He rode off in the increasing day, and Leoline went on her lonely way, the coloured people closing in behind her. She could not miss her road for there was but one, though it wound in and out what looked like unbroken forest from the valley. High up on the hillside hung Vohitra, a long building with the inevitable stoep and an old tiled roof. It looked nothing but a toy thing, like a Swiss châlet, against the massed woods of the mountain crest, but below it in the hollow the vegetation was less severe. There was a grove of bananas tossed down the very slope where the house rested, and below this again the plaintive tone of bamboo—not the insistent liquid sunshine of the cane that filled the valley, but the hesitating green that is pale and golden and infinitely soft by reason of the feathery mass of its foliage. Down the heart of the valley came the river, a shallow stream that sang loudly to the silent listening heavens and the kites, for there seemed no one else to hear. Even Vohitra, with its hint of humanity, was infinitely lonely.
Breakfast was laid for her on the stoep, and Ambroise’s butler, a tall comely Malagasy, bowed low before her with the murmured “Salama!” and asked her pleasure before he left the hill and returned to Port Albert. She looked at his picturesque figure in its deeply fringed lamba—the Malagasy at Port Victoria had in general discarded the native dress—and wished that she might have kept him in preference to Hafez, already grumbling among the calabashes. But she had no orders to give, save a pathetic request for a bath, and that, she learned, already awaited her.
She ate her breakfast in sight of the cane, which was beginning to assert its old influence upon her. There are two crops in Key Island; the one she had seen cut and crushed in Mr. Denver’s factory was the lesser yield, but the Tsara Valley was now in its full glory. Her eyes strayed down the hillside to the rich harvest in the valley again and again, with a kind of fascination. It soothed her in some strange fashion to see the clear colour that always suggested spring and new life, and hope, even though the season was really autumn. Tsara—spring o’ the year! The very name seemed to breathe the pure green of ripened sap, the rejuvenescence of Nature. The shock and jar of sudden death had come so near her of late, that she felt as if it had dinned her senses; now it hummed off into distance again, and life closed peacefully round her, leaving her time to think....
She sauntered through the house after a while, and looked at the long rows of closed doors, for the bungalow was a large one and built to accommodate many visitors, being in a sense a government hotel for the use of sorely-tried officials. The rooms were like loose boxes, and not much larger, but the heat was far less oppressive than in the lower portions of the island, and when the doors were fastened back the cool breeze that blew straight through the house, down the long corridor, made them bearable even at night. Mrs. Lewin’s room was exactly like all the others, save that it possessed a key, which she had sternly demanded of Ambroise’s butler. None of the other doors appeared to have any fastening beyond a rickety handle.
From the house itself she found the stable, and Liscarton, who received her with distrust as one who had lured him into the wilderness. Nor would he accept the sugar she offered, which for a pony who was always hungry was a proof of great offence. But sometimes he would sulk for days if his temper were upset. She pulled his head down in spite of his resentful manner, and kissed the white blaze between his wild eyes and the rough fringe on his forehead. Neither his mane nor tail had been cut, for he had never played polo, and it gave him an untamed appearance in contrast to other ponies. Mrs. Lewin hid the sugar in his manger in case he should change his mind, and went in search of the bath-room.
She discovered it at the end of a steep path which took her a hundred yards down the hillside. It was nothing but a rough wooden shed, with a zinc roof that did not touch the further wall by some inches. As Mrs. Lewin undressed she looked up and saw a slit of azure sky and the crowned head of a cocoanut palm that kept watch above her, but the palm had no appreciative eyes for a new version of Eve. The floor was just warm mother earth, for it had neither been flagged nor matted, and the bath itself was a deep zinc tub with a foot of dubious water in it. Leoline balanced daintily on the piece of board which was all the carpeting allowed to save her from the gritty ground, and observed that the other furniture of the place consisted of an old cigarette-tin nailed to the wall for a soap dish, and a wooden peg on which the towels hung. It was not luxurious, but any means of washing is respected in Key Island, and she had learned humility in this respect. By the time she sauntered back to the bungalow it was nine o’clock, and the broad heat had begun.
One day was very like another at Vohitra; it seemed as if the hours had melted into each other, and the solitude and rest were healing her nature from the wrench it had sustained. She could think now, and face her own evolution. She did not read much, though she had brought a box of books with her. Curiously enough, it was none of these, but a little broken-backed Rubaiyat that she found on a dusty shelf at Vohitra that was her closest companion when she desired a book at all. It had probably been left behind by a former visitor, and it opened so invariably at one stanza that she never seemed to get any further—
“Some for the riches of the world, and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go!