Luck at the Diamond Fields

by Dalrymple J. Belgrave

“You hound, if you open your lips to speak to that lady I will throw you out of the coach,” he whispered to him.

The Jew replied, with a choice collection of bad language, that he would talk to whom he pleased.

“Who are you, with your damned side? I dare say you ’aven’t got a couple of pound in the pocket of your ragged coat; who the—” Joe said, and then pulled up and stopped—there was something in the other’s expression he didn’t like. Darrell had no more to say to him, but leaned back in his seat and smoked his pipe.

He wondered whether or no he had not made a fool of himself in interfering. Well, it would have annoyed him all the journey to have seen her sitting near that greasy-looking brute of a Jew, he thought to himself; she seemed a good deal happier sitting next to Jim Brawnston, and talking to him brightly enough. The woman didn’t live who would not be perfectly reassured by that kindly giant’s honest face.

It was a pretty face enough, Darrell thought; it reminded him of days long past before he left all he cared for behind, and became the hopeless wanderer he was now. “She looks as if she has had a good deal of trouble; what can she be going up to the Diamond Fields by herself for? If she had people there they ought to look after her better than that,” he thought. As he looked at her, another face rose up before his memory, which had once intoxicated him by its beauty till he threw his life away for it—the face of the woman in England who called herself by his name, and had a right to do so. He had seen no refined woman for years, and there was something in Kate’s face which brought old memories back. Yes, he had made a mess of it and spoilt his life—that was the burthen of his thoughts as the coach made its way across the sandy veldt, and the sun got up and scorched them, and the dust-clouds gathered together and choked them, and the stones on the road threw them up and down till all their bones ached.

“Well, I do declare he ain’t much company; seems mighty proud, and I dare say he ain’t got a penny to spend. I knows his sort, and don’t like ’em,” said Mrs Hemp to Mr Aarons, after she had addressed several remarks to Darrell and got no answer.

Joe Aarons scowled at Darrell and made no reply. When his interests were not at stake he seldom felt very keenly about anything, but he did long to pay the other out for the treatment he had received from him, and for supposing that he, Mr Aarons, the well-known Kimberley diamond-buyer, who was worth his fifty thousand pounds, insulted a girl who was travelling up by herself and couldn’t be of much account, by talking to her. He felt mad with anger as he looked at him. How he would like to pound in that face which had borne a look of such unaffected contempt for him, and hear that cold insolent voice cry out for mercy! Darrell paid little attention to him, and sat gloomily wrapt in his own thoughts.

Mrs Hemp addressed various remarks to him which he did not listen to. The English girl in the front seat talked to Jim Brawnston.

“Queer tastes that girl must have,” Aarons thought to himself; “talks to that digger chap who’s as rough as they make ’em, and looks at me when I say a word to her as if I were dirt,” and he looked at the diamond rings on his coarse dirty hands, and wondered at that to him unknown specimen of humanity, the English gentlewoman.

Some hours after sunset the coach drew up at one of those squalid roadside canteens which in South Africa are dignified by the name of hotels. The days one spends in South African travel are bad enough, but the nights at the worst of all bad inns are far more wretched. A blanket in the open air under the marvellous star-lit Southern sky is something to look back to with pleasure, though the chill half hour before daybreak is not so very pleasant at the time. But those hotel bedrooms are things to shudder at, not to see; they open up to one’s mind new possibilities of dirtiness. Then there is the evil-smelling dining-room, where the table has a historic cloth supposed once to have been white, which bears the grease and stains of long-forgotten meals, which generally consist of lumps of mutton and hard poached eggs served on the same plate. If the master of the house is a Dutchman, he will most likely be full of dull, brutish insolence; if he is an Englishman, he probably will be drunk. The waitress will be a filthy Hottentot woman; while as one eats in the inner rooms one will hear noisy natives getting drunk off Cape smoke just outside.