Mrs Valetta sometimes came riding out with Maurice Stair to visit Judy, but she and I never met, and within the last few months she had gone away with her husband to some new town in Matabeleland. I did not inquire where. I asked nothing better than to forget Nonie Valetta, and that she and I had ever crossed each other’s paths.
Maurice Stair was very kind and gentle and silent always. I often let him come with Dickie and me to the hill-tops. He was so quiet that I could almost forget that he was there. Apparently he asked nothing better than to be with me as often as his work allowed. His duties as an Assistant N.C., which he cordially detested were not very arduous, and often took him away for long spells. But whenever he was in Salisbury he found his way to Kentucky Hills.
I liked him for several reasons. One was because he talked so little in a country where everyone gossiped perpetually. Also, there was a kind of quiet melancholy about him that suggested acknowledged failure, and there is always a pathetic appeal to a woman in that. Certainly a man of his age and education ought not to have been idling away his life at work he hated and in which there was no probable advancement. I often felt that, and apparently he felt it, too, though he made no effort as far as I knew to change the tenor of his life. But really I knew very little about him except what he told me in rare expansive moments. He was a public school man, and had been prepared for the Army, a profession he had set his heart on but had been prevented from entering by the caprice of his guardian. This guardian was his uncle and only relative, Sir Alexander Stair, a distinguished diplomat I had often heard of at home—a very clever, witty, lonely, and sardonic old man, and not at all a lovable character, people said. I half understood the bitterness with which his nephew always spoke of him. But it seemed to me very sad that two men, the last of their family and alone in the world, should be so apart in sympathy. Yes: there were several pathetic, appealing things about Maurice Stair, his gentle, dark eyes and quiet, restrained manners, were in striking and refreshing contrast with those of John Courtfield who was perpetually about the house. The Australian’s common ideas, expressed in common accents, did not offend Judy as they did me. Nor was she outraged by the intimacy of his horrible bulging eyes. I came to look forward to Maurice Stair’s presence as a relief from the colonial’s obtrusive personality.
Not that John Courtfield came to see me. I did not in fact think he came to see any one in particular, but that he simply made Kentucky Hills a convenient stopping place on the way to a mining camp out Mazoe way in which he was interested. But at last it dawned upon me that Judy was the star in his sky. When I realised this I don’t know whether I was more shocked that such an unutterable cad should have the effrontery to aspire to my brother’s widow or that Judy should complacently permit such an insolence; the latter I could hardly bring myself to believe with poor Dick hardly yet part of the brown earth that covered him. But the truth was thrust violently upon me one evening when just after putting Dickie to bed I came into the drawing-room and found Judy and John Courtfield sitting there in the half-light, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes like moon-struck sheep. I was so horrified I almost fell upon her then with reproaches, but instead I burst from the room as hastily as I had entered it and going to my own room threw myself on my bed and wept for Dick.
A few moments later I heard John Courtfield’s horse taking him away, and Judy came scurrying to my room. I sat up with the tears streaming down my face, and cried out bitterly to her:
“Oh, Judy! It cannot be true! You cannot have the baseness to think of putting that man in Dick’s place!”
She burst out crying too: called me cruel, heartless, one of those cold-blooded women who do not understand a nature like hers that must have love as a flower the sun—a clinging, helpless nature that must be loved and cared for—that could not live without a man’s love.
“I am so lonely,” she wept. “I feel so helpless—it is sweet to be minded. Of course my heart is buried in Dick’s grave—darling Dick! There can never be any one like him—but I’m sure he would not have wished me to be lonely!”
“He would never have had a cad like that man Courtfield inside his gates,” I raged. But a moment later I was pleading with her, beguiling, begging.
“Oh, Judy! if you must marry again choose some one else; there are lots of nice men here; why should you take one who is not even a gentleman? You know it has been more than hinted to us that he is not honourable. He cannot get in at the Club because of some shady thing he did about money, and because he is so insufferably common that other men detest him. Think how men loved Dick, and how much they think of you as his widow! Do not, for Heaven’s sake, make such a frightful bêtise. You surely cannot love him?”