“Salisbury lies behind that big brown hill,” said Judy, “about an hour’s drive from here.” She was perched with a certain daintiness upon Dirk Mackenzie’s water fykie, sipping a cup of coffee, her back crêpe draperies spread round her on the scrubby grass. Mrs Shand and I, very sunburnt, wearing print bonnets and our oldest skirts, sat of the ground sharing a striped kaffir blanket with several dozen small brown ants, who were busy collecting the crumbs left from breakfast and hurrying off with them to a neighbouring ant-heap. The ox waggon in which we had taken a fortnight to travel from Fort George was loaded so high with packing cases and Mrs Shand’s furniture that it cast quite a large patch of shade, in which we sat as in some cool black pool while the rest of the world, including the dashing Cape cart in which Judy had just arrived, sweltered in blinding sunshine.
Dirk Mackenzie our transport driver, a big, bearded, Natal man, stood smoking in his shirt sleeves talking to Mr Courtfield, the man who lad driven Judy out, and Maurice Stair in riding-kit with his legs twisted, holding his elbow in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stared reflectively at a group of kaffir boys who at a little distance off were squatting round their three-legged pot of mealie-meal pap.
I looked from them to the big brown hill that hid Salisbury, the road of red-brown dust that led there, the dazzling blue of the morning sky, and back again to the chic and pretty widow sitting upon the fykie with her crêpe skirts spread so daintily about her.
Her grey eyes were sparkling, there was pink in her cheeks, and poudre de riz upon her nose; her blond hair, charmingly arranged, shone softly, and a tiny fair curl lay in the centre of her forehead just under the white crêpe peak of her little widow’s bonnet. Quite the most fascinating widow I had ever seen! I had thought of her all the way up as the languid, passé little woman who left me at Fort George, and had longed to reach her and comfort her as best I might. But any one appearing less in need of comfort than this fresh, smart lady it would be hard to find. She looked as if she had stepped straight out of Jays’s. All her languor and weariness of life had disappeared. She seemed to have gone back to the days of her youth before she married Dick. There was the same pretty, appealing look in her eyes, the same clinging, helpless manner, mingled now with an alluring little air of sadness. As for the small white hand that held her coffee cup, nothing could have been daintier, more eager and alive looking. Certainly a very different Judy to the one I had last seen in Fort George! I suppose I ought to have been glad, but I was not. My heart, with astounding contrariety, yearned after the other little languid, untidy, almost unkempt Judy, as one longs in sorrow for the old scenes and surroundings of happier, dearer days.
“Our cart has had a smash-up, but Mr Courtfield lent me his to come and fetch you, Deirdre,” she was saying, “and would insist on driving me himself. Wasn’t it sweet of him? I find that men are so extraordinarily kind to me in my trouble.” Her sad little air deepened, and my heart stirred to her for the first time. Perhaps after all under that elegant crêpe frock she was just a lonely little miserable creature!
“Of course they would be,” I said. “Any one would be kind to you, Judy; and all men loved Dick.”
“Every one in this country is kind, don’t you think?” ventured Mrs Shand.
“Oh, every one? I’m sure I couldn’t say,” said Judy, and looked away over Mrs Shand’s head in a way that made that little woman realise that after all she was only a mere Fort George frump; a faint red colour stole into her sunburnt face.
“Will you get ready, Deirdre?” continued my sister-in-law. “We ought not to keep Mr Courtfield’s horses waiting in the sun.”
“I don’t think I care to leave Mrs Shand alone, Judy. I would rather stay and come in with the waggon to-night. Couldn’t I do that?”