Bertram Mitford (continued 2)

“No, but it’ll amount to something. After that—I have an idea.”

“An idea. Pho! That for an idea. One plan’s worth all the ‘ideas’ in the world.”

Le Sage, you see, had got into his element now. His nervousness had quite left him.

“Call it a plan then. And as to it I am hopeful. Why should a man’s luck always be bad, Le Sage. Why the deuce shouldn’t good times dawn for him? Ah! Look there.”

Even as he spoke the mist, which had been lightening over the river, parted with a suddenness that was almost startling, and from a widening patch of vivid blue the newly risen sun poured down his life-giving beams. It was as an instantaneous transition from darkness to light—to bright, beautiful. Nature-awakening light—and with it the birds began to pipe and call with varying note from the surrounding bushes, while a troop of monkeys gambolling upon a sandspit down in the river-bed, were amusing themselves by leaping its channel, to and fro, as though in sheer gladness of heart. Further and further the mist rolled back, unfolding a dewy sparkle upon bush and veldt, a shroud as of myriad diamonds.

“Look—where?” queried Le Sage, shortly.

“Why, at how suddenly it became light, just as I was talking about my plan—and luck changing. I’m not superstitious, but I’ll be hanged if I won’t take that as an omen—and a good one.”

Le Sage grunted, and shook his head in utter disgust.

“An omen?” he repeated. “Good Lord, Wyvern, what rot. Man, you’ll never be anything but a dreamer, and you can’t run a farm upon dreams—no nor anything else. Would you mind letting me into this ‘plan’ of yours?”

“At present I would. Later on, not now. And now, Le Sage, if you have quite done schoolmastering me, I move that we go back. In fact, I don’t know that it was worth while our coming so far just to say all that.”

“But you’ll think so in a minute. It happens I haven’t said all I came to say, and as it has to be said, I may as well say it at once and without beating around the bush. You must cease thinking of Lalanté at all. You must consider your engagement to her at an end.”

Wyvern had felt nearly certain that some such statement constituted the real object of their talk, but now that it was made, it was none the less a blow. He felt himself growing a shade paler under the weather worn bronze of his face.

“What does Lalanté herself say about it,” was his rejoinder.

“Say? Say?” echoed Le Sage, angrily. “She has no say in the matter. I simply forbid it.”

“You can’t do that, Le Sage. She is of full age, you know,” said Wyvern quietly, but with a ring of sadness in his tone. “Look here—no, wait—hear me out,” seeing that the other was about to interrupt with a furious rejoinder. “I’ve set myself out all through this interview never for a moment to lose sight of the fact that you are her father, consequently have sat quiet under a tone I would stand from no other man alive. But even the authority of a father has its limits, and you have started in to exercise yours a trifle too late.”

“Then you refuse to give her up?” furiously.

“Most distinctly. Unless, that is, she herself wished it.”

“Oh, you would then?” said Le Sage, quickly, clutching at a straw.

“Certainly. But I must hear it from her own lips, face to face. Not through a third party, or on paper.” Le Sage’s “straw” seemed to sink.

“I don’t want to irritate you further, Le Sage,” went on Wyvern after a moment’s pause. “But I’m convinced as firmly as that you and I are sitting here that I shall never hear anything of the sort. It is not in Lalanté to turn from me in misfortune. Our love is too complete.”

“And I don’t count. I, her father, am to stand aside as of no account at all?”

The unconscious pathos that welled up in the very bitterness of his tone, reflected what had lain beneath his mind since some time back—that his child should be so ready and eager to leave him. And Wyvern’s instinct was quick to grasp it.

“I quite see your import and sympathise,” he said. “Yes, I sympathise, thoroughly. But Nature is nothing if not pitiless, and this is a provision of Nature. And look here, Le Sage, my existing run of ill-luck ought to be a recommendation from your point of view in that you will be able to keep the child longer with you, for of course I don’t dream of claiming her until my luck changes.”

“That’ll be never then,” rejoined the other, savagely. “Man, haven’t you more sense of honour than to pin a girl to her contract when you know you haven’t enough to keep yourself, let alone her? She is very young too. I don’t know how I ever gave my consent.”

“She has commonsense and capability far beyond her years, and you know it. Now see here, Le Sage. Be reasonable about this, and give me some sort of a show. If I bring off my plan satisfactorily, I shan’t be the first man whose luck has turned.”

“Oh, damn your ‘plan’ and your ‘luck’ too!” retorted the other, now completely losing his temper. “The first’s a fraud and the other’s fudge. Look here, if you weren’t so much infernally bigger and stronger than me, I’d start in now to hammer you within an inch of your life, but as you are, it’s of no use trying.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Wyvern quietly, but not sneeringly.

Le Sage had got up and was pacing up and down feverishly. Wyvern had never moved. Had he known it, he was at that moment in some considerable peril. He was sitting right on the edge of the krantz, and the other was behind him; and Le Sage was one of those men who when they do fairly lose their tempers go nearly mad. Now his face was ghastly, and he snarled like a cornered animal.

“Your plan’s a fraud,” he repeated furiously, “and you’re a fraud yourself. You humbugged me into believing you were a man of solid position, while all the time you were a damned, useless, bankrupt waster. You sneaked my consent under false pretences. Yes, under false pretences,” he bellowed, “and now I withdraw it. D’you hear? I withdraw it unconditionally, you—swindler.”

Wyvern had risen now, but with no sort of idea of violence, and stood confronting the infuriated man.

“Now, Le Sage, don’t you think all this is rather cowardly on your part?” he said, in a quiet, expostulatory tone. “I mean because you must know that you’re the one man privileged to say such things to me—in fact, to go on all day calling me all the frauds and swindlers you want to, and still remain absolutely immune from retaliation. It’s not fair.”

“Not fair, eh?” snarled Le Sage, infuriated by the other’s coolness, though there was nothing in this that was in the least offensive or taunting. “Well, now, look here. Get away off my place, d’you see? This is my ground. A mile further on is my boundary. Well, get across that as soon as ever you like, and don’t set foot on my place again, or by God, I might even blow your brains out.”

“Then you’d get hanged or shut up for a considerable time, and would that be good for Lalanté?”

“Go—d’you hear,” stamped the furious man. “Go. There’s the boundary. Go over it—to hell or the devil.”

“You don’t expect me to walk ten miles when I’ve got a horse, do you? I left one at your place, and, incidentally, a tooth-brush.”

Le Sage by this time was reduced to exhausted speechlessness. He could only glare helplessly. Not wishing to exasperate him further and needlessly, Wyvern had refrained from saying that he had no intention of going until he had seen Lalanté once more. She would be on the look-out for their return, he knew that, would probably come forth to welcome—him, Le Sage would have no power to prevent their meeting.

So they walked back these two, as they had come, in silence.

Chapter Nine.

“Number One.”

Gilbert Warren, attorney-at-law, was seated in his office looking out upon the main street of Gydisdorp.

He was an alert, straight, well-set-up man, not much on the further side of thirty, handsome, too, in the dark-haired, somewhat hatchet-faced aquiline type. He was attired in a cool, easy-fitting suit of white duck, for the day had been hot, and still wore his broad-brimmed hat, for he had only just come in.

Now he unlocked a drawer in his table, somewhat hastily, impatiently might almost have been said. Thence he extracted a bundle of documents, and began eagerly to peruse them. Among them were deeds of mortgage.

“A damn rotten place,” he said to himself. “These fools have got bitten this time, and serves ’em right. I advised them against touching it. Now to me it doesn’t matter. I don’t mind dropping a little on it to get him out. If I take it over, why then he’ll have to go—and it’s worth it. I will—Come in.”

This in reply to a knock. A clerk entered.

“It’s Ripton, about that committal judgment. Will you see him, sir?”

”—To the devil, willingly,” replied Warren sharply. “Tell him to go there.”

The clerk went out, tittering, to inform the individual in question that Warren was very busy, and couldn’t possibly find time to attend to him to-day, an intimation which had the effect of sending that much harassed and debt-hung waggon-maker slouching down the street, gurgling forth strange profanities, and consigning lawyers in general, and Warren in particular, to the care of precisely the same potentate to whom Warren had just consigned him; only in far more sultry, and utterly unprintable, terms.

“Yes, I’ll take it over,” the attorney’s thoughts ran on, as he scanned the papers. “I can afford a loss on it—rather—and then the stake! Good God! I’d cheerfully plank down all I’ve made, and start life again, kaal, (lit: naked) for that. Out he’ll have to walk—and not much to take along with him either. He won’t show his nose around that neighbourhood again. Le Sage will take care of the rest.”

Warren was the leading attorney in Gydisdorp. The district was large, well-to-do, and litigious, wherefore over and above will-drawing and conveyancing, and so forth, he had as much practice as he could take care of. There were other matters he undertook, but on the quiet, which were even more paying. Shafto, who came next to him, used to declare that Warren ought to be struck off the rolls; but as the two were great friends and invariably took a couple of “splits” together per diem, in the bar of the Masonic Hotel, nobody believed Shafto—only laughed. Besides, Warren was popular. He was genial and gifted, could tell a good story and sing a good song; moreover, he was a keen sportsman. So life, on the whole, was a rosy thing for him, and more so that Warren’s creed could be summed up in a word and a figure. This was it: Number 1.

Pushing the deeds aside, Warren unlocked a drawer, and produced another enclosure. This he handled carefully, tenderly one might have said. Undoing the soft paper wrappings, he extracted a—photograph. Propping it up on his writing-table, he began to study it, and as he did so his face softened unconsciously. Then he took up a large magnifying glass. The powerful lens threw into relief the seductive lines of the splendid figure, the curve of the smiling mouth, the glad, luminous dilation of the eyes—and—it was identical with the portrait hanging on Wyvern’s wall—the one that was dusted and cared for.

This had not been given to Warren by its original. Only one had been given by her to anybody, and it we have seen before. Neither had he stolen it. But a considerable bribe to the photographer’s assistant, himself in difficulties—Warren was nowhere if he failed to take advantage of other people’s difficulties—had procured him this, and another copy, which, he kept at his own house. And as the photographer drove his trade at Cape Town, some hundreds of miles distant from Gydisdorp, why that rendered the transaction all the safer.

“Out he goes,” he murmured mechanically, his glance riveted on the portrait. “Out he goes—and then—I come in. Only—do I?”

The crack of a waggon whip and the harsh yell of the driver, from the street outside; the clear, deep-toned voices of a group of Kafirs passing along the footway, rising and falling in cadenced modulation, the barking of a cur, these were the sounds—everyday sounds—that smote upon his ear in the drowsy afternoon heat. Then rose another, and hearing it he quickly put the photograph face downwards, drawing over it a litter of papers. The sound was that of steps, ascending the wooden staircase—for Warren chose to have his own office off the ground floor, contrary to usual custom in Gydisdorp, so as to ensure greater privacy.

“Come in.”

There entered the same clerk, having barely had time to knock.

“Mr Wyvern would like to see you, sir.”

“Wyvern? Certainly. In a minute or two. I’ll ring.”

The clerk retired. The “minute or two” was spent by Warren in carefully wrapping up the photograph again and replacing it in the drawer. Which done he banged the spring handbell on his table and waited.

“Why, Wyvern, my dear old chap, how are you? Glad to see you again—only wish I could be of more use to you though.”

He was wringing the other’s hand, and his tone was of the most cordial Warren knew how to play on the cordiality stop in a way to soothe the most suspicious, and Wyvern was not suspicious.

“Oh, I’m all right,” said the other, with a careless laugh, not altogether free from a note of despondency.

“By Jove! You look it too,” said Warren, taking in the tall, fine figure, and the clear-cut face with its hall-mark of breeding stamped large. The clear blue eyes, too, were those of a man in the pink of condition, and taking it all in he realised that with his own powers of attraction, which were undoubted, he himself would be nowhere beside this one, or, at any rate, not where he wanted to be—and the rest didn’t matter. “Well, now, what are the latest developments? They are going to foreclose, aren’t they?”

“Yes. It doesn’t matter much in the long run. I’ve got another scheme on hand now. I’m going to sell out and clear.”

“Eh? The deuce you are?” cried Warren, surprised out of his normal and impassive attitude. “Have a drink, old chap—then we can talk things over snugly. What’ll you have? Whisky or dop?”

“Dop, thanks. It’s a Heaven-sent liquor for this climate.”

Warren took the opportunity while getting out the said refreshment to pull himself together. The other’s news had come just in the nick of time. He need not now take over the mortgage on Seven Kloofs. Its owner was going to dear out anyhow; and he himself would be saved a sure and certain loss.

“Here you are now,” he said, “help yourself. Have a weed, too,” taking a cigar out of a box, and shoving the latter across to Wyvern. “So you’re going to clear, are you? Well, I shall miss you, old chap, so will someone else, I expect—eh? Of course, as acting for Keeling, I’ve been in a sort of way a professional enemy, but I haven’t really, for I’ve more than once kept him from putting the screw on you.”

“I know you have, Warren, and it’s devilish good of you.”

“Oh, that’s all right. You see, we can’t refuse business unless it’s downright shady, so I couldn’t chuck this because you and I are pals. Besides, I’ve done you far more good by taking it. If I hadn’t, Shafto would have got it, and I don’t think, somehow, you’d have found him any improvement. Eh?”

“No, indeed,” laughed Wyvern, who didn’t like Shafto, and whom Shafto didn’t like.

“You’ll find it a bit of a wrench parting with your place, Wyvern?”

“Rather. I love every stick and stone on it, although I’ve only had it such a short time. Besides—it has associations.”

“Of course,” laughed the other, significantly. “One of them being that it has ruined you.”

“Well, yes. But even that has carried its compensations.”

“What are you going to launch out in next? I know you’re a reticent chap, Wyvern, but we’re old pals, and if there’s any sort of way in which I can ever give you a leg up, you know you can rely upon me. I don’t ask with any notion of poking my nose into your private affairs, you know.”

“Well, first of all I’m going to Natal to look up a former friend of mine. We served together in the Zulu War; in fact, we raced neck to neck off that infernal Hlobane Mountain, through thousands of raging devils, and made rather more than a nodding acquaintance with grim old Death that day.”

“By Jove! I should think so. Who is he, by the way?”

“He’s trading in Zululand. He thinks I might join him with advantage.”

“I see,” said Warren, secretly foiled in that he had not got the name. But he was nothing if not cautious. He could get at that later, while not seeming too curious. “Well, I hope you’ll have luck—and return triumphant. By the way, didn’t you have a bit of a breeze with old Le Sage the other day?”

“Now how the devil did you get hold of that for a yarn, Warren? I haven’t opened my head about it to any living soul—not even a nigger.”

The other smiled knowingly.

“There’s very little I don’t get hold of, old chap. What if Le Sage told me himself?”

“Did he?”

“Yes. He abused you so infernally that I had to tell him to stop—reminding him you were a pal of mine. Then he abused me, but that I didn’t mind. We do a lot of business together. You can stand a good deal from anybody on those terms.”

“I suppose so. I like Le Sage and don’t bear any grudge against him, though for a day or two after I did feel rather sore. He lost his temper a bit, and I felt sorry for him, because losing one’s temper takes it out of one so. I know it does out of me when I lose mine.”

Warren roared.

“When you lose yours! Why, you never do.”

“Don’t I? But it’s a most infernal weakness. You are sure to come out bottom dog if you do.”

“That’s about it. Have another drink? No? Sure? Well, then, old man, come out with me to my place for the night. What do you say? We can have a good old yarn, and we shan’t have many more of them if you’re trekking.”

“All right. I will.”

“That’s good. Now look here. I’ve got about an hour’s business to tackle, then you romp back here, and we’ll ride out together. No. I won’t ask you to take a cut in at écarté. I know you hate the sight of a pack of cards as dourly as any Covenanting Presbyterian ‘meenister.’”

“Well, I do,” laughed Wyvern, “but not for the same reason. The evening isn’t the time for mathematical calculation. It’s the time for yarning and pipes, and conviviality in general. All right. In an hour, then. So long.”

Warren ran a bachelor establishment some seven miles out of Gydisdorp. It was, in fact a fine farm, but he was interested in it mainly as a game preserve; the fanning department he turned over to an overseer “on the halves.” Not that he was ignorant on that side either, for he exacted his full share of what was yielded by the capabilities of the place. Here he was wont to entertain his friends, and comparatively high play was frequently the order of the evening; indeed it was whispered that it constituted a material addition to his store, both in currency and landed estate. He did neither at Wyvern’s expense, however, for the latter declared, once and for all, that he had nothing to lose, and in the next place the whole thing bored him beyond words.

So when Wyvern returned an hour later the two men rode out together, and passed an exceedingly pleasant and convivial evening. Wherein Warren was a paradox. He had a real liking for the other, and would have done anything in the world to do him a good turn, under all other circumstances. Here, however, Wyvern must be sacrificed, for mere friendship was but a featherweight beside Warren’s overmastering but as yet secret passion for Lalanté Le Sage, and have we not said that the sum of Warren’s credo was Number 1!

And of the two portraits, one in Warren’s office, the other in his home, Wyvern, of course, knew nothing.

Chapter Ten.

In the Third Kloof.

Wyvern was sitting out on the stoep smoking his first after supper pipe.

The night was still fairly warm, though just a touch of a sharp twinge showed that it was one of those nights whereon it might not be good to sit still in the open—let alone doze in one’s chair—too long. A broad moon, not yet at full, hung in the cloudlessness of the star-gemmed firmament, and he sat listening to the voices of night—the shrill bay of hunting jackals, the ghostly whistle of invisible plover overhead, the boom of belated beetles, the piping screech of tree-frogs, and every now and again an unrestful bark from the dogs lying on the moonlit sward in front. Yet, listening, he heard them not, for his mind was active in other directions. For instance, it was just such a night as this, nearly a month ago, that Lalanté had been sitting here with him, nestling to his side, and the sweet witching hour of enchantment had gone by in happy converse. Yet, since, what transition had taken place. A few stolen meetings, more or less hurried, were all the comfort his weary soul could obtain, and now in a day or two, he would be going forth from here homeless—homeless from this home he loved so well, and, of late, tenfold, in that she was to share it with him.

Then despondency grew apace. His new venture—what was likely to come out of that? Was it indeed as Le Sage had said—that he had not got it in him to do any good for himself? But as though to brace him, came the recollection of this girl, and her sweet presence here, here on the very spot where he now was; this girl, so totally outside his previous experience, so totally unlike anyone he had ever seen before, in her sunny winsomeness, in her brave clear hope, and unconventional decision of character, and, far above all, the unreserved richness of her love which she had poured forth all upon him. Her presence seemed with him now in the distilling fragrance of the sweet calm night—would that it really were—to charm away the despondency that lay upon his soul. Despondency was not strength, she had said in her brave encouraging way. No, it was not; but how throw it off? Suddenly an idea struck him.

He went into the house. Two guns in their covers stood in a corner. One of these he unsheathed, and opening the breech looked down the barrels against the light. They were clear and without a speck. One was rifled, to take the Number 2 Musket ammunition, the other was smooth bore Number 12, and a complete cylinder, guiltless of choke. From a drawer he took half-a-dozen cartridges to fit each; those for the smooth bore being loaded with loepers—three and three and three, in layers, a charge calculated to stop the very devil himself. Then changing his boots for a pair of velschoenen made of the softest of raw hide and quite noiseless, he set forth.

The dogs, lying outside, seeing the gun, sprang up, squirming and whining with delight. It needed quite an amount of persuasion, objurgatory, and running to a mild kick or two, to convince them that their aid and companionship was not in the least wanted upon this occasion. It even required the argument of a couple of stones—flung so as carefully to avoid hitting them—when he reached the outer gate, conclusively to convince them. Then Wyvern took his way along the narrow bush track heading for the entrance to the deep wild kloofs—alone.

He had struck the spoor of a leopard—from the pads an unusually large one—that morning, leading along the bottom of the mazy network of kloofs. Into one of these it had led—the one known as the Third Kloof—and from the passing and repassing of the tracks, now faint, now fresh, he had deduced that the beast was in the habit of using this way as a regular path. Here, then, was a cure for despondency—temporary but exhilarating—but the exhilaration was somewhat dashed by the thought that this was probably the last time he would undertake such a quest here, in what his neighbours characterised by the term of his “vermin-preserve” and voted an unmitigated pest.

Shod in silence he took his way noiselessly along. The bottom of the kloofs was smooth and grassy, which, of course, favoured him. Faint zephyrs of the still night air fanned his face, and here and there a rustling in the black mysterious depths of the bush on either hand, told that his presence was not altogether unknown to its keen denizens. To the dwellers in towns and artificiality there would have been something inexpressibly weird and nerve-stirring in this mystery-suggesting solitude, in the great sweep of the bush-clad spurs, black and gloomy in shadow, silvern and ghostly where the moon reached them, and in the stealthy unknown sounds coming unexpectedly, now on this hand now on that, from the darksome depths of their recesses, but to this man it all brought a strange tightening of the heart. All this mystery of shaggy wood, and sphinx-like krantz looming grey in the moonlight, had been his—his property, his very own—and now it was so no longer. The cloud of despondency was deepening down upon him again.

He had been walking now rather more than an hour, and the moon, mounting higher, was pouring down her pale vertical beams right upon these labyrinthine recesses. Then he struck off from the valley bottom, and ascending, cautiously, noiselessly, the steep and stony hillside, gained a point some fifteen yards higher up.

The position was formed by some small boulders, overhung by spek-boem, and it commanded an ample view of anything passing beneath. He knew the spot well, as indeed he knew every inch of that bushy maze, in parts so thick and tangled and thorn-studded as to be well-nigh impenetrable; many a fine bushbuck ram had he stopped in mid career from this very point when they had been driving out the kloofs, during one of those hunts to which he would from time to time convene his neighbours. Here, as he lay, he scanned the open smoothness of the grassy valley bottom. But upon it there was no sign of any moving life.

The kloof ended in a mass of tumbled terraced cliff, overhung by a row of straight-stemmed, plumed euphorbia; with aloes, gnome-like in the moonlight, caught here and there in crevice or on ledge. Within the face of the rock slanted black clefts, constituting a complete rookery for the denizens of what his neighbours termed “Wyvern’s vermin-preserve.” And it was, from his point of view, the very heart of the surrounding maze, and was known as the Third Kloof.

At the meetings of the Gydisdorp Farmers’ Association, Wyvern’s name was held in evil odour on this account, yet now, lying out in the ghostly, solitary night, he thought of it with glee; for was he not possessor, even if for the last time, of what little there was left of strange, wild Nature, and how many of those who thus decried him, at this hour snoring in bed, would have taken the trouble to turn out under the moon to reduce the “vermin” aforesaid by one? With a lively gathering and dogs, and all that, they were ready enough, but—generally missed what they came out for, and were happy enough to shoot bushbucks instead.

One of these now passed immediately below him as he lay, a fine ram, its dark hide and white belly, and long, straight, slightly spiral horns showing in the moonlight almost as clear as by day. But he never moved. This was not his game to-night. This was not what he had come out for. Then he noticed that the animal began to show signs of uneasiness. It stopped short, raised its head from the grass it had been daintily nibbling, then resumed its nibbling. Then it raised its head again, and seemed to be listening; its full lustrous eye turned towards him showed concern. The head then turned towards the upper end of the kloof, and in the clear light the spectator could even see the working of the nostrils as the graceful animal snuffed in the still night air as though winding something. Then with a couple of bounds it disappeared within the blackness of the further line of bush.

The pulses of the lonely watcher tingled. What had alarmed the buck? All his senses were now concentrated on the point towards which the startled animal had been looking. Ah! This was what he had come out for.

There had stolen out into the open a shape, a long, cat-like, spotted shape. Well he knew it, and now more than ever did excitement thrill his frame. The beast paused, standing erect, its tail slightly waving, its head thrown upwards and opened into a mighty yawn which displayed its great fangs. There was a water-hole in the hollow of the kloof, usually a mere mass of slimy liquid mud, now, thanks to the recent rains fairly well filled. To this the leopard paced, its massive velvety paws noiseless in their springy gait. Then dropping its head it began to lap, and the disturbance of the water seemed quite loud in the stillness of the night. Cautiously the watcher took aim. The question was should he use the rifle or the shot barrel. At that short distance he could not miss. He decided in favour of the bullet, and had just got his sight well on behind the shoulder, when—

The great leopard raised its speckled head, and suddenly gathered itself together, as though listening intently. This for a fraction of a minute, but sufficiently long to have shifted its position, and the moonlight was uncertain. But before the watcher could get his sights on to the right spot again, in a glide and a bound it had disappeared into the sheltering shadow of the bush.

Wyvern’s disgust will hardly bear describing in words. Why had he not got in his shot while he had the chance, and while it was well-nigh impossible to miss. Now he had let his chance go by, and it was not in the least likely to recur. But, what on earth was it that had alarmed the beast?

Below, like an eye, the water-hole glared dully. Beyond it now something was standing—a something which seemed to have risen out of the very earth itself—and it took the black figure of a man. And Wyvern was conscious of the cold shuddering thrill that passed through his own system, for the hideous pock-marked countenance turned upward towards him with deathlike stare, was that of the big Kafir whom the puff-adder had bitten—had bitten again and again and who was, of course, long since dead.

How could it be otherwise? No human system could survive an hour with all that deadly venom injected into it. He could have sworn to that awful face—it had been too deeply impressed upon his recollection at the time of the ghastly incident for him to forget it. There could not be another like it in the world; and it was fully visible to him now with the moon full upon it as the phantom stood there, huge and black. No—the thing could not be mortal. It was a physical impossibility—and he felt his flesh creep as it had never yet done.

The figure was moving. It had struck a crouching attitude, and was coming straight for where he lay. Instinctively Wyvern grasped the gun—though what was the use of a weapon against a thing not of flesh and blood? For a second it paused, then with a bound like that of the savage animal it had just scared away it alighted where the bush and the open met. There was a momentary and convulsive struggle accompanied by fierce hissing, then the horrible figure sprang upright, and stood, holding aloft, firmly grasped by the neck, a large puff-adder.

In the throes of strangulation the bloated coils of the reptile whipped the air convulsively, smooth and slimy in the moonlight—but it was powerless to strike. Itself of no light weight, yet its destroyer was able to hold it at arm’s length and at the same time never relax that deadly, strangling grip—the while the expression of the repulsive and horrible countenance turned upon the agonising reptile was one of fiendish gloating. At length the furious writhings died down into a faint muscular heave, and the black fiend, relaxing none of his grip of the now dead reptile, glided into the dark shades which had covered the retreat of the leopard.

Not a sound had been uttered—beyond the first hissing of the snake—not a word said; the whole scene had been horrible and eerie beyond the power of words to describe, in its weird setting of moonlit forest, and cliff and rugged spur. What devilish scene was this which had been enacted there, all in so brief a space of time that the witness thereof could hardly believe he had not dreamt it? Though not in the least timid, Wyvern was an imaginative man, and his imaginative powers were largely stimulated and fostered by his solitary life. Now he asked himself whether the wretched savage had really returned to earth—in a word—“walked,” and there in the wild and moonlit solitude the answer seemed very like an affirmative. He recalled Lalanté’s scare when they had been searching for the remains of this very being, and how no trace of any living thing had been apparent, even to Le Sage’s practised eyes. What did it all mean? Well, it need concern him no further, for in a day or two his interest in Seven Kloofs would be a thing of the past. And having thus decided, a sudden and, under the circumstances, strange drowsiness came upon him and he slept.

The Southern Cross turned in the heavens, and the soft breaths of night played around his forehead and still Wyvern slumbered on, and in the midst of that drear but beautiful solitude he dreamed. He was back at Seven Kloofs again, and, once more, it was his very own. All anxieties were wiped away, and they were rejoicing together in the joy of possession, and in their new-found, undimmed happiness—and then, and then—the stars faded in the lightening vault as the chill dawn awoke the sleeper, heart-weary and sick with the melting of the blissful illusion. But—what was this?

A strange sound, terminating in a sort of whine. Keen and alert now, Wyvern peered forth, just as the great leopard halted beneath, finishing his cavernous yawn, and looking inquiringly upward where scent or instinct told him some enemy was lurking. But just a fraction of a moment too long did he tarry, as the bullet sped forth; the thundrous echoes of the report rolling in many-tongued reverberation among the rocks and krantzes. The great spotted cat lay gasping out its life, with a severed spine.

There are compensatory moments in life, and this was one of them. In the keen exhilaration of the successful shot, Wyvern noted that the beast was an abnormally large and fine specimen of its kind. The skin should be a parting gift to Lalanté; a final memento of Seven Kloofs.

Chapter Eleven.

Dreams—and a Visit.

“I wonder why Mr Wyvern never comes over to see us now,” remarked small Frank Le Sage, one morning.

“I believe he and Lala have had a row,” rejoined smaller Charlie; for thus were they wont at times to abbreviate their sister’s uncommon, and to them high-sounding name.

She for her part smiled. She would not “shut them up,” she liked to hear them talk about him.

“Man, but he’s a fine chap,” went on the first speaker. “I seem to miss him no end.”

“Rather,” assented the other. “And doesn’t he just know how to make stunning catapults!”

“And to use them too,” came the rejoinder.

Lalanté, who had been contemplating the small speakers with a smile of tender approval, burst out laughing at this ingenuous and whole-hearted appreciation of the absent one’s claim to esteem.

“And so that’s all he’s a ‘fine chap’ for, is it?” she said.

“Oh, no. He’s a jolly fine chap all round, you know.”

“Rather,” confirmed the other. Then, insinuatingly, “I say, Lalanté. Let us off that beastly catechism this morning, won’t you? It’s such a jolly morning to go down the kloof and humbug about.”

It was Sunday, and the form of instruction thus irreverently qualified, was wont on that day to take the place of the “three R’s” already referred to.

“Yes, and get yourselves into a nice mess, and tear yourselves to pieces. Supposing any visitors were to turn up—you wouldn’t be fit to be seen,” answered the girl. But her tone was, for the object they had in view, anything but hopeless.

“We shan’t get any visitors except Mr Wyvern, and he won’t care,” replied he who had made the request.

“I hope he will turn up,” declared the other. “He does spin such ripping good yarns. Do let us off, Lala.”

For answer they were encircled by an arm apiece, and upon each eager, pleading face was bestowed a hearty kiss.

“You darlings, I will then,” she said, releasing them. “But—go and put on your old clothes. I’m not going to have you running wild in those.”

Away they sped rejoicing. The condition was not a hard one. It is only fair to say, however, that their hymn of praise to the absent Wyvern was in no way inspired by ulterior motive. Their admiration for him was whole-souled and genuine.

Lalanté looked after them with something of a sigh. They could be happy enough—a small trifle would accomplish that. But she? However cheerful and sanguine and comforting she might be in the presence of her lover, there were times, when alone, that her heart failed her. And now that presence was withdrawn.

Nearly a month had gone by since her father had fixed an open quarrel upon him, which quarrel, for all its tragic potentialities, had found a somewhat tame and commonplace outcome at the time, to all outward seeming, that is. She had, as Wyvern had foreseen, come out to welcome him on that eventful morning; and while obliged to bid him good-bye then, had assured him openly and unmistakably, and in the presence of her father, that she had no more intention of giving him up than she had of jumping off the nearest krantz; a declaration which caused Le Sage to snarl and curse. Then Wyvern, having the good sense to see that no good purpose could be served by further irritating his quondam friend, had bidden her good-bye—not less affectionately than usual we may be sure—and had ridden off.

Since then a frost had set in between Lalanté and her father, but it was of his own creation and nursing, for after the first soreness, the girl had shown him the same affection as before, possibly even more; for, strange to say, she was capable of seeing the matter from his point of view; moreover she knew that his own soreness was largely a matter of jealousy in that he was no longer first. But she would not promise not to see Wyvern again, and this rankled in Le Sage’s mind more than ever, especially as he felt certain she would find opportunities of seeing him.

As a matter of fact she did so find them, but they were few and far between—and only then, when her father’s business necessitated his absence from home. Now of this Le Sage was aware, or at any rate more than suspicious. He was too proud to question Lalanté, she having frankly declared that she could not defer to his wishes in the matter. But his hatred of Wyvern became almost an obsession, dangerous alike to himself and its object. He had one satisfaction, however, out of which he gleaned grim comfort—he held the power now to eject Wyvern from Seven Kloofs within the space of a few months; in the acquisition of which power Vincent Le Sage had made the first bad bargain he had ever been known to make in his life.

Her small brothers having skipped off down the kloof, clad in their old garments and armed with a catapult apiece—to the latter extent supremely happy, Lalanté dropped into a roomy cane chair upon the stoep and let herself go in meditation. Let it not be supposed, however, that hers was any mere contemplative life; far from it. Her strong, capable young nature was eminently cut out for the discharge of everyday duties, and the discharge of them well, too. We have seen how she managed her two small brothers, but her father’s comfort came second to nothing, and into all that concerned him, and occupied his daily interest, she entered thoroughly. Whereby it is manifest that from his point of view there was a good deal of excuse to be made for his soreness now. And if, as we have said, she had no “accomplishments,” and no high opinion of mere schooling, of which, by the way, she had undergone her full share, she had what was better, tact and the capability of rendering the lives of those belonging to her happy and comfortable.

Leaning back in her chair now, in an attitude of meditative ease, her hands knitted behind the soft masses of her sheeny hair, the curving lines of her figure, gowned in cool white, revealed to a sensuous advantage that was wholly unstudied and unconscious, her large grey eyes dilated between their thick lashes, accentuated by the sun-kissed tinge of brown in her clear complexion, the girl made a beautiful picture. In and out beneath the green leaves of the trellised vine which verandahed the stoep, long-waisted hornets winged their way, the winnowing draught of their flight fanning her face; but to such she paid no heed. Her wide gaze was fixed on nothing, but wandered afar—beyond the green and gold of the rolling, spek-boem clad ridges. What was he doing on this heavenly morning? If only he would come over, moved by some afterthought? Why not? Surely a few words need not open so wide a gulf—a few words between men, and one of them angry. But with a sigh she recognised, young as she was, that a few words might open a wider gulf than even a few deeds. If only he would!

There was small chance of it—in fact none. Yet, even then, Lalanté could not be pronounced unhappy. She had all his love, and he had hers. No room was there for any shadow of a doubt or misgiving upon that score, and now she, so to say, bathed herself in its consciousness, even though temporarily reft of the presence of the other of the two thus making to themselves a very paradise within the world!

Strange to say, considering her youth, and the circumstances, after the first natural soreness Lalanté had shown no resentment against her father for the part he had borne in the matter. Him she had treated in the same way as ever, indeed in a manner calculated to soothe rather than feed his rancour. On one or two occasions when he had savagely abused the absent one, she had, with great mastery of self-control, refrained from angry retort, and had begged him, as a matter of consideration for her, to refrain from wounding her. “You would not hurt your little Lalanté, would you, dear?” she had said with an arm round his shoulder. “Well, when you say these things you hurt me as much as you would if you hit me with a stick or a stone. No—more.” And Le Sage had stared, startled, into the moist eyes, and mumbling something, had left the room—hurriedly. But he never abused Wyvern again, at least not in her presence—nor when there was any possibility of her being within earshot. It is even possible that he might have relented, and extended a helping hand to the unlucky one, or at any rate have tolerated a further effort; but the hard, business instinct of the invariably successful man rose, as a bar—as a very bulkhead of hard oak—between him and his more human, and better inclinations.

The hot, dreamy hours of the forenoon flowed on, and still Lalanté sat, to all outward appearance doing nothing, but in reality with racing thoughts. She did not even care to read. You read in order to be taken out of yourself, which was just what she didn’t want. Her father was in a small inner room, with a pipe in his mouth, making up—we regret to say, having previously stated that the day was Sunday—certain accounts, for, in addition to his farming ventures, he did a good deal in the stock-jobbing line. And the girl sat there, dreaming on, reconstituting in her mind a retrospection of all that had passed within that year, which was, if there had ever been such a thing, literally and actually annus amoris.

She recalled, for instance, their first meeting; how she had come in, hot and dishevelled—or at any rate feeling it—after a long scramble with the two small boys away over the veldt—to find, all unexpectedly, the man of whom she had heard so much as her father’s—then—intimate friend. She remembered every line of the expression of the clear-cut, high-bred face, the look of admiration that had momentarily leapt into his eyes directly they rested upon her—hot and dishevelled—in straight, kindly glance; the tall, fine proportions of his frame, the courteous, interested conversation in which he had engaged her. She went over the hiatus of their prompt confidence and growing mutual interest, until—a certain evening, when standing together under the radiant moon amid the fragrant breaths of night—an evening which seemed specially created for such an object—their love had, as it were, rushed together and declared itself as one—yes, as one from the very first. For a brief time life had been a perfectly uninterrupted Paradise, and that to both—and then—and then—trouble, care—black care—had stolen in more and more, but—through it all, love was ever the same, ever undimmed, indeed if possible refined and winnowed by the prospect of adversity. No—assuredly there was no room for unhappiness in Lalanté’s present any more than in her past. The cloud hung heavy, but it would surely lift. It must. It should.

“Who the devil is this?”

The girl started from her day-dream, and turned quickly. In the doorway behind her stood her father, a pair of binoculars in his hand. Then she looked in the direction in which under the circumstance she naturally would look.

Away, where the road topped the ridge, two horsemen were riding; and they were approaching the house. They might have been merely passers-by certainly, but the girl’s true instinct informed her that it was not so, and her heart beats quickened. Yet—why two?

“One of ’em’s Warren,” pronounced Le Sage, with the glasses at his eyes. “And the other—why, damn it! it’s—it’s that fellow, Wyvern.”

This staccato. Lalanté, rising, saw that her father’s face had paled, and the hands that held the binoculars shook.

“Now, dear,” she adjured, putting a hand round his shoulder. “Don’t lose yourself, and remember he may have some particular object in wanting to see you. He has never been here since, and it’s quite possible that he has. Now do receive him with common civility. You must, you know. You can’t be offensive to a man on your own doorstep. Now can you?”

“Oh, can’t I? I seem to remember telling this one never to come near my ‘own doorstep’ again,” snorted Le Sage.

“Never mind. Wait till you hear what he has got to say. You will, won’t you.”

By this time she had got both arms round his neck, and was holding it tight. He looked into her luminous eyes with his own sombre and angry ones, and somehow the anger seemed to die.

“Very well, dear,” he said with an effort, though more gently, and loosening her hold. “I’ll wait and see.”

Meanwhile the two horsemen were drawing very near.

Chapter Twelve.

Farewell!

Warren it was who broke the awkwardness of the meeting.

“Hullo, Le Sage,” he sang out as they dismounted. “I lugged this chap over to say good-bye to you. He’s just going to clear. I told him he couldn’t clear without saying good-bye, just because you had a bit of a growl at each other.”

This in his most breezy way. Le Sage put out a hand to Wyvern, though not particularly cordially.

“Oh, you’re really going, are you?” he said.

“Yes. Day after to-morrow. My sale comes off next week, but I shan’t wait for it.”

The air was still and clear, and, upon such, voices travel afar. The above conversation, taking place at the stables, had been heard by Lalanté, who therefore felt exceedingly friendly towards Warren, whose words implied that the other would not have come over but for his persuasion. She knew, of course, that Wyvern would not leave without managing a farewell meeting between them—just as she knew what her father did not—that he was on the eve of departure. Yet, here he was, and he should not leave her that day if she could help it. There was parting at the end of it, but all its precious hours in between were theirs.

The anxiety which had at first overclouded her face cleared, as she knew by the conversation of the three men drawing near the house, that her father had kept his word. If his tone was somewhat constrained, why that was only to be expected.

“Well, Miss Lalanté,” cried Warren, in his breeziest way as she came to meet them. “I hope we haven’t invaded you too unexpectedly.”

“Not at all,” she answered cordially. “It was good of you to come over.”

In secret Wyvern somewhat resented this way Warren had of using the girl’s own name, even though not omitting the formal prefix. It was quite unnecessary, and formal prefixes are prone to lapse on occasions. But this little jealous twinge was allayed with her greeting of him—all in the old way. He appreciated, too, Warren’s tactful thought in turning Le Sage’s attention right in the other direction.

Then the small boys came in, hot and dusty after their ramble, and it behoved Lalanté to go and superintend the process of making them presentable for dinner—for which it was nearly time.

In process of that festivity assuredly Wyvern’s reputation with the two youngsters as a spinner of “such ripping good yarns” did not suffer as they listened open-mouthed to his narrative of shooting the big leopard in the Third Kloof. The more startling incident of that night he did not narrate for their benefit.

“Man, Mr Wyvern, but I’d like to have been there,” said Charlie.

“Do take us with you some night, Mr Wyvern,” supplemented Frank.

“There won’t be any ‘some night’ again, Frank. I’m going away.”

“What?” cried both youngsters. “No. It’s not true.”

“But it is,” answered Wyvern, with a tinge of sadness. “The day after to-morrow. I’ve only come to-day to say good-bye.”

“But you can’t go. Lala, tell him he’s not to. He’ll stop if you tell him to.”

These two youngsters were actually beginning to feel “choky,” in proof whereof a plateful apiece of one of their favourite puddings seemed in danger of being left untouched.

The whole-souled affection of the two little boys—Lalanté’s brothers—went to Wyvern’s heart.

“Never mind, old chappies,” he said. “We shall meet again some day, and then you’ll be big fellows, and will want to patronise me because I don’t bring down a bushbuck ram at four hundred yards when only his head is showing round a spek-boem bush, as you’ll do. Here, stop that,” he added, as Charlie, the smallest of the pair, began to sniffle ominously, then giving up the effort, broke into a genuine howl. “Men don’t cry—and, this last day we most be all jolly together. See?”

“If you’re going in for the Zulu trade, Wyvern, I’m afraid you’ve hit upon the wrong time,” struck in Le Sage. “I hear they’re all unsettled in the Zulu country over the return of Cetywayo. There’ll be a lively war up there among themselves I’m told.”

“Got to chance that, like most things in this sad and weary world.”

“Man, Mr Wyvern, but they’ll kill you if you go up there,” remarked one of the small boys in round-eyed consternation. “Why you fought against them in the war”—some of his Zulu war experiences being among the “ripping good yarns” he had the reputation for spinning.

“Oh, no they won’t. Besides, you don’t suppose they know who fought against them or who didn’t—and even if they did they’d only respect me the more for it.”

“There’s a little matter I want to talk over with you, Le Sage,” said Warren, as they got up from table, “if it isn’t trenching on your Sabbath rest.”

“Oh, Sabbath rest be hanged,” answered Le Sage, shortly. “Come along.”

“Father, don’t talk in that abominably heathenish way,” laughed Lalanté. “Before your children too!”

She and Wyvern, both, and again, appreciated Warren’s tact, for neither of them believed in the pretext. They had not been alone together yet, and Warren, like the good fellow he was, had resolved that they should be. That was how they read it.

So while the other two adjourned to Le Sage’s business den, these two adjourned to the stoep. The small boys, like their kind, unable to keep still for any length of time, betook themselves off somewhere down in the garden.

“Love, and so you are really going,” began Lalanté with her hand in his.

“Really. But it is going only to return.”

“Yes, I feel that. Yet—it is like parting with one’s very life.”

“That is how I feel it. And yet—and yet—this time somehow I am sanguine. I have a sort of instinct that things are going to mend; that one’s luck cannot always be on the down grade. I can’t tell why, but something—a sort of revelation, perhaps—has come to me telling me I am doing right in going away from here—wrench though it will be. But mere locality—why that’s nothing as long as we have each other. Is it?”

“Darling, you know it is not,” she answered, her head resting in the hollow of his shoulder. “If it were a mere rock island in the middle of the sea and I had you, it would be Paradise.”

He laughed sadly. But it was no time for upsetting her ideals. For a few moments they sat in a happy, if somewhat sad, silence; the same hum of winged insects making its droning lull upon the sunlit air; the sweeping roll of golden green spread out in radiant vista beneath the unclouded sky; the full, seductive beauty of the girl nestling within his arms.

“I was longing for you so,” she said at last. “I was sitting here all the morning going over all the time since we had first known each other. I felt that I would give half my life if you would only come over to-day. And—here you are.”

“But you didn’t think I should go without seeing you again, child?”

“Of course not. But it would have been one of those hurried snatched meetings in the veldt. Well now I have got you all to myself, and I will keep you. Come. We will have a last long walk alone together while they are in there.”

The while the thought was hammering in her brain, that to-morrow at the same time all would be as it was now; no shadow of a difference in anything around but—he would be gone.

“I won’t keep you waiting a moment,” she said, her fingers intertwined in his as she rose. “We will go before they come out.”

Wyvern, left there even for that “moment,” could not help blessing the luck that had brought Warren over to Seven Kloofs the night before, to talk him into coming to bid good-bye to Le Sage as if nothing had happened. As Lalanté had said, they would have managed a final and farewell meeting; but as she had also said, it would have been a snatched and hurried one.

True to her word she reappeared in a moment, looking her best and sweetest; and that was very good to look at indeed. And they went forth, down the way they knew so well, the way they had so often trodden together, and the voices of the gladsome, sunlit veldt made music as they went.

“Oh, darling,” said the girl, as she leaned heavily upon the arm passed through hers, and upon his shoulder. “However am I going to get through the time without you—day after day, week after week, even month after month, and know that you are hundreds of miles from me, after this year—this whole year—when we have been all in all to each other? Tell me—again. No one has ever been to you as I have? Tell me. I will feed on it after you have—gone.”

Her hungry, passionate accents thrilled his every fibre, then his arms were around her in a close embrace.

“Lalanté—my own love—my one and only love, I could go on telling you the same thing. No one has ever been to me as you have been or ever could be. You know how from the time our eyes first met we knew we were made for each other, and it was not long before we proved it to be so.”

“Yes, I know. I was thinking of that all this morning, was bathing myself in a very day-dream of our time together. And now, you are leaving me.”

“Oh, sweet—don’t put that tone—that hopeless tone—into it. I am leaving you only to come back to you. You know that there is no one like you in all the world. I could not imagine anything approaching a duplicate of you if I were to try. But, if ever I find a difficulty it is what on earth you can see in me to love like this: in me—a battered failure all along the line. What is it?”

“What is it?” she answered, slowly, her eyes responding to his straight, full gaze. “What is it? I don’t know. Only a little trick of thought-reading—character-reading rather—and when I had seen you I thought I had seen—the Deity.”

“No, no, child,” he said quickly and reprovingly. “You must not—to put it on the lowest ground—pitch your ideals at such dizzy heights. Only think what a fall it means one of these days.”

“Now I could laugh. Never mind. We have just so many hours—how many have we? And then—blank—deathlike blank.”

“No—no—no! Not deathlike. It is life—life through absence. See now, Lalanté—what a sweet name that is, for I am perfectly certain nobody else in the world bears it—I am looking at you, now in the full glow of the sun at his best light I am looking into and photographing your dear face—as if it needed that—so that it will remain fixed in the retina of memory through day and night when we are apart. Those eyes—yes, look into mine, so will it burn the picture in more indelibly, if possible.”

“Oh, love, love!” Her accents thrilled in their passionate abandonment. “You are going away from me and you have torn my very heart out with you. Yes, I look into your eyes, and my very first prayer is that they may look at me in my dreams as they do now. Yes. Even parting is bliss beside what I could imagine of dead love.”

“Dead love! My Lalanté, how could such a term occur as between you and me?”

“No—no. Not as between us. My imagination was only running away with me. That was all.”

Thus they wandered on. Half unconsciously their steps turned towards a favourite spot, where even on the hottest of days shade lay, in the coolness reflected by a rock-face never turned to the sun, ever shadowed by an overhanging growth. Birds piped in the brake with varying and fantastic note, while now and again the still air was rent by the lusty shouting of cock-koorhaans, rising fussily near and far, disturbed by real or imaginary cause of alarm. It was an ideal place, this sheltered nook, for such meetings as these.

Hour followed upon hour, but they heeded it not at all, as they sat and talked; and the glance of each seemed unable to leave the other, and the pressure of interlocked fingers tightened. This would be their first parting since they had first met, and it was difficult to determine upon which of the two it fell the hardest Wyvern was a man of deep and strong feeling, in no wise dulled by the fact that he could no longer exactly be called young, and the impending parting had been with him as an all-pervading heart pain to an extent which well-nigh astonished himself—while as for the girl, her passionate adoration of him was as her whole being. It is safe to say that he could have done with her what he chose; and realising this, and how he stood as a tower of strength to her, not as a source of weakness, in his firm unbending principle, the very fact fed and fostered that adoration.

It was here that their real farewell was made, here alone, unseen save by the bright birds that flitted joyously and piped melodiously in the shaded solitude.

“Oh, my own, my own,” whispered Lalanté, her beautiful form shaken by sobs she was powerless to repress. “My adored love, you will come back to me, even if you meet with nothing but ill-fortune—worse even than you have met with up till now. You will come back to me. Promise.”

He could only bend his head in reply. He dared not trust himself to speak.

“Haven’t those two come in yet?” said Le Sage shortly, sitting up in his chair. “Magtig! Warren, I must have been asleep.”

“Well, you were, but why not?” answered Warren easily. “Oh, never mind about them: you were young once yourself, Le Sage.”

The latter looked grim.

“Wyvern’s not so damned young,” he said. “That makes it all the worse, because it shows he’ll never do any good.”

“He may where he’s going.”

Le Sage snorted.

“Where he’s going. Going!—Yes, that’s the only good thing about him—he’s going.”

If only the speaker knew how intensely his listener was agreeing with him. It might be that Le Sage’s hostility was not the most formidable obstacle these two had to reckon with. A sufficiently lurid picture was at that moment passing before the mental gaze of the easy-mannered, elf-possessed lawyer. People who were “going” did not always return.

“Why, here they are,” he said, “and the kiddies with them.”

The two youngsters, whom they had chanced to pick up on the way, were a factor in easing down the situation, which was as well, for Lalanté’s face with all her brave efforts at absolute self-control, was not without some pathetic trace of the strain she was undergoing.

Supper, that evening, was not a particularly convivial institution; in fact, the conversation was mainly sustained by Warren. Even the two small boys were instinctively subdued.

“By Jove, I believe we are going to have a storm,” said Warren, as they got up. “We’d better saddle up and trek before it comes, eh, Wyvern?”

“Well, you might just escape it,” said Le Sage, with alacrity. “I’ll go and see about getting the horses up.”

The sun was setting in gloomy, lurid fire behind an opaque curtain of inky cloud, as they went forth into the open air; which said air was strangely still and boding and oppressive, though now and again a fitful puff would bring dull distant rumblings of thunder. Wyvern went round with his uncordial host to the stables, while the others remained on the stoep to watch it.

“I don’t seem to like starting in the face of this,” said Warren. “It’s coming up and we shall get it thick about half way.”

“Then don’t start,” said Lalanté decisively. “We can easily put you up. Ah—look!”

A succession of vivid flashes lit up the gloomy murk in the distance, followed immediately by a heavy, detonating roar.

“I believe you’re right,” said Warren, meditatively. “By Jove, it’s coming on at express pace—right for us, too.”

“One thing is certain,” pronounced Lalanté, not even trying to suppress the jubilant ring in her voice, “and that is that you two can’t possibly go: back to-night. It isn’t safe. Look how the storm is working up, right across your road too. No, you can’t. Now, can you, Mr Warren?”

“I’m in Wyvern’s hands,” answered Warren with a laugh, “and he, I suspect, is in yours.”

“Very well. That settles it. Come. We’ll go round and tell them not to bother about getting up the horses, for you’re both going to stop the night. I’m horribly afraid of lightning—for other people.”

The livid, inky cloud was slowly and surely advancing, and as she had said, it was right across the road back to Seven Kloofs. As the two went forth a distant but heavy boom rolled dully to their ears.

“For other people?” repeated Warren significantly. “And for yourself? You are never afraid?”

“No, I don’t believe I am.”

Warren looked at her with warm admiration, and something else—which he succeeded in disguising the more easily that—as we have said—she was in total ignorance of those two portraits which he cherished in secret.

“Here, father,” she called out, as they reached the place where Le Sage and Wyvern were standing, “call those boys back. The horses won’t be wanted till to-morrow. Just look what an awful storm there is working up. Right across the way too.”

“By Jove, so there is,” said Le Sage. “Hope it means real rain, that’s all. You two ’ll have to shake down here to-night.”

The swift glance exchanged between Wyvern and Lalanté did not escape Warren. To those two the coming storm had brought reprieve. Only of a few hours it was true, but—still a reprieve. Their real farewell had been made, still—

Throwing out its dark and jagged streamers in advance, the black curtain of cloud came driving up. A blinding gleam, and one of those awful metallic crashes that are as though the world itself were cleft in twain, and, ever growing louder as it drew nearer, a confused raving roar.

“Hail, by Jove!” pronounced Le Sage. “That’s a nuisance because it means little or no rain. Where are those two youngsters, Lalanté?”

“Indoors.”

“And that’s where we’d better get, and pretty soon,” pronounced Wyvern.

But before they got there a hard and splitting impact caused all to hurry their pace, for it was as though they were being pelted with stones; and indeed they were, for the great white ice-globes came crashing down, as with a roar like that of an advancing tidal wave the mighty hailstorm was upon them; in its terrific clamour almost drowning the bellowing of the thunder.

“We’re well out of that,” went on Wyvern, as they gained the shelter of the house. “By George, if one had come in for it in an open camp, it would have been a case of covering one’s head with one’s saddle. The stones are as big as hens’ eggs. I’ve only seen it like that once before. Look.”

Outside, the enormous hailstones lay like a fall of ice; and as the blue spectral gleams of lightning fell upon the scene the effect was one of marvellous beauty. It was as though a rain of gigantic diamonds was cleaving and illuminating the darkness, while the layer which overspread the ground flashed out a million points of incandescence. Then, with receding roar, the hail cloud whirled on its course, and there was stillness as of death, save for an intermittent roll of thunder.

Lalanté had found herself drawn to a window—the others were crowding the doorway—and as she pressed to her side the arm that encircled her, she gazed forth upon the weird scene of storm and terror with a kind of ecstasy, and, in her heart, blessing it. But for it she would now be alone—alone and heart-wrung. The evil hour was only postponed—but it was postponed—and they stood thus, close together in the darkness, silent in their sweet, sad happiness.

“We’ll be able to ice our grog to-night, Le Sage,” said Warren presently in his breezy way.

“Why, yes. We’d better have some too—and we may as well have some light upon the scene. See to it, Lalanté.”

“All right, father,” said the girl, cheerfully, but inwardly furiously anathematising Warren for breaking up her last solitude à deux. For she instinctively realised there would be no further opportunity of its renewal—either to-night or to-morrow.

Nor—was there.

Chapter Thirteen.

Bully Rawson—General Ruffian.

Bully Rawson lay in his camp in the Lumisana Forest in north-eastern Zululand. He was playing cards with himself, and as he played he cursed.

Primarily he cursed because he could not quite bring off a move in the game which, with a real adversary, would inevitably give him an advantage—profitable but wholly illicit. Secondarily he cursed merely by way of something to say. Thirdly and generally, he cursed from sheer force of habit; but whichever way he did it, and from whatever motive, Bully Rawson’s language was entirely unprintable, and, in its relation to the higher Powers, rather bloodcurdling even to those who were by no means straight-laced.

Now, blowing off a fine stream of such expletive, he rose to his feet, and flung the whole pack of cards high in the air. Naturally they would descend in a wide and scattered shower, then he would make his Swazi boy pick them up again, and kick him for not doing it quick enough. This would relieve his feelings some; and would be consistent with the methods he usually adopted to justify his sobriquet.

Seen erect he was a heavy, thick-set man, with a countenance that was forbidding to the last degree. His nose had at one time been broken, and his eyes rolled fiercely beneath shaggy black eyebrows. He wore a long black beard, just turning grey in parts, and plentifully anointed with tobacco juice; and his hands, knotted and gnarled, seemed to point to enormous muscular strength. He looked round upon the sunlit forest, cursed again, then turned to enter a circular thorn enclosure within which rose the yellow domes of half a dozen grass huts.

Two native girls—well-formed as to frame, and with faces that would have been pleasing only that the bare sight of Bully Rawson was not calculated to bring a pleasant expression into any human countenance—were squatted on the ground. Both wore the impiti, or reddened cone of hair rising from the scalp, together with the apron-like mútya which denotes the married state. They were, in fact, his two wives.

“Where is Pakisa?” he said.

“He? Away at the wood-cutting,” answered one.

“You two then, go and pick up the ‘pictures’ I have scattered.”

“And the meat I am roasting—what of it?” said the one who had answered.

“You, Nompai,” turning to the other, “You go—au! tyetya!”

This one got up and went out without a word—taking care not to pass this manly specimen any nearer than she could help. As she rose she slung an infant on to her back—an infant far lighter in colour than the lightest native.

“You, Nkombazana, you are rising to the heavens,” he sneered. “You are growing too tall for me. Now I think some hard stick laid about thy bones will keep thee from growing so over fast.”

The woman’s eyes glittered, and a sort of snarl just revealed the fine white teeth. But she did not move. She only said:

“The Snake-doctor—whau! his múti is great and subtle.”

The white man, in the voice of a wild beast’s growl, fired off a storm of expletives, mixing up Anglo-Saxon where the Zulu fell short of lurid enough blasphemy. But Nkombazana answered nothing, and still did not move.

He made a step towards her, then stopped short. The allusion was one he perfectly understood, and it seemed—yes, it seemed almost to cow him. With her he knew well it would not do to go too far. She was a Zulu, and the daughter of a fairly influential chief; the other, Nompai, was a Swazi and the daughter of nobody in particular, wherefore Nompai came in for her own share of kicks, and most—not all—of Nkombazana’s too. He had a lively recollection of a sudden and unaccountable illness—an internal illness—which had seized upon him on a fairly recent occasion, and which for hours had put him through the torments of the damned. This had followed—it might have been a coincidence—right upon a terrific thrashing he had administered to Nkombazana, and his awful convulsions had only been allayed by the treatment of a certain isanusi—known to the natives as the Snake-doctor—treatment for which he had to pay pretty heavily lest worse should befall him. But though he frequently abused and snarled at her, he had never laid hand—or stick—upon his principal wife since. Indeed he would gladly have been rid of her at any cost now. He would not have hesitated to make away with her, but that he dared not. He would willingly have sent her back to her people, but it would never do to arouse their hostility by the slur upon her that such a course would imply, and have we not said above that her father was an influential chief? So to that extent Nkombazana remained mistress of the situation.

Bully Rawson went into a large hut, which he used as a trading store, and reaching down a square bottle filled an enamelled iron cup. No “trade” gin was this—liquor trading by the way was not allowed in the Zulu country at that time, but plenty of it was done for all that. No. This was excellent Hollands, and having poured the liberal libation down his throat he went forth again. There was not much trade doing just then, but he had entered into a contract for the cutting of poles, to be taken to the coast and shipped; for which he had obtained a concession from the local chief. Now, having lighted his pipe, he strolled leisurely through the forest to where the sound of saw and axe told that such work was going on.

Several natives were more or less busily engaged. These were not Zulus, for at that time no Zulu had yet learned “the dignity of labour”—not in his own country at any rate. They were for the most part. Tonga boys from the coast, and, as ill-luck would have it, just as Rawson emerged from the trees, one of them happened to be squatting on the ground taking snuff. His back was towards his fate, nor did any of the others dare to warn him. Suddenly he felt as though a tree had fallen upon him, and the next few moments were spent by his employer in savagely kicking him round and round the clearing, till at last the luckless wretch fell on the ground and bowled for mercy. This he might not have got but that his afflictor became aware of the presence of three tall Zulus, who stood watching the proceedings, a gleam of mingled amusement and contempt upon their fine faces.

“Greeting, Inxele!” said one.

Bully Rawson scowled. He resented the familiar use of his native name, instead of the respectful “’Nkose.” He further resented the sheaf of assegais and small shield which each carried, and which should have been dropped before coming into his camp, or at any rate, while addressing himself. But the Zulu is quick to recognise a blackguard and loth to show him deference, and that this white man was an egregious blackguard as white men went, these were perfectly well aware.

“I see you, amadoda,” he answered shortly.

“He, there, has a message,” said the first who had spoken, indicating the only one of the three who was not head-ringed. “It has travelled from Tegwini.” (Durban.)

“Well, what is it?” rejoined the white man, shortly.

“It is here,” said the unringed native, producing a small packet, which he carried tied on to the end of a stick. Rawson snatched it eagerly. It was a sort of oilskin enclosure.

“Now, what the devil can this be?” he said to himself, fairly puzzled. But the mystery was soon solved. The wrappings being undone, revealed nothing less commonplace that a mere letter—addressed to himself. Yet why should the bronze hue of his forbidding countenance dull to a dirty white as he stared at the envelope? It might have been because he knew that writing well, and had cherished the fond delusion that the writer hadn’t the ghost of an idea as to his own whereabouts. What then? Well, the writer of that letter had power to hang him.

He remembered to give the Zulus snuff out of a large box which he always carried, then while they sat down leisurely to enjoy the same, he tore open the envelope, and that with hands which trembled somewhat. The communication, however, was brevity itself. Thus it ran:

“A friend of mine—name Wyvern—is going into your part, even if he is not already there. Take care of him. Do you hear? Take care of him.

“Warren.”

Rawson stared at the words while he read them again and again, “Take care of him.” Oh, yes, he would do that, he thought to himself with a hideous laugh. Then he fell to wondering what sort of a man this object of Warren’s solicitude might be—whether, in fact, he would prove an easy one to “take care of.” Well, that, of course, events would show. Anyway, what was certain was that Warren’s wishes had to be attended to by him, Bully Rawson.

Turning to the Zulus he asked about news. Was there any?

Not any, they said. The country was getting more and more disturbed because the English Government could not make up its mind. It made one arrangement to-day, and another took its place to-morrow, and now nobody in Zululand knew who was his chief or whether he had any chief at all. There had been some fighting, they had heard, in Umlandela’s country, but even about that there was no certain news.

After a little similar talk they got up and took their leave. Rawson, his mind filled with the untoward turn events had taken, quite forgot to kick or thrash any more of his labourers.

The sun’s rays were lengthening, and with a few parting curses to those ill-starred mortals he took his way homeward. The cool shaded forest gloom was pleasant, but his thoughts were not. What he was chiefly concerned about was not the task that Warren had set him to perform. Oh, dear no. That, indeed, was, if anything, rather a congenial one to a born cut-throat such as Bully Rawson. What concerned him, and that mightily, was that Warren should have located so exactly his whereabouts, for he knew that thenceforward he was that astute practitioner’s unquestionable and blindly obedient slave; and the part of obedient anything, in no wise appealed to the temperament of Bully Rawson. If only he could, on some pretext, inveigle Warren himself up to that part; and with the idea came a conviction of its utter futility. Warren was one of the sharpest customers this world ever contained, and none knew this better than he did.

Thus engrossed it is hardly surprising that even such a wide-awake bird as himself should remain ignorant of the fact that he was being followed. Yet he was, and that from the time he had started from the wood-cutting camp. Half a dozen lithe, wiry Zulus—all young men—were on his track, moving with cat-like silence and readiness. They were not armed, save with sticks, and these not even the short-handled, formidable knob-kerrie; but their errand to the white man was of unmistakable import; and fell withal—to the white man.

Suddenly the latter became aware of their presence, and turned. They were upon him; like hounds upon a quarry. But Bully Rawson, though unarmed, and the while cursing his folly at being found in that helpless state, was no easy victim. He shot out his enormous fist with the power of a battering-ram, and landing the foremost fair on the jaw, then and there dropped him. The second fared no better. But, with the cat-like agility of their race, the others, springing around him on all sides at once—here, there, everywhere—kept outside the range of that terrible fist, until able to get in a telling blow. This was done—and the powerful ruffian dropped in his turn, more than half-stunned, the blood pouring from a wound in the temple. Did that satisfy them? Not a bit of it. They then and there set to work and belaboured his prostrate form with their sticks, uttering a strident hiss with each resounding thud. In short, they very nearly and literally beat him to a jelly—a chastisement, indeed, which would probably have spelt death to the ordinary man, and was destined to leave this one in a very sore state for some time to come. Then, helping up their injured comrades, they departed, leaving their victim to get himself round as best he could, or not at all.

You will ask what was the motive for this savage act of retribution. Some outrage on his part committed upon one of their womenkind? Or, these were relatives of his own wives who had chosen to avenge his ill-treatment of them? Neither.

In this instance Bully Rawson was destined to suffer for an offence of which he was wholly innocent; to wit, the bursting of a gun which he had traded to a petty chief who hailed from a distant part of the country—for he did a bit of gun-running when opportunity offered. But the old fool had rammed in a double charge—result—his arm blown off; and these six were his sons resolved upon revenge. They dared not kill him—he was necessary to far too powerful a chief for that—though they would otherwise cheerfully have done so; wherefore they had brought with them no deadly weapons, lest they should be carried away, and effectually finish him off. Wherein lay one of life’s little ironies. For his many acts of villainy Bully Rawson was destined to escape. For one casualty for which he was in no sense of the word responsible, he got hammered within an inch of his life.

It must not be taken for granted that this ruffian was a fair specimen or sample of the Zulu trader or up-country going man in general, for such was by no means the case. But, on the principle of “black sheep in every flock,” it may be stated at once that in this particular flock Bully Rawson was about the blackest of the black.

Chapter Fourteen.

What Hlabulana Revealed.

In the quadrangle, or courtyard, known as Ulundi Square, in the Royal Hotel at Durban, two men sat talking. One we already know, the other, a wiry, bronzed, and dark-bearded man of medium height, was known to his acquaintance as Joe Fleetwood, and among the natives as “U’ Joe,” and he was an up-country trader.

“You did the right thing, Wyvern, when you decided to come up here,” the latter was saying, “and in a few months’ time”—lowering his voice—“if we pull off this jaunt all right, we need neither of us ever take our jackets off again for the rest of our natural lives.”

“Not, eh? Didn’t know you could make such a rapid fortune in the native trade.”

The other smiled drily.

“Look here, Wyvern. You only landed last night—and a most infernal bucketing you seem to have got on that poisonous bar in doing so. So that we’ve had no opportunity of having a straight, square talk. We won’t have it here—too many doors and windows about for that I propose, therefore, that we get on a tram and run down to the back beach—we’ll have it all to ourselves there. First of all, though, we’ll have these glasses refilled. I don’t believe in starting dry. Boy!”

A turbaned Indian waiter glided up, and reappeared in a moment with two long tumblers.

“That’s good,” exclaimed Fleetwood, having poured down more than half of the sparkling contents of his. “Durban is one of the thirstiest places I’ve ever struck.”

Not much was said as they took their way through the bustle of the streets, bright with the gaudy clothes worn by the Indian population, whose thin, chattering voices formed as great a contrast to the deep, sonorous tones of the manly natives of the land as did their respective owners in aspect and physique.

“By Jove! it brings back old times, seeing these head-ringed chaps about again,” said Wyvern, turning to look at a particularly fine specimen of them that had just stalked past. “I wonder if I’d like to go over all our campaigning ground again.”

“Our jaunt this time will take us rather off it. I say—that time we ran the gauntlet through to Kambula, from that infernal mountain. It was something to remember, eh?”

Wyvern looked grave.

“One might run as narrow a shave as that again, but it’s a dead cert we couldn’t run a narrower one,” he said.

“Not much. I say, though. You’ve seen some rather different times since then. Let on, old chap—is that her portrait you’ve got stuck up in Number 3 Ulundi Square? Because, if so, you’re in luck’s way, by jingo you are.”

“You’re quite right, Fleetwood, as to both ventures. Only a third ingredient is unfortunately needed to render the luck complete, and that is a sufficiency of means.”

“That all? Well, then, buck up, old chap, because I’d lay a very considerable bet you’ll find that difficulty got over by the time you next set foot in hot—and particularly thirsty—Durban.”

Wyvern looked up keenly. Something in the other’s tone struck him as strange.

“What card have you got up your sleeve, Joe?” he said. “You let out something about ‘a few months’ a little while ago. Well now, I may not know much about the native trade, but I have a devilish shrewd idea that a man doesn’t scare up a fortune at it in that time.”

“You’re right there—quite right—and that’s the very thing we’ve come out to chat about—and sniff the ozone at the same time. It’ll keep till we get there. Here’s our tram.”

These two were great friends. Fleetwood, indeed, was prone to declare that he owed his life to the other’s deftness and coolness on one occasion when they had been campaigning together; a statement, however, which Wyvern unhesitatingly and consistently pooh-poohed. Anyhow, there was nothing that Fleetwood would not have done for him; and having lit upon the marvellous discovery which was behind his sanguine predictions of immediate wealth, he had written at once to Wyvern to come up and share it.

A fresh breeze stirred the blue of the waves, as the milky surf came tumbling up the pebbly beach with thunderous roar. Out in the roadstead vessels were riding to their anchors, prominent among them the blue-white hull and red funnel of the big mail steamer which had brought Wyvern round the day before. On the right, as they faced seaward, beyond the white boil of surf on the bar, rose the bush-clad Bluff, capped by its lighthouse, and behind, and stretching away on the other hand, the line of scrub-grown sandhills, beyond which rose the wooded slopes of the Berea.

“Now we’re all right,” pronounced Fleetwood, leading the way along the beach. “We’ve got the whole show to ourselves and we know it. Not a soul can get within earshot of us and we not know it, which is important if you’ve got anything important to talk about.”

“Yes,” assented Wyvern, lighting his pipe. “Now—drive ahead. Found a gold mine, eh?”

“That’s just about what it is; only it’s not a gold mine in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s buried gold.”

“The deuce it is. Where?”

“That’s what I’m coming to. Now listen. There exists a certain Zulu of my acquaintance, a head-ringed man named Hlabulana. I have known him a long while, some time before the war, in fact, and he’s a wonderfully straight and reliable man. Well, a good many years ago a strange thing came within his experience. Off the coast of Zululand, about where the Umfolosi river runs out at Saint Lucia Bay, there arrived a ship—a small ship, I gathered from his account, probably a brig or schooner. Now this in itself was an event, because there was absolutely no trade done with Zululand by sea in those days, any more than there is now. But where this craft undertook to anchor was off one of the most rotten, swampy and uninhabited parts of the whole coast. A boat put off from her and came ashore, and in it were four men. They landed, and no sooner had they done so than the vessel, which appears to have been lying a good way out, was seen suddenly to disappear. She had, in fact, gone to the bottom.”

“One minute, Fleetwood,” interrupted Wyvern. “When was this—have you any sort of idea?”

“Yes, I have as it happens. It can’t have been many months before the big fight between Cetywayo and Umbulazi for the succession. Now that came off at the end of 1856, which locates this earlier in the same year. Good while back, isn’t it? Close upon thirty years.”

“Right. Go on.”

“Well, then, they took some packages out of the boat; not very large ones, but still, it seems, about as much as they could manage. They hid the boat under bushes and started inland. All this, of course, was seen, because although that part of the country is poorly populated, still there were, and are, people there, and such an unusual occurrence was not likely to go unspotted. But the Zulus didn’t show themselves. They kept out of sight, and shadowed the four.”

“What sort of fellows were the said four?” asked Wyvern. “Nationality, for instance. English?”

“I don’t think so. From the account they were dark-skinned, black-bearded chaps, and wore large rings in their ears. I should say—though I’ve no personal experience of either—Italians or Spaniards—or, maybe, Portuguese.”

“Ah! very likely. The latter most probably.”

“Well, they held along, inland, keeping the course of the Umfolosi river not far on their left—that is, travelling north-west. They seemed to have their own stores, for they avoided the kraals, and now and then shot game; for they were well armed. When they came to where the Black Umfolosi forks more northward they didn’t hesitate but struck up it, which showed that at least one among them had some previous knowledge of the country, and this, in fact, was the case.”

“How is it they weren’t all captured and marched off to the king?”

“Yes. That’s one of the very first questions that occurred to me. Wyvern, and I put it at once. Mpande was king then. The answer was that the country was in such a disturbed state just then, and the people so unsettled, that the few living in those parts were extremely unwilling to go to Nodwengu, for fear they should be obliged to take sides in the row brewing between Cetywayo and his brother. You see, the coast-dwelling Zulus are by no meant the flower of the nation, and these didn’t want to be drawn into any fighting at all. They preferred to sit tight at home. They knew, too, that there was little chance of them being hauled over the coals for it, because things were so excessively sultry at and around the seat of government of the Zulu nation, that the high authorities had no time to bother their heads about anything further afield.

“Well, things went on so for a time, and their march progressed. The people inhabiting the coast country took for granted these chaps had been shipwrecked, and were making their way to the nearest settlements of other whites, and it was not till they got in among the passes of the Lebombo range that they were in any way interfered with, and then not until they had reached the western side.

“This is where Hlabulana comes into the story. He was a young ’un then—an umfane. Two of them surprised him while stealthily watching the other two, and he says he has been no nearer death, even in the thickest part of the late war, than he was on that occasion. One of them could talk some Zulu, and they only spared him on condition he should go with them and help carry the loads; and this he agreed to do, partly out of scare and partly out of curiosity. Then the time came when they quarrelled among themselves, the upshot of which was that two of them knifed the other two in their sleep.

“Now came a deadlock. The two who were left were unable to carry all the plunder, besides they were a good deal weakened and exhausted by their long tramp. They had to hide most of their stuff, presumably intending to return for it at some future time. They buried it accordingly in a cave on the western side of the Lebombo, but Hlabulana wasn’t allowed to see the exact spot.”

“Then how does he know that they buried it?” asked Wyvern. “They may have just shoved it into some cleft.”

“There was earth on their knives, moist earth such as you’d get in a damp cool place where the sun never struck. But he can take us to the spot; there are several holes and caves around, but I don’t think we’ll find much difficulty in hitting off the right one.”