“Do you mean she is married to him?”
“Married to him—not at all. She is married to a man called Geach, in Cape Town, but she ran away from him with George Rookwood, and they have been living together for six months now. Her husband by way of revenge refuses to divorce her. Isn’t it insolent of her to come here amongst us?”
“Of course she always has a dozen men round her,” Judy supplemented in a low voice; “they do so love a déclassée woman, don’t they?”
Afterwards I learnt that the man Geach was an enormous brute of a half-Dutch colonial, who drank, and had been in the habit of beating his wife constantly, and had once dragged her all through the streets of Claremont by her amazing hair. Another time he had dipped her in the sea before a crowd of people, and had afterwards been horsewhipped by the crowd.
Of course, both as a Catholic and as a femme du monde I was agacée at these things. I knew that none of Mrs Geach’s sufferings singly or together constituted any excuse for her running away with another man who happened to love her and would be good to her. It was to be supposed that she knew this, too, and that if she did such a terrible thing she would not only be committing a mortal sin, but must thereafter be struck off the rolls and disqualified for any kind of social life. However, she had chosen to do it; so now she had a merry laugh and a defiant mouth, and gave more attention to her clothes than most women.
In spite of her sins I could not help being thankful that there is no law, religious or worldly, that forbids one to feel sorry for wistful-eyed sinners. Also, I began to dislike Mrs Skeffington-Smythe very much indeed. It struck me that she arrogated altogether too much holiness to herself, and that a little charity and loving-kindness would not be out of place in her moral make-up. I was mentally arranging something polite with a bite in it to say to her, when Major Kinsella came and sat down beside me in the chair Judy had just left, and after that I was too busy arranging polite bites for his benefit to remember Mrs Skeffington-Smythe and her malice.
It had been raining all the morning, drenching, thudding rain that flooded the land with small lakes and rushing rivulets; the first taste of the “wet season,” every one said, though it was not really due until November. I had looked forward disconsolately to a dreary afternoon indoors. But by two o’clock every trace of wetness had disappeared with the extraordinary haste that distinguishes the drying up of the rain in the High Veldt. Only the freshly washed land gave up a ravishing odour tinder the hot sunshine, and the sky above was a turquoise plain, across which some giant hand had moved, sweeping all the billowy clouds into one great mass in the west. There they lay piled one above the other in snowy splendour. A blaze of hot light poured down on to the court, making the women droop and blench in their chairs. But my veins sang with delight. Never had I known such delicious heat, and I loved it, and felt like a marigold flaring and revelling in the golden shine. It seemed to me that I had never really been alive before I felt the heat of the African sun. I said so to Anthony Kinsella, and his blue eyes flashed at me.
“You will never be able to live away from it now.”
I laughed, but I suddenly felt the clutching thrill again.
“Oh, one could not live here always,” I said abruptly. “Away from music, and books, and great speakers, and sculpture, and pictures—”