Judy, too, was proving faithless to her promise. She had written to say that she had decided to take Dickie with her to Europe, where she was going to spend her honeymoon.
I rose wearily to go inside and find out what arrangements were being made for lunch, when I noticed that the boy with the music had left off playing. He put his piano in his hair and came up to the verandah. His eyes were fixed wistfully upon Maurice, who was apparently composing himself to sleep. In the Mashona tongue he made a soft little request:
“Neega meena e’tambo Inkos.”
My husband very quickly opened his eyes.
“Get out, you scoundrel, or I’ll give you a kicking instead. And don’t let me see you hanging round here any longer.” He added something. Some added threat in the vernacular made the boy walk away. But he did not leave the farm. I found out later that he was Makupi, the boy whose charm Maurice would not give up, keeping it out of sheer deviltry and malice, just because the boy wanted it so frightfully. When we left Water-lily Farm Makupi left also, and a few days after our arrival at our new home I saw his brick-red blanket again, and heard the thrumming of the little melancholy piano. Often he would come to Maurice and repeat his gentle request:
“Neega meena e’tambo Inkos” (give me my charm, master). And when refused with menaces would walk uncomplainingly away.
Mgatweli was a little gathering of houses and huts, a church, and two hotels—the habitations of three hundred souls. The town nestled in the hollow of a plain, with low, wooded kopjes brooding round it.
Our home consisted of five huts: a dining-room lined with white limbo, a drawing-room lined with red, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. They had been lived in before, and left in a ragged and disreputable condition. There was grass growing on my bedroom floor, and the ants had devoured most of the drawing-room wall drapery. However, the place was undeniably picturesque.
The huts were built in a wide ring round a compound full of bush and big trees, and the whole camp was pitched half-way up the slope of the biggest kop.