The Man Who Won

BY

MRS. BAILLIE REYNOLDS (G. M. ROBINS)

AUTHOR OF "PHOEBE IN FETTERS," "THE DREAM AND THE MAN," ETC.

"Let a man contend to the uttermost For his life's set prize, be it what it may." —ROBERT BROWNING,

LONDON HUTCHINSON & CO. PATERNOSTER ROW 1905

Printed by Cowan & Co., Limited, Perth.

To M. ADELINE HUGHES UNTIRING SYMPATHISER TENDER CRITIC DEAR FRIEND

CONTENTS

CHAP.

I LUTWYCHE'S II MILLIE III THE RIVALS IV THE GUARDIANSHIP OF CAROL MAYNE V A BOER BURYING VI THE FLINGING OF THE GAGE VII IN THE GARRET VIII THE RESCUE IX THE SCANDALISING OF SLABBERT'S POORT X FRANSDALE XI MELICENT'S COUSINS XII THE JARRING ELEMENT XIII LANCE BURMESTER IS CONSCIOUS OF A PERSONALITY XIV THE BREAKING-IN OF MELICENT XV A CLEVESHIRE TEA-PARTY XVI BREAKING BOUNDS XVII A CRISIS AT THE VICARAGE XVIII A NEW HOME XIX AN UNMARKED FESTIVAL XX CAPTAIN BROOKE XXI MIRAGE XXII RECOGNITION XXIII REBELLION XXIV UNREST XXV THE WAY OUT XXVI THE END OF THE FIRST ROUND XXVII THREE MONTHS' TRUCE XXVIII THE GATES OF SPRING ARE OPENED XXIX THE FRIENDSHIP GROWS XXX TREACHERY XXXI REPUDIATION XXXII THE FRANSDALE SPORTS XXXIII CALUMNY XXXIV THE DISCOMFITURE OF OTIS XXXV CONFESSION XXXVI WHAT CHANCED UPON THE MOORS XXXVII THE HOUSE IS BUILT

THE MAN WHO WON

CHAPTER I LUTWYCHE'S

"Handsome, were you? 'Tis more than they held, More than they said. I was ware, and watched. I was the scapegrace, this rat belled The cat, this fool got his whiskers scratched." —ROBERT BROWNING.

The talk had waxed political, and the audience was frankly bored. The man who had been haranguing his mates was hurt at the somewhat too obvious lack of appreciation which his truly democratic sentiments received.

"Ef yer could quit twinin' yerself araound that thar' post a spell, an' listen to a bit o' horse-sense"—he broke off angrily.

"It's usually hoarse when you take the floor, Amurrica," was the surly reply; "but it's blasted little sense I've ever heard come outer your head."

"Ef you was to listen, it 'ud make a powerful deal o' difference to what you heard," snapped Amurrica, whose eloquence was his chief vanity.

"I ain't good at listening," indifferently replied the blond and bearded giant, who was "twinin' hisself araound the post," "onless a man's talkin'; an' that's a fact."

There was a giggle of appreciation among the half-dozen men and youths collected at the gate of the farm enclosure.

"No good, Amurrica; chuck it! Bert'll git there every time," said someone cheerfully.

Amurrica snorted.

"Talkin', indeed! Why, you low-downers in this all-fired continent of Africa, you don' know what talkin' means!"

"Usually means lyin' over in America, don't it?" said Bert casually.

His eyes were fixed on vacancy as he spoke; the chatter of the group around him was nothing but a weariness, like the buzzing of flies. His mind was fixed upon what was going on in the low frame house, with the corrugated iron roof, that stood within the enclosure. He was experiencing something more like anxiety than he had ever felt before in all his four-and-twenty years.

It was oppressively hot. For miles and miles, the pitiless sun lit up the endless veldt, which undulated all around the little township: wild, yet with a dreadful sameness in it.

"As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be," seemed written upon the face of the desert; yet here and there its dignity was scarred, its monotony interfered with, by the ugliness and meanness of human habitation. The beginnings of civilisation, without simplicity as they were without harmony, jarred every sense. The places seemed to be devoid of self-respect or privacy; to consist, in fact, entirely of back premises. Rows of dingy linen flapped upon lines, on ground where the grass was irregularly worn away here and there by the treading of feet. Collections of old meat tins, old kettles, old shoes, heaped upon kitchen refuse, burdened the stale air with miasma. A wretched-looking, lean-to building bore a huge board with the flaunting inscription:

MOUNT PLEASANT BOARDING-HOUSE FOR GENTLEMEN

The gentlemen who boarded there were mostly assembled to-night at the gate of "Lutwyche's."

A little farther away the Vierkleur Hotel fluttered its flag in the heavy air, and rang at night to the coarse laughter and oaths of a set of idlers, attracted to what had been a purely agricultural district by the finding of diamonds.

Lutwyche's lay silent, sweltering in the heat. Round the stoep of the farm-house hungry poultry were congregated; to-day they were being neglected, and they were wisely determined not to suffer in silence.

It was a critical moment in history. All Europe was waiting to know what President Kruger was going to do. It was the period which preceded the sending of his historical ultimatum. The town for days had been buzzing with rumours of war, and Amurrica had spoken great things in the saloon of the Vierkleur. But local interests are strong, and it was not of British supremacy that the men were thinking now.

The sun was going down. They had all, as Amurrica said, quit work, and they were assembled by the barbed wire fence to gather news of the Englishman who lay dying under the corrugated iron roof of Lutwyche's.

Even the quarrelling was listless. It could be seen that Bert's heart was not in it. Where the heart of the huge young Boer was was matter of pretty common knowledge, though there was not a man in the settlement who would have dared to tell him so, except Amurrica, who had his own reasons for not indulging in the perilous amusement.

Presently the door of the silent house opened, and a Kaffir girl came out, with a dirty rug in her hand, from which she proceeded to shake clouds of stifling acrid dust.

"Here, Minnie, Topsy, Hattie, whoever you are, how's the boss—eh?" called one of the loungers.

The girl showed all her teeth in an apparently endless grin.

"You young gentlemen carled to inquire?" she cried, in high appreciation of the family importance. "You brought yo' visitin'-cards—eh?"

"Shut it," said Bert savagely. "How is Mr. Lutwyche?"

"He don' seem not just the right thing to-day, sir, with missus's compulments," grinned the girl, wildly elated by her momentary distinction.

To her intense delight, this last sally caused a giggle among the loafers. She edged nearer to the barbed wire fencing, to prolong this truly delightful conversation; and for a minute or two, idiotic questions and answers pattered across the farm boundary, while Bert's brow grew blacker and blacker.

Suddenly a silence, instant and deep, fell on the gathering. The Kaffir girl scuttled behind a shed with noiseless celerity. From the door of the farm issued two people—Tante Wilma, the Englishman's Boer wife, and striding beside her corpulent bulk, the slim, energetic figure of Carol Mayne, the English mission priest in charge of the station. Tante Wilma wore her most repulsive expression, her sandy eyebrows lowering over her cunning little eyes. Ten years ago she had been a handsome woman, in a redundant style; but six children and an invalid husband had reduced her form to shapelessness and her temper to rags and tatters.

She hated the English cleric, and could not bear that he should come and see her husband. The Boer Predikant would have sat and sympathised with her over his coffee for a couple of hours after his professional visit to the sick man. Carol Mayne never seemed to have an adequate idea of the importance of this woman, who owned half Slabbert's Poort, and had married her English overseer, a widower with a little girl of his own.

She was evidently accompanying the young man from the house much against her will. About half way across the yard, becoming perhaps aware of the audience at the gate, the clergyman halted, just out of earshot. He seemed earnestly recommending some particular course of conduct to Mrs. Lutwyche, who stood sullenly before him, hostility in every line of her coarse face.

The group of men at the gate dropped away silently, singly or in pairs, avoiding the parson; and Bert was left alone, his sullen scowl fixed upon the house, as though willing it to render up the face he had stood there for hours longing to see.

After a while, Mr. Mayne, having finished his colloquy with Tante Wilma, lifted his hat with that unconscious English University manner which had piqued her in her husband, but which now she hated as only the ignorant can hate the thing that they can never understand. The young Englishman's parting salutation, delivered so entirely as a matter of course, belonged to an order of things which, had she been able, Tante Wilma would have destroyed, ravaged, trampled under her gross feet.

She stood glowering upon him as he made straight for the gate by which Bert still lounged. And she was pleased to note that the young man made no effort to open it for his passage.

"Good evening, Mestaer!" said Mr. Mayne, as he reached the gate. "How's the world treating you?"

"I'm —— if I care how it treats me," was the engaging response.

The smile that passed over Mayne's face was particularly humorous and winning.

"Don't care came to a bad end," he said, "and that's what I particularly hope won't happen to you. Are you going my way?"

"No; I'm staying here, if you're so mighty curious to know my plans," was the answer, given with a discourtesy so studied that to notice it would be to allow the speaker to fancy that he had "scored."

The rudeness must, of course, have been obvious to the priest, but he disregarded it entirely. A smile again flickered over his face, as of one who holds a trump card. "Well, then, good-night!" he said briskly, opening the gate at once, and passing through it with an air of having no time to waste.

Bert cast another look at the silent house. Nobody was in sight but the big Boer woman slouching back to the doorway. He lowered the point of his rapier, so to speak.

"Say—how's he goin' on?" he asked.

Mr. Mayne at once dropped his appearance of hurry, and closed the gate slowly.

"Well," he said, "he's just lingering. It may last two or three weeks yet. God help him!"

Bert beat his clenched fist softly on the top bar of the gate.

"Look here!" he burst out, as if the words were torn from him, "they let you go in and out—you can tell—you oughter know. Is she givin' that girl hell?"

"I think things are going on much as they have done this last six months," said Mayne, speaking reluctantly.

"But what'll it be when he's gone? I ask you that? What kind of a life's she goin' to lead then?"

Mayne hesitated. "I don't know," he said at length, with a touch of reserve.

"You know how the she-devil hates her," hissed Bert. "She won't keep her, never fear. She'll chuck her out to any of these blanked scum around the town, and then say the girl's disgraced her, and she'll have no more to do with her! I know Tante Wilma!"

Mayne looked keenly and kindly at the excited speaker. He was sorry for him, from the bottom of his heart; but what to say he did not know, without betraying confidence.

"I think you see things in too black a light," he said at last. "Mrs. Lutwyche is not without a sense of duty, though we know she is not good-tempered. And Millie is not friendless, nor incapable of taking her own part."

Bert lifted his leonine head, and pointed with a gesture of his hand towards the house.

"He told me, with his blanky British pride, that he'd sooner see her in her coffin than married to a man with an ounce of Boer blood in him—him that let a Boer woman marry him," he growled. "He knows my mother was English; I told him. I'd take care of her."

Mr. Mayne was able to follow the trend of the jerky, disconnected sentences.

"Millie's young yet to think of marriage," he said.

"She'll have to think about something worse, before he's cold in his grave, or I'm much mistaken," said Bert, scowling.

The clergyman pondered.

"Do you want me to speak to her father for you?" he presently asked, point-blank.

Bert hesitated; he grew red, then pale.

"Don't like to be beholden to me, do you?" said Mayne cheerfully. "Well, I sympathise with you. But you and I are just walking round the question, you know, Mestaer. The whole point is, what does Millie say? Will she have you?"

The colour again rushed over the crestfallen face of Bert. "Gals like that don' know what they want," he grunted.

"Then it would be very wrong to push her into a life-long contract."

"She don' know what's good for her," repeated Bert. "She'd oughter be arranged for; that's the way to do it. She'd not repent it if she married me."

"Well, look here; I'll make a bargain. If Millie comes to me and says she's willing to marry you, I'll speak to Mr. Lutwyche; but you know quite as well as I do, he would never hear of it against her will."

Hereupon Bert damned first British pride, then his own Boer ancestry, then Tante Wilma, who had caused her husband to contemn all Boers for her sake.

"Swear-words won't help your cause, be sure of that," observed Mayne drily. "English girls aren't going to be won that way."

"Think I'd say words like that to her?"

"More than probably. Well, good-night! I'm due at the Mission; not coming, are you?"

"No," breathed Bert, and said no more; for his eyes were fixed upon a little shadowy figure, moving under the shadow of the stoep.

Mayne saw it too, and walked quietly away.

CHAPTER II MILLIE

"The world was right when it called you thin." —ROBERT BROWNING.

The sun had dropped, as the red billiard ball slips into the pocket, suddenly behind the heaving mass of veldt. Darkness was advancing with tropical, seven-leagued stride, and all things were grey.

The pale figure detached itself from the shadows, and resolved itself into the advancing form of a frail, undeveloped girl of fifteen or sixteen. A strange eye would have been lost in wonder, at the first glance, as to what Bert Mestaer could see here, on which to fix his turbulent affections.

His lady-love was skinny, hollow-chested, stooping and round-backed; her arms were almost like sticks.

She wore a soiled calico gown, too long behind for its length in front. Her pale-coloured hair was drawn off her white face, and plaited into an untidy pig tail which hung down her back. Certain small wisps of it escaped in front, and made what looked in the dim light like the rudiments of a nimbus about her head. She was drawn down on one side by the weight of the heavy, clanking, copper bucket which she carried.

The well was right across the yard, quite near the gate where Bert stood, and his large person was very visible; but the girl came on with no sign that she saw him; and, reaching the well, hooked her bucket on the chain, and let it down, with a stony, expressionless countenance.

Bert leaned over the gate; the expression of his face had altered completely.

"Millie," he said, below his breath, "Millie!"

She gave him a listless glance, from weary, heavy-lidded, dark-blue eyes.

"Oh, good evening!" she said curtly.

He unlatched the gate, came through, and took the windlass out of her hand.

"Thought you promised not to come inside," she remarked.

"Only jest ter wind up this"—perhaps the thought of Mayne and the swear-words flitted across his mind, for he pulled up short, and merely finished lamely with—"this 'ere bucket."

"What's an ear-bucket?" asked Miss Lutwyche, with cold contempt.

He winced like a child from a cane, but made no retort, merely setting all his finely developed muscles a-play, as he raised the gleaming bucket from the depths. When it was at the top, he paused.

"How's he to-night, Millie?"

"Mean my father?"

"Yes, Mr. Lutwyche."

"Oh, same's usual."

Bert's chest heaved with the burden of all he wished to say, and dare not. Some instinct, deep down in him, warned him not to speak to the girl of her father's fast-approaching end. And yet—he thought of all that Mayne had said! Now was his chance, if ever, to declare his passion. He wondered whether Mayne, or anybody else, knew how distant were the terms between him and Millie, what an impregnable barrier she stood behind, how far he was from being on such a footing as might be supposed to immediately precede a proposal of marriage. His tongue clave to the roof of his mouth, and he felt the sweat break out upon him.

The girl moved, leaned over to detach the bucket from the hook. He started, and reaching quickly forward, brought it down upon the side of the well where he stood.

"I'm goin' to carry it indoors for you," he said sheepishly.

She turned, without a word of thanks, and began to walk back to the house.

He strode beside her, in the gathering gloom, his whole being aching with the desire to comfort her.

"Millie," he said at last, "if—if she does anythin' to yer—if she gets too bad, or lays hands upon yer, you jest come to me, or send for me, won't yer?"

The girl let fall a laugh of such quiet scorn that he felt openly sneered at.

"D'you think I'm afraid of her, then?" she asked.

"No," he said warmly; "you've got the pluck of the—" he checked and almost choked—"the pluck of a dozen. But she's stronger than you."

"Is she?" said Millie drily.

He pondered on that answer.

There spoke the careless insolence of the Briton. He admired it, while he writhed under it; but he understood why it made Tante Wilma want to scratch her eyes out.

They had reached the stoep. Nobody was about. He set down the bucket and faced her squarely.

"Millie," he almost gasped, "look here! Give me a word! You know I'd——"

She broke in. "I got no time to talk. I must take this water inside. Good-night!"

His choler rose. "A chap may do what he will for you, and you can't even throw him a word!"

Her languid expression changed; the dark blue eyes flashed wide awake in the twilight.

"I didn't understand you wanted to be paid for carrying the pail!"

"Oh, damn you!" cried Bert, hurt beyond endurance; and he flung away in rage that was not far from tears.

It seemed that the moment he was gone, the girl forgot him utterly. She turned away and went inside the sitkamer without a backward glance.

The sitkamer was full of her father's half-Boer children: two great boys of eight and nine years old, and three or four younger fry. They were rolling about on the floor, playing, fighting and cuffing. Millie took no more notice of them than if they had been mice or black-beetles. She filled the kettle from her pail, and set it to boil, and then, going to a cupboard, got a fresh egg, which she proceeded to whisk up in a tumbler, with delicate care.

Tante Wilma rolled into the room, sat down by the stove, took the coffee-pot off the rack, and poured herself out a cupful, which she proceeded liberally to "lace" with something stronger. She sat sipping it, looking furtively at her step-daughter as she moved, her small face grimly set, noiselessly to and fro. It is very rarely indeed that a Boer woman takes to drink. When she does, she becomes a creature to be avoided.

When her arrangements were complete, Millie took the tray and went out of the room, followed by malevolent glances.

"White rat!" growled Xante Wilma, in the Taal.

The children started a kind of chorus:

"White rat! White rat! Ours is the corn that makes you fat!"

"Not much longer then," muttered the half-tipsy Vrouw. "Another week or two will see the end of it now; and then—out she goes! Aha! She'll wish before long that she had kept a civil tongue in her head. As sure as I'm a living woman, one thrashing I'll give her before she goes! Oh, there's a long account I've got against her—it wants paying, that it does! Much we've had to bear from him, but most from her that encouraged him from a baby to defy me. But I'll take it out on her, once he's gone, the little insolent, English devil!"

CHAPTER III THE RIVALS

"But as if he loved you! No, not he. Nor anyone else in the world, 'tis plain; Who ever heard that another, free As I, young, prosperous, sound and sane, Poured life out, proffered it—'Half a glance Of those eyes of yours, and I drop the glass!'" —ROBERT BROWNING.

Bert Mestaer flung open the door of his farm kitchen, and strode in.