They saved him trouble now. When the bent wire rattled in the lock, and the key fell out upon the floor, she screamed, and his coarse chuckle answered. She was cowering against the wall in a corner of the room when he came in and picked up the key and locked the door. But when his stretched-out, grasping hand came down upon her slight shoulder, she turned and bit it like some savage, desperate little animal, drawing the blood. Bough swore at the sudden sting of the sharp white teeth. So the little beast showed fight, eh? Well, he would teach her that the master will have his way.
There was no one else in the house, and if there had been it would have served her not at all. God sat in timeless Eternity beyond these mists of earth, and saw, and made no sign. It was not until the man Bough slept the heavy sleep of liquor and satiety that the thought of flight was born in her with desperate courage to escape him. The shutters had been left unbolted, and the window was yet a little way open. She sprang up and threw it wide, leaped out upon the stoep, and from thence to the ground, and fled blindly, breathlessly over the veld into the night.
VII
Bough, as soon as it was dawn, sent three of the Kaffirs from the kraals, in different directions, to search for her, and, mounted on a fresh pony, took the fourth line of search 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?