“A stirrup cup!” she said hurriedly. “Come, you must drink it! You are sleepy with the heat of the rooms. This will brace you up to get home.”
“Upon my word, Di, I’ve had enough.”
But she laughed and lifted it to his lips for him, and his hand closed on hers and the glass together. Ally was smoking, but he took the cigar from his lips as if he wondered what to do with it, and Mrs. Churton held it for him while he drank, sniffing it appreciatively. To some women the smell of smoke is a kind of lurid dissipation. The taste of tobacco in their own mouths is not nearly so suggestive to them. Ally finished the whiskey, and then something happened. He did not seem able to hold the glass, and it fell and smashed at his feet. He was troubled, because it belonged to the Mess, and those glasses were expensive things, and had to be made in England; but Mrs. Churton coolly kicked the fragments out of the way, and said it did not matter. At least the whiskey had not been wasted!
How dark it was on the stoep, and how hot and still! Up in the further corner no one could see them from the lighted room. He remembered nothing of getting there, only that her face looked softer than usual in the little light there was; and when she put her cool hands behind his head and kissed him, he felt a sly amusement that she should be so much more keen than he; there was a passion in her kisses, while there was none, he thought, in his. And her voice rang in his ears, “Ally! Ally! come to me when other women fail you!” while he wondered that it seemed to mean nothing. He was far more conscious of the outspread fans of the ravenalas, as if they would fain screen him from the night.
Some one brought his pony round then, and he mounted, surprised it was so easy, and turned the brute’s head down the slope. Their voices echoed after him and died away on the stillness of the air, bidding him good-night, chaffing him noisily, confusing the way he was going. It was impossible to judge one building from another now, and the damned paths wound round and round like a maze. He should take a wrong turning—no, this was safer! He drove his spurs into his pony’s flanks and tore down the hill at a gallop, holding the animal mechanically from stumbling, but trusting to his instinct to get down safely. Why they did not pitch down the steep slopes he did not know, but he was not in the least afraid; a mad exhilaration took hold of him through the wild ride, and he urged the pony on still when he got to the foot of the hill, and clattered through the sleeping town, but the pony knew his way home. Stumbling and dripping with sweat, man and horse galloped the last few yards, and swept up to the very stable door, where the pony stopped with falling head and streaming flanks.
Ally slipped out of the saddle, feeling his mount vaguely, and trying to find the words to explain that he was to be rubbed down and handled carefully, but they would not come, and he gave the rein in silence to a sleepy sais, who seemed to have risen out of the shadows of the stoep. A minute later his voice came back in a curse, for he tripped over the bodies of his own servants crouched close to the cool stones. There were more than the men of his household there, but he did not know. He fumbled at the door, got it unlatched, and reeling over to his dressing-room, dropped like a stone on to the floor in the middle of the room.
The heat of the night had prevented Chum from sleeping at first, and though her headache had driven her to bed early, she had lain there for an hour looking up at the white fall of the mosquito curtain, and listening to the stupid bustle of a hard-back who had drifted in from the outside world in company with a dozen moths, and was floundering to find his way out again. She fell asleep at last listening for Ally’s pony to come up the hill, and was in a deep slumber when the bang of a door shook her awake as completely as if she had never closed her eyes. She sat up in bed, wondering what had happened, and listening to some one who seemed to be strange to the house, and was trying to find his way about. A man must have got in, and she was all alone; yet the boldness of the intruder’s movements as regarded noise, and his lack of caution, were very unlike the stealthiness of the coloured thief. At last the steps found Ally’s dressing-room, and passed in. There was an instant’s pause, a heavy fall, and silence.
Mrs. Lewin was standing at the closed door between the two rooms almost before the sound had ceased; she had no knowledge of how she came there, or of how her fingers let down the rattling shutter with some vague idea of seeing through the opened slits. But there was darkness in the dressing-room, and she opened the door with one hand and switched on the electric light with the other, even as she passed in. Nothing had been touched from the time when she last saw Ally’s man putting it in order that morning. His master having dressed at the club, the place had had an air of lonely neatness all day, for Ally was regally careless how he flung his clothes about when present. Mrs. Lewin took a step forward and almost trod upon his prostrate body before she saw that the heavy dark something in the middle of the floor was a man.
He was lying nearly on his back, having turned in his fall with an instinctive effort towards the air. She dropped on her knees beside him, her heart beating heavily with the remembrance that the nearest doctor was half-an-hour’s ride away, and trying to think what one did for a fit. He was breathing heavily, and his face was flushed and heated. She bent down to wrench open the soaked collar ... and drew back with a choking breath.
Leoline Lewin had seen drunken men before—labourers, lying on alehouse benches, or in the sun; ragged wretches soaked in gin to drown their misery, and slinking past the police. She had heard stories, too, of her own male acquaintance being overcome upon occasion, and had found them funny enough to laugh at as told by their friends. But the real experience had never touched her before, nor had she seen the man who had always stood upright, to her imagination at least, suddenly cast from his dignity to grovel on the earth from which he came.