Chapter Twenty Three.
Good News – and some Bad
“Here comes a fellow who looks as if he didn’t want to use his horse again for a day or two.” And Brian shaded his eyes to watch a moving speck rapidly approaching, but still at a considerable distance.
The hour was just before sunrise, a couple of mornings after our visit to Kuliso, and the two of us were standing on the stoep drinking our early cup of coffee.
“Why, it’s Revell,” he went on, as a look through the field-glasses revealed the identity of the horseman, now lost to sight, now reappearing round a bend of the hillside. “You can see the flaming halo around his face, even from here. By jingo! I hope there’s nothing wrong. He’s going at a hard gallop. Look, dad,” he called through the window. “Come out. Here’s Revell coming up the kloof at such a pace you’d think the joker whose name rhymes with his was after him.”
“Perhaps he’s bringing us some news,” was the answer. “Well, well! We ought to be ready for anything.”
The dogs charged forward with open-mouthed clamour to greet the advancing hoof-strokes, and in a few minutes the horseman dashed up to the stoep.
“News!” he shouted. “News for you!”
“Bad, I suppose?” said Septimus Matterson.
“No. Good. First-rate.”
Even while dismounting he had been fumbling in his pocket, and now held out a long blue envelope. I believed I could see the recipient’s fingers slightly tremble as he tore open this, but his voice was firm enough as he read out its contents, which set forward in terse official phraseology that in re The Queen versus George Matterson, the Solicitor-General, having examined the evidence, did not consider the facts such as to warrant a criminal prosecution, and that the said George Matterson had been released accordingly, and handed over to the care of his sister. The writer then had the honour to be the recipient’s obedient servant, John Shattuck, Resident Magistrate.
“Hip – hip – hooray!” whooped Revell, flourishing his hat in the air, a proceeding which caused his steed, which was standing, veldt-fashion, with merely the end of the bridle resting on the ground, to throw up its head and trot away down the kloof again, snorting vehemently, and the dogs to assail him with frantic energy of purpose which nearly bore disastrous fruit.
“You are a good chap to bring us the news, Revell,” said Brian. “Magtig, kerel! but you’ve ridden your horse to death!”
“Well, it was good enough, wasn’t it? Bliss Matterson was keen on letting you know at once, but couldn’t get hold of any one coming out this way, so I volunteered. I said I’d be the first to bring the news, and I have,” concluded this prince of good fellows quite delightedly.
“Now come inside and have some scoff,” said Brian. “I’ll send and have your gee looked after. You must have ridden all night.”
“So I did. What of it? You’d do as much for Miss Beryl, wouldn’t you? Man, but the nipper was jolly glad to get out of the tronk, I can tell you. Shattuck had no business ever to have put him in. He bust out howling when Miss Beryl went to fetch him.”
“Who did? Shattuck?” I said.
“Eh? Oh, shut up, Holt. Don’t you try to come the Trask,” was the chuckling retort. “By the way, Mr Matterson – what a blundering ass I am – here’s a brievje from Miss Beryl. Oh, and I brought out your post while I was about it.”
Beryl’s note was merely a repetition of the official intimation, and was coupled with a request that some one should come in to Fort Lamport as soon as possible to fetch them out. She judged it better to come home at once.
No one thought of taking notice at that moment of anything so trivial as the mere weekly post. The two or three letters for myself I put in my pocket, hardly glancing at the addresses. Business, of course, but not of urgent importance. On a day like this it could keep.
It was decided that Brian should start with the Cape cart soon after breakfast. He would be at Fort Lamport early in the afternoon, and could even come out nearly half way to-night, and if they did that, and slept at a friend’s farm, why, they would all be back by this time to-morrow.
To these arrangements I listened as in a trance. Beryl would be with us again. This time to-morrow! Why, it was hardly credible. It seemed a year since we had been without her. Not even until this time to-morrow would I wait, however, for already I was busy formulating a little scheme of my own for riding out at some perfectly ungodly hour of the early morning to meet them. Ah, now everything was coming right. It was like a story, by Jove it was; and now this time I would not let the grass grow under my feet. Why should I, indeed? Everything had gone well. Kuliso and his clan were satisfied with their compensation. George was liberated. The only thing to do was to try and forget the whole unfortunate affair all round. And, I hoped – very strongly hoped – I would soon be in a position to help one of them at any rate duly to forget it.
What an ultra-celestial gleam there was in the newly-risen sun, which had now just soared free of the further hills, deepening the cloudless blue into a richer depth! What a ring of joyousness in the varying bird notes, tossed from spray to spray and from tree to tree, over the wide free expanse! Even the distant voices of the farm Kafirs, and the bleat of the flocks, seemed to my wrought-up brain to take on a very gladsomeness of tone. By that time to-morrow Beryl would be home again, and even before then I should have seen her, sweet, fresh and radiant in the rose-glow of the early morning.
All this ran through my mind, and kept me silent; but there was no need to talk, for Revell was a host in himself in that line, and now he was launching forth by the hour, mostly as to the affair which had just met with so fortunate a conclusion, unflattering comments upon the laws of the Colony in general, and their administrator, Shattuck, in particular. Then, after an early breakfast, Brian inspanned, and with a few parting injunctions from his father, drove off.
Revell, naturally enough, was in no hurry to move on, and in my then mood his ceaseless, if harmless, chatter annoyed me. There was nothing particular to be done about the homestead, so I saddled up a horse for a ride round the veldt. I might get a shot at something, but that was a secondary consideration. I wanted to be alone and think.
Very rose-tinted was the reverie in which I was wrapped, as my steed paced on, over swelling rise or through bushed valley bottom. I went back over all the time I had spent in this happy home. I thought of her whose presence had brightened it, and called to mind all manner of little circumstances which now stood out in anything but a discouraging light. Why, even to-morrow might decide everything, given the opportunity, and that I would endeavour to make. And somehow or other I felt strangely buoyant as to the result.
For all the use I made of it I might as well have left my gun at home, yet it was for no lack of chances. A pair of vaal koorhaans rose almost beneath the horse’s feet – rare chance indeed at these wary and beautiful birds, themselves all too scarce in our locality – yet I merely watched them as they winged their way out of shot, uttering their querulous note. Further on, a duiker ram, slinking along not thirty yards distant, a shot I could not have missed, yet I let him go. Later again a large troop of guinea-fowl running for a prickly pear klompje, where, had I followed them up, I should have been sure of at least a brace. They too were left unmolested. The wild game of the veldt seemed to be under a kind of “truce of God.” As far as I was concerned, I felt disinclined to take life that day.
I had reached the spot where I had shot my first bush-buck ram, somewhat lower down in the Zwaart Kloof from the scene of the subsequent tragedy, and here it occurred to me that I would dismount and smoke a quiet pipe; in pursuance of which idea, feeling in my pocket for my pouch, my hand came in contact with the letters I had put there that morning, still unopened and totally forgotten. They were from England, but probably of no importance – possibly some further and tedious delay as to the transfer of my capital, but there was no such violent hurry about that.
The first mystified me, but very uncomfortably so. I believe my hand shook as I tore open the second, and then – and then – I could feel myself growing white and cold – everything was going round. A blow on the head could hardly have stunned me more. For, before I got half through the contents of that horrible communication, I realised the hideous fact. I was a ruined man. The solicitors to whom had been entrusted the transfer of my capital had defaulted for a huge amount, an amount beside which my little all was a mere sixpence, and every farthing of the said “little all” was in their hands. Beyond a few pounds in the bank at Fort Lamport, and the value of the few head of stock I had running on the place, I was penniless.
I stared at the hateful characters of the communication and shrank from reading it again. Yet I did so, and by its light the first I had opened stood explained. It was too explicit. The whole had vanished – vanished utterly. Not even a halfpenny in the pound would any composition afford.
What of the golden dream in which, but a moment ago it seemed, I had been enwrapped? What of the happy, healthful, independent life I had been mapping out? And, of course, what of Beryl?
All – all had vanished. No more thought of independence for me. As a man without means I must be at the beck and call of others, content that way merely to earn a livelihood. No more thought of love. That was a luxury as far beyond me now as a country seat or a town house. The rose-hued dream must disappear, dispelled by an irruption of dank and gloomy fog. I was practically a beggar.
Beryl was coming home to-morrow, but to me that meant nothing now. Yet how could I go through the anguish of dwelling beneath the same roof with her day after day, month after month, knowing that she was lost to me, for, of course, now I could never tell her. And then, as if to render the mockery more diabolically complete, a sort of consciousness came over me that had I spoken sooner she would have refused now to give me back my troth. She was of the stuff who would stand by a man through ill as well as through good. Well, it was too late now. The opportunity had gone – gone for ever.
Had this blow overtaken me earlier, or even now had I never known Beryl Matterson, it would have been bad enough. Now it had fallen with tenfold force – with a force that crushed. A wild eerie temptation came over me, as my glance rested upon the gun which stood against a boulder. This kloof had so recently witnessed one tragedy, why not another? There was nothing left in life, and in my then frame of mind I could imagine nothing worse in the hereafter than the veritable agony I was now undergoing. Indeed, so sharp was the temptation that I have a recollection of resolutely throwing all my cartridges over the krantz. Further, I remember walking with a sort of dazed stagger as I made my way over to where my horse had strayed some twenty yards, and was placidly cropping the grass, the bridle trailing on the ground.
Well, the situation had to be faced. I must pull myself together and make the best of it – which sounds an excellent, hard-headed, common sense, even cheery, way of looking at things, as a theory. At any rate, I kept repeating it over and over again to myself during that homeward ride and afterwards. But, alternating with it, in jangling refrain, was gloomy, hopeless, desperate fact – Ruined! Penniless! Beggared!
Chapter Twenty Four.
Turns of the Knife
“Hullo, Kenrick. What’s the row?” sang out Brian, even before he had got down from the driving seat. “Man, but you do look sick.”
“He just does,” echoed Iris from the back, herself as yet hardly visible.
A stranger who had been seated beside Brian now got down.
“Mr Holt, isn’t it?” he said. “Glad to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”
The address was frank and friendly, the aspect of the speaker prepossessing. I strove to respond with suitable cordiality, and while doing so a resolve flashed lightning-like through my mind. I was giving myself away by dwelling too much on this direful change. Well, I would not.
“Oh, I’m all jolly,” I said, with forced carelessness. “Think I got a touch of the sun yesterday. All right again now.”
The while I was helping to extract the other occupants of the Cape cart – first Iris, then Beryl. Her quick, solicitous glance as we clasped hands was not lost on me, nor was the tact wherewith she refrained from adding her comments upon my personal appearance. Then George got himself out, looking very sobered and subdued, and quite different to the impudent mischievous pup of so short a while back.
“Where’s the dad?” said Brian, looking up from his outspanning. “He’s not seedy, too, is he?”
“Not a bit. He’s down in the further land. Ah, here he comes. By Jove, Brian, you’ve had rather a load,” I went on, as I helped in the extraction of numerous bundles, and in the casting loose of the luggage lashed on behind. I must be doing something, I felt; talking too, otherwise the contrast between this return as I had pictured it hardly twenty-four hours ago and as it now was, would have been too forcibly brought home. Then, even though others were by, I would have managed to convey to Beryl what a delight her return had brought to, at any rate, myself; now, we had met in ordinary conventional fashion, and she was chatting with the stranger, while I chaffed Iris and tried to cheer up that poor little devil, George.
The stranger aforesaid, whose name was Pentridge, was a well-set-up, good-looking fellow of about my own age, a man to whom under other circumstances I should have taken. But now it was easy to see that Beryl occupied nearly, if not quite, as large a preponderance in his thoughts as she did in mine. He was a doctor by profession, and an old acquaintance of the Mattersons, though they had not met for some time. Now, meeting him by chance in Fort Lamport, Beryl had invited him out to the farm.
Here was a new element in the situation for which I had not bargained. The said situation I had thought out again and again during the twenty-four hours which had intervened since my first hearing the abominable news, and notably during an almost sleepless night. I would not say anything about it yet; would take time to think it over more fully. Meanwhile I had found some comfort in the thought that things would be to all outward appearance as they had been. Beryl and I would be together as before; and did I, by any chance, cherish a wild vague hope that anything might happen to cut the knot of the whole difficulty? I believe I did.
But now the advent of this stranger upset all this. In him I saw a rival, and a potent one, for he was probably in a position to declare himself at any moment, while I must perforce lie low. Not only this, but there was that in the personality of the fellow which rendered him doubly dangerous, for he was one of those men to whom all women would naturally turn, some indeed with headlong resistless attraction; whereas I, Kenrick Holt – plain, common-place, plodding – knew myself to be endowed with no such attributes, and had anybody hinted to the contrary, should have laughed in their face.
Upon the resolve to keep my own counsel for the present followed another one, and this was to throw off the dead weight which the change in my fortunes had at first bound upon me, outwardly at any rate. Wherefore as we all shook down again into the ordinary routine of life, I avoided any appearance of aloofness and strove to bear myself as if there had been no change at all. But it involved a tremendous effort of will, amounting at times almost to physical anguish. For instance, if we were taking a collective walk or ride, and I had to witness the incidental pairing off together of Beryl and Pentridge, the bitter reflection that up till now it would have been her and myself would require some crushing down, it may safely be assumed; or in half a hundred incidents of everyday life he had a way of showing her little attentions, and that in a way which to me, at any rate, was unmistakable, though there was this about Pentridge, he never trod upon his own heels, so to say, with over-eagerness.
Still, my manner towards her must have undergone an unconscious change, for more than once Beryl would give me a strange look which I could not quite fathom. Sometimes, too, she would take on almost a coldness towards me, as different from her former free, unaffected cordiality as it could possibly be. Ah! a light suddenly dawned upon me. I was in the way, was becoming a nuisance to her. And acting upon this idea, I threw myself into the work of the place with tenfold energy. That would keep me out pretty well all day, and every day – but then, there was always the evening.
To me there was a humorous element underlying even this situation, and it spelt Trask. Trask’s disgust on finding Pentridge already in the field was quite comical. He could no longer monopolise the conversation, and when he started in to be funny, Pentridge, without seeming to do so, would invariably cap his would-be wit, and effectually turn it against himself. In short, to use a homely metaphor, Trask’s nose was put clean out of joint.
“Who the deuce is that bounder Pentridge, Holt?” he said to me one day when we were alone together.
“First, I don’t know. Second, he’s rather a good chap.”
“Eh? Rather a good chap? Man alive! I should have thought if any one would wish him to the devil it’d be you.”
“Well, I don’t. I like the chap,” I rejoined, shortly.
Trask fired off a long whistle.
“That’s good,” he said. “That’s good, coming from you of all people, Holt. Why he’s cutting you out all along the line.”
Then I fired off a speech.
“I won’t pretend to misunderstand you, Trask,” I said. “But that sort of remark is in the rottenest taste, in fact downright caddish. And look here. For a good while past you have laid yourself out to try and make me a butt for your stodgy wit. Well, I’ve had enough of that – more than enough. So chuck it. See? Chuck it.”
“Oh, all right, Holt. Keep your hair on, old man. How beastly ‘short’ you’ve got in these days. You usen’t to be.”
There was an insinuation here conveyed that did not tend to soothe me, but possibly it was unintentional. Trask had a way of climbing down if tackled direct, that disarmed resentment. To do him justice, I don’t think it was due to cowardice, but to a feeling that he had gone too far, and a natural shrinking on the part of a man not actually drunk or an idiot, from the possibility of being made to look foolish in a row of his own bringing on.
One wet and drizzling day George, who was riding round the place with me during one of my tours of inspection, burst forth with —
“Man, but that chap Pentridge is dead spoons on Beryl.”
“What are you talking about?” I said, rather roughly, not relishing the topic, yet not unwilling, curiously enough, that he should pursue it.
“Why, of course he is. Any fool could see that. Why, they’re always together, and then the way he looks, and the way he talks to her. I mean not what he says, but the way he says it. Of course they are spoons. But he’s a fine chap – hey, Kenrick?”
The young rascal, it will be observed, had made a big brother of me by that time.
“That’s a great yarn you’ve got hold of there, George,” I answered, “but I should advise you not to be too fond of spinning it around, because I’m pretty certain Beryl wouldn’t like it.”
“Oh, of course I wouldn’t say it to any one but you, Kenrick,” he answered, rather hurt. I had taken the youngster somewhat under my wing of late, and he was keen to accompany me on my rounds. It had been decided that he must on no account be allowed to go about alone; in fact, his father had been advised to send him right away out of the locality altogether, and was even then negotiating for a school for him in Port Elizabeth or Cape Town. It could not be too far, it was represented.
The boy’s inconsequent chatter had given another turn to the knife. He was a sharp youngster, and prone to get in everybody’s way. Probably he had seen or heard more between the two than we had, but as to this, of course, I should curtly have shut him up had he volunteered any such narrative to me.
“We’ll just look round by Jabavu’s flock, and then go home,” I said.
“Ja, let’s. It’s beastly cold, and I’ve had enough of it,” he answered, as if that decided the matter.
Cold it assuredly was. A thin penetrating drizzle was falling, and the hilltops over beyond the valley were hidden in mist. Dotting the slope in front, which looked indescribably dreary in the drawing-in afternoon, a spread of white specks and patches represented a thousand or so of sheep.
“Why, there are several Kafirs there with Jabavu,” said George. “Look, Kenrick. There are at least three of them – no, two – counting him.”
The herd, as we drew near, made a great show of rounding up his flock. The other two stood still, awaiting our arrival. They gave me sullen greeting.
“What do you do here, you two? Who are you?” I said in Kafir, which I could talk fairly well by that time. And hardly had I uttered the words when I recognised the big savage, Sibuko, and in the other the fellow who had announced his amiable intention of cutting my throat up there in the cattle-stealers’ cave. “You. What is your name?” I went on, pointing at this latter.
“Maqala.”
The fellow was staring at me with an expression of impudent menace. I didn’t relish his off-hand way of answering, and it was all I could do to restrain myself from laying my whip about his shoulders; but I remembered that we had had enough trouble of late, and it would be as well to avoid a fresh quarrel. So I said —
“Go, Maqala. Go, Sibuko. You have no business here. Go.”
They muttered something as they slouched their blankets around them, and strolled leisurely away. But for one moment, as their glances rested on the boy, the expression of their countenances was such that I thought it would be well if those school negotiations could be brought to a head as soon as possible. Anyhow, that they were here to-day for no good was as certain as that they were here at all.
“I wonder if they’ve been ‘slaag-ing,’” said George.
Evidently he was under no apprehension on the other head, which was as well.
“I don’t think so,” I answered, “but we can count and see.” So we called Jabavu, and having halted our horses a little way apart, made him drive the whole flock slowly between us. The count was correct.
The herd, who was one of Kuliso’s people, declared that these two had merely sat down for a while to have a chat. What harm could they do? he said. They were not even disturbing the game, for they had no dogs.
This was undeniable, but I had a very uncomfortable feeling on the subject of the encounter; and a conviction that these two scoundrels had joined hands through no mere chance, but were watching their opportunity for mischief, forced itself in upon my mind more and more; and as we rode home in the gathering dusk, I almost forgot my own troubles in thinking out what form such mischief might take, and how to guard against it.
A presentiment is a wholly arbitrary thing and subject to no laws of reasoning whatever. Such a presentiment was upon me then. I felt irresistibly that some danger hung over some or all of us, and that when we should be least on our guard. Well, the only way to defeat it was never to be off our guard.