“No insults, my lady, or I’ll do worse. It’s you are the coward—only time I ever got a rise out of you! Didn’t know you had any kind of excitement in you, by gad!”
“You brute! You brute!”
Julia, as much astounded as indignant, and vaguely alarmed, as she had sometimes been in the early months of her married life, turned to walk to the house in a dignified retreat. But France caught her in his arms.
“No you don’t, my lady. Give me a kiss.”
Then, for the first time, passion flamed in Julia. The twilight turned crimson. She beat him on the chest, the face, the head. She kicked him, and strove to unite her hands about his neck and choke him. She longed for a knife, for a pistol. She seethed with hatred and the desire to do murder. And France only laughed, and brushed off her hands with his great hairy ones, while with one arm he clasped her hard and rained kisses on her unprotected face. And he never ceased laughing with an intense quiet amusement, his eyes glittering as they did when he went to hangings, when he once had happened to witness natives tortured in the Congo, as they did at certain performances in Paris calculated to gratify the primitive lusts of man. France had always envied those Eastern potentates that amused themselves with the death agonies of their slaves just before heads were sliced off; but for him and his sort there are still compensations to be found in the depths of civilization.
III
Mrs. Winstone sat in her charming drawing-room in Tilney Street, by a fire that cast a warm glow over her delicate good looks, further enhanced by a tea-gown of violet Liberty velveteen and Irish lace. The tea-table was beside her, and grouped about it were Mr. Pirie, Mrs. Macmanus, and Lord Algy—reinstated in her affections after an interval of fickleness; all were comfortably nibbling muffins and drinking their horrid mess of tea and cream while looking as gloomy as possible.
It was “black week” of December, 1899. Methuen, Gatacre, and Buller had met with humiliating reverses in South Africa, Sir George White was shut up in Ladysmith with twelve thousand men, and the Boers were proving themselves possessed of a generalship, which, combined with the stores of ammunition they had been accumulating since the Jameson Raid, a complete knowledge of their puzzling hills, the strategic devices they had learned from the natives, and an indomitable spirit, had finally succeeded in quenching optimism in Great Britain.
“Jove, you know,” said Algy, “it can’t be only that they’re on their own ground—cursed ground, too, you know. Fancy the beggars knowin’ how to fight.”
Mr. Pirie crossed his legs and smiled complacently. “I flatter myself that I was one of the three or four men in England that anticipated this. Wolsely warned us. Butler warned us. We wouldn’t listen. How could we be expected to when the South Africans here never believed the Boers would fight? And here we are!”