Long Odds

by Harold Bindloss

The matter was, perhaps, not a great one in itself, but it had a somewhat unpleasant effect upon Ormsgill, who knew that the Iberian is not as a rule squeamish about any cruelty that the lust of gain renders it necessary to inflict upon his beast. The horse, as he could see, had certainly been ridden hard, and was very lame. The thing jarred on him, and as he leaned on the veranda waiting until the message he had left to announce his arrival should be delivered, a scene he had looked upon in the dark land forced itself upon his recollection. It was a line of jaded men staggering under the burdens on their heads through an apparently interminable sea of scorched and dusty grass. There was little water in that country at the season, and they dragged themselves along, grimed with the fibrous dust, in torments of thirst, with limbs that were reddened by the stabbing of the flinty grass stems. Then rousing himself he drove the suggestive vision from his brain and entered the hall of the big hotel.

It blazed with light, there was music somewhere, and already conventionally attired men and elaborately dressed women were descending the stairway, and appearing by twos and threes from the corridors. They were for the most part Englishmen and women, but Ormsgill was a little astonished to feel that instead of arousing sympathy their voices and bearing jarred on him. Their conversation appeared to have no point in it, and their smiles were meaningless. They seemed shallow and artificial, and he had lived at high pressure, face to face with grim realities, in the land of the shadow. He stood a little apart, quietly regarding them, a lonely figure in plain white duck with a lined brown face, until a burly man in the conventional black and white strode up to him.

"I'm uncommonly glad to see you, Tom," he said. "Ada will be down in a minute. I left her and her mother almost too startled to understand that you had arrived. The man you gave your message to had just brought it in. You should have let us know what boat you were sailing by. But I mustn't keep you talking. You have just time to change your things."

Ormsgill shook hands with him, but was conscious of a lack of enthusiasm as he did it that irritated him. He had once considered Major Chillingham a very good fellow, but now there seemed to be something wanting in his characteristic bluff geniality. Ormsgill could not tell what it was, but he felt the lack of it.

"I suppose there is," he said with a smile. "Still, you see, I haven't anything to change into. In fact, my present outfit is a considerably smarter one than the get-up I have been accustomed to dining in."

Chillingham's gaze was at first expressive of blank astonishment, and there was a sardonic gleam in Ormsgill's eyes. "You must try to remember that I've got out of the way of wearing evening clothes. I think I'd made it clear that I have been down in the depths the past four years."

His companion's red face flushed a trifle, but he laughed. "Well," he said, "that's one of the things we needn't talk about, and I'm not sure that everybody would be so ready to mention it." Then he drew back a trifle. "Tom, you're greatly changed."

Ormsgill nodded. "Yes," he said, "I dare say I am. In several ways the thing's not unnatural."

After that Chillingham discoursed about English affairs, and though it appeared to cost him a slight effort Ormsgill made no attempt to help him. He stood still, perfectly at his ease, but for all that conscious that he was an anachronism in such surroundings, while the men and women who smiled or nodded to his companion as they came into the hall cast curious glances at him. This duck-clad man with the lined face and steady eyes was clearly not of their world, which was, in the case of most of them, an essentially frivolous one.

At last he turned, and strode forward impulsively as the girl he waited for came down the stairway in a filmy dress of lace-like texture that rustled softly as it flowed about her. She was brown-haired and brown-eyed, warm in coloring, and her face, which was as comely as ever, had a certain hint of disdain in it. That, however, did not strike Ormsgill then, for she flushed a little at the sight of him, and laid a slim white hand in his.