Dick’s idea was to take care of this property for Mrs Marriott, and to put all his energy into enhancing its value for the benefit of the woman who had been widowed for his sake. Incidentally, he wrote that he hoped I would return with him to Salisbury. But my sister-in-law, who wrote by the same mail, coldly advocated a return to Johannesburg and the wing of Elizabet von Stohl.
“You can never live down the scandal that is being talked about you,” she said. “There will always be a tale attached to you, and all the fast men in the country will want to flirt with you on the strength of it. Besides, what are you going to do when Tony Kinsella comes back—for he will come back of course.”
I thanked her much for that! Gladly I forgave her all the rest for the sake of that last little sentence that had slipped with such conviction from her pen. It was true that every one felt so about Anthony Kinsella: he was such an alive, ardent personality, it was impossible to believe him dead.
“Of course he will come back,” was what they all said. Claude Hunloke went further.
“Tony Kinsella is a slick guy!” he announced. “I tell you he has got cast-iron fastenings. Nothing can ever break him loose.”
“And I know that it is true,” I said to myself. “He will come back. Then every one will know the truth about us”; and I crushed down doubt and dismay. Africa put her gift into my heart and wrote her sign upon my brow.
I was minding Tommy Dennison at about this time—a jaundiced-coloured skeleton in a very bad way with black-water fever. He was one of the patients who had overflowed from the hospital into a private hut for special nursing. So I tended him under the instructions and supervision of the hospital sisters, though if any one had a few months before described “black-water” to me and told me I should ever nurse a case without blenching and shrivelling at the task I should have announced a false prophet. But it was even so. I sat by him through the wet, hot days, listening to the drip of the rain from the thatch and the little broken bits of an old song that was often, on his lips.
“Lay me low, my work is done,
I am weary, lay me low,
Where the wild flowers woo the sun.
Where the balmy breezes blow,
Where the butterfly takes wing,
Where the aspens drooping glow,
Where the young birds chirp and sing,
I am weary, let me go.
“I have striven hard and long
Always with a stubborn heart,
Taking, giving, blow for blow.
Brother, I have played my part,
And am weary, let me go.”
At intervals he raved, fancying himself back at Buluwayo where he smelt the King’s kraal burning, and heard the kaffir dogs making night hideous by their howling.
“Oh! will some of you fellows kill those dogs?—choke ’em—feed ’em do anything, only let me sleep... How many do you say? six hundred of them starving in the bush, left behind by Loben... Six hundred!... Into the valley of death... rode the six hundred!” Then back again to his old song: