What would he say and do when they let him 
 out? She took to losing breath and colour at the sound of 
 a heavy step behind her, and would shrink close to the martial 
 figure of W. Keyse when any hulking form distantly re- 
 sembling th'e Boer's loomed up in the distance. 
 
 Oh, shame on her, the doubly false! But: but she had 
 never been so orful 'appy. Oh, what a queer thing was Love! 
 If only But never, never would he. She was imitation. 
 
 There came a moment when W. Keyse swerved from the 
 path of single-hearted devotion to the unseen but ever-present 
 wearer of the golden pigtail.
 
 254 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 As Christmas drew near, and Gueldersdorp, not yet sensible 
 of the belly-pinch of famine, sought to relieve its tense 
 muscles and weary brains by getting up an entertainment here 
 and there, W. Keyse escorted his beloved by proxy, as usual 
 to a Sunday smoking-concert, given in a cleared-out Army 
 Service Stores shed, lent, by Imperial Government to the pro- 
 yTnoters of the entertainment. 
 
 Oh, the first delicious sniff of an atmosphere tinged with 
 paint and acetylene from the stage-battens and footlights, and 
 altogether so flavoured with crowded humanity of various 
 nationalities as to be strongly reminiscent of the lower troop- 
 deck with the hatches battened down ! The excess of brillancy 
 which must not stream from the windows had had to be shut- 
 tered in, and a tarpaulin drawn over the skylight, in case the 
 gunners of Meisje should be tempted to rouse the monster 
 from her Sabbath quiet, and send in a ninety-three-pound 
 shell to break up an orgie of godless Englanders. But the 
 stuffiness made it all the snugger. You could fancy yourself 
 in the pit of the Theaytre of Varieties, 'Oxton, or perched up 
 close to the blue-starred ceiling-dome of the Pavilion, Mile 
 End, on a Saturday night, when every gentleman sits in shirt- 
 sleeves, with his arm round the waist of a lady, and the faggots 
 and sausage-rolls and stone-gingers are going off like smoke, 
 and the orange-peel rains from the upper circle back-benches, 
 and the nutcracking runs up and down the packed rows like 
 the snapping of the breech-blocks in the trenches when the 
 fire is hottest. . . . 
 
 Ah! That brought one back to Gueldersdorp at once. 
 
 Meanwhile, a pale green canvas railway-truck cover, marked 
 in black, " Light Goods Destructible," served as a drop- 
 curtain. Another, upon which the interior of an impossible 
 palace had been delineated in a bewildering perspective of red 
 and blue and yellow paint-smudges, served as a general back- 
 scene for the performance. 
 
 The orchestra piano had been wounded by shell-fire, and 
 had a leg in splints. Many members of the crowded audience 
 were in strapping and bandages. Drink did not flow plenti- 
 fully, but there was something to wet your whistle with, and 
 the tobacco-cloud that hung above the trestle-benches, packed 
 with black and yellow faces, as well as brown and white, could 
 have been cut with a knife, if you had wanted to. 
 
 It was a long, rambling programme, scrawled in huge, black- 
 paint characters on a white-planed board, hung where every-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 255 
 
 one could read it. There were comic songs and Christy 
 Minstrel choruses by people who had developed vocal talent 
 for this occasion only, and a screaming display of conjuring 
 tricks by an amateur of legerdemain who had forgotten the 
 art, if ever he had mastered it. At every new mistake or 
 blunder, and with each fresh change of expression on the en- 
 tertainer's streaky face, conveying the idea of his being under 
 the influence of a bad dream, and hoping to wake up in his 
 own quarters by-and-by, to find that he had never really under- 
 taken to make a pudding in a hat, and smash a gentleman's 
 watch and produce it intact from some unexpected place of con- 
 cealment, the spectators rocked and roared. Then there was 
 a Pantomimic Interlude, with a great deal of genuine knock- 
 about, and, the crowning item of the entertainment, a comic 
 song and stump-speech, announced to be given by The 
 Anonymous Mammoth Comique an incognito not dimly 
 suspected to conceal the identity of the Chief himself, being 
 delayed by the Master's character top-hat a fondly cherished 
 property of the Stiggins brand and the cabbage umbrella that 
 went with it, having been accidentally left behind at the 
 Mammoth's hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished 
 by the lug-sail collar and shiny burnt-cork complexion of the 
 corner-man, was sent to the front to ask if any lady or gentle- 
 man in the audience would kindly oblige a ten-minute 
 turn? 
 
 "All right, Mister!" 
 
 A soiled cotton glove waved, a flowery hat nodded to the 
 appeal from behind the acetylene footlights. The faces in the 
 front rows of seats, brick-dust and ginger-head and cigar- 
 browned European, African countenances with rolling eyes and 
 shining teeth; and here and there the impassive, almond-eyed, 
 yellow mask of the Asiatic, slewed round as Emigration Jane 
 rose up in the place beside W. Keyse, a little pale, and with 
 damp patches in the palms of the washed white cotton gloves, 
 as she said: If the gentleman pleased, she could sing just, a 
 little! 
 
 No, thank you! She wasn't afryde, not she; they was all 
 friends there. And do 'er best she would. She took off the 
 big flowery hat quite calmly, giving it to W. Keyse to keep. 
 The panic came on later, when the Gladstone-collared, burnt- 
 corked Master of the Ceremonies was gallantly helping her up 
 the short side-ladder, and culminated when he retreated, and 
 left her there, standing on the platform in the bewildering
 
 256 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 glare of the acetylene foot-lights, a little, rather slight and flat- 
 chested figure of a girl, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, in a 
 washed-out flowery " blowze," and a voylet delaine skirt that 
 had lost its pristine beauty, and showed faded and shabby 
 in the yellow gas-flare. 
 
 Oh! 'owever 'ad she dared? That dazzling sea of faces, 
 with the eyes all fixed on her, was terrifying. A big lump 
 grew in her throat, and the crowded benches tilted, and the 
 flaming lights leaped to the roof as the 'helpless, timid tears 
 Wiled into her blue eyes. 
 
 And then the miracle happened. 
 
 W. Keyse sat on a back-bench, the thin Cockney face a little 
 raised above the others, because he had slipped a rolled-up 
 overcoat, under him, pretending that it was to get it out of the 
 way, you understand. Always very sensitive about his short- 
 ness, W. Keyse. And she saw his face, as plain as you please, 
 and with a look in the pale, eager eyes, that for once was for 
 Emigration Jane, her very own self, and not for That There 
 Other One. She knew in that moment of revelation that she 
 had always been jealous. Oh, wasn't, it strynge? Her heart 
 surged out to W. Keyse across the gulf of crowded faces. And 
 her eyes had in them, all at once, the look that is born of 
 Love. 
 
 Ah! who can mistake it? It begets a solitude in a vast 
 thronged assemblage for you and for me. It sends its silent, 
 wordless, eloquent, message thrilling to the heart of the Be- 
 loved, and wins its passionate answer back. Ah! who can err 
 about the look of Love? 
 
 She drew a deep breath that was her longing sigh for him, 
 infinitely dear, and never to belong to her, and began her song. 
 She sang it quite simply and naturally, in an untutored but 
 sweet and plaintive voice, and with the Cockney accent that 
 spoke of Home to nearly all that heard. And her eyes never 
 moved from his face as she sang it. 
 
 It was, I dare say, a foolish, trivial thing. But the air was 
 pretty, and the words were simple, and it had a haunting re- 
 frain. To this effect, that the world is a big place and a hard 
 place, with scant measure of joy in it, for you or for me. 
 Bitter herbs grow side by side with the flowers in our Earth 
 gardens. Salt tears mingle w<ith our laughter; Night comes 
 down in blotting darkness perhaps in driving storm at the 
 close of every short, bright day of sunshine. But Life gone 
 by, its hopes and fears and sorrows laid with our once-beating
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 257 
 
 hearts in the good grey dust to rest, I shall meet with you 
 again, in the Land where dreams come true. 
 
 The Land Where Dreams Come True. That was the title 
 of the song and its refrain, and somehow it caught the listeners 
 by the heart-strings, making the women sob aloud, and wring- 
 ing bright sudden drops from the bold eyes of rough, strong, 
 hardy men. You are to remember how the people stood: that 
 scarcely one was there that had not lost brother or sister, 
 mother or husband, child or friend or comrade since the begin- 
 ning of the siege; and thus the touch of Nature made itself 
 felt, and the simple pathos went home to the sore quick. They 
 sang the refrain with her, fervently, and when the song was 
 done, they sat. in touched silence but one moment and then the 
 applause came down. As it fell upon her like a wall, she 
 screamed in terror, and ran away behind the scene, and was 
 found by W. Keyse a minute later, sobbing hysterically, with 
 her head jammed into an angle of the wall of unplastered 
 brick. 
 
 None saw. He put his arms manfully about the waist- 
 line of the flowery blouse. 
 
 " Oh, let me go ! Oh, what a wicked, wicked girl I've 
 bin ! Oh, it's all come over me a-sudden, like a flood ! Don't 
 touch me I'm not good enough! Oh! how can you, can 
 you?" 
 
 She sobbed, and then W. Keyse had kissed her. He did 
 not get another word of her that night. She parted from 
 him in tingling silence. His own uneasy sense of faithlessness 
 to One immeasurably beloved, to whom he had pledged in- 
 violable and eternal fidelity, nearly prompted him to ask her 
 not. to up and tell. But he manfully kept silence. 
 
 The worst of one kiss of that kind is that it begets the 
 desire for others like it. She had turned her mouth to his in 
 that whirling, breathless moment, and it was small, and warm, 
 and clung. He tried to shake off the remembrance, but it 
 haunted persistently. 
 
 He knew he had behaved like a regular beast a low cur, 
 in fact. To kiss one girl and mean it for another was, in 
 the Keysian Code of morals, to be guilty of a baseness. The 
 worst of it was that he knew, given the chance, he would do 
 the same thing again. 
 
 For he could not shake off the memory. The blushing 
 face, wetted with streaming tears from the wide bright eyes 
 that pleaded so, They were blue, too, and the fringe above
 
 258 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 them might, by a not too exhausting stretch of the imagina- 
 tion, be termed golden. He heard her voice crying to him, 
 " How can you, can you ? " And he trembled at the thought 
 of the mouth that kissed and clung. 
 
 He had known bought, kisses, of the kind that brand the 
 lips and shame the buyer as the seller. Never the kiss of 
 Love, until now. 
 
 And now was any other worth the taking? 
 
 " Cr'ripps ! " said W. Keyse. " Not much ! " 
 
 XXXII 
 
 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 ar- 
 ranged 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 murki- 
 ness of odour that clings to 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 smell's necessity for hygienic measures, until 
 the majority of the pallid, untidy, scared Englishwomen, the 
 energetic Americans, and the sturdier Afrikanders, after mak- 
 ing what headway was possible against the ever-rising tide of 
 filth, had yielded to the lethargy bred of despair and lack of
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 259 
 
 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 shriek- 
 ing 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 cool 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 un- 
 naturally 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 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 an ominous spark had darted
 
 260 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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 
 m that malodorous Gehenna, ministering to the wants of slat- 
 ternly 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 her" 
 
 " 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, the Deity in whom she believed, 
 as simply, to quote Gladstone's criticism on the Journal of 
 Marie Bachttistceff, as though He were her grandfather. 
 Saxham had been reared by a pious Welsh mother, but there 
 had always been a little awkwardness about domestic refer-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 261 
 
 ences 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 rh the eyes and smiled. 
 
 " So did I when the Mother gave it to me. I think it be- 
 longed to someone she used to know, and her mother was 
 Lynette. So they baptized 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 among 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 be- 
 yond him at a broad ray of mored 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
 
 262 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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 exulta- 
 tion 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, di- 
 shevelled 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 child- 
 hood." 
 
 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 flash 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 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, brown-fringed underlids, and ran over.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 263 
 
 " 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 winding 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 reveal- 
 ing 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? Did that Irish girl whose young husband was 
 shot in the trenches a week ago and whose little baby died of 
 fever this morning did those other wemen 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 realize their wrongs or 
 understand their rights. But. a day will come when they will 
 understand, and then " her eyes grew dreamy " I do not
 
 264 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 know exactly what will happen. But these international ques- 
 tions, 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 
 iworld 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 Guelders- 
 dorp," 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 
 unfamilar 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 de- 
 voted 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 imprison- 
 ment 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 ex- 
 quisite 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
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 265 
 
 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, short- 
 hand. I earn enough now, by bookbinding, to pay for nay 
 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 agree- 
 ment," 
 
 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, glisten- 
 ing tresses, the amber-hazel of the wistful, brilliant eyes, re- 
 produced 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 iavourite amgng the English poets, and when
 
 266 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 I first went to Rome, years ago, the first thing I did was to 
 hunt up the portrait in the Barberini Palace and 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 a 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 aveng- 
 ing 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 illimit- 
 ably 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
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 267 
 
 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 ac- 
 cepted 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 
 mill-stones 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. Per- 
 haps 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 thaf 
 impulse of confidence. Perhaps she had yielded to it to con 
 vince herself that her enthusiasm was as strong, her purpose 
 still as clear, as ever, in the mission 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 Beau- 
 vayse 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 w.herever I am." 
 
 The thought oi Beauvayse's dying was horrible, intolerable.
 
 268 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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 re- 
 membrance 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 the anxious Mother 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, com- 
 plaints. 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 rheu- 
 matism, 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 bed- 
 gown 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 there- 
 with a pain. How is it begun ? It is begun since middugeten 
 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 
 yenerable copper stewpan, its rim liberally garnished with
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 269 
 
 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 un- 
 fortuitous 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 over- 
 head, 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 kid'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, con- 
 tinuing, " Here, mevrouw, is a packet of Epsom salts. Take 
 half of it, stirred in a cup of warm water, to-morrow morning 
 fasting " 
 
 " Allemachtig ! " she protested. " Is that the Engelsch way 
 of doctoring? To put a new belly-grief on the top of the old 
 one, 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.
 
 270 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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 neighbour- 
 ing 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 
 Works, not yet destroyed 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 un- 
 less 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 offend- 
 ers, 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 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 bowlings, wound about the doctor's 
 leg, a vocal worm, deprecating tyranny.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 271 
 
 "Your Honour is my father and mother. Let the hand 
 of justice refrain from excoriating the person of the unfortu- 
 nate, 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 bad, a very bad, place for the son of my mother." 
 The lean brown right hand swept upward 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-Nordenfeldts had loosed off a 
 group of 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 re- 
 garded 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, elevat- 
 ing 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
 
 272 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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: 
 
 " Mya joagen ! mya joagen ! " 
 
 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 eye-balls uplifted to 
 the drifting cloud of greenish lyddite vapour that thinned away 
 overhead, she was great and terrible, and the very Incarnation 
 of Motherhood 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 they 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 rapa- 
 cious 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 im- 
 perious, more pitiless, more covetous, besotted, brutal, and ig- 
 norant than any other that the spotted records of History can 
 show look here, look here!
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 273 
 
 Nations that rush to dreadful War, loosing the direful three- 
 fold plague of Iron, Fire, and Disease to scourge and brand 
 and desolate the once smiling face of your Mother Earth, 
 pause as you roll onward in desolating cataclysms of armed and 
 desperate men, and forgetting the blood-stained 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 Dep- 
 uties, 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, hav- 
 ing 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 mis- 
 chief 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 eye-sight and
 
 274 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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, wak- 
 ing 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' mis- 
 fortune 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-heerd 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 suf 
 fered. 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 ? Allemachtig, 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, ten- 
 der 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 dry 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 be- 
 loved friend? And when He pitied the Widow of Nain, do 
 you think his eyes were dry? Ah! best to weep."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 275 
 
 She wrenched 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 dry-eyed 
 .as they laid him down, and Saxham stooped above him feeling 
 at the pulseless heart. She saw the docter shake his head and 
 lay down the little hand. She saw the Mother-Superior coax 
 down the eyelids with tender, skilful ringers, 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 pair of 
 breeches she had made out of a cast-off jacket of his father's 
 that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her grief sprang 
 from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found resigna- 
 tion. 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. 
 
 XXXIII 
 
 ROASTING hot Christmas has gone by, with its services and 
 celebrations, its sports and entertainments, its meagre feasting, 
 and its hearty cheer, a bloodless triumph followed by the re- 
 grettable defeat sustained in the battle of One Tree Hill. To-
 
 276 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 day the Union Jack hangs limp upon the flagstaff that, rears its 
 slender height over Nixey's, and the new year is some weeks 
 old. The blue, blue sky of January is without a single puff of 
 cloud, and the taint from the trenches is less sickening, un- 
 mingled with the poisonous fumes of lyddite arid melinite burst- 
 ing-charges, and the acrid fumes of smokeless powder. It is 
 Sunday, when Briton and Boer hold the Truce of God, and 
 the church-bells ring to call and not to warn the people, and 
 sweet Peace and blessed Silence brood over the shrapnel-scarred 
 veld. The aasvogels feast undisturbed on bloated carcasses of 
 horses and cattle lying on the Debatable Ground between the 
 Line of Investment and the Line of Defence, the barbel in the 
 river leap at the fleas, and partridge and wild guinea-fowl drink 
 in the shallows, and bathe in the dry hot sand between the 
 boulder-stones. 
 
 The Market Square is populous with a chatting, sauntering 
 crowd of people, who enjoy the luxury of using their limbs 
 without being called on to displays of acrobatic agility in dodg- 
 ing trundling shell. There are Irregulars and B.S.A.P., Bara- 
 land Rifles and Town Guardsmen. There are the Native 
 contingent from the stad, and a company of Zulus, and the Fin- 
 goes and the Cape Boys with their gaspipe rifles that do good 
 service in default of better, and bring down Oom Paul's 
 Scripture-seasoned denunciation upon Englishmen, who arm 
 black and coloured folk to do battle for their own sable or yel- 
 low rights. These have donned odd garments and quaint bits 
 of finery to mark the holiday, and every white man has indulged 
 in the luxury of a comprehensive wash, a shave with hot water, 
 and a change of clothing, if it is obtainable. Also, drooping 
 feminine vanity revives in hair-waves and emerges from under- 
 ground burrows of Troglodyfic form, arrayed in fluttering 
 muslins, and crowned with coquettish hats, which walk about' 
 in company with ragged khaki and clay-stained duck and out- 
 at-elbows tweed, and are proud to be seen in its brave company. 
 
 Husbands and wives, fathers and daughters, sons and mothers, 
 lovers and sweethearts, meet after the week whose separating 
 days have seemed like weeks, and visit the houses whose pierced 
 walls and roofs, that let the sunshine in through many jagged 
 holes, may one day, so they whisper, holding one another 
 closely, shelter them again in peace. Home has become a 
 sweet word, even to those who thought little of home before. 
 And many who were sinful have found conviction of sin and 
 the saving grace of repentance, and many more who denied
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 277 
 
 their God have learned to know Him, in this village town of 
 battered dwellings, whose streets are littered with all the grim 
 debris of War. 
 
 Nixey's has not come scathless through the ordeal. The 
 stately brick chimneys of the kitchen and coffee-room have been 
 broken off like carrots, and replaced by tin funnels. Patches 
 of the universal medium, corrugated iron, indicate where one of 
 Meisje's ninety-four-pound projectiles recently plumped in 
 through the soft brick of the east wall end and departed by the 
 west frontage, leaving two holes that might have accommodated 
 a chest of drawers, and carrying a window with it. Mrs. 
 Nixey, the children, and the women of the staff inhabit a 
 bomb-proof in the back-yard. The waiters have developed 
 a grasshopper-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 veranda. The blue, fragrant smoke 
 of two long cigars curls upwards over their supine heads, and 
 two long drinks containing a very meagre modicum of inferior 
 whisky are contained in two long tumblers, resting in the bam- 
 boo 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 bomb- 
 proof in the Southern Lines, where messages come in and where 
 messages go out, and where reports are received and from 
 whence orders are dispatched from sunset to the peep of day, 
 and from peep of day to sunset. 
 
 The Wardrobes of H. M. garrison are much impaired by 
 active service, but the flannel trousers of both warriors, if 
 patched, and shrunken by the hasty amateur lavations, boast 
 the cut of Bond Street; their shirts, if a trifle ragged, are im- 
 maculately clean, and the cracks in their canvas shoes are dis- 
 guised by a lavish expenditure of pipeclay. Beauvayse has rum- 
 maged out and mounted a snowy double collar in honour of the 
 Bay, 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 at the left side. Both men 
 might be basking in a Thames-side camp, or resting after a 
 bout at tennis on an English lawn, but for the revolver-lan- 
 yards round their strong, bronzed throats, ending in the butts
 
 278 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 of Smith and Wesson's 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 veranda 
 end. Also, but. for the tension of long-sustained watchfulness 
 on both faces, making it plain that, though resting and repose- 
 ful, they are neither of them unexpectant of a summons to be 
 the opposite of these things. It is ? look that, at different de- 
 grees of intensity, is stamped on every face in Gueldersdorp. 
 An the same uncertainty possesses and pervades even un- 
 sentient things. The Union Jack, hanging listlessly from the 
 summit of its lofty staff, bathed in the golden, glowing atmos- 
 phere of this January day, may, in an instant's space, give plce 
 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 Bronnckers, though a God-fearing man, some- 
 times 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 knock- 
 ing 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 butt away, he pulls himself up, and, eco- 
 nomically impaling it on his penknife-blade, secures a few more 
 whiffs. 
 
 " Against the banian days to come, when there will be no 
 balm left in Gilead," says Beauvayse, cocking 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. Nerv- 
 ous as a cat, or a woman. And, talking of women, I wonder 
 where my wife is ? "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 279 
 
 He turns a large, pink, disconsolate face upon Beauvayse. 
 Beauvayse responds with the air of one who has suffered bore- 
 dom 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 Carr 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 particular 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 quoted classic authors and French epigram- 
 tinkers, and vowed she'd be hanged if she'd have married me 
 if she'd known I'd stand between her and the achievement of 
 a Career. And next morning she rides out with a Corporal 
 and two troopers, both chaps beastly sensible of their responsibil- 
 ity, 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 pelts, 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 Armoured train could have got 
 a broadside," 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.
 
 280 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 As it was, I nearly fell off the roof when I saw my wife com- 
 ing, 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 faiot grin. " Mine's the 
 next bedroom to yours you know." 
 
 " ' Oh, the blood ! Oh, the blood !'..." Not unsuccess- 
 fully does the spouse of Lady Hannah attempt to render the 
 recurrent hiccough and the whooping screech of hysteria. 
 
 ' Damn 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 association 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 circumstances. 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 at night " 
 
 " 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 about st 
 then, and so escaped a lot."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 281 
 
 " That gave her her chance to shoot the moon ! " hints 
 Beauvayse, in accents muffled by his long tumbler. 
 
 " By the Living Tinker! " asseverates Captain Bingo, jerked 
 out of his reclining attitude by vigorous utterance of the ex- 
 pletive, " you could have bowled me over with a scent-squirter 
 when I came" back to brekker and found her gone, and a cocked- 
 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 sex underlined, ' despised sex ' 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 de- 
 serted 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 Ger- 
 man 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 
 Bronnckers has had his headquarters since he moved from 
 Kloof Laager, Geibfontein. 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 sun-tan leaves off. Beauvayse takes his cigar again from 
 his mouth, and knocks the ash off deliberately before he re j 
 spends: 
 
 " 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 owljshly_at his young friend..
 
 283 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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 
 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. Some- 
 thin' like this : ' To let, Underwood 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 
 'ihis 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, before 
 another quarter'? .rent, of the C. at C. came due? And, to put 
 things mildly, there would have been the mischief to pay with 
 your people."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 283 
 
 "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' your ears for?" 
 
 " I'm not," says a muffled, surly voice. " It's a twinge of 
 toothache/'" 
 
 " All I've got to say is," declared Captain Bingo, " that 
 marriage with one's equal in point of breedin' is sometimes a 
 blank draw, but. marriage with one's inferior is a howling error. 
 And if you had done as I'd stake my best that you would have 
 done, supposin' you'd been left to loll in the lap of the lovely 
 Lessie " 
 
 Beauvayse jumps up in a rage. 
 
 " Wrynche, how much longer do you think I can go on 
 listening to this? You're simply maundering, man, and my 
 nerves won't stand it." 
 
 ''All right. But, you haven't the ghost of a right to lay 
 claim to nerves." Captain Bingo obstinately asseverates. 
 "Now look at me." 
 
 "I'm hanged if I want to!" declares Beauvayse. "You're 
 not a cheering object." He drops back into the bamboo chair 
 again. 
 
 "Flyblown, do I look?" inquires Bingo, with dispassionate 
 interest. 
 
 " Well, yes, decidedly," Beauvayse agrees, without removing 
 his eyes from the whitewashed veranda-pillar at which they 
 blankly stare, 
 
 " Streaky yellow in the whites of the eyes, and pouchy 
 under 'em?" Captain Bingo demands of his young friend with 
 unmistakable relish. " ' Yes ' again ? And I grouse and 
 maunder? Of course I do, my dear chap! How can I help 
 it? A married man who, for all he knows, may be a 
 widower " 
 
 " I wish to God that I knew that I was one! " 
 
 "My good fellow!" 
 
 " You heard what I said," Beauvayse flings over his shoulder. 
 
 Captain Bingo, his hands upon his straddling knees, regards 
 his junior with circular eyes and staring out of a large, kind, 
 rather foolish face of utter consternation.
 
 284 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "That you wished to God you were a widower?" 
 "Well, I mean it." 
 
 XXXIV 
 
 "GooD Lord!" 
 
 There is a gap of silence only broken when Captain Bingo 
 Says heavily: 
 
 " Then you did marry the Lavigne after all ? When was 
 it " 
 
 "We'd pulled off the marriage at the local Registrar's a 
 fortnight before you came down with his wire." 
 
 " By the Living Tinker, then it was a genuine honeymoon 
 after all ! " A faint grin appears on Captain Wrynche's large 
 perturbed face. 
 
 " Don't be epigrammatic, Wrynche." The dull weariness 
 in the young voice gives place to quick affront. " And keep 
 the secret. Don't give rne away." 
 
 " Did I ever give you, or any other man who ever trusted 
 ne, away? Tell me that." 
 
 Captain Bingo gets up and covers the distance between the 
 deck-chairs with a single stride, and puts a big kind hand on 
 the averted shoulder. 
 
 " Of course you never did." The boy reaches up and takes 
 the hand, and squeezes it with the shyness of the Englishman 
 who responds to some display of solicitude or affection on the 
 part of a comrade. " Don't mind my rotting like this. There 
 are times when one must, let off steam or explode." 
 
 " I thought and so did a few others, the Chief among 'em 
 that South Africa had saved you by the skin of your teeth," 
 says Captain Bingo, smoking vigorously, and driving his hands 
 very deep into his pockets. " Confoundedly odd how taken in 
 we were! I could have sworn, my part, that you'd just 
 stopped short at " 
 
 " At making a blithering idiot of myself," Interpolates 
 Beauvayse. " If you'll go back and sit decently in your chair, 
 instead of standing behind me rattlin' keys and coins in your 
 pocket, and dropping hot cigar-ash on my head, I'll tell you 
 how it happened. Nobody listening? " 
 
 " Not a soul," says Captain Bingo, padding back after a 
 noiseless prowl to the coffee-room window. 
 
 Beauvayse grips either arm of the chair he sits in so fiercely 
 that thev crack aeain.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 285 
 
 " I I was desperately hard hit over Lessie a year ago 
 
 " So were a lot of other young idiots." 
 
 " That's a pleasant reflection. They were." 
 
 " Of course, I " Bingo's large face becomes very red " I 
 
 inferred nothing in anyway against Miss Lavigne's chara 
 
 Dash it, I beg your pardon! I ought to call her Lady Beau- 
 vayse." 
 
 " Don't trouble. I think I'd rather you didn't. It would 
 rub things in rather too much," says Beauvayse, paling as the 
 other had reddened. 
 
 "Wouldn't it be as well," hints Captain Bingo, "to get 
 used to it ? " 
 
 " No," Beauvayse throws over his shoulder. " And don't 
 assume a delicacy in speaking of the the lady, because it's un- 
 necessary. As I've said, I was very much in love. She had 
 kept house with a man I knew, before we came together, and 
 there may have been other affairs for all I can tell, at least 
 I should say most probably." Something in Captain Bingo's 
 face seems to say " uncommonly probably," though he utters no 
 word. " But she was awfully pretty, and I lost my head." 
 He shuts his eyes and leans back, and the lines of his young 
 face are strained and wan. " I I lost my head." 
 
 " It's it's natural enough," volunteers Captain Bingo. 
 
 There is another short interval of silence in which the two 
 men on Nixey's veranda see the same vision limelights of vary- 
 ing shades and colour thrown from different angles across a 
 darkened garden-scene where impossible tropical flowers ex- 
 pand giant petals, and a spangled water- fall tumbles over the 
 edge of a blue precipice in sparkling foam. The nucleus of 
 a cobweb of quivering rays, crossing and intersecting, is a 
 dazzling human butterfly, circling, spinning, waving white arms 
 like quivering antennae, flashing back the coloured lights from 
 the diamonds in her hair and on her bosom, clasped about her 
 rounded waist and wrists, gleaming like fireflies from the folds 
 of her diaphanous skirts, and crusted on her finger a human 
 butterfly with great stage eyes encircled with blue rims, a small 
 mouth painted ruby-red, a complexion of theatrical lilies and 
 roses, and tiny, twinkling feet that beat out a measure to which 
 Beauvayse's pulses have throbbed madly and now throb no 
 more. 
 
 " It began in the usual way," he goes on, waking from that 
 stage day-dream, " with suppers and stacks of flowers, and a 
 muff-chain of turquoise and brilliants, and ended up with "
 
 286 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "With an electric motor-brougham and a flat in Mayfair. 
 Oh, Lord, what thunderin' donkeys we fellows are! " groans 
 Captain Bingo, rubbing his head, which has hair of a gingery 
 hue, close-cropped until the scalp blushes pinkly through it, and 
 rubbing nothing in the way of consolation into the brain in- 
 side it. 
 
 " I bought the Cottage at Cookham as a surprise for her 
 /birthday," goes on the boy. " She's a year or two older than 
 me " 
 
 " And the rest," blurts out Captain Bingo. But he drowns 
 the end of the sentence in a giant sneeze. " Must have caught 
 cold last night without knowin' it. Dashed treacherous cli- 
 mate this," he murmurs behind the refuge of a pocket-handker- 
 chief. "And so you bought the cottage for Leslie? Another 
 nibble out of the golden cheese that the old man's nursing 
 up for you; what? And in thingumbob retirement by 
 the something-or-other stream you hit on the notion of splicing 
 the lovely Lessie Lavigne. Poetry, by the Living Tinker ! " 
 
 " Do you want to hear how I came to cut my own throat ? " 
 snarls the boy, with white, haggard anger alternating with red 
 misery and shame in his young, handsome face ; " because if 
 you do, leave off playing the funny clown and listen." 
 
 "Never felt less inclined to be funny in my life. 'Pon my 
 word, I assure you!" asseverates Bingo. "You're simply a 
 bundle of irritable nerves, my dear chap, and that's the truth." 
 
 " You wouldn't wonder if you knew . . . Oh, damn it, 
 Wrynche! " the young voice breaks in a miserable sob " I'm 
 so thundering miserable. And all because there there was a 
 kid coming, and I did the straight thing by its mother." 
 
 " Whew ! " Captain Bingham Wrynche gives vent to a long, 
 piercing, dismal whistle, which so upsets a gaunt mongrel 
 prowling for garbage in the sunny Market Square that he puts 
 up his nose and howls in answer. " Was that how you fell 
 
 into the " He is obviously going to say " trap," but with 
 
 exceeding clumsiness substitutes "state?" And wonders at 
 the thing having been pulled off so quietly in these days, when 
 confounded newspapers won't let you call your soul your 
 own. 
 
 "That's because I signed my name 'John Basil Edward 
 Tobart,' " explains Beauvayse ; " and because the Registrar 
 a fatherly old cock in a large check waistcoat like somebody's 
 father in a farcical comedy wasn't sufficiently up in the Peer- 
 age to be impressed."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING '287 
 
 " Weren't there witnesses of sorts ? " hints Bingo. 
 
 " Of sorts. The housekeeper at the cottage and my man 
 Saunders the discreet Saunders who's with me here. And a 
 fortnight later came the appointment," goes on the boy. 
 " And I was gladder than I cared to know at getting away. 
 She Lessie meant to play her part in the ' Chiffon Girl ' up 
 to the end of the Summer Season, and then rest, until . . ." 
 He does not finish the sentence. 
 
 "I suppose she's fond of you what?" hazards Captain 
 Bingo. 
 
 " She cares a good deal, poor girl, and was frightfully cut up 
 at my going, and I provided for her thoroughly well, of course, 
 though she has heaps of money of her own. And when I went 
 to stay with my people for a night before sailing, I'd have 
 broken the the truth to my mother then, only something in 
 her face corked me tight. From the moment I took the plunge 
 the consciousness of what a rotten ass I'd been had been growin' 
 like a snowball But on the voyage out " a change comes into 
 the weary, level voice in which Beauvayse has told his story 
 " I forgot to grouse, and by the time we'd lifted the Southern 
 Cross I wasn't so much regretting what I'd done as wondering 
 whether I should ever shoot myself because I'd done it. Up in 
 Rhodesia I forgot. The wonderful champagne air, and the 
 rousing hard work, the keen excitement and the tingling ex- 
 pectation of things that were going to happen by-and-by, that 
 have been happening about us since October, were like pleasant 
 drugs that keep you from thinking. I only remembered now 
 and then when I saw Lessie's photograph hanging on the wall 
 of my Quarters, and the portrait, she had set in the back of my 
 sovereign-case, that she and me were husband and wife." He 
 gives a mirthless laugh. " It makes so little impression on 2 
 fellow's mind somehow, to mooch into a Registrar's office with 
 a woman and answer a question or two put by a fat, middle- 
 aged man in a shabby office coat, and give your name and say,' 
 ' No, there's no impediment,' and put on the ring and pay a 
 fee I believe it was seven-and-six and take a blotchy certifi- 
 cate and walk out married." 
 
 " It never does take long, by Gad," agrees Captain Bingo 
 with fervour, " to do any of the things that can't be undone 
 again." 
 
 " Undone. . . ! " Beauvayse sits up suddenly and turns his 
 miserable, beautiful, defiant eyes full on the large, perturbed 
 face of his listener. " Wrynche, Wrynche! I've felt I'd
 
 2.88 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 gladly give my soul to be able to undo it, ever since I first set 
 eyes on Lynet.te Mildare! " 
 
 Captain Bingo gives vent to another of bis loud, dismal 
 whistles. Then he gets out of his chair, large, clumsy, irate, 
 and begins: 
 
 " I might have known it, with a chap like you. Another 
 woman's at the bottom of all your bellowing. You're not a 
 bit sick at having brought an outsider a rank outsider, by 
 Gad ! into the family stud ; you're not a rap ashamed at havin' 
 'disappointed the old man's hopes of you, for you know as well 
 as I do that when you'd done sowin' your wild oats and had 
 your fling, you'd come in when he rang the bell and marry Lady 
 Mary Menzies. You're not a damned scrap sorry at having 
 broken your mother's heart, as though you mightn't, have 
 guessed that Lady Foltelbarre scented this marriage in the 
 wind, and had an interview with the Chief, and went down on 
 her knees to him her knees, by the Living Tinker! to give 
 you the chance of breakin' off an undesirable connection ! " 
 
 Beauvayse is out of his chair now. " Is that true about 
 my mother ? " he demands, blazing. 
 
 "I'm not in the habit of lyin', Lord Beauvayse!" states 
 Captain Bingo huffily. 
 
 " Don't fly off like a lunatic, Bingo, old man. How did you 
 find that out ? " 
 
 " Your cousin Townham told me." 
 
 " Damn my cousin Townham for a dried up, wiggy, pratin* 
 little scandalmonger." 
 
 Captain Bingo retorts irately: 
 
 " Damn him if you please ; he's no friend of mine. As yours, 
 what I ask you is, between man and man, how far have you 
 gone in this fresh affair?" 
 
 Beauvayse drives his hands deep into the pockets of his 
 patched flannels, and says, adjusting a footstool with his toe 
 over a crack in the board-flooring, as though the operation were 
 a delicate one upon which much depended: 
 
 " I've told her how I feel where she's concerned, and that I 
 care for her as I never cared yet, and never shall care, for any- 
 one else." 
 
 The faint grin dawns again on Captain Wrynche's large, 
 kindly, worried face. 
 
 " How many times have you met?" 
 
 " Only four or five times in all," says Beauvayse. " I'd set 
 eyes on her twice before I was introduced. I couldn't rest for
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 289 
 
 thinking about her. She drew me and drew me. . . . And 
 when we did meet, there was no strangeness between us, even 
 from the first minute. She just seemed waiting for what I had 
 to own up. And when I spoke, I I seemed to be only saying 
 what I was meant to say. . . . from the beginning of the 
 world I don't believe you've seen her near " 
 
 " I have seen her in the distance, walking with the Mother- 
 Superior of the Convent. A tall, slight girl. Looks like a 
 lady," says Bingo, " and has jolly hair." 
 
 " It's the colour of dead leaves in autumn sunshine or a 
 squirrel's back," raves the boy, " and she's beautiful, Wrynche. 
 My God ! so beautiful that your heart stops beating when you 
 look into her face, and nearly jumps out of your body when 
 a fold of her gown brushes against you. And I swear there's 
 no other woman for me in life or death." 
 
 " I shouldn't be in such a cast-iron hurry to swear if I were 
 you," Captain Bingo replies judicially. " And I've heard you 
 say the same about the others " 
 
 " It was never true before. And she's a lady," pleads 
 Beauvayse hotly. "A lady in manners, and education, and 
 everything. The sort of girl one respects; the sort of girl one 
 can talk to about one's mother and sisters " 
 
 " You'd talk about your mother to a Fingo washer- worn an," 
 Captain Bingo blurts out. " Better you should, than go hang- 
 ing about a Convent-bred schoolgirl and telling her you'll never 
 care for anybody else, when you've got a legal wife, and, for 
 all you know, a family of twins at. home in England." 
 
 The footstool, impelled by a scientific lift of Beauvayse's toe, 
 flies to the other end of Nixey's veranda. " Is one mistake to 
 ruin a man's life? I'll get a divorce from my wife. I will, by 
 Heaven ! " 
 
 " You told me not to maunder just now," says Bingo, with 
 ponderous sarcasm. "Who is the maunderer, I'd like to 
 know ? By the Living Tinker, I should have thought that this 
 siege life would have put iron into a man's blood instead of 
 of Creme de Menthe. Are you takin' those dashed morphia 
 tabloids of Taggart's for bad-water collywobbles again? Yes? 
 I thought as much. Chuck 'em to the aasvogels; stick to your 
 work you can't complain of its lackin' interest or variety 
 and let this girl alone. She's a lady, and the adopted daughter 
 of an old friend of my wife's, and don't you forget it ! " 
 Bingo's gills are red, and he puffs and bows as large, excited, 
 fleshy men are wont to. " If you do you'll answer to me! "
 
 290 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " I tell you," Beauvayse cries, white-hot with passion, and 
 raising his voice incautiously, " that I mean to marry her. I 
 tell you again that I will div " 
 
 " Do you want the man in the street and every soul in the 
 hotel to know your private affairs? " demands Bingo. " If so, 
 go on shoutin'. As to your bein' a widower, the chances are 
 on the other side. . . . Gueldersdorp ain't exactly what you 
 would call a healthy place just now. And as to divorcin' your 
 wife, how do you know she'll ever be accommodatin' enough to 
 give you reason? And if she did, do you think a girl brought 
 up in a Catholic Convent would marry you, even if you called 
 to ask her with a copy of the decree nisi pasted on your chest? 
 Hang it, man, your mother's son ought to know better! 
 And oh, come, I say ! " 
 
 For Beauvayse sits down astride an iron chair, and lays his 
 shirt-sleeved arms on the back rail, and his golden, crisply- 
 waved head upon them. 
 
 " I I love her so, Wrynche. And to stand by and see an- 
 other man cut in and win what I've lost by my own rotten 
 folly hurts so so damnably." His mouth is twisted with pain. 
 
 "Is there another chap who wants to cut in?" Bingo de- 
 mands. 
 
 " You know one gets a bit clairvoyant when one is mad 
 about a woman," says Beauvayse, lifting his shamed wet eyes 
 and haggard young face from the pillow of his folded arms. 
 " Well, I'm dead certain that there is another man who who 
 is as badly hit as me." 
 
 " Who is the other man ? " 
 
 "Saxham!" 
 
 " The Doctor! Shouldn't have supposed a fellow of that 
 type would be susceptible now," says Bingo. " Gives an un- 
 compromisin' kind of impression, with his chin like the bows 
 of an Armoured Destroyer, and his eyebrows like another chap's 
 moustaches." 
 
 " And eyes like a pair of his own lancets underneath 'em. 
 But he's a frightfully clever beast," says Beauvayse. " And 
 what he wants in looks he makes up in brains. And and if 
 he knew there was a scratch against me, he might force the 
 running and win hands down. So hang on to my secret by 
 your eyelids, old fellow, and don't give me reason to be sorry 
 I told " 
 
 "You have my word, haven't you? And, talking about 
 scratch entries," says Bingo, inspired by a sudden rush of rec-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING '291 
 
 ollection, " I ain't so sure that the Doctor though, mind you, 
 this is between ourselves is the sort of giongsay a father of 
 strict notions would be likely to encourage. Do you happen 
 to have come across a goggle-eyed, potty little Alderman 
 Brooker, a Town Guardsman who runs a general store in the 
 Market Place that's his place of business with the boarding 
 up, and the end butted in by a Creusot shell that didn't burst, 
 luckily for Brooker. Well, this beast buttonholed me months 
 ago, and began to spin a cuffer about Saxham." 
 
 "What had the dirty little bounder got to say?" asked 
 Beauvayse, stiffening in disgust, " about a man he isn't fit t.o 
 black the boots of?" 
 
 " Nothing special nice. Said Saxham had lost his London 
 connection through getting involved in a mess with a woman," 
 says the big Dragoon. 
 
 " Don't we all get into messes of that kind? What more? " 
 demands Beauvayse. 
 
 " Said the Doctor had kicked over the traces pretty badly 
 here. Pitched me a tale of his Brooker's having often acted 
 as the Mayor's Deputy on the Police Court. Bench, Brooker 
 being an Alderman, and swore that he'd had Saxham up before 
 him a dozen times at least in the last three years, along with 
 the Drunks and Disorderlies." 
 
 " It sounds like a hanged lie ! " 
 
 " If I didn't say as much to Brooker," responds Captain 
 Bingo, " I shut him up like a box by referrin' politely to Glass 
 Houses, knowin' Brooker had been squiffy himself one night 
 on guard, and by remindin' him that men who talk scandal 
 of their superior officers under circumstances like the present 
 are liable to be Court-Martialled and given beans. And as the 
 Chief, and Saxham with him, dropped on Brooker in the act of 
 smuggling lush into the trenches the other day, I fancy Brooker's 
 teeth are fairly drawn. Though he swore to me that there isn't 
 a saloon-keeper or a saloon-loafer in the town that didn't know 
 Saxham by the nickname of the Dop Doctor." 
 
 " The man don't exist who objects to hear of the disqualifica- 
 tions, mental and physical, of a fellow who he thought likely 
 to enter the lists with him in the in the dispute for a woman's 
 favour," says Beauvayse, with a pleasant air of candour. " And 
 though the story sounds like a lie, as I've said, there's a possibil- 
 ity of its being the other .thing. I'm sorry for Saxham that 
 goes without sayin' though I don't like his overbearin' scien- 
 tific side and his sledge-hammer manner. But that a man with
 
 292 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 a record of that kind should set his heart upon a girl like 
 Lynette Mildare is horrible, intolerable, Wrynche, and while, 
 for the man's own sake, I should respect his beastly secret, for 
 her sake and in her interests, and if I consider that, he's putting 
 himself forward at the risk of my my prospects and my hopes, 
 I shall make use of what I know." 
 
 "You don't mean you'd split on the man! " splutters Bingo; 
 " because, if you do " 
 
 " All's fair in Love and War," says Beauvayse, with a ring 
 of defiance in his pleasant, boyish voice, and a gleam of triumph 
 in his beautiful sleepy eyes. " And this is Love in War. 
 You've put a trump card in my hand against Saxham, whether 
 you meant to or not, and when the time comes, I shall play it." 
 
 He gets up and lounges away. And Captain Bingo, emitting 
 another wailing whistle as he slews round to stare after the tall, 
 retreating figure with the crisp, golden head, is sure of nothing 
 so certainly as that Beauvayse will play that trump-card. He 
 is repentant for having broached the Doctor's secret as he climbs 
 up by the narrow iron stair that leads out upon the roof of 
 Nixey's Hotel to relieve his commanding officer at. the binocu- 
 lars. 
 
 XXXV 
 
 You are invited, the very Sunday upon which the previously- 
 recorded conversation took place, to make the acquaintance of 
 the sprightly P. Blinders, Acting Secretary to Commandant 
 Selig Bronnckers, Head Laager, Transvaal Republic and 
 Orange Free State's United Forces, Tweipans. 
 
 P. Blinders, a long-bodied, short-legged young Dutch apothe- 
 cary of the Free State, with short-sighted eyes behind hugely 
 magnifying spectacles, and many fiery pimples bursting through 
 the earthly crust of him, possibly testifying to the presence of 
 volcanic fires beneath, had acted in the clerkly capacity to the 
 ,Volksraad at Groenfontein. When Government did not sit at 
 the Raad Zaal, Blinders, as calmly as any ordinary being might 
 have done, dispensed jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the 
 counter of his store. These are the three heroic besoms em- 
 ployed by enlightened and conscientious Boer housewives for 
 sweeping out the interiors of their families thrice in the year. 
 
 Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete. The thrifty mother 
 buys a foot or so, and pinches off a bolus of the required magni- 
 tude thrice in the year. No dosing is allowed in between; the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 293 
 
 members of the family get it when the proper time comes round. 
 To everyone his or her share, not forgetting the baby. 
 
 When P. Blinders came away, he left his grandfather to keap 
 store, previously explaining to the aged man the difference be- 
 tween hydrocyanic acid and almond essence for cake-flavouring, 
 powders of corrosive sublimate and Gregory's. By a subtle 
 transition the apothecary-clerk then became the epistolary right 
 hand of General Bronnckers, whose wife, son, and grandson, 
 with P. Blinders, made up his personal staff. And round the 
 Commandant's living-waggon, where they harboured, Chaos 
 reigned and Confusion weltered, and disputes in many tongues 
 English severely excepted made Babel. And, side by side 
 with the domestic, decent virtues weltered all the vices rampant 
 in the Cities of The Plain. 
 
 It goes without saying that the site of Head Laager camp 
 had been cunningly chosen. It occupied a shield-shaped plateau 
 among low, flat-topped hills. The single street of Tweipans 
 bounded it upon the east, and a rocky ridge upon the western 
 side, that might have been the vertebra of some huge reptile of 
 the Diluvian Age, protected camp and village from British 
 shell-practice. 
 
 Signs of this were not lacking. Waggons with shattered 
 timbers and fantastically twisted irons, broken carts, and guns 
 dismounted from their carriages, were to be seen, near the dis- 
 membered or disembowelled bodies of the beasts that had drawn 
 them. Dead horse or mule or bullock decomposing in the sun, 
 seemed to have nothing of offence for Republican noses. The 
 yellow smear of lyddite was everywhere, and, looking over the 
 rock-rampart upon the works below, you saw it like a blight or 
 yolk of egg spilt upon a war-map. 
 
 Family parties bivouacked in those bottle-shaped trenches 
 where each fighting unit had his separate box of provisions sunk 
 in the earth beside him, and his cooking-fire of chips and dry 
 dung, and ate and slept and smoked and shot as he thought 
 good. And in despite of such fires, the unencumbered space 
 and pure hill-air notwithstanding, the noisome ditches wherein 
 the cribbed, cabined, and confined defenders of Gueldersdorp 
 alternately grilled and soaked, were alleys of musk-roses, mar- 
 vels of sanitary purity compared with the works of the besiegers 
 and the abominable camps where, in the absence of a noctur- 
 nally active Quartermaster-Sergeant, with his band of pioneers, 
 stench took you by the throat and nose, while filth absorbed you 
 over the ankles.
 
 294 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 A whiff of peculiarly overpowering potency, reaching you, 
 made you turn away, and then the immense disorder of the 
 camp seized and held your eyes. 
 
 Arms, saddles, karosses, blankets, clothing, panniers of pro- 
 visions and boxes of ammunition, were piled about in mountain- 
 ous heaps. Of military organization, discipline, authority, law, 
 as these are understood by civilized nations, there was nothing 
 whatever. Men in well-worn velveteens and felt billycocks 
 hobnobbed with men in the gaudiest uniforms ever evolved by 
 the theatrical costumier. Green velvet, and gold lace, topped 
 by cocked hats that had despoiled the ostrich to make a human 
 biped vainly ridiculous, adorned Ginirals and Cornels that had 
 no rigiments belongun' to 'um at all at all! and had come over 
 from the Distressful Country to make a bould bid for glory, 
 with the 'experience of warfare acquired while lurking behind 
 hedges and shot-guns, in waiting for persons in disfavour with 
 the Land League. 
 
 Patriarchs of eighty years and callow schoolboys of sixteen 
 fought side by side with the fine flower and the lusty prime of 
 Boer manhood, and many had their wives and children with 
 them under the Transvaal colours, and not a few had brought 
 their mothers. When an officer had any order to give his men, 
 he prefaced it with the Boer equivalent for " Hi! " When the 
 men had heard as much as they considered necessary, they 
 would say, " Come on; let's be going," and slouch away. 
 
 P. Blinders, being a Dutchman of the Free State, minded 
 smells no more than a Transvaal Boer. Yet it sometimes oc- 
 curred to him as odd that the duties of a Secretary should em- 
 brace the peeling of potatoes and the performance of other du- 
 ties of the domestic kind. 
 
 He was squatting in the shadow of the Commandant's living- 
 waggon, polishing off the last of a panful, when Van Busch 
 [came along. English being an unpopular language, the big 
 Johannesburger and the little Free Stater exchanged greetings 
 in the Taal. 
 
 " Ging oop, and leave your woman's work there, and walk 
 a piece with me," said Van Busch. " I have somthing to say 
 to you about my sister that married the German drummer, 
 and is stopping at Kink's Hotel." 
 
 You can see Van Busch taking off his broad-brimmed hat, 
 and knocking the sweat from the leather lining-band. He was 
 dressed in a black broadcloth tailed-coat, flannel shirt, and 
 cord breeches, and wore heavy veldschoen, and carried a
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 295 
 
 Mauser rifle, as everybody else, and had a long hunting-knife 
 as well as a heavy six-shooter in the wide canvas pouch-belt, 
 and a bandolier heavy with cartridges. Thus panoplied, he 
 accurately resembled ten thousand other men. 
 
 But his dark, overfed, full-blooded, whiskered face was not 
 that of an agriculturist, and the strange light eyes, rust-coloured 
 like those of an adder, and, like the ophidian's, set flush with 
 the oddly-flattened edges of their orbits, were at variance with 
 the high, rounded, benevolent temples crowned with a thinning 
 brake of curly hair. The rapacious mouth, with the thick 
 scarlet lips, belonged to the eyes. 
 
 He had put on his hat again, but he swept it off in a flourish- 
 ing bow, as Mevrouw Bronnckers, in high-kilted wincey, a man's 
 hat of coarse straw perched on her weather-beaten, sandy- 
 grey head, came stumping down the waggon-ladder, calling for 
 her potatoes. What was that lazy bedelaar of a Secretary 
 about? and it nearly eleven of the clock. Didn't he know 
 that her Commandant liked his meals on time? 
 
 Mevrouw received the politeness less graciously than the 
 potatoes. That man with the eyes and the greedy red mouth 
 was a woman-eater, she knew. Not for sheep and gear would 
 she, grandmother as she was, trust herself in house or barn 
 alone with a klant like that. But her Commandant had uses 
 for him, the twinkling-eyed, soft-mannered, big rogue. She 
 \vatched him walking off with P. Blinders, for whom she en- 
 tertained a distaste grounded on the knowledge that no good 
 ever came of these double-tongued Free Staters. 
 
 And this one could write in the accursed shibboleth of Eng- 
 land as well as in the Taal. She shook her head as the potatoes 
 rattled into the big pot hanging over the fire. And he walked 
 out on Sundays with the young German woman who was maid 
 to the refugee-widow staying at Kink's Hotel, and who never , 
 showed her nose inside the Gerevoormed Kerk, the godless 
 thing! or went out except by bat-light. Of that one the 
 Mevrouw Bronnckers had her opinion also. And time would 
 show who was right. 
 
 Meanwhile, Van Busch and P. Blinders, who had left the 
 dorp behind them, and strolled up the almost dry bed of a sluit 
 leading up amongst the hills, conversed, in Sabbath security 
 from English artillery, reassuring remoteness from Dutch eaves- 
 droppers. And their theme was the German drummer's re- 
 fugee-widow who never went to kerk. 
 
 Van Busch, who found it helpful in his business never to
 
 296 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 forget faces, had met her on the rail, months back, travelling 
 up first-class from Cape Town. Early in October it was, 
 while the road was still open. And men who kept their eyes 
 skinned went backwards and forwards and round and about, 
 getting the hang of things, and laying up accurate mental notes, 
 because the other kind were even more risky to carry than the 
 nuggets and raw dust, that are hidden in the padded linings of 
 the gold-smugglers' heavy garments. 
 
 The lady, small, dark, stylishly-tailored, and with bright 
 black, bird-like eyes, was not a German drummer's widow 
 when Van Busch and she first met. She had chatted in her 
 native English with her square, bulky, sleek-looking fellow 1 - 
 passenger, well-dressed in grey linen drill frock-coat and 
 trousers, with blazing diamonds studding the bosom of his well- 
 starched shirt and linking his cuffs. 
 
 The wide felt hat he politely removed as he came into the 
 carriage revealed to Lady Hannah a tall, expansive, w r ell- 
 developed forehead. Below the line of the hat-rim he was 
 burned coffee-brown, like many another British Colonial. The 
 observant eye of " Gold Pen " took in the man's vulgarly hand- 
 some features and curiously light eyes, and twinkled at the 
 flaring jewellery and the whiskers of obsolete Dundreary pat- 
 tern that stood out on either side the jewelled one's full, smooth 
 chin. His large, bold, over-red mouth, with the curling out- 
 ward flange to it, gave her a disagreeable impression. One 
 would have been grateful for a beard that hid that mouth. 
 
 Lady Hannah found it curiously disquieting until her fel- 
 low-traveller began to talk, in a thick, lisping voice, with 
 curiously candid and simple intonations. He presented him- 
 self, and she accepted him at his own valuation, as a British 
 Johannesburger, possessing a seat in Parliament, and consider- 
 able interests among the tall chimneys and white dumping- 
 heaps of the Rand. 
 
 Van Busch called his efforts to be ingratiating " sucking up 
 to " the lady. He sucked up, thinking at first she might be 
 the wife of the English field officer who had been ordered down 
 from the north to take over the Gueldersdorp command. Then 
 he found she was only the grey mare of an officer of the 
 Staff. . . . 
 
 She plied Van Busch in his character of Member of Parlia- 
 ment, farmer and mine-owner, with questions. Thought she 
 was juicing a lot of information, whereas Van Busch was the 
 one who learned things- Kind of playing at being newspaper-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 297 
 
 woman she was. and taking notes for London newspaper articles 
 all the time. Had laid out to be a little tin imitation of Dora 
 Carr, or, say, nickel-plated with cast, chasings. Was burning 
 for an opening in the diplomatic go-betweening line; wanted to 
 dabble in War Correspondence, and so on. But Van Busch 
 gathered that the biggest egg in the little lady's nest of ambi- 
 tions was the desire to do a flutter on the Secret Service lay. 
 
 She wanted to be what he termed a " slew," and she would 
 have called a spy. He riddled to her dancing, and wearied 
 before she did. 
 
 " What Woman has done Woman may do ! " was the burden 
 of her ceaseless song. And when she left the train at Guelders- 
 dorp, " Au revoir" said she with a flash of her bright black 
 eyes, nodding to the big Colonial, who was so excessively civil 
 about handing out her dressing-case and travelling-bag. 
 " Many thanks, and don't give me away if you should happen 
 to meet me in a different skin one of these fine days, Mr. Van 
 Busch." 
 
 " Sure, no ; not I," said the burly Johannesburger, with an 
 effusion of what looked like genuine admiration. " By 
 thunder! when it comes to playing the risky game there's no 
 daring to beat a woman's. Give me a petticoat, <?ay I, for a 
 partner every time." 
 
 "Bravo!" Her eyes snapped approvingly. She waved a 
 little hand towards a large pink officer of the British Imperial 
 Staff, who was looking into all the first-class compartments in 
 search of a wife who had been vainly entreated to remain at 
 Cape Town. " There's my husband, who thinks at the op- 
 posite point of the compass. But he hasn't your experience 
 only a theory worn thin by generations of ancestors, all 
 chivalrous Conservative noodles, who kept their females in 
 figurative cotton-wool. Do let me introduce you. I'd simply 
 love to have him hear you talk." 
 
 Van Busch did not pant to make the acquaintance of the 
 Military Authorities. He thanked the impulsive Lady 
 Hannah, but made haste to climb back into the train. The 
 big pink officer recognized the object of his search, and strode 
 down the platform bellowing a welcome. As Lady Hannah 
 waved in reply, the Johannesburger made a long arm from the 
 window, and thrust a pencil-scrawled card into the tiny gloved 
 hand. 
 
 " S's'h ! Shove that away somewhere safe," said Van Busch, 
 in a thrillingly mysterious whisper ; " and, remember, any time
 
 298 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 you want to learn the lay of the land and follow up the spoof 
 of movements on the quiet, that Van Busch, of the British 
 South African Secret Intelligence Bureau, is the man to put 
 you on. A line to that address, care of W. Bough, will always 
 get me. And with nerve and josh like yours, and plenty of 
 money for palm-oil. ..." His greedy mouth made a grin- 
 ning red gash in the smug brown face with the fine whiskers 
 of blackish-brown. His cold eyes scintillated and twinkled un- 
 speakable things at the little lady as the train carried him 
 forth. 
 
 Assuredly Van Busch understood women no less thoroughly 
 than his near relative, Bough. He knew that you could bait 
 for and catch the sex with things that were not tangible. Men 
 wanted to be made sure of money or money's worth. And for 
 the co-operation of P. Blinders in the adroit little game by 
 which the German drummer's refugee-widow who stayed at 
 Kink's Hotel, and only went out after dark, had been relieved 
 of a handsome sum, Van Busch had had to part with nearly 
 one-third of the swag. No wonder he felt and talked like a 
 robbed man. 
 
 " All very well to talk," said P. Blinders, scratching his 
 newest pimple, and looking with exaggerated moonish simplicity 
 at nobody in particular through his large round magnifying 
 spectacles. " But what could you have done without me, once 
 the little Englishwoman smelled the porcupine in the barrel? 
 When she drove out to your friend Bough's plaats at Haars- 
 grond in that spider, pretending she was your sister that had 
 married a Duitscher drummer in Gueldersdorp, and buried 
 him, and was afraid to be shut up in the town with all those 
 lustful rooineks, you thought it would be enough to tell her 
 Staats Police or Transvaal burghers were after her to make 
 her creep into a mousehole and pay you to keep her hid. And 
 it did work nicely for a while. Then the Englishwoman got 
 angry oh, very angry and told you things that were not 
 nice. Either you should put her in the way of getting the in- 
 formation she wanted, or good-bye to her dear brother, Hendryk 
 Van Busch, and his friend Bough." 
 
 " For a pinch of mealies I'd have let the little shrew go, 
 by thunder!" said the affectionate relative. "But my good 
 heart stopped me. The country wasn't safe for a couple of 
 women to go looping about," he added. " And one of them 
 with two hundred pounds of Bank of England notes stitched 
 into the front of her stays. . . ."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 299 
 
 " Five hundred pounds," said the Secretary, with pleasantly 
 twinkling spectacles. Van Busch's stare was admirable in its 
 incredulity. 
 
 " Sure, no, brother; not so much as that?" 
 
 " Trudi told me," smirked P. Blinders. 
 
 "You and her seem to be great and thick together," said 
 Van Busch, with a flattering leer. The little ex-apothecary 
 placed his hand upon his chest, and said, with a gleam of 
 tenderness lighting up his spectacles: 
 
 " I have sighed, and she has smiled." He went on, " If 
 your friend Bough had been dof enough to try and take away 
 that load of banknotes from the little Englishwoman, he would 
 have met trouble. For in a pocket of her gown she carries a 
 revolver, and sleeps with it under her pillow by night; that is 
 another thing that Trudi has told me." He kissed his fingers, 
 and waved them in the direction of Kink's Hotel. " She is a 
 lovely maiden ! " He blew his nose without the assistance of 
 a pocket-handkerchief, and continued: 
 
 " Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the Eng- 
 lishwoman's coffee that would have made her sleep while he 
 stole that money, or he might even have killed her quietly, and 
 buried her on the farm. But a man who does that is not so 
 clever and so wise as the man who makes a plan that gets the 
 money and keeps friends all round, and makes everybody happy 
 is he, now? And that man is me, and that plan was mine. 
 From Paulus Blinders you had genuine information to sell the 
 Englishwoman, and when she has bought it, paying well for 
 it, and written it all down in her despatches to the Commandant 
 at Gueldersdorp, she hands the letters back to you to be 
 smuggled through the lines, and pays through the nose for that 
 also. And who shall say she is cheated? For the letters do 
 get through " the pimply countenance of P. Blinders was 
 quite immobile, but the eyes behind the great spectacles twirled 
 and twinkled with infinite meaning "a week or so after date, 1 
 perhaps, but what is that.? Nothing nothing at all." 
 
 " Nothing," agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled pleas- 
 antly in each other's faces for a minute more. Then said Van 
 Busch, with a loud sigh: 
 
 " But what I have to tell you now is something. The Eng- 
 lishwoman has got no more money. Ask Trudi, if you think 
 I lie. And, of course, the plan was a good plan, and you were 
 a smart fellow to hit on it; but now the two hundred pounds 
 is gone "
 
 300 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Three hundred remain to get." P. Blinders briskly held 
 up five stumpy red fingers and tucked down the thumb and 
 little finger, leaving a trio of mute witnesses to the correctness 
 of his arithmetic. 
 
 " No more remains to get. The cow has run dry." 
 
 The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise. 
 
 "Ach! What is this I hear?" he demanded with indigna- 
 tion. " Nothing left, and I have not had but a hundred and 
 fifty out of the five hundred. There has been dishonesty some- 
 where. There have been tricks, unbefitting the dealings of 
 scrupulous Christian men. Foei, foei ! " 
 
 Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled, look- 
 ing down into the indignant eyes behind the spectacles. Then 
 he said, with his most candid look and simplest lisp: 
 
 " No tricks, brother ; all fair and above-board. Ask the 
 Commandant whether Van Busch is square or not? He knows 
 that the hundred and fifty was paid you honestly on his ac- 
 count, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And you're not 
 the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no, you'll never do that, 
 never! Go and see him now, and settle up. I had a talk with 
 young Schenk Eybel this morning, and he says the answer to the 
 screeve you wrote to the Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp 
 to patch up an exchange of the Englishwoman for that slim 
 kerel of a Boer's son they got their claws on at the beginning 
 of the siege has come in under the white flag this morning. 
 Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without 
 Walt Slabbert, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old 
 man on his grey pony at One-Tree Redoubt." 
 
 The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in turn. The ex- 
 apothecary faltered: 
 
 " What what is this you say? The money paid me on the 
 General's account when it was to be a secret, between us. ... 
 Ach, ach! This is unfair. And suppose I have spent it, how- 
 shall I replace it? Do you wish to ruin an honest man?" 
 
 Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly. At 
 least, it seemed so, for he turned sharp round and trotted off 
 with sorrowfully-drooping black coat-tails, in search of the 
 meek grey pony and the terrible old man. 
 
 But the front view of the Secretary revealed a countenance 
 whose pimples radiated satisfaction, and spectacles that were 
 alight with joy. Much very much would P. Blinders have 
 liked to have kept that hundred and fifty, but his fear had 
 proved greater than his desire.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 301 
 
 He had paid every tikkie of his money faithfully to 
 Bronnckers, and his hands were metaphorically clean, and his 
 neck comfortably safe. He was the poorer by a hundred and 
 fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and experience; and 
 he chuckled at the thought of this in the joy of knowing, in 
 postscripts appended to those despatches of the Englishwoman's, 
 poked sly sarcasm at the British Lion, and enjoyed in imagina- 
 tion the backing of his spiny tail beneath the goad. 
 
 For another thing very pleasant to think of, he had success- 
 fully pitted the cunning behind his giant spectacles against the. 
 superior villainy of Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg. 
 
 XXXVI 
 
 THE German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two 
 green-shuttered, blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was 
 a sister of that good Boer Mijaheer Hendryk Van Busch 
 " a sister indeed! " snorted Mevrouw Kink ; and never went 
 to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before 
 dark, and had a maid who did her hair and wore her own in 
 waves, the impudent wench ; and whose portmanteau, and bag, 
 and boots, and shoes, and skirt-bands, had London tradesmen's 
 labels woven inside them, was the only person in the village of 
 Tweipans and for a mile round it good Nederlands measure 
 who did not know that she was an English prisoner-of-war. 
 
 Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hard- 
 ships, as its alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on 
 having accomplished something of what she set out to do. Van 
 Busch, not counting a week of days when she had found reason 
 to suspect his entire good faith, had behaved like a staunch 
 Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial sympathies. But 
 his valuable services had been rendered for so much more than 
 nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her 
 Bingo was wont to describe as " stony." She had sent for Van 
 Busch to tell him that the position was untenable. She would 
 evacuate, when he could manage to get hold of Nixey's mouse- 
 coloured trotter and the spider, left in the care of Van Busch's 
 good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats. 
 
 A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear 
 the mouse-coloured trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony 
 ground, and the crack, crack of the sentries' Mausers, followed 
 by a hail of bullets from the trenches. . . . She could see the
 
 302 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on the 
 greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn- 
 down blinds: 
 
 "STIRRING STORY FROM THE SEAT OF HOSTILITIES: LADY 
 WAR-CORRESPONDENT RUNS THE GAUNTLET OF BOER 
 MUSKETRY/' 
 
 "Speshul. Hextry Spheshul!" 
 
 Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got 
 through the lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the 
 splashboard, and sink into the arms of the husband loved better 
 than aught save Glory, gasping, as her heroic spirit fled 
 
 " Did the gracious lady say she would have her boots on ? " 
 
 Trudi got up from the flattest and most uncomfortable of 
 the two forbidding beds Kink's principal guest-chamber boasted, 
 and ran her unoccupied needles through her interminable 
 knitting, a thick white cotton sofa-cover or counterpane of 
 irritating pattern and stood over against her employer in an 
 attitude of sulky submission. She was a square-shouldered, 
 sturdily built, young woman of twenty-five, with round eyes of 
 pinky-blue garnished with white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a 
 superb and aggressively-brilliantined head of fair hair elab- 
 orately dressed, waved, and curled. 
 
 The hair was all attached to Trudi's scalp. Lady Hannah 
 had lain in bed morning after morning, for weary weeks, and 
 watched her " doing it," and wondered that any young feminine 
 creature with such arnts, such skin, and such hair should be so 
 utterly unattractive. But. she had lived all these weeks in this 
 one room with Trudi, had languished under her handmaid's 
 lack of intelligence, had seen her eat, wielding her knife with 
 marvellous dexterity, and, wakeful, tossed the while she 
 snored. 
 
 And every morning after Mevrouw Kink had brought in 
 coffee, snorting whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous eye, 
 or whenever the German drummer's widow struck her as being 
 more foreign of manners and appearance than usual, Lady 
 Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself as for a 
 promenade outdoors, lift the corner of a blind, steal a glance 
 at the seething, stenching single street of Tweipans between 
 the slats of the green shutters, and unpin her veil and take 
 off her hat without a word. . . . 
 
 By eleven o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 303 
 
 would have ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the vel- 
 veteen-coated, wide-awake loafers, the tatterdemalions and 
 their womenkind of all types would have turned in. Then 
 Lady Hannah, attended by the unwilling Trudi, was accus- 
 tomed to venture out for what she called, with some exaggera- 
 tion, " A whiff of fresh air." 
 
 Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the piquets at either 
 end of it, and the sentries posted at longish intervals all down 
 its length, the street of new brick and tin and old wooden 
 houses that made Tweipans belonged to Lady Hannah then. 
 Accompanied by Trudi, whose quality of being what I have 
 heard called " deaf-nosed " with regard to noisy smells, she 
 arrived at the pitch of envying, she would stumble up and 
 down amongst the rubbish, or wade through the slush if it had 
 been wet, and stop at favourable points to search with her 
 night-glass for the greenish-blue glow-worm twinkles of distant 
 Gueldersdorp, and wonder whether anybody there was thinking 
 of her under the white stars or the drifting scud. 
 
 But what was Trudi saying? 
 
 " The gracious one cannot have her boots." 
 
 "Why not?" asked Lady Hannah, with languid interest. 
 Trudi struck the blow. 
 
 " Because she has none." 
 
 " No boots? Well, then, the walking-shoes." 
 
 Trudi smiled all over her large face. This placidity should 
 not long endure. 
 
 " The gracious one has no shoes either. Boots and shoes 
 all have been taken away. Nothing remains except the quilted 
 bedroom slippers the gracious one is wearing. And it is im- 
 possible to walk out in bedroom slippers." 
 
 " I suppose it is." Lady Hannah yawned. " Well, suppose 
 you go and look for them. They may have been carried away 
 
 by mistake, like She wondered afresh what could have 
 
 become of that transformation coiffure. 
 
 ; ' There is no mistake," Trudi announced. " And the 
 gracious lady forgot her little gun beneath her pillow this 
 morning. That also is missing," volunteered Trudi, who had 
 had her instructions and scrupulously acted up to them. 
 
 "My revolver has been stolen?" Lady Hannah sprang 
 from her chair, made rapid search, and was convinced. The 
 Browning revolver had been certainly spirited away. 
 
 Red patches burned in her thin little face, and her round 
 black eyes regained some of their lost brightness. Nothing
 
 304 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 like a spice of excitement for bringing you up to the mark. 
 Just now she had felt positively mouldy, and here she was, her- 
 self again. 
 
 " Nobody came into the room in the night. I sleep with 
 the key round my neck, and if they had opened the door with 
 another, I should have awakened on the instant. Nobody has 
 been in the room to-day except the Frau Kink " you will re- 
 member that a German drummer's widow would naturally con- 
 verse in her defunct spouse's native language " the Frau Kink, 
 with the coffee-tray. She did not come near the bed. . . ." 
 The suddenness and force of the suspicion that shot up in Lady 
 Hannah's mind lifted her up out of her chair, and set her upon 
 her feet. " It must have been you. Was it you? " 
 
 She looked hard at Trudi, and Trudi sank upon her bed and 
 dissolved in noisy weeping. 
 
 " Ach, the wickedness! " she moaned. "To suspect of such 
 shamelessness a poor young maiden brought up in honesty. . . . 
 Ach, ach ! " 
 
 But Lady Hannah went on: 
 
 " Yesterday morning, when you were so long in coming back 
 with hot water, and I opened the door and looked out into the 
 passage, I saw you whispering with a little stumpy, pimply man, 
 in a long-tailed black coat and large spectacles. Who is he, 
 and of what were you talking?" 
 
 Trudi did not at all regard the verbal sketch of P. Blinders 
 as a correct one, but though her love was blind to his pimples 
 and ignored his stumpiness, she could not deny the spectacles, 
 which were to her as peepholes affording visions to a blissful 
 married future. 
 
 " He is a Herr who brought me news from my Mutti at 
 home in Germany. She is sick, and my father also, and all 
 my little brothers and sisters are sick too," gulped Trudi, 
 sobbing and wallowing and rasping her flushed features against 
 the knobbly counterpane of the most uncomfortable of the two 
 beds, " because they hear that I am in this place, and they so 
 greatly fear that I will be dead." 
 
 " You aren't dead yet. And you told me when I engaged 
 you that you were an orphan brought up by an aunt." 
 
 " Pay me my vage," demanded Trudi, lifting a defiant and 
 perfectly dry countenance, and launching the utterance in the 
 forbidden English language, " and I vill now go. I vish not 
 to stop here longer." 
 
 " Very well, but where are you going ? "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 305 
 
 "That," remarked Trudi, tossing her elaborately-dressed 
 head and relapsing into her native language, " has nothing to 
 do with the gracious lady." 
 
 There was insolent triumph and unveiled spite in the large 
 face attached to the elaborate coiffure. The gracious lady, 
 realizing that Trudi formed the one link between herself and 
 the rough, strange, suspicious, unfriendly male world outside, 
 pocketed her pride to temporize. Let Trudi remain as com- 
 panion attendant to the German refugee- widow yet an- 
 other week, and the month's due of wages, already trebled in 
 virtue of a service involving risk, should be substantially in- 
 creased. . . . But Trudi only snorted and shook her head, 
 and Lady Hannah found herself confronting, not only a rat 
 determined upon abandoning a sinking ship, but malignantly 
 inclined to hasten the vessel's foundering. 
 
 What was to be done? It is quite possible to be brave, 
 adventurous, and daring without a revolver, its absence may 
 even impart a faint sense of relief as being no longer under 
 the necessity of shooting somebody with it at a pinch, but 
 without boots or shoes, and a Trudi to put them on, Lady 
 Hannah found herself at a nonplus. To conceal the fact 
 from the rejoicing Trudi, she moved to the window and drew 
 the blind aside, and was instantly confronted with a row of 
 round, staring eyes, the nose belonging to each pair being 
 flattened against the glass. 
 
 " Oh ! " exclaimed Lady Hannah, dropping the blind in 
 consternation at this manifestation of public interest. A 
 snorting chuckle from the malignant Trudi fanned the little 
 lady's waning courage into flame. She crossed the room and 
 turned the door-handle. 
 
 The door was locked from the outside, the key having been 
 removed to accommodate the eye of Mevrouw Kink, who 
 reluctantly removed it to unlock the door, and announce that 
 Myjnheer Van Busch had asked to see his sister, as she ushered 
 the visitor in. 
 
 Sisters are not sensitive as a rule to subtle alterations in 
 the regard of their brothers, but the German drummer's re- 
 fugee-widow could not but read in the face and demeanour 
 of her relative a perceptible diminution of interest in a woman 
 who had no more money. . . . He kept on his broad-brimmed 
 hat and pulled at his bushy whiskers as he exchanged a pal- 
 pable wink with Trudi, who was accustomed, when the 
 gracious lady's brother called, to retire with her knitting be-
 
 3c6 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 hind the shiny American cloth-covered screen that coyly 
 shielded the washstand from a visitor's eye. 
 
 Those flat, light eyes of the visitor's twinkled oddly as Lady 
 Hannah's indignant whisper told of the missing footgear and 
 the vanished revolver, and her conviction that the screened 
 knitter was the active agent in their spiriting away. 
 
 " You believe the girl's slewed on you, eh, and that things 
 jare going to pan out rough? Well, sure, that's a pity! " The 
 big man lolled against the deal table covered with a cloth 
 reproducing in crude aniline colours, trying to the complexion, 
 but gratifying to the patriotic soul of Mevrouw Kink, the red, 
 white, and blue stripes of the Vierkleur, with the green staff- 
 line carried all round as an ornamental border. " And I'd 
 not wonder but you were right." He stuck his thumbs in 
 his belt, and asked, with his hatted head on one side and a 
 jeering grin on his bold red mouth: " So, now, and what did 
 you think to do ? " 
 
 Lady Hannah controlled an impulse to knock off the big 
 man's broad-brimmed felt, and even smiled back in the grin- 
 ning face. . . . One very little lady can hold a great deal of 
 anger and resentment without, spilling any over, if she is 
 thoroughly convinced that it would be imprudent as well as 
 useless to display either. 
 
 " As you gather, I intend returning to Gueldersdorp to- 
 morrow at latest. I shall not take my maid, as she wishes for 
 her own reasons to remain behind. Please have the mare and 
 spider here by mid-day coffee-tirrve. We can drive north to- 
 wards Haargrond and double back when we're beyond the 
 lines, as the coursed hare would do." 
 
 Van Busch's red mouth gleamed, curved back from his 
 tobacco-stained teeth. He said with meaning: 
 
 " Boers shoot hares not run them." 
 
 " They may shoot or not shoot," proclaimed Lady Hannah. 
 " I start to-morrow." 
 
 "Without boots or shoes?" asked the red-edged, yellow- 
 fanged smile. 
 
 " Barefoot if I must," she answered, with all the more spirit 
 that she felt, like the hare struggling in a spring. " Please 
 send for the mare and the trap. I leave this place to-morrow." 
 
 " The mare and the spider have been commandeered for the 
 use of the United Republics," said Van Busah. As the angry 
 colour flamed up in Lady Hannah's small, pale cheeks, he 
 added, shrugging his shoulders and spreading his hands:
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 307 
 
 "Bough did his best to save them, for you, no bounce! But 
 could one man do anything against so many? Sure no, noth- 
 ing at all ! " 
 
 She lost patience, and stamped her little foot in its quilted 
 satin slipper. 
 
 " Do you suppose I haven't guessed by this time that Bough 
 the Afrikander and Van Busch the British- Johannesburger 
 are one Boer when it suits them both ? " ( 
 
 His hand, copper-brown as his face, and with the marks 
 of old tattooing obliterated by an acid burn, jerked as he 
 raised it to stroke and feel his whiskers. Something else upon 
 the hand, in the sharpened state of all her senses, struck out a 
 spark of old association, and recalled a name once known. 
 
 "How many men are you, Mr. Van Busch or Bough? 
 You provoke the question when I see you wearing the Mildare 
 crest and coat-of-arms." 
 
 He had turned the deeplj r -engraved sard with his brown 
 thumb and clenched his fist upon it, but as swiftly changed 
 his mind, and took off the ring and handed it to her. 
 
 " I had this ring off Bough, that's a real live man, and a 
 thundering good pal of mine, for all your funning. The chap 
 it belonged to died at a farm Bough owned once. Somewhere 
 in Natal it might have been. And the bloke who died there 
 was a big bug in England, Bough always thought. But he 
 came tramping, and hauled up with hardly duds to his back 
 or leather to his feet. Sick, too, and coughing like a sheep 
 with the rinderpest. Bough was kind to him, but he got 
 worse and worse. One night Bough was sitting up with 
 him reading the Bible, when he made signs. ' Take this ring 
 off of my finger and keep it,' says he. ' I've got something else 
 to give you, but I reckon the Almighty'll foot your bill, for 
 you're a first-class Christian, if ever there was one.' Then 
 he went in, and Bough buried him in regular fancy style 
 
 " And sent the girl to the nuns at Gueldersdorp, or was she 
 there already ? " 
 
 Bough was in the act of taking back the sardonyx signet- 
 ring. His hand jerked again, so sharply that the ring was 
 jerked into the air, and fell to the floor, and relied under the 
 table. He stooped and reached for it, and asked, with his face 
 hidden by the patriotic tablecloth: 
 
 " What girl do you mean ? " 
 
 His dark face was purple-brown with the exertion of stoop- 
 ing as he rose up. Lady Hannah answered:
 
 308 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " The Mother-Superior of the Convent of the Holy Way 
 at Gueldersdorp has an orphan ward, a singularly lovely girl 
 of nineteen or twenty, whose surname is Mildare. And it 
 struck me just now I don't know why now, and never be- 
 fore that she might be " 
 
 " Bough never said nothing to me about any girl. What 
 jlike is this one?" Van Busch twisted the ring about his 
 'little finger, and spoke with a more sluggish lisp and slurring 
 'of the consonants than even was usual with him. " Is she 
 jshort and square, with black hair and round blue eyes, and 
 red cheeks and thick ankles?" 
 
 Lady Hannah, despite all her recently-gained experience of 
 Van Busch, had not mastered his method of eliciting informa- 
 tion. 
 
 " Miss Mildare is absolutely the opposite of your descrip- 
 tion," she declared. " She is quite tall, and very slight and 
 pale, with slender hands and feet, and reddish-bronze hair, and 
 eyes the colour of yellow topaz or old honey, with wonderful 
 
 black lashes. ... I have never seen anything to compare " 
 
 She stopped. 
 
 What strange eyes the man had, full of lines radiating from 
 the tin-point pupils, scintillating like a snake's. . . . He said, 
 in his thick, lisping way: 
 
 " A beauty, eh ? And how long might the nuns have had 
 her?" 
 
 " The Mayor's wife told me she has been under the care 
 of the Convent ladies nearly seven years." 
 
 His brown full face looked solid, and his eyes veiled them- 
 selves behind a glassy film. He was thinking, as he said: 
 
 "And her name is Mildare, eh? And you know her?" 
 
 " I have met her once. She was introduced to me as Miss 
 Lynette Mildare. But just, now I find my own affairs un- 
 pleasantly absorbing. I am suspected in this place, Mr. Van 
 Busch, and if not actually a prisoner, am certainly under 
 restraint. For how much money down will you undertake to 
 extricate me from this position, and convey me back to 
 Gueldersdorp ? " 
 
 He shook his head, and for once the scent of gain did not 
 rouse his predatory appetite. He was wondering how it 
 should never have occurred to him before that the scared little 
 white-faced thing might have fallen into kindly hands, and 
 been nursed and cockered up and made a lady of? He was 
 puzzled to account for her remembering the name that had
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 309 
 
 belonged to the man whose grave was at the foot of the Little 
 Kopje. He was conscious of an itching curiosity to find out 
 for his friend Bough whether it really was the Kid or no? 
 What was the little fool of a woman saying in her shrill 
 voice ? 
 
 " It would be burning your boats, I am quite aware. But 
 
 if it pays to burn them " she suggested, with her black 
 
 eyes probing vainly in the shallow ones. 
 
 He roused himself. 
 
 " A thousand pounds, English. You've not the money 
 here?" 
 
 " No." 
 
 "Or a cheque?" 
 
 Her laugh jangled contemptuously. 
 
 " Do you Boer spies carry a cheque-book upon Secret 
 Service ? " 
 
 " I am no Boer, but an honest, square-dealing Britisher. 
 How often have I to tell you that? Do you suppose you 
 are a prisoner here because I slewed on you ? Wrong, by 
 God! Perhaps I kept things back a bit for fear you would 
 cut up, as women do, and go into screeching-fits. Sure now, 
 that's what any man would have done." His tone of injury 
 was excellently feigned, and his lisp was simplicity itself. 
 " And to call me a dirty spy, when I got you first-hand in- 
 formation, and ran your letters through to Gueldersdorp, at 
 the risk of my blooming neck. . . . Well, you'll be ashamed 
 when you get back there and see those letters, that's what you 
 will, sure!" 
 
 " The letters got through yes. But did they get through 
 in time to be of use ? " 
 
 The little she-devil suspected the truth. He stroked his 
 whiskers and scraped his foot upon the floor, and said in his 
 blandest lisp: 
 
 " They got through in useful time. I'll kiss the Book and 
 swear it, if you want me." 
 
 How deal with a knave like this, who popped in and out 
 of holes like a rabbit, and wriggled and writhed like a snake? 
 Lady Hannah knew an immense yearning for the absent 
 Bingo, husband of limjited intellectual capacity, man of superior 
 muscular development, doughty in the use of that primitive 
 weapon of punishment, the doubled human fist. 
 
 " In useful time ? Useful Gueldersdorp time or useful 
 Tweipans time? That is what I want to get at."
 
 3io ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "Oh, hell! how do I know?" He had turned sulky and 
 scowling, but her blood was fairly up. 
 
 " I know that you have successfully swindled me out of 
 five hundred pounds. I know that when I met you on the 
 train four months back you shaped your plans and baited a 
 trap- 
 
 " To catch a silly woman." His scarlet lips rolled back 
 from his tobacco-stained teeth. His eyes were intolerable. 
 "Ay, maybe I did. And what's to say?" 
 
 " I say you are a blackguard, Mr. Bough Van Busch!" 
 
 The dark face with the light eyes underwent a murderous 
 change. He glanced over his shoulders right and left, and 
 took a step towards her, carrying out the movement suddenly, 
 as a tarantula darts upon its prey. Before the thick brown 
 muscular fingers had choked the scream that rose in her throat, 
 the key crashed in the lock, and the door was violently kicked 
 open, admitting . . . 
 
 No portrait is required of that burly, bald-browed, sharp- 
 eyed, grizzle-bearded, square-jawed farmer, of the bronzed and 
 sun-cracked countenance, implacable under the slouch-hat with 
 the orange-leather band, his old green overcoat, and coarse 
 corduroy breeches, and roughly tanned leather boots, with 
 heavy, old-fashioned spurs, the husk of a fierce, and indomit- 
 able, and relentless leader, twinned with a quiet family-man of 
 bucolic tastes and patriarchal habits. 
 
 Bough, broader by inches and taller by half a head, 
 dwindled, seen in juxtaposition with this man of the iron 
 will and the leader's temperament, to a flabby, dwarfish, and 
 petty being. The fierce grey eyes took him in, and read him, 
 and dropped him and fastened on the little Englishwoman, as 
 the great boots tramped heavily across the floor, and the great 
 voice roared, speaking in the Taal: 
 
 "Pull up that blind! Voor den donder! Shall we be 
 mice, that sit and squeak in the dark?" 
 
 Down came the Mevrouw Kink's square of glazed yellow 
 calico, roller, cord, and all, at the impatient wrench of the 
 big, heavy hand. . . . The window was blocked wit,h heavy 
 bodies, topped by brown, white, or yellow faces ; the street 
 was a sea of them, all staring with greedy, curious eyes at 
 the little Englishwoman who was a prisoner, and the big man 
 who ruled them by Fear. His angry grey eyes blazed at the 
 gapers, and the crowd surged back a foot or two. Then the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 311 
 
 fierce eyes darted back at pale Lady Hannah, and the roaring 
 voice began again : 
 
 " You who came here in disguise, with a false tale and false 
 hair " 
 
 Lady Hannah jumped in her bedroom slippers, and crim- 
 soned to her natural coiffure, as the missing transformation, 
 appallingly out of wave, was plucked from the baggy pocket 
 of the old queer overcoat, and brandished before her astonished 
 eyes. Writhing with the dual impulse to shriek and clutch, 
 no wonder she appeared a conscience-stricken creature in that 
 great man's watchful eyes. His big voice shook her and shook 
 the room as he thundered : 
 
 " Woman, you are no widow of a Duitscher drummer, but 
 the vrouw of a field-cornet of the Army of Groor. Brittanje. 
 He holds a graafschap in Engeland " a mistake on the part 
 of the General's informant " and is hand-in-glove with the 
 Engelsch Commandant at Gueldersdorp." Not so far from 
 the truth ! thought Lady Hannah. " Would he spy out the 
 land, let him come himself next time. Boers hide not behind 
 their wives' petticoats when there is such business to be done." 
 
 In defence of blameless Bingo the hysterical little woman 
 found voice to say: 
 
 " He didn't know I was coming." 
 
 "What says she?" 
 
 Before Van Busch could bestir himself to interpret, Lady 
 Hannah had repeated her words in faulty Dutch. 
 
 " So ! Engelsch mevrouws disobey their husbands, it 
 seems?" Were the fierce, bloodshot grey eyes really capable 
 of a twinkle ? " We Boers have a cure for that. Green 
 reim, well laid on, after the third caution, teaches our wives 
 to fib and deceive no more." 
 
 " You're wrong, sir." 
 
 "Wrong, do you say? Hoe?" 
 
 " What the green reim does teach them," exclaimed Lady 
 Hannah, secretly aghast at her own temerity, " is, not to be 
 found out next time." 
 
 He gave a wooden chuckle, but his regard was as menacing 
 and the voice as gruff as ever. 
 
 " I make no mouth-play with words. I talk in men and 
 guns, and there are half a dozen among the Engelsch, niet 
 mier, that know how to talk back. There are one or two 
 others that are duyvels, and not men. And the worst duyvel
 
 312 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 of all " he waved the big hand westward " is he over there 
 at Gueldersdorp." 
 
 She mentally registered the compliment. 
 
 " You are a woman who writes for the Engelsch newspapers 
 that are full of shameless tales about the Boers." He spat 
 copiously upon the floor, and the big voice became a bellow. 
 " Lies, lies ! I have had them read to me, and the people 
 who make them should be shot. Hear you now. You shall 
 write to them and say: ' Selig Bronnckers is a merciful man and 
 a just. He is not as zwart as he is painted. He caught me 
 mousing round his hoofd laager at Tweipans and what does 
 he do ? ' ' The pause was impressive. Then the roaring voice 
 resumed : 
 
 ' He sends me marching down to the gaol at Gwenfon- 
 tein, that is packed with dirty white and dirty coloured schelms 
 until there is not room for one more " 
 
 He named the homely parasite hymned by Burns . . . 
 
 " ' Or he packs me up to Oom Paul at Pretoria, chained 
 to the waggon-tail like the others.' . . ." 
 
 Lady Hannah wondered, while the stuffy room spun round 
 her, who the others were. 
 
 " Geen, I will tell you what he does." He pitched the 
 crumpled transformation contemptuously into the corner. 
 " He writes to the Engelsch Commandant at Gueldersdorp 
 and says: ' I have here a silly female thing that is no use to 
 me. Take her you, and give me in exchange a man of 
 mine.' . . ." 
 
 " And he ... what, does . . . ? " She could get out noth- 
 ing more. 
 
 " He agrees. Mevrouw Vrynks " " Dutch for Wrynche," 
 thought Lady Hannah dizzily " you will now pay the 
 Mevrouw Kink what is owing for her amiable entertain- 
 ment, and you will start for Gueldersdorp in ten minutes' 
 time." 
 
 The roaring voice of the big fierce-eyed man sounded 
 lovelier than the swan-song of De Rezke. She faltered, with 
 her joyful heart leaping at. the gates of utterance: 
 
 " The mare and spider. You will be so kind as to return 
 them ?" 
 
 His face became as a human countenance rudely carved in 
 seasoned oak. 
 
 " I know nothing of a mare and spider," blared the great 
 voice.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 313 
 
 She looked him straight between the hot fierce eyes, and 
 spoke out pluckily. 
 
 " They are not my property. I hired the trap and the 
 trotter from a hotel-keeper at Gueldersdorp. And Mr. Van 
 Busch tells me that they have recently been comm,andeered for 
 the service of the United Forces of the Transvaal and Orange 
 Free State." 
 
 " So ! . . . Well, that is what I would have done, if they 
 were worth having. Where is Van Busch ? " The angry 
 glance pounced on him in the remote corner to which that 
 patriot had modestly retired. Van Busch cringed forwards, 
 hat in hand, explaining: 
 
 " The Engelish Mevrouw mistakes, Myjnheer. Sure, now, 
 I never told her anything of that kind. How could I, when 
 there was no mare and no spider? Didn't I drive her and 
 the other woman over from Haargrond, with Bough's little 
 beast pulling in a cart of my own? Call the other woman, 
 and she will tell you it was as I say." 
 
 Lady Hannah, supremely disdainful, turned her back upon 
 the liar. . . . 
 
 " So, then, you are not willing to go back in a veld 
 waggon?" demanded the bullying voice. 
 
 " I'm willing to go back in anything that, isn't a coffin," she 
 declared. 
 
 He gave the wooden chuckle, swung about and trampled to 
 the door, calling to Van Busch in the tone of a dog's master: 
 
 " Here, you . . .! " 
 
 Van Busch followed, wriggling as obsequiously as the dog 
 with a stolen mutton-chop upon his conscience. The door 
 slammed, the key turned roughly in the lock. Lady Hannah, 
 oblivious of the absence of outdoor footwear, flew joyously to 
 cram a few belongings into her travelling-bag and resume her 
 discarded hat. 
 
 Outside in the street, the motley crowd having melted away 
 upon his appearance, the Commandant was saying to Van 
 Busch: 
 
 " It is a pity that the Engelschwoman's story was not true 
 about that mare and spider. For if a mare and spider there 
 had been, you might perhaps have kept them for your 
 trouble " 
 
 " Now I come to think of it, Myjnheer Commandant," 
 said Van Busch in a hurry, "perhaps the woman was not
 
 314 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 lying, after all. Bough has a mouse-coloured trotter in the 
 stables at Haargrond Plaats, and a spider stands under the 
 waggon-shed in the yard. If they are hers, I'll let Bough 
 know Myjnheer Commandant said I was to have them. He'll 
 make no bones about parting then. Sure, no! he'll never 
 dare to." 
 
 " I will send a couple of my burghers with you to take 
 care he does not," said the Commandant, in what was for 
 the redoubtable Bronnckers an easy tone. " It is unlucky," 
 he added pleasantly, " that you were such a verdoemte clever 
 knave as to tell the Engelschwoman I had commandeered both 
 beast and vehicle for Republics' use. Because now I will do 
 it, look you. No Boer's son that lives, by the Lord ! will I 
 suffer to make Selig Bronnckers out a liar." He added, as 
 Van Busch salaamed and squirmed with more than Oriental 
 submissiveness, " Least of all a sneaking Afrikander schelm 
 like you. And now, about the money ? " 
 
 " Excellentie," lisped Van Busch, smiling his oily brown 
 face into ingratiating creases . . . 
 
 " I am no Excellentie. . . . Of how much money, properly 
 belonging to the Republics' war-chest, have you cheated this 
 little fool of an Engelschwoman ? " 
 
 " Five weeks back, Myjnheer Commandant," bleated Van 
 Busch, " I had from her one hundred and fifty pounds, which 
 I swear as an honest man has been handed over to Myjnheer 
 Blinders " 
 
 " He has accounted to me." 
 
 "Five weeks back ?" Van Busch hinted. 
 
 " He has accounted for it five weeks back." 
 
 There are men who possess all the will to be rogues, but 
 have not the requisite courage. Such a man was Blinders, 
 who emerged plus a sweetheart, the approval of his Com- 
 mandant, and the eclat of having chaffed the British Lion, 
 out of the affair that was to prove so expensive to Mr. Van 
 Busch. 
 
 " And " the big voice trumpeted, as Van Busch, like a 
 stout-pinned butterfly, twiddled, transfixed by the glare of the 
 savage eyes " you will now account to me for the rest." 
 
 Van Busch faltered with a sickly smile: 
 
 " Fifty more, Myjnheer, that I was bringing you my- 
 self 
 
 " One hundred and fifty you have paid me, and fifty you 
 were going to pay me. Dat spreekt but where are the hun-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 3*5 
 
 dreds you have paid, Van Busch?" bellowed the roaring voice. 
 " Does not my old man-baboon at home pouch six walnuts for 
 every one that his wife gets to share with her kind? When 
 I want to make the big thief spit them out, I squeeze him by 
 the neck. So, voor den donder! will I do to you, Only, 
 geloof mij, I will not do it in play. Pay Blinders the other 
 five hundred pounds before kerk-time. If you haven't got the 
 cash about you, he and young Schenk Eybel shall ride with you 
 to Haargrond, where lives your friend Bough. They can 
 bring back the money and the mare and spider, too. Moreover 
 Eybel, who is a bright lad, and has a head upon his shoulders, 
 wants a slim rogue of a fellow that talks Engelsch to worm 
 himself in over yonder " he jerked his gnarled thumb in the 
 direction of Gueldersdorp " and bring back a plan of the de- 
 fences on the west, where the native stad lies. Perhaps I will 
 let you keep two hundred of that five hundred if you are the 
 man to go. ... But whether you go or stay, by the Lord! 
 you w r ill find it best to be square with Selig Bronnckers." 
 
 And the redoubtable Bronnckers stumped off. Verily, in 
 times of scarcity, when the lion is a-hungered, the jackal 
 must lose his bone. 
 
 It w r ould be well, thought the dispirited jackal ruefully, to 
 remove the unfavourable impression made by a valuable service 
 rendered to the United Republics. It would be a good thing 
 to stand well with Myjnheer Schenk Eybel, who would, when 
 Bronnckers went south, be left in sole command. It would 
 be as well, also, to get a look at the girl that was living with 
 the nuns at Gueldersdorp. 
 
 " Mildare . . ." That was the puzzle her having the 
 name so pat. But these little frightened, white-faced things 
 were sly, and knew more than you thought for. . . . 
 
 Grown up a beauty, too, and with the manners of a lady. 
 He swore again, the thing seemed so incredible, and spat upon 
 the dust. A pretty green shining beetle crawled there. He 
 set his heavy foot upon the insect, and its beauty was no more.. 
 
 XXXVII 
 
 As the Captain's heavy cavalry stride shakes Nixey's roof, 
 the upright, lightly-built soldierly figure in khaki turns and 
 comes towards him, giving the binoculars in charge to the 
 Sergeant-Major of Meynews, who is his orderly of the day.
 
 ;u 6 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " I want a word with you, Wrynche. Rawlings will take 
 the glasses. Come in here under cover." 
 
 He leads the way. The cover is a canvas shelter, perhaps 
 a protection from the blazing sun, but none at all from shell 
 and bullets. There are a couple of wooden chairs under its 
 flimsy spread and a little table. The Chief sits down astride 
 on one of the chairs, accepts a cigar from Captain Bingo's 
 enormous crocodile leather case, and says, as the first ring of 
 blue smoke goes wavering upwards: 
 
 " You'll be glad to know that Monboia's Barald runner 
 has got through with good news for you" The last two 
 words are rather strongly emphasized. " Just before dawn 
 and after Beauvayse relieved you at Staff Bombproof South." 
 
 Captain Bingo swallows violently, runs a thick finger 
 round his inside collar, and his big face goes through several 
 changes of complexion, ranging from boiled suet-dumpling 
 paleness to beetroot red. He looks away and blinks before he 
 says in a voice that wobbles: 
 
 "Then my wife's all right?" 
 
 " Lady Hannah and her German attendant, as far back 
 as the day before yesterday, when Monboia's man saw them, 
 were in the enjoyment of excellent health." 
 
 " Poof ! " Captain Bingo blows a genuine sigh of relief, 
 and the latent lugubriousness departs from him. " Good 
 hearing. I've had call it hippopotamus on the chest this 
 two months, and you'll about hit the mark. Uncertainty and 
 suspense get on a man's nerves, in the long-run. Bound to. 
 
 And never a word the deuce a line all these Poof ! " 
 
 He blows again, and beams. The Colonel, watching him out 
 of the corner of one keen eye, says, with a twitching muscle 
 in the cheek that is turned away from him: 
 
 " My good news being told, I have a slice of bad for you. 
 But first let me make an admission. Since Nixey's pony 
 pulled Nixey's spider out of Gueldersdorp with Lady Hannah 
 and her maid in it, I have had three communications from your 
 wife." 
 
 "You're pullin* my leg, sir, ain't you?" queries Bingo 
 doubtfully. 
 
 " Not a bit of it." 
 
 In confirmation of the statement he takes out a shabby 
 pocket-book, fat with official documents, and, unstrapping 
 it, selects three, and hands them to Bingo. They are flimsy 
 sheets of tissue-paper covered with spidery characters in violet
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 317 
 
 ink, and Bingo, taking them, recognizes the handwriting, and 
 is, as he states without hesitation, confoundedly habbergasted. 
 
 " For they are in my wife's wild scrawl," he splutters at 
 last. " How on earth did they reach you, sir?" 
 
 " The first was brought in by a native boy who said he 
 belonged to the Kraals at Tweipans," says the Chief. 
 " Rolled small and stuffed into a quill stuck through his ear 
 in the usual way. He trumped up a glib story about his cow 
 having been killed and his new wife beaten by Bronnckers' 
 men, and his desire to be revenged and oblige the English 
 lady who'd been kind to him " 
 
 " Umph ! Native gratitude don't run to being skinned 
 alive with sjamboks not much!" the other comments. 
 " Man must have been lyin', or a kind of nigger Phoenix." 
 
 " Exactly. So I couldn't find it in my heart to part with 
 him. He's on the coloured side of the gaol now, with two 
 others, who subsequently landed in with the documents you 
 have in hand there." 
 
 " Am I to read 'em ? " Bingo queries. 
 
 His commanding officer nods, with the muscle in his lean 
 cheek twitching. 
 
 " Certainly. Aloud if you'll be so good." 
 
 Bingo reads, with haltings on the way, for the tissue sheets 
 stick to his large ringers, which are damp with suppressed 
 agitation : 
 
 " HAARGROND PLAATS, 
 " NEAR TWEIPANS, 
 
 " October 30th. 
 
 " To the Colonel Commanding Her Majesty's Forces in 
 Gueldersdorp. 
 
 " SIR, I beg to report myself arrived at the above address, 
 twelve miles distant from the head laager of the Boer Com- 
 mandant, General Bronnckers. I have to inform you that an 
 attack will be made on Maxim Kopje South by a large force 
 of the enemy with guns in the beginning of November. 
 " I have the honour to be, 
 
 " On Secret Service, 
 " Yours most obediently, 
 
 " H. WRYNCHE." 
 
 " Communications care of 
 MYJNHEER H. VAN BUSCH."
 
 318 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Bingo stares blankly at his Chief, the sheets of crumpled 
 tissue wavering between his thick, agitated fingers. 
 
 " I got that letter exactly a week after the attack had been 
 made and successfully resisted," says the Colonel's dry, quiet 
 voice. " Read the four lines in a different hand and ink, 
 that are underlined at the bottom, and tell me what you think 
 of 'em." 
 
 Bingo obeyed, and read: 
 
 "Lady's information perfectly correct. We hope this in- 
 telligence will reach you in time to be useful. 
 
 "I have the honour to be, 
 
 "P. Blinders." 
 "Acting-secretary to General Bronncktrs." 
 
 " By the Living Tinker ! " exploded Bingo. 
 " Don't be prodigal of emotion," the Colonel's quiet voice 
 warns the excited husband. " There are two more letters fol- 
 lowing. Read 'em in the proper sequence. That one with the 
 inky design at the top, that might be the pattern for a pair 
 of fancy pajamas that's the next." 
 Bingo reads as follows: 
 
 "KINK'S HOTEL, 
 " TWEIPANS, 
 " November 28th. 
 
 " To the Colonel Commanding H. M. Forces in Gueldersdorp. 
 
 " SIR, I beg to report myself arrived at Tweipans. I have 
 the honour to enclose herewith a sketch-plan of the village and 
 the disposition of General Bronnckers' laager. Trusting you 
 may find it useful, 
 
 " I have the honour to be, 
 
 " On Secret Service. 
 "Yours most obediently, 
 
 H. WRYNCHE." 
 
 The sarcastic P. Blinders had appended an italicized com- 
 ment: 
 
 "His Honour considers the above sketch-plan remarkably 
 faithful. The building next the Gerevoorwed Kerk, indicated 
 by an X , is the gaol. Comfortable cells at your disposal, which 
 we are keeping aired. 
 
 "P, Blinders."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 319 
 
 " D-a-a- 
 
 The Chief does not happen to be looking Bingo's way as the 
 infuriated husband menaces with a large clenched fist the 
 absent personality of the grinning image of the sportive P. 
 Blinders. 
 
 " Swear it will bring the blood down from your head," 
 advises the dry, quiet voice. " But don't tear up the papers 
 they're too amusing to lose." 
 
 "Amusin'! " growls Bingo, with smarting eyes, and a lumpy 
 throat, and a tingling in his large muscles which P. Blinders, 
 being out of reach, can afford to provoke. " You wouldn't 
 think it amusin', sir, if it were your wife, making herself a a 
 figure of fun for those Dutch bounders to shy at." 
 
 This is the third letter. 
 
 "December 23rd. 
 " To the Colonel Commanding, Gueldersdorp. 
 
 " SIR, I have to report that the coup you have planned to 
 take place on the morning of the 26th, for the capture of the 
 enemy's big gun, is known to General Bronnckers, and that 
 One Tree Redoubt will be strengthened and manned to resist 
 you. 
 
 " Obediently, 
 
 " H. WRYNCHE." 
 Underneath is the sarcastic comment: 
 
 "December 27th. 
 
 "Nice if you had got this in time, eh? And ^ue wanted 
 those boots and badges" 
 
 "P. B." 
 
 " She got hold of a nugget that once, anyway," says Cap- 
 tain Bingo, blowing his nose emphatically; " and by the 
 Living Tinker! if it had reached us in time, we'd have saved a 
 loss of eighteen killed and stripped, and twenty-five wounded, 
 and the stingin' shame of a whippin' into the bargain." 
 
 " Perhaps," says the Colonel, with a careworn shadow on 
 the keen, sagacious face, and both men are silent, remembering 
 an assault the desperate, reckless valour of which deserves to 
 be bracketed in history with the Charge of the Light Brigade 
 at Balaclava. " If Defeat is ever shame, perhaps, Wrynche. 
 But if you could put the question to each of that handful of
 
 320 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 brave men sleeping side by side over there " he nods in the 
 direction of the Cemetery, where the aftermath of Death's red 
 harvest has sprung up in orderly rows of little white crosses 
 " they would tell you it can be more glorious than victory." 
 
 " Of course, you're right, sir. I gather now what your bad 
 news is," says Bingo, who has been dejectedly rubbing his 
 finger along the bristly edges of his clipped moustache, for a 
 'minute past, " Judgin' by the marginal annotations of this man 
 Blinders brute I'd kick to Cape Town with pleasure my 
 wife's a prisoner in Bronnckers' hands?" 
 
 " An unconscious prisoner yes. Give 'em their due, 
 Wrynche. I shouldn't have credited 'em with the sense of 
 humour they have displayed in their dealings with her." 
 
 If it were possible for Bingo to grow redder in the face, one 
 would say that he has done so, as he bursts out, in a violent 
 perspiration, striding up and down over Nixey's sheet-leaded 
 roof. 
 
 " Confound their humour! It's the humour of tom-cats 
 playin' with a a dashed little silly dicky-bird. It's the 
 humour of aasvogels watchin' a shot rock-rabbit kick. It's the 
 humour of the battledore and the shuttlecock. And I'm the 
 dicky-bird's mate and the bunny's better-half, and the other 
 shuttlecock of the pair, and may I be blessed if I can take it 
 smilin'." He mops his scarlet and dripping face, and puffs 
 and blows like a large military walrus on dry land. 
 
 "Perhaps you'll manage a smile when you've read this?" 
 
 Bingo stops in his stride, wheels, and receives an official 
 document on blue paper. Under the date of the previous day, 
 it runs as follows: 
 
 " HEAD LAAGER, 
 " TWEIPANS, 
 
 "January th. 
 
 " To the Colonel Commanding the British Forces in Guelders- 
 
 dorp. 
 
 " SIR, In reply to your communication I am instructed by 
 General Bronnckers to inform you that our prisoner, the Eng- 
 lishwoman who came here in the character of a German 
 drummer's refugee widow to act as your spy, will be exchanged 
 for a free Boer of the Transvaal Republic, by name, Myjnheer 
 W. Slabbert, who is at present confined under the Yellow 
 Flag in Gueldersdorp gaol. The exchange will be effected by 
 parties under the White Flag at a given point North-East be-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 321 
 
 tween the lines of investment and defence one hour before 
 Kerk-time to-morrow, being the Sabbath. 
 
 " I have the honour to be yours truly. 
 
 "P. BLINDERS (Apothecary). 
 
 " Acting-Secretary to General Bronnckers." 
 
 " PS. The young lady of German extraction who accom- 
 panied the Englishwoman has entered into an engagement to 
 remain here. 
 
 "P. B." 
 
 " PPS. The engagement is with yours truly, the young 
 lady having conformed to the faith of the Dopper Kerk. We 
 are to be married next Sunday. Would you like us to send 
 you some wedding-cake? 
 
 "P. B." 
 
 Blinders has certainly had the last dig, but his principal vic- 
 tim, Captain Bingo, fails this time to wince under the point 
 of his humour. With his big face changing from red to white, 
 and from white to crimson half a dozen times in as many sec- 
 onds, Captain Bingo says, refolding the paper and returning 
 it with a shaky hand : 
 
 " Then she she " 
 
 A lump in his throat slides down and sticks, preventing 
 further utterance. 
 
 " Dopper Kerk-time is eleven o'clock." The Colonel looks 
 at his shabby wrist-watch, as the sound of cantering horses 
 comes through the Market Square, and an orderly, leading an 
 officer's charger, halts before Nixey's door. " The B.S.A. 
 escort with their man are due to leave the gaol in ten minutes' 
 time. Here's your orderly with your mount, and you've eight 
 minutes to change in." 
 
 " One minute, sir," Captain Bingo utters with an effort. 
 " This man this Slabbert is a well-known spy a trump 
 card in Bronnckers' hand, or he wouldn't be so anxious to get 
 hold of him. And therefore by this exchange and a 
 woman's dashed ambitious folly you may lose heavily in the 
 end. . . ." 
 
 " I don't deny it." The haggard shadow is again upon 
 the Colonel's face, or is it that Bingo's radiance dulls neigh- 
 bouring surfaces by comparison ? " But don't let. the thought 
 of it spoil your good hour." The smile in the eyes that have
 
 322 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 so many lines about them is kind, if the mouth under the red- 
 brown moustache is stern and sorrowful. 
 
 " We don't have many of 'em. Off with you and meet her." 
 Captain Bingo tries to say something more, but makes a 
 hash of it; and with eyes that fairly run over, can only grip 
 the kindly hand again and again, assuring its owner, with 
 numerous references to the Living Tinker, that he is the most 
 thundering brick on earth. Then, overthrowing the small 
 table and one of the chairs, he plunges down the narrow iron 
 stairway to get into what he calls his kit. Six minutes later, 
 correct to a buckle and a puttee-fold, he salutes his command- 
 ing officer, nodding pleasantly to him from Nixey's roof, and 
 clatters down the street at a tremendous gallop, the happiest 
 man in Gueldersdorp, with this shout following him: 
 
 " My regards to Lady Hannah. And tell her that the 
 Staff dine on gee-gee at six o'clock sharp, and I shall be 
 charmed if she'll join us." 
 
 XXXVIII 
 
 THE little Olopo River, a mere branch of the bigger river 
 that makes fertile British Baraland, runs from east to west, 
 along the southern side of Gueldersdorp, ending in innumer- 
 able thready water-courses, dry in the blistering winter heat, 
 that the wet season disperses among the foothills that bristle 
 with Bronnckers' artillery. Seen from the altitude of a balloon 
 or a war-kite, the course of the beer-coloured stream flowing 
 between forty-foot high banks sparsely wooded with oak and 
 blue gum, and lavishly clothed with cactus, mimosa, and tree- 
 fern, high grasses, and climbing-creepers, would have looked 
 like a verdant ribbon meandering over the dun and ochre- 
 coloured veld, where patches of bluish-green are beginning to 
 spread. The south bank, where the bush grows thickest, was 
 frequently patronized by picnic-parties, and at all times a place 
 of resort for strolling sweethearts. The north bank, much 
 more precipitous, was clothed with a tangled luxuriance of 
 vegetation, and threaded only by native paths, so narrow as to 
 prove discouraging to pedestrians desirous of walking side by 
 side. Where the outermost line of defences impinged upon the 
 river-bed, the trees had been cut down and the bush levelled. 
 But west of Maxim Outpost South, and the trenches that 
 flanked it, all was as it had been for hundreds of years, in the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 323 
 
 remembrance of the great granite boulder that stood on the 
 south shore. 
 
 The great boulder had known changes since the old Plutonic 
 forces cast it upwards, a mere bubble of melted granite, solidi- 
 fying as it went into a stone acorn thirty feet high, which the 
 glacier brought down in a slow journey of countless ages, and 
 set upright like a phallic symbol, amongst other boulders of 
 lesser size. The channel the glacier had chiselled was now 
 full of shining honey-coloured water, hurrying over the grey 
 stones and blocks of quartz and pretty vari-coloured pebbles, 
 while the boulder sat high and dry, with the tall-plumed 
 grasses and the graceful tree-fern, and the yellow-tasselled 
 mimosa crowding about its knees, and remembered old times r 
 long before the little Bushfellow had outlined the koodoo and 
 the buffalo, and the hunter-man with the spear, in black 
 pigments on its smooth plank, and ground up the coprolites 
 gathered from the river-bed for red and yellow paint to colour 
 the drawings. On the western side the great boulder was 
 dressed in crimson lake and yellow umber-hued lichens from 
 base to summit, and in August, when the aloes flowered in 
 magnificent fiery clusters upon its crown and at its base ; and in 
 May the pink bignonia wreathed it. in exquisite trails, and 
 pelargoniums and everlastings bloomed in every cranny of the 
 rocks, King Solomon in all his glory held less magnificence of 
 state. Just now the sweet-scented clematis wrapped the big 
 stone in a white and purple mantle. Where the high grass and 
 bush had been cleared in a wide space about it the 
 shorter, sweeter vegetation that had sprung was full 
 of orchids and scarlet and golden cowslips, sparaxis with chimes 
 of tiny pink and blue bells hanging from splendid brown and 
 amber sword-flower, the long drooping spikes and the scented 
 little irises of white and violet. 
 
 Insects and beasts and birds loved the boulder. The sun- 
 beetle and the orange-tip and peacock butterflies loved to bask 
 on its hottest side, while the old dog-faced baboon squatted on 
 top of it, and chattered wisdom to his numerous family, and 
 the finches and love-birds built in its crannies and bred their 
 young, too often as food for the giant tarantula and the tree- 
 snake; while the francolin and grouse dusted themselves in the 
 hot sand at. the base of its throne of rocks, and the springbok 
 and the wart-hogs came down at night to drink ; and the woolly 
 cheetah and the red lynx came after the springbok and the 
 wart-hog.
 
 324 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 The boulder had seen War War between black-skinned 
 men and brown-skinned men, adventurers with great hooked 
 noses and curled beards, with tassels of silk and gold plaited 
 into them and into the hair of their heads, terrible warriors, 
 mighty hunters, and great miners, who came for slaves and 
 ivory and gold, and hollowed strongholds out of the moun- 
 tains, and worshipped strange bird-beaked gods, and passed 
 away. Yet again, when these ceased to be, there had been 
 War, and this time the black men of the soil fought with 
 white strangers, who wanted the same things slaves, and 
 skins, and ivory, and the yellow metal of the river-sands and 
 of the rocks. Now white men fought with white. The black 
 men owned little of the country now; they hid in the gloofs 
 and schantzes in terror, while the European conquerors shed 
 each other's blood for gold, and land, and power. The 
 boulder was so very old. It could afford to wait patiently un- 
 til these men, like all that went before, had passed. 
 
 Every seventh day the guns ceased bellowing and throwing 
 iron things that burst and scattered Death broadcast, and the 
 rifles stopped crack-cracking and spitting lead. Then the 
 scared birds came back: the w T axbills, and lovebirds, and 
 finches, and sparrows darted in and out among the bushes, 
 and the partridge, and quail, and francolin ventured down to 
 drink. The old baboon had retired to the hills with his fam- 
 ily; the springbok and the wart-hog had moved up Bulawayo 
 way; the cheetah and the lynx had followed them. . . . 
 
 But as long as human lovers came and whispered to each 
 other, standing beside the big boulder, or sitting in its shadow, 
 the boulder would be content. They spoke the old language 
 that it had learned when the world was comparatively young. 
 Black and yellow or white, African or Oriental or European, 
 'this speech of theirs was always the same; their looks and ac- 
 'tions never varied. Either they met and kissed and were 
 happy, or they met and quarrelled and were miserable. When 
 'no more lovers should come, the boulder knew that would be 
 the end of everything. 
 
 There was a gaudily dressed, white-faced young woman 
 waiting now beside the big stone upon this seventh day. Her 
 blue eyes were large and wistful. She had taken off her big 
 flaunting hat and hung it on a bush, and her face was not 
 unpretty, topped by its aureole of frizzy yellow curls. She 
 leant against the sun-warmed granite, and cried a little. That 
 was the way of women when the man was late at the tryst.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 325 
 
 Then she dried her eyes and hummed a song, and, finally, tak- 
 ing a stump of pencil from her pocket, she began to scribble 
 on the smooth grey stone all part of the old play, the boulder 
 knew. The first woman who had ever leaned against him 
 had drawn a figure meant for a portrait of her lover, with a 
 sharpened flake of flint. 
 
 The young woman, as she sucked her lead-pencil, was quite 
 unconscious that the boulder thought at all. She wrote in an 
 unformed hand, and in letters that began by being large and 
 round, and tailed off into a slanting niggle. " W. Keyse, 
 Esquer." Then she bit the pencil awhile, and dreamed 
 dreams. Then she wrote again, " Jane Keyse " and " Mrs. 
 W. Keyse," and blushed furiously, and then grew pale again 
 in anticipation of the Awful Ordeal to come. For she had 
 made up her mind to tell him all, and chance it. 
 
 Yesterday had been his birthday. She had sent him, per 
 John Tow, a costly gift. The four-ounce packet of honey- 
 dew, cheap at five dollars in these days of scarcity, had been 
 opened, and the new pipe filled. A slip of paper coquettishly 
 intimated that the sender had rendered the recipient this deli- 
 cate little service. She meant to sign " Jane Harris," but her 
 courage failed her, and her trembling pen faltered for the last 
 time, " Fare 'Air." 
 
 Oh! how she hated that Other One, whom, perhaps, he 
 liked the best, though he had never kissed her! She would 
 be done with the creature, she thanked her Gawd, after to-day! 
 Oh, how many times she had made up her mind to tell him 
 the truth, and never done it! But if she took and died of it, 
 tell him she would to-day. 
 
 How would he take the revelation? Possibly swearing. 
 Probably he would be angry enough to hit her, when he knew^ 
 If he only would, and make it up afterwards! Oh! how 
 cruel she did suffer! She thought she would not tell him just 
 yet. It was too hard. And then it seemed quite easy, and 
 then she cried out in agony: " Is that 'im comin'? Oh, my 
 Gawd, it is! " 
 
 She clasped her hands over a brand-new blowze, with some- 
 thing under it that jumped and fluttered orful. Mother used 
 to 'ave such palpitytions when her and father 'ad 'ad what you 
 might call a jar. And he was coming, coming. 
 
 Surely W. Keyse looked stern and imposingly tall of stature 
 seen from her lower level, as he appeared among the blue 
 gum-trees on the top of the bank, and began to descend into
 
 326 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the ferny gorge where the great boulder sat and sunned him- 
 self beside the beer-coloured river, whose barbel rose continu- 
 ously at the flies. Something W. Keyse dragged behind him, 
 not by a rope, but by a pigtail, an animated bundle of clean 
 blue cotton, topped by the impassive, almond-eyed countenance 
 of a letter-carrying Chinaman, by name John Tow, who in the 
 pursuit of tikkies, rinding the letter written by the foreign lady- 
 devil to the male one eagerly paid for on the nail, had offered 
 for half as much again to induce her for the future to write 
 two instead of one. Towing Tow, the smarting victim of 
 feminine duplicity, came crashing down upon the guilty girl 
 who had betrayed him. 
 
 " See 'ere ! You know this 'ere young lady, and you re- 
 member what you've bin and told me. Say it over again now," 
 thundered W. Keyse, " so as she can 'ear you. Tell me be- 
 fore 'er as wot she wrote them these letters" he rapped 
 himself dramatically upon the breast-pocket " and how you 
 see her doing of it, before I kick your backbone through your 
 hat." 
 
 All was lost. The Chinaman had up an' give her away. 
 Certainly he had saved her trouble, but. what was he sayin' 
 now, the 'orrible slant-eyed 'eathen? She could hardly hear 
 him for the roaring in her poor bewildered head. 
 
 " S'pose John tell, can carchee more tikkie ? Plenty tikkie 
 want to buy chow allee so baddee times." 
 
 " Always on the make, ain't you ? " commented W. Keyse. 
 With a strong, imperious shove, he dumped the blue bundle 
 down among the irises in which the feet of the guilty fair were 
 hidden, saying sternly: "I give you three minutes to git it off 
 your chest, else kickie is wot you'll catch instead o' tikkie." 
 He furnished a moderate sample on account. 
 
 " Oh, ki ah. Oh, ki ah ! " moaned the tingling John. 
 
 "Don't you be 'ard on him, Billy" he hardly knew the 
 voice, it was so weak and small " it's Gawspel truth. To 
 pay you out. at first, for juggin' Walt, I did write them let- 
 ters every bloomin' screeve." 
 
 " An' sent the pipe and baccy for a birthday present, to make 
 a blushin' fool o' me?" yelled the infuriated Keyse. "All 
 for the crimson sake of a fat 'og of a Dutchman ! " 
 
 The patriot to whom he referred, mounted on an attenuated 
 mule, and escorted by a Sergeant and six men of the B.S.A., 
 under the superintendence of a large pink officer of the Staff,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 327 
 
 was at that moment being conducted at a sharp trot out of 
 the lines, to meet a smallish waggon pulled by a span of four 
 that was being brought, down from Tweipans by half a dozen 
 Boers in weathered tan cord and velveteen, weathered pot- 
 hats and ragged shooting-jackets, carrying very carefully 
 tended rifles, mounted on well-fed, wiry little horses, and accom- 
 panied by a White Flag. If she had known, what would it 
 have mattered to her? All her thoughts were centred in this 
 furious little mao, whose pale, ugly eyes fairly blazed at her, as 
 he repeated: 
 
 " To pay me out. You brawsted little Treachery, 
 you " 
 
 She crimsoned to her hair; you could see the red run rush- 
 ing and rushing up from under the peekaboo embroidery in 
 front of the tawdry blowze, in a hurry to tell her tingling ears 
 what cruel names he called her. 
 
 " To pay you out at first it was. An* afterwards " 
 her throat hurt her, and her eyes did smart and burn so 
 "afterwards I I wanted . . . O Gawd! . . ." she shook 
 all over "you'll never walk out wi' me no more after 
 this!" 
 
 " You may take your dyin' oath I won't." He was bitterly 
 sarcastic. " Strite, an' no kid, didn't you know when you 
 done that I'd never forgive yer as long as I lived?" 
 
 He plucked the stout package of letters signed " Fare 'Air " 
 from his indignant bosom, and threw them at. her feet, with 
 the new pipe, her hapless gift. His wrath was infinitely more 
 terrible than she had imagined. Her tongue clave to the roof 
 of her mouth. Everything kep' a-spinnin' so, she couldn't 
 'ardly tell whether she was on 'er 'ead or 'er 'eels. She will 
 remember that day to the last breath she dror. . . . 
 
 " Didn't you know it?" the voice of her judge demanded 
 again. 
 
 John Tow, finding himself no longer an object of attention, 
 had discreetly vanished. 
 
 " Oh, I did, I did ! " Her agony was frantic. " Oh, let me 
 go away and hide and die somewhere! Oh, crooil, to break 
 a pore gal's 'art! Wot wot loves the bloomin* earth under 
 your feet ! " 
 
 " Garn ! " the scorn of W. Keyse was something awful 
 "you an' your love " 
 
 She wrenched the cotton lace away from her thin throat,
 
 328 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and tore some of her hair out in the strenuous hysteria of hef 
 class, and screamed at him: 
 
 " Me an' my love! . . . Go on. . . . Frow it in me face, 
 an' 'ave no pity. Me an* my love. . . . Sneer at it, take 
 an' spit on it ain't it yours all the syme? Oh, for Gawd's 
 syke forgive me! " 
 
 He struck an indomitable attitude and thundered: 
 
 " So 'elp me Jiminy Cripps, I never will." 
 
 She knew that the oath was irrevocable, and with a faint 
 moan, turned to the great boulder that was behind her, and 
 clung to its hard grey bosom as if it had been a mother's. She 
 moaned to him as her thin figure flattened itself against the 
 stone, to let her go away and die somewhere. He stood a 
 moment looking at, her, and exulting in his power, meaning 
 her to suffer yet a little longer ere he relented. Secretly, he 
 knew relief that the golden pigtail and the provoking blue 
 eyes of Miss Greta Du Taine had vanished out of Guelders- 
 dorp before the first Act of War. He would have felt them in 
 the way now. Those shining, tearful eyes and the mouth that 
 kissed and clung to his had done their work on the night of 
 the Christy-Minstrel entertainment in the empty Government 
 store. He would pretend to go away and leave her. He 
 would come back, enjoy her astonishment, be melted by re- 
 newed entreaties, stoop to ponder, overwhelm her with his 
 magnanimity, and then proceed to love-making. 
 
 But as a preliminary he swung round upon his heel and 
 strode upward through the short bush and the tall grasses, the 
 scandalized flowers thrashing his boots. She saw him, al- 
 though her back was turned. If he could have known how 
 tall he seemed to Emigration Jane as he strode away, W. Keyse 
 would have been tickled to the core. But he turned when he 
 felt sure he was well out of sight, and hurried back eagerly. 
 
 She was not there. 
 
 He was indifferent at first, then angry, then anxious, then 
 disconsolate. Repentance followed fast on the heels of all 
 these moods. He picked up the packet of letters and the re- 
 jected pipe, cursing his own cruelty, and sought her up and 
 down the banks, calling her in tones that were urgent, affec- 
 tionate, upbraiding, appealing; but not for all his luring would 
 the flown bird come back to fist. No more beside the river, 
 or in other places where they had been wont to meet, did W~ 
 Keyse encounter Emigration Jane again.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 329 
 
 XXXIX 
 
 BUT even without W. Keyse and the vanished author of " Fare 
 'Air's " letters the ferny tree-fringed kloof at the bottom of 
 which the beer-coloured river ran over its granite boulders and 
 quartz pebbles, was not empty and void. On Sundays, when 
 the birds returned from the hills, to which they had been 
 scared by the hideous tumult of War, thither after High Mass 
 in the battered little Roman Catholic church in the stad, the 
 Mother-Superior and the Sisters would come, bringing with 
 them such poor food as they had, and picnic soberly. All the 
 week through they had laboured, nursed, and tended the sick 
 and wounded in the Hospitals, and washed and fed and taught 
 the numberless orphans of the siege, and upon this day the 
 Mother-Superior had ruled they were to be together. And 
 all the week through the thought of it kept them going, as she 
 knew. You are to see her holding her little court beside the 
 river upon a certain February afternoon, receiving friends in 
 her sweet, stately fashion, and dispensing hospitality out of the 
 largest and most battered Britannia-metal teapot that ever 
 brewed, what was later originally referred to in the weekly 
 " Social Jottings " column of the Gueldersdorp Siege Gazette 
 as the cheering infusion. The Siege Gazette was an inter- 
 mittent daily, issued from a subterranean printing-office, for 
 the dissemination of general orders and latest news, fluctua- 
 tions in the weight and quality of the meat-rations, and the 
 rise and fall of the free-soup level, being also recorded. To 
 its back files I must refer those who seek a fuller account of the 
 function described by the brilliant journalist who signed her- 
 self "Gold Pen," as highly successful. She gives you to un- 
 derstand that the company was distinguished, and the conver- 
 sation vivid and unflagging. And when you realize that every- 
 body present was suffering more or less from the active pinch 
 of hunger, that social gathering of men and women of British 
 blood becomes heroic and historic and fine. 
 
 " Dr. Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, was observed," we 
 read. " Gold Pen " also notes " the presence of the Reverend 
 
 Julius Fraithorn, son of the Bishop of H , and second 
 
 curate on leave of St. Margaret's, Wendish Street; now 
 happily recovered, thanks to the skill of Dr. Saxham, from an 
 illness, held at no recent date to be incurable. Mr. Fraithorn 
 has undertaken the onerous duties of Chaplain to the Hospitals
 
 330 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 in charge of the Military Staff. It. was gratifying to observe," 
 she continues, " that the Colonel commanding graced the oc- 
 casion by his martial presence. He was attended by his junior 
 aide, Lieutenant the Earl of Beauvayse. We also saw Lady 
 Hannah Wrynche, with her distinguished husband, Captain 
 Bingo Wrynche. Royal Heavy Dragoons, Acting Senior Aide," 
 etc., etc. 
 
 " Late peaches from the garden of the ruined Convent, and 
 grapes from its west wall, gathered in the dead of night by 
 Sister Cleophee and Sister Tobias," " Gold Pen " goes on to 
 say, " were greatly appreciated by the guests, each of whom 
 brought his or her own bread." 
 
 A most villainous kind of bannock of unleavened mealie- 
 meal and crushed oats, calculated to try the strongest tea and 
 trouble the toughest digestion, " Gold Pen " might have added. 
 But the game was to make believe you rather enjoyed it than 
 otherwise. If you had no teeth and no digestion, you were 
 allowed a pint and a half of sowens porridge instead, and thus 
 helped your portion of exhausted cavalry mount or your bit of 
 tough mule-meat down. And so you went on like your neigh- 
 bours, playing the game, while your eyes grew larger and your 
 girth less, and your cheekbones more in evidence with every 
 day that dawned. 
 
 Cheekbones have a strange, unnatural effect when they ap- 
 pear in childish faces. There was a child in a rusty double 
 perambulator that had been a stylish baby-carriage only a little 
 while ago, whose wizened face and shrunken hands were piti- 
 able to see. He was wheeled by a sallow woman, with hol- 
 low, grey-blue eyes a woman whose black gown hung loosely 
 on her wasted figure, and whose shabby, crape-trimmed hat was 
 pinned on anyhow. Siege confinement and siege terrors, siege 
 smells and siege diet, had made strange havoc of the plump 
 comeliness of a matronly lady who once rustled in purple satin 
 befitting a Mayor's wife. She had lost one of her children 
 through diphtheria, and she knew ; unless a miracle happened, 
 that she would also lose the boy. 
 
 Only look at him! She told you in that dull, toneless voice 
 of hers how sturdy he had been, how strong and masterful 
 how pretty, too, with his plume of fair hair tumbling into his 
 big, shining, grey eyes! The eyes were bigger than ever now, 
 but the light and the life had sunk out of them, and his round 
 face was pinched, and the colour of old wax. And the arm 
 lhat hung idly over the side of the little carriage was withered
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 331 
 
 and shrunken the hand of an old man, and not a child. The 
 other, under the light shawl that tucked him in, hugged some- 
 thing that bulged under the coverlet. 
 
 " His father can't bear to look at him," the Mayor's wife 
 said, glancing at the Mayor's carefully averted back. "And 
 I'm sure it's no wonder. He just lies like this, day and night, 
 and doesn't want to move or answer when you speak to him, 
 and he won't eat. The food is dreadful, but still he might try, 
 just to comfort his mother " 
 
 " I does twy," piped Hammy weakly, " and ven my tummy 
 shuts, and it isn't no use twying any more." 
 
 The Mother-Superior brought a gaily-coloured little china 
 cup of that rare luxury, new milk, and bent over him, saying 
 cheerfully, as she held it to the colourless mouth, " Not always, 
 Hammy. Taste this, and see." 
 
 " No fank you." He turned his head away, tightly shutting 
 his eyes. 
 
 " It's real milk, Harruny, not condensed," the soft voice 
 pleaded. He shook his head again, and knit his childish 
 brows. 
 
 " I saided it wasn't no use. My tummy just shuts." 
 
 " I think I would not worry him any more just now," Sax- 
 ham interposed, noting the droop of the piteous, flaccid mouth, 
 and feeling the flutter of the trembling pulse. The Mayor's 
 wife broke into helpless sobbing. The Mother-Superior drew 
 her swiftly out of the sick child's hearing and sight. And a 
 shadow fell upon the thin light coverlet, and a crisp, decided 
 voice said: 
 
 " Then Hammy 's tummy is a mutinous soldier, and must 
 be taught to obey the Word of Command." 
 
 " Mister Colonel . . ." The dull, childish eyes grew a 
 very little brighter, and the claw-like hand went up in shaky 
 salute to the limp plume of fair hair, not glistening and silky 
 now, but dull and unkempt, that fell over the broad, darkly- 
 veined waxen forehead. " It is Mister Colonel. . . . And 
 I haven't seen you for ever an' ever so long. An' Berta's 
 
 deaded, an', an' " The whisper was almost inaudible. 
 
 ... " Vere's something I did so want to tell." The hidden 
 arm came from under the coverings. " It's about my winoce- 
 wus, vis beast what you gived me, ever so long ago." He dis- 
 played the treasured toy. 
 
 "You shall tell me about Berta and the rhinoceros when 
 I have told you something. A Certain Person can come out
 
 332 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 of this vehicle, I suppose, Saxham? It will make no differ- 
 ence, in the long-run, to a Certain Person's health ? " 
 
 " Why, nothing in Heaven or upon earth will make any 
 difference at this juncture," returned Saxham, speaking in the 
 same tone, " unless a Certain Person can be roused to the nec- 
 essary pitch of desiring food. To administer it forcibly would, 
 in my opinion, be worse than useless." 
 
 The Certain Person was lifted out of his cramped quarters 
 by vigorous but gentle hands. The Colonel Commanding sat 
 down with him upon a camp-stool, and as the wasted legs 
 dangled irresponsibly from his supporting knees, and the hot 
 head rolled helplessly against the row of coloured bits of medal- 
 ribbon that were sewn on the left breast of the khaki jacket, 
 he began to talk, holding the limp little body with a kind, sus- 
 taining arm. 
 
 " You've seen how my men obey me, Hammy? Well, your 
 brain and your eyes, your arms and legs, and hands and feet, 
 as well as your tummy, are your soldiers. And it's mutiny if 
 they refuse to carry out the Officer's Orders. And you're the 
 Officer, you know." 
 
 "Am I ve Officer, weally?" 
 
 Interest was quickening in the heavy eyes. 
 
 "You're the Officer. And I'm the Colonel in Command. 
 And when I say to you, ' Lieutenant Hammy, drink this milk/ 
 why, you'll pass along the order to Sergeant Brain and Cor- 
 poral Eyes and Privates Hands and Mouth and Tummy, and 
 
 see that they carry it out. Where is ? Ah! thank you, 
 
 ma'am; that was what I wanted." 
 
 For the Mother-Superior had deftly put the gaily-coloured 
 little china cup into the lean, brown, outstretched hand, and, 
 seeing what was coming, the Lieutenant shed an unsoldierly 
 tear and raised a feeble whimper. 
 
 " Please, no, Mister Colonel ! My tummy " 
 
 " Private Tummy is a shirker, who doesn't want to do his 
 duty. But it's your duty as his Commanding Officer to show 
 him that it must be done. And that's the game we're playing. 
 You'll employ tact before you have recourse to stringent meas- 
 ures. Not make the fellow dogged or furious by angry words 
 or threats. When it's necessary to shoot, shoot straight. But, 
 first, you give the order." 
 
 " Oughtn't ve officer to have a wevolver? " 
 
 " Wait a second, and you shall have mine." 
 
 The deft fingers twirled out and pocketed the cartridge-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 333 
 
 packed chambers, and put the harmless weapon into the child- 
 ish hands. 
 
 " It's veway heavy," Hammy said dolefully, as the shining 
 Army Smith & Wesson wobbled in his feeble clutches, wavered 
 and sank ingloriously down upon his lap. 
 
 " If you had drunk the milk you might have found it lighter. 
 Suppose we try now. Attention ! " 
 
 " 'Tention ! " piped Hammy. 
 
 " Hands, catch hold. Mouth, do your duty. And if Priv- 
 ate Tummy disobeys, he'll have to take the consequences." 
 
 "Please, what are ve confequences? " 
 
 " Drink down the milk, and then I'll tell you." 
 
 The gay little china cup was slowly emptied. Hammy 
 blinked eyes that were already growing sleepy, and sucked the 
 moustache of white from his upper lip with relish remark- 
 ing: 
 
 " I dwinked it all, and my tummy never shut. Now tell 
 me what are ve confequences." 
 
 " A mother without a son, for one thing." The keen, hawk- 
 eyes were gentle. " But drink plenty of milk and eat plenty 
 of bread and porridge and minced meat, and you'll live to see 
 the Relief marching into Gueldersdorp one fine morning,, 
 boy." 
 
 " Unless I get deaded like Berta. And that weminds me 
 what I wanted to tell so bad." The lips began to quiver, and 
 the eyes brimmed. * Soldiers mustn't cwy, must vey?" 
 
 " Not while there's work to be done, Hammy. Would you 
 like to wait now and tell me another day?" For the little 
 round head was nodding against the row of medal-ribbons 
 stitched on the khaki jacket, and the big round eyes kept open 
 with difficulty. 
 
 " No, please. It's about the beasts my beasts what you 
 gived me. Winocerwus, an' Lion, an' Tawantula, an' Tsetse, 
 an' Black Bee just like a weal Bee, only not so sharp at ve 
 end. . . . Don't you wemember, Mister Colonel ? " 
 
 " Of course I remember. The toy beasts I brought down 
 from Rhodesia and gave to a little boy." 
 
 " I was the boy. And you saided I was to let Berta have 
 her share wof dem. And I did let her play wif all ve ovvers. 
 But Winocerwus had to be tooked such care wof for fear of 
 bweaking his horn an' Berta was such a little fing, vat 
 vat " 
 
 "That you wouldn't let her play with Rhinoceros. And
 
 334 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 you think it wasn't quite fair, or quite kind, and now you're 
 sorry? " 
 
 Hammy sniffed dolorously, and two large tears splashed 
 down. 
 
 " I'm sowwy. An' I fought if I was deaded too, like Berta, 
 I could go an' tell her I never meaned to be gweedy. An' I 
 wouldn't eat my bweakfust, nor my dinner, nor nothing and 
 at last my tummy shut, and I didn't want miffing more." 
 
 The Mother-Superior and the Colonel Commanding ex- 
 changed a glance over the child's head before the man's voice 
 answered the child. 
 
 " That wouldn't have made Berta happy. She might have 
 thought you a little coward for running away and leaving 
 your mother and all the other ladies behind, shut up in Gueld- 
 ersdorp. For an officer and a gentleman must go on living 
 and fighting while he has anything left to fight for, Hammy. 
 Remember that." 
 
 " Yes, Mister Colonel. . . ." The drowsy eyes closed, the 
 boy nodded off into slumber against the kind, strong shoulder. 
 The Mother-Superior wheeled the little carriage near, and the 
 Colonel, rising, laid the now soundly-sleeping boy back upon 
 his cushions. 
 
 " What mysteries children are! " he said, as the Mother re- 
 placed the light covering, screening the sleeping face with 
 tender, careful hands from sun and flies. " Imagine remorse 
 for an act of selfishness leading a boy of six to such a de- 
 termination and a normal, healthy boy, if ever I met 
 one." 
 
 " He has been living for some time under abnormal condi- 
 tions," the Mother said softly, looking at the quiet rise and 
 fall of the light shawl covering. " He will take a turn for the 
 better now." 
 
 " And forget his trouble and its cause." The Chief's ob- 
 servant glance had lighted on Rhinoceros, lying upside down 
 in a little clump of flowering sword-grass, into which it had 
 been whisked as the Mother shook out the little shawl. " I 
 think," he said, and pocketed the horned one, " that this gen- 
 tleman had better go into the fire." 
 
 " Perhaps. And yet it would be a continual reminder to 
 conquer selfishness in great as in little things." She smiled, 
 meeting the keen hazel eyes with her great pure grey ones. 
 
 " If you thing so, I will leave it." 
 
 " I will not take the responsibility of advising you to.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 335 
 
 You have already shown more tact than I can lay claim to 
 in dealing with children. And that has been the business of 
 the greater part of my life, remember." 
 
 He looked at her full, and said: 
 
 " I may possess and employ tact when dealing with men 
 and with children, possibly. But not long ago I was guilty 
 of and have since bitterly reproached myself for, I beg you 
 to believe me a gross and lamentable blunder as regards a 
 woman " 
 
 She put out her fine hand with a quick, protesting gesture, 
 as if she would have begged him to say no more. He went 
 on: 
 
 " She is a lady whom you intimately know, and whom I 
 have, like everyone else in this town, learned to esteem highly 
 and to respect profoundly. For the terrible shock and the 
 deep pain I must have given that lady in breaking to her 
 ignorantly and hastily the news of the death of a friend who 
 was dear to me, and infinitely dearer to another with whom 
 she is acquainted I humbly entreat her pardon," 
 
 He had not known her eyes were of so deep a purple-grey 
 as to be nearly black. Perhaps they seemed so by contrast 
 with the absolute whiteness of her face. The eyes winced, 
 and the mouth contracted as she entreated, voicelessly: 
 
 " I beg you, say no more." 
 
 " I have but little more to say," he returned. " I will only 
 add that if at any time you wished in kindness to make me 
 forget what I did that day you would apply to me in some 
 difficulty, honour me with some confidence, trust me in any 
 unforeseen emergency in which I might be of use to you. Or 
 to anyone who is dear to you, and in whom for the sake of 
 old associations and old ties I might even otherwise be deeply 
 interested." 
 
 He had spoken with intention, and now his deliberate 
 glance dropped to the level of the strip of sandy shore beside 
 the river, where the giant Convent kettle boiled upon a dis- 
 proportionately little fire, and Sister Hilda- Antony presided 
 in the Reverend Mother's place at the trestle-supported tray 
 where the Britannia-metal teapot brooded, as doth the large 
 domestic hen, over an immense family of cups and saucers. 
 Busy as ants, the other Sisters hurried backwards and for- 
 wards, attending to the wants of the guests, who sat about on 
 rocks and boulders, or with due precautions taken against puff- 
 adders and tarantulas, sat upon the grass of the high bank in
 
 336 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the shade of the fern and bush. And as vivid by contrast with 
 their black-robed, white-wimpled figures, as a slender dragon- 
 fly among a bevy of homely gnats, the slender, lightly-clad 
 figure of Lynette showed, as she shared the Sister's hospitable 
 labours. 
 
 She had her share of girlish vanity. She had put on a 
 plain tailor-made skirt of fine dark green cloth, short enough 
 to show the dainty little brown buckled shoes that she specially 
 effected, and a thin white silk shirt and knitted croquet-jacket 
 of white wool. A scarlet leather belt girt her slender waist, 
 and a silver chatelaine jingled a gay tune at her side, and 
 about her white slim throat was a band of scarlet velvet, and 
 her wide-brimmed white felt hat had a knot of scarlet in it, 
 and a broad, vivid, emerald-green wing-quill thrust under 
 the knot. And the hair under the green-plumed hat gleamed 
 bronze in the sunshine that filtered through the thick foliage 
 of the blue gum trees that grew on either bank of the river, 
 and stretched their branches out to clasp across the stream, like 
 hands. She was too pale and too thin, and her eyes were 
 feverishly bright, but she looked happy, carrying her tray of 
 steaming teacups in spite of Beauvayse's anxious attempts to 
 relieve her of the burden, and the Chaplain's diffident entreaties 
 that she should entrust it to him. Their voices, mingled in 
 gay argument, were borne by a warm puff of spice-scented air 
 to the ears of the elder people, standing in the shade of the 
 trees at the summit of the high, sloping bank, with the rusty 
 perambulator between them. 
 
 " I thank you," the Mother said, in her full, round tones. 
 The eyes of both, travelling back from that delicate, slight 
 young figure, had met once more. " Believing that you speak 
 in perfect sincerity, I thank you, and shall not hesitate to call 
 upon you, should the need arise." 
 
 Her voice was very calm, and her discreet glance told 
 nothing. He would not have been a man of woman born if 
 he had not been a little piqued. He said, with an air of chang- 
 ing the subject: 
 
 " Miss Mildare strikes me as a very beautiful girl." 
 
 "Is she not?" 
 
 Her eyes grew tender, and her whole face was irradiated 
 by the splendour of her smile. She looked down the bushed 
 and grass-covered slope to where Lynette, all the guests sup- 
 plied, had thrown herself down to rest on a stone under a 
 tree. She had taken off her hat, and her hair was flecked
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 337 
 
 with sunshine as she leaned her head back with a little 
 air of lassitude and weariness against the scarred bark. 
 But in spite of weariness she was smiling and content. 
 The rest was delicious, the peaceful quiet enchanting, the air 
 sweet after the foetid odours of the town; and it was sweet, 
 too, whenever she glanced at the Reverend Julius Fraithorn, 
 who was lying at her feet, or Beauvayse, who fanned her alter- 
 nately with a leafy branch and the tea-tray, to see her own 
 beauty reflected in the admiring eyes of two young and hand- 
 some men. 
 
 The Mother had never seen her thus before. She had been 
 absent from the scenes of Lynette's little social triumphs. Now 
 a great tenderness swelled in her bosom, and a great pity 
 gripped her throat, and wrung the bitter, slow tears into her 
 eyes. 
 
 " She is happy," she whispered in her heart. " She has 
 forgotten just for a little while, and her kingdom of woman- 
 hood is hers, unspoiled, and the present moment is sweet, and 
 the future she has no thought of. My poor, poor love! Let 
 her go on forgetting, even if it is only for a day." 
 
 His voice beside her made her start. He was still speaking 
 of Lynette. 
 
 " Her type is unusual amongst Colonials." 
 
 She returned : " She was born in the Colony, I believe." 
 
 " Ah! but of British parents, surely? I once knew an Eng- 
 lish lady," he went steadily on, " whom she resembles strik- 
 ingly." 
 
 Her eyes were inscrutable, and her lips were folded close. 
 
 " She was the wife of the Colonel commanding my old 
 Regiment Sir George Hawting. A grand old warrior, and 
 something of a martinet. He married a third daughter of the 
 Duke of Runcorn Lady Lucy Bridgevvater." 
 
 She heard without the betraying flicker of an eyelash, her 
 face statuesque in the setting of the close white guimpe. 
 
 He said, with a prick of self-reproach for having again 
 turned the barb that festered in her bosom: 
 
 " Lady Lucy was a very lovely creature, and a very impul- 
 sive one. She lived not happily, and she died tragically." 
 
 There was the ring of steel and the coldness of ice in the 
 Mother's words: 
 
 " She met the fate she chose." 
 
 He thought, looking at her: 
 
 "What a woman this is! How silent, how resourceful,
 
 338 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 how calm, how Immeasurably deep! And why does she think 
 of me as an opponent?" He went on, stung by that quiet 
 marshalling of all her forces against him: 
 
 " Unhappily, the fate we choose for ourselves sometimes 
 involves others. The death of that unhappy woman and the 
 father of her child left an innocent creature at the mercy of 
 sordid, evil hands." 
 
 " In evil hands, indeed, judging by what you have tcld 
 me." 
 
 " I would give much to be able to trace her." There was 
 t a heavy line between his eyebrows, and his eyes were stern and 
 sad. " It would be something to know what had become of 
 her, even if she were dead, or worse than dead." 
 
 A violent, sudden scarlet dyed her to the edge of the white 
 starched coif. Her mouth writhed as though words were 
 bursting from her; but she nipped her lips together, and con- 
 trolled her eyes. And still her silence angered and defied him. 
 He went on: 
 
 " If I seem to you to harp painfully upon this subject, 
 pardon me. You have my word that, without, encourage- 
 ment from you, I will not refer to it after to-day." His 
 close-clipped brown moustache was straightened by the ten- 
 sion of the muscles of his mouth. He passed his palm over 
 it, and continued speaking without, moving a muscle of his 
 face or taking his searching eyes from the Mother's. 
 
 " The name of the young lady who is so fortunate as to be 
 your ward, and even more, the striking likeness I spoke of 
 just now, have led me to hope that my dead friend's daughter 
 was led by a Hand, in whose Divine guidance I humbly be- 
 lieve, to find the very shelter he would have chosen for her. 
 Pray answer, acquitting me in your own mind of persistence 
 or inquisitiveness. Am I right or wrong?" 
 
 She might have been a statue of black marble, with wimple 
 and face and hands of alabaster, she stood so breathlessly still. 
 Her heart did not seem to beat; her blood was stagnant in 
 her veins. She felt no faintness. Her observation was un- 
 naturally keen, her mind dazzlingly clear; her brain seemed to 
 work with twice its ordinary power. She thought. He 
 glanced at the shabby watch worn in a leather band upon his 
 wrist. She was aware of the action, though she never turned 
 her head. She was weighing the question, to tell or not to 
 tell? Her soul hung poised like a seagull in the momentary 
 shelter of a giant wave-crest. Another moment, and the battle
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 339 
 
 with the raging gale and the driving halberds of the sleet 
 would begin again. 
 
 She looked again towards Lynette, and in an instant her 
 purpose crystallized, her line of action was made clear. She 
 saw a little bunch of wax-belled white heath fall from the 
 girl's scarlet belt in the act of rising. She saw Beauvayse 
 snatch it greedily from the grass and read the glance that 
 passed between the golden-hazel and the green-grey eyes, and 
 understood with a great pang of jealous mother-pain that she 
 was no longer first in her beloved's heart. Then came a throb 
 of unselfish joy at the knowledge that Richard's girl had come 
 into her kingdom, that the divine right and heritage and crown 
 of Womanhood were hers at last. 
 
 Were hers? Not yet, but might, be hers, if every clue that 
 led back to that tavern upon the veld could be broken or 
 tangled in such wise that the keenest and most subtle seeker 
 should be baffled and lost. It all lav clear before her now, 
 the manipulation of events, the deft rearrangement of actual 
 fact that might best be used to this end. As her clear brain 
 planned, her bleeding heart trailed wings in the dust, seeking 
 to lead the searcher away from the hidden nest, and now her 
 motherhood and her pride and all the diplomacy acquired in 
 her long years of rule rose up in arms to meet him. 
 
 They were of equal height. Her great, changeful eyes, 
 purple-grey now, swept round to encounter his. She regarded 
 him quietly, and said: 
 
 " No one of your wide experience needs to be reminded that 
 resemblances such as that of which you speak, and which I 
 cannot myself admit to exist, are strangely misleading. But 
 since you have conveyed to me in unmistakable terms your 
 conviction that Miss Mildare is the daughter of a mutual 
 friend who bore that surname is identified in your idea with 
 that most unhappy child who was left orphaned eighteen years 
 ago at I think you said a veld hotel in the Orange Free 
 State?" 
 
 He bowed assent, biting the short hairs of his moustache in 
 vexation and embarrassment. 
 
 " Hardly an hotel a wretched shanty of the usual cor- 
 rugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the high grass country be- 
 tween Driepoort and Kroonfontein. And it seems my fate 
 to be continually bringing our conversation back to a most 
 unhappy and painful theme." 
 
 " I acquit you of the intention to pain or wound. When
 
 340 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 I have finished what I have to say, we will revert to the 
 subject no more. It will be buried between us for ever, 
 though the memory of the Dead live in our pardoning and 
 loving thoughts, and in our prayers." 
 
 The vivid colour that had flamed in her cheeks had sunk 
 and left them marble. The humid mist of tears that veiled 
 her eyes gave them a wonderful beauty. 
 
 He answered her: 
 
 " Your thoughts could not be otherwise than noble and 
 generous. Prayers as pure as yours could not be unheard." 
 
 " No prayers are unheard, though all are not granted." 
 
 She made the slight gesture with her large, beautiful hand 
 that put unnecessary speech from her, and let the hand drop 
 again by her side. Her bosom rose and fell quietly with her 
 even speaking. None could have guessed the tumult within, 
 and the doubts and conviction and apprehensions that swelled 
 together, and the religious fears and scruples that rent and tore 
 her suffering soul. But for the sake of Richard's daughter 
 she rallied her grand forces, and nerved herself to carry out 
 her hated task. 
 
 " I will tell you how I came to be interested in the young 
 lady who is now my adopted daughter, and whom you know 
 as Lynette Mildare. In the winter of 18 the Reverend 
 Mother of our Convent died, and I was sent up from the 
 Mother-House at. Natal, by order of the Bishop, to take her 
 place as Superior. Two Sisters came with me. It was the 
 usual slow journey of many weeks. The wet season had be- 
 gun. Perhaps that was why we did not encounter many other 
 waggons on the way. But one party of emigrants of the 
 labouring class we never learned where bound trekked on 
 before us, and generally outspanned within sight. There 
 were three rough Englishmen two middle-aged and one quite 
 old a couple of tawdry women, and a young girl. They 
 used to ill-treat the girl. We heard her crying often, and one 
 of the Kaffir voor-loopers of their two waggons told a Cape 
 boy who was in our service that the old Baas would kill the 
 little white thing one of these days. She was used as a 
 drudge by them all a servant, unpaid, ill-fed, worse-clothed 
 than the Kaffirs but the old man, according to our informant, 
 bore her a special grudge, and lost no opportunity of wrecking 
 his malice on her." 
 
 " I understand," he said. She went on: 
 
 " We would have helped the child if we could have reached
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 341 
 
 her; but it was not possible. If she had run away and taken 
 refuge with us, and the men had followed her, I do not think 
 we should have given her up for any threats of theirs, or even 
 for threats carried out in action." 
 
 " I know you never would have." 
 
 She made the slight gesture with her hand that put all 
 inferred praise aside. 
 
 " The waggons of the emigrants were no longer in sight, 
 one morning when we inspanned. They had headed south 
 for the Diamond Mines, and we were going northwest." 
 There was a slight hesitation, and her lashes flickered, then 
 she took up her story. " Perhaps we \vere a hundred and 
 fifty miles from Gueldersdorp, perhaps more, when we came 
 upon what we believed at first to be the dead body of a young 
 girl, almost a child, lying among the Karroo bush, face down- 
 wards, upon the sand. She had been cruelly beaten with the 
 sjambok she bears the scars of that terrible ill-usage to-day. 
 . . . We judged that she had fainted and fallen from one of 
 the emigrants' trek-waggons. Months afterwards, when her 
 w r ounds were healed " her steady lips quivered slightly 
 " and she had recovered from an attack of brain-fever brought 
 on by alarm and anxiety and the ill-usage, she told me that 
 she had run away from people who were cruel to her from 
 a man who " 
 
 " This distresses you. I am grieved " 
 
 He noted the sickness of horror in her face, and the start- 
 ing of innumerable little shining points of moisture on her 
 white, broad forehead and about her lips. She drew out her 
 handkerchief and wiped them away with a hand that shook a 
 little. 
 
 " I have very little more to say. She was quite crushed 
 and broken by cruelty and ill-usage. Though she had been 
 taught to read in illiterate fashion, and to write in a way, 
 she could not tell us her name when we asked it. She prob- 
 ably had never had one. And Father Wilx, who is our Con- 
 vent Chaplain, and has charge of the Catholic Mission here, 
 baptized her at my instance, giving her two names that were 
 dear to me in that old life that I left behind so long ago. 
 She is Lynette Mildare. . . . Are you surprised that in six 
 years a young creature so neglected should have become what 
 you see? Those powers were inherent in her which training 
 can but develop. We found in her great natural capacity, an 
 intelligence keen and quick, a taste naturally refined, a sweet
 
 342 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and gentle disposition, a pure and loving heart " Her 
 
 voice broke. Her eyes were blinded by a sudden rush of tears. 
 She moved her hand as though to say : " There is no more 
 to tell." 
 
 " You shut the door upon my hope/' he said. 
 
 It was to her veritably as though the gates of her own 
 deed clashed behind her with the closing of the sentence. For 
 she had stated the absolute truth, and yet left much untold. 
 She saw disappointment and reluctant conviction in his face, 
 coupled with an immense faith in her that stung her to an 
 agony of shame and self-reproach. What had she suppressed? 
 
 Nothing, but that the waggons of the emigrants had turned 
 south from Diamond Town a fortnight before the rinding 
 of that lost lamb upon the veld. And her scrupulous habit 
 of truth, her crystal honour, her keen, clear judgment no less 
 than her rigorous habit of self-examination, told her that the 
 half-truth was no better than falsehood, and that she, Christ's 
 Bride and Mary's Daughter, had deliberately deceived this 
 man. 
 
 Yet for his own sake, was it not best that he should never 
 know the truth! And for the sake of Richard's daughter, 
 was it not her sacred maternal duty to shield that dearest one 
 from shame? She steeled herself with that as he bared his 
 head before her. 
 
 " Ma'am, you have more than honoured me with your con- 
 fidence, and I need not say that it is sacred in my eyes, and 
 shall be kept inviolate. And for the rest " 
 
 XL 
 
 " REVEREND MOTHER," sounded from below. 
 
 " They are calling us," she said, as though awakened from 
 a dream. 
 
 " May I take you down ? " 
 
 He offered his arm with deference, and she touching it 
 lightly, they went down together. Lynette came to them 
 laughing, a cup in either hand, her aides-de-camp following 
 with plates that held the siege apology for bread and butter 
 and familiar-looking cubes of something. . . . 
 
 "Thank you, Miss Mildare. What have you here, Beau? 
 Cake, upon my word! Or is it a delusion born of long and 
 painful abstinence from any form of pastry ? "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 343 
 
 " Cake it is, sir, and thundering good cake," proclaimed 
 Beauvayse. " Made from Sister Tobias' special siege recipe, 
 without candied peel or plums or carraways, or any of the 
 other what-do-you-call-'ems that go into the ordinary article. 
 Go in and win, sir. I've had three whacks. Haven't I, Miss 
 Mildare?" 
 
 He spoke with the infectious enjoyment of a schoolboy, 
 and Lynette's laugh, sweet and gay as a thrush's sudden trill 
 of melody, answered: 
 
 " I think you have had four." 
 
 She flushed as she met the Colonel's eyes, reading in them 
 masculine appreciation of her delicate, vivid beauty, and put 
 her freed hand into the lean palm he held out, saying, with a 
 shy, sweet smile that lifted one corner of the sensitive mouth 
 higher than the other: 
 
 " I didn't come to say How do you do before, because I 
 saw you were busy talking to Mother." Her quick glance 
 read something amiss in another face. " Mother, how tired 
 you look! Please bring that little camp-stool, Mr. Fraithorn. 
 Oh, thank you, Dr. Saxham; that one with arms is more 
 comfortable. Colonel, we're all under your command. 
 Won't you please order the Mother to sit down and rest? 
 She will be so tired to-morrow. Dearest, you know you will." 
 
 She took the Mother's hand, confidently, caressingly. The 
 end of the thin black veil, that was shabby now, and had darns 
 in many places, was wafted across her face by a vagrant puff 
 of cooled air from the river, and she kissed it, bringing the 
 tears very near the deep, sad eyes that looked at her, and then 
 turned away. Saxham, in default of any excuse for lingering 
 near her, went back to Lady Hannah, who had been diligently 
 mining in him with the pick and shovel of Our Special Corre- 
 spondent, and getting nothing out, and sat himself doggedly 
 upon the stone beside her. 
 
 " That is a sweet girl." She nibbled bannock, sparsely 
 margarined, and sipped her sugarless, milkless tea, sitting on a 
 little shady knoll, warranted free from puff-adders and 
 tarantulas. Saxham answered stiffly: 
 
 " Many people here seem to be under the same impres- 
 sion." 
 
 "Don't you share it? Don't you think her sweet?" 
 
 " I have seen young ladies who were less deserving of the 
 adjective." 
 
 Lady Hannah jangled a triumphant laugh. She wore the
 
 344 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 tailored garb the average Englishwoman looks best in, at home 
 and abroad, an alpaca coat and skirt of navy-blue, and a big 
 grey hat with ostrich-plumes, and a voluminous blue silk veil. 
 Her small face was smaller than ever, but her eyes were as 
 round and as bright as a mouse's or a bird's, and her talk was 
 full of glitter and vivacity. 
 
 ' Praise from Dr. Saxham.' . . . If I were a man," she 
 declared, " I should perdre la boule over that girl. I don't 
 wonder where she gets her lovely manners from, with such 
 a model of grace and good breeding as Biddy Bawne before 
 her eyes, but I do ask how she came by that type of beauty. 
 And Biddy " 
 
 " Biddy ? " repeated Saxham, at a loss. 
 
 Her laugh shrilled out. 
 
 " I forgot. She is the Reverend Mother-Superior of the 
 Convent to all of you. But I was at school with her, and 
 I can't forget she used to be Biddy. She was one of the 
 great girls, and I was a sprat of nine, but she condescended 
 to let me adore her, and I did, like everybody else. To be 
 adored is her metier. The Sisters swear by her, and that 
 girl worships the ground under her feet. If I had a daughter 
 I should like her to look at me in that way heart in her 
 eyes, don't you know, and what eyes! Topaz-coloured, aren't 
 they? She has no conversation, of course. / hadn't at her 
 age nineteen or twenty, if I am any guesser. What she will 
 be at thirty, if she don't go off! That little Greek head, and 
 all those waves of rusty-coloured hair. Quite wonderful! 
 And her hands and feet and skin marvellous! And that 
 small-boned slenderness of build that is so perfectly enchant- 
 ing. Paquin would shriek to dress her. And " her jangling 
 laugh rang out, waking echoes from hollow places "it looks 
 do you know? it looks as though he would get the chance." 
 
 "Why does it?" demanded Saxham, turning his square face 
 full upon Lady Hannah, and lowering his heavy brows. 
 
 " Mercy upon us, Doctor, do you want me to be definite 
 and literal? Can't you do as I do, and use your eyes? " Her 
 own round, sparkling black ones were full of provocation. 
 " They look as if they could see rather farther into a mud 
 wall than most people's. Please get me one of those peaches. 
 No, I won't have a plate. I am beginning to find out that 
 most of the things Society regards as indispensable can be done 
 without. I'm beginning to revert to Primitive Simplicity. 
 Isn't there a prehistoric flair about most of us? If there isn't,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 345 
 
 there ought to be. For what are we from week-end to week- 
 end but grimy male and female Troglodytes, eating minced 
 horse and fried locusts in underground burrows by the light of 
 paraffin lamps! Another peach. . . . Thanks. Can't you see 
 those dear things, the Sisters, gathering them by lantern-light, 
 and being shelled by Bronnckers' German gunners. Wretches! 
 Beasts! Horrors!" 
 
 " I hope," said Saxham, in rather heavy irony, " that you 
 acquainted them with your opinion of them while you had the 
 opportunity?" 
 
 She gaily flipped him with the loose tan gloves she had 
 drawn off. Her bangles clashed, and her eyes snapped sparks 
 under the brim of her hat, whose feathers nodded and swished, 
 and her- jangling laugh brought more echoes from the high 
 banks. 
 
 " Ha, ha, ha! Do you know, Doctor, I call that thoroughly 
 nasty to mind me, on such a fine day too, of the Frightful 
 Fiasco. When my own husband hasn't ventured to breathe 
 a hint even. . . . Do you know, when he rode out to meet 
 me with the Escort, all he said was, 'Hullo, old lady; is 
 that you? The Chief wants to know if you'll peck with us 
 at six, and I told him I thought you'd be agreeable.' And 
 
 when we met, he Why do handkerchiefs invariably hide 
 
 when people want to sneeze behind them ? " She found the 
 ridiculous little square of filmy embroidered cambric, and blew 
 her thin little nose, and furtively whisked away a tear-drop. 
 " He never moved a muscle; just shook hands in his kind, 
 hearty way, and began to tell the news of the town. . . . 
 Never, by look or word or sign, helped to rub in what a 
 beetle-headed idiot I'd been." She gulped. " I could have 
 put my head down on the tablecloth and cried gallons " she 
 blew her nose again " knowing I'd lost him a rook at least. 
 For, of course, that flabby Slabbert creature counted for some- 
 thing in the game, or Bronnckers wouldn't have wanted him. 
 And Captain my Captain! . . ." She threw a sparkling eye- 
 dart tipped with remorseful brine at the spare, soldierly figure 
 and the lean, purposeful face. " If you were to say to me 
 this minute, ' Hannah Wrynche, jump off the end of that high 
 rock-bluff there, down on those uncommonly nasty-looking 
 stones below,' I vow I'd do it ! " 
 
 Saxham's blue eyes were kind. Here was a fellow hero- 
 worshipper. 
 
 " I believe you would do it, and that he believes it too."
 
 546 ' ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 She tapped him on the sleeve with the long cherry-wood 
 stick of her white green-lined umbrella. 
 
 " Thank you. But don't get to making a habit of saying 
 charming things, because the role of Bruin suits you. Your 
 Society women-patients used to enjoy being bullied, tremen- 
 dously, I remember. We're made like that." Her shrill laugh 
 came again. " To sauter a pieds joints on people who are 
 used to being deferred to, or made much of, is the best way 
 to command their cordial gratitude and sincere esteem, isn't 
 it? Don't all you successful professional men know that?" 
 
 " The days of my professional successes are past and gone," 
 said Saxham, " and my very name must be strange in the ears 
 of the men and women who were my patients. It is natural 
 and reasonable that, when a man falls out of the race, he should 
 be forgotten at least, I hold it so." 
 
 " You have a patient not very far away who lauds you to 
 the skies." Lady Hannah indicated the slender pepper-and- 
 salt clad figure of Julius Fraithorn with the cherry-wood 
 
 umbrella-stick. "You know his father, the Bishop of H ? 
 
 Such a dear little trotty old man, with the kind of rosy, 
 withered-apple face that suggests a dear little trotty old woman, 
 disguised in an episcopal apron and gaiters, and with funny 
 little bits of white fur glued on here and there for whiskers 
 and eyebrows. We met him with Mrs. Fraithorn at the 
 Hotel Schwert at Appenbad one June. Do you know Appen- 
 bad? Views divine: such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of 
 Constance and the Rhine Valley. To quote Bingo, who suf- 
 fered hideously from the whey-cure, every prospect pleases, and 
 only man is bile and woman, too, if seeing black spots in 
 showers like smuts in a London fog, only sailing up instead 
 of coming down, means a disturbed gastric system. I'm not 
 sure now that the Bishop did not mention your name. Can 
 he have done so, or am I hashing things? Do set my mind 
 at rest ? " 
 
 Saxham said with stiffness: 
 
 " It would be possible that the Bishop would remember me. 
 I operated on him for the removal of the appendix in 1 8 " 
 
 " If you had taken away his Ritualistic prejudices at the 
 same time, you would have made his wife a happy woman. 
 Her soul yearns for incense and vestments, candles, and 
 acolytes, and most of all for her boy. Well, she will thank you 
 herself for him one day, Doctor." The little dry hand, glit- 
 tering with magnificent rings, touched Saxham's gently. " In
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 347 
 
 the meantime let a woman who hasn't got a son say 'Thank 
 you ' for her." 
 
 " You make too much of that affair." Saxham took the 
 offered hand. It pressed his kindly, and the little lady went 
 on: 
 
 " You're still a prophet in your own country, you know, 
 though it pleases you to make yourself out a a kind of medi- 
 cal Rip Van Winkle. In June last year when I did not 
 guess that I should ever know you I heard a woman say: 
 ' If Owen had been here, the child wouldn't have died.' 
 And the woman was your sister-in-law, Mrs. David Saxham." 
 
 Saxham's blue eyes shot her a steely look. The wings of 
 his mobile nostrils quivered as he drew quickened breath. He 
 waited, with his obstinate under-lip thrust out, for the rest. 
 If he did not fully grasp the real and genuine kindliness that 
 prompted the little woman, at least he did her the justice of 
 not shutting her up as an impudent chatterbox. She went 
 on, a little nervously: 
 
 " I don't think I ever mentioned to you before that I had 
 met your brother and his wife. She is still a very attractive 
 person, but it is not the type to wear well, and the boy's 
 death cut them both up terribly." 
 
 " There was a boy who died ? " 
 
 " In the spring of last year. Of meningitis, I think his 
 mother said, and she declared over and over that if you had 
 been there, you would have saved him." 
 
 " At least, I should have done my best." 
 
 She had turned her eyes away in telling him, or she would 
 have seen the relief in his face. He understood now why 
 his mother's trustees had prompted the solicitors' advertise- 
 ment. He was his nephew's heir, under the late Mrs. Sax- 
 ham's will. Seven thousand in Consols and Home Rails, and 
 the little freehold property in North Wales, that brought in, 
 when the house was let, about one hundred and fifty pounds a 
 year, counted as wealth to a man who had possessed nothing. 
 He lifted his square head and threw back his heavy shoulders 
 with the air of one from whom a heavy burden has been taken. 
 His vivid eyes lightened, his heavy brows smoothed out their 
 puckers, and the tense lines about his lips relaxed. His own 
 words came back to him: 
 
 " The Past is done with. Why should not the Future be 
 fair?" 
 
 He knew, as he looked towards Lynette Mildare, who
 
 34 8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 personified the Future for him, and his mood changed. He 
 had loved her without hope. Now a faint grey began to show 
 in the blackness of his mental horizon. It might be a false 
 dawn, but what a lightening of the heavy heart what a leap 
 of the stagnant blood answered to it! He was no longer 
 penniless. He had never loved money or thirsted for estate, 
 but the thought of that sum of seven thousand pounds in 
 Home Securities, and the house that stood in its walled garden 
 on the cliffs at Herion, looking out on the wild, tumbling 
 grey-white waters of Nantavon Bay, was dear to him. 
 
 Plas Bendigaid, the Holy House, the Place of the Blessed, 
 in the Welsh. It had been a Convent once. Its grey, stone- 
 tiled, steep-pitched roof and solid walls of massive stone had 
 sheltered his mother's infancy and girlhood. Perhaps they 
 might cover a lovelier head, and echo to the voices of his wife 
 and his children. He gave sweet fancies the rein, as Lady 
 Hannah chattered beside him. Saxham dreamed of that 
 Future that might be fair, even as he filled up the little lady's 
 pauses with " Yes's " and " No's." 
 
 Love at first sight. He had laughed the possibility to scorn, 
 in other days holding the passion to be r,he sober child of 
 propinquity, sympathy, consonance of ideas, similar tastes, and 
 pursuits, and fanned into flame, after due time to kindle, by 
 the appearance of a rival. 
 
 A rival! He laughed silently, grimly, remembering the 
 resentful, jealous impulse that had prompted his interruption 
 when the boyish, handsome face of Beauvayse had leaned so 
 near to hers, and the blush that dyed her white-rose cheeks 
 answered, no doubt, to some hackneyed, stereotyped, garrison 
 compliment. 
 
 He had seen them together since then: once crossing the 
 veld from the Women's Laager on foot, in the company of the 
 Mother-Superior; once here beside the river, under the 
 chaperonage of all the Sisters; once in the Market Square, and 
 always the sight had roused in him the same intolerable re- 
 sentment and gnawing pain that rankled in him now as he 
 watched them. 
 
 What was Beauvayse whispering, so close to the delicate 
 little ear that nestled under the red-brown hair-waves? Some- 
 thing that set his grey-green eyes gleaming dangerously, and 
 lifted the wings of the fine nostrils and opened the boldly- 
 curved mouth in audacious laughter, under the short golden 
 hair? of the clipped mousta'che. Somehow that laughter stung
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 349 
 
 Saxham. His muscular hand gripped the old hunting-crop 
 that he carried by habit even when he did not ride, and his 
 black brows were thunderous. He tried to look away and 
 listen to the little woman who chattered beside him. 
 
 " Look about you," she bade him, putting up her tortoise- 
 shell-rimmed glass as though she were in a picture-gallery or 
 at a theatre. " Wouldn't the ordinary unimaginative person 
 suppose that Love would be the last flower to blossom in the 
 soil of this battered little bit of debatable ground? But we 
 know better. Look at little Miss Wiercke, the German 
 oculist's daughter, and that tallow-candle-locked young man 
 who plays the harmonium at the Catholic Church. And that 
 other pretty girl I don't know her name who used to keep 
 the book-registers at the Public Library. She is going to 
 marry that young mining-prospector a Cornishman, judging 
 by his blue eyes and black hair do you happen to be Cornish, 
 too? next Sunda} r . And the uncertainty about living till 
 then or any time after Monday morning will make quite a 
 commonplace wedding into something tremendously romantic. 
 But you don't even pretend to look when you're told. Aha! " 
 she cried ; "I've caught you. You were watching another pair 
 of lovers the couple I kept for the last." 
 
 " Not at all," said Saxham, inexpressibly wearied by the 
 voluble little woman's discourse. Ignoring the conventional 
 disclaimer, Lady Hannah went on: 
 
 " They're in the early stage the First Act of the dear old 
 play. Pretty to watch, isn't it? Though it makes one feel 
 chilly and grown old, as Browning or somebody says. Only 
 the other day one was tipping that boy at Eton, and he look- 
 ing such a Fourth of June duck as never you saw, got up in 
 white trousers and a braided blue jacket, and a straw hat with 
 a wreath of crimson Banksia roses round it for the Procession 
 of Boats. And now " she sighed drolly " he's a long- 
 legged Captain of Hussars, with a lady-killing reputation. 
 Though, in the present instance, I'm. ready to back my opinion 
 that the biter is fairly bit. What regiments of women will 
 tear their hair real or the other thing when Beau becomes a 
 Benedick." 
 
 Saxham saw red, but he gave no sign. She turned down 
 her little thumb with a twinkle of triumph. 
 
 " Habet! And I'm not sorry he has got it badly. His hit 
 motif in the music-play has been ' See the Conquering Hero ' 
 up to now; one isn't sorry to see one's sex avenged. But one
 
 350 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 is sorry for Mary Fraithorn's boy." She indicated the Chap- 
 lain with a twirl of her eyeglasses. " She used to visit him 
 with the Sisters when he was ill, and, of course, he has been 
 bowled over. But il n'a pas un radis, unless the Bishop comes 
 round, and don't you think that little Greek head of hers is 
 aware that a great deal of money goes with the Foltlebarre 
 title, and that the family diamonds would suit it to a marvel ? " 
 Saxham said gratingly, and with a hostile look: 
 " Do you infer that Miss Mildare is vain and mercenary? " 
 " Good mercy, my dear man! " she screamed ; " don't pounce. 
 I infer nothing, except that Miss Mildare happens to be a 
 live girl, with eyes and the gift of charm, and that the young 
 men are attracted to her as naturally as drones to a honey- 
 pot. Also, that, if she's wise, she will dispose of her honey to 
 the best advantage." Her beady bright eyes snapped suddenly 
 at Saxham, and her small face broke up into laughter. " Ha, 
 ha, ha! Why, I do believe . . ." She screamed at him 
 triumphantly. " You, too ! You've succumbed. She carries 
 your scalp at her pretty waist with the rest of 'em. How per- 
 fectly delightful ! " 
 
 Possibly Saxham had always been a bear, as her little lady- 
 ship had stated, but the last five years had certainly scraped 
 off whatever social veneer had adhered to his manners. The 
 power of facial self-control, the common tact that would have 
 carried things off with a laugh and a jest, were his no longer, 
 if he had ever possessed them. He got upon his feet and stood 
 before the woman whose six ounces less of brain-matter had 
 been counterbalanced by so large an allowance of intuition, 
 dumbly furious with her, and so unspeakably savage with him- 
 self for not being able to hide his anger and annoyance that, 
 as he stood before her with his bulky shoulders hunched and 
 his square, black head sullenly lowered, and his eyes blazing 
 under their heavy brows, he suggested to Lady Hannah's 
 nimble wit and travelled experience the undeniable analogy 
 between a chaffed and irate Doctor and a baited Spanish bull, 
 goaded by the stab of the gaudy paper-flagged dart in his thick 
 neck, and bewildered by the subsequent, 'explosion of the 
 cracker. He only wanted a tail to lash, she mentally said, and 
 had pigeon-holed the joke for Bingo when it became none. 
 
 " Do, please, forgive me ! ... What you must think of 
 me! . . ." 
 
 She began contritely. But Saxham, without even an abrupt 
 inclination of the head, swung about and left, her. She saw
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 35 1 
 
 the heavily-shouldered, muscularly-built figure crossing the 
 drift a little way down, stepping from boulder to boulder with 
 those curiously small, neat feet, twirling his old horn-handled 
 hunting-crop as he went, with a decidedly vicious swish of 
 the doubled thong. Now he was knee-deep in the reeds 
 of the north shore; now he was climbing the bank. A 
 black-and-white crow flew up heavily, and was lost among the 
 intertwining branches of the oaks and the blue-gums, and a 
 cloud of finches and linnets rose as the covert of tree-fern 
 and cactus and tall grass, knitted with twining jungle-creeper, 
 received him and swallowed him. She saw by the shaking of 
 the foliage that he turned up the stream, and then no more of 
 him. Feather-headed idiot that she had been! Inconsiderate 
 wretch! How, in Heaven's name, after reminding the man 
 of the perfidy of that underbred passee little person with the 
 passion for French novels and morphia tabloids, who had 
 thrown the Doctor over, years before, in favour of his brother 
 the Dragoon how could she have charged him with being a 
 victim to the charms of another young woman? If Mrs. 
 David's desertion rankled still, as no doubt it did, there being 
 no accounting for masculine taste, he would, of course, resent 
 the accusation almost as an insult. Men were such Conserva- 
 tives in love. And, besides, she had just been telling him 
 about the child. She loathed herself for having perpetrated 
 such a blunder. Saxham had murdered politeness by quitting 
 her abruptly; but hadn't she deserved the snub? She deserved 
 snubbing. She would go, for the health of her soul, and talk 
 to dearest Biddy, who always made you feel even smaller than 
 you had thought yourself before. 
 
 She stood up, shaking the sand-grains and grass-burrs from 
 her dress and the folds of the white umbrella. It was near- 
 ing six o'clock. The heat was lessening, and the turquoise 
 sky overhead was flecked and dappled with little puffs of rosy 
 cloud, bulking in size and deepening in colour to the west- 
 ward, where their upper edges were pure gold. And the river 
 looked like a stream of liquid honey, upon which giant rose- 
 leaves had been scattered, reflecting the lovely dappling above. 
 The Sisters were busily repacking their baskets. Little Miss 
 Wiercke, with her lank-haired young organist, sat under a 
 bush, gazing in each other's eyes with the happy fatuity of 
 lovers in the second stage; the young lady who kept, the 
 registers at the Free Library was teaching her Cornish mining- 
 engineer to wash up cups and saucers in a tin basin a process
 
 352 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 which resulted in the entanglement of fingers of different 
 sexes, and made Sister Tobias pause over her task of wiping 
 crockery to shake her head and laugh. 
 
 Little Miss Wiercke was to lose her lank-haired organist 
 a few days later, the prevalent complaint of shrapnelitis carry- 
 ing him off. And the girl who screamed coquettishly as the 
 mining-engineer amorously squeezed her wet fingers under the 
 soapsuds was shortly to be represented in the Cornishman's 
 memory by another white cross in the Cemetery, a trunk full 
 of pathetic feminine fripperies, and a wedding-ring that had 
 been worn barely two months. But they did not know this, 
 and they were happy. We should never love or laugh if we 
 knew. 
 
 Two other people had passed along the path that, ran by 
 the margin of the sand and reed-patches, and were lost to 
 sight. Lady Hannah glanced towards the Mother-Superior, 
 who was being gracious to Captain Bingo and the Chaplain, 
 and hoped Biddy would not miss the owner of the little Greek 
 head and the enchanting willowy figure quite yet. 
 
 Nuns were frightfully scrupulous and gimlet-eyed where 
 their charges were concerned. And certainly, if young people 
 never got away together without quil ne vous en deplaise, 
 there would be fewer engagements. And Biddy must know 
 that it was a Heaven-sent chance for the girl. 
 
 The Foltlebarres had sat too long on thorns to grumble at 
 Beau's marrying a girl without a dot, who was not only lovely 
 enough to set Society screaming over her, but modest and a 
 lady. Up to the present his tendency had been to exalt Beauty 
 above Breed, and personal attractiveness above moral im- 
 maculateness. 
 
 As in the most recent case of that taking but extremely 
 terrible little person with the toothy, photographic smile, Miss 
 Lessie Lavigne of the Jollity Theatre, the affair with whom 
 might be counted, it was to be hoped, as the last furrow of a 
 heavy sowing of wild oats. As this would be a match d'egcl 
 a egal in point of education, at any rate certainly the Foltle- 
 barres would have reason to bless their stars. 
 
 Somebody came over to her just then, saying: 
 
 " Bingo seems in excellent spirits." 
 
 She looked, a little apprehensively, across to where the 
 Mother-Superior and the wistful-eyed, pepper-and-salt-clad 
 Chaplain were patiently listening to the recital of one of 
 Bingo's stock anecdotes.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 353 
 
 "What Is he telling the Reverend Mother?" Her tone 
 was anxious. " I do hope not that story about the unwashed 
 Boer and the cake of soap ! " 
 
 " Don't be alarmed. It's a recent and completely harmless 
 anecdote about the sinner from Diamond Town who got in 
 this morning." 
 
 Her eyes sparkled. 
 
 "Really . . .? And with news worth having?" 
 
 " Mr. Casey might be disposed to think so." 
 
 "Who is Mr. Casey?" 
 
 " That's a question nobody can answer satisfactorily." 
 
 " But is the intelligence absolutely useless to anybody who 
 doesn't happen to be Mr. Casey?" she insisted. 
 
 " Not unless they happened to be deeply interested in Mrs. 
 Casey." 
 
 'There is a Mrs. Casey, then?" 
 
 " So says the man who travelled two hundred miles to bring 
 her letters and the message that she is, as Mr. Micawber 
 would put it, in statu quo" 
 
 " I understand." The bright black eyes were compassion- 
 ate. " She has written to her husband she doesn't, know that 
 he has been killed " 
 
 " Nor do we. As far as we can ascertain, the garrison has 
 never included a Casey." 
 
 " Then you think " 
 
 " I think " he glanced aside as a stentorian bellow of 
 laughter reached them " that, judging by what I hear, Bingo 
 has got to the soapy story." 
 
 She frowned anxiously. 
 
 " Bingo ought to remember that nuns aren't ordinary 
 women. I shall have to go and gag him." She took a 
 dubious step. 
 
 "Why? The Reverend Mother does not seem at all 
 shocked, and Fraithorn is evidently amused." He added, as 
 Bingo's rapturous enjoyment of his own anecdote reached the 
 stamping and eye-mopping stage: "And undoubtedly Bingo 
 is happy." 
 
 " He has got out of hand lately. One can't keep a husband 
 in a proper state of subjection who may be brought home to 
 one a corpse at any hour of the day." Her laugh jangled 
 harshly, and broke in the middle. " The soil of Guelders- 
 dorp being so uncommonly favourable just now to the produc- 
 tion of weeds of the widow's description."
 
 354 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " It grows other things." His eyes were very kind. 
 " Brave, helpful, unselfish women, for instance." 
 
 "There is one!" 
 
 She indicated the tall, black-robed figure of the Mother 
 with a quick gesture of her little jewelled hand. 
 
 " And here is another." He touched her sleeve lightly with 
 a finger-tip. 
 
 " Brave. . . . Helpful." Her voice was choky. " Do you 
 think I shall ever forget the hindrance I have been to you? 
 Didn't I lose you your Boer spy?" 
 
 " Granted you did." His moustache curved cheerfully at 
 the corners. " But that's Ancient History, and look what 
 you brought back ! " 
 
 "A unit of the despised majority who is thoroughly con- 
 vinced of her own superfluousness. Hannah Wrynche, with 
 the conceit so completely taken out of her that she feels, say, 
 like a deflated balloon ; Hannah Wrynche, who believed her- 
 self born to be a War Correspondent, and has come down to 
 scribbling gossipy paragraphs for a little siege newspaper 
 printed in a damp cellar." 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 " Collectors will pay fancy prices for copies of that same 
 little siege newspaper, at auctions yet to be." 
 
 "I've thought of that," she confessed. "But, oh! I could 
 make it so much more spicy if you'd only give me a freer 
 hand." 
 
 His hazel eyes had a smile in them. " I know you think 
 me an editorial martinet." 
 
 " You blue-pencil out of my poor paragraphs everything 
 that's interesting." 
 
 " No personalities shall be published in a paper I control." 
 
 " The Reading Public adore personalities and puerili- 
 ties." 
 
 :< They can go to the Daily Whale for them, then." 
 
 " Isn't that rather a personal remark?" 
 
 " Let me say that if you are occasionally personal, you are 
 never, under any circumstances, anything but clever." 
 
 " Thank you. But, oh ! the difference between what I am 
 and what I aspired to be ! " 
 
 " And, ah ! the difference between what I have done and 
 what I meant to do ! " he said. 
 
 Her black eyes flashed. " You have never really felt it. 
 Achievement with you has never hit below the mark. You,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 355 
 
 of all men living, are least fitted to enter into the rueful regrets- 
 and dismal disillusions of a Hannah Wrynche." 
 
 " Hannah Wrynche, who is content to do a woman's work 
 and fill a woman's place; Hannah Wrynche, who has atoned 
 for a moment of ambitious shall I say? imprudence, splen- 
 didly and nobly, has no reason to be rueful or regretful. 
 Don't shake your head. Do you think I don't know what 
 you are doing, day after day, to help and cheer those poor 
 fellows at the Convalescent Hospital ? " 
 
 Her eyes were full of tears. " You make too much of my 
 poor efforts. You underestimate the effect of praise from 
 you." 
 
 " I said very little in the last cipher dispatch that got 
 through to Colonel Rickson at Malamye, but what I did say 
 was very much to the purpose, believe me." 
 
 She gasped, staring at him with circular eyes of incredulity. 
 "You've mentioned me in your despatches. ME?" 
 
 "Just so! " he said, and left her groping for the ridiculous, 
 little gossamer handkerchief to dry the tears of pride and 
 gratitude that were tumbling down her cheeks. 
 
 XLI 
 
 " CLANG clang clang! " 
 
 A man and a girl came back out of Paradise when the 
 Catholic church-bell rang the Angelus. The girl's sweet 
 flushed face had paled at the first three strokes. When the 
 second triple clanged out, her colour came back. She rose 
 from her seat upon a lichened slab of granite in the cool 
 shadow of the great boulder, and bent her lovely head, Beau- 
 vayse watching her lips as they moved, soundlessly repeating 
 the Angelic Salutation : 
 
 " Ave Maria, gratia plena; Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu 
 in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Jesus." 
 
 The wonderful simplicity of the Chosen One's reply fol- 
 lowed, and the announcement of the Unspeakable Wonder. 
 The little prayer followed, and the rapid signing with the 
 Cross, and she dropped her slight hand from her bosom, and 
 turned her eyes back upon his. 
 
 " You remind me of my mother," he told her. " She is 
 Catholic, you know." 
 
 "And not you?"
 
 356 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "We fellows, my brothers Levestre and Daltham and my- 
 self, were brought up as pillars of the Established Church." 
 His sleepy, grey-green eyes twinkled, his white teet.h showed 
 in the laugh. " The girls are of my mother's faith. It was 
 a family agreement. Are you quite sure you have come down 
 to earth again? Because there's such an awful lot I want to 
 say to you that I don't know where to begin." 
 
 Though his mouth laughed, his eyes had wistful shadows 
 under them. He had tossed aside his Service felt when she 
 had taken off her hat, and the sunshine, piercing the thick 
 foliage overhead, dappled the scaly trunks of the blue-gum 
 trees, and dripped gold upon the red-brown head and the crisp- 
 waved golden one. 
 
 " I am here. I am listening." 
 
 She stood before him with meekly drooping eyelids, feeling 
 his ardent gaze like a palpable weight, under which her knees 
 trembled and her whole body swayed. The great boulder 
 rose upon her left hand like a beneficent presence. Delicate 
 ferns and ice-plants sprang from its chinks and crannies. The 
 long fronds of the sparaxis bowed at her small, brown-shod 
 feet, some bearing seed-pods, others rows of pink bells, or 
 yellow a fairy chime. In the damper hollows iris bloomed, 
 and the gold and scarlet sword-flowers stood in martial ranks, 
 and gaily-plumaged finches were sidling on overhanging 
 boughs, or dipping and drinking in the shallows. The wattled 
 starlings whistled to each other, or fought as starlings will. A 
 grey partridge was bathing in the hot dry sand between the 
 reed-beds and the bank, and in the deeper pools the barbel 
 were rising at the flies. There was no sound but the running 
 water. The spicy smell of aromatic leaves and the honeyed 
 perfume of a great climbing trumpet-flower made the air 
 languorous with sweetness. 
 
 He answered her now. 
 
 " You are here, and I am here. And for me that means 
 everything. And I feel that I want nothing more, and, still, 
 such a tremendous lot besides." 
 
 He breathed as though he had been running, and his sharply- 
 cut nostrils quivered. His white teeth gleamed under the 
 clipped golden moustache. 
 
 Perhaps it made his charm the more definite and irresist- 
 ible that in these days of storm, and stress, and hardship, and 
 peril, his handsome face was never without its gay, confident 
 mile. His tall, athletic figure, in the neat workmanlike
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 357 
 
 Service dress that suited him so well, leaned towards her 
 eagerly. He kept his clear eyes on her face, with the direct 
 simplicity of a child's gaze, but the look bred in her a delicious 
 turn. The perfume of youth and health, of vigour and viril- 
 ity, that exhaled from him, came to her mingled with the scent 
 of the crushed spice-leaves and the perfume of the waxen-belled 
 heaths and the breath of the giant trumpet-flower. She was 
 turning dizzy. She could scarcely stand. 
 
 " I I will sit down," she murmured, and he beat the 
 grasses at the foot of the great boulder and prodded in the 
 hot sand beneath for snakes and tarantulas; and when she 
 sank down with a faint sigh of relief, threw himself at her 
 feet with a careless, powerful ease, and lay there looking up at 
 her, worshipping the golden lights that gleamed through the 
 thick brown eyelashes, and the sweet shadows under them, and 
 her little pointed chin. 
 
 The lace-trimmed frills of a white cambric petticoat peeped 
 under the hem of her dark green skirt; below there was a 
 glimpse of slender, crossed ankles in brown silk hose, and the 
 little brown shoes laced with wide silk ties. She drew off 
 one of her thin, loose tan gloves, and smoothed back a straying 
 lock above her ear, and flushed, hearing him murmur in his 
 caressing voice: 
 
 " Take off the other glove, too." 
 
 She was well aware how beautiful her hands were small, 
 and slender, and ivory-white, and exquisitely modelled, with 
 little babyish nicks at the wrists, and at the inner edges of the 
 rosy palms, and gleaming pink nails, of the true almond shape. 
 She thought little of her face, though she knew it to be charm- 
 ing; but she ingenuously admired her hands and her slender 
 feet, that were quite as pretty without the silk stockings and 
 little brown shoes. He looked at the delicate hands she bared 
 for him with ardent longing, and said: 
 
 " How dear of you to do that, because I asked you ! And 
 do you realize that we're here together alone, you and me, for 
 the first time? Nobody saw us steal away but Sister Cleophee, 
 and I've a notion she wouldn't tell, blessed old soul! " 
 
 Her eyes smiled. 
 
 "You would not call the Mother that?" 
 
 " No more than I would Queen Victoria or the Princess of 
 Wales. And a snubbing from the Religious would be rather 
 worse, on the whole, than a snubbing from the Royalty." 
 
 "The Princess never snubbed you? "
 
 358 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "Didn't she? Tremendously, once. Do you want to heat 
 about it? She had sent away her brougham while the giddy 
 old Dean and Chapter were showing her round St. Paul's. 
 And acting as Extra Equerry I'd got instructions to call 
 her a conveyance, and being young and downy, I'd pick 
 H.R.H. the glossiest growler on the rank. But you've been 
 bred and born here. You don't even know what a growler is. 
 And in five years' time there won't be one left in London." 
 
 " Perhaps I shall see London before the five years are over. 
 And a growler is a four-wheeled cab. You see, I'm not so 
 ignorant " 
 
 " You sweetest ! " he burst out passionately. " I wish I 
 knew all that you could teach me ! " 
 
 He might have frightened her if he had stretched out his 
 arms to clasp her then. But he mastered himself so far. Lying 
 at full length in the grass, leaning upon his elbow, he rested 
 his head upon his hand, and drank her in with thirsty eyes. 
 Something emanating from him enveloped her, delicate and yet 
 forceful, constraining and urging and compelling her to 
 meet his gaze. And the perfume of the great honeyed flower 
 came to her in waves of sweetness, growing in strength, and 
 the monotonous buzzing of the black honey-bees, mingled with 
 the drumming of the crickets, and the flowing of the river, and 
 the beating of her heart, and the rushing of her blood. She 
 leaned her fair head back against the great boulder, and said 
 in a voice that shook a little: 
 
 " Tell me about snubbing." 
 
 " It was High Art. Three words and I knew I'd behaved 
 like a bounder of the worst I had to go back and get the other 
 cab, with a broken front window and a cabby. . . ." He 
 chuckled. " I've met red noses enough, but you could have 
 'seen that chap's glowing through the thickest fog that ever 
 iblanketed Ludgate Hill and wrapped the Strand in greasy 
 'mystery. Don't move, please. . . . There's a ray of sunshine 
 touching your head that makes your hair look the colour of a 
 chestnut when the prickly green hull first cracks to let it out. 
 Or . . . there's a rose grow? on the pergola at home at Harts- 
 bank Chase, with a coppery sheen on the young leaves. . . . 
 I wondered why I kept thinking of it as I looked at you. But 
 I know now. And your skin is creamy white like the flower. 
 Oh, if I could only gather the girl-rose and carry it home to 
 the others ! " 
 
 She was pink as the loveliest La France now.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 359 
 
 "You ought not to talk to me in that way." 
 
 " Don't I know it ? " Beauvayse groaned out. He turned 
 over upon his face in the grass, and lay quite still. A shudder- 
 ing sigh heaved the strong young shoulders from time to time, 
 and his hands clenched and tore at the grasses. " Don't I know 
 it? Lynette, Lynette!" 
 
 She longed to touch the close-cropped golden head. Unseen 
 by him, she stretched out a hand timidly and drew it back 
 again, unsatisfied. 
 
 "Lynette, Lynette! I'm paying at this moment for every 
 rotten act of headlong folly I've ever committed in my life, 
 and you're making me ! " He caught at a fold of her skirt 
 and hid his face in it, kissing it again and again. It was one 
 of the caresses she had been used herself to offer where she 
 most loved. To find yourself being worshipped instead of wor- 
 shipping is an experience. She touched the golden head now, 
 as the Mother had often touched her own. He caught the 
 hand. 
 
 " No, no ! " She grew deadly pale, and shivered. " Please 
 let me go. I I did not " 
 
 She tried to release the hand. He raised himself, and she 
 started at the warm, quivering pressure of his beautiful mouth, 
 scarcely shaded by the young, wheat-golden moustache, upon 
 her cool, sweet flesh. She snatched her hand away with a faint 
 cry, and sprang to her feet, and her cheeks blazed anew as she 
 turned to go. 
 
 " You want to leave me ? You would punish me like that 
 just for a kissed hand ? " 
 
 He barred her way, taller than herself, though he stood upon 
 the sloping lower level. She had learned always to be true in 
 thought and speech. 
 
 " I don't like to be touched." She said it without look- 
 ing at him. 
 
 " You put your hand upon my head. Why did you do it if 
 you hate me so ? " 
 
 " I don't hate you." 
 
 " I love you. My rose, my dove, my star, my joy! Queen 
 of all the girls that ever I saw or dreamed of, say that you 
 could love me back again ! " 
 
 " I must not." 
 
 Her bosom heaved. He could see the delicate white throat 
 vibrating with the tumultuous beating of her heart. 
 
 " Why not ? Nobody has told you anything against me ?
 
 360 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Nobody has said to you that I have no right to love you ? " he 
 demanded. 
 
 " No." 
 
 " Look at me." 
 
 The golden hazel, brown-lashed eyes she shyly turned to his 
 were full of exquisite, melting tenderness. Her lips parted to 
 speak, and closed again. He leaned towards her hung over 
 her, his own lips irresistibly attracted to those sweetest 
 ones. . . . 
 
 " Lord Beauvayse " she began, and stopped. 
 
 He begged: 
 
 " Please, not the duffing title, but ' Beauvayse ' only. Tell 
 me you love me. Tell me that you'll wait until I'm able to 
 come to you and say: ' My beloved, the way's clear. Be my 
 wife to-morrow ! ' ' 
 
 His tone was masterful. His ardent eyes thrilled her. She 
 murmured : 
 
 " Beauvayse ... ! " 
 
 She swayed to him, as a young palm sways before a breeze, 
 and he caught her in his strenuous young embrace, and held 
 her firmly against him. Her old terrors wakened, and dread- 
 ful, unforgettable things stirred in the darkness, where they 
 had lain hidden, and lifted hydra-heads. She cried out wildly, 
 and strove to thrust him from her, but he held her close. There 
 was a shaking among the tangled growths of bush and cactus 
 high up on the opposite bank, and Lynette realized that Beau- 
 vayse's arms no longer held her. She leaned back against the 
 boulder, panting and white, and saw Beauvayse's revolver 
 glitter in his steady hand, as something came crashing down 
 through the tangled jungle upon the edge of the farther shore, 
 and a heavily-built man in khaki pushed through the shoulder- 
 high growth of reeds, and leaped upon a rock that had a swirl 
 of water around it. It was Saxharru 
 
 "Miss Mildare!" cried the strong, vibrating voice. 
 
 She faltered: 
 
 " It it is Dr. Saxham." 
 
 " And what the devil does Dr. Saxham want? " was written 
 in Beauvayse's angry face. But he called out as he lowered 
 his revolver-hand: 
 
 "You've had rather an escape of getting shot, Saxham, do 
 you know? You might have been a Boer or a rhinoceros. 
 Better be more careful next time, if you're anxious to avert 
 accidents."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 361 
 
 Saxham was a little like the buffalo as he lowered his head 
 and surveyed the alert, virile young figure and the insolent, 
 high-bred face from under ominously scowling brows. He 
 made no answer; only laid one finger upon the butt of his own 
 revolver, and the slight action fanned Beauvayse's annoyance 
 and resentment to a white-heat, as perhaps Saxham had in- 
 tended. He sprang upon another boulder that was in the mid 
 swirl of the current, and spoke again. 
 
 " Miss Mildare, I was walking on one of the native paths 
 that have been made in the bush there " he indicated the 
 bank behind him " when I heard you cry for help. I am 
 here, at your service, to offer you any help or protection that 
 is in my power." 
 
 Lynette looked at him vaguely. Beauvayse, crimson to the 
 crisp waves upon his forehead and the white collar-line above 
 the edge of his jacket, answered for her. 
 
 "Miss Mildare does not require any help or protection other 
 than what I am privileged to place at her disposal. You had 
 better go on with your walk, Doctor. You know the old adage 
 about two being company? " 
 
 He laughed, but his voice had quivered with fury, and the 
 hand that held the revolver shook too. And his eyes seemed 
 colourless as water against the furious crimson of his face. 
 Still ignoring him, Saxham said, his square, pale face turned 
 full upon Lynette, and his vivid blue eyes constraining her: 
 
 " Miss Mildare, I am at your commands. Tell me to cross 
 the river and take you back to the ladies of the Convent, or 
 order me to continue my walk. In which case I shall under- 
 stand that the familiarities of Lord Beauvayse are not unwel- 
 come to you." 
 
 " By God . . . ! You ' 
 
 Beauvayse choked, then suddenly remembered where and 
 how to strike. But he waited, and Saxham waited, and still 
 she did not speak. 
 
 " Am I to go or stay? Kindly answer, Miss Mildare! " 
 
 Beauvayse's eyes were on her. He said to her below his 
 breath : 
 
 "Tell him to go!" 
 
 She stammered : 
 
 " Th thank you. But I I had rather you went on." 
 
 Beauvayse saw his opportunity, and added, with an intoler- 
 able smile: 
 
 " My ' familiarities,' as you are pleased to term them, being
 
 362 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 more acceptable to a lady than the attentions of the Dop 
 Doctor." 
 
 Saxham started as though an adder had flashed Its fangs 
 through his boot. A rush of savage blood darkened his face; 
 his hand quivered near the butt of his revolver, and his eyes 
 blazed murder. But with a frightful effort he controlled him- 
 self, lifted his hat slightly to Lynette, turned and leaped back 
 to the stone he had quitted, strode through the reed-beds, and 
 plunged back into the tangled boscage. That he did not con- 
 tinue his walk, but turned back towards the town, was plain, 
 for his retreat could be traced by the shaking of the thick bush 
 and the high grasses through which he forced his way. It did 
 him good to battle even with these vegetable forces, and the 
 hooked thorns that, tore his clothes and rent his flesh left noth- 
 ing like the traces that those few words of dismissal, spoken 
 by a girl's voice, and the hateful taunt that had followed, had 
 left upon his heart. 
 
 It was over. Over over, the brief, sweet season of hope. 
 Nothing was left now but his loyalty to the friend who be- 
 lieved in him. If that man had not stood between Saxham and 
 his despair, Gueldersdorp would have got back her Dop Doc- 
 tor that night. For the Hospital stores included a cherished 
 case or two of Martell and Kinahan, and all these things were 
 under Saxham's hand. 
 
 The heavy footsteps crashed out of hearing. The startled 
 finches settled down again, except at that point, high up OH the 
 opposite bank, to which Beauvayse's attention had first been 
 directed. There the little birds hovered like a cloud of butter- 
 flies, but, practised scout as Beauvayse was, he paid no heed 
 to their distress. She had declared for him. The Doctor's 
 discomfiture enhanced his triumph. Gad! how like an angry 
 rhino the fellow was ! The sort of beast who would put down 
 his head and charge at a stone wall as confidently as at a mud 
 one. It was a confounded nuisance that he had seen what he 
 had seen. But a man who had eventually cut so poor a figure, 
 had been snubbed so thoroughly and completely, might prefer 
 to hold his tongue. And if he did not, here in Gueldersdorp, 
 while no letters got through, while no news filtered in from 
 the big humming world outside, it would be possible to carry 
 things bravely off for a long time. He had told Bingo, to be 
 sure, about about Lessie. But Bingo, though he might blus- 
 ter and barge about dishonourable conduct, would never give 
 away a man who had trusted him. To be sure, it was not quite
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 363 
 
 fair, not altogether square; it was not playing the game as it 
 should be played, to gain her promise as a free man. Should 
 he make a clean breast of it, and tell her the whole wretched 
 story now? 
 
 Perhaps he might if she had not been standing, a slender 
 green-and-white, nymph-like figure, against the background of 
 sun-hot, shadow-flecked, lichened stone, looking at him. The 
 rosy light bathed her in its radiance. And as she looked, it 
 seemed to him that something was dawning in that face of hers. 
 He watched it, breathless with the realization of his dreams, 
 his hopes, his desires. The prize was his. Every other baser 
 memory was drowning within him. It seemed to him that 
 purity, as he bathed in it, washed him clean of stain. He for- 
 got everything but. the secret that those sweet eyes told at last. 
 
 " My beloved ! I'm not good enough to tie your blessed 
 little shoes, and yet no other man shall ever have you, hold 
 you, call you his own. . . . Lynette, Lynette! Dear one, 
 isn't there a single kiss? And I might get shot to-morrow." 
 
 It was characteristic of him that his brave, gay mouth should 
 laugh even in the utterance of the appeal that melted her. 
 She gave a little sob, and raised her sweet face to his, flushing 
 loveliest rosy red. She lifted her slender arms and laid them 
 about his strong young throat, and kissed him very quietly and 
 purely. He had meant to snatch her to his leaping heart and 
 cover her with eager, passionate caresses. But the strong 
 impulse was quelled. He said, almost with a sob: 
 
 " Is this your promise ? Does this mean that you belong 
 to me?" 
 
 Her breath caressed his cheek as she whispered: 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 He was thrilled and intoxicated and tortured at once to 
 know himself her chosen. Ah! why was he not free? Why 
 had Chance and Luck and Fate forced him to play a part like 
 this? 
 
 " I wish to Heaven we had met a year ago ! " he broke out 
 impulsively. " Six years ago only you'd have been a mere 
 kid too young to understand what Love means. . . . Why, 
 Lynette darling! what is the matter? What have I said that 
 hurt?" 
 
 Her arms had fallen from about his neck. She shrank away 
 from him. He drew back, shocked into silence by the sudden, 
 dreadful change in her. Her eyes, curiously dulled and faded, 
 looked at Beauvayse as though they saw not him, but another
 
 364 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 man, through him and behind him. Her face was peaked and 
 pinched; her supple, youthful figure contracted and bent like 
 that of a woman withered by some wasting sickness, her dainty 
 garments seemed to lose their colouring and their freshness, 
 and hang on her, by some strange illusion wrought by the 
 working of her mind upon his, like sordid rags. Against the 
 summer riot of life and colour over and under and about her, 
 she looked like some slender sapling ringed and blighted and 
 ruined by the inexorable worm. For she was remembering 
 the tavern on the veld. She was recalling what had been 
 realizing what must henceforth be, in its fullest meaning. She 
 shuddered, and her half-open mouth drew in the air in gasps, 
 and the blankness of her stare appalled him. He called in 
 alarm : 
 
 " Lynette dearest ! what is the matter ? Why do you look 
 at me like that ? Lynette ! " 
 
 She did not answer. She shook like a leaf in the wind, and 
 stared through him and beyond him into the Past. That was 
 all. There was a rustling of leaves and branches higher on 
 the bank, and the sound of thick woollen draperies trailing 
 through grass. The bush on the edge of the cleared space that 
 was about the great boulder was parted by a white, strong hand 
 and a black-sleeved arm, and the Mother-Superior moved out 
 into the open, and came down with those long, swift steps of 
 hers to where they were. Her eyes, sweeping past Beauvayse, 
 fastened on the drooping, stricken figure of the girl, read the 
 altered face, and then she turned them on the boy, and they 
 were stern as those of some avenging Angel, and her white 
 coif, laundried to snowy immaculateness by the capable hands 
 of Sister Tobias, framed a face as white. 
 
 "What is the reason of this? What has passed between 
 you to account, for it? Has your mother's son no sense of 
 honour, sir ? " 
 
 Tne icy tone of contempt stung him to risk the leap. He 
 drew himself to his splendid height, and answered, his brave 
 young eyes boldly meeting the stern eyes that questioned him: 
 
 " Ma'am, I am sorry that you should think me capable of 
 dishonourable conduct. The fact is, that I have just asked 
 Miss Mildare to be my wife. And she consents." 
 
 A spasm passed over the pale face. So easily they leave 
 us whom we have reared and tended, when the strange hand 
 beckons and the new voice calls. But the Mother-Superior 
 was not a woman to betray emotion. She drew her black nun's
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 365 
 
 robe over the pierced mother-heart, and said calmly, holding 
 out her hand to him: 
 
 " You will forgive me if I was unjust, knowing that she is 
 dear to me. And now I shall ask you to leave us. Please 
 tell the Sisters " from habit she glanced at her worn gold 
 watch "we shall join them in ten minutes' time." 
 
 He bowed, and lifted his smasher hat from the grass, and 
 took up the Lee-Metford carbine he had been carrying and 
 had laid aside, and went to Lynette and took her passive hand, 
 and bent over it and kissed it. It dropped by her side lifelessly 
 when he released it. Her face was a mack void of life. He 
 looked towards the Mother in distress. Her white hand impe- 
 riously motioned him away. He expostulated: 
 
 " Is it safe for two ladies, ma'am, so far from the town, 
 without protection? Natives or white loafers may be hanging 
 about." 
 
 " If you desire it, you can remain within hearing of a call. 
 But go now." 
 
 He went, lightly striding down the sandy path between the 
 reed-beds on the foreshore. She watched the tall, athletic 
 figure until it swung round a bend and was lost to sight. 
 
 Then she went to the girl and touched her. And at the 
 touch Lynette dropped as though she had been shot, and lay 
 among the trodden grasses and the flaunting cowslips face 
 downwards. A low, incessant moaning came from the muffled 
 mouth. Her hands were knotted in her hair. She writhed 
 like a crushed snake, and all of her slender neck and face that 
 could be seen and the little ears that her clutching, twining 
 fingers sometimes bared and sometimes covered were all burn- 
 ing, shameful red. 
 
 "Lynette! My dear one!" The Mother, wrung and torn* 
 with a very agony of tenderness and pity, knelt beside her, and 
 began with gentle strength to untwine those clutching hands 
 from the girl's hair. She prisoned both in one of hers, and 
 passed the other arm beneath the slender rigid body, and 
 lifted it up and held it in her strong embrace, silent until a 
 moan, more articulate than the rest, voiced: 
 
 "Mother!" 
 
 " It is Mother. She holds you ; she will not let you go." 
 
 The head lay helplessly upon her bosom. She felt the rigor 
 lessen. The moaning ceased, and the tortured heart began to 
 leap and strain against her own, as though some invisible hand 
 lashed it with an unseen thojig.
 
 366 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 There were no tears. Only those moans and the leaping of 
 the heart that shook the whole body. And it seemed to the 
 Mother that her own heart wept tears of blood. The hour 
 had come at last, as always she had known it would. The 
 love of a man had wakened the woman in Lynette. She knew 
 now the full value of the lost heritage, and realized the glory 
 of the jewel that had been snatched by the brutal hand of a 
 thief. Ah, Lord ! the pity of it ! 
 
 The pity of it! She, the stainless one, could have stripped 
 off her own white robe of virgin purity, had it been possible, 
 to clothe the despoiled young shoulders of Richard's daughter, 
 cowering prostrate under her burden of guiltless shame, 
 crushed by the terrible knowledge that ruined innocence must 
 always pay the penalty, whether the destroyer is punished or 
 goes free. 
 
 The penalty! Suppose at the price of a lie from lips that 
 had never lied yet it could be evaded? The Mother's face 
 contracted with a spasm of mental pain. A dull flush mounted 
 to her temples, and died out in olive paleness; her lips folded 
 closely, and her black brows frowned, over the sombre grey 
 fires burning in their hollow caves. She rebuked a sinner at 
 that moment, and the culprit was herself. 
 
 She, the just mistress and wise ruler of so many Sisters in 
 the religious profession; she, so slow to judge and condemn 
 others, was unsparing in austerity towards herself. She had 
 always recognized her greatest weakness in her great love for 
 this daughter that might have been her own if Richard Mil- 
 dare had not played traitor. She had never once yielded to 
 the clinging of those slight hands about her heart, but she had 
 extracted forfeit from herself, and rigorously. So much for 
 excess of partiality, so much for over-consideration, so much 
 for lack of faith in over-anxiety, so much more of late for the 
 keen mother-jealousy that had quickened in her to anguish at 
 the thought that another would one day usurp her undivided 
 throne, and claim and take the lion's share of the love that had 
 been all hers. Her spiritual director was far too lenient, in 
 her opinion. She was all the more exacting towards herself. 
 What right had a nun to be so bound by an earthly tie? It 
 was defrauding her Saviour and her Spouse to love with such 
 excess of material emotion the child He had given. Yet she 
 loved on. 
 
 She reviewed all her shortcomings, even while the head lay 
 helplessly against her, and the scalding tears that had at last
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 367 
 
 began to gush from those shut, quivering eyelids wetted her 
 breast. She had esteemed and valued perfect candour above 
 all things. And yet of what concealments had she not been 
 guilty in the shielding of this dearest head? 
 
 She had deceived, for Richard's child, Richard's friend, in 
 the deft interweaving of fragmentary truths into a whole 
 plausible fabric. She knew that, if necessary, she would deceive 
 again, trailing her wings, fluttering on before, as the peewit 
 lures the footsteps of the stranger from her nest. 
 
 Perhaps you call her scruples fantastic, her sense of guilt 
 morbid. Even the lay Catholic can with difficulty comprehend 
 and enter fully into the mental constitution of the Religious. 
 This was a nun, to whom a blur upon the crystal of the soul 
 kept pure, like the virginal body, for the daily reception of the 
 Consecrated Host, meant defilement, outrage, insult, to her 
 Master and her Lord. 
 
 And she had always known, it seemed to her, that this ter- 
 rible hour would come. When the two young figures had 
 moved away together into the green gloom of the trees, she had 
 felt a premonitory chill that streamed over her whole body like 
 icy water, paralyzing and numbing her strength. She had 
 read their secret in their faces, unconscious of her scrutiny, and 
 watched them out of sight, praying, as only such a mother can, 
 that it might not be as she feared. This was her beloved's 
 great hour; she would not have stretched out a finger to delay 
 its arriving. She who had known Love, and could not forget. 
 It might be that in this splendid boy, who was as beautiful as 
 the Greek Alcibiades, and as brave as the young Bayard, lay 
 the answer to all her prayers for her darling. The bridal white 
 would not be a blasphemy, like the young nun's snowy robe 
 and veil. And yet, and yet, in Lynette's place she knew that 
 she could never have looked into the face of a rosy, smiling, 
 wedded Future without seeing under the myrtle and orange 
 garland the leering satyr-face of the Past. 
 
 Was it wise that another should be made to share that 
 vision? She put that question to herself, looking with great 
 agonized, unseeing eyes over the head that lay upon her bosom, 
 out across the slowly moving water, stained with amber from 
 the ironstone beds through which it wound its way, tinged with 
 ruddy crimson from the sunset. For the sky, from the western 
 horizon to the zenith, and from thence to the serried peaks and 
 frowning bastions of purple-black cloud that capped the north- 
 ern hill-ranges, was all orange-crimson now, and the moon,
 
 368 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 then at the ending of her second quarter, swung like a pale 
 lamp of electrum at the eastward corner of the flaming tent. 
 
 " Was it wise ? " She seemed to hear her own voice echoing 
 back out of the past. And it said : 
 
 " The only just claim to your entire confidence in all that 
 concerns your past life will rest in the hands of the man who 
 may one day be your husband." 
 
 The perfume of the great white trumpet-flower came to her 
 in gusts of intensified, sickening, loathsome sweetness. She 
 glanced round and saw it on her right, clasping in its luxuriant 
 embrace a slender young bush that it was killing. The thick, 
 juicy green stems and succulent green leaves, the greedily em- 
 , bracing tendrils and great fleshy-white, hanging flowers re- 
 volted her. The creeper seemed the incarnation of Lust batten- 
 ing upon Innocence. 
 
 Other like images crowded thick and fast upon her. From 
 a mossy cranny in a stone a giant tarantula leaped upon a little 
 lizard that sunned itself, not thinking Death so near. A light- 
 ning-quick pounce of the bleated thing with the fierce, greedy 
 eyes and the monstrous, hairy claws, and the little reptile van- 
 ished. She shuddered, thinking of its fate. 
 
 The blue gums and oaks that fringed the river gorge and 
 the bushes that grew about were ragged and torn with shell 
 and shrapnel-ball. Chips and flinders had been knocked by 
 the same forces from the boulders and the rocks. Amongst 
 the flowers near her shone something bright. It was an unex- 
 ploded maxim-shell, a pretty little messenger of Death, girt 
 with bright copper bands and gaily painted. And a ninety-four 
 pound projectile, exploded, had scattered the shore with its 
 fragments, and doubtless the river-bed was strewn thick with 
 others. You had only to look to see them. Once Lynette's 
 lover knew everything there was to know, the trees and rocks 
 and flowers of the Eden in which every daughter of Eve owns 
 the right to walk, if only once in a whole lifetime, would be 
 marred and broken, scorched and spoiled, like these. 
 
 Purblind that she had been. What claim had any man, see- 
 ing what the lives of men are, to this pitiful sacrifice of reti- 
 cence, this rending of the veil of merciful, wise secrecy from an 
 innocent young head? None. Not the shadow of a claim. 
 She tossed away her former scruples. They sailed from her on 
 the faint hot breeze lightly as thistledown. And now the tear- 
 blurred face was lifted from her bosom, and the voice, hoarse 
 and weak and trembling, appealed:
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 369 
 
 "Mother, you are not angry? I never meant to be under- 
 hand, or to hide anything from you." 
 
 " No," she said, hiding the pang it gave her to realize how 
 much had been concealed between the lines that she had read 
 so often. " You did not mean to." The trembling voice 
 went on: 
 
 " He never spoke to me as though we were strangers. Never, 
 
 from the first. And to-day, he " Her heart's throbbing 
 
 shook her. The Mother said: 
 
 " He has told me what has passed. He said that he had 
 asked you to marry him, and you had agreed." The bitter- 
 ness of her wounded love was in her tone. 
 
 " I had forgotten," she panted, " that, until one little care- 
 less thing he said brought it all back to me in such a flood. 
 
 It was like drowning. Then you came, and and " The 
 
 quavering pitiful voice rose to a cry: " Mother, must I tell 
 him everything?" She cowered down in the enfolding arms. 
 " Mother, Mother, must I tell him ? " 
 
 A great wave of pity surged out from the deep mother-heart 
 that throbbed against her. The deep, soft-swelling voice 
 answered with one word: 
 
 " No." 
 
 Amazement sat on the uplifted, woebegone face of the girl. 
 The sorrowful eyes questioned the Mother's incredulously. 
 
 " You mean that you " 
 
 She folded the slight figure to her. Her sorrowful eyes, 
 under their great jetty arches, looked out like stars through a 
 night of storm. Her greyish pallor seemed a thin veil of ashes 
 covering incandescent furnace-fires. She rose up, lifting the 
 slender figure. She said, looking calmly in the face: 
 
 " I mean that you are not to tell him. Upon your obedience 
 to me I charge you not to tell him. Upon your love for me I 
 command you never to tell him. Kiss me, and dry these dear 
 eyes. Put up your hair; a coil is loosened. He is waiting for 
 us. Come." 
 
 XLII 
 
 THE tall, soldierly young figure was standing motionless and 
 stiff, as though on guard on the river-shore beyond the bend. 
 Whatever apprehensions, whatever regrets, whatever fears may 
 have warred within him, whatever consciousness may have been 
 his of having taken an irrevocable step, bound to bring dis-
 
 370 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 grace and reproach, sorrow, and repentance upon the innocent 
 as upon the guilty, he showed no sign as he came to meet them, 
 and lifted the Service felt from his golden head, and held out 
 an eager hand for Lynette's. She gave it shyly, and with the 
 thrill of contact Beauvayse's last scruple fled. He turned his 
 beautiful, flushed face and shining eyes upon the Mother, and 
 asked with grave simplicity: 
 
 " Ma'am, is not this mine? " 
 
 " First tell me, do you know that there is nothing in it? " 
 
 Her stern eyes searched his. He laughed and said, as he 
 kissed the slender hand : 
 
 " It holds everything for me." 
 
 " My daughter, do you give it him ? " The voice was solemn 
 and very sweet. Lynette answered, her quivering face turned 
 to the Mother, but her eyes for him alone: 
 
 " Mother . . . you know." 
 
 The Mother gave Beauvayse her own hand then, that was 
 marred by many deeds of charity, but still beautiful. 
 
 Those two, linked together for a moment in their mutual 
 love of her, made for Lynette a picture never to be forgotten. 
 Then Beauvayse said, in the boyish tone that made the man 
 irresistible : 
 
 " You have made me awfully happy." 
 
 " Make her happy," the Mother answered him, with a 
 tremble in her rich, melancholy organ-tones, " and I ask no 
 more." 
 
 Her own heart was bleeding, but she drew her black draperies 
 over the wound with a resolute hand. Was not here a Heaven- 
 sent answer to all her prayers for her beloved? she asked her- 
 self, as she looked at the girl. Eyes that beamed so, cheeks that 
 burned with as divine a rose, had looked back at Lady Biddy 
 Bawne out of her toilet-glass, upon the night of that Ascot 
 Cup-Day, when Richard had asked her to be his wife. But 
 Richard's eyes had never worn the look of Beauvayse's. Rich- 
 ard's hand had never so trembled, Richard's face had never 
 glowed like this. Surely there was Love, she told herself, as 
 they went, back to the place of trodden grass where the tea- 
 making had been. 
 
 The Sisters, basket and trestle-laden, were already in the act 
 of departure. The black circle of the dead fire marked where 
 the giant kettle had sung its hospitable song. Little Miss 
 Wiercke and her long-locked organist, the young lady from the 
 Free Library and her mining-engineer, had strolled away town-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 37i 
 
 wards, whispering, and arm-in-arm ; the Mayor's wife was lay- 
 ing the dust with tears of joy as she trudged back to the 
 Woman's Laager beside a husband who pushed a perambulator 
 containing a small boy, who had waked up hungry and wanted 
 supper; the Colonel and Captain Bingo Wrynche had been 
 summoned back to Staff Headquarters, and a pensive little 
 lady in navy-blue alpaca and a big grey hat with ostrich plumes, 
 who was sitting on a tree-stump knocking red ants out of her 
 white umbrella, as those three figures moved out of the shadows 
 of the trees, jumped up and hurried to meet them, prattling: 
 
 " I couldn't go without saying a word. . . . You have 
 been so upset with people all the afternoon that I never got a 
 chance to put my oar in. Dear Reverend Mother, everything 
 has gone off so well. No clergyman will ever preach again 
 about Providence spreading a table in the wilderness without 
 my coming back in memory to to-day. May we walk back 
 together? I am a mass of ants, and mosquito-bitten to a de- 
 gree, but I don't think I ever enjoyed myself so much. No, 
 Lord Beauvayse, the path is narrow, and I have a perfect dread 
 of puff-adders. Please go on before us with Miss Mildare. 
 No. . . ! Oh, what. . . ? You haven't ... ? " 
 
 It was then that Lady Hannah dropped the white umbrella 
 and clapped her hands for joy. Something of mastery and 
 triumph in the young man's face, something in the pale radi- 
 ance of the girl's, something of the mingled joy and anguish 
 of the pierced maternal heart, shining in the Mother's grey 
 eyes, had conveyed to the exultant little woman that the plant 
 that had thriven upon the arid soil of Gueldersdorp had opened 
 a blossom with a heart of ruby red. 
 
 " Oh, you dears! you two beautiful dears! how happy you 
 look ! " she crowed. " I must kiss you both." She did it. 
 " Say that this isn't to be kept secret." She clasped her tiny 
 hands with exaggerated entreaty. " For the sake of the Guel- 
 dersdorp Siege Gazette, and its seven hundred subscribers all 
 perishing for news, tell me I may let the cat out of the bag in 
 my next Weekly Column. Only say that people may 
 know." 
 
 As her black eyes snapped at Beauvayse, and her tiny hands 
 dramatically entreated, he had an instant of hesitation, palpable 
 to one who stood by. In an instant he pulled himself together. 
 
 '* The whole world may know, as far as I am concerned." 
 
 " It is best," said the Mother's soft, melodious voice, " that 
 our world, at least, should know."
 
 372 ONE BRAVER THING. 
 
 "And when oh, when Is It To Be?" begged Lady 
 Hannah. 
 
 Confound the woman ! Why could she not let well enough 
 alone? A sullen anger burned Beauvayse as he said, and not in 
 the tone of the ardent lover: 
 
 " As soon as we can possibly manage it." 
 
 The Mother's voice said, coldly and clearly: 
 
 " I do not approve of long engagements. If the marriage 
 takes place, it must be soon." 
 
 With the consciousness of one who is impelled to take a 
 desperate leap, Beauvayse found himself saying: 
 
 " It cannot be too soon." 
 
 "Then . . . before the Relief?" cried Lady Hannah, and 
 Beauvayse heard himself answering: 
 
 " If Lynette agrees?" 
 
 The rapture of submission in her look was intoxicating. He 
 reached out his hand and laid it lightly on her shoulder. Then, 
 without another word, they went out together, and the tall, 
 soldierly figure in brown, and the slender shape in the green 
 skirt and little white coat, with the dainty-plumed hat crown- 
 ing the squirrel-coloured hair, were seen in darkening relief 
 against the flaming orange of the sky. 
 
 " A Wedding under Fire. Bridal Ceremony in a Be- 
 leaguered City," murmured the enthusiastic journalist. Her 
 gold fountain-pen, hanging at her chatelaine, seemed to wriggle 
 like a thing of life, as she imagined herself aiding, planning, 
 assisting at, and finally sitting down to describe the ceremony 
 and the wedding-veil on the little Greek head. She babbled as 
 her quick, bird-like gait carried her along beside the tall, 
 stately-moving figure in the black habit. 
 
 " Dear Bridget ... I may call you that for the sake of 
 old days?" 
 
 " If you like." 
 
 " This must make you very happy. Society mothers of mar- 
 riageable daughters will tear their transformations from their 
 heads, and dance upon them in despair, when they hear that 
 Beau c'est range. But that I don't hold forth to worldly ears 
 I would enlarge upon the immense social advantages of such a 
 union for that dear child." 
 
 " Of course, I am aware that it is an excellent match." 
 
 Were her ears so unworldly? The phrase rankled in her 
 conscience like a thorn. And in what respect were those Society 
 mothers less managing than the nun? she asked herself. Could
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 373 
 
 any of them have been more astute, more eager, more bent on 
 hooking the desirable parti for their girls than she had shown 
 herself just now? And was this, again, an unworldly voice 
 whispering to her that the publicity ensured by a paragraph 
 penned by this gossip-loving little lady would fix him even 
 more securely, bind him more strongly, make it even less pos- 
 sible for him to retreat, should he desire to burn his boats behind 
 him, so that he had no alternative but to go on? She sickened 
 with loathing of herself. But for her there was no retreat 
 either. Here Lady Hannah helped her unawares. With a 
 side-glance at the noble face beside her, pale olive-hued, worn 
 and faded beyond the age of the woman by her great, labours 
 and her greater griefs, the arched black eyebrows sprinkled of 
 late with grey, the eyelids thin over the mobile eyeballs, purpled 
 with lack of sleep and secret, bitter weeping, the close-folded, 
 deeply cut, eloquent mouth withered like a japonica-bloom 
 that lingers on in frost, the strong salient chin framed in the 
 snowy, starched guimpe, she hesitated: 
 
 " You don't shy at the notion of the par the announce- 
 ment in the Siege Gazette, I mean? . . ." 
 
 " Upon the contrary, I approve of it," said the Mother, and 
 walked on very fast, for the bells of the Catholic Church were 
 ringing for Benediction. 
 
 " Is it good-night, or may I come in? " Beauvayse whispered 
 to Lynette in the porch. 
 
 She dipped her slender fingers in the little holy-water font 
 beside the door, and held them out to him. 
 
 " Come in," she answered, and held white, wet fingers out 
 to him. He touched them with a puzzled smile. 
 
 " Am I to Ah, I remember." 
 
 Their eyes met, and the golden radiance in hers passed into 
 his blood. He bared his high, fair head as she made the sign 
 of the Cross, and followed her in and up the nave as Father 
 Wilx, in purple Lenten stole over the snowy cotta starched 
 and ironed by Sister Tobias's capable hands, began to intone 
 the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. The Sisters were al- 
 ready in their places a double row of black-draped figures, 
 the Mother at the end of the first row, Lady Hannah in the 
 chair beside her, where Lynette had always sat until now. It 
 was not without a pang that the one saw her place usurped 
 by a stranger; it was piercing pain to the other to feel the 
 strange presence at her side. But something had already come 
 between these two, dividing them. Something invisible, im-
 
 374 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 palpable as air, but nevertheless thrusting them apart with a 
 force that might not be resisted. 
 
 Only the elder of the two as yet knew clearly what it 
 meant. The younger was too dizzy with her first heady 
 draught from the cup of joy, held to her lips by the strong, 
 beautifully-shaped brown hand that rested on Beauvayse's 
 knee as he sat, or propped up Beauvayse's chin as he knelt, 
 stiff as a young crusader on a monument, beside her. But 
 the Mother knew. Would not the God Who had been justly 
 offended in her, His vowed servant, that day, exact to the last 
 tittle the penalty? She knew He would. 
 
 Rosary ended, the thin, kind-eyed little elderly priest 
 preached, taking for the text of his discourse the Tract from 
 the Office of Septuagesima. 
 
 " Commovisti, Domine, terram et conturbasti. . . ." 
 
 " Thou hast moved the earth, O Lord, and troubled it ; 
 heal Thou the breaches thereof. . . . That Thy elect may 
 flee from before the bow: that they may be delivered." 
 
 Then the O Salutaris was sung, and followed by the Litany 
 of the Holy Name. 
 
 The church was crowded. A Catholic congregation is al- 
 ways devout, but these people, well-dressed or ill-dressed, pros- 
 perous or poor, pale-faced and hollow-eyed every one, joined 
 in the office with passion. The responses came like the 
 beating of one wave of human anguish upon the Rock of 
 Ages. 
 
 " Have mercy on us! " 
 
 Hungry, they cried to One Who had hungered. Sinking 
 with weariness, they appealed to One Who had known labours, 
 faintings, agonies, and desolations. 
 
 "Have mercy on us!" 
 
 He had drunk of Death for them, had been buried and had 
 risen again. 
 
 Death was all about them. They could hear the beating 
 of his wings, could see the red sweep of his blood-wet, dripping 
 scythe. And they prayed as they had never prayed before these 
 things befell: 
 
 "Have mercy on us!" 
 
 They sang the Tantum Ergo, and the cloud of incense rose 
 from the censer in the priest's hand. Then, at the thin, sweet 
 tinkle of the bell, and the first white gleam of the Unspeakable 
 Mystery upheld by the servant of the Altar, the heads bowed 
 and sank as when a sudden wind sweeps over a field of ripened
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 375 
 
 corn. Only one or two remained unmoved, one of these a 
 man's head, young and crisply-waved, and golden. . . . 
 
 And then came the orderly crowding to the door, and they 
 were outside under the great violet sky throbbing with splen- 
 did stars, breathing the tainted air that came from the laagers 
 and the trenches. But oh, was there ever a sweeter night, 
 following upon a sweeter day? 
 
 Beauvayse's hand found and pressed Lynette's. She looked 
 up and saw his eyes shining in the starlight. He looked down 
 and saw the Convent lily transformed into a very rose of 
 womanhood. 
 
 " I am on duty at Staff Bomb-proof South to-night. What 
 I would give to be free to walk home with you ! " 
 
 Lady Hannah's jangling laugh came in. 
 
 " Haven't you had the whole day? Greedy, unconscionable 
 young man ! Say good-night to her, and be off and get some 
 food into you. Don't say you haven't any appetite. I am 
 hungry enough to be interested even in minced mule and spatch- 
 cocked locusts, after all this. Good-night! I must kiss you 
 again, child. I hope you don't mind?" 
 
 Lynette gave her cheek, asking: 
 
 "Where is the Mother?" 
 
 The voice of Sister Tobias answered out of the purplish 
 darkness : 
 
 " She has gone on with Sister Hilda-Antony and Sister 
 Cleophee, dearie. She is going to sleep at the Convent with 
 them, and I was to give you her love, and say good-night." 
 
 Say good-night! On this of all nights was Lynette to be 
 dismissed without even the Mother's kiss? She gave back 
 Beauvayse's parting hand-pressure almost mechanically. Then 
 she heard his voice close at her ear, say pantingly: 
 
 " No one will see. . . . Please, dearest ! " 
 
 She turned her head, and their lips met under cover of the 
 pansy-coloured darkness. . . . Then he was gone with Lady 
 Hannah, and Lynette was walking home to the Convent bomb- 
 proof, explaining to the astonished Sisters that the Mother 
 knew; that the Mother approved of her engagement to Lord 
 Beauvayse; and that they would probably be married very 
 soon. Before the Relief . . . 
 
 " ' Before the Relief.' Well, no one but Our Lord knows 
 when that's to be. . . . And so you're very happy, are you, 
 dearie?" 
 
 Even as she gave her shy j.ssent in answer to Sister Tobias's
 
 376 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 question, its commonplace homeliness, like the feeling of the 
 thick dust, and the scattered debris underfoot, brought back 
 Lynette for a moment out of the golden, diamond-dusted, 
 pearl-gemmed dream-world in which she had been straying, to 
 wonder, Was she really very happy ? 
 
 She asked herself the question sitting with the Sisters at their 
 little scanty supper. She asked herself as she knelt with 
 them in prayer, as she lay in bed, the Mother's place vacant 
 beside her, the pillow her head's resting-place instead of that 
 dear, familiar breast. Was she happy after all? 
 
 She had drunk sweetness, but there had been a tang of some- 
 thing in the sup that cloyed the palate and sickened the soul. 
 She had learned the love of man, and in a measure it had cast 
 out fear, that had been her earlier lesson. To be held and 
 taken and made his completely, what must it be like? She 
 glowed in the darkness at the thought. And then the rec- 
 ollection of a ruthless strength that had rent away the veil of 
 innocence from a woman-child surged back upon her. 
 
 Just think. Suppose you laid your hand in the warm, strong 
 clasp that thrilled delight to every nerve, and set your heart 
 beating, beating, and, drawn by the shining grey-green jewel- 
 eyes and the mysterious, wooing smile upon the beautiful lips, 
 and the coaxing, caressing tones of the voice that so allured, 
 you gave up all else that had been so dear, and went away with 
 him? What then? Suppose 
 
 Suppose the smiling face of Love should turn out to be noth- 
 ing but a mask hiding the gross and brutal grin of Lust, what 
 then ? She saw that other man's printed face, in hot and living 
 colours upon the darkness. She writhed as if to tear her lips 
 from the savage, furious mouth. She shuddered and grew 
 cold there in the sultry heat. The clasp of the protecting 
 mother-arms might have driven away her terror, but she was 
 alone. It would have been sweet to be alone that night if she 
 had been happy. 
 
 Why had the Mother shunned her? She knew that she 
 had. Why had she felt, even with the glamour of his pres- 
 ence about her, and the music of his voice in her ears, that all 
 was not well? 
 
 Why, even with the lifting of her burden, in the unutter- 
 able relief of hearing, from the lips that had been her law, that 
 her dreadful secret need never be revealed, had she felt con- 
 sternation and alarm? The words were written in fiery let- 
 ters, on the murky dark of the bombproof, where the tiny
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 377 
 
 lamp that had burned before the Tabernacle on the altar of 
 the Convent chapel burned, a twinkling red star before the 
 silver crucifix that hung upon the east wall. 
 
 " He is not to be told. I command you never to tell him." 
 
 The doubt germinated and presently pushed through a lit- 
 tle spear. Had those lips given right counsel or wrong? 
 Ought he to be told? Was it dishonest, was it traitorous, to 
 hide the truth? And yet, what are the lives of even the up- 
 right, and clean, and continent among men, compared with 
 the life of a girl bred as she had been ? The sin had not been 
 hers. She, the victim, was blameless. And yet, and yet . . . 
 
 To this girl, who had learned to see the Face of Christ and 
 of His Mother reflected in one human face that had smiled 
 down upon her, waking in the little white bed in the Convent 
 infirmary from the long, recuperating sleep that turns the tide 
 of brain-fever, the thought that a shadow of deceit could mar 
 its earnest, candid purity was torture. Months back they had 
 said to her the lips that had given her the first kiss she had 
 received since a dying woman's cold mouth touched the sleep- 
 ing face of a yellow-haired baby held to her in a strong man's 
 shaking hands, as the trek-waggon rolled and rumbled over 
 the veld: 
 
 " The man who may one day be your husband will have 
 the right to know." 
 
 It was a different voice to the one that had commanded, 
 " You are never to tell him." Lynette lay listening to those 
 two voices until the alarm-clock belled and the Sisters rose at 
 midnight for matins. Then she lay listening to the soft mur- 
 mur of voices in the dark, as the red lamp glimmered before 
 the silver Christ upon the wall. The nuns needed no light, 
 knowing the office by heart: 
 
 " Delict 'a quis intelligit? ab octa meis munda me. Et ab 
 alienis parce servo tuo " " Who can comprehend what sin 
 is? Cleanse me from my hidden sins, and from those of others 
 save Thy servant." 
 
 The antiphon followed the Gloria, and then the soft 
 womanly voices chanted the twenty-third Psalm: 
 
 "Quis ascendit in montem Domini?" "Who shall ascend 
 to the Mount of the Lord, and who shall dwell in His holy 
 Sanctuary? Those who do no ill and are pure. . . . who do 
 not give their heart to vain desires, or deceive their neighbour 
 with false oaths." 
 
 Or deceive . . . with false oaths. To marry a man letting
 
 378 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 him think you . . . something you were not . . . did not that 
 amount to deceiving by a false oath? 
 
 Lynette lay very still. The last " Hail, Mary " over, the 
 Sisters returned silently to bed. Wire mattresses creaked un- 
 der superimposed weight. Long breaths of wakefulness 
 changed into the even breathing of slumber. The only one 
 who snored was Sister Tobias, a confirmed nasal soloist, whose 
 customary cornet-solo was strangely missing. Was Sister To- 
 bias lying awake and remembering too? 
 
 Sister Tobias was the only other person in the Convent 
 besides the Mother who knew. She had helped her faithfully 
 and tenderly to nurse Lynette through the long illness that had 
 followed the rinding of that lost thing upon the veld. She 
 was a homely creature of saintly virtues, the Mother's staff 
 and right hand. And it was she who had asked Lynette if 
 she was happy? 
 
 Somebody was moving. The grey light of dawn was filter- 
 ing down the drain-pipe ventilators and through the chinks 
 in the tarpaulins overhead. A formless pale figure came 
 swiftly to Lynette's bedside. She guessed who it must be. 
 She sat up wide awake, and with her heart beating wildly in 
 her throat. 
 
 " Dearie ! " The whisper was Sister Tobias's. She could 
 make out the glimmer of the white, plain nightcap framing 
 the narrow face with the long, sagacious nose and wise, kindly, 
 patient eyes. " Are you awake, dearie ? " 
 
 " Yes," Lynette whispered back, shuddering. The dry, 
 warm, hard hand felt, about for her cold one, and found and 
 (took it. Lips came close to her ear, and breathed: 
 
 " Dearie, this grand young gentleman you're engaged to be 
 married to . . ." 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 "Has he been told? Does he know?" 
 
 The long, plain face was close to Lynette's. In the greying 
 light she could see it clearly. Her heart beat in heavy, sick- 
 ening thuds. Her teeth chattered, and her whole body shook 
 as if with ague, as she faltered: 
 
 " The Mother says he is not to be told." 
 
 There was a dead silence. It was as if an iron shutter had 
 suddenly been pulled down and clamped home between them. 
 Then Sister Tobias said in a tone devoid of all expression: 
 
 " The Mother knows best, dearie, of course. Lie down 
 and go to sleep."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 379 
 
 Then silence settled back upon the Convent bombproof, but 
 sleep did not come to everybody there. 
 
 XLIII 
 
 THE Mother was kneeling, as she had knelt the whole night 
 through, before the dismantled altar in the battered little 
 chapel of the Convent, with the big white stars looking down 
 upon her through the gaps in the shell-torn roof. When it 
 was the matin-hour she rose and rang the bell. Matins over, 
 she still knelt on. When it was broad day she broke her fast 
 with the Sisters, and went about the business of the day calmly, 
 collectedly, capably as ever. Only her face was white and 
 drawn, and great violet circles were about her great tragical 
 grey eyes. 
 
 "The blessed Saint she is! ?> whispered the nuns one to the 
 other. 
 
 If she had heard them, it would have added yet another iron 
 point to the merciless scourge of her self-scorn. 
 
 A Saint, in that stained garment! What tears of bitterness 
 had fallen that night upon the shameful blots that marred its 
 whiteness! But for Richard's child, even though she herself 
 must become a castaway, she must go on to the end. All the 
 chivalry in her rose in arms to defend the young, shame- 
 burdened, blameless head. 
 
 Ah ! if she had known ? . . . 
 
 Cold, light, cruel eyes had watched from across the river 
 that day as her tall, imposing figure, side by side with the 
 slender, more lightly-clad one moved between the mimosa- 
 bushes and round the river-bend. When the two were fairly 
 out of sight, the jungle of tree-fern and "cactus had rustled and 
 cracked. Then the burly, thick-set, powerful figure of a 
 bearded man pushed through, crossed the reedbeds, and, leap- 
 ing from boulder to boulder, crossed the river. Before long 
 the man was standing on the patch of trodden grass and flow- 
 ers in the lee of the great boulder, shutting up a little single- 
 barrelled, brass-mounted fieldglass that had served him ex- 
 cellently well. He was Bough, alms Van Busch, otherwise 
 the man who had come in through the enemy's lines as a runner 
 from Diamond Town with the letter (well-meant) from a 
 hypothetical Mrs. Casey to a Mr. Casey who did not exist. 
 His light eyes, that were the colour of browned steel, and set
 
 380 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 flat in their shallow orbits like an adder's, looked about and 
 all around the place, as he stroked the dense brake of black- 
 brown beard that cleverly filled in the interval between Mr. 
 Van Busch's luxuriant whiskers. Presently he stooped and 
 picked up a little tan-leather glove, lying in a tuft of pink 
 flowers. The daintiness of the little glove and the perfume 
 that clung about it brought home to Bough more forcibly than 
 anything else that the Kid had become a lady. 
 
 For it was the girl, sure. No error about that little white 
 face of hers, with the pointed chin, and the topaz-coloured 
 eyes, and the reddish hair. The glass had brought her near 
 enough to make that quite certain. He had been too far off 
 to hear a word, but he had made out what had been going on 
 very well. First, while she had been giddying with the tall 
 young English swell, drawing him on while he seemed court- 
 ing her, as all women knew how to, and again when the tall 
 Sister of Mercy came and rowed her and she had cried, thrown 
 down there among the grass and flowers, exactly as if some- 
 body had beaten her with a sjambok to cure her of the G. D.'d 
 obstinacy that had to be thrashed out of women, if you would 
 have them get to heel when you chose it, or come at your call 
 when you chose again. 
 
 Suppose he chose again. When a man with brains in his 
 holy head once set them to work, there were few things he 
 could not do. He could scare others off his property, for cer- 
 tain. He could exercise upon the girl herself the unlimited 
 power of Fear. He must lie doggo because of the Doctor. 
 It was a thundering queer chance the Doctor turning up in 
 this place. And one of the bosses, helping to run the show, 
 and powerful enough to pay off old scores, if he should chance 
 to recognize in the densely bearded face of the man from 
 Diamond Town the features of the Principal Witness in the 
 once famous Old Bailey Criminal Case : " The Crown vs* 
 Saxham." 
 
 Bough would lie low, and watch, and wait, and then spring, 
 as the tarantula springs. He had cleverly blurred all trails 
 leading back to the tavern on the veld, and he knew enough 
 of girls and women to believe that this girl had kept secret 
 what had happened there. He would pick up with her, any- 
 way, and offer to marry her and make an honest girl of her. 
 If she had a snivelling fancy for the dandy swell who had 
 made love to her and kissed her, he would threaten to tell the 
 fellow the truth unless she_gave him up. Or he would blow
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 381 
 
 on her to the nuns she lived with, and they would have noth- 
 ing more to do with her. 
 
 Voor den donder! suppose they knew already? The plan 
 wanted careful working out. A false step, and Gueldersdorp 
 might become unhealthy for the man who had brought, the let- 
 ter from Diamond Town to oblige Mrs. Casey. 
 
 Suppose the spoor that led back to the tavern on the veld 
 and the grave by the Little Kopje, not as well hidden as Bough 
 had thought, those jewels and securities and the one thousand 
 seven hundred pounds cash might get an honest man into 
 trouble yet, even after the lapse of seventeen years. He 
 breathed heavily, and the pupils of his strange light eyes dilated, 
 and the sweat rolled off his forehead and cheeks until the skin 
 shone like copper. He had been a reckless, easy-going young 
 chap of twenty-five seventeen years ago. Forty-two years of 
 life had taught him that when you are least expecting them to, 
 buried secrets are sure to resurrect. No, Gueldersdorp was 
 not. a healthy place for Bough or for Van Busch. That chat- 
 tering little paroquet of a woman with the sharp black eyes 
 might use them one day, to the detriment of the philanthropist 
 who had brought in the letter from Diamond Town for Mrs. 
 Casey. 
 
 Then the girl! . . , He grinned in his bushy beard, think- 
 ing how thundering scared she would look if she encountered 
 him by chance, and recognized him. The beard would not hide 
 him from her eyes. No, no ! And he smelled at the little tan 
 glove that had the slight, clean, delicate perfume about it, and 
 thrust it into his trouser-pocket, and crossed the river again, 
 making his way back to the native town by devious native paths 
 that snaked and twined and twisted through the jungly bush, 
 as he himself made his tortuous progress through the world. 
 
 He was in an evil mood, made blacker by the prospect of 
 spending a lonely night without the solace of liquor or woman. 
 For Vice was at a low ebb in Gueldersdorp just now, and the 
 commonest dop was barely obtainable at the price of good 
 champagne, and it would not do for the man from Diamond 
 Town to seem flush of dollars. 
 
 Sure, no, that would never do! He must make out with 
 the tobacco he still had left, and the big lump of opium he 
 carried in a tin box in a pocket of the heavy money-belt he wore 
 under his miner's flannel shirt. He groped for- the tin box, 
 and got it, and bit off a corner of the sticky brown lump, and 
 ate it as he went along, and his laboured breathing calmed,
 
 382 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and the chilly sweat dried upon his copper-burned skin, that 
 had the purplish-black tinge in it that comes of saturation with 
 iodide of potassium. And the pupils of his colourless eyes 
 dwindled to pin-points, and his thick hands ceased to shake. 
 He was not the man he had been, and .he had learned the 
 opium-habit from a woman who had managed a joint at 
 Johannesburg, and it grew upon him the need of the sooth- 
 ing, supporting deadener. He went along now, under the in- 
 fluence of it scarcely feeling the ground under his heavy leather 
 veldschoens. 
 
 He trod on something presently, lying on the path. It 
 moved and whimpered. He struck a match with a steady 
 hand, and held the glimmering blue phosphorus-flame down- 
 wards, and saw a Kaffir girl, a servant of the Barala, who had 
 crept out with a bow strung with twisted crocodile-gut and a 
 sheaf of reed arrows, to try and shoot birds. The Barala, 
 though they were sorely pinched, like their European fellow- 
 men, did not starve. They earned pay and rations. They 
 helped to keep the enemy out on the south and west sides of the 
 town, and dug most of the trenches often under fire and 
 ran the despatches, and sometimes brought, in fresh meat. But 
 their slaves, and the native hangers-on at the kraals, suffered 
 horribly. They ate the dogs that had been shot, and the other 
 kind of dog, and fought with the live ones for bones, and 
 picked up empty meat-tins and licked them. They stalked 
 about the town and the native stad like living skeletons. They 
 dropped and died on the dust-heaps they had been rummaging 
 for offal. Soup-kitchens were started later on, when it was 
 found how things were going with them, and hide and bones 
 and heads of horses and mules were boiled down into soup, 
 and they were fed. But a time was to come when even that 
 was wanted to keep the life in white people. You saw the 
 famine-stricken black spectres crawling from refuse-pile to 
 refuse-pile, and dying in that pitiless, beautiful sunshine, under 
 the blue, blue sky of March, because white people had got to 
 keep on living. 
 
 The native girl had been too weak to kill anything. Death 
 had come upon her in the midst of the teeming life of the 
 jungle, and she had fallen down there in her ragged red 
 blanket among the tree-roots that arched and knotted over the 
 path. Her eyes were already rolled up and set. They stared 
 blindly, horribly, out of the ashen-black face. When she 
 heard the steps of a shod man the last spark of life glimmered
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 383 
 
 feebly up in her. Her wild, keen, savage power of scent yet 
 remained. She smelled a white man, and her cracked and 
 swollen lips moved, and a voice like the sound made by the 
 rubbing of dry canes together uttered the word that is the 
 same in Dutch and English: 
 
 "Water!" 
 
 Bough's pale, flat, scintillating eyes were quite expressionless, 
 but his thick lips parted, and his strong even teeth showed in 
 his thick brake of beard. With the caution of one who knows 
 that a single glowing match-end dropped among dry vegeta- 
 tion may cause a devastating conflagration he blew out the 
 lingering flame, and rolled the little charred stick between his 
 tough-skinned fingers before he threw it down. Then he 
 raised himself up, and stepped over the dying creature, and 
 went upon his way, humming a dance-tune he liked. He was 
 not changed. It was still a joy to him to have feebler beings 
 in his power, and taunt and torture and use them at his will. 
 
 He had assumed the skin of the man from Diamond Town 
 in the well-paid service of that bright nephew of Bronnckers, 
 who had, it may be remembered, a plan. 
 
 The plan involved a feint from the eastward, and an attack 
 upon that weakest spot in the girdle of Gueldersdorp's de- 
 fences, the native stad. The Barafe might be incorruptible; 
 the weak spot was the native village, nevertheless. And the 
 next business of the man from Diamond Town was to lounge 
 about its neighbourhood, using those sharp light eyes of his 
 to excellent purposes, and storing his retentive memory for 
 it would not do for a stranger to be caught putting pencil to 
 paper in a town under Martial Law, and bristling with sus- 
 picion with the information indispensable for the putting in 
 effect of young Schenk Eybel's ingenious plan. 
 
 The jackal had had to yield his bone to the hungry lion. 
 Still, it was wise to be in good odour with the Republics; 
 that was why Van Busch had taken on the job. He had not 
 been impelled to risk his skin, and get shut up in this stinking, 
 starving hole by anything the sharp-eyed little Englishwoman, 
 so unpleasantly awake at last regarding the genuine aims and 
 real character of the chivalrous Mr. Van Busch of Johannes- 
 burg, had dropped. Hell, no! That unripe, nectarine had 
 been plucked and eaten years ago. And yet how the ripe fruit 
 allured him to-day, seen against its background of dull green 
 leaves, its smooth cheeks glowing under the kisses of the sun. 
 
 The swell English officer had kissed them too. As she
 
 384 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 meant, the sly little devil, slipping away for her bit of fun. 
 Grown a beauty, too, as anybody but a thundering, juicy, 
 damned fool might have known she would. He swore bitterly, 
 thinking what a gold-mine a face and figure like that, might 
 have proved to an honest, speculator up Johannesburg 
 way. 
 
 His case, he thought, was somewhat similar to that of old 
 Baas Jacobs, the Boer who found the first great South African 
 diamond on his farm near Hopetown, and threw it down be- 
 side the door, with other pretty shining pebbles, for his child 
 to play with. The child's mother tossed it to Van Niekirk as 
 a worthless gift. Van Niekirk passed it on to J. O'Reilly. 
 When the English Government mineralogist, pronounced the 
 stone a diamond, and the Colonial Secretary and the French 
 Consul sent it to the Paris Exhibition, and the Governor of 
 the Colony bought the jewel, old Baas Jacobs must have felt 
 mighty sick. All the world hungering, and admiring, and 
 coveting the beautiful thing he had thrown down to the 
 ground. Small wonder, that to the end of his days he had 
 talked as a robbed man. 
 
 The jewel Bough had left on the veld had belonged to him 
 once. Well, it should be his again. He swore that with a 
 blasphemous oath. Thenceforward he proceeded warily, feel- 
 ing his way, formulating his plan, a human tarantula, evil- 
 eyed and hairy-clawed, calculating the sudden leap upon its 
 prey, an adder coiled, waiting the moment to strike. . . . 
 
 XLIV 
 
 SAXHAM was shooting on the veld, north of the Clay-fields, in 
 a ginger-hued dust-wind and a grilling sun. Upon his right 
 showed the raw red ridge of the earthworks, where two ancient 
 seven-pounders were entrenched in charge of a handful of 
 Cape Police. The pits of the sniping riflemen scarred across 
 the river-bed some fifty yards in advance. Upon his left, a 
 quarter-mile farther north, the recently resurrected ship's gun, 
 twelve feet of honeycombed metal, stamped on the flank " No. 
 6 Port," and casting solid shot of eighteenth-century pattern, 
 projected a long black nose from Fort Ellerslie, and every 
 time the venerable weapon went off without bursting the 
 Town Guards occupying the Fort and manning the eastern 
 entrenchments raised a cheer.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 385 
 
 Saxham, emptying and filling the magazines with cool, 
 methodical regularity, kept changing his position with a rest- 
 lessness and recklessness puzzling alike to friends and foes. 
 Now he aimed and fired, lying " doggo " behind his favourite 
 stone, while bullets from the enemy's trenches flattened them- 
 selves upon it, or buried themselves harmlessly in the dry hot 
 soil. Now he moved from cover, and shot squatting on his 
 heels, or sprawled lizard-like in the open, courting the King 
 of Terrors with a calm indifference that was commented upon 
 by those who witnesed it according to their lights. 
 
 " Begob ! " said Kildare of the Railway Volunteers, who, 
 with the Cardiff stoker, was doing duty at Fort Ellerslie vice 
 t.wo Town Guardsmen permanently resting, " 'tis a great per- 
 fawrumance the Doc is afther givin' us this day." He coolly 
 borrowed the gunner's sighting-glasses, and, with his keen eyes 
 glued to them and his ragged elbows propped on the Fort 
 parapet, he scanned the distant solitary figure, dropping the 
 words out slowly one by one. " Twice have I seen the fur fly 
 off av' wan av' thim hairy baboons since he starrtud, an' sup- 
 posin' the air a taste thicker, 'tis punched wid bullet-holes we'd 
 be seein' ut all round' um, the same as a young lady in the 
 sky-in-terrific dhressmakin' line would be afther jabbin' out the 
 pattern av' a shoot av' clothes." 
 
 " And look you now, if the man is not lighting a pipe," 
 objected the Cardiff stoker, whose religious tendencies were 
 greatly fostered by the surroundings and conditions of siege 
 life. " Sitting on a stone, with the rifle between his knees 
 and the match between his two hands, as if the teffel was gob 
 tired of waiting, and had curled up and gone to sleep." The 
 speaker sucked in his breath and solemnly shook his head, 
 adding: " It is a temptation of the Tivine Providence, so 
 it is." 
 
 " Sorra a timpt," rejoined Kildare, reluctantly surrendering 
 the glasses to the gunner, a grey ex-sergeant of R.F.A., " sorra 
 a timpt, knowin', as the Docthur knows, that do what we will 
 and thry as he may, no bullut will do more than graze the 
 hide av him, or sing in his ear." 
 
 " And how will he know that, maybe you would be tell- 
 ing?" demanded the Cardiff stoker incredulously. 
 
 " I seen his face," said Kildare, jerking a blackened thumb 
 toward the gunner's sighting-glasses, " minnits back through 
 thim little jiggers, an' to man or mortal that's as sick wid the 
 hate av Lire, an' as sharp-set with the hunger for Death as
 
 386 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the Docthurr is this day, no harrum will come. 'Tis quare, 
 but thrue." 
 
 " I've 'ad a try at several kinds of 'ungers," said the R.E. 
 Reserve man, who acted as gunner's mate. " There's the 
 'unger for glory, combined with a smart uniform wot'll make 
 the gals stare, as drives a man to 'list. There's the 'unger for 
 kisses an' canoodlin' wot makes yer want to please the gals. 
 There's the 'unger for revenge, wot drives yer to bash in a 
 bloke's face, and loses you yer stripes if 'e 'appens to be your 
 Corp'ril. Then there's the 'unger for gettin' under cover 
 when you're bein' sniped, an' the 'unger for blood, when you've 
 got the Hafrids, or the Fuzzies, or the Dutchies, at close 
 quarters, and the bay'nits are flickerin' in an' out of the dirty 
 caliker shirts or the dirty greatcoats like Jimmy O! There's 
 the 'unger for freedom and fresh hair when you're shut up in 
 a filthy mud cattle-pound like this 'ere Fort, or a stinkin' 
 trench with a 'andful of straw to set on by day an' a ragged 
 blanket to kip in by nights. But the 'unger to die is a 'unger 
 / ain't acquainted with. I'm for livin' myself." 
 
 " I was hungry when you began to jaw," snarled the man 
 who had been clerk to the County Court. His lips were black 
 and cracking with fever, and his teeth chattered despite the 
 fierce sunshine that, baked the red claji parapet against which 
 he leaned his thin back. " I'm hungrier now, and thirsty as 
 well. Give the bucket over here." He drank of the thick, 
 yellowish, boiled water eagerly and yet with disgust, spilling 
 the liquid on his tattered clothing through the shaking of his 
 wasted hands. Then he turned to the wall, and lay down 
 sullenly, scowling at the lantern-jawed sympathizer who tried 
 to thrust a rolled-up coat under his aching head. 
 
 " They'll be bringin' us our foddher at twelve av the clock," 
 Isaid Kildare, with a twinkle of inextinguishable humour in his 
 "hollow eyes. " Shuperannuated cavalry mount stuped in 
 warrum kettle-gravy, wid a block av baked sawdust for aich 
 man that can get ut down. 'Tis an insult to the mimory av 
 the boiled bacon an' greens I would be aiting this day at 
 Carrickaghvore, to say nothin' of the porther an' whisky that 
 would be washing ut down. Lashin's and lavin's there 'ud be 
 for ivery wan, an' what was over me fadher God be good to 
 the ould boy alive or dead! would be disthributin' amongst 
 the poor forninst the dure " 
 
 " Beg pardon, sir." Another of the famine-bitten, ragged 
 little garrison addressed the question to the officer in charge
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 387 
 
 of the Fort battery, as he stepped down from the lookout with 
 his field-glass in his hand. " Can you tell us the difference 
 of time between South Africa and England ? " 
 
 " Two hours at. Capetown. I'm not quite sure about the 
 difference at Gueldersdorp." The Lieutenant went over to the 
 ancient smooth-bore, and conferred with the gunners standing 
 at her breech. The winches groaned, the heavy mass of metal 
 tilted on the improvised mounting, as the man to whom the 
 Lieutenant had replied said, with a quaver of longing in his 
 voice : 
 
 "Two hours! My God, suppose it only took that time to 
 get home ! " 
 
 " It 'ud be a sight easier to 'ang on 'ere," said the R.E. Re- 
 serve man who acted as gunner's mate, " if there was such a 
 thing as a plug o' baccy to be 'ad. Wot gives me the reg'lar 
 sick is to see them well-fed Dutchies chawin' an' blowin', 
 
 blowin' an' chawin', from mornin' till night. " He spat 
 
 disgustedly. 
 
 " When honust men,' r groaned Kildare, " would swop a 
 year av life for a twist av naygurhead. Wirra-wirra ! ' 
 
 There was a dry and mirthless laugh, showing teeth, white 
 or discoloured, in haggard and bristly faces. Then a short 
 young Corporal, who had been leaning back in an angle of the 
 earthwork, hugging his sharp knees and staring at nothing in 
 particular with pale-coloured, ugly, honest eyes, grew painfully 
 crimson through his crust of sun-tan and grime, and said some- 
 thing that made the lean bodies in ragged, filthy tan-cord and 
 dilapidated khaki, or torn and muddy tweed slew round upon 
 the unclean straw on which they squatted. All eyes, were they 
 hunger-dull or fever-bright, sought the Corporal's face. 
 
 " Dessay you'll think me a greedy 'ound," said the Corporal, 
 with a painful effort, that set the prominent Adam's apple in 
 his lean throat jerking, " when you tyke in wot I've got to s'y. 
 It makes me want to git into me own pocket and 'ide, to 'ave 
 to tell it. For me an' you, we've shared an' shared alike, wot- 
 ever we 'ad, while we 'ad anythink except in one partic'lar." 
 The Adam's apple jumped up and down as he gulped. He 
 was burning crimson now to the roots of his ragged, light- 
 brown hair, and the tips of his flat-rimmed, jutting ears, and 
 the patch of thin bare chest that showed where his coarse grey 
 back shirt was unbuttoned at. the neck. 
 
 All those eyes, feverishly bright or sickly dull, watched him 
 as he put his hand into the bulging breast-pocket, and slowly
 
 388 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 fished out a shining brown briar-root with a stem unchewed 
 as yet by any smoker. 
 
 " Twig this 'ere noo pipe. It was sent me by a by a 
 friend, along of a packet, of 'Oneydew, for a for a kind o' 
 birthday present." His voice wobbled strangely; there was 
 scalding water dammed up behind his ugly honest eyes. " She 
 she bin an' opened the packet and filled the pipe, an' I shared 
 out the 'Oneydew in the trenches as far as it went, but I bin 
 an' kep' the pipe, sayin 'to myself I'd smoke it when she lighted 
 i'- wiv 'er own 'ands, an' not not before. Next day we" 
 the Adam's apple went up and down again " we 'ad words, 
 an' parted. I I never set heyes on 'er dial since." 
 
 The voice of W. Keyse ended in an odd kind of squeak. 
 Nobody looked at him as he bit his thin lips furiously, and 
 blinked his honest, ugly eyes. Then he went on : " It's it's 
 near on two months I bin lookin' for 'er. She she some- 
 times I think she's made a w'y out of the lines after another 
 bloke a kind o' Dutchy spy 'oo was a pal of 'ers, or or else 
 she's dead. There's times I've dreamed I seen 'er dead." His 
 voice bounded up in that queer squeak again. The word 
 " dead " was wrung out of him like a long-fanged double 
 molar. His lips were drawn awry in a grimace of anguish, 
 and the pipe he held shook in his gaunt and grimy hand, so 
 perilously that half a dozen other hands, as gaunt and even 
 grimier, shot out as by a single impulse to save it from fall- 
 ing. " Tyke it an' smoke it between yer," said W. Keyse, and 
 the Adam's apple jammed again as he gulped. " But read the 
 writin' on the bit o' pyper first, and mind yer mind yer give 
 it back." He resigned the treasure, and turned his face away. 
 
 "Blessed Mary!" came in the accent of Kildare, breaking 
 the silence, "let me hould ut. in me ban's! " 
 
 " Spell out the screeve," ordered the R.E. Reserve man im- 
 periously. 
 
 The Town Guard who had questioned the officer about the 
 difference of time deciphered the blotty writing on the slip of 
 paper pinned round the stem of the new briar-root. It ran 
 thus: 
 
 " i ope yu wil Engoy this Pip Deer ; i Fild it A Purpus with 
 Love and Maney Apey Riturns. from 
 
 "FARE 'Am." 
 
 " 'Is gal ? " interrogated the Reserve man.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 389 
 
 " His girl," assented the man who had read. 
 
 " And he never saw her no more, so he did not! " commented 
 the Cardiff stoker as the pipe travelled from hand to hand. 
 Smelt at, dandled, worshipped by every man in turn. Only 
 the Sergeant-gunner, the grey-headed ex-Artilleryman, main- 
 tained his self-command by dint of looking very hard the other 
 way. Then said Kildare impetuously: 
 
 " Take ut back, Corp'ril Keyse. 'Tis little wan poipe av 
 tobacca wud count for between six starvin' savigees." 
 
 " Wot I wants," growled the Reserve man, " is to over'aul 
 a bacca factory afire, and clap my mouth to 'er chimbley-shaft. 
 So take it back, Corporal. It's no manner o' good to me." 
 
 All the other voices joined in the chorus, and the bepapered 
 pipe was thrust back upon its owner. W. Keyse thanked them 
 soberly, and put her gift away. 
 
 His pale, unbeautiful eyes had the anguish of despair in them, 
 and the tooth of that sharp death-hunger of which Kildare 
 had spoken was gnawing what he would have termed with sim- 
 plicity " his inside." For if she were dead what had Life left 
 for him? 
 
 After his first superb assumption of cold indifference had 
 broken down he had sought her, feverishly at first, then 
 doggedly, then with a dizzy sickness of terror and apprehen- 
 sion that made the letters of the type-written casualty-lists 
 posted outside the Staff Headquarters in the Market Square 
 turn apparent somersaults as he strove to read them. This 
 was his punishment, that he should hunger as she had 
 hungered, and still be disappointed, and learn by fellowship in 
 keenest suffering what her pain had been. 
 
 The " Fair 'Air " letters were some comfort. In the trench 
 at night, when fever and rheumatism kept him from the dog- 
 sleep that other men were snatching, he would hear her crying 
 over and over : " Oh, cruel, to break a poor girl's heart ! " 
 And when sleep came he would track her through strange 
 places, calling her to come back to come back and be for- 
 given. And when he awakened from such dreams there would 
 be tears upon his face. And each day he consulted the lists of 
 killed and wounded, and once had staggered white-lipped to 
 the mortuary-shed to identify a Jane Harris, and found her 
 oh, with what unutterable relief! to be a coloured lady 
 who had married a Rifleman. After that he had perked up, 
 and continued his quest for the beloved needle lost in the hay- 
 stack of Gueldersdorp with renewed belief in the ultimate
 
 390 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 possibility of finding it. Then, in the middle of one awful 
 night, the darkness of his mental state had been luridly illu- 
 minated by the conviction that she had joined Slabbert. Now 
 strange voices whispered always in his ears, saying that she 
 was dead, and urging him to follow by the same dark road over 
 which her trembling feet had passed. 
 
 He heard those voices as he wrought and sweated with 
 the gun-team at the levers, and the ponderous muzzle-loader 
 rolled back upon the grooves of her improvised mounting. 
 He heard it as they sponged the antique monster out, and fed 
 it with a three-pound bolus of cordite and a ten-pound ball 
 of ancient pattern with the date of 1770. He heard it now 
 again as he kneeled at a loophole in the parapet, watching Sax- 
 ham. Those pale, ugly eyes of Billy Keyse were extraordinar- 
 ily keen. He saw a grimy hand carefully balance an old 
 meat-tin on the top of the parapet of the enemy's western en- 
 trenchment. He saw Saxham kneeling, aim and fire, and with 
 the sharp rap of the exploding cartridge came a howl from 
 the owner of the hand, who had not withdrawn it with suf- 
 ficient quickness. 
 
 Half a dozen rifle-muzzles came nosing through the loop- 
 holes at that yell. There was quite a little fusilade, and the 
 sharp cracks and flashes in Saxham's vicinity told of the em- 
 ployment of explosive bullets. But not one hit the man. An 
 unkempt Boer head bobbed up, looking for his corpse. The 
 Winchester cracked, and the unkempt head fell forward, its 
 chin over the edge of the parapet, and stayed there staring un- 
 til the comrades of its late owner pulled the dead man down 
 by the heels. 
 
 There was a cheer from the rifle-pits in the river-bed, and 
 another from Fort Ellerslie, where eager spectators jostled at 
 the loop-holes. A minute later the Fort's ancient bowchaser 
 barked and pitched a solid shot. The metal spheroid travelled 
 three thousand yards, hit. the ground some ninety feet in front 
 of the parapet where the bloody head had hung, and over which 
 those explosive bullets had been fired, rose in a cloud of dust, 
 and literally jumped the trench. There was a roar of distant 
 laughter as the ball began to roll, and unkempt heads oi 
 Dutchmen, inured only to the latest inventions in lethal engi- 
 neering, bobbed up to watch. More laughter accompanied 
 the progress of the ball. But presently it encountered a mound 
 of earth, behind which certain patriots were taking coffee, and 
 rolled through, and the laughter ceased abruptly. There was
 
 ONE BRAVER THING , 391 
 
 a baggage-waggon beyond through which it also rolled, and 
 behind the waggon a plump, contented pony was wallowing in 
 the sand. When the ancient cannon-ball rolled through the 
 pony, the owner spoke of witchcraft. But the patriots who 
 had been sitting behind the mound made no comment then or 
 thenceforwards. 
 
 At this juncture, and with almost a sensation of pleasure, 
 Saxham saw his old acquaintance Father Noah climb out of 
 his particular trench, briskly for one well stricken in years, 
 and toddle out, laden with rifle, biltong bag, and coffee-can, 
 to his favourite sniping-post, where a bush rose beside a rock, 
 which was shaded by a small group of blue-gums. Soon the 
 smoke of the veteran's pipe rose above his lurking-place, and as 
 Saxham, with a grunt of satisfaction, stretched himself upon 
 his stomach on the hot, sandy earth and pulled the lever, a re- 
 turn bullet sheared a piece off his boot-heel, and painfully 
 jarred his ankle-bone. 
 
 No one else was shooting at the big Dooinck now. It was 
 understood that Father Noah had a prior claim. And the old 
 man peered hopefully up to see the result, of his shot, and 
 rubbed his eyes. For the hulking dief was standing, voor den 
 donder! standing as he emptied his magazine, and the bullets 
 sang about Father Noah as viciously as hornets roused to 
 anger by the stripping of a decayed thatch. The magazine 
 of the repeating-rifle emptied, Saxham calmly refilled it, caus- 
 ing the puzzled patriarch to waste many cartridges in wild 
 shooting at that erect, indifferent mark, and finally to abandon 
 the level-headed caution to which he owed his venerable years, 
 and climb a tree to obtain a better view of the tactics of the 
 enemy. 
 
 Saxham laughed as the invisible hornets sang in the air about 
 him. The battered solar helmet he wore was pierced through 
 the hinder brim, and he was bleeding from a bullet-graze upon 
 the knuckle of the second ringer of his left hand. Since that 
 Sunday afternoon beside the river, when he learned the mad- 
 ness of his hope and the hopelessness of his madness, he had 
 taken risks like this daily, not in the deliberate desire of death, 
 but as a man consulting Fate negatively. 
 
 Father Noah would decide, one way or the other: the issue 
 of their protracted duel should determine things for Saxham. 
 If he sent the old man in, then there was Hope, if the super- 
 annuated, short-stocked Martini, with that steady old finger 
 on the trigger, and that sharp old eye at the backsight, ended
 
 392 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 by accounting for Saxham, then there would be an end to this 
 burning torment for ever. Strangely, he did not believe that 
 Jie could be killed by any other hand than Father Noah's. 
 Doubtless the long overstrain was telling upon him mentally, 
 though physically the man seemed of wrought steel. 
 
 " To-day will settle it, one way or the other. To-day " 
 
 As the thought passed through his mind, and he brought the 
 sights into line with the mark, a fluttering scrap of white, flut- 
 tering some twenty inches lower down, caught his eye. He 
 dropped the tip of the Winchester's foresight to the bottom of 
 the backsight's V, and knew, almost before the shot rang out, 
 and an ownerless Martini tumbled out of the tree-crotch, that 
 Fate had decided for Saxham. 
 
 Then he went back to the Hospital, grim-jawed and inscru- 
 table as ever. A dirty white rag was being hoisted on a pole 
 by one of the relatives of the deceased. Father Noah, with 
 the long ends of his dirty grey beard raggedly bannering in 
 the dust-wind, was still waiting for the bearers of the hastily 
 improvised stretcher of sticks and green reims, as Saxham, hav- 
 ing obtained a strip of black cloth with a needle and 
 thread from the Matron, pulled off his jacket and sat down 
 upon the end of the cot-bed in his little room, and neatly 
 tacked a mourning-band upon the upper part of the left 
 sleeve. 
 
 It was his nature to absorb himself in whatever work he 
 undertook. As he stitched, the crowded Hospital buzzed 
 about him like a hive, the moans of sick men and the rattling 
 breaths of the dying beat in waves of sound upon his brain, 
 for the long rows of beds stood upon either side of the corridors 
 now, with barely a foot of room between them. In the neces- 
 sarily open space before the Doctor's door a woman's hurrying 
 footsteps paused, there came a rustling, and a sheet of printed 
 paper folded in half was thrust underneath. 
 
 " The Siege Gazette, Doctor," called the Matron's pleasant 
 womanly voice, as, simultaneously with the utterance of 
 Saxham's brief word of thanks, she passed on. In the famine 
 for news that possessed him, as every other human being in the 
 town, the sight, of the little badly-printed sheet was welcome, 
 although it could hardly contain anything to satisfy his need. 
 He set the last stitches, fastened and cut the thread, reached 
 down a long arm from the foot, of the bed, and took up the 
 paper. 
 
 The Latest Information had whiskers. The General Orders
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 393 
 
 announced an issue of paper currency in small amounts, owing 
 to the deplorable shortage of silver, congratulated those 
 N.C.O.'s and men of the Baraland Irregulars who, under Lieu- 
 tenant Byass, occupying the advanced S.W. trenches, had 
 brought so effective a Maxim-fire to bear upon the enemy's big 
 gun that Meisje had been compelled to abandon her command- 
 ing position, and take up her quarters in a spot less advantage- 
 ous, from the enemy's point of view. A reduction in the Forage 
 ration was hinted at, and a string of Social Jottings followed, 
 rows of asterisks exploding like squibs under every paragraphic,' 
 utterance of the Gold Pen. 
 
 Not for nothing has Captain Bingo dolefully boasted that 
 his wife had journalism at her finger-ends. We recognize the 
 style, the very table-Moselle of Fashionable Journalism. So 
 like the genuine article in the shape of the bottle, the topping 
 of gilt-foil, the arrangement of wire and string, that as the 
 stinging foam overflows the goblet, snapping in iridescent 
 bubbles at the cautious sipper's nose, and evaporates, leaving 
 the sticky, sweet-sour drops of nothing in particular at the bot- 
 tom, you could hardly credit it to be of one with any- 
 thing save the genuine beverage of Fleet Street. Stay. . . . 
 The French quotations are not enclosed in inverted commas. 
 That lets Lady Hannah out. 
 
 " Society in Gueldersdorp," she wrote, " bubbles with in- 
 terested expectation of the public announcement of a matri- 
 monial engagement which the intimate friends of the happy 
 lovers profess etre aux anges. 
 
 " Not for worlds would we draw the veil of delightful 
 mystery completely aside from the secret of two young, charm- 
 ing and popular people. Yet it may be hinted that the elder 
 son of a representative English House and heir of a sixteenth- 
 century Marquisate, who is one of the most gallant and dash- 
 ing among the many heroic defenders of our beleaguered citadel, 
 proposes at no very distant date to lead to the altar one of the 
 loveliest among the many lovely girls who grace our social 
 functions. 
 
 " Both bride-elect and bridegroom-to-be attended High Mass 
 at the Catholic Church on Sunday, when the Rev. Father 
 Wilx, in apprising parishioners of the near approach of Lent, 
 caused an irresistible smile to ripple over the faces of his 
 hearers. Toujours perdrix may sate in the long-run, but
 
 394 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 perpetually to faire maigre is attended with even greater dis- 
 comfort. 
 
 
 
 " We have pleasure in announcing the approaching marriage 
 of Lieutenant the Earl of Beauvayse, Grey Hussars, Junior 
 Aide to the Colonel Commanding H.M. Forces, Gueldersdorp, 
 to Miss Lynette Bridget-Mary Mildare, ward of the Mother- 
 Superior, Convent of the Holy Way, North Veld Road." 
 
 XLV 
 
 SAXHAM has not been staring at the printed words because 
 they have struck him to the heart with their intelligence, but 
 or it seems to him because they convey nothing. There 
 is an aching pain at the back of his neck, and his mind is 
 curiously dull and sluggish. But after a little he becomes 
 aware that somebody is knocking at his door. 
 
 " Who is it " 
 
 The Doctor thinks he utters these words, but in reality 
 he has only made a harsh croaking sound that might mean 
 anything. The door opens and shows the Chaplain standing 
 smiling on the threshold. 
 
 The Reverend Julius Fraithorn, no longer a worn and 
 wasted pilgrim stumbling amongst the thorns and sharp stones 
 of the Valley of the Shadow, appears in these days as a per- 
 fectly sound and healthy, if rather too narrow-shouldered, 
 young Anglican clergyman, not unbecomingly arrayed, in 
 virtue of his official position under martial authority, in a suit 
 of Service khaki such as Saxham wears, with the black Maltese 
 Cross on the collar and the band of the wide-peaked cap. 
 Yellow putties conceal the unduly spare proportions of his 
 active legs, and the brown boots upon his long slender feet are 
 dusty, as, indeed, is the rest of him, not with the reddish dust 
 of the veld that powders Saxham to the very eyelashes, and lies 
 in light drifts in every wrinkle of his garments, but with the 
 yellowish dust of the town. 
 
 " I rather thought," the Chaplain says, hesitating, as Sax- 
 ham, without lifting his eyes, turns his square, white face upon 
 the visitor, " that you said ' Come in ' ? " 
 
 " Come in, and shut the door, and sit down," says Saxham 
 heavily and thickly. And. Julius does so, and, occupying the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 395 
 
 single cane-seated chair the bedroom boasts, glows upon Sax- 
 ham with a sincerity of affection and a simplicity of admiration 
 pleasant to see, and asks in his thin, sweet voice how things are 
 going. 
 
 " Things are going," Saxham returns, seeming to wake 
 from a heavy brown study. " You could not put it better or 
 more clearly. Will you smoke ? " He pitches a rubber 
 tobacco-pouch to the Chaplain, who catches it, and the treas- 
 ured box of matches that comes after, and as one man sparingly 
 fills a w T ell-browned meerschaum, and the other a blackened 
 briar-root, with the weed that grows more rare and precious 
 with every hour of these days of dearth: "That's one of the 
 things that are going quickest after bichloride of mercury, 
 carbolic, and extract of beef. As a fact, we are using for- 
 maldehyde as an anaesthetic in minor operations; and violet 
 powder and starch, upon the external use of which I laid an 
 embargo weeks ago, to the great indignation of the younger 
 nurses, are being employed instead of arrowroot. And the 
 more the medical stores diminish, the more the patients come 
 rolling in." 
 
 " And each new want that arises, and each new difficulty 
 that crops up, finds in you the man to meet it and overcome 
 it," says the Chaplain fervently. He is disposed to make a 
 hero of this brilliant surgeon who has saved his life, and his 
 enthusiasm is only marred by Saxham's painfully-apparent lack 
 of belief in certain vital spiritual truths that are the daily 
 bread of fervent Christian souls. Now that, he has become 
 aware of the black band upon the sleeve of the jacket that lies 
 across Saxham's knees, where he sits upon the end of the cot- 
 bed that, with a tiny chest of drawers and a hanging bookshelf 
 laden with volumes and instrument-cases, completes the fur- 
 nishing of the narrow room, he says, with sympathy in his 
 gentle voice and in the brown eyes that have the soft lustre of 
 a deer's or of a beautiful woman's: 
 
 " I am sorry to see this, Saxham. You have lost a friend ? " 
 
 "Lost a friend?" 
 
 Saxham, echoing the last three words, stares at the Chap- 
 lain in a strange, dull way, and then forgets him for a minute 
 or more. Baths are not to be had in Gueldersdorp in these 
 days, and though it is not Sunday, when bathing in the river 
 becomes a possibility, the Chaplain observes that the Doctor's 
 thick, close-cropped black hair is wet, and that broad streaks
 
 390 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 of shining moisture are upon his pale, square face, and that he 
 breathes as though he had been running. But perhaps he has 
 been sluicing his head in the washstand basin, thinks the Chap- 
 lain. No; the basin has not. recently been used. And then it 
 occurs to Julius, but not until he has noticed the starting veins, 
 and corded muscles on the backs of the hands that are clenched 
 upon the jacket, that Saxham is suffering. 
 
 " I always said he felt a great deal more than he permitted 
 himself to show," reflects the man of Religion looking at the 
 man of Medicine. " And the absence of belief in Divine 
 Redemption and a Future State must terribly intensify the 
 pain of a bereavement. If I only knew how to comfort him! " 
 And all he can do is to ask, still in that tone of sympathy, 
 when the Funeral is to be. 
 
 " Perhaps about the midday coffee-drinking," says Saxham 
 heavily, " they would scrape a hole and dump him in. But 
 they're not over fond of risks, and they would probably leave 
 him where he is till nightfall." 
 
 Julius Fraithorn longs, more than ever, that eloquence and 
 inspiration were his to employ in the healing of the man who 
 has raised himself almost from the dead. But he can only 
 falter something about the Inscrutable designs of Providence, 
 and not a sparrow falling to the ground unnoticed. And he 
 expresses, somewhat tritely, the hope that Saxham's friend was 
 prepared to meet his end. 
 
 " I don't exactly suppose he expected it. He had a right 
 to count upon pulling off the match," says Saxham, with a 
 dreary shadow of a grin, "because a better man behind a gun 
 than Father Noah you. wouldn't easily meet. And Boers are 
 fine shots, as a rule." 
 
 " Boers. ... A Boer. ... I thought you told me you had 
 lost a friend ? " Mild astonishment is written on the Chap- 
 lain's face. And Saxham looks up, and the other sees that his 
 eyeballs are heavily injected with blood, and that the vivid 
 blue of their irises has strangely faded. 
 
 " I gave him every opportunity to be my friend," says the 
 dull voice heavily, " by moving out from cover, even by stand- 
 ing up. But no good. He suspected a ruse, and it worried 
 him. Then he climbed a tree, emptied his bandolier at me 
 from a perch of vantage among the branches, and had started 
 to refill it from a fresh package, when I got the chance, and 
 brought him down spreadeagle. And exit Father Noah." 
 
 The Chaplain comprehends fully now, turns pale, and
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 397 
 
 shudders. A blue line marks itself about his mouth; he is 
 conscious of a qualm of positive nausea as he says: 
 
 " You you don't mean you have been talking of a man 
 you have shot?" 
 
 " Just so," assents Saxham, and the sentence that follows 
 is not uttered aloud. " And I wish with all my soul that the 
 man had shot me! " 
 
 " And this is War," says Julius Fraithorn. He pulls out 
 his handkerchief and wipes his damp forehead and the beady 
 blue lines about his mouth, and the crack and rattle of rifle- 
 fire sweeping over the veld and through the town, and the 
 ping, ping, ping of Mauser bullets flattening on the iron gutter- 
 pipe and the corrugated iron of the roof above them seem to 
 answer " Certainly, War." 
 
 " Why, you look sick, man," says Saxham the surgeon, 
 whose keen professional eye has not missed the Chaplain's 
 pallor, though the other Saxham is still dazed and blind, and 
 stupefied by the blow that has been dealt him by Lady Hannah's 
 gold fountain-pen. He leans forward, and lightly touches one 
 of the Chaplain's thin wrists, suspecting him of a touch of 
 fever or town-water dysentery. But Julius jerks the wrist 
 away. 
 
 " I am perfectly well. It was the way in which you 
 spoke just now that rather rather " 
 
 " Revolted you, eh ? " says Saxham, again with the dim 
 shadow of a smile. " Revealed me as a brute and a savage. 
 Well, and why not, if I choose to be one or the other, or 
 both? You Churchmen believe in the power of choice, don't 
 you? Prove to a man that there is something worth having 
 in the bowels of the earth, he burrows like a mole and gets it. 
 Let him once see utility in flying, give him time and oppor- 
 tunity, and he will fly. So if it is to his interests to be clean- 
 lived, high-minded, exemplary, he will be all these things to 
 admiration. Or, if he should happen to have lost the gout 
 for virtue, if he determines that Evil shall be his good, he will 
 make it so." He smiled dourly. " Deprive him of a solid 
 reason for living, he can die. Hold up before his dying eyes 
 the prospect of continued existence under hopeful conditions, 
 he takes up his bed and walks, like the moribund paralytic in 
 the Gospel you preach. You're a living proof of the human 
 power of working miracles. . . . Granted I cut away a tumour 
 from under your breast-bone more skilfully than a certain per- 
 centage of surgeons could have done it. But what brought
 
 398 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 you safely through the operation, healed your wound by the 
 first intention, and set you on your legs again? I'll trouble 
 you to tell me." 
 
 " The mercy and the grace of God," says the Chaplain, 
 " manifested in His unworthy servant through your science 
 and your skill." 
 
 " You employ the technical terminology of your profession," 
 Saxham says, with a shrug. 
 
 The blank stare and the congested redness have gone out 
 of his eyes, and his voice is less dull and toneless. He is 
 coming back to his outward self again, even while the inner 
 man lies mangled and bleeding, crushed by that tremendous 
 broadsword stroke of Fate that has been dealt him by the 
 gold pen of Lady Hannah, and he is ready enough to argue 
 with the Chaplain. He gets off the bed and slips on his 
 jacket, takes a turn or two across the narrow floor-space, then 
 leans against the distempered wall beside the window, puffing 
 at his jetty clay, his muscular arms folded upon -his great chest, 
 his powerful shoulders bowed, his square, black head thrust 
 forward, and his blue eyes coolly studying Julius as he talks. 
 
 " Let me without rubbing your cloth the wrong way 
 put the case in mine. Your belief in a Power that my reason 
 tells me is non-existent stimulated your nervous centres, roused 
 and sustained in you the determination without which my 
 science and my skill and I do not underestimate them, I 
 assure you would have availed you nothing. You said to 
 yourself, ' If God will it, I shall get over this,' and because you 
 willed it, it was so. Were I a drunkard, an outcast, the very 
 refuse of humanity, tainted with vice to the very centre of my 
 being, I have but to will to be sober and live decently, and 
 while I continue to will it, I shall be what. I desire to be." 
 
 Saxham's eyes hold Julius's, and challenge them. But no 
 'shadow of a Dop Doctor who once reeled the streets of 
 Gueldersdorp rises from those clear brown depths as the speaker 
 ends, " Don't underestimate the power of the Human Will, 
 Fraithorn, for it can remove mountains, and raise the living 
 dead." 
 
 " Nor do you venture to deny the Power of the Almighty 
 Hand, Saxham," answers the thin, sweet voice of the Church- 
 man ; " because It strewed the myriad worlds in the Dust, of 
 The Infinite, and set the jewelled feathers in the butter- 
 fly's wing, and forged the very intellect whose power you mis- 
 use in uttering the boast that denies It. Think again. Can
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 399 
 
 you assure me with truth that you have never, in the stress of 
 some great mental or physical crisis, cried to Heaven for help 
 when the struggle was at its worst? Think again, Saxham." 
 
 But Saxham obstinately shakes his head, still smiling. As 
 he stands there transfigured by the dark, fierce spirit that has 
 come upon him and possessed him, there is something about 
 the hulking man with the square, black head and the powerful 
 frame that breathes of that superb and terrible Prince of the 
 Heavenly Hierarchy who fell through a kindred sin, and the 
 priest in Julius shudders, recognizing the tremendous power 
 of such a nature as this, whether turned towards Evil or bent 
 to achieve Good. The while, in letters of delicate, keen flame, 
 the denier sees written on the tables of his inward consciousness 
 the utterance that once broke from him, as, racked and tortured 
 in body and in soul, he wrestled with his Devil on that un- 
 forgettable night. 
 
 " O God ! if indeed Thou Art, and I must perforce return 
 to live the life of a man amongst men, help me to burst the 
 chains that fetter me. Help me oh, help me to be free ! " 
 
 And in his heart he knows that the desperate prayer has 
 been granted. But in this new-born, curious mood of his he 
 will not yield, but combats his own innermost conviction, be- 
 ing, in a strange, perverted way, even prouder of his Owen 
 Saxham who has gone down of his own choice to the muddiest 
 depths of moral and physical decadence, and come up of the 
 strength of his own Will from among the hideous things that 
 hang suspended and drifting in the primeval sludge, than he 
 ever was of the man before his fall. His is a combative nature, 
 and the great blow he has sustained this day in the wreck and 
 ruin of his raft of Hope has left him quivering to the centre 
 of his being with resentment that strikes back. 
 
 " Think again yourself. Ask yourself whether the Deity 
 who creates, preserves, blesses, punishes, slays, and raises up, 
 is the outcome of man's need of such a Being, or His own| 
 desire of Himself. And which conception is the greater that 
 the God in whom you and those of your cloth, and the mil- 
 lions of believers that hang upon it, should have commanded, 
 " Let the universe exist," and have been obeyed, or that the 
 stupendous pigmy MAN should have dared to say, ' Let there 
 be God,' and so created Him? " 
 
 He laughs jarringly as he knocks the ashes out of the black- 
 ened clay upon the corner of the window-ledge. 
 
 " Give credit to the human imagination and the human will
 
 400 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 for inventing a personage so useful to the Christian Churches 
 as the Devil. For as in the beginning it was necessary for 
 Man to build up Heaven and set his God therein, so, to throw 
 His unimaginable purity and inconceivable perfection into yet 
 more glorious relief, it was required that Hell should be delved 
 out and the objective personality of Satan conceived and ken- 
 nelled there, and given just sufficient power to pay the marplot 
 where the Divine plans are concerned, and just enough malev- 
 olence to find amusement in the occupation. What should 
 we do, where should we be, without our Satanic souffre-doleur 
 our horned scapegoat, our black puppet, without whose sug- 
 gestions we should never have erred, whose wooden head we 
 bang when things go wrong with us," says Saxham bitterly. 
 He reaches out a hand for the tobacco-pouch and his glance 
 falls upon the day's issue of the Siege Gazette lying on the par- 
 quet linoleum, where it has fallen from his hand a little while 
 ago. He stoops and picks it up, and offers it to Julius. 
 
 " There's the announcement of an engagement here " 
 
 He smooths the crumpled sheet, holds it under the Chaplain's 
 eye, and points to the two last paragraphs of the " Social Jot- 
 tings " column. " Take it as an instance. . . . Did Heaven 
 play the matchmaker here, or has Hell had a finger in the 
 matrimonial pie? Or has the blind and crazy chance that 
 governs this desolate world for me tipped the balance in favour 
 of one young rake, who may be saved and purified and renewed 
 by such a marriage, while his elder in iniquity is doomed to be 
 wrecked upon it, ruined by it, destroyed through it, damned 
 socially and morally because of it . . ." 
 
 The fierce words break from Saxham against his will. He 
 resents the betrayal of his own confidence savagely, even as 
 he utters them. But they are spoken, beyond recall. And 
 the effect of the paragraph upon the Chaplain is remarkable. 
 His meek, luminous brown eyes blaze with indignation. He 
 is aflame, from the edge of his collar a patent clerical guillo- 
 tine of washable xylonite, purchased at a famous travellers' 
 emporium in the Strand to the thin, silky rings of dark hair 
 that are wearing from his high, pale temples. He says, and 
 stutters angrily in saying: 
 
 " This is a lie a monstrous misstatement which shall be 
 withdrawn to-morrow! " 
 
 " How do you know that? " 
 
 The Chaplain crushes the Siege Gazette into a ball, pitches 
 it into a corner of the room, grabs his Field-Service cap and
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 401 
 
 the cane he carries in lieu of the carbine or rifle, without which 
 the male laity of Gueldersdorp and a good many of the women 
 do not stir abroad, and makes a stride for the door. He meets 
 there Saxham, whose square face and powerful figure bar his 
 flaming exit. 
 
 " It is enough that I do know it. Kindly allow me to pass." 
 
 " What are you going to do ? " 
 
 The Chaplain is plainly uncertain, as he wrestles with the 
 clerical guillotine of washable xylonite, and stammers some- 
 thing about unwarrantable liberty and a lady's reputation! 
 And Saxham recognizes that Saxham is not the only sufferer 
 from the festering smart of jealousy, and that the vivid red- 
 and-white carnation-tinted beauty of the delicate face in its 
 setting of red-brown hair has grievously disturbed, if it has 
 not altogether dissipated, the pale young Anglican's views of 
 the celibate life. 
 
 Agnostic and Churchman, denier and believer, have split on 
 the same amatory rock. The knowledge breathes no sympathy 
 in the Dop Doctor. 
 
 He observes the Chaplain's face, dispassionately and yet in- 
 tently, as in the old Hospital days he might have studied the 
 expression of a monkey or a guinea-pig, or other organism upon 
 which he was experimenting with some new drug. And the 
 Reverend Julius demands, with resentful acerbity: 
 
 " What are you staring at? Do you imagine that the colour 
 of my cloth debars me from from taking the part of a lady 
 whose name has been dragged before the public? I shall call 
 at the office where this rag is published, and insist upon a con- 
 tradiction of this this canard!" 
 
 "Don't you know who edits the rag?" asks Saxham rasp- 
 ingly. " Do you suppose that any unauthorized announce- 
 ment or statement that has not been officially corroborated 
 would be allowed to pass? The paragraph comes from an 
 authoritative source, you may be sure ! " 
 
 " I am in a position to disprove it, from whatever source it 
 comes!" cried the Chaplain hotly. "He shall contradict it 
 himself, if there is necessity. He may be a prodigal and a 
 viveur he bears that reputation but at least he is not a liar 
 and a scoundrel." 
 
 "Who?" Saxham's heart is drubbing furiously. A cool, 
 vivifying liquid like ether seems to have passed into his blood. 
 His quiet, set, determined face and masterful, observant eyes 
 oppose the Chaplain's heat and indignation, as if these were
 
 402 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 waves of boiling lava beating on a cliff of Titanic rock. " Who 
 is not a liar and a scoundrel? " 
 
 " I speak of Lord Beauvaj'se," says the Reverend Julius 
 Fraithorn in the high-pitched voice that shakes with rage. 
 " He is a married man, Saxham ; I have incontrovertible testi- 
 mony to prove it. He gave his name to the woman who was 
 his mistress a week before he sailed for Cape Town. He " 
 
 There is a strange rattling noise in the throat of the man 
 who hears. Julius looks at him, and his own heat and fury 
 appear, even to himself, as impotent and ridiculous as the 
 anger of a child. If just before it had seemed to him that 
 he heard the voice of mankind's arch-enemy speaking with 
 Saxham's mouth, he discerns at this moment, reflected in Sax- 
 ham's, the face of the primal murderer. And being, as well 
 as a sincere and simple-hearted clergyman, something of a 
 weakling, he is shocked to silence. 
 
 XLVI 
 
 AN instant, and Saxham's own face looks calmly at the dazed 
 Chaplain, and the curt, brusque voice demands: 
 
 "What is this incontrovertible testimony?" 
 
 " A letter," says Julius breathlessly, " from a person who 
 saw the entry of the marriage at the Registrar's office where 
 it took place." 
 
 " Is anyone else in possession of this information ? " 
 
 " With the exception of the Registrar and the witnesses 
 of the marriage, up to the middle of last September, when the 
 letter was written, nothing had leaked out. I received the 
 communication by the last mail from England that was de- 
 livered at the Hospital before I underwent the operation." 
 
 " That was the last mail that got through. Who was your 
 correspondent? " 
 
 " One of the senior officiating priests of St. Margaret's, 
 Cavendish Street, the London church where I did duty as 
 junior curate." 
 
 " Have you kept the letter? " 
 
 " It is in my desk at my hotel, with some other correspond- 
 ence of Father Tatham's. You may see it if you wish." 
 
 " I will see it. In the meanwhile, let me have the gist of it. 
 
 This clergyman happening to visit a Registrar's office 
 
 Where was the office? "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 403 
 
 "At Cookham-on-Thames, where Father Tatham has es- 
 tablished a Holiday Rest Home for the benefit of the London 
 working lads," the Chaplain explains. He is sitting on the end 
 of the bed, weak and worn and exhausted with the emotions 
 that have torn him in the last half-hour. Beads of perspira- 
 tion thickly stud the high temples, out of which the angry 
 blood has sunk; his cheeks are pallid and hollow. His eyes 
 have lost their fire; his muscles are flaccidly relaxed; his slop- 
 ing shoulders stoop; his long, limp hands hang nervelessly at 
 his sides. 
 
 " One moment." Saxham glances at the gold chronometer 
 the staff of St. Stephen's clubbed to present him with years ago. 
 It is rather typical of the man that, even when under stress 
 of his heroic thirst he had pawned the watch for money where- 
 with to buy whisky, he should have only borrowed upon it 
 such small sums as are easily repaid. He has yet another five 
 minutes to bestow in listening to the Chaplain's story, yet even 
 as he returns the chronometer to its pocket, his quick ear 
 catches the frou-frou of feminine petticoats outside the door. 
 He opens it, frowning. A nurse is standing there with a sum- 
 mons in her face. She gives the doctor her low-toned message, 
 receives a reply, and rustles down the corridor between the 
 long lines of pallets as Saxham draws back his head and shuts 
 the door, and, setting his great shoulders against it, and facing 
 Julius, orders: 
 
 "Goon!" 
 
 Julius goes on: 
 
 "At Underose Cottage a pretty place of the toy-residence 
 description, standing in charming gardens not far from the 
 Home I speak of, lived a lady an actress very popular in 
 Musical Comedy who was known to be the mistress of Lord 
 Beauvayse. I need hardly tell you the Father touched on the 
 unpleasant features of the story as delicately as possible " 
 
 "Without doubt. But get on a little quicker," says Sax- 
 ham grimly, jerking his head towards the door. " For I am 
 wanted. And don't speak loud, for there are people on the 
 other side of the door. With regard to this lady?" 
 
 " With all her moral laxities," goes on Julius, " Miss Lessie 
 Lavigne " 
 
 " Ah, I know the name," says Saxham sharply. " On with 
 you to the end. 'With all her moral laxities " 
 
 " Miss Lessie Lavigne is a generous, kindly, charitable young 
 woman," goes on Julius, "And the Home of Rest has bene-
 
 404 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 fited largely by her purse. She is known to the Matron, and 
 Father Tatham having occasion to visit the Registrar's office 
 at Cookham on the 2gth of last June, for the purpose of look- 
 ing up the books, with the Registrar's consent, and satisfying 
 himself of the existence of the entry regarding a marriage be- 
 tween one of our young fellows then at the Home and a girl 
 he had foolishly married when on a hopping excursion in the 
 autumn of the previous year Father Tatham encountered 
 Miss Lavigne or Lady Beauvayse, to give her her proper 
 title " 
 
 "In the Registrar's office?" 
 
 " In the act of quitting the Registrar's outer office," says 
 the burnt-out Julius in a weary voice, " in the company of 
 Lord Beauvayse, and followed by two persons who were prob- 
 ably their witnesses; for when the Father entered the inner 
 office the register was lying open on the table, the entry of the 
 marriage still wet upon the page." 
 
 " And your religious correspondent pried first," says Sax- 
 ham, with savage irony, " and afterwards tattled ? " 
 
 "And afterwards, seeing in the Times that Lord Beauvayse 
 was under orders from South Africa, mentioned his accidental 
 discovery when writing to me," says Julius Fraithorn wearily. 
 
 "That will do. When can I see the letter at your hotel? 
 The sooner the better," says Saxham, with a curious smile, 
 " for all purposes. Can you walk there with me now ? Very 
 well " as Julius assents " that is arranged, then." 
 
 " What is to be done, Saxham ? " Julius stumbles up. The 
 fires that burned in him a few moments ago are quenched ; his 
 slack hand trembles irresolutely at his beautiful weak mouth, 
 and his deerlike eyes waver. 
 
 " I advise you," says Saxham, " to leave the doing of what 
 is to be done to me." His own blue eyes have so strange a 
 flare in .them, and his heavy form seems so alive and instinct 
 with threatening and dangerous possibilities, that Julius 
 falters: 
 
 " You believe Lord Beauvayse has been a party to has wil- 
 fully compromised Miss Mildare? You you mean to re- 
 monstrate with him? Do you do you think that he will 
 listen to a remonstrance?" 
 
 " He will find it best in this instance," says Saxham dourly. 
 
 " Do not do not be tempted to use any violence, Saxham," 
 urges the Chaplain nervously, looking at the tense muscles of 
 the grim, square face and the salient right hand that hovers
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 405 
 
 near the butt of the Doctor's revolver. " For your own sake 
 as much as for his." 
 
 Saxham's laugh is ugly to hear. 
 
 " Do you think that Lord Beauvayse would wind up as top 
 dog if it came to a struggle between us? " 
 
 " It must not come to a struggle, Saxham," says the Chap- 
 lain, very pale. " We we are under Martial Law. He is 
 your superior officer." (Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, 
 holds the honourary rank of Lieutenant in Her Majesty's 
 Army.) "Remember, if Carslow the man who killed 
 Vickers, of the Pittsburg Trumpeter" he refers to a grim 
 tragedy of the beginning of the siege " had not been medi- 
 cally certified insane, they would have taken him out and shot 
 him." 
 
 Saxham shrugs his massive shoulders, and with the utter 
 unmelodiousness that characterizes the performance of a man 
 devoid of a musical ear, whistles a fragment of a little tune. 
 It is often on the lips of another man, and the Doctor has 
 picked it up unconsciously, with one or two other characteristic 
 habits and phrases, and has fallen into the habit of whistling 
 it as he goes doggedly, unwearyingly, upon his ever-widening 
 round of daily duties. It. helps him, perhaps, though it gets 
 upon the nerves of other people, making the younger nurses, 
 not unmindful of his arbitrary action in the matter of the 
 violet powder, want to shriek. 
 
 " The Military Executive would be perfectly welcome to 
 take me out and shoot me, if first I might be permitted to 
 look in at the Staff Bomb-proof South, and render Society the 
 distinguished service of ridding it of Lord Beauvayse. Who's 
 there?" 
 
 Saxham reopens the door, at which the nurse, now returned, 
 has knocked. A tired but cheerful-faced young woman, in an 
 unstarched cap and apron and rumpled gown of galatea cotton- 
 twill, informs the Doctor that they have telephoned up from 
 Staff Bomb-proof South Lines, and that the password for the 
 day is " Honour." 
 
 "You are going to him now?" asks the Chaplain anxiously 
 and apprehensively. 
 
 " Oddly enough, I have been sent for to attend to a shell 
 casualty," says Saxham, picking up and putting on his Service 
 felt, and moving to take down the canvas wallet that is his 
 inseparable companion from the hook whence it hangs. " Or, 
 rather, Taggart was, and as he has thirty diphtheria cases for
 
 4 o6 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 tracheotomy at the Children's Hospital, and as McFadyen's 
 hands are full at the Refugees' Infirmary, the Major asks if 
 I will take the duty. It's an order, I suppose, couched in a 
 civil way." 
 
 He swings the heavy wallet over his shoulders, and picks 
 up his worn hunting-crop. 
 
 " And so, let's be moving," he says, his hand upon the door- 
 knob. " Your hotel is on my way. I may need that letter, or 
 I may not. And in any case I prefer to have seen it before I 
 meet the man." 
 
 " One moment." The Chaplain speaks with a strained look 
 of anxiety, squeezing a damp white handkerchief into a ball 
 between his palms. " You have taken upon yourself the duty 
 of bringing Lord Beauvayse to book over this very painful 
 matter. ... I should like ... I should wish you to leave 
 the task of enlightening Miss Mildare to me." 
 
 "To you. And why?" 
 
 Saxham waits for the answer, a heavy figure filling up the 
 doorway, scanning the matting with eyes that suddenly avoid 
 the Chaplain's face. 
 
 " Because I because in inflicting upon her what must neces- 
 sarily be a a painful humiliation " the Rev. Julius clears 
 his throat, and laboriously rolls the damp handkerchief-ball 
 into a sausage " I wish to convince Miss Mildare that my 
 respect and my esteem for her have not diminished." 
 
 " And how do you propose to drive this conviction home ? " 
 
 The Reverend Julius flushes to the ear-tips. The coldness 
 of the questioning voice gives him a nervous shudder. He says 
 with an effort, looking at the thick white, black-fringed lids 
 that hide the Doctor's queer blue eyes: 
 
 " By offering Miss Mildare the honourable protection of my 
 name. My views, as regarding the celibacy incumbent upon 
 the anointed servant of the Altar, have, since I knew her, un- 
 dergone a a change. . . . And it. occurs to me, when she has 
 got over the first shock of hearing that she has* been deceived 
 and played with by a person of Lord Beauvaysc's lack of prin- 
 ciple 
 
 " That she may be induced to look with favour on the par- 
 son's proposal?" comments Saxham with an indifference to the 
 feelings of the person he addresses that is positively savage. 
 The raucous tones flay Julius's sensitive ears, the terrible blue 
 eyes blaze upon him, scorch him. He falters: 
 
 " I I trust my purpose is pure from, vulgar self-seeking ? I
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 407 
 
 hope my attitude towards Miss Mildare is not unchivalrous 
 or ungenerous? " 
 
 " In manipulating her disadvantage to serve your own in- 
 terests," says the terrible voice, " you would undoubtedly be 
 playing a very low-down game." 
 
 Julius laughs, shortly and huffily. 
 
 "A low-down game! . . . Ha, ha, ha! You don't mince 
 3 T our words, Doctor! " 
 
 " I can phrase my opinion even more plainly, if you desire 
 it," returns Saxham brutally. " To bespatter a rival for the 
 gaining of an advantage by contrast is a Yahoo's trick to which 
 no decent gentleman would stoop." 
 
 " At a pinch," retorts the Chaplain, stung to the point of 
 being sarcastic, " your ' decent gentleman ' would be likely to 
 remember the old adage, ' All's fair in Love and ' " 
 
 " Exactly. All is fair," returns Saxham, squaring his dogged 
 jaws at the other, and folding his great arms upon his deep 
 wide chest. " And all shall be, please to understand it. It 
 is, unfortunately, necessary that Miss Mildare should be un- 
 deceived as regards Lord Beauvayse. But the painful duty of 
 opening her eyes will be undertaken by that " the break be- 
 fore the designation is scathingly contemptuous " by that 
 distinguished nobleman himself, and by no other." 
 
 " How can you compel the man to give himself away?" de- 
 mands the Reverend Julius incredulously. Saxham answers, 
 mechanically opening and closing his small, muscular surgeon's 
 hand, and watching the flexions and extensions of the supple 
 fingers with an ugly kind of interest: 
 
 " I shall compel him to. How doesn't concern you at the 
 moment. What matters is your parole of honour that you 
 will never by word, or deed, or sign disclose to Miss Mildare 
 that Lord Beauvayse was not, when he engaged himself to 
 marry her, in a position to fulfil his matrimonal proposals. 
 Short of betraying your rival, you are at liberty to further 
 your own views as may seem good to you. The plan of cam- 
 paign that I, in your place, should choose might not find 
 favour in your eyes. . . ." His look bears upon the younger 
 man with intolerable weight, his heavily-shouldered figure 
 seems to swell and fill the room. Julius is clearly conscious 
 of hating his saviour, and the consciousness is acid on his palate 
 as he asks, with a wry smile: 
 
 " What would your plan be if you were in my place ? " 
 
 And gets this answer:
 
 4 o8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " To praise where a rival was worthy of praise ; to be silent 
 where it would be easy to depreciate; to win her from him, 
 not because of my own greater worth, but in spite of the worst 
 she could know of me. That would, in my opinion, be a con- 
 quest worthy of a man." 
 
 The pupils of the speaker's flaming blue eyes have dwindled 
 to mere pin-points, a rush of blood has darkened the square pale 
 face, to sink away again and leave it opaquely colourless, as 
 Saxham says with cool distinctness: 
 
 " And now, before we leave this room, I must trouble you 
 for that promise oath, if you feel it would be more in your 
 line of business. I don't possess a copy of the Scripture, but 
 I think that is a Crucifix you wear upon your watchchain ? " 
 
 It is. And when the Reverend Julius has kissed the sacred 
 symbol with shaking lips, and taken the oath as Saxham dic- 
 tates, his heart tattooing furiously under the baggy khaki 
 jacket, and an angry pulse beating in his thin cheek, Saxham 
 adds, with the flickering shadow of a smile, as he opens the 
 door, and signs to the Chaplain to pass out before him : 
 
 " You perceive I turn the weapons of your profession against 
 you. Exactly as replying to your question of a moment back 
 with regard to compelling exactly as I intend to do in the 
 case of Lord Beauvayse ! " 
 
 He motions to the other to pass out before him, and locks 
 the door upon his stuffy little sanctum with its shelves piled 
 with a heterogeneous confusion of tubes and bottles, books 
 and instruments, specimens of foodstuffs under the process of 
 analysis for values, and carefully-sealed watchglasses contain- 
 ing choice cultures of deadly microbes in boullion, before he 
 leads his way down the long corridor where narrow pallets, 
 upon which sick men and boys are stretched, range along the 
 walls upon either hand, and the air is heavy with the taint 
 of suppurating wounds, and the hot, sticky breath of fever and 
 malaria. 
 
 He walks quickly, his keen blue eyes glancing right and left 
 with the effect of carelessness, yet missing nothing. He stops, 
 and loosens the bandage, , and relieves the swollen limb. He 
 delays to kneel a moment beside one low pillow, and turn 
 gently to the light a face that is ghastly, with its bristly beard 
 and glassy, staring eyes, and its pallor that is of the hue of 
 old wax, and lay it gently back again as he beckons to the 
 nurse to bring the screens, and hide the Dead from the sight 
 of the living.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 409 
 
 He is in his element, salient and masterful and strong. But 
 the haggard eyes that turn upon him do not shine with grati- 
 tude. He has not reached these hearts. They accuse him, 
 quite unjustly, of a liking for cutting and carving. They sus- 
 pect him, quite correctly, of being in no hurry for the ending 
 of the siege. How should he be, when, these strenuous days 
 once over, he sees nothing before him but the murky blackness 
 of the night out of which he came, from which he has emerged 
 for one brief draught of renewed joy in living before the dark 
 shall close over him again, and wrap him round for ever? 
 
 He has suffered horribly of late. But at the worst his work 
 has never failed to bring relief and distraction. His loyalty 
 to a man in whom he believes has been the mainspring of his 
 unflagging strength. He is not liked or popular in any way, 
 though Surgeon-Major Taggart upholds him manfully, and 
 McFadyen is loyal to the old bond. His harshness repels re- 
 gard, his coldness blights confidences, and so, though he is ad- 
 mired for his dazzling skill in surgery, for his dogged per- 
 severance and unremitting power of application, for his fine 
 horsemanship and iron nerve, he is not regarded with affection. 
 
 He is not in the least aware of it, to do him justice, when 
 his rough ironies and his brusque repartees give offence. In 
 the heyday of his London success he has not truckled to Rank, 
 or Influence, or Affluence. The owner of a gouty or a varicose 
 leg has never had the more civil tongue from Saxham that the 
 uneasy limb or its fellow was privileged upon State occasions 
 to wear the Garter. He trod upon corns then, as he treads 
 upon them now, without being aware of it, as he goes upon his 
 way. 
 
 Julius goes with him, rent by apprehensions, stealing nervous 
 side-glances at the impassive, opaque-skinned face as Saxham 
 swings along with his powerful, rather lurching gait over the 
 ploughed and littered waste that divides the Hospital from the 
 town beyond it. He speaks once or twice, but Saxham seems 
 not to hear. 
 
 The Doctor is listening to a dialogue that is as yet unspoken. 
 He is crushing a resistance that has not yet been made. In 
 imagination his small, strong, muscular hands are gripped upon 
 the throat of the man who has lied to her and deceived her, 
 and he is listening with joy to the gurgling choking efforts to 
 phrase a prayer for mercy, or utter a final defiance, and he sees 
 with grim pleasure how the fine skin blackens under his deadly 
 hold, and how the lazy, beautiful, grey-green eyes, no longer
 
 410 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 sleepy or defiant, but staring and horribly bloodshot, are al- 
 ready rolling upward in the death-agony. The primitive 
 savage that is in every man lusts at a juncture such as this to 
 kill with the bare hands rather than to slay with any weapon 
 known to civilization. 
 
 " Let him look to it how he deals with her. Let him look 
 to it." 
 
 How long it seems since Saxham muttered those words, 
 turning sullenly away to recross the stepping-stones, leaping 
 from boulder to boulder as the river wimpled and laughed in 
 mockery of his clumsy tender of protection and her rejection 
 of it, and Beauvayse's tall figure stood, erect and triumphant, 
 on the flower-starred bank, waiting to recommence his wooing 
 until the intruder should be gone, divining, as Saxham had 
 instinctively known, the hidden passion that rent and tortured 
 him, glowing with the consciousness of secret mastery. 
 
 If this meek, thin-blooded, young clergyman who walks 
 beside him might have won her, it seems to Saxham that he 
 could have borne it. But that this man of all others should 
 dare to approach her, presume to rear an image of himself in 
 the shrine of her pure breast, win her from her high aims and 
 lofty ideals with a bold look and a few whispered words, and, 
 having thrown his honourable name into the lap of a light 
 woman as indifferently as a jewelled trinket, should dare to 
 offer Lynette Mildare dishonour, is monstrous, hideous, un- 
 bearable. . . . 
 
 How comes it that she of all women should be so easily 
 allured, so lightly drawn aside? Was there no baser conquest 
 within reach that this white, virginal, slender saint should be- 
 come his prey? Shall she be made even as those others of 
 whom she spoke, when the veil of a girlish innocence was 
 drawn aside, and strange and terrible knowledge looked out of 
 those clear eyes, and she said, in answer to his question: 
 
 " They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer 
 upon earth. For they are the slaves, and the victims, and the 
 martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures of 
 men. . . ." 
 
 Of men like Beauvayse. 
 
 Not only swart and shaggy, or pale and bloated beastmen, 
 or white-haired, toothless, blear-eyed satyrs grown venerable in 
 vice. But beautiful, youthful profligates, limbed like the gods 
 and fauns of the old Greek sculptors; soft of skin, golden of 
 hair, with sleepy eyes like green jewels, soft persuasive voices
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 41 1 
 
 with which to pour poisoned words into innocent and guileless 
 ears, and the bold, brave blood of old-time heroes running in 
 their veins, prompting them to the doing of dashing, reckless, 
 gallant deeds, no less than sins of luxury and lust. 
 
 Let him look to it, this splendid young soldier with the 
 ancient name, hope of his House, pride of his Regiment. Let 
 him look to it how he has dealt with her, who had no thought 
 or dream but to save others from the fate he destines for her, 
 until his cursed, beautiful face smiled down at hers. For 
 every lying oath he has sworn to her, for every false promise 
 made to the wrecking of her maiden peace, for every kiss those 
 innocent lips have been despoiled of, for every touch of his that 
 has spoiled her, for every breath of his that has scorched the 
 white petals of the Convent-reared lily, he shall pay the price. 
 
 Silently Saxham registers this oath upon that beloved red- 
 brown head, since he denies its Maker His honour, and the 
 whirling blackness that is within him is rent and cloven, for 
 one blinding instant, by the levin-fires of Hell. He knows 
 thenceforward what he will do as he walks with the pale Chap- 
 lain between the shell-torn houses, and along the littered 
 streets, where men and women and children, thin and haggard 
 and listless with hunger, and the deadly inertia of long con- 
 finement, pass and repass as indifferently as though guns 
 battering and growling from the low grey hills south and 
 east, and the incessant rattle of rifle-fire were the innocent ex- 
 penditure of blank cartridge incidental to a sham fight. 
 
 They reach the Chaplain's hotel, and go to his room. Sax- 
 ham waits silently while Julius searches for and finds Father 
 Tatham's letter, takes it and reads it attentively, puts it care- 
 fully away in a worn notecase, restores the notecase to the inner 
 pocket of his jacket, and, without a nod or word of farewell ,( 
 is gone. 
 
 XLVII 
 
 To the remarkably complete system of underground wires in- 
 stalled by the Garrison Telephone Corps, Lady Hannah 
 Wrynche, on duty at the Convalescent Hospital that was once 
 the Officers' Club, was, upon the Thursday that sees the pub- 
 lication of the string of paragraphs previously quoted from the 
 Siege Gazette, indebted for what she afterwards described with 
 ruefulness as a " heckled morning." 
 
 Once a week the " Social_ Jottings," bubbling from the
 
 tis ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 effervescent Gold Pen, descended like rain upon the parched 
 soil of drouthy Gueldersdorp. To make gossip where there is 
 none is as difficult as making bricks without clay, or trimming 
 a hat when you are a member of the Wild Birds Protection 
 Society, and plumage is Fashion's latest cry. Under the cir- 
 cumstances a genuine item of general and public interest was a 
 pearl of price. And yet something had told the little lady that 
 the ruthless Blue Pencil of Supreme Authority would deprive 
 her of the supreme joy of casting it before the readers of the 
 Siege Gazette. She seemed to hear him saying, in the pleasant 
 voice she knew so well: 
 
 " No personalities shall be published in a paper I control." 
 
 He had said that on Sunday, when she had pleaded for a 
 freer hand. Well, he could hardly call the announcement of 
 an engagement a personality, and, supposing he did, how easy 
 to convince him that it was nothing of the kind ! 
 
 She dashed off her description of the Convent Kettledrum, 
 and added the paragraphs we know of, each one accentuated 
 by an explosion of asterisks, and gave the blotty sheets to Young 
 Evans, who combined in his sole person the offices of sub-editor, 
 engineer, chief-compositor, feeder, and Devil. 
 
 Young Evans, who, next to the single-cylinder printing- 
 press driven by the little oil-engine that had sustained a shell- 
 casualty at the beginning of the siege, adored Lady Hannah, 
 vanished behind the corrugated partition that separated the 
 office from the printing-room, and presently came back in inky 
 shirt-sleeves with a smear of lubricating-oil upon his forehead, 
 and laid the wet slips upon the Editorial table. Then he went 
 back, and fell to tinkering at his machine. Lady Hannah cor- 
 rected her proof. When she had done she looked at her wrist- 
 watch. In ten minutes Supreme Authority would descend the 
 ladder, wield the Blue Pencil, and depart. Would he have 
 mercy and not sacrifice? The suspense was torturing. 
 
 Then a simple plan occurred to her by which Supreme Author- 
 ity might be she dared not use the word " circumvented." 
 " Got round " was even worse ; " evaded " sounded nicest. To 
 resist the promptings of her own feminine ingenuity required 
 a greater storage of cold moral force than Lady Hannah desired 
 to possess. She took the editorial scissors, and daintily cut off 
 the three paragraphs from the bottom of the slip. 
 
 The thing was done, and the snipped off paragraphs con- 
 cealed as a pair of brown boots, with steel jack-spurs attached, 
 came neatly down the ladder. He gave her his cheery " Good-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 413 
 
 morning," and congratulated her on looking well. Her cheeks 
 burned and her heart rat-tatted against the hidden paper, as he 
 ran his keen eye down slip after slip, and initialled them for the 
 press. She almost shrieked as he took up the " Social Jottings." 
 The underground office whirled about her as the blue pencil 
 steadily travelled down. Then he was gone and the 
 initialled proof lay before her. She had nothing to do but 
 neatly and delicately paste on the bit she had snipped off. This 
 done, she gathered up her various small belongings, swept them 
 into her bag, and went, leaving the passed proof of the " Social 
 Jottings " column waiting for Young Evans with the rest. 
 
 In the middle of the night she realized what she had done. 
 But even in a beleaguered town under the sway of Martial 
 Law you cannot hang a lady, or order her out and shoot her 
 for Mutiny and Treason combined. There would be a repri- 
 mand ; what Bingo pleasantly termed " an official wigging," 
 unless the Blue Pencil could, by any feminine art, be persuaded 
 that it had passed those pars. 
 
 But, of course, she would never stoop to such a deception. 
 The ruse she had employed was culpable. The other thing 
 would be infamous. And he would be sure to see that the 
 end of the proof-slip had been pasted on. 
 
 She slept jerkily, rose headachy, and set out for the Con- 
 valescent Hospital in that stage of penitence that immediately 
 precedes hysterical breakdown. She experienced a crisis of the 
 nerves upon meeting a man who, regardless of quite a brisk 
 bombardment that happened to be going on just then, was 
 walking along reading the Siege Gazette. Shirt-sleeved Young 
 Evans had worked until daylight getting the Thursday's issue 
 out. And there was a tremendous run upon copies. Every 
 other person Lady Hannah encountered upon the street seemed 
 to have got one, and to find it unusually interesting. The 
 women especially. None of them were dull, or languid, or 
 dark-eyed this morning. The siege crawl was no longer in 
 evidence. They walked upon springs. Upon the stoep of the 
 Hospital, where the long rows of convalescents were airing, 
 every patient appeared plunged in perusal. Those who had 
 not the paper were waiting, with watering chops, until those 
 who had would part. A reviving breath seemed to have passed 
 over them, and spots of colour showed in their yellow, haggard 
 faces. They talked and laughed. ... 
 
 Lady Hannah passed in, conscious of an agreeable tingling 
 all down her spine. The hall-porter, a brawny, one-armed
 
 414 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 ex-Irregular, who had lost what he was wont to term his 
 " flapper " at the outset of hostilities, was too deeply absorbed 
 in spelling out a paragraph of the " Social Jottings " column 
 to salute her. Inside you heard little beyond the crackling of 
 the flimsy sheet, mingled with the comments, exclamations, 
 anticipations, expectations that went off on all sides, met each 
 other, and rebounded, exploding in coruscations of sparks. 
 Something had happened, something was going to happen, after 
 months and months of eventless monotony. It warmed the thin 
 blood in their veins like comet champagne, and quickened their 
 faded appetites like some salt breath from the far- 
 distant sea. 
 
 The flavour of success upon the palate may, like Imperial 
 Tokay, be sensed but once in a lifetime, but you can never for- 
 get that once. Out of her gold fountain-pen Lady Hannah had 
 spurted a little ink upon the famished Gueldersdorpians, and 
 their dry bones moved and lived. She knew a fine must be 
 paid for this dizzying draught of popularity, even as she tied 
 on a bibbed apron, and superintended the serving and distribu- 
 tion of the patients' one-o'clock dinner. 
 
 Horse-soup, with a few potato-sprouts, and one or two sil- 
 vered carrots to the gallon, formed the menu to-day. There 
 was no more white bread, and a villainous bannock of crushed 
 oats had to be soaked in your porringer if you had no strength 
 to chew it. Sweetened bran-jelly followed, and upon this the 
 now apologetic but smiling porter, with the intelligence that 
 her ladyship was wanted at the wall-jigger in the Matron's 
 room. 
 
 The ring-up came from Hotchkiss Outpost North, where 
 Captain Bingo was this day on duty, via the Staff Headquarters 
 office in Market Square, and the voice that filtered to the ear 
 of Lady Hannah was unmistakably that of her own spouse, and 
 tinged with a gruffness as unusual as ominous. 
 
 " Hallo. Is that you ? " 
 
 " Qu'il ne vous en deplaise." 
 
 Bingo growled in a perfectly audible aside: 
 
 "And devil a doubt. What other woman would jabber 
 French through a telephone?" 
 
 "A Frenchwoman would, possibly." 
 
 " Don't catch what you're saying. Look here, what made 
 you shove such a whacking bouncer into the Siege Gazette? " 
 
 " Please put that into English." She underwent a quaking 
 *t the heart.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 415 
 
 " I say, that announcement about Toby and the Mildare 
 filly is all my eye." 
 
 " It isn't all your eye. It's first-hand, fully authorized fact." 
 
 "Rot!" 
 
 " Paix et peu. Say rot, if it pleases you ! " > 
 
 " You'll have to withdraw and apologize." 
 
 " I can't make out what you're saying." 
 
 " It will end in your eating humble-pie. ; r - Can you hear 
 that?" 
 
 " I can hear that you are in a bearish temper." 
 
 " I've reason to be. If a man had written what you have I 
 should punch his head." 
 
 " Say that again ! " 
 
 " I say, if a stranger of the kickable sex had told such a pack 
 of infernal " 
 
 Click! 
 
 Lady Hannah hung up the receiver, blew a contemptuous 
 kiss into the gape of the celluloid mouthpiece, and turned to 
 go. There was another ring-up as she reached the door. 
 
 "Hallo. Are you the Convalescent Hospital?" 
 
 "Yes. Who are you?" 
 
 " Staff Bombproof South. I want to speak to Lady Hannah 
 IWrynche." 
 
 " I'm here, Lord Beauvayse." 
 
 " I say, I'm going to rag you frightfully. Why on earth 
 have you given us away in that beastly paper ? " 
 
 " Whom do you mean by ' us ' ? " 
 
 "Well, me and Miss Mildare." 
 
 " Didn't you tell me on Sunday that you were engaged ? " 
 she demanded indignantly. 
 
 " I did." The answer came back haltingly. 
 
 " And that you didn't care who knew it? " 
 
 "Fact." 
 
 " And that you two were going to be married as soon as you 
 could pull off the event?" 
 
 " Yes." The voice was palpably embarrassed. " But " 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 " But things you don't mind people knowing look beastly 
 in cold print." 
 
 " If I were in your shoes I should think they looked beauti- 
 ful." 
 
 Nothing but a faint buzz came back. Lady Hannah went 
 on:
 
 416 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " If I were in your shoes, and such a pearl and prize and 
 paragon as Lynette Mildare had consented to marry me, I 
 should want the whole world to envy me my colossal good luck. 
 I should go about in sandwich-boards advertising it. I should 
 buy a megaphone, and proclaim it through that. I should " 
 
 There was no response beyond the buzzing of the wire. 
 Beauvayse had evidently hung up the receiver. 
 
 " Is there any creature upon earth more cowardly than a 
 man engaged?" Lady Hannah demanded of space. There was 
 a futile struggle inside the telephone-box. Somebody else was 
 jtrying to ring up. She put the receiver back upon the crutches, 
 and 
 
 " Ting ting ting ! " said the bell in a high, thin voice. 
 
 "Who Is it? "she asked. 
 
 The answer came back with official clearness: 
 
 " Officer of the day, Staff Headquarters. If you're the Con- 
 valescent Hospital, the Colonel would like to speak to Lady 
 Hannah Wrynche." 
 
 Her knees became as jelly, and her heart seemed to turn a 
 somersault. She answered in a would-be jaunty voice that wob- 
 bled horribly: 
 
 " Here here is Lady Hannah." 
 
 " Hold on a minute, please! " 
 
 She held on. She had not shuddered at the end of the wire 
 for more than a minute when the well-known, infinitely- 
 dreaded voice said in her ear, so clearly that she jumped: 
 
 "Lady Hannah there? How d'you do?" 
 
 She gulped, and quavered : 
 
 " It it depends on what you're going to say." 
 
 " I see." There was the vibration of a stifled laugh, and 
 her heart jumped to meet it. " So you anticipated a hauling 
 over the coals ? " 
 
 Revived, she shrugged her little shoulders. 
 
 " Have I deserved one?" 
 
 The voice said, with unmistakable displeasure in it: 
 
 " Thoroughly. Why were not the last three paragraphs of 
 the weekly ' Social Jottings ' column submitted to me yesterday 
 with the rest?" 
 
 She heard herself titter imbecilely. Then a voice, which 
 she could hardly believe her own, said, with a pitiable effort 
 to be gay and natural : 
 
 " Weren't they ? Perhaps you overlooked them." 
 
 " You know I did not overlook them."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 417 
 
 This was the cold, incisive, cutting, rasping voice which 
 Bingo was wont to describe as razors and files. Her ears 
 burned like fire, and her bright, birdlike eyes were round and 
 scared. She gasped: 
 
 " Oh ... do you really " 
 
 " I want the truth, please, without quibbling." The voice 
 was harsh and cold, and inexorably compelling. " Why were 
 those paragraphs not shown to me ? " 
 
 She winked away her tears. 
 
 " Because I was sure you'd blue-pencil them out of existence. 
 And a genuine bit of news is such a roc's egg in these times 
 of scarcity." 
 
 "Genuine! 5 ; 
 
 There was incredulity in the tone. 
 
 " Upon my honour as the wife of a British Dragoon." 
 
 He said crisply: 
 
 " Precipitate publication, even of authentic information, is 
 likely to be resented by the persons concerned." 
 
 She remembered, with a sinking at the heart, that one per- 
 son concerned had already objected. 
 
 " Both of them authorized the insertion." 
 
 " And the official consent to it was obtained by a trick." 
 
 She whispered, her heart in the heels of her Louis Quinze 
 shoes : 
 
 " Please please don't call it that ! " 
 
 " How can I call it anything else? Besides, has it occurred 
 to you that, should any copies of to-day's issue get through 
 these lines, the Foltlebarres will be thrown into a state of vol- 
 canic eruption? " 
 
 " If the Foltlebarres aren't absolute beetles they'll jump 
 for joy. How could their boy possibly do better? " 
 
 " I don't see how myself." 
 
 " Ah, if you're going to back up Toby, the day is as good 
 as won." 
 
 " You're very kind to say so." 
 
 The red was dying out of Lady Hannah's ear-tips. That 
 " You're very kind " had a gratified sound. The most rigorous 
 and implacable of men can be buttered, she thought, if the 
 emollient be dexterously applied. And a bright spark of naughty 
 triumph snapped in each of her birdlike black eyes. 
 
 " Thanks." He was speaking again. " Apologies for keep- 
 ing you. You're up to your eyes in Hospital work, I don't 
 doubt."
 
 418 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " There is enough to keep one going." 
 
 " Without the additional tax of literary labour." She was 
 conscious of a premonitory, apprehensive chill that travelled 
 from the roots of her hair down her spine, and apparently 
 made its exit at the heels of her Louis Quinze shoes. " So the 
 ' Social Jottings ' column will not appear in the Siege Gazette 
 after to-day. Good-morning." 
 
 "Is that my punishment for insubordination?" 
 
 Not a sound in reply. " He must have hung up the receive, 
 and gone away. Oh, horrid, horrid male superiority! " thought 
 Lady Hannah. " To have been put under arrest, even to have 
 been ordered out and shot, would be preferable to being figur- 
 atively spanked and put in the corner." She winked away some 
 more tears, and sniffed a little dejectedly. " And only the 
 other day he seemed quite pleased with me," she added pen- 
 sively. Then she shrugged her shoulders, and rang up the 
 Head Hospital, North Veld Road. 
 
 "Whoyou-e?" 
 
 It was the sing-song voice of the Barala hall-boy. 
 
 " I'm Lady Hannah Wrynche. Is the Reverend Mother on 
 duty in the wards to-day? " 
 
 " I go see. You hang-e on." 
 
 Lady Hannah hung on until her small remaining stock of 
 patience deserted her. As she stamped her small feet, longing 
 to accelerate the languid movements of the call-boy with a 
 humanely-wielded hatpin, a whisper in the velvet voice she knew 
 stole across the distance. 
 
 "Hannah. Is it you?" 
 
 " It's me, Biddy dear." 
 
 There was a soft laugh that ended in a sigh. " It is so long 
 since anybody called me that." 
 
 " I wouldn't dare to with you looking at me." 
 
 " Am I so formidable of aspect? But go on." 
 
 " It's not so easy. But I've had an awful morning. Every- 
 body I like best down on me like bricks and m " Some- 
 body gulped a sob. 
 
 " You are crying, dear! " 
 
 " Not a drop. But if you join in the heckling I shall dribble 
 away and dissolve in salt water. It's all about those wretched 
 paragraphs of mine in the Siege Gazette. But perhaps you 
 haven't seen it ? " 
 
 " I have seen it." 
 
 " You were quite willing that the fiancailles should be made
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 419 
 
 public. . . . Indeed, you gave me to understand you desired 
 it." 
 
 " I was quite willing. I did wish it." 
 
 "Yes. . . . Thank you, dear; that was what I wanted to 
 hear from you. I understand now what the one clapping pair 
 of hands must mean to the actor who is booed by all the rest 
 of the audience. Good-bye, dear." 
 
 " Stay. . . . Who are the persons who disapprove of the 
 announcement? " 
 
 " Mr. Bingo, for one. Not that anything the dear old stupid 
 says matters in the slightest. And and Toby." 
 
 "'Toby'?" 
 
 " I mean Lord Beauvayse." 
 
 " Tell him I quite approve. He should know that in this 
 matter it was for me to decide." 
 
 " Certainly, dear." 
 
 " Whose is the other objecting voice? " 
 
 " The Chief thinks I ... we ... it ... I rather fancy 
 that he used the word ' precipitate ' in expressing his opinion." 
 
 " Refer him to me if he expresses it again." 
 
 " Of course, dear, since you . . ." 
 
 " Good-bye." 
 
 " Good-bye, dear. If Biddy Bawne hadn't been a nun," 
 reflected Lady Hannah, as she went out of the Matron's office 
 and back to her patients, who had long ago dined, " I think 
 she would have made rather a despotic Empress. 'Refer him 
 to me* indeed. What is it ; Sergeant? Don't say I'm rung 
 up again." 
 
 But the one-armed porter was positive on the subject, and 
 her little ladyship went back. This last communication proved 
 a puzzling one. 
 
 "You there?" 
 
 " I am Lady Hannah Wrynche. Where are you ? " 
 
 There was a brief hesitation. A thickish man's voice said : 
 
 " I don't know as that matters." 
 
 " Who are you ? " 
 
 There was another hesitation. Then the stranger parried 
 with a question: 
 
 "You wrote them weekly screeds in the Siege Gazette?" 
 
 " I am responsible for some of the social paragraphs. Kindly 
 say who is speaking?" 
 
 " Nobody that matters much. Can you tell me w r here Miss 
 Mildare lives ? "
 
 420 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Not without knowing who you are." 
 
 " You may call me an old friend of hers," said the thickish, 
 lisping voice, with a sluggish chuckle in it that the little woman 
 at the other end of the wire had heard . . . where? . . . 
 
 " If you are an old friend of the young lady you mention, 
 how is it you don't know her address? " she demanded. 
 
 " Keep her address all you want to. Only next time you 
 come alongside her give her a message for me. Ask her if she 
 remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, five days' trek 
 from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her friend? " 
 
 Lady Hannah repeated: 
 
 " ' And Bough, who was her friend.' You are 
 Bough ?" 
 
 " Click! " Bough hung up the receiver. 
 
 Lady Hannah spent another bad night, not wholly due to 
 the indigestive influence of a dinner of mule colloped, and 
 locusts fried in batter by Nixey's chef. Staggering in the course 
 of disturbed and changeful dreams, under the impact of suffi- 
 cient bricks and mortar to rebuild toppledown Gueldersdorp, 
 being hauled over mountains of coals, and getting into whole 
 Gulf Streams of hot water, she was slumberously conscious 
 that these nightmares were less harassing than one nasty, per- 
 plexing little vision that kept cropping up among the others. 
 It had no beginning and no end. In it the Matron's room at 
 the Convalescent Hospital and Kink's Family Hotel at Twei- 
 pans were somehow mixed up, and the ingenuous Mr. Van 
 Busch, that Afrikander gentleman of British sympathies, whose 
 chivalrous and patriotic sentiments had prompted and urged 
 him to the impelling of his own skin and the risking of his own 
 liberty in the interests of an English lady masquerading for 
 political reasons as the refugee widow of a German drummer, 
 oddly confused in identity with an uncomfortably mysterious 
 individual who possessed neither features nor name. 
 
 " Ask her if she remembers the Free State Hotel on the veld, 
 five days' trek from Dreipoort, and Bough, who was her 
 friend ? " the voice would say. 
 
 " You are Bough ? " she would find herself asking. 
 
 There would be a little guttural, horrible laugh, and nothing 
 would answer but the buzzing of the wire. 
 
 And then she was wide awake and sitting up in bed, with a 
 thumping heart. She was no longer in any doubt as to the 
 identity of the owner of the voice. Van Busch was in Guel-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 421 
 
 dersdorp . . . and however he came, and whatever disguise 
 of person or of purpose sheltered him, his presence boded no 
 good. The merely logical masculine mind doffs hat respect- 
 fully before the superiority of feminine intuition. 
 
 XLVIII 
 
 SAXHAM, shouldering out of Julius's Hotel upon his way to 
 Staff Bombproof South, is made aware that the hundred-foot- 
 high dust-storm that has raged and swirled throughout the 
 morning is in process of being beaten down into a porridge of 
 red mud by a downpour of April rain. 
 
 Straight as Matabele spears it comes down, sending pedes- 
 trians who have grown indifferent to shell-fire to huddle under 
 cover, adding to the wretchedness of life in trench or bomb- 
 proof as nothing else can. And the Doctor, biting hard upon 
 the worn stem of the old briar-root, as he goes swinging along 
 through the hissing deluge w r ith his chin upon his breast and 
 his fierce eyes sullenly fixed upon the goal ahead, recalls, even 
 more vividly than upon Sunday, the angry buffalo of Lady 
 Hannah's apt analogy. 
 
 He is drenched to the skin, it goes without saying, in a 
 minute or two. So is the Railway Volunteer, who challenges 
 him at the bridge that carries the single-gauge railway south- 
 ward over the Opolo, in spite of his ragged waterproof and an 
 additional piece of tarpaulin. So is a mounted officer of the 
 Staff, in whom Saxham mechanically recognizes Captain Bingo 
 Wrynche, as he goes at a furious gallop, spurring and jagging 
 savagely at the mouth of the handsome if over-thin brown 
 charger, who sends stones and mud and water flying from his 
 furious iron-shod hoofs. So is the Barala on guard at the wat- 
 tled palisade of the native chief's house a muddy-legged and 
 goose-fleshy warrior, in a plumed, brimless bowler and leopard- 
 skin karye, whose teeth can be heard chattering as he stands 
 to attention and brings his gaspipe rifle to the slope. The 
 Chinamen working in the patches of market-garden, where the 
 scant supply of vegetables that command such famine-prices, are 
 sheltered from the wet in some measure by their colossal um- 
 brella-hats, but the slashed-up red gravel has imbrued them 
 to the eyes. Yet they continue to labour cheerfully, hoeing 
 scattered shell-fragments out of the green mealies, and removing 
 incrusted masses of bullets that incommode the young kidney-
 
 422 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 beans, and arranging this ironmongery and metal-ware in tiny 
 piles, possibly with a view to future commerce. And so, with 
 another challenge from a picket, posted between the Barala 
 village and the south trenches, where many of the loyal natives 
 are doing duty, Saxham finds himself on the perilous tongue 
 of land that lies behind Maxim Kopje South, and where the 
 Staff Bombproof is situated. 
 
 As the long, low mound comes into view, a dazzling white 
 flash leaps from a fold of the misty grey hills beyond, and one 
 of Meisje's great shells goes screaming and winnowing west- 
 ward. Then a sentry of the Irregulars, a battered, shaggy s 
 berr}'-brown trooper, standing knee-deep in a hole, burrowed 
 in the lee of a segment of stone-dyke that is his shelter, chal- 
 lenges for the last time. 
 
 " 'Alt! I know you well enough, Doctor." It is a man 
 whose wounded arm, was dressed, one blazing day last January, 
 outside the Convent bombproof. " But you'll 'ave to give the 
 countersign. Pass Honour and all's well. But " the sentry's 
 nostrils twitch as the savour of Saxham's pipe reaches them, 
 and his whisper of appeal is as piercing as a yell " if you left 
 a pipeful be'ind you, it wouldn't do no 'arm. Don't, pull your 
 pouch out, sir; the lookout officer 'as 'is eye on you. Open it 
 by the feel, an' drop a pinch by the stone near your toe. I'll 
 get it when they relieve me." 
 
 Saxham complies, leaving the sentry to gloat distantly over 
 the little brown lump of loose tangled fibres rapidly reducing 
 to sponginess under the downpour from the skies. The long 
 mound of raw red earth, crusted with greenish yellow streaks 
 of lyddite from the bursting charges, rises now immediately 
 before him. At its eastern end is a flag-staff displaying the 
 Union Jack. Under the roof of the little penthouse from which 
 the flagstaff rises are sheltered the vari-coloured acetylene lamps 
 that are used for signalling at night. 
 
 Midway of the raw mound rises the rear elevation of an 
 officer in dripping waterproofs, who is looking steadily through 
 a telescope out. between the long driving lances of the rain, 
 beyond Maxim Kopje South to those mysterious hills, swathed 
 in grey-black folds of storm-cloud, that look so desolate, and 
 whose folds are yet as full of swarming, active, malignant life 
 as the blanket of an unwashed Kaffir. An N.C.O. is posted a 
 little below the officer, whose narrow shoulders and dark hair, 
 showing above the edge of the turned-up collar and below the 
 brim of the Field-Service cap, show him to be not Beauvayse.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 423 
 
 And the usual blizzard of rifle-fire, varied by brisk bursts of 
 cannonading, goes on, and the Red Scythe of the Destroyer 
 sweeps over these two figures and about them in the customary 
 way. But even women and children have grown indifferent 
 to these things, and the men have long ceased to be aware of 
 them. 
 
 A bullet sings past Saxham's ear, as the acrid exhalations of 
 a stable rise gratefully to his nostrils, recently saluted by the 
 fierce and clamorous smells of the native village. The ground 
 slopes under his feet. He goes down the inclined way that 
 ends in the horses' quarters, and the orderly, who is sitting on 
 an empty ammunition-box outside the tarpaulin that screens 
 off the interior of the officer's shelter, stiffens to the salute, 
 receives a brief message, and disappears within. 
 
 Before Saxham rise the bony brown and bay and chestnut 
 hindquarters of half a dozen lean horses, that are drowsing or 
 fidgeting before their emptied mangers. Against the division 
 of a loose-box that holds a fine brown charger, still saddled and 
 steaming, and heavily splashed with mud, there leans a stretcher 
 which, by the ominous red stains and splashes upon it, has been 
 recently in use. 
 
 Upon Saxham's left hand is the shelter for the rank and 
 file. Here several gaunt, hollow-eyed, and hairy troopers are 
 sitting on rough benches at a trestle-table, playing dominoes and 
 draughts, or poring over tattered books by the light of the 
 flickering oil-lamps, with tin reflectors, that hang against the 
 earth walls. None of them are smoking, though several are 
 sucking vigorously at empty pipes; and the rapacious light that 
 glares in every eye as Saxham mechanically knocks out the 
 ashes from his smoked-out briar-root against the side-post of the 
 entrance is sufficient witness to the pangs they endure. 
 
 Perhaps it is characteristic of the Doctor that, with a hell 
 of revenge and fury seething in his heart, and a legion of devils 
 unloosed and shrieking, prompting him to murder, he should 
 have paused to relieve the tobacco-famine of the sentry, and be 
 moved to a further sacrifice of his sole luxury by the sight of 
 those empty pipes. The old rubber pouch, pitched by a cricketer's 
 hand, flies in among the domino-players, and rebounds from a 
 pondtting head, as the orderly comes back, and lifts one corner 
 of the tarpaulin for the Doctor to pass in. A pack of ravening 
 wolves tussling over an unusually small baby might distantly 
 reproduce the horrid scene he leaves behind him. The trestle- 
 table and benches are upset, and men and benches, draughts and
 
 424 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 dominoes, welter in horrible confusion over the earthern floor, 
 when the horrified orderly-corporal rushes in to quell the riot, 
 and thenceforward joins the rioters. 
 
 They fight like wolves, but the man who rises up from 
 among the rest, clutching the prize, and grinning a three-cor- 
 nered grin because his upper lip is split, divides the tobacco 
 fairly to the last thread. They even share out the india-rubber 
 pouch, and chew the pieces as long as the flavour lasts. When 
 the thick, fragrant smoke curls up from the lighted pipes, it 
 steals round the edges of the tarpaulin that. has dropped behind 
 Saxham, passing in to the wreaking of vengeance upon the thief 
 whose profane and covetous hand has plucked the white lily of 
 the Convent garden. 
 
 Now, with that deadly hate surging in his veins, with the 
 lust to kill tingling in every nerve and muscle, he will scon 
 stand in the presence of his enemy, and hers. As he thinks of 
 this, suddenly a bell rings. The sound comes from the north, 
 BO it cannot be the bell of the Catholic Church, or that of the 
 Protestant Church, or the bell of the Wesleyan meeting-house, 
 or of the Dutch Kerk. 
 
 " Clang-clang! clang-clang! Clang " 
 
 The last clang is broken off suddenly, as though the rope has 
 been jerked from the ringer's hands, but Saxham is not di- 
 verted by it from his occupation. With that curious fatuity 
 to which the most logical of us are prone, he has been conning 
 over the brief, scorching sentences with which he means to 
 strip the other man's deception bare to the light, and make 
 known his own self-appointed mission to avenge her. 
 
 " They telephoned for me, and I have come, but not in the 
 interests of your sick or wounded men. Because it. was imper- 
 ative that I should say this to you: Your engagement to Miss 
 Mildare and your approaching marriage to her were announced 
 in to-day's Siege Gazette. You have received many congratu- 
 lations. Now take mine liar, and coward, and cheat!" 
 
 And with each epithet, delivered with all the force of Sax- 
 ham's muscular arm, shall fall a stinging blow of the heavy 
 old hunting-crop. There will be a shout, an angry oath from 
 Beauvayse, staggering back under the unexpected, savage chas- 
 tisement, red bars marring the insolent, high-bred beauty of the 
 face that has deceived her. 
 
 Other men, if any happen to be present, will cry out, swear, 
 interfere, or attempt to. Saxham will shake their grip from his 
 arms and shoulders, and push them aside as he goes on.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 425 
 
 "You approached this innocent, inexperienced girl as a lover. 
 You represented yourself to her and to her guardian as a single 
 man. All this when you had already a wife at home in Eng- 
 land a gaudy stage butterfly sleek with carrion- juices, whose 
 wings are jewelled by the vices of men, and who is worthy of 
 you, as you are of her. I speak as I can prove. Here is the 
 written testimony of a reliable witness to your marriage with 
 Miss Lavigne. And now you will go to her and show yourself 
 to her in your true colours. You will undeceive her, or " 
 
 There is a foggy uncertainty about what is to follow after 
 that " or." But the livid flames of the burning hell that is in 
 Saxham throw upon the greyness a leaping reflection that is 
 red like blood. A fight to the death, either with weapons, or, 
 best of all, with the bare hands, is what Saxhani secretly lusts 
 for, and savours in anticipation as he goes. 
 
 Let the humanitarian say what he pleases. Man is a man- 
 slayer by instinct and by will. And within the little area of 
 this beleaguered town do not men kill, and are not men killed 
 every day? The conditions are medieval, fast relapsing into 
 the primeval. The modern sanctity and inviolability attending 
 and surrounding human life are at a discount. Even for chil- 
 dren, the grim King of Terrors had become a bugaboo to laugh 
 at ; red wounds and ghastly sights are things of everyday experi- 
 ence; there is a slump in mortality. 
 
 In those old, far-distant Chilworth Street days, two men 
 who engaged in a battle to the death about a woman might 
 have seemed hardy savages to Saxham. Here things are dif- 
 ferent. The elemental bed-rock of human nature has been laid 
 bare, and the grim, naked scars upon it, testifying to the com- 
 bat of Ice and Fire for the round world's supremacy, will never 
 be quite hidden under Civilization's green mantle of vegetation, 
 or her toadstool growths of brick and mortar, any more. 
 
 And the men are well matched. Saxham knows himself the 
 more muscular, but Beauvayse has the advantage of him in 
 years, and is lithe, and strong, and supple as the Greek wrestler 
 who served the sculptor Polycleitos as a model for the athlete 
 with the Diadem. 
 
 It will be a fight worth having. No quarter. The Doc- 
 tor's breath comes heavily, and his blue eyes have in them a 
 steely glitter, and, as the tarpaulin falls behind him, he shifts 
 to a better grip on the strong old hunting-crop. 
 
 Overhead the rain drums deafeningly on the tarpaulins. The 
 long bomb-proof is heterogeneously furnished with full and
 
 426 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 empty ammunition-boxes marked A.O.S., a leathern sofa-divan, 
 ragged with spurs and marked by muddy boots, several cane 
 or canvas deck-chairs, and others of the Windsor pattern com- 
 mon to the barrack-room. Arms and accoutrements are in 
 rude racks against the corrugated-iron-panelled walls; a trestle- 
 table covered with oilcloth runs down the middle. It is lighted 
 by a couple of acetylene lamps hanging by their chains from 
 iron bars that cross the trench above, and there is another lamp, 
 green-shaded, upon a bare deal table that stands, strewn with 
 papers, against the farther wall. 
 
 A man in shirt-sleeves sits there writing. Another man is 
 busy at a telephone that is fixed against the wall beyond the 
 writing-table. There is something fateful and ominous about 
 the heavy silence in which they do their work. It is broken 
 only by a strange sound that comes almost continuously from 
 where Saxham does not trouble to ask. It is the groaning, 
 undoubtedly, of the wounded man to whose aid he has been 
 summoned, with the added injunction, " Bring morphia," show- 
 ing that little further can be done for him, whoever he may be, 
 than to smooth his passage into the Beyond by the aid of the 
 Pain Slayer. 
 
 Let him wait, however sore his need, until Saxham has dealt 
 with his enemy. He is resentfully impatient in the realization 
 that neither of the men present is Beauvayse. 
 
 Then, as he stands sullen and lowering, the man who has 
 been writing gets up and comes to him. Saxham recognizes 
 the keen-featured face with the rusty-brown moustache, and the 
 grip of the lean, hard hand that hauled a Dop Doctor out of the 
 Slough of Despair is familiar. The pleasant voice he likes say? 
 something about somebody being very wet. It is Saxham, from 
 whose soaked garments the water is running in streams, and 
 whose boots squelch as he crosses the carpet that has been spread 
 above the floor-tarpaulin. The friendly hand pours out 
 and offers him a sparing measure of that rare stimulant, 
 whisky. 
 
 " As preventive medicine. We can't have our Medical Staff 
 men on the sick-list." 
 
 Some such commonplace words accompany the proffered 
 hospitality. 
 
 " I shall not suffer, thanks. You have a shell casualty, you 
 have 'phoned us, but before I see your man it is imperative that 
 I should speak to Lord Beauvayse. Where is he ? " 
 
 " He is here."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 42? 
 
 " My business with him is urgent." 
 
 The man at. the telephone makes a sound indicative that a 
 message is coming through. The Chief is beside him instantly, 
 with the receiver at his ear. He looks round for an instant at 
 Saxham as he waits for the intelligence, and the muscles of his 
 face twitch as if under the influence of some strong, repressed 
 emotion, and the Doctor's practised glance notes the unsteadi- 
 ness of the uplifted hand. Then he is saying to the officer in 
 charge at Maxim Kopje South. 
 
 " The ammunition comes up to-night. Tell Gaylord that 
 we are short-handed here, and shall want him to help on night 
 duty. . . . Practically as soon as he can join us. No, no 
 better. All for the present . . . thanks. Saxham please come 
 this way." 
 
 There is a sleeping place at the end of the long, narrow, 
 lamp-lit perspective, curtained off from the rude bareness of 
 the outer place. Light shows between the curtains, and they 
 are of plush, in hue a rich, deep red. As that strong colour 
 sinks into his brain, through his intent and glittering eyes, 
 Saxham the man has a sudden furious impulse to tear the deep 
 folds back, with a clash of rings on iron rods, and call to the 
 betrayer who lurks behind them to come out and be dealt with. 
 But a hollow, feeble moaning sounds continuously from the 
 other side, and Saxham the Doctor stays his hand and follows 
 the Colonel in. There are two camp-beds in the small sleep- 
 ing-place, and a washstand and a folding-chair. A lamp hangs 
 above, and its light falls full upon the face of the man whom 
 he is seeking. 
 
 Ah, where are they? His furious anger and his deadly 
 hate, where are they now? Like snow upon the desert they 
 vanish away. How can one rage against this shattered thing, 
 stretched on the pallet of the low cot-bed from which the 
 blankets have been stripped away? First Aid bandages have 
 been not ineffectually applied. Fragments of packing-case 
 have been employed as splints for the broken arm and shattered 
 hand, but, in spite of all that has been done, the beautiful 
 young life is sinking, waning, flowing out with that ruddy tide 
 that will not be stayed. 
 
 The greenish pallor and the dusky sweat of mortal agony 
 are upon his face, thrown back upon the pillow, and looking 
 upwards to where the tropical rain makes thunder on the tar- 
 paulined roof. The atmosphere is heavy with the sour-sickly 
 smell of blood, and lamp-fumes; he draws each breath
 
 428 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 laboriously, and exhales it with a whistling sound. Through 
 his clenched teeth, revealed by the lips that are dragged back 
 in the semi-grin of desperate agony, that dumb, ceaseless moan- 
 ing makes its way despite the gallant effort to restrain it. The 
 one uninjured arm hangs downwards, its restless fingers pick- 
 ing at the bloodstained matting that covers the loose boards of 
 the floor. A sheet has been lightly laid over him. It is dab- 
 bled with the prevailing hue, and sinks in an ominous hollow 
 below the breast. And beyond the bottom of it splashed 
 leggings and muddy boots with spurs on them stick out with 
 helpless stiffness. 
 
 A flask of brandy a precious restorative treasured for use 
 in such desperate need as this stands with a tumbler and a 
 jug of water on the camp washstand that is between the two 
 cot-beds. Upon the second bed sits a big and stoutish man, 
 whose large face, not pink just now, is hidden in his thick, 
 quivering hands. It is Captain Bingo Wrynche, heavy 
 Dragoon, and honest, single-hearted gentleman, to whom be- 
 longs the blown and muddy charger drooping in the loose-box 
 outside. The telephone has summoned him in haste from 
 Hotchkiss Outpost North, to see the last of a friend. 
 
 XLIX 
 
 " IT was just before the rainstorm that it happened. He was 
 on the lookout. They have been moving the big gun and the 
 i6-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-Nordenfeldt. 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 art- 
 eries ligatured. Beyond that there is nothing else to do, 
 though he may live till morning."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 429 
 
 " 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 recogni- 
 tion 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 or 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 burst- 
 ing 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, and kisses him 
 solemnly and clumsily upon the forehead; and Captain Bingo, 
 when he goes heavily striding out of the bomb-proof with his 
 bulldog jowl well down upon his chest; and Captain Bingo, 
 bucketing the lean brown charger through the thrashing hail- 
 storm that is jagged across by the white-green fires of burst- 
 ing shell, is rather a tragic figure. 
 
 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 groan- 
 ing, and then he is aware that the groans are his own. He is 
 conscious that a needle-prick in the sound wrist, has been fol- 
 lowed by sensible relief. The unspeakable grinding agonies
 
 430 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 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, to wander over 
 all the past. Could Saxham, sitting motionless and vigilant on 
 the folding-chair, his keen eyes quick to note each change, his 
 deft hand prompt to do all that can be done could Saxham 
 hear, he would behold, anatomized before his mental vision, 
 the soul of this his fellow-man. 
 
 " 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. " Some- 
 thing to say, 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 m-usth 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 dread- 
 nought cap, comes noiselessly in. " No change." Saxham 
 answers to the mute inquiry. " I anticipate none before mid- 
 night. 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 re- 
 covers 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,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 431 
 
 illuminated only with the malignant coruscations of lyddite 
 bursting-charges. But the tempest without is nothing to the 
 tempest that rages in the soul of the quiet man in sodden 
 khaki who watches by the deathbed. 
 
 She has been sent for. . . . She is coming . . . To kneel 
 by the bed 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 he 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 go- 
 ing 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 hol- 
 low on the earth-covered boards of the covered 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. 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 accom- 
 panied by the clinking of crockery and tin pannikins, announce 
 a meal in readiness, and would-be hosts come to rhe curtains 
 and anxiously beg him to take food, he merely shakes his square 
 black head and falls again to watching the unconscious face. 
 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-wag- 
 ging. Whatever they say about me . . . she'll be the one to 
 suffer e 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
 
 432 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 is as electric as strong sympathy. With a leap of understand- 
 ing, and a fresh surge of mad, resentment Saxham acknowl- 
 edges 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 Doctor beside 
 the bed of death. 
 
 His sudden irrepressible movement has knocked a 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 loath- 
 ing. But Saxham the Doctor stoops over him, saying, in dis- 
 tinct, 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 mor- 
 phia 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."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 433 
 
 There is silence. And she does not come. The man on 
 the bed makes a painful effort, gathering his nigh-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. 
 
 "/ would gladly shake the hand of the man who insulted 
 me and who had apologized. 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, uncon- 
 querable sincerity admit of his taking the hand. He fights 
 \vith 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 uncer- 
 tainties. The blue lips dabbled with foam can frame no 
 more coherent words. Only the brain behind the dying eyes 
 is alive to understand when Saxham approaches his own livid 
 face and blazing eyes to the face upon the pillow, and says: 
 
 " 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.
 
 434 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " 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 the housekeeper at Underose Cot- 
 tage. 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 de- 
 mands 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 be- 
 trayed you." 
 
 That " never " of Saxham 's carries conviction. The pale 
 ghost of a laugh is in the dying eyes. The wraith of Beau- 
 vayse'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 rat- 
 tling 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 com- 
 fortless camp-bed, where the hope of a high old House is flick- 
 ering 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 rattling 
 gasps; the beautiful eyes are rolled up and inwards. The 
 light is very nearly out, when, with a last effort, the flame leaps 
 up. He thinks that what is the barely perceptible whisper 
 of a voice already earth is a loud and ringing cheer. He 
 thinks that he is shouting, his strong young voice topping a 
 hundred other voices. It seems to him who, for the bribe of 
 all the beauty he has coveted, and all the love that is yet un- 
 won, could not speak one audible word or move a finger, that 
 he waves his hat again and again. Oh, glorious moment when 
 the white moonbeams blink on the grey dust-wall rolling down
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 435 
 
 from the North, and the horsemen of the Advance ride out 
 of it, and clustering enemies that have rallied again to the at- 
 tack waver, and disperse, and scatter. . . . 
 
 "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 ter- 
 rible 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 ges- 
 ture, the blazing eyes, the livid, furrowed face, the writhen 
 mouth, the furious, jarring voice, leave little doubt of the ven- 
 geance that will be wreaked when he shall track down the 
 murderer. He wheels abruptly, and goes to the telephone. 
 The swift, imperative orders vault from fort to fort; the cir- 
 cuit of vigilance is made complete, the human bloodhounds un-
 
 436 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 leashed 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 withering night of storm, has al- 
 ready pierced the lines. Subsequently that excellent Afri- 
 kander, Mr. Van Busch, rejoins Bronnckers' bright boy at 
 Tweipans with information that decides the date of the Feint 
 from the East 
 
 SHE had gone about her Master's business all Monday, calm 
 and composed, and inexorably gentle. She did not meet 
 Richard's daughter before nightfall. " She will not suffer 
 now," she thought, even as she sent the message that was to 
 allay Lynette's anxiety, and give notice of her whereabouts 
 in case of need. Her mission led her to a half-wrecked shanty 
 at the south end of the town, where some Lithuanian emigrants 
 herded together in indescribable filth and misery. A woman 
 who had been recently confined lay there raving in puerperal 
 fever. Until nightfall, when she was removed to the Women's 
 Hospital on the veld, near the Laager of the Women, the 
 Mother-Superior remained with the patient. 
 
 A burly, bushy-bearded man, with a peculiarly dark skin 
 and strange light eyes, passing the broken window, caught 
 sight of the noble profile and the stately shoulders stooping 
 above the miserable bed. Going home at dark, the Mother 
 heard a stealthy footstep following behind her. 
 
 Since the Town Guard had been withdrawn to man the 
 trenches, many people, revisiting their deserted dwellings, had 
 found them plundered of movable possessions, and, losing the 
 fear of Eternity in wrath at the wholesale evaporation of their 
 worldly goods, had thenceforth remained to protect, them. In- 
 stances there had been of robbery from the person by thieves 
 not all tracked down by Martial Justice and made examples 
 of. 
 
 The hovering human night-bird and the prowling human 
 jackal, whose sole end is money and money's worth, have no 
 terrors for Holy Poverty. But there are other creatures of 
 prey more terrible than these. And the padding footsteps that 
 followed, hurrying when she hurried and slackening when she
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 437 
 
 went more slowly, and stopping dead when she stopped and 
 looked round, conveyed to her a haunting scene of something 
 sinister, and at the same time greedy and guileful, that bided its 
 time to spring. 
 
 She moved in long, swift, undulating rushes, her black robes 
 sweeping noiselessly as a great moth's wings over the well- 
 known ground, her course kept unfalteringly; but her heart 
 shook her, and she gasped as the Convent bomb-proof neared 
 in sight. She had wrought much and suffered more of late, 
 and she knew herself less strong than she had been. When the 
 blue light that hung from a post by the ladder-hole blinked 
 " Home " through the mirk of a night of thin rain and 
 mist-shrouded stars, she knew infinite relief. Her great eyes 
 were as wild and strained as a hunted deer's, and her bosom 
 heaved with her panting breaths. She paused a moment to 
 regain her composure before she went down. 
 
 The nuns who were not on night-duty were gathered to- 
 gether about the trestle-table sewing, while the lay-Sisters pre- 
 pared the scanty evening meal. Lynette was there, sitting pale 
 and quiet on her corner-stool. Richard's daughter had been 
 watching and waiting for her Mother. Ah, to see the re- 
 lief and gladness leap into the dear face, and shine in the 
 beautiful wistful eyes that had shed such tears, dear God! 
 such tears of anguish upon Sunday and then had dried at the 
 utterance of her decree 
 
 " You are never to tell him." 
 
 And changed into radiant stars of joy, by whose light the 
 darkness of her own wickedness and misery seemed almost 
 bearable. 
 
 " It is the Mother. Mother " 
 
 Lynette sprang up, and would have hurried to her, but the 
 Mother lifted a warning hand, and calling Sister Tobias to 
 her, passed aside into a curtained-off and precautionary cave that 
 had been hollowed out behind the ladder. This was the cus- 
 tom when the ladies of the Holy Way returned from doubtful 
 or infectious cases. Lynette sighed, and went back to her stool 
 to wait. The needles had not ceased stitching. 
 
 That humble saint, Sister Tobias, hurried to her diligent 
 ministry of purification. When she came in with hot. water 
 and carbolic spray, she brought a letter with her. It was di- 
 rected to the Mother in a coarse round hand. 
 
 " Somebody dropped this down the ladder-hole as I came 
 by with my kettle," said Sister Tobias. " It's the first letter-
 
 438 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 box I ever knew that was as wide as the door. Maybe 'twill 
 bring in a new fashion, for all we know." She made her 
 homely joke with a sore heart for the sorrow she read in the 
 Mother's beloved face, and trotted away to fetch clean towels, 
 saying a favourite saying with Sister Tobias that her head 
 would never save her heels. 
 
 The Mother opened the letter. It was anonymous, and 
 utterly vile. Had the pen been dipped in liquid ordure, the 
 thing written could not have been more defiling to the touch 
 than its meaning was to this pure woman's chaste eyes. Had 
 a puff-adder writhed out of the envelope, and struck its fangs 
 into the beautiful hand, it would have poisoned her less cer- 
 tainly. And every beat of the obscene words upon the brain, 
 strangely enough, awoke an echo of those long padding footsteps 
 that had followed in the dark. And their owner knew of all 
 that had happened at the tavern on the veld, when a human 
 brute had triumphed in his bestiality, and a girl-child had been 
 helpless, and the great white stars had looked down unmoved 
 and changeless upon Innocence destroyed. 
 
 The Mother read the letter from the loathly beginning to the 
 infamous end. She had been sorely wrought upon of late. 
 She tried to pray, but she knew the Ear Above must be averted 
 from one who had lied and was in deadly sin. . . . When 
 Sister Tobias came back she found her lying in a swoon. 
 
 The little old crooked, nimble Sister, with the long, pale 
 sheep-face, dropped on her knees beside that prone column of 
 stately womanhood, removed the hooded mantle, loosened her 
 guimpe and habit, and worked strenuously to revive her, drop- 
 ping tears. 
 
 " My beautiful, my poor lamb ! " she crooned. " What's 
 come to her? What wicked shadow's black on all of us? 
 What's brooding near us Mary be our guardian! that's 
 struck at her to-night?" 
 
 The letter lay upon the floor, where it had dropped from 
 the unconscious hand. It lay there for Sister Tobias, and 
 might lie. If the Mother willed to tell its contents, she would 
 tell. If not, the little old nun, her faithful daughter, would 
 never ask or seek to know. 
 
 She opened her great eyes at last, and smiled up at the tender, 
 wrinkled ugliness of the long, sheep-like face in the close white 
 linen guimpe. 
 
 " Say nothing to anybody. I was overdone," she said, and 
 rose. Sister Tobias picked up the letter, and gave it to her.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 439 
 
 There was a Boer mutton-fat candle flaring smellily in an iron 
 sconce upon the wall. The Mother moved across the little 
 room, and burned the letter to the last blank corner, and trod 
 the fallen ashes into impalpable powder. Then she helped 
 Sister Tobias to remove every trace left, and obviate every 
 danger that might result from her late toil, and rejoined her 
 quret family of daughters as though nothing had happened. 
 
 They recalled afterwards how cheerful and how placid she 
 had seemed that night. Her smile had a heart-breaking sweet- 
 ness, and her voice made wonderful melody even in their ac- 
 customed ears. 
 
 They supped on the little that they had, and chatted, said 
 the night prayers, and went aching, all of them, with unsatis- 
 fied hunger to bed. You may conjecture the orderly, modest 
 method of retiring, each Sister vanishing in turn behind a cur- 
 tained screen to disrobe, lave, and vest herself for sleep, emerg- 
 ing in due time in the loose, full conventual night-garment of 
 thick white twilled linen, high-throated, monkish-sleeved, and 
 girdled with a thin cotton cord, her face, plain or pretty, young 
 or elderly, framed in the close little white drawn cap of many 
 tucks. 
 
 Then, the ladder having been removed, and the tarpaulin 
 pulled over its hole, the lights were extinguished, and only the 
 subdued crimson glow of the tiny lamp that burned before the 
 silver Crucifix that had stood above the Tabernacle on the altar 
 of the Convent Chapel burned ruby in the thick, hot dark, 
 where, upon the little iron beds, each divided by a narrow, 
 white-cotton-covered board into two constricted berths, the row 
 of quiet figures lay outstretched, her Breviary upon every 
 Sister's pillow, and her beads about her wrist. 
 
 The Mother lay very still, seeing the hideous phrases of the 
 anonymous letter written in hellish characters of mocking flame 
 on the background of the dark. She prayed as the wrecked 
 may when the ship beneath their feet is going down. Beside 
 her Lynette, not. daring to disturb the silence, suddenly grown 
 rigid and awful, lay aching with the loneliness of living on the 
 other side of the wide gulf of division that had suddenly 
 yawned between. 
 
 She had spent the day at the Hospital with Sister Hilda- 
 Antony and Sister Cleophee. She had not seen Beauvayse. 
 But a note had come from him, that had warmed the heart she 
 hid it near. His dearest, he called her his own beautiful be- 
 loved. He could not snatch a minute from duty even to kiss
 
 440 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 his darling's sweetest eyes, but on Sunday they would be to- 
 gether all day. And would she not meet him at the Convent 
 on Thursday, at twilight, when the shelling stopped, and it 
 would be safe for his beloved to venture there ? She must not 
 come alone. Dear old Sister Tobias would bring her, and play 
 Mrs. Grundy's part. And, with a thousand kisses, he was 
 hers in life and death. 
 
 Her first love-letter, and it seemed to her so beautiful. It 
 laid a hand upon her heart that thrilled, and was warm and 
 strong. The hand said " Mine." 
 
 His. She would be his one day soon ; and there would be 
 no more mysteries between the man and the woman welded by 
 God's ordinance into husband and wife. She shivered a little 
 at the thought of that intimate, peculiar, utter oneness. And 
 then, with a sickening, horrible sinking of the heart, she realized 
 that, however well such a secret as that she guarded might be 
 hidden before the priest and the clergyman made they twain 
 One, it must be known of both afterwards, or else be for ever 
 threatening to start through the burying earth, crying, " I am 
 here. How came you to forget?" 
 
 She had been cold in the sultry heat of that long noon, and 
 deaf when voices spoke to her. She was thinking. . . . How 
 if she might be mistaken in him, even now ? He was beautiful 
 and brave and alluring to her woman's sense in what she knew 
 of him, and what was yet to know. He called her and drew 
 her. Nothing noble awakened in her at the smile on the gay, 
 bold lips and in the grey-green, jewel-bright eyes. When he 
 had held her to his heart, she had not felt her soul merge with 
 another, its fellow, and yet. stronger and greater, in that em- 
 brace. He and she were not bodiless spirits floating in pure 
 ether, but an earth-made girl and boy, very much athirst for 
 the common cup of human rapture, hungry for the banquet of 
 mortal bliss. 
 
 It was sweet, but how if he were another, and not the one ? 
 How if her hasty gift of herself robbed both in the long end? 
 How if his headlong passion and tempestuous love should be 
 torn from him like rags in the first instant of that discovery 
 that must almost inevitably be made? She heard his boyish 
 voice crying, "Hateful! . . . You have deceived me!" and 
 was stabbed with quick anguish, knowing him in the right. 
 
 Men did not enter into marriage pure. By some unwritten 
 code of that strange Law-giver, the World, they were absolved 
 of the necessity of spotlessness. They might slake their thirst
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 441 
 
 at muddy sources unrebuked. And the more each wallowed, 
 the more he demanded of the woman he wedded that she should 
 be immaculate in thought and deed if in knowledge, that was 
 all the better. 
 
 What a cloud of doubts assailed her, swarming like bees, 
 settling in every blossomed branch of her mind, and blotting 
 it out with angry buzzing, furry bodies, armed with sharp stings 
 for punishment or revenge. She had seen a little peach-tree 
 weighted down and bowed to the red earth at its roots with the 
 weight of such a swarm. She felt at this juncture very like 
 the tree. A little more, only a slight increase of the burden, 
 and the slender trunk would have snapped. When the bee- 
 master came and shook the double swarm into a couple of hives, 
 the little tree stayed crooked. It did not regain its beautiful, 
 healthful uprightness for a long time. 
 
 The Mother had commanded her never to tell Beauvayse. 
 She realized that in this one sorrowful instance she was wiser 
 than her teacher. If unutterable misery was not to result from 
 their union, he must be told the truth before . . . 
 
 Once he knew it, would he love her any longer? Would 
 he desire to make her his wife ? She knitted her brows and her 
 fingers in anguish, and set her little teeth. Possibly not. 
 Probably not. 
 
 And supposing all went well and they were married. She 
 had not realized clearly, even when she talked of travelling 
 abroad into the unknown, conjectured world, what it would 
 mean to go out from this, the first home she had ever known, 
 and leave the Mother. She caught her breath, and her heart 
 stopped at the thought of waking up one morning in a new, 
 strange country, and knowing that dear face thousands of miles 
 away. 
 
 The loneliness drove her to daring. She reached out a 
 timid hand, and laid iii: upon the breast of the still, rigid, im- 
 movable figure beside her. Ah, what a leaping, striving, throb- 
 bing prisoner was caged there! A faint sob of surprise broke 
 from her. Ah, what was it ? what could it mean ? 
 
 The faint sound she uttered plucked at the strings of that 
 tortured heart. The Mother turned, rose upon her elbow, 
 leaned over the low dividing barrier, took the slight body in her 
 arms, and gathered it. closely to her, shielding it from the 
 fangs of that coiled, formless Terror that threatened in the 
 dark. She felt how thin and light it was, and how frail the 
 arms were that clung about _her, and how wasted was the
 
 442 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 face that pressed against the coarse, conventual linen, covering 
 the broad, deep bosom whose chaste and hidden beauties Fam- 
 ine had not spared. 
 
 She would be a real mother once just once. God would 
 not grudge her that. She bared her breast to the cheek with 
 a sudden half-savage, wholly maternal gesture, and drew it 
 close and pillowed it and rocked it. Had Heaven wrought 
 a miracle and unsealed those whit.e fountains of her spotless 
 womanhood, she would have found it sweet to give of herself 
 to Richard's starving child. But. she had nothing but her 
 great, indignant pity and her boundless agony of love. Long 
 hours after the face lay hushed in sleep above her heart, and 
 while the long, soft breaths of slumber went and came, she lay 
 staring out into the sinister blackness over the beloved, menaced 
 head. 
 
 Rain leaked through the tarpaulin over the ladder-hole, fall- 
 ing in heavy, sullen gouts and splashes on the beaten earth be- 
 low as blood drips from a desperate wound. That image rose, 
 and the blackness seemed all red red with those lines of fiery 
 writing on it, smoking and crawling, flickering and blazing, 
 climbing, and licking with thin greenish tongues of hell-begot- 
 ten flame. 
 
 Then the midnight hour struck, and it was time to rise for 
 Matins. Long after the Sisters had gone back to bed the 
 Mother knelt on, a motionless figure wrestling in silent prayer 
 before the silver Crucifix upon the wall. Dawn found her still 
 kneeling. No ray of heavenly light had found her soul, that 
 weltered in darkness, crying to One Who seemed not to hear. 
 
 LI 
 
 SHE did not venture to take Lynette with her to the Hospital 
 next day, but secretly charged Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda- 
 Antony to carry her whithersoever they went, and not once to 
 let her out of sight. This done, she knew herself impotently 
 helpless to do more. This strong and salient woman, lapped 
 in unseen, impalpable serpent-coils that tightened every hour, 
 was waxing weak. By her own deed she had barred out help 
 and put counsel far from her. She had known the punishment 
 would not be long in coming, when, for the sake of Richard's 
 daughter, she had lied to Richard's friend. 
 
 Now she knew, poor, noble, suffering soul, that it would
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 443 
 
 have been wiser to have saved her spotless garment from the 
 smirch by telling him the truth. Then she could have fought 
 this invisible tarantula Thing, with the conjectural hairy claws, 
 the baleful, glittering eyes, and the padding feet that dogged 
 her in the dark, with a strong man's arm to aid her. God was 
 in Heaven, and in Him were her faith and trust, but the com- 
 fort of a human counsellor would have been unspeakable, 
 
 In a purely spiritual difficulty she would have gone to 
 Father Wilx. The kindly, fussy, feeble little old priest could 
 hardly help her in this extremity. She had never told him 
 what had happened at the tavern on the veld. Deep in her 
 woman's pitying heart the child's cruel secret had been buried, 
 once learned. Sister Tobias was the only one who shared it. 
 
 Meanwhile she was followed that night and the next night; 
 and on the morning of the Thursday, when she rose from her 
 sleepless bed, another letter weighted with a stone had been 
 dropped down the ladder-hole. She was to give the anony- 
 mous writer a meeting and receive a message, unless she wished 
 them that chose to be nameless to lay in wait for the girL 
 Most likely that would be the better way. She would choose. 
 
 She burned the second viper-letter before she went to the 
 Hospital. She found the single sheet of the Siege Gazette 
 fluttering in every hand. Even her dignified reserve could not 
 ward off the well-meant congratulations, the eager questions, 
 the interested comments on the news contained in the three last 
 paragraphs of the column that was signed " Gold Pen." Then 
 came the telephone message from Lady Hannah. We know 
 what words of hers the wire carried back. All the more firm, 
 all the more courageous, all the more determined that her knees 
 shook, and her heart was as water within her. For the thing 
 that coiled in the dark would surely strike now. 
 
 Perhaps it was some premonition of approaching death that 
 made her, always gracious, always infinitely kind, untiring in 
 helpful deeds, move about among the sick that day, with sudi 
 a sorrowful-sweet tenderness for them in her noble face ami 
 in her gentle touch, and in that wood-dove's voice of hers, that 
 they spoke of it long afterwards with bated breath. A per- 
 fume as of rare incense was wafted from the folds of her veil, 
 they said, and a pale aureole of light shone about her white- 
 banded forehead, and her eyes Ah, who that met their 
 
 look could ever forget those eyes? 
 
 It was before twilight when she left the Hospital and went 
 to the Convent, a tall, upright, mantled and hooded figure,
 
 444 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 stepping through the heavy rain that had begun to fall, under 
 a quaint monster of a cotton umbrella with ribs of ancient 
 whale Tragedy carrying Farce. 
 
 It was not the custom to linger in the neighbourhood of the 
 Convent, even among those who were most indifferent to shot 
 and shell. No one was visible in its vicinity, except one burly, 
 bushy-bearded, dark-skinned man in tan-cords and a moleskin 
 jacket. He lounged against, a bent and twisted lamp-post, near 
 the broken entrance-gates, cutting up a lump of something that 
 might have been cake-tobacco upon his broad, thick palm with 
 a penknife. 
 
 She passed him as she went in. His slouched hat made 
 shadow for his eyes. But so curiously shallow and flat and 
 rusty pale were they against the purplish-brown of the full- 
 blooded, bearded face that their sharp, sly, sudden look as she 
 went by was as though the adder-fangs had slashed at her. She 
 knew it was the man who had written those two letters. And 
 something else she knew, but did not dare to admit her knowl- 
 edge even to herself as yet. 
 
 She mustered all her forces to meet what was coming as she 
 went up the broken stairs. The wind and the long, driving 
 lances of the rain came at her through the gaps in the walls. 
 The sky was a driving hurry of muddy vapours. The grey hills 
 were blotted out by mist and fog. Long flashes of white fire 
 leaped from them, and the heavy boom of cannon followed. 
 Then all would be still again. She passed down the white- 
 washed, matted, sodden corridor, and drew out the heavy key 
 of the Chapel door from a deep pocket under her black habit, 
 and went in. 
 
 Rain beat in here through jagged holes in the soft brickwork 
 and poured through the broken roof, whose rubbish littered 
 the floor. Whiter squares on the whitewashed walls, sodden 
 now with damp and peeling, showed where the pictures of the 
 stations of the Cross had hung; with them all draperies had been 
 stripped away and hidden. The crimson-velvet-covered ropes 
 that had done duty instead of altar-rails had been removed, their 
 brass supports unscrewed from the floor. The naked altar- 
 stone was covered with fragments of cheap stained-glass from 
 the little east window of which the Sisters had been so proud. 
 The Tabernacle gaped empty; sandy, reddish-grey dust filled 
 the tiny piscina, and lay thick upon the altar-stone and the 
 shallow wooden altar-steps, and wherever else the rain had not 
 reached it to turn it into yellow mud.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 445 
 
 Why had she come here? Because she felt as though the 
 Presence that had housed her under the veil of the Element 
 were still guarding Its descrated home. And near the door of 
 the tiny sacristy dangled the rope communicating with the bell 
 that hung as yet uninjured in the little wooden cupola upon 
 the roof. The bell could be rung, should need arise. She did 
 not formulate in thought what need. But the recollection of 
 those poisonous viper-eyes stirred even in that proud, dauntless 
 woman's bosom a cold and creeping fear. And when she heard 
 the padding, stealthy footsteps whose sound seemed burned in 
 upon her brain, traversing the soaked matting of the corridor, 
 she caught her breath, and an icy dew of anguish moistened 
 her shuddering flesh. 
 
 Then slowly the door-handle turned. He came in, shutting 
 it noiselessly after him. It was the man she had seen loafing 
 by the lamp-post. And, standing tall and forbidding on the 
 bare altar's uncarpeted step, she threw out her hand in a quick, 
 imperious gesture, forbidding his nearer approach. 
 
 For an instant the dignity and authority of the tall, black- 
 robed figure gave pause even to Bough. Then he touched his 
 wide-brimmed felt hat to her with a civility that was the very 
 pith of insolence, and took it off and shook the wet from it, 
 and dropped it back upon his head again. He leaned against 
 the wall by the door where there was a little holy-water font, 
 and stuck his gross, squat thumbs in his belt, and waited for her 
 to begin. Always did that when the woman was angry. Noth- 
 ing remained for any bloke to teach Bough about the sex. You 
 let her row a bit, and when she had done herself out, you put 
 in what you had got to say. That was Bough's way with them 
 always. 
 
 " You have written letters to me and followed me." 
 
 His grinning red mouth and tobacco-stained teeth showed 
 in the beard. He looked at her and waited. 
 
 "Why have you done this? And, now that you have 
 brought yourself into my sight, quitting the safe shelter of dark- 
 ness and anonymity, what is to hinder me from handing you 
 over to those who administer and enforce Martial Law in this 
 town, and will deal with you as you deserve? " 
 
 His light eyes glittered. His teeth showed again in the brown 
 bush. He spat upon the floor of the sacred place, and answered : 
 
 " That's all blow. How do I know what you mean about 
 writing letters and following? Who has seen me doing it? 
 Not one of the mob. I'm just a man that has come in off the
 
 446 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 road out of the rain. Maybe I have no business in this crib. 
 That's for you to say. . . . Maybe I have a message for some- 
 body you know. So you don't choose to give it, then that's for 
 her to hear." 
 
 He swung about in pretended haste, and laid his hand upon 
 the door. 
 
 " Stop," she said, with white lips. " You will not molest 
 the person to whom you refer. You will give your message 
 if it be one to me, and to to me alone." 
 
 " High and mighty," the ugly, wordless smile that faced 
 round on her again seemed to say. " But in a little I'll bring 
 you down off that. . . ." He spat again upon the Chapel 
 floor, and scratched his head under his hat, and began, like a 
 simple, good-natured fellow, a rough miner with a heart of 
 gold: 
 
 " No offence is meant, lady, and why should it be taken? " 
 
 She seemed to grow in height as she folded her arms in their 
 flowing black sleeves, and looked down upon him silently. The 
 boiling whirlpool in her breast mounted as it spun, stifling her. 
 But she was outwardly calm. He went smoothly on, with an 
 occasional display of red mouth and grinning teeth in the big 
 beard, and always that baleful glitter in his strange light eyes. 
 
 " I'm a man that, in the goodness of his heart, is always 
 doing jobs for other people, and never getting thanked for it. 
 I started to push my way up here, two hundred miles from 
 Diamond Town, three weeks back, with a letter from a woman 
 to her husband. She couldn't pay me nothing, poor old girl. 
 Said she'd pray for me to her dying day. There was a pal of 
 mine put up the grubstake. His name " his evil eyes were 
 glued upon her face "was Bough. You've heard that name 
 before?" 
 
 It was an assertion, not a question. The fierce rush of crim- 
 son to her brow, and the flame that leaped into her eyes, had 
 already spoken to her knowledge. She was deadly quiet, gather- 
 ing all her superb forces for a sudden lioness-spring. He went 
 on: 
 
 " He's a widower now, Bough, and well-to-do. Getting on 
 for rich. Got religion too, highly respected. Says Bough to 
 me, ' There's a young woman at the Convent at Gueldersdorp 
 that's not the sort for holy, praying ladies to have under their 
 roof, for all the glib slack-jaw she may have given them.' " 
 
 Her great eyes burned on him. 
 
 " Say what you have to say, and be brief. Go on."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 447 
 
 He shifted from one foot to the other, and licked his fleshy 
 lips. 
 
 " I've got to tell the story my own way, lady. Don't you 
 quarrel with it. Says Bough : ' They picked her up on the veld 
 seven years ago, a runaway in rags. As pretty a girl she was,' 
 says he, ' as you'd see in a month's trek, and from what I hear 
 they've made a lady of her.' " 
 
 Still silent and watchful, and her eyes upon him, searching 
 him, he went on: 
 
 ' ' However the years have changed her,' says Bough, ' you'll 
 spot her by her little feet and hands, and her slender shape, and 
 her big eyes, like yellow diamonds, and her hair, the colour of 
 dried tobacco-leaf in the sun. . . .' " 
 
 She quivered in every limb, and longed to shut her eyes and 
 shut out the intolerable sight of him, leering and lying there. 
 Had she not interrupted, she must have cried out. She 
 said : 
 
 " You tell me this man Bough is at Diamond Town?" 
 
 " I said he was there when I left. The young woman he 
 talked of was brought up at his place in Orange River Colony, 
 a nice respectable boarding-house and hotel for travelling 
 families on the veld between Driepoort and Kroonfontein. 
 Bough was good to the girl, and so was his wife, that's dead 
 since. Uncommon! Not that they had much of the dibs to 
 spend in those days. But, being an honest Christian man, 
 Bough treated the girl like his own. And right down bad she 
 served him." 
 
 He licked his thick lips again, and the flattish, light-hued 
 viper-eyes glittered. 
 
 " There was a bloke that used to hang around the place 
 kind of coloured loafer, with Dutch blood, overgiven to Square- 
 face and whisky. He got going gay with the girl " 
 
 She stood like a statue of ebony and ivory. Only by the deep 
 breaths that heaved her broad bosom could you tell she lived t 
 by that and by the unswerving watchfulness of those burning 
 eyes. 
 
 " And Bough, when he caught them together, got mad, being 
 a respectable man, and let her taste the sjambok. Then she 
 ran away." 
 
 He coughed, and shifted again from one foot to the other. 
 He would have preferred a woman who had loaded him with 
 invectives, and told him that he lied like hell. 
 
 " The man that had left her to Bough's guardianship was
 
 448 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 a sort of broken-down English officer by the name of Mil- 
 dare " 
 
 Her bosom heaved more stormily, but her intense scorch- 
 ing regard of him never wavered. 
 
 " Mildare. He left a hundred pounds with Bough, to be 
 kept for her till she was twenty. There was a waggon and 
 team Bough was to have had to sell, and use the money for the 
 girl's keep, but a thief of a Dutch driver waltzed with them 
 took 'em up Johannesburg way, and melted 'em into 
 dollars. Bough got nothing for all his kindness not 
 a tikkie. But he's ready to hand over the hundred, her 
 being so nigh come of age. There's a locket with a picture in 
 it, and brilliants round, that may be worth seventy pounds 
 more. All Bough wants is to do the square thing. This is the 
 message he sends to her now. The money and the jewels will 
 be handed over, as in duty bound; and, since she's turned re- 
 spectable and got education, I was to say there's an honest man 
 widower now, and well off that's ready to hang up his hat 
 for her, and wipe all old scores off the slate in the regular de- 
 cent way. . . ." 
 
 She said in tones that were of ice: 
 
 " Bough is the honest man? " 
 
 " Just Bough. ... ' Maybe, in my honest anger at her 
 goings on,' he says, ' I went a bit too far. Well! I'm ready 
 to make amends by making her my wife.' " 
 
 The lioness crouched and leaped. 
 
 " You are Bough ! You are the evil man, the servant, of 
 Satan, who wrought abomination upon a helpless child ! " 
 
 The onslaught came so suddenly that he was staggered. Then 
 he swore. 
 
 "Not me, by G !" 
 
 She pointed her long arm at him, and some strange force 
 seemed to be wielded by that unweaponed woman-hand that 
 struck him and pierced him through flesh and bone and mar- 
 row. . . . 
 
 "You are the man!" She stretched her arms to the wild, 
 hurrying clouds that looked in upon her through the yawning 
 rifts in the roof, and called upon her Maker for vengeance. 
 " How long wilt Thou delay, O Lord, righteous in judgment? 
 Fulfil Thy promise! Bind Thou Thy millstone about the neck 
 of this wretch, hated and accursed of Thee, and let it drag him 
 to the uttermost depths of the Lake of Fire, where such as he 
 shall wallow and howl throughout Eternity ! "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 449 
 
 She was infinitely more terrible than the lioness who has 
 licked her murdered cubs. No Pythoness at. the dizziest height 
 of the sacred frenzy, no Demeter wrought to delirium by ma- 
 ternal bereavement, was ever imagined by poet or painter as 
 half so grand, and terrible, and awe-inspiring, as this furious 
 cursing nun. 
 
 " Delay not Thou, O Lord ! " she prayed. . . . 
 
 Rain fell in a curtain- of gleaming crystal rods between them. 
 Seen through it, she appeared supernaturally tall, her garments 
 streaming like black flames, her face a white-hot furnace, her 
 eyes intolerable, merciless, grey lightnings, her voice a fiery 
 sword that cleft the guilty to the soul. 
 
 The Voice of Conscience was dumb in him. He knew no- 
 remorse, and made a jest of God. But his callous heart had 
 been filled from the veins of generations of Irish Catholic peas- 
 ants, and, in spite of himself, the blood in his veins ran cold 
 with superstitious fear. 
 
 Yet, when no palpable answer came from that Heaven to 
 which she cried, he rallied, remembering that, after all, she 
 was a woman, and alone with him in the place. She had sunk 
 back against the altar that was behind her. Her eyes were 
 closed, her face a white mask of anguish ; she looked as though 
 about to swoon. Bough hailed the symptoms as favourable. 
 Fainting was the prelude to caving in, with the women he 
 knew. But when he stirred, her eyes were wide and preter- 
 naturally bright, and held him. He snarled: 
 
 " You'll not take the girl my message, then? " 
 
 She reared up her tall form, and laughed awfully. 
 
 " Did you dream I would defile her ears with it? Now 
 that I know you, you will be wise to leave this place; for it is 
 a spot where your sins will find you out." 
 
 He jeered : 
 
 "That flash bounce doesn't go down with me. The 
 trouble'll be at your end of the house, unless you listen to rea- 
 son and stop giving off hot air. What's to hinder me making 
 a clean breast to that swell toff she's wheedled into asking her 
 to marry him. What's to hinder me from standing up before 
 the whole mob, saying as I've repented what I done years back, 
 and I've come to make an honest girl of her at last?" 
 
 The whirling waters of bitterness in her breast were rising, 
 drowning her. . . . He realized her momentary weakness, 
 and moved a step or two nearer, keeping well between the 
 woman and the door.
 
 450 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "What's to hinder me, I say? " 
 
 Her rapier of keen womanly intuition flashed out at him 
 again, and drew the blood. 
 
 "Your fear will hinder you. You are here in an assumed 
 character, and under a false name." The long arm shot out, 
 the white hand pointed at him again. "You never came here 
 from Diamond Town. That letter was a forgery. You have 
 papers on you now that would prove you to be a spy, if you 
 were taken. Ah, I can see it written in your coward's face! " 
 
 The devil was at the woman's ear, prompting her. Or was 
 ft ? Bough's dark, full-blooded face bleached to muddy- 
 pale as her terrible voice rang through the desolate place, and 
 echoed among the broken rafters. 
 
 " You boast yourself ready to admit your infamy. You 
 shall be compelled! Everything shall be made known! I will 
 go to Lord Beauvayse now, and tell him all all! And if he 
 loves her, he will marry her. And you who have secrets upon 
 your soul even more perilous, if less vile and hideous " again 
 the terrible hand pointed, and that sense of a supernatural force 
 that it wielded knocked his knees together and dried up his 
 mouth " I see the mill-stone round your neck! . . ." 
 
 The clarion voice mounted on a great note of triumph. With 
 her inspired face, and with her floating veil, she looked like a 
 Prophetess of old. " The Lord is not mocked ! He will avenge 
 His little one as He has promised ! Move aside, you lost, and 
 branded, and miserable wretch! Do you think to hinder Me 
 from doing what I have said ? " 
 
 He was at the bottom of the altar-steps as the tall, Imperious 
 figure came sweeping down. The curtain of rain no longer 
 fell between them, but behind him. He must silence that rail- 
 ing voice that cried in the house-tops put out the light of 
 those intolerable eyes. . . . 
 
 He drew out his revolver with a blasphemous oath. At the 
 gleam of steel in the thickening twilight she dropped her up- 
 raised arms, and made a swift rush to the rope of the bell, and 
 set it clanging. Two double strokes rang out; the third was 
 broken in the middle. . . . For as she swung round, panting 
 and tugging at the rope, he shot her in the back above the line 
 of the white gorget from which the veil streamed aside, and 
 ran to the door as she cried out and swayed forward, still cling- 
 ing to the vibrating rope, and turned there and fired a second 
 shot, that struck her in the body. 
 
 Then he was gone, and the walls were crowding in on her
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 451 
 
 to crush her, and then receding to immeasurable distances, and 
 the blood and air from her pierced lungs bubbled through the 
 bullet-holes in the serge stuff and the scorched linen. 
 
 She stumbled a few steps blindly, then fell and lay choking^ 
 with that strange gurgling and whispering in her ears, the rush- 
 ing blood mingling with the water of the puddles that the rain 
 had made upon the littered floor. She faltered out the name of 
 her Master and Spouse, and commended her pure soul to Him 
 in utter humility. Death would have been a welcome loosing 
 of her bonds but for the Beloved left behind, at the mercy of 
 the merciless. 
 
 The stab of that remembrance lent her strength fo struggle 
 up upon her knees. Ah, cruel! cruel! . . . But she must 
 submit. Was it not the Holy Will? She signed the Cross 
 upon her bosom, with fingers already growing stiff, and made 
 a piteous little act of charity, forgiving the sin of the man 
 against herself, but not his crime against dead Richard's child. 
 And she stretched out long black-sleeved arms gropingly in 
 the thick, numbing darkness that hemmed her in, and moaned 
 to the Mother of the motherless to have pity! . . . pity! . . . 
 
 She swayed forwards then, like a stately falling column, and 
 lay with outspread arms upon the altar-step. 
 
 " Jesu. . . . Mary. ... The child! . . ." 
 
 The sacred names were stifled in her blood. The last two 
 words were nearly her last. sigh. Thenceforward there was no 
 sound at all in the Convent chapel, save the dull splash of rain, 
 falling through the holes in the broken roof upon th? sodden 
 floor, where the dead woman lay, face downwards. . f . 
 
 LII 
 
 No one had heeded the revolver-shot. The detonation of one 
 cartridge when a bombardment is going on, what does it count 
 for? And yet, when the burly figure of the runner from Dia- 
 mond Town slipped out of the Convent doorway and stole 
 across the rubbish-littered garden, and crossed the veld towards 
 the native town, it had been barely twilight a twilight of pelt- 
 ing tropical rain, to be sure. Still, in it he had encountered 
 those who might have suspected afterwards. . . . 
 
 Perhaps it would have been better had he stopped in Guel- 
 dersdorp and mugged it out. But that sharp, prompt, swift, 
 unsparing thing called Martial Law is not a power to play with
 
 452 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 with impunity, and of the man who wielded it in Gueldersdorp 
 Bough had conceived a wholesome dread. Best that he fled, 
 although his going tagged him with suspicion. That cursed 
 stupid game of his with the telephone at the Headquarters of 
 the Baraland Rifles might cost him more than the bit of twist 
 with which he had bribed the orderly, left for a moment in sole 
 charge, and demoralized by the sight of tobacco. 
 
 Opium played you tricks like that, when, for the gratifica- 
 tion of a sinister whim, a grotesque fancy, born and bred of the 
 stuff, you would risk everything. In excess it played hell with 
 the nerves. That, was why those eyes of hers. . . . Damn 
 them ! Why couldn't a man put them out of mind and out of 
 sight? 
 
 It was not to be done. The obsession held him. A black 
 shadow on the floor would be the tall body, lying face down- 
 wards on the altar-steps, with outspread, crucified arms. He 
 heard her stifled crying upon the Name, and the gurgling out- 
 rush of mingled air and blood that followed each deep sob for 
 breath. . . . 
 
 And then he would be running through the lashing, bucket- 
 ing wet, circumventing the sentry-posts, wriggling over the 
 veld on his belly like a snake. He would be pushing through 
 the dripping covert of the north bank of the river for that, 
 he had decided, was the safest way out or in leaving frag- 
 ments of his garments on the thorny cacti that grabbed at him 
 with their green hands. And then he would find himself lying 
 doggo between two great stones, waiting for it to be quite dark 
 before he essayed to pass the rifle-pits that angled across each 
 shore. Two hours he had lain so, and it had hailed, and sheet 
 lightning had smitten greenish-blue glares from the hissing, 
 clattering whiteness, and he had remembered with a shudder 
 | those eyes. . . . 
 
 Then it had been dark enough to risk passing between the 
 .angles of the rifle-pits, where lay men who kept their eyes 
 jskinned and their weapons handy by day and night. And again 
 Bough had wriggled like a snake, but through shallow water 
 instead of grass and red sand. He had swum the deep pools, 
 and once got entangled in barbed wire, and went under, gur- 
 gling and drowning, three times before he wrenched himself 
 loose. It had seemed as though a dead woman's hands had 
 seized him, and were dragging him down. But he tore free 
 and passed safely. There was not a single shot the Devil was 
 so obliging! And then, lest Bronnckers' pickets should mistake
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 453 
 
 a friend in the darkness, he waited for light in a little thorny 
 kloof beyond their advanced outposts; and the dawn came, 
 with an awful gush of crimson dyeing all the eastern sky, 
 so that the pools about his feet even the drops of wet upon 
 the stones and bushes caught the ruddy reflection, and all the 
 world seemed dripping with new-shed blood. 
 
 Then up had rushed the sun, and smitten a glorious rainbow 
 out of fog and vapour, and one end of it seemed to be in Guel- 
 dersdorp, resting in a golden mist upon the Convent's shattered 
 roof, while the other vanished in mid-heaven. It had seemed 
 to the murderer like a ladder by which the dead woman's soul 
 went climbing, up and up, to tell his crime to God. 
 
 He had killed her, that woman in black, to stop her from 
 blowing on him. Who would have dreamed a meek, sober nun 
 could be transformed like that? A lioness whose cub has been 
 shot straightway becomes a beast-devil. She, standing on the 
 naked steps of the bare altar, with upraised, black-sleeved arms 
 and black funereal robes, demanding Heaven's vengeance for 
 that, deed of old, calling down the judgment of God upon its 
 doer, had been infinitely more terrible than the lioness. Light- 
 ning had flashed from her great eyes, and subtle electric forces 
 had darted from her outspread finger-tips. While she looked 
 at him and spoke she enmeshed him, helpless, in a net of terror. 
 It was only when she had turned her back that Bough had had 
 the nerve to shoot. And he was no novice in bloodshed not he. 
 There were things safely hidden and put away and buried that 
 might some day put a rope round some man's neck. But the 
 man would never be Bough. There had always been a scape- 
 goat to suffer until now. 
 
 He ate more opium now than ever, because he could not 
 forget that woman's awful eyes. He would see them looking 
 at him in the dark, when he could not sleep. Her voice haunted 
 him, terrible in its clarion-note of wrath, its organ-roll of de- 
 nunciation. The hand that had pointed to the millstone about 
 his neck had conjured it there. He felt it dragging him down. 
 
 Maar that was gold! You can carry a goodly amount of 
 the precious metal upon your single person, if you are clever 
 enough to stow it and muscular enough to walk lightly under 
 the weight. And a great deal of the yellow stuff, gathered 
 and stored by the mining companies, leaked about this time 
 cut of the hiding-places skilfully contrived for it into the 
 pockets of Van Busch and his pals. It is weighty, as well as 
 precious, stuff, and when you inter it, there must, be bearers
 
 454 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 as well as a gravedigger, and when you carry away a great 
 deal of it at a time, confederates must aid you. 
 
 Oom Paul, when, like some elderly black humble-bee, with 
 crooked thighs deep laden with the metallic yellow pollen, he 
 buzzed heavily off for Lorenzo Marques, deplored the deceit- 
 fulness of riches less bitterly than their nonportability. 
 
 Van Busch, by a series of clever expedients, overcame that 
 difficulty. The cartridges that weighed down his bandolier 
 were of cast gold, cleverly painted; the gun he carried was a 
 hollow sham packed with raw gold; also, his garments were 
 lined and padded with the same material. At Cape Town he 
 would disburden himself, and one of the women who were his 
 confederates would take the stuff to England, and sell it in 
 London, and bank the money in the name of Van Busch. He 
 so managed that there was always a woman coming and a 
 woman going. Women had been his tools, and his slaves, and 
 his victims, ever since he had been born. When the old were 
 worn out and useless, he shook them off, and fresh instruments 
 rose up to take their places. 
 
 He never trusted men in money matters. He knew too much 
 of the power of that yellow pollen that breeds madness in the 
 male. But there is one thing that most women desire more 
 than possession of much money, and that is absolute possession 
 of one man. 
 
 Bough understood women of a certain class. He had moulded 
 them to his will, and bent them to his whim, all his life long. 
 He was a man of manifold experience as regards the sex. 
 
 Lately he had added to his stock. He had stood face to 
 face with a woman, unarmed and in a lonely place, and had 
 tasted Fear. He had seen from afar off a woman whose 
 slight, vivid beauty had roused in him a desire that was tor- 
 ture. 
 
 It was the monster of Frankenstein in love with Clytie; it 
 was Caliban thirsting for the beauty of Miranda. Prospero 
 had not come in time; the satyr had surfeited upon the unripe 
 grapes, and now was ahungered for the purple cluster, tied up 
 out of reach of those gross, greedy, wicked hands. 
 
 The locket with a picture in it and brilliants round, " that 
 might be worth seventy," the dainty, pearly miniature, an ivory 
 by Daudin, of the dead woman who lay buried under the little 
 Kopje, and which Bough had taken from the body of the Eng- 
 lish traveller, together with the signet-ring and everything else 
 of value that Richard Mildare had owned, possessed a strange
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 455 
 
 fascination for the thief. It was extraordinarily like. . . . He 
 hung it by its slender gold chain about his thick neck, and 
 gloated over and grudged the beauty that it recalled. 
 
 It is horrible to speak of love in connection with the man 
 Bough, but if ever he had known it, it was now. His victim 
 of old time had become his tyrant. Replete with vile pleas- 
 ures, he longed for her the more. 
 
 He even became sentimental at times, telling himself that 
 all he had sought was to repair the wrong, and make an honest 
 woman of the Kid. She should have been lapped in luxury, 
 worn jewels equalling any duchess's. He was a man of money 
 now. A little delay, to become yet more rich and arrange for 
 the safe burying of Bough then Van Busch, of Johannesburg, 
 capitalist and financier, would descend upon London in a shower 
 of gold, furnish a house in Hyde Park or Mayfair in topping 
 style; own four-in-hands, and motor-cars, and opera-boxes, and 
 see all Society fluttering to his feet, to pick up scattered crumbs 
 of the golden pudding. 
 
 It really seemed as though the dream would be realized. The 
 gross, squarely-built man, with the bushy whiskers and the light 
 strange eyes, found success attend his every enterprise from 
 that hour in which he had spilt the life upon the pavement of 
 the Convent chapel. The tarantula-pounce never missed a prey. 
 Every knavish venture brought in money or money's worth, 
 every base plot was carried through triumphantly. Bough, 
 alias Van Busch, was not ordinarily a superstitious man, but 
 his run of luck made him almost afraid at times. 
 
 He scented the Relief before the besiegers undertook to 
 scout for Young Eybel in the direction of Diamond Town, 
 and ingeniously warned Colonel Cullings of a Boer plan for 
 cutting off the Flying Column on the scorching western plains, 
 which resulted in the capture of two waggon-loads of burghers, 
 their rations, ammunition, and Mausers a most satisfying 
 haul. He placed before the leader of the British Force inter- 
 cepted telegrams which threw invaluable light on Dutch moves. 
 No more single-minded, ingenious, and patriotic British South 
 African ever drew breath than Mr. Van Busch, of Johannes- 
 burg. And verily he reaped his reward, in an officially counter- 
 signed railway pass, which would enable the patriot to render 
 some further services to British arms, and a great many more 
 to Van Busch, of Johannesburg. 
 
 He had his knavish headquarters still at the Border home- 
 stead known as Haargrond Plaats. Something drew him back
 
 456 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 to the place, and kept on drawing him. From thence he could 
 observe and conduct his operations, and gather news of the 
 besieged in Gueldersdorp. He was there at the time when the 
 Division Irregular Horse and Baraland Rifles, converted, 
 with a half battalion of Town Guards, into mounted infantry 
 by the simple process of putting beasts underneath men who 
 could ride them marched out of Gueldersdorp en route for 
 Frostenberg. 
 
 The slatternly Dutchwoman and the coloured man who had 
 charge of the Plaats were too surely his creatures to betray 
 Bough Van Busch. " Let them smell around the place," he 
 thought, when by the sounds that reached him in his hiding- 
 place he knew the Advance had halted. " They'll tire of the 
 game before they smell out me I " 
 
 His hiding-place was a safe retreat and storehouse for stuff 
 that it was necessary to conceal. No one knew of it save Bough 
 Van Busch and the draggle-tailed woman. It was in the great 
 stone-built chimney of the disused, half-ruined farmhouse 
 kitchen, a solid cube of masonry reared by the stout hands of 
 the old voortrekkers of 1836, its walls, three feet in thickness, 
 embracing the wide hearth about which the family life of the 
 homestead had concentrated itself in the past. 
 
 There may have been a mill on the farm in the old days. 
 Or possibly, meaning to build one, those friendly pioneers of 
 the Second Exodus had dragged the two huge stones into the 
 wilderness, and then abandoned their plan. The lower mill- 
 stone paved the hearth, the upper, the diameter of its shaft-hole, 
 increased by chipping to the size of a muskmelon, had been set 
 by some freak of the farmer-architect's heavy fancy as a coping 
 on the top of the big stone shaft. From thence, as Lady Han- 
 nah Wrynche had said in one of her descriptive letters, dated 
 from " My Headquarters at the Seat of War," it dominated 
 the landscape as a Brobdingnagian stone mushroom might have 
 done. 
 
 The wide black throat of the chimney half-way up was 
 choked by a platform of beams and masonry, reaching not quite 
 across, so that even a bulky man who had climbed up divers 
 rusty iron stanchions driven in between the stones, and certain 
 chinks affording secure foothold might wriggle between the 
 platform and the chimney-wall, and so lie hid securely. Through 
 the hole in the round stone above came air and light. Crevices 
 cunningly enlarged afforded opportunities for viewing the sur- 
 rounding country as for seeing without being seen, and hearing
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 457 
 
 also all that took place in the low-walled courtyard that was 
 used as a cattle-kraal. You had also a bird's-eye view of the 
 lower end of the farm kitchen, where the wall had cracked, 
 and bulged, and spit out some of its stones. 
 
 To this eyrie Bough Van Busch retreated when the wall of 
 dust to the south-west gave up the dim shapes of the Advance, 
 and the beat of many iron-shod hoofs, and the roll of many 
 iron-shod wheels made distant thunder, coming nearer, always 
 nearer. . . . 
 
 Maar! How the trot of the squadron-columns, the roll of 
 the oncoming batteries, shook the crazy building. The Advance 
 rode into the yard, dismounted, and began to ask questions of 
 the coloured man and the slipshod woman. Neither knew any- 
 thing. The woman cursed the Englishmen freely, at. which 
 they laughed, and lighted fresh cigarettes. The man was dumb 
 as stone. 
 
 The Division snaked out of the dust presently, a huge brown 
 centipede that had been chopped in bits, and moved with inter- 
 vals between its travelling sections. There was no halt; it rolled 
 on, a vision of innumerable moving legs and tanned, wearied 
 faces, over the greening veld to the north. The dust grew 
 hotter and thicker, and more stifling, as it rolled. 
 
 It drifted in through every chink and cranny in the great 
 chimney, with the smell of hot human flesh and sweating horse- 
 hide, and Bough Van Busch longed to, but dared not sneeze. 
 Bits of mortar fell about him, and dislodged tarantulas gal- 
 loped over his boots. He shook the loathsome, hairy, bright- 
 eyed insects off, shuddering at them with a loathing somewhat 
 misplaced, considering the affinity between his own methods 
 and theirs. 
 
 Roll, roll, roll! The English voices of the chatting men 
 crouched upon their beasts' withers or sprawling on the limbers, 
 the trampling and snorting of the horses, the sharp signal- 
 whistles of the leaders, the curt utterances of command, mingled 
 with the stream of thought that raced through the busy brain 
 of Bough Van Busch. It had struck him when the Colonel 
 and his Staff rode up and halted by the gateway of the littered 
 courtyard that here would be a chance for a nervy man, with a 
 set purpose, to venture back, cleverly disguised, to Guelders- 
 dorp. He knew he would be risking his neck, but the sting of 
 desire galled him to hardihood. She was there. Red mist 
 gathered in his brain, red sparks snapped before his eyes, the 
 thick red blood surged fiercely throughjiis veins drummed
 
 458 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 deafeningly in his gross ears at the thought of seeing her 
 again. . . . 
 
 And the tail of the Division was going by. A Field Tele- 
 graph Company, a searchlight company, the Ambulances, and 
 a train of transport-waggons, with the mounted infantry 
 brought up the rear. The Advance had galloped forward in 
 haste, the group at the gate lingered. A voice rang out clearly, 
 giving some order. It said : 
 
 " And if abandoned, carry out instructions, previously warn- 
 ing the inmates of the farm to retire out of " 
 
 Tfoe lean, eagle-eyed, keen-faced Colonel bent lower in the 
 saddle to reach the ear of the dismounted officer of Royal En- 
 gineers, who stood with one dogskin gloved hand resting on 
 the sweating withers of the brown Waler. He answered, 
 saluted, and drew away. Then the Staff rode on, into the 
 ginger yellow dust-cloud, leaving the officer of Engineers 
 standing in the beaten tracks of many iron-shod hoofs and many 
 iron-shod wheels. 
 
 He was not left alone. A little cluster of mounted Cape 
 Police had detached itself from the rear of the Division. They 
 were deeply burned, hard-bitten men, emaciated to a curious 
 uniformity, mounted on horses as gaunt as their riders. A 
 sergeant was in command of the squad, and a drab-painted 
 wooden cart drawn by a high-rumped, goose-necked chestnut 
 mare, pitifully lame on the near fore, had an Engineer for 
 driver. His mate sat on the rear locker, and a mounted com- 
 rade rode by the mare's lame side. The shaft of the cart was 
 lashed to a ring on the off-side of his saddle, and thus the mare 
 was helped along. 
 
 Obeying some order unheard of the man who was hiding 
 in the old stone chimney, the party of Cape Police divided into 
 two. One half patrolled the outward precincts of the home- 
 stead. The rest, dismounting in the courtyard, thoroughly 
 searched the place. The Engineer officer took no part in the 
 search. He stood by the stone-coloured cart, busy at the locker, 
 the sapper who had sat upon it being his aid. Very soon he 
 returned to the yard, and stood in the middle of the litter 
 motionless as a little figure of pale, dusty bronze, holding a 
 cigar-box carefully in both his dogskin gloved hands. In spite 
 of his patched khaki and ragged puttees there was something 
 dandified about him. His red moustache, waxed to a fine point, 
 jutted like the whiskers of a watchful cat, the whites of his 
 eyes gleamed like silver as he turned them this way and that,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 459 
 
 following the movements of the men who went in and out of 
 the farm-buildings as directed by their sergeant. The sergeant 
 was an expert in his business, and yet, after a hasty glance up 
 the black, yawning gullet of the chimney where Bough Van 
 Busch lay perdu, he had gone out of the dismantled kitchen 
 whistling a tune. Two of his men remained lounging near the 
 threshold. Like the sergeant they had stooped, hands on spread 
 knees, necks twisted awry in the effort to pierce the thick murk 
 beneath the ragged arch of masonry that spanned the wide 
 hearth where the ashes of long-dead fires lay in powdery grey 
 drifts, and, like the sergeant, had seen nothing. When you 
 covered the man-hole between the platform-edge and the chim- 
 ney-wall with the sooty board and the old sack, it was impossible 
 for anyone below to see anything. The inside of the old chimney 
 was as black as hell. 
 
 The inquisition ended. The khaki-clad figures came hurry- 
 ing out of the house, pursued by the Dutchwoman's shrill re- 
 criminations. The non-commissioned officer made a report to 
 the officer of Engineers. The men who had been deputed to 
 search mounted at an order, and fell in with the patrol, and 
 sat upon their saddles outside the courtyard wall exchanging 
 furtive winks as the mevrouw devoted their souls and bodies 
 to everlasting perdition. 
 
 A quiet utterance from the little red-haired officer checked 
 the torrent of the woman's anger. She screeched In dismay, 
 raising thick hands to heaven. The coloured man's stolid si- 
 lence was suddenly swept away in a spate of oaths and pro- 
 testations. Suddenly, looking in the officer's unmoved face, 
 they realized the uselessness of words, turned and ran between 
 the gateless posts, out upon, away over, the dusty, hoof-tracked, 
 wheel-scored veld. And their ungainly hurry and awkward 
 gestures of terror somehow reminded the peering Bough Van 
 Busch of an engraving he had seen by chance in a Dopper Bible, 
 in which Lot and his two daughters, fearfully foreshortened 
 by the artist, scuttled in as grotesque an insect hurry from the 
 doomed vicinity of Sodom, Queen City of the Plain. 
 
 The officer of Engineers hardly glanced after the retreating 
 couple. He stepped across the threshold of the disused farm- 
 kitchen, holding the little wooden box carefully in both his 
 dogskin-gloved hands. He crossed to the hearth, stubbing his 
 toe against a jutting floor-brick, and as he did so he caught his 
 breath. Then he stepped down under the yawning gape of 
 the chimney, and seemed to grope and fumble at the back of
 
 460 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the hearth. He raised himself then, stepped back, and called 
 out sharply in the Taal: 
 
 "Wieis daar?" 
 
 The man's voice dropped back dead out of the choked-up 
 chimney-throat. A little sooty dust fell. There was no other 
 answer. The voice was lifted again, speaking this time in 
 English : 
 
 " Is anyone hiding here ? " 
 
 No one replied, and the little officer seemed to give up. He 
 lingered a moment longer, struck a match as though to light 
 a cigarette, then went quickly out of the kitchen. An orderly 
 waited with his horse outside the gateway. Bough Van 
 Busch, listening with strained ears, heard the click of spur 
 against stirrup, the creak of the saddle receiving a rider's 
 weight. There was a short sharp whistle, followed by the 
 sound of cantering hoofs, and the rattle of hurrying wheels 
 dying out over the veld to the northward. The unwelcome in- 
 truders had gone. Bough Van Busch, after a cautious inter- 
 val, deemed it safe to descend. 
 
 He was red-smeared with veld dust and white-smeared with 
 mortar, and black with old soot. His bulky body oscillated 
 as he let himself down from beam to stanchion, finding sure 
 foothold in the crevices and hand-grip in the stout iron hooks 
 from which plump mutton-hams and beef sausages had hung 
 ripening in the hungry smoke of burning wood and dung. 
 There was a smell in his nostrils like charring wool and salt- 
 petre. He hung over the wide hearth now. A short drop of 
 not more than a foot or two would bring him safely to the 
 ground. 
 
 Van Busch did not drop. He dangled by the hands and 
 sweated. He blasphemed in an agony of terror, though it 
 seemed to him that he prayed. 
 
 For the dandy little Engineer officer had left the cigarbox 
 lying empty among the powdery ashes in the wide, old-world 
 hearthplace. An innocent-looking parcel it had contained, 
 wrapped in a bit of old canvas, and, further secured with cop- 
 per wire and string, and wedged in a chink between the black- 
 ened stones at the back of the hearth. From it a fuse hung 
 down, a short length nearly consumed by the crepitating fiery 
 spark at its loose end. It burned with a little purring sound, 
 as though it liked the business it was engaged upon. Bough 
 Van Busch knew that in another moment the detonation would 
 take place. . . .
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 461 
 
 He heard nothing of it when it came. . . . Nor did he 
 know it when the walls of Cyclopean masonry bulged and 
 opened about him like the petals of a flowering lily. He was 
 beyond all that. His gross body, headless, rent and torn as 
 though the devils it had housed had wreaked their fury on their 
 dwelling, lay sandwiched between the wreckage of the great 
 chimney and the millstone that had paved its hearth, now a 
 yawning cavity, some six feet deep. Leaning on its side in a 
 trench its own weight had dug in the stony earth of the dirty 
 courtyard was the huge stone that had topped the shaft. 
 Something ugly was wedged in the central hole that had been 
 made bigger to let out the smoke. And the murderer's soul, 
 light as a dried leaf fluttering through the illimitable spaces 
 of Eternity, went wandering on its way to the Balances of 
 God. 
 
 The handful of Cape Police who had searched Haargrond 
 Plaats, with the drab-painted cart, the three Engineers, and 
 the dandified little officer, had only ridden to a safe distance. 
 They halted, and, concealed from observation by a fold of the 
 greening veld, waited for the explosion of the dynamite cart- 
 ridge. When it came the Engineer officer shut his binoculars, 
 and gave the signal to return. 
 
 LIII 
 
 THERE were two funerals in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, 
 upon a May night that no one will forget who stood in the 
 packed throng of shadowy mourners about each of those open 
 graves. The wind blew soft from the west, and the vault of 
 heaven might have been hollowed out of the darkling depths of 
 an amethyst of inconceivable splendour and planetary size. 
 Myriads of stars, dazzlingly white, swung under this, her fit- 
 ting cenotaph, shared with another, not like her holy, not 
 noble or unselfish or devoted like her again, but like her in 
 that he was brave and much beloved. 
 
 Beloved undoubtedly. You could not look at the crowd- 
 ing faces about the narrow open trench where the Reverend 
 Julius Faithorn read the Burial Service by lantern-light with- 
 out being sure of that. Men's eyes were wet, and women 
 sobbed unrestrainedly. He had been so beautiful and so merry
 
 462 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and cheerful always, said the wet-eyed women; the men 
 praised him for having been such a swordsman, horseman, 
 shot. Everyone spoke of him as the life and soul of the gar- 
 rison, the idol of his brother officers, and worshipped by the 
 men under his command. Everyone had something to tell of 
 dead Beauvayse that was pleasant to hear. 
 
 But the great bulk of the crowd was massed behind the 
 black-robed, white-coiffed figures of the Sisters, kneeling rigid 
 and immovable about the second open grave, where the Mother- 
 'Superior lay in her snow-white coffin, fully habited and 
 mantled, her Rosary in the marble hand on which the plain 
 gold ring of her Divine espousal shone, the parchment, formula 
 of the vows she took when admitted to her Order nineteen 
 years before, lying under those meekly-folded hands upon her 
 breast. So she had lain, feet to the altar, in the Convent 
 chapel that her daughters in Religion had draped and decked 
 for her, keeping their loving vigils about her from twilight to 
 dawn, from dawn to twilight, until this hour when they must 
 yield all that was mortal of her to Earth's guardianship and the 
 unsleeping watchfulness of God. 
 
 Suffocatingly dense the throng about this grave, and 
 strangely quiet. The women's faces white and haggard and 
 tearless, the men's drawn and deeply lined. Not even muffled 
 groans or sighs of pity broke the profound silence as the solemn 
 rite drew to its singularly simple and impressive close. As the 
 fragrant incense rose from the censer and the holy water 
 sprinkled the snow-white pall that bore the Red Cross, one 
 dreadful word lurked sinister in every thought: 
 
 Murdered! . . . 
 
 Their friend, helper, nurse, consoler, the woman whose hands 
 had staunched the bleeding wounds of many present, whose 
 arm had lifted and pillowed the dying heads of others dear to 
 them, who had stood through long nights of anguish or delirium 
 beside their Hospital pallets, ministering as a very Angel from 
 Heaven through the darkness of sorrow and despair mur- 
 dered! 
 
 The tender Mother, the wise virgin, who watched con- 
 tinually with her lamp prepared, that at the first voice of the 
 Heavenly Bridegroom she might, enter with Him into the 
 marriage chamber, could it be that His signal had come to her 
 by the bloodstained hand of an assassin? It was so, there was 
 no doubt. And ah ! the horror of it ! 
 
 The aged priest sobbed as, followed by the server, he moved
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 463 
 
 round the grave within the oblong wall of kneeling Sisters. 
 But no answering sob came from the vast assemblage. They 
 were as dumb stricken to stone. They could not yet con- 
 template the felicity of the oure soul of the martyred saint, 
 carried by God's Angels into the Land of the ever-living, ad- 
 mitted to the unspeakable reward of the Beatific Vision. They 
 could only realize that somebody had killed her. 
 
 But when the solemn strophies of the Litany for the Dead 
 broke in upon a profound silence, the responses of the multi- 
 tude surged upwards like giant billows shattering their force 
 in hollow thunder upon Arctic heights. And when, in due 
 pursuance of the symbolic rite of Rome, the vested priest and 
 her whole Sisterhood suddenly withdrew from the grave, and 
 left her earthly body, how wonderful in its marble, hushed, 
 close-folded, mysterious beauty none who had looked upon it 
 ever could forget, waiting for the second coming of her Master 
 and her Lord, a great sob mounted and broke from every 
 breast, and every face was drenched with sudden tears. Per- 
 haps God let her see how much they loved her in that parting 
 hour. And then the bugle sounded " Last Post " over both 
 the open graves, softly for fear of Bronnckers' German gun- 
 ners, and the great crowd melted away, and all was done and 
 over. 
 
 I have said that all the people wept. There was a girl in 
 white, for she would not let the Sisters put. black garments 
 on her, kneeling between Sister Tobias and Sister Hilda- 
 Antony. This girl did not weep at all. Chief mourner at 
 both these funerals, she was not conscious of the fact. She 
 knew that Beauvayse was on duty at. Maxim Outpost South, 
 and could not get away, and that the Reverend Mother was 
 vexed with her, and was hiding at the Convent, pretending that 
 she had gone somewhere, and would never come back. 
 
 She was especially clear of mind when she thought all this. 
 At other times she was not Lynette, and knew no one, and 
 had never known anybody of the name. She was the ragged 
 Kid, crouching on the Little Kopje in the gathering twilight 
 or on the long mound that its eastward shadow covered. Or 
 she was lying under the tattered horse-blanket on the foul straw 
 pallet in the outhouse, waiting for the Lady to come with the 
 great, kind, covering dark. 
 
 Or she was sitting in the bar-parlour on an upturned cube- 
 sugar box beside the green rep sofa where Bough lolled on 
 wet days or stormy nights, her unoccupied hands folded on her
 
 464 CNE BRAVER THING 
 
 lap, her every nerve tense and strained with terror of the master 
 in his condescending moods, when he would make pretence of 
 teaching her to scrawl coarse pothooks and hangers on the 
 greasy slate that usually hung below the glass-and-bottle shelf. 
 Or and at these times the Sisters found her difficult to man- 
 age she was crouching upon one side of a locked door, and a 
 long thin wire was feeling its way into the keyhole on the other 
 side, and the man who manipulated it laughed as the agile pliers 
 nipped the end of the key and turned the wards in the 
 lock. . . . 
 
 And then she would be running through the night, any- 
 where, nowhere, and Bough would be riding after. She could 
 hear the short wheezing gallop of the tired pony when she 
 laid her ear to the ground. And then the sjambok wielded by 
 a strong and brutal hand would bite into the quivering flesh of 
 the child, and she would shriek for mercy, and presently fall 
 upon the ground and lie there like one dead acting that seven- 
 year-old tragedy over and over again. 
 
 God was very kind to you, Reverend Mother, if He hid that 
 sight from one to whom she was so dear. But if His Blessed 
 in Heaven have cognizance of what takes place in this dull, 
 distant speck of Earth, I think some salt tears must needs have 
 fallen from the starry eyes of one of Christ's saintly maiden- 
 spouses, glorious under the dual crown of Virginity and Martyr- 
 dom, and yet a mother as truly as His Own. 
 
 That swift unerring judgment of Saxham's had pointed, 
 months ago, to some such mental and physical collapse, as the 
 result of shock, crowning long-continued nervous overstrain. 
 He had said to the Mother that such a result would be easier 
 to avert than to deal with. 
 
 There was not an ounce of energy the man possessed that 
 he did not employ in dealing with it now. 
 
 Let Sister Tobias tell us, as she told Saxham then, the story 
 of the Finding. She was always a plain woman of few words. 
 
 " The last charge the Mother laid on us Sister Hilda- 
 Antony and me was to keep our eyes upon the child. The 
 very day it was done she told us, and I saw that something 
 had made her anxious by the look that was in her eyes." She 
 dried her own with a coarse blue cotton handkerchief before 
 she took up her tale. " She went alone to the Head Hospital 
 that day. None of us were to be surprised, she said, if she 
 came home extra late. Sister Hilda-Antony and me were on 
 duty at the Railway Institute. We took Lynette with us.~>
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 465 
 
 There! . . . Didn't she look up, just for the one second, as 
 if she remembered her name?" 
 
 She had not done so at all. She was sitting on her stool 
 in her old corner of the Convent bombproof, but she did not 
 heed the shattering crashes of the bombardment any more. 
 She had only moved to push out of her eyes the dulled and 
 faded hair that the Sisters could not keep pinned up, and bent 
 over her little slate again. Before that and a pencil had been 
 given her she had been restless and uneasy. Now she would 
 be occupied for long hours, making rude attempts at drawing 
 houses and figures such as a child represents with round " O's " 
 of different sizes for heads and bodies and pitchforks for legs 
 and arms. . . . 
 
 Sister Tobias went on: "The Siege Gazette had come out 
 that day, with the news of " she dropped her voice to a whis- 
 per " of her being likely to be married before long to him 
 that's gone. May the Lord give him rest ! " Sister Tobias's 
 well-accustomed ringers patterned over the bib of her blue- 
 checked apron, making the Sign. " And Sister Hilda-Antony 
 and me had the world's work with all the people who stopped 
 us in the street and came round us at the Hospital to say how 
 glad they were. Talk of a stone plopped in a duckpond! 
 You'd have thought by the crazy way folks went on that two 
 pretty young people had never went, and got engaged before." 
 Sister Tobias was never coldly grammatical in speech. " But 
 the child was happy, poor dear, in hearing even strangers praise 
 him; and when the firing stopped and we were on our way 
 home, she begged us to turn out of it and call in at the Con- 
 vent, where he'd begged her to meet him, if only for a minute, 
 not having seen her since the Sunday when " 
 
 Saxham, who writhed inwardly, remembering that Sunday, 
 nodded, bending his heavy brows. His ears were given to 
 Sister Tobias, his eyes to the slight figure that somehow, in 
 the skirt some impatient movement had wrenched from the 
 gathers and the shirt-bodice that was buttoned awry, had the 
 air of a ragged, neglected child. And she held up her 
 scrawled slate to keep his look out, and peeped at. him round 
 the side of it. Big strong men like that could be cruel when 
 they were angry. The Kid knew that so well. Perhaps, had 
 those observant eyes of Saxham's been less intent upon her 
 those rude marks upon the slate might have recalled characters 
 as rude and seemingly as incomprehensible shown him by the 
 Chaplain upon the morning of the day that had left her for
 
 466 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the second time motherless. But beyond her face he saw 
 nothing. Sister Tobias was saying: "We went to the Con- 
 vent with the child. We hadn't the heart to deny her, though 
 we thought the Mother might be vexed that we hadn't come 
 straight home. A queer thing happened as we crossed the road 
 and went up along the fence towards the gates with the child 
 between us. ... A big, heavy man, dressed as the miners 
 dress, with a great black beard and his hat pulled down over 
 his eyes, came along in such a hurry that he knocked Sister 
 Hilda-Antony off the kerb into the road^ and brushed close up 
 against her " 
 
 "Against Miss Mildare? Did it occur to you that the man 
 had come out of the Convent enclosure ? " Saxham asked 
 quickly. Sister Tobias shook her head. 
 
 " No ; but I did think he meant stopping and speaking to 
 the child, and then changed his mind and hurried on. ' Did 
 he hurt you, dearie? ' I asked her, seeing her shaking and quite 
 flustered-like. And she answers, ' I don't know. . . .' And 
 'Was it anyone you knew?' I puts to her again, and ' I can't 
 tell,' says she, like as if she was answering in her sleep. Do 
 you thinks she understands we're talking about her, poor 
 lamb?" 
 
 They both looked at her, and she, having been taught by 
 painful experience that to be the object of simultaneous obser- 
 vation on the part of the man and woman meant punishment in- 
 volving stripes, began to tremble and hung her head. From 
 under her tangled hair she peeped from side to side, wondering 
 what it was she had left undone. Ah! the broom, standing 
 in the corner. She had forgotten to sweep out the house-place 
 and the bar. When the dreaded eyes turned from her, she got 
 up and went softly to the corner where Sister Tobias's besom 
 stood, and took it and began to sweep, casting terrified glances 
 through her hair at her two Fates. 
 
 Something gripped Saxham by the heart and wrung it. The 
 scalding tears were bitter in his throat. Do what, he would 
 to keep them free, his eyes were dimmed and blinded, and 
 Sister Tobias wiped her own openly with the blue cotton hand- 
 kerchief. 
 
 " We thought the young gentleman would be waiting near 
 the Convent," said Sister Tobias, " or in one of the ground- 
 floor rooms, but he wasn't there. Me and Sister Hilda- 
 Antony looked at one another. ' Early days for a young girl's 
 sweetheart to be late at the meeting-place,' says Sister Hilda-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 467 
 
 Antony's eyes to me, and mine said back, * The Lord grant no 
 harm's come to him!' We waited five minutes by the school 
 clock, that's never been let run down, and then another five, 
 and still he didn't come. He had got. his death-wound, though 
 we didn't know it, hours before." 
 
 " The Angel of Death had spread his wings over the Con- 
 vent. Both me and Sister Hilda- Antony felt there was a 
 strange and awful stillness and solemnness about the place. At 
 last me and her told the child that go we must. We'd wait 
 no longer. But she, knowing we'd never leave without her, 
 ran upstairs. We heard her light feet going over the wet 
 matting and down the long passage to the Chapel door. 
 Then " 
 
 Sister Tobias sobbed for another moment in the blue hand- 
 kerchief. The child, who had been diligently sweeping, 
 looked at the woman and at the big man who had made her 
 cry with great dilated eyes of fear. She put the broom back 
 noiselessly in its corner, and stole back to her stool. Who 
 knew what might happen next? 
 
 " Then," said Sister Tobias, " we heard the dreadfullest 
 scream. 'Mother!' just once, and after it dead silence. 
 Then I don't know how we got there, it was so like a cruel 
 dream but we were in the Chapel, trying to raise them up. 
 That dear Saint may the Peace of God and the Bliss of His 
 Vision be upon her for ever! lay dead on the altar-step where 
 the wicked, murdering hand had shot her down. . . . And 
 the child lay across her, just where she had dropped in trying 
 to lift her. And the strength of me and the Sister, and the 
 strength of them that came after, wasn't equal to unloose those 
 slender little hands you're watching." 
 
 The slender little hands were busy with the slate and pencil 
 , as Saxham looked at them. 
 
 " Those that came and helped us had been sent on from the 
 Convent bomb-proof, where they'd been to look for her" 
 Sister Tobias glanced sorrowfully at the owner of those little 
 busy hands " with an Ambulance chair and a story of more 
 trouble. But Our Lady had had pity on the child. She was 
 past understanding why they'd come to fetch her. . . . The 
 brain can soak up trouble till it won't hold a drop more. But 
 she was quiet and happy kneeling by that blessed Saint, waiting 
 till the Lady should wake up, she said. . . . And, 'deed and 
 'deed, but it looked like the blessedest sleep " 
 
 Sister Tobias broke down and cried outright. The child
 
 468 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 eyed her half suspiciously, half wonderingly. Her great terri- 
 fied eyes had not seen the man strike, but he must have hurt, the 
 woman. Therefore, she looked sharply at the man between 
 the tangled masses of the hair that could not be kept pinned 
 up, and saw two great slow tears ooze over his thick under- 
 lids, and glitter as they hung there, and then fall. Others 
 jfollowed them, tumbling down the square white face, and the 
 stern mouth was wrenched with a strange spasm, and the grim 
 chin trembled curiously. . . . 
 
 Somebody had hurt the man. ... It is not possible to 
 follow up the workings of the disordered intelligence, and read 
 the blurred letters of the confused mind. It is enough that her 
 terror of him abated. She slipped from her stool to the floor, 
 under the pretence of picking up her slate-pencil, and threw 
 back the hair that prevented her seeing clearly, and peered up 
 in that working face of Saxham's with curiosity, crouching 
 near him. She did not recoil violently when the strange, sor- 
 rowful face bent towards her; she only shrank back as Sax- 
 ham asked: 
 
 "You remember me? You know my name?" 
 
 She nodded, eyeing him warily. If his hand had moved, 
 she would have sprung backwards. But it did not stir. 
 
 "Tell me who I am, then?" 
 
 " Man." 
 
 Her lips shaped the word. Her voice was barely audible. 
 His heart beat thickly as he went on: 
 
 " Quite right, but something else besides man. A man with 
 a name. Tell me the name, or shall I tell it you ? " 
 
 She nodded, and her eyes were great and timorous, but there 
 was no terror of him in them now. 
 
 " My name is Saxham Owen Saxham. Say the name 
 after me." 
 
 For a wonder she obeyed. Sister Tobias caught a breath 
 of surprise, but her subdued exclamation was silenced in mid- 
 utterance by Saxham's look. 
 
 " Dr. Owen Saxham Doctor because I try to cure sick 
 people. You have seen me trying at the hospitals. You have 
 helped me many times " 
 
 She puckered her delicate, bewildered brows, and held 
 her head on one side. To be made to think, and recall, and 
 remember, hurt. 
 
 " Many times, and the sick people were grateful. They 
 often ask me now, How is Miss Mildare?"
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 469 
 
 Her attention had wandered to the bronzed buttons on the 
 Doctor's khaki coat. She was trying to count them, it seemed, 
 by the movement of her lips. Saxham went on with inexorable 
 patience : 
 
 " Never mind the buttons. Look at me. Think of the 
 patients at the Hospital who are asking when Lynette Mildare 
 is coming back again. Tell me what I am to say to them, 
 Lynette." 
 
 His voice shook over the beloved name. In spite of his 
 grim effort to fight down the overmastering emotion, his eyes 
 brimmed over, and a drop splashed, hot and heavy, upon the 
 wandering hand that crept out to finger the buttons that would 
 not let themselves be counted right. She looked up at the 
 eyes that wept for her, and their mingled love and anguish 
 touched even her dulled mind to pity. She held her slender 
 hand up against the light, and looked at the splash of wet upon 
 
 '"You cry?" 
 
 There was a glimmer of something in the eyes that re- 
 deemed their vagueness. A rush-light seen shining through a 
 night of mist upon a desolate mountain-side might have meant 
 as little or as much to eyes that saw it. Saxham saw it, and 
 it meant much to him. His great chest lifted on a wave of 
 hope as he answered her: 
 
 " I cry for somebody who cannot cry for herself. Shall I 
 tell you her name? It is Lynette Mildare. When tears come 
 to her, then it will be for those who love her to cry again for 
 joy, for she will be given back to them. . . ." 
 
 " Lord grant it! " breathed Sister Tobias behind them. But 
 Saxham had forgotten her. The fountains of his deep were 
 broken up and rushing from him. 
 
 " I think that day will come, Lynette. I believe that day 
 will come," he said, holding the beautiful vague gaze with his. 
 " If every drop in these veins of mine, poured out, could bring 
 it more quickly, it should be hastened so; if every faculty of 
 my body, every cell in my brain, bent to the achievement of one 
 end, expended to the last unit of energy, in the restoration of 
 what is infinitely dearer to me than life than a hundred lives, 
 if I had them to devote could insure its dawning, and bring 
 the light of Reason and Memory and Hope into these beloved 
 eyes again " 
 
 A sob tore its way through the Doctor's great frame. He 
 rose up abruptly and hurried away.
 
 470 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 LIV 
 
 A DEADLY lassitude, both physical and mental, had settled 
 down upon the men and women of the garrison. They knew 
 that Bronnckers had gone south, leaving General Huysmans 
 in command of the investing forces. They knew that the rainy 
 season brought, them fever, for they shivered and burned with 
 it, and they knew that the scanty rations of coarse and unpalat- 
 able food were getting smaller every day. 
 
 But they were conscious of these things in a dull way, and as 
 though they affected people who were a long distance off. 
 One day, when for the thousandth time word came that the 
 advance-guard of the Relief was in sight, when the commotion 
 visible in the enemy's laager suggested a poked-up ant-hill, and 
 seemed to confirm the report, there was a brief flicker of ex- 
 citement. Mounted men rode out in force, guns were limbered 
 up and galloped out north and west, to divert General Huys- 
 mans' attention, and give Grumer, conjectured to be waiting 
 for it, the opportunity for an eagle-like swoop down upon the 
 harassed tortoise sprawling on her sand-hills. But the rainy 
 dark came down upon the clatter of artillery, and the shining 
 dawn crept up and brought the cruel news that the allies had 
 really been beaten back; and if there was any doubt of that, it 
 was dissipated when one of the Red Cross waggons came 
 rumbling back out of the sloppy morning twilight, bringing 
 Three Messengers to confirm the tale. 
 
 They were eloquent enough, even in their speechlessness, 
 those three dead troopers, whose boots and coats were missing, 
 and whose pockets had been turned inside out. Not. a man of 
 them was known to any member of the beleaguered garrison. 
 Yet every man and woman there was the poorer by three friends 
 and one more hope. 
 
 We know what was happening while Gueldersdorp ate her 
 patient heart out. It has been written in the History of Suc- 
 cessful Strategy how Lord Williams of Afghanistan, landing 
 at Cape Town in January, found Huller on his way from 
 Port Christmas, Whittaker at Bergstorm, Parris at Kooisberg, 
 Ruthven on the Wiedder, and everybody and everything at a 
 deadlock. And being too old and wise to disdain the wisdom 
 of others, the keen old brain under the frosty thatch recalled 
 to mind the story of Stonewall Jackson, collected what forces 
 he could muster, slipped in between two of the columns held
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 471 
 
 immovable, and having established his lines of communication 
 to the south, launched himself on Groenfontein, and created 
 the necessary diversion. A mighty wave rolled back to protect 
 the menaced Free State capital, the paralyzed columns moved 
 again, Diamond Town was relieved by Sir George Parris, and 
 Commandant Selig Bronnckers was captured at Pijlberg. 
 
 Doubtless he was a bully and a tyrant, that roaring-voiced, 
 truculent man. But those angry, red-veined grey eyes of his 
 could look Death squarely in the face, and the brain behind 
 them could conceive and plan stratagems and tactics that were 
 masterly, and devise works that were marvels of Defensive 
 Art. An the heavy hand that patted Mevrouw Bronnckers' 
 head, as that devoted woman sat disconsolate in the river-bed, 
 surrounded by her children, and pots, and bundles, and the 
 roaring voice that softened to speak words of consolation, even 
 as the trap so ingeniously set to catch a Tartar closed in 
 North, South, East, West belonged to a man who knew not 
 only how to fight and win and how to fight and lose, but how 
 to love and pity. 
 
 There came the faint dawn of a day in May when the plan 
 of that bright young man Schenk Eybel was tried, and tried 
 successfully. . . . The line between two forts that lay far 
 apart on the south and south-west was pierced, while the in- 
 cessant roll of rifles made a mile-long fringe of jagged yellow- 
 ish flame along the enemy's eastern trenches. Even before the 
 feint sputtered out the rush had been made, the stratagem had 
 developed, and at the bidding of twenty incendiary torches, 
 the daub-and-wattle huts of the Barala town leaped skyward 
 in roaring conflagration. 
 
 We know the glorious, unlooked-for ending of that day of 
 fire and blood. It is marked with a white stone in the History 
 of the Siege of Gueldersdorp, and the chapter is headed " The 
 Turning of the Tables." It gives a spirited description of the 
 prudent retreat of General Huysmans, the unconditional sur- 
 render of Commandant Eybel, and winds up with a pen-and- 
 ink sketch of Bronnckers' bright boy breaking the chaff-bread 
 of captivity in the quarters of that slim duyvel, the Engelsch 
 Commandant. 
 
 But while the Boer was yet top-dog in the scuffle, and held 
 the Barala stad, and the fort that had lately done duty aa 
 headquarters for the Irregulars, holding captive their command- 
 ing officer, several of his juniors, and some fifteen troopers, 
 with a handful of Town Guards, and all the fighting men who
 
 472 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 could be spared from the trenches were being posted between 
 the enemy and the town, and a couple of field-guns were being 
 hurried into position, and it had not yet occurred to Com- 
 mandant Schenk Eybel that the cautious Huysmans might 
 leave him in the lurch, things looked very bad indeed for the 
 doughty defenders of little Gueldersdorp certainly up to after- 
 noon-tea time, when a couple of Scotch girls crossed the two 
 hundred yards of veld that, lay between the Fort and the town, 
 carrying cans of steaming tea for the parching Britons penned 
 up there. 
 
 You are to see those calm, unconscious heroines start, fixing 
 their hairpinned braids with quick, deft touches, pinning up 
 their skirts as for the crossing of a wimpling burn rather than 
 for the fording of Death's black river. They measured the 
 distance with cool, keen eyes, took up a can in each hand, ex- 
 changed a word, and started. The remaining can they left be- 
 hind, saying they would come back for it. And they meant to, 
 and would have, but for a pale young woman in curling-pins, 
 crowned by the deplorable wreck of a large and flowery hat, 
 and wearing a pink cotton gown of deplorable limpness, 
 through the washed-out material of which her sharpened collar- 
 bones and thin shoulders threatened to pierce. For 'ow are 
 you to take to call a proper pride in yourself when you 'aven't 
 got no 'art for anythink any more? 
 
 You are to understand that Emigration Jane 'ad bin 'in 
 'Orspital along of what, the doctors called the Triphoid Fever, 
 munfs an' munfs, and 'ad bin crooil bad, an' sent back again 
 after being discharged, on accounts of an Elapse, and kep' a 
 dreadful time at the Women's Combalescent, through her blood 
 being nothink but water and now you may guess the reason 
 of that fruitless search on the part of W. Keyse. 
 
 She tried to run at first, but the can was full and heavy, 
 and her knees shook under her at the screaming of the bullets 
 over that cross-swept field. Her pore 'art beat somethink 
 crooil, and there was a horrible kind of swishing in her years, 
 but to give up, and chuck away the can, and scuttle back to 
 cover, with Them Two stepping along in front as cool and 
 more than halfway over, was what Emigration Jane could not 
 demean herself to do. And at last they passed her coming 
 back, and the Fort loomed up before her, as suddenly as though 
 it had sprouted up mushroom-fashion under her dazzled eyes. 
 And grimy men were leaning over the sandbags parapet ap- 
 plauding her, and blackened hands attached to hairy arms
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 473 
 
 reached down and grabbed the can, and it was taken up into the 
 air and vanished, she never knew how. And then she was star- 
 ing up into the lean, brickdust-coloured face of a Corporal of 
 the Town Guard, whose head was swathed in a bloody band- 
 age, and in all the wide world there was only Her and 
 Him. 
 
 "You fust-class little Nailer. You Al bit o' frock " 
 
 W. Keyse began. Then his pale eyes bolted and his jaw fell, 
 and his overwhelming joy and relief took on the aspect of 
 horrified consternation. 
 
 " Watto ! " he was beginning weakly, but she tore her gaze 
 from his, and with a rending sob, covered her face with her 
 hands, and ran blindly. He remained petrified and staring. 
 And then a bullet struck him full in the face, and he screamed 
 like a shot rock-rabbit, and threw up his arms and fell back, 
 smothering in his own blood, behind the breastwork. And 
 she never knew the cruel trick that Fate had played her, as 
 she ran. . . . 
 
 She learned it later, when Young Eybel and his party were 
 marched prisoners into town, and cheer upon cheer went up 
 from British throats, and bells were ringing joyfully, and 
 <( God Save the Queen ! " bellowed in every imaginable key, was 
 heard from every possible quarter. 
 
 It was while the Barala were w r ailing over their suffocated 
 women and piccaninns, and the acrid fumes of burning yet 
 hung heavy in the powder-tinted air, and the R.A.M.C. men 
 and their volunteer helpers were bringing in the wounded and 
 the dead, that Emigration Jane saw a face upon a stretcher that 
 \vas being carried through the rejoicing crowd, and screamed 
 at the sight, and fell tooth and nail upon the human barrier 
 that interposed between herself and it, and got through how, 
 she never could 'a' told you. 
 
 Rather a dreadful face it was, with wide-open, staring eyes 
 protruding through a stiffening mask of gore. The teeth 
 grinned, revealed by the livid, drawn-back lips, and how she 
 knew him again in such a orful styte she never- not to this 
 <lay, if you offered her pounds and pounds to tell you 
 
 She was only Emigration Jane, but when the bearers halted 
 with the stretcher, it was in obedience to the gesture and the 
 look of a young woman who had risen above herself into the 
 keen and piercing atmosphere of High Tragedy. 
 
 "Put that down, you two blokes. Wot for?" Her thin 
 throat swelled visibly before the screarn_came : " 'Cos 'e be-
 
 474 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 longs to me. 'Ain't that enough? Then I belongs to 'im. 
 Dead or livin' oh, my darlin' ! my darlin' ! " 
 
 The bearers interchanged a look as they laid their burden 
 down. It was not heavy, even when not living under con- 
 ditions of severe starvation, for Corporal W. Keyse was a short 
 man and a spare. Had been, one was tempted to say, in regard 
 to his condition: "For," said one of the R.A.M.C. men to a 
 sympathetic bystander, " the chap has had a tremendous wipe 
 over the head with a revolver-butt or a gun-stock, and he has 
 been shot in the face besides. There's the hole plain where 
 the bullet went in under his near nostril, and came out at the 
 left-hand corner of his off eye. And unless a kind o' miracle 
 happens, I should say, myself, that it would be a saving of 
 time to carry him straight to the Cemetery." 
 
 " Don't let the poor girl hear you," said the sympathetic 
 bystander. But Emigration Jane was past hearing or seeing 
 anything but the damaged head upon the canvas pad, as she beat 
 her breast and cried out to it wildly, dropping on her knees 
 beside it: 
 
 " O my own, own, try an' know me ! Come back for long 
 enough to s'y one word! O God, if You let 'im, I'll pray to 
 You all my days. O pore, pore darlin' 'ead that wicked men 
 'ave 'urt so crooil " 
 
 It was a lover's bosom that she drew it to, panting under 
 the limp and shabby cotton print gown. And the voice that 
 called W. Keyse to come back from the very threshold of the 
 Otherwhere was the voice of true, true love. 
 
 It worked the kind o' miracle, for one of the Corporal's 
 stiffened eyelids quivered and came down halfway, and the 
 martial spirit of its owner flickered up long enough for W. 
 Keyse to sputter out: 
 
 " C'rips, it's 'Er! Am I dead an' got to 'Eaven on some- 
 body else's pass?" 
 
 " Born to be hung, I should say," commented the R.A.M.C. 
 man aside to his mate. " Chuck some water over the young 
 woman, one of you," he added, as the stretcher was lifted, and 
 the small cortege proceeded on its way. " And tell her, when 
 she comes to, that we've taken her sweetheart to Hospital in- 
 stead of to the other place." 
 
 " Rum critters, women," commented another bystander, not 
 untender in his manner of sprinkling the dubious liquid known 
 in Gueldersdorp as water out of a cracked tin dipper over the 
 face of the young woman who sat upon the ground in the centre
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 475 
 
 of a circular palisade of interested human legs. " Look at 
 this one, for instance. Lively as a vink as long as she believes 
 her chap a corpse, and does a solid flop as soon as she finds out 
 he has a kick in him. Help her up, you on the other 
 side. Do you think you could walk now, miss, if you tried 
 to?" 
 
 She made a faltering attempt, but her knees shook under 
 her. Her clasped hands shook, too, as she held them out be- 
 seeching those about, her to be pitiful, and tell her where 
 " they " had taken him. Then, when she was told, and be- 
 cause she was too weak and dazed to walk, she ran all the way 
 to the Hospital, and volunteered to nurse him. 
 
 Saxham stitched up the split scalp of W. Keyse, and grimly 
 congratulated him upon the thickness of the skull beneath it. 
 The bullet had, as has already been indicated, gone in under 
 the left nostril, and emerged below the inner corner of the 
 right eye, gaining the recipient of the wound notoriety as well 
 as a strong temporary snuffle and a slight permanent, cast. . . . 
 
 " You shall git well, deer," Emigration Jane would tell her 
 patient twenty times a day. " You carn't 'elp it, becos I means 
 to myke yer." 
 
 " A' right," her hero would snuffle. One day he added, with 
 a weakly swoop of one lean arm in the direction of her waist: 
 " Mend me an' marry me. That's wot I call a Fair Division 
 o' Labour. Twig? " 
 
 She crimsoned, gasping: 
 
 "Yer don't never mean it?" 
 
 " Stryte I mean it," declared W. Keyse. " Woddjer tyke 
 me for?" 
 
 His bed was in a corner, and a screen baffled prying eyes. 
 She hung over him, trembling, ardent, doubting, joyful, fal- 
 tering: 
 
 " S'y it agyne, darlin'. Upon yer solemn natural " 
 
 He said it with the lean arm round her. 
 
 "An' it's me me wot you wants an' not that Other 
 One? " 
 
 He swore it. 
 
 "You and not that Other One. So help me Jiminy 
 Cripps!" 
 
 "An' you forgives me abart them letters?" Her face 
 was coming close. . . . 
 
 " Every time I blooming well kissed 'em arter I bin an' 
 picked 'em up," he declared..
 
 476 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "You did that?" she quavered, marvelling at the greatness 
 of his nature. 
 
 " Look in me jacket pocket if you think I'm spinnin' yer 
 fairy ones." His close arm slackened a little. " Now there's 
 somethin' I got to up an' tell, if yer never tips me the 'Ow Do 
 no more." 
 
 "Wot is it, deer?" Her heart beat painfully. Was this 
 something the reason why he had not yet kissed her? 
 
 " It's got to do with the Dutchy wot landed me this clip 
 over the cokernut " he indicated the plaster strappings that 
 decorated the seat of intelligence " with a revolver-butt, when 
 they rushed the Fort. After 'e'd plugged at me wiv' 'is last 
 cartridge an' missed." The Adam's apple in his thin throat 
 worked up above the collar of the grey flannel Hospital jacket. 
 " I I outed 'im," said W. Keyse. 
 
 " O' course you did, deer." Her heart, thrilled with pride 
 in her hero. " An' serve 'im glad the narsty, blood-thirsty, 
 murderin' " 
 
 He interrupted : 
 
 " 'Old 'ard. Wait till you knows 'oo it was." He gulped, 
 and the Adam's apple jerked in the old way. "That 'ulkin' 
 big Dopper you was walkin' out along of, when I " 
 
 "Walt! It was Walt?" 
 
 She shuddered and grew pale. 
 
 "That's the bloke I means. I 'ad to 'ave 'im," explained 
 W. Keyse, " ar 'e'd 'ave 'ad me. So I sent 'im in. With my 
 one, two, on' the 'Aymaker's Lift. Right in the middle of 'is 
 dirty weskit. F'fr!" He blew a sigh. "Now it's out, an' 
 I suppose you 'ates me ? " 
 
 She panted. 
 
 " It's 'orrible, deer, but but you 'ad to. An' an' if 
 I' ave to s'y it, I'd a blowin' sight rather it was 'Im than You." 
 
 " I'll 'ave my kiss now," said the lordly W. Keyse. And 
 took it from her willing lips. 
 
 LV 
 
 THERE was no perceptible change in Lynette, either at. the 
 time of young Eybel's frustrated coup or for long after. She 
 was to live as much as possible in the open air, Saxham had in- 
 sisted, and so you would find the girl, with a Sister in charge 
 of her, sitting in the Cemetery, where the crop of little white
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 477 
 
 crosses thickened every day. The blue and white irises had 
 bloomed and withered upon those two graves where her adopted 
 mother and her brave young lover lay before the dawning of 
 that day and the nuns prayed and Saxham hoped for. 
 
 It was his bitter-sweet, joy to be with her constantly, striving 
 with all his splendid powers of brain and body to brace the 
 shattered nerves, and restore the exhausted strength, and lead 
 the darkened mind back gently and by degrees towards the 
 light. 
 
 She did not shrink from him now, but would answer his 
 questions submissively, and give him her hand mechanically at 
 meeting and parting. Saxham had not the magnetic influence 
 over shy and backward children that another man possessed. 
 She would smile and brighten when she saw him coming, up- 
 right and alert as ever, though bearing heavy traces now in the 
 haggard lines and deep hollows of his face, in the greying hairs 
 above his temples and in the close-clipped brown moustache, 
 as in the Quixote-like gauntness of the figure that had never 
 carried much flesh, of the long struggle of close on seven 
 months' duration. 
 
 The pleasant little whistle would die upon his lips when he 
 saw her sitting by the Mother's grave, plaiting grasses while 
 the Sister sewed, or making clumsy babyish attempts at drawing 
 on her little slate. From this she disliked to be parted, so her 
 gentle nurses fastened it to one end of a long ribbon, and its 
 pencil to the other, and tied the ribbon about her waist. 
 
 One day, as the Colonel stooped to speak to her, his keen 
 glance noted that the wavering outline of a house stood upon 
 the little slate. The living descendant of the primitive savage 
 who had outlined the forms of men and beasts upon the flank 
 of the great boulder when this old world was young would 
 have scorned the drawing, and with good reason. It was so 
 feeble and wavering an attempt to convey, in outline, the idea 
 of a white man's dwelling. 
 
 The roof sagged wonderfully, and the chimneys were at 
 frenzied angles with the sides of the irregular cube, with its 
 four windows of impossibly varying size, and the oblong patch 
 that meant a door between them. Above the door was another 
 oblong, set transversely, and rather suggesting a tavern sign. 
 
 There were some clumsily indicated buildings, possibly sheds 
 and stables of daub and wattle, eking out. the ramshackle 
 house. Behind it and to the left of it were scrawls that might 
 have been meant for trees. An enclosure of spiky lines might
 
 478 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 have indicated an orchard-hedge. And there were things in 
 the middle distance, also to the left, that you might accept as 
 beehives or as native kraals. The man who looked at them 
 knew they were native kraals. He drew in his breath sharply, 
 and the fold between his eyebrows deepened, as he scanned the 
 clumsy drawing on the slate. Without those rude lines in the 
 foreground to the right of the house, enclosing a little kopje of 
 boulders and a low, irregular grave-mound, the drawing would 
 have meant nothing at all, even to the eye of a practised scout, 
 except a tavern on the lonely veld. The grave at the foot of 
 the little kopje located the spot. 
 
 " A veld hotel in the Orange Free State a wretched shanty 
 of the usual corrugated-iron and mud-wall type, in the high 
 grass country between Driepoort and Kroonfontein." 
 
 He heard the wraith of his own voice speaking to the dead 
 woman who lay under the fading irises at his feet. He saw 
 her with the mental vision quite clearly. Her great purple- 
 grey eyes regarded his upon an equal level, and they were 
 inscrutable in their strange, secret defiance, and indomitable in 
 the determination of their regard. 
 
 Why had she been so bent upon hiding the trail ? Why had 
 she distrusted him? 
 
 He bent upon one knee in the grass beside the slender 
 shrinking figure, woman's and yet child's, and held out the 
 little slate to her, and said, with the smile that even backward 
 children could not resist: 
 
 "Did you draw this?" 
 
 She nodded, looking shyly up at him from under her sweep- 
 ing black lashes with great wistful eyes. He went on, point- 
 ing with a slender grass-blade to each object as he named it: 
 
 " It is a house, and these are sheds and stables, and this is 
 an orchard, and here the Kaffirs live. But who lives in the 
 house ? " 
 
 She whispered, with a look of secret fear: 
 
 ' The man lives there. And the woman." 
 
 " Tell me the man's name." 
 
 She breathed, after a hesitation that was full of troubled ap- 
 prehension : 
 
 " Bough." 
 
 A red flush mounted in his thin cheek, and he drew his 
 breath in sharply. He asked: 
 
 " Does anyone else live in the house? "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 479 
 
 She reflected with a knitted brow. He helped her. 
 
 " I do not mean the travellers the men and women who 
 come driving up in Cape-carts and transport-waggons, and 
 drive away again, but someone who lives with Bough and the 
 woman. She had been at the tavern a long, long time, though 
 she is so young and so little. Try to remember her name." 
 
 The knitted brow relaxed, and the beautiful dim eyes had 
 almost a smile in them. 
 
 " It is ' the Kid.' " 
 
 " Try and think. Has she no other name? " 
 
 She shook her head. He gave up that trail as lost, and 
 moved the grass-blade to another part, of the drawing on the 
 slate. 
 
 " Tell me what this is." 
 
 She answered at once: 
 
 " It is the Little Kopje. The English traveller made it 
 when he put the dead woman in the ground." 
 
 His heart beat heavily, and the hand that pointed with the 
 grass-blade shook a little. 
 
 " Where is the man who buried the dead woman and built 
 the Little Kopje?" 
 
 She pointed to the rude oblong that was meant for a grave. 
 
 " There." The slender finger climbed the heap of boulders. 
 " And there is where the Kid sits when she is a bad girl and 
 runs away." She peeped up in his face almost slyly. " Then 
 they call her: 'You Kid, come here! Dirty little slut, take 
 the broom and sweep out the bar! Idle little devil, fetch 
 water for the kitchen ! ' ' Her smile was peaked and elfish. 
 She laid a cunning finger beside her pursed-up lips. " But 
 though Wiey scold and call bad names, they never come and 
 fetch her down off the Little Kopje. Beat her when she comes 
 in, and serve her right the impudent little scum! But never 
 come near the Little Kopje, because of the spook the Basuto 
 boy saw there one night when the moon was big and shining 
 white." 
 
 He said, with infinite pity in his tone, and a compassionate 
 mist rising in those keen bright eyes of his: 
 
 " They are cruel to the Kid, both Bough and the woman ? " 
 
 She began to shake. The guardian Sister, who sat sewing 
 a little way behind her, looked up anxiously at her charge. He 
 pacified her with a glance, and, taking one of the slender 
 trembling hands in a firm, kind clasp, repeated his question: 
 
 "Always cruel, cruel. But Bough "
 
 480 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 A spasm contracted her face. At the base of the slender 
 throat something throbbed and throbbed. She whispered 
 brokenty : 
 
 " When the woman went away " 
 
 Her slender fingers closed desperately upon his. Her heart 
 shook her, and Fear was in her eyes. Her voice vibrated and 
 shuddered at her white lips as a caught moth vibrates and 
 shudders in a spider-web. She began again: 
 
 " When the woman went away, Bough " 
 
 Her eyes quailed and flickered ; the waxen face of her was 
 convulsed by a sudden spasm of awful fear. The muscles of 
 her whole body stiffened in the immovable rigor of terror. 
 Only her head jerked from side to side, like that of some timid 
 creature of the wilds held captive in crushing folds or crunch- 
 ing fangs. And he comprehended all, and understood all, in 
 one lighting leap of intuition, as he saw. 
 
 " Hush ! " He stopped her with his authoritative eyes and 
 the firm, reassuring pressure of his hand. " Forget that 
 speak of it no more: Try and tell me who lives here, under 
 these grasses and flowers." 
 
 He moved the hand he held to touch them, and the spasm 
 that contracted her features relaxed, and the terror died out 
 of her eyes, as though some soothing, healing virtue was con- 
 veyed to her by the mere contact with that sacred earth. He 
 went on: 
 
 " She was very noble, very pure, and very beautiful. Every- 
 one loved her, and her life was spent in doing good. You 
 were dear to her inexpressibly dear to her. She used to call 
 you her dearest, daughter. Tell me who she was." 
 
 Her face quivered, and in the depths of her dim, vague eyes 
 a beam of the golden light of old was rekindled. 
 
 " She was the Lady. When will she come again ? " 
 
 He raised his hand and pointed to the sky. 
 
 " When that is rolled away, and the Sign of the Cross shines 
 from the east to the west, and from the north to the south, and 
 the King of Glory comes with His Angels and His Saints, we 
 shall see her again, Lynette " 
 
 His voice broke. He laid the cool, delicate, nerveless hand 
 back upon his knee, and rose, for the Sister was folding up her 
 sewing. He looked long after the girlish figure as it was led 
 away. 
 
 He understood everything now. He knew why the mother- 
 plover had trailed her wing in the dust, striving to lead the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 481 
 
 footstep of the stranger aside from the secret nest. He stooped 
 and gathered a blade or two of grass, and a few crumbs of red, 
 sandy earth, from the grave at his feet, and kissed them, and 
 folded them reverently in an envelope, and hid the little packet 
 in his breast before he went. 
 
 That evening there were pillars and banks of dust on the 
 north-west horizon, and the flashes of lyddite and the booming 
 of artillery told patient Gueldersdorp that the Relief was very 
 near. A few hours later they had lamp-signalled brief details 
 of the battle with Huysmans, ending with " Good-night " and 
 the promise to fight their way in next morning. Later still 
 eight troopers in khaki, jaunty ostrich-tips in their smasher 
 hats, rode into the little battered village town that huddled on 
 the dumpy hill-top, and all the waiting world was gladdened 
 with the news. And London called on a quiet elderly lady, 
 to tell her what the man, her boy, had done. 
 
 The name of that little hamlet town has, cruelly enough, 
 passed into a byword a synonym for everything that is rowdy, 
 vulgar, apish in the English character, with the dregs stirred 
 up. But yet it will ring down the silver grooves of Time as 
 long as time shall be. 
 
 Do I wander from the thread of my story I who have 
 dressed my puppets in the brave deeds of those who strove and 
 endured and suffered, to what a glorious end? 
 
 Great writers lay down plans, formulate elaborate synopses. 
 Not so I, who out of all wreaths that Fame holds yet in 
 her lap to give away, shall never call one laurel mine. 
 
 A wandering wind came sighing past my ears one night upon 
 the Links at Herion, burdened with this story it had to tell. 
 Before then it had only blown in fitful gusts. Then again 
 it blew steadily. I had caught some whispers from it some years 
 before. On the deck of the great, populous, electric-lighted 
 ocean-hotel that was hurrying me across the Atlantic, racing the 
 porpoise-schools to get to New York City, and later to Wash- 
 ington, when the red sunset fires burned low behind the Capitol, 
 it spoke to me in the wonderful, beloved voice I shall never 
 hear on earth any more. Yet once more the wind came faintly 
 sighing, in the giant blue shadow of Table Mountain; it blew 
 at Johannesburg, six thousand feet above sea-level, in a raging 
 cyclone of red gritty dust. Again it came, stirring the celadon- 
 green carpet of veld that is spread at the feet of the Magalies- 
 berg Ranges, that were turquoise-blue as the scillas growing in 
 the South Welsh garden that lies before the window where I
 
 482 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 write, this variable April day. But it blew with a most insist- 
 ent note on the dumpy hill-top where they have rebuilt the 
 ridiculous, glorious village that gave birth to deeds worthy of 
 the Age Heroic, about whose sand-bagged defences nightly pa- 
 trolled a Sentinel who never slept. 
 
 Gueldersdorp tumbled out of bed at three-thirty to see the 
 troops march in by the cold white morning moonlight that 
 painted long indigo-blue shadows of marching horsemen and 
 rolling guns, drawn by many horses, and huge-teamed baggage- 
 wagons, eastward over the bleached dust. 
 
 I dare not. attempt to describe the indescribable. Zulu and 
 Barala, Celestial and Hindu, welcomed the Relief each after 
 his own manner, and were glad and rejoiced. But of these 
 haggard men and emaciated women of British race I can but 
 say that in them human joy attained the climax of a sacred 
 frenzy that human gratitude and enthusiasm, loyalty and 
 patriotism, reached the pitch at which the mercury in the ther- 
 mometer of human emotion ceases to record altitudes. 
 
 At its height, when the last fort had fallen to England and 
 the flag of the United Republics had fluttered down from the 
 tree whence it had waved so long, and the Union Jack went up 
 to frantic cheering, and the retreating cloud of dust, on the 
 horizon told of the exit of the enemy from the Theatre of War, 
 Saxham played his one trump card in the game that meant life 
 and death to him, and life, and everything that made life worth 
 living, to one other. 
 
 You are to see the hulking Doctor with the square-cut face, 
 his grim under-jaw more squarely set than ever, his blue eyes 
 smouldering anxiety under their glooming brows, trying to coax 
 a pale, bewildered girl to take a walk with him. She would at 
 length, provided Sister Tobias walked on the other side and 
 held her hand. So this party of three plunged into the boiling 
 whirlpool of joyous Gueldersdorp. 
 
 People were singing " God Save the Queen," and the " Red, 
 White, and Blue," " Auld Lang Syne " and " Rule Britannia," 
 all at once and all together, and playing the tunes of them on 
 mouth-organs and concertinas. They were shaking hands with 
 one another and everybody else, and shedding tears of joy, and 
 borrowing the pocket-handkerchiefs of sympathetic strangers to 
 dry them, or leaving them undried. They were crowding the 
 Government kitchens, drinking the healths of the officers and 
 men of Great Britain's Union Brigade in hot soup and hot
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 483 
 
 coffee. They were clustered like bees upon the most climb- 
 able house-tops, watching those retiring dust-clouds in" the dis- 
 tance, and the nearer movements of their friends and allies; 
 they were hearing the experiences of dust-stained and travel- 
 worn Imperialists, and telling their own ; and one and all, they 
 were thanking God Who had led them, through bodily fear, 
 and mental anguish, and bitter privations, to hail the dawn of 
 this most blessed day. 
 
 The electrical atmosphere, the surge of the multitude, the 
 roar of thousands of voices, the gaze of thousands of eyes, had 
 its effect upon the girl. She trembled and flushed and paled. 
 Her breath came quick and short. She threw back her head 
 and gasped for air. But she did not wish to be taken back to 
 the Convent bomb-proof. She shook her head when Sister 
 Tobias suggested that they should return. 
 
 And then some of the women whom, she had helped to nurse 
 in hospital saw her, and recognized her, and came about her 
 with pitiful words and compassionate looks not only for her 
 own sake, but for that dead woman's whose adopted daughter 
 they knew her to have been. 
 
 " You poor, blessed, innocent lamb ! " They crowded about 
 her, kissing her hands and her dress, and Sister Tobias's shabby 
 black habit. " Lord help you ! " they mourned over her. 
 " Christ pity you, and bring you to yourself again ! " 
 
 "Why are you so sorry?" Lynette asked them, knitting her 
 delicate brown brows, and peering in their tearful smiling faces. 
 " No," she corrected herself ; " I mean why are you so glad ? " 
 
 " Glad is ut, honey!" screamed a huge Irishwoman, throw- 
 ing a brawny red arm about the shrinking figure and hugging 
 it. " Begob, wid the Holy Souls dancin' jigs in Purgatory, an' 
 the Blessed Saints clappin' their ban's in Heaven, we have ray- 
 son to be glad. Whirroosh! Ould Erin for ever an' God 
 save the Cornel ! " 
 
 She yelled with all the power of her Celtic lungs, plucked off 
 her downtrodden shoes, slapped their soles together smartly, 
 and, with a gesture of royal prodigality, tossed them right and 
 left into the air, performed a caper of surprising agility on 
 elephantine, blue-yarn stocking-covered feet, and was carried 
 away by a roaring surge of the joyous crowd, vociferating. 
 
 Saxham felt the slender hand of his charge tighten upon his 
 arm, and his heart leaped as he noted the working of the sensi- 
 tive face and the heaving of the small, nymph-like bosom under 
 the thin material of her dress. He hoped, he believed that a
 
 484 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 change was taking place in her. He said to himself that the 
 delicate "mechanism of her braiw, clogged and paralyzed by a 
 great mental shock, was revitalizing, storing energy, gaining 
 power; that the lesion was healing; that she would recover 
 must recover. 
 
 Then his quick eye saw fatigue in her. They took her back 
 out of the dust and the clamour and the crowd, back to the 
 quiet, of the Cemetery. 
 
 It happened there. For as she stood again beside the long, 
 low mound beneath which the heart that had cherished her lay 
 mouldering they saw that the tears were running down her 
 face and that her whole body was shaken with sobbing. And 
 then, as a wild tornado of cheering, mingled with drifts of mar- 
 tial music, swept northwards from Market Square, she fell 
 upon her knees beside the grave, and cried as if to living ears: 
 
 " Mother, oh Mother, the Relief ! They're here ! Oh, my 
 own darling to be glad without you! . . ." 
 
 She lay there prone, and wept as though all the tears pent 
 up in her since that numbing double stroke of the Death 
 Angel's sword were flowing from her now. And Sister Tobias, 
 glancing doubtfully up at Saxham's face, saw it transfigured 
 and irradiated with a great and speechless joy. For he knew 
 that the light had come back to the beautiful eyes he loved, and 
 that the Future might yield its harvest of joy yet, even yet, for 
 the Dop Doctor he credited in his own blindness. 
 
 LVI 
 
 THEY were standing together in the same place two months 
 later when he told her all, and asked her to be his wife in his 
 own brusque characteristic way. 
 
 " You have been so good, so kind," she said, in rather formal 
 phrase, but with her sweet eyes shining through tears and her 
 sensitive lips trembling. " You have shown yourself to be so 
 noble in your unselfish care for others, in your unsparing efforts 
 for the good and benefit of everyone " 
 
 " Put that by," said Saxham rather roughly, " and please to 
 look at me, Miss Mildare." 
 
 He had never called her Lynette since her recovery or touched 
 the pretty hand he coveted unless in formal greeting. 
 
 " Put all that by. You see me to-day as you have seen me 
 for months past, conscientious and cleanly, sober and sane, in
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 485 
 
 body as in mind, discharging my duty at the Hospital and else- 
 where as well as any other man possessing the special qualifica- 
 tions it demands. Pray understand that I am not a philan- 
 thropist, and have never posed as one. For the sake, first of 
 a man who believed in me, and secondly of a woman whom I 
 love and you are she I have done what I have." 
 
 He squared his great shoulders and stood up before her, and, 
 though his face had never had any charm for her, its power went 
 home to her and its passion thrilled. 
 
 " I play no part. The man I seem to be I am. But up to 
 seven months ago, before the siege began, I was known in this 
 town, and with reason, as the Dop Doctor." 
 
 He saw recollection waken in her eyes, and nerved himself 
 to the sharp ordeal of changing it to repulsion and disgust. 
 
 " You have heard that name applied to me. It conveyed 
 nothing loathsome to your innocent mind. You once repeated 
 it to me, and were about to ask its meaning. I had it in my mind 
 then to enlighten you, and for the mean and cowardly baseness 
 that shrank from the exposure I have to pay now in the " 
 a muscle in his pale face twiched " the exquisite pain it is to 
 me to tell you to-day." 
 
 "Then do not tell me." She said it almost in a whisper. 
 " Dr. Saxham, I beg you most earnestly to spare yourself." 
 She dropped her eyes under the fierce earnestness of his and 
 knitted her cold little hands in one another. " Please leave the 
 rest unsaid," she begged, without, looking at him. 
 
 " It cannot be," said Saxham. " Miss Mildare, the Dop 
 Doctor was merely another sobriquet for the Town Drunkard. 
 And now you know what you should have known before if I 
 had not been a coward and a knave." 
 
 She turned her ej r es softly upon him, and they could not rest, 
 it seemed to her, upon a man of braver and more lofty bearing. 
 
 " I was the Town Drunkard," Saxham went on, in the cold, 
 clear voice that cut like a knife to the intelligence. " Known 
 in every liquor-saloon, and familiar to every constable, and a 
 standing butt for the clumsy jests that the most utter dolt of a 
 Police Magistrate might splutter from the Bench." His jar- 
 ring laugh hurt her. " The Man in the Street, and the Woman 
 of the Street, for that matter pardon me if I offend your ears, 
 but the truth must be told were my godfather and my god- 
 mother, and they gave me that name between them. You are 
 trembling, Miss Mildare. Sit down upon that balk, and I 
 will finish."
 
 486 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 There was a remnant of timber lying near that had been 
 used in the construction of a gun-mounting. She moved to it 
 and sat down, and the Doctor went on: 
 
 " I am not going to weary you with the story of how I came 
 to be what I have told you. But that I had lived a clean and 
 honourable and temperate life up to thirty years of age when 
 my world caved in with me I swear is the very truth ! " 
 
 She said gently: " I can believe it, Dr. Saxham." 
 
 " Even if you could not it would not alter the fact. And 
 then, at the height of my success, and on the brink of a mar- 
 riage that I dreamed would bring me the fulfilment of every 
 hope a man may cherish, one impulse of pity and charity towards 
 a wretched little woman brought me ruin, ruin, ruin ! " 
 
 Pity for a wretched woman had brought it all about. She 
 was glad to see the Saxham of her knowledge in that Saxham 
 whom she had not known. He folded his great arms upon his 
 broad breast and went on : 
 
 " Nothing was left to me. Everything was gone. Rehabili- 
 tation in the eyes of the Law for I gained that much did not 
 clear me in the eyes of Society that hugs the secret criminal 
 to its heart in the full consciousness of what his deeds are, and 
 shudders at the innocent man upon whom has once fallen the 
 shadow of that grim and false and bloody Idol that civilization 
 misnames Justice. I was cast out. Even by the brother I 
 had trusted and the woman I had loved. I had in a vague way 
 believed in God until then; I know I used to pray to Him to 
 bless those I loved and help me to achieve great things for their 
 sakes. But nothing at all was left of that except a dull aching 
 desire to throw back in the face of the Deity the little He 
 had left, for me. My heart, and my intellectual powers, and my 
 self-respect. . . ." 
 
 Her voice came to his ears in the half- whispered words: 
 
 " Had he left you so little, after all ? " 
 
 " Little enough," said Saxham doggedly, " compared with 
 what I had lost. And as it is the privilege of the Christian 
 to blame either the Almighty or the Devil for whatever ills are 
 brought on him by his own blind, reckless challenging of the 
 Inevitable termed Fate and Destiny by classical Paganism 
 so I found myself at odds with One I had been taught to call 
 my Maker." 
 
 In His own acre, close to her beloved dead, with all those 
 little white crosses marking where other dust that had once 
 praised Him with the human voice lay waiting for the summons
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 487 
 
 of the Resurrection, it was incredibly awful to her to hear Him 
 thus denied. She grew pale and shuddered, and Saxham saw. 
 
 " You see that I wish to be honest with you, and open and 
 above-board. I would not ever have you say to yourself, * This 
 man deceived this man misled me, wishing me to think him 
 better than he was.' There is not much more to tell you save 
 that I took what money remained to me at the bank and from 
 the sale of my last possessions about a thousand pounds and 
 shook the dust off my shoes, and came out here, drunk, to carry 
 out my purpose of self-degradation to the uttermost. And I 
 became a foul beast among beasts that were even fouler, but 
 less vile and less shameful because their mental and moral stan- 
 dard was infinitely lower than my own. And they gave me the 
 name you know of." His voice had the ring of steel smitten on 
 steel. He drew himself up with a movement of almost savage 
 pride, and the knotted veins swelled on his broad white fore- 
 head, and his blue eyes blazed under his thunderous smudge 
 of black eyebrows. 
 
 " The name you know. It used to be called after me when 
 I reeled the streets they whispered it afterwards as I rode 
 by. To-day it is forgotten." His nostrils quivered, and he 
 threw out his hands as if with that, action he tossed something 
 worthless to the winds. " Miss Mildare, I have not touched 
 Drink the stuff that was my nourishment and my sustenance, 
 my comfort and my bane, my deadliest enemy and my only 
 friend since that hour when with the last effort of my Will 
 I rallied all my mental and bodily forces to resist its allure- 
 ment." 
 
 " I know it, Dr. Saxham. I am sure of it." She rose and 
 held out her hands to him, but. he folded his arms more closely 
 over his starving, famished heart, and would not see them yet. 
 
 " You can be sure of it. Alcohol is no longer my master 
 and my god. I stand before you a free man, because I willed 
 to be free." There was a little blot of foam at one corner of 
 his mouth, but the square pale face was composed, even im- 
 passive. " Once, not so long ago, I filled a place of standing 
 in the profession of Surgery and Medicine ; I knew what it was 
 to be esteemed and respected by the world. For your dear 
 sake I promise to regain what I have lost, be even more than 
 I used to be, achieve greater things than are done by other men 
 of equal powers with mine. I am not a man to pledge my word 
 lightly, Miss Mildare. . . ." His voice shook now and his 
 blue eyes glistened. " If you would be so so unutterably kind
 
 4 88 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 as to become my wife, I promise you a worthy husband. I 
 swear to you upon what I hold dearest and most sacred your 
 own life, your own honour, your own happiness, never to give 
 you cause to regret marrying me. For I may die, indeed, but 
 living I will never fail you." 
 
 There was a lump in her throat choking her. Her eyes had 
 gone to that other grave some fifty paces distant from the 
 Catholic portion of the Cemetery. There were freshly-gathered 
 flowers upon it, as upon the grave that lay so near, and two 
 gorgeous butterflies were hovering about the blooms, in mingled 
 dalliance and greediness. 
 
 " You loved him," said Saxham, following the journey of 
 her wistful eyes. " Love him still ; remember him for every 
 trait and quality of his that was worthy of love from you. But 
 give me the hope of one day gaining from you some shadow of 
 of return for what I feel for you. Is it Passion? I hardly 
 know. Whether it is Love, in the sense in which that word is 
 employed by many of the women and nearly all the men I have 
 met, I do not know either. But that it is the life of my life to 
 me and the breath of my being you cannot look at me and 
 
 doubt." 
 
 She was not looking at him. Her eyes were on the little 
 white cross above the Mother's grave; there was an anxious 
 fold between the delicate brown eyebrows. 
 
 " You you wish to marry a Catholic you, who tell me 
 that you were once a Christian and are now Agnostic?" 
 
 " If I have not what is called Faith," said Saxham, " I may 
 at least lay claim to the quality of reverence. And I honour 
 the religion that, has made you what you are. Cleave to your 
 Church, child hold to your pure beliefs, and keep a little love 
 back, Lynette, from your Holy Family and your Saints in 
 Heaven, to give to a poor devil who needs it desperate])'." 
 
 The sweet colour flushed her, and her face was more than 
 beautiful in its compassion. She said: 
 
 " I pray for you now, and I will always. And one day our 
 Lord will give you back the faith that you have lost." 
 
 "Thank you, dear!" said Saxham humbly. She was open- 
 ing her lips to speak again when he lifted his hand and stopped 
 her. 
 
 " There is one other thing I should like to make clear. I 
 am not rich. But neither am I absolutely poor. Letters that 
 I have received from a firm of solicitors acting for the trustees 
 and executors of a near relative deceased, will prove to you
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 489 
 
 that I am possessed of some small property, bringing in an. 
 annual income of something like two hundred a year, and funds- 
 sufficient to settle a few thousands upon my wife by way of 
 marriage jointure. Believe me," he added, in answer to her 
 look, " I know you to be incapable of a mercenary thought. 
 But what I should have explained to " he pointed to the grave 
 that lay near " to her I must make clear to you. It could 
 not be otherwise." 
 
 She went over to the grave and knelt beside it, and laid her 
 pure cheek upon It, and spoke to the Dead in a low, murmuring 
 tone. Saxham knew as he watched her, breathing heavily, that 
 the consent of the Mother would never have been given to the 
 marriage he proposed. That other obstacle in the road of his 
 desire, the lover who had deceived, had been swept away, with, 
 the stern and tender guardian, in one cataclysm of Fate. He 
 went back in thought to the ending of his long shooting-match 
 a outrance with Father Noah, and remembered how he had 
 promised himself that all should go well with Saxham provided 
 Saxham's bullet got home first. 
 
 Were not things going better than he had hoped? She had 
 not even recoiled from him when he had told her of those de- 
 graded days of wastrelhood. Surely things were going well for 
 Saxham, he said, as he waited with his hungering eyes upon 
 his heart's desire. What it cost him not to step over to her, 
 lift her from the ground, and crush her upon his heart with 
 hot and passionate kisses and wild words of worship he knew 
 quite well. But in that he was able to exercise such a mastery 
 over himself and crush that other Saxham down, Saxham gave- 
 praise to that strange god he had set up and worshipped and 
 bowed down before, calling it The Omnipotent Human Will. 
 
 She rose by-and-by, and stood with clasped hands thinking. 
 It was very still, and the air was sweet and balmy, and beyond 
 the lines of the defence-works miles upon miles of sunlit veld 
 rolled away to the hills that were mantled in clear hyacinth- 
 colour and hooded with pale rose. 
 
 " If I married you, you would take me away from this coun- 
 try and these people who have killed her? " 
 
 She had the thought of another in her heart and the name of 
 another at her lips. But only her eyes spoke, travelling to that 
 more distant grave where the butterflies were hovering above- 
 the flowers, as Saxham answered: 
 
 " I would take you away if you wished it." 
 
 "To England?"
 
 490 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Back to England." 
 
 " I should see London, and the house where Mother lived. 
 , . ." She seemed to have forgotten Saxham, and to be utter- 
 ing her thoughts aloud. " I might even see the green moun- 
 tains of Connemara in Ireland her own mother mountains 
 she used to call them. I might one day meet people who are 
 of her blood and name " 
 
 " And of his," thought Saxham, following her eyes' wistful 
 journey to that other grave. 
 
 " But," she went on, " it would all depend " she breathed 
 with agitation and knitted her slender ringers together, and 
 looked round at him with that anxious wrinkle between her 
 fine eyebrows " upon how much you asked of me. Suppose 
 
 I " His intent and burning eyes confused her, and she 
 
 dropped her own beneath them. " li I were to marry you, 
 would you leave me absolutely free ? " 
 
 " Absolutely," said Saxham. " With the most complete 
 freedom a wife could possibly desire." 
 
 " I meant a different kind of freedom from a wife's." She 
 knitted and unknitted her hands. " It is difficult to explain. 
 Would you be willing to ask nothing of me that a friend or a 
 sister might not. give? Would you be content " 
 
 Her transparent skin glowed crimson with the rush of blood. 
 Her bosom laboured with the hurry of her breathing. Her 
 white lids veiled her eyes, or the sudden terrible change in Sax- 
 ham's face might have wrung from her a cry of terror and 
 alarm. But he mastered the raging jealousy that tore him, 
 and said, with a jarring note of savage irony in the voice that 
 had always spoken to her gently until then: 
 
 " Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, 
 into a marriage that should be practically no marriage at all 
 a formal contract that is not wedlock? That, might never 
 change as Time went on, and alter into the close union that 
 physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women 
 who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare? 
 
 She looked at him full and bent her head. And the man's 
 heart, that had throbbed so wildly, stopped beating with a 
 sudden jerk, and the divine fire that burned and tingled in his 
 blood died out, and the cold sickness of baffled hope weighed 
 on him like a mantle of lead. And the voice that had whis- 
 pered to him so alluringly, telling him that it was not too late, 
 that he might even yet win this virginal pure, sweetly-budding 
 maiden, and know the bliss of being loved at last, sank into
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 491 
 
 silence. His face was set like granite, and as grey. His eyes 
 burned darkly under his heavy brows. 
 
 He waited, sombrely and hopelessly, for her to speak again. 
 
 " There are such marriages ? " 
 
 The question was diffidently and timidly put. He 
 answered : 
 
 " Assuredly there are. But not between those who are 
 physcially and mentally sane and healthy men and women 
 at least, in my experience. One case of three I am at liberty to 
 quote was that of an aged and wealthy woman of position and 
 a young and rising public man." 
 
 "Were weren't they happy?" 
 
 The face of the inward, unseen Saxham was twisted in a 
 miserable grin, but the outward man preserved immobility. 
 
 " He enjoyed life. She sat by, and saw every day coming 
 nearer her death, that was to leave him free." 
 
 "And the others?" 
 
 She asked it with an indrawn breath of anxiety. 
 
 " The second case was that of a man, middle-aged and help- 
 lessly paralyzed by an accident in the hunting-field, and of a 
 beautiful and high-spirited young woman almost a girl. She 
 took a romantic interest in him talked of his ruined career 
 and blighted life, and all that sort of thing. And they mar- 
 ried, and she found her bondage intolerable. ... It. ended in 
 his divorcing her. The decree nisi was made absolute a few 
 days before I left London. The third case bears more analogy 
 to yours and mine." 
 
 " Please go on." 
 
 " There was no great disparity of age between these two 
 people. They were sympathetic, cultured, independent both. 
 Their views upon many subjects including the sex question 
 were identical," said Saxham slowly. " And they entered into 
 a bond of union that had for its ultimate aim the culture of; 
 the intellect and the development of what they called the Soul.; 
 The Flesh had nothing in it; the Body," said Saxham, with 
 a grating sarcasm, " was utterly ignored. I forget whether they 
 were Agnostics, Buddhists, or Christians. They certainly suf- 
 fered for their creed. But " his voice softened and deepened 
 " at any rate, the woman suffered most." 
 
 Her lips parted, her eyes intent upon him. 
 
 " You have lived with Sisters of Mercy in a Convent," went 
 on Saxham. " You know of their lives even more than I 
 greatly to my advantage have learned. Energetic, useful,
 
 492 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 stirring, active, never complaining, always ready to make the 
 best of the world as they find it, and help others to do the same; 
 always regarding it. as the preparatory school or training-college 
 for a state of being infinitely greater, nobler, and more glorious 
 than anything the merely mundane imagination can conceive 
 you can realize how infinitely to the nun's advantage is the 
 contrast between them and the lay-woman of Society, peevish, 
 hysterical, neurotic, sensual, and bored. But before these chas- 
 tened, temperate bodies, these serene and well-balanced minds 
 attained the state of self-control and crossed the Rubicon of 
 resignation, what struggles their owners must have undergone, 
 what ordeals of anguish they must have endured! Did that 
 never strike you ? " 
 
 Her lips were pale, and there were shadows under her eyes. 
 She bent her head. 
 
 " The woman, who was not a nun, did for the sake of a man 
 what the nun feels supernaturally called upon to do for her 
 God," said Saxham. " She thrust her hand deep into her 
 woman's bosom, and dragged out her woman's heart, and wrung 
 from it every natural human yearning, and purged it. or 
 thought she purged it of every earthly desire, before she laid 
 the pulseless, emptied thing down before his feet for him to 
 tread upon. And that is what he did." 
 
 He heard her pant, softly, and saw ner hand move upward 
 to her beating heart. His deadly earnestness appalled her. 
 "Was he not fighting for what was more than life to him? He 
 folded his arms over his great chest, and said : 
 
 " For ten years he and she lived together in a union called 
 ideal by ignorant enthusiasts and high-minded cranks. Then 
 she dropped and died victim of the revolt of outraged Nature. 
 A little before the end they sent for me. I said to the man: 
 * A child would have saved her.' And he I can hear him now, 
 answering : ' Ah ! but that would have nullified all the use and 
 purpose of our example for humanity.' The idiot the abor- 
 tive, impossible, dreary idiot! And if ever there was a woman 
 intended by wholesome Nature to bear and nurture babes, it 
 was that woman, who died to prove the possibility of carrying 
 on the business of living according to his damned theories." 
 
 His broad chest heaved ; a mist came before his eyes; his deep 
 vibrating voice had in it a passionate appeal to her. 
 
 " The nun would tell you that in the lofty, mystical sense 
 marriage and motherhood are hers, ' Christ being her Spouse.' 
 I echo this in no spirit of mockery. But this woman of whom
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 493 
 
 I told you knew no vocation and took no vow. She merely 
 tried to ignore the fundamental truth that every normal woman 
 of healthy instincts was meant to be a mother." 
 
 He added: 
 
 " And every husband who loves his wife sees his manhood 
 proved and perfected in her. She was dear and beloved before ; 
 she is holy, sacred worshipped in his eyes, when they look 
 upon his child in her arms, at her breast." 
 
 Something like a sob broke from him. His heart cried: 
 
 " Lynette, have pity upon yourself and upon me!" 
 
 He stood and waited for her reply. She was so exquisite 
 and so full of womanly allure, and yet so crystal-cold and 
 passionless, that he knew his arguments thrown away, his en- 
 treaties mere dust upon the wind. 
 
 " Tell me," he said at length, " do I fill you with anti- 
 pathy? Am I physically repulsive to you, or disagreeable? 
 Answer me frankly, for in that case I would cease to urge my 
 suit with you, and go upon my way, wherever it might lead 
 me." 
 
 She looked at him, and there was no shrinking in her re- 
 gard only a gentle friendliness, as far removed from the feel- 
 ing he would have roused in her as the North is from the 
 South. 
 
 " I will tell you exactly how I feel towards you." He 
 writhed under the knowledge that it was possible to her to 
 analyze and to explain. " I like you, Dr. Saxham. I am 
 deeply grateful to you " 
 
 "Gratitude!" He shrugged his shoulders. "You owe 
 me none; and even if you did, what use is gratitude to a man 
 who asks for love ? " 
 
 " I trust you; I rely upon you," she said. "It is pleasant 
 to me to know that you are near." A line of perplexity came 
 between the fair brown eyebrows; the sweet colour in her 
 face wavered and sank. " But if you were to touch me 
 to take me in your arms I " She shivered. 
 
 "You need not say more." If she was pale, Saxham's 
 stern, square face was ashen. His eyes glowered and fell un- 
 der hers, and a dark vein swelled in the middle of his broad 
 white forehead. " I understand." 
 
 " You do not understand quite yet." She moved away from 
 the Mother's grave, saying to him with a light beckoning ges- 
 ture of the hand, " Please come. . . ." 
 
 Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of
 
 494 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 that other Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His 
 covetous, despairing eyes dwelt on her and clung about her. 
 Ah! the exquisite poise of the little head, with its red-brown 
 waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of shape, like a 
 young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with which 
 she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous, 
 delicate care between the little crowding white-painted crosses ; 
 the atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that 
 breathed from her and environed her! . . . 
 
 His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again 
 its whispering at his ear. 
 
 " You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. 
 Better to be unhappy in the sight and sound and touch of her, 
 unpossessed, than to be desperate, lacking her. Accept her con- 
 ditions with a mental reservation. Trust, to Time, the healer, 
 to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break your promise 
 to that dead man, and tell her as he would have had you tell 
 her, remember as he would have had you tell her! that when 
 he asked her hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of 
 the dancer, Lessie Lavigne." 
 
 He knew where she was leading him to Beauvayse's grave. 
 The voice kept whispering, urging as they went. He saw and 
 heard as a man sees and hears in a dream the pair of butterflies 
 that hovered yet about the fresh flowers her hands had gathered 
 and placed there. One jewel-winged, diamond-eyed insect rose 
 languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light footsteps drew 
 near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed, 
 waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quiver- 
 ing antennae, sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead 
 man had drunk of the joy of life. 
 
 Now she was speaking: 
 
 " Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have some- 
 thing to tell you that, he" her face quivered "should have 
 been told. When you spoke a little while ago of openness and 
 candour when you said that you would never mislead or de- 
 ceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the 
 worst of you together with the best you held up before me, 
 quite unknowingly, an example that snowed me that proved 
 to me " her voice wavered and broke " how much I am 
 your inferior in honesty and truth." 
 
 " You my inferior!" Saxham almost laughed. "/ an ex- 
 ample of light and leading, elevated for your guidance! If 
 you were capable of irony "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 495 
 
 He broke off, for she went on as though he had not spoken: 
 
 " When first we met I mean yourself and me I remember 
 telling you, upon a sudden impulse of confidence and trust in 
 you, what I had determined my life-work was to be " 
 
 " Dear, innocent-wise enthusiast," thought Saxham, " dream- 
 ing over your impossible plan for cleansing the World's 
 Augean stable. Beloved child-Quixote, tilting at the Black 
 Windmills, whose sails are spun by burning blasts from Hell, 
 and whose millstones grind the souls of those lost ones into 
 impalpable pollen, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor 
 of Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Mad- 
 ness madness on the face of it ! " But, madness or sanity, he 
 could not choose but love her. 
 
 "Your life-work! ... It was to be carried out among 
 those others whose voices you heard calling you. See," said 
 Saxham, with the shadow of a smile, " how I remember every- 
 thing you say, or have ever said, in my hearing! " 
 
 " You think too well of me," she broke out, with sudden 
 energy. Her eyes brimmed and the tears welled over her pure 
 under-lids. She put up both her little hands, and rubbed the 
 salt drops away with her knuckles, like a child. 
 
 " When I have told you, you will alter you cannot, help but 
 alter your opinion ! " 
 
 " No ! " denied Saxham ; and the monosyllable seemed to 
 cfrop from his grim lips like a stone. Her bosom heaved with 
 short, quick sobs. 
 
 " I meant to go out into the world, and meet those women 
 who think and work for women, and hear all they have to 
 say, and learn all they have to teach. Then " 
 
 She was Beatrice again, as she turned her face full on Sax- 
 ham, and once more the virginal veil fell, and he was conscious 
 of strange abysses of knowledge opening in those eyes. 
 
 " Then I meant to seek out those women and girls and 
 children of whom I spoke to you, those who lie fettered with 
 chains that wicked men have riveted, in the dark dungeons 
 that their tyrants and torturers have quarried out of the living 
 rock, out of the reach of fresh air and sunshine, beyond the 
 reach of those who would pity and help. I was to go down 
 to them,, and comfort them, and raise them up. I was to have 
 said : ' Trust me, believe me, listen to me, follow me. For 
 my sorrow is your sorrow, and my wrong your wrong, and 
 my shame yours O! my poor, poor unhappy sisters! . . ." 
 
 There was a great drumming and surging of the blood in
 
 496 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Saxham's ears. His heart beat in heavy, laboured, measured 
 strokes, like the tolling of a death-bell. He saw her cover her 
 face with her hands, and drop upon her knees amongst the 
 grasses that thinly clothed the red soil. He saw the butterfly, 
 startled from its feast, rise and waver away. And he saw, too, 
 his veiled nymph, his virginal white goddess, his chaste, veiled 
 maiden Artemis, toppled from her pedestal and lying in the 
 gutter. 
 
 Her sorrow the sorrow of those spotted ones; her wrong 
 theirs, and theirs her shame! ... So this was the sordid 
 secret that haunted the depths of those eyes the eyes of 
 Beatrice! He turned his head away, so as not to look upon 
 her, and his face grew dark with the rush of blood. But still 
 he heard her speaking, as a man hears in a dream. 
 
 " At school all the older girls thought and talked of noth- 
 ing but Love, and most of the younger ones did the same. 
 . . . And I, who knew the dreadful, cruel, hideous side of 
 the thing that each of them set up and worshipped I who 
 shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice and a man's 
 body came near I said in my heart that Love should never 
 find a dupe and a slave and a tool in me. I meant to live 
 for the Mother, and be to those poor sisters of mine what she 
 was oh, my darling! my darling! to me. And all the while 
 Love was coming nearer and nearer, and at last " 
 
 She swept the tears from her face with the palms of her 
 slight open hands, and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and 
 went on brokenly, with sobs between the gasped-out sen- 
 tences: 
 
 " At last it came. I never tried to struggle against it ; 
 it wrapped me in a net of exquisite sweet softness, that held me 
 like a cage of steel. I gave myself up to the sweetness and 
 the joy of it. I was unfaithful to those others I forgot them 
 for Beauvayse. Oh, why should Love make it so easy to do un- 
 lovely things, to be unworthy, to break promises, and to be 
 false to vows! You are in earnest when you make them . . . 
 you are proud to be so sure that nothing shall change or turn 
 you. , . . Then eyes that are like strange jewels look deep 
 into yours. A voice that is like no other voice whispers at 
 your ear. It says strange, sweet, secret things things that 
 come back and burn you and his breath upon your cheek 
 drowns out your scruples in wave upon wave of magical, thrill- 
 ing, wonderful sensation. . . ." She shuddered. " And 
 everything else is blotted out, and no one else matters. You
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 497 
 
 are not even sorry that you have left off caring. . . . Love 
 has made you indifferent as well as unkind." 
 
 She looked up at Saxham from where she crouched down at 
 his feet among the grasses, and her distress melted some of the 
 ice that was closing round his heart. 
 
 " Love cannot, be good. It brings no peace, no happiness 
 nothing but restless misery and burning pain. It makes you 
 even willing to deceive him" Her lids fluttered and she 
 caught her breath. " When another to whom I was dear, and 
 who knew, said, ' Never tell him I command you never to 
 tell him ! ' I pretended to myself that the words had not been 
 spoken out of pity, because my darling loved me too well 
 to see me suffer; and I told myself that it was right to 
 obey." 
 
 Saxham, following the yearning look that went, back to that 
 other's grave, heard the unforgettable voice uttering the com- 
 mand. 
 
 " He never dreamed of my miserable secret. He was so 
 free, so frank, so open himself. He had nothing to hide he 
 was incapable of deceit. It never occurred to him oh, Beau! 
 Beau!" 
 
 Saxham's face was set like a mask carved in granite, but 
 that other Saxham, within the man she saw through her tears, 
 was wrung and twisted and wrenched again in spasms and 
 gusts of insane, uncontrollable, helpless laughter. 
 
 " Nothing to hide incapable of deceit! " It seemed to him 
 that the dead man, all that way down under the red earth and 
 the grass and the flowers, must be laughing, too, at the Dop 
 Doctor who was fool enough not to speak out and end the 
 farce for ever. 
 
 Should he? Why not? But for what reason now, and to 
 what end, since his virginal-pure, dew-pearled, Convent lily 
 lay trodden in the mire? And yet, to look in those eyes. . . . 
 
 They did not falter or drop under his again, as she told him 
 in a few and simple words the story of what had happened 
 in the tavern on the veld. 
 
 " Now you know all," she said ; " now you understand. 
 
 Sister Tobias knows, too, and there is one other. . . . 
 
 I do not speak of . . ." she shuddered and grew pale " but 
 of a man whom all of us here have learned to look up to, and 
 believe in, and trust. No confidence has ever passed between 
 us. I cannot give you any reason for this belief of mine in 
 his knowledge of my story. I only feel that it is no secret to
 
 498 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the Colonel whenever he looks at me with those wise, kind, 
 pitying eyes." 
 
 There was a look in Saxham's eyes that was not pity. The 
 sunbeam that shone through the loose plait of her coarse straw 
 hat, and gilded the edges of the red-brown hair-waves, aureoled 
 again for him the head of Beatrice. 
 
 " I have no faith left, but I am capable of reverence," he 
 had said to her. 
 
 Now, as he knelt down in the grass before the little brown 
 shoes, and lifted the hem of her linen gown and kissed it, the 
 hulking-shouldered Doctor proved his possession of the qual- 
 ity. Devouring desire, riotous passion, were if not killed in 
 him, at least quelled and overthrown and bound. Pure pity 
 and tenderness awakened in him. And Chivalry, all cap-a-pie 
 in silver mail, rose up to do battle for her against the world 
 and against that other Saxham. 
 
 " I accept the trust you are willing should be mine. Take 
 my name take all I have to give. I make no reservations. 
 I stipulate no conditions. I ask for nothing in return, except 
 the right to be your brother and guardian and defender. Trust 
 me! The life-work you have chosen shall be yours; as far as 
 lies in my power, I will help you in it. Your pure ends and 
 noble aims shall never be thwarted or hindered. And have 
 no fear of me, my sweet saint, my little sister. For I may die," 
 said Saxham once again, " but, living, I will never fail you." 
 
 LVII 
 
 SAXHAM, of St. Stephen's, had long ago faded from the rec- 
 ollection of London Society, but Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., 
 Late Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, and frequently 
 mentioned in Despatches from that bit of debatable soil, while 
 it was in process of debating, was distinctly a person to culti- 
 vate. Not that it was in the least easy the man was almost 
 quite a bear, but his brevity of speech and brusqueness of man- 
 ner gave him a cachet that Society found distinguished. He 
 was married, too so romantic ! married to a girl who was shut 
 up with him in Gueldersdorp all through the Siege. Quite 
 too astonishingly lovely, don't you know? and with manners 
 that really suggested the Faubourg St. Germain. Where 
 she got her style brought up among Boers and blacks was 
 to be wondered, but these problems made people all the more
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 499 
 
 interesting. And one met her with her husband at all the 
 best houses since the Castleclares had taken them up. Indeed, 
 Mrs. Saxham was a relative was it a cousin? No now it 
 all came back! Adopted daughter, that was it, of an aunt 
 no, a step-sister of Lord Castleclare, that ineffable little prig 
 of twenty-one, who as a Peer and Privy Councillor of Ireland, 
 and a Lord-in-Waiting to boot, was nevertheless a personage to 
 be deferred to. 
 
 One had heard, hadn't one, ages ago, of the famous beauty, 
 Lady Bridget-Mary Bawne? Well, that was the very person, 
 who had been Abbess, or Prioress, or something-else-ess of a 
 Roman Catholic Sisterhood at Gueldersdorp, and died of 
 pneumonia during the Siege, or did she get shot? That was it, 
 poor dear thing, and how quite too horrid for her! 
 
 We may know that that belated letter of the Mother's, 
 written to her kinswoman when the first mutterings of the 
 storm were yet dulled by distance, and the threatening clouds 
 were beginning to build their blue-black bastions and frowning 
 towers on the horizon had got through at last. The Bawnes, 
 true to their hereditary quality of generous loyalty, threw open 
 their doors and their hearts to dead Bridget-Mary's darling, 
 and Saxham was undisguisedly grateful when he saw how she 
 warmed to them. But he gave no encouragement, verbal, 
 written, or tacit to their desire to fulfil the dead woman's 
 wishes in the settlement of a sum of money upon Lynette. He 
 had made such provision for her himself as his means permitted. 
 His books had been selling steadily for the past six years, his 
 publishers had paid him a handsome sum in royalties, and a 
 thousand guineas for the copyright of a new work. Plas 
 Bendigaid was secured to her, and Saxham's life was heavily 
 insured, and the bulk of the sum remaining from the pur- 
 chase of the furniture and fixtures of the house in Harley 
 Street, with the practice of the physician who was giving up 
 tenancy, had been invested in her name with the other funds. 
 Why should strangers interfere with his sole privilege of work- 
 ing for her? 
 
 " I should prefer that the decision should be left entirely 
 to my wife," he said, when the Head of the House of Bawne, 
 with the pompous solemnity distinctive of a young man who 
 takes himself and his position seriously, formally broached the 
 subject. 
 
 " Lady Castleclare has arah ! already approached Mrs. 
 Saxham on the question," said Lord Castleclare. tapping the
 
 500 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 shiny surface of the leather-covered writing-table near which 
 he sat with the long, thin, ivory-hued fingers, ending in long, 
 narrow, bluish-tinted nails that had descended to him, with the 
 peculiar sniffing drawl that prolonged and punctuated his ver- 
 bal utterance, from his late father. "And I regret to hear 
 ( from Lady Castleclare that Mrs. Saxham gave no encourage- 
 ment to the suggestion. I confess myself disappointed equally 
 with my wife and my sister, the Duchess of Broads, to whom 
 the letter was written the letter that you will understand 
 conveys to the family I represent the last wishes of one whose 
 memory we hold in the most sacred love and reverence " 
 
 The Right Honourable Privy Councillor had here to stop 
 and dry his eyes that were frankly overflowing. Though 
 short, and not at all distinguished of appearance, having de- 
 rived from his mother, the Dowager Countess, nee Miss Nancy 
 Mclleevy of Mclleevystown, County Down, certain personal 
 disadvantages to counterbalance the immense fortune amassed 
 by her uncle, the brewer, this little gentleman of great affairs 
 possessed the kindly heart, and the quick and sensitive nature 
 of the paternal stock. Now he continued: 
 
 " Under the circumstances you will permit me to renew 
 the proposal with a slight modification. The sum we proposed 
 to invest in Government securities for Mrs. Saxham's bene- 
 fit, carrying out a charge that we regard it as a privilege to 
 to have received is not large, merely five thousand pounds." 
 He coughed. " Well, now it has occurred to me that Mrs. 
 Saxham's objection to receive what she seems to regard as a 
 gift from people upon whom she has no claim that is how she 
 expressed herself to Lady Castleclare might be got over if 
 I may employ the expression, by our settling the money upon 
 your children?" 
 
 " Upon our children " 
 
 They were sitting in Lord Castleclare's library at Bawne 
 House, Grosvenor Square. Great books in noble bindings 
 gleamed from their covered and latticed shelves, and the per- 
 fume of Russia leather and cedar mingled with the aroma of 
 red tobacco in the air. A thin fog hung over the West End, 
 deadening the sound of traffic, and dimming the polish of the 
 tall windows. The fire burned red behind bars of silvered 
 steel, the ashes fell with a little clicking whisper. It seemed 
 to Saxham that he could hear his pierced heart bleeding, drip, 
 drip, drip! But he sat like a man of stone, his white, firm, 
 supple hand clenched upon the knob of the chair-arm. Then
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 501 
 
 he said, looking the Right Honourable Privy Councillor full 
 in the face with those gentian-blue eyes of his, now sunk in 
 caves that grew deeper day by day: 
 
 " Let it be so, my lord. I am willing, if my wife consents, 
 that the money should be settled upon her children." 
 
 He prescribed, at Lord Castleclare's request, for a political 
 dyspepsia, and took leave in his brusque, characteristic way, 
 and sent away his waiting motor-brougham, and walked 
 home, thinking, by that new light that had flashed upon 
 him. 
 
 It was January, the London January of whirling dust-clouds 
 below, and racing, murky vapours above. They had been 
 settled in the Harley Street house four months. It seemed to 
 Saxham as if they had lived there for years. The routine of 
 professional life was closing in upon him once again. Patients 
 thronged to his door; Hospitals, and Societies, and Institutions 
 were open to him as of old ; Society courted and flattered him, 
 and gushed about the beauty of Mrs. Saxham. It was as 
 though that celebrated Criminal Case, The Crown vs. Saxham, 
 had never developed into ugly shape under the dirty, stifling 
 skylight of the Old Bailey. 
 
 He crossed Grosvenor Square, and turned down Brook 
 Street, thinking as he went. Pretty women in furs, their 
 make-up subdued by silk-gauze veils, nodded to him from 
 motor-broughams and victorias. 
 
 Though the horse-drawn hansom yet plied for hire, petrol 
 was driving brute-power off the streets. The hooting and 
 clanking of the motor-omnibus made Oxford Street hideous. 
 And that St. Vitus's Dance of the Tube Railway swept under 
 the pavement beneath Saxham's tread as he had passed up New 
 Bond Street. Certainly London was not more beautiful or 
 pleasanter to live in for the six years that had gone by. 
 
 The Tube Works were responsible for much. The Com- 
 panies were linking up the North with the West, and strings 
 of trolleys, coupled together like railway-trucks, and laden 
 with yellow clay or great balks of timber, or giant scales of 
 bored armour-plating, or moleskin-clad, brawny navvies, pro- 
 gressed through incessantly and at all hours the thoroughfares 
 of the metropolis behind huge, giraffe-necked, splay-wheeled, 
 smoke-vomiting traction-engines. Houses and other buildings 
 were being pulled down to make stations ; great hoardings were 
 up, enclosing spaces where work went on all day, amidst clank- 
 ings and groanings of machinery, and clouds of oily-smelling
 
 ;02 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 steam, and where work went on all night, with more groanings 
 and more clankings, deplorable shrieks of steam-sirens and 
 hellish flares that might have been reflections from a burning 
 tophef, cast upon yet bigger and denser clouds of the oily- 
 smelling steam. 
 
 Yes, the big black opulent city was greatly changed. But 
 the change in the people, affecting all ranks and every class, 
 was even greater. There were compensations, if you could 
 balance against the decay of good manners the improvement in 
 sanitation, or set against the crop of evil sown by the dissemi- 
 nation of the vilest literature in the cheapest printed forms, the 
 attainableness, by the poorest, of the noblest productions of 
 literary genius. Or if in congratulating yourself upon the 
 marvellous progress of Scientific Inventions, hailing from the 
 keen-brained West, you could condone the degradation of the 
 English Language in the mouths of Shakespeare's countrymen 
 and countrywomen by the use of American slang phrases, com- 
 mon, coarse, obscene, alternating with the lowest dialects of the 
 East End costermonger. 
 
 Privacy and reticence had become unfashionable, impossible 
 in this, the Era of the guinea-hunting Press-Interviewer. The 
 barriers of social exclusiveness had given way before the push 
 of the plutocrat. The Rubicon between Good Society and 
 Bad Society had become invisible. Racial Suicide and Sexual 
 Licence most hideously prevailed, spreading like some vile 
 disease from rank to rank, and class to class. Woman had be- 
 come less womanly, man more effeminate. Home was a word 
 that had no longer any meaning. Religion had decayed ; the 
 Fear of God had been forgotten. But Socialism was spring- 
 ing up, a rank and lusty weed in crude neglected soil that 
 might have been tilled to good purpose, and a cheap and rowdy 
 form of patriotism was in a very healthy state, although the 
 Union Jack had not yet replaced the Bible in the Board 
 Schools. 
 
 Yes, things had changed, and not for the better. There was 
 a taint upon the moral atmosphere that made the material 
 petrol-fumes of the motor-omnibus almost acceptable by com- 
 parison. The air of Gueldersdorp had been cleaner even with 
 that taint from the crowded trenches heavy on it. Things 
 had changed, and in the midst of all these changes the last 
 sands of the Great Victorian Age were running out of the 
 glass. 
 
 That wonderful life was drawing to its simple, peaceful,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 503 
 
 noble, profoundly touching close, this January of 1901. And 
 its ending had been hastened by the War. 
 
 Truly of her it has been said, and shall be, even when 
 scholars of another race and another civilization, springing 
 from the ashes of this, wrest from the relics of an History of 
 To-day the secrets of an ancient Past : 
 
 " She was not only the Sovereign, but the Mother of her 
 people." 
 
 
 
 Saxham turned into Cavendish Square, and was in Harley 
 Street. The white-enamelled door of a prosperous-looking 
 corner-house bore a solid brass plate with his name. He 
 thought, as he opened the door with his Yale key, how strange 
 it was that this, the very house he had planned to live in with 
 Mildred, and had leased, and beautified, and decorated for 
 her, should have been offered for his inspection by the first 
 West End house-agent he applied to upon returning to London, 
 upon whose threshold he had shaken off the dust of his feet for 
 ever barely six years before. 
 
 The practitioner who occupied it not the same man who 
 had taken over the lease and fittings from Saxham, was ready 
 to give up the house, with all its costly appurtenances and up- 
 to-date appointments, together with the practice, for quite a 
 moderate slice of that legacy of thousands that had come ta 
 Saxham from Mildred's dead boy. Saxham, realizing the man's 
 hurry to realize and depart, wondered what secret, desperate 
 motive lay at the back of his hurry. The reason was soon evi- 
 dent. Like thousands of other men, professional and private, 
 the physician had been a dabbler on the Stock Exchange, and 
 had gone in heavily for South African mining-stock, and had 
 been ruined by the War. 
 
 It was a year of ruin. Society, led by Messrs. Washington 
 P. Jukes and Themistocles K. Mombasa, six-foot, full-blooded 
 buck niggers, elegantly scented, white-gloved, and arrayed in 
 evening garments of Bond Street cut, danced the newly-im- 
 ported Cake Walk through its ball-rooms and reception-saloons, 
 with laughter on its reddened lips, and paste imitations of its 
 family jewels in its waved coiffure and on its powdered bosom, 
 and Ruin in its heart. 
 
 Great manufacturing enterprises, paralyzed by lack of funds 
 and lack of hands, w r ere ruined. Managers producing plays to 
 empty houses were ruined. Publishers publishing books that 
 nobody cared any longer to buy were ruined. Painters expend-
 
 504 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 ing time and money and toil upon pictures that no longer found 
 purchasers were ruined. Millions of smaller folks were ruined 
 by the ruin of their betters. Only the great Mourning Ware- 
 houses prospered exceedingly, and the Liquor Trade and the 
 Drug Trade, the Remount and Forage Trades, and the Army- 
 Contractors flourished as the green bay-tree. 
 
 Saxham's motor-brougham had gone on in advance, twisting 
 knowingly in and out of various corkscrew thoroughfares. It 
 was waiting outside the house in Lower Harley Street as the 
 Doctor reached the door. The chauffeur, a spare, short young 
 man, punctiliously buttoned up in a long dark green, white- 
 faced livery overcoat, a cap with a white-glazed peak shading 
 a lean, brickdust-coloured face, with ugly, honest eyes that are 
 familiar to the reader, cocked one of the eyes inquiringly at 
 his employer, and receiving a sign implying that his services 
 would not be required for some space of time to come, pulled 
 up the lever, moved on, and turned down the side-street where 
 were the entrance-gates of the stable-yard that had been turned 
 into a garage. He had been in Saxham's employment nearly 
 two months. 
 
 W. Keyse, late Corporal, Gueldersdorp Town Guards, had 
 learned to clean, manage, and drive a motor-car belonging to 
 an officer of the Garrison in spare hours during the Siege. 
 This accomplishment, with some other learning gained in those 
 strenuous and bracing times, had justified him in answering a 
 Times advertisement for a sober, active, and intelligent young 
 man, possessing the requisite knowledge of London 
 "Cr'rips!" said W. Keyse, "as if I couldn't pick my way 
 about the Bally Old Dustbin blindfolded!" to act in the 
 capacity of chauffeur to a West End medical practitioner. 
 
 An acquaintance who was a waiter at a West End Club 
 gave him the tip, and the chance came in the nick of time, for 
 Mr. and Mrs. W. Keyse were up against it, and no gay old 
 error. " If you 'ad offered to blooming-well work for people 
 for nothing," said Mrs. Keyse, " her belief was they wouldn't 
 'ave 'ad you at the price." 
 
 The Old Shop, as W. Keyse affectionately called his native 
 island, had drawn the exiles home. Good-bye to the bronzed, 
 ungirdled vastness of veld and karroo, and the clear, dark, dis- 
 tant blue of level-topped mountains bathed in the pure stimu- 
 lating atmosphere that braces like champagne. Old England 
 called with a voice there was no resisting, great draggle-tailed,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 505 
 
 grimy London beckoned to her boy and girl, as the Dig grey 
 liner, with the scarlet smoke-stacks, engulfed her mails and 
 passengers, dipped the Red Ensign in farewell to Table Moun- 
 tain, and sped homewards on even keel over the heaving sap- 
 phire plain. 
 
 Southampton Dock was a pure delight to W. and Mrs. 
 Keyse. The Waterloo Arrival platform sent thrills through 
 their boot-soles to the roots of their hair. They sat in the Pit 
 at the Oxford that night, and there was a South African sketch 
 on with two of the chronic-est jossers you ever see, gassing 
 away in khaki behind earthworks of sacks stuffed with straw, 
 and standing up to chuck sentimental and patriotic ballads off 
 their chests, while the Enemy, who had kept up an intermittent 
 rifle-practice at the wing, left off presumably to listen. 
 " After being used to the Reel Thing," W. Keyse said, " it was 
 enough to make you up and blub." 
 
 That was the first disillusion. Others followed. The aunt 
 who had inhabited one of the ginger-brick almshouses over 
 aginst 'Ighg'it Cimetery was dead when they took her a whole 
 pound of tea and three-quarters of best-cooked ham, and the 
 delicacies had to be given to the old woman next door, with 
 whom the deceased had always had words. You couldn't 'ave 
 expected the old gal to last much longer, but still it was a 
 blow. 
 
 Lobster had long ago given 'Melia the go-by, they learned, 
 in return for the ham and the tea, and they got her address and 
 and hunted her up in a back-street behind the Queen's Crescent, 
 and W. Keyse failed to recognize his charmer of old in a red- 
 nosed, frowsy slattern, married to a sweated German in the 
 baking-trade and mother of two of the dirtiest kids you evef 
 
 ! And Mrs. Keyse, to whom her William had expatiated! 
 
 upon the subject of his family, maintained a portentous dumb-; 
 ness, punctuated with ringing sniffs, during the visit, and was ( 
 sarcastic on the bus, and tearfully penitent when they got back 
 to the Waterloo Road lodging that was cheap at the weekly 
 rent, she said, if you were paying for dirt and live-stock. 
 
 You couldn't spend your time enjoying yourself for ever, she 
 added a little later on, as their small joint purse of savings 
 dwindled and that pale ghost that men call Want began to 
 hover about their hired bolster. W. Keyse had thought of so- 
 liciting a re-engagement, at the fried-fish shop in the High 
 Street, Camden Town, but it had been swept away in favour 
 of an establishment where they mended^ your boots while you
 
 506 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 waited. So he sought elsewhere. The War had drained 
 away so many men, one would have thought employment could 
 be had by any chap who took the trouble to walk about and 
 look for it. But the soles of W. Keyse's boots were worn to 
 their last thickness of brown paper, and all his clothes and Emi- 
 gration Jane's, with the exception of the things him and her 
 had on, had been pawned before it. occurred to the man that 
 that kind of walking ended in the Workhouse. The woman 
 had known it from the very beginning. The valorous deeds of 
 W. Keyse stood him in no good stead. London was stiff with 
 liars who boasted of having been through the Siege, and their 
 lies were more ornamental and sparkling than his truths. 
 
 Mrs. W. Keyse would have took a situation as General, and 
 glad, but there were family reasons against that. She had 
 broke down and cried something dreadful on her William's 
 shabby tweed shoulder the morning he went out to answer the 
 West End Doctor's advertisement. He kissed her and told 
 her to keep her hair on, but she was so hysterical that he was 
 fair afryde to leave 'er. So he took her along, and his good 
 Angel must have suggested that. 
 
 Cripps! when the manservant in plain clothes said, "Step 
 this way, upstairs please " W. Keyse and wife having applied 
 at the area door " and Dr. Saxham will see you," the name, 
 not having been mentioned in the advertisement, which gave 
 only the address and an initial, imparted to both an electrical 
 shock of surprise. They had looked a very small and very 
 shabby and very lost and lonely little couple under those high- 
 moulded ceilings and upon the Turkish carpets that covered the 
 polished parquet of the handsomely-furnished and well-ap- 
 pointed consulting-room that the practitioner who had caved 
 ! in over South African Gold-Mines had considered an adequate 
 setting for his bald-browed and portly presence. Now both 
 .curved backbones assumed the perpendicular, and their wide 
 ^Cockney mouths were wreathed in glad smiles. 
 
 The man sitting in the Sheraton armchair at the writing- 
 table that matched it, the man with the black head and square 
 pale face and heavy muscular shoulders, who looked up from 
 among his papers and notebooks with the receiver of a tele- 
 phone at his ear, rose to his feet, and came to them with a 
 kind, outstretched hand. Saxham never wasted a word or for- 
 got a face. And here were two faces from Gueldersdorp. He 
 shook the hands that belonged to them, and said in his curt 
 way:
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 507 
 
 "How are you, Mrs. Keyse? And you, Keyse? You may 
 guess when I heard that somebody had called to answer my 
 advertisement I hardly imagined that two old patients had 
 dropped Jown on me from the skies." 
 
 The young woman stared at Saxham with her mouth agape 
 and the tears trickling down her hollow cheeks. The young 
 man swallowed something with a violent, effort, and. blurted 
 out: 
 
 " Lumme, Doctor! it's more by 'arf like bein' shot up out 
 of the Other Shop an' landin' in the middle of New Jeru- 
 salem. Weeks along" he picked tip the shabby bowler that 
 had rolled upon the Turkey carpet " for weeks along I've 
 been tryin' to find out what was the matter wi' me. Now I 
 knows! I've bin 'omesick fair old 'omesick for a sniffer of 
 the very plyce I was 'oppin' with 'appiness to git away out of 
 four months back. Good old Gueldersdorp ! " He winked 
 the wet out of his eyes and pointed to Mrs. Keyse with his 
 elbow. " An' look at 'er. Doin' a blub on the strength of it. 
 That's wot it is to be a woman. Ain't it, sir?" 
 
 Saxham's keen glance took in the altered shape of the thin 
 girl in the mended jacket and the large and feathered hat that 
 topped the colossal structure of fair, fizzled hair, even as she 
 dried her eyes with a sixpenny handkerchief edged with cotton 
 lace and tried to laugh. He took the lean chin of W. Keyse 
 between his white, strong, supple fingers, and turned the 
 triangular, hollow-cheeked face to the light, and said, touching 
 the little round blue scar left by the enemy's bullet at the 
 angle of the wide left nostril and the other mark of its egress 
 below the inner corner of the right eye: 
 
 "You found out what a woman can be, my man, when she 
 helped to nurse you at the Hospital." 
 
 "Gawd knows I did!" affirmed W. Keyse. "An' since 
 
 .she's bin' my wife " The prominent Adam's apple in his 
 
 thin throat jerked. He swallowed again as he looked at her. 
 And the red flew up in her pale cheeks, and in her eyes, as 
 she returned the look of him, her lover and her mate, there 
 shone the answering light of love. And Saxham's face dark- 
 ened with angry blood, and his strong, supple surgeon's hand 
 clenched with the savage impulse to dash itself in the face of 
 this ragged, seedy, out-at-elbows Millionaire who flaunted 
 riches in the face of his own beggary. 
 
 Never, never would a woman's eyes kindle with that sweet 
 fire in answer to the challenge of his own. Empty, empty the
 
 508 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 heart whose chambers were swept and decked and garlanded 
 for a guest who never came. Lonely, lonely, desolate this life 
 lived within sound of her, sight of her, touch of her dearer 
 inexpressibly than ever Woman was yet to man. 
 
 He had said to her: " But come to me, and I shall be con- 
 tent even happy. Live under my roof, take the shelter of 
 !piy name I ask no more." 
 
 He asked more in the lonely nights that would never be 
 'companioned, in the silence that would never be broken by 
 Love's whisper or Love's kiss. He was not content; his crav- 
 ing for her fretted the flesh from his bones and gnawed his 
 heart like some voracious, sharp-fanged predatory animal. 
 Happy was he? Happy as one who sits beside a stream of 
 living water and yet must perish of drought. He could only 
 imagine one greater misery, one more excruciating torture, 
 one more exquisite unhappiness than this happiness she had con- 
 ferred upon him and that was to be without, her. 
 
 He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling 
 misery, and kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the absurd 
 little couple. W. Keyse was tested, proved capable of manip- 
 ulating the cteering-wheel, duly certificated, and engaged. 
 There were a couple of living rooms over the coach-house that 
 was now a garage. Saxham sent in some plain furniture, and 
 behold an Eden! Pots of hyacinths purchased from a street 
 hawker bloomed behind the tidiest muslin blinds you ever sor, 
 and Mrs. William Keyse, expectant mother of a potential 
 Briton, sat behind them, and as she patched the shirts that 
 had been taken out of pawn and whether they're let out on 
 hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat 
 'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come 
 back from Them Plyces is something chronic. She sang, some- 
 times " Come, Buy My Coloured "Erring," which they learned 
 you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board School in Kentish 
 Town, and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come 
 True." 
 
 This was the place, this little, poor, cheap home of two 
 rooms one of them opening upon nothing by a loft-door 
 over a garage that had been a coach-house, at the end of the 
 paved yard looking towards the rear of the tall, drab-stuccoed 
 house whose high double plate-glass windows were shielded 
 from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin run- 
 ning on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights 
 were switched on, before the inner blinds were drawn dowa,
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 509 
 
 you could see quite plain into the consulting-room, a little be- 
 low your level, where the Doctor sat at his big writing-table 
 that was heaped with notebooks and papers and had a telephone 
 on it, and all sorts of mysterious instruments in shining brass 
 and silver, as brightly polished as the gleaming thing with a 
 lid, shaped like a violin-case and with a spirit-lamp underneath 
 it, in which all sorts of wicked-looking knives and forceps were 
 boiled when they were taken out of the black bag; or into 
 Mrs. Saxham's bedroom, that was on the floor above, and was 
 done up in the loveliest style you ever! " Not that Mrs. W. 
 Keyse would exchange her present quarters for Buckingham 
 Palace," she declared, pouring out her William's tea, " if in- 
 vited to do so by the Queen herself." 
 
 William stopped blowing at his smoking saucer. 
 
 " They s'y She's dyin'." His face lengthened. He put 
 the saucer down. " They 'ave it in the evenin' pypers." 
 
 Mrs. Keyse had a flash of inspiration. 
 
 " I reckon it don't seem dyin' to 5 Er." 
 
 " Wot are you gettin' at ? " asked the man in bewilderment. 
 
 " I'm gettin' at it like this," said the lighter brain. " All 
 'Er long life she's 'ad to be a queen first, an* a wife after. 
 Now she lays there she's no more than a wife a wife wots 
 goin' to meet 'er 'usband agin after yeers an' yeers o' waitin'. 
 For 'er Crown she leaves be'ind 'er for 'er son, but 'er weddin' 
 ring goes wiv 'er in 'er coffin. See ? " 
 
 " I pipe. Wonder wot 'Er an' 'Im '11 s'y to one another 
 fust thing they meet?" 
 
 " They won't s'y nothink," said the visionary, soberly taking 
 tea. " But I shouldn't be surprised but wot they'd stand an' 
 look in one another's fyces wivout s'yin' a word, for a week 
 or so by the Time Above, an' the tears a-runnin' down an' 
 never stoppin'." 
 
 " Garn ! There ain't no cryin' in 'Eaven," said W. Keyse, 
 beginning on the bread-and-butter. " The Bible tells you so." 
 
 " That's right enough. But I lay Gawd lets folks do a bit 
 o' blub just once," said Emigration Jane, " before 'E wipes 
 their eyes, becos you don't begin to know wot 'appiness means 
 until you've cried for joy." 
 
 " I pretty near did when the Doctor give me this chauffeur- 
 ing job, and so I tell you stryte," affirmed her lord. " D'yer 
 know I 'ad a shy at thankin' 'im agyne, an' got my 'ead bit 
 orf. ' Shut your damned mouth ! ' that's wot the Doctor 
 to me. Well, I 'ave shut it." He closed his jaws upon
 
 510 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 an Inch-thick slice. " But wot I s'y to myself is," he con- 
 tinued, masticating, " that makes the Third Time, an' the 
 Third Time's the Charm." 
 
 "Wot d'yer mean by the third time, deer?" asked Mrs. 
 Keyse, putting more hot water in the teapot. 
 
 " The First," said W. Keyse, with an air of mystery, " was 
 in a saloon-bar full o' Transvaal an' Free State Dutchies at 
 'Gueldersdorp." 
 
 " Lor' ! You don't ever mean " began his wife, and 
 
 stopped short. The scene of her first meeting with W. Keyse 
 flashed back upon her mental vision. She saw the big man 
 waking up out of his drunken stupor and lurching to the rescue 
 of the little one. " Was it 'im? " she panted, as the teapot ran 
 over on the clean coarse cloth. "Was it Dr. Saxham?" 
 
 " You may tyke it from me it was." W. Keyse rescued the 
 kettle, restored it to the hob, returned to his place, and shook 
 his finger at her warningly. " And if you go to remind me as 
 
 wot 'e were drunk when 'e done wot 'e did " He looked 
 
 portentous warnings. 
 
 " I never would. Oh, William ! " 
 
 " Mind as you never do, that's all. ... I tried to thank 
 'im then," went on W. Keyse, " an' 'e wouldn't 'ave it. I 
 tried to thank 'im agyne at the Hospital an' 'e wouldn't 'ave 
 it. I tried to thank 'im yesterday on 'is own doorstep, an' 'e 
 wouldn't 'ave it. So wot I'm a-going to do is Wait! When 
 I was a little nipper at Board School there was a fairy tyle in 
 the Third Standard Class Reader, all about a Lion wot 'ad 
 syved the life of a Louse, an' 'ow the Louse laid out to do 
 somethin' to pay the Lion back." 
 
 " I remember the tyle, deer," confirmed Mrs. Keyse. " But 
 it was a mouse " she repressed a shudder " an' not the 
 thing you said." 
 
 " Mouse or Louse, it means the syme," declared W. Keyse 
 with burning eyes. " And the Doctor's goin' to find it does." 
 He held up his lean right hand and swore it. " So 'elp me, 
 Jiminy Cripps ! " 
 
 LVIII 
 
 LYNETTE SAXHAM came into the consulting-room that was on 
 the ground-floor of the house in Harley Street, behind the 
 room where patients waited their turn. Her quick, light step 
 and the silken rustling of the lining of her gown broke the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 511 
 
 spell that had bound the man who sat motionless in the arm- 
 chair before the Sheraton writing-table staring with fixed eyes 
 and gripping the arms of his chair with unconscious force. 
 
 A faint, pleasant odour of Russia leather and camphor-wood 
 came from the dwarf bookcases that dadoed the walls. The 
 room was quite dark; the two high windows, screened by clear 
 muslin blinds running on gilded rods showed pale parallel- 
 ograms of cold twilight. The coachhouse and stable building 
 at the end of the paved yard showed as a cube of blackness. 
 One window in the centre of the wall was lighted up, and on 
 its white cotton blind the shadows of a. man and woman acted 
 a Domestic Play. 
 
 Perhaps Saxham had been watching this. The shadow- 
 man seemed to sit at a table reading a newspaper by the light 
 of the lamp behind him, the shadow-woman sat nearer the 
 window, employed upon some homely kind of needlework. 
 Her outline when she rose showed that the woman's great, 
 mysterious ordeal, the sacrament of keenest anguish by which 
 her dearest and most sacred joy is won, was very close upon 
 her. She passed behind the man as if to fetch something, 
 stopped behind his chair, and drew her arm about his neck, 
 leaning her cheek down to his so that their two shadows be- 
 came one. 
 
 The starving waif outside the window of the cook-shop knows 
 no more excruciating aggravation of his pangs than to look at 
 food, and yet keeps on looking. It may have been like this 
 with Saxham, empty of all love, and gnawed by the tooth of a 
 sharper hunger than that which is merely physical. He started 
 out of his lethargy when her voice reached him. 
 
 " Owen ! . . . Why, you are sitting in the dark ! " 
 
 She heard someone moving among the shadows. The 
 electric reading-lamp upon the writing-table diffused a mellow 
 radiance under its green silk shade. Two other globes sprang 
 into shining life, and showed her, smiling, and shrinking a 
 little from the sudden incursion of light, as Saxham, with the 
 quiet, unhurried, scrupulous courtesy he always showed towards 
 his wife, received the heavy driving-cloak of sables that she 
 dropped from her shoulders, and laid it over a chair. A frosty 
 breath from the outer atmosphere clung to it, but the silken 
 lining was penetratingly warm and instinct, with the sweetness 
 of the woman, so much so that it was agony to the man. . . . 
 
 She wore a white cloth gown of elegantly simple cut, that 
 revealed with unostentatious art the lovely lines of the slender
 
 512 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 shape. A knot of white and golden freesias, exhaling a clean, 
 delicate perfume, was fastened at her breast; her wonderful 
 red-brown hair was shaded by a broad-brimmed brown felt hat 
 of Vandyke shape, with creamy drooping plumes. The rare 
 promise of her beauty had fulfilled itself in the last six months. 
 She was bewilderingly lovely. 
 
 She drew out the jewelled pins that fastened her hat, and 
 threw it down, and took a favourite seat of hers beside the fire, 
 and looked across at the man who was her husband, smiling 
 faintly as she held her little foot, delicately shod, high-arched 
 ; and slim, to the blaze of the wood-fire. 
 
 " Do I interfere with your work ? Are any patients wait- 
 ing?" 
 
 " It is past my hour for seeing patients," said Saxham, with 
 a smile. " And if anyone were waiting, you are an older 
 client, and have the prior claim." 
 
 " We will have tea in here, then," she said, and touched the 
 bell, adding: " I am fond of this room." 
 
 It was just now a place that was dear to Saxham. He came 
 across to the hearth and stirred the fire to a ruddier blaze, 
 and stood at the opposite side of it, leaning an arm upon the 
 mantelshelf. The shining mirror above it reflected a square 
 black head that was getting grizzled, and the profile of a face 
 that was haggard and worn. 
 
 The servant came with tea, and drew down the upper blinds, 
 shutting out that mocking shadow-play at which Saxham had 
 been staring. As Lynette busied herself with the shining silver 
 and delicate Japanese porcelain, there was a chance of studying, 
 unobserved, the beloved book of her face a locked book to 
 Saxham since that day in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp. 
 
 Ah, what a face it was! It fascinated and held him. Such 
 long, thick, red-brown eyelashes, sweeping the white cheeks! 
 Such a low, wide, perfectly modelled forehead above them, 
 with fine arched eyebrows, darker than the richly rippling, 
 parted hair that was coiled and twisted and roped into a mass 
 behind the small, delicate ears, as though its owner were im- 
 patient of its luxuriance. Such a close-folded, mysterious 
 mouth, with deep-cut curves, hiding the pure white, rather 
 overlapping teeth. An irregular nose, rather square-ended, 
 with eager nostrils, a rounded chin, with a little cleft, in it. 
 went to the making of the face that Saxham and many others 
 thought so beautiful. 
 
 Only something was wanting to it. "Animation," the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 513 
 
 physiognomist would have said. " Vitality, mobility, 
 health " might have thought the ordinary observer, mistak- 
 ing the bluish shadows under the drooped eyelids and about 
 the mouth and nostrils for the usual signals of debility. 
 
 But Saxham, when he looked into the golden-hazel eyes, so 
 often hidden by the thick white eyelids, with their deep fringe 
 of red-brown lashes, said to himself with bitterness: " She is 
 quite well. Nothing on earth is wrong with her, except that 
 she is not happy. I can give her everything else on earth, it 
 seems, but what she needs most of all." 
 
 Let Joy, that radiant torch of the soul, illuminate those dim 
 windows, let Happiness sink like sweet rain into the dry heart, 
 and the whole woman would spring into vivid glowing beauty, 
 like the parched South African veld after the spring rains. 
 Red tulips would spring between the boulders ; exquisite glow- 
 ing pelargoniums and golden montbretias would clothe the 
 baked earth. The ice-plant would no longer be the only green 
 thing growing in the crannies of the rock. Delicate ferns and 
 dew-gemmed pitcher-plants would quiver there, and the spikes 
 of the rosy and pale and purple gladioli would thrust, from the 
 earth like spears, and the sweet-scented clematis and the passion- 
 vine would trail and blossom in rose and white and purple 
 on the edges of the kloofs and gorges, every stem and leaf and 
 bud and blossom growing and rejoicing in the balmy breeze 
 and the glorious June sunshine; the cruel, lashing rains, the 
 devastating floods, and the fierce droughts forgotten as though 
 they had never been. 
 
 Meanwhile the heavy red-brown lashes drooped wearily on 
 the white cheeks, and the long-limbed, slight, supple body 
 leaned back in the favourite chair by the fireside with a little 
 air of languor that only added to her allure. And Saxham, 
 looking at her, said again in his heart: 
 
 " Her children let them settle the money upon her chil- 
 dren." 
 
 She had learned to love, and thrilled at the touch of pas- 
 sion. Well, Beauvayse was dead, but Love would come again. 
 He would read its resurrection in the radiance of those eyes. 
 Then, exit Saxham. Such a marriage as theirs could be easily 
 dissolved, but he would not take the easy road. He had de- 
 cided. His should be the straight and narrow way of death. 
 His death was a debt he owed her. You are to learn why. 
 
 While he reviewed, for the thousandth time, this determina- 
 tion of his, and told himself again how the thing should be
 
 5H ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 done, his tea had grown quite cold. She leaned forwards and 
 touched his sleeve in drawing his attention to the neglected 
 cup, and flushed because he started and looked at her in so 
 strange a way. 
 
 He never, if it could be avoided, touched her. Her old 
 shrinking from him had worn away. His companionship, 
 though he did not guess it, was to her desirable even dear. 
 The light, firm tread of his small muscular feet, the curt, de- 
 cided utterance, made welcome music in her ears. She would 
 watch him without his knowledge when they went abroad to- 
 gether. The esteem in which his peers and seniors held him, 
 the deference with which his opinions were solicited and 
 listened to gave her strange delightful throbs of pride. 
 
 She had felt the first stirring of that pride in him when the 
 man who had been the thinking brain and the beating heart of 
 beleaguered Gueldersdorp had said, wringing her husband's 
 hand: 
 
 " // you have been of any use to me. ... If. ... You 
 have been my right hand and my mainstay from first to last, 
 Saxham, and while I live I shall remember it." 
 
 Brave words heartsome words for the hearing of a woman 
 who had loved him. Lynette was almost sorry that she did 
 not. 
 
 He did not believe that he had won any hearts in Guelders- 
 dorp. His curtness, his roughness, his harshness had been un- 
 favourably commented upon many and many a time. Yet 
 when he left them, how the people cheered! What volumes 
 of roaring sound from lusty throats had bidden him good-bye 
 and God-speed! 
 
 "Hurrah for the Doctor! Three cheers for Saxham! 
 Don't forget us, Doc! Come back again! God bless you, 
 Saxham! Bravo, Saxham! Saxham! Saxhami! Hurrah!" 
 
 A woman who had loved him would have wept for joy. A 
 pity his wife did not! 
 
 How strangely Owen had looked at her just now, when 
 she had brushed his sleeve lightly with her finger-tip! How 
 curious it was that he never touched her if he could help it! 
 She had quite forgotten having told him that, while she liked 
 to know him near, she could not endure the thought of being 
 taken by him, caressed by him, held in his embrace. . . . That 
 had been the frank, truthful expression of her feelings at the 
 time. She did not recoil so from his contact now. She had 
 not realized how deeply her words had wounded the man's
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 515 
 
 great, suffering, patient heart. Spoken, they had passed from 
 her memory. It is so natural for a fair, sweet woman to for- 
 get. It is so impossible for a man who has been stabbed to 
 help remembering, with the deep, bleeding wound unclosed. 
 
 There was another thing that Saxham did not know. Al- 
 though, as time went on, the beloved image of the Mother, 
 cherished in the innermost shrine of her adopted daughter's 
 heart, suffered no change in the clear, firm beauty of its out- 
 lines nor deterioration in the richness of its tender and austere 
 and gracious colouring, and each new day supplied some fresher 
 garland of old imperishable memories to grace it with, that 
 Shape with the grey-green jewel-eyes and the gay mouth that, 
 laughed had faded faded. She would not own it even to 
 herself, but the keen edge of her grief for Beauvayse was 
 blunted. The anniversary of his death, occurring in the com- 
 ing month of April, was to be a solemn retreat of sacred prayer 
 for her. But it was the Mother's death-day also, when to the 
 palm of martyrdom had been added the Saint's crown. She 
 was going to spend three days at the Kensington Convent, 
 where the dead nun had taken the vows. She told Saxham 
 now of the arrangement she had made through Lady Castle- 
 clare, who was intimate with the Superior. 
 
 " It will be a little like old times," she said to Saxham, 
 " living in a Convent again. And there are many Sisters there 
 who knew Mother, and loved her " 
 
 Her eyes swam in sudden tears. And Saxham, as he looked 
 at her, felt his heart contract in a spasm of bitter jealousy. 
 All that love for the dead, and not a crumb for the living! 
 He saw Beauvayse, his rival still, stretching a hand from the 
 grave to keep her from him. And he could have cried aloud: 
 
 " Those tears are for a trickster who cheated you into lov- 
 ing him. Listen, now, and I, who have never lied, even to 
 win you, will show him to you as he really was ! . . ." 
 
 But he did not yield to the temptation to enlighten her. A 
 vision rose up before him of a dying man on a campbed, and 
 he heard his own voice saying: 
 
 " I will never tell her. I will not blacken any man's reputa- 
 tion to further my own interests." 
 
 She was speaking, telling him something. He came back 
 out of the fierce mental struggle to listen to the voice that was 
 sweet and clear, and full of delicate inflections and subtle lights 
 and shadows, and yet so cold, so cold. . . . 
 
 " Imagine it ! I met an old friend to-day at my dressmaker's
 
 5i6 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 In Conduit Street. Not a man a girl who was a pupil at the 
 Convent at Gueldersdorp or, rather, I should say a woman, 
 for she is married." 
 
 Saxham asked : 
 
 " Is she an Englishwoman or a Colonial ? " 
 
 " She is of mingled French and Dutch blood. She was a 
 Miss Du Taine. Her father was a member of the Volksraad 
 at Pretoria. He controls large interests on the Rand, and has 
 an estate near Johannesburg. She is married to an English 
 gentleman. He is very rich, and has a title. She told it. me, 
 but I have forgotten it. She asked me to drive home and lunch 
 with her. . . ." She hesitated. " I did not want to go," she 
 said. 
 
 "Well, and what happened then?" Saxham asked. 
 
 " I made some kind of excuse, and hailed a hansom, and 
 drove to Lady Castleclare's. I lunched with her. She is al- 
 ways very kind. She thought the pearls were beautiful. But 
 'but surely they cost you a great deal of money? " 
 
 She touched a string of the gleaming, milky things that en- 
 circled her white throat above the lace cravat. Saxham said, 
 smiling : 
 
 " They did not cost more than I could afford to pay. I am 
 glad you liked them. I told Marie to put them on your 
 dressing-table, where you would be likely to see them in the 
 morning." 
 
 "You are too good to me!" she said, with quivering lips, 
 looking at him. Her white hand wavered in the air, as though 
 she meant to stretch it out to him. 
 
 " It is not possible to be too good to you ! " said Saxham 
 curtljr. He would not see the outstretched hand. She drew 
 it back, and faltered: 
 
 " You give me everything " 
 
 " You have given me what I most, wanted in the world," he 
 lied bravely. 
 
 " But " she rose and stood beside him on the hearth-rug, 
 tall, and fair, and slender, and oh! most seductively, maddenly 
 sweet to his adoring thought " but you take nothing for your- 
 self. That bedroom of yours at. the top of the house is wretch- 
 edly bare and comfortless ; and then, those absurd pictures ! " 
 
 She laughed ruefully, recalling the row of pictorially illus- 
 trated nursery rhymes that adorned the brown-paper dado of 
 Saxham's third-floor bedroom, the previous lessee having been 
 a family man.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 517 
 
 " Little Miss Muflfet and George Porgy, the Four-and- 
 Twenty Blackbirds, and the Cow that jumped over the Moon. 
 How can you endure ? " 
 
 She looked at him, and was startled by the set grimness of 
 his face and the thunderous lowering of the black smudge of 
 eyebrow. He said: 
 
 " You went to my room to-day. Why ? " 
 
 She crimsoned, and stammered: 
 
 " It was this morning, after you had gone out. I it struck 
 me that your linen ought to be overlooked and put to rights 
 from time to time. How did you know? " 
 
 He did not explain that the perfume of her hair, of her 
 breath, of her dress, had lingered when she had gone, to 
 tempt and taunt and torture him. He said nothing of the 
 little knot of violets that had dropped from her dress upon 
 the floor, and he had found there. His heart beat against it 
 even then. He answered: 
 
 " You told me yourself. And, as for the linen, let it be. 
 The housekeeper knows that she is expected to attend to it." 
 
 " She isn't your wife ! " 
 
 Her golden eyes flashed at him rebelliously. He was pro- 
 voking her, in his innocence of all intention, as a subtle wooer 
 might have planned to do. 
 
 " I am extremely glad that she is not." His mouth relaxed 
 in a smile, and his thunderous brows smoothed themselves. 
 " And now, don't you think you ought to go and dress? You 
 are dining with Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche at The 
 Carlton at seven, and going on to a theatre." He held his 
 watch out. " Six-thirty now," he said, and restored the 
 chronometer to his waistcoat pocket. 
 
 " Very well." She moved a step or two in the direction of 
 the door, and turned her head as gracefully as a young deer, 
 and looked back at him. "But you are coming, too?" she 
 said, and her eyes were very soft. 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 " It is impossible. I have several urgent cases to visit, and 
 there is an article for the Scientific Review" He moved his 
 hand slightly in the direction of some sheets of manuscript that 
 lay upon the blotting-paper. " I have a heavy night's work 
 before me with that alone. My excuses have already been 
 telephoned to Lady Hannah." 
 
 "Owen!" 
 
 She spoke his name in a whisper.
 
 5i8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 -^"Owen!" 
 
 "Couldn't I? would you care to have me? may I stay 
 and dine at home with you ? " 
 
 "And disappoint your friends! . . . Most certainly not. 
 Unless, indeed " his tone warmed to interest " unless you 
 (are not feeling well." 
 
 " I am perfectly well, thanks," she said coldly. 
 
 " Then go to your dinner and your play, child," said Sax- 
 ham, with the smile that changed and softened his harsh 
 features almost into beauty. " I will drive with you to The 
 Carlton, and fetch you from the play. Which of the theatres 
 have you decided to patronize?" 
 
 " Lady Hannah and the Major left the choice to me/' she 
 said, with a little touch of girlish importance, " so I telephoned 
 to Nickalls in Bond Street for a box at The Leicester. He 
 had not got one; he sent me three stalls for ' The Chiffon Girl ' 
 at The Variety instead. It is a revival. I don't quite know 
 what that means," she added, rather puzzled by Saxham's si- 
 lence and the grimness of his face. " You do not mind at all? 
 You do not think it is the kind of play the Mother would not 
 have liked me to see?" 
 
 " No," said Saxham curtly, and with averted eyes. 
 
 She bent her head to him as he opened the door, and went 
 away to her own rooms on the floor above, the drawing-room 
 that was upholstered and hung with delicate green-and-white, 
 rose-garlanded Pompadour brocade, and graceful water-colours 
 from famous hands, and furnished with every luxury and 
 elegance that the heart of woman could desire; the charming 
 boudoir, pink as a sea-shell, and full of new books and old 
 china; the bedroom, with the blue-and-white decorations, 
 where an ivory crucifix that had always stood upon the 
 Mother's writing-table hung above the dainty bed. 
 
 " I think he is a little hard on me at times," she said, as 
 she passed through the warm, firelit, perfumed rooms that were 
 fragrant with the narcissi and violets and lilies that were sent 
 in by his orders, and strewn with the costly, pretty trifles that 
 she, who had been used to the barrack-like bareness of the 
 Convent, delighted in like a child, and the gleaming mirrors 
 gave her back her loveliness. " He treats me as if I were a 
 stranger. And, after all, I am his wife. . . ." 
 
 Saxham's patients found him even curter and more brusque 
 in manner than usual that evening, and the article for the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 519 
 
 Scientific Review made little way. He threw down his pen at 
 last, and leaned his head upon his hands and wondered, star- 
 ing at the unfinished page of manuscript with eyes that saw no 
 meaning in the sentences, whether any man born of woman 
 had even been so great a fool as the man who had written 
 them. 
 
 To have made that promise of secrecy to the dead traitor 
 was an act of sheer, quixotic folly. To have kept it was 
 madness, nothing less. And yet Saxham knew that he would 
 keep it always. That if she ever learned the truth, it would 
 be hinted by the chance remark of some stranger, gathered 
 from a paragraph in some newspaper. There was a small- 
 print line at the bottom of the quarter-column devoted by the 
 compilers of Whittinger's " Peerage " to the Marquisate of 
 Foltlebarre, which might have enlightened her. He turned to 
 it now, and read: 
 
 " Ctss. of Beauvayse, Esther, dau: of Samuel Levah, Esq., of 
 Finsbury, E. C, mar: May, 1899, the late John Edward Basil 
 Tobart, Lieut. Grey Hussars, nth Earl of Beauvayse. Killed 
 in action during the defence of Gueldersdorp, Feb., 1900, while 
 atta: as Junior aide to the Staff of Colonel Commanding H. 
 M. Forces, leaving issue one dau: The Lady Alyse Rosabel 
 Tobart, aged eighteen months." 
 
 At the clubs, Service and Civil, Saxham had heard the im- 
 promptu marriage of the late John Basil Edward Tobart 
 freely discussed. The story of his subsequent entanglement 
 " with some girl or other at Gueldersdorp " had been mooted 
 in his presence a dozen times by Society chatterers, whose en- 
 joyment of the scandal would have been pleasantly stimulated 
 by the knowledge that "Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., late At- 
 tached Medical Staff," was married to the girl. But they did 
 not know, and she . . . 
 
 What use what use in her knowing? Of what avail could 
 be the melting of the ice about her heart, the loosening of the 
 fetters of her tongue, the quickening of her nature, the miracle 
 vouchsafed? Of none, now, for a reason. Saxham told him- 
 self, in those hours when he propped his burning forehead on 
 his hands and looked into the starless night of his desolate soul, 
 that he had ceased even to desire that she should come to love 
 him. Far better that she should never know. 
 
 It was growing late, and he had promised to fetch her from
 
 520 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the theatre. The silver clock upon the mantelshelf chimed ten. 
 He had stretched his hand to the telephone to ring up his 
 motor-brougham from the garage, when he heard the click of 
 her latchkey in the outer door and the silken whisper of her 
 garments passing quickly through the hallway. Then came a 
 knock at the consulting-room door sharp, quick, imperious, 
 oddly unlike Lynette's soft tap. ... At the summons Saxham 
 made two strides across the carpet and opened to her, a ques- 
 tion on his lips. 
 
 "Why have you come back so early? Has anything 
 happened ? " 
 
 Even as he asked, her look told why. She knew. 
 
 She knew. . . . Her face was rigid, a pure white mask of 
 ivory; there was not a trace of colour even in the set lips. 
 Her eyes burned upon him, twin flames of dark amber, steady 
 under levelled brows. She was wrapped in a long ermine- 
 caped and bordered black brocade mantle, that gleamed with 
 jet passementerie; a scarf of white lace covered her head. It 
 hid the red-brown hair with the Clytie ripple in it, and the 
 great silken coils, transfixed by a sapphire and diamond dagger 
 that were massed at the nape of the slender neck. Seen so, she 
 was nunlike in her chaste severity, but for those stern, resent- 
 ful eyes. 
 
 " I have come to tell you that I am no longer in ignorance. 
 I have found out what you have hidden from me so long 
 what the Wrynches knew and would not tell me; what the 
 world has known while I sat in the dark. . . ." 
 
 A spasm wrung her mouth. Saxham rolled a chair towards 
 her. He said guardedly, avoiding her eyes: 
 
 " Until you acquaint me in detail with what you have heard, 
 I cannot explain or defend myself. Will you not sit down? 
 You are looking pale and overwrought." 
 
 She laid one slight gloved hand upon the chair-back, and 
 leaned upon it. 
 
 " I had rather stand, if you have no objection, whilst I tell 
 you what I have learned to-night. I dined alone with Lady 
 Hannah at the Carlton ; we went together to the theatre 
 Major Wrynche had had a summons to attend at Marlborough 
 House." 
 
 She untied the knot of lace beneath her chin, and stripped 
 away the long gloves with nervous haste and impatience, and 
 tossed them with the scarf upon the chair beside her, and went 
 on:
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 521 
 
 " I had heard much of ' The Chiffon Girl.' I wanted to 
 see it. When the First Act began I wondered very much 
 why they called it a Musical Comedy, when the noise the 
 orchestra made could hardly be called music, and there was 
 no comedy only slang expressions and stupid jokes. But the 
 actress who sang and danced in the principal part . . . Miss 
 Lavigne . . ." She had loosened her mantle; now she let it 
 drop upon the Eastern carpet, emerging from its blackness as a 
 slender, supple, upright shape in clinging, creamy-white drap- 
 eries ; her exquisite arms bare to the shoulders, and clasped mid- 
 way by heavy, twisted bracelets of barbaric gold, her nymph- 
 like bosom swelling from the folded draperies of the low-cut 
 bodice like a twin-budded narcissus flowering from the pale 
 calyx, her sweet throat clasped about with Saxham's gift of 
 pearls. 
 
 " She could not sing, though the people applauded and en- 
 cored her " there was a gleam of disdain in the golden eyes 
 " but she was very pretty . . . she danced w T ith wonderful 
 grace and lightness ... it was like a swallow dipping and 
 darting over the shallows of the river-shore, like a branch of 
 red pomegranate-blossoms swayed and swung by a Spring 
 breeze. ... I admired her, and yet I was sorry for her. . . . 
 To have to pose and bound and whirl before all those rows 
 and rows of staring faces night after night . . ." 
 
 Saxham did not smile. But a muscle twitched in his cheek 
 as he said : 
 
 " She would hardly thank you for pitying her." 
 
 " She would be right to resent my pity," Lynette burst out 
 with sudden vehemence. " She has been injured, and I was 
 the cause. Oh ! how could you be so cruel as to let me go on 
 loving him? Was it kind? Was it fair to yourself and me? " 
 
 Saxham's square, pale face was perfectly expressionless. He 
 waited in silence to hear the rest. 
 
 " You know of whom I speak . . ." said Lynette. " He 
 was gay and beautiful and winning not chivalrous, as I 
 believed him ; not honest, or sincere, or true. Months before 
 we met at Gueldersdorp he was the husband of this actress 
 the woman I saw upon the stage to-night. And you knew 
 all this, and never told me. You knew that his memory was 
 sacred in my heart. A man who said he loved me once tried 
 to blacken it. I will not tell you who he was. But I re- 
 member that I laughed in his face as I drove him from me. 
 ' You thought to make me hate him,' I said. ' You have failed
 
 5 22 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 miserably. If it were possible to love him better, if I could 
 honour his memory more than I do now, I would, because of 
 the evil you have spoken of my dead.' " 
 
 She heard Saxham draw breath heavily. She went on with 
 increased passion, and gathering resentment: 
 
 " All my life long I might have gone on in my blindness, 
 honouring the dishonourable, cherishing the base, but for the 
 idle gossip of two strangers in the theatre to-night a man and 
 a woman in the stalls behind us. They talked all the louder 
 when the lights went down. They wondered ' why the 
 Lavigne did not star on the programme as a Peeress,' but, of 
 course, they said, ' the Foltlebarres would never stand that. 
 They were nearly wild when that handsome scamp of theirs 
 married her poor Beauty Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars. 
 He and she had kept house together; there was a kiddie com- 
 ing. . . . The little woman played her cards uncommonly 
 well. . . . The marriage was pulled off on the quiet at a 
 Registrar's a week or so before he got his appointment on the 
 Staff. Straight of the fellow, but afterwards, at Guelders- 
 dorp, didn't he kick over the matrimonial pole? Somebody 
 had seen his engagement to a Miss Something-or-other an- 
 nounced in a Siege newspaper, published the very day he got 
 killed. . . . Poor beggar! Rough on him, and rough on the 
 Foltlebarres, and a facer for Lessie . . . and what price the 
 girl ? ' And I was the girl. ... It was of me they were 
 talking. . . ." 
 
 Her lips writhed back from her white teeth. She winced 
 and shuddered. " Oh ! can't you see me sitting and listening, 
 and every word vitriol, burning to the bone ? " 
 
 " Why did you remain," said Saxham, wrung by pity, " to 
 be tortured by such prurient prattlers? Why did you not get 
 up and leave the place ? " 
 
 " I could not move," she said. ..." I could only sit and 
 listen. Then the First Act ended, and the lights went, up, and 
 Lady Hannah touched my arm. I knew when our eyes met 
 that she had heard as I had. She got up, saying, ' I think we 
 have had enough of this,' and then we came away." 
 
 She caught her breath and bit. her underlip, and he saw her 
 eyes grow misty. 
 
 " She sent a Commissionaire to call a hansom. . . . She 
 took my hand as we stood waiting in the empty vestibule. 
 She said : ' Those chattering pies behind us have saved me 
 some bad half-hours. Your husband, for some reason of his
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 523 
 
 own, has never told you. And it has more than once occurred 
 to me that if I were the true friend I want to be to both of 
 you, I'd have proved it before now by telling you myself. But 
 I've learned to be doubtful of my own inspirations. . . .' I 
 asked her then if all they had said was true? She shrugged 
 her shoulders and nodded : ' Pour tout dire, they let Beau 
 down rather gently. . . . But if he never could tell the truth 
 to a woman, he never went back on a man ; and, after all, these 
 things run in the blood. Passons I'eponge la-dessus. Forget 
 him, and thank your good Angel you're married to an honour- 
 able man!" 
 
 Saxham's eyes were on the carpet. He did not raise them 
 or move a muscle of his face. 
 
 " She told me to forget him. It is easier to forgive him ; 
 there are deceits that smirch the soul of the deceived no less 
 than the deceiver. He lied to the Mother that I cannot, 
 pardon! Perhaps some day but I do not know. Lady 
 Hannah called you honourable. ... I needed no one to tell 
 me what you are and have always been. You hide the things 
 that other men boast of. ... You are loyal even to those you 
 scorn. You kept his secret. I have reproached you to-night 
 for keeping it, even while I honoured you in my heart" 
 
 " Do not honour me ! " said Saxham harshly. " In behav- 
 ing with common decency, can a man tell tales on another who 
 is dead? To commit murder would be a crime less cowardly. 
 I do myself mere justice when I say that I am incapable of an 
 act so vile. Nor would I blacken a living man to make myself 
 show whiter in any man's or woman's eyes." 
 
 She was no longer pale. A lovely colour flushed her, and 
 her eyes were wistful and very kind. Her draperies rustled 
 as she moved towards him. " Owen . . ." she said, and her 
 white hands were held out to him, and her sweet mouth quiv- 
 ered, and her voice was a sigh, " I am alive at last to your 
 infinite generosity. I beg you to forgive me for being blind 
 before." 
 
 " Generosity," said Saxham, " does not enter into the ques- 
 tion. My silence has no merits whatever. What good could 
 I have gained by telling you?" He lifted his eyes, and met 
 hers full, dropping the words coldly one by one. " That ad- 
 vantage one has ceased to desire can hardly be called gain, in 
 any sense of the word. And I have left off crying for the 
 moon. I have ceased to wish for your love even were you 
 willing to give it me."
 
 524 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 She looked at him with piteous, incredulous wistfulness; he 
 had told the lie with hardihood. His mask of a face revealed 
 nothing, but he could not disguise the rage of hunger for her 
 that ravened in his famished eyes. They were upon her lips, 
 her throat, the lovely curves of her young bosom even as he 
 spoke; she felt them as the kisses of a fierce, possessive mouth, 
 and glowed with sudden shame, and something more. He saw 
 her beauty change from the pale rose to the fire-hearted crimson, 
 tore away his eyes, and mastered himself. He stepped back, 
 and the outstretched, quivering hands dropped nervelessly at 
 her sides. 
 
 " You have asked me to pardon you," he said, " for some 
 fancied lack of perception. It. is I who owe an apology to 
 you. Try and forgive me for having married you. ... I 
 should have known from the first that no good or happiness 
 could ever come of a contract like ours." 
 
 "Have I ever said I was unhappy?" she demanded. Her 
 breath came quick and short. 
 
 " Your face has said so very often," returned Saxham, look- 
 ing at it, " though you were too considerate to tell me so in 
 words. But I ask you on this night that sees you freed from 
 an illusion, to have courage and not yield to depression. Your 
 fetters may be broken sooner than you think." 
 
 "Owen! . . ." 
 
 She was paler than before, if that could be possible. She 
 swayed a little, and caught at the back of a chair that was near, 
 and there was terror in her darkened, dilated eyes. . . . 
 
 "Do you say this to prepare me? Have you any illness? 
 Do you mean that you are going to die?" 
 
 " I meant nothing . . ." answered Saxham, " except that 
 men are mortal, sometimes fortunately for the women who are 
 bound to them. Go to bed, my child; to sleep will do you 
 good." 
 
 " Good-night," she said, and dropped her head, and went 
 away. He opened the door for her, and locked it after her, 
 and went back to the writing-table, and sat in his chair. He 
 gripped the arms of it in anguish, and the sweat of agony stood 
 on the broad forehead where a woman who had loved him 
 would have laid her lips. 
 
 He had repelled her, slighted her, wounded her. ... He 
 knew what it had cost him not to take those offered hands. 
 . . . He was tortured and wrung in body and in soul as he 
 took a key that hung upon his chain and unlocked a deep
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 525 
 
 idrawer, and took a flask from it that gurgled as if some 
 mocking sprite had laughed aloud when he shook it. close to 
 his ear. He whom she had praised as honourable was a traitor 
 no less than the dead man. He had said to her, months ago 
 in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp : 
 
 " I may die, but I will never fail you." 
 
 He had not died, and he had failed her. The Dop Doctor 
 of Gueldersdorp was drinking hard again. 
 
 LIX 
 
 BEFORE you turn away in loathing of the man whose experi- 
 ence of Life's game of football had been chiefly gained from 
 the ball's point of view, hear how it happened that the work 
 of all those months of stern self-repression and strenuous denial 
 had been rendered useless. 
 
 In the previous July, when General Huller was visiting 
 Lord Williams, of Afghanistan, at Pretoria, Owen Saxham, 
 M.D., F.R.C.S., had been married to Lynet.te Bridget-Mary 
 Mildare at the Registrar's Office, Gueldersdorp, and at the 
 Catholic Church. One hour after the ceremony the happy 
 pair left by the mail for Cape Town. 
 
 Gueldersdorp turned out to do them honour. We have 
 heard the people cheer. Three days and three nights of the 
 Express, delayed in places by the wrecking of the line, and 
 then the Alpine mountain-ranges sank and dwindled with the 
 mercury in the thermometer. The little white towns succeeded 
 each other like pearls on a green string. Humpy blue hills 
 gave way to the flats, and then in the shadow of Table Moun- 
 tain Babel's confusion of tongues and the stalwart flower 
 of many nations, arrayed and armed for battle, and the glory, 
 and pomp, and power of War. 
 
 The grey and white transport disgorged them, ants of sober, 
 neutral colours, marching in columns to attack other ants. 
 They grew upon the vision and filled it, and the sound of their 
 feet was louder than the beating of the surf on Sea Point, and 
 although martial music beat and blew them on a brazen 
 whirlwind dominating the mind, blaring at the ears the 
 tramping of men's feet and the hoof of horses, and the rolling 
 of iron-shod wheels triumphed in the long-run. 
 
 Saxham engaged rooms at the Trafalgar Hotel, a handsome 
 caravanserai standing in its own gardens at the top of Imperial
 
 526 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Avenue, for himself and his wife, and the savage irony that 
 can be conveyed in the term struck him, not for the first time 
 since he had laid gold and silver on the open book, and en- 
 dowed a woman with the gift of himself and all his worldly 
 goods. 
 
 It was early in the forenoon. They were to sail next day. 
 The big building was crammed, not only with officers under 
 orders for the Front, and their wives, who had come to see 
 them start, but society had descended like a flock of chattering 
 gaudily-plumaged paroquets upon the spot where new and ex- 
 citing sensations were to be had. For the trampling feet and 
 the rolling wheels that ceaselessly went North imparted one 
 set of thrills, and the long trains of wounded and dying that 
 met and passed them, coming down as they went up, gave 
 another kind. Amongst the poor dears in the trucks, and 
 waggons, and Ambulance-carriages you might eventually find 
 a man you knew. . . . The sporting odds were given and 
 taken on these exciting chances; and the fluttering and scream- 
 ing paroquets that crowded the Railway Stations, in spite of 
 their gay feathers, bore no little resemblance to carrion-feeding 
 birds of prey. 
 
 Saxham, Recently Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, 
 suffered from the notoriety inseparable from the name of a 
 man who has been thrice mentioned in Despatches, and has 
 been publicly thanked by the representatives of an Imperial 
 Government. The Interviewer yapped at his heels whitherso- 
 ever he went, and the Correspondent strove to lure him into 
 confidences, and Society fluttered at him with shrill squawkings, 
 and wanted to know, don't you know? It must have been 
 " devey " and " twee " to have gone through all those experi- 
 ences. It was the year when " devey," and " twee," and 
 similar abbreviations first became fashionable. 
 
 There were pleasanter episodes than these, when soldierly, 
 bronzed warriors and simple, unaffected men of great affairs 
 expressed to Saxham in few words their belief that he had done 
 his duty. The approval of these warmed him and helped to 
 raise him higher. It was a little creature, a human insect no 
 bigger than a bar-tender, that brought about the mischief. 
 
 There was an American bar on the ground-floor of the 
 Trafalgar. Saxham stood upon the threshold of the place, 
 replying to the questions of a group of Colonial officers, New 
 South Wales Mounted Engineers and Canadian Rangers, when 
 somebody suggested Drinks, and led the way in. Invited to
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 527 
 
 make his choice from a long list of alcoholic mixtures, begin- 
 ning with Whisky Straight, and ending with Bosom Caresser 
 and gin-sour, Saxham said that he would take a glass of ice- 
 water. 
 
 " Well, boss, since you're on the Temperance Walk," said 
 the Australian, his would-be host, a little huffy, " you'll please 
 yourself, I suppose?" He collected the preferences of his 
 other guests, and gave the orders to the man behind the 
 bar. 
 
 The barman had the misfortune to be a joker of the practi- 
 cal kind. Seeing Saxham held in conversation by one of the 
 other men, he winked portentously at the New South Waler, 
 and whispered in his ear. 
 
 The Australian understood. A reason for Saxham's 
 abstinence had been given him. The new-made bridegroom 
 as a rule shuns Alcohol. And in proportion to his desire to 
 avoid grows the determination of other men to compel him 
 to drink. The bridegroom is fair game all the world over for 
 the Rabelaisian jest and the clown's horseplay. 
 
 The bar-tender, hoisting his eyebrows to his scollops of 
 gummed hair, winked at the New South Waler with infinite 
 meaning, and pointed to a cut-glass carafe that stood on the 
 shining nickel-plated counter. It appeared to contain pure 
 sparkling water, but the liquor it held was knock-out whisky, 
 a tintless drink of exceeding potency, above proof. The 
 Australian shook his head. But he laughed under his neat 
 moustache as he turned away, and the bar-tender concluded to 
 carry his joke through. He dealt out the drinks to their 
 respective owners, and with a dexterous sweep of a shirt-sleeved 
 arm brought the innocent-seeming carafe and a gleaming, 
 polished tumbler immediately before the square-faced hulking 
 doctor with the queer blue eyes, whose pretty bride of three 
 days was waiting for him in their room upon the third floor of 
 the humming, over-crowded caravanserai. Saxham, absorbed 
 by the thought of her, poured out a tumblerful of the clear, 
 sparkling stuff, and had half emptied it before he realized the 
 trick. His eyes grew red with injected blood, and his hair 
 bristled on his head. He struck out once across the narrow 
 counter. The long wall-mirror behind the bar-tender cracked 
 and starred with the crashing impact of the joker's skull, and 
 the man fell senseless, bleeding from the mouth and 
 nostrils. 
 
 Another attendant came running at the crash, and the ex-
 
 528 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 clamations of those who had seen the swift retaliation wreaked. 
 Saxham pointed to the two banknotes lying on the counter, 
 wheeled abruptly, and went out of the bar. 
 
 His brain was on fire. His blood ran riot in his burning 
 veins, and The Vice he had deemed dead stirred in the depths 
 of his being, lifted its slender head, and hissed, quivered a 
 forked tongue, and struck with poisoned fangs. He went out 
 into the purple night that wedded lovers would have found so 
 perfect. The great white stars winked down at him jeeringly, 
 and a little mocking breeze sniggered among the mimosas and 
 palms of the hotel gardens. He passed out of them into the 
 many-tongued Babel of the streets, packed with humanity, 
 throbbing with virile life, and tramped the magnificent avenues 
 and wide electric-lighted streets of Cape Town with the thou- 
 sands who had no beds to go to, and the hundreds who had, but 
 preferred not to occupy them. To his narrow couch in the 
 dressing-room adjoining Lynette's bedroom her husband dared 
 not go. 
 
 So he wore the night out doggedly, wrestling with the demon 
 that boils the blood of strong fierce men to forgetfulness of 
 compacts and breach of oaths. Daybreak touched him with a 
 shivering finger, a hulking figure dozing on one of the white- 
 painted municipal iron seats near the Athletic Ground on 
 Greenpoint Common. The last lingering star throbbed itself 
 out, a white moth dying in the marvellous rose and orange fires 
 of dawn, and the overwhelming, brooding bulk of Table 
 Mountain gleamed, an emerald and sapphire splendour against 
 the rising sun, and the two lesser peaks that are the mountain's 
 bodyguard shone glowing in golden mail as Saxham got to his 
 feet, and shook some order into the disorder of his dress, and 
 faced hotelwards. 
 
 Despair was in the heart of the Dop Doctor, and for him 
 the wonder of the dawn, the marvel of the sunrise meant no 
 more than if he had been born blind. A menial's trick had 
 wrought him confusion; his will, in the saving strength of 
 which he had trusted, was a leaf in the wind of his desire. 
 Even now his throat and tongue were parched, his being 
 thirsted for the liquor he had abjured. 
 
 What was to do ? What was to happen in the future ? He 
 asked himself in vain. As Mouille Point shut its fixed red 
 eye in apparent derision, and the Greenpoint Light winked a 
 thirteen-mile wink and went out, unlike the Hope that had. 
 burned in Saxham, and would be rekindled never more.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 529 
 
 LX 
 
 PITY the man now as he sat brooding alone in the consulting- 
 room, consumed by the thirst he shuddered at, once more an 
 unwilling slave to the habit he abhorred. 
 
 He unscrewed the large flask and drank, and his lips curled 
 back with loathing of the whisky, and his gorge rose at it as it 
 went down. Then he put the flask back and locked the drawer, 
 and laid his head down upon his folded arms in silence. No 
 help anywhere. No hope, no joy, no love. 
 
 Death must come. Death should come, before the shadow 
 of disgrace fell upon the Beloved, of whose love he knew now 
 that he had never been worthy. Well for Lynette that he had 
 never won it. Happy for her that she* had never even learned 
 to care for him a little. 
 
 A few days more, and the great Victorian Age had drawn 
 its last breath. 
 
 The people went in the London streets softly, as though 
 cheir footsteps led them through the stately, grand, and solemn 
 chamber where lay the august, illustrious Dead. 
 
 A subdued, busy hum of preparation was perceptible to the 
 ear. The eye saw the thoroughfares being covered with sand, 
 the draperies of purple rising at the bidding of the pulley and 
 the rope, the carts laden with wreaths and garlands of laurel, 
 passing from point to point, discharging their loads, often re- 
 newed. 
 
 A lady was ushered into Saxham's consulting-room as a 
 long procession of those carts went creaking by. She was a 
 dainty, piquant, golden-haired, blue-eyed little woman, quite 
 .beautifully dressed. Her gown was of black, in deference to 
 the natural mourning, but. it glittered with sequins, and huge 
 diamonds scintillated in her tiny ears, and she wore a mantle 
 of royal ermine, that reached to the high heels of her little 
 shoes. Her hat was of the toque description. Ermine and 
 lace and artificial blooms from Parisian window-gardens went 
 to make up the delicious effect. A titled name adorned her 
 card, which bore a Mayfair address. She seemed in radiant 
 health. As Saxham waited, leaning forward in his consulting- 
 chair, to receive the would-be patient's confidence, you can 
 imagine those blue eyes of his, once so hard and keen, looking 
 out of their hollowing caves with a sorrowful, clear sympathy
 
 530 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 that was very different from their old regard. To his women- 
 patients he was exquisitely considerate. Only to one class of 
 patient was he merciless and unsparing. 
 
 Upon the woman who desired to rid herself of her sex- 
 privilege, upon the wedded wanton who sought to make of her 
 body, designed by her Maker to be the cradle of an unborn 
 generation, its Sepulchre, Saxham's glance fell like a sharp 
 jcurved sword. He wasted few words upon her, but each 
 sentence, as it fell from his grim mouth, shrivelled and cor- 
 roded, as vitriol dropped on naked human flesh. He listened 
 now in silence that grew grimmer and grimmer, as in flute-like 
 (accents, their smooth course hampered by the very slightest 
 diffidence, the little lady explained. Those stormy brows of 
 his grew tremendous. 
 
 Ah, the tragic errand, the snaky purpose, coiled behind 
 those graceful ambiguous forms of speech. Not new the 
 tale to the man who sat and heard. She admired the black- 
 haired, powerful head, and the square, pale face with its short, 
 aquiline, rather heavily-modelled features, and the broad, white 
 forehead that the single smudge of eyebrow barred pleased her, 
 as it did most women. Only the man's vivid blue eyes were 
 unpleasantly hard and fixed in their regard, and his mouth 
 frightened her, it was so grim and set. 
 
 She was not as robust as she appeared, she said. When she 
 had been married, the family physician had said to her mother 
 that it would hardly be advisable. . . . Delay for a year or 
 two would be wise. And her husband did not care for chil- 
 dren. He was quite willing. He had sent her to Saxham, in 
 fact. Of course, the Profession of Surgery had made such 
 huge strides that Risk need not enter into consideration for a 
 moment. . . . And heaps of her women friends did the same. 
 'And expense was absolutely no object, and would not Dr. 
 Saxham 
 
 Saxham struck a bell that was upon his table, and rose up 
 with his piercing eyes upon her and crossed the room in two 
 strides. He flung the door wide. He bowed to her with cool, 
 withering, ironical courtesy as he stood waiting for her to de- 
 part. 
 
 She hesitated, laughed with the ring of hysteria, fluttered 
 into speech. 
 
 " You are not, of course, aware of it, but I happen to be 
 an old schoolfellow of your wife's." Her pretty, inquisitive 
 eyes went, back to the writing-table, where stood a photograph
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 531 
 
 of Lynette, recently taken an exquisite, delicate, pearly-toned 
 portrait in a heavy silver-gilt frame. " We used to be great 
 friends. Du Taine was my maiden name. Surely Mrs. Sax- 
 ham has spoken to you of Greta Du Taine? I left Guelders- 
 dorp at the beginning of the siege. We went to Cape Town. 
 I met my husband there. He is Sir Philip Atherleigh, 
 Baronet." She italicized the word. " He was with his regi- 
 ment, going to the Front. We were married almost directly. 1 
 It was a case of love at first sight. Now we are staying at 
 our town house in Werekly Square. Mrs. Saxham must visit 
 us my husband is dying to know her. We were always such 
 tremendous friends." 
 
 " I am unaware of it, madam." The angry blood darkened 
 his face. His tone told her plainly that the boasted friendship 
 was at an end. 
 
 Greta reddened too, and her turquoise-hued eyes dealt him 
 a glance of bitter hatred. 
 
 " I did not stay long at the Convent at Gueldersdorp. 
 Nuns are good, simple creatures, and easily imposed upon. 
 And 'mother did not wish me to be educated with strays and 
 foundlings dressed up like young ladies actually allowed to 
 mingle upon equal terms with them " 
 
 It was Cornelius Agrippa, I think, who once materialized 
 the Devil as an empty purse. The necromancer should have 
 evoked the Spirit of Evil in the shape of a spiteful woman. 
 Greta went on : 
 
 " Such Society as there was, I should say. You were at 
 Gueldersdorp throughout the siege, and for some time before 
 it, I think, Dr. Saxham." 
 
 Two pairs of blue eyes met, the man's hard as shining stones, 
 the woman's dancing with malicious intention. Saxham stiffly 
 bent his head. But her fear of him had evaporated in her 
 triumph. Those inquisitive, turquoise eyes had an excellent 
 memory behind them. Something in the shape of the square 
 black head and hulking shoulders quickened it now. 
 
 " It's odd " Her smile was a grin that showed sharp 
 
 little white teeth ready to bite, and her speech was pointed 
 with venomed meaning. " I used to go out a great deal in 
 such Society as the place possessed. Yet I do not remember 
 having met you?" 
 
 Saxham's cold eyes clashed with the malicious turquoises. 
 
 " I did not mingle in Society at Gueldersdorp." 
 
 He signed to the waiting manservant to open the hall-door.
 
 532 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 She drew her snowy ermines about her and rustled over the 
 threshold. But in the hall she turned and dealt her thrust. 
 
 "No? You were too busy attending cases. Police-Court 
 cases. . . ." 
 
 Her light laugh fluttered mockingly about, his ears. 
 
 " I remember the funny headings of some of the newspaper 
 reports. . . . 'Another Rampant Drunk! The Town painted 
 Red Again by the Dop Doctor ! ' ' 
 
 "Door!" said Saxham, shaping the word with stiff grey 
 lips. His face was the face of Death, who had come close up 
 and touched him. Her little ladyship went out to her waiting 
 auto-brougham, and her light, malignant laugh fluttered back 
 as the servant shut the hall-door. 
 
 Saxham went back into the consulting-room. The Spring 
 sunshine poured in through the tall muslin-screened window. 
 There was a cheerful play of light and colour in the place. 
 But to the man who sat there it was full of shadows, dark 
 and gloomy, threatening and grim. And not the least 
 formidable among them was the shadow of the Dop Doctor of 
 Gueldersdorp, looming portentously over that fair face within 
 the silver-gilt frame upon the writing-table, stretching out long 
 octopus arms to drag down shame upon it, and heap ashes of 
 humiliation undeserved upon the lovely head, and mock her 
 with the solemn altar-vows that bound her to the drunkard. 
 
 LXI 
 
 THE Great-Victorian Age was laid to rest. 
 
 The great pageant of mortality had wound along the ap- 
 pointed route, under the cold grey February sky, an apparently 
 endless, slowly-marching column of Infantry, Artillery, and 
 Cavalry of the Line, progressing pace by pace between the im- 
 movable barriers of great-coated soldiers, and the surging, rest- 
 less sea of black-clad men and women pent up on either hand 
 behind them. The long rolling of muffled drums, and the dull 
 boom of cannon; the baring of men's heads; the wail of the 
 Funeral March, the flash of suddenly whitened faces turned 
 one way to greet Her as She passed to Her rest upon a gun- 
 carriage, as fitting an aged warrior Queen, drawn to her mated 
 couch within one tomb by the willing, faithful hands of her 
 sons of the twin Services, who shall forget, that heard and wit- 
 nessed ?
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 533 
 
 Who shall forget ? 
 
 The Royal Standard draped across the satin-white, gold- 
 fringed pall, where on rich crimson cushions rested the Three 
 Emblems of Sovereignty. The dignified, kingly figure of a 
 man, no longer young, bowed with sorrow under the Imperial 
 heritage, preceding the splendid sombre company of crowned 
 heads ; the blaze of uniforms and Orders, the clang of sword 
 and bridle, the potent ring of steel on steel, the crimson-trapped, 
 shining horses pacing slowly, drawing the gilded carriages of 
 State, their closed windows, frosted with chilly fog, yielding 
 scant glimpses of well-known faces. One most beloved, most 
 lovely, and no less so in sorrow than in joy. " Did you see 
 her ? " the women asked of one another, as the pageant passed 
 and vanished, and one good soul, all breathless from the crush, 
 gasped as she straightened her battered bonnet and twitched 
 her trodden skirt: "There never was a better than the blessed 
 soul that's gone, but there couldn't be a sweeter nor a beauti- 
 fuller Queen than the one she leaves behind her." 
 
 The last wail of the Funeral March having plained away to 
 silence, the last cannon-shot gone booming out, down came the 
 foggy dusk on mourning London. A chill rime settled on the 
 swaying laurel wreaths, and on the folds of the purple draperies 
 fluttering to the dying of the dismal day. The shops were 
 shut, and many of the restaurants, but the windows of the 
 Clubs gleamed radiantly down Piccadilly, and every refresh- 
 ment-bar and public-house was thronged to bursting. Day 
 changed to evening, and evening lengthened into night, and the 
 pavements began to be crowded. The Flesh Bazaar was 
 being held in Piccadilly, and all up Regent Street and all down 
 the Haymarket the chaffering went on for bodies and for souls. 
 
 A deadly physical and mental lassitude weighed on Saxham. 
 His soul was sick with the long, hopeless struggle. He would 
 end it. He would die, and take away the shadow from Lyn- 
 ette's pure life, and leave her free. His will devised to her 
 everything he possessed, leaving her untrammelled. Let her 
 learn to love once more, let her marry a better man, and be 
 happy in her husband and her children. 
 
 He turned in at one of the chemist's shops. One or two 
 gaudily-dressed, haggard women were at the distant end of the 
 counter, in conference with an assistant. Saxham spoke to the 
 chemist, a grey-whiskered, fatherly individual, who listened, 
 bending his sleek bald head. The chemist bowed, but as he
 
 534 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 had not the honour of knowing his customer, would the gen- 
 tleman oblige by signing the poison-book, in compliance with 
 Schedule F of the Pharmacy Act, 1868? 
 
 Saxham nodded. The chemist produced the register, and 
 opened it on the counter before Saxham, and supplied him with 
 pen and ink. Then he found that he had business at the other 
 end of the shop, and when he returned he smartly closed the 
 book, without even satisfying himself whether the client had 
 written down his name and address, or merely pretended to. 
 Then he filled a two-ounce vial with the fragrant deadly acid, 
 and put on a yellow label that named the poison, but not the 
 vendor, and stoppered and capsuled, and sealed, and made it 
 into a neat little parcel, and Saxham paid, and put the parcel 
 in his inner breast-pocket, and turned to leave the shop. 
 
 It was crowded now ; the roaring business of the little hours 
 was in full swing. The three assistants ran about like busy 
 ants; the chemist joined his merry men at the game of making 
 money, serving alcoholic liquors, mixing pick-me-ups, dispensing 
 little bottles of tabloids and little boxes of jujubes, taking cash 
 and giving change. 
 
 The pack was terrific. Saxham, his hat pulled low over his 
 broad brows, his great chest stemming the tide of humanity that 
 momentarily rolled over the threshold, was slowly making his 
 way to the door, when he felt the arresting touch of a hand 
 upon his arm. 
 
 The owner of the hand belonged, as ninety per cent, of the 
 women in the place belonged, to Francois Villon's liberal sis- 
 terhood. Something in the pale square face and massive shoul- 
 ders had attracted her vagrant fancy. She had quitted her 
 companions two gaily-dressed, be-rouged women and a blue- 
 eyed, yellow-haired, moustached young German, whose stripy 
 tweeds, vociferously-patterned linen, necktie of too obvious 
 pattern, and high-crowned bowler hat, advertised the Berlin 
 tailor and haberdasher and hatter at their customer's expense, 
 as Saxham went by. Now she looked up into the strange, sor- 
 rowfirl eyes that were shaded by his tilted hat-brim, and twined 
 her thin hands caressingly about his arm, asking: 
 
 "Why do you look so queer? Is anything wrong excuse 
 me asking or is it the Funeral has given you the blue hump? 
 
 It did me. I've not felt so bad since mother ' She broke 
 
 off. Then a shriH peal of laughter from one of her female com- 
 panions following a comment made by the other " One of 
 those . . ." she jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 535 
 
 unhintable epithet in the direction of her lady friends "says 
 you're ugly. I don't think so. I like your face." Her own was 
 cruelly, terribly young, even under the rouge and the white 
 cream of zinc, and the rice-powder. " Were you looking for a 
 friend, dear? " she asked, tightening the clasp of her thin, fever- 
 ish hands. 
 
 " Yes," said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no 
 illumination in his sombre face. " For Death ! There is no 
 better friend than Death, my child, either for you or me." 
 
 Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him, 
 and turned and pushed his way out through the noisy, raving, 
 chaffering, patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone, swallowed 
 up in the roaring torrent, of humanity that foamed down Picca- 
 dilly, leaving her frozen and stricken and staring. 
 
 LXII 
 
 MONTHS went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made 
 towards a more familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff 
 of Saxham's. She had never since set foot in his third-floor 
 bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy and the 
 whole regiment of Nursery-Rhyme characters, attired in the 
 brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic, frankly-barbaric baby- 
 hood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and flourished 
 on the fireplace tiles. 
 
 Only a little while, and he told himself that he would set her 
 free. Before the natural craving for love, and life, and happi- 
 ness should brim the cup of her fair sweet womanhood to over- 
 flowing; before her sex should rise in desperate revolt, against 
 himself her gaoler, Death should unlock her prison-doors and 
 strike the fetters from these slender wrists, and point to Hope 
 beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life. 
 
 Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the 
 swift dismissing pang was in the locked drawer of the writing- 
 table beside the whisky-flask. When he was alone and undis- 
 turbed for Lynette seldom came to his consulting-room now 
 Saxham would take it out and dandle it, and hold it in his 
 hands. 
 
 He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, 
 and, it being dark, perhaps would delay to light his lamp, that 
 he might torture himself with looking at that pitiless shadow- 
 play, that humble comedy-drama of sweet, common, unattain-
 
 536 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 able things that was every night renewed in those two rooms 
 over the garage at the bottom of the yard. 
 
 There was a third performer in the shadow-play now. You 
 could hear him roaring lustily at morn and noon and milky eve. 
 The Wonderfullest Baby you ever! 
 
 When W. Keyse was invited by Saxham to inspect his son 
 and heir, crimson, and pulpy, and squirming in a flannel wrap, 
 the Adam's apple in the lean throat of the proud father jumped, 
 and his ugly, honest eyes blinked behind salt water. The 
 nipper had grabbed at his ear as he stooped down. And that 
 made the Fourth Time, and he hadn't even thanked the Doctor 
 yet. 
 
 A date, he hoped, would arrive when a chalk or two of that 
 mounting score might be wiped off the board. He said so to 
 Mrs. Keyse, the first time she was allowed to sit up and play 
 at doing a bit of needlework. Not that she did a stitch, and 
 charnce it! With her eyes beautiful eyes, with that new look 
 of mother-love in them; proud eyes, with that inexhaustible 
 store of riches all her own, worshipping the crinkly red snub 
 nose and the funny moving mouth, and the little downy head, 
 and everything else that goes to make up a properly-constituted 
 Baby. 
 
 " I think the time'll come, deer. Watch out, an' one d'y 
 you'll see!" 
 
 " I'll watch it ! " affirmed W. Keyse. " And wot are you 
 cranin' your neck for, tryin' to look out o' winder? Blessed 
 if I ever see such a precious old Dutch ! " 
 
 The song was in the mouths of the people that year. She 
 laughed, and rubbed her pale cheek against his. 
 
 " You be my eyes, deer. Peep and see if the Doctor is 
 in 'is room. . . ." 
 
 It was ten o'clock on a shining May morning, and the clouds 
 that raced over great grimy London were white, and there were 
 patches of blue between. The trees in the squares were dressed 
 in new green leaves, and the iris and ranunculuses in the parks 
 were out, and the policemen had shed their heavy uniforms, 
 and instead of hyacinths behind the glass there were pots of 
 tulips in bloom upon the window-sills of the two rooms over 
 the garage. And the Doctor, who had been seeing patients 
 ever since nine, was sitting at the writing-table, said W. Keyse, 
 with his 'ead upon 'is 'ands. 
 
 "Like as if 'e was tired, deer, or un'appy? Or tired an* 
 un'appy both ?, "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 537 
 
 " Stryte, you 'ave it ! " admitted W. Keyse, after cautious 
 Inspection. 
 
 " The Doctor don't let 'im see you lookin' at 'im, darlin', 
 or J e might think, which Good Gracious know how wrong it 
 'ud be, as you was a kind o' Peepin' Pry the Doctor 'ave fell 
 orf an' chynged a good deal lately in 'is looks, I mean ! " said 
 Mrs. Keyse, tucking in the corner of the flannel over the little 
 downy head. " Wasted in 'is flesh, like got 'oiler round the 
 eyes " 
 
 " So 'e 'as ! " W. Keyse whistled and slapped his leg. " An' 
 I bin' noticin' it on me own for a long while back now I come 
 to think of it. Woddyer pipe's the matter wiv 'im? Not ill? 
 
 Lumme! if 'e was ill " The eyes of W. Keyse became 
 
 circular with consternation. 
 
 " No, no, dear ! " She assured him, in his ignorance, that 
 the maladies of the soul are more agonizing far than those that 
 afflict the body. " Down'arted, like, an' 'opeless an' an' 
 lonely " 
 
 Downhearted, and hopeless, and lonely! The jaw of W. 
 Keyse dropped, and his ugly eyes became circular with sheer 
 astonishment. 
 
 " Him! Wiv a beautiful 'ouse to live in an' Carriage Toffs 
 with Titles fair beggin' 'im to come an' feel their pulses an' 
 be pyde for it, an' Scientific Institooshuns an' 'Orspital Com- 
 mittees fightin' to git 'im on their staffs an' all the pypers 
 praisin' 'im for wot 'e done at Gueldersdorp, an' Government 
 tippin' 'im the 'Ow Do? an' thank you kindly, Mister! an* 
 " W. Keyse could only suppose that Mrs. Keyse was play- 
 ing a bit of gaff on hers truly " and him with a wife. Mar- 
 ried an' 'appy, an' goin' to be 'appier yet." He pointed to the 
 little red snub nose peeping between the folds of the flannel. 
 " When a little nipper like that comes " 
 
 She reddened, paled, burst out crying. 
 
 " O William,! William " 
 
 Her William kissed her, and dried her tears. He called it 
 mopping her dial, but you have not forgotten that, as the 
 upper house-and-parlour-maid had at first said, both Her and 
 Him were plainly descended from the Lowest Circles. She 
 had melted afterwards, on learning that Mrs. Keyse had been 
 actually mentioned in Despatches for carrying tea under fire 
 to the prisoners at the Fort; had sought her society, 
 lent paper-patterns, and imparted, in confidence, what she knew 
 of the secret of Saxham's wedded life.
 
 538 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "Dear William! My good, kind Love! Best I should 
 'urt you, deer, if 'urt you 'ave to be. You see them three large 
 winders covered wiv lovely lace ? " 
 
 " 'Ers Mrs. Saxham's. He nodded, trying to look 
 wise. 
 
 "Yes, darlin'. Mrs. Saxham's bedroom and dressin'-room 
 they belongs to. I've bin inside the bedroom wiv the upper 
 'ouse-an'-parlour-myde, an' a Fairy Princess in a Drury Lane 
 Pantomime might 'ave a bigger place to sleep in but not a 
 beautifuller. When the Foreign Young Person come in of 
 evenin's to git 'er lady dressed for dinner, she snaps up the 
 lights, bein' a kind soul, before she dror' the blinds, to give me 
 a charnst like, to see in." She stroked the tweed sleeve. " An* 
 once or twice Mrs. Saxham 'as come in before they'd bin pull 
 dahn, an' then O William! there was everythink in that 
 room on Gawd's good earth a 'usband could ask for to make 
 'im 'appy, except the wife's 'art beatin' warm and lovin' in the 
 middle of it all." 
 
 " Cripps ! . . . You don't never mean . . . ? " He gasped. 
 "Wot? Don't the Doctor make no odds to 'er? A Man 
 Like That?" . . . 
 
 She clung to the heart that loved her, and told him what she 
 had heard. . . . And if Saxham had known how two of the 
 unconscious actors in his Shadow-Play pitied him, the knowl- 
 edge would have been as vitriol poured into an open wound. 
 
 LXIII 
 
 THE card of Major Bingham Wrynche, C.B., was brought to 
 Saxham one morning, as, his early-calling patients seen and dis- 
 missed, the Doctor was going out to his waiting motor- 
 brougham. Following what he was prone to call his pasteboard, 
 Bingo presented himself a large, cool, well-bred, if rather 
 stupid-looking, man, arrayed in excellently-fitting clothes, say- 
 ing: 
 
 " You were goin' out? Don't let me keep you. Look in 
 again ! " even as he deposited a tightly-rolled silk umbrella 
 in the waste-paper basket, and tenderly balanced his gleaming 
 hat upon the edge of the writing-table, and chose, by the ordeal 
 of punch, a comfortable chair, as a man prepared to remain. 
 Saxham, pushing a cigar-box across the consulting-room table, 
 asked after Lady Hannah.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 535 
 
 " First-rate. Seems to agree with her, having a one-armed 
 husband to fuss over." 
 
 " She won't have a one-armed husband long," returned Sax- 
 ham, not unkindly, glancing at the bandaged and strapped-up 
 limb that had been shattered by an expanding bullet, and was 
 neatly suspended in its cut sleeve in the shiny black sling. 
 
 " By the Living Tinker, she's had him long enough for me! " 
 exploded Bingo, who seemed larger and fussier than ever, if 
 a thought less pink. " So you'd say if they tucked a napkin 
 under your chin at meals, and cut your meat up into dice for 
 you, and you'd ever tried to fold up your newspaper with one 
 hand, or had to stop a perfect stranger in the street, as I did 
 just now outside your door, and ask him to fish a cab-fare out 
 of J 7 our right-hand trouser-pocket if he'd be so good, because 
 your idiot of a man ought to have put your money in the other 
 one." 
 
 "You're lookin' at my head," pursued the Major, "and I 
 don't wonder. She's been and given me a fringe again. 'Ston- 
 ishing thing the Feminine Touch is. Let your servant part 
 your hair and knot your necktie, and you simply look a filthy 
 bounder. Your wife does it and you hardly know yourself 
 in the glass, and wonder why they didn't christen you Anna- 
 Maria. Not bad weeds these, by half. You remember those 
 cigars of Kreil's and the thunderin' price me and Beauvayse 
 paid for 'em, biddin' against each other for fun?" The big 
 man blew a sigh with the thin blue smoke-wreath, and added: 
 " And before the last box was dust and ashes, poor old Toby 
 was. And that chap Levestre never fit to brown his shoes 
 '11 be Marquess of Foltlebarre when the old man goes, and by 
 all accounts he's contemplatin' the move. Queer thing, Luck 
 is when you come to think of it?" 
 
 Saxham nodded and looked at the clock. A dull impatience 
 of this large, bland, prosperous personage was growing in him. 
 From the rim the top-hat had left upon his shining forehead 
 to the tightly-screwed eyeglass that assisted his left eye; from 
 the pink Malmaison carnation in the buttonhole of his frock- 
 coat to the buff spats that matched his expansive waistcoat in 
 shade, the large Major was the personification of luxurious, 
 pampered, West End swelldom, the type of a class Saxham ab- 
 horred. He had seen the heavy dandy under other conditions, 
 in circumstances strenuous, severe, even tragic. Then he had 
 borne himself after a simple, manly fashion. Now he had back- 
 slidden, retrograded, relaxed. Saxham. always destitute of the
 
 540 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 saving sense of humour, frowned as he looked upon the Sybarite 
 of Clubland, and the sullen lowering of the Doctor's heavy 
 smudge of black eyebrows suggested to the Major that his re- 
 grets for " poor old Toby " had been misplaced. The man 
 who had married Miss Mildare could hardly be expected to join 
 with heartiness in deploring the untimely decease of his prede* 
 ' cessor. 
 
 " Not that it could have come to anything between poor Toby 
 and her if the dear old chap had lived," reflected Bingo, and 
 wondered if the Doctor knew about about Lessie. " Bound 
 to," he mentally decided, " if he keeps his ears only half open 
 as other men keep theirs. Didn't a brace of bounders of the 
 worst discuss the story in all its bearin's, sitting behind my wife 
 and Mrs. Saxham in the stalls at the Variety the other night. 
 Everybody is discussin' it now that the Foltlebarres have left 
 off payin' Lessie not to talk, and provided for her and the young- 
 ster out of the estate, and Whittinger's given her a back seat 
 in the family. . . . That family, too! . . . Lud! what a 
 rum thing Luck is ! " 
 
 The musing Major cleared his throat, and his large, rather 
 stupid, blonde face was perfectly stolid as he smoked and stared 
 at his host, reminding himself that Beauvayse had been jealous 
 of Saxham, Attached Medical Staff, Gueldersdorp, and had 
 feared that, if the fellow knew of the scratch against him, he 
 might force the running, and recalling, with a tingling of the 
 shamed blood in his expansive countenance, how he Wrynche 
 had let Beauvayse into the sordid secret that Alderman 
 Brooker had blabbed. He wondered, looking at the square, set 
 face, whether Saxham had really earned the degrading nick- 
 name that he could not get quite right. The Peg Doctor, was 
 it? or the Lush Doctor? Something in that way. . . . Not 
 that Saxham looked like a man given to lifting his elbow with 
 undue frequency. . . . 
 
 But you never know," thought experienced Bingo sagely, 
 even as, in his heavy fashion, he went pounding on: "The 
 Chief's continuin' the Work of Pacification, and acceptin' the 
 surrender of arms any date of manufacture you like between 
 the chassepot of 1870 and the leather-breeched firelock of Oliver 
 Cromwell's time. The modern kind you find by employin' the 
 Divinin' Rod " the large narrator bestowed a wink on Sax- 
 ham and added " on the backs of the fellows who buried the 
 guns. Never fails used in that way. And as it chances 
 I have a communication to make to you."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 541 
 
 " A communication a message from the Chief to me ? " 
 
 Saxham's face changed, and softened, and brightened curi- 
 ously and pleasantly. 
 
 Major Bingo nodded and cleared his throat. He rebalanced 
 his shiny hat upon the table corner, and said with his eyes en- 
 gaged in this way: 
 
 " I was to remind you from him that not long before 
 the ending of the Siege, a lady who is now a near connection 
 of yours sustained a terrible bereavement through the infer- 
 nally dastardly act of a person then unknown. . . ." 
 
 Saxham's vivid eyes leaped at the speaker's as if to drag out 
 the knowledge he withheld. But Bingo was balancing the 
 glossy triumph of a Bond Street hatter, and looked at it and 
 not at the Doctor, who said: 
 
 "You refer to the murder of the Mother-Superior at the 
 Convent on the date of February the th, 1900. And you say 
 a person then unknown. . . . Has the murderer been ar- 
 rested?" 
 
 Major Bingo shook his head. 
 
 " He hasn't been arrested, but his name is known. You 
 remember the runner who came in from Diamond Town with 
 a letter for a man called Casey? Not long after after my 
 wife was exchanged for a spy of Bronnckers'? " 
 
 " I did not see the man myself," returned Saxham, " but I 
 perfectly recollect his getting through." 
 
 Major Bingo said : 
 
 " I thought you would. Well, the letter was a blind, the 
 bearer an agent of the firm of Huysmans and Eybel, sent to 
 make certain of our weakest points before they put in the attack 
 on the Barala town; and that's the man who committed the 
 murder! " 
 
 "The man who committed the murder?" 
 
 Saxham's vivid eyes were intent upon the Major's face. The* 
 Major coughed, and went on: 
 
 " My wife came across that man at Tweipans under curi- 
 ous circumstances, which I'm here to put before you as plainly 
 as may be. ... She'd met him before the Siege, travelling up 
 from Cape Town. He scraped acquaintance, called himself a 
 loyal Johannesburger, and an Agent of the British South Afri- 
 can Secret-Intelligence-Bureau. Not that there ever was such 
 a Bureau." Major Bingo blinked nervously, and ran a thick 
 finger round the inside of his collar as he added : " The beggar 
 spoofed Lady Hannah up hill and down dale with that, and
 
 542 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 she believed kirn. And when she subsequently flew the coop- 
 dash this cold of mine ! . . ." 
 
 The Major drew out a very large pink cambric pocket-hand- 
 kerchief, and performed behind its shelter an elaborate but. un- 
 convincing sneeze: 
 
 " When she shot the moon with Nixey's mare and spider, 
 it was by private arrangement with this oily, lying blackguard, 
 'who had given her an address a farm on the Transvaal Bor- 
 der, known as Haargrond Plaats where she might communi- 
 cate with him and another scoundrel in the same line, supposin' 
 she chose to do a little business of her own in Secret Intelli- 
 
 gence 
 
 Saxham interrupted: 
 
 " I shall say nothing to my wife of this, and I trust you will 
 impress upon Lady Hannah that it. would be highly inadvisable 
 for her to do so." 
 
 " She won't, you may depend on it." Major Bingo palpably 
 grew warm, and mopped the dew from his large, kind, rather 
 stupid countenance with the pink cambric handkerchief " She's 
 awfully afraid, as it is, that a word or two she dropped at Twei- 
 pans, to that infernal liar and swindler, who'd bled her of a 
 monkey, good English cash paid for procurin' and forwardin' 
 Secret Information that he took damned good care should reach 
 us at Gueldersdorp too late to be of use led up to to the 
 crime ! . . . By the Living Tinker ! it's out at last ! " 
 
 The big man, so cool and nonchalant a minute or so before, 
 fanned himself with the pocket-handkerchief, and turned red, 
 and went white, and went red, and turned white half a dozen 
 times, in twice as many beats of his flurried pulse. 
 
 Out at last, Saxham, and that's why I've been gulpin* 
 ( and blunderin' and bogglin' for the last ten minutes. Poof ! " 
 'Major Bingo exhaled a vast breath of relief. " Tellin' tales 
 on a woman and her your wife even when she's begged you 
 to, isn't the sweetest job a man can tackle! " 
 
 " Let me have this story in detail once and for all," said 
 Saxham, turning a stern, white face, and hard compelling eyes 
 upon the embarrassed Major. " What utterance of Lady 
 Hannah's do you suppose to have led to the tragedy in the Con- 
 vent Chapel ? Upon this point I must and shall be clear before 
 you leave me ! " 
 
 " You shall have things as clearly as I can put 'em. This 
 pretended Agent of the Secrer-Intelligence-Bureau that never 
 existed, and who went by a Dutch name that's as common
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 543 
 
 among Boers as Murphy is among Irishmen, arranged to pass 
 off my wife as his sister, a refugee from Gueldersdorp, who'd 
 married a German drummer, and buried him not long before. 
 Women are so dashed fond of play-actin'! Kids, Saxharn, 
 that's what they are in their weakness for dressin' up and 
 makin'-believe. And my wife " 
 
 The large Major was in a violent lather as he ran the thick 
 finger round inside his collar, and swallowed at the lump in his 
 throat. 
 
 " My wife saw this man at Kink's hotel at Tweipans from 
 time to time. He came, I should explain, to sell bogus infor- 
 mation for good money. And as the boodle ran low, the cloven 
 hoof began to show, and the brute became downright inso- 
 lent." 
 
 " As might have been expected," said Saxharn, coldly. 
 
 " Kept his hat on in my wife's room, talked big, and 
 twiddled a signet ring he wore," went on the Major. 
 " And bein' quick, you know, and sharp as they make 
 'em, you know, my wife recognized the crest of an old 
 acquaintance cut upon the stone. I knew the man myself " 
 declared Major Bingo " and a better never stepped in leather. 
 A brother-officer of the Chief's, too, his senior troop-Captain, 
 and a rippin' good fellow Dicky Mildare, of the Grey Hus- 
 sars." 
 
 " Mildare! " repeated Saxharn. A faint stain of colour crept 
 up under his dull white skin. He waited with keen attention 
 for what was coming. 
 
 " You understand, Saxham, the name did it. My wife had 
 seen the present Mrs. Saxham at Gueldersdorp, and, not knowin' 
 that the surname of Mildare had been taken by her at the wish 
 of her adopted mother, supposed got the maggot into her. 
 head that the Mother-Superior's ward might possibly be a a 
 daughter of the man who the seal-ring had belonged to, know- 
 ing Lord! what a mull I'm making of it! that Mildare had 
 at one time been engaged to marry that " the Major boggled 
 horribly " that uncommonly brave and noble lady, and had, 
 in fact, thrown her over, and made a bolt of it with the wife 
 of his Regimental C.O., Colonel Sir George Hawting. 
 
 " South Africa Lady Lucy and Mildare bolted to," went on 
 Bingo, " and now you know the kind of mare's nest her ladyship 
 had scratched up. And," declared Bingo, " rather than have 
 had to spin this yarn, I'd have faced a Court-Martial of Inquiry 
 respectin' my conduct in the field. For my wife has a kind
 
 544 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 heart and a keen sense of honour, and rather than bring harm 
 upon Miss Mildare that was, or anyone connected with her, 
 
 she'd have stood up to be shot! By G ! " trumpeted Bingo, 
 
 " I know she would ! " 
 
 Saxham's face was blue-white, and looked oddly shrunken. 
 His voice came in a rasping croak from his ashen lips as he 
 said : 
 
 " Lady Hannah mentioned my wife to this man, thinking 
 that she might prove to be the daughter of the owner of the 
 ring. What could possibly lead her to infer such a relation- 
 ship?" 
 
 " You must understand that the blackguard had given my 
 wife details of Mildare's death at a farm owned by a friend of 
 his in Natal, and that Hannah that miy wife knew Mildare 
 had had a child by poor little Lucy Hawting." Major Bingo 
 spluttered. " That was why she asked Van Busch outright 
 whether the girl with the nuns at Gueldersdorp was could 
 be the same child, grown up? By the Living Tinker! I 
 never was in such a lather in my life! The better the light I 
 try to put the thing in, the dirtier it looks. And I'm not half 
 through yet, that's the worst of it ! " 
 
 He mopped and mopped, and took several violent turns about 
 the room, and subsided in a chair at length, and went on, wav- 
 ing the large pink cambric handkerchief, now a damp rag, in 
 the air, at intervals, to dry it. 
 
 " She says Lady Hannah says that the eagerness and curi- 
 osity with which the brute snapped up the hint she'd never meant 
 to drop, warned her to shunt him off on another line, and give 
 no more information. They got on money matters ; and, seeing 
 plain how she'd been bilked, my wife gave the welsher a bit of 
 her mind, and he showed his teeth in a way that meant Mur- 
 der. Just in time before he could wring her neck round 
 and he'd started in to do it, you understand Bronnckers came 
 stormin' and bullyin' in, to tell the prisoner she was Exchanged, 
 and would be sent to Gueldersdorp. . . . They packed her 
 back that very day. . . . And not a week after, the pretended 
 runner came in from Diamond Town with the bogus letter 
 from a Mrs. Casey. ..." 
 
 Saxham had thought. He said now: 
 
 " This man, whose name I must remind you, you are with- 
 holding from me, was disguised as the runner? Is that what 
 has been proved? Did Lady Hannah see the man and recog- 
 nize him?
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 545 
 
 Bingo leaned forward to answer, with his thick left hand on 
 his large left knee. 
 
 " Lady Hannah never set eyes on the man from Diamond 
 Town. But the day the Siege Gazette came out, with a blither- 
 ing paragraph in it that never ought to have appeared, announ- 
 cin' " he coughed and crimsoned " Lord Beauvayse's formal 
 engagement to Miss Mildare, my wife was rung up at the Con- 
 valescent Hospital by a caller who wouldn't say where he tele- 
 phoned from. And the message that came through couched 
 in queer, ambiguous, language, but purportin' to come from an 
 old friend was a message for the young lady who is now Mrs- 
 Saxham ! " 
 
 Saxham's eyes flickered dangerously under their thunderous 
 brows. He said not a word, but every fibre of his being listened 
 and waited for what, he knew was coming. The Major went 
 on: 
 
 " My wife didn't then and there identify the voice as the 
 man's whose alias I am purposely keepin' to myself. She re- 
 membered the name that had been given her as that of the 
 owner of the farm at which Mildare died, rather more now 
 than seventeen years ago, and which by rights was in what's 
 now the Orange River Colony, and not Natal at all. She 
 asked plump and plain: 'Are you So-and-So?' There was no 
 answer to the question. But seven hours later the Mother- 
 Superior was shot; and the nuns and Miss Mildare, on their 
 way to the Convent, were passed by a thick-set, bearded man, 
 who ran into one of the Sisters in his hurry, and nearly knocked 
 her down." 
 
 " That," said Saxham, " has always been regarded as a sus- 
 picious circumstance. But the man was never subsequently 
 traced." 
 
 "No! Because," said Bingo, "the runner from Diamond 
 Town evaporated that night. The Chief had the circumstance 
 kept dark, having his own impressions. My wife might have 
 added to those if she had been fit enough. But the shock of 
 the murder, accompanied with her own secret conviction that, 
 in some indirect way she'd helped to set a malicious, lurking, 
 watchful, dangerous Force of some kind working against your 
 wife when she dropped that hint I've told you of bowled 
 her over with a nervous fever." 
 
 " I remember," said Saxham, who had been called in. 
 
 " Consequently, it wasn't until some days after the Relief 
 a bare hour or two before the Division Irregular Horse and
 
 546 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Baraland Rifles, and a company or so of Civilian Johnnies that 
 had made believe they were genuine fightin' Tommies till they 
 couldn't get out of the notion marched out of Gueldersdorp 
 for Frostenburg, that her ladyship got a chance of makin' a 
 clean breast to the Chief. Hold on a minute, Doctor " 
 
 For Saxham would have spoken. 
 
 " The Chief had had his own private opinion, as you may 
 suppose. He heard what my wife had to say. As you may 
 guess, she'd worked herself up into a regular cooker of remorse 
 and anxiety told him she was ready to go anywhere and do 
 anything he'd only got to give her orders, and all that sort 
 of thing! He charged her with the simple but. difficult role of 
 holdin' her tongue, and keepin' her oar out, and findin' him 
 if by good luck she'd got it by her a scrap of Van of the 
 handwritin' of the clever rogue who'd played at bein' a Secret 
 Intelligence Agent, and waltzed with her five hundred pounds, 
 which, as it chanced, she was able to supply. And the fist of 
 the man which swindled her, and the writin' of Mrs. Casey 
 who'd sent the bogus letter per runner from Diamond Town to 
 a husband who didn't exist, tallied to an upstroke and the 
 crossin'of a'*'!" 
 
 " Is it beyond doubt that the letter from the supposed Mrs. 
 Casey was not a genuine communication ? " Saxham asked. 
 
 " Beyond doubt. As a fact, the envelope of the Casey letter 
 had got a sheet of blank paper inside. Another odd fact brought 
 to light was that the person who communicated with my wife 
 at the Convalescent Hospital about half-past twelve on the day 
 of the murder, rang her up on the telephone belongin' to the 
 orderly-room at the Headquarters of the Baraland Rifles. We 
 had up the orderly, and after some solid lyin', he owned that 
 the man from Diamond Town had bribed him with 'baccy to 
 let him put a message through. And that's another link in the 
 evidence, I take it?" said Major Bingo. 
 
 " Undoubtedly." 
 
 ' There's not much more to tell, except," said Bingo, " that 
 the first, march of the Division on its route to Frostenburg led 
 past a Border farm called Haargrond Plaats. It looked de- 
 serted and half-ruined, with only a slipshod woman and a 
 coloured man in charge ; but something was known of what had 
 gone on there, and might be going on still, and the Boers are 
 clever stage-managers, and it don't, do to trust to appearances. 
 So the Chief detached a party with dynamite cartridges and 
 express orders to make the ruin real. Our men searched the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 547 
 
 place thoroughly before they blew it up; and hidden in a dis- 
 used chimney a solid bit of old Dutch masonry big enough to 
 accommodate a baker's dozen of sweeps were a few things 
 calculated to facilitate that search for the needle in the hay- 
 stack you understand? Disguises of various kinds a suit of 
 clothes lined with chamois-leather bags for gold-smugglin' 
 a good deal of the raw stuff itself, scattered all over the shop 
 by the blow up and in a rusty cashbox a diary or private 
 ledger, written in a clumsy kind of thieves' cipher, impossible to 
 make out, but with the name written on it of the identical man 
 my wife suspected and the Chief believed to be the murderer 
 of Miss Mildare's adopted mother. And that's what you may 
 call the Clue Direct, Saxham, I rather fancy? " 
 
 Major Bingo Wrynche leaned back with an air of some 
 finality, and with some little difficulty extracted a biggish square 
 envelope from the left inner pocket, of the accurately-fitting 
 frock-coat. He lightly placed the envelope upon the blotter 
 before Saxham, reached out and took the shiny top-hat off the 
 writing-table, fitted it with peculiar care on his pinkish, 
 sandy, close-cropped head, and said, looking at Saxham with a 
 pleasant smile: 
 
 " Perhaps you wouldn't mind throwin' your eye over the 
 contents of that envelope? There are three photographs of 
 handwritin' inside, marked on the backs respectively." He 
 waited for Saxham to take the enclosures from the big envelope, 
 rubbing the toe of his varnished patent-leather boot up and 
 down in the grey smear of burned paper-ash that was on the 
 Turkey carpet near the writing-table. His large face was as 
 bland and expressionless as the face of the grandfather-clock 
 in the Sheraton case that ticked against the wainscot behind 
 him. But he did not lose a twitch of Saxham's nostril or a> 
 movement of his eye, as he advised: 
 
 " Take them in numerical sequence. No I is the photo-! 
 graphed facsimile of the cover of the bogus letter to Mr. Casey. 
 No. 2 " the speaker lightly touched it with a large round 
 finger-tip " that's the replica also photographed of a card 
 the man we're after wrote on and gave to Lady Hannah, in 
 case she found herself inclined to invest a hundred or so in the 
 kind of wares he professed to supply. Photo No. 3 is a repro- 
 duction of an autograph and address that's written on the inside 
 cover of the ledger posted up in cipher that was in the cash- 
 box found at Haargrond Plaats." He waited, screwing pain- 
 fully at the stiff, waxed ends of the scrubby moustache.
 
 54 8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Saxham took the photographs in their order. The envelope 
 of the bogus letter brought by the supposed runner from Dia- 
 mond Town had been addressed in a big bold black round- 
 hand with curiously malformed capitals, to 
 
 " MR. BARNEY CASEY, 
 
 " Gueldersdorp. 
 " Care of the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces." 
 
 " Don't put it back in the envelope," said Major Bingo. 
 " Compare the writin' with No. 2." 
 
 No. 2 was the photograph of an oblong card. On it was 
 written in ink, in the same bold hand : 
 
 "MR. HENDRYK VAN BUSCH, 
 
 " Transport Agent, 
 C|o Mr. W. Bough, 
 
 " Haargrond Plaats, 
 
 " Near Matambani, 
 
 " Transvaal." 
 
 LXIV 
 
 THERE was a silence in the consulting-room, only broken by 
 street noises filtered thin by walls and curtains, and the ticking 
 of the Sheraton grandfather clock, and the breathing of 
 two people. Saxham glanced at. Major Bingo with eyes that 
 seemed to have been bleached of colour, and laid the second 
 caligraphic specimen beside the first, and took up No. 3, and 
 read the large flourishing signature: 
 
 "W. BOUGH, 
 
 " Free State Hotel, 
 
 " 50 m. from Driepoort, 
 "Orange Free State." 
 
 After that the silence was intense. The clock ticked, and 
 the faint, far-off street noises came through the intervening 
 screens, but only one of the men in the room seemed to be 
 breathing. At last Saxham's grey lips moved. He said in 
 a horrible clicking whisper: 
 
 "Van Busch and Bough are one?"
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 549 
 
 Major Wrynche's large face wagged in the affirmative. But 
 it was as expressionless as the grandfather clock's. 
 
 " One man ! and that's what I may call the pith of my ver- 
 bal Despatch for you ! " 
 
 Saxham said with hard composure: 
 
 " Van Busch is a Dutch surname that is common in South 
 Africa. With the name of Bough, as the Chief is aware, I 
 have associations. It was, in fact, one of the many aliases 
 used by the witness for Regina in an Old Bailey case in which 
 I was concerned nearly seven years ago." 
 
 The Major nodded once more, and said with brevity: 
 
 " Same man ! " 
 
 Saxham seemed always to have known that the man was 
 the same man. The tense muscles of his face told nothing. 
 Bingo added: 
 
 " But the wrong and injury done to you by Bough amount 
 to little compared with the wrong and injury inflicted upon 
 Mrs. Saxham. That Good Lord! what is it? " 
 
 For Saxham, with a madman's face, had leapt to his feet, 
 knocking over his chair, and stuttered with foam on his blue 
 lips: 
 
 "What wrong? What injury? What. what are you 
 hinting at? " 
 
 "Hinting!" The astonishment in the Major's round, 
 light-blue eyes was so palpably genuine that the crazy flame 
 died out of the Doctor's, and his clenched hand dropped. " I 
 didn't hint. I referred to the murder of your wife's adopted 
 mother by this Bough, or Van Busch, that's all." 
 
 " I beg your pardon, Major ! " Saxham picked up his chair 
 and sat down in it, inwardly cursing his lack of self-control. 
 " My nerves have been giving trouble of late." 
 
 Going by the evidence of the haggard face and fever-bright 
 eyes, the Doctor looked like that uncommonly like that! 
 And the big Major, remembering Alderman Brooker's revela- 
 tion, wondered, as he screwed at the stiff, blunt end of his 
 sandy moustache, whether Saxham might not have reverted 
 to the old vice? " Bad for the girl he's married if he has," he 
 thought, even as he said : 
 
 " Overworked. Get away for a bit. Nothin' like relievin' 
 the tension, don't you know? Norway in June, or the Higher 
 Austrian Tyrol. Make up your mind and go ! " 
 
 " I have made up my mind," Saxham answered, smiling 
 queerly, as he remembered the little phial with the yellow
 
 550 ONE BRAVER THINQ 
 
 label that lay beside the whisky-flask in the drawer beneath 
 his hand. " I shall go very soon now ! " 
 
 "But not immediately?" 
 
 "Not immediately." There was something strange, almost 
 exalted, in the look that accompanied the words. Saxham 
 'added: "If you could give me an approximate date as re- 
 'gards that rinding of that needle in the haystack of South 
 Africa, it would facilitate my departure more than you can 
 guess." 
 
 " Would it, by George ! " Bingo slipped the thumb and 
 forefinger of the useful hand into his waistcoat-pocket. Some- 
 thing sparkled in the big pink palm he extended to Saxham 
 something sparkled, and spurted white and green and scarlet 
 points of fire from a myriad of facets. The something was an 
 oval miniature on ivory. A slender gold chain, broken, dangled 
 from its enamelled bow. From within a rim of brilliants the 
 lovely, wistful face of a young, refined, high-bred woman 
 looked out, and with all his iron self-control Saxham could 
 not restrain a sudden movement and a stifled exclamation of 
 mingled anger and surprise. 
 
 For at the first glance the face was Lynette's. 
 
 With a dull roaring of the blood in his ears and an un- 
 speakable rage and horror seething in him, he took the por- 
 trait from the Major's palm, and held it with a steady palm, 
 in a favourable light. 
 
 Marvellously like, but not Lynette's face! 
 
 The eyes were larger, rounder, and of gentle blue-grey, the 
 squirrel-coloured hair of a brighter shade, the sensitive mouth 
 isensuous as well, the little chin pointed. She might have been 
 ia few years under thirty ; the arrangement of the hair, the cut 
 iof the bodice, might have indicated the height of the latest fash- 
 lion say, twenty-two or three years back. Some delicately 
 pne inscription was upon the dull gold of the inner rim of the 
 .miniature frame, within the diamonds that surrounded it. 
 Saxham deciphered: "Lucy, to Richard Mildare. For ever! 
 1879." 
 
 The dull, dark crimson that had stained the Dop Doctor's 
 opaque skin had given place to pallor. His face was sharp and 
 thin, and of waxen whiteness, like the face of one newly dead. 
 His blue eyes burned ominously in their caves under the heavy 
 bar of meeting black eyebrows. His voice was very quiet as 
 he asked: " How did you come by this? "
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 551 
 
 " It dropped down out of the sky," said Major Bingo 
 measuredly, "with the bits of evidence I've told you of, and 
 a few others, when the big stone chimney at Haargrond Plaats 
 blew up with a thunderin' roar. The other bits of evidence 
 were bits of a man two men you might call him. And, by 
 the Living Tinker, considerin' how he was mixed up with the 
 rest of the rubbish, he might have been half a dozen instead of 
 Bough Van Busch." 
 
 "He had this upon him? He wore it round his neck?" 
 Saxham asked the question in a grating whisper, dropping the 
 clenched hand that held the diamond-set miniature upon the 
 arm of his chair. 
 
 " I should think it probable he did," said Bingo placidly, 
 " when he had a neck to boast of." He added, as he got up 
 to take his leave : " The thing has been carefully cleaned. 
 The chain is broken, and the crystal cracked in one place, but 
 otherwise it has come of? wonderfully. Perhaps you'd hand 
 it over to anybody it belongs to? Hope I haven't mulled 
 that appointment in the City. Remember me to Mrs. Sax- 
 ham. Thanks frightfully. So long ! " 
 
 IN the days that followed Saxham had a letter, written by a 
 man with whom he had been fairly intimate at Gueldersdorp 
 during the strenuous days of the Siege a man who would un- 
 doubtedly not. have lived to go through those days but for the 
 Dop Doctor. It was rather an incoherent letter, written by an 
 unsteady hand. 
 
 Saxham tore it up and dropped it into the waste-paper 
 basket with a contemptuous shrug. But he had made a mental 
 note of the address, and drove there that afternoon. 
 
 The Doctor's motor-brougham stopped at the door of the 
 grimy stucco Clergy-House that is attached to St. Margaret's 
 in Wendish Street, West. Saxham rang a loud bell, that 
 sent iron echoes pealing down flagged passages, and brought a 
 little bonneted woman in rusty black to answer the door and 
 the Doctor's query whether Mr. Julius Fraithorn was at home 
 and able to receive a visitor? 
 
 The little woman, who had a nose like a preserved cherry, 
 and wore one eyebrow several inches higher than the other, 
 shook her rusty crape-trimmed bonnet discouragingly, as she 
 informed Saxham in a husky voice strongly flavoured with
 
 55 2 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 cloves that Father Julius 'ad been in the confessional all the 
 morning, it being the Eve of the Feast of the Ascension, and 
 was quite worn out. If there was anything she could do, she 
 inferred, with quite a third-hand air of clerical responsibility, 
 she would be happy to oblige the gentleman. 
 
 " I shall be obliged by your conveying my card to Mr. 
 Fraithorn. You see that I am a doctor," said Saxham, with 
 unsmiling gravity, " and not an ordinary caller on business con- 
 nected with religion." 
 
 The little cherry-nosed woman in rusty black snorted as 
 /scenting godlessness, and conducted Saxham down a cream- 
 Kvashed, brown distemper-dadoed passage, smelling of kippered 
 haddocks and incense, to a sitting-room at the rear. It was a 
 severe apartment, commanding a view of mews, and had a par- 
 quet-patterned linoleum on the floor, and a washable paper of 
 a popular ecclesiastical design suggestive of a ranunculus with 
 its hands in its pockets. 
 
 Stained deal bookcases contained Julius's Balliol library; 
 chromo-lithographic reproductions of Saints and Madonnas by 
 Old Masters hung above. The Philistine School of Art was 
 represented by a Zoological hearthrug; three Windsor chairs 
 offered accommodation to the visitor; a table of the kitchen 
 pattern was covered by a square of green baize; and a slippery 
 hair-cloth sofa, with a knobbly bolster and a patchwork cush- 
 ion supported the long, thin recumbent black figure of the 
 Reverend Julius Fraithorn, who was lying down. 
 
 " I have come," said Saxham, standing grimly over the 
 prone figure, a single stride having taken him to the side of the 
 sofa, " to prescribe for a man whose nerves are playing him 
 tricks. I have torn up your letter the epistle in which you 
 ask me to afford you an opportunity of making an avowal which 
 will prove to what depths of infamy a man may descend at the 
 bidding of his lower nature. Lower nature! If I am any 
 judge of a man's physical condition, a lower nature is what you 
 want." He threw down his hat and stick upon the green- 
 baize-covered table, took one of the Windsor chairs, and crashed 
 it down beside the sofa, and planted his hulking big body on it, 
 and reached out and captured the thin wrist of his victim, who 
 mustered breath to stammer: 
 
 " There is nothing whatever the matter with my health. I 
 am well that is, bodily." He got up from the sofa, and 
 crossed to the Zoological hearthrug, and poked the smoky little 
 fire burning in the narrow grate, for the May day was wet
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 553 
 
 and chilly. " I shall be better, mentally," he said, with an 
 effort, looking over his shoulder towards Saxham, "when you 
 have heard what I have to tell." He rose up, and turned 
 round, his thin face flaming. " Mind, I'm not to be gagged 
 by your not wanting to," for Saxham had impatiently waved 
 his hand. " Hear you shall, and must! " 
 
 He ground his boot-heel into the orange-yellow lion that 
 couched on a field of aniline green hearthrug, and drove his 
 hands down deep into his pockets, and the painful scarlet surged 
 over the rim of his Roman collar and dyed his thin, sensitive, 
 beautiful face and high, white forehead to the roots of his dark, 
 curling hair. 
 
 " Perhaps you may recall an oath I swore at your instigation 
 one day in your room at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp? " 
 
 "Yes no! What does it matter?" said Saxham thickly, 
 with his angry, brooding eyes upon the floor. 
 
 " It matters," said Julius doggedly, " in the present case. 
 I need hardly tell you that I have kept that. oath. If the man 
 had not been dead, I might have ended by breaking it who 
 knows? What I have to tell you is that, some two months 
 after the Relief, when your engagement to the lady who is now 
 your wife was first made public, I, impelled and prompted by 
 a despicable envy of the great good-fortune that had fallen 
 deservedly fallen to your lot, I sought out Miss Mildare, and 
 told her something I had learned to your detriment, from a 
 man called Brooker, a babbling, worthless creature, a Guelders- 
 dorp tradesman who, on the strength of a seat upon the local 
 Bench, claimed to be informed." 
 
 Saxham's head turned stiffly. He looked at. the wall now 
 instead of the floor, and breathed unevenly and quickly. His 
 right hand, resting on the table near which he sat, softly closed 
 and opened, opened and closed its supple muscular fingers, with 
 a curious, rhythmical movement. He waited to hear more. 
 And Julius groaned out, with his elbows on the common painted 
 mantelshelf, and his shamed face hidden: 
 
 " I knew that the man lied on my soul, I knew it. But 
 the opportunity he had given me of lowering your value in 
 in another's eyes was too tempting to resist. The man had told 
 me " 
 
 " In effect that I was a confirmed and hopeless drunkard," 
 said Saxham ; " and, as it happens, he told the truth." He 
 added: "And what I was then I am now. There is no 
 change in me, though once I, thought it!"
 
 554 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "Saxham! . . . For God's sake, Saxham!" stuttered 
 Julius. But Saxham, hunching his great shoulders, and lower- 
 ing his square, black head, not at all unlike the savage bull of 
 Lady Hannah Wrynche's apt comparison, went on: 
 
 " It is a drunken world we live in, Parson, for all our sham 
 of abstinence and sobriety. But there are nice degrees and 
 various grades in our drunkenness, as in our other vices, and 
 the man who is a druggard despises the common drunkard; 
 and the inhalers of oxygen look down with infinite contempt 
 or, more ludicrous still, with tender, pitying sorrow, upon the 
 toper and the slave of drugs. Nothing immoral about the 
 tasteless, colourless gas, they think, and take no shame in see- 
 ing the oxygenated greyhound win the coursing-match and the 
 oxygenated racehorse run for the Cup. A year or so, and the 
 transatlantic oxygen outfit will be an indispensable equipment 
 of the British athlete. Even to-day the professional footballer 
 and runner and the swimmer inhale oxygen as a preliminary to 
 effort, and bring the false energy that is born of it to aid them 
 in their trial tests of strength. . . . The man who climbs 
 a mountain winds himself up with a whiff or so; the orator 
 inspired by oxygen astonishes the House of Commons or the 
 Bar. And the actor, delirious with oxygen, rushes on the 
 stage; and the clergyman, drunk on oxygen, mounts the pulpit 
 to preach a Temperance sermon. And the Dop Doctor of 
 Gueldersdorp prescribes palliatives for guinea-paying tipplers; 
 and there is not an honest man to rise up and say: ' Physician, 
 heal thyself!" 
 
 The Windsor chair creaked under his heavy figure as he 
 got up. His fierce blue eyes blazed in their sullen caves as he 
 took his hat and stick from the table. 
 
 "What more have you to 'confess'? You did not wrongi 
 me. Moralists would say that you acted conscientiously 
 played the part of a true friend in telling her what you 
 knew." 
 
 " Of my benefactor the man who had saved my life ! " 
 Julius moistened his dry lips. "Your approving moralist 
 would be the devil's advocate. But I have not forgotten what 
 your own opinion is of the man who tries to enhance his own 
 virtues in a woman's eyes by pointing out the vices of a rival. 
 And, if you will believe me, I was punished for the attempt. 
 Her look of surprise . . . the tone in which she said, ' Did 
 he not save your life?' that was enough! . . . Then I I 
 lost my head, and told her that I loved her entreated her to
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 555 
 
 be my wife, only to learn that she never had never could " 
 
 Julius's thin white fingers knotted themselves painfully at the 
 back of his stooped head, and his voice came in jerks between 
 his gritted teeth : " It was revolting to her a girl reared 
 among nuns in a Catholic Convent that a man calling him- 
 self a priest should speak to her of love. There was absolute 
 horror in her look as she learned the truth." He groaned. " I 
 have never met her eyes since that day without seeing or im- 
 agining I saw some reflection of that horror in them." 
 
 "Why torture yourself uselessly with imaginations?" said 
 Saxham, not unkindly. 
 
 He was at the door, upon the threshold of departure, when 
 Julius stopped him. 
 
 " One moment. Has has Mrs. Saxham ever spoken to you 
 of this that I have told you?" 
 
 " Never," answered Saxham, pausing at the door. 
 
 "One moment more. Saxham, is it hopeless? Could you 
 not by a desperate effort break this habit that may that must 
 inevitably bring misery to your wife? In the name of her 
 love for you in the names of the children that may be born of 
 it " 
 
 " Unless you want me to murder you," advised Saxham, 
 facing the passionate emotion of the younger man as a basalt 
 cliff might oppose a breaking wave, " you had better be silent." 
 
 " My right to speak," Julius retorted fiercely, " is better 
 than you know. When I endeavoured unsuccessfully to 
 injure you, I robbed myself of my belief in myself. But you 
 you who gave me back my earthly life, you have robbed me 
 of my faith in the Life Eternal God. Do you know the 
 effect of Doubt, once planted in what was a faithful soul? It 
 is a choking fungus, a dry rot, a creeping palsy! Since that 
 day at the Hospital at Gueldersdorp, when you said to me, 
 ' The Human Will is even more omnipotent than the Deity,' 
 because it has created Him, out of its own need,' I have done; 
 my daily duty as a priest to the numbing burden of that utter- 
 ance I have preached the Gospel with it sounding in my ears." 
 He wrung his hands, that were wet as though they had been 
 dipped in water. " I have tended souls as mechanically as a 
 gardener might water pots in which there was nothing but dead 
 sticks and dry earth." 
 
 "Try to credit me when I tell you," said Saxham, wrung 
 by the suffering in the thin young face and in the beautiful 
 haggard eyes, " that I never meant the harm that I appear to
 
 556 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 have done. Nor can I recall that I have habitually attacked 
 your faith, or for that matter any Christian man's. I remember 
 that I was suffering, physically and mentally, upon the day you 
 particularly refer to, when you came upon me at the Hospital. 
 I had seen an announcement in the Siege Gazette that ... I 
 dare say you understand." He laughed harshly. " As to 
 my theory of the Omnipotence of Human Will, it is blown and 
 exploded, and all the King's horses and all the King's men will 
 never set it back on the pedestal it has toppled from. I owe 
 you that admission, humbling to the pride that is left in me. 
 Of how far Will, in another man, may carry him I dare not 
 judge or calculate. My own is a dead leaf, doomed to be the 
 sport of any wind that blows." 
 
 He took up the walking-stick he had leaned against a book- 
 case, and said, pulling his hat down over his sombre eyes: 
 
 " The best of us are bad in spots, Parson : the worst of us 
 are good in patches. You Churchmen don't recognize that fact 
 sufficiently. . . . And I think no worse of you for what you 
 have told me. If I have anything to forgive why, it is for- 
 given. Do you try, on the other hand, to think leniently of 
 a man who broke your staff of faith for you, and has nothing 
 of his own to lean upon. As for my wife, in whose interests 
 I know you to be honestly solicitous, I will tell you this much : 
 She will be spared the ' inevitable misery ' of which you spoke 
 just now." 
 
 "How? Have you decided to undergo a cure? I have 
 heard," hesitated Julius, " that these things are not always suc- 
 cessful that they sometimes fail ! " 
 
 " Mine is the only cure that never fails," returned Saxham. 
 
 A vision of the little blue-glass, yellow-labelled vial that held 
 the swift dismissing pang floated before him. He shook hands 
 with Julius, and went upon his lonely way. 
 
 LXVI 
 
 EVEN the saintly of this earth are prone to rare, occasional dis- 
 plays of temper. Saxham's white saint had proved her descent 
 from Eve by stamping her slender foot at her hulking Doctor; 
 had, after a sudden outburst of passionate, unreasonable up- 
 braiding, risen from the dinner-table and run out of the room, 
 to hide a petulant, remorseful shower of tears. 
 
 Such a trivial thing had provoked the outburst merely an
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 557 
 
 invitation from Captain and Mrs. Saxham, who were settled 
 for the London summer season in Eaton Square, for Owen and 
 his wife to spend the scorching months of August and Sep- 
 tember at the old home, perched on the South Dorset cliffs, 
 among its thrush-haunted shrubberies of ilex and oleander and 
 rose nothing more. 
 
 But Mrs. Owen Saxham had passionately resented the idea. 
 Why never occurred to Saxham. He had long ago forgiven 
 and forgotten Mildred's old treachery. If David's betrayal 
 had brought him shame and anguish, it had borne him fruit of 
 joy as well. And if the fruit might never be gathered, if its 
 divine juices might never solace her husband's bitter thirst, at 
 least, while he lived, it was his to look at and long for. He 
 owed that cruel bliss to his brother and that brother's wife. 
 And their meeting had been upon his side free of constraint, 
 unshadowed by the recollection of what had once appeared to 
 him a base betrayal a gross, foul, unpardonable wrong. 
 
 Suppose he had married Mildred, and been uneventfully 
 happy and successful. Then, Saxham told himself, he would 
 never have seen and known Lynette. She would never have 
 come to him and laid in his the slight hand whose touch thrilled 
 him to such piercing agony of J 7 earning for the little more that 
 would have meant so much so much. . . . 
 
 Ah, yes! he w r as even grateful to Mildred. She had not 
 worn well. She had grown thin and paasee, and nervous and 
 hysterical. But she was amiable, even demonstrative in her 
 professions of admiration and enthusiasm for Owen's wife. 
 Her regard for the Doctor was elaborate in the sisterliness of 
 its expression when he was present, if in his absence it was tem- 
 pered by a regretful sigh even by a reference to the time : 
 
 " When poor dear Owen thought, me the only woman worth, 
 looking at in the whole world. Ah, well! that is all over, 
 long ago," Mildred would say, with an inflection that was 
 meant to be tenderly reassuring. And she would tilt her still 
 pretty head on one side and smile with pensive kindness at 
 her successor upon the throne of poor dear Owen's heart. 
 
 These gentle, retrospective references were never made in 
 the Doctor's hearing. With truly feminine tact they were re- 
 served for Mrs. Owen's delectation. And possibly they might 
 have rankled in those pretty shell-like ears, if then owner had 
 loved Saxham. 
 
 But Saxham knew that she did not, had even ceased to 
 wish that the miracle might be wrought. Brainy men can be
 
 55 8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 very dense. When she stamped her foot and cried, " I decline 
 to accept Mrs. Saxham's invitation, either with you or without 
 you. I wonder that you should dream of asking me to! If 
 you can forget how hideously she and your brother have 
 treated you, I cannot! I loath treachery! I abominate in- 
 gratitude and deceit ! And I hate her and I shall not go ! " 
 
 Saxham opened his eyes, as well he might. He had never 
 before seen his wife otherwise than gentle and submissive. He 
 found his own bitter explanation of the sudden storm that had 
 burst among the debris of dessert on the Harley Street dinner- 
 table. His square pale face grew more Rhadamanthine than 
 ever, and the glass he had been filling with port overflowed 
 unnoticed on the cloth. But he kept the mask of set composure 
 before his agony of remorse. Then the frou-frou of light 
 silken draperies passed over the soft carpet. The door opened 
 and shut with a slam. Lynette had left the room. As Sax- 
 ham sat alone, a heavy, brooding figure, mechanically sipping 
 at his port, and staring at the empty place opposite, where the 
 over-set flower-glass and the crookedly pushed-back chair, and 
 the serviette that made a white streak on the dark crimson 
 carpet, marked the haste and emotion of her departure, he said 
 to himself tha*- the West End upholsterer who had the contract 
 for refurnishing Plas Bendigaid must be warned to complete 
 his work without delay. . . . 
 
 For Plas Bendigaid, the solid, stone-built grange that had 
 been a convent in the fifteenth century, and probably long be- 
 fore, the South Welsh home of his mother's girlhood, perched 
 in the shadow of Herion Castle upon a wide shelf of the head- 
 land that commands the treacherous shoals and snowy shell- 
 strewn sands and wild tumbling waters of Nantmadoc Bay 
 . . . Plas Bendigaid, with that hoarded, invested money, was 
 to be Saxham's bequest to his young widow. 
 
 Everything that loving care and forethought could plan had 
 already been done to make the old home pleasant and charm- 
 ing. Nothing was needed but the upholsterer's finishing 
 touches. Saxham had planned that she should be there when 
 he wiped out the shame of failure by keeping that promise 
 made in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, little more than a year 
 before. 
 
 He had dways meant to keep ft, but not when the north- 
 east gales of winter and spring should be sweeping over the 
 mountain-passes and lashing the waves to madness; not when 
 the ceaseless scurry of hunted clouds should hare piled the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 559 
 
 south-west horizon with scowling blue-black ramparts, topped 
 by awful towers, themselves belittled by stupendous peaks 
 built of intangible vapours, and reproducing with added 
 grandeur and terror the soaring peaks and awful vales and 
 appalling precipices of snow-helmed Frore and her daughters. 
 
 When the promise of Summer should have been fulfilled in 
 warmth and colour and blossom and sweetness, Saxham would 
 keep his promise. When the huge stones that the hands of 
 men who returned to dust cycles of centuries ago hauled up 
 with the twisted hide-rope and the groaning crane, to rear 
 with them upon the jut of the rugged headland two hundred 
 feet above the waves that now break a mile away the Lonely 
 Tower, now merged in the huge dilapidated Edwardian keep 
 that broods over Herion when those blocks of cyclopaean 
 masonry should be tufted with the golden wallflower and the 
 perfumed wild geranium, and starred with the delicate blossom 
 of the lavender scabious and the wild marguerite, then the 
 little blue bottle that stood in the deep table-drawer near the 
 big whisky-flask should come into use. 
 
 When the vast pale sweep of the sandy dunes should be cov- 
 ered for leagues by the perfumed cloth of gold spread by the 
 broom and the furze; when the innumerable little yellow dwarf 
 roses should blossom on their prickly bushes, thrusting pertly 
 through the powdery white sand, and every hollow and hillock 
 should be gay with the star convolvulus and the flaunting scar- 
 let poppies then Death should come, borne on winged feet, 
 and bearing the sword of keenness, to sever the iron bonds 
 of Andromeda chained to the rock. And here was Summer, 
 knocking at the door. 
 
 Lynette did not reappear. He did not seek her out and 
 ask the reason of her strange display of emotion. Only a hus- 
 .band could do that who had the right t.o take her in his arms 
 and kiss the last remaining traces of her tears away. Saxham 
 went to his consulting-room, and while all the clocks of Lon- 
 don made time, and the moon veered southward, and the stars 
 rose and set, he toiled over his notes and case-books in the bril- 
 liant circle cast by the shaded electric lamp upon his writing- 
 table; and as he wrought, the tide in the big whisky-flask in 
 the table-drawer ebbed low. 
 
 Hours hence he laid down his pen. The flask had long been 
 emptied ; the alcohol-flare was dying out in the grey chambers 
 of his brain. Weariness of life weighed on him like a leaden 
 panoply. He had almost stretched his hand to take the lit.tle
 
 560 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 blue-glass vial that sat waiting, waiting in the deep table- 
 drawer beside the drained flask before sleep overcame him. 
 His head sank against the chair-back. His was a sudden, heavy 
 lapsing into forgetfulness, unmarred by dreams. 
 
 Time sped. The silver table-clock, the clock upon the 
 (mantelshelf, and the grandfather clock in the corner, ran a race 
 (with the chronometer in the pocket of the sleeping man. The 
 brilliant unwavering circle of electric light did not reach the 
 face of the Dop Doctor. It bathed his hands, that hung lax 
 over the arms of the Sheraton chair, and tipped his lifted chin, 
 leaving the strong brow and closed eyes in shadow. But as 
 the pale glimmer of dawn began to outline the edges of the 
 blinds, and stretched at length a broad, pointing finger across 
 the quiet room, the sleeping face showed greyish pale and lumi- 
 nous as a drawing by Whistler in silver-point. 
 
 The dawn had not rested on it long before there came a 
 knock upon the panel of the consulting-room door. It was so 
 faint and diffident a knock, no wonder it passed unheeded. 
 Then the door opened timidly, and a slender figure in pale flow- 
 ing draperies of creamy embroidered cashmere stole upon small, 
 noiseless, slippered feet over the thick Turkey carpet. 
 
 It was Lynette. She had risen from her bed, and looked out 
 from the landing into the hall below, and, seeing the light of 
 the unextinguished lamp shining under the lintel of the con- 
 sulting-room door, had stolen down to ask the Doctor's pardon. 
 Why had she behaved so badly? She could not explain. 
 Only she was sorry. She must tell Owen so. His name was 
 upon her lips, when she saw the Dop Doctor sleeping in his 
 ichair. 
 
 Breathlessly silent, she crossed the room to his side. And 
 then it was to her as though she looked upon her husband's 
 face for the first time. 
 
 There was no stain of his secret excess upon it no bloat- 
 ing of the features. You would have said this was a sane and 
 strong and temperate man, upon whom the mighty brother of 
 all-conquering Death has come, like one armed, and overthrown 
 in the heat and stress of the life-battle. Only the sorrow of a 
 suffering soul was written as deeply on that pale mask of 
 human flesh as though the sculptor-slaves of a Pharaoh, dead 
 seven thousand years agone, had cut it with tools of unknown, 
 resistless temper in the diamond-hard Egyptian granite. 
 
 He breathed deeply and evenly, and not a muscle twitched
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 561 
 
 as Lynette bent over and looked at him. A mass of her red- 
 brown hair, heavy with the weight of its own glossy luxuriance, 
 slipped from her half-bared bosom as she leaned over him, and 
 fell upon his breast. A sudden blush burned over her as it 
 fell. He never stirred. But as though the rod of Moses had 
 touched the rock of Cades, one slow tear oozed from between 
 Saxham's black-fringed, close-sealed eyelids, and hung there, a 
 burnished, trembling point of steely light. And the deep, still, 
 manly anguish of his face cried out to the reawakening woman- 
 hood in Lynette, and a strange, new, overwhelming emotion 
 seized and shook her as a stream of white and liquid fire seemed 
 to pass into her veins and mingle with her blood. 
 
 She began to understand, as she pored, with beating heart, and 
 bated breath, upon the living page before her eyes. 
 
 In its reticence and lonely strength of endurance, that face 
 of Saxham's pleaded with her. In its stern acceptance of 
 suffering and disappointment for Saxham, in its rugged con- 
 frontation of the inevitable, in its resolute long-suffering and 
 grim patience, in its silent abnegation of any claim upon her 
 gratitude or any right to demand her tenderness, the face was 
 more than eloquent to-night. In the pride that would never 
 stoop to beg for pity would rather die hungered than accept 
 one crumb of grudged and measured love; in its secret, in- 
 scrutable, unyielding loyalty to that promise given to a dead 
 man ; in the nobility of its refusal to shine brighter in its faith 
 and truth and chivalry by the revelation of that other man's 
 mean baseness; in its almost paternal solicitude; in its agony of 
 love for her, insensible and careless ; in the sick despair that had 
 given up and left off hoping; even in the pride that had or so 
 it seemed to her asserted itself at the last, and said, " I have 
 left off crying for the moon; I wish for your love no longer! " 
 it pleaded pleaded. . . . Words struggled for answering 
 utterance in her, but none came. . . . She leaned nearer, 
 drawn by an irresistible fascination, and laid her lips lightly 
 upon the broad white forehead, with the bar of black meeting 
 eyebrow smudged across it, and then, with a sudden leap and 
 thrill, she knew. . . . 
 
 All that had been in the past went for nothing. Only this 
 man mattered who sat sleeping in the chair. How easy to 
 awaken him with a touch, and tell him all! She dared not, 
 though she longed to. 
 
 He was her master as well as her mate. When he had said 
 to her that he had ceased to care, his eyes had given his words
 
 562 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the lie. He had looked at her. . . . She shivered deliciously 
 at the recollection of that look. If he were to open those stern, 
 ardent eyes now, he would know her his. His all his, to 
 deal with as he chose. . . . His alone. 
 
 If Saxham had awakened then. . . . But he slept on. She 
 did not dare to kiss that broad white buckler of his forehead 
 again. She kissed the sleeve of his coat instead, and, scared by 
 a sudden sigh and movement of one of the hands that hung over 
 the chair-arms, gathered her draperies around her, and stole 
 as noiselessly as a pale sunbeam out. of the room. 
 
 LXVIII 
 
 IT was barely five o'clock, and the balmiest summer day at 
 Herion is wont to waken, like a spoilt child, in a bad temper of 
 angry wind and lashing rain. Lynette, who had risen from 
 her bed and thrown her dressing-gown about her, to kneel on 
 the broad window-seat and look out. upon this strange new 
 world, shivered, standing barefoot on the mossy carpet. Then 
 she looked round the room, and smiled with delight. For she 
 had found it, upon her arrival of the previous night, to present 
 down to the smallest detail a replica of her bedroom at Harley 
 Street, with this notable difference that on the wall facing 
 the bed-head hung a fine copy of a Millais portrait that was one 
 of the treasures of Bawne House. Lady Bridget-Mary, in the 
 glory of her beautiful youth, shone from the canvas splendid as 
 a star. 
 
 How kind, how kind of Owen ! . . . Her eyes filled as she 
 jgazed, comparing the glowing, radiant face upon the canvas 
 (with the enlarged photograph of the Mother in her habit that 
 ! stood in an ebony and silver frame upon a little table beside the 
 bed. A worn " Garden of the Soul " lay near, and the 
 " Imitation " of inspired A Kempis. Both had been the 
 Mother's gifts. The Breviary and the Little Office of Our 
 Lady had belonged to the dead. Lynette had brought these 
 treasured possessions with her from Harley Street, leaving the 
 ivory crucifix hanging in its place above the vacant pillow. So 
 many sleepless nights she had known of late upon that pillow 
 that there were faint bluish-shaded hollows under the beautiful 
 eyes, and wistful lines about the mouth. 
 
 Since the revelation made to her by her own heart, when 
 the heavy tress of hair dropped from her bosom upon the un-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 563 
 
 conscious breast above which she bent, an insurmountable wall 
 of diffidence and shyness upon her side, and a stern, self-con- 
 centrated isolation on her husband's, had risen up between 
 them, dwarfing the barrier that was already there. 
 
 His writing-table lamp had burned through the nights, but 
 she had never ventured upon another stolen visit to Saxham's 
 consulting-room. The memory of that kiss she had put upon 
 the velvety smooth space above the broad meeting eyebrows 
 stung in her like a sense of guilt, and yet it had its sweetness. 
 She had claimed her right. The man was hers, though she 
 might never be his. . . . To know it was to realize at once 
 her riches and her poverty. 
 
 Out of a vague yearning and a formless, nameless pain had 
 come to her the knowledge of the true herb needed for her heal- 
 ing. The unsated hunger for sympathy and love and loveliness, 
 the loneliness that gnawed him, she comprehended now. And 
 as she looked about her at the dainty, carefully chosen furniture 
 and the exquisite old-world-patterned chintz draperies, recog- 
 nizing what his care had been to please her, and how every 
 little taste and preference of hers had been remembered and 
 gratified, a sense of her own ingratitude pierced her to the quick. 
 
 She had parted from Owen without one tender word, with- 
 out even one glance of greater kindness than she would have 
 bestowed upon a stranger. She ached with futile remorse at 
 the recollection of that frigid, distant good-bye at Euston 
 Station, when Lady Hannah's shrill laugh had jangled through 
 Major Bingo's blustering admonitions to perspiring porters 
 to put the luggage in one compartment, to stow canvas bags of 
 golf-clubs and fishing-rods in the racks, and to damage bicycles 
 at their personal peril, since the company evaded liability. 
 
 It had been Saxham's wish that Lady Hannah and Major 
 Wrynche should be his wife's guests at Plas Bendigaid. Look- 
 ing from her bedroom casements over the tops of the lilacs and 
 larches, the laburnums and hawthorns and hollies of the low- 
 walled garden that ended at the sheer cliff-edge, from whence 
 you looked down upon the tops of the pines and chestnuts, 
 whose green foliage hid the shining metals of the iron way, and 
 made a sea of verdure in place of the salt blue waves that once 
 had lapped and gurgled there gazing across the powdery sand- 
 dunes that were prickly with sea-holly and gay with flaunting 
 poppies and purple scabious, the pink and white convolvulus, 
 and the thorny yellow dwarf rose, that somehow finds nourish- 
 ment in the pale sand of Herion Links, to the line of white
 
 564 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 breakers that rose and fell more than a mile away, Lynette 
 sighed a small sigh of resignation at the prospect of long weeks 
 to be spent in the society of these pleasant, well-bred, rather 
 fidgety people Owen had chosen to bear her company, 
 
 Of course, Owen could not leave his patients. He had ex- 
 plained that, and Lady Hannah and her big Major were old 
 friends of hers and his. And the little woman with the jan- 
 gling laugh and the snapping black eyes had known the Mother 
 in her youth. . . . 
 
 At that remembrance Lynette's eyes went lovingly to the 
 copy of the Millais portrait, and as the sun burst through the 
 streaming wind-chased clouds, and smote bright diamond-rays 
 from the dripping window-panes, the firm lips seemed to curve 
 in the rare, sudden smile, the great grey eyes to gleam with life 
 and tenderness. 
 
 Ah, to spend a long, sweet summer here, alone with that 
 dearest of all companions! Lynette's white throat swelled at 
 the thought, and a mist blotted out the noble face, crowned 
 with its diadem of rich black tresses. She wiped the tear? 
 away, and beheld a world miraculously changed. For land 
 and sea were drenched in radiant sunshine. 
 
 She unlatched the casements and threw them wide, and clean, 
 salt, sweet air came streaming in, bringing the fragrance of 
 hawthorn and lilac and laburnum, and the aromatic tang of 
 the larch and pine. She leaned her white arms upon the grey 
 stone window-sill, and drank the freshness and fragrance. And 
 it seemed to her that this ancient grange, perched on the cliff- 
 ledge in the tremendous shadow of Herion Castle, looking 
 across the restless grey-blue waters of Nantmadoc Bay to St. 
 Tirlan's Roads, was an ideal place to spend a honeymoon in, 
 supposing you loved the man you had married, and were loved 
 by him. 
 
 Her bosom heaved to the time of her heart's throbbing. A 
 blush burned over her, and she drove the thought away. It 
 came back, whispering like a guest who wishes not to be dis- 
 missed. It pleaded and urged and compelled. Something like 
 a strong hand closed upon her heart and drew her, drew her. 
 ... A voice called to her in the silence that was only broken 
 by the voices of birds, and the rustling of wind-stirred leaves, 
 and the crying of the gulls above the white restless breakers. 
 And the voice was Owen's. 
 
 How strangely he had looked and spoken in that last 
 moment of their parting ! It came back in every detail for the
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 565 
 
 hundredth time, as she leaned her white arms upon the window- 
 sill and looked out with wistful eyes upon the beauty of the 
 blossoming world. 
 
 "Good-bye, good-bye! Be happy and forget!" 
 
 The train had begun to move as he uttered the words. He 
 had gripped her hand painfully and released it. As he drew his 
 arm sharply away, a button, hanging loosely by a thread or 
 two, became detached from his coat-cuff, and fell upon the rub- 
 ber matting of the corridor. She was conscious of the button 
 as Saxham and the crowded, grimy platform receded from her 
 view. And before she went back to her seat in the compart- 
 ment that had been reserved for herself and her fellow- 
 travellers, she picked up the tiny disc of black horn, and secretly 
 kissed it, and slipped it into her purse. She was silent and 
 preoccupied during the eleven hours' journey, turning over and 
 over in her mind, mentally repeating with every shade of ex- 
 pression that could vary their meaning, Saxham's strange words 
 of farewell. 
 
 She repeated them now aloud. They were tossed to and fro 
 in her heart on waves of wonder and regret and apprehension. 
 Did Owen really believe that, to be happy she must forget him ? 
 Did he comprehend that she had long arrived at the conclusion 
 that this loveless, joyless companionship, mocked by the name 
 of marriage, was a miserable mistake? 
 
 He had never been under any illusion as concerned it. He 
 had accepted the iron terms of the contract she offered him with 
 open eyes and full knowledge. She heard his voice again, as 
 it had spoken in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp, saying: 
 
 " Would I be content to enter, with you for my partner, into 
 a marriage that should be practically no marriage at all a 
 formal contract that is not wedlock? That might never 
 change as Time went on, and ripen into the close union that 
 physically and mentally makes happiness for men and women 
 who love? Is that what you ask me, Miss Mildare? " 
 
 That was just what she had asked. He had accepted her 
 iron conditions, and stipulated for nothing. He had given his 
 all. What had she given him? Nothing but suffering, being 
 rendered pitiless by the ache and sting in her own bosom ab- 
 sorbed, swallowed up by her agony of grief for the Mother, her 
 passion of regret for dead Beauvayse. 
 
 Beauvayse. . . . Suppose he and Owen Saxham stood side 
 by side down there on the green short grass beneath her win- 
 dows, which of the two men would to-day be the dearer and
 
 566 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the more desired the tall, soldierly young figure, with the 
 sunburnt, handsome face, the gay, amorous, challenging glance, 
 the red mouth that laughed under the golden moustache, and 
 the shallow brain under the close-clipped golden curls, or the 
 black-haired, hulking Doctor, with the square-cut, powerful 
 face and the stern blue eyes, the man of heart and intellect, 
 whose indomitable, patient tenderness had led a stricken girl 
 back from the borders of that strange land where the brain- 
 sick dwell to wholesome consciousness of common things and 
 renewed health fulness of body and of mind? 
 
 She had hardly thanked him. She realized, with tears of 
 scorching shame, that this inestimable service, as all the others 
 rendered her by Saxham, she had accepted as matter of course. 
 It was the way of Saxham's world to take of him and render 
 nothing; he who was worthy to be a King among his fellow- 
 men had been their servant as long as she had known him. 
 
 To call him hard and stern, and seek his aid and sympathy 
 at every pinch; to deem him cold and grudging, and accept his 
 sacrifices as matter of course that was the way of the world 
 with grim-jawed, tender-hearted Owen Saxham. And she, 
 who had done like the rest, knew him now, and valued him for 
 what he was, and loved him. . . . For this was love that 
 had corne upon her like a strong man armed, not as he had 
 shown himself to her before laughing and merry, playful and 
 sweet. . . . This was no ephemeral, girlish passion, evoked 
 by the beauty of gay, wanton, grey-green jewel-eyes and a bold, 
 smiling mouth. This was a love that drew you with irresist- 
 ible strength, and knitted you to the soul, and the heart, and 
 the flesh of another, until his breath became your breath, and 
 his life your life. It called you with a voice that plucked at the 
 secret chords of your being, and was stern and compelling 
 rather than sweet to implore. It drew you to the beloved, 
 not with garlands of rose, but with ropes of silk and steel. It 
 was potent and resistless as death, and infinitely deeper than the 
 grave. It. reached out aspiring hands beyond the grave, into 
 Eternity. And, newly born as it rose in the heart of this 
 woman, it was yet as old as Eden, where Heavenly Love 
 created the earthly love, that, is more than half-divine. 
 
 Why, why had he sent her away, bidding her be happy and 
 forget him ? . . . The memory of his hollow eyes and haggard 
 face pierced her to the quick. He was ill he was in trouble; 
 he. had sent her away that he might bear the burden solely. 
 ... Or ... an iron hand closed upon her heart, and wrung
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 567 
 
 it until points of moisture started upon her fair temples under 
 the fine tendrils of her hair . . . could the reason be another 
 woman ? 
 
 Another woman? . . , She set her little teeth and drove 
 the unworthy thought away. But it came again and again 
 a persistent mental gad-fly. Was he not worthy of love? 
 Suppose another sweeter, gentler creature had found a throne 
 in the heart that his wife had prized so lightly, would it be so 
 very strange, after all? Perhaps that was why he had asked 
 her to forgive him for having married her a little while ago. 
 
 She dropped her head upon her folded arms, and sobbed 
 at the thought. Then she dried her tears and rang for her 
 maid, and presently came down to breakfast with Lady 
 Hannah, smiling and composed, cheerful and attentive as a 
 hostess ought to be. But her reddened eyelids told tales. 
 
 " Misses her Doctor, no doubt," thought Lady Hannah, as 
 she commended the country eggs and butter, and was en- 
 thusiastic over the thyme-scented Welsh mountain-honey, and 
 apologetic over the absence of her Bingo from the board. 
 
 She would carry her nuisance his breakfast with her own 
 hands, she vowed, as he had left his man behind, on hearing 
 from the Doctor that the house was a small one. 
 
 " But why ? " asked Lynette. " There is Marie, my maid, 
 and the red-cheeked parlourmaid, whose name I don't yet 
 know, and Mrs. Pugh, the housekeeper . . ." 
 
 "Who was Dr. Saxham's nurse when he was a little boy, 
 and adores him. And Mrs. Pugh's husband, who is gardener, 
 and handy-man, and coachman when required." Lady 
 Hannah's laugh jangled out over the capacious tray, containing 
 the comprehensive assortment of viands representing what the 
 invalid was wont, to term his " brekker." " But I'm not to be 
 deprived of my privilege, for all that. Do you suppose you 
 young married creatures are the only wives who enjoy cosseting 
 their husbands? There! it's out, and I ought to be ashamed 
 of myself, I suppose, but I'm not. Is that collared brawn on 
 the sideboard ? Bingo has a devouring passion for collared 
 brawn." She added a goodly slice to the contents of the tray. 
 " I warn you, if you regard the billing and cooing of a middle- 
 aged couple as indecent," she went on, " to look the other way 
 a great deal while we're here. For I was for the first time 
 seriously smitten with my husband when he rode out to meet 
 me, returning from ignoble captivity in the tents of Bronnckers, 
 sixteen months ago. When I nursed him through enteric in
 
 568 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the Hospital at Frostenberg I won't disguise it I fell in 
 love! With a bag of bones, for he was nothing else: but 
 genuine passion is indifferent to the personal appearance of the 
 beloved object, though I hadn't suspected it before. The 
 wound completed my conquest, and since then I'm madly 
 jealous if another woman looks at him. ... I see red green 
 would be a better colour because he prefers to have his valet, 
 brush his hair. I don't know that I didn't reduce the holding 
 capacity of this house by a storey there's a pun for you! so 
 as to engineer my hated rival being left at home in Wilton 
 Place. Is that lovely amber-coloured stuff in the cut-glass jar 
 quince marmalade? No; I won't pamper Bingo, if he is the 
 idol of my soul. And please don't wait for me. He likes 
 me to take off the tops of his eggs for him, and he usually eats 
 three. . . ." 
 
 Lady Hannah tripped off with her load, and deposited it 
 before the idol, who was sitting up in a Japanese bed-jacket 
 of wadded pink satin, left-handedly reading the Herion news- 
 paper that comes out once a week, and is published at St. 
 Tirlan's, twenty miles away. 
 
 " I've made a discovery," she announced. " No, don't look 
 frightened. It's only that poor Biddy's belle trouvaille has got 
 a heart. She's not the tinted Canova-nymph, the piece of 
 correct, inanity, I honestly believed her. . . . She idolized 
 Biddy small credit, for who could help it ? She submitted to 
 be adored by that poor foolish boy who's dead. . . . Now she's 
 her black-avised Doctor's humble worshipper and slave." 
 
 " Can't understand a woman worshipping a chap with a 
 chin like the bows of an armoured Destroyer, and eyebrows 
 like another man's moustaches," Bingo objected. 
 
 " Chin or no chin, eyebrows or not a hair, what does that 
 count to a woman in love?" She placed the laden tray be- 
 fore him, and with a maternal air proceeded to tuck a napkin 
 under his chin. He grumbled : 
 
 " There's no knowin' what will take the female fancy. But 
 even if you haven't harked away on a wrong scent, slave's a 
 dash too strong. Struck me they parted uncommon chilly and 
 off-hand at Euston yesterday mornin', considerin' they've not 
 been married much above a year. Do take this thing from 
 round my neck! Makes me feel like Little Willie." 
 
 Lady Hannah unpinned the napkin that framed the bulldog- 
 jowl, and said, patting the sandy-pink bullethead: 
 
 "That's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in amatory
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 569 
 
 affairs. No Eyes sees two people part, ' uncommon off-hand 
 and chilly.' " She mimicked Bingo's tone. " Eyes sees that 
 and something more. A man's coat-button dropped on the 
 floor of a railway carriage, for instance, and a young woman 
 who slyly picks it up silly little gage d'amour and kisses it 
 when a considerate observer pretends not to be looking, and 
 hides it away. Is that evidence, Major Mole?" 
 
 "By the Living Tinker!" he thundered, "I wouldn't have 
 believed it of her ! " 
 
 " Of course you wouldn't ! " She rummaged in an open 
 suit-case. "What necktie do you want to wear to-day?" 
 
 He mumbled ruefully, eyeing her over the coffee-cup: 
 
 "Any of 'em. It don't matter which. They're all alike 
 when you've tied 'em ! " 
 
 She beamed at what seemed to her a gallant speech. 
 
 "Sans compliment? You really mean it? And you won't 
 miss Grindlay so frightfully, after all ? " 
 
 He shook his head ambiguously. 
 
 " I shan't begin really to suffei for Grindlay not till it 
 comes to tubbin' with one fin." 
 
 " Mercy upon us ! " She gasped in consternation. He 
 said, controlling his features from wreathing into triumphant 
 smiles . . . 
 
 " You were so cast-iron certain you could fill his place, you 
 know!" 
 
 Her bright black eyes were hidden under abashed and droop- 
 ing eyelids. Blushes played hide-and-seek in the small cheeks 
 that were usually pale. 
 
 " In in everything essential," she stammered, avoiding his 
 intolerable gaze. 
 
 " Then that's what it is to be Eyes and No Eyes in ordi- 
 nary, everyday affairs! " The man pursued his advantage piti- 
 lessly. " Didn't you regard it as essential that. I should 
 wash?" 
 
 She winked tears away, though her laugh answered him. 
 
 " Most certainly I did, and do. One of the reasons that de- 
 cided me on marrying you was that you were invariably propre 
 comme un sou neuf." 
 
 " I thought, on mature reflection," said Bingo, lying down 
 under the lightened tray with a replete and satisfied air, " that 
 you would prefer a clean husband to a dirty one. Therefore 
 I engaged a bedroom for Grindlay at the Herion Arms. 
 That's his knock. Come in!"
 
 570 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 The valet presented himself upon the threshold, backing 
 respectfully at sight of her ladyship, who gave him a gracious 
 good-morning, dissembling the intense relief experienced at 
 sight of his smug, clean-shaven countenance. 
 
 "Good-morning, Grindlay. I hope the Hotel people made 
 you comfortable. And now you have arrived to take respon- 
 sibility off my hands," she announced, " I'll go and get some 
 breakfast." 
 
 "Haven't you . . . You're joking!" The tray shot from 
 the bed into Grindlay's saving clutch as Bingo suddenly as- 
 sumed the perpendicular. " You don't mean to say that you've 
 been starving all the time I've been gorging myself like like 
 a boa-constrictor?" he demanded furiously. "Why on earth 
 are women such blessed " 
 
 " Idiots?" she supplied, turning on the threshold to launch 
 her Parthian shaft. " Because if they were intellectual, logical 
 beings they would know better than to lavish devotion upon 
 stupid, selfish, unappreciative, heartless, dull dolts of men!" 
 
 The door slammed behind an injured woman. Grindlay's 
 face was a study in immobility. Bingo, after a little more 
 meditation, ponderingly rose and submitted himself to the 
 hands of his man. When the Major's toilet had reached the 
 stage of hair-parting, he roused himself from his reflections 
 with a sigh. 
 
 " Hold on. Put down that comb and go and ask her lady- 
 ship to be good enough to step up here. Tell her that your 
 style of hairdressin' don't suit me. I want a little more 
 imagination thrown into the thing. Hurry up, will you?" 
 
 "O Lord! What a liar I am!" he murmured fervently, 
 addressing his reflection in the glass. His wife's face appeared 
 over his shoulder, bright, alert, and pleased. She said, as she 
 adroitly assumed the office vacated by the discarded Grindlay, 
 who discreetly delayed his re-entrance on the scene: 
 
 " So you can't get on, it appears, without your ' blessed 
 idiot'?" 
 
 " Blessed angel, you mean," said mendacious Bingo, blink- 
 ing under a Little Lord Fauntleroy fringe. " You banged 
 the door before I'd got out the word ! " 
 
 "If I could believe that!" she sighed, and the ivory-backed 
 hair-brushes played rather a tremulous fantasia upon her idol's 
 head, " perhaps I might be induced to confide to you a piece of 
 genuine Secret Intelligence." 
 
 "Concernin'?"
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 571 
 
 " Concerning your wife, Hannah Wrynche." 
 
 "Well, what of her?" 
 
 She took him by the chin and began to part his hair. But 
 her eyes were misty, and her hand travelled unsteadily. 
 
 " This of her. She owned to you, months and months back, 
 that in your place she wouldn't have been one-millionth part 
 as patient with a restless, ambitious woman cursed with an 
 especial capacity for getting herself and other people into hot 
 water." She made a little affected grimace that masked a 
 genuine smart. " Not hot water only boiling lava sometimes 
 fizzling vitriol." 
 
 He said, looking kindly up at the small mobile face and 
 quivering chin: 
 
 " Restlessness and ambition are in the blood, y' know, like 
 gout and the rest of it. You can't, eradicate 'em, however 
 much you try. It's like shavin' a Danish carriage-dog to 
 change his colour. You can't for nuts; his spots are in his 
 skin! See?" 
 
 " Merci du compliment!" Her jangling laugh rang out as 
 if a stick had been smartly rattled down the keys of a piano. 
 But her eyes were wet. His own eyes reverted to his reflec- 
 tion in the toilet-glass. Now his sudden bellow made her drop 
 the comb. 
 
 "My Aunt Maria! See what you've been and done! 
 Made a Loop Railway down the middle of my head, unless 
 my liver's making me see things curly. Don't, swot at it any 
 more ; let that ass Grindlay earn his pay for once. ... By the 
 Living Tinker! you're cryin'. Don't go and say I've been a 
 brute ! " he pleaded. 
 
 "Darling! dearest! you haven't you've never! . . .1 
 The boot's on the other leg, though wild horses wouldn't get, 
 you to own as much." His strong left arm was round heri 
 slight waist, her wet cheek pressed against her Major's bulldog 
 jowl. He cleared his throat in his ponderous, scraping way, 
 admitting: 
 
 " Well, perhaps I may have dropped a briny or so of nights 
 in bed at Nixey's, or on duty at Staff Bomb-proof South, be- 
 tween ring-up's on the telephone when the off-duty men were 
 snorin', and one had nothin' on the blessed earth to do but 
 wonder whether one had a wife or not ? " 
 
 " There were people ready to tell you years before we saw 
 Gueldersdorp that the one you'd got was as good as 
 none. ,
 
 572 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " Lucky for 'em they refrained from expressin' their 
 opinions." She felt his great muscles swell as the big hand 
 tightened on her wrist. " Though, mind you, there have been 
 times when for your own sake, by Jingo! I'd have given all I 
 was worth to have you a bit more like other women " 
 
 "Who weren't dying to dabble in Diplomacy and win dis- 
 tinction as War Correspondents. Who funk raw-head and 
 bloody bones " she shook with a nervous giggle " and all 
 that sort of thing. . . . Would it please you to know that the 
 plumes of my panache of ambition have been cut to the last 
 quill that henceforth my sole aim is to rival the domestic 
 Partlet, clucking of barnyard matters in the discreet retirement 
 of the coop ? " 
 
 "You've said as much before!" he objected. 
 
 " But now I mean it ! Put me to the test. Let the house 
 in Wilton Place we'll live at Wrynche Royal, if you think 
 you won't be bored ? " 
 
 He bellowed joyously! 
 
 " Me bored ! With ten thousand acres arable and wood 
 and moorland to farm and preserve and shoot over, two first- 
 class packs meetin' within a fifty-mile radius of my doorstep, 
 and the Committee of the local Polo Association shriekin' for a 
 President, and the whole County beggin' me with tears in its 
 eyes to take the hint a Certain Person dropped when he gave 
 me my C.B., and accept the Crown Commission as Lord-Lieu- 
 tenant! 'Bored' I like that!" 
 
 " If you would like it, be it! " she flashed. "Trust me to 
 back you up. I can and I will! I'll help you entertain the 
 military authorities and their women, keep the Rolls, sit on the 
 'Bench when you weigh in as Chief Magistrate, and prompt 
 you when you get into a hat. I'll be all things to one man 
 and you shall be the man. Only" she laughed hysterically, 
 her face hidden against his big shoulder " I don't quite know 
 how far these things are compatible with my new role." 
 
 " Of domestic Henny-Penny cluckin' in the Home Coop." 
 Kis big hand patted her almost paternally. " Leave cluckin' 
 to hens with families. Do you suppose I'm such a pachyder- 
 matous ass that I can't understand that home is a make-believe 
 to a real woman, when when there isn't even one chicken to 
 tuck under her wing ! Worse luck for me and you ! " 
 
 She laughed wildly, lifting her wet, flushed face up to him. 
 Her black eyes were shining through the tears that rose and 
 brimmed over and fell.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 573 
 
 " If I told you that the luck had changed, would that make 
 you happy ? " 
 
 He cried out with a great oath : 
 
 "Yes, by G ! " and caught her to his leaping heart. 
 
 LXVIII 
 
 IN the weeks that followed, Lynette, in the course of many 
 interviews held with Janellan Pugh on the subject of lunch 
 and dinner, learned much anent the difficulty of obtaining 
 fresh fish in a sea-coast village, more as regards the Satanic 
 duplicity with which even a Calvinistic Methodist butcher will 
 substitute New Zealand lamb for the native animal, and still 
 more about Saxham. 
 
 Janellan, who had been a rosy maid in the service of the 
 Doctor's grandfather, the Parson, had thought the world's 
 worth of Master Owen, from the first time she set eyes on 
 him in a white frock, with a sausage-roll curl and diamond- 
 patterned socks. She had a venerable and spotty photograph 
 of him as a square-headed, blinking little boy in a velvet suit 
 and lace collar, and another photograph, coloured by hand, 
 taken at the age of fourteen, and paid for out of his own 
 pocket-money, to send to Janellan, who had nursed him through 
 a holiday scarlet-fever. And regularly had her blessed boy re- 
 membered her and Tafydd, said Janellan, until the Cruel Time 
 came, and he was lost sight of in Foreign Parts. Then Mrs. 
 Saxham died, and the Captain mentioned by Janellan with 
 the ringing sniff that speaks volumes of disparagement had 
 turned her and her man out of the Plas " without as much as 
 that ! " here Janellan snapped her strong thumb-nail against 
 her remaining front tooth in recognition of their forty years 
 of service. 
 
 But Master Owen, coming to his own again, " and 'deed 
 an' 'deed, but the Plas ought to have been his from the be- 
 ginning," had sought out the old couple, living in decent 
 poverty at St. Tirlans, and reinstated them in their old home. 
 And well might Tafydd, who was a better judge of the points 
 of a pig than any man in Herion or in all Wales for the 
 matter of that well might Tafydd declare that the Lord never 
 made a better man than Dr. Owen Saxham. What grand 
 things they had said of him in the papers! No doubt the 
 young mistress would have plenty more to tell that had not 
 got into print?
 
 574 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 " I can tell you many things of the Doctor," said Lynette, 
 smiling in the black-eyed, streaky-apple face, " that you and 
 Tafydd will be proud and glad to hear." 
 
 She shunned the giving or receiving of caresses as a rule, 
 but this morning she stooped and kissed the red-veined, 
 wrinkled cheek within Janellan's white-quilled cap-border. 
 Then, her household duties done, she pinned a rough, shady 
 straw-hat upon the red-brown hair, and drew loose chamois- 
 leather gloves over the slim white exquisite hands that were 
 perhaps her greatest beauty, chose a walking-stick from the 
 hall-rack, ran down the steep cliff pathway, crossed the 
 spidery, red-rusted iron foot-bridge that spanned the railway- 
 line, descended upon the farther side of the wood of chestnut 
 and larch that made green shadows at the base of the cliff, 
 and was upon the sand-dunes, walking with the free, undulat- 
 ing gait she had acquired from the Mother, towards the restless 
 line of white breakers that rose and fell a mile away. 
 
 She was happy. A glorious secret kept her bosom company; 
 a new hope gave her strength. She drank in long draughts of 
 the strong, salt, fragrant air, and as it filled her lungs, knew 
 her soul brimmed with fresh delight in the beauty of the world. 
 And a renewed and quickened sense of the joy of life made 
 music of the beating of her pulses and the throbbing of her 
 heart. 
 
 She was a child of the wild veld, but none the less a daughter 
 of this sea-girt Britain: the blue, restless waves beyond that 
 line of white frothing breakers washed the shores of the 
 Mother's beloved green island, Emerald Airinn, set in silver 
 foam. A few miles, St. George's Channel spanned tJhen 
 straight as the crow flies over Wicklow, Queen's County, 
 King's County, taking Galway at the acute angle of the wild 
 mallard's flight; and there would be the chained lakes and 
 stretching rivers, the grey-green mountains and the beetling 
 cliffs, the dreamy valleys and wild glens of Connemara, and 
 the ancient towers of Castleclare rising from its mossed lawns 
 studded with immemorial oaks. And Loch Kilbawne among 
 the wild highlands, and Lochs Innsa and Darva, and Bally- 
 barron Harbour, with its titanic breakwater, and three beacons, 
 and the dun-brown islands hidden in their veil of surf-edged 
 spindrift, shaken by the voices of hidden waters roaring in their 
 secret caves. 
 
 A faint smile played about her sensitive lips. Her golden 
 eyes dreamed as she walked on swiftly, a slender figure dressed
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 575 
 
 in a plain skirt of rough grey-blue, and a loose-sleeved blouse 
 of thick white silk, her slight waist belted with a silver- 
 mounted lizard-skin girdle, a pleasant tinkle of silver chatelaine 
 appendages accompanying her steps. 
 
 And those steps were to her no longer uncompanioned. 
 It was as though the Mother were living, so enfolding and 
 close was the sense of her presence to-day. God was in His 
 Heaven, and the world, His footstool, bore the visible impress 
 of His Feet. And it seemed to Lynette, who had learned to 
 see the faces of Christ and of His Mother Mary through the 
 lineaments of the earthly face that had first looked love upon 
 herself in her terrible abandonment, that those Divine and 
 glorious countenances looked down on her and smiled. And 
 her chilled faith spread quivering wings, basking in their in- 
 effable mild radiance as the little blue and tortoiseshell butter- 
 flies basked in the glorious July sunshine that had followed the 
 morning's storm. 
 
 The tangible presence seemed to move beside her, through 
 the white powdery sand. Over the knotted grasses, between 
 the tufts of poppies and the prickly little yellow roses that 
 fringed the hollows, the garments of another seemed to sweep 
 beside her own. The folds of a thin veil upborne on the 
 elastic breeze fluttered beside her cheek, blew against her lips, 
 bringing the rare delicate fragrance the familiar perfume that 
 clung to everything the Mother habitually wore and used 
 and touched. She did not look round, or stretch out her hand. 
 She walked along, drinking in blissfulness and companionship 
 at every pore of her thirsty soul, joyfully realizing that this 
 would last; that by-and-by the great void of loneliness would 
 not close in on her again. 
 
 Only the night before, upon the brink of the supreme dis- 
 covery that the dead in Christ are not only living in Him, but 
 for us also who are His, she had hesitated and doubted. Be-, 
 fore the sunrise of this glorious day she had learned to doubt 
 no more. 
 
 She had been restless and unhappy. Saxham had not writ- 
 ten for a week. She bitterly missed the short, cold, kind 
 letters in the clear, small, firm handwriting, that had reached 
 her at intervals of three days, to be answered by her constrained 
 and timid notes, hoping that he was well and not overworking, 
 describing the place and her pleasure in it, without mention 
 of her loneliness; giving details of Major Wrynche's progress
 
 576 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 towards recovery, and left-handed attempts at golf, winding 
 up with messages from Lady Hannah and dutiful remembrances 
 from David and Janellan, and signed, his affectionate wife, 
 Lynette Saxham. 
 
 Trite and laboured and schoolgirlish enough those epistles 
 seemed to their writer. To Saxham they were drops of rain 
 upon the parching soil of his heart, the one good that life had 
 for him in this final hap of the race. And yet he had ceased 
 to write that they might come no more. 
 
 If he had known how his own letters to her were welcomed, 
 how tenderly they were read and re-read, how sweetly kept 
 and cherished. . . . But he did not know. He could only look 
 ahead, and strain on to the nearing goal with the great, dim, 
 mysterious curtain hanging beyond it, hearing the thudding 
 of his wearied heart, and the whistling of those sharp breaths 
 in his strained lungs, and the measured sound of his own 
 footfalls bearing him on to the end. 
 
 While night closed in on her, fevered and wakeful in her 
 bed, thinking of him, praying for him, longing for the sight 
 and sound of him. Sleep, when it came now, brought dreams 
 less crystal than of old. Hued with the fiery rose of opals 
 some, because in these he loved her, and that shadowy woman, 
 in whose existence she only half-believed, had no part in him 
 at all. But on the night preceding the revelation she had not 
 dreamed. 
 
 She awakened in the grey of dawn, when the thrushes were 
 calling, and lay straight and still, listening to the glad bird- 
 voices from the garden, her soft, fringed eyelids closed, her 
 white breasts gently heaving, her small feet crossed, her slender, 
 bare arms pillowing the little Greek head ; a heavy plait of the 
 silken wealth that crowned it drawn down on either side of 
 the sweet, pale face and the pure throat, intensifying their 
 virginal beauty. The dull smart of loneliness, the famished 
 ache of loss, were gone altogether. She felt strangely peace- 
 ful and calm and glad. Then she knew she was not at 
 Herion; she was not even in London. . . . She was back at 
 the Convent, in the little whitewashed room with the stained 
 deal furniture the room with the pleasant outlook on the 
 gardens that had been hers from the first. Surely it was 
 past the rising hour? Ah, yes! but she had had a touch of 
 fever. That was why she was lying here so quietly, with the 
 Mother sitting by the bed. 
 
 There could be no doubt at. all. . . . The light firm, pres-
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 577 
 
 sure that she knew of old was upon her bosom, just above the 
 beating of her heart. . . . That was always the Mother's way 
 of waking you. She sat beside you, and looked at you, and 
 touched you, and presently your eyes opened, that was all. . . . 
 Thinking this, a streak of gold glimmered between Lynette's 
 thick brown lashes; her lips wore a smile of infinite content. 
 She stole a glance, and there it was, the large, beautiful, lightly 
 clenched hand. The loose sleeve of thin black serge flowed 
 away from the strong, finely moulded wrist ; the white starched 
 guimpe showed snowy between the drooping folds of the nun's 
 veil. . . . These familiar things Lynette drank in with a sense 
 of unspeakable content and pleasure. Then her eyes opened 
 widely, and she knew. 
 
 She was looking into eyes that had seen the Beatific Vision 
 great grey eyes that were unfathomable lakes of heavenly 
 tenderness and love divine. And the face that framed them 
 was a radiant pale splendour, indescribable in its glorious 
 beauty, unfathomable in its fulfilled peace. Her own eyes 
 drank peace from them, deeply, insatiably, while the Herion 
 thrushes sang their dewy matins, and the scent of hawthorn- 
 blooms and syringa and early roses mingled with the smell of 
 the sea stole in at the open casement where the white blind 
 bosomed like a breeze-filled sail. 
 
 How long Lynette lay there storing up content and rapture 
 she did not know, or want to know. But at last the wonder 
 of those eyes came nearer nearer. She felt the dear pressure 
 of the familiar lips upon her own. A fragrance enveloped her, 
 an exquisite joy overbrimmed her, as a voice the beloved, un- 
 forgotten voice of matchless music spoke. It said: 
 
 " Love him as I loved your father. Be to a child of his 
 what I have been to you." 
 
 Eyes and face and voice, white hand and flowing veil, were 
 all gone then. Lynette sat up, sobbing for joy, and blindly^ 
 holding out her arms, and the rising sun looked over tha 
 mountains eastward, and drew one hushing, golden finger over 
 the lips of the cold, grey, whispering sea. 
 
 LXIX 
 
 A THIN, subterraneous screech, accompanied by a whiff of 
 cinder-flavoured steam, heralded the Down Express as it
 
 578 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 plunged out of the cliff-tunnel, flashed across an intervening 
 space, and was lost among the chestnuts and larches. A rattle 
 and scroop told that the official in the box on the other side of 
 the Castle bluff had opened the points. And hearing the clank- 
 ing bustle of the train's arrival in the station, Lynette reminded 
 herself with a sigh of relief that her maid was packing, that she 
 would presently make her excuses to Major Wrynche and 
 Lady Hannah, and that the midnight up-mail should take her 
 home to him. 
 
 Her course lay clear now, pointed out by the beloved, lost 
 hand. But for this Heaven-sent light that had been cast upon 
 her way, Lynette knew that she might have wandered on in 
 doubt and darkness to the very end. 
 
 She was not of the race of hero-women, who deserve the 
 most of men, and are doomed to receive in grudging measure. 
 A pliant, dependent, essentially feminine creature, she was 
 made to lean and look up, to be swayed and influenced by the 
 stronger nature, to be guided and ruled, and led, and to love 
 the guide. 
 
 Her nature had flowered: sun and breeze and dew had 
 worked their miracle of form and fragrance and colour, the 
 ripened carpels waited, conscious of the crown of tall golden- 
 powdered anthers bending overhead. Instead of the homely 
 hive-bee a messenger had come from Heaven, the air vibrated 
 yet with the beating of celestial wings. 
 
 She was going to Saxham to ask him to forgive her, to throw 
 down the pitiless barrier she had reared between them in her 
 ignorance of herself and of him. She would humble herself 
 to entreat for that rejected crown of wifehood. Even though 
 that conjectural other woman had won Owen from her, she 
 said to herself that she would win him back again. 
 
 She reached the wet, shining strip of creamy sand where the 
 frothing line of foam-horses reared and wallowed. The prints 
 of her little brown shoes were brimmed with sea-water, she 
 lifted her skirt daintily, and went forward still. Numberless 
 delicate little winged shells were scattered over the moist sur- 
 face, tenantless homes of tiny bivalves, wonderfully hued. 
 Rose-pink, brilliant yellow, tawny-white, delicate lilac, it was 
 as though a lapful of blossoms rifled from some mermaid's deep- 
 sea garden, had been scattered by the spoiler at old Ocean's 
 marge. Lynette cried out with pleasure at their beauty, stooped 
 and gathered a palmful, then dropped them. She stood a
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 579 
 
 moment longer drinking in the keen, stinging freshness, then 
 turned to retrace her steps, still with that unseen companion 
 at her side. 
 
 The vast, undulating green and white expanse, save for a 
 distant golf-player with the inevitable ragged following, seemed 
 bare of human figures. The veering breeze shepherded flocks 
 of white clouds across the harebell-tinted meadows of the sky. 
 It sang a thin, sweet song in Lynette's little rose-tipped ears. 
 And innumerable larks carolled, building spiral towers of 
 melody on fields of buoyant air. And suddenly a human note 
 mingled with their music and with the thick drone of the little, 
 black-and-grey humble-bees that feasted on the corn bottles. 
 And Lynette's visionary companion was upon the instant gone. 
 
 It was a baby's cooing chuckle that arrested the little brown 
 shoes upon the verge of a deep sand hollow. Lynette looked 
 down. A pearly-pale cup fringed with blazing poppies held 
 the lost treasure of some weeping mother a flaxen-headed 
 coquette of some eighteen months old, arrayed in expensive, 
 diaphanous, now sadly crumpled whiteness, the divine human 
 peach served up in whipped cream of muslin and frothy Valen- 
 ciennes. Absorbed in delightful sand-dabbling, Miss Baby 
 crowed and gurgled; then, as a little cry of womanly delight 
 in her beauty and womanly pity for her isolation broke from 
 Lynette, she looked up and laughed roguishly in the stranger's 
 face, narrowing her eyes. 
 
 Naughty, mischievous eyes of jewel-bright, grey-green-long- 
 shaped and thick-lashed, bold red, laughing mouth. Where 
 had Lynette seen them before? With a strange sense of re- 
 newing an experience she ran down into the hollow, and 
 dropping on her knees beside the pretty thing, caught it up 
 and kissed it soundly. 
 
 "Where do you come from, sweet?" she asked, between the 
 kisses. " Where are mother and nurse ? " 
 
 "Ga!" said the baby. Then, with a sudden puckering of 
 pearly-golden brows, and a little querulous cry of impatience, 
 the Lady Alyse Rosabel Tobart squirmed out of the arms that 
 held her, exhibiting in the process the most cherubic of pink 
 legs, and the loveliest silk socks and kid shoes, and wriggled 
 back into her sandy nest. Once re-established there, she an- 
 swered no more questions, but with truly aristocratic com- 
 posure resumed her interrupted task of stuffing a costly bonnet 
 of embroidered cambric and quilled lace with sand. When
 
 5 8o ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the bonnet would hold no more, she had arranged to fill her 
 shoe: she was perfectly clear upon the point of having no other 
 engagement so absorbing. 
 
 Smiling, Lynette abandoned the attempt to question. Per- 
 haps the missing guardians of this lost jewel were quite near 
 : after all, sitting with books and work and other babies in the 
 shelter of some neighbouring hollow, from whence this daring 
 adventurer had escaped unseen. . . . She ran up the steep side 
 where the frieze of poppies nodded against the blue sky, and 
 the white sand streamed back from under the little brown 
 shoes that Saxham had so often longed to kiss. 
 
 No one was near. Only in the distance, toiling over the dry 
 waves of the sand-dunes towards the steep ascent by which the 
 hilly main street of Herion may be gained, went a white 
 perambulator, canopied with white, and propelled by a nurse 
 in starched white skirts and flying white bonnet-strings a 
 nurse who kept her head well down, and was evidently reading 
 a novel as she went. Some yards in advance a red umbrella 
 bobbed against the breeze like a giant poppy on a very short 
 stem. The lady who carried the flaming object was young; 
 that much was plain, for the fluttering heliotrope chiffons of 
 her gown were held at a high, perhaps at an unnecessarily lofty, 
 altitude above the powdery sand, and her plumply-filled and 
 gleaming stockings of scarlet, fantastically barred with black, 
 and her dainty little high-heeled shoes were very much in evi- 
 dence as they topped a rising crest. Then they disappeared 
 over the farther edge, the red umbrella followed, and the nurse, 
 in charging up the steep after her mistress, discovered, perhaps 
 by a glance of investigation underneath the canopy, prompted 
 by a too tardy realization of the suspicious lightness of the 
 perambulator, that the shell was void of the pearl. 
 
 Lynette heard the wretched woman's piercing shriek, 
 glimpsed the red umbrella as it reappeared over the sand-crest, 
 realized the horrible consternation of mistress and maid. She 
 must signal them cry out. . . . Involuntarily she gave the 
 call of the Kaffir herd: the shrill, prolonged ululation that 
 carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across a mile of karroo or 
 high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved 
 it, standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile 
 on the high crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow a squat, 
 blue dwarf with arms out of all proportion flourished and 
 gesticulated at her
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 581 
 
 LXX 
 
 IT is Fate who comes hurrying to Lynette under the becom- 
 ing shadow of a red umbrella, on the starched and rustling 
 skirts of the agitated nurse, whose mouth is seen to be shaping 
 sentences long before she can be heard panting: 
 
 "Did you call, 'm? Her ladyship thought you did, and 
 might have found. . . . Oh, ma'am! have you seen a baby? 
 We've lost ours! " 
 
 Lynette nods and laughs reassuringly, pointing down into 
 the hollow. The nurse, with a squawk of relief, leaves her 
 perambulator bogged in the sand, flutters up the powdery rise 
 like some large species of seagulls, squawks again, and swoops 
 to retrieve her lost charge. Miss Baby, perfectly contented until 
 the scarlet face and whipping ribbons of her attendant appear 
 over the edge of her Paradise, throws herself backwards, 
 strikes out with kicking, dimpled legs, and sets up an indignant 
 roar. 
 
 "There now there! 'A was a pessus! " vociferates the 
 owner of the streaming ribbons and the scarlet countenance. 
 " And did she tumble out of her pram, the duck, and wicked 
 Polly never see her? And thank Good Gracious, not a bruise 
 on her blessed little body-woddy, nor nothing but the very 
 tiddiest scratch!" 
 
 " Which is not your fault, Watkins, I am compelled to say 
 it," pronounces the Red Umbrella, arriving breathless and de- 
 cidedly indignant, on the scene. "The idea of a person of 
 your class being so wrapped up in a rotten penny novel that 
 you can't even keep your eye upon the darling entrusted to your 
 charge is too perfectly shameful for words. Baby, don't cry," 
 she continues, as the repentant Polly appears, bearing the re- 
 trieved treasure. " Come to mummy and kiss her, and tell her 
 all about it, do! " 
 
 " I sa-t! " bellows Baby, now keenly alive to the pathos of 
 the situation, and digging a sandy-pink fist into either eye. . . . 
 
 "Don't then, you obstinate little pig!" returns Red 
 Umbrella, with maternal asperity. She looks up to the fair 
 vision that stands on high amongst the poppies, and nods and 
 smiles. " However I am to thank you. . . . Such a turn 
 when we missed her. . . ." She utters these incoherences 
 with a great deal of eye-play, pressing a small, plump, jewelled 
 hand, with short, broad fingers, and squat, though elaborately
 
 582 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 rouged and polished, nails, upon the bountiful curve of a 
 Parisian corsage. " My heart did a double flip-flap . . . 
 hasn't done thumping yet. Am I pale still, Watkins?" She 
 appeals to the recreant Watkins, who is busily repacking Baby 
 in her luxurious perambulator. " I felt to go as white as 
 chalk!" 
 
 "Perfect gassly, my lady!" agrees Watkins, and it occurs 
 to Lyner.tc that the process of blanching must, taking into con- 
 sideration the artificial blushes that bloom so thickly upon the 
 pretty, piquant face under the red umbrella, have been at- 
 tended with some difficulty. 
 
 Everything is round in the coquettish face, shaded by a hat 
 that is an expensive triumph of Parisian millinery, trimmed 
 with a whole branch of wistaria in bloom. The big brown 
 eyes are round, so is the cherry-stained mouth, so is the pert, 
 button nose. The thick, dark eyebrows are like inky half- 
 moons, in the middle of the little round chin a circular dimple 
 is cunningly set. Round, pinky-olive shoulders and rounded 
 arms gleam temptingly through the bodice of heliotrope chiffon. 
 Other roundnesses, artfully exaggerated by the Parisian modiste, 
 are liberally suggested, as Red Umbrella gathers her frothy 
 draperies about her hips, lifting her multitudinous frills to re- 
 veal black and scarlet openwork silk stockings, ending in tiny, 
 plump feet, whose high-heeled silver-buckled walking-shoes are 
 sinking in the hot, white, powdery sand. 
 
 "Please don't go on! I haven't half thanked you," she 
 pleads, still pressing the podgy little bejewelled paw upon the 
 heaving corsage. Then she sinks, with an air of graceful 
 languor, down upon a long, prostrate monolith of granite, that 
 is thickly crusted with velvety orange lichen and grey-green 
 moss, starred with infinitesimal yellow flowers. And Lynette, 
 habitually courteous and rather amused, and not at all unwill- 
 ing -to know a little more of the affected, slangy, overdressed 
 little woman, sits down upon the other end of the sprawling 
 stone pillar, and says, smiling at Baby, who is clutching at a 
 hovering butterfly with her eager, dimpled hands: 
 
 " Of course, it was a terrible shock to you when you missed 
 her. She is such a darling. Aren't you, Baby?" 
 
 Baby, her long, grey-green eyes melting and gleaming danger- 
 ously, her golden head tilted coquettishly, and a gay, provok- 
 ing laugh on the bold red mouth, makes another snatch, cap- 
 tures the hovering blue butterfly, opens the rosy hand, and with 
 a wry face of disgust, drops the crushed morsel over the edge
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 583 
 
 of the perambulator. The superb, unconscious cruelty of the 
 act gives Lynette a little pang even as she goes on : 
 
 " She was not in the least shy. I think we should soon be 
 very great friends. May her nurse bring her to see me some- 
 times? Most babies love flowers, and there is a garden full of 
 them where I am staying. Do you live here? " 
 
 " Live here ? Gracious no ! " Red Umbrella opens the 
 round, brown eyes that Baby's are so unlike in shape and ex- 
 pression, and shrugs her pretty shoulders as high as the big 
 ruby buttons that blaze in her pretty ears. " Me and Baby 
 are only visiting stopping with her nurse and my two maids 
 for a change at the Herion Arms me having been recom- 
 mended sea-air by the doctors for tonsils in the throat. The 
 house is advertised as an up-to-date hotel in the ABC Railway 
 Guide, but diggings more wretched I never struck, and you 
 do fetch up in some queer places on tour in the Provinces, let 
 alone the States," says Red Umbrella, tossing the wistaria- 
 wreathed hat, " which may be a surprise to people who think 
 it must be nothing but jam for those ladies and gentlemen that 
 have made their mark in the profession." 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 Lynette's golden eyes smile back into the laughing brown 
 ones with pleasant friendliness, combined with an irritating 
 lack of comprehension. And Red Umbrella, who derives a 
 considerable income from percentages upon the sale of her 
 photographs, and is conscious that her celebrated features are 
 figuring upon several of the postcards that hang up for sale in 
 the window of the only stationer in Herion, is a little nettled. 
 
 " I refer to the stage, of course." She fingers a long neck- 
 chain of sapphires, and tinkles her innumerable bangles with 
 their load of porte-bonheurs. " But perhaps you're not a Lon- 
 doner? Or you don't patronize the theatre?" 
 
 " Oh, yes. We have a house in Harley Street. And I am 
 very fond of the Opera," says Lynette, smiling still, " and of 
 seeing plays too ; and I often go to the theatre with Lord and 
 Lady Castleclare, or Major Wrychne and Lady Hannah, 
 when my husband is too much engaged to take me. One of 
 the last pieces we saw before we left town was ' The Chiffon 
 Girl ' at the Variety," she adds. 
 
 "Indeed! And how did you Hire 'The Chiffon Girl'?" 
 asks the lady of the red umbrella, with a gracious and en- 
 couraging smile. Unconscious tribute rendered to one's beauty 
 and one's genius is ever well worth the having. And the edi-
 
 584 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 tor of the Keyhole, a certain weekly journal of caterings for 
 the curious, will gladly publish any little anecdote which will 
 serve the dual purpose of amusing his readers and keeping the 
 name of Miss Lessie Lavigne before the public eye. " How 
 did you enjoy the performance of the lady who played the 
 part?" 
 
 Lynette ponders, and her fine brows knit. Vexed and in- 
 dignant, Red Umbrella, scanning the thoughtful face, admits 
 its youth, its high-breeding, its delicate, chiselled beauty, and 
 the slender grace of the supple figure in the grey-blue serge 
 skirt and white silk blouse; nor is she slow to appreciate the 
 value of the diamond keeper on the slight, fine, ungloved hand 
 that rests upon the sun-hot moss between them. 
 
 " I think I felt rather sorry for her," says the soft cultured 
 voice with the exquisite, precise inflections. The golden eyes 
 look dreamily out over the undulating sand-dunes beyond the 
 crisp line of foam to the silken shimmer of the smoothing water. 
 The little wind has fallen. It is very still. The nurse, sitting 
 on a hillock of bents in dutiful nearness to the perambulator, 
 has taken out her paper-covered volume, and is deep in a story 
 of blood and woe. And Baby, a sleepy, pink rosebud, dozes 
 among her white embroidered pillows, undisturbed by Red 
 Umbrella's shrill exclamation: 
 
 " Sorry for her! Why on earth should you be?" 
 
 The shriek startles Lynette. She brings back the grey eyes 
 from the distance, flushing faint coral pink to the red-brown 
 waves at her fair temples. 
 
 " She she had on so few clothes," she says. And there is 
 a profound silence, broken by Lessie saying with icy dignity: 
 
 " If the Lord Chamberlain opined I'd got enough on, I 
 expect that ought to do for you ! " 
 
 " I don't quite understand." 
 
 Lynette opens her golden eyes in sincere wonder at the mar- 
 vellous change that has been wrought in the little lady who sits 
 beside her. 
 
 "I am Miss Lessie Lavigne," says the little lady, with an 
 angry toss of the pretty head, adorned with the wistaria- 
 trimmed hat. " At least, that is the name I am known by in the 
 profession." 
 
 " I beg your pardon," Lynette falters. " I did not recognize 
 you. I am afraid you must think me rather rude." 
 
 "Oh, pray don't mention it!" cries the owner of the red 
 umbrella. "Rude? not in the least I"
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 585 
 
 Mere rudeness would be preferable, infinitely, to the outrage 
 the little lady has suffered. She, Lessie Lavigne, the original 
 exponent of the role of "The Chiffon Girl," the idol of the 
 pit and gallery, Queen regnant over the hearts beating behind 
 the polished shirt-fronts in the stalls, has lived to hear herself 
 pitied not envied, but commiserated for the scantiness of the 
 costume in which it is alike her privilege and her joy to trill 
 and caper seven times in the week before her patrons and 
 adorers. Small wonder that she feels her carefully manicured 
 nails elongating with the desire to scratch and rend. 
 
 Then she reveals the chief arrow in her quiver. Not for 
 nothing is she the widow of a Peer of Great Britain. With 
 all the hereditary dignities of the Foltlebarres she will arm 
 herself, and reduce this presuming stranger to the level of the 
 dust. At the thought of the humiliation it is in her power 
 to inflict she smiles quite pleasantly, displaying a complete 
 double row of beautifully stopped teeth. And she says, as she 
 fumbles in a chatelaine bag of golden links, studded with tur- 
 quoises, and with elaborately ostentatious dignity produces 
 therefrom a card-case, as precious as regards material, and em- 
 blazoned with a monogram and coronet, enriched with 
 diamonds and pearls: 
 
 " I think you mentioned that you lived in the neighbour- 
 hood? May I know who I have the a pleasure of being in- 
 debted to for finding my daughter to-day?" 
 
 " I am Mrs. Owen Saxham. I live at that grey stone house 
 up there on the cliff. ' Plas Bendigaid,' they call it," explains 
 Lynette, a little nervously, as her reluctant eyes dwell upon the 
 face and figure of the woman who was Beauvayse's wife. The 
 encounter is distasteful to her. She is even conscious of a 
 latent feeling of antagonism and dislike. " It belongs to my 
 husband, and this is my first visit to Herion, because we my 
 husband and I have not been very long married. But I like 
 the place very much. And the house is charming, within as 
 without, and there is a hall that w r as once the chapel, when it 
 was a Convent. It shall be a chapel again; that is" the 
 wild-rose colour deepens on the lovely face " if my husband 
 agrees? To have it so restored would make the house seem 
 more like a home, because I was brought up in a Convent, 
 though not in England." 
 
 Her eyes stray back to the sun-kissed beauty of Nantmadoc 
 Bay and the dotted line of white spots that signify the town of 
 St. Tud walls at the base of , the green promontory beyond the
 
 586 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 Roads. She forgets that this little overdressed person is 
 Beauvayse's wife. She forgets in the moment that she herself 
 is Saxham's. She is back in the beloved past, with the Mother. 
 
 " It was in South Africa, my Convent . . . more than a 
 thousand miles from Cape Town, in British Baraland, on the 
 Transvaal Border a tiny village dumped down in the middle 
 of the veld." 
 
 "What on earth is the veld?" asks the lady of the red 
 umbrella, with acerbity. " I'm sick of seeing the word in the 
 papers, and nobody seems to know what it means." 
 
 Lynette's soft voice answers: 
 
 " You can never know what it means until you have lived 
 its life, and it has become part of yours. It spreads away 
 farther than your eyes can follow it, for miles and miles. It 
 is jade colour in spring, blue-green in early summer, desolate, 
 scorched yellow-brown in winter, with dreadful black tracts of 
 cinders, where it has been burned to let the young grass grow 
 up. There is hardly a tree; there is scarcely a bird, except a 
 vulture, a black speck high in the hot blue sky. There are 
 flat-topped mountains and cone-shaped kopjes, reddish, or pale 
 pink, or mauve coloured, as they are nearer or farther away. 
 And that is all." 
 
 "All?" 
 
 "All, except the sunshine, bathing everything, soaking you 
 through and through." 
 
 " But. there is not always sunshine ? It must be sometimes 
 night," argues Lessie, a little peevishly. 
 
 " There are deep violet nights, full of great white stars," 
 Lynette answers. " There are storms of dust and rain, light- 
 ning and thunder, such as are only read of here. . . . There 
 are plots, conspiracies, raids, robberies, murders, slumps and 
 losses, plagues and massacres. There are rebellions of white 
 men, and native risings. There has been War; there have 
 been wars. There is War to-day, and there will be War again 
 in the days to come ! " 
 
 She had almost forgotten the little woman beside her, staring 
 at her, with big, brown, rather animal eyes. Now she turns 
 to her with her rare and lovely smile: 
 
 " The war that is going on now began at the little village- 
 town where I was a Convent schoolgirl. We were shut for 
 months within the lines. But, of course, you have read the 
 newspaper accounts of the Siege of Gueldersdorp ? I am only 
 telling you what you know."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 587 
 
 Lessie laughs, and the laugh has the hard, unpleasant, mirth- 
 less little tinkle of a toy dog's collar-bell, or bits of crushed ice 
 rattled in a champagne-glass. 
 
 " What I have good reason to know." 
 
 Her podgy, jewelled hands are clenching and unclenching 
 in her heliotrope chiffon lap; there is a well-defined scowl be- 
 tween the black arched eyebrows, and the murky light of battle 
 gleams in the eyes that no longer languish between their bistred 
 eyelids as she scans the pure pale face under the sweep of her 
 heavily blackened lashes. She would give the ruby buttons out 
 of her ears to see it wince and quiver, and crimson into shamed 
 blushes. And yet Lessie is rather amiable than otherwise in 
 her attitude towards other women. True, she has never be- 
 fore met one who had the insolence to pity her to her face. 
 
 " I quite feel I know you," she says, with an exaggerated 
 affection of amiability, and in high, fashionable accents, " you 
 having been at Gueldersdorp through the siege and all. Were 
 you ever I suppose you must have been sometimes shot at 
 with a gun ? " 
 
 The faintest quiver of a smile comes over the lovely face 
 her grudging eyes are trying to find a flaw in. 
 
 " Often when I have been crossing the veld between the 
 town and the Hospital, the Mauser bullets have hummed past 
 like bees, and raised little spurts of dust close by my feet where 
 they had hit the ground. And once a shell burst close to us, 
 and a piece knocked off my hat and tore a corner off her 
 veil " 
 
 " Weren't you in a petrified fright ? " demands Lessie. 
 
 " I was with her." 
 
 "Who was she?" 
 
 A swift change of sudden, quickening, poignant emotion 
 passes over the still face. A sudden swelling of the white 
 throat, a rising mist in the golden eyes, suggests to Lessie 
 that she has been fortunate enough to touch upon a painful 
 subject, and that possibly this presumptuous young woman who 
 has pitied a Peeress may be going to cry. But Lynette drives 
 back the tears. 
 
 " She was the Reverend Mother, the Mother-Superior of 
 the Convent where I lived at Gueldersdorp." 
 
 " Where is she now ? " 
 
 " She is^vith God." 
 
 Lessie is oddly nonplussed by the calm, direct answer. 
 People who talk in that strangely familiar way of of subjects
 
 5 88 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 that properly belong to parsons are rare in her world. She 
 hastens to put her next question. 
 
 " Was yours the only Convent in Gueldersdorp where young 
 ladies were taught?" 
 
 " It is the only Convent there." 
 
 " Did you know among the pupils a young person by the 
 name of Mildare? " 
 
 There is such concentrated essence of spite in Lessie's utter- 
 ance of the name that Lynette winces a little, and the faint, 
 sweet colour rises in her cheeks. 
 
 " I know her, certainly ; as far as one can be said to know 
 oneself. My unmarried name was Mildare." 
 
 " You don't say so ! Lord, how funny ! " 
 
 The seagulls fishing in the shallows beyond the foam-line 
 rise up affrighted by the shrill peal of triumphant laughter 
 with which Lessie makes her discovery. 
 
 " Ha, ha, ha! Talk of a situation! . . . On the boards I've 
 never seen one to touch it!" She jumps from the boulder, 
 with more bounce than dignity, dropping the red umbrella and 
 the jewelled card-case, and, extending in one pudgy ringed hand 
 a coroneted card, " Permit me to introduce myself," she says 
 through set teeth, smiling rancorously. " My professional 
 name, as I have had the pleasure of explaining to you, is Lessie 
 Lavigne, but in private" the dignity of the speaker is marred 
 by extreme huffiness " in private I am the Countess of Beau- 
 vayse." 
 
 As Lynette looks in the painted, angry, piquant face she com- 
 prehends the secret of its familiarity. She is conscious of a 
 faint distaste, but of no active repulsion. Then her eyes, turn- 
 ing from it, encounter the cherub rosily sleeping on embroidered 
 pillows, and a rush of blood colours her to her hair. His child 
 his child by the dancer this dimpled creature she has clasped 
 and kissed. The icy, tinkling giggle of the mother breaks in 
 upon the thought. 
 
 " Of all the queer starts I ever struck, I do call this the 
 queerest ! Me, meeting you like this, and both of us pal-ing on ! 
 All over Baby, too. . . . Lord! isn't it enough to make you 
 die? Don't mind me being a bit hysterical!" Lady Beau- 
 vayse dabs her tearful eyes with a cobwebby square of laced 
 cambric. " It'll be over in a sec. And then, Miss Mildare 
 I beg pardon Mrs. Saxham you and me will have it 
 out!" 
 
 "I ana afraid I must be going." Lynette rises and stands
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 589 
 
 beside Lessie, looking down in painful hesitation at. the work- 
 ing eyebrows and the blinking, reddened eyelids. *' I have 
 guests waiting for me at the Plas. And would it not be wise 
 of you to go home and lie down ? " 
 
 The words, for some obscure reason or other, convey an in- 
 tolerable sting. Lessie jumps in her buckled Louis Quinze 
 shoes, wheels, and confronts her newly-discovered enemy with 
 glaring eyes. 
 
 " Go home . . . lie down ! " she shrieks, so shrilly that the 
 sleeping cherub awakens, and adds her frightened roars to the 
 clamour that scares the gulls. " If I had lain down and gone 
 to my long home eighteen months ago, when you were cooped 
 up in Gueldersdorp with my husband, it would have suited you 
 both down to the ground ! " She turns, with a stamp of her 
 imperious little foot upon the scared nurse, who is vainly en- 
 deavouring to still Baby. "Take her away! Carry her out 
 of hearing! Do what you're told, you silly fool!" she orders. 
 " And you " she wheels again upon Lynette, her wistarias 
 nodding, her chains and bangles clanking " why do you stand 
 there like a white deer in a park like a creature cut out of 
 ivory? Don't you understand that I, the woman you pitied 
 my God! pitied, for singing and dancing on the public stage 
 ' with so few clothes on ' " she savagely mimics the manner 
 and tone " I am the lawful wife of the man you tried to trap 
 the Right Honourable John Basil Edward Tobart!" The 
 painted lips sneer savagely. " Beautiful Beau, who never went 
 back on a man or told the truth to a woman that's his char- 
 acter, and it pretty well sizes him up. 
 
 Lessie stops, gasping and out of breath, the plump, jewelled 
 hand clutching at her heaving bosom. The theatrical instinct 
 in the daughter of the footlights has led her to work up the 
 scene; but her rage of wounded love and jealousy is genuine 
 enough, though not as real as the innocence in the eyes that 
 meet hers, less poignant than the shame and indignation that 
 drive the blood from those ivory cheeks. 
 
 " He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cook- 
 ham," goes on Lessie, her mouth twisting, " a fortnight before 
 he was ordered out on the Staff. We'd been friends for over 
 a year. There was a child coming, since we're by way of being 
 plain-spoken," says Lessie, picking up the prostrate red umbrella 
 and the jewelled card-case, possibly to conceal a blush; "and 
 he swore he'd never look at. another woman, and write by every 
 mail. And so he did at firs^ and I used to cry over the bloom-
 
 590 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 ing piffle he put into his letters, and wish I'd been a straighter 
 \voman, for his sake. And then the Siege began, and the letters 
 stopped coming, and I cried enough to spoil my voice, little 
 thinking how my husband was playing the giddy bachelor thou- 
 sands of miles away. And then came the news of the Relief, 
 and despatches, saying that he " her pretty face is distorted 
 by the wry grimace of genuine anguish " he was killed! And 
 ta month later I got a copy of a rotten Siege newspaper, sent me 
 by I don't know who, and never shall, with a flowery para- 
 graph in it, announcing his lordship's engagement, to Miss some- 
 thing Mildare. Oh, it was merry hell to know how he'd done 
 me me that worshipped the very ground he trod! . . . Me 
 that had made a Judy of myself in crape and weepers widow's 
 weepers for the man that wished me dead ! " 
 
 Her voice is thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her 
 eyes are burning coals. She has never been so nearly a great 
 actress, this meretricious little dancer and comedian, as in this 
 moment when she forgets her art. 
 
 " Picture it, you ! . . . Don't you fancy me in 'em ? Don't 
 you see me in my bedroom tearing them off? " She rends her 
 flimsy cobweb of a handkerchief into tatters and spurns them 
 from her. " So ! . . . so ! . . . that's what I did to 'em ! " 
 She snarls with a sudden access of tigerishness. " And if that 
 white face of yours had been within reach of my ten fingers, 
 I'd have ragged it into ribbons like the blooming fallals. Don't 
 dare to tell me you'd not have done the same ! Perhaps, though, 
 you wouldn't. You're a lady, born and bred," owns Lessie 
 grudgingly, " and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that worked to 
 keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while 
 you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool." 
 
 She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. 
 The swollen face with the wet eyes is averted, or Lessie might 
 be roused to fresh resentment by the tenderness of pity that is 
 dawning in Lynette's. 
 
 " You have suffered cruelly, Lady Beauvayse ; but I was not 
 knowingly or wilfully to blame. Please try to believe it! " 
 
 Lessie blows her small nose with a toot of incredulity, and 
 says through an intervening wad of damp lace-edged cambric: 
 
 '^Goon!" 
 
 " I met Lord Beauvayse out at Gueldersdorp." The voice 
 that comes from Lynette's pale lips is singularly level and quiet. 
 " He was very handsome and very brave; he was an officer of 
 the Colonel's Staff. He asked me to marry him, and I I
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 59* 
 
 believed him honourable and true, and I said, 'Yes.' . . . 
 That was one Sunday, when we were sitting by the river. On 
 Thursday he was kflled, and later nearly a year after my 
 marriage to Dr. Saxham I found out the truth." 
 
 Lessie shrugs her pretty shoulders, but the face and voice of 
 the speaker have brought conviction. She thinks that if she 
 had been injured, her rival has suffered equal wrong. 
 
 " You were pretty quick in taking on another man, it strikes 
 me. But that's not my business. You say you found out." 
 She shows her admirably preserved teeth in a little grin of 
 sardonic contempt " nearly a year after your marriage. Don't 
 tell me your husband let you go on burning joss-sticks to Beau's 
 angelic memory when he might, have made you spit on it by 
 telling you the truth ! " 
 
 Lynette's lip curls, and she lifts her little head proudly. 
 
 " He never once hinted at the truth. Nor was it through him 
 I learned it." 
 
 " Ought to be kept under glass, then," comments Lessie, " as 
 a model husband. Now, my poor " 
 
 Lynette interrupts, with angry emphasis: 
 
 " I will not hear Dr. Saxham mentioned in the same breath 
 with Lord Beauvayse ! " 
 
 " He's dead let him be!" Beau's widow snarls, her mouth 
 twisting. Yet in the same breath, with another of the mental 
 pirouettes characteristic of her class and type, she adds : " Do 
 you suppose I don't know my own husband? Take him one 
 way with another, you might have sifted the world for liars, 
 and never found the equal of Beau." 
 
 She gathers up the red umbrella and the jewelled card-case 
 with reviving briskness, and shakes out her crumpled chiffons 
 in the bright hot sun. 
 
 " Me and Baby are leaving to-morrow. I don't suppose 
 we're likely ever to come across you again. Good-bye. I for- 
 give you for pitying me," she says frankly, holding out the 
 plump, over-jewelled hand. " As for the other grudge. , . . 
 What, are you going to kiss me? . . . Give Baby another 
 before you go, dear . . . and . . . forgive him when you 
 can." 
 
 LXXI 
 
 LYNETTE sat still upon the boulder, thinking, long after the 
 red umbrella had departed. While it was yet visible in the
 
 592 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 white-hot distance, hovering like some gaudy Brobdingnagian 
 butterfly in advance of the white perambulator pushed by the 
 white-clad nurse, the heads of two little shabbyish, youngish 
 people of the unmistakable Cockney tourist type rose over the 
 edge of a pale sand-crest, fringed with wild camomile and blaz- 
 ing poppies. Aq>d the female, a small draggled young woman 
 in a large hat, trimmed with fatigued and dusty peonies, called 
 out excitedly: 
 
 "Oh, William, it's 'er it's 'er!" 
 
 " By Cripps, so it is ! " came from the male companion of the 
 battered peonies. He advanced with a swagger that was the 
 unconvincing mask of diffidence. An undersized, lean young 
 man, in the chauffeur's doubtful-weather panoply of black 
 waterproof jacket, breeches merging into knee-boots, the whole 
 crowned with a portentous peaked cap, with absurd brass venti- 
 lators and powdered with many thicknesses and shades of dust. 
 His hair was dusty. The very eyelashes of the honest, ugly grey 
 eyes, set wide apart in the thin wedge-shaped, tanned face that 
 the absurd cap shaded, were dusty as a miller's; dust lay thick 
 in all the chinks and creases of his leading features, and a large 
 black smudge of oily grime was upon his wide upper lip, im- 
 pinging upon his riose. Nor was his companion much less dusty, 
 though the checks of a travelling ulster of green and yellow 
 plaid, adorned with huge steel buttons, would have advertised 
 the Kentish Town Ladies' Drapery Establishment whence they 
 emanated through the medium of a Fleet Street fog. 
 
 " Might we speak to you, ma'am ? " The dusty young man 
 respectfully touched the dusty peak of the cap with brass venti- 
 lators, and, with a shock of surprise, Lynette recognized Sax- 
 (ham's chauffeur. 
 
 " Keyse! ... It is Keyse! " She looked at him in surprise. 
 
 " Keyse, ma'am." He touched the cap again, and made a 
 not ungraceful gesture, indicating the wearer of the weather- 
 beaten peonies and the green and yellow ulster, who clung to 
 his thin elbow with a red, hard-working hand. " Me an' my 
 wife, that is. Bein' on a sort of outin', a kind of beanfeast for 
 two, we took the notion, being stryngers to South Wyles, of 
 droppin' in 'ere an' tippin' the ' 'Ow Do. ' ' He breathed 
 hard, and rivulets of perspiration began to trickle down from 
 under the preposterous cap, converting the dust that filled the 
 haggard lines of his thin face into mud. " An' payin' our re- 
 spects." His eyes slewed appealingly at his companion, asking 
 as plainly as an eye can, "What price that?" And the glance
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 593 
 
 that shot back from the dusty shadow of the exhausted peonies 
 answered, " Not bad by 'arf for you! " 
 
 Lynette smiled at the little Cockney couple. The surprise 
 that had checked the beating of her heart, had passed. It was 
 pleasant to see these faces from Harley Street. She answered 
 with a dazzling smile: t 
 
 " I understand. My husband has given you a holiday. Is 
 he well ? " She flushed, realizing that it. was pain to have to 
 ask others for the news of him that he had denied her. " I 
 mean because he has not written. ... I have been feeling 
 rather anxious. Was he quite well when you left?" 
 
 " Was he? ... Yes, 'm! " W. Keyse shot out the affirma- 
 tive with such explosive suddenness that the hand upon his arm 
 must have nipped hard. 
 
 " I am so glad ! " Lynette turned to the young woman in 
 the ulster, whose face betrayed no guilty knowledge of the 
 pinch. She was small, and pale, and gritty, and her blue eyes 
 had red rims to them from the fatigue of the journey, or some 
 other cause. But they were honest and clear, and not unpretty 
 eyes, looking out from a forest of dusty, yellowish fringe, de- 
 plorably out of curl. Yet a fringe that had associations for 
 Lynette, reaching a long way from Harley Street, and back 
 to the old days at Gueldersdorp before the siege. 
 
 " Surely I know you? I used to know you at Gueldersdorp." 
 She added as Mrs. Keyse's eyes said "Yes,": "You used to be 
 a housemaid at the Convent. How strange that I should not 
 have remembered it until now! And your husband. ... I 
 do not remember ever having seen him before he came to us 
 at Harley Street But his name comes back to me in connection 
 with a letter " she knitted her brows, chasing the vague, 
 fleeting memory " a love-letter that was sent to Miss Du 
 Taine inside a chocolate-box, just when school was breaking up. 
 It was you who smuggled the box in." 
 
 " To oblige, bein' begged to by Keyse as a fyvour. 'E didn't 
 know 'is own mind them d'ys," explained Mrs. Keyse, sweep- 
 ing her husband's scorching countenance with a glance of with- 
 ering scorn. 
 
 " Nor did you," retorted W. Keyse, stung to defiance. 
 " Walkin' out with a Dopper you was if it comes to that." 
 He spun round, mid-ankle deep in sand, to finish. " An' you'd 
 'ave bin joined by a Dutch dodger and settled down on a Vaal 
 sheep-farm, if the order 'adn't come 'ummin' along the wire 
 from 'Eadquarters that said, 'Jane 'Arris, you're to have this
 
 594 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 bloke, and no other. Till Death do you part. Everlasting 
 Amen ! ' " 
 
 There was so strong a flavour of Church about the final sen- 
 tence that Mrs. Keyse could not keep admiration out of her 
 eyes. 
 
 Her own eyes dancing with mirthful amusement, Lynette 
 looked from one to the other of the little Cockney couple, and, 
 tactfully changing the trend of the conversation, hoped that 
 they were enjoying their trip a query which so obviously failed 
 to evoke an expression of pleased assent in either of the small, 
 thin, wearied faces that she hastened to add: 
 
 " But perhaps this is the very beginning of your holiday. 
 When did you leave London ? " 
 
 " Yes'dy mornin' at 'arf-past six," said W. Keyse, carefully 
 avoiding her eyes. A spasm contracted the tired face under the 
 dusty peonies. Their wearer put her hand to the collar of the 
 green and yellow ulster, and undid a button there. 
 
 ' Yesterday morning at half-past six ' ! " Lynette repeated 
 in wonder. 
 
 "An' if the machine I 'ad on 'ire from a pal o' mine chap 
 what keeps a second-hand shop for 'em in Portland Road 
 'adn't 'ad everythink 'appen to 'er wot can 'appen to a three- 
 an'-a-'arf 'orse-power Baby Junot wot 'ad seen 'er best d'ys 
 before automobilin' 'ad cut its front teeth," said W. Keyse, with 
 bitterness, " we would 'ave bin 'ere before. As it is, we've left 
 the car at a little ' Temperance Tavern ' in Shrewsbury, kep' 
 by a Methodist widder, 'oo thinks such new-fangled inventions 
 sinful an' only consented to take charge on account of the 
 Prophet Elijer a-goin' up to 'Eaven in a Fiery Chariot an' 
 come on 'ere by tryne." 
 
 Lynette looked at the man in silence. She even repeated 
 after him, rather dully: 
 
 " You came on here by train ? " 
 
 " Slow Parliamentary stoppin' at every 'arf-dozen stytions," 
 explained W. Keyse, " for collectors in velveteens and Scotch 
 caps to ask tickets, plyse? And but that the porter on the 
 'Erion Down platform 'ad see you walkin' on the Links, and 
 my wife knoo your dress and the colour of your 'air 'arf a mite 
 'orf, we'd 'ave lost precious time in rinding you, and giving 
 you the message what we've come 'ere to bring." 
 
 " From my husband ? From Dr. Saxham ? " 
 
 W. Keyse shifted from one foot to the other, and coughed 
 an embarrassed cough.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 595 
 
 "Not exac'Iy from Dr. Saxham." 
 
 Lynette looked at W. Keyse, and it seemed to her that the 
 little sallow Cockney face had Fate in it. A sudden terror 
 whitened her to the lips. She cried out in a voice that had lost 
 all its sweetness: 
 
 " You have deceived me in saying he was well. Something 
 has happened to him! He is very ill, or ? " 
 
 She could not utter the word. Instinctively her eyes went 
 past the stammering man to the woman who hung behind his 
 elbow. And the wearer of the nodding peonies cried out: 
 
 " No, no! The Doctor isn't dead or ill, to call ill! " She 
 turned angrily upon her husband. " See wot a turn you've 
 give 'er," she snapped. " Why couldn't you up and speak 
 out?" 
 
 W. Keyse was plainly nonplussed. He took off the giant cap 
 with the brass ventilators, and turned it round and round, look- 
 ing carefully inside. But he found no eloquence therein. 
 
 "Why did I bring a skirt, I arsk, if I'm to do the pater?" 
 He addressed himself in an audible aside to Mrs. Keyse. 
 " You might as well 'ave stopped at 'ome with the nipper," he 
 added, complainingly, " if I ain't to 'ave no better 'elp than 
 this!" 
 
 "You mean kindly, I know." Lynette tried to smile in say- 
 ing it. " There is trouble that you are here to break to me ; I 
 understand very well. Please tell me without delay, plainly 
 what has happened? I am very strong. I shall not faint 
 if that is what you are afraid of." 
 
 She caught her breath, for the woman broke out into dry 
 sobbing and cried out wildly: 
 
 " Oh, come back to 'im. Come back, if you're a woman. 
 Gawd, Who sees 'im knows as 'ow 'e can't bear no more. O! 
 if my 'art's so wrung by what I've seen him suffer, think what 
 he's bore these crooil weeks an' months ! " 
 
 The peonies rocked in the gale of Emigration Jane's emotion. 
 Her hard-worked hands went out, entreating for him; her 
 dowdy little figure seemed to grow tall, so impressive was the 
 earnestness of her appeal. 
 
 " Him and you are toffs, and me and Keyse are common 
 folks. . . . Flesh and blood's the syme, though, only covered 
 wiv different skins. An' Human Nature's Human Nature, 
 'owever you fake 'er up an' christen 'er. An' Love must 'ave 
 give an' take of Love, or else Love's got to die. Burn a lamp 
 wivout oil, and see wot 'appens. It goes out! You're left in
 
 596 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 the dark ! " Her homely gesture, illustrating the homely anal- 
 og)', seemed to bring down blackness. Lynette hung speech- 
 less upon her fateful lips. 
 
 " Then, like as not, you'll overturn the table gropin'. 
 ' Smashed ! ' you'll say, ' an' nobody but silly me to blyme ! It 
 would 'ave lighted up a 'appy 'ome if I 'adn't been a barmy 
 idiot. It would 'ave showed me the face of my 'usband leanin' 
 to kiss me in our blessed marriage-bed, an' my baby smilin' in 
 its cradle-sleep 'ard by. ... O ! O ! " She choked and 
 clutched her bosom, and her voice rose in a throaty screech of 
 incipient hysteria " An' I've left my own sweet, unweaned 
 boy to come and say these words to you. . . . An' the darlin* 
 darlin' fightin' with the bottle they're tryin' to give 'im, and 
 roarin' for 'is mam. . . . And my breasts as 'ard as stones, an* 
 throbbin'. . . . Gawd 'elp me 1 " She panted and fought and 
 choked, striving for speech. 
 
 " Keep your hair on," advised W. Keyse in a hoarse whisper. 
 She turned on him like a tigress, her eyes flaming under her 
 straightened fringe. 
 
 "Keep yours! I've come to speak, and speak I mean to 
 for the sake of the best man Gawd's made for a 'undred years. 
 Bar one, you says, but bar none, says I, an' charnce it! Since 
 the day 'e stood up for you in that Dutch saloon-bar at Guel- 
 dersdorp, what is there we don't owe to 'im you and me, and 
 all the blooming crew of us? And because 'e'll tyke no thanks, 
 'e gits ingratitude the dirtiest egg the Devil ever hatched." 
 
 "Cripps!" gasped W. Keyse, awe-stricken by this lofty 
 flight of rhetoric. Ignoring him, she pursued her way. 
 
 " You're a beautiful young lydy " her tone softened from 
 its strenuous pitch " wot 'ave 'ad a disappointment, like many 
 of us 'ave at the start. You'd set your 'art on Another One, 
 : E got killed, an' you married the Doctor but it's never bin 
 no real marriage. You've ate 'is bread, as the sayin' is, an' give 
 'im a stone. An' e's beat 'is pore 'art to bloody rags agynst it 
 d'y after d'y, an' night after night ! I seen it, I tell you ! " 
 she shrilled "I seen it wiv me own eyes! You pretty, silly 
 kid! Don't you know wot 'arm you're doing? You crooil 
 byby! Do you reckon Gawd gave you the man to torture an* 
 break an' spoil ? " 
 
 A hand imperatively clapped over the mouth of Mrs. Keyse, 
 stemmed the torrent of her eloquence. 
 
 "Dry up! You've said enough," ordered her spouse. 
 
 "Do not stop her!" Lynette said, without removing her
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 597 
 
 fascinated eyes from the Pythoness. " Let her tell me every- 
 thing that she has seen and knows." 
 
 " I seen the Doctor many, many times," the woman went 
 on, as W. Keyse reluctantly ungagged her, " watchin' Keyse 
 and me in our poor 'ome-life together with the eyes of a 
 starvin' dog lookin' at a bone. You ought to know 'ow starvin' 
 'urts. . . ." The strenuous voice soared and quivered. " You 
 learned that at Gueldersdorp. Yet you can see your 'usband 
 dyin' of 'unger, an' never put out your 'and. Dyin* fir want 
 of a kiss an' a bit o' cuddle that's the kind o' dyin' I mean 
 dyin' for what Gawd gives to the very brutes He myde. Seems 
 to you I talk low! . . . Well, there's nothink lower than 
 Nature, An She Goes As 'Igh As 'Eaven!" said Emigration 
 Jane. 
 
 The wide, sweeping gesture \vith which the shabby little 
 woman took in land and sea and sky was quite noble and in- 
 spiring to witness. And now the tears were running down her 
 face, and her voice lost its raucous shrillness, and became plain- 
 tive, and even soft. 
 
 " I'm to tell you everythink I've seen, an' know about the 
 Doctor. . . . I've seen 'im age, age, a bit more every d'y. I've 
 seen 'im waste, waste, with loneliness and trouble never turn- 
 in' bitter on accounts of it never grudgin' 'elp 'e could give 
 to man or woman or kid. Late on the night you left 'ome I 
 see 'im come up to your bedroom. E' switched on the light. 
 'E forgot the blinds was up. 'E looked round, all 'aggard an' 
 lost and wildlike, before 'e dropped down cryin' beside the 
 bed. . . ." 
 
 She sobbed, and dropped on her own knees in the sand among 
 the prickly yellow dwarf roses, weeping quite wildly and wring- 
 ing her hands. 
 
 " The mornin' found 'im there. Six weeks ago that was ; an' 
 every night since then it's bin the syme gyme. Never the blinds 
 left up since that first time, but always light, and his shadow 
 moves about. An' in my bed I wake a-cryin' so, an' don't, know 
 which of 'em I'm cryin' for the lonely shadow or the lonely 
 man " 
 
 She could not go on, and the man took up the tale. 
 
 " She's told you true. Maybe we'd never 'ave come but for 
 the feelin' that things was workin' up to wot the pypers call a 
 Domestic Tragedy. Or at the best the break-up of a 'Ome. 
 That's wot my wife she kep' stuffin' into me," said W. Keyse. 
 " An' strewth ! when the Doctor sent for me an' pyde me orf
 
 598 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 . . . full wages right on up to the end of the year, an f t%e 
 syme to Morris an' the 'ouse'old staff, tellin' us e's goin' on a 
 voyage, I s'ys to 'er, ' It's come ! ' : 
 
 " On a voyage! Where? " 
 
 "Oh, carn't you guess?" cried the woman on the ground, 
 desperately looking up with tragic eyes out of a swollen, tear- 
 stained face. 
 
 A mist came before Lynette's vision, and a sudden tremor 
 shook her like a reed. She swayed as though the ground had 
 heaved beneath her, but she would not fall. She choked back 
 the cry that had risen in her throat. This was the time t act, 
 not the time to weep for him. She knelt an instant by the 
 woman on the ground, put her arms round her, kissed her wet 
 cheek, and then rose up, pale and calm and collected, saying to 
 Keyse : 
 
 " Take her to the Plas. Ask for Mrs. Pugh, the house- 
 keeper. She is to prepare a room for you; you are to break- 
 fast, and rest all day, and return to London by the night mail. 
 God-bye! God bless you both! I was going to him to-night 
 at latest. ... I am going to him now. . . . Pray that he 
 is alive when I reach him. But he will be. God is good ! " 
 
 Her face was transfigured by the new light that shone in 
 it. She was strong, salient, resourceful no longer the willowy 
 girl. She was moving from them with her long swift step, 
 when W. Keyse recovered himself. 
 
 " 'Old 'ard! Beg pardon, ma'am; but 'ave you the spon- 
 dulics?" He blushed at her puzzled look and amended: 
 
 " Money enough upon you to pay the railway-fare?" 
 
 She lifted a little gold-netted purse attached to her neck- 
 chain. 
 
 " Five pounds. My maid is to follow. You know Marie. 
 You will let her travel with you ? " 
 
 " Righto! But you'll want a wrap, coat or shawl, or some- 
 think. Midnight before you gits in if you catch this next up- 
 Express. . . . Watto! Give us 'old o' this 'ere, Missus! You 
 can 'ave mine instead. . . ." 
 
 "Please, no! I need nothing . . . nothing!" She stayed 
 his savage attack on the buttons of Mrs. Keyse's green-and- 
 yellow ulster by holding out her watch. " How much time 
 have I left to catch the up-Express? " 
 
 " Eight minutes. By Cripps! you'll 'ave to run for it." 
 
 She waved her white hand and was gone, swiftly as a bird 
 or a deer.
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 599 
 
 " They've signalled ! " he announced after a breathless inter- 
 val, during which the slender flying figure grew smaller upon 
 the distant sight. It vanished, and a thin, nearing screech an- 
 nounced the up-Express. His wife jumped up and clutched 
 him. 
 
 " William ! Suppose she's lost it ! " 
 
 " Garn! No fear! " scoffed W. Keyse. 
 
 As he scoffed he was full of fear. They heard the clanking 
 stoppage, the shrill whistle of departure. They looked breath- 
 lessly towards the green wood that fringed the cliff-base under 
 the Castle head. The iron way ran through the belt of trees. 
 The Express rushed through, broke roaring upon their unim- 
 peded vision, devoured the gleaming line of metals that lay 
 between wood and tunnel, and left them with the taste of cin- 
 dery steam in their open mouths, and the memory of a white 
 handkerchief waved at a carriage window by a slender hand. 
 
 " It's a'right, ole girl," said W. Keyse, beaming. " Come on 
 up to the 'ouse. I could do wiv a bit o' peck, an' I lay so could 
 you. Lumme! " His triumphant face fell by the fraction of an 
 inch. " What'll she do when she lands in 'ome, wivout a 
 woman to git. a cup o' tea for 'er? or curl 'er 'air, or undo 'er 
 st'yl'yces an' things?" 
 
 " She'll do wot other young wimmen does under sim'lar 
 circumstances," said Mrs. Keyse enigmatically. She added: 
 " If she 'as luck, she'll 'ave a man for 'er maid, an' if she 'as 
 sense, she'll reckon the swop a good one." 
 
 LXXII 
 
 UNTIL the actual moment of their parting at Euston, Saxham 
 had never fully realized the anguish of the last moment when 
 Lynette's face should pass for ever out of his thirsting sight. 
 
 It was going. . . . He quickened his long strides to keep up 
 with it. He must have called to her, for she came hurriedly 
 to the corridor-window, her sweet cheeks suffused with lovely 
 glowing colour, her sweet eyes shining, her small gloved hand 
 held frankly out. He gripped it, uttered some incoherency 
 what, he could not remember was shouted at by a porter with 
 a greasy lamp-truck, cannoned heavily against a man with a 
 basket of papers, awakened with a great pang to the knowledge 
 that she was gone. And the great, bare, dirty, populous glass-
 
 6oo ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 hive of Euston, that has been the forcing-house of so many sor- 
 rowful partings, held another breaking heart. 
 
 In the days that followed he saw his private patients as 
 usual, and operated upon a regular mid-week morning at St. 
 Stephen's, whose senior surgeon had recently resigned. The 
 rest of the time he spent in making his arrangements. 
 
 Sanely, logically, methodically, everything had been thought 
 out. Major Wrynche was to be her guardian, co-trustee with 
 Lord Castleclare, and executor of the Will. It left her, simply 
 and unconditionally, everything of which Saxham was possessed. 
 She would live with the Wrynches until she married again. 
 His agents were instructed to find a tenant for the house, and 
 privately a purchaser for the practice. They wrote to him of a 
 client already found. Matters were progressing steadily. Very 
 soon now the desired end. 
 
 His table-lamp burned through the nights as he made up his 
 ledgers and settled his accounts. In leisure moments he read 
 in the intolerable book of the Past of all its sorrows and fail- 
 ures, its frantic follies and its besotted sins. Memory omitted 
 nothing. Not a blot upon those sordid pages was spared him. 
 It was not possible for an instant to turn away his eyes. His 
 mental clarity was unrelieved by weariness. No shadow 
 dimmed the keen crystal of his brain. He was at tension, like 
 a bowstring that is stretched continually. He realized this, 
 thinking: "Presently I will cut the bow-string, and the bow 
 shall have the rest. Even if my boasted will-power reasserted 
 itself even if I rose triumphant, for the second time, cured of 
 my vile craving, I do not the less owe my debt to the woman 
 I have married. I promised her that I would die rather than 
 fail her. I failed her. There is no excuse ! " 
 
 LXXIII 
 
 THE West End pavements were shining wet. Belated cabs 
 spun homewards with sleepy revellers. Neat motor-broughams 
 slid between the kerbs and rounded corners at unrebuked ex- 
 cess-speeds, winking their blazing head-lights at drowsy police- 
 men muffled in oilskin capes. On all these accustomed things 
 the blue-white arc-lights shone. 
 
 The most belated of all the hansom cabs in London stopped 
 at the door of the house in Harley Street as the narrow strip 
 of sky between the grim, drab-faced houses began t.o be dappled
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 601 
 
 with the leaden-grey of dawn. A faint moon reeled westwards, 
 hunted by sable shapes of screaming terror, pale Venus cling- 
 ing to her tattered robe. The house was all black and silent, 
 a dead face with blinded windows. Did Saxham wake behind 
 them? Or did he sleep, not to wake again? 
 
 Lynette tried her latchkey. The unchained door swung 
 backwards. She passed into the house silently, a tall, slender 
 shape. A light was shining under the consulting-room door. 
 Her heart leaped to greet it. She kissed her hand to it, and 
 turned, moving noiselessly, and put up the chain of the hall- 
 door. She felt for the switch of the electric light, and turned 
 it on. 
 
 She was jarred and aching and weary with her journey ; but 
 it was a very fair woman whom she saw reflected in the hall 
 mirror as she unpinned her hat and tossed it upon the hall- 
 table, and passed on to the consulting-room door a woman 
 whose face was strange to herself, with that new fire and de- 
 cision, and strength of purpose in it; a woman with glowing 
 roses of colour in her cheeks, and eager, shining eyes. 
 
 All through the long hours of the journey she had pictured 
 him, her husband, bending over his work, sleeping in his chair, 
 or in his bed. Yet behind these pictures was another image 
 that started through their lines and colours dreadfully, per- 
 sistently, and the image was that of a dead man. She thrust 
 it from her for the hundredth time, as the door-handle yielded 
 to her touch. She went into the room. Saxham was not there. 
 
 The lamp shed its circle of light upon the consulting-room 
 table. The armchair stood aside, as though hastily pushed 
 back. . . . Signs of his recent presence were visible. The 
 fireplace was heaped high with the ashes of burned papers; 
 the acrid smell of their burning hung still on the close air. 
 
 She glanced back at the table. All its drawers stood open. x 
 Ledgers and case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed. A thick 
 packet, heavily sealed, was addressed in Saxham's small, firm 
 handwriting to Major Bingham Wrynche, Plas Bendigaid, 
 Herion, South Wales. There were other letters in an orderly 
 pile. 
 
 She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name. 
 She took it and kissed it, and put it in her breast. There was 
 an enclosure, heavy, and of oval shape. She wondered what 
 it might be. As she did so, she looked at the letter hers had 
 covered, and read what was written on the cover in the small, 
 firm hand :
 
 602 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 "'To the Coroner.' . . . Merciful God! . . ." 
 
 The cry broke from her without her knowledge. The room 
 rang with it as she turned and ran. With the nightmare- 
 feeling of running up dream-stairs, of feeling nothing tangible 
 under her footsteps, with the dreadful certainty that of all those 
 crowding pictures of him seen through the long hours in the 
 racing Express, only the one that she had not dared to look 
 at was the real, true picture of Saxham now. 
 
 Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted 
 like the dream-woman in her dream. From solid cubes of dark- 
 ness to grey landing-glimmers. To the third-story bedroom 
 that had never been done up. In the company of Little Miss 
 Muffet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and Georgy Porgy, 
 would he be lying, cold and ghastly, with a wound across his 
 throat? 
 
 But the room was unoccupied; the bed had not been slept 
 in. Pale dawn peeping in at the corners of the scanty blinds 
 assured her of that. Where might she find him? Where 
 seek him? 
 
 Fool! said a voice within her; there is but one answer to 
 such a question. Where has he gone night after night? 
 Coward, you knew, and yet avoided. . . . What threshold 
 has he crossed when the world was sleeping round him? By 
 whose vacant pillow has his broken heart sought vain relief in 
 tears ? 
 
 She passed downstairs, gliding noiselessly over the thick 
 carpets, and went into the room it had been his pleasure to fur- 
 nish and decorate as his wife's boudoir. Its seashell pinkness 
 was merged in darkness, faintly striped by the grey dawn- 
 glimmer, but the door of the bedroom that opened from it 
 was ajar. Light edged the heavy fold of the portiere curtain 
 and made a pool upon the carpet. She held her breath as she 
 stole to the door, and, trembling, looked in. He was there, 
 kneeling by the bed. His heavily-shouldered black figure made 
 a blotch upon the dainty white and azure draperies; his arms 
 were outflung upon the silken counterpane. 
 
 A rush of thanks sprang from her full heart to Heaven as 
 she heard the heavy sighing breaths that proved him living yet. 
 
 She would have gone to him and touched him then, but the 
 sound of his voice took courage from her, and drew her 
 strength away. He spoke, lifting his face to the ivory Cruci- 
 fix that hung upon the wall above the bed-head. It was a voice 
 of groanings rather than the quiet voice with which she was
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 603 
 
 familiar. She realized that a soul in mortal anguish was speak- 
 ing aloud to God. 
 
 " I cannot live ! " groaned Saxham. " I am weary, body 
 and spirit. What I have borne I have borne in the hope of lay- 
 ing my burden down. All is ready; I have cleared the way; 
 my loins are girded for departure. All I asked was to lie down 
 in the earth and wake again no more. All I asked and what 
 happens? My dead faith quickens again in me. I must bow 
 my neck once more to the yoke of the Inconceivable I must 
 perforce believe in TTiee again. I hear the voice of the pale 
 thorn-crowned Victim, saying, ' I am Thy God who lived and 
 suffered and died for thee. Live on, then, and suffer also, and 
 pass to the Life Eternal when thine hour comes.' O God! 
 my God! have I not earned deliverance? Have I not borne 
 anguish enough ? " 
 
 His fierce, upbraiding voice died out in inarticulate mutter- 
 ings. His head fell forwards upon his arms. Presently he 
 lifted it, and cried out, as if replying to some unseen speaker: 
 
 " If a self-sought death entails eternal torment, am I not in 
 hell here upon earth? How else, when to live is to hold her 
 in bondage, knowing that she longs and pines to be free? And 
 yet, to go out into the dark and leave her! never again to see 
 her! never more to feel the light of her eyes flow into me! 
 Never to hear her voice to be of my own deed separate from 
 her throughout Eternity that were of all the judgments that 
 are Thine to scourge with the most terrible that Thou canst 
 lay upon my soul ! " 
 
 A sob tore him. He moaned out brokenly: 
 
 " Give me a sign, if Thou art indeed merciful ! Show me 
 that there is relenting in Thee! Grant me the hope, at least, 
 that my great renunciation may open a gate by which after 
 cycles of expiatory suffering, I may at last pass through to 
 where she dwells in Thy Brightness. Give me to see her 
 face with a smile on it to touch her hand after all after 
 all! The lips I have never kissed, may they not be mine, O 
 God mine one day in Heaven? If Thou art Love, there 
 should be love there . . ." 
 
 She glided over the deep carpet, stretched out a timid hand, 
 and touched his shoulder. He lifted his great square head, 
 and slowly looked round. The black hair, mingled with white, 
 clung damp to the broad forehead. His eyes were bloodshot, 
 strained, and haggard, and wild. Sorrow was charted deep 
 upon the haggard features. Amazement struck them into folly
 
 604 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 as he started up, stammering out her name, and clutching for 
 support at the brass rail that was at the foot of the bed. 
 
 "Lynette! You. ... It is you? . . ." He shook, 
 staring at her with dilated eyes. 
 
 " Owen, you are ill. You speak and look so strangely. It 
 is me really me ! " she said, trying to speak calmly through 
 the tumult of her heart. 
 
 " I am not. ill. How is it that you are here ? " 
 
 He lifted a hand to his strained and smarting eyes and moved 
 it to and fro before them. He was staring at her still, but 
 with pupils that were less dilated, and the veins upon his broad 
 forehead were no longer purple now. 
 
 " Have I talked nonsense ? I had dozed, and you startled 
 me coming upon me. . . . Why have you ? . . ." He strove 
 to speak and look as usual. " Has anything happened that 
 you have come back ? " 
 
 She pressed her hands together, wrestling for collected 
 thought and clear, explicit utterance, though the room rocked 
 about her, and the floor seemed to rise and fall beneath her 
 feet. 
 
 " Something happened. I have come back from Wales to 
 tell you that I ... I cannot live upon your friendship any 
 longer. I I must have more, or I shall die ! " 
 
 He knew all. She had met the man whose look and breath 
 and touch had revealed to her her own misery. Chained to 
 her harsh yoke-fellow; denied Love's bread and wine of life. 
 . . . He looked at her, and answered coldly: 
 
 "You shall not die. You shall be free. If you had waited 
 until to-morrow " 
 
 " It is already day," she told him, and, as though to con- 
 firm her, a neighbouring steeple-clock clanged twice. He 
 moved uneasily as his eyes fell on the disordered coverlet, half 
 dragged from the bed and trailing on the floor. They shunned 
 hers as he said, a dark flush rising through his haggard pallor: 
 
 " I beg your pardon for the intrusion here. But you were 
 away. ... I could not sleep, and the house was lonely. 
 . . . Is your maid with you? Surely you are not alone?" 
 
 She bent her head with a faint smile. 
 
 " Quite alone. I did not wish for a companion." 
 
 " It was not wise " he began, and took a step door-Wards. 
 
 " I will call one of the servants," he added, and was going, 
 when he remembered, and stopped, saying hoarsely: 
 
 " I forgot. They are gone. I have sent them all away."
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 605 
 
 She looked at him in silence. He continued: 
 
 " I have paid and dismissed them. You will think it curious 
 you will know the reason later I have written to you to ex- 
 plain." 
 
 " I found upon your table a letter addressed to me," she said. 
 He started, knitting his black brows. 
 
 " You have not read it ? " he asked, breathing quickly. 
 
 " Not yet." She touched her bosom, where the letter lay. 
 " I have it here." 
 
 "Please do not open it. Give me back the letter!" He 
 stretched out his hand to take it, and breathed more freely 
 when she drew it out and gave it to him. And a sweet wild 
 pang shot through him; the paper was so warm and fragrant 
 from the nest where it had lain so short a time. But he 
 mastered the emotion and tore open the envelope. He took 
 from it the enclosure, wrapped in folds of tissue-paper, and put 
 it in her hand, saying, as he thrust the letter in his coat-pocket: 
 11 There is something that by right is yours." 
 
 " Mine? . . ." She unrolled the tissue-paper, and the 
 brilliants that were set about the miniature sent spirts of white 
 and green and rosy fire between the slender, ivory-hued fingers 
 that turned it about. She gave a little gasping cry of recog- 
 nition : 
 
 " It is me? How could you have managed ?" Then, 
 
 as the sweet grey eyes of fair dead Lucy smiled up into her 
 own: " I do not know how I am sure of it," she said, with 
 a catching in her breath, " but this must be my mother! " 
 
 Saxham bent his head in answer to her look. His eyes bad* 
 her question no farther. She faltered: 
 
 " May I not know how it came into your hands? " 
 " Through the death," Saxham answered, " of an evil man v 
 You know his name. He probably robbed your father of that 
 miniature with other things; but I can only surmise this. I 
 cannot positively say." 
 
 " You speak of my father." Her face was quivering, her 
 eyes entreated. " Tell me what you know of him, and of " 
 she kissed the miniature, and held it to her cheek "of my 
 mother." 
 
 " Your father," said Saxham, " was an officer and a gentle- 
 man. The surname that you exchanged for mine, poor child's 
 was his. His Christian name is engraved there " he pointed 
 to the inner rim of the band of brilliants " with that of the 
 lady who was your mother. _She \vas_ beautiful ; she was tender
 
 606 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 and devoted ; she loved your father well enough to give up every 
 social aim and every worldly advantage for his sake. She died 
 loving him. He died I should not wonder if he died of 
 sorrow for her loss. For hearts can break, though the Faculty 
 deny it." 
 
 He swung about to leave the room. She was murmuring 
 over her new-found treasure. 
 
 " ' Lucy to Richard ' . . . ' Richard ' . . ." she repeated. 
 A wave of roseate colour broke over her with the memory of 
 the hand that had touched and the voice that had spoken to her 
 in her beatific vision of the previous morning, when the be- 
 loved had come back from Paradise to lay a charge upon her 
 child. 
 
 " My father knew the Mother." It was not a question, it 
 was a statement of the fact. Saxham wondered at the assured 
 tone as he told her: 
 
 " It is true. They had been friends in the world they 
 both gave up afterwards the man for the love that is of earth, 
 the woman for the love of Heaven." 
 
 " She never told me then, but she must have known who I 
 was from the beginning," Lynette ventured. " She gave me 
 the surname of Mildare because it belonged to me. Do not you 
 think so too?" 
 
 Saxham made no answer. He swung about to leave the 
 room. She slipped the miniature into her bosom, where his 
 letter had lain, and asked: 
 
 " Where are you going? " 
 
 He answered, with his eyes avoiding hers: 
 
 " You have been travelling all night ; you must be tired and 
 hungry. Go to bed and try to rest, while I forage for you 
 downstairs. You shall not suffer for lack of attendance, I am 
 quite a good cook, as you shall find presently. When you have 
 eaten you must sleep, and then we will talk of your returning 
 home to your friends." 
 
 " Are not you my chief friend ? " she asked. " Is not. this 
 my home ? " 
 
 He avoided her look, replying awkwardly: 
 
 " Hardly, when there are no servants to wait upon 
 you!" 
 
 " May I not know why you sent them away? " 
 
 He said, his haggard profile turned to her, a muscle of his 
 pale cheek twitching: 
 
 "I am going away myself: that is the reason why. All
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 607 
 
 debts are paid. I have completed all the arrangements, en- 
 tailing the minimum of annoyance upon you." 
 
 " May I not come with you upon your voyage? " 
 
 His eyes were still averted as his grey lips answered: 
 
 " No. I am going where you cannot come." 
 
 " Owen, tell me where you are going? " 
 
 Her tone of entreaty knocked at the door of his barred heart. 
 He winced palpably. " Excuse me," he said, and took another 
 step towards the door. She stopped him with: 
 
 " You are not excused from answering my question ! " 
 
 " I am going just to get you some breakfast," said Saxham 
 curtly, " and then to find a woman to attend upon you 
 here." 
 
 " I need no breakfast, thanks. I want no attendant." 
 
 "You must have someone," said Saxham brusquely. 
 
 " I must have your answer," she said in a tone quite new 
 to him. " What is your secret purpose? What are you hiding 
 from me in that closed hand ? " 
 
 He moved his left hand slightly, undoing the fingers and 
 giving a glimpse of the empty palm. 
 
 " Not that hand. The other." She pointed to the clenched 
 right. How tall she had grown, and how womanly ! " Love 
 has done this ! " was his aching thought. She seemed a princess 
 of faery, fresh from a bath of magic waters. Her very gait 
 was changed, her every gesture seemed new. Purpose and de- 
 cision and quiet self-control breathed from her; her voice had 
 tones in it unheard of him before. Her eyes were radiant as 
 he had never yet seen them, golden stars shining in a pale glory 
 that was her face. . . . 
 
 " All that for the other man ! Well, let him have it!" 
 thought Saxham, and involuntarily glanced at his clenched 
 right hand. 
 
 " Please open it and show me what you have there," she 
 begged him. 
 
 Her tones were full of pleading music. His face hardened 
 grimly to withstand. His muscular fingers closed in a vice- 
 like grip over what he held. But she moved to him with a 
 whisper of soft trailing garments, and took the shut hand in 
 both her own. She bent her exquisite head and kissed it, and 
 Saxham's fingers of iron were no more than wax. Something 
 clicked in his throat as they opened, that was like the turning 
 of a rusty lock. And the little blue phial, with the yellow 
 poison-label, gave up his deadly intention to her eyes. She
 
 6o8 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 cried out and snatched it, and flung it. away from her. It fell 
 soundlessly on the soft carpet, and rolled under a chair. 
 
 " Owen! You would have . . . done that? . . ." 
 
 Divine reproach was in the face she turned on his. . . . 
 He snarled: 
 
 " It would have been done if you had not come back." 
 
 "I thank our Lord I came! ... It is His doing! Once 
 He had sent me knowledge, I could not stay away. ... For, 
 Owen, I have made a discovery. . . ." 
 
 " Yes." He laughed harshly. " As I knew you would one 
 day. Never was I fool enough to doubt what, would come." 
 
 She put both her hands to her lips and kissed them, and 
 held them out to him. He cried out: 
 
 "What is this? What interlude of folly are you playing? 
 It was your freedom you came to demand. You have not told 
 who the man you love is. I do not ask I will not even 
 know ! He is your choice ; that is enough." 
 
 " He is my choice! " Her bosom heaved to the time of her 
 quickened breathing. The splendid colour rose over the edge 
 of the lace scarf that was loosely knotted about her sweet 
 throat, and surged to the pure temples, and climbed to the 
 line of the rich red-brown hair. 
 
 " You will soon be free to tell the world so. Marry him," 
 said Saxham, " and forget the dreary months dragged out be- 
 side the sot. For I who promised you I would never fail you ; 
 I who told you so confidently that I was cured of the accursed 
 liquor-crave; I well, I reckoned without my host " 
 
 His laugh jarred her heartstrings. She cried out hotly: 
 
 " You did not deceive me wilfully. You believed what you 
 said!" 
 
 " I believed . . . and the first snare set for me tripped my 
 heels up," said Saxham. " I paid the penalty of being cock- 
 sure. And I had not the common decency to die then and re- 
 lease you. True, there were reasons they are swept away 
 now. ... I sent, you to Wales that I might be free of the 
 sight of you, that I might end the sordid comedy and have 
 done. You have come too soon. There's no more to be said 
 than that!" 
 
 " There is this to be said. . . ." 
 
 She came towards him, her tender eyes wooing his. Her lips 
 were parted, her breath came in sighs. 
 
 "What you have told me is sorrowful, but not. hopeless. 
 iYou were cured once you will be cured again. And I will
 
 ONE BRAVER THING 609 
 
 help you comfort you suffer with you and pray for you. 
 You shall never be alone, my husband, any more." 
 
 He was melting. His hard blue eyes had the softening 
 gleam of tears. He stretched out his hands and took hers, hold- 
 ing them close. He stooped, and let his burning lips rest on 
 the cool, fragrant flesh of hers, and said tenderly: 
 
 " Dear saint, sweet would-be martyr, you shall not sacrifice 
 your long life's happiness to me. Rather than live on sane 
 and sober, to see you famishing beside me for the want of 
 Love, I would die a thousand deaths, Lynette. Try to be- 
 lieve it. You shall be free. You must be free, my child ! " 
 
 She winced as though he had stabbed her, and cried out: 
 
 " Why do you harp continually upon your death ? I will 
 not listen to you. If I do not desire to be ' free,' as you term 
 it, what barrier is there between us now?" 
 
 He said, amazed: 
 
 " What barrier? Do you ask what barrier? Your love 
 for that other man ! " 
 
 " There is no other man ! " She looked him full in the 
 eyes now, with a lovely colour dyeing her sweet cheeks, and 
 an exquisite quivering wistfulness about her mouth. She 
 moved so near that her fragrant breath fanned warm upon his 
 eyelids. " There is no man but you there will never be any 
 other man. . . . Dearest " her hands were on his shoulders ; 
 her bosom rose and fell close to his broad breast " I have 
 been very slow at learning. But Owen ! I love you as your 
 wife should love ! " 
 
 "You cannot! " He stepped back sharply, and her hands 
 fell from him. " You shall not ! I am not. worthy. I 
 thought so once. ... I know better now. Do not deceive 
 yourself. Love cannot be compelled at will, and I have ceased 
 to wish to desire yours. All I want now is rest and silence 
 and forgetfulness where alone they may be found." He drew, 
 a breath of weariness. 
 
 " If you have ceased to wish for love from me, that is my 
 punishment," she said, very pale. " For without yours I can- 
 not live! God hears me speak the truth!" 
 
 "Lynette! . . ." 
 
 He swayed like a tree cut through and falling. She caught 
 his hands, and drew them to her heart. 
 
 " I have been blind and deaf and senseless. I am changed, 
 I am altered I am awake at last! I know how great and 
 precious is the love you have given me. ... Do not tell me it
 
 610 ONE BRAVER THING 
 
 is mine no longer. Owen, if you do that, it is I who shall 
 die!" 
 
 A sob tore its way through him. His great frame quivered. 
 His mask-like immobility broke up ... was gone. Her own 
 tears falling, she stretched her arms to him; yet while his eyes 
 devoured her, his arms hungered for her, he delayed, knitting 
 his brows. She caught a word or two, whispered brokenly. 
 He asked himself: " Can this be Love?" 
 
 "It is Love! Oh, Owen, I kissed you one night, when I 
 found you sleeping. When will you kiss me back again ? " 
 
 He cried out wildly upon God, and fell down upon his knees 
 before her. He reached out groping, desperate arms, and 
 snatched her close. His deep, shuddering breaths vibrated 
 through her; her own knees were trembling, her bosom in 
 storm. She swayed like a young palm nearer and nearer; he 
 felt her hands about his neck, her tears upon his face. 
 
 " Dear love, dearest husband, I have a message for you. 
 Owen, shall I tell you what it is?" 
 
 " Tell me, my heart's beloved," said Saxham in a whisper. 
 
 Their looks united in azure fire and golden. Their breath 
 mingled, their lips were very near. She felt his strength about 
 her; he drank in her sweetness. The kiss, the supreme boon, 
 was as yet withheld. 
 
 She whispered. . . . 
 
 " I awakened in the light of the early morning the morn- 
 ing of the day I came to you. She sat beside me the Mother, 
 Owen! her dear hand on my heart, her dear eyes waiting for 
 mine. She stooped and kissed me ... it was real ... I 
 felt it. She said: 'Love him as I loved your father! Be to 
 a child of his what I have been to you ! " 
 
 His arms wrapped round her, gathered her, enfolded her. 
 His scalding tears wetted her white bosom as she drew the 
 square black head to rest there, and drooped her cheek upon 
 the broad brow. Her rich hair, loosed from its coils, fell in 
 a heavy silken rope upon his shoulder . . . their lips met in 
 the nuptial sacramental kiss. . . . 
 
 THE END
 
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 I rice, Ji. oo. 
 
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 WINDSOR CASTLE. A Historical Romance of the Reignof Henry VIII., 
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 rone was more discreditable than his divorce from Catharine, and his mar- 
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 end Anne Eoleyn was forced to the block to make room for her successor. 
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 c-f the tale, and then impressed with the wealth of detail concerning those 
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 drawn, but painted faithfully and honestly by one who spared neither 
 time nor labor In his efforts to present In this charming love story all that 
 r rice in blood and tears which the Carolinians paid as their share in the 
 winning of the republic. 
 
 Take it all in all, "Horseshoe Robinson" is a work which should be 
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 story, but because of the wealth of valuable information concerning the 
 colonists which it contains. That It has been brought out once ore, well 
 illustrated, is something which will give pleasure to thousands who have 
 long desired an opportunity to read the story again, and to the many who 
 bave tried vainly in these latter days to procure a copy that they might 
 read it for the first time. 
 
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 filled with delicate fancies, such as seemingly array themselves anew each 
 time one reads them. One sees the "sea like an unbroken mirror all 
 around the pine-girt, lonely shores of Orr's Island," and straightway 
 comes "the heavy, hollow moan of the surf on the beach, like the wild 
 sngry howl of some savage animal." 
 
 Who can read of the beginning of that sweet life, named Mara, which 
 came Into this world under the very shadow of the Death angel's wings, 
 \vithout having an intense desire to know how the premature bud blos- 
 somed? Again and again one lingers over the descriptions of the char- 
 acter of that baby boy Moses, who came through the tempest, amid the 
 angry billows, pillowed on his dead mother's breast 
 
 There Is no more fai'thful portrayal of New England life than that 
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 Good Fiction Worth Reading. 
 
 A series of romances containing several of the old favorites in the field 
 of historical fiction, replete with powerful romances of love and diplomacy 
 that excel in thrilling and absorbing interest. 
 
 GUY FAWKES. A Romance of the Gunpowder Treason. By Win. Harri- 
 8on Ainsworth. Cloth, izmo. with four illustrations by George CruLkshank. 
 Price, $1.00. 
 
 The "Gunpowder Plot" was a modest attempt to blow up Parliament, 
 the King and his Counsellors. James of Scotland, then King of England, 
 was weak-minded and extravagant. He hit upon the efficient scheme of 
 extorting money from the people by imposing taxes on the Catholics. In 
 their natural resentment to this extortion, a handful of bold spirits con- 
 cluded to overthrow the government. Finally the plotters were arrested, 
 and the King put to torture Guy Fawkes and the other prisoners with, 
 royal vigor. A very intense love tory runs through the entire romance. 
 
 THE SPIRIT OP THE BORDER. A Romance of the Early Settlers in the 
 Ohio Valley. By Zane Grey. Cloth, ismo. with four illustrations by J. Watson. 
 Davis. Price, |i. oo. 
 
 A book rather out of the ordinary Is this "Spirit of the Border." Th 
 main thread of the story has to do with the work of the Moravian mis- 
 eionaries in the Ohio Valley. Incidentally the reader is given details of the 
 frontier life of those hardy pioneers who broke the wilderness for the plant- 
 ing of this great nation. Chief among these, as a matter of course, ia 
 Lewis Wetzel, one of the most peculiar, and at the same time the most 
 admirable of all the brave men who spent their lives battling with the 
 avage foe, that others might dwell in comparative security. 
 
 Details of the establishment and destruction of the Moravian "Village 
 of Peace" are given at some length, and with minute description. The 
 efforts to Christianize the Indians are described as they never have been 
 before, and the author has depicted the characters of the leaders of tha 
 several Indian tribes with great care, which of itself will be of interest td 
 the student. 
 
 By no means least among the charms of the story are the vlvfd word 
 pictures of the thrilling adventures, and the Intense paintings of the beau- 
 ties of nature, as seen in the almost unbroken forests. 
 
 It is the spirit of the frontier which is described, and one can by it, 
 perhaps, the better understand why men, and women, too, willingly braved 
 every privation and danger that the westward progress of the star of em- 
 pire might be the more certain and rapid. A love story, simple and tender, 
 runs through the book. 
 
 RICHELIEU. A tale of France in the reign of King 1/Miis XIIL By G. P. 
 R. James. Cloth, 12010. with four illustrations by J. Vv'atson Davis. Price, 1.00. 
 
 In 1829 Mr. James published his first romance, "Richelieu," and waa 
 recognized at once as one of the masters of the craft. 
 
 In this book he laid the story during those later days of the great car- 
 dinal's life, when his power was beginning to wane, but while it was 
 yet sufficiently strong to pe-mit now and then of volcanic outbursts which 
 overwhelmed foes and carried friends to the topmost wave of prosperity. 
 One of the most striking portions of the story is that of Cinq Mar's conspir- 
 
 For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the pub- 
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 Good Fiction Worth Reading. 
 
 A series of romances containing several of the old favorites in the field 
 of historical fiction, replete with powerful romances of love and diplomacy 
 that excel in thrilling and absorbing interest. 
 
 A COLONIAL. FREE-LANCE. A story of American Colonial Times. By 
 Chauncey C. Hotchkiss. Cloth, I2mo. with four illustrations by J. "Watson 
 Davis. Price, fi.oo. 
 
 A book that appeals to Americans as a vivid picture of Revolutionary 
 scenes. The story is a strong one, a thrilling one. It causes the true 
 American to flush with excitement, to devour chapter after chapter, until 
 the eyes smart, and it fairly smokes with patriotism. The love story is a 
 singularly charming idyl. 
 
 THE TOWER OF LONDON. A Historical Romance of the Times of Lady 
 Jane Grey and Mary Tudor. By Win. Harrison Ainsworth. Cloth, izmo. with 
 four illustrations by George Cruikshank. Price, $1.00. 
 
 This romance of the "Tower of London" depicts the Tower as palace, 
 prison and fortress, with many historical associations. The era ia thfl 
 middle of the sixteenth century. 
 
 The story is divided into two parts, one dealing with Lady Jane Grey, 
 and the other with Mary Tudor as Queen, introducing other notable char- 
 acters of the era. Throughout the story holds the interest of the reader 
 in the midst of intrigue and conspiracy, extending considerably over a 
 half a century. 
 
 IN DEFIANCE OF THE KING. A Romance of the American Revolution. 
 By Chauncey C. Hotchkiss. Cloth, I2mo. with four illustrations by J. Watson 
 Davis. Price, |i.oo. 
 
 Mr. Hotchkiss has etched in burning words a. story of Yankee bravery, 
 and true love that thrills from beginning to end, with the spirit of the 
 Revolution. The heart beats quickly, and we feel ourselves taking a 
 part in the exciting scenes described. Hie whole story is so absorbing 
 that you will sit up far into the night to finish it. As a love romance 
 it is charming. 
 
 GARTHOWEN. A story of a Welsh Homestead. By Allen Raine. Cloth, 
 izmo. with four illustrations by J . Watson Davis. Price, Ji.co. 
 
 "This is a little idyl of humble life and enduring love, laid bare before 
 us, very real and pure, which in its telling shows us some strong points of 
 "Welsh character the pride, the hasty temper, the quick dying- out of wrath. 
 We call this a well-written story, interesting alike through Ha 
 romance and its glimpses into another life than ours. A delightful and 
 clever picture of Welsh village life. The result is excellent." Detroit Free 
 Press. 
 
 MIFANWY. The story of a Welsh Singer. By Allan Raine. Cloth, 
 :2mo. with four illustrations by J. Watson Davis. Price, $1.00. 
 
 "This is a love story, simple, tender and pretty as one would care to 
 read. The action throughout is brisk and pleasing; the characters, it is ap- 
 parent at once, are as true to life as though the author had known them 
 all personally. Simple in all its situations, the story is worked up in that 
 touching and quaint strain which never grows wearisome, no matter how 
 often the lights and shadows of love are introduced. It rings true, and 
 does not tax the imagination." Boston Herald. 
 
 For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of price by the 
 lishers, A. L. BURT COMPANY, 52-58 Duaae St., New York,
 
 GOOD FICTION WORTH READING 
 
 A series of romances containing several of the old favor- 
 ites in the field of historical fiction, replete with powerful 
 romances of love and diplomacy that excel in thrilling and 
 absorbing interest. 
 
 ROB OF THE BOWL. A Story of the Early Days of 
 Maryland. By John P. Kennedy. Cloth, 12mo. Four page 
 illustrations by J. Watson Davis. Price, $1.00. 
 
 This story fs an authentic exposition of the manners and customs dur 
 ing Lord Baltimore's rule. The greater portion of the action takes place 
 in St. Mary's the original capital of the State. 
 
 The quaint character of Rob, the loss of whose legs was supplied by a 
 wooden bowl strapped to his thighs, his misfortunes and mother wit, far 
 outshine those fair to look upon. Pirates and smugglers did Rob consort 
 with for gain, and it was to him that Blanche Werden owed her life and 
 her happiness, as the author has told us in such an enchanting manner. 
 
 As a series of pictures of early colonial life in Maryland, "Rob of the 
 Bowl" has no equal. The story is full of splendid action, with a charming 
 love story, and a plot that never looseria the grip of its interest to its last 
 page. 
 
 TICONDEROGA. A Story of Early Frontier Life in the 
 Mohawk Valley. By G. P. R. James. Cloth, 12mo. Four 
 page illustrations by J. Watson Davis. Price, $1.00. 
 
 The setting of the story is decidedly more picturesque than any ever 
 evolved by Cooper. The story is located on the frontier of New York 
 State. The principal characters in the story include an English gentleman, 
 his beautiful daughter, Lord Howe, and certain Indian sachems belonging 
 to the Five Nations, and the story ends with the Battle of Ticonderoga. 
 
 The character of Captain Brooks, who voluntarily decides to sacrifice 
 his own life in order to save the son of the Englishman, is not among thu 
 least of the attractions of this story, which holds the attention of the readar 
 even to the last page. 
 
 Interwoven with the plot is the Indian "blood" law, which demands a 
 life for a life, whether it be that of the murderer or one of his race. A 
 more charming story of mingled love and adventure has never been written 
 than "Ticonderoga." 
 
 MARY DERWENT. A tale of the Wyoming Valley in 
 1778. By Mrs. Ann S. Stephens. Coth, 12mo. Four illustra- 
 tions by J. Watson Davis. Price, $1.00. 
 
 The scene of this fascinating story of early frontier life is laid in the 
 Valley of Wyoming. Aside from Mary Derwent, who is of course the 
 heroine, the story deals with Queen Esther's son, Giengwatah, the Butlers 
 of notorious memory, and the adventures of the Colonists with the Indians. 
 
 Though much is made of the Massacre of Wyoming, a great portion 
 of the tale describes the love making between Mary Derwent's sister, Walter 
 Butler, and one of the defenders of Forty Fort. 
 
 This historical novel stands out bright and pleasing, because of the 
 mystery and notoriety of several of the actors, the tender love scenes, 
 descriptions of the different localities, and the struggles of the settlers. 
 It holds the attention of the reader even to the last page. 
 
 For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of 
 price by the publishers, A. L. BURT COMPANY, 52-58 
 Duane St., New York.
 
 GOOD FICTION WORTH READING 
 
 A series of romances containing several of the old favor- 
 ites in the field of historical fiction, replete with powerful 
 romances of love and diplomacy that excel in thrilling and 
 absorbing interest. 
 
 THE LAST TRAIL. A story of early days in the Ohio 
 Valley. By Zane Grey. Cloth, 12mo. Four page illustra- 
 tions by J. Watson Davis. Price, $1.00. 
 
 "The Last Trail" is a. story of the border. The scene is laid at Fort 
 Henry, where Col. Ebenezer Zane with his family have built up a village 
 despite the attacks of savages and renegades. The Colonel's brother and 
 Wetzel, known as Deathwind by the Indians, are the bordermen who devote 
 their lives to the welfare of the white people. A splendid love story runs 
 through the book. 
 
 That Helen Sheppard, the heroine, should fall in love with such a 
 brave, skilful scout as Jonathan Zane seems only reasonable after his years 
 of association and defense of the people of the settlement from savages and 
 renegades. 
 
 If one has a liking for stories of the trail, where the white man matches 
 brains against savage cunning, for tales of ambush and constant striving for 
 the mastery, "The Last Trail" will be greatly to his liking. 
 
 THE KNIGHTS OF THE HORSESHOE. A tradition- 
 ary tale of the Cocked Hat Gentry in the Old Dominion. By 
 Dr. Wm. A. Caruthers. Cloth, 12mo. Four page illustra- 
 tions by J. Watson Davis. Price, $1.00. 
 
 Many will hail with delight the re-publication of this rare and justly 
 famous story of early American colonial life and old-time Virginian 
 hospitality. 
 
 Much that is charmingly interesting will be found in this tale that so 
 faithfully depicts early American colonial life, and also here is found all 
 the details of the founding of the Tramontane Order, around which has 
 ever been such a delicious flavor of romance. 
 
 Early customs, much love making, plantation life, politics, intrigues, and 
 finally that wonderful march across the mountains which resulted in the 
 discovery and conquest of the fair Valley of Virginia. A rare book filled 
 with a delicious flavor of romance. 
 
 BY BERWEN BANKS. A Romance of Welsh Life. By 
 Allen Raine. Cloth, 12mo. Four page illustrations by J. 
 Watson Davis. Price $1.00. 
 
 It is a tender and beautiful romance of the idyllic. A charming picture 
 of life in a Welsh seaside village. It is something of a prose-poem, true, 
 tender and graceful. 
 
 For sale by all booksellers, or sent postpaid on receipt of 
 price by the publishers, A. L. BURT COMPANY, 52-58 
 Duane St., New York.
 
 POPULAR LITERATURE FOR THE MASSES, 
 COMPRISING CHOICE SELECTIONS FROM THE 
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 ISSUED IN A SUBSTANTIAL AND ATTRACTIVE 
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 HURT'S HOME LIBRARY is a scries which 
 includes the standard works of the world's best literature, 
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 chiefly selections from writers of the most notable 
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 of History, Biography, Philosophy, 
 Travel, Poetry and the Essays. 
 
 A glance at the following annexed 
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 the claim that the publishers make 
 for it that it is the most compre- 
 hensive, choice, interesting, and by 
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 of standard authors for world-wide 
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 commendation, not only of the book trade throughout 
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 interested in the dissemination of instructive, entertaining 
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 Fortunes of Nigel. BY SIR WALTER 
 
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 Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. 
 
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