“Not at all,” chuckled the doctor, delighted with his effect. “She’s simply not there. Everything was found in tip-top order, and a note on the table addressed to Blow telling him not to bother or make any search as she was perfectly all right but had made up her mind to go on a journey. What do you think of that?”
“But where can she be gone to?”
“That’s the question! No one saw her go, but it now turns out that her horse was not commandeered because Rookwood reported that it had a sore foot. Well, sore foot or no sore foot it’s gone, and she’s gone with it.”
“Well, she’s both clever and lucky to be out of this desolate hole,” commented Mrs Valetta.
And she was right. For us the days grew greyer, emptier, and more forlorn. Walks outside the town were forbidden by the Commandant, who was Colonel Blow grown unrecognisably cross and surly. There were no walks inside the town except from house to house, and as we had never been on calling terms with the Fort George women there were no houses for us to go to.
Mrs Skeffington-Smythe used to lie on the sofa most of the day, either polishing her already over-polished nails with a silver polisher or reading Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, a copy of which she carried about with her eternally.
Anna Cleeve would sit by her embroidering on linen, or writing up her journal, which she kept faithfully, saying she would some day write a history of the war. It should have made interesting reading if her pen was half as biting as her tongue.
I wrote letters, and sometimes sketched—anything to appear to take in life the interest I had ceased to feel, and to get through the days until the patrol came back from Linkwater. Mrs Valetta sat always in Mrs-Pat-Campbellish attitudes, biting her lips and watching the world stand still, through half-closed eyes. When the others were not there I was sometimes obliged to listen to her acrid comments on them, and the world in general, and life grew a little greyer and drearier in the listening.
I learned that Anna Cleeve was staying on a visit with some rather well-off cousins in Salisbury. Her uncle was an official of the Company. She had come out to Africa, said Mrs Valetta, with the pure and simple purpose all women have from their cradles up. She purposed to marry—and to marry well—some one with money enough to take her back to the country she loved.
“A London girl! You know what that means. They never see any beauty away from Bond Street or outside of the Royal Academy. However, she is going to marry Herbert Stanfield, and he is well off enough to take her back. But she had better hurry up. She is twenty-five now, and looks thirty when things go wrong. I dare say you know she imagines herself in love with Anthony Kinsella.”