Vetta, Carson's personal servant, gave an imitation of the lady, from which might have been gathered that her chief characteristics were a kangaroo-walk and a face which in contour and complacency resembled a camel's.
In the meantime, Umkoomata and Intandugaza smoked in the verandah, which was like the deck of a yacht, broad and white-planked, and lined with a long row of every kind of easy-chair, a Madeira lounge, and a hammock with Union-Jack cushions.
Carson, with his head far back in a canvas chair and his hands behind it, was smoking a cigar at the mosquitoes, sending them in shrieking swarms to roost in the roof. Incidentally, he was trying to persuade Bramham that the fine weather indicated a three-weeks' trip into Zululand, to get some good shooting.
"I have another three weeks to put in, Charlie, and what is the good of loafing here, at a loose end?" He gave a glance at Bramham seated by him, pipe in mouth, hands in pockets, the picture of health and well-being. "And you are looking really seedy. A trip would do you good."
Bramham immediately began to think himself precariously ill.
"I know," said he uneasily; "I feel confoundedly slack. I must take a dose of quinine to-night. A trip would be just the thing to set me up, damn it!" He stared at the moonlit night, his eyes full of a wistfulness that was extraordinarily boyish in a man on the wrong side of forty. He thought of a lovely spot he knew up on the Tugela, where the moon would just be rising over a great Kop, and he seemed to smell the wood fires on the night air——
"But I can't get away. I've got a big case coming on next month, you know." His face changed, the boyishness passed and the business-man reappeared. "Those fellows in Buenos Ayres are trying to do me up for five thousand."
They smoked in silence for a moment or so, then Bramham continued:
"My lawyer, of course, wants to see me almost every day on some point or another. I really couldn't get away at present, Carson. Why not take a run up to the Rand? By the time you are back I'll have those fellows on toast, and then we'll go off for a few weeks."
"No," said Carson discontentedly, "everything is confoundedly dull on the Rand. I was sick of the place when I was there last month."