Part 51 (1/2)
”I have sighed, and she has smiled.” He went on, ”If your friend Bough had been brave enough to try and take away that wad of banknotes from the little Englishwoman, he would have met trouble. For in a pocket of her gown she carries a revolver, and sleeps with it under her pillow by night; that is another thing that Trudi has told me.” He kissed his fingers, and waved them in the direction of Kink's Hotel. ”She is a lovely maiden!” He blew his nose without the a.s.sistance of a pocket-handkerchief, and continued:
”Of course, Bough might have put some stuff in the Englishwoman's coffee that would have made her sleep while he stole that money, or he might even have killed her quietly, and buried her on the farm. But a man who does that is not so clever and so wise as the man who makes a plan that gets the money and keeps friends all round, and makes everybody happy--is he, now? And that man is me, and that plan was mine. From P. Blinders you have genuine information to sell the Englishwoman, and when she has bought it, paying well for it, and written it all down in her despatches to the Commandant at Gueldersdorp, she hands the letters back to you to be smuggled through the lines, and pays through the nose for that also. And who shall say she is cheated? For the letters do get through”--the pimply countenance of P. Blinders was quite immobile, but the eyes behind the great spectacles twirled and twinkled with infinite meaning--”a week or so after date, perhaps, but what is that? Nothing--nothing at all.”
”Nothing,” agreed Van Busch. The two men smiled pleasantly in each other's faces for a minute more. Then said Van Busch, with a loud sigh:
”But what I have to tell you now is something. The Englishwoman has got no more money. Ask Trudi, if you think I lie. And, of course, the plan was a good plan, and you were a smart fellow to hit on it; but now the two hundred pounds is gone----”
”Three hundred remain to get.” P. Blinders briskly held up five stumpy red fingers and tucked down the thumb and little finger, leaving a trio of mute witnesses to the correctness of his arithmetic.
”No more remains to get. The cow has run dry.”
The brow of P. Blinders grew scarlet as a stormy sunrise.
”Hoe? What is this I hear?” he demanded with indignation. ”Nothing left, and I have not had but a hundred and fifty out of the five hundred. There has been dishonesty somewhere. There have been tricks, unbefitting the dealings of scrupulous Christian men. Foei, foei!”
Van Busch stuck his thumbs into his belt and smiled amiably down into the indignant eyes behind the spectacles. Then he said, with his most candid look and simplest lisp:
”No tricks, brother; all fair and above-board. Ask the Commandant whether Van Busch is square or not? He knows that the hundred and fifty was paid you honestly on his account, and that I kept but fifty for myself. And you're not the chap to bilk him of his due. Sure no, you'll never do that, never! Go and see him now, and settle up. I had a talk with young Schenk Eybel this morning, and he says the answer to the screeve you wrote to the Officer in Command at Gueldersdorp--to patch up an exchange of the Englishwoman for that slim kerel of a Boer's son they got their claws on at the beginning of the siege--has come in under the white flag this morning. Schenk Eybel has a little plan he can't put through without Walt Slabberts, he says. Loop, brother. You'll find the old man on his grey pony near the Field Hospital.”
The eyes behind the spectacles whirled in terror. The ex-apothecary faltered:
”What--what is this you say? The money paid me on the Commandant's account--when it was to be a secret between us.... Foei, foei! This is unfair. And suppose I have spent it, how shall I replace it? Do you wish to ruin an honest man?”
Van Busch grinned, and P. Blinders gave up hopelessly. At least, it seemed so, for he turned sharp round, and trotted off with sorrowfully-drooping black coat-tails, in search of the meek grey pony and the terrible old man.
But the front view of the Secretary displayed a countenance whose pimples radiated satisfaction, and spectacles that were alight with joy.
Much--very much--would P. Blinders have liked to have kept that hundred and fifty, but his fear had proved greater than his desire.
He had paid every tikkie of the money faithfully to Brounckers, and his hands were metaphorically clean, and his neck comfortably safe. He was the poorer by a hundred and fifty pounds, but the richer in wisdom and experience; and--he chuckled at the thought of this--in the joy of knowing himself, in postscripts appended to those despatches of the Englishwoman's, to have poked sly sarcasm at the British Lion. Whose spiny tail P. Blinders imagined to be las.h.i.+ng, even then, at the p.r.i.c.k of the goad.
For another thing, very pleasant to think of, he had successfully pitted the cunning behind his giant spectacles against the superior villainy of Mr. Van Busch of Johannesburg.
x.x.xVI
The German drummer's refugee-widow, who lived behind two green-shuttered, blinded windows at Kink's Hotel, and was a sister of that good Boer Mijnheer Hendryk Van Busch--”_a sister indeed!_” snorted Mevrouw Kink; and never went to the kerk-praying, or put her nose out of doors at all before dark, and had a maid who did her hair, and wore her own in waves, the impudent wench! and whose portmanteau, and bag, and boots, and shoes, and skirt-bands, had fas.h.i.+onable London tradesmen's labels inside them, was the only person in the village of Tweipans and for a mile round it--good Nederlands measure--who did not know that she was an English prisoner-of-war.
Her foray in quest of Secret Information had had its hards.h.i.+ps, as its alarms and excursions, but she plumed herself on having accomplished something of what she had set out to do. Van Busch, not counting a week of days when she had found reason to suspect his entire good faith, had behaved like a staunch Johannesburger of British blood and Imperial sympathies. But his valuable services had been rendered for so much more than nothing that Lady Hannah found herself in the condition her Bingo was wont to describe as ”stony.” She had sent for Van Busch to tell him that the position was untenable. She would evacuate it, when he could manage to get hold of Nixey's mouse-coloured trotter and the spider, left in the care of Van Busch's good friend Bough, at Haargrond Plaats.
A dash for freedom then. In imagination she could hear the mouse-coloured trotter's hoofs rattling over the stony ground, and the crack, crack of the sentries' Mausers, followed by a hail of bullets from the trenches....
She could see the headlines of the latest newspaper sensation, flaming on the greenish gloom of the room with the closed shutters and drawn-down blinds:
”STIRRING STORY FROM THE SEAT OF HOSTILITIES: LADY WAR-CORRESPONDENT RUNS THE GAUNTLET OF BOER RIFLES.”
”Speshul. Hextry Speshul!”
Perhaps she would be mortally wounded by the time she got through the lines, so as to hang in bleeding festoons over the splashboard, and sink into the arms of the husband loved better than aught save Glory, gasping, as her heroic spirit fled----