“No. A visitor. I don’t know who he is. By the way, I must take you over to Earle’s one of these days. He’s got a good bit of shoot. Look here, Jafta,” turning to a yellow-skinned Hottentot, also mounted, who had just arrived on the scene, “Baas Blachland has shot our biggest bushbuck ram at last.”
“Ja. That is true, Baas,” grinned the fellow, who was Bayfield’s after-rider, inspecting the edge of his knife preparatory to the necessary disembowelling and loading up of the quarry.
“We may as well be getting along,” said Bayfield. “Jafta, go and fetch Baas Blachland’s horse.”
“I thought an up-country man like you would turn up his nose at our hunting, Blachland,” said Bayfield as they rode along. “But what you can’t turn up your nose at is our air—eh? Why, you’re looking twice the man you were a fortnight ago even. I suppose that infernal fever’s not easily shaken off.”
“It’s the very devil to shake off, but if anything will do it, this will.” And the speaker glanced around with a feeling of complete and restful enjoyment.
The kloof they were threading afforded in itself a noble and romantic scene. Great krantzes soaring up to the unclouded blue, walls of red ironstone gleaming like bronze in the sun-rays—or, in tier upon tier, peeping forth from festoons of creeper and anchored tree and spiky aloe. Yonder a sweep of spur on the one hand, like a combing wave of tossing tumbling foliage, on the other a mighty cliff, forming a portal beyond which was glimpsed a round, rolling summit, high above in the distance—but everywhere foliage, its many shades of green relieved here and there by the scarlet and pink of the wild geranium, the light blue of the plumbago, and half a dozen other splashes of colour, bright and harmonising; aglow, too, with the glancing of brilliant-winged birds, tuneful with their melodious piping and the murmuring hum of bees. And the air—strong, clear, exhilarating, such as never could be mistaken for the enervating steaminess of up-country heat—for the place was at a good elevation, and in one of the settled parts of the Cape Colony.
Gazing around upon all this, Hilary Blachland seemed to be drinking in new draughts of life. The bout of fever, in the throes of which we last saw him lying, helpless and alone, had proved to be an exceptionally sharp one; indeed, but for the accident of Sybrandt happening along almost immediately after the Matabele raid, the tidings of which had reached England, as we have seen—it is probable that a fatal termination might have ensued. But Sybrandt had tended him with devoted and loyal camaraderie, and when sufficiently restored, he had decided to sell off everything and clear out. “You’ll come back again, Blachland,” Sybrandt had said. “Mark my words, you’ll come back again. We all do.” And he had answered that perhaps he would, but not just yet awhile.
He had gone down country to the seaside, but the heat at Durban was so great at the time of year as to counteract the beneficial effect of the sea air. Then he had bethought himself of George Bayfield, a man he had known previously and liked, and who had more than once pressed him to pay him a visit at his farm in the Eastern Province. And now, here he was.
A great feeling of restfulness and self-gratulation was upon him. He was free once more, free for a fresh clean start. The sequence of his foolishness, which had hung around his neck like a millstone, for years, had been removed, had suddenly fallen off like a load. For he had come to see things clearer now. His character had changed and hardened during that interval, and he had come to realise that hitherto, his views of life, and his way of treating its conditions, had been very much those of a fool.
George Bayfield had received him with a very warm welcome. He was a colonial man, and had never been out of his native land, yet contrasting them as they stood together it was Blachland who looked the harder and more weather-beaten of the two, so thorough an acclimatising process had his up-country wanderings proved. Bayfield was a man just the wrong side of fifty, and a widower. Two of his boys were away from home, and at that time his household consisted of a small son of eleven, and a daughter—of whom more anon.