Chapter Eleven.
“Amoris Integratio.”
“On, Maurice, how could you be so imprudent?”
“Imprudent be—somethinged! If you only knew the difficulty I’ve had to cut loose from the other fellows at all.”
“Yes, imprudent,” she went on, ignoring the last remark. “Supposing any of those wretched children had been about—and they’re just like little savages, always jumping out upon you unexpectedly from nowhere. And we are quite by a pathway, too.”
“Then the sooner we get away from it the better, for I intend repeating the operation with interest before we rejoin the merry crowd.”
“How did you find me out, Maurice? How did you know where I was?”
“Aha, you couldn’t hide from me, you see,” he replied. “No good, was it?”
She made no answer. She seemed to be undergoing a struggle with herself. Then at last—
“Why did you break through our agreement? We were not to see each other for six months. It is not four yet.”
“Violet! Do you mean to tell me you are sorry I have not kept that boshy arrangement of ours. Look me straight in the face and tell me you are—if you can.”
He turned her face towards him. The dark soft eyes were brimming, the delicate features were working with a wild yearning, which its owner was in vain striving to suppress.
“Sorry to see you? Oh, Maurice, my darling, I have thought of late I should never see you again,” she cried, breaking into a storm of sobs as she threw herself on his breast.
And this was the girl who, but a few days before, and almost on that very spot, had made an utter mock of all that savoured of real feeling. “I almost wish it would come true. It would be such a novel sensation,” had been her words to Marian. Ah, but it had come true—and that long before she uttered them. Certain it is that none there at Sunningdale had ever seen this side of Violet Avory; had ever suspected this secret chapter in her history.
“Don’t cry, little one,” said Maurice, soothingly, drawing her further within the recesses of the garden, and away from the obnoxious quince hedge, which might shelter prying eyes. “We are going to have such a happy time together now.”
“Now, yes,” she answered. “But—after? Nothing but misery.”
“Not a bit of it. We can go on waiting. Patience—that’s the word. When I used to get my ‘cast’ hung up or otherwise tangled while fishing, instead of blowing off a volley of cuss words, and tearing and tugging at the stuff, I made it a rule to remark aloud, ‘Pazienza!’ That answered, kept one in a cool and even mind, and saved further tangle and a lot of cussing. Well, that must be our watchword—‘Pazienza!’”
“I have got you now, at all events,” she murmured, pressing his arm. “But now, don’t you see why I met you as a perfect stranger last night?”
“Not altogether. It annoyed me a good bit—in fact, worried me all the evening. I should have thought it would have been better to have let them know we were old acquaintances, at any rate. They would have left us more to ourselves.”
“Not a bit of it. They would have set up a romance on the spot. As soon as a woman gets wind of a romance, she can’t for the life of her, with the best intentions in the world, help watching its progress. It would have been a case of every one hurrying to écarter themselves as soon as they saw as together, doing it, too, in the usual blundering and clumsy manner. I know it all so well—I’ve seen it so often, and, I may as well add, gone through it.”
“That was the reason, was it? Well, you do know a thing or two, little one,” he said admiringly. “But look here. We must snatch a little time together as often as we can. We’ll make Selwood get up rides and expeditions, and pair off, lose ourselves by accident, and all that sort of thing. But mind, I can’t go on talking to you day after day, only as one of a crowd. I can’t stand it. We must manage somehow.”
“Do you think I am a bit less anxious to than you? But, Maurice darling, do mind what I’m going to say. You must be on your guard before people, you always were such an awful old blunderer. You mustn’t go letting slip any ‘Violets,’ for instance, and you’re quite as likely to as not.”
“I’m not going to let one slip at the present moment, anyway,” he replied with a laugh. “And so you thought you were never going to see me again?”
“Ah, I have sometimes feared so. The agonies I have gone through! I know what you are going to say—that it was my own doing. I did it to test you, Maurice. Six months is not a long time, but ah, I have at times thought I should die long before it was over! Day after day, week after week, no news, not a word from you, or even of you. And every one here thinks I am utterly heartless. I never try to undeceive them; in fact, I rather encourage them in the idea.”
No one would have thought so could they but have seen her there that morning, slowly wending through the mimosa brake encircled by her lover’s arm; for they had left the somewhat precarious refuge of the garden. The restless, eager face, the quick, passionate tones, as though she were talking against time, and grudged every one of the too swiftly flying moments which were bringing this doubly sweet, because surreptitious, interview to its end.
They had reached the river-bank. The cool water bubbling along beneath the shade of the trees, the varying call of birds in the brake, the chirruping tree-crickets, the hum of bees dipping into the creamy cups of snow-white arums which grew in the moist shade, the melodious shout of the hoopoe echoing from the black kloofs that rent the mountain side—all made an appropriate framework, a fitting accompaniment of harmonious sounds to this sweet stolen interview. High overhead the hoary crest of a great mountain frowned down from the dazzling blue.
“You haven’t told me yet how you managed to find me out,” said Violet at length, after a good deal of talk that we feel under no special necessity to reproduce, because, given the circumstances, the reader should have no difficulty in guessing its nature.
“Oh, that was the most astonishing piece of luck that ever came about,” he answered. “You had better call it a fatality. I had started to look for you in quite the wrong direction, and fell in with that queer fellow, Fanning. Came down here with him, as you know.”
“Did Mr Fanning talk about—er—tell you about—me?” she said hesitatingly.
Maurice Sellon was not the man to betray poor Renshaw’s involuntary and delirious confidences, even to Violet herself—at least, not unless some strong motive existed for doing so, which at present was not the case. So he answered—
“Talk about you? Not he! He’s much too deep a dog. He just barely mentioned that you were here, which drove me pretty well wild, for it was long enough before I could get him to make a start, and of course I couldn’t let him suspect the reason.”
Strict veracity was not one of Sellon’s strong points. He did not choose to let her into the fact that the wild surprise of their meeting in the hall on the occasion of his arrival was absolutely and impartially mutual.
“But look here, Violet,” he went on. “Talking of Fanning, you were almost—well, carrying on with him last night. I began to get quite angry. You mustn’t make a fool of the poor chap—if you haven’t already, that’s to say.”
Violet laughed—her old, heartless, mocking laugh.
“Fancy being jealous of Mr Fanning!” she said scornfully.
“That be hanged!” cried Maurice, gaily, “But, darling, I grudge seeing you talking too much to any one.”
Thus, womanlike, secure in the possession of her own heart’s desire, she spoke contemptuously of one for whom she really entertained a great and deep-laid respect. Her own love, outside its special object, had not availed to render her more considerate, more tender, towards the man whose heart she had made a plaything of.
Returning through the garden they came upon Renshaw himself, who, with Marian and Effie, was strolling around. Now, the latter, for all her tender years, knew quite as much as was good for her, and in the present instance was prompt to recognise a case of “spoons,” as her abominably precocious young mind did not hesitate to define it. It happened that she disliked Violet, so she fixed her eyes maliciously upon the pair, and her mouth expanded into a knowing grin—which made Violet ardently desire to box her ears soundly there and then—and resolved to store up the incident for future use; in fact, to improve upon the discovery.
“Hallo, Fanning,” cried Sellon, as they met, “you’re looking rather seedy, old chap. Been legging it around too much all the morning.”
“Not I. I feel all right. You won’t have to do doctor again, Sellon—no fear,” was the genial reply.
Now, Sellon’s words had caused Marian to steal a very quick and anxious glance at her companion’s face, which at that moment was certainly destitute of its normal healthy colour.
“Renshaw, you have been overdoing it,” she said warningly. “You have come here to be set up, not to be made ill again. So luckily it’s just dinnertime, and we must all go in.”
So the parties fused, and, merged into one, retraced their steps towards the house, chatting indifferently. But that glance of Marian’s had drawn, as it were, a curtain from before Violet’s eyes. She, too, thought she had made a discovery, and she, too, resolved to turn it to future account—should the necessity arise.
“I say, Renshaw,” said Selwood, sotto voce, and with a characteristic nudge, as they entered the passage a little way behind the rest of the party, “that chum of yours is a knowing dog, eh? Miss Avory has soon managed to cure his headache. Ho—ho—ho!”
Thus did everybody combine to turn the steel, already sticking deep enough, in this unfortunate man’s heart.
Dinner over, the heat of the afternoon was got through in delightfully easy and dawdling fashion. Christopher Selwood, in a big armchair, sat in a cool corner absorbed in the ill-printed columns of the local sheet, the Fort Lamport Courier, which set forth how brandziekte had broken out in one end of the district, and how a heavy hailstorm had peppered the other, and how “our esteemed townsman, Ezekiel Bung, Esquire, the genial landlord of the Flapdoodle Hotel,” had, “we deeply regret to say, fallen off the stoep of his house and injured his leg,” the fact being that the said Bung, Esquire, had walked straight into space while as drunk as a blind fiddler, and intent on kicking out a Fingo who had contumaciously reckoned on quenching his thirst at the public bar, instead of among his compatriots in the canteen. This and other news of a like interesting and intellectual nature, Selwood scanned. Suddenly an exclamation escaped him.
“By Jingo! This is good!” he cried. “I say, Marian, you remember those two black chaps who were round here with all that stock two or three weeks back? That one-eyed cuss who was inclined to be so cheeky?”
“Yes. What about them?”
“You remember the names on their pass?”
“Perfectly. Muntiwa and Booi.”
“All right. The whole of that stock was stolen, and they’ve been run in at Fort Lamport and committed for trial at the Circuit Court, which’ll be held in a week or two.”
“That’s good business,” said Renshaw. “How were they nobbled?”
“Why, a Dutchman spotted them just outside Fort Lamport, and recognised some of the cows as belonging to his uncle or somebody. He said nothing at the time, but just trotted up to the court and swore an affidavit, and they were all run in.”
“But didn’t you say they had a pass?” said Renshaw.
“Of course they had. But therein lies the cream of the whole situation. The pass turns out a forged one, cooked up by a mission-station Kafir, and well done it was, too. So much for educating the niggers. It turns out, too, that the police have discovered these chaps’ hiding-place, away up among the thick bush and caves in Slaagter’s Hoek. It was a regular vultures’ nest, chock full of bones of stolen stock. They must have been at it for years. And then to think of them marching openly through the country on the strength of that forged pass. Let’s hope they’ll get it stiff now they are quodded.”
“Who’s the circuit judge this time?” asked Renshaw.
“Van Reneen, I expect. Judge Sherrington was round on circuit last time, so we are sure to have the other man; and a good thing, too. Old Sherrington loves a black fellow as if he was his father, and lets him down about as lightly as he comfortably can, and that’s very lightly indeed.”
“You are sure to be subpoenaed to give evidence, Chris,” said Marian, mischievously.
“Eh! By Jingo, I never thought of that. I hope not, though!” cried Selwood, in dismay at the prospect of an enforced absence from home, involving, moreover, two long and tiresome journeys, and Heaven knew how many days of kicking up his heels in Fort Lamport, in hourly expectation of being called. “Well, likely enough they’ll have plenty of evidence without mine. Sellon—Renshaw—how about a stroll round? it’s turning cool now. But we’ll do a glass of grog first.”