“And the girl?”
“Oh, the girl is all right, except that she had hysterics. Two or three white people were wounded, and about a hundred niggers have been killed—I wish it had been a thousand!” said Ambroise savagely. “But I think they have had a lesson.”
“Port Victoria is quiet, then? I wonder if I might go round? The mail is almost due,” she added with an instinct of caution to veil her real reason.
“Well, it is getting that way, but I think you are better off here at present. It was the most sensible thing you could do to stop here. The place will be lamb-like when you do see it again. As far as Key’land goes such a rising was just what was wanted.”
“But the loss of life!” she exclaimed with a shudder.
“You can’t help that, and you can only teach the natives respect for the British Empire by a military lesson delivered some time or other. Last time, you see, they got off with a warning, and we all felt that once the troops were here they ought to be punished. Most places catch it that have Gregory as Administrator, and are chastened afterwards. He is the right man in the right place—I’d rather work under him than any man who comes out with a theory of ‘It’s all done by kindness.’”
She tried to keep her face from tingling, and smiled faintly. “You are almost as drastic in your views as the Administrator. Has he—has he come out of the fray unscathed?”
“Oh, he’s all right—so far.” Ambroise laughed, unknowing that his words frightened her. “He has given them a dose of Gregory’s Powder, and they are making wry faces over it. But he is a man who always carries his life in his hand, Mrs. Lewin—he always will, wherever he is.”
She turned away, sick at heart. In her ignorance of the fate that pressed her rapidly, she pictured herself far off from Gregory, in England, thinking of those words that his admiring lieutenant had said. Wherever he might go he would carry his life in his hand, from his savage unofficialism that never got into the papers, and she for a year at least would be as helpless and uncognisant of his movements and fate as she was now. She had no premonition that those whose lives were interwoven with Gregory’s were whirled into quick action with his overmastering vitality, and hurried out of the usual course of events. Life always went quickly with him. He did not lose time through being handicapped by red tape of any description, as his Service was grimly aware. But these things were hid in secret drawers at the Colonial Office, and filed for censure about once in every appointment that Evelyn Gregory had ever had.
Mrs. Gilderoy had been gone but three or four days when in the evening of that following Ambroise’s visit one of the servants brought Leoline a note from her, saying that it had come by a messenger who was waiting. Mrs. Lewin had been sitting at the improvised writing-table in her own bedroom—one of those passion-haunted rooms from whose suggested associations she could never get away after Mrs. Gilderoy had put the fancy into her head. With the note in her hand she rose at once and went across the passage and out on to the stoep, because the natives usually waited there. Her long black gown swished across the bare boards as she went, where other women’s had whispered in the same feminine tongue during long-dead summers.