Chapter Fourteen.
In a lonely shanty on the veld, twenty good miles from the nearest town. Lawless took up his quarters with the woman in whose society he had left Cape Town. The shanty was of corrugated iron lined with planks, and consisted of two small bedrooms and a living-room, divided from one another by matchboard partitions. There were primitive out-buildings that had served a former occupier for stables, and a disused mud hut stood in a sort of blank isolation some quarter of a mile distant. Behind the hut on steeply shelving ground was densely wooded cover, the only sign of shade in the whole picture. The hut had been used by natives apparently quite recently. The wooden blocks, curved to fit the neck, that serve the black man for pillow, stood on the ground. These blocks were joined together by a wooden chain, as is the marital custom of the land. Beside them was a worn and dirty blanket, and a calabash and mealie stamper lay against the wall close to the doorless opening. This primitive native home, with its rude implements and poor accommodation, was seemingly deserted. Probably the coloured occupants, having no lawful possession of the place, had fled precipitately at the coming of strangers who might question their right to be there, and were doubtless watching at no great distance until the white man should depart, as he always departed after the briefest of sojourns in that lonely spot. That they would return eventually was certain; no native, save under compulsion, vacates a place and leaves his blanket behind.
Lawless and his companion settled into their temporary home and proceeded to do for themselves. The woman set the house to rights, while Lawless stabled the horses he had hired from the town, and went out to gather wood to make a fire. When he had collected a sufficient quantity, he returned to the house, piled the logs upon the hearth, and set light to them. They had brought provisions with them, and he filled a new tin kettle from his water-bag and set it on the flames. The woman emerged from the bedroom while he knelt upon the hearth, and stood in the doorway watching him with a light of admiration in her eyes.
“Say, baas, there are no sheets to the beds,” she drawled,—“nor blankets.”
He was intent on his occupation, and did not look round.
“Damn it!” he muttered. “I never thought of that... Of course not... We’ll have to sleep in our clothes.”
“Been jumped, I expect,” she said.
“Very likely. What an ass I was not to come better prepared.”
“Oh! what does it matter?” she returned. “We’ve both roughed it before. It’s a picnic. Get up, Grit. The cooking’s my department. You unpack the food stuff. I tumbled on a gridiron under one of the beds. It’s a bit rusty, but I’ll clean it in the flame; then we’ll cook some of those chops you bought. I’m hungry.”
He was hungry also, and he fell to with appetite, the roughness of the fare notwithstanding, when she placed the fizzling chops on a tin plate and brought them to the table. He cleared a space for them, and cut a chunk of bread from the loaf for himself and another for her, while she made the tea. Then they sat down to the first meal in their new quarters.
It was a silent meal. They were too hungry to talk, and both were tired after a long day in the saddle. It was more than three weeks since they had left Cape Town. They had stayed at different places, until, hearing of the shanty from a man in Stellenbosch, who was anxious to let it, and who told wonderful fairy-tales of the sport to be enjoyed in the neighbourhood. Lawless had decided to take it, and having paid the first month’s rent in advance, bought provisions and hired horses and set out with his companion to take possession of what the owner described as a comfortably furnished shooting-box. Comfort is largely a matter of comparison. Lawless had roughed it often, had fared worse, and been worse housed; but his new surroundings depressed him. It was probably the contrast between them and the recent comfort he had enjoyed that forced home the sordidness of the present life.
When they had supped he dragged his chair nearer the doorway and sat smoking, while the woman cleared away the remains of their meal. She joined him when she had finished her task, drawing up a chair opposite to his on the other side of the opening. Then she took a packet of cigarette-papers and tobacco from her pocket, and rolled herself a cigarette.
“You are dull, dear boy,” she remarked, as she caught the box of matches which Lawless tossed her in silence. “You are a man of action, and the solitudes are not to your taste. This life is the silly sort of mistake made by most honeymooners.”
Lawless looked across at her, a queer expression in his eyes. In the dim light, which mercifully concealed the thickness of the paint upon her face, she was really strikingly handsome. She looked younger than she appeared in the daytime.
“You ought always to sit in the twilight,” he said with brutal frankness.
She laughed good-naturedly.
“If you pay me compliments like that, Hughie, you’ll make me vain,” she said.
She drew at her cigarette, inhaling the smoke and discharging it through her nostrils. He watched her with an odd feeling of disgust. The bond between them was peculiar. The affection was without doubt stronger on her side than on his. But he ungrudgingly admitted she made a man a capital chum; and since throwing in his lot with hers he was keenly alive to the fact that many men envied him his possession. It had been a source of much annoyance to him, and of great gratification to Tottie, that she had been the object of offensive admiration at every place they visited. She had declared that it was because he was jealous that he determined to bury her in the wilds of the veld.
“You are the type of man who would be capable of murdering a woman, Grit,” she said.
“There you are mistaken,” he had answered. “If a woman once washed her hands of me, I should simply have done with her.”
“One can’t turn one’s back on an incident so as to forget it altogether,” she had objected.
“For the matter of that,” he had returned, “a man can’t command memory, but he can so put a thing out of mind that it ceases to disturb him.”
“Then, if ever I chance to elope with Van Bleit,” Tottie had flung at him audaciously, “I shall have the satisfaction of knowing my memory is relegated to the ashbin...”
They sat on until the light failed and darkness settled upon the veld, closing about them stealthily, and shutting out the immensity of the endless stretch of treeless waste that was all that could be seen from the house, a wide expanse of undulating veld held in the blue hollow of the sky. The darkness crept closer. It shut out the face of each from the other’s view. A small red glow marked where Tottie still held a cigarette between her painted lips, and a larger duller glow shone from the bowl of Lawless’ pipe.
“The moon will be up in a short while,” he said abruptly, and the words, quietly as he had spoken, snapped the silence almost violently, as a voice raised above a whisper in a death-chamber might do. “Shall we stay and see it rise?”
“Yes, if you like.”
She flung the end of her cigarette out into the darkness, and watched it where it lay like a somewhat fiery glow-worm until it smouldered out.
And then slowly the darkness began less to roll away than to disclose itself. Black objects stood out dimly from the shade, and the line of the horizon defined itself and almost imperceptibly, so gradual was the change, grew lighter. Tones of colour appeared in the picture; the black melted into purple, so rich and deep as to seem more dense than the sombre shade it superseded. And then abruptly the scene brightened. A soft yellow glow appeared in the sky, and the inverted curve of a blood-red moon showed above the horizon.
Lawless stood up, and knocking the ash from his pipe, leant with his shoulder pressed against the framework of the door, and watched the rising of the moon in silence until, like a thing released from restraining bonds, new-dipped in the life-blood of departed day, it shot up into the sky. He was not aware how long he remained thus, he was not aware that his companion had risen also and stood beside him, until he felt the touch of a hand upon his shoulder.
“Grit, it’s cold,” a voice said, rousing him from his meditations.—“And we haven’t any bedclothes.”
He turned his head slowly and surveyed her by the increasing light of the moon. Then he pushed her inside and shut the door.
“We’ll take a mattress off one of the beds,” he said, “and sleep in front of the fire...”
The next day Lawless announced his intention of going into town in quest of a further supply of comforts. Tottie suggested accompanying him, but he negatived the idea.
“I want your mount for a pack-horse,” he said.
“That’s all very fine,” she grumbled. “What am I to do all day by myself? Think of the risk in a place like this... The white woman and the black man, you know.”
He laughed grimly.
“You have a revolver. I’d back you against any nigger that happened along.”
He rode away in the morning sunshine with the second horse on a lead. For the first mile the woman accompanied him, walking beside him with her hand on his stirrup. Once or twice she looked up at him as he sat, a straight soldierly figure, in the saddle, with the strong stern face shaded by the wide-brimmed hat, and the keen sombre eyes fixed steadily ahead, and in her own eyes shone the light of loyal affection and admiration which so often appeared in them when they rested on him unseen.
“Bring some sort of a newspaper back with you, Grit,” she begged. “It’ll help to keep up the fiction that we’re still in the world, somehow.”
Then she parted from him and started to walk back alone, and he put the horses at a canter and rode forward into the blue haze that shrouded and softened the scene. The morning air was delicately fresh and crisp with a touch of sharpness in it like the feel of an English spring. The African winter, with its warm sunshiny days and cold nights, is the most perfect season in a land that boasts one of the finest climates in the world. White man’s weather, it is called; and it sets the white man thinking pleasantly of the land he speaks of and thinks of as Home. It set Lawless thinking of Home as he rode across the veld,—of a gabled grey-walled house set down in a pretty garden that gave upon a lane. The lane in summer was gay with wild flowers and shaded by find old elms, and he had walked there often with the beautiful woman who had lived in the grey stone house, the woman who had professed to love him, and who had written to him later that she never wished to see him again.
As he thought of it now a wave of bitterness surged over him. He recalled a sentence in her letter that had stung him at the time—that stung him still with a no less poignant pain: “I do not know you... I think I have never known you. You are a stranger to me, and, I see now, my greatest enemy.” ... There were other things in the letter that had hurt; but that sentence stood out luridly with no whit of the bitterness gone from it after all the years...
And so he rode, haunted by memories, his consciousness lashed with the knowledge that what she had written was true. And he knew that the pain of it all was still fresh in her memory as in his. He had read that in her face, and in the tones of her voice, when, at what cost to her pride he dimly understood, she had met and spoken with him again. And he was consciously, deliberately, adding to her distress. At the time it had been a matter of indifference to him what she thought of the life he was leading; now, with his thoughts of her softened by distance, he regretted that he had not deceived her as to the manner of his leaving Cape Town. It had been a poor sort of revenge to flout his mistress in her face—and unnecessary. A man usually conceals such ugly facts. But it could avail little to harbour regrets at this stage. The thing was at an end for ever. He was out of her life now. If she allowed her thoughts to dwell upon him at all, it would only be, he felt, as upon one who was dead to her, and who had caused her no less pain in his dying than he had caused her in his life.
Lawless was late in getting back to the shanty. The light had fallen and night was settling upon the land. While he was still a good way off he discerned the house by the flickering yellow glimmer of the candles Tottie had put in the window as a landmark for him. It was the only means of illumination she had at hand. There was an oil lamp in the house, but the paraffin, which Lawless was bringing with him, had been forgotten on the day of their arrival.
He gave a short sharp whistle as he rode up, and she opened the door and came forth to meet him.
“Lend a hand at unloading,” he said, swinging himself out of the saddle. “The pack’s heavy. Come round this side.”
She helped him lift the sacks from the back of the led horse, and accompanied him to the stable to settle the animals for the night, carrying a dripping tallow-candle in her hand, by the feeble light of which they accomplished their task.
Lawless was very silent, almost taciturn, while he off-saddled and rubbed down his weary horse, giving to Tottie’s gossiping inquiries curt monosyllabic replies.
“Tired, Grit?” she asked, noting his preoccupation.
He swore.
“It’s something more than tired,” he said.
They left the stables, and walking back to where they had deposited the sacks, lifted them, and carried them indoors.
“Got my paper?” she inquired.
He took the newspaper from his pocket and flung it on the table with an oath. The woman looked at him searchingly. It occurred to her that he had been drinking. If it were not that, something had happened to put him out.
Lawless suddenly approached the table and struck the paper, lying where he had flung it, with his open hand.
“They’ve bungled this business again,” he said savagely,—“that pompous fool, Grey, and his crony, Simmonds... Simmonds has gone to his account, poor devil! And Van Bleit’s in tronk, awaiting his trial for murder.”
Tottie’s mouth fell open.
“And the letters?” she gasped.
Having fired his bomb. Lawless cooled down. He took out his pipe, filled, and lighted it, and dropped wearily into a chair.
“You’ll read it all in the paper,” he said. “There’s no mention of the letters.” He gave a short laugh. “My little plan, which I’ve rehearsed to you, in which you were to help, is knocked on the head. I might just as well never have come here. It’s that crass, pig-headed, officious old muddler’s doing. He never trusted me... He fancies I’ve done a bunk... That’s because you’re in it.” He laughed again. “It hasn’t occurred to them that you might be useful—I’m supposed to be simply enjoying myself.”
He smoked for a few minutes at a furious rate, while Tottie opened and read the paper with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands.
“It’s a case of the biter bit,” observed Lawless. “Looks as though they had intended murdering him... A silly sort of a game.”
“Do you think Van Bleit will hang for it?” she asked presently.
“It’s impossible to say. If it pans out at a term of imprisonment it’s checkmate. I’ve a mind to wash my hands of the job.”
Tottie looked up.
“Don’t do that,” she said earnestly. “The Colonel might take it that his suspicions were justified, if you did.”
“I don’t care a damn what he thinks. If a man can’t trust me, he can do the other thing.”
“But I care,” she said quickly. “I’m jealous for your honour, Grit.”
He lifted his head and surveyed her in surprise.
“You!” he said.
Then he laughed awkwardly at the half-shamed admiration he surprised in the woman’s eyes. She turned her face aside quickly, and resumed her reading of the paper.
“All right!” he said sheepishly.
When she had finished the case, she got up and stood opposite him on the other side of the hearth.
“What is your next move?” she asked.
“I don’t move,” he answered quietly, “until after the case is finished.”
“And in the meantime?”
“In the meantime,” he replied, smiling across at her, “you stay here with me in this God-forsaken hole.”