Faith Calls.
“We cannot grieve as they that have no hope.”
A cloud of dark and brooding melancholy settled upon Fort George after the departure of the troops. The streets were silent. Many of the huts had their doors padlocked and rough plank shutters nailed over the windows. Never the familiar sound of a native voice was heard, nor the clatter of a horse’s hoof on the roads. The place had an indescribable air of loneliness and desertion. The men who were left behind were busy all day helping to build sand-bag barricades in front of the post-office, which was to be turned into a fort for our safety in case the town should be attacked later on if the fighting went against our men. All the Mashona boys had run away to their kraals, and there were no domestics or boys for public work, so the convicts, who were mostly Cape natives, were let out under a strong guard of white men and told off in gangs to do the work of digging earth to fill the sand-bags.
The Fort George women who had their homes and their children to mind were busier than ever, having no servants; but the wretched Salisbury women, of whom whether I liked it or not I was obliged to consider myself part and parcel, had nothing whatsoever to do from morning to night. Fortunately or unfortunately for us, Mrs Brand in giving Judy a seat in her cart had been obliged to leave her Cape maid Adriana behind, and she had given the woman instructions to divide her services amongst us. On this account we did not feel the loss of servants much, but perhaps it might have been better if we had had something to do, even housework, for a more wretched quartette of idle people it would have been hard to find anywhere. Three of us at least had a secret that we desperately desired to hide from the others, and the fourth—Mrs Skeffington-Smythe—was quite the most maliciously curious woman ever born.
Adriana, a big bustling creature well able to do the work of our small household, came and cooked in our kitchen and served the meals for all four of us in our little hut, and so there we were, everlastingly together, Mrs Valetta and I rarely speaking to each other, and Miss Cleeve and her friend always on the verge of a quarrel.
The latter two professed a great and eternal attachment to each other, but Mrs Valetta disposed of their friendship thus:
“Mrs Skeffy and Anna Cleeve make me tired. They simply stick together because they know so much about each other they daren’t quarrel, but a quarrel is bound to come one of these days and then their secrets will be flying about all over the place and we’ll have something to amuse us. Anna. Cleeve is far too clever a girl not to tire of Mrs Skeffington-Smythe, who is the silliest woman I have ever met. She thinks of nothing all day but polishing her nails and soaking her soul in Swinburne.”
It usually rained heavily all the mornings and cleared up in the afternoons, and the first time we went round to the tennis-court in desperation for something to do we found that every sign of the markings had been washed away. No one had the heart to paint them on again even if the brush and whitewash could have been discovered, so we left it as we found it with the wind sweeping leaves and pieces of stick and paper across it and turning it into the most desolate spot in the town. We went home again and sat sullenly round the tea-table—four idle, wretched women! And I believed myself to be the most wretched of all. I don’t know how I bore the passing of the days. My heart was “a thing of stone in a valley lone.” To the pain of the blow Judy had dealt me, which still benumbed my spirit, was added the strain of waiting for Anthony Kinsella’s return from Linkwater. My tongue did me the service of saying all the everyday necessary things, and I ate and took part in life like the rest of them, but I could not sleep and I could not think, and it seemed to me that life would never be the same again.
“I could never again be friends with the roses—
I should hate sweet music.”
I found myself listening to a conversation about Mrs Geach, which reminded me of nothing so much as an attack by three savage Indian squaws on some helpless victim fastened to the stake. It transpired that no one had seen her since the day before the departure of the Column, and though every one turned their eyes away from her in the street, or looked through her as if die were a spirit, here were three people very much annoyed because she now preferred to stay indoors and not be seen. The most charitable thing to be heard was a remark of Anna Cleeve’s: