She looked at me with eyes grown like two little grey stones, and her mouth was a fast-shut trap.
“Haven’t I told you that my heart is buried with Dick? But John Courtfield is clever and rich, though you despise him. He is clever enough to have got very rich. We would never have to worry about money again.”
“We!” said I fiercely. “You surely do not include me in your hateful scheme to forget Dick—to disgrace his memory?”
At that she rose at me white-lipped.
“No, I do not: I am thinking of myself and my boy.”
“Don’t include Dick’s son, either. His father thought of him and provided for him; bought him a heritage with his life. He does not need to live on the bounty of this horrible Australian. No: you are thinking only of yourself, Judy. Oh! how can you? How can you?”
I suppose I had no right to say these things. I did not mean them cruelly either, only pleadingly; and in a just cause they seemed excusable. I could not bear this thing to happen.
But she was furious at my opposition and said even bitterer things than I did; told me that I was jealous because no one loved me enough to seek me out; flung jibes at me about Tony Kinsella; said that I was talked about all over the country, that women would not speak to me, that the scandal reflected on her also who had never had a breath of scandal attached to her. She would be glad to change a name that had been so brandished she finished at last: and I doubt not in that moment I was as white-lipped as herself. But I was not so eloquent. I was cold and still as a stone. When she burst out crying, in weak reaction, and began to mumble apologies, I did not speak but walked away from her out of the room and out of the house. I had no gold to offer there for her tinsel and dross—for the ashes and mud that had been flung at me.
I walked the ground until I was weary, then sat on a rock on the kopje side, wondering dully what further daggers for my heart Africa had hidden in her mantle. While I sat there I heard another horse at the gates, and Maurice Stair’s voice echoing across the garden and up the hill. He stayed some time in the house, but later I saw him coming as I knew he would to look for me. In my white gown I was plainly outlined on the moonlit hill, and he came straight where I sat, but before he reached me I called out abruptly, even rudely, for I was in no mood for companionship:
“Do not come and talk to me to-night.”