Byng was not a great genius, and he had never given his natural political talent its full chance; but his soul was bigger than his pocket.  He had a passionate love for the land—­for England—­which had given him birth; and he had a decent pride in her honour and good name.  So it was that he had almost savagely challenged some of the sordid deliberations of this stern conference.  In a full-blooded and manly appeal he begged them “to get on higher ground.”  If he could but have heard it, it would have cheered the heart of the broken and discredited pioneer of Empire at Capetown, who had received his death-warrant, to take effect within five years, in the little cottage at Muizenberg by the sea; as great a soul in posse as ever came from the womb of the English mother; who said as he sat and watched the tide flow in and out, and his own tide of life ebbed, “Life is a three days’ trip to the sea-shore:  one day in going, one day in settling down, and one day in packing up again.”

Byng had one or two colleagues who, under his inspiration, also took the larger view, and who looked ahead to the consequences yet to flow from the fiasco at Doornkop, which became a tragedy.  What would happen to the conspirators of Johannesburg?  What would happen to Jameson and Willoughby and Bobby White and Raleigh Grey?  Who was to go to South Africa to help in holding things together, and to prevent the worst happening, if possible?  At this point they had arrived when they saw—­

   . . .  The dull dank morn stare in,
   Like a dim drowned face with oozy eyes.

A more miserable morning seldom had broken, even in England.

“I will go.  I must go,” remarked Byng at last, though there was a strange sinking of the heart as he said it.  Even yet the perfume of Jasmine’s cloak stole to his senses to intoxicate them.  But it was his duty to offer to go; and he felt that he could do good by going, and that he was needed at Johannesburg.  He, more than all of them, had been in open conflict with Oom Paul in the the past, had fought him the most vigorously, and yet for him the old veldschoen Boer had some regard and much respect, in so far as he could respect a Rooinek at all.

“I will go,” Byng repeated, and looked round the table at haggard faces, at ashen faces, at the faces of men who had smoked to quiet their nerves, or drunk hard all night to keep up their courage.  How many times they had done the same in olden days, when the millions were not yet arrived, and their only luxury was companionship and champagne—­or something less expensive.

As Byng spoke, Krool entered the room with a great coffee-pot and a dozen small white bowls.  He heard Byng’s words, and for a moment his dark eyes glowed with a look of evil satisfaction.  But his immobile face showed nothing, and he moved like a spirit among them his lean hand putting a bowl before each person, like a servitor of Death passing the hemlock-brew.