Читать книгу The Dop Doctor - Richard Dehan - Страница 4

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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 lady's trunk had been brought from the 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 the patient. He winked to her pleasantly across the bed. But the time was not ripe yet. They must wait awhile. The English traveller was not always 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 comfortless 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 swallow the tabloids of quinine or lithia, and fall back on the hard, coarse pillow, exhausted by the mere effort 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 waken 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 haggard, staring eyes.

One night, while the flat gold hunting-watch ticked above his head in the little embroidered chamois-leather pouch dead 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 dissolution.

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 desire 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 conscience, 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 a relative who was the head of his family, and bore a great historic title—so great that those who spelled it out upon the envelope 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 Downing Street that would set the Government at Cape Town working 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 through the gathering mists of death.

The letter worried Bough. To have the English Government smelling at your heels is no joke, thought he. Any moment the mastiff may grip, and then, if you happen to be an ex-convict and deserter from their Colonial Police, and supposing you have one or two other little things against you … the most honest of speculators being occasionally compelled to dirty his hands, if only to tone down those immaculate extremities to something approaching the colour of other people's—then what becomes of the risky but profitable business of gun-running from the English ports through to the Transvaal?

For 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 Colonies, 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 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 appeal for help had been made to the Powers that were, and the reply received to the now historic telegram, through the Resident Commissioner, has equally become a matter of history.

"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 event of an attack by a hostile force.

Also the military armament of the place was about to be materially increased.

And yet up to the little frontier town upon which so much depended not a single modern gun had been despatched.

An easy prey had the little town upon the flat-topped hill, set in the middle 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 beleaguered town were so many open doors for the enemy. Only upon the threshold of each door stood Fear, and guarded and held the citadel.