“She’s down at Cape Town still.”
“Does she ever come up to the frontier?”
“Oh, yes. Sometimes. She would have been coming just about now, only this new war broke out.”
“Who’s that? Ethel?” asked Hicks, returning. He had left the room for a moment to give some directions to one of his natives outside. “Oh, yes. She was engaged to some fellow down there and then choked him off all at once, no one quite knew why. Laura vows that—” Here the speaker became aware of a battery of warning glances being levelled at him from his wife’s dark eyes, and suddenly collapsed in a violent fit of coughing, on recovery from which he threw open the door, and looking frantically up at the heavens declared, with a vehemence wholly unsuited to the occasion, that the rain would inevitably clear away before twelve o’clock. Claverton, on whom not one fraction of this by-play was lost, although he pretended not to see it, could hardly restrain his mirth. Good old Hicks, he thought, was always a whale at blundering, and he had done for himself again. Even in trying to extricate it, he had put his unlucky foot in yet deeper; for, to any one who did not know him, this violent prognostication as to the weather, taken in conjunction with what had gone before, would have had slightly an inhospitable smack; but Claverton enjoyed the situation only too well. By-and-by, when pursuing his journey, he would shout with laughter over the recollection; now, however, not a muscle of his countenance moved as he said, in the most matter-of-fact way:
“You might remember me to Ethel, when you write. We used to have rather fun together in the old times.”
Laura said something in assent, though she mentally resolved to do nothing of the kind. No good would come of waking up old recollections, she reasoned, by mentioning this man who, even if through no fault of his own, had, at any rate, she told herself, cast a cloud over her bright, wayward, beautiful sister’s life, and the sooner he was forgotten the better. For that sister’s sake she by no means shared her husband’s joy over his reappearance, and she sincerely hoped that those two might not meet again, and wished that he would be quick and marry Lilian Strange, or leave this part of the country, or both. Meanwhile here he was, still on the frontier, and Ethel might be coming up to visit her at any time.
Just then a chubby toddling—an exact infantile reproduction of his father—rushed into the room; and Laura, with a touch of pride that was very becoming, exhibited him to her guest, while the urchin opened his big blue eyes wide, and stood staring, with his finger in his mouth, at Claverton’s long boots and shining spurs.
“Go and say how d’you do to Mr Claverton, Jimmy,” said his mother, in the tone of half command, half entreaty, usual under the circumstances. “He’s a soldier, you know, going to fight the Kafirs, like Uncle Jim.”
“Uncle Jim” being Jim Brathwaite, who was the urchin’s godfather.
“I’ll be soja, when I big,” lisped the prodigy, toddling up to Claverton, and tentatively stroking with one finger the shin of his high boot. “I got gun—shoot de Kaffa—bang!”