"What it is to be a man of tact! You've made that purple creature perfectly happy. Don't say you're going to be less kind to another woman!"
She tapped with a reproachful fan the scarlet sleeve of his thin serge mess-jacket, her appraising eye busy with the badges worn on the dark green roll-collar and the miniature medals and star. If a clever woman could be the confidante of a Cabinet Minister, the post of right-hand to the Officer Commanding H.M. Forces in Gueldersdorp might be won. And then the world would know what Hannah Wrynche was born for. What was he saying?
"I never warn my victims beforehand."
"Sphinx! and I hoped to find you in the relenting mood!"
"If possible, ma'am, my granite bosom is more unyielding than on the last occasion when …"
"Do go on!" said the fan.
"When you tried to tap it."
"You're all alike." She sighed. "That is, you give the keynote, and the others take up the tune. Even Bingo – Bingo, whom I firmly believed incapable of keeping a secret in which his dearest interests were concerned longer than ten minutes – Bingo has sprung a surprise on me. I shall end by falling in love with my own husband – such an indecent thing to do after seven years of married life!"
"Fortunately, the scene of your lapse from the crooked path of custom is distant from the West End of London nearly seven thousand miles. And you can rely upon me for secrecy."
"Ah, that!.. If only you did leak a little information now and then." Her eyebrows went up to the dry fringe of her Pompadour transformation. "For the sake of the thirsting public at home, to say nothing of my reputation as a Special Correspondent – "
"Drive over and call on General Brounckers at Head Laager, Geitfontein, on the Border, early to-morrow. Perhaps he would oblige you with matter for a paragraph, and forward the cable by private wire?"
Her birdlike eyes were bright on him.
"I would go if I thought I could get anything by going. Special information – with reference to a Plan of Attack. Oh! if you knew how I'm dying to be really under fire. To hear bullets zip-zip – isn't that the sound? – as they strike the ground or walls, and shells scream overhead!"
She clasped her sunburnt little jewelled hands in affected ecstasy. His eyes were stern, and the lines about his mouth deepened.
"Pray to-night that you may never hear those sounds you speak of!"
She struck an exaggerated attitude of horrified consternation.
"But no! Why am I here?"
"The Lord only knows. I've seen a hen peck at a lump of dynamite…"
"Ah, you never will take me seriously. But own in your secret heart you're as much afraid as I am that a Relieving Column will be sent down from – Do tell me again where Grumer is with the Brigade? Uli, in Upper Rhodesia – thanks! Well, Grumer is quite a near friend of Bingo's, and an old flame of mine. But – to burst our lovely peacock bubble of Siege and let the whole situation down, sans coup férir, into muddy commonplace – may Grumer never come!" She held up her coffee-cup, and drank the toast.
"Only for the women and children here," he said, and his thin nostrils moved to the measure of his quickened breathing, and a hot spark glowed in his keen eyes, "I'd have joined you in that. But under the present circumstances – I'd give five years of life – and I love life! – if our lookouts could pick up Grumer's Advance by the time grey dawn creeps up the east again."
She was incredulous.
"You, who said when you got orders to sail for South Africa – I have it on the authority of your Henley hostess – 'I hope they'll give me a warm corner'!"
"I did say – just that. And I meant it."
His lips pursed in a soundless whistle. She went on:
"I've seen your preparations. The little old forts, put into such repair! and the armoured train, with a Maxim and a Hotchkiss, standing in the Railway siding, ready for business. And the earthworks! And the trek-waggon barricades, and the shelters panelled and roofed with corrugated iron. And your bomb-proof Headquarter Bureau, the iron skull that's to hold the working brain of the place … with underground telegraphic and telephonic communications with all the forts and outposts. It's colossal! A masterpiece of cool, deadly, lethal forethought… I thought I was incapable of the delicious shiver of expectation that the schoolboy enjoys, sitting in the stalls of dear Old Drury, waiting for the curtain to rise on the first act of the Autumn Drama. But you've given it to me – you and our friends out there!" She waved the dry little glittering hand. "And you can talk in cold blood of marching out – and leaving the hive – and all the honey you might have had out of it. Sweet danger, perilous sport, the great Game of War – played as a man like you knows how to play it in this little sandy world-arena, with all the Powers and Dominions looking on. Preserve us! Oh, to be in your shoes this minute, if only for one week! But as I can't, it's you I hope to see riding the whirlwind and directing the storm. Not only for my own sake and the wretched paper's – though, mind you, I don't pretend to be anything but a mercenary, calculating worldly creature …"
His eyes were very kind.
"Bingo knows better!"
Her laugh did not jangle this time.
"Lady Grasby, that vitriol-tongued water-nymph, as somebody clever once called her, said that if Bingo got killed by any chance, I should sit down and write a gossipy descriptive article, dealing with his military career, married life, and last moments, before I ordered my widow's-weepers. Horrible things! They've come in again, too! Talking of gossip, which I know you only pretend to despise, I found the son of a mutual acquaintance dying in the Hospital here. You know the Bishop of H …?"
"His eldest son, Major Fraithorn, was my senior when I was Assistant Military Secretary at Gibraltar in '90. And the Bishop is quite a dear crony of my mother's."
"The Bishop," she said, "was always a person of excellent good taste – except when he cut off his second son, Julius, with two hundred a year for turning Anglican, wearing a soft hat and Roman collars, and joining the staff at that clerical posture shop in Wendish Street West as Junior Curate."
"St. Margaret's. I know the church. Often go there when I'm at home."
"It's the Halfway House to Rome, according to the Bishop, who won't be content with running at every red rag of Ritualism that flutters in his own diocese, but keeps up the character of belligerent Broad Churchman by writing pamphlets and asking questions in the House of Lords with reference to affairs which are the business of other people. According to him, the red cassocks of the acolytes at St. Margaret's are cut out of the very skirts of the Woman of Babylon, and Father Turney and his curates – they're all Fathers there, and celibates by choice – are wolves in wool, and Mephistophelean plotters against the liberties of the Church. Punch published a cartoon of the Bishop shutting his eyes and charging at a windmill in a cope and chasuble. He is sending out a string of Protestant-Church-Integrity vans all over England, Scotland, and Wales this season, with acetylene-lantern pictures from Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs,' and a lecturer to point the morals and adorn the tales… But if he could see his Mary's boy to-day, he'd put up with any amount of felt-basin hats and Roman collars, and incense and altar-genuflections wouldn't count for a tikkie. Oh! it's been a sore with me this many a year, but when I saw him to-day I said, 'Thank God I never had a child!' Because to have seen a boy or girl grow up and wither away as that beautiful young fellow is withering, is a thing that a mother must shudder to look back upon, even when she has found her lost one again in Heaven."
There was genuine feeling in her voice, usually loud, harsh, and tuneless. The bright black bird-eyes had a gleam as of tears. He turned to her with sympathetic interest.
"The Bishop will be obliged to you for finding this out. No hint of it had reached me. I am due at the Hospital in the morning, and we'll see if something can't be done for the boy."
She shook her head.
"It's a case of tuberculous lung-disease. He developed it in the Clergy House at St.