CHAPTER XXXI

When the war broke out, Saxonstowe and his wife, after nearly three years of globe-trotting, were in Natal, where they had been studying the conditions of native labour. Saxonstowe, who had made himself well acquainted with the state of affairs in South Africa, knew that the coming struggle would be long and bitter. He and his wife entered into a discussion as to which they were to do: stay there, or return to England. Sprats knew quite well what was in Saxonstowe’s mind, and she unhesitatingly declared for South Africa. Then Saxonstowe, who had a new book on hand, put his work aside, and set the wires going, and within a few hours had been appointed special correspondent of one of the London newspapers, with the prospect of hard work and exciting times before him.

‘And what am I to do?’ inquired Lady Saxonstowe, and answered her own question before he could reply. ‘There will be sick and wounded—in plenty,’ she said. ‘I shall organise a field-hospital,’ and she went to work with great vigour and spent her husband’s money with inward thankfulness that he was a rich man.

Before they knew where they were, Lord and Lady Saxonstowe were shut up in Ladysmith, and for one of them at least there was not so much to do as he had anticipated, for there became little to record but the story of hope deferred, of gradual starvation, and of death and disease. But Sprats worked double tides, unflinchingly and untiringly, and almost forgot that she had a husband who chafed because he could not get more than an occasional word over the wires to England. At the end of the siege she was as gaunt as a far-travelled gypsy, and as brown, but her courage was as great as ever and her resolution just as strong. One day she received an ovation from a mighty concourse that sent{246} her, frightened and trembling, to shelter; when she emerged into the light of day again it was only to begin reorganising her work in preparation for still more arduous duties. The tide of war rolled on northwards, and Sprats followed, picking up the bruised and shattered jetsam which it flung to her. She had never indulged in questionings or speculations as to the rights or wrongs of the war. Her first sight of a wounded man had aroused all the old mothering instinct in her, and because she had no baby of her own she took every wounded man, Boer or Briton, into her arms and mothered him.