“By Jove! and this was to be a week, too! Never mind—I’ll give up most of it and stick to business. You’re quite right, Chum—I’ll be seized with a savage desire to get things properly settled up before Halton goes. I would grub in correspondence and red tape if only it would ensure my getting out of this beastly island!”
“Don’t overdo it,” said Mrs. Lewin nervously. “He is so quick to see through people. Ally, I wonder if he will send Mr. Halton to Port Cecil? I suppose you’ve heard of that—isn’t it strange that Mr. Gregory should have the nomination of both men to these appointments!”
“Oh I don’t care if the whole of East Africa is put into Halton’s hands, so long as I get the other show. Think of it, Chum—home leave, food that isn’t tinned, lots going on, and some sport again! Salama for old Sir Geoffrey!”
He caught her round the waist, to the amazement of Abdallah, who was bringing in the tea, and waltzed her round the room, steering through the scattered chairs and tables and even into the next room with a dexterity that made her laugh until she could not keep pace with him, and dropped on to the sofa leaving Ally to finish with a grand pas seul that landed him with a thud against the butler’s portly person. Chum sat on the sofa, wiping her eyes rather hysterically, while Ally and Abdallah sorted themselves; and then they drank their tea with a special allowance of sugar in it for the honour of the occasion.
“When we get to Malta,” said Chum seriously, “we will have cream too, as well as milk—can you get cream in Malta, Ally?—and it shall be real tea, up from India, not this nasty stuff from Natal.” In the background of her mind she was always conscious of a sense of reluctance, a desire that did not accord with her earnest assertions of delight in leaving Key Island. Some deep root in her very nature seemed dragging her back whenever she spoke of her departure, and the more she felt it the more she repeated the idea as if to get used to it. It was a thing she had to fight, and she faced it desperately in this its very beginning.
It haunted her through the dance that night, and the whirl of flying feet round the long mess-room. It was too hot for dancing, but Mrs. Lewin did not seem to feel the heat; she was indefatigable, and waltzed through the programme, looking as cool and dry at the end of the evening as at the beginning which is a great feat for a Maitso dance. Leoline wondered if this were the last time she should sit out on the steps of the Mess, or keep time to the Gunners’ band,—and thrust the thought away. It was an ever-recurring ghost, that “last time,” and stung most keenly, strange to say, through an introduction to the guests of the evening, Captain and Mrs. Ritchie Stern. Blanche Stern had very large and searching eyes of a blue that mocked the sea—wholesome eyes, that seemed never to have reflected the image of any man save her husband, and indeed the only thing that Mrs. Gilderoy could find to say of her was that she posed as being in love with Ritchie Stern to fatiguing extent. In an assembly of auctioned men and assorted wives, she was perhaps rather unlikely; but as their eyes met, Mrs. Lewin put her hand to the diamond pendant at her throat with a little start, and a choking feeling that Mrs. Stern was divining her secret mind. They had been introduced in a pause between the dances, and were leaning over the wooden railing of the stoep side by side, while their respective partners fought for ices on their behalf. No African stoep should have a railing of course, but Key Island has improved upon its model in its own opinion, and has gone further and twined the woodwork with stephanotis and gardenia. The strong hothouse scents were in Mrs. Ritchie’s nostrils as she leaned out into the night, looking down on the lights of Port Victoria.
“Captain Stern was here for a fortnight once,” she said idly; “I often thought we should like it as a station—it is such an idyllic place. How lovely these flowers are!”
“It is horrible!” said Mrs. Lewin, with sudden energy. “It is like a trap—you cannot get out, and there is nothing to do. You would hate it!” She was unconscious that she repeated every one else’s Miserere for the first time.
“I don’t think I should mind, if my husband were here too,” said Blanche frankly. She turned her eyes on Mrs. Lewin as if she saw something that interested her in the restless beautiful figure. “The worst of marrying a Navy man is that one is not sufficiently considered in his appointments! They will send Ritchie to dubious corners of the earth, just when the children have arranged to have the measles, and I can’t be in two places at once.”
Mrs. Lewin looked across the stoep to the open doorway where Captain Stern presented a good flat back to her view as he talked to Major Churton. She looked with unconscious wistfulness at his shaven fair head and tanned neck, and wondered if under the circumstances she would have felt her heart torn in two because the seas divided them? And then she remembered her ghost of reluctance to leave this place that she said she hated, and Mrs. Stern’s next words were full of horror to her.