She was thankful that the sudden incursion of natives seemed to have deferred any further scene between them. He was alert and full of fire, but it was not directly for her, though he took elaborate care for her escort back to the bungalow, and accompanied her as far as the garden gate himself.
“Tell your own servants to keep a look out,” he said. “But I expect Captain Lewin will hear that there was a threatened row and come up in hot haste to look after you.” He dismissed the Arabs who had accompanied them, with a nod, and held out his hand to her. “Good-night!” he said in a gentler tone, that made her nerves shoot with fearful anticipation. “You were very good and brave. I hope you were not much frightened.”
“I do not think I realised it all at the moment—you were so cool over it.”
“Because there really was no immediate danger. That was not an organised attack—it was a foretaste of what might happen. That is why I am obliged to detain the Commissioner—to confirm my action should a real riot break out.” He looked at her straight, and she saw that he feared no real danger, and that this was the assertion he meant to fling in the face of the world as his excuse for keeping Halton and sending her husband away—she saw it, but it fell on stunned senses. No one who had seen him to-night would believe that he could fear an attack, however organised, or see any necessity to detain the Commissioner. But she had borne all she could bear at present. She wished him good-night, and turned towards the lights of her own house, like one walking in her sleep.
“Good-night!” he said again, and looked round him, from the dusky garden to the gate which her hand had closed between them, and along the dark pathway to Government House. “When there was a threatened riot before, and I roused you up, I came by the road, for I was riding. But this is the best path on foot. I have never been this way—before.”
CHAPTER XIII
“He that would have a good revenge, let him leave it to God.”—English Proverb.
Captain Lewin’s bearer was what Mr. Halton would have described as an “average idiot” among niggers, but he was anxious to earn his fee, and his anxiety increased his intelligence to a disastrous extent. As soon as he got out of his employer’s range of vision, of course his shambling trot degenerated into a saunter, and he loafed up Maitso Hill, calling out salutations to the natives whom he met coming down from work, for they employed black labour at the garrison. Still he did not absolutely stop, even to talk to the rickety trains of mule carts, whose drivers began a high-pitched conversation with him as soon as they came within sight. No Key Island nigger waits to begin his gossip until he is close to his friend; most of his conversation is screamed in patois from one end of a street to another, as his acquaintance comes round a corner, and the mixture of bastard Arabic, and African-Dutch, and what he thinks is English, bound together by long, lovely Malagasy words, is, to say the least of it, peculiar. By dint of keeping on, however, even at a saunter, the bearer reached the Churtons’ bungalow in some half-hour’s time after he started from the club, and came soundlessly through the screen of logwood, his bare feet lost in the dust, and guided by the lights that twinkled from the stoep.
Before he reached the house itself he saw one of its inmates approaching leisurely, and paused himself, because it would have been waste of energy to take the few extra steps and call up the mistress, when here was the master of the house already at hand. Major Churton was smoking, the red end of his cigar looking like a strayed firefly among the light logwood leaves as he advanced, his big person very big indeed in its white linen and looming through the dusk like a substantial ghost. He had come out in the hope of getting more air than was possible on the stoep, and being in canvas shoes his advance was almost as soundless as the nigger’s. Both men stared at each other through the darkness as if to make sure of the other’s personality,—Major Churton because he did not expect to see a ragged loafer from the town about his house after dusk, and Captain Lewin’s bearer because he saw the end of his responsibility before him if this were really the Bimbashi (Major).
“Well, what do you want?” said Churton shortly.