Volume One—Chapter Sixteen.
“Mingle Shades of Joy and Woe.”
The long dining-room is in a blaze of light, such as it has not sparkled with for some considerable time, and only then on rare and special occasions such as the present one. The polished floor reflects the glow of numerous candles, and, as Hicks vigorously puts it, the decks are thoroughly cleared for action. Expectant groups stand about the room or throng the doorways—for the fun has not yet commenced, and meanwhile talk and laughter goes on among the jovial spirits there foregathered, and the graver ones, when not the subjects of rally, are intent on contemplating the floor, the ceiling, the fireplace, or anything or nothing. The party might be an English one to all appearances. You may descry the usual phases in its ingredients. There is shy humanity, confident humanity, blatant humanity, fussy humanity, even pompous humanity. There, however, the resemblance ends. Of stiffness there is none. Everybody knows everybody, or soon will—meanwhile acts as if it does. Then, in the little matter of attire, many of the “lords of creation” are arrayed in orthodox evening costume and white-chokered, others in black coats of the “go-to-meeting” order, while three or four Dutchmen, bidden to the festivity on neighbourly grounds, sport raiment fearfully and wonderfully made, whose effect is enhanced by terrific neckties, varying in shades from scarlet to green. The company is composed almost entirely of the settler class. Jolly old fellows who have come to look on at the enjoyment of their extensive and well-looking families in various stages of adolescence, and who, in spite of their white hair and sixty or seventy summers, seem more than half inclined not to remain passive spectators of the fun. One or two of these, by the way, judging from nasal rubicundity and other signs, will, I trow, be found more frequently hovering around the charmed circle where flows the genial dram, than in the immediate neighbourhood of the giddy rout. Middle-aged men, bronzed and bearded, looking serious as they contemplate what is expected of them, for assuredly we English, in whatever part of the world we be, “take our pleasures sadly.” Young settlers are there, stalwart fellows, several of whom have ridden from far, carrying their gala array in a saddle-bag, and who by the time they return will have been three days away from home. But distance is nothing; their horses are strong and hardy, and the roads are good, and if not, what matters? Life is nothing without its enjoyments, and accordingly they intend to enjoy themselves, and do.
Of the fair sex there is a goodly muster—though fewer in proportion to that of the men, as is frequently the case at frontier dances—consisting of the wives and daughters of the settlers. Some are pretty, some plain; some are bright and lively, and nicely dressed; others again are badly attired, and neither bright nor lively; and at present they are mostly gathered together in the room opening out of the one which is to be the scene of the fray.
“Now then, Hicks, Armitage, some of you fellows, let’s set the ball rolling,” cried the jovial voice of Jim Brathwaite, as a volunteer pianist (the orchestral department must be worked entirely by volunteer agency) sat down at the instrument and dashed off a lively galop. “Come along, Arthur, give these fellows a lead,” he went on.
Claverton was standing in the doorway. He turned as Jim addressed him. “Well, if it’s all the same, I think I’ll cut in later. Fact is, I’m not much of a dancer. Besides, it’s a ridiculous exercise.”
“Aren’t you! ‘England expects,’” said Ethel, maliciously, as she floated by, a dream-like vision in pink gauziness. Her golden hair, confined by some cunning device at the back of her head, flowed in shining ripples below her waist, and the deep blue eyes flashed laughingly into his as she made her mocking rejoinder.
“Does it? Expectations are notoriously unsafe assets,” was the quiet reply.
“Well, we must make a start or we shall never get these fellows to begin,” said Jim. “Come along, Ethel, you promised me the first dance. If you didn’t you ought to have.”
They glided off, and Claverton stood and followed them mechanically with his glance; but, as a matter of fact, he hardly saw them. He was wondering what on earth had become of Lilian Strange. The dance wore on, and then the next, still Claverton stood in the doorway, which coign of vantage he held conjointly with an uncouth-looking Dutchman and a burly but bashful compatriot, and still she did not appear. At length, while crossing the inner room with a vague idea of putting an artless and roundabout inquiry or two to Mrs Brathwaite as to why Lilian did not appear, he heard himself hailed by his host. Turning quickly he perceived the latter sitting in confab with a contemporary in age, but vastly different in appearance.
“Arthur, this is an old friend of mine, Mr Garrett.”
Then arose a queer-looking old fellow, short, rotund of person, and whose exceeding rubicundity of visage betokened, I fear, anything but aversion for ardent spirits. Running one stubby hand through his bristly grey hair, he extended the other to Claverton.
“’Ow do—’ow do? Not been long in the country, have you? My word, but it’s a fine country, this is—fine country for young fellers like you.”
Claverton thought the country contained also some advantages for the speaker; and he was right. Here was old Joe Garrett, who never knew his father, if he had one, and who, having early in the century deserted from a two-hundred-ton merchant brig lying in Algoa Bay, had started in colonial life as a journeyman carpenter. By hook or by crook he had made his way, and now, by virtue of the four fine farms which he owned, he deemed himself very much of a landed proprietor, and every whit the equal of Walter Brathwaite, “whose ancestors wore chain-armour in the fourteenth century,” as some one or other’s definition of a gentleman runs.
“I was jest such a young feller as you once,” went on this embodiment of colonial progress. “I landed in this country in nothin’ but the clothes to my back, and look at me now. Now, I’ll tell you what I did,” and the oracle, slapping one finger into the palm of the of her hand, looked up into his victim’s face with would-be impressive gravity, “I worked; that’s what I did—I worked. Now, you may depend upon it, that for a young feller there’s nothin’ like a noo country—and work!”
“I suppose so,” acquiesced Claverton, horribly sick of this biography.
“Now a noo country,” went on the oracle, “a noo country, sez I, ain’t an old one. ’Ere you’re free; there,” flinging out a stubby hand in the imaginary direction of Great Britain, “nothing but forms and sticklin’. Now, ’ere I can sit down to dinner without putting on a swallow-tail-coat and a white choker, for instance. No; give me a noo country and freedom, sez I.”
“Quite right, Mr Garrett. A swallow-tailed coat plays the mischief with the digestion, and science has discovered that a white choker tarnishes the silver. Something in the starch, you know—arsenic, they say.”
“No! You don’t say so now?” returned the other, open-mouthed, and not detecting the fine irony of his banterer’s tone.
“Yes, of course. And now excuse me. I must go and find my partner.”
“Certainly—certainly. You young fellers! I was a young feller once, ha, ha, ha!” And old Garrett winked, and contorted his visage in the direction of his recent interlocutor in such wise as should mean volumes.
“This is ours, Miss Strange.”
Lilian had just come in. She had passed close behind the speaker while he was talking to old Garrett, and her entrance did not remain long undiscovered.
“Do you know, I had quite begun to fear you were not going to appear to-night—that you were tired or unwell,” he said, as they made their way to the dancing-room.
“Bight and wrong. I was tired, and so rested instead of dressing earlier. Now I am all right again, and never felt so well in my life.”
“Nor looked it.”
It slipped out. The slightest possible flush came into Lilian’s face.
“You must not pay me compliments, Mr Claverton,” she said, gravely, but with a smile lurking in her eyes. “They are what you men call ‘bad form.’”
“But consider the provocation.”
“Again? What am I to do to you? I know. I shall scold you. This is the second time to-day that you have reproached me for being late. This morning and now.”
Certes the provocation was excessive. She was looking surpassingly beautiful this evening, in creamy white, with a velvety rose of deepest crimson on her breast; another bud, a white one, nestling among the thick coils of her bronze-tinted dark hair. Many a glance of astonished admiration greeted her entrance, and followed her about the room; but the quiet repose of the lovely face was devoid of the least sign of self-consciousness.
“By Jove!” remarked Armitage to his partner, a chubby little “bunch” with big blue eyes and a button mouth. “Claverton’s a sly dog. That’s why he was in no hurry to begin. Oho, I see now.”
“She is pretty. How well they look together!” was the reply, as the two stood against the wall to watch them.
Ethel, whirling by with the Civil Commissioner’s clerk, caught the last remark. She would have given much to have been able to box poor little Gertie Wray’s ears severely, then and there. That young lady babbled on, utterly void of offence.
“I say, though,” said her partner. “She cut you out. Claverton was just on his way to ask you when she came in. He was, really.”
“Was he? Then he should have asked me before. My programme’s full now.”
Meanwhile let us follow the pair under discussion.
“Who was that poor old man you were chaffing so, just now?” Lilian was saying.
“Only a curious specimen of natural history. But how do you know I was chaffing anybody?”
“Because I heard you. Who is he?”
“What perception you have got! ‘He’ is old Garrett, hight Joe, who migrated hither in the year one, to escape the terrible evil of having to dress for dinner.”
Lilian could not speak for laughing.
“Fact, really; he’s just been telling me all about it. Bother! This dance is at an end. We are down for some more together, though.”
“Too many.”
“I claim priority of right. I claim your sympathy as a fellow sojourner in a far country. I appeal to your compassion to rescue me from standing out in the cold, in that you are the only one with whom I can gravitate round this festal room without peril to my neighbours’ elbows and shins, and they know it, and shunt me accordingly.”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” laughed Lilian. “It is you who shunt them.”
“No, I am telling you solemn truth. And now have I not made it clear to you that it is your bounden duty to take pity on me and help the proverbial lame dog over the ditto stile?”
“Well then, I’ll see what I can do for you. Now find me a seat—there, thank you—and go and ‘victimise’ some one else,” she added, flashing up at him a bright, mischievous glance.
“Not yet. Have pity on—the public elbow and shin. I want to rest, too, after discharging my recent heavy responsibility without disaster;” and he made a move towards the seat beside her.
“No. You are not to shirk your duty. Go and do as I wish, or I shall consider it my duty to lose my programme. That means a new one, blank, and then memory is not a trustworthy guide.” And as at that moment some one came up to ask her for a dance, Claverton was constrained unwillingly to obey, or rather, partially to obey, for he fell back on his old position in the convenient doorway, whence his eyes followed her round and round the room, to the complete exclusion of the other score of revolving couples.
“Mr Claverton, do prove a friend in need, and save me from the clutches of that awful Dutchman bearing down upon me from over there,” said a flurried, but familiar voice at his elbow. “I promised him in a weak moment, and now he’s coming. Say you’ve got me down for this, and persuade him it’s his mistake. Quick! here he comes.”
“All right. But you told me once you’d rather go round with a chair, you know, than with me.”
“Did I? Never mind; don’t be mean and rake up things,” replied Ethel, and away they went, while the defrauded Boer, thinking his own sluggish brain was at fault in the reckoning, adjourned to a certain corner of the other room in order to solace his wounded feelings with a sopje (dram).
“How about England’s disappointment?” said Ethel, maliciously, during a pause.
“That affliction has been indefinitely averted. By the way, I never thought to see Allen so screwed.”
“Er—I’m not screwed,” mildly objected that long-suffering youth, who had pulled up with a swaying jerk alongside of them.
“Aren’t you? My good fellow, a man who is capable of mistaking my substantial and visible means of support for this exceedingly well-polished floor, must be in a critical condition.”
“Oh—ah—er—was that you I trod upon? I didn’t know—I’m awfully sorry.”
Half-a-dozen bystanders exploded at this, and the dance over, Claverton began to think he had done a considerable share of duty, and sought an opportunity of claiming an instalment of the promised reward; but his turn had not yet come. Presently he overheard a girl near him say:
“What do you think of that Miss Strange?”
He recognised in the speaker one Jessie Garrett, a daughter of Joe of that ilk.
“Well, she’s very pretty, there’s no doubt about that,” answered her partner, a stalwart young ostrich-farmer from the Graaff Reinet district.
“Should you admire her as much as Ethel Brathwaite?”
“No; I don’t think she’s a patch on Miss Brathwaite; but there’s something awfully fetching about her, for all that.”
“Well, there’s no accounting for tastes. I think she’s too colourless—washed-out looking,”—a fault the speaker herself could in no wise plead guilty to. She was a pretty girl herself, in the florid, barmaid style, but as different a creature to Lilian Strange as a plump dabchick to an Arctic tern.
Claverton’s lips curled as he looked from the offending couple to the object of their remarks.
She to be discussed according to the clod-hopping ideas of louts and scullery-maids. He turned away disgusted. Suddenly he heard himself hailed in loud and jovial tones, and, looking up, found himself in the vicinity of the refreshment table, where three or four ancient settlers were exchanging reminiscences, and occasionally clinking glasses. Prominent among them was old Garrett, his rubicund visage now nearly purple.
“I sh-shay, C-Claveringsh!” called out this worthy. “C-come and have a what-sh-may call a eye-opener—hic!”
“All right.”
“Thas righ’sh. Told yer ’ee ain’t proud,” cried the old fellow, beaming triumphantly on the rest, and attempting to bestow upon Claverton a friendly slap on the back, which the latter quietly evaded. He contemplated the individual before him with vast amusement, and speculated as to how soon this worthy’s early retirement would become imperative.
The rout went on, and presently Naylor and his violin were pressed into the service to second the piano. In the passage outside a number of the Hottentot servants, emulative of their betters, had got up a dance of their own and waxed merry, and laughed and chattered exceedingly, till at last Jim Brathwaite, hearing the row, sallied forth and cleared them all out summarily.
The hours wear on apace. In the silence of the garden the air is fragrant with the cool breaths of night distilling from the myrtle and the flowering pomegranate. High in the heavens hangs a gold half-moon whose lustre pierces a leafy canopy, scattering a network of filmy light upon the shaded earth. In and out of the gloomy shadows of the orange trees a firefly or two trails in mid air a floating spark. All is rest. Now and again a burst of voices and music is borne from the house, yet here it penetrates but feebly, and Night—silver, moon-pierced, star-studded Night—is queen amid the mysterious silence of her witching court.
Two figures wandering down the orange walk in the alternate light, and gloom, and dimness. Listen! That low, melodious voice can belong to no other than Lilian Strange.
“I am so glad we came out here for a little. I had no idea there could be such a night as this except in books.”
“Perhaps it strikes you the more, contrasted with the row and junketing indoors,” said her companion.
“No. In any case it would be delicious. And yet there is something of awe about a night like this—don’t laugh at me—it always seems a mysterious shadow-land connecting us with another world.”
“Laugh at you! Why won’t you give me credit for a capability of entering into any of your ideas?”
“But I do. You are more capable of it than any one I know. There.”
“Thanks for that, anyway.”
“Don’t stop my rhapsodies, but listen. Doesn’t it seem—standing here in this stillness—as if the world lay far beneath one’s feet; that all the littlenesses and prosaic worries of every-day life could not enter such an enchanted realm? Ah-h!”
She uttered a little cry and instinctively drew closer to him as the sudden, yelping bark of a jackal sounded from the bush apparently within fifty yards of them, but really much further off, the stillness and a slight echo adding loudness to the unlooked-for and ill-sounding “bay.”
“Don’t be afraid,” he said, reassuringly. “It’s only a jackal. What would you have done if it had been a wolf?”
“I should have been dreadfully frightened. What a coward I am!”
“At any rate, this time I am not the author of the scare, which is subject-matter for gratulation,” he said.
She laughed. “No; but the interruption came in most opportunely, in time to stay my flights. Here am I, inveighing against, and thinking to rise superior to the prosaic commonplaces of life, when a sound, a mere sound, fills me with an overwhelming impulse to rush headlong back into the despised prose. What a step from the sublime to the ridiculous!”
“I was thinking something of the kind,” replied Claverton, with a half smile; and his voice grew very soft as he looked at her sweet, serious face. “But don’t be in the least afraid. A jackal is about as formidable or aggressive as a tabby cat, though he does make a diabolical row; and as for wolves, they are very scarce, and even more cowardly; and a yet bolder animal would flee from two such unwonted apparitions in the South African bush,” he added, with a laugh, as he glanced at the regulation “evening-dress” of his companion and himself. “Come this way.”
He opened a small gate in the high quince hedge, and they passed out into a narrow bush path which, wound along through the spekboem and feathery mimosa.
“Don’t be in the very least afraid,” he repeated, as they wandered on. “I want you thoroughly to appreciate and enjoy about the most perfect night I ever knew—and I’ve seen a good many—and you can’t do so if you’re expecting a wolf or a tiger to spring out of every bush.”
She laughed. “I’ll try and be less of a coward, and keep my too-vivid imagination under control.” Yet the light hand which rested on his arm seemed to lean there with ever so increased a pressure of trust or dependence, or both.
Is it the movement of bird or beast in the adjoining brake, or is it the tread of a stealthy foot, that makes Claverton suddenly turn and gaze behind him? “I could swear I heard some one,” he thinks to himself; but not a word of this does he say to his companion. Then he laughs at himself for a fool. But he sees not a tall, shadowy figure standing back beneath the shelter of a mimosa tree, watching them over the sprays of the lower scrub. He hears not again that cautious footfall following—following silently as they wend their way along the moonlit path. And what should be farther from his thoughts than danger, real or imaginary?
Presently the plash of falling water is heard, and they emerge from the path on to a high, open bank. Beneath, the moon is reflected in the depths of the still, round pool, whose rocky sides throw a black shadow on the surface, while a small cascade slides from a height of ten or twelve feet, and, glancing like a silver thread through festoons of delicate maidenhair fern fringing the polished face of the rock, plunges, with a bell-like plash, into the glassy depths.
“That’s pretty, isn’t it?” said Claverton. “In the daytime it isn’t much to look at, but by moonlight it shows up rather well.”
“It’s lovely! A perfect picture!”
“I thought you’d like it. Sit down there,” he continued, pointing to the smooth, sloping sward, which he has narrowly scrutinised to make sure that no noxious reptile, whether serpent or centipede, is at hand. Yet may he have overlooked the presence of deadlier foe than serpent or centipede, ay, and wolf or leopard, in that peaceful retreat. “How do you think you’ll like being here?”
“Very much. I like it already. It is so different to any kind of life I have ever known before—so strange, and wild, and interesting. And then every one here is so kind. Why, I might be a very near relative instead of only a recent acquaintance! The worst of it is, I fear it will spoil me by the time I have to go back to my work.”
Her listener bit his lip until the blood flowed. His quick perception had detected the faintest possible sigh of wearyful import which escaped her.
“It shall be no fault of mine if you do go back to that same miserable drudgery,” he thought. But it was too early yet to utter the thought aloud, even he felt that. So he only said—and there was a world of tender sympathy in his tone:
“I’m afraid you have been working much too hard, and I don’t believe you are in the least fitted for it.”
“You must not try and make me discontented, Mr Claverton,” was the answer, with a sad little smile. “The fact is, I do feel the change a great deal more than I ought. Only lately I had a very dear and happy home, now I am entirely alone in the world.”
Again that irresistible impulse came over her auditor. Was it really too soon? Why, it seemed as though he had known her for ages. Yet forty-eight hours ago he had not set eyes upon her. For a few moments he could hardly trust himself to speak. Then he said, gently:
“Tell me about your old home.” The bush behind them parts, suddenly, noiselessly. A head rises; a great grim black head, with distended eyeballs rolling in the moonlight. Then it sinks again and disappears, but they have not seen it.
“I suppose I have no right to feel leaving the old place as I did,” went on Lilian. “We were in a way interlopers, for it belonged to my stepfather, not to our family. I lived there, though, ever since I can remember, and my mother died there. We were very happy but for one thing: I had a stepsister about my own age who detested me. In short, we couldn’t get on together, hard though I tried to like her. So when Mr Dynevard died—”
“Who?”
“Mr Dynevard. My stepfather,” repeated Lilian.
“Of Dynevard Chase, near Sandcombe?”
“Yes. Why, you don’t mean to say you know it?” cried Lilian, lost in wonder.
“I wish I did. I’m afraid my utmost acquaintance with it lies in having driven past the place once or twice. Some distant relatives of mine lived not far from Sandcombe years ago. So that’s where you used to live?”
“Yes. This is a surprise. I shall make you talk to me such a lot about it,” she cried, gleefully. “You will soon be heartily tired of the subject, and will wish you had preserved a discreet silence.”
Claverton remembered the reluctance to dwell upon home topics which she had expressed when the two of them were driving up from the town, and it was with an extraordinary sense of relief that he did so. There was nothing more behind it than the painfulness of her change of circumstances to a proud and sensitive nature.
“After my stepfather’s death,” went on Lilian, “I thought it best to relieve Eveline Dynevard of my presence, and did so. There you have the whole of my history.”
“And then you struck out a line for yourself, and thought to open that miserably hard old oyster, the world, with the blade of a miniature penknife. How enterprising of you!”
“No, not at once—at least—at the first, that is—” and she hesitated slightly and the colour rose to her face, as at some painful recollection. Her trepidation was not lost upon her listener, on whom it threw a momentary chill.
Again that grim head rises from the bushes, ten yards behind the unsuspecting couple, followed this time by a pair of brawny dark shoulders bent forward in an attitude of intense watchfulness—the attitude of a crouching tiger. Again the moonbeams fall upon a fierce visage and eyes glaring with vengeful hate. They fall on something more—on the gleaming blade of a great assegai, and then the mighty frame of a gigantic savage slowly begins to emerge from the covert.
Claverton sees not the baleful stare of his deadly foe, for he is too intent upon gazing at the lovely preoccupied eyes before him, and wondering what is their exact colour, changing as it ever does in the varying light. His companion sees it not, for she is living again in the past. And no zephyr quivers through the silvered leaves or ruffles the pool at their feet, no cloud comes over the calm, fair beauty of the night, no shadow warns of a secret and terrible death hovering over those two, who sit there beneath the witching influences of restful calm, of moonlight, and to one of them—of love.
“Confound it!” angrily exclaims Claverton, half rising as the sound of approaching voices and laughter is borne upon the stillness. The threatening form of the watcher disappears—but they have not seen it—and the voices draw nearer. “Our retreat is a retreat no longer. The whole lot of them are bearing down upon us. Always the way.”
“Always the way.” So it is. As in small things so in great; we see not the finger of Providence in fortune’s hardest knocks. Yet it must be admitted that these seldom wear the guise of blessings, and we mortals are weak—lamentably weak—and our foresight is simply nil. You two, who resent the intrusion of your fellows into this slumbrous retreat, you little reck that that intrusion is the saving of the life of at least one of you.
“But anyhow we must be going back now. As it is they will be wondering what has become of as,” said Lilian, rising.
“I suppose we must,” assented her companion, ruefully. He thought he could have sat for ever in that enchanted glade, gazing into the beautiful face and listening to the modulation of that low, tuneful voice. “Ah, well. Now for the madding crowd again.”
He wrapped her shawl around her, and they wandered back along the narrow path and beneath the orange trees again. Then as they gained the last gate and the sound of music and laughter betokened that they were close to the house, Lilian lingered a moment to look back towards the moonlit pool.
“It is a sweet place, and we have had a lovely walk,” she said. “I did enjoy it so. Thanks so much for bringing me.”
What did she mean? Was she blind? He paused with his hand on the half-open gate, and glanced at her with a curious expression.
A small runnel of water coursed along at their feet, shining and glowing in the moonlight, and she was standing on the single plank that spanned it. Was she blind, that she failed to read even one-tenth of what that look expressed? But he made some ordinary remark, and they passed on.
“Why, where in the world have you two been?” said Mrs Brathwaite as they entered.
“Playing truant. Miss Strange had a slight headache, and I recommended fresh air as a counteracting influence. Then we discovered that we had been near neighbours for some years without knowing it, and got talking English ‘shop’,” answered Claverton. The latter half of his statement was not strictly historical, but the speaker salved his conscience with the trite reflection that “all’s fair in love and war.”
“How curious!” said the old lady, in her interest in the coincidence losing sight of the delinquency and forgetting mildly to scold him therefor. “But it’s astonishing how small the world is, when one comes to think of it.”
“Mr Claverton,” said Lilian, reproachfully, an hour later. “I’m surprised at you. How could you say we were neighbours for ‘some years’ when you knew we were not?”
He laughed. “Were we not? Then we ought to have been. It was the merest accident of time and place that precluded it.” He could not make to her the excuse he had made to his own conscience—at least—not yet.
Pass we again to the silence of the garden. Who is this leaning against yonder fence alone and gazing with stony, set face straight in front of her? Can it be Ethel? Yes, it is. The laughing, saucy lips, so ready with badinage and repartee, are closed tightly together, and the blue eyes, erewhile flashing and sparkling with light-hearted mirth, now start forth with a hard stare. Must we, in the interests of our story, partially withdraw the curtain from her reflections? Even so, let us do it as gently as possible.
“He never looked at me like that,” she murmured, referring to the two on the little plank bridge. “Ought I to have betrayed my presence? I don’t know. I couldn’t, somehow; and they weren’t saying anything. But that look—how plainly I saw it! O, God! if only it had been given to me—to me,” she went on, passionately, “I would cheerfully have died at this moment.”
She paused, and slowly the tears welled to the swimming eyes, and glistened in the moonlight. “All the walks and rides we’ve had together; all the time we have been thrown together! Good God! if I could but live it over again! Since the very moment I saw him come in, and he looked me up and down in that calm, searching way of his—it seems only like yesterday. He never thought of me but as something to amuse him—a pretty plaything—to be thrown aside for a better. No, I am wronging him; never by word or look did he deceive me. It is I who am a fool—an idiot—and must pay the penalty of my folly; but—how could I help it?”
And the sounds of revelry came ever and anon from the lighted windows; and, without, all nature slept in a tranquil hush, and the pale stars gleamed in the sky—gleamed coldly down upon the lonely watcher.
“How I flouted you, and said hard, sharp things to you, darling; every one of them goes through me like a knife as I remember it. Yet that was at first, and—how could I tell?” and a great sob shook the delicate frame. “But help me, my pride! Oh, love, you will never know. The same roof will cover us, and I must talk and even laugh with you as before—and see you and her together; but—you will never know. Ah! what a deal it takes to break one poor little heart! And—how I hate her!”
A voice intrudes upon her reflections, quick, gruff, and horribly familiar. “Oh, there you are, Miss Brathwaite,” it says, “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”
The voice acts upon her even as the trumpet blast upon the proverbial charger. Not a trace of any recent emotion is visible as she turns and faces her persistent but unwelcome admirer, Will Jeffreys.
“And you’ve found me. What can I do for you?”
The young fellow is staggered. The fact is that, warmed by the exhilarating exercise and the yet more exhilarating stimulant which he has imbibed pretty freely in the course of the evening, he has screwed up his courage to the sticking point, and intends to throw the dice of his fate with Ethel before the said exalted quality has time to cool, which process of refrigeration, it may be remarked, has already begun.
“Well, there is something you can do for me,” he says.
“What is it? Do you want a partner for the next dance?—because, I’ll be in directly,” she asks, quickly.
The very tones of her voice ought to have brought home to Jeffreys the inexpediency of pursuing his subject for the present; but some persons are singularly deficient in a sense of the fitness of things or of times, and he was one.
“No; it isn’t that. I want to say something—something about me—and about you,” he blunders, lamely; but she will give him no help, “and—I must—say it—to-night—Ethel!” he jerks out.
“For goodness’ sake don’t say it to-night, or at any other time,” replies she, decisively, putting out her hand, with a gesture as if to stop him. It has the desired effect. Even Jeffreys’ dull wits are alive to the conviction that his is not merely a losing game, but a lost one; and the reflection exasperates him.
“Oh, I might have known,” was the sneering reply. “Of course—no one has been fit to speak to since that fellow Claverton came.”
She turned upon him, her face white with wrath in the moonlight. “Wilfred Jeffreys, you are a brave fellow. You have found me here alone, and have taken the opportunity of insulting me. Now what do you think I am going to do?”
“What?”
“I am going in to ask uncle to put away the brandy decanter,” said she, in tones of bitter scorn; and without another word she walked away, leaving him standing there looking and feeling, from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet, a thorough fool.
Within doors the fun is kept up with a zest characteristic of such entertainments. There are no shy ones left now, all are merged in the ranks of the confident.
Crash!
Down comes Hicks like a felled tree, right in the middle of the room. Matters are at a momentary standstill, and the unlucky one slowly and shamefacedly picks himself up, red and wrathful and covered with confusion. He is muttering maledictions on the head of the guileless Allen, which ass, he declares, not content with cannoning against him, tripped him up.
“Never mind, jump up. Lucky it’s before supper,” laughs jovial Jim Brathwaite.
“Hicks, old man, I told you to draw the line at that fourth glass,” says the irrepressible Armitage in a mighty stage whisper as he whirls by, grinning with malicious delight. The truth being that Hicks is the most abstemious wight in the world. But the remark does not pass unheeded, and a laugh, varying in tone from open guffaw to suppressed titter, further exasperates and discomfits the luckless stumbler, who vows vengeance on his tormentor.
Then comes supper, which must be attended to in relays, space being limited. A Dutchman is desperately anxious to make a speech, and is with difficulty quelled; while Jack Armitage, who has a bet on with some one that old Garrett being too far gone to detect the fraud, he will make him drink three tumblers of water under the impression that it is grog, is using the noble spur, emulation, to induce that worthy to swallow the third, and winks and grins triumphantly at the loser as he succeeds. Meanwhile piano and violin never flag, till at length the waning summer night begins to hint pretty broadly that it is time to knock off.
Then a great deal of inspanning and saddling up; of hunting for stray saddle-cloths and bridles which have gone adrift; not a little wrangling among the coloured stable hands belonging to the place or to the guests, and finally most of the latter are gone. The residue will tarry for a shakedown and a rest.
“Good-night—at sunrise!”
A pressure from a soft, taper hand; a sweet glance from a pair of rather tired eyes, and the door closes on a tall vision in soft creamy draperies.
The recipient of that pressure of the hand, that playful glance, turns away like a man in a dream. Half instinctively he makes his way to Hicks’ quarters. Here he is enthusiastically hailed.
“Hallo, Arthur. Come and blow a cloud before you turn in. All these chaps are asleep already.”
“All right,” was the reply, and the speaker, picking his way among several slumbering wights who rolled in blankets had compassed impromptu shakedowns on the floor of Hicks’ room, seated himself at the foot of the latter’s stretcher. “Give us a fill.”