The Dop Doctor

VII

Bough, as soon as it was dawn, sent three of the Kaffirs from the kraals, in different directions, to search for her, and, mounted on a fresh pony, took the fourth line of search himself.

He had chosen the right direction for riding down the quarry. At broad high noon he came upon her, in a bare, stony place tufted with milk-bush. She was crouching under a prickly-pear shrub, that threw a distorted blue shadow on the sun-baked, sun-bleached ground, trying to eat the fruit in the native way with two sticks. But she had no knife, and her mouth was bleeding. Bough gave the tired pony both spurs when the prey he hunted came in sight. She leaped up like a wild cat when the mounted man rode down upon her, and ran, doubling like a hare. When overtaken, she fell upon her face in the sand, and lay still, only shaken by her long pants. Bough dismounted and caught her by the wrist and dragged her up with his bandaged right hand. He beat her about her cheeks with his hard, open left. Then he threw her across his saddle, but she writhed down, and lay under the pony's feet.

He kicked her then, for giving so much trouble, lifted her again, and tried to mount, holding her in one arm. But the frightened pony swerved and backed, and the girl writhed, and struggled, and scratched like a wild cat. She did not know what mercy meant, but she saw by the look that came into those light eyes that this man would have none upon her. She fought and bit and screamed.

Bough took an ox-reim then, that was coiled behind his saddle, and bound her hands. He tied the end of the leather rope to the iron ring behind his saddle, and remounted, and spurred his weary beast into a canter. The little one was forced to run behind. Again and again she fell, and each time she was jerked up and forced to run again upon her bleeding feet, leaving rags of her garments upon the karroo-bushes and blood-marks on the stones. And at last she fell, and rose no more, showing no sign of life under the whip and the spur-rowel. Then Bough bent over and drew his long hunting-knife and cut the reim, leaving her hands still bound. If any spark of life remained in he girl, he could not tell. Her knees were drawn in towards her body; her eyes were open, and rolled upwards; there was foam upon her torn and bleeding mouth. She was as good as dead, anyway, and the wild dogs would be sure to come by-and-by. Already an aasvogel was hovering above; a mere speck, the great bird poised upon widespread wings, high up in the illimitable blue.

Presently there would be a flock of these carrion feeders, that are not averse to fresh-killed meat when it is to be had.

Bough remounted, and, humming a dance tune that was often on his lips, rode away over the veld.

The great vulture wheeled. Then he dropped like a falling stone for a thousand yards or so, and hovered and dropped again, getting nearer – ever so much nearer – with each descent. And where he had hovered at the first were now a dozen specks of black upon the hot, bright blue.

A wild dog crept down from a cone-topped spitzkop, and stood, sniffing the blood-tainted air eagerly, whining a little in its throat.

The great vulture dropped lower. His comrades of the flock, eagerly following his gyrations and descents, had begun to wheel and drop also. Another wild dog appeared on the cone-shaped kop. Other furry, sharp-eared heads, with eager, sniffing noses, could be seen amongst the grass and bush.

Then suddenly the higher vultures rose. They wheeled and soared and flew, a bevy of winged black specks hurrying to the north. They had seen something approaching over the veld. The great bird hanging motionless, purposeful, lower down, became aware of his comrades' change of tactics. With one downward stroke of his powerful wings, he shot upwards, and with a hoarse, croaking cry took flight after the rest.

The wild dogs stole back, hungry, to covert, as a big light blue waggon, drawn by a well-fed team of eight span, came lumbering over the veld.

Would the ox-team veer in another direction? Would the big blue waggon with the new white tilt roll by?

The Hottentot driver cracked his giant whip, and, turning on the box-seat, spoke to a figure that sat beside him. It was a woman in loose black garments, with a starched white coif like a Dutchwoman's kapje, covered with a floating black veil. At her side dangled and clashed a long rosary of brown wooden beads, with a copper crucifix attached. There were two other women in the big waggon, dressed in the same way. They were Roman Catholic nuns – Sisters of Mercy coming up from Natal, by the order of the Bishop of Bellmina, Vicar-Apostolic, at the request of the Bishop of Paracos, suffragan to North-East Baraland, to swell the numbers of the Community already established in Gueldersdorp at the Convent of the Holy Way.

The oxen halted some fifty yards from that inanimate ragged little body, lying prone, face downwards, among the scrubby bushes that sprouted in the hot sand. Little crowding tiny ants already blackened the bloodstains on the ground, and the wild dogs would not have stayed long from the feast if the waggon had passed on.

One white-coifed, tall, black-clad figure sprang lightly down from the waggon-box, and hurried across to where the body was lying. A mellow, womanly cry of pity came from under the starched coif. She turned and beckoned. Then she knelt down by the girl's side, opened the torn garments, and felt with compassionate, kindly touches about the still heart.

The other two black figures came hurrying over then, stumbling amongst the stones and karroo-bushes in their haste. Lifting her, they turned the white, bloodless young face to the blue sky. It was cut and scratched, but not otherwise disfigured. Her bound arms, dragged upwards before it, had shielded it from the thorns and the sharp stones. They were raw from the elbows to the wrists.

They listened at the torn childish bosom with anxious ears. They got a few drops of brandy between the clenched little teeth. The sealed lips quivered; the heart fluttered feebly, like a dying bird. They gave her more stimulant, and waited, while the Hottentot driver dozed, and the sleek, well-fed oxen chewed the cud patiently, standing in the sun.

Then the Sisters lifted her, with infinite care, and carried her to the waggon. The twenty-four-foot whip-lash cracked, and the patient beasts moved on. Very soon the big white tilt was a mere retreating speck upon the veld. The ants were still busy when the wild dogs came out and sniffed regretfully at those traces on the ground.

Coincidence, did you say, lifting your eyebrows over the book, as the blue waggon of the Sisters rolled lumberingly into the story? The long arm of coincidence stretched to aching tenuity by the dramatist and the novelist! Nay! but the thing happened, just as I have told.

What is the thing we are agreed to call coincidence?

Once I was passing over one of the bridges that span the unclean London ditch called the Regent's Canal. I had walked all the way from Piccadilly Circus to Gloucester Crescent, haunted by the memory of a man I had once known. He was the broken-down, drunken, studio-drudge of a great artist, a splendid Bohemian, who had died some years before. Why did the thought of the palette-scraper, the errand-goer, the drunken creature with the cultivated voice and the ingratiating, gentlemanly manners, possess me as I went? I recalled his high, intellectual, pimply forehead, and large benevolent nose, in a chronic state of inflammation, and seedy semi-clerical garb, for the thing had been an ordained clergyman of the Church of England, and I grinned, remembering how, when a Royal visitor was expected at the great man's studio, the factotum had been bidden to wash his face, and had washed one half of it, leaving the other half in drab eclipse, like the picture-restorers' trade-advertisement of a canvas partially cleansed.

Idly I tossed the butt of a finished cigar over the bridge balustrade. Idly my eye followed it down to the filthy, sluggishly-creeping water that flows round the bend, under the damp rear-garden walls below.

A policeman and a bargeman were just taking the body of an old man out of that turbid canal-stream. It was dressed in pauper's garments, and its stiffened knees were bent, and its rigid elbows crooked, and a dishonoured, dripping beard of grey hung over the soulless breast.

The dreadful eyes were open, staring up at the leaden March sky. His face, with the dread pallor of Death upon it, and the mud-stains wiped away by a rough but not unkindly hand, was cleaner than I had ever seen it in life.

Nevertheless, I recognised in the soaked body in its workhouse livery the very man the thought of whom had haunted me, the great Bohemian painter's drunken studio-drudge.

VIII

School at the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp was breaking up, suddenly and without warning, very soon after the beginning of the Christmas term. Many of the pupils had already left in obedience to urgent telegrams from relatives in Cape Colony or in the Transvaal, and every Dutch girl among the sixty knew the reason why, but was too astute to hint of it, and every English girl was at least as wise, but pride kept her silent, and the Americans and the Germans exchanged glances of intelligence, and whispered in corners of impending war between John Bull and Oom Paul.

That deep and festering political hatreds, fierce enthusiasms, inherited pride of race, and instilled pride in nationality, were covered by worked apron-bibs, and even childish pinafores, is anyone likely to doubt? Schoolgirls can be patriots as well as rebels, and the seminary can vie with the college, or possibly outdo it, occasion given. Ask Juliette Adam whether the bread-and-butter misses of France in the year 1847 did not squabble over the obstinacy of King Louis Philippe and the greed of M. Guizot, the claims of Louis Napoleon and the theories of Louis Blanc, of Odilon Barrot, and Ledru-Rollin? And I who write, have I not seen a North Antrim Sunday-school wrecked in a faction-fight between the Orange and the Green? Lord! how the red-edged hymnals and shiny-covered S.P.G. books hurtled through the air, to burst like hand-grenades upon the texted walls. In vain the panting, crimson clergyman mounted the superintendent's platform, and strove to shed the oil of peace upon those seething waters. Even the class-teachers had broken the rails out of the Windsor chair-backs, and joined the hideous fray, irrespective of age or sex.

"Miss Maloney – Miss Geoghegan – I am shocked – appalled! In the name of decency I command yees to desist!"

"Hit him again, Moggy Lenahan, a taste lower down!"

"Serve you right, Mulcahy! why would you march wid the Green?"

Thirty years ago. As I gaped in affright at the horrid scene of strife, small revengeful fingers twisted themselves viciously in my auburn curls, and wresting from my grasp a "Child's Own Bible Concordance," a birthday outrage received from an Evangelical aunt, Julia Dolan, aged twelve, began to pound me about the face with it. As a snub-nosed urchin, gifted with a marvellous capacity for the cold storage and quick delivery of Scripture genealogies and Hebrew proper and improper names, I had often reduced my mild, long-legged girl-neighbour to tearful confusion. Now meek Julia seemed as though possessed by seven devils. I had been taught the elementary rule that boys must not hurt girls, but the code had no precept helpful in the present instance, when a girl was hurting me. Casting chivalry to the winds, I remember that I kicked Julia's shins, and she fled howling; but not before she had reduced my leading feature to a state of ruin, which created a tremendous sensation when they led me home. Later, during the election riots, two young women fought in the Market Place, stripped to the waist, and wielding boards wrenched from the side of a packing-case, heavy, jagged, and full of nails. And when the soldiers were called out, we know how many a saddle was emptied by the stones the children threw…

Only a day previously the centipede-like procession of girls of all ages, in charge of nuns and pupil-teachers, in passing over the Gueldersdorp Recreation-Ground, had sustained an experience with which every maiden bosom would have been still vibrating had not an event even more exciting occurred between the early morning roll-call and prayers-muster and breakfast.

Greta Du Taine had had another love-letter!

The news darted from class-room to class-room more quickly than little Monsieur Pilotell, the French literature professor; it spread like the measles, and magnified like the mumps.

The Red Class, composed of the elder girls, "young ladies" who were undergoing the process of finishing, surged with volcanic excitement, hidden, but not in the least repressed. The White Class, their juniors, who were chiefly employed in preparing for Confirmation, should have been immersed in graver things, but were not. They waited on mental tiptoe for details, and a peep at the delicious document. The Blue Class, as became mere infants ranging from six to ten years old, remained phlegmatically indifferent to the missive, yet avid for samples of the chocolates that had accompanied the declaration, made to eighty girls of all ages by one undersized, pasty, freckled young man employed as junior clerk and chain-assistant in a surveyor's office, and who signed at the end of a long row of symbolistic crosses the unheroic name of Billy Keyse.

He had seen and been helplessly stunned by the vision of Greta Du Taine out walking at the head of the long winding procession of English, German, Dutch, Dutch-French, Dutch-American, and Jewish girls. They are sent now to be taught in Europe, those daughters of the Rand millionaires, the Stock Exchange speculators, the wealthy fruit-farmers, or cereal-growers, or cattle and sheep breeders, who are descended themselves from the old pioneers and voortrekkers, but they do not get a better education than was to be had at the Convent school at Gueldersdorp, where the Sisters of Mercy took in and taught and trained coltish girl-children, born in a strongly stimulating climate, and accustomed to lord it over Kaffir and Hottentot servants to their hearts' content. These they tamed, these they transformed into refined, cultivated, accomplished young women, stamped with the indefinable seal of high breeding, possessed of the tone and manner that belongs to the upper world.

What shall I say of the Sisters of the Convent of the Holy Way at Gueldersdorp, I who know but little of any Order of Religious? They are a Community, chiefly of ladies of high breeding and ancient family, vowed to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, nurse the sick, comfort the dying, and instruct the ignorant. Like the Fathers of the Society of Jesuits, those skilled, patient, wise tillers in the soil of the human mind, their daily task is to hoe and tend, and prune and train, and water the young green things growing in what to them is the Garden of God, and to other good and even holy people, the vineyard of the devil. Possibly both are right?

I have heard the habit of the Order called ugly. But upon the stately person of the Mother Superior the garb was regal. The sweeping black folds were as imposing as imperial purple, and the starched guimpe framed a beauty that was grave, stern, almost severe until she smiled, and then you caught your breath, because you had seen what great poets write of, and great painters try to render, and only great musicians by their impalpable, mysterious tone-art can come nearest to conveying – the earthly beauty that has been purged of all grosser particles of dross in the white fires of the Divine Love. She was not altogether perfect, or one could not have loved her so. Her scorn of any baseness was bitterly scathing; the point of her sarcasm was keen as any thrusting blade of tempered steel; her will was to be obeyed, and was obeyed as sovereign law, else woe betide the disobedient. Also, though kind and gracious to all, tenderly solicitous for, and incessantly watchful of, the welfare of the least of her charges, she never feigned where she could not feel regard or love. Her rare kiss was coveted in the little world of the Convent school as the jewel of an Imperial Order was coveted in the bigger world outside it, and the most rebellious of the pupils held her in respect mingled with fear. The head-mistresses of the classes had their followers and admirers. It was for the Mother Superior to command enthusiasm, and to sway ambition, and to govern the hearts and minds of children with the personal charm and the intellectual powers that could have ruled a nation from a throne.

Well, she has gone to God. It is good for many souls that she lived upon earth a little. There was nothing sentimental, visionary, or hysterical in her character. Nor, in giving her great heart with her pure soul to her Saviour, did she ever quite learn to despise the sweetness of earthly love. Not all a Saint. Yet the children of those women who most were swayed by her influence in youth are taught to hold her Saint as well as Martyr. And there is One Who knows.

It was not until recess after the midday dinner that Greta Du Taine could exhibit her love-letter. She was a Transvaal Dutch girl with old French blood in her, a vivacious, sparkling Gallic champagne mingling with the Dopper in her dainty blue veins. Nothing could be prettier than Greta in a good temper, unless it might be Greta in a rage. She was in a good temper now, as, tossing back her superb golden hair plait, as thick as a child's arm, and nearly four feet long, she drew a smeary envelope from the front of her black alpaca school-dress, and, delicately withdrawing the epistle enclosed, yielded the envelope for the inspection of the Red Class.