But as is so frequently the case, the Colonel need not have lost his sleep over the prospect of his unpleasant task, for the job fell into other hands than his. For two days he postponed his visit to Pine Croft, keeping Paul close with him under various pretexts. The third afternoon, reading the weather signs in his wife’s face, he girded his loins and addressed himself to the business assigned him. With a heart full of compassion for the wretched creature he had last seen humped upon the shaggy Indian pony making his hopeless way through the brushwood in the train of what his wife described as “that horrible menage,” he rode up to the bungalow in his best military style and whistling a cheerful ditty. So he had ridden upon a Boer entrenchment, at the head of his men, and with a like sensation at the point of junction between stomach and abdomen. He was greeted with a shout from the studio window.
“Hello, Pelham, old boy! Right welcome art thou, most gallant knight! Wilt alight and quaff a posset?” There were not lacking signs that the speaker had been indulging himself in several possets during the afternoon.
“Ah, Gaspard, you are looking very fit, much better than you were when I saw you last.”
“My dear fellow, new worlds are born every day. Richard is himself again. Come in and have something. I feel as a snake must feel when he sloughs off the old and emerges in his brand new skin.”
And in very truth, the change in the man was nothing other than a transformation. Clean shaven, well groomed, garbed in hunting tweeds and immaculate linen, and with his gun over his arm, he was once more the Gaspard of the old days, handsome, cheery, insouciant, with today a touch of patronising insolence. For Gaspard was now in his studio and among his pictures. He was the artist once more, after three years of exile, and with the divine frenzy stirring in his blood he was lord of his world and of the men and things therein. Certainly no object of compassion, and as certainly no man to approach with a proposal of social ostracism. Small wonder that the little Colonel fidgeted nervously with his glass and wondered within himself how the deuce he could lead up to the matter in hand.
“Have another drink, Pelham,” said Gaspard, helping himself and passing the decanter. “Jove, this stuff has mellowed and ripened these three years. Three years? Three and a half years now. A millennium of hell!” He shuddered visibly as he tossed off his glass. “But it’s over, thank God! Over! Jove, it was often a near touch with me. There were days when I dared not trust myself alone with my gun in the woods. Ah-h-h, God!” Again he shuddered. “But it’s over. I’m going to paint again—and as I never painted. I have great pictures here,”—he struck his breast violently, “angels, devils, waiting release. Devils? Yes, I can paint devils now. God knows I have reason to know them!” He turned swiftly upon the Colonel, pouring himself another glass.
“Pelham, do you believe in the devil?”
The Colonel was frankly startled. “Well, of course, I——”
“Ah-h-h, I see, you know nothing about him. Yours is a sickly abstraction. Well, thank God you don’t. But that is all done with. Here I am back where a man can get a bath and sleep in a bed and see the face of a white man. Pelham, I love to look at you, old sport. I’m not saying you’re a beauty, but you are white. You’re my kind. Have another, eh? No? Hear me, Pelham, it is good to be back home. Thought I’d never have the nerve to return. But—man! Man! to die in a far land with never a kent face to look upon as you go out—I just cudna thole it, as old Jinny would say. By the way, how is old Jinny?”
“Oh, very well. Very useful and fairly happy, I think. You see she has Paul.”