He turned to Krool.  “If you say to the Baas what you have said to me about Mr. Fellowes or about the Baas’s vrouw, you will have a bad time.  You will think that wild hawks are picking out your vitals.  If you have sense, you will do what I tell you.”

Krool’s eyes were on the door through which Wallstein had come.  His gaze was fixed and tortured.  Stafford had suddenly roused in him some strange superstitious element.  He was like a creature of a lower order awaiting the approach of the controlling power.  It was, however, the door behind him which opened, and he gave a start of surprise and terror.  He knew who it was.  He did not turn round, but his head bent forward, as though he would take a blow from behind, and his eyes almost closed.  Stafford saw with a curious meticulousness the long eyelashes touch the grey cheek.

“There’s no fight in him now,” he said to Byng in French.  “He was getting nasty, but I’ve got him in order.  He knows too much.  Remember that, Byng.”

Byng’s look was as that of a man who had passed through some chamber of torture, but the flabbiness had gone suddenly from his face, and even from his figure, though heavy lines had gathered round the mouth and scarred the forehead.  He looked worn and much thinner, but there was a look in his eyes which Stafford had never seen there—­a new look of deeper seeing, of revelation, of realization.  With all his ability and force, Byng had been always much of a boy, so little at one with the hidden things—­the springs of human conduct, the contradictions of human nature, the worst in the best of us, the forces that emerge without warning in all human beings, to send them on untoward courses and at sharp tangents to all the habits of their existence and their character.  In a real sense he had been very primitive, very objective in all he thought and said and did.  With imagination, and a sensitive organization out of keeping with his immense physique, it was still only a visualizing sense which he had, only a thing that belongs to races such as those of which Krool had come.

A few days of continuous suffering begotten by a cataclysm, which had rent asunder walls of life enclosing vistas he had never before seen; these had transformed him.  Pain had given him dignity of a savage kind, a grim quiet which belonged to conflict and betokened grimmer purpose.  In the eyes was the darkness of the well of despair; but at his lips was iron resolution.

In reply to Stafford he said quietly:  “All right, I understand.  I know how to deal with Krool.”

As Stafford withdrew, Byng came slowly down the room till he stood at the end of the table opposite to Krool.

Standing there, he looked at the Boer with hard eyes.

“I know all, Krool,” he said.  “You sold me and my country—­you tried to sell me and my country to Oom Paul.  You dog, that I snatched from the tiger death, not once but twice.”

“It is no good.  I am a Hottentot.  I am for the Boer, for Oom Paul.  I would have die for you, but—­”