Abinger drank his coffee as he had eaten, in absolute silence. Then, getting up suddenly, he bit off a word of apology with the end of his cigar, and left the room, Babiyaan following him.
Poppy immediately helped herself to a cigarette, put her elbows on the table and began to smoke. Later, she took her coffee and sat in the verandah. It was shady and full of deep comfortable chairs. From thence she presently saw Abinger emerge from the front door and depart into the garden; the closing clang of the gate told her that he had gone out. The heat of the day was oppressive. She lay back, staring at the lacy green of the trees against the blue, and considering the horrible affair of Luce Abinger's devils.
"It is bad enough for me to have to live with them—what must it be for him!" was her thought. She had seen his torment coming upon him as they neared Africa. Day by day he had grown more saturnine and unsociable. At last he spoke to no one; only Poppy, as a privileged person had an occasional snarl thrown in her direction. It was plain to her that returning to Africa meant to him returning to purgatory; especially since he did not intend to go back to seclusion, but to take up his residence in this house in Durban, where he had often lived in past years. Poppy had gathered from Kykie that before he "got his mark," as she curiously expressed it, and went to live at the old white farm, Abinger had kept house in Johannesburg and Durban; had lived for a part of the year in each house, and was well known in both places. So that coming back would cause him all the torture of meeting old friends who had known him before his disfigurement. He would have to run the gauntlet of familiar eyes grown curious and questioning.
"Why should he have chosen to come back at all to the place of his torment?" Poppy wondered. "It would surely have been simpler and easier to have settled in Italy or somewhere where he knew no one, and would not be noticed so much. It can only be that Africa has her talons in his heart, too; she has clawed him back to her brown old bosom—he had to come."
As Poppy sat in the verandah thinking of these things, she heard the boys in the room behind her clearing the luncheon-table, and talking to each other in their own language. Either they had forgotten her or they thought she could not hear.
"Where has Shlalaimbona gone?" asked Umzibu; and Babiyaan answered without hesitation:
"He has gone to the Ker-lub to make a meeting with Intandugaza and Umkoomata."
Few things are more amazing than your Kaffir servants' intimate knowledge of your affairs, except it be their absolute loyalty and secrecy in these matters outside your own walls. Abroad from home their eyes and ears and tongue know nothing. They are as stocks and stones. They might be fishes for all the information they can give concerning you and yours.
Also, whether they love or hate or are indifferent to him they serve, they will infallibly supply him with a native name that will fit him like his own skin. Sometimes the name is a mere mentioning of a physical characteristic but usually it is a thing more subtle—some peculiarity of manner or expression, some idiosyncrasy of speech—a man's secret sin has been known to be blazoned forth in one terse Zulu word.
It must not be supposed, however, that South African natives are as deep in mysterious lore as the Chinese, or as subtle as Egyptians. The fact is merely, that like all uncivilised peoples they have a fine set of instincts; an intuition leads them to nearly the same conclusions about people as would a trained reasoning power. Only that the native conclusion has a corner of the alluring misty veil of romance thrown over it, while the trained reason might only supply a cold, hard, and perhaps uninteresting fact.