foe with grim joy saw a soldier fall to his soft-nosed bullet;
while far down behind these men of a forlorn hope there
was hurrying up artillery which would presently throw
its lyddite and its shrapnel on the top of the hill up where
hundreds of Boers held, as they thought, an impregnable
position.

At last with rushes which cost them almost as dearly in
proportion as the rush at Balaclava cost the Light Bri-
gade, Byng's men reached the top, mad with the passion
of battle, vengeful in spirit because of the comrades they
had lost ; and the trenches emptied before them. As they
were forsaken, men fought hand to hand and as savage-
ly as ever men fought in the days of Rustum.

In one corner, the hottest that the day saw, Rudyard
and Barry Whalen and a scattered handful of men threw
themselves upon a greatly larger number of the enemy.
For a moment a man here and there fought for his life
against two or three of the foe. Of these were Rudyard
and Barry Whalen. The khaki of the former was shot
through in several places, he had been slashed in the cheek
by a bullet, and a bullet had also passed through the
muscle of his left forearm; but he was scarcely conscious
of it. It seemed as though Fate would let no harm befall
him; but, in the very moment, when on another part
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THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

of the ridge his men were waving their hats in victory,
three Boers sprang up before him, ragged and grim and
old, but with the fire of fanaticism and race-hatred in
their eyes. One of them he accounted for, another he
wounded, but the wounded voortrekker a giant of near
seven feet clubbed his rifle, and drove at him. Rudyard
shot at close quarters again, but his pistol missed fire.

Just as the rifle of his giant foe swung above him, Byng
realized that the third Boer was levelling a rifle directly
at his breast. His eyes involuntarily closed as though
to draw the curtain of life itself, but, as he did so, he heard
a cry the wild, hoarse cry of a voice he knew so well.

"Baas! Baas!" it called.

Then two shots came simultaneously, and the clubbed
rifle brought him to the ground.

"Baas! Baas!"

The voice followed him, as he passed into unconscious-
ness.

Barry Whalen had seen Rudyard's danger, but had
been unable to do anything. His hands were more than
full, his life in danger; but in the instant that he had
secured his own safety, he heard the cry of "Baas! Baas!"
Then he saw the levelled rifle fall from the hands of
the Boer who had aimed at Byng, and its owner collapse
in a heap. As Rudyard fell beneath the clubbed rifle,
he heard the cry, "Baas! Baas!" again, and saw an un-
kempt figure darting among the rocks. His own pistol
brought down the old Boer who had felled Byng, and then
he realized who it was had cried out, "Baas!"

The last time he had heard that voice was in Park
Lane, when Byng, with sjambok, drove a half-caste valet
into the street.

It was the voice of Krool. And Krool was now bend-
ing over Rudyard's body, raising his head and still mur-
muring, "Baas Baas!"

Krool's rifle had saved Rudyard from death by killing
one of his own fellow-fighters. Much as Barry Whalen
404



"ALAMACHTIG!"

loathed the man, this act showed that Krool's love for
the master who had sjamboked him was stronger than
death.

Barry, himself bleeding from slight wounds, stooped
over his unconscious friend with a great anxiety.

"No, it is nothing," Krool said, with his hand on Rud-
yard's breast. "The left arm, it is hurt, the head not
get all the blow. Alamachtig, it is good! The Baas
it is right with the Baas."

Barry Whalen sighed with relief. He set about to re-
store Rudyard, as Krool prepared- a bandage for the
broken head.

Down in the valley the artillery was at work. Lyddite
and shrapnel and machine-guns were playing upon the top
of the ridge above them, and the infantry Humphrey's
and Blagdon's men were hurrying up the slope which
Byng's pioneers had cleared, and now held. From this
position the enemy could be driven from their main posi-
tion on the summit, because they could be swept now by
artillery fire from a point as high as their own.

"A good day's work, old man," said Barry Whalen to
the still unconscious figure. "You've done the trick for
the Lady at Windsor this time. It's a great sight bet-
ter business than playing baccarat at De Lancy Scovel's."

Cheering came from everywhere, cries of victory filled
the air. As he looked down the valley Barry could see
the horses they had left behind being brought, under cover
of the artillery and infantry fire, to the hill they had taken.
The grey mare would be among them. But Rudyard
would not want the grey mare yet awhile. An am-
bulance-cart was the thing for him.

Barry would have given much for a flask of brandy.
A tablespoonful would bring Rudyard back. A surgeon
was not needed, however. Krool's hands had knowledge.
Barry remembered the day when Wallstein was taken ill
in Rudyard's house, and how Krool acted with the skill
of a Westminster sawbones.
405



THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

Suddenly a bugle-call sounded, loud and clear and very
near them. Byng had heard that bugle-call again and
again in this engagement, and once he had seen the trum-
peter above the trenches, sounding the advance before
more than a half-dozen men had reached the defences
of the Boers. The same trumpeter was now running
towards them. He had been known in London as Jigger.
In South Africa he was familiarly 'called Little Jingo.

His face was white as he leaned over Barry Whalen
to look at Rudyard, but suddenly the blood came back
to his cheek.

"He wants brandy," Jigger said.

"Well, go and get it," said Barry sharply.

"I've got it here," was the reply; and he produced a
flask.

"Well, I'm damned!" said Barry. "You'll have a
gun next, and fire it too!"

"A 4.7," returned Jigger impudently.

As the flask was at Rudyard's lips, Barry Whalen said
to Krool, "What do you stay here as deserter or
prisoner? It's got to be one or the other."

"Prisoner," answered Krool. Then he added, "See
the Baas."

Rudyard's eyes were open.

"Prisoner who is a prisoner?" he asked feebly.

"Me, Baas," whispered Krool, leaning over him.

"He saved your life, Colonel," interposed Barry
Whalen.

"I thought it was the brandy," said Jigger with a
grin.



CHAPTER XXXIV
"THE ALPINE FELLOW"

r I ^O all who wrought in the war a change of some sort
1 had come. Those who emerged from it to return
to England or her far Dominions, or to stay in the land
of the veld, of the kranz and the kloof and the spruit,
were never the same again. Something came which, to a
degree, transformed them, as the salts of the water and
the air permeate the skin and give the blood new life.
None escaped the salt of the air of conflict.

The smooth-faced young subaltern who but now had
all his life before him, realized the change when he was
swept by the leaden spray of death on Spion Kop, and
received in his face of summer warmth, or in his young
exultant heart, the quietus to all his hopes, impulses and
desires. The young find no solace or recompense in the
philosophy of those who regard life as a thing greatly
over-estimated .

Many a private grown hard of flesh and tense of muscle,
with his scant rations and meagre covering in the cold
nights, with his long marches and fruitless risks and futile
fightings, when he is shot down, has little consolation,
save in the fact that the thing he and his comrades and
the regiment and the army set out to do is done. If he has
to do so, he gives his life with a stony sense of loss which
has none of the composure of those who have solace in
thinking that what they leave behind has a constantly
decreasing value. And here and there some simple soul,
more gifted than his comrades, may touch off the mean-
27 407



THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

ing of it all, as it appears to those who hold their lives
in their hands for a nation's sake, by a stroke of mordant
comment.

So it was with that chess-playing private from New
Zealand of whom Barry Whalen told Ian Stafford. He
told it a few days after Rudyard Byng had won that fight
at Hetmeyer's Kopje, which had enabled the Master
Player to turn the flank of the Boers, though there was
yet grim frontal work to do against machines of Death,
carefully hidden and masked on the long hillsides, which
would take staggering toll of Britain's manhood.

"From behind Otago there in New Zealand, he came,"
began Barry, "as fine a fella of thirty-three as ever you
saw. Just come, because he heard old Britain callin'.
Down he drops the stock-whip, away he shoves the plough,
up he takes his little balance from the bank, sticks his
chess-box in his pocket, says ' so-long ' to his girl, and treks
across the world, just to do his whack for the land that
gave him and all his that went before him the key to
civilization, and how to be happy though alive. . . . He
was the real thing, the ne plus ultra, the I-stand-alone.
The other fellas thought him the best of the best. He
was what my father used to call 'a wide man.' He was
in and out of a fight with a quirk at the corner of his
mouth, as much as to say, ' I've got the hang of this, and
it's different from what I thought; but that doesn't mean
it hasn't got to be done, and done in style. It's the
has-to-be.' And when they got him where he breathes,
he fished out the little ivory pawn and put it on a stone
at his head, to let it tell his fellow-countrymen how he
looked at it -that he was just a pawn in the great game.
The game had to be played, and won, and the winner had
to sacrifice his pawns. He was one of the sacrifices.
Well, I'd like a tombstone the same as that fella from
New Zealand, if I could win it as fair, and see as far."

Stafford raised his head with a smile of admiration.
"Like the ancients, like the Oriental Emperors to-day,
408



"THE ALPINE FELLOW"

he left his message. An Alexander, with not one world
conquered."

"I'm none so sure of that," was Barry's response. "A
man that could put such a hand on himself as he did has
conquered a world. He didn't want to go, but he went
as so many have gone hereabouts. He wanted to stay,
but he went against his will, and and I wish that the
grub-hunters, and tuft-hunters, and the blind greedy
majority in England could get hold of what he got hold
of. Then life 'd be a different thing in Thamesfontein
and the little green islands."

"You were meant for a Savonarola or a St. Francis,
my bold grenadier," said Stafford with a friendly nod.

" I was meant for anything that comes my way, and to
do everything that was hard enough."

Stafford waved a hand. "Isn't this hard enough a
handful of guns and fifteen hundred men lost in a day,
and nothing done that you can put in an envelope and
send 'to the old folks at 'ome?'"

' ' Well, that's all over, Colonel. Byng has turned the tide
by turning the Boer flank. I'm glad he's got that much
out of his big shindy. It 11 do him more good than his
millions. He was oozing away like a fat old pine-tree in
London town. He's got all his balsam in his bones now.
I bet he'll get more out of this thing than anybody, more
that's worth having. He doesn't want honours or pro-
motion; he wants what 'd make his wife sorry to be a
widow; and he's getting it."

"Let us hope that his wife won't be put to the test,"
responded Stafford evenly.

Barry looked at him a little obliquely. "She came
pfetty near it when we took Hetmeyer's Kopje."

"Is he all right again?" Stafford asked; then added
quickly, "I've had so much to do since the Hetmeyer
business that I have not seen Byng."

Barry spoke very carefully and slowly. "He's over at
Brinkvvort's Farm for a while. He didn't want to go to
409



THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

the hospital, and the house at the Farm is good enough
for anybody. Anyhow, you get away from the smell of
disinfectants and the business of the hospital. It's a
snigger little place is Brinkwort's Farm. There's an or-
chard of peaches and oranges, and there are pomegranate
hedges, and plenty of nice flowers in the garden, and a
stoep made for candidates for Stellenbosch as comfort-
able as the room of a Rand director."

"Mrs. Byng is with him?" asked Stafford, his eyes
turned towards Brinkwort's Farm miles away. He could
see the trees, the kameel-thorn, the blue-gums, the orange
and peach trees surrounding it, a clump or cloud of green
in the veld.

"No, Mrs. Byng's not with him," was the reply.

Stafford stirred uneasily, a frown gathered, his eyes
took on a look of sombre melancholy. "Ah," he said at
length, "she has returned to Durban, then?"

"No. She got a chill the night of the Hetmeyer coup,
and she's in bed at the hospital."

Stafford controlled himself. "Is it a bad chill?" he
asked heavily. "Is she dangerously ill?" His voice
seemed to thicken.

"She was; but she's not so bad that a little attention
from a friend would make her worse. She never much
liked me; but I went just the same, and took her some
veld-roses."

"You saw her?" Stafford's voice was very low.

"Yes, for a minute. She's as thin as she once wasn't,"
Barry answered, "but twice as beautiful. Her eyes are
as big as stars, and she can smile still, but it's a new one
a war-smile, I expect. Everything gets a turn of its own
at the Front."

"She was upset and anxious about Byng, I suppose?"
Stafford asked, with his head turned away from this faith-
fulest of friends, who would have died for the man now
sitting on the stoep of Brinkwort's house, looking into
the bloom of the garden.

410



"THE ALPINE FELLOW"

"Naturally," was the reply. Barry Whalen thought
carefully of what he should say, because the instinct of
the friend who loved his friend had told him that, since
the night at De Lancy Scovel's house when the name of
Mennaval had been linked so hatefully with that of
Byng's wife, there had been a cloud over Rudyard's life;
and that Rudyard and Jasmine were not the same as of
yore.

"Naturally she was upset," he repeated. "She made
Al'mah go and nurse Byng."

' ' Al'mah, ' ' repeated Stafford mechanically. ' ' Al'mah !' '
His mind rushed back to that night at the opera, when
Rudyard had sprung from the box to the stage and had
rescued Al'mah from the flames. The world had widened
since then.

Al'mah and Jasmine had been under the same roof
but now; and Al'mah was nursing Jasmine's husband
surely life was merely farce and tragedy.

At this moment an orderly delivered a message to
Barry Whalen. He rose to go, but turned back to Staf-
ford again.

"She'd be glad to see you, I'm certain," he said. "You
never can tell what a turn sickness will take in camp, and
she's looking pretty frail. We all ought to stand by Byng
and whatever belongs to Byng. No need to say that to
you ; but you've got a lot of work and responsibility, and
in the rush you mightn't realize that she's more ill than
the chill makes her. I hope you won't mind my saying
so in my stupid way."

Stafford rose and grasped his hand, and a light of won-
derful friendliness and comradeship shone in his eyes.

"Beau chevalier! Beau chevalier!" was all he said; and
impulsive Barry Whalen went away blinking; for hard as
iron as he was physically, and a fighter of courage, his tem-
perament got into his eyes or at his lips very easily.

Stafford looked after him admiringly. "Lucky the
man who has such a friend," he said aloud "Sans peur
411



THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

et sans reproche! He could not betray a" the waving of
wings above him caught his eye "he could not betray
an aasvogel." His look followed the bird of prey, the
servitor of carrion death, as it flew down the wind.

He had absorbed the salt of tears and valour. He had
been enveloped in the Will that makes all wills as one,
the will of a common purpose; and it had changed his at-
titude towards his troubles, towards his past, towards
his future.

What Barry had said to him, and especially the tale of
the New-Zealander, had revealed the change which had
taken place. The War had purged his mind, cleared his
vision. When he left England he was immersed in egoism,
submerged by his own miseries. He had isolated him-
self in a lazaretto of self-reproach and resentment. The
universe was tottering because a woman had played him
false. Because of this obsession of self, he was eager to
be done with it all, to pay a price which he might have
paid, had it been possible to meet Rudyard pistol or sword
in hand, and die as many such a man has done, without
trying to save his own life or to take the life of another.
That he could not do. Rudyard did not know the truth,
had not the faintest knowledge that Jasmine had been
more to himself than an old and dear friend. To pay the
price in any other way than by eliminating himself from
the equation was to smirch her name, be the ruin of a
home, and destroy all hope for the future.

It had seemed to him that there was no other way
than to disappear honourably through one of the hundred
gates which the war would open to him to go where
Death ambushed the reckless or the brave, and take the
stroke meant for him, on a field of honour all too kind to
himself and soothing to those good friends who would
mourn his going, those who hoped for him the now
unattainable things.

In a spirit of stoic despair he had come to the seat of
war. He had invited Destiny to sweep him up in her
412



"THE ALPINE FELLOW"

reaping, by placing himself in the ambit of her scythe;
but the sharp reaping-hook had passed him by.

The innumerable exits were there in the wall of life,
and none had opened to him ; but since the evening when
he saw Jasmine at the railway station, there had been an
opening of doors in his soul hitherto hidden. Beyond
these doors he saw glimpses of a new world not like
the one he had lived in, not so green, so various, or
tumultuous, but it had the lure of that peace, not sterile
or somnolent, which summons the burdened life, or the
soul with a vocation, to the hood of a monk a busy self-
forgetfulness.

Looking after Barry Whalen's retreating figure he saw
this new, grave world opening out before him; and
as the vision floated before his eyes, Barry's appeal
that he should visit Jasmine at the hospital came
to him.

Jasmine suffered. He recalled Barry's words : ' ' She's as
thin as she once wasn't, but twice as beautiful. Her eyes
are as big as stars, and she can smile still, but it's a new one
a war-smile, I expect. Everything gets a turn of its own
at the Front."

Jasmine suffered in body. He knew that she suffered
in mind also. To go to her? Was that his duty? Was
it his desire? Did his heart cry out for it either in pity
or in love?

In love? Slowly a warm flood of feeling passed through
him. It was dimly borne in on him, as he gazed at the
hospital in the distance, that this thing called Love, which
seizes upon our innermost selves, which takes up residence
in the inner sanctuary, may not be dislodged. It stays
on when the darkness comes, reigning in the gloom.
Even betrayal, injury, tyranny, do not drive it forth. It
continues. No longer is the curtain drawn aside for
tribute, for appeal, or for adoration, but It remains until
the last footfall dies in the temple, and the portals are
closed forever.



THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

For Stafford the curtain was drawn before the shrine;
but love was behind the curtain still.

He would not go to her as Barry had asked. There in
Brinkwort's house in the covert of peaches and pome-
granates was the man and the only man who should, who
must, bring new bloom to her cheek. Her suffering would
carry her to Rudyard at the last, unless it might be
that one or the other of them had taken Adrian Fellowes'
life. If either had done that, there could be no reunion.

He did not know what Al'mah had told Jasmine, the
thing which had cleared Jasmine's vision, and made pos-
sible a path which should lead from the hospital to the
house among the orchard-trees at Brinkwort's Farm.

No, he would not, could not go to Jasmine unless, it
might be, she was dying. A sudden, sharp anxiety pos-
sessed him. If, as Barry Whalen suggested, one of those
ugly turns should come, which illnesses take in camp,
and she should die without a friend near her, without
Rudyard by her side! He mounted his horse, and rode
towards the hospital.

His inquiries at the hospital relieved his mind. "If
there is no turn for the worse, no complications, she
will go on all right, and will be convalescent in a few
days," the medicine-man had said.

He gave instructions for a message to be sent to him
if there was any change for the worse. His first impulse,
to tell them not to let her know he had inquired, he set
aside. There must not be subterfuge or secrecy any
longer. Let Destiny take her course.

As he left the hospital, he heard a wounded Boer
prisoner say to a Tommy who had fought with him on
opposite sides in the same engagement, "Alles zal recht
kom!" All will come right, was the English of it.

Out of the agony of conflict would all come right for
Boer, for Briton, for Rudyard, for Jasmine, for himself,
for Al'mah?

414



"THE ALPINE FELLOW"

As he entered his tent again, he was handed his mail,
which had just arrived. The first letter he touched had
the postmark of Durban. The address on the envelope
was in the handwriting of Lady Tynemouth.

He almost shrank from opening it, because of the
tragedy which had come to the husband of the woman
who had been his faithful friend over so many years. At
an engagement a month before, Tynemouth had been
blinded by shrapnel, and had been sent to Durban.
To the two letters he had written there had come no
answer until now; and he felt that this reply would
be a plaint against Fate, a rebellion against the future
restraint and trial and responsibility which would be put
upon the wife, who was so much of the irresponsible world.

After a moment, however, he muttered a reproach
against his own darkness of spirit and his lack of faith
in her womanliness, and opened the envelope.

It was not the letter he had imagined and feared. It
began by thanking him for his own letter, and then it
plunged into the heart of her trouble:

". . . . Tynie is blind. He will never see again. But his face
seems to me quite beautiful. It shines, Ian: beauty comes from
within. Poor old Tynie, who would have thought that the world
he loved couldn't make that light in his face! I never saw it there
did you? It is just giving up one's self to the Inevitable. I
suppose we mostly are giving up ourselves to Ourselves, thinking
always of our own pleasure and profit and pride, never being
content, pushing on and on. ... Ian, I'm not going to push on
any more. I've done with the Climbers. There's too much of
the Climbers in us all not social climbing, I mean, but wanting
to get somewhere that has something for us, out in the big material
world. When I look at Tynie he's lying there so peaceful you
might think it is a prison he is in. It isn't. He's set free into a
world where he had never been. He's set free in a world of light
that never blinds us. If he'd lived to be a hundred with the sight
of his eyes, he'd never have known that there's a world that belongs
to Allah, I love that word, it sounds so great and yet so friendly,
so gentler than the name by which we call the First One in our lan-
guage and our religion and that world is inside ourselves. . . . Tynie
is always thinking of other people now, wondering what they are
415



THE JUDGMENT HOUSE

doing and how they are doing it. He was talking about you a little
while ago, and so admiringly. It brought the tears to my eyes.
Oh, I am so glad, Ian, that our friendship has always been so much
on the surface, so 'void of offence' is that the phrase? I can look
at it without wincing; and I am glad. It never was a thing of im-
portance to you, for I am not important, and there was no weight of
life in it or in me. But even the butterfly has its uses, and maybe
I was meant to play a little part in your big life. I like to think it
was so. Sometimes a bright day gets a little more interest from the
drone of the locust or the glow of a butterfly's wings. I'm not sure
that the locust's droning and the bright flutter of the butterfly's
wings are not the way Nature has of fastening the soul to the mean-
ing of it all. I wonder if you ever heard the lines foolish they read,
but they are not:

"'All summer long there was one little butterfly,

Flying ahead of me,
Wings red and yellow, a pretty little fellow,

Flying ahead of me.
One little butterfly, one little butterfly,

What can his message be?
All summer long, there was one little butterfly