“Well, if you must stay here and if you are so set on doing something, why not undertake the care of Dickie for me? He begins to need teaching, and of course it is too far to send him to the little school in Salisbury; then it is very bad for him to be always with the black boys and piccanins; they teach him all sorts of naughtiness; you can’t trust them. It would relieve me of a great worry if you would take entire charge of him.”
“But why not do it yourself, Judy?” It made me sick to think of Dick’s boy being left to the care of natives, but I wanted to be quite certain that she was not inventing a task out of charity. She looked at me, almost indignant.
“My dear girl! what time have I for teaching a child? You forget that now Dick is gone I have simply everything to see about for myself: the care of the property, the accounts, the servants, social duties—such as they are—everything. I haven’t a moment for Dickie. If you won’t undertake him I shall have to send him to Durban again, until I can sell the place. My idea in staying on at all is to improve the property on the lines Dick intended, with the help of his foreman, Mr Stibbert, and presently sell it at a good price to some one of the people who will come pouring into the country now that the trouble with the natives is over.”
After that I consented: but only on the condition that if she sold the Mashonaland property she would at least refrain from parting with Dick’s Matabeleland farms and claims, but keep them for the boy. I had less trouble in persuading her to this on reminding her of the splendid reports that were coming in of the mineral wealth of the country. Experts said that Matabeleland was full of gold.
So it was settled that I should stay, minding and teaching Dickie, and I thanked God for a valid reason to remain in Mashonaland.
The household of Kentucky Hills consisted, I found, of ourselves; Mr Stibbert a clever young German who understood farming on scientific principles and had been engaged to manage Dick’s cattle and land for him; an elderly woman of the same type as Adriana who had brought Dickie up by the East Coast; and a number of native servants. We were not near enough to Salisbury to expect much social life, for it requires some energy in Africa to mount your horse for a twelve-mile ride to pay an afternoon call. Yet I was astonished to find how many people thought it worth while to come galloping along the Mazoe Road for the sake of a cup of tea and a cucumber sandwich. These things were much in request by behabited ladies and begaitered men, in Judy’s cool drawing-room; and Judy was always ready to dispense them, looking very sad and sweet and appealing in her little white crêpe widow’s cap. She told me that she had never had so many visitors before, and that what they came for was to see me, the contravener of bylaws and conventions from Fort George. I thanked them much for that! But if it was true, their object was not attained. I forsook the drawing-room on these occasions and was neither seen nor heard. Judy, a skilful little social politician, told them I had not recovered from my serious illness brought on by overwork among the sick in Fort George, and shock at my brother’s death. She was much too clever to give them any inkling of the vexing arguments she had with me on the subject; of her tart reminders that I was no longer an heiress, nor even a girl with a few hundreds a year, who could go her own way regardless of the opinions of the world; and of her constant injunction to me to try to get the friendship of these women instead of treating them with indifference.
“If you want to live up here you had better propitiate people and make friends,” she advised me, “so that you may at least share such interests as there are in this benighted country.”
But her arguments left me cold. I cared nothing for the interests or the friendships of Salisbury, though I did not doubt for a moment that as Dick had said there were many nice women in the place. All I wanted was to be left alone; to be let roam the veldt; to climb the rocky kopjes with Dickie, and dream up there in the sunshine of the days that had been all too short, when Anthony Kinsella and I lived our brief sweet hour of happiness. I could not bear to meet people who looked upon that dream of ours as outrageous and illegitimate. And I did not want to talk to people who spoke of Anthony Kinsella as one to whom much should be forgiven because he was of the dead. I had outwardly accepted the fact that he was dead and that a monument had been erected where he died. But yet—but yet, why should he seem so alive to me still in my dreams, and my thoughts? Why had nothing been found to identify him? No one could swear to the bones that had been found. Ah, God! what wild hopes and foolish thoughts my heart fed upon. But I wished for converse with none who would rob me of those hopes and I found life easiest to bear with only little gay-hearted Dickie for my companion.
And so, at the first sound of a horse’s hoof Dickie and I were away, scudding up a hill at the back of the house, there to lie hidden among the rocks and sugar bushes until we heard the hoofs once more departing. Sometimes we had a little kettle up there and made a fire for our tea, and afterwards Dickie would climb the rocks pretending they were ship masts while I lay on the short hot grass and dreamed of the days that were no more, talking out my wild hopes—all that I had left, to ponder upon and brood over.
If I had possessed any money I should have fitted out an expedition into Matabeleland over the ground where Anthony had last been seen: and drag-net the whole country for traces of him, or at least for full details of the tragedy, if tragedy there had been. Some one would have had to tell something. Some one should have been made to pay.