The Red Planet Part 7

"You quite understand?" she said, standing up, looking very young and princess-like, her white throat gleaming between her furs and up-turned chin.

"You will find, my dear," said I, "that the significance of your Dead March of a Marionette will increase every day of your married life."

She stiffened in a sudden stroke of pa.s.sion, looking, for the instant, electrically beautiful.

"I wish," she cried, "someone had written the Dead March of a Devil."

She bent down, kissed me, and went out in a whirr of furs and draperies.

Of course, all I could do was to scratch my thin iron-grey hair and light a cigar and meditate in front of the fire. I knew all about it--or at any rate I thought I did, which, as far as my meditation in front of the fire is concerned, comes to the same thing.

Betty had cast out the base metal of her love for Leonard Boyce in order to accept the pure gold of the love of Willie Connor. So she thought, poor girl. She had been in love with Boyce. She had been engaged to Boyce. Boyce, for some reason or the other, had turned her down. Spretae injuria formae--she had cast Boyce aside. But for all her splendid surrender of her womanhood to Willie Connor, for the sake of her country, she still loved Leonard Boyce. Or, if she wasn't in love with him, she couldn't get him out of her head or her senses. Something like that, anyhow. I don't pretend to know exactly what goes on in the soul or nature, or whatever it is, of a young girl, who has given her heart to a man. I can only use the crude old phrase: she was still in love (in some sort of fas.h.i.+on) with Leonard Boyce, and she was going to marry, for the highest motives, somebody else.

"Confound the fellow," said I, with an irritable gesture and covered myself with cigar ash.

She had called Boyce a devil and implied a wish that he were dead. For myself I did not know what to make of him, for reasons which I will state. I never approved of the engagement. As a matter of fact, I knew--and was one of the very few who knew--of a black mark against him--the very blackest mark that could be put against a soldier's name.

It was a puzzling business. And when I say I knew of the mark, I must be candid and confess that its awful justification lies in the conscience of one man living in the world to-day--if indeed he be still alive.

Boyce was a great bronzed, bull-necked man, with an overpowering personality. People called him the very model of a soldier. He was always admired and feared by his men. His fierce eye and deep, resonant voice, and a suggestion of hidden strength, even of brutality, commanded implicit obedience. But both glance and voice would soften caressingly and his manner convey a charm which made him popular with men--brother officers and private soldiers alike--and with women. With regard to the latter--to put things crudely--they saw in him the essential, elemental male. Of that I am convinced. It was the open secret of his many successes. And he had a buoyant, boyish, disarming, chivalrous way with him. If he desired a woman's lips he would always begin by kissing the hem of her skirt.

Had I not known what I did, I, an easy-going sort of Christian temperamentally inclined to see the best in my fellow-creatures, and, as I boastingly said a little while ago, a trained judge of men, should doubtless have fallen, like most other people, under the spell of his fascination. But whenever I met him, I used to look at him and say to myself: "What's at the back of you anyway? What about that business at Vilboek's Farm?"

Now this is what I knew--with the reservation I have made above--and to this day he is not aware of my knowledge.

It was towards the end of the Boer War. Boyce had come out rather late; for which, of course, he was not responsible. A soldier has to go when he is told. After a period of humdrum service he was sent off with a section of mounted infantry to round up a certain farm-house suspected of harbouring Boer combatants. The excursion was a mere matter of routine--of humdrum commonplace. As usual it was made at night, but this was a night of full dazzling moon. The farm lay in a hollow of the veldt, first seen from the crest of a kopje. There it lay below, ramshackle and desolate, a rough wall around; flanked by outbuildings--barn and cowsheds. The section rode down. The stoep led to a shuttered front. There was no sign of life. The moonlight blazed full on it. They dismounted, tethered their horses behind the wall, and entered the yard. The place was deserted, derelict--not even a cat.

Suddenly a shot rang out from somewhere in the main building, and the Sergeant, the next man to Boyce, fell dead, shot through the brain. The men looked at Boyce for command and saw a hulking idiot paralysed by fear.

"His mouth hung open and his eyes were like a silly servant girl's looking at a ghost." So said my informant.

Two more shots and two men fell. Boyce still stood white and gasping, unable to move a muscle or utter a sound. His face looked ghastly in the moonlight. A shot pierced his helmet, and the shock caused him to stagger and lose his legs. A corporal rushed up, thinking he was. .h.i.t, and, finding him whole, rose, in order to leave him there, and, in rising, got a bullet through the neck. Thus there were four men killed, and the Commanding Officer, of his own accord, put out of action. It all happened in a few confused moments. Then the remaining men did what Boyce should have commanded as soon as the first shot was fired--they rushed the house.

It contained one solitary inmate, an old man with a couple of Mauser rifles, whom they had to shoot in self-defence.

Meanwhile Boyce, white and haggard-eyed, had picked himself up; revolver in hand he stood on the stoep. His men came out, cursed him to his face while giving him their contemptuous reports brought the dead bodies of their comrades into the house and laid them out decently, together with the body of the white-bearded Boer. After that they mounted their horses without a word to him and rode off. And he let them ride; for his authority was gone; and he knew that they justly laid the deaths of their comrades at the door of his cowardice.

What he did during the next few awful hours is known only to G.o.d and to Boyce himself. The four dead men, his companions, have told no tales.

But at last, one of his men--Somers was his name--came riding back at break-neck speed. When he had left the moon rode high in the heavens; when he returned it was dawn--and he had a b.l.o.o.d.y tunic and the face of a man who had escaped from h.e.l.l. He threw himself from his horse and found Boyce, sitting on the stoep with his head in his hands. He shook him by the shoulder. Boyce started to his feet. At first he did not recognise Somers. Then he did and read black tidings in the man's eyes.

"What's the matter?"

"They're all wiped out, sir. The whole blooming lot."

He told a tale of heroic disaster. The remnant of the section had ridden off in hot indignation and had missed their way. They had gone in a direction opposite to safety, and after a couple of hours had fallen in with a straggling portion of a Boer Commando. Refusing to surrender, they had all been killed save Somers, who, with a bullet through his shoulder, had prudently turned bridle and fled h.e.l.l for leather.

Boyce put his hands up to his head and walked about the yard for a few moments. Then he turned abruptly and stood toweringly over the scared survivor--a tough, wizened little c.o.c.kney of five foot six.

"Well, what's going to happen now?" he asked, in his soft, dangerous voice.

Somers replied, "I must leave that to you, sir."

Boyce regarded him glitteringly for a long time. A scheme of salvation was taking vivid shape in his mind....

"My report of this occurrence will be that as soon as, say, three men dropped here, the rest of the troop got into a panic and made a bolt of it. Say the Sergeant and myself remained. We broke into the house and did for the old Boer, who, however, unfortunately did for the Sergeant.

Then I alone went out in search of my men and following their track found they had gone in a wrong direction, and eventually scented danger, which was confirmed by my meeting you, with your b.l.o.o.d.y tunic and your b.l.o.o.d.y tale."

"But good G.o.d! sir," cried the man, "You'd be having me shot for running away. I could tell a d.a.m.ned different story, Captain Boyce."

"Who would believe you?"

The c.o.c.kney intelligence immediately appreciated the situation. It also was ready for the alternative it guessed at the back of Boyce's mind.

"I know it's a mess, sir," he replied, with a straight look at Boyce.

"A mess for both of us, and, as I have said, I'll leave it to you, sir."

"Very well," said Boyce. "It's the simplest thing in the world. There were four killed at once, including Sergeant Oldham. You remained faithful when the others bolted. You and I tackled the old Boer and you got wounded. You and I went on trek for the rest of the troop. We got within breathing distance of the Commando--how many strong?"

"About a couple of hundred, sir."

"And of course we bolted back without knowing anything about the troop, except that we are sure that, dead or alive, the Boers have accounted for them. If you'll agree to this report, we can ride back to Headquarters and I think I can promise you sergeant's stripes in a very short time!"

"I agree to the report, sir," said Somers, "because I don't see that I can do anything else. But to h.e.l.l with the stripes under false pretences and don't you try playing that sort of thing off on me."

"As you like," replied Boyce, unruffled. "Provided we understand each other on the main point."

So they left the farm and rode to Headquarters and Boyce made his report, and as all save one of his troop were dead, there were none, save that one, to gainsay him. On his story no doubt was cast; but an officer who loses his whole troop in the military operation of storming a farm-house garrisoned by one old man does not find peculiar favour in the eyes of his Colonel. Boyce took a speedy opportunity of transference, and got into the thick of some fighting. Then he served with distinction and actually got mentioned in dispatches for pluckily rescuing a wounded man under fire.

For a long time Somers kept his mouth shut; but at last he began to talk. The ugly rumour spread. It even reached my battery which was a hundred miles away; for Johnny Dacre, one of my subs, had a brother in Boyce's old regiment. For my own part I scouted the story as soon as I heard it, and I withered up young Dacre for daring to bring such abominable slander within my Rhadamanthine sphere. I dismissed the calumny from my mind. Providentially, (as I heard later), the news came of Boyce's "mention," and Somers was set down as a liar. The poor devil was had up before the Colonel and being an imaginative and nervous man denied the truth of the rumour and by dexterous wriggling managed to exculpate himself from the charge of being its originator.

I must, parenthetically, crave indulgence for these apparently irrelevant details. But as, in this chronicle, I am mainly concerned with the career of Leonard Boyce, I have no option but to give them.

They are necessary for a conception of the character of a remarkable man to whom I have every reason and every honourable desire to render justice. It is necessary, too, that I should state clearly the manner in which I happened to learn the facts of the affair at Vilboek's Farm, for I should not like you to think that I have given a credulous ear to idle slander.

It was in Cape Town, whither I had been despatched, on a false alarm of enteric. I was walking with Johnny Dacre up Adderley Street, dun with kahki, when he met his brother Reginald, who was promptly introduced to Johnny's second in command. Reggie was off to hospital to see one of his men who had been badly hurt.

"It's the chap," he said to his brother, "who was with Boyce through that shady affair at Vilboek's Farm."

"I don't know why you call it a shady affair," said I, somewhat acidly.

"I know Captain Boyce--he is a near neighbour of mine at home--and he has proved himself to be a gallant officer and a brave man."

The young fellow reddened. "I'm awfully sorry, sir. I withdraw the word 'shady.' But this poor chap has something on his mind, and everyone has a down on him. He led a dog's life till he was knocked out, and he has been leading a worse one since. I don't call it fair." He looked at me squarely out of his young blue eyes--the lucky devil, he is commanding his regiment now in Flanders, with the D.S.O. ribbon on his tunic.

"Will you come with me and see him, sir?"

"Certainly," said I, for I had nothing to do, and the boy's earnestness impressed me.

On our way he told me of such mixture of rumour and fact as he was acquainted with. It was then that I heard the man Somers's name for the first time. We entered the hospital, sat by the side of the man's bed, and he told us the story of Vilboek's Farm which I have, in bald terms, just related. Shortly afterwards I returned to the front, where the famous sh.e.l.l knocked me out of the Army forever.

What has happened to Somers I don't know. He was, I learned, soon afterwards discharged from the Army. He either died or disappeared in the full current of English life. Perhaps he is with our armies now. It does not matter. What matters is my memory of his nervous, sallow, c.o.c.kney face, its earnestness, its imprint of veracity, and the d.a.m.ning lucidity of his narrative.