Druro frowned slightly. "Colonel Liscannon is an old service-man——"
"May I beg for one of those delicious cigarettes you were smoking after lunch?" she said languidly. "And do tell where to get some like them. I find it so difficult to get anything at all smokable up here, except from your clubs."
Thus, Colonel Liscannon and his daughter were gracefully consigned to the limbo of subjects not sufficiently interesting to hold the attention of Mrs. Hading. If she could not, by reason of Druro's natural chivalry, put Gay just over the wrong side of some subtle social line she had drawn, she could, at least, thrust her out of the conversation altogether and out of Druro's mind. This was always a pastime she found fascinating—pushing someone out of a man's mind and taking the empty place herself—and one at which long practice had made her nearly perfect. So it is not astonishing that she succeeded so well with Druro that, when Gay left her friends and slipped out to her waiting horse, he did not even notice her going. He was busy trying to persuade Mrs. Hading to come for a spin around the Wankelo kopje in his car, and he was not unsuccessful. Only, they went further than the kopje. About six miles out they got a glimpse of a solitary rider ahead, going like the wind. A cloud of soft, ashen dust rising from under the horse's heels floated back and settled like the gentle dew from heaven upon the car and its occupants. Druro was on the point of slackening speed, but Mrs. Hading's pencilled brows met in a line above her eyes, and one of her little white teeth showed in her underlip.
"Get past her, please," she said coldly. "I object to other people's dust."
Druro was about to object in his turn, though, for a moment, he philandered with the delightful thought of getting even with Gay by covering her with dust and petrol fumes. Unfortunately, his gallant resistance to this pleasant temptation would never be known, for Gay suddenly and unexpectedly wheeled to the left and put her horse's head to the veld. The swift wheeling movement, with its attendant extra scuffling of dust, sent a further graceful contribution of fine dirt on to the occupants of the car. It would have been difficult to accuse Gay of doing it on purpose, however, for she appeared blandly unconscious of the neighbourhood of fellow beings. She gave a little flick of her whip, and away she went over a great burnt-out patch of veld, leaving the long, white, dusty road to those who had no choice but to take it.
Mrs. Hading did not love Gay Liscannon any better for her score, but she would have disliked her in any case. Because she was no longer young herself, youth drove at her heart like a poisoned dagger. One of the few keen pleasures she had left in life was to bare her foils to the attack of some inexperienced girl, to match her wit and art and beauty against a fresh cheek and ingenuous heart, and prove to the world that victory was still to her. But when she had done it, victory was dust in her palm and bitter in her mouth as dead-sea apples. For she knew that the wolf of middle age was at her door.
Marice Hading was one of those unhappy women who have drained to the dregs every cup of pleasure they can wrench from life and fled from the healing cup of pain. Now, with the chilly and uncompromising hand of forty clutching at her, pain was always with her—not ennobling, chastening pain, but the pain of those who, having been overfull, must henceforth go empty.
Small wonder that, weary-eyed and dry-souled, she roamed the earth in feverish search of solace and refreshment. Her husband, a generous, affectionate man, condemned by her selfishness to a waste of arid years empty of wife-love or children, had died of overwork, dyspepsia, and general dissatisfaction some eight years before, leaving his widow with an income of two thousand pounds a year, a sum she found all too small for her requirements.
In her fashion, she had been in love several times during her widowhood, but never sufficiently so to surrender her liberty. Horror of child-bearing and a passion for the care and cultivation of her own beauty were further reasons for not succumbing to the temptation to take another man slave in marriage. She had contented herself with holding the hearts of the men who loved her in her hands and squeezing them dry of every drop of devotion and self-sacrifice they could generate.
But the harvest of hearts was giving out, and the wolf was at the door. She had had very bad luck in the last year or two. The hearts that had come her way were as selfish as her own, and knew how to slip elusively from greedy little hands, without yielding too much. For a long time it had seemed to her that the world had become bankrupt of big, generous-giving hearts, and that there were no more little games of life worth playing. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, she happened upon Wankelo, a green spot in the desert. Here were girls to act as counters in the game she loved to play, and here, too, unless she were grievously mistaken, was a man who had the best of sport to offer. With the hunter's sure instinct for the prey, she recognized unerringly the big, generous qualities of Druro's nature. Here was a heart that could be made to suffer and to give. Besides, he was extremely good-looking. She felt a kind of hopeful certainty that he could offer her jaded heart something new in the way of emotions.