Chapter Six.
Harley Greenoak has Misgivings.
The coming of Hazel Brandon effected something like a revolution at Haakdoornfontein, for she was as good as her word, and at once set to work to reform the interior of that easy-going, happy-go-lucky establishment out of all recognition. The table department she kept going on the same lines as the initiation we saw her make, and the same extended to the rooms. No more dust, no more makeshifts. From all sorts of unsuspected places she fished out hidden things. Dick Selmes, for instance, coming in after a long day’s hunt, stared to find what magic had been wrought in his room. Snowy sheets and pillow-cases on the bed, things his host despised as feminine superfluities, equally snowy towels instead of the one cloudy one he had been forced to make shift with; the rickety three-legged washstand with its rusty tin basin had given way to a neat chintz-covered packing-case and patterned crockery—and the empty-bottle candlestick had been disestablished in favour of a brass one. On the same lines had the quarters of the other two been reorganised, except that old Hesketh drew the line at sheets. Blankets were good enough for any man, he declared, and flatly refused to court rheumatism at his time of life by sleeping between cold, glazy stuff like that.
Our friend Dick now began to overhaul his kit, and was conscious of searchings of heart as he realised that it was so limited. He had brought little more than absolute necessaries in the way of clothing. Greenoak had warned him that he would have to do without luxuries at Haakdoornfontein, and, by Jingo, Greenoak had been right up till now; but Greenoak, of course, had not been able to foretell the sudden irruption of a bright, refined, and exceedingly pretty girl upon their rough and ready mode of living.
And Hazel Brandon was all that. Such sunshine did her presence and merry spirits and winning ways create in this sober male household, that the two older members of the same felt almost uneasy, so incongruous did it seem to the quiet and somewhat sombre life of the place. The younger—well, he was in something of a whirl. One thing about the girl puzzled him, and that was how she could be so nearly related to his host. The latter he was very taken with. He was a dear old chap, as he was wont to say; but with all his sterling qualities, old Hesketh was certainly not quite his equal from a social standpoint. Yet this girl looked absolutely thoroughbred; was, too, in all her ways and ideas. She must have got it on her father’s side, conjectured Dick, perhaps correctly.
There was one thing about her that appealed to him if only that he believed he had encountered it in her for the first time. She was so absolutely natural and devoid of self-consciousness. True he had seen the counterfeit of this in other girls of his acquaintance, but it had not seemed to ring true. He had felt sure—again perhaps correctly—that they were doing it for effect; “crowding it on,” as he more tersely put it. But here he detected no trace of any such thing.
“Do you think I am such a feeble tottering creature, Mr Selmes, that I can’t even turn a door handle for myself?” she said one day, when he had bounded across the room—upsetting one chair and barking his shin against another in his anxiety to perform that onerous undertaking for her.
The words were said with a bright smile. Dick mumbled something.
“Well, I can, then. I’m not one of your helpless English girls who can’t even stick a stamp on a letter for themselves.”
“Oh, you’ve been in England, then?”