The other broke into one of his long, quiet laughs, as if hugely enjoying the situation, as he steadily returned the puzzled, inquiring gaze. “Don’t you remember that refreshing row close to De Klerk—that time you were coming from the gold fields? Hang it, it wasn’t much more than two years ago!” Payne burst forth into a mighty expletive—a thing he very rarely did. “My dear fellow, this is a piece of luck! And I never recognised you! But you were bearded like the pard then, you know; and, another thing—my head must have been spinning round, for I felt an awful whack. Of course. So it is! Why, I ought to have recognised you by the neat-handed way in which you dropped that nigger, if by nothing else! That’s the second time you saved my hide,” and he seized the hand extended to him, in a mighty grip.
“Well, these niggers were tougher customers than those four swaggering Dutchmen, when all’s said and done. I haven’t been in a good honest row for a long while. It does one good.”
Mounting their horses they moved off, taking a farewell glance at the place where the fallen savage still lay at full length, though he began to show signs of returning consciousness. And the still sunshine glowed in all its former calmness, as though no fierce and deadly struggle had just occurred to mar its peace.
Volume Two—Chapter Two.
Ralph Truscott’s Quest.
On the same day that these events are occurring on the far Kaffrarian border, two men are seated together in a dingy office just out of Chancery Lane. One is a solicitor, evidently the presiding genius of the place—a man with a high, bald forehead, iron-grey hair, and a keen, intellectual face; the other is a tall, dark, military-looking man, faultlessly attired, who sits impatiently tapping his boots with his cane while he listens to the lawyer in a half-incredulous and wholly discontented frame of mind, which betrays itself only too plainly in his eyes. A striking-looking man, in age about five-and-thirty; but there is an unmistakable air of dissipation, not to say excess, about the lines of the handsome face—the air of one who had lived too hard and too fast, and would be prematurely old. And a superciliousness about the mouth which the short black moustache did not conceal, and a cold, unscrupulous look in the eyes, would effectually prevent the face from ever being a pleasing one.
Ralph Truscott, late Captain in Her Majesty’s —th Foot, was a firm believer in the adage, “All’s fair in love and war”—in the former half of it literally, as more than one rather shady episode in his gallant career might serve to show, were it known, which it was not, even within his intimate circle; in the latter half as representing the multifold ’cute devices whereby he had staved off and otherwise evaded the just or unjust demands of a swarm of importunate creditors, Jew and Gentile. In a word, the man was a born spendthrift; and having run through one large fortune, and a second smaller one, in an incredibly short space of time, found himself compelled to sell, and had been living upon his wits and high play ever since. Not that he had degenerated into a mere card-room sharper—far from it—but he was noted as a man with an extraordinary run of luck; and though some held significantly aloof from him in connection with the card-table or the billiard-room, yet, on the whole, he had not lost caste. Of course it had occurred to him that he might retrieve his fallen fortunes by picking up an heiress. It ought not to be difficult, for he was just the sort of individual who, gifted with a striking exterior and unlimited assurance, might carry things pretty much as he pleased among the society women of his—or of any—set. But this course was open to two objections. One lay in his own inner consciousness, which made him fully aware that in three years, at the outside, he would inevitably have run through the lady’s fortune, in which case he would find himself again destitute, and saddled with a wife to boot; the other, in the fact that though heiresses themselves might be soft of heart and compliant of head, their parents or guardians were not. Indeed, some of these, in the obduracy of their stony hearts, had been known to veto the transaction forthwith; while others, after a few private inquiries into the circumstances and antecedents of this enterprising individual, had briefly refused to entertain any of his proposals, and had carried off their charges out of harm’s way. So, Captain Ralph, repeatedly thwarted in his schemes of advancement, was compelled perforce to abandon them. He consoled himself, however, with the thought that after all it was better to be a free man, even if living was somewhat precarious, and gave up laying siege to the fair sex, with an eye to the main chance. But meanwhile his liabilities decreased not, and at the time the reader has the honour of making his acquaintance, he was, to use his own expression, “at his last kick” for want of the needful.
Such was the man who now sat in the inner office of Messrs Grantham and Grantham, solicitors, in close confabulation with the senior partner.