“Good-morning to you, Miss Deirdre! I hope it’s not waking you I am.”
At last I opened my eyes and stared about me. Ah! what a glare! Alas! how far off was Ireland, and what a different place this to my rose-chintz room! But what did that matter after all? I could go back when I chose, and in the meantime this was a new and strange land, with fascinations of its own that could not be disputed. Sleep had freed my heart from the paltry vexations of the night, and the spirit of the morning pervaded me once more. I felt nothing but glad to be alive in the gay and buoyant sunshine of which the room was full. It flickered on the bare white walls, and danced upon the pale shining mats that covered the floor. Afterwards I found these to be native mats made by the Mashonas. Every one uses them on their floors, and for verandah blinds. The natives bring them round to the door and one buys them for a shilling apiece. The walls of the room were bare and whitewashed, but they looked soft and powdery, and perhaps that was why there was nothing on them anywhere. The dressing-table was a draped affair, without legs, and so was the wash-hand-stand. A tall strip of unframed mirror stood on the former, leaning against the wall; on the top left-hand side it had a broken corner, over which a lace handkerchief had been arranged. At the foot of the mirror were some silver toilet articles and a poudre de riz box with a faded pink satin puff resting on it. There were no flowers, no pictures, no photographs. My dressing-case stood open on a chair, as I had left it the night before, and my clothes were still hung up on the floor. I sighed.
The little sigh I gave echoed back to me across the room, causing me to turn hastily towards a screen which was placed down the room, dividing it. It was a dull pink screen with golden storks meandering across it, and it might or might not have come from Japan, but seemed out of place in Mashonaland. It did not quite reach from wall to wall, and, to my astonishment, just beyond the top of it I could see Judy’s face lying on a pillow. I had fallen asleep so swiftly the night before that I did not even know I was sharing the room with my sister-in-law.
She was in bed and still asleep. Her fair hair lay in two plaits down the folded sheet. Her lips were pale and slightly apart; her cheeks, faintly tinted, grew rosier towards the nostrils. She was still pretty, but she was losing her complexion, and the peevish lines I had noticed the night before showed more deeply round her babyish mouth. Her hands, resting before her on the quilt, had the calm, complacent look of hands that have grasped their fate and have got it safe. Her fingers were badly manicured, but her broad, gold wedding-ring shone with an assured, defiant glare.
She was a good deal changed from the Judy who had been the prettiest, daintiest girl in Wilts five or six years before. Dick’s heart had been a house of many mansions until the hunting morn when he had first met Judy following the Duke of Beaufort’s pack and had gone down before her grey eyes and pretty, appealing manners. Thereafter no more mansions in his heart, but only a chapel for adoration and prostration. Everything and every one else had gone by the board. I have seen that single-hearted devotion in husbands before, and always in the nicest kind of men; but I have noticed that it does not invariably make the marriage a wild success. The woman usually gets spoilt and selfish, and begins to think she is far too good for her husband. It is rather a sad sight then to see a fine man wasting his heart on some one who despises him for doing it.
For a year or two after their marriage it had been painful to those who loved him to watch Dick making ducks and drakes of his money and chances of a military career under the spell of his adoration for Judy. For her sake he resigned from his regiment when it was ordered abroad, and eventually left the army to have more time to be with her. For her sake he took a lovely house in Mayfair and lived with brilliant extravagance, throwing the dibs to the four winds as Aunt Betty (who has a respect for money) put it, until even his large income began to give out. But Judy (who, as the daughter of a poor baronet, had never been able to indulge her taste for the social life she adored) continued on her merry, expensive way until things got actually desperate with them, and one bright morning Dick was obliged to announce to her that unless he meant to live on his mother (which he didn’t) they must pull stakes for some quiet little place in the country, where inducements to spend money would not be so pressing.
Judy was broken-hearted at the thought of going back to the life from which she hoped she had escaped for ever, but she consoled herself by choosing Surrey as her future home. In fact, she consoled herself so well that in a few months the financial position was worse than ever, and it really came at last to a question of Dick’s taking the remains of his fortune to try for a fresh throw of the dice in some other country. Africa was chosen and they departed, Judy weeping and reproaching every one but herself. Dick had bought an ostrich-farm ready stocked, in the Free State, and for a time all went well; Judy said she adored the life of riding and driving and they made many friends in the capital which was close at hand. Then suddenly the ostriches, afflicted by some mysterious malady, began to die by scores. In a few months poor Dick was thousands of pounds to the bad, and the horizon scowled once more. Judy did her best to persuade him to let mother help him out of his difficulties, a course he had hitherto resisted with all his might, though my mother’s heart and purse were always open to him. Judy wrote and begged me to use my influence with him, and I did, but while things were still unsettled my mother died suddenly, and almost directly afterwards came the American Bank crash, reducing us all to comparative poverty, and making poor Dick’s horizon darker than ever.
But there was not much American respect for money in Dick. He was all Saurin and happy-go-lucky Celt, and I believe that except for Judy’s sake he did not in the least mind being in deep waters. I gathered, too, that he was rather pleased if anything to break away from ostrich farming, which, he wrote me in confidence, was but a dull dog’s life. The next I heard was that he had left Judy in Cape Town, and joined the pioneers who were to open up Mr Rhodes’s new country in the north. Before many months Judy had joined him; and in love with the country and the men who had found it, he ventured the last of his capital in land near Salisbury. With the intention of making his permanent home there, he had started upon what promised to be a prosperous future in farming and horse-raising.
They had one little son, whom they had left in Durban, and who was to be brought up to them as soon as the trouble with the Matabele was finally adjusted.
I sighed once more as I looked at my own slim fingers. I had been too tired to take off my rings, and an opal and a diamond or two winked wickedly at me. I wondered if my hands would be like Judy’s some day—calm and complacent and badly manicured! Just because some good man would come along and admire them and kiss them and think them the most beautiful hands in the world, and thereafter fold them in his breast while he himself took the wheel and did all the guiding through stormy seas, and all the hard work on land of fighting and gripping and parrying for place and position and money! It seemed to me that it would be rather hard on the good man if one didn’t keep the hands just as fair and alive and beautiful as when they first attracted him: and rather mean to let them grow plump and complacent and gripless and neglected.