"You're thinking of a Francolin-partridge, my dear fellow," he said to Portal; "very dark feathering ... almost black ... a little bigger than the Natal grey hens." (There was that little tender laugh again! God! What a dream that was!)
"Not at all," disputed Portal. "They were grouse, I tell you ... sand-grouse ... the male bird has dark-brown wings ... very light back and a pencilled head ... rather like English grouse ... with a black neck. I got scores of them at Solarey ... splendid sporting shots——"
He lifted his voice slightly in his enthusiasm, and it was heard round in the east verandah, where Mrs. Portal was sitting with her great friend, Mary Capron, two other women, and Luce Abinger.
"Listen to the blood-shedders!" said Mrs. Capron.
"Yes, one of them is Bill," said Clem, "and I hoped he was looking after people inside! Who is he talking to, I wonder."
Mrs. Capron opened her lips to answer, then closed them again and looked away at the sea. Luce Abinger smiled to himself.
"That's C-Carson," he said. "He c-came up with me."
Abinger's slight stammer arrested people's attention and made them listen to what he had to say. But to do him justice, what he had to say was usually worth listening to. It is always worth while to be amused, and a man's malice is invariably more amusing than a woman's because it is not so small, and is more daring. What Abinger did not dare with his tongue, he made bold to let you know with his eyes, which were as bad as they could be. Not that he looked at all women with the same look Sophie Cornell had once complained of. He was far too clever for that—he had as many sets of expressions for his eyes as he had for his tongue.
But in whatsoever way he looked, he always made the woman he was talking to tête-à-tête feel that she was doing something rather wicked and none the less fascinating because she could not be indicted on it by Mrs. Grundy. And then his appearance was so peculiarly revolting! That frightful scar running all the way down one side of his clean-shaven face, from his eye to his chin, must have been made with a knife; but no one knew how it had been done, and that made it all the more mysterious. Certainly he was not communicative on the subject.
At present he was sitting on the clean, sun-burnt boards of the verandah floor, with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up, peacefully considering the four women arranged in chairs on either side of him. Mrs. Portal, bunched up with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands, was not pretty, but her face bore the marks of race, and her hair and her kind Irish eyes were full of sunshine. Abinger considered that she had less style than any woman he knew, but that it must be distinctly interesting to be Bill Portal. Mrs. Gerald Lace was silent and reposeful, with the inevitable silent reposefulness of a woman with a fourteen-inch waist. Mrs. Gruyère, warm and pink, fanned herself vigorously with an expensive painted fan, and took breath for a fresh onslaught upon the characters of her friends. Mrs. Capron, staring out at the sea with her lovely, golden eyes, was sufficiently beautiful to be forgiven for not saying much. It was enough to look at her.