The Dop Doctor Part 85

Why had she been so bent upon hiding the trail? Why had she distrusted him?

He bent upon one knee in the gra.s.s 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, with great wistful eyes, looking shyly up at him from under their sweeping black lashes. He went on, pointing with a slender gra.s.s-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 apprehension:

"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?"

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 has 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 gra.s.s-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 gra.s.s-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 s.l.u.t, 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 they 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 sc.u.m! But never come near the Little Kopje, because of the spook the Barala boy saw there one night when the moon was big and shining."

He said, with infinite pity in his tone, and a compa.s.sionate 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----"

A spasm contracted her face. At the base of the slender throat something throbbed and throbbed. She whispered brokenly:

"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; her pale and quivering face 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 crunching fangs. And he comprehended all; and understood all, in one lightning leap of intuition, as he saw.

"Hush!" He stopped her with his authoritative eyes and the firm, rea.s.suring pressure of his hand. "Forget that--speak of it no more. Try and tell me who lies here, under these gra.s.ses and flowers that you water every day?"

He moved the hand he held to touch the grave, and the spasm that contracted her features relaxed, and the terror died out of her eyes, as though some soothing, healing virtue were conveyed to her by the mere contact with that sacred earth. He went on:

"She was very n.o.ble, very pure, and very beautiful. Everyone 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 beloved 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 her 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 footsteps of the stranger aside from the hidden nest. He stooped and gathered a blade or two of gra.s.s, 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 hour of deliverance was near. A few hours later the Relief had lamp-signalled brief details of the battle with Huysmans, ending with "Good-night" and the promise to fight a 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 low, sandy mound, 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, pa.s.sed 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 the 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 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 at Washington, 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 Magaliesberg Ranges, that were turquoise-blue as the scillas growing in the South Welsh garden that lies before the window where I write, this variable spring day. But it blew with a most insistent note on the dumpy mound where they have rebuilt the ridiculous, glorious village that gave birth to deeds worthy of the Age Heroic, about whose sand-bagged defences nightly patrolled 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 hors.e.m.e.n and rolling guns, drawn by many horses, and huge-teamed baggage-waggons, eastward over the bleached dust.