Chapter Fifteen.
Part Two—What Australian Gold Achieved.
“Life has always poppies in her hands.”
“Salisbury lies behind that big brown hill,” said Judy, “about an hour’s drive from here.” She was perched with a certain daintiness upon Dirk Mackenzie’s water fykie, sipping a cup of coffee, her back crêpe draperies spread round her on the scrubby grass. Mrs Shand and I, very sunburnt, wearing print bonnets and our oldest skirts, sat of the ground sharing a striped kaffir blanket with several dozen small brown ants, who were busy collecting the crumbs left from breakfast and hurrying off with them to a neighbouring ant-heap. The ox waggon in which we had taken a fortnight to travel from Fort George was loaded so high with packing cases and Mrs Shand’s furniture that it cast quite a large patch of shade, in which we sat as in some cool black pool while the rest of the world, including the dashing Cape cart in which Judy had just arrived, sweltered in blinding sunshine.
Dirk Mackenzie our transport driver, a big, bearded, Natal man, stood smoking in his shirt sleeves talking to Mr Courtfield, the man who lad driven Judy out, and Maurice Stair in riding-kit with his legs twisted, holding his elbow in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stared reflectively at a group of kaffir boys who at a little distance off were squatting round their three-legged pot of mealie-meal pap.
I looked from them to the big brown hill that hid Salisbury, the road of red-brown dust that led there, the dazzling blue of the morning sky, and back again to the chic and pretty widow sitting upon the fykie with her crêpe skirts spread so daintily about her.
Her grey eyes were sparkling, there was pink in her cheeks, and poudre de riz upon her nose; her blond hair, charmingly arranged, shone softly, and a tiny fair curl lay in the centre of her forehead just under the white crêpe peak of her little widow’s bonnet. Quite the most fascinating widow I had ever seen! I had thought of her all the way up as the languid, passé little woman who left me at Fort George, and had longed to reach her and comfort her as best I might. But any one appearing less in need of comfort than this fresh, smart lady it would be hard to find. She looked as if she had stepped straight out of Jays’s. All her languor and weariness of life had disappeared. She seemed to have gone back to the days of her youth before she married Dick. There was the same pretty, appealing look in her eyes, the same clinging, helpless manner, mingled now with an alluring little air of sadness. As for the small white hand that held her coffee cup, nothing could have been daintier, more eager and alive looking. Certainly a very different Judy to the one I had last seen in Fort George! I suppose I ought to have been glad, but I was not. My heart, with astounding contrariety, yearned after the other little languid, untidy, almost unkempt Judy, as one longs in sorrow for the old scenes and surroundings of happier, dearer days.
“Our cart has had a smash-up, but Mr Courtfield lent me his to come and fetch you, Deirdre,” she was saying, “and would insist on driving me himself. Wasn’t it sweet of him? I find that men are so extraordinarily kind to me in my trouble.” Her sad little air deepened, and my heart stirred to her for the first time. Perhaps after all under that elegant crêpe frock she was just a lonely little miserable creature!
“Of course they would be,” I said. “Any one would be kind to you, Judy; and all men loved Dick.”
“Every one in this country is kind, don’t you think?” ventured Mrs Shand.
“Oh, every one? I’m sure I couldn’t say,” said Judy, and looked away over Mrs Shand’s head in a way that made that little woman realise that after all she was only a mere Fort George frump; a faint red colour stole into her sunburnt face.
“Will you get ready, Deirdre?” continued my sister-in-law. “We ought not to keep Mr Courtfield’s horses waiting in the sun.”
“I don’t think I care to leave Mrs Shand alone, Judy. I would rather stay and come in with the waggon to-night. Couldn’t I do that?”
She was full of remonstrances for this plan, and Mrs Shand would have none of it either, saying that a boy had been sent into town for her husband, and that she expected him out at any moment to stay the day with her.
“Besides,” said Judy, “if you stay out here all day and come crawling in by waggon to-night there will still be the journey to make from Salisbury to our place, nearly twelve miles, and I should not be able to borrow Mr Courtfield’s cart again, as he is going away in it to-night to Umtali. You look a perfect wreck, and ought to get to the end of your journey and rest. Don’t you think so, Mrs Shand?”
“Yes, of course she is tired. We’ve been trekking all night, and the waggon is not a very springy one. Mr Mackenzie hoped to get into Salisbury by the end of this morning’s trek, but there is no grass, and the oxen are poor.”
I was obliged to go and tidy myself up in the waggon tent, and thereafter climb into the Cape cart with Judy and sit behind the short, fat, soft man with the pointed golden beard and confidential eyes, to whom I had taken an unreasonable but nevertheless poignant dislike. I hated to get into the cart Mr Courtfield had so kindly placed at my service, and glanced longingly instead at Maurice Stair’s horse as he slowly mounted and prepared to ride beside us. He looked his best in riding-kit and sat his horse well, swaying in the rather slouchy, graceful way that men who have done stock-riding in Australia affect.
I had long ago learned from him that he had spent several years in Australia before coming to Africa. But it appeared that Mr Courtfield was the real thing from that country—an Australian born and bred, not just a man who had learned to ride there. Judy told me this in a low voice, perhaps to account for the extraordinary accent and bad manners of the man in front of us. I was not very interested. I only wondered vaguely how she could reconcile herself to accept favours from a man who was so obviously not a gentleman. Dick used to say there were some women who had no discrimination about men, and absolutely didn’t know the difference between a gentleman and a cad, even when they had the advantage of knowing and living with gentlemen all their lives. Opportunity had never discovered this trait in Judy; and I vaguely hoped she was not going to develop it now. Life is difficult enough spent among nice men: I could not tolerate the thought of what it might be with a few Mr Courtfields about. Under cover of his talk to Maurice Stair, riding beside us, Judy now addressed me:
“Dearest girl, how awful that you are not in mourning. I suppose you could not get any black in Fort George.”
“I did not try,” said I, looking down carelessly at my grey velveteen coat and skirt, which had certainly seen hard wear and tear in the seven months I had spent in Mashonaland. “I never thought about it, to tell the truth, Judy. Besides, Dick always hated to see people dressed in black.”
“Surely that has nothing to do with it, dear,” said my sister-in-law gently. “One must respect the conventions.”
“I daresay there are some black frocks in my packing cases. They arrived just as we were leaving, so I brought them on.”
“How fortunate!” said Judy, looking cross for the first time, but quickly recovering herself after a searching glance at me. “Still, I don’t suppose you will look well in black, Deirdre. It is such a trying colour for any one but the very blond, and you are so very brown, aren’t you? What a pity you didn’t take more care of your skin on this journey. I never knew anything like a waggon journey to turn one’s complexion to leather!”
“What place is that on the right, opposite the the hill?” I asked. “It seems to be all dotted with white things.”
“That is the cemetery, dear. Poor darling Dick is buried there.”
A grey veil seemed to come down before my face at that, and presently through blurred eyes I saw that the white things were indeed little crosses and headstones.
“I should like to get down,” I said in a low voice, as we reached a wide path that showed the way to the cemetery gate. “But don’t let this man come.”
“Oh, no, he won’t. He buried his wife here a few months ago,” was Judy’s strange answer.
I hoped she would let me go alone, but she expressed a wish to accompany me, so we stood together by my brother’s grave. There were no trees anywhere, and very few flowers, just one or two sturdy scarlet geraniums and some green runners clambering carelessly over the wooden fence. Lines of dusty graves lying in the brilliant light, coarse veldt grass growing about them, and above them the little white crosses, with the oft-repeated phrase, “Died of fever!”
There they lay, sleeping in the sunshine: Cecil Rhodes’s “boys!” The men who had helped to open up the country, light the first fires, and turn the first sods to let the malaria out of the ground for others to build towns on. Of such as these was written:
“Where are the brave, the strong, the fleet!
Where is our English chivalry?
Wild grasses are their burial sheet,
And sobbing waves their threnody.”
“Let us go quickly,” said Judy. “There is a funeral coming.”
So we went back to the cart, and drove slowly so as not to smother with dust a little cortège that passed us, taking a short cut over the grass. If Judy had not said it was a funeral I should not have recognised one, though I had seen many since I came to Mashonaland. The coffin was placed on a Scotch-cart drawn by two bullocks, and had a black cloth flung over it. But some kind hand had redeemed the sordid loneliness by putting a little bunch of wild flowers and a green branch on the black cloth. Three men followed behind, and a woman on horseback.
“Isn’t it awful?” said Judy. “That is the way they buried my poor Dick too. A Scotch-cart with bullocks! But Dr Jim and every one came to Dick’s funeral. He was one of the ‘old crowd.’ This must be some stranger.”
“Fellow from Lomagundis’, died of the jim-jams last night,” said Mr Courtfield pleasantly. “Anderson’s barmaid was sweet on him. That’s her behind, hanging on to Browne’s grey. The horse will have a raw back before it gets back to Police quarters.” He finished his informing remarks with a cheerful snigger, seeming to take some kudos unto himself for discovering that the bunched-up, red-eyed woman could not ride.
Having at last got round the brown hill we came suddenly upon the town. In a moment we were in the main street, which was called Pioneer Street, and the shops of galvanised iron were blinking and winking at us from either side. There were a few brick buildings, and many thatched roofs. All had the conventional verandah, which at the sound of our cart rapidly filled with the usual brown-faced, shirt-sleeved men. Judy dispensed a number of queenly bows and one or two charming smiles, all gratefully received. I smiled too, sometimes, when I saw a face I knew, for many old Fort Georgians were in Salisbury; but my heart was aching, aching, as the sight of brown-faced, shirt-sleeved men now always made it ache.
It was explained to me that this was the business part of the town, known as the Kopje; the residential quarter was on the other side of a large green swamp, and was called the Causeway. A number of squat-looking houses were scattered far and wide over the veldt.
“How I wish,” said Judy, “that Dick had bought a place in town instead of going so far out. Kentucky Hills is still twelve miles away, on the Mazoe Road.”
Mr Courtfield agreed with her that it was very annoying she should have to ride twelve miles for society, or society for her. My head and heart ached dully. I was thankful when at last Maurice Stair rode up to tell me that Kentucky Hills, my brother’s place, was just round the next kopje.
It looked very homelike as we suddenly came upon it, lying in a wide green kloof with low hills winging away from it on either side—a big square bungalow house, painted green, with verandahs all round, and the beginnings of a charming garden about it. At one side of the house a tennis-court had been laid out, and a summer-house put up. It was certainly far ahead of most of the Mashonaland houses, but Dick had begun to build it as soon as he came up, and having the advantage of a little capital had been able to do more than most people.
The verandahs were blinded and full of ferns growing in native pots, and the inside of the house was charmingly comfortable: big airy rooms and windows looking out on the ever-changing changelessness of the red-brown veldt and the far-off hills. The furniture consisted chiefly of deep, comfortable lounge chairs, and tables of polished brown wood that I took for oak, but was really teak, a wood of the country. Judy had her English things scattered about, and photographs of Dick and home-scenes that brought blinding tears to my eyes. There was also a piano, the first that had come into the country, Judy told me; a hotel-keeper had brought it up to make his bar more alluring, but Dick offered him a hundred and fifty pounds for it, though it was only a simple instrument of no particular make. Since the war plenty of pianos have come into the country, but in those days one in hand was worth ten en route.
Judy had asked the men to stay to lunch, and while they were in the dining-room and we were taking off our veils in her room, a boy brought in little Dickie, a darling wee man of five with his father’s eyes and his mother’s blond colouring.
“This is your Auntie Deirdre,” said Judy, and he lifted a shy face to be kissed. At the touch of his innocent cherubic lips the great loneliness that filled me dispersed a little. My world was not so empty after all. Here was Dick’s son for kinsman!
Later in the day when the men were gone and we were resting in the cool, pretty drawing-room, I broached the subject of the future to. Judy.
“What is there I can do?” I asked. “I want to stay in this country. What can I do to earn my living here?”
“Earn your living, Deirdre? My dear girl, what on earth are you talking about? If you really wish to stay in this country you must live with me, of course. Dick especially wished it. But I can’t think why you should want to stay here. I certainly shall not, if I can strike a good bargain with some one for the property here, and sell Dick’s farms and claims in Matabeleland.”
“Oh, Judy! you surely wouldn’t sell the Matabeleland property that Dick practically paid for with his life?”
She stood looking at me in surprise so plainly mingled with resentment that I swallowed indignation and addressed her with all the gentleness I could at the moment command.
“You know Dick had set his heart on that country. He was full of plans for turning his property there into a beautiful heritage for Dickie and at the same time helping on Mr Rhodes’s great scheme of Empire by developing the land to the utmost. Dear Judy, I implore you to keep that for the boy.”
She turned away from me, answering peevishly:
“That is all very well, Deirdre. But what kind of life is this for a woman? I have, with what Dick settled on me and his insurance, four hundred a year. With that and what the property realises I could be quite snug and comfy in London; but here it is nothing at all; one is poor on it. Besides, what is there to keep one in a place like this?”
Strange that the remembrance of that peaceful dusty grave in the sunlight was not enough to keep her! That any one would rather be snug and comfy in London than live in this wide, open land where you had but to go to your window to see plain and sky touching on the horizon! Ah! well, what was the use of trying to make her feel what she could never feel? I returned drearily to the subject of my own future.
“But what is there I can do, Judy? I can not and will not live on you. How can I earn a living?”
“The only women who earn their living up here are barmaids and domestics, my dear,” she answered dryly. “I don’t know if you contemplate doing anything of that sort. All the rest are busy minding their husbands and their homes. I advise you, if you are really bent on staying here, to do the same as soon as possible.”
“What do you mean, Judy?”
“You must marry, of course. When you have once lived down that scandal about Anthony Kinsella I dare say you will have plenty of offers.”
I did not speak, but perhaps something in my face answered for me, for she flushed a little and when she spoke again it was somewhat apologetically, though her words were of much the same tenor.
“I’m afraid you don’t realise how much you have been talked of, Deirdre. Mrs Valetta and Anna. Cleeve both have terrible tongues, and Mrs Skeffington-Smythe simply doesn’t mind what she says about anybody. Every one is outraged at the story of your infatuation.”
“That will do, Judy,” I interrupted violently. “I refuse to hear another word, and do not ever speak to me on this matter again. Don’t you understand that it is sacred; that the memory of that man is the only thing I have left? Haven’t you eyes to see and ears to hear anything else but gossip? Don’t you realise yet that I have never for one moment believed those lies about Anthony, that nothing can shake my belief in his honour? Dick believed in him too. Thank God Dick believed in him too. I have that at least.”
I spoke so passionately and bitterly that she was abashed for a moment.
“I know that Dick believed in him,” she admitted grudgingly. “But then Dick was one of those curious people who would believe in a man simply because he could ‘stare you clear in the eyes’ or ‘had a straight look about his mouth.’ He would pit those things against the blackest evidence, and expect other people to be similarly impressed—dear, sentimental, ridiculous fellow! But I’m afraid the Saurins are like that.”
“Yes, the Saurins are like that,” I said, “and thank God for it.”
Later, when anger had been put away and we could speak more calmly and dispassionately she said:
“Well, if you must stay here and if you are so set on doing something, why not undertake the care of Dickie for me? He begins to need teaching, and of course it is too far to send him to the little school in Salisbury; then it is very bad for him to be always with the black boys and piccanins; they teach him all sorts of naughtiness; you can’t trust them. It would relieve me of a great worry if you would take entire charge of him.”
“But why not do it yourself, Judy?” It made me sick to think of Dick’s boy being left to the care of natives, but I wanted to be quite certain that she was not inventing a task out of charity. She looked at me, almost indignant.
“My dear girl! what time have I for teaching a child? You forget that now Dick is gone I have simply everything to see about for myself: the care of the property, the accounts, the servants, social duties—such as they are—everything. I haven’t a moment for Dickie. If you won’t undertake him I shall have to send him to Durban again, until I can sell the place. My idea in staying on at all is to improve the property on the lines Dick intended, with the help of his foreman, Mr Stibbert, and presently sell it at a good price to some one of the people who will come pouring into the country now that the trouble with the natives is over.”
After that I consented: but only on the condition that if she sold the Mashonaland property she would at least refrain from parting with Dick’s Matabeleland farms and claims, but keep them for the boy. I had less trouble in persuading her to this on reminding her of the splendid reports that were coming in of the mineral wealth of the country. Experts said that Matabeleland was full of gold.
So it was settled that I should stay, minding and teaching Dickie, and I thanked God for a valid reason to remain in Mashonaland.
The household of Kentucky Hills consisted, I found, of ourselves; Mr Stibbert a clever young German who understood farming on scientific principles and had been engaged to manage Dick’s cattle and land for him; an elderly woman of the same type as Adriana who had brought Dickie up by the East Coast; and a number of native servants. We were not near enough to Salisbury to expect much social life, for it requires some energy in Africa to mount your horse for a twelve-mile ride to pay an afternoon call. Yet I was astonished to find how many people thought it worth while to come galloping along the Mazoe Road for the sake of a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich. These things were much in request by behabited ladies and begaitered men, in Judy’s cool drawing-room; and Judy was always ready to dispense them, looking very sad and sweet and appealing in her little white crêpe widow’s cap. She told me that she had never had so many visitors before, and that what they came for was to see me, the contravener of bylaws and conventions from Fort George. I thanked them much for that! But if it was true, their object was not attained. I forsook the drawing-room on these occasions and was neither seen nor heard. Judy, a skilful little social politician, told them I had not recovered from my serious illness brought on by overwork among the sick in Fort George, and shock at my brother’s death. She was much too clever to give them any inkling of the vexing arguments she had with me on the subject; of her tart reminders that I was no longer an heiress, nor even a girl with a few hundreds a year, who could go her own way regardless of the opinions of the world; and of her constant injunction to me to try to get the friendship of these women instead of treating them with indifference.
“If you want to live up here you had better propitiate people and make friends,” she advised me, “so that you may at least share such interests as there are in this benighted country.”
But her arguments left me cold. I cared nothing for the interests or the friendships of Salisbury, though I did not doubt for a moment that as Dick had said there were many nice women in the place. All I wanted was to be left alone; to be let roam the veldt; to climb the rocky kopjes with Dickie, and dream up there in the sunshine of the days that had been all too short, when Anthony Kinsella and I lived our brief sweet hour of happiness. I could not bear to meet people who looked upon that dream of ours as outrageous and illegitimate. And I did not want to talk to people who spoke of Anthony Kinsella as one to whom much should be forgiven because he was of the dead. I had outwardly accepted the fact that he was dead and that a monument had been erected where he died. But yet—but yet, why should he seem so alive to me still in my dreams, and my thoughts? Why had nothing been found to identify him? No one could swear to the bones that had been found. Ah, God! what wild hopes and foolish thoughts my heart fed upon. But I wished for converse with none who would rob me of those hopes and I found life easiest to bear with only little gay-hearted Dickie for my companion.
And so, at the first sound of a horse’s hoof Dickie and I were away, scudding up a hill at the back of the house, there to lie hidden among the rocks and sugar bushes until we heard the hoofs once more departing. Sometimes we had a little kettle up there and made a fire for our tea, and afterwards Dickie would climb the rocks pretending they were ship masts while I lay on the short hot grass and dreamed of the days that were no more, talking out my wild hopes—all that I had left, to ponder upon and brood over.
If I had possessed any money I should have fitted out an expedition into Matabeleland over the ground where Anthony had last been seen: and drag-net the whole country for traces of him, or at least for full details of the tragedy, if tragedy there had been. Some one would have had to tell something. Some one should have been made to pay.
It is true that an official inquiry had been made after Maurice Stair’s report, but nothing further had transpired and the matter left for a time had been gradually put aside in a country full of new interests and new men. It is not much use being a dead man, or a missing man, in Rhodesia, or any other country for that matter.
“To us the absent are the dead;
The dead to us must absent be.”
The living have the best of it. The dead and the missing are soon forgotten, except by the few who loved them personally.
I felt that if I could have gone out into the wild places penetrating the great Somabula Forest and searching all along the thickly bushed banks of the Shangani I should have found some trace, some news, something to break the aching, mysterious silence, and confirm me in my belief that Anthony was still alive somewhere. But across Africa’s rolling leagues of bush and rocks and empty, rugged, burning land no one can travel without the accessories that only money can buy. Bitterly I regretted my stolen thousands, and bitterly hated the old solicitor Morton, whom we had so well and so unwisely trusted.
Poor Aunt Betty too had been badly hit over his defalcation, losing not only her private fortune but the money she had made at sculpture in years of hard work. Nevertheless, she had written and urged me to come back to Paris and share with her all she had. But I steadfastly resisted her urgent letters. I could not go if I would. Stronger bonds held me fast in Africa than ever Betty van Alen’s love could forge. I had to stay with Judy and Dick’s boy as long as I could be of use to them. They had just claims. But even when the day came that they no longer wanted me I should not leave Africa. The witch had dug her claw in deep. I could not go if I would.
As it was I cost Judy nothing. For clothes and the necessities of life, which since I lost my income had become luxuries, I parted one by one with my jewels, sending them down to Durban to be sold.
And so the months slipped by, until a year had gone since the night I kissed Anthony Kinsella goodbye. Of all the old Fort George friends there was only one left in my life—Maurice Stair. The rest were scattered far and wide in Matabeleland, and the different camps and townships springing up in every part of the country.
That is the way in Africa. People come into your life, live in almost family intimacy with you, learn (very often) the very inmost secrets of your heart, share joys and sorrows with you, then pass on and are lost to you for ever. Only here and there you grasp a hand that you can hold over hills and seas, though darkness hide you from one another and leagues divide, until the end.
Of the Salisbury women I had known in Fort George: Anna Cleeve had married her rich man and left Africa: Mrs Skeffington-Smythe was still, to the fore in Salisbury and might always be found where scandals were rifest and the battle of the tongues wagged hottest: but she did not much afflict Kentucky Hills with her presence.
Mrs Valetta sometimes came riding out with Maurice Stair to visit Judy, but she and I never met, and within the last few months she had gone away with her husband to some new town in Matabeleland. I did not inquire where. I asked nothing better than to forget Nonie Valetta, and that she and I had ever crossed each other’s paths.
Maurice Stair was very kind and gentle and silent always. I often let him come with Dickie and me to the hill-tops. He was so quiet that I could almost forget that he was there. Apparently he asked nothing better than to be with me as often as his work allowed. His duties as an Assistant N.C., which he cordially detested were not very arduous, and often took him away for long spells. But whenever he was in Salisbury he found his way to Kentucky Hills.
I liked him for several reasons. One was because he talked so little in a country where everyone gossiped perpetually. Also, there was a kind of quiet melancholy about him that suggested acknowledged failure, and there is always a pathetic appeal to a woman in that. Certainly a man of his age and education ought not to have been idling away his life at work he hated and in which there was no probable advancement. I often felt that, and apparently he felt it, too, though he made no effort as far as I knew to change the tenor of his life. But really I knew very little about him except what he told me in rare expansive moments. He was a public school man, and had been prepared for the Army, a profession he had set his heart on but had been prevented from entering by the caprice of his guardian. This guardian was his uncle and only relative, Sir Alexander Stair, a distinguished diplomat I had often heard of at home—a very clever, witty, lonely, and sardonic old man, and not at all a lovable character, people said. I half understood the bitterness with which his nephew always spoke of him. But it seemed to me very sad that two men, the last of their family and alone in the world, should be so apart in sympathy. Yes: there were several pathetic, appealing things about Maurice Stair, his gentle, dark eyes and quiet, restrained manners, were in striking and refreshing contrast with those of John Courtfield who was perpetually about the house. The Australian’s common ideas, expressed in common accents, did not offend Judy as they did me. Nor was she outraged by the intimacy of his horrible bulging eyes. I came to look forward to Maurice Stair’s presence as a relief from the colonial’s obtrusive personality.
Not that John Courtfield came to see me. I did not in fact think he came to see any one in particular, but that he simply made Kentucky Hills a convenient stopping place on the way to a mining camp out Mazoe way in which he was interested. But at last it dawned upon me that Judy was the star in his sky. When I realised this I don’t know whether I was more shocked that such an unutterable cad should have the effrontery to aspire to my brother’s widow or that Judy should complacently permit such an insolence; the latter I could hardly bring myself to believe with poor Dick hardly yet part of the brown earth that covered him. But the truth was thrust violently upon me one evening when just after putting Dickie to bed I came into the drawing-room and found Judy and John Courtfield sitting there in the half-light, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes like moon-struck sheep. I was so horrified I almost fell upon her then with reproaches, but instead I burst from the room as hastily as I had entered it and going to my own room threw myself on my bed and wept for Dick.
A few moments later I heard John Courtfield’s horse taking him away, and Judy came scurrying to my room. I sat up with the tears streaming down my face, and cried out bitterly to her:
“Oh, Judy! It cannot be true! You cannot have the baseness to think of putting that man in Dick’s place!”
She burst out crying too: called me cruel, heartless, one of those cold-blooded women who do not understand a nature like hers that must have love as a flower the sun—a clinging, helpless nature that must be loved and cared for—that could not live without a man’s love.
“I am so lonely,” she wept. “I feel so helpless—it is sweet to be minded. Of course my heart is buried in Dick’s grave—darling Dick! There can never be any one like him—but I’m sure he would not have wished me to be lonely!”
“He would never have had a cad like that man Courtfield inside his gates,” I raged. But a moment later I was pleading with her, beguiling, begging.
“Oh, Judy! if you must marry again choose some one else; there are lots of nice men here; why should you take one who is not even a gentleman? You know it has been more than hinted to us that he is not honourable. He cannot get in at the Club because of some shady thing he did about money, and because he is so insufferably common that other men detest him. Think how men loved Dick, and how much they think of you as his widow! Do not, for Heaven’s sake, make such a frightful bêtise. You surely cannot love him?”
She looked at me with eyes grown like two little grey stones, and her mouth was a fast-shut trap.
“Haven’t I told you that my heart is buried with Dick? But John Courtfield is clever and rich, though you despise him. He is clever enough to have got very rich. We would never have to worry about money again.”
“We!” said I fiercely. “You surely do not include me in your hateful scheme to forget Dick—to disgrace his memory?”
At that she rose at me white-lipped.
“No, I do not: I am thinking of myself and my boy.”
“Don’t include Dick’s son, either. His father thought of him and provided for him; bought him a heritage with his life. He does not need to live on the bounty of this horrible Australian. No: you are thinking only of yourself, Judy. Oh! how can you? How can you?”
I suppose I had no right to say these things. I did not mean them cruelly either, only pleadingly; and in a just cause they seemed excusable. I could not bear this thing to happen.
But she was furious at my opposition and said even bitterer things than I did; told me that I was jealous because no one loved me enough to seek me out; flung jibes at me about Tony Kinsella; said that I was talked about all over the country, that women would not speak to me, that the scandal reflected on her also who had never had a breath of scandal attached to her. She would be glad to change a name that had been so brandished she finished at last: and I doubt not in that moment I was as white-lipped as herself. But I was not so eloquent. I was cold and still as a stone. When she burst out crying, in weak reaction, and began to mumble apologies, I did not speak but walked away from her out of the room and out of the house. I had no gold to offer there for her tinsel and dross—for the ashes and mud that had been flung at me.
I walked the ground until I was weary, then sat on a rock on the kopje side, wondering dully what further daggers for my heart Africa had hidden in her mantle. While I sat there I heard another horse at the gates, and Maurice Stair’s voice echoing across the garden and up the hill. He stayed some time in the house, but later I saw him coming as I knew he would to look for me. In my white gown I was plainly outlined on the moonlit hill, and he came straight where I sat, but before he reached me I called out abruptly, even rudely, for I was in no mood for companionship:
“Do not come and talk to me to-night.”
“I must,” he answered, and came and sat at my feet. “Oh, do let me, Miss Saurin. I have been talking to your sister-in-law. She was crying, but would not tell me why. Only—I gathered that you and she are not happy together. Dear girl that I love, why will you not let me try and make you happy? Marry me, Deirdre.”
“Do not speak of such a thing,” I said gently. “It is impossible. You don’t know how sorry you make me. But—I can never marry any one.”
“A girl like you cannot live alone, unmarried. By God! you were not made for such a life!”
“God knows what I was made for,” I answered bitterly. “I am beginning to wonder. But I am sure it was not to many you, Maurice. You must not think of this any further.”
“Why not? Ah—but I know why not. You think Kinsella is still alive. I know that is it. My poor child, how can you delude yourself so?”
“You don’t know that it is a delusion,” I said.
“But I do.”
“You do not,” I contended almost violently. “No one knows; no one can know for certain—”
“But I do,” he repeated oddly: so oddly that my attention was arrested. My heart stood still.
“What do you know?” I demanded, in a trembling voice. “What can you know that is not known to every one? And it is not enough. For me at least it is not enough.”
In the long while that seemed to me to elapse before he made an answer I had time to soundlessly cry from my heart in exquisite bitterness and fear:
“Oh, God! spare me this... spare me this... let this pass.”
Maurice Stair looked strangely pale standing there in the moonlight. When he did speak his voice was low and stammering: but I heard his words as clearly as bells.
“I never told you before—it seemed unnecessarily brutal—but now I know that it was a mistake. I ought to have told you. I found something on the spot where the bones lay—something that made me absolutely certain that the man killed there was Tony Kinsella. I have never told any one of it. I—”
“How dared you keep it secret? Oh! how dared you? What was it? But I do not believe you—nothing will ever make me believe you.”
I thought to cry the words in a ringing voice, but I found that I was speaking in a whisper. The ground was slipping away from beneath my feet; Africa was dragging her gift from my heart; my eyes dimmed; I swayed a little, almost falling: but still I whispered:
“I do not believe—I do not believe—”
At last I saw that he was holding something out towards me, and speaking:
“I searched long and well for the other—but—either it was washed away, or the kaffirs took it.”
The thing that lay in the palm of his hand stared up at me like a dull blue eye. I took it with trembling, frozen fingers—a little turquoise ear-ring!