The Judgment House by Gilbert Parker (page 6)

“Well, that is not unnatural. I should expect him to do so. I am going to South Africa also.”

For a moment she looked at him without speaking, and her face slowly paled. “You are going to the Front–you?”

“Yes–‘Back to the army again, sergeant, back to the army again.’ I was a gunner, you know, and not a bad one, either, if I do say it.”

“You are going to throw up a great career to go to the Front? When you have got your foot at the top of the ladder, you climb down?” Her voice was choking a little.

He made a little whimsical gesture. “There’s another ladder to climb. I’ll have a try at it, and do my duty to my country, too. I’ll have a double-barrelled claim on her, if possible.”

“I know that you are going because you will not stay when Rudyard goes,” she rejoined, almost irritably.

“What a quixotic idea! Really you are too impossible and wrong-headed.”

He turned an earnest look upon her. “No, I give you my word, I am not going because Rudyard is going. I didn’t know he was going till you told me. I got permission to go three hours after Kruger’s message came.”

“You are only feckless–only feckless, as the Scotch say,” she rejoined with testy sadness. “Well, since everybody is going, I am going too. I am going with a hospital-ship.”

“Well, that would pay off a lot of old debts to the Almighty,” he replied, in kindly taunt.

“I haven’t been worse than most women, Ian,” she replied. “Women haven’t been taught to do things, to pay off their debts. Men run up bills and pay them off, and run them up again and again and pay them off; but we, while we run up bills, our ways of paying them off are so few, and so uninteresting.”

Suddenly she took from her pocket a letter. “Here is a letter for you,” she said. “It was lying on Jasmine’s table the night she was taken ill. I don’t know why I did it, but I suppose I took it up so that Rudyard should not see it; and then I didn’t say anything to Jasmine about it at once. She said nothing, either; but to-day I told her I’d seen the letter addressed to you, and had posted it. I said it to see how she would take it. She only nodded, and said nothing at first. Then after a while she whispered, ‘Thank you, my dear,’ but in such a queer tone. Ian, she meant you to have the letter, and here it is.”

She put it into his hands. He remembered it. It was the letter which Jasmine had laid on the table before him at that last interview when the world stood still. After a moment’s hesitation he put it in his pocket.

“If she wished me to have it–” he said in a low voice.

“If not, why, then, did she write it? Didn’t she say she was glad I posted it?”

A moment followed, in which neither spoke. Lady Tynemouth’s eyes were turned to the window; Stafford stood looking into the fire.

“Tynie is sure to go to South Africa with his Yeomanry,” she continued at last. “He’ll be back in England next week. I can be of use out there, too. I suppose you think I’m useless because I’ve never had to do anything, but you are quite wrong. It’s in me. If I’d been driven to work when I was a girl, if I’d been a labourer’s daughter, I’d have made hats–or cream-cheeses. I’m not really such a fool as you’ve always thought me, Ian; at any rate, not in the way you’ve thought me.”

His look was gentle, as he gazed into her eyes. “I’ve never thought you anything but a very sensible and alluring woman, who is only wilfully foolish at times,” he said. “You do dangerous things.”

“But you never knew me to do a really wrong thing, and if you haven’t, no one has.”

Suddenly her face clouded and her lips trembled. “But I am a good friend, and I love my friends. So it all hurts. Ian, I’m most upset. There’s something behind Adrian Fellowes’ death that I don’t understand. I’m sure he didn’t kill himself; but I’m also sure that some one did kill him.” Her eyes sought his with an effort and with apprehension, but with persistency too. “I don’t care what the jury said–I know I’m right.”

“But it doesn’t matter now,” he answered, calmly. “He will be buried to-morrow, and there’s an end of it all. It will not even be the usual nine days’ wonder. I’d forget it, if I were you.”

“I can’t easily forget it while you remember it,” she rejoined, meaningly. “I don’t know why or how it affects you, but it does affect you, and that’s why I feel it; that’s why it haunts me.”

Gleg appeared. “A gentleman to see you, sir,” he said, and handed Ian a card.

“Where is he?”

“In the dining-room, sir.”

“Very good. I will see him in a moment.”

When they were alone again, Lady Tynemouth held out her hand. “When do you start for South Africa?” she asked.

“In three days. I join my battery in Natal.”

“You will hear from me when I get to Durban,” she said, with a shy, inquiring glance.

“You are really going?”

“I mean to organize a hospital-ship and go.”

“Where will you get the money?”

“From some social climber,” she replied, cynically. His hand was on the door-knob, and she laid her own on it gently. “You are ill, Ian,” she said. “I have never seen you look as you do now.”

“I shall be better before long,” he answered. “I never saw you look so well.”

“That’s because I am going to do some work at last,” she rejoined. “Work at last. I’ll blunder a bit, but I’ll try a great deal, and perhaps I’ll do some good…. And I’ll be there to nurse you if you get fever or anything,” she added, laughing nervously–“you and Tynie.”

When she was gone he stood looking at the card in his hand, with his mind seeing something far beyond. Presently he rang for Gleg.

“Show Mr. Mappin in,” he said.

CHAPTER XXV

WHEREIN THE LOST IS FOUND

In a moment the great surgeon was seated, looking reflectively round him. Soon, however, he said brusquely, “I hope your friend Jigger is going on all right?”

“Yes, yes, thanks to you.”

“No, no, Mr. Stafford, thanks to you and Mrs. Byng chiefly. It was care and nursing that did it. If I could have hospitals like Glencader and hospital nurses like Mrs. Byng and Al’mah and yourself, I’d have few regrets at the end of the year. That was an exciting time at Glencader.”

Stafford nodded, but said nothing. Presently, after some reference to the disaster at the mine at Glencader and to Stafford’s and Byng’s bravery, Mr. Mappin said. “I was shocked to hear of Mr. Fellowes’ death. I was out of town when it happened–a bad case at Leeds; but I returned early this morning.” He paused, inquiringly but Ian said nothing, and he continued, “I have seen the body.”

“You were not at the inquest, I think,” Ian remarked, casually.

“No, I was not in time for that, but I got permission to view the body.”

“And the verdict–you approve?”

“Heart failure–yes.” Mr. Mappin’s lip curled. “Of course. But he had no heart trouble. His heart wasn’t even weak. His life showed that.”

“His life showed–?” Ian’s eyebrows went up.

“He was very much in society, and there’s nothing more strenuous than that. His heart was all right. Something made it fail, and I have been considering what it was.”

“Are you suggesting that his death was not natural?”

“Quite artificial, quite artificial, I should say.”

Ian took a cigarette, and lighted it slowly. “According to your theory, he must have committed suicide. But how? Not by an effort of the will, as they do in the East, I suppose?”

Mr. Mappin sat up stiffly in his chair. “Do you remember my showing you all at Glencader a needle which had on its point enough poison to kill a man?”

“And leave no trace–yes.”

“Do you remember that you all looked at it with interest, and that Mr. Fellowes examined it more attentively than any one else?”

“I remember.”

“Well, I was going to kill a collie with it next day.”

“A favourite collie grown old, rheumatic–yes, I remember.”

“Well, the experiment failed.”

“The collie wasn’t killed by the poison?”

“No, not by the poison, Mr. Stafford.”

“So your theory didn’t work except on paper.”

“I think it worked, but not with the collie.”

There was a pause, while Stafford looked composedly at his visitor, and then he said: “Why didn’t it work with the collie?”

“It never had its chance.”

“Some mistake, some hitch?”

“No mistake, no hitch; but the wrong needle.”

“The wrong needle! I should not say that carelessness was a habit with you.” Stafford’s voice was civil and sympathetic.

“Confidence breeds carelessness,” was Mr. Mappin’s enigmatical retort.

“You were over-confident then?”

“Quite clearly so. I thought that Glencader was beyond reproach.”

There was a slight pause, and then Stafford, flicking away some cigarette ashes, continued the catechism. “What particular form of reproach do you apply to Glencader?”

“Thieving.”

“That sounds reprehensible–and rude.”

“If you were not beyond reproach, it would be rude, Mr. Stafford.”

Stafford chafed at the rather superior air of the expert, whose habit of bedside authority was apt to creep into his social conversation; but, while he longed to give him a shrewd thrust, he forbore. It was hard to tell how much he might have to do to prevent the man from making mischief. The compliment had been smug, and smugness irritated Stafford.

“Well, thanks for your testimonial,” he said, presently, and then he determined to cut short the tardy revelation, and prick the bubble of mystery which the great man was so slowly blowing.

“I take it that you think some one at Glencader stole your needle, and so saved your collie’s life,” he said.

“That is what I mean,” responded Mr. Mappin, a little discomposed that his elaborate synthesis should be so sharply brought to an end.

There was almost a grisly raillery in Stafford’s reply. “Now, the collie–were you sufficiently a fatalist to let him live, or did you prepare another needle, or do it in the humdrum way?”

“I let the collie live.”

“Hoping to find the needle again?” asked Stafford, with a smile.

“Perhaps to hear of it again.”

“Hello, that is rather startling! And you have done so?

“I think so. Yes, I may say that.”

“Now how do you suppose you lost that needle?”

“It was taken from my pocket-case, and another substituted.

“Returning good for evil. Could you not see the difference in the needles?”

“There is not, necessarily, difference in needles. The substitute was the same size and shape, and I was not suspicious.”

“And what form does your suspicion take now?”

The great man became rather portentously solemn–he himself would have said “becomingly grave.” “My conviction is that Mr. Fellowes took my needle.”

Stafford fixed the other with his gaze. “And killed himself with it?”

Mr. Mappin frowned. “Of that I cannot be sure, of course.”

“Could you not tell by examining the body?”

“Not absolutely from a superficial examination.”

“You did not think a scientific examination necessary?”

“Yes, perhaps; but the official inquest is over, the expert analysis or examination is finished by the authorities, and the superficial proofs, while convincing enough to me, are not complete and final; and so, there you are.”

Stafford got and held his visitor’s eyes, and with slow emphasis said: “You think that Fellowes committed suicide with your needle?”

“No, I didn’t say that.”

“Then I fear my intelligence must be failing rapidly. You said–“

“I said I was not sure that he killed himself. I am sure that he was killed by my needle; but I am not sure that he killed himself. Motive and all that kind of thing would come in there.”

“Ah–and all that kind of thing! Why should you discard motive for his killing himself?”

“I did not say I discarded motive, but I think Mr. Fellowes the last man in the world likely to kill himself.”

“Why, then, do you think he stole the needle?”

“Not to kill himself.”

Stafford turned his head away a little. “Come now; this is too tall. You are going pretty far in suggesting that Fellowes took your needle to kill some one else.”

“Perhaps. But motive might not be so far to seek.”

“What motive in this case?” Stafford’s eyes narrowed a little with the inquiry.

“Well, a woman, perhaps.”

“You know of some one, who–“

“No. I am only assuming from Mr. Fellowes’ somewhat material nature that there must be a woman or so.”

“Or so–why ‘or so?'” Stafford pressed him into a corner.

“There comes the motive–one too many, when one may be suspicious, or jealous, or revengeful, or impossible.”

“Did you see any mark of the needle on the body?”

“I think so. But that would not do more than suggest further delicate, detailed, and final examination.”

“You have no trace of the needle itself?”

“None. But surely that isn’t strange. If he had killed himself, the needle would probably have been found. If he did not kill himself, but yet was killed by it, there is nothing strange in its not being recovered.”

Stafford took on the gravity of a dry-as-dust judge. “I suppose that to prove the case it would be necessary to produce the needle, as your theory and your invention are rather new.”

“For complete proof the needle would be necessary, though not indispensable.”

Stafford was silent for an instant, then he said: “You have had a look for the little instrument of passage?”

“I was rather late for that, I fear.”

“Still, by chance, the needle might have been picked up. However, it would look foolish to advertise for a needle which had traces of atric acid on it, wouldn’t it?”

Mr. Mappin looked at Stafford quite coolly, and then, ignoring the question, said, deliberately: “You discovered the body, I hear. You didn’t by any chance find the needle, I suppose?”

Stafford returned his look with a cool stare. “Not by any chance,” he said, enigmatically.

He had suddenly decided on a line of action which would turn this astute egoist from his half-indicated purpose. Whatever the means of Fellowes’ death, by whomsoever caused, or by no one, further inquiry could only result in revelations hurtful to some one. As Mr. Mappin had surmised, there was more than one woman,–there may have been a dozen, of course–but chance might just pitch on the one whom investigation would injure most.

If this expert was quieted, and Fellowes was safely bestowed in his grave, the tragic incident would be lost quickly in the general excitement and agitation of the nation. The war-drum would drown any small human cries of suspicion or outraged innocence. Suppose some one did kill Adrian Fellowes? He deserved to die, and justice was satisfied, even if the law was marauded. There were at least four people who might have killed Fellowes without much remorse. There was Rudyard, there was Jasmine, there was Lou the erstwhile flower-girl–and himself. It was necessary that Mappin, however, should be silenced, and sent about his business.

Stafford suddenly came over to the table near to his visitor, and with an assumed air of cold indignation, though with a little natural irritability behind all, said “Mr. Mappin, I assume that you have not gone elsewhere with your suspicions?”

The other shook his head in negation.

“Very well, I should strongly advise you, for your own reputation as an expert and a man of science, not to attempt the rather cliche occupation of trying to rival Sherlock Holmes. Your suspicions may have some distant justification, but only a man of infinite skill, tact, and knowledge, with an almost abnormal gift for tracing elusive clues and, when finding them, making them fit in with fact–only a man like yourself, a genius at the job, could get anything out of it. You are not prepared to give the time, and you could only succeed in causing pain and annoyance beyond calculation. Just imagine a Scotland Yard detective with such a delicate business to do. We have no Hamards here, no French geniuses who can reconstruct crimes by a kind of special sense. Can you not see the average detective blundering about with his ostentatious display of the obvious; his mind, which never traced a motive in its existence, trying to elucidate a clue? Well, it is the business of the Law to detect and punish crime. Let the Law do it in its own way, find its own clues, solve the mysteries given it to solve. Why should you complicate things? The official fellows could never do what you could do, if you were a detective. They haven’t the brains or initiative or knowledge. And since you are not a detective, and can’t devote yourself to this most delicate problem, if there be any problem at all, I would suggest–I imitate your own rudeness–that you mind your own business.”

He smiled, and looked down at his visitor with inscrutable eyes.

At the last words Mr. Mappin flushed and looked consequential; but under the influence of a smile, so winning that many a chancellerie of Europe had lost its irritation over some skilful diplomatic stroke made by its possessor, he emerged from his atmosphere of offended dignity and feebly returned the smile.

“You are at once complimentary and scathing, Mr. Stafford,” he said; “but I do recognize the force of what you say. Scotland Yard is beneath contempt. I know of cases–but I will not detain you with them now. They bungle their work terribly at Scotland Yard. A detective should be a man of imagination, of initiative, of deep knowledge of human nature. In the presence of a mystery he should be ready to find motives, to construct them and put them into play, as though they were real–work till a clue was found. Then, if none is found, find another motive and work on that. The French do it. They are marvels. Hamard is a genius, as you say. He imagines, he constructs, he pursues, he squeezes out every drop of juice in the orange…. You see, I agree with you on the whole, but this tragedy disturbed me, and I thought that I had a real clue. I still believe I have, but cui bono?”

“Cui bono indeed, if it is bungled. If you could do it all yourself, good. But that is impossible. The world wants your skill to save life, not to destroy it. Fellowes is dead–does it matter so infinitely, whether by his own hand or that of another?”

“No, I frankly say I don’t think it does matter infinitely. His type is no addition to the happiness of the world.”

They looked at each other meaningly, and Mappin responded once again to Stafford’s winning smile.

It pleased him prodigiously to feel Stafford lay a firm hand on his arm and say: “Can you, perhaps, dine with me to-night at the Travellers’ Club? It makes life worth while to talk to men like you who do really big things.”

“I shall be delighted to come for your own reasons,” answered the great man, beaming, and adjusting his cuffs carefully.

“Good, good. It is capital to find you free.” Again Stafford caught the surgeon’s arm with a friendly little grip.

Suddenly, however, Mr. Mappin became aware that Stafford had turned desperately white and worn. He had noticed this spent condition when he first came in, but his eyes now rediscovered it. He regarded Stafford with concern.

“Mr. Stafford,” he said, “I am sure you do not realize how much below par you are…. You have been under great strain–I know, we all know, how hard you have worked lately. Through you, England launches her ship of war without fear of complications; but it has told on you heavily. Nothing is got without paying for it. You need rest, and you need change.”

“Quite so–rest and change. I am going to have both now,” said Stafford with a smile, which was forced and wan.

“You need a tonic also, and you must allow me to give you one,” was the brusque professional response.

With quick movement he went over to Stafford’s writing-table, and threw open the cover of the blotter.

In a flash Stafford was beside him, and laid a hand upon the blotter, saying with a smile, of the kind which had so far done its work–

“No, no, my friend, I will not take a tonic. It’s only a good sleep I want; and I’ll get that to-night. But I give my word, if I’m not all right to-morrow, if I don’t sleep, I’ll send to you and take your tonic gladly.”

“You promise?”

“I promise, my dear Mappin.”

The great man beamed again: and he really was solicitous for his new-found friend.

“Very well, very well–Stafford,” he replied. “It shall be as you say. Good-bye, or, rather, au revoir!”

“A la bonne heure!” was the hearty response, as the door opened for the great surgeon’s exit.

When the door was shut again, and Stafford was alone, he staggered over to the writing-desk. Opening the blotter, he took something up carefully and looked at it with a sardonic smile.

“You did your work quite well,” he said, reflectively.

It was such a needle as he had seen at Glencader in Mr. Mappin’s hand. He had picked it up in Adrian Fellowes’ room.

“I wonder who used you,” he said in a hard voice. “I wonder who used you so well. Was it–was it Jasmine?”

With a trembling gesture he sat down, put the needle in a drawer, locked it, and turned round to the fire again.

“Was it Jasmine?” he repeated, and he took from his pocket the letter which Lady Tynemouth had given him. For a moment he looked at it unopened–at the beautiful, smooth handwriting so familiar to his eyes; then he slowly broke the seal, and took out the closely written pages.

CHAPTER XXVI

JASMINE’S LETTER

“Ian, oh, Ian, what strange and dreadful things you have written to me!” Jasmine’s letter ran–the letter which she told him she had written on that morning when all was lost. “Do you realize what you have said, and, saying it, have you thought of all it means to me? You have tried to think of what is best, I know, but have you thought of me? When I read your letter first, a flood of fire seemed to run through my veins; then I became as though I had been dipped in ether, and all the winds of an arctic sea were blowing over me.

“To go with you now, far away from the world in which we live and in which you work, to begin life again, as you say–how sweet and terrible and glad it would be! But I know, oh, I know myself and I know you! I am like one who has lived forever. I am not good, and I am not foolish, I am only mad; and the madness in me urges me to that visionary world where you and I could live and work and wander, and be content with all that would be given us–joy, seeing, understanding, revealing, doing.

“But Ian, it is only a visionary world, that world of which you speak. It does not exist. The overmastering love, the desire for you that is in me, makes for me the picture as it is in your mind; but down beneath all, the woman in me, the everlasting woman, is sure there is no such world.

“Listen, dear child–I call you that, for though I am only twenty-five I seem as aged as the Sphinx, and, like the Sphinx that begets mockery, so my soul, which seems to have looked out over unnumbered centuries, mocks at this world which you would make for you and me. Listen, Ian. It is not a real world, and I should not–and that is the pitiful, miserable part of it–I should not make you happy, if I were in that world with you. To my dire regret I know it. Suddenly you have roused in me what I can honestly say I have never felt before–strange, reckless, hungry feelings. I am like some young dweller of the jungle which, cut off from its kind tries, with a passion that eats and eats and eats away his very flesh to get back to its kind, to his mate, to that other wild child of nature which waits for the one appeasement of primeval desire.

“Ian, I must tell you the whole truth about myself as I understand it. I am a hopeless, painful contradiction; I have always been so. I have always wanted to be good, but something has always driven me where the flowers have a poisonous sweetness, where the heart grows bad. I want to cry to you, Ian, to help me to be good; and yet something drives me on to want to share with you the fruit which turns to dust and ashes in the long end. And behind all that again, some tiny little grain of honour in me says that I must not ask you to help me; says that I ought never to look into your eyes again, never touch your hand, nor see you any more; and from the little grain of honour comes the solemn whisper, ‘Do not ruin him; do not spoil his life.’

“Your letter has torn my heart, so that it can never again be as it was before, and because there is some big, noble thing in you, some little, not ignoble thing is born in me. Ian, you could never know the anguished desire I have to be with you always, but, if I keep sane at all, I will not go–no, I will not go with you, unless the madness carries me away. It would kill you. I know, because I have lived so many thousands of years. My spirit and my body might be satisfied, the glory in having you all my own would be so great; but there would be no joy for you. To men like you, work is as the breath of life. You must always be fighting for something, always climbing higher, because you see some big thing to do which is so far above you.

“Yes, men like you get their chance sooner or later, because you work, and are ready to take the gifts of Fate when they appear and before they pass. You will be always for climbing, if some woman does not drag you back. That woman may be a wife, or it may be a loving and living ghost of a wife like me. Ian, I could not bear to see what would come at last–the disappointment in your face the look of hope gone from your eyes; your struggle to climb, and the struggle of no avail. Sisyphus had never such a task as you would have on the hill of life, if I left all behind here and went with you. You would try to hide it; but I would see you growing older hourly before my eyes. You would smile–I wonder if you know what sort of wonderful, alluring thing your smile is, Ian?–and that smile would drive me to kill myself, and so hurt you still more. And so it is always an everlasting circle of penalty and pain when you take the laws of life you get in the mountains in your hands and break them in pieces on the rocks in the valleys, and make new individual laws out of harmony with the general necessity.

“Isn’t it strange, Ian, that I who can do wrong so easily still know so well and value so well what is right? It is my mother in me and my grandfather in me, both of them fighting for possession. Let me empty out my heart before you, because I know–I do not know why, but I do know, as I write–that some dark cloud lowers, gathers round us, in which we shall be lost, shall miss the touch of hand and never see each other’s face again. I know it, oh so surely! I did not really love you years ago, before I married Rudyard; I did not love you when I married him; I did not love him, I could not really love any one. My heart was broken up in a thousand pieces to give away in little bits to all who came. But I cared for you more than I cared for any one else–so much more; because you were so able and powerful, and were meant to do such big things; and I had just enough intelligence to want to understand you; to feel what you were thinking, to grasp its meaning, however dimly. Yet I have no real intellect. I am only quick and rather clever–sharp, as Jigger would say, and with some cunning, too. I have made so many people believe that I am brilliant. When I think and talk and write, I only give out in a new light what others like you have taught me; give out a loaf where you gave me a crumb; blow a drop of water into a bushel of bubbles. No, I did not love you, in the big way, in those old days, and maybe it is not love I feel for you now; but it is a great and wonderful thing, so different from the feeling I once had. It is very powerful, and it is also very cruel, because it smothers me in one moment, and in the next it makes me want to fly to you, heedless of consequences.

“And what might those consequences be, Ian, and shall I let you face them? The real world, your world, England, Europe, would have no more use for all your skill and knowledge and power, because there would be a woman in the way. People who would want to be your helpers, and to follow you, would turn away when they saw you coming; or else they would say the superficial things which are worse than blows in the face to a man who wants to feel that men look to him to help solve the problems perplexing the world. While it may not be love I feel for you, whatever it is, it makes me a little just and unselfish now. I will not–unless a spring-time madness drives me to it to-day–I will not go with you.

“As for the other solution you offer, deceiving the world as to your purposes, to go far away upon some wild mission, and to die!

“Ah, no, you must not cheat the world so; you must not cheat yourself so! And how cruel it would be to me! Whatever I deserve–and in leaving you to marry Rudyard I deserved heavy punishment–still I do not deserve the torture which would follow me to the last day of my life if, because of me, you sacrificed that which is not yours alone, but which belongs to all the world. I loathe myself when I think of the old wrong that I did you; but no leper woman could look upon herself with such horror as I should upon myself, if, for the new wrong I have done you, you were to take your own life.

“These are so many words, and perhaps they will not read to you as real. That is perhaps because I am only shallow at the best; am only, as you once called me, ‘a little burst of eloquence.’ But even I can suffer, and I believe that even I can love. You say you cannot go on as things are; that I must go with you or you must die; and yet you do not wish me to go with you. You have said that, too. But do you not wonder what would become of me, if either of these alternatives is followed? A little while ago I could deceive Rudyard, and put myself in pretty clothes with a smile, and enjoy my breakfast with him and look in his face boldly, and enjoy the clothes, and the world and the gay things that are in it, perhaps because I had no real moral sense. Isn’t it strange that out of the thing which the world would condemn as most immoral, as the very degradation of the heart and soul and body, there should spring up a new sense that is moral–perhaps the first true glimmering of it? Oh, dear love of my life, comrade of my soul, something has come to me which I never had before, and for that, whatever comes, my lifelong gratitude must be yours! What I now feel could never have come except through fire and tears, as you yourself say, and I know so well that the fire is at my feet, and the tears–I wept them all last night, when I too wanted to die.

“You are coming at eleven to-day, Ian–at eleven. It is now eight. I will try and send this letter to reach you before you leave your rooms. If not, I will give it to you when you come–at eleven. Why did you not say noon–noon–twelve of the clock? The end and the beginning! Why did you not say noon, Ian? The light is at its zenith at noon, at twelve; and the world is dark at twelve–at midnight. Twelve at noon; twelve at night; the light and the dark–which will it be for us, Ian? Night or noon? I wonder, oh, I wonder if, when I see you I shall have the strength to say, ‘Yes, go, and come again no more.’ Or whether, in spite of everything, I shall wildly say, ‘Let us go away together.’ Such is the kind of woman that I am. And you–dear lover, tell me truly what kind of man are you?

“Your JASMINE.”

He read the letter slowly, and he stopped again and again as though to steady himself. His face became strained and white, and once he poured brandy and drank it off as though it were water. When he had finished the letter he went heavily over to the fire and dropped it in. He watched it burn, until only the flimsy carbon was left.

“If I had not gone till noon,” he said aloud, in a nerveless voice–“if I had not gone till noon . . . Fellowes–did she–or was it Byng?”

He was so occupied with his thoughts that he was not at first conscious that some one was knocking.

“Come in,” he called out at last.

The door opened and Rudyard Byng entered.

“I am going to South Africa, Stafford,” he said, heavily. “I hear that you are going, too; and I have come to see whether we cannot go out together.”

CHAPTER XXVII

KROOL

“A message from Mr. Byng to say that he may be a little late, but he says will you go on without him? He will come as soon as possible.”

The footman, having delivered himself, turned to withdraw, but Barry Whalen called him back, saying, “Is Mr. Krool in the house?”

The footman replied in the affirmative. “Did you wish to see him, sir?” he asked.

“Not at present. A little later perhaps,” answered Barry, with a glance round the group, who eyed him curiously.

At a word the footman withdrew. As the door closed, little black, oily Sobieski dit Melville said with an attempt at a joke, “Is ‘Mr.’ Krool to be called into consultation?”

“Don’t be so damned funny, Melville,” answered Barry. “I didn’t ask the question for nothing.”

“These aren’t days when anybody guesses much,” remarked Fleming. “And I’d like to know from Mr. Kruger, who knows a lot of things, and doesn’t gas, whether he means the mines to be safe.”

They all looked inquiringly at Wallstein, who in the storms which rocked them all kept his nerve and his countenance with a power almost benign. His large, limpid eye looked little like that belonging to an eagle of finance, as he had been called.

“It looked for a while as though they’d be left alone,” said Wallstein, leaning heavily on the table,” but I’m not so sure now.” He glanced at Barry Whalen significantly, and the latter surveyed the group enigmatically.

“There’s something evidently waiting to be said,” remarked Wolff, the silent Partner in more senses than one. “What’s the use of waiting?”

Two or three of those present looked at Ian Stafford, who, standing by the window, seemed oblivious of them all. Byng had requested him to be present, with a view to asking his advice concerning some international aspect of the situation, and especially in regard to Holland and Germany. The group had welcomed the suggestion eagerly, for on this side of the question they were not so well equipped as on others. But when it came to the discussion of inner local policy there seemed hesitation in speaking freely before him. Wallstein, however, gave a reassuring nod and said, meaningly:

“We took up careful strategical positions, but our camp has been overlooked from a kopje higher than ours.”

“We have been the victims of treachery for years,” burst out Fleming, with anger. “Nearly everything we’ve done here, nearly everything the Government has done here, has been known to Kruger–ever since the Raid.”

“I think it could have been stopped,” said the once Sobieski, with an ugly grimace, and an attempt at an accent which would suit his new name. “Byng’s to blame. We ought to have put down our feet from the start. We’re Byng-ridden.”

“Keep a civil tongue, Israel,” snarled Barry Whalen. “You know nothing about it, and that is the state in which you most shine–in your natural state of ignorance, like the heathen in his blindness. But before Byng comes I’d better give you all some information I’ve got.”

“Isn’t it for Byng to hear?” asked Fleming.

“Very much so; but it’s for you all to decide what’s to be done. Perhaps Mr. Stafford can help us in the matter, as he has been with Byng very lately.” Wallstein looked inquiringly towards Stafford.

The group nodded appreciatively, and Stafford came forward to the table, but without seating himself. “Certainly you may command me,” he said. “What is the mystery?”

In short and abrupt sentences Barry Whalen, with an occasional interjection and explanation from Wallstein, told of the years of leakage in regard to their plans, of moves circumvented by information which could only have been got by treacherous means either in South Africa or in London.

“We didn’t know for sure which it was,” said Barry, “but the proof has come at last. One of Kruger’s understrappers from Holland was successfully tapped, and we’ve got proof that the trouble was here in London, here in this house where we sit–Byng’s home.”

There was a stark silence, in which more than one nodded significantly, and looked round furtively to see how the others took the news.

“Here is absolute proof. There were two in it here–Adrian Fellowes and Krool.”

“Adrian Fellowes!”

It was Ian Stafford’s voice, insistent and inquiring.

“Here is the proof, as I say.” Barry Whalen leaned forward and pushed a paper over on the table, to which were attached two or three smaller papers and some cablegrams. “Look at them. Take a good look at them and see how we’ve been done–done brown. The hand that dipped in the same dish, as it were, has handed out misfortune to us by the bucketful. We’ve been carted in the house of a friend.”

The group, all standing, leaned over, as Barry Whalen showed them the papers, one by one, then passed them round for examination.

“It’s deadly,” said Fleming. “Men have had their throats cut or been hanged for less. I wouldn’t mind a hand in it myself.”

“We warned Byng years ago,” interposed Barry, “but it was no use. And we’ve paid for it par and premium.”

“What can be done to Krool?” asked Fleming.

“Nothing particular–here,” said Barry Whalen, ominously.

“Let’s have the dog in,” urged one of the group.

“Without Byng’s permission?” interjected Wallstein.

There was a silence. The last time any of them, except Wallstein, had seen Byng, was on the evening when he had overheard the slanders concerning Jasmine, and none had pleasant anticipation of this meeting with him now. They recalled his departure when Barry Whalen had said, “God, how he hates us.” He was not likely to hate them less, when they proved that Fellowes and Krool had betrayed him and them all. They had a wholesome fear of him in more senses than one, because, during the past few years, while Wallstein’s health was bad, Byng’s position had become more powerful financially, and he could ruin any one of them, if he chose. A man like Byng in “going large” might do the Samson business. Besides, he had grown strangely uncertain in his temper of late, and, as Barry Whalen had said, “It isn’t good to trouble a wounded bull in the ring.”

They had him on the hip in one way through the exposure of Krool, but they were all more or less dependent on his financial movements. They were all enraged at Byng because he had disregarded all warnings regarding Krool; but what could they do? Instinctively they turned now to Stafford, whose reputation for brains and diplomacy was so great and whose friendship with Byng was so close.

Stafford had come to-day for two reasons: to do what he could to help Byng–for the last time; and to say to Byng that they could not travel together to South Africa. To make the long journey with him was beyond his endurance. He must put the world between Rudyard and himself; he must efface all companionship. With this last act, begotten of the blind confidence Rudyard had in him, their intercourse must cease forever. This would be easy enough in South Africa. Once at the Front, it was as sure as anything on earth that they would never meet again. It was torture to meet him, and the day of the inquest, when Byng had come to his rooms after his interview with Lady Tynemouth and Mr. Mappin, he had been tried beyond endurance.

“Shall we have Krool in without Byng’s permission? Is it wise?” asked Wallstein again. He looked at Stafford, and Stafford instantly replied:

“It would be well to see Krool, I think. Your action could then be decided by Krool’s attitude and what he says.”

Barry Whalen rang the bell, and the footman came. After a brief waiting Krool entered the room with irritating deliberation and closed the door behind him.

He looked at no one, but stood contemplating space with a composure which made Barry Whalen almost jump from his seat in rage.

“Come a little closer,” said Wallstein in a soothing voice, but so Wallstein would have spoken to a man he was about to disembowel.

Krool came nearer, and now he looked round at them all slowly and inquiringly. As no one spoke for a moment he shrugged his shoulders.

“If you shrug your shoulders again, damn you, I’ll sjambok you here as Kruger did at Vleifontein,” said Barry Whalen in a low, angry voice. “You’ve been too long without the sjambok.”

“This is not the Vaal, it is Englan’,” answered Krool, huskily. “The Law–here!”

“Zo you stink ze law of England would help you–eh?” asked Sobieski, with a cruel leer, relapsing into his natural vernacular.

“I mean what I say, Krool,” interposed Barry Whalen, fiercely, motioning Sobieski to silence. “I will sjambok you till you can’t move, here in England, here in this house, if you shrug your shoulders again, or lift an eyebrow, or do one damned impudent thing.”

He got up and rang a bell. A footman appeared. “There is a rhinoceros-hide whip, on the wall of Mr. Byng’s study. Bring it here,” he said, quietly, but with suppressed passion.

“Don’t be crazy, Whalen,” said Wallstein, but with no great force, for he would richly have enjoyed seeing the spy and traitor under the whip. Stafford regarded the scene with detached, yet deep and melancholy interest.

While they waited, Krool seemed to shrink a little; but as he watched like some animal at bay, Stafford noticed that his face became venomous and paler, and some sinister intention showed in his eyes.

The whip was brought and laid upon the table beside Barry Whalen, and the footman disappeared, looking curiously at the group and at Krool.

Barry Whalen’s fingers closed on the whip, and now a look of fear crept over Krool’s face. If there was one thing calculated to stir with fear the Hottentot blood in him, it was the sight of the sjambok. He had native tendencies and predispositions out of proportion to the native blood in him–maybe because he had ever been treated more like a native than a white man by his Boer masters in the past.

As Stafford viewed the scene, it suddenly came home to him how strange was this occurrence in Park Lane. It was medieval, it belonged to some land unslaked of barbarism. He realized all at once how little these men around him represented the land in which they were living, and how much they were part of the far-off land which was now in the throes of war.

To these men this was in one sense an alien country. Through the dulled noises of London there came to their ears the click of the wheels of a cape-wagon, the crack of the Kaffir’s whip, the creak of the disselboom. They followed the spoor of a company of elephants in the East country, they watched through the November mist the blesbok flying across the veld, a herd of quaggas taking cover with the rheebok, or a cloud of locusts sailing out of the sun to devastate the green lands. Through the smoky smell of London there came to them the scent of the wattle, the stinging odour of ten thousand cattle, the reek of a native kraal, the sharp sweetness of orange groves, the aromatic air of the karoo, laden with the breath of a thousand wild herbs. Through the drizzle of the autumn rain they heard the wild thunderbolt tear the trees from earthly moorings. In their eyes was the livid lightning that searched in spasms of anger for its prey, while there swept over the brown, aching veld the flood which filled the spruits, which made the rivers seas, and ploughed fresh channels through the soil. The luxury of this room, with its shining mahogany tables, its tapestried walls, its rare fireplace and massive overmantel brought from Italy, its exquisite stained-glass windows, was only part of a play they were acting; it was not their real life.

And now there was not one of them that saw anything incongruous in the whip of rhinoceros-hide lying on the table, or clinched in Barry Whalen’s hand. On the contrary, it gave them a sense of supreme naturalness. They had lived in a land where the sjambok was the symbol of progress. It represented the forward movement of civilization in the wilderness. It was the vierkleur of the pioneer, without which the long train of capewagons, with the oxen in longer coils of effort, would never have advanced; without which the Kaffir and the Hottentot would have sacrificed every act of civilization. It prevented crime, it punished crime, it took the place of the bowie-knife and the derringer of that other civilization beyond the Mississippi; it was the lock to the door in the wild places, the open sesame to the territories where native chiefs ruled communal tribes by playing tyrant to the commune. It was the rod of Aaron staying the plague of barbarism. It was the sceptre of the veldt. It drew blood, it ate human flesh, it secured order where there was no law, and it did the work of prison and penitentiary. It was the symbol of authority in the wilderness.

It was race.

Stafford was the only man present who saw anything incongruous in the scene, and yet his travels in the East his year in Persia, Tibet and Afghanistan, had made him understand things not revealed to the wise and prudent of European domains. With Krool before them, who was of the veld and the karoo, whose natural habitat was but a cross between a krall and the stoep of a dopper’s home, these men were instantly transported to the land where their hearts were in spite of all, though the flesh-pots of the West End of London had turned them into by-paths for a while. The skin had been scratched by Krool’s insolence and the knowledge of his treachery, and the Tartar showed–the sjambok his scimitar.

In spite of himself, Stafford was affected by it all. He understood. This was not London; the scene had shifted to Potchefstroom or Middleburg, and Krool was transformed too. The sjambok had, like a wizard’s wand, as it were, lifted him away from England to spaces where he watched from the grey rock of a kopje for the glint of an assegai or the red of a Rooinek’s tunic: and he had done both in his day.

“We’ve got you at last, Krool,” said Wallstein. “We have been some time at it, but it’s a long lane that has no turning, and we have you–“

“Like that–like that, jackal!” interjected Barry Whalen, opening and shutting his lean fingers with a gesture of savage possession.

“What?” asked Krool, with a malevolent thrust forward of his head. “What?”

“You betrayed us to Kruger,” answered Wallstein, holding the papers. “We have here the proof at last.”

“You betrayed England and her secrets, and yet you think that the English law would protect you against this,” said Barry Whalen, harshly, handling the sjambok.

“What I betray?” Krool asked again. “What I tell?”

With great deliberation Wallstein explained.

“Where proof?” Krool asked, doggedly.

“We have just enough to hang you,” said Wallstein, grimly, and lifted and showed the papers Barry Whalen had brought.

An insolent smile crossed Krool’s face.

“You find out too late. That Fellowes is dead. So much you get, but the work is done. It not matter now. It is all done–altogether. Oom Paul speaks now, and everything is his–from the Cape to the Zambesi, everything his. It is too late. What can to do?” Suddenly ferocity showed in his face. “It come at last. It is the end of the English both sides the Vaal. They will go down like wild hogs into the sea with Joubert and Botha behind them. It is the day of Oom Paul and Christ. The God of Israel gives to his own the tents of the Rooineks.”

In spite of the fierce passion of the man, who had suddenly disclosed a side of his nature hitherto hidden–the savage piety of the copper Boer impregnated with stereotyped missionary phrasing, Ian Stafford almost laughed outright. In the presence of Jews like Sobieski it seemed so droll that this half-caste should talk about the God of Israel, and link Oom Paul’s name with that of Christ the great liberator as partners in triumph.

In all the years Krool had been in England he had never been inside a place of worship or given any sign of that fanaticism which, all at once, he made manifest. He had seemed a pagan to all of his class, had acted as a pagan.

Barry Whalen, as well as Ian Stafford, saw the humour of the situation, while they were both confounded by the courageous malice of the traitor. It came to Barry’s mind at the moment, as it came to Ian Stafford’s, that Krool had some card to play which would, to his mind, serve him well; and, by instinct, both found the right clue. Barry’s anger became uneasiness, and Stafford’s interest turned to anxiety.

There was an instant’s pause after Krool’s words, and then Wolff the silent, gone wild, caught the sjambok from the hands of Barry Whalen. He made a movement towards Krool, who again suddenly shrank, as he would not have shrunk from a weapon of steel.

“Wait a minute,” cried Fleming, seizing the arm of his friend. “One minute. There’s something more.” Turning to Wallstein, he said, “If Krool consents to leave England at once for South Africa, let him go. Is it agreed? He must either be dealt with adequately, or get out. Is it agreed?”

“I do what I like,” said Krool, with a snarl, in which his teeth showed glassily against his drawn lips. “No one make me do what I not want.”

“The Baas–you have forgotten him,” said Wallstein.

A look combined of cunning, fear and servility crossed Krool’s face, but he said, morosely:

“The Baas–I will do what I like.”

There was a singular defiance and meaning in his tone, and the moment seemed critical, for Barry Whalen’s face was distorted with fury. Stafford suddenly stooped and whispered a word in Wallstein’s ear, and then said:

“Gentlemen, if you will allow me, I should like a few words with Krool before Mr. Byng comes. I think perhaps Krool will see the best course to pursue when we have talked together. In one sense it is none of my business, in another sense it is everybody’s business. A few minutes, if you please, gentlemen.” There was something almost authoritative in his tone.

“For Byng’s sake–his wife–you understand,” was all Stafford had said under his breath, but it was an illumination to Wallstein, who whispered to Stafford.

“Yes, that’s it. Krool holds some card, and he’ll play it now.”

By his glance and by his word of assent, Wallstein set the cue for the rest, and they all got up and went slowly into the other room. Barry Whalen was about to take the sjambok, but Stafford laid his hand upon it, and Barry and he exchanged a look of understanding.

“Stafford’s a little bit of us in a way,” said Barry in a whisper to Wallstein as they left the room. “He knows, too, what a sjambok’s worth in Krool’s eyes.”

When the two were left alone, Stafford slowly seated himself, and his fingers played idly with the sjambok.

“You say you will do what you like, in spite of the Baas?” he asked, in a low, even tone.

“If the Baas hurt me, I will hurt. If anybody hurt me, I will hurt.”

“You will hurt the Baas, eh? I thought he saved your life on the Limpopo.”

A flush stole across Krool’s face, and when it passed again he was paler than before. “I have save the Baas,” he answered, sullenly.

“From what?”

“From you.”

With a powerful effort, Stafford controlled himself. He dreaded what was now to be said, but he felt inevitably what it was.

“How–from me?”

“If that Fellowes’ letter come into his hands first, yours would not matter. She would not go with you.”

Stafford had far greater difficulty in staying his hand than had Barry Whalen, for the sjambok seemed the only reply to the dark suggestion. He realized how, like the ostrich, he had thrust his head into the sand, imagining that no one knew what was between himself and Jasmine. Yet here was one who knew, here was one who had, for whatever purpose, precipitated a crisis with Fellowes to prevent a crisis with himself.

Suddenly Stafford thought of an awful possibility. He fastened the gloomy eyes of the man before him, that he might be able to see any stir of emotion, and said: “It did not come out as you expected?”

“Altogether–yes.”

“You wished to part Mr. and Mrs. Byng. That did not happen.”

“The Baas is going to South Africa.”

“And Mr. Fellowes?”

“He went like I expec’.”

“He died–heart failure, eh?”

A look of contempt, malevolence, and secret reflection came into Krool’s face. “He was kill,” he said.

“Who killed him?”

Krool was about to shrug his shoulders, but his glance fell on the sjambok, and he made an ugly gesture with his lean fingers. “There was yourself. He had hurt you–you went to him…. Good! There was the Baas, he went to him. The dead man had hurt him…. Good!”

Stafford interrupted him by an exclamation. “What’s that you say–the Baas went to Mr. Fellowes?”

“As I tell the vrouw, Mrs. Byng, when she say me go from the house to-day–I say I will go when the Baas send me.”

“The Baas went to Mr. Fellowes–when?”

“Two hours before you go, and one hour before the vrouw, she go.”

Like some animal looking out of a jungle, so Krool’s eyes glowed from beneath his heavy eyebrows, as he drawled out the words.

“The Baas went–you saw him?”

“With my own eyes.”

“How long was he there?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Mrs. Byng–you saw her go in?”

“And also come out.”

“And me–you followed me–you saw me, also?”

“I saw all that come, all that go in to him.”

With a swift mind Stafford saw his advantage–the one chance, the one card he could play, the one move he could make in checkmate, if, and when, necessary. “So you saw all that came and went. And you came and went yourself!”

His eyes were hard and bright as he held Krool’s, and there was a sinister smile on his lips.

“You know I come and go–you say me that?” said Krool, with a sudden look of vague fear and surprise. He had not foreseen this.

“You accuse yourself. You saw this person and that go out, and you think to hold them in your dirty clutches; but you had more reason than any for killing Mr. Fellowes.”

“What?” asked Krool, furtively.

“You hated him because he was a traitor like yourself. You hated him because he had hurt the Baas.”

“That is true altogether, but–“

“You need not explain. If any one killed Mr. Fellowes, why not you? You came and went from his rooms, too.”

Krool’s face was now yellowish pale. “Not me . . . it was not me.”

“You would run a worse chance than any one. Your character would damn you–a partner with him in crime. What jury in the world but would convict you on your own evidence? Besides, you knew–“

He paused to deliver a blow on the barest chance. It was an insidious challenge which, if it failed, might do more harm to others, might do great harm, but he plunged. “You knew about the needle.”

Krool was cowed and silent. On a venture Stafford had struck straight home.

“You knew that Mr. Fellowes had stolen the needle from Mr. Mappin at Glencader,” he added.

“How you know that?” asked Krool, in a husky, ragged voice.

“I saw him steal it–and you?”

“No. He tell me.”

“What did he mean to do with it?”

A look came into Krool’s eyes, malevolent and barbaric.

“Not to kill himself,” he reflected. “There is always some one a man or a woman want kill.”

There was a hideous commonplaceness in the tone which struck a chill to Stafford’s heart.

“No doubt there is always some one you want to kill. Now listen, Krool. You think you’ve got a hold over me–over Mrs. Byng. You threaten. Well, I have passed through the fire of the coroner’s inquest. I have nothing to fear. You have. I saw you in the street as you watched. You came behind me–“

He remembered now the footsteps that paused when he did, the figure behind his in the dark, as he watched for Jasmine to come out from Fellowes’ rooms, and he determined to plunge once more.

“I recognized you, and I saw you in the Strand just before that. I did not speak at the inquest, because I wanted no scandal. If I had spoken, you would have been arrested. Whatever happened your chances were worse than those of any one. You can’t frighten me, or my friends in there, or the Baas, or Mrs. Byng. Look after your own skin. You are the vile scum of the earth,”–he determined to take a strong line now, since he had made a powerful impression on the creature before him–“and you will do what the Baas likes, not what you like. He saved your life. Bad as you are, the Baas is your Baas for ever and ever, and what he wants to do with you he will do. When his eyes look into yours, you will think the lightning speaks. You are his slave. If he hates you, you will die; if he curses you, you will wither.”

He played upon the superstitious element, the native strain again. It was deeper in Krool than anything else.

“Do you think you can defy them?” Stafford went on, jerking a finger towards the other room. “They are from the veld. They will have you as sure as the crack of a whip. This is England, but they are from the veld. On the veld you know what they would do to you. If you speak against the Baas, it is bad for you; if you speak against the Baas’ vrouw it will be ten times worse. Do you hear?”

There was a strange silence, in which Stafford could feel Krool’s soul struggling in the dark, as it were–a struggle as of black spirits in the grey dawn.

“I wait the Baas speak,” Krool said at last, with a shiver.

There was no time for Stafford to answer. Wallstein entered the room hurriedly. “Byng has come. He has been told about him,” he said in French to Stafford, and jerking his head towards Krool.

Stafford rose. “It’s all right,” he answered in the same language. “I think things will be safe now. He has a wholesome fear of the Baas.”

He turned to Krool. “If you say to the Baas what you have said to me about Mr. Fellowes or about the Baas’s vrouw, you will have a bad time. You will think that wild hawks are picking out your vitals. If you have sense, you will do what I tell you.”

Krool’s eyes were on the door through which Wallstein had come. His gaze was fixed and tortured. Stafford had suddenly roused in him some strange superstitious element. He was like a creature of a lower order awaiting the approach of the controlling power. It was, however, the door behind him which opened, and he gave a start of surprise and terror. He knew who it was. He did not turn round, but his head bent forward, as though he would take a blow from behind, and his eyes almost closed. Stafford saw with a curious meticulousness the long eyelashes touch the grey cheek.

“There’s no fight in him now,” he said to Byng in French. “He was getting nasty, but I’ve got him in order. He knows too much. Remember that, Byng.”

Byng’s look was as that of a man who had passed through some chamber of torture, but the flabbiness had gone suddenly from his face, and even from his figure, though heavy lines had gathered round the mouth and scarred the forehead. He looked worn and much thinner, but there was a look in his eyes which Stafford had never seen there–a new look of deeper seeing, of revelation, of realization. With all his ability and force, Byng had been always much of a boy, so little at one with the hidden things–the springs of human conduct, the contradictions of human nature, the worst in the best of us, the forces that emerge without warning in all human beings, to send them on untoward courses and at sharp tangents to all the habits of their existence and their character. In a real sense he had been very primitive, very objective in all he thought and said and did. With imagination, and a sensitive organization out of keeping with his immense physique, it was still only a visualizing sense which he had, only a thing that belongs to races such as those of which Krool had come.

A few days of continuous suffering begotten by a cataclysm, which had rent asunder walls of life enclosing vistas he had never before seen; these had transformed him. Pain had given him dignity of a savage kind, a grim quiet which belonged to conflict and betokened grimmer purpose. In the eyes was the darkness of the well of despair; but at his lips was iron resolution.

In reply to Stafford he said quietly: “All right, I understand. I know how to deal with Krool.”

As Stafford withdrew, Byng came slowly down the room till he stood at the end of the table opposite to Krool.

Standing there, he looked at the Boer with hard eyes.

“I know all, Krool,” he said. “You sold me and my country–you tried to sell me and my country to Oom Paul. You dog, that I snatched from the tiger death, not once but twice.”

“It is no good. I am a Hottentot. I am for the Boer, for Oom Paul. I would have die for you, but–“

“But when the chance came to betray the thing I cared for more than I would twenty lives–my country–you tried to sell me and all who worked with me.”

“It would be same to you if the English go from the Vaal,” said the half-caste, huskily, not looking into the eyes fixed on him. “But it matter to me that the Boer keep all for himself what he got for himself. I am half Boer. That is why.”

“You defend it–tell me, you defend it?”

There was that in the voice, some terrible thing, which drew Krool’s eyes in spite of himself, and he met a look of fire and wrath.

“I tell why. If it was bad, it was bad. But I tell why, that is all. If it is not good, it is bad, and hell is for the bad; but I tell why.”

“You got money from Oom Paul for the man–Fellowes?” It was hard for him to utter the name.

Krool nodded.

“Every year–much?”

Again Krool nodded.

“And for yourself–how much?”

“Nothing for myself; no money, Baas.”

“Only Oom Paul’s love!”

Krool nodded again.

“But Oom Paul flayed you at Vleifontein; tied you up and skinned you with a sjambok…. That didn’t matter, eh? And you went on loving him. I never touched you in all the years. I gave you your life twice. I gave you good money. I kept you in luxury–you that fed in the cattle-kraal; you that had mealies to eat and a shred of biltong when you could steal it; you that ate a steinbok raw on the Vaal, you were so wild for meat . . . I took you out of that, and gave you this.”

He waved an arm round the room, and went on: “You come in and go out of my room, you sleep in the same cart with me, you eat out of the same dish on trek, and yet you do the Judas trick. Slim–god of gods, how slim! You are the snake that crawls in the slime. It’s the native in you, I suppose…. But see, I mean to do to you as Oom Paul did. It’s the only thing you understand. It’s the way to make you straight and true, my sweet Krool.”

Still keeping his eyes fixed on Krool’s eyes, his hand reached out and slowly took the sjambok from the table. He ran the cruel thing through his fingers as does a prison expert the cat-o’-nine-tails before laying on the lashes of penalty. Into Krool’s eyes a terror crept which never had been there in the old days on the veld when Oom Paul had flayed him. This was not the veld, and he was no longer the veld-dweller with skin like the rhinoceros, all leather and bone and endurance. And this was not Oom Paul, but one whom he had betrayed, whose wife he had sought to ruin, whose subordinate he had turned into a traitor. Oom Paul had been a mere savage master; but here was a master whose very tongue could excoriate him like Oom Paul’s sjambok; whom, at bottom, he loved in his way as he had never loved anything; whom he had betrayed, not realizing the hideous nature of his deed; having argued that it was against England his treachery was directed, and that was a virtue in his eyes; not seeing what direct injury could come to Byng through it. He had not seen, he had not understood, he was still uncivilized; he had only in his veins the morality of the native, and he had tried to ruin his master’s wife for his master’s sake; and when he had finished with Fellowes as a traitor, he was ready to ruin his confederate–to kill him–perhaps did kill him!

“It’s the only way to deal with you, Hottentot dog!”

The look in Krool’s eyes only increased Byng’s lust of punishment. What else was there to do? Without terrible scandal there was no other way to punish the traitor, but if there had been another way he would still have done this. This Krool understood; behind every command the Baas had ever given him this thing lay–the sjambok, the natural engine of authority.

Suddenly Byng said with a voice of almost guttural anger: “You dropped that letter on my bedroom floor–that letter, you understand? . . . Speak.”

“I did it, Baas.”

Byng was transformed. Slowly he laid down the sjambok, and as slowly took off his coat, his eyes meanwhile fastening those of the wretched man before him. Then he took up the sjambok again.

“You know what I am going to do with you?”

“Yes, Baas.”

It never occurred to Byng that Krool would resist; it did not occur to Krool that he could resist. Byng was the Baas, who at that moment was the Power immeasurable. There was only one thing to do–to obey.

“You were told to leave my house by Mrs. Byng, and you did not go.”

“She was not my Baas.”

“You would have done her harm, if you could?”

“So, Baas.”

With a low cry Byng ran forward, the sjambok swung through the air, and the terrible whip descended on the crouching half-caste.

Krool gave one cry and fell back a little, but he made no attempt to resist.

Suddenly Byng went to a window and threw it open.

“You can jump from there or take the sjambok. Which?” he said with a passion not that of a man wholly sane. “Which?”

Krool’s wild, sullen, trembling look sought the window, but he had no heart for that enterprise–thirty feet to the pavement below.

“The sjambok, Baas,” he said.

Once again Byng moved forward on him, and once again Krool’s cry rang out, but not so loud. It was like that of an animal in torture.

In the next room, Wallstein and Stafford and the others heard it, and understood. Whispering together they listened, and Stafford shrank away to the far side of the room; but more than one face showed pleasure in the sound of the whip and the moaning.

It went on and on.

Barry Whalen, however, was possessed of a kind of fear, and presently his face became troubled. This punishment was terrible. Byng might kill the man, and all would be as bad as could be. Stafford came to him.

“You had better go in,” he said. “We ought to intervene. If you don’t, I will. Listen….”

It was a strange sound to hear in this heart of civilization. It belonged to the barbaric places of the earth, where there was no law, where every pioneer was his own cadi.

With set face Barry Whalen entered the room. Byng paused for an instant and looked at him with burning, glazed eyes that scarcely realized him.

“Open that door,” he said, presently, and Barry Whalen opened the door which led into the big hall.

“Open all down to the street,” Byng said, and Barry Whalen went forward quickly.

Like some wild beast Krool crouched and stumbled and moaned as he ran down the staircase, through the outer hall, while a servant with scared face saw Byng rain savage blows upon the hated figure.

On the pavement outside the house, Krool staggered, stumbled, and fell down; but he slowly gathered himself up, and turned to the doorway, where Byng stood panting with the sjambok in his hand.

“Baas!–Baas!” Krool said with livid face, and then he crept painfully away along the street wall.

A policeman crossed the road with a questioning frown and the apparent purpose of causing trouble, but Barry Whalen whispered in his ear, and told him to call that evening and he would hear all about it. Meanwhile a five-pound note in a quick palm was a guarantee of good faith.

Presently a half-dozen people began to gather near the door, but the benevolent policeman moved them on.

At the top of the staircase Jasmine met her husband. She shivered as he came up towards her.

“Will you come to me when you have finished your business?” she said, and she took the sjambok gently from his hand.

He scarcely realized her. He was in a dream; but he smiled at her, and nodded, and passed on to where the others awaited him.

CHAPTER XXVIII

“THE BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM”

Slowly Jasmine returned to her boudoir. Laying the sjambok on the table among the books in delicate bindings and the bowls of flowers, she stood and looked at it with confused senses for a long time. At last a wan smile stole to her lips, but it did not reach her eyes. They remained absorbed and searching, and were made painfully sad by the wide, dark lines under them. Her fair skin was fairer than ever, but it was delicately faded, giving her a look of pensiveness, while yet there was that in her carriage and at her mouth which suggested strength and will and new forces at work in her. She carried her head, weighted by its splendour of golden hair, as an Eastern woman carries a goulah of water. There was something pathetic yet self-reliant in the whole figure. The passion slumbering in the eyes, however, might at any moment burst forth in some wild relinquishment of control and self-restraint.

“He did what I should have liked to do,” she said aloud. “We are not so different, after all. He is primitive at bottom, and so am I. He gets carried away by his emotions, and so do I.”

She took up the whip, examined it, felt its weight, and drew it with a swift jerk through the air.

“I did not even shrink when Krool came stumbling down the stairs, with this cutting his flesh,” she said to herself. “Somehow it all seemed natural and right. What has come to me? Are all my finer senses dead? Am I just one of the crude human things who lived a million years ago, and who lives again as crude as those; with only the outer things changed? Then I wore the skins of wild animals, and now I do the same, just the same; with what we call more taste perhaps, because we have ceased to see the beauty in the natural thing.”

She touched the little band of grey fur at the sleeve of her clinging velvet gown. “Just a little distance away–that is all.”

Suddenly a light flashed up in her eyes, and her face flushed as though some one had angered her. She seized the whip again. “Yes, I could have seen him whipped to death before my eyes–the coward, the abject coward. He did not speak for me; he did not defend me; he did not deny. He let Ian think–death was too kind to him. How dared he hurt me so! . . . Death is so easy a way out, but he would not have taken it. No, no, no, it was not suicide; some one killed him. He could never have taken his own life–never. He had not the courage…. No; he died of poison or was strangled. Who did it? Who did it? Was it Rudyard? Was it. . . ? Oh, it wears me out–thinking, thinking, thinking!”

She sat down and buried her face in her hands. “I am doomed–doomed,” she moaned. “I was doomed from the start. It must always have been so, whatever I did. I would do it again, whatever I did; I know I would do it again, being what I was. It was in my veins, in my blood from the start, from the very first days of my life.”

All at once there flashed through her mind again, as on that night so many centuries ago, when she had slept the last sleep of her life as it was, Swinburne’s lines on Baudelaire:

“There is no help for these things, none to mend and none to mar; Not all our songs, oh, friend, can make death clear Or make life durable….”

“‘There is no help for these things,'” she repeated with a sigh which seemed to tear her heart in twain. “All gone–all. What is there left to do? If death could make it better for any one, how easy! But everything would be known–somehow the world would know, and every one would suffer more. Not now–no, not now. I must live on, but not here. I must go away. I must find a place to go where Rudyard will not come. There is no place so far but it is not far enough. I am twenty-five, and all is over–all is done for me. I have nothing that I want to keep, there is nothing that I want to do except to go–to go and to be alone. Alone, always alone now. It is either that, or be Jezebel, or–“

The door opened, and the servant brought a card to her. “His Excellency, the Moravian ambassador,” the footman said.

“Monsieur Mennaval?” she asked, mechanically, as though scarcely realizing what he had said.

“Yes, ma’am, Mr. Mennaval.”

“Please say I am indisposed, and am sorry I cannot receive him to-day,” she said.

“Very good, ma’am.” The footman turned to go, then came back.

“Shall I tell the maid you want her?” he asked, respectfully.

“No, why should you?” she asked.

“I thought you looked a bit queer, ma’am,” he responded, hastily. “I beg your pardon, ma’am.”

She rewarded him with a smile. “Thank you, James, I think I should like her after all. Ask her to come at once.”

When he had gone she leaned back and shut her eyes. For a moment she was perfectly motionless, then she sat up again and looked at the card in her hand.

“M. Mennaval–M. Mennaval,” she said, with a note so cynical that it betrayed more than her previous emotion, to such a point of despair her mind had come.

M. Mennaval had played his part, had done his service, had called out from her every resource of coquetry and lure; and with wonderful art she had cajoled him till he had yielded to influence, and Ian had turned the key in the international lock. M. Mennaval had been used with great skill to help the man who was now gone from her forever, whom perhaps she would never see again; and who wanted never to see her again, never in all time or space. M. Mennaval had played his game for his own desire, and he had lost; but what had she gained where M. Mennaval had lost? She had gained that which now Ian despised, which he would willingly, so far as she was concerned, reject with contempt…. And yet, and yet, while Ian lived he must still be grateful to her that, by whatever means, she had helped him to do what meant so much to England. Yes, he could not wholly dismiss her from his mind; he must still say, “This she did for me–this thing, in itself not commendable, she did for me; and I took it for my country.”

Her eyes were open, and her garden had been invaded by those revolutionaries of life and time, Nemesis, Penalty, Remorse. They marauded every sacred and secret corner of her mind and soul. They came with whips to scourge her. Nothing was private to her inner self now. Everything was arrayed against her. All life doubled backwards on her, blocking her path.

M. Mennaval–what did she care for him! Yet here he was at her door asking payment for the merchandise he had sold to her: his judgment, his reputation as a diplomatist, his freedom, the respect of the world–for how could the world respect a man at whom it laughed, a man who had hoped to be given the key to a secret door in a secret garden!

As Jasmine sat looking at the card, the footman entered again with a note.

“His Excellency’s compliments,” he said, and withdrew.

She opened the letter hesitatingly, held it in her hand for a moment without reading it, then, with an impulsive effort, did so. When she had finished, she gave a cry of anger and struck her tiny clinched hand upon her knee.

The note ran:

“Chere amie, you have so much indisposition in these days. It is all too vexing to your friends. The world will be surprised, if you allow a migraine to come between us. Indeed, it will be shocked. The world understands always so imperfectly, and I have no gift of explanation. Of course, I know the war has upset many, but I thought you could not be upset so easily–no, it cannot be the war; so I must try and think what it is. If I cannot think by tomorrow at five o’clock, I will call again to ask you. Perhaps the migraine will be better. But, if you will that migraine to be far away, it will fly, and then I shall be near. Is it not so? You will tell me to-morrow at five, will you not, belle amie?

“A toi, M. M.”

The words scorched her eyes. They angered her, scourged her. One of life’s Revolutionaries was insolently ravaging the secret place where her pride dwelt. Pride–what pride had she now? Where was the room for pride or vanity? . . . And all the time she saw the face of a dead man down by the river–a face now beneath the sod. It flashed before her eyes at moments when she least could bear it, to agitate her soul.

M. Mennaval–how dare he write to her so! “Chere amie” and “A toi”–how strange the words looked now, how repulsive and strange! It did not seem possible that once before he had written such words to her. But never before had these epithets or others been accompanied by such meaning as his other words conveyed.

“I will not see him to-morrow. I will not see him ever again, if I can help it,” she said bitterly, and trembling with agitation. “I shall go where I shall not be found. I will go to-night.”

The door opened. Her maid entered. “You wanted me, madame?” asked the girl, in some excitement and very pale.

“Yes, what is the matter? Why so agitated?” Jasmine asked.

The maid’s eyes were on the sjambok. She pointed to it. “It was that, madame. We are all agitated. It was terrible. One had never seen anything like that before in one’s life, madame–never. It was like the days–yes, of slavery. It was like the galleys of Toulon in the old days. It was–“

“There, don’t be so eloquent, Lablanche. What do you know of the galleys of Toulon or the days of slavery?”

“Madame, I have heard, I have read, I–“

“Yes, but did you love Krool so?”

The girl straightened herself with dramatic indignation. “Madame, that man, that creature, that toad–!”

“Then why so exercised? Were you so pained at his punishment? Were all the household so pained?”

“Every one hated him, madame,” said the girl, with energy.

“Then let me hear no more of this impudent nonsense,” Jasmine said, with decision.

“Oh, madame, to speak to me like this!” Tears were ready to do needful service.

“Do you wish to remain with me, Lablanche?”

“Ah, madame, but yes–“

“Then my head aches, and I don’t want you to make it worse…. And, see, Lablanche, there is that grey walking-suit; also the mauve dressing-gown, made by Loison; take them, if you can make them fit you; and be good.”

“Madame, how kind–ah, no one is like you, madame–!”

“Well, we shall see about that quite soon. Put out at once every gown of mine for me to see, and have trunks ready to pack immediately; but only three trunks, not more.”

“Madame is going away?”

“Do as I say, Lablanche. We go to-night. The grey gown and the mauve dressing-gown that Loison made, you will look well in them. Quick, now, please.”

In a flutter Lablanche left the room, her eyes gleaming.

She had had her mind on the grey suit for some time, but the mauve dressing-gown as well–it was too good to be true.

She almost ran into Lady Tynemouth’s arms as the door opened. With a swift apology she sped away, after closing the door upon the visitor.

Jasmine rose and embraced her friend, and Lady Tynemouth subsided into a chair with a sigh.

“My dear Jasmine, you look so frail,” she said. “A short time ago I feared you were going to blossom into too ripe fruit, now you look almost a little pinched. But it quite becomes you, mignonne–quite. You have dark lines under your eyes, and that transparency of skin– it is quite too fetching. Are you glad to see me?”

“I would have seen no one to-day, no one, except you or Rudyard.”

“Love and duty,” said Lady Tynemouth, laughing, yet acutely alive to the something so terribly wrong, of which she had spoken to Ian Stafford.

“Why is it my duty to see you, Alice?” asked Jasmine, with the dry glint in her tone which had made her conversation so pleasing to men.

“You clever girl, how you turn the tables on me,” her friend replied, and then, seeing the sjambok on the table, took it up. “What is this formidable instrument? Are you flagellating the saints?”

“Not the saints, Alice.”

“You don’t mean to say you are going to scourge yourself?”

Then they both smiled–and both immediately sighed. Lady Tynemouth’s sympathy was deeply roused for Jasmine, and she meant to try and win her confidence and to help her in her trouble, if she could; but she was full of something else at this particular moment, and she was not completely conscious of the agony before her.

“Have you been using this sjambok on Mennaval?” she asked with an attempt at lightness. “I saw him leaving as I came in. He looked rather dejected–or stormy, I don’t quite know which.”

“Does it matter which? I didn’t see Mennaval today.”

“Then no wonder he looked dejected and stormy. But what is the history of this instrument of torture?” she asked, holding up the sjambok again.

“Krool.”

“Krool! Jasmine, you surely don’t mean to say that you–“

“Not I–it was Rudyard. Krool was insolent–a half-caste, you know.”

“Krool–why, yes, it was he I saw being helped into a cab by a policeman just down there in Piccadilly. You don’t mean that Rudyard–“

She pushed the sjambok away from her.

“Yes–terribly.”

“Then I suppose the insolence was terrible enough to justify it.”

“Quite, I think.” Jasmine’s voice was calm.

“But of course it is not usual–in these parts.”

“Rudyard is not usual in these parts, or Krool either. It was a touch of the Vaal.”

Lady Tynemouth gave a little shudder. “I hope it won’t become fashionable. We are altogether too sensational nowadays. But, seriously, Jasmine, you are not well. You must do something. You must have a change.”

“I am going to do something–to have a change.”

“That’s good. Where are you going, dear?”

“South…. And how are you getting on with your hospital-ship?”

Lady Tynemouth threw up her hands. “Jasmine, I’m in despair. I had set my heart upon it. I thought I could do it easily, and I haven’t done it, after trying as hard as can be. Everything has gone wrong, and now Tynie cables I mustn’t go to South Africa. Fancy a husband forbidding a wife to come to him.”

“Well, perhaps it’s better than a husband forbidding his wife to leave him.”

“Jasmine, I believe you would joke if you were dying.”

“I am dying.”

There was that in the tone of Jasmine’s voice which gave her friend a start. She eyed her suddenly with a great anxiety.

“And I’m not jesting,” Jasmine added, with a forced smile. “But tell me what has gone wrong with all your plans. You don’t mind what Tynemouth says. Of course you will do as you like.”

“Of course; but still Tynie has never ‘issued instructions’ before, and if there was any time I ought to humour him it is now. He’s so intense about the war! But I can’t explain everything on paper to him, so I’ve written to say I’m going to South Africa to explain, and that I’ll come back by the next boat, if my reasons are not convincing.”

In other circumstances Jasmine would have laughed. “He will find you convincing,” she said, meaningly.

“I said if he found my reasons convincing.”

“You will be the only reason to him.”

“My dear Jasmine, you are really becoming sentimental. Tynie would blush to discover himself being silly over me. We get on so well because we left our emotions behind us when we married.”

“Yours, I know, you left on the Zambesi,” said Jasmine, deliberately.

A dull fire came into Lady Tynemouth’s eyes, and for an instant there was danger of Jasmine losing a friend she much needed; but Lady Tynemouth had a big heart, and she knew that her friend was in a mood when anything was possible, or everything impossible.

So she only smiled, and said, easily: “Dearest Jasmine, that umbrella episode which made me love Ian Stafford for ever and ever without even amen came after I was married, and so your pin doesn’t prick, not a weeny bit. No, it isn’t Tynie that makes me sad. It’s the Climbers who won’t pay.”

“The Climbers? You want money for–“

“Yes, the hospital-ship; and I thought they’d jump at it; but they’ve all been jumping in other directions. I asked the Steuvenfeldts, the Boulters, the Felix Fowles, the Brutons, the Sheltons, and that fellow Mackerel, who has so much money he doesn’t know what to do with it and twenty others; and Mackerel was the only one who would give me anything at all large. He gave me ten thousand pounds. But I want fifty–fifty, my beloved. I’m simply broken-hearted. It would do so much good, and I could manage the thing so well, and I could get other splendid people to help me to manage it–there’s Effie Lyndhall and Mary Meacham. The Mackerel wanted to come along, too, but I told him he could come out and fetch us back–that there mustn’t be any scandal while the war was on. I laugh, my dear, but I could cry my eyes out. I want something to do–I’ve always wanted something to do. I’ve always been sick of an idle life, but I wouldn’t do a hundred things I might have done. This thing I can do, however, and, if I did it, some of my debt to the world would be paid. It seems to me that these last fifteen years in England have been awful. We are all restless; we all have been going, going–nowhere; we have all been doing, doing–nothing; we have all been thinking, thinking, thinking–of ourselves. And I’ve been a playbody like the rest; I’ve gone with the Climbers because they could do things for me; I’ve wanted more and more of everything–more gadding, more pleasure, more excitement. It’s been like a brass-band playing all the time, my life this past ten years. I’m sick of it. It’s only some big thing that can take me out of it. I’ve got to make some great plunge, or in a few years more I’ll be a middle-aged peeress with nothing left but a double chin, a tongue for gossip, and a string of pearls. There must be a bouleversement of things as they are, or good-bye to everything except emptiness. Don’t you see, Jasmine, dearest?”

“Yes yes, I see.” Jasmine got up, went to her desk, opened a drawer, took out a book, and began to write hastily. “Go on,” she said as she wrote; “I can hear what you are saying.”

“But are you really interested?”

“Even Tynemouth would find you interesting and convincing. Go on.”

“I haven’t anything more to say, except that nothing lies between me and flagellation and the sack cloth,”–she toyed with the sjambok–“except the Climbers; and they have failed me. They won’t play–or pay.”

Jasmine rose from the desk and came forward with a paper in her hand. “No, they have not failed you, Alice,” she said, gently. “The Climbers seldom really disappoint you. The thing is, you must know how to talk to them, to say the right thing, the flattering, the tactful, and the nice sentimental thing,–they mostly have middle-class sentimentality–and then you get what you want. As you do now. There….”

She placed in her friend’s hand a long, narrow slip of paper. Lady Tynemouth looked astonished, gazed hard at the paper, then sprang to her feet, pale and agitated.

“Jasmine–you–this–sixty thousand pounds!” she cried. “A cheque for sixty thousand pounds–Jasmine!”

There was a strange brilliance in Jasmine’s eyes, a hectic flush on her cheek.

“It must not be cashed for forty-eight hours; but after that the money will be there.”

Lady Tynemouth caught Jasmine’s shoulders in her trembling yet strong fingers, and looked into the wild eyes with searching inquiry and solicitude.