After my marriage she had gone to our various homes and gathered up all my belongings—stacks of gowns, cloaks, kimonos, embroideries, and laces that I had forgotten I ever possessed; together with pictures, china, music, draperies, and curios; all the things I had collected in happy-go-careless days and thought little of, but which were now something in the nature of treasure trove. She had despatched them in case upon case, and they had arrived within the last few months. The huts were crammed with odd and lovely things, and I boasted a wardrobe the like of which no other woman in Rhodesia, perhaps in Africa, possessed. I had reason to be thankful that my taste had always run to the picturesque rather than to the chic. Most of my gowns and all of my wraps could never go out of fashion, for they had never been in it. They would be useful and picturesque until they fell into shreds.
I went down through the zinias, which now I did not hate any longer. Like the hills, they had become part of my life. I should take the memory of them to Australia with me, and wherever I went they would go too. In the moonlight their garishness was dulled to a uniformity of pallor. They looked like armies and armies of little dreary ghosts.
I did not have to ask the way to the big thatched house the Valettas had taken possession of. In a small town like Mgatweli one knows where every one lives even though one does not visit them.
As I came to the deep, chair-lined verandah a man with the air of one of Ouida’s guardsmen threw away his cigarette and came forward looking at me curiously. He seemed surprised when I asked for Mrs Valetta.
“My wife? Yes, but she is ill,” he answered hesitatingly, evidently knowing nothing of her note to me.
“I heard so, and have come to see her,” I said. “She and I knew each other long ago in Fort George. I am Mrs Stair.”
“Ah! Will you come in? I’ll tell her.”
He led the way into a sitting-room, and in the light gave me another enveloping stare full of the bold admiration men of a certain type imagine appeals to women, not knowing that really nice women very much resent being admired by the wrong men.
After one glance at him I turned away a little wearily. Early in a girl’s life these handsome, dissolute faces have their own special allure. But I knew too much. Africa had educated me, and my mind asked for something more in a man’s face now than much evil and a few charming possibilities for good.
Men who have reached the Rubicon boundary, which lies between thirty and forty, should have something more than possibilities stamped upon their faces.