The Rhodesian

by Gertrude Page

Carew thanked him, and they all moved away together. At the hotel, however, he vanished, and it was only after a little adroit persuasion later that Mr. Pym got him to accept an invitation to dine with them in their private room in the evening.

And after accepting, Carew went about the work that had brought him to Bulawayo with an uneasy mind. The fortnight that had elapsed since the evening he found Meryl unexpectedly at the Grenvilles' had been a somewhat disturbed one for him. For many years now his life had flown so evenly in all big essentials. Little worries, little disturbances, disappointments, were inevitable for a man whose heart was so thoroughly in his work, and for whom the conditions of work were often so trying. But these had only ruffled the surface; underneath the smooth river flowed along strong and self-contained. After the upheaval that had been as a volcanic eruption upon smiling sunshine-flooded fields in his life, and the black desolation that followed, there had succeeded a long quiet period of calm action that, if it held nothing which could be termed joy, held nothing either that was sorrow except his buried memories. And he had been well content that it should be so; well content to contemplate just that and nothing else to the journey's end.

And now, suddenly, had come this vague unrest. He sought for its source and its reason, and could not find a satisfactory answer. For though it dated from the coming of the millionaire and his party, he would not admit himself capable of the folly of falling in love with Meryl. To him it was such inexcusable foolishness, in view of many things. Rather he chose to believe it was a voice from the old life, reawakened in his heart, and calling to him across the years. When he smoked his pipe outside the huts, and pondered deeply some knotty point in his report and in the work of the Native Commission, he found himself suddenly remembering that it was September. And away in his beloved Devon they would be out after the partridges—striding through the heather and across the stubble-fields, ranging over the purple moors with purple horizons all round, and in the distance a strip of turquoise, which was the sea. He could almost hear the whir ... rr of wings and the shots on some far hill-side. And he knew that, though the shooting in a wild, vast country like Rhodesia is a far finer and more sportsmanlike affair than shooting driven birds in England, he yet felt, and would ever feel, that intense British love of the soil that had reared him, and the moors where he fired his first gun and shot his first bird. And, of course, upon the heels of the shooting came the hunting, which had once been the joy of his life, ever after he first put his pony at a stiff fence, entirely on his own, and sailed gloriously over, in spite of an anxious groom shouting caution to the winds.

And then all the woodcraft and fieldcraft he had learnt from his uncle's keepers and his uncle's farmer tenants. He remembered how it had been part of his education as a youngster, and how in pursuit of knowledge he had been up early and late and in the middle of the night, picking up information about the woodland creatures from anyone who could teach him or finding things out for himself. There was the poacher who had shown him, for love of the sport, if sport it could be called, how he got the pheasants silently off the boughs in the night—taking them from their roosting-places and never a sound. He had given that poacher a bright half-crown, he remembered, and his firm lips twitched a little over the recollection. He had not seen the humour then of paying the man who was stealing his uncle's pheasants—the pheasants that would some day be his. He wondered if the boys in England now, the future landowners, were taught woodlore as he had been taught it, because it was good for an English gentleman to know all the scents and signs and sounds of his estate.

And after all, he was no landowner at all. By his own act, instead, merely an officer in the British South Africa Police, with a few hundreds a year income, and nothing but a meagre pension ahead.

Ah well! he had had a good deal besides for what he had lost, and it had been a good life enough, dependent solely on himself, and far removed from the caprices of a rich uncle. He regretted nothing at this stage of what had transpired after the upheaval came. Of course, his brother was now owner of the estates that might have been his, and was married, and had children; whereas he was a soldier-policeman looking forward to a meagre pension.

Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered. It was only that, seeing so much more of the Pyms socially than he had been wont to see of anyone, old memories had been awakened. He hoped they would soon go to sleep again, for, in passing, they had taken some of the restfulness out of Rhodesia's far horizons, and fretted the flow of the strong, silent river, with a vague discontent. Sometimes between him and those far horizons there was a face now—sometimes a voice—sometimes just a dim presence—the voice and the face and the presence of Meryl Pym. And it was a thing to be fought down and crushed and conquered—a weakness that was well-nigh a foolishness—a folly such as stern men trample underfoot.

So when Mr. Pym asked him to dine with them privately, he made some excuse, and only yielded under pressure. And when he joined them he was in one of his gravest moods, as if he had barricaded himself round with impenetrable reserve. There were two other guests, so Diana did not twit him openly; she only murmured in an aside, for his ear alone, "I'm so sorry it's a party, and we shall feel obliged to be polite. This civilisation is becoming a positive burden."

Meryl was a little late, and she wore a beautiful gown, of a classic cut, with exquisite classic embroideries and a filigree band on her lovely hair. It was the first time he had seen her in evening dress, and he took one keen, sweeping glance and then looked away. He had rather the attitude of a soldier on parade, to whom the colonel had said "eyes front." Only he was his own colonel, obeying his own laws and restrictions. And Meryl only dared to take a fleeting glance also, for fear her eyes might betray her. And though he looked as striking as a man may, in immaculate evening dress, with his strong, clear-cut features, and inches that dwarfed most men, with the inconsistency of a woman she decided she liked him best in khaki that had seen hard service, and that look of being all of a piece, because his hands and face were so brown. He sat on her left, while Lord Elmsleigh, who was passing through from the Victoria Falls, sat on her right; and though she chatted lightly to his lordship, she was conscious every second of the hour of the big, silent, rather grim soldier-policeman. He spoke very little. Just an opinion now and then when he was asked for it, or the corroboration or correction of a statement, when someone looked to him questioningly. The millionaire, chatting in his quiet, weighty way to his two other guests, noted everything. He knew that Carew and Meryl scarcely once looked at each other, or addressed each other direct, and with a deep sense of regret he had again that feeling of being brought up against some barrier where neither his money nor power nor influence could be of any avail. And at the same time he knew in his heart that he had never met any man to whom he would sooner entrust Meryl and the fortune that must be hers. For though their very silence together revealed to his astute brain that neither was indifferent to the other, he could not but see also that undercurrent of grim determination in Carew. True, he was almost always silent, but Henry Pym perceived that his silence to-day was not quite of that of yesterday. Something had gone out of it—some quiet, grave, unquestioning content. In the keen, direct, steel-blue eyes now there was a shadow lurking behind, that might have been of some old memory, or might have been of some new pain, but which vaguely hurt the millionaire host.

Meryl's eyes were less smiling than her lips, turning a little unsteadily this way and that, with a restlessness that added a touch of vivacity to her quiet beauty. But that, he knew, was the thing we baldly name pluck. It was not to-night he need fear what he should see in her eyes, nor perhaps to-morrow. It was any day, any hour, any moment in the weeks to come, when she believed no one was observing her.